Failing the Crucible
In leadership development we sometimes talk about a “crucible event” that - at least in part - made someone the leader they are. A crucible event might be getting fired from your job then learning from that experience and landing next in an even better job. Or it might be more personal like recovering from cancer, and changing your focus on work/life balance for you and your teams.
Most leaders can come up with some experience, usually negative, that turned out great for them.
So I find myself thinking about what a crucible actually is.
Crucibles are vessels, sometimes ceramic and sometimes metal, used for applying high heat to substances - often metals or ores - to transform them into something else. So a piece of iron ore might be heated in a crucible to release gasses and slag from the raw ore, leaving just the iron.
You can see how a process that removes unnecessary components and leaves a pure metal would be a metaphor for leadership development.
As a leader, I certainly wanted to be the pure iron left behind after a high heat or high pressure experience. Pure iron conjures images of swords (attacking goals) and shields (fending off competitors) and who doesn’t want that?
But it also got me thinking about the crucible itself. A very specific level of heat is required to get iron from ore. If the heat is too much or too little…fail. Discard the ruined ore, and start over with a new batch.
Not every leader who gets fired finds themself in a better version of their job, and not every cancer survivor discovers a new appreciation for work/life balance. But when iron ore fails the crucible process, it’s discarded because there’s always more ore to be placed in the crucible.
I have been discarded ore.
Some of the crucibles I entered were too much heat and I exited, not useful for that originally intended purpose.
Read that last part again: “originally intended purpose.” Sometimes the best use of a crucible is not burning away unnecessary components, but rather helping us realize that some intended use is just not for us.
I encourage you to think about your crucible events, those experiences of heat (hopefully metaphoric) and pressure that made you the leader you are today.
And think also of when the heat was too much. Some of the discarded parts of ore are arsenic - used in medicine - and charcoal - used as a purifier. So maybe, rather than becoming the sword or the shield, you were discarded from that purpose to become a better version of yourself.
