What the Hedgehog Knows About Leadership

Please par­don my inat­ten­tion to my blog. I have been writ­ing else­where: a book of 34 short per­son­al med­i­ta­tions side by side with pho­tograp­shs. It will be avail­able as a free down­load here with­in a cou­ple of weeks.

If you like, you can lis­ten to me read the fol­low­ing post.

This morn­ing I am think­ing about lead­ing work. As in, get­ting things done, deliv­er­ing prod­ucts, attend­ing to the orga­ni­za­tion of tasks, their assign­ment, pri­or­i­ti­za­tion, sched­ul­ing, and del­e­ga­tion — and how this often is such a major con­trast to “process work,” which is about how this work is per­son­al­ly led, oth­ers’ engage­ment and their own lead­er­ship, the capac­i­ties of peo­ple in groups to collaborate. 

It is true that process-ori­ent­ed folks, who nat­u­ral­ly want to cre­ate a sense of shared own­er­ship for the work, may some­times have a very hard time under­stand­ing the out­come-based urgency of enter­prise lead­ers who per­son­al­ly feel the respon­si­bil­i­ty and the pres­sure for deliv­er­ables. But sure­ly there is a bal­ance, and this thought can refine our under­stand­ing: there are the tasks, and there is the work that enables effec­tive com­ple­tion of the tasks. Out­comes and process are com­ple­men­tary by nature, but some­times fight with one anoth­er — at least they fight in peo­ples’ minds. For exam­ple, there are plen­ty of orga­ni­za­tions (in some of which I’ve tried to con­sult) where man­agers set absurd dead­lines, lit­er­al­ly pit­ting teams against one anoth­er and essen­tial­ly try­ing to work peo­ple to death. Turnover may be high, but if enough mon­ey is there in the short-term enough peo­ple will stay long enough to be use­ful. On the oth­er side are orga­ni­za­tions that could def­i­nite­ly get more done if they were clear­er and more com­mu­nica­tive about expec­ta­tions and con­se­quences. In these orga­ni­za­tions there is often a sense of enti­tle­ment and maybe nos­tal­gia for “the way things used to be, when we were a fam­i­ly.” The choice of which way to go is a lead­er­ship choice that inevitably influ­ences enter­prise cul­ture. And the point is that in both cas­es the process side is very weak. Killing peo­ple with unre­al­is­tic demands or cre­at­ing a “soft” envi­ron­ment with no defined expec­ta­tions are gen­er­al­ly evi­dence that lead­er­ship is fright­ened of process, because process demands reflec­tion, and reflec­tion requires insight into one’s per­son­al role in orga­ni­za­tion­al effec­tive­ness. There are a mil­lion vari­a­tions on this theme, from the leader who seems to be friend­ly but is actu­al­ly angry about oth­ers’ lack of per­for­mance, to the leader who abdi­cates all respon­si­bil­i­ty in favor of turn­ing over the work to a team that now has the respon­si­bil­i­ty but, frus­trat­ing­ly, none of the author­i­ty. We cre­ate mazes for peo­ple and won­der why they aren’t per­form­ing as we would like. Out come car­rots, sticks, and many forms of indi­rec­tion, all tools that sep­a­rate us from one anoth­er, and there­fore deplete true effectiveness.

The anti­dote, it seems to me is in being real­is­tic and clear about expec­ta­tions but also being deeply sup­port­ive in terms of devel­op­ment. There can be goals for the work (e.g., exe­cut­ing such-and-such strate­gic ini­tia­tive by year end), and there also can be goals for indi­vid­ual and team devel­op­ment (e.g., devel­op­ing bet­ter inter­per­son­al skills; improv­ing team deci­sion-mak­ing). But to get to the devel­op­ment objec­tives requires also that we over­come the sense of threat from leav­ing the com­fort of imme­di­ate task ori­en­ta­tion. You know you are in the midst of that threat when there is nev­er time for the process of leader devel­op­ment or lead­ers com­plain they don’t have the skills to do it.

The mode I pre­fer in work­ing with teams is this: we are not doing “team-build­ing.” What we are doing is link­ing per­son­al and team devel­op­ment to the accom­plish­ment of spe­cif­ic objec­tives. If, for exam­ple, you have a team of peo­ple who want to save the world, then each of those folks will play a cer­tain role in doing so — these are the tasks — but each also car­ries around per­son­al “stuff” that stands to under­mine the per­son­’s capac­i­ty to accom­plish their tasks. It’s pos­si­ble to go very deep when work­ing on this stuff for each per­son, and gen­er­al­ly speak­ing, the deep­er, the bet­ter. Not long ago, for instance, I was co-lead­ing a work­shop in which one of the peo­ple talked about her hes­i­tan­cy to inter­vene in tough per­for­mance sit­u­a­tions. As she unrav­eled the mean­ing of her hes­i­tan­cy she relat­ed how at a for­mer work­place she had been assault­ed dur­ing an overnight retreat by a drunk­en male co-work­er. This had been an incred­i­bly trau­mat­ic expe­ri­ence for her, since she knew the man and had val­ued him as a col­league. Of course, there was an inves­ti­ga­tion and puni­tive action was tak­en against the offend­er, but lat­er she became the tar­get of ongo­ing blame from co-work­ers, as if the assault had been her fault. Blam­ing the vic­tim is noth­ing new in sex­u­al harass­ment sit­u­a­tions, and for her the high-integri­ty response was sim­ply to leave a job and a work envi­ron­ment she had loved. Her hon­est dis­clo­sure of the past at the work­shop and new under­stand­ing of why she might be hes­i­tant to take on con­flict sit­u­a­tions where blam­ing could occur was lib­er­at­ing both for her and the oth­er work­shop par­tic­i­pants. They, of course, were com­plete­ly sup­port­ive of her growth. She began to think about how to sep­a­rate the real­i­ties of man­ag­ing oth­ers from the real­i­ties of her own experiences.

It is true that with­out the right prepa­ra­tion and envi­ron­ment, expres­sions of this kind can be threat­en­ing. One per­son­’s stuff calls up anoth­er per­son­’s stuff, and for lead­ers who have not done their reflec­tive work, or sim­ply are very pri­vate about it, such encoun­ters can be a lit­tle desta­bi­liz­ing. That’s a safe­ty issue, and requires facil­i­ta­tion and pos­i­tive lead­er­ship to cre­ate the best con­text. How­ev­er, when the safe­ty is present, won­der­ful learn­ing can hap­pen. I recall anoth­er group learn­ing sit­u­a­tion in which one of the mem­bers, a high-rank­ing per­son in the orga­ni­za­tion, shared that he had trou­ble deal­ing with employ­ees who were “ver­bal­ly faster than I am.” Once he expressed this, oth­ers in the group, his peers, shared their own fears about these sit­u­a­tions, and togeth­er they were able to brain­storm some pos­si­ble approach­es. What a delight it was to watch this learn­ing process unfold, based on the will­ing­ness to dis­close and to be tem­porar­i­ly vul­ner­a­ble. Such process­es bring peo­ple togeth­er in com­mu­ni­ty with­out focus­ing on build­ing com­mu­ni­ty itself. They free peo­ple from the stuff that is hang­ing them up so that they take on tasks with a sense that they are not alone and iso­lat­ed, that help is always avail­able. They own them­selves and their work in new ways and increase their sense of per­son­al pow­er. They stop com­pet­ing for cred­i­bil­i­ty and stop wor­ry­ing about being embar­rassed or humil­i­at­ed. They begin to see one anoth­er as fun­da­men­tal­ly trust-wor­thy. And trust, because it is essen­tial to lib­er­a­tion, leads to high­er lev­els of per­for­mance. The whole process, it seems to me, over­comes a dom­i­nant theme in our Amer­i­can orga­ni­za­tions, which is leader as “out­cast.” The anti­dote for all of us is under­stand­ing that our self-pro­claimed wounds and inse­cu­ri­ties at bot­tom are our crit­i­cal fic­tions, are sto­ries we have cre­at­ed for our­selves about our­selves. Dis­cov­er­ing their fun­da­men­tal untruth, like being to blame for harass­ment, or hav­ing to be faster than one’s employ­ees ver­bal­ly, returns us through free­dom to our own whole­ness, and whole­ness ulti­mate­ly is what gets the job done.

And, yes, this does take time. Just as it takes mon­ey to make mon­ey, it takes time in process to cre­ate “the time” for com­plet­ing the tasks. The rea­son this is so is that there is often plen­ty of time, but none of it devot­ed to the right tasks because these tasks call up the inner work that is being avoided.

This, to me, is fun­da­men­tal­ly the lead­er­ship voca­tion called dri­ving fear out of the work­place, this will­ing­ness to reach into our­selves for lead­er­ship growth in com­mu­ni­ty with oth­ers. It is not a sim­ple equa­tion, but it’s a pret­ty darned good one. There’s a Greek apho­rism that goes like this: “The fox has many tricks. The hedge­hog has just one — one good one.” Well, I’m with the hedgehog.

Technorati Tags: Openness, Organizational Culture and Trust.