1. The Cycle of Truth and Trust #Top
Several years ago, while waiting my
turn as a speaker at a computer system vendor’s sales meeting, I listened from
offstage as the assembled group, a mix of about a hundred sales and technical support
professionals, grumbled in open session about what they believed were
organizational impediments to their jobs. They criticized the high turnover in
their company’s upper management, they griped about how their managers
routinely failed to clarify and support their field mission, and they exchanged
rumors of upcoming organizational changes. For more than an hour, they
gossiped. They gossiped, in fact, right through the planned break, even into
the first ten or fifteen minutes of my scheduled presentation.
Theirs was the kind of sullen
exchange to which I and, I’m sure, most of us have become inured over the
course of our careers. After all, when we gather in groups, we tend to complain
about our bosses, bemoan the problems we share, and maybe fret a bit about
future layoffs. This talk rarely influences events, of course. Still, I
suppose, such abreactive banter makes us feel good in the present moment.
Ordinarily, I would have ignored it all and proceeded as planned with my
presentation. For some reason, though, the familiar intramural scuttlebutt
strangely irritated me on that particular afternoon, and something different
and quite unplanned happened.
Thinking back, there was nothing
remarkable about the venue or my particular meeting room, just the usual
box-shaped, bright, commodious space, front-facing chairs arranged in uneven
rows, all focused on a long speaker’s table at one end. Still, if not the
setting, the moment was to become a special one for me. As I took my place by
the overhead projector, presentation materials under my arm, my audience
mustered into their seats and gradually quieted down. I set my prepared notes
and slides down on the table. I would get to them later. To start with on that
day, I grabbed two blank transparencies and a marker pen and switched on the
projector.
“I couldn’t help overhearing
everyone as I stood there in the corner waiting to speak,” I started. “I’d like
to take a few minutes of your time before my presentation to say something to
you, to tell you something
important.” I had little idea what I was about to say, but I was very certain
about what I was feeling. More instinctively than deliberately, I began to draw
a traditional “org chart” – a big box at the top, smaller boxes below, and so
on – arranged in the familiar corporate hierarchy.
“Here is the company you work for,”
I said as I finished drawing very little boxes at the bottom. “Up here,” I
said, pointing to the lone square on top, “sits the big boss, the CEO.” I
looked up and noticed that everyone had become quiet and still − unusual
for an after-lunch presentation during a long day of seminars, especially at a
sales meeting. Everyone was listening, perhaps joined with me in wondering what
I’d say next. I was a little nervous that, speaking extemporaneously, I’d fail
to make my point − or, worse, discover in front of everyone that I had no
real point to make.
“Below that,” I continued, looking
down as I wrote on the transparency, “in the part of the chart where you live
and work, is your senior VP, and some VPs underneath, then managers, your
supervisor, and on and on – all the people you’ve been complaining about for
the last hour.” As I spoke, I scribbled the names of the people who actually
held those positions into the corresponding boxes, working downward from the
top. Many were in the room with us. “Finally, way down here at the bottom, we
come to you, this little box. Your job seems awfully small and unimportant in
the grand scheme of things, doesn’t it? Well, it isn’t. Give me a minute more, and
I’ll show you why it’s actually the most important box on this whole chart.”
I pulled the transparency off the
projector and tossed it into the air to my right. As it fluttered to the floor,
I said “In reality, for all their lofty titles and job descriptions, not a
single one of the people in the boxes above yours matters.”
I grabbed the second blank
transparency, slapped it down on the projector, and uncapped my pen. “No matter
where you work as an IT professional,” I said, “whether you stay here, move on
to another company, or maybe start your own company some day, here’s the only
‘org chart’ you’ll ever need.”
I sketched a large square at the
top of the transparency. “This,” I said, “is your customer. Each of you in this
room has a different one. Many of you have more than one. But at any given
moment in your professional life,” I said, “this is the person who trusts you
with his or her problems. This person depends on you, on your skills, on your
experience, to help them overcome those problems. This,” I said, tapping loudly
at the box, “is your real boss.”
I drew another equally large box
underneath and connected it with a vertical line to the one above. “And this”,
I said, pointing to that second box, “is You.” I capped the pen and looked up.
I could see that everyone was listening to me. “You’re one of the first people,
sometimes the only person from this company that the customer sees.”
“You report directly to your
customer. When you do a good thing on his or her behalf, your customer repays
you, in fact rewards you, with their approval and gratitude. In time, even if
you occasionally do a wrong thing, your customer will understand and forgive,
provided you face your mistake honestly and work effectively to correct it.” My
nerves settled a little as I saw that my point was finding a home in at least a
few of their minds. “When you’re true to your customer’s goals, your customer
responds by trusting you.”
“In support of your relationship
with your customer, one of trust returned for truth, everyone else in your
organization,” I said, “really reports to you.”
I started drawing little connected boxes below the two large boxes on the
transparency, arranged in an upside-down hierarchy. “Your supervisor, your
manager, your vice presidents and your senior VP, all the way down to the CEO,”
I said as I scribbled box after box until I reached the bottom of the slide.
“All those people who you just
spent more than an hour gossiping about, complaining about,” I said, “not a
single one of them matters, except as
they support you in your mission to your customer. Which of them is in charge
today, who will replace whom tomorrow, which will be fired, which promoted,” I
said, “None of that matters. All that matters is that they make products that
your customer can use, and that they provide you with the resources you need to
help your customer use those products to solve their problems. When they help
you to be true to your customer, the trust you earn in return, in effect,
becomes theirs – and that helps them to achieve their goals.”
After a pause, and as everyone
stared silently at me, I took that last transparency off the projector and
tossed it into the air to my left. Except for the rustling of the falling slide
and the hum of the projector, the room was very quiet. Trust, returned for
truth – did I really understand what I said?
Each of us in that room had, in our
careers, our share of good days and bad.
For me, the bad days each were so for assorted reasons that, over time,
had become blurry in recollection. Thinking back at that moment, though, I
clearly remembered that the good ones, happily for me the more numerous, all
had one thing in common: the truth-trust cycle. Through crisis and triumph, on
all the good days, the people I truly served repaid my service with their trust
– the point, I suppose, that I tried to make by telling that story.
I then began presenting my prepared
material, which described the company’s new line of storage management
products. Unplanned, in the context established by my impromptu upside-down
organization chart, I related fresh insights on almost every slide into the
usefulness of the hardware and software in that new product line, and into the
roles various members of my audience could play in matching these new products
to their customers’ needs. Trying to keep the group on the day’s schedule, I
finished with a hurried summary. Personally, I felt very good about my small
piece of that afternoon. Had I connected with anyone?
As I packed up my notes and left
the room, one of the students, someone I had never met before, approached me
and asked if I had ever read a book called Servant
Leadership by Robert K. Greenleaf. He could tell from my quizzical look
that I hadn’t, so he pressed a small note, with title and author inscribed,
into my hand as he shook it, then rushed out ahead of me to catch the next
session. Over his shoulder, he said: “Buy it. Read it.”
2. Earning Trust through True Service: Servant Leadership #Top
In Servant Leadership, Greenleaf proposes that leadership is borne of
willing and enthusiastic service to others. In businesses, governments, and
society at large, leaders can be appointed or elected, or leadership might be
inherited or usurped. In contrast, a servant-leader, in Greenleaf’s view,
always begins as a servant. Over time, by serving, the servant becomes a leader
in the hearts and minds not just of those who are served, but of everyone
around. Leadership is, thus, earned through service to others.
The acts of service themselves,
however, are not enough. Greenleaf illustrates this using a character from
Hermann Hesse’s The Journey to the East. Hesse’s allegory describes a diverse
party of adventurers on a long and arduous expedition. One of the story’s
background figures, a character called Leo, sees to the group’s myriad menial
chores. Among many other things, he carries the luggage, sets up the
encampments, and tends to the group leader’s personal needs.
As the journey progresses, it
becomes obvious that Leo’s role in the group goes far beyond the catalog of
tasks he performs on their behalf. With his enthusiastic and joyous work ethic,
he upholds the team spiritually through the many difficulties they face. Leo is
their servant to his very core, and, in so being, he establishes himself,
without formal declaration or election, as their leader. When, in Hesse’s tale,
Leo mysteriously disappears from the party before their journey is over, they
dissolve as a group and abandon their trip. They just cannot go on without Leo.
Some time later in the story, we learn that the meek but indispensable servant
Leo is actually the supreme leader of the mysterious League that founded the
journey in the first place.
Greenleaf’s sublime treatment of
leadership raises a dilemma for modern organizations that seek to
institutionalize such behavior. It is easy for an appointed corporate manager
to coerce someone into performing an act of service. Once delivered, the
results of such service are usually manifest physically in some form that can
be measured.
However, ordering action in service
to others, then evaluating the results in purely physical terms, ignores the
spiritual aspect of the process of servant leadership as Greenleaf describes
it. It is in the spirit of the
service that one finds servant leadership, not merely in its observable
practice. It is in that elevated spiritual moment that a major shift in human
behavior takes place, like the unexpected turn during my presentation that day:
from inward to outward, static to dynamic, paralysis to action.
Thus, as has always been true of
human greatness, servant leadership is colorless, odorless, and tasteless, but
nonetheless very real. I wondered: if we can’t see it, smell it, or taste it,
then how do we recognize it? How do we encourage it?
After reading Greenleaf’s book, I
thought back to the upside-down organization chart I presented at that sales
meeting. I realized why that student responded to me by recommending
Greenleaf’s book. I recalled the power of the moment when I connected,
sincerely, with him and the others in the room on this subject. I’d explained
that, by truly serving one’s customer, the customer would reciprocate with
their trust. As that bond of trust in exchange for truth grew, others (their
colleagues and managers) would recognize it (as they respected it, benefited
from it), then follow and support it. I had given a modest impromptu course in
servant leadership before I ever consciously knew what it was.
So, how does one recognize servant
leadership? I can tell you from my sales
meeting encounter many years ago, and many similar experiences since: you will
feel it when you do it, you will know it when you see it. With practice, I
believe you can learn to encourage and cultivate it in others, but only when
you come to understand that it cannot be injected into or coerced upon your
peers and subordinates. It grows from the bottom up. As it does, it radiates
and spreads to others from the inside outward.
These ideas, to many, will seem idealistic and
insubstantial. Readers of Greenleaf’s earlier work on servant leadership
undoubtedly pressed him on this point, asking for concrete guidance on the
measurement of its operational benefits. In a later edition[1],
Greenleaf addresses them obliquely:
The difference [between
those who first choose service rather than leadership] manifests itself in the
care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest
priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer,
is: do those served grow as persons; do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more
autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect
on the least privileged in society; will he benefit, or, at least, will he not
be further deprived? [2]
Still, modern managers,
particularly in a metrics-driven industry such as Information Technology, will
impatiently drive to the bottom line: how can servant leadership improve an
organization’s productivity and enhance the quality of its collective efforts?
Can servant leadership be induced reliably in others? Can it be channeled
toward the achievement of concrete goals? Humanity, morality, ethics – the
virtues of servant leadership require patient cultivation. Unfortunately,
pressed for time in our work, too many of us abandon the effort to follow what
we believe will be “safer”, that is to say more profitable, rituals. After all,
what has servant leadership to do with profit?
In fact, in addition to their
natural enthusiasm for working with others, servant-leaders typically exhibit a
strong inner sense of direction, a bias for action, a creative approach to
solving problems, and a passion for completing their assigned tasks. With an
investment of time and a change in attitude, smart managers can ignite servant
leadership within, and thereby greatly energize, their organizations.
Thus, Greenleaf’s ideas, put into
practice, can help us in very tangible ways; but, before turning to his
moralistic prescription for practical success, let us first consider the hard
behavioral science of collective human failure.
3. The Science of Unproductive Behavior #Top
In psychological research conducted
decades ago by Deutsch and Krauss[3]
and since replicated under a variety of experimental conditions, pairs of
subjects participated in a simple electronic trucking game. The subjects were
asked to imagine that they were running one of two trucking companies (the Acme
and Bolt companies), with the goal of moving a truck from one point to another
in the shortest possible time. For each player, the trucks were identical. Each
also had his or her own starting point and destination, which were connected by
a long and convoluted, but unobstructed, highway. The Acme players started
their truck on the left side of the game’s course, concurrently as Bolt started
from the right.
The game’s roadmap (see Figure),
which appeared as a video screen across which both participants could move
their trucks in real time as they played, also offered a single, much shorter
path that either could use. It was a one-lane road, and because the two
companies’ objectives lay in opposite directions, the player’s trucks would
meet head to head on it. If both trucks entered this road at the same time,
neither could proceed. One could back up and take the longer path to their goal
instead, but this would allow the other’s truck to use the shortcut to reach
their destination in much less time.
To start each experimental trial,
the researcher gave the participants verbal instructions that were carefully
crafted to explain only the overall object and rules of the game, without
suggesting in any way how the game should be played. During play, other than
observing each other’s behavior on the video screen, the participants had no
means of communicating.
Figure.
Deutsch and Krauss Trucking Game
Clearly, the optimal strategy for
both players would be to cooperate by alternating travel along the one-lane shortcut.
In practice, however, the participants rarely followed that plan. Instead, in trial after trial, the subjects
quickly became adversaries and fought over the use of the shortcut, wasting
time nosing their trucks stubbornly against each other. When, eventually, one
player reluctantly surrendered and backed up to let the other pass, the
“winning” subject rarely reciprocated in turn. Most games degenerated into a
head-to-head stalemate along the shortcut and overall traffic ground to a halt −
the least productive of all potential outcomes.
In a variation of the experimental
game, the researchers gave both sides a “threat”: an electronic barrier that
each player could impose along the one-lane shortcut, which, when erected,
closed it to all traffic. In this round of experiments, players quickly learned
to use their barriers as an outlet for the aggressive side of their competitive
instincts. In trial after trial, they erected their barriers early in the game
to deny all access to the shortcut, including their own, leaving both players
with only their respective private roads to travel. With the shortcut thus
taken out of play, traffic flowed, but over the longest available routes and,
therefore, at its least efficient pace.
The Deutsch and Krauss research
concludes that, lacking guidance to the contrary and unable to communicate with
each other, people will instinctively seek personal advantage rather than
mutual benefit. They will behave competitively, even aggressively, rather than
cooperatively. They will exploit opportunities to inhibit the progress of their
“opponents”, even if their own goals suffer as a result. Consequently, overall
performance will suffer.
4. Positive Effects of Constructive Communication #Top
By varying the conditions of their
experiment, Deutsch and Krauss showed that constructive communication, between
the experimenter and the participants and among the subjects themselves,
dramatically ameliorated their subjects’ performance.
To begin with, the experimenters
wrote three different sets of initial instructions − different
experimental treatments, in effect, for three groups of participants. The
subjects in group 1 were told that they should find ways to cooperate with each
other to earn the most points for both players overall. Participants in the
second group were told to earn as many points as possible for themselves
without worrying about the other player. The group 3 subjects were told to earn
as many points for themselves as they could and, as often as possible, to try
to prevent the other player from earning any points at all.
In addition, to test the effect of
communication among the game’s players, the researchers further divided each of
these three sets of subjects into two additional groups: the first group of
players was not permitted to communicate with each other at all; the second
group’s participants were encouraged to communicate as much as possible as they
played. The behavior of the research subjects in these six experimental groups
was subsequently observed and scored to be either cooperative (facilitating) or
competitive (inhibiting).
Not surprisingly, participants who
were told by the experimenter to cooperate at the start of the experiment
consequently did so with much greater frequency. Also, in stark contrast with
trials that prohibited inter-player communication, subjects who were encouraged
to communicate with each other during play typically facilitated rather than
inhibited each other’s performance.
When they were instructed to work
together and encouraged to communicate with each other, one player’s overture
to cooperate was almost always met with a reciprocal cooperative rather than a
competitive move. In this fertile environment, mutually nurtured progress took
root and flourished − everyone “won”. Constructive communication, between
colleagues and with supervisors, breeds altruism. Altruism promotes collective
progress.
5. The Psychopathology of IT Management
Problems #Top
I cite the
Deutsch and Krauss experiment because I believe that Information Technology,
very much like the Acme and Bolt trucking companies in their research, is a
“game” of proxies and symbols. Rather than concrete objects, IT professionals
work almost entirely in abstractions: lines of code or code objects, client and
server computer systems, networking infrastructure, help-desk support tickets,
etc. Further, much of Information Technology – writing software, building
systems, diagnosing and resolving technical problems – is naturally practiced
in the singular. Even when they work in so-called “open” office settings, IT
professionals do so most often individually rather than collectively, rarely
communicating with their peers on the subject of their work.
When they do talk, they are routinely divided by their lack of a common
technical language. Unlike most engineering disciplines, with their broadly
adopted and well-understood professional systems and rules, IT practitioners
typically speak in the tribal technical jargon they are taught by product
vendors. Engaged in such connectionless discourse, they compete for position
based on artificial, essentially trivial knowledge. They make sounds as if
speaking, all the while deepening their personal isolation. As a result, only
too rarely do they fully understand each other. Perhaps for fear of bruised
ego, of course, they rarely admit this – to each other, or even to themselves.
This is perhaps why, all too frequently, interminable and wordy IT meetings
with, say, a dozen participants, ultimately peter out by dispatching everyone,
exhausted and confused rather than united, in futile pursuit of a dozen crossed
purposes.
Thus, in effect, using their
employees as subjects, IT managers run the non-communicating versions of the Deutsch
and Krauss experiments every day. Lacking instructions to the contrary, their
employees, like the players in the lab, instinctively assume a
counterproductive posture among their peers. Deprived of meaningful
communication with their co-workers and managers, starved for understanding and
true empathy in their work, it is little wonder that many IT professionals, in
turn, behave like the uninformed and isolated Deutsch and Krauss lab subjects.
Granted, the complex skills and
demands of professional Information Technology differ from those of the simple
trucking game experiments. But are the basic principles of human motivation and
action all that different?
In the real IT world, the acts of
obstructionism, though covert, are no less nocuous. Frustrated in professional
isolation, as in our experimental setting, people raise behavioral “gates”:
habitual barriers to obstruct collective progress. Suggesting what may be a
common etiology, in fact, the litany of all-too-familiar IT-organizational ills
closely parallels the clinical indicia of the passive-aggressive personality
disorder[4]:
·
passive resistance to fulfilling occupational
tasks through procrastination and inefficiency;
·
complaints of being misunderstood,
unappreciated, and victimized by others;
·
sullenness, irritability, and argumentativeness
in response to expectations;
·
angry and pessimistic attitudes toward a variety
of events;
·
unreasonable criticism and scorn toward those in
authority;
·
envy and resentment toward those who are more
fortunate;
·
self-definition as luckless in life and an
inclination to whine and grumble about being jinxed;
·
alternating behavior between hostile assertion
of personal autonomy and dependent contrition.
The corporate data center is indeed
not so far removed from the psychology lab. Most IT professionals, management
and labor alike, have seen such obstructionist behavior exhibited by others. In
private, many of us might even confess to this behavior in ourselves. What does
this teach us about the true underlying causes of inefficiency in our ranks?
What ceiling do we approach as we strive to improve our professional
productivity? Perhaps, rather than in the simple counting of heads, our real
productivity problem is within the heads themselves.
6. Greenleaf’s Servant Leadership
Prescription #Top
In 21st
Century sound bites, given Deutsch and Krauss’ conclusions, the solution is speciously
obvious: communicate more. Perhaps we should meet more often, or embrace
conspicuously in the hallways now and then, or spend more time together outside
the office? Perhaps more professional training is needed, or less? Recognizing
that pointless gossip, as for example at my sales meeting, is somehow unhealthy
and unproductive, what then constitutes positive and productive discourse?
There are no
formulaic solutions in Greenleaf’s writings. Overcoming the interpersonal
communication problems that fester within the very heart of dysfunctional IT
organizations demands considerable moral and intellectual effort. Greenleaf
proposes a starting point[5],
but his is by no means a cookbook:
The
servant-leader is servant first… [Servant Leadership] begins with the natural
feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first.
Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply
different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage
an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions. For such it will be
a later choice to serve – after leadership has been established. The
leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there
are shavings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human
nature…The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant-first
to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served.
True
servants behave in distinctive ways, and this behavior sends clear signals that
induce others to follow. Servant leaders communicate first by doing service,
next by explaining why and how. A true and ineluctable path forward, clear to
all and distinct from false starts, then emerges.
Greenleaf
illuminates the subtle process of servant leadership by listing the traits that
distinguish the bona fide
servant-leader:
A servant-leader listens. Most of us understand
intuitively that listening rather than speaking is the proper first step in
genuine communication. For Greenleaf, listening is an active, evaluative
intellectual process. Unlike, say, tuning a radio to scan for signals, true
listening calls for respecting the ideas of others and working hard to
understand them. Only then can we harness diverse opinions to pursue
organizational goals in a common direction. By contrast, as others are
speaking, IT professionals often scan, without listening, for opportunities to
overpower the group, to superimpose their own ideas, to “own” the meeting’s
lone, surviving, dominant idea. Servant-leaders instead seek opportunities to
integrate the ideas of others, in part with their own, but always behind
achieving the common good. The only power greater than a single workable idea
is that of several proceeding in harmony in a single direction.
Servant-leaders
use their power ethically, through persuasion rather than coercion. Akin to listening, persuasion
demands patience and effort. Greenleaf recognizes that management edicts occupy
a righteous place in any organization. However, when rendered, he prescribes
that they must clearly promote the good of the community rather than the
parochial agenda of their source. Further, to earn the support of others, they
must be seen clearly as such. In Greenleaf’s writings, edicts and directives
are a last resort, subordinate in value and effect to the task of persuading
others to follow.
Similarly, a servant-leader seeks consensus in group decisions. Greenleaf
believes implicitly in the concept of the knowable Common Good, and in the
innate wisdom of every sufficiently informed person to see it. In any group
setting, particularly perhaps within Information Technology, there will be
those who will persist in their own contrarian’s beliefs, regardless of the
information they are tendered. An appeal to authority is the easy solution in
such cases – and the wrong one. Paradoxically, the shortest path to changing
the attitudes of others is to show willingness, even eagerness, to change one’s
own.
Servant
leadership calls for foresight in practice. Indeed, Greenleaf decries the
lack of foresight in a leader as a serious ethical failure rather than a merely
practical one.
A
servant-leader uses open language, and avoids the terminology of the closed
worlds of narrow disciplines or cult beliefs.
The
servant-leader practices acceptance and empathy:[6]
The
servant-leader always empathizes, always accepts the person but sometimes
refuses to accept some of the person’s effort or performance as good enough.
It
is part of the enigma of human nature that the typical person – immature,
stubborn, inept, lazy – is capable of great dedication and heroism if he is wisely led. Many otherwise able
people are disqualified to lead because they cannot work with and through the
half-people, who are all there are. The secret of institution building is to be
able to weld a team of such people by lifting them up to grow taller than they
would otherwise be.
Conceptualizing
is the prime talent of servant leadership. A servant leader has the ability
to visualize, beyond verbalize, an organization’s just objectives, as a whole
within the perspective of past, present, and future. The clear expression of
such conceptual vision offers compelling persuasive evidence to everyone that,
for the good of all, they should follow the servant-leader.
Greenleaf contrasts this skill with
the tactics of what he calls “the operator” – the person who marshals the
organization’s responses to its day-to-day challenges. Greenleaf points out
that an organization needs both, and recognizes that it is the operator who
usually earns the recognition and promotion. But “the conceptualizers,” he
says, “usually emerge when an organization makes a strong push for
distinction.”[7]
Servant-leaders
nurture community. Servant-leaders seek collective opportunities to achieve
the common good, making sure that all share fairly in the fruits of the
accomplishment. Rather than offering it a home, servant-leaders deflect credit
to others.
Finally, a servant-leader chooses to lead. Indeed, the “enemy”, as Greenleaf puts it[8],
is “Not evil people. Not stupid people. Not apathetic people. Not the ‘system’.
Not the protesters, the disrupters, the revolutionaries, the reactionaries….
The enemy is strong natural servants who have the potential to lead but do not
lead, or who choose to follow a non-servant.”
7. Recognizing the Small Triumphs #Top
Greenleaf
brings us back to the powerful cycle of truth and trust. True service to the
needs of others earns trust in return. Manifest often as little victories in
the smallest of places, servant leadership can, when encouraged, spread −
or, overlooked and misunderstood, whither and die.
I once visited a typical IT
helpdesk, meeting there with several first-level responders to users’ technical
problems. My official purpose was to investigate the effectiveness of a
problem-tracking system they had recently installed. We began by discussing the
new system, but, before long, I found myself listening as most of the
technicians droned on among themselves, in their supervisor’s presence,
complaining about this and that, griping about various people and events within
their own organization and the company at large.
The phone rang frequently as they
prattled on, largely oblivious to it. Always, I noticed, the same person rushed
to answer. I listened to her as she spoke with her clients, working her way
through the familiar steps of understanding and fixing their reported problems.
Within a few minutes, each call ended successfully, after which she moved on to
the next. Always, I noticed, she diligently used the new tracking system to
create an electronic ticket for the reported problems, against which she later
meticulously logged the sundry associated events: symptoms described, actions
taken, and, eventually, case closed.
I was struck by the way she handled
a particular call that day, a report of a new problem phoned in by an agitated
user who, as it happens, was a mid-level corporate executive. I listened as
they tried a few maneuvers together over the phone, but the problem stubbornly
persisted. She put her client on hold and politely asked her colleagues at the
help desk if they had any suggestions. Little assistance was offered as they
continued gossiping, so she turned back to her client’s call and offered to
come down to his office to investigate the matter in person. I excused myself
from the group discussion and followed her.
She entered the client’s large office
with a disarming smile. Obviously, the executive inside had many important
matters on his mind, and this problem with his computer was making him very
angry. It took a while, but she finally caught the busy man’s eye as he fussed
about his desk. She asked what was wrong, and listened as he railed on and on
less about the problem than the adverse effect it was having on his schedule.
Reassuringly, she said “Let’s take care of that right now.” She stood next to
him behind his desk and asked him to show her. Obviously agitated and maybe a
little embarrassed, he fingered the keyboard nervously. Sensing that he was
uncomfortable as well as pressed for time, the technician tried to connect with
him personally, to calm him. She asked him about his family, gesturing to a
photo of his wife and children. He recited their names, the grades they were
in, the sports they played, all in the span of a few seconds − as he
became a different, more relaxed person. She smiled and told him how lucky he
was to have such a great family, after which she promptly steered the
conversation back by apologizing for the problem and asking him again to show
it to her. This time, he settled easily into the task of reproducing it while
she and I watched.
Almost immediately, we saw that the
executive was making procedural mistakes, incorrectly trying to use an option
in a software package. With the executive’s permission, the technician replaced
him in his chair and walked him patiently through the correct way of using his
computer. “I can understand why you thought it would work that way,” she said
while drawing the man’s attention to the screen. “Actually,” she said as she
typed, “you need to use this particular feature a little differently.” As he
watched her, he silently recognized his mistake. Instead of calling attention
to his obvious embarrassment, she moved to ease it by offering him his chair
and asking him to give it a try as she watched. He did, and as their
conversation continued she suggested a few other ways the man might try to use
the software to achieve the same results with less effort and fewer steps. As
she tutored him, he asked other questions, even reported a few unrelated
problems that had been troubling him. She fixed all but one of them, opening a
problem ticket in the help desk’s tracking system to make sure it would later
be addressed and resolved. She worked side by side with this man for, perhaps,
twenty minutes, after which he thanked her effusively as she extended her hand
to end the visit. Before she left, she wrote her telephone extension on an
adhesive label and attached it to his computer’s screen. “Call me if you
experience any of these problems again,” she said as she left, “and I’ll take
care of them for you right away.”
Without missing any of the mandated
steps in her help desk’s procedural regimen, the technician took the time to
connect with her client on a human level. She stayed on the subject of the
problem he reported, only occasionally changing topics, for example to ask
about his family, to make him more comfortable and earn his cooperation. She
could have embarrassed him by pointing out his mistake, but she did not. She
could have left when she resolved his reported problem, but she stayed instead
to uncover and fix other problems he might be having, and to make sure he was
completely satisfied with the service he had received.
When we returned to the help desk,
she reviewed the ticket she had opened for the lone technical problem she could
not resolve. She confirmed that its symptoms were expressed accurately and that
all the relevant background information was included. Even though she knew the
ticket would, in its turn, appear automatically for resolution by others on her
team, she took the time to ask her colleagues if they had seen that particular
problem before. When she found someone who had, she encouraged him to accept
ownership of its ticket and get started resolving it. While he worked, she
scanned the ticketing system’s files for problems with similar symptoms, and
found that several other users had, in fact, reported this particular
difficulty over the past few days. She made contact with the assigned help desk
technicians for each of these cases. She shared her observations, explained the
adverse impact the problem was having, and inquired about what they had seen
and with whom they had spoken about it. Before long, her obvious enthusiasm for
her job and commitment to resolving the matter somehow induced them all to work
together, to pool their experiences and search for the common technical threads
running through their separate cases that would lead them to identifying the
root cause of the problem. Within an hour, a thorny technical matter that had
been mistakenly logged as numerous separate issues was resolved, and several
long-standing open cases were closed as a result.
The next day, in a private meeting
with the helpdesk supervisor on the subject of the reporting system, I began to
relate my experiences with that technician, but the supervisor cut me short
when I mentioned the technician’s name. “Oh, her,” he said dismissively. “She’s
a strange person, not easy to talk to, not much of a team player. And, she
takes forever to close a service ticket.”
8. Systematic Pseudo-efficiency #Top
Nothing within the system demanded
otherwise of him, so my friend the help desk supervisor remained ignorant of
the small service miracle that happened under his nose during my visit. I tried
repeatedly to point it out to him, but he would hear none of it. For some
reason, maybe because she chose not to participate in their group gossip
sessions, he had formed an intractable negative opinion about her. Perhaps with
his unconscious help, the statistics reported by the new problem tracking
system had reinforced and, to his mind, certified his adverse judgment of her.
The problem-tracking system, the
subject of my visit to the help desk, was not at fault. In every technical
respect, in fact, it worked perfectly: it tracked problems, recorded dates,
times and names, and returned it all on demand in the form of variously sorted
reports.
Still, as automatic systems often
are, it was blind. It failed to capture the essence of the service the
technician provided as she worked with her client to solve his problems:
empathy, acceptance, foresight, clear human expression − all straight
from Greenleaf’s inventory of a servant-leader’s traits. Later, it ignored her
as she united her co-workers into an ad
hoc service team, leading them to resolve a long-standing problem. Even
though her unseen efforts that day resulted in closing several outstanding
trouble tickets, the system had no way of crediting her for it. Her tactics,
effective as they were, went unrecognized, and therefore stood little chance of
becoming codified and institutionalized.
The system’s abstractions had, in
her case, eclipsed the essential reality of the objects they represented: the
clients’ problems, her actions in response. While trumpeting increased
productivity, the system had actually made the organization less efficient.
9. The Cultivation of Servant Leadership #Top
Cases like this show that an IT
organization’s effectiveness depends largely on the aggregate power of its
members’ individual actions. Therefore, one cannot ignore servant leadership,
which seeks to grow and tap this power, as a candidate strategy for improving
organizational performance.
On the other hand, under pressure
to reduce costs, barraged constantly by technological innovation, and caught up
in corporate politics, it is certainly easier for IT managers to choose to
consider their people in purely reductionist terms: trouble tickets opened and
closed, lines of code written or patched, computer systems inventoried and
upgraded.
The question
remains: how does one instead proceed down the difficult path of accepting and
acting on Greenleaf’s premises? While the world at large could certainly use
more of them, sadly not everyone is a servant-leader. Arguably, servant-leaders
are born and cannot (reliably, by following some formula) be made. The
Deutsch-Krauss research demonstrated this indirectly. Cooperation and
facilitation did not always result from every experiment wherein the subjects
were told to work together and encouraged to communicate with each other.
Likewise, notwithstanding the infertile climate of their narrowly guided and
non-communicating experimental trials, mutual cooperation nonetheless sometimes
spontaneously sprouted. Clearly, individual differences are at work here.
Still,
provided they are officially encouraged, and given the communication tools they
need, the few servant-leaders within can spark productivity throughout the IT
organizations they serve. As a result, the likelihood of successfully
completing projects will improve, and their actual and promised delivery dates
will converge. Operating costs will go down as professional productivity is
enhanced. The probability that people will work together to find the true root
cause of problems, rather than merely follow the official rituals of closing a
problem’s “tickets”, will increase. Put another way, servant leadership is the root
cause of true IT productivity. Over time, personal acts of servant leadership
will ignite real progress toward the collective good. Reflecting their
individual contributions, the overall scores reported by various IT activity
tracking systems will, over time, also improve. The dog wags its tail; not the
other way ‘round.
The retail industry suggests a way
forward for Information Technology management. Store managers use a technique
called “mystery shopping”, visiting their own stores as a customer would, to
audit the quality of service their employees offer. This is much more than mere
surveillance, which aims to identify workers who, through rudeness or
incompetence, suppress their stores’ revenue. Mystery shopping actively
involves owners and managers in the day-to-day business of their stores, thus
situating them to “catch employees doing things right”, to identify employee
service techniques that enhance revenue. Savvy line managers highlight this
behavior at their regular staff meetings, not only spurring the recognized
employees to continue, but inspiring others to follow. In such meetings, tales
of personal successes have far greater impact than spreadsheets of sales and
profit numbers. Recognizing, rewarding, and encouraging good service promises
far greater “bottom-line” benefit than merely spotting and punishing the bad.
By placing themselves in the role
of the clients they support, IT managers can adapt “mystery shopping” to their
purposes.
Management needs to understand the
meaning of servant leadership in their organizations’ support missions, to
internalize its core values: the joy of a job well done, the positive benefits
of earning trust by offering true service. Accepting that servant leadership is
the “Right Thing”, and not just some clever technique, managers who truly
respect this quality in their subordinates’ work subsequently find it easy to
recognize when they see it. Indeed, for them, true quality becomes hard to
overlook.
Once they are integrated into their
own work, managers must share these values with their subordinates. They must
show clearly that these values are not just personal opinions, but are also the
organization’s values. A servant leadership connection must be made with all
employees, not just friends and favorites, on a moral and ethical as well as
practical level. As an institutional value, servant leadership should become a
key element in the process of advancement, from worker to management, and
within management’s ranks.
Once the underlying values of servant
leadership have been established, managers need to encourage their subordinates
to engage in the collegial exchange of ideas, especially technical ideas, using
open and clear expression rather than technical jargon. Management should
reward clarity and discourage cloudiness − thus promoting cooperation by
making it easier to cooperate. Quantum Network Design, a structured method that
can be used to describe all network-integrated systems in both IT-specific and
converged business applications, will be presented in future issues of these
papers.
10. Tapping the
Power of True Authority #Top
In the scheme of things, ethical systems like servant leadership
seem by design to be both elusive and real. It is perhaps intended that, when
we try to analyze and manipulate such moral concepts, seeking somehow to
automate them, they dissolve in our hands. Sadly, under daily pressure to
produce practical results, too many of us give up our trying to discern and do
the right thing. We learn to substitute symbols and, especially, numbers, any
numbers, in its place. We use these numbers to compete with each other, with
ourselves, to play at doing the right thing. Sometimes, maybe accidentally,
certainly too infrequently, we even approximate the right thing by engaging in
this game. But such stumbling about, however rigorously scientific it may look,
can hardly be thought of as wise.
Effective
managers, instead, keenly grasp that true authority must be earned by working,
individually, in terms of genuine right and wrong, thereby
charting a correct course for all. By their example, they encourage
servant leadership. Further, they serve those who would serve by clearing the
obstacles in their way.
Ultimately,
Greenleaf plants a bold signpost before us. Always, in Greenleaf’s conception,
one chooses first to serve, and only then to lead. Which of us has the courage
to choose this first step, to abandon the short-sighted pursuit of
personal exaltation in favor of service to others? Truly, this would be someone
worth following.
Bibliography
Deutsch,
M. and Krauss, R. M., 1960. “The effect of threat on interpersonal bargaining.”
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology,
61, 181-189.
Frick, Don M. 2004. Robert
K. Greenleaf: A Life of Servant Leadership. Berrett-Koehler Publishers,
Inc., San Francisco.
Greenleaf,
Robert K. 1996. On Becoming a Servant Leader. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.
Greenleaf,
Robert K. 1977, 1991, 2002 (25th
Anniversary Edition). Servant Leadership:
A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness. Paulist Press,
New York.
Millon, Theodore and Radovanov,
Jelena (1995). “Passive-Aggressive (Negativistic) Personality Disorder.” The
DSM-IV Personality Disorders. Livesley, John W., ed. Guilford Press, New York.
Notes
