They rarely view themselves that way. But that is how their people describe them. They see themselves as being on top of things, focused on getting the job done right, and usually wondering about whom they can really trust. The people who work for them do not feel valued or appreciated. They can be called “Theory X, tough bosses, authoritarian, directive, pacesetting and task managers.”
These types of leaders can be recognized by their typical work challenges: over busy because they do not delegate, distant relationships with direct reports because they do not invest the time to build a strong bond with them, limited risk-taking and innovation below them because their reports are nervous about how their boss will react, and no strong successors because those people fled.

The second type is described in these terms:
Expects the best from me
Gets me to do my best
Challenges me to excel
Sets clear, demanding and achievable goals
Provides critical feedback in a respectful way

People working for them usually feel that they are growing significantly, are stimulated by the work and their colleagues, and go the extra mile without hesitation. These leaders view their jobs as unleashing the energy of their organization, channeling it in the most productive ways (usually through a clear, compelling vision among other ways), and reducing the obstacles to the progress and growth of people working for them. They can be called “Theory Y, participative, consultative, democratic, and high performance managers”.
Signals that you see from this type of leader are: high spirit and energy in the group, a sense of confidence and optimism regardless of the challenge, a cohesiveness and teamwork that seem natural, and ease of communication between the boss and the direct reports.

Few leaders are all black or all white, but we are likely to know both types. The first type of leader gets obedience at best from the people. People working for this leader operate out of fear and often a lack of respect and trust for their boss and sometimes each other due to the climate and example the leader sets. Anxiety runs high in those organizations. Performance can be high, but usually just for the short run. In fact, when there is a lot of pressure and urgency, sometimes this type of leadership is required.
What these leaders have to watch out for is people becoming passive, waiting to be told what to do and how to do it. Also, they are not likely to risk mistakes and therefore try fewer new ideas or to look for ways to innovate or improve things.

The second type of leader gets much more from his or her people in the longer run. People working for this leader are likely to be self-propelled to do their best. They often perform at levels that exceed everyone’s expectations, including their own. Mutual trust and respect are much more in evidence, again as a result of the climate and example the leader sets. There is a cost however, it is the time it takes to get people’s thoughts and ideas, listen to their questions and concerns, and to build alignment behind a direction. It has to be balanced with the urgency of the situation.

Have you seen either type of leader? What did the leader do and how did it impact you or others? Please share your story with us.

The post What kind of a Tough Leader are you? appeared first on Leadership.

smashwords, Winter, 2013.

My last post focused on learning to see your current story.  This entry is about creating a new one.

You Can Change your Story

Remember that we are exploring the story you have told yourself about your life experiences.  You are not a victim here.  You created the story, and you can change it.  You can come to reframe it and see your story anew–as a source of grace and wisdom rather than as a one of hurt and constraint.  You can also learn to modify the parts that hold you back, emphasize the parts that work, and create a new leadership story that is more aligned with your highest aspirations. This learning process may happen in a step-by-step fashion or more organically, but, either way, the elements of adopting a new story are the ones below.

Learn to See your Old story

Seeing your systemic story (previous post) helps you identify your patterns of behavior over time and the assumptions that support them.  Usually we make these assumptions without even realizing we are doing so; they are implicit.  For example, if your story is about not pushing back on authority figures, an underlying assumption is probably that such behavior will impact you negatively.  Through story work, our implicit assumptions can become explicit and, therefore, more easily changed.

Ask yourself, “Do the behaviors, thoughts, feelings, and assumptions that comprise my story really fit my present day situation?” Often the answer is no.  They may have been effective in the earlier situation(s) for which you developed them, but now they are not.

Once you see your story, alternatives become almost immediately apparent.  In the example above, an alternative behavior is to speak your mind diplomatically in front of superiors, and a different assumption would be that so doing actually causes them to see you in a better light and respect you more

Identify how you want to be as a leader

At this point, you have a good picture of your systemic story, how it has contributed to patterns of behavior over time, how it plays out in present day high stakes situations, and what some other options may be.

Reflect on how you want to be as a leader. Picture yourself as being that leader.  Then, identify specific behaviors, thoughts, and feelings that you want to be engaging in. Notice and adopt key assumptions that support these new ways of being.

Let’s say your story includes something like:  “I never say no to new opportunities and challenges because I don’t want to be seen as inadequate.”  As a result, you get overloaded and stressed. You have thought about a number of possible alternatives.  The new story you choose is, “I say yes when I truly want to, I say no when that is called for, and I negotiate when I think appropriate. My life is in balance.”  Then identify specific behaviors and assumptions that will support your new story, for example, the behavior of sometimes saying no to authority and the assumption that they, rather than thinking less of you, will respect you for standing up for yourself.

Undertake Behavioral Experiments

To bring your new story into being, identify specific behavioral experiments–situations in which you will try out your new behaviors and assumptions.  For example, “In our upcoming budget meeting, I am going to state my position very clearly and not cave in when people question me.”  Again, you might begin your experiments in situations that are lower risk and later try them in situations that are higher risk–holding your own in the budget meeting may be less risky for you than opposing your boss in a 1/1 stand off.

Pay attention to what comes up

Try your experiments and notice what comes up for you—what you think, what you feel, what you say to yourself.  Chances are you will experience both some satisfaction at having done something new and some anxiety in having tried something unfamiliar.  Affirm your feelings of satisfaction and notice the thoughts and feelings from the old story.  Notice them but don’t get tangled up in them.  Metaphorically step back from them, see them, and recognize that they are part of the normal mix of things but that you don’t have to let them be in control.  Choose to act in ways that support what you want to create.

When you are trapped by your old story and engage in less than optimal responses, your story is in the driver’s seat. When you choose and practice a new story, your choice is in the driver’s seat.

Sustain the Changes

Finally, to create sustainable changes in your behavior, make aligned, supportive changes at three key levels of your life system.   Shift your behavior (your face to face system).  Modify how you think and feel—practice adjustments in your thinking and feeling (your internal system) that support the behavioral changes you have made.  And lastly, create elements in your social environment (your larger social system—family, organization, and/or community) that also foster the new way of being e.g. modifying your job description with your boss, changing organizations, tapping into your professional support network.

Reflection and Practice

Set aside an hour to reflect on your current and desired leadership stories.

• Reflect on a recent leadership challenge that was high stakes for you.  In your mind, put yourself into that situation.  Notice what you were thinking (your self talk), what you were feeling, and what you did. Identify the assumptions you were making that lay under what you did.  In all likelihood, you now have a pretty good version of your systemic story.
• Identify the kind of leader you want to be as you face future leadership challenges.  Identify the thoughts, feelings and behaviors you want to exhibit.  Identify new assumptions that support these new ways of behaving.
• Select 1-3 upcoming situations in which you will practice your new way of being as a leader.
• As you are trying new things out, notice what comes up for you.  Notice your satisfaction.  Also notice the voices that are trying to dissuade you from your new way of leading.  Simply notice them, but don’t get enmeshed in them.  Say to yourself, “that’s just my self talk.  Those are just some of the things that come up, but I don’t have let them be in control.”
• Choose to engage in your new behaviors, notice the results you get, and notice your satisfaction at having successfully done something new.
• Continue with your experiments until the new ways of leading became a natural part of your way of being.

Steve is a senior executive coach and consultant.  He has developed and successfully uses a powerful approach to leadership coaching, Creating your Leadership Story, which enables leaders to make deep, lasting improvements in their leadership effectiveness in short periods of time.  He and a group of partners created a breakthrough educational program, Coaching from a Systems Perspective, in which you can significantly enhance your abilities as a systemic leadership coach.

If you would like to learn more about systemic approaches to leadership or story work, feel free to call or email Steve:

Steven P. Ober EdD

President:  Chrysalis Executive Coaching & Consulting
Affiliate:  Systems Perspectives, LLC
Office:  PO Box 278, Oakham, MA 01068
Home:  278 Crocker Nye Rd., Oakham, MA 01068
O:  508.882.1025   M:  978.590.4219
Email: Steve@ChrysalisCoaching.org

Website:  www.ChrysalisCoaching.org

Leadership Blog: http://managementhelp.org/blogs/leadership

The post Unleashing the Power of your Story: Creating a New Leadership Story appeared first on Leadership.

Smash Words, Fall/Winter, 2013.

 Your Story at Play in your Leadership

Have you ever been in the middle of a leadership situation and felt, “I’ve been here before”?  The content of the situation may be new, but nonetheless, the territory seems very familiar.  Have you experienced a tough, high-pressure challenge that was important for you to deal with effectively, but you felt stuck?  You may have experienced yourself trying the same things over and over again, each time trying a little harder, and each time feeling more stuck.  Conversely, you have probably experienced leadership challenges that came out wonderfully despite huge problems; you performed to the max, your energy flowed naturally, and you were successful.  You may or may not have known why things went so well, but you knew that they did, and you knew you felt great.

Experiences like those above are reflections of your deep systemic story at play in your leadership.

One of the most powerful ways to understand your leadership, to learn why you behave and lead as you do, and to discover ways of significantly increasing your effectiveness as a leader, is to understand your systemic story.

What is a Systemic Story?

Your systemic story is the story you have told yourself about your experience in systems, particularly the first system of which you were a part.  It reflects how you learned to survive and operate in systems; for example, your story reflects how you learned to:

Relate to key players in your life system

Achieve Success

Get noticed, or avoid being noticed

Protect yourself and take risks

Respond to authority, and exert your own authority

Give and receive love

At its core, your systemic story is the internal narrative you have created about your experience of the human condition. As such, it is central to who you are as a human being, as a leader, as a coach, and as a consultant.

Seeing your Story

Sometimes, trying to see your own story without someone to reflect with is akin to trying to see your own face without a mirror.  Working with your story requires the capacity to parallel process—to watch yourself doing what you are doing, the ability to reflect deeply and learn from that reflection, a great measure of patience, and practice, practice, practice.  It also requires a framework to help you think about and understand your story.  Hopefully, this material will provide you with the kind of framework and mirror that you need.  Having a useful framework, deep self-reflection, and lots of practice can lead to powerful breakthroughs.

 Reflection 1

In the journey of learning to see your own systemic story, start observing yourself.  “Stand on your own shoulder”, “on the balcony”, and watch yourself in interactions.

Pay particular attention to how you handle challenging situations—what you think about them, how you feel about them, and what you do about them.  Thinking, Feeling, and Acting (meaning, affect, and power) are the three fundamental components of your story.

Reflection 2

After doing the above a few times, continue practicing.  Observe yourself doing what you are doing, particularly in important, high stakes situations.  As David Kantor says, “learn to save 15% of your mind to observe yourself and let the other 85% deal with content.”  Learn to pay attention to your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in these situations.

To see your story even more clearly, ask yourself “What is my self talk about this situation?  What am I telling myself about it?”   Start to think about your self-talk, what you are telling yourself, as a story.  Answer this question:  “What is the story I am telling myself about this situation?”

Ask yourself “is this way of thinking, behaving, and feeling new for me, or have I done them before?  Many people respond to this question with an answer like, “Oh, I’ve always done that; I’ve always been this way.”  If something like that is your answer, you can be almost certain that you are beginning to see the plotline of your deep story.

As you practice observing and reflecting, you will find that your thoughts, feelings and behaviors do indeed fit into a storyline that reflects how you have learned to survive and succeed in systems.

Next:  Creating a New Story

For many, seeing their story is a breakthrough.  As Peter Block once said, “The first step to getting out of the cage you are in is to see the cage you are in.”  People often feel a sense of release and start spontaneously thinking, feeling, and behaving differently; they start creating a new story.  There are also specific things you can do to create and refine a new leadership story for yourself.  Those steps will be the topic of my next post.

Steve is a senior executive coach and consultant.  He has developed and successfully uses a powerful approach to leadership coaching, Creating your Leadership Story, which enables leaders to make deep, lasting improvements in their leadership effectiveness in short periods of time.  He and a group of partners created a breakthrough educational program, Coaching from a Systems Perspective, in which you can significantly enhance your abilities as a systemic leadership coach.

If you would like to learn more about systemic approaches to leadership or story work, feel free to call or email Steve:

Steven P. Ober EdD

President:  Chrysalis Executive Coaching & Consulting
Affiliate:  Systems Perspectives, LLC
Office:  PO Box 278, Oakham, MA 01068
Home:  278 Crocker Nye Rd., Oakham, MA 01068
O:  508.882.1025   M:  978.590.4219
Email: steven.p.ober@gmail.com
www.ChrysalisCoaching.org

Leadership Blog: http://managementhelp.org/blogs/leadership

The post Unleashing the Power of your Story: Working with your Story appeared first on Leadership.

Human history and literature are replete with myths and stories—about the heavens, the earth, planting, the harvest, winter, summer, light, darkness, nations, war, peace, families, and individuals.

All of these stories, our personal ones and our larger myths, are interconnected.  Our individual stories are narratives we have told ourselves about our personal experiences.  Our cultural myths are narratives we have created about our collective experience.  And, in a very real sense, myths are more universal versions of our own stories, and our own stories are personal versions of age-old myths.  Coming to know your own story is high leverage for your growth as a leader

 Joseph Campbell and the Hero’s Journey

There are remarkable parallels between stories from different cultures and with very different content.  These parallels reflect commonalities in the human condition.  Joseph Campbell identified a story-type that is particularly applicable to leadership—The Hero’s Journey.Hero’s Journey stories appear in all cultures, but their underlying character, plot, and thematic structure are much the same.

1. The hero begins in a stable place.
2. Something breaks her loose.
3. He goes into a difficult period, the pit, a trauma.  He faces the abyss.
4. She emerges from that dark night of the soul and goes on a journey, a quest to accomplish some great thing, meet some great challenge, and/or get to a particular place.
5. The hero experiences several tests along the way
6. If the hero passes his tests and is successful in his journey, he achieves his goal, meets his great challenge, and reaches his desired destination.

Our life story can be seen as a Hero’s journey, and for leaders, your leadership story is your own hero’s journey.

For example, Dave is a highly successful mid level leader in a major corporation (stable place).  He is promoted to senior management (promotion breaks him loose).  Faced with difficult new challenges, he knows deeply that what got him to this point won’t make him successful there (a trauma) and realizes that his has to change his behavior and thinking as a leader (his journey).  He experiences specific leadership challenges that he must overcome (tests) in order to be successful in this new world (his desired destination).

Seeing the story you are experiencing as a leader helps you rise above and master it, rather than letting the story master you.

 The Tapestry of Life

Myths and personal stories are the symbolic, liturgical retelling of our core life experiences; of our quests for love, power and meaning; of the deeply experienced themes of our existence as human beings on this planet.  Your leadership journey, your overall life journey, and your journey in your current phase of life are intimately intertwined.  They are all variations of your own hero’s journey.  Such is your life story; such is your hero’s journey; such is your leadership story; and such is the human condition.  They are all part of one whole cloth.

 Reflection

To see your own present and desired leadership story, ask yourself,

• “Where am I in my leadership journey, right now?
• What was my last plateau?    What shook me loose?
• What is my destination, my goal?   What are the major challenges I will face in reaching that goal?
• How do I proceed effectively and humanely to achieve my goal?”

Your answers to these questions will begin to paint the picture of your own hero’s journey and help you navigate it more effectively.

This post as a distillation from Chapter III of my upcoming book:  Unleashing the Power of Your Story

Smashwords, Fall/Winter, 2013.

Steve is a senior executive coach and consultant.  He has developed and successfully uses a powerful approach to leadership coaching, Creating your Leadership Story, which enables leaders to make deep, lasting improvements in their leadership effectiveness in short periods of time.  He and a group of partners created a breakthrough educational program, Coaching from a Systems Perspective, in which you can significantly enhance your abilities as a systemic leadership coach.  See  http://SystemsPerspectivesLLC.com

If you would like to learn more about systemic approaches to leadership or story work, feel free to call or email Steve:

Steven P. Ober EdD

President:  Chrysalis Executive Coaching & Consulting
Affiliate:  Systems Perspectives, LLC
Office:  PO Box 278, Oakham, MA 01068
Home:  278 Crocker Nye Rd., Oakham, MA 01068
O:  508.882.1025   M:  978.590.4219
Email: Steve@ChhrysalisCoaching.org
www.ChrysalisCoaching.org

The post Unleashing the Power of your Story: Leadership and the Hero’s Journey appeared first on Leadership.

Bill was asked to mimic Mary’s posture, then describe what HE felt. He reset, thought a moment and frowned, puzzled. “Uh, very relaxed, comfortable, sort of opened up!” And how would he approach a problem if he were sitting like that? To his evident surprise, he blurted out, “Differently. Kind of curious, no holds barred.” Keeping this in mind in the coming months as he assessed Mary’s performance, Bill began to recognize that her results were in fact outstanding. Her next performance appraisal put her at the top of Bill’s team.

Future blog topics
Where are we going with all this? Last week we noted that smart and successful leaders can make poor decisions without being aware why. Here are several types of internal processes and some organizational processes they can affect.

Internal processes:
Somatic: Bill, above, almost made a bad personnel decision by misinterpreting Mary’s body language. And in mimicking her posture, he learned he learned he could change his own awareness. Our mind and body are tightly integrated.

Emotional: the Greeks and Descartes tried to separate rational and emotional thought. But research over the past twenty years has shown that they are tightly linked and you ignore this at your peril. Many of our memories and schema are steeped in strong but unconscious emotions.

Thinking, deciding, doing: much, probably most, of our mental life is unconscious; sometimes this is useful, sometimes it is toxic; but unless we are aware of and manage our awareness of these states, our decisions and behaviors may be more random than intentional.

Creative: our brain creates models (schema) in part to husband limited energy. We run our brain on about 40 watts, like a dim light bulb, much less than a typical PC. So many thought patterns are learned, then shifted into unconscious and more efficient memory. Trying to be creative runs against this default mode and requires effort and practice.

These can either distort or improve key behaviors. Self-awareness is the first step towards enhancing in using them to enhance how we create and lead the following

Organizational processes
Managing
Developing and influencing others
Improving team performance
Leading change initiatives
Innovating
Designing and facilitating effective strategy development and implementation
Building high performing, sustainable organizational cultures

In upcoming blogs, we will explore how to increase self-awareness, then try new practices to boost leadership skills. Here’s another exercise to try:

Where have I been?
1-On a plain sheet of paper placed sideways (landscape mode), draw a line down the left-hand side. Put a plus (+) at its top and a minus (-) at its bottom. Now draw a horizontal line at the middle across the whole page. The horizontal line represents the passage of time in your life. The vertical line marks how happy or unhappy you were as time passed.

2-Place your pencil at the intersection of the two lines and, as you reflect on your life to date, draw the line of how you felt as your life unfolded.

3-After you complete the line, write in key events that correspond to the high and low points of your line. At each event, stop to think about your surroundings at the time, what you saw, what you heard, what you felt. Take time to focus on each of these senses until you are almost back in the experience. Then shake it off and relax. DON’T READ FURTHER UNTIL YOU COMPLETE THE EXERCISE

Look back at your exercise
Now review what happened. How vivid were your memories? Did they evoke sights, sounds, other sensory recollections? Did you experience different emotions? If so, how strong were the sensations and emotions?

Jot down a few sentences about, first, what you observed about your reactions during the exercise, then what you learned from it. When you’re done assess and write down your willingness to do, and to engage during, the exercise using a simple scale:

Supple: easy
Stiff: took time to begin or get into it
Resistant: very uncomfortable, hard to finish the line
Rigid: coudn’t finish the line or couldn’t even begin it

Lessons learned
There’s a lot going on inside our minds in many different ways that we may not be aware of. All of it can dominate our leadership behavior without our knowing it. And our disposition to explore this phenomenon can range from very willing to totally averse.

Next blog (NOTE: beginning bi-weekly posting, Friday, August 9th)
PACEM and the new management paradigm.

Tom is founder of Thomson-Roy Advisors, a firm providing international strategy consulting and senior leadership development. He is also a Program Director at The Mahler Company and an instructor in MBA and Executive Education programs in business schools in the US and overseas. He was an international executive with the Michelin Group for nearly thirty years, working in over forty countries while holding positions in law, finance, emerging market business development and global strategy. Tom is a graduate of Princeton University and the University of Virginia Law School. Please contact him on LinkedIn or at tomroyjr@gmail.com.

The post Expanding awareness appeared first on Leadership.

Alex was explaining some startling figures to the head of a global division with $7 billion in sales. Craig was thirty eight but had already been in this job for several years. Alex’s team had built the figures from many global data bases and cross-checked them exhaustively. They showed that the division’s markets in Europe and the US were growing much faster than Craig’s reports. So the division’s real market shares were bad and getting worse. And Craig’s shiny new strategy was built on sand. He looked up from the figures at Alex and said smoothly, “That’s very interesting. You should get on our management meeting agenda. See Frank.”

A month later, Alex was still calling Frank. After six weeks with no response, Alex had to include the data in the company’s strategic overview so he sent the presentation to Craig’s head of marketing. Three days before the executive council meeting, the marketing director called Alex, hysterical. “Are you trying to kill my boss?” A month later, after almost twenty years of success and promotions, Craig was sidelined to a regional job. Six months later he was gone. It took more than two years for his successors to return the division to real growth and increased profitability.

A better way

Over the last several years this blog has explored a variety of insightful and useful models for leading effective change. But to lead change, you have to see the need for it, preferably before it’s too late. And that can be a problem if your mind can’t see what your eyes can. We all have a welter of thoughts, experiences and beliefs, what Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck calls our “mindset”.(1) And they can help or hinder effective thinking, deciding and acting, often without our knowledge. This was Craig’s problem: his mindset made him, and through him his team, blind to information inconsistent with his beliefs, with severe adverse consequences.

In this next series of blogs, we will explore in detail internal limitations that affect our individual performance. Leaders of knowledge workers need to be aware of these limitations: in themselves, those they work with and their organizations. And we will introduce techniques and practices for recognizing, overcoming and eliminating these limitations, permitting all of us and those with whom we work to become the leaders we are meant to be.

Rapid self-assessment

Since we are unaware of many sources of self-delusion that can undermine our leadership, we can start by checking the state of our inner awareness. There are simple but effective exercises that can assess and increase it: simple, yet their results consistently shock hard-charging business leaders.

Here is one that takes just a few minutes. If you want to try it, don’t read beyond step 4 until you complete it.

1-Sit in a straight backed chair. Slowly clench your fists, tighten your arm and back muscles and bend from the waist as far as you can. As you lower your torso, frown and tighten your facial muscles.
2-Tighten the rest of your muscles and hold that position for a few seconds.
3-Try to feel happy, joyful. What happens?
4-Now try to feel angry, frustrated. What happens?

Pause briefly to observe the outcomes of steps 3 and 4.

5-Sit back up, relaxing as you do; then without stopping stand up.
6-Take several deep breaths. Shake and loosen your shoulders, gently swing your arms, easily rotate your neck and head.
7-Continue breathing slowly, deeply. As you straighten your posture, lift up your chest and head, open your arms wide and raise them above your shoulders.
8-Smile. Really smile. Keep it up.
9- Try to feel angry, frustrated. What happens?
10-Now try to feel curious, happy, joyful. What happens?

Lessons for leaders

Our inner thoughts, emotions and beliefs can affect decisions and actions without conscious knowledge.

Our mind, brain and entire nervous system are connected and highly interactive. Our mind can control our body, but our body can also control our mind.

The less we are aware of our complex inner life, the greater the risk that key decisions will be affected without our knowing it and produce sub-optimal, even disastrous results.

There are simple ways to assess our internal awareness that can lead to sustained improved performance.

Next blog
Types of awareness and why they are important to the leader in all of us.

(1) Dweck, Carol S., Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Random House, New York. 2007.

Tom is founder of Thomson-Roy Advisors, a firm providing international strategy consulting and senior leadership development. He is also a Program Director at The Mahler Company and an instructor in MBA and Executive Education programs in business schools in the US and overseas. He was an international executive with the Michelin Group for nearly thirty years, working in over forty countries while holding positions in law, finance, emerging market business development and global strategy. Tom is a graduate of Princeton University and the University of Virginia Law School. Please contact him on LinkedIn or at tomroyjr@gmail.com.

The post Pathways for Leaders appeared first on Leadership.

“There is nothing so practical as a good theory”

                                                                                                                                                                     Kurt Lewin

This post is my fourth in a series on what I call Leadership Story Work, which is a way leaders and others can dramatically increase their effectiveness and authenticity through working with their deep personal stories.

In this post I will summarize core ideas reflected in story work.  Understanding these ideas can enrich our experience oF stories.

How we Co-create our Reality

The fundamental notion underlying story work is that we co create our social reality through the stories we tell ourselves about our interactions with one another and the world.  This idea flows primarily from two places

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle posits that we cannot measure all of the properties of light at the same time.  When we look at the wave properties, we cannot see the particle properties, because one kind of measurement screens out the other.  What we observe is a function of the instrumentation we use.  So, if we use instrumentation to measure waves, what do we see?  Waves.  There is a very real sense in which what we have chosen to observe is what we see.  In other words, we co-create our experience of the world by how we interact with it and what we tell ourselves those interactions mean.

Similarly, The Observer Effect in physics refers to changes our observations make on the phenomena we observe.  We cannot observe something in a totally removed, objective manner.  When we observe something, the act of observation modifies what we are looking at.  As soon as we enter a field of observation, we become part of it and help shape it.  Thereby, we co-create our experience of what we are seeing.

 Examples from the Social Sciences

During the 20^th Century, every major discipline, from Philosophy to Physics to Biology developed its own applications of this participatory view.  Three examples from the social sciences are:

Social Constructionism suggests that we largely construct our social reality and its meaning through the stories we tell ourselves about our experiences.

In like manner, Symbolic Interactionism suggests that we are not simple, linear stimulus response creatures.  We are stimulus-interpretation-response creatures.  Our experience of reality has as     much to do with our interpretation of events as it does with the events themselves.

Chris Argyris Ladder of Inference is a model of how we think that demonstrates how the instrument of our mind selects from around us the data that we actually see, then decides what the data means, reaches a conclusion, and decides what to do.  Our conclusions and actions are based as much on how we have sorted the data and the meaning we have given it as they are on the data themselves.

Where do our screening frameworks, interpretations, ascribed meanings, and attributions come from?  Social Constructionism suggests that they come from our internal narrative–from our stories. If you want to learn something about your story and your deep inner self, pay attention to how you interpret situations and react to them, especially situations that you experience in some way as threatening or high stakes.  Therein, your story is at play.  What you are telling yourself, what you are doing, and what you are feeling, particularly in very challenging situations, are windows into your deep personal story.

Time after Time, Good after Bad

Two other key ideas reflected in Story Work are important to mention:

How we think about and experience time:

The Traditional Linear View of Time:  We usually talk about time using a linear model.  We think about sequences of events that comprise our lives to this point.  We talk about “timelines” and seem to believe that our major life experiences fall neatly onto these lines in a linear sequence.  Our previous experiences were a long time ago, and we are very distant from them now. What happened in the past is over.

Some traditional approaches to coaching reflect this linear view of time, and some go so far as to suggest that, if we talk about the past rather than just the present, what we are doing is not coaching.  Coaching is not about the past.  We don’t deal with it; we only deal with the present.

A Systemic View of Time:  Story work reflects a very different way of thinking about and experiencing time.  Story work’s view of time is more akin to Faulkner’s, who said, “The past is never dead.  It’s not even past.”

In discussing his book, Loving Grief[1], Paul Bennett suggests a different, more systemic way to think about time.  Rather than being linear, our experience of time, and some would say time itself, are more like the rings in a tree.  We start with a core and grow around it; we build on our experiences rather than moving away from them.

Rather than saying, “If we talk about the past, it’s not coaching,” story work’s view of time would say, “Because they are so intricately intertwined, we can’t talk about the present without talking about the past”—because we experience, interpret, and respond to today’s events through lenses we have created, through the lenses of our stories.

Perhaps people who say, “we deal with the present, not the past” or, “We don’t talk about the past” are drawing a false dichotomy.  Our life experiences are part of one organic, systemic whole rather than being “what was in the past and what is in the present.”  Like Jesus said about the poor, “Our stories we always have with us.”    They are part of what makes us who we are.

How we frame “negative” experiences.  There seems to be a belief in some coaching and consulting circles that the best way to deal with our negative, less pleasant experiences is not to deal with them.  If we focus on them, we tend to reinforce them, get stuck in them, and give them more power.  Appreciative inquiry means looking at and talking about only the positive.

This way of thinking about being appreciative is reminiscent of the old saying “Denial is more than a River in Egypt.”  It attempts to screen out many of our experiences and thereby runs the risk of blocking opportunities for some of our deepest learning and growth.

An alternative view is that, paradoxically, denying “negative” experiences actually strengthens their grip upon us, keeps us from reframing them, and closes the door to our learning to appreciate them more deeply.  However, being honest about them can be a source of release and wisdom.

When we learn to see and speak the truth about all of our experiences, we come to deeply appreciate and reframe them.  When that which had been un-discussable becomes discussable in a productive way, we are set free.

In my experience, the most powerful leaders, teams, and organizations are not those who report only the positive and who never experience stuck places, dark nights of the soul, “negative” things.  Those experiences are part of the human condition.  The most powerful leaders are those who embrace their negative experiences, go through them, learn from them, and come out much stronger on the other side.

A key aspect of story work is learning to see, acknowledge, and reframe all of our experiences—both negative and positive.

Summary:  When we fully embrace our stories, reality is not objective, cause and effect are not linear, the past is not past, and the negative is not negative.  They are all sources of grace that help us come to terms with the human condition so that we do not deny it but, rather, appreciate it anew. They become, paradoxically, routes to transformation.

————-

The three previous posts that lead up to this one were:

The Presence and Power of Stories

Leadership for our Era

Examining your Own Story

These three posts are summaries from the preface and Chapter One of my upcoming E Book, Unleashing the Power of your Story.  Today’s and my next several posts will each be a summary from the remaining chapters of the book.  Today’s post is a summary of Chapter 2:  Context:  Larger Ideas and Meaning

Steve is a senior executive coach and consultant.  He has developed and successfully uses a powerful approach to leadership coaching, Creating your Leadership Story, which enables leaders to make deep, lasting improvements in their leadership effectiveness in short periods of time.  He and a group of partners created a breakthrough educational program, Coaching from a Systems Perspective, in which you can significantly enhance your abilities as a systemic leadership coach.  See  http://SystemsPerspectivesLLC.com

If you would like to learn more about systemic approaches to leadership or story work, feel free to call or email Steve at:

Steven P. Ober EdD

President:  Chrysalis Executive Coaching & Consulting
Affiliate:  Systems Perspectives, LLC
Office:  PO Box 278, Oakham, MA 01068
Home:  278 Crocker Nye Rd., Oakham, MA 01068
O:  508.882.1025   M:  978.590.4219
Email: steven.p.ober@gmail.com
www.ChrysalisCoaching.org 

Leadership Blog:  http://managementhelp.org/blogs/leadership

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For any CxO or company seeking to adopt or scale Agile for their software development groups – get ready for some organizational soul searching!  The mindset and processes of Agile reflect back your culture, your enacted (not espoused) Theory of Management, and the structural inefficiencies of your org chart…and these are just the beginning!

Culture Clash

Culture is the oxygen of your organization.  You are swimming in it, nurtured by it, yet it remains invisible.  Ask any new employee to describe Culture and you will get a sense of the constraints it places on the organizations ability to change and adapt.  Adopting Agile methods to “upgrade” your product development process, speed up cycle time, and generate flow and suddenly that squishy, amorphous mist (Culture) condenses into a brick wall.  What is going on here?

Culture is the container that holds all the dilemmas of your organization in dynamic tension.  It is the fairy dust that allows your to be:

BOTH Competitive AND Collaborative

BOTH Controlling AND Creative

BOTH Focused AND Flexible

BOTH Simple AND Complex

BOTH Relational AND Actionable

BOTH Results-oriented AND People-oriented

The contours and interactions between these dynamic polarities make up your Culture, and to a large part your organization.  When Agilists come to stay the Culture dynamics shift and the whole system groans…audibly.

Suddenly “red flags” show up everywhere.  Your “Greatest Fear,” which normally lurks in the basement, begins walking the halls in broad daylight.  As soon as these new methods begin producing change, the promise of Agile, the downside extremes of the polarities become visible, providing fodder for resisters and those being forced out of their comfort zone.

Theory X or Theory Y

This squeeze is most obvious in your management team, many of whom have been promoted due to their functional/engineering expertise or excellence.  Do you know how they view the developers they manage – widget or creative genius? How do they define their role – benign dictator or all-star coach?  Are they ready – willing and able – to look in the mirror of their leadership and confront their weaknesses and leadership skill level?  Are they able to consider their obsolescence?  And if you’re planning on scaling Agile, how high up does this personal reflection need to go?  All the way to the top?

This becomes a real bear trap when the consultants troop in and begin training everyone in the development organization to self-organize, manage their own work, decide how much they can do each sprint, and even how to do it.  Cross-functional teams!?! There goes my turf, but not without a fight!  Changing priorities every two weeks, who is in charge here – I set the priorities around here! Your greatest risk of “sand in the gas tank” or a “stick in the gears” comes from the managers who used to have authority, respect, power, control, and a reason to exist.

As Agile squeezes managers of people and project aside, a new dilemma arises – Flatten the organization or Lead with new skills and actions.  At this point you may want to re-read the previous section on Culture.  Perhaps the biggest challenge of scaling Agile comes with the shifting roles of those managing product development.  To be successful they must adopt the Servant Leadership required to support the sprinting development teams.  As they speed up and new processes reduce the “friction” created by waterfall and project management the previous value of management can become waste and be wrung out of the system.  The new Theory of Management that Agile requires is only now being written.  In fact, the ink isn’t even dry.

Structure Follows Function

If you are not dizzy yet, contemplate this last piece of the puzzle.  When organizational culture shifts and management is reorganized what happens to structure?  Think PMO, Portfolio Management, Centralized Strategy, design and business analytics, functional silos!  Is this the time to call McKinsey, PWC, BCG…do you need to spend the money on the big guns of the consulting industry?  Agile doesn’t work like this…remember, that is why you wanted it in the first place.

Agile is fundamentally about learning your way forward, minimal structure, and Just in Time planning.  This is not a structure that can be designed by external draftsmen, posted on the wall of the CxO’s office, and “rolled out” to an unsuspecting organization.  The biggest process change in adopting Agile is the process of organizational development.  It becomes downright biological, you have to grow into this new way of working.  Even more distracting is that it follows the rules of quantum physics (emergent and self-organizing) and networks (Hubs and connections determine information flow).  How on earth can you “manage” something so organic, so alive??

Hear we look to the leaders in operating in unpredictable environments – the US Army War College.  In environments that are volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) you need everyone to be confident in their ability to assess the situation, set up some really smart experiments to test the water, and take small steps forward to see what works.  This is not the time for a gigantic change initiative because you cant predict what kind of change you need.

How ironic that the only way to adopt Agile is using Agile!!

So, Dear CxO, are you ready for the roller-coaster ride?  Are you prepared to explain this to the functional heads of your executive team and your peers (because they will get sucked into the vortex as well)?  Are you ready to herd [cat]tle with only a few sheep dogs (who are the ones doing the on-the-ground thinking and reacting)? That is what you’ll see when you look in the Agile Mirror on your wall.

Dr. Carol Mase is an executive coach who challenges leaders and their organizations to think differently about the world and how they can achieve their fullest potential. Her unique background applies the principles of business, biology, psychology, and physics, to all levels of the organization. She has worked as an entrepreneur, consultant and pharmaceutical executive introducing fresh ideas that produce innovation and adaptive change.  She can be reached at Carol.Mase@CairnConsultants.com or 215-262-6666.

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Ethos: Greek, meaning character, used to describe guiding beliefs, ideals, and the spirit which motivates them.

Community: a group whose intention, beliefs, resources preferences, needs and risks affect and shape its identity.  This captures how organizational culture emerges from our work together and our ethos.

The leadership challenge is to understand how to embed these so that we can use them to influence our company’s success (sustained competitiveness and customer satisfaction).  Peter Block provides a good starting point.  He notes that community is a structure of belonging.  Getting the structure right allows trust, connection, security, and feeling valued to emerge (Etienne Wenger).  When these describe the organizational identity it is a small step to self-organizing teams, collaboration, continuous improvement, quality, fast development times, and a customer-centric focus.  Whether emphasized or assumed, community and ethos are core to all five domains in our intersection.

To embed the Ethos of Community two concepts emerge at the intersection to create a structure of belonging: Communities of Practice and Leader/Teachers.

Communities of Practice (COP). If teams are the fractal unit from which all other organizational units arise, COP are the fractal unit at all levels of shared enterprise over time.  The primary assumption from Wenger’s research is that: engaging in the social practice of forming COP is the foundational process by which we learn (knowledge creation) and become who we are (organizational culture).  Joint enterprise (supported by mutual engagement and shared repertoire) generates accountability, coherence, productive disagreement, collaboration, and the effective use of resources to meet constraints. This produces a pragmatic resourcefulness that is innovative at the local level and results in continuous improvement, self-organization, and “individuals and interactions” as a driving force for change.  As Wenger points out, “Even though [the COP] does not transcend or transform its institutional conditions in any dramatic fashion, it nonetheless responds to [organizational] conditions in ways that are not determined by the institution.  To do what they are expected to do [they] produce a practice with an inventiveness that is all theirs.” (1)

Network analysis can illuminate COP and uncover the connectivity between them, mapping these networks like we map value and process.  Leaders can then seek out Communities of Practice and convert their collective thinking into organizational action.  Mapping community relationships and identifying key COP members allows managers to respond to opportunities and challenges quickly, using existing connections and dependencies.  “We call this a latent network view because it discloses a group that could be leveraged in the future.” (2)  This provides a means of overcoming organizational fragmentation and taking advantage of built-in resiliency.  From a management perspective, then, we have a new means of recognizing, and taking advantage of, structured localness that goes far beyond co-location.

Leader/Teachers: When a new process is adopted, “train everyone” makes sense.  Thereafter, the work itself provides a platform for personal and personnel development.  This weaves together competency, responsibility, accountability, and contribution.  Toyota places this at the center of continuous improvement, achieved through the interactions of Mentors and Mentees.  The Toyota Leader/Teacher is a way of managing that has its roots in ethos and can be traced back to GE’s Crotonville Leadership Development Center and the work of Noel Tichy. (3)

When embedding an ethos of community, job assignments, team composition, and even meetings become a forum for action learning. Two assumptions are core to this idea: that learning is a social event and that teaching is the most effective means of leadership.  Tichy pioneered the idea of “leaders at every level” built on the practice of leadership as a “Teachable Point of View (TPOV)” rather than subject matter expertise. Becoming a great Leader/Learner requires some new management activities: time for personal reflection, creation of a TPOV, the ability to connect to others and engage when the teachable moment presents itself, inquiry and substantive exchanges that seek to discover problems and how people are thinking about solving them, and openness and listening as a learner (often called “beginners mind”).

Teachable moments form a structure of belonging.  They allow leader/teachers to  pull from their TPOV, a personal backlog of learning experiences and ways of “seeing”, and engage with their learning partner(s) to create a transformational idea and new responses and behaviors.  Recall Satir’s change cycle and now view it as a learning cycle.  As leader/teachers, and as learners ourselves, we are watching for transformational ideas to emerge from the intersection of the situation, previous experience and knowledge, the current learning conversation, insight, and understanding.  When that happens we have a teachable moment, all participants are learners and teachers, and actionable change is the outcome.

Leader as Social Architect

No matter how broad or limited your scope of leadership, everyone has the potential to engage in Communities of Practice and be a Leader/Teacher.  To close let me quote a management great, Robert Greenleaf, that summarizes the structure of belonging we can all achieve every day:

“Everyone who aspires to strength should consciously practice listening, regularly.  Every week, set aside an hour to listen to somebody who might have something to say that will be of interest.  It should be conscious practice in which all of the impulses to argue, inform, judge, and “straighten out” the other person are denied.  Every response should be calculated to reflect interest, understanding, [and] seeking for more knowledge.  Practice listening for brief periods, too.  Just thirty seconds of concentrated listening may make the difference between understanding and not understanding something important.” (4)

¹ Wenger, Etienne.  Communities of Practice, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

² Cross, Rob and Parker, Andrew. The Hidden Power of Social Networks.  Harvard Business School Press, 2004.

³ Tichy, Noel. The Cycle of Leadership. Harper Business, 2002.

⁴ Greenleaf, Robert. On Becoming A Servant Leader.  Jossey-Bass, 1996.

Dr. Carol Mase is an executive coach who challenges leaders and their organizations to think differently about the world and how they can achieve their fullest potential. Her unique background applies the principles of business, biology, psychology, and physics, to all levels of the organization. She has worked as an entrepreneur, consultant and pharmaceutical executive introducing fresh ideas that produce innovation and adaptive change.

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Moonshot #1: Management That Serves a Higher Purpose (1)

As more companies embrace and begin adopting the frameworks of our intersection (see January 7, 2013 blog post), the role of managers, supervisors, and bosses is changing.  With the rise of self-organizing and self-managing teams, one could ask: What is the Purpose of Management, period?  To look for the higher purpose of management, let’s examine it from each perspective in the intersection.

Systems Thinking: All frameworks in the intersection recognize the individual as the source of organizational knowledge and learning.  Peter Drucker links the worker to the system in a direct way, “Productivity of the knowledge worker will almost always require that the work itself be restructured and be made part of a system.” (2)

Drucker views productivity as measured by the output of the system, not the individual, and results as the outcome of developing people and the system concurrently.

The higher purpose of management begins with seeing the system as more than the sum of the parts.  Take Southwest Airlines for example (they show up everywhere these days), an airline whose main competitor is the car and whose stated purpose is to make flying affordable for those who wouldn’t otherwise fly.  The higher purpose of Southwest managers (concurrently optimizing people and the system to produce results) would include: employee turnover rate, number of customers served per employee, flexibility to manage variability in demand, and a culture of cooperation across departments.

The message to managers is: If you don’t like the results you are currently getting you have to change the way the work is done.  By understanding the interdependencies between people and the system you can change how results are produced.

Agile Framework: Teams are “the fractal unit of agile, …from which all other units can be created.” (3)

Sounds good, we all like teams.  But, what is a fractal unit?

A fractal is a pattern within a complex system, ie business and organizations.  Fractals have two key features: self-similarity, which allows for infinite scaling, and a detailed pattern or set of defining elements that repeat themselves at every level.  Least you think this esoteric, urban growth, market trends, and human physiology are full of fractals.  So the fractal unit of agile, the pattern that repeats at all levels of the enterprise, is the team.

In agile the defining elements of the team are also those attributes that allow teams to be self-organizing and self-managing.  Simplified, these are: (4)

• Establish long-lived teams that build trust and commitment between members
• Ensure cross-functional capability so that the team can collectively deliver results
• Add customer value by adapting to their changing requirements
• Learn to be “generalizing specialists” ie a multidisciplinary knowledge worker with a technical speciality
• Communicate and collaborate and co-locate (when possible)

Scaling teams also requires self-similarity in operating practices across the organization.  Managers need to ensure the right people are on the team and remain there, that decision-making is participatory in nature, and that the team and its members make commitments, take responsibility, and assume accountability for their work in an open and transparent way.  Whew! That’s a lot.  It certainly qualifies as a higher purpose.

The message to managers from the agile perspective: There is “no upper limit to how many agile teams an enterprise can create” (5) when healthy teams are the fractal unit.

Lean Processes: “…it is unfair and ineffective to ask operators on their own to simultaneously make parts, struggle with problems, and improve the process, which is why Toyota calls autonomous operator-team concepts, “Disrespectful of People.” (6)

Huh? Did I read that right?

If continuous improvement is the goal of each employee then increasing the capability of people to see problems, learn how to solve them, and change their behavior is the purpose of managers. The higher purpose of management achieves this by providing the organization with teacher-coaches whose activities include:

• Observing a persons learning capacity and process and to use this to understand what they are thinking so you can assist them in learning by doing
• Creating situations for learning: present a challenge using dialogue, inquiry, and analysis, then give people space to figure things out and make small failures
• Go and See, use first hand understanding of the situation to create learning not just results

The message to managers from the lean perspective: For socio-technical organizations (7) the role of managers is to balance the social side and the technological side to create an integrated system – people and process.

Design Thinking: To understand this Moonshot from the perspective of Design Thinking, I turned to Roger Martin’s The Design of Business (2009).  In the first chapter he frames the higher purpose of management nicely – To recognize, embrace, and then simplify the uncertainty, ambiguity, possibility and variability in the marketplace and the organization so that actions add value to services and products.  It’s a mouthful, here is his summary:

“The path…from pinpointing a market opportunity to devising an offering for that market to codifying its operations – is not just a study in entrepreneurism. It’s a model for how businesses of all sorts can advance knowledge and capture value.” (8)

Martin calls this “intuitive thinking” and he advocates using this to balance the analytic thinking that predominates in business.  Intuition is a form of abductive reasoning, which generates a series of experiments or rapid prototypes to achieve a future goal one step at a time, learning as you go.  Abduction uses hypothesis generation and testing, and fast feedback cycles to navigate complex situations, e.g. entering a new market or introducing new processes into an organization.  For example, identify the next step (often obvious), take it (a means of testing our “hunches”), and incorporate the feedback we get into the next, next step we take.  With each step, we gain deeper understanding of our situation by removing extraneous information and interacting with the larger system (learning).  Although this sounds obvious, a budget, operating plan, and marketing strategy are predictive while a Sprint, iterative release plan, and prototype are abductive.

The message to managers from design thinking: Balance analytics (proof from the past) with abductive reasoning (validation by experimentation) in order to see features and opportunities that others may miss.

Leadership: The last component of our intersection comes from a case study, Morning Star (9), that examines how spontaneous order (structure) emerges from commitments between people whose work is reliant upon each other.

How do you know who relies on you?  First you have to see yourself as part of the whole system, then you construct a personal mission statement that links your work to the organizational mission.  To do this every employee in Morning Star identifies colleagues who are affected by their work (in their network) and negotiates with them to determine how they will interact over the next year.  The goal of their contract is to achieve their individual mission and the corporate mission simultaneously. This creates a socially dense network organization and promotes information flow across boundaries.

The benefits identified by Morning Star employees include:

• Initiative – driven by reputational capital
• Expertise – individual responsibility for quality
• Flexibility – responsiveness to changing conditions
• Collegiality – networks replace titles
• Local decision-making – pushing expertise down into the organization
• Loyalty – ownership and engagement
• Less overhead – savings fund growth and employee benefits

Morning Star founder Chris Rufer, “A true leader can understand a situation, think through the complexities, come up with a solution, advocate a strategy, and recruit followers.”  I would add, and be confident that the organization is committed to supporting them in these actions.

Hamel offers this message to managers: “You have to decide: is it going to be boss-management or self-management. (emphasis his)

The Intersection: I’m not going to pre-digest this for you…there is much to contemplate here and I trust that you can find something that applies to your situation today, and in the future.

¹ I use the following hierarchy in my work: Purpose, Vision, Mission, Goals, Objectives.

² Drucker, Peter. Management Challenges for the 21st Century, 1999.  Italics in the original.

³ Leffingwell, Dean. Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises. 2007. Italics mine.

⁴ Larman, Craig and Vodde, Bas. Scaling Lean and Agile Development. 2009.

⁵ Leffingwell. Ibid.

⁶ Rother, Mike. Toyota Kata.

⁷ concept from John Shook, The Lean Enterprise Institute and an ex-Toyota manager

⁸ Martin, Roger. The Design of Business. 2009

⁹ Hamel, Gary. What Matters Now. 2012. Chapter 5.3

For those of you with questions, comments, or needing help feel free to contact me directly.

Dr. Carol Mase, carol.mase@cairnconsultants.com, 215-262-6666

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