Vedere Consulting

Three years ago In New Orleans, Kimberly Rivers Roberts, a drug dealer who “did anything I had to do” to get enough money for rent and food, commited an act of faith. She bought a video camera from a friend. She had no idea what she would film. "My state of mind was like, this could come in handy," Rivers Roberts told Steve Inskeep on NPR’s Morning Edition. "My plan was just to film something I could sell."

You might think Rivers Roberts was crazy. What were her chances of making money with a video camera? Then, a week after she bought her camera, Hurricane Katrina struck. Rivers Roberts filmed the storm’s harrowing progress as the waters rose through her house. The family moved to the attic. “I was praying and shooting,” she said in her interview with Inskeep, “that’s what got me through.”

Rivers Roberts’ powerful footage has been included in the documentary, “Trouble the Water,” which won the best documentary award at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival (www.troublethewaterfilm.com). The film crew came through New Orleans shortly after the storm, met the Robertses, and were so taken with their footage that they decided to follow the couple and capture their story. The documentary features a rap recording by Rivers Roberts, who has started a record label (http://www.bornhustlerrecords.com/bornhustler.htm) and is releasing her album, titled “Troubled the Water” today.

In 2001, I facilitated a retreat for the School for the Performing Arts in Richmond (SPARC). SPARC’s mission is to use the “triple threat”—teaching singing, acting and dancing—to build children’s self esteem, confidence and poise. When I worked with them they had grown to the point where they were teaching classes in many different locations. Those many locations created an administrative nightmare. The Board decided SPARC needed to own a permanent home, and although the dream seemed impossible, they pledged to make it happen. It took seven years, false starts and many disappointments. But the Board and SPARC’s leadership, Jennie and Larry Brown, persevered. This summer, SPARC moved into its new home, a spacious building they can call their own.

These stories illustrate that faith takes many forms. It takes acting on an idea without knowing the outcome. It takes persisting even when the odds seem to be against you. Faith works because without it you can’t see the opportunities to move forward that always exist. Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, in his speech last night before the Democratic Convention, reminded us “the Gospel of Matthew says, “If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to the mountain ‘move mountain’ and it will move.” Leadership means having a vision, and moving others to believe in and work for that vision, as Martin Luther King did with his “I have a dream” speech, delivered 45 years ago yesterday. People who were present at that march were able last night to see a black American accept the nomination for president by a major party. It was something many of them said they never believed they would live to see.

I am seeing today with these examples how faith really does move mountains. That people who believe that in the end right prevails ultimately will be successful. Not always in their lifetimes. But ultimately, the goal will be achieved.

You can learn more about Kimberly Rivers Roberts at www.npr.org .
You can read the full text of Tim Kaine’s speech at http://www.demconvention.com/tim-kaine/ .

Labels: Leadership: Vision

"Creative work is first prepared for and only then realized. Improvisation requires preparation; spontaneity requires preparation. The very ability to approach a blank canvas or computer screen is contingent on the artist's inner preparations, contingent on the alignment of his heart, mind, and hands in the direction of his task. The artist who does not get ready will never be ready: an artist must prepare like any ardent apprentice to achieve mastery."

--Affirmations for Artists by Eric Maisel

I was in my late 20’s when I attended graduate school at the Leadership Institute of Seattle. The program was innovative and experiential and attracted a lot of bright, intuitive students. Many came because they wanted to make a difference. Many, like me, were impatient to make our marks on the world. We expected to do well.

We didn’t know as much as we thought we did. We understood, as Greg Johanson and Ron Kurtz say in their book, Grace Unfolding, that “those who are best at what they do are not bound by the axioms, rules and limits of their fields, but allow themselves to be directed by their open, intuitive imaginations.” That was us--ready to break the rules, to be guided by our intuitive sense of what would work. What we didn’t see was a principle vital to the mastery of any discipline—freedom to innovate requires minds “primed . . . by studying widely and deeply.”

The person who made this principle clear to me is a man named Ron Short. A faculty member at LIOS during my time there, Ron created a simple model that illustrates the importance of discipline to freedom. He helped me see that instinct and good intentions are not enough. He has given me permission to create my own version, which preserves, I think, the spirit of the original. It appears at the bottom of this post.

As a coach, my job is to help people improve their performance. There
are a lot of people out there trying to do the same thing--parents,
executives,teachers, doctors, supervisors, you name it. Maybe you.

Doesn't it feel great when you're successful, when a conversation or
something you did helped someone else turn it around? Isn't it
frustrating when nothing seems to change?

David Rock in his book, Quiet Leadership, (www.resultscoaching.com )contends that coaching someone to better performance is harder than we think. We often get it wrong.
Most people, he says, try to change performance by giving advice. According to Rock, that rarely works.

Why? First, it's really hard to change a habit. Behaviors create a neural pathway in the brain. The more you engage in that behavior, the stronger the pathway becomes. Habits have strong pathways. The brain wants to use that pathway. The only way the pathway disappears is through disuse. To do that, the brain must create a new pathway and the only way to do that is to create a new behavior. The more the new behavior is used, the stronger its pathway becomes. The old habit fades as its pathway no longer is utilized. Finding a new behavior you are motivated to pursue is critical to changing behavior.

Second, no two brains are alike. What might help you make a shift won't
mean anything to someone else because your brains are different. However, most people assume “what works for me will work for you.” It doesn’t.

Third, it takes a lot of emotional energy to change a habit. It goes
beyond just wanting to change. It's energy that accompanies the sense
that you want it, you see the solution, you know you can do it. No one
can tell you these things. The energy is generated from within. Having
an "aha moment," an insight, creates this energy. But there's a catch.
My insight probably won't provide enough energy to change your
behavior. Your insight will. Giving advice to someone else is pretty useless.

So there are two small things we can do differently to be more
helpful, more influential. We can help others create new habits
instead of trying to break the old ones, and we can help others think
for themselves instead of doing the thinking for them. Helping others
think for themselves means shifting the way we approach developmental
conversations--changing the questions we ask and the responses we
make.

We must ask open questions rather than closed ones. We must resist giving advice and listen. We must give the person our full attention. We must encourage rather than discourage. Sometimes it means we must replace our old habits of helping with new ones! It’s worth it, though. You’ll see the person’s eyes look up as they begin thinking, you’ll see the energy released as they get an answer, and you’ll experience the connection that comes from helping someone solve their own problem.

Labels: Leadership: coaching

I’m dedicating this blog (my longest one yet!) to a fabulous group of people with whom I have been privileged to work the past several months, and to my esteemed colleague, Kathleen McSweeney.

Plum Cluverius

It was a tough week for the admissions department of a private university. As the director said: “Change is hard!” He should know. His department is undergoing a significant reorganization due to continued staffing shortages and financial constraints. As implementation of the new structure got underway, and even though staff was involved from the start, tempers flared, water cooler whispering resumed, and some of the hard won trust and cooperation within the group began slipping away.

This behavior has caught the managers and staff off guard because the group has worked so hard to create a collaborative environment. The reorganization occurred in part to rectify staff concerns about uneven distribution of work, less than efficient processes, and confusion about leadership roles. Everyone in the department had opportunities to share ideas for the new structure—in meetings, in writing and one-on-one. Changes and their reasons were explained. Staff and management learned together how to communicate, resolve conflicts, work together as a team. They talked together about the future they wanted for the department.

When this department had done so many things right, why did things seem to be going wrong? An answer, I think, lies in William Bridges seminal work on transitions, detailed books like Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes, and Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change. ( www.wmbridges.com ). Bridges helps us see that our emotional response to change, our adjustment to change, what he calls “transition,” is pivotal to the success of any change effort. Each person goes through, at their own pace, three stages of transition.

The first, which Bridges calls “endings,” is the process of saying goodbye to what we must leave behind in the change. Even with positive changes, there is some sense of loss—and loss produces a host of emotional reactions. In the admissions department, this meant saying goodbye to familiar work teams, processes, student groups, roles.

Once we recognize what’s going away, we enter a period that Bridges call “chaos” or “the neutral zone.” I’ve always preferred “chaos” because that’s what it often feels like! In the “chaos” stage, you know what you’ve left behind, but you don’t know where you’re going. Someone from the admissions department said, “you don’t have the picture yet, you don’t know what it’s going to look like.” You’re kind of groping around in the dark. All of us like some sense of certainty, and in “chaos” there usually isn’t much. People experience a variety of emotions—confusion, fear, anger, exhaustion. It can seem hard to get going. It doesn’t sound very pretty, does it? But there’s an upside. In “chaos,” all the old rules go away; it’s easier to be creative. When things are going smoothly, it’s easy to get into a rut. But in “chaos,” there is no rut. You can try new ideas, new ways of doing things.

In the third phase, which Bridges calls “new beginnings,” you begin to get the picture. You see where things are going; you understand what you need to do to thrive in the new world. You form new habits that work. It’s not always an easy phase, but you start to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Every individual, every group, every organization goes through these phases. We don’t go through them together—everyone has their own pace—and we don’t go through them in an orderly way. We wander all over the place—one day hopeful, the next day discouraged, the next day angry, the next day excited, etc. etc. Leaders, often because they are more involved in the planning, are often further along in the process than the staff, and they can forget what it’s like to not know, to be in the dark.

Bridges helps us see that all these reactions are normal. In a transition, both people and process benefit when individuals are tender with themselves, tender with each other and patient with the process. The admissions department has learned the value of discussing progress and setbacks with each other, celebrating successes, staying involved in planning the future, speaking up and offering solutions when something isn’t working.

Any team, department, or organization contemplating a change, or finding themselves in the midst of one can learn from the admission department’s experience. Change is hard. But when you understand the process of transition, you can move through it more smoothly and successfully.

Labels: Leadership: Team

“Abandon sageliness and discard wisdom
Then the people will benefit a hundredfold.”
-- Lao Tzu

This quotation hits me like a thunderbolt. Because my secret longing is to be wise. I’ve trained for it and read for it and worked for it and sacrificed other goals for it. To my mind, wisdom is the ultimate accomplishment. It goes beyond being savvy or smart. It means knowing how to use what you know, how to respond to the moment, how to help.

But there’s a dark side to my pursuit of wisdom. The dark side is having to know, having to respond rightly. If I’m wise (like the many “sage” characters we see on TV) I have to know what to do, what to say. That can be nerve wracking. Because I don’t always know. When I don’t know something I or others expect me to know, I feel incompetent. I lose my focus. As a coach, my attention shifts from my client to myself. “What do I do now?” I ask myself. I become conscious of my hesitations. I wonder what my client is thinking of me. In the worst moments of unknowing, I imagine that everyone will somehow know about this and think I’m completely hopeless. My mind is running a mile a minute.

The last thing I’m doing in such a moment is what Lao Tzu calls “non-doing.” For Lao Tzu, there is a flow of life that is ever-changing, ever-creative. If we trust in the creativity of life, our job becomes one of doing nothing that interferes with that flow. Paradoxically, if one is focused on being wise, one cannot be aware of the flow or trust that flow. Whatever one does will interfere with the creative process. When I struggle to be the sage, I act unwisely. When I let the process unfold, when I don’t grasp for the solution or the right thing to say, when I focus on what’s happening and don’t worry about what I “should” be doing, the right answer comes.

Many of the executives I know are the same way. After all, aren’t they paid to have the answers? These executives believe, sometimes at an unconscious level, that they have to know what to do when subordinates come to them, when their bosses come to them, when the organization demands an answer. They are great problem solvers, great visionaries. And, like me, sometimes the external or internal pressure to know gets in the way. Just like my brilliant insights sometimes get in the way of my client’s discovering something even more brilliant for themselves, the go-to VP with all the answers gets in the way of their subordinates solving problems for themselves. Or they solve a problem too quickly and miss valuable information that would have informed a better decision. Or they solve the problem the same old way and lose out because the old way is no longer sufficient.

There is such pressure for us to know, to be right, to be wise. Yet to be wise and helpful, we have to let go of our desire for wisdom, our need to be right. We must wait for the right time, trust that others will find the answer, tune in to what our senses, our bodies and our emotions are telling us, let go of what we know so we can trust the unknown. All this requires a certain faith, not in ourselves, but something larger. Call it God, call it the Tao, call it the Universe. If we trust in the flow of life, we don’t have to be right. We simply have to be present.

Labels: Self Leadership

Labels: Leadership: motivation

I did something a while ago that I regret. I joked about Richmond (the one in Virginia) being a place where the Civil War is still taken very seriously. If you know Richmond you are probably wondering why something like that would bother me. After all, the Civil War is taken very seriously in this former capital of the Confederacy. But it’s not all about unreconstructed Rebels wishing the South would rise again. It’s a complicated conversation that stirs many emotions. At its best, though, the conversation about the Civil War is an attempt to “integrate and salvage the national story.”

I first saw that phrase in an interview in the Richmond Times-Dispatch with University of Richmond President Ed Ayers. It captures perfectly what I believe is a necessary step in the evolution of our nation and, importantly, in every organization faced with difficult and long-ranging decisions.

I’ve heard people say that we just “need to get over it and move on.” Moving on is a good thing, but moving on without understanding how we got here in the first place keeps our understanding incomplete, our focus small and our options narrow. This is true because the world we live in is the result of decisions made and actions taken in our collective past. We assume many things are simply “the way they are” without understanding that something happened to make them that way in the first place. If we know what that something is, our minds are often opened to new ways of thinking.

Dr. Beverly Fletcher and Dr. Billy Wayson offer a course at the Federal Executive Institute called “The Long Shadow of Slavery.” Their goal is not to rehash old wounds, but to help us look at our past with open eyes so we can see the policies and the reasons for the policies that shape our way of thinking today. Such an examination makes it possible to “heal the future” –to create solutions to long-standing problems. If we see our problems as decisions made long ago, it makes it easier to see the decisions we can now make, individually and collectively, to make things better. Such an honest examination makes it easier to see how our opponents (as well as our friends) came to draw the conclusions they’ve drawn, and then to see new and creative options.

All organizations have difficult, knotty issues to tackle. Often there are conflicting viewpoints about how those issues can be best addressed. I believe that executives need to understand the collective past before they decide on the corporate future. They need to know, not the rosy corporate history fashioned by the communications department, but the organization’s unvarnished understanding of itself.

How can they get this viewpoint? The best way is to ask. Not one person, but lots of people. Marv Weisbord and Sandra Janoff (www.futuresearch.net )created a strategic planning methodology, the future search conference, which brings all the stakeholders of an organization together to create a picture of its future. During the first part of the conference, participants create a collective timeline detailing the significant events and decisions in an organization’s history. This timeline creates a collective understanding of “how we got here” and begins to spark conversations and ideas of how to go forward.

Future Search Conferences are one way an organization can learn about its past. It’s not the only way. However, executives would do well to learn from the Federal Executive Institute. FEI is devoted to developing executive leadership in the federal government. It believes that federal executives need to understand our “national story” if they are to understand the context, the environment, in which they have to lead. Such understanding makes leaders—government and corporate—far wiser and far more effective.

Labels: Executive Leadership