Building trusting and supporting relationships. One benefit includes fostering productive and mutually beneficial collaborations. Your leadership should be visible and communicative.
Inquiring involves asking questions, having a genuine interest and curiosity and learning about others. It includes observing others and doing what you can to make them feel safe to express their opinions. A result of inquiring can be that you understand a person's emotions, motivations, assumptions and how their opinions were formed.
Inquiring is an ongoing process - you should be constantly evaluating your understanding of others, and being receptive to new information which may affect your understanding.
Next, you need to share your own point of view. This is achieved by sharing your own assumptions, goals, emotions and data.
Perspective taking. Trying to understand someone's motivations, what has brought them to where they are.
Step 2 includes representing your point of view, and finding a negotiated agreement. You'll be better able to do this if you understand what's important to your colleague, and what they are looking for (e.g. through finding common goals.).
The 2 sub-dimensions can occur simultaneously, in a process known as "the discipline of balancing inquiry and advocacy" (Senge, 2006).
If you:
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Only employ enquiry: You'll have limited opportunity to share your own views and may not be bought in to / enjoy the outcome.
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Only employ advocacy: You may use selective data, focus on winning the debate and use skewed reasoning.
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Employ both: focus on finding the best solution, investigate all available information.
Inquiry and Advocacy infographic
- Establish how they formed their assumptions.
- Invite them to explain their motivation & avoid aggressive language.
- Confirm your understanding.
- State your assumptions, reasoning and any data.
- Provide examples as illustration.
- Encourage others to explore your viewpoint and provide different ideas.
- Raise your concerns and the reasons behind them.
- Share your views in a way that encourages dialogue.
- Focus on what has been established thus far to help people move forward.
- Ask what information might shift their perspective.
- Do not "agree to disagree". Consider if more information / ideas should be gathered.
To support and coach, you need to share your knowledge but build their confidence and encourage them in the face of obstacles. Rather than hand out specific instructions for tasks, support and coach team members to act independently.
Development is the ability to make meaning of experiences. Kegan divides it into 5 stages, which relate to individual maturity.
- Impulsive (childhood, not relevant for leadership).
- Instrumental (adolescents): Egocentric, what can others do for me, needs boundaries / supervision.
- Socialised (most adults): Take others into account, think before acting, connect with others, focus on obligations & rewards.
- Self-authoring (some adults):
- Construct self-identity based on personal values rather than expectations.
- Able to self-direct.
- Set clear boundaries
- Consider multiple perspectives.
- Convince others to follow their lead.
- Self-transformational (few adults):
- Realise their internal values / self-identity are not fixed.
- Open to feedback.
- Seek opposing perspectives.
- Collaborate with others to find the best way forward.
By understanding which stage others tend to be at, you can tailor you interactions to help move them forward through coaching and support. A worthwhile goal is to help move employees towards stage 5, so they can think about a vision and bring others with them.
Leaders cannot help people move to a stage which is higher than their own. Consider your own stage of development and how you could progress.
Go outside your regular networks and create some new ones. Seek new perspectives, network, and take in new information.
Test the quality of your connecting outside with the following questions: Do I know people to call to get the answer? Do I know people who can coach me to get the answer? Can I get career advice?
As a leader, our job is to mobilise people, What is a good network? Good relationships take time to develop. A good network is "one that brings you what you don't already have in your own head.". Fresh thinking, new perspectives, new expertise which enrich how you do things.
- Breadth
- Connectivity
- Dynamism - different people / places / contexts.
Innovation: bringing together things that haven't been brought together or finding new ways to do things. This necessitates cross-disciplinary approaches.
An example of a leader with a good network: AI-involved startup who brought in an external individual who was hugely influential in the outcomes of this startup.
Some people can find the concept of "networking" distasteful / forced. However, we need diversity in our experience in order to develop.
Steps we can take to get out there:
Get started, make it easy but do something. Focus on what you can give back to your network. During a networking session, ask that person "Who else could I talk to about this?"
The following guidelines are a summary of the aspects involved in building stronger relationships:
- Make an effort to actively listen to other perspectives with an open mind.
- Ask questions in a way that encourages others to share their opinions.
- Before conveying your viewpoint, take time to anticipate how others will react to your ideas.
- Don’t just state your viewpoint; also explain your reasoning process.
- Constantly evaluate the strength of your relationships and how you can improve them.
5 ways for business leaders to win in the 2020s
The pace of innovation & disruption is growing exponentially. Developing trends include AI, shifting global economic order and growing importance of social responsibility & contribution.
- Master the new logic of competition
Emerging technology means that every business will be an information business (to a degree). Businesses need to identify & fulfill each individual customer's changing needs.
Traditional industry boundaries will also blur: competition and collaboration will occur between ecosystems - temporary, mutually evolving partnerships will form. External orientation will be key, as will deployment of indirect influence to platforms and marketplaces.
- Design the organiation of the future
"Integrated learning loops are key": gather information/data, derive insights with ML, act on these insights autonomously, at algorithmic speed.
As a foil to this machine learning, humans need to monitor for societal / political changes, and act on these. They also need to validate algorithms, imagine new possibilities and design a hybrid human-machine organisation.
Humans should focus away from designing fixed, hardwired process & structure and onto making flexible, dynamic systems.
- Apply the science of organisational change
Create a sense of urgency with internal stakeholders that transformational organisational change needs to come.
Use evidence-based transformation, rather than relying on plausible assertions and rules of thumb.
- Achieve innovation and resilience through diversity
This expands the range of a company's ideas and options. It also increases resilience.
Think diversity in experience, educational background as well as gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation and the like.
Support this with open communication practice & diversity in top management.
- Pursue social & business value.
Focus on total societal impact - creating social as well as business value.
Met with McKinsey, met with leaders at Takeda in an informal way: developing relationships. He describes this as "synthetic learning". Dr. Ancona points out that he engaged in sensemaking through meeting multiple people and listening to multiple perspectives.
Met with many employees in the R&D organisation, dug deep into the program and listened to what everyone was saying.
The gift that this imparted to Dr. Plump is that he could improve his understanding of the situation (e.g. spotting gaps in capabilities), but also genuinely built relationships with people because his interactions with them were not transactional.
Takes a strong personal interest in others. Would go to other colleges, talk to them and learn from what they did, what best practice is and what he could learn.
For Dr. Allikmets, the most important aspect was to get team members on board. She explained: what are we here to do, what is the vision, what can they do? Make them believe that this was possible. Connecting with leadership - making sure her team had permission to proceed. Inquiry, lots of advocating, influencing and negotiating to ask people for permission to do something different.
Started with the strategic committee of L'Oreal USA. Influenced them to "own their part" in this. She used guided interventions where leaders made real contact with each other, looked at what this meant for them personally. They created behaviour charters, aligned on the language used to describe their new behaviours, and how they would do this.
- Align on behaviours they would move towards
- Agree to be measured against this
- Agree to have ongoing feedback
This allowed people to co-create.
The feedback was not just anonymous surveys, because Maeve Coburn didn't want this to go nowhere. The leaders received facilited feedback on their leadership style, and all they could do was say thank you. Then they would read through this feedback and the direct reports would talk about the impact on them. This was a magic moment - leaders were humbled, touched and impacted by what they received, because they came to realise how they were affecting people personally.
It was interesting to see leaders slow down and receive positive feedback, because the natural preference was to move to development areas.
Facilitation squad: trained a huge number of internal people to pick this up.
Personal action point: - Find more ways to pay attention before advocating for your point of view.
It was noticeable to see how powerful a change can be initiated when people act together.