Soft Skills for Hard People: Embracing Modern Leadership
[Author’s Note: This talk is adapted from a keynote I’ve given a few times in 2019. It covers a lot of what I emphasize in my leadership coaching sessions. If you would like me to speak at your organization, please reach out about available dates and speaking fees.]
Our story begins just after dusk, with the light of the setting sun slowly fading over the windswept plains of the Eurasian Steppe. It’s about 10,000 years ago, and a small band of Neolithic nomads have pitched camp after following the herds, on whose meat they sustain themselves, across the mountains and plains of the continent for several weeks.
Now, after a grueling day’s walk, everyone has had their fill of the evening meal, and they gather around the cooking fire to listen with rapt attention to the stories of an elder. Her hair is gray, and her form is frail from her advanced years. But her eyes are bright and youthful, her mind as sharp as the onyx blades the hunters use to skin and butcher their game. As the crowd gathers closer to the warmth of the fire, they hush so that all may hear the elder’s tales of heroes past, who faced the many trials presented by gods and spirits of the sky, the forest, the rivers, and the mountains.
Believing Is Seeing
As the citizens of this early human culture listen carefully, reality for them is literally shaped in their minds by the stories of the elder. For a people whose world is quite a bit smaller than our own, whose boundaries represent real dangers of bodily harm from natural forces, strict adherence to the wisdom of the elder is ignored at the cost of life itself.
The stories then form a kind of situational awareness that ossifies in the social mind as the very stuff of reality. The rules of behavior, whether around hunting, gathering, mating, births, and deaths, are all circumscribed by the boundaries illustrated in parables imparted from elders.
For them, there is no objective reality beyond the belief systems that all share about life, death, morality and custom that hold this unit together for their mutual survival. The very concept of an individual is in fact alien to them, for how could any individual survive without the mutual cooperation of all, and indeed the benevolent protection, or at least the benign indifference, of those gods and spirits with whom only the elder has the power to communicate or transact.
Our Stories Matter
Words hold extraordinary power over the human psyche, and always have. The great Joseph Campbell, prolific scholar and progenitor of a concept from literature you’d probably recognize as The Hero’s Journey, considered all mythology from every culture on earth to be telling us basically the same universal story.
In The Hero With A Thousand Faces, released in 1949, Campbell charts a grand narrative through a seemingly endless archive of story and myth from human cultures spanning the globe and all of written and oral history. The story varies in an infinite number of ways, but retains a certain set of patterns that persist across all civilizations:
- The world starting out normal is threatened by some outside force.
- A hero must answer the call to adventure by leaving that world behind, whether temporarily or permanently, and venturing into the unknown to face the threat.
- The hero then faces a series of trials through which they themselves undergo fundamental changes.
- At the nadir of the hero’s darkest fears, a choice must be made, often a kind of sacrifice, bargain, or personal transformation, that finally enables the hero to overcome the adversary. The adversary may be a villain, nature, or him/herself.
- The hero then may return to the home of their birth, but is now irrevocably changed by the experience. In some cases, the hero dies, only further emphasizing their separation from the normal home world of their past.
The Hero as Psyche
Still deeper, Campbell connects the persistent thread of the hero’s journey with the psychological transformation of an individual pursuing enlightenment. Mythology becomes a metaphor for the human experience. The hero is the ego personified, the journey a representation of the transformation from secular experience to the ego dissolution of divine transcendence. The home village stands in for the known world, while the forbidding boundaries of the dark forest or the raging seas represent the unknown depths of our own mind — our subconscious. Through the trials, the hero is tested in their ability to dive into this unknown world, face their fears, and overcome them.
The elder holding court at the edge of the campfire is a shaman, a priest, or guide to the spiritual realm beyond the known world. These figures, keepers of the secret knowledge beyond the mundane realities of daily life, have themselves experienced the hero’s journey, and returned to weave the lessons gained from experience into the cultural fabric of the village. The lessons and parables of how to live are derived from these stories whereby the villagers follow the teachings of the elder without themselves having made the journey. Lacking a true point of personal reference, they must accept the lessons of the elder (a hero from a previous story) on blind faith.
Process As Dogma
All too often then, a schism develops between those who have experienced first-hand the ego-shattering power of the journey beyond, and those who only hear the tales secondhand and must do their best to interpret the lessons into practical daily life. For so powerful is the transcendent experience for the individual, words and pictures fail to fully transcribe the full experience of transcendence.
For centuries, cultures have been structured around the stories of the heroes of their time, each one braving the journey of self-annihilation and rebirth, only to return home and impart tales of their experience to an audience that cannot possibly relate to them. Lacking any experiential point of reference, the uninitiated satisfy themselves with prescriptive interpretations of the story, desperately trying to honor the spirit of the lessons learned outside the boundaries of normal experience, but without any real understanding of them.
Still further from the experience, others learn the transcribed experiences and through layers of retelling and reinterpretation, losing the original meaning of transcendence inside a mountain of procedures, rituals, and to-do lists. Eventually, all links to the original experience of the hero are severed, leaving only books and binders, protocols and rule sets, without any embedded cultural appreciation of their original meaning.
Innovation: A Hero’s Journey
Organizations are structured groups of people with their own culture, stories, rituals, and procedures. Changes within an organization are thus governed by this same process of a hero’s journey steadily eroded of its original significance through the imposition of stale and rigid practice.
All new practices and methodologies face this outcome unless vigilance is exercised in making sure the newly initiated experience their own hero’s journey, rather than merely aping the behaviors described in the rules and procedures that are handed down. That is why Agile transformations that are imposed from above (or indeed from outside) as a pre-baked process— rather than a set of principles that have to be taught, personally experienced, and adapted by the individuals and teams who will be implementing them in their work — tend overwhelmingly to fail the organizations who attempt them.
Inertia within organizations, the tendency to resist change, is very powerful. As has been written extensively elsewhere, the structure and behavior of modern organizations is overwhelmingly influenced by the 100-year-old dictates from Scientific Management by Frederick Winslow Taylor, typified in the commonplace separation of those who do (workers) from those who think and plan (managers), and the strict imposition of hierarchy in decision-making.
Even as ground-breaking luminaries like W Edwards Deming and Taiichi Ohno started chipping away at Taylor’s doctrine way back in the middle of the 20th century, such enlightened approaches such as “Respect People” and “Inspect and Adapt” have still failed to penetrate the upper reaches of most organizations. As such, even when “radical” approaches to product development such as Lean Startup or Agile or Design Thinking are introduced, they are paradoxically presented by fiat and command-and-control approaches, draining them of their creative and inspirational potential and too often turning would-be enthusiasts at the individual contributor level into resentful avoiders and resisters.
Dan Pink’s “Drive”, which introduced us to the importance of intrinsic motivation in knowledge work (and captured perfectly in his phrase: “autonomy, mastery, and purpose”), resonates strongly with Deming’s and Ohno’s assertions that the more autonomy you give workers to make their own decisions the better are the business outcomes. Stanley McChrystal’s “Team of Teams” and David Marquet’s “Turn the Ship Around” further reinforce the same concepts of driving authority down to where the information is.
These are widely read works. Drive alone has 4.4 stars and 1100 ratings on Amazon as of this writing, and 150k up-votes on Goodreads. So, somebody is obviously reading it. Why haven’t senior managers, it seems? Why are so many organizations still leading from Taylor’s top-down playbook?
There is something critical that we’re missing as change makers in organizations, and Joseph Campbell gave us at least one of the keys to understanding it. Modern neuroscience holds the other.
Stories, The Brain, and Changing Behavior
The human psyche is known to be organized in a way that makes behavior change difficult unless it occurs under specific circumstances. Starting from birth, we are able to learn new behaviors that serve a purpose for us, and discard those that don’t. We then automatically encode them into habits that we can then perform semi-consciously. This is a fantastically efficient way to develop new survival and social skills that no longer depend on minute-by-minute calculations and evaluation in the brain. Think about how you drive a car, just for one example.
This is true as well for social behaviors. We may learn manners from our parents because the social cost of being rude (or embarrassing our parents) is quickly discovered to be disadvantageous to us. Over time, we continue to adapt our social behaviors based on feedback we receive from our peers, first inside the home, but eventually in schools and workplaces.
The downside to this encoding process is that when behaviors cease to be useful to us or to our social group, the brain has a hard time getting rid of them. Anyone who has tried to break a bad habit or learn a new language in adulthood will readily recognize this challenge. There are lots of theories about learning and behavior change. But one thing they all seem to have in common is the importance of direct experimentation, practice, and gradual reinforcement. In other words, your own personal hero’s journey.
In fact, we are now learning that thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, and behaviors all exist in a kind of loop that reinforce one another. That means that you can enter the loop at one point in order to modify experiences at another point. So for example, in a workshop on depression at Kaiser Permanente, a worksheet explains that feelings of negativity can often be stopped cold more easily by changing behaviors rather than attempting to change the thoughts associated with the feelings (so taking a walk, for instance, rather than attempting to “snap out of it”, will usually make you feel less depressed more quickly).
Managers in modern organizations, and senior managers in particular, are walking around with a set of learned behaviors in their minds that are very entrenched. Some of these were learned from structured sources like classes, books, and other training. But most were picked up the same way that children learn from their parents — by watching others with more seniority, and copying what they do. The result of course is that management cultures are handed down through the ranks over the lifetime of an organization, much in the same way that behavior patterns are handed down through families.
With this concept in mind, we can now see how attempts to dictate behavior change at the organization level by issuing commands from the C-Suite are not likely to be accepted on the ground level. Instead, each individual in an organization, from the CEO to the intern, needs to personally experience the new process and gradually adapt their behavior to the process in a way that is custom-fit to their own working environment. Elements of the new process that violate social norms to which individuals are not only accustomed to, but actually dependent on for their feeling of social safety and security, are likely to be quickly discarded.
Write Your Own Story
The good news is that organization change is possible. But it is only possible through a set of individual transformations, starting at the executive level. This has been hard for me to accept. When I first learned of Agile, back in the mid-2000s, I was attracted to the very clear values of self-organizing teams and at least semi-autonomy that were clearly evident in Agile’s principles. However, I mistakenly assumed that organizations would thus be able to change only if they started from the bottom and worked their way up to the leadership.
In recent years, I have come to abandon that viewpoint. I still embrace the critical importance of autonomy, mastery, and purpose for those individuals and teams that are closest to the delivery of value to customers. But it has become clear to me that the personal transformation of leaders, the hero’s journey, is indispensable within any organization that seeks to transform itself for success in the future.
Be a better technology leader
Learn to apply these skills in the context of your organization. Check out the Startup Patterns master class on technology leadership. We cover topics like how to discover and pursue your purpose, effective communication, how to manage up to executives, and how to lead change in an organization using influence rather than authority.
