The economic recovery that will follow the COVID Pandemic crisis will not be led by individuals. It will be the effort of groups of people that will restore equilibrium to the economy and elevate the world from the impact of this crisis and the resulting\u00a0global downturn.<\/p>\n
Some individuals will certainly emerge as heroic or visionary leaders and there will be an uncountable number of unsung heroes, \u00a0but the shift towards restoring a sustainable period of growth will be in the hands of organizations of people, be they companies, communities, social movements or any number of formal organizations.<\/p>\n
They will be comprised of scientists and medical care providers. \u00a0It will be driven by the people that work in our factories, drive the trucks to distribute what we produce. Doctors, nurses, teachers construction workers, non-profits, the small businesses on every main street and giant corporations will all play a part. The recovery will see an expansion of entrepreneurism and volunteerism. It will take vision, innovation and grit. The dynamics of these individual \u00a0groups will determine their effectiveness.<\/p>\n
This is where leadership matters most. Dr. Lee Thayer convinced me (and many others) that it is the organization that makes the leader successful and not the other way around. Leadership plays an essential role in an organization\u2019s performance \u2013 but the real work and therefor the real credit for success must be given to the organization. Thayer also argues that a good organization may have a bad leader, but no bad organization has a great leader. It\u2019s the performance of the organization that defines and measures the strength of the leader.<\/p>\n
I like the definition of leadership that was offered to me by Pat Murray, founder of J.P. Murray and Associates, who was himself influence by Lee Thayer.\u00a0(Pat is one of the most influential sources of my own thinking about group dynamics.)<\/p>\n
“To lead is to mobilize and guide the energy and talent of others in the pursuit of a worthwhile end.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\u2014Pat Murray<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
It\u2019s really not all that uncommon to find a great organization with a mediocre or even an incompetent leader running it. When such organizations underperform their potential, as they inevitably do, they either find the need to elevate the performance of the leadership, or accept that the organization\u2019s performance will diminish.<\/p>\n
For a variety of reasons, there are many good organizations held back by ineffective leadership. The most prevalent reason is that as a society we have an enormous tolerance for mediocrity. Another is the educational institutions that churn out a high volume of degrees through a\u00a0system produces a great many skilled managers \u2013 but very few truly competent leaders.<\/p>\n
Because organizations are assemblages of people, the performance of the individuals that comprise the organization, of course, matter. Without competent leadership the performance of the people that comprise the organization is left to chance. Effective leaders reduce that risk by developing other leaders and ensuring that the people are energized and inspired to optimize the contributions they can and must make towards whatever it is that the organization must accomplish.<\/p>\n
How to Leverage the Benefits of a Crisis<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Every crisis offers some silver-linings. One is the emergence of leaders and heroes: the people who step out and show themselves to be outstanding. Another is the mobilization of High-Performance Organizations: those that fill the voids left by the organizations that fail. Both require being prepared to take advantage of the opportunities every crisis serves-up beside the inherent threats.<\/p>\n
We all understand that the stress a crisis brings impacts people in ways that are noticeable and predictable. \u00a0We see good qualities emerge in some people and flaws become pronounced and even magnified in others. Often the most important strength we witness in people is just their grace and steadiness in the face of adversity. In this environment you will often see leaders emerge among their peers. You also find people who are supposedly leaders exposed for their lack of competence.<\/p>\n
A crisis presents the opportunity to upgrade an organization\u2019s leadership by identifying who can and who cannot lead.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Crisis will also stress-test groups. Some groups, like Navy SEAL teams, for example, are built for the stress of adversarial conditions. Other groups are fragile and fracture or even disintegrate altogether. Why? Is it the make-up of the group of individuals? Or how they are prepared to meet the challenges they face? And are these even the right questions?<\/p>\n
We know that so-called \u201cdream-teams,\u201d those assembled with elite talent, should have a clear advantage over a lesser-talented team. Yet they often fail to meet the lofty expectations placed upon them.\u00a0In fact, these teams are often volatile and self-destruct.<\/p>\n
Egos can get in the way of performance and even present a sense of entitlement and pre-ordained destiny. There are plenty examples of patched-together misfits overwhelming elite squads of recognized talent. Make-up of the group matters, but not entirely. It is not just the pieces. It\u2019s how they perform together under adversity that matters.<\/p>\n
Adequate preparation certainly matters. With all things otherwise being equal, the team that is better prepared prevails. A well prepared team with lesser talent will often overcome a powerful foe that is caught by surprise.<\/p>\n
Preparation and training only matters if you have the pieces you need. It\u2019s the \u201cgetting the right people in the right seats on the bus\u201d that Jim Collins canonized in Good to Great<\/em>. If \u00a0you assemble a team of people ill-suited to fulfill their roles \u2013 there is little likelihood of any real success \u2013 regardless of how much they prepare for the challenges they encounter. The saying is that you cannot train a dog to be your accountant.<\/p>\n
A team assembled of competent performers who are fully and properly prepared are truly a formidable force for succeeding at whatever you do. This is a definition of a High-Performance group, team or organization.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The difference between High-Performance Groups and dysfunctional ones is amplified during a crisis, but the inherent qualities that define that difference are always present an are observable even in good times. Short-term success can not only camouflage the issues that make a group mediocre, that success is often what will accelerate the factors that lead to its ultimate demise. This was a point that Oren Harari \u00a0made in his 2006 book \u201cBreak From the Pack.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0(In 2002, Oren Harari was selected by the London\u00a0Financial Times<\/em>\u00a0and Prentice Hall as one of \u201cthe world\u2019s greatest management thinkers.\u201d) It is also true that groups are relatively easy to lead during good times \u2013 and considerably harder to lead in times of crisis.<\/p>\n
Real, perceived, or even simulated threat (as those employed for training purposes) magnify the behaviors that can be observed in both individuals and groups.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Specifically, leaders can more easily and accurately assess how well individuals are prepared to perform under the stress of uncertainty in a crisis. People show us more of who they really are. This provides leaders with an opportunity to better support and utilize people\u2019s strengths and \u00a0understand \u00a0their weaknesses in order to evaluate and develop their potential.<\/p>\n
Developing Group Performance is Significantly Different than Developing Individual Performance.<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Lee Thayer describes one of the four principal tasks of leadership as \u201cpeople-making.\u201d It\u2019s an instructive description in that the leader cannot make the people they must lead. The leader must get others to make themselves into whatever it is they need to be in order to perform at the level required of them.<\/p>\n
The principle lies in the idea that you cannot actually teach people; people must choose to learn. The teacher provides the resources and the conditions that are deemed necessary for learning \u2013 but it is up to student. Lee liked to say that \u201cyou cannot confer a benefit on an unwilling, or incapable recipient.\u201d<\/p>\n
The best a good leader can do is influence the thinking of others so that they might be inspired to learn what they need to know \u2013 and provide a sense of purpose that causes others to choose to be conscientious. It is when they believe that there is something greater than their own individual needs and interests at stake that people find the grit needed to grow.<\/p>\n
Conscientiousness is what causes people to get comfortable with the idea of being uncomfortable.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Some people are just naturally and innately driven to challenge themselves and accomplish remarkable things. They are inspired to see things that must change as being necessary and then do whatever it takes to prove to themselves that it is possible. Those who become leaders transfer that sense of possibility to others and help them share the view that it is necessary.<\/p>\n
The real work of leaders is not people-making, but organization-making. It is not just the assembly of a group, but conducting the performance of the members.<\/p>\n
In people-making you have just one shot. You either influence the other person, or not. If, for whatever reason, the other person chooses not to be \u201cmade,\u201d you are done. But in groups, the dynamics afford a great deal more latitude.<\/p>\n
Groups tend to influence themselves, meaning, members of groups influence each other.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
You are likely familiar with the concept \u201cgroup think.\u201d The instinctively social aspects of human beings lend themselves to people having shared beliefs. To some extent, this show-up as a basic human need. That need is for human connection, which without human beings actually die. Connection to a group is a function of survival.<\/p>\n
Extrapolations of group think show up in various contexts. Jerry Harvey (another mentor of Pat Murray) , the author of The Abilene Paradox <\/em>suggested that within groups an inherent yet unobvious problem is not the presence of disagreement, but that people fail to manage their agreements. People lean towards what they all believe the group believes for fear of separation.<\/p>\n
An entire group may operate in contrast the actual consensus opinion \u2013 on the individual misassumptions that the others in the group all feel differently about the course of action being taken than they actually do. The conditions sustains because no one is prepared to risk speaking out in opposition \u2013 and the entire group heads in a direction nobody really wants to go.<\/p>\n
A factor contributing to this kind of group think is confirmation bias<\/em> \u2013 a term coined by the British psychologist Peter Wason in the 1960s.\u00a0He observed that people have a tendency to favor information that confirms their assumptions, preconceptions or hypotheses whether these are actually and independently true or not.<\/p>\n
It is easy to disregard facts or reasonable truths when the group you are in subscribes to a chosen or prescribed point of view.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This is especially true when either an existing leader is the source of the position being confirmed \u2013 or when a new leader emerges in opposition to the thinking of the existing leadership or status quo.<\/p>\n
Groups are particularly vulnerable to confirmation bias when there is heightened uncertainty due to a crisis. Uncertainty creates a veil of discomfort that is assuaged by reaching for certainty \u2013 even if the basis of that certainty is faulty.<\/p>\n
The desire for comfort and the need for connection creates the perfect conditions for confirmation bias to infect group think \u2013 and for people to look towards false messiahs who appeal to both these needs. This of course can lead to a dangerous state of affairs, where groups ignore real evidence, facts or viable options and instead remain fixated on solutions to problems that do not work. Or worse, turn groups into lemmings that march together off the side of a cliff.<\/p>\n
A Solution for\u00a0Better Group Dynamics<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Pat Murray, in his presentations to Vistage groups over the course of nearly 50- years shared his ideas in a program \u201cGroup Dynamics: The Inside Story on Teams and Leading Them.<\/em>\u201d He cited the work of the psychologist Kurt Lewin, who studied group behavior. Lewin suggested that if you want a high-performance team, the single most important reality to create is a shared fate, which means that whatever happens to one, happens to all<\/em>.<\/p>\n
Pat Murray borrowed much of the foundation to his own thinking from Wilfred Bion, a British physician and psychoanalyst who in 1958 wrote a book called Experiences in Groups<\/em>.<\/p>\n
Within any group of people bonded together by a common purpose \u2013 such as your business \u2013 success is determined by the group\u2019s performance. While the performance of the individuals who comprise a group is critical to the potential of the entire organization, it is not the whole story. The dynamics of the group itself has in powerful impact on the performance of the individuals within it.<\/p>\n
High-performing groups tend to their members. They inform the beliefs that reinforce the shared fate of the group and can provide even greater influence than any single leader could.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Leaders feed the basic purpose to a group at first, but then the group feeds itself. A competent leader helps manage the meaning that feeds the sense of shared purpose, but once the group establishes itself, it takes on its own life.<\/p>\n
We often call this sense of common or shared belief the group\u2019s culture. It is really a mindset based on assumptions about the group\u2019s purpose and the\u00a0connection of the group members to each other through their understanding and personal interpretation of that purpose. People assume that they care about the same things \u2013 and that they share the same understanding about the group\u2019s purpose.<\/p>\n
The leader\u2019s job is to continuously feed and clarify that sense of purpose \u2013 so that the assumptions don\u2019t vary to0 widely. When they do \u2013 the group tends to split into factions or just fall apart.\u00a0Murray attributes this to whether a group is working or not. More specifically he cites Bion\u2019s theory of work versus non-work.<\/p>\n
Bion suggested that \u201cwork means to pursue a task that the group understands and agrees on in a way that is rational, scientific, cooperate, controlled and conscious<\/em>.\u201d Such groups are fully functional. \u00a0A group that is not working is demonstrating the antithesis of what a working group is. The work is unproductive and the behavior is irrational, collusive or fraudulent and unconscious.<\/p>\n
No groups work all the time \u2013 and all groups vacillate between work and non-work. High performing groups are those that recognize the different states and return to work when they drift. The reason for the drift, according to Bion, is that resolving the issues that keep work moving tends to be uncomfortable.<\/p>\n
Like the problems with group-think and operating in crisis, the need to get comfortable being uncomfortable is what creates the demand for effective or competent leadership.\u00a0The role of that leader is not to take-on the problems and solve them, nor is it to relieve the group of their discomfort. The leader\u2019s job is to help the group members understand their responsibilities to the purpose of the group \u2013 to be conscientious.<\/p>\n
Bion described the state of non-work as a mode of operating in a basic assumption mental state \u2013 or BAMS<\/em> \u2013 an unconscious\u00a0assumption about reality shared by all members of the group. In other words it\u2019s a function of group think.<\/p>\n
A competent leader is one who makes it possible and necessary for any and all members of the group to take individual responsibility for declaring when they notice that the group is operating in a BAMS.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
It is not the leader\u2019s responsibility to do so. In fact, \u00a0the condition whereby the group is dependent on its leader to declare BAMS \u2013 is the most blatant example of a group being in BAMS.<\/p>\n
How Leaders Can Help Navigate Groups Towards High-Performance During Times of Crisis<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Borrowing directly from Pat Murray, the greatest opportunity to elevate a team\u2019s performance is to cause the group to be responsible for doing so. In other words any problem that impacts the group\u2019s performance is a problem that the group itself must be responsible for solving.<\/p>\n
This doesn\u2019t mean that every company must adopt a Quaker Meeting style of management. Not every employee has to engage in solving every problem. But as Lee Thayer strongly suggests, the problems within an organization must be solved by those most proximate to the problem.<\/p>\n
When problems are solved by others than those who ought to solve them, we incapacitate the team, and we stifle the growth of those whom we need to develop. People who are deprived of the opportunity to solve their own problems are effectively damaged by the process. Worse, the fabric of the entire organization is weakened as a result.<\/p>\n
Solving the problems amounts to addressing the real issues. It is easy to avoid the real issues and pretend to work on something else. But avoiding real issues doesn\u2019t work.<\/p>\n
It is the responsibility of the leader to ensure that the group knows that it is necessary and has what makes it possible to address the issues that matter most.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The leader\u2019s role is to guide the group to keep a clear view of reality. This not only keeps the group focused \u2013 it engages the most competent people. There is no greater satisfaction in any organization than solving real problems. Ultimately such groups find that they also attract the most competent people \u2013 and routinely solve pressing problems that less competent teams won\u2019t even touch.<\/p>\n
Some of the most immortal words of Pat Murray are, \u201cthe problem you name is the problem you solve.\u201d Problems do not exist without identification and all problems of subjective. A problem is nothing more and nothing less than something different than we need or want it to be. Outside of this context things are purely neutral; they are what they are. But when we identify how things need to be in order to serve our purpose, we can identify what things we need to change.<\/p>\n
Leaders foster an environment of innovation when they allow the people who will execute the solutions to be the ones who name the problems.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This means having a process for keeping the conversation rational. Teams need the kind of environment described by Patrick Lencioni in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team<\/em>, which he illustrates with a pyramid with Trust at the base, elevating to Conflict, Commitment, Accountability and ultimately Results. The leader must enforce behaviors that allow the escalation of action to always aim for meaningful, significant accomplishments \u2013 and avoid convenient or easy results.<\/p>\n
Teams that fail to trust each other or the process will stall and fail. Teams that avoid conflict are really avoiding confrontation \u2013 which is as Pat Murray points out \u2013 the most important element of risk-taking that a group must engage in \u2013 next to honest self-disclosure \u2013 or not hiding.<\/p>\n
Pat notes that most people misunderstand confrontation, confusing it with arguing and hostile conflict rather than a means to interrogate reality in search of truth. Real confronting means \u201cto search for truth without hurting, humiliating or degrading people.\u201d Confronting must involve respect, and the leader must ensure that this is the rule of law for the team.<\/p>\n
Finally, accountability is a matter of performance. Accountability requires visibility and compassionate transparency. Accountability is perhaps the greatest source of anxiety within any organization. It creates politics, silos and personal deceptions. So much, that people tend to avoid real accountability and settle for focusing on the easy stuff rather than solve real problems. Pat Murray suggests that \u201cThere are moments of truth in organizations, when it is time to deliver on the commitment, when the performance is due. \u00a0At the moment of truth you get only two \u201cproducts.\u201d You wither get the promised performance or you get a story \u2026You can\u2019t accept stories.\u201d<\/p>\n
Excuses are a currency in groups. They are bribes that free us of accountability for our own performance. They buy us the perception of safety or freedom, but actually imprison us in mediocrity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
You can deflate the value of excuses and remove them from circulation only by making them worthless. When they cannot buy anything they cease to circulate. But the minute you accept them or tender them, they begin to take on a life of their own. Complaints (excuses where the story is that you are actually the injured party as a result of your own incompetence) begin to become counterfeit currency that undermines the integrity of the group. Without integrity, there is no basis for trust and the entire foundation crumbles.<\/p>\n
Stories bring people together \u2013 and none more than shared tragedy. Wholesale crisis presents the perfect storm. Stories will galvanize the bonds of survivors. People share stories that remind us of our sense of purpose. And stories create meaning around our experiences that not only help us make sense of them \u2013 but help us shape the future we want to create. But stories also allow people to hide from reality and forge fantasies that help us escape from responsibility.<\/p>\n
Competent leaders are compilers and editors of the stories we tell.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Your responsibility is to make your group the author of its own story \u2013 and protect it from becoming actors of someone else\u2019s story.<\/p>\n
Finally, Pat Murray offers three steps as a process to get out of trouble:<\/p>\n
\n
- Anyone on the team who realizes the team is in a BAMS has the responsibility to call it.<\/li>\n
- They ask the work questions, \u201cwhat are we afraid to talk about?\u201d<\/li>\n
- They take however much time it requires to identify the real issue and then deal with it on the spot.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
This is not for the feint of heart \u2013 and clearly, there organizational structures that make it impractical to employ this at all levels, however what is possible and perfectly clear is the need for you as a leader to be aware of the dynamics that drive your organization.<\/p>\n
You have the power in your choices to determine whether mediocrity is your standard \u2013 or if you destiny might be to build a High-Performance Organization. It is your responsibility to decide whether your organization will lead the way out of crisis or be run over by those who can and will.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
###<\/p>\n
Note: Pat Murray passed away this past January (2020). His life and legacy have touched the lives of thousands of leaders through his affiliation with Vistage (formerly TEC) for more than 50 years – where Pat served as a Chair in the very early days – and was later tasked to lead the organization. In the ensuing years Pat was a prolific and influential source of thought leadership through the thousands of presentations he gave to Vistage \/TEC group CEOs -providing insightful guidance and a powerful influence that has sent immeasurable ripples throughout the world. Pat’s thinking has been foundational to the work of hundreds of Chairs who have been profoundly influenced by his commitment to enhancing how leaders think and behave. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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