 I've
been learning a lot in the past couple of weeks. This learning has all
come from conversations, not from reading or research. And to my
surprise, none of these conversations has been face-to-face or even
voice-to-voice. From these conversations, all with good friends, I have
learned three important lessons.
One of these lessons I will
write about in a separate post. It is all about love and friendship and
openness and generosity. The other two are easier to explain, by simply
relating the conversations from which they emerged:
Self-Managers Do Not Need Leaders
In a follow-up conversation to my podcast with Jon Husband, in which I stated categorically that "we don't need leaders", Jon asked me whether, since I am a senior executive myself, was I not a leader? I replied:
Not
a leader. I am a 'thought leader' but the word 'leader' in that context
has a completely different sense. I lead people to new ideas. I don't
tell them what to do with them, or what to do at all, or how to do
anything. I listen and offer ideas when I'm asked for them, but even
then it's really as a sounding board and story-teller, not as someone
telling people what they should do. I'm somewhere, as Jeremy Heigh and I have discussed,
between a facilitator and a coach. Definitely not a leader. Had more than enough of them. In response to this, Jon took me to task for defining 'leader' too
narrowly. There is much more to leadership (a word, by the way, that
has no equivalent word in most languages -- I'd speculate because they
have no need for one; it means literally 'the ability to go first'),
Jon said, than "telling people what to do". I replied:
Telling them, showing them, fighting their battles for them,
'managing' them, advising them what they did right/wrong, making
decisions for them, assessing their 'performance', changing their work
processes/rewards/environment/organization, setting goals for
them, being 'responsible' for them, 'directing' them, defining their
role -- all of this stuff is what 'leaders' spend virtually all their
time doing. It's all paternalistic, and I refuse to do any of it.
My self-set role is to provoke them with new ideas, to listen to
them, to relay what others I've listened to have told me, to tell them
true stories from my own experience, to suggest workarounds when
they're stumped, to do stuff myself that they might find interesting or
inspirational, and, when I must (because I'm paid for it) to help them
remove obstacles. This is not leadership even in the broadest sense of
'leading by example' because I don't expect them to 'follow'. It's also
not 'liberal' leadership in the Lakoff 'nurturing parent' sense -- if I
was responsible for a bunch of young apprentices I might play a nurturing
role, but our organization doesn't hire anyone green. So I expect them not to need
'parenting' and to be able to self-manage. Self-managers don't need
leaders. I
think Jon and I agreed to disagree on this, but perhaps that's because
I have more faith than most people in the ability of the majority to learn to self-manage.
Wild creatures learn the five steps of self-management through a
combination of intuition, play and experimentation. We are so
indoctrinated with Learned Helplessness it is perhaps harder for us,
but my experience has been that when you give people the chance they
pick it up pretty quickly. You Can't Change People; You Can Only Help Them to Let-Self-Change, and Then Only By Touching Them Personally
My podcast #3, featuring Rob Paterson,
will be going up here later this week. I've recently been conversing
with Rob about how change happens. Rob has an ambitious proposal to
help make the people of Prince Edward Island more resilient to some of
the crises we see hitting us all in the decades ahead. It begins with
radical reform of the education system (more about this in the
podcast). The change management process he proposes to bring this about
(based on Alan Deutschman's work) is as follows:
- THE FIRST KEY TO CHANGE: Relate:
You form a new, emotional relationship with a person or community that
inspires and sustains hope. If you face a situation that a reasonable
person would consider "hopeless," you need the influence of seemingly
"unreasonable" people to restore your hope--to make you believe that
you can change and expect that you will change. This is an act of
persuasion--really, it's "selling." The leader or community has to sell
you on yourself and make you believe you have the ability to change.
They have to sell you on themselves as your partners, mentors, role
models, or sources of new
knowledge. And they have to sell you on the specific methods or strategies that they employ. - THE SECOND KEY TO CHANGE: Repeat:
The new relationship helps you learn, practice, and master the new
habits and skills that you'll need. It takes a lot of repetition over
time before new patterns of behavior become automatic and seem
natural--until you act the new way without even thinking about it. It
helps tremendously to have a good teacher, coach, or mentor to give you
guidance, encouragement, and direction along the way. Change doesn't
involve just "selling"; it requires "training."
- THE THIRD KEY TO CHANGE: Reframe:
The new relationship helps you learn new ways of thinking about your
situation and your life. Ultimately, you look at the world in a way
that would have been so foreign to you that it wouldn't have made any
sense before you changed.
Rob's proposal is bold (it
is based heavily on early child development that involves parents
learning how to create a high-trust, authoritative but not
authoritarian relationship with their youngsters). It is impassioned,
sensible, supported by extensive research, and
well-articulated. If anything can work, it will. But I confess I'm
dubious. Although I used to be an enthusiast of the leading 'change
management' approaches, experience suggests to me that they don't work. They can achieve significant temporary change
(which I guess is OK in business, where the short term is all most people care about), but it never seems to be sustainable. There is far too much 'drag' from existing mindsets, processes
and institutions (i.e. our present culture) to achieve anything lasting.
The best we can do, I think, is help people we meet
personally find viable
workarounds that work for them, one on one. If we can get a few parents
to spend more and better time
with their small children, and improve their nutrition, that will be an
important accomplishment. It is caring, attention and patience that is
required, not persuasion. If you give them time -- and only if you give
them time -- people are open to better ways of doing things. This
requires a huge and sustained investment of one-on-one work, and a lot
of patience, and improvisation from the teachers, mentors and social
workers to adapt their approach to the needs and learning styles of
each child and his or her parents. It's a mammoth task.
People
are only up for a mammoth task when they absolutely have no other
choice. We do what we must, when we must. For that reason, I fear, it
is likely to be a great idea that gets only limited implementation. As
I keep saying, things are the way they are for a reason. I
suspect in his heart Rob knows the reasons the situation in PEI is
especially serious and well-entrenched. I hope I'm wrong, and his
program gets adopted and works brilliantly. But if
I'm right, I hope Rob won't get discouraged. It is a great plan.
I've recently reset my own goals
and intentions; they're now much more personal, singular, modest,
inspirational more than aspirational. Stories, not plans. Demonstration
not persuasion. Being generous, not ambitious. We only change the
people we touch, personally, intensely, generously, unambitiously. We change them by helping them, patiently, to let-themselves-change. And
we only have that much patience with people we love. That means we have
to learn to love more people, more openly, more generously, no small
Let-Self-Change challenge in itself, before we will be ready for the
task Rob compellingly argues must begin immediately. I wish we were all
up for it, but I just don't see it. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
