Daring Greatly Part 8

How is vulnerability (uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure) perceived?

How prevalent are shame and blame and how are they showing up?

What's the collective tolerance for discomfort? Is the discomfort of learning, trying new things, and giving and receiving feedback normalized, or is there a high premium put on comfort (and how does that look)?

In each of the following sections I'll talk about how these play out in our lives and what specifically I look for, but first I want to talk about where this line of questioning leads us.

As someone who studies culture as a whole, I think the power of these questions is their ability to shed light on the darkest areas of our lives: disconnection, disengagement, and our struggle for worthiness. Not only do these questions help us understand the culture, they surface the discrepancies between "what we say" and "what we do," or between the values we espouse and the values we practice. My dear friend Charles Kiley uses the term "aspirational values" to describe the elusive list of values that reside in our best intentions, on the wall of our cubical, at the heart of our parenting lectures, or in our company's vision statement. If we want to isolate the problems and develop transformation strategies, we have to hold our aspirational values up against what I call our practiced values-how we actually live, feel, behave, and think. Are we walking our talk? Answering this can get very uncomfortable.

THE DISENGAGEMENT DIVIDE.

Here's my theory: Disengagement is the issue underlying the majority of problems I see in families, schools, communities, and organizations and it takes many forms, including the ones we discussed in the "Armory" chapter. We disengage to protect ourselves from vulnerability, shame, and feeling lost and without purpose. We also disengage when we feel like the people who are leading us-our boss, our teachers, our princ.i.p.al, our clergy, our parents, our politicians-aren't living up to their end of the social contract.

Politics is a great, albeit painful, example of social contract disengagement. Politicians on both sides of the aisle are making laws that they're not required to follow or that don't affect them, they're engaging in behaviors that would result in most of us getting fired, divorced, or arrested. They're espousing values that are rarely displayed in their behavior. And just watching them shame and blame each other is degrading for us. They're not living up to their side of the social contract and voter turnout statistics show that we're disengaging.

Religion is another example of social contract disengagement. First, disengagement is often the result of leaders not living by the same values they're preaching. Second, in an uncertain world, we often feel desperate for absolutes. It's the human response to fear. When religious leaders leverage our fear and need for more certainty by extracting vulnerability from spirituality and turning faith into "compliance and consequences," rather than teaching and modeling how to wrestle with the unknown and how to embrace mystery, the entire concept of faith is bankrupt on its own terms. Faith minus vulnerability equals politics, or worse, extremism. Spiritual connection and engagement is not built on compliance, it's the product of love, belonging, and vulnerability.

So, here's the question: We don't intentionally create cultures in our families, schools, communities, and organizations that fuel disengagement and disconnection, so how does it happen? Where's the gap?

The gap starts here: We can't give people what we don't have. Who we are matters immeasurably more than what we know or who we want to be.

The s.p.a.ce between our practiced values (what we're actually doing, thinking, and feeling) and our aspirational values (what we want to do, think, and feel) is the value gap, or what I call "the disengagement divide." It's where we lose our employees, our clients, our students, our teachers, our congregations, and even our own children. We can take big steps-we can even make a running jump to cross the widening value fissures that we face at home, work, and school-but at some point, when that divide broadens to a certain critical degree, we're goners. That's why dehumanizing cultures foster the highest levels of disengagement-they create value gaps that actual humans can't hope to successfully navigate.

Let's take a look at some common issues that arise in the context of families. I'm using family examples because we're all part of families. Even if we don't have children, we were raised by adults. In each case a significant gap has grown between the practiced values and the aspirational values, creating that dangerous disengagement divide.

1. Aspirational values: Honesty and Integrity Practiced values: Rationalizing and letting things slide Mom is always telling her kids that honesty and integrity are important, and that stealing and cheating in school won't be tolerated. As they pile into the car after a long grocery shop, Mom realizes that the cas.h.i.+er didn't charge her for the sodas in the bottom of the cart. Rather than going back into the store, she shrugs and says, "Wasn't my fault. They're making a mint anyway."

2. Aspirational values: Respect and Accountability Practiced value: Fast and easy is more important Dad is always driving home the importance of respect and accountability, but when Bobby intentionally breaks Sammy's new Transformer, Dad is too busy on his BlackBerry to sit down with the brothers and talk about how they should treat each other's toys. Instead of insisting that Bobby needs to apologize and make amends, he shrugs his shoulders, thinking, Boys will be boys, and tells them both to go to their rooms.

3. Aspirational values: Grat.i.tude and Respect Practiced values: Teasing, taking for granted, disrespect Mom and Dad constantly feel underappreciated, and they're tired of their children's disrespectful att.i.tudes. But Mom and Dad themselves yell at each other and call each other names. No one in the house says please or thank you, including the parents. Moreover, Mom and Dad use put-downs with their children and with each other, and everyone routinely teases family members to the point of tears. The problem is that the parents are looking for behaviors, emotions, and thinking patterns that their children have never seen modeled.

4. Aspirational Value: Setting Limits Practiced Values: Rebellion and cool are important Julie is seventeen and her younger brother, Austin, is fourteen. Julie and Austin's parents have a zero-tolerance policy for cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs. Unfortunately, that policy isn't working. Both kids have been caught smoking, and Julie has just been suspended because her teacher found vodka in her water bottle at school. Julie looks at her parents and screams, "You're such hypocrites! What about those wild parties y'all used to throw in high school? What about that time when Mom went to jail? Y'all thought that was so funny when you told us! You even showed us pictures."

Now, let's take a look at the power of aligned values: 1. Aspirational Values: Emotional Connection and Honored Feelings Practiced Values: Emotional Connection and Honored Feelings Mom and Dad have tried to instill and model a "feelings first" ethic in their family. One evening Hunter comes home from basketball practice and is clearly upset. His soph.o.m.ore year has been tough, and the basketball coach is really riding him. He throws his bag down on the kitchen floor and heads straight upstairs. Mom and Dad are in the kitchen making dinner, and they watch Hunter as he disappears up to his room. Dad turns off the burner, and Mom tells Hunter's younger brother that they're going to talk to Hunter and to please give them some time alone with him. They go upstairs together and sit on the edge of his bed. "Your mom and I know these past few weeks have been really hard," Dad says. "We don't know exactly how you feel, but we want to know. High school was tough for both of us, and we want to be with you in this." This was such a great example of minding the gap and cultivating engagement! In the interview the father told me that it made all of them feel very vulnerable and that they were all crying before it was over. He said that sharing his high school struggles with his son really opened the relations.h.i.+p between them.

I want to stress that these examples aren't fiction; they're from the data. And, no, we can't be perfect models all of the time. I know I can't. But when our practiced values are routinely in conflict with the expectations we set in our culture, disengagement is inevitable. If Mom is exhausted after the grocery shop and drives away without paying once, it might not be a big deal. If "I can get away with it and it's not my fault" is her norm, she needs to adjust her expectations around her kids' cheating. If she drives away without paying but then sits her kids down and says, "I should have gone back in and paid for the soda. It doesn't matter whose fault it was. I'm going back to the store today"-well, that's incredibly powerful. The lesson here is "I do want to live by my values and it's okay to be imperfect and make mistakes in this house. We just need to make it right when we can."

The example about the vodka ill.u.s.trates a common struggle I hear from parents all of the time. "I was wild," they say. "I did things I don't want my kids to do. Should I lie about my escapades?" As a former wild person, I don't think the issue is whether to lie or not to lie. It's about what we share and how we share it. First, not everything we do or did is our children's business. Just as, when they're adults, not everything they do is our business. So we should examine the motivation for sharing a particular story and let the question about what we're teaching drive our decision. Second, having an honest talk with our kids about drugs and alcohol, and our experiences with either or both, can be helpful. But framing our numbing or party experiences as cool war stories and placing importance on being rebellious may eventually be at odds with the values we want our children to develop.

Remember the debate about culture and strategy? I think both are important and I think we need daring strategies to develop daring cultures. As these examples of aspirational values versus practiced values demonstrate, if we want to reconnect and reengage, we have to mind the gap.

Minding the gap is a daring strategy. We have to pay attention to the s.p.a.ce between where we're actually standing and where we want to be. More importantly, we have to practice the values that we're holding out as important in our culture. Minding the gap requires both an embrace of our own vulnerability and cultivation of shame resilience-we're going to be called upon to show up as leaders and parents and educators in new and uncomfortable ways. We don't have to be perfect, just engaged and committed to aligning values with action. We also need to be prepared: The gremlins will be out in full force, as they love to sneak up just when we're about to step into the arena, be vulnerable, and take some chances.

In the next two chapters, I'm going to use the concepts I've introduced here to jump right in and tell you what I think we need to do both to cultivate engagement and to transform the way we parent, educate, and lead. These three questions will guide the following chapters: How does the culture of "never enough" affect our schools, organizations, and families?

How do we recognize and combat shame at work, school, and home?

What does minding the gap and daring greatly look like in schools, organizations, and families?

CHAPTER 6.

DISRUPTIVE.

ENGAGEMENT:.

DARING TO REHUMANIZE EDUCATION AND WORK.

To reignite creativity, innovation, and learning, leaders must rehumanize education and work. This means understanding how scarcity is affecting the way we lead and work, learning how to engage with vulnerability, and recognizing and combating shame. Make no mistake: honest conversations about vulnerability and shame are disruptive. The reason that we're not having these conversations in our organizations is that they s.h.i.+ne light in dark corners. Once there is language, awareness, and understanding, turning back is almost impossible and carries with it severe consequences. We all want to dare greatly. If you give us a glimpse into that possibility, we'll hold on to it as our vision.

It can't be taken away.

Before we start this chapter, I want to clarify what I mean by "leader." I've come to believe that a leader is anyone who holds her- or himself accountable for finding potential in people and processes. The term leader has nothing to do with position, status, or number of direct reports. I wrote this chapter for all of us-parents, teachers, community volunteers, and CEOs-anyone who is willing to dare greatly and lead.

THE CHALLENGE OF LEADING.

IN A CULTURE OF "NEVER ENOUGH"

In 2010 I had the opportunity to spend a long weekend with fifty CEOs from Silicon Valley. One of the other speakers at the retreat was Kevin Surace, the then CEO of Serious Materials, and Inc. magazine's 2009 Entrepreneur of the Year. I knew Kevin was going to speak about disruptive innovation so in my first conversation with him, before either one of us had spoken to the group and before he knew about my work, I asked him this question: What's the most significant barrier to creativity and innovation?

Kevin thought about it for a minute and said, "I don't know if it has a name, but honestly, it's the fear of introducing an idea and being ridiculed, laughed at, and belittled. If you're willing to subject yourself to that experience, and if you survive it, then it becomes the fear of failure and the fear of being wrong. People believe they're only as good as their ideas and that their ideas can't seem too 'out there' and they can't 'not know' everything. The problem is that innovative ideas often sound crazy and failure and learning are part of revolution. Evolution and incremental change is important and we need it, but we're desperate for real revolution and that requires a different type of courage and creativity."

Before that conversation I had never specifically asked the leaders I'd interviewed about innovation, but everything Kevin was saying fit with my data on work and education. I smiled and responded, "It's true, isn't it? Most people and most organizations can't stand the uncertainty and the risk of real innovation. Learning and creating are inherently vulnerable. There's never enough certainty. People want guarantees."

He simply said, "Yes. Again, I'm not sure if there's a name for the problem, but something related to fear keeps people from going for it. They focus on what they already do well and they don't put themselves out there." There was a slight pause in our conversation before he looked at me and said, "So, I understand you're a researcher. What exactly do you do?"

I chuckled. "I study that something related to fear-I'm a shame-and-vulnerability researcher."

When I got back to my hotel room I grabbed my research journal and made notes about my conversation with Kevin. As I thought about that something related to fear, I remembered another set of notes that I had written in that same journal. I flipped back until I found the field notes that I had taken after talking to a group of middle school students about their cla.s.sroom experiences. When I asked them to describe the key to learning, one girl gave the following reply while the others pa.s.sionately nodded their heads and said, "Yes! That's it!" and "Exactly."

"There are times when you can ask questions or challenge ideas, but if you've got a teacher that doesn't like that or the kids in the cla.s.s make fun of people who do that, it's bad. I think most of us learn that it's best to just keep your head down, your mouth shut, and your grades high."

As I reread this pa.s.sage in my notes and thought about my conversation with Kevin, I was overwhelmed. As a teacher I felt heartbreak-we can't learn when our heads are down and our mouths are shut. As a mother of a middle school student and a kindergartener, I found it infuriating. As a researcher, it was the moment when I started to realize how often the struggles of our education system and the challenges we face in our workplaces mirror each other.

I first envisioned this as two separate discussions-one for educators and one for leaders. But as I looked back on the data, I realized that teachers and school administrators are leaders. C-level executives, managers, and supervisors are teachers. No corporation or school can thrive in the absence of creativity, innovation, and learning, and the greatest threat to all three of these is disengagement.

Given what I've learned from the research, and what I've observed over the past couple of years as I've worked with leaders from schools and companies of all sizes and types, I believe we have to completely reexamine the idea of engagement. I call it disruptive engagement for this reason. To reignite creativity, innovation, and learning, leaders must rehumanize education and work. This means understanding how scarcity is affecting the way we lead and work, learning how to engage with vulnerability, and recognizing and combating shame.

Sir Ken Robinson speaks to the power of making this s.h.i.+ft in his appeal to leaders to replace the outdated idea that human organizations should work like machines with a metaphor that captures the realities of humanity. In his book Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative, Robinson writes, "However seductive the machine metaphor may be for industrial production, human organizations are not actually mechanisms and people are not components in them. People have values and feelings, perceptions, opinions, motivations, and biographies, whereas cogs and sprockets do not. An organization is not the physical facilities within which it operates; it is the networks of people in it."

Make no mistake: Rehumanizing work and education requires courageous leaders.h.i.+p. Honest conversations about vulnerability and shame are disruptive. The reason that we're not having these conversations in our organizations is that they s.h.i.+ne light in the dark corners. Once there is language, awareness, and understanding, turning back is almost impossible and carries with it severe consequences. We all want to Dare Greatly. If you give us a glimpse into that possibility, we'll hold on to it as our vision. It can't be taken away.

RECOGNIZING AND COMBATING SHAME.

Shame breeds fear. It crushes our tolerance for vulnerability, thereby killing engagement, innovation, creativity, productivity, and trust. And worst of all, if we don't know what we're looking for, shame can ravage our organizations before we see one outward sign of a problem. Shame works like termites in a house. It's hidden in the dark behind the walls and constantly eating away at our infrastructure, until one day the stairs suddenly crumble. Only then do we realize that it's only a matter of time before the walls come tumbling down.

In the same way that a casual walk around our house won't reveal a termite problem, a stroll through an office or a school won't necessarily reveal a shame problem. Or at least we hope it's not that obvious. If it is-if we see a manager berating an employee or a teacher shaming a student-the problem is already acute and more than likely has been happening for a long time. In most cases, though, we have to know what we're looking for when we a.s.sess an organization for signs that shame may be an issue.

SIGNS THAT SHAME HAS PERMEATED THE CULTURE.

Blaming, gossiping, favoritism, name-calling, and hara.s.sment are all behavior cues that shame has permeated a culture. A more obvious sign is when shame becomes an outright management tool. Is there evidence of people in leaders.h.i.+p roles bullying others, criticizing subordinates in front of colleagues, delivering public reprimands, or setting up reward systems that intentionally belittle, shame, or humiliate people?

I've never been to a shame-free school or organization. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but I doubt it. In fact, once I've explained how shame works, I normally have one or two teachers approach me and explain that they use shame on a daily basis. Most ask how to change that practice, but a few proudly say, "It works." The best-case scenario is that it's a limited or contained problem, rather than a cultural norm. One reason that I'm confident that shame exists in schools is simply because 85 percent of the men and women we interviewed for the shame research could recall a school incident from their childhood that was so shaming, it changed how they thought of themselves as learners. What makes this even more haunting is that approximately half of those recollections were what I refer to as creativity scars. The research partic.i.p.ants could point to a specific incident where they were told or shown that they weren't good writers, artists, musicians, dancers, or something creative. I still see this happening in schools all of the time. Art is graded on narrow standards and kids as young as kindergarten are told they have creative gifts. This helps explain why the gremlins are so powerful when it comes to creativity and innovation.

Corporations have their own struggles. The Workplace Bullying Inst.i.tute (WBI) defines bullying as "Repeated mistreatment: sabotage by others that prevented work from getting done, verbal abuse, threatening conduct, intimidation, and humiliation." A 2010 poll conducted by Zogby International for WBI reported that an estimated 54 million American workers (37 percent of the US workforce) have been bullied at work. Furthermore, another WBI report revealed that 52.5 percent of the time, bullied workers reported that employers basically did nothing to stop the bullying.

When we see shame being used as a management tool (again, that means bullying, criticism in front of colleagues, public reprimands, or reward systems that intentionally belittle people), we need to take direct action because it means that we've got an infestation on our hands. And we need to remember that this doesn't just happen overnight. Equally important to keep in mind is that shame is like the other "sh" word. Like s.h.i.+t, shame rolls downhill. If employees are constantly having to navigate shame, you can bet that they're pa.s.sing it on to their customers, students, and families.

So, if it's happening and it can be isolated to a specific unit, work team, or person, it has to be addressed immediately and without shame. We learn shame in our families of origin, and many people grow up believing that it's an effective and efficient way to manage people, run a cla.s.sroom, and parent. For that reason, shaming someone who's using shame is not helpful. But doing nothing is equally dangerous, not only for the people who are targets of the shaming but also for the entire organization.

Several years ago a man came up to me after an event and said, "Interview me! Please! I'm a financial advisor and you wouldn't believe what happens in my office." When I met Don for the interview, he told me that in his organization you choose your office each quarter based on your quarterly results: The person with the best results chooses first and sends the person in the desired office packing.

He shook his head, and his voice cracked a bit when he said, "Given that I've had the best numbers for the past six quarters, you'd think I'd like that. But I don't. I absolutely hate it. It's a miserable environment." He then told me how after the previous quarterly results were in, his boss walked into his office, closed the door, and told him that he had to move offices.

"At first I thought my numbers had dropped. Then he told me that he didn't care if I had the best numbers or if I liked my office; the point was to terrorize the other guys. He said, 'Busting their b.a.l.l.s in public builds character. It's motivating.'"

Before the end of our interview, he told me he was job hunting. "I'm good at my job and even enjoy it, but I didn't sign up to terrorize people. I never knew why it felt so s.h.i.+tty, but after hearing you talk, now I do. It's shame. It's worse than high school. I'll find a better place to work, and you can be d.a.m.n sure that I'm taking my clients with me."

In I Thought It Was Just Me, I tell the following story about Sylvia, an event planner in her thirties who jumped right into our interview by saying, "I wish you could have interviewed me six months ago. I was a different person. I was so stuck in shame." When I asked her what she meant, she explained that she had heard about my research from a friend and volunteered to be interviewed because she felt her life had been changed by shame. She had recently had an important breakthrough when she found herself on the "losers' list" at work.

Apparently, after two years of what her employer called "outstanding, winners' work," she had made her first big mistake. The mistake cost her agency a major client. Her boss's response was to put her on the "losers' list." She said, "In one minute I went from being on the winners' board to being at the top of the losers' list." I guess I must have winced when Sylvia referred to the "losers' list" because, without my remarking at all, she said, "I know, it's terrible. My boss has these two big dry-erase boards outside of his office. One's the winners' list, and one board is for the losers." She said for weeks she could barely function. She lost her confidence and started missing work. Shame, anxiety, and fear took over. After a difficult three-week period, she quit her job and went to work for another agency.

Shame can only rise so far in any system before people disengage to protect themselves. When we're disengaged, we don't show up, we don't contribute, and we stop caring. On the far end of the spectrum, disengagement allows people to rationalize all kinds of unethical behavior including lying, stealing, and cheating. In the case of Don and Sylvia, they didn't just disengage; they quit and took their talent to compet.i.tors.

As we a.s.sess our organizations for signs of shame, it's also important to be aware of external threats-forces outside of our organizations that are influencing how both leaders and employees feel about their work. As a teacher, the sister of two public school teachers, and the sister-in-law of a public high school vice-princ.i.p.al, I don't have to look far for examples of this.

Several years ago my sister Ashley called me crying. When I asked her what was wrong, she told me that the Houston Chronicle had published the name of every schoolteacher in the Houston Independent School District along with the bonus they received based on their students' standardized test scores. I hadn't seen the paper that day and I was stunned. And I was also confused.

"Ashley, you teach kindergarten. Your kids don't take the tests yet. Is your name in there?"

Ashley explained that her name was in there and that the paper reported that she got the lowest bonus available. What they didn't report was that it was the highest bonus available to kindergarten teachers. Imagine doing that-reporting everyone's salaries or bonuses and moreover reporting them inaccurately-to any other group of professionals.

"I'm in a total shame meltdown," Ashley said, still crying. "All I've ever wanted to do was to be a teacher. I work my b.u.t.t off. I've hit up everyone in our family for money so I can buy school supplies for the kids who can't afford them. I stay after and help the parents help their kids. I don't get it. There are hundreds of teachers like me, and do you read about that in the paper? No. And it's not just about me. Some of the very best teachers I know volunteer to teach some of the most challenging students without any thought about how it's going to affect their scores or bonuses. They do it because they love their work and they believe in the kids."

Unfortunately, the "Scarlet Letter" approach to teacher evaluation is not just happening in Texas-it's become an accepted practice across the nation. The good news is that people are finally daring greatly and speaking up. In response to the New York State Court of Appeals ruling that teachers' individual performance a.s.sessments could be made public, Bill Gates wrote this in a New York Times op-ed: "Developing a systematic way to help teachers get better is the most powerful idea in education today. The surest way to weaken it is to twist it into a capricious exercise in public shaming. Let's focus on creating a personnel system that truly helps teachers improve."

When I posted Gates's op-ed on my Facebook page, many teachers left comments. I was moved by this response from a veteran teacher: "For me, teaching is about love. It is not about transferring information, but rather creating an atmosphere of mystery and imagination and discovery. When I begin to lose myself because of some unresolved pain or fears or the overpowering feelings of shame, then I no longer teach...I deliver information and I think I become irrelevant then."

Teachers are not the only ones who wrestle with shame delivered (usually in the public media) from outside of the organization. I'm often asked to address this issue when I'm speaking with professionals who are routinely vilified, disliked, or misunderstood by the public-lawyers, dentists, and folks from the financial industry are a few. We might roll our eyes and think, C'mon, we love to hate them! But I can tell you from my experiences that it's not fun to feel hated simply for doing work that means something to you, and it can take a serious toll on individuals and cultures.

As leaders, the most effective thing we can do when this kind of media abuse is happening is speak out, insist on accuracy and accountability, and confront it head on with the people affected by it. We can't pretend that it's not hurting our employees. On a personal level, we can resist buying into and perpetuating the public stereotyping of professions that by their nature operate in realms of personal stress.

THE BLAME GAME.

Here's the best way to think about the relations.h.i.+p between shame and blame: If blame is driving, shame is riding shotgun. In organizations, schools, and families, blaming and finger-pointing are often symptoms of shame. Shame researchers June Tangney and Ronda Dearing explain that in shame-bound relations.h.i.+ps, people "measure carefully, weigh, and a.s.sign blame." They write, "In the face of any negative outcome, large or small, someone or something must be found responsible (and held accountable). There's no notion of 'water under the bridge.'" They go on to say, "After all, if someone must be to blame and it's not me, it must be you! From blame comes shame. And then hurt, denial, anger, and retaliation."

Blame is simply the discharging of pain and discomfort. We blame when we're uncomfortable and experience pain-when we're vulnerable, angry, hurt, in shame, grieving. There's nothing productive about blame, and it often involves shaming someone or just being mean. If blame is a pattern in your culture, then shame needs to be addressed as an issue.

COVER-UP CULTURE.

Related to blame is the issue of cover-ups. Just like blame is a sign of shame-based organizations, cover-up cultures depend on shame to keep folks quiet. When the culture of an organization mandates that it is more important to protect the reputation of a system and those in power than it is to protect the basic human dignity of individuals or communities, you can be certain that shame is systemic, money drives ethics, and accountability is dead. This is true in all systems, from corporations, nonprofits, universities, and governments, to churches, schools, families, and sports programs. If you think back on any major incidents fueled by cover-ups, you'll see this pattern.

In an organizational culture where respect and the dignity of individuals are held as the highest values, shame and blame don't work as management styles. There is no leading by fear. Empathy is a valued a.s.set, accountability is an expectation rather than an exception, and the primal human need for belonging is not used as leverage and social control. We can't control the behavior of individuals; however, we can cultivate organizational cultures where behaviors are not tolerated and people are held accountable for protecting what matters most: human beings.

We won't solve the complex issues that we're facing today without creativity, innovation, and engaged learning. We can't afford to let our discomfort with the topic of shame get in the way of recognizing and combating it in our schools and workplaces. The four best strategies for building shame-resilient organizations are: Supporting leaders who are willing to dare greatly and facilitate honest conversations about shame and cultivate shame-resilient cultures.

Facilitating a conscientious effort to see where shame might be functioning in the organization and how it might even be creeping into the way we engage with our co-workers and students.

Normalizing is a critical shame-resilience strategy. Leaders and managers can cultivate engagement by helping people know what to expect. What are common struggles? How have other people dealt with them? What have your experiences been?

Training all employees on the differences between shame and guilt, and teaching them how to give and receive feedback in a way that fosters growth and engagement.

MINDING THE GAP WITH FEEDBACK.

A daring greatly culture is a culture of honest, constructive, and engaged feedback. This is true in organizations, schools, and families. I know families struggle with this issue; however, I was shocked to see "lack of feedback" emerge as a primary concern in the interviews that focused on work experiences. Today's organizations are so metric-focused in their evaluation of performance that giving, receiving, and soliciting valuable feedback ironically has become rare. It's even a rarity in schools where learning depends on feedback, which is infinitely more effective than grades scribbled on the top of a page or computer-generated, standardized test scores.

The problem is straightforward: Without feedback there can be no transformative change. When we don't talk to the people we're leading about their strengths and their opportunities for growth, they begin to question their contributions and our commitment. Disengagement follows.

When I asked people why there was such a lack of feedback in their organizations and schools, they used different language, but the two major issues were the same: We're not comfortable with hard conversations.

We don't know how to give and receive feedback in a way that moves people and processes forward.

The good news is that these are very fixable problems. If an organization makes the creation of a feedback culture a priority and a practice, rather than an aspirational value, it can happen. People are desperate for feedback-we all want to grow. We just need to learn how to give feedback in a way that inspires growth and engagement.

Right off the bat, I believe that feedback thrives in cultures where the goal is not "getting comfortable with hard conversations" but normalizing discomfort. If leaders expect real learning, critical thinking, and change, then discomfort should be normalized: "We believe growth and learning are uncomfortable so it's going to happen here-you're going to feel that way. We want you to know that it's normal and it's an expectation here. You're not alone and we ask that you stay open and lean into it." This is true at all levels and in all organizations, schools, faith communities, and even families. I've observed this pattern of normalized discomfort in the Wholehearted organizations I've researched and I've lived it in my cla.s.sroom and with my family.

I learned to teach by immersing myself in books on engaged and critical pedagogy by writers like bell hooks and Paulo Freire. At first, I was terrified by the idea that if education is going to be transformative, it's going to be uncomfortable and unpredictable. Now, as I begin my fifteenth year of teaching at the University of Houston, I always tell my students, "If you're comfortable, I'm not teaching and you're not learning. It's going to get uncomfortable in here and that's okay. It's normal and it's part of the process."

The simple and honest process of letting people know that discomfort is normal, it's going to happen, why it happens, and why it's important, reduces anxiety, fear, and shame. Periods of discomfort become an expectation and a norm. In fact, most semesters I have students who approach me after cla.s.s and say, "I haven't been uncomfortable yet. I'm concerned." These exchanges often lead to critically important conversations and feedback about their engagement and my teaching. The big challenge for leaders is getting our heads and hearts around the fact that we need to cultivate the courage to be uncomfortable and to teach the people around us how to accept discomfort as a part of growth.

For the best guidance on how to give feedback that moves people and processes forward, I turn to my social work roots. In my experience the heart of valuable feedback is taking the "strengths perspective." According to social work educator Dennis Saleebey, viewing performance from the strengths perspective offers us the opportunity to examine our struggles in light of our capacities, talents, competencies, possibilities, visions, values, and hopes. This perspective doesn't dismiss the serious nature of our struggles; however, it does require us to consider our positive qualities as potential resources. Dr. Saleebey proposes, "It is as wrong to deny the possible as it is to deny the problem."

One effective method for understanding our strengths is to examine the relations.h.i.+p between strengths and limitations. If we look at what we do best as well as what we want to change the most, we will often find that the two are varying degrees of the same core behavior. Most of us can go through the majority of our "faults" or "limitations" and find strengths lurking within.

For example, I can beat myself up for being too controlling and micromanaging, or I can recognize that I'm very responsible, dependable, and committed to quality work. The micromanaging issues don't go away, but by viewing them from a strengths perspective, I have the confidence to look at myself and a.s.sess the behaviors I'd like to change.