"TELL ME!" "SHOW ME!" "LET ME DO!" -- A SEMINAR ON LEADERSHIP FOR TODAY & TOMORROW!

TELL ME, SHOW ME, LET ME DO SEMINAR ON LEADERSHIP OF TODAY & TOMORROW

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2007


TELL ME, SHOW ME, LET ME DO SEMINAR ON LEADERSHIP OF TODAY &TOMORROW

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2007

What is proposed here for the Naples Institute is a three-day seminar for top executives to better understand the nature of the new role in leadership, which is not so much to "command & control," as it is to create a viable culture for its specific requirements, consistent with its customs, values and beliefs.

This relevant culture sponsors the kinds of behavior, commitment and involvement to make it a first-class operation with its people hitting on all cylinders in a synergistic effort to create the moment to establish it as a national or international leader in its industry and market.

PHASE ONE - SEMINAR DAY ONE

CONDUCT A SCHOOL IN WHICH EXECUTIVES ARE TOLD THE THREE CRITICAL LEGS OF LEADERSHIP CULTURE TODAY &TOMORROW

THE "CHICKEN & EGG" PROPOSITION

"Houston, we have a problem!"

The seminar would start with an open discussion to assess the sense these executives have "that they have a problem"; to discern the quality of their knowledge that the complex organization is not working as well as it might.

It would follow as a natural defensive posture for these people to make cosmetic choices that represent little systemic change in operations.

Chief among the reasons might be they don't want to go through the pain. It also could be because they don't know how, or lack the confidence to implement something that is a departure from what they know and have done before.

Now, in terms of the "chicken & egg" proposition, they must have the egg (tool kit) in hand before they can have the chicken (systemic cultural change) in the pot.

The Naples Institute rationale:

My sense is that before we think of great causes in line with the Institute's philosophy of fighting for social justice, it must first be a viable Institution.

To be a viable institution, it must have something to sell that is of value.

To sell something of value, it must have consensus of what that item is (the hedgehog rather than the fox) and put all our resources collectively into that pursuit in a synergistic effort.

Now, there are a lot of possibilities. Since we claim to be a leadership think tank, it would occur to me that our efforts should be in the realm of leadership. This is my proposal for consideration.

Over the last 75 years, we have seen a country in economic panic with soup lines and the WPA, physical panic with the surprise attack of the Japanese on Pearl Harbor and WWII, euphoric affluence followed that war in an explosion of jobs and first generation college students, then the social, moral, and psychological collapse of the working middle class and the institutional infrastructure as children became their own parents, while identity became a homeless mind submerged in affluence, greed, self-indulgence, drugs, crime, civil strife and civil rights, against the background (or foreground) of constant war: policing the world (Korean War), making the world safe for democracy (Vietnam, Kosovo), or reacting to paranoia (Afghanistan, Iraq) in a maniacal attempt to regain purchase of the remembered nostalgia of 1945, the last time everything made sense and was relatively rooted in calm.

Today, we are not happy campers; we have lost our moral compass and our way.

This is a leadership problem, not the pabulum of the sophists who preach gain without pain, correction without rectitude, and flatter those in leadership roles with the rhetorical but erroneous suggestion that leaders matter most when virtually all the evidence points in the opposite direction.

Leaders are, however, more important than ever before but not from the standpoint of "command & control," but as architects of the viable culture to sustain the necessary behavior for success. Executive status has moved from execution to cultural climate control.

It is the followers that count today in a new role and responsibility. As professionals, they now own the game, hold all the trump cards, and could call "checkmate" at anytime if they only realized it. They don't know how to leverage their new status and power, and need guidance, direction, mentoring and measuring to that end.

This is especially true in the United States and European enterprise as the past fifty years has seen the knowledge gap shrink between bosses and workers, while the economic gap has widened. This is not only wrong this is the making for revolution, and it need not be so.

Long before the Information Age and the Internet took hold this was building. The Internet has only accelerated it, not given birth to it.

Now, this is the essential issue of our times in terms of leadership.

How do we reconcile leaderless leadership and dissonant workers -- what I call "Corporate Sin" (AuthorHouse 2000) -- to the fact that the adversarial relationship is outmoded and that a true partnership must, indeed, exist to place leaders and professionals on to the same page and off on the same dime?

A possible approach, and one with which I would be comfortable, and perhaps others as well, is to tell a personal story.

MAKING FOR A DRAMATIC AND MEANINGFUL SHIFT

For the past twenty years, this problem has concerned me. It concerned me even earlier as a summer laborer in a chemical plant while I was going to college, when I was a chemist in the laboratory, a chemical sales engineer in the field, in the US Navy in the Mediterranean, as a corporate executive in South America, Europe, and South Africa, then again as a graduate student as a mature adult, and finally as a company organizational development (OD) psychologist, and once again corporate executive in Europe trying to make the EEC work for my employer.

Each role, each phase, each development was experienced, processed, analyzed and assimilated into what has become my leadership philosophy.

Then it would be a prudent time to introduce these executives to the "tell me" phase of the "three legs" of leadership.

The three legs of this leadership philosophy are:

(1) corporate culture,

(2) the emerging professional workforce, and

(3) the problem with our problem solving strategy or thinking methodology.

(1) CORPORATE CULTURE:

Six Silent Killers (CRC Press 1998) goes into great detail as to the three dominant cultures in any complex organization:

· Culture of Comfort (management dependent with managers as surrogate parents);

· Culture of Complacency (workers counterdependent on organization suspended in terminal adolescence); and

· Culture of Contribution (interdependent management with managers &mature adult workers in partnership).

The failure to create a Culture of Contribution results in six passive behaviors that have cost Fortune 500 companies literally billions in lost productivity.

(2) PROFESSIONAL WORKERS

The professional (see "The Worker, Alone!" Delta Group 1995) is the magic formula that few companies have discovered. The evidence is overwhelming as these workers are still managed, mobilized, motivated and manipulated as if they were still blue-collar workers.

It has become a cliché to call them "knowledge workers" and to say that "knowledge power" has usurp the influence of "position power," when in fact that is far from the case.

This would be explored here, possibly in several institutional settings: commercial, industrial, academic and governance.

For example, we like to think academia is an institution of free exchange and thinking when, in fact, the university climate is as culturally warped as any other. Graduate seminars are programmed, and conducted with professors ignoring or failing to entertain evidence from the empirical world shared by mature students. "Machine age" thinking and the factory mentality dominate here as elsewhere.

(3) PROBLEM SOLVING METHODOLOGY OR THE FAILURE TO THINK LATERALLY AS WELL AS VERTICALLY.

Science is reputed to be value free when that is impossible as we are irrational as well as rational beings.

Logic is not enough, and the evidence is so overwhelming that there is little point in arguing.

Buildings and bridges and railways are built that are poorly constructed; we are a self-indulgent consumer driven society in which no one saves but expects to be rescued for the most egregious offenses against good sense. Meanwhile, we would rather solve other people's problems than our own.

Moreover, we like to compliment ourselves on our front end planning, when in fact, we are poor planners and a solution driven society with little patience with problems.

It could even be argued that we are better at describing than solving problems, finding solace in description and prescription.

That said we are uncomfortable in a passive mode of thought, yet suspect of intuitive wisdom. Whereas vertical or hierarchical thinking is Socratic and searching, lateral thinking is conceptual and discovering. This could be explained in some pragmatic detail.

Moreover, lateral thinking is perceptual rather than processing, nonlinear rather than linear, and systemic rather than elemental.

We like to break a problem down, solve the parts, and then expect the pieces to fit neatly together into an integrated whole. This was the thinking of MBO (management by objectives), which never worked albeit all the parts successfully accomplished their objectives.

This fragmented thought supports the dictum in system's theory: when all the parts are working as well as they might, then the system isn't. Competition between units does not support confluence and cooperation, but denies them.

The complement of lateral and vertical thinking provides the content and context of the problem solving, which is then structured to move naturally to the solution domain.

What is known or critical thinking governs vertical thinking, while lateral thinking is governed by creative thinking or what is not known but can be found out.

Put another way, lateral thinking is "front end" or forward thinking, whereas vertical thinking is "back end" or backward thinking, looking at what has happened in the past, which is a source but seldom the answer.

As we know, this dominates the problem solving from the "war on drugs" to the "war on poverty" to the "war on AIDS" to the "war on terror."

The metaphor of "war" is apropos as we associate violence and destruction with change and not the blending of rational and irrational components in a holistic integration. Yet, it is in this separation not integration that has produced calamity.

WITH THE RIGHT COMPLEMENT OF PUBLIC RELATIONS, CREATIVE IMAGING AND PROMOTION, THIS ("PHASE ONE" - TELL ME!) COULD BE A POWERFUL FORMAT TO BRING TOP CEOs TO THE NAPLES INSTITUTE TO EXPERIENCE SOMETHING ORIGINAL AND TRULY PROVOCATIVE.

Short assessment of Phase One:

The "telling phase" is an introduction to executives as to the nature of what corporate culture is so that they might discover on their own, not imitate some other corporate culture success story elsewhere, on how to apply their own tool kit to the problem.

Professional workers are the most misunderstood and under utilized group in the workforce. Since the 1930s, there has been a tectonic shift from manual to mental labor in the workplace, but it has soared into an unfathomable storm in the last twenty years. This is incomprehensible to professionals and their employers alike. It would be the mission of the "first phase" to make this problem comprehensible.

And finally, the problem solving suffers because of the thinking behind it. This exercise is not a cure but a means of getting them to think differently on purpose by outlining the nature of thinking.

PHASE TWO - SEMINAR DAY TWO

SHOW EXECUTIVES THE A, B, C's OF THREE CRITICAL LEGS OF LEADERSHIP AND HOW THEY WORK OR FAIL TO WORK IN THE WORKPLACE

(1) HOW TO ASSESS WHERE YOUR CORPORATE CULTURE IS TODAY

This would be a review of the "six silent killers" as they appear in a series of case studies taken from the files of this author or others.

It would be followed by a value clarification discussion, possibly with some visual aids to show what the primary motivations and behaviors are of the dominant cultures and how they appear to gravitate to these certain norms.

This material is gleaned from "Six Silent Killers," which can be presented in such a way as to grasp the essence of it in visual aids.

Suffice it to say this book is heavy in content but can be presented in a user-friendly context with trained facilitators privy to its design.

This implies here that this is something that could be packaged and programmed throughout the country under the auspices of The Naples Institute for the purposes of showing executives how culture dominates, and specifically, where their respective corporate culture fits in the culture continuum (comfort, complacency, contribution).

It is possible, even likely, that there exists several subcultures within a dominant culture.

To ferret out the dysfunctional cultures to align them more with and integrated into the preferred culture would require the possible assistance of an OD specialist.

Downstream, the Naples Institute might create a College of OD Practitioners to be schooled in this corporate culture skill base. As there are MDs in specialties with various levels of competence, the same holds true of OD. It remains a specialist field of which even universities are not certain of its authenticity.

(2) ASSESS THE CHARACTER, COMPETENCE AND VIABILITY OF THE PROFESSIONAL WORKFORCE

While in Europe in the 1980s, I developed a Performance Management System for chief financial officers (CFO) of the various affiliates who had little training or understanding of assessing, placing and developing professionals in their role as auxiliary human resource directors.

This included developing competency profiles, career roadmaps, assessment centers and mentoring programs. Revised for the twenty-first century in abbreviated form this might work nicely with such a program.

(3) ASSESS THE PROBLEM SOLVING PRACTICES OF THESE EXECUTIVES

This would include a careful development of the content, context, problem and solution domain of the problem solving in terms of vertical or conventional thinking and lateral or more appropriately, creative thinking.

Of necessity, this would be a sensitive area as executives take pride in their problem solving action-oriented handling of crises. Chances are they are not aware that the crises they usually solve are crises they have created or allowed to develop.

The objective here is to supplement rather than radicalize their problem solving strategies.

This can be done by pointing out how the complement of lateral thinking can be a boom to their success, while at the same time a means of reducing internal stress and strain.

It is this energy-sapping predicament that often results in panic when external demands and surprising developments accelerate out-of-control.

Put another way, this is why the limits of command and control cannot be allowed to surface and lead to entrenchment, cover up, finger pointing, conflict and chaos. The answer to the problem always lies in the metamorphosis of the problem.

PHASE THREE - SEMINAR DAY THREE

LET THE EXECUTIVES DO THEIR OWN THING IN TERMS OF THESE THREE LEGS OF THE LEADERSHIP CULTURE TODAY &TOMORROW

By the third day, these executives are schooled in the nuances and implications of the corporate culture, the role of professionals, and approaches to the problem solving.

It is now time for them to be organized into teams to address these issues and create a company culture that is consistent with what they assume to be the objectives of the company.

They will be assisted by facilitators and guided in this undertaking.

The afternoon of the third day will give them each an opportunity to present their cultural blueprint to the group for discussion.

This is offered as a possible launching pad for getting the Naples Institute off the ground.

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Dr. Fisher's books mentioned in this piece are available on this website from PayPal, or from your favorite electronic bookstore. For more information about this seminar, contact by email: thedeltagrpfl@cs.com.