One of the rules in my fifth grade class was that anyone who falls back in their chair will lose it for the day. This, of course, triggered all sorts of questions in the heart of one eleven-year-old boy, “What would happen if everybody fell over in their chairs on the same day? How would a teacher be able to punish the whole class? Would all the chairs even fit behind the teacher’s desk?” The next day, believe it or not, that very thing happened. First Kelly Cook lost his chair, then Paul Yost fell over in his chair, then everybody but one person in Mr. Olson’s fifth grade class had their chairs topple over before lunchtime. It turned out, if the chairs were stacked on top of each other, all of them did fit behind the teacher’s desk and the whole class could be punished. In fact, the next day when we arrived back at school ready to retrieve our chairs we met a teacher who said that there were still some lessons to be learned about safety. Two weeks later, our chairs were finally returned after everyone had composed an essay about the significant dangers of leaning back in one’s chair. But oh the power that we all felt over those ten days was worth it!

Sometimes we just have to rebel. We shout with our actions – we find our voice. This isn’t the kind of rebellion that is meant to hurt other people. This is rebellion that says we have a choice, we have control, we decide. Just when people think we are boring and predictable, we can choose to follow a different path.

Sometimes, we just have to push the boundaries to assert who we are the world. In his book, Crossing the Unknown Sea, the poet David Whyte writes,

“To live with courage in any work or in any organization, we must know intimately the part of us that does not give a damn about the organization or the work….With a healthy outlaw approach, we are outside the laws of predicable cause and effect and inside the intensity of creative originality. We have a gleam in our eye; we look to the edges of things; no one really knows what we are up to. We see with the eyes of those who do not quite below. We are dangerous again, and glad to be so.”

Psychologists through the decades have reflected on the human need for self-determination. Other research has consistently shown the advantages of having a sense of agency and control. So, take a few minutes and consider where you might want to assert your will, to find your voice, maybe for no other reason than it sounds like fun. It may require you to break a few rules that need to be broken, to dance your own dance, or sing along to a favorite song no matter who is watching in the car next to you. It might require a little bit of risk, a little bit of stupidity.

 When I was a rebel. Reflect back on some of the times early in your life when you were a rebel—not to hurt people—but to exert your own voice.

Shock & awe. Just once this week, say out loud what everyone else is thinking but no one is courageous enough to say out loud. See what happens.

Break a little glass every day. I worked with an executive who made this one of his personal mantras. For him, it meant making sure he wasn’t just going along with the crowd. He was willing to speak the truth as he saw it.

Take back your day. One day this month, clear your calendar. Spend the day on the most important things at work and let the daily fires take care of themselves, just this once. For bonus points, make sure this is day where you skip at least one meeting where people won’t miss you. After all, we miss work all of the time when we are sick and somehow the organization survives without us. Yet, we never give ourselves permission to take a day to focus on the things that really matter in our jobs and lives. What would happen if you did?

Say no. Find something that you won’t do this week. Practice saying no. How did it feel?

Take a day to play. If you have kids, take one day this year to wake them up early in the morning to spend a special day with you. You won’t do it regularly, but this one day might just create a memory that lasts long into the future.

[1] Whyte, D. (2001). Crossing the unknown sea: Work as a pilgrimage of identity. New York: Riverhead Books.

[1] Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic motivation and self determination in human behavior. New Yourk: Plenaum Press.

[1] See Bandura, A. (1982). Self-efficacy mechanism in human agency. American Psychologist, 27, 122-147. See also Ng, T. W. H., Sorensen, K. L., & Eby, L. T. (2006). Locus of control at work: A meta-analysis. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 27, 1057-1087. 

[1] Whyte, D. (2001). Crossing the unknown sea: Work as a pilgrimage of identity. New York: Riverhead Books.

[1] Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic motivation and self determination in human behavior. New Yourk: Plenaum Press.

[1] See Bandura, A. (1982). Self-efficacy mechanism in human agency. American Psychologist, 27, 122-147. See also Ng, T. W. H., Sorensen, K. L., & Eby, L. T. (2006). Locus of control at work: A meta-analysis. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 27, 1057-1087.

Today I’m heading in for a two level spinal fusion….for anyone who’s interested…it’s a fusion at L4-L5 and L5-S1. While it may seem extreme, I’m pretty excited about it. A good friend of mine had a similar procedure 2 weeks ago, so I’ve had a chance to learn from him and also watch him maintain his own spirits as he gets better.
Even though I hate taking a surgical option, I’ve learned so much along the way. Here are a few of those lessons.
1. Make sure you invest in other people, especially when you body or your brain is telling you it’s all about you. So many people have invested in me, even people who didn’t know me that well. Some have prayed, some have mowed my lawn, some have just made the time to ask how I’m doing. Amazing people…I want to be more like them.
2. Our bodies will fail us. I have never been more aware of the fact that my soul resides in a body that is, and will, fail me over time. This isn’t a grim reality, just a reality.
3. My wife is unbelievable. I love her more today than I ever have. She’s scary great. She loves me in spite of my little stupid things, and she is such an amazing mom.
4. My boys are becoming little men. This morning I had the chance to tell them that they are the men of the house while daddy’s in the hospital next week. They have taken the charge and get it. (we’ll see about that one…they are 6 and 7).
5. My friends are generous and my friendships to them are deep. I am blessed. They have my back.
6. It’s hard to take things from people when they offer help. Not because it’s so hard, but because sometimes the help offered creates more work…..most of the time it doesn’t, but you know what I mean. It’s complicated. We all just need to help each other more and be fine if we can’t too.
7. I have a great job. I just do. For as long as I have it, I have a great job that is made up of people who you just want to be around.
8. God is good. He just is.

I’m so excited to be on the other side of this. Back pain has been a part of my reality for 20 years (unbelievable). That’s not a sob story, it’s just a reality. I don’t know anything different. It’s going to be good.

Rob

Sailing is such a powerful metaphor. When I was a kid, my dad and I would sail on a lake called Lake Chelan in a boat called a bumblebee. The boat was probably only about 10 fee long, yellow (surprise, with the a name like bumblebee) but it was fun. When the winds would come up, that little boat could really move. My dad loves to sail, and he taught me so much about sailing, the wind, and how to navigate that little boat in the toughest of waters. The boat had a removable keel, or daggerboard. The keel is the wing that stick out through the bottom of sailboats that keep the boat from tipping over when it’s leaning over. While it’s not a rudder (the thing at the back of the boat that steers the boat, it’s function is to keep the boat upright and stable when moving quickly through the water. The challenge with that little boat was that the keel didn’t have anything to keep it down, so when the waters got rougher and the wind got stronger, it would start to float up through the middle of the boat. When that happened, the boat was completely unstable and flipped on us more than once.

I sometimes ask my clients to consider their guiding principles, or the principles that guide them through life. After I ask them to identify them, I’ll often ask them to go to someone that knows them well and ask them what they see as their guiding principles. The funny thing is that the principles we often describe as a those that guide us are often different from the principles that other people see guiding us. Going back to the bumblebee, sometimes our self proclaimed guiding principles are more like the “bumblebee” printed on the side of the sailboat that actual principles. What we print on the side of the boat may look good, but it really doesn’t say much about the stability of the boat itself. The keel, although hidden, is a much better example of the guiding principle of our lives. While it isn’t seen most of the time and doesn’t’ actually tell us anything about where we are going (like the rudder), it is the thing that keeps us upright in the toughest of storms.

What is your keel? What would someone close to you identify as your keel, or your guiding principles? Are they the same. Do your guiding principles keep floating up through the middle of your boat, failing to give you any consistency and stability in tough times. Think about it, your principles are your keel. Getting them firmly in place will help you know where to stand and how to move forward with some consistency and predictability, even when everything else around you might be out of control.

What are your guiding principles, and how did they different from those described by someone else? What did you have in common?

This morning when I came in to work I had a particularly busy brain. I arrived at work at about 7am so I could start my day with a quick workout. While I was exercising, as usually happens, my mind started to wander into a talk that I’m giving later this week. I was thinking about how far too rarely I am stopped in my tracks. How rarely I take the time to stop, listen, pray, and just relax away from the noise of my agenda for the day. For the talk I’m doing later this week, I’m using a from the book of Jeremiah in the Bible that goes like this:

“Ah, Sovereign LORD,” I said, “I do not know how to speak; I am only a child.”
But the LORD said to me, “Do not say, ‘I am only a child.’ You must go to everyone I send you to and say whatever I command you. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you and will rescue you,” declares the LORD.

Then the LORD reached out his hand and touched my mouth and said to me, “Now, I have put my words in your mouth. See, today I appoint you over nations and kingdoms to uproot and tear down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant.”
Jeremiah 1:6-10

After I rushed through my workout I headed into the locker room. My busy brain was still going. I was beginning to frantically plan for how I was going to talk about “What stops you in your tracks?” The irony that I realized right then in the locker room was that I hadn’t been stopped in my tracks in my planning for talking about being stopped in my tracks. The first thing I thought was, “What an idiot!” Then I thought about the message God was handing me through the words in Jeremiah. Jeremiah is confessing that he doesn’t have all the answers, and that in fact, he doesn’t even know how to speak.

Sometimes when I’m trying to get my kids attention I actually have to stop them in their tracks, get them to look me in the eye, and then let them know that I have their best intentions in mind, and I have them covered. Like a father gently putting his hand over Jeremiah’s mouth, God says, “Stop right there man. I’ve got this one. I have the words for you. I have the agenda. I have the plan.” In that moment in the locker room, I sat down on the bench and spent the next fifteen minutes in silence, letting go of my day. While my busy brain is still here, I realized I don’t have all the answers and I may not get it all done. Most importantly, God stopped me in my tracks this morning.
What stops you in your tracks?

Dr. Rob McKenna

If it truly is important to be intentional about your development as a leader, we would really be missing it if we didn’t take a chance to pause and reflect on our own learning over the last several weeks. I’ve learned some valuable lessons for sure. First off, I am now so convinced that this generation of emerging leaders is anything but entitled. There are plenty of high potential leaders out there who are ready for the challenge, willing to consider the stakes, and willing to learn. Second, I have seen the impact of letting go and letting others speak their own voice. These have been big lessons for me. Now that so many of you have spent the last 10 weeks in my class taking a deep dive into your own leadership presence and potential, what personal lessons have you learned about leadership that you will surely be applying in the coming months and even years?

Based on the conversations we’ve seen over the last several weeks in the blog, I have some advice I want to pass on. While this is certainly not me trying to speak like the master of leadership, it’s advice I’ve received from a group of wise leaders who have invested in me over the years that has really helped me as a leader. So, here goes…

1. Seek out tough feedback on how you show up.
2. Learn how to lead and follow.
3. Become self aware.
4. Get in touch with your developmental stage.
5. Don’t blame—take responsibility—it’s good for you.
6. Leadership is not only about talking—this becomes really important
7. Develop your list of mentors now!
8. Keep success in perspective—self preservation and self sacrifice
9. Learn to write well.
10. Set learning and performance goals and shoot for them.
11. Be intentional—it makes you more interesting.
12. Don’t gossip—Ask yourself, what are you going to do about it?
13. There are lessons to learn right now—are you learning them? Write them down.
14. Take on a whatever it takes attitude
15. Don’t take yourself too seriously, but take others seriously
16. Why do you lead—three questions down.
17. Say you’re sorry.
18. Consider the stakes every day.
19. Be thankful.
20. Know that God loves you.

There’s no doubt that goal setting is important. We know it works. But, the fact is that we know it works for people who set goals. If it’s such a good idea, then why is it so hard to set goals? I think it’s really interesting to think about the times in your life when you’ve been able to achieve something very meaningful to you and then think about what it is that allowed you to set the goal, and then go after it. Think about the last time you set a goal and you knew that you would chase that goal, or you knew you would get it done in spite of yourself. What was the goal? What was it about you that made it work in that situation? What does that tell you about the goals that work for you? In what ways have you tried to set goals that didn’t work for you? Reflecting on what goals you HAVE achieved instead of those you HAVE NOT, what does that tell you about how you should set goals in the future?

This week I asked one of the emerging leaders who is taking part in the blog to generate the blog topic for the week. Her post is below. I look forward to your answers to her question at the end.

Week six’s class discussion left us with more questions than answers. The quartet conversation brought up some thought-provoking ideas that spurred our conversation about authenticity and then last week’s blog laid the foundation for our discussion about sacrifice and its relationship to loss. As a class, we wrestled with both questions for a considerable amount of time but did not even come close to unanimously agreeing upon an answer. An hour and a half into the class session, during the break, I talked with a couple of people about the complexity of the concepts we routinely discuss in this class and how people’s insightful responses do not often confirm our own thoughts but instead introduce and provoke more complex and layered thoughts. Everyone in the conversation agreed that although the questions surrounding these topics are almost always difficult and often times ambiguous, it is important that we at least attempt to form thoughtful responses to them and then be willing to modify these responses when we hear legitimate arguments that may contend with our opinions on the issue.
Acknowledging the complexity of these questions and their tendency to linger and prod at our minds, what question or concept introduced in class has stuck with you the most thus far in the quarter? What concept has made you re-evaluate your behavior or another part of your life? How have the people outside of the class whom you have discussed these concepts with reacted? How did you feel about their reaction?

This last week I had a chance to spend some very intense and amazing time with a friend of mine who is a senior business leader. That doesn’t mean he’s a senior in high school who leads in business, but for those of you who need it bottom shelf like me, it means he’s occupied some pretty high level roles in the organizations where he has served. One of the most intriguing conversations we had (of which we had many) was around the question of sacrifice and what sacrifice looks like in the lives of leaders. The question we kept coming back to was this. Does sacrifice have to hurt? In other words, is it possible to think about the idea of sacrifice without the necessity of it hurting or having some potentially painful cost for the person doing the sacrificing?
It’s a really interesting question isn’t it? Does sacrifice have to hurt? If not, why not? Is it enough to take on a servant’s heart as a person, and if so, is that the same as taking on a sacrificial heart as a person? When calculating the cost of leading others and the personal cost to you of living a sacrificial life as proposed in Philippians 2 from the Bible, does it have to hurt? I’ll leave the response to you experts!