Peter Koestenbaum's Leadership Diamond

I strongly recommend subscribing to Peter Koestenbaum’s weekly Leadership Thought from which I re-publish the following:

KOESTENBAUM’S WEEKLY LEADERSHIP THOUGHT - 09 MAY 2011

FREEDOM: The Axiom That Empowers the Human

If there is only one fact of existence we can teach a person, help a person discover and learn, it is that you are born free:

• free to choose what you think
• free to choose what you do
• free to choose who you are
• free to choose who you become
• free to choose to love
• free to choose to serve
• free to choose the art of co-creation
• and free to choose responsibility for who you are

But also free to choose self-deception, to lie to yourself, to convince yourself of fantasies, to deny your share of responsibility, to ignore what happens to others when they are in your presence.

You are free to choose to put on blinders and not see, to shut your ears and not listen, to hold your mouth and not have a voice.

If this freedom you do not teach, help a person discover and learn, then you abandon a human being, give up on a person, dismiss a subjectivity, and neglect, waste, and undermine a soul…, which is a cruel thing to do.

Demand of people that they be free and responsible. But do not abandon them. Choose to make the commitment to them that you care.

#499 – Published Weekly Since 2001. Selected by Laurie Yehia. Copyright © 2011, Peter Koestenbaum. All rights reserved. The Leadership Diamond is a registered trademark and service mark belonging to Peter Koestenbaum.

Thank you, Peter, gifted leadership philosopher and scholar, for your fine body of work. I’m grateful to you also for granting permission to reprint this Leadership Thought.

Please comment and tell me what you think.

I want to dispel the myth that responsibility is an inherent personality characteristic. Responsibility is learnable — my client’s results prove it over and over again. With the advances of the last twenty-five years responsibility is a directly observable, learnable, and teachable mental process anyone can understand and master.

When leaders treat responsibility as a personality trait (or flaw), then you assume it is nearly impossible to alter it and you must do your best to control others, hence you design controlling management structures and processes. But when you understand how responsibility actually works in the mind, then you can equip yourself with its power, and tap into it to leverage every other tool, skill, and process in your organization.

Ownership Mindset Missing In Action

Thinking that new tools and skills will increase productivity can frequently be a waste of resources for companies — the real problem isn’t a lack of problem-solving tools and skills. The real problem is a severe absence of problem-ownership that prompts someone to relate to the situation, learn from it, and choose a resourceful response. When people don’t feel a sense of ownership for problems, they don’t engage the abilities they posses.

You have the ability to directly and effectively confront this lack of ownership in your team and across your company. When teaching how to take responsibility, I find that once responsibility is mastered, people resourcefully employ all of the dormant tools the firm has invested in. Now that’s leverage!

Corporations are spending billions of dollars on the wrong investment — accountability — when they could be spending it on building sustainable cultures by teaching responsibility.

Most executives these days expend energy on strategic goals and objectives for building a culture of accountability. The focus of these efforts is on doing a better job of holding others to account. When I look at these investments, I see a focus on the external–i.e., outside of themselves–on attempting to do a better job detailing what must be done and then following up to make sure it is done, and finally ensuring there are meaningful consequences for achieving or failing to achieve the stated accountabilities.

The 3 reasons why companies loose money when they focus on accountability:

1. Tightening Control Results in Less Responsibility
Tightening behavioral control begets resistance and irresponsible behavior. Improving the mechanics of the external (accountability management) without understanding the dynamics of the internal (responsibility, or feelings of ownership) frequently creates the opposite effect. The more I attempt to control your performance, the less responsibility you will feel for your situation. You might expend a lot of energy creating some result out of a sense of obligation, but that’s different than a true sense of ownership.

2. We’re All Experts at ‘Looking Good’
There are many ways all of us successfully account for failed performance every day in order to get rewarded anyway. We blame others, or we blame the circumstances (“I got put on a bad team”), or we take pity on ourselves in hopes that others will pity us too, or we claim that we followed the instructions to the letter and still things didn’t work out. All of these claims compel many managers to accept the explanation and let the subordinate off the hook. With a strong desire to keep them on board and motivated, coupled with your own feelings of guilt about your contribution to their failure, you grant the annual raise or bonus.

3. Responsibility Trumps Accountability
My research shows that responsibility (the internal process) trumps accountability (the external process). All the resources in the world spent understanding, doling out, and managing accountability don’t matter in an environment where people don’t demonstrate a sense of ownership when things don’t go as planned. Where performance is concerned, responsibility is the more powerful and primary element. Performance studies consistently show that when high performance is achieved, people have stepped up and accomplished more than they were asked to do. The only state of mind that produces resourceful responses is Responsibility.

Keys to Responsibility

My quest to support clients in rapidly developing more resourceful responses to problems uncovered three keys that collectively provide a prescription for mastering Responsibility: Intention, Awareness, and Confront.

Intention
The first key to unlocking and mastering responsibility is to clearly and powerfully intend to operate as much as possible from a mental position of responsibility. Without this key, the others don’t matter. That’s why it’s first.

We can effectively support leaders and followers at every level to develop a thirst for, a belief in, and a shared value for thinking and acting responsibly.

Awareness
The second key to unlocking and mastering responsibility is to develop an ever-increasing awareness of the Responsibility Process™ operating in your thoughts, language, and actions. Unlocking and mastering responsibility means overcoming the temptation to behave irresponsibly, and that requires self-awareness.

Note that developing self-awareness also represents the state-of-the-art in leadership development.

Confront
The third key is to face the truth. I call this confront, which means to face. As a key to unlocking and mastering responsibility it means to face yourself, examine the situation, and see what’s true about how you are or are not responding resourcefully. The purpose of confronting yourself is to see the truth of the situation and generate new responses to it. Effectively confronting yourself always leads to growth, expanded perspectives, and change.

Most business cultures are not very good at supporting this ability. In fact they support the opposite behaviors of denying, avoiding, defending, and resisting. However, the good news is that this sill can be cultivated in your culture.

Redefine responsibility

The lack of responsibility at work and in society is a fundamental problem. Like solutions to other fundamental problems such as quality and service that are transforming industry, the solution is to redefine responsibility first for yourself and then for your team.

When people learn and apply what I call the the Keys to Responsibility™ to everyday upsets, they start eliminating wasted thoughts and wasted behaviors that are chewing up resources and adding no value to the top or bottom line. Remove them and productivity soars.

Highly responsible people — those who are self-aware and intend to confront themselves about the truth of a problem instead of disowning it — do not remain very long with a blaming, justifying, shaming, obligating employer. Highly responsible people are drawn to employers who cherish that quality and grant freedom, choice, and power.

I encourage you to work on creating that kind of mindset in yourself, and that kind of culture in your company.

As always, let me know what you think by sharing a comment below.

Christopher Avery, Ph.D. wrote the popular book Teamwork Is An Individual Skill: Getting Your Work Done When Sharing Responsibility — which Fortune Magazine claimed is the only teamwork book worth reading. He is a recognized authority on how individual and shared responsibility works in the mind and an advisor to leaders worldwide. Master leadership or build a responsible team (or family) with The Leadership Gift Program for Leaders.

I developed the following model to communicate the essence of partnering between any two entities, whether people or groups, and whether external or internal to an organization:

Partnering = Exchange + Expansion + Integrity

Let’s look at collaborating across boundaries — or what is frequently called partnering — and the first of three keys to sustainable partnering across any boundary: exchange.

We’ll take up expansion and integrity in future posts.

Teams are increasingly called on to partner with the business, with external suppliers, or with the offshore provider. But what does partnering mean? Usually, partnering refers to a sustained business relationship of increasing credible commitment and trust — as opposed to credible threat and distrust — between two or more entities, each governed separately.

Supply chains in many industries, notably high-tech, have pursued partnering to

• reduce costs
• improve quality
• accelerate pace
• improve forecasting
• manage technology roadmaps
• and more

And more and more software development teams are being called on to partner with the business to deliver more valuable solutions as — and where — needed in the business.

Two Types of Exchange: Transactional and Relational

Transactional Exchange

You would not continue doing business with an entity that took unfair advantage just because they could get away with it. If you are a provider, you would walk away from a customer that would not pay you a price that would allow you to remain in business and grow. And if you are a customer, you would walk away from a provider that charged you more than the value you received from the product or service. This type of exchange is generally called “transaction exchange” and partners tend to repeat the same or similar transaction over and over again.

In order to remain partners, entities who enjoy a world-class reputation for being great partners insist that they make the exchange fair or more than fair. They take responsibility for fully understanding and making equitable both sides of the deal. They do not begrudge their partner a profit — or at least don’t begrudge their partner the desire to remain within budget constraints.

In fact, the essence of collaborative leadership in a partnership is wanting your partner to survive and thrive. That’s a wildly different point of view than the “cut ‘em and leave ‘em bleeding” perspective of many bargainers in business.

Relational Exchange

The second type of exchange is vitally important but less well understood. Some call it “psychological exchange” or “relational exchange,” and it refers to the quality of the interaction in the relationship. An example: a situation where you decided to not return to a store, restaurant, gas station, airline, or other provider because the transaction was overly frustrating or distasteful. You felt “out of exchange” in the relationship — you did not deserve to be treated that way.

Partners measure the success of their relationship on the satisfaction of the other partner and constantly innovate in relationship management processes and procedures to improve the relationship satisfaction. Think of the airline, hotel, or car rental loyalty program in which you are a member. They provide special processes only available to your membership level that make it more convenient, trusting, and satisfying to do business with them.

A not-so-shining example of being out of relational exchange

Last week I read a fascinating New York Times expose about the owner on an online business who reveled in customer complaints. Why? The worse he treated customers the more they complained. The more they complained the higher his search engine ranking soared. Thus his website was at the top of the list when you and I searched online for prescription eyeglasses.

He was intentionally trashing relational exchange in order to earn ratings that would drive more transactional exchanges. Suffice to say he was not very interested in repeat business.

He’s since been arrested.

Transactional and relational exchange are the ground floor of sustainable partnering — and teamwork

If you don’t take as your responsibility the creation of an exchange relationship that feels good and fair to both sides, then you’ll never get off the ground in building a collaboration. Learn from these principles and apply them to your everyday teamwork. Think about what you have to offer toward the transactional and psychological/relational exchange and what kind of partnership you’re trying to establish with your team members. How do you rate?

Be honest with yourself and make changes accordingly — it will predict much about your success. Make sure your other team members know that you want them to be satisfied with what you have to offer and that they are satisfied, and make sure that they feel treated well and heard — before they walk off not wanting to do “business” with you anymore and hurting both of you and the whole team in the end.

Christopher Avery, PhD, is a recognized authority on how individual and shared responsibility works in the mind and an advisor to leaders worldwide. Master leadership or build a responsible team (or family) with The Leadership Gift Program for Leaders.

Here are three reasons why mastering responsibility is a must for effective leadership:

1. Leaders respond

It’s what you do. Feeling a sense of ownership for a situation defines leadership. When you don’t feel a sense of ownership, you won’t respond resourcefully, hence you won’t be leading. When someone in leadership blames others, justifies his or her actions, or operates from shame or obligation, he/she has ceased to respond resourcefully. Being stuck — stopped — is the opposite of leading.

2. Others amplify the leader’s acts

Fair or foul, moral or immoral, supportive or conniving, a leader’s actions are scrutinized and amplified by and through followers. If you want followers or team members to take ownership, then you must master the practice of demonstrating ownership at all times — especially when things go wrong.

3. Followers won’t demonstrate greater responsibility than their leaders

It just makes sense — no level of an organization will demonstrate a higher level of responsibility-taking than the level to which it reports. This one principle suggests a number of decisions and expectations:

• you shouldn’t expect your followers as a whole to step up any higher than you do
• seek leadership mentors who are responsibility masters
• realize leadership is about far more than hitting metrics — it’s about owning all actions and consequences across the board

Step up, take ownership — of the good and the bad. If you want your employees or team members to take responsibility, you need to be the one demonstrating it first. Don’t be afraid to be honest about making mistakes. This creates an atmosphere for your followers that invites them to take responsibility for their part without having to fear ramifications. Being a fair leader who masters taking responsibility instead of blaming or shaming others will make you a more powerful leader than you think — give it a try!

Christopher Avery, PhD, is a recognized authority on how individual and shared responsibility works in the mind and an advisor to leaders worldwide. Find additional resources to master leadership or build a responsible team (or family) at The Leadership Gift to enjoy a more productive way to live and lead.

The claim is that Facebook, led by 26-year-old founder Mark Zuckerberg, is systematically liberalizing it’s privacy policy and practices. Why?  To earn more revenue by packaging and selling your and my data to advertisers. Zuckerberg justifies it by saying he is just trying to make it easier to share information with friends. Right.

These two paragraphs stand out:

In 2005 the Facebook’s privacy policy was one sentence long and said that none of your information would be shared with anyone who wasn’t in one of your groups. Today the policy is longer than the U.S. Constitution and requires a lawyer to parse its meaning. Why doesn’t Facebook just use its original one-sentence policy? I’ll take a wild guess and say advertisers, not members, were the driving force here.

Now, I’m not terribly paranoid, so my concern is not so much about my privacy but about choosing to not participate anymore in this billion dollar business. I’m considering deleting my account.

Check out Facebook’s privacy policy for yourself. It is long, and it was recently revised.

What do you think?

I’m guessing this is not a shock to you.

Executive leadership is not the only place this blindness occurs. I see it as the leading (not just top 5) reason for people in all walks of life falling far short of their desires and potential. Yes, its our lack of looking, not our lack of brilliance, that keeps us from perceiving the real threats to personal productivity, achievement, and the ability to deliver value.

Consider this. Research also shows that rather than blindly following previous plans and habits, real leaders examine their own beliefs and assumptions about challenging situations and problems in order to see them for what they truly are. Only then can they mobilize an effective response².

What does that mean? It means that real leadership is marked by facing oneself with the question:

“What is true here that I am not yet seeing?”

And this ability is innate in everyone of us whether or not we choose to use it.

Holding onto a lie is expensive. Seeing new truth is powerful.

Innate Leadership is a Gift You’ve Already Received

What’s in our way of seeing the truth in challenging situations? Anxiety, aka angst, anxiousness, and upset. That’s all. It is uncomfortable, and we have two choices: Cope or Grow. Here’s three ways we cope with everyday anxiety (there are more):

• Denial. We close our eyes, cover our ears, and hum a comforting tune
• LayBlame. We take the position that our problem is really “them”
• Justify. We say that this is “just” the way it is

But these are coping mechanisms that simply keep us holding onto a lie but feeling momentarily better.

With the Leadership Gift, you can instead use your innate leadership to Grow. Just:

• Commit to and trust your ability to respond
• Stand in the fire and look to see what’s true
• Own it–what to do will become clear to you

Agility in large part means the ability to respond successfully to change. Coping won’t accomplish that. Only growing will.

Practice

At Work: What’s nopt quite right that’s got your attention that’s waiting for your innate leadership?

At Home: What heat do you need to examine and turn into light?

Forget past mistakes.
Forget failures.
Forget everything except what you are going to do now and do it.
William Durant, founder of General Motors

—

1. Sydney Finklestein, Why Smart Executives Fail: And What You Can Lern From Their Mistakes (Portfolio, 2003)
2. Noel Tichy, The Leadership Engine: How Winning Companies Build Leaders At Every Level (Collins; Harper Edition, 2002)

This video is evocative and inspirational to say the least. If it doesn’t inspire you to own who you are and step up your responsibility practice, what will?

Tip: Listen to Will’s first sentence in this video. 8 words. That phrase confronted me — as did many others. What will it take for you to say the same thing with the same conviction?

Comments please.

“What about the person who is too responsible?”

What a great question. Read this if you take on too much, or if you know someone who does. Three conditions are worth considering:

• If you are the individual who takes on too much
• If you are the teammate or leader of someone who takes on too much
• If you have a leader who commits employees to too much

This post will tackle the first condition. Subsequent posts will address the other conditions.

The question usually rolls out like a plea for help: What does the Responsibility Process say about someone who takes on too much? I think I’m too responsible because I take on more and more even though I can’t handle more.

Because I can be a little slow, it took me years to figure out that the very best response from me was a probing question. I now reply with “Why do you take on too much?” I now predict with better than 90% accuracy what the leader will say: No one else stepped up and I felt bad it wasn’t going to get done, so I had to do something.

The Responsibility Process always leaves clues

That’s what is so cool about the Responsibility Process. It is reflected in our language so if we know what to listen for, we can learn so much about ourselves and others.

So, why can I predict that response with 90% accuracy? First, the Responsibility Process teaches that taking on too much isn’t responsible at all. How does it teach that? Because in the mental position of Responsibility you feel freedom rather than overwhelm. You are taking charge of your life and moving forward. And I never hear someone who has taken on too much sound like they feel really really good about it.

So, even though they use the term responsible, I look somewhere else on the chart for a better answer. Remember, all 7 positions in the Responsibility Process represent a different definition-in-use of responsibility. But 6 of those positions aren’t really owning it at all. For example, the phrase “my broken leg from skiing is his responsibility” may use the term responsibility but the mindset is one of Lay Blame. So when I hear the phrase “too much responsibility” I listen for the mindset rather than the word.

Someone who feels that they have to take something on is not operating in the mindset of Responsibility.

It looks much more like Obligation to me

But, you say, she does not have to take it on. Agreed. The thought of “have to” is a mindset, an unconscious choice based on an assumption of being trapped. When you do it to yourself you only think you have to. The truth is you don’t have to do anything. We choose to for whatever reason.

Here’s the second reason I can predict the response above with 90% accuracy. The Responsibility Process also teaches that each of us tends to be more conditioned toward one of the positions of irresponsibility than the others. If you are the kind of person who takes on too much, each time you take on an extra load you probably think you are doing the right thing. It’s the weight of the whole load together that feels like you are overly responsible.

But look at the answer to my probing question “Why?” They say “I felt bad” (that’s Shame) “so I had to” (that’s Obligation).

Remember, you graduate from a lower position in the Responsibility Process to a higher position when, for whatever reason, you refuse to hang out in that lower position around an upset. So, I’ve learned that about 90% of the time when someone tells me they are overly responsible, they are really Obligating themselves to something in order to avoid feeling Shame that it won’t get done.

It’s a common and recognizable pattern.

You can never have too much true responsibility

I mentioned above that taking on too much isn’t responsible at all. While it may seem like the right thing to do at the time, the truth is that you will remain overwhelmed and many things (for which others may be counting on you) will go undone. It can be seen as selfish—taking opportunity off the table for others, then doing nothing with it.

But the real reason is that there is no such thing as too much real responsibility. As you learn to own more and more of your life, you own more of your choices. And then you own more of your relationship to the universe around you. And when you do that you feel a part of everything—you interact with everything.

So taking on more is not the same as feeling a part of more. Yes, reduce your Obligation, and increase your true Response-Ability.

Takeaways

If you have a tendency to take on too much or coach people with such a tendency, here are some takeaways from this post:

• Remember the keys to Responsibility are Intention, Awareness, and Confront. Read the post again to see how it is reminding you of your true intention, making you aware of your mindset, and inviting you too confront what is really true.
• Listen to your reasons for taking on something. If your reason is to avoid feeling bad then ask yourself this: How I can let go of feeling bad without piling more on my plate?
• Remember, you are free to choose. Yes is a choice. No is a choice.
• You can also play to your own conscientiousness by asking yourself Is it better to take something on that you know probably won’t ever get done than to not take it on in the first place? After meditating on that question for awhile you may find your answer changing.

Our premise is that software quality is a 3-legged stool composed of process, technology, and people. Most of the focus on improving quality goes into process and technology, but we believe the most gain is made from focusing on people and interactions.

Zach and I started talking about this at Agile2009 in September over lunch. He was telling me about how Rally’s customers complaints about their quality always make him think about Responsibility Process as a tool for improving quality. So we are going to make the case for using the Responsibility Process as a personal, team, and organizational approach to constantly improving software quality and value delivery.

We are going to give as many tips and tools as we can, offer more to download, and reserve 30-40 minutes for answering questions.

At this point, just a couple of weeks before the webinar, our presentation is coming together and the registration page is open. Already more than 500 people have registered — the fastest sign-up for any Rally webinar thus far.

Please join us. Register for the webinar

Details from the registration page

Again, please join us. Register for the webinar

Focus on Elaine McNaughton

Interviewed by Christopher. Interview notes: a charter member of the Leadership Gift… Elaine is an unabashed child of God (comment: the Leadership Gift supports people of faith and science). Elaine offers an example to other leaders who may be examining their own faith in relation to the Leadership Gift… a project manager at American Airlines, Elaine has benefitted from many breakthroughs in her first 6 months in the Leadership Gift eprogram… “I’m able to recognize upset happening inside of me, and I’m able to recognize where I am in the Responsibility Process and get myself through the upset… and I can do that pretty quickly now.” Learn how Elaine is using and introducing the Leadership Gift with her teams, peers, and even superiors at work…

Click to listen or right-click to download the interview with Elaine MP3 (31 mins)

What is the Leadership Gift?

The Leadership Gift unlocks your innate leadership ability by helping you master, step-by-step, your mind’s Responsibility Process — your internal regulator for completely owning your life and generating ever more freedom, power, and choice, versus settling for less.

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