David Whyte has pushed executives at Astra-Zeneca, Boeing, Citigroup, and a host of other companies to hold the conversations they and their employees most need to have. How? Through poetry. In workshops and retreats, he recites and reflects on classic and contemporary works, including his own, using images and ideas from the poems to fuel discussions about such challenges as fostering creativity, engagement, and social responsibility. We recently spoke with Whyte about how poetry begets courageous conversation and, in turn, better leadership. How did you come to bring business and poetry together? I launched myself as a full-time poet in 1986; soon after, I was approached by a gentleman at the end of a speech I had given. In best American fashion, he said, “We have to hire you,” and in best Irish-English fashion, I asked, “For what?” He persisted, saying, “The language we have in the corporate world is far too small for the territory of relationship and collaboration we’ve entered.” For a poet, that was an intriguing invitation. A poet’s work is all about creating a language big enough to represent both the world you inhabit and the next, larger world that awaits you. Initially, I was afraid I would be asked to compromise my work, but as it turned out, executives only pushed me further to elaborate on the themes I’d begun to explore. Good poetry can open up areas of everyday business life that remain impervious to the jargon we have created to describe it. Executives are hungry for this larger language. How can poetry help people become better leaders? Through the insight it provides. Of course, you don’t go to Wordsworth’s Prelude and expect a few good management maxims to come out of it. The poem has bigger fish to fry than whether your organization succeeds or not, but it can cast a brilliant light on the shadowed microworld of the workplace. Consider Wordsworth’s phrase “I made no vows, but vows/Were then made for me.” It speaks to the phenomenon that whatever project, plan, or career you commit to, there will always be a deeper dynamic you discover inside, a promise larger than your original conception that in effect makes vows on your behalf and invites you to find a different kind of courage than you first intended. Poetry is a way of getting at the phenomenology of conversation—that is, what happens along the way when you’re trying to have a real meeting with something other than yourself: a meeting with your customers, with your colleagues, or with a new field of endeavor. It could also be a conversation with yourself about the greater dimensions of your vocation. Good poets throughout history have looked at almost every stage of the process of creative confrontation. Dante is brilliant on the experience of losing your sense of direction but finding something else in that darkness far more precious: waking, as he said, “in a dark wood where the true way was wholly lost.” What makes a conversation real? A real conversation is one that, no matter how slowly, helps you make sense of the world around you. It can tackle great universal questions, or it can be about your work group’s puzzling lack of respect for you or why a division of your company is refusing to go in a previously agreed-upon direction. At the executive and managerial levels, work is almost always conversation in one form or another, and yet we spend almost no time apprenticing ourselves to the disciplines necessary for holding real exchanges. That’s partly because they involve a great deal of self-knowledge and a willingness to study how human beings try to belong—skills we hope our strategic abilities will help us get by without. The temptation is to say, “I’d much rather inhabit the 5% of reality where I’m in control than enter this 95% where I don’t know what the hell is going on.” But a conversational approach makes work less stressful, not more so. It means leaders don’t have to try to be paragons of perfection. My work has executives asking, in many areas of their lives, personal and professional: “What is the courageous conversation I am not having but need to have to take the next step?”
