Tag: Joan Gallos

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Global Leadership: Conquering the Fear of Differences

Days have been filled preparing for our Executive MBA international residency which begins in three days.  We’re going to China. Part of my preparation involves enabling 40 experienced leaders, most with little international experience, to appreciate and respond to cultural differences without paralysis. 

It’s key to their career advancement and professional development. It’s essential for all in a global world. 

As we move closer to the departure date, students have begun acknowledging their fears of anticipating a vastly different world and of the unknown. Some report dreams of not knowing what to do or of being lost in the China-size crowds, others feelings of losing the control over their lives that they have at home.

These are powerful admissions – and they are right on. We all fear the unknown. Human nature loves predictability, and we all want to believe that everyone thinks and sees things just like us. They don’t and that’s OK – and we’ll be OK in a world where that is true. Accept that, and you’ve got the global citizen piece down cold.

How do we take in and use all the knowledge about cultural differences that we can gain through reading and studying without freezing our capacity to act?  The quick answer: with patience, persistence, and humility. It’s like learning and integrating anything new into effective practice.

Preparation helps – the better you know something, the better able you are to call it into play when you need it. So does remembering the Joan Gallos 2 Rules of Thumb for Learning Any New Behavioral Skill:

  1. 1.  go slow. Add anything new and you’ll need to be more deliberate – less automatic – in doing it. It will feel awkward, and you will feel clumsy and ineffective. It may be counter-intuitive – to slow down and to do something that’s awkward and uncomfortable in order to be more effective. But it’s the only way.
  1. 2. be patient with yourself. This is especially hard for successful people: you’ll make mistakes, feel lost, or be scared. It’s OK. Stay open. Figure out what works and doesn’t. Keep trying. And have a sense of humor. You are the only one taking yourself so seriously!

And remember: people are people are people.  When we talk about an increasingly diverse and global world, we tend to focus on differences. Comparing and contrasting how other cultures are different from ours is a good way to recognize and break out of our narrow mindsets about life and the world.  But bottom-line: people share a common humanity. 

Approach any meeting with authenticity and an open heart, and you will connect well with others – even if you struggle with language or customs. Be curious – ask. Relationships are built on connection and conversation.  Make a mistake?  Step on a cultural toe?  Stay alert and respond as you would to any friend.  An honest and humble “Oh, my apologies, please” will go far.

You know more than you may realize about conquering the fear of differences. 

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Leading Up: Managing the Bosses

Leadership is often equated to managing those who report to you – or influencing others predisposed to follow because of your title or position. But savvy leaders understand that leading up is as important as anything else they do. Their capacity to make a difference depends on support and mandates from those above.

Wise leaders, therefore, attend carefully to relationships with more powerful players, pursuing goals of partnership, open communication, and credibility. How well developed are your skills and strategies in doing that?  Here are five guidelines[1] to get you started:

1. Look within. What’s your motivation? Set out to wow folks at the top or push your own agenda and you’re on the road to disaster. Leading up is all about partnerships and reciprocity: you deliver for your boss, and your boss is likely to do the same for you.

2. Build credibility. It has two, equally important components: expertise and trustworthiness. You can have solid business acumen, but if people don’t believe in you, they’ll ignore your message. Credibility comes from consistently demonstrating integrity and reliability in achieving or exceeding your goals.

3. Speak up. A common reaction to authority is overdependence – responding to those above you in a fearful or overly-compliant manner. Bosses are not infallible or well served by anyone who hesitates to tell the truth about potential fallout from their judgments and decisions. An important test of leadership capacity is the willingness to speak truth to power. Are you willing and able to do that?

4. Give solutions, not problems. Make your boss’s job easier and use her time judiciously. Arrive with well-researched solutions. When you say "Here’s what I see, what I’ve done, and what I’ve learned. Here’s my plan. What do you think?", you keep the boss in the loop without putting more problems on her plate.

5. Avoid surprises. Never let your boss be blindsided!  Partnerships take time to develop, but they can unravel quickly. And it goes without saying, but is important enough that it can never be said too often: all your choices should be clear, clean, and ethical.

[1] See Lee G. Bolman and Joan V. Gallos (2011). Reframing Academic Leadership (Chapter 11). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass for more details and additional suggestions.

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The Soul of Principled Leadership: The Road to Success and Significance

I spent a day earlier this week reading and providing feedback to a colleague on a book manuscript dealing with leadership and spirituality issues. In the academic world, that’s what professors do for one another. It’s always a plus when we learn something important from the collegial support.

The book basically asks readers to think about the inner growth needed to drive principled, high-impact leadership. I’m not doing justice to the complexity of the work because it triggered a number of profound questions that have stayed with me all week.

What are the leadership contributions that I hope to make over the course of my lifetime – the things that I want to accomplish so as to have made a real difference by the time destiny comes calling? How do my hopes fit my true leadership gifts? What do I need to do to stay focused and balanced as I steer through these uncharted waters?

These are not simple questions, and we can never answer them fully. But grappling with the larger life issues implicit in them gives us the best shot at designing and managing a career that we can be proud of and that is both successful and significant.

We live at a time that predisposes us to gloss over the need for this kind of deep reflection. There is growing research on the long-term decline in happiness in increasingly affluent and democratic societies where people are misled by a materialist culture to put money and possessions at the center of our lives. They equate success with big paychecks and ignore the growing evidence that those who focus their lives on tangible goods grow demonstrably more miserable over time than those who set out to make other, deeper contributions – and profit from the success of their energizing efforts.

If you have ever felt the golden handcuffs of a well-paying job that drained a little bit of your soul everyday – made going to work as exciting as pushing heavy rocks uphill – you know exactly what I am talking about.

Striving to make a difference feeds the soul, and nothing is more energizing. Successful business leaders confirm that inner growth matters.[1]

So, what are the contributions you want to be remembered for? What are your gifts and talents – the things you do well and really enjoy? How can you fashion your life and work to stayed focused on all that?

Answer those questions, and you are well on the road to a career of success and significance.

[1] See Andre Delbecq, Nourishing the Soul of the Leader: Inner Growth Matters, in J. Gallos (2008). Business Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

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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.