I learned, personally, not just professionally, what HR is really all about, which is the hard fought wisdom that comes from being constantly engaged and with a critical role to play in the lives and feelings of people at work. I learned all about the differences in perspective that those in management roles and those in first-line roles bring to their decisions and actions. I learned the sociology of the workplace and how truth and openness are often distant dreams for people, while day to day relationships go on being fragmentary and people take home their anger and sense of powerlessness.

The day I arrived I was helpfully oriented to my new job — the one on paper — called “Personnel Analyst.” The real job, however, was well hidden. “Don’t eat in the cafeteria,” a well-meaning colleague advised that day. “People around here, learning you are new, will just work you over for the answers they want to hear to their questions; then blackmail the rest of us with some alleged promise you’ve made to them.” Another said, “I won’t be introducing you to the Director of the [such and such] department for awhile. He’ll eat you alive unless you know how to deal with him.” The helpful, “real” orientation.

My first assignment was to take on the organization’s blood drive. It was intended for me to be a way to meet people. I tried to put my friendliest foot forward, but was often greeted by distance and mistrust, as if the blood I was asking for (metaphorically) was not going to a charitable cause.

And then there was the employee survey, some months after I arrived, where employees anonymously rated the HR function. We found that pretty much all eight of us in the department had had our names called out as liars and cheats and incompetents. The feedback was so bad all we could do was laugh and wonder who the heck they were talking about. That was before the better leaders came and we learned we were neither an appendage of management nor simply a mouthpiece for employees, but some much more subtle brokerage in the wars of self-interest.

I stayed over ten years in that department for reasons that had to do with my desire to learn how to talk to people, how to advise and support, how to calm people from their negative assumptions, and help others learn to trust me as I learned to be trustworthy.

HR really can be a place that holds the soul of an organization, but it takes a ton of work to do it, especially when fear and betrayal and subtle or not so subtle animosity have been the norms. Of the many things I received through my experiences, perhaps the best was simply the vision of a workplace where people treated each other with deep respect, compassion, care, where they told the truth, and where the truth was heard. That vision, that inner and outer view of people, of their capabilities and true dimensions, that sensitivity to trust and mistrust as core dimensions of any workplace, of any relationship any time anywhere, that vision of meaningful relationships that comes into the heart and stays because it must in order to do the work — that was the primary gift. Hard fought wisdom is the legacy of doing HR work well. It can change a person and it certainly changed me.

One time, in Hawai’i, I took a class in how to make a dried gourd into a useful water vessel. The process includes putting sand and stones, and a little water, into the gourd, then shaking it hard to loosen the scraps of dried flesh inside the gourd. You need to have something truly abrasive, like the sand and stones, and you have to dump it out and refill it many times, shaking it as hard as you can many times over in order to get all the constricting old flesh out of the way. But eventually, if you stick with it, you get something quite helpful and you can use it for quite a long time.

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In these or any other times, Stafford’s message speaks for itself. As I wrote to Joe this morning, the decisions seem to be 51/49, not 90/10 or 80/20 as they did in the past.

And the mirrors just keep on coming.

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PS: Speaking of posters, I’ve made one to celebrate the Unfolding Leadership blog. Please feel free to download the poster right here.

The specific circumstances under which this question emerges vary, but a common thread is overload, a sense of being overwhelmed with work and/or poor work relationships, with more tasks heaped on every day, pushing the work week to 60 or more hours, sometimes 80 or more, the client caught between a rock and a hard place. As the work hours soar there is less and less time to do the reflection necessary to make the decision to change positions and to prepare for that change. One of my clients suggested she was like a mouse on a circular exercise wheel running so fast there is no way to get off, even for a moment, in order to question whether this is actually a good thing to be doing.

I have to say, Wall Street may be quite happy about reported increases in worker productivity, which can drive corresponding increases in corporate profits, but by virtue of the experiences of these clients the benefit is a very short term one at best and nothing to gloat about or rely upon.

These clients no longer feel they have is either a choice or voice. They have convinced themselves they cannot say no. They cannot say that the workload is no longer reasonable, that more resources are required and here’s what they are, that they are burnt out and the job is killing them. Instead they work twelve hour days that stretch across the weekend in the hopes of “just getting through this.” The problem with “just getting through this,” of course, is that there are even bigger projects on the other side of this, and one lost weekend suddenly turns into the expectation that every weekend involves at least a day or more of work. Unfortunately, such clients, concerned about their reputation as being responsible, also give the impression that it’s okay to take on this work (still saying to themselves it is temporary), in turn teaching those to whom they report that people are capable of doing more and more without limit, implicitly setting a new standard for everyone else in the workplace. By the way, I’ve noticed these clients tend to work for people who put in even more hours than they do, people who have even more completely lost their lives to their organizations and seem to be demanding similar behavior from their reports, as well. It’s all entirely crazy, but that’s America right now — and we don’t have a way out unless some very real boundary setting begins to take place.

What happens to these people without some form of intervention is that they work hard, harder, harder still, go through a process of private agony trying to answer the question (Should I stay or should I quit?) until one day they do simply quit. The engine falls apart and refuses to be put back together. They don’t have another job. They just cannot go on. They reach a tipping point and it no longer matters. They go home to rest. They may be the best people in the shop or office, but one day the toll becomes too great. The boss is surprised, wants to lure them back, gives them the line that they are almost over the hump, doesn’t understand how they have reached the end of their rope because all along they’ve been such good and dedicated employees.

This is a process of hidden, unconscious, or self-deceiving burnout. In burnout, a person goes well beyond the little bell that should have gone off in his or her head that said, “you’re tired” or “you are hungry now” or “it’s time to go home and be with loved ones.” Instead the little bell gets ignored out of fear and a sense of responsibility. Not ignoring it would mean standing up to the boss in a way that could mean loss of reputation, criticism or the possibility of termination, then or later. The worst part of this whole process is that it becomes personal and corporate self-deception. People actually begin to accept this world as the new normal, as we all go to Abilene together. Usually the boss feels pretty powerless, too, just as other managers and executives do, all the way to the top. (It’s sad listening to a manager try to justify working 24 hours on a weekend while the rest of the family goes on a camping trip.)

Clearly what we need to do is re-invent the bell. As a first step in that process of personal and organizational repair and de-programming, I ask my clients to make two separate, simple lists related to their task load: What I can do. What I cannot do. This, by itself, may bring with it simultaneously a sense of threat (”OMG, I’m acknowledging there is something I cannot do!”) and relief (”When I look at the list, yes, I can see how totally unreasonable it is.”) It is usually higher on the relief side because the client can see that feeling overwhelmed is actually a totally appropriate response, but sometimes the client also rebels, refusing to list the tasks he/she cannot do because of the sense of jeopardy to employment status or, more personally, to a self-concept of loyal, responsible employee/victim.

The second step is to fill in the following grid, which is not the same as the first two lists. Rather, it explores the experience of work and it’s organizational impacts. I’ve filled in some sample responses, but these really are situational to the person, nature of the work, and the organization.

The point of this exercise is to remember what the bell sounds like when it goes off.

The third step is to find a voice to express and hold firm at the choice point. This is initially in terms of tasks, what can and can’t be done, but then also in terms of the personal and organizational value-based standards expressed by the grid. This third step is about having a meaningful conversation with the boss in which explicit limits are set. If this sounds dangerous to you, it may well be. Perhaps job loss is around the corner. But if you and your soul are dying and workplace behavior by higher level leaders is verging on insanity, why wouldn’t you set a boundary? Why wouldn’t you trust your own judgment, your own integrity? You have those things, you know, and they are your treasures — treasures meant to be used to live a good life.

So be smart about this. Don’t hold on to the illusion that working conditions will get better when there is no evidence to the contrary. Don’t imagine that somehow others will automatically “get it” — peers, reports, or those you report to — and come with you or even understand you. Don’t assume that because you are special something different will happen. But then do spend the time reflecting on the question and preparing for departure if you decide that’s the best, most reasonable, most self-affirming answer. Get the resume ready, save the money, find the recruiter, and go for it. Then, when you are really ready to have the talk, lo and behold, maybe things can change in your workplace. Or lo and behold, maybe you will discover you were right about this situation all along, that it is untenable. Either way, you’ll be okay because you were thoughtful, conscious, thorough.

There are those great lines at the end of Mary Oliver’s famous poem, The Journey, about saving the only life you can save. Pay attention to those lines. When you do your work and you find yourself in a tough position, you actually have a great deal of freedom and power. You are in the process of unchaining yourself. You’ve looked at your situation all the way through and you are ready to say, loud and clear, “you can’t have this from me.” When you’ve done that inner and outer work, whatever happens — you retain your job in a better way or are forced to find the next opportunity, knowing it will come — you stand on the firm ground of both what is eminently practical and spiritually indispensable.

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To me, one of the greatest success stories on the web these days is David Zinger, who started the Employee Engagement Network. I had a chance to ask David a few questions about his experiences the other day. Here’s what he told me about discovering that he now finds himself leading a “movement.”

I think my role has been a bit improvisational and haphazard. I love your statement in our conversation:

“It didn’t seem to me you set out to create a movement, but you’ve got one. In my mind’s eye I see you turning around one day and noticing that it’s not just a few friends you are walking with, but a whole street-full. Wow! How did that happen?”

I am passionate about employee engagement and have been involved in social media and blogging for just about 5 years. One snowy Saturday afternoon in Winnipeg I wondered how this NING thing works. Best to learn by doing and I thought wouldn’t it be nice if I could get about 20 to 50 people together.

We are now over 1370 members [1408 as of today].

I hope it looks easy but it requires a lot of love. I have welcomed each member individually. I try to read as much as I can. I have banned spammers. I have tried a lot that hasn’t worked. I keep the content fresh. I keep in contact with the members every week and I am honored to learn from each of them. It is like a Master’s Degree in Employee Engagement spending the last 18 months with such a great group of people.

How do you feel about the leadership role your website and your work as a consultant/trainer have placed you in?

I feel honored that so many people will get involved in employee engagement. I want employee engagement to be for all. It can’t be the sucking out of discretionary effort from overtaxed workers. I know that is a strong way to say it but I want everyone to fully benefit by engagement. I am not overly fond of pairing engagement with the role of employee by calling it employee engagement but that is the accepted term and I will work with it for now. It seems sometimes leaders and managers and owners forget in many ways they are employees too.

I work at leading by following well and creating a safe environment of caring.

I have developed a new model for employee engagement that I will unveil in September. I think it makes engagement so much more inclusive and connected. We need results, strategies, organizations, community & relationships, customers, personal and professional development, energy mastery, and genuine happiness. All of it for the benefit of all.

What is the most important gift you bring to your leadership?

I bring love. I love engagement and I love the people there. I want to connect with the members.

I am a good host and a welcoming host. I can seize a nugget and run with it too. Michael Stallard, one of our fine members, suggested the “movement” focus and he was spot on! I don’t just want this to be a collection of resources.

I hope that the network can be accountable for a 1% enhancement in worldwide engagement. Having said that I am not sure I want to measure it but I do want to monitor it. There is far too much survey work in employee engagement work already. I want action.

I want the employee engagement members to let us know who they are engaging with, how they are engaging with people, and the impact it is having. I hope to create opportunites for the various members to make meaningful contributions to employee engagement, the employee engagement network, and their own engagement.

I am a sucker for an anecdote and I am thinking right know of Tina, the cashier at my local gas station and how incredibily engaged and engaging she is. I just filled up the van two hours ago, so Tina is fresh in mind. She is so efficient and so connected to customers and staff. I know this sounds hokey but I want to share Tina wisdom. I will be interviewing her in the very near future. One real Tina is worth 1,000 consultants or 1,000,000 survey data points.

How do you think this work will change your life?

It has already changed my life. I will not teach what I do not live. I am challenged to engage with others and my work more fully everyday.

I have lived my life in reverse. I retired at 20 until 35. I was in semi retirement until 55 which will occur on September 24 and I will move into a working phase from 55 to 75. I very much wanted to be around home while my children were growing up and they are now 21, 18, 18 and I still need them and they still need me but I can do a bit more global work. I plan for my wife to join me as people who engage fully also re-energize through family connections and intentional disengagement.

I have found some great models of teachers and leaders who are 75 so I know I can do this too. I was so fortunate to study with Keith Johnstone who was 75 when he taught us a 10 day improvisation course last summer in Calgary Alberta.

By the way retirement and semi-retirement do not mean you don’t work; it means you work in different ways and with different motivations — more dabbling, experimenting, no racing, no need to have to acheieve. I was very improvisational from 20 to 55. By the way I am talking about the principles of improvisation, not actual on-stage improvisation. I will still be improvisational for the next 20 years but blend that into strategic-improvisation. And I love the contrast of those two terms standing together.

What wounds does it heal for you personally?

I spent 25 years being involved in teaching counselling psychology at the University of Manitoba. I always loved the wounded healer model. I think Robert Bly stated: Our wounds transformed become our gifts to our community. At times I am prone to both disengagement and procrastination. At times I can disengage from someone I care for. At times I have been quick to judge organizations, leaders, employees. Employee engagement for all keeps me moving and transforms all wounds into a gift to our community! One phrase I made up and tried to teach to my counselling students was: Life is not a problem to be solved but an experience to be lived. I want to help people fully live their experiences and part of those people “is me!”

I assume as someone teaching counselling psychology, that you’ve done a lot of personal work on yourself over the years. Is that right?

You are right.

As a counsellor and counsellor educator there was a lot of self-development and personal work over the years.
Years ago I would have answered that question differently but today I do feel quite secure. I am ready to die happy today. I even played with that as a website for a while: www.diehappytoday.com.

I have grown slowly and “bumpily” into who I am. I really do see life as an experience to be lived rather than a problem to be solved and I am more and more okay with not knowing while also expressing what I know at this point in time. Mindfulness and being more in the moment have helped. Great mentors, I’ve had different ones but I have always had one since about 25. They have all been important to me. My wife keeps me honest, gounded, and challenged.

I read somewhere that all you need for happiness is an income of about $24,000 or something like that (can’t remember the exact number) so economic security is easy for me. Work is an expression of who I am and there is a secure fusion of doing and being. As I write this I also know this has really developed a lot in the past 5 years. I love getting older and I can’t wait to grow up and be childlike forever.

To me, David models a flow of such positive, effervescent, inclusive energy that he is perfect for what he is doing — and it shows in his “results.” This is a man with a great heart, generous, deeply engaged and alive in a way many of us want to be. Communicating with David, I get the sense that he helps everyone feel successful. That sort of presence is naturally inspiring and awakening. It is a pleasure and a privilege to record some of his continuing story here.

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I mentioned the phrase “selling wisdom” to my fiancé, Carmen, and she laughed. “Well,” she said,” I envision a little old man with a long gray beard behind a counter, and behind him the wall of an apothecary, except the medicines would have different names. The old man would ask his visitors what they wanted, and they would tell him their troubles whereupon he might suggest a dose of reality or sensitivity or bravery or such, pulling out the powders and the vials”. A Harry-Potterish kind of vision.

And yet I do think — when I’m at my best, anyway — this is exactly the business I am in, egocentric as it may sound. And I’m in it because there’s a hunger in the world for exactly that. People thrive on it. Businesses thrive on it, acknowledged or not. And I like it; I’m good at it. There’s a sort of destiny feel to it.

Before saying more, I want to acknowledge that despite the bemused stance, the self-inquiry is serious. There are sure liabilities to the work. Last week I noticed Ed Batista’s moving post on author David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide last year. Wallace’s perspective on life, as expressed in a graduation speech he gave, one Ed points to in his post, contains a lot of wisdom — just not enough to help him save his own life. But the content was exactly the kind of stuff we need and that people hunger for: penetrating, human, challenging, and deeply vulnerable.

The point is that anyone who thinks he/she is selling wisdom is exactly a presumptious fool. Wisdom can’t be sold, won’t be sold. It’s living, not a living. Oh, I know there are all those examples of gurus that promise enlightenment through books and CD’s, expensive retreats, and so on. But I actually am thinking of something very different. I’m thinking of when I discovered that the moments I was genuinely doing my best work were not while I was standing in front of a group or coaching the CEO in some private office on the top floor. It wasn’t the time on the clock; it was the time after, the time off the clock. And I was doing it with whomever I happened to run into in the lobby or the restaurant or the bar who was feeling something, who wanted to try to understand more of this whole mysterious, mixed up matrix of relationships and tasks. After a couple drinks, people sometimes would let down their guard, talk more honestly about their impressions of the work I had been called in to do in their organizations. They would tell their stories, share an honest attitude toward their organization, their team, the head honchos. These were the real clients, not so much in search of knowledge or even an opportunity to vent. They were in search of wisdom, including whatever mine might happen to be.

Of course, that can lead to an ego trip. I remember the President of a smallish manufacturing concern who wanted to buy me a glass of wine after our retreat with top staff. Earlier in the day I had called him out for evidently manipulating the meeting toward his own agenda rather than sticking with the group’s agreed upon and well planned agenda. I had the feeling, from that moment of tension I’d caused that I wouldn’t necessarily be working for him again and so I had little to lose. As we sipped our wine, I replied to his not so subtle criticisms of me this way: “You know, Bruce, this isn’t about my clients picking me to be their consultant so much as me picking my clients….You know, I don’t work for everybody.”

And, man, did he love that. I think it absolutely made his day for somebody to challenge him that directly. Wow, another alpha to compete with. Okay, after a couple of glasses of wine, I guess I must have been the one ready to tell the truth. But those days, when I still felt I could afford to be cocky, this, too, was evidence about where the real work got done.

He might have been a bit atypical. But from him and others I figured out that some of the very best interventions I could do would happen after the formal presentation, training, coaching, facilitation, etc…it would be later, one-on-one with someone struggling to find answers. Maybe the problem didn’t have anything to do with work, but it was something that caused him or her to wrestle with themselves. In fact, if this “meeting” didn’t happen, it seemed to me generally a sign that my work was going to be more superficial in the end.

Sometimes the issue someone talked about in the off hours was self-esteem — I think of the manager, sweet guy, who couldn’t confront people in his team and defeated himself out a post that would have taken him to the top of his organization. Sometimes the issue was a secret. I think of the woman, good Catholic soul and experienced, respected leader who’d had a lover on the side for twenty years that no one knew about. When he died unexpectedly, there was no one for her to turn to to share her grief. Sometimes the issues had a lot to do with the past. I think of the VP struggling whether to fire a manager who was loud, abrasive, a little cruel with his reports — the VP reflecting on his father hitting his mother and the VP stepping in as 17 year old young man to prevent his dad from ever hitting her again. And I think of the CEO of the big firm in the little town telling me how important his house was to him, and why it mattered, based on his experience as a teenager of his parents as they divorced, forcing him to pick which one of them he wanted to live with.

I think of the many dear colleagues and our laughter after a hard day with a client, us laughing so hard to celebrate our good work and sometimes also to get rid of the darkness of an experience that wasn’t successful at all; us pretending, searching for an always escaping sense of reassurance. Dear people, all of us, all so incorrigibly human.

The Little Shop of Wisdom, how we all have sought it out in the after hours, just around the corner, searching for that wise old man or that crone who can wrap us up a small package of reality, or vision, or courage, or a restored moral view. A drop or two of sanity, you know. No one, really, can buy or sell it; and you can’t really charge for any of those priceless hours, even if it is your true vocation. You can never charge for it and you would be a fool to try.

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There are many wonderful ideas on the thread, but in some ways it is a hapless question. If you say that people can change, you are going to have to face all the good arguments against that belief, and if you don’t believe people can change, you are going to have to encounter all the good reasons to believe they can.

I only want to add the thought there are times when, like a hermit crab, I believe we have to abandon a once comfortable shell that we have outgrown. If we want to be bigger — if we need to be — we have to leave one shell behind and take our chances in the open until we find another. Sometimes this is a difficult process and takes a long time; sometimes things almost magically come together.

I would say this pretty much explains the last twenty years or so of my life. It also has implications for making decisions about who we can best help and how.

I’m sure you can see what side of the argument I am on.

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The Practice of Leadership
Eight Leadership Practices
First Practice: Knowing Your Leadership Edge
Second Practice: Developing Your Comfort Level with Feedback
Third Practice: Caring for Self
Fourth Practice: Leadership and Influence
Fifth Practice: Discussing Undiscussables

Collaborating is the name I give to a conflict that has been turned into a synergy.

All this means is that conflict — difference — is entirely natural to us, and when we use our differences to create a combined outcome that is better than what we might have created separately, we are collaborating. The only really special thing about collaboration is that the process of collaborating takes people some place they might not have gone on their own. My image of collaboration is gates opening between what is mine and what is yours on the way to achieving something of mutual importance and value.

In research that was done by the Amherst A. Wilder Foundation, collaboration was compared to coorperation and coordination — two related but also very different concepts. You can read about the research here. In using their model I’ve found that the one most critical difference is that with collaboration resources are openly shared. Our “money,” whether that represents real dollars or ideas or time and energy goes into the same pot. Nothing is being held back in the process. To achieve something meaningful and new, we must be “all in.” That also means that there is an understanding that no one has the whole answer; only together will the best solution come forward.

It is easy in a leadership role to give lip service to collaboration but actually use it to achieve something else, the most commonly preferred outcome being “buy-in” by others. So, crafty people that we are, we call meetings to discuss our ideas in the hopes that others will adopt them. We actually use the word, “collaborate.” We seem to be open to others’ ideas while maneuvering to get our way. Oldest con in the book and it doesn’t fool anybody — except maybe the leader who brought it there.

I don’t think collaborating is actually about buy-in at all. Its energy comes from a very different place. I am thinking of a CEO I know who went through a very difficult personal period in his life. Previously he had believed he really would achieve the American Dream of a wonderful family life, great job, plenty of financial stability. But then one year it all seemed to go wrong. His wife began experiencing a mental disorder and it became clear to my client that in order to save his relationship with his children he had to leave the marriage. This was absolutely the last thing he had dreamed of, but it became inevitable. At that point, he fell into a period of deep questioning about where his life was really going. He found himself at work attending meetings but not doing what others wanted him to do — which was to make decisions. He realized that in a sense he had been faking it. He didn’t know the answers to their questions, but he could say things that sounded like answers and others would act on that. In the past, his ability to lead in this way had been gratifying, but suddenly it seemed utterly false. He began to do things a little differently. He began to ask others for their opinions and encouraged them to make sound decisions through their own knowledge and insight. Remarkably, the people who worked for him began to prosper in a new way, and he began to get his spirit back, if reformed by the discovery that in neither life or work did he have all the answers. This was not about simply delegating to others, but about having much better, richer conversations where people put out on the table their real views. Somehow he had stopped deciding for others and started collaborating with them.

Oh, how many meetings have I attended where an old culture demands a win/lose argument to prove that one of us in the room (including me) has the right or best answer? Such nonsense, yet I have experienced so many of those apparently important meetings where an active default culture pushed executives to jockey for position and compete for personal credibility: the entangled, self-deceptive, total opposite of collaboration.

But collaboration isn’t really about “win/win solutions” either. That came from models that compared and contrasted collaboration with competition, such as the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument where scales of assertiveness and cooperativeness end up producing five different modes, including collaboration and compromise. I say collaboration is not “win/win” although that may be its most popular definition. I would say it a little differently, I guess, because “win/win” sounds like simply a positive compromise. True collaboration, I believe, goes farther.

An example from many years ago. My boss at the time, Personnel Director for the municipal government where I worked, was (and still is) a mentor to me. But he could also have very strong opinions, given his background as a labor negotiator, about issues such as “management rights.” I, on the other hand, came intuitively from a background of organization development. One day, trying to figure out a solution to a problem in one of the City’s departments, we found ourselves in a serious argument. My boss said to me, “Dan, why is it your solutions always seem to depend on involving and including employees, even if the issue doesn’t concern them?!” My retort, which of course I cannot remember exactly, had to do with his persistent focus on top down solutions that resulted in people feeling manipulated (”Managed” was probably the word I used at the time). So we seemed to be at a standoff. What was critically important about the standoff is that we had just said things to each other we had not said before — but had felt about one another. These things were our “truths.” And we had been having an argument about them, not about the situation in the Department. That was simply our excuse to have the argument. And it had been getting personal. But then something, I’m not really sure what, stopped us from creating a disaster in the relationship. We simply stopped the argument and stepped back. There was something absolutely clarifying about that moment. I had had no idea how my boss had viewed me with regard to employee involvement. I suspect, he had heard something new from me, as well. That was the moment, I believe, when we turned conflict into synergy. We stopped. We reflected. We started talking again, but the knowledge of what had been unspoken in our relationship changed the character of our problem-solving. Neither us then went for an extreme solution. We went for something that was entirely new to both of us.

Peter Koestenbaum in his book, Leadership: The Inner Side of Greatness talks about a group of engineers who found themselves in constant argument until they learned to stop talking about problems and solutions, and started talking about the pain they experienced in their work. The notion of pain, instead of problem, helped them focus on the next move — which was to dialogue, and that in turn led to learning and personal growth. The engineers had stopped the argument, and learned to collaborate.

An instance of this move is a story I’ve told many times about the executive team of a hospital. My plane was late so I arrived after the meeting had already started. As I entered the room, I immediately noticed that several people were wiping their eyes and others were glaring at each other angrily. As I sat down, a few members continued their dark rant about the team and how it always seemed to get stuck like this. The air was full of blame and sideways comments. Someone asked me to help them get out of it. In the moment, frankly, I didn’t know what to do. So I figured I’d better throw it back on them — and did — by asking the question, “What are you learning from this exchange?” The gods were certainly with me that day. That seemed to be just enough of an intervention to stop the hostilities. I made the group formally list out their learnings from the argument they had been having. There were quite a few about the nature of sideways comments and failures to say things directly to one another — as in looking another person in the eye and saying that person’s name so everyone knew where a particular comment was directed. As a result of the group’s self-evaluation, the norms for behavior at meetings changed significantly.

What I am talking about is how collaboration can be born as a tangible shift in group dynamics. A moment you can feel happening. Does this mean that collaboration only happens after an argument? No. But I do believe once people have experienced that moment, they have much better understanding of what collaborating at bottom is about. Having been through that moment, people can come to their encounters with one another differently.

Does this mean that everyone with this experience becomes an effective collaborator? No again. Some people do not find a shift away from argument useful for them. They’ve received too many rewards for dominating, for personal remarks, for loudness, for talking over others, and a host of other bad habits that, unfortunately, have gotten others to go along. And, truly, this can savage the possibilities of collaboration in a team, if the members are not strong enough to talk openly to the offender in the moment. The hospital group had been in that situation for a long time before their mutual tensions enabled them to break through.

To really understand collaboration, I believe we have to go back to that moment just before argument ceases and the synergy begins, and ask, so what’s there? And this is such an interesting moment. I would say it is the instant when the argument becomes sheer reflection of who we are. We are suddenly faced with one gigantic mirror. In the mirror we see the utter futility and pointlessness of the argument; we hear our voices as shouting opinions, not sharing facts. We begin to wonder about where our assumptions and strong feelings have come from, and we take the risk to look at them and see them plainly. Our fallibilities are apparent — at least to us — and we decide that there is nothing, really, in that moment to win or lose. Then, I think, we are able to make a fresh start, apologize if need be, and open ourselves to something really new. Out of this reflection, creativity arises. Remarkably, a sense of partnership or community also can come forward.

The beauty is that real collaboration can’t be faked. Yes, it does lead to a sense of ownership. Yes, it does lead to win/win, but those are outcomes that can’t be bought and sold through technique. All processes can be wrecked by ego, dominance, and slavish adherence to some name or convention. Collaboration can be a sudden and unexpected gift to a group of people who let their common problem become their common teacher.

The process I’m describing isn’t so different from Otto Scharmer’s Theory U, except that it can happen in a flash as people realize how empty it was to put up their careful fences and self-protective barriers in the first place.

One last example, from a slightly different angle. I was working with a big government agency. The head of one of its most important divisions, I’ll call him Salvador, decided to slightly reorganize, meaning that disparate groups would be expected to share their budgeted resources in order to collaborate on their best use across traditional organizational boundaries, both physical and non-physical. Salvador’s direct reports were going through a period of resistance to his vision. In a meeting of twenty or so managers, many expressed their resistance by saying they already collaborated.

One of the most senior of the managers, Richard, put it plainly. “Look,” he said to Salvador, “I do give away some of my resources to the other units. I invite them to learn from our folks when they don’t have training money of their own. They call and ask questions of my staff and we are helpful to them. I include them sometimes on task forces. I think I have a solid reputation for collaborating. And I know others here feel the same way. I really don’t see what you are asking for that’s different from what I already do.”

Salvador faced this challenge directly. “Richard,” he said in front of the group, “I understand that you believe you collaborate. But that is not my observation. And it is definitely not your reputation. My observation is that you occasionally give things to other departments and dole things out, but it never really reaches the level I’m looking for.”

Richard was flustered. “What do you mean, I don’t have a reputation for collaborating?” he demanded.

The rest of the room, of course, was suddenly very quiet.

Salvador continued gently: “Let’s talk about some things you have done to help other departments and things you might have done that would have been closer to the goal.”

As they talked, others joined in to help Richard see that while he had been generous to a degree, he had failed in sharing the one organizational resource that meant the most to him: power. His “gifts” created obligation and superiority to other departments. He really didn’t allow others to participate as equals. Others sucked up to him when they needed his help, but he never called them when he needed assistance. He never really “opened his gate” while expecting others to open theirs. While this was difficult feedback to Richard, as the day went by he seemed to internalize it well. He began to see the part of Salvador’s vision that had been unclear.

Collaboration is a subtle topic. It touches deep parts of who we are. It tests our blind spots. And it enriches us immeasurably.

To do it well, like so much of leadership, requires us to use that very bright and sensitive mirror we all carry within.

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My brother and I were trying to discuss the Holocaust with him in the dream and we had a book cover we were showing him — from a book by a Jewish writer. Suddenly he grabbed the book cover out of my hands and tried to rip it or crumble it. His emotions were entirely surprising. I questioned him, “Dad, what are you so angry about? What is it?”

At this, he stopped trying to destroy the book cover. Visibly upset, he looked at us. “I guess I still have very strong feelings about these things,” he said. Then he reached out to me, put his head on my shoulder and began to sob. I held him in utter sympathy and astonishment.

Then I woke up. I cannot tell you how far this dream of my father is from my actual experiences of him. In the dream it was as if he was showing me an entirely different side of himself, one he had never dared show my brother and me previously. I knew him as very private, practical and cordial — and always in emotional control when it came to his largely unspoken past.

Maybe in spirit form he is sending me a message.

If so, I would say it is a mysterious one about a secret self never revealed to his sons.

And maybe it is also a fact we all have such secret selves, sides of who we are that are unresolved but well covered by reason and conclusion, by little speeches that seem to say we’ve plumbed the depths and know what they mean. Except we don’t and maybe never will. Maybe there is shame in these things and that is why we want to keep them hidden, maybe regret, maybe hurt or fear, so they become boarded off, a locked room that no longer requires our inner attention.

And maybe the way is that whatever happens in the evolution of the human spirit, in the quest to become ourselves, we have to go back and unlock all such rooms, bringing light to these spaces and sharing them with those we love. Maybe we must do it even after death, so strong is the need.

(For Feedblitz Subscribers: Direct link to blog posting. Direct link to Oestreich Associates website.)

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.