If you work at Front, a collaboration software provider, you can anytime scan CEO Mathilde Collin's calendar. This kind of transparency goes a long way in building and sustaining a culture of trust. It gives her the kind of integrity, accessibility and humility she expects and depends on from her leaders and everyone else. She is clear that actions speak volumes words only allude to. We Need more leaders like this.
Conscious leaders
There is a world of difference between the social unconsciousness of greed and self-interest at the cost of the wellbeing of others and consciousness of humility and generosity. It would be realistic to argue that the former is essentially social unconsciousness and the latter social consciousness.
We need to stop referring to socially unconscious people who hold authority positions as leaders. They are not. Social unconsciousness is a form of social parasitics. We need to do everything we can to only support people in leadership who are socially conscious.
Looking to leaders for answers
Regardless of one's location in an organization, each of us has answers to questions that emerge. When questions are new and good, no one has instant answers. Moving forward means learning together. New problems are not solved by old answers, only by new questions. When leaders add value here, it's often the contribution of new questions more than new answers.
Why not to criticize leaders
In parent-child organizational and civic cultures, leaders are easy targets for judgments, based on all manner of unrealistic assumptions and expectations.
Reality, is most leaders worldwide are largely unprepared for skillful and mindful leadership. They're doing exactly what they're prepared for. They need support for growth, not being the object of unrealistic expectations and assumptions.
Are bosses intrinsically smarter?
Everyone on the team brings to the table a unique configuration of experience, knowledge, abilities, connections, ideas and questions. It is an irrelevant comparison to make about whether one person or another smarter than everyone else when in fact when a team is aligned people are smarter together. This implies smarter than any individual boss might be or strive to be.
This has practical everyday implications. When we rely on the collective intelligence of the group we listen better and collaborate more frequently and effectively. We grow more together.
3 reasons not to manage people
The whole business about managing people is interesting. The less we have to manage people the more space we have for leadership so teams can grow together and flourish. Teams grow together and flourish because they have good leadership not because they're being managed. The point of good leadership is to create a team that can manage its own learning, its decisions and its alignment.
The most vital sustainable level of motivation for teams is when teams work from intrinsic motivation. This means that on a daily basis they feel a sense of authorship over the way work gets done, the way they plan and problem solve, and the way they grow. Slow teams are slow precisely to the degree that they feel they need to be managed and that their leaders believe they need to manage them. Nimble teams are nimble to the degree that they have good leadership which helps them discover how to manage themselves in their work.
Among the many reasons not to manage people and provide leadership instead, here are three.
To engage their goodness
Goodness is the unique constellation of skills, abilities and knowledge each of us has that supports doing well in our work. In every team people have complementary goodness. Each person has a kind of goodness that represents goodness that others want to grow. People have a lot to learn from each other and teach each other. As leaders we do not have to be the ultimate source of all learning. What we know about learning curves is that people actually get better at something when they engage that goodness in helping others learn. So we accelerate a team's capacity for growth when we engage people through their goodness.
To share decisions
When we create an environment where knowledge is transparent and there's a culture of curiosity people can make decisions quickly and well together. As leaders we do not have to be the bottleneck for decision-making. When people are entrusted with decisions, they get better at decision-making, the team becomes more responsive and resilient and they become smarter together. In fact we all become smarter together when the team shares decision-making and we can make that possible as leaders.
To work by agreement
When we help the team learn how to work by agreement they manage their own tensions, disconnects and opportunities for alignment and collaboration. Working by agreement means they share awareness of when each other needs help, how they can help each other in their work, and how they can create and test agreements that they can all support in their work. Agreements create trust, alignment and velocity in the team's performance and growth.
Can all leaders grow?
Whatever we believe about the growth potential of leaders or any specific leader, leaders grow when they're ready. That said some leaders will grow with their teams.
Readiness is motivation and optimism for growth in specific ways and contexts. Both are required. Coaching can help leaders connect with these, sparking and nurturing readiness. This is question based coaching. Storytelling helps.
Does it (really) matter if people grow together?
Teams that grow together reach new levels of performance and possibility. The velocity of new levels is equal to the velocity of their growing together.
It is an insane superstition to expect teams to perform better without growing together. This is expressed in the declaration that teams "don't have time to grow" given the pressure we exert on them. This is the dyslogic that if teams take time to grow, they're not doing their work, getting behind and making their numbers worse. It is profound ignorance about the relationship between growing and performing.
Until leaders get clear that, when it comes to team performance, growth has power that pressure lacks. If a team doesn't know how to grow, it doesn't matter how many goals we impose on them, how much time we invest in the distrust of holding them accountable, how many lectures and motivational talks we send them through and how many mission and vision and value statements we wallpaper the organization with.
All that matters is growth.
The wisdom of simple
A recent HBR piece talks about how, in defining core leadership competencies, Microsoft went from the exhaustive complication of 100 essential skills to the elegance of three principles: create clarity, generate energy, deliver success.
Complicated makes growth inaccessible. It's obnoxious and an effective albeit paradoxical strategy for sustaining the status quo, which is what slow organizations do to preserve the illusion of certainty and keep uncertainty at arm's length.
Yours might be different. Three things are good. In nimble organizations we grow together when we continuously expand clarity about the good we seek, the goodness we have and how we can experiment with new ways to engage our goodness for good.
Nimble leader as convener
The transition from slow to nimble teams is smoother with the transition from slow to nimble leaders.
In a slow culture of permissions, slow leaders make sure everything works by approval. As a team discovers how to work in sync with aligned integrity, inclusion and initiative, they make possible the good they seek through the goodness they have. People work more from freedom to do their best than approvals.
Leaders add value as conveners of beautiful conversations. These are conversiations where people are thinking together, not just talking together. Convening is an art and craft. It involves the nuances of question and story sharing that optimizes people being engaged, smarter, faster and better together. People grow together.
This builds capacity more than dependency. Nimble leaders become more free to help the team be proactive, aligned with other teams and partners, mindful of their markets and continously entrepreneurial.
Teams become more nimble. People feel and act valued, connected and free to grow together.