ST. PETERSBURG, Fla.–If credit union employees are reporting they feel “exhausted,” or perhaps you are feeling similarly tired yourself, it may actually be something else you and they are feeing—“loneliness,” according to one leader who admitted it was an insight gained only after having once contemplated remaining in her closed garage with the car running and later realizing what is often expected of leaders is a “big fat lie.”
Speaking to the Defense Credit Union Council annual meeting, Col. (Ret.) DeDe Halfhill, who served in the Air Force and was twice deployed to Iraq and who served in support of the Joint Chiefs in the Pentagon, noted that any Amazon search will find at least 60,000 books on leadership.
And while she attempted to read many of those books because she wanted to be the one to whom younger members of the military looked up to as wise and strategic and cool in crises, it was that deeply personal experience that really helped transform her ability to lead, Halfhill said.
Not Going to Change
It was a critical lesson Halfhill said that in an era of new and numerous challenges isn’t going to change.
“The greatest advantage we have as leaders is our ability to connect,” said Halfhill. “Connection is an advantage today. Leaders who become skilled at it have the advantage today. But make no mistake, it will be an imperative tomorrow. Leaders who are gifted at building connection will be ahead of the game for just a little while longer. But it will be a necessity for the challenges you are facing tomorrow.”
With the average person making approximately 36,000 decisions every day, it can be easy to make many decisions on “auto-pilot,” according to Halfhill. But creating connections isn’t something that can be done via default mode, she stressed.
‘Unskilled and Unprepared’
“Connection is a choice and there are moments around us every single day where we are choosing to take advantage of the opportunity to connect or we're missing it completely,” Halfhill told the DCUC meeting. “At best, we see the opportunity right in front of us, but we feel unskilled and unprepared for how to take advantage of it. At worst we're completely oblivious to the fact that it's right in front of us. But if connection is a choice and it is so critical to how we lead our organizations, then we have to become aware of those moments when they're right in front of us.”
While in command of a unit at Barksdale Air Force Base, Halfhill shared how she would conclude meetings by asking junior enlisted personnel what was on their minds. She said one young airman once asked, “When will the ops tempo slow down?” before he added, “We’re tired.”
Halfhill said she asked others who else felt tired, and nearly every hand was raised. A poll of her DCUC audience found a similar response.
What Exhaustion Often Really Is
At that same time she had been reading a Harvard Business Review study of exhaustion in the workplace that had concluded that it wasn’t that people are tired; instead, they are lonely.
“It’s that feeling of loneliness that is manifesting itself as exhaustion,” said Halfhill. “I wasn’t entirely sure what to do. I had never really talked about loneliness with my team, but what I knew for sure was that as a senior leader we were spending countless hours trying to understand this epidemic of (military) suicide rates. We didn’t know how to engage, how to help them understand there are other options. If you tell me you are tired, I will tell you to rest, to take some leave.
“Basically, I’m telling you to go away, versus bringing you in,” Halfhill continued. “I am potentially exacerbating the very thing I’m trying to address. But if you tell me you’re lonely, I am going to bring you in, bring you closer.”
DeDe Halfhill speaking to DCUC meeting in St. Petersburg.
A Challenge for CU Leaders
Halfhill challenged her audience to think more deeply about what issues are being masked in their own organizations due to a lack of language and the one word that can unlock a strategic problem that has proven difficult to crack.
The right word, she said, can create “micro-moments” that lead to “bold breakthroughs.”
None of this is a new concept, but rather a “forgotten” one, Halfhill said, explaining her research while in the Air Force found a 1948 guide on leadership that spoke of “humanness” and understanding how enlisted men and women felt.
A Deeply Personal Story
Halfhill shared a deeply personal story of how her own “bold breakthrough” around effective leadership came about as the result of a dark time in her own life.
“I knew that feeling of loneliness,” she said, sharing how she had been in the military 25 years, had moved every two years and had needed to create new communities, how she had never been married or had children.
“The more senior I got the less there were people in the room who looked like me,” Halfhill said. “Often, I was the only woman in the room for days. Being an ‘only’ can feel very lonely. So much so, one day I’m driving home from work and I pull into the garage and the very first thought I have is, leave the car running and you don’t have to feel like this anymore, you don’t have to carry this weight. I watched the garage door close behind me and thought, ‘Dinner for one, alone again tonight. I can’t do it.’ So, I sat there for what felt like eternity and then I remembered I have two crazy Yorkies waiting in the house for me.
‘Over and Over Again’
“So, I went in. I thought to myself, ‘Just a bad day.’ The problem was I continued to have that thought over and over again. It scared me enough I decided to get some help, and in doing so I was able to share my story.”
As a colonel, Halfhill said rarely did any young men or women come to her looking to share their own stories. But once she shared hers, she said she began hearing from many young airmen and airwomen saying they were lonely and asking how they might get help.
‘Challenges All Around Us’
“The truth is mental health (challenges are) all around us,” Halfhill said. “Across the U.S. we are at epidemic rates with people challenged by mental health problems. The truth is all of us struggle, and no matter what that struggle is, our job as leaders is to let people know they are not alone in that struggle. It’s our job as leaders to be real, to show your humanity. It’s your own humanity that will build the connection with your team, to be the one who will help them navigate their own challenges. When we are real, we build belief.”
The ’Big Fat Lie’
As is the case in the military, and as in the case in credit unions and other organizations, Halfhill said leaders are supposed to show everyone what “perfection looks like.”
“That’s a big fat lie. There are those moments when our humanity is going to be the thing they need to see,” Halfhill said. “I know being real can be vulnerable, and that can be a hard thing to navigate. But if we don’t learn to navigate that feeling, we opt out of the hard moments where we need to opt in.”
What Vulnerability Is About
Halfhill said vulnerability isn’t just about sharing personal stories, it’s about that feeling everyone gets when something right in front of them feels hard, when there’s risk, and when there’s an emotional component to it.
“And when we don’t know how to navigate that, we opt out,” she explained. “What we know about vulnerability is it’s the first thing I look for in you, but it’s the last thing I want to show you in me. But when I do, it’s a fast track to trust.”
Halfhill again challenged CU leaders to think about the conversations they are not having, the things that need to be said that aren’t, understand what the undercurrent of the problem in the CU that is not being addressed because of the vulnerability it poses.
“How can you identify what it is about it that is making you uncomfortable so you can address it?” she asked. “We can’t leave the challenges we are facing to hope. We need our teams. We need them to come together. Leaders who do this are at an advantage today. But it will be an imperative tomorrow.
‘Can’t Inspire Until You Aspire’
“You don’t get to inspire anyone until you show them that you aspire to be something different,” Halfhill continued. “Then you can inspire hope and possibility in them. The number-one shame-trigger at work is fear of irrelevance. What does change do? It makes some thing or someone irrelevant. If you are leading a change in your organization there is shame, and if you aren’t talking about it there is an undercurrent of shame.”