Humble Leadership: The Power of Relationships, Openness, and Trust [Second ed.] 1523005505, 9781523005505

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Humble Leadership

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THE HUMBLE LEADERSHIP SERIES • • • •

Humble Leadership Humble Consulting Humble Inquiry Helping

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Humble Leadership The Power of Relationships, Openness, and Trust SECOND EDITION

EDGAR H. SCHEIN   and PETER A. SCHEIN

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Humble Leadership, Second Edition Copyright © 2018 and 2023 by Edgar H. Schein and Peter A. Schein All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. 1333 Broadway, Suite 1000 Oakland, CA 94612-1921 Tel: (510) 817-2277 Fax: (510) 817-2278 bkconnection.com Ordering information for print editions Quantity sales. Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the “Special Sales Department” at the Berrett-Koehler address above. Individual sales. Berrett-Koehler publications are available through most bookstores. They can also be ordered directly from Berrett-Koehler: Tel: (800) 929-2929; Fax: (802) 864-7626; bkconnection.com Orders for college textbook/course adoption use. Please contact Berrett-Koehler: Tel: (800) 929-2929; Fax: (802) 864-7626. Distributed to the US trade and internationally by Penguin Random House Publisher Services. Berrett-Koehler and the BK logo are registered trademarks of Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. Second Edition Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Schein, Edgar H., author. | Schein, Peter A., author. Title: Humble leadership, second edition : the power of relationships, openness, and trust / Edgar H. Schein and Peter A. Schein. Description: Second Edition. | Oakland, CA : Berrett-Koehler Publishers, [2023] | Revised edition of the authors’ Humble leadership, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023003574 (print) | LCCN 2023003575 (ebook) | ISBN 9781523005505 (paperback) | ISBN 9781523005512 (pdf) | ISBN 9781523005529 (epub) | ISBN 9781523005536 (audio) Subjects: LCSH: Leadership. | Organizational behavior. | Trust. Classification: LCC HD57.7 .S3428 2023 (print) | LCC HD57.7 (ebook) | DDC 658.4/092—dc23/ eng/20230130 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023003574 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023003575 2023–1 Book production: BookMatters Cover design: Susan Malikowski, DesignLeaf Studio

To future generations. The stakes are even higher now. When we wrote the first edition, we knew enough to be very concerned about what was happening to planet Earth because of global warming. We have since seen so much more to be worried about. Leaders who view the existential challenge of protecting our delicate climate from catastrophic events deserve our dedication in the hope that Humble Leadership can help in their collective pursuit of a healthy planet for our grandchildren and their children.

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Contents Preface

ix

PART ONE

What Is the Essence of Humble Leadership? 1 A New Approach to Leadership 2 Building More Personal Relationships

1 3 13

PART TWO

Examples of Humble Leadership in Different Contexts

33

3 Humble Leadership in Creating and Building Organizations

35

4 Humble Leadership in Transforming Organizations

53

5 Group Dynamics in Humble Leadership

73

PART THREE

Culture and the Future of Humble Leadership 6 Culture Dynamics in Humble Leadership

87 89

7 Anticipating the Future of Humble Leadership

112

8 Humble Leadership Messages: An Allegory

125

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PART FOUR

Experiential Learning for Humble Leaders

133

9 Adopting the Humble Leadership Attitude

135

10 Behaviors and Group Skills for Humble Leadership

145

References

157

Acknowledgments

161

Index

165

About the Authors

171

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Preface Do you find yourself mired in individualistic, combative management chaos in which great leadership is typically reduced to the story of a “superstar” doing something extraordinary and heroic? Would it help to think of leadership not as the “7 Steps” you must take to lead, but as the energy that is shared among members of a group determined to accomplish something new and better? This book proposes a relational view of leadership, framing it as a process of learning, sharing, and directing new and better action within the dynamic interpersonal processes that increasingly characterize today’s organizations. Such leadership processes can occur at any level, in any team or workgroup, in any meeting, in tight or open networks, in co-located or widely dispersed work units, and across all kinds of cultural boundaries. Leadership can come from group members as often as from a designated or appointed leader. It can rotate unpredictably as the task of the group responds to rapid changes in markets and societies. In our view, leadership is always a relationship, and truly successful leadership thrives in a substrate of high openness and high trust. While this book focuses on a new model of leadership, it is equally a book about culture and group dynamics.

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About This Edition This second edition builds on the central premise of the original 2018 version, which is that innovation and growth depend on Level 2 relationships (see Chapter 2). The concept we call Humble Leadership nurtures relationships that are characterized by openness and trust, and it succeeds when these relationships ensure optimal exchange of information and ideas, from which new and better solutions can be set in motion. We broaden our notion of humility by highlighting the ways in which situational humility is critical to making the right decisions and avoiding errors. And we expand on the integral relationship between leadership and culture with a specific vocabulary so that humble leaders can move beyond “culture problems” by following specific change principles and implementing targeted change initiatives.

Who This Book Is For This book is for all managers and leaders who have the motivation, the scope, and the flexibility to create change in their organizations. And while Humble Leadership is greatly needed in our corporations, it is equally relevant to other sectors of society, such as medicine, the arts, political institutions, not-for-profits, sports teams, local community organizations, and so on. In fact, we often already see archetypes of our model of Humble Leadership in some of these contexts. This model is for leaders, but it is not just for those in leading roles. We assume leadership exists in all corners and levels of all organizations. We see leadership as a complex mosaic of relationships, not as a two-dimensional, ­top-down

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status in a hierarchy, nor as a set of unusual gifts or talents of “high-potential” individuals. Similarly, it should become clear that the image of an organization we pre­sent is that of an adaptive organism propelled by a cooperative “nervous system,” rather than an entity built on retrograde notions of the organization as a “well-oiled machine.” Suffice it to say, we wonder now, even more than when we wrote the first edition, why the machine was ever the right metaphor for a human system! Humble Leadership is more than a characterization of a role. It describes a collaborative relationship directed at doing something new and better, and its principles should be relevant not just to human resources and organization development leaders but equally to product managers, finance and operations leads, CFOs, board members, investors, doctors, lawyers, and others in the so-called helping professions. We hope to find readers from all personal and professional pursuits who can see the impact of designing optimal open, trusting, information-sharing relationships that improve outcomes by improving the way groups reanimate and re-energize static role-based organizational designs and by inspiring the participants in these groups to give their best ensemble performances.

What You Can Gain by Reading This Book Prescriptive leadership books—and there are many great ones to choose from—offer lists of requisite skills, success formulas, and desirable attributes that help you climb to the top, to invent the next big thing, to change the world. Our concern is that this focus on heroes and “disrupters,” even those with the right personal values and visions at the time, will go only so far in preparing

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any one of us for the work upheavals we face today and in the future. We are proposing again that we must re-frame the personal challenge of improving one’s leadership skills, turning it into a collective challenge of helping to improve our group’s performance. Consider this book as a way to take the pressure off; you do not have to do it all, and you cannot do it alone. Instead of heading into work wondering how you can individually solve some problem, what if you went to work committed to sorting it out with a partner, a group, a large or small work team? It’s not up to you alone to change the world. It is up to you to help create a learning environment in which you and your group can cooperate in identifying problems and then figuring out processes to solve those problems. We hope this book gives you some new ways to ask questions, some new ways to learn, and some stimulating examples of the ways in which Humble Leadership has helped others create change and growth.

How This Book Is Organized In Chapters 1 and 2 we describe our vision of Humble Leadership and the relationship theory that serves as its foundation. We share some stories in Chapters 3 and 4, while Chapter 5 focuses on group dynamics. Chapter 6 focuses on culture, and here we present vocabulary with which humble leaders might break down and act upon difficult “culture problems” in their organizations. In Chapter 7 we discuss the role of Humble Leadership in a future in which how we communicate and act globally is evolving before our eyes. In Chapter 8 we pull things together by way of an allegory about organizational growth and the forces of bureaucratization that Humble Leadership must

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resist. Finally, Chapters 9 and 10 present a series of next steps for readers: exercises to help individuals and groups gain insight and be mindful about how Humble Leadership can help us deal with volatility, complexity, and ambiguity in a very uncertain world. Peter A. Schein and Edgar H. Schein Palo Alto, California Postscript: This work was completed by Ed and Peter in December 2022. Ed passed away at age 94 in late January 2023 after a very productive life of listening, learning, writing, coaching, and helping.

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PA R T ONE

What Is the Essence of Humble Leadership? In the next two chapters, we define leadership (as contrasted with management and administration), and we explain how Humble Leadership is fundamentally different from and yet complementary to other conceptions of leadership. More specifically, we will discuss why we believe that situational humility and the formation of Level 2 relationships—relationships that acknowledge the whole person—is the essence of Humble Leadership.

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A New Approach to Leadership Leaders today who hope to create breakthrough i­nnovations and tackle ever more complex global challenges must remain open to new concepts and models of leadership. It is reasonable and prudent to expect even more volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA) in the economic, political, and, perhaps most of all, environmental crises that lie ahead. Much of this is the inevitable result of the rapid evolution of technology, the evermore connectedness of all of us around the globe, and the imminent scarcity of the resources that organizations rely on to continue innovating and growing. Many forms and styles of leadership are necessary to cope in a way that balances opportunity, scarcity, pace, and propriety. We cannot overstate the importance of adaptiveness and resilience. We endeavor to demonstrate in this book that a cornerstone of twenty-first-century leadership is Humble Leadership.

Humble Leadership Is a Practice in All Forms of Leadership Before we address this bold claim, we should step back and define some terms as we see them. Humility and leadership are refined concepts; sharing a cut diamond’s essence, they are multifaceted and born of pressure and 3

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time. As we have noted in previous works, humility is not typically associated with leadership (Schein & Schein, 2018, 2021). Let’s explore why we see a critical link between the two. We begin with a simple definition of leadership in order to differentiate it from management, administration, stewardship, and various other forms of directing human endeavors.

Leadership Is the Creation and Implementation of Something New and Better With the above definition in mind, how does Humble Leadership fit in the lexicons of management, administration, governance, and modern refinements of leadership? Consider Humble Leadership as a fundamental process that underlies and can complement various notions of leadership described as “servant leadership” or as “adaptive,” “boundary-spanning,” “learning,” “inclusive,” “transactional,” “transformative,” and so on. These descriptions of leadership emphasize different traits of leaders, while Humble Leadership emphasizes the practice of how any of these traits can help drive new and better actions (Ernst & Chrobot-Mason, 2011; Ferdman et al., 2021; Greenleaf, 1977; Heifetz, 1994; Kouzes & Posner, 2016). The many theories of the personality of the ideal leader and the many arguments for what the ideal leadership style should be are all valid in particular situations and for particular purposes. Whether a person is a “servant leader,” a “real” or an “adaptive” or an “inclusive” leader, or even a “charismatic” or “iconoclastic” leader, the practice of Humble Leadership can help reinforce those ideal traits and move that leader forward toward desired goals. Leadership in general, when defined as focusing a team

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on the pursuit of something new and better, is also distinct from the concepts of efficient management or stewardship, both of which are oriented toward maximizing or optimizing the best of the present practice. Good management, stewardship, and governance never cease to be needed, yet Humble Leadership, in seeking something new and better, operates at the horizon beyond operational efficiency and toward change and innovation. Command-and-control or participative management, or even modern qualityimprovement schemes (e.g., Six Sigma), are all relevant in some situations and for some purposes, but they are distinct from transformational leadership practices because they are biased toward a more efficient status quo rather than the creation of something new and better.

Efficiency and Effectiveness in a Socio-Technical System Since at least the middle of last century, organizations have been aptly labeled socio-technical systems. It is a simple truth that organizations balance the technical and the social in the accomplishment of their core tasks, their reasons for existing in the first place. The two cannot be separated in human systems, whether political, social, artistic, religious, nonprofit, or economic, but they are most clearly exemplified in business organizations. Generally speaking, all managers, from frontline to senior executives, tend to strike a balance in their daily work between the technical and the social, between metrics and meanings, between focusing on the key performance indicators (KPIs) and engaging in open dialogue with colleagues. The critical question is whether we have the balance right. Are we on the best trajectory when we distribute our workload between, on the one hand, tech-

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nical efforts (such as crunching the numbers, mining big data for new insights, or creating measurable objectives and incentives) and, on the other hand, social and collaborative efforts, which aim to get the context right by fixing the processes in our workgroups regardless of the content of the task? The tendency to lean toward managing the numbers is completely understandable, as information is so readily available from both internal data sources and the vast information stores on the internet writ large. It is also very easy to be seduced by the content of our work and be drawn to the clean and unambiguous tasks that can be managed by metrics. Human social interactions, by contrast, are more complicated and can seem messy compared to the job of finetuning a technical system for technical efficiency. One potential pitfall, however, is that too much time spent on fine-tuning for technical efficiency, even if it is fixing what is known to need fixing, may leave insufficient time for tapping into issues that may not be known to the person in charge but may well be known by others “in the room.” Leaders can miss vital process information by paying too much attention to technical fixes rather than looking and listening for social context signals that are outside of the scope of the technical fix. The question is whether anything is missed by not investing in the collaborative process—a process that inevitably introduces new ideas, some of which may be inconsistent with certain tasks and may suggest improvements for how technical tasks could be handled in the future. Does a manager have time to think about what is next when the demands of current objectives are more than enough to fill the day or even the fiscal year? A more thorough exploration of this trade-off has been described as “the innovator’s

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dilemma” (Christensen, 1997). For our purposes, we generally need to consider what can be sacrificed in the long run when too much emphasis is placed on the known tasks and managing the technical “dials” needed to hit only near-term goals. That said, Humble Leadership does not mean diminished emphasis on technical efficiency. It does, however, suggest a re-balancing of intentions—moving beyond singular concern for “hitting the numbers”—particularly when colleagues and stakeholders are aware that other driving factors are at play that may not be captured in the metrics. Such factors may include shifts in demand and supply that render certain metrics no longer as relevant; data from “rearview mirror” metrics; and divisiveness and deception between team members competing for scarce resources in day-to-day operations. Humble Leadership’s emphasis on finding new and better solutions and processes opens the door to forward thinking, allowing for fast adaptations and innovations. Resetting norms around the benefits of sharing insights, speculations, other perspectives, even wild ideas, to stimulate new and better thinking will help small groups, large teams, and entire companies increase their growth. Humble Leadership can help teams see, feel, and conceptualize opportunities that are outside of the defined metrics, moving us beyond known knowns and toward unknown unknowns. One rule of thumb is to consider allocating 20 to 25 percent of work effort away from managing metrics and toward collaborative information sharing focused on co-creating “new and better” using information shared across levels in an organization. Humble Leadership is foundational to getting the most out of this 20 to 25 percent of innovationoriented work effort.

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Humble Leadership is also about “open systems” thinking. Suppose those shifts in demand and supply are triggered by a merger that alters the supply chain, or maybe a customer is forced to reduce operating expenses by 50 percent. Or suppose “quiet quitting” (a term for lowered productivity and/or attrition coined during the COVID-19 pandemic) completely changes the composition of teams that are critical to completing a business plan. These kinds of dramatic and chaotic shifts demand open systems thinking. If management of closed systems means adjusting the “dials” on the management dashboard, Humble Leadership based on open systems advocates looking for new dials, new workflows, new people, new tools and partners— whatever creative ideas may be needed to address both existing and unforeseen challenges.

Humility in Practice: Situational Humility A very specific sense of the word humility is at the core of Humble Leadership. Situational humility is a developed skill characterized by the openness to see and understand all the elements of a situation by: 1. accepting uncertainty, while remaining curious to find out what is really going on, 2. being open, intentionally and mindfully, to what others may know or observe, and 3. recognizing when unconscious biases can distort perceptions and trigger emotional responses. Today’s leadership challenges require that we observe, absorb, and decipher a dramatically expanded amount of

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information, and that we accept that we cannot do this alone. Some of the information required to make the best decisions is in the minds of direct reports, colleagues, or other people in related departments, for whom there may be no endowed authority or responsibility. Humble leaders must be open to them and their ideas. Any assumptions you make about what is new and better will be incomplete until you can assimilate, from as many sources as possible, as much as you can about the challenge or opportunity at hand. In hospital management, do you consult only with the most senior MD, or might you also consider asking techs and custodial staff? It goes without saying that these staff too have keen observational abilities. You may have already learned to embrace situational humility, recognizing from the outset how critical it is to have the most complete information with which to respond to challenges. If you have not yet learned the hard way what happens when you make decisions based on incomplete information, consider embracing situational humility to be a primary step toward becoming a humble leader. This situational humility principle applies no matter where you are in a hierarchy or what your job description defines as your areas of responsibility. You may find yourself in the situation of seeing a problem with more clarity than those with more formal authority, if for no other reason than that accepting your situational humility opened your mind to information overlooked by others. Developing the skills to clarify and share your insight, and then assimilating what others know can help you influence change (toward something new and better), and this is the practice of Humble Leadership.

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The Role of Culture in Leadership Culture can mean many different things. One helpful definition is simply “accumulated shared learning.” The culture of any small team, organization, or even a whole society can be thought of as the sum of what that group has learned and that it then shares with newer or younger members of the organization. When a visionary individual/entrepreneur/founder creates a team to produce something new and better, such as a product or service or a new set of processes or methods, the team learns together how to be productive, and that learning sediments and evolves as integral to their culture. A group builds on a founder’s original ideas and, becoming a team, they co-create new and better practices that become deep elements of their culture. That said, sometimes the development of a group’s culture can evolve away from openness and innovation and toward restrictive ideas about how things should be done (conventions), including the idea of what a leader should be and do. Every society and every organization that has had a success in the past will have ideas and norms of what leadership should be. With this is mind, Humble Leadership considers not only how the new and better may fit into the existing culture but how the Humble Leadership style might fit or conflict with existing conventions of what a leader should be and do. As leaders contemplate the new and better, they may find some people who regard the proposed changes positively, while others see the changes as threats that could challenge conventions they are used to and want to perpetuate. Seeing, hearing, and understanding culture—in terms of

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both structures (conventions) and practices—is an existential concern of Humble Leadership. Different cultures necessarily create different forms of leadership because they face different opportunities and challenges. Still, it is the basic argument of this book that no leadership styles or personalities will be successful unless a leader, whether in a flat global organization or a deep hierarchical organization, and at whatever stage of corporate evolution, accepts that other team members must be involved in decision-making. A leader alone will not be able to sufficiently define what is new and what could be better in a challenging situation or uncertain cultural context. Both situational humility and an openness to co-discovery of what will be new and better, and especially how it might be implemented, require the leader to understand not only the culture that exists now but also how that culture might aid or hinder implementing what is deemed new and better. Any organization of two or more individuals is an amalgamation of cultures (shared accumulated learning), the substrate onto which a leader proposes something new and better. Two important dimensions of culture in practice that we refer to throughout this book are technical culture (strategy, mission, design) and social culture (relationships and communication patterns). To understand these technical and social layers, individuals must look to both the past and the future through the relationships that develop in their teams. A leader who understands these relationships and existing structures will have a better understanding of the impacts that the proposed new and better ideas may have on their work intentions and practices. Relationship building and information gathering (i.e., context and ­content)

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require leaders of all types and levels to embrace what they do not know and to find richer understanding through openness and trust of those around them.

Summary We propose that Humble Leadership is a necessary foundational substrate to all variants or “brands” of leadership in today’s volatile, unpredictable, complex, and ambiguous world. Effective leadership behavior requires situational humility because the information needed to make effective decisions is likely to be widely distributed among members of the team. Humble Leadership will therefore require the creation of personal relationships that will make others feel safe enough to be open and trusting with their leaders and with the other members of the team that is striving to create something new and better.

Discussion Questions ■

Either individually or in a small group, think about what the word leadership means to you. Identify several individuals whom you consider to be leaders, and think about what they have done that warrants that designation. How does what you have thought about fit with our definition?

■

Why do you think situational humility is such an important attribute of Humble Leadership?

■

Why is building relationships essential to effective Humble Leadership?

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T WO

Building More Personal Relationships We ended Chapter 1 with the assertion that in today’s volatile world it is not possible to fully manage a situation all by yourself, because even with maximum situational humility, much of the information you require must come from others who hold the necessary keys or puzzle pieces. Leaders need to build personal relationships that will make others feel psychologically safe enough to share their information and insight, in order that they might (1) help refine and clarify what will be new and better and (2) help ensure that the team’s plans can be implemented. Rather than approaching a situation girded with only the data you are already comfortable with, it is important to embrace the fact that you do not know everything you need to know, as this is the first step toward not just finding new insights but also allowing others to share with you what they know about how to unlock and co-create new ideas and to uncover hidden traps that might otherwise doom your initiative.

What Is a Relationship? A relationship is a set of mutual expectations between people, in which future behavior is based on past interactions.

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We have a relationship when we can anticipate the other’s behavior to some degree. When we say we have a “good relationship,” we mean that we feel a certain level of confidence in being able to anticipate how the other person will react. Further, in a good relationship with another person, we share confidence that both of us are working toward a goal that we have agreed upon either explicitly or implicitly. That feeling of expectation is another way of describing interpersonal trust. We “know” what to expect of each other, and our level of trust reflects the degree to which our behavior toward each other is consistently and intentionally trustworthy. Generally, there is symmetry in mutual expectations. If, however, I trust you, but you don’t trust me, our relationship is uneven. If I can anticipate your behavior but you cannot anticipate mine, then a relationship has not yet fully formed. If I love you but you don’t love me, we may still have a formal transactional relationship, but it is asymmetrical and unstable, and we can’t predict with confidence whether it will progress or end.

Levels of Relationship We need to move beyond the common assertion that we have only “good” or “bad” relationships with each other. Instead, let us consider more descriptive categories under the heading Levels of Relationship (Schein, E. H., 2016; Schein & Schein, 2017, 2019, 2021). All societies prescribe different levels of relationship and teach us how much we can trust and be open with each other within each level. The degree to which I can trust you, and the degree to which you will be open with me and will respect what I tell you, is taught and learned in our culture by the roles we play in our daily

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Exhibit 2.1.  The Four Basic Levels of Relationship Level Minus 1

Negative relationships: characterized by domination, coercion, and impersonal control based on unequal distribution of power (such as a guard and a prison inmate)

Level 1

Transactional relationships: involving role- and rule-based interactions, as seen in service and retail jobs, and in most forms of “professional” helping relationships

Level 2

Whole-person relationships: built on trust and personization, as seen in friendships and in effective, collaborative teams

Level 3

Intimate relationships: characterized by emotionally close connections, in which the participants share total mutual commitment (such as lovers or a married couple)

interactions (both personally and as part of workflows). Implicit in those roles is the guidance of how open and how trusting we are supposed to be. If we ask a close friend for guidance, we expect a truthful response. If we are buying a used car from a salesperson, we may expect a less open and truthful conversation. Here is a rough breakdown of the four basic Levels of Relationship and the features that define them (Exhibit 2.1). L E V E L M IN U S 1: N E G AT I V E R E L AT I O N S H I P S

The lowest level of relationship pertains primarily to  the situations in which people do not treat each other as equals, as might be the case between a prison guard and prisoners or a spiteful caretaker and their patients; in these

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s­ cenarios, one person has more power over the other and the relationship is unbalanced. In the organizational world, we might not expect to find such blatant exploitation or abject dominance, but we see it commonly in sweatshops that coerce hourly wage earners, and in the attitudes of managers who view their employees as merely hired hands, disposable resources, rather than as human beings. Where relationships at Level Minus 1 are allowed, employees may characterize their work situation as “inhumane,” and they may tolerate it only because they feel they have no choice, as with, for example, undocumented immigrants who continue to work for low wages, long hours, and in unsafe conditions because if they complain, their employers will report them to the authorities for deportation (Grabell, 2017). Often, Level Minus 1 relationships are so negative as to be untenable, but there are also neutral forms of Level Minus 1, meaning they are moving toward neither termination nor improvement. Such relationships may be stagnant because there is little expectation that things will change, or because both parties have more to gain by making the best of the imbalance of power, or because there is an awareness that the negative relationship is only temporary. When there is a shared understanding that the unequal power situation is bounded, and not interminable, Level Minus 1 relationships may also have a constructive function. The clearest examples are the indoctrination process of military basic training and/or boot camp and the first years of rigorous academic/professional training, such as in medical school. In the first situation, a newly enlisted soldier shares with their domineering drill sergeant the expectation that the imbalance of power is part of the process of indoctrination that the lowest-rung members in the

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large organization must endure to have their will “broken,” even if quite brutally, because that is what creates alignment, bonding, and simpatico connections down the road. The shared trauma of getting through the process together brings people closer in a unique way. A US Army two-star general told us that, during military training, “Our guys go from Level Minus 1 to Level 4.” We chuckled at this because the model we propose only goes to Level 3, but the point was well taken nonetheless: if Level Minus 1 is part of the development process, for both the organization and the individual, it is not “negative” in that context because it is viewed as necessary. We believe the same might be said of the power and workload imbalance that senior medical faculty impose on first-year medical students and sometimes even on residents. It’s tough, and it might feel unfair and inhumane, and yet it may well be seen by all, over time, as a positive part of the training system. Systems evolve nonetheless, and as new emphasis is placed on the wellness of both patients and their doctors, we may reevaluate the extent to which these exploitative Level Minus 1 relationships are helpful in the healthcare system as a whole. L E V E L 1: T R A N S A C T I O N A L R E L AT I O N S H I P S

As members of civilized society, we expect, at the minimum, to acknowledge each other as fellow human beings. We expect others to notice our presence even if we don’t “know” each other except in our assigned jobs or roles. Level 1 relationships are accepted to be dispassionate or distant, except when something happens that arouses anxiety or anger, such as being bumped into, threatened, or in some other way “disrespected.” Otherwise, Level 1

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i­nteractions are highly routinized exchanges of give-andtake based on mutual expectations and low levels of personal investment. I give you something, you say thank you; you ask me a question, I feel obligated to answer. These interactions are so automatic that we tend to notice them only when the system breaks down, as when someone is not civil, or when someone gets “too personal.” Level 1 relationships cover a wide range of encounters, including how we deal with strangers or casual acquaintances; how we deal with managers, peers, and direct reports at work; and how we manage the (sometimes very personal) service connections we have with doctors, lawyers, and other experts upon whom we rely. What distinguishes these routine relationships is that the link is between two roles, rather than two people. This dynamic plays out when we go to a hospital or clinic and are treated by a different doctor every time, even for the same complaint, or when, at work, we may be assigned a new boss after a reorganization. In these types of exchanges, we may be personally uncomfortable about seeing different people in the same role, but society tells us it should be acceptable because the persons in the roles are assumed to have equivalent competence. While we still need to have a certain degree of trust and to maintain a polite level of openness in conversation, we do not feel the need to “know” each other beyond how we are defined by our particular role or status. Many of our work relationships occur at Level 1 because those interactions are organized bureaucratically—a way of helping us deal with them at scale. “Professionally distant” is, conventionally, how we are supposed to interact with each other in these contexts. And yet this limitation is often the source of our dissatisfaction with ­bureaucracies—

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that is, we feel disengaged at work. Generally, we don’t like being treated impersonally. Nor do we like it when our managers or leaders put on a show of being personal, especially when we sense they are only doing it because research says that collegiality is desirable and that getting employees involved or engaged is important to the bottom line. Humans at work have a pretty good sense for authenticity, sincerity, and consistency, and an insincere show of collegiality often backfires and creates greater distance and less trust. The Limitations of Role-Related Level 1 Transactions Even with the psychological distance that we experience with strangers, some level of trust and openness is expected. Most of us have internalized our cultural norms of civility, good manners, and tact that make social activities and exchanges possible. We anticipate certain things from each other when we engage in transactional service encounters and role-related work transactions that we call “professional.” Under normal conditions, we expect to tell each other the truth, but we have also learned that if we think telling the truth will be hurtful to the other person or will put one of us at a disadvantage, it is acceptable to withhold information to avoid harm. And in other circumstances, we may not expect to receive all relevant information if it does not benefit the other party to be completely forthcoming. In a sales relationship, for example, we expect a certain amount of exaggeration and spinning, and we may find ourselves intrinsically on guard, hence we endorse the caveat emptor sentiment: buyer beware. Level 1 relationships assume a degree of distance, whether social or professional. The concept of professional

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distance is perhaps best in evidence in doctor-patient relationships, where the doctor is a specialist who is expected to know more than the patient. This legitimizes the expert’s asking the client all kinds of personal questions, while it would not be acceptable for the patient to ask such questions of the doctor in return. The relationship is unbalanced for good reason. It is common for direct reports not to tell a manager all of the troubles they are having when implementing what management has requested. If asked directly how things are going, an employee may find it more comfortable to respond with a bit of obfuscation, saying, “Fine, no problems, everything is under control,” even when it is not. An employee may not want to be “the messenger who is shot,” and even further, they may lie that things are okay to help the boss “save face.” Direct reports who have learned that their manager does not much care for hearing what is not going well have very little reason to volunteer bad news and risk repercussions from above. Consider this example: an orthopedic surgeon who is doing a straightforward operation to fix a broken bone can probably depend on the anesthesiologist, the OR nurse, and other members of the team to provide reliable information as the operation proceeds. We have heard doctors assert that it is the “professional responsibility” of the team members to speak up. Unfortunately, we have also heard many younger doctors and nurses admit that they did not feel psychologically safe enough speak up to the senior surgeon if they saw something awry or amiss. There is also a much darker side to Level 1: active subterfuge or willful deception. In certain situations, in silos or even in divisions of large organizations, Level 1 transactional relationships can be negative when there is a “zero-

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sum game” assumption at play. If I believe my group, team, silo, or division can only win when your group loses, I may feel incentivized not only to withhold what I know but even to actively mislead or deceive you. This is a behavioral byproduct of short-term thinking, scarce resources, tight budgets, and, typically, quarterly performance-assessment regimes, which are common in contemporary western business. Simply put, people working under these conditions may have more to gain by maintaining professional distance, concealing information, and, if pressed, misleading others to gain short-term advantage. While such “cut-throat” behavior is destructive if not sociopathic, the good news is that such deviance is a pretty visible form of Level 1 and, because it does not often result in long-term benefit to the organization or the deceiver, it is usually identified and dealt with by effective management, whether on the front lines or in the boardroom. L E V E L 2: W H O L E - P E R S O N R E L AT I O N S H I P S

The paradox of Level 2 is that we know how to function at this level with friends and family but often do not choose to do so at work, because we find it uncomfortable or not rewarding. Yet, the more complex the work, the more we can fail to do it effectively unless Level 2 relationships are achieved. We refer to “psychologically safe” relationships as personized because psychological safety develops when those involved accept the whole person with whom they are building the relationship. This is very different from personalization, which may feel real but ultimately not be authentic and therefore may not offer sustained psychological safety. By contrast, a personized relationship is one in

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which the parties know each other well enough to have built an open, trusting, collaborative connection with each other. This kind of relationship is deeper than the friendly but arms-length transactional interactions that are typical in organizations in which maintaining professional distance is dependent on thinking of people not as people but as roles. Moving beyond this to build personized relationships inevitably involves some new behaviors, some of which run counter to what we have been trained to believe about “appropriate behavior” in our occupations and organizations. But does personizing mean that we must “let our hair down,” get really close with each other, get all “touchyfeely” and “kumbaya,” and become intimate friends with each other rather than just colleagues? No, it does not. In a personized relationship, we do not need to stray from norms of propriety when it comes to that which is truly private. Instead, we emphasize getting to know each other well enough to work well together in an open and trusting manner. We need to trust each other, and for this we need to know who our colleagues are and how they work, but we do not need to know private information. The essence of Level 2 is that the people involved, whether managers, employees, peers, clients, patients, or partners, move from being seen as entities performing roles—just partial or undifferentiated contributors who must be kept professionally distant—to being seen as whole people with whom we can develop personal relationships around shared goals and experiences. Level 2 can cover many forms of friendship and close acquaintanceship, but for the purpose of understanding our concept of Humble Leadership, let us focus on Level 2 relationships at work. Within this context, we propose that managers, doctors,

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lawyers, and other helping professionals can begin to build better relationships with their direct reports, patients, and clients from the very first contact. By opening the door to personization at the outset, both parties can begin to treat each other as whole persons rather than as roles. They can begin to see each other. This can happen very rapidly if we choose to empathically inquire about something personal in the other person’s life and then reveal something personal about ourselves. For example, an employee may notice a photo of a manager in foul-weather gear and ask, “Are you sailing in that picture?” or notice a family portrait and ask, “Is this your family?” Immediately, they have invited a more personal connection. During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when many workers were conducting business from home via videoconferencing, we saw this happen spontaneously. We often could not help but reveal things about our personal lives when our personal lives were happening on screen in the background. We experienced and heard of many wonderful moments when people felt safe enough to reveal and inquire about personal details that would not have come up in, say, a generic conference room around a rectangular table. The irony is that personizing does not have to happen in person and slowly over an extended period of time but can happen very rapidly and naturally over videoconferencing. To our way of thinking, this is a very real silver lining of the dramatic work-style shift most of us had to adapt to in spring 2020. When our COVID anxiety was at its highest and our usual professional guards were down, we found comfort and safety in personizing each other in ways that might not have previously seemed possible, especially via virtual communication. We have recently learned of a consultant who works to

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connect teams dealing with the adaptation and regeneration of our air, water, and soil resources. In her role as facilitator, she uses internet collaboration and videoconferencing tools to help teams from around the world build Level 2 relationships and work toward a common goal. She is able to do most of this work from her home in California and considers the building of these international Level 2 relationships to be not just effective business management but also an essential tool in helping slow down global warming while also teaching people to adapt to climate change. Moving our work relationships to Level 2 means expressing, in actions and words, “I want to get to know you better so that we can trust each other and get our jobs done better.” Level 2 doesn’t mean we need to become close friends and learn all about each other’s private lives, but it does mean we must learn to be open and honest when it comes to work issues. Compared to Level 1, this kind of relationship implies a deeper level of trust and openness in terms of (1) making and honoring commitments and promises to each other, (2) agreeing to not undermine each other or sabotage what we have agreed to do, and (3) agreeing not to lie to each other or withhold information relevant to our collective task. We can know each other well enough at work to trust each other and get the job done without necessarily becoming buddies or doing things together outside of work. Relationships are developed and negotiated through many interactions in which personizing efforts are made and responded to and then either succeed or fail. In the example in which an employee asks a manager about sailing, the manager may respond either enthusiastically or dismissively to the question, thereby sending a signal about their willingness to personize. In this way, Level 2 relationships

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can be built gradually through small experiments in openness that reveal to each party what the limits of comfort are and where there is a threat of going too far into private matters. As Amy Edmondson (2012) has pointed out in her influential work on “teaming,” learning together is one of the best ways employees and their managers can get to know each other, because in that context they can give each other direct feedback, including suggestions on how the work could be done better. This does not necessarily mean that they become friends, just that they know each other’s whole person in the context of getting the job done; they get to know accurately each other’s skill sets and those aspects of personality that bear on the tasks at hand. Edmonson provides a potent example in her study of surgical teams trying a new and difficult operation (Edmondson et al., 2001). The study found that the teams who abandoned the task as being “too complicated” relied on individual professional skill, whereas the teams who were able to successfully use the new procedures were more collaborative in nature. This second set of teams had first been assembled through a volunteering process, and then together with the cardiac surgeon they made a joint decision to engage in a period of mutual learning, which led to increased trust and openness. There is a great deal of emphasis these days on “engaging” employees, which includes giving them time for personal projects and/or rewarding their talents more systematically. Relevant to this discussion is the fact that one can only engage a person, not a role. The manager who is concerned about employee engagement, involvement, and empowerment might thus consider focusing on fostering Level 2 relationships first. In other words, it may not be that

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lack of “engagement” is the problem but rather that people do not like to be roles transacting with other roles at work; they also like to be people engaging with other people. The level of a work relationship should ultimately reflect the nature of the work to be done. There will continue to be types of work for which Level 1 transactional relationships will suffice to provide requisite efficiency, but we have found that the more the work requires collaboration, open communication, and trust in each other’s commitment, the more it may require Level 2 personized relationships. The challenge here is that a Level 1 relationship does not become a Level 2 relationship just because someone decides it; declaring, “There will be more openness and trust” will not make it happen. Personizing takes intention and effort. Doing the work of evolving management norms from Level 1 to Level 2 is the defining task of Humble Leadership. L E V E L 3: I N T I M AT E R E L AT I O N S H IP S

Level 3 relationships can be described as “intimate” or “close” friendships that go beyond Level 2’s interest in the whole person as relevant to a specific task. Level 3 relationships are more emotionally charged, and while Level 2 implies supporting each other and avoiding harm, Level 3 implies actively seeking ways of helping and enhancing each other through compassion and care (often defined as “suffering with each other”). We deepen our relationships through successive cycles of revealing more and more of our personal, even private feelings, reactions, and observations, and we calibrate others’ levels of acceptance of what we are revealing by their reciprocation with their own revelations. Successive levels

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of revelation, acceptance, and reciprocation ultimately lead to a level of intimacy in which all parties are comfortable with each other. What this level looks like will vary with the situation and the personalities involved, and in most work relationships, it also varies with the task. It is generally assumed that we want to avoid Level 3 relationships in organizational life because it can start to look like fraternization, nepotism, and inappropriate favoritism, each of which is considered, at best, to be an impediment to getting work done, if not outright corruption. Office romances are likewise generally considered inappropriate, especially when no attempt is made to conceal the intimacy. In this same vein, gifts and payoffs are not considered legitimate incentives to get things done, as they might bring up questions surrounding fairness, something that can then quite directly impact productivity levels. These and other norms of appropriate and inappropriate exchange apply in some degree to all work relationships. The distinction between Level 2 and Level 3 is essentially a matter of degrees, and the boundary may vary as a function of the task. This can be tricky in a work setting: revealing something intimate about ourselves or asking personal questions of each other is always a test by which we hope to learn what level of intimacy feels comfortable and is relevant to getting the work done, but we often don’t know beforehand whether they will be well received or considered offensive or intrusive. Over the past few years, we have observed US work culture exploring this boundary, as indicated by more frequent use of the colloquial “TMI” (too much information), a signal that the level of personal information shared has crossed the threshold of appropriateness. For some of us, personal questions, responses, and revelations are parts of

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an easy, natural process; for others, they are awkward. The issue is how to bridge that gap and legitimize the sharing of personal information in the workplace, even if it feels difficult or untoward, when doing so is relevant to the task and important to getting the work done safely and completely. The boundaries between Level 2 and Level 3 relationships are situational and dynamic. At work especially, we operate with implicit norms and limits for openness and intimacy, and each of us builds up a personal sense of what is private, to be shared only with close friends and family members. Yet, what we choose to reveal is always a decision based on context. There are some outlying tasks and situations, such as those involving high-performance teams, where we might assume that Level 1 professionalism is the norm but where, in fact, success demands relationships much more akin to Level 3. In these cases, successful completion of the mission requires a high level of intimate knowledge of how each person works—whether that’s an extreme form of “finishing the other person’s sentences” such that team members can anticipate the other’s physical moves while performing a task, or an almost extrasensory or telepathic cooperation based on, at the risk of introducing yet another specialized term, super-empathy. Even if a situation doesn’t require Level 3 intimacy, we should here recognize a Level 2.5, which goes beyond Level 2’s openness and trust and includes some degree of Level 3’s compassion and intense commitment. In defining these levels, we are not asserting that the boundaries are completely clear or that the responses of others are always predictable. Part of building the Level 2 relationship is to mutually discover the boundaries of personization as each party calibrates how the other responds to a change in degree of openness and finds the

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level of comfort where both trust each other and can count on each other to be persistently open and truthful. We need to underscore this last point: Level 2 does not require being nice or getting to like each other, though that may be an incidental benefit or may make it easier to achieve the goal. In workgroups, the point of Level 2 is to provide each member psychological safety such that they feel comfortable opening bi-directional communication, building trust, and thereby accomplishing the task more successfully.

Sentiments as Indicators of Relationship Level The following chart provides one more view of the four relationship levels, this one describing the sentiment that can best characterize the attitude most strongly associated with each relationship level (Exhibit 2.2). At Level Minus 1, antipathy means that the dominant party may actively seek to harm the dominated party in order to reinforce the unequal relationship. At Level 1, apathy means indifference to the well-being of the other side. (Because a predominant characteristic of transactional relationships is self-interest—“I know what I want and what I am entitled to”—the relationship does not concern itself with how one person’s actions may affect another, whether for better or for worse.) At Level 2, empathy for the wellbeing of the other person is central to the process of personization. And at Level 3, compassion, as shown through either personal or professional intimacy, connects both the interests and the emotions of individuals or groups. We introduce these sentiments as another reference check on the layers model, and most importantly as a way to “gut check” the difference between Levels 1 and 2. If parties in a relationship are interested in only themselves

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Exhibit 2.2.  Sentiments Associated with Relationship Levels Relationship Level

Sentiment toward Others

Level Minus 1

Antipathy

Level 1 (transactional)

Apathy

Level 2 (personal)

Empathy

Level 3

Compassion

while being apathetic toward the other, do we expect a high degree of collaboration and information sharing? Probably not! This is why Level 1 is problematic in work contexts. By contrast, the empathy we see in Level 2 is another way of describing the process of putting aside self-interest and finding mutual or collective interest such that information, social context, challenge, and opportunity are shared and acted upon together.

Summary We have defined what a relationship is and have argued that we create relationships through the various sequences of behavior that we exhibit in different situations. In that sense, relationships can be designed and evolved, and the design process begins in the very first interaction between any individuals or groups. We have discussed the four levels of relationship as marked by different degrees of trust and openness, and we have seen why, while Level 1 relationships can be successful in certain situations (i.e., when the tasks are simple and everyone’s roles are clear), the more complex the task and undefined or overlapping the roles, the more essential it becomes to form Level 2 relationships.

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The challenge for Humble Leadership in the average workplace is to build Level 2 trust and openness by becoming more personal, either in what is asked about or in what is revealed, while avoiding both the formality and apathy of Level 1’s professional distance and, at the same time, not pushing for the intimacy associated with Level 3. A defining skill of Humble Leadership is the ability to manage this balance between being too formal at one extreme and being too intimate at the other.

Discussion Questions ■

Think about a particular boss from whom you learned a great deal. How would you describe the relationship you had with that boss, and what kind of behavior did they exhibit to create that relationship?

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If you have been on a team, think about the relationships you had with your team members. What behavior did they exhibit that helped create those relationships?

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If you have been a boss or manager, think about the relationship you had with your direct reports. What was it about your own behavior that helped create that relationship?

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PA R T T WO

Examples of Humble Leadership in Different Contexts In the next three chapters we describe how Humble Leadership has been displayed in various organizational and group situations, ranging from the formation of new groups to the transformation of existing groups, and we will highlight the role of group dynamics in the exercise of Humble Leadership.

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T HREE

Humble Leadership in Creating and Building Organizations Founding a new organization, or a new group within an existing organization, has always been the quintessential act of leadership. Within those new groups, visionary individuals then create many of the better products, services, values, and ideas that then help enterprises survive and thrive. What is unique about inserting the principles of Humble Leadership into the founding and creating process is that the leader, in launching the whole process with others, embraces that they cannot do this alone. As the examples below highlight, a successful humble leader faces systemic problems with situational humility and recognizes that the complexity and fluidity of the work environment requires a creative process that, from the outset, draws on the information and insight of others to generate a vision and then relies on their cooperative involvement to implement that vision. The process unfolds as a humble leader builds Level 2 personized relationships in the organization toward the goal of co-creating something “new and better.” To illustrate this process, we highlight actual situations in which the personality of the formally appointed leaders might never be described as “humble” in the traditional sense, yet their foundational leadership methods have 35

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­ emonstrated situational humility and a focus on building d the right substrate of relationships to facilitate the larger effort’s success.

Co-creating Singapore as a modern city state

EXAMPLE 3.1.

Lee Kwan Yew and the key colleagues with whom he had formed Level 2 relationships during their education in the United Kingdom realized in the early 1960s that Singapore, where Lee was born when it was still a British colony, could not grow and become independent unless it became an important international port and evolved into a viable city-state based on foreign investment (Schein, E. H., 1996). Lee (who served as Singapore’s prime minister from 1959 to 1990) realized that Singapore’s economic survival depended on getting major companies to invest in the economy, something that would not be possible if Singapore did not create an environment that would be attractive and reassuring to skeptical foreign investors. The solution was simple: clean up the city, including changing many elements of the citizens’ behaviors, and create a completely trustworthy, corruption-free government. To make this happen required the implementation of processes that were not only new but had to prove themselves to be better than what had come before. First, these leaders created an economic development board (EDB) consisting of some of their best and brightest young citizens, whose job it was to locate potential foreign investors and sell Singapore as the place to invest and to build their plants, refineries, and research centers. The young officers of the EDB faced complex, volatile environments that required great situational humility on their part,

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as well as the ability to create Level 2 relationships with their potential investors. Internally, they also had to function completely collaboratively, sharing information while, at the same time, competing with each other for promotions within the EDB. Second, the city itself had to be refreshed from the ground up, making it attractive to foreign investors by proving it to be a safe and reliable environment. The leaders’ solution was to administer a program of creating jobs and housing for citizens while demanding dramatic changes in their daily behavior. This method of making the city “squeaky clean” was autocratic and draconian in nature, but the dictatorial behavior felt justified because it gave people jobs, housing, and a promising future. Visitors once said that the new Singapore airport reminded them very much of the pristine and extremely well-run Zurich Airport—evidence that the leaders’ plan was working as intended (Schein, E. H., 1996). Third, administrators needed to ensure that the government’s programs were seen as effective, trustworthy, and reliable, since that would allow both investors and citizens to regard this variant of autocracy to be more beneficial than harmful. To incentivize government workers to remain in their jobs, they were paid at the same level as Singapore’s senior executives, and to ensure teamwork within the government itself, key positions such as running the EDB and Singapore Airlines were often jointly held and systematically rotated to ensure that all the senior government managers knew each other’s jobs and collaborated with each other. Within the government, building Level 2 relationships made it possible for the system to have both a strict hierarchy and clear roles—as long as a high value was placed

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on everyone’s knowing everyone else to an appropriately personal degree and on sharing information pursuant to a common overall goal. The norm was established that a hierarchy was necessary for coordination but that within the hierarchy everyone was expected to communicate across all levels for purposes of exchanging vital information. This information matrix was critical and very innovative. Senior government executives repeated the point that their entrepreneurial activities were strongly supported by their bosses, who often went out on a limb to defend highly controversial decisions taken by their subordinates. What enabled this was the absolute trust between Lee and his colleagues—a trust based on their truly knowing each other. Lee and his colleagues were exemplars of situational humility, and they explicitly articulated a philosophy of pragmatically learning from others what would work best for Singapore. They knew what they did not know, and they were not afraid to ask for help. For instance, they sought the help of the United Nations and various European advisers who might have had comparable experiences of building a young country. Also, as various industries began to locate themselves in Singapore, government officials were quick to learn from those industries how best to run certain things. When interviewed by Edgar H. Schein in 1994, Lee pulled out with great pride a set of manuals for personnel administration, which he had mandated for use in his government. He said that he had chosen those manuals because the Royal Dutch Shell company, an organization that he admired very much, had used them with great success. Many criticized Lee’s autocratic rule, which included the suppression of dissenting political parties, but in response, he justified his actions by continuing to deliver on his

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promises to give Singapore’s people jobs and housing. He came under further criticism as he groomed his son to take over—a clear case of nepotism, which is generally seen as a negative decision for a leader to make. At the same time, however, it was clear that his son would not get the job if he didn’t demonstrate all the talents needed to continue to promote Singapore’s growth. LESSONS: Total commitment to building

Level 2 empathy and collaboration To date, it appears that Singapore has been able to resist the regression to Level 1 transactional relationships, which polarize workers into silos and cause them to become less open and trustful. As we reflect on this history, it becomes clear that Level 2 relationships were vital to the growth of Singapore and that the founders and subsequent leaders recognized how important it was to maintain such relationships. Their plan also hinged very much on the processes of locating the best and brightest talent, providing a good education for them, employing them in the civil service at compensation levels comparable to business jobs, and strongly reinforcing the value of cooperation in the service of the overall strategic goal. As this example has shown, the leaders of the founding process who have Level 2 relationships with each other can create cultural norms that support high openness and high trust within the hierarchical organizations they develop. One way of accomplishing this environment is by not letting roles become rigid and by frequently rotating important leaders through key roles so that each person knows what is involved in the others’ jobs. Again, we suggest that Humble Leadership is a process, reflecting not character traits as much as collective values

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that individuals and groups bring to their work. In small start-ups and single-focus companies, maintaining openness and trust should be considered so vital that it comes to feel as normal, natural, and life sustaining to the company as breathing is to a person.

Foundational leadership in a first-generation technology innovator EXAMPLE 3.2.

The rise and eventual demise of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) offers many illustrations of how even the best intentions to practice Humble Leadership may be met with even stronger needs to forgo pursuit of Level 2 relationships and instead regress to Level 1 transactional, competitive relationships (Schein, E. H., 2003). Ken Olsen, DEC’s cofounder, was a genuinely humble leader who over 30 years built an enormously successful company that in corporate IT was second only to IBM in the 1980s. Ken was a technical entrepreneur who quickly built Level 2 relationships with his immediate reports, hiring primarily the best and the brightest computer system engineers and believing from the outset that they must all be open with each other in order to invent and innovate. Olsen created a DEC social culture that engendered strong loyalty and commitment to the managerial style that he promulgated through his own behavior. Ken’s managerial style was unusual in the amount of freedom he gave to his newly hired engineers—the freedom that allowed them to both cohere as a group and also battle out among themselves the product strategy that DEC should follow. In the early days, it was common for technical leaders within DEC to have long, unruly, drag-out strategy fights, yet still be open with each other once decisions

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were made. Ken’s style of lying low while technical leads fought it out but then intervening to help resolve, concur, and support as necessary, was respected and revered. In these interventions, Ken communicated trust alongside his commitment to action. Once, when Ken was asked why he did not make decisions himself, why he sometimes let the debate run on and on, he quickly countered with, “First of all, I am not that smart. I also learned once, when I made a decision and started to walk down the road . . . ​I discovered that there was no one behind me” (E. H. Schein, 2003). As a leader, he strongly communicated his high moral standards, and specifically his intolerance of deceit and obfuscation. It was okay to argue, he said, but it was not okay to lie to win an argument. In his daily behavior, he was very informal, and he found it easy to be inquisitive and ask tough questions without doing it in a way that his colleagues interpreted as threatening. In fact, he would get upset if he sensed that people were afraid of him. To counter such fear, he made it a habit to spontaneously visit engineers in different parts of the company, sit down with them, and ask them in a genuinely curious way what they were working on. Even if he was critical of what someone was doing, they felt important and seen. People often said that it was better to have Ken criticize you than have him ignore you. Having hired the best technical talent, Ken accepted his vulnerability (of not having all the answers as the founder) and trusted his experts to make the best technical decisions while he focused on creating an environment that enabled them to be open with each other. They were collectively working to get the best answers for product design, not for personal status within the company. Ken empowered his key employees and made himself reliant on them. He

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wanted the market to decide whether their decisions were good ones or not. He humbled himself both to his employees and to the realities of the market but was tough when it came to his personal commitment to the values of truth, openness, and science. Ken realized that making a decision and getting it implemented required the building of mutual helping relationships that depended on complete openness and trust. This expressed confidence in his employees led most of them to feel fully engaged in the organization and to become fiercely committed to the social culture that was emerging. It was a characteristic mix of situational humility facing intellectual rivalry, never-before-seen technical hurdles, and, perhaps most importantly, interpersonal empathy learned from the founder, who was the first to acknowledge that the group around him knew more than he did and that his true challenge would be finding ways to tap the wisdom of individual team members without creating factions and favoritism. A culture can survive, but a company may not Generally speaking, in a new organization it is possible, if not imperative, to empower lower-level employees to make strategic and tactical decisions. It is also possible with successful growth to encourage internal competition in product development and let the market decide what to support. However, with success, growth, and age, there also arises the risk of tribalism if empowered lower-level employees decide to build their own mini-empires, which could cause infighting instead of healthy competition. Ken strongly resisted creating independent divisions within DEC because he believed that the company’s growth

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would continue to support all of its projects, such that even a dramatic market change would not force DEC to focus on some projects and not others. His situational humility, however, failed him here. He did not see that his key engineers were no longer debating openly and objectively but were each representing their own sub-empires and arguing in favor of themselves rather than the collective. Intellectual rivalry had developed into silos, and the technical wisdom that they had once shared was now replaced by parochial thinking based on what was good for each individual silo and not the broader whole. Level 2 relationships with each other and with Ken deteriorated with the erosion of trust. These forces together led to a sad but predictable economic outcome. As the tribes fought, they used up limited resources and sent three major product releases late to the market. Trust eroded very quickly, leading to mutual accusations of lying and spinning. Openness also declined, and relationships became more transactional and professionally distant. Ken was increasingly sidelined by some of the same people he had empowered; the engineers he had put so much faith in now made decisions to benefit their own initiatives rather than focusing on the greater challenge of keeping all of DEC innovative and going strong. As products failed and costs kept rising, the board was forced to remove Ken and promote a more traditional command-and-control CEO, who first downsized DEC dramatically, losing most of its creative engineers to other organizations or to retirement, and then arranged for the sale of DEC to Compaq, which eventually was acquired by Hewlett-Packard. Although it was a sad end, DEC had demonstrated in its first 30-plus years how a founder could build a successful organization with Humble Leadership.

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LESSONS: From extreme empathy to transactional

competition and economic demise There is no one simple answer to the question of how to be a humble leader. In the DEC story, we see a powerful engineer building his organization by only hiring people who are as smart as or even smarter than him and then creating a management system that strongly empowers them. Ken Olsen was extremely situationally humble in founding his organization, and he established empathic Level 2 relationships immediately. At the same time, the story illustrates that if you empower people and grow at the same time, they may develop their own power base and begin to act competitively when they realize they are no longer “just smart” but also leaders of their own mini-organizations, which they then might prioritize over the common goal. Ken strongly encouraged the people under him to manage in the same way as he did, but neither he nor they were, in the end, able to manage the intergroup problems that arose when the market forced the organization to separate into divisions instead of remain as a single unit devoted to all of its product lines. With the growth of separate divisions within the organization, empathy can get lost and situational humility can be replaced by biased thinking that leads to intergroup competition. The management of the potential intergroup fights then becomes one of the major realities that Humble Leadership must deal with. While DEC failed as an economic entity, it is notable that the cultural values that resulted from Ken Olsen’s Humble Leadership style continue to be valued. Some DEC alumni believe that it was by far the best way to manage a company, and many say they spent the best years of their work life at DEC.

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Reforming a medical center into a Level 2 culture

EXAMPLE 3.3.

Can a health care organization create and sustain Level 2 relationships as a substrate for growth? We know that health care is moving in this direction where tasks require a high degree of coordination, and that many hospitals have adopted different approaches to reexamining their work processes through different kinds of reengineering models, and we know that there are broad calls for the “co-production” of health by involving patients and families in a more active way with health care professionals to improve overall “population health” (Nelson et al., 2007; Suchman et al., 2011). But will it be successful, and is it sustainable? We can see clear examples of new collaborative models in emergency rooms and operating rooms in particular (Plsek, 2014; Kenney, 2011; Edmondson, 2012; Valentine & Edmondson, 2015). Let us look at the case of a hospital system in the Pacific Northwest. (This is a real case, but we have created a fictitious name for the enterprise, “PNHC,” and its CEO, “Karl Green.”) Over the past 20 years, the board, the CEO, and other leadership team members of PNHC, have led a serious effort to evolve the entire hospital culture toward Level 2 relationships. The endeavor has been centered on the overarching value of doing what is best for the patient, particularly in the face of challenges to cost structures, research pressures, and safety requirements. Creating a “new compact”: Doctors and administrators learn situational humility together A new era for PNHC began during a time of challenging financial performance. After a tenure of 20 years, the CEO

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retired and a new CEO, Karl Green, was appointed. He had been a doctor of internal medicine in the PNHC system, and had shown great interest in improving PNHC’s overall quality at the flagship hospital. Green’s challenge of creating a new beginning for PNHC started with the co-creation of a new “compact” between the doctors and the organization’s administrators (Silversin & Kornacki, 2000, 2012; Kornacki, 2015). Many change initiatives never get off the ground, or they fail in process, because the underlying cultural values of the medical and administrative staff are in conflict with each other and they don’t jointly own the compact for the organization’s future. Green’s plan hoped to avoid that issue. The new compact required all parties to live by it or, if they were having trouble, either get coaching help or leave. One main effect of the compact was that several hundred key doctors and administrators were now required to get to know each other more personally, the idea being that forming closer relationships would allow them to more effectively consider not only what would be best for patients’ experience and health but also for employee commitment and well-being. The compact began the process of building Level 2 relationships. Choosing a change methodology for the entire organization Green knew from his experience that this degree of rebuilding would require a single, overarching methodology that everyone could share, rather than having many smaller projects using many different change methods. He also concluded that getting shared commitment to a single methodology would require PNHC’s most senior people to really understand it and endorse it. In his research, Green came across a model he thought might be helpful:

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the ­Toyota Production System’s “Lean” method, which was aimed at eliminating waste. Green’s first act as the new PNHC CEO was to take a number of his key physician leaders, administrators, and board members on a 14-day trip to Japan to observe how TPS (aka “Lean”) was working in the automobile and other industries. Green understood that seeing the Lean method operate in person would help his team imagine how it might work in running a medical center. They would learn, initially, by imitation and identification and then by trial and error as they launched their own projects. And Green also understood that what he was building was as much a social system as a technical system, and he saw the trip to Japan as an opportunity for his team to engage in shared learning—something that helps develop Level 2 relationships. Green involved board members to ensure that support from the very top would be forthcoming and remain consistent. He pointed out that it is not enough for the board members to understand the technology of the program and to bless it; they themselves needed to have a parallel personal learning experience that would give them not just insight but active enthusiasm for what was going on. By including board members on these trips and letting them learn alongside the other participants, they formed relationships that made the board essential to the system. Green thus confirmed what he had learned about change projects in general: that many are marginalized midstream, even if they are succeeding, because the board does not understand the rebuilding process and is quick to just bring in a new CEO during times of trouble. Often, if the new CEO does not understand or care about the progress that has already been made, they may cancel or reverse the change process, taking the organization back to square

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one, or even putting it in a worse position. Often, the relationships within the organization remain at or regress to Level 1, and the associates turn to internal competition instead of collaboration. Implementing the system and seeing results Green understood that “new and better” could not simply be imposed on his organization but that it would come as a result of collaboration. After the trip to Japan, he invited various department leaders to consider how their work could be changed and then to make proposals along those lines. If the proposals were approved, the members of those groups engaged in workshop experiences aimed to ensure cross-department consistency in the improvement programs. These activities and events involved building Level 2 relationships with all the members of the organization who would be impacted by the proposed changes, to ensure that they would understand and implement what was decided. For example, one of the dramatic changes was in the PNHC cancer center redesign, for which the goal was to make it effective and comfortable for the patient, rather than just focusing on the doctors and staff who worked there. This plan involved locating all the diagnostic equipment and therapeutic processes in a single part of the building, instead of having patients transfer all over the hospital to get diagnosed and treated. In exploring ways to accomplish this goal, the participants realized that the space originally occupied by the dermatology center was in fact ideal for the cancer center. It was a good plan, but it meant Green and his team would need to work with the dermatology department and convince them to give up their space. While he could have just made an executive decision to move the

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dermatology department, it was important to Green that the staff who was being moved not only understood why the decision was being made but also came to support it. To accomplish this, Green and his team co-created with the dermatology department a new and better space for them to move into—a process that further required a great deal of relationship building and collaboration between the building designers and the physicians and staff who would be working in this new space. Over the following years under Green’s leadership, this intensive collaborative approach enabled PNHC to overhaul many of its operations. The emergency room, for example, was able to implement a process of sharply reducing waiting time and patient discomfort by providing more immediate diagnosis and better access to physician specialists. Primary care facilities were also redesigned in a way that co-located several critical functions and made for smoother workflow. Wards, too, were physically reorganized around centralized nursing stations to facilitate better nurse-­patient interaction. One change came directly out of the team’s observation of the TPS Lean method. PNHC’s new patient safety alert system—the medical equivalent of the Toyota Production System’s process of “stopping the line” if a worker has spotted a defect in a product—meant that any member of a treatment group who saw a problem could stop the treatment process and get an immediate review. A patient safety alert would promptly bring all relevant team members and their leaders together in one place to rapidly assess the issue and decide what needed to be done. Here again, this method stimulated closer relationships across the entire medical center continuum. The new culture of openness and collaboration also

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helped in cases when diagnostic or treatment errors occurred. The process was to openly communicate about them so that the systemic causes could be specified and fixed, instead of regressing to the conventional process of singling out a person to blame. By involving everyone in the social culture in which it was safe to speak up, PNHC positioned itself to uncover some of the complex interactions that frequently caused errors and, hopefully, prevent them from happening in the future. Green’s new system was seeing success after success. When it was discovered that an insurance company would no longer cover orthopedics, Green investigated to find out why and learned that most orthopedic cases went through a preliminary quick diagnosis and then on to a surgical specialist, a process that sharply increased the cost for every patient. It was also revealed that 90 percent of those cases were sent back to a physician’s assistant (PA) for treatment decisions. They then moved the PAs into the intake diagnostic role, which sharply reduced the numbers of referrals to the surgeons and brought the patient cost into line with what the insurance company was willing to insure. A further unexpected benefit was that the surgeons now were able to fill their calendar with more critical cases. As more departments became familiar with the potentially revolutionary impact of the Toyota Production System, and as that realization resulted in more interdepartmental collaboration, a senior group of administrators and doctors began to meet together to create shared approaches of how to evolve and implement new and better processes across all of the hospital’s activities. Over time, it became routine for staff to share stories about the benefits of systematic situational humility and the building of Level 2 relationships, and from that emerged a new kind of Level 2 socio-

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technical culture. The success of these activities eventually led to the creation of an institute that offered to teach some of these attitudes and methods to other hospital systems. LESSONS: A new CEO’s rebuilding initiatives

The major lesson of the PNHC case is that it is possible to build empathy throughout even a large system. We see how a CEO with a discipline of consistent situational humility created a new compact (to which top management formally committed itself) and built Level 2 relationships across the system, starting with his board and senior executives. The primary goal of Green’s compact was to design all improvements for better patient experience and safety, but it is likely that achieving better patient experiences also had secondary positive results for the health care staff themselves. Further, regularly involving board members directly in site visits, walk-arounds, and other activities that allow them to see how the system works not only allows them to become participants in change programs but also ensures the stability of new systems, even through changes in senior management.

Summary We opened this chapter with the observation that some of the most striking and visible examples of Humble Leadership occur when organizations are in their earliest stages of founding. This was the case for DEC, which was a new company, but it is also relevant when an existing entity, such as the city-state of Singapore or the PNHC hospital system, seeks to recreate itself around a whole new and better way of operating. In each of these examples, infusing Humble Leadership values into the culture can create a platform for growth and improvement.

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This founding process often depends very much on formal leaders who are situationally humble and make the effort to see more clearly what “new and better” needs to be done, and to ensure their vision of new and better is implemented, they set about to build relationships with colleagues, subordinates, and clients to enhance and even co-create that vision. In all three examples from this chapter, the Humble Leadership of the founders made them open to experts, helpers, and observers—the “eyes and ears on the ground”—who could provide vital insights during the decision-making process. This is the essence of Humble Leadership: a boss who acknowledges that they cannot see enough and know enough to create meaningful change without involving other team members and assimilating their insights. It is common for historians looking back at business success stories to highlight great visionaries and make them into individual heroes. Our suggestion is to pay at least as much attention to the Humble Leadership practices of individuals who engage with other workers in a way that enables them, as a team, to envision and implement something new and better.

Discussion Question ■

Think about some major changes that have been made in organizations you have been part of or have had experience with. Try to describe these changes and see if you can figure out how they came about. What kind of leadership produced the changes you observed?

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FOUR

Humble Leadership in Transforming Organizations Humble Leadership in large, mature organizations can create change in any direction and from any leverage point. The key difference, compared to the start-up and formation examples described in the previous chapter, is that for the more established organizations the cultural context is much more complicated. Layers of convention directly and indirectly impact any intentions to develop something new and better, and the transformation must happen not through the founder simply implementing their own ideas but through the evolution and iteration of the existing culture of the mature organization. When an established organization begins to falter in its fundamental functions, it typically either advances new leadership from within or brings in new leadership from outside. When outside “experts” or “saviors” are brought in, they confront elements of the existing culture, some of which may have become ossified and possibly dysfunctional. Here is where Humble Leadership can drive transformation by creating awareness of new possibilities and inspiring the team to pursue something new and better. In this chapter, we will look at three cases that illustrate how Humble Leadership was expressed in social interventions

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that changed perceptions and opened eyes to positive ways to transform organizations.

A navy captain neutralizes hierarchical conventions EXAMPLE 4.1.

Hierarchy—a layering of formal ranks or status levels to ensure coordination—is a structural characteristic of organizational life, but what actually goes on between individuals from different levels is not automatically prescribed. We have hierarchies of administrators and professors in universities, senior partners and junior partners in professional service firms, committee chairs and other levels of seniority in legislative bodies, various levels of authority in large research projects, and, of course, clear positions of authority and rank within the health care system. The type of organization in which Level 2 relationships may seem most out of place is the US military, where the very essence of the managerial relationship is that you obey your commanding officer’s orders, full stop. This convention is largely based on military traditions that highlight how important it is for Armed Forces personnel to learn to obey orders regardless of how arbitrary or senseless they might seem. Those with lower levels of authority must act on the assumption that the top leaders know what kind of coordination is necessary. That said, there are also many stories of individual heroes who chose to disobey orders because situational humility illuminated different facts on the ground that could be exploited for collective advantage. A growing number of stories drawn from recent conflicts emphasize teamwork, cooperation across hierarchical boundaries, and the importance of empowering troops to make their own on-the-ground decisions (McChrystal,

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2015; Fussell, 2017). What, then, is “command and control” in the military today, and how does it relate to Humble Leadership? Depending on the actual situation, a hierarchical relationship in this context can be anything from Level Minus 1 to Level 3, but when complex tasks are involved and lives are at stake, the goal should be to form psychologically safe, collaborative relationships of at least Level 2 degrees of trust and openness. The focus of this example is how the culture on a nuclear submarine was transformed from a demoralized, marginally effective, by-the-book Level 1 hierarchy to a high-­ morale, effective, proud Level 2 organization. The change was founded on converting an existing leader-follower system into a new leader-leader system (Marquet, 2012). Under the reimagined structure, the military hierarchy remained operative, yet there were not any followers per se; everyone became leaders of their own areas of command. In telling the story, Captain L. David Marquet shows us how much of this transformation hinged on his situational humility and his developing Level 2 relationships with the key people below him. Marquet began building his relationship with his new crew by talking to people and asking a lot of questions. Because he was not familiar with the ship, his curiosity was honest curiosity, rather than a rhetorical tactic to make it only seem he was interested. On “reading the room” during his early days, Marquet decided that his first concern should be forming relationships with the people most influential on the ship, namely the chief petty officers (CPOs or “chiefs”). One way of building Level 2 relationships with his chiefs was to bring them together in a meeting and demonstrate situational humility with respect to their perspectives. “Are

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you happy with things as they are on this ship, or would you like to see a better way of doing things?” It took a lot of conversation and socialization to get the CPOs to realize that he really did want to hear their thoughts, that this was not a trick question or just a way of killing time before revealing his own hidden agenda. Marquet wrote, “Like so many times, my not knowing the answer ahead of time helped me. Instead of a scripted meeting where I pretended to solicit ideas, we had an honest conversation” (Marquet, 2012, p. 170). The group had to get past justifying the old system of just letting senior officers “command and control.” In the old system, they felt safe, but they did not, in the end, feel accomplished, and this led to low morale and complacency around the work itself. That said, everyone had an implicit motivation to improve, and that made them receptive to what Marquet was inviting them to think about. When operations are going well, it is much harder to get a group to acknowledge that transformation may be needed, but that was not the case here. The CPOs, through Marquet’s inquiry, agreed that they were not satisfied with how things were. The next question that Marquet posed was whether the officers themselves saw any current procedures that they wanted to change. It is worth noting how much more empowering this question was, as opposed to not asking any questions at all but just commanding the CPOs to implement suggestions that had come from other officers or outside inspectors. Marquet’s question was based on genuine curiosity, and the answers he received were revelatory, as they illuminated issues he would not have thought of himself. The first thing the chiefs wanted to change was the policy that all leaves of absence had to be approved by

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all seven levels of the ship’s hierarchy, a system that often caused delays and made family and personal time off very difficult to plan. The proposed change—requiring only immediate superiors to approve leave requests—went against navy regulations, but Marquet agreed to try it. He knew he was taking a personal risk by going against the book, but he also realized he was setting an important personal example of knowing when to override regulations and conventions if they did not make sense in the current situation. The new leave-permission system worked and was an immediate morale booster. With Marquet’s encouragement, the CPOs learned that when they had ideas for change, they were expected to propose them. To overcome their habits of conflict avoidance and waiting for orders rather than acting on their own, they were taught to quickly specify improvements and propose changes to the captain, and then implement them if it made collective sense. To reinforce this attitude of taking initiative, Marquet changed the strict system of superiors giving orders to inferiors, and he implemented the practice of having direct reports announce their own suggestion in the form of “Sir, I intend to . . . ​(change course, increase speed, etc.).” If the suggestion made sense, the senior officer would respond, “Very well.” Marquet further mandated that hierarchical language such as “Request permission to,” “I would like to,” “What should I do about,” “Do you think we should,” and “Could we” be replaced by “I intend to,” “I plan to,” “I will,” and “We will.” This would train people to feel more empowered and specific in their intentions. In situations involving complex or controversial decisions, Marquet also trained his crew members to precede “I intend to . . .” with a statement about why

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they thought that was the right move. The way he thought about it, assumptions and intentions were only dangerous when they were silent and hence could not be validated or tested. Marquet’s system worked, but we might argue for one refinement: “I intend to . . .” feels to us like a constructive invitation for support or validation, but the stronger linguistic construction “I will . . . ​,” by contrast, can be interpreted as a commitment—an action that is not being offered for support or validation. The two phrases are so close, yet one seems intrinsically inviting and cooperative while the latter is heroic and individualistic. We can be pretty sure Marquet was favoring the collaborative and not self-serving intervention. As the CPOs on the submarine became more confident in exercising their knowledge and sharing their opinions, they found it easier to pass that same power down to their own direct reports, with the result that control and influence moved closer and closer to those who knew how to diagnose and fix even the most specialized problems, particularly ones that their higher-ups might not be aware of. Not only did the crew learn the value of situational humility, but as they felt more responsible and empowered, they also saw more areas that needed improvement, saw more ways of doing things better, and, in that sense, they became leaders themselves. This illustrates well how a humble leader can scale Humble Leadership. Let us look at another change Marquet implemented, this one related to creating personized relationships among his crew. His goal was to instill pride in his sailors, and one way of doing that was to acknowledge them as people, not roles. His new behavioral rule was that anyone who

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boarded ship would be greeted in this way: greeters would state their own names, then the name of the person boarding, and then say, “Welcome to the ship.” Marquet believed that using someone’s name instilled a sense of pride, and he believed that acting with pride would eventually lead to feeling pride—pride in the person as a person (who they are), not in their role (what they do). It was an important part of the formula that names were exchanged in this way regardless of the ranks of those involved. To roll this out, Marquet called the 100 members of his crew to a single meeting in which everyone lined up according to rank, with the sailors in the back. When he noticed that they were less attentive, probably because they could not hear him very well, he ordered them to come to the front and gather around him, a noteworthy break with official procedure. This move showed even the lowestranking sailors that their commanding officer wanted each of them to hear the message, that each of them mattered. In a traditional hierarchy, it is usually in the interests of the junior person to have formal, Level 1 relationships with his seniors because it is generally safer and easier to just do what the boss orders and not to have to overthink or be too accountable. But, as happened here, if the higher-level person initiates a Level 2 connection and does so authentically, rather than as a tactical exchange, he can transform the organization because it is now full of junior contributors who feel seen and know they are taken seriously. Captain Marquet’s transformation of his submarine was primarily social. He may also have made changes to the technical functions and flows, but it was clear to him at the outset that the social transformations would make the technical changes easier, and not necessarily vice-versa.

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LESSONS: Level 2 relationships can exist in a formal hierarchy

The most important lesson of this story is that it is possible to transform a top-down control system into an empowerment system without having to abandon the hierarchy. What is required is a readiness on the part of the organization to improve its operation and a humble leader whose mindset, attitudes, and behavioral skills consistently train the employees to shift their focus away from error avoidance and toward purposeful seeking of the new and better. We also learn from this story that building readiness for change requires patience, persistence, and consistency. It also required, in Marquet’s case, a leader who was willing to take risks, as he did in challenging some of the navy’s routine conventional procedures. Fortunately, his risks led to the discovery that sometimes even the highest-ranking officers—those above Marquet—welcomed new ways of doing things, rather than clinging to the old way and maybe even punishing Marquet for his innovations. Another important lesson is that this kind of change requires insight into and skill in managing group relationships. In his account, Marquet provides numerous examples of how the specific ways in which he behaved in the group during meetings is what made the ultimate difference in getting others to change their behaviors and, eventually, their attitudes. The Humble Leadership toolkit includes wisdom and understanding about how groups form and behave. We expand on this in Chapter 5.

Building empathy across an entire large chemical conglomerate EXAMPLE 4.2.

The Multi company (a fictitious name based on a real company) is a worldwide organization involved with industrial

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chemicals, agricultural chemicals, and pharmaceuticals (Schein, E. H., 1985; Schein & Schein, 2018). At the time of this case, the company was run by an internal board of twelve people. The chair of this group was nominally the CEO, although the group members considered leadership to be held by the collective, and they felt totally accountable as a group. Multi had grown through various mergers and acquisitions and created divisions based on products, functions, and geographical regions. The division heads each reported to their respective board directors, but in order to keep leadership working on a collective level, the board members arranged to rotate responsibility for the different divisions every few years, so that each of the leaders would become familiar with all aspects of the business and would not be inclined to favor certain products, countries, or functions at the expense of others, or of the whole company. (In Chapter 3, we saw a similar example of this kind rotation system in the government of Singapore, and we also saw what happened when internal tribalism corrupted the culture at DEC.) Intentional joint accountability among board members encouraged open dialogue on difficult strategic and operational decisions, and it shows us how, by building open and trusting relationships at the board level, even a highly divisionalized, multinational organization can create a governance process in which the “silos” cooperate and are jointly accountable. This leadership arrangement also created a climate in which no one was afraid to speak up, and the leaders, in turn, conveyed these same values to others within the organization, especially their direct reports. In the process, they found that learning to function as a group was an es-

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pecially difficult task, and to help them in that effort they used group-oriented process consultants to learn how to be an effective group. The board members took time out to review their group process frequently and were pleased to discover during those review periods that leadership had actually been widely distributed among them. By sharing the responsibility of leadership and having each senior executive be familiar with each division, geographical unit, and function, they were able to keep their problem-solving at an open and trusting level. To create that degree of joint accountability and open, trusting Level 2 relationships required building and maintaining group norms, which were taught to new members as they joined this process. One example of how this was implemented was the half-day team-building exercise that was part of each annual meeting. Participants across all three layers of the company’s hierarchy would engage in some unusual sport in which they were equally incompetent, thereby encountering each other in a more casual, personal fashion. At the end of the event, they had an informal meal that included lots to drink, and the atmosphere was one of comradery among all members of one company with shared goals. This “distributed” version of Humble Leadership among board members survived effectively for several decades until a major change in the industry led Multi to shed several of their chemical product lines and focus increasingly on pharmaceuticals, a move that eventually led them to merge with another pharmaceutical company that was managed in a more conventional manner. It was, however, significant that when they had to lay off large numbers of people, their process of doing so ­leveraged the Level 2 relationships that most managers

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had developed with their direct reports. The board members agreed that the message of being laid off should be delivered by each employee’s immediate supervisor, rather than falling back on what they considered to be the inhuman process of having HR reps or outsiders deliver such news. In addition, they presented these former employees options including early retirement, part-time jobs, special contractual consulting assignments, various kinds of training programs, career counseling, and generous severance terms. Each of the terminated employees was treated as a whole person being dealt a potentially hard blow. There was never a more important time to personize in order to maintain some degree of trust that this process, albeit painful, was also fair. Multi was proud that they were viewed positively in their community, especially in contrast to a competitor company who used an impersonal layoff process and ended up with scandals and lawsuits. LESSONS: Leadership of groups and individuals

It is possible to govern a large organization using a process that is simultaneously individual and group-based. How comfortable and natural that process feels may depend on the larger cultural context and whether it is more inclined to collectivist or cooperative stewardship. Multi was a Swiss company and clearly reflected many of the values of Swiss culture. Similarly, organizations in which Humble Leadership is used will usually reflect to some degree the larger culture in which that organization is created and functions. Another key lesson from Multi is the importance of having all the top members of an organization fully understand the goals and functions of the organization. Systematic rotation through the various units can help solidify this

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value and build empathy toward each unit. With everyone working toward a collective goal, invested in all parts of the company, and engaged in Level 2 relationships, important strategic decisions can be made even when there is confrontational debate, since these conversations will be happening in an open, collaborative context.

Creating social-responsibility programs in a troubled public utility

EXAMPLE 4.3.

The Alpha Company (fictitious name based on a real company) provided electric, gas, and heat services for a large US city (Schein & Schein, 2019). In the 1990s, it was embroiled with local government because, after an accident had blown asbestos into a neighborhood, the company had both denied and then covered up some of the consequences. Alpha was under probation, and a court-appointed monitor was given complete access to all its activities to ensure that this major environmental violation would be properly remediated. The company needed to transform itself to regain community trust. Alpha’s new chair of the board, Joan Willis (fictitious name, but based on a real person), was also the director of a local natural history museum, and she felt that Alpha had to not only mend fences with local government but also transform its image from being seen as an arrogant powerful utility to a socially responsible member of the community. Willis and the CEO of Alpha together decided that the company’s new image would be built around a socially responsible environmental health and safety (EH&S) program that would benefit both the citizens of the community and Alpha’s employees. When Alpha began this transformation, there was no

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consolidated effort at a high enough level to (a) do the work of repairing the company’s damaged image (which included the stigma of being on probation) and (b) reduce the accidents that had precipitated the crisis in the first place—accidents that not only injured employees and citizens but also polluted the environment. The change program began with Willis and the CEO recognizing that they needed a much more powerful knowledge base, particularly around the environmental issues. They created a special EH&S committee that would report directly to a subcommittee of the board and to the CEO. In addition, the committee would retain as outside consultants two experienced environmental lawyers and an expert on organizational culture. In the indictment of Alpha, the judge had explicitly identified that the culture of Alpha was “part of the problem.” The three consultants working directly with the newly appointed vice president of EH&S then became officially the leadership group—called the Environmental Quality Review Board (EQRB)—that would be empowered to bring about the new and better image and the improved EH&S results: fewer accidents and less environmental damage. Building Level 2 relationships with local management and the union The many facets of the so-called Culture Transformation Program that was launched at Alpha resulted from the EQRB becoming a Humble Leadership catalyst. The first step was a series of meetings of the EQRB aimed to build openness and trust within the group and to consider what new activities, committees, and information gathering processes needed to be designed and implemented. This “getting to know each other” involved the EQRB

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sharing information on (1) environmental affairs and legal issues, (2) insights on how to manage organizational culture change, and (3) institutional memory and reflections on how Alpha’s culture had evolved over the years. Immediately, the group realized the importance of situational humility, since in both the environmental and safety areas it was clear that accidents, oil spills, releases of toxic chemicals and gas, and similar incidents could occur anywhere and anytime, which meant that all eyes and ears of employees at every level should be open. It was not enough to only involve on-the-ground workers when trying after the fact to uncover what “mistakes were made.” The first, most necessary intervention was to ensure that the new EH&S committee would include both high-level executives and union members. The workers’ union represented most of the Alpha field force and had for years been “using” EH&S problems that affected worker health issues as a bargaining tool. In order to build open communication and trust around EH&S issues up and down the whole hierarchy, these two groups needed to work together. EQRB proposed that the EH&S committee should be run by the EH&S VP and should include the Alpha COO, the heads of the major divisions and functions, the EQRB, and two or more union leaders. The key to rehabilitating the EH&S program was openness of communication and high degrees of trust across the departments and the layers of the hierarchy. It was also clear that the openness and trust would be hard to build if the persistent norm was that relationships remain at the transactional, professionally distant level. The participants would need to meet often enough, and for several hours at a time, to not just discuss what new and better programs, processes, and educational activities would be needed for

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the transformations to occur but to also get to know each other at a personal level. Building a shared identity and more open communication across boundaries It took many meetings of the twenty-person EH&S committee for the members to slowly adapt from just being transactional representatives of their various units to becoming a collaborative team that was able to identify and deal with the shared critical issues that EH&S presented. As trust and openness grew, some remarkable organizational changes were proposed, discussed, and adopted. For example, as union representation at the meetings became expected and normalized, upper management realized that it would be beneficial to involve union members more deeply in other capacities as well. When an accident occurred, for instance, union members should be involved not just in the analysis of why it had happened and what should be done differently in the future, but they should be allowed to present analysis and remedies to the committee as experts. This new idea—that union members could make a presentation to a very high-level group of executives—was adopted as a new and much better way of operating, as it not only improved the safety process through much more comprehensive information sharing, it also built better relationships up and down the hierarchy. As relations on the EH&S committee became more relaxed, various members felt more comfortable proposing further relationship building, and the culture continued to improve. One dramatic example of a change brought on by this new atmosphere was the joint decision to have a monthly 2-hour lunch meeting in a large room. The lunch was attended by five or six teams from different divisions

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and functions, each of which had been nominated to pre­ sent their recent innovations in health and safety domain to the other teams and to top management. Each five-member team consisted of some senior managers and some union members. For the first hour, people ate their lunches at tables in randomly assigned groups of four or five, an arrangement that facilitated everyone getting to know each other. After lunch, the tables were pushed back and everyone sat in chairs facing each other in a large circle. The COO asked the members of the circle to introduce themselves in order by name and function, and then the teams gave their tenminute presentations on what they had accomplished, followed by Q&A and general discussion and observations. What was striking in each of these lunches was how much people commented, both on the new things they learned and could immediately adopt in their own groups and on how impressive the union member presentations were. Senior management had not realized how much the company’s different technology divisions—electric, gas, and heating—had to teach each other and how much knowledge the front-line workers displayed. An even more significant change in the EH&S committee itself was that it triggered open dialogue on the traditional disciplinary process. Most often, the process had focused on finding out who was responsible for an accident or spill—“blame culture.” The new way of looking at things invited Alpha to do a more creative analysis of how systemic and technological issues were often at the root of accidents and spills. In this new committee climate, situational humility principles demanded the disciplinary process become more concerned with finding out why an employee may have

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violated a rule. In one example, an employee had been fired for not wearing his eye shield during a dangerous electrical repair. When the committee took the time to investigate why such a well-regarded, experienced employee had so blatantly violated one of the most important rules, it was revealed that the humidity was very high that day and, just at the moment when he was making a final splice, his eye shield had fogged up completely, and the employee would have endangered himself more if he had left his shield in place. In the spirit of situational humility, when this information came to light, the employee was not only reinstated but was asked to be a member of a recently formed task force empowered to find a better vendor to provide eye shields that would be less likely to fog up even in extreme humidity. Here, a new and better technology was introduced as a result of more thoughtful investigation of EH&S practices. The message was clear that senior managers were now open to hearing from the people on the ground and would not wield the hierarchy to punish for problems that had occurred but rather to find creative solutions to problems. To ensure open and trusting communication up and down the hierarchy, the EH&S leadership requested that the outside consultants conduct regular focus groups with union members, who were randomly selected for such interviews. These interviews provided important feedback on whether new programs were or were not working effectively. For example, it was revealed that the highly touted “time out” program, which allowed and encouraged employees to stop a job if they saw a safety or environmental issue, could easily be undermined if top management made of habit of requesting information about which groups and departments had the most time-outs. When middle manag-

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ers confronted supervisors with the question “Why does your group have so many time-outs?” it was not surprising that those supervisors then put pressure on employees to not call time-outs, thereby defeating the whole purpose of the program. Anecdotes from these focus groups revealed a clear dysfunction, and that led to the consultants working with senior management to abandon the traditional numbersbased control tool and instead evolve a program that focused less on financial and schedule issues and more on safety and environmental issues. Alpha then also chartered an “ombudsperson” position and created a confidential callin line to empower employees to report cases in which supervisors had overridden legitimate time-out concerns. LESSONS: Moving an organization from

apathy to empathy and collaboration The most significant Humble Leadership lesson from Alpha was the degree to which the basic EH&S committee itself became a Level 2 group that could openly discuss changes and innovations among themselves, including the union reps. These discussions, aided by facilitation from the EQRB consultants, led to many ideas on how health and safety performance could be improved, and revealed how often the best solutions for what could and should be done came from co-determined ideas from both union members and managers on the committee. For Alpha, building relationships deliberately by having more and longer meetings with a more diverse membership, including outside consultants, was a necessary step toward getting members of the various silos to talk to each other and, more importantly, to listen to each other. Direct intervention, in the form of active facilitation, was required

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at times when communications broke down or people failed to listen to each other enough to get the full understanding of what others were saying. Establishing mutual empathy and an environment of psychological safety encouraged openness and trust across Alpha’s layers of hierarchy. Perhaps the most important lesson here is seeing how much transformation can be created inside an old and existing organization once the traditional Level 1 transactional relationships are replaced with efforts to form Level 2 relationships in which employees get to know each other and shape a common organizational identity. The EQRB functioned for about 15 years, by which time enough members of Alpha had adopted situational humility and created internal Level 2 relationships that the EQRB was no longer needed as a formal group. The practices it developed had begun to function on their own and certain aspects could be revisited by new facilitators brought in to address specific issues related to Alpha sustaining their record of better environmental responsibility, safety, and employee health.

Summary Humble Leadership in the large and mature organization is clearly the most challenging because what is new and better will inevitably be compared with the technical and social conventions that made the organization successful in the first place. Long-time members of the organization especially might be hesitant to work for change when existing systems had always been considered “good enough.” They might also see commitment to Humble Leadership practices as a lot of extra work on top of what organizations already face when it comes to external challenges such as market shifts. This is where Humble Leadership may also

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come across as “tough love”: it asks us to accept that the process may be difficult, but it promises that the internal transformation toward the new and better—a transformation we defined together, rather than that we were forced into by any number of external forces—will be worth it and better for everyone in the end. As the examples in this chapter suggest, implementing Humble Leadership will feel particularly disruptive in both an organization’s technical culture, where new strategies, organizational designs, and processes must be developed, as well as in the social culture, where the shape of the “stabilizing” hierarchy may have to shift along with the ­introduction of new cultural norms centered around the importance of collaboration, open communication, and higher levels of trust.

Discussion Questions ■

Think about organizations you have worked in. What processes could you have improved on if you were the boss?

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Discuss with others why you think the processes you identified were not implemented. What would it actually take to make them happen?

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See if you can identify how an organization’s existing hierarchy limits the potential transformations you envision. How might situational humility and Level 2 openness and trust increase effectiveness?

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FI V E

Group Dynamics in Humble Leadership In the examples in the preceding chapters, we described how leaders had mastered what we labeled situational humility, a hallmark mindset of Humble Leadership. We also highlighted how their successes resulted, in most cases, from their ability to leverage Level 2 relationships in managing groups. The way in which these leaders convened groups and then provided the incentives and experiences to transform them into high-performance teams is striking. What we focus on in this chapter is how much those skills reflect an understanding and acceptance of the role of group dynamics in achieving something new and better.

The Growing Focus on Group Process and Experiential Learning Learning to think and manage in terms of interpersonal and group process is a foundational building block of Humble Leadership. To learn more about situations in which process is crucial to successful performance, let us look outside business organizations and toward the performing arts. This new view will also help us broaden our criteria for “success” or “winning” to include more qualitative criteria, such as total system performance or effective ­adaptive 73

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learning. Where a conventional focus on quantitative measurement tends to suit the linear machine model of many organizations, we find that, as work becomes more organic and systemic, the way we evaluate outcomes must incorporate new perceptual, if not also emotional, criteria suited to the complexity of the work. The linkage between leadership and group dynamics is not new. Social psychologists studying organizations learned early on how powerful group relations are, and how much more gets done when employees are working together rather than alone. The power of group motivation has been well established in experiments that have highlighted that the best way to increase group energy and motivation is to have the group compete with another group. Much of what came to be known about the positive and negative effects of group forces under different task and contextual situations is easily reproduced in human-­ relations workshops through exercises and role-playing situations that focus on competition. However, the early pioneers of group-dynamics studies were so focused on how to improve motivation that they did not see the various correlated and potentially negative consequences that arise when individuals feel motivated to win inside their group. The collective desire of a group to triumph over another group can lead to autocratic behavior, which may surface as members making unnecessary “hurry up” decisions, shutting down deviant opinions, and/or generally undermining the idea that listening to the diverse voices within the group could lead to better outcomes. Under competitive conditions, we often see Level 1 transactional behavior, and sometimes even Level Minus 1, in which some members of the group dominate other members in order to defeat the competing group.

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Of course, there are many positive features of internal group dynamics, and greater interest in them was stimulated by the theories and experiments of sociologist Kurt Lewin, who launched the Research Center for Group Dynamics and a doctoral program at MIT in 1945. Lewin made the profound discovery that the subjects of research could usefully become involved in the research process itself—a concept that has since come to be known as “action research.” Group members’ involvement in the research process provided profound personal learning experiences. A strong link was forged between the process of generating knowledge and the act of immediately applying that knowledge to the problems being investigated, especially in the field of education. These days we usually encounter this concept under the title “experiential learning.” This insight led directly to research on the learning process itself. In a traditional classroom, you would expect the teacher to teach the students what they are to learn. In a classroom more aligned to experiential learning, by contrast, the students would bear the primary responsibility to learn, while the teacher’s role would be to provide a learning environment and tools but not necessarily the syllabus, the lecture, and the readings. This method would obviously have limitations in the hard sciences and engineering, but it could work well in other subjects, and it might be the key to learning about the integrative role of relationships, groups, and culture when determining how well a given task could be accomplished. Lewin’s research showed that teaching and learning about groups and interpersonal dynamics could indeed be greatly enhanced if the teacher, instead of “telling,” facilitated the students having real-time experiences and then analyzing them, with the teacher helping as a facilitator.

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This process of co-creating learning led to Lewin’s founding, in 1947, of the National Training Laboratories for Group Development. It was there, in Bethel, Maine, that T-groups (training groups) were launched as the centerpiece of human relations labs on leadership and group dynamics (Schein, E. H., & Bennis, 1965). What is today known as organization development (OD) largely grew out of these early experiments with what came to be called “sensitivity training.” Participants and facilitators working together learned how systematic analysis of group process was needed to make sense of the events that occurred in and between groups within an organization. In the human relations labs, researchers created groups and had them interact with each other in simulated communities or in competitive exercises so they could then observe how “tribes” formed (often within a matter of days) and how quickly dysfunctional competition arose. Just as the learning process was co-created by participants in the T-groups, so the design of organizations, groups, and teams could be co-created by the conveners and members of the group, rather than an outside expert. Researchers could see on a daily basis how the presence of Humble Leadership practices was linked to a group’s ability to perform more effectively. We realized that managing change, solving problems, and fixing organizational pathologies within the group were more successful if the group’s participants were made aware of group processes and invited to reflect on and analyze them in simulated situations or through exercises designed to make group processes visible. In these studies, researchers noticed that organization development, the management of change, and leadership practices were heavily socio-technical in nature, with the

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socio element strongly evident in the conversations between participants, in the relationships they were building, and in the interactions between groups. While a group’s tasks, goals, missions, and reasons for existence are generally considered part of its technical culture, how it achieves its goals and how well it performs is largely dependent on these social processes. In this chapter we focus more explicitly on how the social aspects of Humble Leadership are reinforced, often imperceptibly, in various organizational change events.

A process for getting silos to work together with shared empathy

EXAMPLE 5.1.

Saab Combitech, the technical division of Saab, the former car manufacturing company, consisted of six different research units, each working for a different division of the company. The CEO hired a process consultant to design an activity that would make the heads of these research units recognize the potential of collaborating instead of functioning as independent units competing for scarce resources. The consultant and the CEO co-designed a three-day, threesegment process-oriented workshop for the top executives of the six units. In segment one, the consultant explained the concept of culture and how the research executives could decipher the relevant aspects of culture that pertained to their work. Each team then designated two of its members to become “ethnographers,” who, in segment two, went into each other’s teams to learn about each other’s cultures and then, in segment three, reported their findings to the whole group. They could then collectively discuss how technical and social cultural themes might be complementary and could serve

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as the basis for developing more cooperation between divisions. The impact of observing each other through the lens of culture and then talking to each other about what they observed created a completely different kind of Level 2 conversation, one that led to many new forms of cooperation. This exercise had helped the research executives see interdependencies between the divisions and understand ways they could help each other that had not previously been visible. LESSONS: Enabling mutual empathy

We saw in this example how transactional, Level 1 apathy between silos could be “cured” by inviting the silo members to get to know each other’s organizations (as “ethnographers”) and thereby discover interdependencies and common work processes. The joint design, made by the CEO and the research executives, enabled the members of different silos to become empathetic toward each other’s work units. The CEO understood that he wanted the key members of each of the six units to get to know each other better, to begin to build Level 2 relationships, but instead of just having them do something together as one group, he thought that teaching them how to observe first would prove to be a more powerful exercise. “Let’s look in to each other’s cultures” was a great objective when the implicit goal was to learn how to operate in synergy, across silos. Learning how to observe and analyze the culture of another group was a new and valuable process skill.

A case of an admiral’s “collapsing” the transactional hierarchy

EXAMPLE 5.2.

We described in example 4.1 how Captain Marquet changed the group processes on his submarine without compro-

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mising the hierarchy. We now want to add an additional dramatic example that we learned about from a retired US Navy admiral who told us how he was able to highlight the importance of situational humility quickly and decisively. The admiral, at the time, was in command of a nuclearpowered US Navy aircraft carrier. Effectively, he was the CEO of a 5000-person co-located organization for whom safety and high-quality performance would be top priorities. As a nuclear scientist and naval aviator, his background, experience, and hands-on knowledge suited him exceptionally well for the technical aspects of his mission, yet his instincts as a humble leader are what this story is about. One day, there was an incident on the flight deck in which an error in chocks and chains handling, a critical part of aircraft operations, could have endangered lives or caused the loss of very valuable aircraft. The error resulted from mishandling by one of the flight deck handlers. According to normal naval hierarchy and protocol, this error should have been recorded, post-mortem debriefed, and corrected, and there would have been some degree of reprimand and disciplinary consequence for the deck handler. The admiral told us that the error was not outside of the normal course of aircraft carrier flight deck operations. Complicated things happen, and the US Navy has a few hundred years of organizational knowledge to deal with such incidents. The commanding officer could have let the hierarchy work the problem and the solution, but that is not what he did. Instead, he invited the deck handler to his quarters to discuss the incident, just the two of them. Knowing how critical the intricate details of deck and aircraft handling are to the mission of an aircraft carrier and the safety of

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those working with it, the commanding officer, a pilot himself, wanted to hear directly from the handler what had happened, including why it had happened, and certainly how and why it would not happen again. At a deeper level, he cared more about the truth and the process than he did about disciplining the handler. The system would take care of the discipline. What must that meeting have been like? Was the lowlevel deck handler terrified, mortified, contrite, reconciled? If all of those feelings were present, how would the commanding officer get to the truth of what had happened? The admiral told us how he managed to quickly create what we would describe as psychological safety for the deck handler by focusing the conversation on his own curiosity of the exact details of what had happened and why, making it clear that this meeting was not about punishment but an exploration of circumstances. The shared goal was for that junior seaman to walk away from the meeting with a dedication to doing things better, not a reprimand for doing things wrong. A reprimand would certainly reinforce a commitment to the hierarchy, but the admiral, as a commanding officer, was more interested in fostering commitment to the task, to safety, and to quality performance. With the gesture of calling this meeting and focusing the dialogue on the person and the detailed truth, rather than blame and punishment, he reinforced his commitment to improving the processes that save (or could cost) lives on the aircraft carrier. The visible, personal two-way dialogue demonstrated commitment to a process that even the most senior leaders and the most junior sailors could identify with and learn from.

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LESSONS: The hierarchy is a socio-technical system

Later in his career this navy admiral became CEO of the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO), a training and consulting organization created by the nuclear industry to ensure that the more than 100 nuclear plants in the US would pass approval standards set by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Ed Schein was part of an advisory committee that met monthly with senior management to advise on how to make the inspection and training work of INPO maximally effective. It was very apparent during these meetings that the admiral was wholly committed to creating interpersonal and group competence in the INPO staff whose job it was to visit, analyze, and help the plants improve. He and his predecessors understood very well that the work of INPO, though seemingly technical, was deeply socio-technical: the safe operation of a nuclear plant had as much to do with openness and trust up and down the organization’s hierarchy as it had to do with technical performance and design. At a training meeting of INPO staff, Ed asked how long it took the task force visiting a plant to determine whether or not there were problems at the plant. The group said it took only half a day or so to identify critical problems of trust and openness, but it took two weeks of analysis to get sufficient examples upon which to begin to build a relationship with the plant staff—a relationship that would enable them to hear and deal with the kind of openness and trust problems that had been observed immediately. To Ed recalling this years later, it became very clear that the admiral’s interaction with the deck handler was both symbolically and personally a reflection of his commitment

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to Humble Leadership. He was able to communicate to the entire organization his situational humility and the importance of empowering any sailor to provide detailed information, regardless of personal culpability. How the admiral then later ran INPO demonstrated his belief that Humble Leadership was not just effective in the context of an isolated incident on an aircraft carrier but could also be a viable and scalable process in a large, complex organization.

EXAMPLE 5.3. Using Humble Inquiry as an improvement tool in a hospital system

Robert Ryan, the head of quality and improvement at the Beta Hospital System, a regional group of ten hospitals spread across several states, has launched a group-based process for changing elements of the organization’s patterns of social interaction. (Note that both Robert Ryan and Beta Hospital System are fictitious names but based on real entities.) Ryan migrated from industrial implementation of the Toyota Production System in manufacturing into the role of chief quality officer of this hospital system and found himself working with the CEO, who was trying to improve relationships among the employees as well as employees’ relationships with patients. Both had encountered the concept of Humble Inquiry (Schein & Schein, 2021) via a podcast by a physician in another hospital, and they had decided to use that specific process as a vehicle for exploring and improving relationships in the Beta system. Ryan had already identified and involved a group of patient-care providers, managers, and physicians who volunteered to help become change champions and implementers of something new and better. The challenge was to spread positive patterns of interpersonal interaction, including Humble Inquiry, across a large and disparate

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­ rganization. How could this hospital system scale out o something as personal and social as how better to inquire, be open, and create trust? For more than a year, Ryan convened a planning team to figure out how best to use the Humble Inquiry book in implementing these changes. His plan involved using training materials derived from the book, and an exercise that could instruct people in the tricky aspects of relationship-building in matrixed organizations. To make everyone familiar with the principles of Humble Inquiry, he distributed the book along with videos on many details of Humble Inquiry and relationship building as well as 3x5 cards printed with reminders of some of the principles he was advocating. What is significant in how this program evolved is that the exercise was originally designed for an entirely different function, and yet it very quickly evolved into a format that reflected the needs of Ryan and the CEO, and also included new elements suggested by some participants who were heads of medical departments. Ryan, as a humble leader, not only initiated the group learning process but wove it into the management system of Beta, which in turn encouraged multiple new and better elements to be introduced by individuals and groups throughout the system. LESSONS: Building a social structure to facilitate

Level 2 relationships across the hierarchy This story highlights how co-designing new processes that bring people into interaction with each other across the hierarchy could be reinforced by designing specific training processes to enable the participants to safely practice Humble Inquiry. This Humble Inquiry training reinforces behaviors that build open and trusting Level 2 relationships, and then invites the participants to scale the relationshipbuilding process throughout their subunits.

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Introducing group theory into technical improvement work

EXAMPLE 5.4.

The management of improvement has become a major concern of organizations in the health care industry. Such programs have often grown out of the application of the methodologies of the Toyota Production System, as in the cases of the Beta Hospital System in Example 5.3 above and of the PNHC in Example 3.3. While those programs emphasize both technical improvement and changes in social relationships, many of them developed much more sophisticated models of change pertinent to the technology of medical practice, while paying less explicit attention to staff relationships. Nevertheless, the evolution of these activities is the result of many acts of Humble Leadership on the part of influential advocates encouraging consciousness of relationshipbuilding, select physicians who went to the mat for these programmatic elements, and socio-technically savvy physician leaders who contributed both content and energy, creating a vital tailwind for continuing programs that paid explicit attention to relationship-building alongside quantitative improvement measures. LESSONS: Building bridges between the social

and the technical in improvement work When Humble Leadership creates significant results in programs like the one introduced at Beta Hospital System, it is important to note that, while it was hierarchical leadership that introduced the practices, the practice of Humble Leadership emerges in many individuals throughout the hierarchy, and across many activities. When we, the authors, have participated directly in these programs, we have been able to observe leadership developing in younger doctors, resi-

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dents, and staff within smaller groups, and from physicians in roles as middle managers, and from senior physicians who shared a commitment to making social improvements alongside technical improvements.

Summary The increasing pace of technological change means it is inevitable that individuals and groups with different levels of technological proficiency will become more and more interdependent. This will inevitably increase the need to focus on interpersonal relationships both inside working groups and between them. The ability to understand and manage group dynamics is a critical variable in determining optimal task outcomes and, therefore, demands that groups evolve from technical rationality into socio-­ technical rationality. We have shifted, as well, from just focusing on group motivation and intergroup competition to focusing on collaborative group processes and the positive gains of helping group members understand and work on effective management of interdependencies. We must seriously consider that in a complex, volatile world, Humble Leadership can be a major force in evolving new and better group collaborative processes.

Discussion Question ■

Think back to work situations in which you were part of an ad hoc group. How was the group organized? Was there a specific leader or a convener? If so, what role did that person play in structuring the work? How did the group make decisions about what to do, and how did it work out?

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PA R T T HREE

Culture and the Future of Humble Leadership In the next three chapters we explore Humble Leadership in its relationship to organizational culture, with reference to a specific vocabulary useful in deciphering culture. We also explore the relationship of Humble Leadership to culture change, followed by an argument for anticipating how culture impacts organizations and their leaders in the future.

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SI X

Culture Dynamics in Humble Leadership Building a comprehensive model of organizational culture is one key to understanding how Humble Leadership can impact the future of organizational effectiveness and design. A leader who tackles challenges with genuine situational humility inevitably encounters the layered, dynamic interaction of subcultures of groups and meetings, routines and rituals. In the process of making sense of this complexity, the question arises “What would be the appropriate ‘new and better’ given the current situation?” In the previous chapter we discussed the importance of understanding interpersonal and group dynamics, and in this chapter we will see how that understanding can be supplemented with an understanding of the cultural forces that shape an organization’s patterns and responses to challenges. For the humble leader, these are the forces that will determine the criteria for what may be accepted as “better.” To make sense of all of this, let us define some terms that will help us explore what culture is and what it does.

A Model and a Vocabulary for Understanding Culture The culture model proposed here has been developed over the past 40 years alongside the evolution of the field of 89

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­ rganizational studies (Schein & Schein, 2017). When pono dering “What is culture?” we often hear something like “It’s what we do, it’s how we act, it’s the air we breathe, and it’s all around us.” All of that is true, and yet it’s not a precise enough definition for our purposes. To be more specific about something as pervasive as culture, our preferred emphasis is on learning, and specifically how a group learns to survive and thrive. As we first put it in Chapter 1, culture can be defined as “accumulated shared learning.” A leader who learns critical lessons during the formative stages of a group or company and then shares these lessons with other members of the organization as it grows can help shape the culture from the very start. In an established organization, new people introduced to the group can bring new perspectives at the same time that they are learning from the insiders and founders about the existing culture. This process of inculcation, iteration, inspiration, and accumulation built on shared learning becomes the foundation for future growth. Our culture model keys off of this definition and off of the continuum of “conventions to intentions.” We reinterpret these terms from the “structure and practice” argument made by cultural anthropologist Marshall Sahlins. Sahlins proposes that culture evolves as a continuous and reciprocal interaction of the “practice of the structure and the structure of the practice” (Sahlins, 1981, p. 72). The concepts of structure and practice become very useful in our attempt to be more specific about culture dynamics.

The Structure of Culture We can define the structure of culture as the accumulation of conventions—the established ways of thinking and acting—that have “gotten us to where we are today.” And we

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Exhibit 6.1. The Structure of Culture Artifacts

What is seen, heard, felt (physically)

Espoused values

What insiders say is important and valued

Underlying assumptions

Core historical and nonnegotiable beliefs

can define the practice of culture as the way we face every new day, including our intentions for building, sustaining, and/or changing what we do and how we think about what we do. Our reactions to challenges and opportunities reflect the stability of our conventions (“we’ve faced challenges in this way before”) and the anticipation or anxiety of our intentions to overcome challenge and create change. Our actions reflect our conventions (structure) and project our intentions (practice). This fundamental dynamic applies to problems of “external adaptation” to external threats/opportunities as well as to challenges of “internal integration,” such as reorganizations, growth, decline, the introduction of new managers/leaders, and so on (Schein & Schein, 2017, p. 6). Expanding on the idea of structure, Exhibit 6.1 is a threelayer taxonomy first introduced in 1985 (Schein, E. H., 1985, p. 14) that still helps us be specific about the conventional values that impact our intentions (practices). Let us start by looking at the first two terms and how they relate to each other. A company’s buildings, offices, cubes, tables, posters, monitors displaying key operating metrics, “Pizza Wednesdays,” “Work-from-Home Fridays,” and numerous other observables comprise the artifacts of any given culture. They are the things you can physically see, hear, and feel in the workplace. What insiders say about their company represents the espoused values, which include both what the organization already does and what it aspires to do moving forward. Although both

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a­ rtifacts and espoused values are part of what makes a company’s culture, sometimes the artifacts don’t match up with the espoused values, as, for example, in the case of Sun Microsystems, Inc. In the years prior to its acquisition by Oracle Corporation, employees were known to espouse, “We’re a systems company,” but in fact, Sun’s design artifacts—which included large divisions that engineered and marketed microelectronics, mainframe class computer systems, data storage hardware, and midrange server systems, as well as operating systems software, signaled that it was primarily a hardware (servers and storage) company. It is no accident, however, that leaders and loyalists to Sun would call it a “systems company” while knowing full well that much of the outside world thought of it as a hardware company: the word “systems” was a unifying concept and vision (and had a higher profitability growth potential than hardware alone), and so it fit the impression Sun wanted to make, regardless of what it actually was. It is not uncommon for an organization to espouse values that are aspirational, even if out of line with what they can achieve in their current market. To truly understand why there are often inconsistencies between the observed artifacts and the espoused values, we must uncover the organization’s original, cohesive reasons for “being,” the values on which the organization was founded and that come to be assumed and nonnegotiable as the organization succeeds and grows. These underlying “reasons for existing” function as the foundational assumptions that drive much of the daily behavior and become the tacit conventions that keep a company cohesive and motivated, or, unfortunately, sometimes deluded, when the external environment no longer aligns with the original values.

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Exhibit 6.2. The Practice of Culture Technical

Strategy, mission, objectives, design

Social

Communication and relationship norms, influence networks, social patterns

Macro

Global/national/local relational trends, occupational norms, cohort norms, technology trends, enviro-sociopolitical movements

The Practice of Culture The practices of an organization, which describe its hereand-now activities and intentions, can also be described in three layers. We label these the technical, social, and macro layers of culture in practice (Exhibit 6.2). The critical distinction between structure and practice is that the latter is enacted and experienced every day, in real time. We see the practice of culture in how an organization approaches strategy, objectives, measures of performance, and so on. When it comes to technical culture, an organization can choose to adapt to fit the current demands of the market, the actions of its competitors, and the broader macro culture trends (e.g., moves toward sustainability, or diversity, equity, and inclusion). By contrast, a company’s social culture norms may be stickier. People do not easily and quickly adapt how they relate to each other in new ways. Human social-interaction skills and patterns are not turned by quarterly responses to financial results or strategic opportunities. Transforming a group’s social culture is a slow process. Even dramatic impacts of technology take longer to shift our social culture than they do our technical culture.

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(Consider how rapidly we evolved from wired phones and receptionists to voicemail, smartphones, and social media channels and modern messaging systems like Slack.) And yet a transformation of social culture can be helped along by broader macro culture trends. The key to understanding “the practice of the structure” is to note how changes in this macro culture impact both our technical culture and our social culture, and how changes in our technical culture may or may not align with our social practices, or even conflict with macro culture trends. Consider this example: Many companies have mandated “back to the office” following the early stay-at-home period of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our accumulated shared learning through those first couple of years of the pandemic included a rapid adaptation—by necessity, not choice—to videoconferencing and remote meetings. We felt our technical cultures change as we reshuffled budgets to accommodate targeted technology upgrades and stipends to help fund the shift in utility and telecommunications expenses from office to home. Strategies and objectives were adjusted to the dramatic yet short-lived market downturn that came as a result of stay-at-home orders and closed production facilities. During this time, our social culture also changed rapidly as we learned new ways of interacting over videoconferencing. We introduced participation schemes and new norms about presence and focus (e.g., a company might decide it is not okay for participants to turn off their cameras or mute their microphones during virtual meetings), and all associates were expected to adapt to the new circumstances. This was also a time when some artifacts of company culture came into clearer view, and some of these conventions have since been normalized and are now quite

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­ isible as elements of company structure. One example of v a cultural artifact in this context is what backgrounds were deemed appropriate for videoconferencing. Some companies mandated professional standards—no more awkward lighting, unmade beds, or endearingly intrusive pets in the background—while others might have relaxed their prior rules. Another artifact that arose in some organizations was a schedule made up of 8 or even 10 hours of back-toback 1-hour videoconference meetings, leaving less time for personal breaks and downtime than in a normal day at the office! Some artifacts triggered immediate responses in technical and social culture practice, and if we step back and observe the impact of the pandemic, we can see how changes in practice turned into dimensions of structure in a relatively short period of time. One change involved new and deep underlying assumptions about the importance of staying safe, of not spreading the virus, and hence of adhering to the right or obligation to stay at home to prevent infecting coworkers. At the same time, though, in the technical culture practice, leaders and managers who perceived a drop in productivity might have associated that with working from home, and thereby mandated that employees return to the office. Examining these shifts and gaps—between structure and practice, between underlying assumptions and new intentions, between leaders allowing concern about technical culture to override concerns about social culture—can help us understand more precisely what’s behind the vague but very real feeling that a company has a “culture problem.” The history of any organization will reveal gaps and disconformities between structure and practice; this imperfection is inevitable. We emphasize this vocabulary

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­ ecause we believe it is critical for humble leaders to see, b hear, and adapt to the cultural milieu in which “new and better” is being pursued. If the humble leader’s new intentions and practices are too radically different compared to the group’s existing underlying assumptions, espoused values, and artifacts, these “sticky” conventions of “how we have always done things” can present stiff resistance to the changes aimed at moving toward the new and better. In a dynamic environment made up of many subcultures, it is therefore important for Humble Leadership to work from a realistic model of the dynamics of how culture evolves.

The Dynamics of Culture Change A more adaptive, iterative, flexible view of the change process is of necessity part of the Humble Leadership mindset. We have proposed a generative metaphor for how leadership, culture, and change interact to provide for positive outcomes; our metaphor is the combined action of wind and waves on a beach that represents “culture.” Picture yourself standing on a beach, watching as waves crest and break. Now, take a symbolic leap with us: the water, the ocean, symbolizes human initiatives, which ebb and flow and interact with the sediment of past interactions, or “culture,” as symbolized by the sandy beach, loose and soft on top, sedimented and solid below. The wind we feel is of two types: onshore wind—blowing from the ocean to the shore, which we can think of as a tailwind propelling human forces toward change—and offshore wind—blowing away from the shore toward the ocean, a headwind of human forces resisting change. As it relates to organizational transformation, the various wind effects are the natural and technological forces that compel and constrain leadership initiatives. The beach rep-

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resents the accumulated residue of past wind and water interactions. Leadership can be visualized as a wave or a set of waves. Wave energy, which is created by winds, tides, and other forces, first traverses the deeper water as a swell, a gentle movement propelled by some existing or historical force. Eventually, that swell approaches land, at which point the normal flow may be disrupted in a way that causes what we now call a wave to crest. The wave starting to crest is how we visualize leadership acting with an intent to create change. How the wave crests and breaks is influenced by a new combination of forces, principally a leader’s intention to do something new and better and the resistance the new initiative encounters. Change happens when the wave washes, or swashes, on the beach. First, the wave impacts the sand (this is the leader’s impetus for and implementation of change creating churn for the organization), and then the water backwashes (which is the organization’s response to the churn). At times the backwash might look like an attempt to restore equilibrium. And it may also feed the energy of subsequent cresting waves. In all cases, the patterns of movement adapt to the forces of the water, the sand/shore, the wind, and other conditions on the ground. The water filling back into the wave, restoring its energy (continuing change), creates a feedback loop with the repeatedly cresting wave (sustained leadership). As you study the waves, the feedback and iteration between the leadership crest and the resulting change is a flow, not a linear pattern of cause and effect. The continuous flow, with each crest washing and backwashing, perhaps looking much the same as what came before, will nevertheless have new impacts on the sand or shore, even if it takes many iterations.

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Culture is the beach, which created the conditions for the wave to crest (the conditions for leadership) and is how we can visualize structure. The practice of leadership, driven by the various winds, impacts the structure (contours of the sand or shore) gradually. Seeing the change may require observing a few breaking waves, but just as we can be certain the contours of the beach are always changing, even if we can’t see it, so, too, does organizational culture change with the constant interplay of the forces described above. Culture (the beach) is both a friction impeding change and an accelerant shaping the gradual response to the leadership and change cycles. The next symbolic leap we suggest is that the wind direction and strength represent the forces of nature (the environment, the macro culture in which the beach exists) and human impetus. With that in mind, the shape of the wave, the relationship of the crest to the backwash, and the relationship of wavelength to frequency are all directly related to which way the wind is blowing. Again, we think of this as human impetus, intention, and resistance. Onshore wind shapes the dimensions of leadership as a tailwind; offshore wind shapes the dimensions of resistance, as a headwind. Culture change reflects both leadership and resistance. H E A D W I N D S A N D TA ILW IN D S F O R C H A N G E

The beach metaphor should help explain how culture, perhaps more than anything else, impacts and is impacted by any effort to lead change. Some dimensions of culture may motivate, and some may hinder. The framework we have proposed above offers a vocabulary with which we can start breaking down how and when change efforts are successful and when they are not. When change efforts are met with unexpected ­resistance,

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we need to understand both where the headwind came from and what characteristics of the beach represent the conventions established from past wave-beach interactions. From there, we can consider what response Humble Leadership might suggest. Here, situational humility becomes crucial to figuring out what is happening on the ground and what elements in the leader’s intention do not fit with the organization’s existing culture—a mismatch that might make the organization resistant to change. Secondarily, Humble Leadership that embraces situational humility can focus on the “beach’s” history of what has or could change, what may take longer to change, and what will likely not change. Abandoning a linear change model and unrealistic change success criteria are central to Humble Leadership being able to nurture change as a perpetual process, not just as a one-time success or failure. In the first example that follows, change was resisted by an entrenched technical culture and its implied indifference to a divergent social culture, which was seen as irrelevant to senior leaders, even as they espoused commitment to something new and better.

How entrenched hierarchy can undermine Level 2: Brian’s story EXAMPLE 6.1.

The potential for Humble Leadership is all around us and always has been, but it does not often proliferate. It is commonly stifled by either regression to or stagnation at Level 1 relationships, or by organizational headwinds that result in a Level 2 manager leaving voluntarily, or even being fired, when a CEO or senior leader chooses to prioritize technical culture conventions over improving the social culture in response to shifting social norms, particularly among

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lower levels of the organization, which often consists of younger people. It is unfortunate when the organization defeats its own efforts to develop its people, as the following example illustrates. Brian (pseudonym) is a few years out of college, with an engineering degree from a top-tier program. He joined a prestigious yearlong rotational management training program at a multinational food company. He was an outstanding performer in training sessions, and that earned him a coveted first assignment: supervising a packaging line at a large manufacturing plant. This global food company is an aggressive marketer and decentralized manufacturer, with many different brands marketed throughout the world and produced and packaged close to key regional markets. Brian’s plant is in the center of the US. The leadership team at his plant has a lot of autonomy and is under a lot of pressure from headquarters to maintain rigorous production efficiency and quality standards. As such, Brian’s boss leaned on him hard to get the job done within tight output tolerances. Brian’s direct reports were predominantly high-schooleducated, unionized, and male. Brian was able to form open and trusting relationships with them in his first few weeks on the job. His management training during the previous year had highlighted the importance of good relationships with plant workers, and his personality facilitated casual, friendly relationships, even though the situation had the potential to feel awkward, with Brian senior to team members who had far more experience with and knowledge of the operation. Brian quickly adapted to the production line’s social culture, encouraging and being encouraged by Level 2 relationships. Brian’s challenge came not from the people but from the

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machinery involved in the line. Brian’s assessment was that it was not well engineered, and it was also difficult to figure out how to fix it when it broke down. This unreliable machinery became the “elephant in the room” that caused tension between how Brian was able to relate to, on the one hand, his team of unionized line workers, and, on the other hand, his boss. When we asked him whether his subordinates would tell him when something was not working well, he said: “Absolutely. We talk all the time and do our best to figure out how to fix things. I have really gotten to know these guys; I know all their issues with the union, and we work well together to keep output and quality as high as we can.” Tellingly, when we later asked Brian whether he told his boss when things were breaking down or off schedule, he said: “Absolutely not. All he wants to hear about is that things are working and that we are meeting schedules; when things break down, he just gets upset and wants to know whom to blame. The reason we get so many breakdowns is because the packaging machine is not very reliable. A lot of what goes wrong, neither my experienced crew nor I know enough to fix. They should really replace the machinery, but my boss doesn’t want to hear that!”  Brian had built open trusting relationships with the line workers, but he found himself in a professionally distant and competitive, if not antagonistic, relationship with his immediate boss and those farther up the management chain. He could not get across to his boss that the problem was with the machinery and not the operators. Over time, Brian began to realize that maybe the boss did not care, or he found it more expedient to assign blame to workers rather than recognize the need to upgrade machinery. How might we explain such asymmetry across only two

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levels in the hierarchy? Did senior management operate according to a conventional hierarchy model that intentionally reinforced a Level 1 social culture by saying professional distance between upper management and lower-skilled manual work was necessary to maintain the authority to keep the plant humming at high utilization? By contrast, Brian’s relationships, forged naturally with his team, were closer to peer-to-peer than boss-to-subordinates (intentionally reinforcing a Level 2 social culture), and that was what made the team’s output as good as it was! Brian could see that the more role-based, distant relationships built around measurement and production targets characterized the entire hierarchy above him. From what he had observed, his boss was not willing to prioritize fixing the faulty machinery and felt no empathy for the team’s struggle to keep it operating. With some reluctance, Brian realized that, even if he moved to a similar manufacturing company, it would likely follow the same hierarchical patterns, and so he decided instead to pursue graduate studies in an adjacent field that would promise the possibility of different kinds of work in different kinds of organizations. Brian put it very succinctly: “I did not see anywhere in this organization any role models; I did not want to be like any of the people I was reporting to.” After nine months on that job, Brian gave his notice and pursued his master’s degree in engineering, with the hope that he would end up in a more interesting, forward-­looking organization. After having invested a full year in training Brian, the company lost a high-potential manager—a result of their own rigid, measurement-oriented, cost- and schedule-dominated system. The unionized workers had learned to tolerate it, but Brian quickly turned away from what had seemed at first like a dream job. Brian had done

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his best—he fit in naturally with the social culture of the line and practiced Humble Leadership when he could—but he faced intense headwinds from the technical culture of senior management. He was succeeding with his direct reports, but the traditional hierarchy above him was operating with Level 1 transactional relationships that prioritized hitting technical metrics above understanding what was really going on. LESSONS: When senior leadership stagnates at Level 1

The important lesson of this story is that different layers of an organization may prioritize different intentions, as driven by existing conventions. For Brian, this schism between how his team was functioning and what his managers valued presented a headwind that proved impossible to overcome in order to create positive change (which in this case was as simple as acquiring new packaging machinery). The most telling comment in Brian’s story is his saying that he did not see any role models higher up in the company hierarchy. Another important lesson is that, even when Brian felt safe enough to tell his boss that the machine was technically the source of the many breakdowns, he was essentially ignored. Consider the absurdity of this outcome given that Brian had been hired for his engineering talent. Creating a climate that encourages people to speak up is of little value if the system does not have the capacity to hear and react appropriately to what is said. We associate that inability to hear and adapt with Level 1 transactional, role-based relationships. Using our wind metaphor to generalize here: in Brian’s case, the technical culture, as characterized by the senior leaders’ Level 1 apathy, was indifferent to proposed changes despite the tailwind coming from Brian and his

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team. Nor did senior managers see the benefits of the Level 2 social culture that had developed with great success between Brian as a production line manager and his staff as front-line operators.

Transparency and unintended consequences: The BCS story

EXAMPLE 6.2.

This is a story about a Silicon Valley start-up that lived and died after about 5 years of effort and dedication. (It is based on a real situation but is an amalgam that has been adapted and “anonymized” for the purpose of illustration.) It’s not an unusual story in that the company was well funded, well regarded, well run, spirited, and excited, with breakthrough technology and experienced people. It is also typical in that, in the end, it was not able to adapt and innovate its way to sustainable independent growth and prosperity. Managing with transparency The communications systems company we’re calling Business Communications Systems (BCS) provided enhanced communications technology to medium-sized enterprises. The company was founded by tech industry veteran engineers who knew how to create new solutions. To build a business based upon this novel approach, they hired an experienced chief executive who had been successful building other technology start-ups. The CEO brought in another experienced sales and marketing executive to complete the senior management team. The founding product designers and their hired-in professional managers shared the value of managing with objective fairness and transparency. They had all seen too much subterfuge and “political behavior” in their past

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­ xperiences at large companies. They also shared the value e of wanting to demonstrate honesty and integrity to their employees and to their board of directors. Integral to this transparency was a metrics-based management system. They decided that all of the functional leaders would define their key metrics, around which they would manage, be managed by, and be evaluated by thumbs up or thumbs down. The data would be presented to the company on wall-mounted flat-screen displays—a real-time pulse of the business on full public display. Employees found this fair and had no reason to doubt or question the direction set by senior management. Transparency was a foundation upon which trust, up and down the management chain, could be built. The artifacts of a culture of transparency and candor were abundant at BCS. One could walk into the main room crowded with tables and workstations for everyone from customer service to engineering, to marketing and executive management, and see the screens on the walls with real-time metrics of business performance. A few times per month, the company would offer lunch, typically from a favorite local pizza place, and use the “all-hands” opportunity for candid discussion of how things were going, what needed attention, who had been hired, what birthdays were coming up, all things everyone should know. In addition, senior managers would take rotations of employees, from all parts of the organization, for lunch in carefully selected combinations—a way of staying in touch, getting to know each other, and sharing information. For anyone joining BCS at this time, candor and transparency would certainly have appeared as espoused values. BCS employees appreciated the day-to-day presence and involvement of the senior managers, and when the groups

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got together—everyone from the newest hires to the CEO—they felt like it was okay to talk openly about their wins and losses, their successes and failures. The BCS social culture was fluid and friendly and largely reflected the close relationships of the founding members and the open work environment that reinforced such apparently nonhierarchical fluidity. Somewhere around the second or third year, BCS hit a plateau. Transparency notwithstanding, there were some disconnects between the product team and the sales teams struggling to close deals with target customers. The numbers were clearly indicating who was meeting the targets and who was not, and hence the CEO, who had been brought in to manage by the numbers, had some tough choices to make. A consequential decision In a decisive move, made after deliberating with other board members and founders, the CEO acted upon the performance data by terminating the employment of one of the original product founders, who was not getting the product line to where it needed to be. The CEO hoped that this core personnel move would improve the pace of new product delivery and demonstrate to the organization the importance of acting decisively when the metrics suggested action was necessary. This was a required technical culture adaptation, shifting personnel and organizational design to improve efficiency and product delivery.  It was tough for the CEO and everyone else, and a bit of a shock to the system, but it was what the numbers said to do. In this technical culture, there would be no hiding from the truth—it was what it was. About a year later, BCS was sold at a loss to a larger com-

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pany and downsized by over 50 percent. The CEO and his management team believed they had done all the right things to set strong anchors—communicating core values around hitting their metrics and maintaining transparency—and it had seemed like a very healthy modern company. What went wrong? A year or two after the company was sold, a senior member of BCS noted, “After one of the founders was terminated, everything changed.” The long-term impact, presumably an unintended consequence, was that the fluid and collaborative social culture, characterized by many important Level 2 relationships and trust, had been betrayed by transactional, by-the-numbers management. This calculated risk on the part of the CEO underestimated the damage of taking such abrupt authoritative action, and, thereby, introducing an insidious substrate of fear. The resulting social culture was anything but fluid, open, and trusting. The move was overtly transactional, implicitly valuing the calculated decisiveness (and risk) over a Level 2 relational and more iterative approach to dealing with the challenge. The impact on the social culture was chilling, not empowering. LESSONS: When transparency may be more weapon than tool

Many managers, leaders, and theorists have highlighted the importance of transparency, while conceding that opening all the channels for all kinds of work-related and financial information is far easier said than done. It is also the reason why we insist on the concept of “openness” to highlight that what and how we communicate is not a passive process of making things visible but an active sharing, revealing, listening, understanding, and responding process. Transparency can be a passive process that does not discriminate what is perceived unless deliberate filters are built in. We

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know that we rarely want to see everything. Openness is a choice of what is important to reveal to get the job done, not just the metrics of what happened and when. The CEO and other senior managers at BCS were trying to build trusting Level 2 relationships. But after one of the founders was fired, the value of sharing and acting on performance information really reflected a different foundational assumption favoring tough-minded, individualistic, mechanistic, pragmatic, transactional leadership (Level 1). Here transparency and candor were quite consistent with an underlying assumption about individuals in the organization being free to do their own personal best, to self-optimize, to compete on equal footing (using the same shared information), and to accept the “broad daylight” consequences of their actions and transactions. Did such deep assumptions about individualistic, pragmatic, transactional relationships prevent them from continuing to build the Level 2 relationships that could have ameliorated the substrate of fear? Was trust something “nice to have” but not an intrinsic value to both the technical culture and the social culture? Transparency without trust may well keep employees engaged and motivated, and possibly very productive, for a period of time. Yet the political, backstabbing, hide-the-ball, deceive-your-peers-to-stayahead atmosphere can be implicitly encouraged by some leaders as the requisite prescription for hypergrowth companies. In the long run, however, with such transparency as a means of control more than as a means of communication (openness), companies can trend toward entropy as disillusioned talent leaves, the wrong kind of skills and performance are promoted, and creative adaptations in response to market changes become politically controversial. Intrinsic openness and trust, and Level 2 relationships at

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all levels of the organization, form a far more flexible and enduring substrate than the endemic fear of transactional Level 1 metrics-driven management. We believe teams of all sizes perform better when team members feel psychologically safe enough to be open with each other. Whether we label it a climate of fear or the loss of psychological safety, at BCS this effect likely dampened the spirits, undermined openness, and threatened the company’s ability to pivot. Protecting psychological safety might have resulted in slowing time to market in the short term and might likely have increased resiliency and independence in the long term.

A Common Pattern In the examples above, Brian’s story and the rise and fall of BCS share a pattern: conventional values favored operational efficiency and metric-based leadership more than collaborative effectiveness, even in the case of BCS, a young company that espoused a fluid and open social culture. The intention to be open and trusting was there, but the tie-breaking force, the slight headwind, was the quest for operational efficiency. The forces of technical culture and social culture are dynamic down to the level of individual actors, and creating change, doing something that is new and better, is rarely linear, as our beach metaphor emphasizes. This idea of nonlinear progress was illustrated at BCS. It had become apparent that a social culture that valued dynamic, responsive, flexible communication had the unfortunate side-effect that engineers often felt like every minute of every workday was interrupt-driven, so much so that it was very difficult to get individual coding work done. With a completely open office plan, there was very little sight or sound insulation

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provided for even the most senior engineers. To address this problem, a scheme was developed to create a “do not disturb” signal that would help prevent constant interruption. Those who felt the need to “shut their door” could put a miniature orange construction-zone cone alongside their monitors or keyboards to signal they were not to be disturbed. It was a clever solution, and largely ignored. The change in social culture was too big to accomplish with such a direct and simple trick. That said, it was effective in creating broader awareness of the risks of frequent interruption, and in this way, a needed change in social culture was in fact proceeding by this small step (or small wave). A challenge for Humble Leadership is specifying (using the suggested vocabulary) which facets of the technical culture are tailwinds to be harnessed and which are headwinds resisting what is new and better. Which conventional values (i.e., espoused values and underlying assumptions) align or do not align with the intention to create something new and better? Which macro culture trends are tailwinds that can be exploited? Movement toward Humble Leadership is culture change leadership, taken in continuous waves and feedback loops, and it accelerates in adaptive, flexible organizations characterized by psychological safety, openness, and trust—Level 2 relationships, up, down, and across adaptive and shape-shifting organizations.

Summary In this chapter we have tried to illuminate both how Humble Leadership and working at Level 2 can occur throughout various parts of an organization and how these intentional innovations can run afoul of established conventions. But because legacy managerial culture is often deeply ­reliant

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on the lone hero or the linear machine model, we also see many examples of change initiatives followed by regressions to transactional Level 1 behaviors. Ironically, the single best indicator that Level 2 and Humble Leadership can proliferate is when messy, complex problems are becoming more common and the importance of survival is higher than ever—challenges that may compel leaders to move toward Humble Leadership in hopes of strengthening their organizations’ ability to “see” and adapt in order to survive and grow.

Discussion Questions ■

Think about the visible artifacts of businesses you regularly visit. What kinds of things do you notice immediately, and what inferences can you make about the different cultural elements of that organization?

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Do you know of any businesses that post “Our Values” statements in public locations? If so, are the artifacts you can observe consistent with these espoused values?

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If you notice inconsistencies between a company’s artifacts and espoused values, what can you infer about the underlying assumptions and conventions by which these organizations actually operate?

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SE V EN

Anticipating the Future of Humble Leadership As we look ahead, we must affirm that a critical process of Humble Leadership is active cultural stewardship— building awareness of cultural tailwinds and headwinds, seeing how conventions may hinder intentions to do something new and better, and knowing how our hereand-now social organization may help or hinder our efforts to generate change. In all of this, there is still one piece missing: active cultural scenario planning about the future. We do scenario planning all the time within our technical cultures. We anticipate demographic and macroeconomic trends in resource planning, we try to anticipate technology shifts and political changes, and we watch carefully what is happening with climate change. The question is whether we have the same discipline for planning around cultural impacts on our futures, such as large-scale trends that might impede or catalyze our pursuit of new and better. Should we be expending as much effort on macro culture futures as we do on technology and macroeconomic futures? To help answer this question, let us add one more dimension to our concept of macro culture: meta culture. Where macro culture is the broad milieu in which our organizations’ social and technical cultures “practice,” meta culture consists of the future cultural trends that we 112

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­ redict, with some degree of confidence, will one day have p an impact on our organizations. Culture scenario planning may sound like a difficult process: it is, in essence, trying to predict something vague and elusive. We can only offer science fiction writer William Gibson’s implied words of encouragement: “The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed” (Gibson, 2003). The trends are out there, we just need to spend some time to see and hear them. Whether we use our term, meta culture, or want to call it future culture, we need to sharpen our situational humility so that we will be able to see that emerging cultural trends, though unevenly distributed, impact macro culture, social culture, and technical culture, and therefore need to be part of the Humble Leadership analytical frame. Consider this hypothetical example of the type of output a team might create in a meta culture “brainstorm” or ideation session: Trends that may impact a business in the immediate future: global-social connectedness; climate justice; social justice; design thinking; flat organization design; gig economy; “the Great Resignation”; self-managed teams; life-work integration . . . ​

This list could go on and on. Just as every cultural context in which change is attempted is unique, every Humble Leadership initiative will have its own unique meta culture dimensions to mind and to mine. New themes will emerge from the meta culture brainstorming process, and many of these themes may become central arguments in a cultural scenario planning effort. For now, we build on the example brainstorm above to offer more themes that we believe humble leaders will need to be mindful of, and that they may be able to use as tailwind, if they are following a

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course that is not inconsistent with stronger meta culture trends (headwinds). 1. Context over content: Humble Leadership will be more successful if it emphasize context and process and puts proportionately less focus on content and expertise. It should come as no surprise that a discussion touching on the future of leadership would start with some handwringing about the impact of artificial intelligence (AI). We join many who expect that large swathes of economies, entire segments of industries, and significant categories of work will be permanently altered or eliminated by distributed clusters of microprocessors “thinking,” making decisions, and directing work. There is little doubt that some categories of work will be more vulnerable than others. Broadly, we believe transactional work (for instance, trading in capital markets) can gain so much from AI that the “trader” role itself might be considered vulnerable. If we are correct that transactional roles may be more vulnerable to AI or augmentation, the challenge will be to redefine these vulnerable roles so that human, contextual processing—that is, building resilient Level 2 relationships—is what will be rewarded rather than content manipulation and transaction management. There is also another way we see Humble Leadership skills as important in an AI-augmented future. What people think they know will be worth less than it used to be. The leader as a visionary expert reaches a point of diminishing returns when anyone can access the same information, and when doing something new has more to do with the implementation processes at play in the organization than with information deficits or expertise gaps. If everyone

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knows or can know, leaders are no longer sole experts, they’re just one of the crowd, or one in the cloud! This “leveling” results, in part, from the ubiquity of AI and the skills of those trained to exploit it. Neural networks built on unlimited processing power (virtually infinite cloud computing power and storage) will continue to appear more and more “intelligent.” Most of us have experienced the ways in which search engines have nearly perfected the ability to finely predict, accumulate, customize, and animate the concepts we search. Humble leaders will see that mere access to and distribution of information may no longer have much power in maintaining a commandand-control hierarchy. Even today, the pace at which databases are tapped and mined for immediate and nearly complete answers to questions is staggering, especially when the database access is in the hands of “digital natives” who started learning to search online before they entered elementary school. A decade or two from now, an employee trained in data science, adept in the latest generation of query languages and, of course, equipped with ever more powerful networked devices, will have a substantial information-assimilation advantage over older learners. This gap may be widened farther by what psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman (2011) observed: that older “experts” tend to become overconfident in what they think they know and believe they have learned, and they are less likely to admit to their own ignorance and acknowledge what they have yet to learn. The young, curious AI-augmented digital learner, on the other hand, may quickly develop a wider and fuzzier knowledge set that is more adaptable, if not also more relevant, than the deeper but limited knowledge of the older experience-

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bound “expert.” One way to describe this broader meta culture trend is simply that younger employees, while less experienced, may be far more savvy than their older colleagues when it comes to certain content-gathering. Humble Leadership is about mining this age-diverse social context in order to expand and disseminate relevant information in order to make the best decisions. In his book Thank You for Being Late, author Thomas Friedman suggests that our common experience of artificial intelligence is actually “IA,” or “intelligent assistance” (Friedman, 2016, p. 199). This is an important framing, as it reminds us that, generally, automation does not mean the end of jobs for humans, it just means different jobs and possibly improved jobs. Humble Leadership can build on this idea of intelligent assistance by enhancing the ability of humans to process how information applies to particular contexts and in relationship to complex tasks. It is well known that the more information we acquire, the more gaps we see that require even more clarifying information, a pattern that often leads to “analysis paralysis.” Humble Leadership can help orchestrate the group sensemaking process and enable it to create the context for fully open dialogue and to select the appropriate decision-making process. While AI may be very efficient at ferreting out the known unknowns, it is only with Level 2 relationships, in which we collectively muddle through uncertainty by sharing, sensing, and reflecting on each other’s reactions, that Humble Leadership can provide the resilience to deal with unknown unknowns. 2. Humble Leadership will have to cope with tribalism (culture wars) and build relationships unbound by unconscious biases.

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We are writing at a time when polarization in politics, sociodemographics, and economics is unbelievably high, having grown even stronger since the first edition of this work was published in 2018. And we are writing from a place (Silicon Valley) where gender discrimination and sexual harassment in innovative companies, large and small, is shockingly prevalent considering how forward-leaning so many young companies are otherwise in this place and time. It is not our goal to suggest completely new solutions to these deeply existential problems, except to offer this idea: Humble Leadership is built on relationships that develop between whole persons who see beyond or around their unconscious biases. The development of effective Level 2 relationships, by definition, is nearly impossible in the context of bias, discrimination, exclusion, and harassment. The Humble Leadership challenge will be to leverage the intrinsically more tolerant attitudes evident in the younger generations into more effective, globally distributed teams in the coming years. Even if explicit segregation and exclusion are in decline overall, we still have to contend with the unconscious biases that emerge among teams, groups, and divisions that are part of a larger whole. Humble leaders will need to find a way through these biases, and especially their own, since true Level 2 relationships cannot develop when biases are interfering with their ability to establish trust and openness. If unconscious biases nudge leaders away from seeing employees, board members, stakeholders, and so on as whole people, their influence will be limited, and they may be replaced by other leaders who have learned to see through their biases and develop Level 2 relationships with an unbounded diversity of whole people.

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3. Humble Leadership must challenge individual abuse of power. Leadership almost always implies using some form of power to make something new and better happen, and we must watch out for abuses of power, a phenomenon that is not limited to traditional strict hierarchies. Emergent humble leaders may need to fight against the temptation to think they are superior to others around them, especially in situations where the leader out-ranks her or his prospective followers. In an environment that values speed the temptation may be even greater, as leaders may be inclined to make hasty power moves. As business theorist Jeffrey Pfeffer notes in Power (2010), power abusers often succeed in the short term; and as organizational psychologist Adam Grant wrote in Give and Take (2013, p. 5), “takers” (selfish power abusers) sometimes succeed in the short term because they believe they are playing in a zero-sum game, where one person’s gain necessarily comes at another’s loss. Self-centered abuse of power is rarely successful in the long run, despite individualized reward systems that favor selfishness over selflessness. The challenge is that once megalomaniacs, iconoclasts, and “heroes” have abused power, it takes much longer for the acts of Level 2 successors to rebuild openness and trust. As organizational psychologist Robert Sutton suggests: bad behavior is five times more powerful than good behavior (Sutton, 2007, p. 170). This implies that positive leadership acts of mutual trust and openness must significantly outnumber negative acts if a humble leader hopes to create and maintain optimal work relationships. It may be relatively easy for leaders to act badly toward colleagues that they out-rank, due to

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professional distance or indifference. However, it is much harder to act badly toward someone with whom one has established an open, trusting Level 2 relationship. As we see evidence in the meta culture that individuals are increasingly demanding better treatment in their workplaces, we see Humble Leadership contributing to this zeitgeist. Humble Leadership emphasizes tolerance, respect, and the value of personal connections between whole persons, and thus it represents a superior way forward, as compared to the indifferent if not abusive power dynamics common in static and transactional organizational relationships. 4. Humble Leadership can help groups become more agile, adaptive, and collaborative in ways that help to tailor leadership to the needs of employees, stakeholders, and customers. The bespoke trend of recent years, in which everything is made to order and delivered direct to the consumer, is still going strong. We think it is likely that “bespoke everything and waste nothing” will continue to be very important in the minds of employees at future-seeking organizations. Personalization is even becoming mission critical for HR, as they tailor benefits and incentives precisely to the personal needs and interests of each employee. Generally, we think it is likely that competition will drive many enterprises to respond directly to the demand for custom products and services, for which distribution will necessitate highly effective communications channels to share information flows and move local market decisions direct to where customers are. Humble Leadership, at the division or product level, is built on unencumbered bi-directional information flows and offers intrinsic “self-management” advantages

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that can meet the demand for the wide variety of bespoke products and services. Self-managed teaming sounds chaotic, yet it has already developed in some industries that are trying to turn VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) into advantage. In a future driven by bespoke business, leadership skilled in the design of relationships may be much better prepared than leadership that is focused on maintaining order within strictly defined job roles. If the market is demanding customization, the leadership task will be to assemble “high-performing teams” (Ricci & Weise, 2011) made up of skilled players with the relationships and the agility to deliver customization and continuous adaptation. 5. Humble Leadership will need to perpetually reconsider how to organize relationships and workgroups in a global mobile world. Centralized organizations and authoritarian personalities constrained by certainty will not succeed in a world twisting toward distributed everything. (Johansen, 2017, p. 148)

We see innovative organizations best described as “shapeshifting organizations” (Johansen, 2017) in which antiquated command-and-conceal transactional exchange behavior will not be rewarded, and leadership will occur organically not hierarchically. Hierarchies will still exist, yet they may come and go (Johansen, 2017), and the energy in organizations will emerge from the edge where cooperative relationship building is more potent than who works for whom. In our view, Level 2 trust and openness become the critical connective tissue binding leaders and followers from an organization’s edge to edge. And yet this does

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not happen without leaders continually tapping and testing with their teams what is resonating, what is sticking, what truly matters and what does not. In group dynamics and meeting management training, this is described as “frequently testing goal consensus.” It must become an important Level 2 process in any workgroup for someone to inquire, “Let’s check on whether we are all on the same page: what are we trying to do?” and to do this in a global, geographically dispersed organization. Global mobile networks make this technically possible, yet the leadership challenge will be to facilitate group reflection and group sensemaking, which must build at least common understandings across linguistic and cultural boundaries. 6. Humble Leadership will involve being both physically present and virtually present as organizations become more globally distributed. One of the most consequential decisions a humble leader may need to make, now and in the future, is the degree to which physical presence is required to establish and maintain Level 2 relationships with direct reports and key contributors in an organization. It will always be the case, even in the shape-shifting organization, that senior leaders will need to spend in-person hands-on time at the edges of their organizations. The COVID-19 pandemic and the spring 2020 stay-athome orders around the globe forced a new standard of tolerance for, if not acceptance of, meeting virtually. We saw many companies of many different shapes and sizes adapting remarkably well to this dramatic change, and the situation presented us with an interesting barometer for how tolerant people would be for various degrees of “hybrid” work (meaning partly at home and partly in the ­office).

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Months and years later, it has not been surprising that pandemic fatigue and social needs created a “backwash” of resistance to all virtual work and a clamor to get back to the office, and where a company ends up on the hybrid work spectrum may be as idiosyncratic as its social culture. What is most important from the Humble Leadership perspective is providing the substrate of openness and trust in which employees are encouraged to share with and learn from colleagues, reports, managers, and leaders what degree of hybrid fits each work context. One thing we believe hybrid work models must optimize for is the initial meeting to build trust and openness. We still need that personal human connection, the bonds that form in the off moments and interstitial conversations at the water cooler, in the hallways, on a lunchtime walk, or at a pub after work. We suspect that the next few decades will see a decline in the frequency or intensity of in-person time spent managing the deliverables (metrics) of others, and this amplifies our view that one of the key skills of the humble leader is rapid personization—the ability to quickly establish open communication at those times when groups are co-located (which in turn removes some of the pressure to hold more-frequent in-person gatherings, especially when telepresence is more efficient). Ideally, Humble Leadership leverages physical presence for the purpose of co-creation of momentum more than for correction of miscommunication.

Summary In Chapter 1 we introduced the challenge for Humble Leadership to strike the right balance of managing for technical efficiency and optimizing for social collaboration. This will always be a trade-off calculation. It is nonetheless our

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­ oncern that the gravitational force toward managing for c technical efficiency is greater than the force toward investing in social effectiveness (through collaboration). It is very easy to be seduced by the numbers. It is very comfortable to stick to the hard metrics in making tough decisions. So many of our public company and private enterprise accounting and reporting systems reward investing in automated systems and letting “the social stuff” take care of itself. Our emphasis on seeing and hearing the practices of technical culture in relation to social culture, macro culture, and meta culture is to arm leaders for the shift away from continually fine-tuning the metrics and their attainment, and toward investment in social and collaborative processes such that technical culture and social and macro culture can come into alignment in the pursuit of what is new and better. Again, we are not suggesting cutting off human investment in technical efficiencies, but rather that it may be the technical efficiencies that more naturally “take care of themselves” through some combination of the schemes of automation or augmented intelligence in the supply chain, in HR, in accounting and payroll, in finance, even in “agile” product development. Can a focus on understanding the alignment of social culture with technical culture bring insights that provide the tailwind a humble leader needs to drive this shift? Can a concerted effort to catalogue and specify how meta culture impacts will challenge social and technical culture provide either the tailwind for change or anticipate the headwind blowing against what is new and better? We believe the answer is yes to both questions, provided there is an honest effort made to use situational humility so that the structure (conventional thinking) does not obscure actual practices

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that may help or hinder efforts to change. Yet implementing helpful practices in the present by developing open and trusting relationships between your organization’s most influential or most “tapped in” team members is necessary though not sufficient. Humble Leadership must also paint the picture of something new and better with a keen focus on what is coming, what is about to happen, and not only on what is happening now. The Humble Leadership shift happens with both presence and anticipation.

Discussion Questions ■

Brainstorm meta culture trends you need to keep an eye on. What trends excite you, and which ones worry you?

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Now apply this exercise within your current work context. Does your organization seem ready for the future that is “already here, just not evenly distributed”? If you identify trends that might put your organization at risk, what are some things you could do about it?

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EIGH T

Humble Leadership Messages: An Allegory Organizational history provides numerous examples of the heroic innovator who proposes something new and better. The image of the go-it-alone maverick, risking everything with extraordinary confidence and perseverance, will remain a central myth in our past, but what we question now is whether this model of the alone-at-the-top chief decider remains salient at all in our future. In innovation-driven industries where VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) is embraced, we believe that, as a company matures, isolated, heroic leaders will ultimately suffer if they fail to gather complete information before making decisions. We have argued that what distinguishes the humble leader, at any level of the organization, is the talent to develop optimal Level 2 relationships, which seamlessly provide the information flow required to make better decisions—the type that allows for innovation at high pace. An individualistic, competitive, destiny-is-in-my-handsalone mindset limits a leader’s ability to handle uncertainty and volatility, since no individual will be able to process the huge volume of data or assimilate the dynamic inputs to effective strategy. Brilliant, creative, charismatic ­iconoclasts

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will continue to step forward to propose something new and better, but in the future we see, the most effective leadership brilliance will express itself more in a “we together” cooperation framework than in an “I alone” delusion, particularly as organizations grow and become more diversified. Even with a “we together” mindset, however, organizations inevitably go through many stages, iterations, perturbations, growth pains, and expansions. While significant technological advances, particularly in communications and enterprise software, have helped organizations address the technical challenges of scaling up and scaling down, have we seen the same advances in human systems? Is it as easy for us to adjust our social culture when the demands on the organization force rapid pivots in our technical culture? Adapting how we relate to each other is hard—it’s not automated, and it may be resisted—but this brings us back to the basic Humble Leadership design challenge: Are the norms for the right levels of relationship in the right places at the right time to ensure optimal information flow? To illustrate this emphasis on information flow that builds on a foundation of openness and trust, we present an allegory featuring an organization that begins its journey with the openness, trust, and empathy substrate but ends up at Level Minus 1. This story is based on real experiences of large organizations spiraling toward bureaucratization. It is not accidental that the downward trajectory in this allegory parallels the levels of relationships at the core of Humble Leadership. The relationship levels in this case progress from Level 2.5 toward Level Minus 1. Unfortunately, we believe this regression toward bureaucracy is agonizingly common.

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Allegory: A Start-Up Becoming a Bureaucracy Imagine you are one of two people in a garage starting a company with a winning product or service that could be the next big thing. You know it’s a great idea, you know it has a massive total addressable market, and you know you have an early-mover advantage. Nothing is going to stop you and your cofounder from spending a lot of time together to get the concept off the ground and into customers’ hands. You and your partner will be “attached at the hip” and “finishing each other’s sentences.” This relationship is at least Level 2.5. Most of your time in creating this innovative organization is spent on social collaboration, with little effort, as yet, spent on managing technical efficiency. Now, suppose your company becomes established and is beginning to grow, and it needs to keep innovating and expanding the product and service lines to help grow revenue and add employees. This growth-and-expansion phase requires high levels of openness and trust; you and your founding partner cannot do everything and make all the decisions, so you will need to share information, distribute workloads, and delegate tasks. However, you should not be comfortable growing in this way if you do not focus on keeping communication channels open and trust levels very high. Level 2 relationships, built through conscious efforts to personize at all levels of your organization, are critical to growth, whether you are a start-up or an established enterprise. You are holding on to the social collaboration values that got you to this growth stage, and you are starting to define the technical metrics that will build efficiencies as you grow. Here is where things get tricky. You and your partner

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have done it: you have taken your idea and turned it into a multi-product, multi-division global enterprise. You have brought on experts in functional areas who know how to scale up large enterprises. You have hired general managers for Europe, Asia, South America, and so on. You now run a complex organization with ambitious and talented general managers. While your organization structure defines the interfaces between functional and regional leads, these definitions are in terms of the roles and hand-offs that are needed to maintain technical efficiency. You discover that the organizational design, which is intended to smooth hand-offs, also creates silos and incentivizes zero-sum competitive games and professional distance. After all, your divisional and regional leads are competing for relatively scarce resources, whether quarterly budgets or headcount. The divisions are under pressure to hit their numbers, and the balance has been struck to optimize for the metrics, which results in spending less time innovating. It is not a surprise that Level 1 has become the dominant relationship mode. You and your founding partner agree, “Wow, we’ve gone from start-up to multinational organization, and we’re also going from partnership to bureaucracy,” where the best you can expect of your leaders is Level 1 professional distance, while hoping that the balkanization that has occurred predictably does not produce subterfuge and deceit among your key leaders. And then you hit a rough patch. A tightening recessionary business cycle and a tough quarter force your organization to rein in costs. The pressure on your key leaders is intense—as much from you as from the public and markets that continue to expect profitability growth. How can your key leaders get back to profitability growth? There is

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little time to focus on career development and employee engagement. Nor is there time to experiment with novel organizational designs (self-managed teams and so on). You and your leaders believe in “design thinking,” but this only really applies to new product ideas, and for now, with belts tightened, the focus must be on finding technical efficiencies to return to profitability. Unfortunately, one of the inevitable impacts of the rough patch is reduction in your workforce. You and your founding partner accept the recommendations of the functional and regional leaders that 10 percent of your employees need to be let go. Not surprisingly, this creates a feeling of mistrust and fear among many of the staff, at all levels, who have “survived” the reduction in force, and they feel a great deal of pressure to perform well, in case another round of layoffs follows in the next quarter. The unfortunate byproduct of this fear, among middle managers in particular, is that diminished psychological safety is exploited by division heads facing direct pressure to improve operating metrics. There are fewer employees around to improve on the metrics, hence everyone is feeling the need to do more with less, and they are certainly not as likely to speak up or complain about inequities and risks. You and your founding partner are disappointed, though not shocked, to learn that employees are feeling exploited, not seen, not listened to, and dominated by their managers. And these managers might say the same thing about their bosses exploiting them. In this sense, the growth-andexpansion phase of the company, which was built on Level 2 relationships and social collaboration, has given way to a contraction phase, which is afflicted by Level Minus 1 relationships, which are perceived to be more “efficient,” in some divisions of the global enterprise. Through this

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­rganization’s short history, innovation and expansion o yielded bureaucratization and a toxic mix of metrics-chasing and exploitative relationships. The good news is that your partner and you have seen this backsliding happening, and you believe there may be ways to fix it before it’s too late! The two founders in our allegory experienced the gravitational force of bureaucratization. We can see from a distance how social culture norms deteriorated from compassion, intense sharing, and empathy within divisions to apathy, behaving badly toward each other, Level 1 zerosum-game competition, and eventually mistrust and antipathy (Level Minus 1) when jobs were on the line. Through growth and expansion, bureaucratic behavior (e.g., internal competition, concealing information, amassing power for its own sake) displaced cooperative and synergistic behavior, the Humble Leadership foundation upon which the company was built. Our allegorical founders had a theory of how to address this, starting with the belief that antipathy needed to be replaced with empathy. One of the ways they fostered the latter was to create cross-divisional and cross-functional councils intended to open communications channels in order to prevent subterfuge and deception. With restored confidence in a renewed sense of social collaboration, the founders then started to distribute decision-making authority back to the people in the organization who had the most information about customers and markets. Decisionmaking authority was no longer a managerial right, it was a shared privilege (albeit one that would need to be proven effective to be retained). Budget authority went alongside decision-making authority. The privilege to make critical

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technical decisions brought with it the budget with which to test and validate these decisions. The founders believed this would compel ambitious managers and humble leaders throughout the business to build open and trusting relationships up, down, and across this multinational enterprise. In explaining their theory to their people, the founders emphasized an organic view of the organization that was cooperative, recognized interdependence, and shifted resources around in response to the market in order to remain effective. The founders in our story saw the wisdom in resetting the self-image of the organization, from that of a well-oiled machine (that had become overly bureaucratic) to a shapeshifting, organic, living system. This Humble Leadership shift could only catch on with a renewed movement away from Level 1 transactional relationships and toward Level 2 personized relationships throughout the organization. It will always be challenging to launch social processes to recreate and rebuild Level 2 relationships without the luxury of starting from scratch, as a small pre-bureaucratic organic partnership can, but the effort will pay off in the long run.

Summary All organizations face ebbs and flows of growth and of market acceptance, and cycles of budget surplus and deficit. These forces can create competition for tightly controlled resources. Managerial roles themselves represent defined budget allocations—“Can we afford one more manager?”—and, in this context, professionally distant relationships across divisional lines may seem entirely rational (“Schmooze just enough to be ready to co-opt the other division’s headcount in the next reorg”). The pitfall, however,

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is when this competitive behavior, apathy, and/or zero-sum behavior toward other divisions leads to deceit. Regressing to Level 1 relationships may look efficient in the short term, but it will turn out to be far less effective, if not destructive, in the longer term. Leaders shifting resources dynamically, as a body shifts blood to where it is needed, is one key to a system’s success. Humble leaders are there to “read the room”—of both the situation and the people involved—and then use that information to set the company’s direction toward something new and better. Humble leaders who practice situational humility will embrace the volatility of the context and then reinforce and leverage Level 2 relationships to ensure that complete information is shared within a flexible, open system continuously adapting to challenges and seizing opportunities.

Discussion Question ■

When you think about the allegory, does it remind you of things you have seen happen in your organization? Have you seen anything resembling bureaucratization, and have you had the power or the intention to do something about it? How would intentional efforts to build open and trusting relationships up, down, and across organizational boundaries have helped?

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PA R T FOUR

Experiential Learning for Humble Leaders In Chapter 9, “Adopting the Humble Leadership Attitude,” we focus on getting you in touch with your own ability to see and understand what is going on around you, especially in terms of the types of relationships you have now and the types you might need in the future to become a more effective humble leader. In Chapter 10, “Behaviors and Group Skills for Humble Leadership,” we offer some exercises intended to help you put your insights to work and change your Humble Leadership behavior. Because opportunities for seeing and suggesting new and better human relations often occur in meetings of groups or teams, we also include some exercises that are best done in group settings, to facilitate both individual learning and group relationship building.

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Adopting the Humble Leadership Attitude

Effective Humble Leadership requires situational ­ umility and building Level 2 relationships, especially in h work situations in which the problems we face have become VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous). All of this must be done in a multicultural world, which adds a whole layer of anxiety and reminds us that we need to sharpen our skills in many different areas. It is also true that, particularly in the Western Hemi­ sphere, we have grown up with managerial cultures that seem to value task accomplishment more than relationships and to value professionally distant transactional relationships more than collaborative group relationships, creating an environment in which meetings and teamwork are grudgingly tolerated only as is pragmatically necessary to get objectives met. Humble Leadership will often identify that the most important “new and better” will require evolving some of the existing cultural conventions into new kinds of intentional socio-technical responses and adaptations. In this chapter we offer two ideas and process tools to facilitate skill building around these new intentions:

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1. Focused reflecting, to broaden your perspective on the different aspects of the cultures of management, administration, and leadership. 2. An exercise to help you analyze the nature and depth of your current work relationships and then decide where the depth of those relationships might need to be changed in order for you to become more effective as a humble leader.

EXERCISE 9.1.

Mindful reflection

Close your eyes and recall your work history. For any of the work projects or jobs that went well, recall the kinds of relationships you had with colleagues, managers, and direct reports. Do you see a correlation between jobs that went well and the Level 2 relationships you had with work colleagues? Memories play tricks on us, and often we forget what was most important. Compensation, awards, and other tangible benefits may make for strong recollections, but we believe those tend to be secondary, whereas recollections of Level 2 relationships with people may come to mind as the most salient successes. We also often learn more from negative experiences, so you might want to repeat this mental exercise with remembering work occasions that did not go well or that left a negative residue, and then analyze how many of those experiences correlated with insufficient or inappropriate relationship levels.

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Ideas to consider ■

Recount to a friend or colleague how your reflection highlighted elements of what Humble Leadership really involves that you had not realized before.

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Get into a group of three or four and compare your insights and stories to determine whether there are common elements you want to focus on for future learning.

■

At the end of your group discussion, take 5 to 10 minutes to review the process of that discussion and talk about how, if you were to do it again, you might do it differently.

EXERCISE 9.2.

Building the basic relationship map

Analyzing your current work relationships and networks from a relational point of view can help you get a sense of what the different levels mean in your organization and where you might wish to improve the level of relationships. A relationship exists if you and the other person each have an expectation of how the other person will respond as you are interacting with each other. A relationship is, by definition, mutual; each of you expects something of the other, even if you do not interact on a regular basis, and each of you has some kind of impact or influence on the other. A relationship map provides a visual record of what you experience in your relationships with others around you. It is a way of being mindful and specific about the nature of these relationships to reinforce or realign how you treat, and are treated by, others in your life.

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Step 1. Putting yourself in the center of your map Start with a blank sheet of paper. (We suggest 8.5 x 11 or A4 to give you ample room.) Draw a 1-inch diameter circle in the approximate center of the page and then write your name in it. Step 2. Circles for work relationships Around that center circle, draw similar circles for the key people with whom you work. Write their names in the circles arranged around you, leaving room to add circles for other key relationships that come to mind as you go through this process. You can use the locations of the circles (higher, lower, or next to your center circle) to signal the status of people you think of as above you, below you, or equal to you in your organization’s hierarchy. Step 3. Circles for family and other personal relationships Draw circles representing key family and community relationships that impact your work and personal life. Children, a partner, or a spouse can be included. Any other relatives can be included if they impact your work and personal lives. The goal is to identify the particular people who have an influence on you, who have expectations of you, and whom you would normally describe as being connected to you. Step 4. Circles for lost or future relationships You should include on this map not only your current, active relationships but also (a) relationships that you lost, whether because the person took a different job, because the pandemic shifted how you interact, or because the relationship changed in some other way, and (b) relationships that you think you will gain as you look ahead.

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You should now have a page that helps you get a full picture of your network of work relationships, family relationships, friendships, and community relationships. Visualizing as much of the network as possible may be critically important in illuminating how external and internal forces have impacted all those relationships in a variety of ways. Step 5. Lines to categorize relationships You can now draw lines between your center circle and each relational circle to express the intensity of each relationship. Draw heavy solid lines where the relationship is constant and fills your workday, and draw broken or dotted lines where the relationship is not very strong. For now, just your use intuition of what it means to have a “strong,” “weak,” or “distant” relationship; in the next step, we will give you some categories for analyzing levels of relationships that will enable you to be more precise about the map you have drawn. Keep an open mind and take your time to include all the important people with whom you feel you have a relationship. (If you are doing this exercise with someone else or in a group, each of you should do it separately and then compare your maps to see whether you have left out any categories of relationships, such as people who are not physically present at work or at home but have an impact on your work or home lives.) One important thing to note: It may be tempting to include circles for functions, divisions, or roles that you interact with. As a first step, that is fine, however, the primary intent of this exercise is to focus on the relationships with particular people. This work is about people, not their roles, so if you have put a placeholder circle for a

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Exhibit 9.1. The Four Basic Levels of Relationship Level Minus 1

Negative relationships: characterized by domination, coercion, and impersonal control based on unequal distribution of power (such as a guard and a prison inmate)

Level 1

Transactional relationships: involving role- and rule-based interactions, as seen in service and retail jobs, and in most forms of “professional” helping relationships

Level 2

Whole-person relationships: built on trust and personization, as seen in friendships and in effective, collaborative teams

Level 3

Intimate relationships: characterized by emotionally close connections, in which the participants share total mutual commitment (such as lovers or a married couple)

role (for instance “legal” or “accounts payable” or “HR”), take the next step and identify the individual or individuals in those roles with whom you interact. You are trying to move beyond the notion of role relations so that you can form whole-person to whole-person relationships. Take some time to think about levels of relationships Before we move on to Step 6, let us revisit some of the concepts we described in detail in Chapter 2, so you don’t have to go back and reread that chapter to continue this exercise. This relationship levels chart (Exhibit 9.1) was introduced in Chapter 2 and should help you be more specific on your relationship map.

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Exhibit 9.2. Mapping Levels of Relationships

Step 6. Levels for your relationship map lines Decide for each line in your map (Exhibit 9.2) what level of relationship you would use to describe the strength of that connection. You can use the numbers we have provided (L−1, L1, L2, L2.5, L3) or you can create your own gradations if you feel a more fine-grained description best fits your situation. Feel free to create multiple maps if you prefer to differentiate social categories of relationships, such as just work relationships, just family relationships, and any other categories that you feel will be important in how you plan

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your future. Even if you do this exercise thoroughly and thoughtfully the first time, it’s worthwhile being ready to redo the map or maps over time and as your relationships change. Relationship maps can really help sort out complex dynamics in your life-work balance, and we hope they will prove to be an important guide not only for the here and now but also as you think your way into the future. Visualizing the present and gauging future progress are both helpful outcomes of this exercise, and we recommend coming back to your maps from time to time and revising them as necessary. Step 7. Using the map to plan for Level 2 relationships Look closely at the relationship lines you labeled Level 2. On a separate sheet of paper, write down what you or the other person did that enabled the relationship to get to this personized level. Try to remember actual behaviors that seemed to make you “see” each other more as whole people, not just roles. Try to identify the behaviors that made you feel more psychologically safe, more open, and more trusting. These behaviors are examples of personizing in your own work experience. Step 8. Using relationship maps to refine your leadership goals Now think ahead in terms of your own leadership goals. Are there other people who should be on your map as you look to the future? Are the current relationship levels that you assigned appropriate for how you envision work in the future, and for your own goals to move toward the new and better?

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Step 9. Using relationship maps to plan for changes Use the map to identify relationships for which the level you assigned is lower than what you believe you will need in the future. Identify those people that will require further relationship building. Here are some tips to help guide that process: ■

Try to become mindful of unconscious biases within you toward the other person.

■

Acknowledge your ignorance; you may actually know nothing about the other person.

■

Mobilize your curiosity about that person.

To develop the right attitude toward building a relationship, consider what your goals really are. Which of these statements reflects your motivation? ■

I am curious about you.

■

I want to know your story.

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I want to get to know you as a whole person as quickly as possible.

■

I want to be able to “see” you, that is, to understand you and develop empathy for your situation.

■

I want you to have empathy for me.

■

I want to be open with you so that we can each understand the other better.

And it can sometimes be just as important to define what you don’t want to do: ■

I do not want to judge you.

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■

I do not want to diagnose you or figure you out.

■

I do not want to test you.

Summary Relationship mapping is simply a way to visualize the vital connections and associations that inform your work. Relationship maps may have very little to do with an organization chart or a work process flowchart, which is exactly why the process is worthwhile. In dynamic, shape-shifting, innovative companies that endeavor to disrupt themselves before they are disrupted by outside forces, we would expect to see relationship maps that look more like a diagram of a complex nervous system than an orderly flowchart. And there are no right or wrong relationship maps. Make up your own mapping conventions if it helps you visualize the vital connections that will identify paths of least resistance as well as headwinds or sources of resistance to change initiatives.

Discussion Questions ■

Based on your relationship map, what are your choices and options for how to further develop certain relationships?

■

Identify one or two relationships that need work, in the sense that you want to build a new relationship or change its level. What do you need to do to accomplish your goal?

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Anticipate what personization might look like in action. What skills have to be honed or developed? (The next chapter will offer some help.)

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T EN

Behaviors and Group Skills for Humble Leadership Most of us already know how to personize in our social and personal activities. You have the skills, but because you may never have consciously used them in the work setting, you may have to spend some time thinking about what they are, practicing them, and honing them for this new goal that you have set for yourself. To help you along, we offer up this group exercise on situational humility.

Learning to See Accurately EXERCISE 10.1.

The lemons exercise

This exercise works well with a workshop group of 10 to 25 people. It will take about 30 minutes and require a facilitator to administer the following steps. We like using this exercise when forming a new group, since it puts all participants on equal footing, regardless of status or rank within a group. Instructions for the facilitator Step 1. Come prepared with a bag containing as many lemons as there will be participants.

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Step 2. Select one lemon and have the group identify as many characteristics of a lemon as they can—shape, color, texture, and so on—while you record their observations on a flip chart or whiteboard. Step 3. Then, have each member of the group take one of the lemons from the bag. Step 4. Give the following instructions: “I want each of you now to get acquainted with your own lemon; look at it carefully and jot down notes to help you remember details.” Step 5. After 3 minutes say: “Now, find a partner and introduce your lemons to each other. Be detailed in highlighting what you noticed about your own lemon.” Step 6. After 3 to 5 minutes, collect all the lemons in the bag, then find some open table or floor space, dump the lemons out, and say to the group: “Each of you go find your lemon.” This should take between 5 and 10 minutes, depending on the size of the group. Step 7. When everyone has a lemon, ask: “How many of you are sure you have found your own lemon?” Step 8. In most groups, everyone will proudly say that they have their own lemon. If there are participants who are not sure, have them compare their lemons to each other; this almost always resolves the uncertainty. Step 9. Now ask the group to look again at the observa­ tions they made of the lemon they looked at as a group and ask: “How much did these criteria help you find your own lemon?” The idea here is that when the group was looking at one representative lemon, their observations tended to be categorical and generic,

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whereas when each person had their own lemon, they paid more attention to details that made their lemon unique. Step 10.  Invite the participants to discuss the how they went about discovering the unique qualities of their individual lemon, how that helped introduce their lemon to someone else, and how that helped them find their lemon again in the crowd. Wrap-up Ask the group to discuss how this exercise can be useful in thinking about how we begin to build relationships with each other. You have the human perceptive skills to identify the unique characteristics of a piece of fruit that cannot respond to your inquiry. If, going into a relationship-­building exercise with another person, you approach the situation with that same mindfulness or perceptiveness and the ability to humbly inquire, think about how much better you can become at building connection and empathy. If nothing else, the lemons exercise illustrates how you can turn your lack of information/context, and your curiosity, into a relationship-building superpower.

Learning New Behaviors to Change Relationship Levels What does it mean to change the level of a relationship, especially if you are dealing with a complete stranger or with someone with whom you have just had a very neutral transactional relationship. What are your behavioral options?

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Developing a relationship from the ground up EXERCISE 10.2.

Learning to ask the right questions and reveal the right things about yourself is the key to relationship building. Do this exercise with two colleagues. It should take about 20 minutes. Step 1. Find two colleagues whom you either don’t know at all or know only transactionally. Step 2. Print and hand out the following paragraph for each person to read: Everything happens through conversation. If you are starting a conversation with a new person and want to personize it, what are your options and choices? The basic choice is whether to begin by asking a more personal question than usual or by revealing something more personal about yourself. As the conversation progresses, this choice will be made by you and by the other person repeatedly and naturally. There is no formula, but the types of things you choose to reveal should be at least broadly relevant to the work situation. (Many of the common “icebreakers” are not relevant, such as asking each other to share what their favorite animal or food is. By contrast, asking someone where they have worked before might be highly relevant.)

Here are some suggestions for how to go about asking questions: ■

Begin with questions that are culturally acceptable to ask of a stranger.

■

Ask questions you do not already know the answers to.

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■

Instead of asking for someone’s entire life history, start small, like asking where they grew up.

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Ask questions that elicit a narrative: “How did you come to work here? What do you like about where you live and/or work?”

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Listen for details that are personal and unique.

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Respond with interest, while being culturally appropriate.

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Allow yourself to follow your curiosity down new paths of inquiry.

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If the person is answering with generalizations, ask for examples.

Here are some tips for when you’re opening yourself up to another person: ■

Share something personal about yourself to start the conversation.

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Watch to see whether the person is interested and is hearing you.

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Depending on how the conversation is going, decide whether to reveal more about yourself or switch over to questioning mode.

With each exchange, you will have a feeling of either being understood and accepted or not, and you can then use those perceptions and feelings to take the next step. Building a relationship is a mutual learning process, and it may involve missteps, awkwardness, or embarrassment, but the important thing is to remember that, in this kind

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of learning, errors are inevitable, they are generally harmless, and you can learn from them. You may also have reactions to what the other person is telling you, and those can guide you on whether you want to build the relationship to a deeper level or not. In practice, this all happens very rapidly, but you can try to become mindful of your own reactions and feelings as guides for what to say or do next. Step 3. Pretend you are seated next to each other on a plane and decide to get acquainted. Converse with each other for 10 minutes. Step 4. Now, analyze your conversation for 5 minutes. Do a “process analysis” on what worked, what did not work, and how you would do it differently in the future. Step 5. Plan to build this type of process analysis (as in Step 4) into all your learning exercises from now on. You will find that reviewing what you did will always reveal important nuances that can help you identify what could be new and better. For the above example, you might learn how to begin differently or react differently in conversations with strangers in the future. Process analysis teaches you how to learn, and you will find especially with group exercises that learning how to learn with your partners is the most important takeaway. Now, put these skills together and try to build a new relationship with someone at work!

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Planning and Implementing Changes in Your Work Relationships Create a new relationship level in your relationship map

EXERCISE 10.3.

Step 1. Go back to your relationship map (Exercise 9.2) and identify a relationship line that you would like to progress to Level 2. Step 2. Set up a meeting with that person and make a plan for yourself for how you will either ask questions or reveal things about yourself to deepen the relationship. Step 3. Throughout the conversation, calibrate your own feelings and observe closely the reactions of the other person. Step 4. Find someone to tell about the experience and ask them to help you reflect on what you learned. This exercise was designed to show you that building and maintaining relationships need not be a mysterious process. What we are calling personizing goes on all the time in your everyday social relationships, but you may not have considered the relevance of this kind of relationship building to your work life. We believe that the future of not only working effectively and but also enjoying work will hinge on recognizing the limitations of role-based transactional relationships and emphasizing the power of Level 2 relationships to build the openness and trust the world of work will increasingly require.

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Humble Leadership in Group Decision Making Your most important opportunities to practice doing something new and better may come up when you are either a member of or the convener of a meeting or a group trying to become a team. One of the most important aspects of group work is group decision making. We want to highlight for you the many ways in which groups make decisions, and the positive and negative consequences of the different methods.

EXERCISE 10.4.

The many ways groups make decisions

This exercise takes about 30 minutes and requires four or more persons for maximum learning. Step 1. The facilitator should give the following instructions verbally or print them out and give them to each group member. You have 10 minutes to identify and rank in order of importance the 10 most important characteristics of an effective humble leader.

Step 2. At the end of 10 minutes, ask the members what decision processes they used while performing this task. Write down the methods they mention on a flip chart or whiteboard. Step 3. Distribute the chart from Exhibit 10.1 and review the material by going down the list and ask the participants whether they noticed any of these methods in their group’s decision-making process. Understanding how groups make decisions is highly relevant both to building teams out of groups of strangers and

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Exhibit 10.1. Eight Different Ways Groups Make Decisions Based on National Training Labs workshops initially conducted in 1956.

1

The plop

Something is suggested and no one responds, so the group does nothing. The suggestion has “plopped.”

2

Selfauthorization

One person makes a suggestion, no one objects, and the group goes on and does it.

3

Minority rule

One person makes a suggestion, one or two other persons agree, no one objects, and the group goes on and does it.

4

Discuss and vote

One or more persons suggest a period of discussion prior to taking a vote on a given suggestion. The group sets a time limit for discussion, then votes and goes with the majority.

5

Voting

Voting can be done in a variety of ways, e.g., by a show of hands or by secret ballot.

6

Polling

All members are asked to tell the group where they stand on the issue and to explain their position. The group proceeds only when everyone has spoken, whether through an ordered process or just open dialogue.

7

Consensus testing

A possible decision is stated and the members are asked: “If we decide this, is there anyone who could not go along with it or would not support implementing it?” If one or more members object, each objector will explain their reasons, and then the group will test a new possible decision in the same way. When everyone has agreed that they could support and implement the decision even if they personally continue to disagree, then consensus has been reached. There is no return to voting.

8

Unanimous agreement

This can and does occur when discussion or polling reveals at the outset that everyone agrees to whatever has been proposed, and consensus testing has confirmed the unanimity.

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to managing meetings of various sorts in various settings and under different levels of time pressure. As a humble leader, it is essential to be able to see with appropriate situational humility when a group is on the wrong track and is making decisions that result in undesirable consequences. We call these the traps of using the wrong decision process. Unforeseen consequences, or “traps” to avoid ■

Silence does not necessarily imply agreement; sometimes it signifies only an unwillingness to object or to reveal important and relevant information (especially in decision-making methods 1 to 4). In some cases, silence may reflect unanimous disagreement, which can then lead to decisions no one wanted.

■

A decision in the absence of psychological safety makes decision-making methods 1 to 4 unreliable and it can also compromise the results in the other methods. Members may withhold important information or disagreement out of fear or because they are choosing to go along with the majority or someone they respect.

■

Status differences can undermine the openness of more junior members and thus may prevent them from sharing relevant information.

■

Voting often creates a minority group that may then undermine implementation once a decision has been made. This can lay the groundwork for future strife, which might include inhibiting team-building or setting the stage for the smaller group to split off.

■

Open voting creates imitation and promotes groupthink and, therefore, a false sense of consensus.

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■

Polling should always be done to explore consensus and to identify potential opposition before a vote creates an “opposition group.” Consensus testing should ask: “If we make this decision, can you all go along with it?” If there are objections or reservations, the group should take the time to explore them, give the objectors time to make their arguments, and either modify the decision or get agreement from the objectors to support the decision.

■

If polling reveals a new direction or new information, consensus testing should be repeated until everyone agrees to support and implement the decision.

■

Each of the eight decision-making methods should be considered for every decision, and the group should agree at the beginning of the process which method they will use.

Step 4. Take at least 10 minutes to review the traps that you noticed and discuss what the group might have done to avoid the negative consequences you observed. This discussion should also highlight that Humble Leadership can come from any member of the group, not just the convener or the person with the highest status.

Summary Hopefully it comes as no surprise that we conclude a book about leadership with a focus on group dynamics. As we have said many times over the past few years, “Leadership is a group sport.” Humble leaders learn that minding the behavior of groups, and improving the behavior of groups,

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is directly related to building at least Level 2 relationships and recognizing that the group knows more than any one individual. Humble leaders recognize the importance of “reading the room,” having a sense of how groups behave, and knowing how to intervene with the right questions (content and process) when group behavior deteriorates. There is nothing wrong with embracing and leveraging interdependence in and between groups, particularly when the quest for independence can lead to isolation. In the end, the odds of superior outcomes are greater in groups that find synergy in open and trusting relationships.

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References Christensen, Clayton M. (1997) The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Edmondson, A. C. (2012) Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, Wiley. Edmondson, A. C., Bohmer, R. M., & Pisano, G. P. (2001) “Disrupted routines: Team learning and new technology implementation in hospitals.” Administrative Science Quarterly 46, 685–716. Ernst, C., & Chrobot-Mason, D. (2011) Boundary Spanning Leadership: Six Practices for Solving Problems, Driving Information, and Transforming Organizations. New York: McGraw-Hill. Ferdman, B. M., Prime, J., & Riggio, R. E. (eds.) (2021) Inclusive Leadership: Transforming Diverse Lives, Workplaces, and Societies. New York: Routledge. Friedman, T. (2016) Thank You for Being Late. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Fussell, C. (2017) One Mission: How Leaders Build a Team of Teams. New York: Macmillan. Gibson, W. (2003, December 4) “Cities and health.” The Economist, 4(2), 5. Gittell, J. H. (2016) Transforming Relationships for High Performance: The Power of Relational Coordination. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Grabell, M. (2017) “Exploitation and abuse at the chicken plant.” New Yorker, May 8, pp. 46–53. Grant, A. (2013) Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success. New York: Penguin Books. Greenleaf, R. K. (1977) Servant Leadership: A Journey into

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the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness. New York: Paulist Press. Greenleaf, R. K. (2002) Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness (25th anniversary ed.). New York: Paulist Press. Heifetz, R. A. (1994) Leadership without Easy Answers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Johansen, B. (2017) The New Leadership Literacies: Thriving in a Future of Extreme Disruption and Distributed Everything. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler. Kahneman, D. (2011) Thinking Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Kenney, C. (2011) Transforming Health Care: Virginia Mason Medical Center’s Pursuit of the Perfect Patient Experience. New York: CRC Press. Kornacki, M. J. (2015) A New Compact: Aligning Physician– Organization Expectations to Transform Patient Care. Chicago: Health Administration Press. Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (2016) Learning Leadership: The Five Fundamentals of Becoming an Exemplary Leader. San Francisco: Wiley. Marquet, L. D. (2012) Turn the Ship Around: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders. New York: Portfolio/ Penguin. McChrystal, S. (2015) Team of Teams: New Rules of Engage­ ment for a Complex World. New York: Portfolio/Penguin. Nelson, E. C., Batalden, P. B., & Godfrey, M. M. (2007) Quality by Design: Developing Clinical Microsystems to Achieve Organizational Excellence. New York: Wiley. Pfeffer, J. (2010) Power: Why Some People Have It and Some People Don’t. New York: Harper Business. Plsek, P. (2014) Accelerating Health Care Transformation with Lean and Innovation. New York: CRC Press. Ricci, R., & Weise, C. (2011) The Collaboration Imperative: Executive Strategies for Unlocking Your Organization’s True Potential. San Jose, CA: Cisco Systems. Sahlins, M. (1981) Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Schein, E. H. (1985) Organizational Culture and Leadership. New York: Wiley.

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Schein, E. H. (1996) Strategic Pragmatism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Schein, E. H. (1999) Process Consultation Revisited. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Schein, E. H. (2003) DEC Is Dead: Long Live DEC. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler. Schein, E. H. (2009) Helping. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler. Schein, E. H. (2013) Humble Inquiry. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler. Schein, E. H. (2016) Humble Consulting. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler. Schein, E. H., & Bennis, W. G. (1965) Personal and Organiza­ tional Change through Group Methods: The Laboratory Approach. New York: Wiley. Schein, E. H., & Schein, P. A. (2017) Organizational Culture and Leadership (5th ed.). New York: Wiley. Schein, E. H., & Schein, P. A. (2018) Humble Leadership. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler. Schein, E. H., & Schein, P. A. (2019) The Corporate Culture Survival Guide (3rd ed.). San Francisco: Wiley. Schein, E. H., & Schein, P. A. (2021) Humble Inquiry (2nd ed.). Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler. Silversin, J., & Kornacki, M. J. (2000 and 2012) Leading Physicians through Change (1st and 2nd ed.). Tampa, FL: ACPE. Suchman, A. L., Sluyter, D. J., & Williamson, P. R. (2011) Leading Change in Healthcare: Transforming Organizations Using Complexity, Positive Psychology and Relationship-Centered Care. New York: Radcliffe Publishing. Sutton, R. (2007) The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t. New York: Warner Business Books, Hachette Book Group USA. Valentine, M. (2018, October 11) “When equity seems unfair: The role of justice enforceability in temporary team coordination.” Academy of Management Journal 61(6). https://doi​ .org/​10.5465/amj.2016.1101. Valentine, M. A., & Edmondson, A. C. (2015) “Team scaffolds: How mesolevel structures enable role-based coordination in temporary groups.” Organization Science 26(2), 405–422.

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Acknowledgments This book has a long history. For Ed, it goes back to what he learned from his mentor and boss, Douglas McGregor, in his very first job at MIT in 1956. The essence of Humble Leadership was learned from Doug through his classic book The Human Side of Enterprise (1960), as well as his personal behavior as a leader. We have known many humble leaders throughout our careers. For Ed, they include some of his clients: Ken Olsen at Digital Equipment Corporation, Sam Koechlin at CibaGeigy, Gene McGrath at Con Edison, James Ellis at the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, and Gary Kaplan at Virginia Mason Health Center. For Peter, influential leaders include Ted West at Pacific Bell, James Isaacs and Chris Bryant at Apple, Jan Tyler Bock at SGI, and Brian Sutphin and Jonathan Schwartz at Sun Microsystems. Ed’s colleagues Lotte Bailyn, John Van Maanen, Bob McKersie, Otto Scharmer, and the late Warren Bennis were exemplars of personizing. Ed learned from them by identifying with their humility and curiosity as teachers and colleagues. He also learned how to be a humble leader in complex situations from the late Richard Beckhard, a veritable genius at personizing with colleagues and clients. The many OD colleagues past and present who have been influential are listed here in alphabetical order: Michael Brimm, Warner Burke, Gervase Bushe, John Cronkite, Tina Doerffer, David Jamieson, Bob Marshak, Philip Mix, Peter 161

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Sorensen, Ilene Wasserman, and Therese Yaeger. We also wish to acknowledge colleagues and provocateurs Rob Cooke of Human Synergistics and John Shook of the Lean Enterprise Institute, as well as David Bradford, with whom Ed wrestled out some of these ideas over intense lunches, and our philosopher friend Noam Cook, who forced us to think clearly about individualism and groups. Amy Edmondson and Jody Gittell helped in working through some of the semantics of “levels of relationship,” and Amy continues to be a close colleague pushing these ideas forward into the future. Peter’s perspective has been deeply informed by faculty at the Human Capital and Effective Organizations program at the USC Marshall School of Business, in particular Chris Worley, Ed Lawler, Sue Mohrman, John Boudreau, Alec Levenson, and Soren Kaplan. In a joint effort with our Organizational Culture and Leadership Institute (OCLI.org) over the last several years, we have learned a great deal from clients and colleagues facing their own challenges of organizational effectiveness, quality, and improvement. Many of them influenced this project directly, through their questions, through their responses to Humble Inquiry, 2nd Edition (2021) and Humble Consulting (2016), and through their encouragement, especially our many Stanford Medicine colleagues Karen Frush, Lane Donnelly, David Larson, Terry Platchek, Lisa Freeman, Ben Elkins, Denise Bennett, Dan Murphy, Joanelle Lucas, and James Hereford. Thanks also to Skip Steward and his ambassadors at BMHCC, and to Tim Kuppler and Steve Wasik for their work on culture. For many years of great dialogue, thank you to Mary Jane Kornacki and Jack Silversin at Amicus; Diane Rawlins and Tony Suchman, with whom we evolved a workshop on

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health care; and Marjorie Godfrey of UNH, Jeff Richardson, Lynn Ware, and Kimberly Wiefling. Ed also learned a great deal from Jo Sanzgiri, his close colleague at Alliant International University; her partner, Julie Bertuccelli; and Jo’s student Manisha Bajaj. Overseas colleagues with whom we have worked on these ideas include Philip Mix of the UK’s NTL Network, Lily and Peter Cheng in Singapore, and especially Joichi Ogawa, who has become a close colleague in the process of introducing our work into Japan over the last 20 years. We have also had opportunities to test some of these ideas at the Organization Design Forum, and there we have worked closely with Mary and Stu Winby and Claudia Murphy. Similarly, we much appreciate Bob Johansen, at the Institute for the Future, for his counsel about how to think about the future, and the opportunity to discuss our ideas with some of his associates. As with other books, we owe a great debt to Steve Piersanti, our editor and publisher. Without his guidance, and that of Jeevan Sivasubramaniam, this book would not have been possible. Finally, we acknowledge our closest family members, Louisa Schein, Liz Krengel, and especially Jamie Schein, as well as Ed’s grandchildren, who have heard, reacted to, challenged, and improved our thinking about the implications of Humble Leadership in the future that they will experience and shape for generations to come.

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Index Accumulated shared learning, 10, 11, 94. See also Culture Acknowledgment, 17 Action research, 75 “Alpha Company” (utility company), 64–71 Antipathy, 29 Apathy, 29, 70–71 Artifacts, 91–92, 91t, 94–96, 111 Assumptions, underlying, 91t, 92, 95, 108 Attitude toward building a relationship, 143 Beach (metaphor for culture). See Waves on a beach Bespoke trend, 119–120 Biases, unconscious, 8, 116–117, 143 Bureaucracy, a start-up becoming a, 127–131 Business Communications Systems (BCS), 104–110 Caveat emptor (buyer beware), 19 Change methodology for entire organization, choosing a, 46–48 Chief executive officers (CEOs), 45–47, 77–79, 81–83 CEO of Alpha, 64, 65

CEO of BCS, 104, 106–108 CEO of PNHC (“Karl Green”), 45–51 a new CEO’s rebuilding initiatives, 51 Chief petty officers (CPOs/ chiefs), 55–58 Collaboration commitment to building, 39–40 moving an organization from apathy to, 70–71 Compact, creating a new, 45–46, 51 Compassion, 29 Competition, 74, 125 from extreme empathy to transactional, 44 Consensus testing, 153t, 155 Context and content, 6, 114–116 Conventions intentions and, 90, 91, 112 and the structure of culture, 90–92 Conversation, personizing the. See Personizing: conversations COVID-19 pandemic, 23, 94, 121–122 Culture, 10. See also specific topics defined, 10, 90

165

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Culture (continued) dimensions of, 11 a model and vocabulary for understanding, 89–90 practice of, 91, 93t role in leadership, 10–12 structure of, 90–92, 91t surviving when company does not, 42–43 Culture change, dynamics of, 96–98 headwinds and tailwinds for change, 98–99 Curiosity, 55, 80, 143 Decision making. See Group decision-making process(es) Design thinking, 129 Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), 40. See also Olsen, Ken from extreme empathy to transactional competition and economic demise, 44 foundational leadership in a first-generation technology innovator, 40–44 Distance, professional, 19–22 Economic development board (EDB), 36–37 Empathy, 28–30, 44 building empathy across chemical conglomerate (“Multi”), 60–63 commitment to building Level 2 empathy, 39–40 enabling mutual, 78 getting silos to work together with shared, 77–78 moving an organization from apathy to, 70–71

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Engaging employees, 25–26 Environmental health and safety (EH&S), 64–70 Environmental Quality Review Board (EQRB), 65–66, 70, 71 Espoused values, 91–92, 91t, 111 Expectations about people’s behavior, mutual, 13–14 Experiential learning, 75 growing focus on, 73–77 Experts and expertise, 114–116 Family relationships, 138 Flat organizations. See Self-management Friedman, Thomas, 116 Future culture, 112–113 Future relationships, 138–139 Global mobile networks, 121 Group decision-making process(es), 152 traps of using the wrong, 154 ways groups make decisions, 152, 153t, 154 Group process growing focus on, 73–77 introducing group theory into technical improvement work, 84 systematic analysis of, 76 Hierarchy, 115 an admiral’s “collapsing” the transactional, 78–80. See also Institute of Nuclear Power Operations entrenched, 99–103 environmental health and safety (EH&S) and, 66, 67, 69 Level 2 relationships and, 37–39, 60, 83, 99–103

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Index  a navy captain neutralizes hierarchical conventions, 54–59 as a socio-technical system, 81–82 Humble Leadership. See also specific topics is a practice in all forms of leadership, 3–4 overview and nature of, x, xi, 3–4 practice of, 4 Humility concept of, 3–4 as core of Humble Leadership, 8 IA (intelligent assistance), 116 Individualistic mindset and “I alone” delusion, 125–126 Innovator’s dilemma, 6–7 Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO), 81–82 Intelligent assistance (IA), 116 Intentions and conventions, 90, 91, 112 Intergroup competition and fights, 44 Intimate relationships. See Level 3 relationships Labor unions. See Unions Leaders, traits of, 4 Leadership, ix, 12. See also specific topics concept of, 3–5, 97 defining, 4–5 of groups and individuals, 63–64 is the creation and implementation of something new and better, 4–5

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practice of, 98. See also Structure and practice Leadership goals, using relationship maps to refine, 142 Leadership style, 4 Lean method/Lean manufacturing, 47, 49 Learning, 90. See also Experiential learning accumulated shared, 10, 11, 94. See also Culture group process and, 73–76 Learning together, 25 Lee Kwan Yew (LKY), 36, 38–39 Lemons exercise, 145–147 Level Minus 1 relationships, 15–17, 15t, 140t Level 1 relationships, 15t, 19, 140t. See also Relationship levels; Transactional relationships darker side of, 20–21 limitations of role-related Level 1 transactions, 19–21 Level 2 relationships, 15t, 21–26, 140t, 142. See also Relationship levels boundary between Level 3 relationships and, 27–28 building a social structure to facilitate, 83 building Level 2 relationships with local management and union, 65–67 can exist in a formal hierarchy, 60 commitment to building Level 2 empathy and collaboration, 39–40 hierarchy and, 37–39, 60, 83, 99–103

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Level 2 relationships (continued) reforming a medical center into a Level 2 culture, 45–51 Level 2.5 relationships, 28, 126, 127 Level 3 relationships, 15t, 26–29, 140t. See also Relationship levels Leveling, 115. See also Hierarchy Lewin, Kurt, 75–76 Linear machine model, 74, 111 Local management, building Level 2 relationships with, 65–67 Lost relationships, 138–139

humble leaders and rapid, 122 relationships, 15t, 21–23, 26, 28–29, 35, 58, 127, 131, 140t, 142, 144, 151 Plop (decision making), 153t “PNHC,” 45–51 Polling, 155 Power, abuse of, 118–119 Practices (or an organization), 93. See also Structure and practice Process, group. See Group process Professional distance, 19–22

Machine model, linear, 74, 111 Macro culture, 93, 93t, 94, 112–113 Marquet, L. David, 55–60 Meta culture, 112–114, 123, 124 Mindful reflection, 136 Minority rule, 153t Mobile networks, global, 121 Motivation, group dynamics and, 74 “Multi” (chemical conglomerate), 60–63 Mutual learning, 25

Rank, 59. See also Hierarchy; Status Reflection, 136 Relationship building. See also Level 2 relationships getting to know each other, 65–68 goals/motivation in, 143–144 Relationship levels, 14–15, 15t, 140t. See also Relationship map; specific levels creating a new relationship level in your relationship map, 151 learning new behaviors to change, 147–150 sentiments as indicators of, 29–30, 30t taking time to think about, 140 Relationship map, building the basic, 137, 141f steps in, 138–144

Olsen, Ken, 40, 44 Open systems thinking, 8 Organization development (OD), 76 Personal relationships, 138 Personalization, 21, 119 Personizing, 21–22, 63, 122, 145 conversations, 148

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Questions, asking the right, 148, 156

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Index  Relationship(s), 11–12, 137. See also specific topics defined, 13–14 developing a relationship from the ground up, 148–150 “good,” 14 leadership as a, ix negative. See Level Minus 1 relationships planning and implementing changes in, 151 Role-based interactions and transactions, 18–21, 139–140. See also Level 1 relationships Ryan, Robert, 82–83 Safety, psychological, 21, 23, 109, 142. See also Personizing: relationships Sahlins, Marshall, 90 Self-authorization (decision making), 153t Self-management, 119–120 Shared accumulated learning, 10, 11, 94. See also Culture Silence and agreement vs. disagreement, 154 Singapore, 36 co-creating Singapore as a modern city-state, 36–39 Lee Kwan Yew and, 36, 38–39 Situational humility, 11, 35–36, 68–69 demonstrating, 55–56 doctors and administrators learning it together, 45–46 Humble Leadership and, 1, 99, 135

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importance of, x, 99 overview and nature of, 8–9 Social culture of BCS, 106–110 definition and nature of, 11, 93t dynamic forces of, 109 technical culture and, 11, 77, 93–95, 123 transforming, 93–94 trust and, 108, 109 Social distance. See Professional distance Social-responsibility programs in a troubled public utility (“Alpha Company”), creating, 64–65 building a shared identity and open communication across boundaries, 67–70 building Level 2 relationships with local management and union, 65–67 moving organization from apathy to collaboration and empathy, 70–71 Socio-technical system, efficiency and effectiveness in a, 5–8 Start-up becoming a bureaucracy, 127–131 Status, 154. See also Hierarchy; Rank Structure and practice, 90, 93–95, 98 Sun Microsystems, 92 Super-empathy, 28 Systems companies, 92 T-groups (training groups), 76 Teaming, self-managed, 119–120

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Technical culture, 93, 103, 106, 110, 112, 123 changes in, 93–94 definition and nature of, 11, 93t dynamic forces of, 109 social culture and, 11, 77, 93–95, 123 Technical culture practice, 95, 112 Technical improvement work building bridges between the social and technical, 84–85 introducing group theory into, 84 Time-out program, 69–70 Toyota Production System (TPS), 47, 49, 50, 82, 84 Transactional competition, from extreme empathy to, 44 Transactional relationships, 15, 17–19, 114, 140. See also Level 1 relationships Transparency and unintended consequences, 104–109 when it is more weapon than tool, 107–109

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Tribalism, 116–117 Trust, 14 social culture and, 108, 109 Unanimous agreement, 153t Uncertainty, 116 accepting, 8 Unions, 67–70, 100–102 building Level 2 relationships with, 65–67 Unknown unknowns, 116 Voting, 153t, 154, 155 Waves on a beach (metaphor for culture), 96–99 “We together” mindset, 126 Whole-person relationships. See Level 2 relationships Wind (metaphor), 96–98 headwinds and tailwinds for change, 96, 98–99, 103, 110, 113–114, 123 and waves on a beach. See Waves on a beach Zero-sum mindset, 20–21, 118

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About the Authors

Ed Schein was a professor emeritus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Sloan School of Management. He was educated at the University of Chicago, Stanford University, and Harvard University, where he received his PhD in social psychology (1952). He worked at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research for 4 years and then joined MIT, where he taught until 2005. He has published extensively, and his books include Organizational Psychology, 3rd Edition (1980); Process Consultation Revisited (1999); Career Dynamics (1978); Career Anchors Reimagined, 5th Edition, with John Van Maanen and Peter Schein (2023); Organizational Culture and Leadership, 5th Edition, with Peter Schein (2017); and The Corporate Culture Survival Guide, 3rd Edition, with Peter Schein (2019). In 2009 he published 171

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Helping, a book on the general theory and practice of giving and receiving help, which was followed by Humble Inquiry (2013) and then, with his son, Peter, the first edition of Humble Leadership (2018) and a second edition of Humble Inquiry (2021). He was the 2009 recipient of the Distinguished Scholar-Practitioner Award from the Academy of Management, the 2012 recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Leadership Association, and the 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award in Organization Development from the International OD Network, and he has an honorary doctorate from the IEDC Bled School of Management in Slovenia. Ed passed away in late January 2023.

Peter Schein is the cofounder of the Organizational Culture and Leadership Institute (OCLI.org), which is dedicated to advancing organization development and design through a deeper understanding of organizational culture and leadership theory. Peter’s writing draws on over 30 years of industry experience in product marketing and corporate development at technology pioneers including Pacific Bell, Apple, Silicon Graphics, Inc., Packeteer (Blue Coat), and Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Oracle), with a focus on the underlying organizational culture challenges that growth engenders in innovation-driven enterprises. He is the coauthor of six books with Ed Schein: Organizational Culture and Leadership, 5th Edition (2017), Humble Leadership (2018 and 2023), The Corporate Culture Survival Guide, 3rd Edition (2019), Humble Inquiry, 2nd Edition (2021), and Career Anchors Reimagined, 5th Edition (2023), with John Van Maanen. Peter was educated at Stanford University and Northwestern/Kellogg (MBA).

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