Haniel Lecture 09 2010 E.pdf - Haniel Stiftung

14 | Ronald Heifetz
Consequently, we also need confi dants. We need people who
don’t actually care about our professional agenda. They really care
mostly about us. And therefore, they can help us recalibrate what
we are doing. They can be a place where we can put everything
in our hearts on the table, without it being organized, without it
sounding reasonable, where we can be as irrational as sometimes
we feel, because there are days like that. (There is an old song from
my era growing up in California “Mama said there will be days like
that”.) And there are days like that. And so we need confi dants;
usually, they are outside of the organization. They are friends, they
are family, or they may be old colleagues with whom we no longer
have any kind of competing set of interests, people with whom we
can then talk freely.
The third idea, distinguishing role and self, is a very important one,
and this is actually a very big idea. I spend two weeks every January
giving an intensive course for people at mid-career at Harvard
Kennedy School on this one idea – the importance of distinguishing
one’s role from oneself. We tend to confuse our professional
roles with who we are as human beings, and because of that confusion,
our own self-esteem ends up being hostage to the vicissitudes
of the professional roles that we inhabit. If all of a sudden
something happens in the United States’ stock market and, even
though you are 4,000 miles away, things go quickly downhill in
the midst of a crisis, it is pretty important to remember that the
import of this event is not personal. This awareness is diffi cult to
maintain because the impact of the event feels personal, and even
more so when you are the authority fi gure, the person in charge,
because all eyes look to you to resolve the problem. Very quickly
for most of you who have grown up identifying yourself as the
go-to person, as the responsible problem-solving person, you can
begin to take people’s problems off their shoulders and take personally
their pains, losses and fears. It is indeed your job to provide
leadership to manage the transitional and adaptive change
demanded by the crisis, and to manage their fears and pains, but
you also have to manage your own. Sometimes, people take personally
the anger that is directed toward them from frustrated
employees, colleagues, and constituents, and then allow themselves
to be burdened in an unhealthy way, unhealthy personally
and unhealthy professionally.
Partners, allies and confi dants, can help you distinguish your role
from yourself. I’ve had the pleasure of lunch on two occasions
with King Abdullah of Jordan, a very talented man. After one of
those lunches, there was an open forum at our school and a South
Ameri can student asked the King a question, “Where we live we
don’t have kings. So I am dying to know, what is it like to be a
king?” And King Abdullah was gracious and wonderfully honest.
He said, I did not expect to be the king. My uncle was supposed
to be the king, but before my father died, King Hussein decided
I should be the king. Well, perhaps my father was preparing me
because he said to me repeatedly while raising me: My son, the
moment you begin to believe that you are a king, you are in trouble.”
King Hussein became king when he was a teenage boy.
“We tend to confuse our professional roles with who we are as human
beings, and because of that confusion, our own self-esteem ends up being
hostage to the vicissitudes of the professional roles that we inhabit.”
He had been king nearly his whole life, but he knew that when
people kissed his hand, they were not kissing him, they were kissing
king. And at the other extreme, when people were shooting
bullets at him, they were not actually shooting at him; they were
shooting at the king.
I have had the opportunity on many occasions to sit with Dalia
Rabin, Yitzhak Rabin’s daughter, a wonderful person and fi ne politician
in her own right. However painful, she understands that her
father’s assassination was not personal. Of course, in a way it was
the most profoundly personal act, to kill her father, but in another
way it was not personal at all. The man who killed Yitzhak Rabin
wanted to silence a decisive and powerful voice that promoted
seemingly intolerable losses, a perspective that challenged the
loyalties many Israeli settlers were carrying from their ancestors
of 2,000 years – loyalty to the love of people who gave them the
belief that they should live on those ancient stones. So, one stays
alive in leading by using partners to help you distinguish your role
from yourself. I fi rst learned this as a father. When I started having
children, one of my close friends said to me, “You will really know
you have succeeded as a father when your child is disrespectful
and you don’t take it personally … and it will take you two children
to fi gure it out!” And that is so true. I have two children, now studying
in the university, a boy and a girl.