Leadership and Institutional Pathology

I'm taking a class called "Leadership and Character Development" right now, and admittedly approached it with a heavy dose of skepticism. I kind of thought it would have all these vision-buzzed-out easily excitable people with palm-pilots ready to save the world, with a teacher more than ready to develop all the latent messiah complexes in the room. Fortunately, this has not been the case. There's been a lot of talk of integrity, and leading out of who you are, which I can, surprisingly, actually resonate with and apply.

Much of my skepticism about this class started with perusing the booklist. There's Covey's "7 Habits of Highly Effective People," (which has become the "Chicken Soup for the Aspirant, Trendy Executive Soul,") and "The Servant," which is a story about leadership--basically a distillation of Covey and De Pree for people that don't like the big words/complex ideas (??) in the originals. Cynicism aside, I found the ideas in the books themselves to be worth reflecting on and rather helpful. My cynicism, I realized, developed many years ago from the experience of walking into the office of a boss (who regularly would take food off my desk and calmly start eating it while talking to me, fail to give me eye contact because he was, um, looking at other parts of my anatomy, etc.) and seeing many of these books on his own shelves. I had made judgments about the books because of a person who (ostensibly) had read them. Okay, okay, so I judged a book by its cover.

All this thought about leadership has led me to think a lot about what I have come to fondly call "institutional pathologies." What I mean by this is that, as a lot of therapists who specialize in family systems theory will tell you, there are certain people in any group who function as "problem-bearers" for the collective whole. They tend to manifest problems that are present within the whole institution, but the community kindly relies on certain individuals to act them out so that "all the rest of us can be reassured by our own normalcy." I have seen over and over (to the point of nausea) institutions that rely on the willingness of some of their staff to work long hours, for little pay and great emotional angst, to compensate for the lack of staff, financial, and/or emotional support that should be a part of any decent and equitable work environment.

I am not just talking about myself, although I have had many experiences like this. I have also talked to at least 25 people working at non-profits and churches who are working nights, weekends, nights of weekends, getting chronic muscle pain, etc. because of unrealistic workloads under which they are laboring. And, to be clear, these are people who value work, who care about their jobs and the people they are serving, who are not "whiny slackers" who just want to prop their feet up at work and eat bon-bons.

There's a double bind here. On one hand, you can suck it up and meet the unrealistic expectations, and feel really spiffy about your own ability to produce under less than ideal circumstances. On the other hand, you then realize that you're enabling a sick system because your own work ethic is pumped up on steroids. I think there is a larger trend in our work lives that is present in our personal lives as well. Life is speeding up--we have text messaging, microwaves, e-mail, cell phones, yadayada. But we as people are still finite, and we can only be in one place at a time, despite all the virtual forms of communication we have, and we can only accomplish so much. And yet, declaring our own limitedness seems a confession of weakness (humility?) or laziness--at least that's the fear.

Over the past few weeks, I have been trying to make a conscious choice to not be ruled by a "tyranny of the urgent." This is becoming somewhat of a spiritual discipline: not just frantically plunging into things, but spending about 10 minutes each morning thinking through what my true priorities are for the day/week. On a "larger picture" level, I am starting to think about the fact that first am foremost I am a child of God, not a machine producing papers, reports, etc. My worth is not in what I produce! I think this is something that we all have to remind ourselves of in a "what have you done for me lately" kind of world.