Posts Tagged ‘leadership’
Entrepreneur, leader, space creator
The great desk tidy continues. Professional organizational designers will instantly recognize what I am going to describe as Level 2 or C Band in Paterson parlance.
Understanding what is needed when
Let’s imagine a mechanic. He, and increasingly she, has served an apprenticeship, gone to college, and worked on lots of cars under the supervision of experienced mechanics.
A car arrives. They look at it. The learn of symptoms from the driver. They make some investigations in a manner that any other trained mechanic would recognize as methodical (or haphazard). They take action.
From time-to-time though, the bundle of symptoms is out-of-pattern. It may be a rare case that they haven’t encountered before It may be a complicated case where feedback to the basic tests they carry out is obscured and muddies the decision making process. The case may be complicated by factors not really to do with the car itself. Spare parts might be short or the car might be needed in less time than the mechanics need to do everything as well as they would like.
When the job becomes complicated, a more experienced colleague steps in “reads the situation” and explains the priorities to the skilled but inexperienced worker. Now that they are oriented again to a set of tasks that they know how to do, they can pick up the task from there.
In time, of course, they become experienced themselves and mentor others.
Directing traffic
In an organization, the role of the experienced worker is sometimes played by a controller who cannot do the job themselves. The archtypical example is the Air Traffic Controller, who prioritizes aircraft and coordinates them with each other and resources on the ground. The controller is not the aircraft Captain’s boss. But does give orders of a kind.
The intersections of networks
In networked industries, the role of the controller is likely to become more common. They may have rudimentary grasp of the skills they coordinate – they may have the equivalent of a light aircraft license, they could join in firefighting in elementary roles, they can do elementary electronics – but they are specialized in control. They have the mindset to concentrate on what is in front of them for long periods. They have good mental maps which they keep up-to-date. They are important enough for psychologists to study them in depth. Indeed many of the advances in applied cognitive psychology have come from studying air traffic controllers.
And so it will be with “managers” of the future. Though that term has developed so many connotations that we may have to drop it.
We will have people skilled at managing “space” where people come together to get things done.
People in this line of work will probably start early. We will see them organizing conventional clubs at school, working online and developing mental models about how to create cooperative spaces in a networked world.
Five competences for space creators in our networked world
As I am on a great clean up of my paper world, I want to write down five competences that the “space creators” of the 21st century will have.
#1 What needs to be done
#2 Emotional energy to connect
#3 Form a collective umbrella
#4 Delegate tasks to protect the collective
#5 Keep commitments to positive emotional space
Sort of abstract but it follows a logic to be: what needs to be done, why are we bothered and how or why would this be our priority, what is the space that we need to work together, what are the important tasks to maintain this space and who will do them, are we having fun here?
How do we learn these skills? A post for another day, I think. First, any comment on the competences?
Let each day’s work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your widest ambition
Posted on: April 18, 2010
Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day’s work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your widest ambition
Sir William Osler (1849-1919) Canadian physician and instigator of medical residencies
Sometimes it is really hard to live mindfully. We want to reminisce, or we left the past untidy and it bothers us. Or we are are excited by future possibilities or anxious about negative side-effects.
How would we feel if we were stranded, in the great grounding of planes by volvcanoes, in a place we didn’t want to be? Most of us will fret until we have a plan.
Organize agilely and leanly
That is the secret, isn’t it? To become ‘agile’ and ‘lean’, so that each day matters for what it is.
What if we rephrased the day’s purpose “from get back home because that was my plan yesterday” to “let’s see what is possible and let’s have fun working out what my choices”.
Leadership vs management
On another channel, some of us have been lamenting the lack of leadership in British politics and the distinction between management and leadership came up, as ever.
I don’t think that leadership and management are ever far apart. We cannot manage without leadership. What looks like management is just clerical work when it is separated from judgment, moral responsibility and poetic imagination.
Leadership, when exists apart from management. probably exists because good management, happening quietly in the background, allowed us to think about what we are doing today without stressing unduly about yesterday or tomorrow.
When the world gets in a muddle, we need leadership AND management to get our heads straight again and the world orderly again so that we can give unto today our full attention.
But that is our goal – to let today be enough to absorb all our energies.
When life is out of order, to put some effort into straightening out the way we think. Sometimes it is a trial. But we do have to ask ourselves how much energy we waste fretting.
We must believe so deeply in those we lead and serve that we want them to be at our side in the heat of enemy fire.
Posted on: March 3, 2010
Art Kleiner
I haven’t read any of Art Kleiner’s books. How did I miss him? Well, I seem to have missed him and it is time to make good.
Managers & the Core Group
I am taken with the idea that every organization has a core group. The group could be corrupt, of course, but every organization does have a core who are part of the value chain.
I joined a university early in my career for that reason. As an academic, I was part of the core, while as a psychologist in HR, I was not.
The perils of neglecting the core
Many of the tensions in modern organizations arise because ‘managers’ have tried to dominate the core – the academics in universities or the doctors in the health service. It doesn’t work. Trying to dominate the core, or heart, eats away at its vitality.
Nurture the core
We, managers and administrators are here to serve. When we understand the core, or heart, and help it function as it should, our organizations flourish.
Managers & the Influencers
And of course, within the organization are groups who are very important because they influence the process in a critical way. Radar in MASH is much more powerful than the Colonel. And Hawkeye, a Captain, dominates the Majors with his wit and grasp of the essence of war.
Social dynamics
Kleiner points out that when we first start working with an organization, that we must read the social dynamics. Who has undue influence? Who has privilege. Formal rank may not matter very much. When does it, and when does it not?
On the periphery
When we are on the periphery, irritating as it may be, it is worth acknowledging how the system really works. Then we can influence the system, even if we will never be part of the core.
Supporting the core
When we are managing an organization, we can acknowledge who is the core ~ not to give them further privileges, they have those already and will defend them to the last ~ but to subtly influence their acknowledgment and influence of other stakeholders who may not be core, but who they cannot do without.
In the university world, there is a cute poem that begins with students who splash through puddles, then associate professors who can jump over puddles, and Professors who are so magnificent that they can jump over the University Library, the Vice Chancellor who can speak to god and the Departmental Secretary ~ she is god.
Managing organizations
Helping an organization maintain its vitality doesn’t take a lot of heavy-handing action. Indeed, the opposite. It takes a little system thinking. A gentle nudge here and a tactful reminder there. Sometimes a good humored reminder of reality when we stand aside and stop protecting people from their own arrogance. When the harm will not be permanent, a lesson in cause-and-effect can be salutary.
The core will always be there. We destroy value when we deny it. And we risk corruption when we sweep relations between stakeholders under the carpet.
Relationships matter. Interests matter. We need to get real.
Look harder for an organization whose core you respect
Art Kleiner makes an important point. There are many organizations whose core is rotten ~ who are evil at heart. We may be in that core, or we may be fretting about our lower status on the periphery. What counts is whether we essentially believe that the interests of the core group are good for the organization and our community. If we believe that, then we stay.
Otherwise, we need to look harder for an organization whose core we respect. It’s best to be part of the core. If not, we can serve it. Gracefully. Thankfully. With a little reverance, but with understanding that the core needs others too and that we should help them manage their relationships with others.
Remember power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. We should never let something we respect become so isolated from reality that it corrupts itself with meglamania.
But to change an organization, to nurture its vitality, we must believe that the interests of the core are the organization’s interests. We need that deep down belief to respect the core and to help it confront issues about its relationships with others.
Am I rambling? I like the acknowledgment of the core or heart of an organization. Remember in the words of Colin Powell, leadership is follow me. We must believe so deeply in those we lead and serve that we want them to be at our side in the heat of enemy fire.
NYtimes does well in its interview with Dr Tachi Yamada, the CEO of the Melinda & Bill Gates Foundation. It’s worth a ten minute break to read the words of a warm person who tells us how he leads and manages an organization and not how we should do it!
(No irony intended, of course. I’ll be reading it again.)
Suspicious of poetry
As a young psychologist, I bought into the notion that psychology must tell us something that is not common sense. Many leading psychologists still think this way. I don’t think it is right. The profession is setting itself apart from the world, above the world, beyond the world. It is now other worldly.
We should be more like management scientists. You know those tough guys who schedule the plans and manage the electricity grid so an airport never has more planes and people than it can cope with and the national grid doesn’t fall over when we all make supper at the same time?
Hard core scientists don’t set themselves up against common sense. They support common sense. Maybe they also read poetry.
Bridging the divide between poetry and management
That being said, maybe we need some prose to help people take the first steps. Writing coach, Joanna Young, tweeted this Lao Tzu quote today.
Kindness in words creates confidence.
Kindness in thinking creates profoundness.
Kindness in giving creates love.
The core of contemporary management thinking
Sounds soppy, but these words from 1500 years ago are the core of modern management thinking.
Kindness in words creates belonging and the possibility of collective efficacy.
Kindness in thinking leads to creativity and strategic clarity and hence provides the bedrock of common action.
Kindness in giving creates the common ties that allow resilience and flexibility.
Some time on Google Scholar and you will drown in academic references.
Leadership, management, human resource management
Leadership: who are we journeying with and why are they essential to our journey?
Management: which way are we going and what can each of us do to help?
Human Resource Management: who feels secure with us and will be with us tomorrow?
Who am I being that my children’s eyes are not shining?
“It’s the same for parents. If their eyes are shining, you know you are doing it. If they’re not, you’ve got to ask a question – who am I being that my children’s eyes are not shining?”
And if their eyes are not shining?
Maybe the wisdom of Tony de Mello will help. Are you trying to make them do your bidding? Could we put equal energy into developing a deep relationship between ourselves and others?
Wise words for business students
In every business school, first year students are taught these words.
I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
You will recognize the words of Abraham Lincoln at the close of his Inauguration.
The better angels of our nature
We recognize the counsel to students. Follow the common story. Speak for the better angels of our nature.
Psychology blossomed in the noughties
Positive psychology, appreciative inquiry, and mytho-poetic tradition are well understood and taught in psychology and management classrooms in all corners of the world.
But we need a name
Paradoxically though, the technical names for these fields are relatively unintelligible to lay people. If there is anything we want to achieve in this field, it is to be intelligible to ordinary people.
Would personal leadership do as name?
Eventually, I settled on the term personal leadership.
We are concerned about styles of leadership that are personal. What I do, for example is not strictly relevant to what you do. And what I do today, has little bearing on what is relevant tomorrow.
And does the name contribute to our understanding?
Having described the rationale of this new field in these words, is it truly a discipline that belongs in the professions?
How can this definition of leadership generate a theory that is useful in practice? After all, if what is relevant today and is not relevant tomorrow, what use is that theory?
We have an ontological challenge
The difficulty is less in the epistemology, that is in the way we study leadership, than in the ontology, the nature of leadership.
We used to think of leadership as something we do.
Now we look at ourselves in context. Our unit of analysis, as researchers say, is “ourself in context”.
What are the practical implications of defining leadership as ourselves in context?
We don’t exist when we don’t see
David Whyte refers to attention. “When my eyes are tired the world is tired also”. We are our habits of attention. We are what we attend to. We are our capacity to pay attention. When our way is lost, we find ourselves by paying attention. By becoming mindful and “touching and feeling” what is around us.
The big change in our understanding of leadership
Who we are is not what we do repeatedly and well.
Who we are is our frontier. Who we are is the place where we are curious about the world. Who we are is the frontier we cannot ignore.
Paradoxically, often when we feel tired, it is not because we are at our frontier, it is because we are not. We are not at a place where we are confronting the unknown carried by the energy of compulsive curiosity.
Leadership is not a spectator sport
We feel alive when we are in a place where “we want to know”. We are leaders when our curiosity about a situation leads us to ask questions. We are leaders when our compulsive curiosity asks questions which holds a mirror up to a situation.
We are leaders when our questions allow people to ask their questions.
How can we understand leadership in a way that allows us to share knowledge?
This question has two goals.
#1 What is the knowledge I can share?
There are many ways of sharing knowledge and we know stories are much more effectual than dry statistics answering questions that were unlikely from the outset to produce a practically significant answer.
We also know that knowledge is also more likely to be absorbed when people trust the presenter – when the presenter shares the journey of the students.
#2 What can I charge for my knowledge?
And probably more important is the heretical question of what can we charge for our knowledge. How can we claim and sustain status for our knowledge?
It is this question that personal leadership answers. We share knowledge not because we are right, but because we are willing to share in the gains and losses of a decision.
It is here that the field of personal leadership enters into the spirit of our age. Authority comes from being willing to share the gains and losses of a decision.
Are we so curious about the people we are with that they are willing to be changed by them ~ without notice and without guarantee?
That is knowledge to be passed on. Am I willing to act with you right now?
flowing motion 
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