The Humane Leadership Conference is an invitation to redefine leadership–our own self-leadership, the ways we lead others, and the criteria we use for those who lead us. What is a humane leader?
We offer leadership training and leadership development courses using the many tools we have created:
Performance review that is easy, clarifying, aligning, and motivating
Earning influence
Evaluating risk & decisions
Aligning one’s values within the values of an organization
Networking for non-networkers
Innovative thinking
We offer leadership training workshops as well as team facilitation, support, and coaching. We also provide individual leadership coaching and support and year-long cohorts. For organizations, we also offer train-the-trainer programs and team alignment workshops.
What in the U.S system has allowed narcissistic malevolent actors (especially those surrounding Jeffrey Epstein) into leadership positions and what allowed them to dodge accountability?
A concerned law student reached out the other day with this question and here are my initial thoughts.
Crisis of Leadership Culture
We’ve been tracking a growing crisis in US leadership culture since January of 2017. We decided to look at possible refinements to leadership culture and development since then as initiatives of The Humane Leadership Institute. In the book, we propose that humane leaders
“… hold responsibility for helping people and organizations better pursue shared goals while ensuring the journey consists of the compassionate refinement of talents, habits, character and skills.”
Business and elected leaders are not trusted by most Americans to act in the public interest, our interest.
Pew Research, July 2019
As workers and citizens, we are partially responsible for allowing leaders to ignore their responsibilities to us. As Americans, we are called to define the scope of our leaders’ responsibility, the criteria they need to meet in order to be allowed to lead us, and the values they must demonstrate to earn our loyalty.
This is especially important to remember this Memorial Day week. We mustn’t wait for November. Many decisions critical to our economy, civil rights, healthcare, and democracy must be made in the coming months.
A budget is a moral document
We must start evaluating and asking more of the leaders in our own lives, businesses, and in the nation today.
We don’t need anyone’s permission to start this work. Alexander Hamilton didn’t wait for permission. In Federalist Paper 85 he wrote,
“Thus have I, fellow citizens, executed the tasks I had assigned myself” as he offered his arguments in favor of the Constitution.
Hamilton also said that our leaders “must be controlled by the reason of the people.” (Federalist Paper 50) The reason of the people can reshape leadership by clearly and constructively evaluating our leaders’ efforts and results.
Is your leader:
Strong and fair?
Caring and empowering of others?
Informed, wise, and balanced in their decision-making?
At the Humane Leadership Institute, we’ve created a tool to help you evaluate your leader’s performance and how well your leader embodies your values. Find the Evaluating Your Leader Wisdom Jig on our website.
First, get curious about your needs and your leaders’ needs:
How could your leader better meet your needs?
What personal or professional needs is your leader trying to meet for themselves?
Do those aligned with your shared values?
What might you do to find overlap and build alignment around shared needs and values?
What can you ask your leader to do to meet your needs and values?
Once you are clear about your leader’s performance and lived values, you can begin designing improvements to your leader’s behavior. This is the tricky part: requesting changes. The goal is to have a discussion about how to better meet the needs of everyone involved. This can happen naturally in the course of conversation, in your own performance review meeting, on internal chat boards or social media, in an intervention, or even as an ultimatum.
If you’ve designed changes and are waiting for the right moment to share them, you have already empowered yourself in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton. Self leadership at this level is available to every one of us. As you work through this process, your empowerment and self leadership skills will grow. Your leader will either grow to better meet your needs or you will find yourself a better leader.
Of course, you needn’t do anything at all. But quietly following leaders who do not meet our own standards has brought us to this moment– a moment that has cost us many lives, jobs, hopes, and opportunities.
My hope this Memorial Day is that you and many others around you will take up this work of evaluating our leaders. By clarifying and speaking our needs and values, we will lead ourselves into a new era of more responsive, responsible leadership. That would be a fitting tribute to all those who sacrificed to defend our shared ideals of liberty and justice for all.
Just last week you were trying to lead your team forward. Now, we’re in an historic moment of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA).
How you lead yourself, your team, your company and your family through these coming weeks will define how all of your life’s stories will unfold.
I want to share what clients have found useful over these past few days. Just to be clear, in my experience this is a messy, iterative process that takes time to perfect. But, just working through the process the first time is likely to add clarity and strength to your leadership.
I try to avoid military analogies in business, but sometimes they are really helpful. To guide fighter pilots in making urgent decisions in very difficult moments, US Air Force Colonel John Boyd invented the OODA loop model.
The model holds that we loop through four steps:
Observe
Orient
Decide
Act
I break these steps down as follows:
Observe – Get connected & curious
Reality – get as close as possible to where the work and transactions are happening.
People – ask a variety of people questions about their situations and opinions.
Data – open a circle of inputs that are as unbiased, direct and timely as possible.
Models – find the best thinking possible. Adapt successful models to your situation, don’t just borrow their conclusions.
Orient – Get analytical
Think clearly – read the smartest, clearest thinking possible. It will sharpen your own thinking skills even if it is not relevant to your area of expertise.
Verify data for completeness, accuracy and timeliness. Refresh your understanding of statistics, especially confidence intervals.
Test ideas for confirmation bias and logical fallacies.
Build networks of insight and care – find support for your thinking and spirits.
Map assets and liabilities, business and personal, including contractual and social obligations.
Prioritize values – these will support the evaluation of options.
Clarify circles of care
Arm’s reach
Personal
Community
Decide – Get rational
Choose to lead yourself and others towards greater strength, clarity, wisdom and true wealth in this experience
Get tight – pull in all outflows of time, energy and money.
Look closely at all of your variable and fixed costs and list how you might cut them and what the trigger will be for cutting each.
Conserve cash in every possible way, it is your key to survival. See renegotiate promises.
Stay home – for now, physically and metaphorically. Create your core value.
Renegotiate promises – notify the person of your intent to stop keeping the promise, then renegotiate a promise you can keep going forward.
Act – Get moving
Purposeful work every morning – know what it is the night before
Build structures that serve you and your crew
Always learning – we will all be changed by this experience, choose your path forward before it is chosen for you.
Refine practice – turn what you learned into a for yourself and others
As we loop from action back to observing the results of our actions we have completed the experiment of one OODA loop. We observed reality, oriented to a hypothesis about it and decided on an experiment to act upon. The results of that experiment feed into our next loop. With luck and some skill, we will loop closer and closer to creating a new reality that works for us and those in our circles of care.
In times of real crisis, we will loop through OODA with the following intentions for ourselves, our teams an organizations. As leaders, we are like emergency room doctors seeking to ensure the patient survives, heals and eventually thrives again. To that end, we must focus on each step in turn:
Stabilize – ensure vital processes of life and value creation continue.
Heal – the damage done in the crisis and in our first responses.
Invigorate – integrate and breath life into the new normal that emerges after the crisis and healing.
Skipping steps in this process will only add risk to your situation. Really focus on observing and orienting around what will be required for survival, make decisions and act in as many loops as are required to ensure survival before you move on to the healing process. You will learn valuable things about your business, your self and your team by investing in this process. As you go, integrate your new wisdom into your daily leadership practices.
I hope you find this helpful. We are here to help anytime, please reach out for a quick advisory orientation discussion anytime. Book a time on my calendar here.
In these critical days, we will hosting free Humane Leadership Open Forums frequently online, see the events calendar here (retired). In these structured roundtables we will address your questions or issues in a confidential, humane group effort to find what’s true and to support to each other in our leadership journeys. Of course, we also have a book that offers a wide variety of tools to support your humane leadership even in difficult moments.
At the close of Drucker Forum 2017, Charles Handy called for a reformation of business enterprises. Frederick Bird and Henry Mintzberg responded with a tongue-in-cheek revision of Luther’s 95 Theses, their 9.5 Theses which included this paraphrase of Luther’s thesis #32:
Those who believe they can be certain of their salvation because they have achieved higher share value will be eternally damned, together with their consultants.
In the US, government seems to gladly allow enterprises to set their own scopes of responsibility, mainly shareholder value, even when that directly conflicts with the best interests of the employees and the communities affected by the production, transportation, and disposal of their products. (Here’s a recent glaring example).
