From Cell-Block to C-Suite: Leadership Lessons Learned Inside
As I write this, I am still fresh from two days in Folsom Prison (above) workshopping with its residents in the very cafeteria Johnny Cash sang “Folsom Blues” in 1968.
I have been participating in the Freedom to Choose Project workshops in maximum security men’s and women’s prisons since 2006. I am also a Board member.
The term “courageous leadership” gets thrown around business sites, keynotes, etc., fairly loosely in the free world (prison vernacular meaning “not in prison”). But once you spend just a tiny bit of time inside, the willingness of the men and women there can create a profound re-contextualization of the term, “courageous leadership”.
It is surely courageous to be a leader in business and summon the will to attend a workshop on leadership and personal development, and then dare to make changes to things like business models, culture practices, meeting protocols, personal revues, customer acquisition mechanisms, etc., and risk ire and rejection by colleagues, clients, consumers, etc.
It’s another kind of courageous to be a “lifer without” (life sentence without parole) and choose to change your life regardless, enroll in a workshop, truly do the work, and then decide to live your new choices and identity — from your cell to the yard —which may actually alienate you from your affiliations and risk daily violence toward you personally.
Courageous leadership. For real.
I have learned that the leadership insights, lessons, and epiphanies I witness and gain inside prison walls, being incomprehensibly hard-earned, extreme-tested, and forged in some of the most blistering crucibles on the planet, are ones of great strength, value, and universality. I am always eager to bring them back outside the walls and into the companies and leaders I work with.
This will be the first of many “Cell-Block to C-Suite” leadership dispatches.
This one is perhaps the most foundational of interventions for powerful and creative leadership:
Our world changes in proportion to our moving from conditioned reaction to creative response to outer circumstances.
Famed psychiatrist, Viktor Frankl, whose work the Freedom to Choose Project is built around, famously proposed after years as prisoner in death camps like Auschwitz and Turkheim:
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
The truth that so many first stumble around:
We can’t create a new reality until we make new choices.
Often, we don’t make new choices because we don’t know we can. Our reactions become so reflexive we don’t even know there is that space.
Inside, in the yard, someone bumps into you without apologizing. Or holds your gaze a couple seconds too long. There are conditioned reactions to these in prison.
In the free world, a pandemic shuts downs the social enterprise you founded overnight and the board says to stop everything, fire everyone, circle the wagons, and restart after the storm. Or, the CEO decides the project you started (and is your baby!) needs to be developed with a different team and reassigns it. There are conditioned reactions to these as well.
The key intervention here is to move into Frankl’s space, and then enter a new criteria for determining the new response. If the old criteria is “What should one do, or what does one usually do?”, the new criteria can strategically orient on the only relevant objective: “What do I want to create?”
“What do I want to create?”
For me, and for my clients, it’s the single most powerful question in life.
Given what I want to create, how do I strategically respond to what is happening?
If I am inside, what I want to create could be an intentional trajectory to a new, functional, and contributing life on the outside. Which means I need to create an optimal parole board hearing. Which means when I might normally respond to that person who bumped up against me with aggression, now I find a different response that serves the new life I want to create. Or if I am in for life without, I may decide I am going to create a journey to a higher security clearance, greater freedom, create a new kind of community inside, be a leader inside for people to find meaning and purpose so they connect to a greater self, and when they get out they don’t reoffend and come back. What a resident said to me once: “I’m free. The prison just doesn’t know it yet.”
If I am in the free world, when the pandemic hits, instead of firing everyone and circling the wagons, I go to “What do I want to create?” — I realize my mission is not business-model centric and dare to explore a new customer model — moving from B2C to B2G. Soon my business is bigger on the B2G vector than it was in the B2C. The pandemic ends and suddenly I have an exponentially scaled and pandemic-proof business in two sectors. This happened.
With the CEO moving the project elsewhere, I might pause, ask “What do I want to create?”, recognize that although beyond me, my project is actually being created, and volunteer to be an internal consultant to the other team. And in this very real case, be shortly promoted to where I am now actually overseeing the project and see that the team it went to brought it to a place I hadn’t imagined and had actually lifted my project to a high level. This happened.
There is a simple (simple, not always easy) rubric that I have witnessed used in all the above circumstances and dozens more that created amazing new unexpected futures. Let’s say a new stimulus/circumstance happens…
- Where I would normally react here, let me enter into the space that actually exists between stimulus and response.
- I identify the conditioned reaction I would normally take because I felt I “should” react that way.
- I see that I am free to respond in a new way.
- Instead of letting “should” be the criteria for my response, I will use a new criteria: “What do I want to create?”
- With that new criteria I see other responses may serve me more greatly.
- I dare to make that new choice and observe how my world responds to it.
Rinse and repeat.
Try it out.
More “Cell-Block to C-Suite” coming.
