New Competency #6: Giving Vision, Meaning, Direction, and Focus to the Organization
Who Are We? What Business Are We In? What Business Are We Not In?
THE AIM for this post is to conclude our review of Scholtes’ six new leadership competencies with the last one he describes in The Leader’s Handbook: Giving Vision, Meaning, Direction, and Focus to the Organization. This one closely aligns with the first of Deming’s 14 Points for the Transformation of Management: Constancy of Purpose.
As before, if you are just joining in, you can catch up on the prior competencies below:
Competency #1: Systems Thinking, Systems Leading
Competency #2: Understanding Variation
Competency #3: How We Learn, Develop, and Improve
Competency #4: Understanding People and Why They Behave as They Do
Ten Questions
Scholtes begins with ten questions that everyone in the organization should be able to answer without hesitation as an indication of cohesion within the organization, ie. how well we work together, and system integrity, ie. how well we fit together. I’ve broken these down into two categories: Organizational and Individual.
Consider your own organization: How many of the following six questions can you answer? For each answer, provide a confidence score on a scale of zero (no confidence) to five (I’m absolutely certain):
Did you struggle? Don’t take it personally; as Scholtes observed way back in 1998 most organizations don’t really dedicate much time at all to thinking about the answers to these questions, but they are vital. Dr. Deming framed this in his first of Fourteen Points as “constancy of purpose”, the long-range objective of management with the aim to innovate, improve, stay in business, and create jobs:
Fear of takeover, along with emphasis on the quarterly dividend, defeats constancy of purpose. Without constancy of purpose to stay in business by providing product and service that have a market, there will be further downturn and more unemployment.
Deming, W. Edwards. Out of the Crisis (The MIT Press) . The MIT Press. Kindle Edition.
Over many years Deming observed how inattention to constancy of purpose led organizations and their leadership into trouble, causing management to react and defer to changes in conditions and phenomena. Without a good sense of where to draw lines, planning becomes political and everything a priority, which we’ll see later in Scholtes’ retelling of his customer with 88 priorities.
Next, consider the answers to the following four questions regarding your own individual sense of purpose and direction. How many can you answer? As before, provide a confidence score from zero to five for each:
How confident were you in answering these questions? Perfect 20? The less confident you are in your answers, the greater the indication that there is, at least from your own perspective, organizational ambiguity which is leaking in from leadership’s lack of constancy of purpose. Without a sense of where you fit, why your work is important, who will use it, for what purpose, and how you will improve, you’ll quickly become demotivated.
Sum up your confidence scores for a final tally out of 50. How well did you do? This is entirely subjective of course, but if you find that your score is below 70% you may want to investigate why with the awareness that the answers you seek could be elusive. If you scored a perfect 50/50 I would like to extend a personal invitation to you for an interview to learn what you leadership is doing so differently from expectations with the caveat that you’re not falling prey to solipsistic thinking, which we’ll explore next.
Incidentally, these questions make for fantastic responses in interviews when they ask if you have any questions for them. Be prepared for some squirming, half-answers, and platitudes. Guaranteed, you will learn a lot for the effort. Consider developing responses to share with those doing hiring in your own organization.
Managerial Solipsism
Organizational constancy of purpose can become threatened by what Scholtes describes as solipsism. This is the epistemological (ie. philosophy of knowledge) conviction that nothing outside of your own mind can be reliably known for sure. Sound absurd? Well, you’re not far off as it’s been challenged for hundreds of years going back to Descartes’ famous assertion of “I think, therefore I am”, but that’s for another time.
In a managerial context, you may have heard of it going by another moniker, the “Not Invented Here” syndrome, or the tendency for leadership to reject any ideas that did not originate within the organization. It manifests through the invention of an alternative reality where we become overly-dependent on internal measurements and perceptions to the detriment of objective ones that have real impact and consequences.
Scholtes gives us a some examples of managerial solipsism in the wild:
Former GM CEO Engine Charlie Wilson’s statement that “What is good for GM is good for America!”;
Grades as a surrogate indicator for learning, eg. we convince ourselves that an “A” is an “A” no matter who awards it, and without any question about how it was obtained or what was learned;
Manipulating book sales figures to make the best-sellers lists;
Favouring only customer success measures everyone agrees on internally;
Meeting internal goals and targets that don’t match outside reality.
You can probably conjure a few more examples from your own observations and experiences. In Scholtes’ view, if there aren’t reliable, objective measurements leadership can depend on to provide a real indication of success, the greater the potential to fall prey to managerial solipsism. In this state, they won’t know whether they are having a vision or suffering from a hallucination.
The Crazy 88… Priorities
Nothing kills constancy of purpose and direction in an enterprise as fast as having so many priorities that you may as well have none at all. Scholtes recounts an experience with a customer whose leadership team had set an astounding 88 top priorities during their annual planning session. Unsurprisingly, half-way through the year they realized that none of their priorities were accomplished, and so they set about re-stating the priorities while maintaining all of them. Mission accomplished!
Not quite: by year-end, again none of the priorities had been accomplished. The following year they resolved to do better in their annual planning and reduced the list to 80 which they then broke down into ten categories each with sub-priorities. So… progress? As with prior iterations, this had the effect of spreading everyone very thinly across just as many priorities as before, and with as little progress to show for it.
Scholtes wisely chose one of the sub-priorities to work on with a respective team where they made significant progress. The lessons here are obvious.
Summary
In this instalment of Scholtes’ New Leadership Competencies, we have reviewed his sixth and final one, Giving Vision, Meaning, Direction, and Focus to the Organization. We’ve learned that, to paraphrase the grandfather in Mordecai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, an organization without constancy of purpose is nothing. Without a clear understanding of why they exist and their long-term aim, they can become unfocused and contribute to a demotivating malaise among their staff.
To demonstrate this, we tested our knowledge against Scholtes’ Ten Questions about our organization’s purpose and direction as well as our own individual purpose and direction, scoring our confidence in our answers as a gauge of our understanding. Subsequently, we looked at two ways constancy of purpose can be destroyed through Scholtes’ anecdotes of managerial solipsism and setting so many priorities as to have none - surely isolated occurrences that have never been replicated since The Leader’s Handbook was published twenty-six years ago…
Reflection Questions
Consider this last new leadership competency from your current perspective; how would you answer the following questions?
How would you define and communicate the vision for your organization to your team? What are the critical components? (Bear in mind Scholtes’ Ten Questions).
How have your past decisions and initiatives aligned with your stated vision? Did they further or detract from it? Why?
In what ways have you had a personal connection to your organization’s stated vision? Is there a story to tell? What impact did it have on you?
What are the most significant challenges to maintain focus on your constancy of purpose? How did you overcome them?
What strategies do you use to help your team(s) understand how to stay aligned with your constancy of purpose? How successful have you been? What improvements have you made?
Has your organization’s constancy of purpose changed over time? What precipitated this? To what effect?
How would you measure the success of your organization’s constancy of purpose? What would be early indications of failure?
How does constancy of purpose translate into organizational culture? Provide examples from your day-to-day observations.
In what ways does your organization’s vision and purpose inspire you and your staff? How does leadership and management model this?
How will you refine or adapt your constancy of purpose to meet future challenges?
Additional Reading
Nov. 15/21 newsletter, The First Step
Sept. 20/21 newsletter, Constancy of Purpose
Oct. 8/21 newsletter, The Deadly Diseases