Defying Gravity
Keep Your Green
Dear Friends,
Everyone of a certain age will remember the night they first saw The Wizard of Oz on TV. Similarly I’ll never forget the night I saw the original cast of Wicked on Broadway with my daughter Emma. When the lights came up for intermission, moments after Idina Menzel sang the very last notes of Defying Gravity, I was frozen in my seat. The power of her voice fastened me in place while Elphaba’s declaration sank in: ‘I will never let anyone or anything bring me down.”
Months later, in one of those exercises we do when we try to condense our entire lives to an epitaph on a gravestone, I was thinking about the things I truly love to do in the natural world. I love to run up hills, cycle up mountains, climb up rocks, and skin up peaks. In organizations I like to bend the rules, move the furniture, break down silos, exceed expectations, create silliness and laugh.
I boiled it all down to three words: She defied gravity.
The weight of the world is real, yet the gravity we assign to it is a choice.
The weight of leadership; the weight of others’ expectations; the weight of organizational rules; the weight of ‘the ways things are done’ all creates a tremendous amount of gravity. Perhaps the greatest weight we carry is the worry about what others will think of us.
Think about the you that you bring to work. How much of the real you do colleagues get to see? How much stays safely at home? To what extent do your peers know what you value? Do they know what you believe in? Do they get to see your vulnerabilities? Do they see you when you’re most at home in your skin? A leader who is willing to be honest about themselves is easier to trust, and trust is the glue of great organizations.
I serve on a Board with a public official who has shown me what deep authenticity in leadership looks like. I knew him by name before I joined the Board but I had never met him and knew very little about him. Well before the end of the first meeting I learned he is a gay man passionate about LGBTQ+ rights and he follows Phish wherever they play. He was clear that if he’s been to a Phish weekend, he will be slow to return to life and duties. He even manages to work a Phish anecdote into many a wonky policy discussion.
Our relationship has developed faster than most professional relationships do because he feels so human to me: open, vulnerable, honest, accessible.
There are limits however. It’s easier to be authentic when you fit into the dominant culture of your organization or community.1 Before the pivotal moment in Defying Gravity when Elphaba declares that she’s done conforming, she longs to fit in. In the song The Wizard and I she imagines and hopes for a future in which the Wizard would say to her: “Would it be all right by you if I de-greenify you?”
I coach many housing leaders working in communities where the politics run counter to their own. They are careful about what they can say and I see the toll it takes.
If you find yourself exhausted by the weight of the world, if you’re continually below the line, think about the role that inauthenticity could be playing. How is the fear of failure adding to the gravity? How is the dread of what others will think of you a factor? How can you get closer to that liberating idea that the only thing that matters is the results you produce, and your results will very likely improve as you defy gravity.
Most importantly, try not to de-greenify yourself too much.
I’ll think of you when I’m in the theater tonight watching Wicked For Good.
All the best,
Betsey