Haniel Lecture 09 2010 E.pdf - Haniel Stiftung

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16 | Ronald Heifetz Fourth, one stays alive by listening. In leadership, when people are neutralized prematurely in political life, they often get taken down with their mouths open! People usually get taken out of action in organizations and in politics because they spend too much time talking and not enough time listening. It is the listening that enables you to identify the complexity of the system that you are engaging, to identify the key parties and the potential losses, new competencies and adjustments you are asking people to make. Only by listening, especially to the voices that most annoy you, can you then develop a strategy to bring people and mobilize people to understand the nature of the changes surrounding them in this world. We have just seen two days ago in the United States an election in which the people did not understand the pace at which change was possible. People in the US expected economic results faster than they could be accomplished. And our new President made the classic mistake of promising more than he could deliver, setting and reinforcing unrealistic expectations that have now generated a strong backlash by a frightened American public. But you also should listen to yourself. Listening to yourself requires anchors and practices. Here are four categories of anchors: The fi rst anchor is a sanctuary. I am not recommending any particular sanctuary. It may be a church or another religious institution. But it also could be a trail in the woods or along a river. It could be a friend’s kitchen table where you have tea. It could be a room in your house where you sit quietly and read. It could be a coff ee shop, a gym, yoga class, or meditation group. The key thing is that you have a sanctuary. You cannot possibly lead in the complexity and speed of current professional life without having anchors that can pull you out of your professional life to hear yourself think again. These are not expendable luxuries. But many times people treat them as if they were luxuries. They say, “I don’t have time to have lunch or breakfast with that friend,” and they cancel the lunch or they cancel the breakfast. These anchors are as critical to professional life as a winter coat is critical to your survival if you move to the North Country or to Boston. These are not luxuries. We need sanctuaries, and we need to protect them. “When we begin to believe that we are the role – I am a doctor, I am a professor, I am a mayor, I am an executive, I am a founder – we forget all of the richness of ourselves as human beings.”
The second category of anchor, as I have said, is partners. We need people whom we can trust to pull us off the playing fi eld when we are caught up in the action. We need allies that can help us regularly debrief the processes of change and take corrective action in the ongoing improvisational practice of leadership. And we need confi dants to help us distinguish self from role – to maintain perspective and be reminded of our humanity. A third kind of anchor lies in various routine practices. Some of the practices are physical, like routine exercise. Some of the practices might be spiritual, like meditation or prayer. Some of the practices might be writing in a journal, or artistic like playing music or painting. And they may not serve any kind of professional function except to help you in a reliable way to restore you to yourself, to be reminded that who you are as a human being is more than the role that you play, particularly when that role can be consuming. A fi nal source of anchoring lies in the multiple roles through which we fi nd meaning in life: the role of father, the role of mother, sister, volunteer, member of a community. Each role becomes an anchor against being swept away by the other roles. You deploy yourself, you manage and compose a life, by creating a network of anchoring roles, each of which is a set of role obligations, each of which pulls at you at that kind of moment when you might say, “I don’t have time for this right now,” although you then grudgingly go along and after you are there, you are grateful. I experienced this, because when my children were young, their mother was fi nishing her Ph.D. and I began to take them and pick them up from school every day. I found this very hard to do because, of course, I was a bit too self-important and had “important obligations” in my work making it diffi cult to leave at 3 o’clock in the afternoon. Moreover, I would get to their school and would have to wait in a long line of cars to pick up my children, and I felt impatient. To pass the time, I used to count how many other men were waiting for their children. In the early years, when my children were in fi rst and second grade, one out of thirty cars had another man driving. So you can imagine how good I felt in my role as a man! What was I doing here? I would have my cell phone and a dictating machine with me to try to maximize every moment, until I fi nally would get to the front of the line. I would then be pulled out of my preoccupations by seeing the little faces of my children. In the early years, it was a slow transition. I would tell them, “Okay, Anni, you get into the car fi rst, and David, you get in second,” because of course they have their seats. But they would never listen to me. They would just throw their bags in, all in chaos, and get into the car, and then out would come stories, stories that I had never heard before, because I discovered they only tell the spontaneous version of their stories once and they tell it to whoever gets there fi rst. Countless nannies are getting all of the good stories today! And I discovered over time that this was so rich. I was learning what it meant to do what mothers have traditionally done, and what a blessing it was for me. Yes, it was a challenge to my role as a man and professional with important phone calls left unreturned, projects and money left on the table. Indeed, as the years passed and I became more successful, people were off ering me large fees, or they would say, “We can’t pay you, but we really need you.” That was even harder to refuse. But all of that had to be left unfi nished because I had to go and pick up my children. But with them, in the daily routines of piano and violin lessons, karate and dance lessons, play dates and afterschool snacks, I felt anchored in a new world of meaning. The two worlds of meaning, work and family, could not be compared. You cannot put them on the same balance sheet. They are each valuable beyond measure. The value for me professionally in helping people lead more eff ectively in their community and business, and in being a father and helping raise and love these children, is each invaluable. The two need each other. “The two worlds of meaning, work and family, could not be compared. You cannot put them on the same balance sheet.” 17
Page 1: Haniel Lecture Live to work or work
Page 5 and 6: 6 10 20 24 25 26 Welcoming address
Page 7 and 8: “Work-life balance is so much mor
Page 9 and 10: As our second speaker at this year
Page 11 and 12: “So if we think of life as a comp
Page 13 and 14: One of the common mistakes in leade
Page 15: When I was doing my best as a fathe
Page 19 and 20: The book was published just before
Page 21 and 22: Dear Mr Haniel, ladies and gentleme
Page 23 and 24: The second, maybe even more importa
Page 25 and 26: About the moderator Roger de Weck i
Page 27 and 28: Silke Adamitza Project Coordinator
Page 30 and 31: 30 | Participants
Page 32: 32 | Participants Dr Hergard Rohwed
Page 35: Imprint Editor Haniel Stiftung, Dui

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