Receptiveness to Community
By Shelly L.
Francis
Leadership can
be lonely, but it doesn’t have to be. It requires not only a capacity to create
community but also a willingness to receive community as a gift.
Becoming receptive to the idea of needing a community is an act of social
courage because it means allowing yourself to be real. Many leaders do not want
to admit that they need help or have feelings or need other people. Such humility
can be seen as weakness. Becoming receptive involves inner work. It must be
present in you as “a capacity for connectedness”—a capacity to resist the
forces of disconnection, such as narcissism, egotism, jealousy, and
competition.
In the
complicated landscape of your life, you may have community in one arena but not
in another. At certain times in your life, you may be happily surrounded by
colleagues, family, and friends; as circumstances change, you may find yourself
alone once again. Community is rarely a given, obtained once and kept forever.
As Patrick pointed out, community requires careful, regular tending, just as a
garden does if it is to thrive for more than one season.
“I was keenly
aware we didn’t have as much fun together as I thought we probably should. I
decided to recruit what we call the Fun Committee. There’s three of us, and we
have very fun planning meetings after hours in a local bar. Then we plan
events, about one a quarter, for the senior executive team to do or to host for
other executive groups. That sense of creating community has been really
important, and helped us with some challenging work that we had to do in the
first half of this year.”
Cultivating
community can also be a form of self-care. Patrick applies an adaptive leadership
concept: giving yourself a sense of sanctuary on a daily, weekly, monthly, and
annual basis.
“It’s easy to
feel you can’t add anything new to your day, but this idea didn’t require me to
do something new, but just do what I’m doing with more intentionality.” When
stepping into the shower each morning or being more attentive at church, he
says to himself, “This is my sanctuary.”
“I play
racquetball once a week with the same guy, and I now say to myself, ‘This is my
sanctuary.’ I’m still a jerk to him on the court, but that’s racquetball. At my
poker group, I stop and look around the table at the five to fifteen guys and
think to myself, ‘This is my sanctuary; these are the guys in the lifeboat with
me.’”
He often tells
the people he leads, “You can create your own community if you don’t have one.
Find your own practice; here are some examples. Don’t shy away from thinking
you can’t. There are lots of options.”
We were created in and for a complex ecology of relatedness,
and without it we wither and die. This simple fact has critical implications:
community is not a goal to be achieved but a gift to be received.
—Parker J. Palmer
About Shelly L. Francis
Shelly L. Francis has
been the marketing and communications director at the Center for Courage &
Renewal since mid-2012. Before coming to the Center, Shelly directed trade
marketing and publicity for multi-media publisher Sounds True, Inc. Her career
has spanned international program management, web design, corporate
communications, trade journals, and software manuals.
The common thread
throughout her career has been bringing to light best-kept secrets —
technology, services, resources, ideas — while bringing people together to
facilitate collective impact and good work. Her latest book The
Courage Way: Leading and Living with Integrity identifies key ingredients needed to
cultivate courage in personal and professional aspects of life.
