Groups in Context

We exist as members in organizational peer groups: in Top Executive groups, Middle Management and Staff groups, and Bottom groups. We also bring our personal bias to our group relationships, to our affinities and antipathies. When things go wrong in our groups, our tendency is to explain these difficulties in terms of personal issues: there is something wrong with you or me, or maybe we are just an unfortunate mix. And when our diagnoses are personal, so also are our usual remedies: fix, fire, rotate, separate, divorce, or recommend coaching or therapy for one or more parties.

In fact, many of the peer group breakdowns that occur are not personal at all; they become personal, but their roots lie in context blindness.

Principle 3: When We Are Blind to Our Peer Group’s Context

Principle 3: When we are blind to the contexts in which our peer groups are functioning, we are vulnerable to falling into dysfunctional scenarios that cause us personal stress, weaken if not end our relationships with our peers, and detract from the contributions our peer groups could be making to the system:

• Territorial Tops. Members of Top peer groups may see themselves as just people with a job to do, but they are more than that; they are a group existing in a context of complexity and accountability (“Four Persons in a Top Context”).

  FOUR PERSONS IN A TOP CONTEXT

  

  Without awareness and mastery of that context, they are vulnerable to falling into dysfunctional territoriality. The process goes something like this. As members of Top teams, we reflexively adapt to the complexity and accountability of our context by differentiating, with each of us handling our own areas of responsibility. Differentiation is an essential process; without it, we would not be able to cope with the complexity and responsibility of our situation. But then a familiar process unfolds; we harden in our differentiations. Differentiations become territories. Each of us becomes increasingly knowledgeable and responsible for our area and decreasingly knowledgeable and responsible for others’ areas. We develop a ‘‘mine’’ mentality. We become protective and defensive of our territory. And we face uncertainties about the form and future of the system: What kind of culture do we want to create? Do we want to expand in new directions or stick to our knitting? Are we going to take financial risks or play it cautiously?

  These are complex questions with no textbook answers, yet we gradually polarize around fixed positions: the Riskers versus the Cautionaries; the Loose/Democratic System Builders versus the Bureaucratic/Authoritarian System Builders. Relationships fray. There are issues about who are the really important members of this team. Members feel they are not respected for their contributions. There are feelings about who is holding up their piece of the action. There are battles for control. Silos develop, sending mixed, confusing messages down through the system. There is redundant building up of resources in the silos; potential synergies across silos are blocked. Tensions among the Tops are high, and it all feels so personal.

• Fractionated Middles. Middle peer groups, whether first-line supervisors or middle managers or staff groups, may think of one another as just people and attribute their feelings about one another as simply reflections of one another’s personality, temperament, motives, values, and such. But Middle peer groups exist in a tearing context, one that draws them away from one another and out toward those individuals they are to supervise, lead, manage, coach, or service (“Four Persons in a Middle Context”).Dispersing is an adaptive response to that tearing context; that is what Middles are hired to do. But in time, we harden in our separateness. We develop an ‘‘I’’ mentality in which our separateness from one another predominates; our competitiveness with one another intensifies, as does our tendency to evaluate one another on relative surface issues: emotionality, manner of speech, skin color, gender, clothes we wear, and such. This fractionation of Middles isolates them, leaving them unsupported, without a peer group, able to be surprised, and often feeling undercut by actions taken by other Middles. It leaves the system uncoordinated, and it works against potential synergies among Middles or any collective influence by Middles.

FOUR PERSONS IN A BOTTOM CONTEXT

• Conforming Bottoms. Bottom peer groups exist in a context of shared vulnerability (“Four Persons in a Bottom Context”). The reflexive response is to coalesce. In coalescing, we feel (and, in fact, may be) less vulnerable. We develop a ‘‘we’’ mentality in which our differences are submerged and we feel connected to one another, supporting and being supported by one another. But then we harden in our we-ness — our closeness to one another and our separateness from all others, from ‘‘them.’’ In our we-ness we become wary of all others, resistant to them, and at times antagonistic to them. In our we-ness, there is pressure from one another as well as self-inflicted pressure to maintain unity. Difference is experienced as threatening to the we, and those expressing difference are pressured to come back into line. Individual action is experienced as threatening to the we and is discouraged. The pressure toward conformity is intense. The cost to individuals is the suppression of their freedom and the opportunity to develop their individuality; the cost to the system is resistance to even the best-intentioned change initiatives and the suppression of energy that could be focused on system business.Each of these scenarios results in stress for individual group members, causes the quality of their relationships to deteriorate, and diminishes the group’s contribution to the overall system. And each of these scenarios is avoidable. Transformation becomes possible with context awareness and choice:

  Leadership strategy 3: Recognize the context your peer group is in; adapt to that context without allowing adaptation to harden into dysfunctionality. Develop your peer group into a Robust System, one that strengthens individual members, their relations with one another, and their contribution to the system.

In order to develop powerful peer groups, we need to

A SYSTEM DIFFERENTIATING

A SYSTEM HOMOGENIZING

A SYSTEM INDIVIDUATING

(1) understand the fundamental systemic processes underlying Robust Systems, that is, systems with outstanding capacities to survive and develop in their environments;

(2) recognize how these processes are influenced by context in ways that can limit peer group effectiveness, and

(3) master the processes. Any peer group — Top, Middle, or Bottom — can become a Robust System.

A Robust System differentiates, homogenizes, individuates, and integrates (see “A System Differentiating,” “A System Homogenizing, “A System Individuating” and “A System Integrating”). ‘‘Differentiates’’ refers to the fact that the system develops variety in form and function, thus enabling it to interact complexly with its environment.

‘‘Homogenizes’’ means developing processes for sharing information and capacity across the system. ‘‘Individuates’’ means encouraging individuals and groups to function separately and make independent forays into the environment, experimenting, testing, developing their potential. ‘‘Integrates’’ means enabling a process in which parts — individuals and units — come together, share information, feed and support one another, and modulate one another’s actions in the service of the whole.

Whether we see context or are blind to it, our groups will reflexively adapt. But some reflexive patterns of adaptation actually diminish peer group effectiveness by relying on certain processes while ignoring or suppressing others. When we see and understand context, we can strengthen our groups by bringing the ignored or suppressed processes back into the mix.

• The formula for falling into Top Territoriality is differentiation and individuation without homogenization and integration.For Top groups in the context of complexity and accountability, the reflexive response is to differentiate and individuate, that is, to develop a variety of forms and processes for coping with complexity and for the parts to function independently of one another in the pursuit of these separate strategies and approaches. Thus far, this is all to the good. It is when Top groups fail to balance differentiation and individuation with homogenization and integration that they fall into destructive territoriality. In light of this peril, how can leaders develop a robust Top peer group? The leadership challenge for Top groups is not to differentiate less but to homogenize and integrate more, to share high quality information with one another, to spend time walking in one another’s shoes, to work together on projects other than their specialized arenas, to function as mutual coaches to one another in which all Tops are committed to one another’s success. Such forms of homogenizing and integrating activities serve to strengthen the group’s capacity. The new formula for Top peer power becomes: Homogenization and integration strengthen differentiation and integration.
• The formula for falling into Middle Alienation is individuation without integration. For Middle groups in the tearing context, the reflexive response is to individuate: to separate and function independently as they supervise, manage, lead, coach, or otherwise service the groups they are charged with serving. This is an adaptive response to the tearing context. It is when individuation is not strengthened by integration that the fractionated pattern described previously develops. In light of this peril, how can leaders develop a robust Middle peer group? The leadership challenge for Middle peers is not to individuate less but to integrate more: meet together regularly with just Middle peers, share information gleaned from across the system, use their shared intelligence to diagnose system issues, share best practices, solve problems, work collectively to create changes that individually they are unable to achieve. The new formula for Middle peer power becomes: Integration strengthens individuation.
• The formula for falling into Bottom Conformity is homogenization and integration without individuation and differentiation. For Bottom groups in the context of shared vulnerability, the reflexive response is to coalesce. Coalescence is a process in which unity is maintained by homogenizing (emphasizing commonality while suppressing differences that could divide) and integrating, that is, sharing resources and supporting one another in common cause. Coalescence is an adaptive response to shared vulnerability; it is when homogenization and integration are not balanced by individuation and differentiation that the groups fall into stifling and destructive conformity. So how to develop a robust Bottom peer group? The leadership challenge for Bottom peers is to strengthen themselves by encouraging differentiation (Let’s explore multiple approaches to coping with our vulnerability) and individuation (Go out there and see what unique contribution you can make). Differentiation and individuation are not experienced as threats to unity as long as they are pursued with the goal of strengthening the we rather than weakening it. The formula of, In unity there is strength, is changed to, In diversity there is strength. In the language of group processes, the new formula for Bottom peer power becomes: Individuation and differentiation strengthen homogenization and integration.

Principle 4: Overcoming the Illusions of System Blindness

Principle 4: Our consciousness — particularly how we experience others — is shaped by our relationship to them. Change the relationship, and we experience them quite differently.

One reaction to any of the group strategies described could be: Very interesting, but it won’t work with my people. And why won’t it work with your people? Well, it’s because of their temperament, or needs, or motives, or level of maturity, and so forth. We find ourselves back into experiencing others through a personal rather than systemic lens. When Tops are in the ‘‘mine’’ mentality, Middles in the ‘‘I’’ mentality, and Bottoms in the ‘‘we’’ mentality, the feelings they have toward others feel solid, firmly grounded in the characteristics of these others. Simply a matter of who they are. And any notion that you might feel differently toward them feels far-fetched. Yet these solid, firmly grounded experiences are in fact the illusions of systemic blindness. Change the relationship, and the feelings change.

In the Power Lab experience (described in Part I of this article), we demonstrate this illusion quite dramatically. A central feature of the program is a multiple-day intensive societal experience in which participants are randomly assigned to Top, Middle, and Bottom positions. With great regularity, Tops fall into territorial issues, Middles become alienated from one another, and Bottoms become a powerfully connected we. And all relationships seem firmly grounded in the reality of who the people are. Then there is a second experience in which all roles are shifted; the powerfully bonded Bottoms are now in different contexts: some as Tops, others as Middles, and others as Customers. And in short order, love is transformed into impatience, annoyance, competition, aggression. Previously territorial Tops and alienated Middles are now bonded Bottoms. They all experience the power of context. That can and should be a humbling experience.

There may be many roads leading to systemic understanding. As an educator, my favorite is this: I prefer to come to a system intentionally knowing nothing about it: reading no reports, interviewing no one. And then I give a talk on Top Teams and Middle Peer Relationships and Bottom Group think. The presentation is about context and how context shapes our experiences of ourselves and others, and the dysfunctional scenarios that can follow. The power comes when people identify themselves and their system in this pure abstraction. How does he know this about us? Clearly whatever is happening to us is not simply about us or our particular organization. Something else must be going on. And that questioning creates the opening for systemic understanding and intervention: for Tops to pay more attention to homogenizing and integrating activities, for Middles to regularly integrate with one another, and for Bottoms to strengthen themselves by building individuation and differentiation into their survival strategies. The challenge for all is to see, understand, and master systemic context.

Systems in Practice: The Case of the Rigid Manager

The following case illustrates the people-in-context ideas I’ve described in this chapter, and it also supports what could be regarded as a fifth principle toward developing system insight:

Principle 5: Seeing people opens up deep but potentially limited personal interventions; seeing context opens up comprehensive systemic interventions.

A change intervention that has been successful in division A of Ace Manufacturing is being introduced into division B with the help of a team of consultants. One snag is that B’s division head is less than enthusiastic about the project. Our department managers are having enough trouble keeping up with day-to-day demands without dealing with the complexity of a whole new initiative. Still, the initiative has been introduced, and five of the six department managers seem invested in making it work despite its apparent difficulties. Charles, the sixth manager, has been ignoring the initiative. To him, it is as if it doesn’t exist. Charles is clear about his boss’s priorities, and his boss’s priorities are Charles’s priorities.

The consultants have attempted to work with Charles, with little success. They interpret Charles’s apparent resistance from a personal developmental framework: seeing him as being stuck at a developmental level at which he is unable to separate himself from the demands of authority. If Charles and the initiative are to be successful, Charles needs to be helped to move through that stage of development and acquire greater independence.

Meanwhile, the other department managers, each operating independently of the others, are grappling with both the requirements of the new change initiative and the continuing demands of the division head, who is increasingly unhappy with them. They have been lax on their paperwork, reports not being timely or thorough, and there have been too many complaints from people in their operations. None of this is a problem for Charles. His paperwork is fine, his reports are timely and thorough, and as far as the division head is concerned, Charles’s operation is running smoothly.

Charles may in fact be stuck at this level of development, and it could be useful to help him move through that stage. But a richer understanding of this situation with more powerful intervention possibilities emerges when observed through a systems lens.

A Systemic Picture. Charles, with his apparent inability to separate himself from authority, is but one piece of a total system scenario involving the relations between and among the division head (Top) and the department managers (Middles). A deeper understanding of this situation and a more global intervention strategy emerges when we take into account the contexts in which people are functioning:

• Top Context: Complexity and Accountability. To the division head, this new initiative is being experienced as another complication in an already complex world. This feeling is reinforced by the lax reports from department managers and the complaints coming from their groups. Progress on the change initiative seems incoherent. The division head receives very different reports.
• Middle Context: Tearing. Charles is not the only Middle torn between the requirements of the new initiative and the day-to-day demands of the job. Department managers are coping with the tearing in different ways. Charles reduces the tearing by aligning up; the division head’s priorities are his priorities. The division head has no problem with Charles, but the consultants do because Charles’s priorities are not their priorities. Meanwhile, the other department managers are coping with the tearing differently. Some are aligning with the consultants’ priorities; the consultants are pleased with their efforts, but the division head is not. Others are attempting to please everyone with limited success.
• Middle Peer Group Context: Tearing. Each department manager faces this tearing alone. There is no Middle peer group with a coherent strategy for handling their tearing and implementing (or agreeing not to implement) the change initiative.

A Systemic Intervention. The key leverage point is the Middle peer group. Currently there is no Middle group with an independent perspective on the current situation or a coherent strategy for dealing with it. Middles, being in their independent, separate ‘‘I’’mentalities, do not experience the need or potential for collective power in their group. In fact, their competitiveness with and evaluations of one another, all consequences of the ‘‘I’’ mentality, support their not working collectively.

A first step in a systemic intervention is to develop system knowledge: education regarding context. Rather than approaching the situation head-on, a conceptual presentation or simulation would be aimed at illuminating context, primarily the Middle context and the challenges that context raises for individual Middles and the Middle peer group. The goal is for the abstract to illuminate the concrete current situation: why people are feeling the way they do and how the development of a powerful, independent Middle peer group can fundamentally transform the situation. Then it is up to department managers to work on developing such a group—one that meets regularly, in which members share information about what’s working for them and what’s not. They support one another, coach one another, and, most important, develop an agreed-on strategy for handling the change initiative.

If Middles are successful in that effort, a number of problems are resolved. The complexity of the Top (division head) is reduced; he is receiving more consistent information from his Middles, and the change initiative appears to be managed more uniformly. Individual Middles are less torn, alone, weak, unsupported; all Middles feel part of a powerful and effective peer group; the change initiative is pursued more consistently. And, one would hope, this change initiative, when implemented effectively, will have a positive effect on the lives of all system members. From this persons-in-context framework, the focus is less on ‘‘fixing’’ any one person than on helping all parties see, understand, and master the systemic contexts they are in.

Implications for Leadership Development

Seeing context is an unnatural act. We do not see others’ contexts; all we see directly are their actions or in actions. Nor do we see our own contexts; what we see and feel are specific events, actions, and conditions. So the challenge is how to educate leaders regarding context.

Conceptual Presentations. This article is one example of education in context. Leaders, like everyone else, welcome the opportunity to organize what appear to be random, chaotic phenomena into actionable abstractions — finding the simplicity in complexity. This framework of Top, Middle, Bottom, Customer does that. It resonates with leaders’ day to-day experiences; they can readily see themselves as moving in and out of these contexts; and those with at least minimal self-awareness can recognize the lure of the disempowering reflex responses. Along with awareness, the framework offers clear choice: alternative strategies for empowering self, others, relationships, and systems. In this sense, this is a teachable framework, whether through chapters and articles such as this, presentations, case studies, animations, theatrical dramatizations, or other media.

Executive Coaching. One-on-one coaching can be an important tool of education in context. This, of course, requires that coaches have a deep grasp of context first in their own lives and then in their ability to see it operating in others. The coach can help the leader take into account the context of others. What is their world like? What are they wrestling with? How are they likely to experience this initiative of yours? And what can you do to ease their condition in a way that makes it possible for them to do what you and the system need them to do? A coach can help leaders be aware of their own context and the choices available to them. Are you unnecessarily sucking responsibility for this up to yourself and away from others? What are the consequences of doing or not doing that? Are you sliding in between others’ issues? What are the consequences of your doing or not doing that? The coach’s job is not only to help create awareness and choice in the moment, but also to educate leaders such that context consciousness becomes a regular component of their analytical framework.

Experiential Education. Well-designed organization simulations enable leaders to experience directly the consequences of context blindness and the possibilities that come with seeing, understanding, and mastering context. There is a difference between knowing these concepts intellectually and experiencing them directly in the heat of action. In a stroke of synchronicity, as I was writing this article, I received an email from an Organization Workshop trainer who had just completed a workshop with the executives of his organization. He wrote:‘‘The best part of it was [that] the group has had a lot of prior exposure to [the concepts of] choice and responsibility. So this was for them a fantastic example of how the theory of choice/responsibility isn’t as easy as it sounds.’’ Experiential education can provide this kind of humbling experience that sets the stage for real knowing.

Conclusion

A missing leadership ingredient is the ability to see, understand, and master the systemic contexts in which we and others exist. In our person-centered orientation, we tend to be blind to context, and that blindness is costly.

When we are blind to others’ contexts, we misunderstand them, have little empathy for the challenges they are facing, misinterpret their actions, react inappropriately to them, and fall out of the potential for partnership with them. When we are blind to the contexts we are in, we are vulnerable to falling into patterns that are dysfunctional for ourselves and our systems as burdened Tops, torn Middles, oppressed Bottoms, and screwed Customers. And when we are blind to our groups’ contexts, we are vulnerable to falling into the dysfunctional patterns ofTop territoriality, Middle alienation, and Bottom group think.

With system sight, all of these dysfunctions can be avoided; we are able to interact more sensitively and strategically with others who are Tops, Middles, Bottoms, and Customers; we are able to create more thoughtful, creative, and productive responses when we are Top, Middle, Bottom, and Customer; and we are able to create peer groups whose members value and support one another and who collectively make powerful contributions to their systems. All of this can be taught — just as we know that the earth revolves around the sun even though our direct experience is the other way around. The other day, I heard my young grandson describing how the other kids in class were grousing about something their teacher had done. He said,‘‘Don’t they get it? She’s just a Middle.’’ So maybe early education would be a productive path to develop.

The post People in Context, Part II appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

Why is this relationship problematic? First, although learning is clearly essential for sustained individual and organizational performance in a changing environment, at times the costs may be more visible than performance benefits. Learning can be messy, uncertain, interpersonally risky, and without guaranteed results. Moreover, not all learning leads to improved performance; it depends on what is being learned and how important it is

for particular dimensions of performance. Although some learning is straightforward (the knowledge is codified and readily used by newcomers), other forms rely on experimentation and exploration for which outcomes are unknown in advance. Lastly, time delays between learning and performance may obscure or even undermine evidence of a clear causal relationship.

As described in this article, organizations can at least partly address these challenges through leadership that creates a climate of psychological safety and that promotes inquiry. But first, let’s go into more detail about some of the ways in which a focus on learning can actually appear to undermine performance.

Impediments to Learning

Where catastrophic failure is possible, mistakes are inevitable, or innovation is necessary, learning from failure is highly desirable. Yet research suggests that few organizations dig deeply enough to understand and capture the potential learning from failures. Why this resistance to learning?

Psychological and Organizational Barriers. A multitude of barriers can preclude learning in teams and organizations. These include limitations in human skills or cognition that lead people to draw false conclusions, and complex and cross-disciplinary work designs that can make failures difficult to identify. Additional barriers include lack of policies and procedures to encourage experimentation or forums for employees to analyze and discuss the results.

Learning about complex, interconnected problems also suffers from ineffective discussion among parties with conflicting perspectives. Status differences, lack of psychological safety, and lack of inquiry into others’ information and experiences related to substantive issues can combine to ensure that a group as a whole learns little.

Powerful individuals or respected experts can stifle dissent simply by expressing their opinions. Social pressures for conformity exacerbate the impact of leaders’ actions, particularly when large status and power differences exist among leaders and subordinates. In addition, people in disagreement rarely ask the kind of sincere questions that are necessary for them to learn from each other. We tend to try to force our views on others rather than educating them by providing the underlying reasoning behind our perspectives, as Chris Argyris and Donald Schön showed long ago (see Argyris, C. and Schön, D. Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspectives, Addison-Wesley, 1978).

More generally, the human desire to “get it right” rather than to treat both success and failure as useful data greatly impedes learning. Individuals prevent learning when they ignore their own mistakes in order to protect themselves from the unpleasantness and loss of self-esteem associated with acknowledging failure. People may also deny, distort, or cover up their mistakes in order to avoid the public embarrassment or private derision that frequently accompanies such confessions, despite the potential of learning from them. In addition, people derive comfort from evidence that enables them to believe what they want to believe, to deny responsibility for failures, and to attribute a problem to others or the system.

Similarly, groups and organizations tend to suppress awareness of failures. Organizational incentives typically reward success and punish failure, creating an incentive to hide mistakes. Teams and organizations are also predisposed to underreact to the threat of failure when stakes are high, different views and interests are present, and the situation is ambiguous. Such groups can fail to learn and hence make poor decisions.

Multiple mechanisms can combine to inhibit responsiveness and preclude learning in group settings. First, people tend to filter out subtle threats, blocking potentially valuable data from careful consideration. They also remain stubbornly attached to initial views and seek information and experts to confirm initial conclusions. Groups silence dissenting views, especially when power differences are present. They spend more time confirming shared views than envisioning alternative possibilities. Organizational structures often serve to block new information from reaching the top of the organization. Rather, they tend to reinforce existing wisdom.

IMPACT OF PSYCHOLOGICAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL BARRIERS TO LEARNING

While proactively seeking to acquire new capabilities often takes a toll on short-term performance, over time, it benefits both the individual and the organization. Avoiding learning behaviors, on the other hand, can undermine long-term performance.

Inability to Learn from Failure. Most organizations’ inability to learn from failure stems from a lack of attention to small, everyday problems and mistakes. Organizations that embrace small failures as part of a learning process are more likely to innovate successfully. Likewise, organizations that pay more attention to small problems are more likely to avert big ones, especially where tasks are interconnected. Despite the increased rate of failure that accompanies deliberate experimentation, organizations that experiment effectively are likely to be more innovative, productive, and successful than those that do not take such risks (see especially Sitkin, S. B., “Learning Through Failure: The Strategy of Small Losses,” in L. L. Cummings and B. M. Staw (Eds.), Research in Organizational Behavior, Vol. 14: 231–266, JAI Press, 1992, and Cannon and Edmondson (2005), cited above).

Small failures arise not only in the course of purposeful experimentation, but also in daily work that is complex and interdependent. When problems inevitably arise during the course of business in these situations, workers can either simply compensate for or work around problems, or they can seek to resolve the underlying cause by notifying those who can help to correct them. The former would likely go unnoticed, while the latter would expose poor performance. Nevertheless, compensating for problems can be counterproductive if doing so isolates information about problems such that no learning occurs.

In hazardous situations, small failures not identified as problems worth examination often precede catastrophic failures. Small failures are often the key early warning sign that could provide a wake-up call needed to avert disaster down the road. Yet, in recognizing small failures in order to learn from them, individuals and groups must acknowledge the performance gaps.

Collective learning requires valuing failure and being willing to incur small failures in front of colleagues. It requires being willing to enhance rather than reduce variance. Learning groups must proactively identify, discuss, and analyze what may appear to be insignificant mistakes or problems in addition to large failures. When organizations ignore small problems, preventing larger failures becomes more difficult (see “Impact of Psychological and Organizational Barriers to Learning”).

The Learning Mindset

Given the above challenges, this section describes some of the theoretical alternatives for promoting organizational learning that enhances future performance. It ties together different but related ideas from research at several levels of analysis (see “Learning Mindsets at Multiple Levels of Analysis,” p. 4).

Advocacy and Inquiry Orientations. As discussed above, organizational structures and processes can severely inhibit the ability of a group to effectively incorporate the unique knowledge and concerns of different members. Key features of group process failures include antagonism; a lack of listening, learning, and inquiring; and limited psychological safety for challenging authority. These kinds of individual and interpersonal behaviors have been collectively referred to as an advocacy orientation (Garvin and Roberto introduced this term in “What You Don’t Know About Making Decisions,” Harvard Business Review, Vol. 79, No. 8, September 2001).

For example, simple but genuine inquiry into the thinking of other team members could have generated critical new insights about the threat posed by the foam strike to the Columbia space shuttle. Instead, NASA managers spent 16 days downplaying the problem and so did not view the events as a trigger for conducting detailed analyses of the situation. A recent analysis by Roberto, Bohmer, and Edmondson concluded that NASA’s response to the foam strike threat was characterized by active discounting of risk, fragmented, discipline-based analyses, and a wait-and-see orientation to action. When engineers became concerned about the foam strike, the impact of their questions and analyses was dampened by poor team design, coordination, and support. In contrast to the flat and flexible organizational structures that enable research and development, NASA exhibited a rigid hierarchy with strict rules and guidelines for behavior, structures conducive to aims of routine production and efficiency. The cultural reliance on data-driven problem solving and quantitative analysis discouraged novel lines of inquiry based on intuitive judgments and interpretations of incomplete, yet troubling information. In short, the shuttle team faced a significant learning opportunity but was not able to take advantage of it due to counterproductive organizational and group dynamics.

In contrast, effectively conducting an analysis of a failure requires a spirit of inquiry and openness, patience, and a tolerance for ambiguity. Such an inquiry orientation is characterized by the perception among group members that multiple alternatives exist, frequent dissent, deepening understanding of issues and development of new possibilities, filling gaps in knowledge through combining information sources, and awareness of each others’ reasoning and its implications. Such an orientation can counteract common group process failures. Learning about the perspectives, ideas, experiences, and concerns of others when facing uncertainty and high-stakes decisions is critical to making appropriate choices.

Confirmatory and Exploratory Responses. Leaders play an important role in determining group orientation to an observed or suspected failure. Analyzing the Columbia Shuttle tragedy, Edmondson and colleagues suggested that when small problems occur, leaders can respond in one of two basic ways. A confirmatory response — appropriate in routine production settings, but harmful in more volatile or uncertain environments — reinforces accepted assumptions, naturally promoting an advocacy orientation on the part of leaders and others. When individuals seek information, they naturally look for data that confirms existing beliefs. Confirmatory leaders act in ways consistent with established frames and beliefs, passive and reactionary rather than active and forward-looking.

In uncertain or risky situations or where innovation is required, an exploratory response may be more appropriate than seeking to confirm existing views. An exploratory response involves challenging and testing existing assumptions and experimenting with new behaviors and possibilities, the goal of which is to learn and to learn quickly. By deliberately exaggerating ambiguous threats, actively directing and coordinating team analysis and problem solving, and encouraging an overall orientation toward action, exploratory leaders encourage inquiry and experimentation. Leaders seeking to encourage exploration also actively foster constructive conflict and dissent and generate psychological safety by creating an environment in which people have an incentive, or at least do not have a disincentive, to identify and reveal failures, questions, and concerns. This form of leader response helps to accelerate learning through deliberate information gathering, creative mental simulations, and simple, rapid experimentation.

Rather than supporting existing assumptions, an exploratory response requires a deliberate shift in the mindset of a leader — and of others — that alters the way they interpret, make sense of, and diagnose situations. When leaders follow an exploratory approach, they embrace ambiguity and openly acknowledge gaps in knowledge. They recognize that their current understanding may require revision, and they actively seek evidence in support of alternative hypotheses. Rather than seeking to prove what they already believe, exploratory leaders seek discovery through creative and iterative experimentation.

Learning-Oriented and Coping-Oriented Approaches. When implementing an innovation such as a new technology or practice, leaders can orient those who will be responsible for implementation by responding in one of two ways. They may view the innovation challenge as something with which they need to cope or as an exciting learning and improvement opportunity. A coping-oriented approach is characterized by protective or defensive aims and technically oriented leadership. In contrast, learning-oriented leaders share with team members a sense of purpose related to accomplishing compelling goals and view project success as dependent on all team members.

In a study of 16 cardiac surgery departments implementing a minimally invasive cardiovascular surgery technique, successful surgical team leaders demonstrated a learning-oriented approach rather than a coping approach. Learning-oriented leaders explicitly communicated their interdependence with others, emphasizing their own fallibility and need for others’ input for the new technology to work. Without conveying any loss of expertise or status, these leaders simply recognized and communicated that in doing the new procedure they were dependent on others. In learning-oriented teams, members felt a profound sense of ownership of the project’s goals and processes, and they believed their roles to be crucial. Elsewhere, the surgeon’s position as expert precluded others from seeing a way to make genuine contributions beyond enacting their own narrow tasks, and it put them in a position of not seeing themselves as affecting whether the project succeeded or not. Learning-oriented teams had a palpable sense of teamwork and collegiality, aided by early practice sessions.

Organizing to learn and organizing to execute are two distinct management practices, one suited to exploration and the other to exploitation respectively.

In addition, team members felt completely comfortable speaking about their observations and concerns in the operating room, and they also were included in meaningful reflection sessions to discuss how the technology implementation was going. In teams that framed the innovation as a learning opportunity, leaders enrolled carefully selected team members, conducted pretrial team preparation, and engaged in multiple iterations of trial and reflection. Dramatic differences in the success of learning-oriented versus coping oriented leaders suggest that project leaders have substantial power to influence how team members see a project, especially its purpose and their own role in achieving that purpose.

Organizational Exploitation and Exploration. Inquiry and advocacy orientations describe individuals and groups; exploration and exploitation are terms that have been used to describe parallel characteristics of organizations. In mature markets, where solutions for getting a job done exist and are well understood, organizations tend to be designed and oriented toward a focus on execution of tasks and exploitation of current products or services. In more uncertain environments, knowledge about how to achieve performance is limited, requiring collective learning — or exploration in which open-ended experimentation is an integral part. In sum, exploration in search of new or better processes or products is conceptually and managerially distinct from execution, which is characterized by planning and structured implementation and amenable to formal tools such as statistical control.

Organizing to Learn and Organizing to Execute. In the same way that leader response drives group member orientation, the mindset of organizational leaders as well as the structures and systems they initiate play a large role in determining firm behavior and capabilities. Organizing to learn and organizing to execute are two distinct management practices, one suited to exploration and the other to exploitation respectively.

Where problems and processes are well understood and where solutions are known, leaders are advised to organize to execute. Organizing to execute relies on traditional management tools that motivate people and resources to carry out well-defined tasks. When reflecting on the work, leaders who organize to execute are well advised to ask, “Did we do it right?” In general, this approach is systematic, involves first-order learning in which feedback is used to modify or redirect activities, and eschews diversion from prescribed processes without good cause.

In contrast, facing a situation in which process solutions are not yet well developed, leaders must organize to learn: generating variance, learning from failure, sharing results, and experimenting continuously until workable processes are discovered, developed, and refined. Motivating organizational exploration requires a different mindset than motivating accurate and efficient execution. Leaders must ask not “did we succeed?” but rather “did we learn?”

In this way, organizing to learn considers the lessons of failure to be at least as valuable as the lessons of success. Such a managerial approach organizes people and resources for second-order learning that challenges, reframes, and expands possible alternatives. Practices involved in organizing to learn include promoting rather than reducing variance, conducting experiments rather than executing prescribed tasks, and rewarding learning rather than accuracy.

Creating systems to expose failures can help organizations create and sustain competitive advantage. For example, General Electric, UPS, and Intuit proactively seek data to help them identify failures. GE places an 800 number directly on each of its products. UPS allocates protected time for each of its drivers to express concerns or make suggestions. Intuit staffs its customer service line with technical designers, who directly translate feedback from customers into product improvements. At IDEO, brainstorming about problems on a particular project often enables engineers to discover ideas that benefit other design initiatives. At Toyota, the Andon cord, which permits any employee to halt production, enables continuous improvement through frequent investigation of potential concerns.

Leading Organizational Learning

Edmondson’s research has identified several success factors for leaders seeking to incorporate learning into their efforts to manage their organizations effectively. These include recognizing and responding to the need for learning versus execution, embracing the small failures from which organizations can learn, and maintaining the ability to shift nimbly between learning and execution as needed.

Diagnose the Situation and Respond Accordingly. Rather than vary their style as appropriate for the situation, in practice leaders tend to employ a consistent approach. They frequently gravitate toward organizing to execute, particularly when associated practices are consistent with the organization’s culture. However, being good at organizing to execute can hamper efforts that require learning. When leaders facing a novel challenge organize to execute rather than employing a learning approach, their organizations miss opportunities to innovate successfully.

Several years ago, the new chief operating officer at Children’s Hospital and Clinics in Minnesota, Julie Morath, exemplified a mindset of organizing to learn. Emphasizing that she did not have the answers, she invited people throughout the organization to join in a learning journey, aimed at discovering how to ensure 100 percent patient safety.

Organizing a team to experiment and learn about an unknown process requires a management approach that embraces failure rather than seeking perfect execution.

Embrace Failure. Organizing a team to experiment and learn about an unknown process requires a management approach that embraces failure rather than seeking perfect execution. Discovery and expeditious trial and error are the keys to successful learning. In the Electric Maze®, an interactive learning exercise created by Interel, participants recognize how unnatural collective learning is for most managers. Teams of students must get each member from one end of the maze to the other without speaking. Individuals step on the maze until a square beeps, at which point the individual must retrace his or her steps back to the start.

To optimize the learning process, the team should “embrace failure” (symbolized in the Electric Maze exercise as “beeps going forward”) and systematically collect as many “failures” as quickly as possible. More typically, however, the need to learn is hampered by the perceived interpersonal risk of “failing” in front of colleagues by stepping on a beeping square. In reality, only by stepping on beeping squares can the team learn quickly and discover the true path forward. The exercise offers a palpable experience to show managers that the desire to look as if one never makes mistakes hinders team and organizational learning.

Maintain Flexibility and Shift as Needed. Some business situations require innovation and execution simultaneously, or in rapid sequence. However, shifting from organizing to learn to organizing to execute can be difficult. Participants in the Electric Maze exercise come to appreciate this challenge as well. To find the correct path through the maze requires organizing to learn.

Once the path is discovered, teams are required to have participants walk through the path as quickly as possible with minimal error. In practical terms, this means the teams must shift their behavior from learning to execution, something that most teams find difficult. The Maze exercise illustrates that managing a team for superb execution of a known process calls for a different approach than managing a team to experiment and discover a new process. The ability to recognize situations that require learning and the flexibility to shift from execution to learning requires awareness as well as skillful management, posing significant challenge to many leaders and competitive advantage to leaders with such ability.

Implications for Performance Measurement

The implication of the complex relationship between learning and performance for performance measurement is worth a brief discussion. Performance is easier to measure in execution contexts than in exploratory learning contexts. In the latter, performance can be challenging to measure in the short term, even if it contributes to clear performance criteria in the long term.

Consider the Electric Maze exercise again. In the second phase, excellent performance is error-free, rapid completion of the task—every member traversing the discovered path. In the first phase, success requires encountering and learning from failures, but how many is the right number? How fast should experiments be run? As in this example, the success of experimentation is far more difficult to assess than the success of execution.

Clearly, there are situations in which it is appropriate to measure performance against quality and efficiency standards. This is true when tasks are routine. However, employee rewards based primarily on indices measuring routine performance, such as accuracy and speed, can thwart efforts to innovate. Stated goals of increasing innovation are more effective when rewards promote experimentation rather than penalize failure. At Bank of America, for example, innovation was an espoused value. Leaders targeted a projected failure rate of 30 percent as suggestive of sufficient experimentation. However, few employees experimented with new ideas until management changed its reward system from traditional performance measures to those that rewarded innovation. Truly supporting innovation requires recognition that trying out innovative ideas will produce failures on the path to improvement.

Leaders need to align incentives and to offer resources to promote and facilitate effective learning. Supporting improvement requires understanding that mistakes are inevitable in uncertain and risky situations. Organizations must reward improvement rather than success, reward experimentation even when it results in failure, and publicize and reward speaking up about concerns and mistakes, so others can learn. Policies that reward compliance with specific targets or procedures encourage effort toward those measures but may thwart efforts toward innovation and experimentation.

Given the problematic nature of the relationship between learning and performance, to provide incentives for learning, performance measurement must examine learning, not just performance. Useful tools include surveys, questionnaires, and interviews to examine attitudes toward and depth of understanding regarding new ideas, knowledge, and ways of thinking. Process measures are also helpful. Direct observation is useful for assessing behavioral change due to new insights. Finally, performance measurement must consider improvement by measuring results over time. Groups that improve more over a fixed time frame or that take less time to improve must be learning faster than their peers.

Supporting improvement requires understanding that mistakes are inevitable in uncertain and risky situations.

Conclusions

This brief article calls attention to some of the challenges and tensions that exist when trying to improve team or organizational performance through proactive learning. We note several ways in which learning and performance in organizations can be at odds. Notably, when organizations engage in a new learning challenge, performance often suffers, or appears to suffer, in the short term. Struggling to acquire new skills or capabilities often takes a real, not just apparent, toll on short-term performance. Moreover, by revealing and analyzing their failures and mistakes — a critical aspect of learning — work groups may appear to be performing less well than they would otherwise.

The work reviewed here has elucidated the challenges of learning from failure in organizations, including the challenges of admitting errors and failures and production pressure that make it difficult to invest time in learning. These challenges are at least partially addressed by managerial efforts to create a climate of psychological safety and to promote inquiry. Leadership is thus essential to foster the mindset, group behaviors, and organizational investments needed to promote today’s learning and invest in tomorrow’s performance.

Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management and chair of the doctoral programs at Harvard Business School. Her research examines leadership influences on psychological safety, learning, collaboration, and innovation in teams and organizations.

Sara J. Singer, M. B. A., Ph. D., is assistant professor of Health Care Management and Policy at Harvard School of Public Health and an assistant in Health Policy in the Institute for Health Policy, Massachusetts General Hospital. Her research uses organizational safety, organizational learning, and leadership theories to understand and address the causes and consequences of errors and adverse events.

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I suggest an often overlooked lens that provides a deeper understanding of these phenomena and a range of more

effective leadership strategies. This is a person-in-context lens in which phenomena are understood as the interactions of individuals and groups with the systemic contexts in which they and others exist. When we fail to recognize context, events are misunderstood and energies misplaced. A missing leadership competency is seeing, understanding, and mastering the systemic contexts in which we and others exist.

In this article, I describe the consequences of blindness to context and the productive possibilities we derive from context sight. The first main section describes four common system contexts: Top, Middle, Bottom, and Customer. The second section discusses the four contexts as they apply to individuals and the third as they apply to groups. In both sections, I describe familiar scenarios that result from context blindness and produce personal stress, strained or broken relationships, and diminished organizational effectiveness. I also lay out some principles for seeing context and describe the positive difference that seeing context can make for leaders and others in organizations.

The fourth main section of the article presents a case that illustrates the limitations of personal orientations while demonstrating how seeing contexts deepens our understanding of situations and reveals more comprehensive and productive leadership strategies.

Seeing, understanding, and mastering context is an essential leadership competency. There is a difference between knowing that people operate in different contexts and experiencing relationships with people from different contexts in the day-to-day turmoil of leading modern organizations. I end with a discussion of the implications for leadership development.

Four System Contexts

A PERSON IN THE TOP CONTEXT

This section describes four common system contexts: Top, Middle, Bottom, and Customer (Oshry, 1994). This is not to imply that these are the only contexts in which people function, but these four are essential to our understanding of organizational interaction, and they are the four that I know very well from my work over the past forty years with both the Power Lab (Oshry, 1999) and the Organization Workshop, both described on page 4. What is important to understand is that Top, Middle, Bottom, and Customer are not just hierarchical positions; they are conditions all of us face in organizational interaction, conditions we move in and out of from event to event. So in that sense, all of us are Top/Middle/ Bottom/Customers.

A PERSON IN THE BOTTOM CONTEXT

• The Bottom Context: Vulnerability. We are in the Bottom context (“A Person in the Bottom Context”) of vulnerability whenever we are on the receiving end of decisions that affect our lives in major or minor ways. Plants are shut down, health and retirement benefits are changed, restrictive governmental regulations are put in place, new initiatives are instituted, current initiatives are abandoned. All of this happens to us without our involvement.
• The Top Context: Complexity and Accountability. We are in the Top context (“A Person in the Top Context”) whenever we have been designated responsible for a system or piece of a system — whether it is the organization as a whole, a division, unit, task force, family, project, team, or classroom. The Top context tends to be one of complexity and accountability: lots of inputs to deal with, difficult issues, issues from within and without the system, issues that aren’t dealt with elsewhere float up to you, and complex decisions must be made regarding the form, culture, and direction of the system. Whenever we are in that Top.

• The Middle Context: Tearing. We are in the Middle tearing context (“A Person in the Middle Context”) whenever we are pulled between the conflicting needs, demands, and priorities of two or more individuals or groups. We are Middle between our work group and our manager, between a spouse and a child, between supplier and manufacturing, between our executive group and the board, between one executive and another.

• The Customer Context: Neglect. We are in the Customer context of neglect (“A Person in the Customer Context”) whenever we are looking to some individual or group for a product or service that we need in order to move on with our work, and that product or service is not coming as fast as we want, at the price we want, or to the quality we had hoped for.

To reiterate the basic point: regardless of what positions we and others occupy, we and they are constantly moving in and out of these contexts: sometimes as Top, sometimes as Bottom, sometimes as Middle, and sometimes as Customer.

Awareness of Persons in Context

We do not reflexively see context; we see people, and we tend to experience our interactions as person to person. Sometimes we are blind to the context others are living in, and sometimes we are blind to our own context. The basic point is that we are not just interacting people to people; we are people in context. Failure to recognize that can lead to serious misunderstandings, inappropriate actions, and dysfunctional consequences. In this section, I discuss the contextual principles at work on the personal level, provide some examples of what that context looks and feels like, and offer some strategies a leader can take in this situation to address the gap.

Principle 1: When We Are Blind to Others’ Contexts

Principle 1: When we are blind to others’ contexts, we are likely to fall into scenarios in which we misunderstand others’ actions, attribute inaccurate motives to them, respond in ways that negatively affect our relationships with them, and diminish our personal and organizational effectiveness:

• ‘‘Arrogant’’ Tops. We may have a brilliant idea for organizational improvement. We send it to Top and await an acknowledgment, maybe even a promotion. To us, this is a great idea with potential for increased organization effectiveness. But to our Top, struggling to survive in this world of complexity, it may be just another complication in an already complex world. A week goes by with no response from Top. Two weeks. Nothing. Our reaction: It’s those arrogant Tops again! We get mad, we withdraw, and we lose our enthusiasm for making any more contributions.
• ‘‘Resistant’’ Bottoms. We’ve just developed an exciting new initiative that could really make a difference to our workers and ultimately to the organization. For the workers, it means more involvement, more empowerment, more opportunity to make a difference. We bring it up to our workers, but there is no enthusiasm. To us, this is an exciting initiative, but to our workers living in this world of vulnerability, this is the latest installment of ‘‘them’’ doing it to ‘‘us’’ again. What have they got up their sleeves this time? What happened to last year’s exciting new initiative? Just wait it out; this too shall pass. We conclude that our workers are just too far gone for anything to excite them.
• ‘‘Weak’’ Middles. We’ve just made a simple request to our Middle; it’s about support we need from him on our project. That’s all we’re asking for. To us, it’s a simple request, but to our Middle struggling to survive in a tearing world, supporting us is working against someone else who is pressing Middle to support her. So instead of a strong commitment to support, we get a weak wishy-washy I’ll see what I can do. Where did we ever get such a weak Middle!
• ‘‘Nasty’’ Customers. We’re trying to be helpful to a disgruntled customer whose product has once again been delayed. There’s nothing we can do about product delivery, but we do want to soothe Customer’s ruffled feathers, so we invite Customer out for coffee; we also suggest a tour of the facility and present our customer survey form. Instead of gratitude, we get an angry reaction from Customer. To us, we are making reasonable gestures; to Customer living in the world of neglect, our nice gestures are simply more neglect! Some people are just unreachable by kindness!

Leadership strategy 1 comes into play in all of these situations:

Leadership strategy 1: Take others’ contexts into account. Make it possible, even easy, for them to do what it is you and your system need them to do.

There is no arrogant Top, resistant Bottom, weak Middle, or nasty Customer. What we have are people — just like us— struggling to cope with their respective contexts of complexity and accountability, vulnerability, tearing, and neglect. Our problem is that we have been reaching out and reacting as if these are just person-to-person interactions. In our context blindness, what we’ve done is increase the complexity of Top, the vulnerability of Bottom, the tearing of Middle, and the neglect of Customer, which is not what we had intended.

The challenge for us is to take context into account. This involves having an understanding of others’ context, having some empathy for them, not reacting to their initial responses, staying focused on what it is we are trying to accomplish, and being strategic, that is, rather than being blind to context, taking other people’s contexts into account. Given the context they are in, how do I make it possible for them to do what I need them to do? So, incorporated into my strategy are the following challenges: How do I reduce the complexity of Top, the vulnerability of Bottom, the tearing of Middle, and the neglect of Customer?

Principle 2: When We Are Blind to Our Own Contexts

Principle 2: When we are blind to our own contexts, we are vulnerable to falling into scenarios that are dysfunctional for us personally, for our relationships, and for our systems. We respond reflexively to these contexts — not all of us, not every time, but with great regularity — without awareness or choice. It is as if these scenarios happen to us without any agency on our part.

• Burdened Tops. When we are Top, living in the context of complexity and accountability, we are vulnerable to reflexively sucking responsibility up to ourselves and away from others. It’s not a choice we make; it simply happens. We don’t see ourselves doing anything. It is just crystal clear to us that we are responsible for handling the complexity we are facing. The more regularly we do this, the more we increase our stress, the more we dilute the brain power that can be brought to bear on situations, the more we gradually disable others so that when we need them, they aren’t there for us.
• Oppressed Bottoms. When we are Bottom, living in the context of vulnerability, we are vulnerable to reflexively holding others responsible for our condition and the condition of the system. Again, we do this without awareness or choice. It’s crystal clear to us that they are responsible, not us. The more regularly we do this, the more righteous we become in our victimhood and the more bitter toward others; the less energy we devote to dealing with the very problems we are facing, and the less agency we feel in our lives. The system suffers from misdirected energy that is devoted to whining, complaining, resisting, and, possibly, sabotaging — energy that could have been focused more productively on the business of the system.
• Torn Middles.When we are Middle, living in the tearing context, we are vulnerable to sliding in between other people’s issues and conflicts and making them our own. It becomes crystal clear to us that we are responsible for resolving their issues. What makes this especially stressful is that they hold us responsible for resolving their issues. Sliding in between weakens us: we become confused, uncertain whose priorities to serve; we may not fully satisfy anyone, we get little positive feedback; and possibly we doubt our own competence. Middles cope with this tearing in different ways: some reduce the tearing by aligning themselves with Tops, others by aligning with Bottoms; in either case, they create tension with whomever they are not aligned. Other Middles cope with the tearing by bureaucratizing themselves, making it difficult for anyone to get to them. And still others burn themselves out shuttling back and forth, attempting to explain each side to the other, trying to placate all sides, struggling to please everyone. In all of these coping mechanisms is a loss of independence of thought and action. No independent Middle perspective is brought to bear, and as a consequence, the system loses whatever value such perspective could provide.Blindness to our own context results in personal stress, fractured relationships with others, and diminished organizational effectiveness.
• Screwed Customers. When we are Customer, living in the context of neglect, we are vulnerable to staying aloof from delivery systems and holding them responsible for delivery. It becomes crystal clear to us that they, not us, are responsible for delivery. So when delivery is unsatisfactory, we feel righteously angry at the supplier and personally blameless. Since it’s clear to us that we have no responsibility in the delivery process, whatever contribution we might have made to the quality of delivery is lost.

In all of these scenarios, blindness to our own context results in personal stress, fractured relationships with others, and diminished organizational effectiveness. The solution is to turn to leadership strategy 2:

Leadership strategy 2: Recognize the context you are in, move past the reflexive disempowering response, and use the possibility of whatever context you are in to strengthen yourself, your relationships with others, and the system.

To master our own context, we need to understand that in system life, we are constantly moving in and out of Top, Middle, Bottom, and Customer contexts. We need to be able to recognize whatever context we are in at the moment. Am I Top, Middle, Bottom, or Customer in this moment? We need to be able to notice our reflex response in whatever context we are in. Am I sucking up responsibility to myself and away from others? Am I holding THEM responsible for my condition and the condition of the system? Am I sliding in between other people’s issues and conflicts and making them my own? Am I staying aloof and holding the delivery system responsible for delivery?

Sometimes the clue to context lies in our feelings: I’m feeling burdened or oppressed or torn or screwed. What is that feeling telling me about the context I am in, and how I am responding to it? Am I feeling burdened because I’m sucking responsibility up to myself? Am I feeling oppressed because I’m holding others responsible? Am I feeling torn because I’m sliding in between others’ issues? Am I feeling screwed because I’m holding the delivery system responsible for delivery?

Awareness allows us to avoid the negative consequences of blindness. Beyond that, it opens up more powerful and productive possibilities for responding to context, possibilities that strengthen ourselves and our systems— for example:

• In the Top context of complexity and accountability, instead of sucking responsibility up to myself and away from others, my challenge is to be a person who uses this context as an opportunity to create responsibility in others.
• In the Bottom context of things that are wrong with my condition and the condition of the system, instead of holding THEM responsible for all that is wrong, my challenge is to be a person who is responsible for my condition and the condition of the system.
• In the Middle context of tearing, instead of sliding in between and losing my independence of thought and action, my challenge is to maintain my independence of thought and action in the service of the system.
• In the Customer context of neglect, instead of standing aloof from the delivery process and holding it responsible for delivery, my challenge is to be a person who shares responsibility for delivery.

We are much more powerful and more contributing system members when, in the Top context, we are creators of responsibility in others; when, in the Bottom context, we are responsible for our condition and the condition of the system; when, in the Middle context, we maintain our independence of thought and action; and when, in the Customer context, we share responsibility for the delivery of products and services. Living from these transformative stands demands that we use more of our potential in whatever context we are in, and it enables us to focus more of our creative energies on the business of the system. These stands also raise unique challenges for us. As Tops, we need to give up some control; as Bottoms, we need to give up our dependency and blame; as Middles, we need to give up our need to please everyone; and as Customers, we need to give up our sense of entitlement.

These are the payoffs and the prices to be paid for seeing, understanding, and mastering the systemic contexts in which we are living. In this section, we explored the leadership challenges of seeing, understanding, and mastering individuals in context. Now we turn our attention to groups in context.

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Robert Greenleaf (1904–1990) is known for initiating the powerful movement called “servant-leadership.” Servant-leaders embody leadership characteristics, capacities, attitudes, and values such as trust, deep listening, foresight, caring, accountability, and balance. By leading in a way that truly serves others, such leaders develop human possibilities — in themselves and in others.

Catalyzing Change in a Large Institution

Greenleaf began his career as an executive. As a young man, he was encouraged by a college professor to “create change from inside a large institution.” Following that advice, Greenleaf chose to work within the largest institution in the world at that time, AT&T. After three years of climbing telephone poles, he moved into a job in hiring and assessment.

Greenleaf was intuitively drawn to lead in a different way. During his time with AT&T, he incorporated certain leadership practices in his work.

• Deep Listening and Powerful Questions. First, Greenleaf helped people discover their own greatness by asking powerful questions., “True listening builds strength in people,” he said. By choosing to listen, you assume “a healing attitude with faith that another will rise to the challenge.”Joseph Distephano, one of Greenleaf’s mentees, recounts, “We would talk about ideas; I would ask him two or three questions; he would turn them around on me with Rogerian skill, and he’d hold me accountable for them at the next meeting.” Greenleaf focused not on giving advice, but on asking deeper questions so that others would access greater wisdom and “become convinced in their own hearts for their own reasons.”
• Co-Creativity. Greenleaf also recognized resistance to change in organizations and observed, “People don’t change a habit just because they know a better way.” To support the change process, he developed “study teams,” an early form of action research, so employees could learn from each other.When Greenleaf conceived of the idea of the world’s first corporate personnel assessment center in l948, instead of pushing the idea, he seeded a slow transformational change. He honed his idea, reading texts, exploring the issues, asking questions, and collaborating in the development of a vision of assessments based on the whole person. Ten years later, AT&T launched the world’s first corporate assessment center. Other corporations quickly followed.

  Greenleaf later discussed this approach to change with his son, Newcomb. “Suppose you had a really good idea? How would you go about trying to get it accepted? Here’s how I learned to do it. First, decide who the key people are in getting it adopted. Then, tell them the idea but only a bit at a time.” He explained that eventually others would “come to an idea on their own.”, “But,” his son asked, “how will they know it was your idea?”, “They’ll never know,” Bob Greenleaf answered — as if that were the core beauty of the stratagem.

  “All great things are created for their own sake,” Greenleaf wrote, quoting Robert Frost. Paradoxically, by giving over his ego, he became a legend at AT&T. His humility was based on knowing who he was, his deepest identity.

• Inner Listening. Finally, Greenleaf taught managers to gather “enough information, thought, and intuition to do something useful.” To access this inner knowledge, Greenleaf found ways to “listen inside.” Listening inside was revitalizing and also a pragmatic practice to gain a “wider span of awareness.” This was true whether he was looking out at the stars, sitting quietly on a train, or taking time alone in his favorite room at Bell Labs — the absolutely silent anechoic chamber. Greenleaf often stayed there, renewed by the silence, until he was kicked out.In his journal, Greenleaf described a time when his creative drive was blocked. He wrote about a “shadow side” in himself that did not take enough time for his family and was overly concerned with prestige. Once aware, Greenleaf put his insights to work, finding ways to achieve more balance and taking a chance on greater life and creativity. At 49, he let go of the prestige of his position at AT&T to retire early, a powerful turning point that accelerated his unique work and contribution.

Servant-Leadership Is Conceived

After retirement, Greenleaf did leadership consulting. This was in the heat of the tumultuous l960s era. He left one consulting job at a college feeling like a complete failure, stating, “It was virtually impossible for me to carry out the task that I had gone there to do.”

Greenleaf didn’t bury or deny the pain of failure. He held the creative tension, clarifying his vision of a university that could serve the high purpose of nurturing the needs and spirit of students. He had read all of the novels by the student’s most popular author at the time, Herman Hesse. He thought about one character in Hesse’s Journey to the East, Leo, “a man of extraordinary presence, a servant who raised the spirit of the group with song while doing chores.” In the book, Leo suddenly disappears. The group members later discover that this servant was actually a wise and influential leader. In reflecting on the book, the phrase “servant-leader” popped into Greenleaf’s consciousness.

Greenleaf found a way to put this idea into action. He wrote a short essay called “The Servant as Leader” and sent copies to 200 friends. The piece became an underground classic in the business world.

Greenleaf later learned that companies such as TDIndustries were continually reordering copies. One day, he called TDIndustries CEO Jack Lowe and asked, “What are you doing with all those copies of my essay?” It turned out that Lowe was giving them to everyone in the organization, from office workers to executives. Furthermore, they were all meeting in small groups to read the essay and apply its insights. More than 30 years later, new employee-partners at TDIndustries still receive copies of “The Servant as Leader” and discuss it in groups. This practice may be one reason that the company is consistently in the top 10 of Fortune magazine’s 100 best companies to work for in America.

The essay was distributed more widely than Greenleaf could ever have imagined and catapulted his leadership influence to another level.

Greenleaf’s Legacy

During his elder years, Greenleaf never became rigid or wavered from his focus on life-long learning. He gathered wisdom in resonant conversations with others — some well-known and others not — including ministers, writers, thinkers, doctors, activists, and business luminaries, such as Ira Progoff, Aldous Huxley, Karl Menninger, and Bill Wilson. He and his wife, Esther, intentionally sought out certain people; others, such as Eleanor Roosevelt, appeared synchronistically.

From the wisdom and maturity of his elder years, Greenleaf began to write books, publishing his first at age 74. A quote conveys the experience of his final “meaning-making” years:, “The rewards of living a full life may be measured in joyous moments rather than days or years. These are the treasures that return to mind in the quiet hours. The moments nobly lived, the challenges met, the truth spoken. Meeting life — taking responsibility and leaving it joyfully once taken.”

Greenleaf’s circle of influence continues to expand today, as Stephen Covey, Ken Blanchard, Margaret Wheatley, Parker Palmer, Ann McGee-Cooper, and many other authors cite servant as leader as an inspiration. Warren Bennis called Greenleaf’s work the “most moral, original, useful writing on the topic of leadership.” According to Peter Senge, “No one in the past 30 years has had a more profound impact on thinking about leadership.” In addition, success stories are emerging from companies that have adopted the principles of servant-leadership, such as Southwest Airlines, TDIndustries, Starbucks, USCellular, and Synovus Financial.

The scope of Greenleaf’s influence goes far beyond the workplace. His seminal writings can be found in graduate and undergraduate courses at dozens of universities. Leaders from a spectrum of religious denominations find that servant-leadership mutually reinforces faith literature. Board trustees are using servant-leadership principles to hold institutions “in trust” for all stakeholders. The Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership has become a hub for servant-leadership efforts around the world.

Lessons from Greenleaf’s Life

The “Servant Leadership Primer” in the appendix of Robert Greenleaf: A Life of Servant Leadership offers insights and reflections on developing as a servant-leader. Servant-leadership can’t be reduced to a formula or technique. It is about developing capacities, habits, attitudes, and values. All of these contribute to a leader’s growth — like tributaries feeding into a moving stream. And the source of this development starts with one’s identity and spirit.

As you read this biography, you will likely become open to exploring powerful questions about life and leadership. Important questions compel us to reflect deeply and measure success in new ways. Greenleaf measured himself by the “best test” of servant-leadership: Do we, and those we serve, grow as persons? Become healthier, freer, more autonomous, more likely to serve? And what is the effect on the least privileged, are they served or at least not harmed?

Whether you adopt Greenleaf’s best test, develop your own, or find other issues to explore, this book will evoke questions that matter. The story will breathe new life into the way you think about developing the capacity to serve — in yourself, your organization, and your community.

Deborah Vogele Welch (DeborahVW@aol.com), Ph. D., is founding partner of Reflective Leadership Associates, a company that provides consulting, coaching, and e-learning services. She is an adjunct faculty member in Industrial/Organizational Psychology at Capella University and cofounder of Arizona’s local SoL group, Cactus SoL.

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