The Heart of Engagement : Leadership Development, Management Education, Retreat Facilitation & Executive Coaching : Mike Cook : AMJ Group

Kimberly Davis is a good friend. She is also one of the most creative people I know working in leadership development. Her revolutionary program OnStage Leadership allows leaders to find their authentic voice, and she accomplishes this in a one day developmental experience. I receive her newsletter monthly. This month it contained a piece I wanted to share here and Kimberly has graciously consented. It is a welcome reminder of a bit of wisdom that we frequently lose sight of, told in her unique voice. Go Kimberly…

"For Easter, when our son was three, we gave him a viewfinder.  Ever since his grandma bought him a broken robot at a garage sale when he was two, our kiddo was totally obsessed with robots.  So naturally, when the Easter Bunny left a viewfinder in Jeremy’s Easter basket, he immediately started calling it his “Robot Eyes”.

For a solid week he wouldn’t go anywhere without his Robot Eyes. He’d be sitting in the backseat of the Prius, on the way to pre-school, with a kid’s cliff bar in one hand (hey, we were running late) and the other holding up his Robot Eyes, through which he claimed to see a whole new world.

I think in a sense that’s what we all do. We all have our invisible Robot Eyes plastered to our faces. We’ve held them up for so long that we don’t even know that they’re there.And it turns out that we only have one disc, the one that came with the thing.  We flash through the pictures on that disc only seeing the same old pictures flash in front of us again and again.  We forget that we can take them off.  We forget that we can go to Target and buy a new disc, or ten new discs, or borrow someone else’s disc.  We only see what we see.  That’s what the world has become to us.  We don’t know how to look at the people we meet, and the things that happen to us, as they really are.  We only look through our Robot Eyes.

Professionally, I’ve found this to be a tremendous barrier. 

• I’ve decided, erroneously, who would benefit from working with me and who wouldn’t. 
• I’ve not had important conversations that need to be had, because I didn’t think it was possible to be understood. 
• I’ve not brought ideas to the table, because I didn’t think they’d be valued.

And, after working with hundreds of leaders, I find I’m not alone.

For leaders, this is a particularly tough challenge.  With the intention of communicating authority, confidence, and credibility, we stop asking ourselves these questions:

• What is it I don’tknow?
• Is there another way of doing this I haven’t thought of? 
• Is there another perspective that might be useful?

Personally, I have to work daily to remind myself to pry my Robot Eyes from my face. It’s not something that comes naturally. When I do, I feel a bit vulnerable and exposed, without the familiarity of my own world-view.

Yet when I do, I’m able to more fully connect, with people around me,with opportunities I didn't know were there, with solutions to problems I couldn't solve on my own.

What is it that I don’t know?

The mind is such a funny thing.  We think we’re seeing things clearly.  That we’ve processed all the evidence and have come up with the most logical conclusion, and yet we come to find out that our own perceptions might be terrorizing our life.

Consider that many of our biggest challenges exist simply because of the way we’re looking at things.Maybe we need a new disc, or two, or ten, for our viewfinders.  Perhaps playing the same old disc over and over is what keeps us from the very things we most long to have – connection, opportunity, solutions.

 This month I challenge you to focus more on what you don’t know, on looking for a different way to see. 

• With an open mind, ask your direct reports and colleagues, particularly those who don’t typically agree with you, about their ideas and perceptions (be sure to make it safe for them to share honestly, and be mindful of appreciating what they have to say).

Removing your personal viewfinder isn’t easy.  But don’t worry.  It’s not like getting a bad sunburn wearing strange glasses.  Nobody can actually see the big white rings on your face where your “Robot Eyes” use to be.  Only you know that they were there.  And I won’t tell if you don’t."

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Around 17 years ago my firm was employed by a large manufacturer in our area to assist with a new product development initiative that had fallen waaaay behind schedule…again. In our analysis of the situation, we quickly found among other things a project that was being managed to death, or at least to a stop, frequently!

The folks responsible for the technical (real) development had been given lots of responsibility and virtually no autonomy. The functional management, spread over several areas, was so busy trying to “contribute” and stay informed that they had succeeded in squashing both the enthusiasm and initiative of the technical development team.

We proposed a new project oversight structure that reflected very distinct “contributions” expected from both the functional managers and the technical teams. The technical team would focus strictly on getting the product developed; the functional managers would focus on providing resources and removing barriers…when called upon.

Seven months later, slightly ahead of the revised schedule promised and under the budget allocated, the new product was delivered. Our role along the way, consisted of maintaining the new structure, reminding the functional managers of their new role and keeping them out of the technical team’s hair.

Seventeen years ago we were operating mostly from commitment, intuition and some experience; we didn’t have a good vocabulary to go along with the structures we created and held in place, or a well defined set of distinctions for change management. Based on my recent reading of Chip and Dan Heath’s book ‘Switch…’ I would now say that what we had intuitively done was “shape the Path”, actually we served as a surrogate for the shaping.

More important to us than knowing what we had done to produce this outcome was understanding what we had tapped into that allowed an otherwise completely bogged down initiative to suddenly rise from its own ashes and race forward to successful completion. Since that time I have devoted myself to developing the means to transfer what we had accomplished to a teachable format with what I will call mixed results at best. Using the Heath’s model, I’ve been successful at addressing the rider (rational) and the elephant (emotional) elements of change but never achieved the breakthroughs I was looking for in tweaking the environmental factors (the path).

I wasn’t going to be satisfied until we could develop a systemic approach that rendered our services as change agents unnecessary in the long term. I think you see where this goes…teach the man to fish…it’s a greater contribution.

This past week I began reading ‘The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy and the World.’ As I rolled along through the first chapter I realized that the author, Jeremy Rifkin, has unwittingly provided me a distinction that has been missing for me for 17 years, “lateral power.” His book is written to bring us to the larger realization of an innovative economic development model that ensures the sustainability of our natural resources and ecosystems. In other words he is working on “big ass ideas.”

I am somewhat uncomfortable about whether I’ll be accused of “dumbing down” concepts like those presented in ‘TIR’ but I had a moment if insight as I read. Lateral power, the concept must apply in many contexts. Somehow I believe that every fundamental concept is scalable. After all, it is “turtles all the way down” right?

 "Lateral power is a naturally occurring resource in every organization that is unintentionally constrained and minimized by unfocused, unconscious hierarchy."

We are encouraged by Peter Block in ‘Community: The Structure of Belonging’ to accept that the traditional hierarchies that we live with in organizations will never go away, so we should probably stop trying to change or eliminate them. I tend to agree with Block and I do not necessarily think the hierarchies should go away, if intentionally focused. However, our hierarchies do often serve to obscure and inhibit the lateral networks that would naturally form in their absence. Lateral power is a naturally occurring resource in every organization that is unintentionally constrained and minimized by unfocused, unconscious hierarchy. I am sure this is a controversial statement. But hear me out.

• You go to work each day planning to make the highest contribution possible. Why would you suspect that your co-workers would be any different from you?
• Answer me this, while the hierarchical priorities of your organization provide for an important flow of information and resources, are they always attuned to the creation and retention of customers as an ultimate primary priority?
• In your experience, are your cross functional peers inclined to look for ways to be supportive of each other’s objectives unless otherwise directed?
• Do you believe that continuing to work on employee engagement will be enough to sustain your organization’s performance or get it where it needs to be, or is something more basic needed, like to freedom to convene parties with mutual interests to collaborate feely outside the constraints of hierarchy?
• Would you welcome regularly participation with working peers in a structured format where the point was the progress of your work and the mutual success of everyone attending? 

Lateral power…it is time to go looking for ways to tap into it. When you reach the end of the road… it’s time to learn to fly. 

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If you are at all conscious of the world of commerce today, you know that in order to remain competitive your organization must have at least the same quality of talent as the leaders in your industry. You’ve also got to know that engaging in a price war for talent is a long term losing proposition. The alternative set available would then seem to include a) being willing to permanently accept your organization as less than an industry leader (a questionable long term strategy for certain), b) entering the world of competitive free agency with all the risk that involves, hoping it is a short term solution or c) focusing on making yours an attractive working environment where people can and do develop to their fullest potential. Your immediate response to option c) may be a knee jerk “Yeah, let’s do that,” followed immediately by the recognition that you have no idea how to do that! That is, if you are being honest with yourself.    

The question that is the title of this post is a direct quote taken from the concluding chapter of Immunity to Change by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey (I wrote about their work a couple of weeks back in a different context). I originally read their newest book hot off the presses in 2009. As is frequently my habit, I did not finish the entire book, stopping once I felt I had a grasp on the “big idea.”

Last week as I was preparing to deliver the Immunity to Change process to a group here in my home area in the Northwest I decided to go back and finish reading the final chapter. To my joy, amazement and eventual embarrassment I learned that what I had thought was a firm grasp on their “biggest idea” was not that at all. I had settled for the “big idea.”

Through their 25+ years of work, Kegan and Lahey have become exposed to some long buried falsehoods as well as false hopes about adult education inside many organizations naming these among them;

• …we annually spend millions of dollars on training programs predicated on the notion that if we provide people with more information we will change their ability.
• …we have often confused the acquisition of more information with getting smarter.

If you are involved in education in your place of work on any level, you may find yourself becoming prickly at the assertion that we have long been looking for treasure while digging in the wrong place. But honestly, aside from high “smiley face” scores, have you seen any really permanent difference in overall ability arising from programs which…

1. Typically are discreet events outside the normal flow of work.
2. Often involve participants who are either total strangers or do not have any ultimate stake in each other’s improvement.
3. Treat subjects that involve behavioral change as though they could be solved by the transmission of information, i.e., “read this book,” “take this class,” “go to this seminar,” etc.

In your own private moments, you must have been as disappointed as I have knowing that all the beautiful materials, lesson plans and instructional design would not make any lasting difference, except in a few cases. (If you are a technical trainer you are clearly an exception in this conversation but if you are involved in management development, these thoughts must be striking a raw nerve!) But wait, there’s more!!!

Kegan and Lahey bluntly recommend that we draw a clear distinction in our employee educational thinking between the desires for technical or adaptive change. Once we have begun to acknowledge that each type of change requires a different approach, they are equally blunt…it is time to move the learning experiences involving adaptive change out of the classroom and into the work teams needing these changes.

Their insistence that organizational environments that foster real change and development arise from the organization’s cultures being built on a developmental stance rings like someone, a voice with credibility, finally shouting that “the emperor has no clothes!”

There is of course much more to Kegan and Lahey's story.Their seven crucial attributes of a genuinely developmental stance form the foundational sketch for the beginning of an entirely new future for anyone involved in organizational development and or change. You can read all that for yourself. But answer me this honestly like your professional future depended on it…

        Would you look forward to a future in organizational/employee education where the budget items associated with these activities were considered sacred and were never part of any discussion that concerned cost reduction?

Yeah, ….that’s what I thought.

There will be no engraved invitations to this revolution.  

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I haven’t written a piece this long in a while but I am fired up about something…You and I both know that your company’s workforce is not in shape. It may not be top of mind in the leadership meetings or among the board of directors but you know, and you know it is affecting everything that goes on in your business, and you are not doing much if anything about it... maybe because your HR department tells you that you can’t.

If you don’t believe me then check in with your risk management group, ask them about the leading causes of absenteeism and on the job injury in your company. I’d be very surprised if you didn’t find that you have an ergonomic plague in your workplace, an inordinate number of injuries and absences related to back and other structural problems. These problems are there because your workforce is overweight and out of shape and aside from the burden this condition is putting on your healthcare costs it also affects the quality of work being done and the energy and creativity available from your workforce at any given time. This is a big deal and it is time we all fessed up and started dealing with it. It is people’s lives and livelihood that are at stake here.

I got rolling on this theme this past week as I finished reading ‘The Coming Jobs War’ by Gallup CEO Jim Clifton.

Clifton has a central thesis and he makes a strong and seriously analytical case for his argument. He makes the bold assertion that job creation and successful entrepreneurship are the world’s most pressing issues right now, outpacing runaway government spending, environmental degradation, and even the threat of global terrorism. “If countries fail at creating jobs,” says Clifton, “their societies will fall apart. Countries, and more specifically cities, will experience suffering, instability, chaos, and eventually revolution.”

Among other things Clifton states very bluntly in his book:

“A nation in which two-thirds of its constituents are obese or in poor health—or soon will be because of their weight, lack of exercise, addiction to cigarettes, bad diets and general low wellbeing –will never win the upcoming fight against global economic competitors. Workers will not be fit enough to win.”

I have a confession to make, although if you’ve ever looked at the picture associated with my blog this may not seem like much of an admission, I have been overweight bordering on obese for the past 30 years of my life. Three years ago with the continual and compassionate support of my wife Pat ("I didn’t marry you so you’d die on me!”) I finally stopped smoking, a habit that I had wrestled with on and off, mostly on, for over forty years. Within the past six months I have begun to successfully deal with my general physical condition. I have lost 50+ pounds and still have a ways to go to get to my goal. Believe it or not I got started with Zumba classes. Turns out it wasn’t so much the Zumba as the classes, I like exercising with other people. For years I have been one of those who made the New Year’s resolutions to lose weight and get fit several times each year only to find myself quickly falling back into old counterproductive patterns because they were simply more comfortable. In my early life, up to and into my thirties I was very athletic; I participated in a variety of sports and even ran marathons for a while. Then around the time I was 35 all that abruptly stopped and for nearly 30 years I simply indulged my appetites in the worst possible ways. It is really a boring story, yes I am a smart guy, I could see what was happening yet I did nothing to honestly step up and take care of myself. My attitude was that as long as I took care of my obligations to family and business I should be free to address my cravings. Like I said…boring.

And now for the first time on 30 years I am effectively, not easily, addressing my well being on a number of fronts. I am grateful to my wife Pat, once again the catalyst for me doing something about my health. Honestly she has had to be courageous, I have not been open to her coaching and she has had to put up with plenty of sharp rebukes from me for coaching when I wasn’t asking for it. I am pretty sure that without her support I would not be as far along as I am, and there is still a ways to go and many new habits to anchor in.

Now, what about your work environment? Jim Clifton states some very stark statistics in his book, among them the fact that currently only one-third of adult Americans are in shape. Another third are overweight and another third obese. Many of these people work for us and we care about them, not just as productive resources but as people and we are allowing them to do what I did to myself for many years, slowly kill myself. I hate to be that blunt but if you are not one of the overweight/unfit you cannot imagine how unhappy a place it is. I can honestly tell you that in all those 30 years there were only fleeting moments of happiness and a lot of self criticism for allowing myself to get in such bad shape. I am betting the people you work with and around who are well out of shape would tell you much the same if they felt safe enough. If you are one of the overweight you know exactly what I am talking about.

So I know this is a big request I am making. If you are currently working with someone who is overweight, obese or in some other way not taking care of their health ask them if you can talk about it. I know all the prohibitions against doing what I am asking but those have nothing to do with caring for your co-workers, they are designed to protect your employer from legal measures. If you are one of the overweight or obese or otherwise self harming folks ask for some help. These issues are almost always more than we can deal with by ourselves. My wife asks me every morning about my weight and if I don’t like what the scale says I am still liable to lie at first before going back and telling her the truth, but I want her to keep asking, I need her to keep asking.  

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A tip of the hat to Gary M. Stern for his piece ‘Redefining the Middle Manager's Job’ which appeared in the September 19, 2011 issue of Fortune magazine. Stern cites a 2010 study completed by Towers Watson of 20,000 global employees of large firms telling us something we intuitively knew but probably haven’t been talking enough about: 48% of the respondents said their immediate manager didn't have enough time to handle their responsibilities as managers or possess the right skills to improve poor performers.

Tom Davenport and Stephen D. Harding, Towers Watson consultants who authored ‘Manager Redefined: The Competitive Advantage in the Middle of Your Organization’ (November, 2010), are strong proponents of an overhaul in the basic design of the middle manager role. The authors recommend that the manager in the middle develop a focus on “offstage management” as the preferred leadership style, managing the environment not managing the people. I, of course, like this because it corresponds with the basic message of my recent post, ‘The Essential Nature of a Middle Manager: Transparent, Transmutable and Permeable.’ When Davenport and Harding assert that right action for an “offstage manager” is one that “…creates an environment for everyone to succeed and then steps out of the way", I am running around looking for someone to “high five”, Hello! Thank you! Mmmmm hmmmm, what did I tell you? That’s what I am talking about!

I could have stopped reading the Stern piece at the point where he presented agreement for my point of view. But…I didn’t stop there, and I am better for having continued. Later in the article there is mention of a very new book, ‘The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement and Creativity at Work’ by Theresa Amabile and Steven Kramer. I bought the book and once I got started I found I could not put it down. The message is that profound in my view. Put as succinctly as possible, the authors contend that far and away the #1 factor that influences people’s work life experience is progress in meaningful work. Coming from Amabile, a Harvard business professor, and Kramer, her psychologist husband, you would expect this work to be well researched and you would not be disappointed. What the authors found in their exhaustive study of over 12.000 daily diary entries turns the thinking of most present day managers right on its head.

In Amabile and Kramer’s words,

 “Ask leaders what they think makes employees enthusiastic about work, and they’ll tell you in no uncertain terms. In a recent survey we invited more than 600 managers from dozens of companies to rank the impact on employee motivation and emotions of five workplace factors commonly considered significant:

• recognition
• incentives
• interpersonal support
• support towards making progress
• clear goals

Recognition for good work (either public or private) came out number one.

Unfortunately, those managers are wrong.

Having just completed a multi-year study tracking the day-to-day activities, emotions, and motivation levels of hundreds of knowledge workers in a wide variety of settings, we now know what the top motivator of performance is—and, amazingly, it’s the factor those survey participants ranked dead last.It’s progress. On days when workers have the sense they’re making headway in their jobs, or when they receive support that helps them overcome obstacles, their emotions are most positive and their drive to succeed is at its peak. On days when they feel they are spinning their wheels or encountering roadblocks to meaningful accomplishment, their moods and motivation are lowest.”

If you are a manager or someone who develops managers you should regard this as very good news: the conclusion based on Amabile and Kramer’s research is that the key to motivation turns out to be largely within your control. What the book's authors do assert and strongly reinforce with tools they have developed is that managers have powerful influence over events that facilitate or undermine progress. They can provide meaningful goals, resources, and encouragement, and they can protect their people from irrelevant demands. Or they can fail to do so.

So here's what I have to say about all this. You know this, not like in your head know this, in your heart you know it. You've known this since you accepted a position as a manager. Mostly, it is why you took the manager's role.

• The question, the one you must answer for yourself, is how do I continue to justify not doing what I know needs to be done?

Get the book, read the article, do whatever you need to do. This is the time of people's lives you have in your hands. They are counting on you to help them make their time at work worth their life.

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