Leading Effectively Series
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How do we develop leadership for public service?
A number of us at CCL have the pleasure of collaborating with colleagues at the Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service at New York University. One question we have explored together is, How do we develop leadership for public service? Wagner sees its relationship to student through this lens of leadership development. Dean Ellen Schall's addressed this year's graduating class and talked about this relationship:
"We have always understood at Wagner that it mattered how we started to engage you, even as prospective students, that we were beginning a conversation, perhaps a relationship--one that could last for years. Two years ago, when many of you applied, we decided to add a particular twist to our application, in part to get your attention, in part to signal we were after a different level of engagement. We gave you the possibility of responding to a photo, a visual image, from a collection of images developed by colleagues at the Center for Creative Leadership. As you may remember, we use Visual Explorer, which is what CCL calls this approach, at orientation as well. The basic idea is that it’s easier to get the conversation started when you have an object in the middle. And we wanted to get a conversation started."This "twist" has worked well.
“It allows us to get a deeper sense of the applicant’s passion for/commitment to an issue, and unlocks the depth of interest in a way that is not always achievable in a standard admissions essay,” says Tracey Gardner, Wagner’s chief of staff.
This Sunday's New York Times published a slide show of the most compelling images and themes.
What does a swimming tiger suggest about public policy, or a pricked finger say about your goals?
Development of leadership in public service begins with engagement. How do you attract and engage students so that learning can be deeper? It can start with a simple question: What do you see?
"Too often," notes Ellen Schall, "applying to graduate school is transactional. We added Visual Explorer because we wanted to signal that the Wagner experience is transformational. Visual Explorer calls for people to slow down enough to reflect on their own experiences, connect their passion for public service to their professional goals, and offer their own perspectives on how to change the world."
Contact Chuck Palus at CCL Labs for more information on using Explorer Tools to create more effective and engaging surveys, and for visual support for collaborative conversations.For more information on this work at NYU Wagner click here.
A lot of things have changed and continue to change in the world. New challenges and opportunities are at our doorsteps just about everyday; to avoid the anguish and to reap the rewards we also have to change in response to our environment.
By “we” I mean us as individuals and as organizations (or any other collective you can think of). While there are still plenty of goods being manufactured, there’s also this whole global knowledge economy thing. I’m not sure if is it easier or harder in terms of leadership; I do know it’s different, not completely different, but different. We’ve pretty much buried the 30-years, same organization, gold watch, retire career. But have we replaced it yet? I don’t think so. We’re still figuring out the situation.
A massive economic meltdown is a pretty good chance to make some changes. Business as usual is not going to work – not for us as individuals or as organizations. We have to focus on results, and we have to think about results differently.
What do we want and how do we want to get it? Metrics like the numbers of hours spent in an office of the price of a stock are fine – but do they really matter – or are they proxy measures, perhaps ones that have become disconnected from the real value we seek? By focusing too much on the parts we can easily measure – we miss the big picture. Too much big picture talk leaves us wondering what we’re supposed to do about it.
Clearly, we’re off balance, distracted, and confused. And in a way that makes sense. Our sense of ourselves and of our world has changed. It’s time to change how we respond, how we lead.
I don’t have the answer and I doubt any one person does – but I’m thinking about a new take on the three “Rs” (reading, 'riting, 'rithmetic) – adding Four New ones - Respect, Results, Responsibility, and Responsiveness*.
*This list is very similar to the Four R's of Inclusive Leadership by Edwin P. Hollander which I reviewed after I wrote this. Even though our lists differ by one item, they are similar enough that I want to give him credit for publishing the list before I did.
With leadership, one is inevitably confronted with paradoxes that challenge the limits of familiar solutions.
The word paradox originates from the Greek words para (beyond) and doxa (belief). Examples of paradoxes faced by leaders include the paradox of continuity and change, planning and action, equality and efficiency, and between leading with certainty and doubt. In leading across boundaries, leaders are confronted with multiple paradoxes – between cultural forces of individualism and collectivism, achievement and ascription, long and short term orientation, low and high power distance. Such paradoxes can be daunting for leaders who are often trained to lead with fixed solutions and models.
Unlike distinct and solvable problems for which an either/or decision may be chosen, paradoxical situations require leaders to see situations from multiple perspectives. As Jim Collins and Jerry Porras observed, it requires leaders to reject the ‘tyranny of the OR’ and embrace the genius of the AND” – a boundary-spanning mindset as opposed to a bounded perspective. A boundary-spanning mindset views paradox, not as a problem to be resolved, but as generative force for learning and change. It accepts both ends of a paradox, even though they seem contradictory ,and seeks higher unifying principles to understand it.
The great Danish scientist Niels Bohr exemplified this mindset. A winner of the 1922 Nobel prize, Bohr has been described as a leader who has made one of the most influential advances in quantum mechanics. In a biography on Bohr, Ruth Moore describes how in a situational impasse and heated debate with his peers, Bohr proclaimed,
“How wonderful that we've met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making some progress!"
The process of working through paradox can help leaders overcome isolated perceptions and identify new ways of integrating different goals and perspectives.
By embracing a boundary-spanning mindset, leaders can tap into the generative potential of paradox for change.
In part 1 of the case of the no-tipping policy, I described how a no-tipping policy came into being and improved morale using two alternative descriptions: one described the case in terms of a leader-influence model, the other described it in terms of a leadership outcome model.
So what? What difference does it make that I can take the same events and describe them in some alternative way? Specifically, what difference does it make to a leader like Jay?
To refresh your memory, here’s the table from the last post describing the two alternative interpretations:
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The leader-influence interpretation |
The DAC outcome interpretation |
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Jay develops a vision of better teamwork and morale, to be realized through a no-tipping policy. |
Jay comes to believe that practices associated with a no-tipping policy (such as pooling service charges and sharing them out) will increase DAC. |
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Jay must influence his employees using a combination of his authority, personal influence skills, and vision for change. |
Since DAC is a shared outcome, Jay must assure that his belief about the positive effect of a no-tipping policy on DAC is shared by the staff. |
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Jay meets with the staff. He succeeds in influencing them to buy into the no-tipping policy. |
Jay meets with the staff. As a result of the meeting, they all share a belief about the positive effect of a no-tipping policy on DAC. |
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Jay's vision is realized. Teamwork and morale improve as a result of his leadership. |
Their shared belief and the associated practices are validated. Teamwork and morale improve as a result of their leadership. |
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Leadership is framed as the behavior of the owner and the process of influencing and getting buy-in from followers |
Leadership is framed as the shared beliefs and practices that produce DAC. |
Looking at things from Jay’s perspective, what difference do the interpretations make? How would using one interpretation or the other make things different for Jay? For his employees? For the business?
Imagine there are two Jays, identical in every way except for their interpretation of leadership. Call one Jay I (for “influence) and the other Jay O (for “outcome”).
Jay I frames his task as influencing (persuading, convincing) his employees that they should buy into his vision of the future. Jay O frames his task as assuring that he and his employees share the belief that a no-tipping policy would produce better outcomes (better DAC). A big difference here is that Jay I sees himself standing in relation to his employees as a force stands in relation to an effect. He is the mover; they are the moved. Jay O on the other hand sees both himself and his employees as being a force, as movers; it is their shared beliefs and behavior that is the effect and that needs moving. He sees the whole way they all work together to create DAC as the object of leadership, not just the employees.
Of course, like Jay I, Jay O may (and doubtless will) use his powers of influence in the process of assuring that they all share a belief in the no-tipping policy. But, since Jay O aims to create shared belief (not just influence others), he is likely to me more open to allowing followers to influence him, to use dialogue, to explore others’ ideas. Jay I, on the other hand, is more likely to see such approaches as a distraction from the main event of getting people convinced.
The end result for Jay I is that his employees have been moved to buy into his vision. The end result for Jay O is that they have all moved together to agreement on what will create better direction, alignment, and commitment among them all. What’s the difference? Don’t Jay I and Jay O end up in pretty much the same situation? For now, maybe they do. But in the future, Jay I will have to rely again on the vision-influence approach (which may or may not work again depending on the quality of the vision and the openness to influence of his employees), whereas Jay O has helped create an ongoing community that knows how to reach consensus. I would argue that this is a more sustainable approach, more likely to work in a wider variety of circumstances in the future.
In my first two posts (27 Aug 2008 and 24 Sep 2008) I wrote about leadership in situations where there is no leader, in the sense that there is no asymmetrical influence, no person with more influence than others. I argued that by thinking about leadership in terms of its outcomes of direction, alignment, and commitment (DAC) it is possible to think about such leader-less situations as still having plenty of leadership.
Now I want to extend this line of thinking to situations where there is clearly a leader, a person who has more influence on others than they have on him. I want to explore how an outcome view of leadership (seeing leadership as the beliefs and practices that produce DAC) reframes the leader-follower influence relation as a special case of a shared process. In other words, the same underlying shared process that enables a leader-less group to create leadership is what enables a leader to create leadership.
Take the case of the restaurant owner who instituted a no-tipping policy, as reported in a recent article in the New York Times.
The owner, Jay, was disillusioned by the fact that the restaurant's wait staff and kitchen employees did not share his sense of passion for the business. Instead, they were bickering over money. The wait staff was constantly maneuvering for better tables, and the kitchen staff didn't believe they were getting their fair share. After thinking about it for some time, Jay traced the problem to working for tips, which he decided hurt teamwork and lowered morale. A no-tipping policy would encourage his employees to concentrate on their work and stop expending so much energy on angling for tips. He met with the staff, who agreed to the no-tipping policy. (The details of this meeting are not reported in the article). Tips were replaced by an 18 percent service charge split 3-to-1 between the wait staff and kitchen workers.
The result has been what Jay hoped for. Even though the wait staff is earning slightly less than before, they report being happier in their work and less anxious about what a customer will tip and how much others are making. One waiter said that her work had "more meaning" than it ever had before. Kitchen workers are making more and feel more connected to the business.
The following table presents two ways of interpreting these events.
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The leader-influence interpretation |
The DAC outcome interpretation |
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Jay develops a vision of better teamwork and morale, to be realized through a no-tipping policy. |
Jay comes to believe that practices associated with a no-tipping policy (such as pooling service charges and sharing them out) will increase DAC. |
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Jay must influence his employees using a combination of his authority, personal influence skills, and vision for change. |
Since DAC is a shared outcome, Jay must assure that his belief about the positive effect of a no-tipping policy on DAC is shared by the staff. |
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Jay meets with the staff. He succeeds in influencing them to buy into the no-tipping policy. |
Jay meets with the staff. As a result of the meeting, they all share a belief about the positive effect of a no-tipping policy on DAC. |
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Jay's vision is realized. Teamwork and morale improve as a result of his leadership. |
Their shared belief and the associated practices are validated. Teamwork and morale improve as a result of their leadership. |
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Leadership is framed as the behavior of the owner and the process of influencing and getting buy-in from followers |
Leadership is framed as the shared beliefs and practices that produce DAC. |
An important thing to notice about this table is that the DAC outcome interpretation does not invalidate the leader-influence interpretation. In other words, the two interpretations are alternative valid ways of describing of what happened. But they are not equivalent descriptions of what happened. The DAC outcome interpretation provides a bigger picture of what happened to make leadership occur. It gets beyond a leader-influence description while including it in a bigger framework. From the perspective of the DAC outcome interpretation, leadership is not just about how a leader influences followers to buy into a vision, it is more broadly about how people who work together produce direction, alignment, and commitment. DAC can be created even without a leader, and so creating DAC with a leader is one way to go, but not the only way.
In my first two posts, I talked about the practical value of a DAC outcome perspective for helping people create leadership when there is no clear leader present. In my next post, I will get into the question of what difference it would make to a leader like Jay to adopt a DAC outcome perspective on leadership.
In the October 2008 issue of Harvard Business Review, Teresa M. Amabile and Mukti Khaire report on a colloquium among business leaders and scholars that invited conversation about the role leaders play in fostering and maintaining creativity in organizations.
The article got me to thinking that too much of the conversation about leading is wrapped up in this business of categorizing, too intent on setting up binary relationships that enable us to anchor ourselves in comfortable positions. In this article, for example, here's how those relationships played out: Creativity is mass customization. Process is scalability. Creativity is energy. Process is entropy. Creativity is autonomy. Process is control.
What if creativity and process are none of those things? Or what if creativity and process are all of those things, but at different times, in different contexts? What if it's not possible to separate them? As one of the colloquium's participants noted, at the first stages of creativity, at that inchoate end of the Gaussian curve, you need a big mindspace, different angles, and minimal censoring. When innovators engage in the commercialization of ideas, they lose interest and energy. Another participant suggested that managers realize that process is the kryptonite to innovation and work hard to contain its destructive influence.
But what if process and creativity exist in the same curve?
Inspired by Jessica Hagy's Indexed blog, I tried to draw an answer. I saw quickly how one curve unfolds to another one, a mirror, maybe, reflecting, or a shadow, revealing the form from another angle. And although I drew two curves, I could draw more. It's not binary -- it's not the metaphor of a mirror that's important, it's the unfolding consequences that become possible only when we set aside the categories we depend on so much for defining the world around us in a way that suits our particular frameworks.
 
So these are just questions. Seems like it's just plain hard to create leadership when the world around us refuses to center, when categories cannot fix, when everything is up for negotiation. But the fact that it's hard isn't a reason not to try.
 My wife and I and about 1300 of our closest acquaintances rode bikes through the streets of San Diego's downtown for about 3 hours. This was the San Diego edition of Critical Mass, an event that got its name in San Francisco in 1992 and now takes place in around 300 cities around the world in various forms.
The form it takes in San Diego is this: bicyclists of all ages and descriptions, on bicycles of all kinds, gather at the fountain in Balboa Park on the last Friday of every month. There is no official leadership and no route announced in advance. As the dark insists, bike riders begin circling the fountain. Various subgroups may take off in some direction and, if the mass doesn't follow them, they return to circling. At some point, and you can feel the energy rising to a point in the crowd, a group begins heading west down the stairs and across the bridge and all at once there are more than a thousand bicyclists traveling into the city.
You can read more about it on Wikipedia and you can see the movie I created from our experience on YouTube.
While there are no official leaders and the routes are decided on the spot, I'm certain that certain people with credibility within the group exercise significant influence over how it proceeds. The term xerocracy was coined to describe the power of someone showing up with the best photocopy of a possible route.
This event generates a considerable amount of controversy for several reasons. One is that the "critical mass" of riders take over the streets and the traffic of automobile and bus drivers and pedestrians is significantly disrupted. The other is that, since the people involved do not give it a specific meaning (some portray it as a protest against the lack of safe bicycling routes, the general indifference of drivers to bicyclists, or a blow for reduced dependence on fossil fuels for transportation; others claim it's just a great community party...a spontaneous celebration of the freedom associated with riding one's bike with a group that makes it possible to travel routes a solo biker could never tackle safely) it is impossible to characterize.
It is a considerable problem for public safety officers. San Diego police have decided to take a low profile response, following the group throughout the evening, but otherwise only responding to problem incidents. Some cities have tried to crack down (the group rides through red lights in most cities, for example), but no responses have been seen as very successful.
For students of leadership, it is helpful as a question mark: What does leadership mean in a group that wants to assert that it is "leaderless"? Clearly it demonstrates the Center's viewpoint that leadership does not reside only in leaders, but it also raises questions about how leadership emerges and how social movements grow without acknowledged leaders.
Your two-wheeling friend,
Doug
 In my first post I wrote about the interest I and some colleagues of mine here at CCL have in leadership in situations where there is no leader, that is, no person with more influence over others than others have over him or her.
I believe it is useful to understand how leadership can be something that a group, team, organization, community, or group of communities can do together without the benefit of a leader. Why? Because I think working together in groups of peers without a clear leader is something that’s going to be happening more and more often to all of us.
But is leadership without a leader possible, or even conceivable? Isn’t leadership nothing more and nothing less than what a leader brings to the party? Isn’t it true that leadership without a leader is like friendship without a friend? This is a fair question, and I for one won’t stop anyone from drawing a line in the sand and saying leadership is just what a leader possesses and expresses when he or she is being a leader, and it’s nothing more (and nothing less).
I won’t stop anyone from saying that, but I won’t agree with them. I think the idea that a leader is the essential ingredient in leadership is still useful in contexts where there is clearly a person who has the most influence. However, I think that idea is useless in contexts where there is no such person, because I think people still need what they get from leadership even when there’s not a leader present. A group working together can’t just accidentally drift into getting something done. They need to agree first of all on just what it is they’re trying to do – their shared direction. They also need to get people organized somehow to do it – they need alignment. And they need people in the group to be committed enough that they are willing to work hard when needed. Any group or team or organization working together needs direction, alignment, and commitment. In other words, people working together need the results of leadership even when there is no leader. And if a group gets the results of leadership, haven’t they somehow “done” leadership and done it without a leader?
Most people have done leadership this way without thinking about it. Take, for example, a group of friends deciding how to spend the evening. Suppose they are all peers, and that on balance every member is as equally influential as any other member. How does the group decide what to do? They talk. People throw out suggestions. Others react: “Let’s go to that new Vietnamese restaurant,” someone says. “I heard it’s very expensive,” another says. “We could go to the watercolor show first and talk about where to eat while we’re there,” says a third person. And so it goes. By some mostly unconscious process that no one is paying any attention to, the group gradually comes to some kind of agreement. They produce a direction for the evening; they make arrangements; in the best case, everyone is enthusiastic about it. They get the same kind of results (though not necessarily the same decisions) they might have gotten if they had appointed someone the leader and said: “You decide.”
What I’m interested in is how the process seems to be mostly unconscious and not the focus of attention. If the group saw “talking about what to do” as a leadership process – a process producing direction, alignment, and commitment – instead of seeing it as “just talking” or “arguing” or “letting everyone have their say”, they might pay more attention and learn how to do it better.
I'm hell-bent on simplifying my life (except that I've been trotting around the world with two computers...is that a contradiction?) and took a step recently by clearing out gobs of formerly-precious stuff from our garage. In a tiny pile of photos I found several that brought smiles to my fuzzy face. One in particular was a "girl with car" picture of my eldest daughter with her dream car, a '61 Mercury Comet. She lounges in pedal pushers and dark glasses against the hood like an auburn escapee from Pulp Fiction.
 I think this memory captures quite nicely a coaching dilemma: how can the coach suggest that the fondest wish of the person being coached seems crazy on the face of it, without imposing one's own values? I helped her buy this car, but something in me wanted to say, "How crazy do you want to be?" Although a lovely car (beauty in the eye of the beholder) this particular auto was also a rolling disaster, not even counting the engine fire it had once experienced.
It is easy to become attached to a viewpoint, a goal, a way of doing things, or a cause and want to hold it fast whether it serves us well or not. Mia finally gave up the Comet. Californians are having to give up the confidence that houses are always a good investment. Hyper-organized managers may have to give up thinking more organization is the solution to everything.
One of the things I like about working for CCL is that we let our commitment to research smack us around a little. It's hard on those of us who are full of prejudices and opinions because the science often forces me to give up my cherished slogans and over-simplifications. It makes it hard to repeat the hoary bits of wisdom passed down from speaker to speaker (like the story of "the destroyer and the lighthouse" bent to make any point I want, for example). But it does prepare us for the rough and tumble of real-world leadership.
Not sure what I'm going to have to yield today, but there will be something. Hope I can hold fast to the right things and let go of the rest.
Your fellow sojourner,
Doug
 I subscribe to an e-mail feed from ChangeThis, a site produced by 800-CEO-Read that solicits and publishes manifestos on a number of topics, including creativity and innovation. Those subjects are of everlasting interest to leaders of all stripes, if I can measure interest by how many voices chime in whenever the conversation turns that way. Mitch Ditkoff, the president of a creativity and consulting company, recently posted a manifesto that described where ideas come from. In there he describes two sources: intuition and rationalism. Ditkoff's argument isn't original -- it's the basis for the one of the longest running philosophical debates ever. But anyone interested in fostering creativity and innovation, and that includes just about any leader in any kind of organization, ought to ask: What good is it to separate the origins of ideas into different sources or approaches or cultures or whatever?
Not much good at all, to tell you the truth. Try this instead: Ideas arise from a single source, from the response to a specific problem. When faced with a problem that doesn't yield to our tacit knowledge, we must create a new idea. If you want to spur creativity and innovation in your organization, or in yourself, all you really have to do is draw attention to a problem and respond. Those responses are the creative ideas from which you can innovate. This isn’t an original argument, either. It's basic human activity.
Stop idealizing, start inventing.
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