How do we get to WE?

There is something in the air.  Call it my natural human tendency to find patterns in things, but two recent conversations with two different clients in two different cities have reminded me of two other completely different clients in two completely different countries.  The parallels are striking.  It could be my bias towards systems thinking, but it has reinforced my belief in unus mundus, the underlying unified reality that interconnects all things.

What is the common thread?  All four of these businesses are sick and tired of being sick.  And tired.  Like, really tired.  All four are nearing their “breaking point.”  That is, they have tried just about everything they know to shift workplace behaviour and engagement.  They are running out of options as to how to get people to take up personal responsibility.  All four of these clients are right at the threshold of making significant shifts in how they do their business.  The scales are falling from their eyes and they are seeing their businesses as whole entities and not viewing symptoms of ineffectiveness as separate from the whole or problems to be solved piecemeal.  They are ready to get to grips with new ways of dealing with their problems.  The clever onion behind the thinkpurpose blog writes, “When you change what you think about how the work works, then you will begin to change how you act, this will change the way work is set out and happens and how people act in the work place.”  These four businesses are right at the place of changing how they think about what works.

Essential to seeing their business as whole entities is being able to see the webs that weave everyone together.  Frustrated with old ways of trying to get people to do things, they are beginning to acknowledge that simply dealing with individual performance is futile.  They understand that the system impacts too much on individual performance to waste their efforts solely on individuals.  They know that the quality of their outcome will be directly correlated to the quality of relationships that they forge.  As David Wilson writes in his blog, fitforrandomness ”Imagine assessing the robustness of the electricity grid with data on power stations but not on the power lines connecting them.”  In order to assess the strength and fitness of an organisation, we need to examine both the individual elements that make up that systems as well as the relationships between them.  To work with only the individuals within a business without also working on their connections is a nonsense.  It’s both a delicate and a heroic undertaking.

What’s wrong with what they’ve got now?  Not much, it turns out.  They have a lot going for them.  They have senior teams with an enormous amount of experience and technical ability.  They are personable and friendly.  They believe in the purpose of their businesses.  They are robust and intelligent.  Put the senior team in a room together, however, and they aren’t sure how to work truly collectively.  Put oxygen and hydrogen in a bucket together and they don’t miraculously coalesce and become water.  Some energy needs to go into the bucket to create H2O.

I’ve written before on the power of WE in business.  Bringing in the theme of my last article about developing consciousness, there is something that can catalyse this WE-ness for business.  Many aspire to it, but we often get stuck when it comes to actually doing it.  How do we become a WE?  It’s not enough to go away and make commitments to each other.  Just like a marriage, it’s not just what happens on the wedding day when you promise some things to each other that makes it a good marriage.  The good marriage comes about through a shift in consciousness from “you and me” to WE.  A good partnership comes about because each party understands that what you want as an individual and what I want as an individual may not necessarily deepen nor be for the good of our relationship.  A good, mutual partnership comes about because effort and energy have been invested in strengthening that web that weaves us together.

A shift in consciousness is required.  That is, greater awareness of what we are currently doing in order to move towards the thing we want to be doing.  Is how you relate, behave and engage with one another assisting you to create the WE?  In working with one senior team, we coached them to become observant of themselves in order to create this new consciousness.  This requires them to develop the role of Observant Team-Player.  For many of us, we operate out of a “selfish” mindset.  In other words, we look at what we do and how we do it with a view to doing our best.  We sometimes lose sight of the fact that others are trying to do the same, and sometimes this means that we might be working at cross purposes.  I’m doing my best, you’re doing your best, but in our “doing-my-best-ness”, we haven’t worked out how to synthesise this into a “WE are doing our best”.  In common parlance, this is operating in silos.

Here’s what it might look like.  In our regular team meeting, I contribute to conversations on the agenda, but I do this while wearing one of two hats: my personal hat or my operational hat.  I am both trying to be a good person and trying to optimise the work, but from MY perspective.  Wearing my personal hat, I am saying (unconsciously, of course):

• “How do I make myself look good?”
• “How can I get people to notice me?”
• “How can I garner praise?”
• “How can I get people to like me?”
• “How can I prove I’m valuable?”

All human things, these.

Wearing my operational hat, I contribute things which demonstrate my technical abilities and knowledge.  If I’m a financial guy, I will speak on any of the agenda items from a financial perspective.  If I’m a marketing guy, I will speak about things from a marketing perspective.  All necessary and important.  I may contribute little or nothing to conversations that I believe have “nothing to do with me”.  Doing this, however, may not develop the sense of “team-ness” that we all need to synthesise together if we are to achieve our common purpose.  If I keep speaking from my operational perspective, I may be reasonably successful in achieving the operational purpose of my silo.  Remember, though, that optimising one part of the system will lead to sub-optimisation of the whole, so if I do MY very best and if everyone is doing THEIR very best in their silos, it doesn’t follow that the whole will be doing its very best.

There is something missing.

If I participate in the meeting wearing only my personal or operational hats, I miss the opportunity to develop the life of the whole team.  I need to put on my team member hat.  When I wear this, I become conscious of myself, I become conscious of when I have an impulse to speak and what I feel moved to say, I observe others’ contributions and I make an assessment as to whether what is going on is furthering the life of the group.  Is what I say coming from a “Me” perspective, a “Me-doing-my-work-well” perspective or a “WE” perspective?  When each member of a team has developed the ability to observe the dynamics of the team, they will learn how to interrupt someone who is “fighting their corner” if they are doing it to the detriment of the effectiveness of the whole.  If they feel that someone is warming up to speak out of their silo, they will challenge people to stop and consider what they are about to contribute: “Is what you are about to say going to progress the life of this team as a whole?”

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

If I’m operating with my WE hat on, I will see that all of the agenda items pertain to me in some way, because they pertain to the effectiveness of the whole business.  Furthermore, if I can’t work out how it pertains to me, there is an opportunity to find out how it does.  Because it does.  Trust me.  If I’m wearing my WE hat, I will see that my technical expertise is best applied when in concert with everyone else’s and vice versa.  Having said all this, I bring all my hats to meetings, I can’t simply focus my efforts on developing a good team feeling.  The expanded consciousness that gets us to WE incorporates and transcends everything we already know and do.

For one of these businesses, who is more than ready and willing to do this “WE” thing, they have an idea of what they want to become, but don’t know how to do it consistently.  This is not unusual, in my experience.  They haven’t yet had enough moments of “felt experience” to be able to say they’ve got there, but what they have tasted so far makes the effort worthwhile.  While a lot of businesses have talked about teamwork and the team effect for years, the investment required in order to really achieve it has been patchy.  Investment in catalysing this team effect is like energy is to the hydrogen and oxygen in the bucket.  Sometimes, it seems that we find ourselves in fantastic teams and it feels great, but I would suggest this is sometimes down to good luck.  We spot each other, we have each other’s back.  Relationships are genuinely mutual and go beyond “what can you do for me and what can I do for you.”  Such teams go beyond collaboration.  They cooperate.  No quid pro quo.  We have a consciousness of operating out of a mindset that furthers the life of the whole.  Just as an architect may sacrifice the optimisation of one room of a house in order to achieve a more satisfying whole, we may quite easily sacrifice something that is of special interest to us for the benefit of the whole.  When we are operating as a WE, we have stopped thinking about people as bodies to do transactions or deals with, we enjoy being with each other and we achieve more as individuals because of the chemistry that is created by the whole.

Getting to WE is not an event, it’s a process.  It doesn’t happen in a moment, it happens over many moments.  It’s not “step 1, step 2…”  Like other mindfulness disciplines, it takes practice, attention and commitment.  I find it heartening that it’s finally in the air and that some businesses are taking the steps to get there.

Leadership is an inside job

So the world didn’t end on December 21, surprise, surprise.  Here we are in 2013, all systems still intact.  I have heard some speak of the Mayan December 21 end-of-all-things-prediction not so much an end of the world, but more of an end of one cycle and the beginning of another.  An end of things-as-they-were.  Let it be so.  Endings can be good and healthy.

I don’t do New Years’ resolutions per se, but I have resolved in myself to focus this year on health, from its broadest perspective.  I will endeavour to place attention on the health of those around me, the health of the organisations with which I work and the health of those within them.  I will place, firstly, attention on my own health, because leadership is an inside job.  We must be healthy ourselves.  I view health as an holistic phenomenon: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, social and relational.  This is not merely the absence of dis-ease, but a progressive and thoughtful movement towards greater freedom and happiness.  This will come about, I believe, through greater consciousness: a journey, therefore, not a destination.  Becoming more aware, in moments, of what is going on for me and others and when it feels unhealthy or unnatural, to seek to do something different.  Striving to live this moment freshly and not relying on old default responses.

Often, I suspect, this will involve taking a Cynical approach, though not from the modern understanding of cynicism (disbelief in the sincerity or goodness of human motives and actions), but coming from the ancient Greek philosophy of striving to live a life that is in tune with what it means to be naturally human.  It seems the time is right to adopt a Cynical approach to life;  it emerged in ancient Greece as a way of offering the possibility of happiness and freedom from suffering in an age of uncertainty.  Uncertainty.  Sound familiar?  While I’m in the process of simplifying my life a little, I’m not about to dispose of all my worldly goods as the original Cynics did, sleep in bathtubs and wander the streets with my dogs on a piece of string, but I take inspiration from the attitude of happiness as being linked to living a life in tune with Nature.  The healthy life.  Challenging false judgements of what is valuable and worthwhile, questioning customs and conventions of how things are done.  I cannot do this without extending consciousness.  This is why I do the work I do.  This is why clients work with us: they are seeking something different, something that challenges their status quo.  Same old, same old (or a pretty repackaging of the “same-old”) won’t create the deep, systemic transformation they require.

Like the Cynics, I believe the world belongs equally to everyone, that opportunity for happiness and freedom is for everyone; not just for those in “power”, those they deem as worthy or those who believe that money = power.  Genuine democracy, having a voice, having agency in one’s life, actively participating in making decisions which affect us.  In life, in work, all over the place.  This is a challenge to current convention.  In my experience, the best customer service comes from people who are being authentic and human and have the freedom to do so.  In my experience, the best leadership comes from those who take an interest in their own learning and encourage others to do the same.  In my experience, the best and most humane workplaces happen when everyone is accepting of everyone else in their same-ness and their difference, living and letting live.  It is also my experience that none of these things happen by chance or good luck.  They come about with consciousness.

Some of what I believe goes against Nature and humanity is the (largely unconscious) acceptance of and acquiescence to systems which are unhealthy.  It comes through in an attitude that humans are resources, that corporations are somehow “people”, that the reason for getting up in the morning is to make more profit (even at the expense of a rainforest, a community, an ecosystem or some other inconvenient obstacle).  I know some may find this irksome, but there is nothing I’ve found in any of the teachings of any of the great historical sages, seers, or prophets that advocates or emphasises owning things for oneself at the expense of others.  As far as I have understood, I’m not aware of anything written by, attributed to or uttered by the Buddha, the Christ, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Mandela, Rumi or Lao Tse that delineates capital accumulation as the road to enlightenment and a better life.  I know what you’re thinking: I’m some sort of dangerous liberal, commie, socialist, atheist, pinko abortion-loving anarchist out to destroy freedom and democracy.  Or I’m one of those well-intentioned, but muddle-headed, hybrid-car-driving, tree-hugging vegans who still say, “Peace and love, man.”  Nothing of the sort.  I do, however, go along with Hilary Wainwright and Richard Goulding who write in “Co-ops help bring economics back to the people,” that “we live in a time when the economics of profit are facing a profound crisis of legitimacy, while retaining a deathly grip on the apparatus of the state.”  Something has to give.  Zizek has spoken about getting close to a zero-point; what he terms “soft apocalypse”.  Our  ecological, social and economic systems are near breaking point and if we wish to retain all the benefits of a humane society, something different is called for.  A new game.

This new game must be, if it’s for the good of everyone, co-created by everyone.  It’s no good getting a room full of good-hearted people in a room, asking them individually to put forward their plan for a better world and then vote for the most popular.  This is the point.  This is how we got here.  We have to do this together.  We have to make these decisions together.  Furthermore, we have to do this togetherness thing by bringing the best of ourselves to the party.  Patriarchal businesses who still operate out of the “Manager-Knows-Best” mindset perpetuate the disengagement and dissatisfaction in those who work there, no matter how benevolent they may attempt to be and no matter what they try to put in place to mitigate for them.  Get out of the way and let people bring their whole selves to work.  Give people a bit of credit.  AND…..if we are to create a real sense of “WE”, it behoves us all to invest ourselves in growing greater consciousness and our ability to be with each other.  My “why”, therefore, is to push for greater self-awareness and consciousness in the world.  This will come about with self-discipline, continued learning and a genuine commitment to diversity and engaging others.

Here’s another challenge to current convention:  I have no faith that a system of capitalism (conscious or otherwise) will lead to an age of enlightenment.  A system operates with a set of rules which maintain its equilibrium.  In other words, a system will strive to perpetuate itself.  I struggle to see how a system of capital accumulation that operates to ensure its continuation can be for the greater good of Nature and humanity.  Fraudulent banksters, tax cheats, self-interested lobbyists and an obscene corporate bonus culture all spring out of a system whose rules say, “This is how you play the game.  It’s called capital accumulation.”  The ones who pay the price are the ones who haven’t learnt how to play the game well enough.  Time for us to play a different game, one that allows everyone to play and demands that the play is fair and equitable.  We are not here to serve the economy, it should serve us.  Becoming more conscious of what we do that colludes with an inhumane system is a first step in creating something new.  Furthermore, becoming conscious of what I do that colludes with my own un-health and that of others and their businesses is a first step to creating something more life-giving.

They say you can’t polish a turd, but you can certainly roll it in glitter.  Nowadays we don’t just buy a product, but we buy our redemption from being naughty consumerists because they donate $1 to a starving child in Africa or promise only to use FairTrade commodities.  We are no longer just consuming, but we are fulfilling a series of ethical and moral duties, right?  I’m not saying this is bad in itself; I am as deeply moved as the next person by images of poverty and injustice and want it to end.  I can also understand why some might think I’m being cruel because as Oscar Wilde wrote, it is much easier to have sympathy with suffering than to have sympathy with thought.  So for me to take a dim view of built-in philanthropy smacks of mean-ness because I really should just appreciate the good that some of these modern businesses do, shouldn’t I?  Why not help a starving child?  Why not, indeed?  I would much prefer a world where starvation was impossible.  My point is that the system which dresses itself up as the provider of charity is the same one that necessitates the need.  Oscar Wilde recognised this in his day, too.  The remedy is part of the disease.  My vision is one where the ills of the world (including the modern workplace) are not merely alleviated, but that they are inconceivable.  It is possible.  Having centuries ago passed through the age of the aristocracy, we could not now conceive of contemporary serfdom.  My view, therefore: capitalism will not save the world, conscious or otherwise.  Consciousness will, though.  Watch and listen to Zizek.

This is the same thinking out of which spring my beliefs that meaning, mastery and autonomy are keys to generating satisfaction and engagement, that Theory Y is much more than a lovely sounding “theory”, that cooperation is far more effective and humane than competition, that learning how to reverse roles with people is good for them and us, that people are not their behaviours and that performance is a systems issue, not an HR one.  We know some things that will make work work better for everyone.  We need to be conscious of how we perpetuate the old ways and to be conscious of being different.

If December 21 was indeed the end of things-as-they-were, I believe that consciousness will be the foundation of the new thing.  Herein lies our work.  It is not good enough to rail against unfair or inhumane systems.  While, as a systems thinker, I perceive the interconnectedness of us all, I am also cognisant of the fact that the human family is composed of a number of individual elements.  These are each of us.  We can make a difference in our lives and the lives of others by growing self-awareness and becoming more conscious of our place in the web of life, how we impact it and how it impacts on us.  Who are we?  What drives us?  What gives us joy?  How can we nurture mutually satisfying relationships with others?  What are my Achilles’ heels and how can I find out?  Who will help me uncover that stuff about me that I am blind to?  Growing consciousness, extending self-awareness; these are not easy things, these are not necessarily painless things.  They are, however, indispensable if we want a better world.  We have a part to play.  I have a part to play.  Hence my focus on health.

Being a great leader, a great colleague, a great customer service representative, a great whatever starts with consciousness.  They are all inside jobs.  It is not accidental.  It requires a conscious choice to develop greater self-knowing, to be honest and gutsy in our conscious self-reflection and taking conscious steps to learning and developing.  If, as Zizek says, the most radical horizon of our imagination is global capitalism with a human face, we have a lot of work to do.  Putting out fire with gasoline?  Or, together, setting the conditions so that the fire couldn’t start in the first place?

The certainty of uncertainty

Sometimes you read something that really strikes a chord.  I recently saw this quote from Kurt Vonnegut:  ”We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”  In other times, I would read this and it would simply seem like a poetic truism, but I’m currently experiencing a number of shifts in my personal situation which made me read that quote as if it was written just for me.  These shifts are creating a fair amount of uncertainty and bringing up all the associated emotions that go with it.  In times like this, it is useful for me to remember that trying to control what is going on in my world will not lead to the best outcomes and in fact, that I need to call on the kind of resources that will best keep me going in times of uncertainty.  These resources, in my experience, are more related to responsiveness rather than planning, innovation rather than inertia.  While some of my uncertainty is environmental, some of it is by choice: I have jumped off a cliff.  It would be rather contrarian of me, therefore, to complain about some of my current uncertainty as I am its author, and for good reason, so the thing for me to remember is a lesson from one of my old teachers: “It’s sometimes not so important what you do; it’s what you do NEXT.”

If we are falling from a cliff, either because we’ve jumped or because circumstances have pushed us, what we need is the ability to be in the moment, thus summoning up all our creativity to learn how not to hit the ground.  Our brains are hard-wired to cause us to respond to uncertainty in predictable ways.  As Thayer et al write, there is “an evolutionary advantage associated with the assumption of threat” and that our “‘default’ response to uncertainty, novelty, and threat is the sympathoexcitatory preparation for action commonly known as the fight or flight response”.  Essentially, because we have inherited a certain vigilance to our environment, when faced with uncertainty, we unconsciously prepare for the worst.  While useful for survival if we are about to be attacked by a lion, it’s hardly the most progressive state to be in if we want to thrive.  This goes for businesses living in uncertain times as well as individuals.

More people are joining the precariat, a new class of people, not in the traditional Marxian sense of “class”, but a section of the populace bound together by the increasing uncertainty in their lives.  If, in the face of uncertainty, more people are living their lives in a state of vigilance, fear and worry, how can this not affect business?  When more of what is going on in the business world is unprecedented, how can businesses pretend that we will magically go back to “business as usual” once all this financial mayhem goes away.  We won’t; things are irrevocably changing.  In the fog of transition, the only certainty is uncertainty.

When the business of a business is pretty predictable, as it was in the Industrial era, there is less need to focus on resilience or responsiveness.  In the old days, business could undertake planning exercises and be reasonably safe in the knowledge that the functioning of the business would be able to successfully execute its plans and that the environment would not impinge too greatly on those plans.  In the modern era where knowledge is “a core commodity and the rapid production of knowledge and innovation is critical to organisational survival” (Bettis and Hitt, 1995, ‘The new competitive landscape’), business needs to get to grips with the reality of uncertainty and decreasing forecastability.  Businesses also need to remember that they are living systems within wider living systems.  Global environmental, political, economic and financial challenges all impact on a business’s ability to succeed.

There is much out there which indicates that we are living in a VUCA world.  Volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.  While, for some, this may seem like a relatively recent phenomenon, I would contend that the world has been thus for much longer, but that what we have been learning in recent years is allowing us to see what we previously may not have.  Systems thinking, for example, is giving us mental constructs with which to make a little sense of a sometimes confusing world.  If dealing with uncertainty requires us to embrace it, as some suggest, the question remains, “How do we do that?”  It can seem a little glib to simply say, “the world is uncertain, embrace it!”

If, on the way down from that cliff, I succumb to my anxiety, it is impossible for me to be spontaneous.  Anxiety and spontaneity sit at opposite ends of a spectrum. Without my spontaneity, I have no spark for my creativity and it is my human creativity which will assist me to come up with new enabling solutions.

Creativity and innovation at work are not just about coming up with new products and services.  They are about how we respond to each other, our customers and the business environment.  Creativity, however, is strategically linked with spontaneity.  As Dr. J.L. Moreno writes in “Who Shall Survive?” (1953), an “individual may have a high degree of creativity but be entirely without spontaneity, a creator ‘without arms’….Spontaneity can enter the creatively endowed individual and evoke a response.”  He goes on to say that there have been many more Michelangelos than the one who painted the Sistine Chapel, but “the thing that separates them is the spontaneity which, in the successful cases, enables the carrier to take full command of his (or her) resources, whereas the failures are at a loss with their treasures.”  Furthermore, “spontaneity operates in the present, now and here; it propels the individual towards an adequate response to a new situation or a new response to an old situation.”

How do you respond to something novel?

When we encounter something unexpected, do we push ahead with our plans?  Do we assist others to embrace uncertainty or do we attempt to keep things as planned so that we don’t unsettle people?  For example, in developing people’s abilities to have workplace conversations about performance, we emphasise that there is no “step 1, step 2″ procedure for carrying these out.  This unsettles some folks.  For one thing, such conversations can be pretty emotionally charged, especially if someone is calling someone else’s under-performing at work.  How will they react?  What will I do if they get angry/defensive/start crying?  For another thing, no conversation can be scripted unless you are an actor on stage.  Even in this situation, actors develop the ability to be responsive to what others say to them and how they say it, otherwise we see a bunch of individuals reciting memorised lines, which is not how good drama unfolds on stage.  Even though they know what comes next, a good actor will be alive to the present moment and deliver their lines as if they are hearing what the other has said for the first time.  Responsiveness.

We can ready ourselves for a challenging conversation, partly by rehearsing what we want to say, but we also need to be ready to respond to what the other person says to us.  We encourage people to think bigger about these conversations as one of many elements in their relationship.  They are a process within a bigger process, not a stand-alone event.  For this reason, we don’t provide tools and techniques, we offer spontaneity development.  As I quoted previously, Dr. J.L. Moreno said spontaneity is the capacity to offer a novel response to an old situation or an adequate (i.e. good enough) response to a new situation.  Any workplace conversation or relationship would benefit from developing this capacity.  Tools, tricks and tips are not sufficient in order to navigate the complex spaces we inhabit at work.  They are useful to a point, but the application of these in a mindful and purposeful manner needs to come from the individual.  In order to deploy all the knowledge and skills that this individual at their ready disposal, the individual needs to be in a state of readiness; this is the spontaneity state.  When we are warmed up to a spontaneity state, we bring out all we have developed and learnt and sythesise them in an appropriate and effective manner to come up with a novel response to a familiar situation or a “good enough” response to something we have never met before.  We don’t struggle to remember useful tips, we don’t get anxious about what we are about to say or do, we don’t fail to bring out what we know we know.  We flow in response to uncertainty, sometimes producing something that surprises even ourselves.  Creativity.

Progressiveness is more than just coping

In many businesses I encounter, the tried and tested no longer seems as effective.  Perhaps the conventional marketing wisdom or sales tactics no longer bring in results like they used to.  They’ve tried sweeteners, good cop-bad cop, management directives, staff socials and everything else they can think of, but loyalty and engagement seem to be on the wane.  As Andrew Zolli describes, we are being called on to develop capabilities that are about “rolling with the waves, instead of trying to stop them“.  Accommodating them rather than building bigger storm walls.  I have previously described my experience of first arriving in India and realising while looking down on a Mumbai street that it was a river and that in order to get by, I’d have to go with its flow rather than try to swim upstream.

Politicians concerning themselves with the interests of the precariat talk about building a new progressive agenda.  I like that word: progressive.  It fits with a model of human functioning that I apply in my work, both for individuals and for businesses.  Whether we are the authors of our uncertainty or it is the product of our environment (or a little of both, as I’m currently experiencing), our response to it is key.  The enabling solutions lie in finding ways to (re)gain a sense of agency in our lives.  Agency, mind; not control.  The model I apply comes out of the work of the work of Lynette Clayton and has been refined by Max Clayton: we operate out of Roles which are fragmenting, coping or progressive.

In every living moment, we respond to our world by taking up a Role.  We learn Roles from the day we are born until the day we die, as we are constantly meeting new situations.  The term “fragmenting” corresponds to “dysfunctional”, reflecting the inner experience of acting in this manner.  Fragmenting Role responses are backward-looking, fear-based, stuck, regressive.  Coping Role responses are those which have served us well in the past and have become almost habitual but which are more oriented to surviving rather than thriving.  Progressive Role responses are those which move us forward.  Each of us has a motivating force which takes us forward in our lives and the Roles we enact that take us there are progressive.  In times of uncertainty, it seems sensible that we would operate out of our coping or fragmenting Roles; this is related to that hard-wiring.  The ones that are most life-giving and useful to us, however, are the progressive.

Once again, we will find it easier to enact out of our progressive Role systems if we can warm up to our spontaneity.  Our progressive Roles are the ones which will enable us to thrive in the face of uncertainty.  Embracing uncertainty, then, is an exercise in consciousness.  Zolli talks about soldiers, ER workers and first-responders training in contemplative practices to assist them to remain resilient.  If our hard-wiring is constantly on the alert and tells us that the uncertain is a threat, mindfulness can help us to short circuit that hard-wiring.

What is required is consciousness.

So we don’t like uncertainty?  Tough.  Just because we don’t like it, doesn’t mean we don’t have to deal with it.  The question becomes, “How can I manage myself in the midst of uncertainty?”

So what am I doing about my current uncertainty?  Well, after a few particularly challenging days, I’m writing about it.  This activity is helping me to be mindful: of myself and of my resources.  These are plenty.  Some are intrapersonal, some are interpersonal and some are supra-personal.  I’m remembering that if I languish in anxiety, I’ll find it harder to keep going.  I’m remembering the moments in my life when I have felt spontaneous.  I’m remembering my mother’s recent email telling me to trust in my strengths and that I’m a very capable person.  I’m remembering to take exercise and eat my greens.

To quote an old friend of mine, worry doesn’t get the cat fed.  

 

 

 

Vanguard Leadership (or The Importance of Being our own Best Friend)

Is there room in the world for a CEO who wears their heart on their sleeve?

Absolutely, undoubtedly, unequivocally, yes!  Such a leader is a vanguard leader.  We were recently in conversation with a CEO who wondered aloud if there is a place for someone like him; someone who, in my estimation, expresses how he feels, lets other know how they impact on him, curiously seeks feedback on his own performance (with a view to acting on it) and strives to do what needs to be done in a way that is aligned with a personal value system orientated to fairness, meaningful work and concern for the well-being of others.  This man is, in my view, in the vanguard of how a CEO should be.  (He’s also a real person!)  I can understand why he might occasionally doubt himself because he likely looks around at other people called “CEO” and doesn’t see himself mirrored back.  The times, however, they are a-changing.

Lots is written about the kind of leaders we require for the 21st century.  I have no desire to replicate what is out there, however what I see in this man who “wears his heart on his sleeve” is an amalgam of responsible leadership, authentic leadership and congruent leadership and I believe it is worth setting these out.  I believe the three are essential in order to surmount the challenges with which the current age presents us.  The terrain the modern leader needs to navigate is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA).   How can we best develop ourselves as leaders to navigate this well, so that we leave our workplaces, the people within them and the world in a better place than when we found it?

Responsible leadership, to my mind, is about being responsive to what is around you; thinking about the wider system.  As Christopher Avery sets out, being responsible goes further than being accountable.  Being accountable, as Christopher says, is backward-looking, in that we can account for our actions.  Being responsible is forward-looking, in that we seek to take account of a wider system.  When we read about responsible leadership or corporate responsibility, we think of triple bottom lines or sustainability: how will our actions affect others now and into the future?  In other words, we are responding to an assessment of the bigger picture; what ripples will our actions (and non-actions) create.  This is vital if we intend to bequeath a planet worth inhabiting for future generations.  While I’m a little loathe to throw morals into the mix, I’d say that a responsible leader is one who would align themselves with a “Do no harm” kind of morality into their work.  Extending this, a responsible, vanguard leader is a systems steward.  A vanguard leader understands that a truly effective business will come about when the organisation (the system) is healthy.  Sick cultures enact sick behaviours.   The systems steward will be responsible for ensuring that there are healthy policies and procedures, a healthy flow of information, a healthy openness to innovation, healthy relationships, a healthy culture of learning, development and continuous improvement.  Being responsible for the hygiene of the wider system will ensure longevity and ‘good growth’.

Being a vanguard leader is absolutely about being responsible.  It is absolutely about being a systems thinker; taking action when the wider system is taken into account and stewarding their business towards health.

Authentic leadership, for me, is bringing your whole self to work.  As Bill George and others say in Discovering your Authentic Leadership, you need to be who you are, not emulate someone else.  Authentic leaders know who they are because they are on a lifetime journey of self-discovery.  Discovering our authentic leadership requires a commitment to discovering who we are.

Being a vanguard leader is absolutely about being authentic.  It is absolutely about knowing who we are, letting people know who we are and not simply being the angry, unhappy guy or gal who gets s**t done.

Congruent leadership is based on personal values, beliefs and principles.  Congruent leaders also place a high value on building and maintaining good relationships with others.   Congruent leaders are guided by a higher purpose.  They become conscious of the value systems out of which they operate and work to align these with their words and their actions.  Such folks are also open to discovering their blind spots, areas where their values, actions and words are not aligned, and to making the appropriate adjustments so that they can operate in a principled manner.

Being a vanguard leader is absolutely about being congruent.  It is absolutely being aware of our values and principles, communicating those and behaving in ways which are aligned with them.

Vanguard leadership is the confluence of responsible leadership, authentic leadership and congruent leadership.  This is the promised land.  We are on the way, but in our wider society we are not there yet.  Some leaders, like that CEO I mentioned, are well on the way, however.  For folks like this, it can be a little isolating.

When we look around and find ourselves a little alone, how can we sustain ourselves?

If we are in the vanguard, we are at the forefront of a movement.  As I said, the times, they are a-changing and I confidently predict that 100 years from now, this kind of leader will be ubiquitous.  If, in our current era, however, we are striking out into new territory, this means we may have times when we doubt ourselves, feel isolated or wonder if we are deluding ourselves.  If you are a leader who enacts responsibility, authenticity and congruence in your working life, what would be useful in order to sustain yourself if there are relatively few living and breathing models of vanguard leadership?   In the world we have inherited from the Industrial Age, we are conditioned to look for gaps, rather than strengths.  That conditioning starts early on at school.  The workplaces we enter reinforce this deficit mentality through the performance management systems we apply to ourselves and others.  Even if we don’t want to focus our energies on what is dysfunctional, we are seemingly compelled to look at what’s not working, rather than what is.  If we unconsciously take this approach with ourselves, especially when we look around and find few people like us, it can dent our confidence.  We can begin to assume we are less capable and less effective than we actually are.  We may distrust or disbelieve positive feedback or fail to see the positive impact we have on others and the wider system.  We can also devalue ourselves; finding ourselves attributing less value to the qualities inherent in a vanguard leader than to those qualities in what we might believe a “real CEO” to possess.  This seems quite natural to me, given our conditioning.  We need to develop a self consciousness in order to remain strong.

As Daniel Goleman writes in “The New Leaders” (2002), emphasis on our gaps often arouses the right prefrontal cortex of our brains.  This gives rise to feelings of anxiety and defensiveness which typically demotivate and interrupt self-directed learning and the likelihood of change and development.  The effect of this is that the very qualities that identify a vanguard leader get lost in the process.

So it is essential that if we are in the vanguard, we develop a strong self-companion Role.  One of my favourite expressions comes from a friend in Scotland.  If I was doing something silly, she’d joke, “Have a word with yourself.”  Even though she was teasing me, she probably has no idea how useful I have found this advice over the years. From a Role Theory perspective, developing a good self-companion means just that, having an intimate relationship with ourselves; being able to have a conversation with the aspect of ourselves that says, “Keep going, you’re on the right track.  Others don’t get it yet, but you are really onto something here.”  Now, once again, I’m loathe to bring morals into the conversation, but I think it’s important to place a caveat on this.  I’m pretty sure Hitler and Stalin had a similar Role within them.  An truly effective self-companion, however, will not urge us to barbarity.  Bear in mind, we are a complex system of inter-related and inter-connected Roles.  The self-companion will be the one that interacts with the rest of us and spurs us on.  By the “rest of us”, I mean the other roles I saw present in that CEO I mentioned at the beginning of this article: strongly orientated to thinking bigger, strongly orientated to the well-being of others, strongly orientated to leaving a legacy of health, roles I can hardly imagine Hitler or Stalin possessing in any great measure.  I’m fascinated by those two despots and how they did what they did, but in all the documentaries I’ve watched, I’ve never observed anything remotely like humility, openness to feedback or care for humanity in their Role systems.

We can consciously warm ourselves up to the thinking, feeling and behaving necessary to fully integrate a strong sense of self-worth.  If this Role is embryonic in us, we need to be quite conscious of growing it, much the same way we needed to be conscious of learning to drive until it became second nature.  We had to actively think, “Clutch, gear, release clutch while depressing accelerator…..”  Similarly, we may have to be awake to growing the habit of being a good self-companion.  What self-talk or affirmation would be useful to build ourselves up?  What emotional state would be most useful to warm up to?  Think of a time when you were full of self-confidence; how can you transfer some of that goodness to your current situation?

“The world has the habit of making room for the man whose words and actions show that he knows where he is going.”
Napoleon Hill

It is just as vital to find peers.  In your head, heart and gut, you know you are doing right by yourself and others, but sometimes we also need to see ourselves mirrored by our peers.  If you are at the forefront, you are, by definition, ahead of the pack.  In one sense, you are peerless.  Not entirely, though.  There are others out there.  We need to apply ourselves to finding these folk.  When we do something that seems a little different or we feel that we don’t quite measure up to what a “real CEO” is, we need to find others who are similarly “weird”.  Seek out others who are supportive, encouraging, caring and interested.

Referencing Goleman again, study after study has demonstrated that positive groups make positive change.  Senior executives reported feeling that many people around them had an investment in them staying the same, not growing and developing.  Finding a trusted peer group of other vanguard leaders, whether that is through a local Vistage group that is resonant with our desire to cultivate new leadership styles or a virtual peer group of leaders interested in being responsible, authentic and congruent, will keep us on track and reduce the isolation of being a little “weird”.  A peer group is a powerful motivator.

Any thoughts on this?  Comments, insights and conversation most welcome.

 

What is the matrix of a leader?

Developing ourselves is not about filling in “gaps”.  If we are systems thinkers, we don’t see gaps.  A gap is an empty space; where nothing is.  We are not empty vessels to be filled; we are whole beings, not “hole-y” beings.  We do, however, have things about us that need strengthening and enhancing.  We have got this far in our lives with the capabilities that we have had at our disposal through a life of learning, but this is not to say that there isn’t more to learn and develop.

Dr. Russell Ackoff said, “Optimising one part of a system always leads to sub-optimisation of the system as a whole.”  This is important to remember, not only with reference to an organisation’s development, but also for an individual.  Our workplaces are complex social systems, the many people being interconnected and interrelated.  Each person has an impact on the wider system and the other people in the system impact on them.  Out of the dynamics of these social systems emerges culture and organisational performance.  To take Ackoff’s statement, if we take one person out of a system and, for example, provide some coaching without awareness of that person’s place in the system, impact on the system and impact of the system on them, the coaching will be less than effective.  Optimising one person in isolation and without attending to the whole system will lead to a skew.

Similarly, when developing capability within individuals, we need to remember that we, too, are systems.  We play a myriad of roles in our daily lives, whether you are a customer service representative, a CEO or a project manager.  The whole of ourselves is truly greater than the sum of our knowledge, skills, experience and character traits.  This matrix of roles that we play is complex and interrelated; each role we enact impacts on other roles we play.  Our character and personality arises from the interconnectedness of all these roles and each time we add a new capability, it affects the whole of our being.  Sometimes we can easily discern this, sometimes learning something new affects us in more subtle ways. For example, developing greater self-reflective skills will impact positively on our abilities to put ourselves in the shoes of others.

In the realm of leader (or rather, people) development, it sometimes seems that there is always the next big thing: The Key Skill Every Leader Should Grow.  It can be a bit like plate spinning, though; that old trick where someone would rush around trying to keep plates spinning on long thin poles.  One week you have to develop your ability to manage diversity, the next week it’s about learning how to deal with the unexpected, the next week you are learning how to listen to your inner voice telling you not to listen to what they tell you the week after that.  Madly rushing about from one “part” to another “part” of ourselves is a misguided approach to people development.  We need to see leader ability as a matrix of interactive roles; the question is then not “What capability do I need to develop?” but “What is the matrix of capabilities I need to develop, and what capabilities am I over-emphasising at the expense of others?”  Leader development should be focussed on the behaviour of the inseparable whole and even if there are specific capabilities that a person needs to strengthen, this should be done with a view to optimising the whole person.

Developing ourselves in a piecemeal, mechanistic way can be as exhausting as plate spinning.  Taking a reductionist perspective is also counter-productive; it’s utter nonsense to view ourselves as clocks, with bits that you can take out in isolation and fine tune or replace.  We need to remain mindful that our abilities to do something may be linked to a collection of other related abilities.  In the same vein, our ability to do something may be hampered by over-use of other abilities.  Take the story of the recruitment consultant who struggled to achieve his list of daily tasks.  It wasn’t related to poor time management skills, which he had said it was.  It was a direct result of being so driven and single-minded about achieving his tasks such that his way of interacting with his colleagues rubbed them up the wrong way and caused them to avoid dealing with him.  Because he required the collaboration of his co-workers, he was not able to get through his tasks effectively.  When we did some work with this person some years ago, we witnessed his manner with others that betrayed some underdeveloped relationship skills.  If we had taken him at his word and gone down the “time management skills” track without looking at his whole being, he wouldn’t have come through with the enhanced people skills he actually needed.  His improved people skills ended up enhancing his ability to “manage” his time.

When Peter Senge says that real learning gets to the heart of what it is to be human, I believe he is talking about whole person development, not simply “training” in isolated sets of skills that enable someone to do a job more efficiently.  When I’m developing people capability, I apply a matrix that we at Quantum Shift developed some years ago.  We use it as an illustrative reminder, not a definitive prescription.  This image is limited, in that it cannot truly illustrate the deep and complex interconnectedness of all the roles and how they affect each other, however, it gives some indication.  Anyone who is in the business of developing people needs to remain cognisant of the interactive nature of these roles and discover how they impact on each other, for each individual that they work with.

Each of these roles is comprised of a number of sub-roles or abilities.  For example, the Decisive Achiever is the one that we enact when we want to get things gone.  It is the one that manages time, makes decisions, is organised and is the one that is usually most recognised and rewarded in the workplace.  This is the role that our recruitment consultant was over-utilising to his detriment, and at the expense of the other roles in his matrix.  He operated out of a belief that if he just came into work and achieved, that would be best.  He was blind to the fact that an optimal achiever is actually one that deploys the whole of his role matrix in appropriate measure and in response to the appropriate context.  When he realised that his Relationship Manager role was the one that was needed in order to go further, and extended this and applied it in tandem with the Decisive Achiever, he actually got more done and with greater satisfaction for himself and his colleagues.  In fact, we heard some months later that the atmosphere in the whole office had improved significantly as a result.

Below is a summary of the roles in this matrix and their traits.  The list is by no means exhaustive, however it gives a flavour of the roles.

Because our personal role systems are organic and ever-emergent, developing them is not time-bound.  There is no end point.  We will develop one thing and this will shine a light on other areas to enhance and extend.  To quote Senge, “Personal mastery goes beyond competence and skills…it means approaching one’s life as a creative work, living life from a creative as opposed to a reactive viewpoint.”  This means we embark on a lifelong journey of learning and development, taking a continual interest in ourselves and holding a perpetual curiosity about the world.  One might say that there is a reasonably finite amount one can learn about, say, time management, but if we engage ourselves in role development, we will keep refining our whole selves to applying our time management skills or our performance management skills or our listening skills well and in an integrated fashion.  Doing this over our life times will be an adventure, it will be messy and divergent, it will not be without challenges.

Some key points to remember about working with people in a systemic way:

• Our roles are an interactive system, or matrix, of sub-roles.  Developing one in isolation will come at the expense of another or others.
• Development is never-ending.  You never “arrive”.  There is no end point.  As we learn one thing and it becomes part of us, we become aware of the next thing to be learnt.  Because we are systems, developing one part of the system will impact on the rest of it and will give rise to the next thing to develop.
• Roles are learnt and enacted in response to real life, not hypotheticals.  They are not in isolation, making workplace learning is more purposeful.  It is ideal to learn in real time, in response to real needs.
• Developing leadership mastery is a messy business, just like life.  It is not linear.  It requires some experimentation, some reflection and meaning-making, some knowledge, some rehearsal and trial and error.

Manage from strength, not deficit

Carbon is intensely heated and pressurised beneath the surface of the Earth to create a diamond; essentially it’s a lump of coal that has been pressure cooked for thousands of years.  Dust, smoke and ash scatter evening sunlight and we see a stunning red sunset; so it’s basically air pollution.  An oyster takes a piece of microscopic grit and forms a pearl; it’s really an irritant that the oyster is trying to protect itself from.

Far be it from me to shatter the romantic associations we place on sunsets, pearls and diamonds, but they do, in fact, originate from stuff which we would not normally consider to be lovely or desirable.  Every magnificent and serene wonder in the universe arose out of the chaos and turbulence of the Big Bang, hardly a peaceful nor benign process.  In the realm of human learning, our most prized gems often arise out of the midst of our most difficult or challenging circumstances.  It’s not a cliche for nothing: “What doesn’t kill me will make me grow stronger.”  At the same time, if we are bereft of personal resources, whether that be internal strengths, strong relational connections with others or a satisfying connection to something ‘higher’, we will find learning and change more threatening than life-giving.  It is worth bearing these two points in mind if you manage staff performance: 1) the seed of excellence lies in the heart of inadequate performance; and 2) we cannot drive people to higher performance if they are not aware of what they are already doing well.  We do not learn something new out of nothing.

An old supervisor of mine used to use the phrase ‘grist for the mill’ when I would talk about some undesirable behaviour in a client.  His reframe of a behaviour or attitude has stood me in good stead for many years.  Not only am I trained in a strengths-based methodology, but my outlook on human beings is one that says we are inherently good and that our behaviours are aimed at generating positive outcomes.  That said, best intentions do not always result in the best outcomes for everyone concerned, but this is more likely down to human clumsiness, shortsightedness and fallibility than willful nastiness, laziness or under-handedness.  The less-than-functional is merely grist for the developmental mill; raw material out of which the treasure can emerge.

Thankfully, for more and more people, it seems entirely sensible that we look at workplace performance through a strengths-based lens.  Why performance manage someone purely from a deficit paradigm, i.e. what is not going well?  While we do have to address poor performance, there is a paradigm out of which we can learn to operate which is progressive, esteem-enhancing and effective.

Just as counter-productive as the deficit paradigm is the head-in-the-sand paradigm.  Many who operate out of this world-view would say that they are optimistic and positive.  What this mindset propounds is that you don’t look at the dysfunctional; accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative.  While I’m all for emphasising the positive, if we behave like Pollyanna, we miss the whole picture.  Taken to an extreme, there are managers who are overly optimistic, believing that, in the end, it’ll all be alright.  Being overly positive can lead you to ignore evidence of some ‘grit’ in your system.  The head-in-the-sand paradigm says that if you just accentuate the positive, the problems and difficulties will work themselves out.  Wrong.  ”Things” do not “work themselves out“.  I know there are CEOs and other leaders out there who hold a version of this viewpoint.  They believe themselves to be positive and optimistic and I’ve no doubt whatsoever that they lead blessed and joyful lives.  However, I’ve heard a self-professed optimist say ”Why would I want to put any of my energy into the staff who are causing the most problems?  I prefer to spend my time on staff who are really performing.”  From here, you are one step away from:  ”Why would I want to spend any time or effort on developing the poor performers?”  ”Why wouldn’t I get rid of the difficult ones and hire people who are willing to just fit in; there are plenty of people who would be so grateful to work here.”  This, to my mind, is not being positive.  It is an over-developed desire to see the positives to the extent that you fail to see the whole picture.  If you put your head in the sand, you are not only blind to weaknesses, but you are blind to the developmental opportunities and the potential pearls amongst your staff.

So both the deficit paradigm and the head-in-the-sand paradigm are limited: they only look at part of someone’s performance.  To view the world from a strengths-based perspective, we look at the whole: what is working well and what is not working well.  A strengths-based paradigm is also a systems thinking paradigm.  It is one that sees the wholeness and connectedness of people.  We are not machines with a bunch of moving parts that can be taken out and replaced when they fail; we are complex systems in which the whole is far greater than the sum of our individual cells.  So in a performance conversation with staff, we need to view their failings in light of their whole being.  There are some things they do well, there are other things that they don’t excel at, but they are inseparable.  Like finding the diamond in the rough, the potential lies hidden.

Even though we know how good it feels to focus on what we do well, drawing attention to others’ weaknesses in workplace performance is not a habit easily unlearnt.  Through our early years, many of us have learnt to place too much value judgement on ourselves and to classify many things about us as inherently good and worthwhile or inherently bad and undesirable.  However, learning to see the world through a strengths-based lens has some bottom line benefits.  A 2002 survey by the Corporate Leadership Council questioned nearly 20,000 employees in 29 countries and found that when their managers emphasised strengths, this resulted in a  36% improvement in performance as opposed to a 27% decline in performance when the emphasis was on weaknesses.

Taking a strengths-based systems view to human performance includes developing a person’s ability to self-reflect so they aware of themselves, what they do well and what needs improvement.  Asking a person to reflect on themselves is the starting point for any conversation about performance.  Making a performance analysis by using a simple, yet powerful three-fold progression of questions means that the person expands their view of themselves and is more capable of being autonomous, confident and engaged at work.  Firstly, ask someone to recall what they do well.  Once they have done this, let them know what you observe in them that is excellent.  Secondly, ask them to reflect on what they do too much of.  Remember I said earlier that I believe all human behaviour is aimed at creating a positive outcome.  Sometimes, there is something that we are good at that we apply too much, and this can get in the way of ideal performance.  It is not intrinsically bad, yet in great quantity is counter-productive.  Salt is a good thing to add to soup but too much will ruin the flavour.  Again, let the other person know what you see them do too much or too often.  Finally, turn the focus to what the person does too little of.  Once they have done this, add more information from your perspective.  Keeping this simple and structured will provide the person with a full and manageable picture of themselves.  Out of this analysis you will have a distillation of information that shows the way to a development path.

To my mind, in a strengths-based worldview, a performance conversation is not one-sided.  Unless a staff member is going through some sort of formal disciplinary process, it seems to me that conversations about performance are just that: conversations.  Both parties contribute.  Both parties have rights and responsibilities.  Both parties have the right to be heard, to be respected and to be believed.  Staff are responsible for being fully present in these conversations and participating.  Staff are also responsible for developing an open attitude to learning and change.  It is no good becoming defensive in the face of uncomfortable feedback or leaving the manager to make all the analysis.  A staff member who is not able to reflect on their performance is the staff member begging to be micro-managed and I know of no employee nor manager who truly desires that.  A manager is responsible for developing the habit of noticing performance, both good and bad-all the time.  It is most useful when both staff and manager are clear about performance standards and achievement throughout the year, not simply at annual performance review time.  Keep good performance on track by giving real-time feedback.   I have spoken to too many people who are in the dark about their performance because their manager just saves everything for that once a year appointment, if at all.  Furthermore, performance conversations should not be scripted or determined solely by the performance review document.  It should be a human to human encounter in which both parties are able to contribute.

Finally, do something after performance conversations.  If you are a manager who has regular conversations with staff, you are likely to follow up anyway, but particularly after one about work performance, make sure something happens, whether that is a coaching session, a decision to undertake training, another review or whatever seems appropriate.  This bit is really important.  What arises from performance conversations is that grist for the developmental mill; within the heart of poor performance lie the seeds of excellence.  Knowing that you have a culture of performance, where it’s just something that gets talked about regularly, means that people can reasonably expect there to be a professional development path that continues to unfold.  Ideally, this will be specific to each person, since each person’s needs will vary.  Whatever you do, though, make sure that you do discuss what is not going well and that you do something to ameliorate it.  It’s a paradox of strengths-based performance management:  you want to change the poor performance but you must start by looking at the good, and when you eventually identify the inadequate, you have the raw material for greater excellence.  If we don’t acknowledge what is outstanding, we don’t have the stable platform from which to grow and develop; and if we don’t examine what is poor, we just end up with a touchy feely nicey nice culture where we stagnate.  We need to find the grit in order to learn something new.  What is the irritant?  What is the source of dissatisfaction?  What is getting in the way of excellence?

The pricelessness of reflection

W. Edwards Deming is quoted as saying, “Experience by itself teaches nothing.”  In a fast-paced world where we are bombarded with more and more stimuli and we are called upon to carry out multiple tasks, this is truer now than ever before.  Our lives are filled with more and varied experiences which, by themselves, leave us with nothing more than information.  Sometimes we get to the end of our very busy days and the most we have made of it was, “I was run off my feet all day,” and we let go the opportunity to reflect on what it all meant to us and our lives.  Are we doing what makes us happy?  Are we spending our lives doing something meaningful to us?  Are our lives enriched by the myriad of interactions and relationships we hold?  Are we making a difference?  If we were asked, we could probably recall the things that happen to us daily, but it is not sufficient to merely recollect if these experiences are to have enormous value to us.  In our working lives, which are becoming more unpredictable and and revolve less around the carrying out of rote routine tasks, we are exposed to a veritable banquet of new experiences and interactions.  Within these experiences lie the building blocks of our transformation.

To build on a previous article, while we certainly need to be open to new information and experiences, we need to do something purposeful with them.  Often in my work, I have cause to reflect on the value of reflection.  Just as every story has a beginning, a middle and an end, so do life’s little episodes.  There is a beginning phase, called the ‘warm up’, the middle phase, where the action occurs, and then there is the last phase, in which meaning is made of the experiences in the action phase.  This last phase is where the reflection happens.  Reflection is essential in order for the significance of the action to be realised.  All too often, we get to the end of the action phase and we hurriedly move on to the next thing.  It’s all do, do, do.

I often liken it to digesting.  If it weren’t for our digestive system, we would find ourselves either unable to take in any more food or passing food straight through our bodies without the benefit of extracting the nutrients that we need to build and grow.  A banquet table filled with food has no significance to us until we take the food into our bodies and let our enzymes go to work.  Only when this has occurred and our cells are making use of the nutrients is the food of any real use to us.  Experience is much the same; only when we have digested it and made conscious meaning of it does it provide us with sustenance and the building blocks for growth.

One of the most skilled experiential trainers I have ever had the privilege to work with, John Bergman, once said, “I provide people with experiences.  I know they’ve had one because I can watch them having it.  What I don’t know is what they’ve learnt from it.  The reflection afterwards is the most important bit.”  Thankfully, I read more people writing about the importance of transfer of learning in the workplace.  Whether you are running a training course, carrying out some one-to-one coaching, facilitating a business simulation with a bunch of senior execs or teaching people to apply social media in their work, it behoves you to facilitate and guide some reflection on what you have been asking people to learn.  Real learning is integrated into who we are as people.  Otherwise, it’s not learnt.  Unless we digest and make meaning of something new, it will pass right through us.  It’s not an added extra; it’s an integral part of the learning process.

In setting up a learning programme with a new client, I have sometimes been asked, “What will the ‘take home’ be?”  If I’m honest, I would say, “I don’t know.”  I could tell you what my agenda will be.  I could tell you what exercises I will get people to do.  I could tell you what I’d like people to learn.  I could tell you that I have a great experiential process that will show sales staff the way to providing better customer experiences.  However, I think we are well past the time when we can assume that just because someone has sat in a training room that they will have learnt what the trainer or their boss or the HR Manager wants them to learn.  Certainly, businesses require people to learn things that will assist them to excel at their jobs and, certainly, businesses want this elusive thing called ROI and certainly, businesses want to spend their L&D budgets on something purposeful that will provide benefits to the people and the business.  That said, spending L&D money is no guarantee of learning or development unless the learning programme (whether that’s a series of coaching sessions or an e-learning programme or leadership development programme) has reflection and integration built in to the programme.  So what’s the take home?  That can depend entirely on how much reflection and integration I ask of people in the session.  If there is none, I’m leaving the ‘take home’ to chance; perhaps some of the people are already good at reflecting and meaning-making, perhaps some of them are not.

Developing the role of Astute Reflector, however, is not only applicable in the context of formal learning; far from it.  More of what we need to absorb and integrate comes from our daily experiences and interactions at work than from ‘formal’ learning situations.  Bringing the learning into work is more than a zeitgeist catch-phrase; it’s about how you view everything that you do, everything that happens to you, every conversation you have.  Is your working day just a series of things to ‘get through’ or are you making the most of your daily experiences, pleasant and not so pleasant, as learning fodder?  Do you get to the end of a busy week with a sense of indigestion because you haven’t processed and made meaning of the week’s events?  We need to shift our thinking so we see that everything that goes on at work is about learning.  There are some compelling benefits that can come to us from developing the role of Astute Reflector in our lives.

We become better at learning from mistakes.  When our Astute Reflector role is well-developed, we regularly stop and debrief, either by ourselves or with others, to examine what went well and what didn’t go so well.  Once we have made this conscious, the chances of us repeating our mistakes begin to fall dramatically.

We distill the ingredients for success.  Rather than leaving good performance to chance, becoming conscious of what works well also shows us the way to consistent excellence.  This isn’t about finding the one or two things that work well and sticking to them, for ongoing reflection is the thing.  However, we can improve our chances of future success if we have actually stopped to reflect.

We see patterns that were previously hidden.  When we reflect, we connect the dots with other experiences in our lives.  This begins to show up patterns.  If you are a systems thinker, you will hold that everything is connected to everything else.  Reflection illuminates those connections, from where we become more conscious of values, habits and attitudes which serve us well and those which don’t.

In his excellent article on mastering the art of self-reflection, Adam Chalker lists three kinds of reflection: reflection-on-action, reflection-in-action and critical self-reflection.  I believe that all three of these are indispensable abilities of the role of Astute Reflector.

If we inculcate the practice of reflection-on-action, we habituate ourselves to asking questions such as:

• What was I trying to achieve?
• What did my actions and responses create: in myself, in others, in the wider system?
• What did I do well? What did I do too much of (that got in the way of excellence)?  What did I do too little of?
• What does that remind me of (from the past)?

Growing the ability to reflect-in-action means that we become more able to notice ourselves while we are doing something and, if necessary, shift our attitudes or actions.  It’s a bit like reading a map while we are on a journey, checking to see if we are heading where we want to go.  If we wish to develop this habit, we can ask ourselves:

• What am I actually doing right now?
• How are people responding to me?
• How am I feeling right now?
• Am I heading in the right direction?  If not, what change of course is required?

I’ve written before on the need to develop more critical self-reflection and self-awareness.  This is taking a cold, hard look at ourselves and asking the challenging questions:

• What lies do I tell myself?
• What am I pretending not to see about myself?
• Am I doing something which truly brings meaning and joy to my life?
• How do I enact power?  Is it personal potency or power over others?
• Do I like who I am?

Once again, these are not discretionary matters to consider only if we have the luxury of time; the role of Astute Reflector is core to the world of work today.  Charles Darwin knew about the value of learning when he said, “It’s not the biggest, the brightest, or the best that will survive, but those who adapt the quickest.”  Making it a habit to ask, “So what?” expands our awareness, helps us to fine tune our abilities and increases our sense of potency in the world.  Best of all, it costs nothing to grow the role of Astute Reflector and maximise your day-to-day experiences.  Cost of training programme that teaches you nothing new: $2000.  Becoming more reflective and conscious: priceless.

 

 

 

Stop training and start developing

I admire people who are good with words.  A wordsmith such as Neil Hannon, one of my favourite song writers, deploys words to great effect whether he is making a biting commentary on the financial game-players who were instrumental in causing the 2008 Great Recession, telling a story of a lonely woman of advancing years or sharing his optimism about life with his baby daughter.  In their younger years, highly articulate and eloquent people such as Hannon learnt exactly the same letters of the alphabet that I learnt, and over their lifetimes have learnt how to do something quite special with them.  There are only 26 letters in the alphabet.  Once you’ve learnt those 26 letters, you can’t learn any more.  People who are good at expressing themselves through language have developed their capabilities to use it in highly creative, skillful ways.  In order to become one of these folks, you don’t need to learn more letters of the alphabet; you learn other things to do this.  You don’t see aspiring writers attending courses in order to learn more letters; you see them attending creative writing courses that put them in touch with their human creativity, associating with other writers and applying their innate creativity to the use of a finite set of grammatical and syntactical rules and conventions (while also sometimes challenging or bending these rules in spontaneous ways).

Developing people in the workplace is a little similar.  Entry level managers, for example, will need to learn the basic tools of management in order to provide competent supervision of their teams and tasks, however good leadership comes about when this manager applies themselves to growing their personal capabilities so that they can apply management knowledge in inspiring and motivating ways with greater vision, impact and influence.

For many of you in a leadership position, you probably don’t need more top tips or knowledge about your job.  You probably don’t need much more information about ‘stuff’; you would probably enjoy developing something else, something deeper that frees you up to apply the knowledge and information you have already acquired with greater ease and finesse.  It’s one thing to know about emotional intelligence, for example.  It’s quite another thing for you to apply this elegantly in a living, breathing workplace with real life people in real life situations.

I say all this by way of stating one of my wishes for 2012: that more organisations wake up to the idea that, rather than sending people on more training courses that treat them like receptacles for yet more tools, tricks and tips, they should be investing in developing the users of these tools.  Rather than trying to fill people up with more information and knowledge, they could look for opportunities for them to learn how to apply what they already know in spades, with greater fluency, creativity and responsiveness to the real needs of their organisations and its stakeholders.  I wish that rather than send someone to another seminar about emotional intelligence, that they invest in some kind of learning that allows them to become more aware of themselves, to reflect and to actually rehearse better emotional and people skills.  I wish that rather than sending a salesperson on another sales training that tells them yet again how important it is to listen to clients and customers, that they invest in something where these salespeople can develop the “role” of Effective Listener by practicing and reflecting on their abilities to listen well to people.  I wish that rather than send customer service staff away to learn lists of things to do when dealing with customers, that they are provided with flexible learning processes that allow them to grow the whole range of human attitudes and behaviours required in order to provide the ultimate customer experience.  I wish that rather than send that shy or reticent manager on another course to learn about “difficult conversations” with their staff, that they seek out the opportunities for this manager to develop the “role” of Robust Guide and actually get to the bottom of why he doesn’t do it (even though he knows what he is supposed to be doing) and to break through those inhibitors by rehearsing and refining some new behaviours and attitudes.

All of this is possible, it is not pie in the sky.  I see such things happen before my eyes.  This is my call for greater emphasis on “role development” and less emphasis on “training” in workplace learning and development.  The word “role” is already known to you.  However, in my work, I apply a very particular meaning of it with reference to capability development.  In the work I do, a role is defined as the living expression of a person in any moment they are alive.  A role is a holistic concept and consists of three components: thinking, feeling and behaving.  Far too much in the way of workplace training with behaviour change as its end result does not address the whole person.  We are whole people and to leave out any of these three components will not necessarily make for genuine and long-lasting shifts in behaviour.

We all amass a vast repertoire of roles in our lifetimes and they arise in response to another person or situation.  Many of the roles we enact in our daily lives are ones which we have become quite habituated to enacting.  In many cases, these habituated role responses are pretty adequate, but in a number of cases, particularly when the environment is more unpredictable and changeable, we go into a role which does not quite fit the bill.  In many of these cases, more information or knowledge will not make a difference to our abilities to respond more adequately; developing our role repertoire, however, will.

To illustrate, complete this sentence: think of  X (a person in your workplace, or maybe even yourself) who sometimes struggles with Y (a task or duty at work).  X has all the information and knowledge they require in order to Y, but something still gets in the way.  When thinking of what X needs to learn, it is helpful to not reduce this simply to “They need to learn how to Y better.”  That assessment is too mechanistic and stops well short of the real learning need.  Such a simplistic assessment can lead to the wrong prescription.

There will be “roles”, or personal capabilities, that unlock their ability to Y.  I have spoken to too many salespeople who keep getting sent on the same old, same old sales courses year after year in order to help them boost their sales figures, and year after year, there is no significant shift in their performance.  In many cases, what gets in the way of optimum performance is not the lack of sales knowledge; it is under-developed listening abilities or an under-developed ability to put themselves in the shoes of their clients or under-developed confidence or under-developed something-else.  I have spoken with too many managers who get sent on courses to learn about having “difficult” conversations with their staff, but, again, in most of these cases, these courses do not create a shift in behaviour because they already know what they should be doing; what they could do more of is confidence or the ability to set boundaries or even the ability to be calm and centred.  Telling someone to be calm and centred will not necessarily make it happen.

A lot of this waste in the L&D budget comes about because what is seen is the failure to perform the task at hand effectively.  This, however, is merely the symptom of something deeper that needs addressed.  We can only really see behaviours and we really only measure performance that is measurable.  What do you do when the thing that needs developing is not so easy to see or measure?  The important thing is to make a really thorough assessment of the learning need.  It is also important to engage with a process that will allow people to learn holistically, so that the shifts in visible behaviour are real, deep and long-lasting and are related to shifts in the person as a person.

Making better decisions about the L&D budget has other ripple effects.  Even in the midst of economic turmoil, I still read about skills shortages in some industries and organisations.  Despite high unemployment, some businesses still say they can’t get the right people.  If we look at who is already in the business and make better assessments of what they really need to learn in order to boost their performance, we can go some way to improving staff engagement as well as the bottom line.  Taking a “role development” perspective on L&D can assist businesses to attract and retain the people they need.  Investing in developing people as people, not as resources that do things, shifts the culture and unlocks opportunity, creativity and innovation.

What’s your wish for 2012?

Just because you don’t see it, doesn’t mean it’s not there

In an increasingly connected and interactive world, where your customers can directly engage with you via social media, where you can measure and survey in order to take your organisation’s pulse, one essential role for us all to develop is The Open Receptive Learner.  This role encapsulates those capabilities related to receiving, processing and making meaning of feedback.  I’ll break my own rule about the use of the word ‘feedback’ because it is a useful shorthand, however, I still maintain my aversion to it and I still cannot seem to shake my old teacher’s suggestion that feedback is that dissonant racket that comes out of a speaker system.

It is valuable to consider this aspect of leader development and customer service because, in the Knowledge Age, the more responsive we are to all kinds of information, the better we will be at dealing with change, uncertainty, emergence and complexity.  I will add that The Open Receptive Learner is but one in an interconnected and complex matrix of ‘responsiveness’ and ‘self awareness’ roles, but those other roles can be the subject of another article.

If you have a well-developed role of Open Receptive Learner, you will be comfortable hearing things about yourself that have been hitherto unknown, you will be open to the notion that there may be some truth in what others tell you about yourself and you will give their comments due consideration, you will receive feedback with curiosity rather than defensiveness and you will endeavour to synthesise feedback in a way that causes you to expand your view of yourself.  What this looks and feels like:  when you are enacting this role, you may respond to others’ feedback by asking further naive questions in an interested tone of voice, in order to gain greater insight into yourself; when you are enacting this role, you may notice that can ably quieten your internal voices that want to react to feedback with justification or argument; when you are in this role, you may notice your body language conveys a relaxed, yet alert, demeanour as you demonstrate genuine curiosity and interest in what the other person is saying.

We solicit feedback when we ask for it directly, when we conduct some sort of culture survey or a leadership 360 or when we invite customers to interact with us on social media.  Even solicited feedback can cause us to respond out of denial, narcissism, arrogance or fear, notably when we hear something unexpected or that is less than complimentary.  While it’s not ideal, it’s understandable, as we are all human and we all have an amygdala which goes off like a car alarm, unable to distinguish between real and perceived danger.  Some of us have just been wired over our lives to be more vigilant than others.  If this is the case, we have human technologies at our disposal to rewire this default response.  What we have been learning in the last decade or so from neuroscience also tells us that we are far more ‘plastic’ than we used to believe.

What about when we receive unsolicited feedback?  We use expressions like, “I felt like I was being blindsided”, “I would never have seen that coming” or “That came out of nowhere”. This is similar to when we attempt to change lanes on the motorway and suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, we hear this loud honk and at the last minute, seeing where the desperate honking is coming from, swerve back into our lane to avoid a crash with the other car that did not, in fact, appear out of nowhere; we simply did not see it.  This can be related to a phenomenon called inattention blindness.  If you have ever seen a magician or illusionist, you will be familiar with how they use this natural tendency in order to entertain, and it is now becoming the stuff of documentary TV channels as we become increasingly interested in how our brains function and how to develop greater self awareness. The most well-known example of inattention blindness was used as a public service advertisement in the UK, trying to get drivers to become more aware of cyclists.

In essence, inattention blindness is when we are unable to see something even if it is plain sight.  When combined with another human phenomenon, asymmetric insight, we will go through our lives with skewed pictures of ourselves.  If we embark on a journey of self-knowledge, we will make some headway in mitigating for these cognitive distortions.  However, we cannot know all there is to know about ourselves simply by developing the role of Self-Reflector.  We require input from others and it is the height of arrogance to believe that information and feedback from others is to be dismissed blithely.

However, herein lies a major conundrum.  If inattention blindness is the inability to see something that is in plain sight and if we all suffer from it, we can accept that it is important to be open to feedback from others.  Intellectually, we can accept that there will be things about ourselves that are in plain sight, but to which we will be blind.  What if, however, the thing that is in plain view of everyone except ourselves, is that we are bad at taking feedback; that our limbic fight/flight/freeze mechanism is so overpowering that we are simply not able to take in any feedback that has just the merest whiff of unpleasantness.  It’s a negative loop.  What if the feedback is that we are bad at taking feedback?  Your emotions go from zero to 60 in an uncontrollable nano-second because your amygdala has somehow got the wrong end of the stick.  It’s just information, but it’s received as a danger and you over-react.  In the words of Radiohead, “Just ’cause you feel it, doesn’t mean it’s there.  We are accidents waiting to happen.”  Damn limbic system.

With this in mind, how do we go about developing the (under-developed) role of Open Receptive Learner if we have already come to the firm conclusion that we are open to feedback but our defensive shields are permanently on red alert?  If you believe that you are good at receiving feedback, how would you know?  If your amygdala is wired such that it detects danger at the slightest hint of criticism, you will be its slave when someone attempts to say, “You are not terribly good at hearing feedback about yourself,” and it floods your body with hormones, inhibiting and distorting the ability of your neocortex to take in and process information.  This essential piece of information is unlikely to get through, thereby scuppering your efforts.  It’s unconscious self-sabotage.

My intention in this article is not to create despondency, rather I wish to pose a pertinent question that all of us interested in self-development must come to grips with.  I believe that pondering questions such as this is not simply an intellectual exercise, rather it is exercising our self-awareness muscles.  In an age when the depth and quality of our self-knowledge is so core to how we are at work, with our peers, our staff, our customers and with our communities; this is no whimsical self-indulgence.  It is part of preparing ourselves for the greater uncertainty and ambiguity that characterises the Knowledge Age.

Warm up to the role of Open Receptive Learner

Here is a process that may assist you to become better at receiving feedback.  If you are in a leadership position, it is probably true that the higher up the ‘food chain’ you are, the less you will know about your business and what its staff really think of you.  If you are genuinely interested in knowing more about yourself and your organisation and encouraging more frank feedback to come your way, bring to mind someone you know who has this role well-developed.  We’ll call this person X.  You have seen them do it or they have a reputation for doing it.  You hear people say things like, “I feel so comfortable telling her what I think, she is such a good listener, even when I’m saying difficult things,” or “I get a really good sense that he listens to what people tell him about his performance.  He seems really interested in knowing what people think about him.”

When you are about to engage in a feedback-type conversation with someone, think to yourself, “What would X do?” and be in the role of that person.  What emotional state would they likely be in, what kind of words or phrases would they use in the conversation, how would they be physically?  As you develop your Open Receptive Learner, you will need to stay conscious of warming up to this role, just as you had to stay fully conscious of ‘clutch, engage gear, depress accelerator, slowly release clutch’ until driving was second nature to you.

Alternatively, if you find yourself blindsided by someone’s feedback, STOP.  If you find it difficult to stop the inner voices, to keep breathing, to bring your heartbeat back to a normal rate, it could be useful to investigate mindfulness training.  Practicing the discipline of mindfulness will go a long way to assisting you to gain greater self-control in your life.

As usual, I look forward to comments on this article.  Go well.

Your Worst Working Moment

Think of one of your best working moments.  One of those times when you felt on top of the world, when you were just ‘flowing’ or when you felt the warm glow of success.  It could have been when you closed that important deal, when you finally got through to your under-performing staff while at the same time growing positive working relationships or when you overcame your fears to achieve a breakthrough of some sort.  You will doubtless have many of these moments; right now, focus on just one of them.  Recall what you were doing, who was with you, how you felt, how others responded to you.

Now bring to mind your worst working moment.  That time you wanted the earth to open up and swallow you, when you felt so bad that you couldn’t look others in the eyes, that moment you would like to wipe from your memory because the mere thought of it ties your stomach in knots.  I won’t ask you to dwell on this for too long, lest it has the power to infect you today.

I will lay good money on two things: 1) the thing that made your peak moment so awesome and your worst moment so dreadful was probably not to do with technical expertise or lack thereof, it was more likely to do with your personal capabilities, and; 2) the thing that made these  moments what they were, are unique to you and your makeup.

I want to address these two assertions because they have important implications for leader development.  Spoiler alert: some of what follows may incense some readers.

Assertion 1: Technical know-how vs. personal capability:  This assertion points to a phenomenon which is already evident, that is, people and organisations are becoming more discerning in how they spend their time, effort and money on workplace training.  For one thing, more people are slowly coming to understand the difference between training and development.  I said a little more about this in a previous blog article, “Are you Investing in Sticky Learning?”.  Neuroscience is now proving what people like Jakob Moreno knew intuitively back in the 1920′s: that we go on learning and developing until the day we die.  Neuroscience is also giving us more hard evidence on how learning happens and it behoves us to respond to new facts and information by radically altering how we teach leadership.  More organisations are coming round to the idea that what makes us up as humans is pivotal to how we execute our work, even if they don’t know what to do about that.  We are living in an age when our personal beliefs and values, our emotions and our motivations must be accorded their due attention when it comes to performance at work.  While technical information and job-specific content is, of course, absolutely essential in order to carry out our jobs, they are not sufficient.  They are merely the ‘what’.

Who we are, as people, drives how we carry out our jobs, and organisations ignore this at their peril.  It is not enough to pay it lip service.  A genuine effort must be made to incorporate real and significant personal development into workplace learning.  There is a world of difference, for example, between learning about interpersonal skills and developing interpersonal skills.  Given the current state of learning and development offerings, if I were to attend a training seminar about Communication Skills, I would expect to come away with not much more than a sheaf of notes and information.  As far as I’m concerned, a waste of my time and money.  I’ve just done a google search: ‘How can I improve my communication skills?” brought up 74, 700,000 results.  We don’t need more information about stuff.  If you are still sending your people on an annual sales seminar and your sales figures aren’t changing, I would suggest you try something different.  Invest in something which grows capability, not adds information.  This is especially true the higher up the food chain you are.  If you are managing people, are at C-level or are hovering around C-level, your job is less about technical expertise and more about intra- and inter-personal capability.  Capability, mind you; not knowledge.

Assertion 2: The #1 capability that you should learn:  The thing that made your worst working moment so horrendous was unique to you.  I realise I may upset even more folks with this second point….but give. me. strength.  I realise that the rules of engagement on Twitter and other social media dictate some use of hyperbole and superlative, promises of quick enlightenment and feel-good platitudes masquerading as wisdom, in order to draw attention to yourself.  Social media ‘gurus’ even tell you this is how to get noticed; and I’m reminded of Peter Drucker’s quote: “We are using the word ‘guru’ only because ‘charlatan’ is too long to fit into a headline.”

Using these linguistic devices is tempting.  I succumb to this temptation myself; look at the title of this section.  The breathtaking cheek!  I also use tweet-scheduling on TweetDeck. Such audacity!  However, I tire of the “Ten Top Tips When Having Difficult Conversations at Work” or “The #1 Most Important Food Group Every Leader Should Eat for Breakfast”, when, in the realm of human development, there is truly no such thing.  Human development is not one-size-fits-all, nor paint-by-numbers.  We are still infected by the old mechanistic, cause-and-effect paradigm of seeing the world, hence we are compelled to read something when it promises enlightenment in five easy steps.  I do it all the time.  And I’m left wanting.  The world is not that simplistic nor black and white, and neither are we humans.  There are no shortcuts to anywhere worth going.  If you are looking for the #1 capability that will transform you and make your working life 73% more satisfying, read no further.  I don’t have the answer.

Well, I do, actually.  But I don’t.

The answer is: the one that YOU most require.  Training and development courses promise to provide you with learning that is relevant to you, but how many actually work with YOUR real concerns, help you to really overcome the things that catch YOU out, assist you to really face the things that scare YOU?  How many of these courses actually leave you a different person when you walk out of the room?  I am not suggesting a day of getting naked with your colleagues.  A learning programme is tailor-made when it accommodates your learning styles and preferences, when it takes account of your current knowledge and capabilities and builds on those, when what is learnt is directly relevant and applicable in your day-to-day and when the providers tune into you and what transformation you are at the threshold of.

How do you work out what you need to develop?  Some of us just know.  If you have embarked on a path of self-knowledge, you are likely to have some sense of the areas within yourself that require further growth and development.  There will be other areas that are less known to you.  We can surround ourselves with trusted friends and associates who don’t shy away from sharing uncomfortable truths with us.  We can develop mindfulness: this is not sitting on a yoga mat burning jossticks (although it may include this); it is developing a discipline of non-judgemental self-observance.  Just like our communities and workplaces, we are complex systems within systems.  The Top Ten Whatevers may be interesting bits of information, but they are unlikely to transform you.

The point again: what is the #1 capability you should be learning?  Answer: the one (or ones) that YOU most need; right now in your life, taking account of what you already know and know how to do and your current situation in life.