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Welcome to episode 213 of The Non Anxious Leader Podcast. I'm Jack Shitama, and today's episode was inspired by an article I found in Fast Company titled how to Avoid the Most Seductive Leadership Mistake. I will post a link in the show notes. As you might guess, that most seductive leadership mistake is the desire for a quick fix. And the article leads off by saying that we can deceive ourselves into thinking we can solve our biggest challenges easily and avoid the discomfort that comes from leaning into something difficult. But progress takes longer than we typically want. And as the article notes, the challenge that we are facing usually has taken a long time to develop. So to think that we can undo it with a quick fix, that we can resolve it with a quick fix, is really deceiving ourselves. This is especially true when we were talking about a family of origin, a congregation or an organization. Patterns of behavior over years have created norms, created surrounding togetherness, pressure that makes change and a healthy response to challenge difficult. The desire for a quick fix often occurs when we face an adaptive challenge. An adaptive challenge occurs when we are trying to confront the status quo to change behaviors, ways of working, attitudes, values and norms.

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On the other hand, a technical challenge can be addressed with knowledge and subject matter expertise. It's a matter of working through the problem- solving process to find the right solution. The desire for a quick fix is often characterized by trying to solve an adaptive challenge with a technical solution. In fact, the Fast Company article gives one example where a congregation has been losing members and has few young people. Sound familiar? An adaptive approach would be to engage with young people and listen about why the preaching, the liturgy and the ministries of the church don't connect. But instead of doing this, the church pours all of its energy into developing a new service with a praise band and video content. The result is that not only does this technical solution, this quick fix, delay the real work of responding to the challenge. Two young couples leave the congregation because of their dissatisfaction with this approach. Of course, this is only one of three examples they give in the article. The other two are a for profit corporation and a school. But it's telling that churches have a reputation for not responding well to challenge and having a desire for a quick fix.

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The article cites three reasons that in the face of a challenge, why a quick fix is appealing, even seductive. First is that it lets us off the hook "The quick fix allows us to avoid messy, uncomfortable work like dealing with other factions and upsetting people we care about. A quick fix lets us off the hook by letting us think we're done." What the quick fix does is it lets us avoid taking responsibility for self and dealing with the surrounding togetherness pressure that makes change difficult. Yes, leading change is messy and uncomfortable, but that is the work of leadership through self-differentiation. It is the ability to work through a challenge while taking responsibility for self and not blaming others, as well as giving people a realistic expectation that this is going to take time, but you are willing to stick with it and you are willing to stay connected emotionally to those in the system. The second reason that a quick fix is appealing is we get to do what we are good at. We get to stay focused on the things that have worked for us in the past and the things that we know we can do well.

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The article notes that choosing a quick fix usually centers around things that we are comfortable with. Whereas when we resist that temptation, when we actually are willing to work through a challenge, we find ourselves in a state of disequilibrium that we find ourselves in an uncomfortable place. "Curiosity is the only way forward. How many of us are willing to admit publicly that we don't know how to solve a daunting challenge? We'd rather apply a solution from our back pocket than admit we have a lot to learn." If you haven't listened to last week's episode where we go over Jim Collins idea that it is a combination of humility and professional will that is fierce resolve that combine to make leaders that can make a lasting impact, it is the lack of humility that makes it difficult to admit that we don't know the answer. Ironically, that is the thing we probably most need to do when we are in the midst of a difficult challenge to be able to say, I'm not sure, but we will work through it. I can recall as we were leading up to summer 2020, right at the beginning of the pandemic, we were all stressing out about whether or not we could run summer camp, especially the staff that was involved in the day to day activities.

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And they wanted answers, they wanted us to make decisions. But I also knew that we needed to work through it step by step until we got to a decision that made the most sense. And that was difficult because information was changing daily. We were able to put off a final resolution by canceling the first few weeks of camp and saying to our constituency that if we were going to do camp at all, it wouldn't start until July. But in the end we ended up canceling the entire summer as well. It might have been easy to just make that decision at the very beginning. But my belief was that we had to work through the process. We had to make sure that we engaged everything we could in terms of trying to make camp work. And we did that. We did a lot of work that we never ended up using some of what we did use the following year. But the process itself, in my mind, helped us to come to the best decision possible without looking for a quick fix. And this is something that reminds me of what Edwin Friedman wrote in A Failure of Nerve, and that is that leaders must learn to embrace discomfort.

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Change is hard and a nonanxious leader doesn't have all the answers. But if you as a leader are willing to lean into the discomfort, you're willing to embrace the process itself, you give the organization you lead the best chance to come to an effective solution to the challenge at hand. The third reason that a quick fix is appealing is that it satisfies the people we need to please. "Avoiding the allure of the quick fix is especially hard for people who need votes or approval from a board of directors to keep their job. People expect those in authority to keep everything under control. No boss or elected official wants to make a speech saying that the solution to a tough challenge will require hard work from everyone, that everyone will have to give up something, and that progress will be incremental." Might I also add that no pastor wants to say the same thing to a church, council or congregation, and no executive director of a nonprofit wants to say that to their donors. But this is what non anxious leaders do. They embrace the discomfort, they lean into the unknown, and they don't worry about the surrounding togetherness pressure that will cause them to choose a quick fix, that will cause them to choose a path that actually puts them further behind.

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So the question is, if we are going to avoid the quick fix, if we are going to lean into the discomfort and embrace the challenge at hand, what can we do? The article recommends three things that you can do to avoid the temptation of the quick fix. The first is to experiment more. This avoids the all or nothing approach that tends to have us putting all of our eggs into one basket, which not only is likely not to work, but it will tend to put us further behind in facing the challenge. The willingness to experiment more means that we are admitting that we don't know the answers and that we're just going to try little things to see what might show promise. This approach will clearly take longer because we may try lots of experiments and learn a lot of things but not make a lot of progress. But it will ultimately get us closer to finding an effective response to the challenge. Which leads to the second recommendation, which is to set longer timetables. By setting longer timetables, you're going to better manage expectations and help people to understand that we don't really know the answers here and that we're going to have to live into it and lean into it and learn as much as we can with these little experiments to see if we can make progress.

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The third recommendation is to stop over promising and under delivering. That is the essence of a quick fix. A quick fix is a silver bullet, a magic pill and easy button which everybody wants to take care of the challenge right away, but that is just not realistic. And so instead of over promising with a quick fix and under delivering with that same quick fix, do the opposite under promise and over deliver. Say we don't know what is going on here, but we are willing to work at it and work at it and learn and grow until we get better at responding to the challenge. The challenge in all of this, of course, is dealing with the anxiety of others. That's where the surrounding togetherness pressure comes from. That's where the desire for a quick fix comes from, whether it is a board of directors, a church council, or a matriarch or patriarch in a church. If you can withstand the surrounding togetherness pressure to find a quick fix to deal with the challenge at hand quickly and resolve it, which is not possible, then you have a chance. What you will want to be able to do then is to remain a non anxious presence with the most anxious in the system.

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Move closer to them. Show that you care for them. Show that you're willing to hear about their concerns and their worries, while at the same time staying focused on making progress through little experiments, little learnings that get you closer to an effective response to the challenge. I wish I could tell you that it is easy to package all of this into one program where you become a leader who can lead through self-differentiation. But of course, that would be a quick fix. In reality, it's about doing your own work, understanding what makes you anxious, understanding how you can better self-differentiate in your own family of origin, and then how you can better self-differentiate as a leader. It is not easy work. It's not a quick fix, but it is work worth doing. That's it for episode 213. You can find the show notes at thenonanxiousleader/213. You can also connect with me at jack@christian-leaders.com and I would ask you if you find these episodes helpful, please share it with a friend, and please leave a review on your favorite podcast platform. Until next time, thanks and goodbye.

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