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weLEAD Leadership Series

Exclusive interview with

Belle Linda Halpern and Kathy Lubar

Interviewed by Greg Thomas

Both Kathy and Belle are co-founders of the Ariel Group and live in the Boston area. Kathy is a professional actress and cofounder of the Boston New Repertory Theater. Belle has performed worldwide as a singer, actress and has taught music students at Harvard University. The Ariel Group uses techniques developed and honed in the performing arts to develop the presence of leaders in business, education and government. Belle and Linda can be contacted at www.arielgroup.com

1. Belle and Kathy, we have just finished reading Leadership Presence and found it to be a fascinating book that discusses a component of leadership rarely discussed or defined. Tell us what leadership presence actually is?

We define Leadership Presence as “the ability to connect authentically with the thoughts and feelings of others in order to motivate and inspire them to achieve a desired outcome.” This ability to connect is essential for all people who lead or motivate others, whether you are a leader of a large organization or a volunteer Little League coach.

People need Leadership Presence in a variety of areas – building better client relationships, inspiring teammates to sprint to the finish, negotiating tricky alliances, and motivating a classroom of students.

We all know bosses, teachers, coaches, and ministers with Leadership Presence. Famous examples are Martin Luther King, Herb Kelleher, Oprah Winfrey, Churchill, Eleanor Roosevelt, Colin Powell, and Gandhi.

2. Some of our readers may be skeptical of the term "actor" being used in anyway regarding leadership! For some, this word conjures up an image of someone pretending to be a leader, or an individual who uses an actor’s skills to simply manipulate others. Can you outline the difference between the kind of qualities just described and Leadership Presence?

Good acting is not about “pretending”, but about bringing your full self to the role. Actors are required to look inside themselves because the only way an emotion can be authentic is if it comes from within. Good leaders must do the same to be effective with those they lead.

We've talked about Leadership Presence as the ability to connect authentically with the hearts and minds of others. People feel you're authentic when they know what you're about and they see that you act in ways congruent with what you say about yourself. People feel you're authentic when you don't pretend to be someone you're not. Too many business leaders try to behave in ways they think their role demands, rather than authentically being themselves based on their values. They come across as inauthentic and therefore not to be trusted.

Great actors, the ones who convince us of the authenticity of the characters they play, are committed to the truth of a role and the reality of the play. To achieve that authenticity, they must bring their life experience to whatever role they're playing. That's the parallel with leaders. Leaders need to bring their life experience and themselves as people to their roles as leaders.

3. What personal experiences led you to write this book?

Both of us have been performers most of our lives. Kathy was a professional actress for fifteen years and co-founded the New Repertory Theatre in Boston. There she taught acting to non-actors: businesspeople, doctors, lawyers, teachers and many other professionals filled her classes. Week after week they returned with stories of applying--with powerful results--what they had learned in class to their interaction with co-workers, students, even spouses. Belle had taught successful singing workshops in the United States and Europe for individuals convinced they could not sing. She discovered that conquering the fear of singing liberated her students to conquer fear and doubt in other parts of their lives. We were both very excited by these experiences and they led us to start The Ariel Group. Over the past 11 years, more than 30,000 executives from hundreds of companies have attended Ariel Group workshops. We wrote this book because we feel strongly that by developing the skills of Leadership Presence, by making profound, authentic connections with one another, employees will be more fulfilled, teams will be more motivated and organizations will be more inspired.

4. Please explain to our readers the unique PRES Model of Leadership Presence?

We believe that Leadership Presence can be learned and have seen dramatic changes in leaders we've worked with over the years. Like anything, it takes time and practice and we break it down into a 4-step process that we call the PRES model of Leadership Presence.

P stands for being Present, the ability to be completely in the moment, one hundred percent "there," and flexible enough to handle the unexpected.

R stands for Reaching out, the ability to build relationships with others through empathy, listening and authentic connection.

E stands for Expressiveness, the ability to express feelings and emotion appropriately by using all means of expression – words, voice, body, face –to deliver one congruent message.

S stands for Self-knowing, the ability to accept yourself, to be authentic, and to reflect your values in your decisions and actions.

5. Beginning in Chapter 6 you begin to discuss the importance of using proper emotion. This is in contrast to many management schools that teach there is little or no place for emotion in the modern workplace. The leader is told to be reasoned, calm and always in control. Help us to understand the power that lies behind human emotion.

We're convinced, after working with thousands of leaders on exactly this issue, that this misconception---leaders shouldn't show emotion---makes them far less effective than they could be. The reason is simple. All human interaction is full of emotion, even at work. You can ignore it, but it's there. Emotion is wrapped around every human activity. Without emotion, we wouldn't get up in the morning. We wouldn't work hard. We wouldn't care. Possessing the ability to express emotion appropriately will make leaders more effective and set the tone and energy level of the whole organization.

Let us give you an example of one emotion that is most often missing in organizations: authentic excitement. It's the emotion leaders tell us they want most in their people. Yet it's the leader who is responsible for creating this in their organization, just as actors are responsible for the authentic excitement during a performance. In order to do that, a leader must first connect with their own passion and then express that emotion authentically themselves. Then others will personally invest their work with passion and authentic excitement. It's contagious!

6. Tell us what a Leadership Values Statement is and why are values so important?

The reason values are critical is that they define you. To know you, to follow you, someone must know what's important to you. That's why values reside at the heart of Self-knowing (the fourth aspect of the PRES model) and thus of Leadership Presence. A leader must not only possess clear, explicit values but she must make them transparent to her organization by speaking and living these values congruently. One step in that process is creating a Leadership Values Statement. These are the beliefs you will take from job to job. Writing your leadership values statement is a simple two-step process:

Step 1: Identify the 3 to 5 values, principles or beliefs most important to you as a leader. For each of these core values, recall a story that defines and illustrates that value for you. The story is important because it shows the value in practice and grounds it in a tangible reality.

Step 2: We then encourage leaders to find settings and situation in which they can share their values through their personal stories.

7. Would you define leadership as primarily an art or a science? Or is it an equal mixture of the two?

We believe that leadership is a mixture of the two, though our approach is more artistic than scientific. For us, the science is in studying what makes leaders most effective and then training them in these specific behaviors and skills. Ultimately though, in the same way that the purpose of theatre and acting is to create meaning and context in our lives, the purpose of leadership is to create meaning for groups and organizations they lead. Actors, with the playwright and the director, create meaning for the audience by revealing some broader and deeper context of life. Leaders create meaning for their groups by authentically connecting what's important to them in their work as a leader and this allows the leader and the led to connect with something bigger than themselves. All of us want to spend our days laboring in some endeavor that extends beyond our own personal needs and desires. We all want meaning in our lives. The leader as artist helps us to find that. That's the ultimate and inspiring purpose of Leadership Presence.

Thanks Belle and Kathy for helping us to understand the importance of Leadership Presence!

To read a weLEAD book review of Leadership Presence, please click here!

Comments to: editor@leadingtoday.org

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