What We're Thinking
It’s all about the learning.
For some time now, I’ve been noticing a change in the way teams operate. When I was first learning my craft, the typical metaphor for a high performing team was often a sports team, or a symphony orchestra, if I was in a place where drawing parallels to sports was unwelcome or misunderstood. These metaphors are less and less applicable in many of today’s dynamic organizational environments.
Balance is learning to live without guilt.
Maybe it is the hopeless optimist in me, but I find the following idea incredibly compelling: “...it’s time to stop limiting our thinking and start believing that equality is possible if we ‘lean out’ and create the companies we want to work for, instead of waiting for the companies we work for to become what we want.”
What a flock of starlings can teach us.
Separation. Alignment. Cohesion. These are the names of the three simple rules that scientists and computer modelers have deduced to describe what enables birds to flock. It’s amazing that a set of guideposts, at once so clear and so broad, could drive the behavior of tens of thousands of autonomous individuals so that they act as a coherent whole.
This is what complex adaptive systems are all about.
We are just beginning to understand that our organizations are also complex adaptive systems. Unfortunately, this means a great deal of change as most organizations have been operating under a much older, and now less effective, set of assumptions deriving from early 20th century innovations.
Think Ford’s assembly line and Taylor’s scientific management. Stupendous ideas in their time. Much less relevant in today’s knowledge economy.
Eric McNulty’s blog in strategy+business makes an argument for the using three different simple rules in our organizations today: Purpose. Values. Performance. I like his thinking. These guideposts are broad enough to apply to a multitude of situations, and can be made clear enough to be uniquely useful in each one.
If you find the usual command and control techniques are not moving your people in the needed direction, try defining a purpose for your organization, clarifying a short list of values, and tracking a few essential success indicators.
Let me know how you get on.
We focus on the wrong things.
One of the best leadership development experiences I ever participated in didn’t even bill itself as having to do with leadership at all. It was one of those men’s weekends. You know, where a bunch of guys who don’t know each other sign up for two and a half days together, usually in a remote setting, to learn more about “what it means to be a man” in today’s world.
I don’t mean that as cynically as it sounds. It was a profound experience for me and for many who participated.
It had such an impact because we created an environment where there was no place for hubris and ego, and where genuine emotions were authentically on display. We did a great deal of work on ourselves, increasing self-awareness and building self-knowledge. In this micro-culture of our own making, we each found trust, respect, compassion, and empathy. This made it possible to be our best selves, as leaders when needed and as followers the rest of the time.
These characteristics are exactly what should be part of any leadership development effort.
I say “should be” because most often they aren’t. Instead, we get hours and hours on competencies, skill, development, and techniques. Or worse, “best practices”. It gets drilled into us from every angle that a good leader is a confident leader, and we in turn conflate this confidence with competence.
If this was true, why are we always surprised when the charming, charismatic, confident leader flames out in such a spectacular way when the heat is on?
Ray Williams in his blog in Psychology Today has a bit to say in response to this question. A big part of the challenge comes from the superficial way we “do leadership development.” Many organizations tend to view leadership development as a product, and this leads to a search for quick fixes, the latest book, and the biggest guru.
Closely connected to this perspective is the need to measure everything. Don’t get me wrong, measurement is useful for many things. Leadership development isn’t one of them, at least not in the short term. If you want to look out over years and track how leaders are growing in your organization and give some credit for that to your development efforts, that can work. Pressures to deliver often create an urgency to find quicker payoffs, and that can be a problem.
A perennial leadership debate is the built vs. inborn question: Are leaders born or can leadership be taught? I find it can be taught, but not in the ways we traditionally think. Self-awareness, empathy, and humility are the cornerstones of strong and powerful leadership. We reduce the likelihood of sustainable change if we don’t start here.
Last point (for now): Leadership development is not a commodity. It is not something only brought in from the outside. It needs to be nurtured and embedded in the culture of the organization.
What have been your experiences with leadership development?
Many of our modern management practices have a direct lineage through slavery.
Here’s something I didn’t know before: http://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2013/01/16/the-messy-link-between-slave-owners-and-modern-management/
While this is startling research, I’m not sure how surprising it is. For those engaged in the despicable and horrific practice, slavery was a business. Owners were looking for ways to maximize their “assets” in much the same way contemporary managers are interested in getting the most out of their human “resources”.
Of course, context is everything. Nevertheless, there is something eerie about how soul destroying many people report their workplaces can be and this historical connection to management practices.
As a result of her provocative research, Caitlin Rosenthal raises a couple of very important questions: If today we are using management techniques that were pioneered and tested on slave plantations, how much more careful do we need to be? How do we need to think differently about our responsibility to the people working in organizations?
