WITHDRAWN How Humility Emerges as a Power-Exchange Force During an Intentional Change Effort Spurred by Turbulent Times

• In Event: Humility + Compassion = More Impactful Leadership for Turbulent Times

Short Description

This presenter will share rich qualitative data and examples from a deep dive study of a high performing firm where an intentional change effort resulted in dramatic and measurable performance outcomes. Interdependent acts of humble leadership and followership emerged as the key mechanisms needed to break the paradox of power-holding.

Detailed Abstract

The qualitative research study (Amato, 2014), using a perspective that all organizations are complex systems of individual members co-creating their realities together (Berger & Luckmann, 1966), explored the phenomenon of values work as emergent values practices (Gehman et al, 2013) by looking deeply into a single case of an exemplary, high-performing company. The small business in focus grew from a single hot dog stand to now hold the place as one of Chicago’s top business catering firms. Notably, in 2016, this company was also named by Forbe’s as one of America’s Best Small Companies. The CEO and his two brothers (the company’s founders) and senior leaders, built a vibrant culture that relies heavily on the company’s core values to drive decision-making and where humble actions by leaders and followers permeates the narratives and stories shared across all employees, regardless of position or status. But this was not always the case.

Not long ago, the CEO and his brothers were known for their authoritarian managerial style. But that would have to change when he received a message loud and clear: “We don’t like command and control. Change the way you lead, or we’re leaving.” At this critical juncture, the CEO and his brothers were known for their authoritarian managerial style. This strong message came from two of the company’s high potential team members, the young leaders he had identified to take over the company after he retired. The CEO reports being told, “We’re tired of your brothers yelling at us, you yelling at us, spending the first 20 or 30 minutes of everyday figuring out and trying to understand what mood the owners were in” (personal communication. February 19, 2013).

Faced with the possibility of losing his high potential employees if he didn’t change his leadership style and the company’s culture, along with bottom-line profit margins moving opposite of sales and to their all-time lowest levels, the CEO was at a critical juncture: he had to take action to save the company. Looking back, the CEO recalled this as a defining moment. “I couldn’t lose them and I couldn’t lose their approach to business.” Recognizing that change was necessary, the CEO asked them, “Change to what?” At this point another critical decision was made: the CEO and his co-owners put the change initiative directly into the hands of their employees.

Over the next several months the company’s staff designed an innovative, team-based culture built around core values, audacious goals, and a unifying purpose. Now, said one of the firm’s senior leaders, “[The culture is] built on trust and mutual respect. It’s built also on the belief that people are able to chart their own course and self-direct themselves” (personal communication, February 19, 2013). This autonomy and positivity bore itself out in improved engagement scores and dramatically, increased profitability.

Key to the successful transformation was that the CEO and his co-founder brothers, joined by the employees, took deliberate steps to change the culture. Common to all steps was an intense focus on embedding and enacting seven core company values – values the employees themselves helped to identify and define – across all facets of the organization.

On one level, values as emergent values practices played a powerful role within the interactions and relationships between and among the leader and followers: leadership was as important as followership (Uhl-Bien, 2014). This process emerged as complex and played more than just a supporting role, instead becoming both part of and necessary to the transformational change and the sustainability of the new values-driven culture. On a deeper level, values work as emergent values practices also emerged as a leadership co-process constituted by and giving rise to the predispositioning of future dispositional frames (Katsenelinboigen, 1997), enabling the transformed culture to survive, grow, and strengthen.

This process was developmental, showing up in the rich narratives and stories of the actors as moving, interactional patterns between and across the co-created realities of the leader and the followers, continually setting (positioning) forward future frames. Without the frames, made possible by social contracts and acts of humility, power-exchanges between the leader and followers—theorized as a requirement for transformational change—could not occur. The study’s findings suggest that humble acts are required before leaders can cede power (truthfully and honestly) and before followers can embrace power autonomously (with freedom and responsibility), thereby enabling true power-exchanges, which are necessary for transforming both the leader and followers to higher moral purposes and motivations (Burns, 1978). The findings also suggest that without humility, there can be no true exchange of power and therefore, no true transformation of the organization and its actors.

What do these patterns suggest in terms of practical application? That is, how might this study’s findings help other CEOs – and leaders across all types of organizations – optimize their chances for achieving sustained successful outcomes after embarking on an intentional change effort to overcome turbulent times and crises? While not exhaustive, the following observed practices, engaged in by both leaders and followers, rose to the top:

1. Be intentional and thoughtful in all actions, especially if the CEO and the one with all the power, by fully embracing the change initiative.
2. Ground the initiative in co-created, core values.
3. Regardless of which change tools and resources are utilized (e.g. continuous improvement models; 360 degree performance reviews, policy and procedure guides, outside consultants, etc.), create social contracts which describe the roles and responsibilities for every actor in the organization.
4. Use the values as the foundational framework for all decision-making and planning processes (hiring, terminating, promoting, reviewing an outcome, problem-solving, client connecting, evaluating, strategizing, budgeting, resource allocating, etc.), as well as for defining expected habits of relating among all stakeholders (regardless of position).
5. As a leader, practice giving up power by truly ceding it, not merely delegating it, to others.

Participant

• Anna M. Amato, edtec central, LLC