Whisht

Appreciation can be hard to come by directly as many of us rave about the great qualities of others when they’re not around to hear it, so I know I’m privileged when I find myself a party to her comments on my leadership.  Of all the attributes she chooses to highlight I’m struck by her summation:  “And she does it all so quietly.”

I think about what these words mean exactly.  Taken out of context they can be misunderstood; can seem like maybe the individual lacks assertiveness, can’t find the courage to speak up or speak her mind.  Much has been written about aspiring women leaders and how they need to find their voices to be successful in this dog-eat-dog corporate world.  If I were my younger and less experienced self I might worry I fall into this category.

We’re conditioned to believe we need to be vocal first responders, that to be heard we need to say our message loudly, repeatedly and to as many people as possible.  Pay for performance and promotion systems can skew towards rewarding those who are best at publicly taking credit for success and unabashedly advertising their achievements and accomplishments. We learn to hold our ideas close to the chest, hesitant to share until they are fully baked for fear a bad idea might mar our reputation or a good one might be hijacked by another to call his own. We become prisoners of our self-promotion, our people don’t want to work for us, our organizations never move beyond the status quo.

There are a myriad of ways to be influential in this world, to drive results, to drive change.  Quiet leaders know that new ideas incubate until they’re brought to life when the timing is right.  They often see the vision far out into the future, but can patiently hold on to it themselves until the rest of the organization is in a position to accept it.  Quiet leaders are methodical, putting the building blocks in place behind the scenes so when the world catches on, they are poised to move forward.

 

Quiet leadership is not about the need to find your voice; it’s about how you choose to use your voice.

Quiet leaders create a following one individual relationship at a time, trusting their reputations to be built through the good experience each person they touch relays to another. They know collaborating on the journey leads to the best solution. Quiet leaders cite the results in terms spotlighting the organization rather than themselves. They acknowledge and applaud the group that gets them there.

Quiet leadership is not for everyone.  There is nothing that says this approach is the only one, nor that it is better than any other.  It’s not an approach that brings sweeping accolades or lightening –speed ascension in an organization.  But for some of us, as much as we think we want to shine, we feel most like our true selves just left of the limelight.  It’s the quiet that allows us to function at our best.  And most importantly it brings to us those individuals we most want to partner with to change the world.

Interlocutress

We’re at a stalemate again, in that all too familiar place, staring at the hump he and I just can’t seem to get over.  I’ve made a move in his direction, thinking I could maybe see things his way. But I’m regretting my decision, wishing I could slurp back over my lips and through my vocal cords the permission I ceded to exercise a freedom I’m not sure I’m comfortable granting.

Instead of talking to him, I lament ceaselessly inside my head, searching for the magic words that will cause him to abdicate his position and leap over, squarely on my side. The trouble is I’ve used all the good letters, laying them bare on the Scrabble board of parenthood, and now I’m left in a dizzying frenzy, feverishly rearranging the consonants and vowels on my tray in desperate hope I’ll be able to spell the mother of all words, the one that causes him to see the light. Instead I’ve got nothing to work with but “to”, “it” or some similarly feeble vocable.

A wise one tells me I don’t need to have all the answers, what I need is a conversation.  “If it was easy,” he says, “someone would have figured it out a long time ago.”  I’m the person who’s been conditioned never to present a problem without being prepared to offer the solution. If this is the requisite consolation for my current quandary, it takes a few moments to sink in before I can feel soothed.

But it dawns on me that approaching this discussion without the answer, that voicing my ambivalence and frustration, and letting my words hang out there in insoluble suspension may begin to shift the burden off my shoulders. And maybe all I can ask for is incremental movement. We walk before we run.

We want our words to be impactful; we know the window of intentional listening opens sporadically and closes quickly.  We hold out for the triple word score in hopes we’ll win by a landslide.  But sometimes it’s staying in the game with a steady stream of “it”, “or” and “to” that adds up to real understanding.  Maybe I don’t need a new set of letters.