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Finding your Competitive Leadership Advantage: Joy

Joy is not the first thing we associate with leadership. Influence, power, strategy skills, achievement, change management, tolerance for complexity – absolutely. Joy? Rarely makes anyone’s Top Ten list.

Experience and years of seeing talented and dedicated executives burdened – or burned out – by the demands of their work have brought joy to the top of my list of leadership requisites. It’s every leader’s under-appreciated, competitive advantage – and the best way to wed great accomplishment with health and balance. 

What’s the role of joy in your work life? How can you find more? 

That’s not an easy question for many of us to answer, nor is it one we often contemplate.  Professional training in all fields focuses heavily on skills,  knowledge,  acumen,  practice,  responsibility – learning more, doing more, doing better.  Joy takes a side seat, if even allowed to the table.  Without joy, the stage is set for a career characterized by stress, strain, and an ethic of just keep pushing harder.     

To illustrate my point on the power of joy – and to add joy to your day – take a look at a leader-in-action video.  As you watch,  think about the leader’s power, influence, impact, efforts, and achievement. Then take a look at his joy. What do you notice? 

Hint:  Joy drives everything – and it has made great things happen.

The leader is Gregg Breinberg, music teacher and director of the fifth grade PS22 Chorus at a large public school in Graniteville, Staten Island, New York. Gregg founded the chorus in 2000, and the world will have a chance to see the fruits of his labors when the group performs at the Oscars in Hollywood later this month. [See Anne Hathaway’s surprise visit to the 11th Annual Winter Concert to invite the group.]

I’m a relative new comer to the PS22 Chorus, but they’ve been an internet phenomenon with more than 28 million hits since Gregg began his postings more than five years ago.   Anne Hathaway said she’s been following the PS 22 Chorus for years – and yes, they have brought her a lot of joy. 

So take a look and a listen. The kids are adorable. The music is great. The leadership lesson, profound.  This is one of the group’s best – and had the flu not derailed me, I’d have beaten the Huffington Post to press in reporting on their terrific rendition of Ariel Pink’s “Round and Round.” 

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Leading with Passion and Soul: Why Gustavo Dudamel is now My Dude

For the last thirteen years, The Dude to me has been the Jeff Bridges character in the Coen brothers’ film, The Big Lebowski.  Memorable character. Great film. I have fun associations from enjoying the film with my younger sons.  I quote lines from it regularly.  When I’m at my wits ends, that’s the film I want to see.  I never expected to replace The Dude with another.  But it happened.   

Gustavo Dudamel, the young charismatic conductor of the LA Philharmonic, is now My Dude.  Jay Leno on late-night TV first alerted me to Dudamel’s possible contention for the title.  I scoffed.  I’ve seen (and I own) the 60 Minutes show on Gustavo. I have known about him and his work since his appointment at age 27 to lead the LA orchestra.  I use him as a model of leading with soul and passion in my teaching.  Charismatic leader?  Absolutely.  The Dude?  Come on. 

I travelled to LA to investigate – or to be more specific, I went on the first of two planned trips to hear the LA Phil, see Dudamel in action, talk with some of the musicians, and research the young conductor’s real impact on one of the world’s great orchestras. This pleasant scholarship was intended to tease out the hype and marketing from real leadership. 

The buzz in the classical music world is that Gustavo has something special.  I wanted a first-hand feel for what that is and to hear what the musicians say and do in response to it.         

I saw the banners hung on every lamppost in downtown LA — and I thought creative advertising campaign. I approached the Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall and enjoyed its beauty. Creative architecture.  I noted the crowds entering the Hall– people of all ages and ethnicities — arriving for a musical form declared dead by so many.  As a classical music lover, I appreciated the strong ticket sales.   

I took my seat in the Concert Hall, 35 feet or so from Dudamel and to his left at an angle that let me see his gestures and face up close and personal.  Nice.  Bernstein and Beethoven on the program.  Two of my favorites.  Front row, center seat for the after-performance talk-back with Dudamel, the vocal soloist of the evening, and a member of the orchestra before going downstairs to talk with other LA Phil musicians. Unexpected bonus. Who should hold the title of The Dude?  Not a question on my mind or in my research protocol. 

5 minutes into the first movement of the first piece of my first live Dudamel-conducted concert, I knew something powerful was happening. Interpretation, pacing, variations  like I’ve never heard.  Nuance that made known music new again. Musicians – many more than twice the conductor’s age – watching and responding intently and with faces that indicated more than ordinary attention to the boss. Many had smiles of joy and pleasure as they played complex and serious music.  That’s not what I’m use to seeing.

I’ve watched from close vantage, for example, many of the great conductors leading the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and I have studied their leadership, relationship, and interaction at work with the orchestra during many open rehearsals.  Something was different with Dudamel and this orchestra. He could influence them with the most subtle of movements: slight nod of the head, twinkle of an eye, squeeze of his shoulder blades.  And everyone on that stage was clearly having a good time.

Now don’t get me wrong.  Dudamel has been described as a conducting animal, and there were opportunities to see his athletic conducting style.  But that struck me as less important a feature of his impact than I had expected.  What was more palpable was shared energy and enjoyment.  The mutual affection. The relationship of reciprocal appreciation and connection between Gustavo and the musicians – and the music that came from that partnership. 

When the piece was over, soloists and orchestra were acknowledged by the conductor and crowd while Dudamel beamed at the players and stood with his back to the audience. Then he turned from the podium. He did not, however,  take his solo bow from center stage as conductors normally do. Rather he walked in among the musicians and then turned to audience: conductor and musicians took their final bows together. 

After the concert and talk-back, the word from the musicians with whom I spoke was that all this was genuine.  Dudamel made a significant difference in their playing – in their work lives.  No, they weren’t just a friendly, happier orchestra than the BSO or others.  Dudamel’s trust and respect brought out their best work.  Their affection for him resulted in a willingness to trust in return – and to follow when he lead with radically different interpretations of music than the musicians had been playing for years.  Experienced professionals led by a wunderkind?  No – and you could feel the musician’s affection and respect for Dudamel in their immediate protests:  experienced professionals led by a talented conductor who is taking the entire orchestra to new heights.  Musicians spoke of playing in ways they never thought possible. The innovation was fun. The fun added energy.  Audiences responded. The results are spectacular.  The Dude torch was passed by the time I left the Concert Hall.

The morale of the story: real leadership is talent and preparation wedded with shared purpose, mutual respect, humility, and a contagious spirit of enjoyment and innovation that facilitates joy at work and unimaginable results.  Leading with passion and soul.  No doubt.  That’s how My Dude does it.              

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Leadership Skill # 2: Cultural Intelligence

Cultural intelligence is key in a multicultural world.  The skills are as helpful in navigating a multinational as they are any where in today’s diverse global world.  Organizations, groups, professions, nations, ethnic groups all have their own cultures.  Even facilitating conversations  between different groups or divisions in your own organization requires strong cultural intelligence.  

Consider, for example, the divide that can exist between engineers and sales folks in many large organizations.  Difference language, values, training, expectations, goals, worldview, behaviors, practices.  Learning to diagnose and move comfortably and ably between cultures is a skill to be treasured.

The idea of multiple intelligence dates back to the early 1980s and the work of Howard Gardner. Gardner proposed that a single general capacity that every individual has – one that could be measured by IQ tests and the like – was too limited for the reality of the human experience.  Individuals are unique in the portrait of their diverse skills and strengths and in the different kinds of intelligence that underpins each.  A star athlete knows and uses different knowledge and skills than a great artist or a Nobel prize winning scientist.  Gardner proposed seven intelligences: linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spacial, body-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal.  

In the 1990s, Daniel Goleman broadened interpersonal intelligence into the idea of emotional intelligence.   

Ten year later,  Christopher Earley and Soon Ang popularized the concept of cultural intelligence (CQ): the ability to understand someone’s gestures and behaviors in the way that person’s colleagues and group-mates would.  

Bottom-line, strong cultural intelligence is the capacity to determine the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, behaviors, and practices that characterizes a group, institution, or organization. That’s not an easy task.  CQ is not stereotyping or equating the idiosyncrasies of an individual from a cultural group as characteristics of the entire group.  

Those with high CQ are akin to good anthropologists with strong ethnographic skills. They look, study, discern, watch over time and situation, compare — and suspend judgment as they work. They note differences and determine the meaning of behaviors from those within the culture who know.     

So how does one increase cultural intelligence?  Become more open to (and even intuitive in) teasing out the appropriate responses and understandings in a cross-cultural situation?  Remain comfortable while knowing that despite best efforts to decipher gestures, language, and behavior that you will never be able to learn, know, or plan for everything? Mistakes will happen – and that’s OK.

Building CQ involves cultural studies and learning about your own and others cultures.  There’s a clear cognitive component in CQ.  However, just knowing  about a culture doesn’t mean you’ll be comfortable in it or have the courage and motivation to adjust body movement and language to mirror someone very different.    

That’s where experimentation and practice come in.  Accept that we all have our own brand of CQ and that like learning a new musical instrument, practice will expand skills and capacities.

Christopher Earley and Elaine Mosakowski studied 2000 managers from 60 different countries and identified six different portraits of CQ, each emphasizing different combinations of natural skills, strengths, and experiences.   They found:  

1.  The Provincial with predispositions for the comfort of predictability of the known 

2. The Analyst with good learning, planning, and environmental scanning skills 

3. The Natural with strong intuitive capacities  

4. The Ambassador with confidence, as well as motivation and behaviors that convey “I belong”

5. The Mimic with abilities to sense how to mirror actions and engage in the cultural dance  

6. The Chameleon with skills and orientations that draw from all of the portraits . 

So what’s your current style?  Which portrait best fits your approach to cultural differences?   How’s your motivation and what’s your plan for growth and development?

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Enhancing Global Leadership: Studying China III – Generational Diversity within Diversity

The layers of diversity in China are deep and broad.  There are, of course, ethnic differences. The government of the People’s Republic officially recognizes 56 ethnic groups – up by one since my trip to China last year. 

I am fascinated by the faces in crowds at the Forbidden City and other places popular with Chinese tourists – folks from the provinces who now have the freedom and affluence to travel internally.  For our students who carry stereotypic beliefs that Chinese people look alike, asking them to study faces is a life broadening experience.       

There are language differences, too. The Chinese  have a common written language but dialects so different that those who speak Mandarin from different cities or provinces can have trouble communicating with one another.  Imagine if English speakers in New York couldn’t communicate with English speakers in Chicago or LA.    

There are growing economic differences that often reflect urban vs. rural distinctions.  

But the differences that are most striking for me are in the mindsets of the generations who live together in China today.  

In the United States, we’ve talked about generation gaps for, well, generations.  Howe and Strauss in the Atlantic Monthly have a good piece on the topic. The origin of generation gap in the U.S. is the flower-power, trust no one over thirty period of the last 1960’s.  And we now speak about the generational differences between the digital natives and those born and raised pre-computer and Internet.  My colleague John Palfrey and his co-author Urs Gasser capture that divide well in their book, Born Digital. 

But to understand the meaning of generation gap in China today, you need to imagine a nation with a digital divide of its own: where cell phones, computers, social media, and digital music are standards for urban young. Add to that the reality that the experiences of those born every decade in China since the 1930’s has been informed by a markedly different political, ethical, and economic reality. 

A young entrepreneur with her BMW and bank account may have parents who enthusiastically sacrificed all to participate in the Long March and grandparents who lost much so as to be “reeducated” during the Cultural Revolution.  Continue back through Chinese history is great grandparents are still on the scene.  

We take for granted in the United States consistent political, economic, and educational systems.  Higher education has been a part of our national profile since colonial days.  Expanded access to it has consistently grown over the course of our nation’s history, with huge participation jumps fueled by the GI Bill post-World War II and the Woman’s Movement in the 1960s and 1970’s.  Underpinning all this is morality of freedom, choice, and opportunity.

The advent of Communism, the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, the re-education of academics and professionals, the evolution of Socialism post-Mao, the introduction of socialist capitalism, and more have taken the concept of generation gap to new heights.

Those looking for a simple definition of China today – its values, ethics, expectations, beliefs, practices, policies — need only remember that the Chinese cannot even answer that question.  The markedly different life experiences and opportunities of those now in their 20’s, their 40’s, their 60’s, their 80’s have created generational divides and multiple lenses on life. 

China’s generational diversity within its diversity is another good reason for us to enhance our tolerance for ambiguity and our cultural intelligence.

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Enhancing Global Leadership: Studying China II– recommended readings

Six books recommended for leaders (and anyone) wanting to understand China today.  I love good fiction and am a stickler for good writing: the books listed are all good reads.  Enjoy!  

1.    Peter Hessler.  Oracle Bones.   I’ve written about this in a past post and recommend it as a place to start your studies.  Gives a feel for the paradoxes and complexities that at China today.

2.    Peter Hessler. Country Driving.  OK, I admit it, I am a Hessler fan.  He’s a fellow Princetonian and Missourian, but I learned that after becoming a follower of his work.  He has the eyes of a good anthropologist and is a compassionate observer who gets to the heart of what’s changing in China.  This is his most recent book about his road trip across Northern China following the Great Wall, time in a rural village, and experiences in an up-and-coming new industrial town.  Amazon named it book of the month in February 2010, and you’ll see why.

In talking about Country Driving in an email to me, Hessler said: 

“It’s more business-oriented than the others. One long section of the book is about a rural family that is making the transition from farming to small business, and another section is about life in a small factory town in the southeast. I suppose I was not particularly business-minded when I went to China, but there’s so much energy there, and I quickly sensed that those were the stories that matter most at this time. It’s remarkable how quickly people respond and adjust to change in China.”

3. Edgar Snow. Red Star Over China Snow was the first Westerner to meet Mao in 1936. This remains the definitive biography of Mao and one of the most important books written about the Long March and the birth of the Communist movement in China. A whole generation of Chinese read this book. Snow was a journalist with Kansas City roots, and people there remember that. Kansas City has a fame in China like few other places. We have an Edgar Snow Archives at the University of Missouri-Kansas City which contains Snows papers, donated at his death by his wife. Great resource.

4.   Philip P. Pan. Out of Mao’s Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China.  My students recommended this one to me. It answers the question of how communism and capitalism, growing freedom and persisting authoritarianism, are co-existing in China.  Pan is the former Beijing bureau chief for the Washington Post, and he brings a good journalist’s pen and sensibilities.  This is the book to understand Communism in post-Mao China.

5.  N. Mark Lam and John Graham.  China Now: Doing Business in the World’s Most Dynamic Market.  I like the easy organization of this book and its how-to nature: how to negotiate, understand East-West differences, handle contracts, appreciate the power of history, know what to say, and so on.  China’s changing fast, but the cultural advice here is a good starting place for enhancing cultural intelligence.

6.   Harvard Business Review.  Doing Business in China Collection.  Eight concise, solid articles from the Harvard Business Review that cover topics like multinationals in China, China’s changing consumer base, East-West negotiations, emerging China brands, and more. HBR articles have a no-nonsense, get-to-the-point quality that I like.   

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Enhancing Global Leadership: Studying China I

All interested in contemporary business leadership need to study of China, not just stay abreast of current events on the front page of the newspaper.  The business landscape is rapidly changing, China is at the center of the changes, and we had best recognize that and be prepared.     

Yesterday was our first global leadership class, and the course is off to a good start.  China is our living case study this semester (and we will travel there together in spring) for building cultural intelligence; expanding international business acumen; and learning about shifting global powers, economies, and marketplaces.  Some observations over my next few posts from our discussions.

China’s complexity:  China is a complex country, with a complex history and culture that infuse its current political, economic, and policy choices in ways a casual observer might miss.

Recognizing what it means, for example, to have been one of the most advanced and innovative nations on the planet – gunpowder, the compass, moveable type, paper making, silk production, nutrition studies, veterinary studies, metallurgy technologies, rice cultivation, pasta, paper money, pharmacology, and more trace their origins to ancient China – gives us clues to the urgency in China’s national aching to be a strong and dominant world player again.  It also enables us to appreciate why and to reconcile the seeming dichotomies in China’s mix of communism and capitalism – its “Socialism with Chinese character.”   

Read about the history of the Opium Wars, the relationship between mainland China and Taiwan, and China’s loss of territories and land over the ages by invasion or as a result of internationally-supported fiat using a cultural lens of face-saving.  You learn something important about the power of trust in foreign relations – and why transparency in China’s contemporary global diplomacy might not come easy.  

Look at the behavioral and philosophical foundations of Legalism in China and of how that can help account for the authoritarian and brutal aspects of the Cultural Revolution or for incidents labeled in the West as human rights violations. 

Combine Confucianism, Daoism, Communism, and Capitalism for a feel of the complexity and variety of personal ideologies and ethical frameworks in China today.   The list could go on. 

I’m not a history buff, so I always appreciate the reminder of how much nations are like people. 

Research — and any good psychiatrist — will tell you that we all come by our behaviors and worldviews  honestly as a result of a combination of early life experiences and what nature has given us.  Thinking deeply about China’s history and its given natural givens – including an isolating physical terrain with huge mountains on three sides and an ocean on the fourth – puts the country’s actions today in a new perspective.   

We can’t know China today without understanding its past.    We can’t know business leadership without knowing both.     

The magnitude of the task:  For those new to the task of studying China — of learning to see China, past and present, through Eastern and Western eyes — it is a big task. 

It will take time, effort, and patience to fully wrap minds around the complexity of a nation that can traces its history hundreds of thousands of years.  The speed of the transitions occurring in China today only magnify the challenge of sorting all this out for business and for policy.    

Where to start:   Read and talk. 

For readings, begin with Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones.  Hessler is a journalist and a beautiful writer.  He seamlessly weaves contemporary stories of a variety of compelling characters in China today with gripping vignettes and snippets of history.  How everything connects is mastery, and every word or fact is essential to Hessler’s narrative.  High praise for the book’s artistry, and it is still a hard read for many.  But the reasons why are exactly why you need to read it.  The mix of history, unknown places, names we can’t easily remember or that require us to sound out every syllable, characters that challenge stereotypes, mini-language lessons, and the backs-and-forths between stories of now and then create a visceral feel for readers that mirrors the experience of China today.   

And talk to everyone.  African cab drivers in Washington, D.C. have given me insights into China’s investments and strategies better than any journalist or researcher. Ex-patriots who have successfully lived and worked in China can identify cultural elements like few else.  Look around. You’ll be surprised how many people you know have links, experiences, and connections to China. 

We’ll bring in diverse speakers over the semester – economists, lawyers, entrepreneurs, Midwestern governs, scholars, citizens interested in cultural relations, consultants, artists, Chinese students studying at our university – to share their take on the complexity.  We’ll get very different perspectives from the different vantage points and as a result of the unique experiences of different professionals.  And we’ll learn from sorting through the differences and inevitable contradictions.  Simply speaking, China today – and yesterday – is just not simple.   

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Talking to the Press on Executive MBA Education

It’s been a long week, and both classes of our Executive MBA are in all day.  My thoughts on how to educate executives and transform good managers into great global leaders appear here today via a link to four articles in the Kansas City Star where my ideas were featured, thanks to a reporter who really listened and understood. 

Grab a cup of coffee, and take a look.  Happy to talk further about anything of interest that you find.   Just post a comment, and let me know.  Onward!

http://newspaperads.kansascity.com/SS/Page.aspx?ptype=SS_TILE&secid=95603&pagenum=1&facing=false

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Resilience 101: How to Build it

If resilience is an essential leadership skill, as I discussed in an earlier post, how do we build our capacity for it?  As someone for whom resilience doesn’t come naturally, I’ve thought deeply about the question.  Five suggestions from my musings:   

Start with what we know we can control or change – ourselves. It is easy in frustrating situations to hope that others will change. We know from research that’s a common, first response for all of us.  But we have the most influence on the change process when we focus on changing ourselves, our responses, our ways of framing a situation. This is not to say that we should cocoon, pull back, and not express our preferences or work to influence challenging or ineffective situations for the better.  It is more a question of how, when, and why we do that intervention work – and a reminder that we stand a better chance of influencing others when we know what we want and when we are trying patiently and openly to make things work.

Embrace our control over our full range of choices and options.  It’s easy to feel stuck – as if there’s only one way out of a sticky situation or only one way to understand it.  It’s harder to think of options and alternatives.  Resilience comes from being a stronger and broad thinker – no one trick pony – and from having the confidence in knowing that we can, even under the most stressful of conditions.

How do we develop those cognitive capacities? Practice them. Be playful. Take a minute now and then to ask simple questions like, so what else could I do now? What other options do I have? How else could I respond? What else is possible? What are five different reasons to explain why someone is now acting as he or she does? Once we get into the hang of it, these kinds of experience-broadening questions become second nature.  They enable us to see a bigger, richer, and brighter world.

Learn to reframe and do it often. Reframing is the process of standing back and deliberately looking at a situation from multiple angles and perspectives before jumping to the conclusion that you know what’s really happening (for you and for others).  Reframing is an especially important skills when we feel high stress, anger, anxiety, or other deep emotions.  That’s when we regress to our most primitive thinking and knee-jerk responses. 

If I tell myself I’m stuck, I am. If I say that I’m lost or overwhelmed, I will be. When I believe there is an opportunity, it’s always there.

When driven blindly by feelings, we react. It may feel good to settle, vent, or blame, but for what purpose?  Professionals have confidence that they know how to respond. The difference between reacting and responding is huge.  It’s the stuff upon which great careers are made.  What are the stories that you tell yourself in the face of frustrating situations?  Try an alternative framing, and you’ll see your mood lighten and your options grow.   

Need a primer to enhance your reframing skills? Try Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership by Lee Bolman and Terry Deal. Expanding the frameworks that you bring to make sense of social settings gives you a leg up in perfecting your reframing skills.      

Accept the reality that not everything is equally important. This sounds trite and obvious, but think about how often you have gotten yourself into a major stew over the small stuff.  We all do it — and more often than we like to admit.

Despite what many of us have learned from well-meaning teachers and sports coaches, not everything is worth doing well – and some things are not worth doing at all.

Sure there are consequences to our choices. Choose not to do something, and you’ve missed an opportunity. This is where knowing yourself comes in.

What’s really important to you? Where do you not want to miss out or not make a mistake? What are the issues or areas in your life where you can cut yourself some slack? Let go? Be less perfect?  Punt without shirking your responsibility to others?  

That’s the essence of resilience and the key to managing work-life balance and overload – and you hold the key to all that.  As you climb the hierarchy with increased responsibility over your career, you will never be able to do everything – and you’ll never be able to do all that you do perfectly.  How can you learn to accept that in yourself?  How can you use your supports and resources to share the load? Build networks of trust? Delegate? That’s not easy for people with high expectations  and needs for control, but it’s essential.            

Laugh.  A good sense of humor is mandatory for a long life and a strong career – and that means laughing at yourself, your mistakes, your flat spots, and your foibles. It’ll help keep things in perspective – and you’ll have a better time. 

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Educating global leaders, global citizens–learning to see through cultural lenses

Business leadership today is global. There’s no debate on that. Not everyone will become a player in a multi-national company – and some may never do any business outside the United States. However, we are all global citizens in an increasingly flat world who need to appreciate that our leadership decisions and choices may be local in operation, but they are always global in impact.

How do we teach people to be productive global citizens? Do we even know what being a good global citizen today means?

The questions have been on my mind all week as I prepare for the first class in Global Management, the course surrounding our international residency. I’m taking our second year Executive MBAs to three cities in China (Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin) this spring, and the course is designed to enable them to make the most of that learning experience.

The syllabus and mechanics are in order. My scholarly area is management education; and I’ve got enough experience, pedagogical savvy and developmental theory under my belt to design a pretty integrated and nifty course.

China is a rapidly changing nation of great accomplishment, influence, mystery, and paradox to the Western eye. I’m no China scholar, so I’ve asked distinguished professionals with on-going, hands-on experiences in China to join me in helping students unravel the paradoxes  and mystery as they learn about China’s history, culture, economy, law, and business environments.

I’m sure students will enjoy and learn from this. But I have bigger goals for them – and figuring out how to accomplish those is what’s kept me on edge.

I want our students to learn to see China through Eastern and Western eyes. More important, I want them to understand why that’s so important, so difficult, and so vital to their professional development in an increasingly diverse work world.  All that is not going to come simply from reading cases and articles,  interacting with our distinguished guests, or even travelling abroad.  It’s going to require time, a new level of openness to experience, self-reflection, and some deep digging to identify their own lenses and cultural blinders.  Oy! And I only have five class sessions in KC and eleven days in China to accomplish this.

I know only too well these are high expectations. Some twenty plus years ago, Jean Ramsey and I joined with colleagues to explore how to create educational experiences that broaden others’ understanding of and comfort with diversity and differences, as well as how to deconstruct the dynamics in the learning. We wrote about that in Teaching Diversity: Listening to the Soul, Speaking from the Heart; and we concluded that exploring differences, working to build emotional and cultural intelligence, and getting people to a place where they can name differences without triggering the human urge to evaluate (or devalue) them is complex and emotion-laden teaching.  And developmental growth of this kind takes time.

Activities, for example, can seem touchy-feely for those who live in their heads and are anchored in their local worlds, threatening to those with quick evaluative and ethno-centric lenses, or simplistic to people who just don’t get it. In those cases, primitive displacement can get triggered – along with some nasty comments come course evaluation time!

But hey, every professor knows if you’re looking for love in the classroom, you’re looking in the wrong place.  Good teaching challenges like nothing else, and sometimes it takes years for students to realize what they really learned from their work with you. 

So, wish me luck. Class is Friday, 8 am.  I’ll keep you posted. 

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Creating Communities of Shared Purpose and Contribution: Still Surprised

I just finished reading a new book by Warren Bennis, Still Surprised: A Memoir of a Life in Leadership.  I loved it for a number of reasons.

First,  Bennis is the father of applied leadership studies and a writer whose prose sings with humor, grace, and wisdom.  I always learn from Warren Bennis and from how he frames experience.  I expected to do the same from this – his book #30 – and I wasn’t disappointed.

I’ve got Post-its marking pages with good reminders and advice on topics like, garnering power through proximity (70), recruiting effectively (116), staying engaged in times of crisis (123), networking like a pro (131), the power of forgiveness (134), staff empowerment as “executive constellation” (146), leader renewal through self-reinvention (150), trust vs. charisma as a leadership cornerstone (184), the imperative for enhancing adaptive capacity and ongoing learning (193), and grace in aging  (all of Chapter 9).

Unlike some reviewers, I enjoyed digging through the stories of Bennis’s successes and failures – his crucibles to transform experiences into leadership muster – for truths that spoke to me.  That’s what a good memoir does.  So caution: this is not a book heavy on advice about how to lead.

No, Still Surprised is a book that encourages readers to think about their life experiences and choices, what they’ve made of and from them, and what work is left to be done.

I was surprised, for example, how quickly the book hooked me into reflecting on my own graduate school days in Cambridge.  Some stories sent me easily down memory lane:  thinking about the dynamic early days of the Sloan School at MIT (where I took courses while at Harvard), or remembering the excitement in discovering that a field like organizational behavior existed – and being thankful for wonderful graduate school chums and faculty who fed my excitement and who have remained close friends since (and because of) those earlier years.

Other Bennis stories brought back poignant memories of people – some of whom are no longer with us — who played a role (direct or indirect) in shaping my career choice, professional interests and directions, and values.  The diverse cast of characters during those intense NTL Bethel summers, for example, made learning challenging and fun.  Our eldest son is named Chris so no more need be said about the place that Chris Argyris, an extraordinary teacher and mentor to me and to my husband, holds in our hearts.  My dog is named Douglas McGregor as a tip of the hat to the man whose classic, The Human Side of Enterprise, is still vital, important, and undervalued in today’s bottom line-oriented work world.  And reconnecting with Ed Schein is always a highlight of any trip back east for important life reasons.

But the real power of the book came from Bennis’s ability to capture the electricity, the evolving dialogue, the community of inquiry, the hope,  the shared interests, and the commitment to social change and human development that characterized the Cambridge scene for me.

I had forgotten all the early 99 cent breakfasts at The Tasty, the noisy greasy dinners at Buddy’s Sirloin Pit, the late night coffees at Café Algiers and the like – the regular coming together with colleagues to share new insights on our evolving professional selves and our plans for how to better use our new skills.  Are we Model II yet?  How can we learn to reflect-in-action? What is real collaboration?  The conversations and meetings – formal and informal — about intervention theory, professional effectiveness, tacit characteristics of organizational life, models about self-fulfilling prophecies and defense mechanisms, applying ethnomethodology, opportunities for planned change, and shared field-work projects were lively, frequent, and learning-filled.

Faculty, students, managers, consultants – we all talked with and to each other, no status separations, working together in Ivory Tower offices or on the shop floor. The simple currency for invitation to participate was a passion for the issues and something to contribute – and newcomers were welcomed and mentored.  The regular Sunday night meetings in his Boston home that Bennis describes in the book is one example of this larger phenomenon.

This was a time and place for me marked by a vibrancy and an unapologetic commitment to issues of practice – to the leaders, managers, followers, and communities whose lives and work could be made better as a result of our thinking, writing, coaching, musing, and consulting.  We weren’t learning just for ourselves and our career advancement.  We were driven by a larger purpose – a sacred purpose.  We wanted to make things better.  And our teachers, mentors, and role models like Warren Bennis, helped us believe that was possible.

That unshakeable faith in human nature and in a better future is at the core of Still Surprised. And it is not now – nor was it back then – the faith of a Pollyanna.

Those who taught and led the neophytes – people like Warren Bennis, Chris Argyris, Ed Schein, Dick Beckhard, Don Schon, and others — understood the inefficiencies, pain, and down-sides of organizational life.  Many has seen first hand the evils of war and injustice, and they set out to do something about that.  They brought open minds, entrepreneurial spirits, and irrepressible optimism to the challenge – convinced that new ways of organizing, leading, and managing were possible.

They were carriers of America’s historic faith in progress and initiative. They believed in democracy, openness, and the worth of every individual.  Above all, they believed in learning and experimentation. They knew they did not have all the answers – or even all the questions. But they were confident that both were waiting to be found.  Their faith and hard work spawned an exciting time, a revolutionary intellectual movement – a paradigm shift – that changed forever how the world understood people, work, leadership, organizations, and change.  Their efforts gave rise to the organizational and applied behavioral sciences, and they developed a powerful array of ideas and practices for understanding and improving organizations – team building, change management, coaching, performance feedback, organizational design, managing diversity, empowerment, participative management, EEO efforts, to name just a few — that we have come to take for granted today.  Most important, they helped people like me believe in ourselves, our potential, and the potential of those around us.

Still Surprised challenged me to remember all that.  May it do some of the same for you!  It reminded me of the power, energy, and intellectual stimulation in a community of like-minded souls – and of how rarely we think to create those for ourselves.  But it’s never too late, and there is much work left to be done even as the days grow shorter for us all.   Contribution is what leadership is really all about.  What will yours be?