Leaders in Every Role

Gone is the lone leader to save the day. Gone is command and control forcing, coercing, and bribing. To create the cultures that will survive in the future, we must play the long game of leadership.

We have entered a time where our baseline level of skill and conceptual abilty is high enough to understand that we need to work together: bottom-up, top-down, and sideways. We must all be leaders.

Leading from every role is not a common practice in the world today. It requires skillful groups of motivated individuals working together to navigate organizational complexities and manage their impact on the world. To create the cohesive, strong, and resilient culture of the future, we must practice this new way of leading.

Culture is hard, but not impossible, to measure. It contains three elements that when mixed in the right proportions have the desired effect.

  • Strong culture starts with a desire for something to be different than it is today. A vision of the future we long to see.
  • Then comes structure – speaking the same language. Important words that define our vision and the path forward must have a commonly understood meaning and a behavioral description of what they look like in practice.
  • Practice is really the foundation of any culture. We must be in conscious practices that lead us in the direction of our purpose.

Building culture is based on the idea that leadership – of an organization, country, or family – is a process of social influence, not a role. Anyone in any system can be a leader. Through their social influence, this person has the ability to enlist the aid and support of others to accomplish a common task.

To socially influence other people, the leader has acquired a skillset – a way of doing. They can communicate a compelling outcome, process, and structure for engagement. Before they apply their skillset, they must have a mindset – a way of believing – that their outcome can be accomplished.

Social influence is the tool we have to change the world. Force is relic of the past. Teaching all people how to consciously lead in any and every position is the key to building strong and resilient cultures.

Desire

The first step in building a strong culture is desire. The group of people must have a longing, a compelling reason why putting effort into culture is important to them.

Trust me, with any endeavor there will be doubt along the path. The desire must be strong enough to move through the periods of doubt and stay committed. If you shift gears due to your fear, you erode any progress you have made with your culture. There will be times where you will question your efforts, the cost, and the time. You must stick to the long game for creating a strong and resilient culture.

At Opal Food and Body Wisdom, the women who lead this business have a deeply compelling reason to put effort into culture. They hold people lives in their hands. The life and death role all people in their organization plays daily reminds them of the importance of a connected structure of care. Leaders can be in every role – even the patients.

Their desire is to contribute to a world where all are able to live fully with security, freedom, attunement, and connection. This is their deeply unique reason for being a company in the world today. This gets them up each day and brings them in to do good work building people up in world that continually breaks people down.

Structure

The second step is structure. Creating a common language. A mission, vision, and values that will guide you.

Few organizations use mission, vision, and values effectively. To be effective, they must be a daily practice. Something to return to when you get confused about your success, failure, what to decide, or how to proceed. They are the foundation and the structure for your business. They must be compelling and relevant. They must ask something of all people that work for and with you. This ask must be clear, understood, and behaviorally specific: why you are here, where you are going, and how you will get there.

Green Canopy Homes takes vision, mission and values seriously. Each year since their inception in 2010, they have set aside a half-day for their whole staff to gather and recommit to the mission and vision, and create a set of values and mantras – behaviors in action – that will help them live into it.

The mission and vision change infrequently. They shifted a few times in the early years to become crisp. Recently, the mission and vision went through an overhaul to represent their changing role in the world.

Green Canopies values are created annually at the whole-staff retreat. Some values carryover from year-to-year, but what changes is the mantras – the behaviors people will exhibit when living into the values.

Green Canopy gets specific with what success looks like in practice. Take their value of authentic communication. There are four mantras that describe what I will be doing when I am living into that value. One is “have hard conversations now.” This mantra is discussed at their monthly leadership development meeting. All team members are given a practical skill to have a hard conversation now. This becomes the common language. All individuals now have permission and are encouraged to be an influential leader. It shapes everyone’s daily practices around skills that help them live into that value.

Practice

The third step is regular practice. Daily conversational practices are required to live into the values that lead to the accomplishment of the mission and vision and the fulfilment of the desire.

Conversational practices are structures that guide people through common relational challenges like giving and receiving feedback, managing conflict, seeing another’s point of view, and listening to understand. An entire organization is taught the same practices. No matter who we run into in our day-to-day work life, we all know how to give and receive feedback, it is a practice – even if we choose not to go there.

In this way people all learn to speak a common language. These known conversational daily practices become habit for people. As they do, the structures fade into the background and the communication between people rises. These practices build trust.

In any business, whatever you do, at its core, is about relationship. At Microsoft, a global Fortune 50 company, people come from many backgrounds. Though this brings an amazing cultural diversity, it ensures that most will interpret the world differently.

Everyone can communicate, but there is not a similar structure of communication, which feels like a different organizational language.

When conversational practices are explicitly taught and practiced, people learn a common language to communicate their actions, thoughts, and feelings, and interpret and speak to those of others. This creates a foundation of similar capabilities leading to productive dialogue and efficient workplace exchanges.

Though not a global company cultural practice, over our 13 years of work there, we see leaders who use these practices everyday to their advantage. They are the ones promoted and relied upon for their leadership. They are the ones making cross company connections and driving successful businesses. They are the leaders weaving the culture that strengthens the company.

Results

Over the years, we have been regularly surprised by the impact of a compelling desire, the structure of a common language, and daily practice on weaving a strong cultural fabric to withstand local and global set-backs. Anything can happen with these three ingredients.

People often remark that not only is their work life more satisfying, but their home life has gotten easier too. They have better skills in all areas of life.

This impacts everything. Through practice with their employees, their children, and all people with whom they interact, they are influencing the leaders of the future.

Opal has been a leader in their field, steadily growing since its inception and doing so consciously. Though they experience bumps regarding growth – get bigger or stay manageable? And staff challenges. They are continually in a conversation about how to create a strong culture where people feel supported, but not catered to. They handle these conversations while maintaining their desire to be healthy inside and out – balancing family, work, and community. Their strong desire to be the change they hope to see in the world fuels their success.

Green Canopy is a risk taker. They have a bold vision and innovative ideas to achieve their vision. When they run into obstacles to their success they do a hard stop. A conscious structural practice. They created S2S – Slow-down-to-Speed-up. A practice that happens when they spot challenges that have thread throughout the entire company. For as long as it takes, they shut down all operations, gather the entire staff, and use the conversational practices we taught them – their common language – to decipher what is happening and where. This is a huge risk, but every time they come out stronger and more connected than before.

At Microsoft, they are a forerunner in global conversation. With 124,000 people employed world-wide, they are a leader in trying to create a common language to empower all to communicate effectively, efficiently, and create a global platform. Though leadership practices are not pervasive or common throughout the entire company, they are a microcosm of what it is like to change a large culture – say a country or state or political institution. Change takes time. It takes a continual, long-game commitment to practicing something new, teaching it to future generations, and weaving it into the fabric of everything you do. This provides and anchor to return to when the complexity gets overwhelming. A calm in the storm of the world. If Microsoft is trying, so can you.

Investing in the future, not only for yourself, but for the benefit of all, is not a small task. What is a company for if not to change the world? Maybe you have reached a level of success in the work you do. Are you consciously bringing everyone along? Is there a deeper longing?

We believe much more can be done. Not more time spent – more effective time spent communicating what is vital and important by understanding your longing, speaking a common language, and being in conscious practices. This will help you become the leader of the future.

Socially influence the world through your strong and resilient culture. Be the envy of others. Accomplish the common task of being a successful and conscious business working in harmony with the world around it. Your dream is possible. You just have to practice.