CHAPTER 2 THE LIFT METAPHOR

Bob: When I was in my second year of college I became increasingly depressed. When I realized what was happening I decided to find some direction in my life. I started by trying to determine my major. Despite months of agonizing, I made little progress.

One day I was walking across campus when a question popped into my mind: "What is the most meaningful thing you have ever done?" I knew the answer instantly. During my life I had had a number of opportunities to help other people make significant and positive changes in their personal lives. These experiences were the most meaningful things I had done. A moment passed, and then something inside me said, "Major in change."

That was a great answer. The only problem was that there was no major in change. I wrestled with this problem, and eventually approached my education differently. I became proactive. I read books that were not assigned, I went to public lectures, and I took classes from many fields that I thought would help me understand change. My formal major eventually became sociology, but I graduated with a body of knowledge about how to help people change. Then I went to graduate school and focused on this same question as it related to groups and organizations. I studied change, taught change, and helped people and organizations make change. As I did these things I realized that I was not interested in change for change's sake; I wanted to understand how people and organizations change for the better. To do this I needed to understand why some organizations, groups, and people were more effective than others, including why some people were more effective in leading more positively than others.

Bob's experience in discovering his passion was the beginning of our process for discovering the ideas that led us to develop the concept of the fundamental state of leadership. In this chapter we will describe how we have learned through our research, teaching, and professional practice to conceive of leadership in terms of psychological states, and to bring together what we have learned into the concept of the fundamental state of leadership. We use the work and the principles of Orville and Wilbur Wright as metaphors for our own work and principles. The Wright brothers' efforts to build an airplane are similar to our own efforts. And the four principles used to harness the aerodynamic force of lift mirror the four characteristics of the fundamental state of leadership that socially and psychologically lift us and the people around us.