Category Archives: Developing as a leader

Real conversations – choosing the focus of your communication

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On Monday, I wrote about two fundamentally different paradigms of communication, drawing on the work of McGregor, Schwarz, Rosenberg and Goleman and expanding on an article I recently wrote for Discuss HR.  Today, I continue this series of postings by discussing the focus of each communication paradigm.

Two different paradigms of communication.  Two different sets of underlying values and assumptions, strategies for execution and ultimate outcomes.  If you want to adopt either one of these approaches, you need to know how the underlying values and assumptions translate into practice.  One area in which the difference is starkly visible, in my experience, is in the focus of attention adopted by users of each approach.

Let’s begin with McGregor’s Theory X;  what Roger Schwarz (in his book The Skilled Facilitator:  A Comprehensive Resource For Consultants, Facilitators, Managers, Trainers, and Coaches) calls a Unilateral Control Model and Rosenberg calls a domination approach.  The aim of the user is to win and not to lose and the user is not concerned about the experience of others.  Implicit in this approach is the belief that there is a single right answer and that all other answers are wrong.  It follows, then, that the user of a domination-based approach to communication will tend to focus on who or what is right or wrong and to gather data which supports the case.  He or she will often favour some kinds of data and dismiss other kinds of data though there may be some internal inconsistency here.  For example, the user of this approach tends to favour objective data and dismiss data concerned with the feelings of others.  At the same time, he or she may take the view that his or or her feelings are justified, especially when they are concerned with judgements about the other person or people.

Marshall Rosenberg, in his book Nonviolent Communication:  A Language of Life, identifies judgements as a key area of focus for the user of this unilateral, domination approach.  This is not about discernment, for the user of this approach often lacks the ability to discern, conflating his or her beliefs, for example, with the facts and confusing observations with conclusions.  Rather, it is about being judgemental.  This is true even when the person concerned is giving positive feedback, which is given in the form of praise and which implies that it is the giver of praise who is the ultimate arbiter of what is right and what is wrong.  In this sense, the emphasis is on what the communicator thinks and believes.

In making the case for a particular approach, the user of the domination approach is likely both to emphasise the use of data and to be keen to control its use.  This might include avoiding scrutiny of his or her own data and ignoring or dismissing data which does not support his or her particular way of thinking or forward path.  Parties to communication become opponents, seeking to prevail, galvanising their arguments in order to win.  This approach may be explicit (in the request for a presentation to support a proposal, for example) or implicit (in the way we think about our colleagues behind the scenes).

What, then, is the focus of a Mutual Learning Model?  This is McGregor’s Theory Y – what Rosenberg calls Nonviolent Communication (or NVC).  This approach is about collaborating in order to achieve a variety of outcomes, including business and personal outcomes.  This paradigm has as its central focus desired outcomes, underpinned by needs or – to use the language of negotiation – “interests”.

What is meant by needs – or interests – in this context?  I tend to favour Rosenberg in the way he clearly differentiates needs from the strategies by which we meet them.  This is something that we often confuse.  The leader who says to a member of staff that “I need you to get that paper to me by 5pm today” is not talking about the need itself but about the strategy by which he expects it to be met.  Nor can we infer his needs directly.  Perhaps, for example, he has a meeting the following day for which he wants to prepare – but not by staying late at work and at the expense of his family.  In this case, his needs might be for connection and intimacy and he plans to meet them by spending time with his wife and family.  Perhaps, though, he knows his own job is on the line if he doesn’t get this paper to his boss in good shape by 9am the next day.  In this case, he might be trying to meet some fundamental survival needs – for food and shelter, for example – by taking action to secure his ongoing employment.

Why is this distinction important and how does it facilitate successful communication?  Because when needs are shared it becomes much easier to reconcile the irreconcilable.  Knowing that the writer of his paper can’t start her final read through until 4.30pm, for example, gives the leader the opportunity to make different arrangements.  If his concern is to spend time with his family, he might choose to take his lap-top home so that he can take delivery of the revised paper on-line or asking another colleague to check the paper whilst its author is in her meeting.  If his concern is to hold onto his job he might be more inclined to stay late to review the paper after his colleague has got it to him or even to ask her to prioritise the paper over the meeting she was planning to attend.  This is essentially a “win, win” approach:  one which aims precisely to achieve outcomes which meet the needs of everyone involved.

It follows, then, that data is seen and handled very differently.  Instead of using data to make a case, users of this second model of communication share data and test it carefully in order to build understanding and to open up new ways to achieve desired outcomes.  Data, in other words, is seen in relation to needs rather than in relation to who or what is right or wrong.


The idea that communication might seek to identify and respond to diverse needs tends to gladden the hearts of many people in the workplace.  Until, that is, they realise that holding real conversations means standing close to the fire.  I’ll be writing about this in my next posting.  Meantime, I wonder:  where are you placing your attention in your communication with yourself and others?  If you’re willing to share, please leave a comment below.

Real conversations – choosing a communication paradigm that supports your aims

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In this posting, I write about the most fundamental area of consideration when it comes to communication – that’s your communication as well as communication in your organisation:  the paradigm that underpins your approach.  This posting expands on my posting on 3rd March, 2011 for Discuss HR.


Whilst it may seem simplistic to look at just two styles of communication – two paradigms of communication – a number of deep thinkers in the field of leadership and communication do just this.  Douglas McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y, for example, outlined in his classic book The Human Side Of Enterprise, relate essentially to two different paradigms of communication. One of them (Theory X) is based on the idea that management control is required because employees need to be “coerced, controlled, directed and threatened with punishment to get them to put forth adequate effort toward the achievement of organisational objectives”. This communication paradigm is based on the idea that some people know better than others and have, as a result, the right to dominate and control. (In practice, this belief often translates as “because an individual is in a more senior role than his team he should know better than others”, a belief that is as likely to be held by his team members as it is by the leader him- or herself).  As an alternative, McGregor offers Theory Y, which is based on the assumption that employees are worthy of trust and respect because they are intrinsically motivated to do a good job.


Roger Schwarz, in his book The Skilled Facilitator:  A Comprehensive Resource for Consultants, Facilitators, Managers, Trainers and Coaches, refers to what he calls our Theory in Use and identifies two theories which broadly align to McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y.  He takes the work of Argyris and Schön, 1974 and Action Design, 1997, to outline his Unilateral Control Model.  This is what Marshall Rosenberg, author of Nonviolent Communication:  A Language of Life refers to as a domination approach – McGregor’s Theory X.  Schwarz maps very simply the core values and assumptions held by the user of the Unilateral Control Model, the strategies which derive from those beliefs and their consequences.  The aim of this Theory in Use is to win and not to lose, for example, and assumptions include the belief that “I understand the situation;  those who see it differently do not” and “I am right;  those who disagree are wrong”.  It’s easy to see how such beliefs limit communication, discouraging an open dialogue about different points of view, and lead in time to misunderstanding and conflict, defensiveness and mistrust – before, in turn, leading to limited learning and reduced effectiveness.  Schwarz also outlines a Theory in Use which he calls the Mutual Learning Model.  This is characterised by assumptions which value the contribution of all parties, recognising that “I have some information;  others have some information” and “each of us may see things that others do not”.  The strategies that derive from these assumptions tend to lead to increased trust and understanding, on the one hand, and reduced conflict and defensiveness, on the other.


Schwarz’s model illustrates one aspect of McGregor’s research that is often overlooked:  that both theories appear to be “right” in the sense that they constitute self-fulfilling prophecies. If you want motivated staff, choose and cultivate an approach to communication which is rooted in acceptance and aspires to mutual learning (Theory Y). If you want mistrust and mediocre performance to proliferate, choose a domination-based approach (Theory X).  This finding is echoed more recently in Daniel Goleman and colleagues’ The New Leaders:  Transforming The Art Of Leadership Into The Science Of Results.  In it, the authors identify six different styles of leadership and highlight that each style has its place:  the most effective leaders are able to select different styles to meet the needs of different situations as they arise.  At the same time, they caution against the over-use of certain styles, highlighting how this can create dissonance in the workplace.  In short, a leader’s choice of leadership – or communication – style significantly affects the climate across his or her team or organisation and this in turn has a measurable impact on business results.


In practice, few people use one paradigm or the other exclusively.  Some people, for example, view some members of their team in one way and other members in another, so that they are likely to use the Unilateral Control Model with those staff they least trust and a Mutual Learning Model with a few select members of their team.  Other people aspire to use one model – often the Mutual Learning Model – and find that, at times, they slip back into the other model, perhaps because it’s the one they grew up with.  I wonder:  what is your experience?  And are you willing to share it here?


Both approaches differ in where they place attention. If you’re serious about choosing motivation and engagement, you need to choose MacGregor’s Theory Y approach to communication and, in turn, to choose to focus your communication in a way that supports it.  I shall be writing about what this means in practice over the next few days.

Real conversations – what are your aims for communication in your organisation?

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In this posting, I write about one area to which we need to attend if we are to learn to have real conversations in the organisations we lead.  This posting builds on my posting of 3rd March, 2011 on Discuss HR.

So much has been done to study the effects of different styles of communication that it’s possible to choose your approach to communication based on a clear understanding of your aims. Choose one style of communication, for example, and you increase levels of mistrust which, in turn, makes it hard to get to the root of and to resolve problems. The more this style of communication is endemic across an organisation the more it leads to mediocre performance, poor morale and low levels of engagement, increased sickness and high staff turnover – and that’s before we even start to think of the impact on our customers.

Choose another style of communication and you build trust even whilst making it easier to have some of the most challenging conversations which face us (and, let’s face it, as a leader in your organisation or an HR practitioner you are charged with your fair share). This second style of communication gets to the root of problems so that they are addressed fully and effectively. It also facilitates the conversations that generate the most creative and effective solutions.

Once you have a clear understanding of the outcomes you would like from your chosen approach, you can choose a communication paradigm that supports you in making progress towards your aims. This is relatively easy given the amount of research available in this area.

In my next posting, I’ll be writing about the different paradigms that underpin different styles of communication, and which lead to some of the outcomes I’ve described above.  Meantime, in case you are interested to explore your aims and aspirations for your communication and for communication across your organisation, I encourage you to take time in a place in which you will be undisturbed to explore the questions below:

  • Take time to connect with your aspirations for your business or organisation in the next 12 months, 24 months and 5 years.  Notice the outcomes to which you aspire in 5 years’ time.  Notice the milestones your organisation needs to achieve along the way in order to move smoothly towards your five-year plan;
  • Notice the challenges that you and others will have to overcome in order successfully to achieve your plans for the next 12 months, 24 months and five years.  Take time to imagine what it will take successfully to meet those challenges;
  • Notice the role that communication will play in overcoming challenges, in meeting milestones and in moving smoothly towards your five-year plan.  Who will need to communicate with whom?  What will be the most critical conversations along the way?  What will be the most challenging conversations along the way?  As you consider these questions, take time to notice the full range of relationships and conversations that will contribute to your organisation’s progress during the coming five years;
  • What are the critical outcomes as you see them from communication within your organisation and between your organisation and its key stakeholders?  I invite you to think not only about the business outcomes themselves but also about those areas of outcome that contribute to business outcomes over time.  What areas do you see as important?  What outcomes do you want in those areas?

You might like to take a moment to notice how confident you feel when you think about your organisation’s ability to deliver the quality and effectiveness of communication needed to achieve your aims and aspirations.  What is this telling you about your experience of communication right now within your organisation?  If your heart is sinking right now, I hope you’ll return to read the remaining postings in this series.

Either way, I’d love to hear about your aspirations for communication across your organisation.  If you’d like to share any of your thinking here, please leave a comment below.

Integrity – a different form of leadership

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What counts is for a man to dare to be entirely himself,
standing alone, one single individual alone before God,
alone with that enormous effort and responsibility. 
Søren Kierkegaard
Working with client organisations to create a model of the competencies they wish their staff to demonstrate – that is, the competencies that differentiate high performance – I have noticed over the years how quick commissioning clients are to ask for the inclusion of Integrity.  This competency is concerned with acting in a way which is consistent with what one says is important – some call it congruity.
In practice, though, I find that organisations want this from their employees – up to a point.  Leaders want their employees to speak openly and honestly, for example, as long as the message is one they want to hear.  They welcome employees who act in line with their own values, as long as their values are congruent with the values of the organisation.  Perhaps, even, they want their employees to be open and honest with customers or clients, as long as they still get the deal.
I have been reminded of this in recent days as I reflect on Uwe Timm’s book In My Brother’s Shadow.  Born in Hamburg in 1940, Timm was 16 years younger than his brother and had few memories of the young man who lost his legs, and then his life, as a member of the German Army.  Timm’s book is both an intensely personal memoir of family life during and after the war and an exploration of the difficult questions that surround the Germans’ involvement in World War II.  How is it, for example, that the Germans asked so few questions about their Jewish neighbours as they gradually disappeared from view?  Of his own brother, he wonders how he could speak of the British bombing of Hamburg as inhumane whilst never making the same judgements of the killing of civilians by soldiers in the German army.
Surveying the literature Timm highlights the case (from Wolfram Wette’s book The Wehrmacht) of a German officer who walked down the street in his home town in uniform together with a Jewish friend, at a time when Jews were branded by the Star of David.  The man, who, in this way, demonstrated the highest level of integrity, was dishonourably discharged from the army.  He also highlights, drawing on Christopher Browning’s book Ordinary Men, how few soldiers took the opportunity that was freely given to them to ask to be withdrawn from duties which included killing their Jewish compatriots.
I want to add that I share Timm’s reflections with the clear understanding that we all face challenges when we seek to act with integrity – to make choices in line with our values in the face of increasing levels of personal risk.  In this sense, leadership has nothing to do with the official role in which we find ourselves.  Rather, it has everything to do with our willingness to make considered choices – and to own those choices – in line with our most heartfelt values, knowing that we cannot control the responses of others to the choices we make.  I believe that this remains a challenge for us all.  And I am grateful that I have not yet had to face the level of challenge faced by Germans during World War II and by many around the world today.
Returning to Timm, I note his awareness of the values that fuelled the choices of his parents’ generation including a strong sense of community and of obedience to community values.  It was in adherence to these values that many men, brought to trial after World War II, said:  “I was only obeying orders”.
No wonder, then, that Timm chooses to quote Kierkegaard, as part of his explorations.
PS  Just to let you know, as a member of Amazon Associates UK, I shall receive a referral fee for any books you buy using the links in this posting.

Creating the climate for success

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Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee, in their book The New Leaders, identify the range of leadership styles that leaders draw on and highlight those styles that create a climate for success.  This is what they call “resonant leadership” and they contrast this with the use of styles which, if overused, create “dissonant leadership”.  The key here is “if overused” – all the styles identified in the research have a role to play when used effectively.
Developing a repertoire of leadership styles and the capability to use them effectively is not easy.  Many of us lack strong role models to emulate so that we just don’t know what “highly effective” looks like when it comes to leadership.  Perhaps we will copy leaders (from our parents, teachers and other childhood figures to our managers at work) without even recognising the implications of their chosen approach.  By copying poor role-models in this way we repeat the behaviours that were not effective first time round.  Perhaps we will try hard to do anything but what they did.  This carries a particular challenge:  whilst we may know what we don’t want to do, how do we know what to do instead?
At the same time, making effective adjustments to our approach can yield benefits all round, as the testimonial below highlights.  I’m grateful to Fabienne Luisetti, with whom I worked in coaching partnership during 2010, for sharing her experiences.  If you’d like to know more about how I work with clients please follow this link for details of how to contact me to arrange a complimentary consultation.
Meantime, this is what Fabienne had to say about her experience of working with a coach:

There came a point where my reputation of being a fair but tough leader became an obstacle to both my career and my well-being. Whilst projects were completed and goals achieved, people were bruised along the way and, at times, I would be living with negative feelings in the evening from my interactions with others during the day.  Having gone through all the leadership programmes available in our company, I decided I needed a more focused one-to-one coaching programme and this is when I started working with Dorothy.

Right from the start Dorothy was very professional in her approach and created the right environment of trust for me to express my feelings, thoughts and reactions.  She challenged a few pain points and also helped me to distil feedback from others and my own work into key areas to focus on.  Her willingness to share theory and to describe others’ experiences helped me to place my situation in perspective. I am delighted to provide this testimonial.

How has coaching worked for me?  A 1:1 coaching program with set milestones was particularly motivational.  At every meeting, I wanted to show progress.  Therefore, in between two coaching sessions, I tried a few new strategies to be able to report upon.  When I realised they were working well for me and the people around me, I was motivated to try further.  This is the way I achieved my three personal coaching objectives;  I am now engaging people and teams in a more collaborative manner;  I can feel people contribute to my projects in a more spontaneous way not because they have to but because they want to.  And I feel good about progressing projects, keeping within deadlines in a much softer way.

Fabienne Luisetti

To blame or not to blame

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This week I have been responding on my blog to a talk by Brene Brown at http://www.ted.com/.  Before I move on, I want to highlight and explore just one more comment from her talk:  when she suggests that the definition in the research of blame is “a way to discharge pain and discomfort”.

I confess I think of the early morning news team on Radio 4.  Do they ever report an unhappy event without asking “who’s to blame?”?  I often wonder who this serves and how.  Nor are the newscasters on Radio 4 alone.  Families blame their fellow family members for the every-day inconveniences they mete out on each other or they blame others outside the family for events – sometimes tragic events – that befall them.  Societies blame other societies (or even vague concepts, such as “terrorism”) for actions they do not enjoy.  People blame politicians.  Politicians blame each other.

I ponder the use of blame in the organisations I work with, for here, too, blame is used liberally.  Managers blame their staff for various actions and outcomes that do not meet their needs.  And because they hold the power of position they do this, at times, directly and openly and even as part of a formal process such as appraisal.  One team blames another (sales blames customer service who in turn blame accounts…).  Sometimes such blame is expressed openly and directly.  Oftentimes it is a low, ongoing grumble in the background of our interactions with each other.

Without question, our choice to blame has a positive intention – we do it for a reason.  If Brown and her colleagues in the world of scientific research are right, we do it to discharge pain and discomfort.  This raises a number of questions for me:  how effective is blame as a way to discharge pain and discomfort?  What are the side-effects?  And what are the alternatives?

Perhaps it would help to define blame in some way.  At the time of writing, Wikipedia offers the following definition of blame:  Blame is the act of censuring, holding responsible, making negative statements about an individual or group that their action or actions are socially or morally irresponsible, the opposite of praise. When someone is morally responsible for doing something wrong their action is blameworthy. By contrast, when someone is morally responsible for doing something right, we may say that his or her action is praiseworthy. There are other senses of praise and blame that are not ethically relevant. One may praise someone’s good dress sense, and blame the weather for a crop failure.

How effective is blame as a way of discharging pain and discomfort?  It seems to me that it must be effective to some degree, otherwise we would not do it.  To take one of the more extreme examples we can imagine, the relative or friend of someone who has been murdered may well find it easier to feel the anger that comes with blaming the person who has committed the murder than they do to be present to the intense feelings of grief connected with the loss of a loved one.  To give a more mundane – but nonetheless pertinent – example, the manager in the workplace may well find it easier to blame his (or her) staff for their failings than to recognise the shortcomings in the instructions he gave or to acknowledge his role in recruiting staff who lacked the necessary skills for the job.

What are the side-effects of blame?  It’s easy to see that blame has consequences that are undesirable.  If we choose to blame others, for example, we live with the ongoing feelings (of anger, resentment and so on) that go with blame.  And we do this whilst never being entirely free of the feelings we are seeking to hold at bay.  These include the grief of the mourner or the fears of the manager, and so on.  At the same time, there are consequences that go way beyond our immediate emotions.  Blame creates the culture we live in, for example, so that even when we are dealing with people who do not think in ways which produce blame we may fear blame from others because it is what we do ourselves.  In organisations, blame is often associated with a failure to get to the root cause of a problem or issue such that the problem continues.  Both the problem itself and the blame associated with it consume energy in ways which are unproductive.

So what are the alternatives?  I am going to offer two of many:

  • If the aim of blame is to discharge pain and discomfort, perhaps a key area to look for alternatives is in the area of handling our emotions.  Marshall Rosenberg, author of Nonviolent Communication:  A Language for Life, invites people to transform difficult emotions by understanding the needs that underpin them.  This means connecting with our unmet needs and the feelings that go with them.  This may well help us with the second of the options I offer here;
  • If our aim is to address a problem or issue, then it helps to focus on the outcomes we want and to explore what it would take to get to our desired outcomes.  Thinking about how we or others are contributing to a problem is no longer a matter of blame but rather becomes, in this scenario, a matter of identifying barriers to progress so that we can find ways to make progress towards our desired outcomes.

Whilst we may continue to consider who is responsible, both options involve letting go of attaching blame in order to get the best outcome.  I wonder, are you ready to let go of blame?

PS  Just to let you know, as a member of Amazon Associates UK, I shall receive a referral fee for any books you buy using links in this posting.  

Numbing painful emotions: is it really good for business?

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Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.

Kahlil Gibran
The Prophet

On Monday, I wrote about Brene Brown’s masterful exploration of empathy and connection on TED (follow this link for a reminder).  Today I want to pick up on her assertion that, by numbing pain and other difficult emotions, we also numb – in equal measure – our capacity for joy.  Is this true?  And if so, what are the implications in the workplace?

Brown highlights in her talk that we numb our emotions as a strategy to protect ourselves from our feelings of vulnerability.  How do we do this?  Brown points to the experience of her fellow Americans, saying, “We are the most in debt, obese, addicted and medicated adult cohort in US history”.  And just to be clear, the picture that accompanied the word “addicted” highlighted alcohol rather than any other substance. Some might say, isn’t this a high price to pay for a bit of emotional pain relief?  Others might say – by their actions they do say – this is a price worth paying.  After all, isn’t society structured in a way that supports this?  But it doesn’t stop there.  As Brown points out, insofar as we numb our negative emotions (she cites vulnerability, grief, shame, disappointment) we also numb our capacity to experience the positive emotions (including joy, gratitude, happiness).  This is not a new discovery as Kahlil Gibran’s passage On Joy and Sorrow from The Prophet amply demonstrates.  Even so, it seems to be a discovery which is not widely known or understood.

I want to take a moment to touch in the implications for us in the workplace.  How many of us have experience of working in places where the expression of negative emotions (maybe positive emotions, too) is – implicitly or explicitly – discouraged?  It seems to me that our wokplaces are, increasingly, emotionally sanitised, so that oftentimes the response to emotion is to get someone out of the building (on “compassionate” grounds) as quickly as possible.  If we’re feeling angry because we didn’t get the promotion we hoped for we are left to find our way through or even expected to pull ourselves together.  If we are shocked by the way a customer has spoken to us on the phone we’re expected to meet our targets by picking up the next call.  If we feel nervous in our first meeting as a member of the Board we sure ain’t going to show it.

If Brown – and Gibran – are right, the corollary of this is that we lose touch with all positive emotions.  The satisfaction of recognising a piece of work well done is lost in the midst of our fear of criticism or even our own self-criticism.  The pay rise brings a temporary boost to our emotions before, quickly, becoming a new part of our every day reality.  The passions that motivated us to join our organisation become lost in the everyday experience of surpressing our emotions.

Last week I pointed to a posting by John Hepworth on DiscussHR about employee engagement.  He begins by saying:  According to Seijits and Crim (2006), a professor lecturing on leadership amused his audience by relating the following:  “A CEO was asked by a business journalist how many people work in his company.  ‘About half of them’, the CEO responded”.  It seems to me that Brown’s research points to a fundamental truth:  if organisations are serious about engaging the full commitment and contribution of their employees they need to get real about human emotion.  We all have emotions.  When we accept this as a fact of life we can begin to explore how these emotions serve us, to learn how we can recognise these emotions and even to learn how to manage and work with these emotions.  Only then can we begin to create the kind of culture and climate in which peole thrive.  This gives us a much greater chance of achieving what some call “employee engagement”.    

Is your team effective?

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Roger Schwarz, creator of The Skilled Facilitator Approach, writes a pithy newsletter (Fundamental Change) every couple of weeks which I enjoy reading.  His recent article, Is your team effective? prompted me to look for any conditions he places on reproducing his article.  Ah!  This is what he says:  Material from Fundamental Change may be reproduced in other electronic or print publications provided this copyright notice is included: “Copyright Roger Schwarz & Associates, 2010. All rights reserved.” and a link to http://www.schwarzassociates.com/ is included in the credits.

Without further ado here is the article I enjoyed so much:

How do you assess whether your team is effective? Is it that the team accomplishes its goals and meets its numbers? Those criteria are important, but alone they are a limited view of team effectiveness. To be effective your team has to meet three criteria1:

Your team meets or exceed the standards of people who receive and review their output, whether that output is decisions, services, or products. Of course, it’s important that a team meet its goals, including the numbers it has set as targets. But that is not sufficient. Ultimately, other people decide whether your team is performing acceptably. If you are not meeting the expectations of people who receive and review your team’s work, your team is not performing effectively.

Leaders often think that the performance criterion is the only criterion for effectiveness. Although that may be true in the short run, in the long run it is essential to meet two other criteria.

Your team works together in a way that improves its effectiveness over time. If your team isn’t improving the way it works over time, chances are it won’t be effective in the long run. You have probably been on a team that met its goals, but was so dysfunctional that you promised yourself you would never work with the same people again. These teams pay too high a price for their performance. Effective teams learn from their experiences and mistakes. They talk openly about how they need to do better as a team, develop and implement plans to do so, and then evaluate their progress.

Your team provides experiences through which team members can develop their skills and have a sense of well-being. Although team members can weather frustrating periods, the team experience overall has to be a satisfying one for team members. If the team experience doesn’t provide opportunities for members to develop their skills or if the team experience creates undue stress, boredom, or frustration, you might lose your best people, and those that stay may be only partway in the game.

Don’t short-change your team by ignoring the second and third criteria. The three criteria are interrelated; you need to meet all three for your team to really be effective.

One way people meet some of their needs for growth and well-being is to be on a team that performs well and that continues to improve how it works. If team members don’t find the team experience satisfying, they will not likely have the energy to meet performance standards or figure out how to work together better.

Teams are complex social systems; to get the most from them, you need to treat them that way.

Roger Schwarz


Leadership and employee engagement

Developing as a leader,

John Hepworth, writing on Discuss HR, highlights the role of employee engagement.  As a contributor to this brand-new blog, I take a moment to add comments of my own, recognising the importance of employee engagement in overall performance and the role of leadership in stimulating or undermining employee engagement:

The Hay Group (for whom I worked for a while a few years back) recently reported that employee engagement is at the top of the list of employer concerns right now. Over the years, they have also drawn heavily on research that suggests that organisational climate is the major factor in creating high levels of employee engagement and that the behaviours of leaders are the major factor in creating organisational climate.

One of the interesting things about this is that we now have masses of research that points to the role that emotional intelligence plays in our success at work and still – as John suggests – to recognise doubt and to seek help is to be seen as “weak”. Perhaps, too, leaders fear that to be open to the doubts and fears of others is also seen as weak.

I think of Anne Wilson Schaef, author of numerous books including The Addictive Organisation, who puts forward the idea that the malaises we observe in organisations are simply the reflection (projection?) of our own symptoms.

Which makes me wonder, what does it take to stand up and be counted as a fearful, doubting and emotional human being? And who has the courage to go first?

Choosing words that heal

Developing as a leader, Emotional Intelligence, ,

Sarah Palin has been sharply criticised in recent days for her insensitivity, even as she tries to look presidential.  Peter Stanford, writing in the Belfast Telegraph, highlights how Palin placed a rifle target over Arizona during the 2010 election to designate that Gabrielle Giffords was a politician she wanted out of the way, leading to accusations that she is personally responsible for Gifford’s shooting last week by Jared Loughner.  Whilst we all wonder what the outcome will be for Gifford and for others who were wounded, six people have already died.

Stanford’s article highlights the power of words, focussing in particular on Palin’s use of the phrase “blood libel” which he examines in depth, laying out the history of its use and its association with acts of terrible violence perpetrated on Jewish people throughout the ages.  Sarah Palin is playing with fire, he says. She has been one of the most effective practitioners of the use of words-as-weapons, damning Barack Obama’s healthcare reforms, for instance, as “death laws”. But just as such poisonous oratory can get the crowds cheering, it can also lay you low. Perhaps the real choice that faces Palin now is whether she wants to join the ranks of politicians whose gaffes and casual ignorance of history make them a joke, or step up into the responsible mainstream.

Obama, without question an orator of great skill, eschews tit-for-tat in favour of a different kind of discourse.  Speaking at a memorial service for the victims of the shooting in Tucson, Arizona, Obama seems to be addressing politicians of all persuasions when he says, But at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized – at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do – it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.

Saying yes to examining the reasons for the shooting so that steps can be taken to reduce the likelihood of similar events in future, Obama nonetheless cautions, But what we can’t do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on one another. As we discuss these issues, let each of us do so with a good dose of humility. Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together.

The openly Christian rhetoric of American politicians sits uncomfortably at times amongst the British, so that some may choose to ignore his words (which you can read in full by following this link).  Yet more people may wonder what this has to do with us.  I see in Obama’s speech an act of leadership of the highest order, for he addresses not only the sense of grief and loss experienced by those affected by this tragedy, not only the political issues of the day, but also the manner in which we choose to live our lives.  His is a rare and welcome choice:  to rise above the opportunity to gain political capital in order to invite men and women on every side of the debate to act in ways which honour the dead and give hope for the future.

As I close, I feel a deep sense of gratitude for a man who is consistent in choosing the language of empathy and compassion over the language of conflict and discord.  For his choice reminds us that we, too, get to choose.  We may not get to choose the events of our lives or the behaviours of those we deal with and still, we get to choose whether to speak to the best of who we are or to the worst.  I thank Obama for choosing words that heal.