Reflective Leaders Needed for the Age of
Rage
When collective
emotions gather steam, knee jerk reactions can make a bad situation worse.
In the comedy western
Blazing Saddles, one seminal moment has the sheriff point a gun to his own
head, threatening to blow his own brains out if everyone doesn’t do as he says.
There have been
echoes of this persuasive technique recently in the U.K., whose populace voted
to exit the EU. A cabal of leaders fell on their own swords like dominoes in
the days after the referendum, the biggest casualty being the Prime Minister,
David Cameron. Was such a bloodbath necessary? I would argue that in critical
times, the case for reflective rather than reactive leadership, in society and
organisations has never been stronger.
Much has been written
recently about the notion of empathy. According to psychologist Daniel Goleman, there are three
types: cognitive, emotional and compassionate. Most leaders can easily
articulate what empathy is. Defining empathy, however, is not the same as
deploying it. In fact I’ve found that many executives I have worked with do not
even have the basic emotional vocabulary necessary to understand the broad
landscape of emotions that exists in organisations and society.
Keeping in touch with
changing emotions
Humans are, at an
anthropological level, reflexively programmed to recognise threats and act on
them. Fight, flight, freeze! Daily, we see instances: the angry soccer player
fronts up and butts heads with an antagonist. The small child runs from the
playground bully. The brain reacts, the person acts. In these cases the Delphic
maxim “know thyself” is redundant, “save thyself” being the wiser option. In
organisations, however, strong emotional reactions take longer to emerge and
build gradually below the surface. As in Newtonian physics, emotional reaction
is subject to the same laws: an initial impulse or changing circumstance is
required, a causal link: change causes reaction, which causes emotion.
The challenge is that
leaders enacting change (their primary task) are not only slow to recognise
what is going on, they are also generally ignorant of how to deal with it. Why?
For one, there is a constant pressure to act. We have become “human doings”,
not human beings. Reflection is undervalued and frequently impossible in a
world where leaders are incessantly battered with new information. As a consequence,
the rage, anxiety or sadness often residing in the substrate of organisations,
like volcanic magma, is both invisible and untapped. And like volcanoes, it has
the potential to explode out destructively. In stressful environments, the
pressure to act can lead easily to intellectual arrogance and dominance in
decision making, rather than taking the slower (and often more painful) process
of deductive dialogue. It requires effort and focus and can signal the death of
what Ludo van Der Heyden defines as fair process.
The power of
collective emotion
Leaders protest that
diagnosing organisational systems is complicated and there is insufficient
time. Symptoms of dysfunction however, are often hidden in plain sight. In
2015, Marissa Mayer, struggling at Yahoo! described a rash of departures from
her senior bench as “part of the design”. It is plausible to
believe that this was simply an expedient public rationalisation of the deep
problems that Yahoo! was facing. However, the welter of departing talent should
have signified that something was rotten. It was reported at the time in Business Insider that “the world
is crashing in on her...she has stopped listening to what people have to say”.
A few weeks ago, less than a year later, the company was sold to Verizon. One
wonders if Ms Mayer, beset by pressures, ever stood still to consider what was
happening.
Worse still is failing
to reflect on the emotional landscape of your customers. Seaworld Inc. is a
salutary example. If you are unaware that people are concerned with our
ecology, then you have been living under a rock. Yet the company took three
years to announce the cessation of the breeding programme for orcas, after the
damning 2013 documentary Blackfish revealed how
these magnificent animals suffer in captivity. In spite of the outcry, it
failed to act. It has now missed forecasts in seven of its eleven quarters as a
public company. It remains to be seen whether the company can reinvent itself.
Reflective action
Jack Welch said many years ago: “The
problem is that leaders fail to ask often enough the question: What is wrong
around here?” Upon reflection the answer to that question is more likely to be
felt in the leaders’ gut than seen in the company accounts. The feeling is
likely to show up way in advance of the earnings miss.
To pre-empt disaster,
I would like to suggest that actions should be “reflective” not reflexive.
·
First, leaders need to make an imaginative leap into the emotional world of
their followers, to identify the prevalent feelings. In town halls and in small
groups they need to call those feelings out. If they are wrong they will stand
corrected, both vulnerable yet courageous.
·
Secondly, and importantly, leaders need to learn the habit of listening both
actively and critically, recognising and acknowledging their own defensive
formations as they do so. To that end, they need sparring partners with whom
they can parse information, offload their own feelings and problem solve. This
can take the form of a coach, chairperson, mentor or trusted advisor.
Ironically, the higher the position, the more likely this will be both
necessary and useful.
·
Finally, leaders need to take into account the other constituencies that connect
them to the outside world: customers, shareholders and broader society.
Reflectively seeking to understand will mitigate misjudged statements such as
that of BP CEO, Tony Hayward, who notoriously said after the Deepwater Horizon
catastrophe “I want my life back,” in spite of the oil spill having destroyed
the livelihoods of thousands along the Louisiana coast. He got his life back:
it cost him his job.
The danger of failing
to listen
Political leaders who
fail to do the hard work of comprehension allow demagoguery in through the
backdoor, permitting crafty opportunists to tap in to popular anger, polarising
opinion and creating exclusive “others” who are the enemy. Even worse, they can
end up on the end of a “Brexit style” backlash, when the silent majority is
finally given a voice.
Similarly,
organisational leaders who misread smoke signals in their organisations will be
subject to sabotage of their plans, passive resistance, whispered treachery and
ultimately oblivion. In a globalising world, individual scrutiny is increasing,
societal disparities are growing, and the actions of organisations become daily
more visible in social media.
Leaders, therefore, should keep close
to society, their teams and themselves through “reflective” action, if they are
to avoid stigmatisation and remain at the vanguard of value creation.
Graham Ward
Read more at http://knowledge.insead.edu/blog/insead-blog/reflective-leaders-needed-for-the-age-of-rage-4880?utm_source=INSEAD+Knowledge&utm_campaign=ffa10be0d7-8_Sept_mailer9_8_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e079141ebb-ffa10be0d7-249840429#Tzj11B51sk1BMzZ9.99
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