Chapter 17
Organizational Approach to Conscious Leadership
A conscious company needs to have conscious leaders, not only at the top but also throughout the organization. To infuse your organization with conscious leadership, you need to change the way you hire, identify, develop, and promote leaders throughout the organization. In hiring leaders, a conscious organization identifies people who score high on the SELFLESS screen, in addition to possessing the technical skills that a position requires.
When a company is identifying future leaders from within its ranks or promoting leaders to higher levels of responsibility, it should use similar criteria. In addition, the company needs to ensure that individuals are seeking to become leaders not for the salary, prestige, or power gained through leadership, but rather because they are driven to serve the organization’s people and its purpose. Are they willing to embrace the “awesome responsibility of leadership” (as expressed at Barry-Wehmiller)? It is important to have people who are intrinsically motivated for the right reasons. It should not be a top-down approach wherein certain people are anointed as the “chosen ones” to be leaders. You can certainly recognize talent, and you know who’s doing what in the organization, but you should look at it through a lens of “Who are the people who have a big positive impact on those around them and on the business?” rather than “Who is delivering the numbers at any cost?”
Leadership development needs to be aligned with the values and guiding principles of the organization as well as with the elements of SELFLESS. One practical way to accomplish this is to create a leadership checklist and orient leadership development programs around that. We will describe this approach in this chapter.
Many people try to climb the corporate ladder by doing whatever it takes; they tend to be the ones who get promoted in traditional profit-centered companies. A study presented at the Australian Psychological Society Congress suggested that psychopaths are as prevalent in the corporate sector as they are in prisons. In the general population, according to forensic psychologist Nathan Brooks, studies have shown that one in one hundred people displayed psychopathic traits. In a study of 261 corporate professionals in supply-chain management, 21 percent of the participants were found to have clinically significant levels of psychopathic traits—a figure comparable to prison populations. These leaders are described as “successful psychopaths.” The highfliers with a psychopathic nature have traits such as an egocentric, charming, or superficial nature and a lack of empathy or remorse.1
A Conscious Approach to Leadership Development
We recommend starting by defining the kind of leaders you want and identifying people who are innately aligned with this definition. However, becoming a leader should never be mandated; people need to have an intrinsic desire to become leaders. Once potential leaders are identified and have expressed their desire to take on the responsibility of leadership for the right reasons, we have to help them on the journey by creating learning experiences geared to developing the requisite qualities in them. Ideally, the teaching in such courses should be done by other exemplary leaders in the organization: leader-to-leader teaching and coaching can be very effective. Outside experts offering standardized leadership training are not nearly as effective; this training often doesn’t align with the organization’s purpose, values, and culture. Potential leaders must understand what it means to be a leader in your organization; what are the core values, competencies, and behaviors expected of leaders? All of that has to be related to actual experiences and how leaders have dealt with challenging situations in the past.
Consider the leadership development programs you have in your organization. What is your most effective program? Why?
Which leadership development program has had the least impact? Why?
The Need for Constructive Dissonance
Many people are uncomfortable with dissonance. But dissonance can have a higher purpose, which is to help us grow and evolve. For those of us who are conflict-averse, we need to recognize this tendency in ourselves, to appreciate that sometimes, friction can be good. The absence of friction means too much consensus, which means too much status quo and groupthink. It is about seeing reality clearly. As individuals, we don’t always see reality clearly; it’s only collectively that we can get a read on reality, provided we can guard against groupthink.
Whole Foods Market CEO John Mackey describes the need for dissonance in organizations:
If we become too cookie-cutter about leadership development, we might create conditions where there’s too much stability and we’re perpetuating already-existing ways. We need to not only tolerate but also encourage dissonance and challenging ideas. If you stop growing and evolving, then you start dying. Conscious leaders don’t always agree; they should also challenge one another. They must have the will and the courage to see and call for change when it is needed. The organization will die if the leaders do not constantly think about what they should be doing differently or how they could be evolving from where they are. It’s not about becoming conscious and then staying there; it’s a never-ending journey of becoming more conscious, seeing reality as it truly exists as opposed to what you think it is, and having a deeper sense of right and wrong.
Many virtues come from alignment. We get alignment in an organization when there is broad agreement on purpose and values. Organizations that have high alignment also have a very high degree of trust. People collaborate. Purpose, trust, and collaboration lead to higher morale. The energy in the organization increases, resulting in greater creativity and innovation. Every conscious business should strive for alignment, because of all the wonderful things that flow from that.
But alignment is not a risk-free proposition. One outcome that can result from a high degree of alignment is groupthink: everybody starts to think alike. Yet the world never stops changing. Competition is continually evolving. If you’re locked into your own dialogue internally and everyone in the organization agrees, you may not tune into what’s going on with your customers or competitors. That can result in stagnation: continuing to do the same thing, with the philosophy of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” A “kumbaya” mentality develops: “We’re all aligned, part of this happy tribe, celebrating and doing great things.” If only it could be that way all the time. Remember: anytime the rate of change outside an organization exceeds the rate of change inside that organization, irrelevance becomes inevitable.
Organizations create cultures, and cultures develop immune systems. Like all immune systems, cultures resist change. But change is essential. An organization that is not changing and growing continually is slowly dying.
If we aspire to be truly conscious, we need to be transparent and bring unpleasant truths to light. We can’t shrink from difficult questions. Dissonance can be irritating but in a stimulating way, like a grain of sand that irritates the oyster but can lead it to produce a pearl.
Dissonance involves new ways of seeing—ways that enable us to think critically about our business and its worldview. With a critical eye, we can challenge the organizational paradigm and the organizational immune system—an immune system that wants alignment and resists dissonance. Dissonance disrupts the comfort zone, which is why it can feel threatening and dangerous to many.
Dissonance comes naturally to some leaders, but not to most. Leaders who embrace dissonance are often seen as mavericks and troublemakers, but effective leaders need to see how the company is falling short and how it must evolve.
Here is a paradox: alignment stimulates invention because when people feel safe, when they’re not afraid, creativity flows and flourishes. But paradoxically, dissonance also creates innovation, because it gets people out of their comfort zones. In fact, when people disagree, this is when you are likely to find truly radical innovation. You only truly stretch when you are challenged.
Alignment in an organization is always temporary. Dissonance, which becomes necessary and inevitable, is a kind of healthy paranoia, similar to healthy stress. It depends on how we use it. We can use it to help the organization evolve, or we can allow it to destroy the organization.
CEOs should be mavericks who simultaneously foster alignment while not letting the organization stagnate with too much of it and actively work toward dissonance. Organizations need both alignment and dissonance, and if the two conditions are mixed in the right proportions, the result is organizational evolution. Alignment plus dissonance equals evolution.
What is the capacity for dissonance in your leadership team? On a scale of 1 to 5 (with 5 meaning the highest level), how would you score the team?
How do you think others on the team would score it? Why?
What do you think you can do to encourage more constructive dissonance on your team? In your organization? What kinds of things can the leadership team do to encourage this in their teams? At the next level below that?
The Barry-Wehmiller Approach to Leadership Development
When it comes to creating an environment in which there are conscious leaders at every level of the organization and in every form of leadership, Barry-Wehmiller takes an instructive approach. This diversified machinery manufacturing company based in St. Louis has created a detailed template for what a great leader in its system looks like.
Barry-Wehmiller has identified its key pillars of leadership as a caring attitude, inspiration, and celebration. The approach starts with caring for people as human beings first, not as functions or people doing certain things, and seeing that the essential responsibility of leaders is to inspire people. In many cases, leaders don’t do that; they tell people what to do. True leadership is about inspiring people to creatively help move the company in a direction that makes strategic sense. The third element is recognition and celebration. At Barry-Wehmiller, there’s a tremendous emphasis on catching people doing good things, holding up that goodness to the organization, and celebrating those things meaningfully. Everybody feels valued and listened to. People enjoy a great deal of responsible freedom to act according to their unique perspective: they are encouraged to take ownership of their work and come up with new ideas and initiatives and so forth, as long as these are consistent with the values and priorities of the business.
This journey started in 2000, when the company assembled a group of leaders from across the organization to think through what they had collectively learned about leadership and cultural transformation. This led to the creation of a document titled “Guiding Principles of Leadership,” which describes the values and the kind of culture the company is trying to create and sustain.
Over the years, Barry-Wehmiller has developed a tradition of what it calls “truly human leadership,” which is leadership practiced in a way that leadership is seen as the “stewardship of the lives that are entrusted to us.” Because Barry-Wehmiller recognizes the huge impact that the quality of leadership has on the quality of people’s lives, the company takes leadership extremely seriously (figure 17-1).
In light of Barry-Wehmiller’s guiding principles of leadership, what five to ten principles would you like your company to embrace? Consider using a process similar to Barry-Wehmiller’s: on off-site with twenty or so participants drawn from different levels of the organization.
Eventually, the company created a leadership checklist, which identified the leadership behaviors consistent with its values and culture (figure 17-2). Barry-Wehmiller likens it to checklists used by pilots and surgeons, because leaders too have the lives and well-being of people in their hands. The company expects its leaders to adhere to everything on the checklist every day they are in their role. The leadership checklist became the foundation for Barry-Wehmiller’s thorough and rigorous Leadership Fundamentals course.
If you had to create your own leadership checklist, what ten things would each leader have to review at the beginning of the day and at the end of the day to ensure that your leadership team is on track with your organization’s culture and principles?
Barry-Wehmiller pays a great deal of attention to the issue of motivation, of why people become leaders.2 At most companies, the practice is to identify so-called high potentials as future leaders, who are then pulled out and given special opportunities to grow and develop. We are reminded of the expression, “Some people are born leaders, some people become leaders, and others have leadership thrust upon them.” In most companies, people have leadership thrust on them. While that may work in some instances, in many cases it does not, because it’s seen as an entitlement for “superior” people to become leaders. Those are cultures in which leaders typically get lots of material rewards, so it reinforces the mercenary mindset of why people want to become leaders. At BW, leadership is about service and stewardship; they constantly use the phrase “the awesome responsibility of leadership.”
Becoming a leader at Barry-Wehmiller is voluntary, not mandated; people who aspire to be leaders under this definition of leadership put up their hands and say, “I want to be a leader. I’m an assembly shop floor worker now but I really want to lead.” There are opportunities for leadership at every level of the organizations, not simply at the executive ranks. People have to apply to be admitted into the Leadership Fundamentals course; they have to write a detailed essay about themselves and why they want to lead. Those selected after a thorough process have the opportunity to deeply learn the Barry-Wehmiller approach to leadership. They then go back to their jobs and apply what they have learned and come back and learn further and get feedback on what happened and what worked. The courses mix people with different backgrounds; you could have somebody from software development and a chief financial officer in the same course sitting next to each other not even knowing what the other person actually does. It is about developing the human being as a leader, not about their current title and position.
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Developing great leaders is not an accident. The best organizations do it with a clear intent and approach. Like the leaders at Barry-Wehmiller, you must ask the key question “What kind of leaders do we want in our organization?” You began that process above by articulating your philosophy or point of view on what kind of leadership traits you want in your organization. You now need to think about four other key elements that go into your leadership development programs:
- Decide on how you select and promote leaders.
- Develop a learning and development program to grow and develop leaders.
- Develop a mentoring and career-tracking program.
- Pull all this together into a personal leadership development plan for each leader in your organization.
Selection and Promotion
The organization will watch what you do more than what you say. Therefore, whenever you promote someone onto or up the leadership track, you send a message to the people in the organization about what you value. Often, there can be a perceived tension between rewarding someone for high performance and ensuring that he or she is setting an example or growing as the type of leader you want to have in the organization. Who you select to come into the organization and how much weight you put on the person’s past leadership behavior also signal to the organization what you value in leaders. Consistency in promotions and hiring will reinforce the value you are placing on leadership quality and behavior.
Learning and Development
While you can’t teach leadership per se, you can develop leaders. You need to think through what you want in your leaders and then work with people who are knowledgeable in this area to design a series of programs that can help you develop these kinds of leaders. Beyond developing people’s skills and capabilities, a conscious company can support their development as human beings—their emotional, spiritual, and systems intelligence.
Mentoring and Career Tracking
Leaders learn best about how to become better leaders by leading. Leadership is an on-the-job training adventure at its core. So you want to place people in the right kinds of positions where they can be both stretched and supported to gain new experiences and grow as leaders. All leaders should have a plan that includes where they are today in their career and what their next two steps in the organization might be, with more focus on what the immediate next step might be. This career tracking should integrate with their development plan, above, to ensure that they are also developing in their current role and are preparing for this next step. In addition, you should develop a mentoring program where they are paired with a more experienced leader who can offer them informal advice on how to learn on the job. This mentorship should be done outside the normal reporting chain. A mentor is someone with whom you can talk through the challenges and key decisions you need to make. A mentorship is a safe place to be vulnerable about what is hard and where your growth edge is. It is invaluable as a support on the leadership learning path.
Pulling It All Together: The Leadership Development Plan
Take the plans for leader selection, promotion, and development, and integrate them to create a leadership development plan for the organization as a whole. Use this overall plan to create individualized plans for key leaders. This is not something that is done to or for people. The best plans are cocreated between the individual leader and the senior leadership and HR people overseeing leadership development. Ideally, individuals self-curate a process with the support of the organization; they take the lead in developing their plan and advocating for the development opportunities that they feel will help them the most. This requires an iterative process of development between the organization and the individual and usually also involves the incorporation of some form of 360-degree feedback to help anchor the development process in reality. Hence when we say that leaders are developed, we are implying that an organization has made a serious commitment to creating an environment where the model of great leadership is clear, reinforced with promotions and supported by an integrated development plan and process. This is the conscious development of conscious leaders.
Kids Talk about Leadership
This video shares the thoughts of kids on leadership, what qualities they expect, and how they think a leader should lead.
URL: https://www.ccfieldguide.com/kids
Search Words: Conscious Capitalism Field Guide Kids Talk about Leadership