03 A Leader Must Be a Designer

The first article in this series The Leadership Manifesto, started with defining the attributes and competencies of a leader. It also stated that the perfect leader does not exist (as far as I have found) but many people display qualities that illustrate leadership excellence – striving for perfection. Here is an abbreviated list of the attributes of an everyday leader.

The second attribute of a leader is to be able to design.

A leader is a designer. The leader creates the environment in which people succeed. The organization is the arena of the leader. Designing an effective organization is the only way to realize the vision of the enterprise. To fail to design the right environment – the right place – is to risk collapse of an otherwise viable organization.

Peter Senge, in The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization (New York: Currency Doubleday, 1990), put forward the notion that the leader has three roles: Steward of the Vision, Teacher and Designer. In this article we will explore how a leader designs the environment in which people can succeed.

Every organization has an environment. Some call it a culture; others refer to the climate of an organization. I have come to use the following working definition. “You can define an organization’s culture by what people do, when there is no one to tell them what to do.” Do the people in your organization trust each other? Do they turn to each other for assistance on guidance, or do they always seem to turn to external sources? Are your meetings open and productive, or is there always one person doing the talking with no debate or discussion? Is healthy disagreement encouraged?

Creating a healthy environment is a tough but necessary task for any leader. If people are not complaining and putting up resistance at a meeting, you can be sure they are doing it at the water cooler and after work. A lack of discussion often indicates a unhappy workforce, it means there may be problems under the surface.

As part of a service improvement initiative with an international client, I took part in a series of surveys (over a 5 year period) to measure the satisfaction of employees compared to customer satisfaction statistics. In each location or branch, the culture survey pointed out several areas of concern for employees that the management team was not previously aware of.

It was interesting what different leadership teams did with the information. Some took the message to heart and immediately embarked on a process to deal with the issues. Others wanted the names of the people who put in negative reports so they could ‘deal’ with them. No, we did not supply that information. It was an anonymous survey.

Leaders who work regularly on improving their problem areas usually started with higher survey results than those who wanted to “deal” with the complainers.

If you have an unhappy or dissatisfied culture, the process to change the environment has to be an open and transparent series of events. First, the results must be reported. Depending on the size of the organization this can be through a meeting (or series of meetings) where the results are presented and then discussion takes place. Following the discussion, action is taken to correct the situation(s) that led to the problem(s) in the first place. Involving people in the cure is as important as their participation in the diagnosis.

Is this easy? No.

Perfection – what a concept. It doesn’t exist. What does 'Nearly Perfect' really mean? It means there would be:

• Two unsafe airline landings at the busiest airports every day

• 20,000 wrong drug prescriptions every year

• 500 incorrect surgical procedures every week

• 50 newborn babies dropped in the delivery room

Myth #2 - There is no such thing as a perfect landing. There are many issues beyond the pilot’s control in every landing. For that reason they have processes, protocols, checklists and procedures. Pilots practice in simulators to prepare for possible emergency situations. They don’t want a perfect landing. They want a safe landing. Who cares if they use an extra twenty meters of runway, when the landing is soft and safe?

Telling your people you are not perfect will not be a revelation to them. They already know it. If a leader can demonstrate humility and grace while sharing negative feedback (especially about them self) it will go a long way to open the environment for others to do the same. After all, which is more problematic for an organization – discovering a mistake in a procedure and having to correct it or having the mistake go undiscovered and uncorrected?

Every organization has skeletons in its closet. If you want to clean the closet, start with your own skeletons. You don’t have to beat them (or yourself) to death. Fess up, fix them and move on.

After opening the environment to honest communication and discussion, dealing with feedback on the current situation, building a process to improve problem finding and fixing and then taking action to put recommendations in place, a leader will find the culture will start to improve and the climate will become more open and cooperative.

Next article – Leader as a standard bearer – Or everybody loves a parade.