PREFACE:
An important concept discussed in this article is reframing. In almost every business that we consult with, we find leaders who need to learn how to reframe their thought processes. Reframing thoughts involves looking at a situation or circumstance from a new perspective. My good friend Kent Roberts has talked about “looking through a new lens” as he has worked with community leaders over the last 20+ years.
Acquiring a new perspective really is like putting on a new pair of glasses. If you wear glasses you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you wear glasses you’ve probably experienced the trip to the eye doctor where you discover your old glasses don’t quite give you the vision you thought you had. But things got fuzzy gradually so you really didn’t notice. Now that the new lenses are put before your eyes you can see how hazy your vision was. These new lenses point out your visual short comings and now you can see clearly that which you didn’t even realize was fuzzy just minutes before.
This is the way we see our organizations. We very often see them through glasses that are not quite adjusted to the point where you get a crystal clear vision of what lies in front of you. And a crystal clear vision is absolutely necessary if a leader is to effectively lead. In leadership it’s not quite as easy as it is at the eye doctor. There is not machine that measures your organizational vision. We can measure your tendencies and biases and that can help but ultimately you will need to make a conscious effort to look at the situation from a new perspective to really understand what needs to be done.
In this article I talk about reframing to reduce the impact of “Perfectionism Paralysis.” That is the paralysis that results from wanting all your ducks in a row so much that actions can never be taken because the ducks just are cooperating. But reframing can be used in many, many different situations. It can be used when the leader is very money conscious and the engineers are very safety conscious. We saw this in a small project we assisted with that involved engineers and a plant manager in Mexico. The plant manager wanted the products out the door on time, on budget, and on spec while the engineers were very concerned about the quality and safety of the products they were shipping around the world. The integrity of the products and the integrity of the engineers were on the line. The key to bridging the gap between the manager and the engineers was helping each side to reframe their thought processes. The manager needed to understand how important integrity was to the engineers and needed to accommodate that in his operations and sales processes. The engineers, on the other hand, needed to understand that unless the company could provide quality machines in a reasonable time frame the company would go out of business. By looking at the problem from a new perspective, one that was new for both the plant manager and for the engineers, the plant manager and the engineers were able to develop a production schedule that met everyone’s needs and expectations.
To build confidence in your leadership requires that you have successful experiences. Sometimes to acquire those successes a leader will need to take a whole new look at what is being done. Sometimes the leader will have to help followers do the same thing. Often, it’s not a matter of looking at the problem from the other person’s perspective but it becomes necessary to look at the problem from a new 3rd perspective that is different from the perspective of both the leader and the followers.
Just as important as having an effective perspective is having an understanding of a problem’s context. Once again I quote my friend Kent Roberts. Kent was fond of telling communities that “context is everything!” By that Kent meant a situations context will tell what needs to be done. It will also tell you how people are likely to behave. If you want to change behaviors you have to change the context. By context we mean the set of circumstances, factors, facts, etc that will have an impact on any given event. For an organization it is the cultural foundation that essentially governs how things get done. What we advocate here is that leaders create a culture by choice as opposed to a culture by chance.
THE ARTICLE
Leadership and Confidence:
It’s important to note that not all managers are leaders but all good leaders must be good managers. To be good a manager leaders must have confidence in their ability to manage people and the work those people must do. How does someone gain the confidence they will need to be able to become a good leader? That’s where the process gets a little tricky.
Our confidence stems from more than one factor. A few of those factors are our knowledge, talents, skills, attitudes, and past experiences. To increase our confidence we need to increase our knowledge base, be fully aware of the talents we possess, engage in deliberate practice to help convert out talents into usable skills, keep a constant check on our attitudes, and involve ourselves in experiences that have a high potential for generating success while still challenging us to stretch and grow. This must all be done with a constant understanding that in leadership there is no such thing as failure. All successes, however, exist on a continuum from hardly any success to enormously successful.
Fear of failure has paralyzed thousands of people who would otherwise be good leaders. Yet, we do not want to whitewash the world of leadership and say everyone achieves roaring successes. That would be disingenuous and counterproductive for this book. What we can do, however, is reframe the thought process. Reframing is a key ingredient to achieving success. If an individual is a perfectionist, it won’t do much good to tell them to settle for something less than perfection. Their make-up is such that they will constantly be concerned about having put something out there that doesn’t meet the standards and to the perfectionist that is failure. The process of reframing involves helping the perfectionist define a new set of work standards, a set that is still demanding but attainable within reasonable timelines and keeps work moving toward the desired end. In addition, changing the language from failure to various levels of success is another means of reframing. A perfectionist can also be stymied by the “ducks-in-a-row” syndrome. That is holding off on actions until every last detail is accounted for. This can result in “Perfectionism Paralysis.” This the organizational paralysis that happens as we wait for just the right conditions to arise so we can move forward with little or no risk of failure. In the mean time your competitors have left you in the dust.
Along with reframing it is also very important to think of context. One of the most amazing contextual successes in American History was actually an American Football player, Jerry Rice. An NFL football game lasts for 1 hour. If we consider that about half a team’s game time is on offence and half is on defense, we can assume that Jerry Rice spent no more than 30 minutes on the field on any given Sunday. In fact, he was actually on the field for less time than that. A typical play will last less than 10 seconds and then it generally takes 25 seconds to get the next play started. So out of the 30 minutes a team may have the ball on offense, only about 8 minutes and 35 seconds are actually used for the plays. A team can generally run 45 to 60 plays in a game and Jerry Rice would usually catch 8 to 12 balls per game. That means Jerry Rice became a dominating football player when he only touched the ball for 80 to 120 seconds per game. That’s 2 minutes or less per game! Talk about context! Great leaders operate the same way. Very little time out of any given day is devoted to the leadership act but every second must count.
SUMMATION:
Every organization functions, even those that get labeled dysfunctional. It is in the best interest of any organization to accept that fact. What we are not saying, however, is that every organization functions to the same level. By organization we mean everything from a family to the US Congress. Perhaps it’s time to stop saying Congress is dysfunctional. It does function but just at a very low level. If we consider a continuum of from 1 to 100 on a functionality scale we might say congress is a 10.
If we stay with the Congress example we will need to ask the question, why is it functioning at such a low level? We might also ask, were there any times in the past where it had a higher level of function? I don’t want to spend much time arguing history either recent or ancient. But I do want to suggest that a key reason for the most recent failures has a great deal to do with both perspective and context. Factions in Congress have refused to look at the world though any lens but the lens they brought with them to Congress. Although they may believe they are staying true to their ideals, it can be shown that they are really missing the mark because to stay true to their ideals requires that they create the culture they desire and through the impasses they have created they have relegated that culture to the whims of chance.
Taking action is a choice. Refusing to take action is also a choice. When actions are aligned to values and expectations they have the potential for leading to the creation of a most desired culture. Through inaction there is only the opportunity of acquiring the culture by chance. Our experience is that many organizations are a great deal like Congress. They allow things to continue to move on down the road at whatever pace it happens and in whatever direction it goes. And then, much like Congress, organization leaders blame “other factors” for failure but always take credit for success.
If real growth and development are to take place it must be intentional. If an organization wants a specific culture it must choose to have that culture. It must decide to specifically take the actions that lead to the desired culture. If all of the activities of the organization focus only on the “work at hand” and none of the activities are specifically designed to develop and maintain the desired culture, the organization and its leaders have opted for the culture by chance.
The word organization stems from the word organize. The word organize comes from the word organ; or to make something like an organ. Let’s use the heart as an organ for this example. Our heart is a muscular organ which has the function of pumping life sustaining blood though out our body. The heart is a well organized organ which actually expends a great deal of energy on its own operational function. It is composed of millions of cells that all work together in an organized fashion to carry out its function. The heart’s culture is one that says all heart cells will pull together to make sure that our job is done and done to meet the body’s needs and expectations. The heart knows that if it doesn’t do what is needed the entire body will fail. Corpus Organization will falter and death will follow. That death affects the heart just as much as it affects the liver, or skin, or brain.
Business and community organizations follow the same laws as does the human body. Unless the culture of the organization honors all functions of the organization and unless the organization expends energy to maintain the necessary culture, the organization will falter and die. Unlike the example of the heart, the business or community organization may not die right away. It may take weeks or months or years but death is inevitable. Ignoring the culture of your body puts you on a path to an early demise. Ignoring the culture of your organization does the same thing!
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