Loss and Leadership Maturity

We all have experienced loss. We’ve all felt the blues. We’ve all suffered. This shared reality, heightened by the viral pandemic, presents an opportunity for mature leadership.

The title above points to the vital necessity for leaders to lean into loss rather than ignore, suppress, or deny it. Loss breaks our heart, forces us to go within to confront our shadows and fears, our denials, our guilt, our wounds. To come out on the other side of grief and loss with new understanding and renewed dedication requires inner strength. It takes maturity to gain wisdom and perspective from the lessons of loss.

Mature leadership embodies strength of character and emotional depth. Mature leaders confront loss and harness empathy and compassion, especially in times of crisis, when fear and anxiety rise to a fever pitch.

When leaders allow their hearts to stay broken open, they’re able to recognize that the suffering they encounter every day among their employees, colleagues, and investors is universal. . . All loss threatens the love, safety, and belonging of even those who hold power. 

—Jerry Colonna  

The Power of Vulnerability

Author Brené Brown is famous for her work on vulnerability and courage. Her enrichment of the discourse of emotional maturity opened the way for my receptivity to the work of executive and leadership coach Jerry Colonna. His book Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up was one of my favorite leadership titles of 2019.

Colonna’s professional achievement in the mid-1990s at the early-stage investment program Flatiron Partners in New York City, followed by the trappings of success at the private equity arm of JPMorgan Chase, was belied by inner turmoil derived from the lingering affect of a troubled childhood. I was astonished by his candor, rendered in beautiful prose with abiding insights into the human condition. His journey inward, painful and difficult, became a narrative of a gentle warrior, who came out on the other side of grief and loss to help other leaders on their journey to resilience and equanimity.

Jerry Colonna

Near the end of the book Colonna makes a key distinction between false grit and true grit. False grit is brittle, a delusive tendency to act as if you don’t feel pain when you get hit, which leads to stubborn behaviors in denial of inner, interpersonal and, often, outer reality. True grit, rather, “acknowledges the potential of failure, embraces the fear of disappointment, and rallies the team to reach and try, regardless of the potential of loss.”

That’s mature leadership informed by the blues.

Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat. Our fate is to become one, and yet many—This is not prophecy, but description.

—Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man 

Political Dimension

Regular readers of this blog will recall that we’ve riffed on how in jazz as well as contemporary organizational practice, shared and distributed leadership is a more agile and resilient model than the old command-and-control model (which still has a function, especially in emergencies.) Another aspect of distributed leadership is sharing and distributing losses.

In the model of adaptive leadership pioneered by Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky of the Harvard Kennedy School, significant changes that are resisted within organizations occur not because of fear of change per se, but due to fear of loss. Loss has a political dimension that mature leaders confront. “When change involves real or potential loss, people hold on to what they have and resist the change.”

A key to leadership, then, is the diagnostic capacity to find out the kinds of losses at stake in a changing situation, from life and loved ones to jobs, wealth, status, relevance, community, loyalty, identity, and competence. Adaptive leadership almost always puts you in the business of assessing, managing, distributing, and providing contexts for losses that move people through those losses to a new place.

—The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World, pp. 22-23

Far From Easy, But Necessary

The emotional intelligence and thoughtful, visionary political engagement required by mature leaders isn’t easy. Yet considering the demands of our time, the uncertainty and dangers caused by Covid-19, and the tsunami of personal, social, and economic loss based on the lockdown, the burden and rewards of leadership must be embraced by ready, willing, and able men and women of courage.

Now’s the time for mature leadership.