Your leadership team does not have a brain. It does, however, have shared perceptions, shared biases and memory, collective thinking, and mutual assumptions. In other words, just as individuals have minds, so does your leadership team have a mind.
Many leadership teams are too busy to objectify and examine their own collective mind. The price they pay is getting stuck on one or both of the following leadership gerbil wheels:
The first leadership gerbil wheel is called “Extracting Value.” [i] Leadership teams using this paradigm think transactionally. Human beings (or groups of human beings) are entities with generally fixed levels of potential, talent, or skill. The job of the leadership team is to match people to the appropriate jobs and to extract as much value as possible.
Extracting Value leaders tend to see the world as a hazardous place in which the strongest and smartest succeed. Knowledge is considered a form of power. Success is the primary goal, with the definition of success changing depending on context.
The second leadership gerbil wheel is called “Arresting Disorder.” Arresting Disorder leaders see everything as a great big, amazing machine. Value is created with persistent efforts to improve the performance of that machine. They believe that knowledge is fungible, in other words, what worked over there will work here. Understanding begets knowledge, and it is often best to seek understanding from experts, studies, and books. Understanding also comes from analyzing, problem solving, searching for best practices, striving for perfection.
I hear you screaming, dear reader, “But both of these paradigms are foundational to the viability of any organization.” Yes, of course, they are. All competent leaders must be able to think transactionally, to match skills to jobs, to abate disorder, improve performance, and so on. These leadership paradigms only become gerbil wheels when you can’t get off them, when your leadership team is unable to access any other ways of making sense. Which brings us to at least one alternative:
Evolving Capacity. Evolving Capacity leaders can step off the gerbil wheels. They believe people, organizations, and systems are living entities, each with their own intrinsic essence. Development is a basic human need, the need to individuate while participating in the whole simultaneously. Understanding comes from personal experience, and new ways of knowing can be developed in addition to simply taking in new information.
Evolving Capacity leaders have no separate set of rules for business. General or abstract principles can’t be applied, necessarily, to the specific and concrete. Everything is interconnected and interdependent. Instead of asking, What do we do? Evolving Capacity leaders ask, How are we making meaning? In addition to identifying problems, they take time to create space for potential. They see their teams, their people, and their organizations as part of a series of nested wholes. And in addition to looking for ways to extract value, they look for ways to evolve capacity and ways to allow essence to actualize.
Fern EPC helps individual physicians, healthcare executives, and teams objectify and examine their thinking so they can eschew fear, regain passion, and reclaim wasted energy.
[i] Extracting Value, Arresting Disorder, and Evolving Capacity are all concepts taken by Fern EPC from Bryan Ungard’s interpretation of Carol Sanford’s paradigms of leadership.