Facilitating Learning

There is no more critical role for management than to help establish a climate for learning. How to do this? It may begin with holding reflective conversations with staff and colleagues. From the literature on expert sharing, we can point to the steps of modeling, scaffolding, and coaching. And in cases where learning hasn't been heretofore promoted, we can incrementally demonstrate leaderful behaviors that support learning, such as: endorsing risk-taking and experimentation, fostering critical reflection and questioning of existing practices and structures, tolerating ambiguity and even mistakes, and, of course, encouraging collective engagement.

The Meaning of Leadership

The word leader comes from the Anglo-Saxon, “ledan,” meaning to “go forth.” So it indeed refers to the person who stands out in front, the hero without whom the group would founder. But perhaps this meaning, which may have served ancient Europe well enough in its day, has now become outdated. Perhaps in this era, we need a new meaning to respond to our increasingly complex and networked world. Today, might leadership refer to working with others to improve themselves and to improve their community? In fact, might leadership no longer suffice as an individual trait, but rather as a practice that refers to the activity of people as they accomplish important work together?

Unsticking 'Command-and-Control' Leadership

It appears that the long tradition of humanistic proposals - be they OD, TQM, or learning organizations - have not seemed to stick in our corporate culture. Why haven't they? The reasons have to do with what are called "institutional" forces in our culture that are very tenacious. These forces, which sustain a culture of dominance and control in organizations, are certainly cultural but also legal, historical, economic, and psychological. For example, some accounts suggest that command-and-control leadership is seen as clearer and more responsive to our anxiety. This is why I have suggested the need for change agents who can promote and fortify a culture of participation and engagement within our organizations. My new leaderful fieldbook [http://www.leaderful.org/bookHome.html] is designed to help such change agents (who could be internal managers or external facilitators) by providing them with an array of tools that can be used at multiple levels of change to produce a more leaderful organization. Try it, you'll like it!!!

The Landmines of Leaderful Change

As readers of this blog are now well aware, change is often unsuccessful when dictated or “driven” from the top. We cannot forget to include the internal and external stakeholders affected by any change. We cannot merely use them as sources of information, rather we see them as co-designers of the change effort. We need to remember to facilitate rather than to direct change.
One way to overcome our instincts to “take over” when change gets tough is to review the landmines – or latent barriers – in the path of leaderful change. Here are five landmines for your consideration, listed with questions for you and your colleagues to consider when undertaking a change effort [these and other related suggestions and activities can be found in the Leaderful Fieldbook]:

Power of the status quo
· Why has the current situation been allowed to persist without change up to this point?
· Who is being protected or privileged by the status quo?

Lack of patience
· How can we overlook some of the expected errors that might occur when people not normally empowered take the reins?
· Do we sincerely trust those at lower levels, or even at our level, to manage operations and processes that we may have formerly overseen?

Low readiness for change
· What is the stage of readiness of the system in question: are people truly interested in taking responsibility, for example?
· What resources have been made available to prepare people for the change?
Attempt to apply “fix-it” techniques
· Has the effort considered any side-effects of the change as well as its long-term implications?
· Has the effort taken into consideration people’s individual agendas, including their feelings and values, on the issue in question?

Belief that we can decree change
· Are people truly committed to the change, both in its process as well as its anticipated outcomes?
· As the change agent, are you willing to step outside of the center and let others shape the process?

Leaderful Practice in Everyday Life

I am nearly always questioned, when the subject of leaderful practice is brought up, where one can find instances of this form of leadership. My first response is that people in our culture are not exposed to it because, let’s face it, our media doesn’t typically pick up on those practices that are collaborative in nature. As a culture, we tend to be more fascinated with the individual and his/her heroics. So, the leaderful doesn’t get the coverage. But it’s there, almost daily, in the mundane actions of everyday people and events.

Sometimes we are aware of it more in what we are subtly told NOT to do – as in such depictions as the popular TV series, ‘the Office.’ But there are organizations that run this way – such as the conductorless Orpheus Chamber Orchestra or W.L. Gore, the maker of Gore-Tex.

Another good example is the company of the Foreword writer to my Leaderful Fieldbook, John Foster, who’s Head of Talent and Organization at the renowned design firm, IDEO. IDEO uses a shared collaborative approach, bringing people from various disciplines together in a collective process to confront and overcome intractable worldwide problems.

Another example is the spirit of Ubuntu that permeates South Africa, recent host of the 2010 (soccer) World Cup, the biggest sports event in the world. Although Ubuntu is a Zulu word and thus not only associated with South Africa, I understand that the preamble to the new South African constitution mentions it and that it comes up as a basis of their culture and means: “humanity to others,” or “I am what I am because of who we all are.” Thus, focusing on such values as the pooling of community resources and working together in harmony, it appears to me to embody leaderful practices. Interestingly, Ubuntu has also been adopted by the IT (information technology) world as a community developed operating system!

Shared Leadership in Sports

I would like to correct what I think are two misinterpretations about shared leadership during the recent debate on WEEI’s “The Big O” show about this topic. First, I should introduce myself. I am Joe Raelin and am a professor of management and organization development at Northeastern’s College of Business Administration. I have studied and written several books on shared leadership, though I refer to it as “leaderful practice” rather than leadership. Rather than see leadership as solely residing in one individual or hero, I see leadership as something that everyone can participate in, and not just one at a time, but collectively and concurrently, that is, all together and at the same time! Why put people in a dependent state awaiting orders from on high? Let them contribute and as the US Army once said, “be all that you can be.”

Anyway, the first misconception that I heard on the show was that under shared leadership, one loses the sense of competition. The second misconception was that under shared leadership, people get chosen for the position of leader without earning it. Let me address each:

1. Competition can be just as fierce under a shared leadership as under a single leadership domain. It’s just that there is more cooperation within the team so that it can build itself into a highly performing unit with everyone contributing their special talents. They then take to the field to beat the other team into submission, though at the end of the game, there is the expected extension of good sportsmanship and congratulations.

2. Players don’t have to vie for being the top gun or leader; rather, they seek to contribute in their own special way that serves the “leadership” of the team. So, someone might be the team’s spokesperson; someone might be the organizer of necessary exercise routines; someone might be the comedian who keeps everyone loose; someone might be a mentor who helps the freshmen learn the ropes. Each of these roles serves a leadership function, so it’s not a question of who deserves the leadership; it is a question of everyone pitching in without awaiting orders to do so and being recognized for their critical contribution.

By the way, there are many many examples of organizations working quite well in this way. Catch a concert by the Boston-based “A Far Cry,” which operates without a conductor, or when winter comes and you put on your Gore-Tex coat, know that it will have been made by a company that prides itself on not having any managers!

Tell us about your "leaderful" experiences

To launch this blog, I would like to ask for feedback of any kind regarding experiences of our readers in attempting any of the activities in the Fieldbook. What has worked, what hasn't? Did a particular moment stand out that led to a transformation in practice? Are the people or systems in question becoming more leaderful?