Scholars and leaders write about this “leveling-up” phenomenon regularly in Harvard Business Review. Herminia Ibarra and Anne Scoular (2019) call it the shift to being a coach rather than a commander, especially when the organization scales. In his seminal work related to leadership adaptability and emotional intelligence, Daniel Goleman outlines the 6 leadership styles and touts the benefit of choosing the right style for the right situation to get results. Jordan, Wade, and Terecino (2019) point out that leaders who thrive are the ones who keep learning, even as they feel the ground shifting beneath them.

For me, that constancy of learning meant embracing the chaos, listening more, and realizing that leadership is about empowering others to step into their roles fully. I had to shift from doing to guiding, and from knowing the answers to asking the right questions.

So if you’re finding yourself unexpectedly in the C-Suite, or maybe you worked your way there but still feel like a bit of an imposter where your leadership role is evolving faster than you are, I encourage you to check out the Core Purpose assessment we created at The Formation Agency.

It’s built to help you understand foundationally whether your particular leadership style and strengths align with your current role, or if it’s time to adapt. You’ll receive an alignment score in four key areas—your Genius, Spirit, Need, and Value—to help you make sense of your situation and begin a process of discovering your Core Purpose. We’ve also created a free workbook to help guide you through this process. My hope is that you can use this as a tool to know yourself better, lead yourself better, and in turn, to prepare to lead others through the chaotic change that, unfortunately, is our new normal.

If you randomly Google 10 companies, you’re likely to find 10 different approaches to values—a different number of values, parts of speech, and lengths of descriptions. So what’s the point of values? What do they actually do? They can be the most ambiguous, and as a result, the most ignored part of an organization’s identity. I propose, however, that they are the most vital because they created the necessary center focus from which people in the organization behave, and they build a bridge between mission, strategy, and operations. 

As we begin laying out our recommended values framework, I want to start by defining an organizational value. An organizational value is a shared belief around human connection and action that produces a mission-impacting result. It answers the question: How do we choose to work together to fulfill our mission?

Let’s break this down. A shared belief is important because we’re not looking for compliance, but rather enrollment. We want our values to be so embodied that stakeholders are magnetically attracted to the organization’s culture. Values as belief-driven actions are so much more powerful than compliance-driven ones because there’s positive motivation and energy behind them instead of least common denominator passivity. 

A value also communicates how individuals will work with themselves and others, clearly defining the organization’s expectations for human connection. 

And finally, these belief-driven actions are not disconnected from the rest of the organization’s identity. They are pointed in a specific direction—mission fulfillment. They drive mission-fulfillment because they help communicate the organization’s core strategic elements—its competitive differentiation, business model driver, and brand promise.

Now that we’ve unpacked what defines an organizational value, and before we describe the values unique to our organizations, I want to take a quick step back. It’s vital to screen all leaders, employees, partners, vendors, board members, and anyone else you’re choosing to connect with the organization for a basic set of healthy human characteristics. These three characteristics create the possibility that your stakeholders will be able to engage in healthy ways to embody, align with, and engage in healthy conflict around the organization’s values. These non-negotiables of human behavior were well laid out by Patrick Lencioni in his book The Ideal Team Player. He calls them humble, hungry, and smart. I like using the following nouns to describe these non-negotiable characteristics—humility, emotional intelligence, and drive. 

Regardless of the form and words, if our leaders and employees, candidate employees, partners, vendors, or others we are in relationship with don’t have or exhibit these characteristics from a place of neutral to positive health, we either shouldn’t enter into a relationship in the first place, or if we already are, we should directly address the situation. If any of us begin to exhibit unhealthy behaviors that are counter to these characteristics, we need to call each other out immediately and move back toward health. No one can afford to mess around with these. They are characteristics of healthy humans.

Only from that base level of healthy work-life values, then, do we move on to our organizational values framework, which contains three interdependent categories of values that are unique to each organization:

1. Foundational values

2. Detracting values

3. Advancing values

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I recommend starting by identifying three foundational values and then identifying a related detracting value for each and then a related advancing value for each. At the end, you’ll have three of each value type, and you’ll also have three sets of values that are interrelated. Don’t worry if this seems confusing now. It will become more clear by the end.

Let’s start by identifying a set of your own unique foundational values. Others may call these core values, but I like to use the word foundational for a couple of reasons. First, these are often established very early on in the organization’s life by its founders. If you’re around any of the work we do in Formation Community, you’ll have heard one of our foundational beliefs—every organizational strength and weakness is rooted in the hearts of its founders or leaders. There’s a sky and a ceiling to an organization’s health. The sky is the limit for strengths, but overuse or misuse of strengths along with our weaknesses can create ceilings that limit growth. The word foundational also communicates that we’re building something together.

Because foundational values are tied to the founders (or leaders depending on the age and complexity of the org), our identification of these values best starts with a look at the strengths and voices of those leaders. I use the 5 Voices system to identify the leadership voice order of the top leader(s) to map their natural foundational voice to a values category. People who speak Creative as their foundational voice are champions of future innovation, for example, so a value for Uniqueness will likely be present in the organization. Those who speaker Pioneer are champions of strategic thinking and achievement, so a value for Expansion or Convenience will likely show up. Connectors may bring Partnership to the table, Nurturers may bring Presence, and Guardians may bring Consistency, as examples.

Foundational values are all positive personality traits, or elements of the DNA of the organization, that you are not choosing as much as identifying. As organizations grow, healthy ones will continue to screen key leaders for their resonance with these foundational values. It’s important to note that while the organization may attract those with similar voice orders, this doesn’t mean we’re looking for homogeneity of foundational voices in our teams by any means. In fact, I’ve worked with many leaders who speak Guardian as their foundational voice, for example, who are excited for their work as a CFO or in operations in highly innovative companies because they recognize their contribution in their organizational functions are necessary to bring just the right amount of institution to organizations that might otherwise get unwieldy in their constant drive for change.

The next category of values to tease out is the detracting values category. I know this seems like an odd inclusion in a values framework. Why would we want to highlight something negative here? The answer is because we are committed to the fullness of our humanity and leadership, the strengths and their corresponding challenges—the skies and the ceilings. If we don’t recognize and address all the shared beliefs around human connection and action that produce mission-impacting results—even those that impact the mission negatively—then we will continue to accidentally employ them and wonder why we aren’t advancing toward mission fulfillment as quickly as we would like. Think of detracting values as shadow values of our foundational values or strengths. The power contained in our DNA can be overused or mis-used, and we can experience counterproductive consequences. Back to the 5 Voices, we all have a comfortability with our foundational voice, which leads to a comfortability with the use of a foundational value. But Guardians, for example, can’t live without distress in an environment run by Connectors and Creators who are over employing their value for New Ideas, constantly introducing unnecessary change and ambiguity, and not allowing processes to be established let alone work toward mission fulfillment. We call out these overuses as detracting values so we’re aware of them and can counterbalance them with our advancing values. 

Advancing values serve as an aspirational extension of our foundational values and a counterbalance or correction to our detracting values. They drive us forward toward mission fulfillment. I’ve found they are best aligned with or even derived from the organization’s mission statement, and as such, they are part of the identity of the organization and usually carried into and through the organization with the founder(s) or key leaders. As a result, they are innate to the founders and necessarily aspirational for many organizational members who don’t share the founders/leaders leadership voice. They serve to align the organization’s strategy from a central set of human behaviors that result in a unique positioning in the marketplace—often called competitive strategy or competitive differentiation.

Here’s a real life example of the values system in play for Formation Community. As a founder who speaks Creator Pioneer, I’ve identified Connection, Collaboration, and Creation as three foundational values. For me, connection is a way of describing my/our natural drive for organizational and systems integrity. Collaboration describes my/our drive for systems and people to work together toward a shared goal. And Creation is my/our drive for future ideas to be realized through innovation. 

These DNA driven values have a shadow side, though. I don’t enjoy dealing directly with conflict, and because I’m focused naturally more on systems than people, I can often avoid conflict and may not even realize it. Functional atheism—or a belief in practice that in order to get something done or done right I need to be involved, can result from my desire to see things done through collaboration with me instead of the healthier, empowerment-focused approach of leading others to collaborate to get things done without me needing to be in the weeds. Finally, pivot happiness is a natural but detracting result of a drive for ideation and creation. The idea of something is often more shiny and fun than the work (toil) needed to bring the idea to fulfillment as challenges are faced.

So to counter these detracting values, we first focus on liberation of leaders through a culture of high support + high expectations. I can’t as easily avoid conflict if I’m communicating high expectations and am also highly supportive of people in the process of holding them accountable. My functional atheism is countered with vulnerability, an openness to admitting mistakes and clear communication about how I’m feeling that builds trust in the team. Finally, discipline counters my tendency to pivot into the next big idea. The disciplined consistency of working processes over time to achieve goals will result in the actual creation of an idea, and it gives us a far greater likelihood of fulfilling our shared mission.

As I’ve worked within this framework, I’ve found our detracting values to be a focal point for conversation and an act of vulnerability. They have given us an approachable language to identify our natural tendencies that keep us from our best work. They allow us to laugh at ourselves a bit, because we have strong foundational language and strong aspirational language on either side of them that guide us into good work. When I have a new idea, a team member may, with a smile on their face, ask if I’m being pivot happy again or if the new idea is actually tied to our current core strategy. With this loving prompt, I can then remind myself that if I want my ideas to be created, I need to be disciplined long enough for them to be realized, and I can appropriately prioritize my exploration of the new idea.

One last note. This framework doesn’t necessarily keep departments or programs within your organization from having their own set of values related to their primary function or core work. I’d be careful about this, and I certainly wouldn’t want them to be disconnected or conflicting, but I do think at times a department may want to espouse more specific values for their work that complement the overall values of the organization. If they more specifically answer the question: “How do we best perform this function together to fulfill our mission?”, then I’d encourage the articulation of specific program values in addition to the organization’s shared foundational, detracting, and advancing values.

Please see the appendix below for a visual display of Formation Community’s organizational values, which were used as examples throughout this document. Thanks also for sharing and subscribing below.

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Appendix: Sample organizational values from Formation Community, Inc.

My assumption is that in reading my work, you have an orientation toward what is true, good, and beautiful, and you have not given yourself up to the movement toward harm, lies, and debauchery. I’ll bet that’s a fair if not obvious assumption, but it’s worth noting because I’m going to begin exploring in a series of posts (that will eventually become a book) the sharp contrast between who we were created to be as humans and leaders and the culture of lies that has been laid, especially over the past 400 years, leading us into deformation instead of formation.

These myths are so culturally pervasive and have subtly been layered over each other that we aren’t aware how radically they have shaped our lives and our communities. While certainly not exhaustive, I’ve identified three foundational lies that have coincided with major cultural innovations—the lies of individualism, industrialism, and consumerism.

In her 2008 book, The Great Emergence, How Christianity is Changing and Why, Phyllis Tickle describes our current cultural moment as the beginning of the end of a 500 year cycle in which the church cleans out its attic for a rummage sale, citing a series of 500 year cycles of “Greats” in the history of the Church. From the advent of Christianity in the birth of Jesus the Christ, to the monastic movement of Gregory the Great, to the Great Schism, to the Great Reformation, each ~500 year cycle culminates in an upheaval that has radically changed not only how we see our faith, but how faith is seen and expressed, and how they world operates as a result.

As I’ve looked back at the last ~400 years with the help of Tickle and others interested in the history of the church and culture, I’ve observed three “isms” born out of major innovations—tangible and intellectual—that now shape what we believe about ourselves, our faith, each other, and the world. And what we believe becomes how we act. I’ll briefly introduce these three isms here and then flesh them out in future posts.

The reason I call them lies and “isms” is because these cultural movements are not bad in and of themselves. To recognize our identities and worth as individuals, for example, is important. When we allow individualism to dominant our worldview, however, we do that at the expense of seeing ourselves as part of the body of humanity, and for followers of Christ, as the body of the Church.

The same goes for industrialism. Efficiency and consistency are not bad things in and of themselves. One could argue that efficiency and consistency in our food system has massively reduced extreme poverty worldwide. When nutrients are stripped from our food in favor of volume and non-food food shapes a pandemic of morbid obesity in Western society, for example, industry becomes industrialism, and we see that we’ve bought into a destructive lie.

Compound this with consuming. Consuming what we need to live is a healthy part of life. Consumerism, however, turns us from consuming only what we need to consuming to make us happy for a moment, never actually being fulfilled and growing our addiction to ruining our planet through multiple forms of waste.

I invite you to join me in a journey exploring these three lies over the following weeks, followed by the truths we need to believe and embody that will help us fight for our formation against the deformation that currently dominates us.

I’m expanding on his work slightly into leadership dynamics for redemptive communities as a whole. Where he positions centering at the intersection of high expectations and high inclusivity, I’m using expectations and support as the two variables to communicate the categories of leadership activity that create centering, boundedness, fuzziness, or neglection.

Here’s an overview of the model.

Leaders in organizations and communities have a choice of four different cultures to create--three of which are unhealthy and one that guides people into increasing ownership of their lives, their communities, and future health.

The prevailing culture in any organization is the direct result of the level of support provided by the community for the community and the level of expectations held for the community members for each other. Both are modeled and guided by the community's leaders.

The first choice–to be a neglected community–ends up being not much of a choice at all. It’s really more of an effect of leadership failure that over time or very quickly atrophies a community into nonexistence. Communities aren’t formed through this approach. They only die from it. The  culture becomes one of abandonment. That shared experience and the resulting anxiety may briefly hold the community together, but leaders who offer neither support nor expect anything from their people will lose them.

The second choice operates at the intersection of high support for its members but low expectations for them. This is a fuzzy community characterized by a culture of relativism, where there is no real center or boundaries, so everyone who shows up even occasionally is “in.” The priority here is that everyone feels comfortable and happy. No one rocks the boat. Unhealthy behaviors are known to leaders but hidden, masked, or ignored. Fuzzy communities often prioritize surface level vanity metrics, limiting their success to participation instead of seeking deeper engagement or ownership.

The third choice is the opposite of fuzzy, using high expectations with low support to create a bounded community. A bounded community has clearly defined beliefs and behaviors that define who is in and who is out of the community. These belief and behavior sets are clear on either side of the boundary. For example, a church may say that members must believe in premillennialism and not postmillennialism, or that members must attend church each Sunday and not go to events where alcohol is served. These strict expectations for its attendees create a culture of coercion, where members tend only to comply by going up to the line but not past it. They often include a large set of doctrinal beliefs and behaviors to do or not do in order to be members of the community. Leaders and members alike are motivated by control.

The last choice is to create a centered community for members through the integration of high expectations with accompanying high support to guide people into co-ownership of the community. They are motivated by the meaning derived from their journey toward the agreed upon center, which in our Formation Community we describe in the identity section of the organization’s field guide. With this posture toward and movement toward the center, they step in and help where necessary, welcoming others into the community, and are able to grow into greater health.

Here’s a visual model I created that summarizes the types of communities, cultures they create, and motivations of each:

In which type of community do you find yourself today? In what ways are you celebrating your movement toward centered community as a leader? In what ways have you moved toward centered community as an organization? Who else is currently exploring this area that I should connect with and/or read?

With you,

Jeff

One of the ministries I work with, Standing Stone, used to use C.A.R.E as its foundational strategy. The ministry’s core work is to pastor other pastors and ministry leaders, so at first blush, it made sense. They used it as an apronym—an acronym where the word spelled from the first letters of each word carries the same meaning as the combined words. Why the grammar lesson, you ask? Well, it’s actually important to this post. Hang in there with me.

C.A.R.E. stood for Connect, Appreciate, Relate, and Encourage. While these all accurately communicated elements of the strategy, and while these are all vital supportive activities, I believe they failed to capture the fullness of the ministry’s strategy because these merely establish the basis for relationship and don’t get to the heart of more deep, meaningful interaction that moves them forward in their formation.

Shortly after beginning my work with this ministry, I began to hear stories of life transformation that required much more than the supportive activities of connecting, appreciating, relating, and encouraging. I heard beautiful stories of tragedies averted—of suicides prevented, marriages restored, and physical and emotional health transformed. I also heard stories of important preventative work, guiding ministry leaders into increasing health.

What I heard was far more than C.A.R.E.; it was actual care.

What’s the difference?

Leaders who actually care, I suggest, do more than the supportive work represented in the C.A.R.E. apronym (or was it really only an acronym?). They also do the work of guiding people to set high expectations for themselves and then holding them to those high expectations. To truly care is to create a culture of high support and high expectations, characterized by tracking with people as they fulfill their commitments, celebrating achievement of those commitments and other goals, and listening to document how they’re interacting with the sources of life in their world.

At the beginning of 2022, Standing Stone made the shift away from using the C.A.R.E., recognizing that their shepherding work was full of high expectations in addition to high support. As importantly, they opened up an internal conversation about what it means for a shepherd to truly care about and for the ministry leaders they walk with.

As leaders, I invite you to do the same. Ask yourself, what it means to truly care for your people. Have you failed them with high support but low expectations, creating a culture of relativism? Or conversely, have you inhibited their growth with low support but high expectations, creating a culture of coercion.

Finally, consider what it would take to increase both your support and expectations to create a culture of ownership where your community can flourish together.

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What does it mean to learn?

In our industrialized educational culture, we think it means regurgitation for standardized test performance. Then we grow up and become leaders and continue the pattern by reading and espousing leadership theories from books. But if leadership by bestseller works, you could simply memorize a book or two and be great at business. Then why does Don Miller, for example, need to provide a 2 day workshop to train someone in the Storybrand framework? And why does that training include real time, practical situations for applying the Storybrand principles? Why couldn’t every leader simply read the book and make it happen? We know this intuitively, but we’ve built systems counter to it.

Learning is not simply regurgitation.

Learning is not completed in the memorization of a theory or a fact. Learning is evidenced by the creation of something new. Creation result not only from remembering new ideas and facts, but in understanding them, applying information into new situations and contexts, analyzing how those ideas work, evaluating them for their value, and then creating something new from them.

If you want to look into this more, Google Bloom’s revised taxonomy of learning. The ultimate evidence of learning is creation. It’s not enough to remember a fact, understand a concept, apply that information into a situation, draw a connection, or justify a stand or decision.

You must produce an original work. You must create.

Words associated with creation are — design, assemble, construct, conjecture, develop, author, investigate, and formulate. When you create, you are forming.

Throughout our culturally accepted learning process, you are gathering and regurgitating information, but in contrast, creation is the ultimate evidence of learning. More than that, creation is the ultimate evidence of formation.

I’m glad that you bought this book, but reading this book is not enough. For it to have any impact at all, you must create something new from it. You must be truly formed by it.

Think about ways we often prioritize how we learn leadership or management. Any digital source of information without engagement is limited to remembering and understanding. Courses and workshops are good, but they end with application and analysis. Only direct engagement with real-time, real-life challenges and opportunities necessitate evaluation and creation. And only consistent engagement with those active challenges offer the full range of learning in a true taxonomy of learning.

So what do you need to do to really learn?

1. Remember facts from memory

2. Understand the context of facts through connections

3. Apply facts to address challenges and opportunities

4. Analyze to distinguish parts of facts through comparison and contrast to create information

5. Evaluate to justify a stand or decision on values related to the information

6. Create new uses for the evaluated information

The ultimate evidence of learning is in the creation of something new. Regurgitation is the first step of learning. Creation is the final step.

Creation > Regurgitation.

Formation is both the act or process of being formed and an arrangement or structure in a community of support. But what are most people experiencing if they’re not practicing intentional, consistent disciplines to be formed? As I’ve said before, there’s formation and then the opposite, deformation, and we’re in constant movement in either direction. As soon as we’re not being formed, we’re subject to being deformed and begin moving in that direction. But there’s also a different movement of deconstruction and reconstruction called reformation.

Formation is a positive, creating, generative process where we become more and more of who we were created to be, individually and collectively.

Deformation is an abdication of our identity to the identity and forces of others, culture, and creation. These forces are strong, and they’re not us. They’re at best entropy and at worst evil. Why open ourselves up to this?

And then there’s Reformation. It’s different. It acknowledges that something was force-formed or false-formed in misalignment with identity and truth, like a cancer cell. As a result, reformation first requires intentional deformation of that cancer cell, that trauma, before healthy formation can happen. It’s an intentional process in the opposite direction of formation so that formation can actually take place, so that a harmful piece of ourselves can be reformed into health. Reformation is a healthy and necessary response to trauma.

If you want to be a leader, you must be interrogate your trauma induced forced/false formation and intentionally break it down so you can reform those neural pathways into health.

You can’t lead others where you aren’t also going.

If you hear in this statement, “You can’t lead someone where you haven’t been,” you’re mistaken, and you’re wrong. You can lead someone where you haven’t been. It’s called adaptive leadership, and that’s the only form of leadership that really exists for any length of time anymore.

Leading requires being on the journey with others. Leading requires the messy vulnerability of entering into newly complex and never before seen situations. And this, by the way, is pretty much every situation in life. The world is the most complex it’s ever been, and that is only increasing.

A prescriptive leader directs a definitive course of action based on what they did in a “similar” situation to the one they’re hearing about. An adaptive leader says, “I might have some experience that we can use right now. Follow me, and we’ll face this challenge together.”

Do you tend to be a prescriptive leader or an adaptive leader? Which kind do you want to be?

The process is the plan.

In the late 1990s, I was working for a university and participated in their strategic planning process. We spent the better part of a year engaging administrators, staff, faculty, and students in developing a beautifully comprehensive three ring binder of a 10-year strategic plan for the university. I proudly placed it on my mahogany bookshelf along with other important documents and continued on in my work.

Three years later, I pulled the binder off my bookshelf to check in on our progress, and not surprisingly, much of our plan was irrelevant because of changes in the higher education market, technology, economy, and culture. Our 10 year plan had been outmoded in under three years.

In my work helping leaders implement adaptive strategic planning in their organizations, I almost always encounter the statement: “We just need to finish the strategic plan.” I understand the sentiment, but it’s coming from a false belief that strategic planning can ever be completed. It can’t. A plan can’t be a plan if it’s outmoded shortly after it hits paper. Strategic plans are a process.

As soon as you have a strategic plan written down, the assumptions and hypotheses begin to unravel due to micro and macro internal and external changes. When you do your strategic plan, you start with a SWOT analysis, identifying internal strengths and weaknesses as well as external opportunities and threats. While all of these change over time, it’s the last one that especially gets us. In a world of accelerating complexity, threats to our plans are born faster every day, so the only way to plan is to be in a constant process of planning — to practice planning so it is embedded in the way you think and act every day. This gives you the ability to adapt in real time to changes.

In our model, you practice planning in a quarterly session to push your 90 day plan forward another quarter so that you constantly have a 12–15 month plan. While the following month may still be 95% accurate, the 90 day plan is likely to be closer to 80% while the 15 month range is more like a guess. It’s not every year that we have a global pandemic, but change is accelerating, and changes in thousands of small variables have impact equal to one large one.

So what steps can you take?

Step 1: Implement a quarterly planning retreat into your organization’s rhythm. For smaller organizations, a half day or one day will suffice. As you grow, you’ll need more time. Prep your leadership team by asking them to provide a SWOT analysis.

Step 2: Hire a facilitator experienced in coaching and consulting organizations through key growth inflection points. Bring someone in who won’t just plug and play a template. They need to be able to adapt the plan and process to your unique context.

Step 3: Make sure your strategy is grounded in your organization’s identity. If you don’t have a solid set of identity statements, work on those before moving to strategy. Your identity statements should include a problem statement, dream/vision statement, org values and a mission statement with a 1–3 year time-framed mission goal. Your strategy is how you plan to achieve your mission goal, which should clearly communicate the most important measure of mission fulfillment for your organization to pursue in the horizon of your adaptive strategic plan.

Step 4: Identify a strategic goal that will measure your success at growing the core driver of your business model. This will likely be found at the intersection of your organization’s mission and revenue. For example, a high school may have a mission goal that measures the % of students accepted into college, and their strategic goal might then be the % of students involved in extracurricular activities and AP classes. With grounding in your mission goal and strategic goal, you’ll more clearly identify the goals and projects needed for the next 90 days.

Remember, the plan will start to lose its integrity immediately after finishing. This quarterly practice, however, will train you and your leaders to think adaptively. The process is the plan.

A couple years ago, when we had a team member transition out of our organization, I searched for the job description we had used in their hiring process, noticed that less than 50% of it remained accurate, updated it to align with our revised strategy and context, and began using it in the hiring process for the replacement. And then I was struck by a pattern — this wasn’t the first time I’d engaged in this process. In fact, every hire in the past few years was the same. The job description they entered into wasn’t the same job description they exited from.

In every case, this created a problem — over time, and often pretty quickly, my team members lost the ability to know how to win at their jobs. More importantly, they lost the ability to have confidence in their contribution to a mission — whether that’s the organization’s or their own personal mission within the organization. And in a world of accelerating complexity, the fog of culture and competition rolls in fast, leaving employees blind to their connection to meaningful work. Why is this important? In a 2011 HBR article, researchers Teresa Anabil and Steven Kramer show that measurable progress in meaningful work is the most important contributor to workplace happiness.

Measurement + Meaning = Job Happiness

Let’s translate these into the components of a good job description.

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There’s a book that sits on one of my shelves. I don’t remember where I got it. My guess is that it was assigned reading for a business or leadership class in college. Or maybe it was from my student government days. Regardless, I didn’t get the point at the time because I wasn’t in a position to really feel it. The book’s title? *The Lonely Whine of the Top Dog*

Now that I’ve experienced executive leadership and coached other CEOs as well, I feel it. Deeply. Leadership is lonely. “Top” leadership is the worst. We’ve created a culture of leadership that elevates us into impossible perceived perfection and isolates us through parasocial relationships. 99% of leaders don’t have a place where they can be real with others, and it’s hard to be real with yourself if others mandate alignment with impossibly high standards.

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These emails will all be rooted in a some core beliefs, which will be the foundation for our explorations. I’ll include insights from other voices I’m listening to. I’ll also share epiphanies I’m having in my own experiences and formation. Here are a few of the core beliefs to get us started:

1. Every organizational strength and weakness is rooted in the heart of its leaders.

2. Your organization and community will never be healthier than you are as a leader.

3. If you’re not intentionally being formed, you’re accidentally being deformed.

My hope is that this publication becomes part of your intentional formation. My goal is that you’ll discover more truth that helps you know yourself to lead yourself to lead your communities into a more meaningful life.

Here are a few ways to optimize your experience:

1. If you were sent here by a friend, subscribe to the Fully Formed. Join this conversation with other leaders dedicated to becoming fully human again. There’s a free version where I’ll deliver snackable content. For those who want to also get additional content with deeper insights, comment with other subscribers, and get early and exclusive access to conversations with me and my friends, there’s a paid option that also helps fuel my work.

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2. Read Fully Formed in the Substack app for iPhone. With the app, you’ll have a dedicated Inbox for my Substack and any others you subscribe to. New posts will never get lost in your email filters or stuck in spam. Longer posts will never cut-off by your email app. Comments and rich media will all work seamlessly. Overall, it’s a big upgrade to the reading experience.

3. Check out our Formation Agency webpage for additional formation, training, and certification opportunities.

Thanks for joining, and welcome to the journey.

Jeff

I experience this mentality every week, if not every day. Someone will ask me if I’ve read__________[book], and tell me it’s SO good. But then when I explore a bit more for how they’ve implemented it or how they’ve uniquely created something for their organization from it, at best they say they’ve used this part or that, and most often they look sheepish and confused. By the way, I get frustrated by this, but I’m completely guilty myself.

I’ve grown up in and been complicit in an education system that values regurgitation over creation.

I believe the reality is that the vast majority of people in leadership positions have settled for voyeuristic or imaginary leadership. We either watch others implement practices, even fictional characters we read about in leadership fables, and believe we are becoming a better leader because we know and “believe in” certain principles. Or, we imagine that we’re actually using said principles because we read them and are regurgitating them as we talk about our work and leadership.

Are either of these scenarios truly formation? Have they found their way into tools and processes that we’re consistently practicing? Are either of these creating something new from the knowledge we’ve acquired? I think not. We’re missing a necessary bridge between intellection and action. What can we do to build a bridge?

1. Explore before arriving. We must diverge before we converge. Only when we make sense of reality can we create.

2. After exhausting exploratory questions, begin to converge. This may look like advice, but it will more often look like epiphanies. These are aha! moments that signify an evolutionary movement forward in thinking. Name these. Record them. Embody them. And don’t look back.

3. Take that epiphany into action. Commit to doing something concretely different in the future. Make a practical and lasting change in your behavior.

4. Invite a trusted confidant or teammate into your epiphany and commitment, and subject yourself to their accountability.

By engaging in these 4 steps, you’ll greatly increase the likelihood that you’re in formation. Moving beyond intellection to action is the key.

You can’t be an alum of an ongoing process. Alumni status is for completion, but leaders are never done forming; we’re formed and we’re also forming or deforming. Formation is a continual process.

If you’re forming, you’ve never arrived, and you’re never fully formed. The moment you declare that you are, you’re guaranteed to begin deforming. The moment you say you’ve arrived, you’ve lost the humility necessary for positive growth.

This could feel stifling to you, but it should feel wildly freeing. No one has arrived. No one is an alum of leader school. Our job as leaders is simply to show up for each other for the good of humanity.

Becoming a Formation leader is particularly hard for CEOs. They’re expected to have all the answers. They’re probably naturally prone to being a definitive leader in their foundational leadership voice. Many CEOs, in fact, disproportionately are foundational Pioneer leadership voices. In the 5 Voices System, the Pioneer is the champion of strategic vision, results, and problem solving. They’re very confident, and their voice is strong and heard. Even if a CEO isn’t naturally wired as a Pioneer, they’re certainly wired that way in nurture. There’s an expectation we have in the U.S. for definitive top leaders. We expect them to have all the answers — the right answers — to be bold, strong, and loud.

This is actually problematic for becoming a formation leader because formation recognizes that we don’t always know the right answers.

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We often reference culture as if it’s one big abstract behemoth to be reckoned with. But the reality is there is no one culture. Rather, we live in an intermingled complexity of many cultures based on a diversity of nature, nurture, needs, attitudes, behaviors, and loyalties.

Cultures often overlap and create powers of belief that make it difficult for people to see the reality they’re swimming in. Consider the compounding impact of 16th century individualism, 18th century industrialism, and 20th century consumerism. That’s almost 500 years of intersecting cultural movements. Adding my own context living in one of the most wealthy cities, counties, states, and countries in the world, and I realize that I live in time and space at the historical apex of narcissistic consumption.

Why is this important? You can’t change what you can’t see, so when you can see and name the beliefs that influence of your cultures, you can make sense of 99% of our collective behavior. And sensemaking is necessary for creating. You can’t change your own behavior or call someone to something new if you can’t see the deficiencies of the past.

Consider these three steps for making sense of the cultures influencing you:

1. Name each group of people you spend a lot of time with, and be specific. Examples: Orange County business building moms. Earth conscious hipster coffee snobs. LatinX indie audiophiles.

2. Next, identify 2-3 underlying beliefs that tie each group together.

3. Finally, ask yourself these questions to decide if you want to be part of their culture: Do they align with the beliefs you espouse? Will they help make the world a better place for us all?