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EDX: Exercising Leadership: Foundational Principles

 
Table of Contents

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Introduction: Get on the Balcony

  • People learn best from experience. Doing things enables people to learn, not theory (reading/seeing).
  • Lessons from your own experience stick with you best.
  • The balcony is the place from which you can step back and observe. So that you can get back on the floor and make your next move.
  • In leadership, the most common sources of problem are diagnostics. If you get the problem wrong, generally the action will be wrong.

A definition of Leadership

  • In any group of people, we only need leadership when we face challenges.
  • People mistake the personal abilities, the hands or the tools as the essence of leadership, rather than the work to be done.
  • Nobody has ever come with a key characteristics of a leader.
  • Leadership is critical because we do face challenges in our lives.
  • How do you mobilize people to get the important work to get done?
  • Think of leadership like the craft of carpentry. Good hands and tools don’t define carpentry. Building something does. Challenges do.
  • Most common source of confusion about leadership is thinking about it as a set of abilities and tools.
  • Leadership - practice of mobilizing people to meet though challenges.

Identify the work to be done

Technical Problems

  • Routine. Easy to solve.
  • Not necessarily simple, but the know-how and systems are ready to go.
  • Not determined by complexity or its importance, but the degree to which the challenge already lies within our capacity to solve.
  • Today’s technical problems were yesterday’s adaptive challenges.
  • Don’t really need leadership, need people to do their job.
  • Require only authoritative and sometimes managerial expertise.
  • Leadership and Authority: You don’t need leadership if you’re just doing what you know how to do already.

Adaptive Challenges

  • Gap we don’t know yet how to close. Gaps between our aspirations and reality.
  • Requires developing a new capability.
  • Unlike in all other places in nature, our adaptive challenges are not only produced by external forces.
  • Pain. Novelty. Uncertainty about what we might lose in the process.
  • People love change when it is a good thing. What people resit is the losses that sometimes accompany change.
  • Leadership requires deep understanding for the pains of change.
  • What to give up and what innovations will enable us to take the best from our history into the future.

Leadership through Adaptive Work

  • I don’t believe a persuasive visionary leader can step in and solve adaptive challenges people are facing.
  • Know-how is yet to be developed and has to reside in the hears of minds of the people who are living the solution.
  • Leadership, as the term is used in this course, is the practice of adaptive work.

Why Do We Misdiagnose?

  • Success of leadership depends on your ability to distinguish challenges that are technical (requiring authority, management) vs. that are adaptive .
  • Tendency to apply technical solutions to adaptive challenges -> low implementation rates of good ideas. E.g. recommending diet and exercise to patients and they don’t comply.

Authority and Misdiagnosis

  • Authority impedes diagnostic capability. Expectations of people create an enormous pressure on people to provide answers rather than raise tough questions.
  • With adaptive problems you cannot take the problem of people’s shoulders. People themselves are part of the problem and thus solution.
  • The more distress, the stronger the yearning for authorities to know the way.
  • 2nd problem of misdiagnosis is personal. Ability to solve problems is part of the identity of “experts”.
  • Often best you can do is to:
    • frame up the right questions
    • identify the key realities that need to be addressed
    • challenge people to take responsibility for tackling the problems
  • We all take pride in knowing rather than not.
  • Being able to step back and go to the balcony and notice when and how you’re being pushed to see the challenge as a technical problem is crucial skill in providing effective leadership.

Unbundling the Work

  • Most problems come bundled.
  • If we treat bundled problems as if it were only technical, we’re going to neglect critical parts of the problem and won’t really meet the challenge.
  • Once diagnosed, how would you begin to mobilize people to develop that capacity.
  • I don’t know is a good place to start. It’s difficult to be able to say so.

Lead With, Beyond and Without Authority

Nature of Authority

  • How would you disappoint people at a rate they can stand?
  • If people expect you to know, but you’re saying we don’t know, you’re part of the problem.
  • Social system implies authority structures and authority relationships.
  • Not all crude power is authority.
  • We’re willingly giving a person authority, personal power. Often by habit. Often not a conscious choice.
  • Power ultimately comes from the people who do the authorizing.

Roots of Authority

  • Trusting others to provide us with services is the basic of social living.
  • Authority is relational. You cannot have authority by yourself. You cannot authorize yourself. You can give yourself permission. You only have authority when others give you authority.
  • Hope that trustworthy people will be found worthy of our authorization.

Services of Authority: Direction, Protection and Order

  • Every authority relationship will to some degree provide direction, protection and order.

Authority and Leadership

  • Common source of confusion is equating leadership with authority. If we do it clouds our thinking and blurs key aspects of both.

Formal Authority

  • Power entrusted as part of a job, title, or official role
  • Reporting relationship - someone senior to check and guide your work.
  • An organization is a system of formal authorization from top-to-bottom and from side-to-side living in a larger society of authorizations.

Informal Authority

  • When people have informal authority we look to them with broader admiration and respect beyond the specific trust to get a job done.
  • In our daily lives, many of our authorizations are informal.

Changes to Authority Over Time

  • Informal authority is enormously valuable.
  • Formal authority often isn’t enough.
  • Informal authority comes often with a subtle, yet quite substantial power.
  • Over time informal authority can turn into greater formal authority.
  • In practice you need to track how your informal ability, your credibility, respect, approval and admiration change in people’s eyes.
  • Election campaigns are all about getting enough informal authority to win.
  • Formal authority is mostly changeless and informal is in a flux.
  • Often formal and informal authority come with power that works most effectively when when used complementary.

Advantages of Leading Beyond and Without Authority

  • One can lead without any authority.
  • Often there are advantages to this way of leading.
  • Many people spend years of lives waiting to get to an authority position where they can finally start to lead and waste many leadership opportunities in the process.
  • Many unsung heroes lead every day just because they care.

Take Action: Think politically

Stakeholder Map

  • Organizational Chart
  • Swim-Lane Diagram. Each role gets a column
  • Stakeholder Map. Dinner/round table analogy. The work is the meal. Factions are visualized like fingers. It’s an iterative process. Each faction has values, potential loses, loyalties.

Take Action: Build Trust

  • Trust is the pivot point
  • In an authority relationship we have “power” on one side and “services” on the other.
  • Components of Trust:
    • values - heart at the right place
    • competence
  • We’re born into this world. Totally dependent and naturally trusting.

Maladaptive Dependence

  • when people have too little faith in themselves, or too much trust in others. Particularly in desperate times.
  • Sometimes we never break out of the habit and realize that we’re the source of a person’s authoritative powers.
  • Sometimes we’ve learned to accept too little from our authority figures.
  • Rousseau: Authority figures are the agents of the citizens, even in a monarchy.

Counter-Dependence and Independence

  • Counter-Dependence - reacting to whomever speaks with an authoritative voice with a reflexive “no”, no matter what they say.
  • Result of repeated experience of disappointed dependence.
  • Independent, you’re grounded in yourself and free to respond deliberately to people, no matter what comes at you.
  • With independence, you’re open to interdependence with other, healthy dependencies in both directions.
  • Erosion of trust in authority is a serious problem in our social lives.
  • It’s one thing to be cautious, but imagine if you couldn’t trust anyone what you expect of them.
  • Lifelong policy of trust will certainly hurt you. Lifelong policy of distrust will hurt you even more.

Disappointing Expectations

  • Be honest and real and speak about the lessons you’ve learned.
  • Reset the unrealistic expectations you’ve set up.
  • Each occasion to reset trust in an opportunity to prepare people to accept uncertainty and move with greater adaptability to other issues.
  • It’s important to respect how quickly people can absorb tough messages.

Reshaping Expectations

  • abuse begets abuse
  • you should not try to meet unreasonable expectations
  • You don’t have to be perfect. Being honest with others about difficulties you encounter can be just as powerful.
  • Maintain focus on the context, remind others of the what and why.
  • Don’t conceal or diminish losses.
  • Meet anger with patience and understanding.
  • Stay close to the opposition.
  • Listen

Take Action: Orchestrate Conflict

  • Reactions to conflict:
    1. Inaction as action. Systems often reward inaction - keeping status quo.
    2. Appeal to authority
    3. Fight or flight
  • Those who exercise leadership must orchestrate conflict within an organizational system to generate dynamism and innovative ideas. Creative tension.

A Process for Mobilizing Learning

  • Prepare before bringing factions together. Do you understand them? What will they lose? What changes need to occur?
  • Gather all views.
  • Create, share and enforce ground rules. Help depersonalize the process and keep the work at center. Ground rules need to be established early.
  • Orchestrate conflict.
  • Promote honesty about loses
  • Experiment. Generate multiple experiments to test out potential solutions.
  • Harness the power of peer consulting.

Recognizing Common Pattern

  • Disequilibrium - state of disruption in an organizational system.
  • Technical work can generate lots of disequilibrium and be slow to decrease, depending on the severity and complexity of the problem.
  • Most organizations ale allergic to conflict.
  • Yet conflict is the engine of innovation.

Increase the Heat

  • Productive range of stress. If you keep the heat to low, nothing will cook. If you heat up too high, people won’t be able to tolerate.
  • Bounds: threshold of learning and limit of tolerance.
  • Strategies for Increasing the Heat
    • Direct the focus of attention to the though issues.
    • Surface conflicts. Resist the temptation to conceal disagreement.
    • Allow provocative statements.
    • Know and use the room’s dynamics. Start with listening and observing. If certain parties appear especially at odds, use that to highlight the core issues.
    • Exceed comfort levels. This is especially true for allocating responsibility. Encourage others not to play it safe when it comes to owning their part of the work to be done.
  • Decreasing the heat is required when the group exceeds the limit of tolerance:
    • Redirect the focus to technical work.
    • Assume responsibility for the though issues.
    • Divide, distribute, and pace the work.
    • Pause and take breaks.
    • Create more structures and processes for working on the challenge.

Anchor Yourself

Hold steady

  • Be able to manage yourself, listen, stay quiet and deliberate and wait for what’s the right opening, right response.
  • Sometimes you have to be able to wait for 10 min, sometimes for 10 years.
  • Keeping the eye on what really matters is absolutely essential.

Ambitions and Inspirations

  • Ambition is about getting things for yourself.
  • Aspirations is about what you want to give.

Sanctuary

Allies and Confidants

  • Confidants will help you to maintain discipline.
  • Allies bring also another constituencies (Wahlkreis, Interessensgemeinschaft).
  • Ally cannot be always true to you, because he’s got his primary loyalty to his constituency.
  • Leadership becomes more dangerous if you’re isolated.
  • You can’t do it yourself. You can’t lead alone.

Staying alive

  • One of the ways to stay in the game through despair is to free yourself form the myth of measurement.
  • You can’t run an organization without measuring things.
  • Measuring doesn’t capture all truth.
  • The good is beyond any measure. Give yourself permission to take pleasure and heart and joy in the fruits of your own labour.
  • If you only look at what’s left undone you’re at risk of burning out.
  • Remind each other.