Tag: creative practice

I’ve been working with a leader who very clearly doesn’t like to be questioned. He wields his authority to control topics and dissuades difficult discussions in large groups. In small groups and one-on-one, he uses desultory commentary to take up air and judging criticism to curtail openness. His position requires these types of conversations and he hosts them in a perfunctory way, but because of his behavior they produce few actionable results and he appears to be ok with that.
My interest in his defensiveness is not meant as an indictment of his character. He’s a lovely and learned guy, truly, and great strengths show in his presence and his own scholarly work. But he has a leadership problem that hobbles his organizational effectiveness. As a scholar of leadership theory, a consultant, and a leadership practitioner myself, I’m curious about that management dysfunction. What to do — from any position — when a formal leader stifles productive discussion?
The classic HBR essay, In Praise of the Incomplete Leader, provides the framework for integrative leadership practice. Leaders recognize and routinely scan relevant perspectives in order to accurately understand their field of play. Because most innovative solutions come from opportunistic anomalies in complex systems, leaders need to be attuned to both familiar and foreign sources of insight and information. Then, they relate to and engage those perspectives to create a shared vision. The essay says, “If they realize other people aren’t joining in, or buying into the vision, they don’t just turn up the volume; they engage in a dialogue about the reality they hope to produce.” Finally, leaders engage teams to invent solutions together.
These concepts are well established in the theoretical evolution of the leadership field (here’s a handy chart on leadership theory if you’re curious) and there’s plenty of evidence that this approach works. But not all leadership practitioners are studied in what they do and increases in formal power appear to exacerbate this particular dysfunction. I’m curious about how to encourage a transformation in that circumstance. It is technically fixable, but he’s stubborn about it and that makes it an adaptive challenge. What conditions need to be present for a leader of high formal authority to make that kind of shift?
One element that affects transformation is the risk environment. Leaders tend to make adaptive changes when confronted with realities dissonant with their visions. In other words, when the shit hits the fan and the normal approach doesn’t work anymore, they are more willing to try something else. The risk with risk, though, is that conservative leaders often retrench. They shut down difficult conversations, hide mistakes, and denigrate people they perceive as detractors, thereby cutting themselves off from the opportunities right in front of them. They seek to deny or erase the very information they need to inform the new approach. Ironically, it’s a devoted team and close confidantes that can cut through the fear and loneliness to challenge old frames, offer insight, and give the necessary permissions to fail. It’s not the work of the formal leader himself, but the courageous actions of those nearby who see the consequences of his behavior and whom he trusts.
Liminality also supports transformative change. Environments that encourage experimentation, whether they be idea spaces or physical spaces, can make novelty seem more comfortable and intuitively trigger new thoughts and behaviors. It’s why we go away on retreats, plan brainstorming meetings, schedule studio days, and take friends out for coffee when they seem boxed in. Leaders have to know not to control the frames in those spaces, though. Entrenched leaders often unconsciously cue others that the environment may seem different but the old rules apply. They stand at the front of the room, selectively call on people to speak, and form groups around old patterns. They use the design of the event itself to reify existing power structures, so that there’s nothing interstitial about it. It’s the work of other people who carefully cut off those controls to make room for something different or unknown to emerge. This is the secret power of facilitators and event planners.
Scaffolding helps too. We know from educational theory that learners who leap do so because they believe there is a new platform within their reach. In organizational terms, it is the human resources infrastructure — goal-setting, supervisory oversight, and regular performance evaluations — that provides the expectation of professional development and the support for it. That works for leaders positioned inside the organization but for entrenched executive leaders, this process is often externalized, sanitized, and highly politicized which renders it ineffective as a tool in transformational change. Again, it would be a board or an oversight committee exercising its own leadership to build a new frame for top leaders to climb.
Unfortunately, transformation is sometimes thrust upon these leaders by debilitating professional setback, health crisis, or profound tragedy. Entrenched leaders sometimes create those conditions for themselves, perhaps as a result of an unconscious need to relieve the existential pain of being disconnected and unchanged. More often, the bus just breaks down and they’re left on the side of the road with no map and no way home. Thus begins an excruciating journey, from which some emerge better and many others are simply broken. It’s risk and liminality without the benefit of scaffolding, and it’s a very tough way to learn.
I’m not sure what it will be with this guy, though I hope very much that the people around him accurately assess his problem and apply their own empathy and power, ideally before nature and time take their toll. In another essay, I’d like to explore the role of cultural institutions as a place where powerful people can confront their demons and find their blind spots. There is some precedent for museums as places of professional development for doctors, lawyers, and law enforcement. If we were to be that for entrenched organizational leaders, how would we attract them and what would we do?