Tag: authentic leadership

Defensive Force

Watching Seinfeld tonight Elaine was bemoaning the fact that she wasn’t seen as responsible enough to babysit a friend’s child. “Who wants to be responsible” responded Jerry Seinfeld “Whenever anything goes wrong the first thing they ask is who is responsible”.

It’s a question that has exercised the mind of the auditor general:  why did four Defence Force officers falsely claim allowances while on secondment to the UN. Listening to interviews on the radio on the way to my run this evening I heard “they’ve been disciplined”, “won’t happen again” and “they only claimed what they were entitled to remember” several times. What I didn’t hear was mention of culture and values that the auditor general had identified as underlying causes of the falsities.

At times of crisis, the leaders of any organisation will need to adopt a command and control leadership style, where directions are given and acted upon without question. The Defence business while on operations surely fits into this camp. But what about the rest of the time? Can the culture switch as required or is there just one culture?

We get glimpses of  an organisation’s culture through stuff that pops out externally – staff retention, how problems are dealt with, choices people make about where to work and statements from leaders are the sorts of things where we can pick up clues. So when its said that the culture and values caused the environment that gave rise to the false claims what culture are we talking about? Is this the culture that requires obedience to superior officers in all circumstances, even when illegal?

On the one hand you need to have officers able to unquestioningly respond to orders. But outside of operations you need to have a culture that allows questioning, coaching and responsibility for ones own actions. Sounds like a big challenge.

So when I listened to the radio tonight I heard all the things that one might expect with the organisation top-down rule book approach to “make things happen”.  “I will ensure that it doesn’t happen again”. That’s a fine aim, but you won’t if you don’t change the culture. And you won’t change the culture by doing treating the problem with the same culture that caused it. That dreadful defensiveness that uses rules and structures to avoid the potential embarrassment of having to explore the root causes that the auditor general identified.

So who is responsible? Is that even the right question? I believe that in leadership discovery we need to start with self. You won’t be acting without integrity and blind unquestioning if you’re authentic. But if your leadership paridigm is about finding new ways to control and strategise then you’re not even scratching the surface – you’re still on the command and control, but with fancy words.

Leadership discovery of authenticity. It’s the best defence against a culture that is not right, and the most sustainable way to embed real change.

That’s got a lot of force to it I reckon.

Stephen

Refresh

I hope that the people who interacted with us during Leadership Week both at our workshops or the many that I am grateful passed by this blog and the Centre’s site took something away.  If they did, I hope that something grows. Discovering my leadership happens at many levels as I was reminded again today by my friend Dr Vikram Murthy.  We can now see on MRI examinations much of what we previously estimated through observations and testing. It’s a bit like knowing the world is round by looking at it from space. Not that long ago we humans thought it was flat, but slowly the thinking developed and we established that it was, well you know the rest! These developments in Neuroscience are  incredibly exciting. The neuroscientist Sam Harris has put forward the proposition that the determination of our values can also be from a scientific basis. More on all this another day.

Last week was both exhilarating and tiring. Exhilarating as I watched eyes opened to values, authenticity and leadership discovery. These were eyes that might not ordinarily get to go on a course. Tiring because, I’m proud to say, I gave it all at our workshops. To do less would have just been work. Add shop to work and I’m away!

I see my diary has another authenticity workshop this week at the ATEM Aotearoa Conference. Fortunately for me I was playing around with the AUT HR system and got myself some leave yesterday (strange but true) and I spent time refreshing.  We all need to refresh and now I’m ready for more.

That we can continually discover things about ourselves and our leadership is the most exciting part of it all. When we think it’s done and dusted, then I reckon that’s when we’re done and dusted. But today I feel like it’s just starting again.

Bring it on!

Do you get it?

Sometimes when I’m talking to people about leadership courses they ask whether they’ll learn about leadership styles like charismatic, authoritative etc. I know about those things, in fact, I’ve even got texts that discuss those things in quite a lot of detail.

Today we ran a workshop on authentic leadership for a group of managers who knew each other well. This group works with young people. We started off quite late but, hey, it’s Monday and who’s in a hurry. We started off talking about what leadership is about. This was a group of self-aware, switched on managers who knew about trust, disclosure and being vulnerable. After that we hardly mentioned the word leadership.

At the end of the day, I asked if they’d noticed that we hadn’t mentioned leadership much. They agreed but they then talked about all the important facets of authenticity and leadership that we had canvassed. One of the managers talked about diversity – not just accepting diversity – but embracing it as part of an individual’s whole being. Others talked about enjoying their own preferences, having followers because you’re real and personal leadership. It felt humble, yet strong at the end of the day.

So, is there a place for labels of leadership? You be the judge, but I reckon we are what we are and that’s the place to start. I’ve said that many times I know, but when you get a group like we had today it really brings it home. Straight-up, real, embracing and lovin’ diversity and all that it brings to their group. And wanting more.

People starting out on their leadership journey often start with the labels. That’s natural. As leaders we can do so much for those starting out on their leadership journey by modelling our authenticity rather then worrying about labels and styles. I reckon the young people this group looks after are very fortunate. And so was I today. Without hardly even mentioning that word leadership.

Do you?

Stephen

What can you say Mother?

Often when I ask people who are the leaders they admire, along with the usual suspects of Peter Blake, Nelson Mandela and Ghandi we often hear “my mother” or “my father”. We also hear about that other mother, Mother Teresa.

I’m reading essays by Christopher Hitchens who is pretty unflattering about Mother Teresa and accuses her of stage-managing images of poverty to ensure that those who were in poverty, stayed there, even when in her care ie the places she set up, even in America, were stripped of all possible trappings of normal civility.

Lately I have realised that the phrase authentic leadership development is absurd. It’s discovery. Running alongside the idea of authenticity in a parallel, but not necessarily the same universe is the concept of personal branding. Develop your personal brand ladies and gentlemen so people know not only who you are, what you stand for but also what you’re really about.

Is that authentic? Or is it marketing spin? Was Mother Teresa an authentic leader? Or did she simply have a brand of poverty that gave her followers? Does it matter?

Only you know that. Mother Theresa can’t answer that. If, like me, you’re fortunate enough to have a mother you could ask, I’d hazard a guess that she wouldn’t give you much of an answer though. My mother never branded or got told how to brand. But I know what she stands for. So does she.

That’s important I reckon.