Ira Chaleff's follower typology

The next followership model, another typology, comes from Ira Chaleff who I believe is part of the Followership Exchange a rather useful wiki devoted to followership. Chaleff published 'The Couagous Follower; Standing up and for our leaders.' initially in 1995 and earlier this year (2008) published (with Ronald E. Riggio, and Jean Lipman-Blumen) 'The Art of Followership: How Great Followers Create Great Leaders and Organizations'.
Chaleff's original work on followership proposed an interesting typology which emphasises the relationship between leaders and followers. Importantly this work recognises the positive role of follower challenge to leadership thinking and as the title of the second book suggests the role followers can play in developing and maturing leaders. Chaleff (et al) blur the lines between follower and leader, seeing rather the dance between the two in influencing and developing each other. The focus here is on the skills of the follower rather than their personality. Skills can be developed and updated and appear less set. There is a downside to skills based arguments however. They often led to indoctrinational types of instrumental training programmes to ensure compliance, which when you look at the typology will work with only a few types of follower. This is not a fault of the model, rather of the interpretation and abstraction of the model by people who misunderstand how such models can be used.
Blind obedience in this model is not seen as a positive attribute, hence the emphasis on bravery (both of the leader and the follower) to tackle the things that need to tackled.

Chaleff's typology:

Implementers. These are the majority of most organisations workers. They do most of the work and busy themselves doing and completing tasks. However they tend not to question the leaders, preferring instead to 'just get on with the job'

Partners. These people want (and often need) to be seen as equal to the leader, especially in terms of their skills and thinking. If this state is allowed to exist in the relationship the partner-follower will respect the leaders position and support the leader strongly. They will also provide the intellectual challenge needed by the leader. With the right leader a strong and positive partnership will develop. If however the leader won't allow these people to partner them (often out of fear that their position/status will be diminished) then they can create powerful enemies.

Individualists. Individualists are independent and will think for themselves. This does not mean that they are selfish, they just don't tend to follow 'group think'. They also like to do as they see fit and do not make great followers in the traditional sense. the wise leader however will use the attributes of the individualist wisely. These people, as long as you keep contact with them, will often provide new ideas and ways of thinking that can be used.

Recourses. These people will do what they have been asked to do and no more. They tend to lack the requisite intellect, imagination and courage needed to do more (I do find the label 'Resources' somewhat depreciating, however I do understand the sentiment behind it!).

As can be seen the focus here is more of a partnership and therefore the relationship between leader and follower. The blurring of the lines between leader and follower in the partner scenario is useful. However as noted before it does depend on the maturity of the leader for it to work. What I do like about this work is the call for courage and therefore emotional maturity / resilience.

As with most typologies (which models of followership tend to be) there is the question as to the nature of the types. Are the types, personality based, fixed and you just need to accept them?
Are they skill based and all you need to do is increase the skills by training, which is an often alluring proposition?
Are they intelligence or even maturity based?
Or a mix maybe? Issues rarely tackled by the models.
Other questions include:
Can people move between the types? Most models appear not to discuss this and accept the position people play. The way around this is often seen as training people to be a particular (more useful) type.
Why are they all 2x2 models? Can the reality (whatever that is) of followership (whatever that is!) really just fall neatly into a world of two dimensions?
Notwithstanding these questions, Chaleff's work requires close scrutiny as the emphasis on relationships and courage is a very profitable (useful and practical) line of thinking which many leaders and employees would do well to think about.

Leaders and followership; the reality?

An emerging theme in the academic leadership journals over the last 15 years has been the concept of followership. This concept is starting to make the move from the academic journals and conferences to operational thinking. We are encountering more and more discussion of followership in companies and organisations, including in a couple of cases competency frameworks that make use of the construct. Unfortunately it would appear that a number of organisations have seized on the wording and developed their own (often less considered and more manipulative) versions of the term.
Just looking up the two terms in google 'leadership' returns over 133,000,000 (over one hundred and thirty three million) hits whereas the term followership returns just 124,000 (one hundred and twenty five thousand) hits, or 0.093% of the hits of leadership which is indicative of the level of attention it receives. A few blogs ago I wrote about leadership and management being part of a system where the leaders and managers need to fit and work together as part of that system, with each understanding their role and responsibilities. The concept of followership goes further, unfortunately the phrase 'followership' conjures up some misleading and largely passive connotations.
Over the next few blogs I will unpack some of the academic literature and research and look at how it appertains to the real operational world in business and services. I will also lay out an argument as to why the term followership does not help and what can more productively take it's place and enhance both the organisation/business/service and ameliorate an individuals experience of working in part of a system.

Too busy to lead III - The draw of certainty & ambiguity aversion

This series of blogs about leaders being too busy to lead appear, from the emails I have received, to have struck a cord with quite a lot of people. The emails can roughly be divided into three categories:

1. About 20% from leaders who recognise their situation and have emailed for help to change the situation, which we are busy dealing with,


2. About 60% saying 'this is so true' from people complaining that their bosses don't lead and spend most of their time micromanaging, interfering in their work and that they spend more time covering their backs and supplying 'urgent data' to the leader rather than being productive.


3. The rest (about 20%) were from leaders saying words to the effect that they would love to get on with leading only "My staff are incompetent so I have to manage them".

The emails were interesting on their own, however being a researcher at heart I decided to investigate a bit further so I started to ask some questions. I wanted first of all to know what the email writers (251 in all) thought the issues were that led to this situation.
In order of popularity of answer:

1. Leaders doing what they are comfortable with / used to doing
2. Role ambiguity between leadership and management
   
3. Lack of trust on behalf of the leader
   
4. Fear of the risk of something going wrong (Similar to but different from no 2)
5. Incompetent staff (guess which group this answer wholly came from)
6. Lack of confidence on behalf of the leader
7. Lack of training for the leaders and others
8. Incompetent leaders

It would appear, if this is correct, that the number one reason for the lack of leadership behaviour from leaders is the safety of doing what the leaders know best - what they used to do. Of the 20% of emails I got from leaders asking for help all of them agreed with the statement that tended to behave in ways that were consistent with their old roles particularly under pressure and revert to management activities rather than maintaining a leadership presence.

Last year (2007) Science published an article about the role ambiguity and certainty plays in our brains based on an experiment Camerer did based on the Ellsberg Paradox which I talked about earlier:

Camerer's experiment revolved around a decision making game known as the Ellsberg paradox. Camerer imaged the brains of people while they placed bets on whether the next card drawn from a deck of twenty cards would be red or black. At first, the players were told how many red cards and black cards were in the deck, so that they could calculate the probability of the next card being a certain color. The next gamble was trickier: subjects were only told the total number of cards in the deck. They had no idea how many red or black cards the deck contained.

The first gamble corresponds to the theoretical ideal of economics: investors face a set of known risks, and are able to make a decision based upon a few simple mathematical calculations. We know what we don't know, and can easily compensate for our uncertainty. As expected, this wager led to the "rational" parts of the brain becoming active, as subjects computed the odds. Unfortunately, this isn't how the real world works. In reality, our gambles are clouded by ignorance and ambiguity; we know something about what might happen, but not very much. (For example, it's now clear just how little we actually knew about Iraq pre-invasion.) When Camerer played this more realistic gambling game, the subjects' brains reacted very differently. With less information to go on, the players exhibited substantially more activity in the amygdala and in the orbitofrontal cortex, which is believed to modulate activity in the amygdala. In other words, we filled in the gaps of our knowledge with fear. This fear creates our bias for certainty, since we always try to minimize our feelings of fear. As a result, we pretend that we have better intelligence about Iraqi WMD than we actually do; we selectively interpret the facts until the uncertainty is removed.

Camerer also tested patients with lesioned orbitofrontal cortices. (These patients are unable to generate and detect emotions.) Sure enough, because these patients couldn't feel fear, their brains treated both decks equally. Their amygdalas weren't excited by ambiguity, and didn't lead them astray. Because of their debilitating brain injury, these patients behaved perfectly rationally. They exhibited no bias for certainty.

Obviously, it's difficult to reduce something as amorphous as "uncertainty" to a few isolated brain regions. But I think Camerer is right to argue that his "data suggests a general neural circuit responding to degrees of uncertainty, contrary to decision theory."

It would appear that our response (aversion) to ambiguity may have a neuronal explanation (not an excuse mind you), which may in turn explain why only about 2% of leaders are mode 4 leaders and are naturally comfortable, or more accurately have a greater ability to mediate their discomfort with uncertainty (emotional resilience).

Too busy to lead II - leading as part of a system

The point of yesterday's blog was that by:

• separating out the different levels of leadership and management on an operational basis,
• assigning clear roles and responsibilities for each level
• ensuring people stick to their areas of responsibility,
  
• keeping the lines of communication operationally relevant, and
• fostering a collective responsibility for success
  

then things run much more smoothly, effectively and efficiently. The realisation we had was that part of the command problem we had was 'role ambiguity'.

We had so many incidents where commanders felt they had to go to the scene because as police officers that was what they were used to doing, rather than stay away and keep a broader and more strategic view.

Leaders and managers get promoted largely because they were good at their previous jobs. When they were promoted or given a job they are (sometimes) sent on generic training for management or leadership but do not receive training or coaching about their new role and place in the system. When we researched how leaders and managers performed under pressure we found that they tended, when things get difficult or ambiguous, to revert to what they knew or were used to doing before they were promoted. This usually means that when there is a problem or stressful issue, they start to get involved in and micromanage people. We had so many incidents of inappropriate Action Bias where commanders felt they had to go to the scene of an incident because as police officers that was what they were used to doing, rather than staying away and keeping a broader and more strategic view.

The GSB (Gold, Silver, Bronze) system works so well because it sees the different levels of responsibility as interconnected parts of one system. What we learned was that:

• training and coaching the leaders to become more disciplined and draw back, concentrating on strategic issues (not getting sucked into operational decisions and problems),
• training the managers to manage at a tactical level and not get sucked into doing and micromanaging, and
  
• critically, ensuring that everyone understands
  
• the system,
  
• how it works,
  
• what their roles, responsibilities and expectations are, and crucially
  
• how and what (and what not) to communicate to whom
  

builds a healthy system where people become more professional and start making better decisions. A central part of the system is to train people how to make better decisions, think in different ways (See Modes of Leadership) when solving problems and learn how to deal positively with ambiguity.

Leaders that are rushing around doing things, fire fighting and managing are a symptom of an unhealthy system.

Leadership is one part of a living system. Like any organ in a living body, it has a purpose and a defined place within the system. Confuse the boundaries of these and the system will not function optimally. A healthy system requires that each part is healthy in itself and works in harmony with the others. Every organ is as important as the rest in the chain. Likewise leaders and managers need to work together in harmony with every other function.

Leaders that are rushing around doing things, fire fighting and managing are a symptom of an unhealthy system. They should have their finger on the pulse of the organisation and be looking after strategic issues, not solving operational problems - thats what the managers and their teams are for. Far too many leaders operate at inappropriate levels in organisations and as a result end up creating the very situations are trying to resolve.

This is all very well but does it work in profit making businesses as well as service industries?
We have worked with investment banks, engineering firms, sales companies, retail enterprises and growing transport companies. The minimum ROI we have seen in the first year has been 3350%. Yes you read that right and that does not include factors for happier and more professional staff and better decision making capabilities.

Are you too busy? Think again you may well be what is holding your organisation back.

Too busy to lead?

You won't be too busy to die

It's odd how things happen in themes, it's a bit like waiting for a bus. There isn't one for ages and then three or four all arrive at the same time. For some reason this is happening with our contact with a certain type of 'leader' at the moment. I put the word leader in parenthesis for a good reason; they aren't really leading even though they call themselves leaders.
They are far too busy solving problems, managing people and directing operations to lead.

Let me tell you a (true) story:

In the early 1980's, the British police forces had a big problem. There was increasing civil unrest in the form of strikes, riots and other large scale public order events. In 1981 the police service was largely unprepared for these events in all sorts of ways. I know because I was involved in all of these as a young police officer. We didn't have the equipment, training and worse still the leadership to deal with these kids of large fluid and dangerous situations. Many mistakes were made and many people were injured and in a couple of cases deaths occurred.

The big issue was the leadership.

The first night on the Toxteth (Liverpool) riots in 1981 saw a police force overwhelmed and needing backup from neigbouring forces. Rows of houses, shops and cars were in flames. Crowds of 100's and in some cases 1,000's were thrashing the local force. Only 1 in 20 police officers had the equipment or training for public order events, and even then not on the scale being experienced during that hot summer with it's very long nights. I know I was there.
One night we were in the front line being petrol bombed, bricked and generally attacked with anything the crowd could get hold of. An officer next to me got hit by a petrol bomb and a brick at the same time. I and another officer doused the flames and pulled the officer back whilst protecting him with our shields from the rain of missiles. The plan in these situations is to remove the injured officer to safety, get medical help (which should always be just behind the line) and then return to the line. We pulled the smoldering officer into a doorway whilst screaming for a medic. Whilst we were waiting we made sure the fire was out and started to attend to his most immediate injuries. At that moment we both realised that we weren't alone in the recess of the building. I flicked my torch on, quickly protecting the injured man with my shield fearing the worst. The beam of the torch quickly picked out the shape of a police officer who was standing right at the back of the deeply recessed doorway. Confused at first we then realised that it was the area commander, a superintendent who was meant to be in charge of this overall situation. the other officer who had helped me drag the injured man back with said spontaneously "F*** me, I hadn't realised we had gone that far back!"

Many things were learned in the those days of the 1981, particularly in terms of leadership which as I got promoted became a central theme of my professional work as Director of Studies at the then, National Police Training.

Like most leaders senior police officers get to their position by doing the job. When they come under pressure they often revert to type and want to get involved in the action (Action Bias). As a result I was involved, with many others in restructuring the way we lead and managed situations that were 'out of the ordinary' incidents. Out of this came the Gold Silver and Bronze command system.

The idea here was to put a framework around leader's and manager's roles and responsibilities. Gold are the leaders at a strategic level. They set the mission goals and then ensure that silver has all the resources they need to do their task. They are kept separate from Silver and are not to go on the ground.

Silver achieves the mission by developing a strategy with gold and bronze as advisers and then commanding operations with one bronze expert as a tactical adviser. Silver commanders are not allowed to leave the command centre. Under no circumstances are Gold or Silver allowed anywhere near operational workings. They almost always (there is lots of evidence for this) make things worse for the people actually doing the job and usually distract them.

Bronze are the managers / commanders on the streets. It their job to make the strategy work at a local level using their operational expertise and without interference from above.

As you will no doubt realise this takes trust. Trust in the professional abilities of other people to do their job.

In short if you are too busy to lead you are doing the wrong things. In our seminars, workshops and coaching we help to get people back to doing what they are meant to be doing and get the organisation running properly.

Quite often the blockages in an organisation are blockages of thinking at the top. Free this up, get organised, start trusting and organisations start to flow and achieve.

T5 - some departures on time...

In the previous blog; Terminal 5 Chaos I made comments about the apparent lack of leadership capability of Gareth Kirkwood and how he came across during the press conference on the first day of the fiasco. Interestingly today he announced that he, together with David Noyes the BA Customer Service Director are leaving the company. The press have now engaged in a 'was he pushed or did he jump' series of speculations.
As I have said on a number of occasions leading when things are ok and the problems are purely operational ones takes skill. Leading at times of ambiguity, change and difficulty is the real test of leadership. Times like this requires agility, emotional resilience and the ability to not only cope with ambiguity but to be able to use it to your advantage.
Most leadership however does not occur under the glare of the media. Poor leadership frequently gets hidden and carries on quietly causing damage unhindered, but noticed by many who can't or won't speak up.
Preparing leaders to deal with situations 'when the wheel comes off' is a specialist process that unfortunately gets left out of most development and coaching events.

Leadership development?

What would have to happen for any leadership development to be called a success?
That it develops more knowledge?
or better skills maybe?
Oh and some leadership models or theories maybe?
A mixture of all of these?

Just what are the attributes of a successful leader and how to best develop them?

How many coaches, leadership trainers and lecturers have answers to these questions that they have thought about before you ask them?

I was interested in what would happen if I started to ask such questions of the people who's job it is to develop leaders either in universities or in industry. The results were enlightening and somewhat depressing. Before I go any further this was an informal research project, but as a result of the findings I have started thinking about a more robust and formal exploration of this subject.

I have set about this task in the last couple of months and made a pest of myself with every leadership trainer and lecturer I have met. On the whole they were all happy to answer me. I have spoken to 161 such leadership developers since January. The lecturers from universities were much more likely to have thought about these questions before hand. Trainers and coaches tended, with a few exceptions, to have to think about this on the spot suggesting that they were just running programmes based on the activities and exercises they knew about.
The academics tended to have thought more about the end result and developed material that focuses on that.
It became apparent that trainers split roughly into two: trainers who mainly run set packages and facilitators who tend to work off the data presented to them by the delegates.
The problem with the academic solutions is that they tend to concentrate on the development of knowledge rather than skills.
Neither group had a ready answer to questions about what is their strategy for developing critical thinking, creativity, and autonomy.
When I asked how they helped to ensure that the leaders developed flexible practices and what they did to develop emotional resilience and the ability to deal with ambiguity I drew a total blank. No one had any thought out suggestions.

It would appear that there is a big difference between academic and industry leadership developers in their outlook and scope. Academics focus more on knowledge development, trainers on skills development and facilitators and coaches on personal development. These are not exclusive, just tendencies towards certain development activities.

Academic sources tend to be more up-to-date than their industry based colleagues. Additionally they are much more likely to present counter arguments for certain theories that industry trainers. Academics are also much more likely to have had their thinking and teaching challenged by peers.

On the other hand trainers are more likely to incorporate new material into their programmes than academics, however such material is much more likely to be unverified. In other words trainers will include material that has little or no research backing. This means that what you could get cutting edge thinking or a pile of drivel. Academics however are not immune to this either, but it is less likely to happen.

When asked how they help leaders make better decisions the most common answer was that simply knowing more helps here. Some (all academics) said they included decision making sciences in their programmes but weren't sure if this actually helped.

Lies, Hillary Clinton's Memory and Leadership Issues

A lot is currently being written about H.C.'s memory / lies / stories. Here are a couple more interesting and charitable blogs from a cognitive perspective :

1. http://scienceblogs.com/mixingmemory/2008/03/defending_hillary_clinton_from.php
2. http://www.neurosciencemarketing.com/blog/articles/hillary-kwame-and-our-fallible-memory.htm
   

I think that there maybe other explanations here, and one in particular that I have researched with leaders, particularly when they are reporting on how they see certain situations like the reality of the market conditions for example.
The phenomenon, 'context recollection' incorporates the affect of the emotions on story telling and recounting of memory events. If there is a strong emotional situational context, in which the story is being retold, particularly those contexts that produce euphoria or fear (risk and ambiguity) there is a strong tendency for the story or memory recollection to be molded to the current context to either carry on the euphoric emotions or to mitigate perceived threats.

The tellers of these untruths know and can report that the memory is not real, however the context appears to change the meaning of the untruth to 'not a lie' for the story teller.

Without evidence to the contrary, many leaders will stick to the 'untruth' and force agreement, creating a false certainty, ignoring and filtering out evidence that everyone else knows the veracity of the situation. Denial of this type is typical mode one behaviour.

This has a lot of consequences in situations where leaders are making decisions based on their understanding of the current situation and perceptions of the past. If they make decisions at times of euphoria or fear (even if they are not conscious of the emotion at the time) the decisions are usually awful ones. Their recollection of the success of the decision is likewise altered by the emotions experienced. This is why I place such emphasis on the development of emotional resilience and intelligence for leaders.

Leaders or followers?

Leadership is a difficult activity: You have to work out what the reality of the environment is; try to predict what will happen over the coming period; decide what possibilities exist or what latitude for action exists; work out where you want to take the company, organisation or country; articulate the same in a way that everyone understands and can buy into; decide the appropriate time scale; methods and so on.

It's a difficult job even in the best of times. However when the environment starts to change or become volatile leading gets really tough. Things are made considerably harder when leaders find it difficult to separate reality from perception. Harder still when emotions start to alter our view of reality.

The research (press release here) I referred to in the last blog has showed that whilst just about all leaders say that they make decisions based on the data, 4 out of every 5 leaders recognise that these decisions , especially in uncertain situations, usually have a heavy emotional basis.

My question is how do leaders learn to make decisions in difficult and uncertain situations?
The answer appears to be not through any formal process. One leader told me:

"A university education is a good start and an MBA helps however it never prepares you for dealing with uncertainty. In fact it makes things worse.You tend to leave thinking that the answers are in the data. In hard times all the data in the world won't help you a jot. It's how you see things and how you fool yourself, and we all do, that counts. Their way of thinking is great for stable times but if you follow their guidance when things are less stable you are going to end up in a lot of trouble."

Another leader stated:

"It is important that people believe I know what I am doing. I have to admit that like many people, when things are foggy you can't in all honesty say I do know what I am doing. I think we all just trust to luck a bit and cast about and see what others are doing. I know it's not satisfactory but what can you do when things are changing so fast?"

.

"What I have learned since taking control of the service is that all the research and models you get fed in training and from college are historical. Not one of them tells you what to do when things have changed or when they are changing. New situations need new thinking, not old research and education. I would place the ability to make good decisions in the face of ambiguity and to be able to think new thoughts in new situations as the number one leadership attributes these days, not the degree someone has." Reported a CEO

Agile Leadership is the ability to be able to lead well in difficult and ambiguous situations, the very circumstances others are clueless in. There is precious little formal preparation for leadership in uncertain times anywhere in the world, which is why leaders are increasingly looking to each others for answers. We run Agile Leadership programs and modules (PDF version)designed to fit in with existing leadership training or as stand alone packages, that develop these attributes. The growing popularity of these events is testimony to the need for something different in formal education and training. I am not saying what is going on now is wrong. It is useful and has it's place. It just doesn't equip people for difficult times, dealing with uncertainty and rapid change where they need to solve problems, make good decisions and lead when everyone else is sat around wondering what to do next; just waiting to see what everyone else is doing (just like the current economic situation where rumour and volatility are rampant). That is being a follower not a leader.

Leadership - leading or following?

Does leadership development come up with the goods particularly when it comes to preparing leaders for dealing with a crisis or ambiguous situations?
Do leadership developers (trainers) know how to develop critical and creative thinking?
We are just finishing off a 5 year research project looking at leadership decision making, problem solving and agility in times of difficulty - when things are uncertain and ambiguous (I will post the articles from this when they are ready). What is becoming very clear is that most leaders have no personal strategy for dealing with difficult situations or ambiguous conditions. The study has found that only about 11% of leaders have such a strategy, or even think about it.

What, you may ask, is the number one leader's strategy for dealing uncertainty or difficulty?
The answer is not very encouraging. It is to see what others are doing and copy it. It's a sort of safety in numbers mentality.

Most leaders don't have a personal strategy for what to do when things get difficult or ambiguous

The second most popular response? To collect more data. The problem here is that the leader's report that this is usually self defeating as the data is normally conflicting and the sheer amount available is confusing. The ambiguity of this strategy usually means that leaders end up making a decision about what data to accept and which to omit. As you can probably guess they largely choose to omit the data that is less optimistic, more confusing and that which they don't understand. When they are confused by the data they fall back on strategy 1. See what everyone else is doing.

The current economic crisis is actually crisis of leadership

You only have to have a look at what is happening in the financial markets at the moment to see this behaviour writ large.

This current crisis is a crisis of leadership. It has been leadership decisions both at corporate and governmental levels that lead us into current economic mess.

Over 83% (the sample size for this study was 1628 leaders from business and service industries in 7 countries) said that they they would not consider them selves to be particularly creative or that they struggled with creativity.

We will look in greater depth this week at leadership development and more from the study.