Action Leadership™
Action Leadership™ is a skill-building process that encourages the Leader to build unique context-based skills in a safe environment that enables the Leader to expand his or her mastery over a special set of soft-skills.
Introduction
“Performance begins when competence ensures effectiveness.”
The issue that bothers me the most is the attempt of clients to lie to the leader, manager, coach, consultant, or even their therapist. All five share this in common. Followers work hard to impress their leaders. It may take some time to work through this to get the authentic followers to participate in the Leadership process. This can make for an interesting beginning to any project or program. But it happens. It is simply another manifestation of the follower’s need for Leadership assistance. —RLN
Theory and practice inform each other. However, theory without practice is weak but practice without theory can be dangerous. Action Based Leadership is informed by theory and enriched through practice. Such Leadership balances theory and practice so that individual leaders attain the optimal outcome. This balance enables Leaders to enjoy an integrated Leadership Approach which facilitates learning, growth, performance, and success.
Balancing theory and practice, Leaders find inspiration in the Tree of Newkirk™, a model of learning based on practice, steeped in the heritage of philosophic thought, and strengthened by the force of psychological insight. Using the Tree of ™ as a guide to growth and performance, the Leader begins at the bottom and works upward flowing from left to right. Thus, the Path of Human Experience flows to the Path of Human Growth which leads to higher experience. This, in turn, leads to deeper growth, and so on until the Leader achieves “Wisdom in Action”.
Achieving this high state of performance, the Leader, as a prerequisite, has first mastered a certain kind of applied knowledge. Commitment empowers the entire process of Leadership growth. Lacking commitment, growth stagnates.
As we will see, the Problem of Performance challenges even the best Leaders among us. Whether in professional or personal life, this Problem of Performance remains an overriding companion on the journey to a life well-lived. As with the ancient Roman Conquerors parading on their chariots, and soaking in the adulation of a hard won victory, the Problem of Performance remains forever with us whispering in our minds that we are merely mortal. Whatever we do, we cannot escape the Problem of Performance. It is the kind of situation, probably common to every leader, that ought to be rigorously addressed cautiously. Experienced Leaders have learned to tread carefully, diligently, and consistently to master it.
Obviously, the framework for achieving performance at the highest level attainable is complex and dynamic. Its formula emerges from a foundation of competence and grit, rather than knowledge and tools. Such a framework builds the requisite variety of effectiveness necessary to produce the intellectual and emotional competence required to master the challenges of Leadership success. Using Action Leadership derived from perpetual cycles of Human Capital Development, the new formula for Leadership success builds the reservoir of Leadership Self-Renewal necessary to ignite the passion for achieving performance at the highest level attainable, the UlThule™ level.
Supporting followers means that Leaders do well to understand the boundaries and manage them professionally. This means saying “NO” when “NO” is appropriate.
—RLN
Action Leadership™
Part One
Authentic Leadership requires self-discipline. Authentic Leadership requires Leader and follower both to share the work. Leadership occurs as an iterative process. Whenever Leadership involves “Disciplined Inquiry”, rather than random speculation, guessing, or random opinion, Leadership involves the design and application of an appropriate Leadership approach enabled by a specific Leadership Methodology. Through this methodology, Leaders and followers cooperate to achieve clearly defined and measurable short-term goals. Leaders select these goals to enhance their followers’ performance in a qualitative or quantitative way, depending on the measurement approach employed for any specific situation. Throughout the Leadership process, Leaders and their followers proceed as a team by progressing through a number of iterative cycles including:
Exploration
Identification
Clarification
Evaluation
Planning, and
Support.
This process enables Leaders and their teams to both confront specific needs and achieve reasonable previously agreed upon goals as solutions. Whenever the Leader designs the Leader-team relationship as a Human Activity System, my preferred model, he or she employs a Soft Systems Methodology (SSM). Using the SSM, the Leader begins the process by investigating a “Problem Statement” or “problem Situation” in an unstructured way. An unstructured investigation enables the Leader to avoid the mistake of hindering the Executive’s obligation to freely articulate the problem situation.
Common Leadership Needs
Potent Leadership consists of methods designed to assist Leaders to successfully execute specific non-random actions that improve performance or achieve other critical goals. These actions may include the following:
Exploring
2. Identifying
3. Clarifying
4. Evaluating, and
5. planning actions.
Action Leadership™ assists Leaders with:
(1) mastering the Problem Definition Process, and
(2) closing the gap between the Problem Definition and the Problem Solution.
Leaders offer facilitative support as teams confront their own performance shortcomings. Ultimately, through Safe Practice, the Leader guides the followers to enact the solution that overcomes the problem situation. When delivered successfully using an appropriately designed Soft Systems Methodology (SSM), Leadership becomes Action Leadership™.
ACTION LEADERSHIP™
Part Two
Leadership - Learning for Action
The Leadership Solution Cycle: What Some Leaders Do
Exploration of the Unstructured Problem Situation
Leaders assist followers with safely exploring how to become more successful in a particular role in a particular organization with a particular history and management perspective. Leaders also assist clients with exploring broader and more strategic obligations for leadership success within specific organizations.
This is the starting point of the Leadership engagement: The Leader and the team proceeds to uncover the situation that requires improvement. Cooperatively, they determine the scope of the improvement requirements that defines the required change or skills review. Here the Leader learns all that can be learned at that time about the problem situation. For example, the problem situation may be a single problem or a family of problems that require resolution. The Leader uses this stage of the Leadership process to conduct research into the problem situation by identifying the primary players and their link to the family of problems. The Leader may also seek to determine the effectiveness of the team’s current work process.
Food for Thought
Action Leadership™ is all about taking the right action the right way at the right time to deliver the right results for the right people assisted by the right team at the right price making the right decisions for the right reasons using the right information infused with the right data derived from the right insights. Right?
Action Leadership™
Part Three
Identification of the Problem Situation
Leaders who remain focused on performance improvement further assist their followers with identifying the individual and/or team behaviors and skills necessary to master a specific job, task, or function within a specific environment. Performance minded leaders also assist followers clients with identifying team behaviors that may positively or negatively impact organization performance. Here leaders may assist teams with identifying team practices or may lead teams to better understand and respond to the perceptions of other people regarding the leader’s own behaviors or perhaps the behaviors of one or more team members.
Employing a Soft-Systems Methodology (SSM), with interviews, workshops, and disciplined observations,
the leader broadly examines the problem by collecting and refining related information. Within the workplace, the Leader describes the structure of the organization, its processes, and the input transformations. The Leader may also note the complaints of the followers, and other people, about team members and if possible the complaints of team members about anything imaginable. Leaders use this state of “Leadership” activity to describe the environment that contains the problem to-be-solved as rapidly and as accurately as possible given the constraints of time, resources, and budgets.
The “problem situation” is broader than the “presenting problem of interest” because it includes an embedded problem environment that contains the problem of interest. More properly, the Problem Situation represents the “Environment-of-Interest” that moves beyond the point or problem of interest, the “presenting problem’. The Leader concludes this stage of activity by presenting a visual systems model of the Problem Situation as an embedded Human Activity System (HAS).
The model of the Problem Situation represents the first Leadership “breakthrough” between the Leader and the followers forming the team. This Model indicates how the Leader understands the information from the followers that could be related to the resolution of the Problem Situation. Using the Systems Models Approach, an Approach that describes the Behavioral, Environment, and Structural Models of the HAS, the Leader obtains a description of the structures and processes of the problem environment and notes the organization issues that could become relevant to the problem definition.
This embedded HAS enables the Leader to organize the core issues and to think about the Human Activity System that is now emerging through the Leadership relationship between Leader and followers. This Model enables the Leader to more fully grasp the nature of the problem situation and communicate this understanding to the team. Remember, though, a model is just a model.
Action Leadership™
Part Four
Clarifying the Problem Situation
We have now reached the point in the Leadership process where the Leaders and team of followers begin to clarify the “what” of the Problem Situation. Implicitly, Leadership is consistently about quality. Right? Poor solutions are not recommended. Ultimately, Leadership is about assisting the team with improving the quality of the team’s life. Hence, some Leaders clarify insights about the team’s personal motivations and life interests. This, of course, means that the Leader often assists their team’s, and other followers, with clarifying the conflicts of work/life balance. Leaders also introduce unified methods designed to enable followers to enrich the quality of their lives. Leadership occurs to improve the quality of life of someone somewhere at sometime. Period. From an ethical point-of-view, this is the reason behind everything an authentic Leader does.
At this point in the Leadership process, the Leader begins to consider the Problem Situation from many perspectives. This is not so easy because each perspective requires a “Root Definition” for each perspective of interest.
In Human Activity Systems thinking, I think of a Root Definition as a description of the purpose that the Problem Situation currently serves and the purpose that the solution will serve. People commonly view a Root Definition as the essence of the situation to be solved. In other words, the leader asks the team to clarify the nature of the transformation that is currently occurring and the nature of the transformation that will improve this by resolving the problem? This question, of course, means that we need to first understand something definitive about the inputs that we want the HAS, or other system, to transform into the desired outputs?
In effect, the Leader selects an issue or task derived from the model of the Problem Situation and designs the team of followers as a HAS to resolve the issue or task. The Leader and team of followers then proceed from the described issue or task composing the Problem Situation. They transform it by producing a new and desired situation through a process of refinement. In doing this, Leaders and their teams complete a CATWOE analysis of each root definition. Successful Leadership actually enables the previously floundering team to produce a more effective Human Activity System. This is the Systems View of the situation.
Since Problem-Solving Transformation is the goal of Leadership, the Leadership Team, the problem-solving HAS, describes the Transformation Process for each Root Definition.
Since the 1960s, Peter Checkland and his followers, applied a System’s perspective to the concept of Root Definition. Through Systems Thinking, we can understand that a "Root Definition" is simply a concise statement. As such, it describes, not necessarily defines (as descriptions and definitions are not necessarily identical) the essential purpose of a system.
Root Definitions answer the really big question in problem solving: What is the desired purpose of the situation? Even bad situations are commonly seen as having some kind of purpose. In this sense we can ask ourselves: What is the goal or purpose of any Human Activity System that governs the transformation of inputs into outputs? Although the question seems simple enough, an appropriate answer requires the Leader, and the followers to consider several core factors that impact the situation including the following:
Wider Environmental Constraints
Involved Actors
Context of the Situation in which the System Operates
World View, the Weltanschauung
Customers
Transformation Process
Owner
Effectiveness
, Efficiency,
Efficacy,
Ethically,
Elegance
In expansive System Thinking, we can see that Root Definitions actually define the results from specific system’s interactions along with the context in which the system operates. Hence, the Root Definiti9on essentially delivers, through its actions and interactions, a core description of the system's "raison d'être", or reason for being, within a given situation. Systems Thinkers often use this insight as a foundational element in methodologies like Soft Systems Methodology (SSM).
Therefore, we can see that the Root Definition presents a statement of purpose that captures the essential nature, or essence, of the particular situation of a specific situation (system) of interest as a problem situation to be solved. We know this because systems by their existential nature as systems, continually engage in the transformation of inputs from an environment into outputs of some kind. Transformation is the essential nature of Living Systems such as Human Activity Systems.
Fundamentally, the Leader and his or her followers describe the inputs and outputs of Transformation. The inputs can be matter, energy, or information. Along with transformation, the Leadership team describes the world view (weltanschauung) that makes the problem solution meaningful.
Naturally, these descriptions bring us to the question of Ownership. Who owns the emerging solution? Is the benefactor of the solution strictly the organization at large, or the leader’s followers, or simply the global all encompassing Enterprise? The description of the owner tells us who has the ultimate authority over the new HAS that emerges through the problem solution. Finally, the Leadership team describes the environmental constraints that impact the new HAS. This description identifies the inputs received from the environment that influence the behavior and structure of the now emerging HAS which now enjoys the new solution to the previous problem situation.
People who apply the Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) view the world from the Systems Perspective. Hence, Systems Thinkers using a SSM, examine the activities and practices forming a Problem Situation as a specific kind of problem involving the system’s processes of input, transformation, output, and feedback and adjustment. Collectively, then, derived from these systems activities or processes, we say that every system possesses or forms an essential nature which we refer to as that system’s “Root Definition.”
SSM works best when the Root Definition identifies the people, processes, and environments that contribute to the problem situation that leaders carefully analyze and desire to resolve. These elements are represented by the mnemonic, CATWOE as originally developed by David Smyth perhaps at Lancaster University sometime around 1975. He identified defined six problem-solving elements, which he integrated six critical problem solving elements that formed that now widely used mnemonic, CATWOE. In the words of Peter Checkland, CATWOE is an essential checklist that can be used to guide our thinking about problem-solving. CATWOE is the mnemonic for:
Customer,
Actor,
Transformation,
Weltanschauung or Worldview,
Owner, and
Environment
As an interesting mnemonic, it also becomes a potent heuristic that guides us through the following analysis of the situation.
Customers: Who are they? In what way does the problem situation affect them impact ?
Actors: Who are involved in the Problem Situation in any way? Who initiated the situation and who will resolve the situation? Who will design and implement the solution(s)? How will this situation impact the success of other possibly related situations and the people involved in them? What will possibly enable the success of the problem solvers, or negatively impact them?
Transformation Process: What processes or systems are affected negatively and also positively by the Problem Situation? What situations are to be transformed and by whom?
Weltanschauung or World View: What is the big picture? And what are the wider impacts of the problem Situation on these bigger issues?
Owner: Who owns the processes of the Problem Situation that you require investigation? What influence will these owners have over the problem solution and what will be their role in resolving the Problem Situation?
Environmental Constraints: What are the known constraints that will influence the solution and its success? What are the potential constraints that may complicate the solution?
These six areas of problem-solving inquiry span a number of strategic and tactical concerns. Collectively, these concerns ignite much thinking about transformation. What need to be transformed actually? What are the complexities in such a challenge? What will be the emerging issues. How can this be prevented in the future? How does such an apparently small problem impact the organization so significantly. What do we change now and in the future to ensure that this problem will never occur again, if possible?
For difficult and complex Problem Situations, the practices of modelling, diagraming, and refining the information may better clarify the descriptions of the Problem Situation which may facilitate the problem solving challenge. The following approach may assist this process.
Step 1: Describe the Current Problem Situation
Briefly, define, describe, and clarify your current thinking about the situation. Remember, this is not yet expected to be a detailed analysis of everything imaginable about the situation but should be enough to get your mind to more clearly focus on the task ahead. This is merely a beginning effort to better understand and mentally visualized the Problem Situation.
Step 2: Engage in Objective Gaming as a way to Brainstorm more creative ideas.
For example, employ each CATWOE element to generate a range of questions about how each of the CATWOE elements impact the specific Problem Situation. Here, one must be careful to address the areas impacted by the Problem Situation. Do this while using a cause and effect. For example, whenever you see the impact of a Problem Situation, or a segment of it, make an effort to identify the possible cause or range of causes of that impact. For example:
For Customers:
Consider their complete experience from beginning to end. Think about how Low Production and inexperienced staff impact customer satisfaction levels and history.
For Actors:
Think about implementation of the proposed solutions. Who, what, when, where and hoe much, are the questions to consider. For example, consider who will design and implement the Problem Solution. Also carefully consider the possible roadblocks to their success. Generally the Human Resources Team is expected to facilitate success by aligning their rules and regulations, mastering modern recruiting techniques, and updating HR Information Systems and Policies. You might want to consider the culture of the work teams and the compatibility of this culture with Leadership approaches.
For Transformation:
Reflect on the inputs and outputs being transformed. Where are the inputs coming from? What are they? Why are they there? How are they transformed? Why are they transformed? Where are the transformed inputs going and for what reason is this occurring? What is the Transformation Process? How does it positively or negatively impact the organization? Consider how Transformation impacts recruiting, interviewing, advertising, customer relations, and so much more. Remember, Transformation means CHANGE from employment to business performance and beyond. Through Transformation, the organization transforms itself. For the Organization, reflect on how much Transformation impacts productivity, head-count, training, complexity of process, revenue lost, technical systems overhead, cost of customer flows, employee morale, employee turnover, staffing ratios, vacancies, stress levels, workloads, turnovers, morale. The question here is what is not being effected by Transformation?
For the Weltanschauung, or World View
It is a good practice here to consider the really Big Picture, the World-View, the larger picture of the Problem Situation. Here we can question the deeper and longer term impacts of the culture on employees and customers. Does company culture have a positive or negative impacts on employees and customers? How do you know?
For the Owner:
Consider the Owner here. Some are good and some are not so good. How does the owner impact the bottom line? After all, Owner effect the departments Heads and their policies. This impacts the employees and perhaps even the customers and the Business Bottom Line. For owners, money is paramount. The can create conflicts throughout the enterprise that favors employee satisfaction.
For the Environment:
Environment is trickly, and complex, because Environment can refer to issues within the external Environment and the internal Environment. The big issue to consider here is about constraints that impact work and attitudes. For example, how does each Environment affect employment opportunities, salary levels, market trends, and business relationships.
Step 3: Zero in on the Problem
Now it is time to think more deeply about the answers to the CATWOE questions. Now go deeper and wider and identify the most impactful processes, activities, requirements, and unforeseen surprises that are ,stirring up the pot and causing red flags that must be turned green. These are the findings that are impacting the Problem Situation in the most unexpected ways. Just consider these areas that surprise many “highIy qualified” Leader. Ready? Currently, the incubators for many of the surprises that leaders face today are
(1) corporate culture, and
(2) employee learning and development.
Guess what? It must be true: “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
Step 4: Initiation of Problem Solving
After we work our way through the CATWOE reflection process, we will have formed a much clearer idea of the nature and complexity of the problems we need to address.
We will doubtlessly have considered a much larger number of issues than we earlier anticipated, and hopefully more potential problem solving ideas than when we “enjoyed” at the beginning of the experience. Now we can more correctly separate out those that that we can identify. For example, we may come up with something quite common today like the following:
Our company culture only pretend to care about its employees.
Communications is not happening."
Due to Management Indifference, people do not deliver on their commitments.
The rewards are insults to our most productive emploees.
If this is the case, we can begin our process of solving these problems. The strategies that we adopt or design will likely be outside the scope of CATWOE, and will vary depending on the nature of the problems we have to resolve.
Part Five
Points to Remember
CATWOE is a wonderful and fun bit of intellectual assistance that enables Systems Thinkers to go wider and deeper in our thinking about resolving an interesting range of Problem Situations than what is usual for many people, problems from the simple to the very complex. CATWOE enables us to set the stage, so to speak, for the big event ahead that can lead to success or failure for many Leaders. It enables problem-solvers to expand our thinking about the problem situations we encounter before we too eagerly dive into to the mess and unnecessarily upset the applecart before we need to roll-up our sleeves and do the wrong thing.
By analyzing the CATWOE factors that continually explode all around us more often than we think, we can reinforce our sanity by broadening and deepening our thinking and reflect on the immediate Problem Situation from many potentially competing, conflicting, and perhaps supporting perspectives.
My Recommended Reference
Smyth, D.S. and Checkland, P.B. (1976) ‘Using a systems approach: the structure of root definitions’, Journal of Applied Systems Analysis, 5(1), 75–83
Part Six
The Final Stages of Leadership
Evaluating Leadership Progress
Performance-focused Leaders excel at assisting followers with evaluating their progress (performance) against expectations (goals). Here the Leadership process is uncomplicated: Leaders first determine and then try hard to resolve the frequently widening gap between the stated expectations of team performance following Leadership guidance and the delivered, or actual, performance delivered by followers via actual team performance. Given that the Leadership guidance was potent and to the point, the gap between the goals and results of Leadership would be expected to close significantly.
Planning for Enduring Change
Most of the time, Leadership is about getting the job done right and quickly. This is the strength of Leadership. Historical Leaders realized this centuries ago. Since that time, Leadership has evolved, changed, and perhaps even improved through new approaches and methods that assist followers with building their skills in technical, behavioral, and contextual domains.
As a final task of Leadership in resolving difficult projects, Leaders assist their followers with developing the essential action plans that enable their followers to achieve the often necessary improvements in performance. Here, leaders begin by defining the the desired performance goals. Next, their followers engage in specific actions as tasks that facilitate the initiation of the specific skills-building or developmental processes so essential to achieving the targeted performance improvements through the previous development of what should become enduring skills.
Part Seven
Completion and Growth
Supporting the Team
Dedicated Leaders consistently support their followers as they engage difficult and complex tasks required to improve performance and personal development on and off the job. Leaders naturally direct, guide, and facilitate the actions and developmental processes of their followers as Leaders achieve the success of their mission. Quite often, Leadership involvement consists of continuous support and guidance through the application of tools, techniques, practices, facilitation, and direct leadership intervention and decision-making. Leaders exercise critical thinking and essential care when it comes to their own career design efforts. Experienced Leaders adopt an unstructured approach s they explore their own careers. However, these Leaders adopt a structured approach whenever they design their own careers.
Halt or Catch Fire
When is the Leadership process ever complete? The answer to this question, of course, depends on the goals of the mission and the pace of the team’s acceptance of their roles and responsibilities supporting the Leader. . While almost everyone has worked for some Leader or other more than a few times, a few followers have worked for a number of different leaders for decades. As a practical matter, every team member, or follower, should remind themselves that Leadership failure can come with an exceedingly high price.
As a cost control, followers can help themselves by participating in a Skills Development Program that targets two or three brief change objectives. Such programs can be very helpful as they often enable Leaders and their Teams to, like magic, transform failure into success. For this reason, such programs are sensible. If a Leader clearly identifies the objectives of a project for his or her followers at the beginning of a project, a potent Leadership guided project would then probably range from one to three months of work. In certain situations, this kind of schedule presents enough time for the Leader to transform one to two change objectives into the skills required to resolve them.