Growth Leadership: How to Help Others Find Their Stride
Parenting feels heavy for school-aged children in the weeks leading up to a new school year. What little structure afforded by camps and summer activities is mostly over. Open-ended, self-directed “together” time increases amid the looming change of a new school year. Bickering increases. Demands get louder. Complaining is at its peak. This angst that kids are experiencing knocks them off balance. I want to enjoy this time with my kids, but also: I am so ready for school to start!
I need to remember that these moments of leading off-balance people come with profound opportunities for fueling their growth. My job as a leader is to help people grow. And, as IBM CEO Ginni Rometty says, growth and comfort cannot co-exist.
Leading others through growing pains can feel so heavy. That’s because people are heavier when they are off balance. They fall into you or away from you. Here are some examples of the heaviness of leading someone who is off balance:
- A manager telling someone they were passed up for a promotion.
- A parent telling their child they can’t have what they want.
- A teacher disciplining a child.
- A consultant/counselor listening to someone describe their problem.
Leading off-balance people also feels heavy because it’s hard to be with someone in pain. When you’re around a hurting person, you’re likely to get hurt yourself. Perhaps the person in pain will attack you with blame, accusation, or insult. Or maybe the person will make you uncomfortable as they experience their hurt, like a parent who’s sleep-training a baby has to endure hearing the pain of a wailing child.
What to Do with Someone in Pain
In his book The Evolving Self, Harvard professor Robert Kegan gives us the best advice for leading someone painfully off-balance:
When we respond to relieving the pain, we communicate a basic lack of trust and move from holding the person to holding onto the person, an impediment to the process of separation.
The mother who can hold her infant unanxiously when the infant is itself anxious is giving her child a special gift.
As heavy as it might be for a manager in a difficult performance review, you have to hold the other person without holding onto them. They need to grow. Kegan goes on to say:
The leader should seek to protect the choice that presents itself in the disguise of problems. These “things” which are carried so painfully, so shamefully, represent a resource to people and their leaders alike. They are chances for growth as portals to growth-work. Accordingly, the leader is trying to hold the door open to them in his choice to resonate to the experience that having such a problem may entail, rather than to help solve the problem, or try to make the experience less painful.
No matter what the content of “the problem,” there is something similar about all personal problems: They are all about the threat of the constructed self’s collapse.
Being off balance is scary for people because it means they might collapse. They might fall. They play out the catastrophic possibilities. “My life will be ruined!” yells the child. “I’ve worked here my entire career; where else could I go?” pleads the employee. “This will take too much time and money to fix!” objects the client.
In all cases, the person who is off balance needs to release whatever they were fused to that once held them in balance. They need to separate from their previous comfort — their power, pleasure, possessions, or preconceptions — in order to grow. Kids, for example, don’t need screens, scheduled activities, and friends around to maintain their equilibrium. These final weeks of summer can help them grow in creativity, contentment, and self-direction.
If you’re experiencing the heaviness of leading people who are off balance, hold them, but don’t hold onto them. Holding them means:
- Being present and available
- Listening and empathizing
- Not shaming, judging, or rejecting them
- Encouraging or providing resources to help them grow
- Resisting the temptation to rescue, fix, or solve the pain for them
Who’s off balance around you? How could you hold them while they grow rather than holding onto them to prevent them from growth?
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