5

Mobilizing

Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.

— WILL ROGERS

A great story that is well told creates energy within those who hear it. If that story is cogent and unforgettable, that energy can be transformed into intellectual commitment. If it is also uplifting and human and challenges people to pursue a noble vision, it can win emotional and spiritual commitment as well—if the leader has the competence to tell the story well.

But the mere telling of the story is not enough. Leaders must capture and direct the energy that the story creates—they must mobilize it. Leaders have four important responsibilities to perform in order to mobilize the energy their stories create. Fulfilling these responsibilities transforms the energy into committed action. The responsibilities are:

1.Enrolling people

2.Educating them

3.Helping them to narrow the broader challenges of an insight or a vision into actions they can perform

4.Doing all of the above in a way that conveys trust, respect, and optimism, and that invites emotional and spiritual commitment as well as intellectual commitment

The Last Five Percent

Marvin Israelow learned about the need to mobilize the energy of others, and it was a thorny lesson. In the middle of the 1980s, Israelow, with his wife Dorian and their three school-age sons, moved from midtown Manhattan to upstate Chappaqua, New York. They moved there partly because of the schools, which are consistently rated among the best in the United States. Israelow, with much experience at helping to develop businesses both large and small, and with some experience in education, knew that he had something to contribute to the Chappaqua School District. An opportunity arose because Chappaqua was searching for a new superintendent of schools. Israelow received an invitation to serve on a task force that was creating long-term goals for the school district as a way of giving direction to the new superintendent.

While serving on the task force Israelow began to see the danger that lurked beneath Chappaqua’s reputation for superior education. He says, “The school district had become complacent as a result of a lot of people from across the country having come to pat it on its back. I knew from my experience as a consultant that this was a death knell for an organization.”

Israelow decided he would seek more formal leadership responsibility, with more authority and influence. He ran for a seat on the school board on a platform against complacency and in favor of continuous improvement. Israelow lost the election.

“I had a well-honed message,” he says, “And I believed that simply by having a message that spoke truth, the message itself would be sufficient to get me elected.”

Israelow did not let defeat deter him. He felt committed, felt a sense of urgency, and also felt some personal calling to do the job he had sought. He says, “I had the experience of being in a place at a time with certain knowledge and a set of skills. All of that coalesced. It pulled me to move the district from where it was to a place that I was inspired to know that it was supposed to be.” Even though it was somewhat humiliating to be defeated in his first public election, he tried again. Israelow says, “Although I had grand broad vision and I had the right message, the right concept of a change that was needed, what I hadn’t done was pay enough attention to mobilizing people. I had to do the last 5 percent that needs to get done to take an idea and a leadership initiative to fruition.”

For his second try at election to the School Board, Israelow knew he would need about a thousand votes to be successful. He enrolled 50 people to be his messengers. Each of them committed to enrolling 20 additional people, making sure they went to the polls and voted for him. This time he won, and he later served a term as the School Board’s president.

There are situations where the full flowering of leadership seems to come unbidden, where commitment is offered when it was not actively sought. For example, after Monsignor Fushek had initial success with Life Teen in his own parish, other parishes sought his help. And Rabbi Schachter-Shalomi states that his leadership came to him as a result of ideas he put forth. But in situations such as Israelow’s, where followers are actively sought, the importance of some type of formal enrollment process cannot be overstated. For Israelow, that process involved enrolling 50 people to get voters to the polls.

Always Educating

Another leadership responsibility in mobilizing the energy of followers, beyond enrolling them, is that of educating them. It is a responsibility that David Hollister understands well because he was a high school teacher before embarking on his distinguished political career. During his tenure as a state representative of Michigan, Hollister sponsored the first mandatory seat belt law in the United States. He had research showing that mandatory seat belts would save lives, would reduce both the number and the severity of injuries, and would result in saving Medicaid dollars. However, other research showed that 65 percent of the people polled about mandatory seat belts opposed the idea.

Hollister says, “It was going to be a political nightmare because public opinion was against me.” Hollister undertook a campaign to change public opinion; it lasted almost four years. The bill finally won passage. He now says that, as a leader, “You are always building a base. You are always educating.” This kind of education acknowledges that people are far more likely to act on their own conclusions than they are on someone else’s. Mere telling is not enough—the key is education that allows people to draw their own conclusions.

Sometimes the education process takes longer. Hollister also worked to enact power of attorney legislation that would allow people to designate another person to make health care decisions for them if they were ever incapacitated and unable make those decisions for themselves. When he began his bid to enact the legislation, he said, “We did some polling and I knew it was going to be a loser.” It took sixteen years to get the legislation passed by the Michigan legislature. “I knew that going in,” says Hollister. “This is very complicated. It is going to take time. So anything that we did (during those sixteen years) had to have a public education strategy. You educate on the process, on the vision, on implementation strategies, or on how to build partnerships.”

Narrowing the Challenge

The third leadership responsibility in mobilizing followers is helping them to narrow the challenges of the initial insight or vision into actions they can and will perform. Those who offer intellectual commitment to a leader may be slow to act, or may not act at all. Those who offer emotional commitment will act, but may be off purpose. Those who are spiritually committed may chafe at the inevitable barriers that confront any change, no matter how worthwhile the change may be. This third responsibility involves helping followers find an answer to the question, “How can I best contribute?”

For example, when David Hollister wanted to enact new legislation requiring mandatory seat belts, the Michigan State Police were supportive. They added a check box to their fatal accident form to indicate whether those killed had been wearing seat belts. The data they collected helped convince the public that the legislation was needed. And Marvin Israelow’s fifty messengers had a very practical and specific role to perform—get twenty voters to the polls to vote for him.

Jim Ellis talked about how he learned the important lesson that leaders have a responsibility to help their followers know exactly how to contribute. “I was a private,” Ellis said, “My sergeant made it his job to train me and to treat me with dignity and respect even though I was an eighteen year old who really didn’t know a whole lot. He showed me what could be done, what I could do, and how I could respond and do the things that were necessary for me to succeed in my role.”

Ellis asks, “Have you ever known anybody who gets up in the morning saying, ‘By God, today I’m going to screw up?’ ” Ellis is absolutely convinced that everybody in an organization wants to do the right thing. He says, “What is important for the leader is making sure that the follower who wants to do well knows what doing well means. Maybe what he thinks is doing well is not really good for the organization.”

Former U.S. Army General Wesley Clark echoes Ellis’s words when talking about the dramatic shift from an army that was essentially coercive in nature to one that is built upon the voluntary participation of its members. Clark is best known as the former commander-in-chief, U.S. European Command, who led the military negotiations for the Bosnian Peace Accords at Dayton, and as a CNN military analyst. Clark called the transformation of the U.S. army into a volunteer force “a wholesale turnaround” in which the discipline through which soldiers learned their jobs came to be viewed as a positive force. “It is like the discipline you have for a football line,” said Clark. “Hey. Don’t jump offside. It’s not like we are just trying to keep you from jumping offside, it is because that is the way you play the game. If you want to win, you don’t get a penalty.” The challenge—the military objective of the moment—becomes narrowed to specific actions that are performed well.

Helping people to narrow the challenge means ensuring that every group of people involved (and eventually every person), understands how its work contributes to the overall effort. This may mean reprioritizing a group’s activities, it may mean starting new activities, and it may mean stopping activities that do not contribute. Organizational leaders who seek change must pay conscious and deliberate attention to making sure this reprioritizing, starting, and stopping of activities actually happens. Leaders are in danger when they assume that people will know what to do differently because they have heard the story and gotten the message. That assumption is a genuine vision-killer.

Thinking Together

The processes of enrolling and educating followers, and helping them to find their own ways to contribute, entails an ongoing relationship between leaders and their followers. This relationship has been described in many ways, but there is general agreement among leaders and those who theorize about leadership that mutual learning is at the center of the relationship. Gardner, for example, says that the relationship is one in which, “Each takes cues from the other; each is affected by the other.”¹ And Chopra says that followers and their needs, and leaders and their responses, cocreate each other.²

The cocreation that Chopra refers to occurs through an extended and evocative dialogue between a leader and followers. The common understanding of the term dialogue—a simple talk between people—does not approach the meaning of the term as it is intended here. The kind of dialogue that forms the bond between a leader and followers more closely resembles the meaning of dialogue as it is described by David Bohm, who is often hailed as one of the greatest physicists and thinkers of the twentieth century. Bohm turned his attention to human communication during the later years of his life. He viewed dialogue as an exchange, involving any number of people, which makes possible “a flow of meaning in the whole group.” It is characterized by a spirit of attempting to create a new understanding within the group that may in turn lead to new ways of acting.³

Dialogue of this kind is not a mere exchange of information and opinion. No one is attempting to win or score points. It is not mere discussion, nor is it argumentation, debate, or a speech followed by a question-and-answer session; although each of these things might, in their own way, be useful. It is, rather, a mutual inquiry, perhaps extending over a long period of time. The inquiry utilizes all of the information—including intellectual, emotional, and spiritual information—that the participants bring to the dialogue. The kind of dialogue that Bohm describes is sometimes referred to as collective thinking or thinking together.⁴

While Bohm’s dialogue is based on the use of language, the content of the dialogue between a leader and followers includes everything the leader does and says, everything followers do and say, and their respective reactions to what each other does and says. When all of these words, actions, and reactions are employed in the service of mutual learning, we have a kind of dialogue. It is less a technique or a well-defined process than it is an attitude of mutual learning that pervades how leaders and followers treat the messages they offer to and receive from one another.

Marvin Isrealow’s dialogue with the community in which he would eventually assume a leadership role began when he was a relative newcomer to Chappaqua, several years before his successful bid for election. He volunteered to serve on the committee that was charged with hiring the Chappaqua School District’s new superintendent. He made calls to offer his service and, he says, “People sort of chuckled and told me ‘You’d have to have been here a little longer than you have in order to do that’.” But those calls led to an invitation to serve on the committee that was drafting long-term goals; the people he called recognized that he knew something about organizations and about education.

The dialogue continued as he served on the committee, as well as at dinner parties and on the sidelines of the soccer fields of Chappaqua. Israelow was learning about his community, and the community was learning about him. He says, “I can’t point back to a moment where I said ‘I want to lead this school district to a commitment to continuous improvement.’ It gradually emerged as I talked to more people about it.” Israelow received a lot of encouragement to move from casual conversation to some kind of more concrete initiative.

“I was listening to the support I was getting,” he says. “There was a level of interest from others that showed I was hitting the mark with something that was important to them.” He was educating them, perhaps by bringing a community need to their awareness, or perhaps by simply providing an invitation to talk about something that had been bothering them. As the dialogue progressed, Israelow was also honing his message.

He also had to learn a few things about himself. “My own learning edge in terms of leadership is putting myself out there in more of an advocating, skillful, deliberate way,” he says. Israelow’s career in consulting had not prepared him for this task; consultants such as Israelow generally facilitate changes that others have decided upon rather than advocate for a particular kind of change. “It was the active part that I struggled with,” he says. So as he was educating the community about the need for change, he was also learning about himself as a leader. He was learning to mobilize himself while beginning to mobilize others.

The salient points of Israelow’s story are that messages were being exchanged between a leader and his followers, and those messages evoked learning—a new basis from which to think and act. Israelow and Chappaqua were thinking together. That thinking and learning continued as Israelow sought office, was rejected, then treated his second campaign with more deliberate attention to getting voters to the polls, and was elected.

As a leader relates his story, it raises questions, ideas, feelings, and other reactions in followers. A good story at least awakens the creative center of the mind. It may also roil the emotions, and rouse the spirit. Energy is created. The leader’s primary task then becomes converting that energy into learning and committed action through this kind of extended and evocative dialogue. Such learning is a two-way street; leaders learn as well as followers.

Mobilizing in a Big Way

The processes that leaders employ in order to fulfill their responsibilities to enroll people, educate them, and help them to narrow the challenge will vary in complexity according to the size and nature of the group of people they lead. For example, in large organizations the leader’s task often flies in the face of an entrenched culture that resists change, no matter how imperative the change might be. One such instance occurred in the late 1990s when Prudential Insurance (now Prudential Financial) prepared itself to meet the demands of a rapidly changing financial services business environment, and to convert from a mutual corporation owned by its policyholders into a publicly held company.

Jody Doele led and managed the program that was the centerpiece of Prudential’s change effort. She later became vice president of Learning and Leadership Development for Prudential. Doele summarizes one of the central leadership problems the company faced: “Top-down communication wasn’t working; the corporate culture at the time meant that information was a form of power, and it was hoarded.” The effort that Prudential launched in 1997 to enroll all of its employees to commit to change involved 215 day-long meetings, each of them involving about 250 employees, and each of them led by two of the company’s senior executives. The effort’s objectives mirrored the three mobilization responsibilities of leaders: enroll all 50,000 employees in a change effort, educate them about the financial services industry and about Prudential’s strategy to compete, and narrow the challenge so that each person can find ways to contribute. Educating all employees about the company’s strategy was just the kind of information that had previously been, in Doele’s terms, “hoarded.”

The first task was to enroll Prudential’s executives. A significant moment in that process occurred near the end of a meeting in which the executives were informed about plans to educate employees and about their roles in those plans. Doele asked the entire group of senior executives to serve as leaders for employee meetings and sign their names to a meeting calendar posted along a wall. Doele reports that the executives swarmed to the calendar. “They were three deep,” she says, “Many came up to me and shared disappointment that they couldn’t get a date!” Enrollment processes often benefit from ceremonies that encourage people to sign on formally. The second task was to educate employees, and Prudential developed a sophisticated set of learning materials to convey its story of change. And finally, processes and procedures were adopted to translate all of the energy generated by the effort into action by committed individuals.⁵ Prudential’s change effort can legitimately be viewed as 50,000 people thinking together about what they each must do to give life to their commitment to the organization.

An Attitude of Invitation

The fourth leadership responsibility for mobilizing followers is conveying trust, respect, and optimism during the course of enrolling people, educating them, and helping them to narrow the broader challenges. Invitational theory is the name used by a number of scholars and researchers to identify and examine the assumptions that will create an environment that helps people develop all facets of themselves. Such an environment fosters intellectual, emotional, and spiritual commitment because it encourages expression of mind, heart, and spirit.

William Purkey, a professor at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, defined invitational theory when he wrote, “Invitational theory is a collection of assumptions that . . . provide a means of intentionally summoning people to realize their boundless potential in all areas of worthwhile human endeavor.”⁶ Invitational theory holds that inviting others to realize their potential involves ongoing interaction. This and the previous chapter have shown the importance of such interaction as leaders tell their stories, engage in dialogue, educate, and mobilize. Purkey wrote a fine summary of these two chapters: “Leaders enlist others in their visions because they are capable of sharing their thoughts in vivid colors and compelling metaphors.”⁷

Invitational theory provides a perspective about the assumptions that will enable leaders to effectively invite people during the course of their interactions with them, and regardless of the content of their insights and visions. There are four such assumptions and they are interconnected—respect, trust, optimism, and intentionality. Together they create the environment in which people are summoned to develop their full potential.

The first assumption, trust, means acknowledging that people will find their own best way of contributing when they are in an inviting environment. Leaders who hold this assumption are able to avoid micro-management. They encourage individual initiative. They help people narrow challenges by educating them about what is needed in a broad sense, then leaving the specifics of implementation to them. They do not dictate what actions are needed.

The second assumption, respect, refers to the belief that people are able, valuable, and responsible. Leaders who hold this assumption find the right person for the right work and leave them to do what they can. The third assumption, optimism, rests upon the belief that people possess untapped potential (there will be more to say about optimism in Chapter 8).

Finally, the fourth assumption, intentionality, refers to the complex process of consistently and purposefully acting in a way that invites the development of the people being invited. In other words, intentionality means consistently and purposefully trusting and respecting people, and expressing optimism. Invitational theorists recognize that environments such as those created by leaders are dependent on the people in that environment, the physical setting, and the policies, programs, and processes that also contribute to the environment.⁸

Leaders may express the assumptions they hold about people either overtly or subtly, but their expression is unavoidable. When leaders who win high commitment are telling their stories, when they are in dialogue with followers, when they are educating and helping people narrow the challenge, they are, at the same time, doing so from assumptions of respect, trust, optimism, and intentionality. They are inviting people to participate in a quest and inviting them into an environment that fosters their own growth and allows their commitment to surface and flourish.

Development Strategies for Mobilizing

Even though Prudential’s leadership effort involved more people than Israelow’s, and presented more issues than Hollister’s, the desired outcomes were the same: enrolled and educated people who have narrowed the overall challenge down to committed action. And the process—dialogue—was also essentially the same, involving all of the people whose commitment was needed. Whether it happens in one-on-one encounters, on the sidelines of a soccer field, or in a formal 250-person meeting at an airport hotel, leaders who want to mobilize others will have to help them decide upon the right things to do, set high expectations, let go of control, and work at setting an invitational climate.

Encouraging the Right Things

Sometimes leaders know precisely the right thing for followers to do in order to bring their visions to reality. Marvin Israelow, for example, knew that if fifty people would commit to enrolling twenty additional people, he would be elected and could promote continuous improvement in the Chappaqua schools. But, more often than not, leaders are so far removed from the work of their followers that they cannot know what should or might be done. When that is the case, leaders can still help followers discover the right things to do by preparing all of their intermediaries to engage with other followers in dialogue that will uncover and promote the right actions. In order to be effective, those intermediaries must be highly committed, articulate about the story of change that the leader wishes to tell, and prepared to help others answer three questions: What can I do that I am not now doing? What do I now do that needs to be done better or more often? and What should I stop doing?

Setting High Expectations

David Hollister was first elected mayor of Lansing by holding out a vision that the city, a middle-size, middle-America, middle-class community, and an underdeveloped capital city, should strive to become a world-class city. He said, “The thought of Lansing being a world-class city like New York or Toronto or London was just outrageous. I had a lot of people counsel me during the campaign to go for ‘All-American’—something much more achievable. I felt offended by that.” Hollister believed the asset base of the Lansing region had the components to become world-class. “So I decided to keep that mantra,” he said, “and to carry it through everything I did.”

During Hollister’s nine years in office, the world-class terminology became woven into the fabric of Lansing. He said, “You see it on car advertisements and on other commercials. The teachers have picked it up, the local college uses it. It has become a standard.” Lansing has not achieved the world-class designation, but Hollister achieved what he wanted—to mobilize the citizens of Lansing to work for a better city. “It set a very high bar,” he said, “whether it was school reform, redeveloping downtown, a commitment to neighborhoods, better police protection, or negotiating with firefighters. I always used that criteria and made people think in stretch terms.”

With pride and satisfaction Hollister told of a young boy who wrote a letter to the editor of a Lansing newspaper near the end of his tenure as mayor. The boy complained that his bicycle had struck a pothole and no world-class city would tolerate a pothole. Hollister said, “I was so elated by the fact that this had become such a criterion in a young person’s mind. That he was using that measure to hold me accountable for his misfortune.”

Letting Go

It is a popular axiom, and a correct one, but is far too often forgotten: “People support that which they help create.” When attempting to mobilize people, leaders do best when they leave most decisions about implementing their insights and visions to those who are in the best position to make any particular decision. David Hollister left decisions about what it takes to be world-class teachers to the teachers, and left decisions about what it takes to be a world-class police force to the policemen.

A leader is not simply a super manager. Leaders tell their stories in clear and vivid terms so that mobilized followers will make the right decisions. Having done so, the leader’s task is to let go of control, allowing people to create plans and actions that they will support and carry out.

Encouraging the Best in Others

William Purkey provides a metaphor for helping educators and students to become more aware of their involvement in creating an invitational environment. He calls it the blue and orange card metaphor. Blue cards are dealt to others each time the dealer is caring, respecting, or optimistic. Orange cards are dealt to others each time the dealer, in any way, informs another person that he is unable, worthless, and irresponsible. Orange cards cause pain. It is possible to give blue and orange cards to oneself as well as others. Every card counts—it has an impact. Purkey believes that it takes twelve blue cards to overcome the destructive impact of one orange card.

Leaders, like educators, ought to be aware of how many blue and orange cards they distribute, and how they do that. Blue cards encourage the best in people. Orange cards encourage escape; for leaders, escape means withdrawal of commitment. Purkey wrote, “It is increasingly clear that everything we do and every way we do it is orange or blue.”⁹

Summary

When a leader is working from the base of a compelling insight, a noble vision, and a well-told story, she is positioned to mobilize the intellectual commitment that is created. In order to do so, the leader engages her followers in an extended dialogue that produces continuous learning—for followers and for the leader as well. The leader also helps followers to ground the insight, vision, and story in their own activities; to decide how they can best contribute.

Questions About Yourself to Contemplate or Discuss with Others

Who, in your life experience, was practiced at mobilizing?

To what degree are you practiced at mobilizing?

What is it about mobilizing that rings true for your current leadership role?

How important is mobilizing to your further development as a leader?

Notes

1.Howard Gardner, Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership (N.Y.: BasicBooks, 1995): 36.

2.Deepak Chopra in a speech to the Mobius Leadership Forum annual conference at the Harvard Business School, April 11–12, 2002. <http://www.mobiusforum.org/deepak.htm> (November, 2002).

3.David Bohm, On Dialogue (N.Y.: Routledge, 1996): 6–7.

4.William Isaacs, Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together: A Pioneering Approach to Communicating in Business and in Life (N.Y: Currency, 1999): 2.

5.Tom Brown, “Communicating and Aligning via One Prudential Exchange,” Management General (2000), <http://www.mgeneral.com/1-lines/00-lines/030004px.htm>.

6.William W. Purkey, “An Introduction to Invitational Theory,” International Alliance for Invitational Education <http://www.invitationaleducation.net> (June, 2003).

7.William W. Purkey, “Blue Leader One: A Metaphor for Invitational Education,” International Alliance for Invitational Education, <http://www.invitationaleducation.net> (June, 2003).

8.Purkey, “An Introduction to Invitational Theory.”

9.Purkey, “Blue Leader One.”