Patience as a leadership practice
Sunday I was pleased to sit on a panel on the practice of leadership for the current cohort of learners with the Leadership Vancouver organization. The other panelists were amazing people: Marguerite Ford, Pam Goldsmith-Jones, and Bar-Chya Lee.
Each of us spoke for 10 or 15 minutes on practices of leadership, and then we answered questions from the participants.
Pam talked about embracing the call to action, quoting from a sign above the bar at the Cactus Club in Vancouver: “The House of Yes.”
Marguerite quoted Senator Nancy Heath and said that “a job worth doing is worth doing badly” meaning that holding back was inexcusable when work demanded to be done. And Bar Chya, using the eagle as his metaphor (familiar of course from Ojibway teachings) talked about the core practices of big view, big heart and higher go. When your view encompasses the world, your own struggles seem small. I talked about the practice of invitation as leadership and the connection between passion and responsibility.
When it came time for questions, one of the questions that came our way was “Don’t you get impatient?” We took our time answering that one – which sent the right message – but I was so patient that we had moved on before I answered it. So for those who were there, and others who may be listening in, here’s what I was mulling over saying about patience.
Patience is an absolutely required leadership skill. Things take time to happen, this is obvious, but more than that, if you are truly leading from a position where you are giving away your power to people, patience allows both for people to take hold of it and for collective intelligence to come into play.
Last week I was facilitating an Open Space meeting for an alternative school community in North Vancouver. To convene the closing circle, I simply took my chair, placed it in the middle of the floor, and placed a bell in the middle of the circle. Within about 10 minutes, all 80 people had followed suit, and I decided that I would just leave that bell there as a talking piece, and wait to see what happened. There was a fair amount of chatter in the room, but the evening had been so spirited and full of energy that I didn’t want to be the one to ask for silence and start the closing. And so I waited, and waited. After a couple of minutes of this a young man strode into the middle of the circle, grabbed the bell and started telling the group about the plans that had hatched in his small group session. When he finished he placed the bell down and others followed suit. It was a prime example of what happens when you exercise patience – soon the people take over and there is no turning back. But preempt that moment, and the people never know whether or not the circle is truly theirs.
Collective intelligence takes a while to emerge, and as we know from all the science on complexity and emergence, tipping points appear out of nowhere – strong signals in the noise around us – and when they happen, they happen quickly. As leaders, the thing we can do to help these along is to simply be patient. Hold the space and the belief that out of the chaos, order will appear and that it will be coalescing stuff into a direction that is more than what one person could possible organize. Leadership that works with emergence watches and listens and waits, and trusts that the collective intelligence of the group will come to the fore. When it finally does, it is something marvelous, and something well beyond whatever it was one was expecting.
