Resilient Leadership

What does it mean to have it all? Does it mean you are happy and satisfied with your life and enjoy what you have? Does it mean the ability to register success and progress when you’ve achieved it? Does it mean loving a partner, parenting a child or making an impact in the workplace? What “having it all” means is different for each person and changes from phase to phase of our life.

As I follow the interviews and responses to Anne-Marie Slaughter’s recent article in The Atlantic, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” I am struck by the complexities of real life — the life that is much more about juggling than it is about balancing. Known for telling women that they “can have it all and do it all, regardless of what field” they are in, Slaughter, the first woman director of policy planning at the State Department, reached a stage in life where she had to rethink this adage and the belief system it fosters. Given a two-year window within which she could return to her position as Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy at Princeton University, Slaughter re-evaluated and decided it would no longer work for her to parent under the required conditions. Her two sons, ages 12 and 14, were suffering as a result of their mother being away all week and home only on the weekend.

Continue reading this article at The Huffington Post.

This is what can happen when adults take their time to inspire young teens:

What does it take to act with courage? What does it take to be the anti-bystander — the one who speaks up rather than stay silent? The officials at Penn State University have modeled the opposite of courage. The cowardly Nittany Lions top executives deemed it too risky to speak the truth and “out” one of their own. Faced with information about former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky’s alleged involvement in sexually abusing a 10-year-old boy, former university president Graham B. Spanier and other top university officials convinced themselves that it was reasonable, or as one email suggested, “humane,” to avoid reporting Sandusky to the authorities. Instead they chose to say nothing and do nothing, and Sandusky allegedly sexually molested boys for many more years.

How easy it is to convince ourselves and others to avoid dealing with the stresses and potential fall-outs that come from exposing atrocious behavior. Recently a friend and colleague took the opposite tactic and spoke up after she and two other women had an encounter at the Union League of Philadelphia, a private club that first admitted women in 1986. The three, according to Ilene Wasserman, founder of ICW Consulting Group, were seated at a table in an empty dining room, only to be asked to move 15 minutes later as the table they were “mistakenly” seated at belonged to a club whose president was adamant about “not permitting women to sit there.” Recognizing that organizations committed to change must recognize the “hidden minefields that are left over from previous periods of time,” Wasserman got the story out on WHYY, the Philadelphia-based public radio station.

Continue reading this article at The Huffington Post.

Last Thursday, I was driving in my car, trying to catch ten minutes of listening time on the radio. Lucky for me, “Radio Times,” hosted by Marty Moss-Coane, was airing on National Public Radio (NPR). I became immediately captivated by the interview with Terry Tempest Williams, author of a memoir, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice. Terry told listeners how, while her mother was dying, she told her daughter, “I am leaving you all my journals, but you must promise me that you will not look at them until after I am gone.” In total, she left 54 journals, “one for every year of her life.” Weeks later, after her mother died, Terry, then 25, went to look at her mother’s three shelves of journals and became shocked to discover that the pages in each and every one of them were blank.

Each time I tell the story, I watch people’s jaws drop and faces register confusion. How could that be? How could it be that a woman held on to three shelves worth of journals that never had a single entry? The author, now 54, the same age her mother was when she died, questions, “What was my mother trying to tell me?”

Continue reading this article at The Huffington Post.