Leading through Change

What word would you use to describe this past year?

Unprecedented? Challenging? Unpredictable? Strange? Scary?

There are two aspects to leading through change. The first is the challenge of leading people in an organisation when they are distracted by the fear and uncertainty of the outside world. The second is harnessing the power of change in the world to build your leadership position. When you are in a leadership position, your followers look to you to give them safety and security, often at a time when even you don’t know what’s happening. How can you provide a sense of security to others if you don’t feel it yourself? And as soon as you offer the calm voice in a storm, others will look to you for support, they will make you a leader, even if that’s not the role you chose for yourself. Leadership is not a role that you can create for yourself - it is a role granted to you, whether you like it or not.

I have two ideas to put to you. Firstly, what you have been taught about leadership for the last 50 years is wrong. Secondly, change doesn’t exist.

I’m going to define leadership as a relationship within which one person feels safe to defer to the decisions of another.

I’m going to define change as the perception of difference over time.

The fundamental, underlying neurological process which drives a fear of change is the abstract symbolic map which we all create to interact with the world. Our greatest sense of safety and comfort comes when the map matches the reality exactly. Things are exactly the way they are supposed to be. Things turn out exactly the way you predict. Our greatest problems in life come from the discovery that other people have their own predictions and plans too, and they are different to yours. The unfortunate reality is that you have to coexist in a confined physical space with other people who are each also trying to impose their own map onto the real world.

Sometimes, as we have seen over the past 2 years, the real world makes up its own rules too, and we all have to react and figure out a new reality.

Why is fear of change an important factor? Because at times of crisis and external change, we are most likely to ally ourselves with leaders, and those leaders aren’t always the most obvious people.

Let’s think about leadership, not as a set of traits or skills, but simply as a relationship. I said that what you’ve been taught about leadership is wrong, and that’s because the global leadership development industry is focused on teaching you how to be a leader by copying the behaviours of a leader. What’s wrong is that leadership is not an action, it is a relationship. Leadership is not something that one person has. People have long argued about whether leaders are born or bred, and the answer is neither. They are created only in the moment they are needed. Consider the events of the past 2 years. Who have emerged as leaders? Consider the challenge of climate change. Who are the leaders? Are they the politicians or corporate figureheads? No, the leaders of the debate on climate change are people like Greta Thunberg and David Attenborough.

A leader is literally the person who you follow. If we think about leadership in a literal sense, the leader is the person who is walking in front. This gives a group two advantages. Firstly, the person in front knows where they are going and the group can stay safe by following. Secondly, when travelling through dangerous territory, the followers can walk in the leader’s footsteps, knowing that the route must be safe. Metaphorically, the leader shows that the route is safe and the destination is achievable. Since we equate time with space, we equate a physical destination with the idea of the future. The future doesn’t actually exist, it isn’t a place that we can walk towards. However, we create the future through our actions today.

Leadership as Relationship

The most obvious evidence for the problems in leadership development is the sheer number of leadership theories and models. This is similar to the idea that the Earth is at the centre of the universe, a common belief that reaches back thousands of years. The philosopher Ptolemy supported this model and produced charts which predicted the movement of the stars and moon which were used in navigation. His charts predicted perfectly the movement of objects in the solar system, unfortunately visiting objects such as comets and asteroids were not so easily explained, so he invented ever more complicated exceptions to his rules. The reason that this model was so persistent is that it predicted most of what people could observe, much like leadership models predict most peoples’ experiences of leadership. A model predicts that a leader is decisive and supportive and analytical and you agree. Another model predicts that a leader is cautious and directive and intuitive and you agree. Unfortunately, because all of the objects in the solar system are part of the same system, you could make any one of them the centre of the universe and predict the movements of all of the others. And yet, none of these would predict the outliers. If a model doesn’t cover every possibility then it isn’t a complete model.

Thanks to the observations of many scientists, Copernicus published his thesis in 1543 and we now have one very simple model which explains all of the movements that we can observe, even for visitors such as comets and stray asteroids.

Leadership development is big business. TrainingIndustry.com values the market at $366 billion globally, so it’s little wonder that there are so many theories. What we don’t have is a single, unified theory which makes them all obsolete. Well, maybe we do.

In 2018 I conducted primary research into leadership, and in particular how future leaders are selected. The inspiration came from working on a number of global corporate talent programs and being asked the same question by HR executives - how can we be so bad at predicting potential? The challenge was that they were spending huge amounts of money trying to profile and predict future leaders, but the people they selected for their high potential programs were no better than the people who they had not seen as future leaders. They kept reinventing the development programs, but that’s not the problem, I think the problem was in how they were defining a leader.

In my research I asked over 100 organisational leaders to define the core leadership traits or behaviours that they looked for in future leaders and they came up with over 30 that they felt were vital. Another model which focuses on strengths has 60 which should be developed. You can see that any leadership program which aims to develop 30 or 60 different core skills is impossible to deliver. Something obvious is missing.

The Ideal Leader

Think about this for yourself for a moment.

What is the one characteristic, skill or trait that you have which you would say is the secret of your career success?

How has this given you an advantage in your career?

Safety through similarity

The first clue which came out of my research is that those 30 leadership traits were viewed differently by different people. We could probably guess that, but is there a way of predicting which person would value which trait? It turned out that the answer is yes, and over 300 people helped with that part of my research. If you ask a person what leadership traits they admire in themselves then they will select the same traits as being important for other people. So in fact there is no consistency at all in what traits define leadership, but there is complete consistency in the type of person that any one individual will see as a potential future leader.

What does this mean? Simply, it means that when you are recommending or recruiting someone for a leadership role, you will prefer the person who most reminds you of yourself. This gives us a really neat trick for success in any job interview, but that’s not the subject of this session.

What we need is a theory that unifies everything that we know about leadership, all of the hundreds of different leadership models and theories into one simple model that can tell us how to develop leadership skills.

Let’s consider another type of relationship that I hope you are all familiar with - love. Love is not a trait or skill that a person can possess. A person cannot be taught to love because love is the relationship created by two people. Yes, there are things you can do that are more likely to lead to love, and there are things that you can do to destroy love. But love is not something that you can do. When you say that you love another person, you are talking about how you feel, not about what you do. If I ask you what kinds of things you do to show love, you’ll list the things that symbolise love to you, not to anyone else. You can’t make someone love you by buying them flowers or taking them to dinner.

When you fall in love, first of all you are attracted to someone because you like them, you are like them, you recognise them as being like you, you have things in common, you have shared interests or views, they represent some qualities which you admire or feel you lack. So you recognise them as someone who inhabits the same reality as you. That sense of likeness develops into love when the two of you enter into an agreement to put each others’ needs first. You take care of them and they take care of you. Love is in the relationship, not in any one person. When one person prioritises their own needs over those of the other, the sense of love fades. Selfishness is probably what starts many divorces.

Similarly, in any situation where there is both complexity and uncertainty, our advantage as a social species comes from our ability to communicate and share information. This gives a clear advantage in terms of the speed of decision making. However, when a decision is made to move in a particular direction, the community has to follow in unity. No-one can predict the future, so a sense of safety comes from trust in the person making the decision. That trust can be based on many different factors including past experience and likeness. When one person says things that you agree with, you feel that you are alike, you are on the same wavelength and that builds trust, and in a time of crisis you are more likely to follow them because you then expect them to act in your interests. The leaders who have emerged in the past 2 years in situations such as COVID and the climate crisis are not the people who said, “Hey, you need to do what I tell you!” - in fact those people have created a much bigger problem of scepticism. If someone who has put themselves in a position of power is telling you to wear a face mask or reduce your use of plastics then they must be trying to manipulate you, so it would be logical to resist. We’re now seeing anti-lockdown protests and riots across the world, which is frustrating for the people who are trying to save lives. In the second world war, when bombs were falling, I don’t know that we had people protesting on the streets during air raids, trying to convince people that the bombs were fake. You can see and feel bombs. You can’t see or feel a virus until it’s too late.

Whatever your views on COVID or climate change, it’s important to understand that these are not your views. They are views and opinions given to you by other people. Such complex opinions are not formed by individual people, they are formed collectively, in response or in opposition to the opinions and actions of others. At a time of crisis, we are each reacting to those opinions and what we search for is a clear sense of direction, and leadership is perhaps no more than that.

Fundamentally, a leader is the person who allows others to feel safe. In 2012, Google created Project Aristotle, aimed at discovering the secret ingredients of their high performing teams. They looked at the work of 180 teams from across the organisation, as evaluated by executives, team leaders, team members, and performance against objective KPIs. The single most important common factor across all high performing teams was a sense of psychological safety - the feeling that team members could take risks, speak openly, expose their weaknesses and be supported by their team mates and their manager. In short, the high performing teams had a manager or leader who allowed the team to feel safe.

When you’re in love, you feel safe because you trust that the other person will take care of you. You trust them not to hurt you. When you are in a team, you feel safe for the same reason. You feel a sense of belonging, you feel that you are with people who are like you, you feel accepted and respected.

Creating trust

Think of someone who you would regard as a leader, someone you know personally and trust. Work out why you trust that person. How do they maintain that trust? What would they have to do to lose your trust?

Now consider what you have learned so far. What are your natural abilities which will help you to lead through change?

In the world of coaching, I often hear of the need to build trust at the start of a coaching relationship. I’ve seen training courses for coaches that say it takes a long time to build trust. The coach has to open up and make themselves vulnerable to show the client it’s safe. Well, just because it’s safe for the coach doesn’t mean it’s safe for the client. Just because you’ve decided to share doesn’t mean that I’m going to. All of this is nonsense. Trust can be built very quickly. It’s just that most people try to do it backwards.

Let’s think it through. When you have built trust with someone, you can ask them tough questions, you can share secret or intimate information, you have an understanding of how they will act and react. What if we turn this around? What if we ask someone a challenging question, and then we have the courage to accept whatever answer they give? Surely, for us to ask the question and receive the answer, we must already have trust. So, my way of building trust is very simple - it’s to assume that I already have enough trust to be having this conversation now, and then I assume that more trust will develop because of my willingness to ask challenging questions and accept their truth.

The thing that makes change comfortable or scary is whether you already knew that it was going to happen. If you could predict the future, you would never be surprised and never caught off guard.

There are basically three ways that you can predict the future. First, if you create it. When you change something, you’re comfortable because you’re in control. Second, if you have learned a repeating pattern, such as the changing seasons or the habits of another person. Third, if you are relying on the promises of another person and those promises are delivered. For a leader, this means that they do exactly what they say they’re going to do.

Let’s put these different factors together.

1. A leader’s primary job is to create psychological safety

2. A leader is leading to a destination, the future, and the future is always unpredictable

3. A leader’s main way of predicting the future is to do what they say they will do

4. A leader’s main way of controlling unpredictability is to give voice to the fears of their followers

This is, in my view, the single most important and most overlooked behaviour of a leader. When people are scared they don’t offer empty reassurances or vague soothing words, they give a voice to those fears. They have the courage to say what everyone is thinking. That courage is the force that unites their followers. It creates trust because now I can hear someone saying what’s been going around in my head. It doesn’t make the fear go away, but now I know that someone understands me. Someone is speaking up on my behalf. People like Mahatma Gandhi and Lech Walesa were seen as leaders because they spoke up for the people who did not have a voice. Their courage united people and gave them strength.

Consider the people who are choosing to follow you. The people who, in your work or in your family, need you to create a safe environment where they can be their best.

Think about what they are worried about and consider how this also is on your mind.

1. Be honest with yourself and with the people you lead.

2. Acknowledge the fear - put it into as simple a phrase as possible.

3. Know and show that this is a normal way to feel in this situation.

4. Set a direction to move forwards together - where you are heading, not the details of how to get there.

When you are accepting your role as leader, offer your followers your HAND.

Honesty

Acknowledge

Normalise

Direction

What’s the downside of leadership? For you as a leader, it means that there’s a lot of pressure on you to know where you’re going. Once people start following you, you have a responsibility to them, whether you like it or not.

When you are leading at a time of change imposed by the world, people will look to you for safety and security first, and then they will follow you forwards.

When you are a leader and you want to create change, you can use exactly the same principles. If your followers are ready for change too, your words will give a voice to their own doubts and fears, and their hopes and aspirations. When you dream, you share your dream with your followers.

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Peter Freeth is an author, executive coach and leadership development expert.

Learn more at genius.coach

The research I mentioned is contained in a forthcoming book, Building your Career Capital, co-authored with my friend and colleague Nitin Thakur.