Leadership, Love, Loss and Learning

Last month, I had lunch with Diane Paulus. Diane had just been named by Time Magazine as one of the one hundred most influential people in the world. She has transformed the American Repertory Theater from a cutting edge regional theater with a fragile budget into a powerhouse incubator of Tony Award winning Broadway productions. The A.R.T. had just been given a significant endowment by the Doris Duke Foundation to reward this shift, which included a meeting with Ron Heifetz of Harvard’s Kennedy School. Diane was intrigued when I told her about the work in Adaptive Leadership that I had been doing with Heifetz.

I described the basic concepts of his framework to her: in the Adaptive Leadership model, the function of authority is to provide direction (where are we going?), protection (how do we get there safely?), and order (how do we maintain the rules along the way?). Leadership, on the other hand, is an action, not a position. To lead means helping people manage the losses that come with big adaptive challenges.

Diane was curious if Heifetz might do some work with the staff of the theater and wondered what kind of changes Heifetz might bring to the A.R.T. She thought his work might be useful for the senior staff. I responded, “Why not include everyone? Leadership can happen from any level of an organization. You’d have to be willing, though, to learn something from that third spear carrier on the left.”

Right after lunch I walked over to the Kennedy School to join the faculty of an eight-day workshop called The Art and Practice of Leadership Development. As the week progressed, I saw the complex relationship between leadership, love, loss and learning unfold.

Seventy participants from various countries packed the semi-circular classroom. Most of the program members taught, coached, or consulted to people in authority. The stated goal was to learn both how to teach and how to exercise Adaptive Leadership. It was clear from the first evening’s introductions that the participants were already jockeying for authority and status.

The tension in the room increased each day of the program. Eight people spoke most of the time; others remained silent. These eight typically talked about their own knowledge, not about learning something new. One person would jump in; the next person would speak on a different point. If someone interjected with passion, others would negate the comment. A faction arose that wanted all discourse to remain calm, comfortable and uncritical.

One faculty member publicly proposed to a participant that she would be more effective if she spoke more succinctly. The group pounced on him with ferocity. Participants critiqued his style, his words, his timing, his stories. He didn’t protect himself with an intellectual defense. Instead, he used the attacks to demonstrate how to be open to learning.

I could see how the group, instead of examining their own resistance to learning, focused their attention on the person who had been challenging their expertise. This was a diversion from facing their own adaptive challenge, the challenge of giving up a little bit of their own authority in order to grow.

At the end of the week, I led a session on storytelling. The last person to come to the front of the room told a story about the final days of caring for his dying wife. He spoke about how he no longer resented the things that she asked him to do. He willingly and eagerly fulfilled even the most arcane details of any task she wanted. The two were planning her funeral service with their minister, who said to him, “Your wife told me that she never knew how much you loved her until now.” There are many ways to understand this story. I view it this way: it is a story of regret that love had never been fully expressed prior to the moment of separation.

This story rose up at the last session for a reason. The participants were about to leave and most would never connect again. The losses in the room loomed large and regret was palpable. They had failed each other by not speaking with honesty. They had not grasped that to exercise leadership is an act of love. They had only a few hours left to help each other accept the loss that is a necessary part of learning.

Back to the American Repertory Theater. The five year transition from a regional repertory theater housing a resident company of actors to a pre-Broadway tryout house has been a huge adaptive challenge. Unfortunately, this challenge was managed solely with technical solutions, both big and small: new accounting procedures, casting only in New York, choosing a season of musical theater, getting a liquor license. There was lip service to listening; early on an outside facilitator created internal focus groups. It was clear, though, that by force of her charisma and authority, Diane Paulus was creating a new organization dedicated to what she called “my vision.”

The losses were huge. The core group of actors was dismantled. The founder of the theater heartbroken. The administration gutted. The offices now house a rotating cast of employees. I often hear “just keeping my head down,” “just doin’ my job,” “what’s the next thing to go?” The high flying success of the theater, both financially and in reputation, created a cascade of casualties. I might actually be one of them.

What if the Adaptive Leadership model had been used instead? The process might have been messier, for leadership, love, loss, and learning are intimately entwined. When a person leading change helps her constituents manage their losses, this is love. This could have altered the current culture. It would have taken a willingness to really listen and learn, a willingness to embrace her own adaptive challenges. Who knows what the end result would have been.

I’m curious to see if Diane Paulus does bring Ron Heifetz into the A.R.T. I’m also curious to see if the ideas he offers will take hold. It would be interesting to see if Diane might helm the theater in a different way, one that models love and learning in the face of loss. For learning is an essential part of moving an organization forward, for everyone, from the lowest person of the hierarchy to the highest. And if the person in charge can provide a model of love, learning and leadership, a new kind of system might emerge and thrive.

Plant Yourself Where You Will Bloom

Uprooted the family. Recent transplant to town. Thriving in her native habitat. Branching out into new arenas. Deep roots in the community. Talent in full flower. A real late bloomer. Cultivating new opportunities. The idea was dying on the vine. Weeding out the unnecessary. Planting a seed for the future. A fruitful endeavor. The time was ripe. So many metaphors from gardens describe our personal and professional lives.

I heard one last year that struck me: bloom where you are planted. At first glance this makes sense. Of course we must attempt to thrive no matter what the circumstances are.

As I investigate my gardens this spring, though, I doubt the wisdom of this advice. Environments change. A tree grows and what was a sunny spot is now shady. I know that the shasta daisies that had freely bloomed there will be struggling to survive. Once I move them, their blooms will return. A tree gets cut down and what was shady is now sunny. A thriving rhododendron now shows signs of stress, its normally glossy leaves curled and brown. It’s hard work to move it, but soon it will spread out and glow again.

Plants also outlive their time in a certain spot. A beautiful peach colored lily looks meager and frustrated. I need to dig it up, split it and transplant it into another area. The blooms will return even bigger than before. A coreopsis is choking itself and the plants around it. The soil where it is planted has become as hard as rock. Tough to dig it up, but I can find a better place for it. It’ll be scrawny for a while, but then become the lovely plant it is capable of being.

I’m in a new garden now, having left Harvard to concentrate on my coaching and consulting. I feel on the surface of life; my root system hasn’t fully developed yet. Yet I also sense the new blossoms starting to bud. Recently, I have facilitated several of the same workshops that I’ve done for years prior to leaving Boston. I feel completely different, as if I’m in new soil, new sunshine, trimmed and pruned, already spreading new leaves. I have a different energy. Cleaner, less distracted, more creative.

As I write, I am thinking about the artists I know who are just leaving their graduate studies to begin their professional lives. The decision of what city to move to looms large. My advice is not only bloom where you are planted, but this: plant yourself where you will bloom. Take note of what’s around you and understand who you have become — that’s just good gardening. And if circumstance and experience give you solid data about a change in your environment or your self, you haven’t made a mistake if you need to try something different. You are a good gardener.

“Our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless trauma about, the lives we were unable to live,” writes Adam Phillips in Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life. We could all dwell on past flowers that never got to bloom. But I’d rather think about actual gardening. Bloom where you are planted doesn’t always work in the natural world. There is too much variation in the environment. Plants need the correct amount of light, water and soil sustenance. Plants need to be pruned. Plants need to be divided, made smaller, cut back. So do we. Keep looking at the garden, inspecting the flowers, assessing their beauty and nature. Then plant yourself where you will bloom.

The Liberation of My Voice

“The liberation of my voice is the liberation of your voice,” Raquel Gutierrez whispered in my ear. It was Friday, March 21st, the last day of the National Hispana Leadership Institute week long workshop at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. As a faculty member of this program, I had just facilitated several days’ sessions on communication, presentation and leadership skills.

Racial and cultural issues were alive in the room from the moment we began. How could they not be? Sixteen women had been chosen from a national pool of applicants as Fellows for this program. Although their Latina heritage was one commonality, their differences were telling. Several women were born in Puerto Rico, one woman was from Peru, some were from Mexico, others were born in the U.S. and identified themselves as such. They worked in education, government, public service, non-profits, insurance and banking. More stark, though, was the makeup of the faculty: four non-Latina women, one Dutch male.

One participant was particularly tuned to the ongoing issue of white privilege in her work as the principal of an at-risk school in Oregon. She could see how it played out yet again in this particular Harvard environment. The group became polarized around her perspective. One woman, who had immigrated from Mexico as a child, didn’t name herself as a Latina but as an American. She was fiercely proud of everything that she had achieved in the U.S., putting herself through school, finding a great position, and now taking this class at Harvard. Another, who was born in Peru, had been adopted by non-Hispanic parents. She seethed all week until the last day, when she spoke passionately about her white parents and the safe home they had provided for her.

Every day, I listened to the voices of these women. In my former role as a voice and speech teacher in the theater, my thrill at the variety of accents in the room would have been about how words were being made. I would have wanted to record each of the participants for my sound files. I would have been dissecting the vowel and consonant shifts, the placement, the musicality and rhythm. I would have been thinking about how an accent might fit in the theater or what would need to change in order to be viable in performance. I would have only partially heard what was being said.

The last session of the last day, each Fellow had five minutes to speak about their biggest learning from the week. One at a time, they came to the front of the room. One very successful woman talked about how this workshop had made her proud of her origins. She spoke about how she can now love her Latina hair and body. She can love her Mom, who she described as wearing a hoodie when she goes out for a smoke in front of the projects where she still lives. She also spoke about how proud she is of how she sounds: her strong Nuyorican accent is no longer something she is ashamed of. I realized that I was hearing her, truly hearing her, because I wasn’t wearing my voice teacher hat.

After all the participants had spoken, there were to be a few closing words, followed by a graduation ceremony. But the Fellows called out for everyone in the room, faculty and staff, to reveal their own big “aha” from the week. I started to think about the decades I had spent required by my profession to correct how actors speak. My mind raced over the current controversies in the voice and speech teaching world. I had heard hours of discussion about how formal or informal a non-regional American dialect should be. I had been a part of ongoing debates about how to honor cultural variations yet provide actors with a practical tool for success in the theater. A big bell in my head was ringing, “white privilege.” The real questions should be, “Are your thoughts clear? Can you be heard? Can you be understood?”

I felt unusually fragile as I came to the front of the lecture hall. I spoke about how I had been wearing my voice teacher hat for thirty-six years. I could feel the weight of that heavy hat lifting after hearing the voices of these women. I had an exquisite sense of something big shifting in my life, letting go of a particular kind of judgement that had been the hallmark of my success in the theater. I could take delight now in the multiplicity of voices, listening for sense, hearing the words, feeling the meaning, understanding the person.

The graduation ceremony began. As I handed Raquel her beautifully bound Harvard Kennedy School certificate, she wrapped her arms around me and whispered in my ear, “The liberation of my voice is the liberation of your voice.” I took a huge breath of relief as tears of understanding filled my eyes.

Adaptive Leadership at Work

The revelatory production of Tennessee Williams’ 1944 play The Glass Menagerie closed last week on Broadway. It was directed by John Tiffany, who had won a 2012 Tony Award for his direction of the musical Once. Tiffany’s creative brilliance is exceptional. What distinguishes his productions, though, is something more elusive. I have been thinking lately about how he embodies many concepts of Adaptive Leadership in his directing style and how that may be the critical difference.

I met John in the fall of 2011. His production of Black Watch, a theater piece based on interviews with Scottish soldiers who served in Iraq, was receiving international acclaim. He had been awarded a fellowship at Radcliffe and was in Cambridge on leave from his position as Associate Director of New Work at the National Theater of Scotland. He was interested in investigating how our native speech patterns change with time and circumstance.

Over lunch at Cafe Algiers in Harvard Square, John talked about growing up in Yorkshire, changing his accent in theater school, and adding a bit of Scottish when he was at work. He told me about the books he was reading and the neuro-scientists he was meeting at Harvard. His delight in new ideas was infectious. I introduced him to the concept of “code switching” — how we unconsciously alter our speech patterns to match our immediate situations. I told him of my Home Dialect Project, a unit of dialect and accent study that brings our graduate student actors back to their earliest speech influences. This meeting began a year long collaboration, which culminated in a production with those students.

I Speak Therefore I Am was my first opportunity to observe John in action. Many theater directors view themselves as the auteur, taking full responsibility for creating every moment of a production. John’s process was very different. During the fall and winter, he asked the student cohort to study the dialects of their parents and grandparents. He also asked them to write scenes and monologues on any aspect of communication. By making the actors take responsibility for the script, he functioned as a collaborator, not an authority figure, doing what the Adaptive Leadership model calls “giving the work back.” This approach generated huge creative energy.

When rehearsals began in earnest in the spring, John introduced a warm-up based on the work of Ros Steen, then the National Theater of Scotland’s voice director. The warm-up demanded real contact, first with eyes, then voices, then bodies. John participated fully every time. He modeled the behavior that he was asking of his actors. He became a part of the process. In the Adaptive Leadership framework, the person who is leading is not separate from the system they are working to change. The leader is “part of the mess.” For example, if a CEO wishes to effect change within an organization, she must be willing to change herself. John put himself on the line. The actors were willing to risk more because he was taking a risk with them.

As rehearsals progressed, I watched how John gathered ideas. He didn’t stick to the unspoken hierarchy embedded in a traditional theater production. Anyone could contribute (actors, dramaturgs, designers, stage management, voice coach) even if the idea wasn’t necessarily in his or her specific area of expertise. One might imagine this becoming chaos, but because making a great production was always the focus, it simply created a fertile open field. He listened to ideas even from outliers, as laid out in Adaptive Leadership, and kept the work at the center.

The second John Tiffany production I coached was the developmental workshop of the musical Once, which went on to win eight Tony Awards. What struck me most this time was the trust that John gave to each of his team members. Many directors feel threatened by giving autonomy to their creative support. In this rehearsal process, John gave generous time to music, dialects, and choreography rehearsals without needing to be an authoritative overseer. By trusting his team, he got the very best of their expertise. This parallels the Adaptive Leadership notion of giving people agency to do their own work, rather than thinking of leadership as telling people how to do what they already know.

My third Tiffany production was The Glass Menagerie at the A.R.T. The first two had been developmental projects; this was an American classic. How would he be in this situation, I wondered, where the text is set and the actors are established stars? Again, the tenor of the rehearsal room was one of open collaboration. Rehearsals began every day with a physical warm-up led by Celia Keenan-Bolger, a Broadway musical performer who was playing the damaged and vulnerable Laura. How wonderful to see Cherry Jones, Zachary Quinto and Brian J. Smith in various yoga poses every morning as they prepared themselves to enter Williams’ painful story.

John worked with patience and delicacy. Because he stayed in tune every moment with exactly what the actors needed, they never felt pressured to perform in an untruthful manner. Conversations were exploratory. He honored their concerns and respected their creative processes. As a result, the work that emerged was unique, deep and personal. We saw none of the ego games that often flare up when stars of this caliber are asked to reveal their hearts in such close proximity. No one wanted to miss a moment of watching rehearsal as the layers of each iconic character became more complex and heartbreaking.

The development of the specific dialect patterns mirrored this same slow process. One might assume that all the characters in a Tennessee Williams’ play speak in an identical Southern manner and that I, as dialect coach, could offer a single template to the actors. This was not at all the case. Cherry Jones’ grandmother lived near where her character, Amanda Wingfield, fictionally grew up. Cherry easily acquired a local Southern aristocratic sound for her role. Brian J. Smith, who played the gentleman caller, is from Texas, and needed to add a more Midwestern flavor for a St. Louis dialect. Zach, Tom Wingfield, could sound less Southern or more, depending on his alliances in the play. And Celia’s Laura could sound like her mother Amanda, or perhaps in an effort to fit in, more like her St. Louis schoolmates. John remained patient throughout this exploration, letting me partner with the actors to experiment with versions of their speech patterns, reject aspects, try something new, reject again, until the dialects that emerged were both personal and precise.

John was using the Adaptive Leadership skill called “pacing the work.” I have never seen a stage director do this as elegantly. He kept the heat high enough in the rehearsal room so that every day brought a new challenge. But he never let it get so high that the actors had a crisis of confidence. Making sure that people are ready for the next step is a necessary component of exercising leadership. The biggest mistakes in leadership occur when events explode beyond repair because too much has happened too quickly or when the incentive to change passes because the pressure has dropped too low.

I hope that John Tiffany wins a Tony Award this June for his direction of The Glass Menagerie. It was an extraordinary experience to be in the rehearsal room with him. I watched him exercise leadership in a way that I’ve never seen before in the theater. I may not get to work with him again in this context, but what I have learned from him is indelible: be curious, be collaborative, trust your partners, model the behavior you are asking for, listen to the divergent voices, and pace the work. The special quality of John’s shows is due in part, I’m sure, to his intuitive use of these Adaptive Leadership concepts; he creates an environment that brings out the best in people, makes them eager to contribute, and gives them real ownership of the outcome.

Actor Training for Leadership Action

I had a big surprise earlier this month. I enrolled in Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading, a course at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government to be taught by Ron Heifetz. It was described as a two-week immersion in the theories outlined by Heifetz and Marty Linsky in their book of the same name. My goals were to learn more about teaching leadership, to understand better how to analyze a leadership challenge, and maybe to learn a little bit more about myself along the way.

I realized from the moment I entered the large lecture hall that I would be challenged in ways I had never been before. The whole world seemed to be there. In addition to the minority cohort of American students, there were men and women from India, Pakistan, China, Japan, Korea, Tibet, Israel, Palestine, Germany, France, Lebanon, Belgium, the Netherlands, the Ukraine, Kosovo, Great Britain, North Sudan, South Sudan, Kenya, Mexico, and many others, most in mid-career positions in their home countries. Muslims, Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists. Students were young, middle aged, or mature, representing experience in business, public service, government, politics, environment, construction, education, media, engineering, and the arts.

A primary premise of Heifetz’ work is that we usually confuse leadership with authority. Leadership can come from any level of society. It is an action, not a role or position. The act of leading, according to Heifetz, is to disappoint people at a rate that they can handle. What he means is that to lead is to hold people through difficult periods of change. It is a dangerous act, one that requires both knowledge of the issues as well as knowledge of the self. This course was about knowledge of the self.

The group slowly began to open up. One intense Lebanese told of fighting with the rebels against Assad’s regime in Syria, recounting the atrocities he had witnessed on both sides. An Israeli spoke of his grandmother being the “living dead” for fifty years. A Pakistani spoke of how villagers continue to use water from a poisoned lake near his ancestral lands, a lake that had sustained his people for generations. A student from Kosovo told the story of the Ottoman Empire conquering his homeland in 1389 and how that battle continues to be refought to this day. Heifetz pushed everyone, challenging the notion that we have to act in the ways that our ancestors acted. He posited that we have no self, just responses to three layers of loyalties: our professional loyalties, our current social loyalties, and our ancestral or cultural loyalties. Many people resisted this notion, defending their belief that they could act independently of past influences.

I reflected on “the magic if,” a phrase from the work of Constantine Stanislavsky, the early 20th century Russian theater director whose experiments inspired what we now call Method Acting. A character in a play is merely a construct of current and past “given circumstances.” The actor uncovers as many of the “givens” as possible in order to understand the how and why of behavior. For example, using “the magic if,” if I were born in Moscow in 1850 to aristocratic parents who lost their fortune, my actions, habits and beliefs would be very different from those that I’m using now. What if this kind of work became a part of leadership training? Could we examine our loyalties by using this template from the the theater? If we acknowledge the power of our “given circumstances,” we can choose how to respond to a situation, rather than reacting the way the voices of the past pressure us to.

I observed others’ and experienced my own reactive behavior again and again during the two weeks of the course. A participant would say something provocative, or even helpful, and the room would erupt. I began to understand how quickly our loyalties set our inner chimes ringing. I could also see how national character was manifested in this microcosm of the world. Even if we don’t perceive of ourselves as personally perpetrating current injustices, we do represent the history of our ancestors and cultures to each other. I could see the American role as it played out in the room, which I described to a fellow student as big-hearted, bossy and invasive. I experienced how the best of intentions could be interpreted as arrogant intervention when coming from one nationality, but as kind assistance from another.

Heifetz continued to challenge the group. He proposed a method of understanding others that he called empathetic imagination. He went on to describe imagining what a day in the life of your enemy was like, the details of getting up, dressing, kissing the children, going to war. This humanizing concept confused several participants. “How do we learn how to do that?” hung in the air. Again, I thought of Stanislavsky. An essential part of the actor’s craft is to bring specificity and richness to the role by filling in the details of a character’s daily life without judgement. When actors create an “etude,” an improvisation inspired by a moment that might not be in the script but may be essential to the story, they are exercising their empathetic imagination. I became excited about bringing another set of theater techniques to this leadership model.

Anger, confusion, and frustration were still present, but people began to talk to each other. The Chinese participants organized a dinner with the Japanese participants to make tentative steps toward a conversation about deeply held mutual antagonisms. They began to sit next to one another in the lecture room. The Israeli whose grandmother had recently passed away spoke to a young German woman with compassion for her guilt and distress in bearing her ancestors’ crimes. Then a woman from North Sudan spoke up.

“I had always heard that the people of South Sudan were animals,” she began. “I had never met anyone from there. I knew nothing. Then I heard a story about the Lost Boys.” At this point, she looked directly at the man from South Sudan. “I heard how they escaped from the war, walked to Ethiopia and lived in a refugee camp for three years. I heard how they were kicked out of that camp and walked all the way back to South Sudan.” Here she paused. “Akol spoke of how he buried many of his friends on the way back.” The room was silent. “But there was no place for them when they got home. So they walked to Kenya, where they lived in a refugee camp for thirteen years.” She paused again. “I knew none of this. We were told nothing.”

Akol spoke. “After Aisha heard my story, she reached out to me. She asked if she could buy me a cup of coffee. Every bone in my body said no. I would betray my people if I talked to her. Would I sell my whole country for a cup of coffee?” Not a sound in the room. “I am learning. I accepted her invitation.”

I started to understand the scale of what Ron Heifetz was trying to do. Of course, he wanted us to acquire some knowledge about leadership. It was bigger than that, though. If quiet conversations between ancestral enemies can begin within the relative safety of a classroom, those conversations might ripple out beyond its confines. If we can recognize that the voices of our loyalties are telling us (or perhaps screaming at us) how to behave, we can understand how cycles of reprisal and revenge continue to be replayed. It then becomes possible to negotiate with those voices in order to make a better choice about how to respond, to be present with compassion and curiosity rather than hiding behind judgement and defense.

I want to be a part of this negotiation with the past so that the future may be different. I may never be in a traditional position of authority, but the contributions I can make may have meaning. I can pass on practices of the theater artist in a new context, one that can alter how we behave with each other even in our simplest interactions. I also now understand how making theater can be can an act of leadership when it is imbued with a sense of service, whether it’s to bring laughter, delight, revelation, reflection or cartharsis. As Stanislavsky writes in My Life in Art, “The theatre is the finest medium of intercourse between nations. It reveals their most cherished hopes. If only these hopes were revealed more often … then, instead of training guns on one another, nations would shake hands and lift their caps together.”

Ring Out the Old — Ring in the New!

For the past 16 years, I have been working with Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Marty and Ron are on the forefront of leadership theory, traveling the world to consult and educate folks in government, industry, and academia. They are also the authors of several seminal books — Leadership Without Easy Answers, Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading, and The Practice of Adaptive Leadership.

Their paradigm, called Adaptive Leadership, is a radical way of looking at what it means to be in the act of leading. They talk about the differences between leadership and authority and how we typically conflate the two words. They discuss what it means to solve technical problems versus facing adaptive challenges. They work on how to mobilize across factions, yet continually emphasize how complicit we are in the problems we face. At the core of their work is the word “adaptive”.

Ron speaks about how nature promotes adaptation. When an organism needs to evolve due to changing environmental circumstances, most of its DNA is saved. The new DNA that allows the organism to survive is just a fractional part of the biological pattern. It’s a conservative process — saving what’s useful and discarding those parts that no longer work.

He expands on this metaphor. “The American Revolution wasn’t a revolution,” he says, “but evolution.” Daily life for the colonists wasn’t radically altered by the new constitution. States remained autonomous. The founding fathers based the system on what was working (the British parliamentary and judicial structure), altered what wasn’t (the monarchy), and created a hybrid (a social contract that authorized the polity) that has been functional for more than two centuries. They even built in a process for incremental evolution via legislation and constitutional amendment.

The act of leadership, then, is to mobilize people to have the agency to change. “Adaptive situations demand that people discover, invent, and take responsibility,” Heifetz writes in Leadership Without Easy Answers. “Sifting through the old and fashioning something new takes emotional work.” One danger is in asking for too much change, too quickly. It’s essential to be smart about how much adaptation is manageable, pay attention when there is too much stress in the system, and understand that casualties might be necessary to keep evolution moving forward.

I’ve been wondering about Adaptive Leadership in a personal context: how do you lead yourself forward? I am currently facing a huge evolution in my life — leaving the world of the theater, which I have inhabited for four decades, for the world of consulting and coaching in a broader sphere. Every day I’m faced with the questions of what do I keep and what do I let go of.

This is both a metaphoric and a literal process as I prepare for a three thousand mile cross country move. I have collected shelves and shelves of professionally “important” books, binders full of resource materials and course notes, file folders documenting my students and classes, and scores of theater programs, reviews and photographs. In a moldy box stored in the basement, I found my grade reports from grammar school, a shank of my baby hair saved by my mother, and hundred of letters, from when we actually wrote to each other on paper.

Each piece can be seen as a fractional signifier of who I am. One response would be, “Save it all, you’ll want to have this someday.” On the other extreme, “Chuck it all — why carry around these pieces of paper? Start afresh!” My challenge is to remain in the adaptive mode: what DNA is useful versus what DNA have you already lost or need to lose?

I began with books. Books about leadership. Save. Shakespeare. Save. Let go of books about voice and books about acting that have been decorating my shelves. Let go of monologue compilations, books of scenes, and scripts. Let go of books that aren’t very well written or interesting. Let go of duplicate books. If my identify is visually manifested by the volumes on my shelves, I can see how my DNA is changing. How do I feel? Both nervous and relieved.

What about the articles and syllabi and handouts that document my teaching and learning for the past four decades? I opened a binder stuffed with notes on every class I took during my actor training at the American Conservatory Theater in the mid-1970s. As I read through them, I had a pleasing discovery. The concepts I so carefully logged have become an integral part of me. I will not lose those ideas if I lose the pieces of paper. Into the recycle bin they go. Classes and courses that I’ll never teach again? Gone as well. Again, the odd combination of anxiety and relief.

Then I came to the moldy box. My question at every artifact was this: “If I no longer have this object, will I still know who I am?” Out go grade reports, cards from people whose faces I don’t remember, letters that chronicle minutia, empty pages of journals. On Christmas Day, listening to carols on my headphones, I read a packet of letters from me that my mother had stored. They are a potent chronicle of another DNA adaptation. Saved.

Some days during this process, my discomfort increases almost to panic. My upcoming new environmental conditions are an opportunity for evolution, but I can’t go too fast. I imagine a farewell to my theater identity. Then I realize that’s the fundamental DNA I’m conserving. It’s the basis for my evolution. I will continue using what I have embodied on stage and behind the scenes, discarding the parts that aren’t functional anymore. And I can feel new DNA growing as I expand into a wider arena.

“Ring out the old, ring in the new” is a cultural mantra for most of us on December 31st. We try to start the year afresh on the morning of January 1st thinking of the technical things we’d like to fix — go to the gym more often, eat more green and leafy vegetables, see more friends.

With a big thank you to Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky for their Adaptive Leadership model, I’d like to change that phrase to “save some old, add a little new” as we begin another year. First, cherish the DNA that that’s fundamental to your evolution. Celebrate who you are. Second, identify the DNA that’s outlived its usefulness. Mourn its loss and let it go. Third, begin to build new DNA as you adapt to your changing environment. You will not only survive, you will thrive as we enter into the exciting times of 2014!

The “Positation Lecture”

Last week, Brenna Nicely, an M.F.A. candidate in dramaturgy at the Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University, asked me for an interview about my years at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. She had been assigned to make a presentation on the history of this theater for one of her graduate classes. She knew that I had trained there to be an actor in the late 1970’s and subsequently had been a member of the acting company and faculty for nearly a decade. She had read as much as she could find about the organization and wanted my personal insights into its culture.

I talked with her about my experiences, both as a student and as a teaching artist. As I did, many specific details about Bill Ball, the extraordinary man who founded A.C.T. in Pittsburgh in 1965, moved it to San Francisco in 1967, and shepherded it to become one of the great repertory theaters of the United States in the 1970’s and 80’s, came flooding back.

I was just twenty-four and a brand new acting student when I first heard Bill’s “Positation Lecture.” The theater was a true repertory company: actors had year-long contracts and multiple roles each season, several shows were in rehearsal at all times, and several productions alternated nights on the majestic Geary Theater stage. Every fall, as the performance season began, the whole company was invited into a large acting studio in 450 Geary St., the aging building that housed the offices and rehearsal spaces for the Geary Theater, which was directly across the street. Bill’s idea of the whole company wasn’t just the professional actors, but included administration, staff, directors and artisans, as well as all the students, in other words, most everyone who was a part of making the theater come alive.

Bill dressed all in white: soft drawstring pants and a v-neck pullover. He spoke passionately to us, his bald head shining and rimless glasses twinkling. He told us first about the necessity of saying, “Yes!” He knew how fragile the creative process is, how the tiniest “no” can shut down the flow that the artist relies on. He told the story of an actor who brings in his personal “great” idea of doing a scene with toilet paper on his shoe. If the director of that play immediately says, “No, that’s ridiculous,” that actor isn’t likely to bring any more ideas into rehearsal. His creativity is gone. If the director says, “Yes! Let’s try that!” then the actor will try it, realize it doesn’t work, and continue to offer ideas until the best choices arise. Creativity is built on the idea of “Yes!”

Bill then listed a number of words that describe feeling bad: under the weather, depths of despair, down in the dumps, dragging, the pits — physical metaphors of downward movement. His philosophy was that these words represent gravity pulling us toward death. Metaphors that describe upward movement: lift yourself up, shoot for the moon, floating on air, high spirits, over the rainbow – these words connote movement towards life. “No is death,” he said, “Yes is life.” By changing our language, we can change how we approach life. The actor uses new language to create a different inner life in a play; why not find a new inner life daily?

Bill continued with his concept of the “Self Esteem Bucket.” He talked about how we leave our homes in the morning, feeling good about ourselves, our lives, our artistry, our accomplishments. But as we travel to the theater, someone looks at us askance, or we hear a negative comment, and we begin to doubt ourselves. By the time we arrive at rehearsal, our “Self Esteem Bucket” has been drained, leaving us with little to offer of ourselves. How do we keep this from happening? Bill spoke about how easy it is to use negative comments in the mistaken idea that we are going to fill ourselves by diminishing those around us. Bill knew that the compliment enhances the creative process of the artist. He asked us to find something positive to say about every actor’s performance. “Praise is food for everyone,” he said.

I first heard those words almost four decades ago. As I think about them now, I reflect on how Bill Ball altered my worldview. Saying “Yes!” isn’t only for rehearsal of a play. It can be a way of life. How will you know if something is going to work unless you try it? Creativity is a messy process; the first idea isn’t always the best, or the worst. It’s the sequence of ideas, the layering of experiments, that brings us, whether artists, scientists, policy makers, educators, or corporate executives, to the best idea, the best way of doing things, the best choices. Whether you are working alone, or creating with a team, “Yes!” keeps the ideas flowing.

I often ask my students or clients to change their language when I hear a negative response (“I can’t,” “I’m stuck,” “I won’t be able to do this,” “This is hard.”) The positive response like “How do I best do this?” “I’m learning to,” “What an exciting challenge,” keeps the possibility of change and growth alive. And I practice this myself. How easy it is get sucked down into the swamp of negativity: “why didn’t I, what a mistake, if only I had…” It’s possible (and necessary) to tell your own story in a completely different way, to change the words, illuminate the best parts and learn from the others. After all, it IS only a story that you are telling yourself.

The compliment, too, has become a primary teaching tactic. I try to start with what’s good, what’s working, what’s been accomplished, not with what’s wrong. This has been useful not only in the classroom, but also in management, negotiation, and leadership (not to mention personal relationships). The essential word after the compliment, which must be true and heartfelt, is “and.” For example, “and here’s what you might try next,” or “and it could work better if you…” or “and as you progress, you will…” or “and let’s think about it this way.” Which brings us back to saying “Yes!” This time its, “Yes, and…”

The “Positation Lecture” changed me. My own artistry is the better for Bill Ball’s words: saying “Yes!” to my own ideas, changing my own language, and critiquing my own work with a compliment followed by an “and”. I apply this to making visual art, learning Spanish, windsurfing, writing, gardening, as well as to my teaching, coaching, and consulting. The flow of work is richer; the work itself is better. And life is, as Bill Ball might have said, more full of wonder, curiosity, satisfaction and joy.

Self, Us and Now

For the past several months, I have had the privilege of hearing Marshall Ganz speak about the use of personal stories in public speaking during his course called Public Narrative: Self & Us & Now at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Students in this course come from every country, every discipline, every age, and every ethnicity. If you are a few minutes late to the cavernous Starr Auditorium in Belfer Center, you are likely to be among the many sitting in the aisles, rather than in a seat.

Ganz is a gentle speaker himself, and his classes are a series of questions. He posits an idea and then probes the audience for their responses. His wisdom is ever so slowly revealed as he guides the class to deeper understandings of how great speakers do what they do. Only once have I seen him reveal the emotion underneath his calm: a student asked him about his personal experiences with Robert F. Kennedy. We had just watched a video of Kennedy speaking in Indianapolis, April 4, 1968, where he talked of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. Ganz had tears in his voice as he spoke about King’s death and Robert’s assassination a mere three months later at the Ambassador Hotel. He was there. He heard the shots.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of great speakers analyzed early in the course. Many are familiar with only the last few minutes of his historic speech at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, the powerful and moving “I have a dream” conclusion. However, the “dream” that ends his speech makes even more sense if we have heard the “nightmare” which begins it.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

King calls for action in “the fierce urgency of Now,” and warns the listeners that there will be “a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual.” He continues, “The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.” Yet he asks his listeners for temperance in their actions.

Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

King creates inclusion throughout the speech. He calls on both black and white to act.

The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.

And in the soaring conclusion he brings himself into the speech: it is his dream that he speaks of, a dream that can become our dream, too.

The central theme of Ganz’ course is that great speeches in acts of leadership have three fundamental parts: Self (our personal experience), Us (our common experiences, beliefs and values) and Now (what we should do right away and how we should do it). When the class examined King’s speech, it became startlingly clear how he wove the Us and Now together in the first two-thirds of his speaking and brought his personal experience in only at the end, the section where he went “off-script” and spoke from his heart, the section emblazoned in our memories. And the final words of his speech weave Self, Us and Now together.

…we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

This speech is breathtaking in its power and poignancy. In our own public speaking, it’s not likely that we will rise to the quality of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s rhetoric. Nor is it likely that we will be at the nexus of history in the way that he was. Yet we can bring ourselves to our speaking in a more authentic and effective way.

We can investigate our personal connection to our leadership challenges. We can find the story of Self and have the courage to speak it, the reason we are doing what we are doing, the moments of revelation or understanding that propel us to make a difference in the world. We can hone this story of Self so that it is simple, clear, and memorable in its detail.

We can include the Us: what do we have in common? What is our shared history? What is our shared purpose? Even if you are speaking to an audience that may not agree with your values, if you dig a little deeper, you can find the place where you and they exist together, where there’s a common thread that binds you.

It is essential, as well, to bring in the Now. What exactly do you want us to do? In what way would you like us to do it? Give us tasks that we can accomplish today; give us larger goals that encompass a grander scope of action.

My time in Marshall Ganz’ class has flown by. He has opened my eyes to a new way of hearing great speakers, a new way of speaking myself, and a new way to teach public speaking and storytelling. During the few months that I have been listening to this master at work, I’ve offered these suggestions to any number of friends and/or clients – and they work! Try them. Experiment. Think more deeply about your purpose and how best you can help move the world forward. And then speak!

Notes to a New Teacher

Several weeks ago, I received a cry for help from an early career faculty member in the sciences who had been getting less than ideal student evaluations. She asked for my feedback on her teaching style. After watching a video recording of her teaching a class, I sent her the following notes.

These comments may seem obvious to many public speakers, yet I find myself repeating them over and over, not only to scientists and academics, but also to people who are presenting in government, finance, insurance, law, leadership training and the arts. I’m posting them here as a checklist for anyone who would like to improve their presentation skills.

Dear –

I’ve got lots of ideas for you, and I want you to know that my comments are not meant as criticism, but as assistance.

It’s good to hear that after watching the video you can immediately see some areas where you need to improve.

I’d like to start with your vocal use:

1. Try to avoid using “um but um,” “um but really,” “sort of,” “um and um,” “um kind of,” “just kind of,” etc. These filler words make you seem less confident and less knowledgeable.

2. Be careful of drifting off at the ends of sentences. You start a thought strongly and then let it fade away vocally as you continue. This also happens when you are asking questions.

3. You are also using some “uptalk.” This means that your pitch is rising at the end of a statement, turning it into a question. The rising pitch at the ends of sentences makes you seem unsure of yourself.

4. Your voice could be more powerful, resonant and flexible — using more volume will help you seem more confident and knowledgeable; more variety will make you sound more interesting. One way to accomplish this is to really tap into your passion for the material!

5. This may sound odd, but your sentences are too long. What happens is this: you get started on a sentence, use your filler words (see #1 above) and then the sentence just keeps going on. As a result, you are taking long pauses between phrases, perhaps to figure out what you are going to say next and how you can make it link to what you just said. That contributes to your halting delivery. If you speak in shorter sentences, each one can be said with confidence, without an internal pause, and without an upward inflection at the end. You will sound more confident and it will be easier for your students to follow your speaking.

Here are some ideas on physical use:

1. Be careful not to shift your weight from side to side. Stand confidently and you will feel more confident. And watch out for standing with your legs crossed.

2. Be careful of using “protective” gestures. You are at your best when your arms are open, not held across the front of your body.

3. Be careful not to fiddle with your clothing. This makes you seem ill at ease.

4. You might think about “dressing for success.” The rule of thumb is to dress one notch above your listeners. This will also help you feel like you are in charge.

And here are my pedagogical notes:

1. Be sure to be fully prepared for the event. By flipping through pages of research papers on the PowerPoint, it looks like you haven’t really done the work to help us understand the material. It might be a better choice to have distilled some of the information that you really want the students to get and prepare your slides with them in mind. They have read the papers, right?

2. You can ask more provocative questions. This also shows your students how prepared you are. Also, rather than “any questions?” or “anything else?” how about saying “what questions?” or “what else?” Additionally, when you ask a question, be sure to pause in order to give enough time for people to think and then answer. You should never be answering your own questions. You might have to wait a bit…

3. I also had trouble understanding the through-line of the class. For every class, ask yourself “What is my purpose?” and answer it with something like this, “My purpose is to find a way to get these students to be so excited about _____, that they are hungry for more.” Not, “My purpose is to get through all this material in the next hour.” This will help you plan your class to find the BEST way to get the students to get it. Think creatively about what that might be. (Putting a paper that they have read onto the PowerPoint screen might not be that.)

I hope these ideas are of help. I’m looking forward to meeting with you soon, so we can practice these techniques.

Sincerely,

Nancy

Welcome to My Blog!

Welcome to the first installment of my blog. Once a month, I will offer my thoughts on issues having to do with communication, presentation skills, negotiation or leadership. Some of these writings will be about how to get better at your skills in these areas. Some will be reflections on current affairs, literature or the arts when what’s going on around us can be observed or evaluated through the prism the above topics.

Many people talk about how important it is to “have a voice.” This is meant metaphorically: be sure to have your ideas presented, acknowledged and promoted. But you literally have to “have a voice” in order to be heard.

Actors who work on the stage understand the importance of vocal training so that they can be heard and understood easily no matter the size of the performance space. They may spend years training their voices to be resonant, clear, and expressive.

But an expressive resonant voice means nothing if it is not coming from a place of authenticity. Without a deep personal connection to your reason for speaking, your words may sound “hollow.” Your need to express yourself and your desire to reach the people you are talking to are both paramount to opening up your voice.

It’s also been my experience that as you train your voice, you may become freer and more confident in finding that personal connection. It is possible to override the influences that keep one silent, whether family, social group, culture, or environment. When you have experienced what it’s like to have a physical voice, then you are ready to “have a voice.”

This blog is a new avenue for my metaphoric voice. As an actor, director and teacher in the theater, and a facilitator of workshops and coaching in all sorts of venues and organizations, my primary mode of communication has been through my actual voice. I am accustomed to speaking to groups of people, whatever the numbers. Not only is it a pleasure, it’s a thrill.

Now, as I begin to express myself through the written word and technology in order to reach a larger audience, I’ve been experiencing the same hesitancies that someone not used to speaking out fully might feel. This new voice may be small at first, but just as a speaker gains confidence in his or her new found expression, so will I. I’m ready to have a new voice.