Transformational leadership

Why my fear of roller coasters does not keep me out of amusement parks

April 13, 2022By Mike Hohnen

Helix - Liseberg - Gothenburg — *Helix – Liseberg – Gothenburg*

They scare the living daylight out of me those roller coasters.

Intellectually I understand that they are safe, probably safer that taking a taxi to the airport, statistically… but still. It’s always been like that, so maybe in a previous life I was traumatised by a roller coaster gone wild. Anyway that is not the point of this final blog post of the year. The reason I mention it is because paradoxically this year I have seen more incredible roller coasters and heard more delighted shrieks from thrilled crowds than at any time previously in my life. More on that in just a minute.

Yes I am in a reflective mood.

You see, technically, this week is just like all the other weeks, but somehow in our mind it’s quite special. It marks an ending and a new beginning and we all get in this mood of yearly review and even more importantly setting new bold goals for the coming year.

All my lovely blogging colleagues are probably bombarding you with: The ten best books you should have read, the eight new trends that you must understand or (flavour of the year) the twelve point action plan that will make this your best year ever!

So why the roller coasters?

Well believe it or not, this was the year that I got to spend considerable time in amusements parks!

Seriously!

As always I have been doing work with my loyal gang of regular hotel clients, but I also got to spend time at Efteling in Holland introducing the Service Profit Chain for IAAPA. In Copenhagen, we introduced a new approach to leadership development at Tivoli gardens and I had the honour for 16 weeks to take a group of seriously enthusiastic managers from Liseberg in Gothenburg through the GROW leadership program.

So what am I learning?

I think my key takeaway this year has been confirmation that at the end of the day, being a great manager is deceptively simple on the surface, and incredibly hard to do well in practice. It’s like juggling. You see the guy rotating 5 oranges in the air and you think: “That’s neat. I can do that.” You pick up the oranges and you understand that there is a gap between knowing and doing.

The 5 oranges of management that you need to juggle have been elegantly formulated by the Gallup organisation based on their extensive research of hundreds of business and managers.

Great managers have these talents/skills/abilities:

They motivate every single employee to take action and engage them with a compelling mission and vision.
They have the assertiveness to drive outcomes and the ability to overcome adversity and resistance.
They create a culture of clear accountability.
They build relationships that create trust, open dialogue, and full transparency.
They make decisions that are based on productivity, not politics.

That’s it! But again this is just more information, and I am sure you don’t need more information.

What you need is probably execution, the HOW part.

So that brings me to next year. Early 2017, we will be launched the Team Leader’s Toolbox – a training program aimed at helping busy mangers learn quickly how they juggle their ‘oranges’.

We have been exploring this theme of Leadership and Management over the year on the blog as well and if you missed some of the posts you can download a compilation in the form of ebook HERE.

Thank you for reading my blog. If there is anything you would like to see more (or less) of next year, don’t hesitate to drop me a line. I love hearing from my readers.

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This post is one of a series where we are exploring the notion of leadership and how this is different from management. Our starting point is the Service Profit Chain and the understating that the management part of our job will only take us so far. If we really want to create an organisation that is capable of delivering outstanding customer experiences, we need to develop an organisation that delivers outstanding employee experiences – and that requires leadership. You can check out other articles of the series below:

Progress drives engagement – So how do you focus on progress?

December 27, 2016By Mike Hohnen

Progress

Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work. And the more frequently people experience that sense of progress, the more likely they are to be creatively productive in the long run. Whether they are trying to solve a major scientific mystery or simply produce a high quality product or service, everyday progress, even a small win, can make all difference in how they feel and perform.

The Progress Principle

This quote which makes so much sense to me brings us to another aspect of not just why we need to focus on developing the people around us, but also how we can do it.

Focus on progress

In order to progress, we need a baseline to progress from. Once we have a baseline, we can start thinking about what we need to learn or practice in order to get better.

For learning actually to happen, there must be a gap between your current capability and the results that you desire.

So in order for our people actually to learn they need to:

Have an awareness of the gap
Be willing to declare their incompetence (I don’t know how to do that.)
Commit to learning

(I have written about this in a previous post some time ago.)

So if I sneak into your business and tap any one of your team members on the shoulder and ask them: “What are you working on at the moment in order to get better?”, or I ask them: “In what ways does your boss feel you have made progress last month?”, do they know?

Or is progress something that is randomly observed and then celebrated: “Oh look isn’t this nice!”?

Focusing on progress is an important part of your leadership role. And your most important tool for this is not a dashboard in excel but conversations, one-on-one conversations (According to Gallup research, team members who have no or very few one-to-one sessions with their direct supervisor are 67% more likely to be disengaged at work. I mention this just in case you have the notion that one-on-one is a waste of time and it is easier to tell them all at once.)

If you happen to be a manager of managers, this is even more import – you are the role model. If you are not having one-to-one conversations (about progress) with your direct reports, there is little chance that they are having them with their team members. In fact, if you are not talking to them about how they are progressing with their approach to manage progress with their team, I am pretty sure it is not happening at all.

How to structure an engaging conversation

What would be a good way to structure these conversations?

Establish the gap. Once we have a gap, we can establish a goal. Moving toward our goal is what progress would look like. Then we can have a chat about so what is going on now compared to that goal. Once we agree on how what is going on is different from the goal, then we can talk about what options there could be in order to make progress towards the goal. Finally, we pick an action and commit to doing that.

The following conversation will be a follow up / feedback on how this is going. If you are familiar with coaching, you will have recognised that what I have described here as a framework is in fact the GROW coaching model – you can check it out in more details HERE.

In any case, in my upcoming course The Team Leaders’ Toolbox, we will be exploring this model more in details. If you would like to be notified when we launch that, sign up with the link below!

Enter your email address below and we will notify you when we launch the Team Leader’s Toolbox!

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What the h… went wrong?

December 27, 2016By Mike Hohnen

Driving home, Peter kept on asking himself this question.

What a disaster! This was an important day. He had put together a cross functional team of ‘experts’; supposedly some of the most competent people in the company. He had taken great pain (and expense) in organising the best possible location offsite. There, he had given them a very clear brief, explaining exactly what needed to be done and what he expected from them. The deadline was 4pm – tight but doable.

And the result?

…. was a monumental f… up to put it mildly.

What was wrong with these people?

There was nothing wrong with these people. What was wrong was that Peter was not managing the states and states of the team in a skilful way. He was ignoring or maybe totally unaware of the basic mechanics of human interaction.

In my previous blog posts, I have explain this concept of states and stages in more details, you may want to read this first.

The four fundamental questions

Once we understand that this ‘instability of organic systems’ is what is going on, we need a basic tool or more accurately, to understand and master the basic process that is needed in order for groups of human beings to collaborate effectively with each other. From behavioural psychology, we learn that whenever humans are put in a new situation, a new project or a new workgroup or maybe just a new workday, they ask themselves 4 fundamental questions:

Why are we doing this?
Who am I going to do it with?
What are we going to do?
How are we going to do it?

And they ask them in exactly that sequence because they need the answers in that sequence. The questions help us make meaning of what we are doing. If it is not meaningful to us, we don’t get much done. It is as simple as that.

The first question is quite subconscious, a sensing. The second question is more of a feeling and the last two questions are more thinking questions. But it is hard for us to move meaningfully forward to the next question if the previous question has not been answered clearly for us.

From process theory, we know that processes follow an oscillating pattern. They move in regular ‘Waves’ from one extreme point to its opposite and then back again. Human group processes the two extremes, which are often insecurity/uncertainty to security/certain.

The High-performance team model

When we combine these two, we get the Drexler/Sibet high performance model and it looks like this:

Why are we doing this?

The first step is all about orientation. Establish a clear purpose and meaning with whatever it is we are about to do.

Who is on this team and do they know each other or not?

If not, we need to find a way to break the ice and let people get to know each other. We are wired in our brains to be slightly distrustful of people we do not know. It is a basic survival precaution that dates back to our cave origins. If we are going to collaborate on a job/project, we need a minimum of trust. We start to build trust as we get to know each other. It is very simple.

If we know each other on the team, we need to check in. Just a quick round. How are we all feeling in general and what are maybe our expectations for this job or venture or day? This is all about, what Blanchard (Situational Leadership) would call, our psychological readiness level.

What are the goals and roles?

Then we need to agree on the goals and roles. What are we trying to achieve and what roles do we each have that will contribute to us achieving this?

How are we going to approach this?

And finally, we need to have a discussion and establish agreement, so how are we going to approach this?

Once we have been through these first four fundamental steps, we arrive at the bottom of the V model a point where we all have clarity and certainty about what we are about to embark on.

As the leader, you have now done 90% of your work. You have set direction, alignment and commitment. Lean back and let them decide the details of (tasks and timeframes, etc.) how they are going to do it. That will be quite easy if we have done the ground work well.

Observe and offer guidance only if needed as they execute, and only when they are done do you step back in and facilitate a reflection, so how did it go? What did we learn and what would we do different next time? You can see my previous post on goal grids and learning for more on this.

In my next online training, the Team leaders’ Toolbox, I will go into much more detail on how to actually do this in practical terms. Because it is not rocket science, it just requires you to be aware of some basic principles about human behaviour and the importance of relationships.

Enter your email address below and we will notify you when we launch the Team Leader’s Toolbox!

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Do you understand the stages that your team goes through?

December 27, 2016By Mike Hohnen

Team

Last week, we took a deeper dive into understanding how the mental states of each team member has an influence on the whole team – and that the team leader probably has more influence on this than anybody else. If you did not read that post, you might want to start there first.

The mental state that team members are in also produces a certain collective behaviour, especially as there are states that are typical for each stage of the life cycle of a team.

When we put a bunch of people together in a team, they typically go though certain stages. This was first described by Psychologist Bruce Tuckman who came up with the memorable phrase “forming, storming, norming, and performing” in his 1965 article, “Developmental Sequence in Small Groups.”

team-phases-pic-001

So this is not new. On the contrary, it is well established framework and many of you have probably heard the expression “forming, storming, norming and performing” before. The words that describe the basic stages that small groups experience. In theory, this is a linear process that starts with forming and then goes step by step through all four stages. But the challenge in this is that most teams do not naturally follow this path – they need some help or else they get stuck.

What stage is your team at?

So what is important is for the team leader to recognise the stages as they unfold in the team and to act skilfully in helping the team through each stage. Part of this team leader’s awareness also means understanding that the team is basically an unstable system, and that from time to time it will regress from the current stage and take a step or even two steps back to previous stages. And it requires skillful action on the part of the team leader to get the team back on track.

Less experienced team leaders often have an aversion to conflict. They feel it is all important that we all get along and have a nice time. So when the initial phase, the forming stage, is coming to an end and the first signs of friction become apparent, the typical reaction is to reorganise the team in order to stop the conflict from escalating. The deep fear is that this could get really ugly.

The quick fix is to shuffle positions or tasks, maybe even transferring one or more team members away from the team to other teams or whatever. The shuffle causes the team process to reset and a new period of forming starts. And it creates the illusion that the conflict or problem is solved.

During the forming stage, everyone is doing their best to fit in and not rock the boat too much. They are also trying their best to adapt to everyone else. But after a while, the friction invariably starts again. It happens because after a while, each of the team members have had enough, they are tired of not voicing their need and constantly trying to bend over backwards to keep everyone happy and they start to voice their dissatisfaction.

Conflict is just a symptom.

Friction is not a bad thing as such; it is just a symptom that we need to align whatever we are doing better with each other.

The way we do that is that we start a number of conversations about how the team is functioning and what we need to do in order for everything to work better for all. This may mean some heated meetings and possible disharmony, but eventually the skillful team leader will help the team come to an understanding that enables them to move forward – typically by establishing some rules of engagement or a team manifesto. As they do, the team moves out of the storming into the norming stage and after a while it becomes (high) performing.

You need to work on the fluffy stuff.

As the team leader, it is important for you to understand that it is hard to get to any level of (high) performance without investing time and energy in what is often seen as the fluffy stuff. You need to have the necessary conversations; conversations that aim on developing better relations and not just on task accomplishments. Handling this in a helpful way that keeps everyone on the bus and heading in the same direction is not something we are born with – it is learned skill.

In my next online training, the Team Leader’s Toolbox, I will go into much more detail on how to actually do this in practical terms. Because it is not rocket science, it just requires you to be aware of some basic principles about human behaviour and the importance of relationships.

Enter your email address below and we will notify you when we launch the Team Leader’s Toolbox!

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How you can help you team manage their states

December 27, 2016By Mike Hohnen

Manage your states

Last week, we looked at how teams are organic systems and as such by definition unstable (If you did not see that post, it might be helpful to read that first HERE).

The lack of stability shows up as a result of the shifting states of each team member, and that in return obviously has repercussion on the state of the whole team.

So what do we mean by states?

States are temporary conditions that constantly transitioning into new states. You are tired, refreshed, lethargic, energetic. Those are all different forms of physical states. Or you are happy, sad, exuberant, angry or whatever. These are emotional states. The two play an ever ongoing interdependent dance with each other. When I have slept well, I feel happier than when I just had two hours restless sleep on a plane.

The state that we are in at any given time influences our performance quite dramatically. Just think of yourself and what a difference it makes to your own performance when you are feeling energetic and happy – or the opposite.

But it is more complex than that. Humans are a social species and we influence on each other. There have been made all sorts of experiments to prove this. You take a deeply depressed person and ask them so sit in a train compartment with 6-8 other people for 15-20 minutes. Just sitting there, not saying a word. And then you interview the other passengers about how they feel afterwards and you can register a clear dominance of more negative, pessimistic state in everyone in that compartment. Alternatively, you ask a guy who just won the lottery, became father for the first time or some other major happy events to also make a journey in a train compartment. Again, just sitting there, not saying a word. When you interview the other passengers, you will find a significant level of positive states and optimism in the whole group.

The rule of thumb here is that the person in the group with the strongest emotion tends to affect the rest of the group positively or negatively as the case may be.

Think about that the next time you turn up for work in a bad mood and with the attitude that it only concerns yourself and they should just get on with their work. You have just lowered the productivity level in your team by anything from 10% to 50% depending on how foul your mood happens to be.

So the first lesson here is that I need to manage my own states. That is a whole subject in itself and I will dedicate a full module to that in my upcoming Team Leaders’ Toolbox training.

For now, let’s just assume that you already understand that and are fully aware of how to manage your own states and what the consequences are for your surroundings when you don’t.

Next, we need to look at, that apart from your basics state, you can also be more or less helpfully in affecting your team members states – both positively and negatively.

What causes us to shift or change our state?

At a very basic level, it is about stimulus and response. Something happens and you react (as per reflex) or you respond. When we respond, there is the notion that we actually make a conscious choice. People who are good at managing their states respond.

Many of your team members will just react. And their reactions follow a very simple pattern.

When something happens that is within the range of what they expected, there is no reaction. Their state is unchanged. When something happens that is better than they had expected, they have a positive reaction and that shifts their emotional state to a more positive mood (and of course that has repercussion on their physical energy levels as well). But if something happens that is worse than they expected, they will react negatively and experience a shift in state to something that is more negative with a corresponding drop in physical energy levels as well.

This pattern has an added complication. Our brain is not very good at differentiating between what is actually going on and what we think is going on, or maybe will be going on in the future. So when we have a feeling that this is going to be great – or terrible, we react accordingly even if whatever it is has not yet occurred.

Shift your focus and you shift your state

That is why paying attention to what we are focusing on is another important part of managing our states. When I focus on what I want, what I would like to create, I have positive thoughts/emotions. When I focus on what I don’t want or what I would like to avoid, I have negative thoughts/emotions.

In the same category but slightly different is the sensation of lack of control. Most of us go into seriously negative states when we feel that we have no control of what is currently happening or about to happen. We have this to different degrees. Some people handle a lack of control better than others. But take away all control from someone and you basically have a torture situation.

A good dentist understands this, and explains very carefully what she is going to do next, etc. In that way, she is actively managing your experience and trying to avoid you going into unnecessarily negative states (Because it is bad for business, you won’t come back, and you will tell your friends bad things about the experience).

Also in this category is any notion of fear. You do not want any of your team members to experience any form of fear. Because it obviously triggers very unhelpful mental and physical states. This sounds so obvious, but think of your own career, how many times a week you had that feeling of fear in your belly? How often was it caused by someone in a senior position, their behaviour or words? Causing any form of anxiety in your team is very unhelpful.

So in summary, you can help you team members manage their states by:

Skilfully managing your own states
Avoiding unpleasant surprises whenever you can (Being clear about what is going to happen and what your expectations are)
Being clear about what needs to be done, but leaving the control of how to do it up to them.
Helping them stay focused on what we are trying to create or achieve as opposed to focusing on what is not working or that we want to avoid

Enter your email address below and we will notify you when we launch the Team Leader’s Toolbox!

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The something for something system is at the heart of the uninspiring workplace.

October 29, 2016By Mike Hohnen

Unspiring

The Something-For-Something System is what happens in most organizations today.

Here is how it works. You come into work and give some of your time in return for a salary. If you work a bit harder, or a little bit more, or a little bit better, you have an expectation that you will also be rewarded for it — a bonus, overtime pay, a promotion, or whatever.

If you don’t work so hard or don’t do your job very well, it is built into the model that you can expect some kind of ‘punishment’.

The assumption is that you come to work because it is in your own interest. You need the money so you can pay your rent, feed the kids, or play golf during the weekend. It’s a something-for-something kind of thinking which has thousands of years behind it. Technically, it is known as transactional leadership.

The Game We Play

If the employer and the employee, or in practical terms, the manager and the employee, have a relationship which basically is about something-for-something, then it very easily becomes a game where you, as an employee, try to get away with doing as little as possible while at the same time getting the maximum amount out.

In that perspective, you could say that from the employee’s perspective, you have actually won something if you managed to do a little bit less and still get paid the same for it. That would be a win for you.

The manager’s role in an organization that practices transactional leadership is not very exiting either, because what this means is that the manager’s most important role is to control whether or not the organization is actually getting the output that the organization is paying for. That means time-stamping, control sheets, registration, serious conversations, the possibility of written warnings, and eventually, the ultimate punishment – layoffs.

In a transactional world, an effective manager is a person who distributes reward and punishment in such a way that he maximizes the output of the employee.

It’s all about management and there is no time for real leadership.

Management by Exception

In a transactional world, the manager manages by exception. By that, I mean that the manager is actually only exercising their management role when something is not working according to the plan, not living up to the expectations. Only when somebody’s not doing what they’re supposed to be doing, they put on their managers cap and do something… maybe.

Maybe, because as most of us don’t actually enjoy being bossy. As a result, the management role easily turns into non-management – something I only do if I absolutely must.

If things are going sort of reasonably OK, then there’s no real reason to do much, is there? It becomes a sort of ‘let sleeping dogs lie’ atmosphere. And in the organizations that are really bad, the supervisor, who is supposed to manage his front-line, gets this same treatment from his department head, who gets exactly the same laissez-faire management from the division VP or whatever. The something-for-something culture runs all the way through the system.

Unfortunately, a lot of research shows that this leadership style is neither inspiring nor the most productive. It’s not something that creates an extraordinary organization or fantastically enthusiastic and loyal customers.

It produces something that is often okay, but rarely fantastic.

It’s built into the model that it has to be like that; it is all that can happen as long as we have that mindset.

Now, I hope you are beginning to see what the problem is.

As long as we understand the world from a transactional paradigm, the something-for-something mindset, we aren’t going to get any further. We are stuck.

So, what is it going to take?

Well, as Frederic Laloux says, we need to move into a completely different mindset. We need to change our paradigm. We need to switch from transactional leadership to transformational leadership.

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[Guest post] Soft power is the driver of engagement.

July 28, 2017By Mike Hohnen

engagement

Managing people has changed considerably over time. Basically we are moving from hard to soft .

Professor Joseph S. Nye, Jr. at Havard Kennedy School was one of the first to talk about soft power and leadership.

To distinguish soft power from hard power in leadership, he compared the two as follows:

Type of Power

Behaviors

Sources

Examples

Soft

Attract and co-opt

– Inherent qualities- Communications

– Charisma- Persuasion

– Leading by examples

Hard

Threaten and induce

– Threats, intimidation- Payment, rewards

– Hire, fire, demote- Promotions, compensations

Looking at the Service Profit Chain, we know there is a connection between employee engagement and customer loyalty, and thus revenue. What do you think motivates you to work? Where does engagement come from? Is it the pay and other material benefits? Or is it because you love your job, your workplace, or you team?

Motivation comes in two basic forms: intrinsic and extrinsic. While extrinsic motivation is all about external rewards, intrinsic motivation refers to the joy and the fulfillment you have from doing something.

“Intrinsic motivation occurs when we act without any obvious external rewards. We simply enjoy an activity or see it as an opportunity to explore, learn, and actualize our potentials.”
(Coon & Mitterer, 2010)

Numerous researches have shown that intrinsic motivation plays an important part in employee engagement. Whether or not your intrinsic needs are met depends a lot on the leadership style of your line supervisor.

Let’s think about yourself in these two scenarios:

Your job pays well but you just hate your bossy manager who is always commanding and threatening to fire anyone who disagrees with him. You are always so stressed and you count down every second till the day ends.
Your boss is thoughtful and understanding and he just inspires you. And you believe in what you are doing even it pays a bit less and you feel you have a sense of belonging in your workplace and your team.

In which case do you think you will choose to commit? I think the answer is obvious.

Leading with soft power, managers will be able to not just to inspire and motivate their team members, but also to influence their behaviours and boost team performance.

On this blog, we have often discussed the need to shift our mindset from transactional to transformational. At the basic level, this is a shift from hard to soft power.

“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, not so good when people obey and acclaim him; worst when they despise him.” Lao-Tsu

To learn more about employee engagement and transformational leadership, you can download Mike’s ebook Understanding Engagement. The ebook provides a very different approach to and perspective on leadership that I think you will need to rethink about how you are leading and managing your team.

Enter your email below and download the ebook now!

Change your mind and grow

April 13, 2022By Mike Hohnen

In my previous post, we looked at two very different ways of seeing the world of work: Transactional and Transformational.

So the next obvious question is why don’t more companies teach their leaders to be transformational?

Organizations have grown skilled at developing individual leader competencies, but have mostly ignored the challenge of transforming their leader’s mind-set from one level to the next. Today’s horizontal development within a mind-set must give way to the vertical development of bigger minds.
___John McGuire and Gary Rhodes Transforming Your Leadership Culture, Center for Creative Leadership

The challenge is that being transformational is not a skill. It’s a way of making sense of the world.

So it is not a question of adding more skills and competencies. What is needed is a different way of thinking.

As human beings and as leaders, we can develop ourselves fundamentally in two different ways. We can add skills and tools to our toolbox, if you like. We often call that horizontal development.

The other dimension of our development is vertical. It is about our growth as human beings. We go through different stages of growth from when we’re born; and these stages are, first and foremost, about how we understand the world. How do we make sense of what is happening around us?

These vertical developmental stages are very apparent when we observe small children, in whom each stage happens over a relatively short time. So, we easily notice the difference.

With grown-ups, it’s slower, and at some points, most of us stagnate at some levels.

It was the Swiss child psychologist, Jean Piaget, who was the pioneer in this area. His work has since been followed-up by researchers such as Jane Loevinger and later Susanne Cook-Greuter.

More recently, Bill Tolbert and Robert Kegan at Harvard, have both worked on grown-up vertical development and what that means in a leadership context.

Kegan describes that grown-ups typically have the possibility to develop in three overall stages. The first one he calls ‘dependent and conform,’ the next one ‘independent and achievement-oriented,’ and the last one is ‘interdependent and collaborative’.

Depending on which of these stages of development you find yourself in as a leader, your approach to a number of classical leadership competencies will be very different.

If we take some of the typical issues that we identify as leadership competencies, they could be strategic thinking, change management, conflict management, and leadership across boundaries.

And depending on where one is in one’s development, one will approach each of these very differently. In the figure below, you will see illustrations of the three developmental levels and how they are handled at each level.

Competencies	Dependent – conformer	Independent – achiever	Interdependent – collaborator
Strategic thinking	– Short-term view – Tactical tasks – Black and white – Either/or – High need for certainty	– Medium-term view – Sees is parts of the system – Sees is some patterns and connections	– Long-term view – Sees many shades of grey – Sees many patterns and connections – Accepts uncertainty as the norm
Leading change	– Change to come from above – Needs and trusts authority to give direction – High need for certainty	– Has own views about best change – Sees the mechanics of change needed – Success is achievement of individuals and teams	– Change is a collaborative process – Comfortable with ambiguity – Success means realisation of a shared vision
Conflict	– To be avoided – Authority is in charge – Feels torn by conflict	– Worked out behind closed doors – Produces winners and losers	– Healthy view together more viewers – Something to be encouraged – Increases learning and performance
Leading across boundaries	– Trusts analysing people you know – Them versus us – Distrust of outsider	– Able to think from others’ perspectives – Horse trades for favours – Focused on success of own self	– Sees the world through others’ perspectives to understand more – Shares knowledge across boundaries – Works in partnership with other functions

If you look more closely at the matrix, you will also see that this is where we find the key as to why we are not seeing as much transformational leadership as we maybe would like.

It’s only at the third stage of development in Kegan’s model, the one that is called ‘collaborative and interdependent,’ that the leader has a mindset that enables a transformative approach — the short explanation as to why this is so, is that, in the two earlier stages, the leader is often more concerned with himself.

The first stage, the dependent stage, is all about fitting in and conforming to the prevailing culture.

In the next phase, independent and achievement-oriented, it’s all about the leader being so oriented towards his own achievement that he risks falling into the trap that it’s all about his project: Better results, market share, new products, or whatever. The leader really wants to succeed personally, often in order to further his career or qualify for a bonus, or whatever. But, because it then becomes all about him and his project, he often doesn’t manage to get everybody else with him. (Followers will engage around ‘our’ project but will tend to disengage if it is just about ‘your’ project.)

It’s only when you, as a human being, have developed to the stage where you are more inclusive and collaborative, have a higher tolerance of others, and are not as focused on yourself – and your personal success – that you actually are capable of inspiring everybody else around you to contribute to what everyone will see as ‘our’ project.