Elsewhere.
'Nobody cares how you pay your rent. Your job is to show us something we didn’t know we needed to see.'
The best leaders sneak up and buffet us then draw us forward on their slipstream.
We're minding someone else's business. Going through the motions. Comfortable. Smothering our inner restless child with our pillow of outer respectability so none of the other happy successful people around us hears its death rattle.
We're marching to the rhythmic drum drum hum drum drum hum drum of the boss and the managers and the meetings and the courses and the mission statements and the core values and the consultants and the professional development and the change management and the teams and the acronyms and the buzz words and the performance reviews and the clichés and the emails about cake in the staff room and the promise of Friday afternoon.
Loitering for the fortnightly hit from payroll.
She is here. No introduction. No names. No preface or title.
Her voice distracts us from ourselves long enough to rouse the child who squirms free and gasps for air.
We know nothing of her other than she wants to be elsewhere.
She's not waiting for us.
Nor are we.
We leave ourselves behind to go and see.
Mess.
'[The BBC gave us] total freedom. They gave us the freedom to mess up which is the best freedom you can have.
For our first series we made our own mistakes. We made lots of mistakes and we realised the control you had to have to get better - the things we needed to change and appreciate...and we were allowed a second series.'
A good boss anchors the straining tension of paying her workers to build and break and build her Widget.
It takes intelligence, confidence, wisdom, patience, resilience, judgement, and humility to be that kind of boss.
Good bosses are rare.
Workers who are grown up enough to choose the anxiety that comes with the freedom of making their own mistakes - and to change and get better - and thus be worthy of such bosses - are also rare.
Most settle into the comfort and security of the tepid disgruntlement of being told what to do in return for the salary that funds their refuge in their Weekend Widget.
The emphasis on leadership and management in workplaces reinforces a message that Someone Else is responsible.
Someone Else is controlling us and therefore our mistakes.
The They will tell us when and how to get better.
The They will Manage and even Drive Change.
We are free to choose the boss that we deserve.
Check.
To check whether your boss wants Leadership or management, try any of the following and see what she does:
- Disagree with her in a meeting.
- Answer 'I don't know' when she asks what someone else is doing.
- Delay reporting to her because you were teaching someone else.
- Answer 'I don't know' to any of her questions.
- Say 'I was wrong'.
Most organisations simply don't have the metaphorical and literal structural tolerance in their people and systems to withstand the amount of turbulence that would flow from having as many Leaders as they proclaim to want or allow.
Which is why most organisations advertise and train for leadership - and recruit and promote for management.
Rare.
Being a Leader is hard.
That's why it's rare to find her.
Organisations call 'Leaders' people who:
- Made a Widget well enough to supervise other people to make (often different) Widgets
- Did something in another organisation that their boss wants them to repeat for them
- Get invited to meetings with limited chairs to learn to advocate their boss's opinion
- Umpire Widget conflicts (rarely) and interpersonal conflicts (mostly)
- Make their Widget better than anyone else in the organisation
- Control others so that the boss doesn't have to
Boss's call them 'leaders' to acknowledge what they want them to do is hard - yet not Leadership hard.
It's a rare boss who will pay you to make decisions that contradict her.
It's a rare boss who will trust you to trust others to change direction from the one she chose.
Rare good bosses means rarer Leaders.
Confidence.
'Once you surrender the idea of intrinsic, objective value, you start asking the question “if the value isn’t in there, where does it come from?” It’s obviously from the transaction: it’s the product of the quality of a relationship between me, the observer, and something else. So how is that relationship stimulated, enriched, given value? By creating an atmosphere of confidence where I am ready to engage with and perhaps surrender to the world it suggests.'
- Brian Eno
The information thuds onto our desk.
It lies there. Inanimate. Markings on paper. Pixels on glass.
We breathe in - and exhale our spirit into it.
We give it life.
We name it:
Complaint. Criticism. Appeal. Escalation. Grievance. Demand.
Or we name it:
Feedback. Evaluation. Comment. Test. Observation. Assessment. Question. Gift.
The actions that we take in response to the information and its relationship to our Widget are what gives it value. We need to engage with it with the eagerness and curiosity that serve our Widget - not our ego.
We need to be brave enough to surrender our understanding of the world for a new one.
If we are all these things - then we invite more thuds upon our desks.
Doubt.
'Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds,
At last he beat his music out.
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.'
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson
'One of the reasons that a person is interested in what other people have to say is they know they don't know. Doubt is the place in me for you to affect me.'
- John Patrick Shanley
A Leader holds certainty with doubt.
A Leader is someone whom others choose to follow. People won't easily abandon their driftwood and tread water over to your raft if you're bailing water.
Doubt is never on the PowerPoint list of The 10 Qualities of a Leader.
Yet Leadership is inherently a transitional state between certainties. Leaders are on a journey from here towards their belief in Something Better Over Somewhere. Otherwise it's Management. (There's nothing wrong with that.)
People who complain about their Leaders almost always don't need Leadership. They need a Manager. Or a parent.
Almost by definition, if someone has certainty about where they're going and how they're going to get there, they are not a Leader. They're an airline pilot or a train driver. (There's nothing wrong with them either.)
Each of us hears the call towards Something Better Over Somewhere. Many of us respond, only to fall back as the tether between our ego and the opinions of the world tightens.
She breaks free and suffers the whiplash of our jealous displeasure.
She lays down a pathway of good decision making to a familiar beat of self-doubt that calls:
'Come! I am just like you.'
Arrows.
'You could always tell the scout on a wagon train because he was the one with all the arrows in him. Any time that you try to go to new ground. Any time that you try to go to territory that you've not been in before, you're going to have resistance.
But there's a whole line of people behind you that are kind of hoping that you make it. There are people who are waiting to get permission to think that way. To get permission to love that way.'
- Dr Joel Hunter
Distance.
Step One of Good Decision Making: Step Back.
Viktor Frankl wrote:
'Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. '
Stimulus: information. A complaint. Criticism. Bad news. New and unexpected data. A problem.
Instinctive reaction. Surprise. Shock. Anger. Defensiveness. Denial. React. Respond. Return fire. Fight.
Impotence.
Step Back.
Lean back in your chair. Stare at the ceiling. Get up and walk. Down the corridor. To the kitchen for a cup of coffee. To a sympathetic colleague's office. Or home.
Have a lemonade or three. Vent to your spouse or pet. Take the cat for a walk. Go for a run. Smash a golf ball. Have another lemonade. Wallow. Feel sorry for yourself. Search the job ads. Watch a movie. Reclaim your freedom.
Be human. Not boss, manager, leader, decision-maker, company woman, parent, mother, father, son, daughter, prodigy. Be worried, annoyed, frustrated, sad, impatient, unreasonable. Wallow. Be selfish.
Allow yourself to be yourself so you can choose to become yourself.
Create the space.
Expand it.
Step up and begin doing what your boss is paying you to do and what you promised her that you'd do. (That's called 'Integrity.')
'I'll have an answer to you by next Friday.' (Aim to have it to them by Wednesday. Under-promise and over-deliver.)
You feel your power returning.
The psychologist Yaacov Trope argues that:
'Psychological distance may be one of the single most important steps you can take to improve thinking and decision-making. It can come in many forms: temporal, or distance in time (both future and past); spatial, or distance in space (how physically close or far you are from something); social, or distance between people (how someone else sees it); and hypothetical, or distance from reality (how things might have happened).
But whatever the form, all of these distances have something in common: they all require you to transcend the immediate moment in your mind. They all require you to take a step back.'
Begin the rest of the Good Decision Making Process unencumbered by the emotions that strangle your ability to analyse and assess data openly and logically and on its merits. Earn your salary. Build your Widget. Become who you are.
'You can't change what's already happened but you can change what happens next.'
- Peter Baines, Disaster Management Specialist.
Stories.
Most people's work is disconnected from their Widget.
They go to their office, occupy themselves for eight hours, go home.
They know that they've done a good job because nobody told them that they didn't and they're still getting emails on the All Staff mail list.
Most importantly their boss puts money in their bank each fortnight for them to forward most of it into their mortgage.
Sure, they make things. Emails, reports, meeting agendas, minutes.
They go to quarterly staff meetings and listen to a boss tell them about how the Widget is going with PowerPoint slides in support.
Once a year they sit down with their boss who tells them how they've performed and what courses they need to do because We're A Learning Organisation.
So they go to the professional development seminars with relief at the novelty of being away from their desk and eat mints with the other seven perky strangers on their table as an expert projects PowerPoint slides with dot points about innovation with anecdotes about Fortune 500 companies and other stories to inspire them to be better.
We love stories. They connect us to something bigger.
Good decision making is story telling.
It has a heroic arc that gives us meaning.
It's heroic because it's our conscious act to embark on the journey and accept its possible consequences and take responsibility for them.
It's superior to what most call decision making which is actually an instinctive sneeze-like response to a stimulus.
Our journey begins with the ascent of a hill where we sit at the top and take in the view of the Widget.
Wow. We never realised how close our desk was to it.
Good decision making is a journey that takes us out and back again to our desk and it won't look the same afterwards.
That's what a Learning Organisation is.
'We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.'
- T.S. Eliot 'Little Gidding'.
Assembly.
The Atlantic Magazine had a recent article about how some companies in the United States are bringing their factories back home.
While increasing wages in developing countries and higher transport costs from the factory to market are part of the reason, most are found in Widget Thinking.
The time from when a product came into fashion and then fell out had shortened from seven years to two. It meant companies had to shorten the feedback loop between factory floor and design table.
General Electric is one company reversing the overseas outsourcing trend. It originally had designers in the United States and manufacturers in China. It decided to bring the workers who built washing machines into the same building as the engineers and designers.
Workers on the factory floor identifying any improvements or issues could immediately inform the engineers who could consult with the designers who could modify the Widget. One example was when workers recommended a design change that cut the hours needed to assemble a washing machine from 10 hours to 2.
This 'inherent understanding' (unconscious competence?) of the product had been lost with the outsourcing to cheaper labour in China. GE got it back by closing the gap between assembly line and designer.
Co-located assembly and design also allowed companies to adopt the ‘Lean’ manufacturing techniques popularised by Toyota. Everyone has a say in critiquing and improving the way work gets done, with a focus on eliminating waste. It requires an open, collegial and relentlessly self-critical mind-set among workers and bosses alike –a culture that is hard to create and sustain.
It requires a Leader.
Each worker adds their widget to the Widget moving along the assembly line. It's the job of the manager to make sure that the assembly line is itself assembled so that the work is as easy and efficient as possible. The best way for the manager to achieve this is through an open, collegial and relentlessly self-critical approach.
In the GE example, the dishwasher team created its own assembly line based on its practical experience of assembling dishwashers. The result was that it eliminated 35 percent of labour.
Here's where the bigger SPEAR picture is important to Widget production. The GE workers only shared the information that led to the reduction in labour after management promised them that none would lose their job.
The Leaders and managers had succeeded in creating the Space where the workers felt safe enough to be so innovative that they did put their very jobs at risk.
Every organisation is making something - its Widget. It's probably not literally an assembly line. It is at least made up of people who each makes something that contributes towards the Widget.
Is this process open? Is it collegial? Is it relentlessly self-critical?
Does every worker feel that they have a Leader who has created their Space, defined their Purpose, Equipped them, Affirmed them.?
Then got out of their way?
Boundaries.
A Leader defines the Space in which those who join her will apply themselves towards the Purpose.
A Leader clearly marks out the boundaries - not as an exercise of power to restrain or control those following but as a shorthand way of defining the resources - time, money, laws, staff, decision-making authority - available to them. It removes as many variables as possible so that she can leave them to focus on doing good work.
The space is marked out in the job ad, the employment contract, the duty statement, policies, procedures, budgets. Practical, unambiguous boundary lines around a field of endeavour and creativity and good work.
A good Leader will make the space as large as practicable to allow those within it the freedom to explore and experiment and innovate.
She may have managers who patrol the boundaries on her behalf. (Many 'leadership' positions are actually caretakers of a boundary of the Space carved out by a Leader.)
Some people's response to boundaries is to run as fast as they can to the extremes of the space and pound on the walls. A few will even cross over them as a child-like expression of their independence or dissent from the Leader. Others will probe the boundaries for technical gaps and exploit them, only to retreat back inside and feign surprise and indignation when asked to account by the managers for their actions.
The Leader responds by inviting them to leave her space and create their own.
As she will soon do herself.
The Leader's final act is to Retreat from the Space that she has created for others to fill.
So that she can define a new one.
And so on.
Because that's what Leaders do.
Competition.
The ABC programme Landline had a story on Chinese investment in the Ord River region of Western Australia on the Northern Territory border.
A local sugar farmer said something that was a rare and refreshing example of an ability to think beyond a simplistic and impulsive response to the government supporting the entry of a huge competitor. One would think that he would be wary and resistant to a large foreign company competing with his livelihood.
Yet here's what he said:
'I think it would radically change it in a positive way, and I think often, we all oppose change. It's a scary thing. It can be very hurtful and difficult, but it's a positive thing. It brings out the best in people. We're a very open community, we embrace new people. I'm really looking forward to having some new farmers come in and show us up a bit, you know, 'cause hopefully they're better than us.'
Hard.
A Leader recognises the tension between the uncertainty, anxiety and chaos that flow from navigating virgin territory, and the fear that this is evidence that she is failing and that she needs to turn back.
Leadership is Leadership because it is advancing where no-one has been before. Leadership is taking people in a direction that they otherwise wouldn't have chosen. It follows (no pun intended) that this will give rise to emotional turbulence in both the Leader and those following her.
It is hard.
Leaders are Leaders because they continue to advance towards where they want to be beyond the point where the PowerPoint leaders turn back because there's no path and it's hard and people are complaining.
The PowerPoint leader talks of leadership of leading of leaders of lead of leadership positions with the background hum of their wheels running over the smooth bitumen highway that was beaten, then surveyed, then graded, then laid out in front of them to travel on in air conditioned comfort with the cruise control on directed by the onboard navigation system while everyone's asleep in the back.
The PowerPoint leader then makes a decision in their voice to deviate. They immediately become disconcerted by the sound and unevenness of the gravel and the bumpy ride as they veer off someone else's route. Those in the back seat stir and mutter at being disturbed by the poor driving. They peer through the windows and feel anxious as they don't recognise their surroundings. They seek comfort and affirmation of the legitimacy of their fears in the other anxious fellow back seat faces. There's murmurs of dissent.
The PowerPoint leader makes another decision that relies on what they learned from their first decision. They veer off the track and into virgin terrain. The back seat grumbles grow into calls to turn back because surely the vibrations and the shaking and the noise and the uncertainty mean that this can't be the right direction.
Wrong way. Turn back. You must be lost. There's no track let alone marked highway and signs. Look around. Nobody else is on this route. Here - look at the map that proves you're wrong. Everyone in the back seat thinks you're wrong. We took a vote. Democracy.
The fear for the novice Leader transcending from PowerPoint slides is that the voices behind them and in their head might be right. Who do they think they are to deviate off the bitumen?
The real time symptoms of error are the same as those of Leadership. It's only those who may follow who can see the sense and predictability of the path.
Choosing to transcend the PowerPoint slides and into Leadership demands exceptional confidence that can survive the battering to ego and identity and the ceaseless gnawing of self-doubt that is louder than the critics' voices. Not motivated by any external goal or incentive because these may never be grasped.
But because to do so is to become who you are.
Principle.
A lot of workplace unhappiness and conflict arises from being dishonest with ourselves.
We are frustrated because our work is not contributing to our Weekend Widget. Or because our Weekend Widget is unsatisfying. Or because we don't know what our Weekend Widget is.
We're unlikely to acknowledge this root cause, let alone take responsibility for it. To do so sounds selfish and stupid - because it is. Worse, it would confront us with our inertia, and the effort it takes to overcome it.
Can you imagine this admission: 'I'm really unhappy in my job because I want to be a professional photographer.'
It's too hard to be ourselves.
It's easier to blame our co-workers or our boss or our employer or the government or our family or someone else who is responsible.
But we can't tell this story to our fellow jaded employees over sandwiches: 'You all need to change so that I can feel more authentic in my workplace.' There has to be a nobler story where we are the hero or victim.
It's usually about Injustice or Unfairness. We hold the attention of our bored co-workers with regular updates about Our Fight for A Principle.
As Liz once said: ''Principle' is often code for feeling vulnerable about disclosing/being honest with yourself about underlying fears, motivations and needs.'
The struggle gives us meaning where we had none. The fight to bring a happy ending to our Story of Workplace Injustice becomes our Weekend and Weekday Widget combined. (The definition of a dream job.)
We may even win our battle. We get a captive audience over lunch. We get an apology from our boss or co-worker. We get a transfer. Or the worst outcome - a pay rise.
Now we've got alienated or new co-workers or boss, or a different desk, or more money in our bank to do - something - on the weekends.
And we're not travelling the world taking photographs for National Geographic.
Transition.
The Weekend Australian newspaper published an editorial assessing the pace of decisions by the new Federal Government a couple of weeks after being elected.
It noted that the various Ministers were not hurrying about their business because of the 'obvious' reason that 'once these decisions are taken the clock starts ticking on getting results'.
It also applauded the approach of the Government of 'asking departments for advice before leaping into action.'
It also noted that this slow pace may be 'awkward for a leader who promised action'.
The transition from candidate to leader is almost always awkward, regardless of whether it's moving from opposition leader making promises to the electorate to becoming prime minister or the enthusiastic job applicant selling themselves into the position of being someone's boss.
One of the hallmarks of a leader is the discipline to withhold action after changing roles. The Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition posits that an expert is most vulnerable when they have to apply their expertise in a different context. An expert is fragile in this phase for another reason. Experts rely on confidence and yet one of the characteristics of expertise is recognising how ignorant you are. A juicy paradox.
Experts who change roles - whether it be from a member of the opposition to government minister or from one employer to another or from worker to line manager - need to resist the 'quick wins', the grand gestures and other superficial acts that declare their arrival.
Instead they may need to endure a rising level of gleeful ridicule from their critics as well as disappointment from their supporters as they take their time to absorb the new terrain.
They also need a boss who is expert enough to understand this settling in period and to patiently allow for it.