by Craig Weber
CHAPTER 16 Your Road Map to Competence
Crafting a Powerful Personal Plan
CHAPTER 17 The Illusion of Conclusion
Why Your Leadership Journey Never Really Ends
Notes
Index
PREFACE
I grew up terrified of two things: going to war and going to work. The funny thing is that between the two, going to work scared me the most. I know that doesn’t seem logical, but the way I looked at it, going to war was possible, but going to work was inevitable.
It all started at my family dinner table. Evening after evening my parents would roll the television into the kitchen and we’d watch George Putnam deliver the news while we ate. As I watched the battle footage from Vietnam I fretted over the question, “Will I be forced to do that when I turn 18?”
At that same table I’d also listen to my dad review his workday at the postal service, often with stories about inept managers, annoying coworkers, and bureaucratic incompetence. I loved my dad, so listening to his stories upset me, but they also filled me with a genuine sense of dread. I knew I’d eventually have to get a job, and from everything I was hearing it seemed like a miserable, soul-sucking way to spend time.
Fast-forward several decades and I still feel the familiar mix of irritation and anger when I hear family members, friends, colleagues, or clients describe the unfair, incompetent, or inhumane nonsense they experience in the workplace. It’s frustrating because it’s unnecessary, it’s counterproductive, and it’s just plain stupid.
But at least now I can do something about it. Building on my formal education in organizational development and organizational psychology, I’m on a mission to help people create more engaged, healthy, and adaptive workplaces:
• Engaged. I help people do more meaningful work that contributes to their organization’s success while developing skills that serve them well beyond the workplace.
• Healthy. I help people build and lead organizations that are good for people, good for business, and good for the community.
• Adaptive. I help people and teams shift their thinking to fit a new problem rather than interpret a new problem to fit their old thinking.
I strive to empower those noble souls trying to do good work, make constructive change, stand up for what’s competent and just, and make the world around them a better place. How do I do this? I show them how to improve their performance by treating dialogue as a discipline.
I refer to this discipline as Conversational Capacity—the ability to engage in constructive, learning-focused dialogue about difficult subjects, in challenging circumstances, and across tough boundaries. It’s being used to bolster the performance of surgical units, flight crews, management cohorts, professional sports organizations, CEOs and their executives, school faculties, CDC emergency response teams, boards of directors, military organizations, community workers, nonprofit organizations, and all manner of work groups. In more than a dozen U.S. states, it is even helping Republican and Democratic legislators work together more effectively as they craft public policy.
But since my first book, Conversational Capacity, came out, hundreds of people have made comments and asked questions that can all be summed up by one question: How do I get better at this?
• Can you help? I’m a really curious person until someone disagrees with me—then it’s all candor.
• I love Conversational Capacity but it’s harder than it looks. How do I build it?
• I’m too nice so I have a hard time with the candor side of things. How can I improve my ability to speak up?
• How do I stay in the sweet spot when I often don’t even recognize I’ve left it?
• I understand the mindset. I want to think that way. But how do I learn to really mean it?
This book is my response. I hope it inspires you to build your capacity to influence, and to put that expanded ability into action to make the world around you a better place.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My name is on the cover, but writing a book is a team effort. So I’d like to thank a range of people who’ve been part of my “team” on this project (and beyond). Thanks first to my family—Renee, Claire, Jason, Bethany, Aly, and Maisie (and our dog Harley)—for their support and patience. They had to put up with a husband, father, father-in-law, and grandfather (and trail-running partner), who was regularly absent or distracted throughout the process of putting this book together.
A lifetime of gratitude goes to Dean Williams, to whom I dedicated my first book and who has been a pivotal influence in my life and my work. I must also acknowledge the late Chris Argyris, with whom I had the good fortune to work and whose research provides a major platform on which this work sits.
Chris Soderquist and Frank Barrett—two close friends and colleagues with whom I’ve worked for years—continually inspire (and provoke) me to higher levels of thinking and performance. Chris’s work on systemic intelligence (SysQ) and Frank’s work on jazz performance and leadership competence (Yes to the Mess) are two additional “enabling competencies” that integrate with Conversational Capacity in a practical, powerful, and mutually reinforcing way.
I also have a set of great friends and colleagues who have shared their ideas, criticisms, advice, enthusiasm, and encouragement—many of them for years—and who suffered regularly as I droned on about this project ad nauseam. This group includes Chris and Shelly Ball, Maria and Jim Kostas, Tony Herrera, Mel Booker, Tre’ Balfour, Shakiyla Smith, Jennifer Wyatt Kaminski, Kim Armstrong, Bob Noel, Beth Bratkovic, Brendan Croucher, Greg Whicker (who also helped with the diagrams in the book), and Colin Baird.
I’m particularly indebted (the drinks are on me) to Chris Ball, Colin Baird, Chris Soderquist, and, most of all, Randy Weber (my editorial consigliere), for the sharp and ruthlessly compassionate editorial assistance they provided with large portions of the manuscript.
I also owe a bucketload of thanks to the countless people with whom I’ve interacted in workshops, speeches, and presentations in a wide variety of organizations—especially those individuals who’ve shared their success stories, their epic failures, their adaptive challenges, their zeal, and, most important, their great questions. They’ve been a continual source of energy, ideas, and inspiration, and they provide a testament to the power of building your conversational capacity and then using it to address the issues that matter most. This includes the thousands of Vistage members and chairs with whom I’ve worked over the past two decades; my colleagues at the Boeing Leadership Center where, among other things, I facilitated the Engineering Leadership Program for 15 years; and all my friends at Boeing Defence, Australia, who have taken a dedicated interest in building their conversational capacity and that of the organization. I also appreciate my friends in the “CDC Conversational Capacity Network” at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for their enthusiasm and support.
Over the past few years I’ve also been honored to work with legislators from a range of U.S. states. For the invitation and opportunity to do this work I thank my friends and associates at three institutions: the Georgia Health Policy Center at the Andrew Young School of Public Health at Georgia State University; the Health Policy Fellows Program of the South Carolina Institute of Medicine & Public Health; and the Center for the Advancement of Leadership Skills of the Southern Office of The Council of State Governments. These organizations each provide a forum for demonstrating that it is possible for legislators with radically different political orientations to work together in a more constructive, learning-focused way as they craft policy for the people they represent.
Finally, I want to thank my ever-supportive literary agent, Lorin Rees, at The Rees Literary Agency, as well as my editor, Casey Ebro, and her brilliant team at McGraw-Hill.
Power is about making a difference in the world. . . . We make a difference in the world by influencing other people.
—DACHER KELTNER
INTRODUCTION
The World Needs People Willing
to Stand Up, Speak Out, and Make a Difference
. . . insist on taking part in what is healthy, generous, and responsible. Stand up, speak out, and when necessary fight back. Get down off the fence and lend a hand, grab a-hold, be a citizen—not a subject.
—EDWARD ABBEY
Inspiring and leading constructive change is never easy. Due to the organizational equivalent of Sir Isaac Newton’s first law of motion, the status quo is preserved unless acted on by an intervening force. Put differently, when it comes to our teams, organizations, and communities, little progress is possible unless people stand up, speak out, and make a difference.
There is a growing need for people willing to do this. The soaring rate of technological, climatic, economic, social, ideological, and political turbulence makes the ability to foster constructive change more vital than ever. There is a surging need, in other words, for people willing to exercise leadership.
But let me be clear. By leadership I don’t mean someone with all the right answers who steps in and takes charge. Real leadership isn’t about position, expertise, or authority. It’s about the kind of work you’re doing. As Dean Williams puts it, someone exercising real leadership is working to “expand boundaries, cross divides, and build bridges to address shared challenges.”1 Seen this way, leadership is about helping people and groups solve tough problems by spurring adaptive learning. It’s less about answers and more about questions. It’s less about building silos and more about breaking them down. It’s less about stroking your ego and more about stoking change.
This work may sound appealing, but there are a couple of sobering factors to consider. First, inspiring and leading such work is difficult. To facilitate meaningful change, you must get groups who tend to pull apart to start working together, raise issues others would prefer to avoid, and encourage people to think and act in new and unfamiliar ways. As you do all this you must also deal with defensive people standing in the way of change because their egos—and often their livelihoods—are tied to the status quo. Real leadership, therefore, is awkward, stressful, and scary. It puts you in situations where your good intentions are easily overwhelmed by your need to minimize or “win.”* It’s challenging work.
But this work is not just difficult—it’s dangerous. The sad reality is that the people trying to make the biggest difference often pay the steepest price.
The people trying to make the biggest difference often pay the steepest price.
Try to spark adaptive learning and meaningful change, for instance, and you risk being labeled a poor team player, a troublemaker, or a heretic. When the status quo fights back, you’re often demeaned, demoted, demonized, or worse. Threaten a sacred cow, and the villagers pick up their pitchforks.
Threaten a sacred cow, and the villagers pick up their pitchforks.
So our world needs more than people with noble intentions willing to exercise leadership; it needs people who can do so with mental and social dexterity, people able to provoke more learning than defensiveness, more head-nodding than eye-rolling, more focusing on the problem and less killing of the messenger. It needs people who can keep their behavior and their intentions aligned under pressure.
This book will help you build that competence. As you work through the chapters, you’ll learn to strengthen your mental, emotional, and social agility so that when you choose to exercise leadership—whether from a position of authority or not—you’ll be less defensive, mercurial, and scatterbrained and more open, purposeful, and clearheaded. You’ll learn to strengthen your conversational capacity so you’re better equipped to deal with those prickly villagers and their pointed pitchforks.
What You’ll Get Out of This Book
In the famous “marshmallow tests” conducted by the late Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Walter Mischel, a child was provided a choice between one treat right away—a marshmallow, cookie, or some other tasty snack—or two treats if the child waited 15 minutes or so. The tester then left the child alone in a plain room with a single treat sitting on the table in front of him or her. Many kids wolfed down the single tasty tidbit, while others mustered the self-control to wait for an additional goody. Simple enough.
But here’s what’s interesting. Longitudinal research found that the kids who set aside immediate gratification in pursuit of the greater reward (the second marshmallow) had significantly better SAT scores, higher levels of education, greater physical fitness, and lower rates of divorce. It turns out that people with greater self-discipline—who can set aside short-term gratification to achieve loftier objectives—lead better lives.
This is an important point to consider as you dive into this book. Every conversation about an important issue is, in essence, a “marshmallow test.” It provides you the choice to indulge your immediate desire to minimize or “win”—the ego-satisfying equivalents of the first marshmallow—or to exercise restraint and focus on balancing candor and curiosity—the purpose-driven and learning–focused equivalent of the second marshmallow.
By working through the pages that follow you’ll build the discipline to wait for that second marshmallow in the conversations that matter to you. More specifically, I have two main goals for this book:
• First, to help you build your personal conversational capacity—your ability to remain smart, steady, and purposeful under pressure—so that you’re increasingly adept at exercising real leadership when it counts.
• Second, to show you how to do all of this as you work to build a healthier and more productive workplace.
Your Personal Work
I’ve never met anyone who enjoys incompetence, relishes mediocrity, or dreams of lacking influence. Nor have I met anyone who revels in being manipulated, seeks out opportunities to react defensively, or delights in seeing their behavior and their intentions part ways. But while no sane person seeks these experiences, everyone falls prey to them from time to time (often more frequently than that). One big reason: They’re all consequences of low conversational capacity.
This book will help you avoid these unpleasant experiences by strengthening your ability to keep your intentions and behavior aligned when it counts. And, unlike many books on the market, it’ll take you beyond good ideas to provide clear and tangible skills for putting those ideas to use.
Whenever you choose to exercise leadership your conversational capacity is a pivotal variable that determines whether you make a constructive difference or a bigger mess.
Treating Work as Your Dojo
Like any competence worth acquiring—whether it’s playing the piano, performing brain surgery, or flying a plane—building this discipline takes practice. Fortunately, if you know where to look, then places to practice are easy to find. Your workplace is full of them. Do you see policies that subvert your organization’s strategy or decrease your team’s effectiveness? Do you see a manager behaving in a way that makes their team dumber when their job is to make the team smarter? Is there an opportunity for improvement that is being missed or ignored? Are your meetings unproductive? Are there “baton passes” between people and groups where the baton keeps getting dropped? Are there interpersonal or intergroup relationships in need of repair? Is the decision-making in your team unclear and inconsistent? Are major problems continually downplayed or avoided? Is your organization facing hard new realities that people refuse to confront? Are people clinging to the status quo when major change is required? Are there festering conflicts that generate lots of heat and dysfunction but little light and progress?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, congratulations; you’ve got a place to practice, learn, and grow. By rolling up your sleeves and addressing these kinds of issues, you’ll learn to do the following:
• Make any meeting, team, project, or conversation smarter than it would be without you.
• Exert greater influence and help good ideas get the traction they deserve.
• Boost your competence and confidence for dealing with tough issues and stressfu
l circumstances.
• Remain levelheaded and learning-focused in frenzied circumstances that cause most people to shut down or go ballistic.
• Strengthen your emotional and social intelligence.
• Increase your mental toughness.
• Participate in your teams, projects, and organizations in a way that cultivates the higher aspects of your humanity—candor, curiosity, courage, humility, conviction, and compassion.
• Transform your workplace into a dojo by treating problems as precious opportunities for practice.
• Earn far more than just an income from your work by developing skills you can use in every aspect of your life.
How to Use This Book
This book will help you think differently, acquire new skills, and take more effective action, even when circumstances conspire against you. But it’s a two-way street. For this book to help you, you’ve got to work with me. To that end, here are a few suggestions for how you and I can work together to make this the most useful experience possible.
Read My First Book
For starters, please read my first book, Conversational Capacity: The Secret to Building Successful Teams That Perform When the Pressure Is On. If you have read it, but it’s been a while, I’d strongly suggest a thorough review.
Partner Up
I suggest teaming up with at least one other person who is interested in building their own competence. Then help each other along by sharing insights and goals, holding each other accountable, and keeping each other focused on moving forward.
Pace Yourself
