Stephen Billing’s Blog

In this guest post, we welcome experienced management consultant Russell Ness, who ponders on whether there is such a thing as leadership – does leadership actually exist?

The theory, practice and development of leadership are seriously flawed. The flaw is that there is no such “thing” as leadership. We have attributed a status to this concept and associated behavior, actions and attributes and it is these that have falsely provided some solidness.

However, when I really consider leadership, I struggle to articulate anything more than vague truisms and inspirational qualities. Many have tried to tie it down – the trouble is, there is no “it”. “It” does not exist. Billy Connelly said, “What you believe is true for you”. This seems to apply to the leadership movement. If you believe leadership is this or that, then it is true (but only for you).

We have studied those greats identified as effective or successful leaders. We have analysed what they do and what they seem to be. At best, all we can come up with is a view of what it is believed those individuals do and have. The key thing is that they are individuals, with no capacity to replicate themselves. The most reputable gurus seem to agree that leadership is in what we are, more than in what we do. And, what we are is a collection of unique memories, experiences, values and a non replicable self that can never permeate or be handed on to, or inserted into another. Logically, the most reliable way to gain what so called leaders have and do would be to be their offspring.

What about all the qualities and behaviours of great and effective leadership? For every quality and behavior, we can find an equal and opposite one that disproves the rule.

Adolf Hitler galvanized a nation to accept and commit unspeakable acts that still provoke outrage and ongoing academic focus. Bill Clinton was internationally lauded as great yet he lacked integrity, morality and fidelity, attributes commonly associated with effective leadership.

So, we then come to talk about leaders being of their time – situational. They emerge as circumstances suit their particular strengths and capabilities.

Churchill was apparently a man of his time. He swept into power when Britain needed a “bulldog” and was just as rapidly swept out when Britain appeared safe. His leadership seemed to have a context for success that the public recognized – however, they did not trust him to transfer that success to a more settled, less critical time.

Were Mao Tse Tung, Gandhi and Mandela also leaders of their time, situation and context, unsuited to a changed environment? They seemed to emerge, pushed to the fore by either a grateful and eager following or perhaps as a result of a vacuum.

Would they have been leaders in a different time and place? If not, we could assume that the leadership qualities of those leaders are not transferable.

Leadership is a figment and bereft of any substance. Individuals may emerge and succeed in a context due to their suitability for that particular circumstance. Their innate capability succeeds at that moment. However, we cannot ascribe a set of attributes and behaviours or capability as leadership and expect that the individual who aspires to the same will succeed in any other set of circumstances.

The natural aspect of leadership to address another time is that of “followership”.

Contributed by Russell Ness
 

Your change efforts are inherently political, whether you intend them to be or not

The poor regard in which politics is held, and the view that it is bad to engage in politics are both indicative of a way of thinking in which it is implicit that people can either choose to engage in politics and therefore be labelled “bad” or they can choose not to engage in politics and be “good”.

Politics are also commonly seen as part of conflict, uncertainty and situations where the formal channels break down or are not effective.

However, I think that politics are an inevitable aspect of the social nature of being human and working in organisations.

I often hear people say "I don’t get involved in the politics." While this seems like an admirable aspiration, all humans are involved in politics because we all have intentions that we are trying to manifest in our organisational lives. The results of what happens in your organisation is a result of the interweaving of all the different intentions of the many people who are involved in the organisation. 

Hidden in the view of politics as the result of conflict, uncertainty and lack of effective formal communication channels, is the implication that people would not need to engage in political behaviour if there were no conflict, if the environment were predictable or if formal means of resolution were working effectively.

Like it or not, conflict, uncertainty and formal channels that break down are a part of human existence in organisations. It ain’t going to go away. Everything is political (or interpreted in a political way), including the actions of people who are not interested in organisational politics, or who think they are not being political.

How managers can initiate change without capital investment

In 2009, how can you create organisational change without a huge financial investment?

The key is for managers to understand the concept of interdependence in which we move away from the notion of the self as autonomous individual. Instead we have an organisation, and indeed a society, of interdependent people whose individiual selves are consitituted through their interaction with each other. In this way of thinking, individual change cannot then be separated from change in the groups to which the individual belongs. Likewise, organisational change cannot be separated from change in the individuals themselves

This means that managers in organisations must understand that they cannot change their organisations while remaining the same as an individual. Through the process of going through organisational change, managers as individuals will change, as will those that work for them.

The interactions between managers and their staff will change, and this will constitute change in those individuals, as well as change in the organisation.

So the first step for the manager seeking to create change in their organisation is to reflect on the interactions in which the manager is participating, and consider how those interactions themselves might change. The key to the change you are seeking lies undoubtedly in what is not discussable in your teams – you can bet it will be being discussed informally. For example, whether or not staff bring up their good ideas at meetings, or ask questions to make sure they understand what is going on in your organisation.

A good question to ask yourself  as the manager is "What are we talking about in our teams, and what are we not talking about?"  If it would be helpful, ask a trusted member of the team, or your own manager. Use the insight you gain from this to start talking with your whole team about what was formerly undiscussable. While this might not be easy, you will see amazing results. And it won’t cost you a single dollar of capital expenditure.

Misunderstandings allow both you and the other person to gain new insight into a situation.

Misunderstandings become apparent when the other person responds in an unexpected way. The unexpected response offers the opportunity to explore the misunderstanding and reach a new way of thinking about the situation. Many times in life we avoid exploring such a misunderstanding, perhaps for fear of escalating the threat of conflict that is inherent in these situations.

In organisational change situations, misunderstanding is often interpreted as resistance. And rather than attempting to explore the world from the point of view of the ‘resistor,’ such exploration is avoided either through trying to persuade with powerful reasoning and authority, or by moving on to another subject to distract attention from these difficulties – for example, moving back ‘on message’ by speaking positively about the vision for the change.

The golden opportunity when misunderstanding occurs is to explore the misunderstanding with the intention of making sense of the other person’s point of view. This joint sense making process can result in both parties having an expanded view of the situation. And this expanded view makes your implementation of change go more smoothly.

This golden opportunity is lost when leaders avoid exploring misunderstanding. The unresolved issues then cause problems for the change project later on. It is somewhat counterintuitive. By exploring the areas that are of concern to the targets of change, you let people know that you are listening and acting on the information they provide.

Instead of changing the subject or ignoring a misunderstanding, paraphrase what you understand them to mean and check whether you have got it right. Reflect on what you have said and what they have said and summarise both points of view. 

I have found that the more I am able to do this, the more I am able to negotiate situations to successful resolution. But it is not just about the techniques. It is about the intention.

By exploring misunderstanding with a view to making sure you have understood what the other person said, and clarifying your own intentions, perhaps several times and in different words, you are taking advantage of the golden opportunity to resolve issues before they become showstoppers.

Communicating your intention is more important than worrying about vision.

Sue Tupling over at Changeworksblog focuses on communication and organisational change.

She has recently posted an article I wrote for her blog. In it, I argue that leaders should be less concerned about communicating their vision and more concerned about communicating their intention. Read the article here.

In my last post I described the sender receiver model of communication and said that thinking this way about communication was a reason why we have communication breakdowns, and why, when they occur, they are so hard to repair. I said that when you see communication as a sender and a receiver in this way, a misunderstanding can only be resolved by identifying which party made a mistake, or which parties made which mistakes. Admission of mistakes like this is hard for people to do, which means it is hard to resolve breakdowns in communication.

What is the alternative?

Ralph Stacey introduced me to the thinking of George Herbert Mead, who, early in the twentieth century pointed out what I have found to be a very useful alternative to seeing communication as a message transmitted between sender and receiver. Mead talks about meaning in interaction as being co-created through a process of gesture and response. Gesture means words, actions, facial expressions and so on, and the response to the gesture creates the meaning of that gesture, at the same time as it is being generated by the gesture.

How is this different from sender / receiver? Well, one difference is that the message has no intrinsic meaning of itself.

If I yell at you, you could take it as a warning that a car is coming and thank me, or as an insult and yell back at me. There is no intrinsic meaning held in the yell itself, and neither of us knows the meaning of it until you respond. Of course, I have intention in yelling, but the meaning we make of it together is not known until the response is given. And of course the response itself is also a gesture calling forth its own response. So, communication can be seen as a continuing process of making meaning through these gestures and responses.

Rather than transmitting meaning from one person to another we are jointly communicating meaning. The response gives the gesture meaning – there is no inherent meaning in the gesture alone.

In this way of thinking, you have to consider both the gesture and the response together as the unit of communication. Thinking this way, your attention is drawn to the meaning made of the gesture/response together, not how the sender’s intention differed from the message decoded by the receiver.

Here’s another example.

The statement “the cost is $10,000” is a very familiar occurrence in a range of settings, from financial (e.g. budgeting or financial reporting), to sales (negotiating a price).  A response of “That’s too much” gives a very different meaning to the interaction compared to a response of “Should we accrue that amount?” 

When I was first introduced to Mead’s notion of the conversation of gesture / response, I thought it was an academic concept of not much value. In fact I thought it was quite a difficult concept to grasp of extremely questionable value. I have now changed my tune completely.

So why is this such a useful way of viewing communication?

It is useful because it completely transforms the nature of what you think communication is. Instead of looking at the sender or receiver as being at fault, our attention is drawn to the meaning that we are making together in this situation. Communication becomes a process of joint inquiry in which we are both, together, making meaning of our situation, drawing on your unique background and understanding, and my unique background and understanding.

For leaders, taking this perspective completely eliminates the need to see employees as expressing resistance to change when they question a change initiative. Why? Because when employees ask questions, they are responding to gestures made by the leader, perhaps at a roadshow presentation, perhaps in a company newsletter or any other setting. This does not mean that the leaders have given the message poorly, or that the employees are resistant. The questions from the employees are the responses to the gestures made by the leaders, which lead to further gestures and responses in a never-ending process out of which meaning is constantly emerging.

When you take this perspective, communication is seen as a joint inquiry, in which both parties are accountable to each other for the meaning they are taking from the interaction. Meaning is constantly evolving through the conversation of gestures and responses. Each response is itself a gesture that calls forth a response. In this process the views of both parties can change.

And that is the exciting thing – it helps you avoid getting stuck blaming each other when communication doesn’t seem to be going the way you would like it to.

This view of communication has been very significant for me and others who have explored it. I would be very interested in your response to this gesture. That will enable us to make meaning together.

So please feel free to post questions or comments. 

Illustration by Martin Coates

Shannon and Weaver’s influential formulation in 1949 of the conduit or sender receiver model of communication constitutes the dominant model of communication. The sender encodes a message which is sent to the receiver who decodes the message. If the sender has encoded accurately, and the receiver has decoded accurately, then clear communication is said to have taken place.

Other factors that can be considered include the channel of communication – face to face, telephone, email etc, and also environmental factors which are considered as noise, and can detract from the clarity of transmission of the message. In this way of thinking about communication, the meaning of it is understood to be held in the message, and is to be decoded by the receiver.

It is known as the conduit metaphor because of the focus on the successful transmission of a message, almost like it was going down a pipe.

This way of looking at communication pervades our thinking on the topic in most areas of organisational life, from information technology and its evolution into knowledge management which concentrates on how these messages can be stored, accessed and decoded at a later date, to cybernetic and computer based models of how humans store, access and extract meaning from these messages.

The goal of communication is understood to be the transfer of meaning from the sender to the receiver with minimum spillage  in the process, to use Eisenberg’s term from his 2007 book Strategic Ambiguities.

The problems of communication are understood to be accurate coding and decoding by the sender and receiver respectively, limitations in the channel of communication, and problems with noise from the environment contaminating the communication. In practical terms, this means that when something goes wrong with face to face communication then we have no alternative but to consider either the sender as having erred in the encoding or else the receiver to have misunderstood the message. Either way one party is at fault.

I believe that this is one of the reasons that breakdowns in communication are so difficult to resolve. For there to be resolution, then one party or the other has to admit that they did something wrong, and this is hard to do.

The sender receiver model of communication is pervasive throughout the western business world. It seems to make logical sense. It fits with our view of ourselves as autonomous individuals making rational choices to bring about our intentions – if we can communicate our intentions clearly as senders, then we will be better leaders and get what we want in the world.

I have come to the belief that one of the reasons communication breakdowns occur is because of our faulty way of seeing communication as the transmission of meaning. And the sender receiver model is also a large part of the reason that we find it hard to repair communication breakdowns. In other words, our very way of thinking about communication in terms of sender and receiver is responsible for miscommunication and the difficulty in resolving miscommunication.

But what is the alternative? For years there seemed to me to be no satisfactory alternative, until Ralph Stacey introduced me to the work of George Herbert Mead, an American philosopher writing in the early twentieth century.

More about this in the next post.