Are you sure you really know what your followers are trying to tell you?

Humans are really good at pattern recognition. Malcolm Gladwell popularized this concept when he wrote about “Thin Slicing” in Blink. Thin Slicing is when we find a pattern with only minimal information. Jung called universal patterns archetypes and Shakespeare captured most of them in his plays.  Indeed being able to notice patterns to identify what is important is not only critical to our survival but saves time and is an aspect of great leadership.  I have always been amazed by how truly excellent leaders can quickly hone in on the one detail that matters out of millions of details to ensure their company’s success and make the right decisions. 

Unfortunately, there is a down side to this survival mechanism.  Neil deGrasse Tyson summed it up well in the 3/23/14 episode of Cosmos noting that humans are so habituated to pattern recognition they also see patterns where there aren’t any. He called them false patterns.

What does this have to do with leadership you might be asking at this point?  Everything - from the ability to hear what your people are really trying to tell you, to judging performance, to hiring, to understanding how well the corporate strategy is keeping up with the market and competitors. Thin slicing works particularly poorly when we are communicating about complex or new things – things that represent an adaptive challenge to an organization and a leader.

Technological innovation is one of the main forces that push organizations to change products or processes or, in particularly disruptive cases, markets.  Imagine a conversation between a leader and a technical project lead asking for resources for an expensive innovation that is not yet proven or a conversation between team members trying to decide under a deadline how to test the latest multimillion-dollar mousetrap.  It’s common in these high-pressure situations to miscommunicate.  We look for familiar patterns and think we are on the same page with the people we are talking with when actually we are in different universes which at a minimum is very frustrating.  In my work with teams and leaders, I see this all the time. There are many, many reasons why people miscommunicate but between leaders and their teams there are a couple of reasons especially worth noting.

The first is the dynamics of power and authority that all leaders and followers contend with. Leaders put their organizations in a petri dish just as followers experience leaders as if through a bullhorn and magnifying glass  - everything is amplified.  A leader we will call “Joe” is passionate about his business and hard driving. However, his passion can feel like a hammer to his people. When he poses a question – a true question – his team takes it like an order.  And Joe is a caring leader and his team still has this reaction. Other leaders who are not as caring do things that are much more threatening to their teams – like putting down contrary points of view or worse the individuals who pose them or interrupting their subordinates or changing the subject when they are being disagreed with.  When this happens real communication stops and knowledge sharing becomes one way - top down - which is the death of innovation and the road to low performance.

The second dynamic that gets in the way of real communication has to do with our assumptions about the meaning of words. We think we know exactly what the other person is trying to communicate because we understand each word they said.  However, when complexity is high and the topic at hand is novel, our unique understanding about what words mean gets in the way of true understanding. The reason is because when we first learn a word, we learn it in a unique context as a toddler, which means there are as many variations on the meanings of words as there are people.  I can mean it one-way and you can take it another. Anyone who has experienced a long-term relationship knows all about this. Add in differentiators like education, geography, culture, professional field, and level within the organizational hierarchy and you can see how it is a wonder we understand each other as much as we do. 

What can leaders do to better understand what their people are trying to tell them?

1. Practice inquiry.  Ask questions and keep asking. The old rule in Six Sigma is to ask why five times to really get to the heart of something.  This is what inquiry does – it helps us understand what someone else really means.
2. Go slow to go fast. Slow down and cultivate patience. Inquiry requires leaders build in time to be able to ask why or what or how and have the headset where they can gauge if they truly understand the concept being communicated. This is nearly impossible when on the run from meeting to meeting. Building in time to be able to think together with followers especially on critical aspects of the business will pay off more in the long run than anything else.
3. Listen actively. Check for meaning by paraphrasing to ensure you really do understand.
4. Don’t interrupt. Interrupting another person conveys one message – that you are important and they are unimportant. This is a highly demotivating message to send your followers (remember the bullhorn?).
5. Be curious and check your assumptions.  Don’t assume you know what a person is saying before they finish a sentence. If your attitude is one of curiosity and you are able to put aside ego, stress, pressure or whatever it is that gets in the way of you being able to fully listen to your followers, you will hear more and learn more and be able to do more. 
6. Optimize the available brainpower in the room by creating more opportunities for informal communication.  Often organizations are good at hiring great people. Then because of formality and hierarchy and the limitations of the leaderships’ soft skills, companies are not able to capitalize on the combined talent and expertise of their employees. Pioneers like GeoCities and Yahoo! understood the power of informal communication in the design of their corporate cultures that emphasized access to leadership, transparency about the business successes and failures and placed a high value on creativity and unique ideas that could bust through the status quo.
7. Cultivate relationships and care about your followers. Know that it’s not about you it’s about them. When you do this you will listen to your followers under the assumption that they have something important to say that you don’t already know.  This positive regard for them will go a long way to cultivating relationships and the bonds of trust needed to optimize the collective intelligence required to compete in today’s volatile markets.

How to Identify the Genuine Article: The Great Organizational Development and Change Consultant

Leaders face many challenges in running their organizations. One of the hardest is managing change.  Change is a constant environmental condition in the business world today. No company can escape it.  Change can happen for all sorts of reasons including: shifting market conditions and workforce demographics, ever evolving laws and regulations, new technology innovations, new competitors, mergers and acquisitions, downsizing, or simply new policy roll outs about pay and benefits.  New hires on teams or in the management ranks can engender anxiety for employees coping with building new relationships and navigating roles and hand offs.

For all these reasons as well as the need to continuously evolve, adapt and improve, leaders hire internal and external organizational development (OD) consultants to help, but they don’t always get the help they need because they hire an “expert” who actually isn’t one except on paper. There in lies the problem, identifying the genuine article, the excellent OD practitioner, is harder than you might think. I know this because one of the first things I was trained to ask potential clients is, have you ever worked with another OD consultant?  If the answer is yes, my next question is, how did it go?  When the client answers, poorly or nothing was implemented or the report - as Levinson notes – is collecting dust on my shelf – then there will be some clean up to do.

OD practitioners that are worth your time do a handful of particular things really well.  First of all they collaborate and involve you regularly – right from the contracting conversation.  They keep their clients close. The mantra I teach my students, as taught to me is, people will only support change they help to create.  

One sign that this is not the case is when the consultant is doing all the work on a change effort and/or making sure you rely solely on their expertise that does not get transferred to you or your people thus creating an unhealthy dependence.  Changes made this way are not sustainable.  Note, that there are appropriate times where you use consultants as, what Peter Block calls, “Helping Hands”.  This is when you give them the work because you don’t have the bandwidth to do it yourself. Hiring a bookkeeper to keep the books for your start up or having a contract recruiter on site to help build your ranks are examples of effective helping hands roles consultants take.  However, when it comes to making systemic transformations that need the support of your employees or all team members, helping hands alone will not be enough just as expertise alone will decrease buy in to the change.

To this end, another goal I have when working with my clients is to work myself out of a job.  Success for me is the client organization that broke down its silos and now communicates across departments and functions well without my help because of work we have done together or the team that doesn’t need me anymore because they are now meeting their goals and interacting beautifully and productively.

Great OD consultants collaboratively create structures that their clients move through in order to bridge the gap between the current and future/desired state. One of the main ways the excellent OD practitioner does this is through the use of the action research as a process model and foundation for all their systemic change work with the client. Leaders need to ask potential consultants what process they use to do their work. Action research is the collaborative process of entering a client system, doing an assessment and jointly diagnosing the problem, then jointly implementing programs for change and then evaluating to see how things went.  That’s the Reader’s Digest version. If your would-be change management expert does not mention any of these things you’re better off moving forward without them.

A more nuanced answer by some consultants is that they use a particular approach like management training or appreciative inquiry or conflict management.  These are all great interventions to build skills, find the positive core of a system or resolve discord respectively, but they only work if that is what is needed. If you interview a consultant and they are immediately selling one approach, you are getting a cookie cutter solution that may not be what you actually need to make the changes necessary to get to higher performance.

When I contract with leaders and ask them what prompted them to call me, they always have thoughts on what needs to be fixed in their company.  However, more than 50% of the time their understanding of the problem is either not complete or completely wrong.  A consultant who follows action research will insist on taking some data to customize their work to the client’s actual need.  It’s much easier to say, sure thing, one management training coming right up.  However, treating the identified problem that is not the real problem does more harm than good by increasing anxiety among employees and leaders, ruining the consultant’s reputation after they have delivered “the fix” and things are even worse, and wasting time and money.

One of the most critical parts of the action research process is assessment and diagnosis. While most consultants may be good at interviewing the leadership team for example, they may not have a scientific process to analyze the data they collect. Make sure to ask the consultant what their data analysis process is.  I did this recently when I was speaking with a clinical psychologist who worked as an organizational development consultant assessing an organization.  They had conducted interviews using a protocol filled with double and tripled barreled questions (not a good start). Their response to my question about how they analyzed the data was, “I read it.”  I probed deeper and that was it – they read it and used their hunches from that reading to diagnose the client system.  They wrote a report and exited. This is the antithesis of great OD consulting.

To be sure, reading the data is a great start.  However submitting interview content to an organized method of qualitative data analysis that includes coding and leads to thematic development is much, much better.

That’s the trouble with expertise – anyone can try to claim it and if they do it just right we want to believe them. Society is addicted to experts. We look to experts to solve our problems and put us at ease. Since there is no licensure in the field of organizational psychology, it is particularly vulnerable to an infusion of false experts. However, the excellent OD practitioner will share their expertise with you to make sure your organization can create and sustain the change. 

Disclaimer to Would-Be Organizational Development Consultants:

You don’t necessarily need a lot of higher education to be a great OD practitioner. I pursued a lot of higher education because I was humbled by the fact that in doing this work I would be making changes in companies that could impact peoples’ salaries – their livelihoods. That’s a huge responsibility. I wanted to be able to work with human systems safely and ethically to make them healthier places to be because there is a lot of suffering at work.  To go from being an artist to an OD Practitioner I needed help. So I got degrees and experience and apprenticed and got certifications, etc.  This is one way to do it.  There are other ways.

Two of the best OD consultants I know, both mentors at different points in my career, do not have advanced degrees in the field or anywhere.  What they do have is past experience running their own successful companies and being in successful multinational companies on top of apprenticing with expert organizational psychologists and strategic human resource leaders as well as reading all the seminal works in the field and taking various certifications like DISC and MBTI.  They are life long learners who keep current with the field and also have a granite foundation in the science of human systems and change. They know action research cold. They practice advocacy and inquiry and understand team and group dynamics. They are dynamos. When a project comes their way that is beyond their expertise they decline. I bring them up to say to would-be OD practitioners that it doesn’t matter how you educate yourself on this work, what matters is that you do.

Lean In and The Identified Patient

Sheryl Sandberg's book Lean In has been generating a great deal of controversy among women. In some cases the reactions have been over the top negative. Cut to my all female book club when I lit a match under dry tinder by asking if anyone had read Lean In.  Two members vehemently began to trash the whole book as baseless from the studies Sandberg cites to the concept in general.  Maybe I should not have been surprised but I was. My experience of the book had been different. I thought Sandberg was really generous to write it. After all, she's a Facebook millionaire and didn't write it for the cash. 

I found her research quite credible and have cited many of the same studies in my own gender and leadership lectures. I found it incredible that the book's title alone could create so much ire (the two most outraged lean in haters admitted to not having read the book to begin with…ahem). 

Frankly, I loved the book. It is filled with practical advice, its research is credible, and how often do those women who have broken through the glass ceiling ever show their underbellies this way?  I find myself giving the book to the twenty-something women I know (who love it) and avoiding bringing it up to the over 35 set. 

However, I have been curious about the negative backlash the book has created among the senior executive women I know. I am thankful to my friend Nina Lualdi for sharing her thoughtful perspective with me. She is a high level executive at the country level with huge international experience and equally huge responsibilities on top of being a wife and mother of two. If anyone is leaning in all the way it is Nina. She has a couple of decades of leadership experience and has been subjected to every type of soft skills development and leadership training available. 

Her issue with the lean in concept is along the lines of fatigue at being the identified patient (not her words but mine).  The concept of the identified patient in a nutshell comes from family psychology. In a family the identified patient is the typical problem child - whether they really are or aren’t. The identified patient is the person in the family who is singled out as deficient, needing of fixing like a patient in a hospital. In reality the family as a group entity is projecting its own collective dysfunction onto the one member - the identified patient.  Group psychology is mind blowing if you stop to consider this, but it happens all the time. 

To take this to the world stage level gender battle, it means that the gender conversation (embodied in books like Frankel's status quo supporting: Nice Girl's Don't Get the Corner Office) looks for ways to fix the underprivileged minority - in this case women.  Fixing is a euphemism to get the minority to look, act, and breath like the majority -which of course is impossible.

The best argument for why the concept of lean in irks high-powered female corporate veterans may be that they are tired of being the identified patient, tired of being asked to look within to critique/fix their problematic female core self. 

There are many studies that show the presence of women in top leadership positions (on boards of directors and executive teams) strengthen a company's viability and performance significantly.  There's also a lot of data on the table about how women who have had to lead without formal authority are actually better negotiators and team builders. Such qualities don’t sound like something to fix. 

All of this begs the question: why aren't we focusing on the powers that be that keep women out?  Why are we trying to make women (and as Nina astutely observed: minorities and anyone who is not tall, white, male, and has a Type A personality) over to act more like men?  Why do we see their qualities as deficient versus something to be honored, aware of, and cultivated? Why aren't we asking the men who hold the power to open the doors and get over the 20th Century qualms about the "marital implications" of mentoring female colleagues?

Maybe the focus should be on educating those in power now about the huge benefits and value of cultivating diversity throughout the leadership ranks.  I think some appropriate titles might be:

Sharing Power 101: A 12 Step Guide

or 

Lean Out of the Way: Collaborative Leadership for Veterans of the Command Control Culture

These are the types of books we need to see. As Nina pointed out, we need to change the conversation not female traits.