Open Leadership

My tweet this afternoon was this:

If you practice an open #leadership style, eventually you will have a severe case of advice fatigue.  Keep listening.  Advice is not a threat.

Leadership is a throw away word, I suppose. Some leaders are commanding, others collaborating; some are facilitators, others are directors.  None are neutral.  Even an inert leader sets a tone that permeates.  So choose, I say, what kind of leader you will be in each of the settings in which you lead.

My default style is openly direct.  Listen, decide, communicate, and remain open to hear more.  It is neither paralyzed by endless debate, nor so bluntly confident that it is not open to critique.  But the listening is exhausting.  I think that those who practice this form of leadership will eventually collapse of advice exhaustion.  

This happened to me this weekend.  I was surrounded by great people who were fully competent and deeply well-meaning.  Listening to each of their perspectives was profitable.  But by the end of the weekend I craved the freedom to have my own opinion and choose my own course.

To be honest, listening well can be exhausting.  But I need to be careful to avoid the instinct that contrary advice is threatening or poorly motivated.  On the occasion when I sense that a line of questioning or advice has unwelcome intent, I have to revert to my knowledge of the person sharing. These are good people who want us to be correct and have a sense that we may have missed something important.  I remember a couple that I used to know who were bickering all the time and constantly correcting each other.  At one point I realized that Lana didn’t want to prove that Bob was wrong, she wanted Bob to be right!  It is with that spirit that I think we need to be listening well.

To take this concept of open leadership a step forward, I really need to distinguish between openness and full disclosure of everything I'm thinking and considering.  Some suggest complete openness about all things because the integrity is at stake.   But this assumes that information equals understanding.  If you need to be instructed about the danger in that statement, you haven’t been on the planet long enough.  ;-)

The risk of dismissing contrarians: When faced with contrary advisers, it is easy to dismiss them because we can find fault with their argument, or because we’re just too plain tired to process the information… again.  But I have found that there is value in continuing to listen.  It would be easier to continue down the course we have charted without bringing up the debate for consideration again.  We can be tempted to reason that the alternate perspective has been considered and we are just burning neurons to continue to rehash it. But that is a temptation I think we should resist.  By allowing our own counsel to be pressure tested that we can grow in confidence that our course is properly set, and be open to redirection if we have it wrongly set.  The pressure of alternate views will strengthen our confidence, knowing that we have been tested.

The risk of staying open too long.  There is some risk that remaining open to this pressure will erode our confidence.  If we become men and women whose conclusions are subject to the emotional pressure of the last person we talked to, we build our house on the sand.  (You can complete the analogy for yourself.)  But this weakened state of reasoning only comes when we perceive the critique of our conclusions as a threat.  Leaders are chosen in part for wisdom. Wisdom implies “God Sense” (to paraphrase Jill Briscoe).  Aristotle put it this way:  Wisdom is the combination of moral will with moral skill.  Jesus said, “wisdom is proved right by [wisdom’s] children.”  Wisdom is judged by its results.  As you ponder these things for yourself, I encourage you to have that combination:  God-centering, moral will, moral skill, focus on acting rightly.  This can be the energy that refocuses us when we slip into the question of our own confidence.

Proverbs 15 puts all of this much more succinctly,  “Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed.”  I suppose you could just read Proverbs, and save yourselves a lot of time!