Integral Leadership ReviewTable of Contents, Integral Leadership Review, December 2001
Mission
I am grateful to the subscribers to Leadership Opportunity. Your support has meant that we can move closer to a way of viewing and being in the world that is integrating, generative and supports our evolving integrity--learning to align our theory and our action. Also, I am grateful for 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.
I have decided to continue the mission and change the name to Integral Leadership Review. My vision is that it will be a place that others, as well as myself, can continue to develop and share ideas about integral leadership and integral coaching.
Connected Leadership
It is interesting to me how things seem to come together for this publication. In the last issue I wrote about the leader as entrepreneur in relationships with stakeholders. Fundamentally this means initiating creative acts with stakeholders in the face of change and challenges. The summary article (below) presents one leader's view of how to do this. He offers interesting propositions about community and connection with customers, employees, other stakeholders and even competitors. Consider his perspective as an affirmation of at least part of what I have been presenting here.
Add to that, Peter Koestenbaum's alert about the importance of integrating the internal and external aspects of leadership and we have part of the formula for integral leadership. For integral leadership is about internal and external. It is about the inner world of the individual and how they manifest that world in the behaviors and relationships to others.
It is also about that collection of relationships. A constant thesis in these articles has been than the world of the heroic leader is no longer a sufficient perspective to forge the leadership that is required in the world of business today. Well, you can read back issues and put those pieces together. Here I wish to focus on a piece of this constellation: the inner world of the entrepreneur.
This inner world is not a problem to be solved. Mostly it is a puzzle tinged with paradox and mystery (see below). As a puzzle it means that we know what a lot of the pieces are. We just need to figure out how they fit together.
The pieces of this inner world are assumptions and beliefs, values, aspirations and guiding principles (a variation on the theme of the work of Mike Jay, entrepreneurial founder of B\Coach Systems). These are the sources of our motivations. They impact how leadership competencies are used: the use of time, energy, information, access to influence, special skills and knowledge and credibility. And in the case of connectedness it is how these competencies are used in relation to stakeholders - to promote connectedness.
Perhaps the most helpful perspective on connectedness would be to think about what is important to the leader in forming each relationship. Priorities and values will foster various approaches and strategies.
Connectedness for leaders is often about forming networks of relationships. The assumptions, values etc. of the leader generate motivations for each connection. If the motivation is to manipulate, this will generate a set of openings and responses as an entrepreneur. If the motive is to form a community a la Larry Weber (see Summary below) another set will be created.
The beliefs and assumptions about connectedness are at the heart of leadership theory. Sometimes the requirements for connectedness may be situational. They are always contextual -- the difference being that contextual is about business objectives and a whole set of stakeholder relationships, not just the relationship between a manager and a person being managed.
That we cannot have leaders without followers has been a mainstream notion of leadership. The shift that more and more are recognizing is that we cannot have leaders without effective relationships related to specific contexts. Connectedness is essential to these relationships and provides a foundation for the creative and innovative acts that are both individual and collective.
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A Fresh Perspective
I recently had the privilege of attending a meeting of the Professional Coaching And Mentoring Association chapter in San Francisco. I attended expressly to hear Agnes Mura, a highly successful executive coach from Los Angeles, do a presentation on paradox in executive coaching. (This report is from my perspective and I hope that Agnes and Bill agree that I got it right.)
She began by sharing something she had learned from Bill Berquist and I share it with you now because it has been so useful in my work with clients ever since.
Fundamentally, Bill's contribution was that while we have become quite skilled at problem solving in business (and other aspects of life), our problem solving skills have become like the proverbial hammer and we treat all life events like nails, like situations that need to be "solved." Bill suggested that there are four different challenges:
- Puzzles:
- We have all the pieces. What we are challenged to do is to figure out how to put them together. An example might be assembling the members of a new project team. (Yes, I know. There can be some problems associated with this.)
- Problems:
- These are situations in which there are potentially many alternative solutions that need to be explored, including their implications. Developing a new marketing strategy in the face of market and competition changes would be an example of this.
- Paradoxes:
- This was the focus of Agnes' presentation. These are situations that are ongoing for which there are no solutions. (Agnes did have a lot to say about managing them, however.) A wonderful example of this is the relationship between customer service and cost management. If you put too much emphasis on one, the other is libel to deteriorate. Consequently, in business we vacillate between trying to come up with "solutions." Every solution has a problem. We have the program or the fix of the month breeding cynicism in our organizations.
- Mysteries:
- These are phenomena for which we have neither explanations nor solutions, nor is one in sight. For some reason I am reminded of Adam Smith's hidden hand that guides market processes of supply and demand. Other examples might include the underlying factors that influence our decisions or motivations. Sure, we get hints at this, we can do an analysis, but we are still left with some factors unexplained, unexplored, even undiscovered. That is where the mystery is (and a reason why coaching is so interesting).
I will leave further explication of this idea to Bill and Agnes. I have used it several times with clients and found that it has helped them be clear about what is the nature of the situation they are addressing.
Summary
Paul C. Judge, "Provocation 101"Fast Company, January 2002.
Larry Weber, founder of Weber Shandwick International, challenges our stale definitions of leadership. Haven't heard of his company? It is a $7 billion marketing and advertising firm., so I guess Larry comes from a position that suggests we should pay attention.
He has published a book, The Provocateur, in which he looks at the attributes of today's leaders -- no longer tied to military metaphors for running a business. For Larry being a leader is about being a "provocateur." They are community builders around the customer at the core.
He offers these lessons:
- "Build a community, not a company. The strength of a business is measured by the strength of its relationships. Provocateurs involve customers, partners, and employees in the business, allowing them to feel that they are important players in the enterprise's success."
- "Roll out the welcome mat for nomadic customers. Customers are footloose; loyalty is rare. But a community that appeal to nomads can attract and keep customers even when they can find a better price elsewhere."
- "Good communities are not built on monologues. Provocateurs try to create a feeling that no walls separate the company from the outside world. The goal is constant interaction -- with customers and prospects, with other businesses and with suppliers and regulators."
- "Act like a great mayor. Who better than former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani knows how to bring constituents together and create a common goal? Successful provocateurs, like great mayors, create excitement, engagement, and a sense of belonging."
- "Marketing is job one. Communicate with customers to benefit the company, and put the brand before everything else that a CEO does. The stronger the communication, the stronger the brand."
- "Love your competitors. Even your toughest competitor serves to validate your ideas and to generate interest in your community. Provocateurs know that they can learn from competitors. And they don't worry that their competitors might learn something from them."
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Special Follow-up Review:Diversity and Top Management 
In the November 2001 issue of LeadershipOpportunity (New Name: Integral Leadership Review) I provided a summary of Kate Sweetman, "Don't Worry, Be Happy,"MIT Sloan Management Review, Fall 2001. That article included a summary of findings from another article (Sigal G. Barsade, et al, "To Your Heart's Content: A Model of Affective Diversity in Top Management Teams,"Administrative Science Quarterly, December 2000.) A key finding that was reported:
"The success or failure of top management may hinge on something few of us ever consider. That is the range of temperaments across the senior team.one important contributor to team success is .a common attitude toward life."
I wondered what this meant for our notions of diversity, particularly the idea that personality, style and experience diversity is valuable for creativity and innovation and even interpretation of data and the generation of meaning. So, I decided to go to the source: the originalAdministrative Science Quarterly article.
This seems like an important area to consider since it impacts performance, recruitment and lots of assumptions that I carry (and perhaps you do to) about the nature of pluralism and its importance in business. Furthermore, this particular study is unusual just by the fact that data was gathered from 62 top management teams with a total of 239 top managers. CEOs of 36 publicly held, 20 privately held and 6 not for profit organizations and the members of their management teams were included. 97% of the CEOs were male; 11% of the team members were female.
The focus of this study is on "individual differences in positive affective personality; "the degree to which a person is cheerful and energetic (high positive affect) versus subdued and reserved (low positive affect)." These can be thought of as the general moods of individuals as opposed to transitory emotions.
I refer you to the original article if you would like the details. Here are a few things that caught my attention. Consider these to be food for thought:
- Our abiding attitudes toward life and work can be perceived and is likely to be the explanation for people who are similar attracting each other.
- "The finding that people consciously and unconsciously prefer others who are similar to them is one of the most robust and reliable social psychological findings." [805]
The hypotheses of the research:
Hypothesis 1: "Individual members who are more similar to others in their group in trait positive affect will be more satisfied with the interpersonal nature of their group experience than those who are more affectively dissimilar." [807]
Hypothesis 2: "Individual group members who are more similar to others in their group in trait positive affect will perceive themselves as having greater influence within the group than those who are more affectively dissimilar." [807]
Interestingly, the authors site several research reports that indicate that diversity, affectively and demographically gets in the way of communication and teamwork and increases conflict.
Hypothesis 3: "Affectively homogeneous groups will have greater cooperation and less task and relationship conflict than will affectively diverse teams." [808]
They cite research that shows that if team members are affectively like the CEO, the latter will trust them more and, consequently involve them more in decision making.
Hypothesis 4: "Similarity in trait positive affect between a group leader and his or her group members will lead to the leader's using a more participative than autocratic decision-making style." [808]
There is no clear consensus in the literature as to whether diversity influences performance outcomes. So the verdict is still out on that one. However, when we focus on the studies of affective homogeneity, the authors think that they demonstrate that homogeneity can positively influence group performance. Cooperation is increased; conflict is decreased.
Hypothesis 5a: "Affectively homogeneous groups will have better group performance than will affectively diverse groups."
Studies have shown that diversity does positively impact creativity and the capacity to deal effectively with tasks requiring problem solving and innovation. This research also shows support for a positive relationship between diversity, on the one hand, and company growth rates, firm performance and effectiveness in responding to competitors.
Hypothesis 5b: "Affectively diverse groups will have better group performance than will affectively homogeneous groups."
Now this is what represents the mainstream of thinking about diversity as I have understood it.
And here are some of their key findings:
- Team members are more satisfied with personal relationships under conditions of similarity.
- The more similar the member to others, the greater the influence.
- The more similar the members, the more cooperation.
- The more diversity, the greater were the stressful social relationships.
- CEOs with greater similarity to the rest of the team were marginally more participative in their decision-making style.
- There was no significant relationship between cooperativeness, task conflict, emotional conflict or CEO participativeness and financial performance.
- Financial performance was higher for top management teams with functional diversity, that is, with broad representation of different functionality in the organization (finance, marketing, operations, general management, etc.)
- Finally there was no relationship between group process and financial performance. The authors find this to be puzzling.
There was also the suggestion that when you have cultural diversity, affective similarity can help bridge the differences.
So, the study is an important one in that it is one of very few that gathers data from a meaningful base of top managers, including CEOs. On the other hand, results are somewhat mixed and it is difficult to generalize the conclusions.
Diversity is still important. And it is equally important to be aware of different kinds of diversity: culture, style, affect, functional and so on. Particularly when we get into issues of high performance teamwork we need to be more sophisticated about issues of diversity. Finally, the relationship between diversity and innovation seems to continue to be a positive one. Perhaps there are ways to work with different kinds of diversity to foster innovation even more.
- Dedication
- Dedicated to Chris Newham with deep appreciation.
- Feedback
- Got any? E-mail Russ Volckmann - russ@integralleadershipreview.com.
- Thanks
- Thanks for taking the time to consider this e-publication 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@integralleadershipreview.com
Tel: 831.333-9200, FAX: 831.656-0110
- Disclaimer:
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- Thank you.
© 2001 Russ Volckmann. All Rights Reserved
