"We cannot lead without feeling the pain of living because the things we do to avoid feeling pain result in poor leadership. We don't acknowledge others. We try to control everything. We lose our temper and criticize others disproportionately. If we don't feel our emotions, we are controlled by them."To read more of Bregman's words on same conference, visit here.
Friday, April 29, 2011
Why Leaders Must Feel Pain
This article in the Harvard Business Review, recounts Peter Bregman's experiences at The Radically Alive Leader learning about empathic leadership, "A leadership workshop with crying? Touching? Extreme self-disclosure?"
Bregman describes the experience of one attendee, exhausted, who avoided delegating because she feels the need to save the day. At the workshop, she was able to physically release, lying on a mattress and allowing others to hold her while she cried. She realized that her micromanagement stemmed from her inability to save a brother from suicide, years ago.
Bregman says, that this is not a leadership skills issue, but that, until she faced, "not just intellectually, but physically and emotionally — that she couldn't save her brother, all the delegation skills in the world will not help her."
Bregman discusses his own life as a child whose mother narrowly escaped the holocaust, "I grew up thinking daily of the six million Jews killed by the Nazis, thinking that because of them, my life had better amount to something." Never measuring up has worn on him. He has decided though, that he must be genuine in this pressure and pain:
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ReplyDeleteReading this article, I am struck by how often I have pushed my emotions down deep and failed to acknowledge their reality and validity. As you and Bregman point out, this has indeed led to instances where I have had a complete lack of sympathy for those I have been leading. As a graduate assistant, I have sometimes failed to realize that there are circumstances in peoples’ lives that demand a bit of leniency.
ReplyDeleteWhat I thought the article could have delved more deeply into, however, is the actual effects of ignoring one’s emotions in leadership. The one instance of the lady who micromanaged suffering a slight meltdown was important to point out, but it seems to me that someone else may argue that this is just because the woman lacked the strong constitution needed to push through the stress of micromanagement. I would disagree with such an individual, but this still seems like the kind of argument someone may wish to bring up. It would have been particularly relevant to discuss in greater detail the impact that this has on those being led. Perhaps Bregman could have shown how the lack of empathy and sympathy felt by those being led tends to lead to lower productivity.