Empathy

The Temperament of Great Leaders

November 11, 2015 By Otis White

Most of the qualities of a good civic good leader, I’m convinced, can be learned. A reasonably empathetic person can master the arts of relationship building, group management, and persuasion. An observant person can learn the processes behind public policy and, in time, see opportunities for action. With a little modesty, a good leader can find her role and, with a little audacity, fill it brilliantly.

But there’s one quality that the best leaders possess that I don’t think can be learned easily. And that is temperament. It’s an old-fashioned word that refers to a person’s nature or disposition, especially as it affects his or her behavior. And the temperament that the best leaders possess allows them to “quiet the self.”

The term comes from David Brooks, the New York Times columnist. He says it is the ability to “step out of the game” when criticized or insulted. “Enmity is a nasty frame of mind,” Brooks wrote not long ago. “Pride is painful. The person who can quiet the self can see the world clearly, can learn the subject and master the situation.”

Most of us can’t do this. If attacked, we inflate with anger. Our impulse is to strike back, quickly, with a cutting remark. What we learn is that, rather than ending the attack, it only escalates the conflict.

Or maybe we don’t strike back but seek revenge, using our positions to get even. A former president once went down that road. And, well, we know what happened to Richard Nixon.

Unfortunately, local governments are filled with those who can’t forget a slight or resist the impulse to strike back. I know of one elected official who no longer speaks to newspaper reporters, communicating only through emails that are filtered through an assistant. He then posts these emails online—as “the truth.” If asked, I’d offer one word of advice to him: Resign. He’s not cut out for this work.

That’s because being criticized in public life is like being hit in football. It’s not a flaw in the system; it’s a feature of the system. We give everybody a voice in politics in the belief that, in the din, the right way forward will emerge. But to get there, we have to endure a certain amount of nonsense and nastiness.

Successful leaders learn how to manage their reactions to the nastiness. Abraham Lincoln wrote what he called “hot letters” to his critics, then stuck them in a drawer with the inscription: “Never sent. Never signed.” Thomas Jefferson suggested cooling off by counting not just to 10 but to 100.

Some recommend a three-part response to being attacked in public: Listen politely, don’t get defensive, and ask for time before responding. This allows for a more thoughtful (and calmer) response.

But techniques can take you only so far. The best leaders do something deeper and better. They look at tense situations as if they were observers who are removed in time. They see their interests and those of their critics, and because it doesn’t feel personal, they react as calmly as actors on a stage. Attack these leaders, and they smile.

It unnerves their critics—just as it rattles other teams’ players when NFL quarterback Andrew Luck congratulates them for sacking him. Here’s how one cornerback described what it felt like when Luck popped up and said to him, “Great job!” “You know if you hear a quarterback get mad, you are in his head,” he said. “With Luck, you thought you hurt the guy, you hear ‘good job’ and you just say ‘aw, man.’ “

That’s what you want to hear from your critics as well, when you smile at their insults. “Aw, man.”

A version of this posting appeared on the Governing website.

Photo by Sarah licensed under Creative Commons.

How Collaboration Happens

July 3, 2013 By Otis White

I’m fond of saying that there are no silver bullets for cities but there are some bronze ones. Here’s a bronze bullet: a healthy cooperation among governments. City councils sitting down with school boards. County governments managing projects with cities. Cities contracting with one another for services. State legislators working with mayors, school superintendents, and county commissioners on legislative strategies. That sort of thing.

The benefits of healthy cooperation are so obvious—lower costs, greater effectiveness, public approval—that it makes you wonder why it’s so rare. My theory: It’s because many leaders do not know how to create the conditions needed for collaboration. And because the conditions don’t exist, neither does the collaboration.

I’m going to set out four things that I think must precede collaboration, but first, a definition. Collaboration is cooperation by interests that don’t have to cooperate. That is, they could go it alone but choose to work together because they see clear benefits or because cooperation is, for some reason, expected. Often collaborators are organizations of equal or nearly equal size. To be a true collaboration, it can’t be an easy, one-off act, it has to be a sustained set of activities. (If I do something for you that’s unexpected and nice, I’m not collaborating. I’m doing you a favor.) And, again, it’s voluntary. If the cooperation is forced by an outside interest, it’s not collaboration; it’s compulsion.

The reason collaboration is so rare is that it requires us to think about things in different ways, and that’s hard. First, we’re not all that good at calculating the benefits of things that don’t exist, such as how things might be if we worked together. Second, we’re suspicious of interests that might be considered rivals. How can we be sure we won’t be taken advantage of? Finally, there’s inertia. If something seems to be working as it is, why change . . . especially if the change involves time or money?

To collaborate, then, requires an act of will. In local government, it has to be initiated by someone who truly wants to collaborate and sees the value of community institutions and governments working together. It takes, in other words, a leader. But it need not be a top leader. It can as easily be a city council member as a mayor, a commissioner as well as a county administrator, a school board member as well as the superintendent. What it requires are diligence and a sense of how one thing leads to another.

And that involves seeing collaboration as a process that depends on three things happening in sequence and then connecting with a fourth element. The sequence is understanding, trust, and transparency. I’ll go through them in reverse order:

Transparency is the key ingredient. You can’t have healthy collaborations if one of the parties feels it may be taken advantage of. So how can you guard against this? By being as open as possible. If your city is supplying a service to others, you have to be open about your costs and revenues. If the city is working with the school system on a joint project, it has to open its books. If the legislative delegation is meeting with local governments, legislators have to be honest about what they can accomplish, and the localities have to be honest about what they need most and what they can contribute to the cause.
But no one wants to be the first to lay his cards on the table. So in order to have transparency, you must have trust, the feeling that you know the person or organization you’re dealing with and that your openness won’t be used against you. Trust, then, precedes transparency.
And what precedes trust is understanding. Understanding takes time. It doesn’t come from a single meeting, it comes from a number of encounters, often in different settings. There’s a reason so many business people play golf. It allows them to size up potential partners and vendors outside of the office. As much as a pastime, then, golf is a vetting process. Your vetting process might include golf, but it could just as easily involve lunches, cocktail parties, or baseball outings.

So think about this in sequence: First, you seek to know those who might be potential collaborators and become known by them. Those understandings allow you to build trust. And trust opens the door to transparency, which is needed for collaboration.

But these things only make collaboration possible. Collaborations don’t actually happen until there’s a fourth element, which is the recognition of mutual interest. This involves someone spotting an opportunity for collaboration, calculating its benefits to all, and persuading others to give it a try.

Here’s the best part of seeing collaboration as a process: Anyone with standing in an institution can start it. If we’re talking about governments collaborating, that means any elected official or relatively well-placed appointed official. All it takes to begin the process is seeing a potential partner and picking up the phone.

Once you do so, don’t be in a hurry; understanding, trust, and transparency take a while. Often there are bruised feelings caused by years of government officials pointing fingers at each other. Be patient, don’t take things personally (when you start talking with your counterparts in other governments, be prepared for an earful about transgressions past and present), and try to be a voice for understanding on both sides. That is, explain your government to potential partners as calmly and objectively as possible, and be quick to speak up for other governments among your own colleagues. Nothing builds trust as quickly as the feeling that somebody over there understands us.

But what about that fourth element, the recognition of mutual interest? How do you prepare for that? Basically, you just keep your eyes open. As you build understanding, trust, and the willingness to be open, the opportunities for cooperation will present themselves. Some may offer great potential benefits, others will have only modest benefits. A good strategy may be to start with some modest collaborations and build toward the big ones, deepening understanding, trust, and transparency along the way.

It can be a long journey, so it may help to keep in mind how some unlikely collaborations came together in the past. Look around. There may be some great examples in your city. If you can’t find one, you can always look back to 1787, when one of the world’s most unlikely collaborations began. It started in Philadelphia that summer, as a group representing 13 bickering governments produced a document beginning with these words: “We the people of the United States . . .”

Revisiting the Core Skills of Community Leadership

May 9, 2012 By Otis White

The best thing about writing a blog, I’ve come to learn, is that you sometimes surprise yourself. I’ve been writing one since February 2010, a little more than two years’ time, and I can already see small changes in my thinking about the things that interest me: how communities change, how people become leaders, how citizens figure into civic progress, and how local politics works. Don’t get me wrong; in re-reading my postings, I largely agree with the central ideas, but I see changes in how I’d put things today.

Here’s an example: the core skills of community leadership, which I wrote about in April 2010. I still believe that leaders who want to be effective in civic work have to master a set of skills, and the five I listed—empathy, facilitation, strategy, learning and motivation—are the right ones. But I’d call some of them by different names today and place them in a different order.

What has caused my thinking to evolve is the work I’ve done in how change happens. In a set of postings, beginning last August, I mapped out how deliberate change comes to communities. (Literally, I called it a map, with starting points and steps along the way, ending in adoption and implementation.) There’s a lot to the map—it took seven postings to explain it all—and one result of spending so much time studying the process was a new appreciation for what it takes to move things through it. That’s the role, of course, of leaders.

And that brought me back around to looking at those five core skill sets. Here’s briefly how I described them two years ago:

Empathy: These are the skills that allow leaders to understand others and work with them, “particularly those with whom you have the least in common.”
Facilitation: These are the skills that “help bring groups together to agree on common goals and strategies. Think of this as putting empathy to work.”
Strategy: These skills “help you see the road—sometimes the only road—that will move good ideas forward.”
Learning: These are the skills that “help you search for, find, and recognize potential solutions, sometimes from unexpected sources.”
Motivation: These skills “help you engage others—and yourself—in your community’s work.”

As I said earlier, I agree that these are the key skills, but I’d put them in a different order, using different words to describe them. Here’s how:

The first skill set is still empathy, but I’d call it relationship building. And, yes, empathy is still important to relationships. But the aim of civic relationships, I’ve come to know, is not to understand people but to enlist them in civic work, and it now seems to me that “relationship building” is a more purposeful and action-oriented term. I’d still put it as the first skill to be mastered because relationship building is where community leadership begins. Without a group of people to call on for assistance and advice—and, ideally, a diverse group—it’s impossible to be a civic leader.

The second skill set is the one I put as number four on the list two years ago, learning. It’s not a great name, but I’ll stick with it for the time being. These skills are about seeing community problems and finding their solutions. Why have I moved it up? Because this is the engine of community change. Change begins when people with strong community relationships meet problems they believe they can solve. So mix relationship building with learning and you have ignition. My caution is that learning is a process and not an event, and the process has two parts: seeing the problems and finding workable solutions. As I wrote in this posting, leaders sometimes get the order reversed. That is, they fall in love with a solution they’ve seen elsewhere—a river walk, say, or a streetcar line—without thinking much about the problem it’s meant to solve. If they did, they might realize that plunking a river walk or streetcar in their community may not improve things . . . and could make things worse.

The third skill set is strategy, and I think my description two years ago still works. It’s about seeing the “critical path” that the change process must follow—the necessary steps of citizen meetings, private consultations, fundraising, committee meetings, public hearings, and government approvals—and marshaling the people and resources to make the journey. If relationship building and learning starts the engine of change, then strategy gives it a map.

Facilitation is the fourth skill set. It’s not a great name, but I can’t think of a better one. I was right to say two years ago that it was the skills that “help bring groups together to agree on common goals and strategies” but wrong to describe it as “putting empathy to work.” It’s more focused and strategic than that. At various points in a change process, leaders have to work with groups of people who are more or less peers, and facilitation teaches you how to do that with good results. Think of the best committee chair you’ve ever seen—the one who kept the group moving forward and pulled the best from its members—and you have the idea.

The final skill set I now call persuasion, which seems a bit more hard-edged than motivation. And that’s on purpose. Change, I’ve come to learn, does not come easily to communities, especially change that requires us to make conscious choices (unlike changes that are mostly beyond our control, such as economic change due to globalization) and meaningful sacrifices. Machiavelli described the problem with change rather well in 1513:

There is nothing more difficult and dangerous, or more doubtful of success, than an attempt to introduce a new order of things in any state. For the innovator has for enemies all those who derived advantages from the old order of things while those who expect to be benefited by the new institutions will be but lukewarm defenders.

Let me paraphrase: People who might benefit from a change have trouble valuing what they don’t yet have, but those who are asked to give something up know to the penny what it will cost them. Given this “order of things,” it takes something forceful to push change forward. And that force is persuasion, done in a hundred ways.

These, then, are my new core leadership skills, in the order in which they come to bear on community change: Begin with relationship building, followed by learning. When you have ignition, you bring in strategy, and facilitation. If all goes well, they will bring you to the 20-yard line. And to get over the goal line you need that final skill, which is persuasion.

Photo by Julie Faith licensed under Creative Commons.

Dealing with Fear and Demagoguery

June 16, 2011 By Otis White

Bear with me as I tell you the story of a place far away, but one whose story will sound familiar. Maybe all too familiar. It’s Toowoomba, a city of 120,000 in Australia’s interior. The funniest thing about Toowoomba is its name (it’s an Aboriginal word that means, more or less, swamp). Toowoomba isn’t actually in a swamp; it sits atop a range of low mountains and is known as a pretty place where people take pride in their gardens, their local university and their schools.

But as Charles Fishman describes in his new book, “The Big Thirst,” Toowoomba has a terrible problem, which it shares with the rest of Australia. It is running out of water. Australia is 10 years into a drought that has become such a part of Australian life that it is called simply “the Big Dry.” Toowoomba’s particular problem is that, because of its location, it suffers a little more than other places, as water runs quickly off its slopes.

By 2005, with the drought in its fifth year, Toowoomba had done the usual things, forbidding outdoor watering, hiring officers to look for scofflaws, and holding community religious services for residents to pray for rain. No luck. The city’s reservoirs were down to 34 percent of capacity, and political leaders were desperately looking for solutions, any solutions.

You can imagine, then, the excitement that Mayor Dianne Thorley felt when, in May 2005, she addressed a local women’s club with news of a breakthrough: For six months, she told the members, she and city water engineers had been studying water systems around the world and had a plan to recycle waste water as crystal-clear drinking water—extending the city reservoirs’ capacity and, possibly, saving the city.

The reaction? “Dumbfounded,” one who was at the meeting, Rosemary Morley, said. The city wanted to run water from the toilet to the tap? “I came home from that meeting,” she told Fishman, “and my reaction was, “˜How can you go forward with a project like that without running it by people?’ I thought, “˜This is such a sneaky thing. There must be something about it that’s funny.’ “

Even so, it took a while for opposition to build. In the meantime, the city council approved the plan unanimously. The governor of Queensland, where Toowoomba is located, endorsed it. So did the member of parliament from the city. And the national government offered to pay two-thirds of the cost of the advanced treatment facility needed for recycling water.

By then, though, a citizens’ rebellion had begun in earnest. A former mayor weighed in, calling it the work of “sewer sippers.” If it came to pass, he thundered, Toowoomba would be known as “Poowoomba.” A group called CADS, Citizens Against Drinking Sewage, organized. And the federal government, seeing the furor, changed its mind, saying it would participate only if the voters of Toowoomba agreed to it in a referendum.

You can imagine how this unfolded. On the one side, the mayor and water officials offered reason, science, detailed technical information and the experiences of far-off places (in the U.S., Fairfax County, Virginia, and Orange County, California recycle water) to assure voters that it was safe to drink thoroughly treated waste water. On the other side, opponents used slogans, scare tactics and pseudo-science. (Opponents brought in an out-of-town plumber who said he had been studying recycled water and learned it contained tiny amounts of hormones from drugs flushed down toilets. Drinking the water, he said, would cause men to grow breasts and lose their testicles. Keep in mind, this was scientific analysis . . . from a plumber.)

Proponents produced a 40-page book, Fishman writes, “with graphics of molecules and filter barriers, pages of text explaining the technology, photos of water in every possible mood, and many pictures of children.” Opponents issued an eight-page newspaper whose front page had a photo of brown sewage. Underneath, it asked, “Is this our city’s future?”

Well. You won’t be surprised that on July 29, 2006, the voters of Toowoomba said no to the water recycling idea by a thumping 62 percent majority. The only surprise is that it wasn’t unanimous.

As discouraging as Toowoomba’s experience was, it raises a good question: How can you deal with fear and demagoguery? This isn’t something that happens only in the Australian Outback or with proposals for recycling water. It happens every day in America, where complicated issues are put before voters promising an important benefit, but only if voters will pay a little more in taxes, change a familiar habit (such as commuting to work by train rather than car), or overcome their squeamishness. These ideas are sitting ducks for opponents whose only chore to come up with a slogan clever enough to play on citizens’ fears and doubts. When they do, the game is over.

What, then, can leaders do to lessen the inevitable resistance to new ideas and, maybe, win over skeptical citizens? The first thing is to do what Mayor Thorley (known in Toowoomba as Mayor Di) and her city hall allies never did: Recognize how much resistance there would be to such an unexpected and unconventional solution. Here’s how Fishman frames the mayor’s blindness:

What Mayor Di didn’t appreciate that day in May 2005 was that she was introducing a whole new way of thinking about water. She wasn’t being “sneaky”—to use Morley’s word—in the least. But Mayor Di didn’t seem to grasp that people might have different attitudes about water, and about what kind of water is wholesome.

What Mayor Thorley lacked was one of the essential ingredients of leadership: empathy, the ability to see the world from the others’ perspectives. She had been quickly converted to the idea of recycling water. She saw no reason others should take their time. When opposition mounted, she dug in her heels, insisting that the decision had been made, and critics should just get over it. “No consultation, no debate,” Rosemary Morley said. “That’s like waving a red flag in front of a bull.”

But realistically, had she been more empathetic, what could Mayor Thorley have done? She could have taken six months to let the public work through the conversion process that she had made in days. When she spoke to the women’s club, her announcement should have been that she was forming a large task force (made up of friends, critics and respected leaders) to look at solutions to the water crisis and involve the community in learning about the options. Recycling water could have been one of the options, but only one.

Knowing how squeamish this option would make people, she could have suggested video conferences between task force members and people in Orange County and Fairfax County. She could have suggested a partial solution: Build an advanced treatment facility but use the water only for non-drinking uses, such as for industrial processes or in city fountains. Then she could have put goldfish in the fountains and invited everyone to watch the fish. (One resident of Toowoomba actually suggested this idea. It would have been persuasive.) After people saw the fish thrive (with no harm to the males), she could have suggested finishing the project.

The secret to defeating fear is a lengthy, open but certain decision-making process, one that allows not just those involved in the decision but everyone an opportunity to learn about controversial ideas without being hurried, to explore alternatives, and discuss and reconcile their feelings. In the end, of course, you have to make a decision. But in most cases, you don’t have to do it at the snap of your fingers. And you don’t persuade others by telling them just to get over it.

So what happened to Toowoomba after the referendum? An advanced treatment plant was built in Toowoomba but only to supply water to a coal mine operator. (The facility doesn’t bring the water up to drinking standards.) Eventually, Toowoomba signed an agreement with another water system to pump drinking water up the mountain. The pipeline and pumping stations will cost about twice what the recycled water system would have and have much higher operating costs that will grow as the price of energy increases. Fear, it turns out, has a price. Toowoomba’s water users will be paying for their fears for many years to come.

And now, the final irony: The water system that’s supplying the water to Toowoomba is building . . . you guessed it, recycled water facilities. So while the citizens of Toowoomba won’t be drinking water that has passed through their own toilets, they’ll be drinking the water from others’.

Photo of Toowoomba City Hall by Tim Swinson licensed under Creative Commons.

How to Listen Effectively

April 18, 2011 By Otis White

On his 27th birthday, John Francis, an environmental activist who loved to argue, decided to be quiet for one day and listen to others. The result changed his life. What he learned on his day of silence was that he hadn’t really been listening at all. “I would listen just enough to hear what people had to say and think that I knew what they were going to say, and so I would stop listening,” he said in a speech not long ago. “And in my mind I just kind of raced ahead and thought about what I was going to say back while they were still finishing up. And then I would launch in. Well, that just ended communications.”

At the end of his birthday, he decided to be quiet for another day. And another. And then for an entire year. In all, John Francis remained voluntarily silent for 17 years, during which time he earned three college degrees (including a doctorate), taught classes using sign language, and walked across America. And he listened, really listened, to the people he met. (If you want to know more about Francis’ amazing story, you can hear it—yes, he speaks now—by viewing one of his presentations online.)

I doubt I could manage even a day of silence, nevertheless years. Perhaps you couldn’t either. But you don’t have to be silent to listen more effectively. And it’s a skill worth learning, maybe the single best thing you could do to make yourself a better leader.

Why? Start with the obvious: You can’t be a leader unless you have followers, and you can’t gain followers if you don’t understand them well enough to represent them. This involves listening. If you want to be effective as a leader, you’ll have to be more than a mouthpiece for a group: You’ll have to negotiate for your followers, and effective negotiating means knowing how leaders of other groups think about things. Finally, leadership means sometimes having to change your followers, as when circumstances shift dramatically and your group has to adapt. To do any of this involves listening deeply—truly taking in others’ fears, hopes, vision and motivations—before acting.

There are other reasons listening can make you a better leader: You’ll arrive at better solutions because you’ll have more complete information. Your ideas will gain greater support if you’ve developed them after consulting others. You’ll make fewer gaffes if you know others’ sensitivities. Finally, you’ll enjoy one of the greatest benefits of civic leadership, which is to learn about people who are different from you in background, temperament and world view.

And it all begins with listening. So how can you improve your listening skills? Here are some ways:

Start by concentrating. This sounds simple but isn’t. The greatest obstacle to listening is distraction. Instead of paying attention to others, we let our minds wander—to what else we need to do, whom we need to see, what we’ll say next, and a hundred other things. So begin your meetings with a reminder: Stay focused on the other person’s words.
Ask open-ended questions that require explanations rather than closed-ended questions that can be answered with a “yes” or “no.” So you might ask, “How did you feel?” rather than “Were you angry?” because it offers a fuller understanding of the person. And keep your questions brief. The simpler the question, the more detailed and candid the responses tend to be.
Listen for insights into the person. People often say a lot more than they intend or we expect them to say; as a result, we don’t always take in what they’re telling us. Your meetings may be about a community issue, but if you ask good questions and listen carefully, you can learn a lot about the person who’s talking. You can not only get her opinions, you can get her life story and motivations, how she forms opinions and reads people. These things can be critically important later on as you work with this person. So listen for these deeper insights.
Take time. It takes a while to understand people, and the longer you spend, the more you learn. Don’t expect to learn someone’s life story, philosophy and motivations in 30 minutes’ time. Plan on an hour or more, which is why lunch can be a good time for such meetings.
Make it comfortable. Here’s another reason to consider lunch as a good setting for listening: It gets the person out of her office and away from her desk. Simply moving to neutral ground will sometimes open up conversations, particularly if the person has reason to see you as a potential adversary. But be careful: Chose quiet restaurants where you won’t be rushed, and think of places where the other person might feel comfortable.
Make eye contact. It seems like a small thing, but looking a person in the eye builds trust and comfort. And for you to listen deeply, you need people to trust you and feel comfortable sharing their hopes and fears.
If they attack you or your group, don’t be defensive. Ask the person why they feel that way. Keep in mind that every civic leader comes under attack from time to time, sometimes unfairly. If you meet anger with defensiveness, it deepens the antagonism. But if you seek to understand the anger, it diffuses it—and may win you grudging admiration. It’s something good salespeople know: When the customer attacks, don’t defend; probe.

At some point, though, we must move from listening to acting, right? Of course, but as international mediator Mark Gerzon says in his book “Leading Through Conflict,” we don’t suffer in American life from too much listening (which Gerzon calls “inquiry leadership”). We suffer from too little listening and understanding. Here’s Gerzon’s advice about when to move from inquiry to advocacy:

The general rule is this: inquiry precedes advocacy. If you (1) are uncertain about having reliable, complete information; (2) have not yet engaged all the relevant stakeholders; and (3) doubt that you will have sufficient votes, power, or other support to put your plan in action, then it is time for inquiry, not advocacy. However, if you (1) have access to all the necessary information, (2) have obtained input from all the necessary people, and (3) have mapped a clear road to implementing a viable plan, then go ahead. Advocate your “solution” to the issue or conflict, and begin to rally everyone behind you.

In other words, until you understand an issue from all sides, have a clear plan, and enjoy broad support, listen up.

The Temperament of Great Leaders

How Collaboration Happens

Revisiting the Core Skills of Community Leadership

Dealing with Fear and Demagoguery

How to Listen Effectively

About Otis White

The Great Project

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