Sit down and be quiet. You are drunk, and this is the edge of the roof.

“It’s comforting to remember that perseverance is the story of humankind. We all come from ancestors who persevered. We wouldn’t be here without them. It’s our turn now.”

Meg Wheatley is interviewed in Booz & Company’s “strategy + business” newsletter this month: “The Thought Leader Interview: Meg Wheatley.”  The Harvard PhD is a management consultant who studies organizational behavior.  She has authored several books including her most recent titles Finding our Way: Leadership For An Uncertain Time and Perseverance.  She first frames the current environment: high levels of fear and anxiety; everyone working harder with less; the increasing pressure to produce better results with fewer resources; weaker results leading to stricter financial controls; all leading to a more restrictive, fear-based and controlling environment which results in a “death spiral.”  She recommends that leaders need to: acknowledge that they don’t have the answers; engage their community to derive solutions to complex problems to get perspectives from all parts of the system; think more deeply about the choices that they have made and the choices that they will make; think deeply about what you and the firm stand for; then have the personal discipline and perseverance to execute on the choices that have been made.  I encourage leaders to read the interview in its entirety – it’s long but worthy – her thoughts and insights are very timely.  I’ve added a number of Wheatley’s insights below:

The environment:

• I’ve noticed new higher levels of anxiety in the business community among the strongest leaders
• When confronted with the harshness of global competition or other severe competitive pressures, too many companies are reverting to fear-based management
• Many leaders are struggling to do good, meaningful work in a time of overbearing bureaucracy and failing solutions
• Everyone is working harder, and in most cases, in greater isolation
• The current pace of work and life, along with increasing fear and anxiety, make it more difficult to have the energy and enthusiasm to keep going
• With our frantic pace, we’re screaming past one another (and more easily provoked and angered by each other), so we’re losing the one resource, community, that gets humans through hard times.
• Many forward-thinking business leaders are increasingly frustrated. They can no longer motivate people in ways that they know will work. Instead, they’re being driven by imperatives from their boards and bosses. They find themselves doing things that feel meaningless or that waste time — or that they know from experience won’t lead anywhere good. They have to implement continuous cutbacks, and to produce more results with fewer resources. They feel terribly pressured yet believe they have no choice but to respond to these demands.
• New leadership is highly restrictive and controlling, using fear as a primary motivator. As a result, the company has been struggling in this current economic climate. And of course it becomes a reinforcing cycle: The worse the financials, the stricter the controls become.
• In most companies, we do not have (and I believe won’t have for the foreseeable future) the money to fund the work that we have to do. Leaders have two choices. One, they can tap the invisible resource of people who become self-motivated when invited to engage together. This approach has well-documented results in higher productivity, innovation, and motivation, but it requires a shift from a fear-based approach to a belief in the capacity of most people to contribute, to be creative, and to be motivated internally. Alternatively, they can continue to slash and burn, tightening controls, and using coercive methods to enforce the cuts. This destroys capacity, yet it is the more common approach these days.
• If you look at job satisfaction surveys, or you listen to people talk, you realize how this business climate has affected most organizations. Management has gone backward from the 1980s and ’90s, when people routinely talked about workforce engagement and intrinsic motivators. Instead, people are demoralized, disaffected, disillusioned. They’re afraid to talk openly about how they feel, because they want to hold on to their jobs. There’s a lot less freedom to walk out in this economy.
• Where does the fear and anxiety come from? Does it have to do with uncertainty, fear of failure, losing jobs?  It’s all of that. People are anxious because these times warrant anxiety. They feel pushed aside and powerless. And then there’s a more personal fear, not as easy to name. Leaders are afraid that they don’t know how to solve the problems they face. The old models of command and control — budgeting, strategy setting, forecasting, incentives, evaluations — are not effective in a changing, volatile environment. Nothing is working as it should. A friend of mine quoted a highly placed oil executive, who whispered to her after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill: “None of us can figure out how this happened.” And I often hear descriptions of complex problems and crises described as, “We’re in new territory here. We’ve never been here before.”
• Too many leaders fail to realize that the old ways, their mental maps, aren’t giving them the information they need. But instead of acknowledging that, they push on more frantically, desperate to have the old ways work. When human beings work from fear and panic, we lose nearly all of our best reasoning capacities. We can’t see patterns, think about the future, or make moral judgments.
• This leads to a terrible cycle, a death spiral. People in fear look for someone to blame; so leaders blame their staff, and staff blame their leaders. A climate of blame leads to self-protective behaviors. People take fewer risks; creativity and participation disappear. New rules and regulations appear, with unintended but predictable consequences: more staff disengagement, more wasted time, more chaos. People spend all their time trying to cope or writing reports to confirm that they aren’t to blame. When I’m speaking with a group and comment about the number of reports people have to write today, or the number of measures they have to track, the audience members roll their eyes and groan.

The Solutions:

• For me, community — people working together and knowing that others are there to support them — is a critically important but largely invisible resource. In most situations (think of natural disasters, family crises, wars, and dislocations), community is the only thing that gets us through. In a time like this, of economic and emotional distress, every organization needs leaders who can help people regain their capacity, energy, and desire to contribute. And this is only accomplished when people work together in community, not in isolation.  But community is hard to find in most organizations. Not only do many leaders deny that this capacity is important, but they’re actually destroying it through their current management approaches.

• I notice that when I ask people how much time they spend thinking together with colleagues, reflecting on what they’ve learned from their most recent efforts, they just stare back blankly at me. It’s getting hard to remember what it felt like to manage reflectively — to take time to figure things out together and to learn from experience.

• When people are truly lost in the wilderness, they go through predictable stages. First, they deny they’re lost; they keep doing what they’ve always done but with a greater sense of urgency. Then, when they begin to realize that they’re lost, they search frantically for any shred of evidence that would indicate that they’re not. Next they deteriorate, both physically and mentally. Their frantic search for the familiar, and their inability to recognize that their current maps aren’t working, leads to the ultimate moment when they realize they are close to death. If they don’t acknowledge that they’re lost and that they need new information to construct an accurate read on their situation, they will die.

• When you’re lost in the wilderness, the only way to survive is to admit that you’re lost — and to stop looking for signs that might confirm that you know where you are. Your old ways of doing things won’t get you out of this situation. Once you realize this, you can look clearly around you, and seek information that will help you rethink what to do. You don’t have to change the situation you’re in; you have to change your mind about it.

• For any situation where the old maps are failing, you need to call together everyone who might have information that’s needed to construct a new map. This includes people at all levels of the system — anyone who plays a role that’s relevant. Especially as you face increasingly complex problems that have no easy answers, you need to be brave enough to seek out perspectives from all parts of the system. It takes a lot of courage for a leader to say, “Our problems were caused by complex interactions. I don’t know what to do, but I know we can figure it out together.”

• Because the situation is so grim and pressured, why aren’t we rethinking how we operate? We are at a turning point. Either we continue to descend into incompetence and failing solutions or we realize where we are and see new ways of thinking and acting. One of my favorite quotes, applicable to this moment, is from the 13th century Sufi mystic Rumi: “Sit down and be quiet. You are drunk, and this is the edge of the roof.”

• There are always choices. Everything in our world — what we do, who we like, what we dislike — is a choice. When we realize this, and start to act on it, we regain our freedom and control. That doesn’t mean quitting your job out of frustration. It means thinking more deeply about the choices you have made, the choices you will make in the future, what you stand for, and your choice to persevere.

• For me, that’s the essence of perseverance. Day by day, situation by situation, you become more conscious of your choices. Sometimes the best response is to keep going, as my friend did. Other times the best choice is to withdraw for a while, reassess the complexity of the situation, and see what will serve your cause, your people, and yourself. You don’t persevere by constantly pushing your head against a wall or by burning out.

• It’s also comforting to remember that perseverance is the story of humankind. We all come from ancestors who persevered. We wouldn’t be here without them. It’s our turn now.

• Good leadership can be found in pockets within any large organization. I’ve dubbed them islands of possibility in some of my past work. The leaders of these pockets routinely meet goals, motivate employees, and achieve high levels of safety and productivity. But, ironically, they never change the behavior of the majority of the organization — even though these few islands reach or exceed the goals set by senior management. There’s a lot of evidence that innovators get pushed to the margins. You’d expect that they would be rewarded, promoted, and given the responsibility of teaching everyone else how to do the same. But instead, they’re ignored or invisible. Sometimes their bosses acknowledge their success, but offhandedly say: “I don’t know how you got these results.” And they don’t show any interest in learning about it. I think of this as an autoimmune response. Bosses don’t want to know how you achieved your results if it’s contrary to the way the system works (or doesn’t work). If they became genuinely interested in these innovative approaches, they’d have to change themselves.

• At the same time, most of us know from our own experience what kind of leadership works best. I’ve asked people of many ages, in many cultures, to talk about a leader they were happy to follow and what made that leader memorable. Several factors, such as integrity, a sense of humor, and a clear direction and vision, often come up. But the most common characteristic of good, memorable leaders is that they create the conditions for people to be encouraged, challenged, and supported, to become stronger and more capable as they do their work. The descriptions are always the same: “The leader thought about me and trusted me (just as I trusted him or her). He or she believed that I was capable and supported and encouraged me to stretch and excel; the leader was not focused on making himself or herself look good.”

• I’ve heard this in so many different cultures that it’s convinced me that there’s only one type of leadership that people respond to positively. If we want people to contribute; if we want them to get smarter as they solve each problem or go through each crisis; if we want to develop our organizations to be responsive, smart, and enduring, then we have to change the way we lead. We cannot continue to lead from fear and control. People will step up to today’s challenges only if they are led with encouragement and support, and trusted to contribute.

• We have to expect that we will encounter a lot of difficulties. We’ll feel a lot of strong emotions such as anger or grief; our good work will go unrewarded. Once we know that these things will happen, we can more consciously choose our responses. We can choose to keep going, to influence where we can, to make a difference in the lives of our staff, and to be the kind of leader that people remember with gratitude. We can become skilled at negotiating within those large, frightened bureaucracies so that people can still do good, meaningful work inside them.

• …the only leaders who succeed are those who have some kind of personal spiritual discipline.  By discipline, I don’t mean meaningless, repetitive, boring practice. That disables people. Nor do I mean religious practice per se. I mean some regular activity that leads you to reflect on your struggles and challenges in a larger context. For one of my friends, Alcoholics Anonymous serves that role. For others, it can be prayer, meditation, or time in nature. I’m not sure about running or other physical exercise, because I think a practice has to connect you to the rest of life — to take you out of the false perception that you are the center of the universe.

• Without that discipline, I don’t see how leaders can maintain their integrity and focus. The prevailing mass culture has schooled a lot of people to follow their passion, find their calling in life, and do what they love. Then they encounter setbacks, failures, disappointments, and very subtle impediments — for instance, their loved ones say, “Why are you working so hard here?” Many people quit. That’s what’s essential about discipline. You do it day after day, even when it’s boring, because you believe ultimately it will lead to a good outcome. The fruit of all this effort becomes apparent only after a long time when it seems not to be going anywhere. Work can begin with passion, but it’s only through discipline that people can persevere.

• The question I ask everyone is, Who do you choose to be as a leader? What is the contribution you hope to make?  It turns out that very few people answer that they care most about success and personal survival. They talk about doing the right thing for the people around them and helping them get through this time…But in this crisis, we have to find the deeper meaning ourselves. I am finding that many people want to be called on to contribute to something larger than themselves right now, to walk out of fear-based leadership practices — and for me, that’s the best motivation possible.