Callan…Coffee…Contemplation for the Week of June 8th
Deep Imprints
When I reflect on my character development, I realize much of my inner cultivation was imprinted on me through key mentors in my life and via rigorous experiences. This tells me character, and interior depth, are imprinted slowly and incrementally over time. We’d like to think we can study our way to character excellence; this is why book shelves are saturated with self-help literature and “Top 10” lists. Sounds good, but in reality, excellence doesn’t work that way. Yes, throughout our lives we want to be good right away. We want expediency and the quick fix. That’s human. But the character growth and excellence we ultimately attain, in truth, come about by gradual imprinting, much like pressure and heat slowly form a diamond within coal. And interestingly, the diamond cannot form without the pressure and heat. Rigor, experience, tests and trials; these are all necessary to imprint character and to carve deep deposits of excellence within ourselves. Excellence, it seems, is cultivated only this way.
Why Ideals Matter
In the age of the “Selfie” we are increasingly falling victim to a paradigm David Brooks calls The Big Me. Today it appears we’ve turned the lens almost exclusively towards us, which leads to thin perspectives and almost no timeless patterns. When the lens is turned towards us we gain only a sense of our private and limited needs and our growing appetite for self-gratification. In the past, people were taught to train their lens outward to capture broader vistas, wider themes, and larger parades of meaning. When our lens is turned outward we gain a sense of transcendent ideals and we gain an unambiguous definition of high standards of excellence. Are people less moral today than yesterday? No. But I think a case could be made that today we lack timeless ideals, and thus, our standards may be wrong. Without an appreciation for timeless ideals, we don’t know what greatness looks like. And when we don’t know what excellence looks like, we don’t aspire to, or hold ourselves accountable for, those things. In order to do what is right, we have to know what right looks like. We must start to turn our lens outward and away from The Big Me.
The Box
We are all challenged daily by what I call The Box. Here’s what I mean. As leaders we are asked to think and live outside the box; have a vision for the future, depict compelling end states, plan succession, and strive to leave a legacy. This essentially heads-up orientation is the necessary state of the leader; looking forward and pulling us towards the horizon. However, if all we do is think and live outside the box, well, pretty soon our box will begin to deteriorate if no one is living inside the box. This is the realm of the manager–focused on today, with a heads-down orientation, ensuring the mechanisms, processes, and procedures catalyzing production are in high repair. This balance between leading outside the box while managing inside the box is tough; however, when done well, great things happen. If we get out of balance, we get into trouble. Too much leadership and too little management creates unrealized dreams. Too little leadership and too much management creates rigidity and ultimately, atrophy. Great leaders are equally great managers, and over time they learn to coexist both inside and outside the box.
An Inheritance
When I reflect back on the two most influential experiences shaping my professional life, sports and the Marine Corps, I wondered: What was it that touched me so deeply and made me feel such fidelity to my companions? What caused within me a conversion to slowly think less of myself and more of others? God knows it wasn’t me alone; I was your typical self-absorbed and immature youth. I think the reason was this: In these two experiences, sports and the Corps, I was called on to sacrifice, and strive, shoulder-to-shoulder with other people. And it was through this crucible of sacrifice, of giving one’s all for something selfless, which created within me a sense of covenant with my team. I began to sense I had been given something of deep intrinsic value earned by those who had gone before. And through this covenant I knew I had been given a special inheritance; a boon meant to be passed on to others. When we are given such inheritances we become debtors to those who helped us, and the only way to repay those who helped us, is to pay it forward to others who will follow us.
Companions
It is not lost on me that the terms company and companion share the same root. But in our modern world and workplace, many things are conspiring to ignore the timeless truth that excellence emerges mostly through bonds of mutual affection. There is no doubt we can, and increasingly do, exploit technology to create workplaces mostly devoid of close, personal engagement. Telecommuting, outsourcing, warrens of walled-off cubicles, and oceans of emails and chats. Efficient? Maybe. Effective in terms of creating companionship and camaraderie? Doubtful. Here’s what I know for a fact, though like most qualities of excellence it would be hard for me to fully quantify: When we purposefully cultivate companionship through bonding and real shoulder-to-shoulder interaction, the line between giving and getting vanishes. The distinction between you and me is eliminated. The wall between yesterday and tomorrow falls. We become fused. And interestingly, in groups animated by deep companionship, it actually feels better to give than to get. Leaders must first grow great companions, to then create great companies.
Check back next Monday for a round up of this week’s social media shares. Or check us out on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or Pinterest to see our posts every day!
Tweet Share