REQUISITE TO ENLIGHTENED LEADERSHIP -- SELF-KNOWING!

OVERVIEW

This is a chapter prepared for a new book to be titled "Enlightened Leadership." It is to be published by THE NAPLES INSTITUTE, a new think tank in which I am one of the founding members.

It will be an anthology of scholars, academics, entrepreneurs and philanthropists, or a potpourri of several perspectives on the subject of enlightened leadership.

The editor and publisher of Executive Excellence, Ken Shelton, and ghost writer and editor of Steven Covey's international best seller, "Seven Habits of Highly Successful People" is to edit the book.

Ken was interested in me being a contributing author as I have written scores of articles for the various organs of Executive Excellence over the last twenty years.

If there is interest, I plan to add a chapter on "Confident Thinking."

QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH VALIDATES QUALITATIVE INTERVENTION

One of my emailers sent me an interesting article on culture. What I have gleaned in a pragmatic way in my empirical qualitative research in organizational development (OD) over the years, appears confirmed by scientists at MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

That is: Culture influences the hardwiring of the brain.

New research shows that people from different cultures use their brain differently to solve basic perceptual tasks.

I believe this is not simply an EAST and WEST phenomenon, but that companies of long standing have the same impact on employees, as do academic communities, governmental bodies, and so on.

Researchers at MIT have discovered that social perspectives within the culture drive all the way to perceptual judgment.

MIT scientists suggest there is a hint that six months into a culture already changes you, referring to psychological rather than neurological research.

This computes with my experience.

I observed this more than thirty years ago when I spent nine months at Fairfax County Police Department in an OD intervention. A white police officer unloaded his service revolver on an unarmed African American in a 7-11 Convenient Store, killing him, when the young man grabbed the officer's nightstick and attempted to hit him with it. A riot followed in which blacks burned down a shopping center.

I would write my master's thesis in industrial/social psychology on this work (A Social Psychological Study of the Police Organization: The Anatomy of a Riot, USF, 1976).

In my study, having been there nine months, I would see idealistic recruits after police academy training go on the line as patrol officers, and within a matter of weeks, bruised by the reality of the street, be as cynical, caustic, calloused and edgy as veterans with similar biases.

There whole personas would change, along with their language. It would be peppered with earthy expletives that were not apparent when first interviewed as they came on the force. Culture is powerful.

The fMRI revealed Americans' brains worked harder while making relative judgments because brain regions that reflected mentally demanding tasks lit up. Conversely, East Asians activated the brain system for difficult jobs when making absolute judgments.

Each group showed less activation in those brain areas while doing tasks in their culture's comfort zone. This is significant.

You will see in this chapter on "self-knowing" that I differentiate cultures of comfort, complacency and contribution from each other. It is uncanny to see how everyone marches as if robotic to the dominant culture of the enterprise. Previously, I had seen this as a young executive in South America and South Africa (1960s), and as a mature executive in Europe (1980s), as well in my home base in the United States.

It was from unobtrusive observation that I developed this typology.

That said, work in the US (and many parts of Europe) has become a playground, a recreational area, a social club, and a sanctuary to surf the net, and do as little work as possible to get by. Translation: the culture is all wrong as the purpose of a company is what it does!

Don't get me wrong, work can be fun but it is not fun that activates thinking and productive work, nor is it a "happy place" that is engaging that the hard wiring of the brain is activated.

For twenty years, I have been harping on this topic with this research seemingly corroborating my empirical and qualitative findings.

This chapter in "self-knowing" is designed to get the reader, whatever his or her situation or circumstance, to get out of the rut, get unstuck, embrace the pain, discomfort, and risk to become an enlightened leader. I share this with you because I believe we are all leaders or none of us are.
JRF

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REQUISITE TO ENLIGHTENED LEADERSHIP – SELF-KNOWING

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 2008

“What is not fully understood is not possessed.”

Goethe

We live in an ambivalent age in which cliché has reached legitimacy. No one is in charge. Everyone goes along to get along. Standard execution is “ready, fire, aim!” If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. There are no winners or losers only spinners. Be patriotic, shop until you drop. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Actions speak louder than words.

We saw this in the Enron debacle. The CEO claimed total ignorance of his CFO cooking the books. We saw it with Hurricane Katrina. The president stands in the midst of the devastation exhorting the terrific job his FEMA director was doing when he wasn’t doing anything. Now we see it with the subprime real estate meltdown. Wall Street is having conniption fits, while the president and Congress are crafting a stimulus package when the horse is already out of the barn. Meanwhile, economists tell us we are in a recession heading for stagflation.

The state of Michigan was once the prime mover of our national economy. Now 450,000 highly paid Michigan workers, mainly autoworkers, are unemployed never again to see their jobs return. With a state unemployment rate of 7.4 percent, highest in the nation, the auto industry has lost its confidence and way. American highways and byways are dominated with automobiles made in Japan, Korea, Germany, Sweden, and soon China. Little consumed by Americans is “made in the USA.” Has this garnered the attention of leaders?

Detroit continues to make gas-guzzlers and SUV’s as big as tanks, giving Americans what they want but not necessarily what they need. The dichotomy between want and need produced is wide enough to drive a subprime truck through.

Small wonder some see the United States as a schizophrenic society. On the one hand, Americans are accused of being compulsive spenders as if there is no tomorrow creating the United States of Anxiety; and on the other, consumer spending accounts for two-thirds of U.S. Gross Domestic Product. Imagine what would happen if Americans suddenly tightened their belts and saved 10 percent of their disposable income. Do the math! The American economy would tank.

To forestall this possibility, from sun up until sun down, Americans are bombarded with subliminal stimulus across the media wasteland to shop until they drop. Americans are living on the edge, but who is leading them there? .

BLINDSIDE OF PROGRESS

Progress has become America’s most important product despite the fact it has created a society of deceit and dishonesty, a society of hidden persuaders and waste makers. For every gain progress produces something is lost forever.

We have poisoned the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land we cultivate. A life without consequences has spawned generation after generation of narcissistic and self-indulgent citizens who always want more, and want it now!

The American brand of self-gratification has evolved into lifestyle diseases that have defied remedy. For the better part of a century, the manifest lack of prudence, patience and control has resulted in a natural state of immaturity: Americans have had little reason to grow up, and so they haven’t.

Actions too often are devoid of consequences at home, in school, on the job, and in the community. Americans appear willing to sacrifice freedom for comfort and security.

We have gravitated from the pride of independence to obsequious counterdependence on our employers in particular and society in general as caretakers and caregivers. We seem oblivious to the latent consequences of this surrender, keeping the peddle to the metal burning up rubber and going nowhere. We are Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land anxiously waiting for a new fad or electronic toy to turn up.

Enlightened leadership cannot come soon enough. For leaders to become enlightened, they must first understand who they are, how they got to the way they are, and how they got to where they are. Then, it may be possible to extricate the American experience from what it has become, a passive, backward-looking and counter dependent society.

Enlightened leadership:

(1) Doesn’t point fingers, but moves beyond what is legal to what is ethical.
(2) Doesn’t give in to the popular response but espouses the prudent.
(3) Understands for every gain something is lost.

Its emerging challenge: what will be the cost benefits of the Information Age and its impact on corporate society as we know it?

Fundamental to enlightened leadership is self-knowing. In this age of complexity, before leaders can find the confidence to deal with it successfully, they must first understand their own motivation. It is not corporate greed that is the fatal flaw but self-ignorance. This is complicated by ignorance of the history, culture and the mind of the time within society and the global community. This crippling ignorance has spawned forward inertia and a pandemic of false hope.


DEALING WITH AMBIVALENCE

Knowledge is power, but mere knowledge is not power. It is only possibility. Action is power. Action’s highest manifestation is enlightened leadership.

We live in an ambivalent age. We suffer a major case of lost identity. We are inauthentic to others, and ourselves. We chase about in masks rather than allowing the core of our essence to surface in self-knowing. What is the evidence?

We cannot stand silence; cannot tolerate being alone without a cell phone strapped to our ear, a laptop on our knees, or waiting impatiently for the text message. We don’t ponder our existence but google the Internet to see what it all means. We are information junkies with little interest in ideas.

In an age obsessed with connection, we live in the most disconnected time in history. Most of our friends are in cyberspace. We are with everyone without being with anyone. We think alike, talk alike, walk alike, dress alike, and even dream alike. We are wedged between a robotic trance and surreal dream. It is why noise has become our music.

Blame this state on the swiftness of technological change. Blame it on the disproportionate distribution of wealth. Blame it on the shrinking of the planet accelerated by the Internet. Blame it on the invasion of privacy. Blame it on the collapse of nation states into the hands of rogue nations. Blame it on atavistic leaders and anachronistic institutions. The blame game only exacerbates the disconnect.

A PRIORI or FACE VALIDITY

The very first thing the enlightened leader should note is that growth and development is from the outside-in, not the inside-out. Our parents first initiate the pattern of cultural programming. Their biases, prejudices and attitudes become ours.

We not only come through our parents but they imbue us with their hopes and dreams, fears and longings, their drives and motivations, weaknesses and strengths, deceits and denials.

One parent may have a drive for everything money can buy, the other for everything money can’t buy. One parent may want us to conquer the world, the other simply to live in it. One parent may live in the past, the other only in the present. The result is often conflicting and confusing, as it no doubt had been for them when they were children.

Staggering with the mindset of parents, the delicate psyche is further assaulted by grandparents and other relatives who flatter and criticize, embrace and reject on the basis of pleasing and disappointing them. While well meaning, they compare us to our parents when they were young, and other siblings in their memory.

Suddenly, we are in the freaky world of “compare and compete.” We are led to look to others for what is of value at the expense of finding it within ourselves. In subtle or obvious asides, we discover we are too short, too tall, too fat, too thin, too ugly, too cute, too slow, too fast, too dumb, too clever, too boring, too lively, too moody, too stable, too limited, too gifted when we don’t own the measuring stick.

In our quest to be like everyone else, we become quickly lost in whom we actually are. Believing we are nobody anyone cares to know about, we stay below the radar as much as possible, hearing adults worrying about us. We gravitate to pleasers and build our identity on the expectations of others, while having little sense of what we desire.

Family friends, teachers and preachers then enter the maddening mix complicating the problem of identity further. These and other authority figures push and shove, prod and pull us in several directions. They can be cruel or kind, attentive or negligent, instructive or damaging to our imitative innocence.

Most of us survive their most cutting cruelties because of the resilience of the human spirit. Unfortunately, it doesn’t prepare us for the most powerful force of all that now comes into play, peer pressure.

Peer pressure is the first manifestation of enlightened leadership. It is revealed by our choice of first friends. We want to belong, to be accepted and popular, to count for something. This is likely to find us jumping through hoops to win favor with our preferred peers. The peers with whom we identify define who we think we are. If they are kind and caring, positive and honest, fun and funny, we will benefit; if they are not, we will suffer for our poor choices.

It is at this point that our essential self, the core of our identity, comes into play. Because of the confusion along the way, we may fail to develop to our potential, but instead become a stranger to ourselves. We see this in the needy person, who attempts to be everything to everybody and ends up being nothing to everyone. No peer is a true friend that keeps us from being all that we could be.

The many masks we wear are the layers of our personality that we display in the changing climate of interpersonal relationships. When the masks displayed are inappropriate to the situation, we are judged as odd. We then become afraid to offend, to disappoint, to embarrass, to fail to live up to other’s expectations, afraid to say “no.” We are in a constant torment worrying about what others think about us without ever knowing what we think. We echo the sentiments of others as a pleaser sacrificing our self-respect and personal dignity for the whim of acceptance when we’ve never accepted ourselves as we are. We leave ourselves open and vulnerable to exploitation.

“No” is the hardest word in the American language to say because we tend to be terrified with the possibility of rejection, failing to realize that self-rejection is the ultimate offense. Imagine how different a world it would be today if the United States Congress had said “no” to a number of major initiatives.

We have been drifting individually and collectively because it has been so easy to say, “yes” when “no” would be more appropriate. When you say “no,” you don’t own other people’s problems. When you say “no,” you don’t project your own problems on others or expect them to solve them. When you say “no,” you don’t try to make others “right” with what is “wrong” with you. When you say “no,” you don’t feel the need to apologize for what you’ve earned, or feel guilty for not bailing out others who have said, “yes” too often.

If you think this sounds a lot like psychology 101, you would be wrong. It is elemental self-knowing. Enlightened leadership is not a clone, nor a formula that once possessed can be applied to all indiscriminately. It is not one-dimensional. It varies as widely as the epiphany of self-knowing varies.

Self-knowing is not in a book, not in a personal trainer, not in a guru, not in a multi-step process but in the individual leader’s naked heart. It is there where the inspiration to lead can be found.

Prescription therapy for ailing leadership has all been done before, and continues to be repeated with little evidence of enlightened leadership. There is less interest in going back to the basics of leadership, self-knowing. Yet, every leader of consequence has survived the senseless programming to discover his core essence in the problem solving and decision-making. It is that journey into self-knowing that is less traveled.

If there is something wrong with leaders today, it is their failure to discover the source of the persons they are and have become. Reproach society for its preoccupation with youth and resolute flight from reality. Few escape its influence. The evidence is in our fear of growing old and therefore our determination never to grow up. This self-indulgent luxury pervades our mental landscape.

Corruption, cover-up, intimidation, paranoia, fear, hatred, jealousy, vengeance, backstabbing, malicious obedience, obsessive compulsive, and other passive behaviors have fueled a conflict between our essence and personality. Essence represents our innate talent, and personality our acquired social graces. Essence and personality are complements of each other, and not meant to be warring factions. One reason for this war is that our essence and personality have been compromised by a society running away from its moorings. Another reason is that in banishing ignorance knowledge has become a common commodity to all. Roles are now confused between leading and following, doing and thinking, as role demands and self-demands enter the fray.

The fundamental challenge of enlightened leadership is to unscramble this confusion by first unscrambling it within itself.

Consider the alternative. Without self-knowing, without the confidence that our moral compass is in place, we cannot know or find our way. We miss subtle changes, maintain the status quo against its encroaching irrelevance, and go from crisis to crisis solving problems we create. Life becomes an excruciating puzzle of mounting stress and strain. We struggle to appear in control when we are falling apart. Then, one day there is a spike in oil prices, the stock market plummets, the housing market collapses, and we are left vulnerable with the future up for grabs.

Face validity is a psychological term that refers to the validity of a test and its relevance to what is being measured. Self-knowing is a test in daily practice but yet difficult to measure in terms of this validity standard. Three behavioral indices are, however, helpful to provide some sense of the relative level in self-knowing apparent in enlightened leadership. These indices are awareness, acceptance, and action.

AWARENESS

Awareness is a broad concept that is addressed here in terms of a vital variable in enlightened leadership – COMPETITION.

We are programmed nearly from birth that competition is good for us; that competition is a great virtue to be developed by everyone. We are encouraged to be competitive by our parents, teachers, coaches, friends and fans. We compete for affection from our parents, for grades from our teachers in school, for jobs and promotions with our bosses in the workplace. We compete in everything we do to win approval, have a sense of belonging, and count for something with others.

While competition is embraced overwhelmingly, we fail to recognize that competition has fostered the ambivalence that dominates our times, complicates our lives, and muddles our minds of our true potential and unique identity. We become clones of a system that replicates itself ad infinitum. Oblivious to this, we fail to see competition:

(1) enslaves and degrades the mind so that we embrace the pathology of normalcy.
(2) is one of the most prevalent and destructive forms of psychological dependence.
(3) has created a needy universe in which the caring profession has found a lucrative clientele.
(4) eventually produces dull, repetitive, imitative, insensitive, mediocre, burned-out, and passive individuals. Such people are devoid of initiative, imagination, creativity, originality, and spontaneity.
(5) cultivates compliance, which responds to outside pressure, instead of cooperation, which is given openly and freely.

COOPERATION is essential to human enterprise. Yet cooperation is not spontaneous. It requires diligence to achieve. Perhaps that is why it is not natural to the workplace. Cooperation requires time and effort when what is preferred are more expedient measures, which invariably end in compliance.

Due to the nature or our programming, our initial encounters start with simple courtesy between individuals or the politeness stage. We then progress naturally from politeness to the suspicion stage. We size each other up, sense where the other person is coming from, and what is expected of us. We do this by asking open-ended questions. This is often referred to as the fight or the confrontational stage. It is necessary to allay our doubts and suspicions as to intention. Not before these questions are answered to our satisfaction are we prepared to enter the cooperation stage and establish a trusting relationship.

Only through this distinctly human process is cooperation achieved. Attempts to go from politeness to cooperation, avoiding suspicion and confrontation, realize compliance instead. Compliance represents flight from suspicion in avoidance of confrontation. It results progressively in submission, adaptation, surrender and, ultimately, general apathy. We find people doing as little as possible to get by and not as much as they are capable of doing. The climate is one of palpable distrust.

A collegial climate of good cheer and congeniality, where there is vertical and horizontal integration of effort, is a product of cooperation. This requires well-planned integrated effort. Competition uses contrived contests between individuals and groups in an effort to achieve the same, but instead fragments and stalls effort at the compliance stage.

Performance appraisal, a competitive instrument of old style management, still used past its efficacy, was designed to stimulate open dialogue and developmental discussion between a boss and a worker. It has deteriorated into a meaningless encounter to justify raises where the boss controls the agenda. The best evaluative system is one in which workers measure their own performance against how their peers measure it. This valuation is pertinent, current and meaningful, and can be reduced to a computer program as an assessment tool to determine readiness for promotion.

Cooperation stimulates INITIATIVE; compliance frustrates initiative. Initiative:

(1) is the most highly prized of virtues in enlightened leadership.
(2) is fundamental to the solving of human problems. Self-reliance, self-management, self-direction, self-dependence, self-confidence, and self-awareness are impossible without initiative.
(3) is the opposite of competition in that it is by nature the quality of a free mind.
(4) is inner force that responds naturally to confrontational situations.
(5) has no place for denial or self-deceit.
(6) has no other recourse than to embrace its problems and ride them to resolution.

A person with initiative is inner-directed as opposed to a competitive person who is outer-directed. The competitive person attempts to reach and exceed benchmarks set by others. Competition is an imitative response. In crisis situations, competition looks for direction rather than taking the initiative, thus lagging in timely decision-making.

Another link to competition is the habit-forming behavior of MAKING COMPARISONS. Competition looks to successful competitors for the model of its own actions rather than assessing its essence and potential in terms of its personal uniqueness. Competition searches for excellence rather than creating it. It relies on critical thinking or on what is already known, and having been done successfully before rather than creative thinking, or on what is not known but can be found out.

The comparing-competing syndrome can be seen with the student competing for grades in school, the athlete in sports for ribbons, and the professional in the workplace always campaigning for the next job. This dangerous game of one upmanship can derail an individual if his career is not following his core interest, or an enterprise if it departs too far from its core business in imitation of a more diverse competitor.

Comparison breeds fear, and fear breeds competition. We believe our safety depends on “killing off the competition,” or beating the competition at its own game. It is easy to miss the folly in this. We have little time to smell the flowers or enjoy our success lest we lose ground to competition. We are always on edge plagued with the thought that competition is plotting to steal our business. Business, as with wars, is first lost at home.

Paranoia, a natural condition to our competitive programming, finds the higher we rise the greater our fear of falling. We are fearful regardless of whether we win or lose, succeed or fail in our daily skirmishes and careers. We are always waiting for the other shoe to drop, caught in a hypnotic state of forward inertia and uncertainty. Evidence of this is found in the structure of work.

We subordinate ourselves to the commands of someone. We cease to deal with this authority politely, respectfully and confrontationally, but avoid conflict and honest exchange for fear it might hurt our standing. We segue into role dependency, as this authority figure in turn develops a dependency on the next authority figure, who in turn develops a dependency on the boss above, until those at the top with the most authority have little clue what is actually going on below. This iterative process ignores all the overt and covert signals from the environment that cry out that something is amiss until it is too late for damage control. Everyone is too busy sucking up to take charge.

It happened with Enron being found out to be a bogus operation. It happened again with General Motors, Ford and Chrysler waking up to find their markets in ruin. And it happened most recently with the subprime fiasco with Countrywide, Citicorp, and Merrill Lynch writing off tens of billions of dollars of debt. What is worse, it promises to happen again because little learning has taken hold from the devastation. A government bailout is on the horizon, along with the Federal Reserve assisting in market corrections while the root causes in the panic are buried from sight.

No doubt many sensed something was awry but pushed down their ethical antennae. They went along for the ride until the patient was put on life support. Leaders lose the ability to see and hear what is plainly in sight when they cling to anachronistic forms of the game they have been programmed to play. For this inclination, everyone suffers.

Leaders are not alone in this dependency. It is how most everything is designed to function. When people look for leadership, they see, hear and respond only vicariously through the leader’s eyes and judgments, a leadership, incidentally, that is programmed to imitate and obey requisite competition.

This is a critical fault of the complex organization. With a workforce of 80 percent or more of educated professionals in Fortune 500 companies, people who possess select information and winning ideas, they are routinely reduced to conventional roles and bureaucratic policies and procedures. Little wonder why they drag their feet and retreat into passive behaviors. Their stubborn reluctance to come forward on a timely basis – to see, hear and report on emerging crises – is the most damaging factor of competition and most wasteful aspect of corpocracy.

None of this is new to the self-knowing leader, but it is not enough to know. Enlightened leadership demands that the structure of work be designed to support the function of work. The function of work will then create a workplace culture of confrontation and conflict, where problems are openly discussed and resolved, and the messenger is not killed. The workplace culture will not only support the vision of enlightened leadership, but it will establish the desired behavior on a predictable basis as if an invisible hand were touching the enterprise.

ACCEPTANCE

Like awareness, acceptance is a broad concept that might best be addressed in terms of CULTURE. We are reminded, from our earliest recollections, of our shortcomings, our limitations, of how we compare to our siblings, relatives and others of our generation. This found the literary critic Murray Kempton lamenting, “Why, America, did you, in your arrogance, teach so many of your children to hate themselves?”

There is a taboo against being our own best friend, of accepting ourselves as we are. This finds us uncomfortable with the person who is comfortable in his own skin, and feels no need to flatter or disabuse us. He marches to his own drummer and expects us to march to ours as well. He is not in competition with others, but only with himself in bringing out his best. He is in touch with the “god within” (enthusiasm) and makes no apologies for it.

We might see him as self-willed and arrogant, the opposite of humble. Arrogance is said to be bad while humility is universally accepted as good. What about false humility, which exploits our empathetic inclinations?

The person described here, who might be construed as arrogant, is not looking for justification outside himself. On the other hand, the so-called humble person may be looking precisely for such reassurance, which of course is false humility. A true person of humility does not see himself as better than anyone else, but rather feels an inclination to use his gifts in the service of others. The most generous person is the one that is not needy, does not own other people’s problems, is not afraid to say “no,” and is not interested in a dependent relationship in any way. Some people so disposed have been called “arrogant.” Albert Einstein’s friends saw him in this light, the man designated by Time magazine as “The Man of the Twentieth Century.” Humility has its place but Einstein’s kind of arrogance changes the world.

Arrogance is taken to be self-conceit and a feeling of marked superiority to others, when that is hardly the case with a person who is self-possessed and has no need or desire to possess or own anyone else.

Nor is meekness a good indicator of humility. It is more likely a guise to appear modest and unassuming, and therefore self-negating and non-threatening to others obsessively immersed in the universe of comparing-competing. If so, it demonstrates the failure of self-acceptance along with the failure to accept others as they are found. It implies intolerance and a patronizing attitude.

Self-acceptance is predicated on the proposition that we are all authors of our own footprints in the sand, heroes of the novels inscribed in our hearts. Every one of us, without exception, is sacred, unique, scripted high drama, played out before an audience of one, with but one actor on stage. This is critical to enlightened leadership.

The sooner the leader realizes he is alone the more quickly he will overcome his bondage to doubt and pervasive loneliness, his enslavement to comparing and competing, and find true friendship with himself so that he can more quickly act decisively and wisely.

What drives this self-negating conflict that prevents us from self-acceptance and self-realization is the constant battle between two selves: the “ideal self,” and the “real self.”

Our “ideal self” is how we have been programmed to believe we should behave.

Our “real self” is how we actually behave.

We spend an enormous amount of energy disguising our actions so that they may be seen in the most satisfying light when, ourselves as we are, have done essentially nothing wrong. The little boy and little girl in the grown man and grown woman control our destiny to the end. We never outgrow their dominance, while their compulsive and impulsive nature often clouds the roles we play. Indeed, the conflict within the self is further complicated with our confusion over “self-demands” and “role demands.”

“Self-Demands” reflect the fragile ego of a leader who finds it necessary to let people know who he is, and how important he is; how brilliant, and experienced he is; and how accomplished he is in what he does; and how lucky they are to know him and to be working for and with him. We all know people like him.

A leader who suffers this fault has a tendency to identify with others with a similar “ego ideal.” He surrounds himself with these “yea sayers,” who magnify his persona. Since it is likely he is attracted to common weaknesses, but unlikely to potential competition with his strengths, his weaknesses are liable to be magnified and his strengths mitigated to produce little efficacy.
The leader’s staff would protect him from the truth of what is going on, spinning events in the mantra of the leader’s well known biases, negating any chance of reality reaching him in time to act.

“Role demands” indicate the leader understands and accepts the nature of the job he has been commissioned to execute. He perceives the situations confronting the organization clearly with little penchant to disguise reality no matter how challenging or disturbing, being primarily concerned with what is wrong and what can be done about it than who is wrong and needs disciplining.

The leader’s immediate role is to activate the critical skills required to facilitate collective engagement and interactive management to tackle the crisis. The troops, knowing and expecting this bold response, will be at the ready to carry out the action.

“Role demands” has another critical component. The troops understand that their leader will not meet the organization’s mission at the expense of the troops, nor the needs of the troops at the expense of the mission. It is his role to see both are in sync.

Therefore, the mission’s goal and needs of the troops are structured to be mutually supportive and inclusive. This develops trust, contributes to worker self-confidence, and most importantly, to everyone being on board. This is a partnership with no need for clever rhetoric.

In a climate of “role demands,” everyone knows what is expected of them and why. Work is intense without being tense; demanding without being hostile; confrontational without being conflicting. It is a creative climate with all the chaos that that may enjoin. Since anyone who has a beef can express it, there is no dancing around perturbations. They surface and are dealt with. Work is fun and workers enjoy what they do. This is a “learning” rather than a “knowing” environment. Knowers are tellers and not listeners, reflecting the characteristics of “self-demands.”

Moreover, this is a psychological as well as physical environment. The psychological climate enhances self-acceptance and candor. This leads in turn to acceptance of others as they are found with critical comments taken in the context that they are offered. Still, there is a more basic reason why “role demands” cannot be poisoned by “self-demands.” The combination of the “ideal self” and “self-demands” results in the situation being poorly defined and therefore impossible to engage appropriately.

When the situation is poorly defined, operations can veer quickly from success to chaos. Once the vision of the leader is corrupted panic can set in with the state of affairs tail spinning to finger pointing, backstabbing, cover up, and sabotage in operation meltdown.

In recent years, we have seen companies in stressful situations “searching for excellence” instead of discovering it with their own people in their own operations. There is the slimmest of chances, as many companies have discovered, in finding success by replicating success seen elsewhere by imitating its design.

Over the years, companies that have attempted to imitate other successful companies have invariably failed in the end. The reason is the essential ingredient that is indigenous to each operation is its CULTURE. Culture, for all intent and purposes, is an attitude that can’t be exported; it is unique to an operation. It can be assimilated over time, but not packaged like a disposable product. Companies that have merged into new entities have found this only too painfully true.

What is culture? It is the shared history, experience, values, interests, successes and failures, heroes and villains, geography and demographics of a collective soul, and cumulative idiosyncrasies over time, which disposes it to act in a certain way.

Culture endures some modification with each respective leader and new generation of workers. A culture’s core values, however, are so powerful that if this new leadership and worker contingent want to experience any degree of success they must pay homage to it, or leave. Should a new leader have a blueprint in his pocket for a more effective operation, which means a modified culture, he must first be a dedicated student of the existing culture. From that scholarship, he must then develop discrete measurable benchmarks and a legion of implementers to sell his message every step of the way. A rough gauge of what kind of culture may exist is reflected in this schematic:

(1) Culture of Comfort: tends to be paternalistically managed with workers mainly passive participants to management’s demands. Management acts as surrogate parent to workers suspended in terminal adolescence. Management dependent workers have the mindset of an obedient 12-year-old;

(2) Culture of Complacency: tends to support a climate of permissive paternalism. Here the manager as surrogate parent is replaced by the spoiled brat worker-as-petulant-child. In an effort to generate results, management bribes these workers with entitlements and fringe benefits expecting loyalty and purposeful performance. They instead create the “mad monarchs of the madhouse” who spend most of their time taking breaks and complaining. This leaves little time or attention to the work at hand. This childlike mentality finds workers in arrested development counter dependent on the company for its total well being. The company has become their home away from home, their caretaker and caregiver.

(3) Culture of Contribution: tends to foster the development of mature adult workers who see themselves as independent contractors and partners with management in getting things done. They don’t expect to have safe jobs if they don’t produce results. They track competition and attempt to out-perform it. They are not afraid to hear bad news, and prefer it to the company lying to them as to how matters stand. They thrive in a climate of give and take where the best skills gravitate to the problems. They are self-pleasers and don’t need a lot of company rah-rah to energize them to give their best. They do it out of pride and self-satisfaction, not out of looking good to management. They are confrontational and will not back away from conflict. If they have a beef, they direct it promptly and politely to its source. They understand managed conflict is the glue that keeps a function on task. They are inner directed and self-managers who follow their own enlightened self-interests.

In any typical organization, these ideal type cultures are apparent, but it is the most successful organizations in which the Culture of Contribution is most dominant.

ACTION

Self-awareness and self-acceptance are crucial to self-knowing. But it is all for naught if enlightened leadership fails to generate the appropriate ACTION. Execution is the primal role of leaders. And action is predicated on the PROBLEM SOLVING.

If the problem is not recognized, or appears too monumental to consider, the problems solved are not likely to be the problems encountered. Recent history suggests disruptions and executive derailments have involved solving the wrong problems because the real issues were too staggering to consider. So, in the span of a short forty years, the United States has relinquished its position as the citadel of manufactured products.

A tectonic shift in the marketplace was unfolding but mainly unnoticed in the 1960s as Japan, Inc. and other Southeast Asia countries commenced to employ statistical process control and to involve workers in the problem solving with what was called “Quality Control Circles.”

For this attention, these Far East countries were producing automobiles, light fixtures, and electronic appliances of a quality new to manufactured goods. Americans rushed to purchase these items bypassing comparable American trademarks with consuming flurry.

Two American engineering scientists of quality standards, W. Edwards Deming and J. M. Juran, exported their skills to the Far East as they failed to convince American companies to consider changing their quality control practices. The Orient proved fertile ground for their problem solving ideas. The rest is history.

Deming created a “science of quality” to the standard of Six Sigma. Six Sigma describes how a process is performing. To achieve Six Sigma, a process must not produce more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities. J. M. Juran, an expert on process quality control, complemented Deming’s science, identifying and eradicating chronic problems at their source. This minimized defects and scrap at the end of the process. It resulted in huge cost savings while typically exceeding delivery schedules by a wide margin.

There is an old saw, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” Deming and Juran demonstrate the folly in such thinking. GM, Ford, Chrysler, GE, ATT, et al weren’t broken but they were soon to find themselves no longer competitive.

Enlightened leadership can never stand pat in the comfort zone, or assume there is no cause for continuing ACTION in decisive improvement.

Enlightened leadership can never afford to hear what it wants to hear, see what it wants to see, and assume what is true against all evidence to the contrary. Nor need it expect to be the bastion of wisdom and the oracle of all answers. A more salient faculty would be to surround itself with the best minds, even minds of repulsive personalities, to address the complex problems threatening disruption. The impediment to this is the lack of self-knowing. With self-knowing, enlightened leadership can rise above the pettiness of self-demands to take a firm control of role demands.

When it comes to complexity, it is always easy to find other issues of higher priority. Apologists offer this argument for disappearing American jobs and industries.

The irony is that today American quality is the best in the world. The problem is it appears too little and too late. The markets are gone and have not returned. With the American mindset, once a trust is broken it is nearly impossible to repair. In any case, the world is now in a new iteration having departed from hardware dominance to the lightness of being of software and electronic digital technology. There is an important lesson here, and that is never to act so smug and complacent again.

COMPLEXITY is now an ever-present danger. There is still the temptation to retreat from complexity’s demands and into the sanctuary of the understood and manageable. The brain’s capacity is finite while complexity is infinite. Quietly, unobtrusively, and one might even say, accidentally, we have created a workforce of many dimensions with impressive capabilities to address the problem solving. These are the knowledge workers, the new army of the night, that represent eight or nine out of every ten workers in major companies. They would love to be set free to tackle complexity.

But alas, and here is the problem, they are programmed as if brawn not brains is still the main forte of enterprise. The vital few in leadership roles continue to make most of the decisions, to dodge the complex issues, and to lead as if it were still 1945.

Traditional leadership has been organized on that basis. Complexity demands that decision-making be restructured to bring into play all the best minds to a project. This suggests that the action role for enlightened leadership is that of identifying what is at issue, and then coordinating resources to attack the problem strategically and decisively. It is not its role much less its capability to solve complex problems. Its role is facilitation.

This does not mean that enlightened leadership abdicates its role and delegates its function to some cronies and sycophants. It means that enlightened leadership is totally involved and committed in facilitating the action plan. This may sound self-evident, but I assure you that it is not, for far too often commitment is equated to involvement when they are not the same. There is no substitute for involvement. Action:

(1) is not a set of principles on a PowerPoint slide.
(2) involves the creation of a culture in which everyone acts as a leader.
(3) involves the enlightened leadership being on board every step of the way.

That does not mean that everyone goes off doing his or her own thing. It means company intelligence is shared openly and honestly. This is prudent action as there are no secrets in the age of the Internet. There can be no surprises so no one is operating out-of-joint with requirements.

Candor implies everyone has a stake in operations, which makes possible voluntary input in tactical and strategic planning. It means bottom-up management and horizontal integration of tasks complemented by top-down leadership so as to discourage shooting from the hip, or the practice of “ready, fire, aim!”

It means position power has had its day and now movement is towards knowledge power as the fulcrum of influence. It also means that the distribution of wealth will be spiraling down while the role of enlightened leadership will be ratcheting up.

This means the configuration of what is deemed leadership is about to change radically. It is hard to imagine companies without CEOs, CFOs and COOs, or even Boards of Directors, as they have become part of our cultural nomenclature, but this, too, shall pass. What may appear as organized chaos will instead be closer to an integrated system’s approach to functionality. The combination of complexity and the new workforce is forcing the change because the problem solving is changing.

We have moved from a mechanistic to an organic configuration in the problem solving. No longer can we divide a problem into manageable parts, and then reassemble the parts into a solution of many partial solutions, and expect to solve the complex problem as encountered.

The evidence is apparent with the “war on drugs,” the “war on obesity,” the “war on crime,” and countless other wars. We have declared war on the complex problems of our day that frustrate us, but with little success. These are lifestyle choices with a magnitude of complexity that defies accurate defining. So, we skip the defining step in the problem solving, and fill the void with endless descriptions and a cornucopia of solutions. This has found us gravitating to a solution driven society with little appetite for defining our real problems.

We prefer value free analysis when lifestyle choices are a subjective matter. We favor information that makes no demands to ideas that force us to think and behave differently. Ideas are provoking and active whereas descriptions are soothing and passive. For example, we have several professional disciplines to explain addictions but few on the ground action plans to resolve such compulsions.

This can be explained as four interrelated and integrated systems that exploit these overlaps:

(1) The Technical System: this involves the use of the technology and tools required to solve complex problems. Professionals are well schooled in the use of these tools and can prune a database that makes complexity somewhat manageable.

(2) The Social System: this is the socialization and relationship component. The social context is critical to the problem solving. This speaks to the integration of many minds and disciplines to an issue. Tools and people are inseparable from each other and must be user friendly to produce synergistic collaborative effort.

(3) The Purposeful System: this is the “problem domain.” The purpose of a system is what it does. The problem domain is coherent and tidy under all the false definitions and approaches that prevent the system from satisfying its purpose.

(4) The Control System: this is the “solution domain.” The solution domain is an incoherent riddle, and the reason so many solutions are failed solutions. It is also because problems are never solved. They are only controlled. This means that enlightened leadership must be constantly aware of the state of the control system.

Effective solutions are flexible and sensitive to unexpected problems. Feedback is critical. When feedback is missing from the process, breakdown follows with the likely demise of operations. Without appropriate feedback, action flies apart with everything going around in circles. A cycle of solutions is fed into the problem without noticeable results. The feedback that might have identified the issue is missing, and thus the paradoxical dilemma.

FINAL NOTE

Enlightened leadership is not touchy feeling. It is not a return to flattering workers with lots of attention as was the case in the 1930s at Western Electric in Chicago. It is not being charismatic and able to talk in sound bytes. It is not a CEO with all the answers.

It is rather the genius of another type; that of a workforce that has been fully engaged, a workforce of brains not brawn, of thinking and doing; of doers with decision-making authority at the level of consequences; of professionals capable of much more than they are asked to do; of production measured in psychological rather than chronological time.

Effective enlightened leadership is counterintuitive. System researcher Russell Ackoff explains how:

“If you take a system apart to identify its every component, and then operate these components in such a way that every component behaves as well as it possibly can, there is one thing of which you can be sure. The system as a whole will not behave as well as it can. Now that is counterintuitive to Machine Age thinking, but it is absolutely essential to systems thinking. The corollary to this of course is that if you have a system that is behaving as well as it can, none of its parts will be.”

This counterintuitive behavior of purposeful systems extends to the idea of comparing and competing, Management by Objectives (MBOs), performance appraisal, indeed, to the fallacy of inner departmental competition.

When you force-fit people into contrived units irrespective of their talents or interests, you negate their ability to make a difference. For over 100 years, we have survived without self-knowing being crucial to our leadership. Today, self-knowing is no longer a luxury but the essence of enlightened leadership. English philosopher John Locke (1632 – 1704) was not speaking of self-knowing but he could have been when he said:

“The improvement of the understanding is for two ends: first, our own increase of knowledge; secondly, to enable us to deliver that knowledge to others.”
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Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr. is an industrial/organization psychologist, and former corporate executive with Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe, Ltd. His latest book is “A Look Back To See Ahead” (AuthorHouse 2007).