Date Posted: December 4th, 2009
For the past two years I’ve been in at least one leadership position. In Fall 2007 I was president of Swing Ann Arbor (SAA) — University of Michigan’s Swing Dancing Student Group — and took over as choir director for Cynnabar’s Singing Group. (Cynnabar is the Ann Arbor chapter of the Society for Creative Anachronism.) I finished my tour of duty with SAA in May 2008, and in Fall 2008 I took over the Minister of Arts and Sciences (MOAS) position for Cynnabar. In that time I’ve learned a thing or two about leadership. Below is a list of 8 things I’ve learned during that time. You’ll get another 8 things on Monday.
1 ) Easiest Way to Make Connections
As a leader, you are visible to your group. People are more likely to remember your name. You’ll have to interact with others in order do complete your projects. Really, it’s a no brainer. As a leader you will meet people.
When I was president of SAA, I presided over meetings. That alone got people to recognize me. I also acted as a bridge between SAA and the other Ann Arbor swing group, so I interacted with the other group too. To this day, I’m still mostly remembered by the Ann Arbor swing people that were around during my tour of service even though I haven’t been dancing in months. More than that, I wouldn’t have any reservation about asking them to help me organize an event or something.
2 ) People who never talked to you before will all of a sudden take an interest in you
This is something that’s sort of distressed me, but seems to come with the territory. People who wouldn’t give you the time of day when you weren’t in a position of power — even if you were an active member before — will now remember your name and talk to you. This happened both as SAA president and as MOAS. If you’re anything like me, you’ll wonder how to treat these people. Is it that they’re attracted to power or something?
I struggled with this for a while until I realized something: Unless you’re in a leadership position you personally aren’t vital to the functioning of the group. You aren’t someone that a general member of the group ought to know. There’s only so much time and energy in your life, it’s best to spend it on important people (and people who you likely to like). A leader qualifies as an important person. I don’t totally agree with this philosophy, but I can understand it… and may even unconsciously act on it too. So, yeah, just because someone gives you the time of day primarily because you’re a leader doesn’t necessarily make them bad people. 
3 ) Service is King
People will love you and want to work with you if you do service. With the MOAS position I volunteered to take care of room scheduling and that’s done a lot to endear the other leaders to me. Same thing with being choir director. The more you give, the more get. The important thing here is not to do service with the expectation that you’re going to get anything out of it other than the joy of seeing something work well. People will sense your ulterior motives and won’t like you all that much.
4 ) Detaching Yourself from Your Ideas is a good thing
I mentioned this in my last post on detachment. Basically if you want to get a proposal passed you have to be detached from most of the details. For example, in SAA I wanted to try a totally new schedule for classes. I wanted to turn SAA into more of a teaching organization than a social dance organization. That took quite a bit of doing. I made an extensive proposal that took account of everything, but most importantly I left lots of areas open to adjustment. I didn’t care how we phased it in or where the extra practices took place. What I cared about was that that there were more classes and that we changed things fairly soon.
The proposal got passed, and of all the things I tried to start while President, I think that was the most successful.
5 ) Contempt is Bad
In Gladwell’s book Blink
he has a chapter that discusses an instance in which a scientist/psychologist type person takes a look at a video of a newly married couple and can tell in an instant whether or not a couple would stay married or get divorced. The primary factor he looked for was contempt, a state where one partner does not respect the other.
Unsurprisingly, if you have contempt for the people you’re working with you’re in for a bad experience. Within a few months of being the head of SAA I developed contempt for my fellow board members, and unsurprisingly things went downhill from there. Ah, hindsight. Whatever you do, when you notice yourself developing disrespect for your anyone in organization WATCH OUT. Chances are there’s been some misunderstanding.
6 ) Criticism comes with the Job
When you’re in a leadership position, someone’s inevitably going to criticize you. It’s OK. It doesn’t mean you’re a failure. It doesn’t mean you’re doing a bad job. What it does mean is you need a method for dealing with it. If you take it personally, feel sorry for yourself, and ask why they aren’t attacking other people in the group… you’ll be doing a disservice to everyone else you’re serving.
7 ) No matter what you do not everyone will be happy
Going on #6, not only will you be criticized, but not everyone will be happy with your decisions. Even your good decisions. The way to know if your decisions are actually good is to ask yourself “is this aligned with where the group wants and/or needs to go?” You also need to look at the criticism you receive, see the criticism.
If you’ve determined the criticism is misguided, should you try to convince the other person of their wrongness? It depends mostly on how much you need to have them on your side and how much time you have. And even then, if you explain your position carefully and well and explain why their response doesn’t make sense and the response is to reiterate their position… it’s probably not worth your time to pursue it further.
8 ) The Loudest Person does not necessarily represent the whole group
This can be really hard to remember. In the choir the majority of the people there don’t have a strong opinion on the music, but one or two people do. I want people to feel welcome to give their opinions and know that it will be heard and acted upon. At the same time I know that it’s not always a good idea to obey what those one or two people suggest just because I’m trying to be amenable to other ideas.
It’s a balancing act. Sometimes it’s wise to listen. Sometimes it’s not. Again, this is best when you have a clear idea of what to measure up suggestions to. Is it aligned with what the group wants to do? How much time is being spent arguing points that don’t have clear answers? Etc.
More to come on Monday!
Tags:
Career, Character-Development, Detachment, Leadership, Relationships.
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Date Posted: December 2nd, 2009
Last week when I wrote about how to develop a thick skin, I mentioned that one way to do it was to practice detachment. I’ve found detachment to be a weird, uncomfortable, hard to really wrap my mind around kind of topic, so I’ll take some time here to examine it in some detail.
First: What is detachment? Why is detachment a good idea?
Detachment is not letting your primitive brain get emotionally involved with a situation. It’s not letting emotion be the sole driver of your decisions. It’s pretending that you’re an outside observer watching what’s happening. Here are some examples to illustrate the concept and show you when it’s a good idea to be detached.
Buying a house When you’re buying a house (or making any large purchase or big decision) it’s a good idea to not be too attached to it. Meaning it’s a good idea to not care about what your buying or at least remind yourself constantly that it’s not yours yet. If you fall head over heels in love with it you run the risk of not seeing the flaws it has or of getting incredibly disappointed when it fails the house inspection or when your lender refuses to give you the money you need to buy it. On top of that, the house is a physical object. It could burn down. A meteorite could crash into it. It’s impermanent. The more attached to it you are, the more unnecessary disappointment you risk.
Your kids Or more specifically, the dreams you have for your kids. The truth is your children are not what you dream, hope, or wish them to be. You may envision them as captains of industry when really all they want to do is teach. You may envision them as staying nearby forever when they really want to travel the world and go on adventures. The more attached you are to what you want your kids to become, the more difficult your life will be. Your kids either won’t fulfill their potential and will resent you, or they’ll go off and live the life they were meant to live and you’ll mourn the loss of something you never had. The less attached you are to the dreams you have for your kids, the more able you are to help them flourish. By being less attached, I mean you still care and love your kids but you’re willing to put aside your expectations of them. You’re willing to remind yourself that your hopes are not necessarily reality.
Beliefs Your beliefs are based on the experience you’ve had until now. In the future you may find that beliefs you’ve had no longer make sense to you anymore. The less attached you are to your beliefs the easier it will be to live in keeping with where you are at any given moment. This is where things get tricky. What does it mean to be detached from your beliefs? They make up your identity, after all. The trick here is to be attached to truth. That is, be attached to what’s real, to what is. Our understanding of what is true changes over time, but the commitment to truth doesn’t have to change. All of us, whether we acknowledge it or not, want truth in our lives. Identify yourself as a truth seeker, and you’ll almost automatically be detached from your beliefs.
Proposals Let’s say you’ve made a proposal for some project that you need to get approved by an executive board. The more you attached you are to each of the details in your proposal, the less likely it will get passed. And if it does get passed it’ll be with a lot of changes you feel uncomfortable about. On the other hand, if there’s a goodly number of aspects you don’t really care about and only a few things you can’t compromise on, the more likely your proposal will get passed and the more likely you’ll be happy about what got passed.
Detachment is not about suppressing emotion
Whenever I heard or read about detachment I’d always felt uncomfortable about it because I was afraid it meant I was supposed to be totally and completely rational. That my having warm attachment feelings was bad. That it was a bad idea to let those feelings have any say in my decision making. Whenever I thought about it I’d see that actually doing what I thought detachment meant would be stupid. If you’re choosing your career based solely on what’s practical you may find 9-5 schedule unbearable. If you’re choosing a partner based solely on practical rational things (How much debt does he have? How much money does he make? Do I like her parents?) you’ll find your home life lacking. It’s often an excellent idea to follow your intuition.
On further examination and after practicing detachment anyway, I realized that’d I’d misunderstood what was meant by detachment. Detachment is not the same as not feeling anything at all. When you’re detached from your emotions, you still feel them. They even can play a part in your decision making (Acting on intuition, anyone?), but your emotions do not control you. They’re a source of information.
Take the house, for example. Aaron and I are buying a house right now and it has been a fairly emotional process. For one thing the house I’d sort of been eying since the summer turned out to be in our price range, was still available in the fall, was one of the first houses we looked at, and when we went to see it it fit a lot of our wants. I basically fell in love with it. But I didn’t let that attachment feeling drive me to make an offer right there. I acknowledged the feeling, made a mental note, and then Aaron and I got a buyer’s agent and looked at 20 more houses.
Waiting to get a buyer’s agent and looking at more houses was a great idea, and something I could only do by forcing myself to be somewhat detached from the strong warm feelings I first had toward the house. By getting a buyer’s agent that meant that we weren’t the ones doing the negotiating, and by looking at all those other houses we really appreciated what the house had to offer. Also by being at least somewhat detached, I was mitigating the disappointment I’d feel if the house failed the inspection or we couldn’t get a loan or something. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still be disappointed if it doesn’t go through, but it won’t be nearly as bad as it would be if I let myself be totally attached to it.
In short, detachment is a really good idea. It gives both sides of your brain a chance to work out a problem. It lessens the pain you feel when things change unexpectedly. It makes you feel happier because it aligns your life with truth. Yay detachment!
Tags:
Detachment, Emotional Health, Psychology, Subconscious.
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