Finding the Answer

Thursday, December 10, 2020 9:12 AM

Leadership is not about having the answer, but about finding the answer. But too often, many leaders think their role is to have all the answers and ensure that everyone on their “team” knows where it came from. This approach isn’t real leadership nor a true team environment; it is one defined by rank and hierarchy.

There is a story that I have seen and heard now several times, so I believe it to be accurate. Still, regardless of its veracity, it is at least allegorical and meaningful for our study of leadership. In this story, an Army General is having a staff meeting. And surrounding the conference room table is his staff of leaders who report to him and a few others. In rank, everyone seated around the table was a lower rank than the General. In this story, the General is not an old school commander in which he issued orders and watched others carry them out. No. This General was a little more progressive and realized that the more sets of eyes brought to bear on a challenge, the better the result would be. He also knew that his rank and stars on his shoulders often inhibited lower-ranked leaders from offering up their opinions and perspectives about a particular issue or challenge, or to be honest, just about anything to someone of a significantly higher rank. After all, the Army had trained these soldiers well to obey the chain of command, and many management theorists opined that “what interests my boss should fascinate me.” With these two considerations embedded deeply in the subordinate ranks’ consciousness, the General often didn’t get much fresh thinking and often had to live with only his own ideas.

But one of the changes that the General implemented in his staff meetings was the process by which, rather than talking first and sharing his ideas about a topic or idea, he instructed others to speak first. The General was a keen observer, you see. When he shared his thoughts and ideas first, he noticed that others would simply agree with him or parrot his own opinions back to him. One or two people of higher rank may add to the General’s original thought, but these were often limited and often without a lot of substance. And no one, not ever, would tell the General that he was wrong, had incomplete information or was missing something significant in his analysis and reflection. He also noticed that it was infrequent that any of the more junior ranks spoke at all in the meetings.

So what the General did was almost masterful in its simplicity. When discussing an idea, obstacle, issue, or challenge, he would invite the most junior person around the table to talk first. The General would ask her for her opinion, her analysis and her thoughts on the topic. The General would do that with the next senior ranked person around the table and ask for his thoughts and then to the next senior ranked person and ask for her thoughts. The General would continue around the table in this fashion until everyone had spoken and shared their opinions and ideas. He would then open the topic up for general conversation so that everyone, having heard others’ comments, could debate the issue as needed. Only after this round of debate would the General offer his perspective, comments, and opinion on the matter being discussed. At this point, the General opened the conversation back up to debate and discussion. Having been already primed by the previous discussion, everyone around the table felt confident and safe weighing in on the General’s perspective. After this final step, the General would decide what to do or the direction needed to be taken. For while everyone has the right to opine and contribute to the matter at hand, and everyone has the right to be heard, not everyone has a vote on what needs to be done. The decision rights and the decision making remained with the General.

The magic of this process improvement that the General implemented is twofold: 1/ He obtains the benefit of hearing the unvarnished opinions and perspectives of everyone around the table, which helps to shape his own opinion and thoughts, and as a result, he can make better decisions and 2/ Because he includes everyone in the discussion he creates an environment of psychological safety and trust in which everyone feels heard and feels that they more strongly belong to the team; that is, he builds a stronger team.  

But the format of the General’s staff meeting is only one part of the process improvements that the General has made. In the meeting itself, the General also behaves differently than the generals before taught him. As each junior officer speaks, he listens intently and is focused on what the junior officer is saying. The General asks clarifying questions and probing questions, not to embarrass the junior officer but to seek understanding. And the General pulls out the opinions of these more junior officers when he sees they may be struggling or if their body language indicates that they have much more to say or disagrees with what is being discussed. The General is acutely aware of who is talking during the debates and, more importantly, who is not. He ensures that the quieter team members are invited to share their thoughts and ideas as the discussion unfolds. The General also makes sure that others do not interrupt or talk over others when sharing their ideas or only taking a breath to continue sharing their thoughts. The General is creating an environment in which everyone feels valued, respected and appreciated for their contributions. The General is creating a space of belonging.

And while the General knows that the process he is trying to create and the behaviours that he is trying to model were not the process or behaviours of the generals that came before him, he is also teaching his staff that there is a better way to lead; one that is more inclusive and more receptive to different perspectives and opinions and one in which the pursuit of finding the right answer is more important for the organization’s success than him solely having the answer. By displaying this vulnerability to depart from his traditionally trained leadership model, he communicates to his staff and his command that diversity of thinking is needed to create the solutions necessary to be effective in their mission and address the challenges they are facing. And the General is modelling a commitment to life-long leadership learning. Regardless of how far he has progressed in rank, he still needs to hone his craft of leadership, study and implement new methods and new processes. The General is displaying a growth mindset because he believes that his command deserves the best leadership, not merely the best leadership that he can provide.  

As the General continued with the new staff meeting model, he experimented with some process tweaks here and there to see what works better in creating even more creativity and innovation and even more significant contribution by the table members. But one thing that the General did have to address only a few weeks into the revised process change and fairly routinely after that as a reminder was that while he welcomed everyone’s contribution, participation and debate on the matter at hand, only one decision could be made at the end of the meeting to move forward. And that decision, on some issues, was his. You see, the debates around the staff table became so spirited at times, and so rich and passionate, that there was some confusion about how the organization could move forward if a consensus wasn’t reached with those at the meeting. The General had to remind the team that there is a difference between collaboration and decision making. The sharing of ideas and making sure that everyone had the opportunity to speak and share their thoughts fully was the collaboration; from the mass of ideas generated, the best ones could be selected to form a decision. Consensus wasn’t the goal; collaboration is. Often, the General would say, as people collaborate more, they begin to believe that consensus is then required as the decision-making model that arises from the collaboration. And while consensus is a valid decision-making model and can be used at the right time and place, it is not necessarily the default nor the best decision-making model that could be used. The decision as to the direction forward was still the General’s accountability. He owned the decision rights, but the process he arrived at the best possible decision was through collaboration. Don’t confuse consensus with collaboration; the General would remind his team, they are two different things. Finally, as part of this reminder, the General would reinforce the obligation that each staff member had about supporting the decision once it has been made. The General would share that although we collaborated and your idea may not be the one that we eventually go with, it was expected that everyone would fully support the decision as if the idea and decision were their own. And everyone around the table were happy to uphold this expectation as they were, in fact, fully engaged in the debate that created the decision in the first place. The team felt the decision was their own.

A year later, the General was reflecting upon the progress that he and his team have made. Some of the leaders at his staff meeting implemented similar processes within their own organizations and at their own staff meetings. Some of the leaders who rotated out to other assignments have taken the approach with them and implemented it there. And while it does take some time to indoctrinate new team members to this process as they join the General’s staff table, the new team members take to the process quickly as they see how the interactions take place; they quickly realize that this is a safe place to contribute. The General knows that the changes made a year ago were both process changes and behavioural changes, ones that he, as the leader, needed to model effectively. And he knows that there is still more work to be done to make his team even stronger, but with these changes already in hand, he also knows that it is only a matter of time to capture those as well. The shift in his leadership thinking, the General reflects, from “leadership is not about having the answer, but about finding the answer” changed the way showed up as a leader. This simple thought changed the way he started to lead a year ago and how he leads today. The final thought the General had that day as he reflected upon the last year of work was a bit of a regret. The General wished he had learned this lesson much younger in his career.