Zen for psychiatric leadership

"Leadership is not about forcing your will on others. It's about mastering the art of letting go."

-Phil Jackson

After my last blog, I was pretty sure that I was finished, at least for a time, focusing on various leaders and leadership. As it turns out, that didn't last for long. In writing the drafts for an upcoming book chapter on "Ethical Leadership for Psychiatry," I discovered some other leaders, one of which I'd like to start writing about now. Hope you don't mind. [By the way, if anyone would like to review and comment on the current chapter draft, just let me know and I'll forward it to you.]

It's just my contention that we can learn so much from leaders in other fields, let alone our own. There are underlying generalities that can cross fields, and certainly there have been leaders that have been successful in more than one field.

One such approach is the Zen of the most successful professional basketball coach in history, Phil Jackson. Zen, simply speaking, can be defined as trying to achieve enlightenment by intuitive insights, really not so far afield from the insights that therapists often try to convey to patients.

Zen and basketball, though!? Almost sounds like mixing oil and water, does it not? How, then did they end up mixing so well?

First, full disclosure here: Jackson won those 11 championships for two different teams, under two different owners. One of those was the Chicago Bulls. I'm from Chicago and the Bulls are way up on the list of my favorite teams.

As a child, I went to many Bulls games with my father. The Bulls, at that time, were a new team, so in some ways I felt that we grew up together. And my sign is Taurus the Bull! Coincidentally or not, when the Bulls finally won their championships under Jackson, who is about my age, I was in the heydays of my own leadership experiences. I tried to convey the essence of my leadership challenges in the book The Ethical Way: Challenges and Solutions for Managed Behavioral Healthcare (Jossey-Bass, 1997). Much better yet, Jackson wrote several books on his methods, which I'll summarize and try to relate to psychiatry.

Coach Jackson had two great superstars on each of those teams, but his leadership challenge was to get them to be team players, too. And he did, where other coaches had failed under similar, if not better, circumstances. Psychiatric leaders often have to mold and develop staff of varying talents and skills.

One overall strategy was to instill a little love. No, not passionate and sexual love with those most macho athletes. This was what Jackson described as more like agape, the love of caring, concern, and understanding. As I researched my book chapter, this resonated with new research showing that a leader in any field, including healthcare, that can model and show compassionate love, increases job satisfaction and reduces burnout for those who work in the organization.

Besides love, another leadership technique that coach Jackson used was relaxation, another paradoxical opposite to the often frenetic action on the basketball court. He brought in yoga and meditation. In our days of trying to do more in less time, how do we find ways to relax and replenish emotionally?

Another strategy that Jackson used was to invent rituals that might infuse practices with a sense of the sacred. We in behavioral healthcare should have less of a challenge feeing that our work in caring for patients is sacred. Many of us feel that our work is a calling. Surely, we can find rituals to infuse our staff meetings, can we not?

Jackson used music, but not the "Sweet Georgia Brown" of the Harlem Globetrotters, or the popular rap music that the players played on their own in the locker room. Again, he used almost the opposite. He used the great cellist Pablo Casals to illustrate the importance of practice, so that skills became more ingrained in muscle memory, necessary even for the most talented stars.

Another strategy was more of an intellectual one. Just imagine asking the best basketball players in the world, men of action, to read books hand-chosen by Jackson, and not sports books at that. One of the players was Dennis Rodman, now back in the news for his controversial interactions, including a drunken rant for which he apologized, with the President of North Korea. Another was arguably the greatest player of all time, Michael Jordan. Another was the gentle giant, Shaquille O'Neal.

One of the yearly books that he gave Michael Jordan was Song of Solomon. This was not the Biblical Song of Solomon, at least not directly. It was the novel by Toni Morrison. This Morrison book had the rare male protagonist, named "Milkman." Milkman has been described as an archetype for a black man searching for what is his, coming out of an ancestral past of racism: body, mind, sex, money? Jordan, of course, already had sports. Was Jackson trying to tell him that despite his skills, that Jordan is indebted to his ancestors, both genetically and socially? That he has to rely some on his teammates, who were mainly also Black-Americans?

For Shaq, as he was called, Jackson gave a copy of Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, a fictional account of Buddha's life, with the hope that it would help the young, happy-go-lucky Shaquille O'Neal to become more serious and become less enamored with his possessions, stimulating a spiritual change. Although Shaq may very well have been joking, he reported back just the opposite: "This is about a young man who has power, wealth, and women (much like me), and gives them all up to pursue a holy life (not so much like me)." Yet, maybe the seed was planted, as Shaq seems to have made slow changes over the ensuing twenty years in the direction that Jackson wanted.

It is unknown how many players read their individualized books each year, nor what they usually thought. But Jackson tried to choose the right book for the circumstances and challenges of each specific player. Therefore, his books touch on many areas: business, spirituality, and culture, especially. What then happened during the games themselves is that Jackson let go and gave the players a lot of freedom, though sometimes injecting a Zen-like question even in a crucial time-out at the end of a game.

Psychiatric leaders can do the same for staff. It is easy to provide generic continuing education opportunities, but hard to hone in on what each individual needs. For books, a couple of possible examples come to mind. If you have a "prouser," that is, a professional who is also a patient (consumer), be sure to have them read Jamison's An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness, where she describes her life as a psychologist with bipolar disorder. Or, if you have a clinician frustrated by the ever-increasing limitations imposed on treatment, have the clinician read the book by the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, in which he describes how he became able to help his concentration camp inmates find meaning in life. In an application of the Logotherapy he later developed, I've adapted it in asking patients what gives their life meaning as the guidepost for even a fifteen minute med check.

Coach Jackson was unique, the opposite of the raging, chair-throwing, yet successful basketball coach, Bobby Knight. Jackson emphasized that each coach has to be true to themselves. How are you true to yourself and able to translate that to the people you try to lead?