Pat Answers #2: Umm…You Have A Voldemort Sticking Out the Back of Your Head

I’ve learned that it’s not often a good idea to pull rank.  At least, not if you want respect.

King

“Good management [parenting,leadership] and bullying have as much in common as great sex and rape.” Tim Field

“Life is a fight, but not everyone’s a fighter. Otherwise, bullies would be an endangered species.”
— Andrew Vachss (Terminal)

In my humble opinion and painful experience, normal life is NOT the military and once you have to pull rank, you are no longer the leader. You might be the boss. But leader and boss are not the same thing. Boss is your position. Leveraging your position to get people to do what you want may actually be a sign that you have no real influence in the group. It can also get you into big trouble like this Chicago school that allowed the custodian to handcuff first-graders and lock them up for an hour to scare the naughty doo-doo out of them. Now they have some very docile students but they also have a lawsuit on their school calendar.  I’ve seen a teacher threaten 6-year-old children with a pair of dirty underwear that he kept under his desk. At the slightest provocation all he had to do was reach under his desk, and the students would ‘smarten up’.

You may be able to flex your muscle, or your handcuffs, or your dirty underwear for that matter, but you won’t have people following you because you have influenced them; they follow because you left them no other choice. Flexing your muscle is the last-ditch effort, the final resort. Ron Weasley said it well when he reminded Harry Potter of this:

“Harry, don’t go picking a row with Malfoy. Don’t forget, he’s a prefect now. He could make life difficult for you.”

Without saying it, perhaps, we hint at making life hard for someone unless they toe the line. It’s the ol’ “Do as I say or else…” In response, however, we get the ol’ “Ya well, I might be standing up on the outside but on the inside I’m sitting down.”

I enjoy reading Seth Godin‘s blog and he writes here about ways we can influence people and help them get the job done. The first is the bully with the heart-of-gold, (the college coach, the drill sergeant, and I might add, more recently, the tiger-mom) who by demeaning and insulting the team/kids gets the desired outcome. It’s all about outcome.

Tiger Mom with the heart of gold.

This type of bullying is a very primal method, and it only lasts as long as the bullying lasts. When the coach/sergeant/TigerMom/handcuffs and dirty underwear are out of sight the performance goes back to business as usual. This type of boss is just plain scary.

“Yeah, Quirrell was a great teacher. There was just that minor drawback of him having Lord Voldemort sticking out of the back of his head!”

Excuse me, but you seem to have a Voldemort sticking out the back of your head.

The other option that Godin describes is competition and scarce prizes, pitting one against the other. This, again, appeals to our inner cave-person-survival-of-the-fittest, with just one winner and everyone else is a loser. This could be society at its worst. Don’t think so? Take a look at this

Godin is suggesting that this has no place in an evolved society.

Instead he says we might want to

open the door. Give people a platform, not a ceiling. Set expectations, not to manipulate but to encourage. And then get out of the way, helping when asked but not yelling from the back of the bus.

(This actually sounds like a great approach for parenting adult children, of which I have three)

When people learn to embrace achievement, they get hooked on it. When adults (and kids) see the power of self-direction and realize the benefits of mutual support, they tend to seek it out over and over again.

I don’t write this as a leadership-parenting expert who has her spit together. I admit I have my own Voldemort sticking out the back of my head sometimes. When I feel like I’m losing ground in the realm of influence, when I feel like I’m becoming The Lady With The Invisible Voice, then the Voldemort sticking out the back of my head tends to yell, make scary eyes and use big words that make great ‘last words’ in any argument. My Voldemort states opinions as though they were facts. My Voldemort remembers vividly the past. And when pushed really hard, my Voldemort pounds down the gavel and declares judgement.

But I am learning… and that’s what this series is about… things I’ve learned. Pat answers. Hopefully this will help someone who isn’t on Learn The Hard Way Road.

Related articles

• Parenting Solutions: Bullied (education.com)

Pat Answers #1 The Bah Ram Ewe Effect!

“Bah ram ewe, bah ram ewe, to your breed your fleece your clan be true! Sheep be true! Bah ram ewe.”

Coming to Thailand 20 years ago, I was sort of like Babe the Pig. I was a farang (westerner) in the far east. I really thought I had to become Thai in order to be effective. Problem was… just like Babe would never be a sheep, I could never become Thai. I didn’t even have the slightest clue about how exactly to ‘be Thai’. I thought that if I learned the language I could at least get started. I went to language school 4 hours a day for a year and a half. I learned all the consonants….

And I learned all the vowels…

And I learned how to put them together with the 5 tones so that I could read and write…

Oink.

I still didn’t know how to be Thai.

I ate the food (reluctantly at first, and always with a glass of iced water). I would attempt nonchalance as I ate some really weird foods, hoping to blend in with the locals. Sometimes I knew what I was eating. Sometimes I didn’t. Once a guy gave me a bowl of soup at church, and as I started to swish my spoon around I found little tiny heads… of pig foetuses. I didn’t eat that soup.

I could be a Canadian trying to be Thai, but I couldn’t be Thai.

Oink.

Then I swung the other direction and that’s where Babe and I differed. He persevered patiently, just being his own pig self among the sheep. Me on the other hand, I felt that if these people were going to keep laughing at my best efforts to be Thai, and if this culture was so impenetrable, then I would stubbornly dig my pig-headed Canadian heels in and all you Thai people, well, you could just fuggeddaboudit.

What did digging Canadian heels look like? Well… I started to make comparisons.

Canadian police

Royal Canadian Mounted Police, thank-you very much!

And Thai police…

Whenever I could I made a point to tell everybody how it was done in Canada… in Canada we sit on toilets, not squat. In Canada you don’t drive your motorbike on the sidewalk. You don’t drive down the wrong side of the street. In Canada we this and we that and blah blah blah.

But again, this was a futile exercise. We weren’t in Canada. We were in Thailand.

Oink.

Then, a shamefully long time later, and with a little help from my friends, I learned the Bah Ram Ewe effect; it’s a very good idea to be true to myself. It’s not photoshop or cutting certain parts of Thai culture  pasting them onto me.

Photoshopped & cut-and-pasted

It’s being myself within Thai culture.

Who was I? I was a (slightly angry -okay, very angry, and cinical) Canadian-born, tri-lingual, kartwheeler, who happened to live in Thailand.

Bah.

Living in any foreign city will contribute to the fabric of who you are. I’ve often described a cross-cultural experience like a French kiss; you can’t wipe it off, you can’t spit it out and you can’t pretend it never happened.

I guess I’ve tried to apply the Bah Ram Ewe to everything I do here too. I can share core values and principles of an organization, and I can follow certain people I respect, learn from mentors and leadership, however, if I mimic their methods then maybe it’s just cut-and-pasting. As I write it all out it sounds so simple and I feel embarrassed that it took me so long to learn this. But this is what I learned. What I do needs to come from who I am, not trying to do it like someone else. Just like my trying to be Thai, I found that trying methods of other successful leaders takes so much energy; you have to think about it all the time, like, is this what a sheep would do? is this what a sheep would say? and you have to keep going back to the book. It doesn’t come from within.

For the couple of years I got to hang out with Dave and Rebecca Gibbons in NewSong Bangkok I learned a lot. I watched the movies they had watched. I read the books they had read. I didn’t want to miss a single gathering.

Hanging out with Dave and Beka Gibbons

When they left I knew I couldn’t do things like Dave did. But I did work at allowing the core values of NewSong to be expressed from my own Bah Ram Ewe, from my own DNA.

Bah!

My Bah Ram Ewe is maternal, it’s urban, it comes from the French kiss of cross-cultural experiences in Bangkok, Paris, London, Toronto and Montreal. And the anger, well it’s still a part of it too only now I am consciously trying to direct it at injustice (and sometimes, in weak moments, my patient husband).

I’m still learning, humbly, and I don’t have all the answers down pat… tee hee… and that’s the part where I wrap this up with a clever conclusion that brings us back around to the top.

Bah Ram Ewe! To your DNA be true!