Fixing the Pain of Leadership

Many managers have had the distinct displeasure of being completely taken aback at something someone did to them or said about them. Think of when the boss threw your proposal back in your lap with a curt, "My 11-year-old could have come up with something better than this."

It feels like an kick in the gut. Emotions flare: anger, pain, failure. It is difficult to think about anything else. Jerome Murphy, a professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, calls this the "leadership trap." The trap is that, as leaders, we think of ourselves as the people with all the answers. So when faced with the reality that we might be fallible, leaders have difficulty dealing constructively with the fallout.

"Running away, suppressing your feelings, and hiding are common methods of control," Murphy writes on a blog post. "Yet the more you struggle to control your insides, it turns out the more you undermine your outsides -- your ability to build trust and take charge as a leader. The more you bury your stress, for instance, the more stressed and reactive you become."

Addressing this pain of leadership requires the person to recognize the emotions she is feeling. His four-step method is to:

1. Pause, step back, and observe your aches, rather than plunge into your internal tangle and become completely entwined in it.
2. Accept your troubling feelings as perfectly normal and get on with your work, rather than deplete your energy (and time) in a vain struggle to feel better first.
3. Concentrate your attention on what you can control -- the appropriate expression of your feelings and, most important, your actions in pursuit of your values.
4. Develop the poise to take effective action despite intense personal discomfort.

He provides the useful example of an university leader who is suddenly presented with a vote of no confidence from the faculty. By going through the four steps, the leader is able to respond with "a balanced plan for responding to the letter -- e.g., listening carefully to the faculty, adding your perspective, addressing frayed feelings, and deciding on next steps together."

What do you take to ease and work through the pain of leadership?

Related Reading

• 5 Steps to Identify Opportunity in the Adversity Around You
• J.K.Rowling Wows the Muggles at Harvard
• Why Success Breeds Failure -- and What To Do About It

(Photo by Flickr user ncanup, CC 2.0)