Category Archives: The Leadership Project

Situations pertaining to leaders #4

Posted by —

6

Last week I had the opportunity to interview one of the leaders of a large charitable organisation whose mission is  “enhancing life and increasing hope for disadvantaged, marginalised and oppressed persons, especially women and girls”.

The organisation has existed for more than 150 years, and sprang from the work of an order of nuns whose vision and commitment still animate the organisation today. The leader shared a story with me about how he and the organisation discovered what integrity really meant.

The test

About 15 years ago, the organisation faced a test. The State Government, led by Jeff Kennett, a deeply divisive figure in recent Australian political history, had just overturned the basis on which governments and charities had worked together for decades.

Until that point, charities worked together to assist their clients. They shared information with other organisations, and each organisation looked out for the other. They understood the efforts and successes of one organisation benefited all.  At one stroke, however, the government decided that henceforth charities would have to compete against each other for government funding.

Shocked and confronted

Each organisation in the sector was thrown back on itself to contemplate a future in which they would be isolated, competitive and obliged to assume the role of supplicant.  It was a time of deep despair and dismay for all organisations. Many doubted whether they would survive, and they feared for the lives and wellbeing of their clients.

At first, this man’s organisation was no different.

Shocked and confronted, the leaders of the organisation gathered together to choose their course of action. And that’s when the spirit of the long-ago nun who founded the order, a woman known as an “innovator, an ambitious person, impatient of authority”, rose again.

The group decided they could not take the government’s money on these conditions and they decided to speak out about it. They considered their long and illustrious history and the impact on the thousands of clients should their organisation not survive, and then they chose to fight anyway.

The eye of the storm

It was the beginning of a very difficult period in the life of this man and his organisation. They were subjected to threats, had to make staff redundant and endured, he said, “many sleepless nights.”

The threat to the organisation’s survival lasted for many months and was only resoundingly decided when the government, against all predictions, lost the 1999 election.

Looking back on that time, the man said while it had been “torrid” and hugely confronting, there had been many unexpected benefits from the organisation’s refusal to participate in the game of competition; its refusal, as he put it, to “sell their soul”.  One of them was the impact on writing their next mission statement.

Shortly after it became clear the eye of the storm had passed, it happened to be their business-planning season. This time, he said, writing their mission statement was a whole different exercise. This time everyone was conscious they were choosing words they had to be able to stand by should the situation require it.  Everyone had gotten that

it’s one thing to talk about integrity, it’s another to live it.

***

Image: Girl not alone, 2011, acrylic, gold leaf and coffee filters on canvas, 135 x 240 cm, by the wonderful Ghadah at Pretty Green Bullet

If you enjoyed this post …

If you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy:

“Can female leaders be true to themselves?”

Posted by —

10

“Can female leaders be true to themselves?” is the noxious sub-heading in an article contained in Harvard Business Review’s recently-released collection entitled HBR’s 10 must reads on leadership.

The sub-heading may be the work of a sub-editor, but I’d plump for the authors, Robert Goffee and Gareth Jones. They have a habit of using antagonistic questions such as the title of their well-known book, “Why Should Anyone Be Led by You?”

There are many reasons the sub-heading and its use in the article rankles with me.  Here are just a few:

  • it’s the one and only time in the article in which women are mentioned, and when it occurs it’s positioned inside the discussion of a problem
  • it’s the only article in the collection of ten articles that cites males leaders only
  • the answer they give to the question is “no, because women always adopt one of three strategies: (a) hiding, using their clothes and appearance, (b) resisting, (c) playfully affirming the stereotype”; in effect, they say, women cannot be authentic and are thus snookered when it comes to leadership
  • I live in a country in which a woman has been elected Prime Minister and she is failing very publicly, very gruesomely; one of the reasons commentators give for her failure is a lack of authenticity and authority. Perhaps she does have issues with authenticity and authority, but in a society in which “experts” such as Goffee and Jones can hawk their awful, limiting views, there’s a temptation to ascribe any issues to her gender and have that be the end of the discussion.

I simply will not believe women cannot be authentic leaders. Je refuse!

***

The multiple effects of acknowledgement

Posted by —

3

Recently, I’ve started doing an acknowledgement exercise each morning. For five minutes, I write down as many things as I can think of to acknowledge myself for.

I started doing this because I noticed I was producing results but not appreciating them. Instead of stopping and acknowledging the fact I’d made something happen that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, I was preoccupied with the things I hadn’t yet made happen.

I was living with the two birds in the bush, not with the bird in my hand.

So for the last week I’ve been doing this acknowledgement exercise each morning, and it’s making a difference. Not only do I get to experience the accomplishment and satisfaction I was foregoing previously, it also illustrates some curious phenomena.

One phenomenon is that it takes courage to do this. There is resistance to articulating one’s results and it shows up in thoughts like “I didn’t really do that; I had help” or “Yeh, well, I got lucky there” or “I think I’ll pass on doing this exercise today; I don’t really need to do it …”

Another is that it can be very surprising to discover what one wants to be acknowledged for. Often, it’s not what you think.

One of the best storytellers I’ve ever met – Marcelle Bernand, a leader of Landmark Education’s Communication course – has a great anecdote about the effect.

Marcelle and her sister had had a disagreement and in the process of sorting it out, they concocted a game. The game was to tell the other person what they wanted to be acknowledged for, and then have the other person acknowledge them. Of all the things Marcelle could have asked to be acknowledged for, she chose one. She asked to be acknowledged for being the person who cleans the lint filter on her sister’s clothes-dryer.

***

Image: Poster by Saint-Genies and Roland, c1960, courtesy of Galerie Montmartre, Melbourne, Australia

If you enjoyed this post …

If you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy:

Situations pertaining to leaders #3

Posted by —

12

In 2008, a new police sergeant arrived in a disadvantaged suburb of a major Australian city. He had been groomed for the line command with a stint in a neighbouring district, but it didn’t prepare him for what he found in his new patch.

Each Thursday night, hundreds of youths from different local ethnic groups, as well as agitators from more distant suburbs, would congregate in the local shopping centre and engage in violent brawls.

Residents were frightened for their lives and abandoned the shopping centre, while shopkeepers faced each Thursday night with dread. Security guards employed by shopping centre management did what they’d been trained to do: shut down the trouble-makers and move them on, often meeting violence with violence, abuse with abuse.

One or two senior officers, long-timers, counselled acceptance. “It’s been like this for years,” they told the sergeant.

But the sergeant felt otherwise. He set out to have things be different, and soon the slow and steady work of building affiliation began.

First up were the security guards from the shopping centre. The sergeant went to them and made a request. He requested they speak respectfully to the youths when having them leave or move along. If a youth didn’t do what was required, he told the guards they should take whatever actions they were entitled to take. Thus, he made a request and reaffirmed their discretion in one stroke.

This was the beginning of the transformation the sergeant wrought.

***

If you enjoyed this post …

If you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy:

Situations pertaining to leaders #2

Posted by —

10

After a string of unspeakable difficulties, including the sinking of his ship, Endurance, which left he and his men scraping a precarious existence on the unstable ice floes of the Antarctic, and an extraordinary journey in the three open life boats to the penguin-shit-covered speck of Elephant Island, Sir Ernest Shackleton faced his most severe challenge. There was no other option. The men couldn’t last on Elephant Island.

Surely, they would starve or die of exposure before anyone passed by. They had only five weeks’ worth of rations, and the polar winter was about to set in, forming a widening barrier of ice between them and passing seals and penguins. After six months of living outside the ship, the Boss had to admit that there was little more he could do to keep his men together: ‘The health and mental condition of several men was causing me serious anxiety.’

He determined that he and five others would take a boat and “make a bid for South Georgia, eight hundred miles away, as impossible as that sounded.” He explained,

The risk was justified solely by our urgent need of assistance.

***

Now came the matter of choosing who to take. He called for volunteers, “though he already knew the crew he wanted.” Not only did he have to think of the task ahead, he had to think of the “consequences for those left stranded on bleak Elephant Island.”

Which is why he knew he couldn’t take his most precious comrade, the inimitable Frank Wild. All of Wild’s skill and intelligence and experience would be needed to keep the men together on Elephant Island. For similar reasons, he knew he had to take the two trouble-makers, McNeish and Vincent, for they couldn’t be left to poison “the already grim atmosphere on Elephant Island.”

He took Crean who begged to go, and was “tough and levelheaded”; and McCarthy, “whom everyone liked” and was “a quiet, highly efficient Irishman brought up in sailing ships” who never “groused or gave any backchat”.  And of course, he took Captain Worsley, the navigator, for if they

missed their mark they would be lost in the vast open waters of the South Atlantic.

On 24 April, 1916 they set off on the voyage that

nearly a century later is still hailed as the greatest boat journey ever accomplished.

By the time they arrived at South Georgia Island 17 days later by some miracle of the human spirit, both McNeish and Vincent were lying at the bottom of the boat, incapable of doing anything. Vincent had been like it for most of the journey. In the midst of hurricanes and ice storms, and bailing for their lives, he had been useless.

Shackleton and his party had not only survived, they had done so carrying two men. Four men did the work of six. It was no accident, Shackleton noted, that the two slackers were the “two most pessimistic members of the entire Endurance crew.”

***

All references from Shackleton’s Way by Margot Morrell and Stephanie Capparell.

Image: The Endurance, by Frank Hurley

If you enjoyed this post …

If you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy:

Situations pertaining to leaders #1

Posted by —

12

There is an extended family: husband and wife, two small children and another on the way, grandparents, aunts and uncles. The husband has had some difficulties with alcohol and gambling. He is highly-strung, a perfectionist; things around the home have to be ship-shape all of the time. He is irritated if the childrens’ toys are lying around, if dinner is not ready when he’s used to it being ready.

His wife works hard to ensure he is not upset. She cleans diligently but sometimes her husband still finds something wrong. The couple has experienced a deep sorrow with the loss of a stillborn child some years earlier. Being pregnant again fills the wife with joy and fear in equal parts.

One of the grandparents, the wife’s mother, is fearful too. Most weeks, she spends time with the couple and frequently minds her grandchildren. She has noticed her son-in-law’s behaviour and is uncertain and fearful. She is uncertain whether her son-in-law’s behaviour towards her daughter could be characterised as abuse, and she fears what might be happening behind closed doors.

She is caught between feeling something’s wrong and not knowing how to proceed. She feels intimidated by her son-in-law’s mood swings, and also by the shadow of the loss he and her daughter have suffered. She feels called on to intervene in some way – sometimes she has to cut short her visits because the protests are there in her mouth – but she dreads the potential repercussions. She fears if she says something to her son-in-law or daughter her access to her beloved grandchildren might be revoked. She also fears it would cause fresh suffering.

One day, nothing much happens except for one thing. The grandmother chooses to act. She looks at the fear and then picks up the phone anyway.

***

Leaders! We want you

Posted by —

8

This is a call for people to participate in a new book project. The book is part of The Leadership Project, started in October, 2011.

We want interview subjects, people who have views about leaders and leadership.

The views may be gleaned from your own practice as a leader, or they may be views about other people being leaders.

Perhaps you’ve been touched, moved or inspired by someone being a leader.

Perhaps you’ve been being a leader in a way that’s had others touched, moved or inspired.

We want to talk to you.

How does it work?

If you’re in the US or UK or somewhere other than Melbourne, Australia, interviews will be conducted by phone. Interviews take about an hour.

If your views are referenced or quoted in the book you will have the opportunity to review the draft text.

To arrange an interview time, contact me at solidgoldcreativity@gmail.com

Happy leading!

***

Who is a leader? Post-mortem on a definition

Posted by —

11

I’ve been attempting to define what I mean by a “leader”. I’ve been doing so under the provocation of a book called Leadership for the Twentieth First Century by Joseph C. Rost, a man outraged that the majority of people writing and thinking about leaders and leadership do not attempt to define their topic.

Well, Mr Rost, I’ve attempted it, so count me in.

What have I concluded about defining a leader?

1. Being in the enquiry is what counts

The definition doesn’t matter as much as the trip one takes to get to a definition. Being in the enquiry is what counts, not the answer.

2. Leaders matter to me

The most important distinction is the distinction between leaders and leadership that was preliminary to the definition. I’ve discovered I’m more interested in being people leaders than in this thing called leadership, and I suspect it’s people being leaders we need more of, not leadership per se.

3. Leaving responsibility implied

I’m happy to leave the question of responsibility implied. Many people would say that taking responsibility is the mark of someone being a leader. I heartily agree, but I want to leave the act of taking responsibility implied within all five points.

We could say that responsibility is a condition of possibility for a person being a leader; ie, no responsibility = no leader.

4. To do or not to do morality?

The big question is one we’ve been tripping over a little: what to do with the question of morality or ethics?

I’ve chosen to leave it out, mainly because I see it as part of the evaluation of a leader. I’m interested in something prior to this: what it means to be a leader. I’m not interested for the moment in what it means to be a good leader.

5. Integrity

I’m still umming and ahhing about what to do with the question of integrity. By integrity I mean the wholeness and soundness of a person as given by the practice of honouring one’s word; I don’t mean something to do with morals or ethics, right and wrong, and so on.

Here’s the practice, a little simplified:

Honouring your word … means you either keep your word, or as soon as you know that you will not, you say that you will not be keeping your word to those who were counting on your word and clean up any mess you caused by not keeping your word. By “keeping your word” we mean doing what you said you would do and by the time you said you would do it.*

On the one hand, we could say integrity is another condition of possibility for a person being a leader; no integrity = no leader. On the other hand, integrity is fundamental to every person, regardless of their being a leader or not.

For now, I’ve chosen to leave it out of the definition because including it might imply it’s only required for leaders.

***

* Integrity: A positive model that incorporates the normative phenomena of morality, ethics, and legality – Abridged by Werner H Erhard, Michael C Jensen and Steve Zaffron. To read the paper, click here. It is a 30-page abridged version of the full 100+ page paper I’ve previously linked to.

Image: The Hare, 1927, Joan Miró

If you enjoyed this post …

If you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy:

Who is a leader? More implications

Posted by —

16

Now, where were we with the definition of a leader?

So far I’m not convinced that attempting a definition is worth the candle, whatever Joseph C Rost may have to say about people looking at leadership who don’t define their topic. Still, post-mortems later.

We’ve covered the implications of points 1 and 2 of the definition in a previous post. This post, the implications of points 3, 4 and 5.

3. A leader sets out, or intends, to make change. A leader may or may not be successful in having the change occur. If the change does not occur, the leader is still a leader.

4. A leader takes on the risk of setting out to make change. A leader’s stance is “I’m willing to be blamed, criticised, attacked, ridiculed or worse if things don’t work out.”

5. A leader faces off the “tyranny of fear” and offers possibility in its place.

3. A leader sets out, or intends, to make change.

The leader intends change. He may or may not succeed in having the change come to pass. What counts is the intention, not the outcome.

The sooner we decouple the idea of “leader” from the ideas of “success” or “outcome”, the better. For one, we’d have more people willing to step up to being a leader. In addition, we’d have to become a certain way to allow people to do their best and not shoot them down when they didn’t pull something off.

We’d have to grow up at last and stop waiting for Santa Claus. Or Godot.

Now, to this word “change” …

In his definition of leadership, Rost qualifies it with the word “real”, which he says means, “substantive and transforming”. This doesn’t work for me for three reasons:

  • once you introduce an adjective or other qualifier into a definition, you’re lost; it’s time to go back to the drawing board
  • I explicitly reject the criterion of degree in my idea of a leader; people can be a leader in small matters or large
  • part of what happens when someone is being a leader is that the unexpected starts to show up; unforeseen, even undreamt-of results start to occur. It’s this magic proliferation – a doing without doing – which is the surest marker of someone operating as a leader. So if you have to know a change is “real” or “substantive or transforming” at the outset, as in Rost’s definition, the magic dimension of the unforeseen is ruled out.

What I mean by change is novelty, as distinct from, say, change as reaction. I mean something new to the situation, new factors, new options.

4. A leader takes on the risk of setting out to make change.

More than half the people I’ve interviewed to date for my book have said being a leader is tough. They’ve talked about blame and criticism, and the fear of it, and they’ve talked about the lack of support, the loneliness. As one interviewee put it,

People are happy enough for you to get out of your comfort zone, but when it comes to them … people vanish.

As Seth Godin says in Tribes,

Leadership is scarce because few people are willing to go through the discomfort required to lead.

That’s it. Being willing to feel discomfort – even most of the time – is one of the requirements of being a leader.

5. A leader faces off the “tyranny of fear” and offers possibility in its place.

A person being a leader does not create or contribute to conversations that rehearse fear.

You know the ones. Conversations about imminent disaster, imminent catastrophe, imminent shortage; conversations which have the shape and content of the “downward spiral”, as Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander describe it in The Art of Possibility.

Instead, a person being a leader creates conversations about possibility.

This new leader carries the distinction that it is the framework of fear and scarcity … which promotes divisions between people. He asserts that we can create the conditions for the emergence of anything that is missing … This leader calls upon our passion rather than our fear. She is the relentless architect of the possibility that human beings can be.

***

Image: The Gold of the Azure, Joan Miró

If you enjoyed this post …

If you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy:

Who is a leader? Implications of the definition

Posted by —

14

Following are some implications flowing from the five points I used to define a leader, together with a few starting remarks.

Being a leader vs Leadership

The five points I raised in yesterday’s post relate to being a leader; they do not relate to leadership per se. There are a few reasons:

  • I’ve just finished Joseph C Rost’s Leadership for the Twenty-First Century and I’m taking his point that the terms “leader” and “leadership” are often conflated
  • at present, I’m more interested in people being leaders than in leadership
  • talking about people being leaders is easier and more productive than talking about leadership; once we human beings start talking about concepts rather than people, the concepts have a way of becoming progressively fixed and abstract. Think “justice”, for example, or “freedom” or “socialism.” This applies even where the concept is defined as a process or relation, as Rost and others have it.

Being a leader doesn’t require others

Yes, it’s counter-intuitive, and lots of leadership people will baulk and think I’m a nutter, but I cannot see that the definition of being a leader requires others.

Most often, other people will be involved. However, there’s nothing in being a leader, as I’ve defined it, that makes other people essential. One can be being a leader on a deserted island with only an old boot for company.

In other words, followers are not essential to being a leader. When it comes to leadership it may be a different matter, and that’s a topic for another day.

The five points and their implications

1. A leader is someone choosing to be a leader at this moment and in this situation.

A person may be being a leader in one situation, and not a leader in another situation. For example, a person may be being a leader in a community project such as a campaign to build a local bike path, or a project to secure employment for long-term unemployed people, while not being a leader in her friendship group or her Rotary club or job. In the following month, she may take on being a leader amongst her friends or at work, and have someone else be a leader in the bike path campaign.

Being a leader is a proposition, a malleable, changing proposition.

2. A leader is given by that choice, and not by other people and their choices. In other words, a leader is a leader by virtue of his own choice or declaration.

A person is being a leader because he is choosing being a leader. Being a leader is not given by some quality or characteristic dispensed at birth. Or by training. Or by reading “how to become a leader” books and blog posts.

Being a leader is given by a choice. Moreover, it’s a choice made by the person being a leader; it’s not a matter of being “anointed” a leader.

For example, say the CEO asks you to become the Program Director on the project to develop a new type of credit card and you say “yes”. It can look as if the choice for you to be a leader was the CEO’s.

Not so. For at least two reasons:

  • you said “yes”; until you gave an answer it wasn’t a choice, it was an offer
  • every day, you still have to get up and go to work and make something happen; every day, every moment, it’s you who is making the choice to be a leader.

Consider something else. Say a colleague, M, is hired as one of 10 business analysts on the credit card project. M too might choose to be a leader. For example, M might start talking to his colleagues and you, the Program Director, about using a new method of developing a prototype he’s seen work well elsewhere. No-one asked M to investigate a new method. M just chose to do so, to be a leader on the project.

… to be continued

Next post: More implications

Image: The flight of the dragonfly in front of the sun, Joan Miró, 1968

***

If you enjoyed this post …

If you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy: