Integral Leadership Review
Formerly LeadershipOpportunity
Integral Leadership In Business and Life Through Coaching
Volume II, No. 2 - February 2002
Table of Contents
- Leadership Quote
- Mission
- Article: Attunement
- A Leadership Coaching Tip
- A Fresh Perspective
- Summary (publications worth noting)
- Coda
Ask about A Leadership Opportunity: An Integral Approach
Leadership Quote
"There are many leaders, not just one. Leadership is distributed. It resides not solely in the individual at the top, but in every person at every level who, in one way or another, acts as a leader to a group of followers - wherever in the organization that person is, whether shop steward, team head, or CEO."
--Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee
Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence, 2002
Mission
I am grateful to the almost 400 subscribers to Integral Leadership Review. Your support means 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-publication is 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 includes 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.
Attunement
Integral Leadership, Part 12
In the last issue we explored the idea of self-management, particularly, management of the relationship between intention and behavior. This encompasses how one's espoused theories with values, beliefs and assumptions relate to the actions one takes. How, for example, does a leader's values relate to how s/he manages action in relation to peers, subordinates and other stakeholders.
Fundamental to all of this is the fit between the leader's intentions, values, beliefs and assumptions and those of the organization of which they are a part. In looking at this we shift from self-management to something that relies on self-awareness and social awareness, key skills in emotional competency in the work of Goleman, et al (see Leadership Quote above). However, the issue of attunement is more difficult to develop because it includes what is in and what is out of awareness.
[Note: in earlier work I have called this alignment. Somehow, this word implies a level of agreement I do not intend. Therefore I have changed to attunement because this is a continuous process of playing with what continuously is moving in and out of harmony. For me, that captures the spirit of the relationship between one's own values, assumptions and beliefs and those of one's cultural context.]
The leader brings a set of intentions, values, beliefs and assumptions to their role. Some are conscious, some not. And they bring these to an organizational culture that is the product of the intentions, values, beliefs and assumptions of the members of the organization. This is also known as organizational culture.
The challenge of attunement is to bring about a supportive relationship between those intentions, values, beliefs and assumptions of the leader and those of the organization's culture. Attunement is the process of relating between the individual and the organization in the arena of culture.
My colleague, John Agno recently published a brief article about a factor in what went wrong at Enron. They had implemented an executive evaluation process that resulted in many individuals being cautious in the face of peer evaluations. John states (read his complete statement in CODA below):
"BusinessWeek …reports that Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling meant to encourage risk-taking through a new peer-review system where a performance review committee (PRC) ranked more than 400 vice-presidents, directors and managers. The decisions of the PRC greatly affected the bonus and stock option grants of the person being reviewed. In practice, the management evaluation system bred a culture in which people were afraid to get crossways with someone who could screw up their reviews."… Enron's new employee evaluation system rewarded highly competitive people who were less likely to share power, authority or information---which undermined any teamwork or institutional commitment. That emphasis on the individual may have pushed many at Enron to cross the line into unethical behavior."
At Enron one leader, Skilling, valued risk-taking and cause to have implemented a system to encourage it, only to find that the very system he initiated bred a culture of minimizing risk-taking. His assumptions and beliefs were not attuned with the culture.
How do we know when we are or are not attuned with the organization culture as leaders? Often we don't. When Jim Collins and Jerry Porras conducted a major study of key values in an international organization, they did not ask executive leaders what those core values were. They trained middle managers to ask front line employees. According to Porras, those employees understood what the core values were because they are impacted by them on a daily basis.
In integral leadership in business I think there are multiple levels of culture to consider. That is one thing that makes attunement so difficult to maintain. Kist as a piano can go out of tune with changes in temperature or humidity or even as a result of being played, so can the leaderget out of tune with the organization culture in the face of continuous change.
In the relationships among leaders and with their stakeholders attunement is about many sets of relationships. The first level is among executive leaders themselves. All are aware of some of their intentions, values, beliefs and assumptions (or mental models) and not of others. Through cultural symbols and the actions of others they all adduce what the culture is and how they fit in the executive suite. Attending to attunement questions then, is also attending to questions of fit.
Executives learn about fit and attunement through trial and error, interpretations that are conscious and unconscious, and creating meaning out of interactions in the realm of engagement (next month's topic). Perhaps one of the most useful ways executives can develop understanding of their leadership culture and their own models is through dialogue, initially dialogue with other executives. This would not preclude parallel conversations with other stakeholders, but other executives may be an important place to start, particularly in recognition of the fact that company leadership is something that is shared and not the purview of just the CEO.
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When coaching an executive about engaging in dialogue with others it is useful to distinguish dialogue from other types of conversation. Dialogue is about learning. The focus of the learning is oneself. It is learning about one's values, beliefs, assumptions and intentions. It brings to awareness what we already know and believe and often surfaces new levels and areas of meaning that can be profoundly important in testing attunement. The leadership coach can support learning this skill by making the potential and practice of dialogue explicit.
A Fresh Perspective
Stages of Development
In the January 2002 issue of the Integral Leadership Review (Self Management) I briefly discussed developmental psychology and mentioned Susann Cook-Greuter's work. A few days ago, I asked her the following question. Here it is with her response.
Question: "I have been reviewing the materials from the LDP (Leadership Development Profile) and your "Descriptions of Ego-Development Stages of Action Logics." I realized that I have a fundamental question: Why is it important to think of these as stages, as opposed to elements/preferences/ competencies/etc. in the human personality? Is one ever totally in one of these stages? Isn't it likely that context influences the individual to shift among these levels? How could it be both/and? How could it be stages and elements…?"
Susann Cook-Greuter: You are asking the eternal questions we developmentalists debate among ourselves. When writing promo or explanatory material the choice between scientific rigor and accuracy and reader-friendliness always arises.
Of course stages are not a clear-cut affair. People do have multiple ways of meaning making at their disposal. The more developed, the more choices there are, or the greater the repertoire since we include and transcend. Earlier ways of meaning making are still available to us. That is why we can be empathetic with young children just discovering the "me, me, me" and asserting it in a tantrum. It's less tolerable when adults show pre-conventional behavior, although even in that case we can put ourselves into the purely self-centered position mentally. Development in childhood is maturationally driven and occurs automatically and in sequence under normal conditions. There is tons of research showing this. There is no preference or choice involved.
One of the main distinctions between the conventional and the post-conventional tier of meaning making is the issue of choice. At the earlier…tiers choice is precisely what is not yet available to people. They act out of the frame that explains the world best to them. Once we have found a better, more comprehensive map for our experience we tend to prefer it over simpler maps which leave more things unexplained or as discrepancies.
I like to use the word "stage" because development, overall, does seem to be stage-like and follow an invariant sequence. Good support and challenge will tend to move people along the spiral to deeper insights and more behavioral choices in ever more areas of influx. Those who can look back on their developmental trajectory generally agree with the sequence. Their very recognition supports the face validity of the stage progression. Short of rare instances of permanent enlightenment, people do have to go through each identification at each stage, then disidentify with that level on their way to an even more spacious understanding of themselves, others and their experience.
I disagree with Spiral Dynamics on people shifting around a lot or being made up of a stacks of Vmemes. This is so because ego development focuses at the level of consciousness or self-awareness a person has not just at their behavior and values. I value many things that I do not myself manage to manifest in my life. I recognize them when I see them, but that's a far cry from living them myself.
Another way of expressing the difference between stage and preference is that to me a real "Diplomat/Conformist" [one of the stages in the LSP model based on the work of Loevinger-ed.] has no choice about the way s/he acts, feels and interprets experience. I am sure I behave occasionally like a Diplomat as well, especially in certain life circumstances or under stress, but I am aware of this as I am executing the behavior. My center of gravity in terms of self-awareness and my preferred way of handling life remains at a higher level.
In my view, that is a major difference in perspective --- and a serious problem with SD in explaining individual development. SD lends itself better to the social macro level. Also using life circumstances as the main motor for development cannot explain the achievement of high-end, or even transcendent insights by rare individuals throughout history.
Stages, too, are part/wholes. Each lower stage becomes part or a subset of the next level, on and on throughout the spiral.
I tend to not think of stages as preferences only because as Fingarette, my favorite author on the topic said 40 years ago, "The ego is the automatic drive towards meaning." It is its orchestrating, synthezising function that is so important, not the changing identifications of the distal self or the many masks we wear and eventually drop.
On another level, and for being more transparent in the commercial world, I sometimes call action logic behavioral preferences as well as capacities, only these are fundamentally of a hierarchical nature. As long as higher is not confused with automatically "better," this is not a problem. The tendency of conventional minds to read stages that way is inherent in conventional meaning making. Conventional is bound by understanding reality in linear terms and to automatically read higher = better. This is deeply engrained in language. Up = good, down = bad etc.
…in my lectures…[I give] a hint of the distinction between higher is better and higher has more capacity. Higher has also more capacity for evil as well as more capacity to recognize evil and shadows in themselves.
I don't tend to describe meaning making in terms of competencies. Because each stage gives rise to new competencies, but a competency by itself does not make a stage. Again, one could talk about development that way to help others have easier access to the material. As a scientist, I am trying to keep distinctions clear at least when I talk to my peers. And I am conscious of them even when I talk to clients. Making new distinctions is fundamental to differentiating and growing! And yet not to insist on making subtle distinctions may also sometimes be the kindest and most integral way to proceed. As always, finding the best fit is an art!
I am in the process of preparing my first e-course lecture for Naropa Institute. So all of these issues are very much on my mind. I don't believe any of these maps and theories will ever do justice to the variability, wonder and mystery of life!!!!! On some level all of this doesn't matter when it comes to living.
(Published with Permission)
Rosabeth Moss Kantor, "Strategy as Improvisational Theater," MIT Sloan Management Review, Winter 2002.
For many of us we are comfortable dancing in the world of new sciences popularized as well as the challenge of integral thinking/feeling/sensing/being. A writer on organizations who has been able to bridge many fields in her work is Rosabeth Moss Kantor, Ernest L. Arbuckle Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. She has recently drawn from her book, Evolve! Succeeding in the Digital Culture of Tomorrow, to offer the essay summarized here.
The traditional model of strategy development resembles traditional theater: well crafted, predictable with unvarying conclusion at the end of each performance.
"The improvisational model throws out the script, brings in the audience, and trusts the actors to be unpredictable--that is, to innovate. Innovation has an inherently improvisational aspect, and writers have long used the metaphor of improvisation in jazz or rock music to describe the actions of innovators on project teams. The metaphor of improvisational theater takes the idea a step further. It shifts attention from the dynamics among members of a project team to the way in which an organization as a whole can become an area for staging experiments that can transform the overall strategy."
Such an approach brings several advantages, not the least of which is that when the company's formal leader issues a major pronouncement about a shift in strategy the organization has already executed it. Kantor denies that her approach is conservative, but fails to examine the implications for leadership (which becomes fostering a climate for improvisation).
The elements of improvisation theater are several:
- Themes: "Improvisation is just chaos and messiness unless it is driven by a clear theme--a topic, a headline or a direction that engages imaginations and gets the action started. (Leaders may generate these themes.)
- Theaters: Examples of theaters are skunkworks, internal venture capital funds and incubators. You cannot effectively foster innovation in highly structured environments.
- Actors: Players must have the capacity to improvise, innovate, taken on unfamiliar roles in unfamiliar contexts. They must adopt behaviors and attitudes that further the action.
- Audiences: They are a part of the performance. Stakeholders need to be brought into the action.
- Suspense: Avoid moving to definition and completion too quickly. Hang out in the potential.
- Successive Versions: Deal with false starts and wrong moves. Do it over again.
Through the use of iterative improvisations a company "can constantly reinvest itself." Improvisation is an organizational strategy for engaging with continuous change in a rapidly changing environment.
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John Agno, "Unintended Consequences of Performance Reviews"
Positive organizational change doesn't take place unless the employee buys into the new corporate culture's intended conformity roles and behavior. The unintended consequences of a new employee evaluation system can send the company reeling.
Last year, we witnessed how Ford Motor Company's use of a new forced-ranking system resulted in a $10.5 million settlement of two class action suits with the company slipping into a crisis management mode of operation.
This year, we are learning some cultural and leadership lessons at Enron---how the emphasis on earnings growth and individual initiative tipped the culture from one intended to rely on aggressive strategy to one that relied on unethical corner-cutting.
BusinessWeek…reports that Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling meant to encourage risk-taking through a new peer-review system where a performance review committee (PRC) ranked more than 400 vice-presidents, directors and managers. The decisions of the PRC greatly affected the bonus and stock option grants of the person being reviewed. In practice, the management evaluation system bred a culture in which people were afraid to get crossways with someone who could screw up their reviews.
Just like at Ford, Enron's new employee evaluation system rewarded highly competitive people who were less likely to share power, authority or information---which undermined any teamwork or institutional commitment. That emphasis on the individual may have pushed many at Enron to cross the line into unethical behavior.
In a tough business climate, company priorities shift and more stringent performance reviews can affect employee raises, deny bonus payments and mark the poorest performers for dismissal.
Beware of the 'group think' impact on how you give and receive performance reviews this year. A down economy is not an excuse for unfair management practices. Please do your part to make sure the performance review process goes fairly and smoothly in these uncertain times.
John Agno is a former executive who is now an executive coach. He is the founder of the Coach2Coach Network. www.CoachThee.com
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
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