Reflective leaders are distinguished by patterns of regular self-assessment and analysis. Reflective organizations employ similar mechanisms of collective reflection and shared stock-taking. But how are such structures established in the workplace? At the heart of any robust system of organization-wide assessment is the collection of data related to workplace culture and perceptions. Drawing from both quantitative and qualitative evaluations, metrics …
The Buck Stops Where?
The data were clear. Three supervisors were doing a great job. Three others were struggling or failing outright. The CEO instinctively approached the survey results as a tool to pinpoint deficient managers. But our experience suggested that the problem lay less in any one individual’s failures than in the overall variation of leadership within the organization. For such a wide …
The Role of Leaders of Leaders
We once worked with a manufacturing company that was trying to move from a top-down leadership approach to a more participation-focused system. Brian, a manager of one of the larger plants, readily accepted the challenge building a new concept of leadership and was doing an excellent job of making unfamiliar and sometimes difficult choices. One day we commend him on …
Reducing Disunity or Building Unity?
To the extent that leaders consider workplace unity at all, they tend to think in terms of fixing what’s broken. Discord is overlooked in countless forms and action is taken only when conditions get truly out of hand, when people are shouting in hallways or departments are refusing to work with one another. But just as peace at its fullest …
Unity, Contest, and Competition
Why do leaders accept the largely avoidable costs of disagreement, turf issues, silos, politics, competition, cliques, hostility, and other forms of organizational disunity? Below-the-line beliefs about human nature play a role. But equally influential are related beliefs about the role of contest and competition in society. Competition is almost universally seen (in Western societies, at least) as a powerful source …
Organizational Unity: Success (or Failure) at the Widest Level
Organizations succeed or fail as whole systems. They can no more thrive on the strength of most-favored aspects than a car can use a functioning drive shaft and carburetor to make up for a dead alternator and flat tires. Systems whose elements are mismatched, sub-optimized, disconnected, or otherwise disunited will, therefore, inevitably fail to reach their maximum potential. This is …
Forging a Reflective Organization
Leadership development is, at one level, an individual pursuit, focusing on leaders’ own strengths and challenges, successes and failures. The discipline of reflective leadership itself is grounded in individual attitudes and beliefs, and the personal choices they give rise to. At another level, however, leadership development is concerned with collective patterns of association and interaction. To build effective human …
Unity, Discord, and the Reality of Human Nature
If it is in fact true that organizational performance rises with growing levels of agreement, collaboration, reciprocity and shared vision, why do leaders accept significant (and largely avoidable) costs of disunity? Much has to do with widespread below-the-line beliefs that disunity is just the way things are. “It’s human nature,” clients have again and again suggested in our consulting work, …