Leadership Doorways: A Different Kind of Dialogue Can Transform the Results Your Organization Gets
October, 2012
| by
Dan Holden

I would return to school a few days later. Parents later wrote about the words I had given to them and about the profound impact I had had that evening on all who were present. This moment marked my emergence as my own person. I would forget this deeper place in my being several times over the proceeding years and come back to it. It is the essence of the Creating stance, as I would later come to know it. At some level we choose it. Yet that night I learned that it chooses us as much as we choose it and this essential voice within us is the most trustworthy reference marker in tough times. This article addresses how to find this place and how to find our way back to it when we feel lost in our leadership work.
- There are leadership doors we are invited to walk through. The invitation comes in the form of prolonged frustration, fear and exasperation…all signs that our old ways of working no longer work!
Old Ways Are Not Enough Anymore
The Eastern wisdom traditions have a saying: How we do anything is how we do everything. If we could observe ourselves closely in one situation we would have insight about ourselves in many. This kind of self-observation seems reserved for the best sports teams, which make a science out of watching game films. Not for business teams. Many leaders pride themselves on their problem solving ability. When problems come up we analyze their components, weigh which actions in the past can best serve the current challenge and then assemble the right resources and execute. If you ask managers what their primary role is, they answer “Solving problems”. It is not that this approach is wrong but rather that it is not always enough. Vic is an executive with a large public service company. A recent employee survey revealed that employees and mid-level mangers felt unrecognized and devalued on the job. Additionally, there had been a high profile case where customers had complained to the state’s attorney general about poor quality service from Vic’s area. Finally, in another part of the organization, there was an episode with customers who had either been billed incorrectly or not at all for services provided them. Investigations into the problem revealed employees had initially made attempts to bring the problem to the attention of those above them, including those in senior level positions. Gradually, over the course of many months, the concern itself died away. This negligence had resulted in a multi- million-dollar price problem that, as the media and regulators got hold of the story, meant something had to be done. Each executive was charged with developing action plans to address the survey results. At the same time, two directors in the billing areas were placed on performance improvement plans (i.e., disciplinary action) and re-assigned to other, lesser positions in the company. In Vic’s area, it seemed the real purpose of these action meetings was to mock the survey results, ridicule those who thought the results reflected serious dynamics, and dismiss as irrelevant others who saw connections between how employees were treated and how customers in the other complaints had been treated. The resulting action plans were little more than attempts to escape the discomfort of the survey and media attention and return to “normal”. In the short term these strategies proved effective. Critical doorways into a different future, however, were ignored or not seen at all.Four Doorways to Expanded Leadership

The Outer System Doorway— The Value & Limitations of Key Performance Indicators.
Most successful organizations survive because they execute well on the right side of Wilbur’s integral framework. Our executive, Vic, had a well-earned reputation for his work in the Outer Collective arena: organizational performance. His monthly operations meetings were legendary: Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) were established and managers were expected to give account for their performance. No excuses, no explanations, and no dialogue. The good news is that with a focus on measureable performance the numbers do in fact move. An exclusive emphasis on this area, however, can drive deeper concerns about performance and potential opportunities underground since the drive is for performance that moves the numbers. The real costs of relying only on performance measures in the Outer Collective arena continue: 1. The deeper passions and desires of the workforce are seldom uncovered and mobilized because they’re not considered relevant to the business conversation. 2. Concerns and fears are only reluctantly brought to the surface and then only when all else has failed. The fear of ridicule or vulnerability out weighs all other concerns. 3. Innovative alternatives seldom have all the kinks worked out of them in their raw form. Absent innovation, leaders are reduced to individual, tactical performers who closely watch and guard their own silos. The status quo is vigorously maintained. 4. A future that is different than the past cannot be birthed because the organizational energies are devoted exclusively to solving problems. This approach at best yields incremental improvements in performance but virtually excludes breakthrough shifts in performance from happening.The Outer Self Doorway— Where High Performance & Accountability Begin.
This arena of leadership and organizational life is familiar and one we often take for granted. This arena contains all that we can see, hear, touch and measure regarding surface and external individual performance. A visit to your doctor’s office typically begins and ends here: blood pressure, heart rate, perhaps an EKG, temperature, x-ray and so forth. In organizations, individual accountabilities, leadership competencies, written job duties, organizational charts that we can download if we get lost in the hierarchy occupy this box. Teamwork, collaboration, respect, trust building skills, high performance, diversity, innovation, excellent quality, and continuous improvement are some of my favorite individual expectations. Who among us would argue with any of these? Leadership communication skills typically involve providing one-way feedback on performance. Meetings tend to be one-way as well with an emphasis on presentations, updates, and status reports. The best leaders, however, learn a discipline that focuses on the language of behavior and use this to break through to their employees and teams. This discipline involves three key components that become the focus of two-way, not one –way conversation: Critical performance incidents: Here is what I see and hear you doing. Performance impact: The personal consequences of someone’s behavior, either positive or negative are offered here. This kind of information can affect a shift in performance. Consequences on the team, customers and others: The larger consequences of a person’s behaviors, when offered here, can remove feedback from “being personal” to clearly connecting individual behavior to business performance. The harsh reality of this Outer-Self arena, however, is that vision wall charts don’t describe what actually happens in the organization! The fact that we easily sign off on collaboration and teamwork doesn’t mean we actually behave this way. Real behavioral change requires a level of self-insight, courage and vulnerability to practice new behaviors that is daunting. Rational analysis of obstacles a team faces does not typically get at the deeper, irrational, causes of poor performance, by far the more impactful. To move into this kind of critical review requires that we stand before another doorway. Mike is an engineering director in a mid-sized manufacturing plant. A former football player, he has built a reputation as a pragmatic, action-oriented leader. Two sister plants have recently been closed in response to drastic financial downturns. Mike knows if he could spend less time in grievance meetings and more time getting real work done his life would be much easier and the plant more successful. His plant is pushing for greater teamwork and involvement among supervisors and the largely union workforce. Tensions run high. Everyone is waiting for the next anvil to drop; the other shoe fell long ago. No one wants this to happen again but the crisis seems to have people reverting to their default—and least effective—mode of interacting. Defaulting to lesser behavioral strategies is what happens when we lock up in reaction to tough times. We lose the ability to see things as they now are, only as they always have been in the past. I may appear to be listening to you but all I see is our past interactions and our history. You do the same with me. During tough times that call for extraordinary breakthroughs in our thinking, decision-making and performance, the unexamined magnet pull to the past can be a deadly medicine. It requires courage and an open mind to look at things as they are. We frequently fail. We know what people will say before they speak but seldom look at what we’re doing ourselves that drives the conversation. Worse, we deny we have any role at all. It’s them.- For leaders who are stuck in the assumption they must always be right, the answer person who knows everything, real dialogue will prove virtually impossible. Why is it even needed?
The Inner Self Doorway— Where Sustainable Breakthrough Begins.
Mike was asked to “speak from the heart” with the first response that came to him. Here are the highlights of the three-minute conversation: Coach: You’re holding a meeting when people begin questioning you. When someone questions you, why is this a problem for you? Mike: He’s challenging my credibility. Coach: Assuming this is true and he’s questioning your credibility, why is this a problem for you? Mike: My reputation is on the line. Others will doubt my ability as a leader. Coach: Let’s say this happens, your reputation is shot. Why would this be a problem for you? Mike: My board expects results. As soon as they have doubts about my leadership, I’m gone. History. Coach: So there would be drastic repercussions—you’re out the door with no job. Mike: And no easy options. My wife won’t move, my kids are in school here in town for the next three years. They’re already disgusted with me for the time I put into this job. They have had it up to here. Coach: Let’s say it plays out just like this. You’re stuck; your family is disgusted and basically turns their backs on you. If this happened, what would it mean about you? Mike: (Silence). I’m just a waste. A complete fool. I don’t deserve to be here. Irresponsible. At this point the consultant went to the white board and wrote the following: “Faulty Assumptions”- When others question me = my credibility is questioned
- If I don’t know all the answers now my reputation is ruined
- Others’ evaluation of me= me
- My worth & value depend on others’ assessments of me
- I am my work; I am my performance (in this meeting)
- I am not enough
The Inner System Doorway— Your Culture Contains Your Desired Future.
Every organization has its scapegoats. When things go wrong these groups become the necessary targets for our frustration and confusion. “Things would be better if only they would change.” Senior leaders frequently become necessary targets; the union, front line supervisors, field operations or headquarters, the regulators, our competitors, the insurance companies all take a turn in distracting us from finding real solutions to the challenges we face. If we don’t recognize the real problems our solutions will miss the mark. The real problem always involves us! Until we see our own contribution to the current circumstances we will be unable to see our potential as creators of a new and more viable future. The time had come for Mike to take the combined union-plant leadership team offsite for a three-day strategy session. Tension and mistrust ran high. The design called for consultants to facilitate a review of the current (external-system) challenges on Day 1, followed by a “creating vision” session on Day 2, and a tactical action segment to close out the retreat. Each side began the retreat blaming the other for the slide in plant performance. This was the familiar win-lose paradigm, the most popular of distractions and the source of much resistance to change. Mike decided to speak to what he was experiencing in the room. He shared that he knew if the plant continued to perform as they currently were, the plant would likely be sold and gutted for parts. He was suddenly touched with the emotional weight of what he had just said. “We’ve lost many of our best people and their families already. I don’t want to lose anyone more. I want all of us to come through this together and right now I just don’t know how to do that. And this old conversation won’t get us there.” There was a long silence in the room. From the back of the room a union leader broke the silence, “We treat customers like we treat each other–with disgust. We get irritated with their requests, we ignore them as long as we can and then we fight them.” Another long silence was followed by the voice of a supervisor sitting at the same table. “He’s right. Stuff that could easily be solved with a simple conversation becomes a battle over nothing at all. We’re too busy blaming others to save our own butt. I wouldn’t want my own kid to work here right now. That’s the hard news. I am embarrassed by all of us. I’m embarrassed by myself.” Nobody in that room knew what to do with this new information yet everyone knew something real had just happened. There was an energy, an aliveness present that no one could deny. Another union leader spoke, “The problems we’re having begin in this room. The solutions begin in this room, too. We go forward together or we go down together. From here on out, we don’t talk about anyone or anything outside this room.” A different, openhearted dialogue then spontaneously took shape for this team. They begin to honestly look at their business as a dynamic whole where one person’s behavior impacted everything and everyone else. Dinner that night was filled with stories of the early days of the plant, of tough transitions in the past, of friends who were no longer around the table. The plant was not out of trouble but there was a sense of optimism and hope that had not been present for years. The doorway into this arena is marked by vulnerability and the authenticity to say the “unspeakable”. For the very first person, the terror can be immense. It is the presence of something greater than our fear–in this case saving the plant and the town where it’s located–that calls forth this dialogue. Rainier Maria Rilke, the great German poet, wrote–- “What we fight with is so tiny, what fights with us is so great. When we win it’s with small things and the triumph itself makes us small. What is extraordinary does not want to be bent by us.”
- -Rainier Rilke
Leadership implications
1. Difficult times require moving through doorways with a kind of fearlessness beyond the superficial. Rather than pretending to be stoic and doing what has always been done, each doorway involves authentic inquiry and dialogue. PowerPoint presentations are not enough. 2. Listening with an open mind and speaking from an open heart can feel vulnerable and awkward. You must model for others the deeper place from which they can then learn to speak and perform. 3. This kind of integral leadership takes time and practice. The status quo, including chasing your own tail in endless emails, meeting presentations and problem solving sessions to make discomfort go away takes much longer, wastes more time and exacts a far greater toll on everyone. 4. Learning how to engage your teams and workforce in left-hand quadrants dialogue is essential if you are to fully tap and utilize the full potential of your organization. Only then will you move forward in an aligned, full-hearted response to the future you collectively desire. 5. The most significant differences in leaders are linked to the amount of complexity they have learned to hold, and the number of doorways they’ve learned to walk through and inhabit. Unprecedented challenges like those we see today require unprecedented responses from leaders and their teams. The stories told here are not unusual when leaders see their enterprise as organic, dynamic communities requiring learning and competency in four arenas. I have stood before many challenging doors since my 18 year old initiation. Some I turned away from, not ready. Others I began moving through and lost heart. Others transformed my world and me for the better. Forty years removed now, I have seen what’s possible when leaders and their teams move through their fear and dissatisfaction to create a different future. What doorways do you stand before now? How will you respond? The future happens whether we want it to or not. Why not consciously create it?About The Author

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