|
Indulge me please. This may be a four-and-a-half minute leadership advisory...
More and more I've advised leaders to take the emotion out of leadership. That when emotion jumps into the driver's seat poor decisions tend to be made, poor goals are usually set and we communicate badly.
Last week I was challenged on the topic. Training in Ohio, I was told by a manager that taking the emotion out doesn't work. That if he removed emotion then he became complacent. That emotion equaled caring.
Like a sports broadcaster who describes loud, demonstrative, emotional athletes as passionate, this manager bought the common misnomer that emotion and passion are the same thing. Like somehow the louder one is the more he or she cares.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
In the May 2006 volume of this newsletter (yes this used to be a monthly. Actually, it was a quarterly before that.) I told the true story of Marie-Helene from the book Is Paris Burning? by Larry Collins and Dominique LaPierre:
Marie-Helene's nervous hands tightened over the grips of her handlebars as she watched the gates of Fresnes prison opening. (This was WW II. France had fallen and Germany occupied her). For hours she had waited in uncomplaining silence.
Now she studied each of the prisoners as they dragged themselves past the machine guns of their SS guards and into the waiting buses.
Then she saw him. A tight little cry escaped Marie-Helene's mouth as she caught her first glimpse of her husband's drawn and pain-worn face. A wild exulting filled her young body.
It was only a few instants later that the awful reality of the scene she was watching struck her. She suddenly understood that her husband was being deported. In agony, she followed him to the bus.
The engines started, and the long line of green and yellow vehicles started to move forward. Marie-Helene ran back to her bicycle. Without knowing why, she got on and pedaled after the convoy.
All along the line of cattle cars, couplings banged together like links in a long chain. Slowly, with the 2453 miserable human beings inside, the creaking wooden cars began to slide down the tracks.
A railroad worker, his own eyes red with tears, walked up to the lonely figure standing by her bicycle. She had followed the bus to the train station. "They've left," he said.
Without knowing why, Marie-Helene determined to follow her husband's prison train as far as she could...
Two hours and twenty-six miles now lay behind her in pursuit of the wooden cattle car carrying her husband. But as she pedaled, her hopes of catching that train had already begun to fade.
At each wayside station where she stopped she had been given the same information: the train had passed two hours ahead of her. No matter how fast she had ridden she had not been able to shorten that interval.
However, 20 miles ahead of her, an FFI commando had blown apart sixty-five yards of rail. The train was stuck. The Germans discovered another train beyond the damaged rails.
As they began to march their prisoners to the new train, Marie-Helene came pedaling down the winding river road alongside the track. Because of the stoppage, she had caught up with the train.
Among the black and coughing figures lurching down the track she recognized her husband. Still holding her bicycle, she bounded across the little field of daisies that separated them.
Then, seeing the frail figure before her, she performed the first gesture that came to her mind: she took a white handkerchief from her pocket and wiped the soot from his eyes.
The guard behind her shrugged in indifference and allowed her to walk beside the pale, stumbling man who was her husband. Her hand clasped in his, she savored two hours beside him.
The prisoners were reloaded in the new cattle cars and began anew their sad trek to Germany. The authors pick up the story...
From a hilltop across an irregular loop of the river, five weeping men watched the prisoners, packed in their new cattle train, disappear down the green folds of the river valley.
As the train rounded the last bend, they could see a tiny white figure following behind. It was Marie-Helene. For her, her journey had just begun.
I ask you: what propelled Marie-Helene down the tracks, this frail, quietly pedaling, desperate woman? (And please don't say a bicycle.)
Emotion? I think not. It was her passion for her husband that drove her.
Real passion is born of real conviction no matter the volume, and as long as passion makes us do, then it is passion true. It was a deep, silent ache that carried Marie-Helene down the tracks.
So Herman Melville described Captain Ahab and his longing for Moby Dick: "If his chest had been a cannon he would have shot his heart upon it."
Passion can include emotion, but passion is not actually emotion. Quiet, unemotional passion is passion nonetheless. Ask Pete Sampras and Roger Federer, two of the great tennis players of all time. Both famously unemotional. I dare you to walk up to either of them and tell them they're not passionate.
Emotion is not the expression of passion, doing is.
Actually, one can be loud, demonstrative and emotional and be devoid of passion. For this I give you the emotional people, including athletes, who accomplish nothing. Emotion can be passion's cheap substitute and imposter.
Passion has focus and purpose, emotion is all over the place. Passion is an inner drive, emotion is an outer reaction. Emotion tires, passion does not. Emotion burns out. If passion burns out, it's only because something or someone has beaten it into submission.
Emotions have great human value as an expression of feelings and as a relief. They allow our inner stirrings to get out so they don't eat us alive. Still, they are temporary and fleeting.
Leaders are human so they will have emotions. But they are most often best dealt with in secret. And decisions, goal setting and communication are better done after emotions have ebbed.
Of course, you might wonder how it ended for Marie-Helen...
She rode 183 miles over two and a half days without sleep or rest. She would not be allowed, though, by the Germans to go any further.
She watched as the train left its final station before it reached its destination--the concentration camps Ravensbruck for some and Buchenwald for the others. Out of 2453 proud men and women, fewer than 300 would come home again to France.
Months later, after Paris was liberated and before the war was over, Marie-Helene crossed the American and German lines in a Red Cross ambulance. There she contacted a Gestapo officer known to friends in Paris.
Through a series of pressures brought on him by Frenchmen with whom he had had black market dealings, she was able to persuade him to take her in a German staff car across Germany into the very confines of Buchenwald, where they found her husband alive. The officer took him into custody.
The trio drove back to France and Marie-Helene brought her husband home to Paris.
In this case, passion got its reward.
| 
