Mike Lehr's Blog

Imagine soil so toxic that nothing will grow. No matter how good our seeds, our farming techniques and the weather are; nothing will grow. The same thing happens when we try to promote great ideas in a bad relational environment: they fail.

That’s why relationships are more important than vision, culture more important than strategy. Vision and strategy can’t grow in toxic relational and cultural soil. This analogy also frames leadership as an affect influencing the hearts and minds of members, requiring the ability to tap both aspects of an interpersonal relationship: emotional and rational.

While this analogy’s point seems obvious, we are biased toward reason; thus, when problems arise, we tend to believe presenting new ideas, educating on the facts or reasoning better will solve them. It’s not unusual for me to have to restate this analogy several times in order to get people to focus on plans containing tactics to improve relationships or to manage conflict. In other words, our tendency is to just find better seeds, use better farming techniques or hope for better weather rather than address the soil.

This happens because no matter how good our ideas are, people will tend to decide that they’re bad if they don’t like or trust us. Our facts won’t change things either because people tend to believe perceptions over facts. People will naturally find reasons to discount our logic and facts.

When we combine all of this with the fact that a diverse workforce improves business, there is great stress on traditional management styles typically unsuited to nurturing the right positive feelings that can dramatically improve performance. By framing problems with this analogy, I increase my success in introducing relational solutions, which are often seen as too “fuzzy” or “soft.” Perhaps it will help you too.

In this post I want to show how informal organizational power and its role in leadership can produce different kinds of leadership. My inspiration is from a Chinese concept of rulers that is over two thousand years old, and I first read in connection to the I Ching. From it, I produced two forms of leadership: Organizational Leadership (OGL) and De Facto Leadership (DFL). When any group identifies its leader, the critical question is:

Are the members’ hearts into following the leader?

The answer is the same difference between a loveless marriage and a loving one. That’s why I express OGL as a hollowed circle to be filled and DFL as a solid circle to be embraced (figure). A loving marriage is love (blue) embraced by the formal structure of marriage (red). Leadership is best when the formal organizational structure is given to leaders that people want to follow, thus producing Aligned Leadership (ALL).

OGL is the hierarchy using titles such as manager and executive to convey positions of authority and rules of responsibility. OGL is more akin to management. DFL is dependent upon the person’s qualities; people follow them regardless of what the rules say. This is how some can be leaders without being managers.

A scene from Braveheart expresses very well the difference between DFL and OGL. In it, the lead Scottish noble, Robert the Bruce, is trying to convince the commoner warrior, William Wallace, that he needs the noble’s support. The latter responds with, “Men follow courage not titles.”

OGL, DFL and ALL reinforce the idea that leadership is an affect that requires tapping into emotions and integrating both aspects of an interpersonal relationship. This helps people to see what they want to see in their leaders, thus encouraging them to follow.

Other posts in this series:

• Leadership vs. Management: The Difference
• Leadership vs. Management: The Difference (Part II)
• Leadership vs. Management: The Difference (Part III)
• Leadership vs. Management: The Difference (Part IV)
• Leadership vs. Management: The Difference (Part V)

Businesses spend much money on developing their visions, strategies and processes; however, they spend relatively little on culture, which trumps all of the others. Megan McArdle discusses her observations of General Motors and others in “Why Companies Fail,” appearing in the March 2012 issue of The Atlantic.

When we talk about vision, strategy and process, they are very much head concepts as opposed to heart ones. For example, they don’t concern themselves much with the relationships that employees have between one another or even the relationships that the management team has with employees. The simplest relational techniques are rarely connected to these heady concepts when, in fact, it’s relationships that drive the cohesion and morale of any organization.

Unless we touch our employees on their emotional foundation, vision, strategy and process will fall far short of their intended success. This perspective transforms leadership into more of an emotional function from a rational one.  This perspective also helps us understand why common business tools such as incentives and processes can retard our efforts to build relationships and effect change.

Using a farming analogy, it doesn’t matter what vision, strategy and processes we use; if the soil isn’t good, we will struggle. In business, the soil is the relationship between the management team and employees. It forms the foundation of a company’s culture. If that team can’t develop effect relationships or isn’t motivated to even use simple relationship building techniques, then how can we expect it to implement great visions, strategies and processes?

Related post: Great Strategy? Don’t Neglect Culture

One can read endlessly about leadership. However, if plays play on a stage, if baseball plays on a diamond, movies on a screen and chess on a board, where does leadership play? It plays in the mind of every member of the group.

Yes, we often see leaderships as having a good vision, strategy, idea or something tangibly similar. In reality though, these aren’t any good if leaders can’t inspire members around these things. By putting leadership on this emotional plane, it becomes subjective; a leader to one could be the Pied Piper to another.

Additionally, leadership comes from the word lead. Lead implies movement from one place to another. This is a change, so leadership is about change. Thus, by combining emotions and change, we arrive at a the conclusion that:

Leadership is an affect – felt by members and personified by one individual – which induces change.

We can see this more clearly in business if we ask: Are employees’ hearts into following their leader? After all, inspiration is a far better motivator for change than compliance. For example, if a leader can personify some of these feelings into an affect, that leader could be a powerful change agent:
 

Since groups are an abstraction, leaders become the “faces” groups, the vehicle through which members can give their feelings a human form. Leaders become the manifestation of their members’ feelings.

The practical outcome of this is that leadership changes from a project- or action-oriented endeavor to a relational one. This means people are more important than vision and relationships are more important than processes. Thus, leadership transform from something mechanical to something human . . . and possibly divine.

Touching can enhance relationship building. In the workplace, some touching creates problems. However, the handshake is generally acceptable and is an extremely effective morale builder when used regularly with employees.

While frequently used to greet new people or re-acquaintances, it’s normal for employees to go with unshaken hands for long periods. For example, a fourteen-year veteran machine operator with a 150-employee manufacturing company had never had his hand shaken by a company executive.

I advise that every employee receive a handshake from a company executive (or senior manager in larger corporations) at least once every three to six months. Executives should be able to do this on a regular basis for their top 100 reports.

Shaking employees is usually easy and fun. Extending your hand often encourages the employee to do likewise. Sometimes, when it’s unexpected, I’ve had to keep my hand extended for as much as 10-15 seconds before the employee extended hers. Thus, I often play off the technique’s novelty by saying:

Hello Anne, how are you [extend hand]?  [As hand is extending continue uninterruptedly.] It has been a while since we talked. What’s going on with your (client, market, family, vacation, etc.)?

I’ve also had employees ask:

Did you want something in particular?

To which I’ve responded with something like this:

No, I just wanted to see how you were doing and to thank you for your efforts.

Touches influence people’s feelings and in turn their thoughts. For instance, a patient touched by a doctor will tend to think that the doctor spent twice as much time with him than she did. We need to remember that people are not light switches. Over time, handshakes work and lay excellent ground for future initiatives.

On the Harvard Business Review site, I read the posting “True Leaders Are Also Managers” by Robert I. Sutton, Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. He commented, “I kept bumping into an old and popular distinction that has always bugged me: leading versus managing.” While I liked his main point linking good leadership to good management, he didn’t resolve the intuitive deficiencies I find in academic attempts to make a distinction between the two.

Figure 1: Good Leadership is Based Upon Good Management 

First, they overlook that leadership is an affect: an emotion in the follower producing an affinity for the leader. The subjective and personal nature of leadership is clearly expressed when we consider that we can manage things such as resources, investments and processes but we can only lead people. This affect transforms management into leadership, metaphorically in the same way we turn a house into a home. Figure 1 expresses the dependent nature of leadership on management as suggested by Professor Sutton. Thus, the difference between leading and managing is emotional.

Figure 2: Change Difference between Leadership & Management  

Second, academia tends to overlook that leadership is about change. It’s derived from lead which implies motion and in turn change – moving from one point to another. As Figure 2 shows, the greater degree of change we require, the more important leadership becomes; good management alone likely won’t be enough. For instance, we don’t say “They’re managing a revolution (extreme change),” we tend to say, “Leading a revolution.” When others respond to how they’re doing with “I’m managing” it implies “keeping up” or “going with the flow.” It doesn’t come close to implying any dynamic attempt of effecting change.

Just as economics is being transformed by behavioral economics, those same psychological influences need to begin transforming an impractical, out-dated, academic perspective of leadership.

Other links in this series:

• Leadership vs. Management: The Difference (Part II)
• Leadership vs. Management: The Difference (Part III)
• Leadership vs. Management: The Difference (Part IV)
• Leadership vs. Management: The Difference (Part V)
• Leadership vs. Management: The Difference (Part VI)

Looking at beauty as power is important in understanding and appreciating intuitive approaches because it dramatically expands the influences and solutions we see. However, as I mentioned in the A Blue Heron Instructs on Patience, we tend to be prejudiced toward action; therefore, we will often overlook beauty as power because it’s not an active force. Thus, it helps if we initially think of beauty as attractive because the verb “attract” implies some kind of active force.

For example, suppose we saw a metal ball rolling on a level table toward a wall. We might initially think that there was something about the ball that caused movement. However, suppose later we find out that a powerful magnet was implanted in the wall. Now, we begin to see the wall as the active force.

Another problem we tend to have is that we look at beauty very superficially, as something physically feminine. However, beauty can exist in anything, including intangible things. For instance, consider the movie A Beautiful Mind; also consider the attraction of beautiful ideas, prices, cars, paintings, formulae, advertisements, parks, scenery, etc. Anything that attracts us has some level of beauty in it; even power is beautiful to many.

So, if a car dealer stocks his showroom with a car that he knows is likely to attract us enough to buy it, who is really applying the active force: the buyer or the dealer? Similarly, when the Indians attracted General George Custer into the trap on Battle of Little Big Horn because he thought he had a beautiful opportunity to defeat them, who was playing the active force: Custer who rushed in or the Indians who created the attractive situation?