7 Paths Blog Humble hierarchy path
Archive for the ‘Humble hierarchy path’ Category
Fewer leaders…more productivity?
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 by richfossI grew up on a family farm. The people I grew up with loved working for themselves and those forced to work for a boss mourned the fact.
It turns out that the USA leads the world in an interesting statistic. We have more supervisors than anyone else. Here’s a fascinating article on “Excess of supervisors dulls firms’ productivity”.
Undercover Boss
Monday, February 8th, 2010 by richfossLast night after the Super Bowl I watched CBS’s new Undercover Boss. The President and COO of Waste Management went undercover in his own company and for a week did frontline jobs ranging from working neighborhood garbage pickup to cleaning Porta-Pottys.
I grew up working class and the show brought back a lot of memories. I grew up knowing that bosses were people who didn’t know how to do the actual work and made life miserable for those who did. The COO of WM had a very hard time doing the work and he saw up close how his productivity policies made life miserable for workers. It was beautiful.
Teaching people how to lead without making life miserable was a big part of my motivation in launching EGL. Perhaps we should launch a version of undercover boss for nonprofit CEOs.
The cost of leadership
Thursday, October 29th, 2009 by richfossUnlike Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the current President of Liberia, I’ve never been jailed because of my leadership. I have had people angry enough at me that if, in the moment, they had the power to jail me, I suppose they would have.
I’ve been criticized many times. Occasionally it’s been deserved because I’ve made my share of mistakes. Many times, however, the criticism has come from the physiological response individuals have had to healthy and wise organizational changes I’ve proposed and/or advocated.
As I’ve grown older as a leader I’ve come to understand that people often have physical responses to change. It has to do with the amygdala, the part of our brain that by-passes the thinking part of our brain to save our skin. Have you ever slammed on the brakes without thinking to prevent an accident? That’s the amygdala.
Leaders are often criticized by people trying to slam on the brakes.
While others’ amygdalas are firing out of control, a leader remains calm. Here’s an excerpt from Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s memoir, This Child Will Be Great:
…the inability to tolerate criticism is a troublesome trait in any human being, but especially so in a leader. If you are a leader, you are going to get hit. You are going to get hit verbally sometimes with some very harsh words; you must be prepared to take criticism, to stand still and just let it pass over you without resorting to retribution or revenge. Being able to “take it” is part of the price of leadership…
Too often people, in their eagerness to stand and shout “Follow me!” neglect to consider the downside. They do not, for instance, consider the possibility of ostracism. But the truth is that if you want to lead and be hailed, you need to prepare to be ostracized, because surely you will be at some point in your career.
Leaders’ amygdala’s work in the same fashion as other people’s. The difference is that good leaders can stand still because once their amygdala starts firing, they return to calm very quickly. Freedman has some great suggestions for returning to calm within six seconds.
Survival
Monday, October 26th, 2009 by richfossRecently I talked with a nonprofit exec who said, “I’ve been in this business for thirty years and this is the first time I’ve been worried about survival [of an organization].”
When Evergreen Leaders was founded in 2003 we focused on leadership development for nonprofits. We still help nonprofits with leadership issues but when nonprofits begin to wonder if they can survive, fundraising becomes paramount.
The exec knows that their organization needs to ramp up their fundraising but they can little afford to hire a consultant. After listening to her, I described the current project that we are working on at EGL: raising funds to write a free ebook on sustainable fundraising, provide free online resources campaign job descriptions and forms, and once the ebook is published, and offer 90-minute conference calls for 6-8 readers of the ebook at $29 a person.
I could see her wheels turning as she recognized that potential value of the project for her nonprofit.
As I listened to her pain at having to make staff cuts, it deepened my passion for making this project succeed. Our communities depend on nonprofit’s like hers to provide crucial services to the most vulnerable among us.
To a lot of community nonprofit execs, it feels like pain and passion are in a race in their organizations. Let’s do our best to help passion win.
You lie!
Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 by richfoss“Last week Republican Representative Joe Wilson shouted “You lie!” to President Obama during Obama’s speech to Congress. While I support health care reform, I’m one of the few people,” I wrote in a column due out tomorrow, “who think it was fine for Wilson to confront Obama when he thought he was lying.
“I just wish,” I added, “that someone in Congress would have had the courage to stand up and say, “You lie!” to former President George W. Bush when he said that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis died because of the lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
Being president does not give you the license to lie and when you do, someone ought to stand up and say, “You lie.”
Sometimes your words come back to haunt you.
My wife, Sarah, copy-edits my column. For the past several days I’ve had occasional back spasms which cause me to cry out in pain. I tend to be an optimist and when people ask me how I’m doing, I’ll answer, “Great!”
Last night we were talking and Sarah said, “You know, when people ask you how you are doing and you tell them you’re great, I want to point at you and say, “You lie!” We had a good laugh.
A Tale of Two Leaders
Sunday, July 26th, 2009 by richfossIn the early 1960’s my father had 8 children and 12 milk cows. Needing more cows to support his family, he went to the local Farmers Home Administration office.
There he met a tall, well built older man by the name of Carlson. The FHA official listened to Dad describe his farm and his need for more cows. “He seemed to have a passion for people,” Dad said recently.
“Before you can get more cows you need a new barn,” Carlson said. Dad’s barn had room for twelve stanchions.
Carlson and my dad worked out a plan for an FHA loan to help Dad build a new barn. Even though Dad only had an 8th grade education, he studied the latest trends in barns and the dairy business. With the help of the FHA loan, he built a free stall barn in Minnesota, one of the most progressive types of dairy barns at the time.
When the barn was complete Dad returned to the FHA to secure a loan to purchase cows for his spacious new barn.
In the meantime, Carlson had retired and was replaced by a short, balding man with a paunch. He listened to Dad and said, “I’m not going to loan you any money for cows. You need to get another job to buid up your herd.”
Dad was shocked. He had a new barn that could easily handle sixty cows and he still had twelve cows. How was he to pay for the new barn with twelve cows?
At the time he completed the barn, he could have purchased good milking cows for $200 each. Over the next decade he built up his herd by taking second and third jobs. Eventually he was able to build the herd to the size that fit the new barn.
“I was bitter for a long time,” Dad said, “but eventually I had to forgive the man.”
When I was thinking of launching Evergreen Leaders I thought about Dad and the FHA The first FHA agent was a good leader who listened to Dad and saw a man who had the potential to be a very good dairy farmer. He helped Dad envsion the possibility of building a new barn and then supported him with a loan.
The second FHA agent was a leader too. He was a leader who lacked vision and weighed Dad down with a difficult task–building up his herd with no FHA loan.
At an early age I learned that leaders can help you thrive or they can load you down with burdens. When you are at the bottom of the totem pole as my Dad was, you thrive with the help of a leader or you become bitter with the help of a leader.
When I launched Evergreen Leaders I was determined to help leaders, especially nonprofit leaders, make sure that even those lowest on the totem pole thrive.
The passion to make sure that every one thrive fires me up every morning for another day of working with and teachig nonprofit leaders how to lead like the first FHA agent.
I1st published 9-30-08.
The Reluctant Leader
Sunday, July 26th, 2009 by richfoss
Lately I’ve been reading a brutally honest book, Leading with a Limp: Turning Your Struggles into Strengths by Dan B. Allender, Ph.D.
“Leaders are dangerous. They can bite without provocation,” he says, “or at least without logic, and it is best to stay out of their way or you’ll have to deal with the consequences.”
In the early 1990’s I discovered how dangerous leaders can be. For six years I worked closely with one of the founders of Plow Creek. I looked up to him and learned much from him. He had a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and many gifts as a leader.
When he took a position in our denomination, I succeeded him as lead elder. He continued as a member of our communal group and was supportive of my leadership.
Then he disclosed a secret history of sexual misconduct that included abuse of children. He disclosed the misconduct when he realized he could no longer silence the family of one of the victims.
Talk about betrayal. Our community went into shock. I struggled to pick up the pieces. People kept coming to me and pouring out their stories of pain–not only pain from the actions of the Plow Creek leader but also the missteps and betrayals of other leaders.
I remember sitting in my office at 3:00 a.m. weeping after having heard a particularly painful story told by a woman the night before, a story where I could easily imagine myself making the same mistake as the leaders who had wounded her so deeply. “Who can possibly be a leader?” I wondered.
Reading Allender’s book, I thought of that dark night of the soul. Out of that painful crisis I continued to lead but with much more humility. I became what Allender calls, “a reluctant leader.
“Reluctant leaders don’t aspire to hold power;” Allender says, “in fact, they avidly work to give it away. They attempt this even as they use power to create a context where power is used fairly, wisely, and with checks and balances.”
1st published 6/25/08.
Protesters: agents of long term change
Sunday, July 26th, 2009 by richfoss1st published 2-12-08.
Fifty years ago in February 1958 a friend of mine, David Gale, along with three others, sailed out of Los Angeles harbor on a thirty foot boat, the Golden Rule, headed for the nuclear testing area in the South Pacific.
David never made it to the South Pacific testing area because a nasty storm came up shortly after they left Los Angeles and after days of being violently seasick, another protestor took his place on the crew.
The Golden Rule crew was part of hundreds of thousands of people in the 1950’s who were protesting nuclear testing and nuclear weapons.
People who are powerless protest the power moves of the powerful. The powerful react with efforts to quell the protests.
The crew of the Golden Rule never made it to the testing area because they were arrested and jailed in Hawaii until the spring of 1958 tests over Christmas Island were completed.
Yet over and over again protests that are quelled lead to change. In 1963 the USA, Britain, and USSR were the first signers of a test ban treaty and the hundreds of thousands of protesters, including the four aboard the Golden Rule, had helped make the world a safer place.
Your organization needs people to protest, to complain. You may resist at first but then you might realize the protesters are right and you and your organization do need to change.
And if you are one of the protesters in your organization, take heart. You may be an agent of long term change.
Shared leadership
Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 by richfoss1st published 2/10/08.
For over thirty years Plow Creek has had shared leadership. Our church and communal group are both led by groups of two or three people at a time.
I’ve been sharing leadership with others at Plow Creek since 1981 which has given me a lot of time to think about the advantages and disadvantages of shared leadership.
Here are four advantages of shared leadership:
Shared leadership builds on individual strengths. My strengths are vision, communication, and relationship building. For organizations to thrive, they need leaders with more strengths than those three. I’ve been fortunate to work with others whose strengths are organizational skills, counseling, compassion, details, etc.
Every leader has weaknesses. Shared leadership makes it possible for the weaknesses of individual leaders to be compensated for by other leaders.
Shared leadership helps build more relationships in the organization. Everyone in an organization wants to connect with the leader. Shared leadership multiplies opportunities for connections. And leaders need to connect with as many people in the organization as possible because people have valuable information that leaders need to lead. Shared leadership multiplies the amount of information that leaders have.
Shared leadership naturally involves conflict because of differing viewpoints. With a single leadership organizational conflicts can be ended prematurely by a decision of the leader. With shared leadership, differing viewpoints can generate creative solutions that a single person would be unlikely to arrive at.
The major disadvantage of shared leadership happens when the people sharing leadership lose trust in one another. When trust is high differing view points strengthen the sharing of leadership. But when trust breaks down those differing viewpoints will be seen though the lens of distrust which is destructive to the organization.
It’s ironic that when I serve as the CEO/Teachers Assistant of Evergreen Leaders. In that role I am a solo leader. As I write this post and think about the shared leadership I began to ponder how we can adapt that model for EGL. After 26 plus years of serving as part of a shared leadership group, I’m convinced it a great leadership model.
Don’t look for extraordinary people
Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 by richfossFirst published on 2/6/09.
In The Breakthrough Company: How Everyday Companies Become Extraordinary Performers, Keith R. McFarland says that small companies that breakthrough to become large and successful have in common several principles including:
Don’t look for extraordinary people; build a place where ordinary people can do extraordinary things.
Evergreen Leaders’ mission is to give ordinary people the tools to help their groups thrive.
McFarland discovered in his study of breakthrough companies that each “focused on creating systems that helped people to grow along with the business.”
I’m still at the beginning of the book. I’m eager to read the section on how companies create systems that help their people grow with the company. I’ll post more about how this principle can be adopted by nonprofits when I read the section.
I was tipped off the book through an article in Inc. The article grabbed my attention because my brother works for Polaris, one of the nine companies studied in detail for the book.