We know  better.  We know – at some level – that we’ve got to help them drain the swamp.  But, see, what Sara and I have remembered in the past few weeks is that draining the swamp takes a deep remembering that there is such a thing as dry ground.  We are the ones who’ve come in to drain the swamp, but at times we’ve let ourselves be snapped at by the same alligators – time pressure, intense cultures, oppressive working norms, communication silos – that plague our clients. And we, like them, sometimes hopped around just trying to save our hineys from those gators.  We forgot our real job. 

Such is the nature of helping with change.  Whether you’re supporting a child to learn something new, helping a leadership team make better decisions and shift their culture, or working with your partner to build a more fulfilling relationship, you step into the swamp.  Your job is to drain it, but to do that you have to remember why you’re there and hold tight to the vision of dry ground.

I coach a lot of “nice guys” and some who wonder why people don’t realize how nice they are “on the inside.”  And here’s the sad part:  often the ones who others perceive as “nice” are working for the ones who are… er, in their own words… “misunderstood” by others.  That is to say, other people often think these leaders are domineering jerks.  But that interpersonal roughness is the edge of a skill set that gets them promoted over and over.  And it gets them promoted over the “nice guy” who might also be considered for the job.

Why is that?  And how can people win when they’re both ambitious and committed to being kind, courteous, and connected with other people?  Here’s the bottom line:  Being “nice” only holds you back when it stops you from addressing key issues with bottom-line importance.  Consultant Eric Allenbaugh taught me, years ago, a valuable distinction:  You can be soft on issues or hard on issues.  And you can be soft on people or hard on people.  True jerks are hard on people, no matter where they stand on issues.  The most promotable people are always those who’re hard on issues.  Unfortunately in most corporate cultures, they can be hard on people and still rise.  It’s my mission, however, to help people become truly extraordinary leaders:  hard on issues, while being soft on people.  That is to say:  keep the “nice” approach to people, but without confusing “nice” with indirect, indecisive, or following consensus. 

My “misunderstood,” hard-on-people, hard-on-issues clients are learning to build in warmth, connection, and empathy so they are just as tough on issues, but softer on people.

And my “nice guy” clients are learning that they finish first when they lean into the goodwill they’ve generated by being soft with people.  They risk a little of that social capital they’ve earned in spades, by being direct and decisive, and teaching other people how to deliver what they want.  What they find is that the risk pays off:  they begin to earn the same respect accorded their tough-guy bosses, but with all the fun and connection of a nice-guy approach.  No one gets mad or says, “wait!  I thought you were nice!”  They thank them for the guidance and clarity.

So how to take better care of both your results and your own vitality?  Have an average day every day.  Perform at a moderate, sustainable level.  Your adrenal glands will start gathering cobwebs, but your metrics will go off the charts.  Our client – let’s call him Joe – has been wowed by this lately.  He’s a sales manager who used to think that “staying ahead of the pack” was the secret of his success.  He tried every day to prove his worth and some days he did amazing things.  But he was exhausted, and it wasn’t sustainable, so he’d then have to slow down to recover and gear up for another push.  He thought it sounded crazy, but he went with us and experimented for a month with aiming for “average” productivity every day.  “I was bored at first,” he told us.  (You will be, too:  it’s not as anxiety-producing, and many of us are hooked on adrenalin.)  “But then when I saw the numbers and realized I hadn’t actually felt like I was working hard to attain these awesome results, I thought:  This might actually work!”  That was in his first ten days.  From there, it has just kept getting better.  He’s got more energy at the end of the day.  He’s been having new ideas for his team and a longer vision of where he wants to go.  All the ways he’d been wanting to “pull up” out of the everyday firefighting are now happening naturally.  So much for average.

One of our clients did this beautifully last week when we observed his meeting.  We’ve been working on that tone with him for a while, and we had nothing but kudos to offer on his leadership.  What could you learn from what he did?  He was there early.  He greeted each person as they entered.  How could he do that?  He wasn’t on his computer… didn’t even have it with him!  He started the meeting with some good people-level signposting.  He welcomed people back from vacation and named where the missing team members were.  It didn’t take long, and then he got into the agenda. 

If these points sound like no-brainers to you, good.  But for many of our clients, goal-driven as they are, setting a warm, productive tone for a meeting seems like a luxury… or simply escapes their attention.  And even if you’re good at it, we’ll bet that the higher the pressure, the less likely you are to attend to the tone of the meeting.  Trouble is, those high-pressure times are the moments the tone is most important.

“One thing we have learned from working on organizational and systemic change is that the leaders are hard to identify in advance.  Sometimes they are CEOs or presidents, but often they do not occupy positions of obvious power in a corporate hierarchy.  They are not the flag wavers, campaigning vocally for change, but rather passionate individuals working to transform their organizations from the bottom up.  They are most often open-minded pragmatists, people who care deeply about the future but who are suspicious of quick fixes, emotional nostrums, and superficial answers to complex problems.  They have a hard-earned sense of how their organizations work, tempered by humility concerning what any one person can do alone.  They often do not think of themselves as leaders, but time proves them wrong.  This is the sort of person for whom we have written this book.”

I quote this passage because I am heartened that Sara and I share an audience with Senge et al.  You open-minded pragmatists, agents of the necessary revolution, conscious conveyors of emergent understandings within your organizations, your families, and your communities:  you are our heroes, and it is to you that our work is dedicated.  In the coming weeks, I’ll be distilling some of my favorite ideas from “The Necessary Revolution” (and probably beseeching you to read it yourself) and elaborating on the spots where its authors’ points overlap with what Working with Power does with clients every day.  For now, know that if you do not think of yourself as a leader, time will prove you wrong.”

We have another take on this idea, too:  there are simple changes that make a profound difference, often in an area where we’ve been working very hard to improve, with little satisfaction.  For one of our clients, it was holding 1:1s with his direct reports.   He hadn’t been prioritizing that, and thought he didn’t have time.  But he was spending a ton of energy fire-fighting and helping his people work around one another.  Once he started scheduling and showing up for a bi-weekly 1:1 with each member of his team, the fires died down.  The chaos cleared… for all of them.  He feels like he has more time.  Not to mention the returns to the bottom line.

And last week, my yoga teacher casually mentioned that her metabolism improved when she cut out gluten (wheat and other related grains all have gluten in them).  I’m thinking about getting pregnant again within the next year or so, and want to drop a bit more “baby fat” before I do so.  I’d been struggling to make changes in my diet, because so many things felt like deprivation and feeding my son keeps my appetite in high gear.  Since I heard that thought about minimizing gluten, though, it’s just been very obvious, easy, and deprivation-free:  “I minimize gluten.”  That means I don’t “see” the bread basket on the table at lunch. I’m not tempted to add a peach-passion fruit scone to my chai order at Neptune (sorry, Dan!).  And the scale is moving, even though I haven’t deliberately eaten LESS of anything except, well, gluten. 

What’s the 2% effort that might make a 98% difference in an area where you’re struggling?

When someone embraces the game of finding a productive way to say what’s really on their mind and heart, great things happen.  Of course, timing, language, responsibility, room for the listener’s process… all these things come into play, but the big deal is getting to that moment of truth.

Sara and I found such a moment today – not in a 1:1 communication, but as we were writing the offer for our soon-to-be-unveiled sample feedback session offer for leaders and teams.  We’d been writing along about what makes us different and answering all the questions we knew would come up.  I suddenly burst out:  “You know what I REALLY wish we could say?!”   Sara said, “SAY IT!”  I wanted to say:  “This work doesn’t pretend that business is something removed from life.  It honors that the best way for each of us to maximize and results – and keep them up – is to create a way of working that nourishes us.”  So I wrote something like that down.  We futzed it a little, into the 2 sentences you just read.  And a huge wave of energy washed into our process.  We’d set ourselves free.  The rest of our writing was easier, more true to ourselves, and more helpful to our audience.

Now:  what do you really wish you could say?

Yes, we’re pros, but actually we HIGHLY recommend (unlike those stunt moto-cross drivers you used to see on TV in the early 80s):  DO try this at home (or at work).  We think it’d be excellent if you could use our tips and start to eradicate the elephants in the room by naming them.  So start here:  Notice that the source of the problems is that some piece of communication is being stepped over.  Just notice. 

Your sleuthing homework:  every time you run into an obstacle or challenge this week, ask yourself (and maybe other people):  “What indirect or missing communication might be at the source of this problem?”  Just notice, for starters.

But over time, as they recognize the long-term depletion they’ve experienced by continually pouring out, giving, providing, driving, producing, going, going, going, and seldom pausing to refill, refuel, and reconnect to their inspiration, many of them circle back and say, “Okay. I’m not sure I fully know what you’re talking about, but I’m willing to give it a try. How do I open to receiving?”

And we gleefully rub our hands together. Aha! They’re on a very good path! If you’re in that place of willing and wondering, too, we’ll share with you the bottom-line, most basic tool for receiving:

The #1 most important component in receiving is seeing yourself – in part – as an empty vessel hungry to be filled. It’s not that this vessel-facet of your being is ALL of who you are, it’s just that to expand your receiving capacity, you have to be willing to taste for yourself that void, so that it can be filled. Practice having your guard down, within your body: Spend 10-20 minutes in a comfortable position like savasana (relaxed on your back) or sukhasana (“easy pose” – sitting comfortably cross-legged, perhaps on a pillow or blanket) or simply sitting in a chair with your feet on the floor. During this time, scan your body for the sensations of need, longing, hunger, sadness, emptiness, or just willingness to receive…. Not so you fall into those, but so you can say “here’s the doorway” through which you can receive – those are the places where you can open to that which you desire, and that which you need but are so courageous and generous that you don’t even know you need.

After you’ve spent this time noticing sensations in your body, your mind will likely ask (impatiently, I might add!), “Okay, so now what?!” That’s its impulse to drive, to do, to make something happen. But there isn’t anything to do this time. That’s the counter-logical power of receiving: it’s a form of power you have seldom used. As a result, it’s untapped. It’s new territory. It’s like finding a fat wallet full of cash in the the other pocket, in addition to the one you already had. Jackpot!

Just don’t ask your receiving power to behave exactly like your driving power. It doesn’t. It’s more yin, in contrast to the yang of driving. Your attention to those sensations will cause changes in your attention, in your presence, and in your feeling state. It will, almost without your realizing, give you new ideas and new options in responding to people and challenges.

If you keep doing it, you’ll find motivation naturally bubbling up to help you do things you’ve wanted to do but that your driving power didn’t get done. What happens when you tap into your receiving is different for each of us. Please leave a comment and let us know what arises for you.

“Our experience with over 2000 executives and leaders tells us that while most people who hold or aspire to leadership positions want to have a deeper, wider, more compelling impact, most think that’s a technical challenge and few know how to go about it. What we’ll teach you in these pages is that the reasons others respond to you the way they do – or worse, don’t respond to you at all – is not because of what you’re doing or not doing with regard to them. The impact you have actually comes from how you yourself experience your attitudes, approach, and actions. Either you’re at ease or you’re not.

Your ease with yourself is reflected in others’ ease with you. Their ease shows up as respect, listening, curiosity, cooperation, motivation, creativity… or anything else you want from them. And your uneasiness, your tension, your – technical term, here: clenchiness – is always reflected back to you as tension in others. That can show up as awkwardness, fear, argumentativeness, avoidance, insubordination, obsequiousness… you fill in the blank: how are people frustrating or disappointing you? Whatever they’re doing, it’s a reflection of your uneasiness.