Authentic Leadership and Your "Crucible Story"

As I wrote earlier this week, I spent Tuesday morning listening to Bill George and his colleagues from the Authentic Leadership Institute, Nick Craig and Tim Dorman, discussing leadership at the Stanford Faculty Club.  In addition to Bill's remarks, Nick and Tim led the audience through an exercise that I found compelling: Exploring your "crucible story."

In George's True North, he discusses the concept in his chapter on a leader's transformative growth:

What enables leaders...to avoid derailment and make the transition from being heroes of their own journeys to become authentic leaders who empower other leaders?  Most of the leaders we interviewed had transformative experiences...

A transformative experience may come at any point in your life.  It could result from a positive experience of having a wise mentor or having a unique opportunity at a young age.  But as much as we all want positive experiences like these, transformations for many leaders result from going through a crucible.

In Geeks and Geezers, Warren Bennis and Robert Thomas describe the concept of the crucible that tests leaders to their limits.  A crucible can be triggered by events such as confronting a difficult situation at work, receiving critical feedback, or losing your job.  Or it may result from a painful personal experience, such as divorce, illness, or the death of a loved one.

George goes on to discuss several crucible experiences of his own, including the death of his mother, the death of his fiancee three weeks before their marriage, and his deep unhappiness while leading a division of Honeywell.  He writes about the concept at greater length in Finding Your True North, a "personal guide" that serves as a companion to the earlier book, co-written by Andrew McLean and Nick Craig:

Your crucible tests you to the core of your being.  It forces you to look at yourself, examine your character and your values in a new light, and come to grips with who you are.  View in retrospect, your crucible may become the defining experience in your life, even if you do not recognize it when you are in the middle of the experience...

Passing through the crucible--or reframing it years later with the benefit of hindsight--you will see the world differently, and thus you will behave differently as well.  It is during such a passage that you recognize that your leadership is not primarily about your own success or about getting others to follow you.  Rather, you understand that the essence of leadership is aligning your teammates around a shared vision and share values and empowering them to step up and lead...

The exercise Nick and Tim conducted was disarmingly simple, but extremely powerful: Pair up with another person in the room, and spend 20 minutes sharing your "crucible stories."  The first story I chose to tell my partner was one I discussed here in a post last October: Peter Drucker on Knowledge Workers, Management and Leadership.

I was working with two teams of students in Stanford's Leadership Fellows program, but I was more focused on managing them--insuring that they "did things right"--than on leading them--insuring that they "did the right things."  As Drucker notes, knowledge workers like my students must be led and not managed if they are to feel satisfied and challenged, to maintain their belief in the team's mission, to learn continuously and to ultimately achieve results.  Drucker declares with great emphasis in Management Challenges of the 21st Century, "One does not 'manage' people.  The task is to lead people."

Both of my efficiently-managed but poorly-led teams were becoming increasingly unhappy, and it was clear that I needed to work with them in a fundamentally different way.  I made a major mid-course correction and told my teams that I wanted to be less directive and foster a greater sense of empowerment and ownership among them.  In practice, this required some very tangible changes: I stopped setting meeting agendas, I stopped attending some team meetings entirely, and I stopped running the meetings I did attend.  I made fewer decisions, particularly with regard to logistics and the allocation of resources--clearly managerial domains.  And I did all I could to give team members a free hand to fulfill their responsibilities--to "do things right"--as they saw fit, with minimal interference from me.

When I wrote that post in October I had just begun to implement those changes, and although the initial results were positive, the jury was still out.  But both teams were ultimately highly successful, at least from my perspective, and it's gratifying to look back on the experience and to feel that this change in approach--from management to leadership--was a meaningful factor in our success.

I'm struck by the fact that George's discussion of "crucible stories" highlights their role in what he calls "the transformation from 'I' to 'We."  From Finding Your True North:

As leaders experience challenging times and learn the lessons of those difficult periods, the process of transforming from "I" to "We" is seeded.  Initial successes may reinforce what leaders do at an early stage, but difficult times force them to question their approach...

We single out the transformation from "I" to "We" because it places leaders in a powerful paradox... [Crucible] experiences force them to be humble.  This newly found humility stems from the recognition that leadership is not just about them.

Only when you stop focusing on your own ego will you be able to develop other leaders.  You will be able to move beyond being competitive with talented peers and subordinates, and you will be more open to other points of view.  As you overcome your need to control everything or do everything, you find that people are more interested in working with you.  A light bulb goes on as you recognize the unlimited potential of empowered leaders working toward a shared purpose.  This transformation opens the door to discovering your full potential as an authentic leader.

I hardly feel that I've "discovered my full potential" as a leader, but my experience with these teams was certainly a significant step forward in my "transformation from 'I' to 'We," and I'm very grateful to the team members for their candid feedback, vast talent and extraordinary dedication.

Postscript 1: A striking after-effect of the "crucible story" exercise in the Authentic Leadership seminar was the way it created such strong feelings of closeness among an roomful of strangers.  As both Tim Dorman and an audience member noted in the debrief, we typically introduce ourselves with success stories and highlights from our resume, "putting our best foot forward," and the result is that we often find ourselves in an unspoken competition with those we meet, comparing ourselves to them and feeling better or worse depending on how we measure up.

In contrast, sharing our crucible stories allowed us to feel much more empathic, engaged and connected with each other.  Rather than focusing on our differences, we were surprised by how much we had in common, how many similar challenges we had faced and how similarly we had responded.

It's made me think about how I might introduce myself differently the next time I meet someone new or begin working with a new team.

Postscript 2: During the debrief, Nick asked, "What do your crucible stories tell you about your style as a leader?"  I realized that although I don't go through the day thinking of myself as a big risk-taker, I'm actually fairly comfortable with risk--I can take some big leaps of faith without knowing how things will work out in the end.  Not all these leaps do work out, of course--I've crashed and burned plenty of times.  But they work out often enough to allow me to feel a greater sense of trust in myself, which I can tap into as a source of reassurance when I'm feeling stressed or uncertain.

Again, thanks to Tim and his colleages at ALI for a great experience.

Photo by Dave Hogg.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Comments

[Vandy Massey]

I completely agree with this. The transformation from 'I' to 'we' is even more critical in difficult times. I believe we will see that the organisations that thrive through the current economic downturn will be those where people are led rather than managed.

Unfortunately, its usually only in hindsight that we recognise the value in our 'crucible' times. Developing a more open attitude to things that are normally perceived as negative (and therefore to be avoided), potentially allows us to get the most out of the experience.

[Ed Batista]

Great point, Vandy, and that openness toward the value of "negative" experiences is something we try to instill in our students in any number of courses. The challenge, as you note, is that it can take time, sometimes years, to fully understand how such an experience has transformed us for the better. But one key is recognizing that "failure is inevitable, and what's important is how you handle it, not how you avoid it."