Follow the Leader, Pt 1
A new understanding of leadership, as experienced one night at a Zen temple in Hawaii
This is my first post in a while. For nine months or so, I’ve been absorbed with writing the first draft of my first book—a memoir about my spiritual journey that tracks everything from how I went on my first silent meditation retreat to try to prepare for the possibility of arrest and torture in Myanmar to my life now at a Zen temple in Hawaii.
While I still have some book-writing left to do, I plan on publishing on this blog more often. Please be on the lookout for a more regular flow of posts dropping each Wednesday morning.
My first new post, below, is part of a series that connects my time in business school at Stanford to my life now as a Zen teacher and priest. It asks us to fundamentally rethink what "responsibility" means for leaders and followers. And how following is actually an indispensable skillset for successful leaders.
I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I've enjoyed writing it.
Warmly,
Cristina
One evening at the end of a 12-week introductory Zen training program at Chozen-ji, the Zen temple where I live in Hawaii, I was tasked with leading a group of 16 participants in what started out as an hour or so of martial arts. The martial arts were not actually the focus of that hour—the main activity was exit interviews, a chance for participants to share what they had realized and learned during the previous 12 weeks of meditation, outside work, martial and fine arts, speakers, and kitchen table discussions. But we didn't want people to sit around, ruminating and planning what they were going to say as they waited for their turn to come up. Martial arts was the solution—vigorous and fully engaging, even working up a sweat.
Dusk stretched into night. As the day darkened, we were dimly illuminated in our movement by the Dojo's large overhead globe lights. Outside, the grounds were dark save for a few strategically placed exterior lights. It all rendered the whole grounds, with our Japanese-style buildings and lush tropical greenery, very romantic. Inside, we moved methodically, our breathing loud, our bodies primed, and our minds at full attention. The night air both inside and outside was cool. But still, true to my charge, we sweated.
Time passed and I began to realize that the interviews were going longer than planned. I wasn't looking at the clock—everything I had was focused on keeping people moving, aware that they were becoming fatigued in body and, I feared, in spirit. I guessed that the interviews were taking two, maybe even three, times as long as they were supposed to. One hour stretched into an hour and a half, and then two.
While I maintained a facade of unwavering focus and determination, the truth was that I was always forward-facing leading our movements because I didn't dare turn around. I was sure that, if I did, it would be to see people dropped like flies, frustrated and sitting on the sidelines, wondering what the hell I was putting them through.
Finally, after two and a half hours, I felt a wave of relief as the last person came back from their interview. I finished the final round of movement and came to stand, silent and still. When I did turn around, 10 or 20 seconds had passed. What I saw was several rows of shiny and exhausted, but content, faces looking to me for what came next. I couldn't believe it. I did not see the leeriness and frustration I had expected. Everyone had been with me the whole time.
Throughout my professional life, I had been in positions of leadership many times, but I had never felt this kind of trust from a team or a group following me. Figuratively and literally, these folks had had my back. A newfound feeling of responsibility began to dawn on me, filling in my idea what it meant to be a leader and what's required of a good one. It was a new mutuality, a sense of leadership that, as organizational psychologists Kim Peters and Alex Haslam describe, is not a virtue or even a skill, but something created in the relationship "between leaders and followers who are bound together by their understanding that they are members of the same social group."
Check out Part 2 of this piece, where dig deeper into Haslam and Peters' work and the places where it resonates with my experiences teaching Zen and leadership at Chozen-ji.