Category: Lead

A friend claims my saying this to her was a help, so I thought I would pass it along.

Most of us are trained to be right, to know all, to get as many gold stars as we can, and then display those stars as often as possible. In this way, we imagine we will protect ourselves from, say, having to slink out of the party after being asked what we do. Because with a gold star position and a phrase to follow it, we think, we will be safe or even convey how someone else will need to do the slinking.

I am a lawyer . . . a lawyer who tries cases in front of the Supreme Court when I am not, you know, consulting to the wanna-be’s at the Hague.

And thus we pretend the battlefield of ego demands artillery rather than allies.

But we should know that such artillery only leads to an arms race with yourself. Wh, for that matter, you can even be President and have your name on the side of a building in gold letters and still be the saddest and loneliest boy alive.

And once we get into these battles as a part of our routine or accept them as the capital of where we work we confuse expertise with trustworthiness, status with happiness, and forget that our gold stars will never win us the love we all needed as a child, likely still need as an adult.

So why not go for the love directly?

Instead of telling you what I do can I tell you I love those cashmere pants? Or how I rollerskated with my kids the other day on my birthday? Or the way my husband plays the organ at churches around town not because he’s so religious but because he’s a cross between Thelonius Monk and a lapsed catholic?

To go for love in a world that values the impressive is not just to escape the fear of what to say at parties, it is to be better at what you do. Sure, for the record, I want my pilot to be an expert. If my surgeon picked up a scalpel and said, “what’s this?” I’d panic. Obviously, being loveable is no replacement for basic competence, especially when the task at hand is life or death.

But most of us are at least competent and few of us manage life-or-death situations. As seriously as you take your organization or your school or your business, as important as what you do may be to someone’s future or your community or your sense of self, acting as if you are always a pilot in a storm or a surgeon replacing a heart just adds stress to your life and everyone else’s around you too. Besides, if pilots and surgeons want to make the rest of their crew or their surgical team relax, they should shoot for loveable too, channel whoever it is riffing on “Straight, No Chaser” between hymns at church.

Instead of, “can I be impressive enough to get you through this?” Try, “what are we doing together?”

With your colleagues or your students, with your boss or those who report to you, aim to be a partner in joy and accomplishment rather than a victor in that same old fight over ego and status. Indeed, especially if lots of people report to you, go for partnership over solo-ship, people wanting to share with you rather than scamper from you. The leader who fails to get some key info or basic honesty from the people they were leading? Who ends up dealing with an impossible crisis as a result? They wanted to impress more than love.

Be generous. Be kind. Be willing to say, “I don’t know.” Leave fruit on people’s desks and send them pointless emails of delight. Work your charisma rather than your resume. People will find out what you do and your skills soon enough anyway. And your status and sense of clarity may go up along the way.

One more thing here: In the Molly School “we teach what we need to learn” notion of education, when you spend less time trying to impress and more time being loveable, you learn to love yourself and others more as well. That makes it easier to have a good night’s rest, look in the mirror, and enjoy the party. Impressing, you might say, where it matters most.

Thus the boss of the future should be someone capable of saying, “I'm not doing anything, how can I help?"

If the average boss looked at their calendar and put on it not all the things they wanted to get done, but instead blocked off all the time they for doing nothing—and encouraged others to do the same—that would go a long way towards taking stress out of the system.

Do you know that ants turn themselves off—just sit there and do nothing—for thirty percent of their work time? That makes it easier for their teammates to operate in tight spaces, prevent traffic jams.

Indeed, not only would building slack into the system make it saner and healthier, it would increase productivity and creativity too. There was a point in the company’s history when half of Google’s money making products were developend in the time employees were given to do whatever they wanted to do.

The DNA of the assembly line is deep in us, tragically. We do better , even trhive, when we work as if in studios and workshops.

Now . . . to make those the model for the economy, and for school too.