The LIFT Blog

By Robert E. Quinn

I was at a meeting with some professional colleagues.  One of my colleagues is a highly accomplished woman.  She told us that she kept a gratitude journal for 18 months.  We were impressed.  Then she told us that she stopped.  We were surprised and we implicitly communicated a feeling of disappointment.  She picked up the implicit message and told us she quit because she no longer needed to keep the journal.  She did not need to write because she was living in a continuous state of gratitude. (more…)

By Robert E. Quinn

I was contacted this week by Gloria DeGaetano, a colleagues from the Parent Coaching Institute, who has written an insightful review of Lift on her blog, along with her own thoughtful analysis. Leadership is a form of social influence, which makes parenting a form–perhaps the most crucial form–of leadership, and a topic that Lynn Perry Wooten has discussed on our blog before. Given the thoughtfulness of her review, I have decided to include it as an entry this week. (more…)

By Ryan W. Quinn

Taken by Adam Pianiezik, found at Flickr's Creative Commons

I am a Boston Celtics Fan. If you follow professional basketball, that sentence is enough for you to know how emotional my past month has been. The Celtics were not supposed to win more than one series in the National Basketball Association’s Playoffs. They were “too old,” “too slow,” and “too lethargic,” particularly if they were going to have to play against four of the greatest players in the NBA today: Miami’s Dwyane Wade, Cleveland’s LeBron James, Orlando’s Dwight Howard, and Los Angeles’ Kobe Bryant. The Celtics are now tied with the Los Angeles Lakers, 1-1, in the Finals. How did they do this? And what can we learn from them that is relevant to leading? It turns out that there is quite a bit we can learn.

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By Robert E. Quinn

Positive organizing often involves integrating concepts that seem mutually exclusive.  This integration of opposites results in a creative tension that lifts the system.  Today I would like to consider one of the most important.

I once interviewed a man who had just taken a senior position in the auto industry.  I asked him to describe his organization.   His response was insightful:

“They claim that this place is high on people because there is no conflict.  In fact this is a terrible place to work.  The politeness is a plague. The politeness covers layers and layers of hidden conflict.  It is a totally political organization.  Nothing that needs to happen gets executed.  There is no energy.  The organization is not growing and the people are dying on their jobs.  When organizations are high on people, they are the opposite of this.  There is creative confrontation.  No issue is sacred.  Everyone is free to challenge and the challenging is done with respect.  As result the organization climbs to higher and higher levels of performance.”

Based on thirty years of experience as an organizational change agent, I agree with this man.  Creative confrontation is a motor for moving to higher and higher levels of performance.

The people in such organizations are very high on task and very high on people.  They engage each other, challenging every assumption, yet they do it without getting upset.  They remain productive because they are deeply respectful of each other.  While confrontation and respect may seem like opposites, the integration of the two is what gives rise to a culture of creative confrontation.

Yet, a culture of creative confrontation is something that we seldom see in organizations.   Few leaders know how to bring it about.  In a forth coming book, Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best and Learn from the Worst, Professor Robert I. Sutton discusses many keys to organizational success [1].  One of his offerings is a list called, How to Lead a Good Fight.  I see it as a great recipe for creating a culture of creative conflict.  I encourage you to evaluate your current work situation as you read each item. (more…)

Ryan W. Quinn

In one of the multi-organization systems I am working with, the leaders are trying to institute a major system-wide change. Before they institute this change, they want to use a survey to measure their system’s baseline status. The idea of conducting a survey raises all kinds of problems, such as where to locate the survey, how measurements will be taken when the units of analysis in the organization differ depending on who you ask, and what it would take to get people to actually fill out the survey–especially given that there are already almost a dozen other surveys that get conducted in the organization on a regular basis. Much of the content in these surveys overlap, but the surveys are distributed at different times to different overlapping portions of the system with no coordination between them, and so there is little to no collective learning that happens from all of these different efforts.

The answer to these issues seems simple. Why not consolidate these surveys? Remove unnecessary overlaps, conduct the survey once per relevant period, and coordinate contribution and learning efforts between the different, interested parties. This could reduce costs, make implementation more effective, iron our differences in how the organizations conceive of their units, and make communication more succinct. Simple, right? (more…)

Ryan W. Quinn

I recently received an email from the publisher of our book, Lift, that had a link to one of their author blog entries. The blog entry is entitled, “Five Ways to Be a Better Social Networker.” The entry listed five mistakes people make when social networking. The article was about media like Facebook and Twitter, but the first item on the list got me thinking about this blog. It said that one of the mistakes was to think of social networking media like television: just blasting information out at people. Even though we have invited comments on our various blog entries, we have mostly run the Lift Blog in this way–simply posting information for you to consume as you like. I would like to ask the question to those of you who follow the blog: Would you like us to run this differently? Are there ways we could have a conversation rather than blasting information? Are there things we could do to make commenting on the blog more appealing? We would love to hear your suggestions. Leaving comments is welcome. Or emailing us at the addresses on the blog home page works as well.

Thanks!

By Robert E. Quinn

Collaboration across organizational boundaries is a great challenge.  There are many structural variables that make collaboration difficult.  Yet some of the variables are not structural.  They are personal issues that eventually become part of the culture.

Over the years I have had many occasions when I have been told things like this: “We cannot have this vice president’s people in the same room with this vice president’s people.”

Because of the conflict between two people, dysfunctional patterns and thick boundaries become etched on entire organizations.    I have often talked about grave cost of such negative patterns and how to change them.  Recently I have been thinking about the costs from a different perspective.   Here I would like to consider the need for forgiveness in individuals. (more…)

By Ryan W. Quinn

A colleague of mine once told me about an experience he had while consulting for one of the world’s largest companies. This company had suddenly experienced a rapid and significant drop in profitability. To respond to this crisis they brought my colleague and the top four or five layers of leadership in their company to an emergency planning meeting to develop strategies for turning the company around. (more…)

By Robert E. Quinn

Over the decades there is a conversation I have had over and over.  Usually it occurs when senior executives want to “fix” their managers.  The problem they specify is that their managers are not leading.  They argue that the company has changed.  It is not the old hierarchy it used to be.  It is now much flatter, it designed for speed.  Managers can no longer wait around to be told, they must take initiative.  The company needs managers to become change leaders.

In this conversation I press to know what leadership is.  The answers usually forms around one of two possible images.  The more frequent image is a description of a person who gets things done.  This person is focused, sets clear expectations, holds people accountable and executes.

The second, less frequent, image, has to do with culture building. In this case, the senior person claims that the best leaders are community builders.  They are close to their people.  They have a vision that is meaningful and the vision is used to attract their people to change.  The people are part of a team.  The team has authentic conversations in which real issues are surfaced.  There is trust.  The people feel challenged and supported.  There is creative cooperation and individuals tend to perform at a high level.  When you visit the workplace, you feel the connectivity and positivity.

These two answers or images are shared with conviction.  Despite the conviction, there is no real evidence that the senior person is right.  The images are actually a reflection of the leadership assumptions of the person speaking.  It might, therefore, be interesting to see what research has to say about these two images. (more…)

By Ryan Quinn

A few weeks ago, I got an email from one of the delightful MBA students we have at Darden, where I teach: David Shepro. Based on an idea from an internet video phenomenon in which a guy named Matt goes to sites around the world and dances with people, “Shep,” as I have occasionally heard him called, decided to contact the Darden faculty and staff and ask if he could come to their offices to dance with them. And he captured it on video.

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