Up Close and Personal, Sort Of

It’s been quiet on the blog, but not due to a lack of activity. It’s riding season, and I keep forgetting how much it takes to get in shape early in the season. Reach the Beach in 100 degrees was a sufferfest. But that’s not the only thing keeping me busy. Last Tuesday was the Oregon primary, and the media descended on Portland, along with Obama, Bill and Chelsea Clinton. I’m a sponsor of the third grade at Rigler Elementary, as part of the I Have a Dream foundation, which was one of the organizations taking part in a community service project with the Clintons. So there I was, on Sunday morning, with a small group of kids and adults planting tomatoes and painting murals in a community garden with Bill and Chelsea. After an hour of cameras clicking, tomato planting and painting, I hopped on my bike, and whizzed across town to Tom McCall Waterfront Park to join a throng of 75,000 people listening to Barack Obama.

But with all that activity and excitement, one image keeps replaying in my mind. I had an opportunity to talk for a few minutes with Chelsea Clinton, without the media or other adults around. We chatted about nothing in particular, just small talk about community projects, teaching, and the like. I avoided asking anything political, or about her mother’s campaign, and yet I noticed she studiously avoided eye contact. Now, maybe I’m making a big deal out of this, but she kept her eyes downcast the whole time. Reading into it I got the sense that the public has to be a frightful thing for her.

And this is where this post winds its way back to leadership and power. I’ve been asking, what is it about leadership, about power, that lends itself to abuse or corruption? The problem is, though, the question doesn’t differentiate the person from the role. The leadership role and the person inhabiting that role are not one and the same. Stepping into a role is like stepping into a vortex of energies. You become a target for projections of all kinds: you are admired, hated, feared, seen as a role model, castigated for failing to be a role model. Your role represents qualities that you personally could never fulfill. And the role, as I pointed out in Public Life, Private Selves, has qualities and features that can take on a life of their own. So fully investigating power and its use and abuse has to take into account not just the individual, and what he or she does with power, but the role, and what influence or affect the role has on the individual.

When leaders or those in power are criticized, even if justified, too much is made of their personality, which leads to a dead end conversation: people in power are corrupt, psychopathic or evil. But if leadership can truly be everyday leadership, something for us all to share, then knowing more about the role and how projection and expectation factor into it, is important. There’s a reality to projection, to social expectation, and stereotyping. Studies show that expectations can play a determining role in performance. If teachers expect students to do poorly, students tend to do, well, poorly. And vice versa. High expectations can raise performance. I have had both experiences. I’ve stepped into the role of facilitator, and people expect me to know, and somehow I always find something brilliant to say. Likewise, I’ve been in the facilitator role when it was “take a shot at the leader” day, and well, it’s no fun.

Back to Chelsea. I kept thinking about her childhood, growing up hearing and seeing difficult, critical and nasty things being said about your parents, about you. What it must be like to be in the public eye, while her father’s infidelities were daily fodder for months on end. Then, just as things subside, your mother runs for President, and there you are again, in the public eye, open season. My eyes would be downcast too. Do I want to be open to whatever some stranger might say to me? Or even what they might think? How would I protect myself from that? How do we survive the roles we’re in? Step one is to become aware that we are in roles, that what happens to us is not just personal, but belongs to the role. Peter Block, who writes about leadership and about consulting, says, when working as a consultant, “take nothing personally before 6 pm.” In other words, what happens to you is addressed to the role, not only you.

Too often, our political leaders only embody the role, but not the personal part. But occasionally, there are amazing glimpses of the role and the person, separate yet relating. Later that day, Obama displayed that skill, something I have seldom seen public figures do:. He said, “I tried to run a positive campaign. But I haven’t always been successful in that. It’s hard. When someone whacks you, you get hurt, and want to whack back.” There’s a human in that role. Are we ready for that? Meanwhile, the media say: toughen up, it’s part of the deal to be whacked, whack back, and the American public need to know their leaders can be tough and take it. Or do we? I’d like to ask Chelsea what she thinks. Her eyes, or what I project into them, tell me otherwise.