I was driving the coiled road to Hana along the Maui north coast and stopped at a fruit stand. A tupperware bowl of plumeria blossoms, the one you can see in the header of this Newsletter, sat along side the fruit for anyone who wanted to put a flower in their hair. I bent over the flowers and snapped the picture.
LEADERSHIP CONVERSATION
Dick Richards Helps Switch on the Light
Dick Richards is an insightful, eclectic writer and Renaissance man with a thirty year career in leadership coaching, organization development and large systems change. He is author of five books, including Artful Work, The Art of Winning Commitment, and Is Your Genius at Work? Semi-retired, with an emphasis on the semi part, Dick now does an occasional workshop, ghost writes books for others, and has recently rediscovered a passion for graphic arts, where he started his career. His goal these days, he says, is to "hang out, enjoy life" and follow the spiritual advice of Gerald Jampolski, remembering that the real key to a good life is peace of mind. To find out more about Dick and his work, including the three books mentioned, you can access his website.
Q. Dick, given your long and successful career, what is your advice to those who aspire to lead today?
A. It's imperative for leaders to bring two things: a credible pathway to change, and hope. At its core, this has to do with the essential transaction between leaders and followers. The leader must offer a way forward that's believable and he or she must be able to inspire others.
The best leaders understand that the currency of the follower is his or her energy, and that the follower's energy comes in four forms: physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual. It is incumbent on leaders to appeal to all four forms. Too often the leader's energy is intellectual alone, and that only gets you the commitment of people to a good idea. Beyond that, of course, is emotional commitment, which depends on how people actually feel about a project's value and importance. It tends to be fleeting, but if you can stimulate and inspire others through their feelings, you can accomplish some things. The highest form of commitment is spiritual. I don't mean this in a religious sense. It just means being committed to something larger than your self. For example, it could have to do with the human condition or the condition of the planet. The point is that the more of these four energies the leader can tap the more can be accomplished. The leader and followers together will actually get something meaningful done. While I see this happening on a small scale, unique to individual leaders, I see it much less often on the larger stage of big corporations.
Q. Can you share an example of spiritual commitment?
Sure. I worked with a privately owned insurance company as it went through the process of demutualization, becoming publicly owned. As part of the change senior management suggested that instead of one standard for service for all customers, that service be broken down into levels, gold and silver, depending on how much the customer paid. Many employees were upset by this. The idea of different levels of service went against the grain of the larger purposes of the organization, against their commitment to something larger than themselves and they were terrified of the erosion of what they believed in. Unfortunately, that energy down in the bowels of the company was not understood by the leaders and had a correspondingly negative impact on the change process.
I also think of a floor sweeper for a large corporation. His job was to keep the corridors and lobby clean, but he was upset he couldn't get the management support and the supplies he needed to do his job. Again, that's energy that's not being captured by leadership. By "capture" I mean creating the linkage -- the linkage between that guy cleaning the lobby and the higher purpose of the organization; helping him know what he is contributing to and giving him what he needs to do it.
On the flip side of these negative examples, I remember an executive for a petroleum company in England. When I spoke with him he told me his job wasn't about the oil at all. It was about providing jobs and the well-being of his nation. He understood what it meant to work for something larger than himself.
Too often such spiritual energy is unrecognized and rarely get play.
Q. So how do we help wake up that sensitivity to spiritual energy in leaders?
A. A leader's change process starts with a sense of vulnerability.
I am thinking of a CEO of a foreign affiliate of a large company who was sent to places that were having difficulty. His dream was working at headquarters because his kids and grandkids lived nearby, but other executives were keeping him at arm's length. He was tough, abrasive. Nevertheless he called me because he began to understand that he would have to do something different if he wanted to be in the club at headquarters. So he was feeling vulnerable.
He was described by people on his team as abusive. But surprisingly, helping him make the change came down to something simple. I asked him what kind of parent he was, and he replied he was the "tough love" kind of parent. No surprise there. I then asked him what kind of grandparent he was, and he said, "Oh, that's different." So I suggested he approach his job more as a grandparent than a parent. It was a change he understood, and within six months he was invited to work at headquarters. His assistant came to me and asked, "Is he mad at me? He's asking me if I want a cup of coffee! He's being really nice to me!"
The change was the product of two things: somebody told him the truth, and him being vulnerable. It helped him reframe who he was by making a suggestion to do something he already knew how to do.
As helpers, the first thing is being alert to those moments of vulnerability, especially when a leader is 'hitting bottom.' The second part is helping the person release something they didn't think they should bring to work. In the example, the executive didn't have to go through some big change process. He just had to bring a different aspect of himself to the party.
Q. What do you think drives this exclusion of some parts of the self in favor of others?
A. There's a mental template for how we are supposed to be at work. It's fun to watch people get past that template, often with the insight, "You mean it's okay to be myself?"
I think of this template and it reminds me of a room I was in with sixty executives. I thought to myself, "I really don't like any of these people." It was strange. When I was with them individually, I did like them. But when they were together there was somehow a set of norms that really put me off, a kind of competitiveness and one-upmanship. Somebody would put a slide up with numbers and others would get out their calculators to check the numbers, eager to catch a mistake. That's who they thought they were supposed to be.
The attempt to live up to that template comes from the ego. It doesn't come out of humility. As a coach, the work is all about giving people permission to be who they actually are. And challenging them: to what degree can you bring new aspects of yourself to the party? How do you do that?
It's like an executive said to me once. Every morning she drove to the office; took her briefcase out and put most of herself into the trunk of the car. That's an image that's stuck with me.
Q. Do you think it's possible for a leader without a vivid spiritual commitment to lead a corporation effectively?
A. No. Not if the executive doesn't understand how to capture the energy that is there. Only if the person has a sense of what's larger. I did an article about Tony Hsieh of Zappos a few years ago. It's the closest I have come to seeing a company operate the way I'd like to see one operate. When they hire people, they look to 50% skill-set and 50% fit with their culture. It comes down to encouraging people to bring their larger self to the workplace - something many leaders simply don't understand.
There's a story at Zappos that illuminates the underlying philosophy. They had hired a senior executive, but every employee who is hired has to spend a couple of weeks as part of their orientation answering the phones from customers. The executive thought that was beneath him, so he was fired and sent home. The story reinforces what it means to work there.
As a leader, you must not be afraid of that emotional and spiritual energy of your team. I think leaders who are married to intellect might just be afraid of all the emotional and spiritual energy they find in their workplace. They might want to capture it, but they only do so in order to control it. I hate to sound damning but it strikes me that the great majority of corporate executives, very comfortable with their own intellectual energy and rewarded for being smart, are emotionally and spiritually immature. Unless you are comfortable with your own emotions and spirituality, you won't be comfortable with anybody else's.
It's a major thing. I worked as a corporate consultant with half a dozen Fortune 500 companies in different countries and the truth is it comes down to this as a change agent or a leader at whatever level: you only know you are being successful when you see the light go on in one person's eyes. You know that is something you can only do one person at a time.
That is where the gold was in my consulting. I'm in a room and the light goes on. I never looked at the stock prices as a measure of success. My whole job was helping to turn that light on.
Q. Why did you decide to withdraw from active consulting, Dick?
The last change project I participated in involved 60,000 people, full support from the CEO, and deep pockets. There was a big consulting team, and I frankly I felt that I'd been to the top of the mountain. When it was completed, I felt I'd done everything I'd set out to do and I simply couldn't stand waiting in another security line at the airport at 6:00 AM. If something was put in front of me that seemed worth doing, I'd do it, but I'm enjoying my life now in a different way, and I believe I offer something very meaningful to clients of my ghostwriting work. I'm fulfilling something in those authors, something they ultimately need to find in themselves. I get a charge out of helping somebody else put their best self out there. I don't need it to be my idea.
And you know, I have my own internal slideshow of all the people I've helped over the years, the incredible and fulfilling moments when I've seen that astonishing light within them come on.
MY LEADERSHIP BINDER
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