Mastering Context:
Leadership Must-Have's

Actions can only be understood within contexts, or frameworks. Great leaders look at ideas, plans, and decisions within a number of different contexts. This is the adaptability that might lead one to say, for example, that a particular course of action could be profitable in the short-term but disastrous over the long haul. Understanding essential organizational perspectives informs and orients leaders and helps them make good decisions. To increase your effectiveness, use all the following lenses as contexts for the Honoring, Disrupting and Aligning actions you take:

• Long-Term View: What's the 50-year perspective?
• Unifying Purpose: What is our organization's market discipline and greatness? Is it being honored and leveraged here?
• Zoom Lens: What needs to be taken from the balcony to the dance floor and vice versa?
• Non-Linear, Adaptive View: What design will allow the community to discover solutions from within? What is working and how can we build on that?

Long-Term View: What's the 50-year perspective?
Mediocre leaders sacrifice the long term for the short term, a trend we see increasingly in the fast times we live in. Often a short-term fix will set up a bad habit in an organization, and the pattern sets the organization up to take a big hit down the road. A long-term view is not about planning for 50 years ahead; it is about not selling the future for short-term gains. A long-term view helps counter the firefighting tendency of many organizations. With this view, you are less caught up in the emergencies of the moment and more able to see what's important in the longer run. Using this lens, you look at the future impact of the decisions you are making today.

Unifying Purpose: What is our organization's market discipline and greatness? Is it being honored and leveraged here?
Never has there been a greater need for flexible, responsive learning organizations. Today's leaders need the ability to keep tying in new tactics, strategies and directions to the constant purpose of the organization. Many leaders struggle to align the entire organization without checking to see whether all the parts are pulling in the same direction. It's not unusual for the various divisions and departments to understand their purpose in local and differing ways. The sales and marketing group may be directing all their efforts at achieving world-class customer intimacy; the research and development department may aspire to world-class product innovation; while the production group is aiming for top quality at the lowest prices. In their book, The Discipline of Market Leaders, Treacy and Wiersema describe the focusing power of committing to one area of marketing excellence, either product innovation or customer intimacy or operational excellence.iii

Jim Collins describes unifying purpose, and why it is needed, in Good to Great. His Hedgehog Concept provides an excellent frame for defining and clarifying organizational purpose.

When leaders don't look through the lens of a unifying purpose, it's easy for them to fall into the "doom loop." In this downward spiral, disappointing results are met with a strong reaction, but not with a good understanding of what happened. A new direction, program, leader, event, fad or acquisition is brought in to save the day. Without continuity or momentum or critical mass, the new whatever disappoints. And then there's another wave of panic and a new silver bullet. When leaders step into the role of Aligning within the context of Unifying Purpose, however, something better than doom and gloom results. These leaders create something like the Flywheel Effect, also described in Good to Great.iv The leader takes steps that are consistent with the unifying idea, accumulates visible results, and communicates the connection between the unifying idea, the steps taken, and the results obtained. People then line up behind the unifying purpose, energized by the results and movement. With this infusion of movement, the flywheel builds up momentum, which drives more steps that are in line with the unifying idea, and on and on.v

Zoom Lens: What needs to be taken from the balcony to the dance floor and vice versa?
In his book, Leadership without Easy Answers, Ronald Heifetz uses a theatre metaphor to describe another essential perspective. Neither the balcony nor the dance floor gives a comprehensive view. Leadership requires bringing the view from the balcony down to the dance floor, and the view from the dance floor up to the balcony. If leaders get stuck in the view from 30,000 feet up, they will miss out on a critical close-up perspective that is also needed. When the view is all lofty, the leader may decide on misinformed strategies and interventions that lead to a hostile "us vs. them" culture. If leaders are always caught up in the day-to-day workings, on the other hand, they lose the big picture and will often sacrifice global good for a local objective. Leaders must use both the wide-angle lens and the telephoto lens to bridge the gap between the front-line action and window-office decisions.

Non-Linear, Adaptive View: What design will allow the community to discover solutions from within? What is working and how can we build on that?
Leaders must understand their organizations as living systems. Chaos Theory has much to teach us about how our business organizations behave and how leaders can be most effective in working with these patterns. In Surfing the Edge of Chaos, Pascale, Millemann and Gioja write, "We hear companies recite the mantra, 'people are our most important asset,' but that is not how these 'assets' are regarded in a crunch. Without the conceptual underpinnings of living systems, the language is empty. Traditional accounting principles provide no theoretical basis for quantifying the economic value of distributed intelligence…Designing for emergence is very different from engineering for convergence."vi

Taking the adaptive view means understanding that:

• In human organizations as in nature, equilibrium is not a sign of health but a precursor of death.
• Innovation usually takes place near the edge of chaos.
• Distributed intelligence in the nodes of a system must be activated through the right blend of structure and freedom, and
• Once mobilized, living entities can only be disturbed, not precisely directed.

The living system view is a much needed component of a leader's set of perspectives. It helps counteract the tendency to think a lot of things are in our control. It reassures us that the painful and unsettling turmoil we so often encounter is natural, and that it is necessary for innovation and growth. It tells us that the knowledge of how to solve problems already exists in our organizations. It affirms to us that, as Honoring, Disruptive and Aligning leaders, our real work is to tap that knowledge and power.

1. All definitions are from: http://encarta.msn.com/dictionary Encarta (R) World English Dictionary [North American Edition] © & 2003 Microsoft Corporation.
2. "Leadership That Gets Results," Daniel Goleman. Harvard Business Review, March-April 2000Stephen R. Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), p. 289.
3. Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema, The Discipline of Market Leaders: Choose Your Customers, Narrow Your Focus, Dominate Your Market (Perseus Publishing, 1997).
4. Collins, Chapter 5.
5. Ibid, Chapter 8.
6. Richard T. Pascale, Mark Millemann, and Linda Gioja, Surfing the Edge of Chaos: The Laws of Nature and The New Laws of Business (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2000), p.199.