The disappointed

Published in the Wakefield Daily Item, July 2, 2024.

As a book editor, I’ve been lucky to work with some wise thinkers on the topic of leadership. Years ago, it was my privilege to work with two of the wisest – Ronald Heifetz, a legendary teacher at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and his coauthor Marty Linsky – on their classic book Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Change. The book makes the compelling argument that when you lead people through change, helping them come to grips with a changing world and to understand how their lives will need to change accordingly, you actually become a threat to them – you’re making them uncomfortable, threatening their long-entrenched habits of thinking and doing, their way of life. Thus, you’re putting yourself in jeopardy, even danger. Think of Martin Luther King, Jr., or Yitzhak Rabin, who paid with their lives for trying to lead people to a new, better world.

I remember watching Heifetz give a talk to an audience of municipal leaders after the book was first published, and one line he uttered really stuck with me:

“To a significant extent, leadership is about disappointing people at a rate that they can stand.”

This might make you chuckle and think, “good one” – a clever aphorism to insert into a speech. That was probably my initial response. But on reflection, it’s deeper and truer than that.

It reminds me of the apocryphal Lincoln quote – “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time” (sometimes attributed to P.T. Barnum). If you tweak this, replacing “fool” with “please,” it seems akin to the Heifetz disappointment principle. Any public leader will nod in recognition of the dynamic, as well as its corollary: that any proposal or policy, no matter how universally beneficial or bipartisan, will have its detractors, people who are disappointed or angry with what’s being proposed.

Everyone knows leaders need to attract and maintain support in order to make progress. With this maxim, Heifetz reveals a darker reality: as a leader, you will always be disappointing some folks, making them uncomfortable or unhappy. This is a big part of what makes leadership hard and risky.

But what about the other side of the equation, all of those citizens responding to the changing world and to the leader – in other words, all of us? Like many others, I support some views and policies of leaders and am critical of others, thinking there are better ways to address a particular issue based on what I know about the relevant facts and context.

But some folks I’ve met, or whose commentary I read in the paper or on social media, seem to be always critical or angry, whining and complaining about stuff, never affirmative or constructive. Often their anger seems directed more at people than at trying to understand or solve issues and challenges.

Case in point, Wakefield’s intrepid local columnist took the opportunity a while back to put former Town Councilor Julie Smith-Galvin in his crosshairs (Item 4/11/24), criticizing her for leading Wakefield to become a certified Climate Leader Community, a designation which provides access to grant funding for town energy efficiency initiatives. Rather than offering a reasoned critique on the issue of costs, Mark Sardella merely railed against the policy, calling it “the latest radical climate scheme,” caricaturing Galvin with his signature snark.

This was too bad since there’s a legitimate debate to be had on sustainability and costs. How much do you think extreme weather, flooding, sea level rise, droughts, wildfires, and all of the associated social and economic effects are costing the U.S. and countries around the world? Trillions of dollars and it’s only going up. This is because for decades we did not reckon with the true costs of fossil fuels in terms of their destructive impact on the planet.  

You can always find lots of whining on the Wakefield Facebook groups. Recently, someone posted about the new plan to make Wakefield more bike-friendly. You’d have thought someone proposed a global baby seal hunting season the way people swooped-in to attack the policy and the town leaders supporting it. Presumably one rationale for the policy is environmental friendliness, and one of the swoopers noted sarcastically, with regard to climate change, “I just looked outside and the sky isn’t falling.” Well, actually, given the unimaginably massive and growing economic impacts of the climate crisis, you could make a pretty good argument that the sky is falling (or the pot is boiling, or whatever metaphor you prefer).

Another Wakefieldian on social media complained about the state of Main Street, bemoaning empty storefronts and lamenting that the town center had gone downhill. But I’ve been in town over 25 years and can attest that there have been real improvements – Hart’s Hardware’s renovated exterior looks great, Public Kitchen and Artichokes and Sabatino’s are bustling, Sweetbay is thriving in its new location, and there are exciting plans for the old Molise building and the former bank building at the corner of Chestnut Street.

My point is not to argue against these specific grievances, but to issue a general caution against slipping into a negative mode of responding to the world, against becoming one of the perpetually disappointed.

Now, I’m getting older and I do understand the pull of the dark side: Why can’t things be easier? Why do we need to be changing stuff all the time? Why can’t we go back to the way things were?

We can’t. We never could. We can only move forward. Disappointment, dissatisfaction, critique: these are fine and necessary as a response to a problem or challenge, but ideally as a spur to try to make things better. They become a problem as a permanent mode and mindset – who wants to be around constant whiners and nonstop nattering nabobs of negativism? It’s also a kind of cop out; the negativity becomes self-sustaining. “What’s the point of trying to make things better?” the thinking goes, “It’s just a waste of time.” (As if complaining isn’t.) It becomes clear why the disappointed don’t want to actually solve problems: because then they wouldn’t have something to complain about.

We should respect and thank leaders like Julie Smith-Galvin. She became a Town Councilor in 2018 with a background in the energy industry and communications, and with an aim to help Wakefield navigate the necessary and inevitable shift toward sustainability as the country and the world respond to the greatest challenge facing humanity. She succeeded in achieving that goal and I applaud and thank her for her valuable service.

Finally, I appreciate Sardella pointing out to readers that if you voted for certain candidates, you voted for these policies. This is absolutely true – voting matters. And I assume many of his regular followers – the perpetually disappointed, the constant complainers, the hell-in-a-handbasket contingent – agree with him. What’s left unsaid, but looming over this and many of his other columns, is the question of how representative his point of view is of Wakefield citizens more broadly. As I recall, Smith-Galvin and her fellow Town Councilors Mehreen Butt, Jonathan Chines, and Bob Vincent were all elected with fairly strong numbers relative to town elections in recent years. I’m certain that the people who voted for Julie are very happy with her service and accomplishment.

Don’t become one of the disappointed. If you find yourself feeling angry all the time at what you’re watching or hearing or reading, take a moment to step back, change the channel, think about an alternative to what’s being proposed, engage in an honest debate on the best ways to solve challenges. Once you do this, it allows you to see that things can get better. I’m looking forward to the possibilities.

© Jeff Kehoe