Planning, Strategy, and Context: your people matter.

As you may know, I am studying for my Doctor of Education in Organizational Leadership, at Brandman University.  Today in my Strategic Planning class we had a great webinar.  One of the best features of this program is continuously tying our learning content to our change project, and our research efforts.  It is what make this program exceedingly practical, and results-driven.

So our discussion was about understanding strategy, and developing awareness of roadblocks to strategic planning.  Two huge considerations are methodology for planning, and the planning context.  First thing to note is they relate to each other.  Your context will dictate how you plan, so this is one of the first discussion to have with the planning team.

Organization Theory, Leadership Theory, Management Theory; who’s right or is it all Bull$#!t?

Recently I had an assignment in my Organizational Theory and Development class.  The essence of the question was what is a more accurate description of Organization Development: has it evolved or is it just adopting every fad that comes along.  I keep seeing this binary thinking rear its ugly head in business and leadership thought frequently: leaders are good/managers bad, servant leadership is the only way to lead, appreciative inquiry only because criticism is wrong.

It’s relatively easy to take a position and adhere to it.  We do it almost viscerally.  But it can stunt our intellectual growth.  We live in a world of practicalities, of getting things done, informed by a certain disdain for theory, and academic thinking.  Heck we ridicule education.  So we are not likely to deeply examine how we understand what we understand.  Theory bores us.

Charisma in Leaders is a Dangerous Thing.

Students of leadership theory know about traits-based approaches.  Traits are a basic attempt to address the question of what good leadership is.  I believe people tend to form a picture in their minds of good leaders by picking famous ones.  Famous leaders are usually charismatic.

So it is no surprise that most people think charisma is required for effective leadership.  I did an informal survey to check.  I asked 100 people (63 women and 37 men) to agree or disagree with this statement: “Charisma is required for effective leadership.”  The results:

Diversity training - it doesn't work.

Question from my Human Resources Management Course: Unlike many training programs designed to develop skills, diversity training focuses on attitude. Briefly describe one experience you have had with diversity training (1) assessing how effective the training was and (2) one recommendation for improvement. Be specific and support your response with an example.

“Diversity training doesn’t extinguish prejudice. It promotes it” (Bregman, 2012, para 15).  I have attended many diversity trainings.  They were all a waste of time, except they helped me identify which of my coworkers might be bigots.  The best lesson I ever learned on diversity was at a UC Santa Cruz graduation. The president delivered the commencement address.  He said something to the effect of focusing on differences is counterproductive.  We should focus on similarities: we put our pants on one leg at a time, we eat breakfast and brush our teeth, and we want a better life for our children.  Diversity highlights division, divisiveness, and creates a hypersensitivity and burden of political correctness. 

On Followership

We can agree that improving leadership will improve results; that is why it is important to study leadership.  “The flip side of leadership is followership.  It stands to reason that if leadership is important to performance, followership must have something to do with it too” (McCallum, 2013, para. 2).  Frankly leaders cannot lead without followers; they need each other.  But the comparative lack of study in this area points to the over emphasis of leadership I talked about in my first post.

Final Discussion Question from Ethics Leadership and Democracy, Brandman University: Definition of Ethics

Q: Now that you've sat through eight weeks of discussion, explain your definition of "ethics." This should be a more substantial definition than “doing the right thing”. Has it changed at all? What ethical perspective or principles do you most closely align with, e.g. Utilitarianism: Greatest good for the greatest number. Why?

A: In all honesty, I cannot say my definition has changed. I still believe that ethics are applying the standards of right and wrong to our actions. I will say that I see now that I identify most with Utilitarianism when making personal decisions, and when making decisions related to broader social questions like public policy and how I will vote, I tend to follow Rawls Justice as Fairness precepts (Johnson, 2012, p. 20-29). I still look to my values of compassion, integrity, service, and excellence as touchstones for my decisions. Of course the legal and moral frameworks inform and guide.

Defining Moments: When Managers Must Choose Between Right and Right by Joseph L. Badaracco Jr.

The commercial tells us life is messy.  More than that it can be destructive.  For centuries philosophers, statesmen and clergy have sought to give us theories to handle the vagaries of life with certainty.  But they suffer from not being encompassing, and worse they are generally sterile thought experiments that do not work in the real world.

Joseph Badaracco wrote this book to provide managers practical guidance for making decisions when the courses of action are all the right thing to do within competing values.  He argues that these right versus right decisions are not well addressed by what he calls the “standard answers” of “follow the law, serve the shareholders, consult the company credo, do the right thing…” (Badaracco, 1997, p. ix).