Chapter 11
Be Present ~ Zen Master Dōgen
New York: Fall 1998. One of the more embarrassing moments in my professional life occurred during a launch meeting for a project with a large consumer-goods company.
We were gathered, Forum team and client team, in a conference room at the client’s New York offices on a crisp fall afternoon. I was glad of the afternoon start time, having been the victim the night before of an overbooking fiasco that had required me to cab it to another hotel in the wee hours and sleep in a sort of garret—apparently one of just a handful of rooms left in Manhattan that evening. I was still feeling slightly out of it as the meeting began.
I was the project leader on the Forum side. On the team were Kelly, the project manager (a role junior to the project leader); Bill, the account executive; and Joe (yes, Toronto Joe again), the senior client liaison. The clients were two pleasant men whose names I don’t recall.
Also in the room were two representatives of a video production company—I’ll call it VidCo—brought in by Joe to collaborate on the project. VidCo’s main business was corporate communications, but they were trying to enter the corporate education space. The clients had purchased from us a sophisticated sales training system, largely video-based, quite innovative for the time. We, Forum, were the curriculum experts, but we couldn’t lay claim to any real technology expertise, so Joe had pitched a partnership, promising the clients that Forum and VidCo would work together as one team.
My short night’s sleep wasn’t the only reason I was feeling out of it. Though I’d led many client projects before, I had never led one that involved a partner, let alone a tech partner, and back then my standard approach to new territory was to shut my eyes and skate on through. A couple weeks before this meeting I had presided over an internal prep call, which had included VidCo and had served, in theory, to introduce us to one another. In truth, however, I’d done nothing in the way of team-building. Worse, I had limited my review of the proposed program to Forum’s pieces, figuring VidCo could talk about their pieces, so why bother to clutter my mind? VidCo had sent us information about their company. I hadn’t read any of it.
I began the meeting by having each person share their childhood nickname. The clients chuckled; we were off to a good start. Then we got down to business. Standing at the head of the long conference table, I took the group through the slides describing the program, and when I came to the video part I looked down the table at the VidCo senior designer seated at the far corner. Her name was Blythe.
“Blaire,” I said, “could you take us through the video components?”
She hesitated, smiling. “It’s Blythe,” she said.
“Oops!” I said. “Blythe, over to you!”
“Ho-ho-ho,” went the room.
The clients had many questions for Blythe. At one point, I thought she hadn’t been clear. “Blaire,” I said, “I think it would be helpful if you could go over that bit again.”
A longer pause. “It’s Blythe,” she said.
“Wow. I am so sorry. What is my problem today? Nice to meet you, ha-ha!”
No one laughed this time. Confused faces turned from me to Blythe, Blythe to me. She resumed her spiel, obviously put out.
From then on, I just tried to get to the end. I moved from one agenda item to the next, smile fixed, eyes down, sensing things falling apart but not sure what to do about it. The clients wanted to add costly new features to the program; when I said we’d need to take a look at the scope, account exec Bill leapt in with “No problem!” Project manager Kelly had commented during the prep call that she was a consultant and had taken this junior role only in order to learn about the industry, a comment I had ignored. When one of the clients now asked if she would be their regular point of contact, she replied (to my horror) that she wouldn’t always be available due to her heavy travel schedule. As we were wrapping up, the other client asked whether Forum and VidCo had ever worked together before.
And somewhere in my blurred recollections of the scene, there is another incredulous stare from Blythe. Did I say “Blaire” a third time?
I honestly don’t know. You see, I wasn’t there.
Being There
This is the means by which we, who are ordinarily set into motion by things, become able to set things into motion. (“Instructions for the Tenzo”)1
This is the way to turn things while being turned by things. (“Tenzo,” another translation)2
Somewhere along the way to getting my master’s degree in Eastern classics, I half-jokingly asked a fellow student who was taking a class on Dōgen to summarize the famous Japanese monk’s teachings for me in one sentence.
“I can do it in two words,” he said. “Be present.”
The essay “Instructions for the Tenzo” (see “The Sage: Zen Master Dōgen,” below) is directed at the person in charge of meal preparation in a Buddhist monastery. Dōgen begins by quoting a line from a twelfth-century Chinese book of regulations for monastic living: “In order to offer nourishment to the monks of the community, there is a cook.” He continues: “Since ancient times this position has been held by accomplished monks who have a way-seeking mind, or by senior disciples with an aspiration for enlightenment.”* The tenzo is one of the senior monks responsible for the community’s well-being. The job is not for the faint of heart.
Dōgen Zenji (1200 – 1253), the founder of Zen Buddhism’s Sōtō school, wrote hundreds of essays, commentaries, and poems—not to mention an entire monastic code—all part of a grand attempt to scrub away centuries’ worth of superstition and cultish ritual which, he seems to have thought, had weighed down Buddhism in Japan and whose removal would reveal Buddhism’s pristine core as expressed in the Pāli Canon. “Just sit” is Dōgen’s famously concise instruction for mindfulness meditation, and many of his essay titles convey a similar simplicity: “Painting of a Rice Cake,” “Mountains and Waters,” “The Moon.” When we dive into the essays, however, we’re met with conundrums such as these: “Know that a painted rice cake is your face before your parents were born.” “Because green mountains walk, they are permanent.” “The moons do and do not use coming and going: go freely and grasp firmly coming and going.” Writings at once so disarmingly straightforward and intimidatingly opaque must, it seems, be approached like cakes, mountains, and moons: not merely analyzed with the mind, but encountered and appreciated with the heart-mind.
The essay spells out the head cook’s duties and, more important, the attitude of presence with which those duties should be performed. In today’s business world “presence” has become something of a cliché, often referring to nothing more than a confident air and a snazzy wardrobe. For Dōgen, however, presence is a deep matter. He illuminates the topic with basic how-tos (“First, go get the vegetables”) combined with cryptic stories and allusions (“The water buffalo swallows the monk Guishan, and the monk Guishan herds the water buffalo”). When we look at the essay as a whole, three ways to be present stand out: 1) Pay attention; 2) Do it yourself; 3) Work with what you have.
First, pay attention. The head cook’s every activity, from rinsing rice to washing dishes, must be performed “with close attention, vigorous exertion, and a sincere mind. Do not indulge in a single moment of carelessness or laziness,” says Dōgen. “Do not allow attentiveness to one thing to result in overlooking another.” You treat the ingredients and utensils with respect, picking them up and putting them down with courtesy. You preserve the rice water for gruel rather than wastefully discarding it. Having put the rice in the cooking pot, you guard it well so neither mice nor “greedy idlers” touch it. Once a dish is cooked, you examine it and carefully set it down in its proper place. And once the meal has been served and you’re back in your quarters, you sit with eyes closed and count every monk in the community, calculating the portion of rice required for each, envisioning in precise detail the next meal and those who will eat it.
The humblest action, done with care and intention, creates good karma. Done sloppily, it creates bad karma. For Dōgen’s tenzo, there is no multitasking.
Second, do it yourself. Dōgen tells of a time when he was living in Tiantong Monastery. Walking across the courtyard after the midday meal he came across the head cook, who was drying mushrooms. The sun was blazing hot, the cook was hatless, and sweat streamed down his face as he worked. Dōgen went over and asked him how long he had been a monk:
“Sixty-eight years,” he replied.
“Why don’t you let a helper do this?”
“Others are not myself.”
“Reverend Sir, you follow regulations exactly, but as the sun is so hot, why are you doing this now?”
“Until when should I wait?”
Dōgen says it was then, as he walked away along the corridor, that he began to see the importance of the cook’s position. Later he describes a visit to another monastery, one in which all the cooking had been delegated to a servant while the tenzo “ensconced himself in his office, sometimes reclining, sometimes chatting and laughing, sometimes reading sutras, and sometimes reciting prayers. For days on end and many months he did not approach the vicinity of the pots.” He could not possibly have done his job, Dōgen says, and, “how pitiable was that person who lacked the way-seeking mind.” It was as if that so-called tenzo had gone to a treasure mountain and returned home empty-handed.
Finally, work with what you have. The biggest “don’t” for a head cook is worrying about the quality or amount of ingredients. “Simply make the best of what you have,” says Dōgen. Treat poor ingredients with the same care as good ones. Don’t despise a soup of the crudest greens; don’t rejoice in a soup of the finest cream. “Never change your attitude according to the materials,” he says. “If you do, it is like varying your truth when speaking with different people; then you are not a practitioner of the way.”
That last line suggests Dōgen is thinking not only of bad ingredients, but of bad colleagues and bosses, too. Way-seekers work with what and who is before them, their attitude unchanging no matter the circumstances. Later on we’re told that if a patron donates money for a feast, the tenzo should not rush off gleefully and buy food but rather consult with the stewards to decide how to distribute the funds. “Do not create a disturbance in the hierarchy by infringing on anyone’s authority,” Dōgen advises. Perhaps you dislike the head steward; perhaps you think he’s an incompetent jerk. As a true tenzo, you go and consult with him just the same.
Why is being present so important? Why bother to pay attention, do it yourself, and work with what (and who) you have? Dōgen says: “This is the means by which we, who are ordinarily set into motion by things, become able to set things into motion.” When our thoughts scatter in reaction to challenges, we become the moved-and-shaken rather than the mover-and-shaker. The more we worry about the crude greens, the less energy we have to make the soup—and then the situation is controlling us instead of the other way around. (I’m reminded of a contestant on The Great British Baking Show who was crying over a runny buttercream. One of the hosts told her to stop it, for “every minute spent crying is one minute less to show the world what a good baker you are.”) Conversely, when we remain calmly attentive and engaged, we have at least a chance of getting a decent meal on the table. Presence is the basis for progress.
Quiet Influence Practice 11: Staying engaged when things get heated
The day after my disastrous launch meeting, Joe left a voicemail for the whole project team. He cc’d Connie, the regional vice president with ultimate responsibility for the account.
“That didn’t go well,” I heard him say. “The clients aren’t happy. Jocelyn, it wasn’t up to your usual standard. We need to talk about how to recover.”
I was mortified. I called Joe and went into a defensive crouch: “OK, first, I was working on no sleep. What Kelly said, I couldn’t believe it, what was she thinking? Bill was undermining me the whole time. And Blythe, wow, she could have just relaxed. I know it was bad. I’m sorry. But it’s not helping when you leave voicemails for everyone.”
Joe apologized for the group voicemail but continued to press me for a recovery plan. I hung up, dejected. I still didn’t know how to fix the situation and in the absence of any ideas was inclined to hole up in my office and work on assigning blame.*
About half an hour later, my phone rang. It was Connie, the regional VP.
“Now I’m really in trouble,” I thought.
But Connie was great. Like Barbara (the project manager in Chapter 2 who handled objections so well), she began by simply listening as I sputtered on about the unfairness of it all.
Then she said something I’ve never forgotten:
“You’re senior to these people. Kelly, Bill, Blythe—they’re going to take their cue from you. If I were you, I would go toward the conflict.”
Her statement woke me right up, for two reasons. First, it had not occurred to me that I, as project leader, was the senior resource. Yes, I had realized it was my job to run the project, but not that I also had the responsibility—the privilege, actually—to set the tone for the others, and that those others would show up if, and only if, I showed up. Second, despite having heard many times the Forum adage “Confront with respect,” I hadn’t fully understood that the way to deal with a conflict was not to back off from it, nor to head it off at the pass, but to lean into it.
“Go toward the conflict.” I repeated the phrase back to Connie.
“Yes,” she said.
“All right,” I said.
From then on, the project went well. Not perfectly; but well. I called Kelly and Bill and had a conversation with each to gather their input on the program. I called the clients and asked them about their concerns and how we could improve. I set up weekly team and client meetings during which we would check our progress and make course corrections. I read and absorbed all the information from VidCo—and apologized, this time sincerely, to Blythe.
In short, I engaged. One thing I did not do was write up a formal recovery plan; it turned out it wasn’t necessary, because now, everyone was on the same page. As soon as I went toward the conflict, the conflict dissipated like a bad dream.
To add a twist: all this engagement had to happen at a distance. I had moved several months before from Toronto to Santa Fe, where my husband had taken a college faculty position. So for that project, and for the next fifteen years as I worked mostly from my home office in New Mexico, I had to find ways to be present with people who were hundreds if not thousands of miles away.
Remote work is a common phenomenon these days—it wasn’t so much, back in 1998—and it adds intensity to the challenge of presence (see “Influence in Brief: Presence at a Distance,” below). Forum’s programs on virtual leadership taught that dispersed teams are no different, really, from co-located teams; it’s just that time, place, and culture gaps in the former tend to magnify ordinary hitches in team formation and function. Similarly, presence is achievable whether you are right there or miles removed; it’s just that a home office makes hiding easier.
Influence in Brief: Presence at a Distance
People say it’s different now. We are not in the office. We never meet. How do you establish trust when the brain is keyed into the attractive, welcoming face? Then there are the different cultures. People talk about it as not just a matrixed environment, but as a widely dispersed net that catches all sorts of bizarre sea creatures. If I am seeing more people around me who are not of my tribe, does it result in more fight-or-flight responses? Can you redefine “tribe” in someone’s head to include the full system? Or are we stuck in fight or flight?
–Ken De Loreto
Social media has opened everything up, but it has also somehow put everyone back into silos, like in the 1970s, and this time they are self-created silos. Everyone is in a bubble.
–Court Chilton
Sometimes you don’t even see your manager for the first year. And maybe their time zone is eight hours different from yours. The relationship is harder to build; some say, “I don’t even know what my manager wants.”
–Carol Kane
Influence is about empathy, about being present in the moment, about storytelling. And the real kicker is authenticity: how do you take off your mask and reveal who you are? All of this resonates across cultures. It’s about human effectiveness, so it’s relevant to everyone. Everyone wants to be better at these things.
–Andre Alphonso
Tips and techniques for dispersed teams are readily found with an internet search. One of the more useful concepts comes from designers of virtual learning, who advise that the communication method should get “warmer”—more interactive, synchronous, and multilayered—as the situation becomes more emotion-laden. For example, a routine project update can go out in an email; feedback on some product specs could be collected in an open document; a big change in strategy should be discussed in a real-time audio or video conference; and if you are laying someone off, you do it face to face. Some of the worst influence flubs are the result of someone’s using a chilly communication method in a vain attempt to avoid a heated situation. The key is always to lean toward, not away from, the heat.
And, although the right technology is helpful when you need to build presence across gulfs in time and space, it’s the attitude that really counts. Whether your team sits in one room or is scattered around the globe, there is no better advice than Zen Master Dōgen’s: Pay attention. Do it yourself. Work with what you have.
Western Pitfall 11: Running from shame
What prevents us from being present? What keeps us from being open, aware, and engaged, especially in situations that feel threatening?
In the West, the commonest answer is: shame. Author and speaker Brené Brown is the most prominent among a host of Western gurus advising us to conquer shame by believing “I am enough”—a belief that (they say) enables us to approach life “wholeheartedly.” Westerners seem to have a voracious appetite for this message; witness the immense popularity of Brown’s two TED Talks. And indeed, when I reflect back on my behavior during that messed-up launch meeting, I might easily conclude it was shame causing me to shrink into my shell like a salted snail, and Connie’s assurance that I was “enough” that enabled me to emerge from my shell and lead the way forward.
Eastern thinkers, however, don’t generally buy this view of shame.* They see shame as a valuable emotion felt by good, humane people and as one of the glues holding society together. Here’s where I may lose Brené Brown fans, for when I reflect further, I side with the East.
Since the 1960s, one of Western psychology’s themes is that we should be happy with ourselves despite others’ criticisms. Refusing to base our self-esteem on what others think of us (in other words, being shameless) is said to be the hallmark of mental health. If we object that that view sounds a touch sociopathic, we’re told there’s a caveat: we must not hurt or mistreat others. But if our mantra is “I’m OK no matter what,” the caveat makes no sense. If I’m fine with myself and never mind your opinion of me, why should I worry about hurting you? If your disapproval doesn’t affect my sense of self-worth, why should I not mistreat you?
Next we’re told there’s a difference between “toxic shame,” which is the belief that there’s something fundamentally wrong with us, and “healthy shame,” which causes us to take responsibility for our mistakes.* But this caveat invites us to make a distinction between “bad shame” and “good shame” and in the process gives us an easy out. Who wouldn’t pick Door No. 1—“I’m OK; begone, toxic shame!”—over Door No. 2—“I’d better mend my shameful ways”?
The Eastern perspective is harder but better: there is only one kind of shame, and it becomes toxic only if we regard it as scary and unhealthy.†
“This is the means by which we, who are ordinarily set into motion by things, become able to set things into motion,” says Dōgen. Here’s another translation of the line: “This is the way to turn things while being turned by things.” The second translation captures the spirit of mindfulness we saw in the early Buddhist discourses; there, if you recall, mindfulness didn’t mean being unmoved by emotions such as shame, but rather—being moved and not freaking out about it. At Forum we had a saying: “To influence, you must be willing to be influenced.” A sense of shame indicates we are willing to be influenced: willing to feel the sting of opprobrium and, instead of retreating or convulsing, to ask, “How should I change?”
Apologies to Western psychology, but we shouldn’t be happy with ourselves despite others’ criticism. We should be happy with ourselves because we are the sort of people who take criticism as a lesson and a gift; the sort of people who gracefully “turn things while being turned by things.” (I am far from being this sort of person, by the way. But I’m working on it.)
When I was interviewing Forum alumni for this book, one memory that came up repeatedly was people’s shamed reactions to their Influence feedback. Former Forum executive Andre Alphonso says:
The Influence feedback hit people really hard, much harder than the feedback in [our management programs] ever did. I think it’s because it was filled out by peers, so people would give the surveys to their friends, and when the feedback was negative, they were hearing it from friends. People would feel slapped in the face. There was one senior leader who said, “I am devastated and I think I want to resign.” She was in tears. I let her talk it through; she did not resign. But she felt betrayed by people with whom she thought she had a good relationship.
Mike Maginn recalls:
We got the most resistance around the trust practice: “Behave in a way that leads others to trust you.” Some people would get low scores and would freak out. I couldn’t just let it go, so I would make myself available after hours for one-on-one counseling. It was very powerful feedback, because if you’re not trustworthy, how can I work with you? So we tried to unpack it and get specific about it. We said there were three components: the information you bring, the judgments you make, and can you execute. That took a bit of the sting out: instead of “you’re an evil person,” we could give specifics on what to do in order to help others trust you.
And Court Chilton, who worked on the 1992 version of the program, says this:
The feedback report was very powerful, but here’s the rub: when people got less-than-good feedback on the “trust” practice, it would wreck them. People placed outsized importance on it . . . so, part of the problem was how to get items about trust in there in a way that would wake people up a bit but not destroy them. In later versions we tried to get more specific about the elements of trust. The result, unfortunately, was that the feedback became somewhat fragmented and watered down.
The Influence feedback report was eventually phased out, a casualty of proliferating internet surveys which caused 360-degree feedback in training programs to feel old hat. Though the reasons were understandable, I regret that the demise of feedback meant that participants were denied the chance to be like Bill, the cellphone engineer we met in the Overview, whose metamorphosis from Most Despised to Most Respected was legend at his company.
Bill, you may remember, was wrecked by his first-round Influence feedback. He progressed only because of that wreckage and how he dealt with it. He didn’t pooh-pooh his single-digit ratings as insults from people less intelligent than he. He didn’t think, “Screw ’em, I’m smart and I’m fine.” Nor did he collapse in a paroxysm of shame. Instead, he listened when the instructor said, “Smart is good, but it is not enough,” and decided he was not enough; that he wanted to be, and could be, more. He went toward the conflict—especially the all-important one within. Like the monk Guishan, he herded the water buffalo while the water buffalo swallowed him whole.
I don’t know precisely how one achieves this kind of absolute presence, which results in the ability to turn the world while being wrecked by the world. I do know that the first step must be to look shame in the face, give it a bow, and invite it in for tea and rice.
The final quiet influence practice is Walking away when influence is no longer possible.