Standing the Heat and Dancing in the Kitchen

Nobody who “starts with a conviction” intends to abandon that conviction when the heat is turned up.  No couple who pledges “til death do us part” intends to be sitting in a lawyer’s office dividing up the couches and flat screen TVs.  No parent who draws a line of expectation in the sand intends to cave when arguing starts with his teenager.  No leader who plans to take her people to Promised Land intends to high-tail it back to Egypt. Nobody who declares that they will follow Jesus intends to deny him three times in one.  But we do way more often than we want to admit.  The strong conviction that comes from our best intentions tend to fade faster No matter how strong our convictions, we all know that sooner or later we will all suffer from what Edwin Friedman calls “a failure of nerve.” 
   
I have been writing some reflections on being a “good disappointing leader” that is built around this simple-to-memorize-and-oh-so-difficult-to-live-out maxim:

Start by acting on conviction, stay connected, stay calm, stay the course.  

While we leaders think of ourselves as faithful, determined and steadfast, too often we give up on change because we hit so much resistance we simply get worn down.  We don’t so much abandon our posts, as we silently step back and surrender them meekly.  We tell ourselves that the key is to “gut it out”, to “grit our teeth” and to “go head long into the breach”  but I want to offer that the key skill is more subtle.  It’s more Tai-Chi than Kung-Fu.  If we want to be able to stay in the kitchen when the heat turns up, we have to learn the two-step dance in the middle of the maxim:

Stay Connected and Stay Calm.

While there are some of us who respond to threats or emotional attacks by “fighting” most of us are more prone to “flee”.  Most of us who work in organizational life, especially organizations filled with volunteers (like churches) tend to avoid conflict at all cost.  

I don’t remember the last time that somebody talked to me about their reasons for leaving our church.  I don’t remember them coming to me, sitting down with me and sharing their feelings about the circumstances.  Mostly, they just silently slip away, grumbling as they go.  Not until they see me around town and we endure the awkward silence about their absence do I get a formal letter telling me that they have “moved on” and they wish me "well."  

Mostly, when we get into conflict, we go away.  The “normal” response to a threat is to distance, to disconnect, to grumble to ourselves or gossip to our friends, but to avoid confrontation for fear that it will turn into a bad scene or that we’ll get a bad reputation for being a grumpy complainer.  And the same is true for those of us in leadership.

So fearing that we will stew in the searing emotions that are swirling around us, we check out, “get busy” with something else, or simply drift away.  We tell ourselves that if we don’t back down we’ll do something in anger that we’ll regret.  So we do nothing instead.  Face to face conversations become quick voicemails, phone calls turn into emails and discussions over lunch become “formal letters.”  And after awhile, because we are so afraid of the heat, walls of ice rise up around us that are so thick that while we may be able to see the subjects of our conflicts, we can’t hear or touch them. 

But if we lose connection, we lose opportunity to keep gently influencing the system for good.  We need at least a light touch on the wheel to steer the car toward the destination of our convictions. 

So what is a leader to do?  Stay connected.  Keep contact.  Close the distance with word and touch.  When someone writes me an angry email, I call them at home.  When someone sends a “formal letter of complaint”, I invite them for coffee. When people start getting upset, I call a meeting and invite them to talk. The more heated the situation, the closer I want to get to it. 

From The Godfather, we learned to “keep your friends close, but your enemies closer” but that was for self-protection.  In this case, that great advice is a way to keep trying to turn enemies into friends (NOT through accommodation, but through influence.)  To keep influencing the system toward health and life.  To stay connected to those who are resisting change so that they might eventually join with us. 

This is counter-intuitive and is very dangerous. Most of us avoid heated situations because we don’t want to get burned or we fear that we’ll be gasoline to the blaze that will torch the whole house.  The purpose for staying connected is to calm the situation down. To regulate the heat so that we can keep cooking toward the goals of conviction that will bring good to our families, organizations, companies or churches. 

But to do that we must learn to stay calm, while connected.  We need to learn to be a thermostat.  Which is where we will pick it up next.