Leadership is not rocket science

Servant Leadership

I just came across this diagram that depicts the evolution of a servant leader (the copyright at the bottom of the page says to share this freely, so feel free to pass this on).

This framework is totally congruent with co-creative leadership and the art of hosting. 

There's nothing new in the world.  We just have to put it into practice.

Executives' greatest fear

Why is is that so many leaders have difficulty admitting that they don't know the answers - even when everyone around them knows that they (the leaders) don't know?  I suspect it's related to a study I heard about that showed that North American executives' greatest fear is of being exposed as an imposter.

That fear makes sense when you realize that  (politics aside), it's whoever made the greatest accomplishments who gets promoted.  The best sales person becomes sales manager, for example.  The problem is that being a sales manager requires a whole different skill set than that which made him or her a great sales person.  And yet, now that (s)he's a sales manager, people expect that someone's sprinkled him or her with pixie dust and now (s)he knows how to manage and lead.

When I say it that way, of course that assumption is absurd, and yet our organizations work that way, don't they?  Is it any wonder, then, that executives' greatest fear is of being exposed as an imposter?  I mean, God forbid if they were to admit that they didn't know exactly what to do.  That would be their downfall for sure - a clear sign of weakness.

Now add to this a crisis or an economic upheaval that changes all the rules of the game.  How likely is that to make leaders admit that they don't know how to move forward?  No - this is just likely to embed someone in fear and build up their defenses.

It takes great courage to overcome all of this history and conditioning, to admit that the system doesn't work, that you don't have all the answers, and that you need the help of the others in the organization to find a way through.  And now is the time where we're calling for that kind of courage.

New leadership not strong leadership

This article calls for 'strong leadership' in turbulent times.  It says you need to communicate what the turbulence is, and I agree with that.  There's no point giving the corporate bafflegab that says everything's fine and people are your most important asset while you're laying off half your workforce.  Nobody believes that anyway.

If 'strong leadership' means having the strength to admit that you don't have the answers, and then actively engaging your people in co-creating the way forward, then I'm all on board. However, I totally disagree with 'strong leadership' if it means the traditional form of leadership where the leader stands up and acts as if they have all the answers.

In times of complexity, no one person, or even an executive team, can produce a better solution than the whole organization working together. 

Why 'old' leadership is deadly in uncertain times

With all the chaos in global markets the past few weeks, many companies are preparing to cut back as they step into fear and uncertainty - and those are precisely the actions that will increase the turmoil that they have to deal with.  In particular, cutting your people and/or minimizing or 'spinning' your communication to them guarantee that you're sabotaging your own productivity. 

These are the actions that fit the 'old' leadership model.  Today, you have the choice as a leader to stay in the pattern of fear that governed our recent past, or to explore new options for leadership that are proving far more effective in uncertain times.

The 'old' model of leadership called for the leader to

1. have the vision
2. control everything
3. have all the answers
4. be decisive and make the 'tough' decisions to provide quick results

Well, laying off people shows a quick return on the bottom line - salaries are a huge chunk of the income statement.  However, it also produces a long-lasting and life-sucking effect on your long-term productivity and effectiveness.  There's actual hard data that shows that companies that cut during a recession actually take longer to recover when the recession ends compared to those who didn't.

The fact is that things are so uncertain and complex today that no one person can be expected to have the answers.  If you put out one of those business-school corporately sculpted releases that try to put a positive spin on things and say that you know what you're doing, everyone knows that you don't.  And at some level every leader knows that nobody believes them because earlier in their careers they used to roll their eyes when their boss told them the same thing. 

What most leaders don't know is that they have a choice.

It can be scary because it's not what they know.  They keep doing what they do not because it works, but because it's all they know.

It takes courage to step into a new way of doing things, particularly when things are uncertain, and not every leader is ready to do that.

In my previous post, I explained how leadership has evolved from the autocrat to he bureaucrat to the transformational or visionary leadership we've talked about for decades.  In complex and uncertain times, no one person can have a clear vision of how to move forward.  The leader has to step out of his or her ego and admit that they have only one piece of the puzzle and tap the collective wisdom of the other key stakeholders to co-create a way forward.

This means the leader stepping up and admitting that they don't know what to do or how to find the way out.  This can be extremely challenging for most people embedded in the 'old' leadership model.  But only then can you honestly engage your organization in co-creating the way forward - and the social technologies exist today where you can actively engage your entire organization (whether a few people or hundreds or more) and tap the incredible wisdom in all your people to find the way forward.

In contrast to traditional leadership, the co-creative leader:

1. co-creates the vision with the other key stakeholders
2. lets go of control of people
3. explore and co-discover the answers with the other players
4. share decision-making with others so they are already 'bought in' to decisions

Co-creative leadership is about being authentic, and about creating a 'leader-ful' organization, not about doing it all yourself.  You share the burden, the work, and the rewards with others.  You're not alone.

That said, this can be a pretty challenging transition for most people who've had little exposure to it.  This journey involves huge personal transformation, and it's important to have support in the form of a coach or a host or a facilitator to help you through this.  Whoever you work with, make sure that they have the experience of helping others through this transition - speak to their past clients in-depth to ensure they produce results.

Evolving leadership

I've discovered that there is an evolutionary hierarchy of leadership - distinct levels that individuals and organizations go through as they grow - and that a new level has been added to this hierarchy over the last couple of decades.

Early leadership started with tribes that gave the power to a tribal leader.  What happened in some situations is that the leader became more and more controlling, essentially becoming a bully, or an autocrat, and the command-and-control model of leadership was born.

In order to control the autocrats, limit their power, and protect the people, bureaucracies were formed that built policies and procedures that limited what any individual could do.  With the industrial age, bureaucracies were designed to eliminate risk and to standardize work.  At that time, the average person had about a grade four education and the total sum of human knowledge was doubling about every 50 years - there was hardly any change.

With the dawn of the information age, the average person has a year or two of post-secondary education and the rate of new knowledge doubling every 3-4 years.  That means that in 3-4 year, half of everything you know about doing your job will be obsolete - we just don't know which half.  Things are changing so fast that you can't write policies fast enough to keep up with them and policies and procedures are tying more hands than getting things done.

As organizations became tied up in bureaucracy, the last 2-3 decades saw the emergence of the visionary or transformational leader who had a clear vision of what needed to be done, and engaged and involved people across the organization in realizing that vision.  This is what many of the more popular books on leadership have focused on.  As a friend of mine puts it, this is the leader who "has seen the promised land" and will lead his or her follower there.

Today, however, there is another challenge.  The problems that we have created have mushroomed, and many of our challenges are complex, ambiguous, multi-stakeholder issues.  It's simply not possible for one person to have a clear vision of what needs to be done because one person usually doesn't understand all the different perspectives.  One person cannot have a clear vision of the way through - one person alone cannot find the "promised land".

To find a solution, today's leaders have to admit that they only have a piece of the puzzle and engage all the key players in strategic, meaningful conversations that tap into the collective wisdom/intelligence to co-create new ways forward that no one party could have created on their own.  This co-creative leadership is the only way through the many large, intractable problems we face today, whether it's health care, union-management challenges, or larger scale issues such as pollution, world hunger and peace.  The leader's role is to create a leader-ful organization.

Co-creative leadership takes a systems-based approach to problems and moves past the surface symptoms that everyone focuses their attention on to uncover the root causes that drive the system - the root causes that move past organizational boundaries and that no one element in the system truly owns.

As Einstein said, "the significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them".  Co-creative leadership introduces the skill-set we need to move to a level where we can solve the unsolvable problems of today. 

Remembering the basics of motivation

Our family carved pumpkins today (actually, they carved and I videotaped and google-searched how to keep pumpkins fresh longer), and I re-learned the keys to motivating others.

My oldest stepson (who is in grade 12) really didn't want to carve a pumpkin, no matter how hard I coerced him.  Then, he asked if he could destroy the pumpkin (exploding pumpkin pulp everywhere).  When I said yes, on the condition that it happened on November 1st, he dived right in and started carving.

This brings back the basics of motivation.  It's not about what you want - it's about what the other person wants.  If you keep trying to get them to do what you want, you lose.  If you can create a way for them to get what they want while you're getting what you want, you both win.  It's not rocket science, is it?

A call for leadership

Far too often you hear about workplaces where managers micromanage and put all sorts of controls on their people because, basically, they don’t trust them.  Ironically, the companies that follow these measures are always struggling, as these actions cost the company far more than the cost savings they were intended to produce. Those companies that know how to truly lead and support their people produce increases in profitability of tens or even hundreds of percent.

The restrictions that the struggling companies place on their employees can range from having to sign in to parts of the office to having to sign out pencils or having to report to an infirmary to prove that you’re sick, even if you’re flat on your back. Essentially, by treating the employee as someone who is not trustworthy, these restrictions become a self-realizing prophecy by creating untrustworthy behaviour among the employees, even employees who wouldn’t normally behave in such ways.

I recently heard some stories on the radio that highlighted why these Draconian measures don’t – and can’t work.  Callers spoke of experiences, in this case, in the restaurant industry.  One caller told of one bar she worked at where the owner became concerned about the ‘free’ pop and coffee the employees were consuming, so he deducted $8 from each paycheck to pay for ‘unlimited’ drinks (which he, of course, thought was being quite magnanimous).  The staff was so offended that they went out of their way to waste pop and coffee whenever the owner wasn’t around.

Those drinks are dispensed through a hand-held unit with buttons for each drink.  After hours, staff would routinely stand around talking by the sink holding these buttons down, pouring pop down the drain for half and hour or more.  Before someone had finished half a drink another staff member would throw it away and refill it, saying that the pop was flat, or the coffee cold.

In another restaurant, wait staff kept their tips in a jar.  When someone broke in one night, and broke a window, the owner took the tips to pay for the window.  A few days later, two of the staff were down in the storeroom and felt quite justified in sneaking a few bottles of wine into their bags, and then quitting a couple of days later.

I’m not writing to excuse the behaviour of the employees ‘getting back’ at their bosses.  However, it is easy to understand – and predict.  Employees who are treated without respect and as if they are untrustworthy feel resentment, and even honest people can justify little things to get back at the employer, like taking office supplies home, or wasting the resources of the company.

The costs to the organization are not just the lost product, but also the lack of productivity of the employees, and other associated costs, such as turnover.  Unfortunately, these are ‘hidden’ costs and not easily identified.  The more that these managers try to use policy manuals to tighten their grip on their people to get their costs down, the more slips through their fingers in ever increasing amounts.  You simply can’t write policy fast enough to control everything.  The more you write, the more holes you create.  And the biggest cost is the loss of commitment from the employees.

Generally, these managers say that this is reality and this is how you have to deal with it.  There’s no other option.  Well, let’s look at another type of ‘reality’ – that of those companies that actually trust their people.  They control the right things, not everything, and they show the lasting results.

Evolving Leadership

   

      

I’ve discovered that there is an evolutionary hierarchy of leadership - distinct levels that individuals and organizations go through as they grow - and that a new level has been added to this hierarchy over the last couple of decades.

Early leadership started with tribes that gave the power to a tribal leader.  What happened in some situations is that the leader became more and more controlling, essentially becoming a bully, or an autocrat, and the command-and-control model of leadership was born.

In order to control the autocrats, limit their power, and protect the people, bureaucracies were formed that built policies and procedures that limited what any individual could do.  With the industrial age, bureaucracies were designed to eliminate risk and to standardize work.  At that time, the average person had about a grade four education and the total sum of human knowledge was doubling about every 50 years - there was hardly any change.

With the dawn of the information age, the average person has a year or two of post-secondary education and the rate of new knowledge doubling every 3-4 years.  That means that in 3-4 year, half of everything you know about doing your job will be obsolete - we just don’t know which half.  Things are changing so fast that you can’t write policies fast enough to keep up with them and policies and procedures are tying more hands than getting things done.

As organizations became tied up in bureaucracy, the last 2-3 decades saw the emergence of the visionary or transformational leader who had a clear vision of what needed to be done, and engaged and involved people across the organization in realizing that vision.  This is what many of the more popular books on leadership have focused on.  As a friend of mine puts it, this is the leader who “has seen the promised land” and will lead his or her follower there.

Today, however, there is another challenge.  The problems that we have created have mushroomed, and many of our challenges are complex, ambiguous, multi-stakeholder issues.  It’s simply not possible for one person to have a clear vision of what needs to be done because one person usually doesn’t understand all the different perspectives.  One person cannot have a clear vision of the way through - one person alone cannot find the “promised land”.

To find a solution, today’s leaders have to admit that they only have a piece of the puzzle and engage all the key players in strategic, meaningful conversations that tap into the collective wisdom/intelligence to co-create new ways forward that no one party could have created on their own.  This co-creative leadership is the only way through the many large, intractable problems we face today, whether it’s health care, union-management challenges, or larger scale issues such as pollution, world hunger and peace.  The leader’s role is to create a leader-ful organization.

Co-creative leadership takes a systems-based approach to problems and moves past the surface symptoms that everyone focuses their attention on to uncover the root causes that drive the system - the root causes that move past organizational boundaries and that no one element in the system truly owns.

As Einstein said, “the significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them”.  Co-creative leadership introduces the skill-set we need to move to a level where we can solve the unsolvable problems of today.

         

The bottom line on survival today

Bottom line: To succeed and move forward in life today, we need to innovate.  If we hadn’t as a species, we’d still be running around with stone knives and bearskins.  It’s part of our nature.  It’s who we are.  We’re seeing the results of not innovating all around us – organizations, large and small, that have been around for years and years are disappearing off the map.  The asteroid has landed, and the dinosaurs are passing on.

You never create breakthroughs by being practical

Modern society seems to have no patience for impracticality, silliness, or flights of fancy. Everything has to be practical and workable and able to deliver results – now. Unfortunately, if you use ideas that make sense and that are practical right away, all you’re doing is more and more of the same old, same old familiar zone. Nothing will produce significantly greater results.

To truly innovate, you need to step away from the practical and get into the impractical and impossible and even the silly. I’ve never been a part of any real innovation that was born out of practicality. And the fact is, if you don’t somebody else will. Change isn’t a choice any more – your only choice is whether you create the changes that wreak havoc with your competitors, or they will do it to you. That’s your only choice.

Look at all of the latest breakthroughs in technology and service. Not long ago, most of those would have seemed impossible or ridiculous, and now they’re everyday (remember Bill Gates' infamous comment that nobody would need more than 64k?).

Simply put, we get practical too fast. In my experience, investing a short amount of time (and it never takes long) to get totally impractical and silly always generates returns far beyond what you would have gained by staying practical.