Connecting to the emotional core of your ‘why’

George Coleman, VP health care at CVS

Making emotional connections with one’s team — connecting with the head and leading with the heart — is a key element in nurturing future leaders.

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That was the perspective shared by George Coleman, VP health care at CVS, in addressing attendees of Drug Store News’ Future Leaders Summit in May.



“If you don’t understand some-one’s personal story — where they have been and who has influenced them — how can you lead them?” noted event co-host and moderator Dan Mack, managing director at Mack Elevation Forum, in his introduction of Coleman. “Leaders must also be free enough to share their own story. That’s how trusting teams are built.”



But before you can share your story you have to own your story.



For Coleman, it took a two-year stint as a Peace Corps volunteer in the small West African nation of Guinea Bissau, a former Portuguese colony, to help him draw his own conclusion.



“People asked me why I wanted to go into the Peace Corps, and I told them it was about challenging myself, to see what I was made of,” Coleman explained. “Could I go out on my own into a strange place, learn the local language and make my own way? ‘Doing good’ was also part of it, but it was a side benefit.”



Once in Guinea Bissau, Coleman was assigned to serve as an agricultural extensionist in a small village where he was the only Westerner within a 50-mile radius. His job was to take knowledge gleaned from schools of agronomy and the like and, as he described it, “transfer it to the village — for example, teaching better planting techniques.”



The mission was simple enough to help the village of largely subsistence farmers grow more rice and shorten — or even eliminate — the so-called “hungry season,” the inevitable period they encountered more or less every year, between planting seasons in the dry months, when their food stores would run out. Yet, after one year in the country, Coleman felt as though he still wasn’t quite connecting with the villagers.



Admittedly bothered by it, Coleman tried hard to understand why that disconnect existed. Certainly, his young age was one factor; respect was something that was really reserved for village elders.



It was during a rather ordinary greeting between two of the villagers that it began to make some sense to him. During such a typical encounter, it was customary for the villagers to ask each other a series of questions — how are you, how is your family, how are your crops, how are your cows. “It was clear that they were doing more than just checking up on each other,” he explained. “They were trying to create a context for the people in their lives by understanding their connections to their world. And me? I just dropped in to their lives without any context. ‘Why would you leave your family? Why would you leave America? America is a land of milk and honey — why would you come here to this poor village of ours?’”



According to Coleman, his typically “Western” reasoning, ideas like “wanting to help out” and trying “to find oneself,” just didn’t resonate in their culture. “They understood that I wanted to help them grow more rice; they understood that I wanted to shorten the hungry season, but they didn’t understand why,” he said.



That began to change shortly after a visit to Guinea Bissau from his parents. During their stay, Coleman’s mother was visited by one of the female elders of the village, and he began to notice something odd — the two women “were connecting on a fundamentally emotional level” without the need of translation, he explained, recalling the conversation between the two. “‘You traveled all this way,’” the older woman told Coleman’s mother. “‘You brought up this young person; here he is in our village. We’ve been taking care of him.’ It was really beautiful.”



It was around then that Coleman first began to understand what it means to lead with one’s heart. “It was about connecting to the emotional core of why you do these things,” he explained.



“You can be rational all day, and deal with everyday things, like looking at numbers,” Coleman concluded. “But if you don’t find your emotional core and connect with your team, it’s going to be an upward slog.”