The Poetry of Leadership
Monthly, as a Vistage Chair, I facilitate peer advisory boards where business owners, executives and CEOs support each other with their most complex strategic opportunities and leadership challenges.
My job is to help group members interrupt executive tendencies to give advice or fix problems while generating a space where we can lead with more open, honest, and curious questions. Questions that invite deeper reflection, connection, and understanding of not only our business and leadership issues but also each other and, ultimately, ourselves as leaders.
Listening is a key leadership muscle we stretch in these group sessions. As business leaders our success hinges on how well we listen – not just with our heads, but with our hearts and our guts.
In this spirit, I sometimes kick off our meetings with a poem. Poetry has a way of slowing us down, inviting greater self-reflection, and teaching us to listen in new ways.
In Leading from Within – Poetry That Sustains the Courage to Lead, Sam Intrator and Megan Scribner explain, “in our ultra-busy, competitive, and desperately breathless world, we need tools that slow us down, talk to our heart, and inspire conversations, both within ourselves and with others, about what it means to lead, to serve, and to journey with heart.”
In our space together, I plan to share an occasional leadership inspired poem as an invitation to slow down, and drop down, into these deeper levels of listening.
This first poem, about the power of connecting with others, is from James Autry’s collection, Love and Profit, The Art of Caring Leadership.
Where might you be able to pay more attention to the threads in your office?
“Threads”
by James Autry
Sometimes you just connect,
like that,
no big thing maybe
but something beyond the usual business stuff.
It comes and goes quickly
so you have to pay attention,
a change in the eyes
when you ask about the family,
a pain flickering behind the statistics
about a boy and a girl in school,
or about seeing them every other Sunday.
An older guy talks about his bride,
a little affectation after twenty-five years.
A hot-eyed achiever laughs before you want him to.
Someone tells about his wife's job
or why she quit working to stay home.
An old Joker needs another laugh on the way
to retirement.
A woman says she spends a lot of her salary
on an au pair
and a good one is hard to find
but worth it because there's nothing more important
than the baby.
Listen.
In every office
you hear the threads
of love and joy and fear and guilt,
the cries for celebration and reassurance,
And somehow you know that connecting those threads
is what you are supposed to do
and business takes care of itself.
