Leadership Jazz Continued

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At the core of becoming a leader is the need always to connect one’s voice and one’s touch.  A leader’s voice is the expression of one’s beliefs, and a leader’s touch demonstrates competence and resolve.

A Key Called Promise

Leaders have at least two requirements:  the need to give one’s witness as a leader—to make your promises to the people who allow you to lead; and the necessity of carrying out your promises.

It’s important recognize that practically everything we accomplish happens through teamwork.  We are not on our own. The highest-risk leader is the one who thinks she works alone.

Just as individuals have a right to expect certain things of a leader, an institution expects and demands certain things from its leaders:

1. The organization expects the leader to define and express both in writing and, especially, through behaving the beliefs and values of the institution.
2. To carry out its work, the organization needs from a leader a clear statement of its vision and its strategy.
3. A leader is accountable for the design of the business.
4. A leader is responsible for lean and simple statements of policy consistent with beliefs and values, vision and strategy.  Policies must actively enable people whose job it is to carry them out.
5. Equity is the special province of a leader.  A leader is responsible for equity in the assignment of all resources, tangible and intangible, in relation to agreed-on priorities.  This includes communication, recognition, and reward.
6. A leader focuses not on her own image as leader, but on the tone of the body of the institution.  Simple observation:  “The best way of appearing to listen is to listen.” 
7. A leader ensures that priorities are set, that they are steadfastly communicated and adhered to in practice.
8. A leader ensures that the planning for the organization at all levels receives the necessary direction and approvals. 
9. A leader reviews and assesses results primarily in three areas: key appointments and promotions, results compared to the plan, the connection to key publics.
10. Leaders are accountable for the continuous renewal of the organization.
11. A leader ought never to embarrass followers.

What’s Fragile?

Betrayal is closely linked to the idea of entropy, the tendency of everything to deteriorate.  They seem to creep into organizations when a leader fails to reflect seriously on what makes important things go awry.

Beliefs and values are the footings on which we build answers to the questions “Who matters?” and “What matters?”

Certain facets of a leader’s character are especially fragile.  Truth, patience, love, and commitment are examples. Consistency, one of the highest expectations we have of leaders, is constantly open to compromise.

A leader’s poise is fragile.  One element of poise is surely the ability to take everyone seriously. 

We must always be aware of the preparation for leadership. Preparation for leadership is a clear debt to followers and the organization.  There are no shortcuts to preparing for leadership.  The accretion of layers of skill takes time.  Real preparation consists of hard work and wandering in the desert, of much feedback, much forgiveness, and of the yeast of failure.

Moving up in the hierarchy does not confer competence. A promotion likely to pan out produces temporary incompetence, the kind of awkwardness that always comes before deeper understanding.

An organization’s cultural harmony is fragile, and an institution’s future is fragile.  Every promotion, every decision related to changes in leadership, the degree to which leaders balance the forces of change and continuity.

The health of the organization is fragile.

There is one last thing on the list of fragile qualities of leadership—success.  Success can expose us to dangerous consequences.  Success can close a mind faster than prejudice.  Leaders are fragile precisely at the point of their strengths, liable to fail at the height of their success.

In a way, leadership is as delicate as Mozart’s melodies.  The music exists and it doesn’t.  It is written on the page, but it means nothing until performed and heard. Much of its effect depends the performer and the listener. The best leaders, like the best music, inspire us to see new possibilities.

God’s Mix

Whether leaders articulate a personal philosophy or not, their behavior expresses a personal set of values and beliefs.

Consider faithfulness.  There are five criteria about faithfulness:

1. Integrity in all things precedes all else.
2. The servanthood of leadership needs to be felt, understood, believed and practiced.  In the book of Luke: “The greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the one who rules, like the one who serves.”
3. Accountability for others:  Amos tells us leaders should encourage and sustain those on the bottom rung first and then turn to those on the top.
4. The practice of equity.
5. Leaders have to be vulnerable, have to offer others the opportunity to do their best.  By creating a genuine opportunity for others to reach their potential at the same time that all work together toward corporate goals.

Rewards and recognition are not the same for all of us.  Look beyond diversity, beyond pluralism, to a new perspective on human strength and potential, perhaps the largest resource available to a leader. Groups unavoidably encompass diverse people, thank goodness.  We are dealing with God’s mix, people made in God’s image, a compelling mystery. Each of us is an ingredient in a great, cross-cultural mix.

How are leaders to do good work?

• Leaders see our institutions, our families, our corporations, cross-culturally.
• Leaders understand that this intense mixture is legitimate and has meaning and belongs.
• Leaders affirm that authenticity is a matter of the heart and, thus, an issue of limitless depth and potential.  For leaders, there can be no disjunction between thought and action.  One of a leader’s chief responsibilities is to initiate action.

This kind of leadership calls for guidelines.  Max DePree says that leaders:

• Try to see that we all tend to be intolerant. Intolerance extends to the shy and the gregarious, to the attractive and the unattractive, to the overweight and the slim.
• Understand that people emulate behavior.
• Accept risk.
• Provide a measure of grace.
• Accept the normal accountability for bringing about change.
• Make their organizations big enough to be natural for all the different kinds of people who work there.
• Remember that believing in the authenticity of people is real and workable.
• Live with reality.
• Are impatient! Are patient! Leaders, no matter how committed, cannot prescribe a quick cure for bigotry or prejudice. The cure begins when we connect the heart and the mind, the voice and the touch. Then leaders must hold other people—as well as themselves—accountable.
• Make a long-term commitment.

We know in our hearts that to be included is both beautiful and right. Leaders have to find a way to work that out, to contribute toward that vision.

Watercarriers

Next to the Watercarrier sculpture at Herman Miller’s corporate headquarters (pictured above) is this inscription: “The tribal watercarrier in this corporation is a symbol of the essential nature of all jobs, our interdependence, the identity of ownership and participation, the servanthood of leadership, the authenticity of each individual.”

Diversity of opinion is as necessary as light and air, a diversity of opinion encouraged and exploited for the good of the group.

To be a watercarrier suggests continuity, longevity, commitment, dependability, and resourcefulness. Watercarriers transfer the essence of the institution to new people who arrive to help us and, eventually, to replace us.

Watercarriers thrive in diversity and understand the fragility of organizations.  People, relationships, values, and beliefs are most important to a corporation and, fittingly, the most fragile components. Watercarriers comprehend and preserve them.

Following is a listing of things important to watercarriers at Herman Miller:

• What’s important and why we are what we are—our history.
• The fragile aspects of our future.
• Relationships. 
• Our commitment to problem solving and good design, a passion for the way in which things ought to be done.
• Our beliefs and goals, our inheritance when we arrived in this corporation—the most important things we can leave behind, our legacy to our corporate heirs.
• The need for continuity and reliability in the leaders of our company.
• The essential role played by longtime followers in the life of the organization.
• Change.  Change without continuity is chaos.  Continuity without change is sloth—and very risky.
• The provision of necessities and the bearing of standards.  This duty lies not solely with management.

Ropes or Bathrooms?

People with the freedom to choose have to consider their choices, and the act of choosing, of course, has a catch—the consequences.

There are five subjects about which people in corporate and institutional settings make choices all the time: the customer (or the student or the patient); the role of change; accountability—both personal and corporate; beauty and harmony; and the quality of our relationships.

We are not free to choose to avoid dealing with change. The only thing to decide is how to deal with change once you create it yourself or once you find it staring you in the face.

Two attitudes will guide us into constructive responses change: 

(1) It’s important to understand that neither change nor the person who leads us to change is our enemy;

(2) The rate of change today requires that each of us become a frantic learner.  Leaders respond to change by learning something.  The eager, frantic learners in life find actual joy in the process of change.

Leaders have the freedom to choose to be personally, and therefore, institutionally, accountable.  Leaders need to choose what to measure in life.  Good short-term results are not synonymous with long-term needs; good numbers don’t result from managing numbers.

Leaders make decisions about beauty and harmony all the time.  If we do choose beauty and harmony, we give ourselves a unique, competitive advantage. Organizations that steadfastly pursue beauty and harmony do attract the best people.

For relationships, we get to choose whether in our hearts we will respect and build on our diversity or ignore it.  We can choose to be hospitable to unusual persons and ideas or we can shun them.  We can choose, each of us, to accept the authenticity of every person in an organization or to deny people the chance to be included.

Leaders’ Leaders

If we are to find new sources and perspectives, it seems there are at least three areas of special concern, which, if thoughtfully considered, are likely to yield good results:

1. How does a leader approach the process of creative work? A leader…

• Is hospitable to gifted people. 
• Protects unusual persons from the bureaucracy and legalism so ensconced in our organizations. 
• Remains vulnerable to real surprise and to true quality.
• Works with creative people without fear.
• Is wary of incremental changes.
• Does not demand unreasonable personal or corporate loyalty.
• Arranges for projects to proceed along a narrowing path.  Peter Drucker once said, “When you have real innovation, don’t compromise.”
• Paves the way for change, preparing the organization and the most important preparation is lavish communication.
• Sets the example for openness and imagination and acceptance.
• Knows that the organization must understand how important it is to have a chance to meet unmet needs.

2. What do creative people need to be fruitful in the worlds of organizations?

• Access to (even intimacy with) senior leadership.
• The ethos of jazz, where a leader picks the tune, sets the tempo, and starts the music, defining a “style.”  Jazz-band leaders know how to integrate the “voices” in the band without diminishing their uniqueness.
• Constraints.
• License to be contrary.
• Odds that their work will get to market.  There must be the potential of reality lying ahead as creative people meander along toward real innovation.
• A fundamental level of trust from leaders.
• To work with others of equal competence, recognizing they improve only as they are challenged and stretched.

3. What should a leader be careful about when dealing with creative people?

• The utilitarian self-concept, recognizing that all things cannot, and must not, be quantified.
• Recognize that just as moving up in the hierarchy does not confer competence, so organizational power does not guarantee wisdom.
• Be careful about what you nurture.
• Be wary of setting out to win prizes. Good work is the goal; recognition is a consequence.
• One last caution: Don’t fail to give credit.

Making the effort to be a leader to creative people and learning to follow them signal both real leadership competence and the understanding that such work comes from the heart and not from a management handbook.

Followers need a chance to do their best; leaders need a lot of help.  Leaders find many teachers and enablers.  The lore of life, the way to one’s voice, comes more from mistakes than achievements, more from listening than talking, more from these teachers and enablers than from one’s own understanding.

Where Do Ethics and Leadership Intersect?

Relationships in business, like any relationships, need to stand up to ethical scrutiny.

One of the most sacred relationships among teams of people is that between leaders and followers. This relationship, so central and crucial, depends to an extraordinary degree on the clearly expressed and consistently demonstrated values of the leader as seen through the special lens of followers. This is why leadership and ethics are inextricably woven together.

When we’re effective leaders, our performance is normally based on such things as trust and vision and competence and fidelity. Most of us understand these things through observing behavior, not by reading books or listening to speeches.

Peter Drucker taught many years ago the difference between being effective and being efficient. Efficiency is doing something right; effectiveness comes from doing the right things.

Three ideas light up the intersection of ethics and leadership—justice, celibacy, and the common good:

1. Ethical leadership withers without justice.  The primary responsibility for the just leader is to provide a level playing field, so that the game be played. We can think about justice as governing the distribution of results.  Justice requires that leadership be a posture of indebtedness.  Think, for instance, of the leader’s obligation to provide first for those on the bottom rung, not for those on the top rung.  To make justice a guiding force in our lives and in relationships requires that we scrutinize our communications.  Organizations communicate whether a leader plans it or not.  The best, sometimes the only, way to discover just exactly what is being communicated is to make it possible for leaders to tell you. 
2. Another connection between ethics and leadership is what DePree calls “celibacy.”  We need to make room for the stewardship of limited resources.  Leaders exemplify personal restraint in their behavior.  Leaders make room for the family, their own and the families of the people they lead. 
3. Ethics and leadership intersect in the common good.  Leaders learn how to become abandoned to the needs of the followers.  Think about yourself as a follower for a minute. You need competence and reality. You need from your leader compassion and fairness. You need a leader who’s visible and whose life exemplifies fidelity. You need the right opportunity, and to reach your potential, you need somebody to give you the gift of accountability. We need somebody who will give us a chance to reach for our potential.  Leaders learn how to make a commitment to the common good. Leaders aspire to look like small boys in August. By the end of August, they’ve been running around all summer in their shorts, sneakers, and shirts. You also know that their knees and their elbows are always skinned, their shins always black and blue, and that they have the marks of the summer’s fracases on their faces. A six-year-old boy at the end of August is the picture of a leader. A leader’s commitments and beliefs are part and parcel of the same thing. But in composing voice and touch, action must follow closely a solid sense of one’s ethics.

Give the Gift of Change

In Anglo-Saxon and Norse cultures, a leader established a reputation in large part by the quality of his gifts to his followers and visitors. Some gifts to ponder:

• Space—to be the kind of person you can be.
• Opportunity—to serve.
• Challenge—constraints to enabling friends.
• Clarity—in objectives, in evaluation, and in feedback.
• Authenticity—that gives hierarchy its true value, that gives you the right to offer my gifts, that neither overlooks nor oppresses.
• Meaning—a lasting foundation for hope.
• Accountability—a result of love.
• Conscience—that forbids people to enjoy apathy or debilitating ease.
• An ethos for change—How can you create a culture for change?

It’s important that we focus more on what we need to be than on what we need to do.

The quality of our relationships is the key to establishing a positive ethos for change.  When unusual people and ideas are welcome, there is an ethos for change.

Implementing change, like leadership and like music, is more an art than a science:

• Leaders are visible.  Followers have a right to see their leaders.
• Leaders understand the context in which people work.  Do you know who’s who and what’s what?
• A leader’s actions incarnate an organization’s beliefs and values.  Actions do speak louder than words.  Leadership is good work, not simply good talk.
• Lavish communication is crucial.
• The right of scrutiny belongs to each participant.  Diversity is expressed through scrutiny and criticism; diversity, when made manifest, strengthens the process of change.

Delegate!

DePree explains, “Clear instruction, confidence expressed as a high expectation, and an obvious trust in my ability to do the job. This was one of my earliest lessons in delegation.”

Hard-driving business managers are often too suspicious to abandon themselves to the consequences of real delegation. They trap themselves into dumping rather than delegating.

What exactly is delegation?  To be a good leader and a poor delegator is a contradiction in terms.  Delegation is one of the ways for a leader to connect voice and touch.  Delegation is both an essential organizational function and an important gift to followers.

What does delegation require?  Delegation requires careful observation, layers of skill, much feedback, and of course some failure.  Delegation is one way of dealing with the increasing complexity in organizations.

Any leader who limits her organization to the talents and time of the leader seriously handicaps the group.  Diversity consists of our individual gifts and the spectrum of gifts gives organizations strength.

We become corporately effective by trusting that others can do some things better than we can.

Delegation requires a form of dying, a separation of issue from self.  We must surrender or abandon ourselves to the gifts that other people bring to the game.  Delegation, like much of a leader’s work, requires trust.

Delegation requires leaders to bring delegates a clear statement of expectation, to enumerate the job’s goals and requirements.

What do delegates need? First, they need a defined purview. They need to know their authority accountability. They need to know the who, what, and when of the project, not the how—that is what the delegate brings. They need all the information the leader has and the sum of a leader’s wisdom regarding the project.

Leaders encourage their delegates, both through words and behaviors.

The dictionary defines delegate as one “sent and empowered.”  Definition of the verb delegate includes this: “to entrust to another.” 

What are the constraints?  Leaders cannot delegate everything.  They must bear the responsibility for picking the delegate.  And leaders cannot delegate their own responsibilities. Leaders are constrained to accept the results of delegation and deal with them.

What do we do with the results of delegation?  First, we say thank you.  Then we give recognition to the delegate within the organization.  Honest evaluation of the results, a vital part of personal growth, must follow.  Last, a leader will recognize that a new challenge best rewards a successfully completed project or good performance.

Polishing Gifts

Leaders see a twofold opportunity—to build a life and to build a career.  And the fact is that people become leaders only by building both.  Leadership is a job, not a position.

A combination of self-confidence and humility is critical.

Organizations have a right to expect decisiveness from leaders.  Acting in the face of one’s weakness requires courage and risk.

How do you learn best?  How do you feel about working with a mentor?  A mentoring relationship is one of the best ways to discover one’s gifts and weaknesses.  Remember that a learning leader must seek out mentors and maintain the relationship.

Good leadership includes teaching and learning, building relationships and influencing people, as opposed to exercising one’s power.

Are you prepared to think about polishing gifts as a way of dealing with time and leaving a legacy?  How do you deal with the difference between speed and time?  Speed constantly threatens the legacy of leaders.  Somehow quality and substance, like truth, arise from an awareness of time.

Consider what will give you joy at seventy or eighty.  Make a parallel track for responsible work in your life—something that complements your career but also serves others.  Practice leadership without power.  Serving on a school board or coaching tee-ball or volunteering in a hospice is an effective way to polish gifts.  Participate regularly in an intellectual pursuit.  Learn who and what gives you health.  Begin to ponder seriously ideas for a second—or third—career.   Ask yourself frequently, “What truly gives meaning to your life?”

We must beware that wealth not supplant richness or faith, that administration not replace leadership, that presenters not take precedence over producers.

DePree observes, “It seems to me that polishing gifts, such a crucial part of the work of a leader, could be called tuning oneself for life.”

Amateurs

Daniel Boorstin, the Librarian of Congress, said, “The leader is by definition an amateur—open to new vistas that training precludes from the professional.”

Only leaders can make it possible for amateurs to survive in organizations.  They can do so by creating an attitude and environment that seeks out, empowers, and recognizes good ideas, no matter what the source.

To be an amateur means literally that you do something for the love of it.

How can leaders recognize the amateurs in their organizations and put them to good use?  Amateurs defy definition.  Being curious, amateurs sometimes run afoul of the organizational hierarchy.  A leader will make it possible for a person to occasionally work outside the hierarchy.

A leader understands the importance of roving leaders, those indispensable people in our lives who take charge when we need them.  Amateurs simply don’t know what they can’t do.  The familiar taboos of life in organizations don’t frighten them.  Ideas, not authority, motivate amateurs.

People must be able to pursue their potential.  For leaders, carving out room for people to pursue their potential has many implications.  Does your company place a higher value on ideas and deeds than rank and reports?

Are producers and presenters promoted?  Are specialists and generalists recognized?

Do the leaders in your organization pay more attention to the possibilities of the future than the honest mistakes of the past?  Is it possible for the people who work here to have a hand in determining their future and their priorities?

Working in groups gives us a chance to deepen our lives and enlighten society.

Followership

As long as a follower is in the group you lead, she is essential.  Consider this, “Are the poorest sandlot baseball players chosen last because they commit so many errors?  Or do they commit errors because they’re chosen last?”

One learns to recognize the difficulty of holding people accountable while giving them space to make mistakes.  One also learns the fundamental necessity of doing so.

One learns that the story of the emperor and his clothes is more a parable than a fairy tale.  If leaders are to stay dressed, they need a lot of help.  Leaders cannot function without the eyes and ears and minds and hearts of followers.

Leaders who expect followers to be mind readers don’t produce good second fiddlers; leaders cannot deprive followers of good training, good orientation, and access to necessary information without paying a price.

Change is essential to organizational survival. Followers are good at change when leaders are good at managing change.  Leaders structure and practice involvement. They listen to, evaluate, and respond to input; they take action, or participation will not survive.

Leaders pay special attention to the equitable division of results.  A leader cannot—and should not—be aware of all the details in an organization.

Don’t forget that followers can improve their leader’s ability to get the job done. Followers have a great deal to teach leaders.

Do Leaders Have a Future?

The selection, nurture, and assignment of people with senior responsibility is one of the most important and difficult and rewarding parts of a leader’s job.

One of the myths of management is that good strategic planning and an appropriate vision will ensure an institution’s future. That simply isn’t enough. Only the effective selection, nurture, and assignment of senior people will secure an institution. When you consider the future of an organization, know that senior leaders are the future.  Senior leaders not only affect strategic thinking and planning, but they also shape an organization’s vision and values and practices.

Senior people fail for many reasons. Their ambition often exceeds their competence. The outstanding performance that brought them this far sometimes lulls them into complacence about their accountability.

Leaders owe it to candidates for senior positions to:

• Ask the candidate, “What is it that you will uniquely bring to this organization and to this senior responsibility?”
• Establish relevant criteria.
• Give the candidate a clear statement of expectations.  In selecting people to senior positions, a leader needs to know how the candidate looks at the organization’s mission and strategy.
• Discuss whether or not the candidate is capable of following her predecessor.
• Clarify what about the candidate’s performance will be measured.
• Arrange for interviews with people from several levels in the organization.
• Pave the way for new people or people who are to be promoted.
• Give the candidate opportunities to withdraw gracefully.

After you select a senior leader, the congratulations given and commitments made, there is one more step you may want to consider.  Senior leaders have difficult jobs to do; we share a high rate of failure.

Ask, “If together you and I fail, how would you prefer to deal with it?  Would you like to be transferred to another position in the company?  Would you like a quiet six months to search for a new job and then resign?  Would you prefer to be fired?”  Candid talk about failure makes the risk easier to live with.

The Attributes of Leadership:  A Checklist

Above all, leadership is a position of servanthood.  One quality of leadership always implies another. 

Here is DePree’s list:

• Integrity.  Integrity is the linchpin of leadership.
• Vulnerability.  Vulnerability is the opposite of self-expression.  Vulnerable leaders trust in the abilities of other people; vulnerable leaders allow the people who follow them to do their best.
• Discernment.  Discernment lies somewhere between wisdom and judgment. 
• Awareness of the human spirit.  Without understanding the cares, yearnings, and struggles of the human spirit, how could anyone presume to lead a group of people across the street?
• Courage in relationships.  Followers expect a leader to face up to tough decisions.
• Sense of humor.
• Intellectual energy and curiosity.
• Respect for the future, regard for the present, understanding of the past.  Leaders move constantly back and forth between the present and the future.  The future requires our humility in the face of all we cannot control.
• Predictability.  Leaders must be calculable forces in organizations; they are not free to follow a whim.
• Breadth.  To borrow from Walt Whitman, leaders are people large enough to contain multitudes.
• Comfort with ambiguity.  Whatever one’s position, the amount of ambiguity involved is directly proportional to the amount of leadership required.
• Presence.  The ability to stop is an important trait of leaders.  Leaders stop—to ask and answer questions, to be patient, to listen to problems, to seek the nuance, to follow up a lead.