cfa consulting

Last week I was fortunate to return to Krakow, Poland to form part of an otherwise internal team providing a leadership conference for the large office based there. This follows closely on the heels of a well received leadership development programme I ran two months before with a delightful, engaging and highly intelligent group of people. I was asked to lead sessions at the conference on ‘Emotionally Connected Leadership’.

Following the conference I was able to visit Auschwitz with a small party from the internal team – and I was to experience ‘emotionally connected leadership’ – much to my surprise!

Our guide, Marcin, engaged with us from the outset. He checked our needs, checked that we could understand his use of English (no need it was absolutely first class) and provided us with some context before we began. He creates a lovely story, as you would expect of a guide, creating for some of us a vivid picture and understanding and from the outset his knowledge and the way he conveyed this were outstanding. His expertise was obvious – however his capabilities went well beyond expertise.

One of our small party has an almost unregulated extraverted sensing preference. If she has a question in her head, she verbalises it – and her questions are all concrete, practical data driven – “Is this the surface that was here at the time?”, “What is that building there?” “What is that made from?” etc. As those familiar with this preference may know the end result is that it breaks the speaker’s ability to tell their story as it constantly changes the point of reference and takes over the agenda. Marcin’s job just got appreciably harder.

Showing no frustration (at least for the first couple of hours) Marcin would calmly answer the tangential questions and try to resume with his story for the rest of us. As the volume of questions increased he cleverly stopped at various points and told us “This building will be self explanatory – and will require no questions” allowing everybody some quiet and contemplation.

Auschwitz does of course provoke strong emotions and a couple of times these became very powerful for people in our group. Marcin was clearly demonstrating a contact with each person, monitoring their reaction, yet not attempting to either draw attention to anybody, nor to manage their feelings for them. At one point one of our group stepped out when a particular room became too much and somebody else started to worry about where she was and wanted to go off and find her. Calmly Marcin said that she had just stepped out and he was sure she would join us at a moment which was appropriate for her. There was no need for drama or drawing attention to people’s feelings, merely an acknowledgement of them and leaving people free to experience whatever was occurring for them. No condescending ‘are you alright’ or words of consolation from Marcin. Just deep respect for people and their feelings – empathy not sympathy.

Whilst my colleagues took a photo opportunity I had a moment to ask Marcin “How can you do this everyday?” His reply superbly summed him up. “You must have empathy for what you are doing and who you are with, however you still need to remain a bit detached so as to function well yourself.” He not only spoke about it – it was evidenced in abundance by his behaviour. Marcin next time I’m at a conference in Krakow I need to take you along as living proof of ‘Emotionally connected leadership’ – I thank him for his time and demonstration.

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