The Elephant in the Board Room

I can’t think of single textbook on leadership that says it. MBA programs certainly don’t: it would be against their interests. And it would be the kiss of death for consultants to provide advice to the effect. An article in Forbes said so in 2013 but it wasn’t quite what needed to be said. It’s an elephant that sits there, in the room at performance review time, at the interview and when promotions are dished out. So I will, say it, at the risk of becoming really unpopular.

There are people, probably quite a few of them, who should not be allowed to be in leadership/management positions.

Personality traits and cognitive schemas are two aspects of the human condition that underpin a good chunk of our behaviour, if not most of it. They are both very resilient and are unlikely to change very much except in the face of a relatively powerful experience with a strong emotional component. This is especially true if the trait is strong and the cognitive schema well established. Weaker traits and schema may change with experience.

Most people are aware of personality traits and have probably completed a DISC profile or an MBTI at some stage of their working life. These are great tests and useful. However, the Big 5 personality traits are the only ones recognised by psychologists to consistently predict behaviour, based on an enormous body of research. It is not surprising, but disappointing to see some very strange personality tests used by some consultants and described in books, that would be about as useful as a horoscope. But, like a horoscope they give people something to talk about even if they not very relevant to real life.

Cognitive schemas are values, attitudes and beliefs: our dogmas and holy cows. These are learned but are powerful predictors of behaviour. There is a barrow load of research to show that people are more likely to act on their schemas than on facts if the latter contradict the former. Our schemas are at the heart of our decision-making.

It goes without saying that people who like to use bullying tactics should be out of the leadership frame. However, bullying still seems to be a popular pastime in many workplaces, particularly the public sector, education and health. But none are immune from the problem. Of course bullying is illegal in most western economies. Strangely, though, bullies still seem to survive despite it having serious consequences to employee engagement and subsequent poor performance and quality. That other flaw in personality, the psychopath, also manages to thrive in organisations largely due to guile and the inability of people to spot them until it’s too late. But these are extremes and there is a much more common problem with personality and management/leadership.

Using the Big 5, it is my view that people will have trouble being a leader/manager if they are low on Openness to Experience (willingness to try something new), very high on Conscientiousness (need to plan, organise and control-inflexible), and low on Stability (highly anxious). Similarly people will have difficulty if they are low on empathy, low on optimism, have high control needs, have trouble self-reflecting and are low on trust.

Any one of these predilections is likely to lead to problems being a leader or manager. A combination of them is likely to be lethal.

Most people in an organisation know who the capable managers/leaders are and who are the misfits. But apart from whispers in the tea-room and at the annual Christmas party many organisations (leaders of) do not act. Many organisations don't consider these characteristics when they recruit or promote. And spare me the nonsense about being able to weed out misfits at interview. It is all too easy to pull the wool over the eyes of an interview panel. Ask any psychopath!

Of course there’s not a profile of a perfect manager/leader and neither should there be. Different people make the world go round and certainly make it a more interesting place. But I wouldn’t allow a surgeon with low attention to detail operate on me, or a lawyer who annoys the hell out of judges with her abrasiveness to represent me in court. You wouldn't be keen on having an accountant who is low on Conscientiousness. Well you shouldn’t. My psychologist needs to be high on empathy.

We need to apply the same standards to management and leadership. Until we do management can hardly call itself a profession given anyone seems to be able to be lifted to the position with minimal scrutiny. Mostly people are recruited to be managers/leaders because they are good at their profession.

Sorry, but the abilities needed to fly an aircraft, build a bridge or teach a classroom of children are not the same that we need to manage/lead people.

The Mental Model Trap in ‘Experts’

One of the workshops I conduct has to do with learning. In fact it is about a particular theory of learning that Chris Kenyon and I developed in 2000, and that has gained some traction, particularly in Europe and the USA. If you are interested in following it up on Dr Google, it’s called heutagogy or self-determined learning. What the theory does is to challenge some education orthodoxies. It does this by virtue of some very convincing research and neuroscience evidence that sheds new light on how the human brain learns. http://heutagogycop.wordpress.com.

One of the tenets of self-determined learning is that the focus should be on the needs, motivations, interests of the learner, and contextually relevant. Thus, it is learner-centric and the focus is very much off the teacher as a guru regarding the delivery of content. This is aided and abetted by the fact that you can get most of what you want to know via the internet and social networking (phone a friend or guru if you need to) as long as you know how to filter the wheat from the chaff. And, indeed, that is a central skill that people in this day and age need to learn. 

So, in my workshops, which are based on self-determined learning principles (it is good to avoid the label of hypocrite if possible), participants are invited to access specific content themselves in groups rather than listen (or not listen) to me talk.  Then we discuss about what they have found and apply what has been learned. I won’t go into details but the idea is to make the process learner centred, enable them to learn from each other by sharing experiences, and to provide an opportunity to pursue a particular area of interest.

What I have found is that ‘expert’ groups, that is people who are experienced trainers and educators, are more likely to be non-compliant compared to the less experienced. On reflection, this is also true when I conduct leadership or organisational development programs that involves people who see themselves as already ‘expert’. Instead of opening themselves up to something new they use their existing mental models and just do what they have always done.

Peter Senge talked about the restrictive nature of mental models in his book ‘The Fifth Discipline’ and psychologists call the same phenomenon ‘Schema’. They are the result of our values, attitudes, beliefs and experiences. The result is a pretty formidable driver of behaviour that is quite difficult to change. Hence, the tendency to revert to the default position when one sees oneself as an expert.

Those who do not see themselves as expert are much more likely to open themselves up to possibilities. Vulnerability may indeed be a key to learning.

So, is it possible to engage in some personal reflection when confronted with the possibility of learning something new? Can we put our previous experience, what we know, aside for a while and explore? Afterwards we can then integrate the old and the new into something that we can understand and use. It seems to me that this is a very mature and powerful thing to be able to do for anyone who sees themselves as ‘expert’, whatever that is.

Influence 101

I’ve just spent a wonderful week talking about learning, leadership and organisational behaviour in Brussels. It’s a tough gig but someone has to do it. A very full week and now it is time to head to the Netherlands for a couple of days of much needed R and R.

After my very last session, which involved mainly managers from a variety of departments I was asked a very challenging question. In fact I was asked many challenging questions during the week, which is no bad thing.  This one involved why I spent time at the beginning of the session showing slides of Australia, such as a beach near our house that is empty, snaps of me with a big fish, kangaroos on a golf course, snakes and crocodiles, that sort of thing. Then I had an activity that involved a lot of participation by the group, although there is a specific learning point at the end. He said that people come along to get to the point not look at pictures of Australia. After all they are busy people.

This was a good point. It also strikes at the heart of two issues. One is the power of influence, as opposed to compliance. The other is process in relation to task.

One of the major factors in influencing other people is the quality of the relationship. In a group setting, and this was my answer, it is important to invest some time in creating a relationship, a bond, between myself and the audience (that I often don’t know) and that doesn’t know me. Sharing stuff about me with which people identify, smiling, eye contact, moving around, using humour and getting people laughing, being relaxed and being open, creates a more positive atmosphere in which people feel more comfortable in opening up. In this particular case, the result was a very lively session where the process ended being taken over by the group. Wonderful! And it seems to work consistently when I take the time to do it.

The same applies to influence with smaller groups, such as meetings for example, and with individuals. Taking a few moments to chat about the weekend, the family (theirs and yours) and so on is an important investment. As is creating a positive relationship with one’s employees in general. Do it and watch the results.

When I run activities with leadership groups or teams in workplace training programs there is a constant. Groups and individuals when given a task will universally forget process and try to solve the probelm without planning, without establishing communication and so on. You know the leadership theory as well as I do. It seems there is a human predilection to want to go straight to solving problems rather than using all the so called ‘soft stuff’. And some people are very tasked focussed and get frustrated if there is not immediate application.

And so that is the second reason I spend time to create this relationship. It is a lesson in process that needs to come before task for the participants. It fosters engagement.

Finally, it is also vital to close with the ‘soft stuff’ too With reward and recognition. With warmth and gratitude. It doesn’t cost much and may prove to be a powerful investment.

The Big Picture

I spent the best part of today wandering the expansive corridors of the Musee D’Orsay in Paris. In fact, it would probably take at least another day to absorb all that it has to offer but off to the Louvre tomorrow. Hopefully, tomorrow will be as inspirational as today which provided me with a great psychological metaphor.

The Musee D’Orsay has a great collection of impressionist artists such as Monet, Manet, Degas, Cezanne, Pissarro and, of course, Renoir. Apart from the pure genius of how these guys used a paintbrush and their paints, there were a few other takeaways about human behaviour as I peered closely at each brush stroke on the canvas and then slowly backed away to look from a distance.

The first thing to notice, particularly with the work of Monet, who was a master of this style, is that the devil is not in the detail. There is no detail at all when you look closely. The picture is a bit of a blur and, in some cases, you no idea what you are looking at: just daubs of paint going this way and that with apparent randomness. It is only when you retreat that the picture makes sense and your mind gasps. Another thing is that these blokes were not afraid to use colour. Again, close up the shades of purple, green, blues and reds don’t seem right. But it all changes when you step back, sometimes onto the toes of some poor soul who is behind you. There is no such thing as white in these impressionist paintings. White for them is a mixture of all sorts of colours but it looks perfect from a distance.

You’ve probably guessed at the metaphor in all this for human behaviour, leadership and for organisational life. That it is the big picture that matters not so much the detail. We can get so caught up in just getting everything just so, the ducks lined up that we miss the real purpose and the important outcome of what we are doing. This is particularly true in a climate of change, which we seem to be in constantly these days. Great painters are able to translate what they see for others in magical ways. Good leaders know how to do this too and make sure everyone is on the same canvas. Knowing where you are going, being a part of something bigger, purpose is a basic human need and motivator

As the old aphorism states, ‘The whole is more than the sum of its parts’. A friend of mine in the UK used to point out that you can have all the right ingredients for a pudding but there is tremendous variability in how the pudding turns out. No-one could make apple crumble like my grandma using exactly the same ingredients. I’ve tried.

Another interesting thing about the impressionists is that when they started showing their work the public was not at all impressed. One critic even when so far as to suggest that wallpaper had more to offer than their paintings. The work of Monet and company was such a departure from previous art, from what the people were used to, that they were unable to appreciate it. Instead it was dismissed as not being real art. Not only did they paint outside in real light so that their work was vibrant with bright colour but the subject matter was different. They portrayed Parisian daily life and were not frightened to make bold statements with their choice of subject.

And now their works are worth zillions of dollars. Who wouldn’t mind Springtime at Giverny or Wild Poppies instead of wall paper in their lounge room?

It sometimes takes huge persistence and resilience to get a great idea accepted, to get enough adopters to get to that magic tipping point: to manage the naysayers and survive the criticism. And it takes passion and the ability to see an even bigger canvas than what currently exists. It is a future canvas.

Think of the excitement of painting something that is invisible to everyone else but you. And the challenge of getting others to see it.

Now that’s leadership.

Dealing with Ambiguity: A Critical Leadership Capability

There is a revolution in the air that seems to be escaping our nations leaders and managers in politics and all manner of organisations alike. The more conservative among them are even more myopic to what is happening, given their tendency to view change as akin to the black plague. As David Price in his new book, ‘Open’, points out there has been a radical shift in the way people obtain information, learn, collaborate and organise themselves. This has all been brought about by the internet and its progeny such as social media.

People now can use their inherent capacity to learn (an ability they had in spades until they went to school) to develop their knowledge and skills in pretty well any area of endeavour. And they do. They find out how to manage their disease, how to use a lathe, growing great orchids, build some shelves in the shed, cook a fabulous vindaloo lamb, the list is endless. All done without necessarily enrolling in a course, without going to a guru. Instead they bring the gurus to them. It’s all there with a few strokes of the keyboard and a search engine. Recently, I learned how to turn a bowl on a lathe from watching YouTube clips made my experts around the globe.

Groups form at will through media such as Twitter to talk about issues of interest. My own Twitter ‘tribe’ consists of a coterie of educational practitioners from all around the world. We share information and talk about what interests us through our blogs, Slideshare, YouTube, Vimeo and other amazing communication tools. Louis Suarez (not the footballer) talks about how to run highly effective and engaged teams through the power of internal social media. There are now numerous examples of how vast crowds of volunteers to deal with disaster situations and protesters to effect political change through community action can be recruited in only a few hours if not minutes using social media.

What this demonstrates to me is that people are intrinsically motivated given the right conditions and that they can self-organise. The internet has managed to create the conditions that enable people to achieve their best.

We have known this for a long time but it is largely ignored for a number of reasons that I won’t go into here. People function best at work or any endeavour for that matter when they have autonomy, clear goals, the freedom to be creative, the capacity to obtain requisite skills and capability, information, participation in decision-making and strategy, variety, meaningfulness or purpose, support and respect, and a desirable future. People can self-organise in groups and effectively project manage them. All of these factors contribute to engagement, which is know to increase productivity, effectiveness, innovation and quality.

Our current management systems in many organisations do not cater well for the sort of ambiguity that is needed for these factors to be realised. Rather, they are controlling, rigid, and designed to repress rather than unleash potential. The research has shown that employees in these sorts of organisations are disengaged and productivity and effectiveness suffers dramatically.

It takes leaders/managers with specific abilities to be able to develop and function with an organisational culture that is ambiguous. They need to be low on the need for control, high on openness to experience, have a mature tolerance to mistakes, not be overly perfectionistic, have high emotional stability, be able to learn, be collaborative and have excellent interpersonal skills, among other things.

If I were designing a job application for a new manager or leader (or maybe any employee for that matter) it would have, ‘The capacity to manage ambiguity’, as the number one required attribute.

No, no, no, no………oooooh, yes: Self-control in Action

You may well have had the following conversation, or similar since it is only a metaphor, in your head at some stage in your life, maybe even daily.

Hmmm, yummy chocolate! No I’ll be good! Just ignore it. No! Find something else to look at. Take the damn things away would you. Gee, that chocolate looks good. I haven’t had any for at least two days. I’ve worked hard. One bit won’t matter. Mmmmmmmmmm! Lovely.

It may not have been chocolate. Maybe it was exercising. You hadn’t got out of bed early enough that morning and told yourself that you would catch up on it that evening. As the day wears on the resolve starts to flicker and then gets dimmer towards knocking off time or on the bus home. Nah, I’ll do it tomorrow.

It could be trying to contain frustration, not scream at the traffic, being nice to someone who is hard to be nice to, not arguing with your teenager, or making those awkward phone calls rather than avoiding them. And of course it could be managing any one of several addictions.

Self-control is a very topical issue from the glossy pages of gossip magazines discussing how to change habits to the more austere thoughts of gurus talking about the attributes of successful leaders. With respect to the latter, self-control has indeed been suggested as an essential element of being a good leader. If you buy into the claims of emotional intelligence, which I personally don’t, self-control is one of the key factors found within this rather paper thin theory. Nonetheless, there is a lot of evidence to show that self-control is a good life skill to have for a whole lot of reasons that are relatively obvious.

There is some recent, neat research, however, suggesting that being able to master self-control may be more complicated than it sounds. It seems that there are two interesting factors that may impede that ability to resist that addiction or that habitual response.

The first of these is what can best be called resistance fatigue. It seems that if we have had to be strong and resist a number of times early in the day then our ability to resist perhaps another temptation later on might falter. So, saying no to too many things might mean you are more likely to fail on at least one of them and then be disappointed. A part of us might think that because we have been so good, and resisted for so long that we deserve a treat, a reward for good behaviour. Then afterwards we beat ourselves up with guilt. After all that was what guilt was invented for. This effect sits well with a fairly well accepted idea that we should try to focus on one change at a time rather than lots. Psychologists also break these changes down into steps, to make it even easier.

The other is that it is often harder to resist temptation later in the day. Presumably that is due to tiredness. Self-control takes a lot of effort and energy. We have to be self-aware all the time, alert to danger as it were, then make the effort to actually resist, to self-regulate. This takes some serious self-talk and is stressful given we are often fighting against a powerful impulse.

So, we need to be alert at the times of the day when we are least likely to want to be alert given we are tired. It’s a bit like sports teams or athletes that manage to lose games in the last few minutes because they relax. Good coaching tries to avoid this natural response to tiredness and stress. And we need to only change a few habits at a time or link them in a way that makes follow the other. Just learning to control one’s emotions is likely to have positive effects in all sorts of other ways, for example. Don’t try and give up two addictions at the same time.

If you are a leader then you need to be on guard when you are stressed or tired, or when you have lots of things happening in your head, your life. This is the time you are most vulnerable to doing lots of damage. This is the time when you need to be very careful to pay more attention to what others are saying, staying even and calm, maintaining relationships, putting others first and so on. When stressed do the mundane things, practical things that don’t involve people. Don’t schedule meetings at the end of the day if you want a good outcome.

And this is even more true in our loving relationships. So many times in my clinical work I see people knock their best friend out of the ring when they need them the most. It seems that we are prone to taking out our stress, losing our control around people who love us. Presumably we relax enough to do that because we feel it is safe. Wrong! Again, this is the time when we need to be most aware and draw our loved ones to us rather than push them away.