How Do You Know? Testing Assumptions About Leadership Development

• In Event: Integrative Leadership Development: Building Tomorrow’s Key Competencies

Short Description

Uncovering, challenging, and testing assumptions is a way to deal with turbulent, unknown environments. Similarities and differences of two cases — coaching an individual leader and developing collective leadership for designing a business strategy — will be presented to illustrate this method.

Detailed Abstract

Leading in turbulent times means leading from a present we cannot control to a future we cannot see, on a path which is emerging while we walk, in an environment that is changing in unexpected ways. In this situation, leaders are asked for directions and they need to make decisions when they do not know what the consequences will be. These challenges become even bigger in turbulent times.

This presentation will describe how uncovering, challenging and testing assumptions that drive behavior is a way to deal with turbulent, unknown environments. It is a core technique for leading in a complex world and a key for leadership development regarding both individual development of leaders and the collective leadership development of teams (Senge 1990).

Two cases from leadership development practice in a business environment will illustrate this method. The first case will show how testing assumptions in executive coaching helped to leverage the leadership effectiveness of a CEO. The second case will demonstrate how testing assumptions helped a leadership team to improve the design of their business strategy and how it influenced communication in the team towards leading collectively.

The case illustrating the method in individual leadership development is a key part of an executive coaching assignment. The coaching was done following the Immunity to Change approach where testing assumptions is at the core of the process (Kegan and Lahey, 2009). The assignment happened as a follow up to a Leadership Assessment. The Assessment was done with the Leadership Circle profile, a 360 degree feedback system that measures leadership competencies highly correlated with leadership effectiveness (Anderson and Adams, 2016). The visual representation of the Leadership Circle Profile also shows self-protective behavior that limits leadership effectiveness. After the assessment, the leader and a certified coach work together to discover the deeper patterns of thinking that lead to the unproductive behavior.

In this case the leaders decisiveness was limited by a fear of conflict. Confronting other people with negative feedback was seen as a threat to the self-image of being seen as a leader worth to follow with passion. With the Immunity to Change Process the leader discovers specific assumptions making the unproductive behavior necessary. The assumptions can be identified as interpretations from earlier events that over time have been generalized as the truth. This overgeneralized interpretation has become a belief that is unconsciously interfering in the interpretation of events in different contexts. Because it is unconscious it has become a driver of behavior, the belief is holding the person instead of the person holding a belief. Naming the assumption of an ‘if … then relationship’ is the first step in moving the assumption from subject to object, which is the central move for personal development regarding Kegan’s constructive developmental theory (Kegan 1982). The ‘if … then … relationship’ is subject because it is deeply rooted in the way the leader sees the world. It becomes object when it is named or written down on paper and object to a curious inquiry. “How do we know if x leads to y and z?” Testing is different from changing assumptions. To test the assumption and learn about it helps the leader in this case to get rid of unproductive behavior in a sustainable way.

For collective leadership development, testing assumptions plays an important role in the decision making process at the core of developing a competitive strategy (Lafley and Martin 2013). It also plays a key role in business model innovation (Osterwalder et al., 2010). Martin argues that a lot of companies mistake the process of designing a strategy with (annual) planning. This illustrates the shift strategy development is in. In a steady environment it is plausible to work with longtime plans - in a fast changing environment leaders need to take the best bet for the future of the company. The decision making process in turbulent times is not build on detailed knowledge and information but in collectively finding out how to increase the odds of success (Lafley and Martin 2013). To foster the collective process of making strategic choices, teams design tests of their assumptions. Instead of “what is true?” they ask “what needs to be true, to be successful with this choice?” and “How can we find out?” Teams learn not to discuss the best argument for a possible choice and convince the other team member. They learn to challenge their underlying assumptions and discover what they do not know and how they can find out what could be true.

The presented case is from a company in the packaging industry. The company provides a disruptive technology in the market and needs to grow fast to gain early market share. Instead of collecting data for market analysis they test their assumptions how to target the best options for growth in the shortest amount of time. It will be shown how the team designed and ran a test of their assumptions in the decision making for research and development of new machines and how following this process revealed the strategic direction.

In the presentation the two cases will show the similarities and differences of testing assumptions in individual and collective leadership development and how this approach helps leaders to navigate the organization and themselves in turbulent times.

Participant

• Johannes Willms, willms.coaching