Leadership Lessons from an Adoption: Stockdale Paradox

Expanding our family through an international adoption has shaped our last three years.  The journey began in December 2009 and in March of 2012 we brought two sisters, Meskerem and Tarikua, to Austin from Ethiopia and into our home.  The adventure continues and the expedition has provided poignant lessons; some of them even apply to leadership. 

Stockdale Paradox:  A great friend and former boss Chip Nemesi had many truisms; one that always stuck with me was “You can’t learn to swim in the front yard”

The agency we used for the adoption insisted that we pursue the adoption in a manner consist with the Hague Adoption Convention even though Ethiopia has not ratified this treaty.  This meant quite a bit of on-line education, books to read and counseling from very gifted social workers.  All of the pre-work instilled in me a belief that we were ready, but in reality we were just doing the butterfly stroke in the tall grass.

One can read all the material they want and then they are face to face with two young children aged 5 and 9 from rural Ethiopia with no English, no real concept of indoor plumbing and an ability to look at a fork as if it was some sort of mystical ancient Jedi talisman.  Mix that in with a couple of American boys and all hell broke loose. 

Napolean said, “A leader is a dealer in hope” The leader’s job is to paint a picture of a better future but how do you bring hope into difficult situations?  In  Good to Great, Jim Collins writes about a conversation he had with Admiral James Stockdale regarding his time in the Vietnamese POW camp. “I never lost faith in the end of the story, I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”

When Collins asked who didn't make it out of Vietnam, Stockdale replied, “Oh, that's easy, the optimists. They were the ones who said, 'We're going to be out by Christmas.' And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they'd say, 'We're going to be out by Easter.' And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”

Stockdale then added, “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end - which you can never afford to lose - with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”

See the truth, but not for worse than it is.  One great lesson in this adventure is that we were always be prepared to give an answer to anyone who asks the reason for the hope that we had…but it was hope grounded in the reality of the moment.  

“Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.” - Emily Dickinson