“Adulthood is not an age, but a stage of knowledge of self.”
— John Fowles
From an early age, I knew that numbers and formulas was not my path to success. I knew, however, that I was good at observing, interpreting, and quickly understanding the unseen and unspoken exchanges between people. It was with those skills that I built the foundation of my career in organizational behavior. I learned key principles and theoretical frameworks and how to understand the research that supports the discovery of how people behave and under what conditions.
These different frameworks and research help guide all of us in understanding performance, motivation, leadership, and managerial skills and behaviors, contributors to trust and engagement, the path through conflicts, communication, and so much more.
I have loved every assessment I have ever taken, shared every framework that made sense of something ethereal, and internalized all this knowledge to help me understand why people do what they do or don’t do.
I have studied healthy behaviors and relationships as well as aberrant behaviors. I have worked on both sides and prefer to work in the workplace with solid, value-based leaders helping them to guide performance, well-being, and sustainable efforts.
I have always said, “We spend more time in our life at work than at any other activity, and more time with our co-workers than even with our families. So why can’t organization be temples to the good works of great people coming together?”In my more than thirty-years of being a practitioner — where all the theory comes alive — I have learned that it takes a consistent, forever effort to tend to the garden of organizational culture; to develop leaders, managers, and contributors; to build strategy and flex to the changing times; and that you are never finished.
The remarkable, high-performing organizations that I have had the privilege to work with understand that it requires a focus of 50% of their attention to the technical and 50% of their attention to the culture and competencies. I have always referred to this as the balance of the hard and soft sciences of organizational behavior.
I know. This is a long, meandering introduction to what I wanted to share. But I wanted to put it in context.
Every day I observe what’s happening in our world and how people and groups are responding. I tend to focus on ‘what’s working’ even though the daily newspaper that I choose to read tells me everything that is not working. I talk and listen. I read posts on various platforms and social media. I am made to laugh, cry, and sometimes rail at the actions that people are taking.
I have a hunch that you, too, are having the same experience.
One of my favorite assessments that I have given to my clients is a communication-style assessment that teaches the three ego states codified by Eric Berne. Theorist Berne, author of Games People Play, and the theory of Transactional Analysis observed that we operate and communicate from three ego states: Parent, Child, and Adult.
• The Parent Voice represents the power held by the parent and given judiciously to the child in an ‘I am OK and you’re not’ tension of power. The parental voice we learned growing up is the one our parents used, either benevolent or autocratic.
• The Child Voice we learned as we grew, we keep until we learn to let it go, which sometimes never happens in the aging process. That voice experiences the world with a smaller base of power and asserts that ‘You’re Ok and I am not.” The Parent / Child way of relating is our experience in the maturation process in family systems. And that was the way most organizations operated culturally in the 1900s.
We had hierarchy for control, rules, and polices to manage, and little autonomy or engagement. It was a ‘Do what I say, not what I do world of work.’ My entire career has been helping organizations to move on a continuum of learning how to let go of this way of relating — and the systems that support it — and moving toward being Adult in our ego states — recognizing that our workforce bring not just muscle but minds, hearts, and ideas to their work and working relationships.
• The Adult Voice is sometimes called the asking voice. It creates positive paths to learning. The Adult Voice asks questions of the listener in a tone that is respectful of the person as an equal adult. It requires the listener to evaluate, determine, and project paths toward positive results. It is deliberate and respectful. The speaker encourages the listener to arrive at logical conclusions and it encourages planning.
The leader and manager who is adult in their approach to relating and building performance systems that liberate the potential of the person will attract, retain, and create a high-performing team.
Why wouldn’t anyone want that for themselves and others?
Each of us operates from the three ego states and in situations that call out the different voices. I would observe that with the stress of the pandemic, of the wildly warm weather, of the cultural inequities bubbling to the surface, of the economic uncertainty, of the duration of the unknown, of political fractiousness, and so much more, that some people are crying out, “I am not OK.” And acting out “I am not OK;” that some are taking rigid, authoritative positions with rules and restrictions; while some are sharing information, promoting dialogue, and appealing to individual responsibility.
There is a lot swirling around us. What parts of your ego voice are speaking up?
I am observing people being angry about being told to wear a mask and social distance, too parental? I am reading on a neighborhood app someone I know calling out businesses for imperfect performance in adhering to masks and making their customers adhere, making me think of the school yard tattle-tale. I have witnessed helpfulness, gratitude, patience, panic, and melt-down. Is there a right way? Something most appropriate and constructive?
I also know that it is not helpful to judge. It dead-ends the learning.
So, I am trying to find my adult way to help others find a voice that is right for the moment and for the need.
One framework cannot be the answer for all of this complexity.
Adult to Adult ways of relating are healthier for creating contributing relations. But in a crisis maybe the Parental voice is needed? Do we need to be told what to do? Do we want to be told what to do? Count on that if you use your Parental voice you will light up a Child response: Tell me to wear a mask! I have the right to do whatever I chose! And the highly emotional dance begins.
This is where frameworks for leadership and strong interpersonal skills help us out.
I am a believer in the twelve competencies of Emotional Intelligence. It is with deep emotional intelligence that we will find our way through each day’s challenges. I love many leadership models but I always seem to go back to the Five Exemplary Behaviors of Leadership as researched by Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner in the frequently enhanced book The Leadership Challenge.
Twenty-five years ago and many thousands of interviews Kouzes and Posner found that Exemplary Leadership was the combination of:
• Inspiring a Shared Vision
• Challenging the Process
• Enabling Others to Act
• Modeling the Way
• Encouraging the Heart
Kouzes and Posner believe that leadership is a set of learnable, observable competencies that any individual can acquire. I believe that when an organization has an abundance of leadership capacity it can survive the good times and the bad.
Our ego states are popping out and creating disharmony. Our way through is to understand that Leadership is Situational (another great model by Ken Blanchard) and that you have to choose the right response for the situation. Combine that with good interpersonal skill (Emotional Intelligence) and the tenants of the Kouzes and Posner model for leadership — with an ample dose of Servant Leadership by Robert Greenleaf — and you have a recipe for making your way through the most challenging time of our generation wisely, conscientiously, and with good intention.
I was motivated to write this blog rather than try to reply to each and everyone one of the different posts on social media that I experienced as too Child when it seemed we needed our Adult selves to guide us through.
Thank you for supporting this verbal processing.
• I stand in service of your leadership and you seeking a wise path through this collapse and chaos.
• From what are you finding meaning?
• How are you staying centered and choosing your responses?
Leslie
“People reveal themselves through their actions.”
— Anne Brown