It's a "no-brainer," isn't it?  We need to do the little things that can make an important difference to others: offer help, solicit or share feedback, compliment someone, take the risk to clear up a lingering misunderstanding, just listen.  

We can all think of little things someone else has done for us that made a difference. (A former boss of mine threw an HBR article on my desk by Chris Argyris, saying "I think you might like this" -- it changed my life).  Yet somehow it is all too easy to dismiss our own small acts. We take them for granted, not seeing their power. Perhaps we don't believe they are "big enough" to be leadership, and yet that's just the point. Small acts of generosity, responsibility, or authenticity may stimulate a kind of "butterfly effect" within relationships, producing meaningful impacts that may only show up much later.

For me, consciously considering small acts leads to a reminder about the many nested systems in which we participate: the psychological, cultural and even spiritual forces that are constantly in motion. A chance remark or gesture may change someone's outlook and then, like the proverbial ripple in the pool, may also affect a team and perhaps ultimately the fate of an organization. If, as they say, "the devil is in the details," so also an angel must be there, as well. The small stuff matters.  We can't escape it.

On her Random Acts of Leadership website, consultant Susan Mazza, as part of her own leadership journey, asks profoundly "...Could committing an act of leadership be as simple as committing an act of kindness?  ...What's the difference between the two?"  Indeed, small things are worth a deeper meditation on how they define us and our work.

 

LEADERSHIP CONVERSATION

Louise Altman helps us bring mindfulness -- and our true selves -- to work

 

Louise Altman has worked since the mid 1990's in corporate, non-profit and academic communities to strengthen workplace communication, relationships and organizational culture. Whether as a coach, trainer, consultant or facilitator, her focus in the intersection of work and emotional life.  It is what happens at this intersection, she says, that controls how well we are able to think in the moment and how well we are then able to act on our thoughts and feelings. It all depends on how present, conscious, and intentional we really are - how mindful - which she defines (in line with the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn) as:

 

Paying focused attention

On purpose

Without judgment

To the experience of the present moment.

 

She writes elegantly crafted articles on workplace evolution, culture, personal expression and freedom on her popular blog at  www.intentionalworkplace.com. A recent pair of articles, titled, "We Need New Models for Workplace Relationships,  Part 1 and  Part 2," is a great place to get acquainted with her work and perspectives, as are two other beautifully written articles about her definition of mindfulness practice, here and here. You can find out more about Louise at the website she shares with her partner, George Altman, www.intentionalcommunication.com.

 

Q. What would you say, Louise, is your vision of the future workplace we could create together?

 

A. We have to start from that idea of driving fear out of the workplace. Fear is such a major player in everything that is done in the workplace, so much of what people do in their jobs, in how our organizations have been structured in the first place, that it's actually a little hard for me to imagine what kind of place it would be without it.  There is so much suffering right now out there.  I can ask the question, "What would you like to be doing differently?" and in response, people simply cry.  This is an amazing statement about the lack of freedom many are experiencing, even if this is more a matter of perception than anything else.   

 

My most profound vision is a workplace where people do feel a sense of freedom, the freedom to be themselves, to be real. Of course, that vision involves all the positive emotions: joy, enthusiasm, confidence, and passion (passion in a genuine way, not the way it is often represented).  But it is more than that, of course. It involves getting past the lack of freedom that is part of the personal and social baggage we bring to work, and it means getting past the amazing uncertainties people are trying to live with as a result of the Great Recession, uncertainties that now seem to be "baked into the cake."  It's not that the lack of freedom began with the recession, but it's clearly intensified to a whole new level.

 

Q. How do you see these uncertainties and failure to be our real selves show up most directly - and what do we do about it?

 

A. One obvious place it shows up is in the expectation that people perform at ever-higher levels of competency every single day. This expectation seems to now be part of the structure of the society we are living in at global levels. A client says to me, "I walk in at 7:00 AM and I have to be 'on' every second until I leave." I ask what it means to be 'on,' and the reply always comes down to not being real, not being me, and in this way is indicative of that core loss of freedom. On another side of the coin, when I'm trying to be of help, a person might say to me, "So you are the communication expert, tell me what I should do when I feel this way."  The very use of that word, "expert," like the word "performance," is a disconnection - and is odd, unnatural, unreal. When I get that question, the only place I can go is to remind people how many others feel the same way, and to encourage small acts of reaching out to one another, acts that reinforce good will, authenticity and trust in little ways.  This isn't about conducting big interventions, big discoveries with teams or organizations, major restructuring, scaling up.  Rather, it is about helping people who work with one another create those touchstone moments and string them together in a meaningful way. It is about helping people encourage one another so that we all can keep going and stay on the right track together.

 

Q. Has that perspective - seeing and encouraging the importance of the small acts - represented an evolution for you?

 

A. Yes, it has.  I came into my work in the corporate world from the non-profit one. They were different environments - except that people had exactly the same problems in trusting and communicating. I began to feel initially that my work was very big.  It was "transcendent."  I remember going to a conference and hearing myself say, "I'm going to change corporate culture." It feels like such a healthy shift to stop focusing and worrying about how my work is going to scale.  It doesn't have to, despite the fact that a financial consultant might say to me, "you're talking yourself out of more work."  The focus now is on five or six or seven people and the movement they can make emotionally together to deal with the really big systemic barriers they are up against; barriers that represent an old, fossilized paradigm in which the most basic message is "Don't be here. Don't be real. Don't be yourselves. It's incompatible with our goals." It's an old paradigm and it's dying a very painful slow death, one team at a time.

 

There's been that evolution for me, but there are also enduring elements in my work.  When I was in graduate school, I was interested in family therapy, especially the work of Salvador Minuchin, which included watching family sessions through one way glass.  I remember seeing how one person in a group would take on and hold the pain for the entire family, how that person would sacrifice themselves in order to keep a less effective family system going.  I see this kind of thing in groups and organizations.  People have all kinds of unconscious arrangements about all kinds of things and I notice these patterns.  And it is precisely because of this that I see how the little shifts people make in their relationships with themselves and each other can be far more important than anything else we can do or imagine. 

 

Q. Have the models for change themselves changed?

 

A. The models for the work of culture change still often assert themselves as male. They may have changed from the past in some ways, but I'm still called upon too often by people who think I'm there to "problem-solve," whatever that might be. I remember working with a client who opened the dialogue with words to the effect, "I know my team.  I know what they are thinking.  I know what they don't like.  Just tell me how I fix it!"  It's very challenging, because what's built into such statements is a view of myself and others in this field. It obscures what we are really trying to do with people to bring emotional intelligence, choice, freedom and flow. The point is, there's nothing to "fix." It's not about what's "dysfunctional" or about this or that person laying their drama on the team. To the contrary, it's about inherent trust in the possibilities every single person possesses, trust in our capacities to address our own issues based on who and what we already are. It's a very different idea than corporate problem-solving - and it can cut through so much stuff. The shift from masculine toward more feminine forms of transformation has been the most important - and restful - shift in myself, too. When I feel it in my work it expresses itself as helping a group achieve a greater place of balance, men and women together as a beautiful equalizer, and there's a softening, an opening, a lightness that begins to overtake things.

 

Q. And where does the evolution go now?

 

A.  In an outcome driven society, we may believe the move to more intimate work is incompatible with impactful work and we are afraid to surrender to something small. Mindfulness, however, is creeping into the mainstream.  It's clear that there are times when it will be misinterpreted - not long ago I saw an article about mindfulness building profits, for example, and I cringed. But I also trust that as this gradual awakening continues, things will change.  If a person engages in mindfulness, something is going to happen!  In my own career, for example, I started by offering conflict management seminars for the first time for the American Management Association, traveling around the country, and it felt like I'd asked the world to send me everyone who was upset, abused and enraged. I attracted that pain to me and I was surrounded by it.  It was clear people were creating their own pain and there was also a great deal of pain in the system. Seeing that, as a moment of my own mindfulness, was the beginning of the process of personal change for me -- because I could feel the possibilities inherent in it. I could help people move to a different perception of themselves in the system.  And that process for me is still going on.

 

 

 

MY LEADERSHIP BINDER

More Resources to Foster Reflective Learning

 

* Joy and Foreboding.  Research Professor Brené Brown outlines a dangerous cultural trend in her TEDxKC talk, "The Price of Invulnerability."