Archive for Leadership

Unwritten rules determine behavior

April 27, 2008 / / No comments

Executive coach Robert Hargrove (1995) asks, “Why do so few chief executives succeed at making their vision statements come alive, even when people agree with them intellectually and emotionally? Why are so many managers and employees frustrated, skeptical, and even cynical aobut their own ability to make something happen?” (107)

Hargrove interviewed Dr. Peter Scott-Morgan, an Arthur D. Little consultant, who offers a very straightforward explanation: everything people do makes sense if you understand the unwritten rules of the organization.  For example, in 1990, a team at Ford Motor Company took a new “learning” approach to building the next generation Lincoln Continental. Despite bringing the new product to market substantially faster and reducing defects in the new car by 20% and thereby saving $65 million dollars, the manager of the project was “passed over for promotion and given early retirement.” Why? Because his organization broke the unwritten rule at Ford of talking openly about problems, which was thought to reflect poorly on his organization. The project was a practical success and a political failure. (108)

Other examples are the CEO who talks about the importance of collaboration and team work, yet rewards members of his or her team based on the size of their organizations or bases their bonuses primarily on the accomplishment of individual objectives.  People in the organization sense the conflict, assess what, at the end of the day, is actually rewarded, and take action based on realities on the ground (109-110).  

Scott-Morgan suggests several strategies for discovering and leading change in light of these unwritten rules:

1. First, discover the rules: Talk with people about the disconnects between formal policy and unwitten rules, the logic behind the unwritten rules, and about business goals and how they do or don’t connect to what they do.

2. Uncover the operative reward system, which substantially shape these rules. This reward system can be understood in terms of: a) Motivators: what is important to this person or group; b) Enablers: who can give it to them or help them get it; and c) Triggers: under what conditions will the enabler “grant a reward or impose a penalty.”

It’s interesting to note that the operative reward system strongly overlaps with but is not necessarily identical to the formal reward system.

3. Consider how the unwritten rules shape the actual functioning of the organization.

4. “Change the rules or go with the flow”: If you are in charge, you have some power to reshape the unwritten rules to get the outcome you want. Otherwise, your options are to find a sponsor who can help bring the disconnect to people who have the power to change it or find a way to use these insights to develop a pragmatic plan to obtain the outcome you want  (111-116).

 I would add that if the CEO or other leader is observant, s/he may have these insights at an implicit level. Asking the questions: “What do I want to have happen (and what does that look like)?” and “What do I actually reward and punish?” can potentially yield some useful insights. 

And, because our assumptions and expectations shape our organizations, including how we actually reward and punish people, it might be very helpful to ask, “What do I really value, and why?”  

References

Hargrove, R. (1995) Masterful coaching: Extraordinary results by impacting people and the way they think and work together. San Francisco: Pfeiffer.

Scott-Morgan, P. (1994). The unwritten rules of the game. New York: McGraw Hill.

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

Lesson in Leadership Communications

April 21, 2008 / / No comments

My colleagues seated in the rows behind us seemed to be much slower on the uptake than I had given them credit for. Could it be that we leaders in the front row were, in fact, smarter?

To begin at the beginning, my colleagues and I were attending a workshop that I had organized for a high technology company in Northern California. Early in the training, the facilitator organized a training game. She divided us into three teams (or mini-organizations) of about 9 people each. To simulate the communication dynamics of most organizations, each group was seated in three rows, with more senior leaders in the front and less senior participants in the back.

The task would be given to each team in writing. Whichever team completed the task first would win. The rules of the game were:

  1. All communication needed to be in writing.
  2. Each row acted as a team, and had to agree on what to write.
  3. Each row could only initiate communications with the row behind it (senior to less senior)
  4. The less senior row could only respond to the specific instruction or question.
  5. All communications needed to be written on the same sheet of paper; that is, each row had to receive a response before it initiated the next communication.

We each received a piece of paper with our instructions. We in the front row compared our notes. The paper said that the task was for everyone to pass the paper with their instructions on it forward. The communication setup was a little awkward but the task was stone-simple. We were confident we’d have it done in less than a minute!

We “leaders” scribbled our request on a piece of paper and passed it back: “Ok – let’s just do it!”

Instead of receiving the flood of papers forward as we expected, there was a long silence, and then some writing, then more silence. What is taking them so long? we wondered. It was a little frustrating to misfire on such a simple task.

Finally, we received our paper back, with question marks on it! The other two rows apparently didn’t understand the instructions. OK, how could we make it any plainer…. We wrote: “Just go ahead and pass them forward now.”

The result was, unfortunately, the same. We “front-rowers” were frustrated, baffled and a bit disgusted that our colleagues lacked our clarity and competitive spirit. Yet, in being critical of our colleagues, I notice that there is something of a sense of self-affirmation…

Ours was not the only group to struggle with this exercise, which was both discouraging and reassuring…

After several minutes of watching us flail, the trainer changed the rules and allowed us to all communicate directly. What we soon discovered was that only the people in the front row had been given the objective; the other two rows were simply instructed to do what the row in front of them told them to do.

At that moment, I understood that we in the first row were, in fact, the ones who had been incompetent in that situation. Have you ever made the mistake of driving the wrong way down a one way street? Others appeared wrong to us, because we ourselves were in the wrong. And, we were entrenched in our error, because we all saw the world the same way — differently than the rest of our “organization” saw it — and the “rules” made it very difficult to get the feedback we needed. As a result, our organizations executed poorly and we were convinced that the problem lay outside ourselves.

What a great learning experience, on many levels! Here are some insights I personally took away from that experience:

  1. As leaders, we need to be careful to ensure that we have clearly communicated the world as we see it, including facts, the models that guide our thinking, and our objectives. It’s folly to assume that we are all on the same page.
  2. When upward feedback loops are limited, we can easily become disconnected from the realities faced by organizational members.
  3. This limitation can also shield us from knowledge of our real strengths and failings.
  4. When organizational performance is subpar or when organizational members are performing poorly, the first place to look to solve the problem must be at ourselves. What are we doing (or not doing) that is creating this result?
Category: All Posts, Communication, Leadership, Rewards, Teams /

Why do people not create or innovate?

April 11, 2008 / / No comments

The key quesiton isn’t “what fosters creativity?”  But it is why in God’s name isn’t everyone creative? Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? I think therefore a good question might be not why do people create? but why do people not create or innovate? We have got to abandon that sense of amazement in the face of creativity, as if it were a miracle if anybody created anything. — Abraham Maslow

Maslow observes that creativity and innovation are natural endowments — we only need to watch young children and remember our own childhoods to know that this is so.  So, why do we, as adults, commonly think of creativity and innovation as qualities that primarily describe the relatively small group of professional creatives? And, why do organizations struggle with the question of how to become more innovative?

Almost 40 years ago, futurist Alvin Toffler observed that our education system was designed to develop citizens who could take up their positions in the industrializing world, as cogs in the great machine (Future Shock, 1970).  Beyond the content of the coursework itself,  schools teach children how to show up on time, follow directions, work within an incentive system that emphasizes external rewards and punishments and to conform to a social program.  Creativity and innovation are generally channeled into art (where classes in art are still offered).  “Play” is considered childish.  Speaking personally, it wasn’t until graduate school that I felt encouraged to think for myself and to create new ideas and knowledge …

Then, as Alfonoso Montuori describes, our organizations are still dominated by bureaucratic forms of leadership and organization designed for the industrial age, which values conformance, compliance, industry, and relies primarily on external reward systems.  Although, as leaders, we intellectually know that our organizations need to become substantially more innovative to survive and thrive, at an emotional level, most of us in this culture, have come to value control and compliance even more…

Maslow’s good news is to remind us that we are all naturally creative. Just as we learned how to suppress and narrowly channel our creativity, we can also begin to unlock our creative potential by removing  those learned barriers (both institutional and internal). 

In order to do this, we will need to circle around to a discussion of the concept of control or power-over, which seems to be creativity’s chief antagonist…

Category: All Posts, Creativity, Culture, Education, Innovation, Leadership, Organization, Rewards /

Constraints on upwards communication in traditional organizations

April 9, 2008 / / No comments

On “How to Avoid Flatterers,” Machiavelli writes:

[T]here is no way to avoid flattery except by letting men know that they will not offend by telling the truth; yet if every man is free to tell you the truth, you will not receive due respect. Therefore a prudent prince will [choose] the wise men of his state and [grant] only to them the freedom to tell him truth, but only concerning those matters about which he asks, and no others. Yet he should question them about all matters, listen to their opinions, and then decide for himself as he wishes. He should treat these councils and the individual advisers in such a way as to make it more clear that there words will be the more welcome the more freely they are spoken. Except these men, he should listen to no one, but rather purse the course agreed upon and to do so resolutely. […] A prince, therefore, should always seek advice, but only when he, not someone else chooses. Indeed, he should discourage everyone from giving advice unless he has asked for it. In fact, if he should observe that someone is withholding the truth, he should show annoyance. (Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Prince, trans. Daniel Donno, New York: Random House, 1966).

Machievelli, here, astutely observes that, in order to preserve authority, traditional authoritarian leadership must limit the upward flow of information.  However, this authority is bought at the cost of:

1. a broader awareness and understanding of organizational and environmental realities;

2. a more diverse range of options; and

3. full and accurate feedback on our strengths and weaknesses as leaders.  

In upcoming posts, we’ll talk further about each of these costs, strategies to offset them, and how they may be more fully overcome in emerging models of leadership and organization… 

Category: All Posts, Communication, Diversity, Leadership /

Communication problems in traditional organizations

March 29, 2008 / / No comments

The human body-mind can be imagined as a network which both consists of specialized parts and as a seamless whole. Our ability to act in an intelligent and appropriate way as a seamless whole is a function of a massive network of electro-chemical communications. When the environment changes in a meaningful way – for example, the temperature rises beyond a certain point — this information is communicated throughout the body leading to both conscious and unconscious physical adaptive responses, to ensure our ongoing health and wellbeing.

Similarly, in an organizational context, our ability to act in an intelligent and appropriate way as seamless whole is a function of a massive network of communications.  However, unlike our human organism, traditional organizations have a number of built-in impediments to healthy communication: 1) communications flow primarily from the top down; channels for bottom-up communications tend to be very narrow; 2) bureaucratic organizational structure often gives rise to the silo effect; and 3) socialization and organizational power dynamics can work to suppress open communications even at the same organizational level.

If our body-minds suffered from such substantial systemic communication problems, we would not be able to function and would probably not survive very long. For example, although our feet might notice that we are walking on glass, but not pass the message on to the brain. Of course, this is silly; but these kinds of dysfunctions happen in organizations all of the time.

We’ll continue to explore these dynamics in greater depth in upcoming posts, with the purpose of continuing to raise awareness of how unexamined dominator cultural assumptions have created our current set of problems. And, of course, the gift here, is that every problem holds the seeds to its own solution…

Category: All Posts, Communication, Culture, Leadership, Organization, Partnership /

Experience of Right and Left Hemispheres of the Brain

March 22, 2008 / / One comment

Below is a link to an awesome video, in which neuroanatomist Jill Bolte describes alternating experiences of the left and right hemispheres of the brain. 

This is important because in the West, we have extensively developed the left brain, associated with rational sequential thought, and modern organizations and approaches to leadership reflect this orientation.  However, it is the right side of the brain which sees larger patterns and is the source of our creativity, including creative leaps.  Therefore, learning how to integrate these diverse facilities — to draw on our inner diversity — can help us to see new opportunities and solutions to old problems.  

Coaching does just this, and therefore it is increasingly being recognized as a core leadership competency in contemporary organizations. And, there are many more interesting and exciting implications of this insight that we will discuss in this blog…

http://blog.ted.com/2008/03/jill_bolte_tayl.php

Category: All Posts, Coaching, Creativity, Diversity, Innovation, Leadership, Organization, Science /

Riane Eisler and Alfonso Montuori on Women’s Radio!

March 19, 2008 / / No comments

This is a great opportunity to hear Dr. Riane Eisler interview Professor Alfonso Montuori about the new Transformative Leadership program at the California Insitute of Integral Stuides. 

http://www.womensradio.com/content/templates/?a=2229&z=11

Category: All Posts, Creativity, Education, Leadership, Partnership /

Innovation & the Machine

March 17, 2008 / / No comments

 The juxtaposition of these two words sounds unlikely doesn’t it?  We really don’t think of machines as being innovative — they do pre-programmed things (one hopes well).  For certain, the operator of the machine can innovate, but not the machine itself.  Similarly, traditional bureaucratic organizations, specialization and organizational lines of communication and control usually substantially limit innovation from within.  

As we discussed earlier, the bureaucratic organization structure is based on the principle of rational control, which enables a small number of people to exercise control over a large number of people. Because security, privileges and economic rewards tend to be commensurate with the scope of authority and power, managers tend to guard and seek to enlarge their scope of conrol.  This and other factors tend to lead both to internal competition and a resistance to changes that may decrease a manager’s scope of control, or put him/her in a less advantageous position.  

Although this blog promotes a Partnership paradigm of leadership and organization, which is distinctly un-Machiavellian, there are few as insightful or eloquent with respect to the dynamics of authoritarian leadership than Machiavelli, who confirms one reason that innovation and change tends to be so difficult for modern organizations:  

“It should be borne in mind that there is nothing more difficult to handle, more doubtful of success and more dangerous to carry through than initiating changes. The innovator makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old order and receives only lukewarm support from those would prosper under the new.” (Niccolo Machiavelli 1512)

This tendency to pursue one’s own self interest can be counterbalanced by an inspiring vision — which is one of the key functions of good leadership. However, it is interesting and potentially instructive to observe that the burueaucratic organization form we take for granted today was not designed or intended to be innovative. This is not to say that such organizations cannot be innovative, but in order to do so, they have to overcome some problems of their own making.

In upcoming posts, we will continue to explore the dynamics of traditional organizations, and also begin to explore emerging paradigms of organization and leadership, and how coaching is both a means and an end to more empowered, collaborative and innovative organizations ….

Category: All Posts, Coaching, Creativity, Design, Innovation, Leadership, Organization /

Leadership & the Machine

March 1, 2008 / / No comments

Theories of leadership are informed by our understanding of the world, including our understanding of others.  This post will consider the worldview out of which the bureaucratic organization arose, including its understanding of creativity and intelligence, and then examine the nature and role of leadership in light of that understanding.  This is valuable to us because it builds towards an understanding that organizational realities are substantially shaped by leadership perspectives — which is a key insight of transformative leadership and a potential source of power for us as we seek to overcome the challenges we are facing both within and without our organizations. 

The concept of the organization as machine evolved from a worldview in which the world itself was seen as an unintelligent mechanism.  In this worldview, the apparent intelligence (and indeed, according to some philosophers, causation itself) arose wholly from God. One prominant scientist later dropped “that hypothesis,” leaving us to imagine the world to be, for the most part, to be a “heap” of unintelligent atoms.  Intelligence (or the appearance thereof) was primarily attributed to human beings.

Further, in this worldview, the idea of intelligence came to be especially equated with rational thought. Some philosophers proposed that rational thought, sealed off from the “corrupting” influence of the body and emotions, participated, in a sense, in the divine.

According to philosopher Charlene Spretnak, “Plato intensified dualistic thought […] by perceiving not only a divine order […] but a sense that the order created by divine, or ideal, forms was radically other than the material world we inhabit.  He established a dualism of universal and particular, of noumenon and phenomenon, of mind and body, and of spirit and matter that shaped all subsequent philosophy and religion in the European tradition [italics added for emphasis] (Resurgence of the Real, 47).

Although, according to this view, the realm of divine order, truth and beauty existed in a realm outside the material universe, Plato held that it could be approached by man through his rational facilities: “[R]ational thought could be experienced only if sealed off from “corrupting” influences  of the body (sensations, emotions, desires) and properly isolated from “lowly” nature. Plato felt that we, that is, our minds, are imprisoned in the dumb matter of our bodies. Although he considered the cosmos to be sacred in its orderliness, he shared with his teacher Socrates, a belief that nature is irrelevant….” (45).

However, not all human beings were considered equally capable of such thought. The relationship between knowledge and power becomes clear in Aristotle’s rendering of gendered reality: “[M]ale rules over the female, or the man over the child; although the parts of the soul are present in all of them, they are present in different degrees.  For the slave has no deliberative faculty at all; the woman has, but it is without authority, and the child has, but it is immature (“Politics” 1260b; Code, What Can She Know?, 9 n. 5).

Therefore, some men (who per chance :-/ happened already to be in power and serve as the gatekeepers of knowledge…), were, by virtue of their asserted superiority of mind, considered to be closer to the divine order of things and thus “better suited” for leadership. (There is a historical parallel in the claim that wealth is a sign of divine favor). 

So, coming back to the topic of leadership and “the machine,” in the industrial-age organization, relatively well-educated managers sought to maximize economic outputs (roles requiring some intelligence and creativity), and “workers” were considered interchangeable “cogs in the machine.” Work was routine and boring, and working conditions were often unsafe.

Metaphorically, leaders were the operator of the machine; the workers were part of the machine itself.

 The leadership style associated with this philosophy and approach to organization has been called, “Theory X,” or what Robert Hargrove calls the “command, control, and coercion model” (Masterful Coaching p.7) and Riane Eisler calls the “dominator model.” 

In such a model, vision, communications and control flow from the top down; management ensures the efficiency and predictability of the machine, through planning, organizing and controlling.

Such highly structured and controlled organizations allow control by a centralized group and support a high degree of efficiency and predictabiliy. The flip side of that coin is that they are also exceptionally good at suppressing creativity and resisting innovation … 

In this post, we might begin to notice how leadership assumptions and values substantially shape organizational realities.  In upcoming posts, we will consider this core insight of transformative leadership in much greater depth, to demonstrate how and why this is so, and how we can use this insight to overcome some of our most previously intractable problems…  

Category: All Posts, Communication, Creativity, Innovation, Leadership, Organization, Partnership, Philosophy, Values, Vision /

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 /
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