Commissioned, Curious, and Critical.
‘You’ll know you’re a good leader when people will follow you… if only out of curiosity.”
-General Colin Powell
‘President [Lincoln] never appeared to better advantage in the world …. Though he knows how immense is the danger to himself from the unreasoning anger of that committee, he never cringed to them for an instant. He stood where he thought he was right and crushed them with his candid logic.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
By far most people who call themselves Leader or hold ‘leadership positions’ are Commissioned. Either someone anoints them to ‘lead’, or they dub themselves ‘leader’. These people almost exclusively rely on positional power to get others to follow. In exceptional cases they may bring leadership qualities to their job, or develop some over their tenure. But the absence of any need to do so means they are unlikely to do the ‘push ups’ necessary to develop their ‘leadership muscle’, or any they had will atrophy due to lack of use. The Commissioned leader dominates organisations. Most of our experience and therefore understanding of leadership is via the Commissioned Leader. Thus, should we reach a leadership position, sadly we will most likely emulate the behaviour of the Commissioned leader.
Then there is leadership spawned by Curiosity. Someone sets off to seek the answer to something. If at least one other person follows them - they’re a leader. The Curiosity Leader is also rare. They are almost never found in organisations, because they operate outside hierarchies and don’t wear the badge or title of leadership, nor seek its formalities and burdens. Their followers are usually unknown to them; following their writing or research without acknowledgement.
And the third source of leadership is Criticism. The Critical Leader draws their followers from those either converted by the Critical Leader’s response to criticism, or the Critical Leader’s criticism of another. As with President Lincoln, the logic in the response to criticism, or even the strength and poise of the Critical Leader’s character in the face of the criticism exchange, attracts disciples. The Critical Leader is even rarer than the Curiosity Leader, and is also almost exclusively found outside organisations. Only an exceptional organisation can accommodate a Critical Leader in its midst.
And yet organisations pride themselves in engaging and paying and celebrating the use of a Critical Friend to help them see their blind spots.
Successful start ups will have a disproportionate blend of Commissioned, Curious, and Critical Leaders. The Curious are the boffins who discover and develop a new product. They attract and welcome the Critical, who challenge the assumptions of the Curious, and either convert to the thinking of the Curious, or the Curious convert to the Critical Leader’s position. The start up needs people to administer the company, and thus the Commissioned Leader is appointed. If the organisation is successful, it grows to the point where Curious and Critical are overwhelmed and almost eliminated by the Commissioned Leaders.
It’s a matter of time before the organisation either fails or is bought out.
The exception is if the organisation is not exposed to market forces - in which case Commissioned Leaders dominate, and attract workers who seek to be told what to do.
This is the military, public service, religious institutes, and any organisation reliant on government funding.
Truth Gives Way to Power.
Imagine if a worker regularly frustrated the efforts of their boss. Failed to keep their boss informed. Wasted their boss’s time. Didn’t give the boss what the boss needed to make decisions. Only told their boss enough information the worker decided the boss needed to know. Treated their boss like a child.
I suspect the worker would rightly be told to pack their bags and sent on their way. Such worker behaviour does not lead to a productive and harmonious workplace. It’s unfair on the boss, the workers, the clients, and anyone relying on the organisation.
Why is it that it’s okay for a boss to frustrate their workers? Not keep their workers informed? Waste their workers’ time with pointless meetings? Withhold information the boss doesn’t think the worker needs to know? Treat workers like a child?
This boss behaviour does not lead to a productive and harmonious workplace. It’s unfair on the worker, other bosses, clients, and anyone relying on the organisation.
The boss would rightly frame the worker’s behaviour as insubordinate, disruptive, unprofessional, disrespectful. The boss would leverage the resources of HR, lawyers, and other experts to address the worker’s behaviour. The boss would not pay for this expertise, and the toll on their time and wellbeing would be minimal.
The worker has limited access to resources to redress the boss’s detrimental affect on the worker’s productivity and wellbeing. They are outgunned. The boss’s behaviour affects the worker’s entire life, and the life of their family.
The only reason a boss get away with what a worker cannot - is positional power. Nothing more.
Truth gives way to power.
The Boss is The Boss.
The first job of a leader is to define reality.
One of the many risks of holding positional power in an organisation is the boss is the boss. She doesn’t have to define the reality. She can make it up as she goes along. She can literally declare white to be black and black, white. Then yellow the next day. Or maybe decree black to be dark navy. The organisation proceeds to plan and execute on this basis. Her lieutenants aiding and abetting - as good lieutenants do. After all, she’s the boss.
It’s a brave person who corrects a positional power boss. Why? Because a positional power boss relies solely on their declaration of reality. That’s the very essence of how they operate. Not on any subject matter expertise or technical qualifications. Simply the authority to declare ‘Thus is so.’ After all, that’s their job: to ‘lead’. Or as one of my Warrant Officers once joked: ‘What’s the use of power if you can’t abuse it?’
The boss is the boss.
Question the accuracy of the boss’s reality, and you threaten the boss. Naturally the boss will respond by removing the threat: you. The boss justifies this (assuming she ever has to justify her actions) with: ‘She was not a team player,’ or the like. No boss will ever say: ‘She threatened my authority,’ or ‘She disagreed with my reality.’
The larger the organisation, the longer the boss’s declaration of reality will remain unchallenged and uncorrected. But just as Reality will quickly smack a small organisation in the face, it will eventually do the same to a large one. The larger the organisation, the longer it takes for reality to bite. Sometimes it’s years.
And usually long after the boss has moved on. Often riding on her success as a boss at her last organisation.
The Passenger.
There are stories of pilots grappling to recover their out of control aircraft, narrating on the radio the aircraft’s behaviour and their attempts to recover it, all the way to impact and their death.
I’ve been in some meetings like that.
Watching on as the boss pulls back their control column of power.
The engines of logic and common sense screaming as the airflow of procedural fairness slows to a stop, the situation stalls, the nose of reason drops, and we plunge.
Had it been my place to intervene, I would have done so. But I was a passenger.
Instead, I watched on, and narrated the descent in my head.
Stop talking boss, and listen. With the ear of your heart. With the curiosity of the naive inquirer. Genuinely listen. Not rote, tick-the-box listen. Not HR listen. Not what-I-learned-in-my-MBA listen. Listen with the ear of someone who …
Too late.
Joy.
Long after the December tinsel and baubles have been boxed…
Deep into January, then February and into the far reaches of the year when desperates are vainly trying to capture the spirit of the season with Christmas in July…
I will survive and smile on the beautiful feeling of having worked with clever, curious, creative, kind people who seek to make things well, and better.
The pure Joy.
Thank you - each of you.
Defining Moments.
A hand went up in the audience.
‘Yes?’
‘Our organisation’s Mission Statement is ‘Innovation and Excellence’. And yet when I asked to go to an international conference on ‘Innovation’ in my field, I was told it was too expensive.’
‘How much?’ I asked.
‘$25,000 airfare, conference fee, and accommodation,’ he said.
‘Then your employer has defined what Innovation it wants. You think it’s worth $25,000. Your employer doesn’t agree.’
Make decisions on the assumption that they advance your organisation’s vision or mission statement.
See what your organisation does in response.
Adjust your understanding of what ‘excellence’ means, accordingly.
The Same Set of Facts.
The secret to running a successful business is to make sure that all key decision-makers in that business have access to the same set of facts.
- Jack Welch
A critic is often someone who does not possess the same set of facts.
A criticism is ‘Hey! Based on my understanding of the facts, you’re not acting in accordance with my expectations of how you said you would act.’
Therefore, criticism is an opportunity for both parties to compare their sets of facts and for one or both to change their understanding of the facts.
And potentially to share that change with the rest of the organisation.
As the first job of a leader is to define reality, criticism is not a threat to the leader.
It’s an invitation to lead.
Indeed - criticism can be the origin of leadership: accompanying someone towards new facts they otherwise would never have considered.
Criticism, if given and received in service of the widget, is at least a gift.
And at its best - an act of love.
Pay Attention.
Employment is an employer paying for us to pay attention to the employer’s widget for eight hours a day, five days a week.
If we’re not paying attention to the employer’s widget - that’s a conflict of interest.
Pay attention.
Cogs Are Less Threatening.
The fact is, many organisations, and a lot of managers want cogs. Cogs are less threatening. Cogs on some level are more dependable. They do exactly what you expect every single time. So the argument I’ve been making for fifteen or twenty years is that the future belongs to organisations that are resilient. That can deal with change. That can do things that are magical that can’t easily be outsourced. That can’t easily be turned into AI. That is the job of a Linchpin. A group of people who care enough to write the manual instead of following the manual.
But - and it’s a very big But - we’re in the middle of a generations long transition away from the industrial era. And if you work at an institution where people are rewarded for being compliant cogs, don’t be surprised when they’re not happy when you act like a Linchpin.
One thing I can share with you, is that early in my career after a year of some of the best work of my life, one of my managers tried to get me fired. He didn’t try to get me fired because he disliked me as a person. He tried to get me fired because it was too difficult for him to manage seven people where one of them was intent on breaking rules, making rules, figuring out how things work, and six of them wanted to follow the manual.
What I figured out in that moment, was that I could stay in the organisation by working with and for other people who got the joke. Who needed what I could provide. But if those people aren’t around, that’s a signal that maybe you need to look somewhere else. Because the worst thing you can do is pretend to be a cog. The worst thing you can do is just give up and become compliant, and ask what to do next, and simply follow the manual.
Because if you do that, then you will be just like everyone else, and you’ll be easily replaceable. And the goal when we do our work is to make things better by making better things.
Lack of Curiosity.
‘In hindsight, it looks like a lack of curiosity.’
-Kathryn Campbell, Secretary of the Department of Human Services, explaining how the Department came to operate the unlawful robodebt scheme.
‘[We are] concerned that there has been a sustained lack of curiosity and action from Defence [to using data to inform suicide prevention measures].’
-Interim Report of the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide.
‘The Inquiry report indicates that while there is no indicator of knowledge or intent to contribute to alleged unlawful behaviours … that there’s a responsibility to know, to be curious to understand what is going on in your organisation.’
-General Angus Campbell, Chief of the Defence Force, responding to questions why senior officers didn’t know about war crimes.
Good decision making in three words:
Be attentively curious.
(Why ‘attentively’? It adds a level of intention and attention and process.)
Bad things routinely happen because good and competent people were not curious. They didn’t think or ask ‘Why are you doing this?’ ‘What made that happen?’ ‘What did you learn from that?’ Good and competent people will, by default, accept things on face value.
Which is why we must direct good and competent people to Be Attentively Curious.
The wonderful thing about curiosity is it doesn’t require expertise or positional power or inclusion in your job description, or permission.
Asking at every level - ‘Help me to understand’ is often all it takes to prevent harm.
Even if you think do understand - it’s interesting to ask someone else their understanding. To ask them to talk you through their understanding.
If good and competent people know that at least one superior or subordinate may randomly ask ‘Help me to understand…’ they are more likely to pay attention to their decision making, and the decision making of those who report to them.
If they know they may be asked to explain their decision, they may adopt a conscious process such as the Five Steps to a Good Decision so they can show their working out, if asked. They are less likely to rely on positional power, or cronyism, or justify their inaction after an event with ‘I didn’t know …’.
We may not be a decision maker. But if an organisation makes it part of its culture to ask ‘Help me to understand …’ we support those who make decisions, and those who report to them. We become dozens or hundreds or thousands of random auditors of our organisation.
Our curiosity helps others to be curious.
Three words to transform any organisation:
Be attentively curious.
Meeting Budget.
If a boss conscripts 18 punters to a two hour meeting, they're spending the equivalent of one person doing an entire week's work.
Does anyone keep score?
Is it anyone’s job to say ‘In hindsight… that wasn’t a good investment of time’?
I suspect HR would spring into action if a punter failed to turn up to work for a week.
Why isn’t it one of the jobs of HR - Human Resources - to track how effectively an organisation uses its humans? To keep a record of every meeting, the times, the number of participants, and ask for a report from every boss in a week, month, or year of the return on investment of every meeting?
If bosses knew they had to report on this quarterly, would bosses give more thought to whether a meeting was as effective as an email, or post on the organisation’s platform of choice?
Should HR - Human Resources - advise and support bosses on how to improve their use of the humans based on their meeting reports?
Could bosses’ bonuses be tied to the money they saved by not having meetings?
Could each boss’s budget include a Meeting Budget - where a boss had to predict how many meetings and thus a salary equivalent they planned to spend? If bosses were required to do this by HR - Human Resources - would that encourage bosses to plan their year better, based on their budgeted number of meetings?
Imagine it: a month before the end of the financial year the boss emails telling the punters they’d expended their meeting budget and they had to make some meeting cutbacks.
Oh the cheering …
The Reality of Today.
Identify where you are. Pitilessly
- Henry Kissinger.
The great risk of goal setting and vision stating and promoting and marketing and PR-ing and the other many aspirational declarations to the world of what we aspire to be tomorrow - is we overlook the reality of where we are today.
Which is usually messier and more uncomfortable than where we want to be. Which may be the reason we loudly shout where we intend to be tomorrow.
We tend to ignore or reject any evidence or voice about today, choosing to direct attention to where we are headed.
We may also point to where we were yesterday. Our noble and righteous history and journey, and the saints and martyrs and pioneers who sacrificed to get us here.
The result is we ignore the problems of today by spending today acting as if we live in an idealistic tomorrow or yesterday. When tomorrow comes, we act as if it’s the next day.
Until inevitably, maybe not tomorrow or the next day, or year - the reality of today punches us in the face.
What You Felt.
You’ve given a lot of evidence about what you felt. I want to know what she said or what she did, which you said amounted to obstruction …
- Justice Michael Lee, Federal Court of Australia Lehrmann v Network Ten
In Step 1 of the Five Steps to a Good Decision we give ourselves permission to turn inward and feel all the messy and irrational emotions swirling inside in response to an event demanding our decision. It’s a selfish, mostly internal act of retreat.
Once largely purged of our ‘I feel’, in Step 1, we liberate ourselves to turn outward in Steps 2 to 5.
To see, hear, and serve others, in a visible, process of showing our working out.
Critical Friend.
Appoint a ‘critical friend’ outsider to help your team or organisation make decisions at your annual offsite retreat.
Or…
Create and maintain a workplace where everyone - workers and bosses and volunteers - feels informed and knowledgeable and confident and safe and respectful and respected and expected to criticise any time.
Attend.
The Federal Court of Australia live streams some trials attracting public interest.
At the beginning of each sitting day, the presiding Justice makes the following statement:
‘Just a reminder to people who are WATCHING of an Order I made … that members of the public who ATTEND the hearing via the Youtube platform available on the online Court List do so on the condition that they …’ etc.
The Federal Court recognises that in 2023, the interest of justice requires the public to ATTEND a court and witness its proceedings via electronic means. The Court does not see itself and thus Justice limited by the size of the courtroom or the number of seats within it. That’s just geography.
The same can be argued for attendance at school in 2023. The best interests of students should not be constrained by where they live, or the ability of their school to attract good teachers, or the size of their classroom or playground or oval or gym.
Students should be able to attend school by means other than sitting at their desks.
It’s just geography.
Deeds are Dear.
With rare exceptions, you can recognise what an organisation values least:
Listen to what it talks about.
Because talk is cheap.
Committed to. Totally committed to. The paramount concern. 110% committed to…
‘But my organisation does live its deeds!’ I hear you protest. Lucky you.
Or it might be its talk is drowned out by its deeds.