Allegiance

I’ve written before about how leaders should be loyal to their followers, modeling the kind of behavior they hope to foster.

But what makes for loyal followers? I think it’s important to reflect on our concept of loyalty, and define what kind of allegiance we’re asking of people.

I like to think of loyalty as a continuum. At one end is loyalty to your vision or idea. People follow because the agenda you’ve laid out before them is compelling. They are loyal to you, but only to a point. Their allegiance is contingent upon accomplishing the vision. This also means they will be willing to challenge and argue with you about what this vision looks like. Sometimes, it can even lead to people leaving because the vision you’re laying out no longer matches with what they thought the vision was or should be.

At the other end of the spectrum is loyalty to you. It’s not to the vision or the idea (though it may appear that way). Their bond isn’t to the mission of the organization, the bottom line, or the greater good. They are loyal only and always to you. They give blind assent to whatever you say, without every questioning or wavering.

This side of the continuum scares me. It’s Jim Jones territory. It is the kind of loyalty a cult leader demands from his or her followers. Worse still, many are willing to give it.

Creepy Crawlies

I’ll never forget it. Instant, blossoming pain in my heel, burning white hot and slowly radiating up my foot and leg. I looked down to see what I had stepped on, and there it was. A scorpion. He (maybe it was she?) was a small guy, no larger than a quarter. But his sting packed a wallop.

Growing up in Brazil, it was not uncommon to encounter little creepy crawlies around the house. Spiders, cockroaches, ants—all were normal and I just learned to dispose of them in safe and productive ways (by smashing the guts out of ’em and tossing their carcasses outside).

I was 9 or 10, and Mom had told me to pick up my room. Haphazard piles dominated the landscape. Random stuff was shoved into corners. It was MESSY. It was the last thing I wanted to do. But I also knew better than to cross my Mom, so clean I did.

It happened when I was hauling junk out from under my bed, apparently where he had decided to move in. As soon as I felt his sting, I shrieked in terror and pain, and hobbled out of the room. Mom was close by to both render aid and kill my attacker (by the way, a fresh-cut onion is a neat little trick for helping with insect stings). Thankfully, it was only a small scorpion. His sting hurt—a lot. But it wasn’t life-threatening and I was back to normal in no time.

I wonder how big he would have gotten if I had never bothered to clean my room. I wonder what other potentially dangerous creepy crawlies would have joined him, to grow and linger unnoticed until they were too big to hide.

I wonder what scorpions lurk in the dark corners of my life. What’s quietly growing in my heart, threatening to one day inject its venom into me or those around me?

Mom was right. It’s time to clean our rooms.

Baggage

One of my mentors used to say, “Some people have baggage. And some people BEAT YOU with their baggage.”

We are all dysfunctional to some extent. It’s part of being human. Like it or not, we all have baggage, emotional suitcases that feel like they’ve been packed for us. In them we carry our disillusionments, wounds, bad habits, and scars. And like the proverbial monkey on our back, we take this baggage with us wherever we go.

That means that as leaders, we have this wealth of dysfunction to draw upon when we’re leading. All the junk in our suitcases conspires to hobble us, to trip us up and render us ineffective. It’s essential that we work hard to understand what we’re carrying around, that we’re taking time to unpack our bags.

We can’t afford to beat anyone with our baggage.

A Gift…

She had called the meeting. One of my employees. It was a particularly busy day for me, one in which I felt as though I had very little margin because of the appointments on my calendar. I went into the meeting thinking that I would answer any questions and resolve any issues quickly so that I could get back to my busy schedule. She just needed my leadership to point the way. Or so I thought.

As soon as I sat down, I realized this wasn’t going to be simply business. It was about something deeper. This was personal.

Over the next twenty minutes, she pointed out one of my big blind spots. It’s a leadership deficiency that stems from a very old wound and it makes me get defensive really fast. She painted the picture of what it felt like to be on the receiving end of that reaction. To have me “bite” and then walk away, leaving her stinging, wondering what she did wrong. Even worse, wondering what was wrong with her.

She could have just stayed quiet. She could have learned what kinds of conversations or circumstances triggered my defensive flare-ups, and then learned to manage (tip-toe?) around them.

Instead, she called me on it. She had no guarantee how the conversation would go, yet she did it anyway.

It was hard, but I listened. I heard her describe the damage my blind spot created. I apologized, and took responsibility for the hurt I had caused.

I’m so grateful for teammates like that. She cared enough to not let me continue to blunder with my blind spot, bludgeoning others who hit upon that particular button in me. She made me aware of it so that I could begin to address it, to not let it hurt others in the future.

She gave me a gift.

Sanctuary

Weathering the storms of conflicting roles is really hard work. Mostly because I have such a hard time distinguishing them from my identity. What I do is not who I am, and yet I allow so much (too much?) of my worth and significance to be defined by how well or poorly I’m fulfilling the roles in my life.

Leadership on the Line has been an invaluable resource to me as I’ve sorted this stuff out. The authors do a terrific job of helping leaders distinguish between role and identity. They write of the need to create anchors for your soul—practices that help bring you back to center, that help you detach from your roles and return to who you are.

One of those practices is called sanctuary. They define it as:

A sanctuary is a place of reflection and renewal, where you can listen to yourself away from the dance floor and the blare of the music, where you can reaffirm your deeper sense of self and purpose… In a sanctuary, you are out of that world [the world of your roles] entirely, in a place where you feel safe both physically and psychologically. The rules and stresses of everyday life are suspended temporarily. It is not a place to hide, but a haven where you can cool down, capture lessons from the painful moments, and put yourself back together….

We’re not peddling a particular type of sanctuary… What matters is that it fits you as a structure that promotes reflection, and that you protect it daily. Once a week is not enough.

That last line was the most challenging: the idea of seeking a sanctuary daily. For a long time, I discounted their advice. I would approach sanctuary in an ad hoc manner, and try to squeeze in time when the calendar allowed.

Newsflash: ad hoc isn’t consistent.

Two weeks ago, I decided to carve out space on my calendar for sanctuary—daily. I ended up with two spaces that work really well for me. One of my sanctuaries is my journal. This is my “mobile solution;” my journal travels in my work bag everywhere I go. I can be in a coffee shop, at work or at home and still seek sanctuary. What I’ve done most often is find a quiet place at work (but away from my office and where most of my co-workers can’t find me) and write for thirty minutes, reflectively processing through my day. I make sure to focus a lot on my own leadership: the challenges I’m facing, the lessons I’m learning, the blind-spots that are being revealed. Doing this, even for just a half-hour, has made a tremendous difference when I go home. By “dumping” my work-related anxiety in my journal, I can more easily and more fully transition from my leader role into my husband/father role. Work doesn’t follow me home.

The second sanctuary I found by accident. I hate running (almost as much as I hate writing!), but I do it because it’s good for me. Worse, my iPod broke, so I’ve been forced to run without anything playing in my ears. I was convinced that now running would be pure torture. But I’ve been surprised by how much I’ve enjoyed the quiet contemplation of running. While my body works, my mind has the space to roam. I decompress. I turn over problems, not in an anxious, “I need to fix this” kind of way, but just looking at them from different angles. I think about the people I’m leading and how I can help them. I pray a lot; for my family, for co-workers, for my church. I’ve come to cherish this particular sanctuary. Don’t get me wrong, I’d still much rather spend 30-40 minutes watching a TV show or reading a book than pounding pavement—but I’ve found sanctuary in my running. It’s become another way for me to shrug off my different roles and more securely anchor myself in my identity.

NOTE: The above was written a week ago. In the intervening seven days, I’ve lapsed in my daily pursuit of sanctuary. I got in a few runs, but not once did I spend time journaling. And guess what happened? I had a much harder time separating my roles from my identity. Work followed me home on several occasions. My wife got the full brunt of my unresolved and unprocessed leadership anxieties that should have been filtered through my sanctuary.

It’s not that it was a terrible week with everything bleak and gray. It was actually a decent week. But I felt less anchored in my identity, more prone to confusing it with my roles. I felt…vacillant. This week, I’m getting back into my practice of sanctuary.

I need it.