In contractual relationships, our primary concern is holding others accountable for high standards of performance. Effective contractual relationships require what we deal with others in good faith and that we assume full responsibility for performing our part of the arrangement. That is absolutely essential, but the normative trust and commitment of contractual relationships will never be enough to establish a high performance work environment.

Research has shown that only affective trust and commitment between leaders and followers produces the psychological safety requisite for people to apply the full potential of their heads, hands, and hearts to work. Building on a solid foundation of fair contractual relationships for everyone, high performance leadership moves to establish covenantal relationships with as many employees as possible.

Covenant promises require a different kind of trust, commitment, and leadership intimacy than do contracts.  Contracts are the currency of bosses and subordinates; covenants the currency of partners. Interdependent partners in covenant relationship commit to enabling each other to keep promises established to achieve the vision, values, goals, and daily behaviors consonant with their shared purpose.

Unless and until you are willing to hold yourself accountable for performing your own job with distinction, walking the talk your employees value, and genuinely caring for those you’ve been given the privilege to lead, you will never master covenant leadership. You are not entitled to partnership; you earn partnership by first providing it to others.

“How can I help?” may be the single most important question you can learn to ask as a leader.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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You Will Lead The Same Way You Follow, So Be Careful How You Follow

I’ve written a lot about purpose on my blog, because I love it. Purpose is why we do what we do, and I think it is the missing ingredient in many businesses. Many businesses go to great lengths to produce statements that describe what they do, how they do it, where they do it, and their values as they pursue some nebulous future; however, very few have given any serious thought to why what they do matters. Mission statements are virtually worthless, but purpose lives in the hearts and minds of those that serve it, which makes purpose a powerful driver of behavior.

I met Jesse Lyn Stoner on Twitter, and when I found out she had co-authored a book with the great Ken Blanchard on vision, we had a frank discussion about how much she loved the concept of vision and how much I hated it. But to be honest, I’ve never in my life read a book on vision, so when Jesse offered to send me a free copy of her and Ken’s revised book “Full Steam Ahead: Unleash the Power of Vision in Your Work and Your Life,” I agreed to read and review it.

The book is written as a story with fictional characters. I know many people love that style of business writing, but frankly I do not. Even though I did not like the style, I LOVED the message Ken and Jesse share about vision:

Vision is knowing who you are, where you are going, and what will guide your journey. Knowing who you are means being clear about your purpose. Where you are going is the picture of the future. And what will guide your journey is your values. (p. 79).

I was both surprised and thrilled that they made purpose the foundation of vision. That’s the way it should be, but as they point out in the book, many organizations still miss that critical point. The authors assert “The vision must benefit everyone it touches” (p. 167). That’s a very high and appropriate standard that is simply not possible to achieve void of purpose.

The book concludes with some very useful tools that will help you create, deploy, and evaluate your vision. I am very glad to recommend this book to anyone and everyone that is interested in vision at work.

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Purpose

I’d like to share with you one of my favorite descriptions of meaningful work. Don’t miss the fact that the leader in this example learned the power of purpose from her employee. This passage can be found in Richard Daft’s textbook “The Leadership Experience”:

Servant leadership can mean something as simple as encouraging others in their personal development and helping them understand the larger purpose in their work. When Linda Burzynski became president of Molly Maid International, she learned about servant leadership from one of her cleaners. Posing as a new member of the cleaning crew, Burzynski entered a home with her partner, Dawn, to find dishes piled high, food spilled on countertops, clothes and magazines strewn about, and pet hair everywhere. Surveying the mess, Burzynski was ready to walk out, but Dawn explained that the woman who owned the house was going through a divorce and dealing with three rebellious teenage sons. “She’s barely hanging on.” said Dawn, and having a clean house gave her a sense of order and control. Burzynski noticed that Dawn seemed to take extra care because she knew she was helping the woman with more than just her household chores. Burzynski says she learned that day about the power of being a servant to her employees and helping them find larger meaning in their difficult jobs. (pp. 232-233, 3rd edition).

People like Dawn both inspire and challenge me. As much as I know and write about leadership, I wonder if I have the character and presence to behave as Dawn did when similar situations present me with the opportunity to give myself permission to be excellent.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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Courage Always Exists In The Present. What Can I Do Today?

Christmas is tomorrow, so I’m glad to offer you my first and possibly my last “God blog.” I try to stay away from politics and religion here, but I am going to make an exception today. Hopefully, by the end, you will appreciate a little more why I am such a huge fan of the concepts of purpose and interdependence as I think and write about leadership.

I am a born again Christian. I never understood what that meant until it happened to me. God leveled me, and then raised me up again when I was 24 years old. I never saw it coming, but I now understand He aimed his sucker punch at me before the creation of the world. He did all the work, and I reap rewards I can never merit. Frankly, I’m a lousy Christian. What continues to marvel me is that He knew what a wretch I would still be 25 years later, and He adopted me anyway.

I sincerely believe it’s a miracle that God chose and loves me. Many of those that know me well would strongly concur.

I don’t like to use Jesus as an example of a great leader. The Son of Man was, of course, the greatest leader the world will ever know, but that was never His purpose. I try not to fault people that want to put Him in the leadership box, but I personally avoid it because although He merits the accolade He simply does not fit in the box. He doesn’t fit in any box, and I like that a lot.

I think the thing I love the most about God is that He is utterly purposeful. Everything He does, every time He does it, is completely consistent with His purpose. I also love the fact that His purposeful behavior is independent of my acknowledgment, understanding, or approval.  Yet for His purpose, He created a system where our roles are interdependent. I cannot fulfill my role in His system without Him, and he cannot accomplish His purpose without my role. He holds himself accountable both for fulfilling His role and for enabling mine. He set it up that way. That’s amazing.

Growing up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I was proselytized to accept that God had a plan for my life. I didn’t buy that then, and I don’t buy it still today. My NIV concordance shows that variations of the word “plan” are used in the bible 98 times, with only 14 of those being in the New Testament. Variations of the word “purpose” appear 57 times, with 30 of those in the New Testament. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John never recorded Jesus using either word. In those 155 references, it’s usually men that make plans (that often fail) while God is almost always behaving purposefully rather than executing a plan.

I’m thankful I don’t have to worry about making a mistake that is not part of “the plan.” He uses every mistake I make and trouble I encounter to work for my good according to His purpose.

His interdependence with me is both ancient and eternal. My life is purposefully emergent, both to me and to Him, but He experiences the emergence differently than I do. My experience is constrained by time and space, His is not; time and space are defined by and constrained within Him. That is so cool.

Purposeful interdependence is the pattern I consistently see as I try to wrap my finite brain around an infinite God. My fascination with purposeful interdependence naturally spills over into how I think and write about organizational behavior and leadership.

God has tremendous utility. His works and ways are truly amazing; however, He deserves to be glorified and loved simply because of who He is.

Wherever you are and whatever you believe, I hope tomorrow and all the rest of your days are a time of joy and peace for you, your friends, and your family.

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Real Leaders Love Their Enemies

I’ve written before about the power of expressing gratitude, but on this day before Thanksgiving I wanted to see if I could learn more about it from a different source. Gratitude is listed as one of the strengths of transcendence in Chris Peterson and Martin Seligman’s book Character Strengths and Virtues. As a strength of transcendence, gratitude connects us to others and helps provide meaning to our lives. Here is how they define gratitude:

Gratitude is a sense of thankfulness and joy in response to receiving a gift, whether the gift be a tangible benefit from a specific other or a moment of peaceful bliss evoked by natural beauty. The word gratitude is derived from the Latin gratia meaning “grace”, “graciousness,” or “gratefulness.” All derivatives from this Latin root “have to do with the kindness, generousness, gifts, the beauty of giving and receiving, or getting something for nothing” (Pruyser, 1976, p. 69). Prototypically, gratitude stems from the perception that one has benefited due to the actions of another person. There is an acknowledgment that one has received a gift and an appreciation of and recognition of the value of that gift. It would be unusual to say that one is grateful to oneself. (p. 554).

I really like the idea that the ability to give to others without expecting anything in return is a character strength. Graciousness is transformational both for those that give and those that receive. Those void of grace never experience the fullness of a life lived beyond transactional relationship with others.

Someone with a strong grateful disposition experiences gratitude with intensity and frequency. They feel grateful for numerous things (e.g. family, friends, job, and health) at any given time. For any given positive outcome or life circumstance, those with a strong grateful disposition can find numerous people (e.g. parents, co-workers, mentors, and role models) to feel grateful for.

How grateful are you? Here are six questions psychologists use to measure gratitude (McCullogh et al., 2002).

1.     I have so much in life to be thankful for

2.     If I had to list everything I felt grateful for, it would be a very long list

3.     When I look at the world, I don’t see much to be grateful for (reverse scored)

4.     I am grateful to a wide variety of people

5.     As I get older I find myself more able to appreciate the people, events, and situations that have been part of my life history

6.     Long amounts of time can go by before I feel grateful to something or someone (reverse scored)

Make an intentional choice to be more gracious and grateful toward others today, and every day from now on. Be grateful for the fact that you have the ability to continuously improve your strength of character.

There is no substitute for performance. Your fundamental responsibility at work is to be really good at your given duties. You can’t suggest ways to improve the process unless and until you begin to master that process. And your ability to perform is one of the most important things people want to know about you when they evaluate your trustworthiness.

The most important thing they want to know is your intentions toward them. Because we simply don’t trust people that we think don’t have our best intentions at heart, there is no substitute for caring. If you can’t build trust, you can’t lead, and if you don’t care about your followers, they will never trust you.

But caring is a luxury for those that can’t perform. When I first started teaching, I was basically thrown into the classroom. I honestly didn’t care too much about my students because I just wanted to survive the semester. It was only as I began to master my new job that I developed the capacity to care about those I had been given the privilege to serve.

Leaders, master your jobs, then help your people move up the learning curves at work and master their jobs. Without performance mastery, they will have little capacity to care about what they do, who they do it with, and who they do it for. As they become purposeful performers that care, the work they do will become more meaningful to them and they will become more satisfied with and committed to you and your organization.

You will reap the benefits of better task performance, less withdrawal behaviors (e.g. tardiness, absenteeism, turnover) and more interpersonal citizenship. Don’t just tell them to get better and to care – help them develop the capacity to make it a continuously developing reality.

Leadership is caring about how well your people perform and being really good at helping them perform better.

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The Stepford Organization

“When leading a group, should the leader pay differentiated attention to individual members and the group as a collective simultaneously?”  This is the question raised by Joshua Wu, Anne Tsui, and Angelo Kinicki in a recent Academy of Management Journal publication.  Their study of 70 work groups in eight companies found that successful team leaders manage the team, not the individuals.

If you have bought the prevailing wisdom that managing the strengths of individual group members is the best way to manage your group, you could be making a big mistake. This study found that if you provide highly differentiated leadership to each member of your group, you will indeed increase the individual self-efficacy of those individual members. But the increased individual self-efficacy had a negative effect on the group’s collective efficacy, and a negative effect on the group’s effectiveness.

Group collective efficacy, on the other hand, had a significant positive effect on group effectiveness. The researchers measured collective efficacy with items that assessed the kinds of tasks the group might perform, not specific tasks any single group member might perform.

Group collective efficacy resulted from group-focused rather than individual-focused leadership. Group-focused leadership produced group identification, which in turn produced a collective sense of efficacy among group members.  This is the type of leadership where group leaders specify the importance of group members having a strong sense of collective purpose and mission in working with the group as a whole.

Popular thinking on leadership asserts that effective leaders must not only inspire the group as a whole, but must also be attentive to the unique needs of each and every individual in the group. The results of this research suggest “that leaders who attempt to satisfy both individual and group needs may inadvertently compromise group processes and group outcomes” (p. 101).

If your individualized approach to leadership creates a group full of members where some have high self-efficacy and see themselves as “high potentials” while others do not, you are likely sub-optimizing the performance of your group as a whole. The differences in individual efficacy among group members affects how they feel about each other and their ability to accomplish things together. This is especially critical when group tasks require extensive interdependence among members.

When group performance matters, and people need to work closely together for the group to be effective, the belief that “we can do it” is more important than any individual’s belief that “I can do it.” If you lead a group like this, you probably want to keep that strength-based snake oil on the shelf.

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I’ve defined enemies very specifically as those that consistently put their own self-interest ahead of the shared organizational purpose.  If you want to be a purposeful leader, enemies come with the territory, so we have good reason to love our enemies.

Even if we intend to be purposeful actors, there are times when we are the very enemy we think we oppose. All of us have an ever present motivation to act in our own best interest, and we are all very skilled at deceiving ourselves into believing its only other folks that behave this way.

We should learn to love confronting our own egocentrism daily in order to be prepared to confront the enemy in others when necessary. Our enemies will always choose a fight with the enemy within us over a fight with the purpose. Our ego is not worth fighting for, so always let them win that part of the fight early. Understand that the best way to keep your dignity is to lose your ego.

Make sure what you are fighting for is what is best for us and not just what is best for you. That’s not as easy as it sounds.

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A Question Of Principle

It’s relatively easy to love our friends at work, those purposeful actors that struggle with us to build something bigger and better than ourselves. Our friends provide us safe harbor when the storms of work roll in.

But real leaders love their enemies.

Recall my very specific definition of enemies: anyone that consistently puts their own self-interest ahead of the shared purpose. Because we have to take a stand against these folks that disregard our purpose, our enemies define our leadership.

Enemies are an integral part of our purposeful pursuit. Instead of bemoaning enemies, we should anticipate them and prepare to embrace their continual presence in our lives. We certainly don’t want to destroy them, and we can’t allow them to destroy us.

Here are 8 ways that leaders can develop the capacity to love their enemies:

1.Confrontation. We don’t do either our enemies or ourselves any favors by ignoring their destructive behavior. We have to have the courage to say what we think and fight for what we believe in.

2. Respect. We respect our enemies by telling them the truth to their face. We should not feel compelled to hold our tongues in public about the behavior we object to, but our enemies need to hear it first from us in person.

3. Restraint. When our enemies do not show us the same respect that we show them, we have to resist our strong desire to retaliate or express our anger.

4. Kindness. One of the hardest things we have to do as leaders is to care about people that don’t care about us. We are never relieved of that responsibility. Despise the behavior, but never the person.

5. Assistance. We don’t dump on our enemies by telling them “this sucks, so do you, and you better change it – or else!” We have to see ourselves as a resource for our enemies to find their way to more purposeful behavior.

6. Patience. Change is hell. Our enemies will probably not change as fast as we want them to. Empathize and endure.

7. Forgiveness. Forgiveness is something we do for ourselves. We must forgive our enemies for who they were and what they did to us out of respect for their courage to try to change.

8. Humility. Win our lose, it’s not about us, it’s always about the purpose. Relationships will need to be renegotiated and repaired after the conflict, so we can’t allow hubris to rear it’s ugly head.

If you can accept it, enemies are a blessing for the purposeful leader. Leaders that can see the big picture appreciate enemies as simply a part of the process of achieving a purpose worthy of hard work and sacrifice.

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Courage Always Exists In The Present: What Can I Do Today?

Our enemies are those that consistently put their self-interest above the shared purpose. Enemies are not those that fall short in their continued pursuit of the shared purpose, but those that either cloak themselves in the rhetoric of purpose as their behavior reveals their true intentions, or those that openly oppose the purpose in both word and deed.

We have to take a stand against these enemies of the purpose. Because our enemies present us with the clear choice to stand up or to hide, our enemies define us as courageous followers and purposeful leaders. Let me suggest the following four ways that our enemies define us:

1.  What we are willing to stand for.

If you have no enemies, it’s because you don’t stand for anything worth struggling for. All the great leaders throughout history had enemies because they all stood for something they believed was worthy. I’ve worked with and for so many people that were content to go about their days avoiding any and all conflict. These folks are de facto enemies of the purpose because if they are not with us, they are against us. Their silence in our conflict with those that put self-interest above purpose is itself a stand with the opposition. Our task as leaders is give people a shared purpose worth standing for, then to eliminate all excuses of ignorance and ambivalence and move them to declare what they stand for.

2. Who we stand up to and when we stand up.

We can’t just stand for the right thing when it is easy. We have to be willing to stand up to anyone at anytime the shared purpose is at stake. The toughest stands will come against those that have more position power. The stakes in those stands are higher, and our adversaries will use the rhetoric of conformity – questioning our respect and loyalty – in an effort to get us to “sit down and shut up.” If that does not work, they will employ other tactics to intimidate or discourage us. Expect it, and be prepared to shed some blood. sweat, and tears. It is in battles with these folks that the war for the shared purpose is won or lost. We won’t win every battle, but we can’t win the war if we are not willing to fight every battle. Everyone that compromises the shared purpose is worthy of confrontation.

3.  How we stand.

Even as they debase us, we are never relieved of the responsibility to continually care for and about our enemies. With professionalism, courage, transparency, patience and persistence, our aim is to bring the egocentric back in line with the shared purpose. Severing a relationship is something that should occur only in extreme and rare circumstances, and we should never grow comfortable with cutting someone lose. Whether we win or lose the battle, we must remain graceful toward all involved. It’s not about us, its about the purpose. We are part of a determined effort to build a road, not a castle.

4. What happens when we fall.

If we want to experience the fulfillment and exhilaration of working for something bigger than ourselves, we better be prepared to have the snot beat out of us on a regular basis. We will fall, but we can’t let those falls destroy us. We have to recover from our falls with increased commitment and resolve to learn from the struggle. The only way we truly lose is to surrender, and we NEVER have to surrender. Sure, we might have to quit a crappy job on occasion, but we should never surrender the pursuit of worthy work.

Find the purposeful where you work and partner with them to build healthy, responsible organizations where everyone can thrive. We are not entitled to that kind of workplace – we are going to have to work hard and fight for it. That fight begins within, by assuming full responsibility for ourselves.

Complacency and hubris are our greatest enemies.

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