"The essence of leadership lies in the continuum of growth. An effective leader, like a teacher, must inspire, educate, and nurture - - and never leave his or her pupils in the same space where they started"
Organizational Growth
The most successful organizations become teaching organizations from top to bottom. Such organizations do not spontaneously emerge. Rather, leaders need to use their power appropriately to build follower behavior in which people at all levels share information and learn from each other.
Many times we need to make paradoxical use of our power by issuing orders so that followers will do things that are voluntary - - teach and learn from each other. Laissez-faire leadership is nothing less than abdication. Rightly used, power overcomes resistance and encourages sought after behavior.
Under proper leadership, teaching and learning behaviors permeate the entire organizational environment. And of course, humble leaders set the example of being the biggest learners.
Learning requires change and at the heart of learning lays the development of new capacity. He tells us learning fails for two basic reasons:
- We do not allow a realistic amount of time for capacity building - - our change effort resembles trying to learn the violin in an intensive three-day workshop
- Our change program is designed to change our people "out there" - - true change comes from within
"We must be the change we seek" said Ghandi. We lead by changing our self. Leadership has everything to do with example, but not just example.
Passion
As leaders we must also inspire - - inspire our constituency to follow our example. More than that, our inspiration must connect to our constituency's aspirations. Aspiration has to do with alignment between our goals and what is meaningful to us. Most of us can somehow sense - - intuit, feel, hear - - that there is something we are here to do.
Passion is the difference between "doing what someone said we ought to do" and "doing what we're here to do". Leadership taps the power of aspiration. Alignment with our aspirations is what enables deep learning and change.
Too often today organizational learning is carried out by specialized, disconnected, and sometimes antagonistic individuals or groups that functionally are stand-alone silos. The results produce ivory tower research that is rarely applied.
To overcome these deep systemic problems we need to rediscover what has been lost in this age of specialization:
- the ability to honor and integrate theory
- the need to emphasize personal development throughout the organization
- a focus on practical results
Research needs to become a disciplined pursuit of discovering understanding that leads to a generalizable theory and method. Capacity is built by aligning individuals' deepest personal and professional aspirations with their capability and knowledge. Practice is critical in helping people work together to achieve practical outcomes and build practical know-how in the process. For organizations to learn, research as well as capacity building and practice need to be interrelated and integrated.
A Community of Leaders
Effective organizational learning requires building a community of leaders. Organizations need to systematically recognize and develop three categories of leaders:
- Local line leaders with significant bottom-line responsibility to introduce and implement new ideas
- Executive leaders - - mentors and partners for line and middle managers - - who use their position and authority to invest in and promote new knowledge infrastructures and learning laboratories
- Internal networkers who move about the organization spreading and fostering commitment to new ideas and practices
From such development efforts come "people who are genuinely committed to deep change in themselves and in their organizations. They lead through developing new skills, capabilities, and understandings".
High performing organizations find success through leading people effectively which means spurring them to new thinking and learning (or in other words, having the individual knowledge workers bring about organizational transformation as they grow).
High-Performers
A high-performance organization can be defined as one that empowers its people on an organization-wide basis to meet the challenge of change. High-performance means engaging the people of the organization in personally meaningful change. High-performance is found in an organizational community that celebrates individual contributions to teamwork.
In high performing organizations, leaders sees their role as "systems architects, engaged in the critical task of building values, cultures, and a set of management practices that enable the recruitment, retention, development, and motivation of outstanding people". Such organizations can be described as fast, nimble, exciting, and continuously changing.
Independence, responsibility, and accountability are cultural hallmarks. Learning is highly valued. Making mistakes and failing is understood as keys to learning. Teamwork and the sharing of information and ideas are rewarded. Followers are tuned in to what is going on "out there" in both the internal and external environment.
Followers have a voice and are encouraged to participate through it.
Individual Learning
It has been said that the most difficult thing for a leader to do is to admit wrong. Further, admitting to any level of incompetence is seen as a career killer. Our culture works with an emphasis on face-saving and denying error. We deceive not only others, but ourselves as well, with our self-seeking defensive nature.
Even today, the majority of organizations still buy into the fantasy that somehow organizational change can be engineered without personal change at the top. Leadership charades are all about credibility. Learning and change are intricately linked.
Keeping up appearances make it especially difficult for "smart people to learn" - - and change.
Learning Loops
Individual learning is a primary basis for organizational learning and transformation - - learning underlies organizational change initiatives. Learning can be single, double, or triple loop. Single loop learning corrects the mismatches between actions and intended outcomes simply by changing actions - - underlying values and assumptions are not open to change.
Double loop learning (which is difficult and painful) occurs as an individual changes internal governing values or assumptions which ultimately lead to change in action and behavior. "Double loop action learning involves radical challenges to participants' value systems or frames of references, which are likely to be perceived as a profound threat to their psychological and social well-being".
Triple loop learning comes from discovering errors embedded in the organization's traditional systems which shape and constrain individual values and assumptions - - social traditions, governing values and norms. Individual awareness leads to changes in action and behavior.
We can identify a number of dilemmas found in organizational learning initiatives:
- First, although emotional expression is often encouraged during change interventions - - since it is done not to accept and join with the emotion but to explore the reasons to overcome the emotion - - how can emotional resistance be conquered by the very type of inquiry and confrontation that inhibits emotional expression?
- Second, how can people commit themselves to double-loop action-learning practices, while their feelings and whole nervous systems are working against those practices?
- Third, how can emotional resistance be dealt with while facilitating double-loop action learning when the requisite direct inquiry and confrontation are too threatening or embarrassing to handle, particularly when the issues at stake themselves are high?
- Fourth, how can people commit themselves to double-loop action-learning practices, when these practices will undermine their very political power within the organization?
- Fifth, how can individual or group-level learning ever lead to any meaningful change at an organizational level when the individual or group understand the underlying political dynamics within the organization yet do not have adequate strategies to overcome them?
- Sixth and finally, how can managers under the pressure of organizational politics and control imperatives, such as meeting deadlines or short-term goals, commit themselves to practices that require a great degree of openness, while they are pressured to remain in tight control? How can a person seek openness and mutuality while exercising power that is inherently unilateral and controlling?
Utilizing groups or self-managing work teams will not change these dilemmas because such exert even more powerful constraints within the organization than the fundamental control imperatives imposed by managers as individuals.
Organizational transformation is rare and extremely difficult to generate on purpose because of the difficulties in bringing about double loop and triple loop learning:
- the emotional barriers at the individual level • political obstacles at the organizational level
- managerial control imperatives within the organization's extended social structure or value chain There are three ways to overcome these dilemmas:
- Create up-building positive affects to address emotional barriers - - such positive emotional states not only broaden a person's thought-action repertoire but can also lessen the defensive affects of negative emotions. Positive affect can be brought about in three approaches:
- by trust and friendship building
- by starting with a single loop, win-win approach (during which deeply held values and assumptions neither surface nor are challenged)
-
by actively joining with the emotion
This three-step process opens the door for transformational dialogue and more rapid, less painful, double loop learning later. - Leverage opposing forces to overcome political obstacles: a sense of crisis, discovery of low performance, or an external environmental shift are powerful forces that shake up organizational inertia and challenge follower's mental frameworks. Profound uncertainty or crisis can lead followers to open up to new insights or change their behavior or both; forces that work against existing organizational arrangements, including change-oriented engineered shifts in political dynamics and power bases, open the door for double loop learning. Bring external legitimacy and resources into the organization to compete with control imperatives, i.e. actively connect to outside institutions and reframe issues with an alternative institutional governance in order to shift the current managerial control paradigm to a different internal institutional logic; use that socioeconomic and political support to create a leadership learning process. Although generally change initiatives are successful when authored by leaders in powerful positions, less powerful actors can act as potential change agents when they learn how to leverage the larger forces within their organization.
Greg Merten, a general manager and vice president of Hewlett-Packard, says all of us need to be a work in progress:
Because leadership is about causing change, we all need to be leaders, especially when significant change is required. Change is too prevalent for anyone to believe that his or her position grants a license to avoid learning and developing. Learning needs to be part of the culture of all organizations at all levels; otherwise, we become misfits.... not only is it okay to keep learning about yourself on the job... it is critical.
He says if senior managers fail, it is not because they aren't smart enough, but rather because they can't lead effectively.
Leaders need to have a synergistic balance of analytical skills - - related to IQ - - and emotional skills commonly known today as emotional intelligence. Perhaps the greatest attribute of leadership, in his opinion, is the leader's willingness to be vulnerable.
Leaders need each other, especially to learn from each other. We need each other's perspectives and the strength of each others' character. Our personal perspective is both our greatest leadership asset and our greatest limiter.
"We see the world not as it is, but as we are".
A Perpetual State of "Becoming"
We need to lead out of whom we are and out of what our organization needs us to be. As leaders, we not only need to be authentically ourselves, we need to be actively growing from that authenticity; we need to be in a perpetual state of "becoming".
It takes personal risk - - courage instead of insecurity - - to achieve the growth necessary to meet the needs around us. Sometimes, we need to be jolted out of avoiding personal change.
"Leadership is not a role; it is a habit of mind - - a point of view developed by creating meaning from experiences of lifetime".
In other words, leaders learn from reflecting upon the experiences that life brings them. Leadership is about continually deepening our understanding of reality and about creating new realities. It is about discovering principles and laws, and about developing greater capability to participate in the unfolding of our world.
Security or Competition
In order to create trusting relationships, we need to learn to be vulnerable. Our willingness to be vulnerable arises out of strength, not weakness. We can be vulnerable because of a confident accepting of ourselves and each other; vulnerability can be expressed when we transcend needing to protect ourselves out of fear. Our relationships are most powerful when we are most exposed. When we can toss aside our insecurities, we will quit competing with people and instead learn how to collaborate more effectively.
Competition creates alienation and destroys rather than creates value. When we can toss aside the need to be right or to be better, our listening qualitatively changes; instead of listing for confirmation of what we already know, we instead focus on learning what another may contribute. When we feel secure in our relationships, we can work together collaboratively in taking risks to accomplish the seemingly impossible. When we get right down to the gist, we learn that we don't resist change as much as we resist being put unilaterally at risk.
Leadership is about growth and change. We cannot make the world stand still. As much as we yearn for stability, in this fast-paced global village we find ourselves in, stasis is an illusionary and ultimately disappointing hope. When we move from hesitancy and tentativeness to commitment, our path and our providence becomes secure. In the boldness of total commitment, we find our own genius, power and magic.
"Fallure"
When we are confronted with a moment of commitment, we need to make the decision. Our choice is between striving to do our very best - - in a backdrop of fear, pain and uncertainty - - and retreating to what is apparently safe and predictable. Illustrating with a rock-climbing term, "fallure" - - not tightening the safety ropes when failure is possible - - is a choice that challenges us to stretch ourselves for success when the consequences of failing only means a bumpier ride; in fallure the outcome of trying and failing is never catastrophic and is usually quite minimal.
Going to fallure means full commitment to test the true limits of what we are capable of achieving. In fallure we do not give ourselves a psychological out. Fallure may be scary but it is not dangerous.
The inner experience of fallure and "safe failure" (minimizing discomfort) are completely different. In fallure we often rise to a completely different mental level and sometimes "break-through" to new capabilities. Safe failure or retreat takes no courage and in some ways is similar to a defeatist attitude. With fallure we increase our mental strength - - fallure is about conquering ourselves. Success is linked to courage.
However, fallure is not foolhardiness. If the consequences can be dire, permanently injurious or debilitating, or in any way disastrous, it is not the time for fallure. As leaders, we need to stay alive and preserve our health, whether personally or corporately. Risk needs to be managed for its consequences.
We develop courage through repeatedly stretching ourselves during times when the consequences of failure are relatively minor. We can find out our true limits and continuously grow in spite of reiterative inconsequential failure. It does not matter if the odds of success are low as long as our attempts to go to new heights are not dangerous.
Mindless reiteration of fallure is not all that profitable. Rather, to beneficially risk fallure in an effort to push to the edge of greatness, we need to change our frame of brain. The biggest barriers to our success lay in our minds as we limit our creativity or capability.
Breakthroughs come not by changing what we do but by changing, first and foremost, how we think about what we do. We need to reflect upon patterns of the past and possibilities of the future. We need to turn apparent limits into stepping stones to completely new approaches.
Unlearning
Peter Drucker has often stated "we need to learn and unlearn more things more quickly than ever before". What limits our growth our unwillingness to become a "beginner," again. We do not like to "unlearn". After years of experience in our field we think of ourselves as already a super-expert. By staying with our strengths we perform fairly well but our growth remains incremental.
For quantum learning to take place, we sometimes have to start anew as beginners. The primary barrier to personal progress is not ignorance but the illusion of our knowledge and expertise. The complacency of superiority can preclude us from deep level discovery and learning.
Start with Me
Ralph Stayer, CEO of Johnsonville Foods, after achieving personal and corporate transformation in the sausage industry, learned we can lead people to their potential by understanding the human spirit. The leadership transformation started with himself:
- CEOs need to focus first on changing themselves before they try to change the rest of the company. The process resembles an archaeological dig, or at least it did for me. As I uncovered and solved one problem, I almost invariably exposed another, deeper problem. As I gained one insight and mastered one situation, another situation arose that required new insight and more learning. As I approached one goal, a new, more important, but more distant goal always began to take shape.... To make the changes that will lead to great performance, I recommend focusing on goals, expectations, contexts, actions, and learning: People want to be great. If they aren't, it's because management won't let them be.
- Performance begins with each individual's expectations. Influence what people expect and you influence how people perform.
- Expectations are driven partly by goals, vision, symbols, semantics, and partly by the context in which people work, that is, by such things as compensation systems, production practices, and decision-making structures.
- The actions of managers shape expectations.
- Learning is a process, not a goal. Each new insight creates a new layer of potential insights.
- The organization's results reflect me and my performance. If I want to change the results, I have to change myself first. This is particularly true for me, the owner and CEO, but it is equally true for every employee.
Level 5 Leaders
Jim Collins asks what catapults a company from merely good to truly great. In a word, leadership. The beginning of greatness starts with leadership. The kind of leader he refers to blends extreme personal humility with intense professional will. Level 5 leaders, as Collins has dubbed them, also create a culture of disciplined people. This can only be done by getting the right leaders "on the bus" (into the organization) and helping the wrong leaders off the bus.
Level 5 leaders are marked by a paradoxical duality: modest and willful, shy and fearless, fierce and gracious, calm and intense. They confront the most brutal facts of their current reality while simultaneously maintaining absolute faith that their organization will ultimately prevail. Level 5 leaders shun public adulation and are never boastful.
To motivate they principally rely on inspired standards, not inspiring charisma. They channel their ambition into their organization, not into their self. They work diligently to set up successors for even more greatness in the next generation of leaders.
They take personal responsibility for poor results, never blaming other people, or external factors, or bad luck - - they look in the mirror and not out the window. Yet they look out the window, not in the mirror, to apportion credit for the success of the organization.
Level 5 leaders are characterized by dedication to making their organization the very best in the world - - if for no other reason than that they simply cannot imagine pursuing anything less. No matter how difficult, they demonstrate an unwavering resolve to do whatever must be done to produce the best long-term results and set the standards for building an enduring great company. Level 5 leaders will settle for nothing less.
Collins says it is not clear how level 5 leaders are developed. There is insufficient research available at this time. The presence of a strong narcissistic ego seems to prevent many from reaching the fifth level. Often what brings the humility required is a significant life experience such as a near-death experience with cancer, a twist of life-saving fate, or a strong spiritual belief or conversion.
Five Levels of Hierarchy
Collins identifies five levels of hierarchy in leadership. Level 5 leaders do not need to sequentially go through all five levels, but what is clear is a they need to develop all the capabilities of the lower levels. Collins summarizes the hierarchy as follows:
- Level 5 - - Level 5 executive: builds enduring greatness through a paradoxical combination of personal humility plus professional will.
- Level 4 - - Effective leader: catalyzes commitment to and vigorous pursuit of a clear and compelling vision; stimulates the group to high performance standards.
- Level 3 - - Competent manager: organizes people and resources toward the effective and efficient pursuit of predetermined objectives.
- Level 2 - - Contributing team member: contributes to the achievement of group objectives; works effectively with others in a group setting.
- Level 1 - - Highly capable individual: makes productive contributions through talent, knowledge, skills, and good work habits.
Above all leaders of today have to be healers and unifiers. This means accepting responsibility for what lies outside the walls of an organization as well as within. They disperse leadership across the organization by banning hierarchy and creating more circular, flexible and fluid management systems.
They work to establish mutual respect, collaborative relationships, and the wise use of teams.
True leaders transcend their own organization to help build their community - - for its own sake and also because a deteriorating, fragmented community cannot provide the kind of engaged, energetic, high performance leadership needed to achieve the organizational dream.
How do leaders grow and develop? By linking five foundational pillars:
- self insight
- motivation
- capabilities
- real-world practice
- accountability
All five of these factors must be present if we are going to learn effectively.
We should strive to become "deep generalists" rather than specialists. Let us rely on the beginner's way of thinking as much as on experience. In our quest to learn, we need to yield to openness and vulnerability.
As best we can let us shift from control-order-predict to align-create-adapt. Most importantly, we need to leverage doubt, uncertainty, and mystery by favoring compasses over maps. Above all, we need to encourage everyone to create and share meaning as we go about our work.
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