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Episode Transcript
Lisa: So Jocelyn, thank you for coming on the Leadermorphosis podcast.
Jocelyn: Thank you for having me.
Lisa: Yeah, my pleasure. I thought maybe we could start with because your work is so interesting to me. I love kind of intersectional people who are bringing in lots of different threads. And in your work, you weave in lots of threads from like Eastern philosophy, management thinking, literature and drama and all kinds of things. So could you describe for listeners like, what is your approach? What is the how would you describe the work you do in the world? And why are those threads important to you?
Jocelyn: Sure. So, my academic background is in philosophy and English, English literature. And then I also, later in life, I got a master’s degree in eastern classics, which is the literature and philosophy of India, China and Japan, and I got that here at St John’s College, which is located where I live in Santa Fe, New Mexico. But in between that time, for 25 years, I had a career in corporate training with a company called the Forum Corporation, and they did leadership and sales training.
And one of the many interesting things about Forum was that they did some of the first research and some of the first training in this area called Influence, that we named influence, which at the time was sometimes called lateral leadership, or matrix management. It was sometimes called, but it came up. It started to arise in the late 70s, when people realized that these big silos that they were working in in organizations, were sort of breaking down, and they were having to work across organizations. And so the typical management training, which of the day, which really taught about hierarchical management - how do you manage direct reports? That wasn’t enough. And everybody was suddenly, managers, or really anybody in an organization, was suddenly having to work with people who did not report to them and over whom they did not have positional authority.
So this topic that we called at Forum that we called Influence became a very hot topic, and Forum did a lot of research in it, and came up with one of the first workshops for leaders or for anyone, about how to work with people over whom you do not have authority. So for the 25 years that I spent there at Forum, I got to learn a lot from a lot of very smart people about influence, this topic of influence, from our research and from our work with clients.
So when I finally left the company and was an independent consultant for a little while, and then wrote a book called “The Great Sound Leadership”, which sort of brought together Western literature and philosophy with leadership. After writing that book, I started to think, maybe I could bring in my knowledge about Eastern classics and combine that with this knowledge about lateral leadership. Influence, because the two really do go together in a lot of interesting ways. So that was the genesis of this book, “The Art of Quiet Influence.”
Lisa: I’m getting really excited as you’re talking because it’s reminding me again why I’m really excited to have you on the podcast, because there are two pieces there that are really relevant to our audience, which is number one, leadership in a self-managing organization. So when you have no traditional management hierarchy, what are the leadership skills, leadership mindset that we can develop, which is kind of perhaps, what you’re referring to when you’re talking about influence.
And the second is that I’m also really interested in looking at examples outside of like Europe and North America, of organizations that are exploring these new, more decentralized ways of working, because you know, it’s different in every culture. So when I picked up “The Art of Quiet Influence”, I was really intrigued by that kind of mix and kind of comparing some of the ways of thinking and paradigms of, you know, the West and East, and how that compares in leadership. So I think we have a lot to talk about here that’s relevant for this movement now, of new ways of working, right?
Jocelyn: Indeed, yes. And one of the things I discovered in blending these two sort of aspects of my life together is that, although you want to be careful not to engage in cultural stereotyping, I mean, it’s certainly not true that Eastern thinkers are all equality minded, or being a Buddhist doesn’t necessarily make you a nice, gentle person. It’s not about that. But it is true that Eastern thought, going back for millennia, really is much more open to this idea of sort of everything being connected in a less hierarchical way and a less individualistic way than we think of in the West. So in the West, our management thinking tends to be based on this premise that, well, I’m an individual and I’m the boss, and that means I get to tell the other individuals what to do. So it’s a very different - it comes out of a very different philosophical background than the Eastern philosophical background, which tends to be far less individualistic, less somewhat less hierarchical.
Lisa: What could you share with listeners in terms of, if I’m listening to this conversation and I’m a leader in an organization, and I’m wanting to transform my organization to be more self-managing, more decentralized - what can I do? What are some kind of traps for me to avoid? What are some ways that I could start to develop a leadership that’s more conducive to that kind of more network style of working?
Jocelyn: Yeah, so, I mean, it really starts with the mindset. And as I said at the very beginning of the book command authority is not a good basis for life. Thinking that because you have a title, you can tell people what to do and they’ll actually do it, is just not true. And I call that the authority myth, and a lot of us buy into it, including myself. I’ve fallen into this trap many a time where thinking that because I had the title manager of x or vice president of whatever, that that meant that I had real power.
And I draw a distinction in the book between authority and power, power being in the best sense, the ability to get work done, and the way to have real power, the real ability to get work done or influence with people over whom you don’t have authority. That’s first of all a question of mindset. So it’s getting sort of getting rid of this myth or trap that we all tend to fall into, of thinking that, “Oh well, because I’m the boss, I can just call the shots,” and it just isn’t true. Sometimes it might be true in the short term, but there are so many examples that I share in the book of people, leaders who thought that they could get away with just sort of flinging orders using command authority, and it did work for a time. But long term, what works much better is what I call influence, or influence without authority.
Authority - the main trap, or the first trap that I think Westerners often fall into, is believing that once you’ve sort of decided, “okay, I buy this influence idea. I’m going to work laterally. I’m not going to rely on my authority.” The next thing that people often think is, “well, it’s a matter of reciprocity, favor trading. So I scratch your back. You scratch mine.” And that’s a very Western way of thinking about influence that a number of scholars and writers have written about, and it’s sort of the dominant view of influence in the Western world that it’s about someone, it’s almost a monetary view of the situation. So I’ve got $5 and I pay you, and eventually you’re going to pay me that.
And again, that can work. But the interesting thing is that there’s plenty of research that shows that actually influence works in almost the opposite way. In other words, you are much more likely to think well of me and want to do things for me, if I not, if I give you something, but if I ask you for something, if I ask for your advice or if I ask for your help, then that is a much more influential behavior than me saying, “well, I gave you this. I invited you to this party. And so you’re going to invite me to mine.”
It’s sort of ironic. It’s sometimes called the Benjamin Franklin effect, because he was the one who first noticed it, and wrote about it. He wrote about how when he would win over somebody who had been an enemy by actually asking the person for help. And when he asked the person for help, they would suddenly, their whole attitude toward him would shift, which is a great example of influence.
Lisa: What I really liked in your book, “The Art of Quiet Influence”, was you had this brilliant diagram about the stages of group development and the kind of leadership that’s needed at those different stages in order to sort of share power, really, in an effective way. Can you say something about those stages of group development and what you’ve learned about the leadership that’s needed to really support a group through those?
Jocelyn: Yeah, so the stages of group development is a very old and well used concept in the organizational development world. And there are many versions of it. The most famous one is forming storming norming performing version, and now I’m forgetting the name of the man who came up with that, but at any rate, forming storming norming performing is the first one of these group development models.
And basically what it says is that there are stages that a group naturally goes through. First they’re sort of coming together and trying to figure out what’s going on. And then there’s usually a conflict stage, the storming days. And then there’s a time when they’re hopefully developing group norms, and they’re starting to get better at things and then performing when they’re really cranking along.
So at Forum, the company I mentioned, we had our own version of this called membership control cohesion. The version that I use in my book is membership, control, performance, because I think that really captures the essence of what’s going on the best. And then what I talk about are three core influence practices that are most appropriate at each of those three stages. So at the membership stage, what you really need to pay attention to is inviting participation. And then in the control stage, you need to pay attention to sharing power. And in the performance stage, need to pay attention to aiding progress. So those are the three core influence practices: inviting participation, sharing power, aiding progress. And then there are specific practices or techniques underneath each of those that I talk about.
Lisa: In terms of the sharing power piece, I’d love to hear more from you about what you’ve learned on that front, because I think that’s a really juicy topic that we are bumping into now as we try and explore less hierarchical ways of working. Yeah, we realize how much we’ve relied on that positional power, as you said. What are some ways that we can start to share power together, both as kind of colleagues and also if you’re a leader in terms of influence?
Jocelyn: Yeah, so actually it’s interesting. I’m going to back up to the first practice, because it really starts there. It starts with the beginning, when your group is forming, your team, your group, whatever. And this inviting participation idea, because if you don’t have that, if you don’t do that, then you’re not going to be able to share power later on.
And my favorite sort of image that I like to share about this is from a colleague of mine in Australia who used to teach classes in teamwork, team leadership. And he would draw this thing called a hassle graph on a flip chart or on the whiteboard. And a hassle graph was, there was time along the bottom, and hassle on the vertical axis. And then he would draw a picture of how it was supposed to work, which is that you should have the hassle going down over time. But what almost always happens is that the hassle starts out low, and then it goes up over time just when you don’t want it to be going up.
And the reason for that, he would always say, is that people forget to that it’s going to be much better if you frontload the hassle. And by that, he meant all that stuff that we think is sort of fluffy and unimportant, making people feel like they’re part of the group, asking them about their day, or asking them about their hobbies or their families or just asking their opinions about what the project is going to be all about. It’s all that getting to know you stuff that people tend to think is just getting in the way of getting the work done.
So especially nowadays, when teamwork is so common and we’re all thrown onto 15 different projects at once. People feel like they don’t have time. It’s like everybody should just get on with it. But what that does, my colleague would say, is it means that all you’ve done is to postpone hassle to a later date. Whereas if you had created that sense of belonging up front, that sense of “yes, we really are a group, I know that my input is going to be valued. I feel that I’m going to be listened to. I feel that I’m going to have a say in what happens” - if you can create that sense of confidence in people up front then as you go along, the hassle is much less, and there are many fewer power struggles, because people feel like they have power. They feel that they are a valued member of the group who has a say.
So that’s sort of the first step. It really starts up front, and then as you go along into the second phase of the group development, which is the control phase you are going to have some power struggles. And there’s a few techniques there that I can talk about.
Lisa: I think that would be really interesting, because reflecting on how this perhaps shows up in the work I’m often doing with teams. We might talk about creating team agreements early on, or kind of almost setting up some social contracts about, how we want to be together, how are we going to make decisions together? And that kind of unloading of hassle, as you say, saves a lot of time. And then I speak to groups a lot who are really struggling with this sharing power stage and kind of trying to find that, how do we where do we all fit in? How do we play our part together? So I think this sharing power piece is really something that people struggle with in these new kinds of organizations.
Jocelyn: Well, I will share that this is the most popular concept, I think, that I’ve ever written about. I included it in all of my books, because people invariably say, “Oh, I just love that idea.” So it’s this, and it comes up in this sharing power section of the book. And it’s this idea of friends, foes, allies and adversaries.
So this is a concept that is very, very poorly understood, I think, by us all, because we tend to think - we as just as human beings, tend to think of our relationships on a single line, from enemy or foe to friend. So if you’re nice to me and we get along, then you’re my friend. And if you’re not nice to me and we don’t get along, then you’re my enemy. That’s how we tend to think about it.
And this leads to tremendous power struggles, because you have somebody who is working against you, apparently. And so you think, “Boy, that person is just my enemy, and I need to squash them, or I need to avoid them,” and it creates a lot of just unhelpful power struggles, this one-dimensional view of relationships.
And the helpful thing to do is to see relationships as two-dimensional. So there’s another line, if you will, that goes from allies to adversaries. And the thing about allies and adversaries is that those relationships are conditional. So you’re an ally of mine because, perhaps because our interests align for the moment, and you’re an adversary of mine, because our interests are at odds again for the moment.
So very often, what we do as human beings, is we mistake allies for friends and enemies for adversaries, which can create all sorts of problems. First of all, we can assume that somebody who’s actually an adversary, we think they’re an enemy, and that means that they’re never going to change, and there’s nothing I can do, so I just have to fight them. But in fact, if you understand that most of our relationships really are not friends or foes, which are unconditional relationships, they’re either allies or adversaries that can switch. So if you understand that, then you know that an adversary is really just an ally in waiting, and if you can figure out a way to get your interests aligned with that person, then very quickly, you can have an ally.
The other flip side of this is that we can often get very upset when it turns out that somebody who we assumed was a friend turned out to be merely an ally. And there’s a lot of blame that gets thrown around. I give the example in the book of if there’s somebody who’s been your ally and suddenly, if they support you, their job is going to be in jeopardy, it’s not surprising that they might turn against you, and people can get very upset about this, because they’re like “you were my friend”, but most relationships, especially relationships at work, are just not that way. People are not friends in the sense of unconditionally with you based on a bond of love or duty, which is what a friend is, or unconditionally against you based on the sort of intractable view of you and your awfulness. They’re just allies and adversaries.
So the good news is that when it comes to sharing power, we can avoid many of these power struggles, if we just really grasp this fact that the majority of people that we interact with are going to be allies or adversaries, and we can switch the adversaries to allies fairly easily, if we use some techniques like asking them about their interests. “What do you care about in this project?” sharing your interests. “Here’s what I care about,” and the more you talk to them, keeping it on “what are your interests?” Rather than, “why do you hate me?” it’s surprising how quickly you can find common ground and find that actually, there are ways to work together to advance whatever shared interests you have.
Lisa: I like that. It also kind of reminds me that I think a lot of this mindset shift in terms of what you’re talking about, and in terms of what I’m often talking about on this podcast, is a lot of it is about paying more attention to the relationships we have in workplaces, and developing kind of relational skills to be more skilled in some of those skills, instead of relying only on technical competence, or results focus or whatever. But actually, these relational skills are really important. And I don’t know if that’s also again, if you’ve noticed this in your comparison of, like, Western and Eastern thinking. My sense is that in East, relationships are also more important. What are your thoughts about relationships and relational skills? Is that something that you think is worth developing?
Jocelyn: Yeah, there’s a story actually, that I talk about in at the beginning of the book that I love, which is about “Bill the Answer Guy,” and he was another colleague of mine who was a facilitator, an instructor for this influence program that we offered. She went to teach one of these influence programs at a large manufacturing company, and they had a lot of technical experts there at this manufacturing, I don’t know, semiconductors or something technical, high tech.
And there was this guy who I referred to as Bill, who was in that class, and he was in the class, people would receive a feedback report that gave them anonymous feedback or averaged feedback from their colleagues about how good they were at this set of influence practices, which were basically relationship skills. And this guy, Bill, got one of the lowest scores that anybody had ever seen. I mean, he was just in the basement. People obviously couldn’t stand him.
And my former colleague, who was telling me about this, said that he was just absolutely floored by this, when he got his feedback report, and he was seeing these dreadful scores, and he came to talk to her at the break, and he said, “I just, I can’t believe this. You know, I’m such an expert. I’m the Answer Guy. People come to me because I know more than anybody. I’m the smartest guy in the room.”
And Tracy, my colleague, who’s the facilitator, said, “Well, look, Bill, I was just observing a little while ago. We were doing this activity, and it was a drawing activity where people had to collaboratively draw a house or something like that. And Bill would actually, he actually grabbed the marker away from somebody in his group and started drawing over whatever she had drawn.”
And so Tracy, my friend, said, “do you see how that might put people off.” And Bill was like, “Huh?” And he said, “Yeah, but, but still, I was right, and I knew the answer, and I’m smart.” And Tracy said to him, “yeah, right, you are smart, and smart is good, but it’s not enough.”
And so Bill went off, and he was sort of quiet through the rest of the workshop. Didn’t say very much. And then a couple of years later, Tracy said she came back to the same organization and taught the same influence program again, and this time, Bill was taking the class again, but he was taking it as a sponsor of the class, and he had become the leader of their process improvement efforts. This was in the heyday of process improvement. So he had become their process improvement guru.
And he was sponsoring this influence program and this time, his feedback scores were like in the 90s. He was just off the charts great. And apparently, Tracy said his transformation at this company was legend. People talked about Bill all the time. He was such a respected figure, so his respect level had just went through the roof. And the story of his transformation was legend at the company.
So it just goes to show that, first of all, anybody can change. And also that if one embraces the relationship skills you actually gain power - real power in the sense of people come to you for advice. People look up to you. People respect you.
Lisa: Yeah, that’s a lovely story. I find that I encounter things like that often when I’m leading courses as well that it’s quite an identity crisis for people. Often, if you’ve built your whole career on being an expert, on knowing the answer and the leadership skills that are needed now are different kinds of leadership skills, in a way, and in some ways, being really smart, being an expert makes it really challenging to sort of give that up sometimes, or to sort of step back sometimes. So it’s really kind of touching to hear that that he was able to make that transformation and that became legend in the organization.
Jocelyn: Yeah, indeed.
Lisa: So I guess I’m thinking people listening might be thinking, What about the third stage - aiding progress? What are the practices there? What’s that stage about?
Jocelyn: So that is when you reach the performance stage and your team is sort of chunking along and doing well, and you’re getting the results. And the trap there, the main trap for leaders, is one of two things. We either tend to abandon the team and say, “okay, everything’s great. Now I can move on to the next thing,” or the flip side of that is that we might start to micromanage even more because things aren’t moving fast enough, because nothing ever moves fast enough or as fast as expected. So then we sort of get in there and try to micromanage.
And the true influencer, the person who knows how to influence does neither of those. It’s sort of a continued presence. I talk a lot in the book about being present, meaning that you’re fully there, you haven’t checked out, so you’re there, you’re involved, you’re paying attention, but you’re also not creating problems for people by throwing your weight around. You’re present, aware, calm.
There’s many people who I interviewed for the book who talked about the power of your own calmness, like being the ship with the even keel, and the way that calm or sense of mindfulness, is not just a personal matter, but it spreads. People see somebody who has that sense of presence, that sense of calm, and they want to be like you. They want to be with you.
Somebody mentioned that she’d like to go into her boss’s office and just sort of sit there, because she could kind of soak up that calm. So it’s sort of ironic again, because when we think of progress, we often think that we’ve got to push, push, push.
There’s a story from China, from the Chinese sage Mencius, where he talks about the poor farmer who came back from his field, his rice field, and said, “oh I’m so exhausted.” And his family said, “why?” And he said, “Well, I’ve been pulling on the rice shoots all day to make them grow.”
And it’s an interesting image that we should all keep in mind, because we all do a lot more pulling on the rice shoots, I think, than is really needed. When what we should be doing is, well, what we should have done is cultivated the rice field up front. Again, hassle up front, loading the hassle, cultivating the rice field at the beginning, and then tend the rice field so that rice grows on its own, rather than pulling on the rice shoots.
Lisa: I really like that image. It’s maybe a good transition point to another topic that I wanted to ask you about, which is that I was really delighted to read in your book about climate. And I think this is a topic, I think you even say it in the book, but it’s one of the most kind of least understood and yet most kind of potent concepts in the business world. And I’ve talked a little bit with Amy Edmondson and a few people, but it’s not I noticed that it’s not common language for people. And people often say like, “Oh, do you mean culture?” But climate and culture are distinct, right? So, can you share a bit about climate? What is it? What is it not? Why is it important?
Jocelyn: Yes, so great question. And yes, I love the topic of climate. That’s the other thing I talk about in all of my books, because it’s such a useful concept. Forum actually, the company that I worked for did some of the original research on climate back in the 1980s.
So climate is not culture. Culture is a very long term, almost set in stone thing, a company’s culture. Organizations’ culture is formed quite early on by the actions of the founders, by how everybody treats each other, the norms, the structures that are set up early in the organization’s life, and it’s very hard to change culture. People throw around, “we’re going to go in and change the culture.”
I think Peter Drucker said culture eats strategy for breakfast. So culture is very hard to change. Climate is actually very malleable, and climate is defined as simply what it feels like to work in place. So in contrast, culture is long term, climate is short term. Climate is malleable, and climate is directly affected, most directly affected by the actions of your immediate superior, so your team leader or your manager.
There’s another saying that says “people don’t leave organizations. They leave managers.” And that is because managers, and nowadays, not just formal managers, but team leaders, project managers, etc, they are the ones who really have the strongest impact on climate. That is what it feels like to me as an employee or as a team member to work in a place.
So climate is for any leader, for a team leader, or for anybody who would be a leader, wants to be a leader - climate is a very useful concept to understand, because it is so malleable. So what I do as a team leader to create a positive climate on my team, to help people feel that they are working in a good place where they can be their best, where they can contribute, where their ideas and contributions are valued. Anything that I do as a leader to create that climate is going to have an extraordinary effect on retention and on performance and on results.
So it’s unlike culture, which I think people sort of spend too much time beating their head against the wall, trying to change company culture, climate is something that we can work on right now and see effects almost instantly. We can see effects tomorrow.
Lisa: So what can you give an example of what I might do then, if, as a leader in any kind of capacity, if I want to talk about climate, or if I want to help to shift it, if I recognize that it’s not positive and I would like it to be more positive, what can we do then to shift it?
Jocelyn: Yeah, so I have a bit of a contrarian view of this that I talk about in the book. Forum, in doing our research on climate, we came up with these six factors that were, I’m going to forget what they are now, but there was clarity and accountability. And there was a number of factors that wouldn’t be surprising about good leadership practices.
But the more I thought about it, and the more I read Eastern thinkers on this topic, the more I came to think that it’s kind of a mistake to think about climate in this very rigid, “here are these six factors, and I have to pay attention to them, and I’m going to be evaluated on them.” It was almost a very heavy technical way to think about a topic that should actually be quite light and fun, if you will. Because one thing about a positive climate is that it’s fun. People like to go to work in a place where it has a positive climate.
So I actually believe now that the most impactful thing that you can do as a leader to impact the climate is to exude good humor and good cheer yourself. And I draw a contrast in that chapter of the book, between Forum where I worked for many years, and then this other company that I went to, where I took a break for a few months and went and worked at this other consulting firm, and this other consulting firm, people were so down all the time, and it came directly from the managers, because the people at the top of the company all the way down were very technical types. They all wanted to be the smartest in the room, and nobody was having any fun ever.
In contrast, and people barely said good morning to each other in the halls. People barely smiled. In contrast to Forum Corporation where, when I first joined, I was a little bit freaked out, because people were so cheerful, and they would smile, and they would say, Good morning, and they would ask you how you were doing, and if you made a mistake, they wouldn’t sort of, you know, you wouldn’t get beaten down. People acted as if they cared about you as a person.
And as I say, at first, I was a little bit freaked out by that, because I thought, maybe it’s phony, or it’s just silly. But I came to really appreciate the climate at that company that was created by the many, many managers, not everybody, but most managers and team leaders and everybody sort of absorbed this climate of good cheer, good humor, encouragement. So it’s really a lot simpler, I think, than having to remember a lot of different techniques. It’s just, be of good cheer.
Lisa: Yeah, I think what I take from what you’re saying is that how we are sometimes, is so much more important than what we do. And how we are is really contagious, like you were saying before. You know, if I have a way of being, which is really stressed, then other people in my team are also going to feel really stressed, whereas if you can find a way and do the things that you need to do, as you said, to be kind of calm, or at least not reactive, to find a way of relating to the team… You know that this is possible, even though it might be difficult, or I believe in this team, even though these are challenging times, or whatever, that being piece, that mindset piece, is so important. Because climate is - once you see it, you can’t unsee it, I find. I think it’s not something we’re taught to pay attention to, but we feel it, and once you start to see it and talk about it, then you can transform it. But as long as it’s sort of unseen, there’s not a lot we can do to change it, right?
Jocelyn: Yeah, and people think that it’s fluffy. So many managers, senior managers in particular, think that this is fluffy. And also they worry that it might reduce accountability. You know, if we’re nice to everybody, but it isn’t about that, really.
I say one of the traps that I talk about in the book is expecting everybody to sing Kumbaya, which is kind of the opposite extreme to which some Western folks go when they try to absorb some of this wisdom from the East - they think, “okay, we’re all going to just be nice” and it’s not about that.
What I found really affected the climate at this company was that it wasn’t everybody was always nice. It was that people were good-humored, but they also were encouraging. Whenever I or somebody else stepped forward, a junior person said, “hey, I’ll take this on. I’ll take the lead on that.” It was, “yes, go for it.” There was never a sense of, “oh, well, that’s not your place, or you’re not in the right position for that, or you don’t have the authority.” It was just “Yeah, go for it. Give it a try.”
And I had many wonderful managers who were like that. But it also just sort of was an attitude that imbued the company somehow that you could try, you could go ahead. And that, I think had more of an impact on climate than just people being nice. It wasn’t that there was no accountability. It just was that people encouraged you to try.
Lisa: Yeah, I think there’s even a Lao Tzu quote from the Tao Te Ching - you can tell me if I’m mispronouncing any of that…
Jocelyn: That’s right, yes.
Lisa: And I know there are different translations, but there is a quote that even talks about climate, that it’s more important to run a group with an open climate, or something like that, and the value of a leadership that is not about driving and sort of stepping in all the time, but really allowing other leaders. You know that the leader’s job is done when the group says “we did it ourselves” and all of that.
So it’s kind of fun to me that there are some really ancient ideas about leadership, about effective groups that we’re almost getting back in contact with now and is being supported by the latest psychology and research and stuff. And it’s really kind of confirming something perhaps we’ve known for a long time and have piled on a lot of kind of thinking on top of individualistic thinking, perhaps, and in some ways, it feels like we’re unlearning things that are no longer useful, right?
Jocelyn: Well, the Western model of organizations comes from the military originally. So this isn’t just Western, I mean, this is an Eastern thing as well. Militaries are set up hierarchically for good reason. The chain of command.
But in the West, especially post World War Two, there was so much research that had been done on effectiveness in the military, and the leadership research came out of the military, and so that was sort of transferred over to the corporate world. And the assumption was, we’re going to set it up the same way, because that’s efficient, and you’re going to have these silos, it’s going to be quite rigidly hierarchical. Authority is the name of the game.
And it was in the 1980s when the Japanese companies started to basically just trounce the US car companies because they had this completely different approach for manufacturing cars, and they called it Kaizen, continuous improvement. But it was much more than that. It was a whole philosophy of working in teams and giving the people closest to the work the authority to make decisions, and in Japanese culture, also, teamwork and equality is highly valued.
So they just had this whole different way of manufacturing cars, and they built much better cars than the US car companies were doing. So that was really the genesis of this whole idea of lateral leadership, matrix management, or influence as it came to be called, and it’s an interesting sort of history to look at how the Western business world started to look to Japan and say, “Oh, they’ve really got something going on here.” And that was the beginning of all this thinking about a different kind of leadership.
Lisa: Yeah, and kind of frustrating in some ways - why is it taking us this long to sort of shift things when there’s so many things that we know don’t work like I think most people could agree now that that kind of bureaucratic, rigid, hierarchical way of working is just not effective in the current landscape. As someone who has been exploring these things for several decades, do you feel optimistic that things are changing? Are you hopeful that there is a shift happening?
Jocelyn: That’s a good question. The shift has happened for sure, I don’t think anybody denies the fact that flatter organizations and a different way of thinking about leadership, more lateral way of thinking about leadership leads to better results. I don’t think anybody denies that. So I’m optimistic about that. It’s kind of accepted wisdom now.
What I’m not so optimistic about is that I think it’s now come to the point where teams and project work and lateral leadership, working with people over whom you don’t have authority is so common that people tend to think that it’s just going to happen.
So going back to what I was saying at the beginning about when you have a team that gets together and everybody’s on 15 different teams or projects, and it’s just assumed that, “well, this is how we do work now. So let’s get on with it. We’re not going to bother with the team contract, or we’re not going to bother with going around and setting ground rules or ask everybody how they’re doing. We’re just going to get on with it,” because it’s just assumed this is how work gets done these days.
And in some ways, we had an advantage, I think, back in the 90s, when this way of working was new. And so everybody was sort of like, “oh, well, we have to learn how to do this.” And they would seek out workshops on influence skills, and they would seek out feedback on their relationship skills or collaboration. It was much more talked about, and now I think it’s just assumed that we all know how to do this. “So let’s just get on with it.” And it’s not true. Influence does not come naturally to human beings.
Lisa: Yeah. And I wonder if there’s also a bit of a trap at the moment that, “oh, you know, we’ve introduced these new structures, flatter structures, or we’re an agile organization, therefore, all of that stuff happens naturally,” whereas this is, from what I’ve heard you say, this is much more about a practice. It’s about awareness. It’s about commitment to what people have often dismissed as sort of soft and fluffy, that are actually the things that are really crucial.
Jocelyn: That’s a great point, yes, the emphasis on - and this started with the whole Six Sigma process improvement, re-engineering thing in the 90s, where a lot of consulting firms made a lot of money by coming in and restructuring organizations or teaching them the Six Sigma processes and techniques and tools. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But again, back to what I was saying about climate.
I think all of this is much more of a mindset, “Master yourself first.” There’s a wonderful quote from Buddha that says - not gonna get this right, but - “better than mastery over 1000 people is mastery over one person - yourself.” And that’s really what it’s all about, is that self-reflection, the ability to self-reflect, to see what pitfalls you might be falling into and mastering yourself so that you can have these skills, much more than the structure of the organization.
Lisa: Yeah, I guess, on that note, in kind of concluding our conversation, what words of wisdom could you leave listeners with in terms of their journey as influencers, as leaders or budding leaders?
Jocelyn: Oh, there’s so many. But I joke sometimes that the whole book can be boiled down to “say less, listen more.” And that’s not an easy thing either. I mean really listening is hard. We are so often when we think we’re listening to somebody, we’re really preparing the next thing that we’re going to say in our minds to refute what they just said. And so to talk less, listen more, is a very profound change and sort of a way of being. So I think that’s the key piece of profound wisdom I would leave people with.
