Every person who intends to exert leadership in his personal life, in business or any other vocation—and even in the family--will intentionally focus on personal growth. Research has shown us that effective business leadership growth inevitably requires mentors. Though true, that notion is plainly inadequate. The fact is that all living and all development takes place only with relationships. To put it still more directly, we experience growth because of our connections to other people. I can go through my years since grade school and well into my sixties, and still point to people that changed my life, impacts that would have to be considered as turning points and often milestones. Change that would never have happened without those connections.
The underpinnings of growth are inevitably acts of creativity built on relationships. Virginia Woolf puts it this way: Masterpieces (turning points and milestones) are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of thinking in common, of thinking by a body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.
I still have a lot of memory about my first real growth experience, a phenomenally unique milestone while only in the 7th grade. I’ll explain later why the experience was so important, why I remember so many details, and what it did for me. To begin, the experience was initiated by a civics teacher, Mr. Fickes, a teacher whom I thought was pretty dumb. I opened my mouth too often and after one episode he chewed me out, telling me I’d be in the “insane asylum by the time I finished high school.” Shortly after that experience, the chair of the social science department, Dr. Arthur, a very impressive intellect, and a delightful woman with sparkling eyes and a Michigan PhD, took seven top students out of the class and created a seminar group on civics for us. Fickes did not return the following year.
What happened in that “seminar” with Dr Arthur was a turning point in my life. That I still remember the faculty names and the process that followed are indicative of its power. But I never fully understood its profound and unique impact until I took an educational psych class during my senior year of college.
Dr Arthur started out by getting to know us and providing some “temporary” assignments for study and class interaction. After just a few really fascinating sessions and my own personal research, she asked us to select a historical idea that could apply to current affairs. It was to be a “major project,” requiring a lot of new skills. So, we were taught how to use the research library, keep notes on 3X5 cards (no internet available), how to create a proposal, present that proposal in class and finally write up our conclusions in five to seven pages. Dr Arthur was always available and willing to help. What I remember about her was that while giving terrific help, she also asked tons of questions. But she had a way of asking questions that made for both a lot of thinking and a lot of fun. Nothing seemed to be off the table. I had never seen that done before.
Half-way through that 1947 Spring semester with Dr Arthur, President Truman announced the Marshall Plan, a strategy for rebuilding countries in Western Europe. As soon as that announcement hit the news, Dr. Arthur told us that she was taking a few days off to go to Washington to “find out what was happening.” Her college roommate was a well-known Washington journalist who could provide her with both background and contacts. She told us to take the class time, head to the library and work on our projects without her. When anyone stopped us in the hallways, we were just to say we were working with Dr Arthur, a pass that we found to be magic. Our freedom was unusual, but all seven of us were highly motivated. Early in the semester, she had already prepped us by taking us to the local public library and showing us how to do research. After that trip, she told us we had enough background to use the great resources at the Detroit Public Library--a six-mile trip down Woodward Avenue for twenty-five cents on the Greyhound bus. We all loved the huge palace-like library, an Italian Renaissance structure. Several of us brought friends and worked there regularly through high school until we all went off to college. Though less than 8% of adults had college degrees in the 1950s, college was expected at our suburban Detroit high school. So, living in our circumscribed little world, we assumed that working in a library of 2.5 million volumes was normal, although we were told that the great library at the University of Michigan, where my six classmates eventually graduated, was much larger. I was being introduced to a new and much larger world.
But after about a week in Washington, Dr. Arthur returned, bringing us so much personal information that we were google-eyed for weeks. Not only government materials on the Marshall plan, but personal information about well-known people, the legislative process and a host of policy conflicts. It was a questioning free-for-all—and, as we soon learned—an opportunity to learn how to question. I remember a single sheet on how to ask questions, strategies we put into use immediately. By the second day, she was giving us feedback on our questioning before answering. In hindsight, we learned to become journalist interviewers.
Dr Arthur also had a small office where we were always welcome to talk about our project. Often, after our conversation, she’d stop us in the hallway, handing us a paper or a book which she thought might help us further. With all we know about giving feedback today, her feedback was just knockout—and something we’d never experienced. She might write “this is a fascinating idea, because. . .” or “have you thought about the relation of . . . to your idea that. . .” Or, “I’ve never thought about your idea that. . . . Great insight!” Surprisingly, there was a mutuality to the relationship. We were actually providing Dr Arthur with information she lacked. In addition, she was always learning about how we learn—and the best ways to facilitate our learning, all of which made us proud of her. She dropped learning processes into our conversations on a regular basis. As I remember, they seemed unplanned. We were always glad for the conversation because very often she picked up on our ideas and applied them, always asking if that “worked better.” That kind of notion or the research about learning was largely nonexistent in the 1940s. Today we know she was asking all the right questions.
Secure base
What Dr Arthur provided for each of us was a secure base, an interpersonal relationship which makes it possible for an individual to thrive. The current understanding, which Dr Arthur personified, highlights two contexts through which an individual can thrive: coping successfully with life’s adversities and actively pursuing life’s opportunities for growth and development. It also highlights processes for dealing successfully with adversities—a highly-important personal need of mine.
She taught us the elements of doing research, writing research papers, asking questions, providing and using feedback and learning together. As a seventh-grade teacher, she set an unforgettable standard. My undergrad history major of history and my continuous learning are reflective of that experience. Of the six classmates, one became a lawyer and another a university professor. The fact that I still remember so much of that experience seventy years ago attests to its importance—a turning point in life for a boy growing up in a middle-class, highly dysfunctional family. But that experience was merely one of many, many turning points in my life. Still, it served as an elementary template and paradigm for future opportunities.
What I got out of that rich experience was the belief that I could someday get out of my horrible, dysfunctional family. And after graduating from college, getting married to a wonderful woman and just before setting off to a seminary a thousand miles away, my father had a brief conversation with me that I’ll never forget. “Your mother,” he said, “will destroy your marriage. Never come back to Detroit.” There’s a lot of family history in that sentence and too much left unsaid. But what’s important is that we never returned, and my mother destroyed my brother’s life and marriage.
Growing in connection
So, one of the important points I want to stress is that every single turning point or milestone in my life has been marked by at least one supportive, idiosyncratic relationship. In hindsight, I realize that there were always peaks in my learning when I thought I had learned everything possible from that milestone, only to find out later that the peak was a plateau. It was a way station on a still higher climb. More growth and learning were still to come from that milestone.
In sum, contrary to conventional wisdom, it’s very important to recognize that none of our great thinkers and professionals got there on their own. There were always significant relationships in their lives, sources of their talent, insight and expertise. Read a great biography and this fact is rarely obvious, indicative of the parochialism of leading American writers. For example, study the biographies of Lincoln or Churchill and you’d think they were innately brilliant, rarely leaning on others. But that’s completely fallacious. If you go back and dig deeply into those lives, you’ll find all kinds of relationships that fostered their growth, enabling them to become the great personalities of history. Without those relations we would never have had a Lincoln or a Churchill.
In contrast, if you read the biographies of great artists, sculptors and musicians, their growth-relationships surface fairly often. Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and Richard Strauss, like all musicians—even the great Black singers--were borrowers and plagiarizers, growing from teachers and acquaintances of those behind them. If you study the history of DaVinci, for example, you’ll find out those to whom he apprenticed, and whom his teachers apprenticed to. It just reinforces the fact that no single individual is fully original or creative without networks that often go back centuries.
This single fact goes against the highly individualistic culture that America has come to stand for. It’s seen in blatant fashion in the ongoing, stupid, destructive “war” between Trump and American scientists. But it’s also seen constructively in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success--and other of his books.