EIGHT
Humble Leadership Requires Reinforcing the “Soft Stuff”
We noted in Chapter 1 that something new is “in the air.” What we see that is new is growing acceptance that managerial culture needs to be centered on interpersonal and group processes—colloquially, “the soft stuff.” In the various stories in Chapters 3 through 6, we described how leaders had what we would label a Humble Leadership mindset and how their success resulted, in most cases, from their Level 2 skills in managing groups. The way in which leaders convened groups and then provided the incentives and experiences to make them into high-performance teams is striking. When the focus is on interpersonal relationships inside organizations, it is inevitable that group dynamics will become the critical variable in determining optimal task outcomes. The future demands that we evolve technical rationality into socio-technical rationality.
Learning to think in interpersonal and group process terms becomes a foundational building block of Humble Leadership. That implies even learning from the performance arts, where process is crucial to successful performance, as well as broadening our criteria of “success” or “winning” to include more qualitative criteria such as “total system performance” or “effective adaptive learning.” The quantitative measurement focus suits the linear machine model, but as work becomes more organic and systemic, the way we evaluate outcomes must incorporate new perceptual if not emotional criteria suited to the complexity of the work.
The linkage between leadership and group dynamics is not new. Social psychologists studying organizations learned early on how powerful group relations are, and how much more work gets done when employees are working together rather than working alone. The power of group motivation has been well established in various experiments that highlighted that the best way to increase group energy and motivation was to have the group compete with another group. Much is known about the positive and negative effects of group forces under different task and contextual situations (Schein, 1999). However, we were so focused on how to improve motivation that we put blinders on when it came to seeing the various correlated consequences inside the group, such as becoming more autocratic, shutting down deviant opinions, going into unnecessary hurry-up decision modes, and generally undermining the diverse forces in the group that led to better ideas.
Focus on Group Process and Experiential Learning
Interest in group dynamics was stimulated by the theories and experiments of the German sociologist Kurt Lewin, who launched the Research Center for Group Dynamics and a doctoral program at MIT in 1945. What was really new in the research launched by Lewin was the profound discovery that the subjects of research could usefully become involved in the research process itself, what has since come to be known as “action research.” Not only did group members provide vital data that the observing researchers could not see, but the involvement in the research process gave those group members profound personal learning experiences. A strong link was forged between generating knowledge and immediately applying that knowledge to the problems being investigated, especially in the field of education.
This insight led directly into experimenting with the learning process itself. Suppose the learners had the primary responsibility to learn and the teacher’s role was to provide a learning environment and tools, but not the syllabus or readings? This method would obviously have limitations in the hard sciences, but might it be the key to learning the soft stuff, the dynamics of relationships, groups, and culture?
It was discovered that teaching and learning about groups and interpersonal dynamics could indeed be greatly enhanced if the teacher, instead of “telling,” asked students to have real-time experiences and analyze them with the help of the teacher. This process of co-creation came to be what we now call “experiential learning” and led to the founding in 1947 of the National Training Laboratories where T-groups (T for training) were launched in Bethel, Maine, as the centerpiece of human relations labs on leadership and group dynamics (Schein & Bennis, 1965; Schein, 2014).
What is today known as organization development (OD) grew out of these early experiments with sensitivity training where managers and facilitators working together learned how systematic analysis of group process was needed in order to make sense of the events that occurred in and between groups within an organization. Today, one of the main organizational problems managers cite is how to get what are now called “silos,” different divisions, product groups, or geographic units to work together. How would a “group process” emphasis help? In the human relations labs, we created groups and had them interact with each other in simulated communities or in competitive exercises and could observe how tribes formed within a matter of days and how quickly dysfunctional competition arose among them. Going forward, we could experiment with how to reduce intergroup tensions or how to co-create groups that would be more cooperative if not synergistic from the outset. Just as the learning process was co-created in the T-groups, so the design of organizations, groups, and teams could be co-created by the conveners and members of the group rather than an outsider expert. We learned from the outset in the T-groups that such co-creation always hinged on building relationships first, and that meant getting to know each other as individuals through personization.
We also learned that managing change, solving problems, and fixing organizational pathologies depended on making the participants aware of group process through reflection and analysis in simulated situations or designed “exercises” that made group issues and processes visible. A humble leader could create the conditions for such change by co-designing new group experiences as the following examples illustrate.
EXAMPLE 8.1. A Process for Getting Silos to Work Together
Saab Combitech, the technical division of Saab, consisted of six different research units, each working for a different division of the company. The CEO hired Ed as a consultant to design an activity that would make the heads of these research units recognize the potential of collaborating instead of functioning as independent units competing for scarce resources. Ed and the CEO designed a 3-day process-oriented workshop for the top executives of the six units around three segments (Schein, 2016).
In segment one, Ed would explain the concept of culture and how to decipher it. Each group would then designate two of its members to become “ethnographers” who would, in segment two, go into each other’s groups to learn about each other’s cultures and then, in segment three, would report out their findings to the total group. They could then collectively discuss where there were cultural themes that were common and could serve as the basis for developing more cooperation. The impact of observing each other with a cultural lens and being forced to talk to each other about what they observed created a completely different kind of conversation that led to many forms of cooperation over the next few years.
What made this work was the joint design with the CEO. He understood that he wanted the key members of each of the six units to get to know each other better, to begin to build Level 2 relationships, but instead of just having them do something together, it proved to be more powerful to make it a learning exercise: “Lets learn about each other’s cultures” was a great objective when the implicit goal was to learn how to operate in synergy, across silos. The CEO also understood that he owned the intervention and made his needs the driving force.
For Ed as the consultant, the high degree of Level 2 personization with the Saab Combitech CEO empowered the CEO and Ed to challenge the different heads of the silos to work openly and leave out the mistrust that characterized the past rivalry between the silos. This experience with the Saab Combitech CEO also recalled for Ed his early interactions with the CEO of Ciba-Geigy (CG), the Swiss Chemical MNC now owned by Novartis. Early in building the relationship with Ed, the CG CEO invited Ed to spend a night and a day of conversation at the CEO’s personal home in the country. While unsettling to Ed at first, it quickly became clear why this accelerated the work process in Ed’s engagement with CG. The Level 2 connection, accelerated by spending time in a personal context, built trust and provided for openness that was critical in getting the change work done.
These examples were originally reported in Humble Consulting (2016) and are adapted for our purposes here.
EXAMPLE 8.2. Creating a Different Organizational Process at the Massachusetts Audubon Society
The Massachusetts Audubon Society (Mass Audubon) was a large, successful wildlife and land conservation organization that had been operating for a long time throughout New England. Ed had been on the board for about 2 years when Norma, the head of Mass Audubon, and Louis, the chairman of the board, decided that it was time for a campaign to raise capital funds. Such a campaign had been run a decade or more previously, and the need for new buildings and expansion of the programs was growing rapidly. The big question was whether the board was ready to tackle such a campaign, because it would require a great deal of extra work and commitment from the board members and the organization’s staff.
The process committee decided that they needed to create a task force of committed board members to address the question of whether or not the board was ready and asked Ed to chair this task force. He agreed and took it as a challenge to see whether using what we now call a Humble Leadership approach could influence how this task force of ten board members would work together on this campaign.
Ed’s plan as task force convener was to let the group get acquainted informally over a meal with only the vague mandate that they would be discussing whether or not the board and the organization were ready for a capital campaign. That required overruling Norma’s desire to open with a speech on how previous task forces had functioned. She also had to agree to starting with an informal dinner at a local club that would stimulate personization. During dinner, Ed kept the conversation general but then, over dessert, proposed the following with emphasis and gravity:
To get our discussion going, I would like to ask us all to do something that some of you might find a little different, but I consider it very important to start in this way. I would like each of us, in the order in which we are sitting, starting to my left, to take a minute or two to tell the group, from the heart, why you belong to Mass Audubon. I would like no discussion or interruptions until we have heard from all of us. We can then proceed with our formal agenda. This will take us a while, but it is important that we hear this from everyone. Roger, why don’t you begin? Why do you belong to this organization?
The logic behind doing this kind of “check-in” was to get everyone to say something personal. The purpose of asking people to talk “from the heart” was to personize their membership and, at the same time, to gather information from which to infer how committed the members of this task force might actually be to a capital campaign. If enthusiasm in the task force was missing, they would have to consider postponing the whole idea.
This process brought a new level of cooperation to this group. Each person spoke with great passion about how important Mass Audubon was in his or her life, how important its role was in conservation and nature education, and how enthusiastic each one felt about helping the organization grow and prosper. By the end of a half hour, everyone had spoken, and it was clear that this task force was ready to proceed with the hard work of involving the rest of the board and especially the employees and staff of Mass Audubon.
The task force of senior leaders then decided to replicate this “check-in” process with the respective staffs. Each of the leaders of the staff groups was asked to say why he or she worked for Mass Audubon, and the board members repeated their statements. We learned later that one of the most significant unanticipated outcomes of these meetings was that for the first time the larger staff actually heard ten board members say why they belonged to Mass Audubon. Until that time the staff saw these board members as only names with unknown levels of interest in the organization. Furthermore, as we had anticipated, the staff for the first time learned a great deal about one another’s levels of commitment and interests. The organization had been plugging along with a Level 1 formal-role-determined process and had never really had a session where more personal feelings, motives, and values could be leveraged.
What started out as a relatively minor intervention turned out to have major impact because it personized the whole process of working together on the capital campaign. The campaign itself took off with personal connections, emotional engagement, and great enthusiasm and over its 2-year period successfully met its multimillion-dollar target.
The great contribution of this kind of experiential learning was to give people in organizations personal insight into how group processes worked and how important the understanding and management of such processes were to accomplishing the tasks that the groups had undertaken. In subsequent debriefs, groups could then collect further insights and develop the process skills needed to actively manage the group’s work.
Group Growth and Development
Group performance depends very much on how the groups are created and the norms that are evolved around psychological safety for all members. A leader trained in group dynamics should understand how groups develop around the specific tasks they face. How well the group works reflects the kinds of relationships that are fostered in the initial group meetings, and this dimension of leadership is too often ignored in the mainstream of “leadership development,” which emphasizes the special skills required for individual leadership excellence rather than skills required to make group members feel psychologically safe and to build a group culture that is adapted to the group’s purpose. The humble leader needs to be aware of members’ needs to develop their identity in the group, to learn how they can contribute, and, most important, to develop understanding and acceptance of the others in the group. This process typically fails when leaders push groups into task work too quickly, that is, before enough personization among members has occurred, hence trust and openness remain at a marginal Level 1, and collaboration looks more like exchange than cooperation.
Making Group Dynamics a Central Leadership Responsibility
We are proposing with Humble Leadership that we emphasize the concepts and vocabulary around group building, group maintenance, group development, and internal and external group relations that highlight how group members play many different adaptive roles at different stages of group development and that group boundaries will shift unpredictably as organizational work will shape shift. Leadership and followership become subsidiary role descriptions relative to the recognition of the important group roles and functions that make groups more or less effective: convening, setting goals, evolving norms, asking for ideas, brainstorming, building systemic understanding, identifying possibilities, decision processing, summarizing, consensus testing, action planning, and group sensemaking. Our point is that these should not be topics and skill development areas for group specialists and consultants, but should become defining skills of the effective humble leader.
We should also remember that early group research showed the very real distinction between task leaders and relational leaders in group evolution (Bales & Cohen, 1979; Hackman, 2002). We should not ignore the stages of group development that determine whether the group’s problem solving will be valid or, as in “groupthink,” will reflect the private agendas of certain members. Humble leaders need to be aware of how easy it is for a group to slip into collectively doing what in fact no one wanted to do because no one felt the complete psychological safety to speak up and no one had the skill to test for consensus. Here we are referring of course to the well-documented and all too familiar dysfunction known as “the Abilene paradox” (Harvey, 1988). It is important to see this issue as a matter of skill. Humble Leadership involves skills and experience to know when and how to intervene with summarizing, consensus testing, polling, and, finally, decision making and action planning.
Humble leaders also must be wary of the tactic of applying efficiency criteria to the running of meetings, including publishing agendas ahead of time and, even when new members are at the meeting, starting the discussion immediately, keeping to tight schedules, in essence running a meeting much like a machine would be operated. Why is this a mistake? Because inevitably when individuals enter a new group, such as when they attend a meeting with new people, each participant will be pulled in conflicting directions: One force is the self-conscious thoughts about why we are there, what will be expected of us, how psychologically safe will we be if we speak up, and what hidden agendas or “elephants in the room” may be impacting effectiveness. The other force will be the relentless pull of meeting efficiency, to manage the time precisely, to reinforce the implicit hierarchy, and to drive progress through judicious if not brutal assignment of action items and deliverables. What is left in between these forces is the adaptiveness and organic energy of a group learning how to sequence a continuous stream of new tasks if not new priorities.
Especially if this is a new group or a meeting with new members, a better approach always is to begin informally with a gathering (not a meeting, but perhaps a free lunch, or doughnuts and drinks for everybody) and an informal check-in that allows people to calibrate themselves and get to know each other a little bit. Food and drink automatically put everyone on the same plane as humans “breaking bread,” which becomes essential if psychological safety is to be nurtured.
We should not ignore that even a mature group has to maintain and nurture itself to be able to connect with and function in a network of groups, build connections with other groups, and develop the agility to deal with unexpected events that may require different kinds of leadership, followership, and membership behavior (Bennis & Shepard, 1956; Bion, 1959; Schein, 1999).
Summary and Conclusions
When all is said and done, we have to accept that leadership, culture, and interpersonal and group dynamics are intertwined conceptually and behaviorally. This is the socio of the socio-technical system; this is the “soft stuff” that humble leaders cannot delegate to HR, outside consultants, or facilitators. This is the stuff that is all too often ignored or actively pushed under the rug in Level 1 transactional management cultures. It is once again (or perhaps always has been) time to bring the soft stuff into the mainstream of management and leadership.
We all have the capacity to live and work at Level 2 and even Level 3, but we have not incorporated it sufficiently into work situations that require it. Personizing is challenging. Living in a transactional role-bound world of work is easier. We have to give it up because we will not be able to get the job done without personizing and building effective cooperation and team learning.
Emerging humble leaders will realize that their effectiveness will depend on their own understanding of this Level 2 soft stuff and their skill in managing it. They will learn this from their own experience, from consultants, and from their own engagement in workshops and various training activities. However, in the end, they must not only understand it, but own it. We believe that, in the end, leadership in complex organizations will be Level 2 personized Humble Leadership.
We can provide a little help in how to get there by describing, in the next chapter, a bit more precisely the necessary mindset, attitudes, and behavioral skills that are involved in becoming competent in Humble Leadership. We can suggest some readings and exercises, but we want to be clear that our own learning in this area has been experiential and that understanding of group and interpersonal dynamics requires experiencing those dynamics, not just reading or hearing about them.