The Power of the Herd (4 page)

Selfless dedication to a calling results in behavior that appears alternately selfish and eccentric to family and friends. Part of the inevitable crankiness stems from trying to listen to your muse over the din of skeptics who don't believe in what you're doing, while you learn to set appropriate boundaries between yourself and people so enraptured with your vision that you'd never get anything done if you accepted all their dinner invitations. Of course, in Gaudí's case, a good meal now and then would have helped. It's hard to function when you're obsessed, overworked,
and
starving. But even while dining with wealthy clients, the architect rarely strayed from a daily vegetarian regime so strict that most people would consider it a form of fasting.

The willingness to relinquish personal comfort
in service to a goal is so common among trailblazers of all kinds, even in corporate settings, that best-selling authors Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee have a term for it: the “Sacrifice Syndrome.” In
Resonant Leadership,
they characterize it as a counterproductive yet hard-to-resist trap that leaders fall into when they “sacrifice too much for too long — and reap too little.” Deeply religious, Gaudí also subscribed to the Catholic concept of “mortification of the flesh” at a time when early-twentieth-century painters and composers were romanticizing the idea of suffering for one's art. And while we're at it, let's add the pressures of the visionary state itself. The muses don't give a hoot about keeping your mortal body in optimal working order. When inspiration hits, it's common to forget to eat or sleep for hours, even days, on end. And when inspiration fails, usually near some crucial deadline, a full-blown sleep
disorder
is on the horizon. With all these factors combined, Gaudí was lucky he lived long enough to meet a tragic end at seventy-four, let alone exhibit the endurance and clarity to continually raise funds for the cathedral while managing its construction and perfecting its revolutionary design.

And here's perhaps the most unwieldy paradox of all: new perspectives demand sensitivity, creativity, and time spent alone to take form, while the subsequent manifestation of any significant, long-term vision requires motivating
large numbers of people to pursue a common goal. A loner wandering around in that pulsating, open-nerve state may be able to mainline inspiration, but can he deal with the conflict, miscommunication, power plays, judgment, and politics of bringing his finest ideas to fruition? At the opposite end of the spectrum, intensely social people who develop a skin thick enough to let them navigate interpersonal and organizational dramas often lose connection to the very sensitivity that breeds inventive, nuanced thinking.

The solution involves a simple division of labor, you might say, but history has proven otherwise. Shrewd, charismatic managers and entrepreneurs have been known to prey upon brilliant yet socially awkward artists and inventors, whose ideas get diluted in the process. This kind of relationship, at its most benign, becomes codependent as the visionary loses touch with worldly concerns while his business partners neglect to further develop their own creative capacities. And both sides of this human equation are susceptible to the Sacrifice Syndrome as ambitious ideas face innumerable hurdles along the way, demanding visionaries and more practical leaders alike to break through the pressures, prejudices, and habits of the status quo on their way to creating lasting, meaningful change.

Finally, there's the ultimate, arguably supernatural challenge: ensuring that the vision remains healthy after your poor worn-out bones are buried in the ground. Gaudí's cathedral currently faces a threat more insidious than Catholichating communists: public transportation. One proposal involves construction of a subway nearby, which architects fear would damage the basilica over time. Another plan would turn the church
into
a train station. Apparently, it wasn't enough to hit Gaudí with a tram. The assault of mass transit continues unabated nearly a century after his death.

These possible compromises to Sagrada Familia's integrity illuminate one crucial aspect of managing individual and group needs over the long term. Not only do leaders have to convince colleagues, investors, and employees to buy into significant ideas, but at some point these innovators must also inspire a much larger public to support the vision as well. Whether in business, politics, art, or religion, initiating significant change is a lot like trying to overhaul an entire railway system while runaway trains continue to speed through it. No matter how defective the current model, people en masse resist the inconvenience and uncertainties of innovation with the hostility you'd expect them to reserve for immediate threats to their survival. Heated debates over public health care in the United States provide a glaring example. The average working man or woman isn't trained or even encouraged to engage in cathedral thinking. And really, why should people be willing to sacrifice their own hard-earned
comfort without an injection of the same 220-volt shot of inspiration that got the original innovator going? Acting as both lightning rod and transformer is part of the skill and thrill — and inevitable burnout — visionary leaders must learn to manage if they plan to achieve anything consequential.

As Mother Teresa once inscribed on the wall of her children's home in Calcutta,
“If you are successful, you win false friends
and true enemies; Succeed anyway…. What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight; Build anyway.” Pull this off, and you hit the PhD level of leadership development. Or maybe we're talking sainthood here. Yet even those of us still working on the necessary prerequisites for great leadership — inspiration, innovation, communication, and emotional and social intelligence — need to understand how to navigate what Boyatzis and McKee call
“the Cycle of Sacrifice and Renewal”
if we plan to align our God-given talents and hard-won knowledge with long-term goals.

In the old pyramid-building days, slave labor ensured that generations would be conditioned through dominance and demoralization to act as drones for an agenda they were forced to support. This system, active in the United States less than two hundred years ago, “evolved” into the assaults on mind, body, and spirit that factory workers endured regardless of the lip service paid to their status as free men and women. Labor laws and unions protecting workers eventually emerged. Yet once you graduate to a significant leadership position, particularly one with entrepreneurial elements, the rules change. There are no government regulations to protect you. You must suddenly learn to advocate for yourself while also organizing, motivating, and inspiring others. To raise the difficulty level, some people will rave enthusiastically about whatever mission you represent while covertly undermining some aspect of the plan, often unconsciously, sometimes for reasons even they don't understand. As the vision expands and takes on a life of its own, you must constantly modify your original expectations and strategies to align with unforeseeable challenges and opportunities, or you too will compromise the dream. And no one ensures that you receive fair pay for working no more than a reasonable number of hours, either. In the most daring, potentially paradigm-shifting fields, you're likely to spend years compensating others before yourself. All the while, employees will assume you're raking in the bucks, a throwback to the old robber-baron days, when the resentment was truly justified. Mass media reinforces this age-old mistrust, offering far more coverage of CEOs flying in private jets to receive government bailout funds than of innovators who sacrifice time and money
while supporting a worthy vision. In the public mind, leaders are, quite simply, guilty until proven innocent. This is why, even though people are conditioned to at least feign respect for anyone in a supervisory role, authentic trust and compassion must be won, sometimes slowly over time, sometimes as dramatically as a warrior running a gauntlet of tribal abuse.

In 1999, Mike Judge, of
Beavis and Butthead
fame, satirized egotistical yet clueless bosses and insipid management practices in the film
Office Space.
A decade later, after running his own increasingly successful media enterprise, he couldn't help but take the opposite position in his film
Extract.
Here Judge explored, with his usual brand of twisted social commentary, what the founder of a company deals with on a daily basis. In a radio interview with
Fresh Air's
Terry Gross, he revealed the reasons behind this change in perspective:

I'd worked just dozens and dozens of jobs
before I started my animation career. And by that point, I was pushing thirty. So I'd always been the employee. I had never had anybody work for me….And then suddenly, when
Beavis and Butthead
started, I had anywhere from thirty to as many as ninety people working for me. And so, I just suddenly became sympathetic to my former bosses. You know, I was just, like, God, these people don't appreciate anything. I've got to baby-sit them. They're always fighting with each other and me.

One eye-opening experience involved hiring someone to color in his line drawings. In a good-natured attempt to share the little bit of wealth he was finally accessing, Judge offered what he felt was a generous, above-minimum-wage rate for a job that didn't require any significant thought or creativity. At that time, mind you, he was working within a limited budget for an untried series of MTV shorts. Even so, Judge overheard, along with so many unprintable expletives, his employees complaining that he was getting rich at their expense. “I was, like, God, I can't win,” he told Gross, obviously still surprised by the irony of his position.

This is the dark side of leadership. No one talks about it much, perhaps because most people would refuse to be promoted if they knew what to expect. Even worse, conventional training programs don't prepare new leaders, let alone visionaries, for the most infuriating challenges involved. Common advice for handling power stress is to “suck it up” and “get over it.” Even the best books on emotional intelligence in the workplace only scratch the surface of the personal and social issues innovators face.

In negotiating the Cycle of Sacrifice and Renewal, for instance, renewal is not as simple as taking a vacation, eating dinner at home several times a week,
and spending a couple weekends a month attending your child's soccer games. The inescapable pressure of unresolved interpersonal difficulties, high expectations and demands, heartless gossip, and the general lack of compassion people display for the leader's position follow you wherever you go, keeping you up nights, infiltrating your private thoughts and spousal conversations on even the most isolated Hawaiian beaches. In
Resonant Leadership,
authors Boyatzis and McKee create a strong foundation for interrupting the Sacrifice Syndrome through cultivating mindfulness, hope, and compassion; but real, lasting renewal also requires successfully managing a host of paradoxes simultaneously. Leaders must somehow balance individual and group needs within their companies and the culture at large. They must sacrifice personal comfort and short-term gratification yet avoid burnout, in part by setting effective boundaries with fans, foes, and the relentless energy of inspiration itself. To develop a thick skin, as new managers are so often tempted to do, is to lose the sensitivity necessary for creativity, and the compassion essential for effective leadership. To keep your heart open is to experience a certain amount of pain daily. Learning how to manage the discomfort without simply shutting down is possible. But the personal breakthroughs that are required resemble the transformations most often associated with religious or mystical experience.

Models for great leadership, in fact, read like recipes for sainthood. As Boyatzis and McKee observe,
great leaders “deliberately and consciously step
out of destructive patterns to renew themselves physically, mentally, and emotionally.” These individuals “are able to manage constant crises and chronic stress without giving into exhaustion, fear, or anger. They do not respond blindly to threats with fearful, defensive acts. They turn situations around, finding opportunities in challenges and creative ways to overcome obstacles. They are able to motivate themselves and others by focusing on possibilities. They are optimistic, yet realistic. They are awake and aware, and they are passionate about their values and their goals. They create powerful, positive relationships that lead to an exciting organizational climate.” And they're masters at helping colleagues and employees rise to similar levels of creativity, emotional intelligence, and social awareness simply for efficiency's sake, if not for altruistic reasons.

As I've so often asked myself, my colleagues, my mentors, and sometimes anyone within hearing range, where's the handbook for
that?

In the early 1990s, an initially frustrating attempt at renewal gave me the insight and later the tools to address some of these age-old dilemmas. I had recently
resigned from my position as program director of a Florida public radio station to move to Arizona with my new husband, recording artist Steve Roach. After five years wrangling a group of energetic, highly opinionated, artistically motivated people, not only at the station itself but also during the numerous special events and music festivals I organized along the Gulf Coast, I was ready for a break. Working as a freelance writer, living in the desert with my own private composer creating new works of art in the next room, was a dream come true, fulfilling yet economically unpredictable for both of us. So it wasn't long before I also accepted a position as morning announcer at the local classical station. No longer dealing with the headaches of managing such an operation, I was expecting to hide out in the studio, enjoying a daily dose of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. The problem was, even though the station was technically a part of a major university's communications department, there was precious little communication going on. And so, after experiencing the employee/employer dynamic from the leader's viewpoint, I was suddenly thrust back into the labor pool to reevaluate both perspectives from the trenches.