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- “Let George do it”: Markets are shrinking. The product development pipeline is dry. Yet, everyone is content to pass the buck as they wait for (George) someone else — an innovative, brilliant leader to arrive and save the day. Vice presidents defer to senior vice presidents who defer to C-level executives, all of whom defer to the CEO, who rarely has a magical solution. These vertical boundaries are not easy to cross effectively.
- “Yes, but”: Another familiar refrain: “Yes, I will stand up and lead change, but I need total control over how it turns out.” In their push for happy outcomes, leaders often do not want to give colleagues time and space to innovate or find new ways of responding to change in the business climate and broader world. By sacrificing a thorough process, they get the same old results. Almost all difficult challenges require a number of stakeholders to work together.
- “Either-or”: With their intense, change-management focus on numbers and operations, leaders give the people side of their organizations short-shrift. There’s not enough time to deal with sticky culture issues, they say. Ultimately, though, culture eats strategy for breakfast – and it will consume their operations, too. All supply-chains require traversing horizontal boundaries. You must be able to both work in your area and work effectively with “others” in order to connect the “silos” in the supply-chain process .
- “Check if off the list”: Leaders with a results-oriented, analytical mindset want to check “culture change” off their list as fast as possible. But it doesn’t work that way. Lasting organizational change can take several quarters, if not years. Impatience will sink it in a hurry.
Leading Together – Taking the Hard Road
March 30th, 2011Leading Together – Taking the Hard Road
By John B. McGuire
When did taking the easy way out become the way to do business? Or to boost the economy, build communities, improve our schools, raise our kids and solve our problems? When did we decide that leadership was a cushy job?
Deep down, don’t you remember the thrill of taking the hard road? The anxious anticipation of uncharted territory, the uncertainty of crossing into new frontiers? The surprises and different views encountered as you stepped into new territory, the ability to do what seemed beyond reach? The pride of personal achievement and the camaraderie of shared experience?
For too many leaders, it’s become all-too-easy to win “their way”, drive the numbers, or hammer home their point of view. “I did it my way” was great for Sinatra, but is a failed pathway where collaboration across boundaries is a requirement for doing business.
Others take the route of avoiding the big, long-term challenges in favor of their own short-term gain. The two year—I got mine (take the money and run) personal economic ethic is too prevalent in too many corporations. Sustainable, strategic, long-term organizational health is a hard road.
Leaders take on the big complex challenges—managers take on the easy, quick wins. In today’s complex, interdependent world, big challenges always requires working together across multiple groups effectively. The short-term, task orientation of just kicking the can down the road is an all-too-easy, well-established strategy in both business and public life. Even compromising – which only gives a nod to multiple views – has become just an easy out.
The problem is that none of these easy roads take us where we need to go. They circle around the tough stuff and drain our energy. Meanwhile, the complex challenges loom above. Like building clouds that threaten dark days ahead, these tactics of avoidance make certain that storms of calamity are pushed off for uncertain tomorrows, rather than leading through them today.
So, how do we tackle conflict and complexity? How do we move beyond “Us versus Them” and create genuine win-win options? How do face up to options that are good for customers, constituents, consumers and our employees simultaneously? How do we look at the challenges and integrate all the right answers into innovative, best-for-all solutions? How do we – together – take the difficult journeys and become even stronger and more capable?
At CCL, we’ve seen business, government and community leaders answer these questions through collaboration, creativity and commitment. Working together across groups, organizations and even countries is tough.
Collaboration moves beyond compromise in which everyone loses something in hopes of gaining a little. Collaborative work uses dialogue, not debate, to deeply understand the problems we face. Then it generates multiple options, integrating the best ones into sustainable solutions. Collaboration fosters a creative process that combines and integrates the perspectives of the many into something new.
Collaboration is a shift to problem-solving. It is a shift away from blame and political one-upmanship and, instead, demands that collective leadership take 100 percent responsibility for outcomes. This is the no-blame zone. In this zone there can be no “Us versus Them” because the we are them.
The complexity of our leadership challenges requires creativity. We need new mindsets—bigger minds–and new processes to explore multiple right answers and to integrate them into the best solution available now. Creativity is an attitude of learning in the moment, paying attention and telling the truth about root causes. Only with creativity will we find collaborative, sustainable solutions to the complex problems our institutions, businesses and communities are experiencing.
But to collaborate and create effectively, we need to build the trust and stamina that comes from deep commitment. The hard work of leadership across boundaries involves setting direction, creating alignment and fostering shared commitment. It is especially challenging – and essential – when facing a situation that is big or complex, messy, unclear or emotion-laden.
You strengthen and show your commitment when you:
Resolve to stop arguing and start talking. Forget about “I’m right and you’re wrong.” Listen to understand and learn.
Resolve to stop blaming. Leave behind fault finding. Instead, focus on outcome-based bridge building.
Resolve to stop fighting for resources. Taking what you can, when you can, because you can is no way to lead (and no way to live).
Resolve to take responsibility for shared success. Let go of the illusion that you are not connected. Leadership isn’t about your own success; it’s about the success of your clients and customers, your suppliers and employees, your local neighbors and your global connections.
Resolve to grow bigger minds. Take time out for learning, reflection and possibility. Consider the problem or opportunity through a larger or different lens.
Finally, resolve to take the right, hard road. It may be painful at times, but I promise: the view is worth it.
John McGuire is a senior faculty member and Transformation Practice Leader at CCL and co-author of Transforming Your Leadership Culture.
Stepping Up to Lead Collaborative Change
March 30th, 2011Stepping Up to Lead Collaborative Change
By John B. McGuire
Across our cities, our countries, and our world, leaders are in crisis. They – we – struggle with practical fiscal and policy issues while wrestling with deep, values-based questions: Who and what do we represent? What do we need to do to work across all the boundaries required to be effective–how do we need to behave as organizations? How do we survive in challenging times and move toward an uncertain future?
Permeating many of our challenges is a fear of change. This fear itself is a boundary beyond which lurks the unknown. Business, political and community leaders alike are overwhelmed by the rapid change they’ve experienced already and the complexity and ambiguity that the future holds. Many of us hesitate to lead in the face of change, uncertain of the both the process and the outcomes.
To face the challenges of the future we must learn to work together across myriad boundaries, and to do this our ailing systems need to be transformed. Local institutions, governments, educational institutions, non-profits, and businesses (both large and small) must be able to shift and adapt as organizations – which requires leaders who will step up to lead in fundamentally new ways. We need leaders who are able to change mindsets in order to change behaviors in order to change organizational practices in order to transform their businesses, their communities and the future.
Sound too far “out there” to be practical? Maybe so, but when the stakes are high and no one knows what “business as usual” means anymore, we’ve found that investing in leadership transformation is a powerful strategy. The question is, then, how does this transformation take place?
At CCL, our research and work with executives has revealed some fundamental facts about how transformation can happen in organizations – and that work offers a roadmap for our local and regional leaders as well. Here’s some of what we know:
You can’t wish away change and uncertainty. Transformation in organizations begins when leaders embrace ambiguity and uncertainty rather than hiding from it, or dismissing it with a well-rehearsed response. Instead of trying to master uncertainty and avoid complexity through tactics, procedures, micro-managing or denial, leaders need to accept the VUCA world. Describing the context of leadership as Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous is almost a cliché in some circles, but surprisingly few leaders understand or accept the implications that a VUCA world has on their organizations, customers, supply chains and communities. The post-global financial crisis is a mega-example. Every community faces the ripple effects of fiscal challenges and shrinking resources.
You can’t ask others to do what you won’t do yourself. Leaders who want their organizations to change and adapt must change themselves first. They need to grow bigger minds to deal with bigger issues. They must stop looking outside for someone or something else to change and take a hard look at their existing beliefs. They need to develop the ability to spot what no longer works and replace them with better ideas.
KONE , a global leader in the elevator and escalator industry, needed to build trust and openness within the senior leadership team in order to address business challenges. As CEO Vance Tang says, “We had to appreciate that we had to change ourselves first in order to change the culture.”
You must cultivate interdependence. Now is the time to pursue a new leadership culture, one that enacts (not just pays lip service to) collaboration, flexibility and boundary spanning. For several years my colleagues and I have been focusing on leadership culture, driven by the core idea that we need to develop not only individual leaders, but also collective, interdependent leadership.
Here’s what we’ve learned: leadership is a social process, and there is a hierarchy of leadership cultures – from dependent to independent to interdependent. Each advancing stage of culture is more capable of dealing with complexity, working effectively across boundaries and leading change. So, if you need to solve complex problems, adapt quickly, generate future-ready strategies and drive change, you need to develop interdependent leadership.
Senior managers of a global consulting organization put their goal for leadership culture change into writing: they wrote and posted a “Declaration of Interdependence” as a commitment to their connectivity and shared success. They understood that they needed to truly collaborate, using dialogue, beyond debate, to deeply understand the problems they and their clients face. Collectively, the senior leadership agreed to model the mindset and the behaviors that will lead to multiple options, creative solutions and a highly flexible organization of groups working collaboratively with each other.
Transforming leadership culture begins with senior leaders taking these three steps. But how that takes place and where those steps lead is not quick, easy or formulaic. But it can be done. Do you wonder what it would look like if it were done in your own organization and community?
John McGuire is a senior faculty member and Transformation Practice Leader at the CCL and co-author of Transforming Your Leadership Culture.
Four Mindsets that Block Change
November 14th, 2010Four Mindsets that Block Organization Change
By John B. McGuire
Even as the global recession gradually recedes, our volatile economy and advancing technology makes change unavoidable for all of us. Whether it’s lingering high unemployment, rollercoaster financial markets or political turmoil, the landscape and its’ boundaries for leaders keeps shifting – and most of us are quite uncomfortable in it.
That’s understandable. Change, after all, entails risk and conflict. Every boundary and border that must be crossed in order to face these challenges brings the fear and stress of leaving behind the old routine and venturing into the unknown. For leaders, whose decisions in this climate have tremendous implications for colleagues, clients and their own careers, the pressure is even greater.
And that makes change leadership the vital – and often missing – link for grappling successfully with uncertainty. For individuals, change is challenging enough. It pushes us to learn, think and act in new ways as we step from familiar safe zones and into new and unfamiliar territory. For organizations, change demands that same response from entire groups of people, whether they are corporate divisions or military units or sports teams.
Large-scale, effective change only happens when an organization’s culture is transformed – and that work calls for sophisticated leadership skills. It also requires patience and preparation because individuals and organizations typically do everything they can to resist change … and for good reasons.
When change leadership succeeds, however, exciting changes in the culture follow. Those organizational dynamics that senior executives dream about, from agility and speed to execution and teamwork, can manifest themselves. I’ve seen it happen with clients, and these positive changes are exciting to behold. Employee morale rises. Innovation increases. Bottom-line performance improves.
That happens when leaders focus more on leading change than merely managing it. Indeed, knowing the difference between management and leadership in your day-to-day work is more important now than ever. First, though, a word about change management: it’s not easy, and its value shouldn’t be underestimated. It focuses on external systems and processes with the goal of streamlining operations and creating new markets. It takes mental toughness, foresight and strong analytic skills.
But it can only take an organization so far. Change management, in the end, is always about technical efforts designed to minimize uncertainty and risk. It aims to create a predictable world. But the world, as we’ve been reminded over the past two years of economic strife, is not predictable. It is highly uncertain – and that’s where change leadership matters. Change leadership recognizes that human systems and organizational cultures cannot be guided by business strategy alone. Business strategies need to be paired with leadership strategies. When they aren’t, companies find again and again that their people have not developed the leadership skills actually needed to enact a well-designed strategy.
Leadership is a social process and for it to be effective we have to talk to each other effectively. This is not about better communications or a training course. Rather we mean that people have to have conversations in which they can show up, be real, drop their shields and be authentic with each other. Every new boundary we must cross in human relationships requires making sense of in that social process, and as leaders that is not a simple challenge. Most leaders naturally shy away from it.
At the Center for Creative Leadership, we’ve identified four mindsets that cause people to retreat from leading change and to resort to the old, comfortable task of simply managing operations. Recognizing and reversing these mindsets builds the groundwork for real and lasting culture change:
John McGuire is a senior faculty member at the Center for Creative Leadership’s Colorado Springs campus and co-author of Transforming Your Leadership Culture.