Terry’s article on the fate of Malala Yousafzai captured my own sense of being stirred to action in light of this atrocity. The capacity of humankind for injustice in action and in inaction points to the reality that the world needs a transformational influence. It is this need that I find answered in my own encounter with Jesus the Messiah. If you are a reader of my blog then I hope you see that when I talk about faith I am not talking about blind parochialism but an encounter with God that I cannot avoid and will not treat with triviality but with deep curiosity, enduring reverence and explicit impatience with any form of religious expression that fails to reflect that nature and character of the God revealed.
I commend this article to you. a teenage advocate.
Don't Try to Change Me – Discovering the Differentiated Leader
An inauspicious start to a critical engagement
“Don’t think you can change me…don’t even try.” The department director shot these words at our introduction.
I caught the eyes of my friend darting toward mine to see if I would buckle or flinch in the first volley. I smiled and while grasping the hand of the director to shake it I looked into his eyes and said, “That is the last thing I would attempt…I am not here to change you I am here to help you leverage the success of the department you have built to the potential you see for it. Is that ok with you?”
“Ok,” he responded. He looked surprised.
“Well then I have two rules,” I continued “and I need you to agree to them before I begin or I will pack up and walk out.”
“What are they?” the director queried.
“First, you give me permission to discover the unvarnished feedback of your employees,” I began. “Second, you agree to debrief with me at the end of the project to tell you what I have learned. Do you agree?”
“I agree,” he said and looking at my friend “he is not a bad guy Tim.”
“I told you Dick, he is good at what he does.”
This engagement germinated when Tim had asked me one night what I my research focus was in my doctoral program.
“I am looking at how hope impacts the development of existing and emerging leaders in complex organizations” I responded to his inquiry.
As we talked more about the insights I had gathered in my field research Tim asked, “Would you be willing to see if that fits at the school district? Our department could really use something like this and we have no budget for consultants right now.”
Tim told me that the technical maintenance unit developed in the early 1980s. The director and his secretary were the first employees. At the time of the project the unit operated with 80+ unionized employees. The unit’s original assignment was limited to fulfilling EPA directives on the abatement of asbestos contamination. Today the unit handles abatement of every potential environmental health risk to students. Not only has the complexity of regulatory compliance increased but the volume of work within this metropolitan school district increased with its initiatives to meet its plan of reducing the backlog of deferred maintenance.
The growth of the department, its technical focus, its existence within a complex metropolitan school district and the fact that its original director was still the leader made this an irresistible field study.
I negotiated for permission to publish my findings (I didn’t know school districts had so many attorneys). The District finally gave permission to publish my work as long as I never mentioned it by name.
Tim had initiated a focus on best practices in management at every level of the department. He had a long leash that resulted from the fact he served as the de facto director for several months the director was recuperating from a significant health challenge and that Tim had the highest respect for the expertise of the director. Tim’s respect was both professional and personal. This respect provided the safety net the director needed to extend trust to my research project.
Classic leadership tensions
In the course of doing the field research some interesting observations emerged:
- Growth in the scope of leadership responsibility requires a change in how the leader works.
- Growth in the scope of leadership introduces political (relational) challenges not clear before.
- Growth in the scope of leadership responsibility reveals gaps in a leader’s capacity.
- Growth in the scope of leadership requires that a leader find new sources of feedback.
- Demands on capacity require a change in time management strategies.
- Demands on capacity require a leader to leverage organizational sovereignty (i.e., depend on the skills and abilities of others and expand the scope of decision-making versus insisting on one’s own perspective exclusively).
- Growth in the scope of responsibility requires an ability to find and engage other leaders.
Change was not an option for this department. A vortex of constant and discontinuous change resulted from the department’s growth and contentious budget/philosophical changes in the District. A chronic degree of mistrust and anxiety existed among the employees I interviewed and surveyed. I prepared to debrief with the director at the end of the research project. I could not help but remember his edict, “Don’t try to change me.”
When changes occur what is impacted?
The Director’s warning about challenging him to change was intriguing in its own right. He had already faced a wave of change but struggled with altering his behaviors in ways that are classic to a founder. He managed like a tyrant in that he refused to delegate control of decisions – he was the bottleneck of his department that threatened to push the department in into dangerous lapses of execution. He was the first in and the last out of the office often working 16 hour days. He had destroyed his family, had few friends and was losing political capital in the District because he did not know how to relate with peers. As captain of his own ship he worked more like a pirate barking orders and threatening to keel-haul inefficient crew.
The Director was on a collision course with the future – a future that no longer needed a pirate at the helm of an underfunded loosely supervised division. He had sailed into the center of the District’s maintenance budget in part by the fact he is an internationally recognized expert in his field and in part because of the success he had achieved over the years in raising recognition of the dangers of environmental pollutants and the need to give safe educational environments. The problem was not a fight for recognition and budget in the bureaucracy. The problem was the director’s own lack of self-regulation in the face of tension. He did not know how to relate to the organization he had built. He had no idea how to relate to the larger bureaucracy of the school district. If change did not occur the District would slowly dismantled the maintenance unit and absorb it into other departments.
The Director’s initial bark, “don’t try to change me” was not the bark of a blind tyrant hell-bent on running the department into the ground. It was a statement of recognition that he felt he could not compete on the same ground as the polished political apparatchiks of the District office and was not sure he wanted to – but he did need to adjust something. So how does a pirate accustom to effecting immediate and sweeping change, immediate execution of ideas with full budgetary discretion alter behavior enough to avoid being abandoned by his allies i.e., the District he serves?
The power of reflection in defining context
After talking with the Director and his team I realized the Director did not see how his own success altered the political terrain. The director faced two big crises: readjust his approach to his own team or risk losing the best and the brightest that were all frustrated by the repressive tyranny of the director’s micro management (he did not trust them and they knew it). The director had to readjust his approach to the District that now saw him as a policy maker and not an odd ball outlier – he now had power but he did not realize it. There are few things more dangerous than a leader that possesses power but fails to exercise the self-awareness to realize the extent (or limitations) of their power. The Director was still fighting for recognition of his expertise and the importance of student health. But, he had won that war – the District had become a model for school districts around the nation for environmental health.
In my curiosity about what the Director had done and my probing about how the changes he initiated had altered District policy both of us gained insight into the shifting political terrain in which he now functioned. We had several three-way interviews between the Director, Tim and me. Tim was a master at pointing out the Director’s accomplishments, offering deep respect and bringing the current challenges to clear definition. These conversations forced a reflection of the type top leaders desperately need – a strategic reassessment of their position. The Director however had never taken the time to do this on his own because he was too busy fighting the good fight to realize that he was wining fewer battles because the opponents had moved. He ended up wounding his political alliances and most trusted employees. Tim served as the Director’s first mate inside the office and as his emissary to the District. Without Tim’s respect for the man and his accomplishments the Director’s survival in his role was doubtful. The Director realized two things in these conversations based on his reaction to me.
First, the district trusted his opinion about the law and regulations around environmental safety. The former pariah was now a recognized expert. He had accomplished something significant and meaningful. The problem was that while he had achieved a new status he did not know how to behavior relative to his new status – he is like a championship boxer who after beating his opponent continues the fight with the referee trying to name him the champion. The failure to change behaviors based on the changing environment makes more enemies than friends.
Second, the Director was rapidly losing the political capital needed to keep his clout in the organization he had created from scratch. He still had fight left and still had battles to win but had not defined them appropriately. The Director sensed the loss of political capital but had interpreted it as an irrational outside threat and not a self-inflicted wound to his own credibility. His dissonance upon realizing this had shaken his confidence in himself. Tim used the opportunity to drive both realities home with data that was affirming, disarming and incontrovertible. The Director became more inquisitive and open to learning. This was the easier of the changes. As the Director grasped the new limits of his fight and talked about what needed to happen next in his department and beyond. He became quite inspirational in the weeks we talked together – he is passionate about environmental health.
The breakthrough
How did this change occur? At the end of the field study I prepared a report and the Director and I sat down to lunch to discuss my findings.
“Ok,” I began. “You committed to hearing feedback at the completion of my research. I am ready but I need two actions from you. I want you to commit to doing these actions for three months without fail. Will you give me that commitment?”
The mood of the lunch shifted at the tension and competition of our first meeting reemerged. The director repeated his first words to me, “Don’t try to change me!”
“We already agreed to these ground rules, Dick,” I responded. “Your insistence on resisting feedback only tells me that you would prefer to sabotage your entire division and sacrifice it on the altar of your own hubris. Is that what you are telling me?”
“Geez, you are ….”he paused, “…ok what do you want me to do?”
I asked, “In your own words who are you?”
He floundered for a moment grasping for what I meant.
“I am an expert in my field. I am focused. I want to make a significant contribution in life. I am gruff and impatient with incompetence. I am a man of few friendships but I think they are deep,” he replied.
“Ok,” I said, “…your team agrees with all of this but they don’t trust you.” He looked rather stunned as founders often do. I explained that in my experience founders are very capable of outlining how they have sacrificed. Founders ably describe the risk they assumed in the pursuit of success. Yet they are blind to the sacrifices and risks taken by those they have inspired to help them achieve their big goals. Granted, the risks incurred by employees seem small in comparison to putting family, assets, and reputation on the line like founders often do. However founders inherently infer that a proportional sacrifice is required of all their key employees. It takes a different shape usually in long hours and high demands and initially low pay. If the employees sacrifice remains unacknowledged and devalued then a mutiny occurs. The casualty of such a mutiny is not limited to the founder – everyone is hurt.
It was quiet for a long time – I felt little compulsion to rescue Dick from whatever internal reflection he was doing in the silence. Finally he said, “Ok, I will commit to your suggested actions.”
“Great,” I replied. I need 20 minutes of your time each day. I need 10 minutes in the morning and 10 minutes in the evening. As your employees arrive I want you to walk out of your office and greet your employees by name.” For all the years Dick had worked to build the department he always arrived up to 60 minutes ahead of his employees and stayed for up to three hours after they left – and never left his office. Only two people dared to enter his office without being invited – Tim, his first mate and Dick’s secretary. Employees summoned to Dick’s office endured scolding on their failure to consider all the aspects of their projects. Dick would itemize their failures and send them back to correct their mistakes. If anyone pushed back during these interactions Dick would launch into a review of his published work and his stature as an expert.
“I can do that,” Dick replied.
“Ok, then 10 minutes before the end of the day I want you to come back out of your office and thank your employees for their hard work.” I said.
“What? They are paid for that work. That is their thanks. They and the union give me nothing but grief with all their gripping, their grievances – we spend so much time with union reps and attorneys over this crap that we fall behind on critical projects.” Dick’s face had begun to glow with a reddish hue.
I stared right back at him, “You gave me your word that you would keep your commitment. Are reneging? I am happy to leave you the bill for lunch and go home now. But, I need to know if you have the integrity to keep your word.”
Dick stopped mid-breath. “Why do I need to thank them for doing their jobs?”
“Because,” I said, “…they are doing their jobs. They could be out sitting behind the district buildings drinking beer and simply reporting that they are working. They could be doing all kinds of things that would destroy this department.”
“They try that crap and they will be fired,” Dick retorted.
“Good,” I said, “you need to be consistent in excellence and in the management of the task. That excellence is not the problem here. Thank them every day because they perform the work you assigned to them. And if any of them are not you have the disciplinary processes in place to discuss that problem – use them consistently. The question is; will you keep your commitment?”
Dick agreed. In the months that followed I checked in with Dick in a surprise visit. He was noticeably happier and his employees in the department caught me and thanked me for whatever it was I had done to make Dick human. A year later the department inherited all maintenance functions in the district. Eventually Dick moved to a new position that allowed him to be the knowledge expert and put Tim in the Director seat. The employees, Tim and Dicks all told me that the consult had been a success. The real success however is that Dick emerged as a fully differentiated leader. He was never the best friend of his team. However he had become human and began to allow his direct reports to thrive. By appreciating their work Dick begun to recognize their expertise and slowly backed away from micromanaging every detail.
Conclusion – what is a differentiated leader?
A differentiated leader is a person whose identity exhibits several critical behavioral characteristics. Dick had started the department as a differentiated leader but then because of the capacity shift that occurred as the department grew he fell into regressive and reactive behavior. As his identity reemerged several critical behaviors returned and grew in-depth. Being a self-differentiation leader requires:[1]
- The capacity to go it alone. Dick’s capacity to move with or without popular support had built the department. His failure however to extricate himself from the emotional binds of the less emotionally mature leaders in the district had caused him to retreat from this position of leading to a defensive position that ultimately made him the victim of District “politics”. Dick despised the feeling of helplessness – he overcame it by reasserting his willingness to engage people.
- The ability to recognize and extricate oneself from emotional binds. When Dick began to re-engage his team he had to face the reality that his retreat from relationships to isolation in his office had only complicated the emotional binds of the less emotionally mature. The more he retreated the more his employees turned to grievances and work slowdowns to express their malcontent.
- Recognition of the folly of trying to will others to change. Oddly enough the director resisted strong-arm tactics to change his style while simultaneously trying to force others to change. He faced two points of resistance: (1) the intransigent and emotionally regressive who needed to be reminded to take responsibility for their own well-being and destiny and (2) those who were attempting to “will” the director to change by amplifying grievances and work slowdowns. The fact is that when change (or crisis) is “…viewed in terms of proportional or systems thinking and not straight line, linear thinking, then outcomes other than mere capitulation or escape become possible….mobilization of an organism’s resources such as resiliency, determination, self-regulation, and stamina.”[2]
- The modifying potential of a non-anxious presence. The department under the Director’s insistence on capitulation by the union had become reactive i.e., attempts to squelch or side step union activity resulted in a greater degree of intransigent resistance on the part of the union and attempts by potential leaders to escape the conflict by blending into the environment as though they could exist unseen by the reactive parties. When the director changed his approach by exercising awareness and thankfulness it altered his anxiety and de-escalated the reactive anxiety of the employees. Conversations began to look at the larger issues faced by the department and new contributors emerged from the shadows with new solutions.
- The ratifying power of endurance in crisis. Tim demonstrated endurance in the process. He stayed by the Director’s side providing honest feedback and creative perspectives and remained engaged with the employees refusing to allow them to capitulate their part of making the department a success. His endurance encouraged participation and the possibility of change in the minds of the employees.
- The self-regulation necessary for dealing with reactive sabotage. As the department began to make a shift toward change some saw change a more threatening potential than the undercurrent of reactive conflict that had been the norm. Dick’s new found fortitude helped him engage the transparent conversations needed to lay out the opportunity and the result of not taking the opportunity. He began to see that the union agreements restricted more than his behavior, it outlined expectations on the employees. Not everyone exercised self-regulation. A couple of the employees requested transfers to other departments because they resented the new more positive environment and higher degree of personal responsibility. Dick and Tim transferred employees who failed to assume personal responsibility. Each transfer reduced the number of sabotaged union negotiations and project deadlines. Sabotage follows effective leaders.
- The factors in the leader’s own being that cause him or her stress. In the private conversations Dick talked about the collapse of his marriage and his health and his faith. He wanted to find a way to renew his faith and health…his marriage had ended in a rather nasty divorce. As he came to terms with the impact of his spiritual and physical health he saw how his own struggles had contributed to his poor leadership and the slow erosion of trust and integrity in the department. To the degree leaders exercise self-awareness about the factors that cause them stress they are effective in mitigating the stress of others. (See the comments on emotional intelligence in http://raywheeler.wordpress.com/2011/02/19/servant-leadership-and-corporate-social-responsibility/.)
So how is your differentiation as a leader? Can you describe what makes you unique? Do you exercise the seven traits outlined above? In what ways do you see improvement may be needed or advised? Who are you talking to about it? Dick had two trusted advisors that led him through significant changes in perspective – Tim who worked for him and me who served as a timely mentor/coach. If you don’t have a trusted advisor who provides clear and unvarnished feedback it is time to find one. Let me know your thoughts in the comments. Thanks.
Don’t Try to Change Me – Discovering the Differentiated Leader
An inauspicious start to a critical engagement
“Don’t think you can change me…don’t even try.” The department director shot these words at our introduction.
I caught the eyes of my friend darting toward mine to see if I would buckle or flinch in the first volley. I smiled and while grasping the hand of the director to shake it I looked into his eyes and said, “That is the last thing I would attempt…I am not here to change you I am here to help you leverage the success of the department you have built to the potential you see for it. Is that ok with you?”
“Ok,” he responded. He looked surprised.
“Well then I have two rules,” I continued “and I need you to agree to them before I begin or I will pack up and walk out.”
“What are they?” the director queried.
“First, you give me permission to discover the unvarnished feedback of your employees,” I began. “Second, you agree to debrief with me at the end of the project to tell you what I have learned. Do you agree?”
“I agree,” he said and looking at my friend “he is not a bad guy Tim.”
“I told you Dick, he is good at what he does.”
This engagement germinated when Tim had asked me one night what I my research focus was in my doctoral program.
“I am looking at how hope impacts the development of existing and emerging leaders in complex organizations” I responded to his inquiry.
As we talked more about the insights I had gathered in my field research Tim asked, “Would you be willing to see if that fits at the school district? Our department could really use something like this and we have no budget for consultants right now.”
Tim told me that the technical maintenance unit developed in the early 1980s. The director and his secretary were the first employees. At the time of the project the unit operated with 80+ unionized employees. The unit’s original assignment was limited to fulfilling EPA directives on the abatement of asbestos contamination. Today the unit handles abatement of every potential environmental health risk to students. Not only has the complexity of regulatory compliance increased but the volume of work within this metropolitan school district increased with its initiatives to meet its plan of reducing the backlog of deferred maintenance.
The growth of the department, its technical focus, its existence within a complex metropolitan school district and the fact that its original director was still the leader made this an irresistible field study.
I negotiated for permission to publish my findings (I didn’t know school districts had so many attorneys). The District finally gave permission to publish my work as long as I never mentioned it by name.
Tim had initiated a focus on best practices in management at every level of the department. He had a long leash that resulted from the fact he served as the de facto director for several months the director was recuperating from a significant health challenge and that Tim had the highest respect for the expertise of the director. Tim’s respect was both professional and personal. This respect provided the safety net the director needed to extend trust to my research project.
Classic leadership tensions
In the course of doing the field research some interesting observations emerged:
- Growth in the scope of leadership responsibility requires a change in how the leader works.
- Growth in the scope of leadership introduces political (relational) challenges not clear before.
- Growth in the scope of leadership responsibility reveals gaps in a leader’s capacity.
- Growth in the scope of leadership requires that a leader find new sources of feedback.
- Demands on capacity require a change in time management strategies.
- Demands on capacity require a leader to leverage organizational sovereignty (i.e., depend on the skills and abilities of others and expand the scope of decision-making versus insisting on one’s own perspective exclusively).
- Growth in the scope of responsibility requires an ability to find and engage other leaders.
Change was not an option for this department. A vortex of constant and discontinuous change resulted from the department’s growth and contentious budget/philosophical changes in the District. A chronic degree of mistrust and anxiety existed among the employees I interviewed and surveyed. I prepared to debrief with the director at the end of the research project. I could not help but remember his edict, “Don’t try to change me.”
When changes occur what is impacted?
The Director’s warning about challenging him to change was intriguing in its own right. He had already faced a wave of change but struggled with altering his behaviors in ways that are classic to a founder. He managed like a tyrant in that he refused to delegate control of decisions – he was the bottleneck of his department that threatened to push the department in into dangerous lapses of execution. He was the first in and the last out of the office often working 16 hour days. He had destroyed his family, had few friends and was losing political capital in the District because he did not know how to relate with peers. As captain of his own ship he worked more like a pirate barking orders and threatening to keel-haul inefficient crew.
The Director was on a collision course with the future – a future that no longer needed a pirate at the helm of an underfunded loosely supervised division. He had sailed into the center of the District’s maintenance budget in part by the fact he is an internationally recognized expert in his field and in part because of the success he had achieved over the years in raising recognition of the dangers of environmental pollutants and the need to give safe educational environments. The problem was not a fight for recognition and budget in the bureaucracy. The problem was the director’s own lack of self-regulation in the face of tension. He did not know how to relate to the organization he had built. He had no idea how to relate to the larger bureaucracy of the school district. If change did not occur the District would slowly dismantled the maintenance unit and absorb it into other departments.
The Director’s initial bark, “don’t try to change me” was not the bark of a blind tyrant hell-bent on running the department into the ground. It was a statement of recognition that he felt he could not compete on the same ground as the polished political apparatchiks of the District office and was not sure he wanted to – but he did need to adjust something. So how does a pirate accustom to effecting immediate and sweeping change, immediate execution of ideas with full budgetary discretion alter behavior enough to avoid being abandoned by his allies i.e., the District he serves?
The power of reflection in defining context
After talking with the Director and his team I realized the Director did not see how his own success altered the political terrain. The director faced two big crises: readjust his approach to his own team or risk losing the best and the brightest that were all frustrated by the repressive tyranny of the director’s micro management (he did not trust them and they knew it). The director had to readjust his approach to the District that now saw him as a policy maker and not an odd ball outlier – he now had power but he did not realize it. There are few things more dangerous than a leader that possesses power but fails to exercise the self-awareness to realize the extent (or limitations) of their power. The Director was still fighting for recognition of his expertise and the importance of student health. But, he had won that war – the District had become a model for school districts around the nation for environmental health.
In my curiosity about what the Director had done and my probing about how the changes he initiated had altered District policy both of us gained insight into the shifting political terrain in which he now functioned. We had several three-way interviews between the Director, Tim and me. Tim was a master at pointing out the Director’s accomplishments, offering deep respect and bringing the current challenges to clear definition. These conversations forced a reflection of the type top leaders desperately need – a strategic reassessment of their position. The Director however had never taken the time to do this on his own because he was too busy fighting the good fight to realize that he was wining fewer battles because the opponents had moved. He ended up wounding his political alliances and most trusted employees. Tim served as the Director’s first mate inside the office and as his emissary to the District. Without Tim’s respect for the man and his accomplishments the Director’s survival in his role was doubtful. The Director realized two things in these conversations based on his reaction to me.
First, the district trusted his opinion about the law and regulations around environmental safety. The former pariah was now a recognized expert. He had accomplished something significant and meaningful. The problem was that while he had achieved a new status he did not know how to behavior relative to his new status – he is like a championship boxer who after beating his opponent continues the fight with the referee trying to name him the champion. The failure to change behaviors based on the changing environment makes more enemies than friends.
Second, the Director was rapidly losing the political capital needed to keep his clout in the organization he had created from scratch. He still had fight left and still had battles to win but had not defined them appropriately. The Director sensed the loss of political capital but had interpreted it as an irrational outside threat and not a self-inflicted wound to his own credibility. His dissonance upon realizing this had shaken his confidence in himself. Tim used the opportunity to drive both realities home with data that was affirming, disarming and incontrovertible. The Director became more inquisitive and open to learning. This was the easier of the changes. As the Director grasped the new limits of his fight and talked about what needed to happen next in his department and beyond. He became quite inspirational in the weeks we talked together – he is passionate about environmental health.
The breakthrough
How did this change occur? At the end of the field study I prepared a report and the Director and I sat down to lunch to discuss my findings.
“Ok,” I began. “You committed to hearing feedback at the completion of my research. I am ready but I need two actions from you. I want you to commit to doing these actions for three months without fail. Will you give me that commitment?”
The mood of the lunch shifted at the tension and competition of our first meeting reemerged. The director repeated his first words to me, “Don’t try to change me!”
“We already agreed to these ground rules, Dick,” I responded. “Your insistence on resisting feedback only tells me that you would prefer to sabotage your entire division and sacrifice it on the altar of your own hubris. Is that what you are telling me?”
“Geez, you are ….”he paused, “…ok what do you want me to do?”
I asked, “In your own words who are you?”
He floundered for a moment grasping for what I meant.
“I am an expert in my field. I am focused. I want to make a significant contribution in life. I am gruff and impatient with incompetence. I am a man of few friendships but I think they are deep,” he replied.
“Ok,” I said, “…your team agrees with all of this but they don’t trust you.” He looked rather stunned as founders often do. I explained that in my experience founders are very capable of outlining how they have sacrificed. Founders ably describe the risk they assumed in the pursuit of success. Yet they are blind to the sacrifices and risks taken by those they have inspired to help them achieve their big goals. Granted, the risks incurred by employees seem small in comparison to putting family, assets, and reputation on the line like founders often do. However founders inherently infer that a proportional sacrifice is required of all their key employees. It takes a different shape usually in long hours and high demands and initially low pay. If the employees sacrifice remains unacknowledged and devalued then a mutiny occurs. The casualty of such a mutiny is not limited to the founder – everyone is hurt.
It was quiet for a long time – I felt little compulsion to rescue Dick from whatever internal reflection he was doing in the silence. Finally he said, “Ok, I will commit to your suggested actions.”
“Great,” I replied. I need 20 minutes of your time each day. I need 10 minutes in the morning and 10 minutes in the evening. As your employees arrive I want you to walk out of your office and greet your employees by name.” For all the years Dick had worked to build the department he always arrived up to 60 minutes ahead of his employees and stayed for up to three hours after they left – and never left his office. Only two people dared to enter his office without being invited – Tim, his first mate and Dick’s secretary. Employees summoned to Dick’s office endured scolding on their failure to consider all the aspects of their projects. Dick would itemize their failures and send them back to correct their mistakes. If anyone pushed back during these interactions Dick would launch into a review of his published work and his stature as an expert.
“I can do that,” Dick replied.
“Ok, then 10 minutes before the end of the day I want you to come back out of your office and thank your employees for their hard work.” I said.
“What? They are paid for that work. That is their thanks. They and the union give me nothing but grief with all their gripping, their grievances – we spend so much time with union reps and attorneys over this crap that we fall behind on critical projects.” Dick’s face had begun to glow with a reddish hue.
I stared right back at him, “You gave me your word that you would keep your commitment. Are reneging? I am happy to leave you the bill for lunch and go home now. But, I need to know if you have the integrity to keep your word.”
Dick stopped mid-breath. “Why do I need to thank them for doing their jobs?”
“Because,” I said, “…they are doing their jobs. They could be out sitting behind the district buildings drinking beer and simply reporting that they are working. They could be doing all kinds of things that would destroy this department.”
“They try that crap and they will be fired,” Dick retorted.
“Good,” I said, “you need to be consistent in excellence and in the management of the task. That excellence is not the problem here. Thank them every day because they perform the work you assigned to them. And if any of them are not you have the disciplinary processes in place to discuss that problem – use them consistently. The question is; will you keep your commitment?”
Dick agreed. In the months that followed I checked in with Dick in a surprise visit. He was noticeably happier and his employees in the department caught me and thanked me for whatever it was I had done to make Dick human. A year later the department inherited all maintenance functions in the district. Eventually Dick moved to a new position that allowed him to be the knowledge expert and put Tim in the Director seat. The employees, Tim and Dicks all told me that the consult had been a success. The real success however is that Dick emerged as a fully differentiated leader. He was never the best friend of his team. However he had become human and began to allow his direct reports to thrive. By appreciating their work Dick begun to recognize their expertise and slowly backed away from micromanaging every detail.
Conclusion – what is a differentiated leader?
A differentiated leader is a person whose identity exhibits several critical behavioral characteristics. Dick had started the department as a differentiated leader but then because of the capacity shift that occurred as the department grew he fell into regressive and reactive behavior. As his identity reemerged several critical behaviors returned and grew in-depth. Being a self-differentiation leader requires:[1]
- The capacity to go it alone. Dick’s capacity to move with or without popular support had built the department. His failure however to extricate himself from the emotional binds of the less emotionally mature leaders in the district had caused him to retreat from this position of leading to a defensive position that ultimately made him the victim of District “politics”. Dick despised the feeling of helplessness – he overcame it by reasserting his willingness to engage people.
- The ability to recognize and extricate oneself from emotional binds. When Dick began to re-engage his team he had to face the reality that his retreat from relationships to isolation in his office had only complicated the emotional binds of the less emotionally mature. The more he retreated the more his employees turned to grievances and work slowdowns to express their malcontent.
- Recognition of the folly of trying to will others to change. Oddly enough the director resisted strong-arm tactics to change his style while simultaneously trying to force others to change. He faced two points of resistance: (1) the intransigent and emotionally regressive who needed to be reminded to take responsibility for their own well-being and destiny and (2) those who were attempting to “will” the director to change by amplifying grievances and work slowdowns. The fact is that when change (or crisis) is “…viewed in terms of proportional or systems thinking and not straight line, linear thinking, then outcomes other than mere capitulation or escape become possible….mobilization of an organism’s resources such as resiliency, determination, self-regulation, and stamina.”[2]
- The modifying potential of a non-anxious presence. The department under the Director’s insistence on capitulation by the union had become reactive i.e., attempts to squelch or side step union activity resulted in a greater degree of intransigent resistance on the part of the union and attempts by potential leaders to escape the conflict by blending into the environment as though they could exist unseen by the reactive parties. When the director changed his approach by exercising awareness and thankfulness it altered his anxiety and de-escalated the reactive anxiety of the employees. Conversations began to look at the larger issues faced by the department and new contributors emerged from the shadows with new solutions.
- The ratifying power of endurance in crisis. Tim demonstrated endurance in the process. He stayed by the Director’s side providing honest feedback and creative perspectives and remained engaged with the employees refusing to allow them to capitulate their part of making the department a success. His endurance encouraged participation and the possibility of change in the minds of the employees.
- The self-regulation necessary for dealing with reactive sabotage. As the department began to make a shift toward change some saw change a more threatening potential than the undercurrent of reactive conflict that had been the norm. Dick’s new found fortitude helped him engage the transparent conversations needed to lay out the opportunity and the result of not taking the opportunity. He began to see that the union agreements restricted more than his behavior, it outlined expectations on the employees. Not everyone exercised self-regulation. A couple of the employees requested transfers to other departments because they resented the new more positive environment and higher degree of personal responsibility. Dick and Tim transferred employees who failed to assume personal responsibility. Each transfer reduced the number of sabotaged union negotiations and project deadlines. Sabotage follows effective leaders.
- The factors in the leader’s own being that cause him or her stress. In the private conversations Dick talked about the collapse of his marriage and his health and his faith. He wanted to find a way to renew his faith and health…his marriage had ended in a rather nasty divorce. As he came to terms with the impact of his spiritual and physical health he saw how his own struggles had contributed to his poor leadership and the slow erosion of trust and integrity in the department. To the degree leaders exercise self-awareness about the factors that cause them stress they are effective in mitigating the stress of others. (See the comments on emotional intelligence in http://raywheeler.wordpress.com/2011/02/19/servant-leadership-and-corporate-social-responsibility/.)
So how is your differentiation as a leader? Can you describe what makes you unique? Do you exercise the seven traits outlined above? In what ways do you see improvement may be needed or advised? Who are you talking to about it? Dick had two trusted advisors that led him through significant changes in perspective – Tim who worked for him and me who served as a timely mentor/coach. If you don’t have a trusted advisor who provides clear and unvarnished feedback it is time to find one. Let me know your thoughts in the comments. Thanks.
You are Stalled as a Leader Because you are Lost as a Person
The most dynamic leaders I know are also the most interesting people. Is that a coincidence? I don’t think so. Developing leaders is a multifaceted process that has much more to do with helping leaders develop who they are than it does developing a technical understanding of leadership.
Growth as a leader is multifaceted because people do not develop along a linear path of skill sets that build capacity. Instead leaders simultaneously develop technical skills, interpersonal styles and conceptual ability in a complex interaction between their internal sense of purpose, the context in which they lead (i.e., the relational dynamics of the organization) and the varying demands of the market place for product.
Identifying the factors of development along linear paths, as I have done in the diagram above, helps define the components of a leader’s development and illustrates that simply learning new skills is not the most significant aspect of leadership. The failure of many leadership development programs is that they focus solely on attempts to develop the skills and ability of leaders without addressing the far more important aspects of the leader’s identity as rooted in his or her personality and their spirituality (consciousness i.e., how they perceive reality).
Real success in leadership is not so much a technical skill as it is the ability to read the emotional environment and reassure people in the face of anxiety. Leaders who are most effective in reading the emotional environment of their organization and offering reassurance stand out – they exude confidence (not hubris) that reassure others and moves the conversation from anxiety to possibility. They have a secure identity. They have a differentiated sense of self.
If the leader understands his/her differentiation from the group then they are able to act without being affected by the group’s (institution’s) own emotional processes. Without a clearly differentiated sense of self the leader fails to develop clear values, a unique vision or a defined moral foundation. Instead the undifferentiated person looses the nerve to be his or her own self in the face of the emotional reaction of the group to both internal and external events. The leadership challenge inherent in being a differentiated person is succinctly described by Friedman:
A leader must separate his or her own emotional being from that of his or her followers while still remaining connected. Vision is basically an emotional rather than a cerebral phenomenon, depending more on a leader’s capacity to deal with anxiety than his or her professional training or degree.[i]
A differentiated person possesses clarity about their life goals and clarity about their own capacity potential. A differentiated person is unruffled by the reactivity of others. A differentiated person or leader is able to express his/her self without blaming. This person takes responsibility for their own destiny and emotional health.
Without a differentiated sense of self leaders become caught up in the organization’s emotional processes. As a result often agitate anxiety instead of steering the group through it. When a leader agitates his or her organization’s anxiety then behaviors such as reactivity, herding (quest for uniformity versus individuality in which the organization adapts to its least mature member), blaming, a quick-fix mentality and a lack of leadership occur.
I met Steve Moreau some time after he stepped into a CEO role in 2005. The way he presented himself impressed me. He consistently emphasized three core values: excellence, engagement and execution. He emanated conviction, energy and commitment. He did not seem to be merely mouthing a formula or the tag line of the latest business book. Steve capably lead the hospital he lead from loosing money to being one of the top 100 acute care hospitals in the nation and he did it in two years. How? Rather than blame his staff for poor engagement, or blame the situation Steve initiated change in how he and the organization related – he did not allow the least emotional mature members of the staff to decide the emotional climate of the hospital. He brought in coaches to work with his executive team and key managers to help them define their own individuality and he affirmed that individuality by rewarding performance and creativity.
How are you doing as a leader? Are you unruffled by the emotional reactivity of others? Do you hold others accountable for their own emotional wake? Do you insist that the least mature of your staff to grow? If you are then you most likely face the sabotage and resistance real leadership generates but you also experience progress and breakthroughs in how people on your team assess their situation and possibilities. Are you a differentiated person? If not, it is time to hire a coach or find a mentor capable of helping you change the way you see yourself and overcome the imaginative barriers that keep you from risking new thinking. If you are stalled as a leader you may be lost as a person. Don’t attend another seminar boasting 12 great breakthrough strategies – do the hard work of knowing yourself.
[i] Edwin H. Friedman. A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix [Kindle Version], 430 of 5400. Retrieved from Amazon.com.
6 Ds of Toxic Leadership – A Call for Courageous and Compassionate Leadership
Leadership is a Work in Progress
Leadership is always a work in progress. As men and women respond to dynamic market pressures, seismic political interactions, multi-level relational needs, routine and extraordinary tasks new lessons on seeing oneself and one’s context emerge. The challenge is not that weaknesses or faux pas occur–the challenge is when behavior intentionally resists complexity and change to prefer the route of least resistance in personal interactions. In my observations of less than sterling behavior by managers and executives in a variety of industries common patterns emerged that have toxic consequences.
The tendency to resist complexity and change emanate from a variety of motives rooted in an individual’s personality traits, the context in which they serve, and as a reaction to the relational webs in which the person works and lives. What I have noticed is that the six Ds of toxic leadership identified below are routine only in so much as I recognize these as one side of personal behaviors that also seem correlated to the level of stress the person faces. That is to suggest that the six Ds of toxic leadership are maladaptive approaches to reasserting a sense of personal control over stressful or unexpected outcomes or behaviors by others with whom the leader relates.
These six deadly sins of leadership also seem to manifest along two different axes i.e., those that are more public than private and those that are more aggressive than passive – illustrated below. It appears important to know where each dysfunction falls on these axes to decide the best intervention strategy when they occur. Each of these dysfunctions obscure reality–creating a mental fog that diminishes a sense of personal power/responsibility and personal competence/individuality. Obscuring reality or redefining reality along a win/loose or right/wrong dichotomy characterizes each of these dysfunctions. How people respond to these dysfunctions depend on the ego strength of the followers. In my experience where these dysfunctions routinely manifest in leader behavior followers generally show lower ego strength–a fact I attribute to: (1) A leader’s deliberate choice of those easily manipulated, (2) People tend to conform to the group as a form of security/acceptance and (3) People with higher ego strength avoid placing themselves in abusive situations.
The scale suggesting passive to aggressive behavior recognizes that these dysfunctions may react to stimuli in a self protecting fashion (passive) or may pro-act to remove perceived threats (aggressive). Healthier organizations exhibit implicit (mentoring) and explicit (intentional coaching) interventions and pre-screening that are designed to avoid dysfunctional leader behaviors prior to hiring on the one hand and to expand a person’s capability for working in complexity on the other hand.
What are these rather common toxic behaviors and what is their impact on followers and on the leader’s future ability to get things done?
Dodging
Defined; evasion as a means of escaping or avoiding something, especially one that involves cunning or deceit. The behavior is passive in that it reacts to accountability by attempting to redirect responsibility to others. The behavior also manifests as disengagement from the behavioral dimensions of effective leadership i.e., idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation and individualized consideration. Leaders exhibiting dodging behavior hide in their office or cubical actively avoiding (dodging) critical interactions with direct reports and up-line authority.
The act of dodging results in an organization that fails to achieve or execute or more often in organizations that show a significant disconnect between formal and informal leadership. Leaders who dodge their responsibilities are little more than figure heads who consume organizational resources while their underlings are left to fend for themselves and figure out how to get things done.
Oddly enough leaders who dodge responsibility indirectly contribute to the emergence of capable people who learn to manage the inertia of a disconnected leader. The down side of dodging behavior is that it teaches emerging leaders what once they have power they can focus on the rewards of power without regard to the organization’s means of achieving outcomes. Additionally, blind pursuit of prestige contributes to ethical lapses and poor moral judgments by emerging leaders who: (1) Seek the recognition of the powerful for what they carry out at any price and (2) Want to achieve the perceived prestige and power of arriving at a high-ranking leadership position.
When dodging is an isolated behavior address it by coaching that sets clear goals for performance and personal development. However, when dodging is a long-term behavior interventions must address the entire organizational culture. Followers often resist interventions that attempt to alter organizational behavior. If employees view the organization as the golden goose that rewards loyalty then changing the goose removes the potential of future reward. Ultimately organizations exhibiting such behaviors collapse on with Enron speed.
Derisive
Defined; contempt for and mockery of others. Derisiveness stems from a narcissistic overestimation of self-importance combined with a lack of creative thinking. Hamel describes one aspect of derisive management as “denominator management”.[i] Denominator management is all about cutting the denominator (capital, headcount, and investment) when evaluating financial ratios. Derisive managers act out a “corporate anorexia”. Instead of focusing on growing the numerator off a more-or-less fixed base of investment and headcount to drive productivity higher derisive managers show their lack of creativity and lack of respect for the workforce by consistently cutting headcount, benefits and pay to keep up profitability. Derisive leaders fail to see that the issue is not numerator versus denominator rather the challenge is linear versus nonlinear innovation. The challenge is to figure out how to break the conventions of an industry and address both.
Derisive managers de facto cut out leadership and talent development in their quest to maximize profitability without considering sustainability. Leaders and organizations must question the absence of people skills and talent development in profit driven or survival driven decisions. When people are viewed a little more than corporate chattel their simply is no reason or opportunity to develop leaders.
Healthy organizations challenge derisive leaders on their attitude (or blindness) toward employees and their lack of truly innovative thinking. Usually coaching serves as an effective change intervention unless the manager in question suffers from more than a quick fix perspective toward business challenges. Where managers suffer from a disregard of people generally they present a significant human resource compliance risk.
Despot
Defined; the use of power in a cruel and unreasonable way. Organizational despots use their power to obliterate perceived threats to their place, influence or favor with other power centers with which they feel an alignment. Despots often work aggressively behind the scenes deriding emerging talent and/or ideas that seem to threaten the status quo of power.
Despots demoralize change agents and emerging leaders by redirecting their sense of reality and situational clarity. For example one client described a despot that used every private meeting to remind the client she lacked the scope of ability needed to succeed at work (without ever specifying the allegedly deficient ability, skills or knowledge) and that senior management had written her off as a fit to the organizational culture. The reverse was actually true. The fact was that she was considered to be a high potential employee who would be promoted above the despot. Despots work in private and thus keep up plausible deniability of abuse. If the target of the despot goes public to question the despot’s message the employee him or herself appear misinformed and paranoid lacking the kind of confidence needed for healthy self promotion.
The fact despot’s work primarily in private is important in designing an intervention. Privately they are most sinister yet they do slip up publicly typically reacting to questions or alternative tactical suggestions with extreme emotion and anger. Astute followers use these outbursts to test the reactions of others and ask publicly about the source of the intensity. Practicing the art of powerful questions (e.g., you seem to feel quite strongly about this…why is this?) the despot is drawn out of his/her cloak of privacy. Interrogating reality in public exposes the untruths and fabrications the despot uses to keep others in line. There is a twofold danger in this strategy however. First, if the organizational culture is dysfunctional questions seeking clarification in public may be interpreted as insubordinate and unreasonable (a Orwellian redefinition of the word “reasonable”). Drawing the despot into the open in a dysfunctional organization results the follower being seen as disloyal, unpredictable or unreliable – all correct when the criteria is accepting the dysfunctional behavior as normal. Second, the follower asking the questions can count on another round of private tongue lashing.
It is important to build strong internal alliances that allow you to test reality claims. And it is equally important to push back on the private destructive behavior of the despot. For example: a despot tells a victim privately that their lack of skill is the sole reason a project crashes. Followers possessing enough ego strength may push back on hay wire assumptions with data and alternative perspectives. Followers with lower ego strength can test the claim by privately seeking out alternative evaluations and comparing insights. A despot’s time in power is always limited and when they crash their survival in the organization depends on (1) the depth of their alliances and (2) the health of the organization.
Despots spoil emerging talent and development – check your organization’s employee engagement and turnover rates. Despots impede the growth of organizational capacity.
Defensive
Defined; defensive reasoning avoids assessment and is characterized in:
- The quest for unilateral control.
- The maximization of winning and minimization of loosing.
- Suppression of negative feelings (non-emotional, invulnerable).
- Quest to be perceived as rational – or objective (detached, superior).
In a day when success in business increasingly depends on learning, defensive reasoning undermines the organization’s capability of continuous improvement and sustained performance. In organizations in which learning does not occur the emergence of what Heifetz calls a doom loop emerges in which the loss of resiliency and emergence of scapegoating characterized as:[ii]
- Misperception of the nature of the threat – don’t see reality clearly (compare Drucker’s discussion about “theory of business” – Drucker, HBR, Sep.-Oct. 1994, pp. 95-104).
- The threat may be perceived but exceed personal capacity to adapt.
- The threat evokes distress that leads to pain avoidance, blaming action, externalizing the enemy, denying the problem, jump to conclusions, or find a distracting issue to restore a sense of stability.[iii]
A leader given to defensiveness develops a brittle personality and often exhibits an “inappropriately high sense of despondency or even despair…” when demands overload the ability to control responses.[iv] This leader ends up losing influence as others begin to push back on the warped reality of the defensive leader to reduce the mistrust and suspicion he or she generates. When the defensive leader also holds power followers typically ignore the defensiveness and create informal power lines to carry out necessary problem solving and creativity thus duplicating time spent on every problem or challenge. This kind of duplication reduces the organization’s efficiency and is often one of the drags on profitability the financials record but fail to define.
Because defensive reasoning is a public dysfunction grounded in a private fear the best strategy is to keep up public dialogue presenting alternative data and assumptions while simultaneously seeking to engage a private relationship that gets at the adaptive incapacitation. Coaching is particularly helpful in this regard and more sophisticated organizations regularly use coaching to help their management and executive team expand their adaptive capacities.
Defensive reasoning may derail important tactical decisions and thus expose the organization to unnecessary competitive pressure.
Debauchery
Defined; extreme indulgence in the gratification of the senses the indulgence of appetite. I once receive a call from a vendor with whom we did business. The voice on the other end introduced themselves as our new account manager. We talked for a moment about pricing structures, demand and the role their product played in our business plan. He noted that he wanted to visit our operation and get to know us better. Then he dropped the bombshell, “When I come,” he said, “I expect you to hook me up with some California hotties. If you want to maintain your favorable pricing with my organization you will have to make this happen.”
Like other dysfunctions debauchery views business as a means to leverage pursuit of their own appetite. Not only did the suggestion that we visit several strip clubs and then end the night in a private party with some strippers offend my sense of morality it violated our company ethical code. Does sound moral judgment and values have a role in business success? Or, is this just business?
The research into what makes leaders effective concludes that highly effective (transformational) leaders not only ground themselves on fundamental moral foundations they inculcate the character strengths of moral courage and integrity in their followers. The bottom line of morally grounded leadership is that the followers who grow up around these leaders gain the ability to make their own ethical and moral decisions not merely from the fear of recrimination or punishment but because of the self-awareness that unethical behaviors are inconsistent with highly effective leadership.[v]
Where debauchery is unrestrained managers explicitly and implicitly violate both employment law and sustainable business practice. In my experience debauchery leads to quid pro quo promotions of incompetent managers whose positions and benefits serve as hush-money in the face of sexual harassment and/or sexual favors. Profitability plummets from managerial incompetence, employee disengagement and employee legal action.
Debauchery requires a strong intervention for legal, moral and business sustainability reasons. Intervene by direct confrontation of inappropriate behavior and consistent enforcement of company policy. Be sensitive to those who are victims of the debauchery. As in other dysfunctions where followers have strong ego strength they either face the perpetrators of this power abuse or leave employment for a better opportunity. However, as in other dysfunctions perpetrators of debauchery also seem to master the art of grooming less secure employment candidates and employees for abuse. If left unaddressed debauchery destroys all aspects of a business.
Demagoguery
Defined; emotional appeals to falsehoods to manipulate response of followers. Demagogues may represent delusional leaders or as is more common in my experience leaders who rise to a position and responsibility that exceeds their grasp of complexity or capacity to serve as an effective organizational catalyst. These leaders are masters at grooming emerging leaders into servants of their misinformation and manipulation.
I sat in the green room waiting to give my department report to the international board of our organization. I was new to the corporate office. I served at the invitation of my mentor who served as Vice President of the international division. Roy had warned me that he recruited me to help effect a change in corporate culture and that his efforts had succeeded in creating a bifurcation of those who supported his efforts and those who plotted his demise. I respected Roy deeply. But I had to admit I wondered if he was being a little paranoid (which was way out of character for him). Then I met Bill (another young leader recruited by one of Roy’s detractors).
“What will you say in your report,” Bill queried.
Having temporarily forgotten Roy’s advice to keep my plans and strategies for the board’s ears only I provided the bullet points of my presentation; (1) an evaluation of the current status of my department as compared to other similar departments, (2) an evaluation of potential contributions to the corporate strategy my department could make and (3) a strategic plan including pro forma financials that showed the projected impact of making the changes I suggested.
“You can’t tell them that,” Bill said with a look of concern that hinted of the condescension one expresses when they feel they have an inside track to power.
“Why not” I asked?
“They will eat you alive. Everyone knows you don’t give the board the real situation. Besides you will make us look bad,” he continued with a forced grin.
Since Roy and I had gone over my report I felt confident that I was on the right track and did not deviate from the plan. The board gave me a round of applause when I finished and one of the other agents of change on the board praised my report as a model for everyone else. I felt great about the presentation mainly because I was naive about the impact of demagoguery.
In the months that followed the closed-door political posturing became more clear to me. I heard more back rumors about myself. I didn’t take everything seriously – I was in the power seat. I met regularly with the president. My position was grooming me for greater responsibility. I had a mentor (Roy) who consistently reminded me that power would corrupt me if I did not commitment myself to servant leadership. Then an unexpected series of events unfolded.
Roy died in a private plane crash. All those back door meetings I had watched positioned a new Vice President in power who hated Roy. The result, I was on the wrong side of the power equation over night and became the target of the demagogues’ full court press to have me removed. I was shocked at the misinformation and misrepresentation I endured in the following months.
The outcome of demagoguery is not simple. It would be easy to say that demagogues simply place their mindless lackeys in key roles. I watched very capable people defend decisions they disagreed with strategically and ethically as necessary for the survival of the organization. They reframe their situation in extremes seeing other divisions in the corporation as overt threats to the survival of the international division. It is this kind of reframing or mental fog that demagogues create and that keeps them in power.
Confusion, self-doubt and disillusionment emerged in these mid-career leaders. All of them eventually left the organization. The demagogue was removed and replaced by another demagogue. The corporation entered a time of chaotic change and legal problems.
Resist and expose demagogues with alternative and verifiable data and truth-telling. In my view interventions with demagogues must be organizational wide – coaching or other individual interventions are not effective because demagogues are master manipulators of reality.
Conclusion
I contended in the beginning of this article that leadership dysfunctions are coping strategies for dealing with complexity and pressure. In my experience all the dysfunctional leaders I have met also exhibit decisions of incredible insight and sometimes strategic foresight.
Because I tend toward optimism in how people develop I am convinced that many of these leaders can transform from dysfunctional to healthy leaders if their followers, organizations and social/professional networks and colleagues act to contradict their dysfunctional behavior.
However, as Jean Lipman-Blumen points out followers “…accept, often favor; and sometimes create toxic leaders…”[vi] The reality of corporate and organizational experience often mirrors the dynamics uncovered in Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment (1971) in which student volunteers began to act as though the situation was real leading to prisoner abuse, depression among prisoners and shocking instances of extreme behavior. Only one prisoner objected to being mistreated yet, “…other prisoners viewed this individual as a troublemaker despite the fact that he was protesting on their behalf, as well as his own. Even the ‘good’ guards felt helpless to intervene.”[vii]
Those who oppose dysfunctional leaders always face some form of retaliation from the leader and often from his or her followers or peers. However, if (1) currently dysfunctional leaders have a chance for transformation and (2) dysfunctional behavior is to stop someone must make the choice to act and intervene consistently.
My hope in categorizing toxic leadership as I have is that it would expose toxic leaders to those followers and organizational decision makers caught in the fog of confusion or uncertainty dysfunctional leaders generate. My hope is that courageous and compassionate leaders/followers step up to be the catalysts of truly healthy organizations. Most of all I want to challenge those who recognize dysfunction but either feel helpless or that it is not their responsibility to act. Do we have a responsibility to act? Yes! The Apostle James pointed out that;
Anyone, then, who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, commits sin.[viii]
Acting in the face of dysfunction, even in light of the potential social or professional consequences is a moral/ethical mandate. Are you willing to act? Do you know the cost of acting? Or perhaps a more poignant question is do you know the cost of not acting?
What if you have seen yourself in one of these dysfunctions? Then it is time to act concretely. Find a coach or mentor who will tell you the truth and help you name the causes and develop new capacities for working with complex situations you face.
[i] Gary Hamel. Leading the Revolution (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 13.
[ii] Chris Argyris. “Teaching Smart People How to Learn.” In Harvard Business Review, May – June 1991, pp. 5-14.
[iii] Ronald Heifetz. Leadership Without Easy Answers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 37.
[iv] Argyris, 10.
[v] Weichun Zhu, Bruce J. Avolio, Ronald E. Riggio and John J. Sosik. “The Effect of Authentic Transformational Leadership on Follower and Group Ethics.” In The Leadership Quarterly, 22 (2011) 801-817. Zhu et al discuss the impact of authentic transformational leadership on a group’s sustainable survival, development and performance.
[vi] Jean Lipman-Blumen. The Allure of Toxic Leaders: Why We Follow Destructive Bosses and Corrupt Politicians – and How We Can Survive Them (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2005), 24.
[vii] Lipman-Blumen, 33.
[viii] James 4:17 (NIV)
What Does it Take to Effectively Lead a Congregation?
What does effective leadership need? What actions best enable pastors and pastoral staff to lead their teams to success? How do they set standards that challenge people to new levels of commitment in ministry? Why do other managers and leaders seem unable to motivate their team to meet even minimum standards? How do they allow for powerful leadership within others, without feeling threatened, and still offer direction around clear values and mission? Why do some leaders and managers succeed and others watch in agony as their team’s performance slowly fades to the point of crisis? Why do some pastors seemingly drive away their best staff people in a flurry of spiteful suspicion and hurt? What is needed?
I sat with a group of business owners listening to their comments about their pastors. Each of these men ran successful businesses and consistently integrated their faith with their leadership activities.[1] These men had a measurable impact on their communities, employees and professional networks. However, their comments about their pastors were filled with frustration, pejorative exclamations, and cynicism. They had come to expect poor leadership skills, socially detached behavior, dishonesty and ethereal theological reflection that failed to offer any real insight to the immediate challenges and problems of these leaders. Why had the ministry partnership between these men and their pastors broken down? Two problems presented themselves in the midst of our conversation.
First, the pastors in question (all of them leaders of churches over 800 in attendance) could not speak the language of these businessmen. Pastors conversed about the need for salvation, social justice and the importance of giving but were not fluent how to mobilize the talented and the able toward these needs. The absence of a clearly articulated ministry/management philosophy, employee guidelines, job expectations for staff and analytically measured outcomes for the money invested in the church contributed to the perception in these business men that the work of the church was misguided at worst and ineffectual at best. They wondered why the work of the church seemed unimportant enough to create clear strategies and accountable/measurable action-plans.
Second, as I listened it became clear that the pastors in question ostensibly lacked the skills needed to engage in honest relationships with these men. Personal disagreements were framed as problems of spiritual immaturity. Personal honesty was replaced with denial and ecclesiastical censorship. Pastors seemed more interested in securing the power of their domain than of partnering with gifted men and women in their congregations for extending the grace of God.
I pondered the wide gulf of both relationship and respect clear between these men and their pastors. Could it be bridged? What might that bridge look like? What skills were needed by the pastors to bridge the gap? What assumptions in the businessmen needed to be challenged in how they viewed the mission of the church?
I reflected on the lives of highly effective leaders. Effective leaders have the ability to successfully bridge between or integrate the “spiritual” and “secular” in how they frame meaning and the purpose of the church. Or to put it another way, highly effective leaders capably define meaning. In my excursions into the business world and the church I have found both capable and incapable leaders.
While my remarks contrast business and church leaders in terms of ability (which was true in the context of the conversation cited) I have met just as many incompetent business leaders as church leaders. The difference is that incompetent business leaders are removed or fail more quickly because the metrics of their success are less complex than those facing leaders within the congregational setting.
Admittedly Christian leaders are not always so socially ambidextrous in their integration of spiritual/secular concerns. However effective Christian leaders have a perspective of culture and their relationship to it that enable them to communicate functionally in both the context of the church and the society in which they live. Watching leaders interact with culture seems to render one of two types of approaches; those that invite cultural dialogue and those who rejects cultural dialogue. In effective leaders, regardless of their orientation to culture, three things seem inherently embedded in their approach to ministry.
Frame a Clear Vision that Applies God’s Promise
The first is that they exercised the ability to frame vision and outline clearly measurable tasks in light of the promise of God. This vision inspired a “mind to work” in those they influenced.[2] Nehemiah’s context for example possessed rules and boundaries that find similar to the networks and relational histories inherent in today’s experience. Nehemiah had to address the threat to the Babylonian worldview raised by his conviction about the prominent role of God in history, the tension of unmotivated followers, the opposition of divergent worldviews and power agendas, and the propensity for organizations to disintegrate into mediocrity and “group think.”
Demonstrate Courage and a Bias Toward Action
The second is that in the face of a very real threat to their well-being and their future, leaders exercise courage in action and decisions. Like Nehemiah, leadership action involves spiritual/social courage, not only because of one’s expressed faith in the God of Abraham, but also because clarity in demarcating action can drawn one into a power struggle between faith and the prevailing deities and power structures of the leader’s context. In today’s context every leader faces the same pressure. On the one hand a pressure exists to avoid rocking the prevailing social paradigm and violating certain social taboos on the other hand the leader must decide how to express clear commitments without bigotry but with a sure purpose.
Inspire, Direct, Maintain, Correct and Celebrate
Third leaders like Nehemiah exercised leadership activity that inspired, directed, maintained, corrected, and celebrated the right actions of those who worked around them. Stated from the premise of the reference above, wouldn’t it be nice if a pastor had the skills to, (1) create a team of business people, other congregational members and pastoral staff and (2) lead them to work at the peak performance of their gifts and abilities that (3) helped them work toward measurable social and personal change as a result of their faith?
I have had plenty of opportunities to experience the frustration of not knowing how to lead people. As a result, I have asked lots of questions and fired off more than my share of acrimonious complaints about the lack of commitment and follow through I saw in others. What does effective leadership need? What actions make the most successful production managers or effective executive and senior pastors, and enable them to lead their teams to success? How do they set standards that challenge people to new levels of performance, while other managers and leaders seem unable to motivate their team to meet even minimum standards? How do they allow for powerful leadership within others, without feeling threatened, and still offer direction around clear values and mission? Why do some leaders and managers succeed and others watch in agony as their team’s performance slowly fades to the point of crisis? Why do some pastors seemingly drive away their best staff people in a flurry of spiteful suspicion and hurt?
I offered three insights to these questions yet I am certain there are more. What do you think it takes to lead a thriving congregation?
[1] I did not sponsor the meeting, I was a guest. I did notice that among all the business owners in this evangelical organization not a single female business owner was present, nor did it seem like this was expected. I mention this because many female business owners run companies that exhibit cutting edge employee relationships, superior customer service and superior profit margins. The National Association of Women Business Owners, of which my wife is a part, has industry leading female executives that are often overlooked or dismissed by their male counterparts. I would like to say that in the church world things are different that women are recognized for their gifts and abilities and authenticated in their ministries and leadership – but the same bigotry faced by women in the market place is simply re-framed with spiritual language in the church world and is offered as a biblically authenticated model of gender relationships. I want to call this into question.
[2] Nehemiah 4:6. My premise has been challenged by other educators in Christian Leadership who suggest that business models and assumptions are inadequate for the church – I agree with the statement as it stands. The mission of the church is not reducible to profit. What I disagree with is that the ministry of the church is not measurable. The simple fact is that the reasons why pastors and some Christian educators say that the ministry of the church is not measurable mirrors the excuses I have heard from my direct reports in business where everything is measurable. The same verbiage and the same reasoning from one context to the next suggest to me that such statements are excuses used to mask the fear of accountability. So, in the absence of a compelling alternative I will retain my assumption that there are measurable aspects of ministry and organizational development that must be used in the church and para-church organizations that keep the missional focus sharp and the work effective rather than the dull irrelevance that is sometimes the case.
What is in your emotional wake? Three lessons on being authentic.
The painful question
Roy looked me in the eye with one of those looks that drills through the defenses, “Now that you are at the helm of your organization understand that it won’t be that many years before your largest challenges will be the consequences of your own decisions…when you have no one to blame but yourself what will change look like then?”
I remember sitting and staring at Roy with a stunned look I could not hide. I had just unloaded my frustration with the decisions of those leaders who had controlled the congregation before I arrived to lead. I was younger than my peers. I had asked for a particularly difficult assignment i.e., to take a dead congregation and turn it around and I had won it – although I have to admit there wasn’t a long line for this assignment. The congregation had a long blood trail of broken and frustrated pastors who had served before me. The average stay was barely two years.
My idealism about turning around a dead organization suffered severe challenges early on as I faced nearly 50 years of entrenched values, fears, poor decisions and reaction to my innovative initiatives. I was frustrated. A deep local recession added to the difficulties. The recession destroyed our community’s employment base. The community experienced a negative migration of population because of the double-digit unemployment. I had a lot to whine about in my mind but Roy had little time for my pout.
The responsibility and weight of decision-making in leadership offers a sobering antidote to the adrenalin of power and authority that attends leadership. I realized that I had to nurture the kind of open forthright relationships that would give me clear feedback to avoid making stupid mistakes and to build a foundation for influence. The fact of the matter is that power and authority come and go in organizations much like the seasons. Influence however emanates from a leader’s character and travels with him or her from one assignment to the next.
I knew where I wanted the organization to go – I had a very clear vision. I had a good idea about how to go about it. This presented me with a double-edged sword. On the one hand my confidence inspired others to join me in the adventure. The vision I communicated seemed to engender enthusiasm (people like to be part of an organization that is going somewhere significant). However, in my self-confidence I often exhibited stubbornness. Only the wildly confident could get through to me when I was on a “right” rampage. I saw three tasks.
Hear the hard questions
First, I had to listen to others whose advice would move me past my arrogance so they could find synergy with my confidence. This means I had to see my arrogance and that is the problem. Sue was particularly helpful in this regard. The wife of one of my mentors (he was an executive at Weyerhaeuser Company) she was very accustom to encountering arrogant young bucks and equally accustom to deflating them to a manageable level of arrogance by simply asking questions. She had a way of reviewing what I had just decreed that immediately gave me three to four more perspectives that led me to see my first statement was little more than pompous pontificating. I wasn’t always sure how she did it. I did know that my staff was always relieved to know I was going to see Chuck because they knew that I would also see Sue and she would work some magic that made me easier to work with.
Encourage and demand honest feedback from others
Second, I had to encourage their self-confidence to get their best performance and endure their arrogance in the process. The staff and I had worked on planning a major initiative for weeks. I was clearly convinced that it would succeed. It failed to gain board approval. After that particularly difficult meeting I walked from the conference room to the offices with my senior staff. Rod said partly under his breath, “I knew this would not fly.”
Shocked and angry I turned toward him in the hallway and lifted him off his feet and pinned him to a wall with one hand. I remember while I was turning that the other staff upon seeing my expression were backing away.
I looked Rod in the eye and said, “If you ever keep your opinion from me again I will fire on the spot. Other bosses may fire you for disagreeing with them. I will fire you for not giving me your honest assessment. Do you get it?”
Rod shook his head in the affirmative. As I smoothed my own ruffled feathers a collective sigh of relief emerged.
We talked for a couple of hours together that evening after the board had gone. I talked about how much I needed the assurance that my team would not let me waltz into the future like the Emperor in his new clothes.
Leaders often find themselves isolated because of the power and politics surrounding their position. However, they cannot afford to remain isolated. To remain isolated replaces leadership with either over-cautious risk aversion or blind disregard of risk. Either choice negates leadership and results in loss of trust and legitimization by followers.
Practice reflection – what do others experience around you?
Third, I had to embrace the consequences both good and bad of my leadership and personal decisions. Mistakes in judgment occur – recognize them, apologize, learn and apply the lesson to the next set of challenges. John, one of our board and a senior executive stood in my office door one day. The rest of the staff was out-of-town and I remained behind to run things in their absence. I was having fun.
“You are amazing,” John began pausing long enough for me to fully absorb his words. “I have watched you this week – you are a Jack of all trades.” John paused again allowing me to puff out my chest with a smug sense of satisfaction. John walked out of my line of sight.
I sensed a few minutes later that another person was standing in my office door and looked up from my work to see John again standing there. “Oh, one more thing,” John began.
I expected another accolade.
“Master of none,” John finished.
My chest deflated.
“Ray, this week you have run the secretaries ragged, ignored your wife, scheduled meetings like people had no private life and left people longing for the staff to escape your business. Is this the outcome you aimed to achieve?”
“Not exactly,” I weakly responded.
“Ok,” John said, “you have a couple of days to correct the chaos you created.” With that John disappeared from my line of sight again.
What was the outcome I wanted to generate in my wake? I pondered the question. I realized that the more I ponder the question the more I realized what change looks like when the challenges I face are of my own making.
Conclusion
Roy was right. I look back on a career that has some significant accomplishments. I look forward to a few more before my work days are done. But I also look around and see consequences to my decisions. Some I like…some I don’t. I have begun to talk about the one’s I don’t like with the people I subjected to those decisions. Roy did not warn me that it wasn’t the big things that would come back to query me. It is the little things, the everyday decisions about how I treated people, the priorities of my life when it came to work and family. I don’t know the ratio of good to bad decisions. I find myself more concerned with adjusting the daily decisions I make now so they align with values I don’t mind having interrogated by others. I find myself more concerned about being present in the moments of my day. I find myself taking time to see people around me, to see and hear my employees and to be fully present with my adult children, grandchildren and my wife. It looks to me that I am becoming a better leader as a result.
Are the outcomes of your behavior what you intended? Do you see the outcomes of your behavior? Do you own your own emotional wake? These are the questions I find refine a man or women and make the difference between refined authority, power, influence and the rough-hewn exercise of a position that leaves others disillusioned or wounded and organizational outcomes languishing and unsustainable.
Men and Women are Different – Learning to Mentor across Genders
Crossing the Gulf
She was a bright, intelligent, spiritually attune and confident young woman. I recognized in grading her homework that she had few intellectual peers in 
the class. However, she rarely contributed to the discussion – this class in the United States was a homogeneous group of undergraduate men and women. I relaxed assuming that my cultural assumptions were mirrored in my students – the last thing I anticipated was an education in how my gender assumptions affected the class.
I called on her one day in a class discussion and asked if she had something to contribute…I knew she did. She had a better grasp on the subject than anyone in the class and was bright enough to extrapolate and synthesize the subject to other areas of her experience and knowledge.
As I turned her direction to call on her I noticed (in hindsight – it did not register at the time) that her eyes pleaded with me to pass her by. I zeroed in on her and asked her to respond to the question. It was only then I realized the non-verbal queues I had ignored as I worked toward the question. When I called on her she expressed a look of betrayal and hurt. Before I could respond to either of these observations she leapt from her seat and ran from the classroom crying! I was stupefied.
I caught up with her as she sat in the commons and asked if I could join her. She politely agreed and seemed to expect my question. She explained to me that in all her school years she had minimized her intellectual capabilities because she had learned through being rejected and ostracized by both her male and female peers that standing out as an intellectual woman equated to social suicide. In calling on her I had revealed her intellectual capacity. Her sense of vulnerability and exposure eclipsed the affirmation of her ability I had intended to communicate. I apologized to her and reminded myself to be mindful of the power I wielded in the narrow environment of the classroom.
That day it became clear to me that to be unaware of one’s own cultural and gender assumptions runs the risk of damaging mentees and not empowering them. It was possible to inadvertently leave my mentees marginalized and irrelevant to their context. Without attending to the complexities of mentoring these unexpected results derail the best intention of the mentor.
Mentoring is a relational process and it requires first that mentors be at ease in social interaction. In mentoring someone who knows something (the mentor), transfers that something (empowerment and resources such as wisdom, advice, information, emotional support, protection, linking to resources, career guidance, status) to someone else (the mentee) at a sensitive time so that it impacts development.[1] Mentoring results in other tertiary benefits such as reduced employee turnover, a more attractive organization from the perspective of employee recruitment and increased organizational learning (the precursor of sustainability in processes and success).[2]
However, mentoring is also a kind of sacred archetype, a capacity to illuminate a role of often-hidden yet rare power in the drama of human development.[3] It is the archetypical nature of mentoring that makes it so potentially damaging or helpful especially in cross gender interactions. The act of mentoring may be assigned significance far beyond the mere exchange of ideas or skills.
The encounter I had with this talented student represents one of the many challenges in mentoring. Is it possible to effective mentor across gender lines? Is it proper? It is a necessity in many organizations – yet it is often a challenging arrangement for both the mentor and the mentee.
The necessity is clear. Consider the observations of Elizabeth McManus writing about women in law firms. Her observations apply to many of the organizations I have worked in or with over the years.
The reality is that “[w]omen who are not mentored are in fact less likely to advance…. [f]emale lawyers remain out of the loop of career development.” They aren’t adequately educated in the organization’s unstated practices and politics. They aren’t given enough challenging, high visibility assignments. They aren’t included in social events that yield professional opportunities. And they aren’t helped to acquire the legal and marketing skills that are central to advancement. This exclusion results in a negative cycle, where women who do not advance are more likely to leave law firms and “[t]heir disproportionate attrition then reduces the pool of mentors for lawyers of similar background, and perpetuates the assumptions that perpetuate the problem.” The fewer women who are mentored, the fewer of them there are to rise to the top to act as mentors to new women associates.[4]
The same thing can be said of female staff members in churches, non-profit organizations and businesses. Cross gender mentoring is often the only way women find the opportunity to engage the larger organizational and strategic challenges they need to develop as leaders. Too often the lack of capable female leaders with in organizations is not the result of insufficient talent and ability but insufficient opportunity and sponsorship.
The profound benefit of mentoring means that its application toward every potential leader is a desirable aim to increase organizational depth and effectiveness. In light of this benefit in the business context the loss of mentoring relationships because leaders do not know how to mentor across gender is unacceptable. In a faith-based context such as a church or Christian organization (my own reference point is limited to the Christian tradition by experience and training) the lack of cross gender mentoring relationships is even more appalling. It is clear in Genesis that the imago Dei invested in humankind requires the inclusion of both male and female if it is to be complete and undistorted. Conversely a bias to either male or female perspectives diminishes and distorts our insight into the nature and character of God. Historically and contemporarily the Church has often failed to support the development of women preferring to stay predominately male in imagery, language and governance. The loss of the Church’s ability to speak to today’s complex world is due in part to this distorting bias in my opinion.
Successful cross-gender mentoring requires two categories of understanding. First, understand how to create a safe mentoring environment as a mentor or as a mentee. A good structure ensures that both the mentor and mentee understand the expectations of the mentoring relationships and understand the boundaries that make the relationship safe. Second, understand how women differ from men in how they develop as leaders.
Establish a Safe Mentoring Relationship
Admittedly views of how men and women should relate in the workplace differ from one generation to the next and from one culture to the next. Any guidelines I offer will not fit in every situation. However, it is precisely this diversity that necessitates making the ground rules of mentoring explicit and not implicit. It is the job of the mentor to create a safe environment.
Start by identifying the assumptions that limit the effectiveness of cross gender mentoring relationships. Emerging generations perceive cross-gender relationships to be more common. However, the down side is that their sexual relationships are more open and pervasive. This openness however does not end the potential for great personal pain and the attending awkwardness of trying to work with an “EX” or of trying to reset a friendship violated by miscues about sexuality – as popular television dramas such as Suits, Harry’s Law and others illustrate routinely. The potential of ruined reputation and eclipsed advancement opportunity due to poorly framed sexual relationships is as alive as ever. How do mentors establish proper boundaries and so avoid violating the trust of their organizations, their mentees, their families or their colleagues? How do they communicate the necessity of these boundaries to emerging leaders so they do not undermine their own advancement by poor interpersonal choices?
Assumed stereotypical roles. Behavior defined by assumptions and expectations about cross-gender relationships may cut anxiety but may not give opportunity to practice the kinds of behaviors needed to enhance leadership ability and capacity. Why? Most stereo typical roles are family based or marriage based. Neither of these models fit the global context of leadership well. Hence if stereotypical roles are used to define the relationship, the role modeling of effective leadership will not be effective. There is little chance of discovering what it means to be female in a male dominated culture or what it means to work with women as powerful and effective leaders if limited stereotypical roles dominate the nature of the relationship.
When discussing gender differences it is more profitable to speak about how men and women develop and not how they should behave. For example men tend to speak and hear in the language of status and independence while women speak and hear in the language of connection and intimacy (intimacy does not have sexual connotations – a queue that is sometimes misinterpreted by men). Knowing these differences allows a mentor to frame questions, provide assignments and sometimes protect their mentees so that the unique way in which the mentee maximizes learning.
Emotional entanglements. While there is tremendous potential in growth in friendships and emotional ties because of the differences in viewpoints of the genders there is also the potential for co-dependency where one or the other of persons depends on the other in an unhealthy way for affirmation and approval. Avoid co-dependency by maintaining broad exposure to learning opportunities and challenging assignments so that the mentee’s sense of affirmation results from the outcomes of their new learning in practice.
The natural intimacy of the mentoring relationship may also lead to the experience of sexual tensions. Sexual tension is normal and where it is held in perspective it can generate higher levels of creativity. The problem with sexual tension is not its existence but the potential stress it places on interpreting the non-verbal queues in a mentoring relationship. Make the guidance of your interaction explicit and be quick to express concern if a boundary is crossed by either person in the mentoring relationship. The relational aspect of mentoring is under much more stress in a cross-gender relationship. Feelings and the affect are often much more in focus than the cognitive aspect of learning – so exercise awareness. The last thing a good mentoring relationship needs is to collapse in the accusations of or fear of sexual harassment.
Sexual entanglements. A safe mentoring environment requires clear boundaries in the relationship so that sexual tension does not give way to sexual involvement. If sexual involvement develops in a mentoring relationship it does so to the detriment of mentoring and role modeling. Care must be taken about physical contact and expression of or recognition of sexuality. Avoid fantasizing. Because mentors are typically in a place of power organizationally sexual entanglements create a double jeopardy of poor personal judgment and legal liability. The greater loss generated by inappropriate dalliances occur when illicit sexual activity affirms unproductive gender stereotypes or loss of trust in authority figures. The loss of trust has far-reaching implications for the organization’s ability to act as a legitimate and credible institution.
Public scrutiny. Because people see and check cross-gender mentoring relationships such relationships must be seen as above-board and exemplary. What others think, though perhaps inaccurate, carries weight in shaping reputations and in the end leadership effectiveness and career advancement. Leaders have an important social stewardship here. I will never forget the day my wife returned from one of her first public speaking engagements in our early marriage. She accepted an invitation to speak to youth at a church-sponsored camp. The first reports she filed via phone calls indicated that she was extremely effective, competent and engaging. I was proud and admittedly a bit jealous. However, when she returned home devastated. After being rated as one of the best speakers (she was also published as an author at that point – years before I published anything I might add) she was told that she would never be invited back. She was too beautiful! It was that terrifyingly blunt. The director of the camp was distraction by her from his own sense of sexual propriety.
Clearly the organizational leaders should have overruled the director and encouraged him to deal with his own issues. He was later removed for having sex with one of the campers. However, my wife’s reputation was never revisited. She remained a pariah for no other reason than that she was a successful young woman who was a clearly gifted communicator and leader. The leader’s stewardship is to protect emerging leaders from the pettiness of jealous or insecure onlookers.[5]
Familial scrutiny. Cross-gender relationship may also be a threat to one’s spouse. If a leader’s time commitments show an out of balance preference for work over home then jealousy and mistrust typically arise because work and career demands might be seen as having more priority than the family and spouse relationship. Married mentors must stay conscious of the impact of cross-gender mentoring on his/her family. This is true too of married mentees. Mentors and mentees who are single often face social pressure to marry in some parts of a western culture. I have seen this pressure taint mentoring relationships to the point the value of the relationship was lost. The needs of career and family are unique and the leader must respond to both with proper presence and engagement.
Peer resentment. Be aware of the fact that others in the organization also want to advance. Solo women are often hesitant to enter consistent mentoring relationships for fear that she will have to choose between advancement and her peer relationships with other women. The mentor may be completely unaware of the stress created by the peer resentment directed at the mentee.[6]
Leaders sometimes reduce these issues because they have little bearing on the work environment in their minds. I suggest that leaders reduce these issues at their own peril. Ignoring social dynamics does not work out well in any workplace – this is especially true in a cross-cultural context in which social signals and assumptions may not be as easily accessed as in one’s own cultural context.
Understand Women Learn Differently
I assumed that my primarily male approach to learning i.e., competitive, disconnected from the subjective, complex and contextual was universal. Instead I began to see that the young coed in my story viewed learning based on connectedness and community. To her learning was intimately connected to the subjective – she wanted to know what others felt and experienced as part of the context of knowing. She worked in a collaborative environment to meet everyone’s needs and discover new ideas. The way men and women approach learning and the way they develop is different.[7]
Men and women learn best when they are involved in diagnosing, planning, implementing and evaluating their learning – involve your mentees in self-evaluation (this is a central aspect of spiritual growth). However men and women use different ways of knowing.[8] The phases of growth men and women move through as they develop share commonalities in many ways and are much different in others. Men tend to develop a sense of morality around rights evoking the imagery of “blind justice” that relies on abstract laws and universal principles to mediate conflict or disputes.[9]
Women develop a morality of care and responsibility. Instead of pressing for blind impartiality women argue for understanding the context noting that the needs of the person cannot always be deduced from general rules.[10] Role of the mentor is to create and keep up a supportive environment that promotes conditions necessary for learning – this underscores the significance of defining the relationship clearly and of those mentor types (e.g., sponsorship) that work to protect the learning of the mentee. (See more at http://raywheeler.wordpress.com/2012/05/28/mentors-developing-highly-effective-leaders/ and http://maturitascafe.com/2012/03/26/the-gift-of-mentors-and-sponsors/). If the mentor refuses to engage this way of knowing when working with women the reciprocal benefit of the mentoring relationship is lost.
So what are the phases of development suggested by Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger and Tarule? What is their significance in mentoring women?
Silence: extreme denial of self-dependent on external authority for direction.
Catalyst: socialization characterized by social, economic, and educational deprivation. These women grow up in repressive contexts where they have no voice whatsoever. These women develop language skills but do not cultivate capacity for representational thought.
These women lack confidence in their own ability to learn – even from their own experience – the capacity they do express is limited to immediate events versus past or future; to actual versus metaphorical or imaginary; concrete versus deduced or induced; specific versus generalize or contextual iced; to behaviors actually enacted versus values or motives. They feel passive, reactive and dependent thus assume blind obedience as a way to survive. They also hold extreme sex roles. Thinking for themselves violates their concept of what is proper – they experience a sense of extreme isolation.
Clearly a women in this phase of development is not a candidate for a leadership role however, mentors in business often engage these women in entry-level jobs and find training them is sometimes challenging. The simple act of learning to successfully execute a job can be a tremendous catalyst to growth. Mentoring functions such as friendship, coaching, role modeling can be especially helpful in developing these women’s potential in the work place or service roles in church organizations.[11]
Received knowledge: listening to the voices of others.
Catalyst: parenthood is often a catalyst to this shift if a woman was not already in this phase of development.
Women in this phase highly value words and learn by listening – they hear in concrete and dualistic ways i.e., right and wrong without room for ambiguity – the idea of paradox is inconceivable the assumption being that contradictory ideas are a clear contradiction of fact. Hence greater weight is given the quantitative over against the qualitative. Women in this phase rely on authority and the belief that there is only one truth. This perspective leaves women in this phase maladaptive for the complex and rapidly changing, pluralistic society we face today. When mentoring these women work toward providing clear guidelines on what is acceptable and unacceptable as well as how to handle ambiguous situations. Don’t expect them to make decisions where there is no clearly defined right answer. Be aware of the fact that women hold an either or perspective on truth they often worry that to develop their own powers is at the cost of others hence they hesitate to consider development seriously. Mentoring functions such as counseling, coaching, teaching, acceptance-confirmation and divine contact make a significant impact.
Subjective knowledge: the inner voice emerges often to the exclusion of other voices; it is the quest for self.
Catalyst: redefinition and application of new ways of knowing and learning. Note: the shift toward this phase is often rooted in some crisis of trust in male authority must often based on sexual abuse or harassment (20-35% of women interviewed by Belenky et al experienced some form of sexual abuse or harassment).
This shift is a major developmental transition with repercussions on relationships, self-concept, self-esteem, self-assertion, and self-definition – it is a move toward greater autonomy and independence. Women approach this phase cautiously often feeling exhilaration and fear because taking this stand means taking a stand for herself that may leave her isolated from her social support leaving her feeling extremely lonely.
Subjectivist women distrust logic, analysis, abstraction, and language. Following the discovery of personal authority is a reassessment of life circumstances and attributes (and whether these fit with a new sense of personal authority). Characteristically women redefined relationships around the quest to amass personal experience apart from the obligations (restrictions) of their past – courage and in some cases recklessness characterize this quest.
The dominant learning mode is one of inward listening and watching. The end of this phase is characterized both in the discovery of one’s own voice and of the necessity of understanding others whose lives impinge on personal experience. Mentoring relationships, especially cross-gender relationships may be tested in this phase for reliability and safety. Maintaining a safe environment is critical. Friendship and role modeling are critical in this phase. A spiritual guide is particularly important in this phase as the person defines their sense of self and community in new ways.
Procedural knowledge – the voice of reason: procedural knowledge is characterized by an emphasis on rules, skills, and techniques inherent in analytical thinking.
Catalyst: it is inconclusive what leads to this development in some women while others do not enter this phase. It may be exposure to authority that is benign in a dictatorial sense while also knowledgeable.
The reasoning of this phase is more complex than what occurs in received or subjective knowledge. At this point in development a woman only exercises the capacity for independent thought i.e., outside the strictures of procedure, only at the request of authorities. Mentoring in this phase of learning should include challenging assignments, acceptance-confirmation, coaching and training.
Procedural knowledge – separate and connected knowing: this phase is more than separation from and mastery over objects it infers (like the Greek word gnosis) intimacy and equality between self and object – implying personal acquaintance with an object.
Catalyst: this phase emerges from the need to understand the opinions of other people – particularly opinions that are personally obscure or alien.
Women in this phase develop a deep emotional intelligence. Whereas the separate self of the previous phase seeks reciprocity in relationships (considers others as it wishes to be considered) the connected self seeks to respond to others in their terms. This phase builds on the subjectivist conviction that the most trustworthy knowledge is personal experience versus pronouncements of authorities – the emphasis in this phase is the development of rules (effective personal processes) to gain access to the knowledge of others. The procedures effect is to get out from behind one’s own eyes to adopt a different lens and see the world through the eyes of another.
The emphasis in the phase remains the procedure although those rules remain somewhat intuitive i.e., not fully codified by the person who is still experimenting and refining their approach. Mentoring can focus on sponsorship, exposure and visibility as well as coaching, friendship, counseling and spiritual guide.
The conclusion to procedural knowing is that women who stay in these phases cannot be truly radical because their thinking is encapsulated within systems – they critique only within the standards of the system itself. Therefore mentoring that helps them see outside the system is helpful including such functions as protection, coaching, historical models and spiritual guide.
Constructed knowledge – integrating the voices: constructed knowledge is characterized in a sense of self-awareness i.e., of judgments, thought, moods, and desires. Constructed knowledge begins as a quest to reclaim a sense of self by integrating intuitive knowledge with knowledge learned from others.
Catalyst: an attempt in this phase of development to integrate the fragmentation of self into the process of knowing. With this comes a larger ability to hold apparently contradictory insights in tension.
This phase of development takes the context of knowing seriously and recognizes that all knowledge is constructed and truth is a matter of the context in which it is embedded. In other words the ability to know reality is partial limited and in need of humility and not arrogant and absolute assertion – compare the functions of propositional versus dialogical truth. c.f., 1 Corinthians 13. Belenky et al offer an important insight for mentors;
In didactic talk, each participant may report experience, but there is no attempt among participants to join to arrive at some new understanding. “Really talking” requires careful listening; it implies a mutually shared agreement that together you are creating the best setting so that half-backed or emergent ideas can grow. “Real talk” reaches deep into the experience of each participant; it also draws on the analytical abilities of each.[12]
The moral decision-making of constructivist thinking seeks to understand conflict in the context of each person’s; needs, perspectives, and goals and not invoking a hierarchy of abstract principles. This does not imply that abstract principles are not considered but that an attempt is made to apply or contextualize these so that conflict ends in a win/win where ever possible. Mentors should pay special attention to providing challenging assignments, sponsorship, protection and coaching as well as exposure and visibility.
In using this information as a mentoring guide it is important to note that the research did not set up but rather implied a development path through these phases. Passage through theses phases of development is not linear rather people can retreat or temporize these phases. It is significant that these phases are not age driven but circumstantially driven. This is a significant insight for mentors working to create developmental environments in their organizations
Reinforce the Relationship with Clear Definition
It is important to define the nature of the relationship that you expect to have with your mentor or mentee.
Table 1: Define the Expectations[13]
| Time | Our meetings begin and end on timeWe will manage our time well and use agendas to keep us on trackWe will put interruptions asideWe will meet for a specific period then reassess how we are doing |
| Feedback | We make regular feedback an expectation |
| Role Expectations | Each of us actively participates in the relationshipWe will each keep a mentoring journal to reflect on our experiencesWe will honor each other’s expertise and experience |
| Communication | Our communication is open, candid and directWe will respect our differences and learn from them |
| Stumbling blocks | If we come up against a stumbling block, we will address it immediately and not wait until the next meeting |
| Confidentiality | What does confidentiality mean in this relationship?What talk stays between the mentor and mentee? What can be shared with others?What permissions must be gained before talking with anyone outside the mentoring relationship? |
| Closure | When we have completed this mentoring cycle or in the event that our relationship doesn’t work out, we will have a closure conversation and use it as a learning opportunity. |
Communicate Violations of your Boundaries
Putting a structure to mentoring relationships is only part of creating a safe and healthy relationship. The other part is feedback in the relationship in what I call formal and informal feedback. Formal feedback consists of the direct purpose of the mentoring relationship e.g., skill acquisition, challenging assignments etc. Informal feedback consists of the honesty and integrity of the interpersonal communication. Structure and formal feedback is important to make sure that the relationship possesses clear learning outcomes. However, structure and formal feedback does not end the potential for misunderstanding in relationship. Therefore it is important to show how to discuss violations of the relationship. What happens if the mentee or mentor violates the agreed upon boundaries?[14] Informal feedback (as a mentor or mentee) when a boundary is violated needs to include the following:
- Let your mentoring partner know that he/she has crossed a boundary.
- Refer to the ground rules outlined in the mentoring agreement
- Describe the behaviors that clearly show how the boundary was crossed.
- Request that the behaviors stop
- If you mentoring partner acknowledges she/he crossed a boundary, let her/him know you appreciate the understanding
- If boundaries go unacknowledged and continue to be crossed, ask your mentoring partner to stop crossing the line. If the behavior continues, insist that it be stopped. And, if that fails, walk away from the relationship.
Conclusion
Mentoring across the gender divide possesses certain risks and yields significant insight not just in a theological or philosophical sense but in plain marketing and business sense as well. Companies who consistently develop women as well as men increase profitability and return on equity and return on invested capital.[15]
Thanks to my student that day in the classroom I am more attune to the skills and insights I need to develop the leaders emerging around me. How about you?
[1] J. Robert Clinton and Richard W. Clinton. The Mentor Handbook: Detailed Guidelines and Helps for Christian Mentors and Mentoree. (Pasadena, CA: Barnabas Press, 1991), 2-5.
[2] Tammy D. Allen, Lisa M. Finkelstein and Mark L. Poteet. Designing Workplace Mentoring Programs: An Evidence-Based Approach(Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Kindle Edition, 2009).
[3] Laurent A. Daloz. Mentor: Guiding the Journey of Adult Learners (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1999), xxiv.
[4] Elizabeth K. McManus. “Intimidation and the Culture of Avoidance: Gender Issues and Mentoring in Law Firm Practice” in Fordham Urban Law Journal (Volume 33, Issue 1, Article 7, 2005), 100-14.
[5] To my point about the inability of the church to engage current issues with vitality – my wife changed careers and has had a marvelously successful career as a financial planner to her clients great gain and the church’s great loss. Her story is repeated in many of my female theology students who find that opportunities to serve are grossly restricted to stereotypical roles ill-suited to either their gifts or the needs of local communities.
[6] I find it very helpful to read blogs that give me an ongoing insight into the issues the emerging generation faces. One particularly well written blog can be found at http://lostgenygirl.com/.
[7] Mary Field Belenky, Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger and Jill Mattuck Tarule. Women’s Ways of Knowing: the Development of Self, Voice, and Mind (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1997).
[8] Zachary, 513 of 6664.
[9] Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger and Tarule, 8.
[10] Ibid, 8.
[11] For more definition on mentoring roles see http://raywheeler.wordpress.com/2012/05/28/mentors-developing-highly-effective-leaders/
[12] Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger and Tarule, 144.
[13] Zachary, 3579 of 6664
[14] Zachary, 3710 of 6664
[15] A number of studies look at the corporate context and emerging women leaders and their impact on business results. See http://www.20-first.com/9-0-better-bottom-line.html for more information.
When Crap Lead to a Leadership Breakthrough
A friend of mine told me a story I have not forgotten. He was traveling up a mountain road stuck behind a cattle truck. He wanted to pass but could not get a clear shot when one of the cows let fly and covered his wind shield in well, fertilizer.
“I nearly crashed…the stuff doesn’t respond to wind shield wipers well.” He said.
“What did you do?” I queried.
He laughed and said, “I prayed as I pulled over; ‘crap, God why me?’”
“I was really pissed,” he continued. “I envisioned my paint job being ruined, I smelled like a barnyard – that was going to go over well in my next meeting. Then something strange happened.”
“What?” I asked.
“I don’t way to say God talked to me” he began “…don’t think I am loosing it, but it was like God was talking to me and answered the question I asked in my self-pity, ‘Because you were following too close much like you do with your team, back up enough to coach and not be blinded by the stuff that happens.'”
The encounter changed his approach to leadership – he moved from micro managing (stage managing) his team to holding them accountable for their roles while trusting and mentoring their decision-making processes.
It is amazing what happens when leaders hold their teams to account for outcomes and then mentor them along the way pushing decisions back to the right people when those people attempt to slide out of responsibility. He stopped retaking delegated authority and then resenting the fact all the work landed on his shoulders.
He took the crappy experience to heart and his team became one of the most effective and efficient management groups in his industry – and they started having fun. Actually leading and not dictating and micro managing changed the way he viewed his team. He respected them more versus resenting them. He trusted them more instead of being constantly suspicious of their activity.
On the flip side his team started trusting him. Understanding mentoring as a leadership activity is the back story about what he learned. Check out these other two articles and think about how to put mentoring to work in your leadership situation. http://raywheeler.wordpress.com/2012/05/28/mentors-developing-highly-effective-leaders/ and http://raywheeler.wordpress.com/2012/06/16/4-ways-to-mentor-your-team-to-success/
But, be careful. No one is exempt from crap happening – make sure your positioning as a leader accounts for the unexpected and that you have the mentoring skills to lead others through the mess.
4 Ways to Mentor Your Team to Success
The Challenge – Control, Trust, Delegation and Accountability
How do leaders expand their organizations without loosing control of vital functions? A small business owner in a rapidly growing business said it this way, “I am one of those small but fast growing companies but like you said some of the issues here at my office might certainly start with me. My biggest issue, I can’t let go. I have to do it all myself. It’s like the saying ‘If you want things done you have to do them yourself’ which takes so much time from my schedule. My problem is trusting my team or teaching them.” (Owner of a Tri-state Business)
Is the choice founders make really a choice between quality or quantity; control or delegation; trust or effectiveness? The owner quoted above like many leaders in both business and the non-profit sector suffers from a false dichotomy. Organizations need both quality and quantity; control and delegation; and trust and effectiveness. Notice that the assumption is clear – no one has the same degree of ambition as I when it comes to my organization’s success. While this is true it is true in degrees and not absolutes.
In an earlier article (http://raywheeler.wordpress.com/2012/05/12/7-tools-mentors-use-to-affirm-effective-leadership/) I discussed the impact Moses’ father-in-law (Jethro) had on changing Moses’ perspective about his role as a leader. It is important to return to the story of Israel’s exodus from Egypt and Moses’ role in this exodus for a moment to set the stage for what might be called the Moses conundrum i.e., no one has the same ambition I do for this organization.
Nature of the Moses Conundrum
Owners and founders have a unique perspective of their organizations. Consider for a moment that Moses, like almost every founder, faced impossible odds and steep opposition to his vision. Empowered by a catalytic encounter with God in the desert Moses not only faced the opposition of a well established nation as he pursued the dream of a unique identity for his people. He was initially rejected by the very people he worked to liberate because his first efforts at liberation made their lives more miserable. He faced the backlash of Egypt’s pharaoh who sought to squelch the upstart Moses and the idea of an emergent new nation. Owners put everything on the line for their vision – one false step and they lose everything.
I once worked for a privately held company that hired me to help them expand to new markets. I turned down a more lucrative offer to work in a publicly traded company because (1) the privately held company demanded that change happen with greater speed – I could have a direct and immediate impact on outcomes verses the indirect and much slower impact on outcomes in a publicly traded company and (2) I had a greater potential for short-term gains in my own financial position in the privately held company. So, I traded a long-term career opportunity for a very risky but potentially lucrative gig in a privately held company.
I will never forget my shock a few weeks after turning down the third recruiting offer from the public firm (each one more lucrative) when the owner walked into my office and declared, “I don’t trust you.” I felt like decking him on the spot. Several thoughts ran through my mind including the frustration of facing mistrust when I had just sacked a fantastic career offer to engage the adventure of building something from scratch. What was the catalyst to this frustrating encounter? The owner had just put up a million dollars of equity (everything he owned) to fund the expansion. Whose sacrifice for the vision was greater?
Answering the question of sacrifice and investment offers an important insight into what I call the Moses conundrum – no one initially pays the same price as the founder in the first stages of the organization’s lifecycle – everyone takes a risk of significant harm to their future to join the vision of the founder. The conundrum is that even though the founder pays a high initial price – he/she must learn to recruit people to assume an uncomfortable level of risk for the organization to continue to thrive. For example: someone had the guts to be your first hire (unless you hired the first warm body that walked in from the street). If you recruited your first hire because you knew what they could do to be a force multiplier to your time and effort as the owner then recognize and appreciate their risk and recognize/reward them appropriately. Note: recognition has a much greater leverage potential at every stage of the organization’s lifecycle. This doesn’t exclude the need for reward – it is to say reward without recognition and relationship often leads to disappointment and betrayal.
This introduces two big mistakes I see founders make (1) they don’t hire force multipliers they hire stabilizers and (2) they don’t recruit the best they hire to survive another month. If employees or partners are not going to serve as force multipliers they will do more harm than good. A vicious cycle emerges. Founders need force multipliers. They know that no one they hire has made the same initial investment. They don’t know how to find force multipliers so they hire stabilizers (employees who can do exactly what they are told) because they don’t trust anyone with the essence of the business. Stabilizers end up failing to exercise critical thinking skills reaffirming that employees can’t be trusted so the founder takes up more the tasks he/she tried to escape. Employees act slighted and show an entitlement attitude infuriating the owner causing a greater gap in trust and so on.
Owners who fall into the Moses conundrum show one or more of the following dysfunctional behaviors:
- Impulse versus Innovation. Focus: new ideas. Result: demoralized staff who cannot find consistency in action. Manages by flirting with new ideas, is unpredictable and fails to follow through. Prime focus is on why.
- Working harder versus working smarter. Focus: task at hand. Result: hard work with the FISH time-table (first in, still here). Manages by crisis without delegation, training, long-range or short-range planning. Prime focus is on what. (See Adolescence and the role of delegation.)
- Control versus accountability. Focus: doing things right. Result: orderly processes while what needs to be done is eclipsed by how it should be done. Manages a well controlled disaster; the company may go broke but it will do so on time. Prime focus is on how.
Get Out of the Vicious Cycle of Mistrust
How did Jethro’s mentoring help Moses cross the trust threshold to find force multipliers? I have highlighted several points in the text that name the principles founders need to multiply their force multipliers in leadership. Read the text then think through what I have to say about below.
17 Moses’ father-in-law replied, “What you are doing is not good. 18 You and these people who come to you will only wear yourselves out. The work is too heavy for you; you cannot handle it alone. 19 Listen now to me and I will give you some advice, and may God be with you. You must be the people’s representative before God and bring their disputes to him. 20 Teach them his decrees and instructions, and show them the way they are to live and how they are to behave. 21 But select capable men from all the people—men who fear God, trustworthy men who hate dishonest gain —and appoint them as officials over thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens. 22 Have them serve as judges for the people at all times, but have them bring every difficult case to you; the simple cases they can decide themselves. That will make your load lighter, because they will share it with you. 23 If you do this and God so commands, you will be able to stand the strain, and all these people will go home satisfied. Exodus 18:17-23 (NIV)
Jethro illustrates four critical force multipliers leaders need to stay vital and sane as their organizations grow and become more complex:
- Outline and explain your core values
- Look for People who exhibit characteristics of trust
- Delegate based on each person’s capacity and capability
- Collaborate on complex issues leave routine issues
Outline and explain your core values
Jethro told Moses to spend time educating the leaders around him on how to live. In other words Jethro wanted Moses to make explicit things that he held implicitly. Your team cannot read your mind. I once gave what I thought was a simple assignment to my administrative coordinator, “Jim,” I said, “we need some signs around this property to direct people – our facility is too confusing.” We had purchased existing structures next to our original site to expand our operations. I was concerned that the hodgepodge of buildings and new parking left visitors confused about how to find their way around the chaos.
On the day the signs were installed I parked in the sanctuary parking lot and climbed out of my car anticipating a professional looking, easy to read “road map” to the facility. What I saw instead were signs nearly too small to read, remnants of a hardware store closeout that neither matched the ambiance of the congregational facility nor the vision we had to present our message and mission with excellence in a community used to spiritual charlatans. I was both frustrated and angry at myself for not communicating with greater clarity what I wanted to see in the signage. I proceeded to rip each sign from the building and walked into Jim’s office with a mangled menagerie of metal scrap. I dropped the now unusable mass on his desk watching in his face that he was horrified at the expectation of what I was about to say. “Jim, this isn’t right. I don’t know what I did wrong in communicating my expectations but when I figure it out I will be back and we can talk about it. Until then don’t worry about the signs.”
That last word of encouragement did not lighten his countenance. I went into my office seething with anger. I recognized that my frustration was not at Jim but at a dissonance I was feeling with the entire staff. They were not doing things the way I wanted them done. We had begun to have exchanges in the office that had an edge to them. I sat and prayed that God would help me, I felt like we were missing an important ingredient to our team.[1]
I asked myself why Jim would buy such junk. It occurred to me that Jim loved to save money, in fact having him serve in the role of administrative coordinator had gotten us some great deals. I continued my rumination, Jim likes a good deal. In fact, he values good deals. I value cost savings too but I also value excellence. Cost savings and excellence balanced each other out in my mind. In Jim’s mind a good deal trumped most other concerns. Jim had not bought junk, he had saved money.
“Ok,” I thought, “I am onto something here.” I continued my list of “most important” things to me. “Let’s see, I value cost savings, relationships, excellence, commitment, truth-telling…” My list of values grew.
I returned to Jim’s office the same afternoon. “Ok Jim,” I began “here is what I did wrong. I gave you a job to do and you did it on time and under budget. But I failed to instill in you the values that have been at the core of my work here the last 7 years.” Thus began a conversation that became a turning point in how I lead.
I illustrated nine core values in an interactive matrix and told Jim that I wanted him to do the assignment again only this time to make certain that he incorporated all nine values in his actions. He tried to hand the assignment back to me – I didn’t blame him for being gun-shy but I insisted on trying this new experiment in leadership action. I had to get past the frustration I was feeling. “Jim, even if I don’t like the final outcome, if you can prove to me that all the values meet in your decision, your decision will stand.” Why? Because I felt these core values were the foundation of our success. The tension I felt with the staff I had recruited rested in the fact I felt dissonance with what had made us successful in the first place.
On the appointed day I parked out back to check the work again. I bounded out of my car with a sense of expectation and laughed the moment I saw the signs. They were excellent, Jim later told me that he negotiated with a sign painter (the best in the county) for custom signs by bartering for our signs by offering the use of our building by sign painter’s family reunion. The source of my laughter was not that the signs were well done. I was delighted with the quality. I laughed because the base color of the signs was maroon, I hate maroon. I walked into Jim’s office still laughing. He looked at me with growing expression of uncertainty. “Jim the signs are great. You met every core value, well done.”
“Then why are you laughing?” he asked.
“That is not important; you did an excellent job meeting our working values. I think I am on to something with this Jim. I think it will make our communication fun again.” I said.
“I agree, but why are you laughing?” Jim pressed for an answer.
I finally relented, “Jim the signs are great, you met the values but I hate maroon. So, just as a matter of my personal taste – I acknowledge that this has nothing to do with our core values – could you avoid doing anything else in that color?”
Jim’s face grew white with anxiety. “Jim, are you ok?” I queried.
“Yea, I am alright but you know those usher shirts you asked me to order? I ordered them in maroon.” Jim said.
I broke into such loud belly laughs that the entire staff gathered around Jim’s office to share the joke. It turned into a great day for me, great because I learned, tested and successfully implemented one of the most important leadership principles I have ever caught.
Reflection spent identifying and applying core values determines to a large extent the success or failure of any team. If the core values of an organization are understood they serve as the coxswain who keeps the tempo and direction clear helping the team work together.
Your own values will decide which alternatives you seriously consider.[2]
Look for people who exhibit characteristics of trust
Next Jethro told Moses to look for capable, God-fearing and honest men. Allow me to translate these characteristics to read: capability, caring and integrity. Jethro helped Moses define trust explicitly thus making it easier to decide what needed to be delegated and who was capable of doing the job.
The research of Burke, Sims, Lazzara and Salas (2007) confirm that a leader’s ability to be successful in encouraging or managing organizational effectiveness is enhanced or reduced by the degree to which their subordinates and co-workers trust him/her and vise versa. Burke, Sims, Lazzara and Salas’ review of research literature concluded that trust within organizations (i.e., person to person, person to leader, team to team and person-organization) possess three broad qualifications: ability (capability), benevolence (caring) and integrity. These are qualifications are elaborated in the table below.
Capability, caring and integrity as factors of trust[3]
|
Capability |
Caring |
Integrity |
|
|
|
Delegate based on each person’s capacity and capability
What is important to see in Jethro’s advice is that he not only identified specific qualities of trust but that he also made clear that trust is dynamic and not an either/or proposition. In other words trust people to the degree they are capable of fulfilling that trust. It is as big a mistake to trust people with tasks they are incapable of completing as it is to fail to trust others at all.
Building capacity in your team requires that you provide them with the opportunity to grow their knowledge, skills and abilities in an environment that offers the proper level of risk, feedback and safe guards to compartmentalize the consequences of bad decisions. The aim is not to avoid all bad decisions – after all you have made your fair share – it is to make sure that the scope of decision-making power matches the capacity and capability of the decision maker to deal with a decision’s complexity. This is why Jethro encouraged Moses to build into the judicial system of Israel scope limiters of decision-making power that triggered needed collaboration when the complexity of decisions over reached the experience and ability of the team.
Collaborate on complex issues leave routine issues
Jethro’s identification of the dynamism of trust introduces another important variable in the founder’s success – relationship/collaboration. Jethro’s suggestion to create decision-making scope limiters put Moses in a place of continuous mentoring and collaboration.
The founders I meet often suffer from two leadership deficits related to mistrust: isolation/insulation and task saturation. In following Jethro’s advice Moses avoided the trap of isolation by collaborating with his leaders on more complex decisions. When founders isolate themselves from their teams they cut off the feedback (i.e., become insulated from reality) and suppress the organization’s level of trust. When founders don’t trust their teams they work themselves until they burnout or blowup. By collaborating Moses avoided the burnout inevitable in “doing it all myself” and maintained the proper involvement of strategic activity and decision-making.
Because trust is a two-way street it is important to realize that how people first approach trust is different. While the qualifications of trust seem universal the way people approach trust with another person appears to exist on a continuum. On the one end of the continuum are those people who extend trust once they see evidence for extending such trust. On the other hand are those people who extend trust de facto until one violates their trust. Put these two people in the same company and mistrust occurs almost immediately and often irrevocably because they violate each other’s sense of integrity (i.e., doing what is right by either extending trust in the first place waiting until enough evidence of care, capability and integrity exist to extend trust).
The problem for many leaders is that once trust is lost they cannot explain the dynamics of that loss. Hence the model of Jethro as verified in the research of Burke, Sims, Lazzara and Salas (2007) offers a vocabulary and conceptual model for training and correcting trust. Any leader may become jaded over time when they experience a violation of trust, possessing a model by which to identify the reason for the loss of trust encourages the right kind of conversation to occur between and founder and his/her team so that trust can be restored.
If an organization sustains growth beyond the capability and capacity of the founder it is because the founder has learned to delegate key functions on the basis of her/his explicitly stated core values and explicitly defined trust.
Conclusion
Jethro’s advice to Moses is timely for leaders and founders who find themselves caught in a cycle of burnout because they don’t fully trust their employees. We noted three common traps that develop out of mistrust:
- Impulse versus Innovation
- Working harder versus working smarter
- Control versus accountability
The solution according to Jethro was to find and empower team members who demonstrated the qualities of trust i.e., capability, care and integrity. In finding the right stuff founders, business owners and leaders must consistently execute the following aspects of effectiveness:
- Outline and explain your core values
- Look for people who exhibit characteristics of trust
- Delegate based on each person’s capacity and capability
- Collaborate on complex issues leave routine issues to others
Do you trust your team? Or are you headed to burnout? Are you fighting to control minutia or do you control the right things to set up force multipliers in the way your team works? The case study of Moses is insightful, Israel was ready to dump him as a leader more than once before Jethro’s influence helped Moses turn back seat drivers into a team of leaders growing in effectiveness. If you don’t have a mentor like Jethro in your life it is time to start looking.
Finally, don’t read this article without comment. Find out how other leaders respond and elaborate on these concepts by offering your own. I know I appreciate comments – so do others. Thanks.
[1] Indeed, I was caught in one of the 10 most common mistakes leaders make. Hans Finzel calls it leadership chaos, we simply were not singing off the same page. Finzel reminds us of four important communication realities, (1) never assume that anyone knows anything, (2) the bigger the group, the more attention must be given to communication, (3) when left in the dark, people tend to dream up wild rumors and (4) communication must be the passionate obsession of effective leaders. I was obsessed alright, but not with communication. I was obsessed with why my staff couldn’t get things done right. The problem, I discovered, was me. (Finzel 1994:113)
[2] Bennis & Nanus 1985:104
[3] Shawn C. Burke, Dana E. Sims, Elizabeth H. Lazzara, and Eduardo Salas, “Trust in Leadership: A Multilevel Review and Integration.” Leadership Quarterly 18, no. 6 (2007): 606-32.