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No Pain, No Gain
This has been a very different and very stimulating year for me. The engagements we've been working on have required a shift in focus and in deliberation. Lately, I'm spending a lot of time thinking about leadership and its impact - both good and bad - on the health and vitality of organizations.
Do we know what real leadership is?
I've always bought into the idea that leadership is critically important. Who doesn't? It's one of those things we tell ourselves, that we read in leadership books, and that we hear in leadership speeches.
As of late, I wonder whether the repetition of leadership's importance has somehow dulled its blade. Do we really want real leadership? Do we know what it means and what it looks like? Especially if it disagrees with our opinions or our world-view?
If we want effective leadership, why do we withhold our support?
Many organizations don't really act as if real leadership is important. What they want is management and the smooth, predictable, and tidy dimensions that signal orderly, understandable stability. Since change threatens, it is perceived as something negative. This includes change that is initiated by leadership because it is necessary or because it may create a more advantageous future for the organization.
In fact, many organizations are so threatened by change that they conspire - wittingly or unwittingly - to create managers and avoid leaders. This is particularly true among non-profits, a place where predictability, smoothness, and attitudes of entitlement gnaw at muscular vitality.
A Brief Case Example
In September, Anita Scism, President and CEO of the Walton Arts Center, and I presented a session on strategic governance at the Arts Midwest conference in Little Rock. In our session, we presented a short case study on how to lay the informational and process groundwork for Board members to make difficult decisions.
We used a particular case study from the Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville, Arkansas as a point of departure for the session.
Like many organizations, Walton Arts Center's programs and services had grown to the point that resource constraints required establishing priorities. Arts organizations are like trees. If you want a healthy, beautiful, and vital tree, you'd better prune it. Letting it grow willy-nilly isn't good for it and it isn't good for you.
Anita, her senior team, and I spent 90 days preparing for a one-day board retreat where these difficult decisions would be considered by the Walton Arts Center Board of Directors.
We carefully developed a plan for the meeting and a corresponding agenda. We developed a set of key messages about the purpose of the meeting, its importance, its scope, and the outcomes we set out to achieve. Then, we made sure that the entire Board received a series of communications that informed them about the meeting and its goals.
To prepare Directors' to deliberate quickly, we developed one-pagers about each program that spelled out - in simple terms - what each program or service was, who it served, what it cost, what it returned, and how it related to the mission.
A presentation was developed that set forth each Director's legal duties of care, loyalty, and obediance (Carver). Groundrules and agreements for discussion were developed along with a detailed timeline for the consideration of each agenda item.
On a teleconference prior to my visit, Walton Arts Center's senior team and Roan Group staff brainstormed a series of questions that we anticipated might be asked. Then, we developed answers for each question that were factual, to-the-point, and brief. We then decided who among us would answer each question.
We scheduled a full-day rehearsal immediately prior to the Board meeting where each Senior Team member presented information about each program or service under consideration. Questions were asked and answering was rehearsed.
When the meeting occurred the next day, it went flawlessly. We moved through our entire agenda with lively and thoughtful discussion on the part of the Board. We came out of the meeting with very specific policy direction and with a set of work activities and timetables established by the Board of Directors.
As an aside, I should mention that the Walton Arts Center's Board is quite remarkable. There are senior management from companies like Gillette and Proctor & Gamble. There are academic officers from the University of Arkansas, bank presidents, and key community leaders. It is a diverse, intelligent, and down-to-business group of people who are at once intelligent, cordial, and easy-going.
It was a great day with great people.
A number of Board Members commented to each other at the end of the day that this meeting was one of the most productive meetings in their memory. They congratulated themselves, the staff, and me for a well-planned and effective use of their time. To a person, they were happy with their process and with its outcomes. Nobody felt unproductive and everyone felt - even when their opinion did not prevail - that all the issues, opinions, and concerns had been considered prior to action. Given who was in the room, it was high praise, indeed.
So often, Board meetings are tedious and repetitious. They are rubber-stamping colloquies where policy issues fail to surface. They are recitations of hobby-horse opinions interrupted by interrogatories and soulless cheerleading. Is it any wonder that organizations have trouble attracting Directors for service, and once serving, to meetings?
Real governance deliberation is an antidote to poor involvement, poor attendance, and even poor contribution records on the part of Board Members. Time is precious and making good use of it is a critical staff leadership responsibility. This meeting succeeded because the stakes involved change and because the real decision-making rested where it belonged - with the Board.
Prioritizing is Tough
Not every program or service that is implemented can remain a priority. People aren't immortal and neither are programs and services. Yet, too often in our sector cultural services professionals perceive the elimination of any program or service as symbolic of the arts as a whole not being valued. Too often, we see any service cut, whatsoever, as signaling the beginning of an onslaught of more cuts.
Continuing to provide programs and services without consideration of their value is not only impractical, it can be deadly as well. Organizations that do not attend themselves to providing what is both needed and wanted will quickly find themselves unsustainable and irrelevant.
You can be the best buggy whip manufacturer on the face of the Earth, but if people don't want buggy whips, being good and being committed are not only irrelevant, they're naive.
When we look at how organizations work, and how effective they are, we almost always find that the organization continues to do unnecessary and ineffective things. For some reason, either leadership or management doesn't act on its mandate to prioritize work and focus. Since not everything can be done, what is most important?
The best managers and leaders don't add to their teams' workplans without taking something away. The most effective leaders know that focus is more important than money when it comes to creating results.
High Quality Standards Can Be Your Enemy
Worse, leadership and management often doesn't understand that high quality standards are counter-productive when applied to unnecessary or marginally necessary work activities. Doing something unnecessary well is laughable in strategic terms. It is a colossal waste of resources.
Quality matters most when it advances an organization's ability to improve its mission delivery to its end-users. That's why considering and re-considering mission is such a critical part of what leadership must attend itself to.
Only Vision Trumps Mission in Importance
As of late, I've come to believe that the only thing more important than mission - for leaders - is vision. If it is to remain in place, mission must survive the test of vision.
Leaders are stewards of their organizations' futures. As such they are duty-bound to refresh and inform their foresight. A leader's first responsibility is to anticipate, understand, and then act on what the future is likely to bring.
John Greenleaf was right when he said that "A lack of foresight is an ethical failure."
When Leaders Get Caught in the Operating Trap
Leaders, like everyone else, often find themselves in the operating trap. They find themselves attending to managing the present, making it tolerable, and making it profitable, if possible.
By doing these things - especially by doing them well - they'll generate good feedback and experience positive reinforcement. But if their management of the present inhibits their ability to steer into the future, they fail not only themselves, but their organizations and their mission. It's hard to recognize you're failing when the people around you are telling you that you're doing a good job.
The Importance of Excess Capacity
At the Walton Arts Center, the tree needed pruning. Nobody likes program cuts for all the obvious reasons. But, Anita Scism, as the organization's leader recognized that one of her key obligations is to ensure that the Walton Arts Center always has enough additional focus capacity to remain opportunistic, fleet-footed, and flexible. These things aren't possible in a dull state of overwhelm.
Pruning processes don't create good feedback. They don't create comfort. Comfort is not necessarily an attribute that matters when it comes to effective deliberation and decision-making. I've come to believe that the most effective leaders - like Scism - build environments that focus more on creating capacity than creating comfort.
No pain, no gain.
Posted on October 10, 2006 09:35 AM | Permalink
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Comments
Great insight Neill.