Integral Leadership Review
Formerly LeadershipOpportunity
Integral Leadership In Business and Life Through Coaching
Volume II, No. 1 - January 2002
Table of Contents
- Leadership Quote
- Mission
- Article: Self Management
- A Leadership Coaching Tip
- A Fresh Perspective
- Summary (publications worth noting)
- E-mail to the Editor
Ask about A Leadership Opportunity: An Integral Approach
Leadership Quote
"In British Coal, there was no leadership. Managers simply followed the dictate of the government.But when I joined the union in the 1960's, miners were the thought leaders at the vanguard of improvements for working people and society. Mining destroys your lungs, crushes your body.
"Working underground makes you crave improvement. A century before, it was the miners' dues that helped build institutes of learning, theaters, libraries, reading rooms.
"Our job in the union was not only to represent our workers.but also to explain to them what it meant to work together, share together, support the national health services, improve the education system. The world was what we were working with."
--Tyrone O'Sullivan, Welsh labor union leader whose union bought out the Tower Collery which is now owned and run by the workers. www.baynet.co.up/colliery (quoted in Fast Company, November 2001).
Mission
I am grateful to the subscribers of Integral Leadership Review. Your support has meant that we can move closer to a way of viewing and being in the world that is integrative, generative and supportive of our evolving integrity--learning to align our theory and our action, our values and assumptions with achieving what is important to us. Also, I am grateful to the many kindnesses, suggestions and offers of support we have received.
The mission of this e-journal has been to be a practical guide to the application of an integral perspective to the challenges of leadership in business and life and to the effective relationship between executive/business coaches and their clients. My vision is that this will be a place where others, as well as myself, can continue to develop and share ideas about integral leadership and integral coaching.
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Self-Management
Integral Leadership, eleventh in a series
The articles offered on integral leadership to this point have been focused on one of four sets (individual or collective, internal or external) in four levels of leadership:
- Getting individual leaders onto the same field. (Commitment to shared purpose.)
- Assuring effective use of leadership resources. (Competence in leading.)
- Appropriate teamwork. (Innovative players on a team of leaders.)
- Building relationships and involving stakeholders in achieving business objectives. (Connected entrepreneurs in a leadership enterprise.)
While there may still be much to explore related to each of these themes, we will return to them later. For the time being, this and other articles to follow will shift the focus to working the relationship of the four factors through self-management, alignment, engagement and leadership system evolution.
Self-management here refers to the developmental (or anomic, when poorly executed) process of relating internal/individual (intention) to external/individual (behavior). And this is a very, very big subject. It relates to all that we have evolved as a species about learning, growing and developing as human beings, physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually--education, training, therapy, counseling and consulting, human potential activities, physical development and coaching.
Among integral theorists, most notably Ken Wilber, developmental psychology has held a special position. This includes the work of Robert Kegan (The Evolving Self, In Over Our Heads), the spiral dynamics of Graves a la Don Beck (Spiral Dynamics by Beck and Chris Cowan), and the work of Loevinger, particularly as applied by Susanne Cook-Greuter (Leadership Development Profile) and Bill Torbert (Personal and Organisational Transformations, The Power of Balance), respectively. It is beyond the scope of this article to elaborate these, but the references are hopefully useful to anyone wishing to explore further.
The purposes of self-management include keeping and evolving focus, making behavioral adjustments, learning from experience and so on. Self-management is fundamentally the process by which we observe our inner and outer experiences and make adjustments through learning, altered assumptions, experimentation and the like. We develop knowledge and skills in doing this. Self-management is the manifestation of those skills for development.
In business leadership, self-management attends to the relationship between individual leaders' intentions (values, beliefs, assumptions, etc.) and their behaviors in their roles as leadership group members, leadership organization contributors, leadership team players and leadership enterprise entrepreneurs.
An example: Roger believed that it was important for him to educate corporate customers of his technology. His approach to marketing and sales relied for some time on this strategy. After a while, sales began to slide. His belief continued to drive his behavior in the way it always had. But something had changed. Thus, awareness is the first critical step in self-management.
Roger asked one of his customers why their purchases had declined. He was told that his technology was getting out dated. Later, as he walked to his car, Roger got angry and started calling his customer derogatory names. He got on his cell phone, called one of his managers and complained bitterly about his customer's loyalty and understanding of the technology.
His manager's response surprised him. "Maybe there are some innovations we need to be looking at."
As a leader in his company Roger decided to find out for himself what was going on. After talking with a more of his best customers, he discovered that their companies were beginning to find additional applications that were important to them in dealing with shifts in their markets. Newer companies were occupying that niche. These customers were not totally satisfied with how things were working
Roger found himself being confronted with his attachment and belief in the technology he had been instrumental in developing and bringing to market. The fundamental technology was sound and it needed to evolve. So did Roger's assumptions and beliefs. He worked with each to identify their requirements, went back to his company and successfully worked with others to get this new functionality available in their suite of applications. Sales began to climb again.
In order for this change to happen, a not so exceptional business development, Roger had to go through a process of self-management. This involved being aware, noticing a variance between results desired from behaviors based on his beliefs and the results he was actually getting, gathering new information and testing changes.
Thus, self-management is about learning from the relationships between
- commitment and being a member in the leadership group,
- competence and contributing to the leadership organization,
- capacity for innovation and being a leadership team player, and
- ability to connect with stakeholders as an entrepreneur in a leadership enterprise.
Self-management uses these relationships between what is internal to the leader and the behaviors that stem from that to growing and evolving learning in leadership.
Self-management is a critical set of skills for leaders in the face of change in so many dimensions of their businesses, changes that seem to happen slowly or in an instant. The successful business leader understands his/her relationship to self-management. In articles to follow, we will explore how self-management relates to alignment at the level of values and beliefs, engagement at the level of action, and the evolution of the business leadership system.
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Leaders are seeking outcomes from their coaching experiences related to awareness, purpose, competence and well-being, says B\Coach's Mike Jay. Coaching is probably the most valuable support system for achieving these outcomes through an evolving process of self-management. But coaches need to beware. Because we see behaviors or hear words that have meaning for us about developmental needs related to self-management, does not mean that is what is going on. When we coach to these, we are coaching to gaps. When the client becomes aware of these issues or opportunities they have created an opening for the use of self-management to create change. Stimulate the client's capacity to identify openings and to refine their skills in self-management.
Tim Sanders, "Love is the Killer App," Fast Company, February 2002.
Back in the mid-eighties, if memory serves, Roger Harrison published an article on love in business. At that time he indicated that we couldn't really discuss the idea of love because the socio-political dynamics and machismo that dominated the business culture of the time precluded it. Have times changed? Tim Sanders, a senior executive at Yahoo, seems to think so.
Citing Milton Mayeroff's (On Caring) definition of love as the "selfless promotion of the growth of another," Sanders extends the idea to business with this:
"Love is the act of intelligently and sensibly sharing your knowledge, networks, and compassion with your business partners."
And with regard to leadership he continues,
"The secret to being a high-impact leader and the essence of individual and corporate success: Learn as much as you can as quickly as you can and share your knowledge aggressively; expand your network of people who share your values and connect as many of them with each other as possible; and, perhaps most important, be as openly human as you can be and find the courage to express genuine emotion in the harried, pressure-filled world of work."
A heady -- no, "hearty!" -- message from a corporate executive. In a sidebar the articles explains "why love conquers all."
- You will build an outstanding brand.
- You will create and experience (that attracts others).
- You will get access to people's attention.
- You will harness the power of positive presumption. (trust)
- You will receive exceptional feedback about the value of your knowledge.
Thus the three critical elements of the power of love in business are knowledge, networks and compassion
"People who love what they're doing, who love to learn new things, to meet new people, and to share what and whom they know with others: These are the people who wind up creating the most economic value and, as a result, moving their companies forward."
I wonder what Roger Harrison would think of that?
How does this article relate to the idea of Integral Leadership? I think it is in representing the value of bringing our full selves to leadership--and followership--including attention to the cultures of our organizations. When organizational cultures preclude bringing all that we bring as human beings, the holon is "broken" and our potential, individually and collectively, is diminished. Love is an expression of spirit. Spirit is one of the aspects of being human. It is one of the elements of integral development.
Gretchen M. Spreitzer and Robert E. Quinn, A Company of Leaders, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001.
There is a growing literature about leadership as a function that must be fostered throughout a business organization to effectively engage with the rapid pace of development and change faces by many businesses, as well as providing the quality of customer service required to thrive. This contributes to our knowledge and understanding of integral leadership because it recognizes that leadership is not just an individual act, a heroic act, but a collective phenomenon, as well.
This recent offering is essentially about how executives can use empowerment to achieve leadership practices throughout their organizations. It offers examples of successful empowerment and strategies for fostering it. Empowerment has a history of failure.
They attribute this to five factors:
- Ambivalence about implementing empowerment,
- Bureaucratic culture that protects traditional ways,
- Conflict within the organization over what and how it should be,
- Personal time constraints precluding commitment and action, and
- Fundamental misunderstanding of how empowerment is achieved.
In order to build empowered leadership throughout an organization it is necessary change the mindsets of people. ".genuine empowerment consists of fundamental personal beliefs that employees have about their role in relation to the organization."
Their prescription for effective empowerment includes:
- Meaning: having a personal connection to work,
- Self-Determination: having freedom and discretion
- Competence: confidence about one's abilities
- Impact: making a difference.
All four are essential for empowerment to be effective.
The benefits of empowerment, the dispersal of leadership through the organization, include:
- Individuals view selves as effective,
- Employees are less resistant to change,
- Individuals are more innovative,
- Individuals are transformational in their leadership abilities, including influencing upward,
- Higher job satisfaction.
- Empowering yourself,
- Creating clear vision and challenge,
- Continuous security and support for employees,
- Continuous openness and trust, and
- Continuous guidance and control.
These disciplines stand in tension with each other and provide the field of paradox of empowered leadership,
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"Everything Tyrone O'Sullivan knows about leadership and management he learned at the coal face, at the pithead, and on the picket line.
- "Take your place in history.
- You've been given a unique part to play at a unique stage of your company's history. Make the most of it. 'No one could write a history of the mining industry without the Tower experience. Now, as leaders, we are major players in that history,'
- "Pat, don't kick.
- Create a workforce that is working with you -- not for or against you. 'If you've had nothing but kicks in your life, another kick will make no difference. What will make a difference is a pat on the back and being allowed to share in the good times.'
- "First ask, then act.
- Always manage by consent with those in the know. 'I don't care what industry you're in: All the knowledge is on the shop floor, not in the boardroom. If you don't mine the knowledge from those people, you're failing your company.'
- "Know when to walk away.
- Always know your price; don't sell yourself short. 'When we first bid for the pit, the power stations wouldn't give us the price for the coal that we needed. I told them that all my working life I'd fought to ensure my men had decent wages -- and that I wasn't going to undersell them now. I walked away. They caved in. My problem is that I always think I'm right, but I don't consider it a weakness. I've got to have confidence in my judgment."
Tyrone O'Sullivan from Fast Company, November 2001
Thanks for your consistent sharing of your e-journal! I appreciate it!!
Russ, you might consider doing an article on why diversity is good business. The reality is that diversity does effect the bottom line. I personally go to businesses that represent the values that I hold, when I have a choice. Innovation, creativity and remaining on the cutting edge is enhanced with good well thought out diversity strategies. If diversity is to be truly effective one needs to have diversity integrated into the organization as threads that are weaved through a tapestry!
In relationship to the study that you cited [Barsade, et al (see 12/01 issue of ILR)]:
I can't help but wonder how valid this info is based on the diversity of the CEO's, 97% being male, 11% females as team members? Hmmm, doesn't sound like diversity? How many were people of color, had a disability, hidden or not hidden, etc. That certainly could skew the findings, now couldn't it? Sorry, but I definitely have some strong feelings about this area. We frequently give lip service to diversity and do it because we think it's a good thing to do, when in reality, it's just plain good business! "
"The surest way to know the future, is to design it yourself!" -
Marcia B., PersonAbility, Inc. (www.person-ability.com) Get "The Business Edge" sign up now! Author of Awakenings: An Eye To The Soul, Vol's.1 & 2, and Navigating the Minefields of the Employment Arena.
Dedication
Dedicated to Chris Newham with deep appreciation.
Feedback
Got any?
russ@leadcoach.com
Thanks for taking the time to consider this epublication in a world of data overload. For leaders, collaborators, consultants, academics and coaches alike, I welcome you to some ideas and a dialogue that may benefit us all. I hope you will contact me soon with your idea, reference or article. Suggestions on improvement are welcome.
Russ Volckmann, PhD
Coaching Leaders in Business and Life
Email: russ@leadcoach.com
Web: www.leadcoach.com, Tel: 831.333-9200, FAX: 831.656-0110
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