Traditionally, the best and brightest specialists were promoted to positions of leadership, on the strength of the rationale that their creative success would permeate the team they headed. The legacy of this strategy, however, is knowledge organisations that are often financially and intellectually weakened by these brilliant specialists who were actually incompetent, autocratic leaders. Even today, few technical specialists are schooled in general management and, as a consequence, most learn from experience or need to receive management and leadership training after their appointment.
Recent research is showing that classic directive leadership or traditional autocratic management strategies are not effective in knowledge organisations or teams, and that knowledge workers respond to inspiration rather than supervision. Henry Mintzberg rightly notes that, in knowledge teams, the members are there because they are highly proficient at what they do so they need little coaching at a technical level. What they do need, according to Mintzberg, is inspiration, protection and support, all of which agree with the creativity-enhancing supervisory encouragement and organisational support of Amabile. Mintzberg described the type of leadership required to effectively lead a knowledge team as “covert leadership” because it is leadership that is delivered subtly through everything the leader does.
Leadership is generally accepted to occur at three different levels: the individual level where leaders mentor, coach and motivate; the group level, where leaders build teams and resolve conflicts; and at the organisational level, where leaders build culture. On the individual and team levels, leaders can covertly inspire and energise just by treating team members as “respected members of a cohesive social system”. Mintzberg stipulates that covert leadership establishes the team culture because the leader sets the culture standard through behaviour. Hardy and Schwartz also noted that a leader is only effective if her behaviour matches her directives. Therefore, the behaviour of a leader establishes the culture of the team or organisation, regardless of whether directives accompany the behaviour or not.
–Heather L. Bruce, Leading Creativity: Effective Leadership of Knowledge Teams
Category Archives: Humanities
Exactly Where She Wants To Be
I’m a mental health professional, but I am also human. Therefore I experience the slings and arrows of life, which sometimes land solidly under a chink in my armor, and as I cannot be objective about myself, I suffer as others do.
Recently I wrote to my friend, Marta:
IÂ’m treading water of my own depression.
I could be happy, content — I ought to be. I am healthy (mostly), employed, loved, housed, fed, clothed. People like me, they really like me! BUT. Instead I feel numb, or emotionally flat, and my body aches a great deal. I carry out my daily duties and smile and laugh, but I also feel resistant, unsettled, and clenched. Meeting new people and making friends is trying. I miss you. I miss my other peeps. I avoid the phone because I want in-person connection. Ah, fuck it.
And I haven’t made art. Though I did color this weekend — a mandala. Does that count?
What is WRONG with me? I ask this in light of my recent encounter with death. Why the hell am I not embracing my life, cherishing it? Living it with joy?
And bless her wise, enormous heart, she wrote words of comfort and meaning.
That is a cliché. Encounters with death do not make us cherish life more. I think people say that because it is expected. It is what you’re supposed to say. Maybe they do sometimes, in moments of sunshine and cool breezes on the skin and what-not, but I think they often make us more fearful, more stressed, more tired. When my mother died I felt that there was nothing except a great, horrible void all around me. There was no floor under my feet and no roof over my head, just space and the knowledge that for the rest of time as I knew it, my mother would not be there. Perhaps because her death was unexpected, it made me feel that death waited around every minute of every day. It takes a while after that to feel that any of the small things that normally bring joy had any point at all. There is nothing wrong with you. You’re grieving. It isn’t easy and it isn’t tidied up with pithy sayings and clichés. But a moment will come when you’ll realize that you have been cherishing life, and you won’t be sure when the change came. At least, that’s how it was for me.
I have grieved deeply before. The last time I was also experiencing a moderate depression, and the loss which evoked grief deepened that episode. I have much more insight now, and a vastly better support system than I had then. Pharmacology helps too. Of late, I just find life draining and irritating. I become annoyed with the unexpected, when I would rather meet it with equanimity. Cognitive behaviorists would prescribe that I need to change my thinking. Buddhists would suggest I meditate and notice my ego. Athletes would recommend more exercise. Psychoanalysts would infer that this was connected to a long-buried childhood pattern or experience. All may be true, but this doesn’t change a thing.
I long for (and perhaps this is part of the problem) the following experience, and wish it to be the general tone of my life:
I arrived for one of my last sojourns at The Farm on a chill sunny day quite early in June 1979, just after Aunt Jane and Uncle Kip had moved up for the summer, while the lemon lilies and iris were still in bloom, before all the asparagus had gone to fern. After settling my considerable baggage in the downstairs front bedroom, which would be mine now that I could no longer climb the stairs to the one above it, I wandered back into the kitchen. It was new to me, the ample wooden cabinets and yellow Formica counters and stainless-steel sinks and especially the wide bay window above the table. I stood staring through the newly ample panes at the sweep of garden, lavendar flags and yellow trumpets against a tangle of green, the whole blurred in the long spreading shafts of late light.
“What are you looking at?” Jane asked behind me.
“Just the garden,” I answered. “I was feeling the pleasure of being exactly where I want to be.”
“I’m glad,” she said. “I’m glad you’re here.”Everyone should have one place where, when she’s in it, she’s exactly where she wants to be. And if she can no longer return to it, well, at least she’ll have been there. That’s something.
–Nancy Mairs, Remembering the Bone House: an Erotics of Space & Place
I have experienced this before, numerous times, in my original home state and then during my Texas years. But not since I moved to California.
I write about my personal struggles here both to cope with my life (the expression is curative), and with the hope that others reading it might find a kindred spirit and thus feel less alone in their journey.
A Mother and Not-Mother
Every girl should have a mother, I think, not the sort of predatory monster sketched out and whined about in pop-psych books designed to cop a chunk of the bestseller trade, but an ordinary mother like mine, flawed but serviceable, who will hang your kindergarten plaque in her kitchen and teach you to sew an invisible hem in your skirts and stay up watching a late movie with you both because she likes you and because she likes the movie. She may, like mine, take some of her responsibilities too seriously, especially in matters (not entirely unrelated) of politeness and sex, and in this way cause you a good bit of unnecessary teeth gnashing and sleeplessness. But unless, unlike mine, she’s some kind of nut, you’ll learn to interpret the clamp of emotional hands on your spirit as one of love’s shape-shifting signs and to pry her fingers free without breaking them or the heart they clutch.
At the same time, every girl should have a not-mother, a woman who has, in every sense, no stake in you. If you’re a bad child, no one will blame her. And she has a much narrower interpretation of badness than your mother, anyway. Almost nothing you do seems to strike her as bad. A lot more of what you do strikes her as funny. Like when you build a “cat house,” you solemnly tell her, for sleek, striped Minnie. Or when you lather yourself lavishly with the expensive soap from S.S. Pierce shaped exactly like a lemon, with a lemon’s maddening pungency. She’s under no obligation to warn you that certain words “aren’t nice” or to exhort you to thrift. She’s under no obligation at all. That’s what a girl needs: a woman who’s free to love her without fretting whether she’s going to grow up to be all right.
–Nancy Mairs, Remembering the Bone House: an Erotics of Space & Place
Penetrate the Veiled Consciousness
All I know is that people never penetrate the veiled consciousness that earns me the label “dreamy” (though it isn’t dreaminess unless life itself is, after all, a dream). Places do. I can establish a direct relationship with the slant of sun across a rug, the smell of blueberry bushes or mud flats, the scratch of sand inside a wet bathing suit, pale creamy oatmeal in a blue-and-white bowl, hot and sweet. These things speak to me as people do not.
–Nancy Mairs, Remembering the Bone House: an Erotics of Place & Space
Freaky Friday? Nah.
The news will be chock full of talk about the superstition surrounding this day. Read about the history of Friday the 13th and the possible origins for fearing this date.
As for me, I embrace it. There are 13 lunar cycles in a year (I cherish the moon). A baker’s dozen means one extra goody for me. Friday is a wonderful day of the week, the start of the weekend. There is no reason to build up fear where none is justified.
Oh yes, another reason to enjoy this day? It marks the fact I’ve now been married two months.
Happy Friday the 13th, everyone. Go break a mirror, walk under a ladder, and cross the path of a black cat. And don’t bother throwing salt over your shoulder.
Beyond A Mere Escape
It’s that the benefits of reading extend beyond a mere escape from oneself. They linger. Reading affords one a certain detachment from life. Reading allows me, at least, to approach the events of my own life with the same mild curiosity I have toward a good novel: it’s easier not to get so invested. One could argue that film and television must do the same, but in truth, there is something different between the mediums. Books – texts – are private, personal, unique. They’re fueled and informed by whatever you’ve already experienced. Movies are public. They give everything to you. Also, television and film are almost always (and necessarily) presented from a limited third-person point of view: the nature of the stated objectivity of the camera makes anything else difficult. Books can be written from the inside, or from all sides – you get a taste of what it’s like to experience the world through the eyes and skin and past of another.
–Siona, Nomen Est Numen
Educational Conundrum
One-third of the state’s public elementary school students — that’s more than 1.5 million children — are classified as English learners.
Currently, the schools face conflicting incentives over how to deal with these students.
On the one hand, NCLB [No Child Left Behind] requires California schools to increase the number of students they reclassify from English learner to English proficient. On the other hand, the act requires all groups — including English learners — to show improvement in academic achievement. By themselves both requirements are reasonable.
Schools should strive for improvement in English proficiency as well as academic achievement among their English learners. But if students haven’t reached a certain threshold of English proficiency, they simply cannot demonstrate their full academic ability on tests that are given in English.
Under the current law, increases in reclassification are likely to cause decreases in academic test scores for English learners because the most proficient — and consequently highest scoring — students are no longer part of that group. So, with improvement required in both areas … where does the incentive lie?
And then there’s the financial lure: Schools now receive additional funding from NCLB for each English learner student they have, but once they reclassify a student from English learner to English proficient, they lose that money. So again, where does the incentive lie?
–Christopher Jepsen, ‘No Child Left Behind’ leaving English-learners behind?
Read more in English Learners in California Schools, by Christopher Jepsen and Shelley de Alth.
A Place For Everything
Widen your consciousness to the dimension of the earth and you will have a place for everything.
–Mira Alfassa (The Mother)
A Secret Cry
There is a secret cry inside every heart, sometimes so deeply hidden that it may not even be audible to the person who hides it. Whether they are complete strangers or someone you think you have known all your life, if you can hear a person’s secret cry then all your defenses and criticisms crumble. You become one with them and you cannot do anything other than love them as yourself.
–Natalie d’Arbeloff, Blaugustine
All The Beauty
All beauty of this world is wet with the dew of tears.
–Theodor Haecker
A New Perspective on Frustration With Inconsistency
However, for me, my frustration regarding my inconsistency or impermanence is an expression of how I suffer when I am unable to control both my situations and my self. I struggle to lock myself down in a fixed state. I imagine what qualities I would possess were I who I want to be and then I try hold that all in place in the hopes that I wonÂ’t have to wonder who I am. If I begin to doubt who I am and what makes me me, I can look to these labels that I attach to myself and feel reassured. I am a Buddhist. I am a vegetarian. I am a vegan. I am sensitive. I am someone who does yoga. I am someone with radical politics. And so on.
Is it any wonder that I am then inconsistent? After all, none of these things make me who I am. I donÂ’t even make me who I am.
Going To My Heart
Today my prayer consisted in simply going to my heart and re-membering all the folks I’ve stored there. It is not cold storage. It is a quite warm and tender place.
–Sr. Macrina Wiederkehr, OSB, A Tree Full of Angels
The Antidote
Despair, said Thomas Merton, is the absolute extreme of self-love.
If we believe in the self, and cling to the self, how can we not despair ? The self faces certain obliteration. It arises from and returns to nothing.
But if we see the conscious self as a construction — a local epiphenomenon in the vast, interconnected web of being — we might attain what he describes as “humility,” the antidote to self-love.
How do we accomplish this ? Meditation lays us bare to ourselves — sensation, thought, intention, all arise in the mind, as does the watcher, just a thought among thoughts.
Once we’ve seen this, how can we return to all those heady boasts and claims ? I am this. I am that. Oh, really ? Tell me more.
And, thus deflated, how can we keep hankering after stuff ? Or hating ?
If you want to call part of this process “God,” I have no quibble with you.
–Paula, author of Affiction
Too Good Not to Post
Jack, a blogger whom I’ve read on and off for the past year, wrote something I felt compelled (again) to post at this site.
We keep ourselves stuck with how and why questions. How am I to live? How am I to get people to love me the way I want them to? How am I do get where I want to go in my career? Why am I where I am? Why do people in my world act and think the way they do?
Joseph Campbell’s spin: I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive. Looking for the meaning of life is looking for the how and why. Being alive is about saying yes to what makes us feel most alive. The answer to how and why is yes.
What makes you feel alive?
–Jack, from Jack/Zen
Off the top of my head…
- Walking and pausing to smell all the glorious roses that bloom in just about every front yard here.
- Giving Stella a body massage and burying my face in her tummy while she purrs.
- Drinking cold water when I’m thirsty.
- Reading aloud to interested listeners.
- Cooking a delicious meal, lighting candles, serving it with a glass of good wine.
- Writing
- Making collages, doing needlepoint.
- Helping out at organizations that benefit others.
- Listening to music.
- Lying in the hammock, enjoying the breeze.
- Clean, fresh bedsheets.
- A bouquet of flowers on the living room table.
- Slathering lavendar-lemon, or vanilla, or rose-scented oil on my skin.
- Riding my bike.
- Blowing bubbles in a park.
I’m certain I could think of more… but why waste time thinking? I do that so much already. I’d rather take a walk in the evening air.
Have a restful weekend, good readers. Or an active one, if that’s your preference! I’ll return Monday with more “good stuff.”
Read To (Your) Children
When my students had to take the mid-term tests for my program, I promised them a reward if they all focused and finished within one week. They did, and I made good on my vow. I gave them each a copy of a classic children’s book.
Book ownership is a significant component of cultivating the habit of reading. Having one’s own books, to pick up anytime and delve into, creates a sense of investment. This can encourage the attitude of curiosity that prompts one to look between the covers. My students don’t own many books.
Another aspect of helping children love reading is to read to them. Again, this is something many children don’t experience. The book I gave them is The Phantom Tollbooth. They were somewhat in awe when I gave each a copy. A few days later, one student told me, “You know, I thought this book would be boring, but it isn’t!”
As a reward for excellent behavior at the end of program yesterday, I offered to read aloud. I read the first chapter and, when done, asked if they’d liked being read to. They all nodded vigorously. One student said, “You read fast, Teacher.” I asked if that was bad, and he replied that it was good, that other teachers read too slow and in a boring voice. Another boy declared with enthusiasm, “Teacher, I didn’t like it. I LOVED IT!” So I promised to read them a chapter a day, 20 in all, as long as they also read it on their own. It’s such a fun story to read aloud! I wish I could read to children more often.
If you have children in your life — your own, nieces, nephews, cousins, your friends’ kids — consider buying them a book for their next birthday. Or just because; reading doesn’t have to be a special occasion. And read them a story, or a book about a subject they like, when you next have time for a shared activity. You’ll have their rapt attention, and you’ll probably enjoy yourself.