What happened to that win-win partnership with your boss, colleage, or direct report that suddenly dissolved into mistrust and suspision? Despite your best intentions, how did hidden agendas, unresolved conflicts, and miscommunication get in the way?
With new research, fresh insight, and up-to-date examples of what it takes to collaborativelyy organize and sustain healthy relationships at work, this newly revised edition of Clear Leadership tackles these issues head-on. Building on the powerful concepts that made the first edition such a success, Gervase Bushe explains why even the most promising partnerships get derailed and what you can do about it.
What happened to that win-win partnership with your boss, colleage, or direct report that suddenly dissolved into mistrust and suspision? Despite your best intentions, how did hidden agendas, unresolved conflicts, and miscommunication get in the way?
With new research, fresh insight, and up-to-date examples of what it takes to collaborativelyy organize and sustain healthy relationships at work, this newly revised edition of Clear Leadership tackles these issues head-on. Building on the powerful concepts that made the first edition such a success, Gervase Bushe explains why even the most promising partnerships get derailed and what you can do about it.
Clear Leadership: Sustaining Real Collaboration and Partnership at Work
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Clear Leadership: Sustaining Real Collaboration and Partnership at Work
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Overview
What happened to that win-win partnership with your boss, colleage, or direct report that suddenly dissolved into mistrust and suspision? Despite your best intentions, how did hidden agendas, unresolved conflicts, and miscommunication get in the way?
With new research, fresh insight, and up-to-date examples of what it takes to collaborativelyy organize and sustain healthy relationships at work, this newly revised edition of Clear Leadership tackles these issues head-on. Building on the powerful concepts that made the first edition such a success, Gervase Bushe explains why even the most promising partnerships get derailed and what you can do about it.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780891062813 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Quercus |
| Publication date: | 01/11/2011 |
| Sold by: | Hachette Digital, Inc. |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 228 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Clear Leadership
Sustaining Real Collaboration And Partnership At Work
By Gervase R. Bushe
Nicholas Brealey Publishing
Copyright © 2010 Davies-Black, an imprint of Nicholas Brealey PublishingAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-89106-281-3
CHAPTER 1
Where Interpersonal Mush Comes From and What It Does to Organizations
The content may be different, but the process described in the story below goes on in organizations every day, all over the world. It seems to be a process beyond culture, something that is true of all human beings. In this book I call it "sense making." Sense making is making up a story about other people's experience (what they are thinking, feeling, and/or wanting) to fill in the gaps in our knowledge. Read the following scenario and see if it is at all familiar to you. Bill, the general manager, is widely considered one of the most collaborative executives in this organization, and he has a team that by all conventional measures works well together.
Bill, the general manager for the eastern division, entered the room where his direct reports had been waiting ten minutes for their weekly meeting to begin. They knew he had been on the phone to headquarters on the West Coast and paid close attention to his appearance as he entered. Rumors had been circulating about impending budget cuts, and given the losses over the past three quarters, none in the room would be surprised if they happened. Bill briskly apologized for being late and launched into the first item on the agenda, a report on a project in one of the departments. The meeting continued to follow the agenda, and once all items were finished, Bill immediately left the room and returned to his office.
After the meeting, people met in twos and threes, sometimes including others who had not been at the meeting, to compare perceptions. Shirley thought Bill seemed flushed and angry when he entered the room. Jason didn't notice the anger but agreed that Bill had been a little more curt than usual and seemed eager to leave the meeting and get back to something. They discussed how unusual it was for Bill to leave so quickly and not stick around to chat for a while. They concluded that the phone call from the West Coast must have been bad news and wondered why Bill wasn't willing to share it with them. Shirley said, "It's just not like Bill to leave us all up in the air like that."
Meanwhile, Roger and Fernando were gathered around Kimberly's cubicle, where she was telling them she had heard from a colleague on the West Coast that another division had gotten a sizable cut in its operating budget. Fernando and Roger thought that Bill wasn't "acting normal" in the meeting and figured that he had been told they would be facing cuts as well. They wondered why he didn't say anything about it in the meeting, and all three tossed around theories ranging from the idea that he had been told not to say anything until there was a company-wide announcement to the thought that he was going to be firing someone in the room and wanted to wait until he could tell that person privately before announcing it. Roger mentioned that he was already prepared to take 20 percent out of his department's budget, and Fernando said he'd better start planning for that as well. They parted agreeing to let one another know if they heard anything new.
In another part of the building, Jennifer was telling Margaret about the last time she had seen Bill "so upset," in a previous job when Bill's boss had closed down a project that Bill felt was close to success and hadn't been given the opportunity to prove itself. "But you know," Jennifer went on, "Bill is a company man, and he closed it down without ever publicly grumbling about it. At least I never heard him say anything about it." Margaret agreed that Bill never lost his cool; it was something they admired about him.
Do you recognize the process in this story? We are all sense-making beings, that is, we will work at trying to make sense of people who are important to us until we are satisfied. We are all detectives in the interpersonal mush, building hypotheses and theories, looking for clues, fitting the pieces together until we have a satisfactory answer to the mystery of why someone did or said something. Then we stop until the next mystery comes along that needs to be solved. It appears that we don't do it only when we're trying to make sense of others. We even do it to ourselves. There is evidence to show that we make up stories about ourselves so that we can make sense of what we see ourselves doing, but in this book, I'll focus only on how we do that with other people.
In the story above, Bill's direct reports are trying to make sense of his behavior at the meeting. Notice a few common characteristics of sense-making processes. One is that Bill's actions are being placed in a larger context: the knowledge that the division has been losing money and the rumor of impending budget cuts. In order for us to make sense of something, it has to fit with what we already believe to be true, the bigger picture. Another characteristic is that what Bill doesn't say or do is given just as much scrutiny as what he does say and do. Nonverbal actions are given meaning. Notice that people are making up fantasies about Bill's experience, about what is going on in his head. One thinks he's angry; another thinks he was eager to leave the room. Also, people are trying to understand him within the general picture they have of him ("Bill is a company man"). For us to be satisfied with our sense making, current stories have to fit with past sense making. A third characteristic is that people are talking to others for the purpose of trying to make sense of Bill. We rarely go to the person we are trying to make sense of to check out our stories — we turn to third parties. That is especially true when we don't feel good about the behavior we are trying to make sense of, and that is what fuels much of the interpersonal mush in organizations. When the event we are trying to understand is new or different, it's as though some part of us knows that we are on thin ice in trying to make sense of others, so we seek out someone else to help us. Sometimes this isn't even a person in the organization — a spouse or close friend will do.
The sense-making process is over when we have a story that we treat as "the truth." We no longer treat the story as a possible scenario but accept it as what happened, and we align our future perceptions and actions based on these "facts" unless new information surfaces that forces us to revise our story. If the new information is vague and ambiguous, however, it can easily be ignored or distorted to fit.
Are you curious about what was going on with Bill in the story above?
As it turns out, Bill was preoccupied with an important phone call he had received from his boss. The senior VP had just told him that he agreed with the argument Bill had been making for months, that divisional losses were due to his division being underresourced, especially in sales and marketing. Because cuts were being made in other parts of the company, Bill's boss did not see how the division's budget could be increased at this time, but he was prepared to fight to ensure that its budget was not cut if Bill could put together a convincing business plan and find a way to transfer his existing budget into sales. If revenues improved, the VP said he would work to increase the budget in the future. He also advised Bill not to say anything about it because it was far from a sure thing, and with cuts going on elsewhere in the company, others might try to work against them if rumors started circulating.
In this case, people were way off in the stories they were making up, but the accuracy of our stories doesn't matter — what matters is recognizing that this process is endemic to human relations. It cannot be stopped. So in work relationships, we have two choices: tell them what is going on in us or let people make up stories about what is going on in us. If you don't tell them, they make it up. Those are your only options.
What could Bill do, having been told not to mention the substance of the phone call? Well, what did Bill do? Like most people, he thought that if he said nothing, then people wouldn't think there was anything going on. Wrong. People who work closely together day in and day out are picking up all kinds of cues all the time (and making them up, too). Those with authority are the most closely watched for clues about what is really going on. Bill had no idea of the impact he was having on the people in the meeting. At work, people will notice any incongruity in the boss and use it as fodder for new rounds of in-depth sense making. Bill had a number of choices for how to influence the sense making that was bound to follow after such an important phone call, but these were pretty much out of his awareness. In this book, I argue that the best strategy is almost always to be a Descriptive Self, that is, to tell the truth of your in-the-moment experience. Let me give you an example of what Bill could have said.
Bill: I just had an important call from my boss. I am not at liberty to tell you what it was about, and that troubles me, because I'd like us all to be honest and up front with each other, but I also understand his concern and agreed to stay silent. There may or may not be some good news for us in the near future. I want you to know the call was not bad news. I'm excited and a little distracted, but I think that is all I can say, and it's important right now that we don't start any rumors, so, please, just hang on and let's continue with our meeting as planned.
If Bill had said something like this, he would have been letting the people he works with see what was going on in him at that moment without violating any agreement he had made with his boss. He would be describing his here-and-now experience, so people would not be forced to make it up. Any stories they made up afterward would likely be more accurate, making the interpersonal climate clearer and less mushy. Would saying this stop people from sense making? Probably not. They might still meet in small groups after the meeting to fantasize about what the good news could be. But it would stop a rush of negative, fearful fantasies that had managers spending their time thinking about how to chop 20 percent off their budgets and all the fallout from that being passed down through the division.
More important, however, is the effect of being a Descriptive Self day in and day out. It's not about the one-time hit of telling the truth of your experience but about the long-term impact on an organization when people tell the truth of their experience. When they do this, they are building a culture of clarity. If Bill had built a culture of clarity, his subordinates would have felt comfortable asking him directly about what was going on and talking about their fears so that they would have his direct input into the stories they settled on as "the truth." Any one of them would have felt comfortable saying something like, "Bill, I know you were on a call to headquarters and you seem a little distracted. Naturally, I'm wondering if that was bad news about our budget." But such an inquiry doesn't often happen in an organization characterized by interpersonal mush. People don't ask each other directly what is going on, so a lot of energy goes into sense making. In a climate of interpersonal clarity instead of mush, people would be more willing to suspend their sense making, believing that they would get a satisfactory explanation from Bill as soon as possible, because they have had that experience in the past.
Do people have to know what is going on in the boss's head? No, not if the boss just wants people to do what they're told. Working at gaining and maintaining interpersonal clarity isn't necessary if you just want people to follow instructions or deliver on whatever has been negotiated and agreed to. But it is essential to partnership — to relationships in which people are working together, all taking responsibility for the success of what they are working on. Collaboration and partnership require people to be internally committed, and that calls for a certain level of equality and give-and-take. For subordinates, the easiest move in the world is to give responsibility for success to the boss and sit back and just do what they're told. That move is so easy that any boss who wants to be in partnership with the people who work for him has to struggle against it and work consistently at spreading responsibility throughout the system.
Telling the truth of our experience is really quite simple, but it's so rare in organizations that some businesspeople at first react to my message as if I were from Mars. To them, interpersonal mush is a normal way of life, and anything else is a utopian dream. So let's pause for a moment and consider why most relationships at work exist in interpersonal mush.
Why We Live in Interpersonal Mush
First, a technical definition: the term interpersonal mush describes an interaction that's based on stories people have made up about one another and have not checked out. You generally don't find out if your sense making is accurate unless you ask. Most people do not describe what is going on in themselves unless they are asked. It doesn't seem like a natural thing to do. This tendency does not necessarily come from malicious intentions, fear, distrust, or any other negative source. It is just that we haven't been taught to describe our experience. Some people are even taught not to do so; they've been told that describing their experience makes them seem too self-centered. Most of us have never even thought that it might be useful or important to describe our experience to others. We have few role models of Descriptive Selves, and even when we are around those who do use clear leadership skills successfully, it's not immediately obvious what they are doing. I remember one very bright engineer in my executive MBA class who, at first, said I was nuts to tell her to be a Descriptive Self at work. A few weeks later, she came to class flush with the realization, which she had come to during a regular meeting at work, that the three most influential engineers in her organization were also the most Descriptive Selves at work.
Growing Up
We learn most about how to act around other people in the first group we belong to, our family of origin. In our families, we were children and our parents were adults. As such, there was a huge imbalance in experience, knowledge, and power. There are lots of things that might go on in adults' lives that they would not want to describe to their children (e.g., spousal problems, work fears). The problem with saying nothing is that children make up stories about what is going on and why they are excluded.
As children get older, they develop their own reasons not to tell their parents everything that is going on in their lives, so the parents make up stories about their children's lives. In most families, parents and children come, to some extent, to make up what is going on in each other's minds. Even the least dysfunctional family develops a level of interpersonal mush that children learn is the normal way to interact with others.
Then we hit adolescence, when normal developmental processes make us desperately want to fit in and belong. Most of us learn that it is not OK to have a different experience from our peers — that we are expected to have similar thoughts, feelings, and wants if we want to fit in. Then there is the double whammy of sexual relations, in which there is so much vulnerability. We learn to look for clues, get information from third parties, but never ever approach the object of our interest head-on — too scary. High school is a perfect training ground for living in interpersonal mush; it's where we learn how to keep up appearances and repress renegade thoughts, feelings, and wants. We learn how to operate in a world where it really isn't safe to be fully open and different, and we don't expect others to be open and different with us either. The successful people are those who have learned how to operate effectively in interpersonal mush, even how to use it to their advantage in their normal, well-intentioned attempts to do well, be liked, and achieve in the world.
Hierarchy and Authority
In organizations, a third force makes interpersonal mush so prevalent: hierarchy. Having a hierarchy means that some people have authority over others. There is a difference between too much authority and just the right amount. In order to organize a group of people effectively, we need to create the right amount of authority, that is, clarity about who is responsible for what and who has final decision-making power over what. One problem with a lot of large organizations is that the structure of hierarchy is haphazard, poorly designed, and more of a barrier to effective organizing than a support. It would take us too far afield to go into this topic, which is covered well elsewhere. But even when hierarchy is well designed, it creates interpersonal mush because of the reactions to authority most of us develop in our families, schools, and religious institutions. Basically, most of us learn to duck and take cover around say or do, and then we say or do that when they are around. We learn to keep to ourselves the thoughts and feelings that we believe might make authorities angry, upset, or less than pleased with us. As a result, interpersonal mush is greatest in situations of unequal power, especially where one person or group feels dominated or oppressed by another.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Clear Leadership by Gervase R. Bushe. Copyright © 2010 Davies-Black, an imprint of Nicholas Brealey Publishing. Excerpted by permission of Nicholas Brealey Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Preface to the Revised Edition ix
Acknowledgments xi
About the Author xiii
Introduction 1
1 Where Interpersonal Mush Comes From and What It Does to Organizations 19
2 Introduction to the Organizational Learning Conversation 49
3 Understanding the Foundations of Clear Leadership: Self-Differentiation 63
4 The Four Elements of Experience: The Experience Cube 91
5 The Aware Self: Knowing Your Experience Moment to Moment 109
6 The Descriptive Self: Reducing the Mush by Making Me Understandable to You 145
7 The Curious Self: Uncovering Other People's Experience 171
8 The Appreciative Self: Creating Spirals of Positive Partnership 201
9 The Learning Conversation in Depth 237
Conclusion: Learning to Sustain Collaborative Organizations 259
Appendix Research on the Impact of Clear Leadership in Organizations 271
Notes 283
Glossary 287
References 289
Index 291