Good leadership is the ability to rapidly change

This blog is about my journey through a text called ‘Leadership Agility – Five levels of mastery for anticipating and initiating change’, (Joiner and Josephs, 2007). This text, amongst others, aligns with our thinking here at the Leaders Institute of SA’s and explains the ‘why’ behind our flagship program the Governor’s Leadership Foundation’s (GLF) reason for being. As Director of Programs my role is to develop programs and evolve the GLF to meet our mission of creating wiser leaders.’

At a recent GLF forum one of the panellists spoke about the fact that good leadership was no longer about intelligence or charisma, but the ability to rapidly adapt to change.

Certainly this seems irrefutable when we consider what this text terms ‘the agility imperative’. Joiner and Joseph identify two deep global trends that have created a turbulent world economy and ultimately altered what it now takes to achieve sustained success. These two trends are accelerated change and complexity and interdependence. Further to identifying these, Joiner and Joseph predict these trends will grow.

It will be critical for organisations to anticipate and respond to rapidly changing conditions by leveraging highly effective internal and external relationships.

Joiner and Joseph present a successful case study of an organisation that transformed its operations and fortunes under an ‘agile leader’. However this case study is very much the exception due to what they call the ‘agility gap’ – a lack of leaders with the capacity to lead with the agility that is required in today’s (and tomorrow’s) environment.

So what is this so called ‘agility’? “Leadership agility is directly analogous to organisational agility: it’s the ability to take wise and effective action amid complex, rapidly changing conditions.” (p. 6)

This is the reason why the Leaders Institute exists; to create the capacities of mind in the leaders of South Australia necessary to close this ‘agility gap’. Our GLF program and the Integral Leader program clearly address this in their design, helping participants transition in the mastery of leadership agility, as Joiner and Joseph term it, in order to create wiser leaders for our state and nation.

Whist Joiner and Joseph frame this as 5 levels of leadership, at the Leaders Institute we tend to use the Torbet et all seven levels as described by this Harvard Business Review article. Essentially the only difference is the inclusion of two earlier stages of development (Opportunist and Diplomat) which although rare can sometimes be found and can cause major issues.

It is evident the conventional levels (Expert and Achiever) which dominated the waning decades of the twentieth century are losing efficacy and are not the levels of leadership needed to take us forward in the 21^st century with its many adaptive challenges. What is required, Joiner and Joseph identify, is a critical need for collaborative problem solving, team work and continuous organisational change. We can no longer rely on ‘heroic leadership’, which underutilises the greater team. We need leaders who will guide their teams to take greater responsibility for their own leadership and contribution.

The catch is only about 10% of today’s managers are operating at the required post-conventional levels of leadership (Catalyst, Co-creator and Synergist in Joseph and Joiner language or Individualist, Strategist and Alchemist in the language we use here at the Leaders Institute). Clearly we have our work cut out for us regardless of the semantics!

How to thrive

This blog is about my journey through a text called ‘The Practice of Adaptive Leadership’, (Heifetz, Grashow, Linsky, 2009). This is the seminal text in the Leaders Institute of SA’s flagship program the Governor’s Leadership Foundation (GLF). As Director of Programs my role is to develop programs and evolve the GLF to meet our mission of creating wiser leaders.’

The last chapter in Heifetz and Linsky’s book is about thriving! They outline what you I  and probably already know (and perhaps made some new year’s resolutions about – although these might seem a distant memory by now) but it’s always good to have the reminder or perhaps a fresh take on it. This chapter is about sustaining and indeed thriving on your adaptive journey with the following tips shared:

-          Take care of yourself not as self-indulgence but as a necessity to achieve your purposes.

-          Grow your personal support network.

1. Talk regularly with people outside the environment in which you are trying to lead adaptive change
2. Satisfy your hungers outside of work so you don’t seek them or act them out in your organisation. For example Hiefitz and Linksy suggest you hunger to be well liked, if you don’t satisfy this socially this may lead to you wavering when you need to risk not being liked when leading adaptive change. Knowing your vulnerability and taking care of them from 12 step programs to bicycle clubs can keep you on purpose and productive in the work place.
3. Anchor yourself in multiple communities outside of your organisations for multiple insights/skills and general balance. (I once asked a face painter at a kids party what her number one tip for raising children was – she’d raised 8 herself so I thought there’d be a bit of wisdom there– and she offered the advice to help your child develop groups of friends from multiple communities so they had more than one sounding board or reference point. Makes sense it’d apply to us as adults and leaders as well!)

-          Create a personal holding environment by looking after your body to maintain your stamina, keep in touch with your emotions mindfully and manage your stress. Create sanctuaries such as space and time for reflection (lunch breaks, meditation, weekly planning sessions walks etc..)

-          Renew yourself. Renewal is an active process of reworking the negative energy and ‘scars’ from the journey and returning to the core of your values and being. Do this by:

1. Having a balanced portfolio. Invest your need for meaning in your life in more than one place (not just work!). Friendships, health community family etc…
2. Find satisfaction daily and locally. Don’t get lost in the grandiosity of your vision – there are tangible small transformations you have the opportunity to make every day.
3. Be coolly realistic and unwaveringly optimistic. Consciously practice both optimism and realism. Being one or both is a choice.

This morning I worked on creating a personal holding environment that’s a bit more optimistic, mindful and conducive to thriving and went for a run by myself, without music, without a goal and just for the purpose of looking after me. I must admit it felt self-indulgent, especially when I was treated with the sight of a seal rolling through the gentle waves down at the beach. Last week it was a dolphin looping through the silvery water reflecting the dusky pink light. Some perfect moments to create my personal sanctuary.

Get experimental!

This blog is about my journey through a text called ‘The Practice of Adaptive Leadership’, (Heifetz, Grashow, Linsky, 2009). This is the seminal text in the Leaders Institute of SA’s flagship program the Governor’s Leadership Foundation (GLF). As Director of Programs my role is to develop programs and evolve the GLF to meet our mission of creating wiser leaders.’

 

Heifetz and Linsky point out that everything you do in leading adaptive change is an experiment. Framing it this way offers you space to try new strategies, ask questions and discover what’s essential, what’s expendable and what workable innovation is. Framing this way also allows some protection when you fail in your educated guesses.

We’ve had quite a bit of discussion around this already.. run multiple experiments to increase innovation, make midcourse corrections, audition ideas and so on. It seems to me this is a central theme and critical component to Heifetz and Linksy’s adaptive leadership. Certainly I’ve shared examples of how it has been applied in my current organisation and how it could have benefited previous organisations to take this stance.

What is different in this chapter in reference to experiments is Heifetz and Linsky clarify how you might need to communicate the fact you are running experiments. They point out that you may have to manage expectations through your communication according to the situation, disabusing people of the certainty they may need at a rate they can absorb. It may be necessary to express confidence in a ‘solution’ and explain later!

Taking an experimental mindset will mean taking greater risks than you are used to taking which takes courage. I read recently of five factors John Cleese believes you need to make your life more creative not as a ‘talent’ but as a way of operating, one of which was confidence; “Nothing will stop you being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake.” Being creative and experimental may also mean you need to exceed you authority which Heifetz and Linsky recommend you do ‘thoughtfully’. You do not want to be viewed as subversive, but real, deep change will not occur if authorities keep you in the box they want you to stay in – they can thus be the architects of the status quo.

Most people don’t want to be a trouble maker, but that’s the risk you run as you turn up the heat to achieve a productive level of disequilibrium where change from the status quo can occur.

An important step in the process is to ‘name your piece of the mess’. This is identifying your contribution to the difficulty creating the need for adaptive work. Doing this and demonstrating your willingness to make sacrifices will help bring people on board, take ownership and contribute.

A similar concept, in that it is probably hard for ‘traditional’ leaders to do, is to display your incompetence. Why do this? Because no one learns anything by repressing their ignorance or incompetence. It is also necessary to step into incompetence to resolve adaptive challenges facing them – after all if they were within our level of competence, we would have already solved them! Making this first move fosters a necessary culture of learning.

How to inspire people

This blog is about my journey through a text called ‘The Practice of Adaptive Leadership’, (Heifetz, Grashow, Linsky, 2009). This is the seminal text in the Leaders Institute of SA’s flagship program the Governor’s Leadership Foundation (GLF). As Director of Programs my role is to develop programs and evolve the GLF to meet our mission of creating wiser leaders.’

Heifetz and Linsky define inspiration as the capacity to move people by reaching and filling their hearts from deeper sources of meaning. Heifetz and Linsky believe this is necessary to lead people through and adaptive challenge which is more than facts or logic but engages values. Fortunately Heifetz and Linsky believe anybody can inspire others, but it must be through their own unique voice shaped by their purposes, the particular challenge and their personal style of communication.

As you might then gather, finding your voice isn’t about elocution or overwhelming with facts and arguments – it’s about connecting and speaking to other’s values and needs. Language that reaches into other’s hearts. Helping them to envision a future with the best from the past while also holding out new possibilities.

Two skills are therefore required here:

1. Listening from the heart
2. Speaking from the heart

Listening from you heart is really about listening with compassion to the communication happening a layer below the over words spoken – possibly a layer of subtext the stakeholders might not have worked through yet either. Body language and your own response to the communication exchange shed light on what is really going on if you are able to be mindful in the interaction.

Here you will discover conflicts, contradictory values, alternate perspectives, historical occurrences and emotions that provide clues to perhaps a problem in the larger environment.

As Heifetz and Linsky point out adaptive change creates loss and invariably becomes about who gains and losses are distributed and managed.

So some tips for listening from your heart include:

1. Listen with curiosity and compassion beyond judgement
2. Allow for silence (and listen for content… tension, relief, peace or curiosity) even when you are in authority

Speaking from the heart, an equally critical component, is about communicating the values at stake, the reasons that make attempting adaptive change and experiencing the inevitable losses, worthwhile. Importantly its people’s hearts that will resist you, not their heads, and they will not let you into their hearts if you don’t let them into yours. So it is critical for you to understand you own values, beliefs and emotions and excel in communicating them.

When speaking from the heart in an adaptive leadership context it is critical to hold yourself and others through the emotion. This means allowing yourself to experience the emotions as you speak to your audience, but continue on rather than shorten or end your presentation as they surface.

If you are in an authoritative position Heifetz and Linsky suggest using a strong tone and a tentative message to reassure your audience that what you are asking can be done but allow the level of disequilibrium to remain so they don’t transfer all ownership and authority for the problem immediately to your shoulders. All too often our authoritative leaders do what they know is expected of them and use a strong tone and message providing the definitive answers which will not be most effective in initiating adaptive change.

Heifetz and Linsky also encourage us to ‘speak musically’. This means through the modulation of sound, silence and cadence. And make each word count.

This recent Harvard Business Review Blog provides another perspective on how to inspire. Rather than make great tomato soup Campbells sought to “build the world’s most extraordinary food company by nourishing people’s lives everywhere, every day.” Much more inspiring don’t you think? Read more here.

Engage courageously

This blog is about my journey through a text called ‘The Practice of Adaptive Leadership’, (Heifetz, Grashow, Linsky, 2009). This is the seminal text in the Leaders Institute of SA’s flagship program the Governor’s Leadership Foundation (GLF). As Director of Programs my role is to develop programs and evolve the GLF to meet our mission of creating wiser leaders.’

Heifetz and Linsky identify five major constraints to engaging in adaptive leadership which most people experience to some degree. These are:

1. Loyalties to people who may not believe you are doing the right thing
2. Fear of incompetence
3. Uncertainty about taking the right path
4. Fear of loss
5. Not having the stomach for the hard parts of the journey

They recommend tackling the first constraint by undertaking a number of steps. Firstly watching again for the gaps between you words and actions, staying in the present (and putting the past to rest), identify the loyalties you need to refashion and then conduct the needed conversations. You can also create rituals for refashioning ‘ancestor’ loyalties. This means if somebody who you need to converse with is deceased or can no longer be reached then you create a ‘ritual’ in order to create the closure you might need to leave the unproductive aspects of that loyalty behind you. And finally, focus on what you are conserving by remaining true to core principles and values as you leave perspectives that are no longer helpful.

An on the ‘practice field’ (a regular section in this text) exercise brings this point to life. Have a direct conversation with those around you that may sound like…”look, I am going to disappoint you in some ways, and I’m going to make you proud in others. Here is where I am going to go in a different direction, and here is where I am going to make you really proud.”

Manage the next constraint (fear of incompetence) by leaning into your incompetence. Find structured and challenging learning opportunities and treat your view of your incompetence as an assumption; a story about reality, not the truth itself.

To manage the uncertainty of taking the inevitable new path down which an adaptive challenge will take you, Heifetz and Linsky suggest falling in love with tough decisions. This could include deciding in ‘close calls’, choosing between the known and unknown, deciding to do the ‘right thing’, when you know it will incur significant losses and deciding in a situation where several of your values are in conflict. Not easy!

So how do you learn to love making those types of decisions? According to Heifetz and Linksy you can increase your capacity to do this by accepting and practicing the following concepts:

-          Accept that you are going to have to make some tough decisions throughout your life

-          Nothing is forever and making no decision is in itself a decision, and

-          Tough does not necessarily mean important. So few decisions are so important that everything depends on them.

The next constraint is fear of loss and the best way to work through this is simply by giving yourself permission to fail. It is helpful to broaden your definition of success on a particular adaptive change intervention, prepare your constituents and finally commence by conducting small experiments where failure might be easier to stomach.

The strategy for the final constraint is to build the stomach for the journey. How do you do that? Basically its practice and setting clearly defined short term goals along the way. Keep reminding yourself of your orienting purpose and verbalise your willingness to stay in the game as long as necessary so anybody not that committed doesn’t bother with sabotaging behaviours, as they will recognise your commitment.

Finally, be patient and compassionately let others share the issue as they come to terms with it in their own time.

Stay connected to your purposes with five key practices.

This blog is about my journey through a text called ‘The Practice of Adaptive Leadership’, (Heifetz, Grashow, Linsky, 2009). This is the seminal text in the Leaders Institute of SA’s flagship program the Governor’s Leadership Foundation (GLF). As Director of Programs my role is to develop programs and evolve the GLF to meet our mission of creating wiser leaders.’

As discussed in the previous blog, there is no reason to shoulder the difficult work of adaptive leadership if you do not have a compelling higher purpose to serve. This provides the inspiration, direction and, I think, the resilience to sustain the journey.

Heifetz and Linsky describe five practices in this chapter to help you stay connected to your purpose.

1. Negotiate the ethics of leadership and purpose
2. Keep purposes alive
3. Negotiate your purpose
4. Integrate your ambitions and aspirations
5. Avoid common traps

Negotiate the ethics of leadership and purpose

This seems to be about the juggle of being ethical versus effective. As we’ve discussed, leading adaptive change means experimenting, auditioning interventions, and generally taking risks in roles you might not always have assumed. So is it ethical to act confidently when in fact internally you’re managing the creative tension that responding to an adaptive problem creates? Yet this may be the most effective way to lead through the new, yet to be navigated waters of solving an adaptive problem.

It is an inevitable conflict for you so Heifetz and Linsky suggest doing the following things:

-          Calculate your intervention’s potential damage to others

-          Assess the damage to your self-image and your espoused values

-          Keep the question itself active in all its forms. For example, do the means justify the ends in this instance?

This closer examination will help you judge how far you are willing to go in the context of your purpose, impact on others and your own self-image and values.

Keep purposes alive

This is a critical practice. As Heifetz and Linsky point out if you lose touch with your purposes, you lose your capacity for finding meaning in your life. No small thing! And with Martin Seligman recently in town espousing his PERMA model of positive psychology, we know that he believes that ‘meaning’ (the M in PERMA) is a critical pillar in having a full and rich life.

In the last blog we discussed capturing your purpose in a sentence or as an image. A physical object that you can see every day can be a powerful reminder.

Some examples Heifetz and Linsky provide are a picture at your desk, a favourite inspirational book at your bedside, an inspiring saying framed on a wall or a keepsake from a friend to whom you committed to say true to your purpose.

Rituals that exist in everyday life, both personal and work, can be related or connected back to your purpose. A great example from Heifetz and Linsky is an organisation that formally built into its regular meetings a time for reflection near the end of meetings to ask whether they have advanced their larger purposes.

Negotiate your purposes

Often your purpose may be one of many within an organisation. For example a manager responsible for environmental affairs in an auto company may feel passionate about the production of green cars, but may have to accede to the competing commitment of short-term profitability. A Board or senior manager may equally have the purpose of providing strong sustained livelihoods to its community of employees as their personal and valid purpose. And you can‘t produce green cars if you no longer have a production platform running.

Negotiating your purposes requires you to translate them into a language that others understand and respond to favourably. This may include a different message emphasis dependent on your audience but which still remains true to your overriding purpose. And then you need to make them tangible for people in the form of objectives, plans, strategies, timelines etc.

Integrate your ambitions and aspirations

Heifetz and Linsky suggest you can productively have both ambitions and aspiration serving you actively. They are integrated forces – not mutually exclusive as treated by some. It can create an ongoing tension for you (e.g. aspiration to spend time with your children versus an ambition to achieve an important goal at work) but you can honour both and free yourself of guilt or embarrassment over either.

Avoid common traps

The traps identified by Heifetz and Linksy include going ‘blind and deaf’. In other words becoming so single-minded you don’t notice contrary data or signals you need a mid-course correction. This was one for my partner and I to be mindful of when we passionately developed a program for older adults proactive wellbeing in an aging population.  The program was very effective but we were ‘blind and deaf’ to some market elements in our desire to positively widely impact the life conditions of older adults.

Another is becoming a ‘martyr’. In organisation life this can be illustrated by a person becoming marginalised or even fired for being too persistent an advocate for a lost cause. This can be frustrating when it is not just about your purpose and you actually believe it will be to the benefit of the organisation. I have seen this frustration and cynicism of a colleague revert back to enthusiasm when their thinking was valued at their next organisation.

Appearing ‘self-righteous’ can trigger resistance in others. And being the self-appointed Chief Purpose Officer can similarly be limiting. Reminding people of the larger purpose when leading change is very important but ‘over doing it’ is not helpful. If you try to fuse the purpose into every event regardless of the relevance, you undermine the power of the purpose to inspire and motivate.

 

All of these five practices are quite possible to do when you break them down like this. The key though is being really clear about your purposes.

Articulate your purpose

This blog is about my journey through a text called ‘The Practice of Adaptive Leadership’, (Heifetz, Grashow, Linsky, 2009). This is the seminal text in the Leaders Institute of SA’s flagship program the Governor’s Leadership Foundation (GLF). As Director of Programs my role is to develop programs and evolve the GLF to meet our mission of creating wiser leaders.’

Mmmm isn’t this a much pondered question? What is my life’s purpose? It might not need to be your life’s purpose but it certainly will help if it is closely aligned. Leading change through an adaptive challenge is difficult and dangerous work. So you need to deeply care about the change you wish to make – much easier if you see it as aligned to your purpose.

So Heifetz and Linsky stress the importance of identifying your higher (orienting) purpose – a critical part of understanding yourself as a system that provides a larger context for prioritisation and resolve in difficult times.

Your purpose helps you allocate your time, or conversely examining how you spend your time may be illuminating about what your real purpose is. Watching what you do , what decisions you make (big and small) to see what reflects your actual purpose can be uncomfortable if it reveals dissonance for you.

Heifetz and Linsky suggest after this self-reflective process you may want to write your orienting purpose down in a sentence or express it in an image to use or keep handy.

Most people have multiple important purposes and this will help you prioritise these. It will also help you make sense of who you are, why things are the way they are, why they happened the way they did etc. Articulating your purpose makes it explicit and allows you to see the story you are telling yourself identifying it as your assumption not an absolute truth which gives you greater freedom to make different choices.

The more specific the purpose you can allocate to an adaptive change project or indeed your own orienting purpose, the more useful it will be. So it may take some practice and continued application to find the purpose, or set of prioritised purposes that resonate with you both in your heart and mind.

A key ‘on the balcony’ exercise in this chapter is to, “Write one sentence expressing your overriding sense of purpose. What have you been put on earth to do? What brings you inexpressible joy or a sense of meaning? Keep rewriting the sentence until it connects with you below the neck.”

A second one I also found useful was to identify all the possible purposes you could have (professional success, family, spiritual pursuits, stopping global warming, financial success, and so on), and do the following analysis:

-          Make a list of the top ten purposes to which you feel most connected

-          Rewrite the list in order of most important to least.

-          Draw a line under the top 5 (as most people only act on their top few purposes)

-          Next to each item write what you have done on behalf of that item in the last three weeks. Write a P next to the ones you have done proactively and an R next to the ones you’ve done reactively.

-          As a last step, write a few things you could do for each purpose that you have been unable or unwilling to do before.

-          Look at all the data and consider what you might be willing to try over the next three weeks.

I haven’t done the last exercise but I had a crack at the first, although without any refining at all. So today my one liner and top priority is…”To help people have a greater capacity to engage in their various communities (work, home, social, schools) in a way that provides them with an improved sense of fulfillment and happiness. Might need some more work : )

This Harvard Business blog provides five lessons from ‘world changers’. I note that the number one lesson is to start with purpose. All the encouragement needed to go back and do some refining on my overriding sense of purpose!

Understand your roles

This blog is about my journey through a text called ‘The Practice of Adaptive Leadership’, (Heifetz, Grashow, Linsky, 2009). This is the seminal text in the Leaders Institute of SA’s flagship program the Governor’s Leadership Foundation (GLF). As Director of Programs my role is to develop programs and evolve the GLF to meet our mission of creating wiser leaders.’

The key here seems to be understanding where your values and or perspectives are shared with others in relation to the challenge at hand. Simply because this creates a faction and factions are needed to lead adaptive change. It is incredibly challenging to lead adaptive change on your own. Not least as you don’t have the extended networks of relationships and allegiances that a faction does.

Within any group or faction you will have an assigned role(s) for which you are recognised. The more roles you can play the more effective you will be as they give you a wider repertoire to draw from in different situations, making you less predictable and readily pigeonholed. Plus the more roles you play, the more factions you will be connected to.

The main point here is to give yourself permission to play different roles to lead effectively from different places in different contexts. To play roles such as a parent may mean putting your heart and soul into that role; however it doesn’t mean that role defines you alone. It’s what you are doing at a particular moment in time and doesn’t permanently define you.  This is important as we must understand that if playing a particular role doesn’t work it’s not you who did not work – it is simply your performance within that role. This can help you feel less vulnerable and not take things as personally if your performance in that role does not work out in that moment or over time. Taking things personally and turning your attention inwards taking your eye off the problem at hand.

Separating self from the role you need to do allows you greater emotional strength to ignore personal attacks which can be expressly to divert you. A great tactic for this type of manipulative approach from others might be to say “I’m sure I could be a better person. Let’s get back to the issue before us.” Consider also that undue praise is just as powerful diversion as a powerful attack.

Heifetz and Linsky also point out that a progression to idealisation is problematic – hard to resist and a sure sign somebody is displacing responsibility squarely onto your shoulders. As Heifetz and Linsky go on to point out, “Adaptive leadership generates capacity not dependency.”

Broadening Your Bandwidth

This blog is about my journey through a text called ‘The Practice of Adaptive Leadership’, (Heifetz, Grashow, Linsky, 2009). This is the seminal text in the Leaders Institute of SA’s flagship program the Governor’s Leadership Foundation (GLF). As Director of Programs my role is to develop programs and evolve the GLF to meet our mission of creating wiser leaders.

 

Broadening your bandwidth is about increasing your repertoire of techniques for working on adaptive change. You will have to mix and match from this repertoire as dictated by the situation.

To start exercising your bandwidth muscle, diagnose your current repertoire. What skills do you have? What are you missing or not so effective in? Put this analysis into the context of adaptive leadership and you should consider how skilled you are at raising the heat, getting on the balcony or distinguishing the technical from the adaptive aspects of an issue.

Having catalogued and categorised your repertoire of techniques and proficiency in same, you’ll more readily be able to recognise when you can intervene yourself or when you would be wise to bring in reinforcements given the specific situation.

Heifetz and Linsky suggest for example somebody good at keeping people on task (or keeping the heat at a productive level) should potentially bring in somebody else to undertake the creative brainstorming required to identify multiple experiments.

Having looked at your current bandwidth, inevitably to lead adaptive change you need to expand your bandwidth which is not easy. We all have natural tolerances and comfort zones – pushing out of these into risk, ambiguity or conflict can be very challenging.

So some ideas to put this into practice include when in a difficult conversation looking for the exit, don’t take it. Stay in the game until the next exit presents itself. Or ask a colleague to observe you in a meeting and take notes on the ways you respond to situations of conflict or complexity. This practice and reflection opportunity will help you broaden your bandwidth and perhaps add a new tune to your vibration.

Know your tuning

This blog is about my journey through a text called ‘The Practice of Adaptive Leadership’, (Heifetz, Grashow, Linsky, 2009). This is the seminal text in the Leaders Institute of SA’s flagship program the Governor’s Leadership Foundation (GLF). As Director of Programs my role is to develop programs and evolve the GLF to meet our mission of creating wiser leaders.

Knowing ‘your tuning’ is understanding those childhood experiences, genetic dispositions, cultural background, gender and loyal identifications with various groups that affect you both in your personal life and in the workplace.

Heifetz and Linsky describe these as strings that vibrate continuously, communicating to those around you who you are, what’s sensitive and what’s important to you. Understanding these, similar to my last blog, allows you to respond rather than react.

Heifetz and Linksy use the example of conflict. If you don’t mind or enjoy conflict you may raise the level of conflict to the point that it is unproductive and people shut down. I can operate in conflict but as identified in the adaptive leadership text, my strict parenting ensured I don’t relish in it. In fact the level of conflict (yelling, shouting and swearing amongst colleagues) whilst not directed at me but observed daily at a NSW financial institution, ensured I found an alternative role within my probationary period. It just wasn’t the environment I wanted to be in, yet those within it seemed fuelled by it and continued to thrive for the short term at least.

Knowing your triggers is the key and its being mindful (or getting onto the balcony in Heifetz and Linsky terms) when somebody ‘hits a nerve’ or a ‘hot button’ which is a relatively common experience. Observing and analysing these interactions (usually accompanied by behavioural changes) will allow insight into your tuning which in turn will allow a response versus a reaction next time you’re triggered.

Heifetz and Linsky believe there are two categories of triggers which they call ‘hungers’ and ‘carrying other people’s water’.

Hungers can apparently make you particularly vulnerable and relate to three pairs of normal personal human needs that if unfulfilled can become difficult to manage:

1. Power and control
2. Affirmation and importance
3. Intimacy and delight

Trying to carry other people’s water is equivalent to carrying other people’s hopes, needs, expectations and fears. Heifetz and Linsky often see this in our Not For Profit sector where people are often burnt out and overwhelmed as a result.

This is explained by the way, from the time we are born other people load us up with their expectations. Useful when you are young as a source of wisdom, encouragement and guidance, but as we mature, other’s hopes can take the form of unresolved problems which can be impossible to resolve and far less in your control than resolving your own.

Responding rather than reacting puts you back in the driver’s seat. You purposefully choose how you respond to your needs and the needs of others as their leader. It allows you to help other’s manage their own hopes, needs, expectations and fears rather than disempowering them by shouldering them yourself.