Under the big top: How big is your leadership tent?
By: Julie Penner
Tags: Startup, Work, Family, Leadership, Leadership Development

And what happens to the tent when you’re tired?

Leadership is like a tent, it makes space for people to come inside and belong, have a community and a space to create, feel taken care of, etc. I like to envision it as a circus tent, big, expansive, able to hold many people under it, with a center pole in the middle holding it up. The taller the center pole, the bigger the tent, the more capacity it has, more people can fit in the tent. For example, I’m a member of a group of people that goes to burning man every year. It’s a collection of people brought together for a specific purpose, which could be any size, but settled at about 15 people. That’s roughly the size of the tent. It’s that size primarily because our camp leader, the person who created the tent in the first place, has that capacity for this part of his life. His capacity is like the center pole in the tent- if he had more capacity, there could be a bigger tent. Note: He’s also a CEO with a successful and growing startup, that’s another tent he put up, which is where most of his capacity goes.

Most of us hold up tents in different areas in our lives, in our families, with our friends, with our activities and in our professional lives. If we are founders, the leadership tent at the company or project we start plays a big part in our lives. The tent is not just for employees- it’s also for investors, customers, suppliers, cheerleaders, advocates and anyone else that’s actively involved. The bigger the tent, the more that is possible, but also the more work there is to keep the tent up. It feels to me that there is often a person keeping that center pole in the middle of the tent steady. In business, it could be a CEO or a COO. In our family lives, it could be a matriarch or a patriarch that keep everyone bound together on some level.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the center poles we put up and steady. When I worked at Techstars, I was part of a two-person team that held up a pretty big tent for the startup community in Boulder and beyond. It was wonderful, deeply fulfilling and also sometimes exhausting. The job of holding up that center pole has been passed to someone else now, and it’s wonderful to just be in the tent, but it also assumes that the people who have the job now will create a tent with at least as much room for me and the people I care about as there was before- not at all a certainty. At the venture fund where I work, I’m not a founder, someone else has created and is steadying that center pole in a tent I like a lot. It’s great, and I try not to take it for granted. And my family tent is something different altogether.

What about you? Are you holding up tents in your life? How do you feel about them? Did you choose them? Are there any you would like to put down or have someone else hold, even for a while?

I am not suggesting that work and life and family are not team sports, that creating a tent is a one-person job. Of course there are people that help create and maintain the tent. What I’m saying is there is usually one person, rarely two people, that are holding up the center poles, the leaders. Just because you are a leader holding up the center pole in your tent doesn’t mean you aren’t collaborative or that you don’t have support, but there is a recognition of a leader, even in the most collaborative and supportive settings. Leaders do two things no one else does: create containers (another word for a tent) and managing conflict and impasse. Leaders can add more jobs to their plates, but those two things are sufficient to be one.

That is real work, creating the container and managing for conflict and impasse. Sometimes, leaders get tired. They need a break. What do they do? I’m reminded of words by Parker Palmer about leadership and the insight that inner work can bring to leaders about this challenge:

“The gift we receive on the inner journey is the knowledge that ours is not the only act in town. Not only are there other acts out there, but some of them are even better than ours, at least occasionally! We learn that we need not carry the whole load but can share it with others, liberating us and empowering them. We learn sometimes that we are free to lay the load down altogether. The great community asks us to do only that what we are able and trust the rest to other hands.”

It is not easy to give up or take a break from holding up that center tent pole, or to stop carrying the load to use Palmer’s analogy, even when we are exhausted. For me, there’s fear of what will happen to the tent and to the people under it and to the work and relationships that are created within it? That fear will drive me to keep holding that center pole for dear life. If you are a founder or a CEO or a matriarch, can you relate?

If you see the center poles in your life that you are responsible for, are there people who can hold it for a while? If not, what are the options? I can think of three.

You could create more support, either find other people who can hold up the center pole or change the structure of the tent completely to support the tent in a different way. You could surround yourself with people who similarly hold center poles as tall as yours. They know what it’s like to create a tent that size, they understand, you’ll be in good company, even if you’re holding up separate tents, it’s much less lonely. You can decide to set down the center pole with grace and thoughtfulness. It won’t happen overnight, it takes deliberate consideration for what will happen to the people when the tent comes down. While sad and difficult to end, it may make space for a different tent to emerge with different center pole minders, and isn’t that the order of things and how we renew ourselves and society continually?

What have I missed in this exploration of leadership tents? I would love to hear from you and your experience.