Peter Linkow, KNFP-4, President, Work/Family Directions (WFD)
This article was originally published in the April 2003 issue of the KFLA Newsletter.
Peter Linkow How have you, though your leadership, made a difference in one of your communities?
It is difficult to assess whether I have made a difference in any community where I am a leader. I rarely have a straight enough line between my actions as a leader and a difference in the community to conclude that I have made that difference.
Because the right measure of difference is so hard to know and ascertain, I am suspect about declaring that I have made a difference in a particular community. Ultimately, for me, making a difference has a face. An experience I had early in my career serves as my guiding metaphor for making a difference. At a teen center I led, I found a fourteen year old girl smoking marijuana one afternoon on the back step. Her older sister was a drug addict and her older brother was in jail. Her father had climbed into bed two years earlier and essentially remained there. Her mother had a great vitality and spirit that had been shrouded by too many years of poverty and family distress. Hidden within this girl were a practical intelligence, a self-confidence, and a thirst for survival. Over several years, with assistance from many others, she found a more positive path. My contribution was to believe in her, provide her with decision making tools and skills, help her surface the path that was in her, and nudge her back on that path when she was in jeopardy of falling off. Today she is a gifted teacher and parent.
I regret sometimes that making a difference has become so much more abstract and complicated as the scope of my leadership responsibilities has increased.
What sustains you in your practice of leadership and your commitment to change?
My commitment to change gets so intertwined with ego and making a living and the everyday circus of survival that I find it difficult even to be so lofty as to think of leadership as a practice. Ultimately, I suppose, it is the same as success; it is to make a difference one life at a time. Leadership provides a potent instrument for making those differences.
HOW do you measure success?
As I said earlier, the first measure of success for me is making a positive difference in someone’s life. My second measure of success is empowerment, enabling people to control their own destinies.
In his oft-repeated quote, Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism, made a powerful connection between leadership and empowerment which works for me. He said, ”A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.”
In this era when leadership is close to being a cult, Lao Tzu’s maxim has a danger. The truly gifted, empowering leader, who makes leadership invisible, may not be noticed by anyone at all.
If you had to give an aspiring leader one piece of advice, what would it be?
Be sure to distinguish between rules of leadership practice and leadership principles. Immutable rules of leadership practice probably don’t exist. Leadership practice must fit the context, the unique dynamics and challenges of the situation requiring leadership. You have to become skilled at managing all sides of apparent contradictions–like being directive versus facilitative or operational versus strategic, and be able to embrace a leadership approach that fits the context.
On the other hand, you must have leadership principles that are immutable. To rephrase a quote by Thomas Watson Jr., the great leader of IBM, I firmly believe that any leader, in order to survive and achieve success, must have a sound set of beliefs on which he premises all his actions. Next, I believe that the most important factor in leadership success is faithful adherence to those beliefs. And finally, I believe that if a leader is to meet the challenges of a changing world, she must be prepared to change everything about herself except those beliefs as she moves through a life of leadership. Principles like ”See difference as a source of advantage” or ”Pursue fairness and justice” transcend the context.
I have asked a lot of leaders what their Principles are and I have been shocked by how few have been able to directly answer that question. Yet, they are often very dear about their rules of practice, even though those rules no longer apply to the context in which they find themselves.
Are you a better leader than you were five years ago? How do you know?
This is another question I find difficult to answer. One of the things that I have discovered is that as your leadership capabilities grow, so, often, do your leadership responsibilities. The trick is to keep up with your responsibilities. If anything, I was a better leader five years ago than I am today.
I have been vested with the responsibility to lead an organization with an eminent history through a tough recessionary period. This environment has put me on a steep learning curve, stretching my competencies and skills and knowledge to the limit. I am being challenged to grow as a leader at a time in my life when I would like to be playing more to my strengths.
Please ask me this question again in a year or two.
How do you lead through a crisis?
You'll have to take my answer with a grain of salt. I have been leading an organization through a crisis and we haven’t achieved success yet.
I follow three principles in a crisis: maintain integrity, act quickly, and don’t ever forget.
It is a struggle not to place blame for my leadership travails. Maintaining integrity requires accepting responsibility. Responsibility means owning my actions and focusing on those areas that are within my focus of control and taking action on them.
Crises require tough decisions. Delay in facing tough decisions often makes them worse. I have found, for example, that in times when layoffs are required, it is far kinder to everyone to act quickly than to hold out hope that things will change. For those who go, you typically have more resources today to ease their transition than you will tomorrow. Those who stay avoid the morale loss that comes from the interminable downward spiral. Further, they enter and complete the grieving process sooner.
Crisis often demands serious change and serious change has a profound impact on people’s lives. I try to never forget that I am holding people’s self-esteem in the palm of my hand and that it is vital to hold it with gentleness, care, and compassion.