The Directive Approach — Giving Useful Feedback

The essence of directive coaching is providing feedback. Take this approach when your goal as a coach is to instruct others on what they’ve done well and what they can do to improve.

As a coach, one of the main gifts you have to offer to anyone who you’ve seen in action is to express to them your observation of that action and its consequences. It’s best to present your impressions straightforwardly and with compassion. The quality and sensitivity of a coach’s feedback can make a huge difference in spurring growth. On the other side, to be an effective client (or coachee), the primary challenge you face is to remain open and manage your natural tendency to be defensive in reacting to feedback — information about your actions and their consequences — that is in some way inconsistent with how you currently view yourself. Getting good at both giving and receiving directive coaching requires practice. Very few people are naturally gifted in this essential skill.

In providing directive feedback, your main responsibility is to identify strengths and clarify areas for improvement that address your client’s goals, while at the same time finding ways to reduce his or her defensiveness. You produce value as a peer coach when you give feedback that, first and foremost, addresses goals that are a real priority for them, not for you. It’s useful, too, for you to push your clients to stretch and go as far as they can in pursuing the goals that matter to them.

I’ve found that the best way to offer feedback is to prepare what you’re going to say in advance and to make sure it’s balanced, not overly positive or negative; a mix of both is best, not least because it enhances your credibility and your client’s trust that you’re being candid. Be direct and specific about what you’ve seen and the consequences of your client’s actions. Of course, if you are being constructively critical — pointing out a client’s mistake or area for improvement — you’ve also got to offer a constructive suggestion or two.

When you give directive feedback, you want to make sure that what you’ve said is what has actually been heard and understood by your client. The easiest way to do this is to simply ask your client to repeat back to you how she took what you said and what it means to her. Finally, it’s almost always a good idea to conclude an offering of directive feedback with an expression of your interest in providing follow-up assistance, leaving the door open for future opportunities for you to help.

The Nondirective Approach — Asking Smart Questions

The essence of nondirective coaching is simply asking useful, probing questions. Many people fear change because it forces them into unknown territory, where things are unpredictable and unfamiliar. And yet there are predictable stages people go through when they undertake intentional change. In taking the non-directive approach, your goal is to help others to see and feel the need to create meaningful, sustainable change. Here are the stages and some of the key questions to ask in helping your clients to face the challenges associated with each:

What’s the problem?
The first step is identifying the need for change. This can be difficult, as many of us ignore information that disconfirms our current perceptions or threatens the status quo. Coaches can help identify blind spots — by encouraging self-reflection about things that aren’t obvious to their clients. As a coach, basic questions to ask to increase awareness are:

-As you think about your goals, what’s not working well in your life?
-What are the consequences of this issue for you and for the important people in your life?
-What is the source of the need to change — is it in you or is it external?

Why bother?
The next stage is about the belief that the need to change is urgent enough to take action. Because we naturally tend towards continuing the status quo, if doing something new doesn’t feel urgent, it’s not likely to occur. Coaches can help raise urgency by asking questions such as these:

-Looking ahead, what will happen if you don’t change?
-What will happen if you do change?

What’s your decision?
The decision to change is a crucial moment because it marks the point when your mind shifts and you begin to see a different future. It is also a fragile point in planned change processes, fraught with temptations to revert to the way things have always been and distractions away from the focused effort that’s required to do something new and make it stick. However, coaches can help clients reach and move beyond this point by asking:

-What have you decided to do differently and why?
-What is the ideal outcome?
-What are your new goals?

What steps exactly?
What are the possible step-by-step actions the client can take to make this decision real in his or her work and life? Good coaches ask clients to think aloud about what to do differently, how to overcome obstacles, and what skills or sources of support are needed. You can help your client discover specific ideas for how to better accomplish goals by asking:

-What exactly will you do, and when will you do it?
-How will you measure progress?
-What stands in the way, and how will you overcome these barriers?
-How will you generate needed support?

Are you really in?
Generating sufficient commitment to follow through is one of the most challenging aspects of any change process. Because commitment wanes without a sense of urgency, coaches should continually test for this. Coaches can ask:

-What if this is harder than you think?
-What are the first steps — and the next steps — you will take?
-How will you maintain your sense of urgency?

How will you sustain it?
Even if a client has made it through all of the prior stages, it is crucial that he or she receive reinforcement for the positive outcomes gained. Encouragement at every small step builds momentum, and coaches should provide frequent reinforcement and celebrate their clients’ successes to bolster confidence and help clients avoid slippage. The key questions here are:

-What impact has your new behavior had on you and others?
-What accomplishments are you proud of achieving?
-Is there a smarter step that might help you build momentum?
-How can I (as your coach) reinforce your commitment to action?

Get in the Game!

Directive and non-directive peer coaching can make a real difference in helping people change. Try both methods and then find out what works and what doesn’t by asking your clients to critique your actions. Like any other skill, practice as a peer coach — with follow-up assessment of what works and what doesn’t, along with support from people (that is, your clients) who are dedicated to helping you become more adept at helping them — makes perfect.

We all need somebody to lean on. No one gains real success, in business or in other parts of life, without the support of other people. Peer-to-peer coaching is an important source of social support, and there are good reasons why, as a business professional, you can and should do it regularly.

Drawing on decades of experience in coaching and in teaching others how to coach, in this post I describe what you can do to cultivate your own peer-to-peer coaching network — a small group of trusted people whom you help and who help you by providing encouragement, ideas, a different perspective on obstacles and opportunities, and social pressure to actually do what you know you need to do differently.

I’m not suggesting that you become a professional coach, or pretend to be one. Informal coaching connections aren’t a replacement for professional coaching or counseling support, which should be sought when problems in your life reach the point where you are unable to deal effectively with them with the resources you’ve currently got at your disposal. Rather, I’m offering ideas that, short of professional counseling, can help you and your friends, colleagues, and family members help each other in your efforts to create change.

Coaching, to put it simply, is the process of helping others to improve performance now and developing their capacity to perform well in the future. It’s about changing behavior to make things better. Because the process of change is difficult and can provoke anxiety, people often resist it. The forces of inertia are strong, but effective coaching can surmount them. Peer-to-peer coaching is fun, because it involves learning and solving real problems; it’s free; and, I’ve found, just about anyone can do it.

What You Gain

There are many benefits that derive from informal coaching relationships. First, the obvious and automatic ones you receive as a “client” (what I call anyone on the receiving end of coaching): By talking about a new business idea, for example, with a peer coach who has no vested interest other than in helping you figure out the best next step, you can get the encouragement you need to overcome your fear of starting something new and specific suggestions for realistic actions to take. Perhaps more important, peer coaches hold you accountable — you feel obliged to report to them on your progress, of lack thereof — an all-too-often missing ingredient in recipes for cooking up something new.

Then there are the intangibles that come from helping others, and these might ultimately be the most useful. People find that when they are trying to help someone else produce change they themselves gain useful insights on their own problems, just by listening to someone else’s. (Full disclosure: I’ve made a career out of asking questions to which I wish I knew the answers.) In addition, there is a sense of camaraderie and the good feeling that comes when you have a positive effect on another person’s well-being. Further, doing so enhances your reputation as someone who invests in others’ success. Finally, because the giving and receiving of coaching support is a behavioral skill, through practice and reflection on what works and what doesn’t, you can develop and improve your ability as a coach.

Getting Started

If you’re starting from scratch, think about the people in your current personal and professional networks with whom you’d like to collaborate in an informal coaching network. They might be co-workers, friends, or members of your family. Start small, with three people, including you, and with each of you taking turns serving as both coach and client for the others.

Begin with the three of you finding a time to talk about your goals for your informal coaching network. The more open you are about your goals, the more likely they’ll be realized, because your commitment will be higher. In this first conversation, you should also talk about your hopes and fears. Discuss how your small network will work together. Establish expectations, set up times to meet (via email, phone, or face-to-face), and begin to learn about each other’s interests. Clarify how you’ll play the coach and client roles, and be open to adjusting these expectations as needed. Gain an initial understanding of your clients’ key relationships at work, at home, and in the community. At the same time, respect privacy and preferences for how much information your clients are willing to disclose.

Guidelines for Peer Coaching

Here are some general guidelines for how to be an effective peer coach:

• Show you care about helping your clients achieve their goals.
• Share your own experiences only to help the client feel accepted, not to focus on you.
• Be as aware as possible of your own biases as a coach.
• Stay in touch with the reality your client is facing — listen well.
• Don’t hide your ignorance — ask questions, even ones you might think are dumb.
• Encourage your client to get more help when needed, from all sources.

Some cautionary notes: First, if you cannot provide feedback at the time your client is expecting it, immediately communicate this to your client to explain the delay. This builds trust. Avoid long periods of coaching inactivity. Like any developed skill, good coaching requires time, energy and thoughtfulness by both participants — and you get can get rusty quickly. Try not to criticize your client’s ideas; usually it’s just best to listen and offer alternatives. Don’t promise more than you can deliver; this will decrease your credibility.

Two Types of Coaching

Once you’ve gotten started, you can focus more on what kinds of coaching work best for different people and situations. Coaching can be either directive or nondirective. Directive coaching involves listening to your client and then offering advice from your own experiences or knowledge base. Nondirective coaching requires listening to your client’s problems, but instead of then offering advice, asking questions that encourage your client to reach solutions independently. Asking good questions helps your client achieve greater self-understanding. Both forms of coaching can be effective; the preferred type depends on what your client needs. For details, stay tuned for my next post.

One of the least discussed yet quite salient issues for American business in this year of health care reform is an important yet hidden cost associated with mental illness: the drain on productive work endured by family members struggling to support loved ones who suffer from such diseases. The good news for business leaders is that it’s not hard to do something to help and thus feel good while improving company culture and morale, as well as your bottom line.

Mental illness comes in a staggering array of forms, and affects a broad swath of our general population. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, an “estimated 26.2 percent of Americans ages 18 and older — about one in four adults — suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year.”

Awareness and understanding of mental illness has grown in recent years; still, it’s often not taken seriously or treated as a legitimate medical disease either by businesses, by the health care system, or by our society. Indeed, too many people remain reluctant to get the help they need because of the stigma associated with mental illness. The website bringchange2mind.org (with a powerful new public service video by film director Ron Howard) asserts that “for many, the stigma associated with the illness can be as great a challenge as the disease itself.”

This stigma extends beyond those directly stricken to family members. Parents of children with mental illness are often viewed as guilty by association, unfairly perceived as the cause of the illness — the source of harmful child-rearing practices — when the origin is mainly biological. Parents and other family members feel shame and a sense of failure. I know because one of my adult children suffers from a toxic combination of schizophrenia (a thought disorder) and bipolar illness (a mood disorder).

There are real costs associated with employees having to carry this heavy weight of worry and responsibility, especially if they feel they must do so without the understanding and support of their organization. There is stress, unwanted social isolation in the workplace, and the feeling that they must find clandestine ways of responding to urgent demands for their attention. All of this undermines productivity by causing burn-out, unplanned absences, distractions from focused effort on tasks, and poor confidence in being able to contribute to the team.

As a leader in your organization, you can reduce these costs and inspire greater performance from valued employees. You can enable them to feel freer to ask for the help they need in supporting their families by changing how you think , how you talk, and how you act. In turn, they are bound to repay you with extraordinary effort and commitment to your goals and to your company.

Mind your attitude. Changing your attitude toward one of greater understanding and acceptance requires education (see, for example, this recent Harris survey on schizophrenia). If an employee with dependent care responsibilities born of a physical abnormality or illness needs to bring a loved one to a doctor’s visit, no one judges him harshly. Indeed, this is likely to evoke sympathy. On the other hand, if he has to disrupt his work schedule to care for a family member, who — for reasons difficult to grasp and explain — cannot be left alone for fear of hearing voices or of some other dread psychological symptom, then he might well be reluctant to risk letting others know why he needs the time because they might look askance or even question his own mental stability. Your attitude can make all the difference. By taking mental illness as seriously as any physical illness, you convey emotional support and encourage employees to get the help they need to cope with the strains of caring for their sick loved one.

Watch your words. The words you use, and the way you use them, convey your attitude. Here’s a tip from bringchange2mind.org: “Refrain from using terms like ‘crazy,’ ‘nuts,’ ‘psycho’ and ‘lunatic.’ While there may be times when it is too challenging or simply not possible to politely correct someone else’s insensitive use of language, you can always try to watch your own.” To combat harmful stereotypes and demonstrate understanding, it’s better to say, for example, that someone “has schizophrenia” than to call that person a “schizophrenic” — the illness is not the person.

Model behavior. The kinds of actions that show genuine support are the same ones you’d want to show all your employees in treating them as whole people, with important aspects of life playing out beyond the bounds of work: Initiate and encourage dialogue with an open mind, address the individual needs of each employee, respect confidentiality, and be flexible and willing to engage in joint problem-solving while focusing on results that matter to you and to them.

Change the culture. As a business leader you are in a position to have a positive influence on the culture of your organization which, in turn affects all your employees as well as other stakeholders — clients and customers, suppliers, community members, and so on. Your supportive attitude about those who are forced to live with mental illness — with the words and deeds to reinforce it — can shape your company’s values and the behavior in it that determine whether or not all your people get the help they need to both contribute fully to your business and lead productive lives.

What else can be done to make it easier for parents and other loved ones of those who live with mental illness to perform well at work? Please comment and share your stories, advice, and resources.

Bruce’s epic music is a source of inspiration for millions around the world. Like many others, his impact on me has been deeply personal. On a recent night in Philadelphia, listening to Bruce and his E Street Band, I was reminded once again of why the Boss (big B) is not only New Jersey’s greatest export and America’s rock poet laureate, but why he’s a model for other bosses (small b).

Consider these three simple principles that Bruce exemplifies to inspire his followers:

1. “Prove it all night” — Devote yourself fully to your people and never let up

Springsteen is obsessed with giving everything he has to his fans, and he always has been. When he shows up for work, he is wholly present and demands that every member of his band and company does the same. In the early days, he would spend hours before a show sitting in most of the seats to check the sound to ensure that it was good for everyone in the house. He plays until you’re exhausted.

2. “Come on up to the rising” — Create community by connecting people to something bigger than themselves

Bruce found salvation in music and in the brotherhood of his band. This sense of connection gives authentic vitality to the many roles, beyond that of musician, he takes seriously in his performances: revival-show preacher, wry comic, and self-educated social critic. His fans feel a bond cemented by ideas that matter — social justice, the hope for redemption, love. In a world that is increasingly volatile and fearsome, those like Springsteen who can “talk about a dream and try to make it real” are prized for bringing people together and helping them realize how they can make the world a bit better.

3. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive” — Appreciate what’s good; express optimism

Springsteen’s music, even as it focuses on the social and political problems of racism, economic inequality, and war (as in the Grammy-winning album The Rising), has a fierce determination to find the good and celebrate it. There is realism, but no cynicism. It takes both sensitivity and steadfastness to find and maintain this balance. The most successful and effective leaders have learned — through reflection on the crucibles of their own personal experiences — how to do this in their own distinct way, in their own unique voice.

Our turbulent world — more networked than hierarchical, more flexible than standardized — demands leaders like Springsteen, who generate loyalty and commitment not so much with their use of positional power and formal authority, but with their authenticity, their integrity, and their creativity.

Chief among the film’s many virtues is the deeply compassionate display of a man’s struggle to be true to his dangerous, heroic obsession, though doing so leaves him in the most existentially harrowing place imaginable — “the hurt locker.” The expression, of course, is figurative, meant to describe a mental and emotional state of pain, where human warmth and intimacy are forsaken. The riveting portrayal of James and his comrades compels the viewer to feel acute tension all the way through. You’ll be emotionally spent by the end of the movie.

The Hurt Locker also raises a question about work that’s relevant for professionals the world over: Where do I draw the line between passionate commitment and destructive fixation? The adrenaline rush that comes with living on the edge of life and death in the service of one’s country is counterpoised against the desire for connection with family and other loved ones. What are the consequences when the former wins and the latter loses?

For country, you might think, the outcome is desirable; a rare talent is being applied to meet an urgent performance demand with direct positive impact on military achievement. But at what cost to the soldier and the people closest to him? You feel the pain of the young sergeant’s heart-wrenching farewell to his only son as James prepares to return to the field of battle. He’s a professional is driven by his mission, relentlessly pursuing the cause he believes in — at almost any cost.

Should we fault him for his preference? Why not fully support the complete immersion of a great talent into work that must be done very well, even if the personal cost of such a choice is dear? When the stakes are life, death, and defending the country, we’re more inclined to encourage obsessive involvement in the task despite the costs. But what about business professionals who’ve crossed over from passionate commitment to destructive fixation? Are the costs worth it in that context?

Everyone has their own individual value systems, and I try to refrain from judging or imposing upon the personal values others hold. But one piece of more general advice would seem to hold true: You need to know your own core values and continually align them with your actions by experimenting with how you get things done. And when there are costs, to those around you and to yourself, at the very least you need to be sensitive to this, and honest in dealing with the consequences. Most people want to have some measure of engagement in all four aspects of their lives—work, home, community and the private self (mind, body, and spirit). But there are those, like Sergeant James, for whom work is all. And why not?

I urge you to see this movie. But whether or not you do, I’m eager to hear your stories — your own or those about people you know — who have wrestled successfully with this dilemma: Is it possible to live a rich life that is solely focused on achievement in work, to the exclusion of all else?

Even President Obama, who masterfully demonstrated his storytelling skills in the campaign, was recently described as shuffling from one crucial issue to the next, like an iPod listener flits from song to song. No time for albums. Trying to do too much, too fast, and on too many fronts can be risky, yet today’s environment requires that we get better at doing so.

All the more reason, then, for giving attention to how you get others to pay attention. The trick is to show movement on the issues that matter while, for each issue, helping your key stakeholders grasp the meaning of what you’re aiming to achieve — why the goal matters to the team or the organization and how we’re going to get from here to there.

So don’t give up on honing your storytelling skills; instead, learn how to move faster among your different narratives. Through practice and feedback, improve your ability to connect through stories — while keeping them short to hold beleaguered attention spans. For even as the digital age compels us to develop ever-increasing capacities for a switch-your-focus-but-remain-present state of mind, as a leader you still have to be able to convey a narrative that resonates with your people and inspires them to move with you in the right direction.

A good leadership story has the power to engage hearts and minds. It has these six crucial elements:

1. Draws on your real past and lessons you’ve learned from it.
2. Resonates emotionally with your audience because it’s relevant to them.
3. Inspires your audience because it’s fueled by your passion.
4. Shows the struggle between your goal and the obstacles you faced in pursuing it.
5. Illustrates with a vivid example.
6. Teaches an important lesson.

Leaders at all levels and in all walks of life can improve their skill in telling a good, fast leadership story. Here’s how: think of a story that meets these six criteria and convey it to someone — anyone who you’d like to teach — in less than two minutes. Then ask them what impact the hearing of your tale had on them. Where they moved? Did they learn what you wanted to convey? Next, repeat with someone else — but do it faster. Then again, faster still.

Let us know what you discover.

This was the question I asked last week at the beginning of a day-long workshop attended by a group of senior-level women at a major technology firm headquartered on the west coast of the US. And I’ve been asking this question of thousands of other business professionals over the last year or so in similar settings around the country. Just a few days ago, in Puerto Rico, I asked it again at a gathering of business executives and, again I heard pretty much the same thing.

By far, the most common responses? Adaptive, flexible, and innovative.

Because of the ubiquitous sense of turbulence in most of our lives these days, the leadership attribute that comes to mind most often is the means for dealing with chaos. It boils down to this: playful creativity.

Now, more than ever in my experience, people are feeling a need for greater control. When you believe in your own power to generate new ways of getting things done — that is, when you have the confidence and competence to produce meaningful change — then you are less likely to succumb to the stomach-churning anxieties that come from not knowing how you’ll deal with whatever obstacle that’s next to be thrown in your path.

What’s most essential for us in the Global Leadership 2.0 universe, then, is the capacity to be creative as leaders. The really good news is that you can learn to become more creative as a leader, at work — no matter what your formal position — and in the other parts of your life, and thereby gain a greater sense of control over the turbulence.

Leadership is the capacity to mobilize people toward valued goals; that is, to produce sustainable change — sustainable because it’s good for you and for the people who matter most to you.

To be innovative, to act with creativity, is to experiment with how things get done. The innovations people pursue in my Total Leadership workshops are designed to improve performance not only at work but also at home, in the community, and in your private life (mind, body and spirit) by better integrating these different parts of your life — I call the results four-way wins.

These short-term experiments could be trying a new way to delegate; reducing noise by shutting down your technology for a while; sharing your vision of the kind of world you’re trying to build with others; even exercising regularly to reduce stress and enhance your focus. These are just the kinds of small wins that the participants at the west coast technology firm and the executives in Puerto Rico were going after by the time we finished our workshops. But the larger purpose was to gain greater mastery of the skill of leading change. For once the experiment ends, the real learning begins, through reflection on what worked — and what didn’t — in the attempt to bring about something new.

A warning: If you’re not continually getting better at overcoming the three great inhibitors to creativity — fear of failure, guilt about appearing to be selfish, and ignorance of what’s possible — then you’re missing opportunities to strengthen your capacity to gain control in an increasingly uncertain world.

So, what small wins are you pursuing these days? How will they improve your ability to be creative and to have greater capacity to adapt to the rapidly shifting realities of your life and work?

Medcan’s CEO, Shaun Francis, is an alumnus of my Total Leadership course at the Wharton School, which he took in 2003, and he kindly invited me to try the service his firm provides. I was blown away. In less than a day, I underwent a comprehensive set of health assessments — all done with great care, professionalism, technical excellence, and no wasted time. None!

I came away with some very useful information about my own health and the adjustments I need to make to manage it more wisely. The knowledge you acquire when you take a close, candid look at every dimension of your health is empowering. I’ve never had the opportunity to take a such detailed view of my health, and as a result I feel a greater sense of control over my future.

So, ill-informed as I am about the state of health care in America, not to mention the rest of the world, the first thing I exclaimed, in my end-of-day conversation with Shaun and a few of his colleagues, was, “Everyone should have this!” Of course, they agreed.

As a manager you need the same thing for your people; useful information about what’s working and what’s not, and evidence-based ideas on how to maintain the former and reduce the latter. A well-run 360 feedback process can provide this at the office, but it’s especially fruitful if your sources of feedback include people beyond your circle at work.

First, identify the most important people in your life at work, at home, and in your community. Then ask them what they want and need from you. Finally, describe your expectations for your own performance.

Look for patterns you may have missed about how the different parts of your life affect each other. You’re probably overestimating what they really expect from you; you might even be missing a major priority of theirs, or putting effort into something that doesn’t matter to them at all! Talk with your key stakeholders to verify and, where it makes sense, change those expectations. (For more ideas on how you can do this, check out the part of my book that focuses on being whole, or this post on focusing on what matters most to you.) The upshot: a greater sense of control and power to shape your future. It’s usually better to know the reality of what you’re facing than to deny it.

Even if you’re the one manager out there who doesn’t feel like she’s running around putting out fires or (to mix my metaphors) skating ahead of the cracking ice, remember that preventing problems is always less costly than waiting for them to erupt. It’s as true in your workplace as it is at the health clinic.

So, when was the last time you did a comprehensive assessment of your health — and your performance?

“Joyous laughter — this is the sound I hear throughout the home I have built and now maintain for mentally ill women in Puerto Rico. They are surrounded by people who love and care for them. They are enjoying life.”

Juana, let’s call her, was telling the brief (one-minute) story of her personal leadership vision; a description of the impact you’re having on your world and the legacy you’re creating 15 years from now. When Juana sat down, one of her close colleagues said, “I’ve known you so long yet I never knew about this part of who you are. Wow!” I couldn’t help but ask Juana how I could support her pursuit of her vision. All of us were moved, and felt inclined to contribute.
The time flew as one speaker followed another in this exercise, undertaken by my students and clients to help them act with authenticity by clarifying what’s important as a leader in all parts of life.

A useful personal leadership vision — one that focuses action, provides direction, and inspires your stakeholders in all parts of life to move in a direction you choose — is a compelling image of an achievable future. In my book and in a previous post I detailed how you can develop your own personal leadership vision. Telling others a one-minute version of it is a powerful tool for unearthing your real passions and thereby increasing your capacity as a leader.

After hearing a set of examples, I then ask the whole group to describe what was inspiring in what was just said and heard. Invariably, it is the people who speak not about their own achievement but, rather, about how they’re helping someone else who draw the most powerful emotional responses and pronounced support.

Having heard many personal vision statements in the last few days, in different groups (including, through an interpreter, securities industry executives visiting The Wharton School from China), I was struck, once again, by the power of this very this simple, yet critically important idea. Serve others and others will want to serve you. This paradox is often difficult to grasp, especially in your early years. Yet is seems to be a universal truth: People are more likely to pay attention to you — and they are more inclined to help you — when you declare yourself committed to serving others.

Try it now
To grow as a leader you must have a personal leadership vision. Compose a draft of yours, practice telling it to others, and revise it to ensure that it’s both really true and truly inspiring. I’d welcome your report back (with a comment below) about the impact of your doing so on yourself and on the important people in your life.

Take it further
Ask your colleagues at work to do the same and then share your personal leadership visions among yourselves. You’ll likely find that trust builds as you become more aware of what really drives each other, and you’ll be better equipped to capitalize on a critical, often overlooked, aspect of diversity: the remarkable variety that exists in the aspirations of the people around you.

1. Reduce fear to enable change.

Imagine being so afraid of losing what you value that you don’t want to have anything worth caring about. At one point in this can’t-stop-reading narrative, we find Ayers struggling with a choice about whether to move from the streets of LA into a protective group home. As the wise counselor of this home recognizes, despite its terrors the “advantage of life on the street is that you have nothing to lose.”

There’s an awful kind of safety in taking no risks to make things better. This is one of the great challenges you face as a leader intent on getting others to do things differently. Lopez learns through a series of heartbreaking fits and starts that he must patiently grasp Ayers’ worldview — characterized by fear — before he can help Ayers feel safe enough to take small steps to a better place.

Once Lopez understands this about Ayers he becomes more creative, and hence more effective, in cajoling Ayers to try something new. It’s a great example of how you have to persistently adjust your approach until you find a way to get the people you’re trying to move in a new direction see how change is something they can and want to do, for themselves.

2. Ennoble your work through service.

In his heroic attempts to help the tragically crippled, majestically talented Ayers find a safer and more fruitful life, Lopez found inspiration. He realized previously untapped potential for meaning as well as a renewed sense of purpose — salvation, really — for his journalistic pursuits.

He became a greater and more influential writer, and he reported that his family life too was enriched as a result of his passionate commitment to supporting Ayers. By unselfishly heeding this call to serve through his work, the number of people who were compelled to help Lopez in his support of Ayers and others similarly afflicted multiplied rapidly.

I see this time and again, in organizations and groups of all sizes and types, in the US and around the world: The more you serve the needs of others, the more likely it is that you will find others supporting you, and the better you’ll feel about yourself.

3. Express what’s real to you.

One of Ayers’ former teachers is quoted in the book as saying that “if you put your very existence into it, your sensitivity and your humanity, it makes for a sound distinctly yours.” When you muster the will and the courage to do this — to find your voice and let it ring — people will respond to that sound. They will follow your lead.

Lopez’s grand insight was to feel the power of Ayers’ full immersion in his inner vision — his unabashed love for the music, his spiritual embrace of it — and to know that he, too, could aspire to his own such expression. Indeed, Lopez found it in this remarkable book, and its achievement is a wonderful demonstration of how the best and most important work we do springs from that which is deep inside.

Coda

Read the book. See the movie. Share your thoughts on its most important messages.
Lopez’s work inspires us to focus more attention on mental illness as a critical social and economic issue. Leaders in all sectors of society must increasingly be prepared to deal with its many ramifications. As one example, in a post last year I wrote about how the costs of mental illness are a greater health care problem than those of physical illness.

But the primary source of my motivation is that a member of my own family suffers from a similar syndrome as Ayers. I know firsthand what it’s like to feel the joys and sorrows of dearly loving someone who has immense native talent that’s inhibited by terrible anxieties, hallucinations, and depression. Let me direct you to an invaluable resource for useful information: the National Alliance on Mental Illness.