About John J. Scherer
It’s
fascinating how John’s principals translate so easily to
cultures around the world, to people in China, Eastern
Europe, Kenya, and Canada are transformed by his
approach to ‘Unleashing the Human Spirit at Work’. It is
easy to see the trajectory that his life has taken. This
boy from Richmond, VA, an Eagle Scout and professional
magician, was Captain of his Roanoke College swim team,
and holder of many campus leadership positions. After
graduating with honors, he served four years as a Combat
Officer in the US Navy. Following in his grandfather’s
footsteps, he became a Lutheran Minister, where his
first ‘congregation’ was with ‘people of the night’ on
the streets of Norfolk, VA. He then was called as
Lutheran Chaplain at Cornell University and begin his
practice as a Gestalt Therapist. He soon found himself
working with campus and community groups on issues that
divided them, and gained a reputation as a facilitator
of conflict and change. Business and government leaders
who experienced his work began calling on him as a
consultant.
In 1973 he moved to Spokane, WA, and co-created the
first competency-based Master’s Program in Applied
Behavioral Science. That program equipped hundreds of
men and women to be ‘change artists’ and opened John to
taking his work international: consulting, speaking,
leading seminars and becoming an author .It was at this
point that John decided to launch his own leadership
development firm. Since 1987, John’s Executive and
Leadership Development Intensives have helped business
and community leaders from 22 countries to expand the
mind, stretch the body and deepen the spirit.
John’s first book Parables (1972), looking at Jesus’
stories as transformational encounters. His second, Work
and the Human Spirit (1993), opened the door on the
movement, and his latest, Five Questions That Change
Everything: Life Lessons at Work, is explores how to
turn the workplace into a school for deep development.
Stephen Covey’s organization recently named John one of
America’s Top 100 Thought Leaders in Personal &
Leadership Development, along with people like Lance
Armstrong, Oprah Winfrey, Mark Victor Hansen and Wayne
Dyer.
In this article, John will explore what role emotions
have in leadership and in leadership development. Are
emotions simply ‘static in the system’ or a potentially
dangerous distraction (or worse) to be over-ridden by
the mind, or do they play a more central part in
leadership effectiveness?
Not long ago I was with the senior leadership team of a
well-known international company in a three-day
leadership development experience. They had come
together to explore who they were, individually and
together, and to learn how to be more effective at what
they DO by becoming more fully aware of and stepping
into who they ARE. Not your traditional road.
These highly-skilled and successful men and women were
running the most operationally effective and financially
solid division of their region, yet they sensed there
was more to be had. The CEO believed it had to do with
the human factor, the culture that had developed in the
process of becoming successful. People were in their
departmental silos and not collaborating as well as they
could. He believed there was even more success to be had
by breaking down some of their barriers to each
other—and to themselves.
By taking this approach, they were placing themselves on
a path which has recently proven to be increasingly
well-traveled and well-documented. The business
world—and the organizational world in general—has
finally come to see that IQ (Rational Intelligence and
Critical Thinking) is necessary but not sufficient for
long-term success or effectiveness. How many brilliant
managers and leaders have you known who ‘fell off the
cart’ at some point, not because they weren’t smart
enough, but because of ‘something else’? That something
else has been given a name, EQ, and Dan Goleman is
credited with bringing it to the attention of growing
numbers of people with his book, Emotional Intelligence.
The Adaptive Skills
In the mid-1970’s Richard Bolles (What Color is Your
Parachute?) came up with three levels of skill that
effective people needed to be working on. In 1975, I
placed them in an iceberg model like this:
‘Above the waterline’ are the Work Content Skills,
things you need to know how to do to be effective at the
job you now have. If you were a dentist (who needed to
know how to do a root canal), and you changed careers to
become a marketing specialist, a whole bunch of Work
Content Skills would no longer be useful, and a whole
new batch of Work Content Skills would suddenly need to
be learned. These are not transferable from one type of
job to another.
Just beneath the surface are the Functional (or
Transferable) Skills. These are things that our dentist
above could take along to the next career. Skills like
communication, problem-solving, budgeting, planning,
leading meetings, motivating people, etc.
Then, ‘deeper’ in a sense, are the Adaptive Skills, or,
as I have renamed them, the Basic Human Tendencies.
These are the skills you and I developed at a very early
age that have to do with how we learned to adapt or get
along in the world. They include things like how we
approach conflict, what ‘sets us off’ or makes us happy,
the human needs we have (for instance: recognition, or
status, or safety, or control) and what we do to try to
ensure we have enough of them. These are our underlying
‘down deep’ assumptions and tendencies which influence
how we experience ourselves, others and life. The
‘default settings’ in our operating program which appear
when we ‘boot up’ in the morning. This level actually
determines how effective we will be in our Work Content
and Functional skill areas. By the time we are five or
six, these skills or tendencies are well-entrenched and
have become what I call our ‘Autopilot’. Put us in a
room with a bunch of people and watch how we operate. In
many ways, we are ‘on automatic’ and don’t even realize
it. If someone around us does X, we almost always have
reaction Y.
This is NOT about IQ or Intelligence
These ways of operating in the world are not rational.
In fact, a case can be made that a great deal of what we
do from moment to moment is clearly not rational at all!
Or else, why do we continue to do things that we know
don’t work? Apparently, ‘knowing’ is not enough. If all
we needed to do was THINK a new thought, or learn
something we needed to know about, we’d all be highly
effective and successful: ‘Just figure out what the
correct or empowering or helpful thought is and think
it. When you do, life will begin to unfold in miraculous
ways.’
Today, there are many teachers out there who propose
just such an approach. Would that it were so. . .
Because, lurking just under the surface of this rational
world of manageable thoughts, is the world of
un-manageable emotions, feelings, ‘knowings’ of a very
different kind. As long as that wonderful new thought is
happening ‘over the top’ of a bone-deep emotional
pattern that runs counter to that thought, the internal
dissonance created will sabotage that new thought every
time. It looks like we navigate off our emotions much
more often than our rational thoughts. One CEO told me,
‘I finally figured out what I do when I have to make a
decision: I gather lots and lots of data, talk to lots
and lots of people, develop a sensible, rational plan of
action—then I follow my ‘gut’ feeling.’ In my own life
and work, every time I have gone against my ‘gut’
(emotional knowing), I have paid for it.
Why Are We So Afraid of Emotions at Work?
Meanwhile, back at that senior leadership team, off in
the development course. . . At one point in the
experience each person was working on what I call their
‘GPS’ (Greater Purpose Statement). Part of the process
entailed them listening as their colleagues told them
what they saw as their core strengths, their ‘charisms’
or natural gifts. After receiving those words from their
colleagues, the person was invited to speak about their
areas of development, or
what I call ‘stretches’—things that ‘aren’t perfect
yet’—and asked the group for ones they had left out.
In the process of hearing and seeing themselves
reflected in the words of their close colleagues inside
the safe space they had created, virtually every one of
these hard-driving, successful senior leaders started to
‘get emotional’. You could see it well up behind their
eyes and their faces softened. Some said, ‘I can’t speak
right now. I don’t want to get emotional. Give me a
second.’
It’s not a word that gets used much in the workplace
but, sitting there in the presence of such courage and
honesty, I would swear that what was happening in that
experience was love. Profound love.In the workplace.
With colleagues that occasionally fight about stuff. And
will again. But something shifted that can change the
way they deal with the ‘stuff’ that comes at them.
Here’s my question: Why is that aspect of
reality—emotion, one that seems so central to life and
vitality, so resisted? What is it about emotions that
has earned them such a bad rap? What would happen if the
creative energy embedded in emotion were to be tapped
into at work? Isn’t that what every leader wants:
loyalty, commitment, energy, enthusiasm? If they don’t
live in the emotional domain, where do they hang out? Do
leaders actually think they can generate those kinds of
emotions in their people, and not themselves dive into
the world of emotions?
John J. Scherer
