Integral Leadership Review
Formerly LeadershipOpportunity
Integral Leadership In Business and Life Through Coaching
Volume II, No. 3 - March 2002
Table of Contents
- Leadership Quote
- Mission
- Article: Attunement Revisited
- A Leadership Coaching Tip
- A Fresh Perspective
- Summary (publications worth noting)
- Coda
Ask about A Leadership Opportunity: An Integral Approach
Leadership Quote
"Mustering the courage to interrogate reality is a central function of a leader. And that requires the courage to face three realities at once. First, what values do we stand for -- and are there gaps between those values and how we actually behave? Second, what are the skills and talents of our company -- and are there gaps between those resources and what the market demands? Third, what opportunities does the future hold -- and are there gaps between those opportunities and our ability to capitalize on them?
"Now, don't get the wrong idea. Leaders don't answer those questions themselves. That's the old definition of leadership: The leader has the answers -- the vision -- and everything else is a sales job to persuade people to sign up for it. Leaders certainly provide direction. But that often means posing well-structured questions, rather than offering definitive answers. Imagine the differences in behavior between leaders who operate with the idea that 'leadership means influencing the organization to follow the leader's vision' and those who operate with the idea that 'leadership means influencing the organization to face its problems and to live into its opportunities.' That second idea -- mobilizing people to tackle tough challenges -- is what defines the new job of the leader."
--William C. Taylor
Mission
I am grateful to the more than 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 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 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 Revisited
Integral Leadership, Part 13
In the last issue I presented the notion of attunement as a process in which an individual executive leader attended to the relationship between their own values, beliefs and assumptions and those of other executive leaders. This discussion could equally apply to the relationship between a CEO and the rest of the company, a team leader and other members of the team or to a middle level manager and the members of his organization. It could apply to any constellation of people in a leadership situation.
In the last few years, Charles Hampden-Turner and Fons Trompenaars have extended the formers work in Radical Man (where he outlines what is still a powerful model of psycho-social development and an approach that continues to influence his work today), Maps of the Mind (perhaps Hampden-Turner's most well known work in which he explores left and right brain views of various theories and models), Sane Asylum (about his experiences with the Delancy Street Foundation) and more recently Charting the Corporate Mind, Creating Corporate Culture and Riding the Waves of Culture in exploring values, diversity and leadership in global businesses. Their most recent work, 21 Leaders for the 21st Century, is a fascinating treatise that outlines the leadership challenges and responses of 21 leaders in global businesses from Richard Branson at Virgin to Kiriyenko and the Russian oil industry to Jim Morgan at Applied Materials. The scope and credentials of this study are significant and unique in the literature on business leadership in the world today.
While the stories of how these leaders recognized and responded to significant leadership challenges are well worth reading for the wealth of insight they provide, I focus on this work because it suggests a way to begin to understand the relationship between individual values, beliefs and assumptions and those of a leadership (team, organization) culture.
When a leader is in harmony with other leaders at the level of their own values and the leadership culture, the most important things to guard against is probably some form of blind spot or group think (collective blind spots). It is when there are differences due to a form of diversity that many individual and collective dilemmas will surface. Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars summarize these at the global level as seven major dimensions of difference which trans-cultural competence must deal with effectively. Briefly, these are:
| 1. universalism (rule making) |
particularism (particularism/exceptions) |
| 2. individualism (self-interest and personal fulfillment) |
communitarianism (group interest and social concern) |
| 3. specificity (preference for "hard" precise standards) |
diffusion (preference for pervasive "soft" processes) |
| 4. neutral (emotions inhibited) |
affective (emotions expressed) |
| 5. achievement (status through success) |
ascription (status ascribed to person's potential-age, family, education, etc.) |
| 6. inner-directed (control and direction from within) |
outer-directed (control and direction from outside) |
| 7. sequential (time as a dance with passing increments) |
synchronous (time as a race with circular iterations) |
They have identified 100 leadership dilemmas and focus on 21 in the book. What is important about all of this is not the taxonomy, but the concept of reconciliation. First, leaders must recognize the values dilemma. Then they must respect it or be caught in a trap of difference. Finally, reconciliation is essential to an attunement process.
How to achieve reconciliation? Through virtuous circles and by avoiding vicious circles. Here is where this methodology or model is reminiscent of Hampden-Turner's model of psychosocial development. This model is used to describe the process of individual and social development through interaction. It is also used to describe anomic interactions leading to individual and social alienation or anomie. Virtuous circles are developmental while vicious circles are anomic. Reconciliation occurs through virtuous circles and fails in vicious circles.
This is all relevant to leadership because, according to their strongly supportive research, trans-cultural leadership is about creating virtuous circles and limiting vicious circles among competing variables. While their examples are very much drawn from international business, particularly situations that are cross national and cross cultural, their approach may apply equally well to understanding the role of leadership in business of all sorts. It may be that the differences are more subtle or about mental models. The approach should work equally well.
An example may be in order. A state hospital for the developmentally disabled is located in a rural community somewhat removed from the main paths of commerce in a certain western state. Historically, local families have staffed the hospital and much of its administration. In recent years, however, more and more personnel have been brought in from the "outside." This has stirred resentment on the part of local families because they had come to view the hospital as their guarantee of employment and that was being threatened. The administration sought to bring in better educated, better trained experts than could be found locally. Thus we have a conflict of the 5th type: achievement vs. ascription. Locals favored ascription while the new administration (from outside) favored achievement.
This dynamic of construction and deconstruction, of virtuous and vicious circles, is what attunement is about: individual participation with the harmonious and dissonant chords of culture. It is at the playing edge of consciousness and awareness. Leadership, individually and collectively rests on this play.
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In working with executives around attunement, there are a myriad of potential openings to explore. Ultimately, the executive must choose which to follow. As a coach, however, it is important to support the executive in exploring them. In the case of attunement, openings will include attention to issues of identity, such as values and beliefs about being a team player. As executives explore these, support them to look not just from their own point of view, but also from the perspective of their leadership system. Executives may shift from being subject to these assumptions toward holding them as object. This is a significant developmental step that opens possibilities they would not have seen otherwise.
A Fresh Perspective
Leadership: A Conversation with Chris Cowan
I had the good fortune to have a conversation with Chris Cowan, coauthor of Spiral Dynamics recently. The conversation ranged over a number of subjects. Initially, the subjects were around ideas related to development, generally. Here we share some comments about leadership and the use of Spiral Dynamics in development.
RV: Would you summarize how you're using Spiral Dynamics with leaders in business and organizations?
CC: What little I do is just show them that different people respond to different leaders, leadership styles and strategies. You simply have to build in a leadership system. It can be part of strategic planning or whatever. You have to build in a system that first matches where followers are and then stretches about half a notch ahead of that so they have something to follow as opposed to something to match.
RV: How is it a leadership "system?"
CC: We build a whole coherent system, because it's a leader-follower system dynamic. When you're looking at organizations you have to do multiple little sub-spirals and think: what's the management philosophy; what's the purpose; what's the individual competency package of this 'leader' person; what's the nature of this follower; what's the nature of the past they're trying to glue together? You have to plug all that stuff in.
RV: I start with the assumption that leadership is a function that exists anywhere in the organization. If you want to create change in your organization then one thing you have to do is start with the executive leadership. The executive leadership can be considered at the very least a leadership sub-system, if not a leadership system in its own right. That leadership system among the executives is one that involves development at the individual level as well as the collective level. Does your approach think in those terms.
CC: Leadership functions exist throughout an organization at multiple layers. You have to develop them where the work is done and where the work is facilitated. We need to ask what are we doing here, and why, and how are we going to be doing it next, and why?
RV: My goodness, what an original idea. (Laughter)
CC: All of those things have to be massaged and intertwined. Leadership is about how to do that. Spiral Dynamics acknowledges that folks expect and need different things from the persons they're working with. So we draw out different kinds of management/leadership systems. We ask, what's the nature of their work environment; what's the nature of the workplace; what's the nature of how they communicate; what's the nature of things that motivate or demotivate? You have to create a system where, since you're going to have a mix of human beings, you will keep them all reasonably comfortable, reasonably productive, not going nuts and continue to grow.
RV: How are you working with leaders?
CC: All I do is training here and there and sit down and chat with them. We don't have a huge consulting practice at all. All we do is writings and trainings. We just sit down with folks and show them the stuff and listen to what they're trying to do.
One guy in Holland ran a string of health care facilities. He was put into the position of being managing director to create culture change. He was mandated to be a change leader. We sat with him and explored what he could do. How can he lead given the nature of the people he's got. We asked him, "What's the nature of your people; what's the nature of the existence problems they're confronting; what are the realities of what they might and might not be able to do?" You have to be reality based and say, "Okay, yeah, you could dream and do this, but reality-wise, this is what is feasible. So how can you accomplish that, get that incremental 10% improvement where everybody is happy?
That's all I know to do with people. We just sit with them, listen to the problem and try to analyze the problem. We try to leave them with a tool so that when they go about their business they can apply it and then come back with email or phone calls and say, "Help! That didn't make sense!" or "We agreed to this and this was stupid. What are some alternatives?"
RV: Since you co-wrote Spiral Dynamics has your model or your concepts of leadership changed?
CC: I've learned a lot more about Graves' theories since then. I have loosened up. I was a little more on the yellow soapbox then than I have become of late. I think there is an awful lot of strength throughout all the systems and so the idea of trying to grow people is more and more anathema to me. I like the idea of letting people find congruence where they are. They can do some horizontal change and open the doors for them to make vertical shifts if they want to and as they can. We cannot try to mandate it, to enforce it or to be quite so strong in pushing it.
It's not an "everybody's beautiful" thing. People don't change until they acknowledge more complex existence. You may change their lingo and you may change some of their behaviors. You can certainly adjust some of what they're doing.
While they're doing it their fundamental being isn't going to shift any. I've gotten away from that pretense: pretending I was going to change who people are. Now I just worry about how can they do better? How can they be of use? How can their little 75-80 years be better years? And enjoy them.
RV: That's the spirit in which I work with a leadership holarchy that starts at where are you trying to go? I characterize that as strategic objectives, business objectives: those that are short term; they're not highly visionary or any of that, although they may be derived from that. Then I ask the question as a collective, what is your leadership purpose? By defining your purpose you establish the definition of your leadership group.
Still at the collective level, what are the leadership resources that are required to implement your purpose and that in effect gives you the impetus for creating a leadership organization within your company. This is still focused on the executive level.
Next, in order to realize your purpose and achieve your objectives and utilize your resources effectively, sometimes the linear dynamics of organization don't work very well and you've got to shift nonlinear stuff among the executives. It is about change and involves teamwork. They've got to get inspired as a team. Ultimately, collectively as a set of leaders, they create a vital enterprise. This involves taking what they have built among themselves as executive leaders and engaging with stakeholders from that place. All of that is in support of trying to achieve those business objectives.
CC: You began with the right question, which is, "What business are you in? What's your purpose here? What are you doing?"
RV: At the individual level, corresponding to leadership purpose is commitment and membership in the group. Corresponding to resources is competence and being a contributor to the organization. Corresponding to inspired teamwork is capacity for innovation as a team player. And corresponding to the vital enterprise is importance of connection to stakeholders as an entrepreneur in the service of the business objectives.
CC: Cool.
RV: That's what I mean about a structural kind of arrangement, where I think that spiral dynamics has something to say about how people work those issues. I haven't put that together yet, but it's intriguing.
CC: You've nailed what it really does. Spiral dynamics is a descriptive, not a prescriptive thing. When I say Spiral Dynamics I mean Graves' work. All the talk about Spiral Dynamics is just re-labeling Graves' ideas. These ideas are not novel; they're just his stuff carried forward in large measure.
RV: At a meeting recently someone talked about issues around the application of integral perspectives and I basically affirmed what the person was saying: "As long as you're descriptive, you're okay, but as soon as you start getting prescriptive, you're in trouble." (Laughter)
CC: I tell people it gives them a scaffolding for a business, because it let's them put up a platform to surround the structure. They can climb all over this platform and look at it from different angles. They can chip, nick, repair and change the rocks and so forth, but this model basically is that scaffolding and not the structure. They've got to have a set of tools in hand when they climb up on the scaffolding. There's nothing waiting for them, so they've got to have Myers-Briggs, leadership models and all that stuff.
RV: Emotional intelligence?
CC: Yeah, emotional intelligence, and, all that.you name it, whatever. They can have anything they want in terms of tools, because this basically lays out a better way to pick which tools to use, when and where. It lets them have a clearer picture of this building. My fantasy is that it is a better picture of what to do and also what not to do. I think its part of the hype that sometimes surrounds this spiral stuff, that it is hyped as more than it is. It is both more than it is and less than it is. And people are looking for answers that this does not pretend to offer. This began as a question of studying the nature of human nature and how it changes.
RV: And what I get from you is that it's an excellent way of creating a descriptive window, to create meaning out of what you're experiencing and what you're seeing. As soon as you turn it into something that says you really ought to want to be yellow, or something like that, then you've fallen off into the abyss of prescriptive morality.
CC: That's precisely it. There's been a lot of that going on with this stuff lately. That is anathema to understanding the point of view. The point of view fundamentally is, you can't do that. People aren't going to change until they're ready for change. You don't, you can't change them. They can change, but you can't change them. So all the talk about uplifting them and trying to yellow-ize them and make them into the second tier shows a fundamental misunderstanding of this model.
James S. Payne, Christopher C. Cowan, David W. Cox and V. Randolph Jordon. Differential Management & Motivation: An Advanced Understanding of Human Development & Motivation. Charlottesville, VA: Lincoln-Rembrandt Publishing, 1994. (7 Elliewood Avenue, Charlottesville, VA 22903)
As people interested in an integral approach to leadership, our attention has been drawn to Spiral Dynamics through the excellent work of Chris Cowan and Don Beck. Their extension of the work of Clare Graves has been a major contribution, not just to integral thinking but also to influencing a more peaceful change process in South Africa. There is hope that its perspectives can influence our thinking about dealing with differences and change.
Ken Wilber has embraced Spiral Dynamics as representative of developmental psychology. Other perspectives in developmental psychology have also been included in integral thinking, including the work of Robert Kegan and Jane Loevinger, particularly as extended by the work of Bill Torbert, Susann Cook-Greuter and Otto Laske. It is clear that at this stage of our thinking, developmental psychology offers models and concepts that parallel the idea of the holon and of the holarchy and their attendant concepts (like streams).
Recently Don Benson told me about a book that is also built on the work of Clare Graves. Note that Differential Management & Motivation was also written by Chris Cowan (and others). Published in 1994 this work predates the more famous Spiral Dynamics by Don Beck and Chris Cowan. Here I wish to share with you a couple of notions related to what stood out for me as I read this earlier work.
A core theme of Graves' work is that we develop; we change in our lives. He identified a pattern that is most widely known as spiral dynamics with its use of colors to represent stages of psychological (and spiritual) development. These relative positions on the developmental spiral are based on the worldview we hold at each level.
One of the things that interested me about this work is the use of a staircase metaphor for development. "Graves' data revealed that the staircase tends to spiral between Individualist/Elitist ways of thinking and Communal/Collective view." Each step in this spiral staircase presents a developmental opportunity at that level. Each step is necessary to move up the spiral staircase.
When we use this idea to try to understand what is going on in our own lives or in others' it is important to note that the model helps us understand how we think but not what we believe, why we might act but not what we can do. In other words, these stages are about how we make decisions in our lives. As such, they can provide useful insights to individual leaders. Each level has value and merit in its own terms.
The model is useful in understanding the dynamics of collective leadership and the diversity that is inherent in most collective contexts. It reminds us that growth and development, whether individual or collective, must address the issues of consciousness, awareness and knowing to move to higher levels. Furthermore, growth and development are multifaceted processes subject to challenge and reversal in the changing world around us.
The approach suggests that there are three conditions for this growth
- "Present Level needs must be satisfied.
- "Dissonance or a challenge must be present
- "Exposure to other types of thinking, acting, and behaving."
The model and strategies laid out here are a precursor to Beck and Cowan's Spiral Dynamics. And the authors of this earlier work point out "most people do not fit neatly into any single Level. Graves' theory helps us think in terms of 'types in' rather than 'types of' people. Most people are combination of Levels." Somehow, despite this affirmation of how individuals do not fit neatly into boxes (a point of view that I read into Beck and Cowan's work as well, returning to this earlier work is a welcome reminder.
Hopefully we can find a way to language developmental typologies so that we can drop labels for people and apply them to phenomenon that are widely shared by all human beings. Certainly, we all face developmental challenges. And we have achieved progress during our lifetimes. The authors of the two works considered here would no doubt agree that the popularization of their work has led to inappropriate labeling. But perhaps there will be more about these issues as they apply to leadership in subsequent issues.
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David Kirkpatrick, "Net Gains for the World's Poor", Fortune, 4/2/02.
What could be more of an example of integral leadership than building a system that uses technology to link people and capital the world over to support developmental projects and small businesses get started among the world's poor? Such a project, initiated by two former World Bank employees is spreading among leaders all over the world. This is a story that involves both individual and collective leadership, that challenges beliefs and values and focuses on action. This is the story of DevelopmentSpace as reported in Fortune magazine.
When Mari Kuraishi and Dennis Whittle were involved in a World Bank effort to generate innovative ideas for distributing funding for development they were surprised 150 very good ideas. This led to a worldwide process for generating proposals for the distribution of $3 million that attracted 1100 proposals and 44 winning projects. They took this experience and create DevelopmentSpace on the Internet as a place where people can contribute directly to development projects for the poor, including a project in Uganda for funding mothers in business so they could earn the money to provide adequate nutrition for their children.
And they have built an Internet process that automates the process of connecting funding to people who have projects as. They went live in February.
"DevelopmentSpace plans to leverage the work of existing institutions in the field, even as it enables anyone to contribute to development. A number of grant-giving agencies have already expressed interest in using the new site as a tool to find projects. Nonprofit groups and trained volunteers in developing countries will vet projects before they can be listed. When DevelopmentSpace gets to the next stage--facilitating investments--it will work closely with micro-lending institutions, which have well-established procedures for cultivating financial discipline and responsibility among small borrowers.."
While they have not yet made it possible to directly fund a small business, say in Congo, Lebanon or El Salvador, that is a feature they hope to bring on line soon. In the meanwhile people are already investing in a project to bring toilets to schools in South India and several other projects elsewhere. Check it all out at http://www.developmentspace.com/
A Request
If you are finding the Integral Leadership Review to be bringing useful, fresh perspectives to the subject of leadership, please think of the leaders in business and life that might be able to benefit from subscribing to this epublication. Please send them a copy or a link to the web site, www.leadcoach.com so that they may explore it. In this time of intense internet communication, we all need to manage our time and read those things which are most relevant for our work, our thinking and our values. It is my hope that many people will find the evolving Integral Leadership Review does just that. Your help is deeply appreciated.
Dedication
Dedicated to Chris Newham with deep appreciation.
Feedback
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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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