CHAPTER 1
My Journey to Abundance Leadership

Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it.

—BUDDHA

One day I was in a conversation with a colleague about our families and work. As I described most of my immediate family's jobs and professions, I realized that all of us worked for ourselves. I hadn't thought much about that conversation until I started writing this book and thinking about leadership and how hard leading is. Because of these discussions with my family and the reasons for their self-employment, I became aware of how hard it is to lead in a way that makes work fulfilling for others, and why the Abundance Leadership model emerged from my work experience and my educational journey.

To help myself better understand how I came to think about why an Abundance mental model could be a driving force in good leaders, I reflected on my own work journey to my role today, as a partner at Organizational Performance Group (OPG). Similar to many of you readers, I started work early, at the age of 12, with babysitting and small tasks for neighbors and friends of my parents.

In my mid-teens I had two jobs that have always stayed with me. The first was flipping burgers in a small burger shack at the beach where I grew up, Muir Beach (see Figure 1.1). The burger shack was in a converted trailer. There was often only one of us working at a time. Whoever was there would not only make the burgers but also take the cash, make the milkshakes, clean the counters, and more. I had to serve in all roles at different moments.

FIGURE 1.1 Laura at the window of the burger shack at Muir Beach in 1974, age 15.

SOURCE: Laura Freebairn-Smith (Author).

I remember the burger shack boss being very trusting and gone quite often. I cannot visualize him any longer, but I remember the general effect of being left on my own, which felt both good and a little worrisome.

This ability to develop staff members, sometimes by pushing them to the edge of discomfort, shows up in the Abundance Leadership model.

The second job that I had as a teenager was working in a factory that produced goods for head shops, for about $1.65/hour. For those of you who are too young to know what a head shop is, it was a store that sold things like roach clips, bongs, rolling papers, posters, and other 1960s and 1970s weed and hippie paraphernalia. This factory produced the roach clips, the bongs, and other items sold in such shops. The factory took up about half a floor of a big building in the industrial area of Sausalito, one of the towns in Northern California where I grew up. The boss was an older man who was neither curmudgeonly nor nice as I recall; he was matter of fact and focused on productivity. I started out filling orders for stores, walking among the shelves full of bins of paraphernalia.

FIGURE 1.2 Henry Winkler as Fonzi.

SOURCE: AA Film Archive/Allstar Picture Library Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo.

One day the factory got an order to roll thousands of Fonzi posters (see Figure 1.2). If you've ever bought a poster, it probably came rolled up in a long, thin plastic bag. There is a special machine for rolling posters and putting them in those plastic bags (see Figure 1.3). You sit on a stool and use a foot lever to cause a long metal bar to spin. The bar is right above your lap. The stack of unrolled posters is on the other side of the bar. You take a poster and begin wrapping it around the bar and then, guiding the poster with your hand, you step on the foot lever that activates the rod to roll. Once the poster is rolled, you take a plastic bag and pull it over the end of the rod and the poster. Slide the poster off the rod into the bag. Tuck the end of the plastic bag into the top of the poster and put the completed poster into a box.

I was so fast at rolling Fonzi posters, which were being sold at the local Safeway store, that the boss promoted me into the glass-blowing shop where bongs were made. I learned how to make glass bongs in the last few months of that job. I can't remember why I stopped working there; maybe it was a summer job. What has stuck with me through the years were the promotions for being productive. I remember so clearly the pride I took in being the fastest and being promoted. Celebration, reward, and recognition are also key techniques for Abundance leaders.

FIGURE 1.3 Pedal-operated poster rolling machine.

SOURCE: Boggs Equipment.

I had many other odd jobs during my early years. Similar to many students, I waitressed for a summer and fall semester at a restaurant near Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. I would work on the weekends while I was attending UC Berkeley. On occasion I would work the overnight shift, which was one of my favorites. I loved the early morning customers, some of them fishermen heading out onto the Bay to fish. I also loved bringing home apple pie to my father's apartment in San Francisco where I was staying and eating it with him right before I would go to bed, and he would head off to work.

The restaurant was a non-unionized environment. At some point the union was conducting an organizing effort and the staff members were asked to go out on strike, which we did. It was my first time becoming a union member and the only time I would walk a picket line. I would become a union member again much later when I was a professor at Central Connecticut State University. This early experience with walking a picket line and unionization was an integral part of my education and evolution as a leader.

Unions and picket lines would reappear in my first weeks at Yale, when the clerical and technical staff members went out on strike just as the fall semester started in my first year of graduate school. I have complex opinions about unions that are not the topic of this book. Suffice it to say, I think they are essential in some industries, and I think they need to transform the way they work with management in other industries.

Abundance leaders are thinking about bigger societal and environmental issues such as income equality, empowering workers, and other matters that will improve the world, not just their own lives.

The next significant work memory I have is a very short stint I did as a business manager for a construction firm in Oakland right after I graduated from Berkeley, while I was waiting to head to Asia that fall. This was another piece in the leadership mosaic of my work life that produced the Abundance Leadership model.

At the construction company, the entire workforce was male; it was 1980 after all. I don't begrudge the context of history; it is what it was. One of the remarkable things about this job was the thinly veiled sexualized photographs on the walls of the office. The owner was an amateur photographer who took pictures with soft filters of scantily clothed women. Similar to many women of my age, we learned how to navigate a sexually fraught environment. That is not the topic of this book, but I will say that sexual overtures, physical touching, and more were common in my work experience until the late 1990s.

Abundance leaders work hard to ensure that their staff members feel safe and work in non-abusive conditions, the definitions of which are in constant flux and evolution.

I left the job in Oakland to go trekking in the Solo-Khumbu region of Nepal to the base camp of Everest with my mother. The trip was a graduation gift from her. Although not a work-related experience, two events during that trek would inform my thinking about leadership in the coming years.

There were 25 of us on that trek—a large group. In Nepal in the high Himalayas, there are no roads once you get above a certain altitude, and the trails are narrow. By the end of each day, the person at the front of the line could be two to three hours ahead of the person at the back of the line. Our trek leader was a young woman named Meredith. She had a habit of moving up and down the line all day long. She always made sure that she or a Sherpa was with the last person in line. She had a marvelous quiet, steady presence that was very reassuring—always making sure the last person had support. We use this method of leading, attending to all, in the Abundance Leadership immersion program during one of the experiential exercises. This method of leading is important in day-to-day work as well.

The second event on that trek that changed my internal relationship to service and leading was when I contracted pneumonia at 10,000 feet. Most days I was one of the first into camp because of my age—I was the youngest at 21. One day I found that it was getting harder and harder to breathe. I would walk 100 steps and have to sit down. I arrived into camp two to three hours after the last person, accompanied by my mother and a Sherpa. That night I had a high fever; the doctor on the trek came to our tent and gave me a shot of antibiotics. The next morning, I was still very sick.

That day, the Sherpas created a way to carry me on their backs, using a tumpline and a stick (see Figure 1.4). A Sherpa would carry me for 20 minutes, and then pass me to another Sherpa. Up in the Himalayas, there is very little flat ground. We were going up and down all day. The Sherpas were always polite and kind and never made me feel like a burden, which I clearly was both literally and figuratively. The Sherpas were moving so fast that the doctor fell and broke his...