OS for Leaders
Every decision you make, and
Every action you take.
Just as you might have a spiritual practice, your operating system is your leadership practice.
But not all operating systems are equal...
SACRIFICING
This hurts you and keeps on hurting you.
SUSTAINING
This grows you and keeps on growing you.
SOARING
This makes you exponentially more effective,
and it's just the best kind of fun.
When I start working with a leader, I often like to ask her about her operating system. If she tells me she doesn't have one, then chances are she's using the sacrificial default.
That's the system that works best when it's unconscious, because...
The more you see, the less you can make yourself do it.
When you're following the principles of sacrifice things can feel scattered and chaotic. But there's nothing random or happenstance about sacrificial leadership. It's a system. A system that can keep a leader locked down for years even though she hates being there. A few how-tos, a few good intentions, just don't have the power to break you free.
On the other hand, the sustainable and soaring operating system are ones that you choose consciously.
In making this choice, you're actually deciding who you want to be...
A force to reckon with,
Instead of a burnout.
Upgrading from the sacrificial OS takes serious discipline, but that's how you get to the serious fun of leading.
When you choose the combination of sustainability and soaring, you're...
Giving your staff the very best gift you can give them.
You're giving them a workplace where they can...
Grow and develop,
Play at the top of their game,
Feel proud of themselves,
Meet their need to make a difference like they might never have imagined.
They get to spend their days in an environment free of debilitating dramas.
When it comes to operating systems, it turns out that what's good for you is good for your whole organization—staff, Board, clients, and donors, too.
Let me say more about why this is true...
Sacrifice drags leaders down into resentment,
Soaring calls forth a leader's natural spirit of generosity.
When a leader is doing really well herself, she wants everybody to do well. It's not like she's going to go soaring and leave everyone else in the sacrificial dust. It just doesn't work like that.
Say you're a soaring leader and you take charge at a sacrificial organization, one of two things will typically happen...
You'll pull the organization up, or
The organization will drag you down.
Soaring leadership is not a solo thing. You can soar on your own if you're an independent artist, musician, or athlete.
But...
You can't be a soaring leader on your own.
You need a team that's soaring, too, or on their way there. Soaring leadership is social. And has to be. And we want it to be, because being lonely at the top is no fun.
Sometimes I get asked about those leaders who triumph at the expense of their staff. They sacrifice their staff for their own gain and glory.
Leaders who do this can look happy, but I've been behind the scenes with them and then it's not a pretty picture. Because what they're also sacrificing is the kind of relationships they could otherwise be having with their staff. Caring relationships. Enduring friendships. They end up with scared and angry employees, not vibrant partners.
And what does it do to your soul to exploit your staff when your mission is to put an end to such things as exploitation? The times I've worked with such leaders, and they wake up to what they're doing, they're immediately in great pain.
So, no, I don't think it's possible for a leader to do great at the expense of her staff, not when we ask the deeper questions.
And I definitely don't think it's selfish to put yourself first, because when you do that in the way I'm talking about on this site, you're putting everyone else first at the same time.
Principles
On the home page I said that you come first and how-tos come second. So where do principles come into this? This is an important question because the principles you choose to follow are what make up your operating system.
Where do you find those principles?
By listening to what's deepest in your heart.
On the pages I have for each of the three operating systems, I talk about the principles I think go with each. But like always, you come first, so I hope you'll use my ideas to provoke your own thinking about what's true for you and what works for you.
And when you choose the principles you want to follow,
You're choosing who you want to be.
So your operating system is a very big deal.
Notice too, that...
How-tos are relative, but principles are steadfast.
How-tos are not primary or stand alone. They depend on other things, like...
Your talents and strengths,
The particular situation you're in,
Who you're talking to in the moment.
Your core principles, though, hold true...
No matter what
No matter who,
No matter when.
They're constant because they're essential to who you are.
Here's an example. Sacrifice says it's okay to use your staff up just like it says it's okay to use yourself up. By contrast, a key principle of the sustainable and soaring operating systems is...
Being the wind under the wings of your staff.
But you'll enact that principle through different how-tos depending on the person...
Challenging Tema might be how you show her you believe in her.
Comforting Ted might be how you show him that you care about him.
Mentoring Teri might be how you show her how much it matters to you to have her on your team.
Or another principle...
Giving people the exact kind of support that they need to be at their best.
And again, people are different...
Nan is achievement-oriented. Give her goals and she loves to go charging after them on her own. What she likes best is when she's completed an assignment that you come celebrate with her and notice how she's done 110%.
Eduardo is big on connection. So you check in with him at the end of every day for two minutes to see how things are going with his work. He's working for you more than for the goal, so that bit of attention every day keeps him cooking.
OS power
Problems come in families. So instead of trying to solve them one by one, you can pull the rug out from under the bunch of them at the same time by upgrading your OS.
And that works, because sacrificial problems won't run on the sustainable operating system:
Gossip doesn't continue in a vigorous culture of mission discipline.
Acting out doesn't continue an environment where the accepted standard is taking responsibility for your own actions and being direct in your communications.
Low productivity won't continue when people know how to work from their strengths and are eager to do it.
Let's look at how this works.
Annie had a long list of problems she was taking on one after the other. But every time she thought she'd solved one problem and turned her back to go after the next one, the first problem blew up again.
In our first meeting she said, "This is driving me crazy. It's like these problems are stuck together in a big glob. I can't make them let go of each other."
Annie was ready for change: "Whatever it takes!" She got to work upgrading from sacrificing to sustaining. It took her from spring through summer and on into fall.
Halloween morning she called me to say, "In the process of changing my operating system, all those old problems have disappeared. It's like they all just got on a bus together and left town. Very sweet. No more tricks, just treats!"
So Annie's nonprofit became a much happier place to work.
And speaking of happier and more productive, there's a lot of emphasis these days on capacity building, but it's important to remember that...
The operating system of an organization is the primary determinant of capacity.
In sacrifice mode, people can be super busy exhausting themselves. But exhaustion is not what makes people productive. It's good to institute capacity strategies like project management and economies of scale, but first let's make sure that we're calling forth the inner capacity of the people doing the work.
And let's make sure that capacity building never means demanding even more of an already exhausted staff.
Whenever someone calls me with a problem I always want to take a look at their OS as part of understanding what's going on...
Diana called me because her organization was in trouble. She was about to embark on a ten-month, $10,000 strategic planning process to see if that might fix things.
When I laid out the three operating systems for her, she was shocked at how sacrificial she and her organization were. She decided to change that first. Her Board and staff were glad to follow her lead.
As they shifted into sustainable mode, they could see that their programs were fine and their strategy was fine. It was only their OS that needed to be replaced.
They not only saved a serious chunk of change but also ten months of working hard doing the wrong thing.
And again, this was a win not just for the leader, but for the whole organization.
What's in a name?
If
you decide to read through the OS pages, please don't be too quick to
slap a label on yourself. That's because even though there's complexity
to each of the three operating systems, you are even more complex.
I urge you to take the time to look at your life carefully before you decide what your operating system is.
Sometimes there are surprises...
Aileen thought she was stuck in sacrifice, but not so. She was a masterful leader, it's just that she had a fierce inner critic telling her she was a loser. Once we cleared that out she she found herself soaring.
Bob thought he was soaring because he kept having ecstatic moments. But these were actually sacrificial highs. How could I tell? Because they were consistently followed by crashes. By contrast, soaring highs are followed by deep contentment.
Carrie thought she was in sacrifice because she felt burnt out. She had spent 20 years as a leader in her field. She had mastered and more than mastered everything she was doing. She was just bored. And no wonder. She needed something new. In Carrie's case, she needed the challenge of soaring. It wasn't optional, she needed it.
Danny felt disoriented and was worried about feeling that way. He took it as a bad sign. I asked him to tell me what his days were like, in detail. When he was done I listed for him the characteristics of soaring. He immediately saw the match. He was actually in soaring mode, he just didn't know what it was. Once he understood it, he relaxed, settled in, and then started having the time of his life.
One more note about complexity. As you'll see if you read further, I have more than one name for each of the operating systems. Feel free to use whatever name works for you or to make up your own.
Also, you'll see that sacrificing and sustaining are opposites. They are incompatible with each other. They are adversarial.
But soaring grows naturally out of sustaining, so they are partners. The more you develop mastery, and the more you develop a culture of mission discipline, the more soaring becomes possible.
And given this partnership, I sometimes talk in terms of two systems instead of three. For example, when I'm working with a Board and have very little time, I'll often use shorthand. I'll use the name "conventional operating system" for sacrifice, since that's the default OS in the nonprofit sector.
And then I'll put sustaining and soaring together and call them the "premier operating system."
Taking the whole journey
Just for fun, here's a quick example of what a journey from sacrifice to soaring might sound like...
Stop sacrificing
I refuse to live like this.
I'm done with being exhausted.
I'm done chasing crises.
I'm putting a stop to all this acting out that's going on because it makes everyone so miserable.
I'm done tolerating a Board that's a dozen different kinds of trouble.
I want to be able to eat lunch in the middle of the day.
I miss my family. I want to be home more.
Whatever it takes, this sacrifice stuff is over.
Get sustainable
I'm twice as capable as I was a year ago. It's like there are two of me in my position now.
I've stopped being a savior, now I'm a leader.
No more being a drudge. I've got my spirit back.
I've found my own asking voice. I'm okay with asking for money, so I raise more of it.
I'm getting good at setting limits and boundaries. I want to be able to say no every single time I need to say no.
I'm getting good at authentic negotiating (not the stuff in the movies). I'm learning how to bring people together around real needs. So my working relationships, both in my nonprofit and outside, are now 100 times better.
I know my strengths. I build on them. That's why I'm up to speed. I manage my limitations but I don't let them distract me or slow me down.
I've stopped listening to my inner critic. Really stopped. Yes, there are still some days when it clobbers me, but those days are rare enough that I don't worry about them.
I work strategically every day. We still do planning, but not the grand, formal plans that are DOA because the world has moved on while we were busy planning.
I'm learning the psychology and politics of how people behave in groups, so now I can fix problems and make magic happen.
I've recruited a Board that knows how to be on our team and focuses on contributing. No more critical parents, fussbudgets, or dead weights.
I put serious time into developing my staff, so everything I'm learning, they get to learn, too.
I'm starting to have moments of soaring, which are a little scary and a lot exhilarating.
Go soaring
I used to say I was doing really good, but now I'm doing really great.
I've had big ambitions from the start. And now, finally, I'm making the kind of difference I always dreamed of.
I've created a staff culture where everyone lives by the discipline of mission and loves it. We call forth the best in each other. We're the wind under each other's wings.
Funders consider us colleagues not supplicants. They come to us as often as we go to them.
Donors come to us, too. We blow their minds with what we do. They think we're cool and they want to know us.
Our light is shining. People can see who we are and what we're made of.
We're surrounded by so many kindred spirits we almost can't keep up with them. They're inspired by us so they get involved.
I'm so thankful for this life I have.
And once you've gotten to soaring, that doesn't mean the story's over, because there's no end to soaring. There are always new dimensions to discover. You get to keep reaching deeper and flying higher.
And now, here are the four pages which make up my OS constellation...
Source and spirit
This is where your leadership starts,
with what's deepest in your heart.
SACRIFICING
This hurts you and keeps on hurting you.
SUSTAINING
This grows you and keeps on growing you.
SOARING
This makes you exponentially more effective.
© 2008 Rich Snowdon
