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Unleashing the Magic in Organizations: Some New Rules for Leaders

By Kathleen D. Dannemiller, Mary Eggers, and Peter Norlin of Dannemiller Tyson Associates and Therese Fitzpatrick, Independent Consultant

Unleashing the Magic at Brio

In the fall of 2000, we received a call from Craig Brennan, a friend and wild-eyed silicon marketing genius, telling us that he had just become the CEO of Brio Technology in Santa Clara, California. Brio was in free fall. He asked if we could come and do our magic to help him engage his new organization on a winning path. Craig is a treasured friend and former student, who knows the work we do and who has developed a passion for and been involved in creating organizations that operate as whole systems. He appreciated the power of an interactive system capable of operating with one brain/one heart. In his previous positions, he often worked for companies that operated in the old command and control style. He knew he did not want that for Brio.

In March 2001, two of us met with a Brio Event Planning Team that was a microcosm of the whole organization. This group worked together to create a compelling purpose for the next change steps. Based on that purpose, Craig pulled together, for a three-day event, four hundred employees from different levels of the organizations and different geographies around the world to achieve the purpose and outcomes, which were:

"Carpe Diem! As the new generation of Brio, everyone will clearly understand & commit to our shared vision with renewed spirit & energy to become a world-class $1B company."

Desired Outcomes:

• Embrace the change!
  

• Each of us undehhhhhhhrstands our business - i.e., who are our customers, what we sell, and whose needs our products meet
  

• Brio's Vision and what is needed to achieve it are effectively communicated
  

• Renew individual and organization spirit…resulting in a performance-based learning culture
  

• We are all thinking globally, internally & externally
  

• Each employee knows what to do to contribute to Brio's success
  

• Employees understand what our company's organization looks like
  

• Commit to the values and actions (roadmap) needed to be a profitable $1B company
  

• We know how our jobs affect other employees' success & vice versa
  

• Feeling excited and ready to kick-butt!"

On the third day of the event, Craig and some of his leaders grew fearful that we would not achieve the purpose through the day's current plan. Craig proposed a significant change in the plan for the day. In our opinion, that change would have inadvertently sent a message of "command and control/leader knows best" to the entire group. This was contrary to the essence of Craig's beliefs, and certainly contrary to the essence of our beliefs. We confronted Craig, held up the mirror and said, "You don't want this. We know you don't." He said, "You are right. That's why I brought you here to help me " We returned to the original plan. .. with great results.

We achieved all the proposed, desired outcomes. The outcomes were magical, according to the participants. The organization shifted on its foundations as a result, for those who were there. It has only been three months so we are probably just at the end of Act I. But one of the things we know is that they will be winners in the future. Brio has become a group of winners, indeed.

Why The Magic At Brio?

If you're a leader facing the kind of challenges that Craig Brennan encountered as a new leader at Brio, then you're also faced with a choice at every moment about how to approach these challenges. These choices force us to confront our assumptions and values about how people change, how they create and sustain momentum to reach their best possible future, and what a leader must do to create conditions for organizational success.

"It was the best of times; it was the worst of times," as Charles Dickens said so long ago. Since this is always the case, no matter what era we're living in, what makes the difference between success and failure? The key is mindset-the way we think about things. And a leader's mindset is especially critical, because mindset drives behavior, and a leader's behavior creates the conditions for an organization's future. At the moment, most leaders find themselves pulled between two conflicting mindsets, one rooted in a long history of assumptions, dating back to the Industrial Revolution, about the value of command and control. Too often, in the last decade or so, we've seen "tough" leaders with command-and-control mindsets doom whole organizations to mediocrity, whether e-commerce "dot.coms" or old fashioned bureaucracies.

The other mindset-the one we saw Craig Brennan using at Brio-is based on a very different set of assumptions, and it drives a very different set of leadership behaviors. And because we've seen it with our own eyes, we also know that when a leader acts out this mindset, the organization comes alive. It thrives, it moves, it tackles complex demands and meets them, it identifies the kind of success it wants and achieves it. This leadership mindset is grounded in a radical shift in perspective about how living systems operate and about how human systems change and grow. As our understanding has expanded (aided with the wisdom in books such as Meg Wheatley's, Leadership and the New Science)1, we now see that this mindset suggests some new rules for leaders of organizations around the globe.

Because we now know that our organizational world is a living system with new rules for success, we also know that when leaders use these new rules, they unleash a special kind of magic and they change their own job descriptions. Here are three examples of some 'old' and 'new' leadership rules.

SOME NEW RULES FOR LEADERS

Old Rule #1: The leader's job is to know, and to serve as a final authority in important decisions.

New Rule: The leader's job (in the 21st Century) is to call people together whom we have typically kept apart, and to find ways to uncover and connect the collective wisdom of our people. When leaders follow this rule, we've seen that this shared wisdom emerges most effectively when people are invited to come together and create "one-brain, one heart." Here everyone in the organization, through accepting each others' views, comes to see that we all know the same thing ("one brain"), and we are all connected around the same yearnings and vision of a preferred future for the organization ("one heart").

Old Rule #2: The leader's job is to control-information, people, risk, the future. The effective leader is in charge of everything that's going on, both inside and outside the organization. The leader's job is to ensure that people in the organization obey the rules, and people in the organization look to the leader to keep them safe (e.g., "If I obey, then I'll have a job, and the company will survive).

New Rule: The leader's job is to ask questions and facilitate conversations at ALL levels of the organization. An organization can achieve its goals quickly and successfully only when people's energy is aligned and their commitment is focused, and we believe that this requires a leader to engage people at all levels of the organization in connected discussion. Under the old rule, in bureaucratic organizations people or teams are (unknowingly) often working at cross-purposes from each other and cross-purposes from their leader's plan for success. When this bifurcation occurs, it is a signal that our thinking is not "whole" - each of us needs to know what all of us know in order to be "whole"…and therefore, wise. In most organizations, people now ask, "How can I be part of a strong organizational team when we live in different countries, work in different time zones, operate at different levels of the organizational structure, and, literally, live in different worlds?" When a leader follows this new rule, and finds ways to get people knowing and talking about the same things, all together, all the time, they find creative ways to bring themselves into alignment.

Old Rule #3: The leader's job is to drive and monitor organization performance by focusing on what is going wrong, and punishing mistakes.

New Rule: The leader's job is to build and sustain high performance by noticing and appreciating when people do things right-especially when they act with courage, integrity, and accountability. Reinforcing courageous, right-minded action, especially when it turns out to be a mistake, is the only way to encourage people to take risks, and leaders who follow this rule typically build organizations with spirit and pride.

When leaders follow these rules, we've seen them guide their organizations successfully through turbulent times, buoyed by the collective optimism and courage of people who know that their wisdom and competence is valued. Unleashing this kind of magic in an organization requires, of course, that a leader demonstrate similar courage and commitment. At the core of this shift in leadership mindset is trust-trust in other people and trust in yourself. We've seen that if you are willing to trust others, you will survive that old Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times!" In fact, the curse transforms itself into a promise.

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DANNEMILLER TYSON ASSOCIATES:
is a virtual consulting company centered in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Dannemiller Tyson Associates specializes in rapid, significant and lasting organizational change. We work from a Whole-Scale® perspective often involving hundreds of people simultaneously in getting alignment on key issues. The results of this work often pervade the entire organization at all levels. You can contact us at www.dannemillertyson.com.

KATHLEEN D. DANNEMILLER (Emeritus)
Kathleen Dannemiller is the founding partner in Dannemiller Tyson Associates and co-inventor of Real Time Strategic Change and Real-Time Work Design® (now called Whole-Scale®). Kathie has been a passionate advocate of empowerment, systems theory and whole system change for more than 30 year s. Kathie has been a consultant, coach and mentor to countless leaders, consultants and organizations as they build a better future. She has been a political organizer at the national, state and local levels as well as a community organizer. Kathie is recognized worldwide for her ability to move entire organizations forward with speed, depth and spirit. Kathie is a member of the National Training Laboratory and the National Organization Development Network. To put it in her own words she helps organizations become "one brain and one heart - we need to bond, become one in what we know, which is the brain, and what we feel, which is the heart." She would also say that engraved on her soul are many of the teachings of Ron Lippitt, one of her mentors. One of those teachings is to figure out who needs to be in the room and what conversations need to take place. As easily as breathing in and breathing out she believes there is no conversation that is above or beneath anyone and that everyone needs to have a voice, a real voice in shaping their future. Her work comes from the heart and is grounded in the foundation theories of the field of OD.

MARY EGGERS
Mary Eggers is a designer/facilitator of the Whole-Scale® change process and of Developing Whole-Scale® Change Competencies workshops. What excites her most is the opportunity to work in partnership to tap the spirit of individuals and organizations. This happens by involving everyone, empowering them to participate in meaningful ways and giving them a voice in creating and implementing the organizations preferred future. Mary has been in the field of organization development since 1985 and has experience in healthcare, education, government, information technology, not for profits and manufacturing. She has an MS in Organization Development from the American University/National Training Laboratories. She is a member of the National Organization Development Network, the Chesapeake Bay Organization Development Network, Women in Technology and the Strategic Leadership Forum Washington DC Chapter.

PETER NORLIN
Peter Norlin, Dannemiller Tyson Associates, has 25 years of experience as both an internal and external consultant, focusing on the development and integration of leaders and leadership; partnerships, teamwork; and collaboration; and whole-system change.

THERESE FITZPATRICK
Therese Fitzpatrick is an independent organization consultant with 15 years legal and consulting experience in the East and Midwest, currently living in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Dannemiller Tyson Associates are authors of two new books: Whole-Scale Change: Unleashing the Magic in Organizations and Whole-Scale Change: The Toolkit, Berrrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. 2000.

The fifteen partners of DTA worked together to write these books. Using our own Whole Scale processes, we worked as a community, one brain and one heart, to bring our best wisdom to the content of these books.