Mike Lehr's Blog

In 2008, a study by Professor Jens Krause, then of the University of Leeds, indicated that it only takes a purposeful minority of five percent to influence an entire crowd. The implication of his work for change management is this: we can initiate change with a small minority, we don’t need everyone at the outset. A passionate minority can often be very successful against an inert majority.

In general, there are four types of personalities when it comes to change:

1. Initiators: want to initiate change because the status quo doesn’t serve them
2. Adapters: adapt once they see the change working for the initiators
3. Followers: will follow the other two types once they believe it’s “the thing to do”
4. Resistors: will resist change because they don’t want to change or can’t change

The five percent will usually include Initiators. The problem is that many companies have them scattered across the company as in Figure #1. However, if we can consolidate them so they can work together and mutually support one another, they become Figure #2. Even though it’s only five percent of the total picture appears quite more powerful than the five percent spread randomly throughout Figure #1. The same happens in groups and organizations especially if some are in leadership positions.

Any insurrection begins with connecting supporters. This might mean reorganizing so they can work together: assigning them to the same project team, task force, product development team, call center or marketing campaign. The grouping should be as cross functional as possible down to the support people.

To cement the team’s camaraderie, it should receive attention from top leadership and ample dose of interpersonal techniques from it. Their momentum will encourage the adapters and followers leaving only the resistors with whom to work.

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)

The article, “The Modern Matchmakers,” from the February 11, 2012 edition of The Economist contained two major business lessons that I’ve discussed earlier regarding the solving of people-related problems:

1. What people think they want isn’t necessarily what they will choose
2. When faced with too much choice, people have less energy to think about them

For example, the article cites the work of Eli Finkel of Northwestern University on speed-dating in which he found that “people’s stated preference at the beginning of the process do not match the characters of the individuals they actually like.” Furthermore, “that when faced with abundant choice, people pay less attention to characteristics that require thinking and conversation to evaluate . . . and more to matters physical.” In short, just as Sheena Iyengar of Columbia University and Mark Lepper of Stanford concluded that too much choice is demotivating,” Finkel found it can dull thinking processes.

As I had also done in an earlier post on online dating, we can translate these themes to our business efforts by asking three questions:

1. How much freedom does someone want?
2. What does someone really want; what will he really do or decide?
3. How much (and what kind of) thinking will someone require from a leader?

These further translate into more tactical questions for managers and executives such as:

1. How much flexibility or process must I give someone?
2. What differences do I see between what he wants and what he actually does?
3. What kind of decisions do I give her to make and what (or when) do I decide for her?

Complicating this further is the fact that the answers will vary for each employee, requiring deeper and more interpersonal skills from managers and leaders. Are your managers up for the challenge?

Previous post on online dating:  What the Failures of Online Dating Can Teach Us

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.

So, the boss walks in and harshly reprimands an employee. Unknowingly, she probably just shot his productivity down for the day. A while ago I worked with a company in which it was fairly common practice for the owner to come in late Monday morning and severely reprimand his employees. I witnessed what that did to their productivity for the week.

What we often don’t realize is how much words, phrasing and general conversation can affect people. In the November/December 2011 issue of Scientific American Mind, Tori Rodriguez in her article, “What Just Happened?”, cites several studies including ones in which:

• “. . . people who were unconsciously exposed to images of fast-food logos became more impatient . . .”
• “ . . . when participants recalled an illness-related memory, their pain tolerance decreased.”
• Participants were “unknowingly primed toward goal pursuit” simply by reading something “that included words such as ‘success’ and ‘achieve.’”

While Rodriguez recommends that we become more aware of this “priming” as she calls it by recalling what we “saw, heard and thought about in the past few minutes,” we can also raise our awareness concerning how we negatively influence people accidentally. Moreover, we could use this priming for good. For instance, simply wishing people luck can improve their productivity and performance.

That means we need to beware of that “constructive criticism” we offer. If it really is that constructive and helpful, we should position it as advice, assistance or simply help. Consider too, if we never compliment an employee. It’s as though we never watered a plant.

Next time you want to motivate someone, it might be as simple as talking about something positive, enjoyable and yes, even humorous.

For many of us, we feel good when we help others. What we are even learning is that many of us, especially women, will tend to feel what others feel. Thus, we not only feel good about helping others, but we feel their happiness from our help.

In the July-August 2011 issue of the Harvard Business Review Yochai Benkler’s cites in his article “The Unselfish Gene” the work of neurophysiologist, Giacomo Rizzolatti, who originally “found that our brains mirror not only pain and motor movements but pure emotions as well.”

It’s important to emphasize empathy as an emotion, not merely an understanding as I also indicated in the difference between emotional intelligence and intuition. It’s one thing to see someone smiling and know they are happy and quite another to feel they are happy because if someone can feel good about the happiness of another person, he is more likely to cooperate.

What Rizzolatti’s research, advanced by Tania Singer’s use of brain scans, indicates is that people can actually feel what others feel in the emotional areas of their brains not just the rational ones. Moreover, the intensity of empathy will vary by person with some not feeling much at all.

This has tremendous implications for leadership development because it shows the importance of sensitivity in team intelligence. Whereas Part II of this series dealt with context, this post implies a cooperative business culture is also a function of personalities: some people will just feel better about cooperating than others will. Thus, this implies that highly sensitive people, who also tend to be very empathetic, might be better leaders and employees in a cooperative environment.

Thus, cooperation is not only about creating the right environment but also about having the right personalities, personalities that are empathetic.

Other posts in this series:

• Cooperation vs. Self-interest: Which Reigns Supreme?
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest (Pt 2): Context – The Great Influencer

As we saw with pigeonholing and tasting food, context influences us greatly. This extends to people’s inclinations to collaborate. In support of this, the July-August 2011 issue of the Harvard Business Review has Yochai Benkler’s citing in his article “The Unselfish Gene” the work of Lee Ross from Stanford University. He found people being more inclined to collaborate if the context of the effort promotes it.

That’s why leadership that manages, operates and communicates with the implied assumption that employees are essentially motivated by “What’s in it for me” will tend to foster a less collaborative culture than leadership doing the same against a backdrop of collaboration. From an everyday perspective, this means the culture that heavily relies upon extrinsic rewards such as money, awards and perks for individual performances will tend to be less collaborative than the one relying upon intrinsic rewards such as the enjoyment of working with and helping others. Mastering morale builders that don’t cost a cent go a long way in helping here.

This doesn’t mean we eliminate monetary rewards for individuals, but it does mean we focus more on the culture we are promoting in our businesses; culture is context. However, the promotion of that culture must be real. If employees sense a divorce between words and actuality, then the context for collaboration falls, thus causing most employees to resort to self-interested behavior.

Using intrinsic rewards to buttress a collaborative context is involved. In addition to mastering morale builders, it means mastering compliments. Understanding and appreciating the different kinds will help us see how intrinsic rewards differ from extrinsic ones. It’s only by mastering these on an interpersonal level will we be able to extend it throughout our companies and organizations.

Other posts in this series:

• Cooperation vs. Self-interest: Which Reigns Supreme?

People often marvel that more managers don’t use inexpensive morale builders. Of course, many of the same also wonder, “How did that person become a manager in the first place?” It’s that we tend to feel negative power is more powerful than positive power is; thus, we will tend to feel the former would be a more powerful leader.

An article in the July-August 2011 issue of Harvard Business Review titled, “Why Fair Bosses Fall Behind” by  Batia M. Wiesenfeld, Naomi B. Rothman, Sara L. Wheeler-Smith, and Adam D. Galinsky provides research supporting this. In terms of powerfulness, they found that rude managers consistently scored higher than respectful managers did.

To illustrate this, I sometimes ask: Which dog would you prefer as a pet, a collie or a pit bull? Frequently, people select the collie. I then ask: If you lived in a high-murder neighborhood, which would you choose? People frequently switch to the pit bull. While the workplace isn’t that dangerous, evolution and the days of uncivilized life long ago still affect us. Then, we required leaders unencumbered by sensitivities to protect us. It’s why some of the world’s most ruthless, modern dictators (i.e. Stalin) are still admired today by significant portions of their native populations.

In everyday business life, we often experience this bias when people disqualify others as leaders because they “aren’t tough enough.” Negative power is very overt, easy to see. Contrast this to the positive, subtle power inherent in the inexpensive morale builders. That’s why we often see Darth Vader as a very powerful Star Wars figure even though he was the slave of the Emperor.

Thus, when we promote the rude, the Dark Side has successfully seduced us by triggering our insecurities and fears.