Archive for Organization

The Organization as Machine:Industrial-Age Strategies of Rational Control

February 23, 2008 / / No comments

I must say that it is a challenge to write about industrial-age models of leadership and organization, as I am so eager to move on to talk about emerging models, which are much more interesting and useful to those of us in the knowledge economy – which is practically everyone… 

Still, this philosophical, psychological and sociological review of the current situation is useful because it helps to show why modern organizations have the challenges they do, and why, emerging models can be so much more helpful to us in dealing with a very dynamic environment.

In my last post, I discussed the hierarchal organization as a control strategy, in that it allows one or a small number of people to control a broad scope of resources and activities. It’s also very rational in that rational (vs. creative) thought involves breaking the whole into different parts for individual study (and control).

The hierarchal organization was therefore a natural choice of 19th century industrial-age capitalists, seeking the market power and economies of mass production:

1)      It provided owners of capital with the necessary means of control;

2)      The specialization implied by rational forms of organization supported the operational efficiencies of mass production.

3)      The workforce at this time was largely uneducated; relevant knowledge and control were concentrated at the supervisory level.

4)      Culturally, it fit well with an orientation to hierarchy based on economic class and modern rational strategies of control.

This form of organization, as factory, was compared to a perfect machine, rational and efficient. In the next post, we’ll talk about the leadership styles appropriate to managing “the machine.”

Category: All Posts, Creativity, Culture, Leadership, Organization, Philosophy /

Origins of the Modern Bureaucratic Organization

February 16, 2008 / / No comments

If you were to choose the organizational form that maximizes the number of people and functions that can be controlled by a single leader, what style would you choose? (The correct answer can be found at the bottom of this post).

  1. Flat organization
  2. Bureaucratic organization
  3. Leader-full team
  4. Matrix organization

Since thousands of years before the dawn of the industrial revolution, “strong men,” wanting to maximize their control of people and resources have employed a pyramid-shaped, hierarchal form of organization: small societies based on “strong-man rule” evolved into kingships with their own militaries, which evolved into nation states …

Hierarchal societies are based on a hierarchal flow of power from the top down. Anthropologically, they tend to be male dominated (in that men dominate women). Human order is frequently understood to reflect divine order, and since early times, rulers have often claimed a special relationship to divinity, which justifies and endorses their power. They were sometimes understood to be incarnations or partners of the gods (as in Sumeria), or, more recently in Western cultures, to be chosen or annointed by God.  For example, in the late 19th century Germany, childrearing manuals emphasized disciplining the child in such a way as to exact unquestioning obedience to the father. This practice was thought to prepare the child to submit to governmental authority and thereby live a godly life (Alice Miller, For Your Own Good).

The values and ethics of a culture cannot be entirely separated from the power structure in that those in power shape the rules that define “goodness.” “Rules favor the rule makers and when they don’t, the rules are changed.” Therefore, “good citizens” conform to power; those who both are not powerful and do not conform are “bad citizens” and risk punishment. The culture of these organizations tends to be paternalistic. Loyalty is rewarded (for example, with position and lands — a share of the power) and disloyalty is punished.

More subtly, the worldview of the rulers, in which light the rules seem right and appropriate, is the correct view. Therefore, loyalty includes endorsing the worldview of those in power. Challenging this perspective, in a sense, also challenges the legitimacy and power of the ruler. For this reason, challenging this worldview entails some risk and is best done with diplomacy, in privacy behind closed doors. Diplomacy avoids the sense of direct challenge, and privacy allows the leader an opportunity to adapt the perspective as his or her own. The same conversation in public would be the equivalent of a frontal challenge to power. 

In this way, there will always be a link between power, knowledge and values, in any given culture: Power is about making rules that reflect and benefit a particular perspective, and propagating that perspective, and such knowledge and rules help shape the values and ethics of the culture.  

In an upcoming entry, we will talk about the emergence of the modern bureaucratic organization, including how it drew on the military/feudal model, and how it both fit and shaped the industrial age of the 20th century…

(The correct answer is 2. Bureaucratic Organization)

Category: All Posts, Culture, Ethics, Leadership, Organization, Philosophy, Values /

Developing Leadership Capabilities for the Innovation Age

February 11, 2008 / / No comments

One of the purposes of this blog is to encourage fresh thinking with respect to how we can most effectively collaborate to achieve worthy goals.  According to leadership gurus, James Kouzes and Barry Posner, getting extraordinary things done in organizations in the current age (often called the “innovation age”) requires leaders who can:

  1. Articulate a vision of the future when things are so unpredictable […]
  2. Inspire others toward a common purpose […]
  3. Create an environment that promotes innovation and risk […]
  4. Build a cohesive and spirited team […]
  5. Share power and information, and still maintain accountability […]
  6. Put more joy and celebration into our efforts […]  (Kouzes & Posner, The Leadership Challenge, 4th ed., 2008)

Leaders and organizations that are deeply rooted in “industrial age” models leadership and organization, based on metaphors such as the “organization as machine,” often struggle to achieve the capacities needed to meet current challenges.  In the next few posts, we’ll discuss why this is the case and why coaching is such an effective strategy for organizational transformation and change.

First, we’ll talk about the goals of traditional bureaucratic organizations, the assumptions that underlie this strategy, and the conditions under which those assumptions might be appropriate.

Second, we’ll talk about common organizational problems, and why they are so difficult to solve, using industrial-age models of leadership and organization.

Third, we’ll talk about some emerging paradigms of leadership, and how they support leaders in building needed organizational capabilities.

Finally, we’ll talk about how leadership and organizational coaching can support leaders in transforming their organizations to develop the needed capabilities.

Does that sound good?

Category: All Posts, Coaching, Collaboration, Innovation, Leadership, Organization, Vision /

Coaching as a Transformative Leadership Competency

February 3, 2008 / / No comments

A key theme in this blog is transformative leadership, which involves transformative learning – on the part of both the leader and the organization. A key competency of transformative leadership is coaching.

As a transformative learning strategy, coaching can be contrasted with consulting. Consultants are experts who supply answers. However, more often than we might hope, these answers may become expensive “shelfware.” Knowledge becomes shelfware primarily because leaders and their organizations have not digested it and made it their own.

As an example, the CEO of a personal care products company in the Western U.S. wants to increase the company’s sales.  He has hired a succession of marketing consultants to advise him on how to accomplish this. Each consultant is hired with great expectations and eventually ushered out the door as a disappointment. Why? The CEO does not agree with the consultants’ assessments or recommendations. What they see as dysfunction, he sees as the way he wants to run his business. He has a particular philosophy of business and isn’t inclined to change it, even though it is not working for him.  If he saw the world in such a way that the recommendations made sense, chances are, he would already have been taking the actions the consultants’ recommended. He wants someone to make his philosophy work.

Assuming that the CEO is behind the needed changes, if the changes don’t seem normal and natural to all of the organization members who need to make them work, the organization will struggle to change. People will do what is asked as long as someone is looking over their shoulders but will tend to drift back to old, comfortable behaviors.

Transformative coaching, on the other hand, involves supporting leaders and organizations in developing expanded and more effective perspectives and strategies. In the above example, a coach might support the CEO in thinking though the assumptions that underlie his philosophy, to learn why it hasn’t achieved the desired results; in developing an enlarged perspective; and in developing and executing strategies that reflect these new insights.

Similarly, the CEO as transformative leader and coach, has the tools to facilitate a similar shift on the part of the organization as a whole…

Category: All Posts, Coaching, Leadership, Organization /

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 /

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 /

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 /

Welcome!

December 6, 2007 / / No comments

Welcome to The Partnership Leader!  As the title suggests, this blog discusses leadership — in particular, a Partnership approach to leadership. The term, Partnership (with a capital P), was coined by cultural historian Riane Eisler and describes an emerging type of leadership that is both very applicable to the dynamic world in which all of our organizations presently operate, and intrinsically rewarding for its practitioners.

Background 

This blog has been many years in the making. As a woman and leader in the high technology industry, I have had the opportunity to work with some of the industry’s most progressive and visonary leaders. Yet, even in these relatively enlightened environments, I sometimes felt that organizational norms hindered rather than helped us to achieve our goals. Although collaboration was essential to organizational success, structures, reward systems and organizational dynamics tended to encourage competition; being heard in meetings often involved grabbing and holding the “ball” of meeting airtime, limiting the scope of ideas considered; and organizational learning and flexibility seemed to be constrained by a network of vested interests. Communications flowed regularly from the top, yet employees complained that “communications are poor.” 

Over time, I came to learn that the sense of dissonance that I sometimes felt with respect to “business as usual” was not unique to me or my industry, but was shared by many women and men in the corporate world. My conversations with leaders in sectors as diverse as high technology, health care, non-profits, education, and consulting have confirmed that these problems can be found in virtually every industry.  I also found a hunger, at almost every level of the organization, for meaningful work, and a workplace which encourages mutual respect, trust, collaboration, and in which team members can make their fullest contribution.  

In my doctoral studies, I discovered how a network of assumptions shapes our worldviews and by extension the social structures we create. I was fortunate to meet and have the opportunity to collaborate with Professor Alfonso Montuori, a pioneer in applying Riane Eisler’s Partnership framework to leadership and organizations and director of the graduate program in Transformational Leadership at the California Institute of Integral Studies.  

According to Montuori, the bureaucratic structure and the modern management style, still used by many organizations, is an historical creation, developed and adapted by men for a particular purpose and environment. As a historical creation, it reflects the assumptions its creators held about about the nature of the world, and us as human beings. The successes of modern organizations have been well-documented; yet, it has become widely recognized that many of the fundamental assumptions that underpin this approach, are no longer true and, certainly, the environment has changed radically!

Therefore, if we and are organizations (and our larger world as a whole) are to thrive, we must adapt a creative approach to leadership and organization; to test old assumptions and determine if they are still true; to think afresh for ourselves, rather than follow the well-worn path of “business as usual.” Fortunately, as we navigate this new territory, we have some guideposts in the emerging thought of many pioneering theorists and practitioners, such as Riane Eisler, Alfonso Montuori, Isabella Conti, Ronald Purser, Margaret Wheatley, Peter Senge and others.

Purpose 

The purpose of this blog is to:

>  share ideas about how a Parternership framework provides both a useful way of understanding how and why organizations must evolve to survive and thrive, and a strategy for achieving successful and enduring change;

>  develop a larger conversation to explore, develop and share our experiences putting these strategies into action. Together, we can explore the leading edges of leadership thought and practice.

Although this blog is written for both practitioners and academics, my bias is towards making these ideas accessible to practioners. Therefore,  although I will point towards some excellent sources, you won’t tend to find the same rigor in citation and language as you will find in an academic journal on the same subject!

The term, journey, is often used to describe a shared experience that involves learning and growth. It’s my hope that our conversation together on this (and other, related blogs) will constitute a rewarding journey for all who participate, and that our work together will help a larger number of people experience the effectiveness and satisfaction of Partnership in their organizational lives.

In Partnership,

Lisa

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