Presence: cultivating conditions for people to do their best thinking
Barbara Hannigan conducting rehearsal of the Rakes Progress
If you are in a leadership position, cultivating conditions for people to do their best thinking during a crisis won’t happen by accident. You can’t cultivate that thinking space without embodying it yourself – that’s why practicing presence is the starting place.
Presence is what allows you to pay attention, connect to what matters, and make more deliberate choices. It helps cut through confusion, providing calmer awareness and the flexibility to improvise with things as they are. Presence allows you to admit the complexity and overwhelm without being scattered and reactive, or paralayzed by it. A crisis provides one certain opportunity: to pay attention to things we ordinarily ignore, and to amplify our empathy muscles. Your ability to choose where you focus is critical in a crisis.
paying attention is the foundation of trust
In this article I’d like to set out why presence is the foundation that supports everything else, how you can work on it, and the difference it can make in your mindset and decision making, particularly as a leader.
Being a leader means setting an example for how to be and guiding processes, not just what to do. This is true all the time, but more obvious now, and more challenging when it’s not possible to work in person. When you create calmer conditions through presence and attention, you are also creating space for trust to emerge.
Trust can never be forced. It doesn’t mean shutting down emotions, quite the contrary. But it doesn’t mean collapsing into them either. When we have trust, we don’t need to resort to manipulation. People need to feel trust in order to be open and collaborate. Especially as a leader, your inner state will influence others. If you are anxious, it will transfer to your team. If you are able to remain calm, even when facing uncertainty, people will be reassured. As legendary basketball player Michael Jordan said about Phil Jackson when he was their coach at the Chicago Bulls,
“As a player you connect with the atmosphere the coach creates. With Phil it was like we were in harmony with each other in the heat of battle. We were comfortable not only with each other but with the situation no matter how difficult the moment. We were able to find peace amid the noise, and that allowed us to figure out our options, divine solutions and be clear-headed enough to execute them.”
I’ll be the first to admit that finding peace in the noise is probably a lot easier when you’re playing a basketball game than trying to survive a pandemic. The basketball player has been training for this their entire life, while most of us feel utterly unprepared for this situation (with the exception of leaders like health minister KK Shailaja of Kerala, a state in Southern India). But really, the choices of mindset are the same – it all starts with being present. We can learn from the experts. Listen to people who work in conflict zones, they know that if they don’t master their mindset and resilience, they will not be effective and may get into danger themselves. Listen to people who work in hospice, or teach troubled youth, or work in the arts. They probably have a lot to teach the rest of us right now about how to have presence of mind.
you’re a genius when you inhabit the spirit of a place
“We speak of genius when we speak of leadership, hoping for some of that elusive genius in ourselves, but the word genius in its Latin originality means simply, the spirit of a place...the genius of an individual lies in the inhabitation of their peculiar and particular spirit in conversation with the world… Everything is at stake, and everything in creation, if we are listening, is in conversation with us to tell us so. ”
An image of presence is the warrior, in the martial arts sense, not the worrier. Awareness of your own physicality and of the space around you calms you down so you can be alert to what’s really going on, paying attention to people and conditions in the moment.
use sensory awareness to tune into others
Most of the time we are living in the future or the past. We’re either worrying about what will happen in the future, how to get a grip and control outcomes, or we are reviewing and critiquing the past. These may be useful problem-solving strategies, but what often happens is that we are compulsively pulled by our thoughts and worries. It’s not a strategic choice, but a habit of mind. If we get pulled into thinking about the future and past at a critical moment, we can miss the cue that is going to help our business recover, have a new insight, or connect a new team in a critical way. Being distracted is also a major factor that lowers trust. It may be subconscious, but people will feel less trust when they feel that you and your thoughts are somewhere else. Fully inhabiting the spirit of place where you are is transformative.
great leaders are self-aware
As a leader, when you are aware of yourself, the place and people around you, you can tend to emotions, sit with ambiguity, and consider options in a connected way, not only in your head. Presence is a physical state as well as mental and emotional. It’s not just a thought or a concept. It’s not a mysterious, “woo woo” thing. Mindset and presence is researched and practiced in sports, the performing arts, and many other contexts. Social psychologist Dr. Amy Cuddy has researched and written extensively about it in her book Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges. Cuddy gives an example from the military as well, “Standing at attention is an upright, grounded, and motionless posture. Not only does it signal respect, it’s also the posture most conducive to feelings of alertness and strength. Soldiers are trained to do this for a simple reason: when a commanding officer is communicating information that could influence life-or-death decisions, soldiers must be fully psychologically present. Standing at attention brings them to the present.”
mindsets can be practiced and change
Whatever mindsets and values were being practiced before the Covid-19 crisis are now magnified. If reacting and jumping in every direction because of lack of clarity of purpose was already the status quo in your organization, that will show even more so now. If fear-based leadership was the driver and habit, it will be now too, and so will the negative consequences of these mindsets.
Even if you’ve been a purpose-led leader, practicing presence for years, this is a challenging moment. This is when fruit comes to bear. Whatever you’ve been practicing shows. But mindset is not fixed, it’s on a continuum. You can always start or return to practices that help bring out the best in yourself and your teams.
Presence and the energy it brings will help you create a high-quality environment, where trust and possibility take hold. So before you start to strategize on your reorganization, start a new design initiative for customer relations, or plan a big pivot – be present. Ground yourself and your team in the mindsets that help to be discerning and do your best thinking. Once you do that, you can connect to your purpose, apply problem-solving methodologies that spark creative possibility, and pass on the good that you and your team have to offer.