The Virtue of Patience
“Patience is a virtue,” my mother frequently chided her children, the five of us no doubt insisting that we needed something right now – a new bicycle, a snack or a ride to a friend’s house. As a kid, I always wondered what she meant. We all knew that patience was on the list of officially sanctioned virtues, so what was the point of reminding us? I thought she was saying, “Patience is a good thing.”
It wasn’t until I was a teenager that it suddenly struck me; what she really meant was, “patience is one of the virtues you should cultivate in yourself.” And not for the first or last time, I wondered if I was perhaps an exceptionally slow learner.
Virtues have been on my mind a lot lately, since I feel that the conversation about “values,” both personal and organizational, has become stale and unproductive. Because organizations seeking to define themselves tend to pick values by committee, the values selected are, while undeniably worthy, mostly meaningless in everyday life. In other words, they don’t serve as a useful working guide for staff and board. Values seem to exist in some exterior void, behind glass, like a piece of wall art that nobody notices anymore.
Virtues, on the other hand, are easily accessible, there to be nurtured and encouraged. They only exist in active practice.
So what would it mean for an organization (nonprofit or for-profit) to say that it is patient? Think about this: Organizations are created to solve problems. Important problems cannot be solved in a year, or even five or ten. Being patient is the explicit acknowledgement of this reality.
A patient organization, knowing that it needed a long time to make any headway in solving the world’s problems, would think of project cycles in ten-year increments at least. Programs would be set up, and program partners selected, on the basis of long-term commitments to solving difficult problems, instead of short-term projects that barely scratch the surface. It’s the difference between a merely incremental approach (e.g., helping one more child get an education, or one more rural village get a handpump) and truly catalytic change.
Catalytic change comes when an intervention fundamentally alters the way a system responds (hopefully for the better). For example, a low-performing school system that is failing the community’s low-income children transforms into one with highly motivated teachers and good graduation rates even for those children.
In a patient organization, the leaders would evaluate the organization’s capacity based on whether it had the necessary systems, staff and cash reserves to keep the programs running and the lights on for the long term to achieve catalytic change. Senior staff members would focus their attention on training and developing newer staff members for the future, creating a culture of continuous learning and development. All staff members would seek opportunities to improve their skills and intellectual capital, secure in knowing that their ability to be successful is measured in years, not months. Mothers and fathers could take time off for childbirth, and the organization would celebrate parental leave, confident that the staff member would return and that having children adds to the maturity and reliability of staff. The top leaders would make public commitments to stay in it for the long haul, creating a sense of security and inspiring other staff to make similar commitments.
Let’s talk frankly–there’s not much you can get done in just a year or two. Short-termers are largely a waste of resources. In both the nonprofit and for-profit worlds, senior staff tenure is astonishingly short; I think the average for a Chief Development Officer or Chief Marketing Officer is around twelve months. Twelve months! You spend the first six months just learning the basics of the job.
This is exacerbated, at least in the nonprofit world, by the short attention span of donors, who often have trouble thinking about programs that last more than two or three years. What a different conversation it would be, don’t you think, to sit down with a donor and explain that ten years is the minimum amount of time it would take to get traction on the problem at hand, and that it would be irresponsible to launch something knowing that you were going to wind it up just as it got going?
Imagine you are a child in a school and you win a scholarship that covers school fees, books and supplies every year. But the agency that gave you the scholarship will only support you for three years; after that you’re on your own. I guess that makes you “sustainable,” but in my personal dictionary that’s defined as “sorry, we don’t feel like helping you anymore.”
In my view, you take on a moral obligation when you provide something as meaningful as a scholarship; you should at least have the decency to carry it to some sort of conclusion – graduation from high school or college, for example. This is the real, deep meaning of patience – the willingness to commit to a long-term engagement in order to have a profound impact. It doesn’t just mean being able to sit around quietly waiting for something good to happen.
Patience is the wisdom to make long-term investments in finding solutions. Like teaching your kids the same lesson over and over and over again. I may be a slow learner, but having three children has taught me that much.
HueLieuHuynh said,
May 25, 2012 @ 9:24 pm
John, I must admit that I am not the most patient person in the world. Given an assignment, I would try to find the shortest distance between Points A and B, with few detours mapped in. Of course, life does not run in a linear line, does it? Those who expect to reach set milestones by a certain age with no “detours” in mind will be disappointed when they are derailed. How many of us have never been derailed in life? It should be expected that we will be derailed in life; what matters is how we manage to get back on our feet again, and, sometimes, change course.
With our fast-paced, ever changing world, with news updates uploaded online every few seconds and stock prices fluctuating every few seconds, no wonder we develop short attention spans. Kids entertain themselves by playing video games and watching TV. Many of us surf the Internet for entertainment. How many people these days sit down and read a book for pleasure every night?
As you and I know from our work in communications and, in my case, a few corporate and even non-corporate environments, we have deadlines to meet. I have worked for 3 newspapers and 1 medical journal and 1 university press. They all have deadlines. Newspapers have daily deadlines, and journals and presses have monthly and other deadlines. Time is money. You lose time, you lose money, and, sometimes, you lose your job. We have turned into time-crunching creatures, slaving away for impersonal corporate and other institutional entities.
I have spent a number of years in grant-writing work. There are deadlines in grant proposal submissions, but the process can take up to a year to fund. My husband works for medical doctors at a state university. He helps with grant proposal submission to the National Institutes of Health in Washington, DC. Federal grants take many months to get funded. Grant-writing work is not for the faint-hearted, given that only about 20% of all grants get funded despite all the hard work in the proposal stage. Some foundations give seed money and want a road map of how your organization will sustain itself after the grant money has run out. This takes long-term planning.
Despite daily organizational deadlines, we need leaders who can sit back and take a long-term view. For-profit corporations don’t seem to have the luxury of waiting 5 to 10 years to turn a profit, with shareholders banging on their doors from Day One of the IPO. For major non-profit organizations, I would say the shortest job commitment for an Executive Director should be at least 5 years, preferably 10 years. You are right, there is not much one can do in 1 or 2 years.
One year is not very long in geologic time, but a lot can happen in our artificial world in one year. Stock prices fluctuate countless times, though, if you take a long-term projection, you can look back 5 to 30 years and see trends and patterns. Since we are talking about patience, we must factor in time. We must allow some time to pass to generate perspective. Time has become a luxury in our modern world. We don’t live in perpetuity. Some of us “live on” in perpetuity through our work and legacy (creative legacy, philanthropic legacy, etc.). Given enough time, we can achieve quality through our work. However, with our set deadlines, sometimes quality is compromised and sacrificed for quantity.
Yesterday I took my 5-year-old daughter to the local Vietnam Veterans Memorial. It made me realize that although we do not live in perpetuity, when we die, we are dead in perpetuity. Today I watched a short video about the last days of Andy Gibb, with his brother Barry saying that he wished he’d spent more time with his little brother. I think that time is the most precious gift we can give someone. Time is intangible, so we can’t quantify it the way we can quantify money, but time can be felt. The time and attention you give someone can make a great difference in that person’s life. Some corporate executives get paid disgustingly big lumps of money for their time, while many peons in lower corporate ladders sweat for peanuts. I give away a lot of quality time for free, but that doesn’t mean my time is free. I am highly selective about whom I give the time of day. My time is not unlimited.
Two summers ago, I spent some time in the Medical Intensive Care Unit for septic shock that nearly claimed my life the first 24 hours I spent in the Emergency Room. When I “woke up” from my unconsciousness, I found myself lying in a hospital bed, completely dependent on others for my life. The doctors and nurses and other medical professionals put in heroic efforts to save my life. I had been fiercely independent and was not used to depending on others for my basic biological needs. I was used to accomplishing everything as efficiently and timely as possible. I had to learn to be patient with some of the medical technicians who I thought weren’t as expedient as I would have liked them to be. They sent some med tech students to poke my veins for the IVs, and some of the kids would take up to 30 minutes to find a vein and to do it right. One time two kids couldn’t find my vein and they had to send in someone with an ultrasound to find a vein. It was trying, but I finally learned the value of patience and made allowances for “imperfections”. Someone told me that I certainly wasn’t the best candidate to save my own life, so I had to be patient with “slower” people whose job it was to help save my life. Few things in life were more humbling than lying in a hospital bed and realizing that my life was not entirely in my own hands.
Finally, as a parent, I need to be patient with my child. My husband said he learned lessons of parental patience by watching other parents practice patience with their kids, in their speech and behavior. I am still learning, but I have made some headway.