Invisible Greatness
I recently read a post by Chris Butler titled “You can be a great designer and can be completely unknown”. Chris is a graphic designer with experience in interaction design, product design, and design leadership and training. His post hit on a perspective I appreciated about designers and creators. It framed a parallel to my own observations in organizations and their accepted talent development and management practices. The core parallel idea is that organizations are, in fact, full of great creativity and high-value work product but that broad recognition of it can be rare. Here is a key excerpt from Chris’s post that really outlined the idea for me.
“We live in an attention economy that equates visibility with value. Social media follower counts, speaking engagements, press mentions, and industry awards have become the measuring sticks of design success. This creates a distorted picture of what greatness in design actually means. The truth is far simpler and more liberating: you can be a great designer and be completely unknown.”
This is also true of other domains and tradecraft in many organizations regardless of the industry it is in . Organization carry built-in incentives that heavily reward action and visibly, often even when actions may not hit exactly the right target. Show-and-tell theatre can pull organizational energy and momentum off balance from generating increasingly beneficial and higher impact behaviors.
The irony can be palpable. Typically, organizational intent is to enable their talent to create the best of an organization but often fosters patterns that unintentionally limit the value generation and contribution of their talent. For instance, it’s easy for organizations to be developmentally constrained by its own prescriptive standardization in the pursuit of predictability and efficiency. This often creates average outcomes leading to somewhat mediocre and non-competitive ecosystems. This is never the desired intent, but organizations can find themselves victimized by their own unintended consequences if they can’t follow the through-line to what effectively raises the individual, team, and organizational performance.
The result is that organizations can end up painting themselves into a performance limiting corner. A common example of this is when there is an open role in an organization and management insists on placing an available but unqualified person be placed in that role and hope for the unlikely best. The incentive for keeping the workforce fully assigned to any available work, outweighing the increased risk of failure and creating an impact that lowers performance on a given team or within the organization.
In today’s attention deficit and social media conditioned environment, organizations have a heavy bias toward action and are especially tuned to activity driven cultures with incentives organized around task or initiative completion. It’s common to hear leaders offer one variation or another of the productivity quote, “What gets measured gets managed (or done).” and attributed to Peter Drucker. An interesting fact is that this quote was never uttered by Drucker. Sometimes quotes or ideas get popular because we want to believe they are true. Why do we want them to be true? Because they confirm our own belief system, filters, and mental models so they make us feel comfortable and help us make sense of things even if not entirely correct.
One of most effective counters to this challenge is to ask some illuminating questions for those who dare to foster a little organizational introspection.
1. Can you see value around or beyond the activities that are at center-stage and under the spotlight? For every leading character there is a much larger supporting cast. Can you see the full cast of contributing characters and identify their importance?
2. Are recognition behavior patterns in place that hold and foster the less visible extended value that is holding your organization together and enabling broader success?
3. Are there low-visibility activities, initiatives, design, or even foundational thinking that should be given some sustaining oxygen?
As Butler indicates, every organization is “scattered with the artifacts of unrecognized ingenuity”. Sometimes, excellent performance and contributions are great because they don’t call attention to themselves at all, like a well-oiled wheel that does not squeak. High impact design or high-performance contribution can be invisible greatness.
When visibility commands all the attention, there is risk that being noticed is the priority over being meaningfully useful to the organization. Benefit to the larger organization should be a clear target. The popularity or visibility of an activity can be important, but it does not always equate to the best outcomes or competencies. The larger “greatness” within organizations is likely significantly facilitated by more than what you think you can see. Look around for that invisible greatness right next to you and say “hello” and offer it some recognition.
Presidential Service
Have you ever been the president of something? Your local stamp collecting club or maybe the much-loved president of the HOA? Or possibly you have held a higher profile opportunity such as the president of the local city council or a national organization. Regardless of type or prestige level, the daily role of president is the central function of serving the organization at hand.
This enabling of success takes the form of vision, mission, and execution towards the organizational purpose. Leaders are orchestrators of people and an array of departments and functions so that others will arrive at their appropriate “success destinations” facilitated through the leaders’ actions and example.
The “top” leader is the leader of leaders, also knowns as the president, and sometimes the CEO in many companies. This service-oriented leadership drives integration, builds community, and amplifies the power and impact of all the collective capabilities applied to a diverse set of objectives.
Don’t be deceived by grifters who sell a leadership approach based on fear, self-preservation, or bait others with self-indulgence and servitude. The best leaders understand and demonstrate humility in knowing that leading is the privilege of carrying responsibility for the greater good and greater success. This will be demonstrated by actions and very few words in authentic leaders. If you observe anything other than these characteristics you may be bearing witness to a toxic or fraudulent leader.
Organizations full of people helping one another succeed is an organization full of leaders who serve. In those organizations the president is the top servant.
Moving Forward Means Going Vertical
What’s Coming
Research indicates there will be more investment in organizational transformation in the next 10 years than in the last 40 years. In addition, all this incoming digital transformation is going to be dependent upon human transformation. So where does that leave us?
New Expectations
Leadership, design, execution, and performance of transformation work will require speed, agility and multiple forms of implicitly human capacity. This human capacity will be needed to see, understand, empathize, and respond in a greater variety of ways and in response to a wider range of situations. In other words, all members of any organization will need to be proficient in having capacity for ambiguity and complexity, a keen awareness of self and others, and a practitioner of resilience. This is a lot to consider, and most organizations are not anticipating or moving towards being prepared for intercepting this fast-approaching future.
Moving Up
Above and beyond the knowledge or skill stacking from classes and webinars delivered by horizontal development, vertical development is focused on extending capacities that come from expanding emotional, intellectual, and even physical awareness and capabilities. Beyond that, vertical development provides a scaffolding for understanding and working with the process of capacity building. It targets building capacities to see, understand, empathize, and respond in a greater variety of ways in response to a range of situations.
Outcomes
The outcomes of Vertical Development are three fold:
It enable leaders to expand their range of response.
It grows organizational culture to allow for experimentation, psychological safety, and mindful action and interaction.
It provides leaders that coach with a map for going deep to address the mindsets that define, limit, and shape experiences and growth.
Primary Targets For Beginning
There are several key areas needing investment for evolving and growing into meaningful vertical development impact. It is becoming increasingly important to create awareness of Vertical Leadership Development (VLD) and its distinction from horizontal development and how they work together. Here are some primary targets to consider for the vertical leadership development journey.
Develop knowledge of Vertical Development frameworks and core principles.
Learn how to use VLD as a map for distilling and supporting growth.
Become skilled in VLD development stages and transitions related to leading and coaching.
Utilize VLD coaching and assessment tools and techniques that will impact mindset, coaching experience, approach, and developmental movement.
It’s highly likely there will be additional conversation on this topic in the future. This is just the warm up to really getting started. The opportunities are expansive for human engagement and contribution as organizations face a tsunami of transformation in their near horizon timelines.
Inherent Friction
“If everyone’s on board, then you’re not leading change of any substance whatsoever.”
I recently came across this comment in something I was reading. It got me thinking.
It’s conventional to think that change rides within the vehicle of consensus. Leaders will look to communicate and gain agreement on a direction, action, or initiative before initiating the planned action. It’s a form of directive leadership but it expects to gain agreement with the idea that agreement equals ignition of the change.
The truth is that there is often unaddressed friction across any attempted change. Friction related to stopping old behavior or functions and replace them with new ways of doing or being. This reality of moving from a state of A to a state of B is at the core of change. Laying out the phases or steps of change is like reading the menu at a restaurant but cooking the food and delivering the food to the table is where the movement is, and that takes work. Change does not walk itself through the door. It is not simply spoken into existence.
Change requires traction to move forward, and traction takes friction at the point of surface contact. The practice of moving and affecting behaviors of people and culture share similar qualities to the laws of physics. Like physics, to keep friction points from overheating, the use of lubrication can facilitate gaining the benefits of friction while managing the heat generated by the movement. Change in organizational, team, or individual settings can benefit from forms of social lubrication. Those things that remove or reduce destructive friction but enable the right forms of friction for forward movement.
There are different ways to introduce social or psychological lubricants. Before you can design for that strategy, you must first realize change is a friction game and not a matter of agreement. It’s one thing to order a great burger but it’s another thing to get it from the menu to your plate.
Is Leading About You or Others?
One of the most common approaches to leadership looks much like the standard early education classroom in most any education environment. The bell rings, you take your seat, you are asked to focus on the tasks at hand, you plan and execute your work, you are held accountable for doing and showing your own work, and the bell rings again and you are released to then return the next day and do it all over again. The similarities between many corporate job experiences and the norms of a standard classroom experience are somewhat jolting.
One of the key dynamics at play in this scenario is the fact that we like patterns, those repeatable rhythms of life and work that help us anticipate and get a dose of certainty. We value predictability, repeatability and any system that can give us consistency.
When managers and leaders “run” their teams and organizations in this manner there are some unfortunate results. This modeled approach is the most recognizable and most easily rewarded in many organizations. It is characterized by relative clarity of results, who holds the power, and whose job it is to “fill the order”. It’s great factory work if you want it but it’s driven by a leadership view that is leader-centric at its core. The mission, the setup and the rewarded by the system around leaders, is to get more people to do more of the things that the leader will get rewarded for.
This kind of leadership is inside-out and is not developmentally focused on others. It’s driven by short term targets and an emphasis on individual accountability but also diminished collaboration. This approach is typically less performant and elicits a lot of churn and friction around people challenges. For better for worse, this is a common conventional flavor of leadership that is still strongly entrenched today. After all, how else does one expect to get promoted? There is a component of vanity and ego in these kinds of environments.
A less conventional but arguably more successful alternative is the approach where leaders layer their efforts with a focus on others and elevating the performance and contribution of team members that are appropriately pointed to impactful outcomes. The success of leaders, team members, and organizations are amplified exponentially when leaders and managers organize their own role and their available power to enable those entrusted to their leadership. It also means that as a leader or manger you have to know how to shape and direct the kinetic power of the talent within your charge towards the right targets. This is often a dynamic equation to keep rebalancing as opposed to a static set it and forget it prescriptive approach. It means leaders must be strong in reading ever changing situations, adapting, communicating, and influencing others through other methods than power and control.
One of the challenges is that organizations cross up our vocabulary around leaders, managers, people, and the work. Maybe people are to be “led”, and work is to be “managed”. Not the other way around. Often, we conflate or simply invert those definitions. It is common that organizations frequently incentivize the conventional factory method without realizing what it may be costing their organization across performance, work product quality, and talent development levels. If you are a leader or manager, you have an opportunity to make an intentional choice about how your “run” or enable talent you are stewarding.
Which model does your organization reward?
What type of leader do you strive to be?
What will best help your own success take off?
A Matter of Intangibility
Whether talking through individual or team performance issues, challenges around navigating transitions, or getting clear on effective leadership development, these growth journeys share some common ground.
Becoming and contributing your best in all of these areas can fall into one foundational definition of performance: “Performance is measurement of developmental growth and contribution potential reached by an individual or team.”
Moving well beyond hitting the highest score on a team, pulling in the top sales numbers, or climbing through layers of promotions, the best measure of performance is gaining ground expanding contribution and impact. There are plenty of top scorers, sales plaques, and updated business cards out there but performers that drive true value and make things and others around them better are more elusive.
To be brutally honest, many organizations, leaders, and managers struggle to enable this version of performance for two primary reasons. First, the elements of contribution and growth-based performance are not built into common postindustrial age business and management models and consequently are not incentivized, let alone understood. Second, this approach is more difficult to measure and consequently more challenging to observe or reward. It takes focusing on the intangibles that amplify performance instead of the direct external indicators.
Below is a working framework that can be used to bring this approach closer to the surface for the practice of designing and building environments that activate around contribution and growth driven performance. Give it a try when working through leading and managing people, teams, and organizations and see if it changes the depth and quality of performance across your sphere of influence.
6 Elements of Performance
Current State
How are thing currently going?
Orientation
Is the path forward clear?
Opportunities
What is the ease or difficulty typical experiences?
Optimize
What are the ways to become better?
Enhance
Where are the additional areas for contribution?
Future
Where can there be growth towards something new?
Don’t Let Them
It’s so easy to let others articulate and narrate who you are. When others are allowed to frame your identity and your contribution, it’s usually limited by labels and thinking in singular terms. He’s an electrician or she’s a layer.
An additional challenge is that we are unsure of how to project ourselves and that when a story is left blank, others will tend to fill it in. Don’t let them!
It’s fair to find it challenging to tell your own story well from inside your own skills but it’s really the most valuable perspective.
We are all more than any one thing. Most of us fulfill and function in a variety of roles and identities. Even better than having a valuable way to project your identity and value to others is the confidence and solid bearing of direction it provides for you in your own mind.
Define a simple but powerful persona brand that is your own elevator pitch for yourself. Invest in your own branding and messaging or someone else will do it for you.
If you were to work out an equation similar to the process for creating a product or brand, it might look something like this.
“I am a [ ] who does [ ] through [ ]. “
“I do this through [ ] and [ ].”
“The result is [ ].”
“My approach combines [ ] and has the benefit of [ ].”
Bottom Line - Short Version: “I provide [X-Service] for [Y-Need], generating [Z-Benefit].”
Define yourself and you define your path. Self-lead your way towards the career and life you want and deserve. Don’t let your brand get hijacked by pirates whose only incentive is to plunder, not promote. You are the captain of your own journey.
Cool Change
We all say we want change, but we also find it uncomfortable when it finally comes our way. We simply have a natural affinity to the familiar and the predictable or to whatever gives us certainty. We don’t like the unknown. It makes for a slippery embrace.
Some thoughts on keeping your cool amidst change:
A change is a transition. This means that you are in the process of walking out one door and through another in some form or fashion. It’s a process and an experience, so give yourself grace and patience. Remember that it is a ride that has a beginning and an end. It is not endless.
What is new will be different than the old. Change is fundamentally a positive thing but recognize that it will also come with uncertainty and anxiety that will be uncomfortable and possibly feel a little less safe. But that new place of change will eventually become familiar where you can establish as sense of command and increased confidence.
The “old” often has a sense of being fixed in place where the new can seem less secure and a bit wobbly. The new will have a different sense of pressure but it’s also a container for fresh opportunity. Usually, you don’t feel ready for this but it’s likely that you are, and more than capable of doing the new thing than you think you are.
Exiting your “old” will be its own thing. It will take energy and the management of your own emotions, so just know it will be a spend but also ok. Keep in mind, regardless of what array of variables show up, your path is your path and it belongs to no one else.