This morning I have been thinking about an interaction I had at the Spring 2019 From Vision to Action Executive Roundtable. Myself and another person were walking down the hall toward the conference room where the Roundtable was to take place. I turned to the other person and asked “How long have we been working together?”
He replied, “Since November 1999. Do you remember when we first met?”
I thought for a moment and said, “I am sorry to say I don’t.”
He continued, “It was November 1999. You keynoted a conference that I attended. I was a first time CEO and I asked you after your presentation what I needed to know and do as a new leader. You told me to read the book, Flight of the Buffalo: Soaring To Excellence, Learning to Let Employees Lead by Belasco and Stayer, and then to call you to discuss it.”
I smiled.
He continued the story by saying, “I did read the book and then I called you.” And with that, he quoted two of the most powerful lines from this book:
“Transfer ownership for work to those who execute the work.”
“Create the environment for ownership where each person wants to be responsible for his/her own performance.”
In times of accelerated change, chronic uncertainty and rampant complexity, we want people to own the work they are doing. We also want these same people to have a clear picture inside of them about what is a “great performance”. And finally, we want all the systems and structures to align and support that “great performance” at the individual, team and organizational levels.
As I wrote last week, I believe the foundation upon which ownership, clarity and alignment is built starts with the senior leadership team. The challenge for us at this time is to realize that within complex change the leader’s job with their team and the organization as a whole is to engage in active inquiry.
Many years ago Stephen Covey explained it this way: “seek first to understand; second to be understood.” Active inquiry is based upon persistent and thoughtful inquiry through questions.
This past summer I worked with many different leadership teams as they began planning for the future. In particular, I was working with a senior leadership team where I asked three foundational questions:
- What is going right?
- What shouldn’t change as you execute a new strategic plan?
- What does growth mean to all of you?
In one particular circumstance, every single senior leader at the table would make a statement. No one asked questions. The CEO was stunned. There was no thoughtful inquiry.
At the end of the day, the CEO asked me for my analysis of the day’s meeting and I respond with “I don’t know if you can get there from here with this group of people. The day was all posture and no dialogue. They are senior managers but there was little senior leadership behaviors displayed at the individual or group level.”
Upon considerable reflection, I have figured out that complex times and changes require more interactive communication at multiple levels within the organization. The goal of which is to create understanding, trust and a level of dialogue where by we may discover “positive deviance”, i.e. a solution or set of solutions that may already working within the organization itself, rather than looking to outside people and companies for best practices or clues about how to proceed. Furthermore, interactive communication can redirect our attention from “what’s wrong” to “what’s right”
This week, sit down and do your own reflecting. Ask yourself the following two questions:
- Where are we building safe, respectful, and trusting work environments so all involved will commit to decisions and plans of action?
- Where are we building time and space into our daily lives so we have the courage to hold one another accountable to delivering those plans?
Now is the time to work for a better future.
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