Now it might be strange for some of you to start a leadership journey
with a poet. I mean, certainly my team actually thought I was completely
crazy. But if you've ever heard David Wright speak and if you know of his work,
his words have a wisdom and a poignancy, that just cut through all those
executive defenses and enter right into your heart.
So David got up and in this English brogue- he's an Englishman- he
started to weave his poems with stories. Stories from his own life, through a time
he had a terrible argument with his daughter. The time that he lost his very
best friend. And the moment in his life when he decided to leave his corporate
job and go into his calling as a poet. And all that all the while he was
talking about his poems and he framed this with something that he called
"courageous conversations". "Courageous conversations" are the conversations we
are not having. These are the conversations that we're afraid to have.
With the world, with our customers, with our colleagues, with our friends, with
ourselves. And we listened for over two hours and during that time no one moved.
No one got up to get coffee, no one got up to go to the bathroom,
no one got up to have a smoke which in France is unusual, no one made a peep.
And at the break we designed an activity and we asked each leader to
pair up with another leader and to really share the courageous conversations
that they weren't having with their teams back at home.
We created a safe container for this to happen. So of course they were my team
and I didn't have anyone to share with. So I took my little notebook and I sat
in the corner and I wrote down: "here are the courageous conversations I'm not
having with them." But as I looked out I saw how much heart and soul they were
putting into this exercise. And they were really really sharing
things that they had never shared before. And I started feeling really out of
integrity. So at the close of the session, I knew I had no choice.
I got up my legs were shaking and my hands were kind of trembling and I took my
crinkled paper and I admitted to them that I was afraid. That I was worried
that maybe they didn't trust the direction I wanted to go. Maybe they
wished I had more answers that I didn't have. I told them that I needed their help.
I couldn't and shouldn't run this business alone. And then I braced for the
worst. But as I gazed up and I looked out into the audience, I didn't see
disappointment. I saw truly empathetic even tearful stares back at me.
And then the most extraordinary thing happened. Somewhere in the back, a leader
who is particularly skeptical of this work, looked down at his shoes his
hand timidly rose and he said, "I'm an impostor.
I pretend to know things that I don't just to impress my team." And then another
hand went up another leader said: "I don't really listen. I just listen to validate
my point of view." A third leader's hand went up he said, "I am terrified of the
unknown and that's why it takes me so long to make decisions." In retrospect
this whole thing seems a little crazy right? I mean it could have been
completely suicidal for me, not to mention my team who was so honest and
courageous and what they did. But that afternoon changed something.
It changed something in a way that I could never have
predicted. I mean we all just set down our suits of armor, the ones we
carry around as leaders and we started to share in a different way. So all that
burden that complexity that we've been hiding from each other, we can now get
out in the open and from that day forward we could begin to co-create our
future with so much less fear.