Decoding the Hidden Dynamics of Teams

Please join me for a one day workshop on: Decoding the Hidden Dynamics of Teams  Mar 04, 2016 09:00am - 4:30pm Event Type: Continuing Education Program Category: Organizational Leadership  Description Kathryn Stanley, PhD and Gillien Todd, MEd, JD, instructors This unique workshop will provide leaders, teachers, coaches, consultants, HR and organizational development professionals with the tools to work at a much deeper level within groups and systems. Running for the first time in the US, the workshop will introduce participants to the theory of ‘Structural Dynamics’, which deconstructs the hidden dynamics of group interaction and links them to observable behaviors in the room – ultimately creating the opportunity to change stuck patterns of behavior which are not working. The workshop includes the Kantor Baseline Instrument and debrief. By participating in this program participants will: Discuss Dr. David Kantor’s model of structural dynamics through the use of the Kantor Baseline Instrument Identify and work with typical behavioral tendencies and stuck dynamics Practice a range of ways to change stuck behavior and dynamics Learn to use Structural Dynamics as a powerful way of developing yourself, others and teams Program Code: SD16 6 CE Credits, $295 includes the Kantor Baseline Instrument Location: William James College, Newton Enrollment limited to 20 people. To register click here.

My Research with David Kantor - Accelerating Team Performance

Learning how to make change happen - Kantor Style

David Kantor, Ph.D.

In June of 2012 I was approached by Dr. David Kantor to research his model of human speech patterns, most popularly known as the 4 Player Model but also more formally called Structural Dynamics. Because he was introduced to me by my third reader from my dissertation committee and long time friend I agreed to meet with him. That sounds a little arrogant but the reason I say that is because the minute I officially got my letters I got approached by 3 different older guru-types in our field to do research for free. Not being a trust-funder but an owner of a consulting practice, full time teacher and a mom, my time was limited so I was cautious and very skeptical about David and his model in general.  Having consulted to, intervened in and made an in-depth study of organizational behavior, development and human systems and having been exposed to many, many models I needed to have David back up his claims that he had discovered a model of models for all of human speech. That's a pretty audacious claim right?

He explained to me that in the 1970s he and Dr. William Lehr signed up 19 families in Cambridge Massachusetts to allow themselves to be observed at close range for a few months. He not only placed a tape recorder in every room that was turned on by the first family member up and off by the last person to sleep but also a graduate student equipped with a tape recorder and notepad lived in the house the entire time.  From this, he and his partner and graduate student team analyzed hours and hours of tapes and and came up with the 4 Player Model that evolved into Structural Dynamics. You can read about the results of this research in his book, Inside the Family.

Having earned a degree from a school that required my dissertation work to be peer review ready (meaning very high standards for the research I conducted) I came to appreciate evidence based theories and models. It's hard to tell sometimes whether a theory is just accepted wisdom, like the earth is flat, or if a model is grounded in scientific research. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, as it turns out, is not an evidence based model nor is John Kotter's 8 Step Change Model or Debono's Six Thinking Hats. All of these models are based on the anecdotal evidence and the idiosyncratic experiences of their creators. Today, due to the advent of Big Data, there is a demand for evidenced based conclusions and for good reason. Anecdotal models are limed in their use, can be quite wrong for many circumstances and can also be damaging if you use them to intervene in a situation that they have not been tested in - at worst. The least damaging effect is that they waste time and make no real change.

It mattered to me that David came by his model through scientific research. His ask of me was also encouraging in terms of his own integrity because he asked me to poke holes in his model. He asked me to test it in executive teams to see if it held. He had been using it in practice in his work doing family therapy for 40 years and then with executives teams in large organizations like The World Bank. But he had not formally tested it in corporations, only in families.

Since then we have run our pilot study and the data is pointing to the fact that he got it right. We need more testing of course and are in the process of lining up teams to continue our research, but so far I have not been able to say there is an extra speech act or that the operating systems are wrong. We are having an ongoing argument about the place of humor which I think is a random move so we are discovering even more depth to the model.

I am glad I've spent so much of my free time on this project. I learned how to use the model with teams and executive coaching clients I work with and it's very powerful. I've facilitated so many different interventions over the last twenty years between organizational restructuring, large scale culture change, team development, third party intervention and 360 feedback, etc. I noticed especially at the system and group/team levels of intervention that I can design the most beautiful appropriate intervention in complete collaboration with the client, but if they can't communicate/hear each other it does not matter. It won't work. They are still stuck in their old patterns and no amount of active listening, feedback, or conflict negotiation training creates a long term fix because the root cause is often at the unconscious level of values, personal story, and deeply internalized patterns of communication that Kantor has captured in his model of Structural Dynamics.

After getting two degrees in organizational psychology, having apprenticed with Drs. Jay Galbraith, Steve Phillips, Lynn Newman and other expert Organizational Development consultants to really learn how to help people, teams and whole systems change it was frustrating to me when after many meetings, much use of process consultation and adherence to Edgar Schein's principles among others that often the interventions would not hold.

When I started to use Kantor's model to watch my own communication patterns and see the patterns of others, I realized this was the deeper level that can create the skills, readiness, and availability for client systems to truly transform.  I'm really glad I took David up on his offer to be his Co-Principal Investigator on the project because my consulting abilities and practice model have grown from it.  I am now teaching his model (in Collaboration with Dialogix) in two classes. One called Making Change Happen and the level 2 class called Changing Behavior in High Stakes. I have been through both as well as train the trainer sessions and it's been well worth my time.

Last, I had an interesting and somewhat disturbing conversation with a long time OD consultant. She noted that most of the teaching these days in OD, OB, etc. is around training skills versus actual intervention. She worried the art and psychology of planned change is getting lost. I got into the field of Organizational Psychology because I was lucky enough to be in a position of facilitating groups from an early age and in doing so experience the wonder of seeing a person's consciousness shift so that they could see the world in a completely different way that got them unstuck.  After much hard work to learn how to do this, I have seen this shift at the team and the whole systems level. Seeing deep shifts of consciousness occurring in the individual, among team members, and in whole organizations is a wonder and an honor and that's what intervention is.  In my teaching at William James College and my work with Kantor's model and training others to use it, I am doing my part to make sure the art of intervention is not lost.  If you are interested in learning more, please join me in learning about how to make change happen in human systems - Kantor style.

How To Overcome Our Biases? Walk Bodly Toward Them

This is the best talk you could ever listen to about the state of bias in our country and what to do about it.  Thank you Verna Myers!

The Value of Understanding the Structural Story

[S]igmund Freud discovered many years ago that it is part of normal human life to project our innermost fears, judgments, hopes and dreams onto others; or as my colleague Kieran says, we “load each other up”. Indeed there are many management books, intervention tools, and thoughts on what to do about this when it happens in a work setting. When we load another person up by projecting our reality on to them at work it can lead to problems be creating self-reinforcing negative feedback loops. This occurs when one person projects a moral story onto a colleague causing their colleague (or the person projected upon) to do the same thing back to them. As this goes on it gets worse and worse leading to number of unproductive and damaging effects.

I have seen this phenomena many times in working with engineering teams. When faced with making a decision about a project, the engineering team members often spend time analyzing the underlying technical issues and underpinnings of the proposed plan of action. Understanding why they are doing the project is just as important to them as how they will do it. In Structural Dynamics, when we discuss purposes and the underlying mechanisms we are using the language of Meaning.   Since the engineers are going to have to implement the plan, which typically means creating something new to address a problem, they want to understand the purpose and theoretical underpinnings.

However, the leader of this team, the longer they sit there listening to the analysis, becomes more and more frustrated and thinks, “ This team has analysis paralysis and just can’t make a decision.”   Often leaders are put in the role of minding deadlines and ensuring that work gets done. All the concrete elements of how and when things will get done including deciding what the bottom line is. Discussions around developing time frames and next steps are spoken in the language of Power.
Seeing the leader’s frustration and annoyance with the pace of the decision making, engineering team members decide that their leader doesn’t care about quality and they become equally frustrated and tension ensues as the projections fly creating layers of moral story that end up hurting relationships and making it even more difficult to get work done.

Reframing the story using Structural Dynamics is a powerful intervention I have been using with my client teams, leaders, coachees, students and corporate pairs who are in conflict. In reframing the moral story to a structural story of the engineering team and the leader we can see that they are speaking different languages and therefore not able to hear or appreciate what each other needs or is trying to communicate, just as if the team were speaking French and the leader speaking German. Understanding is not happening.

Sharing Kantor’s model of Structural Dynamics in the corporate setting brings quick relief, is eye opening, and healing to strained and “loaded up” relationships. Instead of having to tell a morale story, e.g.,  the team can’t make a decision and the leader doesn’t care. The structural story is much more useful. The team needs to spend time in Meaning because it’s the only way they can get to an accurate decision. And the leader needs to use the language of Power in order to keep the team and project on track. When both parties know these languages they can then transparently and with understanding of where each other are coming from change the nature of the discourse from unproductive to a productive collaborative dialogue. Knowing the structural story makes it much harder to come to unproductive and often inaccurate moral conclusions.

Cross posted at Dialogix  http://www.dialogix.co.uk/home/blog/

Do you have the guts to innovate?

Some of the greatest innovations were the result of failures: corn syrup, Pyrex, the Post-It-Note adhesive. All failed attempts that ended up having other uses that made their company's millions.

Stewarding great ideas into innovative new products and services that succeed in the market is tricky business. Below are four key things leaders can do to ensure their employees have the mindshare and space to not only invent new products and services but also get them to market.

1.   Provide time and space for employees to be creative versus buried under the day to day work flow. Creativity is the foundation of all innovation. Google used to give each employee one day or 20% of their time at work to focus on projects of their choosing. From this program many successful innovations emerged including Gmail. 

2.  Align Rewards. Recognize employees, teams, and supervisors who conceive of and design innovative new products, services or internal procedures and policies. Rewarding ideas for innovations is just as important as rewarding completed innovations if you want to instill the value of the new in your organization's culture. Corning has done this for over a century and they keep innovating as a result. 

3.  Tolerate risk by rewarding failure. Create an organizational culture that values learning from failure versus blaming. Start with how you treat your own staff, because cultural norms always roll downhill. Risk tolerance is evident when failure is viewed as a necessary step in the process of innovation. Trial and error is involved in all new inventions.  Thomas Edison made over 10,000 attempts before he succeeded at making the light bulb.

4.  Open up communication channels across, up and down. The ability for employees to communicate throughout their organization creates a culture where ideas or shared and played with. Organizations that encourage employees to communicate with a leader two levels up or peers in different functions, have a higher degree of innovation than companies that don’t. Leaders who encourage informal communication build companies that also have higher retention rates. These types of companies are simply better places to work and foster the conditions that allow innovation to thrive.

Authentic Leadership: Good for Business and Our Health

It's been said that one of the biggest indicators that a person might be CEO material (experience, education, etc. held equal) is the ability to work a sixteen hour day.

A huge workload, however, is not the only challenge for today's leaders.  As we know, Twenty-first century leaders are dealing with volatile conditions and a level of complexity and competition for resources unheard of at the start of the Twentieth century. 

Followers are also changing in that the US workforce demographics are becoming more diverse than they have ever been in terms of skin color, age, gender and skill sets. The nature of work itself in most corporations requires employees to make a great many discretionary decisions which requires them to be managed in a way that is very different from the Industrial Age Command Control style of leadership (autocratic, top down, hierarchical,  Theory X).  Today's employees, with their in-depth training and high levels of education are knowledge workers.  

The rise of the knowledge worker requires leaders to allow their followers more autonomy, more of a voice in strategy and decision making, and collaborative consideration in terms of performance assessment and rewards. Additionally, leaders must possess multicultural and relational intelligence that is only possible by deepening their awareness of their own leadership identity development (biases, privilege, fears, and assumptions about leadership).  Furthermore, the best leaders have a heart deep clarity about their purpose as a leader and are passionate about getting feedback from their environment to ensure they are on track with what they are trying to achieve. Because they seek feedback, their followers experience them as less threatening and more collaborative which makes the leader's mission catching.  Because they are able to take the feedback in and make changes shows that they are able to learn and flexible enough to change their thinking for their mission.  

All of this is starting to make the 16 hour work day look like the least of the challenge for today's leaders.

When we consider the work of leaders like Attorney Kenneth Feinberg who has responded quickly and competently to the traumatic world events 9/11 and the Boston Marathon bombings for the greater good, what we are witnessing is authentic leadership. A great historical example is Abraham Lincoln. 

Authentic leaders have a deep foundation in their own personal mission which ignites followers with similar convictions to join them in the stewardship of movements, organizations, countries, and campaigns to help in the aftermath of trauma and war and give service to populations with ongoing support needs like veterans, the poor, and the displaced.

Authentic leaders due to their sincerity about who they are, transparency about their mission, willingness to collaborate in order to serve the greater good above their own egos, inspire their followers and other stakeholders.  Authentic leaders are on the forefront of change.

The journey to reach authenticity is not always straightforward or easy. Research shows that some authentic leaders become so through adversity and hardship they experience, others through the discovery and development of causes and still others through formal learning programs.  The end result is an understanding of their own life story and worldview that fuels their sense of justice as well as their passions and causes. Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, chronicles his life story and how it fueled his mission to make all employees partners and offer benefits to part time workers (a revolutionary thing at the time) in Pour Your Heart Into It. 

The definition of Authentic leadership includes the relationship between the leaders and their followers (Gardner et al., 2005). In fact it’s the followers who reinforce the leader’s authenticity, which is deeply rooted in the leaders self-authorization of their role as a leader. Indeed it has been found that the leadership role and the self are relativity undifferentiated for the authentic leader (Gardner & Avolio, 1998).  Warren Bennis described authentic leadership as a form of self-expression (1992).

Furthermore, authentic leadership is good for business! Here are some highlights from research on the positive impacts of authentic leaders on their followers and organizations:

1. Authentic leadership is positively related to profit (Rowold & Laukamp (2009)
2. Followers, of authentic Leaders, experience a relationship that includes social mirroring and attunement and interpersonal synchrony, have lower salivary cortisol levels (the stress response hormone) than those followers who are not connected to their leaders on this subconscious level (Kouzakova, Van Baaren & Van Kippenberg, 2010)
3. Relationships with authentic leaders are characterized by a phenomenon called resonance which includes the sharing of mutual positive emotions, a subjective sense of being in synchrony with one another, and activation of parasympathetic nervous system responses (e.g. rest, and digest response) (Boyatzix, et al., 2011).
4. Relationships with non-authentic leaders produce negative emotions, interpersonal discord, and parasympathetic nervous system activation (fight/flight response) (Boyatzix, et al., 2011)
5. Authenticity between leaders and followers engenders feelings of compassion, hope, a sense of play and mindfulness (Boyatziz & Mckee, 2005)
6. When leaders and followers are not connected in this way it’s considered dissonance which includes the engendering of malice, micromanaging, betrayal, and insensitivity which create toxic emotions in the workplace that take a toll on employee well being and performance (Frost, 2004)
7. In a MRI imaging study, researchers found that memories of authentic leaders stimulated the area of the brain in such a way that signaled creative and the ability to think out of the box (Frost, 2004)
8. Conversely, memories of inauthentic leaders produced a "cognitive narrowing of the person’s attention" which researchers surmised was due to following  a leader who is focused on corrections and errors which limit the contributions followers can make (Frost, 2004)
9. Studies involving quantitative EEGs have found that leaders who communicate an inclusive vision with an emphasis on social responsibility, altruism, and the empowerment of various stakeholders versus a more narcissistic, self-interested vision, build psychological capital (including the optimization of hope confidence and resilience) in their followers (Boyatziz & Mckee, 2005)

Seriously, who would you rather work for, hire to lead your company or have as a peer?

We share emotions with our partners, therapists, teachers and friends every day. When my daughter smiles at me, no matter how bad my day was, I smile back and feel happy and uplifted.  When my husband is not happy about something I can feel it before he even has to say anything and vice versa. We share emotions in this same way with our leaders too. Who would you rather share emotions with on a work-a-day basis?  A leader who is driven by passion and a clear mission and who is authentic in their approach and honest about who they are or someone who is not this way?

The last part of the research I will share is a definition that delineates the main factors that make up authentic leadership based on a longitudinal study from 2005 to 2008 that analyzed five separate samples of data from China, Kenya and the US:

"Authentic leadership is a pattern of leader behavior that draws upon and promotes both positive psychological capacities and a positive ethical climate, to foster greater self-awareness, an internalized moral perspective, balanced processing of information and relational transparency on the part of leaders working with followers, fostering positive self development" (Walumbwa, et al, 2008:94).

Authentic leaders are multiculturally intelligent, engender respect, self-actualization and health in their followers by their example and collaborative practices and intuitive understanding about the fact that followers make the leader.

Derek Sivers captures this dynamic very well here: 

First Follower: Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy