I caught this interview with Kaki King on CNN today. I’ve never heard of Kaki King, so I was barely paying attention when she said something that just blew me away:

I play guitar for a living, and this guitar is way smarter than me. I know that, and I say this a lot, but I really mean it from the bottom of my heart. I am a guitar student, and I will be for the rest of my life. There is just too much to learn in a lifetime. There is something beautiful and challenging and humbling about that that I don’t want to let go of.

This is a woman that Rolling Stone magazine named a “Guitar God” in 2006, yet instead of considering herself a master, she embraces the role of life-long learner. Although the art of the music is interdependent on both her and her guitar, she exalts the potential of the instrument over her own strengths and accomplishments.

Gosh, I wish more leaders would view the people they’ve been given the privilege to lead that way. Our attitudes as leaders should be “these employees of mine are way smarter than me. I am a student of the potential of their behavior, and I could spend a lifetime learning how to better partner with them to create an organization where we, our customers, and our community can all thrive. I am humbled by the challenge of what our interdependence can achieve.”

Kaki’s comments about her music remind me that the art of leadership is in mastering the discipline and joy of continual learning. Kaki might disagree, but I think people are more fascinatingly complex than any musical instrument. There is just too much to learn in a lifetime about how to work well with others.

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

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Thoughts, feelings, and motivations comprise an individual’s inner work life. Inner work life manifests in behaviors that matter at work – performance, citizenship, and withdrawal. Inner work life is driven by events at work – events that signify progress, events that support the work itself, and events that support the person doing the work.

Events that support the work itself are second only to the progress principle in their ability to affect the inner work life of folks in your organization. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer use the term catalyst to describe things that facilitate the completion of work and the term inhibitor to describe the absence or negative form of a catalyst.  It’s very important to keep in mind that “catalysts and inhibitors can have an immediate impact on inner work life, even before they could possibly affect the work itself.” (p. 102).

Catalysts and inhibitors are a direct product of an organization’s culture, which “is created largely by the words and actions of leaders, beginning with the organization’s founders.” (p. 108). The three main aspects of culture that shape specific catalyst and inhibitor events at work are (p. 109):

• Consideration for people and their ideas. Do managers at all levels honor the dignity of employees, value their ideas, and serve as examples of civil discourse?
• Coordination. Are systems and procedures (e.g. performance evaluation) designed to facilitate coordination or competition between individuals and groups?
• Communication. Open, honest, and respectful communication is perhaps the most powerful force for sustaining progress, coordinating work, establishing trust, and helping people understand that what they think and do matters.

One of my favorite sayings from Bob Sutton is “the law of crappy systems trumps the law of crappy people.” The most effective way to change the culture of any organization is to change its systems, the way it works. The first and most important change must occur between your ears – a discontinuous change in thinking about your role as a leader and your relationships with your constituents.

Change the way you think, and you will change the way you behave. Change the way you behave, and you will change the way others think and feel about you and ultimately how they behave toward you. Change the way you and your people relate with each other, and you can partner with each other to fix the crappy systems. Continually fix the crappy systems, and you can begin to affect positive change in the culture of your organization.

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

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I love the concept of inner work life from the book “The Progress Principle“. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer describe inner work life as the “perceptions, emotions, and motivations that individuals experience as they react to and make sense of the events of their workday.” (p. 20). Based on the work of Richard Hackman, Ed Lawler III, and Greg Oldham, we’ve known for over 40 years that how folks think and feel about their jobs affects their performance. We can change how folks think, and consequently how they perform, by making improvements to the work that they do.

Inner work life follows a very similar chain of logic. Employees perform to the extent they are motivated to do so. Given that employees know what to do, how to do it, and when to do it, we have a reason to expect that they might choose to perform. Motivation to perform is strongly affected by what an employee thinks and how he or she feels about work. Perceptions can lead to emotions, and emotions can affect perceptions, and both affect motivation.

If you want to affect the motivation of your employees, you have to improve how they think and feel about the organization, the work they do, co-workers, themselves, and you. The choices you make as a manager influence the events of every work day, and it’s workday events that drive employee performance through employee motivation, emotion, and perception.

The fact that you can help improve the performance of your employees by the choices you make as a manager is great news! It’s your responsibility to learn how to partner with your employees to continually improve the work environment. In future posts, I’ll share with you more specific thoughts from Amabile and Kramer on how to avoid negative and promote positive events at work.

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

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There is a difference between employees not speaking up at work because they don’t have anything to say about a specific issue and not speaking up because they fear the consequences of expressing their ideas. Managerial behavior can signal employees that it is unwise to speak up. But even when managers hold positive beliefs about the value of employee voice that manifest in encouraging behavior towards employees, some employees will still be reticent to share information they believe is risky.

The Academy of Management Journal recently published an extremely well done study by James Detert and Amy Edmondson (full citation below) that examined employee taken-for-granted beliefs about when and why speaking up at work is risky or inappropriate.  The authors found that “sometimes unwillingness to speak up is not experienced as intense, discrete fear but rather as a sense of inappropriateness; voice seems risky because it seems wrong or out of place.” (p. 481).

Through a series of four separate studies, they identified the following five beliefs employees can hold about authority figures that can cause them to exhibit self-protective silence:

1.     Negative career consequences of voice: e.g. if you want advancement opportunities in today’s world, you have to be careful about pointing out needs for improvement to those in charge

2.     Don’t embarrass the boss in public: e.g. you should always pass your ideas for improvement by the boss in private first, before you speak up publicly at work.

3.     Don’t bypass the boss upward: e.g. loyalty to your boss means you don’t speak up about problems in front of his or her boss.

4.     Need solid data or solutions (to speak up): e.g. unless you have clear solutions, you shouldn’t speak up about problems.

5.     Presumed target identification: e.g. it is not good to question the way things are done because those who have developed the routines are likely to take it personally.

This research is important because it shows that the boss is not always to blame for organizational silence. Individuals arrive at work with a set of implicit theories about work and authority figures that they learned via past direct and vicarious experiences. The authors conclude “managers appear saddled not only by their own actual behaviors inhibiting voice but also by subordinate beliefs about managers.” (p. 484).

If you want employee voice to become an operational priority, you are going to have to make changes to your selection, training, evaluation, reward, and promotion systems. My advice is to make employee voice an expected, measured, and rewarded behavior. Hire employees that can demonstrate a proven record of coming forward with specific suggestions and solutions at their previous jobs. Never promote to a position of management an employee that in addition to mastering the performance expectations of their assigned job did not also attempt to partner with managers to improve that job.

If you discover you have a manager that stifles employee voice, help them with training but don’t promote them again until they demonstrate that they understand how to encourage employee voice. If you discover you’ve hired an employee with strong self-protective beliefs about the safety of silence, help them engage in behavior at work that directly and specifically challenges those beliefs; otherwise, “it is unlikely that they will revise, set aside, or develop new implicit theories related to speaking up.” (p. 465).

Do you have any suggestions? Please share them in the comment section below!

Full citation: Detert, J.R. & Edmondson, A.C. (2011). Implicit Voice Theories: Taken-For-Granted Rules of Self-Censorship at Work. Academy of Management Journal, 54 (3): 461-488.

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Expectations are the framework of interdependent work relationships. They are built on a foundation of REAL responsibility and secured by the glue of REAL accountability.

We naturally expect our leaders to have expectations of their followers. Not all organizations and leaders engage in formal goal setting, but I would not give you a nickel for a leader that does not communicate clear performance and behavioral expectations, help followers achieve those expectations, reward them when they do and take timely and developmental corrective action when they don’t.

That’s status quo leadership. If you want to practice truly remarkable leadership, you have to take your relationships with people to the next level. This means inviting your folks to have higher expectations of you than you have of them, to share those expectations openly with you and everyone else on the team, and to collectively hold you accountable for those expectations.

Get your team together and ask them all to share openly what they need from you in order to excel at their jobs. You need to hear those expectations, and they need to hear each other’s expectations. When the team hears the full spectrum of things people expect from you as a leader, they will probably realize that you are going to need their help if you are going to have any chance of helping them by meeting those expectations. Openly sharing expectations is one way of moving folks on the team toward assuming even more self-responsibility, which is the foundation of interdependence.

You have to work hard to make it safe for your folks to share their expectations of you openly, because you also have to make it unacceptable for them to not hold you accountable for high expectations. Keep in mind that if you go this route, you will be modeling for them a style of leadership that they probably have not seen often if at all. Be patient, be gracious, but be unequivocally resolute.

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

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I’m not a big fan of acronyms, but I created the acronym REAL – responsibility, expectations, accountability, learning - to try to describe what I think right relationships at work should look like. I recognize that very few of our relationships at work will develop into the goal of interdependent partnerships, but that can never be an excuse for us to not continually strive to prepare ourselves and others to be increasingly more interdependent with and less dependent upon each other.

Assuming full responsibility for your performance and citizenship behaviors at work is the foundation of interdependence. You can never be truly interdependent if your behaviors force others to assume responsibility for you. Here are a few suggestions for how we can master our current responsibilities, improve the jobs that we do, do more than what’s expected by helping others, and care about our purpose:

1. Understand your organization’s purpose, why it exists to do what it does. Don’t expect to find this written in an official document – you might have to think hard about this yourself

2. Understand why you were selected for your position over others

3. Understand how your work contributes to the organization’s final products and services, and why your work matters

4. Understand when and how your performance is measured and how it is evaluated. Make a list of the daily behaviors you need to exhibit to exceed your metrics

5. Invest in your own personal development

6. As you master your current responsibilities, look for ways to improve the work you do. Find the courage to communicate your suggestions in the form of solutions rather than complaints

7. As you master and now improve your current responsibilities, look for ways you can help others with their responsibilities

8. Be trustworthy as well as trusting of others

9. Engage with your work and colleagues instead of waiting to be engaged

10. If you are not satisfied with your work, identify the root cause and try to fix it. Commitment is a powerful driver of performance and citizenship behavior, and you will never fully commit if you are not satisfied with your work.

I’m not suggesting this list is compressive, but it’s a good start. Have I left out anything important? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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Much has been said about how important relationships are for effective leadership. It’s true that leadership requires influential relationships with others to get things done. Yet it’s also true, and maybe even more significant, that it’s only through right relationships with others that we are even able to fully see what really needs to be done. Right relationships are interdependent, covenantal partnerships, not dependent contracts.

Interdependent relationships with courageous others help us better see things for what they really are, rather than we want them to be. Right relationships help leaders discover innovative opportunities, avoid strategic myopia, and select purposeful courses of action that others can support with enthusiasm and authenticity.

Can you see right relationship? Interdependent relationships should be REAL – characterized by responsibility, expectations, accountability, and learning:

• Responsibility: unless and until you assume full responsibility for your own behavior and results, you force others to assume responsibility for you. It is your responsibility to perform your job with ethical distinction and to care about what you do, who you do it with, and who you do it for. Personal responsibility is the foundation of interdependence.
• Expectations: healthy, interdependent relationships are characterized by mutual expectations that every party in the relationship recognizes as legitimate. To be a partner, you must care about the expectations others have of you, and you must have the courage to share with others the expectations you have of them. Expectations provide the framework for interdependence.
• Accountability:  interdependent partners first hold themselves accountable for personal responsibility and reciprocal expectations. They then hold themselves accountable for enabling others to assume responsibility and exceed expectations. Finally, they hold others accountable for performing as promised and for caring about their work. Accountability is the glue that secures interdependence.
• Learning: interdependent relationships change and continuously improve over time as partners learn how they can assume more responsibility for themselves and how they can better enable others to assume the fullness of their roles. Learning and growth are the fulfillment of interdependence.

Can you see yourself in REAL relationships? Being REAL in our relationships with others is a skill we have to develop even if others never invite us to be REAL or treat us the same way. We are responsible for our behavior, not how others respond to our behavior. How well are you doing establishing REAL relationships with others at work?

Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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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.

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Leadership in its fullest expression is relational. Strong relationships are characterized by shared purpose, affective commitment, trust, and interdependence.

Out of necessity, most of our relationships at work are overwhelmingly contractual. Strong systemic drivers of behavior – e.g. selection, training, goal-setting, performance appraisal, and rewards – are both enabled and constrained by their agency. Contractual relationships assume things will go as planned, pressure others to action, and encourage recourse when things go wrong. Contractual relationships foster dependency and constrain intimacy.

Covenant relationships are forged with purposeful promises. All parties in the covenant are motivated to keep their promises not only because they share passion for a cause, but also because they deeply value and appreciate the interdependent posture of the covenant. When promises are strained, covenant encourages restoration instead of recourse. According to Max Depree:

Covenant relationships are open to influence. They fill deep needs and they enable work to have meaning and to be fulfilling. Covenantal relationships reflect unity and grace and poise. They are an expression of the sacred nature of relationships. Covenantal relationships enable corporations to be hospitable to the unusual person and unusual ideas. Covenantal relationships tolerate risk and forgive errors. (p.60).

Interdependent partners each assume full responsibility first for their own performance, then for challenging assumptions and continually improving the systems that define the performance culture of the organization. Covenantal relationships inspire intimacy at work.

What’s keeping you from leading others with relationships characterized more by interdependent covenants and less by contracts? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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