Leadership

Leadership

connecting leadership

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What is leadership? In the past year I have written many posts on the subject from a variety of perspectives. Much of it is about ‘connected leadership’ — where people must be both teachers and learners. Neither training programs, nor even coaching, are enough.

Leadership by example through experience becomes the key. Connected leadership is more feminine, retrieving gender balance. It is not about individuals, but connected groups of people, especially engaged citizens. A networked society needs more universal mothers, not authoritative fathers.

We don’t need better leaders. We need organizations and structures that let all people cooperate and collaborate to get work done. Positional leadership is a master-servant, parent-child, teacher-student, employer-employee relationship. It puts too much power in the hands of individuals and blocks human networks from realizing their potential. Changing leaders will not change this type of  system from which they emerged. We need to change the system.

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beyond government and markets

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The key to our transformation toward a network society is citizen sensemaking. The thinking that got us into our current state of affairs will not get us out. Hierarchical leadership, even in democratic governments, is inadequate for the complexity of a networked society. Our governments seem to be completely unprepared to regulate surveillance capitalism, let alone climate change. Leadership on these issues is coming from outside government and in spite of the market. “We want leadership distributed because this is too much weight even for the mightiest of us.” —Jennifer Sertl. A new form of cooperative leadership is needed today. It is emerging.

What network organizational models can we develop to address complex global issues? One local/global example is an initiative to adapt our forests to climate change, connecting governments with the market, through a non-profit — Community Forests International. One of the biggest climate change initiatives is being led by a 16-year old student from Sweden — Greta Thunberg. Now is the time to continue experimenting with new models, such as platform cooperativism.

My focus for over a decade has been to help people learn together. I have been a champion of social learning and developed the personal knowledge mastery framework to help people learn in networks, communities, and at work. The reason that learning is the work today is that our existing organizations and institutions do not have the answers. We have to create new ways to address what governments and the market cannot. First we have to be able to describe and discuss them. This kind of learning — making sense of our collective condition — has been ignored by schools and institutions. There is no curriculum to prepare us.

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we don’t need another hero

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People in leadership positions are very busy — too busy it seems.

“CEOs attend an endless stream of meetings, each of which can be totally different from the one before and the one that follows. Their sheer number and variety is a defining feature of the top job. On average, the leaders in our study had 37 meetings of assorted lengths in any given week and spent 72% of their total work time in meetings.” —HBR 2018-07

But being busy makes them feel important — perhaps even heroic.

“Many of us can get caught up acting like heroes, not from power drives, but from our good intentions and desires to help. Are you acting as a hero? Here’s how to know. You’re acting as a hero when you believe that if you just work harder, you’ll fix things; that if you just get smarter or learn a new technique, you’ll be able to solve problems for others. You’re acting as a hero if you take on more and more projects and causes and have less time for relationships. You’re playing the hero if you believe that you can save the situation, the person, the world.” —Margaret Wheatley

As Margaret Wheatley states, “Heroic leadership rests on the illusion that someone can be in control.” But we don’t need heroes, we need learners.

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toward a network society

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Our current triform society is based on families/communities, a public sector, and a private market sector. But this form, dominated by Markets is unable to deal with the complexities we face globally — climate change, pollution, populism/fanaticism, nuclear war, etc. A quadriform society would be primarily guided by the Network form of organizing. We are making some advances in that area but we still have challenges getting beyond nation states and financial markets.

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the universal mother

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Umair Haque has written what some might consider a controversial article on why AOC [US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] short-circuits the conservative mind and why the universal mother is the antidote to the authoritarian father.

“The universal mother is the antidote to the authoritarian father. Think about it. Reflect on it. Remember it. Treat the bizarre and weird contradictions of post-modern gender theory with the skepticism they deserve — my gender is the most important thing in the world, but yours doesn’t matter at all!! Understand it’s just conservatism and patriarchy in disguise, all too often, all over again — a kind of weak liberation to be sexually desired, to be virgins and whores, but not really existentially valued, as mother-creators, spring-bringers, winter-melters.” —Umair Haque 2019-01-16

For hundreds, even thousands, of years women have been excluded from power and AOC is taking the public podium back. She understands the new medium. I think AOC is a sign of the times and that we will see many more mother figures coming forward in the emerging network era. The reactionaries may currently dominate the public discourse, but over time they will lose.

“Why do our societies feel so out of control? So imbalanced? Like they’re collapsing and crumbling before our very eyes? The reason is very simple, in one way. Too many authoritarian fathers — not enough universal mothers. Societies like American and Britain have long histories of empire building, which reflect cultures of authoritarian fatherhood. It’s no surprise that as the world became a little more powerful, and they became a little less powerful — they retreated into a desperate search for authoritarian fathers. Reagan … Bush … Trump. But Theresa May is Britain’s authoritarian father — not its mother — sternly commanding it, threatening it with terrible punishment, cracking the whip over it.” —Umair Haque 2019-01-16

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authority plus reputation

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According to Daniel Mezick, there are two systems in an organization — formal and informal. Leadership is exercised through authority in the formal system, and through reputation in the informal one. Combined, Mezick calls this simply, ‘hierarchy’, which he says is neither good nor bad. It just is.

I would agree that both exist. We are getting more interested in the informal system and the value of reputation as society and our organizations become more networked. In a networked world, reputation is gaining power. In organizations with increasingly shorter lifespans, formal authority is temporary while reputation can extend beyond the life of an organization.

Rita McGrath says that, “Hierarchy [authority] creates the illusion of control”.

“… but you want to avoid the usual trappings of hierarchy—top-down decision making, approvals, committees. These things create the illusion of control, but in a world that’s changing rapidly, they ironically don’t provide you with actual control. The more you rely on top-down decision making, the less you get that input from the edges that’s so critical to the ability to respond to rapidly changing external environments.”

People in positions of organizational authority may have temporary power but it is their reputation that will help them find their next engagement. There are few of us working today who will not have a ‘next engagement’. Helping make our networks smarter, more resilient, and able to make better decisions will enhance our reputation in our human networks. It will also make for more human organizations.

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in the beginning was the word

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A fairly lengthy article in The New Humanist — Are we city dwellers or hunter-gatherers? — questions the accepted wisdom that it was agriculture that domesticated hunter-gatherer societies and as a result imposed hierarchies and created societal inequalities. The authors cite many discoveries of hunter-gatherer societies that managed to organize on a massive scale and create large complicated structures.

“Still more astonishing are the stone temples of Göbekli Tepe, excavated over 20 years ago on the Turkish-Syrian border, and still the subject of vociferous scientific debate. Dating to around 11,000 years ago, the very end of the last Ice Age, they comprise at least 20 megalithic enclosures raised high above the now barren flanks of the Harran Plain. Each was made up of limestone pillars over 5m in height and weighing up to a ton (respectable by Stonehenge standards, and some 6,000 years before it). Almost every pillar at Göbekli Tepe is a remarkable work of art, with relief carvings of menacing animals projecting from the surface, their male genitalia fiercely displayed. Sculpted raptors appear in combination with images of severed human heads. “

These required some form of institutions and command & control to coordinate work. But these works were mostly done on a seasonal basis with large groups of people getting together for a period of time and then going back to egalitarian tribal ways. This trend was also in evidence in North America and the Arctic. People were willing to get together and give up control in order to hunt or create something larger than themselves. There is also evidence that a selected few of these people were revered and their deaths celebrated to show their wealth and influence.

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embrace the snowflakes

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Q. Why in the age of the internet does the British army need the ‘snowflake generation’ more than ever?

A. Their compassion in dealing with local populations, and their technological prowess, are essential qualities in any modern military operation

Major Heloise Goodley, army chief of general staff’s research fellow at Chatham House, says that new skills are needed for the modern, machine-augmented battlefield.

“The proliferation of automation and artificial intelligence has not decreased the requirement for a human component in war, but it is changing the decision making and cognitive skills required of those soldiers. The army needs soldiers who have the intellectual and psychological aptitude to work in an increasingly automated operational environment, the very computer skills Generation Z have become derided for.” —The Independent 2019-01-05

This is not your father’s Army. It’s not even the Army I left 20 years ago. Back in 1998, on leaving the Army, I felt that global digital networks would change everything — they have. I have more recently noted that the future is networked & feminine and that we need to retrieve gender balance to adapt to new societal and economic realities. That balance is not just masculine/feminine but a balance that utilizes a broad range of human capabilities —  including “phone zombies” & “snowflakes” as the UK recruiting posters state. Just look at the leadership skills that 32,000 respondents indicated were the most important in today’s work world.

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cooperative leadership

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Last week I hosted a video chat on the changing nature of leadership. Part of the discussion was on the changing needs of society as the dominant organizing forms shift — from Tribes to Institutions to Markets, and now to Networks. We are currently in a post-modern phase transition where the vestiges of the old form (Markets) still dominate as new forms of Networks are being experimented with. The ensuing uncertainty drives the current rise of populism, xenophobia, and demagoguery. People are scared. But the future can be positive.

The new network form is retrieving cooperation — sharing freely with no expectation of direct reciprocation — as the primary way of getting work done. We can only influence networks, not direct them. Collaboration — working together for a common objective — worked well in markets because companies could collaborate in order to compete. Collaboration also works well in relatively stable institutions where the rules don’t change too quickly. But collaboration is too limited to work in networks.

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understanding leadership

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My introduction to leadership came fairly early, as I was in Army Cadets and took my first leadership course at age fourteen. Every Summer through high school I would go to Cadet camp, with other boys who looked, acted, and sounded like me. I finished school and joined the Army thinking I had leadership potential. The Army thought so, as I was accepted into military college to become an officer.

College was a bit like Cadet camp, with drill and military stuff that I was used to. There were no women until my last year, when the first female officer cadets entered RMC. So I had no female peers, and on graduation went to an Infantry unit, which was only men at the time.

The introduction of women to an all-male military school was not without its challenges. Many years later one of the first-year students for whom I was ‘responsible’ — more like I was responsible for making their lives difficult — told me that she appreciated that I had treated the men and women equally in our section. Several of my colleagues had not. I’m not sure why I had this moral compass, but it’s likely from my mother who has lived a life of many challenges and raised us in a disciplined way. She had grown up in what could be called the Prussian military tradition.

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