Work is Love Made Visible

by Frances Hesselbein

  No one wants to look foolish. We all want to look and act our best, especially at work. And nothing makes us feel like an outsider faster than blundering in front of witnesses. It’s embarrassing, for starters. A mistake might show that you’re not up to speed with everyone else. This hyper-self-consciousness discourages introducing new processes, bringing new ideas to the table, questioning established practices that might be past due for improvement. To be emotionally and intellectually prepared to offer up new ideas, there must be a small part of our essential nature that is willing to look at our work with the fresh eyes of an outsider.

  This requires the psychological safety that Amy Edmondson talks about.

  As the CEO of WD-40, I addressed the challenge of making it safe to be able to put forward fresh ideas, even if they fail utterly. I set the tone by being very free and comfortable with the three words, I don’t know.

  I also instituted the concept of learning moments, starting with myself. The learning moment concept came from the desire to reduce the fear that naturally comes with trying something new and having it go down in flames. Fear of public humiliation keeps people from being as creative as they can be because failing in front of others can hurt a career. In another company. But at WD-40 Company, it’s fodder for exploratory conversation, where everyone learns from experience. Learning moments aren’t conversations about failing; they’re conversations about learning from experience. And everyone benefits without having to make the same mistake themselves.

  4. Community: A tribe is nothing without its great legends, creation story, totems, symbols, secret handshakes, and icons. Memories, especially the positive, lasting ones, build the wealth of knowledge that unites people all over the world over time. Such community markers not only tell insiders who is a fellow tribe member, but also broadcast to the world who you are and what you stand for. And they ignite the passion of outsiders (let’s call them auxiliary members), as well. That, in turn, ignites pride of membership in the insider.

  The weekend before writing this chapter, I was invited to a small gathering of corporate executives at a mountain ranch outside of Aspen, Colorado. Just being invited to this particular small tribe was thrilling enough. But when a GE executive found out that I was the CEO of WD-40 Company, she couldn’t contain her excitement. “My father-in-law loves that stuff!” she said, asking for a picture with me. Naturally, when I got back to the office, I sent the proud father-in-law a WD-40 baseball cap and an autographed can of, well, WD-40. What else?

  Conclusion

  Let us not overlook the role of the tribal leader in the company tribe. It is our role to be constant learners and then teachers of our tribe members – in particular, the young generations coming up. It’s not always easy, but it’s critical to tribal survival.

  In my homeland, the Aboriginal tribal leaders have been tasked for millennia with the job of teaching the youngsters how to throw the boomerang. When thrown properly, the weapon returns to its owner. When thrown effectively, the boomerang has made contact with an animal and the tribe will eat. Will the young Aborigine who is still learning this new skill be punished, shamed, and shunned for missing the mark? Absolutely not. The tribal leaders teach again and again. And eventually that young man will grow up to teach the next generation.

  Just as with tribal societies, as corporate tribal leaders, we have a stewardship of the lives entrusted to us in organizations. We must genuinely care about others, because what happens to our people during the day gets carried home with them when their workday ends. We must create a corporate environment that sustains, trains, embraces, and encourages our people. Their daily experience at work supports the emotional health that equips them to bring positivity back home to their core tribe – where they ultimately belong.

  Reflection Questions:

  Is there anyone in your past that had a profound influence on your ideas of business and work relations?

  Do you feel like you are a member of a tribe at your workplace? Is there one or many tribes in your organization? What are their goals and values?

  If you perceive that your organization lacks a tribal culture, how might you go about creating one? What would be the benefits of doing so?

  Notes

  1. https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/video/item/positive_emotions_open_our_mind.

  2. Barbara L. Fredrickson, “Chapter 1: Positive Emotions Broaden and Build,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 47 (Cambridge, MA: Academic Press, May 14, 2013).

  3. Amy C. Edmondson, “Managing the Risk of Learning: Psychological Safety in Work Teams,” International Handbook of Organizational Teamwork and Cooperative Working (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003).

  24

  New Leader Development

  Leadership Lessons from the Doerr Institute1

  Brigadier General Tom Kolditz*

  Tom Kolditz is the founding executive director of the Ann & John Doerr Institute for New Leaders at Rice University – managing the most comprehensive, university-wide leader development program in the world. He designed the core Leader Development Program at the Yale School of Management, served as chairman of the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership at West Point, and was the founding director of the West Point Leadership Center. A highly experienced leader, Brigadier General Kolditz has more than 30 years in leader supervisory positions, serving on four continents in 34 years of military service. He is a recipient of the Distinguished Service Medal, the Army’s highest award for service. He is a Fellow in the American Psychological Association and is a member of the Academy of Management. He has been named a Thought Leader by the Leader to Leader Institute and as a Top Leader Development Professional by Leadership Excellence. In 2017, he received the Warren Bennis Award for Excellence in Leadership. He holds a BA from Vanderbilt University, three master’s degrees, and a PhD in psychology from the University of Missouri.

  ■ ■ ■

  My purpose is to develop leaders. I direct the most comprehensive leader-development program at any university – the Ann and John Doerr Institute for New Leaders at Rice University in Houston, Texas. The Doerr Institute is changing the world by introducing professional-caliber leader- development strategies in colleges and universities – places where leadership institutes and programs have traditionally been soft, minimally impactful, and weakly assessed. When I look out the window, I see something invisible to others: the future of leader development in providing professional quality development to young leaders early in their lives and careers. This is a somewhat contrarian approach in a field dominated by executive coaching and rarified programs for high-potential employees. Contrarian or not, the view is one I want to share with leaders in all sectors as we seek to promote leadership in our respective spheres.

  The Challenges We Face

  It seems like [Jim Collins] is saying that in order to be the most successful leader, you have to put the interests of the company before yours, which surprises me. I am also surprised by the emphasis on preparedness and willingness, rather than intelligence…. I tend to think of successful leaders as being more cutthroat, not open to compromise and friendship.

  —Precoaching student leader development plan, Rice University

  This quotation reveals the challenges we face for leader development in the emerging global workforce. For the majority of young people, leadership is something you do when elevated to a role. Rather than an organizational commitment, leadership is understood to be a self-focused position of advantage and privilege. Leading comes with privileges and the authority to order people around. In both politics and business, some of the worst leadership role models imaginable are prominent in the news. These leaders wield great power and influence, despite lacking important leader qualities, such as personal integrity, responsibility, accountability, loyalty, trustworthiness, respect for others, and a sense of ethics. Before we can do the work of leader development, we must overcome the prevailing idea that leadership is hierarchical, transactional, and
for many millennials, not held as an aspiration.

  Traditional leader-development programs selectively invest in leaders many years into their careers. A common industry strategy is to focus leader development resources on developing only those identified as high-potential employees. This paradoxical practice causes me to wonder why companies don’t identify the HR people who are hiring the low potentials, fire those HR people, and use the cost savings for broader-based leader development for everyone else in the organization. Focusing leader development on high potentials reinforces an old and debunked leader stereotype, that is, that leadership is equivalent to an elite status.

  Alternatively, Frances Hesselbein, founder of the progressive Hesselbein Global Academy for Student Leadership and Civic Engagement at the University of Pittsburgh, has repeatedly made the compelling argument that being a leader is not predicated on an assigned role, but is rather a way of being, an element of character largely focused on serving the organization and the people in it. Similarly, in The Handbook for Teaching Leadership, Harvard editors Scott Snook, Nitin Nohria, and Rakesh Khurana2 point to the former Army doctrine of Be, Know, Do, by subtitling their work, “Knowing, Doing, and Being.”

  However, the current delivery of leader-development practice typically targets a handful of high potentials who have reached the executive level – the elites who have been labeled as leaders due to their position. It’s a game of catch-up. Coaching did not blossom in the senior executive space because this is the ideal point at which to develop people as leaders. It blossomed there because of a corporate focus on rationing opportunity to employees with the greatest potential, and because top leaders are ultimately responsible for the allocation of training expenses and resources, to others as well as to themselves. This state of affairs hinders the overall quality of leaders in society. It also presents a transformational opportunity for universities to impact the world by increasing the capacity of their students to lead.

  The Time Value of Leader Development©3

  Leader development among college students has the potential for having the highest payoff in terms of enduring capacity to lead. This is borne out by the best science we have. College-aged people show higher plasticity of social and emotional intelligence, memory ability, and processing speed than older adults,4 skills that allow them to learn faster. If learning to speak a foreign language, play a musical instrument, or swing a baseball bat is best learned early in life, then why would learning to lead be postponed for late adulthood? The openness/imagination facet of the Big Five personality traits,5 statistically correlated with higher levels of leadership, increases the most during the college years, followed by stability or slight decline in adulthood.6 Likewise, the social dominance facet of extraversion (connected with assertiveness, independence, and social self-confidence – key aspects of leadership) is also greatest among 18- to 22-year-olds, whereas beyond age 40, no significant increases in this facet of personality appear. Finally, theory and research on identity formation suggest that the college years might be particularly strategic for leadership interventions, because it is during this period (at least in Western countries) when identity is in greatest flux, even more so than during adolescence.7,8 The Doerr Institute consulted Professor Lara Mayeux, a developmental psychologist who teaches at the University of Oklahoma, for verification of this conclusion, and she said, “The consensus at this point is that college is the best time for some type of intervention, because it’s the developmental period when most key elements of identity change.”

  Leader development also has time value because of the integration and assimilation of learning. Take the simplest example of a person growing along two leadership competencies, communication and decision making. While each has value independently, over time, being a better communicator will enhance the dialogue around decision making, and improve decision-making outcomes. Now multiply that principle across every competency improved in the developmental journey of a young person: growth as a leader becomes exponential. Leader development increases in value because of the passage of time.

  Learning to Lead for the Future

  The complex, transformative, and distributed nature of the Fourth Industrial Revolution demands a new type of leadership … about cultivating a shared vision for change … empowering widespread innovation and action based on mutual accountability and collaboration.

  —Klaus Schwab, Nicholas Davis, and Thomas Philbeck, 2017 World Economic Forum9

  If it makes sense to develop younger leaders, then it’s also important to envision the leader skills that may be most critical for success in their future. The 2017 World Economic Forum (WEF) articulated and addressed the advent of changes related to technology as the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” (or 4IR). From the proceedings of the WEF’s 2017 Annual Meeting of New Champions,10 there is a shift in competencies that new leaders will need to master to adapt to the powerful social and economic trends in the next 10–20 years:

  Ability to work in flat, nonhierarchical teams. Influence without formal authority will drive team performance and be the most important leadership shift in 4IR. All team members will either exert influence or become irrelevant.

  Flexibility in multifunctional, specialized teams of leaders. Teams of leaders will be responsible and accountable to boards; the days of the solitary and valiant CEO leader are numbered.

  Efficacy in distributed, multiorganizational workplaces. Leaders of the 4IR and their teams will not be located in far-flung, isolated, suburban office parks operated by a single company, but will work in shared spaces and in multiple, nonpermanent locations as needed, befitting the increasingly decentralized 4IR leadership structure.

  Building teams as follower networks. It is not enough for 4IR leaders to embody a list of leader characteristics or skills; they will also need to be able to recognize, manage, and develop such qualities in other people, and to do this effectively in an extended virtual environment, beyond their formal team or immediate organization.

  Pragmatic ethics. Leaders will need to be savvy to deceit, malfeasance, and illegality – especially in terms of behavior conveyed by digital and informational means. They must protect their organizations in a world disappointingly tolerant of unethical behavior. Having strong personal ethics is simply not enough; new leaders must have a strong awareness that others may not share their commitment to doing what is right.

  Authenticity. Technology, speed, and social media will diminish privacy in 4IR, and there will be little separation or distinction between personal and professional lives. Leaders must be living lives of integrity and consistency if they are to gain the trust of others.

  Coward-consciousness. Leaders must be adept at recognizing and discouraging cowardice in the face of ambiguity, volatility, and the consequences of risk. This is not just promoting courage; cowardice is a more common and a contagious quality characterized by excessive self-interest, not merely fear.

  Doerr Institute Method: Our Contrarian Approach

  Leadership is not defined by the exercise of power, but by the capacity to increase the sense of power among those who are led. The most essential work of the leader is to create more leaders.

  —Mary Parker Follett

  The Doerr Institute for New Leaders was designed from the outset to be a comprehensive, top-quality leader-development architecture and a model for top-tier universities. Our mission is to “elevate the leadership capacity of Rice students across the university,” in order to support the university’s mission to “cultivate a diverse community of learning and discovery that produces leaders across the spectrum of human endeavor.” Our imperative is to better prepare graduates to lead in a world where massive change will be driven by technology shifts in artificial intelligence, big data, rapid computing, global threats, and rapid shifts in markets. Our work at Rice has application outside the context of academe, from corporate program design to self-directed leader development. The following five Doerr Institute design considerations are shar
ed here to help readers look out through our window, see what we see, and apply a new strategy in their organizations and their personal and professional lives:

  Everyone Has High Potential as a Leader. At the Doerr Institute, no one competes for opportunities for leader development. Immediately, people ask, “How can that be affordable?” It’s affordable because if people self-select into leader development opportunities, the take-rate will always be far fewer than the potential opportunity. Some individuals don’t have a growth mindset and are skeptical of development. Some don’t want to invest personal time in their long-term development. Some simply prefer to follow. None of those people should be consuming resources in a leader-development process, and none of them are high potentials, no matter what HR says about their capacity. Allow people to self-select into leader-development opportunities and grow those people to the top of your organization. The common alternative is to promote someone with technical ability who may or may not be willing or able to lead, and then ask coaches or other leader developers to make up for that – the game of catch up.

  Develop Leaders One Person at a Time. When one thinks of leadership-development programs in organizations, one often thinks of group methods, tiered classrooms, and corporate universities. At the Doerr Institute, we had to devise the best approach to handle a huge array of diverse new leaders: 6,200 students across seven unique schools within the university. Our counterintuitive approach was to work with one person at a time, despite the apparent economy of scale of using the classroom. We do not steer students into leadership classes. Instead, we offer professional leadership coaching to every student in the school who requests it. Coaching individuals is far better at producing measurable outcomes in behavioral change or identity formation. Scheduling one-on-one sessions fits the work flow and demands of student schedules. We coach students in the context of activities that they are already involved in and passionate about. We do not create contrived events or experiences with entertainment value to make it palatable. Effective leader development is hard work.