Here’s a practice for creating a culture where people cooperate to develop solutions on the ground. In following with the theme of leader-as-host, smart rules are an alternative to adding more structures and procedures to an already complex environment.

Smart rules are the set of simple yet powerful principles that define the approach to the work done by and within your organization. It is a service model based on your core values. The way to create your smart rules is to describe what everyone is expected to do to demonstrate each core value in the context of work of the organization.

Excellent examples of “smart rules” are those portrayed in Patrick Lencioni’s business fable, Getting Naked.  (A “must read” for any organization providing ongoing, relationship-based services!) The consulting firm in the fable held high the values of trust, loyalty, humility, selflessness, and transparency. Their smart rules were:

• Always consult instead of sell – every sales situation is an opportunity to begin to demonstrate value
• Give away the business – giving advice and service before entering an agreement shows you’re more focused on the relationship than your short-term revenue
• Tell the kind truth – delivering a difficult message puts serving the client’s need before protecting your own business
• Enter the danger – step into uncomfortable situations; acknowledge the “elephant in the room”
• Ask dumb questions – they’re usually the ones others are afraid to ask
• Make dumb suggestions – don’t hold back, some of them are good
• Celebrate your mistakes – call them out and take responsibility for them
• Take a bullet for the client – humble yourself and take the burden of the client in a difficult situation
• Make everything about the client – focus is on understanding, honoring, and supporting the client
• Honor the client’s work – an active interest and appreciation for the importance of the clients business; if you can’t, don’t take the work
• Do the dirty work – take on whatever the client need you to do
• Admit your weaknesses and limitations – we all have them; don’t cover them up

If you don’t have smart rules yet, have the leaders of your organization facilitate stakeholder focus groups to brainstorm what your organization’s core values look like in action. This activity alone is powerful in helping everyone find the meaning and possibilities in their work. As always, for every culture maker, the practice must be modeled and taught from the top down to be sustained as a shared assumption.  Have fun!

“It is time for all the heroes to go home”

William Stafford

Why do we continue to expect our leaders to be heroes that have all the answers, tell us what to do, and control the risks to our livelihood and survival? No individual can understand every aspect of an organization – we, being human, simply don’t have the cognitive capacity.  In their 2010 article, Leadership in the Age of Complexity: From Hero to Host, Deborah Frieze and Margaret Wheatley suggest that the growing complexity of organizations requires that we stop waiting for someone to save us and expect our leaders to play host to the “hearts and minds of everyone in our communities.”

The mistake in thinking that heroes can always get us out of complicated messes is the illusion that one person can be in control. We live in a world made up of complex systems which are all “emergent phenomena – the result of thousands of small, local actions that converged to create powerful systems with properties that may bear little or no resemblance to the smaller actions that gave rise to them.” Yet when chaos ensues, we pressure our leaders to take control, to fix it! Attempts at command and control send leaders into isolation with a few trusted advisors looking for quick solutions that only create more chaos.  The causes of today’s problems are complex and interconnected. There are no simple answers, and no one individual can possibly know what to do. This limitation is seldom acknowledged and when our leader-as-hero fails to deliver the desired state, we fire him (or her) and start looking for the next elusive perfect hero.

To embrace the opportunity of the complex systems in which we work and live, we need to abandon our reliance on the leader?as?hero and invite in the leader?as?host.  We need leaders “who know that problems are complex, who know that in order to understand the full complexity of any issue, all parts of the system need to be invited in to participate and contribute. We, as followers, need to give our leaders time, patience, forgiveness; and we need to be willing to step up and contribute.” Frieze and Wheatley go on to say that effective leaders-as-hosts “don’t just benevolently let go and trust that people will do good work on their own.” Hosting leaders

• provide conditions and good group processes for people to work together.
• provide resources of time, the scarcest commodity of all.
• insist that people and the system learn from experience, frequently.
• offer unequivocal support—people know the leader is there for them.
• keep the bureaucracy at bay, creating oases (or bunkers) where people are less encumbered by senseless demands for reports and administrivia.
• play defense with other leaders who want to take back control, who are critical that people have been given too much freedom.
• reflect back to people on a regular basis how they’re doing, what they’re accomplishing, how far they’ve journeyed.
• work with people to develop relevant measures of progress to make their achievements visible.
• value conviviality and esprit de corps—not false rah?rah activities, but the spirit that arises in any group that accomplishes difficult work together.

In addition, here is some advice from my personal experience as a leader-as-host:

• Give people the opportunity to learn more about what others they interact with actually do – know your “internal customers.”
• Create ways in which people can actually experience the “future of their decisions.” For example, an engineer knows what it takes to repair what she designs; a program manager understands what it takes to evaluate the program outcomes
• Promote diversity not only as social identity but also the differences in how people think, their experience, and their personalities. Leaders-as-hosts step back and let different points of view surface and challenge each other.

Don’t let your good intentions and desire to serve turn you into a disillusioned, over-worked, fire-fighting hero with a cause. You’ll end up alone. So “go home” and there you’ll find you really are not alone at all.