Both people in leadership in elite organizations and people in ordinary, everyday jobs experience the heat, pressure, reactivity, and corrosion of the crucible.
A crucible is a hardened ceramic vessel used to perform reactions that would shatter an ordinary Pyrex flask with too much heat, pressure, reactivity, corrosive-by-products. Heat, pressure, reactivity, corrosive by-products: sounds like work. Not every minute of every day, but often.
The threat of the crucible of work is always in the background, especially for leaders: those who have accepted heightened responsibility for others and for the performance of their organization; those who live with accountability for many variables that are out of their control; those who are tempered, in fact taught, to assert control using the tools of power and hierarchy at their disposal; those who face the possibility of very public faiure; and those who receive the often exaggerated rewards of success and are tempted to believe these rewards are owed to them.
For most leaders in an imperfect, broken world, the crucible is unavoidable. There is no opting out. Just when you think you've got everything calmed down, working smoothly, under control, all hell breaks loose and you're back in the crucible.
As a leader, how might you shape the crucible for others to something less harmful?
Instead of being deformed in the heat of the crucible, might a leader be purified and formed, like bronze, into something more valuable, more useful?
You are invited to reflect on these questions as they present themselves at the places and in the substance of your work. The premise is that the crucible is unavoidable and that the only way to direct the heat and pressure of the crucible toward something positive, toward formation, is by doing interior work.
So a leader's first work, the most important and enduring work, is interior work, to attend to what is happening in your own assumptions, even as they are being formed and reformed.
The new book, "LEADERSHIP IN THE CRUCIBLE OF WORK" by Sandy Shugart, PhD, provides an invitation to enter the conversation concerning how we form and are formed by our work.
In practice, taking seriously the injunction to "do all the good you can to all the people you can" awakens possibilities to connect our purpose and our performance in powerful ways, making it possible both to do well and to do good.
Source: Dr. Sandy Shugart: Leadership In The Crucible of Work: Discovering the Interior Life of an Authentic Leader
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