chapter FOURTEEN

Beyond the Behavioral Profile

This chapter is one sort of digest of this book. Chapter Fifteen will be another: a structural dynamics analysis of Barack Obama as a leader, designed to bring the ideas shared in this book into an analysis of the current pressures facing the ultimate executive leader.

Right now, first, I want to briefly revisit six themes that tie in with Level IV of the structural dynamics model. By now I hope you have been convinced of the usefulness of the behavioral profile for reading the room. Yet you may still be skeptical of or reluctant to move yourself and the leaders you coach to the deepest (story) level.

Second, I want to present twenty capacities by which I believe future leaders should be assessed, using members of the ClearFacts management team one final time as examples. In Chapter Fifteen I will use these capacities as part of my analysis of the leader in the Oval Office.

MUST WE REALLY?

Behind any hesitation you may have to incorporate Level IV into your model for coaching and into your coaching itself, or to pass it on to leaders, you may still have doubts about six assertions I have made in this book. Of course, you must draw your own conclusions, so I frame them here in question form. By distilling my own position once more on each, I hope to move you to clarify yours (and, I hope, in this direction).

Must We Really Talk of Love?

Yes, and in our working lives. Although some business leaders persist in saying that their calculations leave no place for love, they themselves feel it manifested in the rewards of status, power, and dollars. A few, like Ralph Waterman, are more conscious of its broader pervasive power in business and are setting out to spread that awareness in the workplace. The culture has changed and will continue to do so, and our future leaders are growing up in this new culture.

Does Empathy Really Matter?

“Only connect!” wrote E. M. Forster in his 1910 novel, Howard’s End: “That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.”

As I argued in Chapter Ten, empathy is a sine qua non of decision making with regard to moral purpose. It is also central to connecting, identity, love, and leadership. Without empathy, a leader’s message of purpose will fall flat or seem false and empty. In hard times, when tough decisions must be made, when in fear or doubt the many look to the few or to the one to guide them to safe landing, the leader’s personal connection is what makes others follow.

Empathy is also essential to effective cross-model conversation. If disputants have empathy, or let the “other” exercise it, or, best of all, if as a precondition for engagement they set out to learn about it, they stand a chance of walking away from polar discourse more peacefully and more loved.

This is successful intimacy: succeeding in paying the price of putting one’s trust in an “other,” giving this other the power to keep our moral failings in check. This ability depends on one’s own successful experience of intimacy in some form in one’s life. To appreciate the value of this approach, consider the alternatives represented by Arthur and Howard.

Arthur Saunders Connecting 

Arthur returns to his departmental team, a group of five handpicked types, each an unapologetic opposer, after having a difficult time, mainly with Howard, in a management team meeting. The departmental group is known for its boisterous sturm und drang—its means for making creative decisions—but also for its cohesion, its felt sense of warmth and pride, when, following a typical storm, the breaking sun coaxes life back into a wilting stem of an idea.

“Art, you look like you’ve been to a funeral,” one says.

“Right—his own,” says another.

“Howard again?” groans a third.

“What’s up?” they chant in chorus.

Arthur tries to shuck off their concerns with, “We’ve work to do.”

“Not til we dress your wounds. Just doing what you taught us. You can’t tap your best if junk is festering in your mind. Let’s get rid of the junk, so we can really get to work.”

Howard’s Failure to Connect 

At another moment, Howard is saying “so long” to a fellow traveler, Clyde, with whom he struck up a “down and dirty” conversation on a plane. He’s had this kind of conversation only once before, on a fishing trip with Brian Casey, his one close friend at the time, at night by an isolated trout-filled lake in the foothills of the Laurentians. After beating back the swarms of mosquitoes that chased them a harrowing twenty yards from their outboard motorboat to the sanctuary of a cabin, they surrendered to exhaustion. Single-malt scotch went down easy. It greased their tongues. They talked loosely of down-and-dirty sexual adventures both knew were more fantasy than reality.

“Nice meeting you. See ya again some time,” Howard and Clyde each say as they walk out of the airport concourse and head off in opposite directions.

Not likely, Howard thinks, shrugging off a perplexingly unwelcome feeling, a blow penetrating somewhere near his heart. It surprises him. Where’s Brian Casey fishing these days? What? Me lonesome? No way. I’m here to haul in my own next big one. Remember how Ian shook my hand when he saw my proposal yesterday and read the client’s response? You bet this new sucker—sorry, “client”—has swallowed it, hook, line, and sinker. All I have to do is reel him in. And Ralph embraced me! Unbelievable.

After days and nights of focused, hard work, Howard is well prepared to do something he knows how to do. Searching for the limo driver who will take him to the hotel, he smiles inwardly, his chest swells. Let’s face it: I am good at what I do.

But that nagging loneliness bulls its way back into Howard’s companionless, unwed, lonely thoughts. Swat the damn mosquito. Brian. That story I spun him about the sex with Mary Jo. Howard smiles again. Well, not quite how it happened. He remembered Mary Jo’s entreaties: “Tie my hands. Not so tight. Stop! It hurts! You’re hurting me!” I didn’t stop. I didn’t believe her. For me the best sex I ever had. For her, not so. And tomorrow I clinch the deal. Tomorrow night. Sex.

Why Emphasize the Value of Intimate Partners?

Intimate connectedness is the most obvious source of love. The ideal purpose of this intimacy, true connectedness, is a potential antidote to everything from leader burnout from overwork (Ralph), to maybe being on a wrong career path (Arthur), to disaffecting relationships (Ian), to fraud (Howard and TJ).

Sonia is our exemplar partner in intimacy. By insistently reining in her spouse’s inclinations toward self-sacrifice, by her persistent presence and connection with him, and by her insistence on their retreating to intimately communicative time together, over a significant number of years she has enabled him to spend his work time as a healthier, more productive, more moral leader.

Should spouses and partners be saddled with the role that Sonia takes on? Structural dynamics indirectly addresses this question in its insistence that for a leader to be a whole person, work and love must come together in one life, and that designing a life worth living is one way to make this happen. Sonia’s strategic move to join Ralph in designing their model for living adds an energizing new turn to their relationship.

Can a spouse have too big a role in her partner’s career? Could and should Art Saunders have stayed at ClearFacts, or was the influence of his wife, Jane, for the better? The question should be kept in mind.

Should Coaches Elicit Childhood Stories of Love?

Coaches who have trained in structural dynamics see a clear connection between communication styles and all four levels of the structural dynamics model. Childhood and later stories shape how the leader reads the room (sees, hears, and names what he perceives) and what actions he takes. Like the rest of us, leaders have deeply personal childhood and hero stories that can arouse strong feelings driven by shadows.

Are coaches equipped to elicit such connections in a productive and safe way? Or can they be? The question is not trivial, but in fact many times I have successfully elicited such stories and witnessed their transformational power, and have coached other consultants to do the same. In light of this, in my own training of coaches I have introduced methods that help the practitioner develop the capacity to deal at the level of childhood stories. None report anything but success.

Why So Much Emphasis on Models?

Any leader who must function under pressure should build and articulate a practice model under the guidance of a rigorously trained coach. And under my own watch, the coach’s training is rigorous, including developing a practice model of her own and submitting to supervision of her work in the field by another, more senior and already qualified consultant.

You or your leaders may assume that time spent building a model will distract and burden them. To the contrary, my experience is that having a model raises the quality of both a leader’s work and his life.

Why So Much Focus on Fraud?

If we define fraud broadly as setting out to “beat the system” for personal gain, fraud is now pandemic and viral in our culture’s financial, political, and other institutions. I have argued that people in positions of power are particularly vulnerable.¹

On an individual level, what can be done to turn the pandemic around? Leaders can begin to build self-correcting leadership models with well-trained coaches as their guides, themselves fully equipped to speak truth to power. Members of such leaders’ teams can be afforded similar options to grow personally and professionally in creating a life of meaning, a sure immunization against fraud.

RAISING THE BAR: TWENTY LEADER CAPACITIES

The list here collects and briefly summarizes twenty capacities that structural dynamics suggests are essential for outstanding leaders. It is useful as a more or less complete structural dynamics framework for assessing where a given leader’s practice stands. Think in terms of a rating for each—for example, a scale from 1 (low) to 7 (high). Together, they can raise the bar for future leaders, converging in what structural dynamics considers the ultimate capacity: leader communicative competency that moves outward from reading the conference room to reading and narrating the story of an even larger one.

For the following section, I rated, using the 1–7 scale I mentioned earlier, each of the ClearFacts team members in terms of their strengths in each of these twenty capacities of leaders. I used a rough method with no pretense of science. At the end of the chapter, I will ask you to do some ratings of your own.

To rate, I established with two research assistants a set of criteria for high, medium, and low ratings. My assistants then rated the ClearFacts team members independently of each other, reconciled their differences, and shared their perspectives with me. I will report our judgments in terms of high, low, and growing-edge capacities. An average of 6–7 was considered high; 4 or less, low; and 2 or 1, growing edge.

THE CLEARFACTS TEAM: INDIVIDUAL CAPACITIES AND CONTRIBUTIONS

You probably possess a strong sense now of who the ClearFacts characters are as people and as leaders, and of the personal and professional challenges they have faced from a structural dynamics perspective. You’ve seen them engaging in interpersonal clashes and responding to unexpected external events. You’ve heard rising up in them, often surprisingly, major parts of their childhood histories and how those histories affected them as they have faced certain tests of worth, moral character, and performance in rocky times.

Here, to demonstrate the applicability of the twenty criteria in efforts to raise the bar for future leaders, I will summarize what we’ve learned about the strengths and weaknesses of each of the ClearFacts people as leaders. I will also suggest some implications for other leaders with similar profiles.

Ralph Waterman

I will assess Ralph as he was before his year of executive coaching with Duncan. Because in previous chapters I have documented Ralph’s growth during that year, I will also say a few words about his future.

A bystander in random meaning, Ralph was, as we know, a rare choice of CEO for an established organization. At the outset Ralph had a model of his own, though it was not fully articulated or developed at the time. Central to it was the idea of making the management team more diverse, and he did so in these respects: bringing in a female, Martha, open in affect, to balance the team’s closed power dominance; and bringing in Ron, open in meaning, to bolster support for Ralph’s green energy goals.

Ralph made one other important decision later: seeking strategic reform after the high-stakes firestorm, he decided to increase the size of his team. Again, his goal was ever-richer diversity, which comes more naturally to leaders such as he (with open and random profiles) than it does to closed leaders.

In this sense, as well as in terms of other criteria for assessing a leader (in the structural dynamics model, at least), Ralph showed himself as a leader whose decisions support systemic rather than personal goals.

Ralph brings much else to our understanding of what an ideal future leader could look like. He empowered his coach to

• Help him become a skilled team leader
• Challenge and check his (random) tendency to decide things impetuously
• Look closely at whom he favored or disfavored (including his nemesis) and why
• Come to terms with his hurt-child view of his history
• Push back on his suspect stand on transparency
• Look more deeply into his self for traces of shadow behaviors, and take responsibility for them
• Up-end his self-deluding conviction that busy people know how to master the experience of time (see Chapter Thirteen)
• Help him commit himself to the difficult work of model building
• Help him unify his two core worlds, work and intimacy, and the two selves that reside there, into one integrated whole

Ralph exemplifies what one can achieve through disciplined learning, first with a guide and subsequently on one’s own. Table 14.1 sums up his salient capacities.

Table 14.1 Ralph’s Highs, Lows, and Growing Edge

Ralph is a natural for model building. His appetite for learning about himself and about models (natural to someone high in meaning) suggests that he can improve weak capacities with coaching, and probably on his own.

What else does Ralph’s example suggest about the random type? Randoms do better at imagining the future than dealing with current realities; that is, they are better vision leaders than performance leaders. But they can be good to great leaders if they choose their team with an eye toward balance, and work with others who love managing, as Ralph deployed Ian. If Ralph ever moves on to another organization, he will again need a closed-type second in command like Ian. We’d advise him to hold out for one who is also interested in developing his own model.

Ian Maxwell

Ian Maxwell, ClearFacts’s CFO, COO, and Ralph’s second in command, was too stern for some and a problem for Martha, with whom he often clashed. Still, he ran his unit well, consistently achieved desired results, and, to his credit, presented as a man who kept his word. With his eye fixed on the bottom line, he held in check his CEO’s tendencies toward expansiveness, which Ian often thought were reckless.

Ian showed more capacity for change than one would have expected at the beginning of our story. This was due in large part to coach Duncan, who broke through Ian’s off-putting boundedness. Approaching him through meaning, Duncan made a rare connection with a man who kept himself at a distance by choice.

A few months earlier, Ian had, in an uncharacteristic move, approached Duncan with a personal problem. In Ian’s mind, Duncan was still a newcomer, but Ian was distressed by a massive breakdown in communication with his son, Hector, and by fear for the boy’s life. Unable to engage in cross-model conversation with a young man strong in affect, Ian feared his son was threatening suicide when he received a cryptic phone message. Duncan was able to walk Ian through his response, and as a result, Ian came to respect Duncan’s methods and view Duncan as more of a part of the team. This episode also played a part in his awakening to the necessity of human connection, a behavioral dimension leaders of this type must add to their repertoires.

The fraud crisis helped put Ian’s integrity on display. When others sought punitive retribution, Ian, to their surprise, insisted on treating Howard and Template Jones fairly, in the mode of the adjudicator. Table 14.2 sums up Ian’s salient capacities.

Table 14.2 Ian’s Highs, Lows, and Growing Edge

Movers in closed power like Ian call for special attention. The business world recognizes their value. They are heavily recruited and generally helped up the career ladder with promotions; they occupy the top notches in our most powerful organizations. Unfortunately, some organizations encourage the type to circle around regulations in search of new routes to profit.

Leaders with Ian’s profile tend to turn down the opportunity to build their models, but I think this does an injustice to the business world and to themselves. It’s good that Duncan is on a campaign to bring Ian along, preparing him to join his colleagues in model building with a coach’s guidance.

Howard Green

Howard’s is a cautionary tale. Hard working and highly productive, he is a mover and opposer in closed power. Howard is unlike closed mover Ian in that Howard’s absorption in analytic meaning all but totally eclipses any sight of philosophical meaning. Howard fanatically applies mathematical analysis to demonstrate his ability to generate profits, for which he was dutifully rewarded at ClearFacts. His views about affect, connection, and intimacy are clouded at least in part by skepticism, and markedly distorted by his history as to what love is about.

Unlike Ian, Howard is weighted down by dark shadows that render anything that gets in the way of his achieving his goals a nuisance he must get rid of or destroy. Given room to make deals, he hires an accomplice in moral turpitude, and together they conspire to commit fraud that strikes at his firm’s raison d’être. Table 14.3 sums up Howard’s capacities. He received many other low scores, too, but the ones I show are the most relevant to our model of a future leader.

Table 14.3 Howard’s Highs, Lows, and Growing Edge

My assistants and I were struck by how hard it was to find many high scores for Howard. Of course, I had portrayed him as the team’s villain. Nevertheless, I hold that his low ratings have very real implications for the ongoing discourse about what leadership is and how to help develop it. Business schools, clearly the most influential institutions responsible for training business leaders, should take notice by asking the following questions:

• Should we consider moral intelligence and emotional intelligence, along with business intelligence, in selecting students?
• What would a course on morals—one that actually inspires moral decision making—look like?
• Is it possible to induce leaders to monitor their own behavior as they evolve as leaders?

Martha Curtis

Martha is an exemplary proponent of the open system. Her signature speech act, mover in open affect, is backed by her wide behavioral repertoire: she moves, follows, and opposes effectively in all three communication domains and is the team’s best bystander, except when she is triggered by certain closed-power people.

For Martha, as for many leaders who profess a preference for an open system, shadow forces from childhood can at times prove the lie; they lead Martha to look more closed than she is. Leading her own team, she can maintain her open-system stance, tolerating difference, making and supporting compromise, and connecting. And in the management team, led by a random with whom she has bonded and whom she trusts, these capacities and her strong opposer are appreciated.

But in a training assignment with Ian, an unrepentant closed type, Martha’s protector hero frequently erupted in defense “of the innocent,” the young, the promising “potentials being put through the wringer under Ian’s deliberately military style.”

In other words, in high stakes she becomes a protector who can be provoked to slide into her gray zone—that is, when toxic themes she’s carried with her from her childhood are triggered. Her overwrought clash of profiles with Howard, who triggered her most toxic themes, threw her off balance. When she clears up this glitch, she will become the leader she is meant to be. By the end of our story, she is in fact prepared to do so in therapy or coaching and by getting on with building her model, as she enthusiastically plans to do. Table 14.4 sums up her capacities.

Table 14.4 Martha’s Highs, Lows, and Growing Edge

Martha’s scores were almost universally in the high middle to high range; her lows, usually the downsides of highs rather than truly shadowed behavior, made it difficult to find low lows, without unduly forcing choices.

As more and more women make their way into positions of power, this question stands out: Must they bury or disguise their natural behavioral tendencies in order to “make it”? In the current sociocultural climate, the question itself has an inescapable taint of stereotype. Yet it must be addressed. As this trend continues, women who score high in affect will have to contend with men who are closed in power and indisposed to emotional expression.

Ian’s profile and style remain the branded leader prototype, the one that is coveted by our current corporate mind-set. His attitude toward women and their place in this world is still alive and kicking back, as Martha discovered. Attempting to break free of stereotype, I deliberately supplied her with scars and warts to match Ian’s. My presenting Ian as a leader undergoing real change was also a deliberate attempt to break free of stereotype.

Martha is a high performer in her specialty. We trust that her readiness for self-knowledge and her genuine eagerness to be coached in developing her model will pay off.

Ron Stuart

On the Behavioral Propensities Profile, Ron would rate as a mover in open meaning. In his language domain propensities, power would rank behind meaning and affect. In high stakes, he would prosecute some and strongly advocate for others. In crisis, he is a level-headed survivor, dedicated to the firm’s purpose and strong moral foundation—perhaps too committed, putting his intimate relationship at risk.

Made sensitive by racial insult, Ron reveals a complicated profile, his “act” before coming to ClearFacts contradicting his real profile, which was more varied than was reputed. As a black, he had decided at the start of his rise as a leader to wear a mask of aggression; he would play “the man’s” game. “I’m no Uncle Tom,” he told Ralph in confidence, and “I’m no Angry Black either. (Not even at racists; we’re all racist. I only get angry at extreme racists who deny their bigotry, like Howard.) I just gave them what they wanted: a smart, hard-driving, profit-making power guy. But it got me to you.”

Ralph had quickly swept race off the table and reached Ron’s more authentic self. The two connected from the start. Both were committed to alternative energy. Both were prescient and entrepreneurial in their view of electric cars as an important wave of the future. Both were convinced that this meant longer-lasting batteries would be crucial.

But the two connected even more deeply on a personal level. A little psychologizing would suggest that Ron was the son Ralph would never have, and that Ralph represented the father Ron wished he’d had. It is safe to say that bonds like these—bonds of love—do occur in the workplace. Their implications for leadership must be named, and their positive and negative aspects explored. Table 14.5 shows Ron’s capacities.

Table 14.5 Ron’s Highs, Lows, and Growing Edge

Ron is a leader whose performance will not peak until he deals with his childhood story and how it limits his functional awareness. Easy as it is to support his attitude toward people like Howard, as a leader Ron will have to deal with such individuals. Building a strong leadership model with a coach capable of eliciting his story of imperfect love and that story’s structural impacts will help. At our story’s end, he is on that path.

Ron presents a problem for leaders like Ralph, whose own random tendencies lead Ralph to secretly support Ron’s attitudes toward the darkly tainted authoritarian ways of some closed people.

Ralph is not alone as a leader whose ego is fanned by a talented young protégé. He does Ron no favors, however, if he goes too far in treating him as a favorite son who shares his dreams for the firm, and fails to treat his protégé’s personal life and need to evolve as a leader as equal in priority to his contribution to the firm.

When Ron arrived at ClearFacts, he did so wearing a mask. People who don masks feel compelled to hide out or to go underground with who they really are for fear that they will be mismatched with the organization in which they find themselves. In time, in part because of his relationship with Ralph, and also because the team culture permitted him to find his voice, Ron showed his true rich range of behavior. A naturally good bystander, he developed the ability to oppose and a strong voice to move convincingly, and was able to follow as a matter of choice on issues he could support.

However, his relationship with Ralph raises an easily ignored leader-follower issue. Ron opposes his boss with ease and makes strong moves as well. However, a meta-level look at their dynamics reveals that over time Ron overly follows, sharing Ralph’s narrative burdens and, like Ralph, sacrificing his personal life, but without a Sonia to rein him in.

In heroic terms, Ron is a survivor with a strong commitment to a shared cause. Ron could, out of loyalty and devotion to Ralph, slip easily into his type’s gray zone where abandonment of self for cause effectively leads to abandoning those closest to him, and the possibility of their having a life worth living. Fortunately, Duncan has identified the issue as one Ron must deal with in his evolving practice model. There are many leaders in similar situations who do not acknowledge this kind of problem.

Arthur Saunders

Art has risen to the position of director of advertising and marketing in ClearFacts’s products division, heads a team dominated by creative random types, and holds a place on the management team, where, despite being the much valued and adored “voice and image” of the firm, he doesn’t really belong.

Arthur’s profile, like Martha’s, extends across various types. He is primarily a mover in open meaning. In low stakes, Art is a good follower and bystander, but a weak opposer. A poet at heart, he has enough random propensity to connect with Ralph, his random CEO, and with most other people in the firm, excepting Howard Green, who sees him as a competitor to be struck down; also, Howard has picked him out for a fight because Art’s qualities and behaviors resemble those of Howard’s brother, whom Howard has since childhood made an object of aggression.

Howard’s appetite for combat and his competitor’s aversion for it hastens Art’s eventual exit from the company, an exit that had long been inflexibly championed by Art’s wife, Jane. Well aware of her husband’s story of a father whose own image is enhanced by his son’s success in the world and who puts psychological pressure on the son to pursue a business career at which the father failed, Jane applies her own pressure on Art to leave the combative, commercial world of business for a place better suited to Art’s nature: a sanctum where ideas, aesthetics, and beauty are valued for their own sake. See Table 14.6.

Table 14.6 Art’s Highs, Lows, and Growing Edge

What makes Art a figure of special interest for discourse on leadership is that on his own merits he could succeed in leadership’s major leagues, though not as a number-four clean-up slugger, not as a franchise player, but as a solid number six or seven in the batting order: a player who’s “got the right stuff,” solid and dependable in the arts of the game.

The business world is home to more Arts than is known because they do not show up as vividly as our protagonist has here. Often they live in misery, pretending more than really wanting to be there; hiding out, at cost to themselves and to their firms.

Here are some remedies that could help correct this wasteful problem of profile mismatches that lead to questionably premature departures:

• Spot the issue early. This means developing more precise and predictive tools for selecting promising as well as established leaders. Smart candidates size up an organization’s preferred profile, then cover up to get the job. Organizations of the future, understanding the value of diversity (strategic use of different profiles), will develop procedures aimed at making a proper place and role for those who belong but do not fit the dominant model.

• Develop mentors who understand the need for diversity. Such leader mentors would keep an eye not on shaping recruits in their own or the organiza­tion’s pursuit of “profits now” but on a longer view. For example, they would advocate assignments that are geared to a long-term view of the mentee’s development as a leader.

• Allow changes in role. I look forward to a time when people like Art, who, having served time as performance leader, are given the opportunity to stay on but in a different role that accommodates their life circumstances and their own proclivities. In the ideal future organization, Art would stay with his team but step down as its director, give up his place on the management team, and serve ClearFacts in the role of wisdom leader or citizen leader.

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From Insight to Action

In Table 14.7, rate yourself, Ralph, your boss or a colleague, and President Obama on a 1–7 scale, with 1 being low and 7 high.

Table 14.7 Twenty Leader Capacities

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Notes

1. Kantor, D. “Sex and the CEO.” Unpublished paper, 2010.

2. The exit leader is the organization’s “sanctioned iconoclast.” This leader’s unique contribution rests in his ability to recognize and call out aspects of the organization and its performance that others lack the courage to challenge. His focus is not to critique but to improve by constantly seeking higher and higher levels of performance and by engaging in candid self- and organizational reflection. The exit leader is a critical but too often absent role in a well-functioning leadership system.