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Self-Mastery, The Foundation of Leadership
When life isn’t working for you, when you aren’t getting the results you want, when your followers are stumbling around as you are; what to do? These situations happen to us all. At these times, we most need the power of conscious choice. We make many choices every day. We don’t notice most of them. Most are pre-made, automatic habits that require no conscious thought. We go through our routines: we wash up, have breakfast, check the phone, drive to wherever we are going, and interact with those around us. On most days, we give those actions barely a moment’s thought. It’s all automatic and works well…unless it doesn’t. Even then, still on automatic, we blame, complain, make excuses, and worry. We feel sorry for ourselves. We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t. Such a waste of perfectly good energy.
Not too long ago I was having dinner with a client in the midst of a project that was going well. At some point my client looked up at me and said, “I’m glad you’re not one of those OD people.” After recovering from my surprise, we had a good discussion about what OD is and isn’t. Here is a summary of that discussion.
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Michael F. Broom, Ph.D.
Excerpted from his book The Infinite Organization
Consensus decision-making has the reputation of being very time-consuming. It needn’t be if the steps outlined below are followed. The failure of most supposed consensus procedures result from failing to ask those objecting if they are willing to accede to the proposition work even though they are not in full agreement with it.
You used all of your skills to move your team from being dysfunctional to one with a high level of productivity, full engagement of all team members, and they even had some fun together. But will your success last? Will they revert back to dysfunction when you can’t be there? Did you built in the mechanisms to make your changes sustainable?
An important key to having great teams and organizations is their sense of safety. Their members feel free to speak, to dissent, to be radical, and even outlandish. This freedom is key to having high levels of productivity, engagement, and creativity. In so many organizations and teams such freedom has been stifled. Cultures and norms of group think, submissiveness, and ennui develop when team members sense that being different is risky or useless. What a waste of human capital, of human energy, of human beings!
Here are two ideas I’ve found useful toward creating an environment of safety in teams and organizations. Both level the playing field where those involved see each other as human beings rather than boss and subordinate, sales and manufacturing, or some other form of more power and less power.
The CEO is frustrated! She is the CEO of a major health care organization and, like many other organization leaders, believes in teams. She has project teams, functional teams, cross-functional teams, process improvement teams, etc. A few of those teams work very well and others not so well. She wishes she could clone the leaders of her good teams and rid herself of the others. That so many of her teams are mediocre really bugs her! She’s got the dysfunctional team blues.
Once again, at a major organization development conference, I heard OD practitioners bemoan how hard it is to tell potential clients (and family and friends) what they do and how they do it. As usual, I refer them to a definition of organization development I published several months ago. Today, I decided that it was time to totally restructure that definition.
People ask me why I use a rather fierce looking dragon as my Center for Human Systems’ logo.
Dragons are known throughout the world in all climates, cultures, and eras. There are dragons with horns, claws, breath of fire, great size (some small), wondrous wings (some wing-less), and marvelous colors. These serpentine creatures forever populate our myths, legends, novels, and movies. Dragons are strong, fierce, powerful, and persuasive. They are creatures of magic, power, and beyond-normal insights. In Western cultures the magic and power of dragons is destructive; they are to be eliminated. In other cultures, dragons are positive symbols: Chinese dragons are symbols of good fortune. In the Aztec, Olmec, Mayan world, their dragon—Quetzalcoatl—symbolizes sustenance and re-birth. In the old Slavic world, some dragons—Zmaj—were friends of humans while others—Azdaja—were friends of witches and such. When they fight, great storms occur.
Lean, Six Sigma, Prosci, and other formulized change management methodologies all offer an orderly set steps to take—a recipe for ending waste, improving productivity, and otherwise accomplishing desired changes. There are, of course, several recipes from organization development practitioners that offer recipes. John Kotter’s eight steps are very popular. There are several versions of the stages of planned change that that typically include entry, contracting, data-gathering, intervention, and evaluation in one set of words or another. So what’s the problem?
A CEO of a medium-sized hospital asked me to train his front-line patient-facing staff in how to be pleasant to patients. The head of IT department asked me to facilitate “an advance” for her and her staff. She pointedly told me that everything was working well; that she wanted “an advance” rather than “a retreat.” That’s just two examples of the clients who routinely ask me to implement the solutions they think will solve the problems they believe they have. I have been fortunate that my mentor, Donald Klein, drilled into my head not trust client diagnoses and prescriptions. Do your own systemic diagnosis, he told me.
I didn’t take his admonishment too seriously. A general manager of a TV asked me to facilitate what he called a routine annual retreat to reward his team for good work and to think about the coming years. “Nothing heavy,” he said. I took him at his work and was blindsided by the considerable mean-spirited sniping and their difficulty getting to consensus about the smallest issue. I never again trusted a client diagnosis.
More important, when I insist on doing my own diagnosis and contracting around those results, I found myself doing more systemic OD work and fewer stand-alone retreats and trainings! Through insisting on doing my own data-gathering (individual interviews), I can discover the systemic issues that are the root-cause of the client’s issues. With the hospital, I identified as a key issue the lack of accountability for building and maintaining a positive work environment that started at the very top of hospital. As we resolved those issues, behavior at the bottom quickly improved.
From my IT department interviews: everything was not hunky-dory but rife with frustration from the staff’s inability to solve problems because of the director’s intention driven by her assumption that everything was okay. As a result, we did a series of retreats to clear-up the back-log of problems followed by strategic planning.
In both cases, I did extensive coaching with the clients about their use of self before any group-work could was done.
Some OD practitioners fall into is the automatic tendency to please their clients by doing what they ask for. Significant Conscious Use of Self is the antidote here. In addition, I have had clients insist that no data-gathering was needed since they told me what the problem is and what they want done about it. Do not allow yourself to be intimidated. Instead, suggest there is always more going on than meets the eye. I also tell them I need to do your interviews to design something that will be effective. I’ve not had that fail.
Turning requests for retreat facilitation, training, and other interventions into real systemic intervention delivers a better result to clients and helps practitioners build a reputation for making a difference that drives more work.
Want to learn more skills for making a difference in human systems? Applications are now available for this Fall’s Dragon Principles Intensive which now offers its Certificate in Humans Systems Change Management. Find out more at chumans.com/our-services/intensive.
About Michael F. Broom. I’m an organizational psychologist with 40 years of experience with all kinds of people and organizations. I’m the author of The Infinite Organization, and Power, The Infinite Game (with Donald Klein), and the upcoming The Dragon Principles. After 25 years at Johns Hopkins, I founded the Center for Human Systems. I am a Lifetime Achievement Award honoree of the OD Network.
