Challenges of Creating a High-Performance Organization
One of the great achievements of capitalism, differentiating it from all earlier forms of organization, was that it created a market for the independent mind. With the birth of capitalism, the question, "What has your birth determined you to be?” was replaced by the question, “What have you made of yourself?” Identity was no longer something you inherited but something you created and were accountable for.
The idea of progress caught people’s imagination. The premise was that intelligence, ingenuity, and enterprise could generate a continuing improvement in the standard of living that new discoveries, new products, new expression of human creativity could without limit keep raising the quality of human existence. Mind is the supreme capital asset. The climax of this process of development is the emergence of an information economy in which material resources count for less and less and knowledge and new ideas counts for almost everything.
Now we live in a global economy characterized by rapid change, accelerating scientific and technological breakthroughs, and an unprecedented level of competitiveness. These developments create demands on our psychological resources. Specifically, these developments ask us to bring a greater capacity for innovation, self-management, and personal responsibility - a higher level of consciousness - to our work activities. This is not just asked at the top. It is asked at every level of a business enterprise, from senior management to first-line supervisor and even to entry-level personal.
How can we establish an organizational culture that support high performance, personal accountability, and creative initiative?
A modern business can no longer run by a few people who think and many people who do what they are told - the traditional military command-and-control model. Today, organizations require not only a higher level of knowledge and skill among all those who participate in the process of production, but also a higher level of independence, self-reliance, self-trust, and capacity to exercise initiative - in a word, self-esteem. This means that in the process of wealth creation, persons with a decent level of self-esteem are now needed in large numbers. Knowledge workers, in particular, can be creative and productive only in an environment that nurtures self-esteem. Creative people see work as a source of joy or a means of self-expression or self-fulfillment, or as a path to self-development.
Today, in a complex business organization that orchestrates the knowledge and skills of financial, marketing, and sales people with engineers, lawyers, system analysts, mathematicians, chemists, physicists, researchers, designers, health care professionals, experts of every kind - what we see is no longer management and workers but an integration of specialists. Each of these specialists has knowledge and expertise not possessed by others in the organization, including the boss. Each is relied on to think, to create, to be innovative, to contribute. Workers have become ‘associates’ in an atmosphere that is becoming increasingly more collegial rather than hierarchical. The more knowledgeable and skilled they are, the greater the contribution to the company they will be able to make. A growth in competence very likely leads to an increase in the experience of self-efficacy. From the point of view of individual, it is obvious that work can be a vehicle for raising self-esteem.
Whereas independence, creativity, self-responsibility, and interpersonal competence are at a high premium, mechanical obedience per se is worth very little. This is one of the chief reasons that, in the economic sphere, self-esteem is now challenged - and needed - far more than at earlier stages of our development.
The challenge is to our creativity, flexibility, speed of responsiveness, ability to make change, ability to think outside the square, ability to get the best out of people. Economically, the challenge is to our innovativeness and, behind that, to our management ability. Psychologically, the challenge is to our self-esteem. Entrepreneurship is by its nature anti-authority. It is anti-status quo. It is always moving in the direction of making what exists obsolete.
Successful organizations know that to remain competitive in world markets they need a steady stream of innovation in products, services, and internal systems that must be planned for as normal part of their operations. Thoughtful individuals know that if they wish to advance in their careers they cannot rest on yesterday’s knowledge and skills. An over attachment to the familiar has become costly and dangerous; it threatens both organizations and individuals with obsolescence.
From the boardroom to the factory floor, work is understood more and more clearly as an expression of thought. As equipment and machinery have become more sophisticated, the knowledge and skill required to operate them has risen accordingly. Employees are anticipated to monitor them, service them, repair them if necessary, anticipate needs, solve problem - in a word, function as self-respecting, self-responsible professionals. Everyone is expected to think - optimally, not minimally. Whether you are CEO or a beginner embarking on your first job, your chief economic strength is your ability to think (integrated, to be sure, with what is now called ‘emotional intelligence’).
Small and medium-sized business have displayed an innovativeness and flexibility - and ability to respond to market changes and opportunities with lightning speed - too often lacking in larger, more cumbersome organizations. In the context of big business, to become entrepreneurial means to learn to think like small business at its most imaginative, swiftness of response, constant alertness to developments that signals new opportunities. This means, among other things, radically reducing bureaucracy and freeing units to operate entrepreneurially.
Self-esteem makes a different, economically as well as personally. Self-esteem is disposition to experience yourself as being competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and of being worthy of happiness. It is made of two components: self-efficacy and self-respect. Self-efficacy is confidence in the efficacy of your mind, in your ability to think; by extension, it is confidence in your ability to learn, make appropriate choices, and respond effectively to change. Self-respect is the experience that success, achievement, fulfillment - happiness - are right and natural for you.
When self-esteem is high, the action dispositions are to move toward life rather than away from it, to move toward consciousness rather than away from it, to treat fact with respect rather than denial, to operate self-responsibly rather than irresponsibly. When self-esteem is low, the action dispositions are the opposite.
Is my way of functioning appropriate to the requirements of my life and well-being?
Our life might be unconsciously organized around the attempt to protect a self-esteem we do not posses what is called a pseudo-self-esteem - perhaps by making ourselves seem right by always making others seem wrong. Nothing is more common than to deny or avoid our fears and self-doubts, thereby preventing them from ever being healed or resolved. If you are fully willing to confront self-esteem problems, to face and accept reality, you create the possibility of change and growth. If you deny your problems, you sentence yourself to being stuck in the very pain you wish to escape.
It is very difficult for people to act beyond who and what they believe themselves to be. They may succeed in doing so for brief of time, but if their self-concept remains unchanged, the gravitational pull of their self-limiting beliefs will draw them back to old, familiar, and less productive ways of functioning.
It is safe to say that how you respond to discomforting realities reveals a great deal about your deepest vision of who you are - how secure or insecure you feel. It also reveals what kind of future you are likely to shape. To be sure, if you were ambitious and imaginative person, with a good level of self-esteem - if you were more conscious, more self-assertive, and more self-responsible than those around you - you would very likely see possibilities for advancement that others did not.
To face life with (reality based) assurance rather than anxiety and self-doubt is to enjoy an inestimable advantage: your judgments and actions are less likely to be distorted and misguided. A tendency to make irrational decisions, as well as fear of making decisions, are both observable consequences of intellectual self-distrust.
A simple example is the fact that analysis of business failure tells us that a common cause is executive’s fear of making decisions. What is fear of making decisions but lack of confidence in one’s mind and judgment? In other words, a problem of self-esteem.
Yet another example pertains to competence at negotiating. A study discloses that whereas people with healthy self-esteem tend to be realistic in their demands, negotiators with poor self-esteem tend to ask for too much or too little.
To face human relationships with a benevolent, non-arrogant sense of your own values is, again, to enjoy an important advantage: self-respect tends to inspire respect from others.
Self-esteem is a vitally important psychological need. The root of that need is the fact that our life and well-being depend on the appropriate exercise of mind - and that process is not automatic. It represents an act of choice.
We are not automatically programmed to focus our attention where it is most needed: we are free to look - or look away.
We are not automatically programmed to be rational just because rationality is urgently required: we are free to think - or avoid thinking.
We are not automatically programmed to confront and consider facts just because it is in our best interest to do so: we have the option or evasion. We control the switch that turns consciousness brighter or dimmer.
As a species we contain within our design a capacity for cognitive self-regulation: that is our free will. This means that whether we learn to operate mentally in such a way as to make ourselves appropriate to life is ultimately a function of our choices.
Do we strife for consciousness or its opposite?
For coherence and clarity or its opposite?
For truth or its opposite?
And through our choices do we make of ourselves a person we can admire - or opposite?
The level of your self-esteem has profound consequences for every aspect of your existence:
how you operate in the workplace,
how you deal with people,
how high you are likely to rise,
how much you are likely to achieve,
and in the personal realm, with whom you are likely to fall in love,
how you interact with your spouse, children, and friends, and what level of personal happiness you attain.
The relationship between self-esteem and achievement is not a simple one. It is safe enough to observe that self-esteem makes the path to achievement easier and more likely. And yet a person of troubled self-esteem but high intelligence, a strong achievement orientation, and a tenacious disposition may manage to accomplish a good deal. What will be missing is the ability to enjoy what has been achieved.
There are significant correlations between healthy self-esteem and a variety of other traits that bear on the capacity for achievement and happiness. Healthy self-esteem correlates with rationality, realism, intuitiveness, creativity, independence, flexibility, ability to manage change, willingness to admit and correct mistakes, benevolence, and cooperativeness. Poor self-esteem correlates with the opposite traits.
Your self-esteem simply represents the context that makes certain behavior more or less likely, more or less natural for you. For example, if you face a difficult problem or challenge from a base of confidence in your mind, chances are you will persevere; persevering, you will not always succeed, but you will succeed more often than you fail; in succeeding, you will reconfirm and reinforce your initial confidence.
On the opposite, if you face a difficult problem or challenge from a base of doubt in your mind’s ability, chances are at some point you will give up or cease to give your best effort, since you feel in your heart the verdict is already in and it against you; giving up, or giving much less than your best, you will fail more often than you succeed - and your failure will reconfirm and reinforce your initial self-doubt. Either way, your self-concept - who and what you believe yourselves to be, such as it is, generate a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If self-esteem is confidence in one’ appropriateness to life, then we can readily understand why men and women of high self-esteem tend to expect success and happiness and why, as a consequence, they are likely to create these conditions for themselves. Men and women of low self-esteem tend to expect defeat and suffering, and their lives are shaped accordingly. No one can understand the course of his or her life who does not understand the power of self-fulfilling prophecies. They are the central dynamic of our existence.
If you suffer a defeat in your work - the business losses money, the strategy fails, the deal falls through, the customer goes elsewhere, the promotion does not happen - but you face that defeat with a solid self-esteem, you tend to manifest resilience; you pick yourself up and get back in the ring. If you suffer defeat and have underdeveloped self-esteem, the danger is that you will fall into blaming, alibiing, scapegoating, denial, passivity, depression, or despair.
It is inevitable in the course of any career that sometimes you make mistakes and sometimes you fail. What is decisive for your future is not the defeat but the state of mind with which you greet it. An astonishing high number of our most successful entrepreneurs have one or more bankruptcies in their past; failure did not stop them.
If you face other human being with a secure sense of your own value, you tend to convey respect and good will, since self-respect is the base of respect for others. You do not tend to fall into gratuitously adversarial relationships. You are not driven to make yourself big by making someone else small. Benevolence feels natural to you. If you face other human beings with a sense of inadequacy or even worthlessness, you tend to bring fear and hostility into your relationships. Benevolence feels impossible to you. You have no time or energy to really encounter the other person: you are too preoccupied with your anxieties. If you expect to be disliked or rejected, you may behave in ways that make your expectations come true. If you expect not to be taken seriously, you may behave in ways that guarantee it.
Thus self-esteem is intimately tied to interpersonal competence - and by competence, in this context, I mean the ability to deal with other human beings in ways that are satisfying both to you and to them. Since most of our goals and purposes in life, both professional and personal, require at some point the cooperation and participation of other people, this is an ability of no small importance.
If you have good self-esteem, your communications are likely to be open, honest, and appropriate because you believe your thoughts have value and therefore you welcome rather than fear clarity.
If you have poor self-esteem, your communications are likely to be muddy, evasive, and inappropriate because of uncertainty about your thoughts and feelings or anxiety about the listener’s response. If I choose to fake the reality of my person, I do so to mislead the consciousness of others and as well as my own. I do so because I feel or believe that who I really am is not acceptable. I value delusion in someone else’s mind above my own knowledge of the truth. The penalty is that I go through life with the tormented sense of being an imposter. This means, among other things, I sentence myself to the anxiety of wondering when I will be found out.
One of the advantages of self-esteem is that you do not tend to escalate small frictions into major problems. You are not easily thrown off your center. You are not touchy - not overly sensitive. You do not quickly fall into defensiveness or reactive hostility. You tend to focus on solutions, on resolutions, rather than on self-justification. This is a great asset in the workplace and in marriage.
If degrees of self-esteem are thought of as being on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 representing optimal self-esteem and 1 representing the lowest imaginable, then if a manager is a 5, who is he or she more likely to hire, a 7 or a 3? a 3. Multiply this example hundreds or thousand times and project the consequences for a business.
Here are few examples of how low self-esteem can manifest itself in the arena of work:
Example 1: A woman received a promotion in her company and is swallowed by panic at the thought of not possibly being able to master the new challenges and responsibilities, “I’m an imposter! I don’t belong here!” she tells herself. Feeling in advance that she is doomed, she is not motivated to give her best. Unconsciously, she begins a pattern of self-sabotage: coming to meetings unprepared, being harsh with staff one minute and solicitous and placating the next, clowning at inappropriate moments, ignoring signals of dissatisfaction from the boss. When she gets fired she tells herself, “I knew it was too good to be true.”
The implicit reasoning here is as follow: If I die by my own hand, at least I am still in control; I spare myself the anxiety of waiting for destruction to come from outside source. The anxious feeling of being out of control is unbearable; I must end it any way I can.
Example 2: The head of a research and development lab is informed that the firm has brought in a brilliant scientist from another company. He immediately translates this to mean that his superiors are dissatisfied with his work, in spite of much evidence to the contrary. He imagines the new man will eventually be appointed head of the department. In a fit of blind rebelliousness, he allows his work to deteriorate. When his lapses are pointed out to him, he lashes out defensively and quits.
When our illusion of self-esteem rests on the fragile support never being challenged, when our insecurity finds evidence of rejection where no rejection exists, it is only a matter of time until our inner time bomb explodes. The form of the explosion is self-destructive behavior.
Example 3: A manager reads a superb idea proposed by a subordinate, feels a sinking sense of humiliation that the idea did not occur to her, imagines being overtaken and surpassed by the subordinate and begin plotting to bury the proposal.
This kind of destructive envy is a product of an impoverished sense of self. Your achievement threatens to expose my emptiness; the world will see - worse, I will see how insignificant I am. Generosity toward the achievement of others is emblematic of self-esteem.
When we are moved primarily by fear, sooner or later we precipitate the very calamity we dread. If we fear condemnation, we behave in ways that ultimately elicit disapproval. Low self-esteem is a continuing hazard to our well-being and long-term effectiveness.
Childhood experiences or more precisely, the way a child interprets his or her experiences tend to lay the foundation for the level of self-esteem that will emerge later in life. Adults that give a child a rational, non-contradictory impression of reality; who relate lovingly, respectfully, and with belief in a child’s competence and worth; who avoid insults, ridicule, and emotional or physical abuse; and who uphold standards and values that inspire the best in a child - such adults can often make the path to healthy self-esteem seem simple and natural. Adults who dealt with a child in the opposite manner can make the path to self-esteem far more difficult and sometimes impossible (without some form of help).
Work with self-esteem may have to begin with healing childhood psychic wounds breaking destructive patterns of behavior, dissolving blocks, or neutralizing anxiety. However, although it can clear the ground, the elimination of negatives does not produce self-esteem. Just as the absence of suffering does not equal the presence of happiness, so the absence of anxiety does not equal the presence of confidence. Self-esteem is built over time by specific practices, specific ways of operating in the world. What nurtures and sustains self-esteem in grown-ups is not how others deal with us but how we ourselves operate in the face of life’s challenges - the choices we make and the action we take.
There are six practices most essential to building self-esteem:
1. The practice of living consciously
- respect for the facts;
- being present to what you are doing while you are doing it;
- seeking and being eagerly open to any information, knowledge, or feedback that bears on your interests, values, goals, and projects;
- seeking to understand not only the world external to self but also your inner world as well, so that you do not act out of self-blindness.
To work at cultivating the kind of awareness is a noble pursuit, even a heroic one, because truth is sometimes frightening or painful, and the temptation to close your eye is sometimes strong.
Between self-esteem and the practices that support it, there is reciprocal causation. This means that the behaviors that generate good self-esteem are also expressions of good self-esteem. Thus living consciously natures and supports self-esteem; and also, the possession of self-esteem inclines you to operate consciously because you experience your mind as efficacious.
2. The practice of self-acceptance
- the willingness to own, experience, and take responsibility for your thoughts, feelings, and actions, without evasion, denial, or disowning - and also without self repudiation;
- giving permission to think your thoughts, experience your emotions, and look at your actions without necessarily liking, endorsing, or condoning them. If you are self-accepting, you do not experience yourself as always on trial, and what this leads to is non-defensiveness and willingness to hear critical feedback or different ideas without becoming hostile and adversarial.
The practice of self-acceptance is the virtue of realism applied to the self. It is your willingness to stand in the presence of your thoughts, feelings, and actions with an attitude that makes approval or disapproval irrelevant: the desire to be aware.
If you practice self-acceptance, you build self-esteem; conversely, self-esteem makes self-acceptance easier because your value is not in doubt or on trial in your mind.
3. The practice of self-responsibly
- realizing that we are the authors of our choices and actions;
- that each of us is responsible for our own life and well-being and for the attainment of our goals;
- that if we need the cooperation of other people to achieve our goals we must offer value in exchange;
- and that the question is not, ‘Who is to blame?’ but always, ‘What needs to be done?’
The natural development of a human being is from dependency to independence, from helplessness to increasing efficacy, from non-responsibility to personal accountability. Self-responsibility is the adult expression of this understanding.
If you live responsibly, you strengthen your self-esteem; and self-esteem inspires self-responsibility because passivity, alibiing, drifting, and dependence feel alien to you and inimical.
4. The practice of self-assertiveness
- being authentic in your dealings with others;
- treating your values and person with decent respect in social contexts;
- refusing to fake the reality of who you are to avoid someone’s disapproval;
- being willing to stand up for yourself and your ideas in appropriate ways in appropriate circumstances.
Self-assertiveness, rationally understood, requires the courage to live your values in reality - to stand up for who you are; not to be so controlled by fear of someone’s disapproval that you twist your true self out of recognizable.
If you are self-assertive, you grow in self-esteem; and self-esteem drives self-assertiveness because you refuse to treat your person or your values with disrespect.
5. The practice of living purposely
The practice of living purposely, as apposed to mentally drifting through life, is essential to any genuine sense of control over your existence. It is your goals and purposes that give your days their focus.
If you live purposely, you nurture self-esteem; and self-esteem expresses itself through that practice because confidence powers the desire to achieve.
This should not be understood to mean that the measure of your worth is your external achievements. The roots of your self-esteem are not your achievements per se but those internally generated practices that make it possible to achieve.
Steel industrialist Andrew Carnegie once stated, “You can take away our factories, take away our trade, our avenues of transportation and our money, leave us nothing but our organization, and in four years we would reestablish ourselves.”
His point was that power lies in the source of wealth, not the wealth; in the cause, not the effect. The same principle applies to the relationship between self-esteem and external achievements.
6. The practice of personal integrity
- living with congruence between what you know, what you profess, and what you do;
- telling the truth, honoring commitment, exemplifying in actions the values you professes to admire;
- dealing with others fairly and benevolently.
When you betray your values, you betray your mind, and self-esteem is an inevitable casualty. If you operate with integrity, you generate self-esteem; and self-esteem inspires integrity because a love affair with yourself is not one you are eager to sacrifice.
In every organization there are people whom others trust and people whom they do not trust. There is no mystery about what creates trust. It is a matter of congruence, that is, of integrity. If integrity is a source of self-esteem, it is also an expression of self-esteem.
A healthy self-esteem offers an invaluable context for effective action in the workplace, the converse is also true: learning and practicing effective action in the workplace can be a discipline leading to higher self-esteem. Work can be a vehicle for personal development.
The primary function of a leader in a business enterprise is to persuasively convey a vision of what the organization is to accomplish, and to inspire and empower all those who work for the organization to make an optimal contribution to the fulfillment of that vision and to experience in doing so that they are acting in alignment with their self-interest. Thus a leader must be a thinker, an inspirer, and a persuader.
The higher the self-esteem of the leader, the more likely it is that he or she can perform this function successfully. A mind that distrusts itself cannot inspire the best in the minds of others. A person who feels undeserving of achievement and success is unlikely to ignite high aspirations in others. Nor can leaders draw forth the best in others if their primary need, arising from their insecurities is to prove themselves right and others wrong, in which case their relationship to others is not inspirational but adversarial.
It is a fallacy to say that a great leader should be egoless. A leader needs an ego sufficiently healthy that it does not perceive itself as on trial in every encounter - not operating out of anxiety and defensiveness so that the leader is free to be task and results-oriented, not oriented toward self-aggrandizement or self-protection. A healthy ego asks, what need to be done? An insecurity ego asks, how do I avoid looking bad?
One of the best ways to work on being a good leader is by working on one’s self-esteem, by applying practices that support self-esteem to the sphere of work and work relationships.
To be effective a leader must be well aligned with reality - open and available to all facts, knowledge, information, data, feedback that bear on the success of the mission of the organization. Openness to fact, pleasant or unpleasant, goes to the heart of what it means to live consciously.
Quote from an interview with Jack Welch of General Electric gave to Harvard Business Review some years ago:
Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion. Above all else, good leaders are open. They go up, down, and around their organization to reach people. They make a religion out of being accessible.
Real communication takes countless hours of eyeball to eyeball, back and forth. It means more listening than talking. The process of achieving mutual understanding and consensus must be absolutely relentless. That’s a real challenge for all of us. There’s still not enough candor in this company. By candor I mean seeing the world as it is rather than as you wish it were. We’ve seen over and over again that business facing market downturn, tougher competition, and more demanding customers inevitably make forecasts that are much too optimistic. This means they don’t take advantage of the opportunities change usually offers. Change isn’t something to fear; it’s an enormous opportunity to reshuffle the deck, to replay the game.
We’ve had managers at GE who couldn’t change, who kept telling us to leave them alone. They wanted to sit back, to keep things the way they were. And that’s just what they did until they and most of their staffs had to go. That’s the lousy part of the job. What’s worse is that we still don’t understand why so many people are incapable of facing reality, of being candid with themselves and others.
What Jack Welch is stressing here is the importance of ‘the sense of reality - the respect for the facts’ and tragedies that result when people resist, avoid, or deny that which clearly implacably, is.
In the last two decades we have seen many examples of once-great companies shrink into anemic versions of their former selves, disappear into mergers, or lose significant market share because their leaders refused to confront the fact that strategies that had once been successful were no longer adaptive to the new realties. They were ruled not by a respect for facts but by their wishes and fears. Rather than respond to clearly apparent changes, they stayed lost in dreams of the good old days.
The first law of self-esteem and the first principle of effective leadership are the same: Thou shalt be aware. Dismissing pertinent realities in the name of short-term comfort is not an acceptable option.
In the professional realm or the personal, any time we choose to confront painful realities that we know need to be addressed because they bear on our values, goals, and projects two results follow: our actions become more appropriate and we grow in self-esteem. We feel more effective because we are more effective.
Leadership begins with the leader possessing a vision, to which he or she is passionately committed, a specific and concrete agenda for actualizing that vision, and an unrelenting focus on results. After that many factors contribute to success or failure. But no factor is more fundamental than the leaders’ degree of openness to reality, respect for reality, and speed of appropriate response to reality.
Nothing is intrinsically irrational about the impulse to pull back from that, which is frightening or painful. All of us have such impulses. But if we have a well-developed sense of reality and a capacity for self-discipline, we recognize that there are circumstances in which it is dangerous to allow fear and pain to have the last word. Sometimes we need to do things that scare us. Sometimes we need to look at things that are painful. If we don’t, the consequences will be bad for us. Understanding this, we know that sometimes all we can do is draw a deep breath and proceed.
If we are mentally blocked and unable to see our way clearly in some area, what can we do to shift to a higher and more powerful level of consciousness? One of the most effective techniques is the sentence completion process. Here are two examples how it can work.
The CEO of an accounting firm raised a problem he described as acutely embarrassing. He said that his business was growing fast and that he needed to hire a brilliant, high-level executive, in effect, a number two person but he was afraid of hiring someone cleverer than himself.
Each morning for two weeks, at the start of his business day he was to open a confidential notebook and write at the top of a fresh page:
If I bring more consciousness to my fear of hiring a brilliant executive . . . . ,
then as quickly as his pen could move over paper, without editing, censoring, or taking time to think, he was to write at least six endings for that sentence stem. He was to repeat this process every day for two weeks.
The problem was solved. He could see through his fears, see their foolish irrelevance, see that by failing to seek out the most brilliant person he could find he was acting against his own interest. At the end of the first week, he said, “the fear and the procrastination felt silly.” His sentence completion included such endings as:
If I bring more consciousness to my fear of hiring a brilliant executive . . . .
- I’d see that the smarter the person I hire, the better off I’ll be.
- I’d see that my fear is an old reaction no longer relevant.
- I’d recognize how much I love and admire competence.
- I’d recognize how starved I am for brains.
- I’d see I have to update my self-concept because this fear is stupid.
- This reaction really feels unworthy of me and I no longer can even hold on to the perspective from which it came.
Sentence completion work is a deceptively simple yet powerful tool for expanding self-awareness, self-understanding, and personal growth, since we experience our own resourcefulness and therefore self-esteem-enhancing.
There is almost no limit to the kinds of problems it can address. If done properly, without self-criticism while one is doing it - and with invention if one gets stuck, to keep the flow unobstructed - the technique triggers spontaneous insights and integrations and connects a person with knowledge and wisdom never made explicit or articulate but residing in the psyche beneath awareness.
The executive continues to do a series of completion for the sentence stem:
If I bring more awareness to the challenges of being an effective leader . . .
- I see that if I play the Lone Ranger, my people are going to feel abandoned by and cut off from me.
- It’s obvious that if I want their best, I’ve got to create more of a relationship with them.
- I’ve got to drop the notion that the only good ideas are mine.
- I’ll control my impatience and listen whether their suggestions and proposal always good to me or not.
- I’ll see that if I really want people’s creative participation, I’ve got to learn to keep my ears open and my mouth shut even when it’s hard as hell to do.
- I’ll face that it’s not enough that I think my people are great, I’ve got to let them know it, and not just with money but also with respect.
He learned to make himself a more effective leader while strengthening his self-esteem by bringing his behavior into alignment with his knowledge.
Integrity is an essential pillar of effective leadership. The reason is the intimate relationship that exists between integrity and the ability to inspire trust.
Studies in leadership clearly show that whereas people can and will perform extraordinary feats for leaders whom they trust, their performance tends to be less impressive when that trust is lacking. It is no mystery how trust is created. It is a matter of congruence between words and actions:
One tells truth. One keeps promises. One honors commitments. One’s behavior manifests one’s professed values. One deals with people fairly and justly.
The essence of what came up with this sentence stem: If I want to be perceived as trustworthy . . . done by a group of executives at a major brokerage houses:
- Tell the truth and make it safe for other to do so.
- Keep promises
- Walk the talk
- Don’t just preach ‘respect for each individual’ but also exemplify it in your behavior.
- Manifest integrity and communicate that nothing less is acceptable.
- Understand that meeting your number is not enough; you must also live your professed value (those values include honesty and integrity).
- Set an example
- Exemplify fairness and even-handedness in all your dealings with people.
When it comes to setting an example, ultimate responsibility necessary falls on the leader. Unfortunately, few company heads understand or appreciate the extent to which they are role models. They do not realize how closely their smallest moves are noted and absorbed by those around them, not necessarily consciously, and reflected via those they influence throughout the organization.
If a leader is perceived to have integrity, a standard is set that others tend to feel drawn to follow. A leader who treats people with respect - associates, subordinates, customers, suppliers, and shareholders - sends a signal of incalculable power, a signal for which no speech or mission statement is a substitute. And conversely, a leader who feels no need to operate with integrity or to be fair and decent in dealings with others also sends a signal that cannot be neutralized by the expression of noble sentiments.
Trust is inspired by consistency and predictability. If we feel we do not know what a leader might do in any particular situation, we cannot feel trust. If someone is sometimes honest and sometimes not, sometimes fair and sometimes not, sometimes values-driven and sometimes not, we may be able to appreciate that person’s other assets such as intelligence, energy, enthusiasm, creativity but we will not feel trust. And when we do not trust, we rarely give our best.
To say it once more: trust requires consistency and predictability. Leadership needs more than an inspiring vision. It needs the passion and enthusiasm to translate that vision into real-world results. For this it needs the passion and enthusiasm of other people. Leaders need to enroll others in the vision and its realization. They do not need to win love, but they do need to win respect and better still would be to win admiration. This is more likely to be achieved by leaders who have first earned their own esteem.
During the 1980s, while CEO of Chrysler, Lee Iacocca persuaded the union to make major financial concession on the grounds that the company was caught in hard times. Then Iacocca turned around and gave himself a gigantic bonus.
What signal was he sending to Chrysler employees?
Was it a signal to inspire higher level of moral behavior or lower level?
Did Iacocca raise the level of trust or the level of cynicism?
Predictably, the next time the union sat down at the bargaining table its representatives were ruthlessly unrelenting in their demands and conceded not an inch; all spirit of cooperation was gone.
A great deal of business activity consists essentially of conversations: conversations between representatives of different institutions, conversations between CEOs and their executives, conversations between managers and people reporting to them, conversations between salespersons and customers, conversations between purchasing specialists and suppliers, conversations between company negotiators and union representatives. All such conversation entail the understanding that people are accountable for what they say, including what they promise to do, and only to the extent that such understanding is honored is business activity possible.
If we understand this, we see that integrity, trust, and character are not peripheral to business but fundamental which means that self-esteem is fundamental. While this truth is relevant at every level for the long-term success of an enterprise, nowhere does it more urgently need to be kept in constant focus than in the office of the CEO, whose job is to set the standard. CEOs may not usually think of themselves as moral teachers, exemplars, or inspirers but they are and they should.
Apart from the general matter of integrity, one of the ways leader generate trust is through the clarity of their communications.
Do they articulate clearly not only the general vision but also a concept of how that vision is to be actualized?
Do they articulate clearly what they are asking for and requiring from their people?
Do they articulate clearly the ethical and philosophical principles they expect to guide the work and the nature of the culture they see as the necessary context for their achievement?
For example, when Larry Bossidy became CEO of AlliedSignal, he helped design a personal development program and put eighty-six thousand employees through it. But also, during his first year, he personally spoke to fifteen thousand people, explaining his vision, helping them to understand markets and market conditions, lecturing, asking questions, arguing, debating, relentlessly pursuing a shared clarity of understanding concerning what AlliedSignal was to achieve. Over a period of six years, he helped increase the market value of his company by 400 percent. He understood that leaders are teachers and that their first obligation is to be clear of how that vision is to be actualized.
Another way leaders inspire trust (and demonstrate integrity) is by the quality of the people with whom they surround themselves. A leader who seeks out the best, most innovative and independent minds to be found, mind who will not be afraid to disagree with the boss and will not be penalized for doing so - and who makes it abundantly clear that their contributions are welcome – sends a strong signal that will reverberate through the entire organization that the focus is not on ‘Who is right?’ but on ‘What is right?’ It is a signal summoning the best in everyone, and thus tends to attract those who have a decent level of self-esteem, which every organization needs, and also to speak to the spark of self-esteem that exists in almost all human beings. Here again we encounter the strong reality-orientation: a concern with what’s true? What needs to be done? What best serves our mission and values? Not rank but reality is given the last word. And when a leader embodies this principle we are witnessing self-esteem in action.
When this reality-orientation is perceived to be consistent and basic to an organization’s culture because a leader exemplifies it, teaches it, insists on it, rewards it, people feel safe, they feel honored and they feel trust. And then they may astonish themselves and others with what they are able to accomplish.
One of the secrets of Motorola’s extraordinary success is that it rewards employees who successfully challenge faulty premises propounded by senior management. James O’Toole (a research professor and is internationally recognized for his work in the areas of corporate culture and leadership) witnessed an incident, when an engineer at Motorola publicly disagreeing with CEO Robert Galvin and promising to shoot his idea down (Galvin started his career at Motorola in 1940. He held the senior officership position in the company from 1959 until Jan. 11, 1990 when he became Chairman of the Executive Committee. He continues to serve as a full time officer of Motorola.). When Galvin gave his laughing approval and saw that O’Toole was astonished by it - O’Toole thought that almost anywhere else the engineer would be thrown out or at least be reprimanded - Galvin said, “Are you kidding? This is how we beat the Japanese.” That is self-esteem made visible in company policy. Think of the level of trust that would already have to exist at Motorola for an employee to speak so freely. No wonder when one thinks of the most admired and innovative companies today, Motorola always figures prominently.
To invite everyone’s feedback does not mean that everyone has equal authority regarding the final decision. As Max DePree, former chairman of Hermann Miller, points out, “Participate management is not democratic. Having a say differs from having a vote.” After all the respectful talking, listening, debating, and interacting are done, someone has to say, “This is what we are going to do.” That’s a leader’s job. The ability of leaders to do this job rests on at least two factors:
The first, obviously, is trust in their own ability to think, choose and make appropriate decisions.
The second, is their ability to manage any desires they may have to be liked or approved that obstruct the perception of what needs to be done or the will to do it.
No leader can be effective who has not learned to manage emotions whether the emotion pertain to a hunger for popularity, inappropriate exhibitionistic impulses, competitiveness with subordinates, defensiveness, anger, or fear and insecurity. Emotions need to be recognized, owned, experienced, and accepted (non-self punitively) but not acted on when to do so conflicts with more important agendas. A leader’s job is to guide the organization to the fulfillment of its mission, and not to indulge in personal catharsis at the expense of this primary commitment.
The leader’s job is to do what he or she honestly thinks is right for the organization. Sometimes this task will test self-esteem. But if, without repression, denial, or disowning, leaders learn to manage and rise above feelings and emotions that may stand in the way - if they place their firsthand judgment of the realities confronting them above all other considerations - they grow in personal stature, grow in self-esteem, as they grow in professional effectiveness. Such a leader becomes a better person and a better executive at the same time.
The ability to operate in this manner presupposes a reasonable level of self-awareness. You cannot successfully manage feelings of which you are ignorant or which you have denied and disowned. On the contrary, such repressed feelings tend to manage you. (This is an extremely powerful tool for emotional freedom and wellness: The Sedona Method: Your Key to Lasting Happiness, Success, Peace and Emotional Well-Being by Hale Dwoskin.)
Self awareness (an aspect of living consciously) is one of the characteristics of effective leaders. Without it they cannot manage themselves; unable to manage themselves, they cannot properly manage others. They will tend to lack the emotional intelligence that is the foundation of interpersonal competence. Without a commitment to self-examination, a leader operates at a severe disadvantage. The willingness to look at yourself dispassionately, at your thoughts, feelings, and actions - moved by desire not to judge or condemn but to be aware, learn, and understand - is both a process that strengthens self-esteem and also one that expresses self-esteem.
Focusing only on your strengths and being blind to your weaknesses does not strengthen self-esteem. You need to be aware of both. No one is equally strong in all respects; if you know what your weaknesses are, you can learn to compensate for them - which is precisely what effective leaders do. Ineffective leaders do not see themselves realistic, do not recognize that they have any shortcomings, and therefore do not think their way through to solutions - they merely resort to denial, blaming, and alibiing.
- It takes a significant measure of self-esteem to generate a vision that is rational, uplifting, and involves stepping into the unknown and persuading others to follow one there.
- It takes a significant measure of self-esteem to embody and uphold a standard of integrity with such unswerving consistency (regardless of the latest crisis) that it becomes the trademark of an entire organization thereby creating an internal culture of trust and mutual regard.
- It takes a significant measure of self-esteem to give away power, to welcome and embrace the talents of others, never to steal their responsibilities, and to be relentless in communicating one’s belief in their potential.
- It takes a significant measure of self-esteem to see oneself - assets and limitations – realistically, and to think strategically about how to transcend shortcomings.
Rarely are such things done easily. They demand courage, energy, perseverance, and commitment.
A great deal is written about the problems of leading people in a company through the trauma of change and anxiety of change as if leaders do not have to confront the same fear and resistance within themselves. The truth is that change can be a problem for leaders no less for followers. And the difficulties with change experienced by employees are often the reflection of difficulties existing in the mind of senior management or the CEO.
A sentence completion exercise such as: If I bring more self-esteem to the resistance to necessary change . . .
- I’d focus on the present and the future, not stayed lost in dreams of the good old days.
- I’d accept how much the world has changed.
- I’d produce a specific agenda to achieving change, not just talk in generalities.
- I’d talk to our people, I’d listen to their fears, I’d let them air their concerns, I’d explain, and talk and talk and talk until I saw they really got it.
- I’d pull this whole issue out of the clouds and make it a crusade.
- I’d admit how much I see and understand but often ignore and don’t use.
- I’d admit how much I’d love to start a new tradition here and not just follow in the old ways.
- I’d pay more attention to the excitement I feel when I actually think of doing this.
- I wouldn’t allow myself to be ruled by fear, nostalgia, and inertia. I’d shake loose and become my own man, even if it’s difficult.
More often than not, problems in an organization reflect attitudes and problems at the most senior level of management and need to be addressed at that level if they are to be resolved. A relatively small amount of corrective action at the top can produce major changes down the line. In any organization, personal responsibility and culture change begins at the top.
The most effective leaders operate at a high level of self-responsibility. They do not waste energy on blaming. They ask,
“Did we err in placing that person in that position?
Did we fail to provide the necessary training?
Where was the mistake made and how can it be corrected?
Is there something I ought to have done differently?”
Singapore Airlines was commonly regarded as one of the best airlines in the world. It was deeply committed to empowering its people, who were encouraged to solve a great many problems on their own authority and without consulting higher-ups. When asked why he did not punish some employees who made errors in the execution of their duties, Chew Choon Seng, who was CEO of Singapore Airlines, said with astonishment,
“Punish them? Why should we have punished them when it was our fault? We believe the task of the leaders in a large company is to articulate the values of the organization, to create a system in which people can be productive, and to explain the goals that the system was to achieve. We also believe that people don’t act maliciously. If we in top management had done those jobs properly - if we had explained adequately the purpose behind employee empowerment - those few errors would not have occurred. That is why we went back to evaluate our own communication skills.”
Such leadership practice of self-responsibility, openness to self-examination, and commitment to taking corrective action is at once a test of self-esteem, a source of strengthening self-esteem, and also an expression of self-esteem.
There is paradox in one of the challenges of leadership. On one hand, effective leaders need confidence in their own judgment, perseverance in their vision even when others do not yet share it, ability to tolerate misunderstanding, opposition, and aloneness, and a passion to fulfill that vision that overcomes difficult obstacles.
On the other hand, they need the realism to recognize that sometimes they can be wrong, that they become stronger, not weaker, by testing their ideas against the ideas of others, by being open to discovering errors in their thinking and being eager to correct them, and by being fully as much the student and learner as the teacher.
The two attitudes represent only a paradox, but not contradiction, because there is no contradictory between confidence in one’s judgment and awareness of one’s fallibility. A self-esteeming mind can easily and comfortably hold these attitudes in appropriate balance. To be open to new information that may require a revision of some of our premises does not mean that we wander around in uncertainty and self-doubt. It is defensiveness, not openness, that reveal insecurity.
A brilliant leader is not someone who produces brilliant solutions. It is someone who inspires other people to produce the brilliant solutions. The design work as leaders includes designing an organization’s policies, strategies, and systems. The essence of design is seeing how the parts fit together to perform as a whole. Designing organization as a whole includes the intangibles and of even the subtler values that knit things together. Good leaders are continually trying to understand the whole.
Although ‘leader as designer’ is neglected today, it touches a chord that goes back thousands of years. To paraphrase Lao Tzu, the bad leader is he who the people despise. The good leader is he who people praise. The great leader is he who the people say, “We did it ourselves.”
Lao Tzu also illuminates part of the reason why design is a neglected part of leadership: little credit goes to designer. The functions of design are rarely visible; they take place behind the scenes. The consequences that appear today are the results of work done long in the past, and work today will show its benefits far in the future. Those who aspire to lead out of a desire to control, or gain fame, or simply to be ‘at the center of the action’ will find little to attract them to the quiet design work of leadership. Those who practice it find deep satisfaction in empowering others and being part of an organization capable of producing results that people truly care about. In fact, they find these rewards more enduring than the power and praise granted to traditional leaders.
The long-term success of a business enterprise requires that it has more leaders at more levels than its competitors. This means that a commitment to creating as many leaders as possible throughout one’s organization is a strategic imperative. Leaders who are secure in the knowledge of their own value are more likely to nurture and support potential leaders rather than feel threatened by them, and to realize that no organization can sustain success without them. The virtue involved is not selflessness but realism – responsibility toward what the situation requires.
As things stand at present, in the world of business self-motivation will have to occupy a higher role. Whoever, on any level, takes responsibility for the success of a task and mobilizes others around what needs to be done is operating as a leader. Such men and women are the spark plugs without which no organization can sustain high performance. This leads us to the question how one creates a culture in which such leaders are likely to arise or more broadly, how one manages work in such a way as to get the best of human brainpower.
With regard to his or her own specialty, each employee knows more than the manager or supervisor. Therefore, independence, self-responsibility, and some measure of creativity are not merely expected of everyone, they are mandatory. There is no other way for the system to work. The older bureaucratic command-and-control pyramid has progressively given way to flatter structures, flexible networks, cross-functional teams, and task forces (combinations of talents coming together for particular projects and then disbanding). This implies an entirely new concept of human relationships in the workplace, with knowledge and competence replacing rank as the voice of authority.
Without the old familiar chains of command, many managers are going through what might be termed a self-esteem crisis: with lines of authority and power no longer clear-cut, they are challenged to find new definitions of their roles, as coach, as facilitator, as support system, rather than as boss. Their need now is to disengage feelings of self-worth from traditional forms of status or from the performance of particular tasks, and to base it instead of their ability to think, to learn, to master new ways of functioning, and to respond appropriately to new realities.
Every change demanding new unfamiliar responses is a challenge to one’s self-esteem. To inspire and facilitate the resourcefulness of others, as their new role demands, managers must first find that resourcefulness within themselves. This means that to be effective they must be willing to confront themselves and work on themselves, work on their personal development, work on their self-esteem. A self-esteem anchored in trust in your mind and its operations is infinitely more reliable than one anchored merely in your status or possession of a particular set of skills.
Today companies have no more important challenge than that of attracting and keeping high-quality people. Right now there is a bad shortage of brains. A business culture that supports and nurtures self-esteem is far more likely to hold bright, talented people than one that does the opposite. Further, an organization whose employees operate at a high level of consciousness, self-acceptance (and acceptance of others), self-responsibility, self-assertiveness, purposefulness, and personal integrity would be an organization of extraordinary empowered human beings.
The policies that support self-esteem are also the policies that make money. The policies that demean self-esteem are the policies that sooner or later cause a company to lose money simply because, when you treat people badly and disrespectfully, you cannot possibly hope to get their best. And in today’s fiercely competitive, rapidly changing global economy, nothing less than their best is good enough.
A modern organization elevates the practice of teamwork to new heights of virtuosity, while simultaneously requiring a core of individualism in each participant because thinking is an activity of an individual mind, and so is self-trust, and so are tenacity, perseverance, and all the other mind-traits that make achievement possible. Competing in an era that demands continuous innovation requires us to harness the brain-power of every individual in the organization.
So, as a primarily sketch of what high self-esteem management might look like, we can observe that the traits just mentioned (practices that support self-esteem) are supported in an organization to the extent that the following conditions are met:
· People feel safe: secure that they will not be ridiculed, demeaned, humiliated, or punished for openness and honesty or for admitting, “I made a mistake” or for saying “I don’t know but I’ll find out.”
· People feel accepted: treated with courtesy, listened to, invited to express thoughts and feelings, dealt with as individuals whose dignity is important - treated, in effect, as volunteers.
· People feel challenged: given assignments that excite, inspire, and test and stretch their abilities.
· People feel recognized: acknowledged for individual talents and achievements, and rewarded monetarily and non-monetarily for extraordinary contributions.
· People receive constructive feedback: they hear how to improve performance in non-demanding ways that stress positives rather than negatives and that build on their strengths.
· People see that innovation is expected of them: their opinions are solicited, their brainstorming is invited, and they see that the development of new and usable ideas is desired of them and welcomed.
· People have easy access to information: not only are they given the information (and resources) they need to do their job properly, they are given information about the wider context of their work - the goals and progress of the company - so that they understand how their activities relate to the organization’s overall mission.
· People have authority appropriate to what they are accountable for: they are encouraged to take initiative, make decisions, and exercise judgment.
· People work with clear-cut and non-contradictory rules and guidelines: they are provided with a structure their intelligence can grasp and count on and they know what is expected of them.
· People are encouraged (required) to solve as many of their own problems as possible: they are expected to resolve issues close to the action rather than pass responsibility for solutions to higher-ups, and they are empowered to do so - without power it is meaningless to talk about responsibility.
· People see that their rewards for success are far greater than penalties for failures: teach that errors and mistakes are opportunities for learning. Ask, “What can you learn from what happened?” The most powerful learning comes from direct experience, through trial and error - through taking an action and seeing the consequences of that action; then taking a new and different action. Develop in yourself greater tolerance for frustration and errors because without them innovation is impossible.
· People are encouraged and rewarded for learning: they are encouraged to participate in internal and external courses and programs that will expand their knowledge and skills.
· People experience congruence between an organization’s professed philosophy and the behavior of its leaders and managers: they see integrity exemplified and they feel motivated to match what they see.
· People experience being treated fairly and justly: they feel their workplace is a rational world they can trust.
· People are able to believe in and take pride in the value of what they produce: they perceive the result of their efforts as genuinely useful, and they perceive their work as worth doing.
To the extent that these conditions are operative in an organization, it will be a place in which people with high self-esteem will want to work. It will also be one in which people of more modest self-esteem will find their self-esteem raised. The conditions that stimulate self-esteem are conditions that stimulate active and creative employee participation - that stimulate innovation.
Recognizing the benefits to the organization that would result, what actions might managers take?
To encourage the practice of operating consciously:
· Provide easy access not only to the information people need to do their job, but also about the wider context in which they work so that they are always operating with the clearest grasp of context possible.
· Create open, interactive environment in which people can share ideas, excitement, and wild fantasies – stimulating everyone’s imagination.
· Offer opportunities for continual learning and upgrading of skills. Stress the value of study and skill acquisition. Send out the signal in as many ways as possible that yours is a learning organization. The organizations that will truly excel in the future will be the organizations that discover how to tap people’s commitment and capacity to learn at all levels in an organization.
· Allow adequate time for ideas to develop and mature, recognizing that minds have their own timetables.
· If someone does superior work or makes excellent decisions, invite him or her to explore how and why it happened. By asking appropriate questions, helps raise the person’s consciousness about what made the achievement possible, and thereby increase the likelihood that others like it will occur in the future.
· If someone does unacceptable work or makes a bad decision, practice the same principle. Invite an exploration of what made the error possible, thus raising the level of consciousness and minimizing the likelihood of a repetition.
· Avoid over-directing, over-observing, and over-reporting. Excessive managing (micromanaging) is the enemy of autonomy and creativity.
· Plan and budget appropriately for innovation. Do not ask for people’s innovative best and then announce there is no money or other resources to implement what they come up with.
· Stretch your people. Assign tasks and projects slightly beyond their known capabilities. Challenge consciousness to grow. Keep handling responsibility down, projecting confidence in people’s ability to think and solve problems on their own.
· Give creative people the opportunity as large a part as possible in overall decision-making, thus engaging and utilizing their minds not only with regard to specific problems but also with regard to long-range plans.
To encourage the practice of operating self-acceptance:
· When you talk with your people, be present to the experience. Make eye contact, listen actively, offer appropriate feedback, give the speaker the experience of being heard and accepted.
· Regardless of whom you are talking to, maintain a tone of respect. Do not permit yourself a condescending, superior, or blaming tone.
· Keep encounters regarding work task centered, not ego centered. Never permit a dispute to deteriorate into a conflict of personalities. The focus need to be reality:
What is the situation?
What does the work requires?
What needs to be done?
· Describe undesirable behavior without blaming. Let someone know if his or her behavior is unacceptable: point out its consequences, communicate the kind of behavior you want instead, and omit character assassination.
· Let your people see that you talk honestly about your feelings: if you hurt or angry or offended, say so straightforwardly and with dignity.
· Recognize and accept differences in individuals. Do not demand that everyone be made from the same mold. Cultivate the ability to identify each person’s unique characteristic, and treat each person as having value in his or her own right. Approach the power inherent in diversity of approach.
· Develop in yourself greater tolerance for frustration and errors because without them innovation is impossible.
· As much as possible, reward success and except failure as a source of learning.
· Find out how you can improve – all the while modeling self-acceptance.
To encourage the practice of self-responsibility:
· Communicate that self-responsibility is expected and create opportunity for it. Give your people space to take the initiative, volunteer ideas, and expand their range of competence.
· Set clear and unequivocal performance standards. Let people understand your none-negotiable expectations regarding the quality of work.
· Elicit from people their understanding of what they are accountable for, so as to assure that their understanding and yours is the same.
· Encourage people who challenge mainstream assumptions - including the assumptions of higher-ups in your organization.
· Teach perseverance. Encourage people to come back to an unsolved problem again and again. With regard to finding solutions, spread the philosophy of ‘If not me, who?’
· Allow as much freedom as possible for individuals to guide their own work and communicate your confidence in their ability to do so appropriately.
· Continuously look for ways to give away power to your people. You can teach self-responsibility without ever mentioning a word.
· Promote on the basis of merit rather than seniority, thus sending out the signal that an individual’s future lies to a significant extent in his or her own hands.
· Communicate that you are interested in solution, not excuses, alibis, or blaming. Publicize and celebrate unusual instances of self-responsibility.
To encourage the practice of self-assertiveness:
· Teach that errors and mistakes are opportunities for learning. What can you learn from what happened? Is a question that builds self-esteem, encourages self-assertiveness, expands consciousness, and promote not repeating mistakes.
· Let’s your people see that it is safe to make mistakes or to say, ‘I don’t know, but I will found out.’ To evoke fear of error or ignorance is to invite deception, inhibition, and an end to self-assertive creativity.
· Let your people see that it’s safe to disagree with you: convey respect for differences of opinion and do not punish dissent.
· Work at changing aspects of the organization’s culture that undermine self-assertiveness and self-esteem.
· Find out what the central interests of your people are and, whatever possible, match tasks and objectives with individual dispositions. Give people an opportunity to do what they enjoy most and do best; build on people’s strengths.
· Aim your people and get out of the way. Let them know you are available if needed but do not impose your presence or involvement gratuitiously. Remember that your business is to inspire, coach, and facilitate, not to cater to any impulses you may have always to be center stage. Remember that the measure of your success is their creative self-assertiveness.
· Encourage people to see problems as challenges to their ingenuity. Self-assertiveness entails pushing back on the boundaries that confine us. Creative perseverance is one of the highest forms of self-assertiveness.
Treat as a challenge to your own creativeness the task of finding new and powerful ways to get this message across.
To encourage the practice of living purposely:
· Ask your people what they would need to feel more in control of their work, then, if possible give it to them.
· Give your people the sources, information, and authority to do what you have asked them to do. Remember that there can be no responsibility without power, and nothing can so undermine purposefulness as assigning the first without giving the second.
· Help your people understand how their work relates to the overall mission of the organization, so that they always operate with a grasp of the wider context.
· Encourage everyone to keep measuring results against stated goals and objectives.
· Remember that innovative behavior can no longer be left to chance. You must explicitly communicate that it is expected. If I were to make innovation my conscious purpose what would I do (or do differently)?
· Teach the gospel of converting goals into purposes. Again, encourage the question, If I were to make the attainment of these objectives my conscious purpose, what would I need to do?
· Arrive at an absolutely clear statement of what the problem or goal is, and encourage people to own the problem and to make its innovative solution their personal mission.
To encourage the practice of integrity:
· Exemplify that which you wish to see in others. Tell the truth. Keep promises. Honor commitments. Let there be perceive congruence between what you profess and what you do, not just with insider but also with everyone you deal with: suppliers, customers, and so on.
· If you make a mistake in your dealings with someone, are unfair or short-tempered, admit it and apologize.
· Let your people see that you are honestly want to know how you affect them, and that you are open to learning and self-correction. Uphold standards of honesty, integrity, and fair dealing and let it be known that failure to honor these values can be grounds for dismissal, even if one has met one’s number.
· By your own choices and actions, show your people the moral behavior you expect of them. Show the world what kind of organization you have. Everyone understands that individuals and companies make mistakes; the question is what they elect to do about those mistakes: own them and correct them – or try to sweep them under the rug.
· Convey in every way possible that your commitment is to operate as a thoroughly moral company, and look for opportunities to reward and publicize unusual instances of ethical behavior in your people.
Think of each employee as a consultant - as someone with his or her own perspective on the organization, its practices and its needs, someone who may have something unique to offer, be it way to cut costs or better serve customers or improve some internal system or adapt existing products to new uses, to fill some unnoticed niche in the marketplace or modify the workplace in such a way as to facilitate and stimulate greater creative interaction among people. Think of the impact on self-esteem and on the motivation to contribute of being treated in this manner.
Rather than dwell on the areas where a worker is weak, find out what he does well, determine the context in which he is able to exercise his positive capabilities and let him do it. Make his shortcomings irrelevant. The function of organization is to make human strength productive and this is accomplished by building on people’s assets. This idea is superb illustration that the practices that serve high performance are also the practices that serve self-esteem and vice versa.
A major step in operating consciously and self-responsibly is the willingness to examine yourself and identify what might the internal obstacles need to be overcome. Your deepest vision of yourself - of what is possible and appropriate to you.
There are many reasons managers may not do their job well. One reason is that they have never been properly trained. Another is that they do not really like managing people, they like managing technology or finance or logistics or anything but human beings. Another is that they lack emotional intelligence, that is, lack of emotional awareness - do not know how to manage their own feelings, are not sensitive to others’ emotion and needs. While not all managerial problems are traceable to self-esteem problems, it is impressive how often they are, in whole or in part.
Some years ago a study was done of 200 top executives in Fortune 500 companies who had suffered some career setback, from missed promotions to business failures. The study identified five fundamental causes. Significantly, none had to do with technical side of the work; as a group of the managers in the study were as technically competent as those who succeeded. The causes all had to do with the human or psychological aspect of their job:
1. The biggest single cause of failure was poor interpersonal skills.
Inability to inspire; poor listening; doesn’t give or receive criticism well; fearful of conflict, therefore avoids confrontation and the raising issues likely to produce agitation.
This describe a person who does not bring respect or benevolence to human encounters; who operates out of fear and insecurity, not out of confidence and respect for facts; and who lack the level of self-awareness that is a prerequisite of dealing effectively with others. With such liabilities, an executive cannot create the climate of respect that is the foundation of high performance among knowledge workers.
2. An inability to change, to let go of strategies that are no longer adaptive
Failure to respond appropriately to the new and unfamiliar. Rigidity is a characteristic of a mind lacks confidence in itself and therefore lacks confidence in its ability to cope with new and unfamiliar challenges. Poor self-esteem clings to the security of the known; high self-esteem sees change as an opportunity and even an adventure. We cannot lead others where we are afraid to go ourselves. An executive who dreads change is not a force for progress in an organization but a force for demoralization and apathy. Instead of inspiring confidence, a fearful executive inspires fear and inertia.
3. A preoccupation with self-aggrandizement or turf-protection at the expense of the needs of the organization.
However rationalized, this represent a betrayal of trust and failure of integrity. It is also a belief that one is not good enough to succeed on objective performance alone.
4. A fear of making decisions and taking action - one of the commonest causes of business failure.
What is this fear but lack of confidence in one’s mind and judgment?
5. Lack of resilience and the ability to rebound from adversity and setbacks.
Disappointments in business (as in life) are inevitable. The level of our self-esteem has a great deal to do with how we are likely to react to them.
The executives who failed to get promoted or who lost their jobs were the ones who in the face of problems did not search for solutions but instead fell into defensiveness, alibiing, and blaming others, or else into depression and passivity. This is typical behavior of people who lack trust in their own resourcefulness.
Sentence stems below invariably stimulate a direct experience of our own resourcefulness and interpersonal effectiveness.
If I bring more consciousness to my dealings with people today . . . it is very common to get endings such as:
- I’d listen more.
- I’d be more sensitive.
- I’d notice how I affect people.
- I’d be a better communicator.
- I think I would be more relaxed, less impatient, and more benevolent.
- I’d notice what works and what doesn’t work when dealing with people.
If I operate with greater self-acceptance today . . . typical endings include:
- I’d be more accepting of others.
- I wouldn’t generate so much heat.
- I’d be calmer.
- Not everything would be such a big deal.
- I’d be kinder.
- Encounters would be more human.
- I’d be more open to listening.
- I’d be less on the defensive.
- I could handle critical feedback better.
If I operate with greater self-responsibly with people today . . . typical endings include:
- I’d take pains to be sure I was understood and not blame others when I wasn’t.
- I’d look at what I am avoiding.
- I’d get more done.
- I’d control my priorities and not let people throw me off for no good reason.
- I’d give up blaming and examine myself more.
- I wouldn’t permit myself alibis.
- I’d carry my own weight and require that others carry theirs.
- I’d stay focus on results.
- I’d be a better team player.
- I wouldn’t expect people to be mind-readers. I’d let them know what I was thinking or expecting or needing.
- I’d pay attention to the quality of my communications.
If I operate more self-assertively with people today . . . typical endings include:
- I’d be more candid.
- I wouldn’t drag my feet about declaring bad news.
- If I didn’t understand, I’d ask questions rather than pretend I knew.
- When I knew something impossible was being asked of me I’d say so on the spot.
- I’d more honest about my feelings.
- If someone wasn’t doing the job that was needed, I’d be faster to react and insist on better performance.
- I’d be clear about my expectations and I’d lay them right out there.
- If I know I need something from the company to do the best job possible, I’d say so, I’d ask for it.
- I wouldn’t be wishy-washy about presenting my ideas at meetings, I’d stand up for them.
If I operate more purposely with people today . . . typical endings include:
- I’d want to know the purpose of any meeting or conversation and I’d try to keep us on track.
- My work would be more focused on results.
- I’d prioritize my time better.
- I’d tell people when they wandered away from the subject.
- I’d encourage my people to stay conscious of their goals and not get distracted.
- I’d stay focused on my job.
- I’d look at everything from the perspective of how it affects long-term goals.
If I bring more integrity to my dealings with people today . . . typical endings include:
- I’d be more careful about the promises I make or the assurances I give.
- I’d think more about what’s fair and not act so much on impulse.
- I’d stand up for my people.
- People would know my word was my bond.
- I’d be a person I could admire more.
- I wouldn’t alibi.
- I’d act on what I know.
- People would have more confidence in me and more trust.
- I wouldn’t go unconscious to escape unpleasantness.
I typically suggest that people work on one stem from Monday through Friday, then move on to the next stem the following week, and so on. That repetition is essential for going deeper into the material, facilitating lasting integration, and simulating changes of behavior. When people elect to experiment with exercises such as these, they are often astonished at how much they know, how much insight and wisdom seems to lie below the surface of awareness. Through sentence completion exercise many people discover how much creative intelligence often lies unused because it was not expected by anyone or because no one believed it was there. The challenge is not so much to teach new management skills that no one has heard of before as it is to liberate what people already know and remove the barriers to their acting on it.
Answering these questions may help us to move forward:
How do I translate these learning into action?
How do I overcome fear?
How do I keep myself on tract?
When we project the conviction that people are capable of far more than they give themselves credit for, we facilitate their activating resources of which they were unaware with the results of improve performance and improved self-esteem.
Change is the ultimate challenge facing business organizations today. And change and its vicissitudes cannot be mastered without a culture of accountability and innovation. This reality generates the need for higher levels of psychological development than were ever needed before so that working on oneself and working on one’s job are not unrelated. Few general observations:
- If we cannot manage ourselves, we are unfit to manage others.
- If we are blind to our own feelings and emotions, we will be blind to the feelings and emotions of others.
- If we do not have the discipline to keep ourselves task-focused, we will not be able to inspire that focus in others.
- If we cannot keep our own spirits up in the face of adversity, we cannot sustain hope and courage in those who look to us for leadership.
- If we are cynical about ourselves, we will be cynical about others and inspire cynicism in them.
- If we do not model self-responsibility, we cannot teach it.
- If we do not exemplify integrity, we cannot inspire it in others.
As an aside about Peter Drucker, when I first read his great classic “Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles,” I was struck by the persuasiveness of his ideas, the thought that kept recurring was: Who are the giants who will put into practice what he is advocating?
Therefore what an honest manager or leader must ask is, “Do my actions embody the principles that I wish to see exemplify in those I manage?
We see the need for responsibility and accountability, the importance of integrity and trust, the imperative of innovation as well as some of the opportunities for growth and development.
Any significant change constitutes a challenge to our confidence in our resourcefulness. The most important change is in the rate of change itself, the fact that change keeps happening faster and faster and that turbulence, not to say chaos, must now be recognized and adapted to as the norm. This is one of the many reasons self-esteem has become so important today.
If you are an executive who carries the responsibility for leading necessary change in your organization, the place to begin is with self-examination, with the question:
Are these parts of me that resist and are in rebellion against this change, even though my mind sees that the change is necessary?
You might even experiment with sentence completion:
One of the bad things about making this change (or these changes) is . . .
Give your reservations a hearing; give them their day in court; articulate them and meditate on them, without self-reproach.
Another mind-clearing sentence stem that is also very useful:
One of the ways I could undermine the changes I am advocating is . . .
In raising the level of your self-awareness, you will increase the likelihood of successfully implementing the changes you are committed to. And you will not be simultaneously engaged in self-sabotage. You will neither be sending contradictory messages to your people nor engaging in contradictory behavior. The discipline of taking yourself through this process raises the level of your consciousness, strengthens your self-esteem, and helps clear the way for you to perform effectively.
It is imperative that the reasons for the changes - their necessity - be made abundantly clear. This may need to be explained not once but many times. Questions need to be treated respectfully and answer patiently, since what you require is not obedience but cooperation.
Just as the new challenges confronting the organization can be framed not as tragedies but as opportunities (which is how change-masters see things), the new responses required of individuals can be understood not as burdens or problems but as vehicle for personal growth. This is the perspective that yields the experience of power in time of turbulence.
If the need to master change is one of the great challenges of the twenty-first century organization, another is to create a culture of self-responsibility and personal accountability. When people operate self-responsibly and accountably, it is a win both for them personally and for the organization that employs them.
First and foremost this point can never be overstated: leaders and managers must exemplify that which they wish to create around them, that which they wish to see in others. This means:
- Being proactive rather than reactive.
- Manifesting a high level of consciousness, focus, and purpose.
- Taking responsibility for every choice, decision, and action without blaming or finding alibis.
- Being fully accountable for all promises and commitments made.
- Being clear on what is and is not within our power.
- Being task focus rather than turf-protecting.
- Being able to bounce back from defeat, setbacks, or adversity and continue moving toward goals, rather than surrendering to despair.
- Demonstrating an unmistakable commitment to facing reality, whether pleasant or unpleasant.
When these traits are present in leaders and managers, the result is much the same as when they are modeled by parents in a family: a context is established in which it is most likely that these traits will be absorbed and exhibited by others. The conclusion is drawn: This is how human beings are to act; this is the norm here; this is what is expected.
Leaders and managers have to think through the policies that will inspire the desired mind-set among employees. Here are just few basics:
· Require clarity concerning what is expected.
This means leaders and manager must be absolutely clear, and see to it that the relevant persons are absolutely clear, about what each individual in an organization is accountable for. Until each person knew what was expected of him or her, there could be no question of appropriate accountability.
· Seek information regarding people’s work goals.
The best people in any organization are always looking to move beyond their job descriptions and, whatever possible, this is an attitude to be nurtured and supported. Give people all the responsibilities they can reasonably handle. Ask more of them and support them in asking more of themselves.
· Be task-centered, not ego centered.
When we keep our encounters focused on reality and the objective needs of the situation, we support a climate of self-responsibility rather than permitting a dispute to deteriorate into a conflict of personalities. The focus should be on: What is the fact? What need to be done? And not on: Whose whishes will prevail - yours or mine? The individual should ask, “What are the reasons for taking this position?” and not, “What is my rank in the organization?”
· Invite feedback on the kind of manager you are.
Let your people see that you are honestly interested in the image you project and how you affect others. Let them know that if they have a grievance against you, you expect them to communicate it as quickly as possible and set an example of open, non-defensive listening.
· Give corrective feedback without blaming.
If someone’s behavior is unacceptable, describe it, point its consequences, including how other people are affected, and spell out the kind of behavior you require instead. Stay focus on fact and avoid character assassination. By keeping the focus on reality and avoiding put-downs or personal attacks, you speak to the self-responsible adult in the other party and discourage an evasive or defensive response.
· Help people experience themselves as the source of their actions and tune them in to the why.
If someone does superior work or makes an excellent decision, invite him or her to explore how and why it happened. Ask appropriate questions to help the person identify what made the achievement possible. As a result, the person doesn’t write off the achievement to luck but experience himself or herself as the responsible causal agent, and you thereby increase the likelihood that the behavior will be repeated.
By the same logic, if someone does unacceptable work or makes a bad decision, practice the same principle, invite an exploration of what caused the error, again stressing responsibility, in this case minimizing the change of a repetition.
· Establish clear and unequivocal performance standards.
Employees need to know a leader’s none-negotiable expectations regarding the quality of this work. They need to know that this is the minimum expected of them.
· Let problems stay with the person who created them.
When someone’s behavior creates a problem, ask him or her to provide solution, if possible. Try to avoid handling down ready-made solution that spares that person from taking a new initiative or developing new ideas. Instead, say,
“Now that we agree on the nature of the problem, what do you propose to do about it?”
Do not deny people the experience of learning from their struggle with this question.
· Focus on finding solution, not blaming.
When things go wrong, the question should not be ‘Whose fault it is?’ but ‘What needs to be done?’
Convey in every way possible that blaming is an irrelevant distraction. The name of the game is results, not accusations.
Ask, “What are your ideas on how this situation can be improved or corrected?
· Give people the resources for self-responsibility.
People cannot be accountable for what you have asked them to do if they are not given the appropriate resources, information, and authority. Remember that there is no responsibility without power. It is demoralizing to give the people the first but not the second.
Picture this: I am your supervisor, and I walk over to you with pencil in hand and tell you to take it. You reach for the pencil, but I won’t let go. So I say, “What is wrong with you? Why can’t I delegate the pencil to you?”
· Remember what your job is.
A great leader is not someone who comes up with brilliant solutions but rather one who inspires his or her people to come up with brilliant solutions. A great leader draws the best in people.
· Work at changing aspects of the organizational culture that thwart or frustrate self-responsibility.
Sometimes outmoded procedures carried over from the command-and-control management model frustrate the self-responsibility that you are promoting. When significant decision-making must be passed up the chain of command, those close to the decision are disempowered and paralyzed. Such policies stifle innovation and creativity, and make personal accountability all but impossible.
· Avoid micromanagement.
Micromanagement is the enemy of autonomy and self-responsibility. If you want people to operate self-responsibly avoid overdirecting, overobserving, overreporting, and overmanaging. Let people know what needs to be done and leave them alone. Let people struggle. Let them take the initiative in asking for help if and when they need it, but do not take the decision out of their hands. Leaders who micromanage inhibit the very traits they need most for the success of the enterprise. Young people learn self-responsibility in part by being trusted; so do men and women in organization. When a leader conveys belief in people’s competence and worth, people are far more likely to rise to the occasion. Do not step in unless it is absolutely necessary.
Delegation without follow-through is abdication. You can never wash your hands of a task Even after you delegate it, you are still responsible for its accomplishment, and monitoring the delegated task is the only practical way for you to ensure a result. Monitoring is not meddling, but means checking to make sure an activity is proceeding in line with expectations.
· Plan and budget innovation.
It is unreasonable to ask for self-responsibility, initiative, innovation, and creativity and then announce that there are no resources to support and implement the contribution people make.
· Find out what people want and need to perform optimally, and provide it.
One of the most useful questions to ask people is, “What do you need to feel more in control of your work?”
· Reward self-responsible behavior.
Reward self-assertiveness, intelligent risk-taking, acts of initiative, unsolicited problem solving, and a strong orientation toward action. Look for opportunities to reward and celebrate it. Let your responses signal ‘That is what we want!’
It will be obvious that every one of these suggestions, aimed at supporting self-responsibility and personal accountability, also supports self-esteem – supports an individual’s experience of competence and worth. Organizations that support self-esteem attract the best people and tend to keep them. There is no mystery as to why. Not if you understand the important of self-esteem to the feeling of personal fulfillment.
Successful business organizations know that to remain competitive in world markets they need a steady stream of innovation in products, services, and internal systems.
One of the most frequently citied sources of work satisfaction among creative, innovative persons is the opportunity to interact with other high-level-knowledge workers who provide challenge and stimulation – as well as the opportunity to pit their minds and energies against those of their counterparts working for competitors.
They tend to posses a high level of imaginativeness, which plays an important role in creative thinking. So time and opportunities to engage in mental play can be important to generating results.
They tend to think outside the box, to ignore conventional or standard ‘sets,’ and to look at things in new and unexpected way which means that an overly conformist (traditional) business culture is deadly to the innovator. Management must learn how to accommodate independent minds by creating an environment in which such people can feel comfortable, valued, appreciated, without ignoring or violating the basic structures and procedures that an organization legitimately requires.
Creative and innovative people tend to notice problems that others have failed to notice and to ask questions others failed to raise. Keeping everyone mission-focused, task focused, and integrity-focused, so that personal feelings of resentment are not allowed to sabotage the larger goals. This is accomplished, first and foremost, by the values management upholds and exemplify.
Creative and innovative people also tend to manifest significant autonomy and independence. They tend to have highly integrative minds and to see connections between seemingly unrelated elements, therefore don’t be in a hurry to dismiss ideas that at first seem strange.
Creative and innovative people tend to be persevering and to be stimulated by the challenges of hard work. So one of the ways to inspire their best is to offer projects that push them to the outer limits of their known abilities and beyond. They have made themselves highly knowledgeable in the field where their creativity and innovativeness finds expression.
Creative and innovative people operate far more by intrinsic than by extrinsic motivation. Growth and achievement needs matter more than praise or monetary rewards (without denying the latter may be important.) Which means: give them freedom, give them resources, give them a stimulating environment – and give them an exciting and inspiring mountain to climb. It is the task of management to create a context in which creativity and innovation can flourish.
Since organization necessarily has its own mission and goals, a delicate balance must be maintained between creative freedom and goals on one hand, and, on the other, the restraints required by the organizations overall agenda. The challenge of finding this balance itself represents an opportunity for creativity and innovation.
There is no serious endeavor, from work to marriage to child-rearing that cannot be approached as a vehicle for personal growth. Thus if you were to choose your work as the arena in which you will cultivate the practice of living consciously, the practice of self-acceptance, the practice of self-responsibly, the practice of self-assertiveness, the practice of living purposely, and the practice of personal integrity - into your life then your work would benefit while you as a human being benefited. You would grow professionally at the same time that you grow personally. Achievement would rise and self-esteem would rise. In this case, work has the potential of being a spiritual discipline – if that is how it is approached.
If a concern to grow in integrity is not a concern of the spirit, I do not know what is. It is also concern with profound ramifications for business success. Soul work is essential to meeting the challenges of the information economy.
In a world in which change is happening all around us, and faster and faster, our openness to change within ourselves, to letting go of irrelevant attachments, to learning and growing as a way of life becomes a personal and professional imperative.
With so many business book quoting famed chairman and CEO of General Electric Jack Welch these days, he made an observation too perfect not to cite in concluding this discussion:
“When the rate of change outside exceeds the rate of change inside the end is in sight.”
‘Inside means two things: inside the organization and inside the individual. In either case, change begins inside an individual mind.
To change we must first change our thinking habits. We must begin with those few basics that affect the way we think. We can greatly change the course of our lives by spending more time and making a greater conscious effort to refine our personal philosophy.
We must keep a watchful eye on the subtle differences between success and failure. We must not allow ourselves to think that the errors do not matter. They do. We must not allow ourselves to assume that a lack of discipline in one small area of our lives will not make a difference. It will. And we must not allow ourselves to believe that we can have all that we want to have and become all that we want to be without making any changes in the way we think about life. We must.
In the course of our life, our values, goals, and ambitions are first conceived in our mind; that is, they exist as data of consciousness, and then - to the extent that our life is successful - are translated into action and objective reality. They became part of the “out there,” of the world that we perceive. They achieve expression and reality in material form. This is the proper and necessary pattern of human existence. To live successfully is to put ourselves into the world, to give expression to our thoughts, values, and goals. Our life is unlived precisely to the extent that this process fails to occur.
To accept the process of struggle as part of life, to accept all of it, even the darkest moments of anguish - that is one of the most important attitudes that differentiates individuals with high self-esteem from individuals with low self-esteem. The wish to avoid fear and pain is not the motive that drives the life of highly evolved men and women. Rather it is the life-force within them thrusting toward its unique form of expression - the actualization of the self. The basic passion in the best leaders is for self-expression. Their desire is to bring ‘who they are’ into the world, into reality. Their work is clearly a vehicle for self-actualization.
Recommended reading:
The Fifth Discipline by PETER M. SENGE
The idea of progress caught people’s imagination. The premise was that intelligence, ingenuity, and enterprise could generate a continuing improvement in the standard of living that new discoveries, new products, new expression of human creativity could without limit keep raising the quality of human existence. Mind is the supreme capital asset. The climax of this process of development is the emergence of an information economy in which material resources count for less and less and knowledge and new ideas counts for almost everything.
Now we live in a global economy characterized by rapid change, accelerating scientific and technological breakthroughs, and an unprecedented level of competitiveness. These developments create demands on our psychological resources. Specifically, these developments ask us to bring a greater capacity for innovation, self-management, and personal responsibility - a higher level of consciousness - to our work activities. This is not just asked at the top. It is asked at every level of a business enterprise, from senior management to first-line supervisor and even to entry-level personal.
How can we establish an organizational culture that support high performance, personal accountability, and creative initiative?
A modern business can no longer run by a few people who think and many people who do what they are told - the traditional military command-and-control model. Today, organizations require not only a higher level of knowledge and skill among all those who participate in the process of production, but also a higher level of independence, self-reliance, self-trust, and capacity to exercise initiative - in a word, self-esteem. This means that in the process of wealth creation, persons with a decent level of self-esteem are now needed in large numbers. Knowledge workers, in particular, can be creative and productive only in an environment that nurtures self-esteem. Creative people see work as a source of joy or a means of self-expression or self-fulfillment, or as a path to self-development.
Today, in a complex business organization that orchestrates the knowledge and skills of financial, marketing, and sales people with engineers, lawyers, system analysts, mathematicians, chemists, physicists, researchers, designers, health care professionals, experts of every kind - what we see is no longer management and workers but an integration of specialists. Each of these specialists has knowledge and expertise not possessed by others in the organization, including the boss. Each is relied on to think, to create, to be innovative, to contribute. Workers have become ‘associates’ in an atmosphere that is becoming increasingly more collegial rather than hierarchical. The more knowledgeable and skilled they are, the greater the contribution to the company they will be able to make. A growth in competence very likely leads to an increase in the experience of self-efficacy. From the point of view of individual, it is obvious that work can be a vehicle for raising self-esteem.
Whereas independence, creativity, self-responsibility, and interpersonal competence are at a high premium, mechanical obedience per se is worth very little. This is one of the chief reasons that, in the economic sphere, self-esteem is now challenged - and needed - far more than at earlier stages of our development.
The challenge is to our creativity, flexibility, speed of responsiveness, ability to make change, ability to think outside the square, ability to get the best out of people. Economically, the challenge is to our innovativeness and, behind that, to our management ability. Psychologically, the challenge is to our self-esteem. Entrepreneurship is by its nature anti-authority. It is anti-status quo. It is always moving in the direction of making what exists obsolete.
Successful organizations know that to remain competitive in world markets they need a steady stream of innovation in products, services, and internal systems that must be planned for as normal part of their operations. Thoughtful individuals know that if they wish to advance in their careers they cannot rest on yesterday’s knowledge and skills. An over attachment to the familiar has become costly and dangerous; it threatens both organizations and individuals with obsolescence.
From the boardroom to the factory floor, work is understood more and more clearly as an expression of thought. As equipment and machinery have become more sophisticated, the knowledge and skill required to operate them has risen accordingly. Employees are anticipated to monitor them, service them, repair them if necessary, anticipate needs, solve problem - in a word, function as self-respecting, self-responsible professionals. Everyone is expected to think - optimally, not minimally. Whether you are CEO or a beginner embarking on your first job, your chief economic strength is your ability to think (integrated, to be sure, with what is now called ‘emotional intelligence’).
Small and medium-sized business have displayed an innovativeness and flexibility - and ability to respond to market changes and opportunities with lightning speed - too often lacking in larger, more cumbersome organizations. In the context of big business, to become entrepreneurial means to learn to think like small business at its most imaginative, swiftness of response, constant alertness to developments that signals new opportunities. This means, among other things, radically reducing bureaucracy and freeing units to operate entrepreneurially.
Self-esteem makes a different, economically as well as personally. Self-esteem is disposition to experience yourself as being competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and of being worthy of happiness. It is made of two components: self-efficacy and self-respect. Self-efficacy is confidence in the efficacy of your mind, in your ability to think; by extension, it is confidence in your ability to learn, make appropriate choices, and respond effectively to change. Self-respect is the experience that success, achievement, fulfillment - happiness - are right and natural for you.
When self-esteem is high, the action dispositions are to move toward life rather than away from it, to move toward consciousness rather than away from it, to treat fact with respect rather than denial, to operate self-responsibly rather than irresponsibly. When self-esteem is low, the action dispositions are the opposite.
Is my way of functioning appropriate to the requirements of my life and well-being?
Our life might be unconsciously organized around the attempt to protect a self-esteem we do not posses what is called a pseudo-self-esteem - perhaps by making ourselves seem right by always making others seem wrong. Nothing is more common than to deny or avoid our fears and self-doubts, thereby preventing them from ever being healed or resolved. If you are fully willing to confront self-esteem problems, to face and accept reality, you create the possibility of change and growth. If you deny your problems, you sentence yourself to being stuck in the very pain you wish to escape.
It is very difficult for people to act beyond who and what they believe themselves to be. They may succeed in doing so for brief of time, but if their self-concept remains unchanged, the gravitational pull of their self-limiting beliefs will draw them back to old, familiar, and less productive ways of functioning.
It is safe to say that how you respond to discomforting realities reveals a great deal about your deepest vision of who you are - how secure or insecure you feel. It also reveals what kind of future you are likely to shape. To be sure, if you were ambitious and imaginative person, with a good level of self-esteem - if you were more conscious, more self-assertive, and more self-responsible than those around you - you would very likely see possibilities for advancement that others did not.
To face life with (reality based) assurance rather than anxiety and self-doubt is to enjoy an inestimable advantage: your judgments and actions are less likely to be distorted and misguided. A tendency to make irrational decisions, as well as fear of making decisions, are both observable consequences of intellectual self-distrust.
A simple example is the fact that analysis of business failure tells us that a common cause is executive’s fear of making decisions. What is fear of making decisions but lack of confidence in one’s mind and judgment? In other words, a problem of self-esteem.
Yet another example pertains to competence at negotiating. A study discloses that whereas people with healthy self-esteem tend to be realistic in their demands, negotiators with poor self-esteem tend to ask for too much or too little.
To face human relationships with a benevolent, non-arrogant sense of your own values is, again, to enjoy an important advantage: self-respect tends to inspire respect from others.
Self-esteem is a vitally important psychological need. The root of that need is the fact that our life and well-being depend on the appropriate exercise of mind - and that process is not automatic. It represents an act of choice.
We are not automatically programmed to focus our attention where it is most needed: we are free to look - or look away.
We are not automatically programmed to be rational just because rationality is urgently required: we are free to think - or avoid thinking.
We are not automatically programmed to confront and consider facts just because it is in our best interest to do so: we have the option or evasion. We control the switch that turns consciousness brighter or dimmer.
As a species we contain within our design a capacity for cognitive self-regulation: that is our free will. This means that whether we learn to operate mentally in such a way as to make ourselves appropriate to life is ultimately a function of our choices.
Do we strife for consciousness or its opposite?
For coherence and clarity or its opposite?
For truth or its opposite?
And through our choices do we make of ourselves a person we can admire - or opposite?
The level of your self-esteem has profound consequences for every aspect of your existence:
how you operate in the workplace,
how you deal with people,
how high you are likely to rise,
how much you are likely to achieve,
and in the personal realm, with whom you are likely to fall in love,
how you interact with your spouse, children, and friends, and what level of personal happiness you attain.
The relationship between self-esteem and achievement is not a simple one. It is safe enough to observe that self-esteem makes the path to achievement easier and more likely. And yet a person of troubled self-esteem but high intelligence, a strong achievement orientation, and a tenacious disposition may manage to accomplish a good deal. What will be missing is the ability to enjoy what has been achieved.
There are significant correlations between healthy self-esteem and a variety of other traits that bear on the capacity for achievement and happiness. Healthy self-esteem correlates with rationality, realism, intuitiveness, creativity, independence, flexibility, ability to manage change, willingness to admit and correct mistakes, benevolence, and cooperativeness. Poor self-esteem correlates with the opposite traits.
Your self-esteem simply represents the context that makes certain behavior more or less likely, more or less natural for you. For example, if you face a difficult problem or challenge from a base of confidence in your mind, chances are you will persevere; persevering, you will not always succeed, but you will succeed more often than you fail; in succeeding, you will reconfirm and reinforce your initial confidence.
On the opposite, if you face a difficult problem or challenge from a base of doubt in your mind’s ability, chances are at some point you will give up or cease to give your best effort, since you feel in your heart the verdict is already in and it against you; giving up, or giving much less than your best, you will fail more often than you succeed - and your failure will reconfirm and reinforce your initial self-doubt. Either way, your self-concept - who and what you believe yourselves to be, such as it is, generate a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If self-esteem is confidence in one’ appropriateness to life, then we can readily understand why men and women of high self-esteem tend to expect success and happiness and why, as a consequence, they are likely to create these conditions for themselves. Men and women of low self-esteem tend to expect defeat and suffering, and their lives are shaped accordingly. No one can understand the course of his or her life who does not understand the power of self-fulfilling prophecies. They are the central dynamic of our existence.
If you suffer a defeat in your work - the business losses money, the strategy fails, the deal falls through, the customer goes elsewhere, the promotion does not happen - but you face that defeat with a solid self-esteem, you tend to manifest resilience; you pick yourself up and get back in the ring. If you suffer defeat and have underdeveloped self-esteem, the danger is that you will fall into blaming, alibiing, scapegoating, denial, passivity, depression, or despair.
It is inevitable in the course of any career that sometimes you make mistakes and sometimes you fail. What is decisive for your future is not the defeat but the state of mind with which you greet it. An astonishing high number of our most successful entrepreneurs have one or more bankruptcies in their past; failure did not stop them.
If you face other human being with a secure sense of your own value, you tend to convey respect and good will, since self-respect is the base of respect for others. You do not tend to fall into gratuitously adversarial relationships. You are not driven to make yourself big by making someone else small. Benevolence feels natural to you. If you face other human beings with a sense of inadequacy or even worthlessness, you tend to bring fear and hostility into your relationships. Benevolence feels impossible to you. You have no time or energy to really encounter the other person: you are too preoccupied with your anxieties. If you expect to be disliked or rejected, you may behave in ways that make your expectations come true. If you expect not to be taken seriously, you may behave in ways that guarantee it.
Thus self-esteem is intimately tied to interpersonal competence - and by competence, in this context, I mean the ability to deal with other human beings in ways that are satisfying both to you and to them. Since most of our goals and purposes in life, both professional and personal, require at some point the cooperation and participation of other people, this is an ability of no small importance.
If you have good self-esteem, your communications are likely to be open, honest, and appropriate because you believe your thoughts have value and therefore you welcome rather than fear clarity.
If you have poor self-esteem, your communications are likely to be muddy, evasive, and inappropriate because of uncertainty about your thoughts and feelings or anxiety about the listener’s response. If I choose to fake the reality of my person, I do so to mislead the consciousness of others and as well as my own. I do so because I feel or believe that who I really am is not acceptable. I value delusion in someone else’s mind above my own knowledge of the truth. The penalty is that I go through life with the tormented sense of being an imposter. This means, among other things, I sentence myself to the anxiety of wondering when I will be found out.
One of the advantages of self-esteem is that you do not tend to escalate small frictions into major problems. You are not easily thrown off your center. You are not touchy - not overly sensitive. You do not quickly fall into defensiveness or reactive hostility. You tend to focus on solutions, on resolutions, rather than on self-justification. This is a great asset in the workplace and in marriage.
If degrees of self-esteem are thought of as being on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 representing optimal self-esteem and 1 representing the lowest imaginable, then if a manager is a 5, who is he or she more likely to hire, a 7 or a 3? a 3. Multiply this example hundreds or thousand times and project the consequences for a business.
Here are few examples of how low self-esteem can manifest itself in the arena of work:
Example 1: A woman received a promotion in her company and is swallowed by panic at the thought of not possibly being able to master the new challenges and responsibilities, “I’m an imposter! I don’t belong here!” she tells herself. Feeling in advance that she is doomed, she is not motivated to give her best. Unconsciously, she begins a pattern of self-sabotage: coming to meetings unprepared, being harsh with staff one minute and solicitous and placating the next, clowning at inappropriate moments, ignoring signals of dissatisfaction from the boss. When she gets fired she tells herself, “I knew it was too good to be true.”
The implicit reasoning here is as follow: If I die by my own hand, at least I am still in control; I spare myself the anxiety of waiting for destruction to come from outside source. The anxious feeling of being out of control is unbearable; I must end it any way I can.
Example 2: The head of a research and development lab is informed that the firm has brought in a brilliant scientist from another company. He immediately translates this to mean that his superiors are dissatisfied with his work, in spite of much evidence to the contrary. He imagines the new man will eventually be appointed head of the department. In a fit of blind rebelliousness, he allows his work to deteriorate. When his lapses are pointed out to him, he lashes out defensively and quits.
When our illusion of self-esteem rests on the fragile support never being challenged, when our insecurity finds evidence of rejection where no rejection exists, it is only a matter of time until our inner time bomb explodes. The form of the explosion is self-destructive behavior.
Example 3: A manager reads a superb idea proposed by a subordinate, feels a sinking sense of humiliation that the idea did not occur to her, imagines being overtaken and surpassed by the subordinate and begin plotting to bury the proposal.
This kind of destructive envy is a product of an impoverished sense of self. Your achievement threatens to expose my emptiness; the world will see - worse, I will see how insignificant I am. Generosity toward the achievement of others is emblematic of self-esteem.
When we are moved primarily by fear, sooner or later we precipitate the very calamity we dread. If we fear condemnation, we behave in ways that ultimately elicit disapproval. Low self-esteem is a continuing hazard to our well-being and long-term effectiveness.
Childhood experiences or more precisely, the way a child interprets his or her experiences tend to lay the foundation for the level of self-esteem that will emerge later in life. Adults that give a child a rational, non-contradictory impression of reality; who relate lovingly, respectfully, and with belief in a child’s competence and worth; who avoid insults, ridicule, and emotional or physical abuse; and who uphold standards and values that inspire the best in a child - such adults can often make the path to healthy self-esteem seem simple and natural. Adults who dealt with a child in the opposite manner can make the path to self-esteem far more difficult and sometimes impossible (without some form of help).
Work with self-esteem may have to begin with healing childhood psychic wounds breaking destructive patterns of behavior, dissolving blocks, or neutralizing anxiety. However, although it can clear the ground, the elimination of negatives does not produce self-esteem. Just as the absence of suffering does not equal the presence of happiness, so the absence of anxiety does not equal the presence of confidence. Self-esteem is built over time by specific practices, specific ways of operating in the world. What nurtures and sustains self-esteem in grown-ups is not how others deal with us but how we ourselves operate in the face of life’s challenges - the choices we make and the action we take.
There are six practices most essential to building self-esteem:
1. The practice of living consciously
- respect for the facts;
- being present to what you are doing while you are doing it;
- seeking and being eagerly open to any information, knowledge, or feedback that bears on your interests, values, goals, and projects;
- seeking to understand not only the world external to self but also your inner world as well, so that you do not act out of self-blindness.
To work at cultivating the kind of awareness is a noble pursuit, even a heroic one, because truth is sometimes frightening or painful, and the temptation to close your eye is sometimes strong.
Between self-esteem and the practices that support it, there is reciprocal causation. This means that the behaviors that generate good self-esteem are also expressions of good self-esteem. Thus living consciously natures and supports self-esteem; and also, the possession of self-esteem inclines you to operate consciously because you experience your mind as efficacious.
2. The practice of self-acceptance
- the willingness to own, experience, and take responsibility for your thoughts, feelings, and actions, without evasion, denial, or disowning - and also without self repudiation;
- giving permission to think your thoughts, experience your emotions, and look at your actions without necessarily liking, endorsing, or condoning them. If you are self-accepting, you do not experience yourself as always on trial, and what this leads to is non-defensiveness and willingness to hear critical feedback or different ideas without becoming hostile and adversarial.
The practice of self-acceptance is the virtue of realism applied to the self. It is your willingness to stand in the presence of your thoughts, feelings, and actions with an attitude that makes approval or disapproval irrelevant: the desire to be aware.
If you practice self-acceptance, you build self-esteem; conversely, self-esteem makes self-acceptance easier because your value is not in doubt or on trial in your mind.
3. The practice of self-responsibly
- realizing that we are the authors of our choices and actions;
- that each of us is responsible for our own life and well-being and for the attainment of our goals;
- that if we need the cooperation of other people to achieve our goals we must offer value in exchange;
- and that the question is not, ‘Who is to blame?’ but always, ‘What needs to be done?’
The natural development of a human being is from dependency to independence, from helplessness to increasing efficacy, from non-responsibility to personal accountability. Self-responsibility is the adult expression of this understanding.
If you live responsibly, you strengthen your self-esteem; and self-esteem inspires self-responsibility because passivity, alibiing, drifting, and dependence feel alien to you and inimical.
4. The practice of self-assertiveness
- being authentic in your dealings with others;
- treating your values and person with decent respect in social contexts;
- refusing to fake the reality of who you are to avoid someone’s disapproval;
- being willing to stand up for yourself and your ideas in appropriate ways in appropriate circumstances.
Self-assertiveness, rationally understood, requires the courage to live your values in reality - to stand up for who you are; not to be so controlled by fear of someone’s disapproval that you twist your true self out of recognizable.
If you are self-assertive, you grow in self-esteem; and self-esteem drives self-assertiveness because you refuse to treat your person or your values with disrespect.
5. The practice of living purposely
The practice of living purposely, as apposed to mentally drifting through life, is essential to any genuine sense of control over your existence. It is your goals and purposes that give your days their focus.
If you live purposely, you nurture self-esteem; and self-esteem expresses itself through that practice because confidence powers the desire to achieve.
This should not be understood to mean that the measure of your worth is your external achievements. The roots of your self-esteem are not your achievements per se but those internally generated practices that make it possible to achieve.
Steel industrialist Andrew Carnegie once stated, “You can take away our factories, take away our trade, our avenues of transportation and our money, leave us nothing but our organization, and in four years we would reestablish ourselves.”
His point was that power lies in the source of wealth, not the wealth; in the cause, not the effect. The same principle applies to the relationship between self-esteem and external achievements.
6. The practice of personal integrity
- living with congruence between what you know, what you profess, and what you do;
- telling the truth, honoring commitment, exemplifying in actions the values you professes to admire;
- dealing with others fairly and benevolently.
When you betray your values, you betray your mind, and self-esteem is an inevitable casualty. If you operate with integrity, you generate self-esteem; and self-esteem inspires integrity because a love affair with yourself is not one you are eager to sacrifice.
In every organization there are people whom others trust and people whom they do not trust. There is no mystery about what creates trust. It is a matter of congruence, that is, of integrity. If integrity is a source of self-esteem, it is also an expression of self-esteem.
A healthy self-esteem offers an invaluable context for effective action in the workplace, the converse is also true: learning and practicing effective action in the workplace can be a discipline leading to higher self-esteem. Work can be a vehicle for personal development.
The primary function of a leader in a business enterprise is to persuasively convey a vision of what the organization is to accomplish, and to inspire and empower all those who work for the organization to make an optimal contribution to the fulfillment of that vision and to experience in doing so that they are acting in alignment with their self-interest. Thus a leader must be a thinker, an inspirer, and a persuader.
The higher the self-esteem of the leader, the more likely it is that he or she can perform this function successfully. A mind that distrusts itself cannot inspire the best in the minds of others. A person who feels undeserving of achievement and success is unlikely to ignite high aspirations in others. Nor can leaders draw forth the best in others if their primary need, arising from their insecurities is to prove themselves right and others wrong, in which case their relationship to others is not inspirational but adversarial.
It is a fallacy to say that a great leader should be egoless. A leader needs an ego sufficiently healthy that it does not perceive itself as on trial in every encounter - not operating out of anxiety and defensiveness so that the leader is free to be task and results-oriented, not oriented toward self-aggrandizement or self-protection. A healthy ego asks, what need to be done? An insecurity ego asks, how do I avoid looking bad?
One of the best ways to work on being a good leader is by working on one’s self-esteem, by applying practices that support self-esteem to the sphere of work and work relationships.
To be effective a leader must be well aligned with reality - open and available to all facts, knowledge, information, data, feedback that bear on the success of the mission of the organization. Openness to fact, pleasant or unpleasant, goes to the heart of what it means to live consciously.
Quote from an interview with Jack Welch of General Electric gave to Harvard Business Review some years ago:
Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion. Above all else, good leaders are open. They go up, down, and around their organization to reach people. They make a religion out of being accessible.
Real communication takes countless hours of eyeball to eyeball, back and forth. It means more listening than talking. The process of achieving mutual understanding and consensus must be absolutely relentless. That’s a real challenge for all of us. There’s still not enough candor in this company. By candor I mean seeing the world as it is rather than as you wish it were. We’ve seen over and over again that business facing market downturn, tougher competition, and more demanding customers inevitably make forecasts that are much too optimistic. This means they don’t take advantage of the opportunities change usually offers. Change isn’t something to fear; it’s an enormous opportunity to reshuffle the deck, to replay the game.
We’ve had managers at GE who couldn’t change, who kept telling us to leave them alone. They wanted to sit back, to keep things the way they were. And that’s just what they did until they and most of their staffs had to go. That’s the lousy part of the job. What’s worse is that we still don’t understand why so many people are incapable of facing reality, of being candid with themselves and others.
What Jack Welch is stressing here is the importance of ‘the sense of reality - the respect for the facts’ and tragedies that result when people resist, avoid, or deny that which clearly implacably, is.
In the last two decades we have seen many examples of once-great companies shrink into anemic versions of their former selves, disappear into mergers, or lose significant market share because their leaders refused to confront the fact that strategies that had once been successful were no longer adaptive to the new realties. They were ruled not by a respect for facts but by their wishes and fears. Rather than respond to clearly apparent changes, they stayed lost in dreams of the good old days.
The first law of self-esteem and the first principle of effective leadership are the same: Thou shalt be aware. Dismissing pertinent realities in the name of short-term comfort is not an acceptable option.
In the professional realm or the personal, any time we choose to confront painful realities that we know need to be addressed because they bear on our values, goals, and projects two results follow: our actions become more appropriate and we grow in self-esteem. We feel more effective because we are more effective.
Leadership begins with the leader possessing a vision, to which he or she is passionately committed, a specific and concrete agenda for actualizing that vision, and an unrelenting focus on results. After that many factors contribute to success or failure. But no factor is more fundamental than the leaders’ degree of openness to reality, respect for reality, and speed of appropriate response to reality.
Nothing is intrinsically irrational about the impulse to pull back from that, which is frightening or painful. All of us have such impulses. But if we have a well-developed sense of reality and a capacity for self-discipline, we recognize that there are circumstances in which it is dangerous to allow fear and pain to have the last word. Sometimes we need to do things that scare us. Sometimes we need to look at things that are painful. If we don’t, the consequences will be bad for us. Understanding this, we know that sometimes all we can do is draw a deep breath and proceed.
If we are mentally blocked and unable to see our way clearly in some area, what can we do to shift to a higher and more powerful level of consciousness? One of the most effective techniques is the sentence completion process. Here are two examples how it can work.
The CEO of an accounting firm raised a problem he described as acutely embarrassing. He said that his business was growing fast and that he needed to hire a brilliant, high-level executive, in effect, a number two person but he was afraid of hiring someone cleverer than himself.
Each morning for two weeks, at the start of his business day he was to open a confidential notebook and write at the top of a fresh page:
If I bring more consciousness to my fear of hiring a brilliant executive . . . . ,
then as quickly as his pen could move over paper, without editing, censoring, or taking time to think, he was to write at least six endings for that sentence stem. He was to repeat this process every day for two weeks.
The problem was solved. He could see through his fears, see their foolish irrelevance, see that by failing to seek out the most brilliant person he could find he was acting against his own interest. At the end of the first week, he said, “the fear and the procrastination felt silly.” His sentence completion included such endings as:
If I bring more consciousness to my fear of hiring a brilliant executive . . . .
- I’d see that the smarter the person I hire, the better off I’ll be.
- I’d see that my fear is an old reaction no longer relevant.
- I’d recognize how much I love and admire competence.
- I’d recognize how starved I am for brains.
- I’d see I have to update my self-concept because this fear is stupid.
- This reaction really feels unworthy of me and I no longer can even hold on to the perspective from which it came.
Sentence completion work is a deceptively simple yet powerful tool for expanding self-awareness, self-understanding, and personal growth, since we experience our own resourcefulness and therefore self-esteem-enhancing.
There is almost no limit to the kinds of problems it can address. If done properly, without self-criticism while one is doing it - and with invention if one gets stuck, to keep the flow unobstructed - the technique triggers spontaneous insights and integrations and connects a person with knowledge and wisdom never made explicit or articulate but residing in the psyche beneath awareness.
The executive continues to do a series of completion for the sentence stem:
If I bring more awareness to the challenges of being an effective leader . . .
- I see that if I play the Lone Ranger, my people are going to feel abandoned by and cut off from me.
- It’s obvious that if I want their best, I’ve got to create more of a relationship with them.
- I’ve got to drop the notion that the only good ideas are mine.
- I’ll control my impatience and listen whether their suggestions and proposal always good to me or not.
- I’ll see that if I really want people’s creative participation, I’ve got to learn to keep my ears open and my mouth shut even when it’s hard as hell to do.
- I’ll face that it’s not enough that I think my people are great, I’ve got to let them know it, and not just with money but also with respect.
He learned to make himself a more effective leader while strengthening his self-esteem by bringing his behavior into alignment with his knowledge.
Integrity is an essential pillar of effective leadership. The reason is the intimate relationship that exists between integrity and the ability to inspire trust.
Studies in leadership clearly show that whereas people can and will perform extraordinary feats for leaders whom they trust, their performance tends to be less impressive when that trust is lacking. It is no mystery how trust is created. It is a matter of congruence between words and actions:
One tells truth. One keeps promises. One honors commitments. One’s behavior manifests one’s professed values. One deals with people fairly and justly.
The essence of what came up with this sentence stem: If I want to be perceived as trustworthy . . . done by a group of executives at a major brokerage houses:
- Tell the truth and make it safe for other to do so.
- Keep promises
- Walk the talk
- Don’t just preach ‘respect for each individual’ but also exemplify it in your behavior.
- Manifest integrity and communicate that nothing less is acceptable.
- Understand that meeting your number is not enough; you must also live your professed value (those values include honesty and integrity).
- Set an example
- Exemplify fairness and even-handedness in all your dealings with people.
When it comes to setting an example, ultimate responsibility necessary falls on the leader. Unfortunately, few company heads understand or appreciate the extent to which they are role models. They do not realize how closely their smallest moves are noted and absorbed by those around them, not necessarily consciously, and reflected via those they influence throughout the organization.
If a leader is perceived to have integrity, a standard is set that others tend to feel drawn to follow. A leader who treats people with respect - associates, subordinates, customers, suppliers, and shareholders - sends a signal of incalculable power, a signal for which no speech or mission statement is a substitute. And conversely, a leader who feels no need to operate with integrity or to be fair and decent in dealings with others also sends a signal that cannot be neutralized by the expression of noble sentiments.
Trust is inspired by consistency and predictability. If we feel we do not know what a leader might do in any particular situation, we cannot feel trust. If someone is sometimes honest and sometimes not, sometimes fair and sometimes not, sometimes values-driven and sometimes not, we may be able to appreciate that person’s other assets such as intelligence, energy, enthusiasm, creativity but we will not feel trust. And when we do not trust, we rarely give our best.
To say it once more: trust requires consistency and predictability. Leadership needs more than an inspiring vision. It needs the passion and enthusiasm to translate that vision into real-world results. For this it needs the passion and enthusiasm of other people. Leaders need to enroll others in the vision and its realization. They do not need to win love, but they do need to win respect and better still would be to win admiration. This is more likely to be achieved by leaders who have first earned their own esteem.
During the 1980s, while CEO of Chrysler, Lee Iacocca persuaded the union to make major financial concession on the grounds that the company was caught in hard times. Then Iacocca turned around and gave himself a gigantic bonus.
What signal was he sending to Chrysler employees?
Was it a signal to inspire higher level of moral behavior or lower level?
Did Iacocca raise the level of trust or the level of cynicism?
Predictably, the next time the union sat down at the bargaining table its representatives were ruthlessly unrelenting in their demands and conceded not an inch; all spirit of cooperation was gone.
A great deal of business activity consists essentially of conversations: conversations between representatives of different institutions, conversations between CEOs and their executives, conversations between managers and people reporting to them, conversations between salespersons and customers, conversations between purchasing specialists and suppliers, conversations between company negotiators and union representatives. All such conversation entail the understanding that people are accountable for what they say, including what they promise to do, and only to the extent that such understanding is honored is business activity possible.
If we understand this, we see that integrity, trust, and character are not peripheral to business but fundamental which means that self-esteem is fundamental. While this truth is relevant at every level for the long-term success of an enterprise, nowhere does it more urgently need to be kept in constant focus than in the office of the CEO, whose job is to set the standard. CEOs may not usually think of themselves as moral teachers, exemplars, or inspirers but they are and they should.
Apart from the general matter of integrity, one of the ways leader generate trust is through the clarity of their communications.
Do they articulate clearly not only the general vision but also a concept of how that vision is to be actualized?
Do they articulate clearly what they are asking for and requiring from their people?
Do they articulate clearly the ethical and philosophical principles they expect to guide the work and the nature of the culture they see as the necessary context for their achievement?
For example, when Larry Bossidy became CEO of AlliedSignal, he helped design a personal development program and put eighty-six thousand employees through it. But also, during his first year, he personally spoke to fifteen thousand people, explaining his vision, helping them to understand markets and market conditions, lecturing, asking questions, arguing, debating, relentlessly pursuing a shared clarity of understanding concerning what AlliedSignal was to achieve. Over a period of six years, he helped increase the market value of his company by 400 percent. He understood that leaders are teachers and that their first obligation is to be clear of how that vision is to be actualized.
Another way leaders inspire trust (and demonstrate integrity) is by the quality of the people with whom they surround themselves. A leader who seeks out the best, most innovative and independent minds to be found, mind who will not be afraid to disagree with the boss and will not be penalized for doing so - and who makes it abundantly clear that their contributions are welcome – sends a strong signal that will reverberate through the entire organization that the focus is not on ‘Who is right?’ but on ‘What is right?’ It is a signal summoning the best in everyone, and thus tends to attract those who have a decent level of self-esteem, which every organization needs, and also to speak to the spark of self-esteem that exists in almost all human beings. Here again we encounter the strong reality-orientation: a concern with what’s true? What needs to be done? What best serves our mission and values? Not rank but reality is given the last word. And when a leader embodies this principle we are witnessing self-esteem in action.
When this reality-orientation is perceived to be consistent and basic to an organization’s culture because a leader exemplifies it, teaches it, insists on it, rewards it, people feel safe, they feel honored and they feel trust. And then they may astonish themselves and others with what they are able to accomplish.
One of the secrets of Motorola’s extraordinary success is that it rewards employees who successfully challenge faulty premises propounded by senior management. James O’Toole (a research professor and is internationally recognized for his work in the areas of corporate culture and leadership) witnessed an incident, when an engineer at Motorola publicly disagreeing with CEO Robert Galvin and promising to shoot his idea down (Galvin started his career at Motorola in 1940. He held the senior officership position in the company from 1959 until Jan. 11, 1990 when he became Chairman of the Executive Committee. He continues to serve as a full time officer of Motorola.). When Galvin gave his laughing approval and saw that O’Toole was astonished by it - O’Toole thought that almost anywhere else the engineer would be thrown out or at least be reprimanded - Galvin said, “Are you kidding? This is how we beat the Japanese.” That is self-esteem made visible in company policy. Think of the level of trust that would already have to exist at Motorola for an employee to speak so freely. No wonder when one thinks of the most admired and innovative companies today, Motorola always figures prominently.
To invite everyone’s feedback does not mean that everyone has equal authority regarding the final decision. As Max DePree, former chairman of Hermann Miller, points out, “Participate management is not democratic. Having a say differs from having a vote.” After all the respectful talking, listening, debating, and interacting are done, someone has to say, “This is what we are going to do.” That’s a leader’s job. The ability of leaders to do this job rests on at least two factors:
The first, obviously, is trust in their own ability to think, choose and make appropriate decisions.
The second, is their ability to manage any desires they may have to be liked or approved that obstruct the perception of what needs to be done or the will to do it.
No leader can be effective who has not learned to manage emotions whether the emotion pertain to a hunger for popularity, inappropriate exhibitionistic impulses, competitiveness with subordinates, defensiveness, anger, or fear and insecurity. Emotions need to be recognized, owned, experienced, and accepted (non-self punitively) but not acted on when to do so conflicts with more important agendas. A leader’s job is to guide the organization to the fulfillment of its mission, and not to indulge in personal catharsis at the expense of this primary commitment.
The leader’s job is to do what he or she honestly thinks is right for the organization. Sometimes this task will test self-esteem. But if, without repression, denial, or disowning, leaders learn to manage and rise above feelings and emotions that may stand in the way - if they place their firsthand judgment of the realities confronting them above all other considerations - they grow in personal stature, grow in self-esteem, as they grow in professional effectiveness. Such a leader becomes a better person and a better executive at the same time.
The ability to operate in this manner presupposes a reasonable level of self-awareness. You cannot successfully manage feelings of which you are ignorant or which you have denied and disowned. On the contrary, such repressed feelings tend to manage you. (This is an extremely powerful tool for emotional freedom and wellness: The Sedona Method: Your Key to Lasting Happiness, Success, Peace and Emotional Well-Being by Hale Dwoskin.)
Self awareness (an aspect of living consciously) is one of the characteristics of effective leaders. Without it they cannot manage themselves; unable to manage themselves, they cannot properly manage others. They will tend to lack the emotional intelligence that is the foundation of interpersonal competence. Without a commitment to self-examination, a leader operates at a severe disadvantage. The willingness to look at yourself dispassionately, at your thoughts, feelings, and actions - moved by desire not to judge or condemn but to be aware, learn, and understand - is both a process that strengthens self-esteem and also one that expresses self-esteem.
Focusing only on your strengths and being blind to your weaknesses does not strengthen self-esteem. You need to be aware of both. No one is equally strong in all respects; if you know what your weaknesses are, you can learn to compensate for them - which is precisely what effective leaders do. Ineffective leaders do not see themselves realistic, do not recognize that they have any shortcomings, and therefore do not think their way through to solutions - they merely resort to denial, blaming, and alibiing.
- It takes a significant measure of self-esteem to generate a vision that is rational, uplifting, and involves stepping into the unknown and persuading others to follow one there.
- It takes a significant measure of self-esteem to embody and uphold a standard of integrity with such unswerving consistency (regardless of the latest crisis) that it becomes the trademark of an entire organization thereby creating an internal culture of trust and mutual regard.
- It takes a significant measure of self-esteem to give away power, to welcome and embrace the talents of others, never to steal their responsibilities, and to be relentless in communicating one’s belief in their potential.
- It takes a significant measure of self-esteem to see oneself - assets and limitations – realistically, and to think strategically about how to transcend shortcomings.
Rarely are such things done easily. They demand courage, energy, perseverance, and commitment.
A great deal is written about the problems of leading people in a company through the trauma of change and anxiety of change as if leaders do not have to confront the same fear and resistance within themselves. The truth is that change can be a problem for leaders no less for followers. And the difficulties with change experienced by employees are often the reflection of difficulties existing in the mind of senior management or the CEO.
A sentence completion exercise such as: If I bring more self-esteem to the resistance to necessary change . . .
- I’d focus on the present and the future, not stayed lost in dreams of the good old days.
- I’d accept how much the world has changed.
- I’d produce a specific agenda to achieving change, not just talk in generalities.
- I’d talk to our people, I’d listen to their fears, I’d let them air their concerns, I’d explain, and talk and talk and talk until I saw they really got it.
- I’d pull this whole issue out of the clouds and make it a crusade.
- I’d admit how much I see and understand but often ignore and don’t use.
- I’d admit how much I’d love to start a new tradition here and not just follow in the old ways.
- I’d pay more attention to the excitement I feel when I actually think of doing this.
- I wouldn’t allow myself to be ruled by fear, nostalgia, and inertia. I’d shake loose and become my own man, even if it’s difficult.
More often than not, problems in an organization reflect attitudes and problems at the most senior level of management and need to be addressed at that level if they are to be resolved. A relatively small amount of corrective action at the top can produce major changes down the line. In any organization, personal responsibility and culture change begins at the top.
The most effective leaders operate at a high level of self-responsibility. They do not waste energy on blaming. They ask,
“Did we err in placing that person in that position?
Did we fail to provide the necessary training?
Where was the mistake made and how can it be corrected?
Is there something I ought to have done differently?”
Singapore Airlines was commonly regarded as one of the best airlines in the world. It was deeply committed to empowering its people, who were encouraged to solve a great many problems on their own authority and without consulting higher-ups. When asked why he did not punish some employees who made errors in the execution of their duties, Chew Choon Seng, who was CEO of Singapore Airlines, said with astonishment,
“Punish them? Why should we have punished them when it was our fault? We believe the task of the leaders in a large company is to articulate the values of the organization, to create a system in which people can be productive, and to explain the goals that the system was to achieve. We also believe that people don’t act maliciously. If we in top management had done those jobs properly - if we had explained adequately the purpose behind employee empowerment - those few errors would not have occurred. That is why we went back to evaluate our own communication skills.”
Such leadership practice of self-responsibility, openness to self-examination, and commitment to taking corrective action is at once a test of self-esteem, a source of strengthening self-esteem, and also an expression of self-esteem.
There is paradox in one of the challenges of leadership. On one hand, effective leaders need confidence in their own judgment, perseverance in their vision even when others do not yet share it, ability to tolerate misunderstanding, opposition, and aloneness, and a passion to fulfill that vision that overcomes difficult obstacles.
On the other hand, they need the realism to recognize that sometimes they can be wrong, that they become stronger, not weaker, by testing their ideas against the ideas of others, by being open to discovering errors in their thinking and being eager to correct them, and by being fully as much the student and learner as the teacher.
The two attitudes represent only a paradox, but not contradiction, because there is no contradictory between confidence in one’s judgment and awareness of one’s fallibility. A self-esteeming mind can easily and comfortably hold these attitudes in appropriate balance. To be open to new information that may require a revision of some of our premises does not mean that we wander around in uncertainty and self-doubt. It is defensiveness, not openness, that reveal insecurity.
A brilliant leader is not someone who produces brilliant solutions. It is someone who inspires other people to produce the brilliant solutions. The design work as leaders includes designing an organization’s policies, strategies, and systems. The essence of design is seeing how the parts fit together to perform as a whole. Designing organization as a whole includes the intangibles and of even the subtler values that knit things together. Good leaders are continually trying to understand the whole.
Although ‘leader as designer’ is neglected today, it touches a chord that goes back thousands of years. To paraphrase Lao Tzu, the bad leader is he who the people despise. The good leader is he who people praise. The great leader is he who the people say, “We did it ourselves.”
Lao Tzu also illuminates part of the reason why design is a neglected part of leadership: little credit goes to designer. The functions of design are rarely visible; they take place behind the scenes. The consequences that appear today are the results of work done long in the past, and work today will show its benefits far in the future. Those who aspire to lead out of a desire to control, or gain fame, or simply to be ‘at the center of the action’ will find little to attract them to the quiet design work of leadership. Those who practice it find deep satisfaction in empowering others and being part of an organization capable of producing results that people truly care about. In fact, they find these rewards more enduring than the power and praise granted to traditional leaders.
The long-term success of a business enterprise requires that it has more leaders at more levels than its competitors. This means that a commitment to creating as many leaders as possible throughout one’s organization is a strategic imperative. Leaders who are secure in the knowledge of their own value are more likely to nurture and support potential leaders rather than feel threatened by them, and to realize that no organization can sustain success without them. The virtue involved is not selflessness but realism – responsibility toward what the situation requires.
As things stand at present, in the world of business self-motivation will have to occupy a higher role. Whoever, on any level, takes responsibility for the success of a task and mobilizes others around what needs to be done is operating as a leader. Such men and women are the spark plugs without which no organization can sustain high performance. This leads us to the question how one creates a culture in which such leaders are likely to arise or more broadly, how one manages work in such a way as to get the best of human brainpower.
With regard to his or her own specialty, each employee knows more than the manager or supervisor. Therefore, independence, self-responsibility, and some measure of creativity are not merely expected of everyone, they are mandatory. There is no other way for the system to work. The older bureaucratic command-and-control pyramid has progressively given way to flatter structures, flexible networks, cross-functional teams, and task forces (combinations of talents coming together for particular projects and then disbanding). This implies an entirely new concept of human relationships in the workplace, with knowledge and competence replacing rank as the voice of authority.
Without the old familiar chains of command, many managers are going through what might be termed a self-esteem crisis: with lines of authority and power no longer clear-cut, they are challenged to find new definitions of their roles, as coach, as facilitator, as support system, rather than as boss. Their need now is to disengage feelings of self-worth from traditional forms of status or from the performance of particular tasks, and to base it instead of their ability to think, to learn, to master new ways of functioning, and to respond appropriately to new realities.
Every change demanding new unfamiliar responses is a challenge to one’s self-esteem. To inspire and facilitate the resourcefulness of others, as their new role demands, managers must first find that resourcefulness within themselves. This means that to be effective they must be willing to confront themselves and work on themselves, work on their personal development, work on their self-esteem. A self-esteem anchored in trust in your mind and its operations is infinitely more reliable than one anchored merely in your status or possession of a particular set of skills.
Today companies have no more important challenge than that of attracting and keeping high-quality people. Right now there is a bad shortage of brains. A business culture that supports and nurtures self-esteem is far more likely to hold bright, talented people than one that does the opposite. Further, an organization whose employees operate at a high level of consciousness, self-acceptance (and acceptance of others), self-responsibility, self-assertiveness, purposefulness, and personal integrity would be an organization of extraordinary empowered human beings.
The policies that support self-esteem are also the policies that make money. The policies that demean self-esteem are the policies that sooner or later cause a company to lose money simply because, when you treat people badly and disrespectfully, you cannot possibly hope to get their best. And in today’s fiercely competitive, rapidly changing global economy, nothing less than their best is good enough.
A modern organization elevates the practice of teamwork to new heights of virtuosity, while simultaneously requiring a core of individualism in each participant because thinking is an activity of an individual mind, and so is self-trust, and so are tenacity, perseverance, and all the other mind-traits that make achievement possible. Competing in an era that demands continuous innovation requires us to harness the brain-power of every individual in the organization.
So, as a primarily sketch of what high self-esteem management might look like, we can observe that the traits just mentioned (practices that support self-esteem) are supported in an organization to the extent that the following conditions are met:
· People feel safe: secure that they will not be ridiculed, demeaned, humiliated, or punished for openness and honesty or for admitting, “I made a mistake” or for saying “I don’t know but I’ll find out.”
· People feel accepted: treated with courtesy, listened to, invited to express thoughts and feelings, dealt with as individuals whose dignity is important - treated, in effect, as volunteers.
· People feel challenged: given assignments that excite, inspire, and test and stretch their abilities.
· People feel recognized: acknowledged for individual talents and achievements, and rewarded monetarily and non-monetarily for extraordinary contributions.
· People receive constructive feedback: they hear how to improve performance in non-demanding ways that stress positives rather than negatives and that build on their strengths.
· People see that innovation is expected of them: their opinions are solicited, their brainstorming is invited, and they see that the development of new and usable ideas is desired of them and welcomed.
· People have easy access to information: not only are they given the information (and resources) they need to do their job properly, they are given information about the wider context of their work - the goals and progress of the company - so that they understand how their activities relate to the organization’s overall mission.
· People have authority appropriate to what they are accountable for: they are encouraged to take initiative, make decisions, and exercise judgment.
· People work with clear-cut and non-contradictory rules and guidelines: they are provided with a structure their intelligence can grasp and count on and they know what is expected of them.
· People are encouraged (required) to solve as many of their own problems as possible: they are expected to resolve issues close to the action rather than pass responsibility for solutions to higher-ups, and they are empowered to do so - without power it is meaningless to talk about responsibility.
· People see that their rewards for success are far greater than penalties for failures: teach that errors and mistakes are opportunities for learning. Ask, “What can you learn from what happened?” The most powerful learning comes from direct experience, through trial and error - through taking an action and seeing the consequences of that action; then taking a new and different action. Develop in yourself greater tolerance for frustration and errors because without them innovation is impossible.
· People are encouraged and rewarded for learning: they are encouraged to participate in internal and external courses and programs that will expand their knowledge and skills.
· People experience congruence between an organization’s professed philosophy and the behavior of its leaders and managers: they see integrity exemplified and they feel motivated to match what they see.
· People experience being treated fairly and justly: they feel their workplace is a rational world they can trust.
· People are able to believe in and take pride in the value of what they produce: they perceive the result of their efforts as genuinely useful, and they perceive their work as worth doing.
To the extent that these conditions are operative in an organization, it will be a place in which people with high self-esteem will want to work. It will also be one in which people of more modest self-esteem will find their self-esteem raised. The conditions that stimulate self-esteem are conditions that stimulate active and creative employee participation - that stimulate innovation.
Recognizing the benefits to the organization that would result, what actions might managers take?
To encourage the practice of operating consciously:
· Provide easy access not only to the information people need to do their job, but also about the wider context in which they work so that they are always operating with the clearest grasp of context possible.
· Create open, interactive environment in which people can share ideas, excitement, and wild fantasies – stimulating everyone’s imagination.
· Offer opportunities for continual learning and upgrading of skills. Stress the value of study and skill acquisition. Send out the signal in as many ways as possible that yours is a learning organization. The organizations that will truly excel in the future will be the organizations that discover how to tap people’s commitment and capacity to learn at all levels in an organization.
· Allow adequate time for ideas to develop and mature, recognizing that minds have their own timetables.
· If someone does superior work or makes excellent decisions, invite him or her to explore how and why it happened. By asking appropriate questions, helps raise the person’s consciousness about what made the achievement possible, and thereby increase the likelihood that others like it will occur in the future.
· If someone does unacceptable work or makes a bad decision, practice the same principle. Invite an exploration of what made the error possible, thus raising the level of consciousness and minimizing the likelihood of a repetition.
· Avoid over-directing, over-observing, and over-reporting. Excessive managing (micromanaging) is the enemy of autonomy and creativity.
· Plan and budget appropriately for innovation. Do not ask for people’s innovative best and then announce there is no money or other resources to implement what they come up with.
· Stretch your people. Assign tasks and projects slightly beyond their known capabilities. Challenge consciousness to grow. Keep handling responsibility down, projecting confidence in people’s ability to think and solve problems on their own.
· Give creative people the opportunity as large a part as possible in overall decision-making, thus engaging and utilizing their minds not only with regard to specific problems but also with regard to long-range plans.
To encourage the practice of operating self-acceptance:
· When you talk with your people, be present to the experience. Make eye contact, listen actively, offer appropriate feedback, give the speaker the experience of being heard and accepted.
· Regardless of whom you are talking to, maintain a tone of respect. Do not permit yourself a condescending, superior, or blaming tone.
· Keep encounters regarding work task centered, not ego centered. Never permit a dispute to deteriorate into a conflict of personalities. The focus need to be reality:
What is the situation?
What does the work requires?
What needs to be done?
· Describe undesirable behavior without blaming. Let someone know if his or her behavior is unacceptable: point out its consequences, communicate the kind of behavior you want instead, and omit character assassination.
· Let your people see that you talk honestly about your feelings: if you hurt or angry or offended, say so straightforwardly and with dignity.
· Recognize and accept differences in individuals. Do not demand that everyone be made from the same mold. Cultivate the ability to identify each person’s unique characteristic, and treat each person as having value in his or her own right. Approach the power inherent in diversity of approach.
· Develop in yourself greater tolerance for frustration and errors because without them innovation is impossible.
· As much as possible, reward success and except failure as a source of learning.
· Find out how you can improve – all the while modeling self-acceptance.
To encourage the practice of self-responsibility:
· Communicate that self-responsibility is expected and create opportunity for it. Give your people space to take the initiative, volunteer ideas, and expand their range of competence.
· Set clear and unequivocal performance standards. Let people understand your none-negotiable expectations regarding the quality of work.
· Elicit from people their understanding of what they are accountable for, so as to assure that their understanding and yours is the same.
· Encourage people who challenge mainstream assumptions - including the assumptions of higher-ups in your organization.
· Teach perseverance. Encourage people to come back to an unsolved problem again and again. With regard to finding solutions, spread the philosophy of ‘If not me, who?’
· Allow as much freedom as possible for individuals to guide their own work and communicate your confidence in their ability to do so appropriately.
· Continuously look for ways to give away power to your people. You can teach self-responsibility without ever mentioning a word.
· Promote on the basis of merit rather than seniority, thus sending out the signal that an individual’s future lies to a significant extent in his or her own hands.
· Communicate that you are interested in solution, not excuses, alibis, or blaming. Publicize and celebrate unusual instances of self-responsibility.
To encourage the practice of self-assertiveness:
· Teach that errors and mistakes are opportunities for learning. What can you learn from what happened? Is a question that builds self-esteem, encourages self-assertiveness, expands consciousness, and promote not repeating mistakes.
· Let’s your people see that it is safe to make mistakes or to say, ‘I don’t know, but I will found out.’ To evoke fear of error or ignorance is to invite deception, inhibition, and an end to self-assertive creativity.
· Let your people see that it’s safe to disagree with you: convey respect for differences of opinion and do not punish dissent.
· Work at changing aspects of the organization’s culture that undermine self-assertiveness and self-esteem.
· Find out what the central interests of your people are and, whatever possible, match tasks and objectives with individual dispositions. Give people an opportunity to do what they enjoy most and do best; build on people’s strengths.
· Aim your people and get out of the way. Let them know you are available if needed but do not impose your presence or involvement gratuitiously. Remember that your business is to inspire, coach, and facilitate, not to cater to any impulses you may have always to be center stage. Remember that the measure of your success is their creative self-assertiveness.
· Encourage people to see problems as challenges to their ingenuity. Self-assertiveness entails pushing back on the boundaries that confine us. Creative perseverance is one of the highest forms of self-assertiveness.
Treat as a challenge to your own creativeness the task of finding new and powerful ways to get this message across.
To encourage the practice of living purposely:
· Ask your people what they would need to feel more in control of their work, then, if possible give it to them.
· Give your people the sources, information, and authority to do what you have asked them to do. Remember that there can be no responsibility without power, and nothing can so undermine purposefulness as assigning the first without giving the second.
· Help your people understand how their work relates to the overall mission of the organization, so that they always operate with a grasp of the wider context.
· Encourage everyone to keep measuring results against stated goals and objectives.
· Remember that innovative behavior can no longer be left to chance. You must explicitly communicate that it is expected. If I were to make innovation my conscious purpose what would I do (or do differently)?
· Teach the gospel of converting goals into purposes. Again, encourage the question, If I were to make the attainment of these objectives my conscious purpose, what would I need to do?
· Arrive at an absolutely clear statement of what the problem or goal is, and encourage people to own the problem and to make its innovative solution their personal mission.
To encourage the practice of integrity:
· Exemplify that which you wish to see in others. Tell the truth. Keep promises. Honor commitments. Let there be perceive congruence between what you profess and what you do, not just with insider but also with everyone you deal with: suppliers, customers, and so on.
· If you make a mistake in your dealings with someone, are unfair or short-tempered, admit it and apologize.
· Let your people see that you are honestly want to know how you affect them, and that you are open to learning and self-correction. Uphold standards of honesty, integrity, and fair dealing and let it be known that failure to honor these values can be grounds for dismissal, even if one has met one’s number.
· By your own choices and actions, show your people the moral behavior you expect of them. Show the world what kind of organization you have. Everyone understands that individuals and companies make mistakes; the question is what they elect to do about those mistakes: own them and correct them – or try to sweep them under the rug.
· Convey in every way possible that your commitment is to operate as a thoroughly moral company, and look for opportunities to reward and publicize unusual instances of ethical behavior in your people.
Think of each employee as a consultant - as someone with his or her own perspective on the organization, its practices and its needs, someone who may have something unique to offer, be it way to cut costs or better serve customers or improve some internal system or adapt existing products to new uses, to fill some unnoticed niche in the marketplace or modify the workplace in such a way as to facilitate and stimulate greater creative interaction among people. Think of the impact on self-esteem and on the motivation to contribute of being treated in this manner.
Rather than dwell on the areas where a worker is weak, find out what he does well, determine the context in which he is able to exercise his positive capabilities and let him do it. Make his shortcomings irrelevant. The function of organization is to make human strength productive and this is accomplished by building on people’s assets. This idea is superb illustration that the practices that serve high performance are also the practices that serve self-esteem and vice versa.
A major step in operating consciously and self-responsibly is the willingness to examine yourself and identify what might the internal obstacles need to be overcome. Your deepest vision of yourself - of what is possible and appropriate to you.
There are many reasons managers may not do their job well. One reason is that they have never been properly trained. Another is that they do not really like managing people, they like managing technology or finance or logistics or anything but human beings. Another is that they lack emotional intelligence, that is, lack of emotional awareness - do not know how to manage their own feelings, are not sensitive to others’ emotion and needs. While not all managerial problems are traceable to self-esteem problems, it is impressive how often they are, in whole or in part.
Some years ago a study was done of 200 top executives in Fortune 500 companies who had suffered some career setback, from missed promotions to business failures. The study identified five fundamental causes. Significantly, none had to do with technical side of the work; as a group of the managers in the study were as technically competent as those who succeeded. The causes all had to do with the human or psychological aspect of their job:
1. The biggest single cause of failure was poor interpersonal skills.
Inability to inspire; poor listening; doesn’t give or receive criticism well; fearful of conflict, therefore avoids confrontation and the raising issues likely to produce agitation.
This describe a person who does not bring respect or benevolence to human encounters; who operates out of fear and insecurity, not out of confidence and respect for facts; and who lack the level of self-awareness that is a prerequisite of dealing effectively with others. With such liabilities, an executive cannot create the climate of respect that is the foundation of high performance among knowledge workers.
2. An inability to change, to let go of strategies that are no longer adaptive
Failure to respond appropriately to the new and unfamiliar. Rigidity is a characteristic of a mind lacks confidence in itself and therefore lacks confidence in its ability to cope with new and unfamiliar challenges. Poor self-esteem clings to the security of the known; high self-esteem sees change as an opportunity and even an adventure. We cannot lead others where we are afraid to go ourselves. An executive who dreads change is not a force for progress in an organization but a force for demoralization and apathy. Instead of inspiring confidence, a fearful executive inspires fear and inertia.
3. A preoccupation with self-aggrandizement or turf-protection at the expense of the needs of the organization.
However rationalized, this represent a betrayal of trust and failure of integrity. It is also a belief that one is not good enough to succeed on objective performance alone.
4. A fear of making decisions and taking action - one of the commonest causes of business failure.
What is this fear but lack of confidence in one’s mind and judgment?
5. Lack of resilience and the ability to rebound from adversity and setbacks.
Disappointments in business (as in life) are inevitable. The level of our self-esteem has a great deal to do with how we are likely to react to them.
The executives who failed to get promoted or who lost their jobs were the ones who in the face of problems did not search for solutions but instead fell into defensiveness, alibiing, and blaming others, or else into depression and passivity. This is typical behavior of people who lack trust in their own resourcefulness.
Sentence stems below invariably stimulate a direct experience of our own resourcefulness and interpersonal effectiveness.
If I bring more consciousness to my dealings with people today . . . it is very common to get endings such as:
- I’d listen more.
- I’d be more sensitive.
- I’d notice how I affect people.
- I’d be a better communicator.
- I think I would be more relaxed, less impatient, and more benevolent.
- I’d notice what works and what doesn’t work when dealing with people.
If I operate with greater self-acceptance today . . . typical endings include:
- I’d be more accepting of others.
- I wouldn’t generate so much heat.
- I’d be calmer.
- Not everything would be such a big deal.
- I’d be kinder.
- Encounters would be more human.
- I’d be more open to listening.
- I’d be less on the defensive.
- I could handle critical feedback better.
If I operate with greater self-responsibly with people today . . . typical endings include:
- I’d take pains to be sure I was understood and not blame others when I wasn’t.
- I’d look at what I am avoiding.
- I’d get more done.
- I’d control my priorities and not let people throw me off for no good reason.
- I’d give up blaming and examine myself more.
- I wouldn’t permit myself alibis.
- I’d carry my own weight and require that others carry theirs.
- I’d stay focus on results.
- I’d be a better team player.
- I wouldn’t expect people to be mind-readers. I’d let them know what I was thinking or expecting or needing.
- I’d pay attention to the quality of my communications.
If I operate more self-assertively with people today . . . typical endings include:
- I’d be more candid.
- I wouldn’t drag my feet about declaring bad news.
- If I didn’t understand, I’d ask questions rather than pretend I knew.
- When I knew something impossible was being asked of me I’d say so on the spot.
- I’d more honest about my feelings.
- If someone wasn’t doing the job that was needed, I’d be faster to react and insist on better performance.
- I’d be clear about my expectations and I’d lay them right out there.
- If I know I need something from the company to do the best job possible, I’d say so, I’d ask for it.
- I wouldn’t be wishy-washy about presenting my ideas at meetings, I’d stand up for them.
If I operate more purposely with people today . . . typical endings include:
- I’d want to know the purpose of any meeting or conversation and I’d try to keep us on track.
- My work would be more focused on results.
- I’d prioritize my time better.
- I’d tell people when they wandered away from the subject.
- I’d encourage my people to stay conscious of their goals and not get distracted.
- I’d stay focused on my job.
- I’d look at everything from the perspective of how it affects long-term goals.
If I bring more integrity to my dealings with people today . . . typical endings include:
- I’d be more careful about the promises I make or the assurances I give.
- I’d think more about what’s fair and not act so much on impulse.
- I’d stand up for my people.
- People would know my word was my bond.
- I’d be a person I could admire more.
- I wouldn’t alibi.
- I’d act on what I know.
- People would have more confidence in me and more trust.
- I wouldn’t go unconscious to escape unpleasantness.
I typically suggest that people work on one stem from Monday through Friday, then move on to the next stem the following week, and so on. That repetition is essential for going deeper into the material, facilitating lasting integration, and simulating changes of behavior. When people elect to experiment with exercises such as these, they are often astonished at how much they know, how much insight and wisdom seems to lie below the surface of awareness. Through sentence completion exercise many people discover how much creative intelligence often lies unused because it was not expected by anyone or because no one believed it was there. The challenge is not so much to teach new management skills that no one has heard of before as it is to liberate what people already know and remove the barriers to their acting on it.
Answering these questions may help us to move forward:
How do I translate these learning into action?
How do I overcome fear?
How do I keep myself on tract?
When we project the conviction that people are capable of far more than they give themselves credit for, we facilitate their activating resources of which they were unaware with the results of improve performance and improved self-esteem.
Change is the ultimate challenge facing business organizations today. And change and its vicissitudes cannot be mastered without a culture of accountability and innovation. This reality generates the need for higher levels of psychological development than were ever needed before so that working on oneself and working on one’s job are not unrelated. Few general observations:
- If we cannot manage ourselves, we are unfit to manage others.
- If we are blind to our own feelings and emotions, we will be blind to the feelings and emotions of others.
- If we do not have the discipline to keep ourselves task-focused, we will not be able to inspire that focus in others.
- If we cannot keep our own spirits up in the face of adversity, we cannot sustain hope and courage in those who look to us for leadership.
- If we are cynical about ourselves, we will be cynical about others and inspire cynicism in them.
- If we do not model self-responsibility, we cannot teach it.
- If we do not exemplify integrity, we cannot inspire it in others.
As an aside about Peter Drucker, when I first read his great classic “Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles,” I was struck by the persuasiveness of his ideas, the thought that kept recurring was: Who are the giants who will put into practice what he is advocating?
Therefore what an honest manager or leader must ask is, “Do my actions embody the principles that I wish to see exemplify in those I manage?
We see the need for responsibility and accountability, the importance of integrity and trust, the imperative of innovation as well as some of the opportunities for growth and development.
Any significant change constitutes a challenge to our confidence in our resourcefulness. The most important change is in the rate of change itself, the fact that change keeps happening faster and faster and that turbulence, not to say chaos, must now be recognized and adapted to as the norm. This is one of the many reasons self-esteem has become so important today.
If you are an executive who carries the responsibility for leading necessary change in your organization, the place to begin is with self-examination, with the question:
Are these parts of me that resist and are in rebellion against this change, even though my mind sees that the change is necessary?
You might even experiment with sentence completion:
One of the bad things about making this change (or these changes) is . . .
Give your reservations a hearing; give them their day in court; articulate them and meditate on them, without self-reproach.
Another mind-clearing sentence stem that is also very useful:
One of the ways I could undermine the changes I am advocating is . . .
In raising the level of your self-awareness, you will increase the likelihood of successfully implementing the changes you are committed to. And you will not be simultaneously engaged in self-sabotage. You will neither be sending contradictory messages to your people nor engaging in contradictory behavior. The discipline of taking yourself through this process raises the level of your consciousness, strengthens your self-esteem, and helps clear the way for you to perform effectively.
It is imperative that the reasons for the changes - their necessity - be made abundantly clear. This may need to be explained not once but many times. Questions need to be treated respectfully and answer patiently, since what you require is not obedience but cooperation.
Just as the new challenges confronting the organization can be framed not as tragedies but as opportunities (which is how change-masters see things), the new responses required of individuals can be understood not as burdens or problems but as vehicle for personal growth. This is the perspective that yields the experience of power in time of turbulence.
If the need to master change is one of the great challenges of the twenty-first century organization, another is to create a culture of self-responsibility and personal accountability. When people operate self-responsibly and accountably, it is a win both for them personally and for the organization that employs them.
First and foremost this point can never be overstated: leaders and managers must exemplify that which they wish to create around them, that which they wish to see in others. This means:
- Being proactive rather than reactive.
- Manifesting a high level of consciousness, focus, and purpose.
- Taking responsibility for every choice, decision, and action without blaming or finding alibis.
- Being fully accountable for all promises and commitments made.
- Being clear on what is and is not within our power.
- Being task focus rather than turf-protecting.
- Being able to bounce back from defeat, setbacks, or adversity and continue moving toward goals, rather than surrendering to despair.
- Demonstrating an unmistakable commitment to facing reality, whether pleasant or unpleasant.
When these traits are present in leaders and managers, the result is much the same as when they are modeled by parents in a family: a context is established in which it is most likely that these traits will be absorbed and exhibited by others. The conclusion is drawn: This is how human beings are to act; this is the norm here; this is what is expected.
Leaders and managers have to think through the policies that will inspire the desired mind-set among employees. Here are just few basics:
· Require clarity concerning what is expected.
This means leaders and manager must be absolutely clear, and see to it that the relevant persons are absolutely clear, about what each individual in an organization is accountable for. Until each person knew what was expected of him or her, there could be no question of appropriate accountability.
· Seek information regarding people’s work goals.
The best people in any organization are always looking to move beyond their job descriptions and, whatever possible, this is an attitude to be nurtured and supported. Give people all the responsibilities they can reasonably handle. Ask more of them and support them in asking more of themselves.
· Be task-centered, not ego centered.
When we keep our encounters focused on reality and the objective needs of the situation, we support a climate of self-responsibility rather than permitting a dispute to deteriorate into a conflict of personalities. The focus should be on: What is the fact? What need to be done? And not on: Whose whishes will prevail - yours or mine? The individual should ask, “What are the reasons for taking this position?” and not, “What is my rank in the organization?”
· Invite feedback on the kind of manager you are.
Let your people see that you are honestly interested in the image you project and how you affect others. Let them know that if they have a grievance against you, you expect them to communicate it as quickly as possible and set an example of open, non-defensive listening.
· Give corrective feedback without blaming.
If someone’s behavior is unacceptable, describe it, point its consequences, including how other people are affected, and spell out the kind of behavior you require instead. Stay focus on fact and avoid character assassination. By keeping the focus on reality and avoiding put-downs or personal attacks, you speak to the self-responsible adult in the other party and discourage an evasive or defensive response.
· Help people experience themselves as the source of their actions and tune them in to the why.
If someone does superior work or makes an excellent decision, invite him or her to explore how and why it happened. Ask appropriate questions to help the person identify what made the achievement possible. As a result, the person doesn’t write off the achievement to luck but experience himself or herself as the responsible causal agent, and you thereby increase the likelihood that the behavior will be repeated.
By the same logic, if someone does unacceptable work or makes a bad decision, practice the same principle, invite an exploration of what caused the error, again stressing responsibility, in this case minimizing the change of a repetition.
· Establish clear and unequivocal performance standards.
Employees need to know a leader’s none-negotiable expectations regarding the quality of this work. They need to know that this is the minimum expected of them.
· Let problems stay with the person who created them.
When someone’s behavior creates a problem, ask him or her to provide solution, if possible. Try to avoid handling down ready-made solution that spares that person from taking a new initiative or developing new ideas. Instead, say,
“Now that we agree on the nature of the problem, what do you propose to do about it?”
Do not deny people the experience of learning from their struggle with this question.
· Focus on finding solution, not blaming.
When things go wrong, the question should not be ‘Whose fault it is?’ but ‘What needs to be done?’
Convey in every way possible that blaming is an irrelevant distraction. The name of the game is results, not accusations.
Ask, “What are your ideas on how this situation can be improved or corrected?
· Give people the resources for self-responsibility.
People cannot be accountable for what you have asked them to do if they are not given the appropriate resources, information, and authority. Remember that there is no responsibility without power. It is demoralizing to give the people the first but not the second.
Picture this: I am your supervisor, and I walk over to you with pencil in hand and tell you to take it. You reach for the pencil, but I won’t let go. So I say, “What is wrong with you? Why can’t I delegate the pencil to you?”
· Remember what your job is.
A great leader is not someone who comes up with brilliant solutions but rather one who inspires his or her people to come up with brilliant solutions. A great leader draws the best in people.
· Work at changing aspects of the organizational culture that thwart or frustrate self-responsibility.
Sometimes outmoded procedures carried over from the command-and-control management model frustrate the self-responsibility that you are promoting. When significant decision-making must be passed up the chain of command, those close to the decision are disempowered and paralyzed. Such policies stifle innovation and creativity, and make personal accountability all but impossible.
· Avoid micromanagement.
Micromanagement is the enemy of autonomy and self-responsibility. If you want people to operate self-responsibly avoid overdirecting, overobserving, overreporting, and overmanaging. Let people know what needs to be done and leave them alone. Let people struggle. Let them take the initiative in asking for help if and when they need it, but do not take the decision out of their hands. Leaders who micromanage inhibit the very traits they need most for the success of the enterprise. Young people learn self-responsibility in part by being trusted; so do men and women in organization. When a leader conveys belief in people’s competence and worth, people are far more likely to rise to the occasion. Do not step in unless it is absolutely necessary.
Delegation without follow-through is abdication. You can never wash your hands of a task Even after you delegate it, you are still responsible for its accomplishment, and monitoring the delegated task is the only practical way for you to ensure a result. Monitoring is not meddling, but means checking to make sure an activity is proceeding in line with expectations.
· Plan and budget innovation.
It is unreasonable to ask for self-responsibility, initiative, innovation, and creativity and then announce that there are no resources to support and implement the contribution people make.
· Find out what people want and need to perform optimally, and provide it.
One of the most useful questions to ask people is, “What do you need to feel more in control of your work?”
· Reward self-responsible behavior.
Reward self-assertiveness, intelligent risk-taking, acts of initiative, unsolicited problem solving, and a strong orientation toward action. Look for opportunities to reward and celebrate it. Let your responses signal ‘That is what we want!’
It will be obvious that every one of these suggestions, aimed at supporting self-responsibility and personal accountability, also supports self-esteem – supports an individual’s experience of competence and worth. Organizations that support self-esteem attract the best people and tend to keep them. There is no mystery as to why. Not if you understand the important of self-esteem to the feeling of personal fulfillment.
Successful business organizations know that to remain competitive in world markets they need a steady stream of innovation in products, services, and internal systems.
One of the most frequently citied sources of work satisfaction among creative, innovative persons is the opportunity to interact with other high-level-knowledge workers who provide challenge and stimulation – as well as the opportunity to pit their minds and energies against those of their counterparts working for competitors.
They tend to posses a high level of imaginativeness, which plays an important role in creative thinking. So time and opportunities to engage in mental play can be important to generating results.
They tend to think outside the box, to ignore conventional or standard ‘sets,’ and to look at things in new and unexpected way which means that an overly conformist (traditional) business culture is deadly to the innovator. Management must learn how to accommodate independent minds by creating an environment in which such people can feel comfortable, valued, appreciated, without ignoring or violating the basic structures and procedures that an organization legitimately requires.
Creative and innovative people tend to notice problems that others have failed to notice and to ask questions others failed to raise. Keeping everyone mission-focused, task focused, and integrity-focused, so that personal feelings of resentment are not allowed to sabotage the larger goals. This is accomplished, first and foremost, by the values management upholds and exemplify.
Creative and innovative people also tend to manifest significant autonomy and independence. They tend to have highly integrative minds and to see connections between seemingly unrelated elements, therefore don’t be in a hurry to dismiss ideas that at first seem strange.
Creative and innovative people tend to be persevering and to be stimulated by the challenges of hard work. So one of the ways to inspire their best is to offer projects that push them to the outer limits of their known abilities and beyond. They have made themselves highly knowledgeable in the field where their creativity and innovativeness finds expression.
Creative and innovative people operate far more by intrinsic than by extrinsic motivation. Growth and achievement needs matter more than praise or monetary rewards (without denying the latter may be important.) Which means: give them freedom, give them resources, give them a stimulating environment – and give them an exciting and inspiring mountain to climb. It is the task of management to create a context in which creativity and innovation can flourish.
Since organization necessarily has its own mission and goals, a delicate balance must be maintained between creative freedom and goals on one hand, and, on the other, the restraints required by the organizations overall agenda. The challenge of finding this balance itself represents an opportunity for creativity and innovation.
There is no serious endeavor, from work to marriage to child-rearing that cannot be approached as a vehicle for personal growth. Thus if you were to choose your work as the arena in which you will cultivate the practice of living consciously, the practice of self-acceptance, the practice of self-responsibly, the practice of self-assertiveness, the practice of living purposely, and the practice of personal integrity - into your life then your work would benefit while you as a human being benefited. You would grow professionally at the same time that you grow personally. Achievement would rise and self-esteem would rise. In this case, work has the potential of being a spiritual discipline – if that is how it is approached.
If a concern to grow in integrity is not a concern of the spirit, I do not know what is. It is also concern with profound ramifications for business success. Soul work is essential to meeting the challenges of the information economy.
In a world in which change is happening all around us, and faster and faster, our openness to change within ourselves, to letting go of irrelevant attachments, to learning and growing as a way of life becomes a personal and professional imperative.
With so many business book quoting famed chairman and CEO of General Electric Jack Welch these days, he made an observation too perfect not to cite in concluding this discussion:
“When the rate of change outside exceeds the rate of change inside the end is in sight.”
‘Inside means two things: inside the organization and inside the individual. In either case, change begins inside an individual mind.
To change we must first change our thinking habits. We must begin with those few basics that affect the way we think. We can greatly change the course of our lives by spending more time and making a greater conscious effort to refine our personal philosophy.
We must keep a watchful eye on the subtle differences between success and failure. We must not allow ourselves to think that the errors do not matter. They do. We must not allow ourselves to assume that a lack of discipline in one small area of our lives will not make a difference. It will. And we must not allow ourselves to believe that we can have all that we want to have and become all that we want to be without making any changes in the way we think about life. We must.
In the course of our life, our values, goals, and ambitions are first conceived in our mind; that is, they exist as data of consciousness, and then - to the extent that our life is successful - are translated into action and objective reality. They became part of the “out there,” of the world that we perceive. They achieve expression and reality in material form. This is the proper and necessary pattern of human existence. To live successfully is to put ourselves into the world, to give expression to our thoughts, values, and goals. Our life is unlived precisely to the extent that this process fails to occur.
To accept the process of struggle as part of life, to accept all of it, even the darkest moments of anguish - that is one of the most important attitudes that differentiates individuals with high self-esteem from individuals with low self-esteem. The wish to avoid fear and pain is not the motive that drives the life of highly evolved men and women. Rather it is the life-force within them thrusting toward its unique form of expression - the actualization of the self. The basic passion in the best leaders is for self-expression. Their desire is to bring ‘who they are’ into the world, into reality. Their work is clearly a vehicle for self-actualization.
Recommended reading:
The Fifth Discipline by PETER M. SENGE
posted by Inspirational Articles at Wednesday, April 19, 2006
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