Ten truths of leadership

Of course there’d have to be ten, not nine or 13 or a Tom-Peters list of around 37. Ten is nice and neat; makes a tidy package; one tattoo for the back of each finger to remind us as we type our emails.

A recent LinkedIn Group update featuring Ten Truths of Leadership  got me going. James Kouzes and Barry Posner have published another book on leadership. I guess they have to make a living. Their ten truths are true all right. No doubt about that. And yes they’re almost as old as the hills; Biblical even.

A leader who consistently achieved all of them would doubtless be absolutely inspiring.

But I doubt “Ten Truths” will change anything much. They will be tweeted and quoted and everything will go on pretty much as normal.

It’d be interesting to see how many leaders do consistently achieve even half of them, in the eyes of their supposed followers that is.

I’ve worked with many leaders who truly believed that they behaved or at least earnestly, consistently tried to behave like that. I used a very simple method to show them very clearly that they were dreaming.

I got them to record a work conversation with a peer or report, transcribe ten minutes from that tape into the right hand column of a page with their corresponding thoughts on the left hand column (an approach devised by Chris Argyris for his seminal work back in the 70s). Then we’d take a look at the variation between what they were thinking and what they actually said at that time. We invariably found significant contradiction, betraying that they were manipulative, controlling, closed minded, distrusting, and their ‘values’ conveniently flexible.

They were predictably aghast and embarrassed. I assured them that they were normal but that that norm isn’t acceptable in a successful contemporary learning organisation.

As we began the process of change, the biggest obstacle was that they knew, from hard experience,  that actually behaving as “Ten Truths” suggest is very risky because the first one to do it risks being done over by “the others”.

I assured them that unless the leader takes that risk, then no one else will. Then tentatively I coached them to risk new communication behaviours then reflect on the process and the results. Slowly they became more confident to break the mould; to become conscious of the gap between their espoused behaviour and their behaviour-in-action and with the help of their peers and reports, close the gap through changed communication behaviour.

It’s a slow process, but it consistently works where lists of truths consistently fail to make a difference.

Impatient? Go get a new leader. Tempt him with an obscenely high salary and benefits. He’ll likely screw you over just the same.

Will 2010 Be As You Like It?

‘All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players” says Bill Shakespeare’s character Jacques in As You Like It, Act II Sc vii,

To what story, what climax, what denouement have you renewed your commitment, passion and determination this year?

The evidence is clear that if you set your goal then commit to it by focusing on completing specific actions towards that goal, then you have a very high probability of achieving it. It gets messier if you can’t do it on your own; if you need others to commit and focus on it too.

How can you get those others to want what you want? How can you get them to “buy into” it; to play your game, run your race, act in your theatre; accept your rules and judgement?

Typically you cast yourself as the master puppeteer: as lord of the dance; you pull the strings. A lot depends on your skill and alacrity at manipulating strings: at management.

No wonder then that managers have such a major influence on businesses: by some reports over 70% of employee behaviour is determined by the actions of managers (I wonder who determines managers’ behaviour).

So if your marionettes are not responding as planned, do you become an even better puppeteer: do you contrive with the latest tools, systems and processes to increase control by adding more ‘invisible’ strings?

Or do you seek to breathe life into your marionettes; into their wooden minds, hearts and limbs; risk letting them influence the dance, the narrative, and the score? Do you risk letting them be the stars?

Will they want to stay with your small show? Will they perform like you? Will they covet your role?

Do they understand the play? Does it speak to them? Do they relate emotionally to their roles and to each other. Are the roles shallow, 2 dimensional or are they ‘character’ roles.

Does the play have a universal quality that appeals on multiple levels to different players and its audience? Or is it a cheap circus that abuses its talent?

What are you playing at?

Poetry at Work.

Last week lone-sailing Seascape, my 12 foot, clinker-style dinghy; hushed breeze rushing, bow splashing and wake boiling, I slipped and sliced, suspended on chrome-smooth sky-tinted surfaces, ruffled, disturbed, even annoyed by mercurially agitated warm humid breezes. Mind in neutral, senses wired for sudden shifts, body and boat commune, response-merged pursuing purpose.

Then suddenly I plunge into turbid work-waters, seeking uncontrived rhyme, rhythm, and reunion. Instead jolted by proudly, profoundly prosaic hard harsh habits, I struggle to rescue the dream from resigned remembrance and to surface, to breathe.

Now thankfully buoyed by miraculously new-found and re-found relationships, carried by the tidal flows that touch and disturb even dammed work-waters, I find poetry resurgent enough for shade and sustenance.

FREEDOM = purposeful responsibility

“People are unique. Combinations are even more unique. The successful companies tend [to] communicate and apply [“the 7 habits”] in unique manners that match their unique dreams and goals and strengths. That's when earth-shattering experiences are created, delivered, experienced.”

Zane Safrit makes this interesting observation in a RESULTS.com on Linkedin discussion about David G. Thomson’s Business Week article The Seven Essentials of High Growth Companies.

I add that not only are combinations of people unique but combinations of opportunities are too. The effects of these unique combinations are always more or less unexpected. Organisations that thrive on the unexpected are those that thrive today.

So perhaps it would be useful to consider how communicating the “7 habits” might enable organisations to encounter, recognise, take and profit from unexpected opportunities.

One quality that seems to pervade the “7 habits” is diversity of people at all levels in and around the organisation. Not just having the diversity but recognising it and utilising it within a unifying sense of cohesive purpose and shared vision. Effective interpersonal communication is the key to that.

At a practical level, I find that a major blockage in that communication process is the common sense that a job is a series of tasks. That’s an industrial concept founded in people as machine parts in a process. My role frequently includes helping people to re-conceive their job as a purposeful role in a collaborative project; a role defined by mutually interdependent responsibilities and indicative accountabilities rather than tasks. Almost invariably this is scary and confusing for them.

It’s rather like having been in prison for years then being released to “freedom” and unable to cope with the responsibility. It’s not that people don’t want responsibility or cannot be responsible. Responsibility is something that most people desire. Being given responsibility is an indication of trust, competency, standing, worth, esteem, regard.

Here’s the thing: people can’t re-conceive their jobs as roles by themselves any more that they can pull themselves up by their own boot laces. They need the help of an “outsider’s” perspective to generate the new imagery.

As the “outsider” I walk people through the process of defining their role in 120 words or less beginning with a fresh descriptive title, then the purpose of the role within the greater scheme; a summary responsibility in a sentence and up to five specific responsibilities; their overall accountability in a sentence and up to five specific indicative responsibilities with goals (KPIs).

Once they’ve described their own role with me I encourage them to attempt the process with their reports and so on. It’s got a high probability of being effective, purposeful interpersonal communication between unique individuals.

The Emperor Has No Clothes!

This last week, while I experimented at applying my reading of Weick and Sutcliffe’s Managing the Unexpected to my own current organisational experiences, Steve Denning surprised and impressed me with his piece: Radical transparency vs The age of bullsh*t . He damns Management, as epitomised by the career behaviours of recently late Robert McNamara, with causing the current recession.

Coming on top of the similarly critical series of articles in the June HBR (mentioned in my blog last week) it was like a triple whammy.

What sprang to mind for me was Weick and Sutcliffe’s quote from Charles O’Reilly’s 1989 California Management Review article “Corporations, Culture , and Commitment” :

In the chaos of the battlefield there is a tendency of all ranks to combine and recast the story of their achievements into a shape which will satisfy the susceptibilities of national and regimental vain-glory . . . . . On the actual day of battle naked truths may be picked up for the asking. But by the following morning they have already begun to get into their uniforms.

Denning’s piece seems to me like a naked truth, spoken in the wake of battle.

Half expecting some to be clothing that truth already, I hasten to point out that this isn’t a cloth-cap Marxist rant against Management. I’m not arguing against management (small m) and I don’t think any of the writers mentioned here are. The argument is against a set of pervasive assumptions about how organisations should be managed: against the “ism” managerialism.

For instance, though I may rant and rail against stupidly simplistic (mindless) obsession with goals and KPIs, I am a passionate advocate for mindful, statistically sound use of valid, reliable objective and subjective data in controlling operations. I’m firmly with Edwards-Deming on that.

The argument is that we must seize this opportunity to learn from what Weick and Sutcliffe would call the “brutal audit “ of the last year. We must seize this opportunity to learn to be sensitive to signals of impending failure that contradict our convenient, simplistic assumptions about cause–and-effect and relevance. We must learn to incorporate that mindfulness into our organisational infrastructure.

I reckon that perhaps the best place to pick up and act on those naked truths is in entrepreneur owned and led, small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs). There the boss is more able, more likely to engage directly with high performing teams in a marriage of strategic simplicity and operational complexity through radically transparent interrelationships.

If you want a how-to list on recognising and picking up those naked truths then take the above link to Steve Denning’s article. Don’t expect bullet points. He’s into stories.

Keep it complex stupid!

I just returned from a brief break in a quiet corner (Naqalia Lodge) of Waya Lailai island in the Yasawa islands, Fiji. Expecting to do a little reading I took Weick and Sutcliffe’s Managing the Unexpected 2nd edition (2007) with me.

Serendipitously the June HBR caught my eye in the airport bookstore (along with The New Scientist and Scientific American). HBR’s June focus was Rebuilding Trust. I was interested that interpersonal communication was the key common element.

O’Toole and Bennis argue that “What’s Needed Next [is] A Culture of Candour”, arguing that “we won’t be able to rebuild trust in institutions until leaders learn how to communicate honestly – and create organizations where that’s the norm”.

Then I got into my hammock with Weick and Sutcliffe.

After I adjusted of their denser writing style, I appreciated the depth and complexity compared to the popular HBR style. When I finished I enjoyed the new cohering sense it gave to the HBR articles about building trust, not trusting too much, achieving innovation, being a good boss, and the deep failure of business schools.

Interestingly, between the 2001 1st edition and the 2007 2nd edition the subtitle changed from “Assuring High Performance in an Age of Complexity” to “Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty” reflecting the continuing Richter 5+ seismic shifts in organisational environment. What’s impressive is that their thesis seems more powerful in the light of recent events.

Of course Weick and Sutcliffe write about communication too but unlike the HBR articles they have room to go beyond description and exhortation to update and further demonstrate their 2001 thesis about mindful action.

They provide excellent argument against fashionable simplification, focus and strategising being the ways to achieve success in this day and age. This is particularly true for businesses operating complex technical systems in dynamic, ambiguous contexts. They argue for mindful infrastructure. They contrast this with mindless infrastructure, which typically attends to success, simplicities, strategy, planning and status. They argue very convincingly that attention to success confirms the status quo; simplification rules out crucial information and diverse perspectives; attention to strategy and planning ignores operational reality and attention to status erodes and ignores expertise.

They argue that the keys to success today are attention to failure, context, operations, resilience, and expertise. They recommend managers lead change by opportunistically demonstrating changed communication behaviour: candidly reporting and discussing failure; including and rewarding diverse perspectives; being intimate with actual operational experience rather than ideas and generalisations; pushing analysis and decision-making downwards; deferring to expertise (which exists between people) not authority, so that others can begin to see what mindful work looks and feels like. Out of that experience emerges changed values, attitudes, and beliefs – changed culture.

Very convincing. Though I guess that one reason I find it so is because it confirms my own analyses and makes useful sense of my own experience in and with organisations over that last decade or so.

I can see this providing me with a rich resource for thought, analysis, action and blogging . . . . . . .