An introductory qualifier
Well, not exactly everything. After all, it’s a pretty big subject. And although the seeds for participative management and collaborative leadership were planted in the marketplace years ago and have seen substantial growth in our organizations and institutions since, tending the garden of their evolution has been and is no easy task. Stray roots of patriarchal traditions and lingering strands of autocratic, “power over” attitudes and practices continue to hamper efforts to cultivate collaborative workplace climates and are hard to weed out. But we continue to till and to fertilize the soil, digging deeper and uncovering obstacles, even as we seek simultaneously to harvest more of what we’ve discovered about what it means and what it takes to be a collaborative leader, and to put collaborative power to work. This brief article is devoted to that task.
“Real” leadership – What is that ?
Some time ago a senior vice president of a major manufacturing firm asked for my help in exploring what it would take to create “a high quality leadership development program” that he and his colleagues could install in their company. During the course of our conversations, and because my own schedule was crowded at the time and he wanted to begin to search out what was “out there” in the marketplace right away, I encouraged him to attend an introductory workshop in leader effectiveness that a trusted colleague of mine was set to conduct within a month’s time. Since it was a program that I enthusiastically endorsed and had conducted workshops in myself, my hope was that by attending he could catch a glimpse of its approach to leadership and perhaps sense its potential for inclusion in any future plans as our discussions moved forward. He decided to go, and we agreed that I would contact him shortly after the workshop’s end to discuss his experience, and whether and how we might proceed.
It turned out that he liked the workshop, but he had a strongly felt reaction to the program’s identified subject matter. “Leader effectiveness?”, he questioned. “I think that’s a misnomer – the workshop was mostly about relationships and interpersonal communication skills.” Citing the program’s emphasis on Active Listening, effective confrontation, and conflict resolution, he categorized them all as “people skills stuff”.
And he stated that although he believed the skills could be supportive of a leader’s performance, they were nevertheless subsidiary to…….well, actually, he couldn’t say exactly to what. Except that for him they were not “the real thing”. They were not “real” leadership skills.
The default presumption about leadership in the popular mind
It wasn’t the first time that a corporate executive or other organizational decision-makers with whom I was in conversation about leadership education had drawn such a conclusion about this kind of workshop content. And it’s not surprising – for at least two reasons. One is that there’s a kind of “default” presumption in our society about leadership that’s firmly imprinted in the popular mind, and it is this: “Real leaders” are charismatically aggressive, “take charge” persons who possess the “hard skills” of “getting things done”.
And what might those skills be? If we look in the direction of a study of Steve Kaplan of the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business, we can begin to get a clue. Although independent of my surmise about a “default presumption” that shapes how many people think about what constitutes a “real” leader, Kaplan for his own purposes suggests that “hard skills” include behaviors associated with being “fast”, being “aggressive”, and demonstrating “persistence” and “follow through”. And citing some of his research findings, he asserts that when it comes to what constitutes what he calls the most “impactful” features of leadership, these kinds of steady, quick-moving, take charge behaviors actually “trump” the so-called “soft skills” of being “good listeners”, “consensus builders”, staying “open to criticism”, demonstrating creativity, and being “team players”.
Whether his intention or not (and I would suspect not), Kaplan’s conclusions nevertheless mesh well with, but unfortunately lend potential implicit support to the “default” stereotype of leadership and to those who believe (like the manufacturing company vice president) that “soft” interpersonal competencies are perhaps nice accessories to have, but are not themselves what real leadership is all about.
Good news and bad news for “communication skills”
But there’s a second reason that it’s not surprising that some corporate leaders and organizational decision-makers sometimes conclude that relational and interpersonal skills are only subsidiary to what “real leadership” is about. And that is that those who are advocates for or who conduct this kind of leadership training often actually package their presentations in a language that promotes such skills as Active Listening and effective confrontation primarily and precisely as “communication skills,” inadvertently inviting the impression from some that these are essentially ancillary, handy tools that can be usefully added to a leader’s “skill belt” to be used in the right way at the right time to help improve both individual and team performance. The good news is that those communication skills can indeed make a positive difference, there is research to verify it, and most organizational decision-makers – like the vice president of the manufacturing company – support their use.
But the bad news is that something crucial is missing. For the vice president of manufacturing (and perhaps others like him), the question remains: What do these skills have to do with leadership? “Where’s the beef?” about leadership? Must he, must we, only infer? Is the only answer, after all, that these “soft” skills are simply helpful add-ons, passed along to us from the social sciences, good for helping leaders pay attention to peoples’ needs and for increasing participation, but in the last analysis remaining subsidiary to the other so-called “impactful” actions of the hard driving “take charge/I’m in charge” leader? And is that why, for example, corporate leaders often send those subordinate to them to leader effectiveness workshops that focus on “communication skills” but seldom attend themselves? That is, because it’s not about “the real thing”? Because it’s “subordinate” to the real thing?
Meeting the challenge: It’s not about the skills
After years of facilitating leadership training workshops and pondering the “what’s real leadership?” question, I’ve developed a conviction, a point of view in response to such questions as these – one that I wish I had developed and could have shared with the vice president of the manufacturing firm years ago before he went his own way, seeking other resources. And it is this: Leadership is a way of being-in-action with others. It is a conscious exercise of human energy that has intention and purpose. It is, in fact, as Peter Block has said, the process of translating intention into reality. And it occurs – always – within the context of a world of interactions. In other words, it is “inherently a relational, communal process”.
Consequently, it’s not really about the skills. It’s about what drives them, what fuels them, what gives them life. And what drives and fuels and gives them life is a transforming energy that some of us call collaborative power. Collaborative power is power with, not power over. And the “communication skills” are the vessels, the methods of action through which that power can be exercised and implemented. Everything evolves, and what leadership is and what it means is no exception. It is who we are, and who and what we choose to be when we seek to join with others in shaping productive outcomes.
It seems only natural, then, to ask: What kind of outcomes do we want? If, in fact, we get what we create, what is it that we want to create? Who is it that we choose to be? Here for your consideration are some possibilities…….
Some what-ifs
What if you and I believed, with great and honest passion, that whenever we were in conversation about something — the outcome of which each of us had a substantial stake in — every present moment of the exchange between us was immediately and literally formative of the quality of results we would get? What if we believed that?
What if we believed, ever so strongly, that when we were planning and problem-solving with others, the practical value and success of the solutions we shaped together were significantly determined by the quality of the relationship climate that we created through our interactions – and that it is we, and only we, who have the power to create that climate?
And what if we believed, and with a high degree of confidence, that we knew what the characteristics of that climate needed to be in order for new and productive things to happen, that those characteristics could be identified, learned, and brought into being through our own attitudes and actions, and that their influence and endurance depended on our knowledge and skill, and on our commitment to continually nurture and develop them?
What if we believed all of that? What if we believed that when information is being transmitted, or when organizational visions are being formed, or when teams are being created, or when decisions are being made and implemented, or when conflicts arise, that it is literally in and through the conscious exercise of an informed, collaborative way-of-being with others that the most productive and lasting and rewarding things happen?
What if, indeed? Can you imagine?
Copyright 2013, H. Tucker Upshaw PhD.