Author: julia fabris mcbride

Imagine this scenario…

The charismatic founder of a small (but influential) nonprofit resigns suddenly and moves across the ocean, leaving the organization in turmoil.

Stepping in quickly to clean up the mess, the Board promotes Douglas from Deputy Director to Acting ED.

Douglas has been in his new position for a month when the Board “strongly advises” him to assume all fiscal and administrative responsibilities of the organization – removing those duties from the portfolio of a senior staff member. Douglas knows that his direct report will not let go without a fight. But he pushes that knowledge out of his mind and begins to make plans for the change.

Douglas asks his Civic Leadership Coach to help him identify the steps for moving administrative responsibilities from one desk to another.

Making the Adaptive Leadership Mind-Shift

Adaptive Leadership Theory says that with “technical work” the problem is clear (The wrong person has responsibility for finances in Douglas’s organization) and the person in authority (Douglas) needs to optimize executive of the solution (Rewrite the job descriptions and act accordingly).

Douglas’s Coach recognizes that he is thinking of the situation as a “Technical Problem.” She encourages him to consider “Adaptive” interpretations.

Leading Adaptively Means Moving Beyond Default Interpretations

Pushing against Douglas’s default interpretation (“The senior staff member is creating problems, and leadership requires that I get him to see things the board’s way”), the Coach’s questions help Douglas shift his perspective of the problem from “technical and individual” to “adaptive and systemic.” Douglas recognizes the great degree to which the organization has been knocked out of balance by the founder’s untimely exit. He acknowledges the high levels of distress and the conflicting values that have led to stonewalling by the senior staff member, and to less obvious signals of distress from other members of both staff and board. Realizing the systemic (adaptive) nature of the challenge he is facing, Douglas acknowledges that the temperature in the organizational system has become too hot for most people to handle. He and his Coach consider ways to turn down the heat just enough to allow people to see the situation clearly.

Adaptive Leadership Requires Smart-Risks and Experimentation

By the end of the coaching session, Douglas understands that his major leadership challenge will be helping everyone identify and accept their piece of the adaptive work of creating a strong, post-founder organization. He resolves to experiment, that very afternoon, by initiating conversation with the staff about their loss, hurt, and grief related to the founders’ departure.

~ Guest blogger Julia Fabris McBride is the Coaching Project Director at the Kansas Leadership Center. Visit her online at www.CoachJulia.com.

I woke before sunrise to write about leadership.

Anticipating a good 90 minutes before boy, man and dog appeared at the kitchen table, I switched on the coffee maker, snapped a quick picture of the full moon setting in the west, and flipped open my MacBook.

In less than two minutes, a sleepy almost-three-year-old called from the hallway, “Mom? I’m awake.”

Good morning, Life! How does anyone find time for Leadership?

I’m reminded of “The Carrot Story” told by Ronnie Brooks to an auditorium full of burned-out arts administrators. It was 2002 in Chicago. I was a crispy piece of nonprofit-manager-toast, ready for a change in the way I managed my life. Ronnie’s story struck a chord with me.

“The Carrot Story” (A leadership parable)

One spring, a woman received a packet of carrot seeds from her neighbor. She planted the seeds in her back yard, studying the directions as she went.

A couple of weeks later, she tramped back out to the garden to thin her carrots as directed. She knelt to work, but looking closely at the little seedlings, she just couldn’t do it.

The tiny carrots were too beautiful, too healthy-looking, too alive!

So, the woman let all the seedlings grow into fine, tall, luscious, dark green plants. She watered, and tilled, and waited with great anticipation to taste her first homegrown carrot. Then, on a hot summer day, she went out to the garden to harvest her crop.

She found only gnarled roots, tangled up in one another, thick, woody and inedible.

You need to choose, if you want to lead.

In 2002, I heard “The Carrot Story” as a wake-up call. I needed to weed the garden of my life, say “no” more often, change the way I spent my time, let go of the “shoulds,” abandon some of what defined me in the first four decades of my life, so that I could walk fully and joyfully into middle-age, and on to elder-hood.

I had to stop trying to do everything, so that I could hope to accomplish something.

There will always be choices to make.

What I’m realizing today, as midnight nears and I’m finally getting around to posting this entry, is that you can’t thin your metaphorical carrots once and expect that you’re done.

Every day is a thousand choice-points: Purpose choices, priority choices, big choices, small choices, morning choices, evening choices, difficult choices, necessary choices.

As you make choices more consciously and intentionally, your leadership capacity grows.

Guest submission from Carter McNamara of Authenticity Consulting, LLC.

There’s been an explosion of interest in the topic of leadership. Too often, we assume that leading always means leading others. Actually, that’s not the most common form of leading – and it’s not the most important.

Most Important Form of Leading – Leading Yourself

Most experts would agree that if you can’t effectively lead yourself, then you can’t effectively lead other individuals, groups or organizations. If you’re continually changing your priorities and can’t effectively address most of them, then the rest of the world will seem to be a confusing mess to you, as well. Others will soon become confused about your priorities, including for them. You’ll soon lose credibility and your ability to lead.

What Are Some Skills Needed to Lead Yourself?

There are many. We can’t address them all, but here’s a useful list from which to start. You need skills in learning, physical fitness, decision making and problem solving, critical thinking, setting personal goals, prioritizing, time and stress management, self-coaching, emotional intelligence, motivating yourself and work-life balance.

Notice those skills are needed whether you’re around other people or not!

So next time you read about the many skills needed to be a leader, don’t forget that you first need to lead yourself!

What do you think?

———————————————————————————
Carter McNamara, MBA, PhD – Authenticity Consulting, LLC – 800-971-2250
Read my weekly blogs: Boards, Consulting and OD, Nonprofits and Strategic Planning.

Reason’s whole pleasure, all the joys of sense,
Lie in three words — health, peace, and competence.
~ Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope penned those lines of iambic pentameter in the first half of the 1700s. But I wouldn’t be surprised if I heard them from a stressed-out 21st century nonprofit executive director. Imagine the conversation.

An Executive Director, on the verge of burn-out, talks to her leadership coach:

Nonprofit ED: (stress evident in her voice) I still care about the mission. I want to move this organization forward. But I can’t see the big picture. Everyone wants something from me. The budget’s a mess. We’ve set some tough goals and I’m feeling overwhelmed. Like I’m just not up to it.

Coach: What do you need?

Client: I want to enjoy my work again. I want be able to make choices with all my senses intact. It’s pretty simple, really. I need health, peace, and competence.

Leadership Competence in Civic Life

In Tuesday’s blog post, Steve Wolinski wrote, “The primary benefit of competencies is that they provide an easily shared and understood view of leadership that can be used in a wide variety of ways to build human capital and drive business outcomes.”

This morning, I’ll share a set of four competencies, developed by the Kansas Leadership Center, to help individuals exercise leadership in civic life. For two years, I’ve been using these competencies in coaching conversations with clients in Kansas and across the country. We find them useful in guiding the answers to two common questions about leadership:

1. What can I do to focus my efforts?
2. What should I pay attention to in order to make progress on the issues I care about?

Civic Leadership Competencies (courtesy of Kansas Leadership Center)

DIAGNOSE SITUATION

• Explore adaptive and systemic interpretations
• Distinguish the technical and adaptive elements
• Distinguish the process challenges from the content challenges
• Test multiple interpretations
• Read the temperature in system
• Identify the locus of the work

ENERGIZE OTHERS

• Engage unusual voices
• Work across factions
• Start where they are
• Speak to loss
• Infuse the work with purpose
• Build a trustworthy process
• Discover connecting interests

MANAGE SELF

• Identify you capabilities, vulnerabilities and triggers
• Figure out how others perceive your role in the system
• Distinguish self from role
• Choose among competing values
• Increase tolerance for uncertainty, ambiguity and conflict
• Experiment beyond your comfort zone

INTERVENE SKILLFULLY

• Make conscious choices
• Raise the heat
• Give the work back
• Hold relentlessly to purpose
• Speak from the heart
• Act experimentally

What do you think? What interests you? Any thing you want to experiment with? What competencies or sub-points do you want to hear more about?

My leadership development journey began in 1961, when I popped into the world as the first CEO of the Donna and Jim Fabris Family. (I’ll use the organization’s acronym, DAJFF.)

Jim and Donna founded DAJFF less than a year earlier. They were 23 years old. Jim says he’d been planning DAJFF since he was about 12. Donna had needed some convincing. At any rate, they named themselves President and Vice President of the Board, and have held those positions ever since.

Family as organization/Oldest daughter as CEO

I took the job of CEO because I liked DAJFF’s vision statement (which was something like: “Loving each other always, though we don’t talk about it much”). I could see that the Board knew how to work hard. I’ll also admit that, early in my career, I needed the security they offered. Little did I know.

Managing the chaos

I learned management skills on the fly (alongside walking and talking). I labored in vain to teach Donna and Jim the basics of organizational development and collaboration: I urged them to slow down. Do some strategic planning. Balance reflection and action. They wouldn’t listen.

The Board refused to think about anything but Growth.

By 1970 we’d mushroomed to a staff of 6. Yes, we were making an impact. But (from my perspective) the budget was out of control. Why hadn’t I chosen to work in a for-profit family!!

Donna and Jim had all but insisted on hiring: John, Director of Communications (1963), Jim, Director of Outrageous Ideas (1964), Jerry, Integration Manager (1967), and, in our final and most ambitious hire, twin Operations and Technology Managers, Andy and Fred (1970).

We’d had a great first decade, true. But in subsequent years, vision usually out-paced capacity. As CEO, I struggled to hold all the pieces together.

Sixteen years into the job, I was burned-out. Between the Board’s inadequacies, staff issues, and the size of my own job description, I knew it was time to move on to bigger and better things.

Debriefing the metaphor

I landed on this “big family as organization/oldest daughter as CEO” metaphor in the first nonprofit management course I ever took, in the mid-1990s. Back then, my role in the metaphor was (brilliant) executive mediating between an ineffectual board and a staff of 5 cantankerous employees.

I’ll be honest with you. In management class, I was looking at my childhood through the lens of what my parents didn’t do.

It’s Leadership Development, Stupid!

Today, I’m thinking about who I am, who my brothers have become over the last 40+ years, and what my parents did every single day when we were growing up. They Asked For Our Best.

I came to the overlapping fields of Leadership Development and Coaching through the stage door. I studied Theatre in college, have a graduate degree in Acting and started my adult life performing in Chicago’s Off-Loop theaters. Like my father in the newspaper business, I’ve grown up right alongside both the coaching profession and the field of “Leadership Studies,” just a few years to old to have discovered them as more viable alternatives for my higher education.

That’s okay.

Sitting beside me at my kitchen table tonight are two books that (in concert with 15 years in the nonprofit trenches and another 6+ as a coach) stand out as pinnacles of my self-styled higher education in leadership. They each connect profoundly, from different perspectives, with my own vision of a meaningful life.

They are:

1. The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World by Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow and Marty Linsky, and
2. Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future, by Margaret J. Wheatley.

The first is about purpose, perspective, connection, working outside your comfort zone, listening, risk, experimentation, failure, and trying again.

The second is about listening, connection, purpose, the common good, and hope.

Havel on Hope

Vaclav Havel wrote in Disturbing the Peace, “Hope … is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is. Hope is definitely not same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. In short, I think that the deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to good works, and the only true source of the breathtaking dimension of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from “elsewhere.” It is also this hope, above all, which gives us the strength to live and continually to try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.”

The Hope Theory of Leadership suggests that each of the other theories of leadership is useful in certain situations. And not a single one is useful without the kind of hope, which Havel describes, that lives, and works, and continually tries new things.

Leadership is not leadership without hope. What are your hopes? What will you try? What else?

If I think about “Leader” as a job description I get confused. How can anyone “Lead” all the time? How exhausting! A sure recipe for failure! An invitation to the dread-disease BURNOUT. Don’t you at least need to “manage” your own schedule?

What about “Management” as the complete and total sum of what you do each day? UGH. How can we make the world a better place if you just sit (or walk) around and manage?

When it comes to leadership: I want verbs. I want action. I want improvisation. I want intervention. I want the possibility of real change. Rather than “best-practices” let’s see some brand-new-never-been-tried-in-quite-this-way-might-even-fail practices.

Organizations need leadership AND management.

To lead is to take risks on behalf of purpose and the greater good. To manage is to mitigate risk on behalf of the bottom line. A successful organization does both. A successful executive does both. A valuable employee at any level of the organization does both.

Leadership requires the willingness to try something new, the willingness fail once in a while, and the foresight to minimize the impact of your failures.

Management is the every day work. If you already know how to get the results that you want, that’s management. If you have practices in place (i.e. for helping employees feel connected appreciated, cared for and linked to the larger vision of the organization) that’s management. If you have a system in place, you are managing. If you are 90% sure that when you do THIS, the result will be THAT, you are managing.

Jumping off the leadership cliff.

When you step into uncharted territory on behalf of purpose, you are attempting to lead. When you hold steady under criticism, you may be leading. When you invite ideas that conflict with your own, you may be leading. When you assess risk and design low-risk experiments with the end firmly in mind, you are attempting to lead.

After my last blog post, a reader responded with a comment and an important question that this post has done little to answer. (Sorry, Meredith!) She wrote: “ ‘Countless, individual acts of leadership’ – that’s a scary phrase for many who want someone else to tell us what to do. What are some of the acts of leadership that have been tried, what else might there be to try?”

I’ll offer more specifics in future posts. MEANWHILE, please entertain the possibility that my suggestions may never be as valuable as your own answer to these these two questions:

1. What do I care about so much that I am willing to intervene?
2. What is a low-risk experiment that might help the group make progress on what I care about?

I live in the Kansas Flint Hills. It’s ranch land, no more than 4 people per square mile. (No surprise, then, that I do most of my coaching by telephone.) But we are a community. And we have no shortage of issues requiring leadership.

Leadership is not the same as Authority.

As we blog about definitions of leadership, I urge you to remember that “Leadership” is NOT the same as “Authority.” Let’s toss the word “leader” out of the lexicon. It doesn’t mean anything. The current habit of talking about “leadership positions” confuses things. Authority is a position. You must CHOOSE to lead.

Leadership is an action.

Leadership is an action. Acts of leadership are exceedingly rare.

Here in Chase County, Kansas, as elsewhere in the country, citizens regularly and dutifully step up to fill positions of authority. We have our Mayors, County Commissioners, Chairs of this and Presidents of that. There’s a Fire Chief and a Sheriff. Each church has its Pastor, each school its Principal.

But tonight I’m reminded of our need for leadership. It’s a beautiful spring night, the wind is calm, and bright orange flames slice across the hills outside my kitchen window. It’s FIRE SEASON in the Flint Hills. Tonight, ranching families are doing what they’ve done for so long that most of them would say, “We’ve always done it.”

But this custom of burning every pasture every year (begun in earnest only 30 years ago) is polluting the air as far away as Louisville, Kentucky. It’s destroying habitat for prairie chickens and other native species. The EPA is cracking down and ranchers are hanging on tight to the culture they’ve been raised in.

There is no Prairie Fire Czar with authority enough to dampen the conflict. We don’t need to create another position. No one need be elected or promoted. Finding a solution that the community can live with will require countless, individual acts of leadership.