Leadership

About Leadership, Horses and The Importance of Trust

Weekend Woes Turned In a Lesson in Leadership

We were scheduled to take the horses, Cranberry and Faust, out for the weekend to get fitted for new saddles. Saddles that will fit them better and simply make it more enjoyable for them when they are ridden.

So these plans for the weekend were very exciting. The weather was amazing and all the stars seemed aligned.

Except for one thing…the horses were having nothing to do with it.

We Cannot Make Someone Do Something

No matter what we tried, no matter how long we spent with them, no matter how we asked, they would not get into the trailer.

Horses are well known for their ability to teach leadership. Working with a horse provides an incredible metaphor for leadership. It’s about learning to lead through partnership, relationship, trust and communication – it has very little to do with the words you speak and a lot more to do with the space and relationship you create.

Horses and the Leadership Lessons They Teach

I learned (or re-learned) a familiar lesson this weekend, you cannot make a horse do anything. We have two beautiful creatures who have come to be part of our family but this weekend they were a combined 2500 pounds of, “Nope. Ain’t gonna do that.”

It was super frustrating because we knew what was in store for them. We had this perfect vision of what a great experience we had planned for them. With an outcome that had their best interest at heart. But the thing is, they had another agenda. Their agenda was driven by fear and uncertainty.

Trust Is Earned Over Time

We lost hours, and Saturday was gone. We tried again on Sunday. Even brought in our horse trainer. An expert we were certain would tackle this problem and convince the horses to trust us and let us guide them to a new experience that we were sure they would enjoy.

Except for one thing…the horses were having nothing to do with it.

Cranberry finally decided she would give it a try on Sunday but Faust made the choice to stay home.

How Do Humans Decide Whom To Trust?

As humans, we are always at choice, even if it doesn’t feel like it. We make choices of ‘this’ not ‘that’, all day long.

I’ll be honest, there were moments during these two days that I was tired, hungry, worn out and just plain wanted the dang horse to get in the dang trailer so we could make the dang appointment we made. I hate being late and making others wait.

The more frustrated I got the less patience I had. And I’m quite certain they could tell!

Are You Impatient with Change?

Where do you find yourself impatient with change? Are there times when you just want to tell your team to ‘get on with it’ or when someone asks why should I do it this way you feel like saying ‘because I said so and I can see so much potential here if you would just do what I tell you to do’.

In organizations leaders can be lulled into thinking that they can make people do something by offering consequences to saying no – like firing someone or not offering them the next opportunity that comes. In reality if people don’t buy into what they are being asked to contribute to they might go through the motions to make you believe they are compliant but oftentimes the real conversation goes underground. They look like they are compliant but the real conversation becomes covert.

Taking Action on Something You Believe In

All the convincing, cajoling or influencing in the world will not make someone take an action they don’t believe in.

Faust was the same way this weekend. He wasn’t ready.

This weekend became a lesson about leadership that I will hold onto. About trust. About what I bring to a situation. About accepting that I cannot change someone’s mind. That it’s not about me, but more about how I arrive as a leader, with horses or with humans. It speaks volumes about my notion that I can make someone do anything…just because I want them to and I’ve laid out this great outcome that everyone should want to be a part of it.

Building Trust Starts with Communication

Leadership is so many things and one of the basics is How You Show Up. Building trust. Learning to communicate. Listening to the other. Getting clear about roles and responsibilities. Setting boundaries. Letting go of my agenda. Inviting others into a conversation. Listening. Seeking to understand the other. Seizing the opportunities from past experiences and learning from them. And as a Team Facilitator, how to honor the facilitation stance.

Enhance Your Leadership Journey With TeamCatapult

If any of this resonates with you, we have many opportunities on the horizon for enhancing your leadership journey. Take a look at our upcoming workshops.

Thanks to Faust and Cranberry, our whole family had a leadership lesson this weekend and I know I’m a better leader today because of it.

What’s your journey stepping stone looking like?

Marsha

How To Lead with Virtual Team Facilitation

During a recent two-day Virtual Team Facilitation workshop, one of our attendees Lisa created several visuals that demonstrate the activities we present during this 2-day workshop.

Find out what TeamCatapult shared in this Virtual Team Facilitation workshop on Day 1 of this Virtual Facilitation Workshop, here.

The Use of Slack Channels During Virtual Team Facilitation!

Slack is a useful tool for all remote teams. As a facilitator of virtual meetings, Slack can be your go-to tool to get conversations going and to keep them going.

Use a Slack channel for checking in
Lean in to listen
Hear every voice
Check in after breaks

The Mental Model and Decision Funnel!

When asking questions during a remote meeting, here are some things to keep in mind.

Know in advance what type of decision the team is aiming for:

Consensus?
Majority?
Other?

Once a decision is made, it can be tempting to revisit it. You might need to remind the team of how and why they reached a decision. This is a good time to consider that the decision-making process needs to be reviewed and revised as well.

Evaluation vs Decision Making in Virtual Team Facilitation

Distinguish between evaluation and decision making.

Tools to Evaluate

Dot voting
Announce evaluation
Use affinity mapping before dot voting

Do not rush through evaluation and remember that silence does not mean agreement! As the facilitator, you are there for support and to help the team reach agreement, ask questions like:

Would anyone like to push back on…?
What would you advocate for?
Who would follow?
Is there another move you’d like to make?

Decide

In Mural, evaluate by color coding sticky notes against the criteria of the topic’s issues
Consider using a grid sorting template
Use gradients of agreement

These tools can help uncover what is holding people back and if necessary, generate a revised proposal that addresses concerns.

Virtual Team Facilitation Tips for Leaders

Here are three additional practical tips for leaders new to virtual team facilitation.

1 Transparency

Be transparent when something isn’t working as it should. Calmly accept and adapt and tell the attendees what is going on.

2 Ask WHO

Do not ask ‘Does anyone’ but instead ask

WHO… needs more time?
WHO… can push back?

3 Facilitator Assistant

Have one facilitator watching for participants who might get disconnected. Offer help in Slack or via email, text or whatever alternative means you’ve chosen to communicate.

More Virtual Team Facilitation Help is Available!

We are grateful for Lisa’s willingness to share these visuals with you, our audience, to provide you with a glimpse into the world of Virtual Team Facilitation

Whether it is you, your leadership team, or your company that needs help with Virtual Team Facilitation, TeamCatapult is able to lend a hand.

Please contact us today for more information for both private and public Virtual Facilitation Masterclass workshops.

Showing Up and Engaging: How We Put It All into Practice

How We Put Agile Leadership into Practice

How we choose to show up and how we choose to engage as leaders directly affects the outcome of becoming an agile organization.

Leaders are the KEY to transformation—they are at the center of the change. To be successful, the change has to begin WITHIN leaders. The job of leadership becomes owning the culture, setting a vision, enrolling others so it becomes a shared vision, and helping support what’s needed in the culture to fuel that vision.

Everything you say, do, reward, or focus on sets the culture. The job of leaders is shifting away from shaping the work and shifting toward shaping the culture. How am I, as a leader, contributing to the culture we have?

Putting Agile Leadership Into Practice

The question to answer is this: How can we put into practice the characteristics of agile leadership and the structural components of conversation in order to lead cultural change?

Deepen Your Awareness.
Awareness precedes choice precedes change. How do you engage with your team? What’s the impact you have in the team? How do you know? The more we are able to deepen awareness of our own behavior the easier it becomes to make choices that align with our intentions.

Grow Your Leadership Range.
True innovation and transformation happens when leaders create the space to learn and think together rather than acting on their preconceived ideas about the best way forward. There is common trap that leadership looks like having the answers, and moving things forward. What if leaders had range? the ability to advocate for an action when needed, but also to create space for inquiry and deepened understanding? Adaptive challenges do not come with roadmaps, they require new ways of engaging and leading through the process of dialogue.

Imagine a company that is experiencing tough times in a competitive market. Now, compare the examples below—they model two different responses to the situation.

Scenario #1: “We need to become more innovative. Our competitors are outpacing us each quarter. I want t launch a transformation initiative. Janet, I would like you to take this on. Let me know what you need for the budget. Let’s talk next week about defining the key metrics and goals.”
Secnario #2: “ I’m noticing we are starting to lag behind our competitors in time to market. I would like to think together about ways we might tackle this issue. What do others see? What opportunities do we have? Where might we be getting it wrong?”

In the first scenario, the leader makes an assertion, observes the current state and makes a move about what’s needed next. In the second scenario, the leader makes an observation (Bystand), names a concern (Bystand), and then inquires of others. The leader in the second scenario signals that there is space for exploration and resists the impulse to jump right into action.

Growing range in leadership is about learning to make space for other voices, to seek to understand, to be open to hearing things that might be hard. It is about resisting the inherent tension to be the “solver of problems” and instead be the seeker of collective intelligence. Leaders with range are far more likely to discover a clearer path and lead more sustainable change.

Practice the Four Actions.
Move, Follow, Oppose, Bystand. We all have one that we will do more often than the others. What actions might you be overusing? Which are underutilized?

Pay attention to your conversations. Where do you remain silent or inactive in the conversation? What do you see that you might not be saying?

By practicing all four competencies you build awareness around how you engage and help your team create collectively.

Grow Your Collective Leadership Culture
Leaders create the culture. What we say, how we respond, what we reward… these are all are signals about the culture we’re creating. Team coaching helps leaders learn and grow together so that they become more aware of their actions and more intentional about what changes are needed.

Moreover, team coaching helps leaders learn together, collectively, in their real-world day-to-day challenges. It’s the most effective way to help leadership teams see the patterns in how they engage so that they can take action—and change the outcomes they’ve been getting.

Team Coaching helps leaders develop, together.

How Leaders Engage: Learning to Be an Agile Leader

Showing Up Is Important. Engaging Is Paramount

In “How Leaders Show Up: Learning to Be an Agile leader” we learned that research consistently and clearly demonstrates that team effectiveness is highly dependent upon the quality of communication between team members.

The quality of communication is how we explain why some teams are high performing and others struggle. It’s how we explain why some organizations are successful at large organizational changes and others are not. And it’s how we explain why we might have very engaging and productive conversations with some people and end up in complete frustration with others.

In our work with leadership teams, what we often see is that leaders spend a great deal of time focused on the “what” in their business:

What’s the target for next quarter?
What’s our revenue?
What are we doing to innovate and transform?
What’s our roadmap?
What metrics will we use to show progress?

However, leaders spend very little—if any—time looking at how they engage.

Conversations are the foundation for all of our interactions. But there is a structure to how conversations unfold—to how we engage—that determines how well we perform. Just like the structure of a riverbed determines the flow of water in a stream, the structure of a conversation determines performance.

Structuring Conversations To Improve Engagement

At TeamCatapult, we’ve found that when we introduce engagement from a structural perspective, leadership teams are able to start seeing things much more clearly:

How they are getting in their own way
Where their espoused values and beliefs create dissonance with their actions
Where they are having more meaningful and productive conversations to solve the more complex and adaptive challenges in their organization

When we can see and name the structure of conversations in a non-biased way, it’s easier to see where the structure is either enabling or getting in the way of a positive, productive outcome, and it’s easier to feel at choice in our interactions.

Structural Dynamics To Improve Conversations

The theory of “structural dynamics” was developed by David Kantor in the early 1970s. It emerged from his work in family systems therapy but was extrapolated in the 1980s to characterize interaction in any system, including the relationships that exist in organizations.

4 Kinds Of Action for Effective Interactions

In structural dynamics, there are 4 kinds of action that need to be taken in every conversation in order for the interaction to be effective.

The 4 action competencies are:

Move: this is when someone initiates an idea. It sets the direction in a conversation.
Follow: this action continues the direction of the conversation, supporting what is happening an/or offering clarification.
Oppose: this action challenges or disagrees, and offers an alternate perspective.
Bystand: with this action, someone notices and names what’s happening in the conversation in a morally neutral way. The bystand action often bridges competing ideas.

For a conversation to unfold in an effective and meaningful way, someone in the room needs to vocally bring each and every one of these actions into the conversation.

Field of Conversations

Everything we want and desire from business agility stems from our ability to have conversations that explore ideas, perceptions, and understanding. From our ability to surface together what people do not already have on their own.

“We call this type of conversation a dialogue.”

A dialogue is when you explore the uncertainties and questions that no one has answers to. It’s where you think together, using the energy of differences to enhance the collective wisdom.

People often use the terms “discussion,” “conversation,” and “dialogue” interchangeably to mean the same or similar things. In reality, however, they are each quite different and result in very different outcomes.

From Monologue to Dialogue: Making a Choice

Most teams would self-identify as having lots of dialogue, but when you observe them for a little while you often find that they tend to spend most of their time in monologue. You hear one person dominate, or you hear two people locked in debate with two opposing views. In fact, very few teams are able to have skillful conversations or dialogue without some prompting and some intentional and thoughtful awareness.

Because our conversations are where we make meaning and sense of what’s happening in our organizations, it is critical to build that intentional and thoughtful awareness. This begins with understanding the basic fields of conversation. If we want to move forward more productively, we need to know where we are.

The “fields of conversation” is a framework developed by MIT lecturer Otto Scharmer in his observations of groups in conversation. It describes four different fields that we move in and out of when we are interacting in a group.

“Courteous Compliance”
In this first field of conversation, we are downloading. In a new group, this is where people are figuring out what’s acceptable and not acceptable. In a more established group or team, this is where people are following the rules, and the conversation often stays on the surface. It is a polite field of conversation where the main action competencies of Move and Follow predominate.
“Breakdown”
If you stay in the conversation long enough, you will reach this second field of conversation. This is where debate occurs. The action competencies of Move and Oppose are most common in this field. Unconsciously, groups in this field of conversation will make an important choice: they will either stay with the Oppose and make space for it to be voiced, or they will silence the Oppose and go back to a state of courteous compliance.
“Thinking Together”
For groups that stay with the often uncomfortable feeling of the Oppose action taken in the “breakdown” field of conversation, the reward is that they get the opportunity to “think together.” No longer focused on rehashing the past or holding tightly to views and opinions, this is the space where genuine curiosity enters. One does not have to agree with another’s point of view in order to inquire and be curious about it. As curiosity flourishes in this field of conversation, the group begins to focus on creating the future.
“Generative Dialogue”On rare occasions, we might push beyond “thinking together” and enter the “generative dialogue” field of conversation. This is the true space of innovation, where we are no longer holding onto our own opinion but are creating new ideas together. Generative in nature, the action competencies we see in this field of conversation are Move, Follow, Oppose, and Bystand. Each action competency is active and voiced within the group.“What you resist persists.” -Carl Jung

How We Do Anything is How We Do Everything.

When we never leave politeness or debate fields of conversation, we just keep reenacting the past. We get stuck in our current beliefs and thinking. We do this for many reasons. Maybe we have leftover beliefs from how we have seen our mentors lead. Or there is leadership culture in the organization that says, “Let’s not have any surprises,” so everyone makes up their mind on discussion points before they arrive to a meeting. The trap in this thinking is twofold: it assumes that we already know everything we need to know, and it assumes that the decision point requires a technical solution.

There is risk and vulnerability to showing up and being in dialogue with others. It requires letting go of “knowing” the answers and the desire to have it all figured out. It also requires that we make space for opposition. Rather than viewing the Oppose action as something to be feared, we need to view it as necessary. Without opposition, we will remain stuck where we are.

And when we gain a new level of understanding, when we learn, and when our beliefs and mindsets shift, we achieve real change.

We Become Agile

How Leaders Show Up: Learning to Be an Agile Leader

At TeamCatapult, we believe that the single greatest predictor of high performance and successful change lies in who leaders are BEING in conversations and how they are ENGAGING. We don’t operate from lists of “do this—not that.” Instead, we hold the perspective that all behaviors are choices that either produce the intended outcome or produce an unintended consequence. From this lens, becoming agile is less about right and wrong and more about awareness and choice.

The Quality of Leadership Communication

Research consistently demonstrates that team effectiveness is highly dependent upon the quality of communication between team members. The quality of communication is how we explain why some teams are high performing and others struggle. It’s how we explain why some organizations are successful at large organizational changes and others are not. And it’s how we explain why we might have very engaging and productive conversations with some people and end up in complete frustration with others. What often inhibits a team’s potential is how they show up and engage (or not) in the conversation.

Being Agile vs Doing Agile

Organizations that are successful at agility did not get there because they implemented the latest best practices. It’s not that they figured out the holy grail of team development or that they took the latest Kanban tool and prioritized work. They are likely DOING these things, but that’s not why they are finding success.

It’s not WHAT they are doing, it’s HOW.

It’s how their leaders are BEING when they show up in the room
It’s how they ENGAGE when they’re talking with their teams

How we show up and how we engage makes all the difference. Who are we being when the bottom drops out of the stock? How are we talking when a delivery does not go as planned?

“As a leader, the single MOST effective thing you can do to change your organizational culture and grow agile leadership at all levels is to develop your ability to understand and to choose how you show up and how you engage.”

How Leaders Show Up

Awareness precedes choice, precedes change.

What kind of leader do you want to be?

In agile leadership, who we are being when we show up in the room can make or break a team’s dynamic, its ability to work through complex problems, and the quality of its solutions.

That’s why it’s important to understand the characteristics of who you want to BE as a leader—and feel at choice in how you show up to every conversation. In our work with leaders, we start by introducing 4 characteristics that we’ve seen modeled by successful agile leaders time and time again:

1) Leaders Show Up Focused

What’s your vision? What are you saying ‘yes’ to? And, more importantly, what are you saying ‘no’ to?

The choice here is focus. It is clarity for yourself and for others about what’s important—and what’s the most important thing next. Focus has a cadence. It means you’re maintaining just the right level of strategy, purpose, and intent. You’re not so detailed that your focus changes every minute, and you’re not so broad that you don’t have the benefit of clarity.

When you are choosing focus, you are committing your attention. You are choosing to feel focused over feeling frazzled, scattered, and busy.

2) Leaders Need To Be Creative

Zig Ziglar once said, “It’s not what happens to you in life that matters. It’s how you respond to what happens to you that makes a difference.”

You can choose to create; to focus on the future and away from a past whose outcome you can’t change. Being creative comes from a place of hope, vision, and taking a systems perspective. It’s about asking, “what do I want to create?” If you don’t like the current situation, what would your ideal be? What’s possible? What’s next?

Being creative is the belief that you can create what you want. And tapping into vision and creativity is far more productive than being fearful and reactionary.

3) Leaders Should Be Adaptive

Being adaptive means choosing to inhabit the space of emergence, to be okay with not knowing, and to be open to sensing what’s needed next.

Ron Heifitz, in his book The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, makes an important distinction between “technical problems”—problems that have a clear definition and are easily solved by experts—and “adaptive challenges.” Adaptive challenges are problems whose solutions require exploration, experimentation, new learning, and changes to beliefs, values, and mindsets.

Becoming Agile as a business is the very definition of adaptive.

There is no roadmap, only hypotheses and learning to determine the next action.

4) Leaders Choose to Be Dialogic

William Issacs, in his book Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together, defines dialogue as a shared inquiry—a way of thinking and reflecting together, particularly when the stakes are high.

Choosing to be dialogic is about seeking the collective intelligence in order to unfold new thinking and innovation that we would not or could not get to on our own.

Basically, it’s a way of being open and curious. Of joining with others in exploration. Of being aware of your own perspective and willing to share in a way that is not about convincing or influencing others.

There is a balance between having a clear opinion and perspective (advocacy) and genuinely seeking to understand others without clinging to our own viewpoints (inquiry). Being dialogic means choosing to find that balance.

Curious?

Read more in this next article titled “How Leaders Engage: Learning to Be an Agile Leader”