Creating Brave Spaces
Have you noticed, there’s something strangely disconcerting or disconnecting about leaders who present themselves as near perfect or super strong? They seem almost incapable of showing any sign of vulnerability or ever admitting a mistake, much less making an apology.
On the other end of the spectrum, there’s something intrinsically trustworthy about leaders who present as authentic, approachable, and yes, even vulnerable. They seem to connect easily with others and almost effortlessly create what I like to call brave spaces—where people can speak their truth, question a decision, or take the other side of a debate without fear.
These are the individuals who lead with trust and inspire others to do the same.
After spending 20+ years in corporate America—much of it in executive leadership—while also doing my best to integrate a long-standing mindfulness practice into life, I have come to believe that leadership trust is one of the most indispensable qualities for inspiring teams to deliver results and excel. Time and again, I’ve seen those who lead with vulnerability and trust, more capable than others of fostering creativity and innovation, navigating disruption and uncertainty, and leading transformation successfully.
As we teach in our Inseus Search Inside Yourself (SIY) Courses, one of the core qualities of highly effective leaders is emotional intelligence—the capacity to recognize our own and other people’s emotions and to use this information to guide wise thinking and behavior.
We also teach that one of the pillars of emotional intelligence, and ultimately of leadership trust, is empathy. When leaders can feel as and with another human being, they connect more deeply and allow others to show up with their true authentic voices, to take chances, and even to admit failure. Some people call this the ability to create safe space. To me, calling it brave space seems more real.
Perhaps that’s because I once was the beneficiary of that kind of brave space in my own professional life. At the time, one of my children was facing a serious health issue that would require me to be away from the workplace for extended periods of time. I went into my CEO’s office to have what I expected to be a very difficult conversation about the tremendous stress I felt on the home front and my heightened need for a great deal of flexibility at work.
This proved especially hard for me. I shared my vulnerableness. I shared a life that was not nearly as perfect as I wanted others to believe. There was a crack in the veneer of total control that I had created for myself. I had to ask for help.
Without missing a beat, my CEO immediately created what I later recognized as a brave space for me by extending authentic compassion, empathy, and support in my time of great need. It was a huge lesson for me as a leader.
Because of how he responded to me, I was enabled and empowered to create that same kind of brave space for members of my team, not just in times of personal crisis, but in all sorts of situations. From someone who disagreed strongly with a decision I had made, to someone who had to admit that her great idea had failed completely, creating spaces to share our humanness, our braveness, and our realities became our best team practice.
One of the great lessons that I learned in my own Search Inside Yourself journey is that what we can teach and train emotional intelligence skills, like empathy, through practice. Neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to change shape and reorganize itself by forming new neural connections—tells us that what we practice grows stronger.
In the next installment in our ongoing blog series, Mindful Leadership: Lessons from Life, I’m going to take the idea of creating brave spaces through empathy to the next level by exploring the secret to having those difficult conversations that both professional and personal life brings our way. Stay tuned!
Mindfully yours,
Ashley