Emotional Leadership

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

The Delegate Couldn't Know How Deeply His Comment Resonated with Me

Just prior to our saying goodbye, one of the IBM Global LGBT Leadership Workshop delegates, remarked to me one on one, "American culture has a different way of public speaking... and the way you facilitated -- I would call it -- 'emotional leadership'."

Is it part of American culture to facilitate warmly, or is it just my style, and I happen to be American?

It's true that I touch participants on the shoulder and back occasionally and also laugh easily as well as hope to move people -- to activate them -- but it's not even fully conscious on my part...until now, as I'm reflecting on what the delegate said.

In terms of emotions themselves, I always feel so many when facilitating learning, and perhaps, more than ever with this series: a summit for openly lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) IBM executives, and a global leadership development workshop for LGBT not-yet-exec. leaders.

For the workshop I co-designed and facilitated last Friday, I felt sad, desirous, anxious, competitive, thrilled, super-invested, touched and loving. And then afterward, while sitting in the hotel bar with a number of delegates, I felt the same emotions, plus exhausted.

Sad: My father of blessed memory died at ~11:20 pm, November 1st, 1982 and had grown up in D.C., 40 minutes from where I was facilitating in Baltimore. Could I do all I did on November 1st and 2nd to honor his memory? Would he be proud of me, or would we be estranged if he did not approve of my lesbian identity?

Desirous: All of the female delegates and even a few of the male ones are attractive to me. It's exciting to know that none of them is heterosexual -- never happens in any other learning arena. Please God, let me remain appropriate and not cause anyone to feel harassed verbally. Please don't let me embarrass myself by leaking any of these feelings, even as I have a pact with Pat never to act on any such feelings, and haven't in the 20 years we've been together. Don't want to express 'em either.

Anxious: Will I be able to be a great agent for their learning and activation? Am I reaching all of them, or am I leaving some behind? Will the timing of the agenda work out? Can I adjust it effectively if need be? Are they finding the exercises meaningful? Are they willingly opting in to one of the teams being formed around the 2013 Vital Few? Is this learning experience one of the best they've ever had or not? And if not, why not?

Competitive: What is it about the execs. that enabled them to lead such huge missions? What would it take for me to be recognized as worthy of leading one? Which one could it be? Will I ever be recognized as meriting the exec. stripe? Do I look as fit as the other women? Why am I one of the only women in the entire room with short hair? Who am I better-/worse-looking than? How can I stay quiet instead of revealing competitiveness by what I say? How can I remain poised and just listen and be happy for others' success?

Thrilled: What a rush to see them enter the ballroom and pick up their name-badges and tent-cards and to know that it's really happening: nearly 50 LGBT IBMers from around the world, together -- just us -- for a whole day. And thrilled by the international panel -- charming, lovely delegates from Bangalore, Moscow, Vienna and Tel Aviv. How lucky am I to get to ask questions that make me curious and to invite questions from participants! What a privilege to be the moderator!

Super-invested: I want these learners to succeed, especially because they are my people. Also, am concerned that being one of them, I will be judged even more strictly by them than I might be if I weren't one of them.

-- Disclaimer -- : I'm sitting in front of a football game on TV because Pat and I want to be together this evening after my having been away for half a week, and so it's harder to focus on my feelings for this blog-entry. By the way, her Green Bay Packers won, so the mood around here is buoyant.

Touched: When one of the executive panelists -- who's responsible this year for 3/4 of a billion dollars of IBM revenue -- responded to my moderator-question about when he first became aware of his gender identity, I was moved because he spoke of how abused he'd been as a kid by peers, since they saw him as effeminate. Most of all, I was touched that the delegates apparently bought in to my upfront premise of the workshop -- that self-awareness leads to authenticity, which leads to premier leadership -- as demonstrated by their willingness to reflect with one another so openly, especially since a good number of them had never met one another prior to the workshop.

Loving: Just before kicking off the workshop, I sat down next to a delegate with whom I wasn't previously acquainted, introduced myself and asked, "How's it going?"

"It's all sort of a whirlwind," she said, "I'm just taking it all in." She looked like I remember feeling in the early days of my coming out: bombarded. I felt flooded with compassion, listening to her. At the end of the day, when she said goodbye, I saw that she had dimples. They were visible, now that she no longer seemed overwhelmed.

And after the international panel was done, I stood and looked at each of the panelists from Austria, India, Israel and Russia, and felt tearful with a rush of affection; it seemed that they were similarly moved when I looked in their eyes.

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I've been sitting on this blog-entry for weeks, wondering why I couldn't write something more perfectly expressive of my feelings post-Baltimore and as self-revealing and honest as I've been above, I didn't post the above prior to now because it was missing the full expression of my most embarrassing feelings of all (though I did leak a bit of it above in the "Competitive" section....) In the spirit of my friend Richard's belief that it's the things about which we're most embarrassed that are most interesting about us, I'll express it finally, 23 days later:

Am I a hypocrite? Am I practicing what I preached, about pursuing our potential? I invested imagination-time x 2, design-time x 2, sponsor-review-time x 2, room-setup-time x 2, facilitation-time x 2 and all-of-the-above-emotions-time x 2 in dedicating sessions to the advancement of IBM, the LGBT community at large, and very specifically to a selected group of LGBT IBMers, but when will I know when I've fully advanced and reached my own potential? What *is* my own potential? What is healthy ambition vs. unhealthy ego? How much ego do I get to have before it's unhealthy?

I am qualified and repeatedly invited to help develop premier leaders, but am I recognized as a leader myself? And if so, why am I not literally leading people again, with a title to match? And is it enough to me if I myself recognize myself as a leader? And when did I gain this craving for outward status? When I joined the company, I did not even aspire to be a first-line people manager, and then did, but for pastoral reasons -- really -- and the people-manager role did satisfy my pastoral bent. And I left management to help start up the LGBT business development mission, and didn't return. Why am I thinking so literally now?

Would it wreck the amazing experience a number of delegates told me they had if they knew that their facilitator had these questions? Or might it paradoxically reinforce my credibility?

And what will I do with these questions? How can I answer them in a way that benefits my work and me altogether? All I can do is make a personal pledge that co-designing and delivering the sessions is rededicating me to further pursue my own potential in addition to having promoted that the delegates pursue theirs. Time for more prayer, too, I think: God, please help me follow your direction. Amen.

Lady Gaga & a Leadership Development Conference

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Re-posted from my IBM internal "Learning to Lead" Blog

I snapped this photo at the Galleria's Massimo Dutti store, by the Duomo; to me, they looked like a couple.

"Dio errori non ne fa." / "God makes no mistakes." This was among the only statements translated into English in Francesca Giuliani's article on p. 53 of the June 7th edition of Italy's newspaper, "la Repubblica;" it seemed to be a reference to Lady Gaga's new song, "Born This Way," and her planned appearance at yesterday's festival associated with Rome's Europride celebration for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) people. How apt to read that statement as I flew from Newark to Milan to help facilitate the GLBT Leadership Development Conference that I co-designed for 30 IBM senior, but not yet executive, GLBT leaders from across Europe....

As a result of the conference, a delegate in a critical role pledged that he would not accept a lucrative offer that was on the table from [a competitor]; another decided that pursuing a promotion was worth the effort after all, though prior to the Conference, he had convinced himself not to try; another recruited six other delegates for half a year's worth of monthly programs in the podcast series he calls "Radio Eyrie," which is designed to be a collection of informal learning on what selected gay, lesbian, bi and trans IBM leaders know about their parts of the IBM business and can explain to any IBMer who wants to listen; hope they add a link from it to IBM's Informal Learning Exchange (ILX).

In addition to the delegates' commitments to further developing business, GLBT Community initiatives and themselves as leaders, I found the following moments of the conference to be among the most profound:

• Delegates' arrival; hadn't been a host of what felt like such a warm reception line since my Bat Mitzvah at 13; everyone seemed so pleased to be there, and I was, too
  
• Lucio Toninelli, HR VP, Italy, talking about how Italy as a country has some distance yet to go in becoming GLBT-friendly: "You don't change a culture of centuries overnight, but you don't give up"
  
• A delegate's:
  
  • Enthusiastic reaction to the cost-of-thinking-twice flowchart that openly-lesbian IBM Managing Director Claudia Woody adapted from IBM alumnus John Martin
    
  • Gratitude for being helped to expand his career vista simply by being asked in plenary, "Is a future IBM CEO in this room today?"
    
  • Self-reminder that she needs to shut down negative self-talk that says, I'll never fit in and so never will reach my potential
    
  • Plea for more decision-making power/empowerment as a manager in response to another delegate's experience that anything is possible...if one is willing to go through however many necessary checks and balances, i.e., so many checks and balances should be unnecessary, he felt, if we are serious about Our Value of Trust and personal responsibility in all relationships
    
  • Conclusion about external speaker, Andrea Notarnicola's, quote from author Martha Nussbaum's message, "...disgust is not an appropriate guide for decision-making;" the delegate realized that just as she hopes that non-GLBT leaders heed the message when they assess GLBT employees, she needs to heed it as well, regarding anyone with whom she is not natively comfortable
    
• Delegates' selected, early experiences of first recognizing themselves as leaders, including:
  
  • Being put into the officers' stream of the Royal Air Force and accepting the role (and then being discharged for homosexual activity)
    
  • After 5 or 6 months as a first-line manager, being introduced as "my boss" by one of his direct reports; he realized then that he needed to rise to the occasion and demonstrate real leadership
    
  • Becoming the Head Boy in a South African boarding school, after speaking no English just four years prior, and managing 15 Prefects, and then being a people manager for his entire career so far
    
  • Not seeing self as a leader, but:
    
    • Rather, as a thought leader, e.g., being asked for a rationale on why Database Marketing & Market Intelligence should merge, and this was 10 years prior to the industry doing the same
      
    • Having it thrust on him, since first serving as a Prefect at 16 and then always managing teams in his career.
      
  • Helping advance GLBT inclusion among:
    
    • The UK's Sea Cadets
      
    • A major, national Lutheran youth organization.
      
  • In the movie theater, where he worked at 15, suggesting to his management that he could do the best job as the manager and having his management listen and appoint him...and he *did*
    
  • When he was a kid, having all of the other kids always looking to him for what they would play every day and now, fast-forward to his volunteer-work, leading a national association for Gay and Lesbian people in Denmark.
    
• My reminder that IBMers have lived/worked/done business in many countries other than their own, and so even though everyone currently lived in Europe, a substantial number had lived/worked/done business everywhere from Indonesia, to Malaysia, to Mozambique, to Thailand, to the United States, to Zimbabwe and others
  
• External speaker, Andrea's, smart-phone metaphor about the 21st century and gay, lesbian, bi & transpeople's leadership opportunities: Our lives are in our hands....I agree!
  

Helping My People...

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

Is Draining, but Fun

Today, I was invited to talk with the Jewish Community of IBM, which historically (for the past couple of years) has existed as an opt-in online community whose members mostly provide tips on where to find Kosher meals while traveling on business.

The leader is a member of the IBM Manager Community that I lead and he asked me some time ago, "Would you like to talk with the Jewish at IBM Community about Leadership Development opportunities?"

"Sure," I said, feeling more responsibility than usual, more nervous. It's one thing to help leaders at large, but to help leaders from my own community was more pressure than I expected.

In the experience of it today, when I heard a couple of clicks about 15 minutes into the hour, I was crestfallen. What Epikorsische (overly-secular) thing did I say that caused them to hang up on this teleconference, on me? Specifically, I worried that I had somehow offended a couple of the more strictly, Jewishly observant members. Oh, well. Keep your cheery tone up, I told myself and forged on.

It felt important to be telling them of the many resources that were available for their IBM leadership development, both online and as part of formal learning programs and offerings, and to be interspersing my own experience with the tools particularly. Why shouldn't I help my people specifically along with all IBMers? Historically, I've helped my gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender IBM colleagues a great deal, but never before was called on to help a dedicated group of Jewish IBMers.

Blame it on Web 2.0; every IBMer can start up an online community behind our firewall now. How great that we can find one another so much more easily now, i.e., people with whom we naturally affiliate.

Probably, about 20 people spent their lunch- and dinner-time with me, depending where they were calling from -- one guy said he was dialing from Israel and had a super-Israeli name -- and only a few consistently asked questions. It can be a loaded topic, and a bit anxiety-provoking, I was reminded, and probably, it didn't help that I called the presentation, "IBM Leadership Development: Another Way for Your Family to Klive Nachas [Take Pride]."

Later, this afternoon, I received an instant-message from a colleague, asking if he could speak with me individually about IBM leadership opportunities, as he had not been comfortable, talking in front of the rest of the callers.

Apparently, I wasn't the only one feeling some pressure. It was worth it, though. Certainly, my mom was proud to hear about the session.