Influence of Leadership - The Human Side of Transformation
Let me start by saying I respect and appreciate leaders. I myself have a natural compulsion to lead, and thus know the feeling of it. I like to think I have learned through time, experience and introspection how to be both a good follower and a better leader. Leaders are important. Most of us would struggle to see how a leaderless world would function. I could wax on about the virtues of leadership. I could equally give voice to all the pitfalls of bad leadership, yet neither of these discussions would advance us in our continued study of transformation within this article series. If you haven’t guessed it, this article is about the specific aspects of leadership as they relate to enabling culture transformation.
ON YOUR HEELS
Similar to those sporty and annoying wheeled shoes “Heelys”, leading culture change is a different type of leadership. It requires you to shift your weight to your weak muscles, lean back on the abyss, and find comfort in vulnerability. It’s counter-intuitive to “leader think”, but the reason for this is powerful, and will become apparent as we explore further.
If culture is the atmosphere created from the execution of work. And, If culture biases to the strong, and works to minimize risk; then effective leaders have been leading to reach those results. Your current leaders have developed the current state. Their fingerprints are all over the culture they lead in. If the job is to cultivate change in the culture. Leaders have to work against their instincts, and have to welcome more risk. Ultimately leaders have to not lead, but learn.
No matter the starting place, a leader, or group of leaders, who set out to overtly and systematically alter the culture as an improvement project have a stack of challenges confronting them. Leadership is a badge built of experience. Thus, leadership intuition is a collective set of learnings, and accomplishments that frames the brain of a leader. Leaders generally think they are, by default, right. Much of a leader’s experiences and training built a guiding mental frame that makes the mechanisms of culture change counter-intuitive. As an example we’ve discussed the value of soft-skills, yet these are not always traits of corporate leaders. Additionally culture, and its change, is also experiential, or the result of activities. Allowing change to have agency in a well-oiled machine is not a natural skill of corporate leaders as a whole. To properly affect change, it will require strategic exercises to change leadership’s conceptual frames, training them in new approaches, and some clear tangible mapping that these new approaches will lead to real world value.
We talked in the third article - “The Objective of Culture” about the concept of a logical value chain that creates the links between all the individual “wins”, so that everyone in the organization feels represented and motivated. I want to revisit this from the viewpoint of leadership. This value chain is most critical for alignment in the organization’s leadership. I initially struggled whether to call this a chain of value, or a chain of logic. I went with the first, but the latter is probably the more accurate description. It does create value, but what it really is, is the collection of everyone’s logic that defines their win in the change.
CHAIN OF LOGIC
We can simplify a given company to a collection of stakeholders who achieve the stated goals of the company. Each worker derives extrinsic and intrinsic value from their work, or they wouldn’t likely do the job. These relationships are established within the complex, but long lasting structures of the company’s hiring, training, and operational practices. Some are written down, most are not; but they are there. Culture change is financially, temporally, and emotionally expensive. In part because it is working to retool components of this existing value structure. To effectively navigate the exploration and potential change of these shared rules, it requires alignment and ongoing support of the people involved. The sentiment of this can be summarized in this question: how do you fractally define “what’s in it for them” for everyone involved? To be honest, I haven’t seen a perfect model yet. I do believe building the project’s messaging and measurement to be inclusive of the elements of this chain of logic can be powerful. This chain is also quite important to the change agents, and their ability to communicate from one group to another, about why it matters and tie together the various logic points to tell a story, or maybe sing a song.
RHYTHM SECTION
Culture change is messy, risky, unnatural, and uncomfortable to implement. No matter your approach, it is important to first envision, and codify a realistic win for the executive leadership of the company. This can be a fancy consulting presentation, a set of goals, or a benchmark of another company. It is probably a combination of items that clearly and tangibly justify the reason for the change. Let me suggest that you (at least conceptually) also consider including a drum. Why a drum? When the spark of the idea is started, associate it with the drum, when you meet and ratify the “go forward” for the initiative; someone points to, and beats the drum. When you train the management team, someone beats the drum. When you rally the troops, someone beats the drum. At milestones and anniversaries, someone beats the drum, and progress meetings, someone beats the drum, and when achievements are made, someone beats the drum. If the core leadership forgets the importance of the drum, the effort will likely fail. Just like the chain of logic, the cadence of alignment is critical to keep everyone in the dance together.
EXERCISING DEVILS
There is a ghost that lives between “spoken” and “lived” culture. That ghost is a presence that works against wholesome change, and the best tool to live ghost-free is understanding. Lack of clarity is often the first ghostly devil of an initiative. We have discussed that culture is an experience or by product of ongoing corporate activity, this means it’s real, known, felt, feared, loved, burdening or uplifting. Many company cultures have a dissonance between what is “spoken” and what is lived culture. I am here to tell you even in these environments there is still only one culture, the “lived” one. Understanding a misalignment in perspectives of current culture, needs to be the first step in any correction. Without clarity and understanding any attempt to improve is like reviewing a map with a blind fold. Here’s the bad news for leaders. In my experience when there is lack of clarity, when there is one person talking while others stare, it’s likely leadership who is wearing the blindfold; and the blindfold is a learned trait I call accelerated confidence. Leaders are used to leading and leaning in on their “gut” to keep pace with the evolving world around them. Leaders are quick to think “I got this…”.
Instead of leadership exhibiting an overdose of early confidence, it could be a high paid consultant, or some other combination. No matter, this is someone who is too comfortable in their own frame, and is underestimating the impact of others to their plan. These scenarios should be avoided at all costs. They can truly damage trust, reduce or remove results, and turn the drum beat sour. It is important to note that most companies who look to implement change, are doing so after past attempts. These past attempts may have failed to some degree, and may have left the culture skeptical of change efforts. Great change is osmotic, over time, diverse and iterative. If there is truly a desire for lasting change. The first goal, and possibly the only goal, should be a full understanding of the environment, its cognitive frames, the charms of all, and the pains of today. If an organization does nothing more than identify the “good, bad and ugly” of their current culture through an exercise of shared understanding; this act alone may bring about the culture change that is wanted. Of course it may be further developed with other steps, but start with understanding.
STAGING LEADERSHIP
When leading a group I tend to be an open minded, and I welcome feedback in generous portions; but my position of strength is to be a “lead from the front” leader. You can envision my personage clad in medieval armor, sword on my hip, and colorful standard flying above my head, while standing on a Scottish hillside, admittedly I do. I might have some latent “hero” tendencies, yet possibly the most deft tool that I learned later in my career is the art of environmental curation. Instead of rallying the troops, the idea is to curate the environment to allow the wisdom and creativity of others to bubble up from within. Curating change is similar to the role of director, who realizes the film is about the actors; the director only sets the scene.
The general steps of curating an environment are:
1) Create a stage
2) Set the atmospherics to enable the process
3) Invite a diverse group of players to the stage
4) Practice stillness, and protect the experience
5) Enable the shared wisdom that is developed
Let’s be honest, for many leaders the action that takes the biggest muscles is stillness. We leaders are born and raised to rush forward as the knight in shining armor, but this leader go-to is too often used, and being better curators of special collaborative space is a leaderly mechanism that can be magical.
There are a set of attitudes that are the gateway drugs to this type of well rounded leadership. I believe they can be taught, because I believe a good portion of our leaders already have these traits dominant within themselves. For example there is a great deal of work on the attribute of humility as a trait of great leaders. I will not restate what has been learned, but here is a nice piece by Harvard Business Review on a recent international study that documents it. Humility is one of a line of attributable features of great leaders that also includes vulnerability, timing, inquisitiveness, and empathy. In other words, great leaders have soft-skills. To bring alignment and energy into our corporate cultures, we need more well rounded leaders who are able to be vulnerable, and willing to allow the whole company to bring forth a brilliant change. If we allow our leaders to learn they will not only help ensure a fuller change in culture, they will be better leaders going forward.
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