Evolve Leadership Consulting Limited

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Paul de Beer

Leading without blinkers, imagine the power

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Recently I consulted to a particular executive team regarding their company structure. Working with the team early one morning, I started by having them imagine their business in a few years time having achieved a high level of success. They then worked in two groups to draw up what the describing attributes would be in that scenario. Next I had the team draw up the attributes considering the worst case scenario, that of the business having failed. At this point they started looking rather concerned, and commented that many of the negative scenario attributes existed in the present.

These new perspectives appeared somewhat of a surprise to them, yet all I did as their facilitator was enable them to share information they already individually knew. Clearly the team for some reason had not until that moment been able to share their views and perspectives adequately. The ability for a team to share and consider every perspective is paramount to creating high performance teams, a prerequisite to building sustainable high performance organisations.

This type of situation is not uncommon. Considering the fact that the overall tone, culture and direction of the organisation is set and modelled from the top, team performance can make or break organisations. Companies that were average performers managed to flourish in the simpler word that lies behind us. The highly competitive world that faces us today will increasingly only tolerate top performance. Today increasingly higher demands are placed on senior leadership to develop highly performing companies. Our cognitive blinkers In order to understand what leaders can do to better enable companies through their collective leadership, it may be useful to look at some of the potential blind spots we have as individuals, after all a team is simply made up of individuals. Dr Gregory Berns, neuroscientist and author of “Iconoclast”, describes that the human brain is limited by an energy constraint of about 40 watts of power (a light bulb). In order to save energy the brain will use information stored from past experiences rather than figure out new options by re-evaluating all the new information. This small flaw in our system will often result in us feeling that our perceptions are real. The truth however is that our perspectives are just our perceptions. Dr Berns goes on to say that the solution to limit the effects of our past experiences on our perceptions is by regularly bombarding our brains with information it has never encountered before. This information bombarding process will force the brain to think outside of our normal pathways. Inferring from Dr Berns’ findings, one could go on to say that as leaders we need to always be open to hear different views however tough and despite sometimes feeling that we know better.

The field of cognitive science describes a number of cognitive biases that result in humans making judgement deviations from “reality”. These biases may well be related to the brains energy constraints. Below is a list of a few of the most common biases:

  • Bandwagon effect — the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same.
  • Choice-supportive bias — the tendency to remember one’s choices as better than they actually were.
  • Illusion of control — the tendency for human beings to believe they can control or at least influence outcomes that they clearly cannot.
  • Confirmation bias — the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions.
  • Status quo bias — the tendency for people to like things to stay relatively the same.

Full list found at www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias

Rank and power blinkers

Another dynamic that can have a severe impact on people, teams and the organisation is the effects of rank and the related use of power. In the world that lies behind us, it was more acceptable for management to lead using their positional power as a motivator for example by saying: “I am the boss now do what I tell you”. Today this old world style would be considered coercive leadership and could result in people becoming fearful and angry and disengaging from the organisation. Organisations where coercive leadership is the norm tend to develop cultures of dependence, where people hold back their personal power and abdicate thinking and leadership to higher levels. These organisations become slow and struggle to reinvent themselves. In such cases, senior leaders are forced to get too involved in operational thinking to the detriment of long term planning and organisational integration.

Today senior leaders need to work very hard to soften the effects of the positional rank they have inherited within their organisations. They have to demonstrate to others that they are open to receive all forms of feedback by not becoming defensive when the feedback arrives.

They need to search out views and perspectives widely, even though they may think they already have all the information.

Flattening the organisation

High performance organisations require leadership to be distributed throughout the organisation. In order to foster a culture of agility and adaption which is key to competitiveness, all the resources need to be engaged resulting in staff feeling as if they own the business. The traditional hierarchy created a vertical flow of power within the organisation, resulting in silos and counterproductive leader-follower dynamics.

The challenge is to create an organisational structure and culture where the power flows horizontally, where staff interacts directly with others outside of their “team” in the business to find solutions, rather they using the vertical hierarchy as a long distance telephone. In order to achieve this requires a departure from certain traditional views. As an example, if we ask members of an executive team who their team is, the CFO, CTO, CMO etc will traditionally answer finance, technology, or marketing respectively. Considering this view, the danger would be that these executives are so focused on their function that they are not spending adequate focus on the objectives of the greater organisation. The chief executive most certainly cannot be the only person with the greater hilltop view. This same paradigm shift should be applied throughout the organisation resulting in everyone broadening their view of the organisation and their function. Heads of marketing should not just understand their individual components of marketing but should also understand and influence all of marketing within the organisation.

Today’s winning leadership toolkit

In order to lead organisations to success in this world requires leaders with a set of skills that often seem absent from our toolkits. Few of the skills required today were used by previous generation’s leaders, nor were these skills taught to us in our homes, schools or universities.

Leaders today need to:

  • Learn to feel comfortable not knowing all the answers.
  • Master the art of having courageous and sometimes tough conversations with others.
  • Invite and receiving feedback without defensiveness.
  • Value opposing, dissenting and unfamiliar views and voices.
  • Suspend personal anxiety and judgement.
  • Learn to be the manager as facilitator and coach.
  • Master listening skills.
  • Create reflective sanctuaries in order to reflect on events and perspectives.
  • Understand and use personal power and rank effectively.

The challenge is that many seasoned leaders may have attained great success withoutmastering these skills in the old world, but success will demand them in the future. These skills are often labelled as soft skills however when a person tries to learn them, you quickly discover just how hard it is to break old habits and master these skills as well as the powerful impact their use has on others.

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Time to talk

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When times become tougher for businesses, either due to economic recession or other industry related challenges, senior leadership often fall into the trap of instituting radical knee jerk remedies but often neglect to create a place and time for others within the organisation to align with the need to change as well as to raise differing perspectives that could hold opportunity.

However frightening the financial results and projections may be, the cold truth is that the very people who know the answers to operating more efficiently, are those that are closer to the customers and products, and are the people lower down in the organisation.

 

This new world of work that we find ourselves in, has lead to a highly competitive landscape where quality, service, innovation and differentiation are key to enter the market, but not always remain there. The complexity of business today means that we need to have all the resources aligned, and leadership leveraged at all levels within the organisation.

In any organisation with numerous employees, there is a natural differentiation of roles and responsibilities. Those individuals at the lowest levels are more narrowly focussed and tend to be closer to the product and/or service offered by the company. As we move towards the top tier of leadership, we move further away from product detail but we have a broader view of the organisation, deal with longer term milestones and more abstract concepts.

 

The higher the level the leadership roles become, the more important the need to work to align key internal and external stakeholders and to constantly understand the changing competitive landscape in the future in order to lead the organisation to make subtle directional changes in the present. In order to become an agile or learning organisation, all the resources in the organisation needs to understand the greater vision and own the components of it that they can contribute towards. All the resources in the organisation need to be aligned with each other and be fully engaged and be able to execute their leadership influences both up and down within the organisation. 

 

Untapped opportunities that lie within organisations can be leveraged by individuals and teams who can learn to enter dialogue to be able to raise dissenting and paradoxical views, the very perspectives that hold the key to innovation and competitive practices. Great disconnects in understanding often exist between levels in the organisation, lower levels may not agree with the level above or know certain information that higher levels may require. Lower levels often deem it unsafe to exercise influence higher up in the organisation and therefore hold back their contributions. From my experience working with numerous senior management teams, I am often surprised to find out just how little conversation is had between team members and differing levels within the organisation. 

 

On numerous occasions I have witnessed highly experienced and highly skilled individuals become almost paralysed and the very thought of having to influence others in more senior roles in their organisations. I am left with the thought that great competitive advantage exists for organisations that can somehow create a place where people can simply talk to each other despite their position, perceived rank or any other reason that may block simple discussion.

 

Leaders often dismiss the skills of listening, dialogue and coaching as simply soft skills without realising the powerful impact they may have on the organisation. One of the reasons for this is that many of these so called soft skills can take a very long time to master and cannot simply be learned cognitively or by reading the text book. They need to be practiced and learned experientially and over a relatively long period with much trial and error. Leaders must be prepared to acknowledge their incompetence in this regard in order to start learning, a startling challenge for some, but confirming that humility is indeed a very powerful leadership trait.

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Conscious leadership a key factor of sustainability

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Con-scious – Having an awareness of one’s environment and one’s own existence, sensations, and thoughts. Conscious is a word that has been coming up for me a lot when dealing with leaders at senior levels within organisations. It means different things to me in different dimensions. At the personal level it means being truly aware of the impact of one’s leadership on others and the organisation over time. Do other people hear what I am saying and understand it in the way I intended when I delivered those words? Do I understand my impact on others? Is the person I imagine I am, the same person experienced by others?

Does my leadership have the best effect on others? Most people answer “yes” to all these questions until they elicit honest feedback from their manager, peers and/or reports. Organisational systems generally don’t create environments in which brutally honest feedback can be given and therefore requires leaders to either use third party confidential 360 instruments or to gradually show the people surrounding them that they value developmental feedback and consistently solicit that feedback. For most people the former is the only way.

We find ourselves in a radically different world today compared to the world we grew up in during the sixties and seventies. Organisations require skills tailored to an environment of urgency, high stakes and uncertainty. Organisational Cultures need to be built where the best internal and external thinking and practices can be leveraged. The leadership and energy of each person needs to be leveraged and hence we need to use a leadership style that includes people and takes them along with us. The challenge of our time is we are currently living in the gap between the old and the new. By this I mean that many of us grew up in an authoritative and coercive world where we were told what to do. Today it is about inclusion, respect, transparency and trust. We can use the old school methods but these tend to lead to disengagement and talent attrition which is not what we need in order to create agile and High Performing Organisations.

Jim Collins in his book why the mighty fall, describes a key component leading to organisational failure as “Hubris”, basically meaning organisations thinking they are so good that they become arrogant and fail to see the changes in the competitive landscape. We as humans have many wired irrational faults described as cognitive biases. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias) Cognitive biases skew our judgement, leaving us thinking our views and perspectives are accurate when in fact, they generally have many flaws. The way to avoid such pitfalls is to engage others for their views and perspectives, a practice particularly difficult for those of us schooled in the old way of doing things. Many managers I have worked with over the years believed they engaged others sufficiently, but upon receiving their 360 reports, have been shocked to discover the contrary. Once they contemplate these new insights, they may be convinced to begin to lead in a more conscious or aware state and start the journey of growth. Learning starts when we can shift from a place of unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence, knowing what we don’t know. It is therefore not a surprise that the bulk of leadership literature considers humility a key trait of successful managers. A healthy level of low self-confidence is not necessarily a bad thing, as it may assist us to engage others for their perspectives in order to consider that just maybe I could be wrong.

So how do we become conscious leaders? As I have stated above, we need to become conscious about how we are seen by others. This means we must be able to work with and integrate perspectives that vary from our own without pushing them away. This is very difficult for most of us as adults, and requires a focus and desire of wanting to learn and develop. We see the world through our knowledge or lenses and it is incredible how people and the teams they manage grow through acquiring new perspectives. I have met many good people working at senior levels over the years, some which have done a huge amount of damage without intending to. It is a pity that such people generally only start wanting to change when they make a catastrophic mistake or have derailed as executives.

Maybe we require that jolt to start looking inside. An ideal list of things to do and learn as a minimum requirement to start the journey towards becoming a more conscious leader would include:

  • Understanding self emotionally and learning how to deal with our own stress and anxiety.
  • Encouraging people to give you honest feedback and be careful not to be defensive when receiving it.
  • Finding a good 360 process, and get feedback regularly.
  • Learning inclusive leadership skills such as listening, situational leadership, coaching, giving and receiving feedback and team leadership.
  • Learning about self: Psychological diversity or preferences, shadows, strengths and weaknesses.
  • Learning to reflect as an individual and as a team.
  • Reading widely particularly regarding self development and leadership.

A conscious leader can make a huge positive impact on Organisations and teams and is usually admired and followed by others. Conscious leaders build powerful Organisational Cultures that keeps the Organisation conscious about its internal and external environments and the strategy needed to pave the right trajectory. Fred Kofman in his book Conscious Business – how to build value through values, points out why we need such Organisations and what leadership must do to achieve them. In their book Conscious Capitalism, Raj Sisodia and John Mackey discuss the role of business in society and what needs to be done to create win win situations between all stakeholders to lead to sustainability for all.

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