Navigating Leadership Challenges: Moving Beyond Advice to Empowerment

Introduction:

In the realm of leadership, providing advice often seems like the obvious path to helping others navigate complex situations. Yet, Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen, authors of "Thanks for the Feedback," shed light on the limitations of advice-giving, emphasizing the need for specificity and context. This raises the question: How can leaders effectively address challenges without merely dispensing advice? Let's explore a more empowering approach that emphasizes understanding, collaboration, and fostering a culture of trust.

Empowering Through Coaching:

Rather than offering quick-fix advice, effective leadership involves coaching individuals to discover their own solutions. Coaching isn't about dictating actions; it's about guiding individuals to unlock their inner wisdom. As Parker Palmer suggests, it's about "pulling out their inner teacher." By refraining from prescribing solutions and instead helping individuals explore their options, leaders empower them to make informed decisions aligned with their unique circumstances.

Understanding Context:

When faced with inquiries about handling leadership dilemmas, it's crucial to resist the temptation to jump to conclusions. Rather than hastily providing answers, take the time to understand the nuanced context surrounding the situation. Delve into the organizational dynamics, team relationships, and external factors shaping the challenge at hand. This deep understanding lays the groundwork for tailored guidance that resonates with the specific needs of the individual and the organization.

Organizational Considerations:

At the organizational level, effective leadership entails aligning team objectives with strategic goals. Reorganization should stem from a clear strategic rationale, driven by shifts in internal or external dynamics. Merely reshuffling teams without addressing underlying issues risks perpetuating dysfunction and escalating costs. Leaders must assess whether the benefits of reorganization outweigh the disruptions it entails, ensuring that organizational integrity remains intact.

Fostering Collaborative Dynamics:

Within teams, fostering a culture of collaboration is paramount. True collaboration isn't about everyone being involved in everything but rather about trusting each other's expertise and contributions. Leaders play a pivotal role in nurturing this culture by fostering trusting relationships and upholding team standards. Encouraging open communication, embracing vulnerability, and instilling confidence in team members create a fertile ground for collaboration to flourish.

Accountability and Conflict Resolution:

In the face of conflict or underperformance, leaders must navigate with finesse. Accountability rests not solely on the individual but on the collective responsibility of the team. Leaders should encourage a culture of peer accountability, where team members hold each other to high standards. Addressing individual shortcomings requires a delicate balance of coaching and mentorship, guided by the overarching goal of fostering growth and improvement.

Conclusion:

Navigating leadership challenges demands a departure from conventional advice-giving towards a more nuanced and empowering approach. By embracing coaching, understanding context, and fostering collaborative dynamics, leaders can navigate complexities with confidence and efficacy. Ultimately, it's not about having all the answers but about empowering others to find their own path to success.

Handling Leadership Situations Without Giving Advice

From time to time, I receive questions from readers asking for advice on how to handle certain leadership situations. I think, that to be able to really advise, you need a lot of detail about the situation the person is in because there are so many details that could sway things one way or another.

Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen in the book Thanks for the Feedback say that the problem with giving advice is that it cannot ever be specific enough. We tend to try to give out sage or wise comments without enough detail for the person to implement that advice. Or, we are such experts in something that we assume everyone knows our specific jargon. For example, “When you deliver your presentation, make sure it stands out.” Interesting advice, but what does “stand out” even mean?

The other thing that makes advice hard to give is that when I give it out, I now own the result of it. Since it was my idea, it can in some way fall back on me if it doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter if the person didn’t follow my advice the exact way I laid it out, or if they took just some of it, but not all of it. In the end, the advice didn’t help and I feel I am in some way responsible.

That is usually why I prefer to coach in order to help people find options that seem reasonable and doable for them to try. One thing I had to learn as I was growing as an executive coach is that while coaching is in some respects about helping people solve problems, it is far from telling them what to do. It is more about what author Parker Palmer calls “pulling out their inner teacher.” Helping them see their options and then supporting the options they choose, is to me, what coaching is about.

Now when I get a question from a reader seeking advice, I usually will read it and ponder it for a week or even more. I am not thinking about what the person should do in the situation described, or what I would do if I were them. Instead, my thoughts usually turn more to trying to understand the context of the situation they might be in and then coming up with some general guidelines or options they could choose from themselves. I had a question from a reader. The question was, “How do leaders know when to intervene to promote better collaboration versus just reorganizing the department? Is there a tipping point where a simple intervention can help to resolve the issue rather than incur an expensive reorganization?”

My Thoughts

As I pondered this question and decided on how to react without giving advice, I really saw two very distinct ideas emerging. The first is organizational and the second has to do with how teams function.

The organizational aspect has to do with the needs of the organization and strategically how the group is put together to meet the needs of the organization, while the team function aspect is more about the relationships among the members of the group. I wanted to tackle these areas independently, then bring them together at the end.

The OrganizationAL IDEAS

Teams are formed to meet some specific need that the organization has realized. Teams of people come together in an organized fashion to accomplish a specific set of goals or tasks. They can also come together as change agents moving the organization from an old set of objectives to new goals that move the organization closer to completing its mission and making the vision a reality.

As I stepped back and thought about the question above, I thought that if I was going to reorganize a department, then there needed to be a strategic reason. There will likely have been some change, either internally, like a new or redefined mission, or externally, like a shift in customer demands. This type of change to reorganize will be driven by forces external to the team. Something has happened somewhere that causes what the team is doing to not be as valuable to the organization. Rather than dismantle or reorganize the team completely, the team would be given a new set of goals and objectives that match the external reality.

Reorganizations are chaotic, emotional, and expensive. The external pressures being experienced need to be greater than the emotional and financial cost to reorganize.

Reorganizing dysfunctional people on a team also only sends the dysfunction to another part of the organization. The description I hear most often for dysfunctional people in an organization is that they are not good for the team. The attitudes and behaviors are destructive and left to their own devices will have a very bad effect on the organization. So then, why would you move them somewhere else? Just because an organization can afford the reorganization doesn’t mean that is the right thing to do.

HOW TEAMS FUNCTION

If teams are not functioning well, a leader or coach has to be able to step into the moment. It takes both personal courage and a mindset that the needs of the organization outweigh any personal agendas that might exist. The leader must have the courage to call out behaviors that are not conducive to good team functioning.

General Stanley McChrystal, in his book Team of Teams writes that “superteams” are able to construct a strong lattice of trusting relationships. He makes the point that in a true team environment, the leader needs to be less concerned with hierarchy and command, what their position is, and advising individuals what to do and be more concerned with ensuring trusting relationships are forming so that there is a supportive network to perform.

Trust amongst team members is ensuring people are comfortable being vulnerable about their weaknesses, mistakes, fears, and behaviors without fear of reprisal. So, if someone doesn’t know something, they are not judged for the lack of knowledge, but supported in getting the knowledge they need. A teammate should feel a sense of confidence to admit a weakness and have someone on the team come alongside them and say “Here, let me help you with that.”

There are three things I find vital for a team to be able to trust each other:

1. Cultural Integrity: As a group, we are always going to do the right thing. If someone on the team is being disrespectful, as a team, we go to that person and let them know that is not how this team behaves. We want to have them on the team, but the culture here is one of kindness and respect. Integrity matters always.

2. Comfort with Vulnerability: Teammates have to be willing to admit weaknesses and mistakes and can never be penalized or punished when they do. If you are a person who avoids conflict, you should be able to admit this to your team and they need to come alongside and help you improve this skill. The team has to believe in you and believe that you can improve. It all starts with a culture of realizing we are all human and we all fall short somewhere.

3. Confidence in the Members: Not one of us holds all the answers. Teams have to believe in their mission and have confidence in each other to tackle whatever is put before them. As individual humans, we crave safety and security. Taking risks is not always a safe feeling. This is the value of the team. As an individual, my need is for safety. The team is there to support each other to take risks and achieve much more than an individual ever could. High-performing teams have to have confidence in each other.

Back to the Question at hand

The question was, “How do leaders know when to intervene to promote better collaboration versus just reorganizing the department? Is there a tipping point where a simple intervention can help to resolve the issue rather than incur an expensive reorganization?”

I would argue that one of the main purposes of the leader of a team is to foster a culture of collaboration that leads to results. Not collaboration so that every person touches everything, but trusting each other enough to know that one person doesn’t don’t have to touch something if another person is already running with it.

The leader is the person accountable if someone is not living up to the team's expectations. The leader should rally the team to their responsibility of pulling the person back in line. If the team won’t do it, then the leader has two jobs. One job is with the team to create a culture of team discipline, and the other job is with the person who is not living up to team standards by coaching that person individually. My position is that if there is group conflict, then the leader is ultimately the one accountable and at fault.

What about you? What advice would you share in response to this very interesting question?

Does Conflict Have to Feel like a 4 Letter Word?

CONFLICT.

It is not literally a “4 letter word,” but in organizations sometimes it feels twice as bad as any four-letter word ever would.

Conflict is one of those tense words that can have such a negative connotation. So averse that we avoid it like we would have during the heart of the COVID Pandemic if someone in the grocery store was not wearing a mask when it was required.

It is like the conversation you know you need to have with someone, but you go the other way because avoidance seems, at the time, to be much less painful than the interaction.

But is it? What is behind this avoidance? 

This is the generation of “when you see something, say something.” I think that mantra is pretty easy to articulate in isolation, like when you are hiding behind your Facebook or Instagram page. But, putting all the social pressures we feel in organizations on top of it and avoiding conflict can seem like a better route than addressing it.

What if the person I am in conflict with gets hurt? Worse yet, what if I get hurt?

Rather than face the hurt or the pain, our knee-jerk response is often to avoid it. Just like the person in the grocery store who was not wearing a mask during the Pandemic, our first thought was not the fact that it is unlikely they have COVID, rather, we probably chose to avoid them altogether. There is over a 90% chance that all is well, but we become paralyzed by the prospect of the pain, so we avoid and miss all the great opportunities that could have been present if we just engaged.

Conflict and Emotional Intelligence

I was working with a team of folks a few years back whose senior leadership team was trying to address the fact that their business was being held back because everyone in the company was so nice to each other. 

I actually see this a lot with the organizations I work with. They are great people. Highly professional. And rightly so, in our organizations, it has become the right thing to do to treat employees well, and with respect.

A goal in developing organizations is to try and understand what the people need and to try and meet those needs. We hear a lot these days about how to engage employees; making sure they are enjoying their work has become a metric for performance. That is all well and good, except if we are not careful we can over-index the relationships to the extent that problems will go unsolved.

It is interesting to me the relationship between “Interpersonal Relationships” and “Decision-Making”, specifically the problem-solving aspect of a decision-making process. 

First, let me define my terms:

Interpersonal Relationships between people are mutually satisfying relationships that are characterized by trust and compassion. 

Problem-Solving is the ability to find solutions for problems where emotions are involved (which is every problem) and how the emotions impact the decision.

Here is what it looked like for the client I mentioned above:

The organization had a culture of caring about people. The experience was very much like being in a family. By in large, they all are really nice people. They trust each other and show a tremendous amount of care and compassion. They have strong interpersonal relationships. 

So when a deadline came…(and went)… for a project to be delivered, it created a problem. Other teams would be waiting for the work that was now missing. What ensued is what I called “tension smiles”. You can feel the tension of the missed deadline, all the while smiling as if nothing was wrong. 

The emotion about the problem was high. The relationships were trusting.

The issue became that the folks in the organization saw the choice they had as either stressing the relationship OR solving the problem. What I heard was, “If I confront Sam for missing the deadline, then I will lose trust with him.”  

From their perspective, the choice was between preserving the relationship OR the solving problem - not both.

This is common when it comes to conflict. The tension and the emotion affect our ability to see things clearly. We fall into fear-based thinking that blinds us. Instead of seeing the full picture, fear causes us to see very few options in front of us.

The Strategy 

A simple hack when you feel you are facing this dichotomy is to change your “OR” to an “AND”.

How can the manager in the above scenario have both strong interpersonal relationships and solve the problem at hand?

Understanding where Sam is coming from AND holding him accountable for missing the deadline are both possible by flexing your empathy muscle; empathy for Sam as well as for the people impacted by his missing the deadline. 

Our emotions will, at times, not tell us the truth.

It will feel like I must pick one option over the other; such as the relationship over solving the problem. This is the “false” in a false dichotomy.  

Your emotion, your fear, and your anxiety are all telling you something, but what they are telling you gets misinterpreted.  

Your emotion is telling you that there is tension. The question your emotion is asking you is “What do you want to do about this?”  

Emotions can’t decide. All they can do is inform.

It is up to your more rational, thinking brain to make the decision. In order to do this, it is key when you feel the fear or the anxiety in the false dichotomy of the choice to take a deep breath. Step back for a moment and see if you can find a way to solve the problem AND maintain the relationship.

Change your “OR” to an “AND”.

Hold Sam accountable AND maintain the relationship.