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David
Whyte has pushed executives at Astra-Zeneca, Boeing,
Citigroup and a host of other companies to hold the
conversations they and their employees needed to have.
How? Through poetry.
In
workshops and retreats, he recites and reflects on
classic and contemporary works, including his own, using
images and ideas from the poems to fuel discussions
about such challenges as fostering creativity,
engagement and social responsibility. We recently spoke
with Whyte about how poetry begets courageous
conversation and, in turn, better leadership.
How did
you come to bring business and poetry together?
I
launched myself as a full-time poet in 1986; soon after,
I was approached by a gentleman at the end of a speech I
had given. In best American fashion, he said, “We have
to hire you,” and in best Irish-English fashion, I
asked, “For what?”
He
persisted, saying, “The language we have in the
corporate world is far too small for the territory of
relationship and collaboration we’ve entered.” For a
poet, that was an intriguing invitation. A poet’s work
is all about creating a language big enough to represent
both the world you inhabit and the next, larger world
that awaits you.
Initially, I was afraid I would be asked to compromise
my work, but as it turned out, executives only pushed me
further to elaborate on the themes I’d begun to explore.
Good poetry can open up areas of everyday business life
that remain impervious to the jargon we have created to
describe it. Executives are hungry for this larger
language.
How can
poetry help people become better leaders?
Through
the insight it provides. Of course, you don’t go to
Wordsworth’s “Prelude” and expect a few good management
maxims to come out of it. The poem has bigger fish to
fry than whether your organization succeeds or not, but
it can cast a brilliant light on the shadowed microworld
of the workplace.
Consider
Wordsworth’s phrase “I made no vows, but vows/Were then
made for me.” It speaks to the phenomenon that whatever
project, plan or career you commit to, there will always
be a deeper dynamic you discover inside, a promise
larger than your original conception that in effect
makes vows on your behalf and invites you to find a
different kind of courage than you first intended.
Poetry
is a way of getting at the phenomenology of
conversation—that is, what happens along the way when
you’re trying to have a real meeting with something
other than yourself: a meeting with your customers, with
your colleagues or with a new field of endeavor. It
could also be a conversation with yourself about the
greater dimensions of your vocation.
Good
poets throughout history have looked at almost every
stage of the process of creative confrontation. Dante is
brilliant on the experience of losing your sense of
direction but finding something else in that darkness
far more precious: waking, as he said, “in a dark wood
where the true way was wholly lost.”
What
makes a conversation real?
A real
conversation is one that, no matter how slowly, helps
you make sense of the world around you. It can tackle
great universal questions, or it can be about your work
group’s puzzling lack of respect for you or why a
division of your company is refusing to go in a
previously agreed-upon direction.
At the
executive and managerial levels, work is almost always
conversation in one form or another, and yet we spend
almost no time apprenticing ourselves to the disciplines
necessary for holding real exchanges. That’s partly
because they involve a great deal of self-knowledge and
a willingness to study how human beings try to
belong—skills we hope our strategic abilities will help
us get by without.
The
temptation is to say, “I’d much rather inhabit the 5
percent of reality where I’m in control than enter this
95 percent where I don’t know what the hell is going
on.” But a conversational approach makes work less
stressful, not more so. It means leaders don’t have to
try to be paragons of perfection.
My work
has executives asking, in many areas of their lives,
personal and professional: “What is the courageous
conversation I am not having but need to have to take
the next step?”
Lisa Burrell is an editor for Harvard Business Review. |
