Learn to look for the pattern not just the behaviour
Skip Bowman
Author of Green2Great and Safe2Great | Keynote Speaker | Futurist | Creator of the Relational #GrowthMindset | Championing Leadership for a Sustainable, Equal, and Critical-Thinking World
When you spot something ineffective, strange or wrong in your employees or colleagues, you probably quickly assume that there is something wrong with their skills or intentions. It’s the False Attribution Error, one of the key cognitive biases. Rarely do leaders consider a more uncomfortable option: that you are CO-CREATING the behaviour through your own action or inaction.
This is a crucial point made by Siobhan McHale in her book “The Insiders Guide to Cultural Change”?
I like to call this shadow-boxing, but I think perhaps Siobhan has a more elegant metaphor, that all behaviour is more like a dance than a solo performance. Sometimes it’s a pas-de-deux, sometimes its a line dance, or perhaps the Macarena. No matter how many people are involved, when we consider it a dance, we consider our own co-responsibility for what it going on. That’s the key point of system thinking. When you look at someone’s behaviour, you have to consider whether YOU are the one leading the dance and others are following.
Interestingly, leaders tend to bring out the opposite of their strengths in their employees.?
Of course, it has nothing to do with you. Behaviour is individual. People are just expressing their psychological preferences. NOT!
FOUR important rules of behaviour
(1) Behaviour is interactional and structured. We respond to each other.?
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(2) Behaviour is shaped heavily by culturally accepted codes to communicate and get things done.
(3) Powerful people have a significantly larger impact on culture and on interactions.?
(4) Most people cannot see these patterns - it’s automatic.
The interactional patterns fall into 4 categories. People COPY the behaviour of high-status members of a group or organisation. People COPE with dominating or anti-social behaviours through adopting overly friendly or submissive forms of interaction. People RESIST dominating, anti-social (or laissez-faire leadership) through critical and sceptical behaviours including passive-aggressiveness. The common point is that these are responses to the behaviour shown by the most powerful people in the room.
Alternatively, people can CREATE new patterns. It’s much less common, but it is the foundation of my conception of Growth Mindset. When you create patterns together, you release yourselves from existing patterns, expectations and norms, and you create a more spontaneous, intentional, aware, suple, and lively dance. To succeed, powerful people, i.e, YOU need to?
Great dancing requires leadership AND followership. It’s a partnership, not a straight-jacket.
Chief Operating Officer, GDSA
3 年Thank you for sharing... ??
Change Management | Leadership & Team Coach | Strategy Facilitator | Life-long learner
3 年Systemic viewing of issues. So important!
Author of Green2Great and Safe2Great | Keynote Speaker | Futurist | Creator of the Relational #GrowthMindset | Championing Leadership for a Sustainable, Equal, and Critical-Thinking World
3 年The shift from independence to co-responsibility in culture change is difficult but essential. It’s made harder in those cultures that have blame games and avoidance as common patterns. Two myths I often have to debunk is (1) that it’s the CEO or senior leaders that shape the culture, and (2) that we have “one” culture. The first myth actually prevents change happening at all. “Unless the CEO changes, we can’t change!” Not true because the second myth is also wrong. There are lots of healthy pockets of culture even in rather toxic organizations. There are always leaders choosing to buck the pattern and create a Growth culture. Finding and encouraging these leaders is an importent part of my #safe2great method.
Technology Transformation Leader | Enabling Digital Innovation in Retail, CPG & QSR at Scale
3 年Brilliant point ?? ,