Dare to Depend on Others !

As a leader, one of the biggest errors you can make is to believe that you can be self-sufficient. In a world where it seems that the highest virtue is to be independant, this can appear as a paradox. Nevertheless, if a great leader is often someone with a strong personal vision, she or he is also a master in relating to others.

A leader is a high-quality relationships gardener

Why would people follow you ? This is the key question that needs to be answered by any leader. So, if you do not have a high-quality relationship with your followers, how can you lead ? Great leadership author Jagdish Parikh reminds us that we have to manage our relationships with “detached involvement“. This means that we always incur the risk of being too attached to people (or to objects, to events, and of course to ourselves). At the same time, no leadership is possible if it is felt as distant or superior.

You may be an exceptional achiever, a great visionary or the most respected expert in your field, it makes no difference : to get results, you will need to rely on the motivation and performance of many others – especially in the highly complex environment we are living in today. In his recent book, Humble Inquiry, The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling, MIT Profesor Edgar Schein is making a neat and… humble point about the tendancy we have to believe that a leader is the one who has answers.  One common characteristic of large-scale failures (such as the disaster of Space Shuttle Discovery) is the absence of a climate for subordinates to surface big issues as they show up. Creating such a climate is one of the roles of the leader, which implies a very deep consciousness of his dependency on others for the success of any endeavour. Asking authentic questions that surface his own ignorance is a key habit to develop such a climate, since it indicates clearly that there is no problem in NOT having all the answers.

A leader takes the risk of the other

One of the biggest problems of our times is the fragmentation of people in society or in organizations. It is often very strange to hear some executives complain about the silos or the lack of collaboration that exist in their companies, when all the systems they have put in place (from budgeting to compensation) are mainly constructed on individual (or fragmented) contributions. It is as if the large bureaucratic organization was trying through its processes to reunify separate and independant units.

The origins of this tendancy come from very far, and probably from the economic theory linked to the Enlightment views that promoted the advent of the individual, emancipated from holistic societies. I think that our challenge is to develop again a shared commitment (of employees, of citizens,…) towards what belongs to us – and not to me, or to any individual. Italian economist Luigino Bruni wrote a beautiful book, The Wound and the Blessing, around the proposal that we can only meet that challenge through the acceptance of the Other – as a potential blessing, but also as a potential wound. This means that we must not dream of a society that has eliminated all the frictions inherent to the fact of living together (the wounds). An authentic leader risks to be wounded by the world around her, by the people she meets. This is the fundamental condition for receiving the blessings that people can bring to the cause or the enterprise she his fighting for.

For you – leader or follower (and you know that we cannot be good leaders if we are not able to be good followers) – three questions can help you improve your capacity to relate to others :

1. Do the persons who follow you feel that you are with them even if you are not totally melted with them ?
2. Do you practice often the gentle art of asking instead of just telling ?
3. Are you willing to let others bless you or are you just preventing yourself from the wounds that you can get from them ?

Never Forget Lateral Learning

In a recent session with teams of Intrapreneurs from Group Poult (European leader in Private Label biscuits), we asked to some participants to illustrate through their experience what co-creation with customers really meant. The result was brilliant. We first heard about the new relationship between a factory in Brittany with United Biscuits, and then about the way Poult has helped Michel & Augustin (a French young and “crazy” company) in its development. I was supposed to give a short presentation on co-creation, but it proved totally useless. So I did not give it. Once again, I had been totally impressed by the power of what I call Lateral Learning – i.e. learning from your peers.

In contrast to that, I took part last week in the preparation of a learning event for the top 120 people of a large well-known company. The whole meeting was about “filling” the program with more and more experts or speakers. At one point, I asked if it was not possible to leverage the knowledge, wisdom and experience of the participants. The idea was finally accepted, but why did we need so much time to have it appear in our conversation ?

I guess it is because we have been educated in a system where knowledge is transmitted hierarchically from someone “who knows” to others “who don’t know”. It is considered mainly as an asset, seldom as a flow. For some of the best researchers, knowledge creation is social and happens between people. We cannot control this process. At best, we can create conditions for it to happen.

If you want to understand the profound meaning of this shift of point of view, you can watch this video made by the World Bank, that I discovered recently. It explains very clearly  the philosophy of a program called South-South Learning which differs from traditional ones where Western experts would tell to developing countries practitioners what they should do.

In my experience (as a learner or as a designer), a ‘learning from your peers’ approach has ALWAYS worked. At Team Academy, lecturing is considered as a very powerful tool, so we use it with moderation (no more than 5% of the training session time). If we want to use Lateral Learning much more, we need to really believe in people’s ability to self-manage their work*. And that’s pretty difficult !

* This expression comes from M. Weisbord and S. Janoff remarkable book on Future Search.

My TEDxStrasbourgUniversité Talk

Only for French speakers, sorry !

Inspiring Books for 2013 – #3 : Managing Flow, I. Nonaka

All right. This is not the kind of books you want to read in the subway or in a café. It is academic, and probably made for academics (its price also is for academics…). But I think its main ideas are useful for any leader who wants to build a XXIst Century organization.

I. Nonaka and his co-authors describe in this book the seven key components of the knowledge-based firm. These elements operate together and allow the creation of knowledge in a dynamic interaction of the firm with its environment. The components of Nonaka’s framework are the following :

Three Paths to Management Innovation (HCL, Hervé Thermique, Morning Star)

One of the conferences of the World Forum in Lille was named “Management 2.0”. Three companies – HCL, Morning Star and Hervé Thermique – shared their view on what it means to be an open, freedom-based or democratic company. As you may know, I am very involved in this topic, through some of my clients and also through a team of liberating leaders who meet regularly to share their experience. It was very interesting to see in action three different ways of conducting a similar quest. Let’s see what each company delivered before attempting a kind of synthesis.

Bottom-Up Organizations ?

Three weeks ago, at a SOL France meeting, I’ve been lucky enough to discover a very inspiring experience. Yann Baudron, Regional manager of Hervé Thermique, explained very simply and with a lot of ingenuity the managerial system that has shaped this company over the last 40 years. For some readers, this story can look exotic… but it is true.

Life is Strong / Life is Fragile

This photo comes from my garden. I am so amazed by the beauty and simplicity of life. A very very small seed that has been enclosed in an envelope sometimes for years is able to grow like this zucchini in a few days !
In a time where most urban modern people have lost their deep connection with nature, this kind of tiny miracle of life can easily be overlooked. But it is repeated again and again everywhere on the surface of the globe.
When we think about organizations, maybe we ought to reflect a little more about the implications of this wonderful impulse that brings life. How many times do managers act as gardeners of social systems ? Do they see their task as a careful and patient taking care of life wherever it appears ?
I am not one of those people who consider nature as a kind of Goddess we have to revere. But I think that we’d better be cautious about what we do with (or often without !) her. Resilience also exist in people and in organizations, but if life is strong, it is also very fragile. There is a point of exhaustion and over-exploitation of our social eco-systems (be they communities, teams, families,…) after which coming back to a normal state is very costly.
Let’s not forget our responsibility in caring for life through our daily actions.

 

Prototypes or Quick Wins ?

In the typical Change Management orthodoxy, there is this notion that you have to identify so called “quick wins” in order to gain momentum for your initiative. I do not deny the importance of such early successes : it develops self-confidence in any project team and it builds credibility for the change program itself.

Nevertheless, I observe that it is much more challenging (and efficient) to design appropriate prototypes. In the way T. Brown from IDEO defines them, prototypes allow space for a real learning attitude, which include the possibility of mistakes and even failure. By promising quick wins, any change team puts itself in a position where there is no other option but to deliver performance – and only performance. This can lead to a level of stress that impedes learning dramatically.

In addition to that, if early results happen to be present, the cult syndrom  can be feared, where a core team starts to believe that 1) it owns a definitive truth and 2) that what has been demonstrated at a usually small scale can be easily amplified to the large scale (which is never the case).

One of my clients often says : (S)he is right the one who is right at the end. And what we want is results – at the end. Even if during the journey and because of learning, results are not as beautiful as expected.