This week, I’m concluding the teaching of a seven-week course at The School of Jewish Communal Service at Hebrew Union College here in Los Angeles. The class has been called “Collaborative Communication for Jewish Professionals.” I have been fortunate enough to be allowed to put out lots of my thinking about Communication and to have it be thought about and discussed by some incredibly bright and caring students. (My gratitude and thanks, by the way, goes out to each of them; it has been an honor spending time with them.)

With Thursday as the last day, I want to leave them with something that sums our time up  and, more importantly, leaves a mark for them to think and act from.  Let’s face it, wasting learning, especially when it’s designed to influence others, is, on so many fronts, a really bad idea.  We must be better for it.

What do I hope they remember and act on?  We’ve spent a great deal of time in class talking about making decisions about communicating with others and the risks that any path you choose to do that entails.  At least one time, a class member pushed back on the idea of being constructively candid and said so beautifully: “Isn’t it just easier to vent? . . . You feel so much better.”  She certainly was representing a popular point of view that I hear a lot.  This Communication/Collaboration/Leadership thing I keep pushing people on is, I’m told, so hard.  

On Thursday, I will remind them that if we would have focused our attention this summer on what was the easy way to go, they would have, once more, been bored in a classroom, and that would have been sad.  I will remind them that wherever they end up working in the Jewish world, that ultimately the impact they will have will be directly linked to how they treat the people they work and come in contact with.  Lastly, I will leave them with an image they can always hold onto as they forge their leadership in a world where there is far too little of the kind that’s needed.  Leadership, I will tell them, is not one risk but two.  You have to, at least symbolically, hold up two hands.  One hand signifies taking the risk of speaking up and stating what you believe needs to change to make things better.  The other hand completes the symbol of the Double Risk.  Because not only do you take a risk by saying you have an idea, you also desperately need the help of others to give it real life and meaning. Asking for that is scary. And for others to believe in you and want to contribute the help demands they be treated with respect and trust; rare as those two things may seem in the world.  

I will tell them now that we are all “said and done,” we have devoted our session to learning ways, no matter how hard they may be, that are intended to build to build respect and trust in ourselves and others.  And I intend to conclude Thursday by reminding the class of something that I heard Bruce Springsteen sing about many years ago: “If there’s something you need/if there’s something you want/ You’ve got to Raise Your Hand.”  

Raise them up.

Lately, I’m being more diligent in creating a book. For those who know me well, thank you in advance for your friendly skepticism. Based on my history of capturing my work in writing form, you have every right to feel that way. However, without a whole expose here, I can say it seems to be making more progress than it ever has. Stay tuned…to quote the famous Zen story punch line…”We’ll see.”

A theme is really sticking out of this effort though. In question form, can someone change? Can someone do something that they’ve never done before? For right now, this only has a little to do with my book creation. That’s for later. It actually is much more about what I help clients wrestle with every day. For example, counseling a senior leader of an organization about the ongoing troubling and unproductive behavior of one of his key direct reports. When I (and others) have encouraged the leader to give the colleague feedback about the behavior, he counters with “I think that’s just the way he is...he’s not going to change. He continues: “Look, no matter how much I want to be taller and to play in the NBA, that’s not going to happen. I’m not going to talk with him. We’ll just live with it”

This comes, btw, from the same leader who professes the value of people to the health and well-being of the organization. And it’s the same leader who tries his best to follow good habits of eating and exercise because his doctor told him that he needed to. Though he is, of course, right that someone cannot change height much, there’s something wrong with this leadership picture. Really wrong.

Here’s what I suspect about people, perhaps including you, who act like this leader. As long as you profess the inability of yourself or others to change, it relieves you from having to do the hard work of helping others do the hard work of changing. You’re chickening out from what I believe is the distinctive attribute of a productive leader; finding a way to share the truth about the future and work to instill actions to improve it. At the heart of that work is finding the bravery to have the conversations, and to accept, as scary as it can be, that your choices make a difference. 

How different would your life be if you consistently acted from the belief that your choices meant something of significance to your life and the lives of people you care about?  

Though it won’t put you up against Kobe and LeBron, you’ll stand a greater chance of playing far better in a much more important game.