Brought to you by Jeff Thoren, DVM  

Volumes have been written about leadership in the workplace.  Peter Block, organizational-development consultant and author of three best-selling books on the subject, has a different take: Stop being a parent and start having conversations that matter.

Block says, “If you think leadership is about being a boss and getting people on the same page, think again.  It’s about being a colleague and getting people to talk to and connect with each other.”  Prepare to examine your own assumptions and beliefs about what makes for effective leadership.

Here’s this month’s feature ...

Leading the Way by Peter Block

From - An Interview in the April 2005 issue of HOW Magazine

Highlights from the article:

• The goal is to create institutions that are both productive and habitable.  Most institutions err in either one direction or the other.  They become exclusively relationship/morale/satisfaction-focused and suffer in terms of performance, or are run by the iron will of the owner and aren’t great places to work.
    

• “Leadership” is a well-developed misconception. The dominant belief is that the task of leadership is to set a vision, enroll others in it and hold people accountable through measurements and rewards.  It’s a patriarchal system used to create high performance through centralization of power.  Most leadership training focuses on how to be a good parent.  We teach how to “develop” people, as if they were ours to develop.  We do a lot to create the notion that bosses are responsible for their people.
    

• All that parenting has the unintended side effect of creating deep entitlement and having employees stay frozen in their own development.  Most management techniques are ways of controlling people so they feel good about being controlled.
    

• These are the most common questions I get from my clients. “How do I get people to …” and you can fill in the blank after that. My favorite is, “How do I get people on board with my ideas/visions/whatever.”  My response is, “How do you know you’re in the boat?”  These are the wrong questions.  They’re the questions of a parent about recalcitrant children.  As soon as you start the sentence, you’re acting as a sovereign.  All of these are components of the patriarchal way of thinking that dominates our culture.  Put this in boldface: They are not your children. Once you realize that, real engagement is possible.
    

• So the challenge is how to create a new framework for thinking about leadership and management that doesn’t have the side effect of entitlement, with its visible symptoms of whining and complaining. The challenge for leaders is creating a culture of accountability, where each of their people feels responsible for the well-being of the whole institution and not just worried about their own careers or personal wants.
    

• Leaders create accountability by diffusing the power, by engaging people in a way that produces accountability and acknowledging the fact that we’re all in this together.
    

• This approach asks the same from both the organization/employer and the employee: a deep willingness to be authentic with each other.  In less vague terms, it asks them both to grow up.  Growing up means we are willing to engage each other as equals and partners and have honest conversations.  It means stop whining and complaining, and confront your own choices and responsibilities.
    

• Leaders should be asking, “What are the conversations we need to have that serve the interest of the business and also make it a place where people care and are treated well?”  In traditional leadership, the focus is on the boss/subordinate relationship.  Today’s leader needs to think in terms of a peer-to-peer relationship.

For the full text article, go to ...
http://www.peterblock.com/assets/How405.pdf

Conversations That Matter

According to Peter Block, the most powerful tools for a leader are what he calls “conversations that matter.”  There are certain conversations that have transformative power and, if you want to create an alternative future, you have to change the way people speak and listen to each other.

You can’t legislate consent or demand accountability. It doesn’t work. So you have to engage people in ways that encourage them to choose accountability.  There are certain conversations you want to eliminate -- whining, complaining, blaming, over-analyzing, discussing weaknesses.

The real skill for the leader -- the practical application that gets right down to the next meeting with your staff and how to help them contract more powerfully with each other -- is to create a conversation about what we want from each other.  We do this by asking powerful questions that confront people with their freedom and their responsibilities, such as:

• What do we want to create together?

• What’s our contribution to the thing we complain most about?

• What do we say yes to that we really don’t mean?

• What do we want to say no to that we don’t have the courage to?

• What’s the promise we’re willing to make with no expectation of return?

• What are the gifts we hold that we neither fully acknowledge nor have fully brought into the world?

You could say these are questions of possibility, ownership, dissent, commitment and gifts. You can go a long way with these questions.

Next Month

How can we insure that personal and organizational transformation will succeed?  The secret lies in integrating recent discoveries in psychology and neuroscience, where breakthroughs in brain research are helping us understand the nature of successful behavioral change.

To receive this FREE monthly e-Newsletter via e-mail go to our e-Newsletter Sign-Up Page.  Please feel free to pass the e-newsletter along to your colleagues, friends and family.