Maintaining the Servant-Leader Balance
It is a common experience for many of use to be driving along and suddenly experience an explosion of red and blue flashing lights in our rear view mirror. Something has happened to cause us to be noticed by the police. There is usually a visceral response - a sudden pit in our stomach, a shiver up our spine - as we find our way to the side of the road while wondering what wire we tripped.
When I was first learning to drive, I would have these visceral feelings of having been caught doing something wrong even while driving correctly. Having an excitable father, predisposed to anger, coaching from the passenger seat certainly didn't help. It made learning how to drive an unpleasant experience and, in hind sight, wasn't particularly effective at making me a good driver in a short period of time. It took a year or two of driving on my own to gain confidence and make my way around town without the unhelpful and unnecessary sense of dread and anxiety.
Curious enough, these same sensations occurred in other areas of my life. In college I was an excellent student in large part because of the fear of making a mistake. As a young quality control chemist for a global pharmaceutical company my work was impeccable due to the precise instructions that had to be followed and, again, the fear of making a mistake. If I did poorly on an exam or couldn't successfully complete a QA test on a particular product batch, the metaphorical police car in the rear view mirror was there to engage the bad feelings and drive me on to work harder and pursue greater levels of precision.
Over the course of several career shifts and greater experience this trait was largely left behind with the exception of managing people. Leadership often presents the need for difficult decisions that affect the lives of people around you. Here again, dread and anxiety challenged my ability to make the best decisions possible. And, again, I learned over time to set aside those emotions until after important decisions had been made. But always with leadership issues, the metaphorical police car in the rear view mirror was there to challenge my decisions and force a critical re-evaluation on what I could have done different and to what effect. By this time, the rules and laws I may or may not have been breaking were of my own creation.
Then one day, after having made one of those decisions that was to have a significant negative effect on one of my employees, I didn't have the trailing anxiety for whether or not I made the best decision possible. And that felt even worse. I actually missed having the metaphorical police car in the rear view mirror. The epiphany at that moment was while I had made the correct and necessary decision, I had executed the actions with a lack of empathy and an over abundance of superiority.
This experience launched me down the path of learning more about psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy related to communication and emotions. This journey has been richly rewarded and, even though I've been a dedicated traveler on this trail for 12+ years, isn't likely to end any time soon. The metaphorical police car in the rear view mirror has long since been replaced with an internal set of scales and balances to be sure I'm checking a variety of perspectives to know when I need to lead and when I need to serve.