1.
Introduction
It is the very nature
of the beast—leadership is a high-pressure position whose occupants are
expected without rest to make decisions that affect the lives of constituents
and the well being of the entities they oversee. That it is lonely at the top
has become a cliché, and though the spoils, when they come, may be plentiful,
it is well that more and more leaders are, like kings of yore, hiring executive
coaches to advise them.
This
brief paper is a snippet from a soon-to-be-published book, Reading the Room: Group Dynamics for Coaches and Leaders,[1]
that attempts to put leadership in a new conceptual perspective — that of structural
dynamics — that is firm in its belief that leaders who do not develop a model of their own are vulnerable to
hidden forces originating both in personal histories and current environments. Unexamined
and left to chance, these forces take leaders down paths that too often do serious
damage. Having a practice model of his or her own is my answer to this leadership
dilemma. Needed — and this is crucial — is a coach who herself is armed
with a model for how to help leaders develop their models in the context of
leading their management teams.
Four Developmental Stages
While
helping the leader develop his practice model, his coach simultaneously guides
him through four developmental stages.
Stage 1: Functional
Awareness
In the functional awareness stage the leader comes to understand how the
structure and patterns of communication in all his relationships play out in
key face-to-face relations (Structural Dynamics is a theory of face-to
face-relationships), differently with each of his management team members and
with his private partner and or spouse[2]
Once a leader can
recognize behavioral profiles in action[3]
and can read them in himself and in the room where interactions take
place, the coach can lead him to the
origins of these behavioral patterns in himself. These are key stories gathered
from childhood through young adulthood and determine his typical ways of
interacting with others.
Later in this stage,
coaches round out leaders’ discovery of the self in action by helping leaders
see their shadow behaviors, or, more
dramatically, their dark sides. These,
too, originate in stories, inconveniently and often destructively rising to the
surface in high-stakes situations. The leader gains much in understanding what
these are and where they come from.
Stage 2: System Awareness
Systems thinking relies on
circular rather than linear ideas about cause and effect. No theory in my
opinion has contributed more to our understanding of how organizations work.
Many leaders have been exposed to it, but for the greater part have yet to
grasp it to any meaningful degree. Repeatedly the coach will focus the leader
on system awareness. For example, she might point out circularities at the
heart of a controlling system. “What is it about your behavior that causes X,
whom you can’t stand, to behave toward you in such a way that you can’t stand
him?”
A leader
who fails to understand circularity in communication risks cutting off valuable
feedback about goings on in the organization. Poor insight into systems may be
at the root of why his or her most valuable close relationships fail. Without
good systems-thinking skills, the leader may also not understand how the
organization works and how its parts interact—how, for example, if people in
marketing fail to communicate effectively with people in sales or product
design, the product may ultimately sit on a shelf.
Stage 3: Moral Awareness
The moral dimension of
leadership behavior has come to occupy a central place in structural dynamics
theory. This stage of the process aims
at promoting moral awareness in leaders, meaning basically an awareness of the
forces that tempt fundamentally good people to do basically bad things.
Lawrence
Kohlberg and others have begun calling attention to moral behavior and its
corruption in leaders and their organizations.[4]
Business schools, the most prolific
generator of leaders and decision makers, are adding moral behavior to their
curricula. If the fall from grace of some of their best and brightest graduates
is indicative, however, that curriculum has a long way to go.
Stage 4: Responsible Self-Evolution
Advocates of structural
dynamics insist that leaders and their coaches make the demanding but rewarding
effort to develop and continue to “build their models.” The advocates also hold
their coach trainees to this same standard.
The capacity for responsible self-evolution is
my phrase for addressing the question, “When does the power to acquire skills
and knowledge shift from others to the self?” In this stage, when leaders have
achieved functional, systemic, and moral awareness, and have achieved an
initial grasp of what I call communicative
competency,[5]
structural dynamics recommends that they take responsibility for developing
a model of their own making; a leadership model that is uniquely theirs.
Four Steps in Model
Development
Four
things are essential for building one’s model:
1.
Knowing one’s personal model[6]
is the first step. Your personal model is unveiled in the first stage,
achieving functional awareness. It has a profound influence on what leaders do
and say, and thus on any model they attempt to imitate or develop.
2.
Working with a coach with an articulated model of her own, and a model
for helping leaders develop their own.
3.
A meta-model for developing any model in the realm of human systems.
4.
A pre-existing model context; here, Structural Dynamics’ Accelerating
Team Performance.7 It provides a framework that anchors the leader’s
effort to build his model from the ground up.
A Model of Models
Model
building may sound dauntingly abstract. Where does one begin? How does one sort
through the plethora of models that have bombarded the marketplace of ideas on leadership.
To think about what to look for as you unearth and organize your model, it is
useful to have an organizing set of theories (or requirements) that I call a meta-model. The meta-model, (or “model of models”) is a framework that defines the
aspects of a fully formed and robust model. Within it we can organize and
interrelate the pieces of our models. Any social meta-model needs to propose
three kinds of theories: theories of the thing,
of change, and of practice.
A Theory of the Thing
A theory of the thing describes the entity on
which your model focuses:
§ What is it? For example, Reading the Room presents a
systems-oriented theory and examines the skill of leadership.
§ What are the underpinnings
of that skill? Reading the Room singles
out communicative skill, beginning with communication in face-to-face
relations.
§ What assumptions does the thing (in this case, leadership) depend
on? One assumption is that leadership
often entails leading high-performing teams; such teams identify a second thing in SD’s model.
§ What skills are required of
a high-performing team? In a high-performing team, each member acquires communicative competency, an
understanding of the structure of successful and unsuccessful communication and
how they contribute to each.
A Theory of Change
The theory of change describes how to bring about
change for that thing on which your
model focuses. It describes the nature of change and how change happens within
or for that entity.
§ What are the prerequisites
of change (in our case, the changing of a person to become a better leader, or
a team to function with maximal effectiveness)?
§ How does change happen? What
brings it about?
§ How does context—time, place
and person—affect change?
§ Does change occur the same
way in an intimate human system versus a larger, more impersonal one?
For the thing called
leadership:
§ If leadership’s goal is
optimal personal and team performance, what is the baseline (in our model, low-stakes
behavioral propensities) and what is the standard (for us, communicative
competency in both low and high stakes) at the other end?
§ Through what stages do
leaders and their teams evolve?
A Theory of Practice
A theory
of practice fully articulates the conceptual underpinnings of what the
practitioner does on the ground, based on his understanding of the thing and its theory of change. [Note: Your theory of practice should not be
confused with your practice model. The latter is what the practitioner does in
the room. It is circularly derived from interaction with our meta-model’s three
component parts.]
§ What is the conceptual
language system behind the practice (in our case, structural dynamics) model?
§ How do the methods,
techniques and tools used in your practice model reconcile with your theory of practice?
§ What is the theoretical
rationale behind a practice model designed to occur in distinct stages (three,
in our case)?
§ Is the theory behind the
practice consistent with the goals of the practice?
Building Your Own From
Pre-Existing Models
Structural dynamics posits three phases to
building a model—imitation, constraint,
and autonomy. In seeming contradiction to the first phase just cited, SD
contends that it is not possible to imitate another’s model, not for long
anyway. Our personal models and other “constraints” see to that. Still, it asks
leaders and coaches who undertake model development, to begin with two of its own
models—one on leadership, and the
other on how to lead teams. Models
get built, according to Structural Dynamics, by constraining and being
constrained by existing models such as these.
The Bar Raised High
It
must be evident that this brief paper has a rhetorical message. It insists that
leaders and those who coach them must undertake the lengthy, demanding, but
rewarding journey through our three phases of model building if the quality of
leadership is to be raised. Building a model includes articulating it, making
it public, and responding to constraints by those who challenge its premises.
This not only raises high the bar on leadership, it brings transparency and
accountability to a new level.
[1] Reading the Room: Group Dynamics for Coaches and Leaders is
scheduled for release in April by Jossey-Bass, an imprint of John Wiley &
Sons, New York, NY.
[2] SD theory alleges that
leaders have real lives that affect their work behaviors and vice versa, and
that love and intimacy play a role in leader behavior.
[3] An assessment instrument,
the Behavioral Propensities Profile, measures the leader’s characteristic
behaviors, including how different profiles interact and often clash. See www.kantorinstitute.com for details.
[4] Kohlberg,
Lawrence (1981). Essays
on Moral Development, Vol. I: The Philosophy of Moral Development.
San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row.
[5] Communicative competency refers to the ability to read dysfunctional communication
structures in the room and to make the appropriate vocal action oneself or to
call upon another whose profile and repertoire more appropriately fill the gap.
[6] Your personal model is a
systematic framework for how you experience, interpret, and act on events, in
particular, the verbal communication structures you encounter in closely held,
two or more person groups. Part One of Reading
the Room is devoted to explicating how one’s personal model manifests
itself in low-stakes situations; and Part Two how these propensities play out
when the stakes are raised. It recommends that leaders, all team members, and
the leader’s coach all take the assessment instrument, the Behavioral
Propensities Profile.
7 See Reading the Room, Chapter 12, page 302.
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