Hanging the Mirror

The Discipline of Reflective Leadership

“Makes an important contribution to the leadership Literature.”
Kirkus Review

Hanging the Mirror

The Discipline of Reflective Leadership

“Makes an important contribution to the leadership Literature.”
Kirkus Review

 
Knowledge Versus Leadership “Style” March 4, 2024

We previously explored the idea that leadership is a knowledge-based profession. We suggested that, to excel, leaders must develop expertise not only in technical areas, but also in the human knowledge base, that body of learning about how human beings act, react and interact.

When presenting these ideas in our consulting work, the question of leadership “style” often arises. How does adherence to the principles of the human knowledge base accommodate variations in manner and approach, clients want to know. How are basic human differences accounted for?

Because leadership is a personal undertaking, those in positions of authority will always display a wide range of personality.  This is natural and appropriate. But what leaders must understand — what they cannot afford to misconstrue — is that style never justifies violating the human knowledge base.

This is true for all areas of human endeavor. Professional chefs, for example, employ a vast range of culinary styles, from down-home and diner to fusion and vegetarian. But they must all cook meat to the same temperature if they wish to kill harmful bacteria. They must all heat milk gradually if they wish to keep it from scorching.

They must all conform to the same body of knowledge about universal, unalterable principles if they wish to practice their craft effectively, regardless of the particular style or approach they have chosen to employ.

Like cooking, leadership can accommodate a wide range of styles and approaches. But like cooking, its fundamental principles necessarily supersede any notion of philosophy or personal preference.

A leader might be naturally introverted, but the performance of his staff will suffer if he does not give them sufficient feedback. A leader might be naturally exacting, but employee morale will plummet if she indulges in excessive or unconstructive criticism.

Put simply, a leader can no more use style to justify unhelpful or unhealthy leadership practices than an architect can use style to justify designing unsafe and structurally unsound buildings.

This is a dynamic we have all seen in organizations we’ve worked in or supervisors we’ve worked for. The question, though, is the degree that we ourselves fall prey to.

How often do we, inadvertently or unconsciously, excuse questionable leadership choices because “that’s just my style”? And to what degree might those choices be harming the human systems we lead?

 

Leadership and the Human Knowledge Base December 4, 2023

In today’s “information economy” people are often promoted to positions of leadership because of their technical knowledge or performance.

Once there, however, these newly-minted leaders are required to exercise human competence as well as technical ability. No longer is someone simply a machinist; she is a machinist supervising other machinists.

Where previously she had only to master technical duties like milling, grinding, and lathing, she now must establish effective channels of communication, resolve disputes, build culture, and master a host of other people-related skills.

Leadership is every bit as knowledge-based as any skilled trade or technical profession. Yet important as familiarity with organizational structures, systems and processes is, equally, if not more, critical is an understanding of how human beings act, react, and interact – a body of knowledge we have called the human knowledge base.

We all understand the role of knowledge in daily life. If the recipe says four hours at 250 degrees, we know we can’t cook the roast at 500 for two hours and expect tender meat.

We know that we cannot leave houseplants outside in December and expect them to live. We understand that we cannot violate the principles of a knowledge base without consequences, and we choose our actions accordingly.

Unfortunately, our expectations are very different when it comes to the human knowledge base.

Though it makes no more sense than putting a cake in the freezer and expecting it to come out piping hot, we undermine others but still expect to receive their support. We criticize subordinates but expect them to offer ideas and input. We stick to ourselves but expect others to communicate information to us.

In short, we treat others any way we see fit, and wonder why our systems are plagued with dysfunction.

A supervising nurse once stood up in one of our seminars and said that she always followed a clear body of knowledge in her medical duties because that was the only way to effectively treat and care for patients.

But, she said, when acting as a supervisor of other nurses, she realized that she didn’t base her behavior on knowledge at all. Instead, she based it on her mood, how much time she had, what kind of pressure she was under, or whether or not she liked the person with whom she was dealing.

“That’s a wake-up call,” she said with admirable honesty, “And not a good one.”

Unfortunately it’s also a wake-up call most of us need from time to time, pulling us back to the realization that only to the degree that our leadership choices reflect the principles of the human knowledge base will the systems we lead be able to reach their full potential.

 

The Humanity of Employees? 10 Propositions for Reflection November 6, 2023

Thinking impacts behavior. This is true in all aspects of life, but its effects are particularly pronounced in leadership thinking about employees, where expectations and assumptions can create self-fulfilling prophesies — for both the better and the worse.

Douglas McGregor, former professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, was one of the first business authorities to explore the impact of this relationship between thinking and doing in the workplace. He clearly articulated the power of what we here at Management Associates have called below-the-line mental models and beliefs.

His Theory X /Theory Y model provided one of the earliest illustrations of how leadership thinking impacts leadership behavior. Central to the model were a set of propositions about basic human nature as it pertains to the workplace, adapted below:

  1. The average human being can find work a source of satisfaction.
  2. Most employees have the capacity to exercise a relatively high degree of imagination, ingenuity, and creativity in the solution of organizational problems.
  3. Man does not need external controls or the threat of punishment, but will exercise inner self-direction and self-control to attain organizational objectives to which he is personally committed.
  4. The potentialities of the average human being are far above those that are typically recognized in organizations today.
  5. Under proper conditions, the average human being in an organization learns not only to accept but to seek responsibility.
  6. For many organizational tasks, managers can rely on the individual to exercise self-control.
  7. Even the lowliest untalented laborer seeks a sense of meaning and accomplishment in his work.
  8. Most employees are capable of exercising a certain amount of autonomy and independence on the job.
  9. In most organizations one can generally trust one’s subordinates.
  10. Giving greater independence to most employees would be good for the organization.

How many of the above propositions do you agree with? How much do you think your boss would support? How many would those who report to you, if asked by a neutral third party, say you believe in?

These questions are anything but idle, for participants in our workshops have, without exception, indicated that they would work with enthusiasm and commitment for a leader who held these beliefs. Similarly they expressed reservations about any leader who disagreed with more than a handful of them.

Why is this? Because we all know that the decisions, actions, and relationships of such a leader will be based on trust, mutuality, and the value of the human element in the workplace. Similarly, we know that leader whose below-the-line beliefs are contrary to those principles will tend to create work environments that are authoritarian, untrusting, controlling, and micromanaged. And no employee wants to work in those circumstances.

Improving your effectiveness as a leader, then, requires reflection not only on what you do and accomplish, but on what you believe and value. For your views of employees and their role in the workplace will determine your leadership of them, for better or worse.

Above the Line, Below the Line (Part 2 of 2) October 2, 2023

Last week we explored the relationship between the above-the-line world of external actions, behaviors, and choices, and the below-the-line world of internal assumptions, beliefs, and values.

The former, we suggested, invariably flow from the latter. Our actions are necessarily driven by our mental models and emotions. Our choices are shaped by the ideals and paradigms we hold.

The concept is relatively straightforward, even self-evident. It’s implications, however, are almost invariably overlooked in the workplace.

Leadership training provides one conspicuous example. Training of this kind typically focuses only on teaching new skills and techniques, with little attempt to surface, explore, and reframe the below-the-line factors driving current behaviors. The result is leaders who can pass a pen-and-paper test on the material of the training, yet fail to operationalize it in any sustainable way.

Think of your own history. How many trainings have you attended in your career? How many orientations to new systems, procedures and approaches have you (in the words of one of our clients) been “subjected to”? And how many have had enough resonance and relevance that they still affected your choices six, eight, twelve months later?

The reason many such initiatives fail to achieve sustainable change is simple: training approached as an exclusively above-the-line exercise is largely superficial. We, as participants, might be exposed to a new set of skills or body of expectations. But barring any deeper examination of the reasons why we do what we do, the influence of our existing below-the-line foundations pull our actions, like a spring, back to what they have always been.

In short, trying to change behaviors without undertaking an honest exploration of the below-the-line attitudes and assumptions that support them is a losing proposition.

Now leaders can use their organizational authority to compel employees to comply with systems they don’t understand and procedures they don’t support.  They can get an organization to look like change has taken place. But that appearance, based on the application of force, is illusory, and the moment pressure is removed, behavior begins reverting to previous patterns and routines.

So long as employee’s below-the-line orientation remains unchanged, therefore, lasting transformation will remain out of reach. But it’s important to understand that leaders are every bit as subject to these dynamic as employees.

Our daily choices and actions, as leaders, are driven by beliefs, values, attitudes and assumptions just as much as those of our employees. We, too, are creatures of the inner world.

And only to the extent that we are willing to reflect on and investigate the drivers of our own behavior– the unexamined assumptions, the hidden biases, the unarticulated hopes and fears – are we able to grow as leaders and as people.

Above the Line, Below the Line (Part 1 of 2) September 25, 2023

For years our seminars included an exercise that asked participants to think of the best listener they had ever known and describe what made that person so special.

Most responses centered on techniques like maintaining eye contact, asking clarifying questions, and mirroring body language. But invariably someone would raise their hand and say that what really mattered was that the person “sincerely cared about me.”

This response and others like it, we realized, were qualitatively different from the rest. Genuinely caring about someone was not a skill to be practiced. Wanting the best for a friend or coworker was not a technique to be employed.

Answers such as these focused not on things that people did but rather things that they were—things that they stood for and believed in.

In conducting the exercise, we began separating the two sets of responses with a simple horizontal line. Above the line were the surface-level actions, skills, behaviors, policies, techniques, and procedures that came to participants’ minds first and fastest.

Below the line we noted the attitudes, assumptions, beliefs, paradigms, and values that were not so immediately obvious, but which constitute far more core elements of personal identity.

Over time, this simple delineation evolved into a model of human behavior that we and many of our clients have found both powerful and challenging.

“Above-the-line” is where the rubber meets the road, where action is taken and results begin to show. It is where the world is engaged.

“Below-the-line” is a sphere that is less visible but arguably more important, for it is from below the line that actions and behaviors receive their direction and impetus.

Put in organizational terms, above-the-line is what leaders do, below-the-line is why they do it. Both are important, and both must be addressed in authentic growth and development efforts. But even more critical is understanding the interaction between the two and the way each is influenced and shaped by the other.

The next post in this series will examine this relationship and it impacts leaders’ behaviors and the functioning of their organization.

Who You Are, Not What You Do July 19, 2023

Much of what we think of as the business of business takes place externally. Tangible activities like striking deals, formulating plans and launching initiatives fill our days and constitute the prism through which we view and understand our work life.

But business authorities, academics, and thinkers have long suggested that the most fertile field for leadership attention is the inner world of values and understandings. Time and again they have suggested that importance be placed not only on what leaders do, but on how they think and what they believe.

Here, they say, are the fundamental criteria by which we act and react. Surely it is not insignificant that the first special-issue edition in the 79-year history of Harvard Business Review was themed “Breakthrough Leadership: Why Knowing Yourself is the Best Strategy Now.”

What you do, in other words, is a reflection of who you are. Every action you take as a leader is a direct reflection of your values, attitudes, beliefs, and mental models. Every behavior you manifest, every goal you pursue, every choice you make is directly shaped by some element of who you are.

The connection between internal being and external engagement is of extraordinary importance. This is true for our supervisors, but it is equally true for ourselves in regards to our own subordinates.

Whatever leadership capacity we hold, the influence of our internal landscape is enormous. Our conceptions of work, responsibility, loyalty, obedience—the list is endless— shape our minute-by-minute choices in interacting with employees, conceiving policies, and making leadership decisions.

Becoming an effective leader, therefore, involves more than strategies and approaches. It requires seeing ourselves for the human beings we truly are, willingly and committedly making a practice of looking inside to see both that of which we are proud and that which we would change.

 

One Question to a Healthier Workplace Environment June 26, 2023

In our years of consulting work, we have conducted numerous organizational assessments.

In that work, we have found that one question reveals more about  an organization’s culture than almost any other. The answer employees give to it often tell us all we need to know about the workplace they face.

The question has to do with the use of organizational authority, that workplace quality which stands as not only the primary distinction between bosses and employees, but arguably the only distinction between them.

Consider:  supervisors might be smarter than their subordinates. They might be better problem solvers, or have more technical knowledge, or exercise more skill in managing others. But the only thing that is invariably true is that they hold more organizational authority.

Authority is the one and only quality that is shared by every supervisor. It is what allows leaders to create culture within an organization, what allows them to determine whether risk is embraced or avoided, whether questions are valued or discouraged, whether information is shared or hoarded.

Authority is, in many ways, the currency of leadership.

The question, then? To what extent do leaders use their authority for employees as opposed to on them?

Organizations in which employees feel that leaders use their authority for them—protecting them, facilitating their work, supplying them with resources—are almost always focused, cohesive, and optimistic about the future.

And in similar fashion, organizations in which employees feel that leadership uses its authority on them—isolating them, intimidating them, using their work to further personal agendas—are often characterized by resentment, apathy, and conflict.

Organizations are not monolithic, of course, and variations can almost always be found from department to department. But these results have been exceedingly consistent in our experience. Moreover they confirm what we all intuitively know already – that we give our efforts and allegiance far more readily to leaders who protect us than those who exploit us.

Personal and ongoing reflection, then, on this one simple question— how you exercise your authority as a leader and to what ends you turn it— can be a powerful means of transforming your office, department, or organization.

Intentionally Shaping Culture or Just Hoping for the Best? May 15, 2023

Much is made of workplace culture and the effect it can have on organization dynamics, functioning and performance.

But what about when culture is overlooked or ignored? What happens then?

One way we have tried to help the leaders we work with is to imagine culture as a leader’s back yard.

With attention and effort, this land can be developed and cultivated. With care and attention, it can be made to produce beautiful flowers and needed fruits.

But if not, if it is neglected, the problem is not that nothing will grow there. The problem, rather, is that everything will grow there.

Without care and attention, the yard becomes choked over with vegetation from seeds blown in from the outside world. It becomes filled with bits of garbage tossed in by passers-by. It becomes overrun by undergrowth planted years ago and left to grow uncheck ever since.

It becomes, in other words, a hodgepodge of the inconsequential, the counterproductive, and the fortuitously beneficial.

Culture is much the same. When not consciously determined, it grows and evolves in multiple directions, according to countless influences, not the least of which being employees’ former workplace experiences.

And while these patterns of thought and action will likely include the good as well as the bad, few of them will optimal. Moreover, the overall effect will be neither coherent nor integrated.

The challenge facing leaders, then, is not how to build workplace culture, but how to guide the culture that already being built, day by day.

Their duty is to shape the culture around them into something beneficial and vigorous, and not simply leave it to chance and hope that they like what they end up with.

Seeking Passionately Committed Constituents? Know This About Service May 1, 2023

Think about a business you think is fantastic, a place you not only patronize, but evangalize for. Two things are almost invariably true about such an organization.

The first is that its service is outstanding. Things like prices, policies, and selection can distinguish a good organization from a mediocre one. But sticking out as really great is almost impossible without outstanding interactions with staff.  We human beings are social creatures, and being treated well by others matters to us.

The other thing is that the quality of service is stone-cold dependable.  You could call the customer service line a dozen times and each would be as productive as the next. It could be two in the morning, and the night manager would call all over the city to help you find what you need. Fire and brimstone could be raining from the sky and the college student at the cash register would give you a helping hand and a genuine smile.

Such reliability is key to nurturing truly committed constituents. Why? Because for them – for all of us, really – outstanding service is either consistent or it’s nonexistent. A car that runs without problems nine days out of ten is not 90 percent acceptable. It’s 100 percent unreliable.

You might not object to a more “typical” level of service. You might even consider yourself satisfied by it. But you wouldn’t feel any particular affinity for the organization that provided it. For organizations to distinguish themselves and create true constituent loyalty, therefore, service must be delivered first time, every time.

What does this mean for leadership and management? First of all, it requires consistency of experience to be made an organizational priority. Quality of service must be raised to a point of principle and driven down through all levels of the organization.

Constituents’ impressions of an organization of an organization are formed not through interactions with mid-level managers and career supervisors, but rather with the frontest of front-line staff. Leaders, therefore, need to embed a commitment to quality service in the organizational culture in such a way that the  teenagers making $8 an hour at after-school shifts understand it, support it, and make it a reality for constituents.

Failing that, quality will be hit-or-miss and determined almost entirely by the personality and daily mood of individual employees — which is as sure a recipe for mediocrity as can be imagined.

Organizational Development: It’s All About YOU, Dear Leader April 3, 2023

In our consulting work, we regularly tell leaders that organizational improvement begins with them, individually and personally. Don’t look down at your employees, we tell them. Don’t look up at your supervisors. It’s all about you.

Is this an ego boost? A pretext for self-importance? Actually it’s the exact opposite. For pointing the finger at others becomes impossible when we acknowledge that problems, difficulties, challenges and setbacks arise only within the culture that we, the leader, created or allowed.

This mindset removes many of the excuses we make for ourselves.

Leaders who attribute failure to others implicitly assume a victim mentality that robs them of the power to achieve positive change.  By casting themselves in the role of bystander, they announce that it is employees, supervisors, suppliers, partners (etc., etc., etc.) who hold the real power.

It is often said that leaders must take responsibility for the performance of the system they head. This is true, but misses the point:  leaders are already responsible for what happens below them, regardless of whether they acknowledge that responsibility or not.

Leaders not only can shape the performance of their department, division, team or office, they are doing it at every moment of every day.

The question, then, is not whether you as a leader take responsibility for your workplace, but whether you acknowledge the responsibility they already have, and to what degree you are consciously turning that influence to positive ends.

Consider: In what ways might your leadership actions be helping or hindering your employees? What kind of atmosphere are your interactions with them creating? What kinds of messages are being sent by the offhand comments you make? What priorities do your daily routines and habits imply?

The are the kinds of questions asked by leaders who strive to become an active source of improvement in their organization.

How Leaders Create Profit (It’s Not What You Think) March 20, 2023

Leaders are almost universally judged on their ability to generate revenue. A prospering business must generate enough income to support development and growth. Even nonprofits must secure donations, user fees, grants, or similar streams of revenue to retain talent and achieve real-world results.

But how do leaders best secure that revenue?

Years ago a group of Harvard Business School faculty considered this question in a paper entitled Putting the Service-Profit Chain to Work. Widely read and highly influential, this research sought to establish a clear chain of cause-and-effect relationships linking leaders and profits.

The bottom several links of the chain were quite intuitive. What drives profit? Customer loyalty. What drives customer loyalty? Customer satisfaction. What drives customer satisfaction? Quality of service or product.

But beyond this, misconceptions begin to set in. If quality is a necessary prerequisite for profits, leaders often assume they must be the ones to ensure that quality. In effect, they behave as if the service-profit chain ended at quality:  leadership creates quality, which creates satisfaction, which creates loyalty, which creates profit.

With this mindset, leaders set out to “manage” quality directly, through things like oversight, supervision, quotas, and tolerance levels. But while such tools have their place, they can easily lead to micromanagement and the kind of  rigidly risk-averse environments that, paradoxically,  lead to more mistakes, not fewer.

The reason this approach fails is that it overlooks one fundamental truth: quality depends most directly not on leaders, but on employees.

Quality, the Harvard research suggested, is driven by employees’ productivity, loyalty, and (most of all) ownership over their work. These are shaped by employees’ satisfaction with their job and position. And that, in turn, is shaped by the organizational culture created by leaders themselves.

The end result looks something like this: Leadership -> organizational culture -> employee satisfaction -> employee loyalty/productivity/ownership -> quality of service or product -> customer satisfaction -> customer loyalty -> profit.

Leaders want to generate revenue and achieve results. Many also want to provide quality to their customers or constituents simply for its own sake.  But in their eagerness to take immediate action, to “do something,” many leap directly from leadership to quality,  short-circuiting the human-centric links of of the service-profit chain — culture, employee satisfaction, and employee ownership.

This can be fatal, for the results they seek are best achieved not through the eagle eye of managerial oversight, but by creating a culture in which excellence is cultivated and nurtured. It is achieved first and foremost through people.

This is a theme that received significant focus in the Harvard paper. “Anyone who looks at things solely in terms of factors that can easily be quantified,” remarked one CEO quoted in the research, “ is missing the heart of business, which is people.”

It is people who design products, people who produce them, people who sell them, and people who purchase them. And because business does not merely involve humanity, it is humanity, the more clearly leaders understand how feelings, perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs (their own included) impact organizational performance, the more effectively they can build cultures of excellence.

Pockets of Excellence: You Can Make a Difference February 20, 2023

As a values-based management consultancy, much of our work focuses on the human issues of leadership such as dignity and respect, appreciation and gratitude, vision and inspiration.

The idea of being a leader of people, not just processes and programs, strikes a chord in countless managers and supervisors.  Yet time and again they say that no matter what they do, that’s not the way their supervisor behaves.  That’s not how they themselves are treated. That’s not the way things are done around here.

Regardless of their personal preferences, they tell us, they have only limited influence over the culture of their organization. Even if they wanted to change the system, they couldn’t. They wouldn’t be allowed to.

That’s true, we say. Then we start talking about pockets of excellence.

The idea is simple: while leaders have minimal influence outside the scope of their authority, they have nearly unlimited control within it.

Leaders are the ones who set the culture for the employees who report to them. They are the ones who articulate the expectations for their department or office. They are, for all intents and purpose, the CEO of the human system they head. And it is within their power to build create excellence within that sub-system, no matter how dysfunctional or counterproductive the rest of the organization might be.

A friend of ours once worked in an organization headed by a man greatly admiring of the managerial style of the Third Reich. “The way they clicked their heels when they saluted,” he enthused, “now that’s respect.”

Sounds horrible, right? But our colleague stayed in the organization for over a decade. Why? Because he reported not to the CEO, but to a vice president who was unfailingly constructive and humane. That vice president established a sub-culture that shielded his departments from the CEO’s more distasteful foibles.

Leaders sometimes object that the concept we describe isn’t equitable. “Why should I get dumped on from above and still try to build something better for those below me?” they say. “That’s not fair.”

They’re right. It’s not terribly fair.

But do we aspire to be leaders who treat our employees only as well as we are treated by our own supervisor? Do we seek only to perpetuate the shortcomings the system in which we are embedded? Or is our vision to create the best possible system with the resources and challenges that we have been handed?

This is a question that every leader, whether they realize it or not, is answering each and every day.

 

Building Blocks of Reflective Leadership – Patience and Perseverance February 6, 2023

Easy solutions and quick fixes are commonplace in contemporary society. Results are promised within days and progress guaranteed through a few simple steps. Time and again we are assured that not only can we eat more and still lose weight, but that we should.

Swimming in these waters day after day, we all come to expect some degree of immediacy in our endeavors. We want the computer fixed now, not tomorrow. We feel that the paperwork should have been completed yesterday, not today.

But while such promises might hold a degree of allure, most of us know that very few things worth our time happen overnight and without effort. Change might sometimes come suddenly or without warning, but development, solid and sustainable over the long term, is achieved only over months and years of consistent effort.

Determination is a key component of any reflective discipline, but patience and perseverance are its indispensable twin sisters – related in operation and complimentary in outcome.

In this respect, reflective leadership is less about progressing by leaps and bounds, and more about advancing along a steady process of incremental growth. It is about building new patterns of thought and action, little-by-little, day-by-day.

Leaders who are looking for one-and-done answers would find little satisfaction in such an approach. Nor would they likely find success with it.

But even leaders who are committed to the rigors of a reflective path should not underestimate the task before them – the patience they will need to have with themselves and others, and the perseverance they will need to exercise in daily efforts.

Walking a path of development focused less on immediate results than long-term transformation is not easy. Nor, frankly, does it find a great deal support in a world so often driven by quarterly earnings reports and year-over-year performance metrics.

But improvement, if it is to be sustainable and lasting, must spring from ongoing effort, and that is invariably grounded in resolute patience and unshakable perseverance.

Discipline and the Reflective Life January 23, 2023

Consider the word “discipline” for a moment. 

In one sense it refers to a subject or a course of study. Within the context of the discipline of reflective leadership, the material to be mastered includes the principles of the human knowledge base and our ability to reflect on how our choices and behaviors, as perceived by those with whom we interact, conform to or violate those principles.

But the term also carries implications of self-control and personal restraint. It suggests a standard we must strive to achieve, a path we must work to follow.

In this light, discipline becomes a characteristic that reflective leaders exert effort to manifest, a standard they strive to live up to.

Exercising discipline in a reflective practice means that we take self-assessment seriously. We pursue it with dedication and refuse to make allowances on account of external circumstances.

That we’re sick and grouchy, that the pressure of a deadline is immense, that the predicament we’re facing is unfair and unjust – we refuse to allow exceptions or excuses to absolve us of our duty.

Instead, we keep our gaze on ourselves and the choices we are making. We do this not only because it’s the “right” thing to do, but because these choices are where we have the greatest leverage over the systems around us. They are where the most improvement, both personal and organizational, can be achieved.

It is a basic human tendency to focus on the shortcomings and failures of others. Turning the weight of that critical gaze back on ourselves takes discipline and commitment. Keeping it there takes even more.

But what is leadership if not the quest for continual improvement? Where will improvement come from, if not from leaders who are conscientiously hanging the mirror and giving honest consideration to what they see reflected back at them?

Reflection is the surest means of development and growth, not only for leaders and managers but for human beings functioning in any context. Only through reflection can we and those around us realize the potential that lies within. Only through reflection do we become everything we could be.

Forging Unity – The Key Participants January 2, 2023

The responsibility for addressing the imperative challenge of creating unity rests upon two different but overlapping groups.

 

First, it is essential that managers and supervisors, those people invested with formal organizational authority, commit themselves to forging the required unity, both between themselves and between the people that report to them.

 

The unity of management is a prerequisite to whole-system health and optimal performance. The disunity between people in management positions is where, traditionally, some of the greatest evidence of dysfunctional competition and conflict are consistently found. It is clearly destructive to overall performance and must be fearlessly addressed and corrected.

 

Second, it is important to recognize that creating unity is ultimately a human challenge facing everyone within an organization, regardless of title or position. We all bring into our organizations notions and skills shaped by a culture that encourage us to compete rather than to collaborate, contend rather than cooperate, win rather than support. We all bring with us societal stereotypes, prejudices, convictions, and habitual responses that are obstacles to creating a truly unified organization. With that being said, it becomes clear that he greater the number of people within an organization that can be enlisted to adopt unity as a personal goal, the greater the degree of success that can be achieved.”

 

The specific issues each of us face may vary, but none of us can safely say that we are untouched by the challenge of forging human unity in the workplace. Only as each of us raises the protection of human dignity within the organization to a point of principal, only when the creation of organizational unity becomes driven by convictions as well as economics, will we be equipped with the energy, and more importantly, the courage and will required to search for and root out those entrenched patterns of conflict and competition that too often define our organizational lives.

 

It is easy to spot the flaws in others. Only the combined forces of practicality and conviction will effectively animate the sincere effort required to address the most difficult challenge of all – to recognize and eliminate those prejudices and stereotypes that distort our own thinking. Upon us all, managers and non-managers alike, rests the responsibility to search out and correct the ways we ourselves contribute to the lack of unity that may. inadvertently, sap the organization of its energy, divert its attention, and diminish both its potential and it people.

 

Motivated by both pragmatic and economic concerns as well as by ethical and moral considerations, we must now accept, both individually and collectively, the imperative of developing organizational unity.

Unity – The Organizational Imperative November 28, 2022

In the landscape of today’s working world, organizations are the fundamental and defining structures within which we work, produce, and get things done. Very few people now work outside of an organization. The pervasiveness of organizations in our society is now so complete that we take them as a given and no longer question the rationale behind their existence. In fact, so completely are we immersed in, surrounded by, and engaged with them, that their existence goes essentially unnoticed. They have become like water to fish

The problem with accepting organizational existence at such an unexamined, unquestioned axiomatic reality is that we inadvertently overlook the very reason why organizations were formed in the first place. In doing so, we marginalize the most important feature required for organizational success. Organizations were formed by people who, facing external demands, understood that two or more people, working in unity, can accomplish more that they could working separately and alone. Over time, however, unguided by a clear understanding exactly what forging that unity would require, organization dynamics took on a life of their own. As organizations became the ubiquitous structures in which we work and conduct business we lost sight of their original purpose and central requirement: organizations were formed to facilitate and tap the power pro ermined by far more than the skills, talents, and capacities of the individuals within it. An organization’s ultimate success is a result of the degree to which people transcend their individual excellence to create interpersonal synergy and achieve collective excellence. An organization’s success has more to do with how the people work in relationship with each other than with how effectively they function individually in their technical/professional roles.

Unity – that collective cohesiveness, empowering alignment, and fundamental sense of oneness that can permeate an organization’s culture – must be understood to be the beginning point, and the ultimate power behind, any organization’s performance.

Organizations need unity. Many have survived without it. Many have been profitable without it. But none have come close to their full potential without it! To succeed at their highest levels by any measures, organizational unity must be adopted as a pragmatic requirement and a principal based imperative requiring the committed attention of any holding a leadership position. In fact, it could be argued that forging and nurturing organizational unity may well be the single most important outcome of great leadership.

Over the next several blogs, I hope to explore with you the various requirements and essential dynamics underpinning true organizational unity.

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Building Blocks of Reflective Leadership – Determination November 7, 2022

Building reliable habits of personal reflection is not easy. Like mastering any new skill, learning to hang the mirror involves no small amount of setbacks and failure.

We might maintain a sense of objectivity for a time, then lose it at a bad turn of events or sharp verbal jab. We might restrain emotional responses when the going is easy, but lose our composure when we most need it.

Training one’s self to hang the mirror regularly and reliably – not as an afterthought, but as a key aspect to ongoing professional development – is a process that tests our resolve again and again.

Shifting one’s mindset from “getting it” to “getting closer to it” can help in meeting these challenges. Rather than striving to attain arbitrarily imposed standards of accomplishment, priority is placed on taking tangible steps of progress. Slow-and-steady is the mode of action, and assessment is grounded more in process and learning than “success” and “failure”.

What does this look like in practice? If we have never had occasion to assess our interior landscape, taking a first look inside is a notable step in its own right. Similarly, a daily practice that is fragile and easily interrupted is – regardless of any limitations and shortcomings – still a foundation from which to build.

If previously we might have never reflected on a hostile interaction with a coworker, we might now give it some thought at home over the weekend. Where formerly, days might have passed before we assessed the choices we made in a particularly difficult meeting, it might now be only that afternoon that we consider steps that might have led to a better outcome.

Slowly, with determination and effort, our capacity for reflection grows. Over time we become able to assess our choices in real time, as we are making them.

This capacity – adopting more productive behavior on the spot, rather than after the fact – is, in a way, the ultimate goal of any reflective discipline. It is crucial in the transformation of personal choices and behaviors.

But it can be developed only to the extent that we weather the fits, starts, and setbacks of the learning process with resolve and determination.

Building Blocks of Reflective Leadership – Humility September 26, 2022

Few spheres of human activity are more driven by “results” than the world of business. Visible success is the coin of the realm, and confidence, bravado, even self-aggrandizement are pervasive. Humility, then, stands as a somewhat counter-intuitive characteristic of truly outstanding leaders.

Humility is certainly one of the more nuanced facets of leadership. In part, this has to do with the hierarchical structure of modern management. By definition, leaders have been placed above their employees in terms of decision-making and responsibility. What, then, does humility look like for someone who necessarily oversees others?

Humility concerns the way leaders approach their employees—the tone they take, the interactions they carry on, and so forth. But it also has to do with the way they approach themselves. In this respect, humility implies an open and forthright acknowledgement of one’s own limitations, shortcomings, and weaknesses.

Such acknowledgement involves taking responsibility for the challenges that are known to us. This includes both those deficiencies that frustrate and annoy us, and those that we have implicitly adopted as our “pet” vices.

But humility also demands an acknowledgement that all of us have other shortcomings lying just below the surface of our conscious awareness. It calls for acceptance of the fact that we all fail in ways we don’t realize and in areas we might not expect.

Humility is crucial to leadership and organizational development because only by acknowledging the need for improvement can that improvement actually be achieved. If we are convinced the problem lies elsewhere—in the staff, the union, the marketplace, or countless other sources—we will never become anything more than what we are right now.

In terms of the discipline of reflective leadership, humility implies acceptance of the reality that problems often emanate as much from us as they do from anyone else. Our views, choices, and actions lie at root of countless daily challenges. The problem, all too often, is not “out there.” It’s “in here.”

Humility also prompts us to keep searching for increasingly constructive and productive approaches. For humility, at its highest, involves not just correcting deficiencies, but actively searching for ways to improve.

Eliminating negatives builds good organizations. Cultivating positives—realizing there is always room for our own growth—builds outstanding ones.

Building Blocks of Reflective Leadership – Detachment September 5, 2022

All of us are attached to particular views of the world and given ways of approaching it.

We know that a project is pointless and we have no time for those who think otherwise. We know that a favored employee is a gem, regardless of performance reviews suggesting the contrary.

We have our positions and, regardless of circumstances, we are committed to them. We are convinced. We are sure.

Attachment can be a dangerous concept, but is especially treacherous for leaders. When we become attached to a certain idea, situation, or action, we care less about what is true, right, and useful than what will vindicate the position we have become attached to.

Having invested ourselves in a particular point of view, we advocate it not because of its merits but simply because it is ours. It has become an extension of ourselves, and in allowing this to happen, we place ourselves in a position where our personal stature will be diminished if our chosen view is discarded or discredited.

Moreover, this personal investment strongly inclines us to defend the position we have chosen to the bitter end—a situation that becomes a recipe for disaster when parties become attached to opposing sides of the same issue.

Though common in the workplace, this polarized, win/lose kind of construct is both counterproductive and, in the final analysis, artificial. It is created by our own minds and can be dissolved (or at least avoided) in the same way.

Detachment is what allows us to escape from this trap. When we are detached from an issue, we have a stake not in any particular side or philosophy, but rather in finding the best possible outcome.

We are left free to explore facts and evaluate options with an unbiased mind. We are free to adjust our thinking as circumstances change and new facts come to light. We are free to consider our positions with objectivity and independence, rather than being locked into positions rendered inflexible by personal attachments.

For leaders, detachment is freedom.

How Culture Can Make (or Break) a Business August 23, 2022

Think organizational culture is limited to the formality of dress and the length of coffee breaks? Think again.

Culture shapes innumerable aspects of workplace functioning, everything from how information is shared and news is spread to how mistakes are handled and questions are received.

But almost  no facet of organizational performance is more impacted by culture than interpersonal interactions.

The way people work (and don’t) with each other, the way departments collaborate with (or undermine) each other — countless human underpinnings of organizational life receive their form from workplace culture.

What does this mean, in practical terms?  A social service agency we once worked with provides a telling example.

This organization was in the process of absorbing a smaller provider of similar services, and the partnership was the cause of considerable excitement. The new agency was free from many of the problems that plagued the parent organization — things like criticism, negativity, and backbiting — and it was hoped that the influx of new blood might provide the catalyst for some much-needed changes.

For a time, that expectation seemed well founded.  The merger sparked changes in numerous areas and conditions seemed to be on a generally upward trend.

But as the new staff spent more and more time with the old, their fresh attitudes and productive approaches began to fade. Slowly, but surely, they adapted to and adopted the norms and patterns of behavior they saw around them. In time, the two groups were virtually indistinguishable from one another.

“They were so positive and constructive in the beginning,” one executive lamented not six month after the launce of the merger. “Now they’re just like us.”

This agency’s experience illustrates what a powerful role culture plays in shaping workplace dynamics. Leaders tend to assume that employee attitudes stem from personal temperament.  Dividing the world into “good attitude” and “bad attitude” employees, they assume a successful workplace is built by identifying the former and avoiding the latter in the hiring process.

But the employees of the small agency mentioned above didn’t transform their attitudes out of the blue and for no discernable reason. They operated one way under one set of cultural norms, and another (less productive) way under another.

Put simply, one culture created positive and productive employees, and one culture created negative and fault-finding ones.

Leaders often fall into the trap of lamenting the poor quality of  “employees these days.” Rarely, though, do they consider the possibility that the real problem might be the organizational culture they themselves are creating. Rarely do they consider the possibility that the problem might not be in the hiring process but rather an workplace culture that systematically turns the “right” employees into the “wrong” ones.

Leadership, Mindfulness, and Meditation August 1, 2022

How many times have you been in the car, wrapped in thoughts of the day, and found yourself driving somewhere other than where you intended?

Defaulting to familiar routines in the absence of conscious thought has uses in life, not the least enabling us to navigate a highly multitasking world. But “auto piloting” in the human sphere ensures that our interactions with others end in the same kinds of places over and over again.

If we wish to find new and more productive end points for our relationships, then, we must abandon well-worn paths of ingrained habit and begin making more intentional choices about what we are doing and where we are going.

Reflecting on beliefs, behaviors, and choices in this way requires mindfulness of ourselves as we go about our day – an awareness not only of what we are doing, but why and how we are doing it. It requires us to be in the moment, to give attention to what is going on around and inside us right now.

This, in turn, requires detachment from self and a certain degree of distance from personal thoughts, feelings, and desires. When we succeed in adopting a mindful and reflective attitude, we take part in the interaction of the moment—strategizing with a partner, clashing with a coworker—but we also stand apart and at a distance. We monitor proceedings through the eyes of a neutral observer, rather than an invested participant.

If this sounds similar to meditation, that’s because it is. Mindfulness and reflection are two expressions of the same fundamentally meditative process. Both center on the removal of personal attachment to ideas, outcomes, and views as a means to achieve specific goals.

But where traditional forms of meditation seek connection with a higher being or state of existence, the workplace discipline of reflective leadership seeks connection with those higher human realities inherent in ourselves and others.

Leaders walking this path undertake a moment-by-moment appraisal of below-the-line values and beliefs and consider the way those mindsets affect the thinking, attitudes, morale, commitment, and vision of their employees.

They work to understanding how the human spirit operates in their organization, how it translates into concrete performance, and how they are personally involved in furthering or hindering that spirit.

Pursuing a reflective practice benefits leaders, but it is no mere tool of self-help or strategy for personal improvement. Rather, it is a practical means of optimizing the functioning of a human system.

Leaders who understand their effect on the systems and interactions around them can best identify and achieve the changes needed to advance those systems. Ultimately, reflective leadership is a path to continuous organizational improvement.

The Nuts and Bolts of Collective Reflection August 1, 2022


Reflective leaders are distinguished by patterns of regular self-assessment and analysis. Reflective organizations employ similar mechanisms of collective reflection and shared stock-taking.

But how are such structures established in the workplace?

At the heart of any robust system of organization-wide assessment is the collection of data related to workplace culture and perceptions. Drawing from both quantitative and qualitative evaluations, metrics of this kind allow the human dimensions of organizational life to be assessed in specific and concrete terms.

Data, though, find their greatest utility as a stimulus for discussion and reflection. Facts and figures are important, but conversations are the primary point of leverage in any survey process. It is through conversations that shared understanding is built, insights are identified, root causes of challenges are articulated, and ideas for action are generated.

Leaders must therefore find ways to facilitate dialogue through the entirety of an organization. They must not only talk about the importance of collective reflection, they must devote time and resources to nurturing it.

This can and should take place through formal and management-directed structures. But an organization that reflects only when a meeting is call to do so is not a reflective organization.

Leaders must therefore also work to nurture informal patterns of collective reflection, those spontaneous conversations emerging organically around the water cooler, the lunch table, the parking lot.

Finally, just as individual leaders often benefit from seeking out the perceptions of others, organizations may sometimes wish to seek assistance from external resources. Fresh viewpoints and perspectives can shed great insight on an organization’s own internal findings.

Strategies such as these help code purposeful and unified reflection into the DNA of an organization. They help establish habits of reflection that ensure that whatever external challenges an organization might face, its internal functioning will continue to grow and develop.

 

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“In Relationship” : The Forgotten Dimension of Employment April 18, 2022

What exactly is a job?

A person could work a lifetime without ever explicitly considering such a question. But its importance should not be underestimated, for actions are guided and shaped (as well as constrained and limited) by below-the-line understandings of what one is actually doing day after day.

In the most basic formulation, a job could be described simply as work done to achieve organizational objectives. Such a definition would not be inaccurate. It would describe a great deal of what goes on in the workplace.

And yet careful consideration reveals that this definition is partial at best, for organizational objectives are never achieved unilaterally. People don’t work in isolation. Rather, they work in relationship with others toward shared goals.

The quality of relationships with other human beings, then, is a significant aspect of a person’s job. It is a real and tangible element of organizational performance that needs to be elevated and highlighted. And yet this condition of “in-relationship” is both overlooked and underappreciated at all levels.

In our consulting practice, we have talked to thousands of people about the work they do, and only a very few have ever suggested that working effectively in relationship with others is a significant part of their job.

The importance of being a “team player” is noted on countless job postings and paid lip service numerous talks and seminars. Yet human relationships are routinely subordinated to the “real” work of filling orders, managing inventory, ensuring compliance, and the like.

That so many of us overlook such a crucial facet of our jobs goes a long way in explaining the persistence of numerous workplace challenges and failures. It also suggests the need for leaders to raise interpersonal relationships as a visible priority and target of system-wide attention and focus.

This does not imply that leaders must become the behavior police. Nor does it suggest that positive attitudes can be created simply by ordering employees to adopt them.

Rather, it suggests that leaders must work to create a culture in which the way people value and treat one another is not only taken seriously, but raised to a point of principle.

The Role of Leaders of Leaders March 7, 2022

We once worked with a manufacturing company that was trying to move from a top-down leadership approach to a more participation-focused system.

Brian, a manager of one of the larger plants, readily accepted the challenge building a new concept of leadership and was doing an excellent job of making unfamiliar and sometimes difficult choices.

One day we commend him on the strides he had made in involving those reporting to him. We then asked how his subordinate supervisors were coming in the process of involving their people. Brian blanched and said faintly, “That’s part of my job, too?”

All those who oversee subordinate managers, from vice-presidents and division heads to floor directors and line managers, are responsible for developing not only their own leadership capacities, but also those of the people below them.

The task facing these leaders of leaders can, in a way, be thought of as managing the process of leadership itself.

This is absolutely crucial in building effective human systems. Unfortunately it is regularly overlooked in the workplace. Countless employees, for example, say that the quality of management in their organization depends almost entirely on who you work for or what department you are in. Some managers are great. Others are terrible.

Such extreme variations in management are a sure sign that the process of leadership is going unmanaged. Leadership is being determined, either partially or entirely, by the whims of individual personality and temperament. Management is little more than a crap-shoot, and poor, counterproductive and even destructive dynamics can, in such circumstances, continue for years on end.

Avoiding such pitfalls beings with leaders like Brian expanding the circle of reflective leadership to include those below them. They do this by setting clear standards through training, coaching, and mentoring, and then reinforcing them though regular systems of feedback, encouragement, and recognition.

Leaders own personal improvement is of course indispensable to organizational development. But movement towards true collective excellence obliges leaders at all levels to consider not only their own effectiveness, but also that of each subordinate leader within the scope of their authority.

Vision, Culture, a Vision *of* Culture February 28, 2022

Vision and the conscious building of culture are central to the individual dimensions of reflective leadership. But both take on additional significance in the context of building and leading a reflective organization.

Vision lies at the heart of the unity of purpose needed to sustain long-term collective excellence. A clear articulation of why an organization exists and what contribution it seeks to make  is perhaps the preeminent point of unity in an organization. It is the North Star that allows every individual to chart a course in alignment with all others.

Vision is crucial in defining the results an organization seeks to deliver.  But just as important as its whats — its activities, initiatives, services — are its hows. How will the organization pursue its desired outcomes? How will its staff interact with one another? How will they communicate? Question? Learn?

The values defined by a vision of organizational functioning are crucial in supporting agree-upon standards of conduct. They provide the framework in which interactions between all stakeholders – among employees,  with the organization as a whole, and with the external world – are carried out.

It relatively clear that leaders who seek to create reflective organizations must craft a vision of their organization’s highest external impact. But these leaders must also articulate a vision of their organization’s highest internal functioning – it’s processes, procedures and interactions at their most commendable and effective.

“Externals” such as size, production volume, stature, and industry-rank  come easily to mind when considering the future. But an organization’s ability to achieve particular goals depends in great part on the nature of its internal functioning, the quality of its human systems, and the efficacy of its interpersonal interactions.

A vision of culture therefore goes hand-in-hand with a vision of contribution. Outstanding product is the companion of outstanding process.

Reducing Disunity or Building Unity? February 7, 2022

To the extent that leaders consider workplace unity at all, they tend to think in terms of fixing what’s broken. Discord is overlooked in countless forms and action is taken only when conditions get truly out of hand, when people are shouting in hallways or departments are refusing to work with one another.

But just as peace at its fullest and most meaningful is more than just an end to war, organizational unity is much more than a mere lack of disunity. Rather, it is a dynamic state of interpersonal coherence that can, with time and effort, be built within an organization. It is a condition that requires, but also nurtures, a wide array of shared goals, values, priorities, and hopes for the future.

To build such a culture, workplace coherence must be adopted not only as an explicit organizational goal but also a principle of operation. Leaders must strive to build ever greater unity, but only through means that are themselves unifying: by establishing commonality of purpose, opening opportunities for dialogue, actively involving employees, fostering true teamwork, building consensus, and the like.

Well-worn justifications of the status quo –  ideas like “we don’t have to like each other to work together” –  are so common in the world of business that concepts of unity and disunity can seem naïve or idealistic.

Nevertheless, any endeavor that lacks coherence of effort and commonality of vision will find itself beset by numerous difficulties stemming from chronic disagreement, friction, and discord. And though it may keep soldiering on, that lack of unity will be an inescapable drain on energy, talent, time, and resources.

Organizations can and do survive disunity. The swings of fortune may even endow some with success and a certain measure of acclaim. But conflict, hostility, discord, apathy and indifference take their inevitable toll. For only a profound alignment of aims, values, and aspirations allows organizations to leverage to their highest and fullest the human potential latent within them.

Any organization can be successful for a time. Only unified ones can be consistently great.

Unity, Contest, and Competition December 7, 2021

Why do leaders accept the largely avoidable costs of disagreement, turf issues, silos, politics, competition, cliques, hostility, and other forms of organizational disunity? 

Below-the-line beliefs about human nature play a role. But equally influential are related beliefs about the role of contest and competition in society.

Competition is almost universally seen (in Western societies, at least) as a powerful source of motivation. It is presented as a uniquely effective way of bringing out the best in individuals and optimizing the performance of groups.

So fully have such beliefs permeated our consiousness that most of us have little awareness of the faith we implicitly invest in the idea of opposition as a way to attain shared goals.

Yet many studies have suggested that, contrary to popular belief, in virtually no area of endeavor does competition lead to improved performance or production.

Moreover competition, by its very nature, is antithetical to collective aims and initiatives. Author Alfie Kohn, for example, writes:

Strip away all the claims in [competition’s] behalf that we accept and repeat reflexively.  What you have left is the essence of the concept: mutually exclusive goal attainment.  One person succeeds only if another does not.  From this uncluttered perspective, it seems clear right away that something is drastically wrong with such an arrangement. …Competition by its very nature damages relationships.  Its nature, remember, is mutually exclusive goal attainment, which means that competitors’ interests are inherently opposed.  I succeed if you fail, and vice versa. …so the failure of others is devoutly to be wished.

Placing employees, departments, or other organizational subdivisions in competition with each other implicitly frames them as competitors, each of whom is inherently opposed the others’ success. To succeed, each must beat, conquer, or otherwise prevail over those with whom it is in competition.

Put plainly, leaders who subscribe this paradigm create an environment in which in one part of the organization actively desires, or even works toward, the failure of other parts of that same organization.

The question facing leaders, then, is whether this is truly the best way to harness the talents, energies, and human capacity latent in an organization? Or might there be approaches more suited to the attainment of shared organizational goals and objectives?

Organizational Unity: Success (or Failure) at the Widest Level November 22, 2021

Organizations succeed or fail as whole systems. They can no more thrive on the strength of most-favored aspects than a car can use a functioning drive shaft and carburetor to make up for a dead alternator and flat tires.

Systems whose elements are mismatched, sub-optimized, disconnected, or otherwise disunited will, therefore, inevitably fail to reach their maximum potential. This is as true of coworkers, offices, and departments as it is of spark plugs and serpentine belts.

Yet the ability to work together as a unified whole – while maintaining necessary differences and celebrating diversity – is a concept rarely mentioned leadership discourse.

Indeed, virtually all contemporary organizations are characterized by low-grade levels of disunity and discord. Turf issues, silos, cliques, self-interested competition, politics, and outright hostility represent just a few of the chronic maladies that countless leaders have learned to accept, learned to live with, and even learned to ignore.

But no matter how adept we might become in ignoring these symptoms of disunity, their long-term costs –  in terms of reduced productivity, impaired communication, dampened enthusiasm, and recurrent conflict – can be steep indeed.

Many leaders choose to simply put up with organizational disunity. At some level, this is their prerogative. But not unlike financing one’s life with credit cards and never paying off the balance, the costs of such a choice cannot be avoided indefinitely.

We might learn to survive the penalties imposed. We might even learn to acclimate to the hardships our decisions give rise to. But no matter how “normal” these circumstances may come to feel, precious resources are being squandered each and every day.

Forging a Reflective Organization November 1, 2021

Leadership development is, at one level, an individual pursuit, focusing on leaders’ own strengths and challenges, successes and failures. The discipline of reflective leadership itself is grounded in individual attitudes and beliefs, and the personal choices they give rise to.   

At another level, however, leadership development is concerned with collective patterns of association and interaction. To build effective human systems, leaders must attend not only to their own personal interactions with others, but also to the way the people they oversee view, value, and treat one another.

This means that we, as leaders, must be mindful of the way we relate to persons A and B. But we must also take responsibility for the way person A treats person B, how person B treats his coworkers and contacts, and so forth.

Steps in this direction help expand the scope and range of reflection. And just as the most effective leader is a reflective leader, the most effective organization is a reflective organization – one in which leaders and non-leaders alike regularly assess personal beliefs and actions in light of their organization’s fundamental purpose.

To build such a workplace environment leaders must:

  • Strive to forge unity of thought and vision around the contribution the organization is designed to make in the world.
  • Help the organization define the culture by which it will pursue its vision.
  • Vigorously involve people, both individually and collectively, in vision- and culture-building.

Describing such steps is of course far easier than putting them into practice, particularly among the many challenges, setbacks, and limitations of any real-world organization. But every move in this direction will strengthen the capacity of the system to identify paths to further progress.

Communication: What Do You Believe? October 18, 2021

“In no other area have intelligent men and women worked harder or with greater dedication than…on improving communications in our organizations. Yet communications has proved as elusive as the Unicorn.”

These words are as true today as they were in 1973 when Peter Drucker first wrote them. Communication is an area in which many organizations struggle and even more fall short. But is this difficulty endemic to communication itself? Or is it merely indicative of the way leaders approach it?

We have suggested that the heart of communication is the act of making things common. While giving due consideration to technical considerations of system, structure, and method, leaders must remember that all communication ultimately concerns the act of building understanding between human beings.

With this in mind, it becomes clear that the quality of interactions depend in large part on who we are and how we view others:

  • Do I believe that employees are getting all the information they need? How do they see it? Why don’t I share more information with them?
  • Do I believe that employees are truly concerned about helping this organization? If yes, am I giving them all the information they need?
  • Do I want employees to demonstrate independent thinking and judgment? And if so, am I giving them information they need to do it well?
  • Do I want employees to understand decisions or just obey them? Do I resent being asked “why”? Do I think that when people ask questions about a decision, they are questioning the decision?
  • To what degree do I believe that other people’s dignity is important to the quality of their work? How does my communication with them demonstrate what I believe? How do they see it?
  • Do I care what other people think? Do I think they have anything of value to contribute? Does my behavior demonstrate that?
  • To what degree do I believe that creating a communication-rich environment is a high priority?

The answers we give to questions like these – not the ones we formulate for public consumption, but the ones arrive at our own private deliberation and reflection – will do much to determine how effectively we are able to communicate with those on whom the achievement of our aims and goals  depends.

Listening: Mastery of Our Own Self-Centered Tendencies September 27, 2021

All of us listen. From morning to night we listen to spouses, kids, clients, friends, coworkers, and employees. But the very fact that we do it so much fools us into believing that we do it well.

The reality, of course, is that our superficial and often scattered attention is no more listening than communication is simply telling people stuff. It is a rough approximation, but little more.

Like so many leadership behaviors, effective listening begins below the line in the internal world of attitudes and beliefs. To truly listen, we must genuinely value the thinking of those around us. We must respect them and believe that their thoughts are worth our time and attention.

True listening also requires an unequivocal acknowledgement that we don’t already have all the answers we need. It demands an admission of the reality that our thinking can be enhanced by others’ input.

Listening of this kind is as profound as it is rare. Celebrated semanticist and author S.I. Hayakawa describes the difference between this kind of listening and what most of us are accustomed to:

Living in a competitive culture, most of us are most of the time chiefly concerned with getting our own views across, and we tend to find other people’s speeches a tedious interruption of the flow of our own ideas. Hence it is necessary to emphasize that listening does not mean simply maintaining a polite silence while you are rehearsing in your mind the speech you are going to make the next time you can grab a conversation opening. Nor does listening mean waiting alertly for the flaws in the other person’s argument so that later you can mow him or her down. Listening means trying to see the problem the way the speaker sees it . . . Listening requires entering actively and imaginatively into the other person’s situation and trying to understand a frame of reference different than your own.

In this light listening is less a skill or behavior than it is a mastery of our own self-centered tendencies. Listening in the way described by Hayakawa requires us to set aside the concerns of our own ego, shelve our personal aims and priorities, and sincerely try to understand another person’s point of view and enter into their frame of reference.

It means working to go past what people are saying to search for what they are meaning. It is, above all else, an act of will. In this sense it is no hyperbole to suggest that human beings can live for years at a time without ever really listening to another person at all.

It becomes clear, then, that in cases of communication difficulties, the problem is often not that we don’t know how to listen well, but rather that we don’t really want to.

Dignity and Worth: The Cornerstone of Healthy Human Systems September 6, 2021

All below-the-line beliefs and biases held by leaders  influence the functioning of human systems. But few are more important than those concerning human dignity and worth.

These qualities address our basic sense of place in the world. They speak to our most fundamental right to exist. And because they are so central to human self-identity and self-conception, they are effectively non-negotiable in the workplace.

Put simply, people will never willingly work with someone who does not honor their basic dignity and worth as a human being.

You need look no further than yourself to verify the truth of this principle. How constructively would you work for a supervisor who humiliated and belittled you? Who viewed you as expendable or replaceable? Who treated you not as a person but as a tool?

Rare, indeed, is the person who would not rebel against such treatment, becoming resentful, hostile, antagonistic, cynical, apathetic, disengaged, or any of  countless other qualities corrosive to the healthy functioning of a human system.

Most of us have had a horrific supervisor or two in our career. But while true tyrants do exist, they are far less common than leaders who diminish the dignity and worth of their employees only inadvertently and accidentally.

These leaders are not bad people. They do not intentionally seek to be malicious or hurtful. Nevertheless, through the influence of outworn theories and attitudes, the weight of organizational culture, or just the never-ending press of work, they end up faltering in this most critical aspect of leadership.

We often ask participants in our workshops where they think protecting dignity and validating worth falls on the list of priorities held by their organization’s management. “Pretty low,” is the response made by many. But even more frequent is the opinion that dignity and worth don’t even make the list.

This is a sharp indictment of modern leadership. Organizations can and do, of course,  function without regard for the humanity of their employees. But the problems they face—low morale, minimal quality, mediocre service, substantial turnover—are as predictable as they are avoidable.

And while economic necessity might compel employees to stay in such a workplace,  they will give little of their energy, their creativity — little of themselves — to an organization that does not respect their fundamental humanity. And their leaders have no right to expect anything more.

Conversation: Shared Frames of Reference August 23, 2021

As organizations grow, they become increasingly reliant on one-directional forms of communication such as memos, newsletters, and speeches. These can be quite efficient in some respects, but the complexity, nuance, and detail they are able to convey is inherently limited.

To clarify finer levels of understanding, then, conversation is needed. The ask-listen-discuss cycle of two-way communication creates a self-correcting loop that refines meaning and leads to greater degrees of shared understanding, regardless of the communication skills of the individual participants involved.

The importance clarification of this kind has can be seen in a simple exercise we have often used in our consulting work. The activity begins when one person is designated as the “leader” and the rest of the group as “employees”. The leader is given a diagram of several geometric shapes positioned in a certain arrangement and told to describe it such that the employees will be able to reproduce it.

In the first round, the leader is told not to take any questions from the group and they are told not to ask any. They are to simply adhere to their “job description” and follow the directions given by their superior.

In the second round, a new leader is told to solicit questions, listen carefully, and strive to ascertain the understanding and comfort of the group. Moreover, the employees are told that not only can they ask questions, but that they must not let the process move forward until they are fully confident that they understand what they are supposed to be doing.

Invariably, the results of the exercise’s two phases are like night and day. In the first, it is not uncommon – no matter how explicit the instructions, no matter how meticulous the details – for some participants to simply give up out of frustration (thereby becoming recalcitrant “problem employees.”)  And of those who do finish, the accuracy of the drawings varies widely, as does participants’ confidence in their work.

In contrast, both confidence and accuracy are uniformly higher in the second round. Most, if not all, participants get the drawing exactly right. The mood of the room is also far more upbeat, lively, and collaborative. It is not uncommon for applause to break out when the desired arrangement is finally revealed.

In real life problem situations, leaders and supervisors often say, “I told them that,” or “It’s in the manual.” This may be true. But these sentiments misses the point that simply “telling them” without establishing an environment that not only allows but expects questions and clarification is a fully inadequate system of communication and, ultimately, a failure of leadership.

Content Communication, Relational Communication (2 of 2) July 26, 2021

Content communication — the whats, whens and whys of day-to-day interaction — is extremely seductive in its tangibility. But leaders cannot afford to underestimate the impact of relational communication in the functioning of any human system.   

To understand the enormity of this influence, put yourself in the shoes of a woman working in an office full of men who believe that a woman’s role in business ends at answering telephones and serving coffee.

These attitudes would never be communicated formally, of course. They would never appear in the employee handbook or be found in the organization’s  mission statement. They would never, in other words, find expression in content communication.

But wouldn’t the point still get across? Wouldn’t the women there have a pretty good idea of the lay of the land, through the jobs they were given or not given, the information that was shared with or withheld from them?

Wouldn’t the meetings they were invited to or excluded from, the greeting they received or didn’t receive in the hallway say all that needs to be said?

Though organizational attention typically focuses almost entirely on the content of communication systems, every encounter, no matter how dry or mundane, impacts personal relationships as well.

How we ask for a phone number, how we hold ourselves as we wait for it to be found, how we take leave of the employee who gave it to us — these all send relational messages that have real, tangible effects on the workplace.

This is particularly true of leaders. The way we interact with our employees sends countless messages about the status and parameters of relationships with them. And those messages in turn influence countless human dynamics, from how willingly employees collaborate with us and how freely they share information, to how likely they are to offer possible solutions and how ready they are to go the extra mile when needed.

Outstanding organizations, then, are distinguished by the quality of their relational communication as much as by the quality of their content communication.

Content Communication, Relational Communication (1 of 2) July 5, 2021

Communication can be divided into two broad categories: content and relational.

Content is the what of any message. It is the facts and figures, the ideas and opinions that we transmit through e-mails, conversations, memos, or notes on the bulletin board. It is anything that can be expressed in words.

Relational communication pertains to the who of any interaction. Though we may be unaware of it, every instance of content communication is surrounded by a field of relational communication that reveals the way parties view and are viewed by each other. It defines, in large part, the nature of the relationship between the two of them.

Three points about relational communication bear particular emphasis:

  • Relational communication is a direct reflection of our below-the-line attitudes. Because we do not consciously shape relational communication, its messages spring unfiltered from our deepest personal thinking. Relational communication, then, provides a direct window into the below-the-line attitudes, values and beliefs we hold.
  • We are communicating relationally 100 percent of the time. Content communication is largely a matter of conscious choice: we make a phone call or we don’t, we send an email or we don’t. Relational communication, however, is not a matter of choice. We are constantly broadcasting relational messages, whether we realize it or not. This means that our beliefs and values (as well as our biases and prejudices) are always leaking out to one degree or another.
  • Relational messages are more important to us. Because relational messages are linked to how we are perceived and valued, our perception of what is being communicated relationally is always more important to us than content communication. And when the two conflict, we will always give more weight to the relational message (the brusque tone, the clenched jaw) than the content message (“no, I’m not upset”).

For leaders seeking to build outstanding human systems, it is imperative to remember that every interaction transmits not only surface-level information, but also deeper messages about the degree to which we respect, value, and appreciate others.

Every quick phone call, every offhand comment and conversation in the hallway, answers, for others, the question “how do you see and value me?” Over time these relational messages become as clear as any email or memo – and they exert enormous impact on interpersonal dynamics and, in turn, organizational performance.

Communication and the Challenge of Conveying Rationale June 27, 2021

Of the many content areas workplace communication can be divided into, few are more prone to difficulties than organizational choices and decisions.  The who’s, what’s, and where’s of decisions are typically conveyed with acceptable clarity and consistency. The rationale behind them, however, is not. 

In practical terms, this means that while employees typically receive the operational outlines of upcoming changes—this project is being cut, that department is being reorganized—the reasons necessitating those changes — the why behind them — will often remain a mystery.

As a result, employees are able to follow the narrow instructions they are given, but are powerless to go beyond this task or this job. They are therefore unable to help leadership accomplish the higher-level goals that those  instructions were designed to achieve.

A leader might, for example, ask that a lamp be removed from a table.  His employees can comply with that request easily enough, but unless they are told why—the room is being redecorated and the lamp is the wrong shade of yellow, the desk needs to be dusted, more light is needed in another part of the room—they cannot undertake other initiatives that would further the leader’s ultimate aim.

Without more information about the rationale behind the decision, they cannot take it upon themselves to remove the yellow potted plant as well, or retrieve the duster from the closet, or turn on an overhead light. They can do nothing but wait for their next directive.

Explaining the thinking behind decisions also helps employees’ participation become increasingly sophisticated. It allows employees at all levels to gain a management-view of organizational challenges, which enables them to make greater and more effective contributions to solving future problems.

As a leader, then, you can have enormous impact on your organization simply by communicating the reasons underlying decision as widely as you communicate the decisions themselves.

Spelling out the “why” of choices makes the decision-making process more transparent, helps build trust, and helps employees accept decisions that may be difficult.

Below-the-Line Inhibitors of Productive Communication May 24, 2021

Many factors can inhibit the establishment of conditions that tend to characterize superior-functioning organizations .Leaders’ own below-the-line beliefs, values, and assumptions, however, can be particularly problematic.

Consider, for example, the following:

  • Unexamined assumptions that one is already communicating sufficiently with employees
  • A failure to establish formal mechanisms to assess the quality of organizational communication systems
  • Need-to-know  approaches to communication and decision-making
  • A belief that communicating thoroughly with employees is prohibitively labor intensive and time consuming
  • An attitude that equates information with power, and a related fear of losing power by sharing information
  • The belief that employees are capable of understanding only rudimentary levels of  information

All of these pose significant impediments to the construction of productive patterns of organizational communication . What leaders believe about themselves and others, then, can be as important to building an effective workplace as what they say.

Leaders whose beliefs are aligned with the principles of the human knowledge base will find appropriate and effective channels of communication as a matter of course. They and their employees will develop the patterns of communication suited to their own particular circumstances, and misunderstandings will be corrected by the two-way dialogue of conversation.

If leaders’ beliefs are not aligned with those principles, however, no amount of reorganization or structural tinkering will suffice. If they fail (or refuse) to embrace the human-to-human nature of communication, a culture in which employees thrive and excel will remain beyond reach.

The attitudes above, then, constitute an important area for leadership reflection and consideration.

Types of Workplace Communication and Why they Matter May 10, 2021

When leaders assess organizational communication, they often use generalizations such as “good communication” or “communication problems.” Such expressions seem natural, but in fact obscure a great variety of context and circumstance.

To better understand the variety of workplace communication, it can be helpful to think in terms of topic-specific categories of communication. One organization, for example, might excel at communicating policies but struggle in areas of training and skill development. Another might communicate goals and objectives effectively but stumble in conveying organizational vision and mission.

In our workshops we sometimes have participants list those areas in which they personally need communication to do their jobs effectively. From the answers given, general categories can be identified that would be found in most organizations. These include:

  • Vision and mission
  • Goals and objectives
  • Job descriptions
  • Policies and procedures
  • Standards and expectations
  • Organizational relationships and structures
  • Feedback
  • Decisions and the rationale behind them
  • Training and orientation
  • Available resources
  • Deadlines and priorities
  • Plans and changes
  • Hot issues
  • Market conditions

Leaders can begin identifying categories relevant to their own organization by posing to themselves and – more importantly – to their employees a few simple questions: What do I need to know to do my job effectively? What additional information would increase my capacity to act confidently and proactively? In what areas does a lack of facts or information hinder my performance?

Undertaking this type of analysis is important because rarely is communication “good” or “bad” throughout the entirety of an organization. Rather its quality depends on what is being conveyed.

For example, communication is strongest in concrete but prosaic areas like policies, procedures, and job descriptions, and much weaker in more abstract but substantive areas like vision, mission, and big-picture goals.

Identifying these content areas allows organizations to more accurately assess exactly how and where communications succeed and falter – and to take steps accordingly.

Building Blocks of Reflective Leadership – Humility March 22, 2021

Few spheres of human activity are more driven by “results” than the world of business. Visible success is the coin of the realm, and confidence, bravado, even self-aggrandizement are pervasive. Humility, then, stands as a somewhat counter-intuitive characteristic of truly outstanding leaders.

Humility is certainly one of the more nuanced facets of leadership. In part, this has to do with the hierarchical structure of modern management. By definition, leaders have been placed above their employees in terms of decision-making and responsibility. What, then, does humility look like for someone who necessarily oversees others?

Humility concerns the way leaders approach their employees—the tone they take, the interactions they carry on, and so forth. But it also has to do with the way they approach themselves. In this respect, humility implies an open and forthright acknowledgement of one’s own limitations, shortcomings, and weaknesses.

Such acknowledgement involves taking responsibility for the challenges that are known to us. This includes both those deficiencies that frustrate and annoy us, and those that we have implicitly adopted as our “pet” vices.

But humility also demands an acknowledgement that all of us have other shortcomings lying just below the surface of our conscious awareness. It calls for acceptance of the fact that we all fail in ways we don’t realize and in areas we might not expect.

Humility is crucial to leadership and organizational development because only by acknowledging the need for improvement can that improvement actually be achieved. If we are convinced the problem lies elsewhere—in the staff, the union, the marketplace, or countless other sources—we will never become anything more than what we are right now.

In terms of the discipline of reflective leadership, humility implies acceptance of the reality that problems often emanate as much from us as they do from anyone else. Our views, choices, and actions lie at root of countless daily challenges. The problem, all too often, is not “out there.” It’s “in here.”

Humility also prompts us to keep searching for increasingly constructive and productive approaches. For humility, at its highest, involves not just correcting deficiencies, but actively searching for ways to improve.

Eliminating negatives builds good organizations. Cultivating positives—realizing there is always room for our own growth—builds outstanding ones.

Building Blocks of Reflective Leadership – Determination March 15, 2021

Building reliable habits of personal reflection is not easy. Like mastering any new skill, learning to hang the mirror involves no small amount of setbacks and failure.

We might maintain a sense of objectivity for a time, then lose it at a bad turn of events or sharp verbal jab. We might restrain emotional responses when the going is easy, but lose our composure when we most need it.

Training one’s self to hang the mirror regularly and reliably – not as an afterthought, but as a key aspect to ongoing professional development – is a process that tests our resolve again and again.

Shifting one’s mindset from “getting it” to “getting closer to it” can help in meeting these challenges.  Rather than striving to attain arbitrarily imposed standards of accomplishment, priority is placed on taking tangible steps of progress. Slow-and-steady is the mode of action, and assessment is grounded more in process and learning than “success” and “failure”.

What does this look like in practice? If we have never had occasion to assess our interior landscape, taking a first look inside is a notable step in its own right. Similarly, a daily practice that is fragile and easily interrupted is – regardless of any limitations and shortcomings – still a foundation from which to build.

If previously we might have never reflected on a hostile interaction with a coworker, we might now give it some thought at home over the weekend. Where formerly, days might have passed before we assessed the choices we made in a particularly difficult meeting, it might now be only that afternoon that we consider steps that might have led to a better outcome.

Slowly, with determination and effort, our capacity for reflection grows. Over time we become able to assess our choices in real time, as we are making them.

This capacity – adopting more productive behavior on the spot, rather than after the fact – is, in a way, the ultimate goal of any reflective discipline. It is crucial in the transformation of personal choices and behaviors.

But it can be developed only to the extent that we weather the fits, starts, and setbacks of the learning process with resolve and determination.

Community, Communion, and the Human Side of Communication February 22, 2021

Any time two or more people work in tandem, they create a human system.  And that system will be only as effective as the patterns of communication that support it. For communication is the means by which diverse talents can be directed toward a shared goal, the way a collection of individual I’s can be transformed into a cohesive and capable we.

In a very real sense, communication is what makes coherent, collective action possible.

But while communication allows us to express ourselves and gather information, it also builds ties of association and relationship. It draws individuals and groups together into a shared community of thought and discussion, if only for the duration of a conversation.

Communication can be understood, then, as the process of making things common. Linguistically related to “common,” “communion,” and “community,” communication can be viewed as the means by which we make our internal thoughts, beliefs, and perceptions available to those around us for external discussion and action. It is the way we share of ourselves and have access to the experience of others.

This community-building function is of great importance in the workplace. For only to the degree that leaders are willing to enter into “communion” with their employees will they be able to establish effective patterns of association. If they hold themselves above or apart from employees, communication will inevitably falter, for the very foundation on which it rests will be undermined and unsound.

Effective communication, then, depends as much on what leaders feel or don’t feel about their employees, as it does on what they say or don’t say. It depends as much on the values, beliefs, and attitudes they hold as the structures, systems, and approaches they build.

Routine interaction may involve countless utilitarian exchanges. But at the end of the day, communication is a quintessentially human endeavor that involves much more than the surface-level transmission of facts and information.

No matter how large organizations might grow, then, and no matter how remote and removed various parties might seem from each other, communication must always be approached as a matter of one human being connecting with another. Anything less will fail to fully leverage the human potential available and inherent in the system as a whole.

Effort, Habit and the Timetable of Transformation February 8, 2021

Instant gratification is widely prized today, not the least in business circles. The number of leadership books promising tips, tricks, and secrets to achieve quick and painless change — of ones’ employees, ones’ organization, ones’ self — testifies to the number of leaders seeking the silver bullet solution.

Of course many leaders realize that things which seem too good to be true usually are. But repeated exposure to claims, even those we reject as unrealistic or fantastic, can gradually distort our perceptions of what is normal and realistic.

When it comes to leadership development, then, it is worth considering the extent that such eat-more-and-still-lose-weight promises might have led us to underestimate the time and effort needed to achieve lasting personal change.

In an article exploring collaboration and participatory leadership, well-known consultant, trainer, and author Peter Grazier offered an arresting depiction of the determination walking such a path of transformation can require.

“Although I was observing this phenomenon almost daily in my work, it took almost four years before my own decision making process became more naturally collaborative,” he writes.

Now, four years is not the timeline on which most of us chart a course of personal improvement. Not only does it seem more than a little daunting , it seems downright unnecessary. We assume that a few weeks, a few months at most, of dedicated attention should be enough to tackle most any managerial shortcoming.

And yet Grazier echoes what many other thoughtful leaders have suggested: that personal growth is valuable precisely because it is so hard-won. “As I have looked back on my own transition,” he writes, “I have gained a greater awareness and appreciation of the difficulty of changing ourselves, let alone others.”

Change, in short, is worthwhile in large part because it is so challenging.

Moreover, change requires dedication not just to act at a tactical level, but also to be vulnerable at a personal one. “It took a series of significant emotional events to have me seriously reconsider how to contemplate, explore, and make decisions differently,” Grazier writes, describing what could be termed a below-the-linechange in thinking and outlook.

Leaders—all people, really—improve not by turning away from challenges but by grappling with them head-on. They improve by hanging the mirror and asking tough questions about who they really are, what they really believe, what they value, and what m0tivates their action.

Facing these questions can be challenging. It requires effort, time, dedication, and perseverance. And in many ways, it is less a task to be completed than a far-stretching path to be traversed little by little, day by day.

But only by hanging the mirror and taking a good look at how we view the human beings around us can we create an environment that fosters truly excellent performance. Only by looking first at ourselves can we hope to develop others.

Fear and the Exceptional Leader January 25, 2021

Leaders’ assumptions, values, beliefs, and mental models are critically important in shaping their day-to-day choices, choices that mold workplace culture and impact organizational functioning.

But an equally important driver of behavior – and one that is far more frequently overlooked and avoided — is fear.

Fear is a delicate issue in the workplace, particularly among leaders. Because of the visibility of their position, many leaders are reluctant to admit anxiety or insecurity, lest they be perceived as being weak or incapable. (Note how we can even be afraid of looking afraid.)

Such concerns might seem natural and understandable. After all, how many of us have not tried to project an air of confidence we didn’t really feel?

But of course no human being is entirely free from fear. The notion is not ony preposterous but patently nonsensical.  Moreover, hiding from or denying the fears we honestly feel can blind our perception, limit our choices, and distort our leadership potentially damaging ways.

We once asked a group of leaders what was preventing them from involving their subordinates more fully in decisions affecting their work. For a variety of reasons the group was able respond with an unusual degree of authenticity. The below-the-line dynamics they identified were as illuminating as they are honest:

  • Fear of surrendering authority and control
  • Fear of losing importance
  • Fear of being upstaged or outperformed by employees
  • Fear of appearing unknowledgeable or incompetent
  • Lack of trust in employees and coworkers
  • Fear of exposing inconsistencies or deficiencies in personal thinking or decision making
  • Lack of a positive relationship with those who would be involved
  • Preferring to seek input from those who already agree with our thinking

If these seem unusually personal, the participants themselves were surprised at how many obstacles to seemingly technical/tactical issue of involvement were grounded in their own fears and insecurities.

For leaders of that organization, employees were being excluded from decision-making processes not because of concerns about time or organizational boundaries or other logistical challenges. They were being excluded because of fear.

Owning up to this reality required a stout commitment to reflecting deeply on the motivation underlying personal leadership choices and honestly assessing the effects, both positive and negative, of those choices.

In that regard, this group’s willingness to acknowledge personal challenges, shortcomings, and areas for growth provides an example we would all do well to emulate.

Three Below-the-Line Obstacles to Involvement January 11, 2021

Involving employees in workplace decisions has been associated with a wide range of operational benefits. And yet true involvement remains relatively rare in the workplace. Why?

Many factors play a role, of course. But the unintended consequences of hierarchical systems of authority pose a particularly stubborn set of challenges.

Common to virtually all modern organizations, these hierarchies tend to create and reinforce assumptions about who has capacity and who does not, who is a decision-maker and who is not, who is qualified and who is not. In effect, they make the talent pool appear shallower than it actually is.

These systems also impact leaders’ below-the-line views of themselves and their employees. In particular they often lead to beliefs that tend to result in the exclusion of employees. Among these are:

  • The belief that it is the boss’s job to make the best decision. Many leaders believe that making the best decisions possible is a central element of their position. This is not incorrect. But a more accurate understanding is that it is the boss’s responsibility to ensure that the best decisions are made. The distinction is important, for research has shown that involving others leads to more effective, creative, and accepted decisions.
  • The belief that seeking employee input takes too much time. Time is the most common objection to involving employees, and it is true that involving employees does require an initial investment of time. But involvement is almost always more efficient in the long run. When making a decision unilaterally, a leader’s first task is selling that decision to employees. A decision that has involved employees from the beginning, however, already enjoys, by virtue of the participative process by which it was made, the support and buy-in of those needed to see it to completion. It creates a team already optimized to succeed in its task.
  • The belief that an open door policy is an adequate channel for soliciting input. Open door policies are common in the workplace, and many leaders have a genuinely open door. But even the most sincere open door policy puts the onus of action on the employee, which invariably inhibits communication. True involvement is not a passive state of being, not a matter of being willing to listen if an employee has a concern or idea. Rather, it arises from a leader’s conviction that involving employees in decision-making processes benefits him- or herself as much as the employees. It involves proactively and consistently seeking employee input on matters of importance.

Avoiding patterns of thought such as these can help leaders build cultures of commitment and enthusiasm, and help them more effectively leverage the talent, creativity, expertise, and imagination latent in the system they head.

Employee Involvement and Participation: Do We Really Want It? December 28, 2020

The benefits of involving employees in decisions that affect them are clear. Victor Vroom, one of the seminal pioneers in areas of motivation and decision-making, once wrote:

“Participative decision processes…can provide a training ground in which people can think through the implications of decisions. Participation can also perform a team building function, building positive relationships among group members and helping meld them into a team. Finally, participation can aid in aligning the individual goals of group members with the goals of the organization.”

It stands to reason, then, that if leaders want employees who can think through the implications of their decisions, who can work effectively as members of a team and align themselves with organizational goals, they need to involve their people in the decision-making process.

In countless organizations, though, this does not happen.

The challenge is not one of tactics or strategies, for involvement can be pursued in variety of ways, whether formal or informal, in group settings or one-on-one.

The unfortunate reality, rather, is that many of us simply have very little regard for the thinking of others.

We might say we believe that others’ thoughts can improve our own. We might even believe – at the level of abstraction – that our leadership is enhanced by the input of others.

Yet when the time comes to reorganize the department or open the new site location, we just don’t feel that this is the right situation to start involving employees. We believe in involvement, just not today.

It’s crucial, then, to understand that involvement is as much a practical description of operational reality as it is a normative standard of aspiration. Put more simply, the issue is not so much that leaders ought to or should involve employees in decision-making processes for one reason or another. It is that involving them is simply the way the best decisions are made.

In its highest form, involvement stems from leaders’ recognition that their own thinking suffers without the thoughts of others. It is the practical expression of an acknowledgement that they will accomplish less acting alone than they will by leveraging the capacities of the human system they lead.

Do we really believe this? Do we truly embrace our dependence on those we lead, oversee and supervise? Or do we sometime try to reap the organizational benefits of participation by providing the form, but not the substance, or involvement?

True involvement comes from leaders genuinely valuing the thoughts and ideas of employees, to the point that they consistently seek out and actively listen to those opinions and suggestions.

The Most Profound Form of Recognition December 14, 2020

We have previously suggested that recognition is, at the most fundamental level, an acknowledgement of the worth of a human being. But how can we tell if someone really values us? What demonstrates their regard? What are its tangible, outward manifestations?

When asked this question in workshops, participants often say things like “they seek me out,” “they spend time with me,” “they share thoughts and ideas with me,” “they ask my opinions,” “they listen with real interest.”

The behaviors they describe shed light on a fundamental truth of human interaction: that involvement is perhaps the most profound form of recognition one human being can give another.

You can applaud your children’s intelligence or maturity, but if you do not involve them in decisions affecting the family—buying a new house, moving to a new city—that praise rings hollow.

You can tell your wife you love her, but if you never seek her thoughts or opinions, she will not feel valued. Involvement is one of the clearest and most immediate ways to acknowledge the worth of another human being.

Expressing appreciation for efforts and thanking people for the work they do is extremely important. But words alone can only go so far. Sharing information, discussing ideas, or soliciting input demonstrates regard in a way that few other leadership actions can.

Involvement communicates an appreciation for talents and contributions by actions, and not just words alone. It shows that you value people’s capacity to think, not just their capacity to work. And that is a message that can transform a workplace.

Involvement: Path to Increased Ownership November 23, 2020

Countless leaders seek to strengthen ownership and personal responsibility for organizational initiatives in their workplace. What many don’t realize is that involving employees  in decision-making processes can be a powerful way to build such support.

We once worked with a fire chief who had been budgeted money to buy a new truck. He was looking through a catalogue one day, trying to decide what to order f0r the station, when one of his men dropped by and asked what he was doing.

When the chief explained the purchase, the man dropped what he was doing and immediately called the rest of the station to come take a look. Within moments the small office was crowded with men flipping through the catalogue and enthusiastically discussing the merits and drawbacks of various options.

When the truck arrived, it was the pride of the station. The men cleaned it, cared for it, and talked it up to anyone who would listen.

The chief’s counterparts at the city’s three other stations, however, told a very different story.

Their men, they said, roundly disliked the recent purchases. They showed little if any gratitude for the new vehicles and grumbled incessantly about everything that was “wrong” with them. One of the chiefs went so far as to say he sometimes wished he had never bought a new truck at all.

The chief was surprised and somewhat puzzled by the great difference in response and reaction.  But the kicker, he later told us, was that the four vehicles were so comparable in features as to be almost indistinguishable from one another.

The four stations had, in effect, purchased the same truck. But where the chief’s men had been involved in the decision-making process, the others had simply been informed of a decision made by a superior who had not bothered to seek their input or opinions.

That simple act of involvement turned out to be the difference between employees who were proud and excited and employees who were disgruntled and resentful. And in this, the chief experienced firsthand what research has shown time and again: that the act of involving people in the decision-making process builds ownership of decisions and motivation to support them.

Leaders often say people resist change, but this is not quite true. As a general rule human beings do not resist change, we resist being changed. And the ownership that results from involvement can be a key difference between the two.

Guest Blog: Leadership for the Solo Entrepreneur? November 9, 2020

Recently, I was lucky enough to host a book club discussion for Hanging the Mirror.

I was immediately drawn to this book because, in my work as a consultant to small business owners, I feel like the biggest problem they face is not access to smart strategies or good workers.  The most pressing problem is a lack of self reflection within their business.

So often, I work with clients who are quick to point fingers to external forces that impact their business.  What’s always missing is a sense of personal responsibility for the choices they make in their business.

The group discussing the book was made up of small business owners including some solo-entrepreneurs with no staff.

The most divisive issue that emerged during the discussion was whether or not a book on leadership was relevant to someone who doesn’t have any staff.  Do you need to acquire leadership skills if you have no staff to lead?

What I learned from Hanging the Mirror is that the concept of self-reflection is relevant to any business owner regardless of whether or not he or she has staff.  Every business benefits from an owner who can reflect on their beliefs and recognize how those beliefs impact the actions they take within their business.

Even if you’re starting as a solo-entrepreneur, it’s likely that you will be growing and bringing on staff.  It’s never too early to start learning about what makes a great leader, and Hanging the Mirror is precisely the book that will help you understand how to excel in that role.

Holly Howard is the founder of Ask Holly How, a New York City based consulting company focused on helping skilled artisans make the leap to become savvy entrepreneurs.  See askhollyhow.com for more information.   

Unity, Discord, and the Reality of Human Nature October 26, 2020

If it is in fact true that organizational performance rises with growing levels of agreement, collaboration, reciprocity and shared vision, why do leaders accept significant (and largely avoidable) costs of disunity? 

Much has to do with widespread below-the-line beliefs that disunity is just the way things are.

“It’s human nature,” clients have again and again suggested in our consulting work, unwittingly giving voice to bedrock assumptions about the human condition. “People fight. They gossip. They clash. There’s nothing to be done about it.”

Unity, in this view, goes against fundamental realities of psychological makeup.

But is this true? Is disunity an inescapable feature of human nature?

It’s certainly true that disunity is not lacking in the workplace. It can be seen everywhere. Most of us have lived a lifetime in its churning waters.

Yet highly unified organizations do exist in the world, organizations in which collaboration, mutual assistance, and commonality of vision are the norm, not the exception.

And the fact that their facilities can be visited, their processes studied and documented, suggests that disunity is not an immutable law of nature, like gravity. Rather, it a choice organizations make – even if only implicitly and unconsciously – and is therefore one they can choose to not make.

Imagine an organization in which departments go out of their way to help one another. An organization in which all individuals make a point of placing the welfare of the whole organization above their personal concerns. An organization in which the success of any one person, office, or division is celebrated as the success of all.

Such organizations can be found. They may be  rare. They may be challenging to create. But the fact that they exist at all – and that their culture stems from connscious, concerted, and sustained effort, as opposed to the happy accident of circumstance – stands as testament to the fact that disunity and discord are not inescapable facts of life.

The unity organizations can establish if they make it a priority is far more than what many leaders believe is possible. A key question facing all leaders, then, is the degree to which they are prepared to make organizational unity an explicit and operational priority.

Involvement, Group Decision-Making, and the Path to Optimum Solutions October 17, 2020

Involving employees in decisions that affect them and their work is crucial to capturing the human spirit in the workplace. Leaders, however, often resist involving employees in day-to-day affairs.

Such reluctance stems in large part from leaders’ perceptions of both themselves and their employees.

Because they were promoted into a position of leadership (and their employees were not), mangers often unconsciously assume that they must be smarter, more creative, better decision-makers, etc. than their employees. And many therefore feel that involving employees would introduce inferior ideas into deliberations and unnecessarily slow the decision-making process.

The human knowledge base, however, indicates just the opposite. Research has shown that involvement is one of the most effective ways of tapping the collective intelligence of an organization.

One study, for example, indicated that with basic training in consensus decision-making techniques (collaborative leadership, flexible patterns of communication, cooperative problem solving, etc.) a group-crafted solution is superior to the best solution of any individual member some 75 percent of the time.

Put simply, involving employees in decision-making processes will yield better results three times out of four, even if a leader actually is smarter, more creative, and a more capable decision-maker than her or his employees.

Group decision-making does not “average out” the talents and capacities of individual members, pulling down the top and raising the bottom. Rather, it multiplies those capabilities.

Far from detracting from the efficacy of the decision-making process, it generates possibilities and open horizons that none of the participants would have come to on his or her own. And as leaders become ever more dependent on the specialized and technical knowledge of their employees, involvement will become less a choice than a necessity.

Habits That Inhibit Effective Recognition October 12, 2020

Some leaders rarely, if ever, recognize the efforts of their employees. Others sincerely believe they give sufficient recognition, but in fact do not.

Of the two scenarios, the latter is the more challenging by far. When our hearts are in right place, it is difficult for us to realize that our desired outcomes are not actually being achieved.

(This is an example of our espoused theories fooling us into believing our behavior is achieving something other than what it really is.)

So how can well-meaning leaders increase the likelihood that that their efforts to recognize their employees are having the effect they think they are?

Being aware of (and avoiding) the following pitfalls is a good place to start:

  • Formal recognition policies. Formal recognition programs are generally well-intentioned, but all too all easily can degenerate into impersonal expressions of corporate bureaucracy. Scott Adams, creator of the “Dilbert” comic strip, shares the following example: “As I approached the front of the room to accept my award it became apparent that the executive running the program didn’t know what I did for a living. Thinking quickly, he invented an entirely fictitious project for the benefit of the audience and thanked me for my valuable contribution to its success.” Recognition programs are not inherently bad, but they do constitute corporate policies, which have been identified one of the top sources of workplace demotivation.
  • Generic compliments. Adams’ story also touches on the issue of specificity. To be meaningful, recognition must be specific, concrete, and informed. It must spring from time spent with employees and familiarity with their capacities and duties. Most of us have had the boss who threw “good job”s around to motivate the team, and we know how hollow such generic compliments can sound. Effective recognition must rest on leaders’ personal involvement and investment.
  • Above and beyond. Leaders often associate recognition primarily with outstanding or unusual accomplishment. Extraordinary victories should certainly be celebrated. But every organization relies on numerous positions that, while crucial, offer few opportunities for above-and-beyond distinction. Given that organizational performance can depend in large part on these jobs, leaders must recognize contribution as well as distinction. Recognition of this kind applauds the unobtrusive, behind-the-scenes kinds of service that can so easily be overlooked or taken for granted.
  • Every couple of months. Many leaders feel that they recognize their employees, and they are right. What they fail to do, however, is give recognition at a level and frequency that impacts employees’ views of themselves, their work, and their organization.  In their best-selling book, First, Break All The Rules, Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman explored the critical importance of employees feeling that they have received recognition or praise in the past seven days. Many of us recognize employees; very few of us offer recognition at that level of frequency and consistency.
Mental Models That Inhibit the Recognition of Employees September 28, 2020

Recognition of and appreciation for the efforts of employees is central to a culture of engagement, ownership and commitment. The success of such initiatives, however, depends on more than questions of how, when, and in what venue.

Leaders’ efforts at offering recognition are shaped — and potentially limited — by a host of below-the-line mental models, attitudes and values. And unfortunately, these beliefs often rest on assumptions from the past that are becoming increasingly discredited.

Such misconceptions include:

  • Not part of a leader’s job. Many leaders conceive of their job in purely operational terms. In their mind, their job is to ensure that patients’ needs are met, that marketing campaigns are launched on time, that products are produced efficiently and reliably. Lost in this view is the means by which these goals are met, namely, the human side of leadership. If leaders do not see building an effective human system as part of their job description, it goes without saying that they will fail to accurately recognize their employees. This view inaccurately frames recognition as a perk that is, ultimately, unnecessary.
  • Pay is enough. Some leaders feel that personal appreciation from a leader is not necessary, in light of the economic dimensions of employment. The paycheck employees receive is thanks enough, many feel, and any expectation of recognition or appreciation beyond that is unreasonable and unwarranted. Leaders of this kind typically believe that money is the primary or only reason that human beings work. This view, however, is contradicted by research suggesting that money in fact more often serves as a source of demotivation than motivation.
  • Neediness. Some leaders question why they should be expected to applaud “every little thing” employees do, and bristle at the idea of “babying” employees for fulfilling responsibilities that were theirs in the first place. Objections of this kind spring from below-the-line attitudes that frame recognition as a form of psychological immaturity to be grown out of.  Such attitudes are not uncommon, but behavioral research has consistently shown recognition and validation of one’s efforts to be a basic psychological need of human beings. Refusing or neglecting to provide such recognition does not make organizations and employees stronger, it makes them weaker.

Efforts to express appreciation for employees’ contributions rest on basic paradigms about human nature and the responsibilities leaders hold in regards to the people they oversee. To effectively offer recognition, then, leaders must reflect not only on the choices they are making, but on the personal beliefs that drive and shape those choices.

Appreciating What Employees Do and “Can” Do September 14, 2020

Recognizing employees’ efforts is critical to building workplace morale  and motivation. But it can also play an important role in building new skills and capacities.

We once surveyed a software development firm in Nebraska. Meeting with a cross section of staff members, we asked a range of open-ended questions, one of which was, “How do you know if you are doing a good job?”

As is often the case, many employees said they didn’t really know when their supervisor thought they were doing well. A few said they found out only in their annual performance review.

In one department, however, employee after employee told us that their department head believed in them even more than they believed in themselves.

She not only appreciated what they had done, they said. She continually expressed confidence in what they could do, encouraging them to take on and succeed at new projects.

And more than a few said that under her leadership, they had grown in ways they wouldn’t have thought were possible.

When we met this woman, it was immediately clear that she leveraged the power of encouragement to an unusual degree. In her view, the most fundamental role of leadership was “harvesting the talents of people.”

And in that light, she took it as her personal responsibility to find the strengths of her employees — even those still undeveloped — and value, encourage, and nurture those gifts.

Her approach was inspiring,  convincing, and refreshing. But it was effective as well: the difference between her department and others in the organization was night and day in terms of morale, enthusiasm, and commitment.

Results such as these should come as little surprise. We all appreciate having our potential acknowledged by others, particularly those we report to. And rare is the person who is indifferent to warm encouragement to stretch and take risks.

An important question for leaders to reflect on, then, is the degree to which they look beyond what employees have already done in the workplace, to find what they could do with appropriate encouragement, mentoring, trust, and support.

Perception and Challenge of Communicating Appreciation August 21, 2020

Sufficiently recognizing and appreciating the efforts of employees poses challenges at all levels of the organizational chart. Everyone from vice presidents to fry cooks say that they hear about every small mistake they make, but only rarely are told when they have done a good job.

This is due, in large part, to distortions of perception. We human beings are acutely aware when our efforts go unrecognized—I worked all weekend on that report and she couldn’t even manage a lousy ‘thank you’!  But we are almost unable to realize when the labor of others goes similarly unacknowledged.

Many times we will not know that a subordinate worked all weekend preparing the report. But even if we do, it simply will not mean as much to us as if it had been our own free time spent on company business.

Our own labors are always more real to us than those of our employees. And because of it, we will rarely give as much recognition as we would expect and hope to receive for the same amount of work.

In short, we will, time and again, give to others less than we would want to receive.

Further complicating the issue is that while recognition is a primary source of motivation, its lack is rarely a source of significant complaint or grievance.

Employees will not typically agitate or protest when they feel their efforts are going underappreciated. As a result, there might be few overt symptoms for a leader to “fix”.

But while a lack of recognition and appreciation may not cripple a workplace, it will steadily eat away at morale and blunt enthusiasm. It will not sink the ship but it will prevent the sails from becoming fully filled.

To effectively express gratitude, then, leaders must take into account and work to understand the perceptions of employees. They must strive to ascertain how employees view the recognition they are giving.

But most important of all, they must take the time to get to know the people they supervise. Just as generic gifts are never as meaningful as those that reflect a person’s individual likes and dislikes, generic recognition will never be as effective as appreciation that springs from a leader’s ongoing association with the person being recognized.

Recognition, then, can best be understood not as a tool leaders employ, but an expression of the quality of relationships they hold with others.

Appreciation: The Heart of Recognition August 6, 2020

When it comes to the role of recognition in the workplace, the knowledge base is clear: we human beings want to be appreciated and valued in the work we do.

Recognition, though, is only as good as the spirit that animates it. As a fundamentally above-the-line behavior, recognition can be disingenuous as easily as it can be sincere, perfunctory as easily as heartfelt.

It must therefore be rooted in below-the-line qualities of spirit such as gratitude and appreciation if it is to be meaningful to employees.

Leaders who wish to more effectively recognize employees, then, must begin by taking a candid look at the fundamental beliefs and values shaping their own behavior.

Do I have a sincere and personal appreciation for the contribution of employees? Do I genuinely feel gratitude for the work they do? Do I have a truly appreciative heart?

The answers to these questions will go a long way in determining how effective your efforts at recognition will be.

Appreciation is not only critical to effective leadership, it is far more so than many leaders realize. In our consulting work we have gone so far as to tell leaders that if they do not sincerely appreciate their employees, they should get out of the business of leadership altogether.

We say this not to be harsh or condemnatory, but simply because  recognition is far too important to be marginalized or trivialized. 

This importance stems in large part from the fact that, to the recipient, recognition is invariably personal. Plans and projects might be what people end up talking about but we are the ones doing a good job. We are the ones contributing to a program. We are the ones being thanked and valued.

Recognition is therefore an issue fundamentally concerned with people, not tasks. It is an acknowledgment of contributions made, but in a deeper sense it is an acknowledgment of the value and worth of an individual him- or herself.

And much as we all want to be recognized for what we do, we want even more we want to be appreciated for who we are.

This is true of our employees, our friends, our coworkers, our family, and ourselves. It is a universal human desire. And because it is such a personal issue, no one will be satisfied with a supervisor who does not value their efforts and recognize their contributions.

Recognition, Thanks, and Motivation July 27, 2020

The link between recognition and motivation in the workplace are clear. We need only look to our own experience — the pride we felt when our work was praised by an appreciative supervisor, the improvement in our outlook when we were sincerely thanked for the grunt work we do month in and month out — to understand how the one leads to the other.

But in spite of the fact that it stands a free, immediately implementable, and constantly available source of employee motivation, recognition is sadly lacking in the workplace.

The toll of such oversight is heavy, in both organizational and human terms. One of the executives of a steel corporation in eastern Pennsylvania, for example, one told us that when he was first hired as the foreman of one of the foundries, he was receiving performance reviews on all employees on a regular basis.

He noticed one day that a certain long-time employee had been doing particularly good work the past several weeks. Wanting to encourage such performance, he called the man over the next time he saw him, and said he had noticed his efforts and wanted to thank him for everything he was doing for the organization.

In recounting the story to us later, the executive noted that the worker stood well over six feet tall and weighed upwards of 250 pounds, with not an ounce of fat on him. He was a hard man through and through, and not someone looking for charity from anyone.

But as he stood in the heat of the foundry floor that day, tears began to stream down his face. “I’m sorry,” he said with obvious embarrassment. “It’s just that I’ve worked here for seventeen years, and this is the first time anyone has ever thanked me for something I’ve done.”

That the contributions of countless human beings, from foundry workers and waitresses to managers and vice-presidents, go unrecognized and unthanked for weeks or even years at a time is simply a reality of the world today. It may seem morally acceptable to you, or it may not. But feelings of propriety aside, wholesale disregard of the dynamics of effective human interaction has tangible, bottom line consequences on organizational performance.

All across the nation, workers do their jobs in the absence of any meaningful sense of gratitude from their organization, and many do them well. But the potential they might otherwise be able achieve is squandered day after day after day. For people will never give their all for an organization that takes their efforts for granted.

This might be good enough for some leaders. They  might believe that nothing more is possible, or simply be content with employees who will, most of the time, do what they are told.  But mere compliance will never suffice as a foundation for true excellence. Distinction will never be built on a workforce simply clocking in, clocking out, and collecting their paychecks.

Workplace Vision in Action: One Example July 13, 2020

Employees can bring many things to the office, but workplace vision is not one of them. Vision is an element of organizational culture, and culture derives most directly from the actions and choices of leaders at all levels.

But what does it mean for a leader to instill vision in to a workplace? What does this look like in practice?

You may remember the plant manager, described in a previous post, who so eloquently linked the requirements of a new manufacturing process to the real, human impact it would have on the lives of the company’s clients.

Two years before that episode, that manager had only recently been hired, and was working to drive the new process into the plant through the rigid application of top-down authority.

Offering no real ownership of the process to employees, he faced (or more accurately, created for himself) numerous challenges.

His top-level managers voiced support only because it was politically expedient to do so. His shop workers used his “fancy” system only resentfully and avoided it in whatever ways possible.

And though a few realized the potential inherent in the new process, most awaited the day that the new manager would go away and the plant would return to “normal.”

The story could have ended in disaster, but happily did not. As time wore on the manager began honestly considering his employees’ views of himself, the effects (both intended and otherwise) of his leadership style, and his hopes and desires for the plant.

Reassessing the foundations of his approach to leadership, he began articulating in more understandable and accessible terms the passion for the work that he had had all along.

In doing so, he instilled a far deeper sense of purpose and meaning in the process he was trying to introduce. He created a vibrant vision of the future for his employees to embrace. And as he more clearly communicated and more consiously modeled this vision, he gradually won the commitment of employees from frontline staff to senior management.

Vision can be a crucial catalyst of organizational change, but it always begins at the top. Moreover, it often, perhaps always, demands the kind personal introspection — challenging and sometimes difficult — that this leader was willing to undertake.

What is my below-the-line understanding of vision and the role it plays in the workplace? How is that understanding manifested in my day-to-day choices? How do others perceive the choices I am making?

Vigilant reflection on questions such as these is key to helping your organization become more committed, enthusiastic, and vision-driven.

Job Description vs. Vision June 22, 2020

Why do people work? Or, put differently, towards what do people work?

Most employees, if asked about their job, will describe the tasks they perform. “I keep the president’s calendar and make her travel arrangements,” they might say, or “I oversee maintenance and repair of the company’s network servers.”

If you press further, asking what they are trying to achieve by those tasks, many will hesitate or stumble, not because they don’t want to explain, but because they have little sense of their work being connected to any larger goals.

Moreover, a distressing number will suggest that their primary concern is simply getting from one day to the next — “I’m trying to stay out of trouble, that’s what I’m trying to achieve.”

Issues of meaning and motivation can be complex in the workplace. One feature, though, is clear. In the absence of a compelling vision of the future, organizational functioning tends to become highly dependent on, and defined by, formal job descriptions.

Within such environments –ultimately created or allowed by leaders  — people perform tasks not to accomplish goals or aims, but simply to discharge the responsibilities of their position.

Under the influence of a workplace culture like this, the office manager orders supplies not to assist in providing better service to clients, but because that’s what the office manager does. The department head holds weekly meetings not to inspire or direct the team she oversees, but because that’s what a department head does.

Job descriptions are, of course, useful and necessary tools. Their utility, however, should not obscure the fact that over-reliance on them tends to inhibit awareness of, and ownership in, the wider goals they are meant to further.

Unless job descriptions are supported by a clear, compelling, and emotionally-resonant vision of the future, organizations will struggle to reach their full potential, despite even furious levels of activity.

It is important to also note that an industry’s arena of functioning does not, in itself, provide any reliable sense vision. Healthcare facilities and social service agencies pursue unquestionably commendable missions. But such organizations can be as mechanical and task-oriented as any machine shop or manufacturing plant.

Put simply, vision is endemic to no class of organization. It’s benefits can be realized only when created through the energy and attention of consciously committed leaders.

Vision, Vision Statements, and Leaders as a “Living Symbol” June 8, 2020

A compelling sense of vision is integral to the operation of outstanding organizations. If vision is to go beyond mere talk, however, it must be embraced throughout the entirety of a workplace.

Leaders must cultivate vision at all levels of organizational responsibility, for only if vision is meaningful to the frontline employees – those who produce the products and interact with the customers — will it achieve its full potential.

This will not happen through a vision statement alone.

Organizational vision is a vibrant source of inspiration animating the shared pursuit of a common goal. Vision statements are an administrative tool. They can be effectively used to communicate organizational goals and aims, but they can also be little more than hollow pieces of bureaucracy.

The value of a vision statement, then, lies not simply in creating and distributing one, but in the impact that the values and objectives it conveys has on the way people think, feel, and behave.

For a vision statement to have  meaning and relevance, leaders must continuously be breathing life into it through their actions, attitudes, and decisions. They must manifest their commitment to it in the decisions they make, the conversations they hold, the coaching they do. They must operationalize it in their organizational policies and procedures and use it to connect the tasks employees are asked accomplish with the purpose those tasks are intended to achieve.

In the words of one business authority, leaders must so incorporate vision into their hour-by-hour activities that they become “a living symbol of the new corporate culture.”

Of crucial importance, then, is the degree to which leaders are personally vision-driven in their work. Similarly critical is the extent that that personal commitment is communicated to employees, though formal channels but also in the many subtle ways that mark it as a true operational priority.

Vision might mean the world to you, but if all your employees see you focusing on is filling beds or trimming costs, they will give little credence to what you say about the vision.

Only if your daily interactions are perceived as being guided by a consistent and compelling vision of the future will that vision resonate with employees. And only to the extent that your employees see a vision genuinely reflected in your actions will that vision take root.

Vision, Communication and the Front-Line Employee May 25, 2020

Vibrant and meaningful vision is intimately tied to leaders’ dreams hopes for the future. To be effective, though, vision cannot, remain at the level of senior leadership. Only to the extent that it is communicated throughout an organization and collectively embraced does vision become relevant to the work of the organization and begin exerting influence on concrete operational realities.

We once had the pleasure of visiting a family resort famous not only for its spotlessly pristine grounds, but also for its ability to maintain such cleanliness through the efforts of teenagers whose mothers couldn’t get them to clean their rooms if they tried.

Seeing one such youth patrolling a plaza with a broom and dustpan, we introduced ourselves and asked him to tell us about his job. The young man described the kinds of routine duties that one would normally expect. But when we asked what he was trying to achieve with his work, he, knowingly or unknowingly, began describing a powerful vision of service.

“Everybody who comes here has problems,” he said. “They have problems when they come, and they’ll have problems when they go. What we try to do is create a fantasy world where, for at least a little while, they can forget their problems.”

Impressed by his answer, we asked how he furthered such a noble goal. He shrugged and said, “Sweeping junk off the ground.”

Remarkable as the young man’s understanding of his job might be, it bears emphasis that his attitude was no happy accident. He wasn’t simply a singularly mission-driven employee that some manager had the good fortune to discover. Rather, his thinking was the effect of a leader-created culture that consciously surrounded even the most mundane tasks with meaning.

Raising attitudes such as this to the level of culture ensures their continuation and steady proliferation throughout the organization. Rather than being an attribute of the employee filling any given position, they are an attribute of the system as a whole.

Getting to this point is no simple task. To become an element of culture, vision must be communicated throughout the entirety of an organization. It must be communicated in terms and through channels that are meaningful and appropriate to each particular level. And it must be communicated not just once or even periodically, but constantly and continuously.

This requires considerable effort.  John Kotter, a former professor at Harvard Business School and one of the foremost authorities on leadership and change, suggested that most organizations undercommunicate their vision by a factor of ten.  For every instance the average leader refers to an organizational vision, Kotter says he or she should do it an additional nine times.

It becomes clear, then, that while leaders may appreciate the importance of communicating vision, almost all drastically underestimate the work needed to establish it as a vibrant element of workplace culture.

Crafting Vision, Finding Vision May 12, 2020

Given how frequently the word finds its way into discourse in management circles, it is worth considering what vision is and where it actually comes from. What is the genesis of a vibrant and compelling sense of organizational vision?

It is not uncommon to hear people speak about creating or crafting vision. Such sentiments are not inaccurate per se, but it’s important to understand that true vision is less something that is created than it is excavated from within.

Vision is a thing the roots of which can be found in each one of us already, if we take the time to look. It is something that needs to be found rather than created, something to be articulated rather than crafted.

For some leaders, vision lies near the surface. It is apparent and relatively straightforward to identify and articulate. For others, vision lies a bit deeper and must be unearthed though a more sustained process of inquiry, introspection and discovery.

But either way, the search is a crucial step of the process and ingredient of the final product. The process of looking within, that inventory-taking of personal values, motivations and dreams, allows leaders to find what will not only inspire themselves, but others as well.

So what goes into a compelling vision? Marketplace metrics have a role, but rarely are effective organizational visions entirely or even predominantly defined by them. In a similar vein, money is indispensable to organizational functioning, but the pursuit of profit will never, by itself, create enthusiasm and commitment. Employees do not cherish dreams of growing market share or hold within their hearts aspirations of happy shareholders and smiling board members.

To capture the spirit of employees at its most vibrant and vital, then, leaders need to ask themselves not only why their organization and its products and services do exist, but why they should exist. To pull the best from their employees, they need to answer who really cares if their business exists at all, and why the world is better off with it than without it.

At its highest, vision defines an organization by the contributions it makes to society.  Statements of this kind touch on issues of the personal and the human, considerations that speak to a universal longing for a better future. And it is in these terms, therefore, that leaders can most effectively articulate their organization’s most inspiring understanding of itself and its work.

Vision and the Possibility of Achievement April 27, 2020

Perhaps you’ve heard the parable of the three bricklayers. Coming across a group of masons at work on the roadside, a traveler asks what each is doing. “Laying brick,” says the first, remaining at his work. “Constructing a wall,” the second replies with a shug. The third wipes his brow and answers, “Building a cathedral.”

The story hinges, of course, on the idea of vision. Vision is that essential bond that connects the duties we are asked to perform with the aims those duties are designed to advance. Vision tells us where we are going, and invests our work with meaning and significance.

Fired by a clear and compelling vision of the future, the intern no longer makes copies simply because he is low man on the totem pole. Instead, he is providing a service, however routine, that facilitates the distribution of resources to those in need.

Motivated by a meaningful sense of mission, the receptionist answers phones not just to earn a paycheck, but to further production of a product beneficial to the public.

“A shared vision is not an idea,” writes Peter Senge in his seminal book, The Fifth Discipline, “It is not even an important idea such as freedom. It is, rather, a force in people’s hearts, a force of impressive power.”

Vision is, in many ways, what raises a job to a calling. It is the difference between a workman laying brick and a workman building a cathedral.

A compelling vision of the future is also what makes achievement possible.

Consider again the work of the three masons. The first lays a brick, lays another, lays a third. He can churn out product aplenty, but he can achieve almost nothing because his work, in his eyes, is nothing more than an endless string of bricks.

The second enjoys a much greater capacity for achievement because of his wider scope of purpose. He can admire the craftsmanship of the walls he has built, can appreciate the attention to detail that his efforts showcase.

But only the third finds emotional resonance in his work. He can take pride in finishing the sanctuary where the faithful will pray, can feel satisfaction in setting out the courtyard where children will gather. He can know, at the end of a long day, that he has accomplished something of value.

Achievement requires a standard by which success and failure will be judged.  Vision provides that definition of what is actually being accomplished.

Vision does not  and cannot change the work that is done. The masons are all using the same bricks, after all. But it does change the context in which that work is pursued.

It changes how work feels as nothing else can. And without it the concept of achievement is a pale and empty abstraction.

Vision: The Emotional Connection April 13, 2020

Much is said today about the role of vision in the workplace. Unfortunately vision is often approached primarily as a tool to be wielded or tactic to be deployed – a mechanistic and relatively superficial understanding unsuited to the task of  capturing employees’ imagination, enthusiasm, dedication, and commitment.

A client once took us on a tour of an 800-person plant manufacturing transmission assemblies for 18-wheel tractor-trailers. The machinery was huge and awe-inspiringly complex. But the manager’s remarks focused on a newly-adopted manufacturing process and the voluminous documentation it required.

Coming across a worker filling out some of theses charts and spreadsheets, the manager asked why so much paperwork necessary. The man spoke of things like ensuring quality and increasing efficiency, and the manager agreed. But there was more than that, he said.

“The reason we track these statistics,” he said, “the real reason we do all this stuff is that someday some trucker is going to be tearing through the panhandle of Texas at 2:30 in the morning, trying his best to make a delivery on time.

“He’s going to be tired and alone, and whether he knows it or not, he will be trusting us to give him a transmission that won’t break down. He’ll be depending on us for his livelihood and his safety, and we can’t let him down. He’s the reason we fill out these forms every day—because it’s our duty to take care of him and everyone like him.”

These words, far from a mere motivational speech or rousing pep talk, sought to invest an otherwise mundane task with purpose and significance. With just a handful of sentences, this manager offered an alternative – and and far more compelling – vision of one employees work, by placing routine duties within a context of profound meaning.

The importance of this should not be underestimated, for we all seek meaning in life. We all want to further something larger than ourselves. And when given the chance to do so, we will work committedly to advance an endeavor that we see as being of personal significance to ourselves.

Unfortunatley meaning is in distressingly short supply in many workplaces. And while employees with no sense of purpose in their work may well still follow directions, will still lift what they are told to lift and file what they are told to file, few will go much beyond that. Few will spontaneously give of themselves in those ways that make the difference between mediocrity and excellence.

Warren Bennis once that wrote that without meaning, labor is time stolen from us. And no one wants to work for someone who is stealing from them. Leaders that hope to create a workforce filled with investment, motivation, and ownership, then, have no choice but to find ways to suffuse their workplace with meaning.

Capturing the Human Spirit March 23, 2020

Many employees are cynical, apathetic, disillusioned with their work. This is a sad truth of the workplace.

What is also true, though, is that none of us want to feel that way about our employment. We would all rather be motivated than unmotivated, rather be fired up about the work we do than indifferent.

Given that human beings have a fundamental desire to be engaged at the level of the spirit, the question leaders must ask themselves is not Why aren’t these employees engaged? but What elements of my workplace culture are preventing them from being engaged?

We have previously explored how leaders can inadvertently create the very behaviors —hostility, insubordination, apathy, indifference, etc. — they most dislike in employees, through the unintended consequences of their own leadership actions and choices.

But I’m not a tyrant, many might think to themselves. I’m not a bully. I’m one of the nice guys.

This is likely true. We have found they majority of the leaders we have worked with to be sincere and well-meaning people.

Yet it is undeniable that leaders may praise employees’ accomplishments, ask after their families, and remember their birthdays, yet still hold mental models — say, that that employees will not work unless supplied with external reasons to do so — that generate counterproductive and even destructive workplace dynamics.

The crux of the issue, it can be seen, lies in the below-the-line mental models that leaders hold. Do they — do you, as a leader – believe that the average human being can find work a source of satisfaction? That most employees have the capacity to exercise a relatively high degree of imagination, ingenuity, and creativity in the solution of organizational problems? That even frontline employees seek a sense of meaning and accomplishment in their work?

Such questions are far from mere abstractions, for fundamental views about human nature determine, in large part, the culture any leader builds in his or her human system. And that, in turn, shapes the behaviors and choices of the employees functioning in that culture.

The base of knowledge about human behavior in the workplace is not new. And if truth be told, few of its principles are particularly surprising or revolutionary. Just as studies on diet and health regularly emphasize a few well-known concepts—eat more fruits and vegetables, get more exercise— findings on the health and effectiveness of human interactions have been remarkably consistent.

Rather than seeking new answers, then, it seems we would be far better served by holding the mirror up to our beliefs, and considering how closely they match the accumulated body of proven and dependable principles.

Put simply, reflecting on what we truly believe—our theories-in-use, not just our espoused theories—is imperative in capturing the human spirit and developing the human potential of those around us.

Creating Motivation? Or Creating Conditions Conducive to Motivation? March 9, 2020

Countless leaders have wrestled with the issues of motivation. How do I motivate this or that employee? How do I increase collective motivation throughout my office, department, or organization?

These questions address important workplace realities. But are the foundations of such inquiry sound? Do leaders actually motivate employees at all?

Research has suggested that a great deal workplace motivation stems from a relatively small number of sources – things like opportunities for achievement and recognition, the enjoyment of work itself, opportunities for increased responsibility, and personal growth and development.

Such studies further suggest that true motivation is not something that can be given from the outside. A sense of achievement in work well done, the satisfaction of increasing responsibility, the pleasure of doing an enjoyed task—none of these can leaders give directly to employees, like they would a raise or a benefit package.

Rather motivation comes only from within each individual person. Leaders can create the conditions in which motivation flourishes, but they never create motivation directly.

Put simply, leaders don’t motivate employees. They create cultures and environments in which employees’ inherent motivation manifests itself.

What does this mean in practice?

It means that people have good reasons for wanting to work. We want to contribute to meaningful goals. We want to be thanked and appreciated for the efforts we contribute. We want our capacities are fully utilized.

This intrinsic drive seems to lie at the heart of W. Edward Deming’s comment that excellence is 100% voluntary. His words suggest that rarely, if ever, will managers be able to “motivate” employees to excellence through the brute force of sanctions and rewards.

What they can do is create conditions in which employees are inspired to voluntarily give their all to a project or goal they believe in.

Viewing employees as unwilling partners in need of motivation, leaders place themselves in the position of continually “pushing the rope” toward excellence.

But with an understanding of the basic human desire for meaningful endeavor, leaders can embark on the far more exciting prospect of unleashing and harnessing the human spirit already filling their workplace.

What Motivates People? (3 of 3) February 23, 2020

Previously this series examined those environmental factors that most led to motivation and inhibited it. These might seem like two sides of the same coin, but there are indications that the two are less intertwined than one might guess.

Research conducted by Frederick Herzberg suggested that, rather than opposing ends of the same spectrum, they constitute two different scales altogether.

Influenced by different factors in different ways, motivation and demotivation rise and fall independently of one another. The level of one, in other words, doesn’t necessarily predict or determine the level of the other.

What does this mean in practical terms?

One important implication is that human beings can be both motivated and demotivated at the same time. We can be excited by the responsibility of a new job while being discouraged by the red tape involved. We can enjoy the recognition of heading a high profile project while chafing at restrictive systems of supervision and oversight.

The importance of this fact for leaders should not be overlooked. It is inevitable that some workplace conditions will annoy, irritate, and anger our employees. It’s similarly inevitable that some of those conditions will be beyond a leader’s ability to remedy.

But Herzberg’s research suggests that, regardless whether or not they can alleviate sources of demotiavtion, leaders are always capable of providing meaningful sources of motivation. They might not be able to remove the negatives, but they can always find ways to provide the positives.

This reality can be highly empowering to leaders at all levels. It suggests that leaders can always do something. They are never powerless.

Yet it also raise a challenging question:  How are to those of us in positions of authority choosing to divide our leadership time between tasks that aim to supply motivation and tasks focused on removing demotivation?

Are we, as leaders, merely addressing grievances? Or are we actively working to grab our employees’ imagination and fire their interest?

This is no trivial matter, for the two approaches yield very different results. And only to the extent that we are consciously working to create conditions that nurture motivation can it be said that we are truly working toward capturing the power of the human spirit in our workplace.

What Motivates People? (2 of 3) February 10, 2020

We previously explored research that Frederick Herzberg did on primary sources of workplace motivation —  things like achievement, recognition, work itself, responsibility, and growth and development. These findings are valuable in themselves, but Herzberg didn’t stop there.

He also asked employees to describe times they had been particularly dissatisfied, uninterested, and unengaged in their work. And as was the case in motivation, responses to this question tended to fall into a number of clearly defined categories.

Topping the list of primary sources of demotivation (what Herzberg somewhat inelegantly referred to as “hygiene factors”) were:

  1. Company policies and procedures. Red tape is irritating in the best of circumstances, but is particularly aggravating when it prevents us from doing work that is expected of us.  It is no wonder, then, that policies and procedures were cited as employees’ number-one source of demotivation.
  2. Supervision. Polling has consistently shown that employees quit managers far more often than they quit companies. It therefore comes as little surprise that poor supervisory practices were the second-most frequently mentioned source of workplace demotivation.
  3. Workplace relationships. Interactions with others exercise great influence over both our immediate mood and our longer-term disposition. Negative relationships — intimidating, antagonistic, frustrating, etc. — are therefore a powerful source of demotivation.
  4. Working conditions. Workplace conditions are a classic cause of discontent. Whether physical danger, onerous working hours, or inadequate equipment, adverse conditions are a perennial source of demotivation.
  5. Salary. Though salary is widely considered the fundamental reason people work (and is unquestionably necessary), money functions far more powerfully as a source of demotivation than motivation. Decreasing the size of an employee’s paycheck will invariably demotivate him or her. But increasing it will not, by itself, guarantee that any additional work will be done.

Demotivators are what cause employees to grumble, what cause them to quit their jobs or form unions. They therefore occupy the majority of leaders’ time and attention.

But even if a leader could create ideal policies and perfect workplace conditions, she would not have increased motivation. Employees might not be discouraged, but neither would they be motivated.

New policies, pay packages, and parking lots can remove sources of irritation, but they can’t create enthusiasm and commitment. They can’t, in other words, capture the human spirit.

This is important for leaders to understand, because removing negatives, although important, achieves only a state of neutrality. Achieving the excellence to which leaders aspire requires something more.

The third and final part of this series will explore how leaders can use the two facets of workplace motivation identified by Herzberg – motivators and demotivators – to build a workplace that cultivates employee commitment, drive, and ownership.

What Motivates People? (1 of 3) January 27, 2020

Motivation is a central workplace concern. Countless leaders ponder what stimulates it, how can it be sustained, how is it destroyed.

Luckily such questions caught the attention of Frederick Herzberg, an American psychologist who became one of the foremost authorities on business management.

Herzberg explored the issue of motivation through hundreds of in-depth, open-ended interviews. In them, he asked employees to describe times when they had been truly satisfied by their work, times they had been personally committed to the task before them, eager to get to the job, and willing to go the extra mile, not because it was expected of them, but because they wanted to.

In compiling and analyzing these accounts, Herzberg found that, out of the numerous factors that could motivate a person in the workplace, a relatively small number were identified again and again.

Among these were:

1.      Achievement. More than any other factor, employees indicated that the chance to achieve something personally meaningful was a source of significant motivation to them.

2.      Recognition. Because human beings are social creatures, the opinions of others exert a strong influence on our outlook and disposition. Having our work recognized by supervisors, coworkers, and customers therefore provides a strong source of motivation.

3.      Work itself. Herzberg’s findings were published at a time when it was widely believed that employees needed to be coerced or bribed into doing work. His research, however, found that work itself—the creativity of designing advertisements, the thrill of committing high-stakes financial transactions, the personal connection of caring for patients—is a powerful source of motivation in its own right.

4.      Responsibility. Increased organizational responsibility typically involves duties that are more strategic, substantive, and challenging. But its also sends a powerful signal that we are respected and valued enough to be given tasks of importance. Responsibility therefore provides motivation through multiple channels.

5.      Growth and development. Few experiences provide more satisfaction than exercising and developing one’s natural talents. (Think, for example, of the diligence with which hobbyists hone their voluntary craft). Opportunities for the expansion and development capacities, then, offer a natural source of motivation.

Such findings are enlightening in themselves. They challenge notions, many persisting even today, of what is and is not meaningful to employees. They also provide leaders with a valuable “menu” of sources of potential motivation.

But Herzberg’s research did not stop there. It also explored those factors that leave us drained and distracted. The second part of this series will explore this topic – what the research said about what demotivates people in the workplace.

Motivation, Culture and “Bad Attitude” Employees January 13, 2020

Almost nothing is more frequently lamented in management circles than “bad attitude” employees, those people it seems nothing can be done with.

It’s true that few workplace dynamics are harder to address than antagonism, apathy and hostility.

But rarely mentioned is the role that sincere and well-meaning leaders can play in creating such “bad attitude” employees.

A friend of ours is an avid and life-long gardener. She is the type of person who, if working as, say,  a landscaper, would need only the slightest direction to transform a piece of property into a small corner of paradise.

But suppose you, as her supervisor, decided she needed to be “managed.” Suppose you gave her a single tulip bulb and said, “Take this outside and plant it where the X is marked on the ground. I will come by later to check your work. If it’s satisfactory, I’ll give you another bulb to work on.”

And further suppose that company policy required her to secure written permission to pull any weeds under two inches tall and file a requisition order to use any company spades or rakes.

What would her attitude toward her job be then? Would she wake up excited about doing the kind of work that she has loved since childhood? Or would she dread yet another day at the grindstone?

Hiring the right people for the right job is certainly important. But hiring policies will never be sufficient, in themselves, to guarantee or sustain superior organizational performance.

Why? Because organizations are constantly hiring the “right” people—people well-suited to their positions and capable of making significant contributions in them—and promptly turning them into the “wrong” people.

In the example above, our gardening friend would, unquestionably and without a doubt, be a terrible employee. Filled with resentment, hostility, and indifference, she would not only seem like a bad-attitude employee, she would actually be one.

But while a supervisor would rightly identify her as a problem, he or she would be mistaken in assuming that she walked in the door that way.

Our friend was the world’s most enthusiastic gardener when she was hired.  It was only through her leaders’ choices, both in direct supervision and in formulating policies, that her attitude gradually soured.

This example, though clearly fabricated, illustrates how leaders’ choices and actions can negate the commitment and motivation associated with the intrinsic enjoyment of work itself.

Of course not every employee will be in love with his or her job, and alternative sources of motivation will need to be identified in many cases.

And yet reducing workplace endeavor to the lowest common denominator will and managing from that standpoint will create a workplace culture toxic to morale and enthusiasm, and virtually guarantee a steady stream of “bad attitude” employees.

Employees, Donkeys, and Getting Things Done December 24, 2019

In some ways, motivation is less complicated than one might imagine.

Involving people in decisions that impact them, recognizing the value of their contributions, giving them opportunities to assume responsibility in meaningful ways — study after study has shown the importance of factors like these.

Yet countless workplaces fail to supply such sources of motivation. Why?

Much of the reason can be found in beliefs about basic human nature, particularly beliefs suggesting that human beings are not intrinsically motivated, that they are fundamentally averse to work, that they require external impetus to do it.

Such deeply entrenched mental models produce a range of behaviors and structures that treat employees less like human beings than donkeys or other load-bearing animals.

Under the influence of such paradigms, leaders strive to advance projects by aiming employees in the proper direction and then “motivating” them with a swift kick in the rear end — a strategy that has been colorfully referred to as “KITA” (kick in the ass) management.

KITA is unequivocal. The use or threat of formal reprimands, reductions in pay, reductions of job duties or privileges, and termination produces immediate, observable action.

(Reward-centered systems such as profit sharing and merit-based pay are forms of KITA as well—the carrot rather than the stick, but KITA nonetheless.)

But while KITA management can ensure compliance, it will never create engagement, ownership or enthusiasm. It will never suffice to unleash a sense of internal drive to achieve. It can, in other words, produce movement, but not motivation.

The source of KITA’s shortcomings is simple. The farmer may have a beautiful vision of the many crops that pulling the plow from point A to point B helps to bring about. But the donkey has been given no such vision and therefore has little or no investment in striving after point B.

Taught only to avoid the discomfort behind it and pursue the goodies before it, the donkey cares nothing for the wider context or goals of its work. In fact, the donkey doesn’t even know point B exists.  Its “management” has ensured that it thinks only of its own personal well being.

How many leaders today lament the unreliability of their employees, their unwillingness to take initiative and lack of motivation? And yet how many have planted the seeds of those very behaviors by inadvertently conveying to employees their job is not to think or ask questions, but merely to follow orders?

It is true that KITA can produce a certain level of results. But it is similarly true that KITA is a tool whose use undercuts its own ultimate aims.

And because of these dynamics, leaders seeking to build the best human system they can must be constantly on guard, lest we, through the agency of our own leadership actions, be inadvertently creating among employees the qualities that most frustrate us and hold back our organizations from becoming what they otherwise could be.

Capturing the Human Spirit December 9, 2019

Leadership is a 100 percent human undertaking. Systems are populated by people. Policies are embraced or rejected by people. Plans are enacted or ignored by people.  And because of this, effective leadership hinges on a leader’s ability to access the talent, enhance the capacity, and develop the potential of people.

But what are these human beings that leaders are obliged to work with?

At its most basic, humanity encompasses both tangible/physical and non-tangible/spiritual aspects. Leaders tend to focus almost exclusively on the former, particularly as they pertain to the professional performance of employees. In many ways this is understandable. One-dimensional abstractions like “welders” or “programmers” are far easier to supervise than flesh-and-blood human beings with shaky marriages, sick kids, and unrealized aspirations.

And yet the idea that employees—or leaders themselves, for that matter—are capable of checking their humanity at the workplace door is as preposterous as it is counterproductive. Leaders might be drawn to the idea of single-purpose “workers,” but human beings are what they will always get. As Anita Roddick, founder of one of the largest cosmetics franchises in the world, once said, “We were searching for employees, but people showed up instead.”

People are complex, filled with nuances and contradictions that can be challenging and – quite frankly – more than a little frustrating to negotiate. And yet the very humanity that we so often seek to avoid holds within it the seeds of true collective excellence.

Deep down, we all know that truly great organizations are never built by workers merely following orders or striving after external bonuses and perks.

It’s true that a certain level of compliance can be bought, obedience compelled, and results simply required of employees. But we intuitively understand, from our own experience if nothing else, that people’s best comes only when their imagination, heart and spirit are truly committed to an enterprise.

W. Edwards Deming once declared that excellence is 100 percent voluntary. Excellence, he seemed to suggest, is choice reserved for each individual employee, a gift that may be freely given, but can never be demanded.

Unlocking the power of this voluntary commitment and dedication requires the cultivation a working environment which supports and develops the whole person— and not just those portions upon which professional performance is imagined to depend.

Only in this way can leaders hope to capture the human spirit which is the basis of all true excellence. And building this environment is the essence of true leadership.

Taking Stock: Three Critical Elements November 25, 2019

Crucial to growth as a leader is a comprehensive process of personal stock-taking, an ongoing discipline of objectively looking at our actions and beliefs and considering the effect they have on the individuals and systems around us.

Though such reflection encompasses many constituent elements, three seem to be of particular importance: knowledge, choice, and perception.

For any given question, we must first ask ourselves how our below-the-line beliefs stand up against the accumulated body of knowledge about what contributes to or detracts from productive interactions. If our beliefs contradict that knowledge base, we will need to begin a process of honest reevaluation and reframing.

If our beliefs match the knowledge base, the issue then becomes one of choice. Is our belief a theory-in-use that is reflected in our day-to-day choices? Or is it merely an espoused theory that begins and ends in words alone? These are crucial questions, for only to the extent that our beliefs are realized through conscious choices do our organizations benefit from them.

The perceptions of others can then be seen as the culmination of the knowledge we consult and the choices we make. All of us mistake espoused theories for theories-in-use at times. The people around us, however, see only the actions that stem from our theories-in-use. Their perceptions therefore provide an important view of our behavior as it really is, not we think or hope or would like it to be.

This three-part stock-taking this requires discipline. Testing familiar beliefs against tried-and-true principles, examining and reexamining choices to ensure they reflect that knowledge base, and comparing personal perceptions with the views of others demands effort and exertion.

But just as few of us would consider driving an eighteen-wheeler on a busy interstate without side view mirrors, could we any more effectively rise to the complexities of leading a modern organization with no conscious mechanism of reflection?

This is a question that might well give every leader pause for thought.

Perceptions, Authority, and Perceptions of Authority November 11, 2019

Managers today often perceive relatively little hierarchical “distance” between them and their subordinates. Yes, they might shoulder certain responsibilities and make the final call in certain situations. But they generally see themselves as part of the team.

That perception, though, is in many ways a consequence of the very authority they hold (and their subordinates don’t).

However insignificant the difference between you and your subordinates might seem to you, it matters a great deal to them. And because employees behave according to how they – and not you – see the world, that perceived difference in authority influences your every interaction together.

No matter how close you feel to your employees, then, your authority ensures that they steer clear of your hot buttons, walk carefully when you are having a bad day, and tell you things in ways you will find most palatable.

And because they do this without telling you, only by patient and careful search could you spot the shadow your authority inadvertently casts.

A mid-level manager who attended one of our presentations once shared these ideas with her own supervisor. “Thank goodness there’s none of that kind of stuff between us,” said that leader, with whom she had an extremely close and collaborative working relationship.

“Well…” the woman hesitated.

“What?” he exclaimed, sitting up in his chair. “Like what?”

In later telling the story to us, the woman said that it was at that point that she pulled up her mental list of off-limits topics – note the mere fact that she had a list of “safe” and “unsafe” subjects – and mentioned the most innocuous, most inoffensive one she could find.

The suddenly stony face of her supervisor turned several shades of color in rapid succession. A few tense moments passed in silence and then she stood up and backed out of the room without another word being said by either of them.

About 20 minutes later the supervisor came to her office and said gruffly, “I guess I proved the point, didn’t I?”

The point that bears emphasis here is this was a great boss, one the woman couldn’t praise enough. And yet the influence of his organizational authority created a collection of red lines that were nearly invisible to him, but were every-day realities to his subordinates.

How much do each of us work to find our own red lines and the ways they are projected on those we oversee? How consistently do we manage the effects of our authority? How proactively do we drive fear from the workplace and consciously work to make  an environment that welcomes all employee insights and observations – and not just the ones we prefer to hear?

Your View Isn’t the Important One: The Role of Perception in the Workplace October 28, 2019

Imagine that you wanted to know what kind of husband a certain man is. How might you find out?

This simplest approach might be simply asking him directly.  But that would only reveal the kind of husband he thinks he is, or tries to be, or hopes to be.

If you wanted to know what kind of husband he actually is, you would do far better to ask his wife. She is the one who interacts with him on a regular basis. She is the one who experiences him in the role of “husband” day after day, and her perspective is therefore uniquely positioned to assess his efforts.

Put in another way, her perceptions are the true test of whether he is as effective a husband as he thinks he is. And as important as they are in a marriage, perceptions play an equally important role in workplace leadership.

To understand why, think about your own boss. Though she might honestly consider how her decisions affect you and your work, she will never understand their consequences as fully as you do. Her assessment will always be limited, as any leader’s would be.

We human beings can assess the impact of our behavior on others to a degree. Our perceptions, however, are necessarily one-sided. We can strive for impartiality, can do our best to put ourselves in other’s shoes. But such efforts will get us only so far.

A leader’s self-reflection in the workplace, then, must intentionally take into account the views of his or her employees. Just as comedians know that audience reaction is what determines the quality of a joke, leaders must learn that the views of employees—and not their own perceptions—are what determine the quality of workplace dynamics.

You may think you are an approachable supervisor. But if your employees think otherwise, communication will be poor. You may think you treat subordinates equally. But if they perceive favoritism, cohesiveness and teamwork will suffer.

Like the husband mentioned before, you can describe the kind of leader you think you are, or are trying to be, or hope to be. But only your employees can say what kind of a leader you actually are. And if you want to be effective with them, it is their view that must concern you.

Only when self-reflection incorporates the views and perceptions of others, only when we reach beyond the limits of our own beliefs and expectations, can it be said that we have a true reflection of the human system we head and the impact our actions have on it.

What We Believe, What We Think We Believe (3 of 3) October 15, 2019

The first part in this series introduced the concept of the espoused theories we consciously believe in and the theories-in-use that actually determine our choices and behavior.

The second installment explored how it is not only possible, but likely for there to be differences between those two sets of theories.

But what can be done about those discrepancies?

The issue can be approached from two angles. The first concerns the validity of the espoused theories we hold. We must first determine whether the things we consciously believe actually lead to the results we think they do.

Does competition between employees really increase productivity? Does collaborative leadership really lead to better decisions?  Do low-level employees really need constant supervision?

Questions like these deserve serious attention, for if the principles we consciously champion are not sound, our leadership will inevitably flounder.

The second (and more fundamental) aspect concerns those areas in which our behaviors do not match the theories we espouse — areas we must identify and find ways to remedy.

This presents no small challenge, for, as we have noted before, discrepancies between belief and behavior are nearly invisible to us.  Like the woman in the diner or the CEO of the manufacuting firm, we all think our behavior reflects our beliefs. It just happens that sometimes we’re wrong.

As leaders we can address these issues only by taking an honest look at daily behaviors and reflecting on the attitudes and beliefs those behaviors imply.

Only by stepping back from ourselves can we note that our tendency to act unilaterally doesn’t match our championing of collaboration, that our habit of putting subordinates in competition with one another doesn’t support our speeches about teamwork, that our level of information sharing contradicts what we think we believe about open communication.

Only by a searching reexamination of ongoing patterns of behavior can we begin assembling a picture of the values, paradigms, and assumptions that inform our actions and decisions.

Maintaining this level of awareness throughout a day—while sitting in meetings, chatting with coworkers, writing reports—takes effort. It is work in the truest sense of the word.

Moreover, it almost invariably punctures some of the comfortable fictions we build around ourselves.

Maybe you realize that instead of never having time to talk with subordinates, you simply do not value their opinions that much.

Maybe you find that though you think of yourself as being available to coworkers, you actually wish they would simply resolve problems themselves.

Maybe you discover that though you wish others would shoulder more responsibility, you are reluctant to give up the opportunity to be the hero.

Such revelations can be hard to face, particularly when they run counter to familiar assumptions and cherished self-conceptions.

But simply becoming aware of these disconnects is no small achievement, and beginning to grapple with them is a step of real growth, not only as a leader, but as a human being as well.

What We Believe, What We Think We Believe (2 of 3) September 23, 2019

The first part in this series introduced the idea of espoused theories and theories in use. It also raised the possibility that the principles each of us consciously support might not be what are actually shaping our behavior and decisions.

But what does this look like in practice?

In our consulting work we were once presenting these concepts when the CEO of a heavy manufacturing firm jumped from his chair and hurried out of the room.

Returning a few minutes later, he explained that while he profoundly believed that all employees were trustworthy partners in a common enterprise, he had scheduled time clocks to be installed on the floor of his factory that very day.

Despite the egalitarian beliefs he espoused, he said, he realized that his actions revealed a theory-in-use that factory workers could not be trusted as fully as office workers.

Dismayed and unwilling to accept the double standard implied by his behavior, he had stepped into the hall to cancel the installation.

Because all of us sincerely believe the values we espouse, we rarely spot contradictions within ourselves. We are biased toward a logical and consistent view of our actions, and we therefore tend to see just about what we expect to see in our behavior.

But here is the rub: just as we clearly see the disconnects in other people—the “open door” supervisor who hates interruptions, the “give me honest feedback” associate who prickles at any perceived criticism — those same people see the discrepancies that exist within us.

It’s important to again stress that these incongruities should not be mistaken for hypocrisy. The classic case of the manager who champions the cause of employee empowerment while micro-managing in actual practice provides a good example.

Though some might pay lip service to empowerment for the sake of “optics”, most mangers honestly support it and think they practice it. It just happens that, in actual fact, they do not. The strength of their espoused theories fools them into thinking that their behavior is something other than what it is.

The challenge facing all of us, therefore, revolves around the idea that the things we ardently believe in might have little or nothing to do with the choices we make in our day-to-day interactions.

It is not only possible, but likely, that in certain areas of life, we really don’t know how we act. Or, more accurately, that our perception of our behavior differs significantly from the perceptions of everyone else with whom we interact.

Building greater coherence between our espoused theories and our theories in use is therefore one of the central aims of the discipline of reflective leadership.

The third and final installment of this series will explore ways to pursue this coherence between beliefs and behaviors.

What We Believe, What We Think We Believe (1 of 3) September 9, 2019

Assessing minute-by-minute choices is a key aspect of the discipline of reflective leadership. But building a true picture of how we act turns out to be surprisingly difficult.

Part of the difficulty stems from the way we think about our behavior.

We all act in accordance with mental “maps” of what we believe to be true about the world. These maps allow us to plan, implement, and evaluate actions.

But for all their value, they have one very significant catch: the maps that shape our behavior are often not the ones we think shape our behavior.

Take, for example, the manager of a body purification center we once heard being interviewed in a bustling morning diner.

The woman spoke eloquently and with conviction about the benefits of restoring systemic balance, releasing flows of energy, and ridding the body of toxins.

But at one point the interviewer noted that, even as she spoke, she was smoking a cigarette and eating a plate of greasy sausage. “What does that square with ridding the body of toxins?” he asked.

The woman paused a moment, then laughed and said, “Well, you gotta wake up somehow, right?”

The beliefs, values, and views this woman consciously championed centered on alternative, holistic health. Her behavior, however, suggested a more complex set of mental models.

Chris Argyris and Donald Schon, of the Harvard Business School and MIT, explored mental dichotomies like this at length. In particular, they focused on ideas they termed espoused theories and theories-in-use.

Espoused theories, they said, are those values and beliefs to which we consciously subscribe. They are ideas we talk about, think about, and express to others.

Theories-in-use, on the other hand, are the things that actually determine our behavior. They are the worldview and values that are revealed by our actions.

As illustrated above, espoused theories and theories-in-use can be identical, but often are not.

Such differences could be mistaken for hypocrisy. But Argyris and Schon were clear that espoused theories and theories-in-use are equally sincere expressions of genuine belief.

We truly and legitimately believe in both sets of theories. One simply determines our behavior, while the other does not. And the problem, the real challenge, is that it is very difficult for us to tell which of our theories are which.

Part two of this series will present some practical examples of how these dynamics can play out in the workplace. It will also explore ways that we can see past our espoused theories and identify those theories-in-use actually shaping our choices and actions.

“The world is in dire need of more effective leaders, and this powerful book gets to the heart of what makes or breaks leaders more than any other I have read.”
William B. Harley, President, Harley Consulting & Coaching