Sacrificing
What do I mean by the sacrificial operating system? Here are some signs...
too much work
not enough resources
running from crisis to crisis
loneliness
resentment
exhaustion
more exhaustion...
and finally burn out.
Burn out is bad enough, but the damage of sacrifice can go deeper. Which is why I want to anchor this page in the real lives of real leaders:
Elyssa told me, "I got so busy and had so little time for my friends that they wandered off. They stopped calling because I could never get together. So later when I really needed them, they were gone."
Myrna's partner Max moved out. He told her, "You always come home stressed. All you do is complain. I get how terrible work is for you, but this isn't a relationship anymore."
In a town I visited, I met Jillian, the director of the community center. Everyone in town loved that Center, except for two people—Jillian's daughters. When I asked them what they thought about the Center, there was fire in their eyes. It took their mom from them, not only 9 to 5, but evenings, weekends, and holidays.
Martin said, "I'm a relationship person. I really want a partner, but I'm here in the office so many hours, even on weekends, that I have no time to meet someone. Or on those rare days when I have the time, I don't have the energy."
Jeremy loved the organization he started. It was his baby. It meant the world to him. But it took everything he had. And then it took more than everything he had. One fall morning toward the end of his tenth year, he hit the wall. He couldn't make himself get out of bed and go in to work. The office called and he didn't answer. It was stone cold over for him. He said, "I feel crazy loving so much something that hurts me so badly."
It's stories like these that make me say...
Sacrifice is the core tragedy of the nonprofit sector.
And it's stories like these that make me think if this is the best we can do, then we should just shut the sector down, because it's not okay to hurt such good, good people like this.
But of course this is not the best we can do. As hard as I am on the sacrificial operating system, there is one good thing I have to say about it...
We know how to stop it. We do know this. It's not a mystery. It's just that it's a gutsy thing to do.
And I promise you that if you're getting things done as a sacrificial leader, you'll become two, three, four, ten, or a hundred times more effective if you upgrade your operating system.
You can take your sacrificial drive and turn it into sustainable moxie or soaring magic.
On this page, I'm going to have a lot to say about what sacrifice is and where it comes from. I want to get it out in the open where we can see it for what it is and deal with it, because one of the worst things about sacrifice is...
When we surrender.
When we say, "It goes with the territory."
When we learn to live with it because it's so familiar.
When we let it do its damage unopposed.
Of course not everyone has a serious story of loss. There are many leaders who are able to do what I call Sacrifice Lite.
They are using the sacrificial operating system, but perhaps they have enough funding and staff that they can keep their hours under control so they're not feeling all that much pain. But they're still suffering a loss—the loss of possibility.
While they're cruising along doing things the hard way, they're missing out on the life that sustainability or soaring could give them.
And then there are leaders who "master" sacrifice...
If you go to a workshop on burnout prevention you might hear advice such as: "Treat yourself to a massage and a hot tub on Friday evening at the end of your hard week." This advice is fine in and of itself.
But if that massage and that hot tub only serve to refresh you so you get up Saturday morning, go back into the office, and work through the weekend, then you've only dug yourself in deeper. You're only making the sacrificial operating system last longer and hurt you more.
There are sacrificial leaders who are able to keep themselves one inch away from hitting the wall. They've mastered the system so it never breaks down. But that also means they never get the push they need to break free.
You could say they've learned how to make sacrifice sustainable.
I was one of those. For example, I once went 12 years without taking a whole week of vacation at one time. My maximum was four days in a row and that usually included two weekend days.
I felt secretly proud of that craziness. In the world of sacrifice it gave me big points. I've even heard people gasp with admiration when I've told them about it.
Those 12 years make for a good war story. But they didn't make for a good life. I regret that I ever did that to myself. And I don't get to have those years back to do them over.
So for anyone getting by in sacrificial mode however you're doing it, I want to give this warning...
When sacrifice gets bad, it can get really bad. And sometimes it can get bad really fast. Please don't wait for that to happen. I urge you to get out of the sacrificial operating system now.
Quick definitional pit stop
When I talk about sacrifice as an operating system, I'm talking about a consistent pattern of behavior or lifestyle. I don't mean sacrifice as a short-term,
situational strategy.
For example, say you find yourself caught in a convergence of deadlines in a particular week. You decide to work late every night and you miss out on a concert you wanted to go to, a movie with your friends, and three quiet evenings at home with your partner.
So you're sacrificing, but you know why you're doing it. You know this is the exception not the rule. There's no long-term damage.
And sacrifice is not just about long hours. I remember in the first years when we were building CAP, I worked very long hours seven days a week, but I was having the time of my life.
You would have had to tie me in a chair to keep me from doing what I was doing. I was meeting so many great people. I was making the difference that mattered to me most. What could have been better?
Then we got our state funding and the bureaucracy demanded an impossible number of service units. They actually told us they knew they were breaking our budget, but they wanted to try it anyway and see what happened.
What happened was this: Suddenly we were drowning in what we had once loved.
And now we were working in a steady state of sacrifice.
What about money and sacrifice? You'd probably get paid a whole lot more if you took your skills and experience and got yourself a job in the corporate world. So you are indeed sacrificing income to do social change work. That's real.
And of course you should get paid a special premium salary for changing the world. You should get paid much more than people who spend their days defending and exploiting the status quo.
But, in the meantime, you get to do work that feeds your soul. I hope it feeds your soul.
That's another reason to make sure that you are sustaining or soaring. Low pay is not good, but low pay coupled with sacrifice is not something we should have to put up with.
At the very least, I want you to get compensated really well in terms of meaning. At the very least, I want you to feel yourself growing every day, moving forward, becoming stronger.
So when I talk about sacrifice what I mean is that....
You're sacrificing your very self.
I'm talking about core injury.
Getting to the bottom of it
So how does sacrifice hook us? And what drives it? What keeps it going despite how much we suffer from it?
We don't sacrifice because we're dummies. There's a real reason for it. We're trying to meet a real need. We're trying to achieve something that matters. It's just that we've picked the wrong strategy, perhaps because it looks like the most expedient way to go.
Let's look at five common sources of sacrificial leadership:
1. Wanting to save people
The initial impulse is one of heartfelt concern...
I see people hurting. I see the planet in danger. My need to respond is so urgent that I decide to jump in and do anything and everything I can to stop the hurting and end the danger.
I feel desperate to fix things now.
And I know there are not nearly enough people doing this work, so I feel I have to do double or triple duty.
In the context of desperation, sacrifice seems to make sense.
Now let's turn this operating system into a one-sentence short story:
I'm sacrificing myself to save you.
or
I'm sacrificing myself to save the world.
While the impulse behind this story is lovely and honorable, here's the problem...
Saving people is the opposite of leading them.
Leading means inspiring people and preparing them to save themselves. Or to prevent the need for saving in the first place. And doing this in partnership with them.
When a community becomes dependent on a savior-leader, then co-dependency can easily set in. And we know what a disaster co-dependency is for everyone involved.
If I could go back and talk to myself in the days when I was in savior mode, here's what I would say...
"Richard, child abuse is not your problem. It belongs to the community. You and your organization, even the statewide movement you've built, even all of those people working together, are not enough to stop child abuse in California.
"The problem is just too big. You cannot solve it by yourself so you should not own it by yourself.
"What you can do is lead. Instead of taking the problem off the shoulders of the community, make sure they feel it. Challenge them. Call them to action. Make sure they take responsibility for their own future.
"Help the community discover within itself the power to respond to the problem."
I could have named this page "the salvation operating system," because leaders in this mode are sacrificial saviors. I settled instead on the term "sacrifice" because of the damage done to leaders and activists.
2. Earning love
For some of us, our childhood strategies
dovetail right into the salvation operating system. That was definitely true for me. And from what I've seen, my experience is not all that
uncommon, but I'll use myself as an example.
I grew up in a family and a church community where the rule was...
Don't expect to be loved for who you are. You're supposed to earn love.
Do enough things to please the people around you and then maybe, possibly, hopefully someday those people will decide to love you.
I was a kid who paid attention to the rules, so I got very, very good at pleasing people. Need a nice guy to listen to you? Call on me. Got a problem? Let me solve it. The world's in trouble? I want to be the one to save it.
But as you know, this strategy doesn't work...
Because love that you've had to earn is not real love.
It doesn't satisfy. It leaves you hungry. So you keep on chasing the impossible.
Now, of course, there are people who put away their childhood strategies when childhood is over. But I took this hope of earning love right along with me into adulthood and on into nonprofit leadership where I acted it out on a much bigger stage.
My motivating fear was: "If I'm not the savior, I'm nobody." And this caused me no end of trouble.
I think this is where the "founder's syndrome" comes from, too. When leaders don't know they are lovable and worthy just in and of themselves, they end up so desperately merged with their work so that to even imagine letting go of it feels like death.
The drive to save oneself by saving others is one of the things that makes leaders lonely when what they want so badly is the exact opposite.
3. Being in with your colleagues
I believe that sacrifice is the default operating system for our sector, and if that's true, then there are two problems. First, it means that the majority of leaders are using themselves up and burning themselves out.
Second, it means that sacrifice is then the norm. It's the basis for our nonprofit culture. And given that we are social beings for whom it's very important to be an accepted member of our group, there's pressure for us to live by this nonprofit norm even if it hurts us and holds us back.
In the face of a culture of sacrifice, sometimes a leader has to make a tough decision. Here's what one ED told me...
Lydia: Once I got solidly into the soaring zone and things were going consistently well for me, I suddenly had the feeling that I didn't belong in my old group anymore. The other EDs I used to pal around with spent much of their time complaining.
But I didn't have anything to complain about anymore. I started having the feeling they're weren't all that happy to have me around. And it definitely wasn't as much fun for me. It's like I had moved on.
Georgette said, "You're a curve wrecker." I think she meant it as a joke, but there was an edge to her voice. And what I remember from my school days is that nobody likes curve wreckers.
Rich: So would you give up soaring to get back in with your old group?
Lydia: I wouldn't even think of it. This is odd, but even when I was in that group I still felt the loneliness of the leader.
Now, though, I have such deep connections with both my staff and my Board, that I never feel lonely. And I wouldn't give that up for anything.
4. Resistance to social change
We're not just operating in the context of our sector, but in the context of the society as a whole.
The powers that be are often deeply committed to the status quo. For them it makes simple sense to keep nonprofits so busy delivering services that they never have time to do organizing and advocacy.
Those who are benefiting the most from the way things are, often refuse to fund leaders who are trying to fundamentally change the how power works. There's funding pressure and political pressure on nonprofits to operate sacrificially. So social change leaders sometimes have to push through that pressure when they decide they want to get sustainable or go soaring.
5. Internalizing the pain of others
Let me add one more thing that contributes to sacrificial leadership. There are leaders who are working with people who have been traumatized, as with torture, rape, abuse, or battery. There's also a kind of trauma that goes along with things like racism and poverty.
This can overwhelm leaders. They might start suffering from vicarious or secondary trauma. They might start thinking that suffering right along with your clients is a way to bond with them and show them that you care.
Dealing with trauma day after day can drag people down into sacrificial mode.
It takes a special discipline to work with those who are in great pain. It's quite a gift for caregivers to take very good care of themselves, so they can inspire people by example to move from victim to survivor to soaring.
It's a system, but it's unconscious
When you look at all the bad things that go with sacrifice—the crises, the exhaustion, the crazy things staff and Board members do—it might seem like these things are bad luck or happenstance. But they aren't. They're part of a system.
It's just that this system is unconscious.
And that makes sense because why would you consciously choose to live in a steady state of distress? And it also makes sense why sacrificial leaders often feel like victims—because their lives are beyond their conscious control.
It's only when you bring sacrifice out of the shadows and into the light and see that it is a coherent system, that you can start to break free of it.
What's great, though, is that you actually don't have to solve the problems of sacrifice one by one. That's because, as I said on the page called OS for leaders, sacrificial problems don't run on the sustainable operating system. When you upgrade, a bunch of related problems just disappear.
But meanwhile the unconscious nature of sacrifice sets up the whole organization for all kinds of acting out.
The Nonprofit Soap Opera
Here's what that looks like:
Feelings are flying around all day every day. Nothing happens without drama. Fear is in the air. Everyone gets their feelings hurt constantly. The work takes second place if any place at all. And like in TV soap operas, this state of affairs continues relentlessly with no end in sight because in a soap opera the one thing no one ever does is to change the operating system.
Of course there are some individuals who do learn to do things differently. But the community does not learn. That's why we can always count on another painful episode tomorrow. And that's one reason soap operas are so emotionally compelling.
A quick note here. There are plenty of fans of soap operas who learn important things about human nature from what they're witnessing—all those messes, miscommunications, betrayals, and evil schemes. And they learn, too, from watching how love sometimes triumphs.
But watching a soap opera is very different from living inside one.
Sacrificial nonprofits often get exclusively focused on feelings, even obsessed with them. And, yes, feelings are essential in connecting us with each other. And mastering emotional intelligence is a key part of leadership.
But it's also true that...
Feelings by themselves are not enough for decision making. The purpose of feelings, as Marshall Rosenberg says, is to point to needs. If needs are getting met, chances are we're happy. If needs are not getting met, chances are we're unhappy.
It's of the utmost importance that we always ground our decisions in the real needs of real people in the real world.
In fact, I believe it's exactly this desire to meet real needs that is the genesis of social change work.
It matters that we know the difference between emotional processing that takes us forward in our work, and processing that sinks us.
Of course, igniting an emotional drama of is a quick way to trigger intensity and make it seem like important things are happening. But what's the cost? What's the emptiness we're trying to fill by doing that? What's the real need we'd be better off addressing directly? And is it really satisfying to get sizzle and more sizzle till it burns you, but never get the steak?
Now I have to admit that I've been involved in more than a few righteous dramas myself. That was back in the days before I knew better. I remember the apocalyptic urgency, how one side was noble (my side) and the other was evil, and how nothing mattered more than trouncing them.
I wish I had known then what I know now. When I look back on those times what I see is good people on both sides hurting each other badly. And for what? I can't think of a single thing that was gained by all that pain.
A hallmark of sacrifice is relationships gone wrong—people acting out feelings, not really seeing each other, getting lost in projections, not knowing how to talk directly with each other, not being able to negotiate with mutual respect. And not understanding how healthy the discipline of mission is for everyone.
People become social change leaders because they want to work for a brighter world, but sacrifice can turn their daily experience of that work ugly. Are any of the following scenes familiar?
Every time there's a disagreement in a staff meeting, it's like the match meets the gasoline. Seemingly insignificant issues trigger giant reactions.
A staff person looks at you and sees his parents. He may be in his 30s or 40s chronologically, but emotionally he's reliving adolescent rebellion. Every time he looks at you, you feel a wave of disgust coming from him and washing over you.
Your staff is divided into factions. You spend way too much time trying to mediate and calm things down. The daily distress owns you emotionally and kills your spirit, so when you go out to meet with a funder, you can hardly smile let alone be genuinely enthusiastic about your organization.
A staff person develops a blind hatred toward you. Overnight you've become the enemy and you don't understand why and you can't get him to shake loose from his obsession. You try reasoning, you try being nice, you try being understanding, and not only do these attempts not work, they make things worse.
One of your staff, the one you've decided to fire because she spends more time gossiping than working, thinks she should be the ED because in her view you're a total loss. You find out that everywhere she goes in the community she trashes you, subtly or blatantly depending on who she's talking to. Now you really want to fire her, but your Board chair tells you not to because she's the daughter of an old friend of his.
The founder of your organization, who is still on the Board, is unhappy with you, not because you're failing as ED, but because you're five times more successful than he ever was.
The economy is really bad. Your staff get scared, then they get angry at you because you have to lay someone off, even though the person you let go is the one sour goof-off who was doing nothing of value anyway. The staff expects you to work magic with money and keep them from ever even having to worry about the future. No amount of reasoning seems to touch their freak out. Nothing settles them down. You get mad and tell them, "Just wait till you're a leader, then you'll see what it's like." They roll their eyes.
You ask your Board to start doing more fundraising because you really need their help. You see them instantly get their backs up. The finance chair says, "How long has it been since we evaluated our executive director?" Now instead of raising money, they're riding herd on you, watching every move you make and criticizing anything they can find to criticize.
So are these stories bad enough? There are even worse ones I could tell, but I figured these would do.
Again, such messes are not random events. They're part of a system—an operating system. Sacrifice doesn't just allow bad things to happen. It generates this kind of mess and distress. That's what it does.
And it generates the...
The Perfect Storm
What happens when the negative elements of the sacrificial, co-dependent, nonprofit culture come together all at once?
You get a swirling vortex of hurtful dysfunction.
You get force five relational aggression.
Imagine if the following all showed up in your organization tomorrow morning:
emotional bullying
poison gossip
vicious jealousy
righteous judgment
helpless exhaustion
victim posturing
free-floating fear
hunger for attention
scarcity panic
bitter attacks.
Once a perfect storm gets going, you have hell to pay. And people pay in a deeply personal way. That's the thing about relational aggression, it's so personal.
And sometimes it gets so bad that people never really get over it. Decades later a memory triggers and you feel like you're right back in the middle of it.
As a coach, I've helped leaders put a stop to these storms and I know how hard it is to bring an organization back to safe ground. That's why I'm such a fierce fan of prevention.
And really, the life of the organization is at stake here. I've seen nonprofits go under because of this kind of storm. I've seen others take years to recover their productivity and health.
So I urge you, if you ever see any two elements of the perfect storm lining up, in fact, if you ever see even one element show up, stop everything and do whatever it takes to get your organization back on track. It's really that serious.
Two key lies
The sacrificial operating system can get us believing things that just aren't true. Here are two examples:
"I'm failing as a leader."
In my first coaching
session with Marybeth, an ED caught in sacrifice, she said with such sadness in
her voice, "This is not the right path for me. I'm failing. I want you
to help me transition out. I don't have what it takes to be a leader."
"Leading is about rallying people around a mission. Leading is the opposite of being lonely at the top. Leading is the opposite of doing everything yourself. It's not about you going down to keep the ship afloat."
Then I said, "Please don't quit yet. Give yourself some time. Let's get you into sustainable mode and then you can decide if you like leading or not.
"And by the way, I'm glad you're not a success at sacrificial leadership. That's a terrible thing to succeed at."
Marybeth did give it time. She did upgrade her operating system...
And then she fell in love with leading.
Everyone could see her talent for it. It was unmistakable. What a shame it would have been if she had walked away from it in defeat.
Think about how many Marybeths we've lost because of the lie sacrifice tells.
"I may be suffering but at least it's for a good cause."
That's what I told myself once I realized that I was in fact suffering.
But looking back, I can see a dozen ways my work would have been so much better if I had taken care of myself.
Here's the bitter irony...
Sacrifice actually made my work worse.
I was driving myself so hard, using myself up, and what was I really doing? I was hurting the work just like I was hurting myself. Lose-lose.
This truth was really painful because then...
What did all those years mean?
I've coached many leaders who started out in sacrifice then built themselves a sustainable operating system and from there went soaring.
What I've seen in every single case, with no exception, is that as they progress, their work just gets better and better. In some cases, exponentially better.
It's not just that they turn out more service units. It's not just quantity. Their work has a different feel to it. They create new approaches. They transform their work.
And fun. Did I mention fun? The work becomes about a zillion times more fun.
So if you're tempted to continue sacrificial leadership because you're afraid that if you don't, your work will lose, please stop. The exact opposite is true.
The rule of thumb is:
"You suffer, your work suffers. You thrive, your work thrives."
Breaking free
The sacrificial operating system can literally...
Make you forget you are.
It can make you forget why you started leading in the first place.
So the antidote is to...
Remember who you are,
Go get your spirit back, and
Take a stand for yourself.
Notice that I'm not talking about a technical solution. I'm not talking about ordinary how-tos...
"If I just take one more time management workshop, I'll get things under control."
"If I read one more book on leadership, I'll find the answer."
"If I get caught up just once, then I can stay caught up."
I told myself such fairy tales a hundred times. I kept working harder and harder to solve the problem of working too hard. Understandable, but crazy.
You can't break free of the sacrificial operating system by using sacrificial strategies. There are indeed specific steps you can take to transition into sustainability, but...
First you take your stand, then you take your steps.
What do I mean by "a stand"? It's what matters to you so much that you will not be backed off from it. Taking a stand means you are living directly from your source.
You are making your decisions based on what's deepest in your heart.
You can begin with either a NO or a YES. You get to discover what works for you.
For example, let's start with NO. There's a part of you that refuses overwhelm and isolation, just simply refuses...
NO! I will not drown.
NO! I will not live like this anymore.
NO! Sacrifice is not me.
It doesn't matter how good the cause is—NO!
Now what about YES?
Remember the last time you watched a two year old discovering the power of no? Recall for a moment how she put her whole body into it, how she trumpeted her no and struck a tough-guy pose while a self-delighted hint of a smile played across her lips from the beginning of the 'n' to the end of the 'ooooo.' She was claiming herself with that no.
So her no was also a yes.
That's why it doesn't matter which one you start with, because both no and yes are the expression of the life force in you.
If you want, you can read back over the noes above and feel the yes in them.
Or see what these feel like...
YES to the part of me that always loves me.
YES to the part of me that knows how to ask for what I need.
YES to the part of me that wants to be a leader not a savior.
What will your way forward look like? It will look like you. And maybe it will look different on different days depending on your mood. Maybe your path to freedom will be...
Serious and urgent because you are so hungry for sustainability that you want to be there now. Bold and dramatic because you want everybody to see the new you and know that change is happening. Unruly and rebellious because you're going to blow up sacrifice rather than dismantling it piece by piece. Quiet and pleasurable because
you have such easy confidence about breaking
free that you want to savor each step forward.
And don't forget the spirit of play because it's the exact opposite of sacrifice. Notice how it shows up more and more as you leave sacrifice behind. And remember, too, that you don't have to have your new
system in place before you take a stand for yourself. You don't have to wait till all your old habits and
behaviors are gone. You don't have to have all your ducks in a row
because freedom doesn't require ducks.
Your spirit can go soaring right now.
Your spirit can lead you forward.
Next you might want to check out other pages that are part of the OS constellation:
OS for leaders
The overview of the operating systems.
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
