Everyone a Leader_ a Guide to L - David Colcleugh

EVERYONE A LEADER A Guide to Leading High-Performance Organizations for Engineers and Scientists

EVERYONE A LEADER A Guide to Leading High-Performance Organizations for Engineers and Scientists

David Colcleugh

© University of Toronto Press 2013 Rotman-UTP Publishing University of Toronto Press Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-4564-6

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetablebased inks

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Colcleugh, David, 1937–, author Everyone a leader: a guide to leading high-performance organizations for engineers and scientists / David Colcleugh. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4564-6 (bound) 1. Leadership. 2. Engineering – Management. 3. Science – Management. 4. Organizational effectiveness. I. Title. HD57.7.C59 2013

658.4'092

C2013-905004-3

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

Contents

List of Figures Preface Acknowledgments PART ONE: The Meaning of Leading and Leadership 1. Leading: The Catalyst for Change Influencing People: The Process Change: The Work of Leaders Making Change: Getting Results Values: The Foundation for Positive Change 2. Developmental Leadership Learning Frameworks The Nature of Leadership Activity Developmental Leadership Activity The Best Leaders Are Competent Leaders PART TWO: Preparing Yourself to Lead 3. Role Model Leading and Leadership The Developmental Learning Process Role Model Leader Designation Leadership Competency Model 4. Thinking Effectively Thinking Effectively Model 5. Skills Capability Functional Expertise

Developing a Personal Mission Knowing Yourself Knowing Others The Power of Interdependency Teaching Others Diversity of Thought Focusing on What Is Most Important Learning from Experience 6. Character Attributes Future Looking Inspiring Others Honesty Respect for People Tenacity Trustworthiness Effective Communication Social Well-Being Energy 7. Purposeful Behaviour Motivation Leadership Styles PART THREE: Leading the Organization 8. The High-Performance Business Organization 9. Sustainable Growth 10. The High-Performance Work System and Serving Stakeholders Internal Stakeholders’ Needs Satisfaction External Stakeholders’ Needs Satisfaction Stakeholders’ Loyalty

Harmonious Relationships 11. Viability Creating a Harmonious Relationship with Customers Organizing Around Value-Add Processes Developing an Effective Change Process 12. Vitality Creating Harmony among Employees Working Effectively in Teams Developing a High-Performance Culture 13. Virtue Creating a Harmonious Relationship with Society Treating People Fairly Making Decisions to Do the Right Thing Epilogue Index

Figures

1.1 People and Change 2.1 The Tetrad 2.2 The Nature of Leadership Activity 2.3 Developmental Leadership Model 2.4 Leadership Competency Model 4.1 Thinking Effectively Model 5.1 Reconcile Model 5.2 Levels of Accomplishment 7.1 Leadership Styles Model 11.1 Value-Add Element 11.2 Value-Add Process and Value-Add System 11.3 Value-Add Structuring 11.4 The Change Process Model

Preface

“What will employers expect of me?” Most young people ask themselves that question as they contemplate a career in engineering or the sciences. It makes little difference whether they are considering a career in for-profit business or not-for-profit. I know that many years ago, when I was starting out as an engineer, this question was on my mind. Early in my career, I was certain that my employer expected me to contribute on the basis of my technical capabilities. I was a research engineer completely dedicated to improving manufacturing processes. I suppose I was like many other engineers who want order and structure and logic in their lives and who dedicate themselves to the practical sciences. I had little interest in collaboration in those early days. Of course, I knew that working together was important, but I was sure that success was largely going to be a function of my engineering and technical skills. My journey from engineer to leader-engineer began about five years into my career when a certain supervising senior engineer influenced me to understand that the business side of engineering was important and that I needed to become an integral part of that business. He also helped me realize that I could leverage my contributions and skills by working with and influencing others. Several years after that, as a reasonably successful technical manager, I experienced another moment of understanding. A group of us concluded and eventually proved to ourselves and others that leadership was the key to a successful company. This long journey from engineer to engineer-leader to leader-engineer has convinced me that I can add to the understanding of what employers truly expect of us as engineers and scientists. It is an important question because graduating engineers or scientists are confident that their education will open up a lifetime of challenging and rewarding work. They also know that how well they succeed will depend greatly on how well they, as practising engineers, meet the needs of their employers. And to a large extent, it will also depend on their ability to satisfy society’s needs more generally. Many graduating engineers believe that they will satisfy their employer’s needs, and society’s, by applying the skills they learned in college or university. They believe that their engineering training is what the employer wants. When these people ask me to verify as much, I reply in a way they do not expect. What I tell them is that the vast majority of employers expect the technology graduate to have four distinct traits (see below) in addition to engineering skills.

Indeed, society as a whole expects them to have and use those traits. I urge them to consider all four very carefully as they enter the workplace, for I believe this will help them set and achieve their career goals. I also believe that they will benefit from learning at an early career stage what they will need to offer in order to meet the needs of employers, business organizations, and society as a whole. Our technologically rich world is the ultimate beneficiary of engineering and scientific competence. Those four traits are as follows: It will help you succeed if, first, you bring to your career a determination to continuously expand and upgrade your engineering / science skills. Most people would agree with that, but, unfortunately, some people stop there. The most successful engineers have recognized that there are other requirements they must satisfy. So the second trait leading to a successful engineering career is a willingness to develop yourself emotionally, socially, and physically. Competence in what are often referred to as the “soft skills” is extremely important to employers, for it is those skills that enable all of the organization’s people to work together effectively and with high levels of energy, which points to the third trait – selfmotivation, or will. That is, you need to be strongly motivated to contribute well beyond your job description and to seek ways to contribute beyond the current or daily problems presented to you for solutions. In this book I will be discussing those three traits in terms of the preparation required to lead. As I will show, strong leaders display a competence that extends beyond engineering skills. They are self-starters who seek challenges beyond the current ones. They look for ways to benefit the employer into the future. They are the ones who raise their hand at meetings and ask the best questions, such as “Have we thought about trying this? Would doing it this way make our company stronger?” When you are a strong leader, others notice it. All of this leads me to the fourth trait of successful engineers, which is the ability to build on the first three so as to develop competence in leading others – that is, in influencing people, teams, groups, and the entire organization to make changes that will generate higher performance. Employers may not articulate their needs in terms of leadership, be it of self or others – indeed, most do not – but all of them notice potential leaders when they encounter them, including among recent engineering graduates. Deliberately or not, employers look for highly trained people who are willing to grow their capabilities, both as engineers and as leaders. This book presents a pathway for developing the ability to lead oneself and others. The aspiration presented here is simply this: Everyone a Leader. This book will help prepare you to create and lead a high-performance organization, which is defined here as one in which all the people are motivated to achieve ongoing positive change and to get results that satisfy the needs of all stakeholders – owners, employees, customers, and society.

The key to achieving that goal efficiently and effectively is for everyone in the organization – from the executive suite to the sales office to the plant floor – to actively learn to become a role model leader: that is, for everyone in the organization to be constantly engaged in learning to achieve higher levels of leadership competence, and, importantly, for them to learn to think completely and in an orderly way about all things that are important to achieving goals and getting high-performance results. And at the same time that the organization’s people are developing themselves individually as exemplary leaders, all of them are working together to develop a high-performance business organization. The route to achieving that future state entails establishing high-performance work systems dedicated to sustaining, growing, and serving all stakeholders. The developmental leadership framework for an organization is best understood by comparing it with the conventional leadership framework. The leaders in a conventional organization are at the top of a positional hierarchy; from there, they direct the work of the managers, who in turn direct those whom they are managing, and so on. In the developmental leadership model, by contrast, everyone is learning to be a competent agent of change. Leading in a developmental organization is not a position – it is a process followed by all the people in the organization. The work done in a conventional organization is most often carried out in a tightly controlled manner. In this sort of organization, change is incremental and transactional and is planned based on past experience. In contrast, a developmental organization emphasizes ongoing positive, transformational change dedicated to achieving aspirational goals and results. To accomplish this, the organization emphasizes that everyone is learning to be a leader; it also establishes flexible and robust processes for everyone to continuously improve. Working developmentally – that is, by process – is in contrast to working by structure, which is the approach taken by conventional organizations. Every individual in a developmental organization will be leading in some particular circumstances and following in others, depending on the work at hand. But even when an individual is in “follower” mode, the individual’s competence as a leader will continue to enhance the organization’s effectiveness. Transformational change can result from this. The Design of the Book Part One: The Meaning of Leading and Leadership This section defines leading and leadership in terms of influence, positive change, and values. This is followed by an introduction and discussion of the developmental leadership model and its defining elements.

Part Two: Preparing Yourself to Lead This part of the book describes how everyone can increase their leadership competence by learning certain skills, character attributes, and purposeful behaviours and by learning to think effectively and completely about change and other important ideas. The goal for the organization is “role model leading competence for all.” This means recognizing that every individual can continuously develop higher and higher levels of leadership competence. Furthermore, they can be motivated to do that, and they can learn how to do that. Part Three: Leading the Organization This part of the book discusses how the high-performance organization, be it for-profit or not-for-profit, achieves sustainable growth. It does so by learning how to create high-performance work systems. Such systems in an organization are interdependent and are dedicated to three things: first, to increasing the “value-add” of the organization’s work (its viability); second, to developing the spirit and ability of the organization’s people (its vitality); and third, to doing the right things (its virtue). In this way, the organization can achieve a high level (a harmony) of service to all stakeholders. The Target Audience This book is intended mainly for engineers, scientists, and technologists who are early in their careers and professional lives. Specifically, undergraduate students and people who have started their careers in engineering and other technology-intensive organizations will benefit from this book. Engineering and science-intensive business organizations will be at the forefront of the advances the world makes to improve the lives of people. The changes that need to be made in the mindset of organizational leaders are best directed at those who are early in their careers. Yet engineering and science students in colleges and universities who are interested in learning more about business leadership have long been underserved by books and other publications. Technologically competent people are found in every industry and in almost every organization. Engineers and scientists tend to think and act in systematic, process-oriented ways. It is their nature, be it innate or instilled, to go about their work in a thoughtful and orderly manner. For them, that is the best way to solve problems and make things better. The leadership frameworks described in this book are designed to meet their needs. The Background to This Book

The model presented in this book was developed and implemented in a science company by engineers, scientists, and other practitioners of technology. It was developed for the purpose of creating a more effective and “growthful” organization. It was not developed by academics, consultants, psychologists, or others for the purpose of better understanding the behaviour or characteristics of leaders. Instead, it was developed by people doing work in a real organization for the purpose of improving the performance of their organization as measured by the most demanding of audiences: customers, owners, other employees, and society at large. Many of the examples and stories in this book relate to DuPont Canada1 because that is where I worked for decades, starting as a research engineer and eventually becoming CEO. At DuPont Canada we set out deliberately to improve our organization’s performance. We were already well aware of – and practising – the principles of democratic leadership. But we needed more: we needed something that would truly transform our company. So we began to develop a new model of leadership – one that, while rooted in previous leadership approaches, would enhance them significantly. Very early in our development of this model, we achieved results that convinced us we were taking the best possible approach. On the way to turning ourselves into a “learning organization,” we improved productivity, achieved better quality, and strengthened our relationships with customers, employees, and society. We became a high-performance organization as measured in terms of service to stakeholders. A second test of this book’s developmental leadership framework happened in classrooms at the University of Toronto, in the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, where for six years the leadership model presented here has been taught to undergraduate and graduate students through a course titled Leading and Leadership in Groups and Organizations. That experiment has succeeded: these aspiring leaders have embraced what that course has taught them and have benefited from it in their own measured opinion. This is noteworthy for a number of reasons. First, it signifies that material developed in an industrial environment has transposed well into an academic one. This is the reverse of what typically happens when intellectual material is presented. Second, if this book’s premise is correct – that is, if all engineers, scientists, and technologists working in organizations around the world would benefit from acquiring leadership competence – then surely they should start doing so while they are still in school.

Acknowledgments

I humbly acknowledge the following people who are the reason this book could be written: First and foremost, I thank the people at DuPont Canada, whom it was my privilege to work beside for many decades. In the mid-1980s, we began working to transform the company. During those years, many people – too many to mention – dedicated themselves to creating a new way to operate a complex business organization. All of those people were driven to become better, more competent individual leaders and organizational leaders as the means to grow the enterprise. The direct result of their commitment to excellence has been a strong and loyal and vital culture. Next, I thank Charles Krone, who worked with many of us from the beginning of our leadership project and who became a friend of the company, not just a consultant. Charles developed with us many critical thinking concepts, including Levels of Thought and Function / Being / Will (© Charles Krone Associates, with permission), and worked alongside us providing inspiration as well as opportunities for us to develop our learning capacity. His influence is evident throughout the book in the various frameworks and models I will be presenting. Without his influence we would not have been as successful as we were. Third, I must point out that this book has grown out of, and supports the program of, the Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering (ILead) at the University of Toronto. Professor Doug Reeve is the Director of the Institute, which evolved from the Leaders of Tomorrow (LOT) initiative in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry at the University of Toronto. I am proud to say that I am an alumnus of the university. The visionary leader, Professor Reeve, and his essential partner in the work, Professor Greg Evans, asked me to prepare a course based on my DuPont experience, to deliver it to their students, and finally to write the book.

EVERYONE A LEADER A Guide to Leading High-Performance Organizations for Engineers and Scientists

PART ONE

The Meaning of Leading and Leadership

1. Leading: The Catalyst for Change 2. Developmental Leadership

1 Leading: The Catalyst for Change

Let me start by asking you to think about a significant event in your life that inspired you so that you said to yourself or to others, “That changes everything! Why hadn’t I thought about that?” All of us have experienced important changes in our worlds. You have almost certainly linked each of those changes to particular individuals. We seem to find it natural to identify important changes, positive or negative, with agents of those changes. Even when many people contributed, we seem to want to link those changes to individuals. Often in our memories, the change agents who have inspired us are great men and women, many of them engineers or scientists, such as Henry Ford, who revolutionized mass production, and Albert Einstein, who reinvented Newtonian physics. Then, at the personal level, there are people that we actually know who inspired us to change our lives. Perhaps it was a mechanical engineer on your project team who pointed you towards a design change that eliminated a major bottleneck; perhaps it was a civil engineer you know who started a small but thriving construction company; perhaps it was a high school physics teacher who inspired you to pursue a career in engineering. Let me tell you a story about continuous, difficult, inspiring change that has had an impact on me. The story, which is ongoing, summarizes a long and complicated series of events, all of them related to extraordinary engineering creativity and difficult decision making over a long period of continuous change.1 The story revolves around a discrete business unit (Package BU) in the polymer materials marketplace. It was one of a number of discrete business units within a large, consolidated technology company (Materials Co.), whose purpose was to create solutions for customers. Carol had been a research engineer in Materials Co. for many years. She worked largely on other people’s ideas, moving those ideas forward by making small but important changes that generated successes. But that would change as she developed from a technical person with a great deal of drive into a person determined to be an agent or catalyst for change. Carol had an idea that became a passion that she believed could have a strong, positive impact on Materials Co. The concept involved a radically different packaging system for foods – one that would have little environmental impact and low cost. She recruited others in the company to the idea and started a project, and after a long and sometimes frustrating period of experimentation involving many people, she was able to start Package BU. My experience has

been that most successful business developments require enormous time, effort, and energy, and that was definitely the case here. Even after the business was launched, there were a series of major issues to be addressed relating to less than robust technology and to a marketplace that had become disenchanted with the product. All of these seemingly insurmountable issues were dealt with by Carol and a host of others associated with Package BU. By then, the team she had formed was legendary within the company. They were always setting goals and achieving them. They had embraced a mantra that worked: listen to the customer, reduce costs, boost productivity, and take responsibility for making things better. Each challenge the Package BU team faced led to innovations, and each innovation allowed the small unit to grow. That growth was slow at first, but within a few years the unit was of considerable size, though still relatively small within its parent company. All the while, however, Carol and her team had to contend with a series of senior managers at Materials Co. who kept pointedly asking her and her team, “Why should we continue to support Package BU when it is so small and so different from the rest of our business?” These strategic concerns within the company were a distraction, but Carol often reminded her team, “We need to listen and find answers to their questions and persuade them to understand us – these executives are our customers, too.” And they did find those answers, and they continued to get the support of these senior managers, albeit reluctant support. This challenge became almost a daily one, or so it seemed for Carol and her team and their supporters within the company. Throughout this phase of the story, Carol served as an inspirational role model: she urged her team to move forward and meet their goals, while at the same time communicating and interpreting their work to the company strategists who were constantly asking probing questions about how her Package BU fit into Materials Co. Eventually, the conflict reached a turning point, with Carol on one side and the company’s senior managers on the other, both equally determined. Materials Co.’s senior managers decided that their strategists were correct, that Package BU was not a good fit, and that Carol should stop spending time and resources on growing the business. Carol and her team went to work, delivering the same message again and again: unless it kept growing, Package BU would die. But they could not change the minds of the senior executives this time, and the cash outputs of Package BU were soon being diverted to support the company’s core businesses. Finally, the decision was made to shut down or sell Package BU. It was too small and too different, and it was generating too little profit to survive within Materials Co. Carol and her team were depressed. I remember discussing this turn of events with her. Though deeply disappointed, she was adamant that her team would persist and change the minds of the company’s senior managers.

I remember asking her whether this might not be the time to give in, to disband the team and go back to solving other people’s problems and developing solutions that, so it seemed, mattered more to the company. I remember her saying that her role was to see the strength in both perspectives and to use that to find even better reasons to grow Package BU as a unit of Materials Co. Very soon after this, one of her team members had an idea and convinced Carol and the team members of its validity. As a group, they asked for a meeting with the company’s senior leaders. The idea they had was simple: if Package BU was too small to fit comfortably in the larger company, then transform it into a much larger BU, and do it rapidly by acquiring a company in a related technology and marketplace. As a result of this “reconcile,” Package BU would become a better fit within Materials Co. in terms of size and market, and, in fact, transform Materials Co.2 After much discussion, the senior leaders told Carol’s team, “Prove your concept to us and we will consider.” So Carol and her team, after engaging in more discussion, experimentation, and persuasion, set out to find candidates for acquisition. This is an ongoing story, and it isn’t clear yet whether the story will be one of success. The outcome of all the work, all the discussion, all the engineering and scientific advances, and all the emotional ups and downs is not the actual point here. Rather, the message is that the events described here were all catalysed by a person who demonstrated leadership capability. Carol influenced many people throughout the company to move beyond the status quo. She inspired her team to reach for a better future; she was tenacious in her pursuit of that future; and she incorporated the best ideas of others while moving her unit towards the future she wanted it to achieve. Finally, Carol’s work improved the lives of many people: the employees of Package BU, whom she motivated so well; the environment, which benefited from the products her unit produced; and the customers, who benefited from the innovative products the unit produced. As an aside, an acquisition was made and the story of this business unit moved to a different phase of continuous change. I believe we were put on this earth to improve the lives of others. Few people would dispute that; most would agree. Most of us focus our actions to accomplish that goal on those who are closest to us: family, friends, our community, people who share our values, and so on. How are we doing? Many people have succeeded at improving the lives of others – there are too many to ever list, and all of us have our lists. But if we step back and add it all up, we cannot be satisfied with the results. I am certain that it is possible for all of us to do more than we have done. There is too much suffering, too much conflict, and too much waste of potential around the world for us to be satisfied.

Most people would agree that at the forefront of the work to improve the lives of others, and to improve the world for the better, are those who are functionally competent in science, technology, and engineering. Rapid advances in the various sciences and technologies and in their implementation (by engineers) are many and well known. To fill this book’s pages with examples would be superfluous. There have been many advances, many disappointments, and many mistakes in the development of science and various technologies as well as in their implementation. But most of us would agree that overall, science and its outgrowths have made our lives better. How are we to strengthen this progress fuelled by science, technology, and engineering? How are we as engineers to make our work even more productive, even higher in quality, and even more attuned to people’s needs? What actions can we take to improve people’s lives even more than we already have? I suggest that we require a catalyst to answer these questions and to achieve the goals that are inherent in them. A catalyst like Carol. Speaking as a chemical engineer, I can assure you that catalysts are wonderful things. A catalyst is a material that has a strong, positive effect on the rate of a chemical reaction and on the amount of energy required to complete that reaction. Yet it is not consumed or destroyed by the chemical reaction it is supporting – it remains to do it all again. In my mind, the leader of an organization is a sort of catalyst – a person who guides the organization passionately towards positive change, doing it effectively, learning from that experience, and doing it again and again – better each time. This is what Carol and her organization did. Although a catalyst is not consumed in a reaction, it may be poisoned or deactivated in some way, or perhaps coated in waste products. Unfortunately, the same can happen to aspiring leaders who have not prepared themselves: who either have not learned to be leaders or believe they were born leaders. I contend in this book that only those who learn to be leaders will succeed in changing things for the better by influencing the people who follow them. Leadership competence is not born in any of us; we all need to develop it. To extend the analogy, a catalyst must be designed carefully for the task it is meant to accomplish. This cannot be done casually. A catalyst, if designed carelessly, can just as easily take the chemical reaction in a bad direction so that the desired outcome isn’t achieved. So a catalyst – that is, a leader – must learn to become competent in the leadership tasks at hand in order to succeed in the incredibly difficult work of changing the world for the better. More questions flow rapidly from all this: What is leadership? How do we define it? Why is it important? The academic and practitioner communities have been debating those questions for many years. Everyone is convinced we need

more of it, but no one is able to define it to the satisfaction of all. Many books and articles have been written about leadership. Joseph D. Rost in his compelling book Leadership for the Twenty-First Century3 spends much of his time reviewing the literature and concludes that there is no consensus on what leadership is. He is right about that. The torrent of writing about leadership flowing through our world today amounts to various attempts to define leadership. The resulting definitions hinge on activities and their outcomes. For example, a magazine article will declare that a certain company (or activity in that company) has succeeded because of a certain leader, or it will describe for readers a specific leadership activity. One main reason why there is so little agreement on what leadership is relates to the fact that people are proposing their ideas about it from different levels of thought. Some propose a conceptual definition, as in “leadership is visioning.” Others propose an action-based definition, as in “leaders make the right decisions and get results.” In other words, many definitions focus on why leaders do what they do, or on how leaders prepare themselves to do what they do. Definitions of leadership are disputed because those who offer them do not reveal and perhaps do not even recognize which level of thought they have prioritized: Why? How? What? In his book, Rost discussed at great length the myriad definitions that have been proposed for “leader” as well as for “leadership,” which he quite rightly views as a separate concept. The word “leader” was already in common use by the seventeenth century. At the time, it meant someone who “guides, conducts, directs, or controls,” which is very much what a modern-day leader does. “Leadership” began appearing in dictionaries in the 1920s, by which time it meant, variously, “the office or position of a leader” or “the ability of a leader.” Rost tells us that leadership is a twentieth-century concept, and he is right. The definition of leadership evolved from the positional definitions of the early twentieth century, which described what leaders do, to those of the mid to latter part of the century, which focused on why leaders exist. R.C. Davis defined leadership as “the principal dynamic force that stimulates, motivates, and coordinates the organization in the accomplishment of its objectives.”4 J.K. Hemphill wrote that “leadership may be said to be the behavior of an individual while he is involved in directing group activities.”5 By the mid-twentieth century, definitions like these had become widely accepted, largely in the context of the development of large corporations and the science of organization management. The head of a large organization or one of its largest parts was called the leader. This individual was at the top of the hierarchy. One result has been persistent confusion when we try to grasp what leading really means and who leaders actually are. Leadership is a functional activity. It is the work a leader does, in the same

way that engineering, accounting, and selling are the activities engaged in by engineers, accountants, and salespeople, respectively. All of these people are functionally competent to do specific work. A functionally competent engineer can learn to be a leader. That does not mean this person stops being a value-add engineer. Depending on that person’s role in the organization, the leader-engineer will spend more or less time as an engineer, or alternatively, more or less time as a leader. An engineering department head in a large, multifunctional company will by the nature of the activity be spending almost all his time in leadership activities. But he will do that job better if he is and remains a competent engineer. It is my philosophy, described in this book, that all people can learn to lead and that all who do so will benefit both themselves and everyone else in the organization and in society. It is not a premise of this book that those who learn to lead lose their other functional competencies or that those competencies should be allowed to deteriorate. The premise is quite the contrary – the competent leader-engineer will add value to the company and to society by growing all the functional capabilities in his or her possession. Competent leader-engineers, whether their role is largely leadership activities or largely functional engineering activities, are engaged in problem solving and changing things for the better. Having both functional capabilities is advantageous for all concerned. As I noted earlier, a catalyst is a material that can increase the rate at which a chemical reaction occurs. In terms of leading and leadership, this “chemical reaction” is, quite simply, change. In the world of science, technology, and engineering, advances are made by solving problems and making things and situations better. The work of leading is “making positive change,” and the primary process for accomplishing that is influencing people. In this book I will be using the following two definitions: Leading is influencing people to make positive change. Leaders are people who influence others to make positive change.

Influencing People: The Process A process is a chain of steps or actions, all connected, with each step adding value. For example, building a house is a process: first you gather all the materials, then you build a foundation, then you build a floor, then you build the walls, then you build the ceiling, and so on. Each of these steps adds value to the house you are building. Each is part of logical chain of activities. And each step in the process of building a house has its own steps: hammering nails, carrying materials, painting the walls, and so on. The process of leading – that

is, influencing others – has many value-add steps, as well as systems and subsystems. In this book you will encounter extensive discussions about this. Leading by process is very different from leading from a position in a hierarchy. At DuPont Canada and at many other companies in the 1980s, the focus was on hierarchical leadership. As part of the evolution towards “Everyone a Leader,” we shifted our focus from positional leadership to a more developmental, process-oriented form. This process-oriented way of leading is the essence of the message you will read about in this book. Carol, in our opening story, was a catalytic, process-oriented leader in a company that up to that point had emphasized positional, hierarchical leadership. Many, many people are tied to the notion that a leader is, quite simply, a position in a hierarchy. In many, perhaps in most groups and organizations, be they profit-oriented or not-for-profit, people progress up a variety of hierarchical ladders. Consider the progression from junior engineer, to senior engineer, to supervisor of a small group of engineers, to manager of a larger group, and then to the much-desired “leader” designation. This progress, which is measured in terms of pay and relative authority, reflects the positional definition of leadership. By contrast, the premise of this book is that, in fact, a leader is someone who engages in leading – who “does” leading by engaging in leadership activities in a disciplined and systematic manner. Furthermore, those leadership activities can take place anywhere in an organization, at any level of its hierarchy. Leading is as likely to occur, and leadership is as likely to be encountered on a shop floor as in the executive suite. This process definition of leading and leadership will be thoroughly investigated and advocated in this book. What, then, is successful influencing? What causes people to agree to make positive change in their organization and, by inference, in themselves? There are three main points to bear in mind regarding how leaders can influence or catalyse people to accept a new direction. Admired Leaders The link between admiration and influence can be strong. People admire others for many reasons – physical, social, emotional, and mental intelligences are involved in varying degrees. People are more easily influenced by those they admire. Much depends, quite simply, on the leader’s competence. This verges on a tautology: if you as a potential follower recognize a person as a leader – that is, if you admire that person’s leadership competence – you will allow yourself to be led by that person. I learned about this very early in my career. After a few years in DuPont Canada, I was given a first-level managerial role. That was an exciting time for

me. I had been assigned a group of people as well as specific objectives, and now I had to achieve results through the efforts of these people whom I barely knew. So to start with, using my authority as a manager – as an aspiring leader – I ordered them to do certain things. Most of the people said “Yes!” Some said nothing. The work was completed over a few months, but the project was a failure. I had just learned a valuable lesson about leadership: If you want people to accomplish extraordinary things, you have to earn admiration for your leadership. Ordering people to do things is easy; influencing them is hard. But influencing them always generates more successful outcomes. Often, when people are ordered to do things, they say “yes” but then go into a mode of behaviour that is really “no sir” or “on my terms, sir.” This is “closet rejection.” When a less competent leader discovers less than satisfactory results, only then does he reap the consequences of poor leading. And often the less competent leader will blame his own failure on the incompetence of his followers. “If only the people were better,” he tells himself, “then the results would have been better.” And he responds by ordering them to do it again, and the project fails again, and so on. All of which generates this question: Can a person learn to be an admired leader, a competent leader, a role model leader? The answer is yes, and part two of this book will describe in detail how role model leadership can be learned. Reciprocal Maintenance We next consider the phenomenon of “reciprocal maintenance.” What this means, quite simply, is that people feel obligated to do things for those who have done things for them. You are influenced to give something to someone who shows a willingness to give something first to you. The very best technical salespeople know this. I know agricultural chemicals technical salespeople who have made it their practice to send detailed weather forecasts to farmers on a regular basis, along with all kinds of similar useful items that reflect the values and needs of their customers. These are often small, proactive service gifts that help farmers do their work. This effort bears fruit many times over in the form of increased sales. It is the same for aspiring leaders – if you want to influence people, start by giving them something they value highly. The first thing that may come to mind when I say “give something to someone” is a tangible material reward, such as bonus pay or some other monetary reward. Those sorts of things can be well intended – indeed, they can be valuable – but they are unlikely to have a lasting impact. So offer those things for the right reasons, while also recognizing their downsides: they have at best a

short-term impact and can result in awkward expectations. Strangely enough, reciprocal maintenance works best when the exchange is long on work value and short on dollar value. High-performing leaders know that the best possible strategic gift they can make to their followers is simply this: an appealing future state. Instead of material goods, these leaders offer a future state that their followers will want. This is far more powerful than monetary gifts or other instant gratifications. These followers are being offered a more appealing future than they could have imagined on their own, along with direction on how to achieve that state. And that is a gift of enormous consequences. It is also a lasting gift. In return – and this is where reciprocal maintenance comes into play – the leaders asks their followers to work with them to implement that future state so that everyone will benefit. In this way, a contract has been made between the leaders and the followers: those who are willing to follow their leaders’ direction will receive in return a better life as well as the opportunity to work with others who are similarly prepared to follow. Thinking Leaders People tend to be conformists – that is, to do whatever they see other people doing. Examples of this are legion, in fashion, in music, and in politics. Stand on a busy street corner sometime in a conspicuous spot and look up. Soon enough, other people will start to gather around you and, yes, look up with you. That experiment illustrates a superficial outcome practised by those who are looking for quick, short-term influence. A less competent leader may rely solely on charisma to get people to follow. But after people have “looked up” and seen nothing of substance – after they have seen nothing that will meet their personal needs – that sort of leader’s influence over them soon vanishes. The very best leaders are competent, thoughtful, and systematic, much like the best engineers and scientists. They have ideas that other people find appealing enough to accept. Most people want to think – they want their minds to be challenged and to offer and receive big ideas. The most influential leaders are the ones who are willing to engage others in seeking forward-looking ideas for positive change. People know when their capacity to think creatively is being respected and when their leader is open to their ideas. They find it gratifying when they encounter a leader like this and will in turn be more open to accept their leader’s thinking. Change: The Work of Leaders The only constant is change, continuing change, inevitable change. Isaac Asimov

It is easy to embrace Asimov’s sentiment as we look around at the worlds of politics, business, technology, and even sports. It is reasonable, indeed fashionable, to say that things are changing. Everyone seems to acknowledge that change is inevitable. After some thought, almost all of us would agree that change is everywhere; that it is continuous; that it can be either slow or rapid; and that it is sometimes random and other times purposeful. Great people and influential observers are always reminding us that times are changing, especially when times are tough and we need to be reminded to do something about it: The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate for the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise … with the occasion, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. Abraham Lincoln, Message to Congress, 1 December 1862

That is an extraordinary excerpt from a speech by a great leader. Lincoln was influencing his fellow citizens to take action, to do something different, to change things for the better. And in doing so, he touched on all of the key questions that a leader must consider: Why? How? What? The readers of this book, engineers and scientists, are in the cauldron of change. Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, entrepreneur, inventor, and futurist, has said: “An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense ‘intuitive linear’ view. So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the twenty-first century – it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate).”6 This comment about the current rate of technological change underscores the need of engineers and scientists to engage in leading change – it offers both an opportunity and responsibility. Hierarchy of Change A useful approach to understanding change is in terms of its sweep and complexity. Granted, change is important whatever its magnitude. The point here is that a leader’s role will adjust according to the magnitude of the change. The best way to think about this is in terms of three levels of change: incremental, continuous, and transformational. Incremental change is small but measurable. It is change in some variable that is relatively easy to accomplish. If we are producing widgets in our factory and we have been making yellow, red, and blue widgets and we decide to make a few green widgets, that is an incremental change. It is incremental because the green widgets are a small fraction of the total; thus, little has changed in the mandate of the manufacturing manager and the organization. Little has changed

for the factory’s future or its role, mandate, or profitability. We can measure the changes in the widget business, but this will have little impact on the business’s long-term future. We have made an incremental change – one that is significant enough to be measured, but incremental nonetheless. The distinction here is between transactional and transformational change. “Transactional” here refers to asking others to take small, easily understood actions. “Transformational” refers to asking others to see the benefit of major, not so easily understood directions. Many profit-oriented organizations are content to make incremental changes because their culture sets a high value on stability, control, and regulation. This is often a characteristic of governments as well, and of other organizations that favour transactional over transformational change. It is also common among organizations run by people who are more comfortable managing than leading. Managing is more about controlling present boundaries than seeking new ones. Managers are more likely to launch incremental changes in their role of controlling and improving a current state. This is not to suggest that incremental change doesn’t involve leadership. Indeed, incremental change may require leadership when the task at hand is the first step towards more aggressive, future-oriented change. That is, leaders may experiment with incremental changes as a way to prepare the ground for more dramatic changes. This can help minimize risk when failure in the early changes could have disastrous effects on the organization and its people and other stakeholders. For example, when considering changes in a bridge design, if dangerous stresses cannot be completely ruled out, it may be prudent to focus on incremental change. It may even be prudent to bring about more dramatic change through a series of incremental steps, measuring and evaluating changes in the design in an orderly manner along the way to an improved future state. All incremental changes of this type involve leadership, for they entail managing transactionally with the long-term goal of leading transformationally. Perhaps this is a play on words, but it helps us understand that incremental change can be useful as an interdependent idea when combined with continuous improvement change or transformational change. It also illustrates that organizing effectively requires leading and managing processes, often by the same person. Continuous improvement goes beyond incremental change. It is change that leads towards a new direction for the organization. It is a systematic and disciplined approach, and it reflects a commitment by leaders and the organization to make things better. As noted, incremental change entails small but measurable steps that may have little impact on the organization’s future performance or aspirations. Continuous improvement, by contrast, is large, measurable, and planned. It also has ongoing effects on the organization’s future performance as measured by a

large number of productivity, quality, and service indicators. When we talk about productivity, we are referring here to productivity in the generic sense, as input that generates output. Examples include financial productivity, measured perhaps by sales revenue per employee; social productivity, measured as the percentage of a country’s people living above the poverty line; and innovation productivity, measured as the number of new products the company has launched in the marketplace each year or the number of recent hires for its engineering department as a percentage of total hires. In other words, productivity includes many important measures relating to the organization, the industry, and the country. Let’s consider our widget factory again. Let’s say that the leader sets a direction that commits the organization to becoming the most productive widget manufacturer in North America. Furthermore, she defines productivity in terms of revenue over cost – that is, as sales revenue from widgets sold over the cost of buying the raw materials, making the widgets, marketing them, and so on. By this definition of productivity, the direction she has set amounts to a commitment to ongoing change for the factory business – a direction that she, as a leader, has set. Many, many businesses engage in continuous improvement. The idea grew out of the Total Quality Management movement of the 1970s and 1980s, though its roots go back even earlier to the Deming-inspired quality revolution in Japan’s auto industry. A company, especially a large and complex one, requires strong leadership in order to generate continuous improvement – to set a direction and guide the actions of all those involved in carrying out that direction, whether as individuals or as team members. And after that direction has been set, strong management is required in order to foster the environment that must exist to get all projects started, to keep the company on track once change begins to occur within it, and to prepare the company’s people for further change. In an environment of developmental continuous improvement, success can be measured in a number of ways. In fact, measures are visible almost everywhere that enable all members of the organization to see and understand their contributions to the change effort as they go about their daily tasks. During major continuous improvement efforts, there will be many distinct and important projects throughout the organization. Each project will be distinguishable from the others in terms of who is leading it, which people are assigned to it, how its success is measured, and what it is contributing to the company’s overall targets. Transformational change goes well beyond incremental change in terms of the size of the change and its impact on the organization’s future. Transformational change is major, innovative, disruptive, and difficult; it also takes a long time and results in an entirely new future for the organization. In

many ways, transformational change is less measurable than incremental change or continuous improvement. It is visionary, conceptual, and vague but also clearly directed. An example is the transformational change that is under way around the world in the energy sector: vast and multiplying innovations, new companies, and new government programs. These changes are dedicated to the same vision – the replacement of fossil fuels. This is global transformational change. But transformational change can also be discussed at the level of the individual firm or organization. Under our definition of transformational change, I would offer as an example an acquisition by our widget company that doubled the size of the company and that changed its technology base. That acquisition would be a transformational event for the company, especially if it moved the company into a different product line or a different industry sector. Recall from our earlier example that this was quite similar to Carol’s solution to the threat facing her Package BU. It is the leader’s role to initiate transformational change. The great leaders throughout history and into the present day have based their reputations on the transformational change they have imagined and carried out. History is full of transformations in companies, governments, and institutions of all kinds, many of them positive, some negative. There is no end of transformational leaders who could be called on as examples: in politics, Mohandas Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher; in technology, Edwin Land of Polaroid and Steven Jobs of Apple; in health, Francis Crick and Margaret Sanger; in the arts, Charlie Chaplin and Ansel Adams. These people changed the world and inspired and influenced countless others. Still other business leaders were innovators of processes. Two of the most prominent among these were engineers associated with the American auto industry of the early twentieth century: Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan. Henry Ford revolutionized manufacturing by developing the automated, conveyor assembly line, which reduced by 90 per cent the time it took to manufacture a car – an enormous transformational change that allowed most people to buy their first car. This in turn drove a whole series of transformations of the U.S. economy. Around the same time, Alfred Sloan built General Motors into the world’s largest automaker by changing how cars were marketed. It was Sloan who persuaded car buyers to pay more for luxury and prestige instead of opting for the simple “car for the masses” that Ford was producing. Sloan and his organization changed forever the industry – indeed, the whole world – by influencing people to pay more for a luxurious Cadillac and to pay more for the colour they wanted when buying a less expensive Chevrolet. This new marketing approach, known as “product differentiation,” generated enormous profits for GM and was rapidly taken up by other companies and industries.

One final point: The strongest leaders are highly motivated to make major transformational changes. But they achieve those changes through a series of continuous improvement projects, which in turn are composed of many and varied incremental change steps. All of these efforts are focused on the transformational goal and implemented through a disciplined, systematic, and highly integrated set of work processes. Making Change: Getting Results Leaders are accountable for the direction of the company, business unit, or project, and they must be committed to implementing that direction. A leader will do a great deal of thinking, researching, consulting, collaborating, and seeking of shared purpose in many different ways before crafting that direction. But after all that – after that direction has been crafted and then presented to the organization’s followers and stakeholders – the direction amounts to a decision to go forward, and the leader is dedicated to making the change and getting results. The very best leaders are passionate about making meaningful change and getting measurable results. Getting those results is not the last thing the very best leaders think about and do. The best leaders think about getting positive results all the time. There is a fallacy in the minds of some – tragically so in the minds of some aspiring leaders – that role model leaders sit in a corner office thinking about visions of a future, take those visions to the organization’s people, say “go do it,” and then walk away. The false idea here is that leaders set the direction for others to then implement. In other words, leaders only watch change happen. That is at best an exaggeration, and most people know it. The reality is that the very best leaders are engaged in the entire process of change. They are driven by the value they place on meaningful change and by their overwhelming desire to get results. But they also hold it to be true that the very best way to change things for the better is to influence people to follow their direction in the most effective manner possible. The very best leaders believe – indeed, they know – they must work in unique and different ways than those whose primary roles are managing and following. Furthermore, they must do so at the action and results stages of the change process. Leaders often participate in projects by adding their functional skills to those of the team. Even so, their most important task – getting results – is accomplished not by contributing to the functional work but by leading. The organization needs to sense the leader’s role in taking action and getting results. That leader needs to be seen, heard, and felt when change is being implemented. Sometimes this means that the architect of the change effort must be seen as working with the team hands on. Sometimes the leaders, having

designed and set the direction, can make their ongoing impact felt by asking appropriate questions and by personally coaching the people on the implementation team. There are many ways that leaders can make their impact felt, depending on their unique capabilities. What is most important is that they be passionate about the action and results stages of the change process, not merely interested. This point is discussed at more length later in the book. The very best leaders know and are motivated – or driven – by the complete process of leading: by thinking, directing, influencing, doing, and getting results. None of these elements of the leading process is more important than the other. All of these elements are about changing things – about getting results that improve people’s lives. I have said that leaders are passionate about meaningful change and getting results. An equally good word for that is ambition: role model leaders and aspiring leaders are extremely ambitious. In most of the lecture series that I give students on leading and leadership, I ask them, “All those who want to change the world for the better, raise your hand.” Of course, they all do. They are all aspiring leaders. But they do not yet know how to lead or what to do. They may not understand what I’m really asking, but they place great value on the idea of service to people. They are ambitious! And that is what young aspiring leaders need to be, but that is just the start. Big results require big ambitions. Michael Hammer and James Champy7

As aspiring leaders, these students are motivated and ambitious but not yet fully competent. They cannot yet answer the how and what questions of leadership. The aspiring leaders’ ambition and competence are important interdependent concepts when a company is seeking to get great results from leadership activities. One learning framework that can help with that understanding is a simple 2x2 matrix, reflecting the high and low scales of competence and ambition. When I first became a supervisor in a technical organization many years ago, I had a conversation with a capable engineering technician – one of the people in the group I was managing. We were talking about career aspirations. He told me that his ambition was to be the technical manager of the R&D organization. This surprised me – this man was good but not excellent at his job. He was certainly experienced, but he was aspiring to a role that was many, many competency levels above his current level. We explored together the questions Why? How? and What? relative to this idea, this ambition he had to get the result he wanted, which was to get a promotion to this distant hierarchical level. We agreed it was a superordinate target, but he insisted it was doable. He was

unable or unwilling to engage in a realistic discussion centring on How? or What? – especially on the notions of hard, demanding, results-oriented work. Especially instructive to me was our discussion of Why? Why, I asked him, do you want to become the technical manager? The answers he gave centred not on service to others or on improving the lives of others or on meeting the needs of the organization. All of his motivation centred on personal ambition. This is when the words “blind ambition” first occurred to me. Blind ambition is ambition without competence; it is based on ego rather than a purpose and service beyond self. At the other extreme in the 2x2 matrix is a competent role model leader without ambition: a bird without wings. At the same time, an incompetent aspiring leader with ego-driven ambition is destined to be disappointed and may well damage the other people in the organization. Neither one of these examples is headed for role model leading and leadership. “Noble ambition” is, I believe, an appropriate term for competent, highperformance role model leaders who are passionate about meaningful change and positive results that serve the needs of others. Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson elegantly makes another point: the very best role model leaders have “noble ambition” and work very hard to get the best possible results from the direction they have given others. While implementing the direction, they do different work than those managing and those following; but they work as hard and in some cases harder than others. A certain manufacturing manager, a good engineer and my colleague for many years, is the best example of noble ambition in my experience. He was determined to serve others and teach them the developmental way to create sustainable, positive results. He made himself available to share his competence as a leader and an engineer. He designed learning frameworks as his instrument of choice when working with people who, like him, were ambitious to get superior results. He was an authentic person whose quiet confidence, competence, and ambition inspired people to do more. Noble ambition is a determination to learn to be a high-performance leader or to go beyond and to have a work ethic that says to those following, “I want you to follow my direction and I will work hard to influence you to follow, and I believe so strongly in you and in the direction that I will work very hard with you to accomplish it.” There is an important reality about the interaction of leaders and followers when change is being implemented: it is never a linear process. It is not step by step, as in, “The leader has an idea … The leader influences people to accept

the idea … The leader and followers do the hard work … The change happens …” The interactions of people making change constitute a non-linear process that requires constant reinforcement. The level of leading and leadership competence must be very high to withstand the various countervailing energies at play in a change process. In all organizations, when engineers or leaders set out to change things, the morale of those following shows a consistent pattern, as illustrated in Figure 1.1. Morale is a measure of the logical and / or emotional acceptance of the direction the leader is giving his or her followers. When acceptance is high, so is morale; when acceptance is low, morale sinks. Morale is a measure of “buyin” or willingness to change. To grasp the meaning of leading and leadership, it is important to understand this pattern. People often start out wanting to accept the leader’s view that change is good for us. In these early stages of the influencing process, morale often rises. People are enthusiastic; they accept the leader’s positive message. This is very similar to what happens when army recruiters ask young adults to sign up for military service during wartime. The message is accepted because the leader and the message are trusted and because people have no experience to draw on. The recruiter is signalling change, but the people he is recruiting are unable to take the long view – that is, to see what the change will actually mean to them. Obviously, the leader accentuates the mystery at these early stages by expressing a personal commitment to the change. This early enthusiasm typically does not last. Reality sets in – people begin to see, listen, and feel as the leaders describe honestly the path forward and the work to be done. This requires followers to move from the comfort of the current state towards an uncertain future state. And this is where the questions usually start, beginning with “What’s in it for me?” “Why is the current state so bad?” “How can he do that?” “How do we acquire the skills to do this?” The leader will have to answer a host of questions of this sort. The initial burst of enthusiasm at the early stages is the result of the leader’s competence. But even the best leader’s skills begin to lose their impact as the organization reflects on the Why? What? and How? questions. Less capable leaders, after they have told the organization that change is coming, quickly begin to lose their followers’ morale. The followers’ initial euphoria can have a very short half-life. Unfortunately, acceptance of change often turns quickly into resistance. Most people do not accept change easily. The notion of “tuning out” comes into play here – that is, people may say they understand and support the new direction in order to avoid controversy, when in fact they are “closet resistors.” This is the worst possible state. It is much better to have people engaged with the leader to answer the Why? What? and How? questions. Even the best leaders’

capabilities are tested in these situations. Figure 1.1 People and Change

Gradually, however, the leader begins to gain the trust and credibility required to persuade people that the transformation is necessary and that it will make for a better future. The resistance yields to “getting it” – to understanding why that transformation is important for the organization and its people, who begin to better and truly understand the benefits that change will bring as a result of their participation. The length of time it takes to move from “resistance” to “getting it” is a direct function of the leader’s skills, character attributes, and behaviours, which together define the competence of a leader. Simple logic and experience has revealed to me the catalytic effect of Everyone a Leader. In a given group, if there are many among the “followers” who have developed their own competence as leaders, the time and energy required to move from point 4 to point 5 in the figure will be markedly less. Values: The Foundation for Positive Change If we are to understand the word “positive” as a descriptor for the change that leaders work to achieve, then we need to understand “values.” Here, values refer to those things that are valuable or positive for people. A new car is valuable because it is worth something in terms of cash, but it is also valuable in terms of personal beliefs – that is why so many people nowadays are opting for an electric car or a hybrid, or why they are moving into an inner city where they can travel by public transit. Leaders are dedicated to creating positive change – indeed, they are defined by that effort – and the outcome of their efforts is improvement in the lives of people. “People” is arguably the most important word in the definition of leadership that I am using. By that word, I am referring mainly to those within

the organization who are following at any point in time; but here are other important stakeholders in the leadership equation. For example, individual customers often participate in the creation of positive change, typically by encouraging companies to change their product specifications. These customers then evaluate whether the changes meet their specific needs for value-add. What I’ve just noted about customers can also be said of society as a whole. So, leadership has an impact on people within the organization, on customers, and on society as a whole, and each of these in a given situation will have different needs and priorities. Generally speaking, customers need their business to be strengthened by the changes the supplier organization’s leader is making; society needs the well-being of its various communities to be enhanced by the change. At the same time, those in the organization who are following need to be inspired, or at a minimum see benefit for themselves in the change. When poor leaders do harm, it is usually because they are focused on serving themselves or a handful of stakeholders. Examples are legion. This is not the definition of positive change, nor does it reflect developmental leadership. A leader’s values are, at root, personal ones. That is, the changes a leader works towards making are motivated by personal values. To be effective, leaders must be guided not by egocentric or reactive personal needs but by needs that are purposeful – that is, by needs that have a purpose beyond selfservice and that involve service to others. In the case of the leader-engineer, or leader-scientist, this is especially important. It is equally important for leader-artists, leader-teachers, leaderpoliticians, and so on; but engineers and scientists, being the stewards of the world’s engineering and scientific technologies, need to be especially conscious of their power to do the right things. And doing the right things means serving people’s needs and improving their lives.

2 Developmental Leadership

Developmental leadership is the integrated, systematic approach to leading business organizations. “Developmental” here refers to an ongoing learning process engaged in by everyone in the organization; it is a process that is dedicated to growth, change, and doing things better all the time. At DuPont Canada, the leadership model I describe here guided the company as it transformed itself into one that experienced high(er), continuously improving performance. In chapter 1, I defined leadership and discussed values as the foundation for positive change. Specifically, I wrote: To be effective, leaders must be guided not by egocentric or reactive personal needs but by needs that are purposeful – needs that have a purpose beyond self-service and that involve service to others.

Reflecting this, DuPont Canada’s core organizational values are focused on service to people. In the culture of that company, the value underpinning all others was workplace safety. As shown in the following example of developmental leadership, this meant leading people to learn to eliminate workplace injuries; but, true to the developmental credo, it was a model for other value-based leadership processes. My hope is that this example will introduce readers to the concepts and learning model presented in the pages that follow. From the day I joined DuPont Canada as a newly minted engineering graduate, I knew that those who had just hired me were serious about me not experiencing any workplace injuries. They set me a target of zero injuries of any kind – not even a paper cut. I started out in a pilot plant in the R&D department, where my work involved developing and commercializing a new polyethylene polymer. On that very first day I was given an overview of why, how, and what: why it was important to me as an individual, and to the company as a whole, that we had zero injuries; how I and others around me were expected to work together to continuously approach a zero-injury workplace; and what we were to do every day to move towards a zero-injury state – which involved a very clear strategy. Achieving zero injuries was not something we did on the side when we were finished for the day with developing and commercializing a new polyethylene polymer (my first career task), nor was attaining that goal a coffee break task or some sort of add-on. It was something we did every day – a goal that added

value to the business even while we were reaching for it. It was something we worked on in groups and that the CEO, the plant manager, and the research director all worked on with us. The zero injuries mandate was viewed as an actualization of the company’s core value: “Do no harm to oneself or others.” Everyone I spoke to on those first few days was very clear: we would work as individuals to achieve the target of zero injuries. Doing so would be part of our functional work (in my case, engineering research), and part of our business work (in my case, creating a new class of polyethylene products that would add value in the company). In this way, the goal of zero injuries was bound together with the engineering work and the business work I was engaged in with others. It had been drilled into us that our work would be less than acceptable if any of us were injured while we accomplished it. In the simplest of terms, if I was injured, the work would suffer. This was not a threat, not an order. It made sense even in these early days. Throughout my thirty-nine-year career, the intensity of the learning work, of continuous improvement, did not lessen. Did we achieve zero injuries? Yes, we did, in some places, for long periods of time, and many people went many years, some their entire career, without an injury. Did we achieve zero-injury performance everywhere, all the time? No, we did not, but we learned from those experiences, just as we gained a great deal from the effort to achieve zero injuries. A minor recordable injury could occur among a large group of people, entire manufacturing plants, marketing divisions, and senior executive teams, after years of zero injury. They would immediately undertake a systematic analysis to learn what needed to be changed to prevent another incident. Everyone believed it was possible to achieve zero injuries. We had learned early to see it as a realistic goal, a future state, and a focused aspiration. And the results we achieved from trying – for embracing zero injuries as a corporate aspiration – were world class. At whatever level – plant, country, division – a DuPont plant was the safest place that anyone in the community could be: sometimes ten or even 100 times safer. DuPont’s safety record has often been recognized as a model for others. But setting an aspirational future state is the easy part. Many people stop there, as if they expect that state to simply come about, wished into being. A target cannot be achieved that way. That target must represent a future state that everyone in the company desires, and it must generate passion among the people whom the target will affect – enough passion that they will work hard and long and intelligently to achieve it, however difficult it is. At DuPont, “zero workplace injuries” was viewed as that kind of target. Everyone, at any company, wants to go to work and return to their family at night without injury. They will be willing to work hard as individuals and with others in the workplace towards that particular target. DuPont employees know that with hard, intelligent work they will make progress towards their goals, and they will

be confident that they will make things even better for the next person as they move closer to the theoretical “zero.” But there was another benefit to setting “zero workplace injuries” as an aspiration. Doing so, and setting out to achieve it, taught all of us as individuals, and the organization as a whole, to develop processes and systems capable of achieving other high-performance goals; we learned to think effectively and in an orderly way about a host of systematic ways of operating. All of this resulted in people who performed at a higher level. The safety process as described allowed us to aspire to “zero negative change” targets related to ethical incidents, product quality incidents, environmental releases from our manufacturing sites, and so on. Here is another example of an aspirational target: everyone, especially the engineer and the scientist, understands the aspiration of the “perpetual motion machine.” And everyone understands that this aspirational target is impossible in our world. But this has not stopped machine design engineers from trying to achieve the target of a 100 per cent efficient machine. Engineers who accept that aspirational challenge – the perfect machine – create better designs than those who do not. All of these aspirational targets entailed the development of leadership processes and systems that led to improved results for the business and its stakeholders. This chapter will offer insight and guidance for understanding a developmental leading and leadership learning framework. Learning Frameworks Learning frameworks, as I use them in this book, will help you understand the way things are or could be. They can be used in just the same way an engineer uses a physical framework when building an automobile. The physical shape of a car is fixed, and a variety of elements or things or systems are then hung on that framework to create or describe the car. In the same way, I will be describing leading and leadership concepts or ideas or systems by presenting learning frameworks that describe certain features and relationships. These are often visual, geometric representations of realities, which are useful when explaining the complexities of leading and leadership. Engineers and scientists use learning frameworks all the time. Many scientific theories and empirical relationships are described with graphs, or as functions, or in other visual ways – in the same way, for example, that a civil engineer uses stress / strain curves to explain the behaviour of concrete. Three-Term Framework The triad is a powerful and flexible learning framework that can represent any

number of things and that lends itself easily to the questions that are used frequently throughout this book; indeed, this book’s structure reflects the Why? How? What? rubric: Part One: Why are we motivated to learn and prepare ourselves to lead? Part Two: How do we prepare ourselves to lead? Part Three: What is the work of leading and leadership of the business organization?

Four-Term Framework The four-term framework is perhaps the most used and most useful of the learning frameworks. Its generic form, referred to as a “tetrad,” is illustrated in Figure 2.1. In this book you will be encountering this framework repeatedly. What this tool helps us learn is that any leadership activity – any activity at all – can be understood as an interaction of four elements of mental activity or thought. For this reason, the tetrad is sometimes referred to as the “doing” or “understanding” learning framework. In the following sections of this chapter and the rest of this book, the triad and tetrad learning framework tools will be used to help you grasp the complexities of leading and leadership. These more simple learning frameworks are used as important components to construct more complex mental models. The developmental leadership model and the derived leadership competency model are examples. These mental models help the reader understand the complex nature of the meaning of leading and leadership. Figure 2.1 The Tetrad

And, further, the important thinking effectively model to be introduced in part two and extended to the change process model in part three is another example of simple learning frameworks’ utility. The developmental leadership model

and the derived leadership competency model are valuable and represent (a) the elements, concepts, and systems you need to learn in order to prepare yourself to lead, and (b) subsequently, the work that competent leaders must do to develop high-performance business organizations. The Nature of Leadership Activity A number of years ago, a member of DuPont Canada’s board of directors introduced me and others to an extraordinary person named Bonnie Schmidt. Bonnie had recently graduated with a PhD in physiology and had just started a business organization called Let’s Talk Science. She had recognized after graduating that she wanted to change the world. Her idea, her passion, was to increase awareness of science and engineering in the minds of all people. She, like us, believed that the world would benefit from this; she believed that the best way to accomplish this would be to engage young people in learning the power and benefits of science and engineering. DuPont Canada became a founding sponsor for Bonnie’s Let’s Talk Science business organization. The company believed that her vision, her commitment, and her talent could be a powerful force in society. Bonnie and her extremely talented associates have developed innovative course materials for young people from preschool to high school age and convinced teachers to use these materials. She has also assembled a large group of volunteers, most of whom are science and engineering graduate students. These volunteers take their highly developed skills into schools, where they deliver classes under the guidance of the regular teachers. It is a wonderful thing to watch PhD students in nuclear physics or mechanical engineering describe to public school students what they are learning about science. Most regular teachers do not have that kind of highly specialized knowledge, so they value the materials these volunteers provide and work to integrate them into their classes. The students in these classrooms relate easily to messages delivered by twenty-year-old scientists. What we have here is a confluence of talents directed at young minds that are open to influence. Bonnie’s organization has become very successful. Its developmental learning work is based on and driven by a desire to change the world by enhancing young people’s awareness of science and engineering. Bonnie is changing their perceptions and creating more scientists and engineers, which demonstrates the nature of leadership. She is an active catalyst for changing the perceptions and actions of young people relative to science and engineering. She influences them to believe that their future will be more interesting, indeed, more fun, if they embrace science. She leverages outcomes by influencing teachers to understand as well. She and her organization teach the teachers and the young people why science is important in improving our world; how science

can be a positive force in their lives; and what to do to learn more about science and engineering. Her future state vision of a better world is one in which all people have an awareness and appreciation of how science, engineering, and technology improve their lives. A Generic Framework In chapter 1, I proposed a working definition of leading and leadership: Leaders are people who influence others to make positive change. And, furthermore, Leaders are those who are engaged in the processes of leading and the activities of leadership. A leader is not a person occupying a position in a hierarchy.

The generic framework for all leadership activity captures those definitions in a tetrad (see Figure 2.2). That tetrad serves as a learning framework for any change or leading process. It also represents a simple but powerful descriptor of leadership activity. The terms it contains serve as the first-level elements of leadership activity. In the sections below, “The Developmental Leadership Model” and “The Leadership Competency Model,” I will be building on this first, generic level of thought to complete the road map for the rest of the book. This first-level framework provides a means for thinking strategically about activities during which change is occurring and thinking carefully is important. My colleagues and I have used this generic framework to think strategically about product and process improvements, organizational change, mergers and acquisitions, and a host of other important tasks where objectivity is important. The same framework can be used in other environments – for example, to understand governmental or political change, social change, or academic pursuits. In short, it is suitable for thinking about any leading process. This generic framework considers three specific interdependent processes: changing things for the better, taking action, and thinking about future states. Changing Things for the Better Changing things for the better is a primary activity of leadership. In chapter 1, I offered a working definition of leading and leadership: influencing people to make positive change. The generic framework I propose to represent the process of changing things for the better is this dyad: Ground state → Ideal goal

In as much detail as is useful, the ground state is meant to represent those

things that are meant to be changed. An example follows: Even in the simplest form we can conceive that manufacturing an automobile involves designing and building many distinct and complicated systems and then connecting all those systems to form a finished automobile. Those systems include the ignition “system,” the paint “system,” the engine “system,” the suspension “system,” and so on. Figure 2.2 The Nature of Leadership Activity

When the leader-engineer decides to change things for the better in a given model year, decisions must be made regarding which systems need or do not need to be changed to make the new model better. In the terms we are using in the generic framework, the systems to be changed comprise the ground state. The leadership activity described as “changing things for the better” is represented in the generic framework as the sum of many leading and leadership activities related to moving from a ground state to a set of ideal goals for each of these activities. I was the general manager of the paint business for DuPont Canada for a number of years. The leader-engineers of the automobile manufacturers would contact and consult the leader-engineers in the paint business at DuPont Canada to discuss changes in the painting systems for their new automobile models. Teams would be assigned and goals established to meet the needs of the painting systems for the new models. Collectively, as a business unit, all the people in DuPont Canada’s various project teams – the chemistry team, the logistics team, and the customer service team – would spend many hours working on the ground state. Then, once we understood what needed to be changed to meet the needs of all stakeholders – especially the customer – we would shift to defining and then working on goals.

Taking Action The change from ground state to the goals described in the previous section is the sum of many discrete actions taken after change has been thought about and decisions about what to do have been made. The very best leaders are people of action and are passionate about getting results. This was discussed in chapter 1. The very best leaders are energetic, hard-working, and believe strongly in continuous learning. When the word “action” is used to describe the nature of leadership, many think of a charismatic, hard-driving, extroverted workaholic. Actually, there are many personality descriptors of leaders. The one just mentioned is outdated; indeed, it has been found that leaders who can be described that way are less successful in the long term than the Level 5 leader personality described by Jim Collins in Good to Great.1 For Collins, a Level 5 leader is someone who “builds enduring greatness through a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will.” My interpretation of Collins’ and my own experience in observing leaders at every level is that character is more important than personality. Behaviour must be purposeful, not ego driven. The best leaders have learned the skills, character attributes, and purposeful behaviours that they require to influence other people to act. Thinking about Future States I have asked many people to define leadership. I have done so in classrooms and at conferences attended by CEOs. In the right place, at the right time, it is a good conversation starter because everyone has an opinion and the answers vary widely enough to stimulate debate. I have never said no to any answer I hear, or at least I haven’t yet in all my question-and-answer sessions. And those answers have ranged from “telling people what to do” through “operating the business” to “describing a vision,” to “changing things.” After a long discussion, most people are comfortable with the working definition I offer in this book: leadership is influencing people to make positive change. But that comfort is short lived because many people next want to understand precisely what those words mean. They especially want to know what the nature of the work is: what leaders think about and do. The discussion of “making positive change” is an opportunity to introduce “direction” and “future state” as important leadership topics. I tell the group that the most unique aspect of leadership as an activity is that it looks towards the future and takes a future-oriented perspective to influence people to carry out changes. The best leaders are able to create inspiring targets for the work of others. A leader who is an engineer knows that the purpose of building a bridge across a

river may be to build the best bridge in the world or to build a better bridge than the last. But a more inspiring purpose is to build that bridge so that people can enjoy the other side of the river and thereby improve their lives. The best leaders set targets for their change work. Those targets provide a direction for the work that others and the leader do. They provide direction for everyone on the team and for their goals as individuals. The alternative is a large number of projects that have little direction, which leads to inefficiency and ineffectiveness. Focusing entirely on building bridges to cross rivers will lead to efficient results – to low-cost, high-quality, rapid construction of bridges that cross rivers. Effectiveness is different; it means working on bridges that are designed to do many different things, such as cross rivers or cross rough terrain or cross deep canyons. Or it could mean building all-stone bridges, for example, or suspension bridges that use and require a variety of technologies. Leaders are more focused on effectiveness. That is because when we aim for effectiveness, we find ways to develop bridge-building technology and we thereby become capable of extraordinary things, such as building bridges over ever-wider rivers. When we choose our targets intelligently, our business can focus on growing through innovation. Focusing on effectiveness will always lead to efficient results: it is a two-for-one proposition. The very best leaders are future looking in that way. They are motivated to succeed, and they are capable of setting extraordinary targets for their followers. And when they can do that, they earn the admiration of others. Surveys have shown that this is one of the most admired attributes of leaders. A target can be more specific or less so: which one depends on the level of positive change – whether it is incremental, continuous, or transformational (see chapter 1). A company of leader-engineers who do transactional work (i.e., incremental or continuous improvement work) associated with building bridges over rivers will require a more specific target, such as “Become the lowest-cost builder in North America.” A company of leader-engineers working on getting people across wide spaces will benefit from transformational change targets that are much less specific, such as “Become the mover of people over wide expanses.” A target like that allows the freedom to innovate, to be creative, and to grow in an orderly way. It inspires people to build on each success and on each goal that is successfully achieved. When the target for a future state offers more freedom, people can move in a direction that is somewhat less clear. This in turn allows a variety of less specific actions to be taken, though the steps can still reflect order. The keywords here are order and freedom:

• Order involves a high degree of organization and precision in making things function effectively. It is achieved by limiting choices. • Freedom is about choice. It includes allowing choices in learning, thinking, and functioning and making these choices when doing work. A number of future state targets can be discussed along the order-to-freedom continuum. The two poles of the future state continuum are planning and aspiring. Somewhere between these two extremes is visioning, which will be discussed at length in the third part of this book. Future State Targets: Plans Future state targets, often referred to as objectives or plans, provide orderly direction for the various actions taken by individuals or organizations. They are most useful for providing direction for transactional change. Plans for future states are most useful to companies in which transactional or managing processes predominate rather than transformational processes. The planning perspective tends to deal with answers to the What? question – that is, with the actions required to achieve future, usually short-term, goals and objectives. An engineering contractor working on a project to build a bridge is focused on doing the job for the city very efficiently. That means building the bridge on schedule, at cost, and safely, without injuring any of the firm’s people or the city’s workers. These are the planning goals and objectives – the future state plan. The future state plan will be provided to the company as well as to the city’s managers so that everyone involved will be able to plan and execute to achieve the future state goals. Future State Targets: Aspirational Aspirational targets are very different from planning targets. They are relatively vague, and thus they provide considerable freedom of action for those being guided. They are also much more challenging, for they often require work of a superordinate nature in order to move in the direction of the aspiration. “Superordinate” targets are challenging, beyond-the-ordinary targets. They involve work that requires large amounts of mental, emotional, and physical energy. Aspirational future states are defined by the beliefs and philosophy the leader holds. The answer to the question of why a cause is important is embedded in the aspirational future state. Future states are planned largely through the management of processes, which in turn involve setting objectives and developing ways to achieve them. By contrast, aspirational future states can be implemented successfully only when those leading and those following share a common understanding of and belief in the cause. This often makes things difficult for the leader who must

inspire the followers to dedicate themselves to that cause. But once this has been achieved, the aspiration, or, the cause, becomes a force that commits the followers and that will continue to inspire them. Committed followers with shared values become almost fanatical in service of the cause. In this way, a developmental culture evolves. An earlier example used a proposed aspirational future state that we at DuPont referred to as “Our Goal Is Zero Injuries.” Obviously, this described a theoretical state of perfection – one, however, that we all believed in and were inspired to bring about and experience. Another example of an aspirational target relates to the work of a former microbiologist at DuPont named Norman Borlang. He left the company, developed an aspirational future state target, did many wonderful things, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 as a result of his groundbreaking work. Borlang was a plant scientist who did more than anyone else in the twentieth century to help the world feed itself. In doing so, he saved millions of people from famine. In his 1970 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he described his aspirational future state: Almost certainly, the essential component of social justice is adequate food for all mankind. Food is the moral right of all who are born into this world. Yet today fifty percent of the world’s population goes hungry. Without food, man can live at most a few weeks; without it, all other components of social justice are meaningless. Therefore I feel that the aforementioned guiding principle must be modified to read: If you desire peace, cultivate justice, but at the same time cultivate the fields to produce more bread; otherwise there will be no peace.2

Borlang inspired his followers to implement many projects that gave life to this cause. The instruments that he and his followers used were science, engineering, and various technologies. He and his followers developed diseaseresistant varieties of wheat that enabled food production to be made enormously effective. Ultimately, his work saved millions of people from starvation. Borlang’s work was driven by science, by his leadership competence, and by his dedication to an aspirational future state. Another example: If you were to list the most amazing engineering feats in history, what would they be? I suggest that one – on a very short list – would be landing a man on the moon. That engineering project involved new science, a multitude of complicated inventions, and multiple sets of problems solved. It required many dedicated engineers, scientists, and technologists, all of them working energetically together and all of them motivating themselves, leading, and inspiring others to accomplish the impossible. And this work began in 1961 with a speech by an amazing leader who understood that this engineering miracle would influence the world’s people to

see the United States as an admirable nation and one worth emulating. In that speech, President John F. Kennedy defined the aspirational future state: Time for a great new American enterprise – time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on earth … I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.3

Those words captured the hearts and minds of a nation and its scientific and engineering community. The aspiration provided the inspiration that fuelled the accomplishment – an extraordinary future state. Developmental Leadership Activity Developmental leadership refers to specific activities that are necessary to develop high-performance work systems in an organization. A high-performance work system is one that, by definition, is constantly doing things better. Developmental leadership, to me, is best understood in terms of two sets of tasks. The first set has to do with individuals developing their leading ability as individuals – learning how to lead themselves. This entails learning and the continuous development of individual competence. The goal here is to achieve an ideal state of competence called role model leadership. The second set of tasks, which depend on understanding and acting on the first, involves leading an organization towards its ideal state. The goal here is to achieve a high-performance work system, and it is achieved through collective and collaborative work of the organization’s members. The role model leader makes this possible. The purpose of developmental leadership activity is to achieve ongoing growth in the organization, and that happens when everyone devotes themselves to learning to do things better all the time. Consider the role of a mechanical design engineer who is responsible for designing a new reactor to make chemical X within a large, multi-product manufacturing operation. There are two ways for him to execute this role. The first is the conventional way: project management. Then there is the developmental way: the engineer knows that his role is to improve the way things are done, not simply to do things the same way forever or to make incremental changes in procedure. So he sets out to learn what the function of the reactor is from a variety of perspectives, such as the chemistry of the reaction and the business objective in building a reactor. Put another way, he sets out to understand the requirements of the reactor from the perspective of those who will be using it: the chemical engineers and technicians, the maintenance people who will be maintaining it, and the customers who will be using the reactor’s products. Through developmental leadership, the mechanical

design engineer is trying to understand something about the needs of those who will be using his design. The conventional approach to designing a reactor mainly involves managing and controlling procedures and standards. All of this managing and controlling is part of the developmental approach as well. What distinguishes developmental leader-engineers in this example is that with each project, they are always seeking better reactor designs as well as better ways to be more productive and to produce higher-quality decisions, with the goal of better satisfying the users’ needs. They are carrying out the project not only efficiently but also more effectively, by finding ways to enhance their contribution to all stakeholders. Figure 2.3 Developmental Leadership Model

Developmental Leadership Model The mental model I will be using to discuss developmental leadership (see Figure 2.3) comprises three interdependent frameworks. This developmental model goes a step beyond the generic framework described earlier. That earlier one referred to the three fundamental leadership activities: changing things to make them better and improving other people’s

lives; thinking about future states; and taking action. This developmental leadership model is derived from those three activities. What unites the two component frameworks, as you will see, is the action of continuous learning. Self-leading and organizational leading are developmental processes. Both are continuous and are dedicated to learning to be better individual leaders and better organizations. Taking Action Developmental learning is the action an individual must take; developmental work is what the people of the organization do to achieve positive results from learning. In the previous example, one aspect of learning to be a safe person was developmental learning as an individual – that is, learning how to work without injuring yourself or contributing to an injury to others. Leadership work, by contrast, is done by all the people in the organization to change things so that fewer injuries occur. Developmental Learning Developmental learning starts with an individual aspiring leader – that is, with someone who is highly motivated to improve her individual capabilities as a person and as a leader. The motivation to learn – to develop oneself – is arguably the single most important attribute for an aspiring leader and is something that all successful leaders possess. Some people contend that leaders are born – that at least some leadership qualities are an accident of birth. Undoubtedly, some people are born with some traits that help make them leaders – more and more observers believe that such traits can be innate. But even those who are so fortunate still have to develop those innate qualities by committing themselves to learning. Charisma will sometimes “get you in the door,” but even then, it is the leadership competencies you learn that will “keep you inside,” where the real work of leading is done. It has often been contended that a leader must be an extrovert. That view is less widely held than it used to be – there are plenty of introverts these days in the executive suites of successful firms. So the answer to the question “Are there born leaders?” is “Yes, but …” And the answer to the question “Can leadership be learned?” is “Yes, absolutely …” And more relevant than either of these answers is this point: the very best leaders develop themselves through continuous learning. Indeed, people who are not innately capable of positively influencing people can learn the skills and character attributes that can provide them with that capability. Similarly, naturally charismatic people who can easily influence the actions of others do not become exceptional leaders unless they are willing to lead with

less reliance on personality, and that takes learning. Learning to lead is a developmental process. It is not about taking a course, reading a book, or subscribing to various business journals. All of those can help, but they must be combined with thinking, experiencing, practising, behaving in certain ways, and any number of processes that reinforce leadership. So, learning to be a better leader principally involves combining selflearning with a disciplined approach to gaining experience. That discipline requires you to approach your task of learning to lead by asking the three basic questions this book has put forward: Why do you want to be a better leader? How are you to go about becoming one? And what do you need to do to become one? Developmental learning is not the same as training. It is not learning by recipes or rules or procedures. Developing competence requires active learning so that you become capable of improving the ways you accomplish tasks. Developmental learning is also continuous: you set goals, work to achieve them, and then having done so you set new goals, always reaching for new challenges, new ideas, and superordinate targets. Part two of this book will describe in detail the specific actions you need to take to become a developmental role model leader of self. Developmental Work Learning to be a developmental, competent leader of self takes work. It is a personal challenge. And it requires the individual to decide which value-add efforts need to be taken on. Much the same can be said of an organization or team: it needs to be motivated to do developmental work, and it is leaders who generate that motivation, having first learned how to motivate themselves. During a visit to a DuPont Canada manufacturing plant, I participated in a discussion of the success that this very good manufacturing facility had achieved. In the course of the presentations, a young and inexperienced employee told the room, “If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.” He was expecting all of us to laugh and express their agreement. But others at the meeting who knew me well (he did not, yet), looked at me and waited. They did not have to wait long. I said to him, “If it isn’t broken, fix it anyway.” We went on to have a productive discussion on how to improve an already solid manufacturing process. The meeting concluded with several ideas from him and others that everyone agreed we could test during the next maintenance shutdown. Those were implemented and ultimately increased our production. Anything can be improved, and anything can be changed for the better. Strong leaders inspire others to act on those two simple concepts: always seek improvement, carry it out, and seek more.

When you develop yourself into a competent leader of self, leading others flows naturally from that. All the work you have had to do to develop your selfleadership skills will find its way naturally into the organization you lead, which is another way of saying that self-leading is a necessary precursor to leading a business organization. You are leading an organization well when you inspire the other people in your organization to become leaders of self. Indeed, high performance depends on it. Competent leadership of self can be an end in itself: quite simply, it makes you a better person, a better citizen, and a more competent human being. Plenty of people have little interest in leading others in organizations. There is no reason why they should have to want this – perhaps they only want to be better engineers, better doctors, or better researchers. Certainly, there are many valuable roles that do not focus on leading people in complex organizations. All of us would benefit from learning self-leadership whether or not we extend that new competence beyond ourselves to leading teams or organizations. Learning that competence is justified on the basis of service, to ourselves and to others. Changing Things for the Better An aspiring leader engages in a continuous process of becoming a better leader. A leader who succeeds at this becomes recognized as a role model leader. It is important to remember that leadership is a process and is something one never stops learning. There is no award for becoming a leader; there is no certificate that says you have become one; there is no end point. A role model leader is someone who is still learning and still motivated to become one. The specific skills, character attributes, and behaviours required for role model leading competency will be discussed in part two. A word about the ground state for role model leaders: they have answered the question of why they want to become one. Having done so, they have positioned themselves to ask how and what: how they are to prepare themselves and what they will have to learn. And a word about the ground state for high-performance work systems: they begin as conventional organizations. There are a variety of designs for these work systems, but usually they have been designed around hierarchies, whether they are referred to as functional departments or business units or something else. For example, a company might have a CEO at the top, and down from that person cascades any number of functional departments: manufacturing, engineering, marketing, R&D, operations, and so on. And each of those departments will likely have its own subdepartments. And this hierarchy will be further complicated by the variety of markets and regions that the organization serves. That sort of hierarchy is typical of what I will be calling a conventional organization.

The kind of conventional organization I will be describing here is well managed, capable, and efficient, but it lacks leadership – specifically, it lacks role model leadership. For that reason, the business will not grow to its potential and all of its various stakeholders will benefit less than they could. Conventional organizations that are managed well are sometimes dedicated to continuous improvement. The goal of conventional continuous improvement is to improve the efficiency of the internal functional departments. Each departmental manager looks for ways to improve the functional competence in his department, increase the pace of work, and hire more competent managers, accountants, and other experts. In terms of personnel, improvements are often achieved by a cycle of terminating the least competent employees, hiring better ones, and renewing the organization with training programs. The functional departments in a conventional organization may improve their efficiency in this way, but they run the risk of isolating themselves from other departments – the so-called silo effect. The responsibility for integrating these departments is too often left to the “supermanagers” at the top of the positional hierarchy, who control the work of the departments to ensure enterprise efficiency. In its ideal state, a developmental, process-oriented organization will be full of people who are constantly developing themselves as individuals and, in that way, constantly moving their organization towards the achievement of a highperformance work system. In an ideal organization, everyone is constantly developing leadership competence, and they are doing so together so that performance levels rise. Teams, groups, and networks are everywhere; they form and then they disband when the work is done. Too many organizations suffer from a shortage of real leaders and an abundance of positional leaders, and the outcomes for stakeholders suffer as a result. But these organizations can change if they set out to develop leadership capabilities in their members, for those members will then apply their new competencies to improving the organization. It doesn’t matter whether the organization is profit-oriented or not-for-profit – every organization would benefit from a culture where high value, perhaps even the highest value, is placed on leadership. The ground state that is necessary to making these changes includes, first, aspiring leaders, and second, conventional organizations whose members are motivated to change themselves with the goal of improving the lives of people by learning leadership capabilities. Thinking about Future States Aspiring role model leaders need to think first, and think hard, about appropriate targets for their efforts; indeed, so does everyone in the

organization. People who have committed themselves to a future state will use that as guidance when setting goals for their ongoing change efforts. At any given point in time, a developing organization will have a number of individuals who have developed into strong role model leaders, many others who have just begun developing their leadership competence, and some who are not yet motivated to learn to be leaders. An organization needs to have a clear purpose – it must have as part of its vision a future state that all can embrace, for then all its people will have the same target as they develop competence. Connected to this purpose, the organization will benefit from looking collectively into the future towards the target they share as a group. Earlier in the chapter, it was shown that the framework for thinking about future states varies with the kind of change being considered. When thinking about small, well-defined incremental changes, the future state is best described as a plan; when thinking about extensive continuous improvements, the future state is best described as a vision; and when thinking about transformational, extensive, ongoing, difficult change, the future state is best described as an aspiration. This hierarchy for thinking about future states is useful when appropriate targets are being considered for the leadership development activities described in this chapter. Developmental leadership activities are ongoing, evolutionary, difficult, and transformational. Leaders need to direct their efforts at superordinate aspirational targets. Those who are still learning to become role model leaders – those who haven’t yet learned to want to be leaders – need to be shown that the organization has a worthwhile aspirational target and have to see this target if they are to develop themselves. And, in the same way, those people need to have and see a worthwhile aspirational target for the tough work of development of their organization as a natural outcome of the individual aspiration. An Aspiration: Everyone a Leader The aspiration – the future state for the activity of developing into a competent leader of self – is Everyone a Leader. Setting aspirational targets such as “zero workplace injuries” and “Everyone a Leader” has spillover effects for the people who embrace those targets and for the organization as a whole, in all dimensions of productivity, quality, and service to stakeholders. So if individuals can motivate themselves to accept an aspiration as a valid, pragmatic target, this will clear the way for all of them to develop themselves into successful leaders and for the organization to become a high-performance one. Scientists and engineers deal pragmatically with “perfection” every day.

When engineers build better bridges and factories, or develop better chemical processes, they have been inspired by scientific theories about perfect states. They work developmentally, always improving existing processes and always seeking innovative solutions that approach the same perfection as the scientific theories they have learned. Engineers produce a vast array of materials, often by following complex manufacturing processes that involve potentially hazardous raw materials. While doing this work, the engineers at DuPont believe that “zero injuries” is a realizable target; by inference, they do not believe that some injuries are acceptable. They are convinced that perfection is a practical target and all their work is better because of that conviction and because the efforts they have made to achieve it are delivering measurable results. Put simply, there is nothing more practical than a theory accepted. Believing that everyone can learn to be a leader has the same sort of impact – accepting it provides the motivation required to become one. In turn, if everyone accepted the idea that zero injuries was not possible, then there certainly would be injuries; an undesirable outcome. An Aspiration: The High-Performance Business Organization The aspiration of a high-performance business organization relates mainly to moving beyond the constraints of conventional business organizations. In a highperformance business organization, all the employees are individually motivated to achieve the target of Everyone a Leader and they work together to achieve that goal for the company as a whole. Such an organization focuses on these aspirational outcomes: • The organization has created an admirable set of core values and lives those values. • All individuals have learned to be role model leaders and are continually developing their leadership competence. • The organization has created and sustained a harmonious level of service for all stakeholders. • Productivity and quality measures are all higher than in other business organizations and are growing sustainably, with no wasteful processes or outcomes. Again, let’s use safety as an analogy. If everyone in an organization is committed to zero injuries, then they will be highly motivated and inspired by others working beside them to work on leading the organization to a state of high performance in safety and in all other activities. The Best Leaders Are Competent Leaders

In the section “A Generic Framework,” I provided an “elementary” mental model of leadership. I pushed this to a second and more detailed level of understanding in the section “Developmental Leadership Model,” which involved two complementary developmental systems: leading organizations and its precursor, leading self. In the following section, I introduce a third level of understanding of leadership. This one extends the model towards describing what an aspiring leader must do and learn in order to become a role model leader, as well as what these leaders must do to create high-performance work systems. This third level of understanding of leadership, then, focuses on developing competence as an individual leader and as an organization of leaders. Competence is the ability to accomplish things efficiently and effectively.

We all want our leaders to be competent if we are going to accept their influence and direction, because if they aren’t, we won’t be able to learn from them. Think of a leader you have known. In your view, was this person competent? Now ask yourself how willing you were to follow the direction that person set – not whether you actually did, but whether you were motivated to do so. I am certain you will find a positive correlation between your willingness to follow him and your opinion of his leadership competence. Unless we are certain that our leaders are competent, it doesn’t really matter what other attributes they might have – we won’t be motivated to follow them. When I have asked others to define the word “competence” for me, almost all of them have struggled. We all seem to understand what it means, but everyone seems to have a different way of describing it: “Knows things.” “Can do things.” “Smart, not just intelligent.” “Capable.” “Gets results.” I can agree with those words, but still they leave unanswered some of this book’s core questions: What must an individual do to reach a level of competence that will cause others to follow? How can a person prepare to achieve that level of competence? And why do people actually aspire to be strong leaders in the first place? The more I think about the word competent, the more certain I am that this is the most important descriptor that a leader can aspire to, for it suggests so many things. Charles Krone, who often helped us think about things at DuPont Canada, often applied a mental model that bears directly on what I’m discussing here. He told us that we need to consider every person’s will, being, and function. His model described a person’s entire potential to think about doing things and becoming someone different in the future. Charles was always challenging us with thoughts, words, and ideas that made us stop and think about things

differently, and as a result we learned to formulate fresh ideas about the real and pressing issues we were dealing with in the company. Krone’s three words and the earlier ideas of G.I. Gurdieff (see the various writings of P.D. Ouspensky), who described ways and means for human beings to develop themselves, have helped me to clarify the word competence: Will: Why I am motivated to prepare to do things and then to do them. Being: How I prepare myself as a human being to do things. Function: What I do.

Competence is an integrated set of capabilities. It cascades from will (the motivation we must have to exert our mental, emotional, social, and physical energy to carry out work), to being (the qualities that distinguish human beings from machines, which include spirit, character, and the capacity for personal growth), and finally to function (the actions we take to create value-add outputs). So, we can say that a person who has achieved the necessary levels of will, being, and function has become competent to perform at a high level. This is a simple, elegant, three-term framework that helps us understand the elements of all human performance. It has any number of uses, but for our purposes, it serves best as a framework for thinking about an individual’s or organization’s capacity to perform tasks. Some would differ, saying that we need only enhance our functional skills to become competent and proficient at high-performance tasks. It isn’t so. Let’s consider an example: Currently you are a junior engineer in your department. You have been offered the position of Senior Design Engineer, and you are thinking of accepting it. You apply the will–being–function framework to help you decide. The following is one possible sampling from your analysis: Will: Why would this new role be motivating for me? That is, which of my personal values would it satisfy? Reward? Recognition? The opportunity to learn and develop? Being: How would I be able to carry out this role? That is, what new capabilities would I be required to learn? I would need to improve my communication skills. I would also need to gain a better understanding of the department’s internal and external customers. Function: What is the value-add of the new job? That is, what would the importance of my new role be to the company? To customers? To others?

Once you answer all the questions guided by the will–being–function model and analyse the results, you will be better positioned to decide whether you have the motivation to take the job – that is, to prepare for the role and execute it. Sports analogies are overdone, but the will to win in organizations as diverse as hockey teams, football teams, and curling squads is well documented.

Unless there is a will to win, even the most talented team can lose. Think about the Canadian men’s hockey team at the 2006 Olympics, or the U.S. men’s basketball team at the 1972 Olympics. There was much controversy around both losses, but even if the U.S. basketball team had won the game by a point instead of losing by a point, it would still be an example of how low levels of will and being can cause even a much superior team in terms of function to lose. Business leaders like to say “We have the best engineers … We have the best scientists” and so on. In practice, though, organizations tend not to differ much in the functional capabilities of their people. Where they do vary is with regard to the sum of the function, being, and will of those they employ. There are many examples in the business world of how will, being, and function are all necessary to achieve extraordinary performance. The very best leaders and managers in business organizations know that it is virtually impossible to achieve high levels of performance solely through the functional capabilities of their people. What is not so easy is raising the level of the organization’s being, which can only be done by developing the character of its people and their collective vitality. This in turn depends on the will of those people to share personal and organizational values and to be inspired by those values – by the virtuous goals of the organization. For many years, I have used the following framework whenever I have needed to think about my own leadership capabilities or those of others. It is how I have learned to help me decide whether people are performing up to their potential, whatever their role. Leadership Competency Model: An Introduction The approach I take extends the Krone model to a second level of complexity, so that it serves as a learning framework for leading and leadership competency of self and organization. Will: Why are individual and collective leaders motivated to take action to do the work that is necessary to grow themselves and the business organization? Being: How are aspiring leaders to prepare themselves? And how are they to work together in an organization to influence positive change? Function: What actions by individual aspiring leaders or collective activities by the organization need to be taken to bring about positive change?

Let me illustrate this idea of holistic leadership competence. In the engineering department of our company everyone was striving to develop their competence both as leaders and as engineers – Everyone a Leader. That meant developing their competence as leaders of self as engineers as well as leaders within their business unit organizations.

The value-add work of the engineering department involved many things, but a large part of it was directed at capital project execution. Our company “spend” here was many tens of millions of dollars per year, comprising a multitude of small / medium and occasionally very large capital projects. It was essential that the department’s engineers be competent. One of those major projects was the design and construction of a large expansion to one of our major polymer manufacturing operations. The complexity of this project related to its size in financial terms (it would cost many millions of dollars), its technology (it involved launching a new, innovative process from our R&D organization), and its timeline, which for business reasons was much shorter than was normal for our company. It was essential that this project be done well. Terry (I will call him that) had come to our company around the same time I did after graduating from a very good engineering school. He wanted to contribute to the organization as an engineer and was not interested in being a manager or salesperson – he wanted to be a high-performance engineer who worked on delivering projects. Over the years, he and I saw a lot of each other – in the beginning, we worked together, and now I was a business unit leader and a customer of his. Terry had developed into an excellent project engineer. He was sought after by all those who had a capital project to be executed because all his projects were completed safely, on time or faster than scheduled, and at or below planned cost. No one was ever injured during the design or construction of any project he led, that I can recall. Terry was always straightforward, confident, tenacious, and hard-working. He also communicated well, not only to business managers but to all the people on his project teams. When I first discussed the project with him, he was immediately excited and began to quiz me about the business goals, asking a lot of questions that started with why. He said he needed to understand the business goals so that he and his project team could add value, and that could only happen if he knew the business strategy and objectives. So we assigned the project to Terry, and he put together the project team. Many of the department engineers wanted to work with him. They admired him because they knew he was a good leader whose skills as an engineer and coach were well known. But mostly they wanted to work on his project because of his character and his ability to develop the people on his team. Terry would always take time with his team to teach. The team he put together included me, as the business leader, and a number of the R&D people who had developed the new technology. He persuaded all of us to be active members. Communicating with a diverse team is always a challenge, but he had a track record for succeeding at it. The team’s engineers gained much from his ability to understand and communicate the needs of the project’s customers.

As the project progressed, it became clear to me that his team members were delivering the project in terms of safety, schedule, cost, and quality. Also, the team members were learning from Terry and from one another. The engineers were becoming more skilled as engineers, but also more skilled as team players – that is, they were learning to work with others more effectively. By the project’s end, because of Terry’s success in leading them, all of them would be more valued as engineers on future projects. This only strengthened his reputation as a role model. All of Terry’s engineering talent and all the concern he expressed for people reflected his motivation to do the right things for the business organization. You knew from his behaviour that he would do everything possible to deliver. Terry was a role model leader-engineer who knew how to contribute at a highperformance level to the leadership of the business organization. And yes, the project was completed well – all objectives were met or exceeded. I end this part of the book by describing a leadership competency model (Figure 2.4). Figure 2.4 Leadership Competency Model

Again, as with the model for developmental leadership, this figure shows three aligned interdependent frameworks. Each has three specific actionable

elements relating to the generic terms function, being, and will. In addition, each leg of the model has a fourth action element that is unique. The element thinking effectively is important for determining the competency of leading self; serving stakeholders is a critical set of processes and activities to be learned by those who aspire to lead organizations. Each of these two processes to be learned – thinking effectively and serving stakeholders – has elements of function, being, and will. For example, thinking effectively requires us to think about why a person is motivated to think, how the individual prepares to think about things, and what the individual is thinking about doing. Similarly, serving stakeholders of the business organization guides us to consider and learn to understand why serving society is so important to the success of the enterprise, how the business can advance by achieving shared purpose with employees, and what needs to be done to continuously add value by serving customers effectively. The “Self-Leading Competency” mental model will be detailed more fully in part two of this book. The “Organizational Competency” mental model will be described in part three.

PART TWO

Preparing Yourself to Lead

3. Role Model Leading and Leadership 4. Thinking Effectively 5. Skills Capability 6. Character Attributes 7. Purposeful Behaviour

3 Role Model Leading and Leadership

When I am asked about role model leadership in some of the companies I am involved with now and by students at the university where I teach, my mind fills with faces and experiences, not concepts. Especially, I remember the people at the beginning, the early adopters of the developmental leadership model at DuPont Canada. For example, I remember the manufacturing operators who readily accepted the idea of Everyone a Leader and who were inspired by the idea that they could learn to become change agents and who were encouraged to do so: my twenty-year-old administrative assistant, who developed enthusiastically over the years to become one of the company’s best sales managers; and especially our engineers and scientists, in the engineering department and the R&D laboratories and other places, who developed themselves into leader-engineers and leader-scientists. These engineers and scientists demonstrated their role model leadership in many ways. They approached their problem-solving assignments in different ways according to the task at hand by defining their objectives in terms of customer needs and the challenges the problem gave them. For example, if the engineering problem they faced was to improve the efficiency of a steam-producing boiler, they always made sure that they understood the broad range of success criteria as defined by both the internal customers and the external ones. It was not enough for them simply to increase thermal energy from the boiler. They also wanted to know how solving the problem would strengthen the viability of the plant and the plant manager (for whom the boiler was being improved), the business unit, and the company as a whole. As they developed their leadership capabilities, their interests and competencies changed and expanded: they were no longer “merely” engineers who solved technical challenges; they had come to view their technical expertise and the demands of the business as part of one package. Decades ago, just as DuPont Canada was beginning to transform itself, I hired an engineer who accepted the idea that she could learn the processes and competencies of leading and who was encouraged by our emphasis on “changing things” to make us a better company. She developed into a role model leader and contributed greatly to our work of sustainable growth in a number of business units. Her willingness to master individual leadership skills was instrumental to her success. She became widely admired for influencing a number of people to learn process-mapping techniques that reduced wasteful costs everywhere and that improved the quality of our products. She was constantly coaching others and inspiring them to learn and perform – to develop

and grow. She had a passion for all of that. My own understanding of the power of Everyone a Leader came before the concept existed in my mind or in our company. Early in my career at DuPont Canada, I was transferred from the research division to the nylon manufacturing technical department and given the job of polymer technology supervisor that involved heading a group of about fifteen people, all of them engineers and scientists with a considerable amount of experience. The group’s mandate was to develop a mathematical model of the nylon polymerization process. This would allow more effective process improvement work and process innovation. It was a challenging assignment. The technical department was an important part of the Kingston Manufacturing Plant, which manufactured nylon polymer and, from that, varieties of nylon fibre. The nylon fibre had a variety of end uses, such as in textiles and carpets. The nylon polymer was also sold for automotive and other industrial uses. The Kingston nylon plant was one of a number of nylon manufacturing sites that DuPont had around the world and arguably one of the very best. My manager in the technical department there was Kalev Pugi. Kalev is the central figure in this story. He was about forty-five years old, a graduate chemical engineer, and he had a reputation as an ideas person who also got things done. He had emigrated from Estonia and worked in northern Ontario as a lumberjack before he went to university. He often told us he could cut more trees than anyone else in the bush. Once you knew Kalev, you knew this was true. He was an extremely driven worker who had more energy than three people and who was both humble and extremely assertive. He was humble socially but very assertive when it came to achieving his goals at work. Kalev had a vision, and he told us about it in a meeting about two months after I arrived in the department. I had been told that Kalev often had visions about how to make things better – some of them more visionary than others. His idea this time – the substance of this story – was to create a continuous polymerization reactor for nylon that would result in the lowest (in the world) capital cost to build and the lowest cost to operate and that would produce the highest-quality polymer for producing carpet fibre. This quality goal was important because carpet fibre has to be dyed and you need very high-quality polymer so that the fibre will dye uniformly. The higher the quality, the more profit to the polymer manufacturer because the customers need this quality in order to participate at the high end of the market. That’s the other thing Kalev often talked about – customers. He was very customer oriented. Kalev envisioned a form of wiped-film, high-pressure reactor. The idea had merit in terms of theoretical heat and mass transfer, but from a wide range of perspectives – mechanical, physical, and chemical – it was difficult to see how we could make one work. Put simply, it was a long shot for all of us highly

trained engineers. Kalev said, “OK, let’s get to work – let’s form a team – let’s accomplish the impossible.” There was a group at DuPont’s international headquarters in Delaware – the New Venture Group – and Kalev told us he had already scheduled a meeting with them to tell them what we were planning and to ask for their financial backing. All of this was quite exciting, but it was also worrisome because I did not know much about the technology. I had been involved in polymerization, but in polyethylene not nylon technology, which involved chemistry that was quite different. Kalev reassured me when I told him of my concern. His answer was typical: “You can do it – just get to work and learn.” Another concern was my lack of experience as a supervisor, given that my Polymer Technology Group was large and experienced. Again, Kalev was supportive: “You can do it – we can get together and discuss what leaders need to know. We can do that on weekends.” Kalev formed his team. Then he went to the meeting in Delaware. He told them his team had the capability to develop this new reactor technology in two years: “We will deliver the report before Christmas day two years from now.” The New Venture Group was persuaded and gave us the funding to do six months of preliminary work; they told us they would provide more support if the data justified it. This outcome surprised all of us on the team: Kalev had actually convinced DuPont world headquarters to fund us – not fully, but enough for us to start. The surprising aspect of this was that the idea was no more than a concept and had no supporting data. Even more surprising, the New Venture Group received many requests for funds. There was not enough money for all of them, but somehow it was there for us. Our team consisted of a small group of technology-competent people, a marketing person to ensure that we stayed focused on customer-oriented solutions, and, of course, Kalev, the leader. He called our team CR-8 (Canadian Research, eight-blade reactor). It had a nice ring to it. We had T-shirts made. This was the core team, and Kalev made it clear that we would be free to decide how we would organize our human resources to support the development work, but that everyone would be involved in the highest-priority endeavour – the CR-8. This was Kalev’s way of telling us we would be accountable for our work on the CR-8. All of us would need to give our “real jobs” a lower priority, though those “secondary” assignments would still have to be carried out on time and on budget. My “real job” involved mathematical modelling. As an aside, all of us on the CR-8 team were able to accomplish our original goals – including my group’s work on the mathematical model. We accomplished this while dedicating considerable effort to the project that Kalev had launched. At the outset, Kalev participated on the CR-8 team as an engineer, but very soon after, he shifted his focus to the following:

• Driving us with encouragement. He reminded us repeatedly that we were great technical people and leaders and that we could accomplish anything we truly wanted to do. • Inspiring us with his vision of the future. He assured us that we would personally be recognized in the company and ultimately beyond as having created a great breakthrough; also, he assured us that our customers would prosper and become loyal to the company because of the higher-quality nylon fibre. • Securing ongoing management support. He described our progress to management and returned with more support, more money, and more time. Eventually he secured the two years we said we needed. The result of all the work on the CR-8: • We had many small victories as well as many setbacks technically and emotionally. Overall we progressed steadily, inventing and implementing. • At the very end of the two years, Kalev took our final report from the research and pilot plant work to the New Venture Group in Delaware and declared victory. They agreed that we had succeeded. • The CR-8 came to be seen as a revolutionary means of producing high-quality nylon polymer. Kalev Pugi was an extraordinarily capable leader-engineer. First and foremost he believed at his very core in making all things better, all the time, and that the best way to accomplish this was by influencing others to utilize technology to change things. And he believed that all of us could and should learn to become competent agents of change, which for him meant developing ourselves into better engineers and preparing ourselves to lead others. All of us associated with this effort remember it many years later as one of the best experiences of our careers, if not the best. His example taught me a lot about competent leaders. It also convinced me that people who are sufficiently inspired and competent can accomplish anything they choose... I sound like Kalev. This experience opened my mind to the potential of role model leadership. It also launched me on what would be a long career of thinking and doing and of learning to be a better leader of myself and ultimately of organizations. The Developmental Learning Process In our developmental leadership model, individuals set out to become competent to lead groups, teams, and entire organizations. It is a given that becoming a role model leader requires strong motivation. How does a

motivated individual progress from aspiring to achieving the competencies of a role model leader? What change process is at work here? What must the aspiring leader do? The developmental learning process has many facets: discipline; on- and offthe-job learning; mentoring; and drive, which is a reflection of the individual’s own character. Each of these facets can be illustrated. In a disciplined learning process, there are teachers and teaching aids. The teachers here are often other leaders – those who have progressed (and are continuing to do so), those who have reached a level of recognized competence, and those who have demonstrated their value-add in the organization. In a conventional organization, the senior managers assign objectives to others. Most of them do not teach. Instead, they leave it to the human resources department or to training programs or they expect employees to teach themselves or, in many cases, they expect employees to know enough and not need to learn more. In the developmental organization, by contrast, all people are teachers. I will be describing this high-performance teaming process in part three; in high-performance organizations, the method of “teach, learn, teach” is a key component of teams. All meetings – indeed, almost all encounters – have “teaching moments” designed into them. DuPont Canada maintained a rotating group of five to nine people (we can call them facilitators) who were expert at and focused on developmental learning – on coaching people in how to learn. They were recruited from all of the company’s various functional areas – engineering, R&D, manufacturing, and so on. All of the developmental teachers were highly motivated role model leaders who were expert in the concepts of Everyone a Leader as described in this book. They were available to facilitate learning within teams and working groups across the company. After a time in the rotating group, they returned to their usual tasks in the departments from which they had been recruited. The time they spent teaching leadership to others was a learning experience for them as well as for others. Role Model Leader Designation “Role model leader” is not a diploma, an exam passed, an award, or a qualitative measure; rather, it is a label assigned, sometimes unconsciously, to leaders by those who see them as role models. When your team is working with a role model leader, you will notice it soon enough. You will admire the person, trust her, be open to her influence, and so on. And you will recognize her as a role model leader largely because you are taking steps to become one yourself. Role model leadership, then, is a reflection of an individual’s high level of learned competence; it is not a position. To extend this, the presence of a role model leader is a reflection of the progress of the organization as a whole.

Everyone working with Kalev Pugi knew he was a role model leader. We did not use that term – it simply wasn’t in our minds – but we still knew he was one. Kalev did not know he was a role model leader, but he knew he was motivated to be a better leader every day. To enlist in a common cause, people must believe that the leader is competent to guide them where they’re headed … If they doubt the person’s abilities, they’re unlikely to join the crusade. Kouzes and Posner, The Leadership Challenge1

The rest of part two discusses the learning required to progress towards the state of role model leading and leadership. A final note before we start: the developmental leadership model teaches us that the development of individual leading and leadership competence is the precursor for successful organizational development. The organization’s people will be developing themselves and their organization at the same time. Developmental learning within the organization as a whole is enhanced by the rapid development of the individuals who comprise it. Leadership Competency Model The leadership competency model describes the capabilities that an aspiring leader requires in order to become a role model leader (see Figure 2.4). The focus will be on three terms: skills, character, and behaviour. A person’s competence as a leader is a reflection of the cascading sum of these and how well they are integrated to create the competence required of the individual role model leader. Skills: The capabilities that allow the leader to function effectively – that is, to do things. Character: The inner human attributes that prepare the leader to function effectively. Behaviour: Expressions of the person’s motivation to prepare him / herself to function as a leader. Individual leading competency: The total, integrated expression of skills, character, and behaviour.

These elements, once learned – and learned well – define the role model leader. In this part of the book I will be discussing them as qualities that aspiring leaders can learn. That is, they are what leaders learn to do and be; they reflect how leaders prepare themselves to become exceptional; they suggest why such people are willing to dedicate themselves to learning to become role models for others. The above elements, all together, are what define role model leaders. The important point here is that they are linked – a change in one results in some degree of change in the others. That is a good thing, because a positive change in

any one of these will measurably improve the others and, it follows, the individual’s overall competence as a leader. Interestingly, an individual who is following might sense a high level of leadership skill called “honesty”; another might sense, in the same leader, a high level of behaviour called “honesty”; still another, a high level of character called “honesty.” They are all sensing the same positive attribute, yet they experience and reflect on it in different ways. As we all must have experienced when following a leader, we can always tell when a positive attribute is not present. There are too many so-called leaders who do not have the competence of role model leadership, and these people cannot hide. And their followers have no difficulty articulating which specific skills, character attributes, and behaviours that these leaders are lacking. In so doing, the followers reinforce the need to further develop these characteristics in themselves. The developmental leadership philosophy is defined by Everyone a Leader. In other words, everyone, whatever they are doing at any point, whether it is leading, managing, or following, is learning to become more competent in the skills, character attributes, behaviours, and thinking capabilities defined and discussed here. In practical terms, in any group, team, or organization, some will be more motivated to learn than others, and some will learn more rapidly than others. Some will be able to dedicate more mental, emotional, social, and physical energy than others to the task. An organization that is dedicated to developmental learning will, at any given time, have people with growing leading and leadership competence, but they will be progressing at their own pace. There will be people at different levels of competence. The ideal state, in our model of role model leading competence, is a moving target.

4 Thinking Effectively

The 11th of September 2001: an infamous day in recent world history. An airliner hijacked by people with a frightening vision of the future slams into a skyscraper in New York City on a beautiful autumn day, and the world changes. We will never really know how almost three thousand people in that building behaved, thought, or acted in those minutes after the crashes. We can only imagine. Some would have panicked and run; others would have frozen in fear. Many would have demonstrated anger; others would have reached out calmly to the icons and beliefs of their faith and to their values of family and human relationships. Many electronic messages were sent out in those minutes, many of them to family and loved ones. Many prayers would have been said. One can only imagine how many of their messages were never heard. And then there were those who intuitively or by training reached out to others to help, to provide guidance. Many would have sought or even demanded help; but others would have sought to provide it generously with no other motive than that it needed to be done. In a crisis, our complex and various inner worlds are on view for others to sense as at no other time. In a crisis, some people demonstrate their great leadership skills and others show how much they need leaders. There were people in those buildings on that day who made the decision to lead. Some made the wrong decisions; others made decisions that saved lives. Those who chose to lead in those moments in that place had decided to make change happen and to influence other people to follow them. But why were those people motivated to lead at that moment? Why did they feel compelled to say “follow me”? How did those leaders decide to exert their concept of safe passage on others? Did they formulate a strategy? Also, did people in the World Trade Center intuitively follow certain people and or were they influenced to go in different directions than they originally planned? And finally, what did the leaders in the World Trade Center that day actually do? Did they decide on a course of action and then demand action from others? Did they intuitively and rapidly develop a strategy, evaluate it, and convince others of its rightness? If we could determine the answers to Why? How? and What? in that situation, we would have a clear understanding of those leaders and how they led. So in what follows you will be confronting those three questions in almost every discussion of a newly introduced idea. The answers will help explain the concepts and provide you with essential insights into leadership and how it can

be learned. Those three simple questions and their answers will offer a disciplined, systematic approach to thinking effectively and thoroughly about complex ideas related to the role and practice of leadership. As I noted earlier, skills, character, and behaviour are linked together. Change one, and you change the other two in some way. For example, if you strengthen your character attribute of trustworthiness by learning from other admired leaders, this will improve your skills your behaviour as well – perhaps as it relates to your capacity to inspire others. There is, though, one desirable capability that relates to all three – that is a skill, a character attribute, and a behaviour: the ability to think effectively. To become a transformational leader who “changes the world,” you must somehow learn to think broadly, critically, and thoroughly about things. You must be able to explore ideas holistically – not just in terms of actions, and not just in terms of your own beliefs. And, importantly, you need to learn to think systematically. The term “conventional wisdom” has been used by people over decades to reference limited thinking when considering new ideas. J.K. Galbraith referenced the term in his famous 1958 book The Affluent Society. If we are satisfied with thinking about things in conventional, well-understood ways and using old concepts, progress and change will be resisted. Aspiring role model leaders who are engaged in changing things and influencing others’ direction need to go beyond conventional wisdom. This takes both will and mental energy; it requires mental tools as well as practice at using them skilfully. Henry Ford, obviously a very accomplished engineer, was a great proponent of thinking deeply about things. He explained that others were reluctant to think because it is hard work. He, of course, was right. David Garvin and his co-author of Rethinking the MBA have written that business leaders are asking for MBA schools to incorporate thinking skills and more leadership development into their curricula.1 His is another way of saying that to become a role model leader, you must learn to think effectively and completely, and that takes skill, character, and purposeful behaviour. Essentially, the framework for thinking effectively has three steps. Those steps move us from sensing that something must be done, through thinking about what we must do, to taking positive action. In effect, thinking requires us to answer these three questions: Why? How? and What? Below, I expand on this. This learning framework, presented in Figure 4.1, is used extensively in this book. It was Charles Krone, in the early 1980s, who introduced his nine levels of thought model to us at DuPont Canada. These nine levels of thought have ever since been an important tool for my thinking about leading and leadership. With Krone’s permission I will be using the nine levels of thought in various places throughout the book (my version, though, is somewhat different from his) as the basis for the learning framework for thinking effectively and completely about

leading and leadership. Thinking Effectively Model The thinking effectively model is proposed to assist the leader-engineer or leader-scientist in thinking in an orderly, effective, and complete manner. All of us respond to the world around us in complex cognitive ways. A detailed description of the mind’s inner workings is well outside the scope of this book and certainly well beyond my capability. But it will be useful here to take a deep breath and consider a simple model of the mind’s inner workings. Most people – and this is certainly true of leaders, who by definition “influence people to make positive change” – are interested in moving from sensing something to getting results. It is the nature of leaders to measure their own success in terms of actions taken and positive results achieved. Leaders, like engineers and scientists, exist in order to make things better. Many of us believe that the best leaders are action oriented, and we tend to admire those leaders who are able to move quickly from sensing something to doing something. Sensing → Doing

The common view is that leaders see or hear something – they sense it – and then they are able to successfully execute an idea from that limited input. This, however, often has less than optimal results. The admonition “just do it” rarely if ever works. It works well enough when we sense we are out of shape and start to run and lift weights. But even in cases like that, it would be better to think about how far we should be running and how much weight we should be lifting. The argument most often advanced for going from sensing straight to doing is that it saves time. “Thinking takes too much time,” people suggest. Yet it has been shown again and again by engineers engaged in the planning and execution of capital projects that when enough time is given to doing effective, up-front design work, costly mistakes of omission and commission are minimized and the length of time from start to finish is often quicker than the “just do it” approach. The admonition “think before doing” is a practical approach that minimizes both errors and time. So, the process to be recommended is Sensing → Thinking → Getting Results

The next section will address the following question: How complete should the thinking process be? (See Figure 4.1.) Figure 4.1 Thinking Effectively Model

Developing Meaning This step requires us to take our sensations as inputs and construct ideas. To develop meaning, ideas of all kinds – confusing ones, insightful ones, ideas that come long after the sensations have gone – need to be constructed. Ideas will come if aspiring leaders are open to them – if they have prepared themselves by developing goals, ambitions, high levels of mental energy, and high levels of motivation, and if they have the will to receive ideas. When our thoughts have value to us, we hold on to them; when they don’t, we let them go. Whether they have value will depend on how well they align with our beliefs, philosophy, and principles. Beliefs: Those ideas we hold to be true. Philosophy: A composite of those beliefs we are willing to live by. Principles: Guidelines to help us turn our philosophy into action.

By this approach, leaders develop ideas that align with their personal values. For role model leaders, that alignment is utterly necessary. Without it, our ideas will be empty of meaning for others, for they will mean nothing to you, and your followers will realize this intuitively. You have to be genuinely committed to your ideas or your followers will know instinctively that you are not. Conversely, if they know your commitment is genuine, the way is open for you to influence them to work relentlessly to put your ideas into practice. We always knew that Kalev was deeply committed to his causes. He was very clear about his values for the work we were doing. That tells you why beliefs, philosophy, and principles are important: they are the values that other people see in you. From this process of aligning values with ideas, the following answers emerge:

• An answer to why we think the way we do about ideas. • An answer to why we value one idea over similar other ideas. Quite simply, we value those ideas that reflect our beliefs, philosophy, and principles. All of which takes us naturally to the next step in the process. Formulating Direction In this step, we begin turning ideas into directions. Too many people, once they have developed guidelines for action or high-level principles, leap straight to doing. That is not the best way, and it is not what a role model leader does. It is far better to develop a variety of options and then consider them all – their short- and long-term implications. Only after doing that thoroughly and effectively is it time to develop a set of actions that we may take. This stage, then, might be called the mid-level or strategic step in the thinking process. To be more specific, formulating direction involves taking your ideas, cascading them down the levels of thought through concepts, strategies, and designs, and then writing them down: Concept: A few short sentences that describe the idea from the perspective of an idealized or future state. Strategy: How the concept is to be accomplished. Three to five statements of purposeful action should be enough. They should include a range of acceptable alternatives. Design: The development of a detailed set of strategic projects.

This triad of concept, strategy, and design should serve as a stand-alone statement of the idea you originally sensed. If you have little doubt about your idea’s value, there is no harm starting with the strategic part of this triad. A final point: you might revisit the concept, strategy, design triad on an annual basis if your organization is embarking on major or transformational change. Having formulated a direction, proceed naturally to the next step, which is to implement it. Implementing Action This is the final step in the leadership thinking process. Here, your competence as a role model leader – your skills, character, and behaviour – will be essential to the organization’s success. This is the step that generates results. It is where thinking processes evolve into doing processes, where plans are converted into actions. It is where strategic thinking turns into tactical thinking and then into results.

This process of achieving results can also be viewed in terms of three cascading levels: Action: Another word for this is tactics. Action is what we actually do to carry out the design. Put less simply, actions are what we must do to carry out the detailed strategic projects developed during the design step. Usually there will be a number of distinct steps for each aspect of the project. Audit: This involves checking what is actually happening against what is supposed to be happening. Are the results what you expected? Will you have to change your actions on the basis of the results you are getting? Evaluate: At this final level of thought, you compare your specific objectives to your measured results. Did you achieve what you expected? Is it necessary to go back and take different actions or not?

The evaluation stage is, in fact, ongoing. With every evaluation you make, you adjust the actions you have implemented based on the results your actions are generating. At this stage, your thinking will be highly tactical: you monitor the project, evaluate whether you are achieving the results you want, and you make thoughtful decisions to change what needs to be changed. At this critical stage, role model leaders engage with managers and with other followers to ensure that everyone understands the purpose of the work and that everyone is focused on achieving the results expected. The goal here is to influence people to take actions that will result in the desired outcomes. In summary, the premise in this section is that thinking an idea through in an orderly and disciplined manner before taking action will yield better results: Sensing an idea about something important ↓ Thinking about the idea in terms of its value to us ↓ Thinking about how to do something to realize benefit from the idea ↓ Thinking about what specific actions should be taken to get results from implementing those actions ↓ Taking action, measuring outcomes, and getting results

As I said in earlier sections, the goal of all leadership is to influence people to make positive changes to the ways things are done. And an important tool for successful leaders is a disciplined, systematic thinking process that enables them to explore the benefits of ideas before launching them at the organization. The distinctions in meaning among the nine levels of thought are subtle. Even

so, in some instances, there will be great benefit in taking the time to parse the thinking process of a group or an individual into all nine levels of thought. Doing so can be very helpful when the thinking is directed at a complicated and important change or transformation where the aim is common purpose and understanding. In other instances, however, it can be enough to integrate the levels into the three triads of thought (see Figure 4.1) – Why? How? and What? An Example of Thinking Effectively THE SCENARIO

A group of engineering students discuss the idea that both they and society in general would benefit if leadership development were made part of the curriculum. These students conclude that a leadership course could strengthen the engineering curriculum. They decide to do some disciplined thinking about this idea, using the thinking model they have learned. A summary of the nine-level thinking process is provided below. Note that it gives only one statement for each of the levels of thought. In the real world, before a result was obtained, there would need to be many statements and choices at each level. THINKING ABOUT AN IDEA

Belief: Engineers in the workforce today are not helping improve the world as much as they could and should. Philosophy: If engineers learned leadership skills, character attributes, and purposeful behaviours early in their university years, they would become better engineers and better citizens as well as agents of positive social change. Principles: The Faculty of Engineering will strongly encourage its undergraduates to learn about and apply leadership skills, character attributes, and purposeful behaviours. Concept: Engineers with leadership capability are the ones best equipped to lead transformational change across a broad spectrum of society. Strategy: Leadership learning opportunities are to be provided throughout the undergraduate curriculum and experience. Design: A series of academic courses and leadership experiences are to be provided in each undergraduate year and in graduate programs. Action: One important action step: experienced leaders will be asked to teach leadership courses to those students who wish to learn something about the craft. Audit: The Engineering Faculty will conduct a disciplined, credible self-audit

of engineering graduates five years beyond their graduation to ascertain the benefits of leadership training for undergraduates. The action steps will then be revised to reflect the audit’s findings. Evaluate: A disciplined, credible set of metrics to measure the benefit to society of a leadership program will be used to test and ultimately justify a sustainable effort in the faculty. Also, the action steps will be revised to reflect the measurement so that improved results are obtained.

5 Skills Capability

The specific work of leaders is to make changes that improve their own capabilities as well as those of other individuals and entire organizations. Our leadership framework goes beyond the development of skills; skills, though, are the starting point. As I noted in the preface, at a point in time, DuPont Canada’s senior leaders decided to markedly improve their company’s performance by embarking on a strategy: that everyone would learn to become a competent leader. Over the years, to accomplish this goal, they made many changes to processes and systems. One of these initiatives involved “management by objectives” (MBO). Many conventional organizations use this well-known tool: managers set objectives in co-operation with the individuals in their organizations. They then measure the performance of those individuals to establish their pay. DuPont Canada had been using this tool for many years; now, though, it was decided as part of the evolving design of the developmental leadership organization to redesign it in ways that would allow everyone to self-manage. This new “SMBO” approach shifted accountability for setting short-term work objectives onto each individual and joint responsibility for review of outcomes onto that individual as well as the person’s manager. More will be said about self-management in part three of this book. Around the time the SMBO system was introduced, I was leading and managing a small group of engineers that was dedicated to the design and construction of capital projects. We switched, like everyone else, to the SMBO approach. Early on in this transformation, I observed behaviour that encouraged me to believe that our strategy of Everyone a Leader was making DuPont Canada a better company. A number of people in my group set SMBOs that were not much different than those that had been set for them under manager-directed MBOs. But over the years following the change, more and more of them became motivated to improve their functioning capability by setting personal objectives that were more challenging and more developmental. The less motivated, at least at the beginning, set more traditional engineering functional objectives: performing specific design tasks more efficiently, communicating well with the business sponsor to keep them informed, and so on. But the more motivated engineers set personal objectives not just to communicate well with the business leaders – they would seek out those leaders to learn from them; they would determine any unrecognized business needs that

would make their projects more successful; and they would help them extend the potential of their projects. Instead of taking conventional approaches, they set out to explore the potential for innovation. In one case, an enterprising leader-engineer wanted to explore ways to shorten construction times in the Far North during the winter. His unit took the time to experiment with ideas and materials that would shorten concrete cure times at ambient temperatures far below freezing. Their experiments succeeded. Also, many of these aspiring leader-engineers set the objective of learning more about their engineering specialties. To that end, they took outside graduate courses at night, or they participated in a variety of self-learning initiatives. The message for me was that when people are encouraged to take accountability for leading themselves, they often develop their functional expertise and become more skilled at their work. Functional Expertise Expertise, here, refers to the skills people have that are the focus of their professional contribution to society. These might be engineering skills, science skills, machine maintenance skills, or sales skills. They are the functioning capabilities in which the individual is capable of becoming an “expert.” Engineers, scientists, or technologists, to become effective leaders, must continuously develop their capability as a functional “expert” in their chosen field. They must be prepared to maintain and indeed expand their knowledge and understanding of their field. The philosophy of Everyone a Leader is what motivates the individual to develop as a role model leader. A closely related idea here is “Everyone a Functional Expert.” There is enormous power in a team of people with diverse and highly developed functional skills – in financing, marketing, engineering, manufacturing, and so on. Even more powerful, then, if in addition, each of these talented people is developing leadership competence. Such a team is equipped to meet the most challenging transformational goals. I did some consulting work with a company that invented and manufactured medical devices. I had the opportunity to meet with other consultants who were medical doctors. One doctor was especially interested in leading and he was a senior manager in a large medical device sales and distribution company. He told me that he was a more effective leader because he was still a good doctor and was continually renewing his skills by taking shifts in a local hospital emergency ward. Even the most senior leaders – the ones at the very top of the organizational hierarchy – need to maintain and grow their functional expertise. Leading my company was a welcome challenge for me in terms of my leadership skills. It would have been much more challenging had I not been convinced of the need to

maintain and grow my expertise as an engineer. This technical savvy allowed me to communicate effectively, to engage in problem solving with some project teams, and to engage with thought leaders each with their own expertise. This was essential when it came to determining future directions for innovation. I was not alone in this determination. The role model leaders whom I knew and respected in the company and in other organizations were all determined to maintain and grow their functional expertise throughout their careers. Of course, personal choices need to be made in terms of which functional expertise to maintain and grow and to what extent. It is normal for individuals to develop their functional capabilities in many different ways and directions during their lifetime. A graduate engineer may focus on a specific set of engineering skills or evolve into a generalist. Another graduate may decide to develop as, say, a technical sales representative or a financial manager. All of these people, though, will benefit from developing their leading and leadership capabilities. Again, personal choices will need to be made in terms of the time and energy devoted to either functional expertise or leadership competence. The key point here is that every individual needs to develop both. In too many organizations there are too many leaders who believe that they can allow their functional expertise to slide as they learn and become better at leading, managing, or supervising others. This is a mentality of scarcity. The belief that a person can learn and practice only so much functioning capability is false. Rather, I believe in a mentality of abundance – that learning is both a continuous process and a cumulative one. Newly graduated engineers can, if self-motivated, maintain their engineering skills and indeed broaden and deepen them. I have seen many graduate engineers serve their organization, themselves, and society with their learned engineering skills and then move into other areas of expertise – sales, accounting, personnel, and so on. But the very best of these people do not abandon their previous functional capabilities. Instead, they carry them forward and use them in a cascading development of capabilities and learned skills. They work at maintaining and growing their skills throughout their careers. Developing a Personal Mission A personal mission is a powerful tool, and developing one is an extremely important skill for aspiring role model leaders to learn. Thinking about and developing a personal mission statement – and, most important, following through on that statement – is a key capability for anyone who hopes to influence others. You cannot lead unless you are skilled at leading yourself. Thinking deeply about and writing down and constantly revisiting a personal mission statement allows you to gain knowledge about what you need and want

to change. It provides a roadmap of what to do to achieve the future you desire for yourself. Stephen Covey has written extensively about personal mission statements. It would serve you well to explore his thoughts.1 A specific framework for a personal mission statement is given below. This one has served my personal needs very well over the years. It is a classic fourterm learning framework; it has two dyads. The first relates to the personal motivation to move from a current state towards a more satisfying future state (i.e., one’s life goals): Personal Current State → Priority Life Goals

As you go about constructing your personal mission statement, you will have a picture or a sense of what you want to accomplish in your life at a personal level. These goals can be and should be practical, indeed visceral – things like “I want to be seen by others as successful,” “I want to dedicate my life to serving others,” “I want to be seen by others as important,” and so on. It is important, though, that you be honest with yourself. Many people spend so much time trying to do the right thing as perceived by others that they find it difficult to separate that from their real, personal life goals. The second dyad focuses on the thinking and doing – on the operational work you will have to do to reach your goals: Personal Values and Direction ↓ Priority Work Activity

Here you need to think about, define, and reaffirm to yourself your personal values – those beliefs you hold strongly about yourself, your work, and your life. Also, you must develop a direction to bring about that future. For example, if you envision yourself as a senior leader in your company, or – to go in another direction – as an accomplished senior engineer at your company, you need to develop a strategy for achieving that future. Will you need to change jobs to gain more experience at leading different kinds of organizations? Will you need to do things differently to gain other experiences? Will you need to take time off from your company and go back to school to acquire a new set of skills? Deciding which actions to take may well require that you take time to do research, and to consult with others to get it right in your mind. The second part of this second dyad is “priority work activity.” Here you need to further define the work you should be doing to realize the vision and strategy you have described for yourself. For example, if your direction is to become a senior engineer, you will want to seek out work that will improve your leadership skills; and you will seek opportunities to network with senior managers, to learn more about the company’s technologies, and so on.

Knowing Yourself This skill is based on learning who you are, not who others consider you to be. It is important to do this in an ongoing manner – to constantly be learning more about who you are as you seek to improve yourself. Maxwell Maltz developed a thesis about this in his well-known book Psycho Cybernetics.2 In that work, he maintained that individuals must have a measure of self-awareness – an accurate and positive view of themselves – before setting any life goals; otherwise, they will never achieve those goals in their entirety. Knowing oneself is a benefit to individuals and to others: a clear example was demonstrated to me when a talented research scientist working in a biotechnology company decided that he was not meant to be a manager giving orders to others. He decided he could learn to be a leader and influence others and the company to dedicate resources to moving in a different direction. He saw the benefit to the company and to himself in engaging in medical end-use research and development, which was his personal competency and passion. I noted earlier that it is important to learn the character attributes of role model leaders. I will introduce these later on, but I will mention here that you cannot hope to strengthen your character unless you begin with a solid understanding of yourself. Perhaps the best tool for achieving understanding of yourself is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).3 Everyone, I believe, should take the test and have it evaluated by an expert. Doing so will give you tremendous insights; indeed, some people will tell you that the assessment cannot help but change those who take it. Perhaps that is going too far, but I believe that within certain boundaries, it is possible to change one’s personality. For example, you can learn to become more extroverted or more introverted if you have the will to do so and the skills to learn how, and the MBTI can help with that. As an example, it is valuable information to know how much of an introvert you are. Having learned about introversion and extraversion, you can choose whether to act on that knowledge as part of an effort to change. You will, along the way, realize that role model leaders can be introverts or extroverts. What matters more is how you manage your personal energy. Introverts need to manage their personal energy in different ways than extroverts. Leaders who have come to know themselves will have developed insight into how they react to various emotional stimuli. Every role model leader has a preferred and well-communicated leadership style. It is also true that role model leaders, to be maximally effective, need to be able to change their dominant style when facing a crisis. How well you know yourself and how well you are able to adapt to situations will determine how able you are to change your dominant style at critical moments. Various leadership styles will be discussed in the following pages.

To have a strong degree of self-awareness is the first step in understanding how others see you. Indeed, one could argue that self-awareness is important largely because it enables you to know how others see you. Unless you can influence people to make positive change, you are not a leader. Until you become aware of how others perceive you, you will find it very difficult to influence others. So you must learn how to sense how others perceive you. Knowing Others Role model leaders need to be able to read the people around them if they hope to change their environment in positive ways. This skill, too, can be learned. That much should already be clear, but perhaps this next point is not: a role model leader seeks reasons to make changes. Unless you learn to test the current state of your environment against alternatives, you will not develop a change mentality. Role model leaders are always looking for better ways to do things and for better models for future states. They embrace a healthy discomfort with the status quo. Again, they seek positive changes to make. Positive change is not an absolute – whether a change is positive or not depends a great deal on others’ perceptions of it. So a leader who would make positive change must learn how to understand the needs, wants, and values of others. Learning to know others is not entirely a matter of experience. It also requires a systematic approach to learn about the other people in your world. And it requires you to watch for transformational changes to make. In finding them, you will also find ways to influence others to make change. You cannot know everything about everyone. History is full of people who became role model leaders by aspiring to a better future. Think about the great researchers in engineering, chemistry, medicine, and the social sciences: Linus Pauling and his revolutionary findings in molecular biology; Jonas Salk and his successful development of a polio vaccine; and Peter Senge and his passion for systematic thinking. Each of these role model leaders changed the world in part by intensely seeking to know others and their environment. So, how do we learn to know others? Mainly, you learn this skill by training yourself to pay attention to people and things, be they natural or manmade. There is much to be learned by observing and thinking about continuous change in the natural world. Why do plants and animals do things in certain ways? How do they affect their worlds? What can we learn from evolution? Mostly, though, we can learn from other people. Seek out those who are expert in areas in which you wish to learn more. If you want to become a better tennis player, don’t play with those you can beat easily. In the same way, if you want to lead people, get to know a great leader and learn from that person. Much has been written about mentorship. Without question, it works, but it is also difficult to sustain unless you have a

willing and active mentor and you share that person’s energy. The skill of learning how to know others, and the capacity to benefit from that, is largely a matter of active sensing, active listening, and active observing. The best advice in terms of active listening and active observing is simply this: Stop talking! The very best leaders – the ones who understand the benefits to be gained from knowing others – are often the ones sitting quietly in the room and listening and observing. Less skilled leaders sometimes misinterpret this active listening and observing as a sign of weakness, laziness, or disinterest. Active thinking is another beneficial skill – one that when coupled with active sensing can be very powerful. Listening to and observing others and measuring their ideas, actively comparing them with your own, often leads to even better ideas. But be careful whom you decide to learn from. Many aspiring leaders – indeed, most people generally – gravitate towards charismatic personalities. Through the centuries, role model leaders have often been understood as charismatic leaders – as the archetypical “great men” or “great women.” There is nothing wrong per se with charismatic leadership; charisma, when coupled with thoughtful competence, is better than the magnetic attraction of a powerful personality who says “follow me” and then takes you nowhere or, worse, to a place that you (or the entire world) never wanted or needed to see. Furthermore, charismatic leaders often get caught up in their own personalities and become enthralled with themselves. For such people, ego satisfaction becomes a more powerful driver than any vision of a better future. The Power of Interdependency The very best leaders know how to deal with ambiguity; they know how to see both sides of the situation at hand. That is how they can develop good relations with diverse groups and individuals. Poor leaders – and others who are less competent than role model leaders – do not deal as effectively with ambiguity. As a result, they come across as indecisive, which in turn confuses the people in their organization. These followers simply can’t tell what their leaders really want. In real-world organizations, this sort of interpersonal confusion tends towards the following results: • Discussions end with “agreeing to disagree,” which is never the right result. • Discussions end with “meeting halfway,” which is never the optimal result either. For example, price negotiations almost always end up halfway between the original price positions. Such compromises are overrated: both sides lose something, and time has been wasted in the negotiations.

There is a better way, and it is called a “reconcile.” A reconcile is not a compromise, and it results in each side knowing it has won. The powerful learning framework (see Figure 5.1) is an interdependent triad called the reconcile model. This model was used in our company in any number of ambiguous situations as a learning tool and as an approach to solving problems and making decisions. Ambiguity, here, refers to a situation where there are two opposing views. It is the constant companion of leaders; it is certainly mine. In chapter 1, I described a story about persistence and leadership that I experienced firsthand. Carol came to know her senior managers in many ways. In her determination to change things in the direction of her aspiration, she was constantly crafting reconciles that met their needs as well as her team’s and her own. In the process, she found better ways to do things. The main reconcile described in the example was the action that responded to the decision to shut down her business because of lack of strategic fit. She found a better way to sustain her business and meet their needs. She acquired a business – a reconcile, a change – that was innovative and that satisfied both sides. Another example might be two engineers on a project team that has been assigned the task of improving the profitability of a milling machine that produces steel channels for construction end uses. One engineer believes that the approach should focus on reducing the machine’s operating costs; the other believes that the company should buy a new machine with the most advanced technology. The latter approach would focus on generating more revenue from the new machine’s higher productivity. Those higher revenues would result in higher profit, even after the machine’s cost was factored in. Figure 5.1 Reconcile Model

These two engineers decide to apply the reconcile model to seek a better solution – one that has elements of both ideas. They agree that cost reduction must be an element of the solution, and they also agree that more advanced technology ought to be an important element. They decide to purchase the most

advanced computer software and hardware as well as an improved cutter to give even higher productivity at slightly higher cost. Together, these decisions will allow the machine to be run at higher productivity, thereby generating more revenue for the business. They also decide to make a proposal to their suppliers of steel: they will offer one of their suppliers a very high share of their business in return for a significant reduction in the cost of steel. Intelligent application of the learning model by these aspiring leaders has allowed them to achieve a win-win reconcile, one that respects the ideas of both. And how is a reconcile achieved? To start with, the two sides must agree to reconcile. That is, they must agree to find a new idea that is better than either of their original ideas. And what is the better idea going to be? It will be a fresh idea that has been developed through cooperation, trust, innovation, and hard, thoughtful work. It is a leader’s task to develop environments where trust and cooperation can blossom. Trust and cooperation provide the framework within which the hard work of reconciling can be done. But in itself, hard work is not enough – the two sides must agree to engage in it together. This means that the leaders engage in moving their people down the following trajectory: Argument → Empathy → Action → Win-Win

A Win-Win Process First

→ The proponents of two strongly opposed ideas come to the table.

They open their minds to see the problem from the other’s point of Second → view; they seek to understand by comparing the other’s beliefs and principles to their own. Third

They each take the other’s side, seeking ways to give expression to → the needs and concerns of the other instead of simply stating and restating their own positions.

They determine what results would constitute a fully acceptable Fourth → solution for both sides. Again, openness and honesty are important here. They identify several new options for achieving the results. They “innovate themselves away” from their original positions.

Fifth

→

Sixth

Together, they select one idea that is different from the original two. → They test this new idea as to whether it is a reconcile that is acceptable to both.

Seventh → They continue until they have arrived at a fully satisfactory reconcile. Developing interdependent reconciles is an important leadership activity as well as a skill that leaders need to develop. Reconciles allow people to participate openly and creatively in the continuous improvement process – in fact, it inspires them to do so, for it frees them from the demotivating threat of losing (i.e., having their idea denied). Recently, the idea of integrative thinking proposed by Roger Martin and the idea of a “Third Alternative” by Stephen Covey have emerged.4 Both these eminent teachers and authors are very much aligned with the notion of the reconcile model used in DuPont Canada for many years. Teaching Others Leadership can be learned and learning to be a role model leader is a challenge well worth taking up. Learning is a skill in itself. And what is the best way to develop that skill? I maintain that you learn best by teaching others: by teaching leadership, role model leaders hone their own leadership skills. The teaching process is best implemented in two stages: influencing the student to accept and participate in the learning process and engaging in the teach-learn-teach process itself. The first involves convincing the student that there is value in learning to be a leader; more specifically, learning starts with the student realizing that “I don’t know what I don’t know” and then accepting that he or she should move towards learning about leading and leadership. This is the influence required to move people from a state of unconscious to conscious incompetence. The second part of the teach-learn-teach process is the teaching itself and moving from conscious incompetence to conscious competence. If the organization’s values include the philosophy of Everyone a Leader, then the learning process will be natural and effective – part of a leadership learning “culture.” Without this cultural backdrop, the teaching will entail isolated and individually motivated events and will be much less efficient and effective. Diversity of Thought Advocating and practising diversity of thought is an important skill for role model leaders to learn. This is the idea that one should seek other points of view, be patient when making decisions, and accept that there will be no single right answer. Leaders are always dealing with ambiguity. If our organization needs to increase its profit, do we focus on cutting costs or increasing revenues? Which

leadership style will get the best results in a given situation? Which of our best engineers will we place in charge of a given project? Role model leaders soon learn that for most important questions, there are no single correct answers. So instead, they establish the options for accomplishing the tasks at hand; then they make their choices unencumbered by the need to always choose a single right answer. They learn to spend their time and effort on a measured, limited number of possible answers – usually three. It is always easier to decide among three options. It is also easier to make decisions when three people work together. Two people can discuss, argue different logics, and have great difficulty deciding between two right answers to an issue or decision. When a third person is in the room, that person often listens and hears the two arguments and sees and feels the argument both logically and emotionally. This third person can then intervene and raise the level of understanding and decision making to the point where conclusions can be drawn and decisions can be made from all the possible answers. This is another useful way of using the reconcile model. There is another useful skill – a tool that is a well-known outcome of the concept of diversity of thought. That tool is often referred to as “diverge / converge.” It is a simple but effective tool for reaching a decision where a number of alternatives are possible. To illustrate, say that you are seeking an answer to an important strategic or tactical issue. A good approach is this: • List all possible answers. Take lots of time, for the tendency is to select the “right” answers too quickly. • Expand on your or the group’s understanding of the “rightness” of each answer. Again, take your time to list the pros and cons for each. • After this thorough and disciplined divergence of thinking, start to work on convergence: – Read and discuss all the divergent information. – Rate each item on the list you’ve developed on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is a high degree of “rightness” and 5 is a low degree. It is often wise to have each participant do this in a quiet spot where each can study all the pros and cons. • Collect all the information, measures, and opinions, then converge on the “most right” answer together – sometimes it will be the one with the highest score, sometimes not. This is a simple approach, but it is based on some important principles: • Role model leaders respect the opinions of others and diversity of thought. • Role model leaders are comfortable with ambiguity but also have a passion for action preceded by systematic thinking.

• Role model leaders influence others to make positive change. And, finally, a most important idea that evolves from this skill: diversity of thought. All leaders benefit from a diverse set of career experiences. The very best leaders will take advantage of and create opportunities to make career changes to broaden and enrich their learning. An example would be the learning when a leader-engineer moves into a sales and marketing team or transfers to a different country or organization. Focusing on What Is Most Important Role model leaders focus on the few important matters that they are best able to influence. This is because, quite simply, there are always more issues worth addressing than there is time to address them all. Unless you prioritize, you won’t accomplish as much as you could; you may accomplish nothing at all, and what you do accomplish will take more time than it would have otherwise. This may sound obvious, but ambitious people tend to forget it. The important issues will always be large in number. It is tempting to launch strategies or actions to deal with all of them, especially when we see opportunities to change situations for the better and when it is clear to us what can be done about them. But when we take on too much, we are only leading ourselves astray. Stephen Covey refers to this as the circle of concern.5 The basic problem here is our very human tendency to overestimate our abilities and underestimate opposition to change. Indeed, we like our role model leaders to be strong willed, to be passionate about overcoming barriers – human, natural, economic – and getting results. But that passion is precisely what can lead to overreaching oneself. So how are we to learn to be confident in a realistic way? Basically, we do it by learning to prioritize. By learning – if the issue is environmental pollution – that it is better not to tackle a long menu of problems, for doing so is likely to lead to a series of suboptimal solutions. It is better, instead, to focus on making rapid and sustainable changes that address (for example) the most serious pollution problems at hand. One might, in this case, first target chemicals that are known carcinogens. Having eliminated these, and having dealt with the inevitable technical and human objections to any change process, you can then move on to the next set of pollution challenges – perhaps to water pollution in the vicinity of the company’s operations. When this approach is taken, success builds on past success; indeed, progress can accelerate. And these successes can be “banked,” in the sense that past successes make future challenges easier to overcome. This is largely because success builds your credibility and fosters trust. Another point can be made: role model leaders seek to expand their circle of

influence. That is, they strive to increase the number and importance of issues they can influence successfully. If their influence stops growing, it will inevitably deteriorate. This may seem odd, but remember that there are many oppositional forces to change and that those forces are constantly growing. So a role model leader must expand his influence simply to stay ahead of those forces. The final point to be made about prioritizing relates to urgency. Time is managed best when the manager / leader minimizes less important activities and focuses mainly on those that are most important and most urgent. However, many people make the mistake of neglecting the “most important, less urgent” things, which often include activities relating to the role model leader’s personal development. The best examples involve learning activities such as keeping up to date on the latest advances in our own technical specialty and, importantly, developing ourselves as leaders. These learning activities need to be a priority. Another aspect of time management is speed. Today’s world is moving more and more quickly, to the point that speed has actually become a commodity that the market will pay for. People are not willing to wait for things to just happen. Those who understand the quickening pace of today’s world will have an advantage in the marketplace. Many aspiring leaders would agree that speed is important and that so is its primary measure, which is productivity. But many also confuse saving time with acting impulsively. That is a mistake: higher productivity is more likely to be achieved by thinking and by taking the time to consider the best ways to move forward. Thinking before acting is the best approach to accomplishing the right things in the shortest time. Such is the magic of “front end loading.” The very best project engineers know how important it is to spend considerable time thinking completely and effectively in the early stages. In this way, wasteful steps can be eliminated and innovations can be developed. Only then, after they have committed to a well-considered project design, do they start to spend money on the work itself. And the work will be completed more quickly the first time with no need to correct mistakes and repeat the work. So, you often maximize speed and productivity by going slow until you are certain it is time to go fast. Learning from Experience Everyone knows that experience is a great teacher. Experiences of all kinds offer us opportunities for learning to become better leaders. There are two extremes. There are those who spend a career, indeed a lifetime, learning the same thing over and over again from their experiences. Then there are others, at the opposite end of the spectrum, who learn more efficiently by developing their

capacity to get the most out of every learning experience they encounter. The latter people learn more from opportunistic experiences – they sometimes deliberately design such experiences. That is the height of learning effectively, and it is what role model leaders do. Those of us who play golf watch professional golfers swing a club and are inspired to work harder at the game. It is unlikely that watching Rory McIlroy or even a journeyman pro will raise our functioning capability to professional levels, but almost certainly we can learn something from the experience of watching those magnificent swing mechanics. And even when we do not learn to function on the course as well as we might hope, the experience of watching will enhance our preparedness, our spirit, our being, and our character and cause us to be more motivated to improve our functional skill to swing a club better than before. Learning from observing can achieve a positive outcome. But learning from experience is meant to stimulate action. This can be doing something and making a mistake or doing something right the first time. Many will tell you making mistakes and learning from those mistakes is the preferred route. This has always caused me some concern. Of course, making mistakes is a natural occurrence when taking action in the engineering, scientific, and business worlds, and coupled with a root cause, analysis and corrective action is a route to positive learning. But, the preferred route is disciplined, orderly thinking before taking action and learning from the experience of successful outcomes. The point here is that learning from experience is itself a leadership skill. Role model leaders need to demonstrate a passion for doing so. This is the height of practicing reciprocal maintenance. On a team, if team leaders seek out learning experiences by observing, listening, interacting, and sensing the contributions of others who are following in the team process, those followers will give back to the leaders and see a common purpose in assisting the leaders in their role. Learning experiences can and should be designed by both individuals and the organization. All individuals at all times learn from what they see and do, but this is an unorganized, ad hoc approach to learning from experience. A better alternative is to use tools such as the levels of thought to systematically design learning experiences. The organization that is encouraging an Everyone a Leader strategy will design a system that encourages progress in leadership skills and reward individuals on the basis of their progress. In the high-performance organization, such systems are very similar to those used in all organizations for encouraging and measuring the growth of other functional skills (e.g., engineering, marketing, and so on). Figure 5.2 Levels of Accomplishment

A learning framework to illustrate this organizational development dynamic is given above, along with two hypothetical examples of people developing in different ways although they are both motivated by the promise and reward of Everyone a Leader. It is worth mentioning that this framework and example are not differentiating accomplishment by title or hierarchical level but by identifying a cascading scale of developed capability. A CEO of a company could, depending on competence at any point in time, be a level 3, 4, or 5, in my experience. The Development of Ashley, the Aspiring Organizational Leader ASPIRING LEADER

A recent engineering graduate has just joined a firm. Both the entry-level engineer and the company expect her to develop as an engineer and as a leader. We will call the engineer Ashley. The company assigns Ashley to a project group that is one of a number of important teams dedicated to building a new plant to produce a new product that is expected to have a strong impact on the company’s fortunes. This is an important and early opportunity for Ashley, and she knows it. On that team, Ashley has many opportunities to work one-on-one with the team leader, Ken. Ken is a role model leader dedicated to ensuring that the team achieves its goals and to developing the leadership capabilities of his team members. After some considerable opportunity and time, Ken judges Ashley to

be a competent aspiring leader. What did Ken sense and experience in his observations of Ashley? Ken saw a competent engineer who was meeting her goals while contributing to those of the team. He saw Ashley demonstrating not only her engineering skills but also her considerable interpersonal skills. Everyone on the team finds Ashley credible; they trust her as a contributor and like her as a person. She is doing productive work and demonstrating her competence, which is contributing to the team’s overall goals. Ashley is a self-starter who needs little help from the leader or others in doing her work; and she is beginning, quite deliberately, to read about and learn the skills, character attributes, and purposeful behaviours required to lead effectively. DEVELOPING LEADER

After about a year, the project team meets its goals and is disbanded. Ken, the project team leader, is asked by the senior project leader to evaluate the performance of his team members – both their functional competence and their leadership capabilities. In his evaluations, Ken is critical of two of his team members: they have not met all their personal objectives and have needed considerable help from Ashley and Ken in order for the team to stay on track. Also, they have not shown strong leadership capabilities, especially in terms of self-motivation and work habits. However, Ken is very pleased with how Ashley has developed. She is judged to be a highly competent engineer and has demonstrated considerable potential as a leader. She has taken the time to get to know the people on the team; she has shown very positive energy and has a tenacious – often aggressive – approach to finding ways to get things done. She has often looked for better ways to do things. In short, Ken believes that Ashley has demonstrated leadership capability. She works effectively with others in a change environment; she is doing some public service work outside the firm; and she is learning about the stakeholders in the communities near the plant. And, importantly, she is increasingly admired as a role model leader by a growing number of her peers. ROLE MODEL LEADER

A few years have passed, and Ashley has continued to perform well as an engineer and as a member of a number of successful teams. She has been recognized as a “go to” person. When a team leader needs to get something done and done well, they go to Ashley. As a result of her exemplary performance as an engineer and a developing leader, she is given the opportunity to lead a team that has just been formed in another department of the company. That department is developing a new process in a field outside Ashley’s functional competence,

so this will be a challenge for her. If she hopes to excel, she will not be able to rely on her capabilities as an electrical engineer. In this new environment, she will need to focus on her leadership capabilities. As part of her new responsibilities, she will need to work with the department head to pick some of his team members and to develop a set of team objectives. Ashley consults with other leaders in the company and is able to convince them to transfer some key people from their departments to her team. She is able to do this because these leaders recognize that their own people will benefit from the experience of working with Ashley, who many now recognize as a strong developmental leader as well as a good coach and role model. Ashley assembles her team and works with them in a two-day meeting to craft a set of team and individual objectives. Included in the objectives are metrics for measuring performance as well as an aggressive schedule for carrying out the work. When crafting the team objectives, Ashley commits a significant amount of resources to leadership development. She researches the subject and consults with others she respects. With the team, Ashley develops a team mission statement that links its work to the company’s vision. This exercise is much appreciated by the team, for the resulting statement links its objectives to the needs of the various stakeholders. Moving forward in time, the team has met all its objectives – another success for Ashley, who is now recognized within the company as a role model leader. She is now being given more and more leadership responsibilities on larger and more important teams. She continues to work deliberately on her leadership skills, character attributes, and purposeful behaviours and as a result she is able to learn more with each new responsibility. She is respected and admired as a competent role model leader in the company. ORGANIZATIONAL LEADER

Ashley grows through individual development, through experience, and through thinking about communities beyond the company. She is recognized as a great leader who has exceptional values and who tries to change things to make the world better. She is given a significant promotion within the company and is recognized as an organizational leader. She is given the opportunity to assume full accountability for a new division that will be based on the acquisition of new technology by her company. Ashley recognizes the importance of this opportunity and is confident she will demonstrate her capability as an organizational leader. The difference between the demonstrated capability of a role model leader and that of an organizational leader is large. Put simply, organizational leaders set the direction for a complex organization; formulate an innovative vision, mission, and strategy; and engage people successfully in that shared purpose.

Organizational leaders continue to learn new leadership skills, character attributes, and purposeful behaviours and to refine the ones they already have. They spend time in the world outside the company, seeking positive opportunities to serve and learn from new and existing stakeholders. Ashley is justifiably proud of her growth and demonstrated capability as an organizational leader. In the entire firm, there are only five leaders at this level, but she is motivated to continue developing her competence to serve others as a leader. By now she is also being recognized by outside organizations as an outstanding leader. HIGH-PERFORMANCE ORGANIZATIONAL LEADER

Ashley has demonstrated great competence as the company’s senior leader. She is greatly admired by the entire company. She has become a “legend in her own time” – a superordinate leader. She has created a great deal of change – most would say transformational change – in many of the company’s systems, as seen by customers, employees, and shareholders. Those changes have grown the company markedly and in many dimensions. Ashley has been recognized outside the company as a visionary – as a highperformance leader who also serves society in many ways. At the same time, her character and behaviour are admired as value based and performance based, not personality based. In fact, many perceive this accomplished leader as humble and as more interested in service than in herself. Many inside and outside the company would agree – Ashley is a highperformance organizational leader. But Ashley knows that the goal is to achieve more – to reach for “higher-performance leadership.” Leadership is a developmental journey during which there is always more to be learned and more to achieve. The Development of Tarah, the Aspiring Leader-Engineer Tarah, a talented engineering graduate, has the ambition to become the company’s chief engineer. This is a highly functional role, one that involves acting as an internal consultant to all of the company’s business leaders. It is an extremely important role and is rewarded well, financially and emotionally. Tarah decides to focus on ascending the engineering functional ladder. This ladder describes the levels she will need to rise through and the competencies she will have to demonstrate at each rung. But she also buys into the idea that she will be a better engineer and a better person if she achieves some identity as a leader – that is, if she learns and gains and practises some leadership capabilities. So she consults the leadership progression hierarchy and determines to set herself the goal of achieving the competency expressed by the identity called “Developing Leader.” She makes this decision based on her

belief that a chief engineer will be of more benefit to the company and to herself if she shows leadership in a team environment. The alternative – to participate on teams only as required, without a focus on team objectives and on the needs of others – would benefit no one. So Tarah dedicates time to learning leadership capabilities and demonstrates them at every opportunity. The CEO often asks her to consider moving “up the leading and leadership ladder.” Tarah resolutely declines to do so, pointing out that her career goal is to be chief engineer. She achieves her goal, and everyone tells her that she is the best chief engineer the company has ever had. A large part of her achievement is her always evident and growing leadership competence. Tarah and Ashley developed differently: one as a competent leader-engineer, the other an equally competent engineer-leader. And, each recognized the importance of becoming more valuable to themselves and their organization through learning to be more functionally competent in leading and leadership and their field of expertise.

6 Character Attributes

Skills describe how role model leaders function; character attributes describe their humanity. Character attributes are the foundation of the role model leader’s social and emotional level of performance. To illustrate this point, when you first meet someone, you perceive that person as intelligent and likeable. The first attribute, intelligence, relates to function; the second attribute, likeability, relates to character. It is largely on the latter trait that you will base a relationship. Character, then, relates mainly to social and emotional intelligence and less so to mental intelligence. The latter is what delineates a leader’s functional skills. In a conventional organization, the engineer doing process work in a manufacturing plant or design work in an engineering department is dedicated to achieving objectives. This entails carrying out tasks that will have clear outputs. Designing a distillation column for a new manufacturing area in a pharmaceutical company is challenging work, and the engineer and his supervisor or manager will agree on the expected result within a given time frame. It is different in the developmental organization, where everyone is developing leadership competency. The engineer who is designing a distillation column will be expected to achieve the same results as those in a conventional managing process, but he will be encouraged to look for ways to carry out the task in innovative ways by changing things and making them better than the last time. And in seeking better ways to carry out the functional work, he will also be seeking better ways to interact with others, including with the supervising leader. Clearly, then, the leader-engineer will be expected to exhibit strong interpersonal capabilities along with functional skills. For example, he will be expected to exhibit the character attribute of tenacity in pursuing a design that is more efficient and effective than previous ones. The leader-engineer will seek input from others, and not necessarily in his immediate area – perhaps he will approach the company’s marketing people to determine the customer’s quality needs. In this way he will be demonstrating respect for the opinions of others. Also, the leader-engineer will communicate clearly and often with all those directly engaged in the work and with those who are less engaged but who are still affected by the work. In short, the leader-engineer in the developmental organization will demonstrate strong character and humanity as an essential part of the work. When I think about people of great character in a work environment, I think about an engineer I know well, who rose above others equally talented in terms of skill and functioning ability. Bryan (not his real name) was the research engineer on a business team I knew well at DuPont Canada. The team was

interfunctional and was comprised of seven highly skilled people. Five were engineers or scientists; the other two held degrees in English literature and sociology, respectively. Each member made a diverse but valuable contribution to the team’s work. But that is not the story I want to tell here. That team had a challenging goal, which was to develop a new (at the time) specialty fibre for automotive air bags. Our Kingston nylon operation produced a variety of products, but this one would be unique because often it would make the difference between life and death in a car crash. And we would be developing it here in Canada, at DuPont Canada’s own research facilities. The challenges during the early stages were often technical ones, and Bryan took the lead in meeting them. It was he who provided the team with the muchneeded technology input. The team’s marketing person was a talented engineer as well, as was the finance person, who had come out of the R&D department many years earlier to become a talented financial analyst. These two team members were both a challenge and a help to Bryan, because they sometimes reverted to their engineering expertise and gave advice to him – advice that was sometimes useful, sometimes not. Bryan would listen intently and either accept the advice or reject it. But he always gave good reasons for rejecting it; he had great respect for his team members. They sometimes didn’t like his answers, but they were pleased with his attitude. From the time the team was formed, the other members admired Bryan’s high technological competence. They saw him as a humble, quiet, introverted person with a good sense of humour that only sometimes came out and that was much appreciated when it did. Like any good comic, he picked times when the team needed to have its spirits raised. The team’s designated organizational leader encouraged the members to give Bryan time to speak and participate. A number of the team members were inclined to talk rather than listen; Bryan was the opposite. But when he did speak, everyone listened because his contributions were vital to the team’s success. At this point in the product’s life cycle, there were a multitude of product and process issues, and he expressed his ideas about them in a way that benefited the whole team. Bryan was passionate about his personal goals as part of the team. He knew that meeting those goals would be important to the team’s success, yet he always communicated to the others that their goals were equally important. At almost every team meeting, he would connect his personal work to the team’s goals. Everyone felt good after Bryan made a presentation. Bryan was a master of communication – not in quantity, but in quality. His points were always valid and he knew how to make them clearly. Also, he was truthful at all times about the technology issues he was dealing with – he did not brag about his successes, nor did he sugarcoat his failures. As a consequence, the team trusted and respected him for “telling it like it is.” He had a compelling

way of weaving the personal values that he held for the business into our project discussions. For example, he once explained to the team that his goal was to increase the strength of the air bag fibre while reducing the size of the filaments, while at the same time reminding us that what was important was not the ultimate lower cost of the stronger fibre but the safety of the people in the vehicles that used it. Bryan had great respect for us, our customers, and society, and the team respected him, trusted him, and learned from him. And probably because of that, they liked him a great deal. This role model leader of great character inspired the team with his technology contributions, his actions, and his character. He contributed greatly to the goals they achieved. Ultimately, his team met all of its challenges and DuPont Canada became the supplier of a large share of the world’s airbag nylon. An aspiring role model leader must develop character attributes if he hopes to lead himself and thereby learn to lead others. I distinguish between personality and character. Personality is your visible persona. Shyness, extroversion, cheerfulness, and charm are all personality traits. Character has to do with whether you are reputable, admirable, honourable … or not. Character attributes can be learned. For example, you can learn that it is important for leaders to be able to inspire others. You can then dedicate your intelligence – mental, emotional, social, physical – to developing that character attribute. Having done so, you can apply that attribute to influence others. In the following pages I discuss those learnable character attributes that best prepare people to become role model leaders. Future Looking A role model leader is an optimist, always looking forward, always seeking a better future state. The current state is important, but as the ground for formulating and launching new directions. “Future looking” includes the natural or learned capacity to think in the long term – from five to as many as twenty years forward. That is so far into the future that it is a difficult to be specific, so the role model leader will often describe a concept to his followers but not its details. His vision or aspiration is clear enough to provide direction but not specific enough to allow instruction. So he describes the future in terms that, while deliberately vague, are clear enough to be perceived as possible. Too many details would be counterproductive, for the followers would tend to respond by focusing on the pros and cons of implementation rather than on the potential, future holds. The role model leader wants to express to his followers that their world can be better, not to describe what to do to get there. He wants to make it clear to them how much promise the future holds, not what the future will be in detail.

Some people use the past to extrapolate the future. If as an engineer you have had five years of relative calm in manufacturing process variables, then the “planner” in you will often predict the same for the next one to three years, with minor variations. The reason for this conservative approach to planning is to avoid failure. Managers are often risk averse because their job is to control situations. When managers think ahead, it is in terms of recent past experience. The role model leader, by contrast, focuses on the better future, not on the ongoing current state, which is where managers “live.” In part one, I distinguished between aspirational and visionary and planning future state thinking. Each type of thinking is important and needs to be learned by the aspiring role model leader. In terms of levels of thought, the first is more of a belief; the second, a concept; the third, much less future oriented and more a managing action. The benefit of focusing on the future state is that it enables followers to see a better future. The leader can then influence people to develop paths to achieve that future state. Inspiring Others The ability to inspire others is arguably the most important character attribute of role model leaders. Inspiring is an action word – perhaps the most positive of all action words. Inspiring others is a positive, energy-building action. In some ways, it is like teaching people to breathe. The only difference is that breathing is a natural action, whereas inspiring others is a deliberate one. When we are inspired by others, we are moved to believe in those individuals, their messages, their beliefs. That is inspiration’s power. The leadership attributes that are capable of inspiring others include the following: • Willingness to work for a cause. • Positive emotion, passion for something. • Energizing others to work for a cause. • In difficult times, working to create a more positive future while communicating a message of “we will succeed.” • A history of success at leading positive change, especially during difficult times. It is important to recognize the difference between motivation and inspiration. Motivation is something we all have; it is what pushes us to do things. Inspiration is the ability to dramatically influence others, to convince people to be passionate about positive change. How do we learn the character attribute of inspiring others? The above list suggests where we can start, for all of its items can be learned and practised.

The capacity to inspire others is best developed by experiencing and observing a model. Make a list of exemplary leaders or persons who have inspired you and who have influenced others to make significant change in their world. I have already spoken about Kalev Pugi, who was the most inspirational person I have ever worked with. In the field of engineering, the project of landing a man on the moon was, I would argue, the most inspirational project in modern history. It inspired countless people around the world to engage in careers in science and engineering. Neil Armstrong, an aerospace engineer, and Buzz Aldren, a mechanical engineer, became heroes. These two men were engineer-astronauts, not test pilot-astronauts. Flying spacecraft had become a technology assignment. There will be inspirational leaders and teams in your own environment who can serve as models for you – people you can observe and study directly. Seek them out in order to learn from them. How do they approach people? How do they talk to individuals? When do they gather people together for communication? How do they decide when to act? There is plenty that can be learned from inspirational leaders whom you actually know. Honesty Honesty is a vital character attribute of role model leaders. That word is used so often to describe admirable people that it has lost some of its meaning. I define honesty as a triad: truthfulness, integrity, and ethical behaviour. The easiest to understand and most important attribute of the triad is truthfulness. It is impossible for a leader to influence people to make positive change without telling them the truth. Some people resort to lies to influence people. Lies and deceptions in the leader / follower relationship can never go undetected in the long term and are often revealed in the short term. Lies, when discovered, have a devastating effect on the leader / follower relationship. Followers have enormous power: they can say no easily and in many ways to the leader who is attempting to influence them. A single lie – when a follower detects it – and the leader’s credibility is lost for a very long time and perhaps forever. From truthfulness we move to integrity. Integrity can be learned and can best be understood in terms of our personal fundamental values. It encompasses those values that each of us holds close and that form and maintain our personal identity. Integrity is often and correctly assigned as the sum of the honesty of all the people in an organization Let us test our understanding of honesty. We will do so in the context of an organization’s leaders. We know that role model leaders are admired for their honesty. We also know that it is preferable for our organization’s leaders to hold beliefs that coincide with our own as followers. Some examples of beliefs:

• Stealing from customers is bad. • Providing products to customers that are safe to use is good. • People are vital to our success. I can call these truths because all of us hold them to be true and because they have been tested by experience and example. Now, a leader of the organization may hold the following additional beliefs: • Stealing from customers is bad – but once is okay. • Providing safe products to customers is good – if we can raise the prices to cover costs. • People are our greatest asset – except in a poor economy, when we have to reduce costs and can therefore justify terminating 20 per cent of the workers. Any or all of these may constitute a set of beliefs or a philosophy of leading an organization held by a given leader – a leader who, I would say, is a “bad” one. Here we are entering the world of personal choice – a world guided by an individual leader’s choices, which are expressions of that person’s integrity. Integrity in this sense is the sum of those beliefs that describe a philosophy of leading for an individual or as already mentioned, for an organization. To complete the picture, let me recast the above ideas as a statement of philosophy that reflects a role model leader’s integrity: • Stealing from customers is bad; even once is not acceptable. • We will only manufacture safe products; we will never sell unsafe ones. • People are our greatest asset; even in tough economic times we will have concern for the well-being of our people. These examples are all reflections of the admired character attribute called honesty. They also help us understand why role model leaders must learn what truthfulness and integrity signify both for themselves and for the organizations they aspire to lead. As has been said, “The devil is in the details.” If the leader and the organization are comfortable with defining honesty as we will not steal from customers

and then one day the organization finds out its leader really means we will steal from this customer, once

then the leader will be viewed as dishonest – as not credible – and may well lose the ability to influence and lead. This points to why role model leaders interact regularly with the people in their organization: to truly understand them,

and they him, so that the values of leader and followers are aligned. Returning to the honesty triad, we can expand this logical discussion of the character attribute we call honesty. As noted earlier, the three related ideas that together define honesty in the role model leader are truth, integrity, and ethical behaviour. The first two are related to the levels of thought we have referred to as beliefs and philosophy. The third is related to the third level of thought – principles. Truth: A belief I and most others hold. Integrity: A philosophy or set of beliefs we hold to be true. Ethics: Principles, or guides to action, that I am willing to use as my definition of ethical behaviour.

Each of these levels of thought in turn moves us closer to action – to doing something, to getting results. Principles are guides to action. They are our thoughts taken to a high level to describe why we do things and in what circumstances we will take action. Say that a principle relative to safety and security in Organization A is: “We will ensure the safety and security of all people in our organization and set our goal as zero injuries in the workplace.” That is a powerful statement. It is also an honest statement of Organization A’s care and concern for the safety of the people in the organization. At Organization B, by contrast, regarding ethical behaviour, a principle might be: “We will ensure the safety and security of all people in our organization and obey all existing laws and regulations relative to safety and security of people.” These two principles are quite different. Each is an honest and ethical statement and a guide to future action. But each will result in a very different set of actions. In Organization A, the leaders will expend all effort, all cost, all their energies to establish policies and procedures to prevent even the most minor of injuries to people in the workplace. Whereas in Organization B, those same leaders will establish policies, procedures, and actions after determining what the laws are in their community. The actions of this organization will be directed by the laws, which most often will be much less stringent in terms of cost and effort. In many instances, this approach will “build in” a certain number of accidents. Thus, we have two very different outcomes from two different statements of organizational principles or ethics. The leader-engineer must deal with ethical ambiguities and dilemmas on a continuous basis in areas such as the following: • Public safety and design • Conflict of interest with customers arising from technology utilization • Trade secrets and industrial espionage

Engineering professional organizations provide some, but unfortunately limited assistance in dealing with the ongoing specific ethical questions surrounding things like genetically modified foods, global warming, and political freedoms around the world. The leader-engineer is expected by her business organization to solve technological problems in circumstances where ethical questions are important yet supremely difficult to answer. Questions regarding organizational and leadership ethics are especially important. The good news is that the engineering design process is closely related to some accepted frameworks for making ethical business decisions.1 The important point here is, again, that ethics are rooted in principles, and everyone needs to be clear to themselves – so that they can be clear to others – what their own principles are. A final word: developing common understanding among all people in an organization on something as important as honesty is hard work. And that hard work starts with the role model leader, who must learn to understand his own beliefs, philosophy, and principles as they relate to honesty, and to all other character attributes as well. Once the organization’s leaders understand their own individual beliefs, philosophy, and principles as these relate to honesty, they must influence the rest of the organization to do the same. In this way, the organization as a whole will learn to “inhabit” the trait of honesty as the leaders have determined it. Respect for People The most successful leaders offer people respect. Rodney Dangerfield, a comedian in the 1970s and 1980s, was famous for a routine he developed that focused on the phrase “got no respect.” We all laughed, for many reasons, but perhaps most often because at some point in our lives we have all suffered from a lack of respect. We all want respect from others. When certain individuals do not respect us, we will not respond well to the requirement to follow their direction. Leaders get respect, not by asking for it, but by earning it. Respect is what role model leaders give to others, and they expect others to reciprocate by respecting them. There is a familiar adage: “The best way to get power is to give it to others.” This is as true for respect as it is for power. Leaders show respect for people in their organization by trusting them to work diligently towards the goals, objectives, and vision of the future state as it has been described to them. Once goals have been well articulated and communicated and accepted, leaders trust people to do the good and right things to achieve them. Kalev Pugi called me into his office one day and told me that we needed to create a new pump design to make a step change in an important polymer-

handling process. I told him that it would require a significant, perhaps major innovation. He replied, “Let me know what resources you need, and you will get them, except for more time. Then let me know when you get the job done.” The result was achieved in a different way than Kalev expected, but we let him know when the problem was solved. He was pleased – he was purposeful, he had no problem with different methods, and he had great respect for people. Leaders understand that people want – indeed, need – to be trusted to do the good and right things. They also know that people want to be held accountable for the results of their work. Holding people to account for results is a mark of respect for their capacity to do the good and right things. For role model leaders, the ideal situation is one in which there is mutual respect for and from people who are working collectively to achieve a better situation for all. This mutual respect is achieved when everyone in the organization is engaged in high-performance work within a high-performance work system. High-performance work is realized when people work together to solve problems, respecting one another’s abilities, motives, and spirit. Highperformance workers expect their leaders and managers to trust them to do the work; to present them with goals, strategies, and a vision; and to provide them with opportunities to learn the necessary capabilities to do the work effectively. High-performance workers then expect to be held accountable for their highperformance results. They expect their role model leaders to do different work than they do, but also expect them to work to the same standards of excellence, to learn continuously, and to get outstanding results as they influence and inspire others. There are people who have squandered the opportunity to earn others’ respect. These people have done things to others or to themselves that cause enough harm that showing respect towards them afterwards is difficult if not impossible. Many of us, unfortunately, have had the experience of losing respect for someone. Unfortunately, I have experienced a few instances when talented engineers lost the respect of others in the organization. Those situations almost always involved people taking credit for technical advances that they had not earned. Often, the cause was emotional or mental pressure on the individual. A scientist I knew for many years was under personally imposed pressure to succeed after a series of failures in his research. He took a great idea for the design of an experiment from a technologist on his team. The experiment was completed and opened the door for a successful project and a patentable process, and he was highly praised within the organization. Only later did I discover where the idea had actually come from and that this scientist had not given that source the credit for it. This caused me and many others to lose respect for that individual. When I discussed it with the scientist, he admitted to the failing and corrected the perception in the organization. He had shown respect for others, albeit later than

would have been ideal. Tenacity The aspiring leader needs to learn to persevere in influencing others to share his or her new direction. In the field of engineering, and in that part of the business world that depends heavily on scientists and engineers, moving in a new direction has a higher probability of failure than is found in many other fields. People in those environments who are being asked to change direction and to develop new products or new technologies are being asked not only to make change but also to accept a higher level of risk should the new direction not yield the results envisioned by the leader. As a consequence, the leader must be tenacious when confronted with objections and disappointments. The example of a scientific leader, an agent of change, a tenacious role model leader that is personally meaningful to me is Francis Crick. He and his associate James Watson were awarded the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA: The major credit Jim and I deserve is … is for selecting the right problem and sticking to it. It’s true that by blundering about we stumbled on gold … We could not see what the answer was, but we considered it important that we were determined to think about it long and hard, from any relevant point of view.

I recollect him saying the words above in a room at Cambridge University in 1962, on the day he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine or shortly thereafter, I cannot remember. I was a postdoctoral student, and he was already a famous scientist, and he had agreed to speak informally to a group of us about scientific research. I was prepared for philosophy that evening, but what we got was an exuberant Francis Crick, full of himself, humorous, and telling his story of perseverance and extraordinary success. Reading my notes from that evening again and from the perspective of a leader, I see the vision of the scientist, the shared purpose of collaborators, the results achieved from a long and tenacious journey that changed the world forever. There is a difference between tenacity and stubbornness, just as there is between courage and recklessness. A role model leader fully understands all aspects of both the current state and the future state he or she is proposing. A detailed understanding, fully researched, with all options examined, will minimize the potential for missteps when the future is being envisioned. In this sense, tenacity – be it rooted in logic or emotion – is a positive attribute for a role model leader, provided that the target of that tenacity has been justified through preparation. Conversely, a leader who has not prepared well, or who does not understand the situation well, is merely stubborn or reckless and is not

a role model leader. Ask an entrepreneur whether she is a risk taker. She will probably smile and say she has taken the risk out of entrepreneurship and replaced it with knowledge. Only fools take unnecessary risks; entrepreneurs and role model leaders focus on solid preparation and thorough knowledge. Only then do they tenaciously urge others to follow their direction. Even the best-prepared role model leader needs courage. Change, especially transformational change, requires it. The future can never be predicted with perfect accuracy, so the role model leader must be willing to accept some prudent risks. As well, once a risky decision has been made, that leader needs to demonstrate to her followers that she is working hard to learn as much as possible in order to minimize risk and maximize reward and that she is prepared to implement aggressively and with confidence. Even after a plan has been prepared well and the situation is thoroughly understood, there will be risk. To summarize, role model leaders prepare well and then have the courage to carry out their plans. Tenacity, to me, means strength of purpose. Leaders behave in purposeful ways. Their role is to determine future state direction, and that direction often asks others to change how they do things. Leaders must have a strong will as well as steadfastness when faced with objections and opposition. Role model leaders do not second-guess themselves. They are decisive. They take action, learn from their successes, and especially learn from mistakes when they happen. Role model leaders treat mistakes as means to improve quickly, not as excuses for indecision. For them, lessons taken from mistakes are gifts, not wounds. Mistakes are never welcome, but you should not fear them as long as you know how to learn from them. Trustworthiness Successful role model leaders are trusted by their followers. A large part of the leader’s role is to decide on new directions, to make change, to move the organization towards a new state. Imagine that you were blindfolded and told to walk along a narrow wooden plank over a deep gorge. Even if there was a pot of gold as a reward, you would not try this unless you could take the hand of someone you trusted. Many people say “trust me” in communications with others and in cynical jokes. When you ask someone to trust you, in effect you are asking them to make a withdrawal from the emotional bank account that has been filled over time between you and the individual or organization. Leaders, by contrast, do not ask for trust; rather, they earn that trust from a large emotional bank account that is owned by the followers and that has been built by deposits from the leader. Another reality is that unless and until a person (or organization) trusts you,

that person (or organization) will answer “No!” to your requests for substantive change. You cannot be a leader unless you and your followers trust one another. A leader’s role is to provide direction to others and to influence them to make change – sometimes major change. Until you have the trust of those you are trying to influence, the change you want to make cannot happen. That is because followers decide to follow – or not – based on whether they trust you. Having said all that, a person can learn to be trustworthy. The following list might provide guidance on how an aspiring leader can develop trustworthiness. A role model leader who is trusted will be guided by these principles: • Do what you say you will do. • Be reliable over a long period. • Be recognized as someone who shares successes, not just failures. • Get trust by giving trust. • Develop a history of correct decisions and of getting results from them. A CEO-engineer of an electronics company I know was judged by senior managers in his company to be untrustworthy. The company results were poor and deteriorating rapidly. This continued until the CEO recognized the prevailing opinion of the managers. He took action, by structuring a mentorship process with a retired CEO he knew and respected. Together they reinforced the importance of learning skills and character attributes for leading others, including trustworthiness. The company’s results began to improve as the trust between the CEO and others improved. It is important, but also difficult, to always do what you say you will. The importance is obvious, but the difficulty is equally necessary to understand. Leaders are engaged in changing things, not in doing the same things over and over again. Their task is not to control or stabilize things but to change them. So the possibility always exists that leaders will influence people to make changes that have unforeseen negative consequences. When that happens, the people involved and observers on the sidelines may interpret this as the leader not doing what he said he would do. This in turn may cause a withdrawal from the “emotional bank account” of trust between leaders and followers. Is this possibility a good reason not to strive for change? No! The role model leaders will have prepared themselves – they will have developed an inventory of skills and various character attributes that will enable them to recover from the setback and regain the “balance” in the emotional bank account. The aspiring leaders will have reached the goal of role model leadership when they have a history of correct decisions, positive changes, and achievement of results. Recovery is always possible from bad decisions and poor results, but not from a long and consistent history of negative results. That is the reality. The way to ensure a history of right decisions, right results, and

positive change is to never stop learning the skills and character attributes required by role model leaders, along with the behaviours we will be discussing later on. Effective Communication All role model leaders have learned to communicate efficiently and effectively. You will markedly improve your chances of influencing people in an organization if you are recognized within it as an excellent communicator. When a leader communicates well with all employees, misinformation and rumours are much reduced. Either of these cause low productivity as well as less focused, less purposeful behaviour among the organization’s people. Role model leaders understand why it is important to be an excellent communicator, and how best to communicate what is important to communicate. The audience for the role model leaders’ communications includes those people they have determined they want to influence as well as any other stakeholders they need to influence as part of the change process. There is a large body of literature on how to communicate efficiently and effectively. I would only add here a few practices that have helped me to be a better communicator: • Communicate the important message often, looking for ways to vary the delivery to keep it fresh. • Be authentic, match your actions to the message. • Look for opportunities to deliver the message face-to-face rather than not. It is vital that the role model leaders be recognized as great communicators. That leaders’ credibility will be much stronger if they can describe clearly the future state being advocated; deliver the message with clarity and passion; and answer questions about the direction with equal clarity and passion. If the message is inconsistent, if the leaders cannot deal with questions and controversy, if they are unable or unwilling to deliver the change message clearly and often, shared purpose will be elusive. But there is another dimension to role model leaders’ communications: the message must be more than functional – that is, clear and purposeful; it must also resonate at the emotional level, for it is this second level that inspires followers to do extraordinary things that they perhaps would not have done if they had made their choice to follow based solely on logical arguments. Is this a form of selling? Is it charisma? A gift for speaking well is a valuable asset, but that gift is not the subject of this book. Certainly, being able to perform like Sir Laurence Olivier at the speaker’s podium would be strongly desirable and it is perhaps even learnable. But gifts like those do not in themselves make a role model leader, however helpful they might be. More

important is for role model leaders to be aware of their listeners’ needs in terms of how the message is delivered and to tune their communication style to maximize their receptiveness. No opportunity can be missed to convey a message in a style that matches the audience’s needs. The recipients of the message may be influenced by a quiet style delivered to small groups, or by the opposite – a stage show where the message is delivered as theatre. (Steve Jobs’ product roll-outs were a superb example of the latter.) Role model leaders need to be capable of delivering messages that meet the needs of their followers. While words are obviously important, other things, such as body language, can be very powerful. The great actors know this – Robert De Niro and his peers can move us with a shrug or a wry smile. Social Well-Being Role model leaders’ characters are directed at seeking “whole-self benefits.” By this I mean that leaders prepare themselves to interact constantly with all elements of society, inside and outside work, including family. Much has been made by many about life balance – that is, about balancing work, family, and recreation. No one can say precisely what balance is best for someone else; only individual leaders can decide for themselves. A role model leader puts effort into enhancing family harmony. This relates to both the amount of time and the quality of that time. Growth in personal and family harmony contributes greatly to a role model leader’s capacity to serve others effectively. Networking with other leaders and capable people is a means for role model leaders to learn from and to teach others. Professional associations, think tanks, and self-initiated forums all provide opportunities for networking of this kind. I think of my own experience as a member of the Canadian Chemical Producers Association. This was a group of leaders of small, medium, and large Canadian chemical companies. The association’s work was rewarding and fun. I had the opportunity to learn from a diverse group of thinkers and to offer my company’s functional services to much smaller, embryonic companies that served the industry and the country. The most rewarding of these experiences were the ones where these embryonic companies had great technologies and a great value proposition to offer society and thereby improve the lives of others. But the embryonic company was lacking some technical expertise or other resource, and we could provide it and improve the industry in so doing. All role model leaders are driven to serve society. There are many ways and many opportunities to give life to that character attribute, which is learnable. The customer and the shareholder / owner are important albeit unique elements of society, and providing service to those is understood even in conventional organizations. The aspiring developmental organization sees great mutual

benefit in serving society as a whole. Energy Leaders work hard, mentally and physically. This is a fact, in my experience, and it is especially true of role model leaders. Most people, unless they do hard, physically and mentally demanding work, cannot learn to become highperformance leaders. Few people think of physical fitness as a prerequisite for learning to become a leader. Because leading others is so demanding, the healthier you are, the easier will be the tasks you face and the more energy you will have throughout the days and nights your work demands of you. Followers and other observers find it hard to differentiate mental from physical energy. A goal of the role model leader is to learn to stay extremely fit. Another is to demonstrate high levels of mental energy. Stephen Hawking is a world-renowned theoretical physicist. Even though his body long ago failed him, he works long hours at an energetic pace. We all know people who have accomplished much because of their extraordinary mental energy. These people decided long ago to become more “mentally fit” and to move beyond an “automatic” level of mental energy, which is where most people exist – most people are not prepared to do extraordinary things and prefer to do their work as they have done it before. Role model leaders raise their level of mental energy to a “conscious” level and beyond. By conscious I mean that their thinking, learning, and doing are all characterized by striving to do more and accomplish more all the time. And they do this on behalf of others, with improving the lives of others as their goal. This is reaching for the state of developmental leadership. It is hard work to achieve and maintain conscious levels of mental energy. To succeed, we must be motivated to learn more about our work and our work goals. We must be both knowledgeable about our work and aware of why we are doing it; in other words, we must be aware of what we are aspiring to achieve. That is what provides meaning and strategic substance for the work of role model leaders. Followers admire leaders who demonstrate high levels of physical and mental energy. They are seen as passionate, energetic, and committed to changing things for the better.

7 Purposeful Behaviour

In classrooms and in various work environments, I have observed that when I discuss the learning required to develop oneself as a leader, most people gauge their development by comparing themselves to others, including inspirational people they know, their role models (i.e., “heroes”), and their peers. And that comparison is most often made in terms of others’ behaviour. Here, we can define behaviour as the instrument that delivers an individual’s skills and character attributes. Behaviour is the outward manifestation of a person’s interpersonal skills and character attributes (discussed previously) as experienced by the observer. Behaviour is typically summarized with simple, clear statements like these: “He’s very skilled and smart, but he treats people badly.” “We aren’t friends, but I respect his ability.” “He’s a phony who will do anything to impress his boss.” “I’ve learned a lot from him – he’s a great coach.” “I wish I could lead others like him – he’s a role model.”

Behaviour is the final element in the triad of capabilities that aspiring leaders must learn in order to prepare themselves for role model leadership. A leader’s behaviour is a function of motivation and style. Motivation To learn the required skills and character attributes described in earlier sections of this book requires considerable self-motivation and will. This wilfulness to behave as a role model leader expresses itself as what I call purposeful behaviour. Behaving in a reactive or ego-driven way is not purposeful. People can be inspired and influenced by others to do things and to do them in certain ways, but they must motivate themselves to behave in certain ways. For example, parents and perhaps other role models can influence or inspire a young person to go to university and study engineering, but that young person must motivate herself to study hard and become a graduate engineer. In the same way, people must motivate themselves to exert the mental energy to learn the skills and character attributes required to become competent leaders capable of influencing others. Reactive behaviour occurs when aspiring leaders respond to external stimuli that are not totally aligned with their own values. Some examples: special interest groups or particular individuals may demand that you as a leader-

engineer or your organization act in a certain manner; you may be tempted by the allure of an easier but unethical means for achieving your organization’s environmental remediation goals. Leaders who take the reactive route – even if it is just sometimes – are demonstrating to their followers that they are not developing themselves as role models. And importantly, those followers will often be confused about their leader’s intentions because they will have learned to expect that external stimuli will come along and change their leader’s expressed intentions again and again. Ego-driven behaviour occurs when aspiring leaders focus on selfsatisfaction. These leaders do things that meet their own needs rather than the needs of others. An example of this is a leader-engineer who takes credit for the ideas and work of others and uses his success to enhance his own reputation. Another example would be an aspiring leader who takes the organization in a direction that does not reach for transformational goals and who is satisfied with easier, safer change even while others in the organization are developing themselves and their teams by reaching for goals that will grow the organization and benefit others, even though risking failure. Yet another example is a project leader who pushes for her own approach to solve a problem and rejects others’ approaches without discussion or investigation. These are examples of poor leaders. Unfortunately, all of us have observed talented and skilful people who have chosen to benefit themselves by behaving in ego-satisfying ways. People who demonstrate this behaviour can severely damage the careers and even the lives of others. The worldwide mortgage meltdown of 2008 is an outstanding example of this – the world’s economy is still recovering, and only slowly, from the ego-driven greed of others. The best-known proponent of the philosophy of service is Robert Greenleaf, author of the 1970 essay The Servant as Leader.1 This essay is often quoted, although his ideas were not new even in 1970. Indeed, the philosophy of service by leaders goes back to very ancient civilizations and religions. Even so, Greenleaf provided a very valuable teaching just prior to the 1980s and the rise of democratic models of leadership. I do not fully accept all aspects of Greenleaf’s model of service, largely because of my perception that it distances the leader from being “in the work” of the organization, but that is not so important in the context of this discussion. The developmental leadership model presented in this book calls for us to take action to do work to improve other people’s lives by working to make things better. It calls for individuals to exert mental energy to develop themselves throughout their lives. Developmental role model leaders strive to nourish their enterprises; they purposefully – wilfully – do the right things for themselves and for their stakeholders. Leadership Styles

In 1939, Kurt Lewin, along with a number of researchers, introduced a valuable and now famous approach to describing the various styles of leadership.2 There have been many, many studies and suggestions since that time about leadership styles. Dupre writes that style is “the relatively consistent pattern of behaviour that characterizes a leader.”3 Here I offer my understanding of style and present a model to help clarify the issue. This model compares purposeful workdirected leadership styles to help us better define leadership and understand role model leadership. The uniqueness of this model is emphasized by comparison with other models referencing various social behaviours4 and personality behaviours.5 In this book, the focus is on the work of leaders who are changing things in value-add enterprises. The framework here describes the various ways that competent, purposeful role model leaders lead activities in their groups, teams, and organizations – the way these people do the work of leading others. I believe that leadership style is a reflection of the beliefs, values, and goals a person has developed as a consequence of his personal history and personal experiences and whatever wisdom he has gleaned from those. A leader’s style, then, is inevitably personal. It is a way of behaving that has evolved partly by design but also by experience both at work and outside of work. There are many, many different styles. Each of us has our own style of behaving as people and as leaders, and our followers sense that style, often better than we do. Often we, as leaders, have an idealized notion of our leadership style. We become in our minds who we think we should be rather than who we actually are. All aspiring leaders are predisposed to behave in certain ways as they seek to influence people, and seldom does an aspiring leader move away from his dominant style. Even so, an aspiring role model leader should learn a variety of ways of behaving purposefully. That is, she should understand the various possible purposeful behaviours or various styles and how they influence people to do work in different ways. She should then examine what those different leadership styles have to offer. Finally, she should be open to refining her dominant style by learning and using different styles. The goal in this is to act purposefully in ways that make it possible for her followers to accept and work towards positive change. This is an important “identifier” of the role model leader. It is important that followers – indeed, all the people in the organization – understand the leader’s dominant style. They need to realize that in certain situations the leadership style may change, but they also need to be confident that their leader’s dominant style will eventually return. Followers want consistent and purposeful behaviour from those whom they follow; but they also understand and sometimes welcome change if it is for a good reason. All of this is to say that a high-performance role model leader should learn

about and be able to adopt as necessary a wide range of purposeful leadership behaviours. In the literature, this idea that there is no single best style of leadership is called the situational leadership model, attributed to Hersey and Blanchard.6 The Leadership Styles Model The literature on leadership has been growing for almost a century. Many theories and recommendations have been developed for the purpose of guiding aspiring leaders, and there have been many discussions of appropriate and inappropriate leadership styles. Without too much effort, any reader of the literature can find dozens of definitions of different styles. Some authors have tried to summarize and select and offer unifying approaches and suggestions: “the four leadership styles” or “the three leadership styles” or even “the ten leadership styles.” What we present in this book is a different and more flexible approach, one that helps us learn about purposeful leader behaviours, one that offers four unifying concepts (see Figure 7.1). Think of these as archetypes in the Jungian sense. Others such as Hopcke, Bostock, and Hitt have taken a similar approach.7 The purposeful behaviour archetypes offered here are flexible and are based on two concepts: high to low collaborative behaviour, and high efficiency to high effectiveness. These terms will be defined in the following pages. The learning framework presented here is unifying in the sense that the four archetypes form a whole that encompasses a range – theoretically, an infinite range – of useful hybrids that can serve almost all situations. Here, then, are the four archetypical styles of purposeful behaviours in this learning framework: • The authoritarian • The administrator • The organizer • The coach Each style is described below in terms of certain skills and character attributes and defining behaviour. The leader should choose and utilize a leadership style that best fits the existing situation as well as the culture of the organization. The most important factor, though, is the situation. For example, if the leadership challenge involves a difficult change in the organization’s direction, this begins to define the situation. Additional information will include the history of other change processes, the character and behaviour of the organization’s other leaders, and the amount of time available for the change. This information guides the leader in how to assess the situation.

Figure 7.1 Leadership Styles Model

When a business enterprise awakens to a competitor that has introduced a game-changing product, that situation often demands a change in leadership style. The advent of many viable global competitors in the North American car industry caused leaders to move, albeit slowly, from an ego-satisfying style to a more purposeful continuous improvement leadership style and the leaders also developed better products. Similarly, changes in environmental laws or practices can cause an existing firm to move towards a more rules-oriented leadership style to ensure adherence to a new external regime. In addition, the culture of the organization must be assessed. The culture can be defined in terms of the organization’s values, the rituals and taboos that exist within it, and any number of things that “brand” the organization. When the founder of a company leaves, the culture almost always changes. The leadership style of the founder is often replaced by one that is more operational and more team based than before. Many predict this will happen at Apple in the post–Steve Jobs era. A leader who is studying the situation and culture must decide which leadership style will best influence the organization to make the envisioned changes. Obviously, the leader will have a preferred or dominant style. But the leader as a student of the leadership style model will be able to learn and select the right style. Perhaps, for the sake of comfort, he will choose a style that is close to his dominant style. But this will take place after carefully examining the culture and the situation.

Before I describe the leadership style model in more detail, let’s summarize the key points that define the challenge for the aspiring role model leader: • Leadership style is extremely important and it helps define the leadership identity of the individual. • Leadership styles can be learned and practised. How well they are learned and practised depends on how well the aspirant is learning and growing his or her competence as a role model leader. • Role model leaders do not deny their natural dominant identity, but they learn alternative styles in order to enhance their ability to do the work to achieve positive change. • When taking the expected thoughtful, purposeful approach to a given situation and / or cultural challenge, the role model leader must make a choice: utilize his or her dominant style, or adopt a different leadership style temporarily. As noted earlier, the components of the leadership style model reflect four archetypal behaviours. Each of these behaviours is discussed below. THE AUTHORITARIAN

This archetypal leader influences people by applying power and authority. This authority may be rooted in the leader’s position in a hierarchy, or it may be vested in that person by the other people in the organization. In other words, it can result from action by the leader or from action by the people in the organization. The authoritarian leader in our model is not a dictator. Dictators use force, often violent force, to accomplish their objectives. Authoritarian leaders, by contrast, influence others through the power of persuasion. The purposeful behaviour of the authoritarian leader is coupled with a powerful confidence that he is the most competent person to make the important decisions relative to organizational values, strategy, and action. Less commonly, the people in the organization decide to give significant authority to a leader because the situation requires rapid decision making. An example of this would be a crisis in a company that can best be addressed by a particular competent leader with the capability to make all the decisions. Most people would associate this style with ego-driven motivation. But this style can also be motivated by service, that is, by a purpose beyond self. For example, an army general who needs to rapidly capture ground from the enemy will not necessarily be concerned about the immediate wants and needs of others. Instead, he will act purposefully on the premise that the action will serve society and create positive change. He will be concerned about the state of readiness of his assets and people, and he will have prepared them for an attack. He will not accept anything other than full acceptance of his orders. This

is a pure form of authoritarian leadership. This leadership style is highly efficient. Decisions and conclusions are reached quickly. There is little discussion and very few experiments are done to find alternative approaches. So this is a low-cost, rapid, and efficient way to achieve results. By contrast, the coaching style and the organizer style (see below) seek the best results for all stakeholders. (Note that seeking does not always lead to finding.) The leader–follower dynamic is extremely important in order to understand the value of the authoritarian style. The similarities and differences in character, personality, and values between the leader and followers always have a strong impact on relationships within the group or organization. But in an organization or group led by an authoritarian leader, these similarities and differences are critical. The followers in an organization led by an authoritarian leader are primarily concerned about whether that leader will deliver success or failure, turmoil or harmony. Also, those who follow an authoritarian leader need to be the right people at the right time and place if the organization is to succeed. And these people need to have a very high amount of trust in their leader: they need to believe that their leader is the right person to lead them and that the goal the leader has defined is the right one – one that transcends any input they might have. There are always good people who are willing and able to work for an authoritarian, but there are also many good people who are not willing to do so and who will never be able to subjugate themselves to an authoritarian’s ends. I have known at least two authoritarian leaders well; they were both engineers who founded their own companies. One was a former engineering professor who founded a company in an important arena of environmentalism; the other founded a specialty machine manufacturing firm. Both leaders were successful, and their companies prospered under their purposeful leadership. Each of the engineers was the most competent business person in the company as well as the most competent technology person. Each had a mission that produced results that improved the lives of people – certainly of their stakeholders. To illustrate a temporary shift to an authoritarian style, I was in a leadership role at one of our company’s manufacturing units when we experienced a large increase in workplace injuries. Up to that point, the leadership style in that unit had been highly democratic: focused on coaching and continuous improvement. I communicated to the organization that because of the spike in injuries, I would become much more operational and authoritarian. The organization responded well as a more controlled environment was introduced. Changes were made unilaterally, and when improvements began, I moved back to a more developmental style. The organization welcomed that return, but it also understood why an authoritarian approach had been necessary for a time.

Organizations in extreme crisis, or those that have had extreme change thrust upon them, often benefit from a strong-willed and competent authority figure. Such an organization can benefit from a leader whose strength of character and undeniable skills are attuned to the reality of the crisis and who steps forward to take charge. Similarly, there will be followers who recognize that the situation demands that they step forward and place their trust in this leader. So there are situations where an organization and its stakeholders can benefit from authoritarian leadership. The term “power based” is often used to describe this style of leadership in the sense that all power in the organization is in the hands of the leader. Unfortunately, the word “power” has become demonized in today’s leadership practice that places a high value on collaboration. The reality is that all leaders seek the power to influence others to change and that there are many examples of positive results being generated from the use of power. “Power,” then, can be a positive thing. Yet the fact remains that authoritarian leaders give orders without attempting to inspire others or influence them with logical argument. The behaviours of an authoritarian leader include the following traits. First and foremost, she “does it all” by declaring what, when, where, why, and how things will be done, with little input from the group. She is the singular force in the group. Her every action is designed to maximize her authority and personal influence within the group. That group’s goals and objectives are based on the leader’s defined needs in the given situation. A unique trait of authoritarian leaders is that they tend to look outside the group or organization for alliances and partnerships. There are several reasons why. First, this sort of leader does not want to share influence or decisionmaking authority with those in the group, within which he has based his leadership on the authority of “one.” Also, he will use outside experts as an opportunity to gain capability or to share any failure. Authoritarian leaders are not stupid: they want to make good, purposeful decisions, so they often seek outside counsel who, not coincidentally, can also serve as scapegoats as necessary. An authoritarian leader’s worst fear is of being solely blameworthy for failure, for this would destroy his reputation as well as his ego. So he takes steps to ensure that there will be others to share responsibility or blame for any failure. So authoritarian leaders behave in certain ways, and some get positive results while others do not. As with all leadership styles, the results depend on the situation and on the culture of the organization. Many people considered Steve Jobs of Apple to be an authoritarian. Many successful founder-led organizations in the IT field are authoritarian in nature. Dick Cheney in the George W. Bush White House was an authoritarian leader. You will be able to think of many others. A final important point: each of the leadership styles discussed in this book

can be used by leaders motivated by ego, by leaders reacting to outside influences, or by leaders who behave purposefully. Authoritarian leaders are often motivated by ego. But authoritarian leaders can also be motivated by a purpose beyond themselves. Such leaders are competent to take action and define direction without reference to others – to do it themselves, and to do it purposefully, motivated by values beyond their own – and they are recognized as such. THE ADMINISTRATOR

The administrative leadership style is based on the power vested in rules and policies. It is based on efficiency – on rapid, low-cost decision making. Under the authoritarian style, the individual leader is the instrument that exercises power; in the administrative style, the instruments are organization’s rules, policies, and norms, which are in the hands of the administrator leader. During our discussion of the authoritarian style, I commented on the common bias against the word “power.” Here, in talking about the administrative style, the common bias today is often against “rules.” Many people reject a leader who believes that rules are a legitimate basis for leading. Yet we see rules being applied everywhere, and legitimately so. Man is born free, yet is everywhere in chains. Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Our lives are often regulated by rules – by speed limits, tax rates, office hours, and so on. All of these rules have been established by leaders and accepted by society. Indeed, rules can bring out the best in people. Tight budgets often make people more creative when it comes to changing things, cutting costs, and getting positive results. Another characteristic of the administrative style is that it tends to subject people to strict controls. The administrator-type leader believes in carefully thought out rules and policies and is inclined to set rigid standards and measures to control her followers’ actions. Such a leader influences people to carry out their work in precise, specific ways, believing that this will ensure reliable and precise results. A good example of a situation where a pure administrative style would be appropriate is when hazardous chemicals are being handled. Clearly, the leader will want to influence people to accept carefully crafted rules and procedures and to implement them to the letter. Generally, safety policies require strong rules and procedures. The archetypical administrator leader will have people and followers in the organization who are highly competent functionally. This is necessary because the instruments this leader applies – rules and policies – are bureaucratic by

definition. The implementation of strategic direction is driven by the need for precision at all times. A controlled environment is expected to result in controlled success. It follows that an administrator leader has little tolerance for followers who do not meet their goals and objectives. There is little room in such a regime for learning from mistakes – for developing a learning culture based on experience. This is very similar to the authoritarian culture, though it results from a very different leadership style. In one case, the leader is always correct because of his competence; in the other, the leader is always correct because his behaviour reflects an unbreakable rule or policy. Whenever possible, an administrator leader makes decisions based on history or precedent. Again, this is very different from the authoritarian approach, where the leader makes decisions based solely on his individual assessment at that moment. In an administrator leader’s organization, the change process is highly efficient – from organizational values to strategic direction to the setting of goals and objectives to implementation. Efficient in this case means rapid, precise, and low-cost. All of this efficiency is possible because of rules and policies that ensure there is little or no discussion or teamwork. It is possible also because the people in the organization are highly competent functionally. Such organizations have little need for the sort of people who thrive on interfunctional discussions about a better way forward. An administrative leader expects the organization to execute strategy and get results through handoffs from one competent functional group to the next. In an organization headed by an administrator leader, the change process is not highly innovative: there is little emphasis on seeking new ways to do things, and there isn’t much consideration of paths forward. Instead, direction is sourced from well-travelled historical paths – from precedents or policies. If a precedent is found to be flawed during implementation, a new direction will be sought. But once that new and better direction has been found, the organization’s highly competent people will make a strong effort to determine why the new direction is better and devise new rules and policies to reflect the reasons they found. Innovation is given little credit for success; instead, that success is ascribed to improvements in a policy that was originally flawed. The administrator leader teaches and communicates knowledge – sometimes called rules and principles – and asks people to follow those rules and principles to achieve change. An example of an administrator leader would be a leader-engineer of a large team of highly trained technicians manufacturing hazardous materials, such as explosives or toxic chemicals. THE ORGANIZER

The organizer-leader gets results through the actions of inspired people. The

authoritarian leader does not need inspired people, only followers who will do what is asked. The administrator leader does not need inspired people, only functionally capable people who follow rules and policies. You will learn next that the “coach” leader finds ways to inspire people to find their better selves in order to get results. Each of these leadership styles influences people to get results, but they do so in very different ways. The organizer is dedicated mainly to influencing people to work in groups in a disciplined and systematic way. A business organization led by such a person has groups and teams everywhere – both expert functional teams and interfunctional business teams. These groups and teams do both strategic and tactical work. They participate fully in the organization through leading, managing, and planning. The organizer is a leader of leaders and is willing to let others lead. This leader of leaders is analogous to an orchestra conductor. Everyone in the orchestra is a competent functional person and leader of self but is inspired and led by the organizer-leader. The emphasis on working in groups gives many people the opportunity to learn more about both leadership and followership. The organizer leader teaches the people in her organization, providing them with the opportunity and responsibility to understand why it is important to develop leadership skills as well as how they can do so. The organizer influences people to do their work – both strategic and tactical – by structuring the work into coherent processes as well as into sets of processes called systems. The result is a disciplined, systematic approach to doing work and achieving success. I came to know a large manufacturing company in the automotive parts industry; at one point the prevailing market conditions required them to find ways to reduce internal costs. Instead of adopting an authoritarian leadership style and arbitrarily reducing costs, they opted for a strong emphasis on the organizer style. This resulted in a company-wide initiative to redesign key operating processes and thereby reduce their infrastructure costs. This is an example of an organizer-leader who decided to change the company’s cost structure at a time of crisis by mobilizing the people into teams that were accountable for all cost elements. These teams were directed by the overall purpose as described clearly by the organizer. Each team was inspired by that person to share in the overall objective. And the organizer was involved in the work by playing a functional role as well as a business and a leadership role. The organizer style of leadership is highly democratic. The organizer establishes the company’s direction as well as the purpose for the work of the various teams. She then ensures that the whole organization is operating harmoniously. At the same time, all the people in the organization will be consulted in all aspects of the work and at all stages. The organizer is looking for the most effective means to achieve her vision of the future. She knows that

there are many ways to achieve success; she also knows whether the people in the company are capable functionally and whether they have the necessary leadership skills to achieve the goals that have been outlined for them. This style of leadership does not absolve the leader from accountability for the decisions made. The organizer consults, and she allows teams both to follow direction and to help craft it, but she reserves important decisions for herself and will certainly have “51 per cent” of the vote in key decisions. So this is democracy, yes, but the future state is still directed by this leader of leaders. Organizers are sometimes referred to as “process leaders.” However, that term is often used to suggest that such leaders are more interested in processes than in results. That is far from true. The organizer believes strongly in following a disciplined approach that involves accumulating detailed knowledge before any action is taken. The result is very likely to be that decisions are implemented better and more quickly than otherwise. This process-oriented, front-end-weighted approach results in high-quality decisions in the run-up stages before the project is actually implemented. It also means that fewer mistakes reveal themselves once implementation starts. The optimum approaches have all been developed before any expensive implementation steps are taken. A good example of an organizer-leader is Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric (GE), especially in the later stages of his career. He engaged people in learning to be leaders, and he did so in very disciplined and systematic ways that enabled people to develop themselves through experience. In addition, there was no question in anyone’s mind at GE that Jack Welch was the chief architect of the future state for the company. He was an inspiring, visionary, process-oriented leader who got results. In summary, the organizer creates an effective set of processes, systems, and structures. She ensures that the people in the organization are competent; that they have considerable self-leading capability; and, importantly, that they are inspired to play active roles in leading the work to achieve the future state that their leader has crafted for them. THE COACH

So far, we have discussed three very different behavioural styles: authoritarian, administrator, and organizer. The authoritarian provides direction by telling followers what to do; the administrator gives direction through rules, policies, and principles by referencing history and precedent; the organizer provides direction in a democratic manner through consulting and teaching others and helping them to understand what needs to be done. Next, we consider a fourth important leadership style for aspiring role model leaders to consider: the coach. Coaches – mentors are just as familiar a term –

provide direction by teaching. They establish supportive partnerships with their followers, through which they share their knowledge and capabilities in order to encourage personal and organizational growth. They do not tell their followers to do things, nor do they advocate rules. They teach others the possibilities that exist to change things for the better by encouraging them and by setting an example. The coach does not aggressively involve followers. He needs to be certain the follower wants and needs coaching. He wants a partnership to be possible; he believes that the followers can do their work, but he also makes himself available to assist when they express a need. The coach, once engaged, encourages and supports and inspires his followers to make positive change. He teaches new skills and capabilities as required. Coach-style leaders lead their people from a set of personal values, which followers come to understand. Those values include the central premise of the book – which is, that people can be taught certain skills, character attributes, and values-based behaviours that will allow them to lead themselves to achieve positive change. The best example I can remember encountering of the coach style was in China, when I was working in Asia and engaged in influencing Asian companies to partner with our company on various joint ventures. A company leader, whom I got to know very well, was a coach-leader. His company had attracted our interest because of our complementary technologies in plant science. He had hired the best scientists and engineers he could find and organized them into project teams – I would have called them natural work teams. He defined the projects his teams would undertake at a high level of purpose and then allowed them complete authority and freedom of action. His role after that was entirely to encourage them, and in that regard, he spoke to them in almost mystical terms about the endless opportunities that they had to accomplish their goals and what those goals could mean. Some of his teams failed, but many did not, and together they built a highly successful enterprise, seemingly without his functional help but with much of his being and will. If one of the most important company goals is a major improvement in workplace safety, the goals of an organizer-leader might include continuously improving the injury rate year over year. The goals of the administrator-leader would include setting more and better safety rules for people to follow. The goals of the authoritarian would include ordering the supervisors and managers to in turn order their subgroups to improve their safety performance, and to do it quickly. A coach-leader, by contrast, would consult with as many people as possible in the organization by encouraging and influencing them based on his personal values and teaching them where necessary to set aspirational goals that are far higher than the current ones. The coach-leader would remind the company’s people that they could do far better – that they were too talented to

be having injuries and that they could and needed to improve. Beyond the Archetypes The preceding discussion of the four archetypes intends to accomplish two things. First, the discussion sets useful boundary conditions for a multitude of situational leadership styles that have varying proportions of each archetype. The boundaries were defined (see Figure 7.1) in terms of two dyads: the one from the more efficient but less effective authoritarian style to the less efficient but more effective coach style, and the other from the much more collaborative organizer style to the much less collaborative administrator style. Second, the discussion provides understanding for the aspiring role model leader regarding the choices available for dealing with various situations and cultures. Up to this point, the dialogue with you, the reader, has been objective and nonjudgmental. That is about to change. This book is dedicated to describing and advocating a unique model for leading organizations. I call it developmental leadership. The goal is to develop role model leaders based on the aspirational target of Everyone a Leader. The leadership style for fulfilling the conditions necessary to become a developmental role model leader is found in the top right quadrant of the fourterm leadership style framework (see Figure 7.1), which is in close proximity to the archetypes organizer and coach. That, I would point out, is directly opposite the lower left quadrant: authoritarian and administrator. Several characteristics of the coach style differentiate it from the organizer style. The coach is a mentor who provides followers with ideas and examples of behaviours that have merit. The organizer is more of a teacher who engages with the team of followers and other leaders to provide direction. The developmental leader is a competent teacher who provides direction but who also provides space and opportunity and encouragement to the followers so that they can develop themselves to make positive changes in the organization. In this process the developmental leader both learns and teaches. In that way, he develops himself while developing others. The developmental leader always sets goals for the team that encourage them to improve situations through innovation. Also, this leader influences followers to seek positive reconciles wherever strongly held views exist. The coach style is more likely to encourage change than to influence it. The organizer style is more likely to persuade change than to influence it. The developmental leader will seek transformational change as a means of sustaining “growthfulness” in persons and organizations. She will promote aspirational future states that inspire followers to see meaning in their work to change things and to improve the lives of others. The developmental leader is a reconcile, an idea more innovative, more

influential than the organizer-leader or coach-leader archetypes, with elements of each leadership style.

PART THREE

Leading the Organization

8. The High-Performance Business Organization 9. Sustainable Growth 10. The High-Performance Work System and Serving Stakeholders 11. Viability 12. Vitality 13. Virtue

8 The High-Performance Business Organization

Even Hollywood could not have embellished the story of Eleuthère Irénée du Pont. He was a French immigrant to the United States at the height of the French Revolution; he was a refugee from oppression who had a passion to start a new life and a successful company. His story is unique in many ways, in part because of his entrepreneurship and that of the company that still bears his name. His is a story of role model leadership and the founding of a high-performance business organization. In Delaware in the early nineteenth century, while E.I. du Pont was establishing his business, he began to develop a values-based organizational culture. His early leadership in that regard has inspired generations of DuPont employees to this day. The company that E.I. du Pont founded grew rapidly and succeeded quickly – indeed, it became one of the most successful enterprises in North American history. The company has survived and prospered for more than 200 years, which makes it one of the oldest in the world. Of course, as with all enterprises, it has encountered disappointments and failures. But its successes have been legendary. It was Pierre S. du Pont, a descendant of the founder, along with Alfred Sloan of General Motors, who largely invented professional managership and strategic business centres. That model has been the standard design for businesses ever since. And both of these business leaders were engineers. But there are other aspects to this story. Before fleeing France, E.I. du Pont had been the assistant to Antoine Lavoisier, long regarded as the founder of modern chemistry. In North America, du Pont would base his business on his practical knowledge of that science. He started by producing and selling gunpowder – obviously, an extremely hazardous material requiring deep technical knowledge. His technical skills and the values on which he built them would spawn a culture of invention and innovation. Between 1950 and 1970, its scientists and technologists would develop an unprecedented number of classes of materials – essentially, the DuPont Company invented the polymer industry. And it continues to invent new products. To this day, DuPont refers to itself as a “Science Company.” The DuPont Company can be commended for many things: for helping to invent the modern corporation; for developing high-performance systems for materials innovation; and for showing others how to develop ideas into inventions and then into products that satisfy customers. But perhaps its most important contribution to corporate history was that it was among the first

companies to recognize that people are its most important resource. E.I. du Pont’s gunpowder business was potentially hazardous, and the early experiments producing that material sometimes resulted in explosions that injured or killed his workers. He decided early on that these injuries and deaths were unacceptable – this, in an era when fatal industrial accidents were commonplace and given scant attention. Many people at the time believed that workplace injuries were a cost of doing business in hazardous processes and products. E.I. du Pont, though, believed deeply that eliminating such accidents was the right thing for his company to do. In our terms, he embraced the core value that his company must show concern for its workers. He then expressed that value by developing a safety and security culture, one that he himself lived by working in his factory alongside his production workers. E.I. du Pont was a scientist, a businessman, and a role model leader. He based his leadership on his values, which included concern for the well-being of others. He was also determined to create a strong and sustainable business model. By any measure, he succeeded. I worked for the DuPont Company, so its story is well known to me. I know of many other admirable companies, such as Walmart (for its high-performance distribution system), General Electric (for its high-performance human resource system), and Toyota (for its high-performance manufacturing processes), and there will be others that I have never heard of that you yourself could name. In chapter 2 of part one, I introduced the developmental leadership model. That model has two parts: individual leadership and organizational leadership. Part three of this book discusses at length how role model leaders make positive change in organizations. That positive change, as you will be reminded, is directed by the aspiration to develop a high-performance business organization. The developmental leadership model this book presents is an evolution from the authoritarian models of the past, where the leader / boss prevailed, as well as from the more recent democratic approaches, such as participative teamwork. In developmental leadership, everyone is developing leading and leadership competence and everyone works together to build high-performance work processes and systems that will benefit the organization’s stakeholders. All of this developmental learning and work moves the business organization towards higher and higher levels of performance and the moving target that I call the high-performance business organization (see chapter 2). To review, such an organization has these traits: • The organization has created an admirable set of core values and lives those values. • All individuals have learned to be role model leaders and are continually developing their leadership competence.

• The organization has created and sustained a harmonious level of service for all stakeholders. • Productivity and quality measures are all higher than in other business organizations and are growing sustainably with no wasteful processes or outcomes. Earlier, I described the company founded by E.I. du Pont as a highperformance business organization. Does this mean the company meets all the criteria described above and that it meets its targets all the time? The simple and obvious answer is no. The metrics listed above are aspirational. They are meant to clarify the meaning of a high-performance business organization and what it hopes to achieve and to suggest how it can set out to become one. I know the DuPont Company very well; I know that its people strive to improve all the time. And I know that there are times when its people, including me when I worked there, make mistakes that result in setbacks in productivity, quality, and other measures. But when mistakes are made, DuPont’s people recognize them and take disciplined, systematic actions to rectify them and continue moving forward. That, quite simply, is what developmental organizations do and what separates them from others. And in doing so – in continuously striving for perfection as the target – they rapidly improve the lives of others and themselves. All engineers and scientists know that there is nothing more practical than a theory believed.

9 Sustainable Growth

Sustainable growth is the expected outcome of leadership activities in the pursuit of the high-performance business organization. I return to the story of the DuPont Company, which was founded in 1802 to manufacture gunpowder and has been growing for more than 200 years. I do this in order to illustrate the concept of setting an aspirational future state, working diligently to approach that target, and achieving sustainable growth as an outcome. For its first decades, the company focused on its “black powder” business. Then in the early 1900s, the company entered an era of rapid growth and wideranging innovation. Soon, though, one of its senior executives decided that still more change was needed – specifically, the company would from now on engage in fundamental research in the pure sciences as an approach to developing new and transformational products. This was risky, but it succeeded, in part, because of the hiring of very talented engineers and scientists, including Wallace Carothers, who in 1928 was named head of the organic chemistry section at the company’s Experimental Station. Carothers, a talented scientist with an academic background, worked with other scientists and engineers, including Julian Hill, a gifted chemical engineer, to develop a miracle material called nylon. A few short years after they created this new polymer, DuPont built a full-scale nylon manufacturing facility and began marketing this new product with huge success. During this same period, the company’s leaders developed and acquired many products serving diverse markets and technology niches. Those products included sodium cyanide for electroplating, hydrogen peroxide for bleaching, titanium dioxide for paints, and a variety of other industrial chemicals. Nylon was DuPont’s most famous invention because it led directly to the development of a number of other polymers, such as neoprene (a synthetic rubber) and the first polyester superpolymer. Carothers filed fifty patents in the nine short years that he worked for DuPont before his death. All of this supports the claim that DuPont invented the polymer industry. DuPont’s “tagline” – “A Science Company” – speaks to its interest in and mastery of the innovation process. DuPont’s success over more than two centuries has been based on its ability to generate a continuous stream of new ideas in science, technology, and engineering; it then implements those ideas in ways that serve its customers as well as society at large. Many of the products it produced in the past, such as nylon, replaced natural materials. Today DuPont has turned its attention to “green” products that align with nature. It is seeking to replace some of its synthetic, polymeric products with organic ones. DuPont

Sorona®, a renewably sourced fibre and biopolymer, contains a high percentage of renewable plant-based ingredients. Sonora has a number of uses, such as in clothing and carpeting.1 All of this demonstrates the commitment of DuPont’s leaders to continuous change and development, which has led to more than 200 years of ongoing sustainable growth. Clearly I am biased, but I greatly admire the company. I am also sure there are other companies that are embracing sustainable growth and innovative high performance. I just do not know them as well. Like DuPont, these companies are aiming for the targets of the high-performance business organization to facilitate and inspire their work. In this regard, I would like to introduce three important words that you will encounter in the rest of this book. The first word is development. This is a book about developmental leadership. In the literature, much has been written about sustainable development. In this book, however, we reserve development for another purpose: the growth of people’s capabilities and competence. This is the sort of growth that is required for achieving the goals and promise of Everyone a Leader, as well as for the collective development of people in organizations as they work together to develop higher-performance work processes and systems. The second word is business. In my classroom, when I ask students to define business, they more often than not associate the term with making money. That definition is too limiting, however. Leaders are important for the success of profit-oriented organizations, but they are equally important for not-for-profit and service-oriented organizations. I define a business organization as one whose purpose is to add value for the benefit of its stakeholders. Governments, academic institutions, and service organizations such as the Red Cross, Greenpeace, and a small-town Lion’s Club are also businesses, when we think in terms of value created for stakeholders. The third word is growth. In their book Every Business Is a Growth Business, Ram Charan and Noel M. Tichy begin by stating some principles that they maintain are held consistently by the world’s best business leaders. Let me reproduce three of them here. There is no such thing as a mature business.2

What this means is that all successful business enterprises need to find ways to grow, or they will die. Maturity cannot be sustained, and neither can zerogrowth operations. This is largely because world-class competitors will grow and take customers away from the business. Growth is a mentality created by the company’s leaders.3

That is, the successful leaders of these world-class business enterprises are the intuitive starting points for a growth strategy. It is their expectation – their “truth” if you will – that growth will happen in their business enterprises. Define a growth trajectory so that everyone in the company can understand it.4

That is, these world-class leaders all believe that growth is a responsibility shared by everyone. As we say here in this book over and over again … Everyone a Leader, for superordinate success. Charan and Tichy and many others who write about successful business enterprises know that the goal is growth – “grow or die” – and they also know that the role of business leaders is to grow their enterprises. In my world, the target concept for all people is Everyone a Leader, and the defining characteristic of leading is “influencing others to make positive change.” The irreducible outcome of these future states is rapid, sustainable growth, and the expected additive outcome is the satisfaction of all stakeholders, that is, sustainable development. And all of this results in a sustainable and responsible business enterprise – one that, as it grows, improves the lives of all people. True leadership is about creating domains in which we continually learn and become more capable of participating in our own unfolding future. Joseph Jaworski5

It does not matter whether we refer to this as growth or as positive change: role model leaders are driven to ensure that their organization is sustainable and continuously improving. “Sustainable” in reference to growth is a very important qualifier when we consider the work of the role model leader. I attended an important meeting several years ago. Its purpose was to find ways to grow a particular business unit, and it was attended by mid-level and senior managers from that unit and beyond. I was struck by the number of suggestions that focused on short-term gains, most of them cost related. Somewhat facetiously, to compel people to start thinking in the longer term, I suggested that I could do better than any of the short-term solutions being offered if I simply terminated half our employees and threatened to dismiss the ones who were left. That would dramatically increase our profitability. Some laughed, and some got angry, but I believe that all of them got the message: we needed to think about sustainable ways to grow the business instead of short-term, one-time answers. When leaders think about growth and do something about growth, a number of questions arise. Mostly, those questions are variations of the following: How will the business organization be grown more rapidly? How will it be grown in different directions? How will both of these be accomplished? That is, what

needs to be done to grow the business and improve it continuously in terms of development and innovation? Put another way, leaders are challenged to think about growing sustainably in terms of speed, size, and competence – the three dimensions of growth. Those three dimensions in turn serve as a very useful model for thinking in terms of expanding, extending, and evolving – the “three Es” of growth. Expanding refers to doing more of the same things and doing them at lower cost proportionately. In DuPont Canada’s paint business, the manufacture of coatings for new automobiles was an important business unit. Growth occurred by expansion – that is, new and more productive facilities were built similar to those already in place. More paint was produced and the business grew. At the same time, the unit expanded by gaining new customers for essentially the same lines of paint. Growth by expansion is not as dramatic or innovative as growth by extension or evolution. Even so, leaders play an important role in it. Role model leaders influence people to expand the company and to meet the challenges of growth in effective ways. Of course, expanding a company requires a great deal of managing in addition to leading. The DuPont Company, since its founding, has been expanding; indeed, many companies do expand successfully, but unfortunately, many stop there. Extending growth is not the same thing as expanding it. Extending it means moving into new arenas of competence, which are often related to the old ones. Frequently, companies extend themselves by carefully examining their competencies in the two distinct dimensions of marketing and technology. Without entering into too much detail, marketing competencies encompass matters such as geography, customer profiles, products, services, merchandising, and the competition. Regarding technology, the factors to be considered include materials technology, information technology, and “financing” technology. Again using DuPont Canada’s paint business as an example, we extended our business by building a new operational segment that targeted the auto collision repair market – an extension beyond the new car market and painting technology. Extension involves increasing the organization’s capabilities – those of its people, its technologies, and its processes and systems. Thus growth by extension involves significant change, which requires role model leadership. And, of course, it involves managing and planning competencies as well. With regard to our opening example in this chapter, DuPont’s leaders early in the last century grew the company by extending it from the original gunpowder business into the developing market for the new explosive technology called dynamite. Evolutionary growth is considerably different from growth by expansion or extension. Growth by evolution is meant to generate transformational change. It requires leaders to sense and think about change opportunities and the

accompanying challenges. It entails considering change in all dimensions of size, speed, and competence. Again I refer here to DuPont Canada’s paint business. Leaders may decide to change the business in an evolutionary manner by developing innovative ways to produce paint that significantly improve productivity, quality, and the capacity to serve customers. An example would be replacing organic solvents with water-based ones to reduce the risk of damaging the environment. Another example would be changing how paint is marketed by selling the idea of “painted cars” as the unit of sale rather than “gallons of paint.” The business would take “ownership” of the task of painting the cars on the production line, replacing the automobile producer. This could move the company into a new business, partnering with the car company to produce and sell painted cars, rather than simply being a supplier of paint to the car company. For that matter, the company might develop unique chemistries for coating a variety of things besides cars – items like plastics, pharmaceuticals, and food products. The technologies for these things would have to be radically different from the ones for painting cars. Nevertheless, the company would still be in the coating business. Perhaps the best example of sustainable evolutionary growth in the DuPont Company up to this time has been nylon, which was a planned evolutionary step in the company’s growth. That product was developed by setting a superordinate expectation that a commercial business in the very new science of macromolecules was possible. The how and what were related to creating a disciplined, systematic process of invention that meant founding an Experimental Station and hiring a gifted but little-known researcher who was at the forefront of the academic research and who was prepared to be guided by the company’s aspiration. So there are various dimensions of rapid and sustainable growth. Expanding, extending, and evolving each require competent role model leadership. And, importantly, the role model leader must help the organization’s people develop their competence in ways that further the organization’s aim, which is to grow sustainably and rapidly in all three dimensions. Growth is a process. Rapid growth needs to be viewed as essential to all people and all stakeholders in the business organization. To achieve that rapidity, leaders influence people to work on growth every day, every week, every month. I believe that speed is a clear mark of success in our rapidly changing business environment. Indeed, the ability to get things done quickly is a precondition for success. Leaders who are committed to achieving rapid growth must make abundantly clear to their people what outcomes they expect. That in turn requires a ceaseless effort to minimize organizational distractions that cause people to lose focus on growth activities. Common purpose is difficult for groups, teams, and organizations to achieve at the best of times, and this difficulty only multiplies

when the outcomes expected are not well understood by the people who have been tasked with achieving them. The measures of success for a mission of rapid, sustainable growth are best described in terms of productivity, quality, and service. Productivity is a generic measure of output / input. Inputs are, basically, the actual things and processes that people work on, along with the energy they exert on these. Outputs are the results of the work they do. Quality is the generic measure of perfection. Specific measures of quality most often involve calculating the reduction of waste from value creation and value realization processes – in other words, less waste means higher quality. For example, in a manufacturing process, a common measure of quality is “first pass yield,” defined as the amount of 100 per cent acceptable product produced in a manufacturing process the first time through, with no need for recycling or rework. Service measures refer to key performance indicators of stakeholder needs satisfaction. For example, in a commercial business, a common customer service measure is repeat sales to a given customer. A satisfied customer will buy again and again. An important point: role model leaders act rapidly and competently when growing their people, just as they do when growing goods and services. It is people who do the work of growing things; but people also need to do the work of growing themselves. Here we are referring to the growth of leadership skills, character attributes, and purposeful behaviours, in addition to the growth of functional expertise in engineering, marketing, manufacturing, accounting, and so on. For an organization to grow, its people need to develop and grow their organizational capabilities. I discuss these in the following pages.

10 The High-Performance Work System and Serving Stakeholders

Leading an organization entails influencing groups of people to make positive changes that meet stakeholders’ needs. This can involve changing the ways people approach their work or changing the work itself. The work of role model leaders is to move the organization towards the future-state aspiration referred to in this book as the high-performance business organization. At any point in this developmental leadership work, the ideal goal is referred to as the high-performance work system. The high-performance work system is a collection of work processes and systems and structures that are continuously improving and that have been thought about, designed, and implemented by role model leaders and the organization. Such a system raises the organization’s level of performance from that of a conventional, competent, but lower-performing entity to one of increasingly higher levels of performance – that is, higher levels of productivity, quality, and service. In part one, I introduced a two-part learning framework called the developmental leadership model (Figure 2.3); I then extended the specific nature of leadership activity and referred to this more refined model as the leadership competency model (see Figure 2.4), which also had two parts: individual leading competency and organizational leading competency. The individual leading competency part of this framework was extended in part two so as to detail the important elements and capabilities required if one is to learn to be a role model leader. These were the skills, character attributes, and purposeful behaviours that the aspiring role model leader must learn. In part three, I propose a similar approach to understanding the highperformance work system. Here, the learning framework (see Figure 2.4) describes four key sets of work processes that define the work activities of leadership required to develop a high-performance work system. Such a system is designed to do the following: • Serve effectively the needs of all stakeholders in the business organization. • Improve the viability, vitality, and virtue of the business organization. The best business organizations direct their efforts towards meeting the needs of people: those who dedicate their time and energy, called employees; those who invest their financial resources, called owners (and, often, employees); and those who have expectations for the outputs of the business, who are called

customers and owners and other elements of society. Customers, owners, employees, and society are the usual stakeholder designations for a profitoriented business. In a not-for-profit business, we talk instead about beneficiaries, benefactors, and employees. In organizations with little leadership, there is often more emphasis on meeting customers’ needs and less emphasis on employees and society. The defining characteristic of high-performance business organizations – more specifically, of high-performance work processes and systems – is that they strongly emphasize service to all stakeholders. This service to all stakeholders has three principal defining elements: viability, vitality, and virtue; and all three are encountered in abundance in the high-performance work system (and the following chapters will discuss these individually). When all stakeholders are served effectively, the value-add of the organization’s processes improves, and so does the spirit and energy of employees. Everyone, inside and outside the organization, sees that it is doing the right things for its stakeholders. My view is that the purpose of leading business organizations is to improve the lives of people. Also, the main focus when going about this is on improving the functional and material lives of people by providing those within the business with value-add work and those outside it with the beneficial outputs of that work. But this is fully realized only when the people doing the work find the work experience meaningful and satisfying and when the results of that work are uplifting and motivating for the people in the business. The work of leaders is vital to the successful business organization. Role model leaders understand the following: • That it is very difficult to influence the people in an organization to accept change and follow their leaders’ direction unless those people’s needs are met along with the business’s needs. • That it is even more difficult to influence people outside the organization to accept change in that organization and to continue to support the business and its leadership unless valuable services are being provided and are seen as being provided. The relationship between the business organization and its stakeholders encompasses three cascading factors of service: satisfaction, loyalty, and harmony. Each of these requires an increasing level of role model leadership to be exerted within the organization. Each represents a compounding state of common purpose between the stakeholders and the organization, a purpose that moves from satisfaction to loyalty to the most ideal state: harmony. Below I discuss each of these compounding levels of stakeholder service, recognizing that they are successively more difficult to attain and that each is

more beneficial than its predecessor to the organization and its highperformance work system. Furthermore, each requires an increasing level of leadership competence and mental energy. This first level of shared purpose is best discussed in terms of the following: internal stakeholder satisfaction (i.e., that of employees) and external stakeholder satisfaction (i.e., that of customers and society). Internal Stakeholders’ Needs Satisfaction The internal stakeholders are the people of the organization – and that means all the people, whether they are at the top of any hierarchy or at the bottom, and whether they are engaged in leadership, manufacturing, marketing, research, or any other function. The most important need for the organization’s people is meaningful work. This is followed by reward and recognition for the work they do. The reward (or pay) for the work is satisfying to employees when they judge it to be fair compensation for the work done. In this regard, fairness is a function of the personal values – the beliefs, philosophy, and principles – of the individual employee. Most employees, however, make this judgment based on comparisons with other people both inside and outside their organization. It is common practice for business organizations to measure the pay rates of other organizations, and leaders do this with great transparency so that their employees will perceive their compensation as fair. Many employees consider recognition for work done to be as important as pay – that is, as long as their pay meets their needs. When pay is inadequate as perceived by the employee, recognition may become of secondary importance, though it will still be very important. There is nothing more satisfying to an individual or a team than for an admired leader to say “thank you,” “good work,” “we appreciate your effort.” This is a synergistic event: the employee is being satisfied, and the leader is growing as a role model in the eyes of the employee. Reward and recognition satisfy important needs for employees. But even more important to them is meaningful, challenging work. In conventional organizations, a common fallacy among managers, leaders, and followers is that some people just want to do the work, get paid, and go home. In my experience, this is not true. These people are not being given the right work, in the right way, in the right place. An important challenge for leaders is to satisfy the unrealized needs of individual employees. Meaningful work, whether recognized or not, is work that challenges employees’ mental, emotional, and social intelligences. People want to engage in work that requires them to expend energy. There is nothing more damaging to the human condition than boring, monotonous work.

People want to better themselves and serve others. The best highperformance work systems recognize this and challenge their employees to develop new capabilities. They also set goals for employees that can be and are measured in value-add terms – that is, value-add for customers and for society. This includes productivity measures such as delivery-time improvement for customers; quality measures such as the amount of material manufactured within customers’ specifications; and service measures such as reductions in emissions and waste materials released into the environment. External Stakeholders’ Needs Satisfaction Many organizations, regrettably, make little effort to seek out the needs and opinions of external stakeholders beyond the minimum – that is, beyond communicating with customers as necessary. Many organizations routinely ignore societal stakeholders, such as the communities around their facilities, plants, and offices. These comments may sound extreme, but they reflect my experience, which is that some companies are oblivious to the needs of their external stakeholders beyond the requirements of satisfying either customers or the ego needs of the organization. So, I next illustrate what I mean by satisfying the needs of all external stakeholders. Soft drink manufacturers are in business to improve the lives of people. So are the operators of medical clinics. That is the purpose of all businesses. Their products and services and all other outputs are directed mainly at satisfying customers’ wants and needs. Those who buy a soft drink are seeking a taste experience that will improve their lives at least at that moment. The medical clinic is improving – perhaps even saving – the lives of its customers. Each in its own way is improving its customers’ lives. The workers in the bottling plant that makes the soft drinks receive pay for their services. Clearly, this improves their lives and the lives of their dependents. The same applies for the employees of the medical clinic and for every other business. Then there are the people beyond the customers and employees – that is, the communities affected by these businesses. It must be the purpose and intent of the business organization to improve society. For a business not to have that goal would be sheer folly – a business, after all, can continue to exist only with society’s permission. Even the most backward society has the power to destroy a business by resorting to punitive laws or by giving way to its citizens’ activism. And the final stakeholders to be considered are, of course, the owners – that is, those customers of the business or highly motivated members of society or sometimes employees who have provided the means (typically money) to start

and sustain the business. Clearly, the owners will expect their lives to be improved by the organization’s actions as well as by the results it obtains. For profit-seeking enterprises, this, of course, is measured by financial returns. But the concept of return on investment (ROI) also applies to not-for-profit organizations, which look for their investment to cause certain effects – a principal one being the happiness of the donors, who are special stakeholders at not-for-profit organizations. A related ROI for not-for-profit donors is the emotional satisfaction of doing the “right” thing. Stakeholders’ Loyalty As I have said repeatedly, every business exists in order to serve people, specifically its stakeholders. A competent business organization succeeds at this and strives constantly to succeed even better – to “delight” its stakeholders, if I may put it that way. When stakeholders are delighted with the performance of a business, they become loyal to it – not just satisfied, but deeply loyal. Loyalty is a powerful word, and a business that has been able to inspire it is in an enviable position. When a business’s stakeholders are satisfied enough that they are loyal, the competition becomes less relevant. As an example, consider the customer stakeholder. In a normal business relationship, customers compare the products and services they receive from Company A with those being offered by Companies B, C, D, and so on. A customer who is delighted with the products and services of Company A will feel less need to investigate those of competitors. Instead, that customer will vest any need for change in Company A, fully expecting it to continue to outdistance the competition. That is, this customer fully expects Company A to demonstrate not only that it is able to provide the best, most satisfying products and services but also that it is a high(er)-performance company. This reflects the customer’s belief that Company A has leaders who will change its outputs in ways that will justify continued loyalty. As an organization seeks loyalty from customers, its high-performance leaders influence it to proactively develop new and improved products and services for the customer, without that customer having to ask. They also provide customers with the very best information about their own customers. In other words, they partner with their customers, helping them find new business opportunities. Loyalty between customers and the business organization is possible only when role model leaders exist in great numbers within the latter. Role model leaders are continuously improving their company, regenerating it when necessary in order to sustain the loyalty of the customer base. The leaders of a high-performance organization, as they seek loyalty from customers, influence their organization to innovate continuously, to factor their customers into all

decisions, and so on. All actions focus on exceeding customers’ expectations with regard to cost, quality, and service. The concept of loyalty as a goal of role model leadership is applicable to the other stakeholders – employees, society, and owners. All of these stakeholders have their needs, and all role model leaders have as their objective a highperformance business organization that is able to inspire loyalty. Harmonious Relationships The role model leaders in a high-performance work system make strong efforts to raise their organizations’ level of performance, from satisfying needs to inspiring loyalty to the ultimate goal, which is developing harmony. A harmonious relationship exists when the stakeholders have achieved complete agreement on the purpose of the business organization – on its goals, its values, its benefits to society, and indeed its reason to exist. This harmony as just described among the stakeholders in the business is a complete alignment of function, being, and will. Furthermore, a high-performance alignment of shared values exists when full understanding at the level of knowledge (function), consciousness (being), and understanding (will) exists. Or, in other terms … A true harmonious relationship exists when knowledge is shared among all stakeholders; when we appreciate one another’s spirit and character and culture as human beings; and, finally, when we are motivated to understand one another fully and to work together with the shared purpose of achieving rapid and sustainable growth within the organization. When the state of harmony exists between stakeholders and the business, the lives of people involved will be improved. When the alignment of the function, being, and will of the business organization is fully aligned with the function, being, and will of the stakeholder person(s), there will be a state of shared purpose in terms of values and actions. More will be said about the importance of harmony in creating effective and high-performance work systems. The harmonious relationship between the shareholders and the business is best understood by segmenting that relationship into its component parts – viability (customers), vitality (employees), and virtue (society).

11 Viability

A business organization will be judged to be moving towards high and then higher performance when the work done and the results obtained reflect increasing value of products and services offered. That is what we mean by a viable business organization. A high-performance work system contains a number of processes that support the achievement of a more viable organization whose products and services become more valuable, especially to customers but also to other stakeholders. A business organization is becoming more viable when the value of its outputs increases relative to the value of its inputs as a result of working on the inputs. Viability is a measure of the functioning effectiveness of the processes and systems of the high-performance work system. Viability measures what leaders have been doing to improve the business’s value-add. These are the three key leadership work processes that contribute to improved viability in a high-performance work system: • Creating a harmonious relationship with customers • Organizing around value-add processes • Developing an effective change process Creating a Harmonious Relationship with Customers The importance of serving the needs of all stakeholders has been discussed. The role model leader seeks to go beyond satisfaction and loyalty to develop harmonious relations with all stakeholders. A harmonious relationship between customers and the role model leader’s business will improve the measurable value of the organization. There are those who believe the customer is the most important stakeholder; words like “the customer is king” and others are common. This may be a valuable approach for some businesses, but I believe the same passionate approach to serving all stakeholders is best. In a harmonious relationship with the customer, the business organization benefits from increased revenues, longevity of the revenue stream, and often reduced costs. There are reduced costs because the business will not have to spend as much money finding and maintaining a roster of new customers. A harmonious relationship with a customer ensures a long relationship. The benefits to the customer are also many. The customer knows he or she will receive the organization’s highest quality in terms of products, technology and marketing at the level that most businesses extend to their long-standing A-

list customers. And the organization will also often offer preferred pricing. A values-based partnership creates innovative opportunities that add value for both partners. A harmonious, trusting relationship establishes, in effect, a new enterprise that works on and exploits entrepreneurial opportunities in the collective value chain of activities. Leaders in the two partnering businesses work together on those opportunities. In this values-based partnership, each partner has confidence in the role model leadership of the other. When the business organization has a harmonious relationship with its owners, those owners get a rapid, high return on their invested money and the business acquires an ongoing resource that is essential for success. Owners are a unique customer of the business organization. Most investors recognize that the best action a business can take is to develop competent, future-looking leaders – that is, role model leaders who aspire to and are capable of developing an innovative high-performance business organization. Organizing Around Value-Add Processes Stephen (not his real name) was a very good engineer. He had been an excellent student during his university days and after graduation he joined a small machine manufacturing company, SmallCo, where his talents were highly valued. He contributed much to the company, and he, in turn, always said that he learned how to be a better engineer at SmallCo. Unfortunately, family issues required that he move to a different city, and he left that company. He was recruited to head the engineering division of LargeCo, a much bigger company that manufactured heavy machinery. He always said he was lucky to have been offered that position, but the industry by then knew he was a talented engineer and leader. Stephen soon noticed that LargeCo was not nearly as successful as SmallCo: by almost all productivity and quality measures it was a weaker company. LargeCo had two distinct parts: about half its people and other resources were directed at a single large-volume product (product A); the other half were directed at seven much smaller-volume products (products B to H). Stephen also learned quickly that LargeCo’s engineers worked in a very different way than SmallCo’s. At SmallCo, the work was organized by a valueadd process and it had been organized that way for years. Each job was broken down into specific steps, and then competent people were assigned to those steps. That system worked well. By contrast, work was carried out at LargeCo according to a structure. The much larger engineering division he had joined was a freestanding unit that was similar to other functional units such as human resources, R&D, finance, and accounting. Also, LargeCo was broken down into strategic business units (SBUs), and each SBU contained various marketing and manufacturing people

and assigned representatives from the various functional units. The heads of the functional units managed administration, pay, and benefits of the functional people in the SBU, but the SBU heads managed the work of the functional people in the SBU. This was a conventional structure: the SBU as an interfunctional business team. The leaders of the SBUs told Stephen that the role of company’s functional organizations was to provide competent expertise to the SBUs and to serve the needs of customers as defined by the SBUs’ leaders. This was quite different from his experience at SmallCo, but he understood that LargeCo’s intention was to “stock” each SBU with the required skills. When he discussed this with his new co-workers in the engineering division, they seemed quite content, and they understood that their job was to satisfy the needs of the SBU manager. Stephen was impressed with their work – they were highly skilled engineers. However, many pointed out that the rigid structure often made collaboration more difficult and actions more time consuming. Stephen was troubled – the differences between LargeCo and SmallCo went beyond those you might expect to result from company of that size. At SmallCo, the manager had always been reminding him that his role was to serve customers, not the manager or the SBU. At SmallCo, needs had been determined by talking to the sales representatives and sometimes to the external customers directly. Once the engineering work required to satisfy the customers had been determined, that work was mapped out step by step in way that would maximize the value-add. These steps were then assembled into logical value-add chains (VACs). Finally, engineering people were assigned to do the work as outlined by the VACs. In this way, the work needed to satisfy the company’s customers was matched to people who were competent to do the work. During Stephen’s early days with LargeCo, he talked many times with the president who had hired him. At one point, he discussed an idea he had for improving the effectiveness of his engineering division. Intrigued, the president asked Stephen to expand his idea and make specific recommendations before he got caught up in the present system. Stephen asked two other experienced engineers to help, and they got to work. They met with the SBU managers and determined the specific expectations of these important people. He learned that the expectations placed on the assigned engineering division people varied widely from one business to another. Product A’s SBU leader required his assigned engineer to be primarily an expert in machine maintenance technology and practice. The seven smaller SBUs needed a wide variety of capabilities: one SBU needed the assigned engineer to be a capital project manager, another needed the assigned engineer to do considerable engineering design work, and others placed different emphasis on various engineering skills. But what really surprised Stephen was that a number of SBUs were asking their assigned engineers to carry out a

variety of non-engineering tasks – customer technical service, cost analysis, and, in one case, market analysis – for which these engineers had little capability. It seemed the SBU managers were asking for and being given engineering people and then they would find ways to use those resources even when the people assigned to them weren’t fully competent to carry out those assignments. Stephen and his team finished their work and made the following recommendations to the president: that the engineering division be held accountable as a value-add business organization, that the mission of the engineering division be to serve the needs of the customers who required actual engineers, and that the engineering division be a source of value-add engineering competence for the company. This meant that each SBU would contract for engineering expertise as needed. The work would be defined jointly by the specific SBU and the engineering division, and then competent engineering talent would be assigned to the work. Sometimes this would require full-time assignments, and sometimes only part-time engineers from the engineering division were required. On occasion the engineering division would even subcontract from outside firms to satisfy the needs of the SBUs and their customers. The president of LargeCo accepted these recommendations on an experimental basis – he would try to turn the engineering division from a functional component division into a value-add one. The result was that the right people were in in the right place at the right time. Productivity and quality improved significantly. Also, the people in the engineering division became much more motivated. They were closer to the customers, and they felt that they had a leadership role in the company and that they could change and improve things more effectively. After a trial period, the president and the SBU leaders decided to expand this change by including all the other functional units. The change was, in effect, from a structure based on internal controls to one based on internal and external customer needs satisfaction. The leadership effort initiated by Stephen (they called him a role model leader when he received the company’s highest award) had accomplished an important result for the company. Conventional organizations place an overriding emphasis on structure. An example beyond Stephen’s story relates to the design of a typical manufacturing plant. A conventional organization will think mainly in terms of controlling people and assets. Each layer of management will be given a clear message of accountability in terms of the layers above and below it. Job descriptions will describe what this means in terms of the roles of managers and other employees. The organization will be described in terms of boxes, with people’s names and roles and with lines of control from box to box. This is how such organizations seek efficiency.

The organizational design of a high-performance work system is different. The role model leaders in this system are biased towards influencing people to make positive change in order to grow the business rapidly and sustainably. To accomplish that, they must design the organization as a system that is effective, robust, and above all flexible. All three attributes are necessary in order to accommodate continuous improvement and change, which is the goal of the high-performance work system. The Concept of Value-Add Value-add is about positive change – about change that happens when inputs or raw materials are processed so that the result is outputs (i.e., finished products) that have more value than the original inputs. Figure 11.1 Value-Add Element

Inputs are the people, the raw materials, and the hard and soft assets associated with the business organization. Outputs are the products of the work done on those inputs. Later I will discuss this in more detail. For now, let’s simply refer to this concept as “The Guppy,” because the diagram for it looks something like a fish. The fish is a very old creature in evolutionary terms. So is the idea, in business terms, of value-add. Whenever someone launched a discussion of “The Guppy” at DuPont Canada, we knew we were about to engage in a discourse on functional effectiveness and value-add and that the issues on the table would also include substantive discussion of organizational effectiveness and leadership. The concept of value-add has a strong impact on our understanding of business leadership. All businesses, profit or not-for-profit, are built around the idea of adding value. For example, a mining company starts with a stretch of bush or mountainside, mines it, and transforms it into raw ore – chunks of rock and dirt that sometimes contain only a few percent of metal. A milling company then takes this raw ore, processes it, and transforms it into a high-grade concentrate that contains a much higher percentage of metal. A steel company then takes this high-grade concentrate, processes it, and transforms it into steel. A manufacturer takes that steel, processes it, and transforms it into rods, beams, plates, and fasteners. A construction company then takes those rods, beams, plates, and fasteners, assembles them, and transforms them into an office tower.

We can see from the above example that adding value is rarely a single-step process. It almost always entails multiple steps that are linked together to form a value-add process or chain. The output of a given step is the input for the next, and so on. Let’s further our understanding of value-add and its importance to organizations by considering the task of producing an automobile. It takes countless inputs to produce an automobile on an assembly line. A very incomplete list includes the auto parts themselves, the fasteners, the various pieces of equipment, and even robots. And those are just the physical assets – the things that are required before any work can be done. The outputs are the assembled automobiles. The work includes all the actions that people take to manipulate those inputs until the result is the finished product, the automobile. Every step in any functional process – manufacturing, marketing, R&D, and so on – relies on a multitude of value-add steps. To thoroughly understand any one of these functional processes, we have to break down the process into its value-add steps, whether that process involves manufacturing a given product, marketing it, or developing it. “Breaking down” – or “mapping,” as it is sometimes called – is an important skill for engineers to acquire to improve a given process. Competent engineers can break down a process into its value-add elements almost as second nature. Doing so – working with processes – is part of their basic education. When solving problems, they think almost automatically about material flows. In our example of producing an automobile, there are a multitude of functional steps: manufacturing parts and the whole automobile; researching and developing components; accounting for the costs of producing an automobile; and so on. And each of these steps can be further broken down into even fundamental value-add steps. For example, in the overall process of manufacturing an automobile, painting the side door on a Taurus can be viewed as a specific value-add step in a chain of steps. The inputs for that particular step would be materials such as the side door, the paint shop, and the correct colour of paint. The output would be the painted side door of a Taurus. The work would include such things as the physical and mental actions of the trained painters who manipulate the paint, the side door, the paint robots, and the machinery in the paint shop. Many, many such value-add steps go into manufacturing an automobile. I have barely scratched the surface, if you allow a bad pun. For example, there is the action of delivering the correct colour of paint to the paint shop, which in turn can be further disintegrated into the action of ordering the correct colour of paint from the paint supplier. Each input to a value-add step can be subdivided by the manufacturer into component value-add steps so that a value-add chain is described where one value-add output becomes the input of a subsequent valueadd output. That chain becomes what we call a value-add process (or simply a

process). Figure 11.2 Value-Add Process and Value-Add System

Value-Add Processes and Systems As noted above, the entire business organization can be described and defined in terms of value-add processes (see Figure 11.2). This is a logical and disciplined way to describe an organization of people who are committed to a common productive purpose. It is how work gets done, and it is also how the design of an organization should be perceived by the people who work there. So it makes sense to design an organization in terms of discrete sets of value-add processes. Yet in many business organizations, people doing work are grouped according to the kind of work, the level of work, or the location of the work. The kind of work might be manufacturing, marketing, or research. The work might be the work of a “paint” business, an “automobile” business, or a “packaging” business. These “kind of work” arrangements usually distinguish between functions or customers. The level of work approach might group people in terms of their competence so that there are senior engineers, junior engineers, engineers-in-training, and so on. The location of work might refer to similar business groupings in each country, region, or city. The conventional ways of describing work sound logical and are easy to understand, but they do not lend themselves to understanding an organization, to improving it, or to changing the actions taken by the people who are grouped in these ways. “Doing engineering work” sounds like a clear concept, but it does little to help us understand the actual work being done, such as designing, constructing, and all the other things engineers do. Role model leaders have a bias towards changing things – towards making them better and thereby generating positive results. Furthermore, in business organizations, all changes relate to productivity, quality, and stakeholder service. For example, when an organization’s leaders are considering changes to the business’s overall costs, it will be highly useful for them to develop an understanding of how those costs are presently being generated. What are the value-add steps in any given process? And what are the costs incurred by each of those steps? Having answered these questions, they can more efficiently and

effectively consider the work of reducing costs. When the leadership of a particular value-add process is assigned to a single individual in each process group, that person can be held accountable for the ongoing continuous improvement that has been assigned to that group. How this complex array of processes is then put into manageable form has primarily to do with the organization’s design. For an organization to be designed effectively, two further elements must be factored in: systems and structure. Basically, a well-designed organization will be built around certain processes that can be described as “core” and that are supported by various other processes (see Figure 11.2). For example, the core process of painting the side door of a Taurus would be supported by additional processes such as these: • Delivering the paint to the paint shop • Buying the paint for the paint shop • Hiring painters for the paint shop The sum of the core processes and all the various supportive processes can be called a system. In this example, we might call this integrated collection of processes the system of “painting things,” which is part of the overall task of manufacturing an automobile. And the system of “painting things” will be only one of many systems that are necessary to describe the task of producing an automobile. The arrangement of the various systems into an organizational structure is the final step in our systematic organization of people and assets. There are, of course, many different ways to structure a business organization. The discipline of doing so is often referred to as organizational design and is a key function and role of leadership. Value-Add Structuring of the Business Organization In a conventional organization there is a rigid, often pyramidal structure of managers reporting to more senior managers who report to more senior managers. Any change in structure will be difficult and will cause a cascade of change to accommodate the original one: Reorganization to me is shuffling boxes, moving boxes around. Transformation means changing the way the organization thinks, the way it responds, the way it leads. It is a lot more than just playing with boxes.1

In a conventional organization, change calls for reorganization, shuffling boxes around. Change is sometimes avoided because of the onerous nature of reorganization. In a developmental business organization, change is the route to

achieving high performance. In a developmental organization, structuring is an extension of the process and systems design. Change is more easily accommodated by targeting value-added steps: adding, subtracting, and redesigning individual processes or systems. When organization design is carried out from the perspective of processes and systems, rapid changes and improvements are possible. Sets of systems can be arranged and rearranged; different sets can be created to accommodate change. There is no rigid hierarchy. Leaders provide direction as the work dictates. Figure 11.3 describes a hypothetical organizational structure or design using the principles described in this section – that is, thinking about organizational structuring in terms of processes and systems. Let me be specific in explaining Figure 11.3. An engineer was given the task of designing a human resourcing organization in a small company. This engineer developed five important systems: A: The integrated human resourcing core leading, managing system B: The subsystem for evaluating people’s work performance C: The subsystem for identifying new hires Figure 11.3 Value-Add Structuring

D: The subsystem for identifying outside consultants E: The subsystem for paying people

Another point is that B and E are obviously related systems and the framework (Figure 11.3) recognizes that point. All of the subsystems are important but the design encourages change because there are no rigid dependencies. Each system can be considered a standalone set of processes to be changed as necessary. The reversing connections between the systems are meant to refer to all the important developmental actions, such as communication, defining strategic issues, and solving problems between work systems. In summary, the most significant difference between a high-performance work system and a conventional organization is that the former focuses on

value-add chains or processes, whereas the latter focuses on functions and structures. The former is effective, flexible, and easy to change; the latter is efficient, inflexible, and difficult to change. One is designed around natural work processes; the other is designed around job descriptions. One facilitates a leading approach; the other facilitates a managing approach. Developing an Effective Change Process Approaching the design of work in terms of value-add work processes and systems allows those engaged in the processes of leading, managing, and following to change the business organization more easily and in so doing eliminate waste. In this way, value-add can be improved and the business can grow more rapidly. In this section, I continue to emphasize leading by means of value-add processes. Specifically, I discuss what role model leaders must do in order to bring about positive change in high-performance work systems. Bringing about positive change is the work of role model leaders. Clearly, then, they need to understand the most effective ways to bring that change about. My premise is that the most effective way for them to approach this work is by grasping the value-add steps of any task by thinking thoroughly about the change they want to bring about and then acting in a disciplined and orderly manner, one value-add step at a time. In an organization designed around value-add processes, everyone becomes a leader. Everyone in the process can be engaged in changing in improving things. The Change Process Model In part two I described the skills, character attributes, and purposeful behaviours required to qualify as a role model leader. Those who hope to lead complex organizations must develop all of these. My conviction has long been that leadership is, at its root, about the capacity to think effectively and completely from values to results. Part two also described the unique capability of “thinking effectively and completely” in detail. This is what role model leaders must be able to do above anything else. The tool presented in part two for the aspiring role model leader to learn, practise, and utilize this capability was “levels of thought.” I will return to that model in this section when discussing the components of the change process. As you will see, levels of thought will be the basis for the thinking framework in Figure 11.4 that I propose as the change process model. By answering the three questions – Why? How? What? – we can come to understand the work of leading an organization through significant change. We can learn all the steps required of role model leadership for change. We can

learn what it is that role model leaders must do in order to inspire their people to make changes collectively or individually. This will involve a series of steps that have the potential to teach the organization’s people how to make change – steps that have the potential to call people to action to implement change and get results. All of this competence will in turn help create a high-performance work system – one in which positive change is the goal for a better future for everyone involved: Everyone a Leader, everyone engaged in the process of change. Figure 11.4 The Change Process Model

Developing Meaning for Change There are three sequential components in the change process: developing meaning, formulating direction, and implementing that direction. The first aspect of the change process – developing meaning – is arguably the most important, for any change proposed and acted on by the role model leader must have a clear and valuable meaning for everyone in the organization. The word valuable has arisen a number of times in this book. To review, values are beliefs that determine our behaviour – they are things that we as individuals or as organizations hold to be true and enduring and that motivate us to think and act in certain ways. Values guide our lives and our actions. They are extremely important and can best be understood as encompassing three levels of thought: beliefs, philosophy, and principles. Values were discussed at length in part one and again in part two, where the levels of thought tool was introduced and where beliefs, philosophy, and principles were discussed at length. Earlier in this book, the relationship between personal values and organizational values was described. As noted at

the time, each set of values reflected a somewhat different, albeit specific, set of beliefs, philosophy, and principles. Here I introduce the idea of “change values” as a way to describe the beliefs, philosophy, and principles of people in a high-performance work system. Why are role model leaders motivated to change things? We can answer that question by asking questions such as these: • What are the individual role model leader’s beliefs about change in relation to the collective beliefs of the group, team, or organization? • What principles, guides to action, or behaviours exist in the minds of the organization’s leaders in relation to changing the work their organization is doing? The answers to questions like those draw out the beliefs, philosophy, and principles about change and the meaning of change for the people in the highperformance work system. Here I need to reintroduce the idea of the “catalyst.” This refers to a leader who has an idea for changing things to improve some aspect of the organization. Say, for example, that Linda, a research engineer in the R&D organization, has an idea that she has fully explored and thought about. She decides that this idea, which would result in significant change to the company’s major product line, must be a priority for the company. Linda, here, is a change initiator or catalyst. She must find a way to influence the company’s other leaders to join in a common purpose that relates to her idea for change. This will be easier for her than it would be in most companies because her organization has embraced the concept of Everyone a Leader and its people are learning to be leaders; all are therefore open and motivated to make continuous change and seek to improve the organization. The other people in her organization already have the individual leading skills, character attributes, and purposeful behaviours of leaders. Linda realizes that other, more conventional organizations have not embraced that mantra and thus individuals in those organizations would be harder for her to influence than those in her company. Linda also realizes that she must first develop meaning for the change she has in mind. To that end, she must establish her own set of change values and then influence others to align with those values. Ideally, the others in her company will achieve a state of shared, harmonious values that align with her idea. She recognizes that even though her organization has accepted the philosophy of Everyone a Leader, this will require considerable work on her part. What does Linda do? Her approach is as follows: • She clarifies in her own mind her beliefs about the change. For example, “I believe that the product modification is important for the company. I also

believe that the product modification can be scaled to commercial uses.” • She invites the others in her company to a session where they can hear her beliefs about the change. This is also an opportunity for her to hear what their beliefs are regarding change. • She collects their shared beliefs, and she summarizes the key unifying beliefs as a statement of philosophy. That statement will be the precursor for a set of principles for guiding future action. For example, “The R&D organization as a whole and selected marketing people strongly support definitive laboratory and pilot plant and market testing of new product X in our markets Y. We believe this product has the potential to grow our revenues by a significant level – a level that needs, however, to be estimated through additional explorative work.” • The group, having become inspired, develops further meaning for the change by developing a set of principles that guide future action. For example, “We will proceed with defining how to develop and influence people in the marketing organization. We will establish the benefits to customers and other stakeholders that will be affected by this change.” These three steps fully develop the meaning for the organizational change that Linda is attempting to initiate. This meaning is probably not the exact same one that Linda would have expressed as the change initiator. But by collaborating with others, she has learned from them, and in turn those others have sensed her strong motivation to make the change. The others have strengthened their admiration for her as a role model leader. The idea has moved from specific change agency in the mind of a single person to the notion of enduring organizational value for change. Going beyond the idea of change agency in a specific part of the organization is the notion of enduring organizational change values. Change values are not completely different from personal and organizational values; indeed, in the very best organizations they are part of organizational values. In organizations where ongoing change is an overriding priority, stated values for change are woven into the fabric of organizational values. A large and complex technology company and service provider to government, military, and commercial enterprises in the aerospace business states the following as its premier values: Passion: To be passionate about winning and about our brands, products and people, thereby delivering superior value to our shareholders. Risk Tolerance: To create a culture where entrepreneurship and prudent risk taking are encouraged and rewarded. Excellence: To be the best in quality and in everything we do. Motivation: To celebrate success, recognizing and rewarding the achievements of individuals and teams.

Innovation: To innovate in everything, from products to processes. Empowerment: To empower our talented people to take the initiative and to do what’s right.

Here we have a statement of values that begins by defining the business and then states and defines the beliefs of that business. Clearly, this company aspires to be an innovative organization that takes prudent risks. In its statement one can feel the organization’s energy and the priority it places on change. Another example is from a large and diversified energy company. Its stated values are as follows: Profitable Growth: Seeking sustainable, profitable growth by encouraging relentless pursuit of our vision, simplicity of style, speed of action, innovation and leadership in all of our chosen business activities. Positive Change: Embracing and capitalizing on change, recognizing that every employee must be empowered to stimulate continuous improvement in all aspects of our business. Enthusiastic Customers: Enhancing our reputation as a company that customers can rely on to deliver products so excellent in their quality, and service so outstanding in its responsiveness, that it will always be recognized for leadership in the marketplace. Involved Employees: Striving for a workplace where opportunity, openness, enthusiasm, diversity, teamwork, accountability and a sense of purpose combine to provide a rewarding professional experience that promotes fairness, dignity and respect for all employees. Confident Shareholders: Managing all parts of our business in a manner that builds value into the investment of all shareholders, confirming their confidence in participating in the ownership of this company. Responsible Citizenship: Conducting our business with the highest standards of ethics, adherence to the law, and “doing what’s right” – thereby continuing the legacy of encouraging a healthy and safe workplace, responsible government, a highly competitive free enterprise system, environmental responsibility.

In these statements, this company cross-references a commitment to its vision. Interestingly, it references its dedication to “positive change,” continuous improvement, and “doing what is right.” The above two statements are excellent examples of specific approaches to developing meaning for change for the people both inside the organization and outside it. Both groups are important: a company’s values must be clear to the stakeholders inside the company if they are to be motivated to carry out the direction as it relates to change. And that same change direction must be clear to the stakeholders outside the company – customers, communities, society at large – so that they understand the boundaries within which the company works when achieving its goals. Only then will society be able to support the company as a member of its community. Both the thinking effectively model (see Figure 4.1) and the change process

model (see Figure 11.4) answer the questions Why? How? and What? These are the three essential questions for the leader-engineer when thinking about things to change and when changing things to create high-performance work systems and improve the lives of people. Formulating Direction for Change In the previous section we considered this question: “Why are we motivated to change something?” The determination, dissemination, and acceptance of change values (i.e., beliefs, philosophies, and principles) are the first steps in any orderly change process. The goal of those steps is to develop a shared purpose in the organization that includes the leaders who are the originators of the change. Once the shared purpose is achieved, the change process can move to the next step: “formulating direction.” The formulating or setting of direction for change answers this question: “How do we plan to make the change that the organization’s leaders have proposed?” At this stage, the elements or levels of thought are concept, strategy, and design. Also, as noted in the previous section, developing meaning for change entails fostering the required will among the people in the organization by motivating them to accomplish the change being proposed. This section deals with our necessary preparedness as human beings to make the changes – the “being” state that people must reach so that they can envision and plan the changes. At this stage, the organization and its leaders are energized – they are willing to change in order to satisfy the organization’s fundamental beliefs, philosophy, and principles. Put another way, their values are aligned with those of the organization so that they are ready to be influenced to move to the next level of change. How, though, are they to envision that change? In part one, I introduced the important aspect of leadership that I referred to as future state targets. I also introduced three hierarchical levels that ranged from planning targets to aspirational targets. Planning targets provide a precise future state relating to shorter-term transactional change; and at the other end of the scale, aspirational targets describe a future state where both leaders and followers enjoy considerable freedom of interpretation. An aspiration is a superordinate target, a statement of theoretical perfection; though necessarily vague, it also offers a great deal of choice when it comes to achieving broader and longer-term change. A vision is somewhere in the middle of this spectrum: it is suitable for processes of ongoing, important, continuous improvement of a transformational nature. This kind of change is more often the norm in organizational change. I will use this measure of a future state target in the following description of the change process. DEVELOPING A FUTURE STATE VISION AND MISSION

This is arguably the most important step in the change process. In terms of levels of thought, it is at the concept level. At this step, the leaders are proposing a new future state: they are opening the door to a better future and asking their followers to understand what that future will be – to accept it as their own and to do the rigorous work required to implement it successfully. In the simplest of terms, the leaders are saying, “This is the concept for the future, now let’s do the thinking and work to get there.” In the previous section, we focused on shared organizational values; here, the focus has shifted towards shared “beingness” (i.e., togetherness, spirit) among the leaders and followers. Leaders influence their followers to move towards a better future state by appealing to their shared values and character attributes. Role model leaders are able to engineer and give substance to the future state for which they are calling. The two most common means to this end are vision and mission. Each serves a purpose, and each provides a conceptual view of change – more concretely, a picture of a better place than the current state as seen by the role model leader. VISION

Vision has been written about and talked about extensively. By now, it is either revered as the most important attribute of a leader, or it has become an object of cynicism as a result of overuse. What is vision? Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus, great teacher-leaders, defined it this way: A vision articulates a view of a realistic, credible, attractive future for the organization; a condition that is better in some important ways than what now exists.2

Of course, a vision is “better in some important ways than what now exists” only if the leaders are able to influence their followers to accept their view of the future. A leader’s view or perception needs to become a reality for her followers. Vision is what differentiates leaders from everyone else. It is a description of something different from what is current – something no one else has achieved. It is an understanding shared by all who are part of the organization. It answers this question: “What will the organization become?” Vision is a picture of the organization’s future that serves the interests of all important stakeholders: customers, employees, and society. Let us consider some examples of visions written for organizations that are quite different from each other. The first is from a company called EcoSynthetix. To be one of the world’s leading technology and market developers of bio-based

materials through value-added substitution of fossil-based products. Our enterprise will benefit society as a result of our products being sustainable based on green chemistry and a reduced carbon footprint.

Broadly speaking, vision statements come in two generic forms. One form speaks to an ideal world and indicates what a perfect world would look like, and this company’s vision statement is clearly one of these. In this vision statement EcoSynthetix perceives its ideal future state. The second broad type of vision describes not an ideal world, but an ideal organization. There are many such statements. I provide an example to illustrate this approach. This one is from a biofuels company called Biox. Our company will build, acquire, own and operate a network of biodiesel production facilities, utilizing our proprietary process technologies capable of producing the highest quality biodiesel fuel in jurisdictions where clearly defined renewable fuel standards policies exist. Our goal is to be the leading value-added integrated supplier to the existing fuel distribution network.

Each of these companies is looking into their future in different ways. Both are young, innovative engineering and science intensive organizations. In chapter 2, in the section “Thinking about Future States,” I made a distinction between two boundary conditions. First, a plan is a future state that is very actionable and second, an aspiration is a statement of a future state that is more philosophical. And vision is somewhere between these two boundaries. The Biox vision is clearly leaning towards the plan boundary, but it is not specifically a plan, but it is a conceptual vision of their future. EcoSynthetix chose a statement, a vision that is close to an aspiration. The importance of vision cannot be overemphasized. A clear vision allows everyone to rally around a common direction, even in crises. It serves as an anchor in turbulent times. It helps the organization to see what could be and should be, and it provides guidance and inspiration for the difficult work that is necessary to achieve a better future. A vision must strike a balance between vagueness and specifics. It needs to be specific enough to provide clear guidance to the organization and relevant enough to be achievable. Perhaps most important, it must also inspire. At the same time, though, it must be vague enough to allow people to turn their imaginations towards an improved future state. It also needs to be vague enough to appeal to all kinds of people, to different functional categories of people, and to people with different levels of will and openness to change. And finally, a vision needs to be relevant under a variety of future conditions. This is an important point. Visions or future states cannot and should not be rewritten every few months. If they are not fairly permanent, they will lose their impact as thoughtful descriptors of a future target. It is appropriate to

rewrite a vision statement when a much more inspirational direction is called for. But rewriting according to a whim would cause the resulting words to lose their potency as a teaching and learning tool. I know all of this to be true for the two companies I have used to illustrate this section. I am the chairman of the board for each company and see the leaders of these young evolving companies, one an engineer the other a scientist, and how they use these statements to guide their actions as they seek to succeed. How to Develop Vision for the Organization

This section describes an approach to thinking about and writing a vision. Developing a viable vision of an organization’s future is hard work. It is also both creative and labour intensive. And it is important work. The approach outlined below has four steps. I do not mean these steps to be prescriptive – there is no single correct way. This section will be useful if it serves as a starting point for the ultimate goal; it will be useful if the steps encourage you to think about, collaborate on, document, and communicate a vision that is appropriate to your organization. The goal is all-important; the means are open-ended. With that caveat, there are four steps for you to consider. 1. The Organizational Leader Assumes Accountability The leader envisions a future state. This is a personal creative process. The leader assumes accountability for the idea and then assumes accountability for the process that will move that idea towards a viable vision for the organization. It is vital that the organization’s leader formulate a personal view of the future based on his own beliefs and on his own insights into the organization and himself. It is the organizational leader who senses the need for change and who initiates it, so he needs to own the visioning process. In each of the previous examples of visions for these young companies, I can say with assurance that the words represent the will, being, and function of the leader-founder. 2. The Organizational Leader Gathers Information and Wisdom Key to the organizational leader’s role as the “owner” or initiator of the vision is selecting a group of “thought leaders” to help him move the process along. A thought leader by definition is someone in the organization who • knows a great deal about the organization and its history and culture, • is highly respected by certain segments of the organization, • has significant skills and character attributes of a role model leader, and

• is respected by and respects the capabilities of the organizational leader. These thought leaders are formed into a working group whose purpose is to assist the organizational leader. They do so by offering opinions on all aspects of the future state idea and researching backgrounds that are pertinent to the idea, and by engaging – under the leaders’ direction – in a systematic approach to developing the idea towards a credible future state direction for the organization. It is important to understand at this stage that plans are not being made – rather, ideas are being clarified. This is strategic thinking, not strategic planning. 3. The Words Are Generated This is an important step in the visioning process. It is best to make it fun. The thought leaders will all have their own ideas. This is where the visionary leader will need to listen, feel, and sense when the words are good and right. “Good” here means that they reflect the future as seen by the leader; “right” means that the words all have meaning and call for action. The words are also right because they are easily understood and meaningful rather than empty. As part of this process of generating words, it is often useful to write a thorough description of the organization’s current state. This will allow everyone to see the clear gap between the current state and the future one (i.e., the vision). Everyone will believe they know the current state well and will be surprised at how useful it was to write it down. Also, a clear description of the current state will make it easier to develop a gap analysis – that is, an analysis of the work that will need to be done by the people in the enterprise to move from the current to the future state. Also important to this “generate the words” part of the process is deciding on and implementing a format for the vision as well for its supporting documentation. A strong vision statement is short, clear, and succinct and appeals to all stakeholders. The vision statement must be appealing, and it must be marketable. It must be able to inspire and influence many people from a variety of places. Words, clearly, are important. 4. The Vision Is Made to Work Once steps 1, 2, and 3 are complete, the really hard work begins – the work of communicating the vision to the stakeholders and influencing all of them to move in a new direction. This is where the character attributes and learned skills of leaders become critically important. The need is to align people to a common purpose and to ensure that the relevant people share a common understanding of the new direction. The word

relevant is important. Especially in a complex organization, it is unrealistic to expect that everyone will be able to align their interests with a transformational change. That should still be the goal – all people aligned – but realistically, it often isn’t possible, at least immediately. So the role model leader of transformational change must expect to engage in ongoing teaching and learning. In DuPont Canada, our future state target was aspirational: Everyone a Leader. This was a vague and difficult message for everyone to understand at the beginning of the transformation. To facilitate the communication, we created a small group of highly competent, highly motivated experts and communicators in the “technology” of the developmental leadership philosophy. Those people, most of them engineers, had regular jobs. They were process engineers, plant operators, maintenance experts, and so on. There were perhaps a dozen of them. I referred to them as “teachers,” and their task was to learn at a deep level and then to communicate, inspire, and teach when the opportunity presented itself. They were often asked by teams and groups to engage in facilitating learning where it was appropriate. These people were highly instrumental in making it implementable for Everyone (to be) a Leader of future state direction. MISSION

“Mission” and “vision” are often used interchangeably in the literature on leadership. My experience has been that much can be gained from clearly distinguishing the two concepts. Both terms refer to a future state achieved as a result of significant change. A vision, however, is a vague (though actionable) picture of the initiating leader’s future state. It is something both different and desirable, something that can be achieved only through considerable effort, perhaps decades of it. It is a target that provides direction for the activities of an organization that is committed to positive change. A mission, by contrast, though it does all of that, does so within a time frame of perhaps three to five years. Thus, it needs to be more specific so as to provide direction to the organization within that time frame. The mission statement for EcoSynthetix is provided to illustrate the differences between its vision and its mission. The actual values for the measures of success and the actual year when the milestones would be expected to be achieved (three years from the date the mission was designed) are not given here. We drive stakeholder value through rapid innovation and sustainable growth by leveraging our enterprise to deliver bio-based materials worldwide.

Milestones: • Revenue generation: $X per year • Value realization: Y new customers • Strategic relationships established: Companies A and B

• Value creation: Z new products developed The vision is the architect of change; the mission is the builder of change. A mission defines the organization’s purpose clearly and in a way that reflects its vision, which by definition is longer-term and less specific. A mission focuses on the organization’s expected specific outputs over three to five years. Below I summarize the differences and similarities between a vision and a mission. Similarities

• Both are “owned” by the organization’s leader as well as by others who have been fully engaged in formulating them. • Both are meant to influence, inspire, and energize the people in the organization so that they will understand and act on the leader’s new direction. • Both describe what is possible. Mission statements, it must be pointed out, are sometimes too focused on what is, or they too closely reflect the current state. This is not useful. Differences

• A mission statement should describe some important stakeholder-specific goals or targets that are measurable and that will move the organization towards the future state described by the vision, which is inevitably vaguer. • While a mission and a vision are both future looking, the vision is what leadership wants the future to look like, whereas the mission is more of a link to strategic intent, one that describes in broad terms what the business is and what its direction needs to be towards that future. To illustrate some of these points, the global mission statement for Greenpeace is reproduced here: Greenpeace is an independent global campaigning organisation that acts to change attitudes and behaviour, to protect and conserve the environment and to promote peace by:

• Catalyzing an energy revolution to address the number one threat facing our planet: climate change. • Defending our oceans by challenging wasteful and destructive fishing, and creating a global network of marine reserves. • Protecting the world’s remaining ancient forests which are depended on by many animals, plants and people. • Working for disarmament and peace by reducing dependence on finite resources and calling for the elimination of all nuclear weapons. • Creating a toxic free future with safer alternatives to hazardous chemicals in

today’s products and manufacturing. • Campaigning for sustainable agriculture by encouraging socially and ecologically responsible farming practices.3 Greenpeace’s mission statement can serve as a model for others. As with other mission statements we have seen, there is an introductory paragraph followed by detailed goals and objectives. The former is brief; each word, though, is important and speaks to a specific behaviour or strategy. This is a very strong role model mission statement from which much can be learned about structure and form. STRATEGY

There are many definitions of strategic intent, but the one this book will use is as follows: “strategic intent relates to the things we put in place to accomplish the future state change.” This book also distinguishes between strategic thinking and strategic planning. The difference is a large one. Planning is something that managers do and often entails extrapolating from the past in order to predict the near future. It is an extension of an annual budget, something that is calculated. Strategic thinking, by contrast, is something that leaders do. Strategic intents describe steps towards the future state; they are more visionary than calculated; they are more about potential than action plans. An example of strategic planning: “For the next three years we will grow the business at a rate of 1 per cent per year beyond the experience of the past three years, primarily by introducing our new product X broadly to our customers in North America.” An example of strategic thinking: “We will continue to grow our business by introducing a broad range of new products designed to reach our goal of being the largest company in our market.” This example of strategic thinking provides the basis for further utilization of the level of thought tool. The next step is to take this to the design (see part two, chapter 4) level of thought. I see this as the opportunity to develop potential scenarios or strategic projects. For example, if it is our strategic intent to “introduce a broad range of products” to accomplish a vision of the future, then there needs to be further strategic thinking to develop strategic projects that are the best routes to the future we desire. We might think about three to five different products that are feasible offerings for the market. These are real, not concepts. They are real because we will test them with engineering, R&D, marketing, and manufacturing competencies to ensure they are real. But at this point, we are not taking action or making choices. Rather, we are thinking about the possibilities and becoming

comfortable with the range of potential directions. To summarize, then, formulating direction for change can be viewed in this way: Vision → Mission → Strategy

The vision is the anchor. It describes what the organization will achieve in the distant future. It is vague in its wording but clear in its aims, and it is achievable. The mission creates unity and develops a commitment to achieving measurable results. It is focused on a shorter term – three to five years, but sometimes shorter than that. The strategy is a set of statements that are more specific. They are guides to measurable actions. Of these three, the strategy is the most flexible. It is a refinement of the organization’s vision and mission, and it focuses on actionable projects. It is a tool that leaders can use when selecting the means and ways to create the changes encompassed by the vision and the mission. The leader has both the opportunity and the flexibility – perhaps even the responsibility – to consider changes in strategy. Indeed, a role model leader should consider changes in strategic intent at least every year or two or even more often. When doing so, she should ask these questions: How have things changed in the past few months in our environment? What have we learned that might suggest a new strategy? How have our competitors changed, and does this force us to change our strategy? What changes does our organization need to make to meet the new challenges of a changing environment and challenging competitors? In many ways, the skills, character attributes, and purposeful behaviours of the role model leader are tested more when strategy is being defined than at any other time. There is a calmness, a thoughtfulness to developing a vision and a mission; strategy, by contrast, is usually formulated when times are more urgent. Strategizing is a high-energy process. Leaders who succeed at defining the right strategies truly are admirable role model leaders. Strategy encompasses all the thinking that is required in order to utilize human, physical, financial, and technological resources with the intent of achieving the organization’s vision. It can also be thought of as a means to seek a competitive advantage. The advantage has been realized when the organization has placed itself in a better position than its rivals to meet the needs of stakeholders. Competitive advantage is important to both profit-oriented organizations and not-for-profit ones. In a profit-oriented business, competitive advantage flows from a strategy that has placed the organization in a better position than its rivals to create economic value for customers. Those customers then reward the organization’s efforts with sales revenues that can translate into sustainable growth. In a not-for-profit organization, competitive advantage flows out of a

strategy that places it in a better position than other service providers to create real and perceived value for society. Society then rewards these efforts with donations of money, time, and energy, which in turn can translate into sustainable growth for the organization. Implementing Change The levels of thought that define the stage we call implementing change and achieving positive results are as follows: Action: Examine what needs to be done to accomplish change and get results. Audit: Examine what the organization is doing, then identify what, if any, variation exists between the target and the strategy for achieving it. Evaluate: Examine performance relative to expectations.

This step of implementing change deals with the functioning capability that the organization and its leaders need to apply in order to make the required change happen. A multitude of studies have found that many businesses fail because of poor execution. It doesn’t matter how good the strategy is; excellent execution is always more important if you hope to get the results that you and the other stakeholders expect. Let’s be clear about what we mean by getting positive results. Those results are, in effect, the measures of the transformational change promised by the future state direction. They are signifiers of progress from a similarly measured current state. For example, if our goal is a workplace safety frequency of 2.0 injuries for every 200,000 hours worked by all the people in the organization, and if we experience an organizational injury frequency of 1.0 injury per 200,000 hours worked last year, then we have succeeded at making positive change. We haven’t yet achieved our aspiration, which is zero injuries, but this is a positive result nevertheless. An action is a clearly defined and planned event that requires an output of energy by the elements and resources that the organization has dedicated to it. At this stage in the change process, the leader’s role is to influence the people in the organization to think about, plan, manage, and lead the work. Role model leaders contribute to this by leading the design of the work processes, by ensuring that their people understand the importance and urgency of the work, by ensuring that the people thus engaged are dedicated and (one hopes) inspired to do the work, and by ensuring that the people doing the work are functionally skilled and have the right mix of character attributes and purposeful behaviours to be effective. All of this requires the leaders’ ongoing involvement. This is not leading by mandate. The very best role model leaders are not “doing” the work; rather, they are being seen, heard, and felt by their people as being in the work. At the getting-

results stage of the change process, the very best role model leaders have a visible and well-understood approach to leading. People think of execution as something leaders delegate while they focus on the “bigger issues.” Their idea is completely wrong. Execution is a discipline and a system. Larry Bossidy4

Bossidy is saying that implementation is a leader’s most important job. If the leader’s role is to influence people to make positive change, he is definitely right. Many leaders interpret their role as “asking,” “persuading,” or “demanding” that followers take action based on the direction communicated to them. But it would be an error to think that a leader simply directs her followers to take action and get results while she merely watches. I agree with Bossidy, an engineer and business person, and with many others: a leader must be passionately involved in taking action to get results. My experience has been that when a leader is actively and appropriately involved with the people who are implementing the direction, stronger and more effective results are achieved. People want their leaders to be involved; they are inspired by their leaders’ participation. A leader’s credibility is enhanced when she involves herself in implementation. To be clear, the leader’s involvement entails active mental, emotional, spiritual, and – yes – physical work. Implementation is the role and shared responsibility of all the people involved in a project – followers, managers, and leaders. If you are not consumed with the need to participate in and complete the change process by implementing direction, you are not a role model leader. If you inspire people with a vision of the future and set a direction for important change and then walk away from implementation, telling yourself it’s someone else’s job, you are not a role model leader. Indeed, you are being foolishly counterproductive and almost guaranteeing markedly suboptimal outcomes. Think about all the activists who yell and scream about their cause in many forums, even those who speak knowledgeably – those so-called activists who criticize and ask for change and then do nothing. Are role model leaders those people? Or are they the ones who seek to work with others on actionable projects in the private and public sectors? One could argue that the latter are doing more to contribute to a better world. Even visionary leaders lose credibility if they step aside when it is time to take action, leaving implementation to others. Role model leaders stay the course from idea to results. They are willing and able to participate in the entire change process. The word action, to me, means productive work that leads to positive change – to the adding of value as judged by the stakeholders. Whether work has been

productive is determined by audit and evaluation steps; action includes a process of auditing and evaluating actions that have been taken. To state this more fully, an action, such as “selling more widgets,” is subjected to an audit, such as “how many” and “what size.” The results are then subjected to an evaluation: Did these outcomes of the action benefit the stakeholders of the enterprise? What level of productivity, quality, or service was reached? Managing is largely about controlling the work, “stabilizing” it, if you will. In this vein, managing during times of change involves looking out for whether the change is working and whether the change could be carried out more efficiently. If additional change is needed, or if the change is proceeding according to plan but those following have the capacity to accomplish even more positive change, leading addresses that circumstance. Leadership is extremely important in the overall iterative processes of action, audit, and evaluation. Each of these requires decisions to be made: decisions relating specifically to the need for further changes, as well as decisions regarding followers’ potential to do more. The very best role model leaders participate and collaborate with others – both those managing and those following – during implementation. They are also flexible, and they have the skill and judgment required to decide on the best ways to maximize long-term results. In the simplest of terms, leaders, managers, and followers work closely together from strategy through action to auditing and evaluation. The principal leadership roles are as follows: making strategic decisions relative to selecting, retaining, and developing people; making decisions about changes in strategy; helping managers assess results; and engaging with followers to understand their needs so that positive results are obtained. The principal management roles are as follows: establishing efficient control; planning action steps; getting results through people; controlling inputs and outputs to projects; and auditing and evaluating results. The Interface between Strategy and Implementation The interface between formulating direction and implementing action is encountered at the moment when strategic thinking shifts towards tactical thinking. This is a key point in the change process, because it is where strategy faces its first real test. Crossing the boundary from strategy to tactics does not, however, mean that strategizing is finished and that tactics are all that are left. Strategy formulation can be deliberate or emergent.5 Deliberate strategy flows from analytical thinking; it entails assessing the market, competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, market growth, and customer needs. Once this assessment is completed, decisions about implementation are made. This, briefly, is deliberate strategy making, which is the traditional approach to

strategic planning. Emergent strategy is very different. It flows from day-to-day priorities established by leaders, managers, and followers, all of whom will have a hand in implementation. People who develop strategies in emotional or intuitive ways do not recognize the consequences as strategic decisions or as different from tactical ones. Role model leaders will recognize when a strategy needs to be changed because they have positioned themselves to take part in the implementation, which is when that need makes itself visible. Role model leaders encourage both these approaches and have the competence to influence people to engage in both to accomplish the necessary results. They also understand when to stabilize a strategy and when to change it. How to Use the Change Process Model To illustrate the utility and flexibility of the change process model, I offer the following examples. The principal characteristic of the model demonstrated here is its flexibility. It is designed to meet the user’s needs and can be applied in its entirety or in part. It allows for complete strategic thinking from belief to action or, alternatively, for targeted strategic thinking – whatever is required of those who are leading the change. The examples offered are all hypothetical. PARTIAL UTILIZATION OF THE CHANGE PROCESS MODEL

Partial utilization is only possible when practitioners fully understand the change process model and are competent and have used it to its fullness. Then they have the capability to test its flexibility as well as the openness to benefit from its parts. The parts I am referencing are the three triads that form the whole (see Figure 11.4). The three triads of the change process model are developing meaning for change, formulating direction for change, and implementing the change. Each of these consists of three component levels of thought, as described in the thinking effectively model in chapter 4. Say, for example, that a company’s leaders are fully satisfied and confident that their beliefs, philosophy, and principles represent the values of the company. But these senior leaders recognize that there is a need to set a new direction. The company is no longer able to achieve a competitive advantage and grow by making automobile engines for car companies. These leaders must now apply their competencies to shift the business to making smaller engines for boats – new market, new customers. The senior leaders and the various thought leaders sit together in a room and put the company values “on the wall” and begin to discuss and rework the second triad in the change process model – vision, mission, strategy. Once this is done and there is understanding among all in the company, they begin to consider the third triad – the implementation step in the model – and work that

triad in the same manner. Another example of the model’s flexibility and usefulness relates to the power of using the first triad unilaterally. The beliefs, philosophy, and principles of the company as a whole – its values – may be valid, but the first triad can be used in various ways within different parts of the company to create common purpose. Say, for example, that a new team has been formed to make incremental changes in a chemical process. These engineers and technicians understand the company’s direction and the part their team will play in the whole. But they want to create a strong common purpose among themselves in this new team. So they utilize the first triad of the change process model in order to determine and shape a common purpose through a discussion of beliefs, philosophy, and principles for the team and the part it will play in the company as a whole. AN EXAMPLE OF FULL UTILIZATION OF THE CHANGE PROCESS MODEL

The company’s most senior leader receives a message from the people in his organization: they have noticed an increase in the number of injuries in the company’s manufacturing plants. This leader tells himself that the organization – both its leaders and its followers – must somehow dramatically reduce these injuries if not eliminate them entirely. This will require transformational change, not just an incremental reduction in injuries. The leader decides to utilize the change process model as a means of collaborating effectively with his leadership team and a group of other thought leaders. Together they will think about the Why? What? and How? of the change. His senior people and thought leaders are all experienced practitioners of the change process model, so they recognize its flexibility and power to guide the thinking of change agents. They also recognize that it can be used for situations that border on crisis as well as for situations where more time to think is available. Clearly the present situation, where people are being injured, is a crisis that demands change. They agree that the change process model must be used in its entirety and that this can be done efficiently and will benefit the organization. Spending the time upfront will benefit the organization in the long run. That time might be well used as follows. DEVELOPING MEANING FOR CHANGE

1. The change agent and the thought leaders meet and decide to list all their beliefs surrounding the facts of a large increase in injuries in the organization. 2. The group spends many hours collecting a wide variety of beliefs. These beliefs both confirm previous beliefs and reinforce the bedrock idea of seeking to do no harm to other people.

3. Many of the group’s beliefs underscore the need for an honest discussion of individual and organizational competence relative to the issue. It is vital that this group not argue, but instead display tolerance for one another as they seek the right answers. At this stage, it is not the goal to reconcile differences of opinion. 4. The group of leaders then take all the beliefs they have gathered and construct a statement of philosophy. Here the idea is to look for agreements so that a broad but powerful statement of the organization’s thinking can be developed. An example might be, “All injuries in the workplace are preventable and we are committed to move towards a future state of zero injuries.” This statement, remember, has flowed from a long and thoughtful discussion whose goal has been to develop a coherent statement of values. Statements like this answer these questions: What do we stand for? Why do we need to change? What will we need to change? 5. Next, the group considers the statement of philosophy it has established and, from it, develops five to ten statements that will serve as guides to action. These statements may well include the following: • We will ask our people to seek ways to prevent injuries to themselves and others in the organization as a condition of their employment. • We will continuously inform all our stakeholders, inside and outside the company, about our company value of doing no harm to people. • We will reinforce with our employee stakeholders our resolve as senior leaders to not tolerate any injuries at any time. • We will reinforce with our employees that they are individually accountable for their personal safety and the safety of others within the work system. The transformational change contemplated focused on reinforcing with employees the importance of sustaining organizational values. An examination of the company’s past collective actions revealed that they had not reflected those values, and now the senior leaders are determined to do what is necessary to “get on track” again. This in turn may mean taking unusual actions – countercultural actions – or developing a new strategic direction. The leaders decide they have done a thorough job of creating the atmosphere of collective thought at a level of “guides to action.” The meaning of the required change, but not the strategy or actions, has been determined. A shared purpose is possible. Now it is necessary to somehow determine how to act on the principles and formulate a direction for change. FORMULATING DIRECTION FOR CHANGE

1. The group now moves to the next element of the change process. Here they

consider these questions: How do we plan to change the level of injuries in the organization? What must we think about and do to support our beliefs, philosophy, and principles – our values as they relate to the increase in injuries? 2. They begin to think about concepts. Concept here can be defined as “an idea we pursue and how we would like things to be.” It is a stated vision of the future that will inspire people in the company and all other stakeholders. 3. The concept is developed, along with the concept’s meaning for stakeholders – a necessary element if shared purpose is to be achieved. Everyone, after all, must be able to see a benefit to themselves when their company changes direction. The concept in the example at hand is stated as follows: “Zero injuries is the goal for the company.” This is a powerful (because it is clear) view of a future – one in which all stakeholders can see something for themselves. 4. The leaders are satisfied that their work so far has resulted in a concept that will move the company towards a more forceful statement of intent on the subject of safety. The leaders, quite simply, are demanding action. This direction will be somewhat less democratic than before, but it will not entail a change in culture or leadership style. 5. The next step is to develop some strategic intents with the goal of providing more actionable steps for the company’s employees. This means developing a few additional strategic intents and not throwing out the present strategy, which has long been, “All people will work diligently to continuously improve safety performance.” The strategic intents developed from this process are as follows: • The company will consider the safety implications for our people in all forms of work. If the work cannot be done safely, it will stop until it can be made safe. • The development of our organizational functional competence on behalf of all stakeholders, especially employees, will take into account the implications of doing no harm to people. IMPLEMENTING THE CHANGE

The final step in the change process model takes a very long time for the group. They recognize the importance of it. They also recognize that they have done good work in terms of crafting a reinforced set of safety values along with a more specific (but additive) descriptor of a future state related to safety in the workplace. They have decided that the implementation actions they are about to develop next will have to be prescriptive, but in a way that will not damage the organization’s culture, which is developmental, aimed at continuous improvement, and develops leaders.

In the end, they establish the following three action steps. These will be communicated to the stakeholders – specifically, the employee stakeholders – for immediate implementation. 1. The company expects that all work will be done safely. If this is not possible, every employee has the obligation to stop the work and participate in making it safe. 2. All employees will act as their work partner’s “protector” or “brother’s keeper” by ensuring that work is carried out in a safe manner. 3. Safe conduct and working safely will be conditions of employment in the company. There will be other specific detailed actions that flow from these high-level actions. Each department or function will have specifications that flow from these. The senior leaders feel they have benefited from applying the change process model thoroughly and effectively. It has allowed them to formulate a set of actions that have the potential to transform the existing unacceptable situation in a way that will not damage the company’s culture. In summary, the change process model can be used in its entirety, or selected parts of it can be used in specific situations. It can be used by large organizations that are contemplating large or transformational changes or by small organizations contemplating small, incremental changes. Finally, it can be applied to processes of incremental, continuous, or transformational change. Change requires thinking and doing. Role model leaders need to be disciplined and systematic as they seek to improve the lives of others. Again, I remind the reader that thoughtful, complete thinking about all things, when done effectively and “up front,” will create better results and the results will happen more quickly because there will be no wasted actions or restarts.

12 Vitality

The previous chapter described the leadership role that Stephen played at LargeCo. He changed the company in positive ways by improving the organizational design of the engineering division and the entire company through a focus on value-add work in support of both internal and external customers. This led the company to develop a systemic change process beyond the engineering division – one that further enhanced the organization’s functioning competence. As a result, the SBU and company measures of financial success improved over an extended period. In the engineering division leadership team meetings, Stephen and his people were excited about the results they were getting. But there was always an underlying theme at these meetings: “We can do even better.” Some people shared ideas they had gleaned from their family life; others talked about the positive energy they generated doing work for a Rotary Club or a youth sports team. Everyone realized that this sort of energy did not exist in LargeCo – that there was a lack of spirit within the company. Each engineer talked about the level of spirit in each of their SBUs. Many sensed a lack of spirit and positive energy but some disagreed and saw the opposite, a great work environment. A common theme emerged: in the SBUs where the leader created an environment where all people were treated as real human beings rather than “tools” for getting work done, there was positive energy and a positive working-together environment. One of these engineers was Ed, who had been at LargeCo for many years. In his attempt to explain the energy in his SBU, he quoted Henry Ford, one of his engineering idols: “Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.” Ed said that the people in the company needed to work together to serve one another as well as they had learned to serve customers. He pointed out that the SBUs were functioning as separate islands and that while each was getting good results, the company as a whole had no identity. Everyone identified with an SBU or a function; no one identified with the company. The engineering division’s leaders came to believe that their division, the SBUs, and the other functional units needed to come together if they were to work effectively, and that this would entail yet another organizational change. In effect, Stephen and his engineering division had concluded that an important element when discussing high-performance work systems is vitality. The word as used here refers to life – that is, the life of the organization. In a business organization that enjoys an abundance of vitality, the people are competent, confident, energetic, and spirited. They work together to move the

company towards its targeted future state and goals. Positive change is enormously enhanced when all people work effectively together, having committed themselves to positive change. People want to work; they want to do useful work; they want to see and sense that their personal influence and efforts are having positive effects and outcomes. People, in sum, yearn to create high-performance work systems for themselves and others. But for them to do that, their leaders need to encourage and support their efforts. Role model leaders can make the difference between a spirited organization and one that is not. This chapter discusses a variety of work processes as well as the leadership capabilities that are important when developing high levels of vitality in an organization: • Creating harmony among the employees • Working effectively in teams • Developing a high-performance culture Creating Harmony among Employees A harmonious relationship among employees benefits the business in too many ways to list. Perhaps they can be summarized in this way: there can be no highperformance, high-vitality work system without harmonious relationships among people. Most people will dedicate sufficient energy to do what they must to earn their pay and benefits, and they will be loyal towards their organization if the work they are given is enjoyable and challenging and if they are rewarded well. But to go beyond this – to reach a state of harmony where the organization’s vitality is at a high-performance level – the business organization and its leaders must take a different approach where employers and employees are partners, not combatants. There are many ways to do this, some more strategic, some very tactical. One tactical way our company approached this was by expanding our thinking, which led us to design a system of incentive pay. This was not unusual: in almost every company senior executives are provided a portion of pay “at risk.” In other words, a portion of pay is variable based on meeting certain company directives. Meet those, and you earn the pay; exceed them, and you get more; do not meet them, and you get less. However, we extended this system to everyone in the organization. The percentage of “pay at risk” for lower ranks was less than it was for the executives, based on role accountability, but the potential was the same: more pay for better-than-expected results, less pay for less-than-expected results. This approach was highly successful and created greater harmony between the organization and its people. Even in difficult times, when some segments of the company did not perform, there was a sense of “we

are partners, we are all in this together.” This vitality was, of course, stronger when people were achieving their targets, which often happened. Employees at all pay levels made the connection between themselves and the organization’s purpose. An even more powerful strategic way we found to create a harmonious partnership between the organization’s goals and those of its people entailed a universal approach to learning and developing leadership capabilities. It involved a cross-organizational strategy of leadership development: Everyone a Leader. Everyone wants to learn, and people will become a leader with an organization that gives them the opportunity to learn while they are working. That is because they sense that the company is interested in them as human beings and that it is encouraging them and investing in their personal development. The Everyone a Leader approach to leadership underscores that encouraging personal development fosters harmony between the business and its employees and that the organization will be transformed as a result. Everyone wants to feel satisfied with their work and to feel proud when they tell people where they work. In the simplest of terms, people want to feel a sense of common purpose with their employer. They do not want to go to work feeling bad or alienated from their employer. Unfortunately, too many of them do. People want to be part of a high-performance work system where the benefits of work are shared and so are their personal values, and where their purposes are common. Working Effectively in Teams The vitality, spirit, and energy of people are all greatly enhanced by collaborative work. Almost everyone agrees that teams are the best venue for accomplishing work. Yet if you ask a group of people in a business organization, a social action group, or any other experienced group, “Are the teams you have participated in as a member or a leader effective? Do they get the desired results?” the answer is likely to be surprisingly negative. The task, then, is to establish teams that work as intended – teams that increase the vitality of the people working on them and teams that thereby maximize the results of the work they do. And in a high-performance work system, that task belongs to leaders. Hierarchy of Teaming In this section, I classify teams as high-performance or underperforming. There are, of course, many shades of grey. But this simple distinction will allow us to learn more about the characteristics of successful teaming. Besides the dichotomy just mentioned – high-performance and

underperforming – there are other useful approaches to understanding highperformance teams. Other collective processes worth exploring in this regard are core teams, competency networks, working groups, and virtual companies. I will be discussing each of these for understanding the purpose, utility, and the characteristics of these various collaborative approaches to doing work, especially those where I have experience, and to highlight the ones that are most likely to be useful in given situations. First, though, readers may be wondering whether it is possible, in a highperformance work system, for a person to contribute as an individual to an organization’s success. The answer to that question is a resounding yes. It is possible, indeed often desirable, for an individual to do work that is purposeful and directed at increasing the success of the entire organization. I can think of a number of examples of positive individual effort: • Thinking about ideas at different levels and developing ideas before presenting them to others or influencing others to work together on the idea. • Working on improving certain skills and character attributes to reach higher levels of leading and functioning capability. • Carrying out limited, specific tasks that support a team’s objective, but doing so from outside the team. So, yes, individual work within a high-performance work system can be of very high value. Most often, though, it is valuable because it is contributing necessary inputs to a broader project or because it is a necessary precursor to a group or team effort. High-Performance Teaming I begin this section by summarizing the six characteristics of high-performance teams that have stood out in my experience. In so doing, I hope to make it clear how role model leaders in high-performance work systems can lead an organization most effectively. 1. SMALLER IS OFTEN BETTER

Many who have studied the characteristics of successful teams have concluded that small teams work best. That is also a personal observation. If there are fewer than five members there will not be enough functional capability to satisfy the team’s goals. If there are more than nine or ten members, conflict is likely to develop in a way that limits the focus on the team. There will be too much energy in a group that large and too little focus on the task. Many years ago, one of the teams on which I participated had a member who researched this phenomenon. He found that in prehistoric times, a hunting party

was about nine people, each of whom had different skills. For example, there would be people skilled in tracking (i.e., sensing, smelling, seeing, hearing), there would be the killers, there would be the haulers, and there would be those with skinning and dressing skills. There were around nine people in hunting groups in most cases. So perhaps even in prehistoric times, teams that had a specific goal required an optimum number of people for success. At the very least, this is worth remembering. The empirical evidence I have gathered over the years has convinced me that each team will find its optimal vitality in part from an optimum size. Too few people, and the team will suffer from a shortage of capability; too many people, and the team’s energy will dissipate. The role model leader will often experiment with the team size for a given task and have the competence and courage to make changes early in the process. 2. HIGH-PERFORMANCE TEAMING REQUIRES HIGH-PERFORMANCE MEMBERS

The members of a team must have the capabilities the project requires. So a role model leader must evaluate people carefully before assigning them to the team to ensure that the group will have the capabilities that the project requires. But at the same time, the team must not be overloaded with more people than the project requires. It is better to select a handful of highly capable people than a larger number of people with fewer capabilities. It may be important to select members with the required skills, character attributes, and behaviours, but it is essential to select members who can work collaboratively. The best role model leaders of high-performance teams will take the time and exert the energy to seek out those members who are most likely to deliver the best results. The best people will be motivated to do the work contemplated, will be the most competent people to carry it out, and will have had – importantly – relevant experience at the work. In part two of this book, I described a number of capabilities required for role model leadership. The characteristics I listed there are also required for all members of a team. Indeed, it is in the cauldron of the high-performance team that the competency of role model leading, the idea of Everyone a Leader, is evident. The more role model leadership the team has, the higher its performance will be. And the higher the functional capabilities of these role model leaders, the more likely it is that the team will succeed. Imagine a team on which everyone has the character attributes of trustworthiness, respect for people, tenacity for getting work done, and honesty in dealing with tasks and other team members. This is a high-performance teaming environment. Then add to that team the functional capabilities of role model leading – first and foremost, the ability to think effectively and to communicate with others at all levels of thought. Then add to that the ability to

reconcile different points of view and to create innovative solutions, and the ability to prioritize work and bring extensive experience to the team. And then imagine recruiting people with role model leading behaviour: members who are not ego driven, who will not disrupt the team’s work with a personal agenda, and who will not seek ways to gain the upper hand over others or to leverage the team’s performance for their personal benefit. Highperformance teaming is highly dependent on purposeful behaviour – ideally, it is dependent on values-driven behaviour. And finally, there are few high-performance teams that would not benefit from engineering and scientific functional capability. This is true even of those teams formed to deal with organizational issues that would be considered nontechnical. The problem-solving capabilities of a competent engineer or scientist can add considerable value. 3. DISCIPLINED, SYSTEMATIC PROCESSES ARE REQUIRED

The work of a team must be sharply defined and fully thought out. A useful tool for this essential component of high-performance teaming is what I call the “task cycle.” Each high-performance team needs to collectively develop each component of this framework, which will then guide the team’s actions. This cycle should be conducted more than once as the team carries out its work. Also, the task cycle must be conducted jointly, with all members heard, so that they can determine the need for any revisions to the task. In a newly formed team, conducting a task cycle should be the first step. The Task Cycle Model

The task: Express the team’s work in a few words to see if all understand the task in the same way. The purpose: Expressing the team’s purpose begins by answering the Why? question. The answer will serve as the reason the work is being done as it relates to a future state. The What? question is then asked, and the answer – which usually starts with “To do...” – will be a broad statement that summarizes the actions the team is to take that will result in the goal being achieved. Lastly, the How? question generates a series of steps that the team will take to meet the goal. The documentation of this is often in the What? How? Why? order. The expected result: This part of the task cycle requires the team members to clearly and fully

express the outcomes they consider their goal. It also includes specific quantitative performance metrics that reflect the goal. At this point, it should be clear to the team how achieving the outcome will bring positive change to the organization and how the team’s success will meet the needs of each stakeholder on the team and those of the business organization as a whole. The team process: There needs to be a discussion and an early decision on the value-add process the team will apply to determine the steps required to do the work. Will there be discussion, presentation, subteam work? Will there be regular meetings? The process to be used needs to be disciplined, orderly, and systematic. It can evolve once the project has begun. The functioning capability:

This refers to the skills, character attributes, and unique behaviours required to achieve the outcomes expected of this specific team. It includes a commitment by the team leader to help her team members develop leadership competence. In fact, the selection of team members should be based on whether the people being chosen are motivated to learn leadership capabilities while serving on the team. Those who will are the ones who should be chosen. Here is where the identity of the people on the team is described and where the questions are answered regarding who will be executing what, where, and when. An Example

The task: • The manufacturing plant managers will be working together to improve safety in their plants. The purpose: • (What) To rapidly reduce the level of measurable injuries across the company’s manufacturing plants. • (How) The senior leaders of all the manufacturing plants will work together and learn together for the purpose of finding ways to change things in a positive manner to improve safety in the workplace. • (Why) In order to achieve the future state goal of zero injuries in the workplace. The expected result: • A path towards a 10 per cent year-over-year improvement in recordable

injury frequency from the current state. • Growth in the manufacturing plants’ leadership capabilities required to achieve the goals described. (This is a developmental learning outcome – every high-performance team has one.) The team process: • A series of meetings, estimated to span one year – at least once per month of all plant leaders. The team is to include a highly experienced and competent expert in workplace safety from a role model plant as well as front-line operators from the poorest-performing plant. • Subteams on leading and leadership capabilities will be required, as well as a subteam on information gathering and utilization. The functioning capability: • Specifically the most senior leadership from each manufacturing plant. • Specific expertise in workplace safety technologies and manufacturing practices. • Specific expertise in the behaviour and capabilities of the front-line workers (e.g., relating to practices and procedures). • Expertise in leading and leadership competence to fulfil the need for all on the team to develop their capability as part of the work – an individual who will be the leader of the team for this task. 4. EVERYONE MUST ACCEPT ACCOUNTABILITY

The role model leader will emphasize the need for all members of the team to accept accountability for the team’s success. Specifically, the role model leader of the high-performance team will accept personal accountability for achieving the team’s goal. Also, that person will influence others on the team to hold one another accountable for the results. All members will have personal objectives related to meeting the team’s goal, and they will influence, encourage, and assist the other members to assume their personal responsibilities for achieving that goal as necessary. Integral to this collective acceptance of individual and team accountability is honest collective feedback. Each person on the high-performance team needs to feel responsible for providing feedback to the team on its performance and also to feel responsible for providing feedback to other individuals on the team with regard to their performance relative to the goal. All of this will require the team’s role model leader to teach the skills, character attributes, and purposeful behaviour required – teaching and developing the requisite leadership competency in each member.

And finally, there must be accountability in the team to achieve the team’s goals … do the work, meet the goals, end the work, move on to other tasks. 5. EVERYONE NEEDS TO BE ENGAGED IN LEARNING

The previous discussion on accountability described the need for role model teaching and performance. First, the leader of the high-performance team needs to exhibit exceptional leadership competence. That person must also be prepared to engage the entire team in the ongoing development of leadership competence. The most effective way to do this is by integrating the work directed at achieving the goal with developmental teaching. For example, if the team’s goal is to improve some aspect of workplace safety, then the development of leadership capability might focus on behaving ethically, achieving reconciles, respecting other people, and so on. The difference between a high-performance team and a team that is merely effective has mainly to do with the leadership development that is part of the high-performance team’s agenda. The leader of a high-performance team understands that the competence concentrated in that team provides a great opportunity to develop future role model leaders for the organization as a whole. Extra time will be required to inject the work of leadership development into the project the team has been assigned, but that extra effort will pay off in the future for the organization. There is no better environment for developing leadership than in the cauldron of a high-performance team doing work of great importance and urgency. A leader who is skilled at teamwork will state at the outset that one objective is to maximize team performance. He will realize that teamwork is an opportunity for developing the self and for learning to be a better person and leader. This leader will also be aware that another key aspect of his role on the team is to protect its members from outside influences that might distract them from their goal. In other words, this leader will influence those outside the team to support his team members and their goals. Moreover, if some people in the organization threaten to interfere with the team, the role model leader will need to protect his team from them. Recall from part two that Kalev Pugi was superb at this aspect of leadership: he won support for his project at headquarters and made sure that his team had the funding, resources, and time to develop an important new manufacturing process. This is not to say that all outside influences are negative. The role model leader also needs to be open to positive outside influences and provide a conduit for them. For example, the role model leader can locate the necessary technology and other potential value-adds as the team requires them.

6. UNDERPERFORMING TEAMS MUST BE IDENTIFIED

The role model leader of a high-performance team needs to realize that unless the team has a continuous improvement mentality – a developmental mentality – it may not perform to its potential. Generally, an underperforming team has one or more of the following characteristics: • The team members do not collaborate. This fault is then magnified because those individuals who are experiencing difficulties are not being supported by others. • The leader and the members have not created a disciplined process for the work, which leads to wasteful actions. • Overall, the team leader has not established a team commitment to a clear goal. As a consequence, the members are focusing on themselves rather than the goals. Other Organizing Entities As I noted earlier, there are other approaches to collaboration that role model leaders can find very useful. These should be absorbed as integral parts of a high-performance work system. If used effectively, each has the potential to improve the vitality of the organization’s people. CORE TEAM

A core team is a coordinating team for a related group of other teams with all the attributes of a high-performance team. Each member of the core team is a leader – often a role model leader – and each is the accountable leader for the related teams. A core team is important for large strategic projects in which a number of teams must all be coordinated to achieve an overall goal. The core team’s purpose is to ensure the effectiveness of each of the related teams so that the overall goal of the strategic project is achieved. An example is the core team at the very top of a company: the CEO, CFO, CTO, and so on. It includes all of the people who are accountable for developing their own leadership competence and leadership competence of the enterprise and those who are accountable for setting the company’s overall direction to achieve the company’s aspiration. There can be core teams at all levels of the organization: large engineering projects may benefit from the direction of a core team; dealing with strategic customers may require the attention of a core team; and so on. WORKING GROUP

A group is not the same thing as a team. A working group comprises a number of

individual contributors headed by a leader-manager who has a specific goal and who has formed the group to work on meeting that goal. The leader-manager is focused on the goal; the members of the group are focused on their individual contributions, which are coordinated by the leader, often in an authoritative, albeit purposeful manner. As we learned in part two’s discussion of leadership styles, the authoritative style can be useful when a crisis develops or a special situation demands it. The role model leader may sometimes revert to this style from a more collaborative style for a specific purpose. A crisis often demands that the role model leader get specific work done, and that leader may need to recruit people with specific competencies in order to achieve his goals. So he will form a working group, explain the crisis or special situation, and clearly explain his goals as well as his need for help in reaching them. The role model leader should, of course, explain that his newly adopted authoritative style is specific to the crisis at hand and that it does not mark a change in his dominant style. A working group often develops into a team later on when the moment is right. COMPETENCY NETWORK

This is an organizational network dedicated to improving the capabilities of others. Such networks are important components of a high-performance work system. They are designed to improve functional skills across the organization. Role model leaders from all functional areas of the organization form these networks to improve the competencies on which sustainable growth relies. These leaders understand that improvements in value-add demand functional competence. They also understand that high functional competence enhances the organization’s vitality. So within the company, as part of the high-performance work system, finance, marketing, manufacturing, and research – indeed, all the major functional people and leaders – will form and participate in functional-specific competency networks. This concept will extend to the highly specialized functional areas within each of the larger networks. For example, the manufacturing competency network will act as a core team for a maintenance network, a technology network, a safety expertise network, and so on. VIRTUAL COMPANY

This organizational entity was developed in DuPont Canada as an important part of our developmental learning approach and culture. It is an interdependent structuring that complements the competency networking and the highperformance business teaming. It is, in fact, the natural interdependent reconcile of the two. The Virtual Company idea is a further means to generate more

business productivity, improve the quality of the company’s offerings to stakeholders, and enhance the service to those stakeholders. For example, in DuPont Canada we had a number of these organizational processes; one was the Sales and Marketing Virtual Company. It was composed of sales and marketing functional representatives from all the various high-performance business teams. The goal of the Virtual Company was to work across the high-performance business teams in a way that utilized and sought synergies and novel customer solutions. For example, paint technology and products were coupled with packaging films technology and products to envisage a unique offering to “colour” metal parts – and to increase the value-add for the whole company. Developing a High-Performance Culture Culture can be defined as the identity of any organization. It is who the people are and how they work together. The idea of organizational culture as an important aspect of the study of organizations arose in the early 1980s and 1990s. The first time I heard the word related specifically to business organizations was in the early 1990s, when Louis Gerstner, in his book Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? talked at length about the overriding importance of developing a strong culture.1 Gerstner, an engineer, was already a highly successful and experienced leader of organizations by the time he came to IBM to fix a failing company. He is widely credited with saving IBM from collapse. He did so by refocusing the company so that it emphasized IT services rather than the production of mainframes; he also moved the company to embrace the Internet as an innovative business opportunity. But equally important, he launched a successful, broad-based effort to revitalize the company’s culture. In essence, he changed it from a set of disjointed groups and business units into an integrated whole of value-add processes dedicated to a unifying direction. The people at IBM responded to this new direction and learned how to work together. Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary defines culture as follows: “The integrated pattern of human behavior that includes thought, speech, action, artifacts and depends on one’s capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations.” Culture can also be viewed as an organization’s brand or its character. A brand is difficult to define, but when you experience it you know it is special. Coca-Cola is a brand; Disney is a brand; Levi Strauss is a brand. A brand is an identity – the identity of a product, a service, a business. Fundamentally, it is the characteristic that makes something special and memorable. In the past, I have worked with consultants from McKinsey & Company and they would often tell me their definition of culture in their company is “the way we do things around here.” That is a favourite of mine.

To flesh this out, a culture is the attitudes, skills, and behaviours that characterize an organization. It is the set of characteristics that everyone in the organization knows and that outside observers notice most clearly, though perhaps not as clearly as insiders. Every organization of any kind has a distinct culture. Almost everyone would agree that an organization’s culture affects how it does things and how its people behave. Much research has shown that high-performance companies are more likely to have a well-defined, well-understood, and sustainable culture. Organizations like these are stronger because they are able to generate more unity of purpose and behaviour. A strong culture has developed a system of informal behaviours and attitudes, which its people then internalize, adapting them as necessary. This internalized system of attitudes and behaviours tends to align people in their work. The stronger the culture, the more collective action and loyalty exist among its people. Over many, many years, DuPont Canada developed a strong and welldefined culture. In simple terms, the company existed because it expected its people to be innovative and developmental; it also expected them to look out for one another and to show care and concern for all stakeholders. We felt a collective loyalty to the organization; we were “DuPont Canada people,” not engineers, accountants, or some other function. Role model leaders know that a strong organizational culture is important to their work of influencing people to make positive change. They also know they must take into account the organization’s culture when exerting that influence. It can be difficult to change things in a culture that strongly resists change. At the same time, if the culture is strong, the positive impact of change can be greater than if the culture is weak because the people who have been influenced to accept the change are more practised at working together. These people, after all, recognize that their culture is strong, and they value that strength. So once they have been influenced to change, that change is likely to be more sustainable. The leader must understand her organization’s culture and apply that understanding when influencing people to make positive change. Only in this way can she hope to be effective as a change agent. Having grasped the culture, she can work within it, sometimes changing certain aspects of it in order to create a new future state. When engaging an organization in a change process, the role model leader has choices to make: • Introduce change in a direction that does not affect the organization’s culture. • Introduce transformational change that will require major changes in the culture where the change in culture will be integral to the change in direction. • Some hybrid of these two.

Whichever option is chosen, the role model leader must take into account the existing culture when setting the direction for change. Any significant change in culture needs to be for the purpose of achieving a better state – that is, a high(er)-performance work system. That is a core premise of this section. Before discussing the elements of a high-performance culture, the reasons for developing one, and the challenges of doing so, it would be useful to understand the key elements of what I will refer to as the “conventional organizing approach” culture. I say here and will repeat later: the elements of the conventional organizing approach are the base and other elements are added to achieve the culture of the high-performance work system. (These are discussed in subsequent pages of this chapter.) Proximate Environment Under the conventional organizing approach and beyond, a culture develops over time at least partly as a direct result of the outside world’s influence. By “outside world” I mean the proximate environment in which the organization operates. Key elements of this proximate environment are the realities of the market and the industry and (often) the geography in which the organization finds itself. An activist, not-for-profit, service-oriented organization may operate in an inner city, in public schools, or in any number of other well-defined sectors of society. The space in which a Rotary Club operates will be quite different from the one in which the Salvation Army operates, but each organization will be well aware of its proximate environment and how it affects its members’ character and behaviour. Similarly, the people at Google can easily define their culture, and so can the people who work for the Canadian National Railway (CNR). They operate in very different market spaces and have quite different aims – Google might say it is moving knowledge; the CNR might say it is moving materials and people. So the reality of your marketplace, and of the environment in which your business operates, will do much to define the character and behaviour of the people in your organization and often the skills they must have. Each organization, given its proximate environment, must do certain things very well. For any organization, it is the customers or service receivers who define the marketing, selling, inventory, manufacturing, and other functional processes and skills. Customer needs and the character attributes of the customer base are reflected in the organization’s culture. This is easy to understand in reference to a business organization that is a single-product, single-service provider. But what about large, complex organizations that serve the needs of multiple sets of

customers? DuPont Canada was a large company with many diverse business units when I was there. The customer base for the “paint” business was quite different from the customer base for the “synthetic fibres” business. How could people working in each of these business units be culturally defined as DuPont Canada people? In strong but complex organizations, the culture can be defined in terms of character and skills. For example, DuPont Canada can be described culturally as a “marketing technology” and “manufacturing in potentially hazardous environments” company. The multitude of products and services offered by DuPont Canada shared these cultural descriptors. Thus, people in DuPont Canada – and in similar business organizations with diverse business units – can recognize common behaviours and character attributes. Each business unit at DuPont Canada was marketing functionally complex products; some of these products were sourced from potentially hazardous manufacturing processes. This created cultural bonds that in turn affected the behaviour and skill sets of the people. This point, about a coming together of skills and character attributes even in complex organizations, is reflected in DuPont’s tag lines as they have changed over the years: Better Things for Better Living through Chemistry ↓ Better Things for Better Living ↓ A Science Company

The global DuPont Company is about 200 years old. The phrases that its marketing people have developed to describe the company have changed over that time, but DuPont has always been and is to this day described by its character attributes, behaviours, and skills. It is often described by the new products it engineers and by its ability to regularly reinvent itself, its technologies, and its products. This is one statement of culture as seen by the proximate environment. Traditions, Totems, and Taboos In the earliest civilizations there were groups and organizations and leaders. The leaders were often religious ones who developed rituals or “traditions,” often to appease or interpret their gods. And there were always “totems” or instruments that exemplified the myriad events and happenings that could not be understood except as reflections of the behaviour of things they could understand. For example, the indigenous people of North America’s West Coast created and carved hierarchies of understanding and erected them for all to see

and thereby understand. In the earliest civilizations there were also taboos, which were defined as forbidden actions. People could protect themselves by not performing those acts. Taboos included things that should not be eaten or touched or practised because of the harm, often mortal harm, that would result. So it was in the past, and so it is today. Traditions are actions that help bind people together. Totems are symbols, real and perceived, that represent common understanding among people in an organization. Taboos are behaviours and actions that are discouraged and often denied to the people in an organization. Some of the strongest cultures have been defined by their religion. In religious organizations, traditions, totems, and taboos are clearly defined and understood. They often take the form of rules, procedures, dogma, and sanctions. But those same mores also exist in more secular organizations where they help define and strengthen the culture. There are many specific examples of traditions, totems, and taboos that characterize a given organization. Many are the same, but many others are unique to a single organization. Some organizational traditions, totems, and taboos are so strong that they are adopted by employees even when they leave their workplace and go home. It was always well known that you could identify a DuPont employee in the neighbourhood on a Saturday morning in the summer. They were the ones wearing steel-capped boots to cut the lawn. Our safety culture did not stop at the gate of the office or at the manufacturing plant. Traditions, totems, and taboos are visible everywhere in organizations. They include ritual celebrations of team achievements; the elevation of superior role model leaders to hero status in company historical records; and, at the opposite end of the spectrum, the prosecution of leaders who have demonstrated breaches of truth, integrity, ethics – a societal taboo for all to witness (think Enron and WorldCom). In many business organizations there are less visible but still important rituals, totems, and taboos, such as a Friday night beer with your team, employee of the month awards, and annual strategic planning retreats. All of these elements of an organization, though common and often somewhat trivial, when taken as a whole and repeated over months and years, begin to define a culture. Some rituals are much more prominent than others. An example is Greenpeace’s ritual of sending out representatives in conspicuous ways to their perceived adversaries to generate audiences for their point of view. Greenpeace will send small boats to circle whaling vessels and oil tankers, and to send out activists to climb water towers to raise Greenpeace flags and signs. Tactics like these define a culture.

Core Values I have discussed the importance of values when defining both individuals and organizations. I have defined values as the sum of beliefs, philosophy, and principles – those things that are important both to us as individuals and to the organizations to which we belong. They are the things we hold to be true and that do much to guide our actions. The importance, to aspiring leaders, of welldefined values cannot be underestimated. Core values help define the organization’s culture. An organization with a strong culture will have a clear and concise set of core values that everyone in the organization aligns with. I said before when defining values that it is possible for a role model leader to have certain values that are not fully aligned with those established by the organization. But that leader’s core values must not differ. It is inconceivable that a role model leader could have core values that differ from those of the other people in the organization. Core values are those beliefs and principles that rise above other beliefs and principles that might be held; they are values that verge on the mystical, the cultlike. Examples are everywhere. McDonald’s does not just believe in high quality; they insist on it, and they have designed elaborate systems and processes based on that core value. Just ask any employee. It is perhaps simplistic to say that Japan has built its culture around reproducing quality everywhere in its products and in its people’s actions; perhaps this is going too far, but it is the behaviour and attribute that most would recognize as Japanese. The DuPont Company has a set of core values. The best illustration of a DuPont core value raised to the highest level – where it defines the organizational culture – relates to safety. Adherence to the culture of safety and to safe behaviour has defined the DuPont Company since its founder decided to work alongside the people in his original explosives factory. As the senior role model leader, he had decided to eliminate deaths from the unplanned detonation of black powder in his factory. He designed systems and procedures to achieve that end; then he decided that the best way to influence people to change their way of doing things in the factory was to stand beside them and work with them. This transformed the process for manufacturing explosives. The culture of safety continued as the DuPont Company moved from a single hazardous product line to others. The defining of the company’s safety culture went hand in hand with the development of the business. Employees are encouraged to live this safety culture off the job as well. The commitment to safety is also reflected in the products developed in the DuPont laboratories, such as Kevlar® aramid fibre. Kevlar is woven into fabric used to make protective apparel that has saved the lives of thousands of people around the world.2

I was associated with DuPont by observing and living its culture for more than thirty years. From that experience I learned that a strong set of core values helps develop a strong culture and a high-performance company. Over time, strong values grow into core values. Essential to that process is the reinforcement and support provided by a succession of strong leaders. There are symbiotic relations among strong leadership, a strong culture, core values, and high performance. High-Performance Work System versus Conventional Organizing Approach Role model leaders in a business organization strive to move away from a conventional organizing approach towards a more ideal state that I have been referring to as the high-performance work system. All role model leaders pick up that challenge. I have discussed the elements that are important for developing a culture under the conventional organizing approach. Those elements are the proximate environment; the traditions, totems, and taboos; and the core organizational values. The difference between the culture of a high-performance work system and that of a conventional organization is an important additive element: Everyone a Leader. The premise of this book is that everyone can benefit from learning and practising the skills, character attributes, and purposeful behaviours of individual leading. Extending that idea to the environment and design of the business organization will have a powerful influence on its performance: people will understand others better, they will be ready and willing to make change a priority, and they will take every opportunity to change any and all aspects of operations. Whether this involves incremental change or transformational change, they will engage in change processes at each and every level of thought. This does not mean change for the sake of change; it does, however, mean that when opportunities present themselves, people in a high-performance organization will not pass them up. They will influence the people around them to reach for the opportunity to improve the organization. The superordinate target, the aspiration of Everyone a Leader, can serve as the definition of a high-performance culture, for it fosters ongoing positive change. So the difference between the culture of a high-performance work system and that of a conventional organization lies in the additive element, the developmental processes associated with role model leadership. Specifically, it lies in influencing the organization’s people to accept the concept of Everyone a Leader and to accept the strategic priority of everyone developing leadership

competence. Contrast this with the more passive stance of accepting that leadership is important but without doing everything possible to learn it and develop it across the entire organization. The difference between the high-performance organization and a conventional organization is a cultural one that can best be understood by segmenting the description into three parts: • The integrated person • The developmental mindset • The self-managing person THE INTEGRATED PERSON

A culture of high performance encourages people working together to understand one another at all levels of thought. When people know one another and have a full understanding of one another’s capabilities, the organization’s vitality is strengthened. In some business organizations, people are placed in work silos. They are functional people or business people; they are leaders or managers or planners; they are experts in selling or advertising or communications. In such an environment, people tend to be good – sometimes very good – in specific areas. The drawback to this model is that these expert people often do not know much about other things going on around them. And often these experts are not in a position, nor are they encouraged, to develop synergy with other experts to create more value across the business organization. The expert engineer is often consumed by the challenge of problem solving and is focused on this and not much interested in other organizational issues. And in these organizations, leadership is all too often in the hands of very few. The notion of change is in the hands of experts, whom we will refer to as positional heads or leaders. This sort of business organization is not as productive as it could be. More output for a given input of talent is possible when there is cross-functional activity, when all people are involved in leading, and when all people better understand the business and contribute to creating value – not simply knowledge for others to use. In a high-performance work system, by contrast, all individuals – whether they are business people or functional experts – are thinking about leadership and doing work as leaders. This challenges them, makes them more productive, and improves the quality of their individual outputs. More important still, the quality of output is improved when a business organization is fully integrated and develops an entire company of leaders. This principle of Everyone a Leader and everyone a business person and everyone a functional expert was important to the approach taken by DuPont

Canada. This was most evident when observing the work of functional experts who emphasized that aspect of their triad of learned competency. For example, a tax expert at DuPont was well known within and outside the company as a member of various associations and government forums – a true expert. When he realized that he was not only a functional expert but also a business person and a leader who had the opportunity to change things for the better, his contribution to the company rose dramatically. His efforts to minimize tax paid changed to a focus on optimizing the business process. He began to participate with others in redesigning various business processes in the manufacturing plant so that they would be more tax effective. That is, he looked for ways to minimize tax at the start of the business process rather than after the money had been spent in the early stages of making products. He also initiated an interfunctional network to educate manufacturing people in the intricacies of the tax rules and procedures so that they could find ways to optimize the tax regime – an act of role model leading. Let me describe two other examples – more generalized ones – to further illustrate the principle of everyone learning and practising the triad of competencies. An exceptional role model leader near the top of the company hierarchy was engaged in leadership as his primary competency. But he was also an expert in the functional role of purchasing – he was an engineer and the company’s primary buyer for energy as well as the leader of the company’s purchasing function. In addition, he was challenged to transform the infrastructure – the “back room” of the company – through a systematic review and redesign of its component business processes and systems. In all of this work, he engaged many other leaders, functional experts, and business people – all of them integrated thinkers. He enjoyed great success as measured by the waste reduction that occurred. He demonstrated a disciplined, systematic approach to doing work the right way. One more example: One of our talented people was primarily a business leader of one of our business units. He understood how to create value from his manufacturing plants, but he also knew how to realize value through extraordinary customer service and marketing – functional work. He had decided to lead but also to “do business.” He was the resident sales manager for one of his business’s product lines. In addition, he organized a network of other sales managers from other business units to seek other sales opportunities by finding new customers who valued a “basket” of company products. Again, this person was a leader: a business person and a functional expert working to improve the quantity and quality of his contribution. When all people – functional experts and business people – recognize that they are leaders, and when the organization’s culture encourages this integrated approach, they will in a very natural way work together more effectively.

What this means in practice is that every person will dedicate considerable effort to learning the capabilities, skills, character attributes, and purposeful behaviours of individual leading. It also means that the functional capabilities they brought to the organization – as engineers, accountants, technicians – will need to be maintained and improved in the context of their work in the organization. And these same people will need to become knowledgeable about the company’s business. That is, they will need to learn and think about its value-add direction; about the needs of the stakeholders; about the key measures of performance and success; and most important, about Why? How? and What? their work will contribute to the success of the business. All employees will continually learn more and understand their contribution to the leading, functioning, and value-add of the business organization. This effort and philosophy will apply across the high-performance work system, thus increasing the vitality of the whole. Let there be no mistake – as a cultural ideal, this effort applies everywhere in the company, from the offices of the senior executives to the workplaces of the front-line manufacturing workers. The person who maintains the boiler in the factory is a leader: both a functional person and a business person. He is charged with learning the capabilities of leading and thinking about and making positive changes in his area in concert with others; he is expected to be expert in maintaining boilers; he is expected to understand at a certain level of knowledge, and hopefully at a conscious level, the company’s business. Understanding the overall business of the company will allow this expert in boiler maintenance to understand at a functional and emotional level his contribution to the business. This conscious understanding will improve his vitality and the vitality of those around him. He will understand, not just know, the value-add of his work and the work of others in his area. THE DEVELOPMENTAL MINDSET

What do we mean by a developmental mindset? It means that everyone in an organization accepts that ongoing learning is required to become a developmental one. In accepting the goal of becoming a developmental organization, employees are accepting an individual responsibility as well as an organizational one. The individual responsibility is “each person engaged in developing him / herself with the goal of becoming a role model leader.” The culture’s identity, as seen by others, will reflect its employees deliberate efforts to develop leadership skills, character attributes, and behaviours. The organizational strategic responsibility is “to change, to improve, and to renew all operations within the high-performance work system.” A simple example is provided below. Sandra, a mechanical engineer in the manufacturing plant, is responsible for the process of repairing pumps.

Method A: Respond to the need to repair the pump when it fails. Repair the pump and return it to its original pumping specifications and performance. Method B: Develop a preventative maintenance system and seek to minimize the number of pump failures. When a pump fails for whatever reason, return it to its original pumping specifications and performance. Method C: Working alongside other mechanics and engineers at the company, develop new, improved designs for the pumping required in the plant. Continue to work on the design and continue to improve the pumping function with zero failures as the goal. Method D: Engage in a team with other functional people in the plant who are associated with the manufacturing stream that requires pumping. These people could be engineers who understand the places where the pumps are used, or accountants who understand the various cost elements of the pumping process. The objective here is to modify and thereby improve the manufacturing process so as to minimize the energy required to pump – and at the same time, to improve other aspects of the manufacturing process. Method E: Make positive change in the manufacturing process that eliminates the need to pump.

The stages of this example move from the conventional approach through more and more developmental approaches to, finally, a superordinate or aspirational or transformational approach. When I was contemplating writing this book, I wanted to describe what I experienced while working with the people of DuPont Canada. I discussed it with some of my colleagues. One of them was an extraordinary role model leader named Art Heeney. Art is an engineer and he moved through the organization and served in many ways. A number of his roles were in manufacturing. So I asked him to write a story that could help others – specifically, engineers developing themselves as leaders – to better understand the idea of the developmental culture and organization from the perspective of those interested in operations and making things. This is what he wrote: One of the earliest revelations in my manufacturing career was that the way we did the work in our operations actually served to limit the contributions that individuals could make to the business. This sounds rather ludicrous and, at that time, I couldn’t have articulated this thought, but there is ample evidence to support it. I began my career in the role of a maintenance engineer at DuPont Canada’s largest plant in Kingston, Ontario, where close to a thousand employees worked in a complex and demanding environment. The structuring of the work was equally complex, with many specialized skills enshrined in a collective agreement. As an example, the relatively simple task of changing a thermocouple in a hot polymer system required the involvement of four people. A production operator had accountability for managing the process and releasing the equipment to the maintenance organization in a safe state. It was then the work of an insulator, a pipefitter, and an instrument mechanic to complete the assignment. The principle underlying this approach was based on a view that individuals’ capabilities were limited and that success lay in roles and relationships that were rigidly defined and closely managed. This was a very topdown, efficiency-driven approach to work.

I should point out that DuPont Canada was, at that time, a highly successful manufacturing company and that its approach to work systems was hardly unique. It was the way work was organized, and the effectiveness of the approach was seldom questioned. I recall a shop floor conversation I had with a maintenance mechanic regarding the work he was engaged in. He told me, “I check my brain at the gatehouse when I arrive at the plant site.” His role was defined for him, and creative excursions outside these boundaries were forbidden. It was at this point that I began to sense the inherent weakness in this approach to work. We hired talented people, possessing enormous potential, and then imposed work systems that limited not just their contributions but their personal development as well. Our managing processes focused on efficiency and gave little thought to the overall effectiveness of the organization. It fascinated me that these same people could leave the plant at the end of their shift and be transformed into township reeves, fire chiefs, lay preachers, or small businessmen. The human potential to serve our businesses was being squandered. Fortunately, I wasn’t the only one questioning the status quo. DuPont Canada was blessed with enlightened and courageous leaders who saw these flaws and who initiated a search for innovative approaches to work. Throughout my 36-year career with DuPont Canada I was witness to a remarkable transformation. The essence of this transformation was a fervent belief that individuals possess unlimited potential. The recipe for success is in finding the means to develop this potential through the work in which people are engaged. Over the years, as we evolved our work systems to unleash the potential in our organizations, it became apparent that there were a number of underlying attributes of this more developmental organization. The first and perhaps most powerful attribute was an unrelenting focus on customers. And by customers I mean those delightful folks who actually pay for our products and services. In manufacturing we sometimes convince ourselves that our customer is the organization at the next step in our value-add chain. This is a mistake. Wherever possible, personal contact with customers should be designed into the work. An organization that understands the needs of customers will realize the consequences of process variances and take corrective actions far more quickly than a conventional organization. When the customer is truly “felt” in the organization, all of the manufacturing key performance indicators will improve. There is no more potent source of energy for people than a meaningful relationship with the paying customer. We’ve always known this to be true for marketing and sales people. Why should it be any different for the people who actually have their hands on the product as it is being created? Another over-arching attribute was the need for everyone to be involved in the work and for all to work together in serving our customers. Being involved is far more than just getting the job done. It requires each individual to see the larger picture and to appreciate how their work contributes to the overall goal. Of necessity, these are team environments, and the ability to work seamlessly with others is essential. It is also essential for all to possess a willingness to take charge and to act with urgency. The individuals who are closest to the value-add process are in the best position to recognize variances and take the necessary corrective action. Too often we have relied on the hierarchical leader to make the critical decisions. This leads to delays and needless waste. Instead, provide people with the information they need so that they can make the right decisions sooner. Information sharing needs to be a natural part of the work. The old adage that information is power is still true, but leadership must have the courage to yield

this instrument to the team. The pursuit of continuous improvement must be evident in all that we do. These organizations must seek to learn through every experience and strive to get better through each work cycle. Maintaining the status quo is merely a guarantee that you are losing ground as the world around you evolves and your competition gains ground. It’s obvious that the leader’s role must shift dramatically in a developmental organization. This can be unsettling for those who have developed their approaches in a more traditional organization. However, once the transformation has been made, the personal satisfaction gained is enormous. Leaders in these growthful organizations must have the capacity to visualize possibilities in any situation; they must have a passion for the value-add process; and they must possess the capacity to command appropriate behaviour both in themselves and in others. In my mind, an organization that demonstrates these attributes is one within which all individuals see themselves as “business people,” “functional people,” and “leaders.” Their work and their role may shift with the demands placed on them, but in a very real way, they are all leading. THE SELF-MANAGING PERSON

The conventional organization usually has individuals referred to as leaders, managers, and followers. Often, a leader gives instruction to various managers, who give instructions to the followers, who do the work. This is a rigid, hierarchical system. It is not my intent here to discuss at length the differences between leaders and managers in a conventional hierarchical organization – plenty has already been written on that subject.3 I will, though, mention that there have recently been suggestions that managers must change – that they “must be recast as social system architects who enable innovation and collaboration.” That entails a shift towards developmental leadership.4 The vitality of the people in the developmental organization is positively affected by the principle that everyone can learn to be a leader and that everyone can lead or follow in a harmonious manner, seeking to improve the lives of others. In a high-performance work system that is dedicated to the concept of Everyone a Leader, it is possible to change the culture in ways that heighten the organization’s vitality and thereby generate positive change. This is an extension of the individual leading aspect of the developmental leadership model described in part two. Managing oneself, or self-managing or individual managing, is really an aspect of the idea of Everyone a Leader. In a highperformance business organization, titles and positions count for less – everyone takes turns managing, leading, and following, depending on the process at hand. The same person will at one time be leading and at another be following or managing. Natural Work Teams

Individual managing can be accomplished through “natural work teams.” These are high-performance teams that people form in the area of the organization where they work. Two examples: in the regional sales office of a strategic business unit, the people are naturally working together; in a manufacturing plant, the people are producing a given product. Such work teams are the most natural way to accomplish work effectively. They are elemental to a business organization – its building blocks, as it were – and you see them everywhere. Natural work teams are usually found in areas where the people are performing specific tasks, such as in the spinning area for synthetic fibre products. If the people on these teams are learning leadership skills and have functional competency (e.g., at selling things, or manufacturing them), and if they also understand the value-add they are providing to the business organization overall, they are developmental and in a position to self-manage. So there will be no need for a sales manager, no need for an area manufacturing supervisor or foreman. In the above examples, these high-performance teams – these natural work teams – can allocate specific managing tasks to the individuals doing the functional work of selling or manufacturing. The concept of natural work teams can be extended to multifunction situations. Consider a natural work team that has been challenged to manage a strategic business unit. Here in this natural work team we might have a finance person, a manufacturing representative, a marketing representative, a planner, and a human resource expert. Again, it is possible for each of these people to shoulder accountability for an aspect of a business unit manager’s role so that there is no role for a manager per se. On such teams, the individuals are managing themselves, and in turn, this team of individual managers is managing itself. The managing process has been distributed among the people who are doing the functional work. What are these managing tasks? The manager in a conventional organization uses his authority to control people and things and focuses on objectives that reflect his specific managerial role. This “dedicated, positional manager” engages in various managing processes such as planning the team’s activities, providing the team with human and material resources, organizing resources for specific team activities, and exercising control to maintain a steady state in the team’s activities so that certain objectives are met. It is easy to see that in theory, the tasks of managing can be allocated. But for this to work, specific competence must exist in the people and the organization. This competence is the competency of role model leading: Everyone a Leader, everyone a functional expert, everyone a strong-willed and competent business person with a developmental outlook. My experience has been that a natural work team usually does not need a

“positional” manager provided that it is staffed by people who have strong functional competence, who are dedicated to learning and who understand their purpose as well as how that purpose aligns with the aspirations of the organization as a whole. In fact, a natural work team that is populated with people like these will be disadvantaged by a positional manager whose job is to control their activities. The members of a natural work team – which is both a microcosm and a building block of the high-performance work system – can manage themselves. And when all of an organization’s teams operating in this manner are networked effectively – which they are, in a high-performance work system – there is no need for positional managers. But I would add to that: a system also needs to be disciplined and orderly if it is to succeed in managing itself. And there are many possible approaches to ensuring that it is. Over the years, DuPont Canada developed the STAR model (Strategy, Teaming, Actions, and Responsibilities) as part of cultural changes it made over many years. That model describes how to develop teams that will manage themselves effectively in a high-performance organization. In other words, it describes both a process and a system for nurturing natural work teams. It outlines managing processes and responsibilities such as planning, providing human and material resources, and organizing those resources for specific team activities. As positional managers are eliminated from the structure, their tasks are assumed by the members of the natural high-performance team. To carry out those tasks effectively, all the team members need to be competent and they will have to learn the tasks as part of their overall functional role. My experience at practising this concept has been that on many teams, the various individuals migrate towards one managerial task or another. Each person will have a natural interest and capability to “plan,” to be “the logistics person,” to be “interested in people,” to be “interested in things,” and so on. It is often surprisingly easy to divide managerial tasks into functional elements that the various individuals on the team are most interested in doing. Obviously, in some cases, the ones who are naturally interested in “planning,” say, will need to learn that skill offline on their own or do that planning in concert with other “planners” in the larger organization. Example: This example applies the STAR model to a manufacturing environment. The work of managing will be allocated to the various team members who will also have specific functional roles such as operating a machine, maintaining a machine, or improving the machine. These same people will extend their work to include one of the following managing tasks: Directing: The person accountable for the collective process who decides the direction

and the goals of the team, group, or organization and its relationship to the overall mission of the larger organization. Personnel: The person who addresses the team’s human resource capability – for example, this person sources people for the team and matches them to specific tasks. Materials: The person who acquires and handles the materials and information the team requires – for example, raw materials, disposition of outputs, and shipping. Planning: The person who forecasts the team’s actions and outputs and who evaluates its progress towards goals – for example, by aligning monthly customer sales to output. Operations: The person who maintains and renews the various processes, systems, and structures within the team’s purview – for example, by continuously upgrading the team’s activities in order to eliminate waste.

All the members of the natural work team will be allocated to the various points on the STAR model. There will be one or more people at each point depending on the complexity of the team and the organization. They will be allocated based on their interests and capabilities and expected to continuously improve their capabilities at those tasks. A final important feature of the system is networking. Competency in each of the managing processes on the STAR model is enhanced when all the people in the larger organization learn together in a competency networking process on a regular basis – that is, when all the people engaged in human resourcing in each natural work team come together to learn to be better human resource people, to learn the skills, techniques, and procedures to become expert in that role. The great benefit of this individual managing model is that it challenges people to learn more – to learn to be competent in the organization’s various tasks. They will become more experienced, more integrated, more developmental, and more competent. At DuPont Canada, this mode of operation – Everyone a Leader, everyone an individual manager, the use of natural high-performance work teams – was practised in marketing and sales groups, in manufacturing plants, and in various functional units such as accounting and engineering. Always, successes (or failures) could be linked to the presence (or absence) of sufficient leadership competence on the natural work teams. Even when an experiment in individual managing was not entirely successful, the vitality of the organization increased. People were energized by the concept of self-management. Even when it was necessary to take a backward step by introducing a conventional manager to the team, that team did not slide back all the way. Instead, the “replanted” manager became a resource, not the “boss.” In effect, the manager role in these circumstances became that of teaching individual managing and leadership. When the experiment succeeded, the vitality of the people on the team was at a very high level and their performance as a unit was extremely high. Then there is the question of whether individual managing can fail as a result

of “overwork.” How can a person performing a challenging functional role such as engineering or accounting on a natural work team take on additional work such as directing or planning? Having observed these teams, the answer is clear to me: people are energized by the concept of individual managing. I am convinced that people who are vitalized in their work have almost limitless potential to achieve. I have observed firsthand the integrated nature of viability (function), vitality (being), and virtue (will). Leaders who increase their followers’ vitality by extending them opportunities to manage themselves are reinforcing the inherent motivation of employees across the company to do the right things and thereby the virtue of the organization. And, based on my experience, there is a strong correlation of self-managing and the functional (viability) results such as increased revenue and other growth performance measures across the organization.

13 Virtue

Let me continue the story of Stephen and the engineering division. Some time has passed and LargeCo has benefited greatly by transforming itself from a conventional organization into a more developmental, process-oriented, learning one. The company’s other division leaders now recognize Stephen and his engineering division as an “organizational development laboratory.” One day, Stephen asks the president of LargeCo for time on the agenda of his core team. The core team is the organizational entity that the president consults with when developing the company’s various functional and business leaders. As the head of the engineering division, Stephen is a member of that team. It is the third anniversary of the day Stephen joined the company. The week before, he had decided that it was time to introduce a new idea to ensure that LargeCo’s growth momentum will be sustainable. In his presentation to the Business Council (which is what the president calls his core team), Stephen compliments the team on the success they and their people are having at growing people’s competence and organizational effectiveness. LargeCo’s productivity, quality, and customer service measures are all at historic highs, and so is morale within the company. But then he adds: “Growth can only be maintained if the company is sitting on a three-legged stool.” This gets their attention. He continues: “We’re adding tremendous value through our work at meeting the company’s goals and objectives, and we’re working together across the company in innovative, developmental ways. And, importantly, we’re developing a strong developmental culture.” He observes that LargeCo is intensely focused on serving customers and developing people as leaders of positive change. They all should be proud of this, he tells them, but they should be taking action to always do the right things as perceived both by the company’s own people and by society at large – that is, by all stakeholders, broadly defined. This sets the stage for a very rich conversation among the senior leaders of LargeCo. As the meeting wraps up, Stephen, the president, and the other senior leaders agree to create high-performance systems in the company that will be dedicated not only to adding value and working together effectively but also to doing the right things for society and for the company’s other stakeholders. They agree to work together to design some of these systems and to do so quickly. Stephen is leading the company to concentrate on serving all stakeholders, including society at large. This is something that many conventional organizations neglect to do.

If a high-performance work system is to generate sustainable growth, the people in that system must be highly motivated. The drive to increase value-add can only be sustained if the people believe the work being done is the right work – that is, if it is virtuous work. Virtue in this sense can be defined as the willingness of people to strive for superordinate performance. So in this section I describe a number of leadership processes that can help foster a more virtuous organization under these three key headings: • Creating a harmonious relationship with society • Treating people fairly • Making decisions to do the right things Creating a Harmonious Relationship with Society Much has been written about business organizations serving society’s needs in addition to those of customers, employers, and shareholders. Over the years, this idea has been gaining acceptance as a legitimate and important criterion for the very best ethical business organizations. The reason to serve and support neighbouring communities is to avoid controversy and unrest. This is often called public relations, but just as often, it reflects genuine concern for one’s neighbours. Of course, service organizations such as the Red Cross, the United Way, national engineering societies, and so on are business organizations in their own right and have specific value-add mandates to serve society. By definition, these kinds of organizations are dedicated to serving their society at a harmonious level of shared values. Their visions, strategies, missions, and actions are aligned to achieve shared purpose with specific stakeholders. Service organizations are more similar to profit-oriented businesses than many of them want to admit. After all, they meet the needs of their communities and seek support from donors, who are really customers. They gather revenue by making value propositions to potential donors. They invest a great deal of effort in advertising and marketing in order to secure their donors’ loyalty to their cause. So we can say that all business organizations, be they profitoriented or not-for-profit, should be motivated (and some naturally are) to develop harmonious relations with society. Most profit-oriented organizations demonstrate their commitment to serving society by dedicating money and human resources to that end. That is, they donate to communities and causes where social needs have been identified. Sometimes these actions are of sufficient magnitude that real emotional attachments develop between certain “causes” and the business organization. That is most often a direct result of individual leaders in the organization who are building support for specific stakeholder communities within their

organizations. For example, a senior leader in engineering may place a high value on giving to a specific cause such as Habitat for Humanity. That leader will dedicate personal energy to developing support within the various organizations in his firm for that cause. In this way loyalty can develop between the business and the target community. In the high-performance work system of the developmental organization, creating harmony with society is deeper than individual leaders and their societal cause. Creating harmony between the business and society strengthens the virtue of a high-performance work system. Creating harmony, in other words, is another way of doing the right thing – in this case, the right thing as seen by societal stakeholders as well as by specific society members, employees, owners, and customers. When employees recognize that their organization is dedicated to improving the lives of people everywhere, they will be influenced to help improve their organization. They will be motivated to work diligently towards serving its needs as defined by their leaders. In the same way, customers will want to be associated with the business, which they perceive as working to improve the lives of people everywhere. There is a systematic way of thinking about harmonious relationships between business organizations and society. In part one, a framework fully describing the capability of a person was proposed: function (what we do), being (how we do things), and will (why we are motivated to do things). This same framework designed for individuals can be extended to help us understand the capabilities of organizations as they do work. A business organization and society and the activities of each will be judged to be in harmony when their function, being, and will are aligned. At a functional level, society must perceive and understand that the products and services provided by a business are dedicated to improving the lives of people everywhere. For example, an automobile manufacturer will move towards this virtuous objective by improving the safety of its products without governments and public opinion forcing it to do so. Here, the key to aligning business with society is for the company to be perceived as doing the right things for the right reasons. The alignment of “being” is a task of aligning emotions and spirit. This, at a societal level, amounts to a recognition that the business’s actions are energizing to all people. The alignment of being is the alignment of the collective character of society with the character attributes of the business organization. If a business shows respect, honesty, cooperation, and genuine care and concern for its community, that community will accord that business the same. To achieve harmonious relations, a high-performance business organization needs to develop consistent communications with society. This means telling society the truth about its actions inside and outside its own boundaries. When a

company makes mistakes, it must admit them publicly, tell the community how it will repair them, and then repair them in a way that indicates the mistake will not be repeated. The alignment of will between the high-performance work system and society at large is a result of the expenditure of large amounts of energy to create this broad base of understanding. It is the development of aligned operational philosophies. The philosophy that all societies everywhere in the world hold to be true transcends culture, religion, economics, and just about everything else. It is simply this: “Improve the lives of people.” All developmental organizations must adopt this operating philosophy. They must then develop processes to actualize that philosophy. For example, engineers and scientists from a local business organization may take time to engage with students to help them develop understanding and appreciation for engineering and science. Treating People Fairly An organization that recognizes the need to do the right thing as it conducts its business will be perceived by its people as treating them fairly. Fairness is a sweeping sort of word. People will say “I very much enjoy my work – it is tough and challenging, but they treat me fairly.” People often say that “fairness” is the reason why they exert enormous effort to serve the goals of the organization. Leading a high-performance work system is largely about influencing people to do extraordinary things, to change things for the better. Individuals will engage with high energy in a high-performance work system when they perceive they are being treated fairly. Fairness is a broad term that encompasses the extrinsic and the intrinsic, that has both material components and social and emotional ones. Fairness, like leadership, cannot be defined precisely, but it doesn’t really have to be – all of us recognize when we are being treated fairly. Below I describe some important processes based on beliefs and principles that are part of my vision of a highperformance work system’s ethic. They all relate to this principle: The high-performance developmental organization treats its people fairly.

In an article in the June 2010 issue of the Harvard Business Review, author Tony Schwartz cites a 2007 Towers–Perrin study.1 That study, which was based on a survey of 90,000 employees of organizations worldwide, found that only 21 per cent felt fully engaged at work and that nearly 40 per cent were disenchanted or disengaged. Furthermore, those companies that had high levels of engagement reported a 19 per cent increase in operating income; those with low levels of engagement reported a 33 per cent decrease in operating income. There are many causes of disengagement, so perhaps that study can only help

convince us of the importance of treating employees in a manner they perceive as fair. In the following pages I describe a number of critically important factors related to treating an organization’s people fairly. It is vital to a highperformance work system that all of these be addressed. There are others, but the five factors below reflect the essence of my beliefs and experience. 1. Fair Compensation Treating people fairly is often viewed merely in terms of providing them with competitive remuneration – the industry, the region where they live, the going market rate for their skills, and so on. Pay is much like price. It is a given that the price of the product you are marketing must be perceived by customers as fair. When a customer complains about price, the role model leader in the selling organization almost always finds that the real complaint (albeit unstated) is poor quality or poor customer service – in other words, a lack of something else, not always an unfair price. It is easy to price fairly; it is harder to determine and address those other unstated issues. That is the challenge that must be addressed by the role model leaders of a virtuous, vital, and viable high-performance work system. The same logic can be extended to paying people fairly. Paying fairly is not something to be debated – it is obviously an important component of the highperformance work system. So it will be taken as a given in this book. 2. The Right Organizational Values An organization’s values are those things it holds to be true. They are the beliefs, philosophy, and principles that guide its actions. They are determined in a variety of ways for the purpose of serving the organization’s needs. There are huge differences in the values that different business organizations hold as their guides to setting goals. Most companies, though, have statements that in some way reference the value they place on people: “Care and concern for people,” “Treat people fairly,” “Pay people well,” and so on. And most companies in their statements also refer to serving society: “Do no harm to the environment,” “Serve societal needs,” “Donate X percent of revenue to local communities,” “Support local charity Y,” and so on. And, of course, these statements often refer to financial beliefs and principles: “Excellence,” “Innovation,” “Grow the business at rates greater than GDP,” and so on. We as individuals and as employees will have our own sets of beliefs and principles that determine our goals. These will tend to be very specific to who we are, to how we think about things, and to our history, among other factors. Goals such as “I want to retire at fifty-five,” “I want to be perceived as socially

responsible,” “I want to be happy,” and “My family is most important.” So regrettably, there are often – I should say, there are almost always – differences in goals between the employee and the business organization, as well as among employees. The organization’s people can choose to ignore those differences, or they can live with them, or they can question the enterprise’s values and goals. Reconciling differences in values in positive ways by engaging employees in thoughtful conversation and discussion to reach agreement on a set of core values is one way to strengthen the virtue of the business organization. Showing respect for employees’ values can be another powerful way of highlighting that the organization’s beliefs are important to it and that its people should try to find common ground between their beliefs and those of the organization. It would be even more powerful to say that the business is open to changing what it stands for based on its employees’ beliefs. The nature of values is such that there is no better way than that to align the behaviour of the entire business organization with that of its individual employees. This approach holds the potential for a business to relate to its employees at an ethical level. When that potential is there, the “human beingness” of the organization is converging with that of the individual employees and the business organization is becoming more virtuous and – it follows – more of a high-performance work system. 3. Asking Individuals to Grow beyond Their Expectations In a high-performance work system, respect for individuals is an important aspect of treating them fairly. One way of expressing this respect is by expecting them to exceed expectations; to grow and perform beyond the boundaries of their individual work objectives; to exceed the boundaries established for them by the organization; and to do all of those things often. In the same way, the individual in a developmental high-performance work system should perceive the enterprise as often going beyond the expected service to its employees; as doing more than is necessary to inspire employees’ loyalty; and as making every possible effort to achieve a harmonious relationship. To expect people to exceed their normal performance and achieve extraordinary things is to respect and admire them as leaders. And a highperformance work system will find ways to celebrate extraordinary individual performance that exceeds expectations. The high-performance work systems I have known first-hand embrace the concept of personal developmental objectives. Grow yourself as you grow the business. This process involves asking individuals to think about and do work that challenges them in order to exceed expectations in an arena where they have capabilities that have not been fully developed. They then perform work that benefits the organization greatly and at the same time grows their capabilities.

These objectives, having been met, exceed the expectations that the each of these individuals originally held. Say, for example, that a research engineer working on a new product for a new market has challenging objectives. But this person also has a personal development objective, which is, that she will do this work within a much shorter time frame by influencing others, inside and outside the company, to participate on a special team of experts; and she has another personal development objective, which is to reach an understanding with a valued customer that will allow her to use its facilities to test various products before commercialization (the point being to allow faster and more cost-effective, internal development of candidate products, albeit with some risk and cost to the customer). There is no greater inspiration for an employee than the achievement of individual-directed high-performance goals. Role model leaders need to challenge people to develop their capabilities by setting and meeting highperformance work objectives. 4. Asking People to Be Accountable A virtuous business organization will have well-defined and developed accountability processes for individuals, groups and teams, and the organization as a whole. At each of the stages of any change process designed to improve the organization’s viability, clear accountability must be established. This is the right thing to do; it is also the fair thing to do. People cannot do their best when they are uncertain of their accountability and that of their fellow employees. Furthermore, when everyone understands their accountability and understands that the company has strong procedures for ensuring it, this can significantly improve the results of a change process. Accountability brings structure, focus, and clarity to individuals’ actions. Providing all three is necessary to role model leadership. Role model leaders understand the critical balance between freedom and order when leading people in a change process. They understand that without an emphasis on accountability, and without mechanisms to ensure it, there can be no freedom. Orderly processes that lead to predictable results provide space and time for thinking and innovation. Without order, there can be no freedom. If a business had to invent a process for implementing a project each time it launched one, that business would be consumed by those processes and its people would have neither the freedom nor the time to engage in creative thinking to achieve extraordinary innovation. There is a simple framework that leaders can use to organize people in a work process with defined “accountabilities” so that there is no confusion about

their roles. It is called the R•A•C•I framework (or A•R•C•I, as I will call it here): Accountability. Which specific individual in the organization and work A process will be held to account for the outcome of a given action or • objective? R Responsibility. Which of the individuals will collaborate on given action(s)? • Consult. Which select individuals should be consulted about the action(s) or C objective(s) so that the people in the work project will benefit from that • consultation? Inform. Which select individuals need to be informed about actions and / or I the outcomes of actions so that the accountable and responsible people will • benefit from that information transfer? The people in the work project, having been influenced and / or directed to assume one of the above A•R•C•I roles, are better able to understand their place in an accountability matrix. Using this framework, the project work team can create an orderly approach to communicating among themselves and with others. This will in turn create for them the opportunity to develop the required innovative approaches to their action plans without fear of misunderstandings and confusion. It will also be viewed as fair by all. Let’s expand on this idea of accountability with regard to taking action. Two topics in particular will underscore the importance of accountability: • Goals and objectives • Measurement of actions and results First, every strategic work or project group (or subgroup) needs a set of agreed goals, as well as objectives for each individual and for the whole group. The distinction between a goal and an objective can sometimes be ignored, but in the spirit of being disciplined and systematic, let’s make that distinction. A goal is a more idealized measure of a projected accomplishment, the measure of perfection achievable in a given time frame. An objective is specific and is the expected measurable accomplishment of a value-add step. So if the strategic project is designed to reduce the number of injuries in a manufacturing operation, then a goal might be to “reduce the injury frequency this year to the lowest in the past decade,” whereas the objective might be to “reduce injury frequency this year by 20 per cent over last year.” For the sake of accountability, it is extremely important for role model

leaders to measure outcomes. That is, the goals and objectives that define the work to be done must be accompanied by specific promises to deliver specific results. Every member of the strategic project team will have his or her performance measured relative to the goals and objectives. These measurements can be absolutes, ranges, financial ratios, or something else, as long as they are specific. They need to be numeric whenever possible so that success can be quantified. Earlier in this book, I urged aspiring leaders to focus on productivity, quality, and stakeholder service measures of performance. Measurement is a precursor to inspiration and credibility. Role model leaders seek to inspire those who would be led. They help followers set aggressive but doable goals. They then work with their people to help them accomplish those goals. Role model leaders in so doing will have inspired their people to believe they can accomplish much; moreover, those people will perceive as fair the demands being placed on them. When the measurable goals have been achieved, the role model leaders’ credibility and trustworthiness will have been enhanced. Role model leaders who set the direction for change, challenge their people to be accountable, help them set aggressive implementation plans and goals, and help them achieve measurable goals, will have grown their “emotional bank account” with their followers and will be perceived as influential and inspirational leaders. Finally, it is important that leaders regularly review the actions and results of the various groups, teams, and individuals working on strategic projects and subprojects. These “operational reviews” are opportunities for the leaders and the people in the work unit or project to communicate, to learn, and to receive feedback on their actions and results. Each operational review has an expected result, one that is often a new direction. And importantly, each one meets the needs of the individuals who are seeking feedback on the importance of their contributions. 5. Linking People’s Work with Their Lives The target here is to have individuals working with high energy and spirit to add value to a high-performance work system. Role model leaders influence their employees to dedicate that mental and emotional energy to their work. The employees will perceive this as fair when they sense that the organization understands that they have a life outside the organization – a life, moreover, with its own values. So a high-performance work system will develop ways to honour that reality. This is yet another virtue that the organization needs to develop. A conventional organization acknowledges its employees’ lives outside the organization by providing “benefits.” It makes these contributions in the form of

health and insurance plans, vacation time, memberships in recreational clubs, and so on. High-performance work systems fully acknowledge that people need time and energy for personal needs. They provide benefits that add value for the business and for the employee. These benefits establish a more seamless boundary between work and life, and they often allow individuals to develop capability and competence. Some examples: • Providing new technology – updating home personal computers, PDAs, and so on. • Providing opportunities, funding, and time for employees to attend university, college, and various courses where new capabilities can be learned. These need not be related to roles within the company. • Making a commitment to promote from within the organization rather than from outside the organization. The role model leader will seek many different approaches to providing opportunities for reciprocal maintenance between the employee and the business organization. Innovative ways to do “the right thing” as perceived by individuals often link personal values with organizational ones. Put another way, a high-performance work system links employees’ goals to the organization’s future-state goals. By contrast, a conventional organization offers benefits that are linked to short-term, controlling goals. Making Decisions to Do the Right Thing It is not always easy to influence a business organization to make the right decisions. Courageous decision making is required in order to generate successful business outcomes. Sean is an engineer who founded a company that makes dyes for the textile industry. This is a tough business because most textiles in Sean’s market are imported from developing countries. The company’s R&D people have developed a much less costly product called Product X that has the potential to make the company more competitive and, more importantly, that will allow it to sell this dye to its textile customers at a much lower price which will improve the customer’s competitive situation as it relates to offshore suppliers. There is one major problem: the new dye is hazardous to manufacture and produces a by-product that could damage the environment if it got into the air or water outside the plant. The plant manager and R&D chemists call a meeting with the company’s senior leaders, including Sean. What will the company do? Will it produce the new product after finishing the last amount of R&D, potentially saving its customers from closure because of relentless offshore competition? Or will it stop the R&D on this new product, for it has no more

money in the budget for the additional work required to learn how to make it safe? Other projects are progressing and are using the available funding. At the meeting, the R&D and manufacturing people insist that this new product would generate more profits and that the shareholders would be very pleased. The customers would be pleased as well, in that the company would be materially improving its business by offering them lower prices. The company in turn would generate more volume from these customers, which in terms of profits would more than compensate for the lower prices. The company’s employees would be pleased because their jobs would be protected. There would, after all, be more volume and more work, and no threat of lost jobs (which will occur if their customers lose the battle against offshore competition). Also, the employees are willing to accept and believe they are able to safely reduce the potential added risk of producing this new product. It is time for Sean, the CEO, to speak. He is an admired role model leader who has provided the company with inspirational leadership for many years. He asks the group to assess the impact on the communities around the plant and beyond. He also asks them to understand the need for the company to make right decisions for all stakeholders as well as continue to create a virtuous highperformance work system, not just one that is viable and vital. They all recognize the potential for harm to society at large. He asks the group to find cost savings in the R&D budget by postponing other promising R&D projects, and to reallocate costs to further R&D on product X. And when the revitalized R&D work yields an equally good product, but one with no negative impact on the environment or on employee safety, then it will be possible to price this product somewhat higher than first planned and direct the additional profits towards the R&D projects that have been postponed. The customer will be pleased, even with the somewhat higher price, which is still lower than that of the legacy product. The shareholders will be satisfied because of the higher profits even if they are not as high as those of the potentially polluting product. The employees will be pleased that the company has demonstrated that it values their safety. And, finally, society will be pleased because of the potential growth of the company and also because the company will be telling the communities their products are safe and non-polluting. Sean made a courageous decision. That is what role model leaders do in organizations that strive to develop high-performance work processes and systems. It was an innovative reconcile of opposing views (chapter 5) as well as a courageous statement that all stakeholders need to be satisfied as part of the design and philosophy of the high-performance work system. The generic measures of performance for leading a high-performance business organization to achieve sustainable growth were introduced in chapter 9. These were high productivity. high quality, and exceptional service to stakeholders. The outputs of decisions can be thought about in terms of these

defining process measures. In our example, Sean was very conscious of the need to serve all stakeholders. This formed the basis of his strategy for dealing with the issue facing the organization. He and his organization deliberately chose to protect the value-add by redirecting expensive R&D resources to preserve the profitability of the customer organizations as well as those of his company. And the quality of the decisions made was measured in terms of adherence to his organizational values as a role model leader for protecting the environment, safety, and health of the people both within and outside the organization. Productivity of the Decision-Making Process The decision-making processes of individuals and organizations are of considerable interest. We all want to make decisions as quickly as possible, and many people think that great leaders “just do it” – that is, they make decisions almost instantly when faced with issues, crises, and opportunities. Then others believe that decisions are best made through broad and deep consultation and discussion, argument, and confirming measures. These two views represent the extreme poles of how leaders make decisions to do the right things for the business organization and themselves. Leadership decisions, like all decisions, are made in different ways. For many years people have categorized decisions with reference to the thinking they entail, broadly speaking, as right-brain or left-brain thinking. Modern neuroscience has developed quite a different picture anatomically, but in practice, the essential model still holds: people make decisions in two distinct ways, better described as logical and intuitive. Logical ways utilize an analytical thinking process based on reason- or fact-based analysis; intuitive ways utilize learnings from actions and experience that are stored in emotional centres in the brain. This is an enormously simplified description of the differences but will be useful for this discussion. MAKING DECISIONS IN A LOGICAL MANNER

A wide body of thought suggests that the key to good and right decision making is exceptional planning. In other words, we can logically analyse a situation and then take all that information – almost always heavily weighted to past events – and determine the best decisions. And since those decisions have been systematically planned, the implementation will be efficient and effective. Herbert Simon devoted a lifetime to the study of rational decision making. He also pioneered concepts of computer-aided artificial intelligence. In his book Administrative Behavior,2 he describes his belief that as individuals or organizations acquire more information and knowledge, it is possible for them to make better decisions. This is the essence of rational or analytical decision

making. Decision tree models – which are still popular – are all about comparing and organizing options and the outcomes of various decisions. They allow us to decide among several plans. They generate a visual representation of the various probabilities as well as the risk / reward outcomes of each option. The decision tree method leads systematically to a preferred plan of action as well as to a decision to move in that direction. There are many other such models. All of them use a variety of premises to sort and sift options and reach conclusions that lead to preferred action plans. Some of these alternative models are easily found in the literature. These methods entail logical processes and apply analysis as the overriding feature when considering what the right decision is at a given point in time. The idea here is that the best route to a decision is through facts and analysis; the best results will then be reached. In their book, The New Rational Manager, Kepner and Tregoe3 propose logical methods to deal with problem solving and decision analysis based on logic, procedure and disciplined methods. This book is a valuable summary of the rational approach to deciding how and what to do when confronted with difficult decisions and problems. The appeal of the logical approach to decision making is that it is inherently thoughtful, orderly, and complete. Most people would characterize scientists and engineers as logical decision makers. The scientific method involves making a hypothesis, then conducting experiments to test that hypothesis, then adjusting it based on the experiment’s results, and so on until a satisfactory conclusion is reached. All of this requires a series of logical, analytical steps. An engineer is also thought of as primarily a logical decision maker, but the engineering process allows for more intuition, and engineering design can indeed have emotional elements. The best role model leaders in many of the best institutions and organizations around the world influence people to utilize and refine their tools for logical decision making, and thereby achieve excellent results – that is, right and virtuous decisions. Yet logical approaches to decision making take quite a bit of time and require additional resources. Diligent leaders and managers will often do too much analysis. And, even after significant effort, it is sometimes found later that the decisions were not particularly good ones. That is because when changes are being made, there are always unanswered questions and murky variables. The potential consequences cannot be sufficiently clear. Do we know enough about the impact of the change on customers or on the environment? Many ambiguities arise when an organization is setting a new direction, and even more of them arise when that direction is being implemented. This is where highly skilled role model leadership is a necessity. Role

model leaders who are experienced, courageous, and trustworthy will say: “We have all the analysis we need. Now is the time to stop the analysis and make our decision.” MAKING DECISIONS IN AN INTUITIVE MANNER

Intuition relies on the mind of each individual. By “mind,” I mean the repository of learning, experience, and past analysis that is available to the one who is making the decision. The smallest child makes decisions intuitively. Often those decisions are bad ones, and parents are there to prevent the consequences: they prevent falls; they remove foreign objects from the mouth; they help the child learn from experience before any harm befalls him or her. World-class athletes, too, rely on intuition and “muscle memory” to throw a strike, sink a long putt, or sidestep a row of 300-pound defenders. These athletes make their decisions intuitively from a large inventory of experience they have gained during practice. In the airline industry from the 1940s to the late 1980s, there was considerable evidence that pilot error was contributing to many crashes. Since the 1990s, though, pilot error has contributed very little to disastrous failures in commercial flying. In fact, the airline industry today is judged to be the “poster child” for those who practise six sigma technology. We are much safer in an airplane than we are driving to the airport. What caused this seemingly miraculous change? It was accomplished by a change in culture and leadership style. The leader or pilot in a commercial aircraft in the 1950s was an authoritarian – the absolute ruler in the cockpit. The pilot made all decisions unilaterally, even in an emergency. Then role model leaders decided that changes had to be made. Flight simulators were developed, and pilots were required to take training in decision making. They were subjected to situations that tested their abilities in many different dangerous situations, and they were held accountable for learning to resolve those situations safely. They were scored on tests, and they were offered incentives to get better in the simulator. In addition, the culture in the cockpit was changed so that pilots were strongly encouraged to work together with the rest of the airliner crew – to ask for advice in an emergency, to communicate constantly with them even during routine take-offs and landings. The same systems and measurements previously only available to the pilot were now independently available to the rest of the cockpit crew. All of this working together increased the vitality of the cockpit organization, which contributed to a safer trip for everyone – this was a more virtuous outcome. These changes, directed and implemented by role model leaders, have resulted in an amazing improvement in the lives of all the stakeholders in the airline industry. Intuitive decisions are sourced in different ways and perhaps in different

parts of the brain than logical ones. Modern neuroscience has made huge advances in understanding how the brain works. These new understandings tell us that, anatomically, the right / left differences are actually more front / back. However, brain anatomy and functioning is not the subject of this book. Suffice to say that our brains make intuitive decisions in “emotion” centres in the brain and logical decisions in separate “reason” centres, with quite different results. Emotional or intuitive decisions are made on the basis of a “brain experience”: the brain learns from failures that have been corrected or successes that have been achieved. This is how children learn from their parents to make rapid decisions in everyday life, such as whether to run or walk and how to pronounce words. It is also how a pilot in an airliner today can quickly correct a routine landing that has gone wrong because of landing-gear failure. That pilot has practised this situation again and again in a simulator. The brain, when asked, makes a quick emotional or feeling decision based on what it has learned. It also has an enormous capacity to store and manage information and experience – to process it so that it can be used for intuitive decision making. This is important: the brain has a huge capacity to store and manage experience and learning, which in turn can be used to make productive decisions. Patterns of productive thought and behaviour are important to recognize when decisions are being contemplated. Both intuition and logic are linked to all decisions, albeit in different proportions. The findings of modern neuroscience, when applied to leaders’ decision making, can be extremely helpful in the development of a high-performance work system.4 The following are guidelines, patterns, and “rules of thumb” that role model leaders need to consider when making right decisions: • Difficult decisions, when there are a limited number of variables (say around five), yield to a logical approach – that is, analysis and planning. Example: A decision about an important raw material for any company when the three variables are cost, quality, and customer service and when there are a large number of potential suppliers. This decision calls for a matrix of the three variables for each of the suppliers, as well as a relative rating system of some kind to measure the performance of each supplier versus the three elements. • Decisions involving complex situations with many variables that could significantly affect the potential outcome, with enormous repercussions for the business, call for intuitive decision making. Example: A long-standing research project that could materially change the direction of the company has many different paths at this point. Each is very different; each has its proponents in the organization; each will cost a lot of money to continue; and once a decision is reached, it cannot be reversed. In this situation, logical analysis of the many variables will very often result in more questions than

answers. Some analysis that fills the gaps in the experience of competent role model leaders is often useful, but it is best that this decision be made intuitively – perhaps by a small panel of experienced and highly competent role model leaders with pertinent experience who can share their conclusions as they relate to the decision being contemplated. They will have formed their own conclusions based on their store of similar experiences, past decisions made, and results obtained. In other words, here it is best to call on the learned capabilities of these leaders. • Complex situations like the one described above, where it is possible to break down the decision making into segments, call for some degree of intuition. Example: A proposed merger and acquisition is contemplated, and a large number of potential partners are available. The first decision might involve a logical decision-making process to reduce the number of partners to a handful. At that point, it would likely be advisable to summon some experienced role model leaders to make decisions intuitively, because of the large number of variables involved in the final choice. In a situation as complex as this, decision “gates” can be used. At the first gate, a few selected variables are analysed; after that, a more “emotional” final decision is made by a select group of role model leaders, reflecting the fact that too many variables cannot be quantified. This approach often benefits from teams, with each team dedicated to a specific element of the decision that is being made. Quality of the Decision-Making Process Decision making in a high-performance work system goes beyond making good decisions in a productive manner. In the high-performance work system, the decisions need to be right, not just good, and not just quick. In the previous section I described how decisions can be made productively. Both rational, logical ways and emotional, intuitive ways are appropriate in different situations. But decisions also need to be of high quality and effective. The impact of a high-quality “right” and “good” decision is most important for customers and employees. Mark is a production engineer in the manufacturing operation of an auto parts company. He is the leader of a team of engineers that has been assigned the task of redesigning the air conditioning system for a major model of a customer’s line of trucks. He is scheduled to make a presentation to other team leaders working on other aspects of the transformational work (e.g., drive system, ignition system, entertainment systems) that the company is doing on this truck model. During the presentation, Mark describes a series of decisions he and his team made to advance their work, such as hiring (a year ago) several engineers who are experts in automotive air conditioning technology and systems. Also during

the presentation, Mark is surprised by a barrage of complaints from the other systems engineers that the people he has hired are not communicating with the engineers in their groups; they sometimes “stretch the truth” in technical sessions to inflate their own egos, and they do not collaborate in priority-setting sessions when it is being decided how to share necessary resources from the marketing and purchasing groups. As a result of all this, the overall project is falling behind in cost and schedule and many engineers are refusing to work with Mark’s new people. They go on to say that they are making decisions in their project teams without clearly understanding what is happening on the air conditioning team. As a consequence, the overall project is suffering from a lack of productive and high-quality decisions, and customers are going to suffer – indeed, are already suffering. What is happening to Mark is the same as what happens in many places in many organizations: capable, well-meaning people are reaching decisions that result in wasteful outcomes or in outcomes that are not totally “right,” “positive,” and “high quality.” When this happens, organizations need to go back and rework their decisions for their own benefit and the benefit of customers. The first step in developing high-performance work systems that result in a preponderance of right, positive, and high-quality decisions is to ensure that all people in the organization are developing themselves (see part two) as role model leaders. This will go a long way to ensuring that the skills, character attributes, and behaviours of all people are aligned and that everyone is prepared to effectively participate in reaching “right” decisions. Mark saw that there was not enough effective communication or respect for others, nor did the new people place enough value in purposeful behaviour and cross-project collaboration, compared to the more experienced engineers. He surmised that he needed to engage the new employees in the development of their leadership capabilities so that they had the same competency as the rest of the engineers in the organization. All skills, character attributes, and behaviours (see part two) are important, but Mark saw that the overriding priority in the situation he faced, if he was to improve the ability of his new engineers and turn them into high-quality decision makers, was to instil in them the character attribute of honesty. In an organization determined to make right and virtuous decisions, all people must be truthful with one another. This is fundamental. Decisions can be made logically or intuitively, but all the people involved in them must be truthful with one another so that those decisions are made in an honest manner. Then there is the customer, who expects the decisions reached within supplier organizations to be made honestly. Customers must be able to rely on their suppliers to make high-quality decisions on their behalf. Honesty in this case is the collective truths of all the people in the organization, truths that can

be referred to collectively as integrity. Ethical Decision Making I have noted that honesty is the key determinant in quality decision making. In terms of relations between the organization and the customer, the measure of honesty is integrity. The customer expects the business organization to be honest in all it says and does; when that is the case, the latter’s decisions will be of high quality. The relationship between the organization’s high-performance work systems and society is also based on honesty. Here the decisions are expected to be ethical. That is honesty at the level of principle (see chapter 6). Society at large expects – and in fact demands – that high-performance business organizations perform and make decisions ethically, and it will punish and even terminate the existence of those organizations that do not do so. Leader-engineers and leader-scientists have a special responsibility to society to provide direction, to act, and to get results in an ethical manner – in other words, to make decisions to do the right things. In today’s world of rapid technological advances – a world relying more and more on technology – leaders-engineers have a vital decision-making role to play. Leader-engineers influence people to make positive change – to make things better. The developmental leadership model described in this book encourages everyone to learn and develop the capability to lead organizations to achieve continuous improvement and change in harmony with all stakeholders, including society. Every leader should be prepared to influence organizational strategies and actions to give life to the following general principles. Role model leaderengineers should be prepared to make decisions and influence the decisions made by others in the organization who are guided by these ethical standards. 1. In all project objectives in the organization, give priority to ensuring public safety. 2. Engage in work in the organization that does no harm to individuals or the environment. 3. Influence business organizations’ strategies to create sustainable growth that improves the lives of people. The national and regional engineering societies and groups that license engineers and so on, cover the same ground as described here, often going beyond, in delineating principles for engineering and scientific professionals to follow. All of these principles are clear and can provide guidance to the actions of leader-engineers and leader-scientists as they develop and learn to improve

the lives of people through ethical decision making.

Epilogue

This book has described a unique model for learning about the processes for leading an organization. It is based on the premise that it is essential for an individual to develop certain skills, character attributes, and purposeful behaviours as a precursor to becoming competent in the work of leading an organization. It takes competent role model leaders to create admirable highperformance work systems. Perhaps the most important feature of the learning framework that dominates this book is the aspiration for the individual and organizational work required. That aspiration is provided by the challenge of accepting and seeking two theoretical states of perfection called Everyone a Leader and the highperformance business organization. Again, the first is the precursor of the second. The acceptance of scientific theory and then doing work to prove and “live out” that theory is a common activity in the world of science and engineering. These theoretical states of perfection provide the target for much innovation and scientific positive change. It is no different in our leading and leadership model. The superordinate potential as described by the high-performance business organization will be evidenced by perfect harmony with stakeholders; by no waste in work processes; and by all people continuously developing as competent role model leaders and beyond. This creative tension between the belief in the superordinate target of the high-performance business organization and work dedicated to the development of practical outcomes called high-performance work systems is the domain of the role model leaders everywhere in the organization. This is a developmental concept – the target or theory that provides the aspiration for ongoing development of high(er)-performance work systems. The other creative tension is the one between the superordinate target of Everyone a Leader providing aspiration for the active, energetic development of practical outcomes and the creation of large numbers of role model leaders continuously improving their leadership competence. The culture created as a result of these positive tensions will be characterized by high levels of thinking, learning, changing things for the better. Again, there is a close analogy here with the functional work of inspired engineers and scientists. A practical key to successful outcomes from these creative tensions is the rapid ongoing development of a body of role model leaders. That is, having

developmental work processes across the business organization dedicated to learning and producing competent leaders. Some people will be motivated to dedicate themselves to rapidly become the very best leaders; others will develop more slowly according to their own needs and wants; others will want to dedicate more of their time and capacity to learning how to be more competent in their other functional roles (i.e., engineering, marketing, accounting, and so on) and will only dedicate some of their effort towards learning how to be competent as a leader. The important point is that the organization of people will evolve their capabilities in different ways, according to different timetables, and at different speeds. But all need to dedicate time and effort to learning how to be competent in leading and leadership to achieve the promise of the high-performance business organization. A final comment: There is an overriding need in the world to create peoplecentric organizations of all kinds – especially in engineering and science – that are functionally competent, have a great and admirable character, and are motivated to continually improving the lives of people. In short, building highperformance work systems where leading and leadership is a priority for all.

Index

A•R•C•I framework, 221–2 abundance, 76 acceptance, 23–4 accountability: and A•R•C•I framework, 221–2 and compensation, 185 and conventional organizations, 152 and fairness, 221–3 and high-performance teams, 191 and measuring success, 222–3 and organizational leaders, 93, 168 and organizer leaders, 124 and respect, 104 and role model leaders, 221 and self-management by objectives (SMBO), 74 and the task cycle model, 191 and values, 163 and vision statements, 168 and vitality, 191 action. See taking action Adams, Ansel, 19 Administrative Behavior (Simon), 227 admired leaders, 12–13, 111, 162 Affluent Society, The (Galbraith), 66 airline industry, 229–30 Aldren, Buzz, 99 ambiguity, 81–2, 85 ambition, 21–2 anticipation, 23–4 Apple, 19, 118, 121 Armstrong, Neil, 99 Asimov, Isaac, 15 aspirational targets: aspiration defined, 167

and Borlang, 37–8 and change, xiii–xiv connecting personal and team goals, 97 and CR-8 team, 59–61 and customer loyalty, 146 defined, 165 and developing a personal mission, 77–8 and developmental leadership model, 40 and DuPont Canada, 170 and effective communication, 109 and Everyone a Leader, 46, 127, 170 and food production, 37–8 and future state thinking, 36, 37–8 goals defined, 222 and high-performance business organizations, 46–7, 133 and individual leading competency, 46 and leadership activity, 33 and mission statements, 165, 170–4 and moon landing, 38, 99 objectives defined, 222 and organizer leaders, 124 and rapid growth, 139–40 and reciprocal maintenance, 14 and role model leaders, 60, 127 and setting targets, 28 and spillover effects, 46 and superordinate targets, 37 and sustainable growth, 137 and the tetrad, 30 and zero workplace injuries, 28, 37. See also future state thinking; influencing others aspiring leaders: and ambition, 21 aspiring leader-engineers, 94 and character attributes, 97–8 defined, 90 and developmental leadership model, 40 and developmental learning, 41

development of, 90–4 and future state thinking, 45 and leadership competency model, 50, 63–4 and leadership styles, 115. See also leadership styles; role model leaders audits, 71, 73, 174 authoritarian leaders, 116, 117, 118–21, 126, 133, 193–4 behaviour: of authoritarian leaders, 120–1 and change values, 160–3 defined, 112 and ego-driven behaviour, 113 and ethical behaviour, 100, 102–3 and individual leading competency, 63–4, 66 and leadership competency framework, 63–4 and leadership styles, 114–15 and motivation, 112–14 and philosophy of service, 110, 114 and purposeful behaviour, 34, 113 and reactive behaviour, 113 and style, 112 and taboos, 199. See also leadership styles being, 48–50, 217 beliefs: and behaviour, 160–3 and the change process model, 178, 179–80 and organizations, 100–2 and thinking effectively, 69, 72. See also values Bennis, Warren, 166 biases, 120, 121–2, 156 Biox, 166–7 Blanchard, K.H., 115 blind ambition, 22 Borlang, Norman, 37–8 Bossidy, Larry, 175 Bostock, J., 116 brain function, 229–30 brand, 195–6

business (defined), 136 Canadian Chemical Producers Association, 110 Canadian National Railway (CNR), 198 career development, 90–4 Carothers, Wallace, 134–5 catalysts, 8–9, 161 Champy, James, 21 change: and action, 20 and administrator leaders, 122–3 and aspirational goals, xiii–xiv and change agents, 5, 8 and changing things for the better, 33–4, 43–5 and continuous improvement, 17–18, 27 and developmental leaders, 127 and developmental organizations, xiii–xiv, 157 and DuPont Canada, 33, 203–4 and Everyone a Leader, 161 and getting results, 19–24 the hierarchy of change, 16–19 and high-performance business organizations, 202 and incremental change, xiii, 16–17 and innovation, 19, 129, 163 and leadership, 11, 16–17, 22–3, 33–4, 116–17, 177 and morale, 23–4 and organizational culture, 195, 196–7, 198–9 and positive change, 24–5 and role model leaders, 156 and technological change, 15 and transactional change, xiii, 16, 165 and transformational change, xiii–xiv, 16, 18–19, 127, 139, 157, 197 and the value-add concept, 152–4 and value-add processes, 156, 158–64 and values, 26, 160–3. See also sustainable growth change process model: and catalysts, 8–9, 161 and deliberate strategy, 177

and developing a future state vision, 165–73, 178–80 and developing effective change processes, 158–82 developing meaning for, 69, 159–64, 179–80 and emergent strategy, 177–8 and formulating direction for change, 68, 69–70, 164–7, 181 full utilization of, 179–82 and implementing change, 174–7, 182 and the interface between strategy and implementation, 177–8 and mission statements, 165, 170–4, 178–80 and partial utilization of, 178–9 strategy and implementation, 177–8 and using the change process model, 178–82. See also learning frameworks; viability Chaplin, Charlie, 19 character attributes: about, 63, 95–8 character defined, 95 and conscious mental energy, 111 defined, 95 and effective communication skills, 108–10 and energy, 111 and ethical behaviour, 100, 102–3 and future looking, 98 and high-performance teams, 187–8 and honesty, 100–3, 233 importance of, 34 and inspiring others, 99–100 and integrity, 100–2, 233 and interpersonal capabilities, 95–7 and leadership competency framework, 63–4 and learning, 97–8 and personality, 97 and physical fitness, 111 and respect, 103–5, 220–1 and self-awareness, 79 and social and emotional intelligences, 95 and social well-being, 110 and tenacity, 105–7

and thinking effectively, 66 and trustworthiness, 107–8 and truthfulness, 100, 102 Charan, Ram, 136 charisma, 41, 81 Cheney, Dick, 121 circle of concern, 87 coach-leaders, 116, 117, 125–6, 127 collaborative behaviour: and A•R•C•I framework, 222 and the change process model, 179–82 and change values, 161–2 and conventional organizations, 150 and cooperation, 83 and decision-making, 229, 231, 232 and harmonious relationships between employees, 184–5 and implementing change, 176 and leadership styles, 116–17, 127 and organizational culture, 196 and power, 120 and the reconcile model, 82–4 and teams, 192–3 and vision statements, 169. See also teams Collins, Jim, 34 communication skills, 108–10 compensation, 143, 185, 218–19, 224 competence: and admired leaders, 12–13 and ambition, 21–2 and being, 48 and blind ambition, 22 and competency networks, 194, 212 defined, 47–9 and development, 135 and developmental leadership, 39 and developmental learning, 42 and extending growth, 138 and function, 48

and functional expertise, 75–7 and high-performance teams, 187 and leadership competency model, 63–4 and marketing competencies, 138 and motivation, 63 and role model leadership, 62 and self-management by objectives (SMBO), 74–5 and thinking leaders, 14–15 and will–being–function framework, 48–50. See also individual leading competency; leadership; organizational leading competency competitive advantage, 174 concepts, 70, 72, 181 conscious mental energy, 111 continuous improvement: and change, 17–18 and conventional organizations, 44 and developmental work, 42–3 and DuPont Canada, 208 example of, 27 and future state thinking, 45, 164–5 and global competition, 117 and organizational values, 164 conventional organizations: and change, xiii and collaboration, 150 and continuous improvement, 44 conventional leadership frameworks, xiii and developmental leadership model, 40 and hierarchies, 43–4, 149–50, 152, 156–7 and high-performance work systems, 43–4, 201–9 and learning, 62 and process-oriented objectives, 95 and structure, xiv, 158 conventional wisdom, 66 core teams, 193, 214–15 Covey, Stephen, 77, 84, 87 CR-8 team, 59–61 credibility, 176 credit, 105, 113

Crick, Francis, 19, 105–6 crisis: and authoritarian leaders, 119, 120, 193–4 and leadership, 65–6 and organizational culture, 195 and organizer leaders, 124 and vision statements, 167 and working groups, 193–4 culture. See organizational culture customers. See stakeholders Dangerfield, Rodney, 103 Davis, R.C., 10 decision-making: and administrator leaders, 121–3 and ambiguity, 81–2, 85 and authoritarian leaders, 119 and collaborative behaviour, 229, 231, 232 and decision tree models, 227 and diverge/converge tool, 86 and diversity of thought, 85–6 and ethics, 224–6, 233–4 and honesty, 233 and intuition, 228–31 and logical reasoning, 227–8, 230–1 and organizer-leaders, 124–5 and productivity, 226–31 and quality, 231–3 and role model leaders, 107 and stakeholders, 233–4 and will–being–function framework, 49. See also thinking effectively deliberate strategy, 177 design, 70, 73 development: defined, 135 developing leaders, 90–2, 94 developing meaning, 68–9 and the developmental mindset, 205–9 developmental work, 40, 41, 42–3

developmental leadership model: and authoritarian leadership, 133 and changing things for the better, 40, 43–5 and competence, 39 defined, 26, 39 and developmental leadership, xiii–xiv, 40–1 and developmental work, 41, 42–3 and DuPont Canada, 26 and Everyone a Leader, 40, 64 example of, 27–8 and future state thinking, 40, 45, 127 and leadership styles model, 30, 127–8 and leading organizations, 39–40 and learning, 40–2 and role model leaders, 39, 43 and taking action, 40, 41–2. See also individual leading competency; organizational leading competency developmental learning. See learning developmental organizations: and change, xiii–xiv, 157 and developmental leadership, 44 and DuPont Canada, 207–9 and future state thinking, 45 and interpersonal capabilities, 95–7 and serving society, 110. See also high-performance business organizations; organizational structure direction and directing: and formulating direction for change, 68, 69–70, 164–7, 180 and future state thinking, 212 and management, 176, 212 and the tetrad, 30 diverge/converge tool, 86 diversity of thought, 85–6 DNA structure, 105–6 DuPont Canada: and aspirational targets, 170 and author, xv and change, 203–4 and changing things for the better, 33 and CR-8 team, 59–61

and customers, 208 and developmental leadership, 26 and developmental learning process, 62 and the developmental mindset, 206–9 as developmental organization, 207–9 and developmental work, 42–3 and Everyone a Leader, 12, 57–61, 170, 203–4, 213 and functional expertise, 203–4 and growth, 138–9 and The Guppy, 153 and hierarchical leadership, 12 and leadership frameworks, xvi and learning, 61–2 and learning organizations, xvi and Let’s Talk Science, 30–1 and management by objectives (MBO), 74 and organizational culture, 196, 198–9, 211–12 and organizational values, 26–7 and paint business, 33, 138, 139 references to Canadian organization, xvn1 and role model leadership, 57–61 and self-management by objectives (SMBO), 74–5 and STAR model, 211–13 and value-add processes, 153 and virtual companies, 194–5 and zero injuries, 46 DuPont Company: and core values, 201 and Eleuthère Irénée du Pont, 131–2 founding of, 131–2, 134 and high-performance business organizations, 133 and organizational culture, 201 and organizational values, 199, 201 references to global organization, xvn1 and sustainable growth, 134–5, 138–9 and workplace safety, 132 du Pont, Eleuthère Irénée, 131–2

du Pont, Pierre S., 131 Dupre, M., 114 EcoSynthetix, 166–7, 170 effectiveness: about, 35 and effective communication, 108–10 and leadership styles, 116–17, 127 and natural work teams, 210–13 and thinking effectively, 53 and value-add processes, 153 and viability, 148 efficiency: about, 35 and administrator leaders, 121–3 and authoritarian leaders, 119 and hierarchies, 152 and leadership styles, 116–17, 127 ego-driven behaviour, 113, 121 Einstein, Albert, 5 emergent strategy, 177–8 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 22 emotions. See character attributes employer expectations, xi–xiii empowerment, 163 energy, 111, 223–4 engineers: and engineer-leaders, 90–4 and leader-engineers, 11, 94 and life improvement, 25 and professional organizations, 103 and value-add engineers, 11 environment, 197–9 ethical behaviour: about, 100, 102–3 and decision-making, 233–4 ethics defined, 102 and fairness, 143, 217–24 and organizational values, 163–4 and taboos, 200 and virtuous organizations, 224–6

evaluation. See measuring success Every Business Is a Growth Business (Charan and Tichy), 136 Everyone a Leader: and aspirational targets, 46, 127, 170 and change, 161–2 and developmental leadership, 40, 64 and developmental leadership model, 40 and developmental learning, 62 and DuPont Canada, 12, 57–61, 170, 203–4, 213 and functional expertise, 75–7 as goal, xiii and harmonious relationships between employees, 185 and high-performance business organizations, 202 and high-performance work systems, 209 and individual leading competency, 46, 202 and the integrated person, 203–5 and leadership competency model, 50–3 and learning from experience, 89–90 and natural work teams, 211 and organizational culture, 202 and role model leaders, 202 and the self-managed person, 209–12 and self-managing, 209 and teaching others, 85 and vitality, 185, 209. See also leadership evolutionary growth, 138, 139 excellence, 163 expanding growth, 138 experience, 88–90, 122 extending growth, 138 extroverts, 41, 79 fairness, 143, 217–24 family harmony, 110 focus, 87–8 food packaging, 6–8 food security, 37–8

Ford, Henry, 5, 19, 66 four-term framework, 29–30 freedom, 36 function: defined, 48 functional departments and the silo effect, 44 and functional processes, 153–4 and harmonious relationships with society, 217 and leadership competency model, 50 and natural work teams, 210–13 and skills, 95 and value-add processes, 153 and will–being–function framework, 48–50 functional expertise: about, 75–7 and administrator leaders, 122 and character attributes, 96–7 and DuPont Canada, 203–4 and high-performance teams, 187 and leadership, 11 and processes, 154 and professional development, xii. See also skills capacity future state thinking: and aspirational targets, 36, 37–8, 45 and character, 98 and developmental leadership, 40, 45, 127 and developmental organizations, 45 and fairness, 219–20 and formulating direction, 164–7, 181, 212 and future learning, 98 and goals, 14, 45, 222–3 and implementing change, 174–7, 182 and the interface between strategy and implementation, 177–8 and leadership activity, 33, 34–6 and mission statements, 165, 170–4, 178–80 and planning, 36, 45, 164–5, 211–12 and strategy, 172–4, 177–8 and vision statements, 45, 164–72, 173, 178. See also aspirational targets

Galbraith, J.K., 66 Gandhi, Mohandas, 19 Garvin, David, 66 General Electric (GE), 125, 132 General Motors, 19, 131 Gerstneer, Lou, 195 goals. See aspirational targets Good to Great (Collins), 34 Google, 198 Greenleaf, Robert, 114 Greenpeace, 171–2, 200 ground state, the: defined, 32–3 and developing a personal mission, 77–8 and developmental leadership model, 40, 45 and high-performance work systems, 43–4 and the nature of leadership activity, 33–4 and taking action, 34 and the tetrad, 30 growth. See sustainable growth gunpowder business, 131–2, 134 Guppy, The, 153 Gurdieff, G.I., 48 Hammer, Michael, 21 Hawking, Stephen, 111 Hemphill, J.K., 10 Hersey, P., 115 hierarchies: and authoritarian leaders, 118 and conventional organizations, 43–4, 149–50, 152, 157 and hierarchical leadership, 12 the hierarchy of change, 16–19 and natural work teams, 210–11 and process-oriented change, 157 and teams, 186–7 and totems, 199–200 high-performance business organizations: and aspirational targets, 46–7, 133

business (defined), 136 and change, 202 and developmental leadership model, 40 and Everyone a Leader, 202 and fairness, 218 and high-performance organizational leaders, 90, 93–4 and the integrated person, 203–5 and learning from experience, 89–90 and motivation, 49–50 and organizational culture, 196–7, 202–13 and organizational values, 46, 133 potential of, 235 and productivity, 47, 133 and quality measures, 133 and role model leaders, 47, 133 and stakeholders, 47, 133 and sustainable growth, 133 traits of, 133 and value-added processes, 158 and viability, 148–9 and vitality, 183–4 and will–being–function framework, 49–50 and work-life balance, 224. See also developmental organizations; organizational structure high-performance work systems: about, 104 and competency networks, 194 and conventional organizations, 43–4, 201–9 and developmental leadership model, 40 and the developmental mindset, 205–9 and Everyone a Leader, 209 and individual effort, 186–7 and organizational culture, 197 and role model leaders, 201–2 and the self-managing person, 209–12 and stakeholders, 142 and vitality, 185, 209 work processes of, 141–2. See also learning frameworks; processes;

stakeholders; work Hill, Julian, 134 Hitt, William D., 116 honesty, 64, 100–3, 233 Hopcke, R.R., 116 IBM, 195 implementing action, 68, 70–1 importance (focus on), 87–8 incremental change, xiii, 16–17 individual leading competency: and ambition, 21 and charisma, 81 and developmental leadership model, 39–40, 42–3 and Everyone a Leader, 46, 202 and fairness, 220–1 and high-performance work systems, 186–7 and honesty, 100–2 and individual effort, 186–7 and the integrated person, 203–5 and knowing yourself, 78–80, 103 and leadership competency model, 63–4 and motivation, 60 and personal mission statements, 77–8 and respect, 104 and self-awareness, 78–80, 103 and self-management by objectives (SMBO), 74–5 and the self-managing person, 209–12 and skills, 63–4, 66 and stakeholder service, 53 and thinking effectively, 52, 53 and vitality, 185. See also competence; developmental leadership model influencing others: and administrator leaders, 122–3 and admired leaders, 12–13 and authoritarian leaders, 118–19, 123 and change values, 161–2 and competence, 63

and effective communication, 108–10 and expanding influence, 87–8 and future looking, 98 and implementing change, 174–5 and inspiring others, 99–100 and learning, 98 and Lincoln, 15 and mission statements, 165, 170–4, 178–80 and morale, 23–4 and needs, 142 and organizational culture, 196–7 and organizer leaders, 123–5 the process of, 11–12 and professional development, xiii and reciprocal maintenance, 13–14, 14, 89 and role model leadership, 60, 87–8 and self-awareness, 80 and service, 143 and successful outcomes, 13 and the task cycle model, 192 and thinking leaders, 14–15 and trustworthiness, 107–8 and visions, 166, 169–71. See also aspirational targets; inspiration; leadership innovation, 19, 139, 162 inputs, 140, 152–4 inspiration: defined, 99 and harmonious relationships between employees, 184–5 and inspirational role models, 6–8 and inspiring others, 99–100 and organizer leaders, 123–5 and vision statements, 167. See also influencing others integrated person, the, 203–5 integrity, 100–2 interdependency, 81–4 introverts, 41, 79 intuition, 228–31

Japan, 200–1 Jaworski, Joseph, 137 Jobs, Steve, 19, 109, 118, 121 Kennedy, John F., 38 Kepner, Charles, 228 Kingston Manufacturing Plant, 58–61 Kouzes, James M., 63 Krone, Charles, 48, 67 Krone model, the, 48–50 Kurzweil, Ray, 15 Land, Edwin, 19 Lavoisier, Antoine, 131 leaders: defined, 10–11 and hierarchies, 12 and motivation, 20–1, 112–14 and personality types, 34, 41 values of, 25 leadership: and catalysts, 9 and change, 11, 16–17, 22–3 and crisis, 65–6 and developmental leadership, xiii–xiv, 26 and effectiveness, 35 goals of, 71 leadership competency model, 52–3 leadership defined, 9–12, 26, 31–2, 34–5 leading defined, 11, 31–2 and managing, 16 and professional development, xiii, 9, 11, 41–2 and thinking effectively, 159 and transformational change, 18–19. See also competence; Everyone a Leader; influencing others leadership activity: and the change process, 176–7 and changing things for the better, 33–4 and developmental leadership activity, 39–40

and future state thinking, 33, 34–6 and the ground state, 33 and implementing change, 176–7 the nature of, 30–1, 33 and project management, 39 and taking action, 33, 34 Leadership Challenge, The (Kouzes and Posner), 63 Leadership for the Twenty-First Century (Rost), 9–10 leadership styles: about, 114–17, 127–8 and administrator leaders, 116, 117, 121–3, 126 and admired leaders, 12–13, 111, 162 and aspirational leaders, 99–100 and authoritarian leaders, 116, 117, 118–21, 126, 133, 193–4 and coach-leaders, 116, 117, 125–6, 127 and developing leaders, 91–2, 94 and developmental leaders, 90, 127–8 and hierarchical leadership, 12 and high-performance organizational leaders, 90, 93–4 and leader-engineers, 11, 50–3, 58–61, 94–7 and leading by process, 12 and levels of accomplishment, 90 and organizational leaders, 90, 93 and organizational situations, 116–18 and the organizer-leader, 116, 117, 123–5, 126, 127 and process leaders, 125 and thinking leaders, 14–15. See also aspiring leaders; behaviour; role model leaders leading self. See individual leading competency learning: and active listening, 81 and character attributes, 97–8 and development, 135 and developmental leadership model, 40, 41–2, 127 and developmental learning, 40, 41–2, 61–2, 194–5 and the developmental mindset, 205–9 and DuPont Canada, 61–2 from experience, 88–90, 122 and fairness, 220–1, 224

and functional expertise, 75–7 and harmonious relationships between employees, 185 and high-performance teams, 191–2 and influencing others, 98 and knowing others, 80–1 and knowing yourself, 78–80 and leadership styles, 118 and learning frameworks, 29–30 and learning organizations, xvi and levels of leader accomplishment, 90 and meaningful work, 144 and mentorship, 81, 108 and observation, 81, 89 and personal mission statements, 77–8 and self-managing, 212–13 and sustainable growth, 140 and the task cycle model, 190–1 and teaching others, 84–5 and trustworthiness, 107–8. See also teaching learning frameworks: about, 141 and change process model, 158–82 and conventional leadership frameworks, xiii and derived leadership competency model, 30 and developmental leadership model, xiii–xiv, 26, 30, 39, 40–7 and DuPont Canada, xvi and elementary leadership model, 31–8 and four-term framework, 29–30 and the Krone model, 48–50 and leadership competency model, 47–53, 63–4, 66 and leadership styles model, 116–28 and the reconcile model, 82–4 and the task cycle model, 189–91 and tetrad framework, 29–30, 32 and three-term framework, 29 and triad framework, 29 and will–being–function framework, 48–50. See also change process model; high-performance work systems; thinking effectively

Let’s Talk Science, 30–1 levels of thought: and active thinking, 81 and the change process model, 159–82 and diversity of thought, 85–6 thinking leaders, 14–15 and time management, 88. See also thinking effectively Lewin, Kurt, 114 life balance, 110 life goals, 78–80 life improvements: and business goals, 142 and harmonious relationships with society, 215–17 importance of, 8–9 and needs, 144–5 and philosophy of service, 110, 114 and sustainable growth, 137 Lincoln, Abraham, 15 listening, 81 logical reasoning, 227–8, 230–1 loyalty, 145–6, 196, 215–17 lying, 100 Maltz, Maxwell, 78–9 management: components of, 212 and directing, 176, 212 and high-performance teams, 192 and management by objectives (MBO), 74 and management support, 60 and managers, 16, 98 and materials, 212 and natural work teams, 210–11 and the self-managed person, 209–12 marketing competencies, 138 Martin, Roger, 84 maturity, 136 McDonald’s, 200 McKinsey & Company, 196

meaning, 69, 159–64 measuring success: about, 67–8, 174 and accountability, 222–3 and continuous improvement, 18 and DuPont Canada, 204 and evaluation, 71, 73, 174, 176, 191, 204 and operational reviews, 223 and quality, 140 and sustainable growth, 140 mental states, 76, 136 mentorship, 81, 108, 125–6, 127 mission statements, 165, 170–4, 178–80 moon landing, 38, 99 morale, 23–4 motivation: and authoritarian leaders, 121 and change values, 160–3 and competence, 63 defined, 99 and developmental work, 42–3 and fairness, 217–18 and leaders, 20–1 and leadership competency model, 50 and organizational values, 163 and role model leaders, 60 and sports, 49 and virtuous work, 215, 216. See also behaviour; will Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), 79 Nanus, Burt, 165 natural work teams, 210–13 needs, 109, 142–5 negotiation, 82–4 networking, 110 New Rational Manager, The (Kepner and Tregoe), 228 noble ambition, 22 nylon manufacturing, 58–61

objectives (defined), 222 observation, 81, 89 operational reviews, 223 operations, 212 order, 36 order-to-freedom continuum, 36 organizational culture: and change, 196–7 and core values, 200–1 and the customer base, 198 defined, 195–6 and the developmental mindset, 205–9 and DuPont Canada, 196, 198–9, 211–12 and DuPont Company, 201 and Everyone a Leader, 202 and high-performance business organizations, 196–7, 202–13 and influencing others, 196–7 and the integrated person, 203–5 and leadership style model, 117 and proximate environment, 197–9 and the self-managing person, 209–12 and stakeholders, 198 and STAR model, 211–12 and sustainable growth, 214–15 and traditions, totems, and taboos, 199–200. See also organizational values; vitality organizational leading competency: and developmental leadership, 26, 39–40 and Dupont Canada, 26–8 and knowing others, 80–1 and leadership competency, 47–53, 63–4, 66 and leading organizations, 39–40 and organizational leaders, 90, 93, 168 and viability, 53, 148–52 and virtue, 53 and vitality, 53. See also competence; developmental leadership model; leadership organizational structure: and conventional organizations, xiv and core teams, 193, 214–15

and natural work teams, 210–13 and organizational design, 157–8 and processes, 156–8 and systems, 156–8 and transformational change, 157 and value-add processes, 150–2, 157–8 and vision statements, 166–70 and work types, 155. See also developmental organizations; high-performance business organizations organizational values: and the change process model, 178 and change values, 162–3 and core values, 200–1 and DuPont Canada, 26–7 and DuPont Company, 199, 201 and fairness, 219–20 and high-performance business organizations, 46, 133 and organizational culture, 117–18. See also organizational culture; values organizer-leaders, 116, 117, 123–5, 126, 127 Ouspensky, P.D., 48 outputs, 140, 152–4 paint business, 33, 138, 139 passion, 162 Pauling, Linus, 80 people (defined), 24 perfection, 46, 140, 165 perpetual motion machines, 28 personality types, 34, 41, 79, 97 personal mission statements, 77–8 personnel, 211, 212 philosophy: and the change process model, 160–3, 179–80 and the philosophy of service, 110, 114 and thinking effectively, 69, 72 physical fitness, 111 planning: and change, 164 and future state thinking, 36, 45

and management, 211–12 Polaroid, 19 polymer materials marketplace, 6–8 positive results, 19–24, 139 Posner, Barry Z., 63 power-based leadership, 120 presentations, 97 pricing, 149 principles, 69, 72, 102, 160–4 prioritization, 78, 87–8 processes: defined, 11–12 and functional processes, 153–4 and growth process, 139 and high-performance teams, 187 and innovation, 19 and operations, 212 and organizational structure, 156–8 and organizer leaders, 124–5 and planning, 37 process (defined), 11 and process leaders, 125 and systems, 124 and the task cycle model, 189–91 and teams, 189–93. See also high-performance work systems; value-add processes product differentiation, 19 productivity: and change, 17 and decision-making, 226–31 and high-performance business organizations, 47, 133 and sustainable growth, 140 and time management, 88 and value-add processes, 150, 152 and virtual companies, 194 professional associations, 110 profitable growth, 163 project management, 39 proximate environment, 197–9

Psycho Cybernetics (Maltz), 78–9 Pugi, Kalev, 58–61, 69, 104, 192 quality: and core values, 200–1 and decision-making, 231–3 defined, 140 and harmonious customer relationships, 149 and high-performance business organizations, 133 and organizational values, 162 and price, 218–19 and quality measures, 47 and sustainable growth, 140 and value-add processes, 150, 152–3 and virtual companies, 194. See also stakeholder service R•A•C•I framework, 221–2 reciprocal maintenance, 13–14, 89 recognition, 105, 113, 143–4 reconciles: and ethical behaviour, 226 reconcile model, 82–4 use of, 7, 127 resistance, 23–4 respect, 103–5, 220–1 responsibility. See accountability Rethinking the MBA (Garvin and Cullen), 66 revenue, 149 risks, 106, 162 rituals, 199–200 role model leaders: and accountability, 221 and admired leaders, 13 and aspirational targets, 60, 127 and change, 156, 174–5 and competence, 62 and core values, 200–1 and customer loyalty, 146 and decision-making, 107

defined, 43, 90 and developmental leadership model, 39, 40, 43 and diversity of thought, 85–6 and DuPont Canada, 57–61 and Eleuthère Irénée du Pont, 131–2 and Everyone a Leader, 202 and functional expertise, 75–7 and future looking, 98 and growth, 138 and high-performance business organizations, 47, 133 and high-performance teams, 187–8 and high-performance work systems, 201–2 and influencing others, 60, 87–8 and leadership competency model, 50–3, 63–4 and leadership styles, 79, 118 as leader type, 43, 90, 92 and learning from experience, 88–90 and organizational culture, 196 and role model leader designation, 62–3 and self-awareness, 79 and teaching others, 84–5 and tenacity, 106 and thinking effectively model, 69 and time management, 87–8. See also aspiring leaders; individual leading competency; leadership styles Rost, Joseph D., 9–10 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 122 rules, 121–3 Salk, Jonas, 80 Sanger, Margaret, 19 scarcity, 76 Schmidt, Bonnie, 30–1 Schwartz, Tony, 218 scientific method, 228 self-leading competency model. See individual leading competency self-motivation. See will Senge, Peter, 80

sensing, 68 September 11, 2001, 65–6 Servant as Leader, The (Greenleaf), 114 service. See stakeholder service short-term thinking, 137 silo effect, 44, 203 Simon, Herbert, 227 skills capacity: and developing a personal mission, 77–8 and diversity of thought, 85–6 and focus, 87–8 and interdependency, 81–4 and knowing others, 78–81 and knowing yourself, 78–80 and learning from experience, 88–90 and self-management by objectives (SMBO), 74–5 skills defined, 63–4, 95 and soft skills, xii, 63–4 and teaching others, 84–5 and thinking effectively, 66. See also functional expertise Sloan, Alfred, 19, 131 Small, D., 116 social well-being, 110 societal relationship, 215–17 speed, 88, 139 sports, 49 stakeholders: and change, 25, 33 and decision-making, 233–4 and ethical behaviour, 224–6 and harmonious relationships, 146–7, 148–9, 163, 215–17 and high-performance business organizations, 47, 133 and loyalty, 145–6 and organizational culture, 198 and organizational purpose, 136 and organizational values, 163 and value-add processes, 151 and viability, 148–9

and vision statements, 169. See also high-performance work systems stakeholder service: and DuPont Canada, 208 and environment, 198 and external stakeholders’ needs satisfaction, 144–5 and high-performance work systems, 142–3 importance of, 53 and individual leading competency, 53 and influencing others, 143 and internal stakeholders' needs satisfaction, 143–4 and leadership competency model, 52–3 and organizational culture, 198 and sustainable growth, 140 and virtual companies, 194 and virtuous work, 215. See also quality STAR model, 211–13 strategy, 70, 72, 172–4, 177–8 success. See measuring success superordinate targets, 37 sustainable growth: about, 136–40 business defined, 136 development defined, 135 and DuPont Company, 134–5, 138–9 and evolutionary growth, 138, 139 and expanding growth, 138 and extending growth, 138 growth defined, 136 and high-performance business organizations, 133 and inputs, 140 and maturity, 136 and organizational culture, 214–15 and organizational values, 163 and processes, 139 and productivity, 140 and quality, 140 and service, 140 and virtue, 214–15. See also change

systems. See processes taboos, 199 tactics, 70–1, 177 taking action: action defined, 70–1, 174, 176 and change, 20, 174–6 and culture, 196 and developmental leadership model, 41–4 and function, 48 and ground states, 34 and implementing change, 174–7 and the nature of leadership activity, 33, 34 and strategy, 172–4 and taboos, 199 and tactics, 70–1, 177 and the tetrad, 30 and thinking effectively, 68, 70–1, 73 and traditions, 199 target audience, xv targets. See aspirational targets teaching: and coach-leaders, 125–6 and developmental leaders, 127 and organizer-leaders, 124–5, 127 and role model leadership, 84–5. See also learning teams: and character attributes, 187–8 and collaborative behaviour, 192–3 and competency networks, 194, 212 and core teams, 193, 214–15 and hierarchy of teaming, 186–7 and high-performance teaming, 187–93 and learning, 190–1 and natural work teams, 210–13 and organizer leaders, 123–5 and processes, 189–93 and size of teams, 187 and the task cycle model, 189–91

and virtual companies, 194–5 and vitality, 185 and working groups, 193–4. See also collaborative behaviour; vitality technological change, 15 tenacity, 105–7 tetrad frameworks, 29–30, 32 Thatcher, Margaret, 19 thinking effectively: about, 67–72 and audits, 71, 73, 174 and concept, 70 and design, 70 and developing meaning, 68–9 and evaluation, 71, 73, 174, 176, 191 example scenario of, 72–3 and formulating direction, 68, 69–70 and implementing action, 68, 70–1, 73 importance of, 53, 66–7 and individual-leading competency, 52–3 and leadership, 159 and leadership competency model, 52–3 and strategy, 70, 72 and tactics, 70–1. See also decision-making; learning frameworks; levels of thought Third Alternative, 84 thought levels. See levels of thought three-term framework, 29 Tichy, Noel M., 136 time management, 87–8 Total Quality Management movement, 17–18 Toyota, 132 traditions, 199 transactional change, xiii, 16, 165 transformational change, xiii–xiv, 16, 18–19, 127, 139, 157, 197 Tregoe, Benjamin, 228 triad frameworks, 29 trust: and authoritarian leaders, 119 and the reconcile model, 83

and trustworthiness, 66, 83, 107–8 truth, 100, 102, 217 tuned-out states, 23–4 University of Toronto, xvi urgency, 87–8, 173 value-add processes: about, 149–58 and change, 156, 158–64 and DuPont Canada, 153 and high-performance business organizations, 158 and organizational structure, 155–8 and systems, 155–7 and The Guppy, 153 the value-add concept, 152–4 value-add engineers, 11. See also processes values: and change, 26 and change values, 160–3 and coach-leaders, 126 and customer relationships, 149 defined, 24, 160, 200 and fairness, 143, 219–20, 223–4 and harmonious relationships with society, 215–17 and leaders, 25 and personal mission statements, 77–8 and project teams, 97 and thinking effectively model, 69 valuable (defined), 160 and values-based partnerships, 149. See also beliefs; organizational values viability: about, 148 and the change process model, 160 and creating harmony with customers, 148–9 and organizational leading competency, 53 and organizing around value-add processes, 149–52 and the value-add concept, 152–4 and value-add processes and systems, 155–7

and value-add structuring of business organizations, 157–8. See also change process model virtual companies, 194–5 virtue: about, 214–15 and ethical behaviour, 224–6 and harmonious relationships with society, 215–17 and organizational leading competency, 53 and treating people fairly, 217–24 and virtuous work, 215, 216 vision statements, 45, 164–71, 173, 178–80 vitality: about, 183–4, 213 defined, 184 and harmonious relationships between employees, 184–5 and high-performance business organizations, 183–4 and organizational-leading competency, 53. See also organizational culture; teams Walmart, 132 Watson, James, 105 Welch, Jack, 125 Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? (Gerstner), 195 will: and character attributes, 95 defined, 48 and leadership competency model, 50 and professional development, xii and purposeful behaviour, 113 and self-management by objectives (SMBO), 74–5 and tenacity, 105–7 and will–being–function framework, 48–50. See also motivation word generation, 168–9 work: and developmental work, 41, 42–3 and implementing change, 174–6 and individual effort, 186–7 and meaningful work, 144 and natural work teams, 210–13 and organizational structure, 155

and organizational values, 163 and productivity, 140 and the silo effect, 44, 203 and virtuous work, 215, 216 and working groups, 193–4 and work-life balance, 224. See also high-performance work systems workplace safety: and administrator leaders, 122, 126 and aspirational targets, 26–8 and authoritarian leaders, 120, 126 and coach leaders, 126 and DuPont Company, 132, 201 and organizer-leaders, 126

1 For simplicity I will use “DuPont Canada” when referring to the Canadian organization and “DuPont” when referring to the global company, which includes the Canadian organization, rather than the legal entity names, unless there are places in the book where it is necessary to be specific.

1 The names in this example are fictitious, but the events are real, as are most others in the examples in this book. 2 In a “reconcile,” negotiations do not result in losers – both sides benefit. This concept will be discussed at length later in the book. 3 Joseph D. Rost, Leadership for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Praeger, 1993). 4 R.C. Davis, The Fundamentals of Top Management (New York: Harper and Row, 1942), 27. 5 J.K. Hemphill, “The Leader and the Group,” Journal of Education Research 28 (1949): 4. 6 Ray Kurzweil, “The Law of Accelerating Returns,” 2001, retrieved 22 January 2004 from http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134-html?printable=1 7 Michael Hammer and James Champy, Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution (New York: HarperBusiness, 1993), 226.

1 Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … And Others Don’t (New York: Harper Business, 2001). 2 Norman Borlang, “The Green Revolution, Peace, and Humanity” (Noble Peace Prize lecture, Oslo, Norway, 11 December 1970). 3 John F. Kennedy, “Landing a Man on the Moon” (Address to a Joint Session at the Congress of the United States, Washington, DC, 25 May 1961).

1 James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner, The Leadership Challenge, 3rd ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003), 29.

1 David Garvin and Patrick G. Cullen, Rethinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2010).

1 Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 2004). 2 Maxwell Maltz, Psycho Cybernetics (New York: Pocket Books, 1973). 3 Visit the Myers & Briggs Foundation, http://www.myersbriggs.org 4 Stephen Covey, The Third Alternative (New York: Free Press, 2011); Roger Martin, The Opposable Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Press, 2009). 5 Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 2004), 81.

1 Bridget Bero and Alana Kuhlman, “Teaching Ethics to Engineers: Ethical Decision Making Parallels the Engineering Design Process,” Science and Engineering Ethics Journal 1, no. 3 (2011): 597–605.

1 Robert Greenleaf, The Servant as Leader (Westfield, IN: Robert K. Greenleaf Center, 1982). 2 K. Lewin, R. Lippitt, and R.K. White, “Patterns of Aggressive Behaviour in Experimentally Created Social Climates,” Journal of Social Psychology 10 (1939): 271–301. 3 M. Dupre, Leadership Is an Art (New York: Doubleday, 2004). 4 Robert Bolton and Dorothy Bolton, Social Style/Management Style (New York: American Management Association, 1984). 5 A Guide to the Isabel Briggs Myers Papers, 1885–1992, George A. Smathers Library, Department of Special and Area Studies Collections, University of Florida, Gainsville, 2003. 6 P. Hersey and K.H. Blanchard, Management of Organizational Behaviour – Utilizing Human Resources, 3rd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1977). 7 R.R. Hopcke, A Guided Tour of the Collected Works of C.G. Jung (Boston: Shambala, 1999); J. Bostock and D. Small, “The Influence of Power on Psychological Functioning: Community Psychology Perspectives,” Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology 9 (1999): 75–8; William D. Hitt, Ethics and Leadership: Putting Theory into Practice (Columbus: Battelle Press, 1990).

1 The DuPont Oval logo, DuPontTM , Kevlar®, and Sorona® are trademarks or registered trademarks of E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company or its affiliates. DuPont Canada is a licensee. 2 Ram Charan and Noel M. Tichy, Every Business Is a Growth Business (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1998), 241. 3 Ibid., 242. 4 Ibid., 88. 5 Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1996), 182.

1 Louis V. Gerstner Jr., Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround (New York: HarperCollins, 2002). 2 Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus, Leaders: Strategies for Taking Charge (New York: HarperCollins, 1985), 82. 3 Greenpeace, “Who We Are,” retrieved 21 February 2011 from http://www.greenpeace.org/international/about/our-mission 4 Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done (New York: Crown Business, 2002), 6. 5 See Henry Mintzberg and James Waters, “Of Strategies: Deliberate and Emergent,” Strategic Management Journal 6, no. 3 (1985): 257–72.

1 Louis V. Gerstner Jr., Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? Leading a Great Enterprise through Dramatic Change (New York: HarperBusiness, 2003). 2 The DuPont Oval logo, DuPontTM , Kevlar®, and Sorona® are trademarks or registered trademarks of E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company or its affiliates. DuPont Canada is a licensee. 3 John P. Kotter, Leading Change (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Press, 1996); Peter Drucker, On the Profession of Management (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Press, 2003). 4 Gary Hamel, “Moon Shots for Management,” Harvard Business Review 87, no. 2 (February 2009): 91.

1 Tony Schwartz, “The Productivity Paradox: How Sony Pictures Gets More Out of People by Demanding Less,” Harvard Business Review 88, no. 6 (June 2010): 64. 2 Herbert Simon, Administrative Behavior (New York: Free Press, 1976). 3 Charles Kepner and Benjamin B. Tregoe, The New Rational Manager (Princeton: Princeton Research Press, 1997). 4 David Kahneman, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).