Are You Using Your Powers for Good or Evil?

See one, do one, teach one

This is a very popular way that we like to teach. We reference it a lot. Sometimes I think we forget that the same power of observation, initiation, and passing on knowledge can be used for good as well as evil.?

How many of us have worked in organizations where we watched powerful leaders modeling behaviors that were in direct conflict with the company goals and stated vision?

Sometimes this leadership disconnect came from not-so-powerful middle managers, who, wishing they were more powerful, shared their dangerous versions of best practices, modeling behaviors that soothed what is broken in them, not what grows employees or organizations.?

If we strive, as learning leaders, to proliferate our knowledge or culture, we have to help our organizations, our leaders, and our individual contributors to be conscious consumers of what is being passed on.?

• Are those messages on-brand for who we are as an organization??
• If they are not, do we know how to speak up??
• If they are not, and someone speaks up to us, what do we do? What do we say??
• How do we address the conscious consumption of the culture we pass down and around to others??

Remember, we can use this power for good or evil or for just plain old mediocrity.

• Who do we want to be today??
• Who do we want others to observe us being and whom do we want to grow to be the Leaders of tomorrow??

When it comes to this kind of observation-driven learning, it is important that we not only show and do and teach, but it is critical that we model and prioritize normalizing talking about the what and why of behaviors our employees are seeing.?

They need language to understand why we are doing what we’re doing, but also language and lived examples of speaking up if what they are seeing does not align with what we have defined as our organization’s goals and mission.?

In my experience, this has been the most effective way that we can positively charge a see one, do one, teach one model to prevent it from being used to support negative behavior models.?

We want the observational model to foster growing competence, not shrinking confidence.

When you define a policy, also define acceptable behaviors and unacceptable behaviors... give examples.

Reinforce the difference between observable behavior and mindreading motivation or perceived personality traits.

This is why this matters and how will that make a difference to your organization:?

See one, do one, teach one is not just a potential compliance or company culture issue.

The mistakes we make setting our people and organizations up for success with this are repeated during every performance management cycle at most companies.

Feedback on performance skews heavily away from observable behaviors, and the research is very clear that this impacts women and other marginalized employees disproportionally.?

Don’t accidentally reinforce systems that foster bias and could put your company at risk for losing your best talent because:

1. They are learning the wrong lessons by observing broken behavior from powerful leaders…no policy will save you from the outcome of allowing this to continue
2. The are being measured against faulty productivity metrics and evaluated by impression and mindreading rather than observable behavior
3. There is no check and balance in your processes or programs for your decision makers to “check themselves” and no one else feels empowered to check them

If your organization has fallen down the rabbit hole to this wonderland of chaos, all is not lost, but you are going to have some difficult conversations and decisions ahead of you.

The very first questions to ask about each department, function, and leader are:

• What are we modeling by our observable behaviors?
• How is this aligned with our vision and values?
• What are the observable examples of alignment?
• Where are the conflicts? How are we explaining that?

If our explanation was the lead story from the media I trust most, how would I feel?

Would I feel embarrassed to explain to the people I love most why when this happened in front of me, I did nothing to stop it?

Awareness is the first step to conscious decision-making. Then, it will be up to you to figure out who you want to be at work and what kind of company you want to help grow.

Choose good instead of evil...it makes the world a better place and you will have a lot less explaining to do...