Last weekend was beautiful and balmy in New England, so I decided to take a long meandering bike ride, exploring the myriad bike trails that connect the towns, villages and rural landscapes of the Connecticut River valley. As I pedaled through fields bursting with early spring sprouts of green, I realized that this lovely network of trails was the result of a many year collaborative leadership effort. Wayne Feiden, current Director of Northampton’s Office of Planning and Development, came to the valley more than 20 years ago, and at that time Northampton had 2.4 miles of bike trails that were not used very much. Growing up Wayne had always liked biking, and he developed a vision for an increase in city and regional bike trails that has grown incrementally over the years. Northampton now has $13,000,000 worth of bike trails that reach north to Leeds and connect with extended trails in Easthampton, Southampton, Hadley, and Amherst. Wayne bikes to work every day, as do many others in the region, and he gives two reasons for the expansion of the system – one, is the recreational opportunities it provides, and two, is the transformative opportunity the trails offer for how people travel.
Over the years Wayne and many others have had a shared vision of a greatly expanded bike trail system, and making this vision come to life has been a truly collaborative effort on their part, as they worked with many groups around the region including the conservation commission, members of the city council, and numerous citizens’ groups. There was strong enthusiasm and there was intense resistance. There was hot controversy and there was quiet cooperation. Wayne obtained grant money to pay for the trails, and enumerable citizens’ meetings were held to get eventual community buy-in.
Wayne told me that when he first became a planner 25 years ago, he heard that many planners were being fired – half of them for taking strong positions and the other half for taking weak or no positions on important planning issues. Wayne decided that if he were ever to be fired, he would want it to be for taking strong positions on issues he believed in, so he’s taken strong positions. He believed in the development of bike trails for Northampton, he articulated his beliefs, he collaborated, and he hasn’t yet been fired.
Wayne isn’t trained in systems-based leadership, but he took an “I” position, kept calmly connected with the various interested factions of the community, maintained a long-term vision in spite of the ups and downs of the project, and was an effective collaborator in making it happen. Systems-based leadership defines leadership as a relationship process, and that’s a pretty good description of the leadership that transformed the Northampton bike trail system. There is still a lot more to do, including expanding the bike lanes on city streets, but this project rides the crest of the green movement throughout the country, and it will thrive.
How is your long-term vision? How do you manage yourself when there is a lot of resistance to your vision? Is your leadership part of a relationship process? Does this story trigger new ideas for you as you think about your own leadership? I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
Katharine Gratwick Baker
Archive for the ‘Business leadership’ Category
Collaborative Leadership and Bike Trails
Thursday, April 29th, 2010What To Do When You’re New
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010I was coaching a business executive last week who was relatively new to her company’s management team. She had worked for another company in the same industry for twenty years, and had been considered a particularly gifted leader there. When there were some shifts in the direction that company was going in, she decided to look for another job. This was a carefully considered non-impulsive decision, and she took her time exploring professional opportunities before settling on the new position. Her references were excellent, she and the CEO of the new company connected well on an interpersonal level, and he hired her specifically for her leadership skills.
The management team of the new company welcomed her in a very friendly way, and she jumped right into her new job, energetically expressing her thoughts and feelings in meetings about how things were run and the changes that needed to take place. Strangely enough the management team did not seem interested in her views and opinions and, although still friendly, they tended to ignore her comments in meetings. She had been hired for her leadership skills, but no one seemed to want her to lead them in new directions. What wasn’t working for her?
As we explored this problem in a coaching session, she recognized that her leadership in the previous company had evolved over time. She hadn’t started out a leader, but had gradually formed relationships in which she had proved her competence, reliability, flexibility and vision over many years. In the new company she thought she could hit the ground running and be the leader she had evolved into in the prior company. Through coaching she learned that leadership is a relationship process and that it would take time and the development of trust and mutual respect before she could become a true relationship leader in the new company.
Does this seem obvious to you? Not necessarily. If you think that leadership consists of a collection of individual characteristics and traits, then you may think this woman should have been able to become an instant leader in her new company. If you know that leadership is a relationship process, you surely understand what her “next steps” need to be in the new company.
Katharine Gratwick Baker, February 24, 2010
Leaders Don’t Manage People, They Engage Them
Friday, January 29th, 2010Distinguishing leadership and management in organizations is critical for clear thinking about the roles, responsibilities and performance of people in positions of authority as well as those of the individuals who report to them. In our book Leading a Business in Anxious Times, Katharine Baker and I define leadership as “a relationship process among members of an organization that inspire them to take full advantage of opportunities, recognize and minimize threats to success, and avoid catastrophic failures” (page 19.) Framed as a relationship process, leadership is by definition reciprocal, and the outcomes are products of the relationships among people—the owners, executives, directors, managers, supervisors, employees, consultants, customers, vendors, etc. Thus the quality of the relationships in the workplace speaks to the quality of leadership.
Individuals who are responsible for accomplishing the work of the organization—the day to day operations, process improvements, implementing changes, etc. are often called managers. They usually decide policies, establish procedures, control allocation of resources, schedules, and evaluate performance against quality standards, and they are often responsible for hiring and firing of personnel. When outcomes are disappointing, you might hear them say, I really don’t like to “manage people”. In that context, I don’t see them as poor managers; rather I see them as poor leaders. I have a bias against the concept of any individual “managing other people” because it fosters one-directional thinking, without regard for the reciprocity of human behavior in social systems. All parties play a part in the product of their relationship. Thinking of business management as managing people keeps managers’ thinking other-focused rather than keeping it focused on their own behavior. The obvious point here is that individuals can change or manage their own behavior to create an environment where others have the opportunity to perform well, but they cannot change the behavior of others. That’s a by-product of high functioning leadership.
Leadership and management, as it is commonly understood in today’s organizations, are not mutually exclusive. Successful managers also provide leadership. They inspire people to perform and the most successful ones inspire exceptional performance—performance that results in successful outcomes for all stakeholders. However, leadership need not only come from managers or from others in positions of authority. Every employee in an organization can and often does provide leadership at different times around various challenges. Successful organizations develop a culture of leadership—with widespread recognition that the organization is a natural system of mutually interdependent individuals who are responsible for managing themselves in mature ways. Such organizations have leaders throughout that foster open discussion and collaboration, mutual respect, and decision making that is in the best interest of the whole organization.
Leslie Ann Fox, CEO, Care Communications, Inc. January 29, 2010
Leading in a Time of Constant Change
Monday, January 4th, 2010Happy New Year to our readers, colleagues, friends, and families. What Leslie and I wish for the world (and for your company, your community, your family and ours) is that systems-based leadership ideas will take off in 2010. As we write in the introduction to Leading a Business in Anxious Times, the leadership principles we’ve introduced in the book “will enable you and your organization to successfully face the challenges that you encounter in an unknown but constantly changing future. They will give you the resilience, stability, flexibility, and vision to prepare yourself effectively for whatever lies ahead. Imagine if your company embraced responding to change as its strategic differentiator. What could it not accomplish?” (p. 22)
At this point all we know about 2010 (we don’t even know if it will end up as “twenty ten” or “two thousand ten”), is that it will surely involve enormous change and demands for adaptation from all of us. We will certainly be called upon to analyze, understand, and utilize new technologies, new products, and new ideas for defining and solving challenges at home, at work, and in the wider world. As you know from reading our book (and probably from your own life), most people experience change and the demand to adapt as stressful. When we are feeling anxious or stressed out, we can’t think as clearly, we make mistakes, we look for shortcuts, and our productivity and performance go down.
Faced with the inevitability of change in 2010, what can we do about it? We’ve said that functioning higher on the scale of differentiation (p.110) is the key to managing change and to providing effective leadership at all levels in a business. And raising your functioning has to start with self-awareness: “Understanding how you functioned in your family when you were growing up, what triggers your anxiety today, and how you react when you are anxious can inform your thinking in ways that enable you to better manage your anxiety in the present. Functioning at a higher level of differentiation as a member of an organization is always beneficial; you are less vulnerable to absorbing anxiety from others in the emotional system. Being a non-anxious presence in the system brings big benefits to the organization… As a way of leading, differentiation of self is about the value that a thoughtful, self-reflecting, emotionally independent individual brings to the workplace (p. 124).”
Please read on through Chapter 5 to learn more about how to do this. And write to us about how it works for you as you face the changes that 2010 will surely thrust upon you.
Katharine Gratwick Baker, PhD, Northampton, MA, December 31, 2009.
Please join our blog on “Leading a Business in Anxious Times.”
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009Our book describes the impact of anxiety on the workplace and how the capacity to think clearly in the presence of anxious colleagues, staff, and customers in the hallmark of an emotionally mature leader. Learning to recognize the signs of anxiety at both the individual and organizational level is the starting point for leading in anxious times. Our ideas about emotional systems and emotionally mature functioning in the workplace have helped us, our clients, and employees achieve a greater level of satisfaction at work and have had a profound impact on the culture of organizations that consistently pay attention to this dimension of leading.
We hope to have discussions on this blog with you, our readers. Please tell us how our ideas resonate with you and how you use the book in your workplace to promote more mature leadership. We are also interested in your thoughts about a definition of leadership that is based less on individual traits, personality, and temperament, and more on the mutual interdependence of the workplace relationship system.
We look forward to hearing from you –
Leslie and Katharine
