Leadership Option
“We are sliding into something
which is clearly becoming a long-term standoff, and Putin
looks committed and not ready to give up,” he said. “It is
a bad sign that everything is becoming a long-term
problem.” - http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/30/world/europe/as-sanctions-pile-up-russians-alarm-grows-over-putin-tactics.html
Something that I have learned living and working alongside
people in dire socio-economic conditions provides a backdrop
for a leadership contingency that I will name the "leadership
option."
Please excuse me for what may be some rambling and some
emotional reasoning, but I have wanted for a long time to talk
about what I see becoming much more prevalent in the world as
complexity accelerates.
I'll start this off with a personal story:
"My younger brother Henry, which I haven't seen or heard
from in about a decade used to love TACOS from our home
town Taco Town, a place we frequented when our mother used
to take us boys on a train to meet our father when he
worked late at the "car lot" at S&T Oldsmobile in
Scottsbluff, NE, a town of about 14,000 at the town,
located in the "panhandle" of Nebraska, right on the
Oregon trail for those of you wanting geography.
My brother loved to eat tacos with a LOT of hot sauce and
I have to say, I was about the same...
One day while ordering at the drive-through, they refused
to give my brother (through some management dictate most
likely to simple employees which could not deviate, or so
it seemed) his normal large cup of hot sauce. That day was
the last time in my memory that my brother visited Taco
Town."
What happened that day, through no one's particular fault was
a loss of options.
My brother in satisfying his high vengeance (probably runs in
the family as I look back), removed his option and "joy" of
eating tacos at TACO TOWN to this day, I can't say he has
returned, but my bet is that he may not have "personally."
Some of us in satisfying what are underlying motives close off
particular options.
My brother intended in taking away business and discouraging
others from doing business with them, but in the end, I
learned a valuable lesson. He closed off his only option that
led to his own happiness with that act of satisfying an
unconscious motive irrationally.
Now, back to the quoted story above, and the TPOV: Leadership
Option.
A lot of leadership today--because of complexity and motive
structures--closes off options in the practice of that
leadership.
While it's important to be decisive and to know what values
one has, we begin to enter VERY slippery slopes when we don't
understand "leadership options."
Now, let me try to make this real for you with another
personal story:
Here in the Philippines, I work with "less" capable people for
a lot of reasons on both sides. I can see clearly that my own
actions lead to the loss of leadership options because I
"expect" them to behave in many ways as I would--according to
Biases I hold--which I think would be relatively common for
most leadership.
In doing so, I find myself continually at a loss for options,
as the path in which I scaffolded is NOT TAKEN and I find
myself looking back in reflection NOT realizing that the path
I scaffolded was not a path possible for most of these people.
Case in point:
I have a pedicab driver (pedals a bike attached to a cab that
people ride in) and I wanted to help him repair something on
his cab, so it would be better for him and for me. I gave him
the equivalent of $10, only to find (I'm embarrassed to tell
you how many times I have fallen victim to my expectations)
that he didn't spend the money on repairs but chose instead to
allocate the funds to various things like food, his daughter's
parade fee, and so forth, only to find that the cab wasn't
repaired and I was faced with the same dilemma.
Now, for me, the first thing that happens is I get mad
(Enneagram 8 might be clue) and then all sorts of options
begin to close off, all of which make the situation worse than
it would have been, if I had been able to put myself in my
pedicab driver's shoes--a lack of empathy to put it mildly.
If I had been able to do so, I would have created other
options for myself and him so that we didn't end up in the
closed cul de sac where I am mad at him and he and I don't get
what we need.
This is key, even on the world stage.
What triggered this TPOV is that we are gradually closing down
options which are going to create a set of behavioral choices
which nobody likes, all because of our expectations about how
the world is for others.
In business, and in leadership around the world, we
continuously have "leadership options."
Helpful Hint: You
might even think of these like financial options with "puts"
and "calls" on which way the stock price went over time,
collecting when you're right, losing your rights when you're
wrong.
Action Step: In
order to exercise our leadership options, we need to be able
to more fully understand the likelihood of someone's own
perspective rather than our own, and in world circles this can
be very complex.
In the Russian case, as noted in the article, do we really
want to shove someone like Putin in a corner...has he ever
backed down from anything? Do we expect that he will say, "oh
you guys are right and we made a mistake, now let's see if we
can undo this thing?" Would we say that? You see, the
leadership option is to be able to hold open the idea that
what we are doing may be a failed strategy.
Would you hear President Obama try to convince the world that
perhaps because of misunderstanding, and the desire for
Ukraine to be a democracy, that perhaps we closed off some
options that might have been in part responsible for what is
going on?
Did you hear Malaysian Airlines say that we made a mistake in
flying over a combative space where the potential for those on
the ground hostile and without specific knowledge may have
confused the situation and inadvertently shot us out of the
sky?
Of course you are NEVER going to hear any of those arguments,
factual as they might be and that is because we have given up
the "leadership option!" We have failed to see that other
perspectives may be as valuable as ours and as a consequence,
we continue to insist, to sanction, to bully, to subterfuge,
to sabotage to get our own ways, and the very processes
involved begin to cancel leadership options.
Do we think Putin is weak? Did I think that my pedicab driver
would make rational decisions, looking ahead and realizing if
he spent the money differently than intended that he would
lose future funds, yet had no choice and did it anyway--whose
fault was that for closing down that option? It was MY
expectations of rational behavior on his part, the same kind
of perspective that we are now using to sanction Russia and
push them into a corner where rationally we think they will
say or do what?
You see, what "option" are we giving them?
The only "leadership option" they have is to act in their own
interests continuously until they eliminate all of their
"leadership options." Do we really want a country like Russia
RUNNING out of options? Do we want to set global accord back
to the cold war standards and again try to "starve" them--send
our precious (extra) gas and oil to Europe to "show the
Russians that can't hold Europe hostage?
You see, the point of this diatribe is to help leaders
understand their OWN roles in outcomes as they eliminate their
own and the options of others in the process. Without fully
"grokking" this idea, daily we are all losing our options that
are very precious to us and our world because we assume
rationality based on our perspectives, without fully
understanding that if we remove options from others, we are
indeed removing "leadership options" from ourselves, and THEY
are not to blame, we are the one's who caused the options to
be lost in the first place.
The slippery slop(e) of long term problems are created by
small decisions we make everyday without appropriate
perspective.
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