The Three Intentional Spaces Needed by All Leaders
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
We all aspire to be good leaders, supportive of our teams & companies and also at home. The core of this aspiration is that leadership starts with ourselves. We must believe in these qualities and model them for others. One physical instantiation of leadership is the ability to create intentional spaces, or experiences for our coworkers, team and ourselves. The three intentional spaces that all leaders need are 1. External spaces of service, 2. Internal strategic / introspective space, and 3. the Liminal spaces in between.
1. External Spaces of Service
Many leaders I work with believe in a philosophy of servant leadership, where unlike a traditional command-and-control style, a leader’s job is to be in service to the people on their teams and to the organization as a whole. People come first, and that priority is additive to the company’s overall performance and success.
As part of this model, leaders create spaces of service for their teams. This can be an intimate space such as a 1–1 meeting with a report or a skip level, a staff meeting of your direct reports, or as expansive as a company all-hands. Most leaders will immediately focus on the agenda—the nuts and bolts of details to be covered including key messaging, long-term strategic plans, short-term updates, and interactive brainstorms or question & answer sessions. These to-do items are the typical—and crucial—tactics that first come to mind and are often captured in an agenda or a slidedeck.
What’s often overlooked is the feel of the space or the intention of the experience. This is a fuzzier, more woo-woo area that’s de-prioritized for the rational get-shit-done brain. Creating this intention involves asking questions such as:
What emotion do I want the people in this space to feel?
What is the arc of that emotion throughout the meeting? e.g. How do I share the positive, celebratory news versus the pragmatic downers that need to be announced?
How should people feel at the end of the meeting?
Afterwards, what do I want people to remember about the meeting?
How should they describe the experience to their partner or roommate when they go home later that evening?
This intention serves as the foundational north star for the external space, be it a 1–1 or an offsite. These can be based upon a written set of company values. Yet the lived company culture is how these multiple external spaces are curated over time and by all the leaders in the company. It takes time, consistency, and intention.
2. Internal Strategic / Introspective Spaces
For a leader to hold space for others, they must also carve out the time for themselves. Each day or week will have mini-crises and immediate fire-drills to be solved—that’s the rhythm of a modern workplace—however leaders can create structures to come back to strategy and contemplation.
For introspection, some of us need a physical break, whether it’s a vacation or a retreat to go inwards and reflect on how the daily or weekly activities matter towards a long-term goal. Others can create a weekly time to reflect and reset for the next week. Many of us need all of these rhythms in a year. This is the personal introspective space. We loos inward at how we continue to get energy from activities and people at work, and how this matches with life values and career aspirations.
There’s also strategic space where where as leaders in a company, we carve out the time either alone or with key partners to take a 10,000 foot view of where the company should be going. It gets out heads out of the trees and looking at a long-term view of how our weekly priorities map to the overall company direction. This is where we can also get outside counsel from a board of advisors or trusted mentors, and make sure that the company is on the right track.
3. The Liminal Spaces in Between
Finally, through our work lives we have many transitions between external spaces of service and internal spaces. We have to switch gears when moving from a visioning offsite to the day-to-day operations of finalizing a budget or shipping products to retail stores. We switch gears between a rejuvenating vacation, and jumping back into the rapid-fire of email triaging. We may have a carefully planned out schedule for the week that must be thrown out to address an urgent crisis that may derail the company.
These ambiguous liminal spaces are challenging. We are out of routine or switching from one routine to another. Be gentle with yourself. Slow down and create more space for the inevitable messiness or discomfort that will arise. Some ideas to consider:
If you’re coming back from a vacation, consider blocking the first day back to be a re-entry day that’s meeting-free. Use that day to review material, catch up on emails, and do a debrief with a trusted lieutenant.
If your team has been pushing towards a huge event, give the entire team the rest of the day off. Or schedule in common days off for the coming weeks. When the entire team is off, there is less pressure to check-in and be productive.
Build in some daily mental space between activities. This can be as short as a five-minute solo regroup to breathe or taking an hour-long walk after delivering a challenging performance review.
Pick an experiment for liminal spaces that you can try out. Notice how you are afterwards. See if it made a difference in your energy or performance.
Bottom-Line
As leaders, we must hold space for ourselves and our teams. Consider how we want to intentionally design these experiences. Remember the three intentional spaces that all leaders need — 1. External spaces of service, 2. Internal strategic / introspective space, and 3. the Liminal spaces in between.