“The Closer you are to the Ground, the more Inescapable are the Inter-Linkages.”
Editor’s Note: Apologies for yet another post so soon, but we’re just starting to catch up with a fall season full of presentations. This is an edited version of a talk I was to have made to a class of Dr. Robert Thomas at the Scheller School of Business in Atlanta on Servant Leadership. If this was the talk that was given it would have been a much better experience for the students. But, alas, they didn’t get my best effort. Perhaps some of them will see this post and gain some benefit from it.
The assignment for today is some variation on the theme: How do we talk about matters like Servant Leadership in a world like this one? How do we think about competent, attentive service to others in societies seemingly committed in these uncertain times to killing, starving, and marginalizing? How do we respond as a species given that we have not only failed to expunge the four horses of the apocalypse — war, famine, pestilence and death – but as Michael Offutt claims we have now added a fifth – misinformation – one made exceedingly more sophisticated in its potential for deception with the recent explosion in Artificial Intelligence.
For me these questions are largely about synergy and self-scrutiny and have linkages to a longer personal history than it might otherwise appear.
When I was in graduate school, I participated in a Ways of Knowing project – based on a premise that what the disciplines do is different regarding how they gather knowledge and what constitutes knowledge from that perspective. In conducting our investigations, we found that these differences are largely matter of priority and focus, not of kind. There is enough overlap between what financiers know and what astronomers know that they can communicate with each other, beyond their unique expertise. And it is better for the world, and certainly for the academy, that they do so. People should be able to explain their methods and explore synergies with each other and should be encouraged to do so. If Einstein could explain himself to the world, the rest of us have few excuses for note doing so.
This way of understanding the world in its inter-disciplinarity has had implications for what we have done for a generation at the UN which is to pay close attention to what diplomats are doing and saying and then remind them of the related conversations going on in other conference rooms which should be encouraged to enrich their own. It isn’t “brain surgery” to recognize that poverty reduction, economies free of corruption and communities free of gender and racial discrimination are better prepared to pursue and keep the peace. There are times at the UN, literally, when we seem to be among the few people who recognize – or cop to recognizing — that while we are talking about the Middle East in the Security Council, complementary conversations are taking place in General Assembly committees, in UNICEF, in the UN office of drugs and crime. How do we explain away that apparent inefficiency? Why is it so difficult to have one comprehensive conversation, to put all our cards on the table in one conference room, to craft resolutions we can genuinely be proud of and which honor to full effect our promises to a world often in desperate need? Our perspective on these matters don’t make us particularly popular, but few would deny that the abstractions of policy we perpetuate at international level don’t always speak to concrete and interlinked needs and aspirations at local level.
This third phase of the journey draws much from Dr. Robert Thomas of the Scheller School of Business and his “servant leadership” colleagues and is based on the belief that there is much to commend leadership that is directed fundamentally towards the well-being of colleagues and communities, that leadership succeeds best when the people tethered to such leadership are encouraged to thrive. Of course, the movement also recognizes that, in a variety of business and other contexts, we human beings don’t yet seem to be up to the challenges of these times, including the challenges related to servant leadership. Too many of us shield our eyes from complexity. Too many distract themselves from hard truths. Too few sufficiently prioritize the well-being of others. Too many accept the “logic” of current institutions and the judgements of peers too much at face value. Too many are suspicious of pretty much everything and everyone – except themselves. Too many project on to others the faults which they fail (or refuse) to resolve in themselves.
And these aren’t just the folks hanging out at the Chick FilA in Decatur. These are the people who are running our world, the people asking us for money and votes, the people who want us to believe that its just too much trouble for them to share and grow, to fix the inefficiencies and barriers that keep the world on pins and needles, that allow the headlines to be stolen, day after day, by media who believe that we consumers just can’t get enough of the shootings and invasions, not enough of the betrayals and corruption, not enough of the pictures of bodies piled up in morgues in part because people like me in the policy world simply haven’t kept our promises.
Of course, we can keep those promises, just like we can organize our businesses and other institutions to better care for colleagues and communities. We can. And there is no magic here. We simply have to commit to being better people. Me. People like me. People not like me. Better.
Well, saying it is one thing, but the proof is in the doing. Again with full reference to the demands of servant leadership, we’ve embarked in support of a fresh initiative called by its founder Dr. Lisa Berkeley, “Inner Economy.” Inner Economy: Recognizing our different intelligences, some which we greatly indulge in such as the conceptual and their abstractions which largely govern elite learning in a place like Scheller, but also the other iterations of intelligence in which we are largely left to fend for ourselves. Cultural intelligence. Ethical intelligence. Even spiritual intelligence. We don’t often identify these as “intelligence” let alone pursue their distinctive forms of wisdom, their contributions to a life well-lived. But they are essential to the relationship-building and skillful, pragmatic commitments to which servant leadership invariably points.
I want to focus on perhaps the most obvious and in some ways among the most neglected of intelligences, emotional intelligence. In the world of our making, we don’t see the education of the emotions as part of the curriculum either of school or, increasingly, of life.
Think about how we in education and policy approach the emotional realm. Mostly we do with emotions what we do with most everything these days – we learn to brand and indulge and even weaponize. People practice the “skill” of emotionally manipulating others, of “yanking their chains” as we used to say, so they will buy what is being sold, whatever that is. Even to purchase things and ideas which may actually be against their own best interests, like folks who buy a car from Toyota because they think that Jan has a nice voice or purchase a phone plan from AT & T because people think Lily is like the girl next door even though she is actually the girl from another continent.
There are a number of intelligences which have been identified and which fit snugly into a servant leadership framework. But none with quite the potential impact of emotional intelligence.
The fact is that, like our cognitive capacities, we can educate the emotions by which I mean helping to ensure that our feelings are understood by us and are relevant to circumstances we encounter in the world; that they are reality-based rather than based on habits of the heart that we metaphorically “drag” through our lives while trying – often with some sense of desperation — to both rationalize their existence and minimize their negative impacts.
What are some of the manifestations of under-educated emotions? This is a short and woefully incomplete list, but it does point to some of our emotional habits that impact our capacity for servant leadership, that we are reluctant to change, and that in some instances we don’t even recognize ourselves as having potential to change.
- Jumping to conclusions based on limited and/or self-serving evidence.
- Positing and reacting to threats where none exist.
- Projecting on to others bad intentions which we are equally guilty of, or which we might in some instances be more guilty of.
- Creating enemies where they don’t and shouldn’t exist including by turning disagreement into disunity.
- Being overly sensitive to the moods of others and assuming that somehow, some way, those moods have something to do with us, even when they don’t.
- Using language primarily as a tool to create distance or establish hierarchies rather than to disclose or share.
- Assuming that people have more power over us than they do and that we have less power over ourselves than we have.
- Being overly suspicious of the motivations of others but not also of our own.
- Demanding more respect from others than we show to others.
- Talking yourself into making only the changes you are willing to make, not the changes you need to make.
I could go on. This list could easily be thirty items long or more. This is about you the reader, about me the writer, about those who run key aspects of your life and seek to run it going forward.
Here’s the rub. We’re not going to have better policy until we have better policymakers. We’re not going to have better communities and education systems until we insist on being better teachers, better mentors, better at empathy and discernment, better at putting the needs of young people and office colleagues in our front mirror rather than our rear one. We are not going to have more supportive working environments until we master the skills of service and synergy based on a broader and deeper knowledge of ourselves and others, based as well on skills related to recasting more horizontal structures from our overly habituated verticals.
This is good news and bad. Good in that the changes we need to make are still within our power. Bad in that we are running out of time to make them. And every day that we fail to put the education of our emotions on our priority list is another day we threaten to drift further into emotional chaos, another day when the promise of servant leadership is undermined by a failure to reflect hard and practice harder. And in case you haven’t been paying attention to our increasingly frustrated, wary and traumatized communities, chaos is clearly hovering on our collective horizon.
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