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Locus of Control

If — by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;

If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Locus of Control

The world is not out to get you, in fact in the big scheme of things you really don’t matter at all. There are currently some 7.9 billion people on the planet which is more people than have existed throughout all time in history. Of this all most uncomprehendable number, there are only a few thousand notable individuals who have made their mark in the annals of history. Hence, it’s unlikely that very many of us will be shortlisted to notoriety. Most of us will not write a best seller, star in a block buster movie, be president of a country, a company or even a local football club, and most of us won’t retire wealthy with a holiday house in the Bahamas. In fact, for most of us, the best we can hope for is to live a rewarding life without suffering too many significant losses and to die at a ripe old aged surrounded by our loved ones.

But maybe the world is being unfair to us. Maybe if it just through us the occasional bone, or gave us a handout every so often, we would feel and do so much better and achieve so much more!

But the reality is the world doesn’t owe us anything, nor do any of the billions of other temporary occupants of the planet and to think otherwise is naive.

Quote by Mark Twain

“Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

So, should we just accept our fate and give up now, or to we get angry and rebel against the establishment, and demand to be given the same outcome as those few who we deem to be privileged?

Or is there an alternative to this drama. An alternative to why we feel so oppressed and victimised? And, if the world truly isn’t out to get us, are there things we can do to get ahead and arrest this feeling of victimisation.

Is it possible that our situation is not the result of an oppressive world, and that other people are struggling just as much as we are to get ahead and have the best life they can? Sure, the world is full of difficulties and prejudices, but is it possible that everyone is going through something, and you are not unique in how you feel?

What if your inability to succeed was all in your head? What if you are discriminating against yourself by believing you are unable to get a head because no matter how hard you try the world is against you? Do you think this mindset would be helpful or would it predispose you to think, feel and believe, it’s all hopeless and everything is out of your control?

If two equally qualified, competent people of the same age, race, gender, and orientation, interviewed for a job you would assume they would both have an equal chance of winning it, right?

Wrong. One of the biggest discriminators in this and many other situations in life is the mindset of the individuals. If one person believes that they have no control over the outcome and that it is solely upto others to decide if they are worthy, they will present with ‘tells’ that will be picked up upon; whereas, if the other person presents with confidence and a mindset that they are in control of their future this will also be evident and in a close competition will likely be the difference between being selected or not.

This is often best seen in sporting competitions where competitors are so closely matched that the result cannot be predetermined. In this scenario, it will almost always be the individual with the superior mindset who will win.

In life, we ultimately hit what we aim for. If our focus is on being victims, then that is what we will become. In 1954 Julian B. Rotter’s research identified what he called people’s Locus of Control. What he discovered was that those who believe they are in charge of their own destiny have what he referred to as an Internal Locus of Control, whereas those who believe that outside factors control their destiny have an External Locus of Control.

A person’s “locus” (place or location) is conceptualized as Internal, when they believe they can control their own life, or External, when they believe life is controlled by outside factors they can’t influence, or that chance or fate controls their lives.

Having an Internal Locus of Control, believing you set your own destiny, will allow you to focus your attention on succeeding rather than obsessing about the world being against you and ultimately leading you to failure.

Internals believe that their hard work will lead to positive outcomes. They also believe that every action has its consequence, which makes them accept the fact that things happen, and it depends on them if they want to have control over them or not.

Externals attribute outcomes of events to external circumstances. People with an External Locus of Control tend to believe that the things which happen in their lives are out of their control, and even that their own actions are a result of external factors, such as fate, luck, and the influence of others. They believe the world is too complex to predict, or successfully control its outcomes. Such people tend to blame others rather than themselves for the outcomes in their lives. People with an External Locus of Control also tend to be more stressed, neurotic, and prone to clinical depression.

This simple shift in mindset from an External Locus of Control to an Internal Locus of Control could make all the difference to how you live your life and therefore what you get back in return.

Believing you are in control of your own destiny comes with the added benefit of contributing to your general wellbeing and happiness and surely that alone is worth striving for.

The Nice Leader Fallacy

If you believe the constant barrage of social media posts, good business leaders are those who focus on taking care of their people, being empathic, and being nice, but like so many ideologies, this opinion has been communicated by a noisy minority with an agenda, but no valid argument. This agenda seeks to conflate the employment of staff by an organisation with a responsibility by the leader to take care of the staff in a way that far exceeds any moral obligation or legal requirement.

Modern leadership has had its focus redirected from achieving the vision to the welfare of employees. Universities indoctrinate their students by focusing their teaching on social leadership principles and literature, rather than on a broader, more holistic curriculum.  Leaders are told that their primary responsibility is taking care of their employees and that by doing so the business will prosper.

Leaders today feel obligated and indeed are told on social media that they are responsible for all aspects of their employees’ well-being as if their employees have no responsibility for themselves and are incapable of acting autonomously. Unfortunately, our human nature causes us to become dependent over time in a sort of “learned helplessness” way and people will tend to take advantage of the leader if they perceive that he or she is weak and willing to tolerate bad behaviour.

The migration of Gen-Z into the workforce exacerbates this problem. According to Proff. Jonathan Haidt, the over-protection of children in the 2000s, arguably the safest time in history, the addition of ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ on social media, and the introduction of trigger-warnings, controlled and compelled speech, safe-spaces, microaggressions, and no-platforming has resulted in a generation of ‘fragile’ people who started entering the workforce between 2015-18.

Leaders are told that, if they take care of their employees, their employees will take care of the business. But is this actually true? Is there any evidence that employees who are mollycoddled are more productive, happier, and loyal? Unfortunately, the answer is no. There is no empirical evidence that this is the case at all. This is what I refer to as the “Nice Leader Fallacy”.

This is not to say that leaders should not treat their employees well. On the contrary, the opposite of nice leadership is not bad leadership. It’s important to not conflate nice leadership with effective leadership. To quote Jocko willink there are only two types of leaders, effective and non-effective.

Leaders need to have a clear vision for the future of the business and be able to communicate that vision to the various internal and external factions that have a part to play in realising the vision. Anecdotally, employees respond best to leaders who consistently act professionally, ethically, and fairly to everyone.

It’s the leader’s role to enable their employees to achieve the vision by removing roadblocks and bottlenecks, providing tools and resources, and constantly shining a light on the path to the future. It is not the leader’s role to take care of every aspect of their employees’ well-being or give in to their every demand. Employees have a responsibility for their own well-being. It is, however, the responsibility of the leader to not contribute to the employees’ ill-being, to not place them at avoidable risk, or to treat them without respect or dignity.

Employment is an agreement between an organisation and an individual for the exchange of the individual’s time, experience, and effort for fair and agreed remuneration. Any expectations above and beyond this must be fair, agreed and not to the detriment of the organisation. It is true that all organisations have high performers who are motivated by extra attention and rewards such as increases in remuneration and bonuses. Providing these are fair and benefit the organisation by supporting the leader’s vision, these should be supported. What should not be supported are unwarranted demands by low performers based on group success or collective demands.

One of the most difficult challenges faced by leaders today is the recruitment and retention of staff. Leaders are falling into the trap of believing that the only way to attract and retain top talent is to offer higher remuneration, better conditions, and to provide an enjoyable environment where employees can socialise and feel appreciated. Where the organisation can afford to provide these conditions, it absolutely should. However, without also offering challenging and rewarding work, accountability for outcomes, and the authority needed to succeed, the ‘sugar rush’ will quickly wear off and staff will begin looking for more rewarding work and higher remuneration for their next dopamine hit.

Maslow implied this when he created his ‘Hierarchy of Needs’. Once an individual’s basic needs (physical, safety, and security) and psychological needs (belonging, love, and esteem) have been achieved, they will seek to achieve their highest order need for self-fulfillment. This will ultimately include the need for appropriate remuneration, however, at this level, individuals want to feel that they are contributing value to the organisation and are integral to the achievement of something important and enduring.

In non-business scenarios such as war, sport, politics, and education, the realisation of their vision and the achievement of the associated outcomes must be the leader’s primary focus. This often results in the conclusion of the ‘finite game’, activity, or mission which concludes when there is a clear winner.

This differs dramatically from business where the leader needs to continuously achieve sufficient financial success to sustain the business and/or meet shareholder financial, legal, and moral expectations and targets. In business, the organisation is analogous to an organism where the aim is to grow, develop and survive as long as possible.

In business, top leaders may develop the vision and set the direction for the organisation, but they are pressured to act and react to external forces with opposing interests such as shareholders and unions.

Ultimately, top leaders need to not allow themselves to be coerced into making decisions that adversely affect the achievement of the vision in order to be nice. There’s nothing wrong with being a ‘nice leader’ however this should be subordinate to being an effective leader who delivers the outcomes necessary to grow and sustain the business.

Delegation

Delegation generally refers to the assigning of responsibility of a function, activity, or task to another individual. Delegating responsibility has the effect of “scaling” the leader’s capacity by removing some burden and reallocating it to another person, freeing the leader up to attend to the most important matters with the knowledge that the subordinate matters are well taken care of.

Leaders, businesses, and organisations need to place trust in the professional ability of their staff, and particularly in their junior leaders. As with the maintenance of standards, leaders and managers must ensure those working for them are not only equipped to carry out those tasks assigned to them but that they do so in a manner appropriate to the required outcome and the circumstance at the time.

Careful observation is necessary to ensure that it is not just the outcome that is considered, but that the path to that outcome is also subject to review. While this may appear to run counter to the accepted philosophy of Mission Command, it should form an important part of the process. A task undertaken does not mean that it has been effectively and safely carried out.

Whilst the leader can delegate responsibility for the performance of a function, activity, or task, he or she cannot hand off accountability for the outcome or the way the delegate achieves that outcome. This accountability inherently resides with the leader and is an ethical, moral, and legal obligation. Leaders may delegate tasks to subordinates, but they cannot delegate their responsibilities.

Delegation is not Abdication.

Junior leaders must uphold the standards set by the organisation and/or senior leaders. Responsibility for the overall performance of an organisation or group remains the responsibility of the individuals occupying senior leadership roles. Leaders should ensure that they do not simply rely on their “orders, directives or intent” being carried out. The high standard expected by senior and junior leaders alike should be similarly expected through all levels and aspects of the organisation. Leaders cannot expect their subordinate leaders and followers to suddenly ‘switch on’ in a crisis or time of high demand if they have not received the training and conditioning necessary for higher end operations.

For delegation to be effective the following conditions need to be established, documented, and understood:

WHO – Formal, documented assignment of responsibility to an individual who is deemed competent, and possesses the requisite skills, knowledge, and experience to properly execute the assigned delegation.

WHAT – Clear and unambiguous statement of intent from the leader to the delegate.

WHERE – Identification of any boundaries for the assigned responsibilities.

WHEN – Notice for when the delegation starts and ends.

HOW – Details of any specific methods or expectations associated with the delegation.

LIMITS – Clearly stated limits of responsibility and authority.

It is crucial to follow this process and set in place these conditions for all delegations, not just for senior leadership roles and management positions. Taking the time to delegate responsibility effectively is important and will ensure the subordinate leader is clear about their responsibilities and how they are expected to carry them out. Failure to delegate effectively is also setting up the subordinate leader to fail in the execution of their delegated responsibility and will result in you spending time to resolve issues or need to continually assist the delegate to perform their assigned duties.

Once all necessary conditions have been set in place and the leader can trust that their delegates are properly equipped to perform their assigned responsibility in the manner expected, it is essential that the leader not only delegates responsibility to act but also the authority to do so without the need to constantly seek higher approval. This is the fundamental basis and essence of Decentralised Command.

The Value of Values

Have you ever attended a leadership course or corporate training session where you were asked to quickly jot down your core values? If you have, I’ll bet you identified around five values that you thought should be important to you and would be appropriate should you be singled out to share them with your colleagues.

But have you ever sat down in a quiet space and thought deeply about what is truly important to you? Are there things that are so important that you would be willing to make a stand for them, lose your job over them, give up your freedom for them, or even sacrifice your life to preserve them? This might sound somewhat dramatic, but I doubt many people have taken the time to consider what is truly important to them and what they are willing to do or not do in order to live according to their values. In fact, I doubt most people are even aware that they have a consistent set of values that guide the way they live their lives. Rather, they live according to what seems right to them at the time. But if they were to stop and think about why they make the decisions they make or act the way they do, they might just realise their free will is being controlled by internal and external factors and a sense of what is right or wrong.

Values can be grouped into three broad categories. These are individual values, societal values, and corporate values.

As humans, we are social creatures, so we need to conduct ourselves and behave in a manner that won’t see us cast out from our social group or network. When we are young this means acting in a way that subordinates us while we learn and become accustomed to what is acceptable to the group. As we grow and rise in status within the group, our values become important as they characterise who we are and they influence those who are subordinate to us. Our values underpin our moral character and define the type of person we are. Because we are brought up within our relevant social settings our individual values a generally aligned with those of our “tribe”.

The multicultural nature of the world today has seen a melding together of a broad range of values from various ethnic groups and geographic locations. There are also societies that are very conservative and have strict religious teachings or legal doctrine that determine their values. There can be significant differences between the values held sacred by one group to those held sacred by another and this has contributed to conflict throughout history.

In today’s business world, we now also have corporate values which tend to be linked to the ethical conduct of business and the adherence of organisations to their social and legal responsibilities. Unfortunately, business values are sometimes developed as a subset of the business planning process and are developed by senior leadership behind closed doors. An organisation’s values need to reflect the values of the society in which it operates as well as those of its employees. Trying to force employees to conform to corporate values that do not align with the individuals’ values doesn’t work as it’s the same as trying to convince a 13th-century religious scholar that the world isn’t flat.

All teams, groups, organisations, and businesses are made up of individuals whose values are shaped by their specific cultural, social, and religious upbringing and beliefs. Amongst all of this variability, there does; however, seem to be some consensus on core values within specific groups. Without diluting the absolute importance of the individual, societal groups do tend to share the same, or at least similar values such as the need to be loyal, honest, fair, humane, and free, noting that some cultures interpret these values differently.

While individuals may hold around five values as core to them, the variability in these values is very large and exists on a sliding scale.  Individuals within the same group may all hold honesty as a core value with most trying to be honest most of the time, while one may be dogmatic and another quite liberal in their adherence to this value.

With so many competing values the effective functioning of any group can be impacted upon by a misalignment of values. 

Many organisations now list their values on their websites and in their proposals and use them as a selling point. This can be construed as disingenuous as specifying that one of your values is honesty, for example, may be seen to imply that this differentiates you from your competitors when, in reality, acting honestly is a normal expectation of business by society and under the law. Similarly, listing courage as a value for your employees to adhere to is only valid and effective if management and leadership genuinely reward courageous behaviour, when in reality, too often the opposite is true. Others like teamwork are listed to encourage better collaboration and enhanced performance to only be undermined by compensation and promotion systems that reward individual effort.

If organisations are going to espouse specific values, they need to ensure that the values chosen are truly representative of how the organisation wants its staff, managers, and leaders to behave and how it wants to be known. Alternatively, an organisation made up of staff from very different backgrounds, might be better served by adopting and documenting a set of expected behaviours rather than a list of values. 

In my opinion, the two areas where values provide the greatest value are in shaping an individual’s moral character and in influencing individual and group decision making.

Accountability vs Responsibility – A Case Study

On the 21st of October 2021, Halyna Hutchins was shot by Alec Baldwin on the set of the low-budget Western RUST. But who is ultimately responsible for the shooting and does that responsibility in any way diminish the accountability of the movie’s producers?

In the interview, Alec Baldwin speaks with ABC News reporter George Stephanopoulos about the tragic fatal shooting of Halyna Hutchins and the wounding of Joel Souza on the set of his new movie Rust.

Baldwin speaks out about his role in the shooting and states that he does not feel guilty about what happened and knows that someone is responsible but that it is not him.

This case study highlights the difference between accountability and responsibility. As a leader, you can delegate responsibility for functions, activities, and even missions, but you ultimately retain accountability for the actions of those you lead and the outcome of their actions.

While you may not be directly responsible for what your followers do, you are accountable for their actions and it’s your responsibility to ensure they are qualified, competent, and experienced for the activities assigned to them. You are also responsible for setting the conditions that ensure the safe and successful performance of their duties.

As leaders, we need to trust that those we assign tasks will perform those tasks in a manner that is safe and according to any relevant standards and specifications. With the exception of deliberate negligent action or sabotage, the behaviour of our followers, how they perform their roles, is a direct reflection of their understanding of our expectations of them and how we allow them to act.

This is especially true of teams that are formed quickly for short durations of high intensity and dangerous work. The ability to build trust rapidly is underpinned by knowledge of individual team member’s skills and experience and shouldn’t be formed based on assumed competence. The degree of two-way trust that exists between a leader and their followers should be proportional to their familiarity with each other or based on objective evidence of their skills and experience and their reputation.

While it is more often than not appropriate and even necessary to employ “Mission Command” and allow our followers the autonomy to perform their roles based on their skills and experience, we retain the responsibility to maintain oversight and ensure all necessary checks and balances are in place and due dilligence is performed.

We are also responsible for ensuring our followers feel “psychologically safe” to speak out and express their concerns, knowing that they will be listened to and treated seriously. As leaders, we need to make decisions based on the best and most complete evidence available at the time. Too often when things go wrong, leaders have either dismissed concerns as they could not ‘see’ them as significant risks, or concerns are not raised by followers due to their fear of being ridiculed or seeming inexperienced or alarmist. Hindsight is a skill all leaders need to possess and to paraphrase the late Stephen Covey leaders need to always “start with the end in mind”.

Leaders can not do everything themselves and one of the hardest parts of developing into a good leader is letting go of the reigns and delegating non-leadership activities to your followers. But delegation does not mean abdication and while you can delegate responsibility and authority to your followers you can not delegate your overall accountability.

So is Alec Baldwin responsible for the death of Halyna Hutching and the wounding of Joel Souza or does responsibility rest with others who may have performed their roles in a negligent manner setting in place a sequence of events leading to the fatal shooting?

If Baldwin is not responsible for the shooting, is he still accountable through his role as a Producer of the film?

These are questions that will need to be deliberated over and answered during be court trial in early 2022. 

Directive Control

For the past 20 years or so, the focus of most modern leadership theorists has been on the need for leaders to create an environment where followers feel safe to contribute fully without fear of ridicule or reprisal. Thus, the transition to the 21st century has also been a time to transition our approach to leadership and to introduce the concept of Psychological Safety.

Psychological Safety was popularised by organisational behavioural scientist, Amy Edmondson in the early 2000s but its origins extend back to Schein and Bennis in the 1960s. The concept of Psychological Safety has, in-kind, been incorporated into systems such as “Safety Culture” and the Toyota Total Production System (TPS) and is represented in the “Andon Cord” system.

What is Psychological Safety?

Psychological Safety is the ability to “show and employ one’s self without fear of negative consequences of self-image, status or career” (Kahn 1990, p. 708). It fosters a sense of value in what individuals and teams have to contribute, endows them with a sense of belonging, and empowers them to speak up, collaborate, and experiment.

But this post isn’t about Psychological Safety. Rather it’s concerned with the notion that Directive Control no longer has a place in the leader’s tool kit, and that’s wrong.

The wide adoption of Psychological Safety and the desire of leaders to demonstrate inclusivity may have caused them to ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’. At the same time as Psychological Safety was experiencing rapid take up throughout the corporate world, society was experiencing a significant shift in behavioural expectations. This shift was seeing diversity and inclusion experience an elevated sense of value and bullying and harassment being called out as inappropriate behaviour and rightly, worthy of punishment.

However, the problem is that the negative bullying and harassment behaviour prevalent at the time has been conflated with the leadership technique known as Directive Control.

The term Directive Control comes from the German ‘Auftragstaktik’ (literally, “mission tactics”) and was the precursor to Mission Command. It is a form of ‘command and control’ developed initially for use by the military and is predicated on the commander giving directions to their subordinates based on their intent. That is, the orders given describe the objective or outcome required, but does not prescribe how to achieve the outcome.

Directive Control tends to conjure images of military commanders yelling orders and punishing subordinates who fail to comply or achieve the objective. But this is a mischaracterisation which has been propagated by ill-informed, self-professed gurus in the leadership consulting circuit, pedalling their own leadership systems and ideologies.

The problem is, Directive Control has become synonymous with poor leadership due to the barrage of articles written that denounce and demonise it and those who employ it.

Directive Control, Mission Command and Command and Control are generally misunderstood terms. This is likely due to the terminology used to label the techniques which seems to imply autocratic, exclusive, and micro-managing forms of dictatorial rule. But this is an incorrect interpretation of these valuable leadership and management techniques.

To properly understand why these techniques are not evil and the value they offer, we need to understand the role of a leader.

 
While there is no universally accepted definition of leadership it is generally agreed that a leader is someone who creates a vision and influences followers to achieve the objectives required to realise that vision.

 

Commander’s Intent

Once a leader has formed a vision, which is a view of some desired future state, they will generally express their intent for achieving the vision. This is not detailed planning. Rather this is the ‘what’ to achieve not the ‘how’ to achieve it. The role of subordinate leaders is to take the leader’s intent and create detailed plans.

A camel is a horse designed by a committee.

When the military develops plans, they seek out the widest available input from all relevant, credible sources. This is a very inclusive process but deliberately restricts input from those who are not properly informed, positioned or experienced to contribute. At all levels of planning, commanders encourage what the military calls ‘contributary descent’. This is a technique where anyone and everyone involved in the planning is required to raise any concerns or issues they have with the plan. A kind of continuous Debono ‘Black Hat’ review.  Once the plan has been agreed and finalised, however, everyone is expected to adhere to it.

Directive Control

Directive Control is a system of leadership where the leader expresses their intent and provides direction to followers on the objectives to be achieved and then empowers them to achieve the necessary outcome within the parameters of a set of ‘freedoms and constraints’[1]. To be truly effective, the leader must educate and mentor their followers for sufficient time to develop trust in their ability to make decisions and the leader must vary their leadership style according to the evolution of the situation.

Decentralised Execution

Decentralised execution is the delegation of decision-making authority to followers, so they may make and implement decisions and adjust their assigned tasks in fluid and rapidly changing situations.

Follower decisions should be ethically based and within the framework of their higher leader’s intent. Decentralised execution is essential to seizing, retaining, and exploiting the operational initiative during operations in environments where conditions rapidly change, and uncertainty is the norm as has become the case in today’s VUCA[2] business world.

Rapidly changing situations and uncertainty are inherent in business where leaders seek to establish a tempo and intensity that their competitors, cannot match.

Decentralised execution requires disseminating information to the lowest possible level so followers can make informed decisions based on a shared understanding of both the situation and their leader’s intent. This empowers followers operating in rapidly changing conditions to exercise disciplined initiative within their leader’s intent.

Generally, the more dynamic the circumstances, the greater the need for initiative to make decisions at lower levels. It is the duty of followers to exercise initiative to achieve their leader’s intent. It is the leader’s responsibility to issue appropriate intent and ensure followers are prepared in terms of education, training, and experience to exercise initiative.

The leader’s intent provides a unifying idea that allows decentralised execution within an overarching framework. It provides guidance within which individuals may exercise initiative to accomplish the desired end-state. Understanding the leader’s intent two levels up further enhances unity of effort while providing the basis for decentralised decision making and execution throughout the depth of the organisation. Followers who understand the leader’s intent are far more likely to exercise initiative effectively in unexpected situations. Under the Mission Command approach to command and control, followers have both responsibility and authority to fulfil the leader’s intent.

Now that we have a shared understanding of the term Directive Control and how it is employed through decentralised execution, you can see how the philosophy of Directive Control is fully congruent with that of Psychological Safety. Hopefully, this has inspired you to consider researching more about Directive Control and Mission Command with the intent of incorporating their philosophies into your leadership style rather than excluding them due to the stigma created by ill-informed leadership gurus.

[1] Freedoms and constraints set out the rules, regulations, and limits of the mission or activity.
[2] Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous (VUCA).

Building Rapid Trust

Credit to The Cove and the Centre for Australian Army Leadership

The ability to build trust quickly is a skill leaders often need, but more often struggle to know how to achieve. In this Pod Cast, Dr Jemma King speak with the Centre for Australian Army Leadership about how to achieve rapid trust and explains her top 5 factors to increase inter-team effectiveness. There’s a lot that Dr King unpacks in this show so you may want to listen to it more than once.

Key take-aways

Dr King speaks about the need for leaders to demonstrate their ability and benevolence and to act in a consistent manner in order to rapidly gain trust and to sustain that trust over the long term. To aid in remembering these three critical components of trust she refers to these characteristics as the A-B-Cs of trust.

Dr King also explains that before followers will care about how much you know, they first want to know how much you care. Hence the sequence of the A-B-Cs is important and starts with benevolence, then ability and consistency.

The diagram below shows the relationship between a leader’s ability and benevolence or warmth.

Ability vs Trust

Ethics and Integrity

Ethics

Ethics and Integrity are undoubtedly the foundations of great leadership. Over the years, the media has been littered with examples of leaders and individuals who put profit and self-interest ahead of what was right. There are far too many modern examples where leaders compromised their integrity and breached their ethical obligations.

Related to follower willingness or conviction is the concept that leadership has a moral or ethical component. Followers see the difference between striving for a goal that they believe to be ethically sound and one that is ethically or morally wrong. This distinction is made to differentiate between those leaders that are influential and visionary but morally or ethically corrupt and those that are equally influential and visionary but morally and ethically sound.

Leader Responsibilities

It is necessary for leaders to have more than just an academic appreciation of ethics. Leaders require an understanding of how ethics influence their decision-making and actions. Leaders have specific responsibilities that relate to the individuals and the teams they lead. There are three fundamental ethical responsibilities that leaders are required to discharge. These are:

  • Serve as role models worthy of emulation.
  • Promote ethical development for followers.
  • Develop and sustain an ethical climate within the group that they lead.

Case Studies

Enron. One of the best-known examples of unethical behaviour is the 2001 Enron scandal where senior executives deceived clients and shareholders by hiding billions of dollars of losses and debt and coerced their auditors Arthur Andersen into ignoring and hiding the issues. Enron was ultimately caught and forced to file for bankruptcy and Arthur Andersen, then one of the largest and most respected auditing companies in the world, folded. Several Enron senior executives received jail sentences but despite Enron’s billions of dollars of assets, many investors’ pensions and livelihoods were lost by the actions of greedy, unethical, and morally bankrupt executives.

Wells Fargo. In 2016, Wells Fargo, one of the US’s largest and most trusted financial institutions was found to have created millions of fraudulent savings and checking accounts on behalf of their clients without their consent. Initially, senior leaders tried to distance themselves from any wrongdoing, blaming individual employees and managers; however, regulators found the fraud was due to senior leadership pressure to open as many accounts as possible and through cross-selling. The bank has been issued nearly $3Bn USD in fines and suffers ongoing reputational damage despite a pledge to reform its practices.

Despite most organisations and institutions now having strict policies on ethical behaviour and providing training at all levels, unethical behaviour continues to be an insidious problem that causes all manner of leadership challenges. But it’s not just commercial businesses that push the boundary to gain a competitive advantage. Ethical failures can occur in any organisation and at any level within the leadership and management ranks. In 2015, the then Chief of Army, LTGEN David Morrison AO, addressed the Australian Army to state his position on inclusion and his expectations of the officers and soldiers under his command. He did this because of allegations made against Officers and NCOs of misconduct and behaviour deemed inappropriate and demeaning to female ADF personnel.

“The standard you walk past is the standard you accept”

In making his stand, LTGEN Morrison may have himself crossed an ethical boundary through his treatment of some of the accused, effectively ruining their careers despite no charges being laid. It is important to apply ethics and integrity at all times and to all parties.

So how do leaders ensure they do not succumb to the allure of the quick win or belief that they can get away with unethical behaviour? What stops individuals from straying when no one is watching? Here are a few things you can do to stay the course set by your moral compass.

Know your values and live them

Nowadays, most organisations have a set of defined values. The unfortunate reality is that many organisations set these values as a means of marketing to their customers that their business is about more than just gross margins. There is little point to businesses setting corporate values if these values do not perfectly align with those of every individual member of the organisation. Besides, every client automatically expects every organisation to value honesty, integrity, trust, loyalty, and the array of other trendy values pinned to company websites everywhere. Values are nothing unless they are demonstrated through consistent behaviour. Leaders need to lead by example and exemplify the behaviour they expect of those they lead. There is real power in knowing this as you may attain compliance by mandating values but you will inspire behavioural change through inspiring junior staff to want to emulate their leaders.

Do what’s right, not what’s quick or easy

Time and cost pressure are powerful drivers and are significant influencers of behaviour. The need to be profitable and survive when times are tough will test even the most disciplined leader. This is when only the very best leaders know that crossing the ethics line is far worse than any short-term gain that may be realised by acting in an unethical manner. It is far better, to be honest, and deal with issues and problems at the time, rather than delaying them or acting inappropriately. Elron and Wells Fargo have shown the impact of crossing the line for short-term gain.

If it doesn’t feel right; do, or say something

Many times, in our lives we will encounter situations where our ethics, morals and integrity are challenged. This can be anything from schoolyard antics and trying to gain or retain your popularity amongst the “cool kids”, to peer pressure to shoplift or turn a blind eye to discrimination in the workplace. Speaking up and acting according to your values is hard and it gets harder the further you walk past the bad behaviour. There’s an old saying, “bad news doesn’t get better with age” and this is certainly true when it comes to needing to speak up. It is far easier to stop unethical behaviour at its early stages before it takes root. This is also the time when you are least implicated in the issue and therefore are less likely to suffer from being complicit. Often, the difficulty is noticing the subtle signs that something is not quite right. Hence, it’s crucial that you act as soon as you sense something seems off. At this early stage, be cautious not to be too accusatorial. A good technique is to ask lots of questions. Eventually, any corruption or unethical behaviour will surface, and you can then take action.

Choose good role models

Identifying three or four role models of unimpeachable ethics and striving to emulate their character and ethics is a great way to help keep you from straying due to pressure and local influences. Research them, think about them often, think about what they would do when faced with your challenge or ethical dilemma, and speak their names during conversations to reinforce them as important to you. Also, choose a couple of trusted mentors with who you can speak honestly and confidentially and use them as sounding boards when you have difficult circumstances to navigate or decisions to make. Generally, if you feel the need to discuss an issue with your mentors this should be a red flag that something is not ok, and your mentor should help confirm this and hopefully help you choose what to do.

Making ethical decisions

Facts and logic underpin all good decisions and decision-making processes, but it’s our moral compass and our values that guide and temper those decisions. Facts and logic alone only tell us what is; they don’t tell us what ought to be. If ethical decision making was as simple as understanding the facts and applying logic, all decisions would be black and white and solved by using the right mathematical equations. Many of the ethical dilemmas we face are multivariable problems that undermined our values, our cultural norms, and our religious beliefs and are often tainted by our biases and steered by our heuristics. There is no simple answer to the question of how to consistently make good ethical decisions. I believe all we can do is try our best to make them according to our values and, to quote Stephen Covey, “start with the end in mind”. Understand the outcome that must be achieved and anticipate any unintended consequences. It is often impossible to make a completely ethical decision, or at least from the perspective of some individuals or factions. In these cases, you should take a utilitarian approach.

Other approaches to ethical decision making include Kantian ethics, the Fairness or Justice approach, the Common-Good approach, and the Virtue or Aretaic approach.

Being of good moral character and always demonstrating good ethical behaviour and making ethical decisions are core to being a good leader. These traits will build internal and external trust and will be the pillars of your reputation. These things are precious and take much time to mature. Failing to act ethically and with integrity will destroy your reputation before your eyes and render you unable to lead; so, be warned, any momentary lapse of ethics could, and well ought to result in your downfall.

What Makes Teams Work?

Teams win because they are a stable, bounded group of individuals who are interdependent in achieving a shared outcome and work or practice together over a long period of time. In today’s fast-paced world where change is constant and disruption is an aim of business, diverse teams are brought together quickly and expected to achieve great things, often under immense time pressure, with complex and ambiguous requirements and no real certainty of the outcome. Amy Edmondson’s TED Talk on teaming sheds light on why some teams can come together to accomplish great things by bonding, finding a common purpose, and being prepared to try new things and fail. Leaders who practice situational humility and remain curious, create an environment of Psychological Safety that allows team members to speak up without fear of criticism or ridicule.

Meeting Expectations

Meetings are a useful means for brainstorming, planning, communicating, and coordinating activities. Pre COVID19 most meetings were conducted face-to-face in meeting rooms and were a means of bringing a team together to discuss important operational or project matters, often setting post-meeting tasks or follow-up. Holding meetings necessarily came with the requirement to schedule the meeting and book a room, plan the meeting and set a formal agenda, corral the participants, conduct the meeting, decide on and assign actions, set deadlines, take minutes, and socialise the outcomes. Meetings were used for discussions and decisions, and for planning and executing activities. After a meeting, teams would interact and discuss joint and individual activities creating an unseen extension of the meeting. Teams would, in effect, operate in ‘group silos’ performing both individual tasks and group activities requiring periods of isolated effort and team interaction. Tasks would be performed and would last until the activities were completed or the next meeting provided new or updated directions. Meetings took time and effort to set up and run and had a defined purpose.

Fast-forward to the 2020s where COVID19 has created a world where lockdowns and working from home are commonplace and meetings are conducted over the internet via videoconference. The ability for teams to socially interact during their workday has been eroded and the ability of team members to bond and create a unified team identity, a ‘tribe’ has been lost. This has negative implications for the team’s ability to complete their assigned duties in the effective and coordinated way they would if working together in a physical group environment. This social interaction is not only important from a humanistic and mental health perspective, it’s the way informal mentoring, problem solving, and innovation occurs. When individual members of a team work in isolation they are less likely to draw upon the diverse thinking that happens when a group of individuals interacts as a team. Under the constraints that COVID19 forces upon us, it’s important that teams take the time to connect in informal online meetings where formal agendas and meeting outcomes are not important and group discussion is the foremost purpose of the meeting.

As the leader or manager of the team, it’s important that you understand that your role in these meetings might be, to not be in these meetings. That’s right, your presence in these meetings may inhibit the natural flow of the meeting and morph its purpose from team interaction to planning, coordinating, deciding, and executing new activities. The purpose of these team interactive meetings is to allow your team to interact and discuss the activities already set, not to leave the meeting with a new set of activities, tasks, and deadlines. In the current paradigm, leaders and managers need to view online meetings in the same way as face-to-face meetings but must also realise that not every meeting is a formal meeting. Leaders and managers need to be clear with themselves about which meetings are for planning and assigning tasks and which meetings are just team interactions. Leaders and managers must ensure they do not dominate these meetings or assign new tasks. If you think about normal face-to-face meetings where the leader or manager needs to plan and set up the meeting and manage the outcomes, and then compare this to sending a meeting invitation to the team, ‘winging it’ and leaving the meeting with staff now having 15 or 20 new tasks, you run the risk of overloading staff with too much work.

Leaders and managers need to realise that their staff may not be comfortable taking the initiative and set up their own meetings or even understand the need or value in doing so. It’s important that you have a discussion with your team about the value of working together whilst in isolation.

Here are 10 ways you can hold better online meetings that help you lead or manage your team without overloading them and allow your team to interact, problem solve, be mentored, and be innovative.

  1. Distinguish between formal meetings and team interactions
  2. Conduct formal meetings as if they are face-to-face meetings
  3. Restrict formal meetings and task allocation to only when they are needed
  4. Develop a task register to track task allocation and progress and to allow task cross-leveling
  5. Start each week with a weekly planning meeting to understand and coordinate the weekly workload
  6. Make most meetings ‘catch ups’, progress updates, or information sessions
  7. Control your urge to end each meeting by assigning new tasks to staff
  8. Have a discussion with your staff about the importance of their own online interactions, mentoring, and group discussions
  9. Set up a reoccurring end of week meeting to wrap up the week and socialise before the weekend
  10. Don’t forget to have regular one-on-one ‘meetings’ with your staff to discuss their challenges and check on their welfare

COVID19 has been disrupting the way we live and work for over a year and a half now and will continue to challenge us for a long time to come. Ensuring the way we interact online is positive and effective and does not compound the stress staff already endure is critical in maintaining effective teams and reducing mental health issues. Holding effective, purposeful meetings is not only a critical leadership and management function, it’s now often the only interaction we have with our staff so its worthwhile making them as beneficial as possible.

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