Relearning to Lead
I met my best friend Beth in graduate school, in the Plant Biology Department at the University of Minnesota. We both liked plants and science and were avoiding real life. Neither of us was on track for a career as an academic research scientist. Not for us the all-science, all-the-time channel that was the life of the hardcore scientists we worked under.
We weren’t sure what we’d bumble into next, only that it wasn’t likely to be in academia. She secretly wanted to teach. I secretly wanted to write novels. We’d have been laughed out of Plant Biology to admit as much to anyone but each other.We spent a lot of hours in the basement of the Bio SciBuilding, whining about the agarose gels that we needed to run to get our experiments done, so they’d let us graduate. Over sour coffee and stale Snickers bars, we hashed over problems with bosses and lab mates, and oh, yeah, whatever the romantic drama of the moment. Always more interesting than agarose gels.
Mostly we were snarky and disengaged because neither of us had any real sense of direction. Nor ambition. Nor confidence. For two young women who later grew into competent and effective women, we were a pretty sad sack of insecurity in those years. In going to graduate school half on a lark, we’d both taken paths of least resistance and least risk. We weren’t trying all that hard, because we didn’t care all that much.
For myself, it was the safe path because I didn’t have myself-worth wrapped up in plant science. In contrast, writing novels, well, that was a whole different story. Of that I was terrified. In the moment, though, we were fine to accept that we were bumbling along without much direction, because we’d lost all sense of having much to contribute.
Fast forward twenty-five years. Beth is now the Head of Science for a large girls’ high school in London. She has a host of teachers and technicians under her supervision. Myself, I’ve lived the past twenty years in a small town in Vermont, where slowly I’ve learned to write novels while raising three kids, farming some land, and using that doctorate from Minnesota to do some applied plant science, aka vegetable breeding. Around the same time Beth stepped into a leadership role in her job, I stepped into one in my community, leading the charge to put an addition on our historic public library. I’ve volunteered to herd cats to choose a design, raise several million dollars, pass a municipal bond, and then oversee the construction. And I'm actually having a blast, because I feel like the right person for a job that feels valuable.
Beth and I have taken to coaching each other through the pitfalls of trying to lead. We’ve read Brene Brown’s books on how to have courage, take risks—and who to trust. Here are a few things we’ve figured out for ourselves.
1. Being a leader comes down to having the guts to make decisions, and then owning them even when they turn out to suck.
2. As leader you need to apologize when it’s appropriate, but not one whit more than necessary.
3. You need to figure out who has your back and who is secretly threatened by you. Figuring this out will require every bit of your spidey sense.
4. You need to learn to listen while neither agreeing nor disagreeing
5. You need to make sure that everyone feels heard.
6. There are people you will never please.
7. It’s your job to keep the work fun for yourself—and for everyone else if it’s possible.
8. You’re required to wear your adult face at all times, except with those who really have your back.
So, then. All of that is good. We’re both learning cool new skills and doing work we feel good about. We’re making progress toward being the people we want to be.
The other morning, though, I woke up and remembered something I’d nearly forgotten. I remembered that when I was seventeen, a junior in high school, I’d been president of my youth group chapter. And that I had a lot of responsibility and felt perfectly competent in that role. I’d been a leader back then, yet I’d totally taken it for granted. Sometime after that, my self-esteem plummeted such that I no longer saw myself leading others.
WhenI told this to Beth, she recalled a similar thing, that she’d been president of her 4-H club and had bred rabbits for a national registry. What had happened to us? Why has it taken 35 years for us to find our stride as leaders again?
I can’t just blame society, as that seems pointless. And yet there’s something in the group mind of our culture that still does more to sap courage than to bolster it. Brene Brown would point it all back to shame, and I’m sure she’s right. It’s about fear of being vulnerable. My bigger question is, why don’t we have more resilience coming out of our childhoods? Even when we have evidence that we can make competent leaders, why do we soak up the secret embedded messages that make us feel so vulnerable?
My daughter is 19 and has an innate sense of self that I pray she’ll hold onto. I can only marvel at her maturity for her age. If I’ve had anything to do with it, it’s been in my own struggles to find my path as a novelist—the passion that has slayed me time and again. She’s seen what it looks like to get crushed by disappointment, but then get back up and try again. She’s seen that it doesn’t kill you. However, I see in her face that it also scares her. She wants nothing to do with being an artist, wearing one’s fragile heart on the outside.
Of course I see the same fears in my sons. We women have our particular sources of shame, and men have their own. Often, as far as I can tell, in today’s world these sources have begun to blend and cross. What stays the same is that everyone of us needs to find the courage to take risk and live with the outcome. Even if it sucks. Because sometime, someday, perhaps it will be worth it.
But what if these risks don’t pay off? What if all our dreams for success get scuttled or muted? Well, I tell myself there are still the side benefits. The person you become in striving to live courageously is someone far more complex and empathetic than who you would have been otherwise. You make a better friend to others. You value people more. You can laugh at nearly anything.
Take my Beth, for an example. I may never make a dent as a novelist, but I’ve been a kick-ass best friend to a kick-ass woman. Together we’ve developed magnificent spidey senses. We’ve helped each other get back to being leaders again. That’s not nothing.