Archive for Leadership

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 /

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 /

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 /
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