The subject of ‘emotional labor’ is described by the psychologist Arlie Russell Hochschild as

“the management of feelings to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display (which is) sold for a wage and therefore has exchange value”.

In his book The Managed Heart, The Commercialization of Human Feeling, he talks about the McDonald’s employee or the airline employee who, no matter how they are feeling, have to show certain feelings to perform their task. Hochschild calls this ‘emotional labor’. It applies to leaders, of course, and is linked to the Sentic States that we talked about in a previous post.

The Managed Heart, by Arlie Russel Hochschild

We tend to assume emotions in the workplace are unwelcome - at least those that aren’t part of the pantomime of serving with a ‘Have a nice day’ smile, that is. Anger, for example, is assumed to be negative. But, controlled anger, against injustice, for example, or even against the competition for leaders who find that motivating, can command attention, create focus and be a positive thing in a leader.

The emotional labor that it takes to suppress how we actually feel creates stress (that conflict between the role and the real you that we talk about in the Manifesto, that arises from a lack of ‘oneness’) and drains energy.

I’m convinced that the ‘realness’ that marks out great leaders comes from being deeply connected with yourself and selectively sharing what is going on inside yourself with the outside world. That takes courage (though, after a while, you fail to see it as ‘courage’. It is just something you have to do to be fully alive). This doesn’t mean expressing your emotions to everybody indiscriminately. It does mean acting on Daniel Goleman’s definition of Emotional Intelligence, in which you hone your ‘antennae’ of empathy in every conversation at work, rather than going through the motions, with all the feelings of ‘numbness’ that that can mean.

Having genuinely juicy conversations

For example, maybe I’m in a client meeting and I can sense some resistance to what I am saying. This in itself is not always easy in the workplace - being aware enough of the other to spot the cues when there is resistance. If you just want to get through the day without acknowledging the uncomfortable areas, you might ignore it. But, if you are open enough to feel it, that then requires the courage to share it with the client. It might be a case of pausing in your sales pitch, or whatever it is, stepping out of the conversation and saying:

“I’m feeling a little stuck here. Something’s not quite working, is it. Can you help me with that?” That’s a courageous and usually a fruitful act. It’s an invitation to the other to converse with an Open Heart. It shows you have the confidence that the invitation will not be rejected.

That’s when the genuinely juicy conversations start. “Yes, we are stuck because this is my dilemma…” comes the reply and you are away.

How to save your life

So, one of the biggest issues in the workplace is being in touch with and having the courage to recognize and manage emotions like anger, hatred and so on, to reduce the emotional labor of work.

You will find that what you are actually doing by having the courage to be yourself - coming back to our core question of “Why should I display courage instead of going along with things for the sake of a quiet life?” - is protecting yourself from illnesses that come from the stress of emotional labor.

It could be argued, you are literally saving your own life, in this sense: Caroline Mace, in her book Anatomy of Spirit has delved into how suppressing your chakras or emotions, or states - however you want to frame this - develops certain types of disease. She focusses particularly on cancer and diagnoses its roots in the suppression of particular emotions.

So, we end this discussion of ‘Why be courageous?’ with a suitably terminal answer. We act courageously, in line with what our true selves and our values tell us to do, so that we can be alive and not die.

I remember doing a workshop once with Brian Bacon of the Oxford Leadership Academy. Brian talks about how each of us has a ‘leadership compass’. To find the True North (as Bill George likes to call it) that your compass points to, Brian conducts this exercise:

Ask yourself: “In what situations would I be courageous?” Even more to the point, Brian asks “What would you be willing to die for?” For your daughter? Your country? Dig deeper and you find the things or people you are prepared to die for. Though those things and people are ‘out there’ or ‘other’, they are intimately connected with your sense of self. The connection is your values. What you are actually willing to die for might be fairness, love, respect…We are driven by our values. What you would be prepared to die for tells you what those values are, and thereby helps you identify the real you.

The opposite of bystander syndrome

The BBC Radio 4 program ‘All In The Mind’ recently (June 4th 2008) interviewed a young man who had been standing on a railway platform, with other commuters, when a woman fell onto the line. Her foot was trapped by one of the rails. A train was due any minute. Without thinking, the young man jumped down, freed the woman’s foot and moved her out of harm’s way, like a scene from a movie, with the sights and sound of the train bearing down on them. The young man didn’t move from the rail - putting himself in the same danger as the woman who had fallen - until her foot was free and they could both move.

Why him and not the other commuters? That was the question. Because, he said, he couldn’t live with himself if the woman had died or been maimed due to his inaction. He had been brought up in a family where they all looked out for each other; his sisters and aunts all looking after and protecting each other. That’s the only way he knew how to live. His values drove him to jump down onto that line.

This is the paradox: you risk your life because if you didn’t act you wouldn’t be able to live as your self ever again; you would be unable to live your life as your true self afterwards if you had let the moment go by and not acted.

The interview was part of an analysis of the work of Philip Zimbardo into everyday heroics - what makes ordinary people carry out acts of heroism. Zimbardo is famous for his Stanford University prison experiment, where he set up a mock prison in the basement and gave one set of students - the warders - power over another set of students - the prisoners. The warders began to so extensively abuse their power that the experiment had to be cut short.

Now Zimbardo has turned his attention to the opposite - how to create cultures in which acts of everyday heroism are the norm. This is exactly what we want in our organizations, isn’t it?

Creating a culture of everyday heroism

Part of the challenge of leadership today is creating a culture made up of constant acts of everyday heroism; small acts in which people are guided by their own and the organization’s values to do the right thing, and keep the organization aligned to its True North. These thousands of small acts of courage and leadership accumulate to become the direction of travel of the organization, and to define its culture.

We all know one or two ‘conscious companies’ (but they are rare, and ill-defined) in which people can be trusted to do the right thing for all stakeholders rather than just blindly following company policy and procedure each day because that’s the role they put on when they walk in the door. They aren’t bystanders or people going through the motions. They are engaged and connected with the work and with each other. That gives the organization the same sense of ‘aliveness’ that you get at individual level when people have the courage to be themselves, identify their values and live their life accordingly.

Here’s Zimbardo’s definition of ‘everyday heroism’ (which takes, of course, courage - the theme of these posts):

“Heroes don’t have a special personality. They are not more compassionate, more altruistic, more or less of anything. They are simply people that in a particular situation where most people, observing something bad, do nothing, then the hero is the one who steps out of the crowd and challenges the definition of the situation, challenges the authority, dissents, defies, rebels and does not comply.”

So, this “What would you die for?” question - which turns us all into everyday heros if we act on it - liberates you to act in a way which you feel most alive, does it not? The paradox goes further. In our next post, we will touch on how having the courage to act as your true self, knowing what you would risk your life for, as the young man in the example above did, can actually stop you dying young and help you lead a longer, healthier life.

People tend to see themselves and others as courageous or not courageous. Those who define themselves as the latter might think “It’s wonderful to act courageously, but I can’t because I have fears or anxieties and those constrain me”… or even “Courage isn’t for me. I prefer a quiet life.” Which raises the question, then, Why be Courageous? What’s the point?

Wherever you find tales of people acting with courage - the heroic stories that emerge in war or struggles of all kinds, armed and unarmed - throughout history, those acts of courage are about one thing; breaking free of constraints to become liberated.

I hate to use war as a metaphor, but the personal courage required to lead is about fighting against the constraints of the different roles we create for ourselves, as described in the Manifesto. The constraints of not speaking out, not being ourselves, but being defined instead by the limits of the role we are occupying at the time - ‘manager’ in the workplace for example - makes us unhappy, stressed, and will eventually kill our sense of ’self’ (and possibly, kill you for real. We’ll return to that connection between courage and mortality in a later post).

Paul Tillich, in his book The Courage To Be, talks about fighting against constraints and roles to find the real ‘me’ and to live as that person. The real you is the place where you feel most fulfilled. Bill George and Warren Bennis have ploughed the furrow of ‘authenticity’ for us, arguing powerfully for how essential it is to leadership today. To be authentic you have to know yourself - the real you, not the patterns and habits of behaving that have grown up around your various roles over the years - and live according to the values that define the real you.

So, again, why would you want to be liberated? Why would you want to act with courage? I would only want to act with courage for the simple sake of being alive. When you are your authentic self is when you feel most alive. The psychologist William James has done a lot of work on ‘what is the real me?’. He says you need to seek out the particular mantle and attributes that make you feel most alive, and that ’seeking after’ takes courage. When you are acting in a way that makes you think “This is the real me”, then you’ve found that vitality and you stick with it.

Again, we return to ‘Why would you want to be liberated in that way?’ Well, for me the answer is that the moment you start to feel the aliveness, the sense of being awakened that comes with acting as your true self in the way James describes, then you fight to keep that ‘mantle state’ upon you; you see role constraints as a threat to your aliveness and you fight for it.

But, though courage emerges from that seeking of the true self, it doesn’t mean that acts of courage come from ’selfishness’. Quite the opposite. We’ll move to courage and selflessness, oneness, values and larger purpose in the next post.

I was talking with a friend, Stuart Turnbull, who is particularly interested in love in organizations, and we realized that the word ‘courage’ has its root in ‘heart’. ‘Cour’ = ‘coeur’ (’heart’ in French). That explains why Courage seems to sit at the core of Open Heart Leadership, as it is about acting from the heart.

In Turkish, we have the same connection as the Latin root: being courageous almost translates directly to being ‘heartful’. That brings us to the word ‘encouraging’, which also has ‘heart’ at its core, and is about nurturing courage in others to do the right thing - an essential part of leadership.

If we follow this ‘heart’ link, it is a vital topic in different philosophies. In Sufi-ism, the heart is the ‘house of the divine’ and you are promised a state of no fears, no worries if you connect completely with the heart.

Manfred Clynes, the psychologist (see the MindMap jpeg in the post below) has a basic construct of emotional rhythms he calls ‘Sentic States’. He says they are universal, shared across cultures by all humanity. The seven Sentic States have been linked to the seven chakras of the body by Peter Hawkins of the Bath Consultancy Group, who has used the model in training.

The seven Sentic States are:

Anger
Hatred
Grief
Love
Eros
Joy
Awe

You can see from the jpeg (the MindMap, below) how Peter Hawkins maps these states onto the different parts of the body where the energy chakras reside. Love sits in the heart, which is hence where ‘Courage’ lives. ‘Courage’ and ‘Love’ are intertwined. Acts of Courage are, generally, acts of Love. Hence a lot of leadership thinkers like Ken Blanchard talk about ‘love’ as being essential to leadership. And leadership practitioners from Southwest Airlines’ Herb Kelleher to former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani are equally open with their connection between love and leadership.

“It might sound slightly bizarre, but one of the key beliefs for effective leadership is to be madly in love with the people you are leading”.
- Ken Blanchard, co-author, The One Minute Manager

“There are three keys to leadership:
1. Be optimistic…
2. If you don’t love people, do something else.
3. Be absolutely clear what you stand for.”
- Rudy Giuliani, former Mayor of New York

We will use these posts to chip away at the definition of Open Heart Leadership, like a sculptor, by working through some critical elements - Courage, Realness, Intimacy and so on.

We’ll start with several posts on Courage, because Courage is emerging as a foundation theme in what the academics refer to as ‘connectedness’ and that we are defining here as Open Heart Leadership. In the next few posts we will cover why Courage is at the heart of leadership, where the word comes from (cour = heart, of course), how it is essential to any search for authenticity, how it is essential to leading an examined rather than an unexamined life, and how that leads to the greater awareness, the greater consciousness you need to be a leader and to run a conscious company.

Here is a jpeg of a MindMap I created to help me think this through. Click on it a couple of times to get your ‘magnifier’ to work, so you can read it. Or, download the jpeg and use your viewer to read it.

I’ll then blog tomorrow on some of the elements in the MindMap to pull together how Courage is at the core of Open Heart Leadership.

Courage and Open Heart Leadership, the MindMap. From Alper Utku's Open Heart Leadership blog.

So, what do we mean by Open Heart Leadership?

By open heart leadership I mean a new construct of leadership involving openness, realness, compassion and intimacy. Open Heart Leadership happens when you embrace whatever comes to you, with a sense of leadership. It’s about having unconditional love for others and for who you are and what you represent, without prejudice and conditions. It is a about a genuine desire to know yourself and grow everyday in every sense. It is about being real, being connected with your true self. It is about living a personal evolution every moment and being open to a mindset revolution at any time. It is a mandate for continuous personal growth. It’s about embracing something bigger than myself with authenticity, dialogue, intimacy, realness; embracing whatever is in front of you without any condition.

‘One-ing’

I’ll use ‘one-ing’ as a verb here. I tend to assume that we all come to this life with a core. Then we start to have experiences, interact with people, develop attitudes, behaviours. Our core remains the circle in the middle, but it becomes surrounded by other circles – interactions form a second circle, assumptions that arise from those interactions form a third, attitudes form another, then behaviours, then personality.

The different roles we have in life bring us different responsibilities. In my personal case, as leader, father, friend, stakeholder and so on, we assume we have to do certain things to fit that role. To fit the definition of father, salesperson, manager, we feel there are things we have to do.

That creates a duality between the someone at the core – who you are – and the ‘should be’ that you try to be when in these different roles. You have created a second person. One of the deepest sources of stress is the tension between these two different places, which we can call:

1. The place of human being (our core)
2. The place of human doing (how we act in different roles)

Read the rest of the Open Heart Leadership Manifesto