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?
The Horse I Rode In On
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.
In its public role, the station played sophisticated, soothing sounds. Behind the scenes, however, its administration was unnecessarily secretive and manipulative, playing political games, most often at the expense of female employees, who were rarely, if ever, promoted. As a nationally recognized music critic and former program director myself, I had a reputation that garnered a certain level of respect from the administration. But watching colleagues deal with a capricious, incongruent system tested my patience. Consoling these people inadvertently became part of my job, as several of my most creative work-related friends would burst into the announcing studio in tears, telling me ever more disturbing tales of maltreatment to the tempestuous accompaniment of Rachmaninoff, Wagner, and Ravel. As a lowly announcer myself, I was powerless to initiate organizational change, yet as an individual with a certain amount of leadership presence, I could occasionally turn the tide in my own favor. The ability to teach these skills to my fellow employees eluded me, however, mostly because I was unaware of key nonverbal elements influencing the most frustrating, as well as the most successful, of these pivotal interactions.
At the same time, I was perplexed by the famous musicians I encountered. Most people, radio station managers included, suppress emotion, hiding their true intentions behind bland smiles and passive-aggressive maneuvers, only to blow up at inopportune moments under stress. Yet artists rewarded handsomely for expressing emotion were likewise leading highly dysfunctional lives. It
