“I talk to people across the country about smart organizations and organizational metanoia and the feedback is always very positive. If this type of organization is so popular, why don't people create smart organizations? I think the answer is in leadership. People don't really understand the kind of commitment these organizations require. " Bill O'Brien.
What are the fundamental roles of leadership in team coaching?
The functions of leadership in team coaching are to create the conditions for the people who compose it to expand their ability to continually clarify and maintain their vision.
The traditional perspective of leadership, especially in the West, is rooted in an asymmetric and individualistic vision. It is based on assumptions about people's powerlessness, their lack of personal vision, their ineptitude for change, and often their lack of loyalty. He believes that only leaders can remedy these deficiencies.
As these myths prevail, organizations reinforce their short-term focus and charismatic leaders. They do not take into account systemic forces or collective learning. They settle for short-term solutions that can be detrimental in the long run.
In team coaching with a systemic perspective, leadership functions are more subtle and important. They are about design, service and coaching.
Leaders are responsible for encouraging people to continually expand their personal mastery, their ability to understand complexity, clarify their shared long-term vision, bring out their mental models, and learn collectively.
This new perspective is essential. Smart organizations will only be a good idea until leaders make the decision to build them. Adopting this creative attitude is the first act of leadership. Inspire the shared vision of the team. Without it, team coaching and all the tools will serve to solve problems. Only with this attitude can something truly new and sustainable be created.
The competition of the leading designer
The leader I interviewed for the Story of Purpose, which I published in my book "Coaching with a Systemic Perspective, precisely in the module" The new functions of leadership for organizational learning, "commented to me while we ate that he had identified a structure of limits of growth in a multinational division.
The limiting condition was the division's ability to assimilate new managers: as the number of managers in the division increases, the diversity of management styles will increase. They can erode the vision and operational values that currently work very well.
This leader, instead of waiting for conflicts to arise to deal with them, has taken action. He designed a selection and self-evaluation process that will help new managers understand the vision and current values to see if they are compatible with their style. He spent a lot of time sharing this design and learning with the managers. The result has been that the limits of growth have disappeared and it has been transformed into a growth process with compensating feedback.
From the perspective of "leader as hero, problem solver" this would not be leadership. There was no crisis, not even problems to solve! Of course, the hero leader does not normally know either, that the problems of incoherence between vision and values never arise. In the case of our leader they were not resolved either. They dissolved. This is the mark of the valid design.
The essential function of the leader is to design the learning processes.
The processes by which the team can address critical situations and the people who make it up continuously learn
This is a new task for most experienced managers.
Many have promoted and been successful because of their ability to make decisions and solve problems, not because of jointly designing the future of the team or helping them learn.
The Servant Leader Competency
The role of the leader assumes a deep perception of purpose behind his personal vision. What we have called History of purpose. It is a pattern for the future that defines meaning in your personal aspirations and hopes for the organization.
The role of the leader is to develop a unique relationship of his personal vision with this story of purpose. Then, the leader becomes a servant of his vision.
With the interview I conducted with the leader of the Purpose Story, which I have cited above, I experienced the same experience as Senge's three that he cites in his "Fifth Discipline", that although they all operated in very different organizations, they all had a common purpose:
The evolution of his organization was part of something bigger.
I confirmed what Senge says in relation to traditional managers and also many contemporaries: “they were not leaders of the same race, precisely because they did not see a larger history”. For these leaders, visions are so significant that they are the most powerful vehicle to drive them forward.
In learning teams, leaders may initially have their own vision. But soon they begin to learn to listen to the visions of others and understand that their personal vision is part of something larger. Something that does not diminish her own vision, but deepens it. And what produces it the most is the will to serve this vision.
Service to the vision changes the relationship between the leader and the vision. The vision ceases to be a belonging to become a vocation.
As George Bernard Shaw expressed it very well in his dedication of Man and Superman:
“This is the true joy of life, being used for a purpose that you yourself recognize as powerful…. To be a force of nature instead of a small, feverish and selfish bunch of afflictions and grudges complaining that the world is not dedicated to making him happy.
One of the paradoxes of leadership in team coaching is that it is collective and, at the same time, individual.
Leadership responsibilities are distributed among all the people in the organization but they only produce valid results if they are the result of individual choice.
Choice is different than desire. The option is active. Desire is passive. Desiring almost always represents what we don't have. It is a state of deficiency. Choosing is a state of sufficiency.
We choose what really matters to us. Everything that is important in our life is the result of choices we make.
Only through choice does an individual become the servant of a vision.
Only through the option do you learn. The teams that learn can only be made up of people who put their vital spirit in the choices that guide this spirit.
The leader coach's competence
Another role of the leader is to encourage learning and help team members to see reality accurately and develop empowering systems understanding. It is a key function, every day more.
The leader coach is someone who helps people learn how to achieve their vision.
It is someone who takes responsibility for the antidote to one of the most common flaws of most organizations:
- Lack of shared vision and, as a consequence, routine inertia. General reactivity to current reality is at the opposite pole of that of visionary leaders who have lost commitment to the truth.
It is easy for us to remember a leader destroyed by his vision. They have surely lost the ability to see current reality. They may try to avoid uncertainty by pretending that everything is fine. They become fanatics and cannot understand learning.
The leader-coachs are people with a natural leadership generated by the development of conceptual and communication skills. A leadership product of the effort to reflect on personal values, of the alignment of personal behavior with these values to learn to listen, appreciate others and respect their ideas. If there is not this personal effort, leadership becomes an inconsistent style.
The leader coach, put more simply: is a person who learns.
The coach leader comes to see his fundamental work with simplicity. Set your goals according to your Purpose Story and your values. His firm commitment to the truth brightens the gap between reality and vision. He generates creative tension in himself and in the entire organization.
They energize your team. This is its basic function.
People begin to see aspects of reality as things that can be changed.
They begin to create a state of serene perception rooted in that all aspects of current reality, actions, processes, patterns of change and even systemic structures can depend on our influence due to creative tension. This change of focus, this metanoia, is expressed very well by the Hebrew philosopher Martín Buber in the phrase: “The new leader is the one who is alert to what emerges from himself, seeking a direction to be in the world; but it is not alert to seek support in it, but to bring it to reality as it wishes.
