You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world[1]

The events of the Arab Spring affirm the observation that revolutions do not start at the top where the past and tradition is especially venerated – revolutions start at the bottom where the most diversity and possibility of broad-based adoption. But the Arab Spring could dwindle into narcissistic self-absorption like many of the “revolutionaries” of the 1970s in the United States who are now near retirement some of them wondering what happened to the idealism of their youth.

I was talking to a more experienced friend of mine about the challenges I faced in one organizational context in which I work.  “You need,” he said after listening for while, “to read Gary Hamel’s book.”

He loaned Leading the Revolution and I have thought about a couple of the insights that live between the covers of this fascinating thesis.

Hamel insists that in business (or any organization) the responsibility for innovation must be broadly distributed.  I know from experience that the caveat is that those at the top typically derail attempts at broadly distributing responsibility for innovation as a means of protecting precedent (the prerogative of a few). In fact when operating models, business models, mental models and political models are in perfect alignment then the chance of innovation breaks down under the pressure to silence dissenters who threaten the status quo and the rewards inherent in being at the top.

Nurturing innovation requires that the organization’s mental model (deeply cherished beliefs) be challenged (pushed out of alignment with the business model) so that assumptions can be rethought.  This however is not possible without first throwing the political model (distribution of power) out of alignment long enough to redistribute power so innovation can take hold. If power remains narrowly distributed at the top then the chance of successfully innovating from the bottom is next to impossible.  This gives me pause to think about (1) how I have acted when I have been at the top and face dissenters who want to review how we do things and (2) how I manage the political power of organizations in which I do not exist at the top.

Figure 1: Creating Space for Business Concept Innovation[2]

So what is it that moves the mental and political models of an organization to make room for innovation as illustrated in Figure 1?

It takes two things to push mental and political models off-balance enough to introduce innovation according to Hamel: imagination and passion.  The risk is the potential for political backlash (e.g., Bashar al-Hassad in Syria during the Syrian uprising of 2012).  However, without becoming an imaginative and passionate activist unleashing innovation has little or no chance of occurring. Hamel makes an important point about becoming an activist in an organizational sense:

Activists are not anarchists.  They are, the “loyal opposition.” Their goal is to create a movement within their company and a revolution outside in.[3]

In discussing activism in a purely organization sense, activists are committed to their company and to a cause that is at odds with pervading values or practices within the organization. Activists can behave responsibly and be a source of alternative ideas according to Hamel. Activists refuse to fit in on the one hand and live out street-smart pragmatism on the other hand.  It is this second point - street smart pragmatism - that is often missing in inexperienced activists.  They fail to see the potential backlash or pitfalls inherent in activism and so become the walking wounded who give up because they miscalculated the severity of the backlash.

So why care enough to engage in the behaviors of an activist?  Hamel offers three compelling reasons:

1. A person needs to live and work with purpose over and above their paycheck.  Research demonstrates that those people who experience flow are also people who work out of a sense of purpose.[4]
2. The organization is not "them" – it’s you. Whining about "them" is simply an excuse to justify inaction.
3. You owe activism to your friends and colleagues – they deserve to make a very cool difference in the world.

Conclusion

Many of the leaders I work with both in the class room and in the board room can profit from this insight by Hamel. They don’t want to be  an empty suit or disillusioned has-been. On the other hand some people simply don’t want to risk the potential backlash nor the work needed to engage in true innovation. How about you?  Are you an imaginative and passionate contributor to purpose and meaning in work?

Here is another question, what if you are at the top?  Are you ready to be an activist?  What does it mean for those who follow you?  What does street smart pragmatism look like for you around your board or other stake holders?  Remember, your employees and colleagues deserve to make a very cool difference in the world.

The lecture was on ethics in decision-making and the discussion moved, as it always does when I teach outside the USA toward American foreign policy.  In the midst of the discussion these Kenyan graduate students gave me a proverb that fits political realities all leaders have to work with in corporate as well as in public service contexts.

"When elephants fight the grass gets crushed, when elephants make love the grass gets crushed."

Effective leadership (leadership that does not destroy or damage people) recognizes how organizations allot and display power. It is not uncommon for good leaders to get crushed not-with-standing their skill, insight and alliances when they are at the wrong place and time e.g., a regime change or economic downturn. Such experiences push leaders through crucible experiences and boundaries to growth. I did not catch a sense of fatalism from these students as much as a clear view of reality and a warning to know where the elephants were at all times. I found this helpful in corporate life. One of my graduate professors was a specialist on organizational change.  “Ray” he said on several occasions, “remember power wins.”  It was his way of reminding me to be aware of the elephants.

Eels and Change

A friend of mine had invited me to China to help train managers in a start-up hospitality consulting firm. The hospitality market in China was on fire, hotels and motels were springing up everywhere.  The challenge for my friend (we had met in graduate school) rested on the rate of growth threatened to outstrip the firm’s ability to develop the necessary leadership skills not to mention any kind of bench.  At the end of the session on recognizing the predictable barriers to personal development in career and personal growth my interpreter turned to me with the mixture of epiphany and interrogation.

“You are an eel.”

“Help me understand what you mean by that,” I said.

“Do you see the fish in the market when you come to the office?”  He answered. “They sit in the tanks all day and over time they become listless.  When this occurs no one will buy them because they don’t look fresh.  So, the fisherman places an eel in the tank.  This makes the fish come back to life,” he explained.

The insight about change has a bearing on trust.  The effect of the eel depends on the perspective of the viewer.  To the fish the eel is a threat.  The fish snap to in the presence of the eel yet the effect is short-lived. The observation of my interpreter made me stop and think about the pace at which I was moving and whether I was helping these managers think through the concepts I explained in the lens of their own worldview.  From the owner’s perspective I challenged lethargy and encouraged action. The larger challenge my interpreter helped me see was how to synthesize the needs of the owners for rapid change with the needs of the managers for deeper understanding and engagement i.e., a function of trust.

Can an eel be simultaneously a source of change and hope?  Not if you are a fish.  Leaders must exercise awareness of how followers perceive your actions. The ends you expect may not be the results others generate. Learn to use a variety of leadership roles and styles.

Storks, Frogs and Epiphanies

I was still chewing on the what to do with the eel story a couple of days later when my interpreter served also as my mentor with another bit of wisdom.

“You are a stork.”

“Is a stork better than an eel?” I queried.

“No, a stork is different.” He responded in what I understood as a correction of my western proclivity for either/or resolutions to ambiguity or dissonance. He reminded me to exercise an “opposable mind” as Martin calls it. Highly creative leaders avoid reducing decisions between alternative options but seek instead to hold the tension of apparently opposing decisions to create an entirely different kind of approach.  This ability to rest comfortably in the ambiguity of tension results in an integrative thinking that seeks out “…less obvious but potentially relevant factors…” then considers “…multidirectional and nonlinear relationships among variables….”[1]   With this done the effective leader pursues the problem as a whole and not the parts and “Creatively resolve tensions among opposing ideas; generate innovative outcomes.”[2]

“What does the stork do?” I asked with a greater awareness of my need to learn.

“The stork shows the frog that there is a greater reality than that which the frog sees from the bottom of the well.  You see, the stork appears to be supernatural (read exceptional or unreachable) to the frog.  It appears and disappears at will at the top of the well and the frog cannot understand how the stork accomplishes such a miraculous feat.  One day the frog asked the stork to help him understand the wonders of the stork’s miraculous existence.  The stork laughed and lifted the frog from the bottom of the well to see the world from on top of the well.  You are helping us see a different world.” (Remember Plato’s cave of allegory?)

I was moved and encouraged – apparently I inspired both fear and hope in my time with these leaders.  More importantly I was learning to hold apparently opposite or mutually exclusive views of reality in a dynamic tension.

Conclusion

Parables or stories connect with the experience of the hearer and offer a lens for dynamic reflection.  So, my conclusion is simply a launching point for many more insights in fact if you have other cultural unique parables please share them with me in the comments.

1. Highly effective leaders exercise awareness of how organizations assign and use power.  Leaders who lack this awareness end up trampled to death. The leader who is unaware of their power will trample to death those he/she leads.  All good leaders have a tool kit of influence, authority and power.  Power is the last of the tools a leader should use.  Those leaders who abuse the use of power are like a rogue elephant. The destruction caused by rogue elephants and toxic leaders motivates people to end the threat of damage by changing jobs or eliminating the threat.
2. Highly effective leaders exercise self-awareness and situational awareness.  There are times all leaders must act like eels.  Recognize however that change management requires an awareness of the fear change engenders. In experienced leaders scare their employees to death resulting in disengagement and turn over. Neither alternative generates long-term success in meeting business goals. Great leaders understand that change is only as effective as a shift in how people see their situation.
3. Highly effective leaders work to redefine reality.  They work with an opposable mind that discovers new alternatives and inspires people with the possibilities inherent in seeing a problem or challenge differently.

My students and the employees I work with often become my mentors and teachers. Part of the delight I have in leading rests in the influence I exert but the greater joy rests in the exposure I have to new insights and learning from the lives of those I have the privilege to serve.  Are you learning?

I was intrigued with the article (and the ensuing flap) over Greg Smith’s New York Times essay on why he left Goldman Sachs. In the middle of all that was written one thing stood out as a consistent theme – corporate culture is important.  What does corporate culture do?  How does it help an organization to be efficient?  When does it hurt profitability in the long run?  The questions are important to anyone at the helm of an organization.

Corporate Culture Defined

What is corporate culture?  A corporate culture is a shared (inculcated) way of seeing and making sense of the world internally and externally. Corporate culture is reflected in statements like, “That is how we do things around here.” The values and systems that grow around an organization can be one of the most powerful tools available for ensuring consistent decisions, seeing new possibilities, reinforcing quality actions and communicating a consistent brand. It is the corporate culture that support and leverage the discrete functions of the organization and that inhibit them from becoming silos of independent functions that undermine efficiency. I have adapted the idea of culture to the corporate setting.[1]  Organizational culture is:

• The total way of life inside the corporation;
• the social legacy individuals acquire from the corporation as typically modeled by the founder or chief executive(s);
• a way of thinking, feeling and believing;
• a theory on the part of management about the way in which employees as a group of people in fact behave;
• a storehouse of pooled learning and belief;
• a set of standardized orientations to recurrent problems;
• learned behavior;
• a mechanism for the normative regulation of behavior;
• a set of techniques for adjusting both to the external environment and to competitors;
• a precipitate (impulse) of the firm’s history.

Identifying corporate culture is sometimes like catching a slippery fish – it is more difficult to do when one is inside the culture.

Because corporate culture is a set of assumptions that define reality and response to reality it is important to make an effort to define how our organization behaves.  What if an organization’s cultural assumptions are inaccurate? Some argue that because business deals primarily with facts and numbers that such subjective things as “organizational culture” do not actually impact real business decisions.  The fallacy in this is that truly objective data does not exist.  The selection important data is an act of cultural filtering. When the interpretation of what the numbers mean is turned into actionable milestones the full force of the organization’s culture surfaces.

Corporate Culture Can Go Awry

Organizational culture is both formative and resilient.  It is not permanent. This point is critical for leaders to understand.  Organizational culture can withstand severe stresses and the occasional lapses of executive or managerial judgment. Organizational culture reinforced by the consistent behavior of its leaders serves as a check to lapses of executive or managerial judgment and as a guide and check for employee behavior.  The formative nature of organizational culture reinforces the discrete actions of the organization that create value.

On the other hand organizational culture is adaptive. The rather scary point is that organizational culture follows the behavior of leaders over time.  Culture reflects and structures the values that drive it.   This can result in a corporate culture that evolves to meet new market pressures effectively.  Or the adaptive nature of corporate culture may just as possible create a toxic environment that supports or masks its own toxicity.  Read Smith’s description again:

“It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients. The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years. It wasn’t just about making money; this alone will not sustain a firm for so long. It had something to do with pride and belief in the organization. I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years. I no longer have the pride, or the belief.”[2]

Smith asserts that the organizational culture (the systems and values inculcated by the leadership over time as demonstrated in their behavior and decisions) became toxic internally and externally at Goldman Sachs and thus undermined employee engagement and loss of client focus.

Even the responses critical of Smith’s essay made the same observation of Goldman and Sach’s toxic culture.  Matt Levine’s critique of Smith’s motives and timing did not undo Smith’s thesis but confirmed it:

“One question on everyone's mind is…why did it take him 12 years to figure out that Goldman's culture was rotten? After all, Matt Taibbi and the SEC have been saying similar things for years.”[3]

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker also confirmed Smith’s observation about eroding organizational culture.[4] Great leaders pay attention to their organization’s reputation. This is not a Pollyannaish denial of the fact that successful organizations generate their share of envious critics’ hell bent on blackening the eye of success.  Every great leadership team and great organizational culture has its detractors. However, if an organization’s reputation differs substantially from the organization’s espoused values it is time to stop and assess the organization’s health.

I contend that the leader who fails to pay attention to the nuances of the culture he/she influences through their own behavior, decisions and reward structures are already well down the road of an organizational failure whether that failure be the loss of talent, an ethical/legal lapse, or financial collapse. Why?  What does organizational culture do in operational terms?

Three Operational Impacts of Organizational Culture                          

Organizational culture is critical to the support of the organization’s discrete actions. Discrete actions recognize the unique disciplines that make up the organization’s competitive advantage.  Organizational culture is the framework on which all support actions build.  As noted above organizational culture is the sum of its history, approach to implementing strategy and its understanding of the underlying economics of the activities themselves.  Organizational culture is most visible in support activities such as human resource management, firm infrastructure and technology development.

Organizational culture is essential to identifying and bridging the threat of isolated actions. Isolated actions indicate competition internally that add to costs and reduce value.  Isolated actions may either indicate a dissonance emerging in the organization’s culture or may be the cause of dissonance in the organization’s culture.  Where the organizational culture is working it becomes the informal mechanism for pulling attempts at isolated action back into the appropriate discrete actions of the company.

Organizational culture is the character and feel of the organization that draws and retains the firm’s top talent.  As noted in Levine’s critique of Smith’s commentary Goldman Sachs has hemorrhaged talent.  Levine contends the hemorrhaging talent is the result of an economy that has readjusted the financial rewards possible in the industry.  Levine’s parallel observations are interesting.  The correlation of toxic culture and loss of income potential or value creation seems to affirm the first two impacts of organizational culture.  The demise of corporate culture creates the kind of internal dissonance that clearly sends talent searching for something employees can take pride in.  Do your employees take pride in the work of your firm?  If they don't then it is time to look at your organization's culture and its mission carefully.

Assessing Organizational Culture

So where does a leader start in evaluating the culture of their organization?

Artifacts and creations – how do people dress, what art is in the building, how is the building structured and decorated?  These are clues not conclusions.  This is the constructed physical and social environment, written and spoken language and overt behavior of members.  Determine whether a change has occurred and how the change impacted the organization.

A friend of mine, the president of an organization, once redesigned the corporate office space by moving his office from the seventh floor to the third floor with all the divisional offices and consolidated the second and third floors to house the entire corporate structure so he could actually walk around and talk with his team.  He told that his initial move prior to the total remodel was to move his office from the seventh to the third floor.

The day after he completed his move he returned to find his office vacated.  He asked what happened to his office.  It was moved back over night to the seventh floor.  The board did not want to flatten the organization.  My friend created cultural dissonance by moving opposite the culture with the intention of changing the culture.  My friend succeeded in the remodel project. He won the approval of his senior management team.  However the board ultimately removed him. The board hired someone whose values mirrored a more hierarchical approach to organizational culture. Had my friend been more observant he would have paced the change he attempted differently.

Reevaluate the espoused values – what ought to be; the non-negotiable of the organization.  Determine whether the actual values imbedded in decisions reflect the espoused values.  Pay special attention to episodic events of inconsistency i.e., periods when espoused values are forgotten or ignored in decisions.  This usually occurs in crisis.  Pay attention to what triggers the abandonment of espoused values and ask two questions.  First what was the trigger and does this trigger represent a toxic starting point?  Will behavior that seems to be the exception actually become the rule and result in a toxic culture that may undermine the long-term support of the firm’s discrete activities thus eroding its value making potential?

Second, ask whether the espoused value is sufficient for the organization?  One organization I worked in espoused “family values” which was interpreted as willing to pay for health insurance, provide extended leave in extenuating circumstances and overlooking poor performance if a family problem could be identified as the cause.  The dissonance that occurred in this privately held organization was that poor performers were viewed recipients of financial reward at the expense of those top performers.  In a debate among the executive team this dissonance came to the surface. The dissonance was never really addressed.  The result, a new set of isolated activities emerged as managers worked around the dissonance at the cost of the firm’s profitability.  The solution would not be to cut the “family value” but to define it more clearly in light of the other driving values of the firm.  In this case the executive team failed to address an insufficient value and thus contributed to the emergence of a toxic reaction.

Review the firm’s basic assumptions. Assumptions are perceptions taken for granted and therefore happen all the time in the cultural unit.  These assumptions affect five areas:

1. Humanity’s relationship to nature – whether the perceived total environment can be controlled or must be harmonized or people are subjugate to nature.
2. Nature of Reality, Time and space – what is real and how one discovers what is real. Event or time oriented.
3. The nature of humanness – what it means to be human and inhuman in behavior.  Helps determine who fits and who does not
4. The nature of human activity – whether humans can be perfected or you can’t influence behavior at all – fate.
5. The nature of relationship – what is the proper way to relate to each other?

It may first appear that reviewing assumptions has no bearing on what the organization does to generate value.  However assumptions are the crux of managerial decisions from the line to the C Suite. If the organizational culture is in the throes of dissonance assessing the firm’s assumption’s can often bring the root of the problem to light.

Conclusion

The power of understanding and deliberately framing corporate culture rests in the fact that corporate culture can serve as the non-verbal accelerator of corporate efficiency and resilience.  The down side of a culture’s adaptability is that it can devolve into toxicity as it mirrors the behaviors of its executives and managers in the market place.

When corporate culture is effectively evaluated and monitored it provides one of the most power tools to maintaining the discrete actions of the firm and is essential is to identifying and bridging the threat of isolated actions.

Finally, by reviewing the firm’s artifacts and creations, espoused values and basic assumptions leaders can decide the health of the culture they manage relative to the firm’s value creation and talent retention activities.

In the first and second installment of this series I looked at what makes trusted friends turn into fatal enemies in business.  When trust dissipates into posturing and the emergence of win/loose competition or attempts to annihilate a foe the result is a toxic impasse. In my example I cited the situation in which an owner became his own worst enemy – his quest for power, prestige and privilege divorced from the responsibility, discipline and trust needed to sustain his quest ended in the demise of his business and the blatant quest of his partner to put him out of business.

There is no single issue at work in the demise of interpersonal relationships. Personal histories show up in the stressors of a startup business with wildly different sets of assumptions.  Yet in the growth of any organization (for profit or non-profit) a tipping point exists that predicts stressors in the relationship among leaders and one of two outcomes: (1) leadership divorce or (2) leadership conflict toward discovery.

Predictable Tension Points

Dynamic organizations grow as a result of the driving vision of an entrepreneurial founder and reach a point at which the founder can no longer keep up with the multiple demands of the organization.  At this crossroad the owner or founder (remember this stage of organizational development occurs in non-profit and for profit organizations) realizes that he/she needs help.

The organization must develop its own identity and processes that move the vision and mission of the Founder forward beyond the skills and abilities of the founder.  One of my favorite organizational theorist calls this the need for organizational versus personal sovereignty.

Organizational sovereignty is an essential building block to the development of great internal structures and processes.  Leaders need to understand the logic behind the development of processes and rules that make sure consistent quality and accountability in the performance of the core competencies of a company or organization as it pursues the vision that birthed it in the first place.

Vision First

In my view organizations won’t die for lack of core competencies per se. I have been a part of growing organizations that suffered for lack of competence but survived because their vision temporarily moved them past the restrictions of incompetence.  This is not to say that the lack of competence in leadership has no eventual adverse or destructive impact.  When an organization possesses a vision for a different reality, and that the vision permeates every aspect of the organization it can weather periods of slowed momentum regardless of incomplete competencies.

However, when an owner/founder recognizes the need for new management talent yet consistently usurps their input once hired the talent will disengage. If this occurs the organization reverts to a earlier stage of development or begins a death cycle.  Owners or founders who find their organizations repeating the same growth and loss patterns should look in the mirror.

Conceptualizing the Tension Points - Organizational Sovereignty

The challenge an owner/founder faces is how to alter his or her perspective on leadership to proactively engage in the development of leadership at every level of their organization – this sounds simple until the owner realizes that developing leadership means redefining control. Two classic mistakes occur.

On the one hand the cost of talent leads an owner to reject the right talent in favor of the almost right talent.  The results of a bad hire are obvious almost immediately multiplying the owner/founder’s worries and work than streamlining both.

Similarly owners who hire the right talent, delegate the right decisions then panic and revert to withdrawing control also face the likelihood that (a) their talent will leave or (b) they will fire their new managers because they don’t know how to redefine the locus of control from themselves to the organization.  The result is disastrous.

If the organization is to thrive then it must successfully carry out a different approach to authority.  Adizes (1988) makes this observation:

The move to Adolescence requires delegation of authority.  In a society this is analogous to making the move from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarch where the king is willing to abide by a constitution.  The Founder must be willing to say, "I am willing to subject myself to the company rather than have the company subject to me.  I will be bound by the same policies that bind everyone else."[1]

The illustration of a constitutional monarchy is an important one. In a privately held company the owner does bear the bulk of the risk in the early days.  Typically it is the owner’s house, savings, or equity that is on the line when it comes to the financial performance of the organization.  It is this risk that causes owners to jerk back on the reigns of delegation to override organizational sovereignty.  History demonstrates that any monarch’s attempt to reassert absolute control after having set up a constitutional existence is sure to end poorly.

In non-profits the same dynamic works.  It is still the founder’s assets, equity and sweat equity that has built the original organization (e.g., church startups). In this situation a pastor feels all the same sense of threat and fear a business owner does at the prospect of relinquishing control by subjecting themselves to an emerging leadership team of staff and governance members. The question remains – will the pastor abide by the same policies that bind everyone else?

The move toward organizational sovereignty is a screening time -- "...it separates those organizations which will advance and flourish from those which will flounder.  It separates those organizations that have self-discipline and those that don't."[2] To become a great organization requires self-discipline to control urges and short-term temptations.  Organizational self-discipline keeps its focus on the long-term while simultaneously turning its attention to its internal controls and processes with the goal of doing fewer things better as defined by its core vision and core competencies.[3]

The transition even when done well is not instantaneous.  Adizes (1988) observed:

…management can spend a year defining the organization chart, determining its corporate mission (not only deciding what else its going to do but also deciding what it's not going to do), developing training programs, salary administration systems, and incentive systems.  If this is done proactively, the reorganization can avoid the emergence of future problems such as lack of salary administration, lack of clarity in the organizational structure and hiring tomorrow, people who were needed yesterday.[4]

Does it take a year to carry out this kind of structuring?  Yes, my experience has been that organizations that need to define the systems of organizational sovereignty have already begun to experience the dissipation of their energy and resources by trying to be all things to all people – their leaders have already experienced mixed messages and bungee cord delegation that usually signals that the top decision maker or makers are overtaxed and not sure what the next steps should be.

What are the primary components involved in building organizational sovereignty?

1) Appropriately delegating authority (this is where defining organizational structure, determining mission and reviewing personnel occur).

2) Creating policies that consistently apply to all (this is where developing training programs, salary administration systems and hiring the right people occur).

3)  Creating a learning environment and the systems needed to help transform experience into knowledge.

Delegated Authority and Roles of Management

The definition of delegated authority depends on understanding the roles of management or leadership.  Managers or leaders must consistently solve problems and make decisions. Management defined here is the act, manner or practice of directing, supervising and controlling. Be careful to avoid mis-matching the adjectives in the definition to the wrong referent.  Management directs strategies and responses to market pressures and opportunities.  Management supervises the work of others offering mentoring, feedback and support.  Management controls processes and expenditures. Controls make sure the efficient use of resources produce a profit or execute a mission while retaining enough cash reserves.

If the activities and the referents (measurements or results) are confused, such as a manager may attempt to control people and not processes or expenditures then relationships turn dysfunctional and damage the morale and productivity of the company and set up the loss of trust that eventually leads to betrayal.  Management activities either undermine or reinforce the ownership of tasks in a department by the leadership skills employed.  In other words management either reinforces or undermines organizational sovereignty leading to an organization that is smart, responsible and agile or an organization that is stupid, irresponsible and impulsive. Management techniques characterized in Table 1 illustrate the difference in approach and outcome management activities and referents can have.

Table 1: Management Techniques

How can Owners Successfully Navigate the Change to Organizational Sovereignty?

In watching owners wrestle with the issue of organizational sovereignty I have several suggestions to offer:

Look for feedback from the right people.  Many owners suffer from self-inflicted injury by ignorance. Business schools, owner networking groups, consultants and successful entrepreneurs (who have already made the jump from personal to organizational sovereignty) offer a wealth of experience and insight.  There is an old adage that carries a lot of truth – if you hang around with turkeys you will never fly with eagles.    Some owners/founders find solace in those who are at the same level of development but that solace blinds them to the realities they should address.

Practice self-awareness. Stress and fear always distort a person’s most successful behavioral patterns. I have watched owners eviscerate their key talent with one of two common results.  In the best case talent that is consistently undermined leaves the company as a result.  This is best because it offers and immediate wake up call. In the worst case the talent stays but unplugs.  Demoralized talent looses its commitment and engagement with the critical issues.  Instead a survival mode results that resembles a brain-dead body animated with life support technology.  If the tension remains talent will work to sabotage all attempts to change the status quo (i.e., survival). Lipman-Blumen (2005) offers an important insight; “followers knowingly tolerate, seldom unseat, often prefer, and sometimes even create toxic leaders.”[5]  Why does this dynamic occur? Lipman-Blumen (2005) suggests that such behavior is motivated by six human needs:

Need for reassuring authority figures to fill our parent’s shoes

Need for security and certainty – which prompts us to surrender freedom

Need to feel chosen or special

Need for membership in the human community

Fear of ostracism, isolation and social death

Fear of personal powerlessness to challenge a bad leader

It is difficult to hear how others experience one’s behaviors. But if you will listen your business and your personal life will improve.  Find a coach. A good coach can help you identify the stress points in your behavior that tip the scales from creativity to chaos.

Realize that running a business is not being a technician.  Often people strike out on their own because they want to focus on what they love doing…if this is the goal the last place to be is a business owner unless you work out of your garage and make the kind of money that never requires the purchase of equipment, assets or hiring of employees.  If you dream of being a business success then you must learn to (a) run a business and find others who do the technical work or (b) hire someone to run the business while you run the R & D or the shop etc., while you learn how to read financials and balance sheets and check policies to make sure that the core values you set out to live by are invested in the daily operation of the company.  Assume a learning posture. The moment you stop learning is the moment you start your own demise in business.

Summary

The loss of trust is a contributor to organizational demise.  In young organizations the founder is often the biggest culprit in undermining trust because he or she does not understand the need for organizational sovereignty.  Organizations experience common developmental life cycles and predictable tensions.  The smart leader anticipates known tension points and learns how to navigate them successfully. The critical decision point young organizations face is the need to formalize structures away from the founder in a move toward organizational sovereignty.  If the founder fails to learn the power of delegation the odds for creating a toxic organization exponentially increase. Toxic organizations tend to be self-perpetuating because the creation of toxic leaders often helps people meet psychological needs. Diagnosing the existence of good delegation is possible by looking that the management techniques typically employed to decide if management behavior contributes to or undermines organizational sovereignty (Table 1). Organizational success or demise is not set in stone. Leaders, founders, owners committed to learning and open to input have the best possible chance of success.

What kind of organizational culture will you build or support?

What makes trusted friends turn into fatal enemies in business?  There is no single issue at work in the demise of interpersonal relationships. Personal histories show up in the stresses of a start-up business with wildly different sets of assumptions.  Yet there are three variations I have seen in how stresses impact work relationships.  The first and most extreme is the toxic impasse.  The second and more common is the abnormal divorce.  The third and most constructive is the normal conflict toward discovery.  In this installment I will explore the toxic impasse.

I introduced the toxic impasse in part 1 of this series.  The surprising intensity of venom I saw in my replacement in the software company had a history.  The impact of the 9/11 attacks on our sales pipeline was survivable.  My replacement possessed the right credentials and experience to help the owner endure the temporary loss of revenue by restructuring the organization’s functions and debt. So, where did the relationship between these two friends derail?

The First Encounter

Brian had brought the employment paperwork to my second interview.  Both interviews occurred offsite so I never saw the offices prior to my first assignment – a trade show.  Brian gave me tickets for a flight to Orlando were I was to attend was a hospitality trade show.  There I would not only meet the rest of the turn around team but also meet the owner.

I arrived late in the afternoon and caught a taxi to the hotel.  I called Brian to announce my arrival and he asked me to meet the team and the owner for an early breakfast the next day.  I spent the night reviewing the features and technical detail of our software and familiarizing myself with the operational challenges of hotels.

The next morning I met the team.  I fielded questions from the owner with enough familiarity with his product to make a decent first impression.  We left breakfast for the trade show to see the booth the owner had hired workers to erect.  No one on the turn around team had seen the booth before.  If you have not been to a hospitality trade show what I am about to describe loses its impact.   Hospitality trade shows are like attending a Vegas variety show. They are loud, glitzy, and sexy. The graphics were impressive. The light shows were amazing and the multi-media were exhilarating.  We turned the corner to see our booth at the end of the aisle…in fact I did not see it at first because it was so nondescript.  Once the owner had focused our eyes on the booth I blurted out, “well, it won’t take much to raise the bar on this company!”

As soon as the words left my mouth I figured my job was over and my return flight would be a networking opportunity to find new work.  The owner however, turned, looked me in the eye and said, “Brian, I guess you hired the right team.”   We were off to a less than auspicious start.

The booth contained one computer to show the software.  I had no brochures.  I found business cards that looked designed circa 1950. Brian barked at Laura to go gather competitor intelligence.  He turned to the owner and said, “You did set up the meetings with the flags this morning right?” The owner answered yes.  Brian then turned to me and said, “work the booth, here is a technical manual – see if we can sell this software.” They all left.

I never saw any of the team again except Laura who dropped off competitor information, “hide this and bring it back to the room with you tonight,” she said then disappeared down another aisle.  The day was especially grueling.  Talking with technical buyers about software I had never used and only vaguely understood meant that I had to bypass questions and gather leads.  I was exhausted.  Brian had set up the next morning’s breakfast as a debriefing and strategy session for day two so I did not need to talk to any of the team that night.  I just wanted to get some sleep.  I went to my room and found my key card did not work.  The front desk told me the credit card used to reserve my room was over its limit. It took several calls to Brian’s room and conversations with the front desk to get back into my room.

I arrived at the debriefing meeting early to bend Brian’s ear.  “I thought you said this company was well capitalized,” I shot at him the moment we sat down.  “Was yesterday’s circus an indication that this ship has already sunk?”  Brian assured me the company was fine.  “Have you seen the financials?” I asked.

“Not yet, I just completed negotiating our salaries and the turnaround plan days before this show.”

My mouth was now hanging open.

“We’re fine, Ray.” Brian said then pointed with his eyes to the door where the owner had entered the room.

 The Second Impression

We flew back to Southern California after the show on a red-eye flight from Orlando.  Brian wanted to meet first thing the next morning to discuss what we needed to do to position the brand, reorganize the structure and slam through the database to start generating sales.

I arrived before sunrise at the offices the next day.  I could not help but notice the cobwebs that bedecked the main entrance.  I entered the lobby. A receptionist barely glanced up from her computer screen to acknowledge me.   I introduced myself and as I did the receptionist’s demeanor shifted from cranky to surly. “Oh” her voice now had an icy distance to it, “you are one of the new team.  Brian is in the upstairs conference room.”

“Thanks,” I said – I felt that sinking feeling I had felt in Orlando at the trade show.  I walked across the office space passed the skeletal remains of a once flourishing company.  The empty cubicles and closed off office space reminded me of dead ocean reef like those that show up on National Geographic specials - stark, empty shells.

“Geez Brian,” I said entering the conference room, “what happened to the receptionist?”

“She’s gone today,” Brian retorted.  “Let’s get to work.”

Laura walked in from the break room with the day’s mail in hand and we started the meeting.

In the months that followed we discovered:

1. Women on the payroll who had no clear job function in the company.
2. The financials revealed that the company was leveraged beyond its value – in private loans from the owner’s wife.
3. Many of our largest customers were in the beginning of legal action against us.
4. A growing number of significant clients were replacing our software with our competitor’s software.
5. All but one of our developers (the only male) walked out one day complaining of sexual harassment.
6. Our customer service manager (a female) was also the keeper of company gossip – which she used to secure her place as a manager and stay protected from termination for incompetence.

I dug around the files and storerooms for something that would give me an sign of what had transpired – my anthropological and ethnographic classes at work. I found that the owner had been a radical innovator in the industry.  He introduced the first commercially viable property management software, but he had not kept up with the technology.  Early successes and enormous revenue from the first sales had given the owner a false sense of security and success.  He lacked the discipline to follow through; he made a series of disastrous mistakes and asked his friend Bob (my replacement) to clean up the results.

Over time Bob restructured the company to protect the assets of the owner’s wife and to provide a profitable division he could manage without interference.  Hence the day I met Bob (to orient him on our operations) was the day Bob had anticipated and planned for years.

Toxic Leaders

The owner had become a toxic leader.  Toxic leaders are persons who, “…first charm but then manipulate, mistreat, undermine, and ultimately leave their followers worse off than they found them.”[1]  The owner was a smooth talking and very charming person.  I watched him in sales meetings with potential clients make promises that I knew we would never be able to keep – we simply did not have the programming budget.  I was seeing the impact of a toxic leader.

How do toxic leaders gain their power?  The fact is that followers often knowingly, “…tolerate, seldom unseat, frequently prefer, and sometimes even create toxic leaders.”[2]  Even good leaders have the seeds of toxicity – humans are inherently frail.  Toxic leaders exhibit observable behaviors such as:[3]

• Violating basic standards of human rights
• Consciously feeding their followers illusions that enhance the leader’s power and impair the follower’s capacity to act independently (e.g., persuading followers that they are the only one who can save them or the organization)
• Playing to the basest fears and needs of followers
• Stifling constructive criticism and teaching supporters to follow and not question the leader’s judgment and actions
• Misleading followers through deliberate untruths and misdiagnosis of issues and problems
• Subverting those structures and processes of the system intended to generate truth, justice, and excellence and engaging in unethical, illegal and criminal acts
• Building totalitarian or narrowly dynastic regimes, including subverting the legal processes for selecting and supporting new leaders
• Failing to nurture other leaders, including their own successors
• Maliciously setting constituents against one another (in my observation this may not be malicious at first but manipulative – either way the damage is extensive)
• Treating their own followers well, but persuading them to hate and/or destroy others (I have seen this occur between departments such as where one VP instructs his direct reports to undermine the efforts of another VP’s department)
• Identifying scapegoats and inciting others to castigate them
• Structuring the costs of overthrowing them as a trigger for the downfall of the system they lead, thus further endangering followers and non-followers alike
• Ignoring or promoting incompetence, cronyism, and corruption

What is behind the behavior of toxic leaders?  Insatiable ambition, enormous egos, arrogance and lack of integrity all feed the reckless disregard for the consequences of their actions on others.  The more I learned about the company the more I realized the owner was a toxic leader – and the people in the company had allowed him to stay toxic – perhaps even needed him to be toxic for their own needs.

That day in my office I heard Bob’s version of Operation Valkyrie (the failed attempt by German military officers to assassinate Hitler in World War II). Bob was set on figuratively assassinating the owner.

The End Game

Toxic leaders stay in power because they are allowed to stay, perhaps even needed to remain in power by those who follow them.  Follower needs for safety, security, self-esteem affirmation, love, belonging, aesthetics, self-actualization, purpose and transcendence all factor into beliefs or myths that inform and calcify our behaviors. We see what we want to see.  In the extreme people wonder how so many Germans could be duped by the evil foisted upon them by Hitler…yet toxic leaders remain unchallenged for a variety of reasons in public, private and religious organizations today all around the globe.

Something about the owner’s last attempt to subvert his existing team by bringing in Brian’s turn around team had caused Bob to snap, to respond not with a healthy challenge but a toxic challenge of his own. Since my last meeting with Bob I have seen the pattern repeat itself again and again.  Toxic leaders charm and manipulate.  Toxic followers ignore the abuse for the promise of some need being fulfilled by the leader.  So what strategies are available to followers?  Followers are not passive victims; they are passive or active contributors to toxicity by leaders.   There are several actions an individual can take.

Counsel the toxic leader, help that leader improve.  This requires honest feedback and a level of vulnerability.  Many leaders express the need for feedback and personal insight (even if they resist it simultaneously). In fact the higher a leader moves up in organizational hierarchy the less likely it is that they will find honest feedback…why?  Followers need the leader to provide certain needs.  Evaluate your own needs, use self-awareness.  What do you need from the leader you consider toxic?  Is this leader the only way to meet this need?  Is the price worth it to you…or to them as a person?

Quietly work to undermine the leader.  This choice is a difficult one because it opens the temptation to become toxic to address toxicity.  This strategy can work if the toxicity of the leader has surpassed what the organization typically endures or you can form an alliance with people who have the organization power to withstand the backlash that may result.  A friend of mine once tried to have a toxic leader quietly removed from their role.  He built an alliance of those in the company who also recognized the negative impact this leader was greater than any benefit he brought to the company.  What they failed to calculate was the needs of the owner in this privately held company.  The owner needed the toxic leader because he had quadrupled revenue through engineered processes.  Losing the toxic leader threatened the income of the owner…my friend was eventually forced out of the company.

Join with others to confront the leader. There are internal politics to consider.  I once formed an alliance to address a toxic leader only to have the alliance blow up on my face as my “friends” denied their role in the alliance and sacrificed me to meet their own needs.  They hated the toxic leader…but that leader provided the security, belonging and esteem they needed and were afraid of losing.

Leave.  There are toxic environments that will not change…they meet or promise to meet needs the followers desperately want.  The only choice in this instance is to leave.  As one who once made this choice, and left a 25 year career behind to start all over in an entirely different field, I can tell you this is not easy.  However, if my own experience is any indication it is far better than staying in a toxic environment.  I have, even as a novice in my new career experienced far more of the type of work I wanted to do since I left than I ever had the opportunity to engage by staying.  Why did I stay so long?  Because the toxic leader dangled the promise of meeting my own needs in front of me repeatedly.  I needed the toxic leader until I discovered that what I needed had nothing to do with that leader or organization.

What if toxicity does not quite describe the challenges you face?  Organizations face predictable points of conflict (that may open the way to toxicity) at various points in their own development.  By anticipating the development life-cycle of the organization it is possible to predict points of conflict and design strategies to discuss this conflict. In Part 3 I explore ways to diagnose and address some of the more common sources of conflict organizations meet.  The challenge for all of us as leaders and followers is to honestly face the reality that toxic behavior is often motivated by valid needs clothed in the fear of loss.  Two questions help me reconsider my own behavior as a leader: (1) what am I willing to pay emotionally and relationally to meet this need; (2) have I been honest about my need and am I looking in the right place to meet it?

“Look Ray,” he said, “I know you have your stuff together.  Sit here, gather your consulting fee and look for another job while you do. This is not about you.  This guy does not deserve to be in business.  I am going to take him down, take what cash I can and move to the job I already have lined up.”

These are the last words I heard upon exiting my first job after graduate school.  How in the world had this company come to such a venomous end?  The guy speaking was a man the owner trusted completely.  Upon receiving news that I would  be let go in the downsizing after the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center I was told that based on performance I was a good choice.  However, the owner preferred to bring his longtime friend and director of the manufacturing division in to restructure the company to survive the hit we had taken in our cash flow as a result of a vanishing sales pipeline.

How did I get here?  Why was this guy so filled with poison toward this owner?  Why was the owner so clueless?

 The Back Story

I completed a master’s degree in intercultural studies with an emphasis on organizational development and leadership development.   I became more and more enamored with the subject of organizational design and leadership development. I knew I wanted to take this new knowledge into business and work to improve personal and organizational performance.   I did not know how to make the transition from directing and leading in the religious non-profit world to the business world.  I knew two things, I had something very valuable to offer and a lot to learn (the curse of graduate education is that it provides new knowledge and in so doing also catalogues every students ignorance).

I alerted several mentors and close friends that I was not interested in another non-profit role but wanted to enter the business world to test the wings of my newly acquired expertise.   Brian, a friend of mine (a recently minted MBA on his second post-graduate role) asked me to join his turn around team.  I remember his pitch.  The company he was hired to lead had a pioneering software product for managing the front desk operations of hotel and other hospitality property.  The company had developed and protected an innovation the big guys had not yet thought of.  The company was strongly capitalized.  The owner had made a poor hiring decision and was ready to listen to business/organizational talent that could structure and propel his innovation forward.  The owner would back away from daily operations and give Brian and his team the opportunity to lead forward. Brian recruited me to serve as director of operations, another experienced friend to lead sales.  We rebranded, reorganized, restructured our way through the first three months and began to see the promise of building sales momentum.

I went to work understanding the operational functions of programming, customer service, human resources, and sales.  I mapped a new organic organizational structure designed to leverage Brian’s business plan forward and began recruiting and retraining across all departments.   Lora went to work restructuring the sales department.  She worked through our database like a lioness stalking a herd of gazelle. Brian went to work rebranding the company and analyzing financials.  These were heady days. We were succeeding in turning things around.  The owner was happy, our customers were either happy or becoming happier and our innovation was protected and winning us sales from our bigger and more established competitors.

I was on the freeway traveling to the office in Anaheim, California before sunlight on the morning of 9/11 and heard the news of the first plan hitting the tower of the World Trade Center.  I drove to work glued to the radio and stunned at what I was hearing.  When I walked into the office instead of seeing the sales team on the phones to our Caribbean and east coast customers they were in the lunch room standing around a television set watching the horrifying drama unfold.  Before the day was even over potential customers started calling to cancel their orders for our software.  In the first 48 hours following 9/11 we lost our entire sales pipeline and began analyzing how long we could keep the doors open without any sales revenue.

The End – The Enigma of Human Relations

What a contrast to my first meeting with Brian. My last meeting with the owner ten months later was a dirge. “Ray,” the owner announced “I would like you to orient Bob (the director of operations at the company’s manufacturing division) on operations in the software division.  Bob will take over operations of both divisions as we merge to survive this set back.  I have known Bob for a long time and his law degree and experience are just what I think we need to survive.  If there were any way financially I could keep you and your skills I would but without sales we are going into a hole at an unrecoverable rate.”

We negotiated a consulting role that would last for two weeks.  I would have two weeks to find something new and turn over the reins of the software division.

I showed up to the office on my first day as an ex-employee turned consultant.  When Bob walked into my office and described in detail how he was going to destroy the owner financially and why.

What happened?

If you have insights into this catastrophic dynamic write your comments here.  Over the next several weeks I intend to write on how business relationships disintegrate to the point that trusted friends turn into fatal enemies.  The subject of betrayal and situations leading to betrayal are not new nor are they simply the fodder of English literature classes studying Julius Caesar.  Do strategies exist that help owners and managers avoid this collapse of trust? What are your insights?  Have you experienced a similar collapse of relationship?  Have you seen it?  Have you studied it?

Leaders adjusting to a new scope of responsibility face the challenge of redefining their relationships to those who were direct reports, those who were peers and those to whom they report. Every emerging leader develops a theory of leadership as a result of their interactions with their context, peers, direct reports and supervisors in a way that synthesizes their understanding of their own strengths, other’s strengths/motivations and of the tasks in front of them.  Every person given responsibility for an organization’s performance enters the sometimes mystifying world of leadership.   By leadership I mean (i) a culturally aware process, (ii) that involves influence, (iii) that exercises legitimate authority, (iv) in a group context, (v) that involves achieving a goal.

Every leader discovers that their self-image endures the tarnishing effect that results from attempting to work with people who are difficult.  Difficult people are characterized by skepticism of a leader’s motive, capability, capacity, or vision of the future. The emotional toll of dealing with difficult people slows organizational momentum and in a worse case derails the leader and his or her team. Ordinarily assessing a goal from the perspective of differing views of reality adds to rather than detracts from the functionality of a group. This assumes that those who offer perspective possess (1) an equivalent horizon of the threat, opportunity, weaknesses and strengths of the group; (2) a respect for the fundamental orientation of the leader; and that (3) the leader has an appreciation of the differing perspectives of the group.  I asked a friend to summarize the lesson’s he had just learned as he navigated a transition.  I used his lessons as a springboard for the article below.

Lesson 1: Play winning percentages and priority investments

Bruce’s (not his real name) promotion from leading a field office in Europe to working in the corporate office in the United States set the stage for this important lesson. Bruce described a difficult former direct report that his replacement did not know how to handle.  In fact, the new manager, trainer and corporate coach had attempted to intervene in this employee’s behavior.  The various interventions were working at cross-purposes to one another in a way that excused the employee’s poor performance and actually masked the central issues of this employee’s behavior.

I listened intently for a while then asked, “Bruce, what are the odds of success you give your planned intervention?”

There was a pause on the other line for a moment when he responded, “Hmm, I’d say about 10%”

“So,” I responded, “you will mobilize your time and energy to by-pass your own organizational structure to work directly with an employee that you only see a 10% possibility of saving?  How does that fit into your strategic aim for changing the culture toward accountability and leadership?  Aren’t those two aspects of the culture you wanted to change?”

“Yes, I do want to create a culture of accountability, we do not execute well and we do not hold people responsible for their jobs” he responded.

“Is the action you have outlined the best way to leverage your change project forward?” I asked.  “Is a decision that only has a 10% chance of success the best use of your time or that of the field managers?” I continued.

Before Bruce could respond I asked another question, “Do the managers on the field agree with your assessment of this employee?”

“Yea,” he said hesitantly, “they don’t know what to do with the employee – they are frustrated.”

“What if you handed the assignment back to them and coached them through the needed conversation with the employee?” I asked.

Popular misconceptions about leadership often start with the premise that leadership is a distant indirect influence in a group context – an “ivy tower” exercise.  The fact is that much of what a leader does is actually one on one interaction that negotiates a common understanding of reality and responsibility.  One on one interaction is called “leader member exchange” (LMX) which is the name of a leadership theory positing that by working with an in-group (those people with whom the leader has mutual trust, respect and commitment) allows a leader to carry out more work in a more efficient way than working without one.  In-group employees show a higher commitment to work outside the scope of their formal job description and a higher degree of innovation in looking for ways to advance the group’s goals.

Prescriptively LMX theory suggests that a leader should develop high-quality exchanges characterized by trust and respect with all of his or her subordinates rather than just a few.  The promotion of healthy leader member exchanges not only breaks down the inequities and negative implications of creating in and out groups it also promotes partnerships (through effective dyads) that builds the team, benefits the organization and contributes to the leader’s own career progress.  Using questions I intended to help Bruce think about what effective LMX looked like in his situation.

As Bruce ruminated on the questions he reframed his LMX approach and determined to enlist the field managers and employee mentors to design an intervention that outlined specific expectations and outcomes.

Lesson 2: Keeping me focused on my role and helping people solve their own issues

Staying focused on one’s own role is especially important in transitions.  Bruce’s move from managing a field office in Europe to leading the field offices globally from the corporate headquarters changed the nature of Bruce’s daily tasks. The way he spends his time and the kind of work he needs to value and the scope of perspective he now has to exercise are all different.  Watkins (2003) describes the importance of understanding the significance of transition challenges;

… transitions are critical times when small differences in your actions can have disproportionate impacts on results. Leaders, regardless of their level, are most vulnerable in their first few months in a new position because they lack detailed knowledge of challenges they will face and what it will take to succeed in meeting them: they also have not developed a network of relationships too sustain them.[1]

The overriding goal in a transition is to build momentum by creating virtuous cycles that build credibility and by avoiding getting caught in vicious cycles that damage credibility – leadership is about leverage.  The behavior Bruce described in this situation represented a vicious cycle in his organization.  The vicious cycle that managers fail to discuss the challenges of people management meant these managers handed their responsibility off laterally and upwardly.  Remember Bruce described a network of leaders in the company of four different managers (the employee’s manager, the trainer, the corporate coach and Bruce) all working with one line employee who because of the demand of attention left the high producing employees off on the sidelines (See Figure 1 below).  Employee commitment, contribution, conviction, confidence and sense of alignment with the organizational culture all suffered as a result.

Bruce faced the necessity of exercising adaptive leadership in order to model and reinforce a different kind of behavior the organization needed to escape the vicious cycle of codling low producers at the cost of developing their high producers.

3.  Starting with the agreed goal of our division and naming the issues that are stopping us proved to be a win.

The vicious cycle clear in Bruce’s experience is not uncommon in organizational interaction. When habits and attitudes become part of the problem over time they create a systemic problem. A systemic problem is a problem that has grown larger than the people involved; it becomes a system of its own that is self-perpetuating.  The recognition that systemic behavioral problems exist forms the need for a different approach.  Simply raising the level of effort to reassert known solutions only worsens the situation.

This is why a leader’s job in encouraging change is to help people face the reality of their situation in a way that they have the emotional energy to handle and to engage the organization’s people in trying to define change.  Heifetz and Laurie say it this way;

… the locus of responsibility for problem solving when a company faces an adaptive challenge must shift to its people.[2]

In the face of an adaptive challenge everyone must learn new behaviors all the way through at every level of the organization.  Disequilibrium in relationships, processes and emotions that result from facing deep change require that a leader sustain patience and hope to aid their teams in confronting the contradictions of existing behavior to adjust their values to the new realities around them.  Bruce had to shift responsibility for working through new behavior to the employee and the manager.  He could not ride in like a knight in shining armor and win the day if he wanted to change the organizational culture and develop the breadth of organizational leadership.  Rather than approaching the situation issuing directives Bruce utilized coaching skills.

4.  Asking, not telling the employee to reflect how she sees these things play out in her life, worked in gaining her attention.

In taking this stand Bruce did two things. First he authenticated what the employee felt.  Oddly enough managers and leaders tend to discount the feelings or perception of those they don’t understand or those that irritate them.  Ignoring or belittling a person’s perception never resolves the conflict but either pushes it underground so that it takes a sinister and subversive form or fuses an explosion that results in escalated tensions and broken relationship.

Second, he compelled the employee to take responsibility for her own actions by asking her to assess the kind of emotional wake her behavior left behind.  According to Bruce this employee often excused her behavior and its negative emotional wake on the basis of being misunderstood by her manager or other leaders.  As a result she never assessed her behavior as something she had a choice in determining. Bruce was able to get the employee to articulate that she viewed herself as a victim of circumstance beyond her control not as a person who had learned helplessness.  The reality is that thinking determines behavior or outlook determines the outcome.  Said another way, an outlook anticipating success determines success in outcomes.  An outlook anticipating failure, defeat etcetera determines failure, rejection, and defeat.  This employee routinely torpedoed her own success in the way she thinks.  For the first time someone asked her to be responsible for her own feelings and behavior. (For more on this subject see http://wp.me/pYuoc-1j).

5.  Sharing how I see these things play out in my personal life.

Bruce literally came out from behind himself to make the conversation real by taking the risk to; (1) be known, (2) to be seen and (3) to be changed.  This takes courage – it is the courage to give honest feedback.  Because Bruce had opened the conversation by authenticating the employee he gained a hearing – a real conversation ensued. Bruce was doing what Susan Scott writes about her in her book on Fierce Conversations.  He had taken stock by asking himself some tough questions prior to the conversation.  Good leaders regularly ask themselves questions such as:

How often do I find myself saying things I don’t mean just to be polite?

How many meetings have I sat in knowing that the real issues were being avoided?

What has been the economic, emotional, intellectual cost for my dishonesty?  What is the cost to my organization?  What is the cost to my relationships?

By making it real Bruce set a tone that essentially said, “I respect you as a person and I am interested in what you really have to say and I am confused and disappointed when you don’t say it but mask it by avoiding behaviors.” This kind of honesty is the foundation for discipline in an organization.  Too often I hear leaders confuse the idea of respect for their employees with a laissez-faire approach to leading.  (For more on the subject of discipline see http://wp.me/pYuoc-2E).

6.  Having her agree to pursue her leaders experience with her in the areas mentioned.

By making it real Bruce began to challenge deeply held assumptions. He set the stage for a new definition of reality by respecting the employee’s perspective and offering his own.  It was now time to check for understanding which they did in listening to one another and checking in…did they understand what the other was saying? The process of challenging reality (the deeply held assumptions we have about what is really going on) is that it requires risk taking – that risk once again is the risk of being known, being seen and being changed.  It is important to gain a cross-check to reality by inviting others to weigh in.  In Bruce’s situation he invited the cross-check to reality by risking the response of other the corporate coach, trainer and field manager who were familiar with the tensions between Bruce and the employee.

If the other leaders opted to avoid the fierce conversation or avoid the risk of being known, seen and changed themselves the conversation and its beneficial changes would be lost.  So, Bruce also had to have open and honest conversations with these leaders helping them understand how dishonesty played a role in perpetuating the employee’s unsuccessful behavior and beliefs about herself and the organization.

7.  Mapping the people involved helped clarify the situation.

This lesson referred to a conversation Bruce and I had prior to talking with the employee. He described the frustration he and the field leaders and coaches shared in working with the employee. Bruce intended to develop leaders and nurture an organizational culture of accountability and consistent execution.  However, he described actions what worked the opposite of his intention but he was too close to the situation to see it. So, we drew a picture (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Relational Network – Distorted Priorities

It only takes a minute looking at the picture to see several unhealthy trends. First, notice that the employee had positioned herself at the center of all attention and emotional expenditure.  The field employees were relegated to a periphery role of refereeing the tension between the Field Manager and the Employee – and they resented this role.  Their resentment undermined their respect of the both the Director of Field Operations and the Field Manager.  Work had slowed to a minimal performance.

Second, notice that the Trainer and Corporate Coach were also involved in attempting to work with the employee.  That direct communication between the Director, Field Manager, Trainer and Corporate Coach was rare allowed the employee to play each one off the other – and she did it masterfully.  The resources intended to help the Field Employees were literally siphoned off by the attention given to the employee.

Third, the diagram captures a visual sense of the confusion that surrounded the situation – the closer each leader was to the situation the more it felt like they had entered a fog.  The Field Manager felt slighted by the Director’s intervention, the Director was frustrated by the Manager’s failure to act on the situation, the Corporate Coach failed to engage a 360 degree perspective of the problem and the training manager nurtured the employee’s sense of victimization by questioning the competence of the Director.

Creating this map helped Bruce see that his intentions were not visible in his actions. He had to change his behavior to move his organization to a new level of leadership and accountability.

8.  Understanding that just because people don’t want to solve a situation doesn’t mean I need to step in and solve it for them.

Bruce described this realization in the following words, “I need to push them back to it. This doesn't mean I don't work at setting up the situation for the best success but they need to do the heavy lifting here. Not attacking the employee's point of failure in these standards but rather processing how they impact the operation as a group allowed her [the employee] to reflect without defensiveness.”

Leadership doesn’t develop in an organization that (1) keeps people from facing the consequences of their actions by premature interventions or that (2) instills such a fear of mistakes that emotional immobilization occurs or that (3) consistently revokes permission to lead while simultaneously invoking accountability for actions that the people have no control over i.e., the actions of their leaders/managers or that (4) uses a laissez-faire management style until problems percolate to upper management leading to fits of anger and threats.

Conclusion

Bruce is growing as a leader.  It is clear in his reflection that his understanding of what it means to exercise authority, power and influence in moving his organization toward consistently high performance is developing. I asked him if I could write on his observations because I believe many leaders could learn from what Bruce is learning.

Now that you have read this what did you learn?  How will what you learned alter your behavior?  What specific behavior do you need to change? Who will you talk to about it?  Let me know how you plan to use this information or let me know if it helps you define your situation. If the latter is true what part of this article helped you most?

Or, what part of this article do you disagree with and why?  Let me know…I am still learning to lead effectively as well.

A group of clients dropped in on our office the other day.  One of them had their seven-year old son in tow and while he was well-behaved he was obviously bored.  We have a collection of marketing and trade show trinkets including a box of rubber band balls with our company name on them. In a lull in the conversation I grabbed one and offered it to the young man.  As he reached to receive the gift I offered, his mother posed a question.  What was this maternal prompting?  As you may have guessed she asked, “What do you say?” The expected answer was, “Thank you.”

Just how powerful is gratitude?  Gratitude is a virtue that contributes to living well. It is an emotional state and an affective trait demonstrated in behavior and as such it has tremendous potential for engaging change in how a person experiences life or determines the meaning of their circumstance. It is a positive emotion that has more recently captured the imagination and eye of researchers because of the mediating role gratitude plays in other positive emotions and overall mental health.

What role does gratitude play in how we shape our thinking or our success or our failure?  Can the practice of gratitude actually make a difference in how we experience life?  Can acts of gratitude alter corporate cultures and increase productivity and the bottom line?

Gratitude Acts as a Pathway to Expand a Sense of Meaning and Purpose

Why is gratitude important?  Does the significance of experiencing and expressing gratitude survive childhood into adulthood?  Gratitude occurs when we recognize someone has intentionally done something for us that is beneficial to us.  The ability to recognize what others do for us is dependent upon a consolidation of a sense of self as a causal agent understanding that others are causal agents as well. This sense of self-awareness and awareness of others is called an “internalized theory of mind” that understands that other people (like oneself) are intentional beings whose behavior is motivated by desire and belief.[1]  This fundamental grasp of selfhood and sense of others formulates in children at around age 4.  Without this internalized theory of mind a person becomes narcissistic.

Narcissistic individuals disdain gratitude because of an inflated sense of their own superiority – is it any wonder then that our mothers are so adamant about teaching thankfulness?  Narcissistic people view expressions of gratitude as little more than attempts to curry favor or weakness – an unnecessary emotion that distracts from the need to perform expected tasks. In contrast to the extreme self-sufficiency inherent in narcissism the experience and expression of gratitude requires the ability to relinquish some self-sufficiency to see the actions of others and to acknowledge that no one really lives independent from the beneficial actions of others.

Is it any wonder then that Paul equated the act of gratitude with the discovery of God’s will? (1 Thessalonians 4:17-18)  It takes a sense of self related to others and aware of others including God to come to an awareness of deeper meaning and purpose in life beyond the satisfaction of one’s own immediate and self-absorbed impulses.

Emotions like gratitude are not the same as sensory pleasure or mood.  When talking about emotions researchers refer to multi-component response tendencies that reveal themselves over time.  Emotions are rooted in how a person defines the meaning of some event in what Lazarus (1991) called the personal environment relationship or adaptational encounter. Defining meaning consciously or unconsciously triggers a series of response tendencies that influence how a person experiences the event.  It is not the event itself that leads to emotion as experienced by the person in their facial expressions and physiological changes. It is the meaning assigned to the event by the person that result in emotional reaction to the event.

The interaction between belief, interpretation and experience is what makes the study of emotions and positive emotions in particular so important in understanding whether (1) a person can decide to alter their emotional state; (2) can support new behaviors over time and (3) can experience appreciable or measurable psychological and physiological benefit. If there is a relationship between a person’s belief (how they assign meaning to events) and their emotional state and if their emotional state influences their choice of behaviors in response to triggering events then the possibility of influence the belief triggered by events opens the door to influencing the range of responses expressed by the person to those events.  This is precisely why positive emotions and gratitude specifically has been the subject of research.

What is Gratitude?

Gratitude is a sense of appreciation and joy that arises when an person receives a tangible benefit provided by another person or source who has intentionally acted to improve the beneficiary’s well-being. Gratitude is also the experience of a moment of peaceful enjoyment evoked by natural beauty.  Gratitude assumes a personal nature when the benefactor is another individual or it may assume a transpersonal nature when the benefactor is God or the cosmos. Fitzgerald (1998) takes the definition a step further identifying three aspects of gratitude: (a) appreciation for another, (b) a sense of goodwill toward that person or thing and (c) a disposition to act that flows from a sense of indebtedness.

How does Gratitude Change Us?

Gratitude is an adaptive perspective that engages continuous personal development.  Fredrickson (2004) asserts that gratitude broadens an individual’s mode of thinking and builds psychological and social resources.  Hence gratitude broadens and builds a person’s momentary thought-action repertoire (the power to grasp and analyze ideas, cope with problems and manage an increasing degree of complexity).

The term “thought-action repertoire” refers to the spontaneous character of emotion.  Thoughts (ideas or interpretations of events) actually lead to specific action.  In negative emotions such as the recognition of danger (the thought) leads to an immediate fight or flight response (action). In contrast to negative emotions that yield quick action, positive emotions tend to challenge our assumptions or beliefs allowing us to alter our thought patterns and hence develop other responses. It is possible to alter emotional response by altering the belief behind the emotion.  Hence it is possible to change the degree to which one experiences gratitude by engaging exercises designed to leverage awareness of the benefit one experiences either through the intentional actions of others or through apparently providential circumstances at work.

Gratitude is a powerful and critical force in personal survival and growth. Grateful people show (or develop) a different perspective on life that some researchers describe as a positive memory bias.  A positive memory bias means that a person not only recalls a greater number of positive memories they reframe unpleasant experiences more positively over time as compared to the initial emotional impact of those experiences.   People who exhibit a state of gratefulness are more alert, enthusiastic, determined, attentive and energetic.  Fredrickson (2004) asserts that the benefits gained in emotional episodes of gratitude are durable i.e., they stick with a person.  For example:

• Grateful people rebound faster emotionally from negative events.
• Vaillant (1993) theorized that adaptability in life is the ability to replace bitterness and resentment with gratitude and acceptance.
• The willingness to practice gratefulness even in the face of life’s greatest disappointments is critical to boundary processing in personal growth. Boundary experiences are those events that force a person to move to depth in their skills, perspectives or self-awareness to continue in and grow in effectiveness.

Gratitude literally prompts people to engage their environments and take part in activities that are adaptive – i.e., push the boundaries of experience and insight in such a way as to build new thought-action repertoires that can be called upon later in more stressful situations.

The Way People Experience Gratitude Varies

Gratitude is a complex emotion. Thus people experience gratitude in different ways. Research suggests that gratitude is an emotion experienced in a combination of facets including intensity, frequency, span and density.  Understanding these facets helps to (1) recognize the depth to which gratitude impacts perspective and behavior and (2) suggest ways to develop a state of gratitude through the practice of appreciation and reflection.

Gratitude intensity describes the degree to which a person feels gratitude in the experience of a positive event.  An intensity scale recognizes that people experiencing the same positive event may not experience the same degree of gratitude.

Gratitude frequency measures the number and types of events that elicit a report of gratitude.  Some people report gratitude for in the simplest act of politeness while another may consider such simple acts as insufficient to call for gratitude.

Gratitude span refers to the number of life circumstances for which a person feels grateful at a given time.  Someone with a strong grateful disposition reports gratefulness for family, job, health, and life itself as well as a list of other benefits.  A person with a lower span of gratitude reports gratefulness for fewer aspects of his or her life.

Gratitude density refers to the number of persons to whom one feels grateful.  Such persons may include parents, school teachers, tutors, mentors, friends and God.

Consider your own experience of gratitude.  Take a moment to rank your gratitude quotient by assigning a level of experience to the facets of gratitude above. Use the number 5 to show a strongly felt occurrence of each of the facets above and the number 1 to show an absence of experience in each of the facets above.  While the results of this informal self survey are anecdotal they indicate the degree to which you are aware of how others benefit or positively impact your life.  If your score is low ask yourself how others experience you – are you present in these relationships?  Do you see what others have done for you?  Do you express gratitude for their actions?  A practice of gratitude could yield some important changes in your relationships at work and at home.

Does Practicing Gratitude Make a Difference?

So why would one actually practice gratitude? (Other than assuring your mom does not show up at work or a social engagement asking the question, “What do you say?” when others act in ways that are beneficial to us.)  People who practice gratitude find that gratitude creates the urge to:

• Engage reciprocity with creativity
• Build and strengthen social bonds and friendships
• Act altruistically
• Act faithfully with obligation

Conversely those who do not express or experience gratitude exhibit the opposite characteristics.  The urges associated with the practice of gratitude occur in every aspect of a person’s behavior: social, physical, intellectual and spiritual.

In addition to the interpersonal benefits of gratitude grateful people also experience intrapersonal benefits of gratitude. In an experiment conducted by McCraty et al (1995) subjects who consciously experienced appreciation for 5 minutes actually reduced stress as exhibited in heart rate, pulse transit time and respiration rate.  Clearly the practice of gratitude makes a quantifiable difference in how people perform and how they experience life.

How Does Gratitude Work if you are a Leader?

Gratitude engenders organizational transformation and performance by encouraging positive emotions that reverberate through others. A leader’s positive emotions predict the performance of their entire group.

Gratitude as expressed by a leader is dependent upon the leader’s recognition of his or her follower’s intentional benevolent actions.  Remember that people experience gratefulness as a complex interaction of intensity, frequency, span and density. Observing and probing a leader’s experience of gratitude offers an insight into the degree to which their experience and expression of gratitude may influence group behavior.

Team observations made by Losada (1999) concluded that those teams that flourish show the highest ratio of positivity to negativity and the broadest range of inquiry and advocacy.  Teams that experienced extreme negativity calcified after such encounters and lost their behavioral flexibility and ability to question.  They ended up floundering in limited thought-action repertoires centered on self-absorbed advocacy.  Fredrickson (2004) notes that when “…positive emotions are in short supply, people get stuck.  They lose their degrees of behavioral freedom and become painfully predictable.  But when positive emotions are in amply supply, people take off.  They become generative, creative, resilient, ripe with possibility and beautifully complex.”[2]

Conclusion

Gratitude prompts people to engage their environments and take part in activities that are adaptive.  The broaden and build theory of positive emotions (Fredrickson 2004) hypothesizes that positive emotions actually produce health and well-being and not just mark or signal health and well-being.  Gratitude is an adaptive perspective that engages continuous personal development. Gratitude enhances organizational transformation and performance. Finally gratitude is an interpersonal and intrapersonal experience that benefits the social, psychological and physiological health of those who are grateful.

Test these observations yourself by practicing the exercises below.  Let me know the results.  I want to hear back from you.

Exercise 1: Recalibrating Your Thinking. Identify three things that happened today for which you are grateful? (e.g., a coworker’s extra effort, an employee’s extra effort, a friend’s feedback, or a spouse’s feedback etc.)

1.

2.

3.

Exercise 2: Transform your Experience.  One technique utilizing a behavioral-cognitive approach to learning gratitude encourages a four-step process: (a) identify non-grateful thoughts; (b) formulate gratitude-supporting thoughts; (c) substitute the gratitude-supporting thoughts for the non-grateful thoughts; and (d) translate the inner feeling into outward action. (If this seems too simplistic review the Stockdale paradox described by Jim Collins, “I never lost faith in the end of the story,” he said, when I asked him. “I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.” Admiral Stockdale said this on his time as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.)[3]

She had just completed a sentence as I captured her thought on my laptop and sat transfixed on the screen waiting for her lecture to continue I added a few more thoughts, rabbit trails, I wanted to pursue later.  My note taking always has a conversational aspect to it.  I synthesize research and insights from reading I have done and take the precious few seconds between the professor’s breaths to jot down ideas that come to mind as they lecture.   I was in an education design course the last semester of my doctoral program.  The course caught my interest because I wanted to develop my teaching skills – the focus of my course work was leadership yet I intended to spend time teaching on the subject academically and professionally. I completed my notes and sat staring at my screen waiting for her to continue the lecture.

We sat around tables set up in a conference arrangement and Dr. Elizabeth Conde-Frazier sat just to my right.  I realized after some moments that she was not going to restart immediately.  I stretched my hands, repositioned them over the key board and then glanced around the room.  For some reason every eye was aimed my direction.  I turned to look at Dr. Conde-Frazier and caught a rather penetrating gaze.  When our eyes met she inquired, “Why are you here?”

The question itself did not strike me as odd for two reasons. First, as a master teacher Dr. Conde-Frazier modeled a powerful and effective andragogy – transitions into dynamic reflection between the content of the course and our personal experience in her class was not uncommon.

Second, as a middle-aged white guy in a culturally and gender diverse institution I often betrayed my own biases and upper middle class, suburban assumptions in my comments.  This typically engendered a torrent of commentary from my academic peers on the evils of social power abuse.  A litany of historical references to abuse by those who held power and privilege (middle-aged white guys) often morphed into personal stories of marginalization or worse.  I learned to listen to these stories as a process of education and reconciliation. I was after all a token representation of everything that social privilege represented both bad and good.

This was not always easy.  I often would rather have argued that it was not I who engaged in the kinds of social abuse often described. However, I do represent and enjoy a privileged place in society.  I did not grow up in poverty, I lived on the good side of town and my parents remained married to one another throughout their lives. My upbringing was very different from many of those in the classroom.  I did not have to dodge gangs or violence each day.  I did not go hungry.  I attended good schools and could afford medical care.  I was exposed to a great deal of cultural diversity as the son of a college professor. But the diversity I saw was sanitized – I saw it without its context.  So, diversity was simply a distraction from the typical.  I did not understand the experiences represented in the diversity.  Compared to so many others the word “privileged” does apply to me. So I determined to learn and engage the stories my presence and my ignorance drew out.  On this day however, I had made no comment.  I simply absorbed the content of the lecture and thought about how to use it. Dr. Conde-Frazier maintained her gaze.

“I am not sure of the context of your question,” I responded.

“Why are you here,” she repeated with the same penetrating gaze.  “Are you here to add to your social power and status through the acquisition of a doctorate or are you here to learn to serve?”

The Reflection

The question framed a dialectic that was common in my educational process. I thought about it for a moment.  Was the question a false dichotomy?  Is the acquisition or possession of social power de facto a contradiction of service?  The inference beneath the frequently prickly comments of some of my academic peers in the program affirmed that many thought privilege and service were mutually exclusive.   Many of them had suffered measurable social and ethnic prejudice and only arrived at this institution by indefatigable persistence against all odds. Admittedly I did not understand the hurdles they had to cross to be there.

Clearly a danger exists in the pursuit of power or added social currency.  Blind pursuit of power leaves a wake of wrecked hopes and lives callously dismissed as mere collateral damage.  But even if a person is not pursuing blind ambition the dilemma of injuring others while on the quest for justice does not go unnoticed by those hurt by the exercise of good intentions.  A group of graduate students in Kenya helped me understand the damage of activism with good intentions. As we discussed ethics in leadership and the idea of reconciliation and justice they pointed out that they did not object to justice.  They objected to the way others defined justice for them. “We have a proverb here,” one of them stated.  “When elephants make love the grass gets crushed – when elephants fight the grass gets crushed.” From the perspective of the grass the issue is not whether elephants fight or make love…the issue is that the elephants are unaware of the grass in the first place.

The class sat still waiting to hear my response – Dr. Conde-Frazier had now drilled a virtual path into my soul with her gaze.   I looked her in the eye and said, “Yes.” The reality I faced at that moment was provocative. I could not divorce myself from my own historicity any more than I could alter my skin color or change my height.  To try to be something other than what I am simply renders me foolish and demeans others. However, to deny who I am and that I have privilege is to continue dancing on grass that I remain unaware. To live without awareness of others places me in a position of actively engaging in the social and emotional injustices that I claim to eschew.

“Elizabeth,” I said, “I am here to gain the tools I need to serve and I am here to acquire the cultural power inherent in a doctorate.  My aim is to use the power I live in to serve others.  I hope that I learn how to do that effectively.”

An almost reverential hush came over the class.   No one said at that moment what they were thinking.  I appreciated the silence since I felt exposed and vulnerable in the moment.  After a few moments Dr. Conde-Frazier returned to her lecture. I returned to my notes but I never left the question.  The question echoes in my heart and mind almost every day – why am I here?  What is my ambition?  Do I see the grass – to use the metaphor of my friends in Kenya?  How do I serve when my very presence can damage, threaten or hurt the ones I hope to serve?

From Activist to Servant

Serving as a leader is a dilemma. The dilemma does not reside in putting power, authority and influence alongside service.  The pursuit of the common good by leadership implies the use of power, authority and influence to this end. The dilemma rather resides in the reality that leaders caught up in the big issues of their responsibility can become blind to their context and the unanticipated impact of strategic and tactical decisions.  A friend of mine from Jamaica once explained the realities of this concept.  He said that some time prior to the 1990s the dairy industry in the United States over produced product in part due to government subsidies.  According to my friend the United States dumped excess product on the market in Jamaica to avoid waste.  Serving a developing country with inexpensive dairy product turned into a curse by destroying the dairy industry of Jamaica.  Assuming for a moment that the motive for dumping the product was humanitarian and not just economic the unexpected result of turning self-sufficient dairy farmers into unemployed dependents is terrible.

The challenge in my Jamaican friend’s story, assuming the best of motivations for the original act, is the challenge of turning from activist to servant. What is the difference?

Leaders as activists arrive with solutions. The clear and present danger of being an activist is that both the solution suggested and the problem identified may be irrelevant to the context. Again, the Kenyan proverb – if the elephants only see each other as the problem then every solution they offer will damage the grass.  Such is the nature of the elephant.

However, if a leader arrives as a servant who possesses tools, knowledge and ability and determines to use those tools, knowledge and ability to innovate around the context then an entirely different potential emerges.   A group of graduate students in Ethiopia taught me another important lesson on serving. I taught a course titled, “Leader Driven Organizations.” I designed the course to help leaders identify and unleash a pipeline of leadership within their organizations.  I built the course around my dissertation and was excited to actually use my theories in real life situations. The class consisted of business owners, Non-governmental Organizational leaders and political leaders up to the ministry level. The first round of questions after the first lecture made me rework the concepts of my dissertation through entirely different lenses. I had assumed stable political environments.  I had assumed a western definition of leadership and followership. My students did not share my definitions or the cultural assumptions behind them. I had to forget being an expert and assume the posture of a peer with insight and experience to give – the context demanded that they translate my insights into their unique context. My experience could not accepted carte blanche.

The incident reminded me of something my dad told me when I landed my first leadership role out of college. “Son,” he said, “may I give you a piece of advice?”

“Sure dad,” I replied a little surprised at the question.

“Son, you are like a freshly minted second lieutenant,” he started. My dad was an ROTC graduate who entered the United States Air Force with a freshly minted master’s degree in electrical engineering and physics. “You know a lot but you don’t know beans about how to lead.” He paused.

“A colonel and mentor of mine told me when I graduated from officer candidate school how to succeed in my first command and I want to share that with you,” He continued.

“Go ahead dad, you have my attention,” I replied.

“He told me, Wheeler, when you arrive at your first command find the Chief Master Sergeant as soon as you arrive. When you find him you ask him this, ‘Chief Master Sergeant, I have no idea how this place runs, how do you do it?’  Do that Wheeler, and you will learn how to be an effective officer.” Dad paused. “Do you understand what I am saying?  College graduates are nothing more than educated idiots.”

“Thanks dad, if the meaning wasn’t clear in the story it is in the last statement. I get it,” I said.

“Good, you have the theory but there is a gap between theory and practice and your respect of the context and the people in that context is the first step to knowing how to put your theory to work.”

Dad was right.

As leaders we want to make a mark for a variety of reasons.  At best we see a future potential that we want others to engage and benefit from. At best we see inefficiencies that are more than cost generators they destroy people’s identity, confidence and sense of value and contribution. At best we arrive armed with the latest in leadership theory and praxis that we know will make the work place a better place where people want to be committed to make a difference.   At worst we crave recognition as top dog, innovative whiz-kid, competitive victor, top talent and the go to person for future promotion regardless of the collateral damage we may generate in the climb  to the top.

I needed and continue to need the interrogation Dr. Conde-Frazier launched that day in class. Every leader needs it.  Why are you here?

Conclusion

I started thinking about the trust I have been given as a professor and a leader. A discussion with my current students (mid-career leaders in a master’s program) about the insights they experienced in a class on cross-cultural leadership prompted my reflection.  Their insights and reflection in discussion while prompted by the course material have taken up a life of their own because these leaders have engaged the course concepts through the rich tapestry of their own leadership experience.

One of the students, a widow with three children who teaches college courses in a developing country summed up the idea best when she wrote, “Living with others necessitates, trust, respect, understanding and acceptance.  Those things can bring the possibility to build good collaboration, and people can feel secure and comfortable in those situations. Those concepts really expressed my thought when I was at Santiago following the Master courses. I was surprised to see how people from different cultures, with different intellectual backgrounds, can easily put behind them, language barriers, color, identity and family barriers in order to become connected each other. I was amazed to see how, in spite of my poor English, the class took time to listen to me, and tried to understand my points of view. The experiences that everyone shared gave me the possibility to understand the similarities and differences among those cultures…. The experiences [others] shared also [helped] me…understand how I can react to some situations, good or bad; how I must put all my strength to keep going, instead of spending time to advance negative judgment; how I am not the only one who experiences bad situations. But as human beings, everywhere people know crucibles; knowing how to respond to those crucibles can be a way to build a new hope. I will never forget the profit that I gained from those moments.”

Statements like this remind me why I teach. They remind me why I go through the work of study, course preparation, grading, and faculty meetings while also holding down a full-time management job.

Effective leadership is servant leadership. Servant leaders allow others to interrogate their motives. Servant leaders own a commitment to define service by those they serve and not by their own activism. Servant leaders are first students not experts.  Servant leaders understand that whatever success they have as a leader comes when they create a win/win environment.

Dr. Conde-Frazier’s interrogation does not haunt me, it reminds me to engage the question daily lest I become numb to the context I serve and the mix of motivations that stand behind my actions. Thank you Dr. Conde-Frazier, thanks dad and thank you students.  Your lives make me a more capable leader and teacher.

Are you a servant leader?  Consider the following questions:

1. How often do you ask others to reflect with you about your motives?
2. How often do you ask others for their opinion and operational insights?
3. Do you spend time on the floor or in the field listening to your employees?  Do you know what they value? Do you know their struggles?
4. Do you allow others to question your conclusions?
5. Do you teach others what you know and encourage them to think in a bigger picture?
6. Do you practice challenging your own conclusions and observations?
7. Do you routinely meet with mentors to gain feedback and insight?
8. Do you have a vision of a future that benefits everyone – or does your preferred future only have room for you?
9. Do you wrestle with how to get a win/win solution when simply winning is hard work?
10. Do you find yourself resorting to power as the knee jerk response to conflict rather than exercising influence or personal authority that pulls others into being responsible participants and not just complainers?
11. Do you talk more than listen?

It does not take much experience in cross-cultural communication to realize that getting a message across is a much more difficult task when different cultural filters are in place.  In business where communication is so important an understanding of how concepts different cultures frame reality and define their values is imperative.

Business executives wanting to set up a strong Asian presence identified potential partners and initiated a distance conversation to find common ground.  When they felt they had enough information they drew up a contract and flew to Asia to negotiate a final agreement. After presenting their proposal their hosts simply suggested dinner and then drinks followed by karaoke.  The next day followed a similar pattern.  On the third day the Americans left frustrated without an agreement. The entire relationship with their potential partners fell apart.  Why?  The American executives had not taken the time to understand the cultural assumptions of their hosts.  They worked from completely different assumptions about (1) what constituted a good working relationship and (2) what formulated an enforceable agreement.  The most significant variables involved in their failure were not business strategies but cultural ones.

What do I mean by culture?  Culture consists of:

1. The total way of life of a people;
2. the social legacy of the person acquires from his group;
3. a way of thinking, feeling and believing;
4. an abstraction from behavior;[1]
5. a theory on the part of the anthropologist about the way a group of people in fact behave;
6. a storehouse of pooled learning;
7. a set of standardized orientations to recurrent problems;
8. learned behavior;
9. a mechanism for the normative regulation of behavior;
10. a set of techniques for adjusting both to the external environment and to other men;
11. a precipitate (impulse) of history.

Inter-cultural studies define culture using one of two fundamental methods either of which could have significantly altered the outcome of the results of the meetings the American executives had with their Asian counter parts.  One method uses a stratigraphc approach that assumes that basic human needs are held in common. A stratigraphic approach attempts to name underlying values and the cultural structures that result.  Another method uses a semiotic approach to understanding culture. In a semiotic approach a person tries to understand cultural differences by identifying the way people describe significance.  Those who promote the semiotic approach often find a stratigraphic approach too mechanical in that it does not always allow for the influence of individuals i.e., personal adaptations to a cultural view.  I describe them both below because they both have strengths that effective leaders use to understand cultural differences.  Both approaches attempt to define the differences in how various cultures see and interpret life.

Stratigraphic Approach

One of my professors, Charles Kraft, uses a stratigraphic approach to understanding cultural differences.  He identified four basic needs and their functions including: biological, psychological, socio-cultural and spiritual. See Table 1.

Kraft contends that analyzing culture consists of understanding the relationship between three different stratigraphic layers.[2]  The most visible part of a culture (the top-level) consists of visible behaviors.  Behavior is the easiest to see however how it is understood by an observer from a different culture easily leads to misinterpreted meaning.  The reason visible behavior is not always understood has to do with the fact that behavior reflects two deeper levels of a cultural system.

Just beneath the visible level is a mid-level aspect of culture consisting of the underlying values that surround how basic needs are understood and met.  The five dimensions of culture identified by Hofstede help explain how the values by which human needs and interactions are defined result in significant differences in how cultures approach those needs.

The deep level of a culture consists of those basic needs and problems faced by all humanity.  The deep level is universal in that needs for food, air, shelter, sex, excretion, meaning in life etcetera are observable in all human societies.  However, the context in which these needs are defined impact the structures different social systems create to understand the significance of these needs and the way they meet them. For example the context of an Inuit family living on the frozen tundra of the north frame these basic needs in an environment that is radically different from a Maori family living on a South Pacific Island.  For this reason I have added a middle or arbitrating layer to Kraft’s table called values.

People in Kraft’s view are more alike than cultures.  In fact Kraft contends that “If we didn’t have a lot in common, the quest to communicate cross-culturally would be worthless.”[3]

Table 1: Universal Needs and Functions in Diverse Cultures

I accept the contention that people have much in common, however getting at how to understand the differences in how cultures define significance, priority, and relationship is the challenge for people working across cultural divides.  A stratigraphic view of culture is helpful in providing a general reference point for differences – a beginning point to define what is different and how communication must adjust.

Semiotic Approach

Another way to define culture uses a semiotic model. Clifford Geertz champions this method in which the primary thesis is, “…that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.”[4]

Semiotics is the study of signs, symbols, and signification. Semiotics is the study of language where one studies a system of symbols agreed on in a given culture to communicate meaning.  Semiotics is a method that those who are bi-lingual and with significant cross-cultural experience have the opportunity to use most effectively.  So, if one is just starting out, semiotics is too complex.  However, do not ignore the principles behind this method of cultural understanding. Once language learning begins the use of semiotics in business provides an advantage in that it moves one closer to comprehending the nuanced meanings often missed by non-Native speakers. Understanding nuance is important when attempted to negotiate contracts, close deals or resolve tensions common to any business relationship.

In the study of semiotics seeks to understand how cultures use symbols (“symbology”). The following linguistic terms explain the concept of comparative symbology in semiotics.  They are important concepts used to help define meaning.

1. Syntactics:  The formal relationships of signs and symbols to one another apart from their users or external reference. It is the structure or general rules of language that guide users in developing meaning and communicating that meaning.
2. Semantics:  The relationships of signs and symbols to the things to which they refer. For example: in English the word “rock” may be understoodas mineral mater of variable composition or a mass of stone.  The symbol is assigned to the object.
3. Pragmatics:  The relations of signs and symbols with their users.[5]  This refers to the way language is used in different contexts.

The first two levels listed above (syntactics and semantics) involve the structural and functional relations of individual symbols within a communication system.  In language these symbols are morphemes (smallest unit of speech), words and sentences; in culture we could interpret it as the basic meaning-based functions of individual cultural symbols.  For our purposes the most important term to the study of semiotics is pragmatics.  Within the study of linguistics pragmatics is involved with the “force of speech events on the world”, or the social context in which the language is spoken.

Geertz states that the use of a semiotics in the conception of public meaning requires a thick not a thin conception of culture.  Semiotics enables a person to move from a thin to thick conceptions.  The idea of thick and thin conceptions is illustrated in how the human behavior of winking is interpreted.  A ‘thin’ interpretation (merely semantic or syntactic) defines winking as “a contraction of the eyelid.”  This definition is clearly deficient if one is interested in understanding why the person is winking.  Surprisingly some business communication seems to assume that a thin interpretation of a partner’s behavior is sufficient grounds for getting a message across.  The pitfalls are obvious in the illustration.

Conversely a cultural interpretation or comparison of the meaning behind the behavior i.e., Geertz’s ‘thick’ (pragmatic/semiotic) definition of winking, explores the cultural context of the act of winking. Was it an involuntary movement of the eyelid, or did it have a meaning-based, communicative function?

The benefit of a semiotic approach is that it values the context in which communication occurs and thus helps to avoid drawing broad generalizations that effectively mislead one into believing they have captured the full impact of cultural differences when in fact they possess only a thin perspective. Geertz contends “…not that there are no generalizations that can be made about man as man, save that he is a most various animal, or that the study of culture has nothing to contribute toward the uncovering of such generalizations.  My point is that such generalizations are not to be discovered through a Baconian search for cultural universals.”[6]

Putting Interpretive Models to Use

My point in the discussion above is to show; (1) that cross-cultural understanding is possible; (2) that one understands in degree or layers not in whole so that (3) continuous learning is necessary to succeed well in communication across cultures. As noted previously one must engage in language learning to be effective in the global market. (See,http://raywheeler.wordpress.com/2011/09/05/cross-cultural-communication-check-your-assumptions/)

Effective global business leaders develop cultural understanding by listening and inquiry. This means that before a person is truly effective in cross-cultural interaction they own the realization that their own behaviors are informed by a culturally based set of values that are not de facto universal and may in fact be getting in the way of understanding. Regardless of the model used (stratigraphic or semiotic) learning a new culture requires that one listen and observe to find the relationships between words, actions and the values the inform both. There are four available strategies which are important to understand in assessing cultural forms.  See Table 2.

The point is that learning a new culture when one has limited language skills requires observable phenomenon (behavior) from which to infer constructs.  By the word “constructs” I mean the collective programming of the mind that results from certain conditions of existence that produce a system of permanent and transferable tendencies that function as the basis for practices and images that can be collectively orchestrated without a conductor. (See Hofstede’s work.)

Learning a new culture often consists of observing behavior and asking for an interpretation for why that behavior occurs.  A pitfall exists in this strategy that researchers call the Heisenberg effect. The Heisenberg effect states that observed behavior provoked by research cannot always be extrapolated to circumstances in which the researcher is not present.   This presents a problem of validity in that inferred values or mental models may seem valid in the first answers provided by a cultural mentor but have little real influence in real behavior. In other words I may think I understand a behavior as something that applies in all social settings within the culture I study only to find that the information I received from my cultural mentor was limited to a specific context or situation or in fact represents an ideal that no one actually lives out.

Table 2: Four Available Strategies for defining Cultural Constructs[7]

When seeking to understand a new culture a person can use provoked or natural strategies.   Provoked strategies are those observations that engage another person to provoke a response that helps the observer understand.  For example the strategies in quadrant 1 above are the easiest to conduct.  The data gathered from instruments like those mentioned in quadrant 1 seem valid without further proof i.e., they have face validity.  Face validity is a property of a test intended to measure something. It is the validity of a test at face value. In other words, a test has face validity if it "looks like" it is going to measure what it is supposed to measure. So, while the methods of quadrant 1 are useful they run the risk of the Heisenberg effect.  Off set the potential of misunderstanding by using the methods of quadrant 1 in conjunction natural strategies defined in the measurements of quadrants 2 and 4 in Table 2.

It is important to understand a dynamic identified by Argyris and Schön as the difference between espoused theories and theories in use.  Espoused theories are those ideal values a culture holds as a reference point for what is good or acceptable.  Theories in use refer to how decisions are actually made. Hofstede called this the distinction between desired and desirable behaviors.  The distinction is important in distinguishing between actions (the desirable that indicates values in action on the basis of the individual and the situation) andwords (which provides the ideal [desired] that is held as a standard for determining action. In other words; what is the frame for the norm is it statistical (desired) or deontological (desirable)?

Desired: the statistically validated values that characterize the mental programming of a group. Discover desired values by assessing the words and actions of a collection of individuals.

Desirable: the ontologically stated values of a group that inform the assumptions behind ethical decision-making and choices of action.

Both words and actions are important to gain competence within a culture especially in serving as a change agent and a team builder (i.e., actions/competencies that are critical in leading across cultures).

Hofstede used quadrants 1 and 4 to identify and describe the mental software used by groups of people in the constructs of: (1) values and (2) culture.  This allowed him to name discrete group mental programs while also recognizing the variations inherent due to ecological differences and personal adaptation. Hence it is important to understand Hofstede’s definition of terms.

Values: a conception, explicit or implicit, distinctive of an individual or characteristic of a group, of the desirable which influences the choice from available modes, means and ends of actions.[8]

Culture: the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another.[9] Culture consists in patterned ways of thinking, feeling and reacting, acquired and transmitted mainly by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments or in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e., historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values.[10]

So what should you be attentive to in trying to understand cultural values?  Hofstede suggests using the following contrasts to define how a culture thinks and behaves. Using these continua help compare and contrast observed versus stated values.  Ask yourself how do people talk about these concepts?  Do they act in ways consistent to what they said?  Under what circumstances do their actions seem to differ from what they said?  Are these apparent differences common to everyone or observable in only one or a few?

• Evil versus good
• Dirty versus clean
• Dangerous versus safe
• Decent versus indecent
• Ugly versus beautiful
• Unnatural versus natural
• Abnormal versus normal
• Paradoxical versus logical
• Irrational versus rational
• Moral versus immoral

It is not only important to understand how these concepts are defined but to capture the reasoning behind the definitions (remember the focus is behavior). Table 3 identifies the distinction then between desired and desirable.  When listening to people talk listen for three semantic differentials – these give hints to whether you are hearing desired or desirable values.  Osgood et al 1975 identified three semantic dimensions

• Evaluation – good or bad
• Potency – strong or weak
• Activity – active or passive

Learning to listen for values by the way is a skill that enhances leadership in one’s own cultural context as well. When we talk about the complexities of culture we will move this discussion a step further.  For now think about language that illustrates these semantic dimensions.  Think about it in conversations you have had in your own organization and it would be helpful to think about difficult conversations.

Table 3: Distinction between the Desired and the Desirable and Associated Distinctions[11]

Conclusion

The growing ability to understand and to make oneself understood in cross-cultural settings is a process.  As long as a person grasps the concept of culture and commits to learning how to get things done they will grow in their cross-cultural communication ability or cultural intelligence. If a person assumes that the way they are accustomed to working is universally effective frustration and ineffectiveness occurs. Using the listen models suggested in this paper is a good step toward learning to get things done in cross-cultural settings.  What similar ways of understanding do you use in a global market place to get things done?  What has worked for you?  What did not work?  Who did you turn to for help?  What kind of help did they give?  Write me or leave a comment and let me know what you learned.