Leadership – Leading Differently

A Few Words About Trust

“Trust brings a higher level of communication and a higher level of commitment and accountability.”
Bruce Arians

You cannot advance change without understanding the importance of trust. Every positive change that has ever occurred in human history has happened because of the development of personal relationships built on trust. Trust is a necessary component in turning shared values into shared action.

Trust doesn’t happen overnight. It develops over time. If we trust each other, it doesn’t simply mean that I believe what you say. When you consistently do what you say you are going to do, it builds trust. When you demonstrate honesty, kindness, transparency and humility, it builds trust. Trust is created by actions, not by saying, “trust me.”

Because it is intensely personal, trust can be complex. It can be influenced as much by intuition, and gut feeling, as it is on logic and evidence. Trust is not necessarily an either/or proposition. It can exist on a continuum. You can share values and goals with someone, but disagree with the means by which they want to achieve those goals. Your level of trust informs your tolerance for risk, or your willingness to invest time and energy.

Trust is not transferable. Just because A trusts B, and B trusts C, it doesn’t mean that C will automatically trust A. The trust between B and C can, however, serve to open a door to a trusted relationship between A and C. Trust can also fade without regular, reliable, trustworthy acts,

Misinformation erodes trust. Example: Outlandish, unsubstantiated medical, or scientific claims on social media serve to erode public trust in science. There isn’t a tremendous return on investment trying to combat the rantings of the misinformation echo chamber. When it seems difficult to tune out those rants, just ignore them, and remember that change happens at the center.

Finally, remember that trust is not about marketing, or propaganda. It is about developing authentic human relationships and having each other’s backs. In the words of psychotherapist and author Thomas Moore: “We need people in our lives with whom we can be as open as possible. To have real conversations with people may seem like such a simple, obvious suggestion, but it involves courage and risk.”

A Brief Introduction to Conflict Resolution

“If we manage conflict constructively, we harness its energy for creativity and development.”
Kenneth Kaye

Just because people share the same goal around creating change, does not mean that they will agree on everything. Effective social change leaders recognize the importance of addressing internal conflicts early, and in a way that improves relationships among allies. Even if a dispute seems like a small thing it needs to be addressed. What seems like a small thing to one person might be the key to trust or commitment to another.

Sometimes conflict appears to be about one thing, but it is, in fact, related to a variety of things. This reality is commonly illustrated by an iceberg metaphor. Factors such as culture, values, and assumptions are always present beneath the conflict in question.

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Cultural Differences

Not every conflict involving people who are different is caused by cultural differences, but recognizing cultural differences is particularly important. Cultural differences can include things such as:

communication styles
attitudes towards conflict
approaches to completing tasks
decision-making styles
ways people come to know things

We cannot know all things about all cultures, and there are no universal intercultural problem-solving methods. These two things, however, are true: 1) in every culture people communicate because they want to be listened to and they want to be understood; and 2) in every culture people respond to respect and disrespect.

Individual Conflict Styles: a Starting Point

Many people find it useful to try to determine where individuals fit on an inventory of conflict styles. The most popular description of individual styles is probably the Thomas–Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument, developed in the early 1970s by Kenneth W. Thomas and Ralph H. Kilmann. The assessment instrument itself is under copyright, and can be purchased, but the categories as they are mapped in terms of their relationship to assertiveness, and cooperativeness, are widely known (see image below).

Effective Strategies for Managing Conflict

Respectful, Active Listening
Apologizing when appropriate
Don’t lose your sense of humor
Accepting a goal of negotiating and compromising
Temporarily postponing decisions
Sharing all of the reasons for your opinions
Soliciting intervention by a trusted third party
Taking turns speaking

Useful Resources

Online Master of Legal Studies maintains a long list of resources

Conflict Resolution Network

Community Toolbox

Three types of intelligence that will help you lead change

“Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.”
Stephen Hawking

Although I agree that it can come in useful on certain occasions, if you were hoping for tips on reconnaissance or spying, you are going to be disappointed. I apologize. I am using “intelligence” here in the context of acquiring skills, habits, and knowledge that help you better understand yourself, and other people.

We frequently think of intelligent people in terms of academic achievement. People with academic intelligence are logical, and seek evidence based on the analysis of data. They remember theories, and formulas. They got good grades in school.

There are, however, other types of intelligence. Some people say there are eight types, others nine. Some believe there are 12 types. I want to focus on three particular types of intelligence that are necessary in order to effect change. They are: emotional intelligence, social intelligence, and existential intelligence.

Emotional Intelligence

I like the definition of emotional intelligence on the helpguide.org website it says that “emotional intelligence is the ability to understand, use, and manage your own emotions in positive ways to relieve stress, communicate effectively, empathize with others, overcome challenges and defuse conflict.”

We are passionate about the things we want to change in the world. Passion and emotion go hand in hand. We feel the desire for change on a very personal level. The emotions of both our allies, and our rivals run deep. Emotions can lead to deeper ways of knowing. They can also inflame tensions.

Things you can do to develop your emotional intelligence include:

Hone your listening skills – Avoid preconceptions. Encourage the speaker to be open and honest. Understand the speaker’s point of view and ideas, even if you don’t agree with them.
Understand that all criticism is not an invitation to fight.
Try to empathize. Don’t avoid difficult conversations. Examine your own biases.
Be aware of the ways your emotions might be barriers to understanding complex situations. Take time to consider expressing clear, thoughtful responses rather than simply giving knee-jerk reactions.

Social Intelligence

Social intelligence is developed through experience. Unfortunately, we cannot anticipate every circumstance and event in life. We can’t fully cultivate social intelligence simply from educating ourselves. Sometimes our interpersonal interactions do not go well. Recognizing why those exchanges went poorly helps us learn from our mistakes.

Leading change requires diplomacy. Good diplomats have social intelligence. They show discretion and thoughtfulness in their interactions with other people. Tactful consideration for others builds trust, and trust is priceless.

Healthy personal relationships are at the core of every level of positive change. We do not walk the world alone. In the words of the late American radio personality Earl Nightingale, “Getting along well with other people is still the world’s most needed skill. With it…there is no limit to what person can do. We need people, we need the cooperation of others. There is very little we can do alone.”

Existential Intelligence

Existential intelligence is all about bringing out the philosopher in you. It involves thinking deeply about the big picture. Pondering existential questions is often related to the desire to create social change. For example:

Are there values that we all share?
Are there universal human rights?
What is your purpose in life?

Thinking about life’s big questions can lead to people evaluating their values, and making changes in their lives in an effort to take responsibility for their actions based on those values. People leave “successful” careers to work at making the world a better place. (See the post, “Narrowing the Gap Between Our Ideal and Our Real Values”). You may not spend countless hours contemplating existential questions, but whatever time you do spend will always be time well spent.

The Game is Not Over: Bouncing Back from a Defeat

“Fortitude is the marshal of thought, the armor of the will, and the fort of reason.”

– Francis Bacon

Losing an election, a local council vote, a legal challenge, or failing to remove a barrier to the change you want to see can be discouraging, and emotionally draining. Rarely, however, does your opposition’s victory eliminate every opportunity for you and your allies to move your cause forward. To use a tennis metaphor, your loss may have been a point, or a game, or even a set, but it wasn’t necessarily the match. Here are a few things to consider once you’ve dusted yourself off and are ready to jump back into the thick of things.

Feeling Bad – Once a setback has occurred, don’t spend more than a few minutes feeling sorry for yourselves (OK, it may take a day or two). It is important to honestly evaluate your missteps and tactical errors. Don’t beat yourselves up for your mistakes. Learn from them.

Accepting Criticism – People may criticize leadership groups or individuals. That’s normal. Admit your own mistakes. Own your failures. Follow that up by reasserting your dedication to your cause and inviting a committed group of people to start planning your next action. You’ll do so with the confidence that you won’t make the same mistakes twice.

Reaffirming Goals – Remind yourselves why your goals are still important. Reaffirm your shared values with all of your allies. Don’t dismiss those who are not yet ready to jump immediately into direct action. Give them space, and let them know that they are valued, and they’ll be back when your cause’s energy builds again.

Cultivating More Leaders – Finally, remember that a leader’s job is not to find followers, but rather it is to create more leaders. Have one-to-one meetings with people who joined you along the way, who may not have been with you during earlier strategy planning. You’ll find more leaders, and more ways to articulate your messages, and make your case for change.

The fight is not over.

Small Victories

allies — Image by Gerd Altmann via Pixabay

“We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.”
— Howard Zinn

The pursuit of social change is not always about big wins. When you are in it for the long haul . . .

Sometimes you will point out complexities where people saw only black and white.

Sometimes you will sow seeds of uncertainty.

Sometimes you will point out ambiguities.

Sometimes you will remind people to examine their own competing values.

Sometimes you will meet one new, likeminded ally.

Small victories create the underpinnings for the platforms upon which change is built. Leaders of change need to identify these victories, and articulate their value to your allies. Recognizing the small wins serves to remind us that leadership is a distributed activity that takes place at an interpersonal level. Every person engaged in every small action is demonstrating leadership for change.

Five Reasons to Lead Change

“Some men have thousands of reasons why they cannot do what they want to, when all they need is one reason why they can.”
– Martha Graham

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There are hundreds of reasons to take an active role in creating a better world. Here are just five of them.

You find yourself complaining a lot.
You find yourself starting too many sentences with phrases such as, “Why doesn’t somebody” or, “When are they going to.” You are that somebody.

Children depend on you.
Everyone can think of an issue where children are adversely affected through no fault of their own. The world needs to be safe for future generations.

You’re smart.
You know more about the issues that you’re passionate about than most people do. You’ve already got a head start on creating a solution.

Nobody should have to live in fear.
Whether it’s fear of the unknown, fear of failing, or fear of what other people think, fear limits our choices, our options, and our opportunities. You have more courage than you know.

You need to eat, drink, and breathe in order to live.
Despite differences in political ideology, everyone has some fundamental common ground when it comes to life’s necessities. Consider starting with issues that touch these commonalities, and find some unlikely allies.

Like I said, there are hundreds more reasons. Those reasons are connected directly to your most closely held values. You care. How can you not act?

Give Authority

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When people are involved in something that is organized, they sometimes need permission to act on certain things. Nobody wants a loose canon, right?

Other times people are held back by the idea that they need permission to act on things that do not actually require permission. Maybe it’s an excuse for being afraid. Maybe they are just indecisive. Whatever the reason, we periodically need to give a stamp of approval.

Here’s something to think about the next time you are in a leadership role where someone needs permission. Are you giving them responsibility, or authority?

If I say that I am giving you the responsibility to do something, it sounds like I am giving you a job to do, and I expect you to do it. Responsibility is positional. It moves from the bottom to the top. Responsibility can sound like a burden.

If I say that I am giving you the authority to do something, it sounds like I am validating your power. You are in charge of doing something due to your abilities, and your competence. Authority is a pat on the back.

Give people authority.

Seeing ROI Through a Community Lens

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“I know there is strength in the differences between us. I know there is comfort, where we overlap.”

― Ani DiFranco

Often, when people have conversations about proposed changes in their community, there are two questions that are either explicit, or are just under the surface. These questions speak to return on investment (ROI). People want to know: what’s in it for me; and what is it going to cost?

It’s reasonable to think that someone would want to know what kind of return they might expect on their commitment of time, energy, or money. That expected ROI does not, however, always reflect some sort of purely selfish interest on the part of the person whose support you are seeking. Rational people see their self-interest tied to the common good.

Social change, community building, and placemaking are about improving everyone’s quality of life, and identifying their common self-interest. This is why it is imperative to express your case for support in terms of the ‘rising tide lifts all boats’ metaphor, as well as pointing out specific individual benefits.

Most individuals don’t have the ability to create the scale necessary for many of the quality of life measures that they seek. They don’t have the resources to create a park, or a cultural event. They can’t singlehandedly avoid public health issues. They can’t ensure that people will be trained, and make living wages performing the services that they need to care for themselves and their loved ones. Vibrant, healthy communities embrace the idea of the public good.

I have spent a considerable chunk of my career in higher education. For a long time, public investment in higher education was seen by elected officials as a public good. Colleges and universities are economic engines, and incubators of innovation. For some reason, however, public investment in higher education has seen a steady decline over the past couple of decades. One contributing factor to this dwindling support is the fact that college recruitment strategies have focused so heavily on the individual career and income gains that can be realized by obtaining a college degree. Lawmakers took notice and essentially said, ‘if the gains are private, maybe the investment should be private.’

Take some time to look at the issues you are concerned with through a community lens. Even if the issue seems to focus on the challenges individuals or small groups, how does the resolution of those challenges benefit the community as a whole?

What does it mean to be strategic?

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“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”

– Dwight D. Eisenhower

A social change strategy is more than just a plan of action designed to achieve a goal. It cannot be easily diagramed, because successful movements have distributed, as opposed to centralized leadership. Strategy is more than planned activities written in the boxes of a logic model.

This does not imply that you are in a constant state of improvisation. To be strategic is to understand that a wide variety of actions done with an informed perspective, or worldview, can contribute to collective success.

Those actions cannot necessarily be orchestrated by or coordinated from some center of operations. Localized opportunities present themselves, and people take advantage of them. Plans emerge with constantly evolving circumstances.

In this regard, strategy is more of a position, than it is a plan. A commitment to your position provides a lens through which you will know if your actions complement those across a movement.

“You may not be interested in strategy, but strategy is interested in you.”

– Leon Trotsky

Revealing the Invisible

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“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”

– Ralph Ellison

When it comes to people being invisible, there are a couple of types of invisibility to consider. Both kinds represent significant challenges in the process of trying to effect social change.

First, there are people, or groups of people that are deliberately unrecognized. They often have few financial resources, are generally of poorer health, have less social capital, and are often considered by much more privileged people, as being less important.

The second group of “invisible” people, or groups of people are deliberately hidden. These are people of wealth and influence, whose activities allow them to rig social and political systems under the radar of most people.

The deliberately unrecognized, the unheard, and the unseen, are often at the heart of changes we are trying to create. It is important to amplify their voices, and to shed light on their realities. Awareness, education, and advocacy are key strategic goals. For example, if your city doesn’t have homeless people on street corners, and in parks, officials may deny that homelessness is something they need to be concerned about. Only by hearing the stories of people who are couch hopping, sleeping under bridges, or in cars, can you reveal the true extent of your community’s lack of affordable housing.

It is important to understand that the “invisible” are not simply needy, or victims. Giving voice to the invisible serves to uncover potential strategic approaches and assets. They are the people who often know the best solutions to overcoming the challenges that they face. Any social change effort should seek to leverage people at the margins; not as sad examples, but as full partners in planning the future.

“The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.”

– Woodrow Wilson

Revealing the invisible may not only expose unfairness and inequality, but it can also uncover something on the other end of the privilege spectrum – the so-called, power behind the throne that is working in opposition to your goals. This influence is usually purchased with large amounts of money.

These influencers are usually very careful to not actually break any laws, despite the fact that their actions may be ethically abhorrent. You may never come close to matching their financial clout, but exposing their role can, however, be beneficial. This is because the money trail points to real self-interests, as opposed to those being touted in your opposition’s misleading rhetoric. In some cases, it may be possible to boycott the source of the influencer’s income, or at least send some bad publicity their way.

Ultimately, it will probably be more effective to spend more time on revealing the realities of the deliberately unrecognized, than on exposing the deliberately hidden. That is where there is more untapped power; and it is the kind of power that money can’t buy.

Leadership and the Dunning–Kruger Effect

“Useful men, who do useful things, don’t mind being treated as useless. But the useless always judge themselves as being important and hide all their incompetence behind authority.” – Paulo Coelho

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In 1999, a couple of psychologists from Cornell University, named Kruger and Dunning, published some research findings* which essentially said that there is a tendency for unskilled individuals to overestimate their own ability, and a tendency for experts to underestimate their own ability. This incorrect self-assessment of competence became known as the Dunning–Kruger Effect. When organizing to effect change, this tendency creates unique challenges.

Over-Estimators

If someone has assumed a leadership role, the failure to recognize their own lack of skill, as well as the extent of that inadequacy, is a potential recipe for disaster. This is doubly problematic as the researchers also found that over-estimators also fail to accurately gauge skill in others.

I have written previously about emotional intelligence, and how people can develop their capacity for it. Similarly, I believe that people can train themselves to more realistically assess their abilities in a variety of skills. The fact that under-performance is accompanied by tangible evidence in the end, means that there is incentive for people to seek honest, realistic self-assessment.

Under-Estimators

The real tragedy lies with the under-estimators. Undervaluing your own abilities isn’t just sad and unfortunate on a personal level. It has an impact on group morale, commitment, productivity, and ultimately, success.

One strategy to overcome this challenge would be to use appreciative inquiry, or one-to-one conversations, to map the assets of individuals. People sometimes forget about skills and talents that they have, and require others help to uncover those assets.

If you have examples of how an individual’s over-, or under-estimating their own abilities has played out in you work, please share them in the comments below.

*Kruger, Justin; Dunning, David (1999). “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Tacit Knowledge and Change Agentry

“We know more than we can tell.”
– Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension

Tacit knowledge is the kind of knowledge that is difficult to convey to another person either verbally, or in writing. It can also be critically important in the process of affecting social change.

Common examples of tacit knowledge include things such as emotional intelligence, or how to speak a language that you’ve learned through immersion over a lifetime, or humor (we all laugh at things that we can’t explain why we find them funny). There are some people who argue (I am not one of them) that leadership itself is a skill that primarily leverages tacit knowledge, gained only from experience.

This intelligence that people often refer to as intuition, is more than a mere hunch. It is the result of subconsciously connecting many bits and pieces of knowledge that we’ve collected over a lifetime. Think about a chess player who makes a rapid succession of moves. Despite the pace of the game, the moves are as calculated as they are situational.

Tacit knowledge is not always correct. It is just as likely as explicit knowledge, to get caught in the trap characterized by that Mark Twain quote, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” The deep roots of superstition, racism, and all sorts of other human failings lie in the faulty assumptions of tacit knowledge.

Take the so-called “golden rule,” for example: “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” It doesn’t take training to practice. Its inward orientation suggests that it is based on self-constructed, tacit knowledge. Its biblical origins might even suggest to some that it is some sort of universal truth. The problem is that this “truth” has an inherent bias. The more generous, and effective strategy for human interaction seems to lie in what is known as the Platinum Rule: “Do unto others, as others would have done unto themselves.” In other words, treat people the way they want to be treated, not the way you want to be treated.

Despite its imperfections, tacit knowledge can be crucial to organizing and motivating people to advocate for change. It is expressed in the wisdom of elders. It is the source of the confidence that people place in a community’s opinion leaders, people who have gained the trust of many people, and whose opinion on an issue serves as a sort of seal of approval for like-minded residents.

The transfer of tacit knowledge is so situational, that there is no easy method to measure, or make use of it. This reality is why distributed networks of grassroots activists are more effective than centralized, networks that look like corporate organizational charts.

Capacity inventories and appreciative inquiry interviews, like those that we use in asset-based community development, can go a long way toward uncovering forgotten or hidden assets. It is often, however, easier to discover skills and talents, than it is to discover what people know. Tacit knowledge often reveals itself over the course of the development of personal relationships. Recognizing when uncommon knowledge is being shared is an important skill.