Archive for Teams

Vision and Limits: Creating a Space for Learning and Innovation

January 17, 2009 / / One comment

Carman writes: Hi Lisa,  I’ll try to paraphrase your questions:

1. Is emergent (bottom-up) organization compatible with goals and direction (top-down)?

2. When is the imposition of limits appropriate?

Morgan explains that “the intelligence of the human brain is not predetermined, predesigned, or  preplanned. Indeed, it is not centrally driven in any way. It is a decentralized emergent phenomenon. Intelligence evolves.” (p.94)

Morgan calls vision, norms, values or limits “cybernetic reference points.” Though they guide behavior and prevent complete randomness they also create a valuable space “in which learning and innovation can occur.”

To return to the example of the trainees:

Managers seem to have slain the goose to get the golden egg (forgive the worn-out analogy). Conversely, by referring to the philosophy (vision and values) of the organization they might have avoided short-term thinking (and the tyranny of targets!) and encouraged the emergence of new behaviours.

For example, might trainees eventually have fostered more effective ways of serving clients (and accomplishing goals)? Might such behaviour have enabled new insights and learning for managers? In short, could managers have learned from learners?

Tomorrow we can discuss single-loop versus double-loop learning if you like Lisa. Once we have beggared the brain metaphor perhaps you would like to select the Morgan metaphor that especially interests you.

Well, I’m off to the Stanley Park seawall, which I love to walk each weekend. Sometimes I see seals and sometimes they see me. Heavy fog in Vancouver today. Reminds me of a Conan Doyle novel. Sweet symphony from KUWY (on computer) without and Starbucks coffee within–the Lark is ascending!

Bye for now!

Carman,  It’s such a treat to read your posts!  Yes, I look forward to your thoughts on single-loop and double-loop learning.  Are you familiar with Robert Hargrove’s triple-loop learning model?  It heavily inspired my (current) transformative-holistic learning model: 

http://creativeleadercoach.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/model.gif

Your day sounds very pleasant! We’ve had a taste of summer-like weather here the past few days in Southern California, and it makes me look forward to the long, warm days, again.

Talk soon, Lisa

Category: All Posts, Change, Creativity, Culture, Design, Innovation, Organization, Partnership, Teams, Vision /

Unleashing Collaborative Power in the Workplace

January 17, 2009 / / 2 comments

If you are interested in how Partnership approaches to leadership can unleash collaborative power in the workplace, I encourage you to check out Cynthia King’s Creating Partnerships: Unleashing Collaborative Power in the Workplace (2005).   

See more at: http://www.creating-partnerships.com/

Category: All Posts, Change, Collaboration, Culture, Leadership, Organization, Partnership, Teams /

What kind of dance are we doing?

August 3, 2008 / / No comments

In my last post, I succumbed 🙂 to using the dance analogy for describing how we negotiate what is taking place in any interaction or relationship. We could use the term “negotiation” or “game” but the first suggests conscious “strategy” and even manipulation, and for me, the second invokes transactional analysis, which describes some common scripts or “dances” that people tend to engage in together.

No, the term “dance” works well because while it can involve conscious intention, it’s more holistic, reflecting both the mental and physical, conscious and subconscious interactions. Given that 80% or more of communication is non-verbal, this analogy reminds us that our body language and tone of voice are conveying much more than our words do.

These dances happen on a very small scale (what kind of conversation are we having with ourselves?) to a very large scale (national and global). For example, most of us are familiar with the classic “dysfunctional family dance” in which grown children return home only to find themselves in the sway of old roles and communication patterns. There are the all-too-common painful dances of co-dependence and addiction, of victim and victimizer, and conversely, the constructive and pleasurable dances of supportive friendships and high performing teams.

The dance we do is always at least partly a reaction or response to the dance that other people are doing. Just as in some forms of dance, one person moves forward and the other moves backwards, people tend to respond to each other in complementary ways, which may evolve into more structured roles. As a day-to-day example, after dinner, I clear the table and my husband does the dishes. We didn’t plan it that way — it just evolved. Small, organic organizations typically evolve this way, and as they grow the roles become more formalized.

Therefore, one way of thinking about culture, including organizational culture, is as a dance of complementary relationships. As with families, these dynamics can be constructive or dysfunctional. Either way, the power of the situation very often leads us to react in ways that tend to perpetuate that situation.

In my next post, we’ll consider the Stanford Prison experiment as an example of how easily a professor and a group of college students were able to slip into a highly dystopian dance within a very short period of time through the power of role playing. The purpose is to illustrate the power of role playing to create rather gripping realities. We are all already doing this today, but we are not always consciously aware of it. By becoming consciously aware of these dynamics, we are better able to respond in ways that create the outcomes we want.

Practice
1. Make a list of your significant relationships. These may include work-related relationships and can include relationships with groups as a whole.
2. What role do you play in each relationship? What role do others play in relation to you?
3. Do you notice any patterns?
4. What are the outcomes for you? for others?

Category: All Posts, Change, Communication, Culture, Leadership, Organization, Teams /

Example: How a shift in perspective can shift a situation

July 26, 2008 / / One comment

We are all hardwired to respond to subtle social cues. Smiles, laughter, yawning — are all contagious. Studies have shown that when we are in tune with others we unconsciously adapt our body/language to be compatible with theirs.

This unconscious mimicry of physical expression tends to invoke a similar emotional or psychological effect: Someone smiles at us and we smile back; their good feeling becomes our good feeling. To test this premise, smile now and notice how it lifts your spirits. (It feels great and it’s also good for you: professor of psychology Barbara L. Fredrickson hypothesizes that positive emotions can help undo the damaging effects of stress.) This mimicry is considered a biological/psychological/sociological foundation of empathy.

A colleague shared an insight from her own experience. In contrast to her husband, who is outspokenly judgmental, “Barbara” has always kept her thoughts to herself. However, as she has become more aware of her own faults, she had become less judgmental and more compassionate towards others: her perspective changed, and her thoughts and quality of being followed.

Because she had never shared her thoughts, she had assumed that this “internal” shift was completely private, until a family member appreciatively noted how much less judgmental she is “nowadays.” Although she had never said a word, her attitudes had come through in her body language, eyes — her whole presence. And, that had affected the way that people felt around her.

It’s easy to imagine how Barbara’s earlier judgments might have created some subtle or not-so-subtle distance in those relationships, and how this distance would have made it more likely that she would continue to judge and find fault; it can also lead to others judging her negatively in turn: “She is always frowning at me!”

In turn, her new attitude of compassion has clearly strengthened her relationships, creating a more positive dynamic. Although the analogy of dance might be a bit over used today, we might imagine that they are all doing a different dance together. This is about more than feeling good (a good in itself): putting on our practical “ends-oriented” hat, we can also notice that the before and after situations have very different potentials, for example, in terms of what the participants might accomplish together.

Similarly, as leaders, our perspectives and thoughts affect the way we “show up,” the dynamics of the situation, and ultimately, its potential.

This is something we all already “know” from our own experience. However, our cultural emphasis on “doing” often blinds us to how a shift in our perspective (“our being”) can transform a situation in ways that no amounts of “doing” under the old paradigm could accomplish…

Practice
1. Begin to notice how the way other people “show up” affects you, and how you are inclined to “show up” with them.

2. After you have some experience with practice #1, you might begin to notice how differences in the way you “show up” affects others and the situation. A constructive experiment, if you are not already doing this regularly, would be to practice actively looking for the positive in others and notice how it shifts the dynamics of the relationship and situation.

Please feel free to share your experiences here.

Category: All Posts, Change, Communication, Culture, Leadership, Teams /

Organization as Organism & Machine

May 9, 2008 / / 15 comments

In my last post we backed our way into a discussion of an emerging way of thinking about leadership and organization: the metaphor of the organization as an organsim. 

 http://www.creativeleadercoach.com/2008/05/01/the-brain-as-a-metaphor-for-organization/

As we talked about earlier, metaphors are maps of the terrain that can yield some useful insights, so we don’t need to hold on to them too tightly (as an ideology). Rather, when considering a metaphor we might ask two questions:

  1. Does it have some basis in reality?
  2. Is it useful?

Whereas the organization as a machine metaphor can be seen to have arisen out of Newtonian physics (the view of the Cosmos as machine) and the industrial revolution, the metaphor of the organization as an organism has its recent roots in new physics and biology, and the framework of systems theory, which observes that the whole has emergent properties that can’t be fully explained by examining each of the parts. Rather these properties emerge as a result of the relationship and interaction of the parts. 

I’ll apologize in advance for this: A useful but gorey example that is often given is that you sacrifice an animal and examine each of its parts, you won’t find life; life is an emergent property of the whole animal.  The same could be said of  a well-functioning team: a quality emerges in the interaction that only exists in potential in the individual team members.

 Seeing relationships vs. parts requires us to shift our vision. Are you familiar with the famous cognitive optical illusion: the figure-ground vase? http://www.123opticalillusions.com/pages/Facevase.php

The image can be validly interpreted as two faces or as a vase. The one we see is the result of a mental interpretation, which may or may not be conscious. Once we’ve seen one view, it can be a challenge to see the other, because our current perspective is so obvious to us!  Yet, if we look for the other figure, as described by others (or the text), we can see that as well.  

And so it is with our metaphors of organization (and the cosmos). We might see the parts or we might see the relationships/interactions of the parts and the structures formed by those interactions.  As Westerners, our cultural history has attuned us to see the parts very well. However, most of us have not been trained to “see” the tangible reality of the qualities that emerge in relationship and how these materially influence what emerges as the whole.

Coming back to our earlier post on the brain analogy for organizations … Scientist Fritjof Capra (1988) observes that biological organisms often have some machine-like qualities (Turning Point, p. 266).  Our knowledge of these qualities has empowered the accomplishments of modern medicine. And, it is also true that biological organisms (and as it turns out, social organizations) also have emerging systemic properties. To “see” how relationships give rise to these properties, we need to shift our field of vision to look at relationships and patterns of relationship.  (This is where Riane Eisler’s concept of Partnership can be seen to be very relevant to leadership and organizational development).

This is just one example of how a shift in perspective can be extremely powerful in opening up a whole new set of tools and possibilities. And that is what coaching is all about…

Category: All Posts, Coaching, Collaboration, Communication, Culture, Leadership, Organization, Partnership, Philosophy, Science, Teams /

Lesson in Leadership Communications

April 21, 2008 / / No comments

My colleagues seated in the rows behind us seemed to be much slower on the uptake than I had given them credit for. Could it be that we leaders in the front row were, in fact, smarter?

To begin at the beginning, my colleagues and I were attending a workshop that I had organized for a high technology company in Northern California. Early in the training, the facilitator organized a training game. She divided us into three teams (or mini-organizations) of about 9 people each. To simulate the communication dynamics of most organizations, each group was seated in three rows, with more senior leaders in the front and less senior participants in the back.

The task would be given to each team in writing. Whichever team completed the task first would win. The rules of the game were:

  1. All communication needed to be in writing.
  2. Each row acted as a team, and had to agree on what to write.
  3. Each row could only initiate communications with the row behind it (senior to less senior)
  4. The less senior row could only respond to the specific instruction or question.
  5. All communications needed to be written on the same sheet of paper; that is, each row had to receive a response before it initiated the next communication.

We each received a piece of paper with our instructions. We in the front row compared our notes. The paper said that the task was for everyone to pass the paper with their instructions on it forward. The communication setup was a little awkward but the task was stone-simple. We were confident we’d have it done in less than a minute!

We “leaders” scribbled our request on a piece of paper and passed it back: “Ok – let’s just do it!”

Instead of receiving the flood of papers forward as we expected, there was a long silence, and then some writing, then more silence. What is taking them so long? we wondered. It was a little frustrating to misfire on such a simple task.

Finally, we received our paper back, with question marks on it! The other two rows apparently didn’t understand the instructions. OK, how could we make it any plainer…. We wrote: “Just go ahead and pass them forward now.”

The result was, unfortunately, the same. We “front-rowers” were frustrated, baffled and a bit disgusted that our colleagues lacked our clarity and competitive spirit. Yet, in being critical of our colleagues, I notice that there is something of a sense of self-affirmation…

Ours was not the only group to struggle with this exercise, which was both discouraging and reassuring…

After several minutes of watching us flail, the trainer changed the rules and allowed us to all communicate directly. What we soon discovered was that only the people in the front row had been given the objective; the other two rows were simply instructed to do what the row in front of them told them to do.

At that moment, I understood that we in the first row were, in fact, the ones who had been incompetent in that situation. Have you ever made the mistake of driving the wrong way down a one way street? Others appeared wrong to us, because we ourselves were in the wrong. And, we were entrenched in our error, because we all saw the world the same way — differently than the rest of our “organization” saw it — and the “rules” made it very difficult to get the feedback we needed. As a result, our organizations executed poorly and we were convinced that the problem lay outside ourselves.

What a great learning experience, on many levels! Here are some insights I personally took away from that experience:

  1. As leaders, we need to be careful to ensure that we have clearly communicated the world as we see it, including facts, the models that guide our thinking, and our objectives. It’s folly to assume that we are all on the same page.
  2. When upward feedback loops are limited, we can easily become disconnected from the realities faced by organizational members.
  3. This limitation can also shield us from knowledge of our real strengths and failings.
  4. When organizational performance is subpar or when organizational members are performing poorly, the first place to look to solve the problem must be at ourselves. What are we doing (or not doing) that is creating this result?
Category: All Posts, Communication, Leadership, Rewards, Teams /

Transformative Leadership in Times of Stress

January 19, 2008 / / One comment

In a recent article, Chris Rice, CEO of BlessingWhite reminds us that the quality of leadership becomes especially important in challenging times. Keeping your employees energized and enthused, and retaining your best employees best positions our organizations to adapt and respond to changing conditions.  Yet, if surveys of employee satisfaction and commitment are any indication, more of your employees than you would like to imagine are open to or considering other opportunities.  The quality of leadership and, especially, the quality of the manager-employee relationship are critical to retention and engagement.  

Yet, have you noticed that, under conditions of organizational stress, the quality of leadership may decline rather than than become stronger?  Research has shown that whereas the perception that a team is winning tends to build team cohesion, teams that experience themselves as “losing” are more likely to engage in finger-pointing and to pull apart in the face of heightened demands.

A big part of the challenge (and the opportunity) is that leaders are human.  When we are fearful, our knee-jerk reactions (in our current cultural context) are often an impulse to self-protection and an increased need to control the situation. In an organizational setting this translates to tightened controls and more unilateral top-down directives, in which alternative perspectives are suppressed. This tends to demoralize employees and fuel a sense of alienation at precisely the same time that greater engagement and commitment is needed.

What can be done? 

Well, first, may I propose that we have a choice in how we respond to stress. Extraordinary leadership begins with extraordinary self-leadership.  How many of us, when we are under stress begin to skip exercising (guilty), eat poorly, and sleep less?  Sprinters can afford to invest all of their energy in that one big push, but most of are not in a short race — we are in a marathon. Or to use a financial analogy, how long can we draw down our “capital” before we begin to see diminishing returns on our investments?

A coaching client of mine — a remarkable woman — when under extraordinary demands on many fronts, described to me her proactive, constructive response to stress: she began to eat better (more fresh vegetables and healthy meals), she intensified her stress management routine, she reached out to good friends and colleagues for support, she took time to appreciate her accomplishments, to give appreciation to others.  Impressed, I asked her how she managed to do precisely the right thing when most of us tend to feel the compulsion to do precisely the wrong thing; she said she had done what we all do in the past and had learned from it.  (Coaches learn from their clients all the time.)

You can bet that she was (and is) a Rock of Gibraltar for her colleagues, who look to her for leadership.

Another aspect of her success, you might have noticed, is that she reaches out to others to form collaborative relationships to constructively deal with the challenging environment.  This, by the way, tends to be a very successful strategy for dealing with stress that comes most naturally to women  (http://raysweb.net/poems/articles/tannen.html) but works well for both genders.   

Effectively, using the language of Partnership (http://www.creativeleadercoach.com/2007/12/09/what-is-partnership/), in times of stress, we do have a choice between domination (pushing ourselves into ill health and fractured relationships, and dominating others through demands and control), and Partnering with ourselves and others.  We might also notice that the dominator approach is fear-based and reactive, and as such, it does not draw on our higher human endowments;  whereas the Partnership approach is expansive and intelligent, and offer us far greater potential for personal and organizational health.

Application

How do you respond to stress? What is one thing you could do differently to make yourself and others stronger rather than weaker in times of challenge?

Category: All Posts, Collaboration, Communication, Leadership, Organization, Partnership, Teams /

Values as Attractors

January 2, 2008 / / No comments

I just found this excellent post that fits in wonderfully with our conversation on Partnership culture and how it can enable more flexible, collaborative and innovative organizations…  Two points that I think are especially helpful are:

  1. Values predict behavior (obviously very important to the discussion of culture and organizational change)
  2. Organizational values function as attractors, giving rise to a kind of dynamic order in “chaotic” organizational systems.  The implication is that given shared values, order can emerge in the absence of unilateral power (or control).  Leadership, rather than management, becomes the essential ingredient.  You must see this graphic!

http://blog.vortexdna.com/scholars-everywhere-reinforce-vortexdnas-message/

Category: All Posts, Leadership, Organization, Partnership, Teams, Values /
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