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Leadership Lesson from Hillary
Robert Rabbin
If you are keeping an eye on the U.S. presidential campaign, you'll have heard
of how Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton turned certain defeat into stunning victory
in the New Hampshire primary. In doing so, she also turned the U.S. media inside
out and upside down, triggering a tsunami of talking heads trying to grasp
concepts like authenticity and vulnerability.
In case you missed it, here’s what happened. On Monday, 7th January, at the Cafe
Espresso in Portsmouth, N.H., Marianne Young asked Clinton about the rigors of
the campaign trail, “As a woman, I know it's hard to get out of the house and
get ready. My question is very personal. How do you do it?”
Clinton’s response included, “It's not easy, it's not easy. And I couldn't do it
if I just didn't passionately believe it was the right thing to do.”
But what Clinton said is less important than how she said it. Her voice
trembled. Her stoic and controlled mask melted; maybe there was a tear or two,
or just some mist. No one knows for sure. The U.S. media became obsessed with
this sudden burst of vulnerability and authenticity, this unscripted moment in
which Hillary was indisputably heartfelt and sincere. In a subsequent interview
on CNN, the commentator asked her, “You mean, it’s okay to be human?”
Yes, it is.
There is a vital leadership lesson in this. Leadership is about credibility;
credibility is about authenticity, which is about vulnerability — which means
one’s speaking has to reveal, rather than conceal, one’s true thoughts and
feelings. For leaders, the true purpose and power of speaking is to create an
authentic connection.
Authentic connection means that you touch your audience by speaking from your
heart to theirs, in a simple, direct manner. You look in their eyes and you tell
the truth. Authentic connection has a precise formula:
Authentic Connection = Intimacy With Self + Vulnerability With Others
Intimacy with self implies a willingness and capacity to know oneself from
the inside out, deeply; one must excavate through layers of repression, other
peoples’ ideas and beliefs, fears and inhibitions — all the way to a dynamic
place of genuine enthusiasm for one’s life, for one’s deeply felt vision and
values. You’ve got to know who you are in the core of your very being, because
this is what people are looking for. They want to see the thing in you that they
can trust, as if you were going to belay them on a long steep climb up a
perilous cliff. As a belayer, their life is in your hands. Can they trust you?
Can they believe you? If people do not fundamentally, even intuitively, trust
and believe in you, they will not listen further. They will not care what you
have to say.
Vulnerability with others implies a willingness and capacity to stand in
front of others fully seeing them, and allowing them to see you, without
pretense or defense, without putting up masks or barriers behind which to hide
or distort our genuine presence. Vulnerability is risky business, at best; we
scarcely open ourselves all the way with our spouse or partner, how in the world
can we do this in front of people we don’t even know, and maybe hundreds of
them? Leaders take this risk. Authentic leadership is not about transmitting
information; it is about transparent communication. It is a relationship based
on honesty and integrity.
It is this quality of establishing a connection with oneself and one’s audience
that creates the channels through which communication — as distinct from
information — is transmitted. It is a matter of embodying one’s message, rather
than presenting information.
People want to trust you, not what you know or your ideas or plans. First things
first. If they don’t trust you, they won’t trust anything that comes after. Who
are you? Where is your character, your spine? Where is that solid thing about
you that will cause people to put their life in your hands?
You may not even know anyone who leads this way, who speaks this way, who lives
this way. That’s how rare it is. We’ve got too many deals with the devil, done
or in the making. I guess that’s why in a single moment, Hillary’s moment of
authentic leadership transfixed an entire country, if only for an equally brief
moment. Still, the lesson is there.
Authentic leadership requires, demands, that one shows oneself. YOU are
the message.
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