Archive for Lisa Christie

On metaphors, maps and transformational learning

January 27, 2008 / / No comments

 Given the “perpetual white water” of the contemporary business, Peter Senge has pointed out that one of the most critical skills that organizations need to develop is “learning how to learn.”  Real learning can be contrasted with “shelf-ware” – that brand of learning that remains intellectual and theoretical, until it is ultimately forgotten… In contrast, real learning changes the way we look at a situation, the way that we think, the way that we are, the way that we behave – it is truly transformational.Transformational learning involves seeing things from a new perspective, so that new kinds of behavior become natural and obvious rather than “politically correct.” 

In an earlier article, I wrote about how the metaphors we use to describe leadership and organizations shape our perception and interpretation of a situation and therefore, our behavior (http://www.creativeleadercoach.com/2008/01/16/what-is-your-organization-like/).  Metaphors act as a kind of map of the territory; yet, as we know, there is an enormous difference between the map and the actual territory.

We need simply compare a street map to the full experience and complexity of our own neighborhoods to see that the map simply represents one way of perceiving and thinking about a much richer and complex reality. The number of physical, social, psychological… maps (not to mention the interactions amongst these categories) that we could create are only exhausted by our imaginations. Each new map would give us new insight, but taken all-together, they could never exhaust reality.

For this reason, we need to hold our perspectives more lightly, to experiment with new ones to see how they work or don’t work for us.

One prevalent metaphor is the organization as a well-oiled machine. In upcoming articles, we’ll explore this metaphor in more detail to see what it buys us and also what it costs us with respect to collaboration, innovation, and organizational effectiveness.

Practice

In what ways is your organization like a machine? How is this analogy useful to you in thinking about your role as a leader?

In what ways is your organization different than a machine?

What different metaphors do you use for thinking about your organization?

Category: All Posts, Education, Leadership, Organization /

Transformative Leadership in Times of Stress

January 19, 2008 / / One comment

In a recent article, Chris Rice, CEO of BlessingWhite reminds us that the quality of leadership becomes especially important in challenging times. Keeping your employees energized and enthused, and retaining your best employees best positions our organizations to adapt and respond to changing conditions.  Yet, if surveys of employee satisfaction and commitment are any indication, more of your employees than you would like to imagine are open to or considering other opportunities.  The quality of leadership and, especially, the quality of the manager-employee relationship are critical to retention and engagement.  

Yet, have you noticed that, under conditions of organizational stress, the quality of leadership may decline rather than than become stronger?  Research has shown that whereas the perception that a team is winning tends to build team cohesion, teams that experience themselves as “losing” are more likely to engage in finger-pointing and to pull apart in the face of heightened demands.

A big part of the challenge (and the opportunity) is that leaders are human.  When we are fearful, our knee-jerk reactions (in our current cultural context) are often an impulse to self-protection and an increased need to control the situation. In an organizational setting this translates to tightened controls and more unilateral top-down directives, in which alternative perspectives are suppressed. This tends to demoralize employees and fuel a sense of alienation at precisely the same time that greater engagement and commitment is needed.

What can be done? 

Well, first, may I propose that we have a choice in how we respond to stress. Extraordinary leadership begins with extraordinary self-leadership.  How many of us, when we are under stress begin to skip exercising (guilty), eat poorly, and sleep less?  Sprinters can afford to invest all of their energy in that one big push, but most of are not in a short race — we are in a marathon. Or to use a financial analogy, how long can we draw down our “capital” before we begin to see diminishing returns on our investments?

A coaching client of mine — a remarkable woman — when under extraordinary demands on many fronts, described to me her proactive, constructive response to stress: she began to eat better (more fresh vegetables and healthy meals), she intensified her stress management routine, she reached out to good friends and colleagues for support, she took time to appreciate her accomplishments, to give appreciation to others.  Impressed, I asked her how she managed to do precisely the right thing when most of us tend to feel the compulsion to do precisely the wrong thing; she said she had done what we all do in the past and had learned from it.  (Coaches learn from their clients all the time.)

You can bet that she was (and is) a Rock of Gibraltar for her colleagues, who look to her for leadership.

Another aspect of her success, you might have noticed, is that she reaches out to others to form collaborative relationships to constructively deal with the challenging environment.  This, by the way, tends to be a very successful strategy for dealing with stress that comes most naturally to women  (http://raysweb.net/poems/articles/tannen.html) but works well for both genders.   

Effectively, using the language of Partnership (http://www.creativeleadercoach.com/2007/12/09/what-is-partnership/), in times of stress, we do have a choice between domination (pushing ourselves into ill health and fractured relationships, and dominating others through demands and control), and Partnering with ourselves and others.  We might also notice that the dominator approach is fear-based and reactive, and as such, it does not draw on our higher human endowments;  whereas the Partnership approach is expansive and intelligent, and offer us far greater potential for personal and organizational health.

Application

How do you respond to stress? What is one thing you could do differently to make yourself and others stronger rather than weaker in times of challenge?

Category: All Posts, Collaboration, Communication, Leadership, Organization, Partnership, Teams /

What is your organization like?

January 16, 2008 / / No comments

How do you describe an experience to someone who has never had it?  If you are like most people, you will compare the experience to something that the person may be familiar with — you will use a metaphor.  These metaphors act like a map of the territory, pointing out its features and how to navigate it.

This characteristic of metaphors can be useful in problem solving. When our usual train of thought does not lead us to a solution, one often frutiful approach is to ask, “What is this situation like?” Considering analogies often opens us up to new ways of seeing the problem and potential solutions.

Paradoxically, in the same way that the metaphors we use can reveal the territory, by leading us to think along certain lines, they also serve to obscure the territory.  The reason for this is that, in order to distinguish and differentiate aspects of our environment, we must foreground some part of our experience or thoughts and background others. We see what we are looking at. What reveals also conceals.

This insight is useful for us in thinking about leadership and organizations.  Many of the metaphors we use for organizations have been taken from the military, sports, and beginning in the industrial age, even factories!  Nautical analogies show leaders are “at the helm,” running a “tight ship.” Each of these analogies has arisen in an era shaped by certain ideas, and in turn have shaped the way that we have historically approached leadership and organizations.

Are any of these analogies “true”?  To the extent that they are descriptive (or prescriptive), we can say that they are “true”; yet no one of these analogies exhaustively describe organizations or, especially, their potentials — what they can be.  In the next few posts, we’ll explore common metaphors for organizations, their strengths, and their limitations, and talk about some emerging metaphors that are very useful for thinking about how organizations can better respond to our dynamic environment!

Category: All Posts, Leadership, Organization /

Transformative Leadership Degree with a Concentration in Partnership Studies

January 5, 2008 / / No comments

I’m so pleased to share with you that the California Institute of Integral Studies is launching a new graduate degree program in Transformative Leadership, with a concentration in Partnership Studies.  As you know if you have been reading this blog, I am excited about the potential of a Partnership orientation to meet the challenges we are facing in our organizations today (as well as at every level of our culture). 

Riane Eisler and Susan Carter will be co-teaching the first course this Spring.  If you are interested in a leading-edge graduate education in transformative leadership, I hope you’ll take a look…

transformative-leadership-concentration-in-partnership-studies.pdf

Category: All Posts, Education, Leadership, Partnership /

Values as Attractors

January 2, 2008 / / No comments

I just found this excellent post that fits in wonderfully with our conversation on Partnership culture and how it can enable more flexible, collaborative and innovative organizations…  Two points that I think are especially helpful are:

  1. Values predict behavior (obviously very important to the discussion of culture and organizational change)
  2. Organizational values function as attractors, giving rise to a kind of dynamic order in “chaotic” organizational systems.  The implication is that given shared values, order can emerge in the absence of unilateral power (or control).  Leadership, rather than management, becomes the essential ingredient.  You must see this graphic!

http://blog.vortexdna.com/scholars-everywhere-reinforce-vortexdnas-message/

Category: All Posts, Leadership, Organization, Partnership, Teams, Values /

Leadership & Vision

December 30, 2007 / / 2 comments

In the spirit of the New Year, this week’s post relates to our visions for a better future. Vision is central to leadership. As leaders, we perceive possible desirable futures and take actions to co-create them. A great vision can both suggest the actions needed to achieve it, and unify and inspire organization members to take intelligent, collaborative action towards the achievement of that future.

In its fullest sense, vision involves a dialogue between our rational-sequential “left-brains” and our holistic/visionary “right brains.” (It’s probably no coincidence that our capacity for sight is associated with the “right brain”). 

Because Western culture is built on rationalism, we Westerners (especially engineers, accountants, MBAs, academics, etc.) tend to excel in rational, sequential, incremental logic. Analysis and logic are the big tools in our tool bag and we tend to reach for them whenever we have a job to do. (Guilty!)

Therefore, it is not surprising that we sometimes take this approach to vision. For example, on several occasions, I have seen corporate leaders express vision in terms of financial targets. While financial targets are important, rational-conceptual goals, the limitations of financial target as vision are 1) it doesn’t include much information on how the vision is to be achieved; and 2) as studies have shown, for most organizational members, money has real practical limitations as a motivator. 

However, when we also engage our right brains, we can not only imagine possible futures, but we can gain insights as to how these futures were achieved. Such is the power of our right brains, which can invent entire worlds for us in our dreams. Video game/virtual reality designers are still trying to approximate and imitate that kind of computing power.

As is the case with many of our dreams, not all of our visions are reliable and achievable. Here is where our rational facilities shine. What parts can be used?  Does your imagination suggest any areas for additional research? What good ideas can we take away from this exercise? 

And, because this is dialogue, we can also ask additional questions that draw on the creative resourcefulness of our right brains, such as, “What would be needed to really make this work?”  Or: “What’s missing, that if added, would solve this problem?” 

In sum, to really delve into vision, we play in the educated imagination, and develop some constructive dialogue between our rational and non-rational cognitive capacities.

A whole related topic is to achieve this in groups (done correctly, we can achieve creativity “on steroids” 😉  To gain the benefits of creative synergy, we must be able to “play well together” and then be rigorous in challenging ideas to see what can work, while maintaining constructive, collaborative relationships. More on this another time…

A New Year’s Practice

1. Pick one area of your life, or organization, and instead of focusing on its present limitations, imagine how you would like it to be. Do this just for fun, in the spirit of play.  Think about what it would look like, feel like. … By engaging all of your senses in your vision, you help facilitate the shift.

Tip: If the answer comes to you automatically in a way that you have thought of it many times before, you have not yet tapped into your imagination. Think: constructive daydreaming. If this doesn’t come easily, you can warm up to the process by first remembering a past success in as much detail as possible, and then imagining a positive scene that may be happening somewhere in the present.   

What do you see? Are there any elements of your vision that surprise you? 

Feel free to ask questions of your vision. As we will discuss in future posts, questions are one of the most powerful ways you can get your imagination to work for you. 

At the end of the process, consider what useful new insights or ideas you might take away from the exercise. How might you put these new ideas or insights into action?

Category: All Posts, Creativity, Leadership, Vision /

Comments Now Working

December 30, 2007 / / No comments

Thank you to my good colleague Candice Shehorn for letting me know that comments were not working on the site.  As a WordPress newbie, I had set the Option regarding postings to “subscriber must be registered and logged in.” I had read that this setting was a good way to avoid SPAM — well, yes, if people can’t post — no SPAM!  Oh my. 

I’m glad to report that comments are working correctly now.  I review them to make sure they are appropriate and not SPAM, so if you don’t see your comments posted right away, you should see them within 24 hours.

I appreciate hearing from you. If you have any non-comment feedback about this site, please email me at: lisa.christie@creativeleadercoach.com  

Category: All Posts /

The Gift of High-Commitment Leadership

December 22, 2007 / / No comments

One way that organization culture shapes results relates to employee (or team member) commitment. Research has shown that high levels of employee commitment, as measured by employee retention and whether the employee would recommend the company to a friend as a good place to work, are correlated with an increase in operating margins and net profits and that low levels of commitment are associated with a decrease in these indicators.

What factors impact team member engagement? These factors include:

1) Team members’ perceptions of the quality of leadership (the quality of the organizational vision and strategy, and the leader’s ability to inspire commitment to a larger worthy goal);

2) Opportunities for development;

3) Empowerment; and

4) People skills of the employee’s immediate supervisor.

This is consistent with the observation that, increasingly, people seek meaning and self-actualization in their work, and that that the quality of their interpersonal relations is important to their quality of work life.

Can we provide this kind of work environment for our team members? One of my coaching mentors likes to say that as coaches, we give to our clients most abundantly that which we hold for ourselves. Adapting this to the topic at hand, we might also observe that: As leaders, we give to our colleagues most abundantly, that which what we authentically give to ourselves.

1) Do you fully believe in the mission and vision of your organization? Do you feel you are making a contribution?

2) How self-actualizing are you within the context of our own role? Are you able to contribute to your fullest capability?

3) Are you very satisfied with the quality of our relationships and interactions with colleagues?

If the answer to all of these questions is yes: Fantastic! What are some of the ways you are shaping an environment in which your team members can be similarly inspired and engaged?

If the answer to any of these questions is no: What is missing and how can you add that missing piece or pieces into the equation for the benefit of both yourself and your organization?

The beauty of this approach is that it is a virtuous cycle. What you allow yourself, you can give to others; and what you give to others comes back in terms of increased satisfaction and higher quality of relationships.

In that spirit, may you enjoy and share these most important gifts of meaning, contribution and goodwill this holiday season and in the years to come!

Category: All Posts, Culture, Leadership /

Culture as Strategy

December 16, 2007 / / No comments

Usually, when we think about strategy, we don’t think about culture. Culture is a given – it’s just there.  In this post, I propose that culture is always an implicit aspect of strategy and that, by recognizing it as such, we can better position ourselves to achieve extra-ordinary results.

Theory

It can sometimes be helpful to review the assumptions we take for granted. In that spirit: culture is defined in various ways, but for our purposes, let’s tease it apart to reveal three dimensions:

1. First, it’s a complex of inter-related beliefs and assumptions, which give rise to values. These beliefs, assumptions and values are often expressed in stories, or metaphors.

2. These beliefs and assumptions give rise to patterns of behavior.

3. These patterns of behaviors give rise to institutions, such as organization structure, processes and reward systems.

For example, the retailer, Nordstrom believing that customer satisfaction is essential to its business success, famously oriented its associates to deliver exceptional customer service. Stories of truly exceptional customer service circulated both throughout the company and the community. And, you can bet that Nordstrom’s processes and reward system ensured that that behavior would continue to occur.

Cultures tend to be self sustaining, which is one of the reasons we take them for granted. They are like the air that we breathe, and they often seem impervious to change.  One of the reasons for this is that just as our beliefs shape our behavior and our institutions, our institutions also shape our behavior and our experience of what “works” (and therefore, to some extent, our beliefs and assumptions).  For this reason, changing culture is notoriously hard. 

Yet, as the Nordstrom example illustrates, an organizations culture makes a big difference in what it can achieve and how easily it can achieve it, in the same way that who-we-are as individuals shapes our possibilities and the energy we must invest to achieve our goals. 

Is it possible to change organization culture?  Well, given that an organization is comprised of people, its collective history, and its structures, processes, and reward systems, we might ask whether it is possible to change these elements. Certainly, we can change organizational structure, and reward systems. We can reframe and evolve our collective story….  But, can people change?  Is it possible to change ourselves?

I suggest that we can learn a lot about how to evolve our culture by learning how to evolve that bit of culture that we all carry with us: our beliefs, assumptions, and our habitual patterns of behavior.  This kind of change is at the heart of transformative leadership, a key focus of this blog!

Practice

1. What is your organizational culture?  What methodologies do you use to know?

2. How well does your culture support your objectives and explicit strategies for achieving them?  Are there gaps? How might you begin to close those gaps?

3. What has been your experience with successful change, at a personal level? What enabled you to be successful in making the change?

Category: All Posts, Culture, Leadership, Organization, Rewards /

What is Partnership?

December 9, 2007 / / No comments

In her study of history and anthropology, cultural historian Riane Eisler found that cultures tended to group themselves roughly around two attractor points, which she termed the “dominator model” and the “partnership model.”  In the dominator model of social relations, the social structure is generally hierarchic and authoritarian, and maintained through fear and the hope of reward.  Power is control-oriented, and “goodness” is often equated with compliance. 

Conversely, in Partnership model of relations, social relationships are more egalitarian, including more sexually egalitarian. Each person has creative power and persons collaborating together generate a creative synergy, in which the sum is greater than the parts.  In both cases, social structures both reflect and reinforce a dominator or Partnership model of relationships.  

How does this relate to leadership?  If we imagine that leadership entails vision, communication and strategy, we might observe that our personal orientation shapes each of these three elements:

  • What is an appropriate and worthy vision for our organization?
  • Is our communication with others monological or dialogical?
  • What kind of organization and culture can best help us achieve our vision? 
Category: All Posts, Collaboration, Communication, Creativity, Leadership, Partnership /
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