The Paradox of Time Management
The Paradox of Delegation
The Paradox of Motivation
The European Leadership Crisis
Why Should Managers Learn Coaching Skills?
The Paradox of Time Management
The paradox of time management, however, is that in most cases, the issue doesn’t at all concern time. As a matter of fact, everyone has no more and no less than 24 hours a day. Whether you are the CEO of a multinational corporation or the local manager of a small hyperactive team, you can either feel that one day is much too short to get anything done, or you can arrange to have a lot of free time for rest and recreation or strategic thinking (Note that both of these are often one and the same).
Consider two common criteria for most people who have time management issues: they usually do not delegate much and they are very demanding perfectionists. In effect, those who want to keep a firm hold on too many details are also the ones who claim that their days are much too short to do it all. Indeed, managers who do not trust others enough to let go of their excessively demanding expectations are also the ones who have to come in very early, leave very late, and take work home on weekends. Executives who prefer to do everything themselves, those who feel that they best can do it right are invariably the ones who worry, stress, and develop ulcers.
Note that the process is self-confirming. If you do not trust anyone to do their job correctly and consequently over control your employees, you will only retain those who accept or need constant supervision. If you justify your existence by finding fault in your environment’s accomplishments, and then diligently follow up to repair their imperfections, then they will rapidly find ways to cater to your fundamental existential needs and supply you with enough to keep your days full and busy.
The paradox of time management is that it really concerns knowing your place and letting others take the full responsibility for occupying theirs. Being a manager or an executive does not consist in doing your employee’s job or in repairing their shortcomings. Management consists in clearly defining goals, allotting the necessary means, and then getting out of the way until it is time to evaluate results. To run an effective team, a manager just needs to manage, and each of their employee’s job is to deliver results. This observation immediately takes us to a first obvious conclusion: Time management issues are really people management issues. CEOs and executives who demonstrate poor time management actually do not know how to manage people. They do not know how to manage their employees, their purveyors, their clients nor their partners.
The paradox is that when managers demonstrate time management issues, it is because they are doing other people’s jobs in their place. In effect, being short on time at the end of the day is an indicator that you have not been in the right place or space. This would indicate that in management, time and space are one and the same issue, as Einstein has brilliantly demonstrated. The time-space continuum is indeed so constructed that if you are loosing time, then you may not be in your right place, so you may need to learn how to delegate.
The Paradox of Delegation
In the above definition of delegation, notice that the role of the organizational leader has not once been mentioned.
Case study: A CEO once asked a to meet a coach. He had a very common problem. As he was a very dynamic and controlling person, his executive team had strongly suggested that he get personal support to learn how to delegate. In their first meeting the coach reformulated the CEO’s motivation: _“So if I understand correctly, not only you have been totally responsible for everything in your organization, now, on top of that, you are also going to be responsible to start changing it, to develop a more delegating management culture.” The CEO was stunned, and stayed silent for a few minutes. Still stuck in the company’s frame of reference, he could hardly understand the coach comment.
What this CEO could not perceive is common within most leader-driven top-down organizational cultures. Indeed, when an organization has lived for years within the perspective that their leader is to be held responsible for everything, it follows that they also hold the firm belief that changing that order of things must also rest on the leader’s shoulders.
The first paradox in this common situation is that if leaders are to ensure that delegation does happen, they will continue to be held responsible for that change. If leaders are held responsible for delegation, then they are still responsible, and therefore not delegating at all. As a consequence, leaders cannot be given the responsibility, or take the responsibility to delegate to employees. Their employees must instead learn to take their responsibilities and provoke delegation.
This common paradox reveals another one, however. As in the case of the above organization, when employees agree to ask their leader to delegate more, they are actually making their leader responsible for their lack of initiatives. In effect, when employees ask for delegation from their leaders, they are actually giving their leaders the responsibility for their passive behavior. Consequently, and paradoxically, the best way to delegate upwards, to leaders, is to ask them to delegate downwards, to their employees. Delegation is like freedom, independence or liberty. If you do not want to be free, ask someone else for it. By asking someone for independence, one actually relinquishes his or her liberty.
The paradox of delegation is of the utmost importance in centralized environments and controlling organizations that have a model or heritage of strong autocratic leadership. The pervasive paradigm shared by all the members of these social systems is that leaders are responsible for practically all aspects of everyone’s personal and professional lives.
The underlying comfortable and complementary passive attitude is that nobody can change this state of affairs.
Common employees and citizens cannot change their leaders to have them become more participative. Leaders also cannot change anything when everyone expects them to be solely responsible for a major cultural change. Now does that sound familiar?
Case study: The strategic solution developed to accompany the above-cited CEO was to implement a collective system-oriented cultural change process, within his immediate executive team. The objective of this change process was to modify the quality of interfaces between the team members, including the CEO. This allowed for a rapid increase of each individual’s ability to take responsibilities and inform their local environment of all personal initiatives. This type of change within the executive team of an organization is the first step towards implementing the cultural transformation of the larger system this team collectively leads.
When the executives of a system collectively take intelligent initiatives, assume responsibilities, and empower themselves to act appropriately, they model new behavior for the rest of their organization. Then everyone begins to spontaneously analyze needs, make decisions, implement actions and inform their larger professional environment of their progress towards designated goals. This is real delegation.
The Paradox of Motivation
In the course of the last fifty years, questions on how to motivate personnel have been asked by all levels of most of the world’s organizations. Surprisingly, solutions offered to attempt to solve this fundamental issue have not brought about any measurable change in the course of time. Today, the same questions are still offered to coaches and consultants by the same organizations, and the proposed solutions still seem to be as ineffective as ever.
A large number of organizations are indeed facing an undeniable fact. Top executives and middle management don’t know what to do to raise the level of employee motivation and the commitment that comes with it. Consequently, they are externalizing the issue to experts, consultants, trainers and coaches in the hope that these independent purveyors may come up with new magical solutions.
There are many words that are related to motivation. Some such as “motor” and “automobile” pertain to the mechanical environment. If we perceive personnel as a mere work force, or as engines, then the question is indeed what fuel should we provide them so they will run correctly to destination.
As a consequence of this perspective, training is almost systematically delivered in expensive or exotic destinations, allegedly chosen to develop employee motivation. Compensation and benefit packages and other indirect perks are also said to motivate and retain the best employees and managers. Coaches are called in to help empower professionally disappointed and distressed individuals, and of course, re-motivate them. Huge sums of money are yearly spent to improve the physical appearance of the workplace in an attempt to improve morale, and motivation. But we are not getting better results. We may be completely missing the point.
- Caution: When a problem remains present over decades, we are not solving it. We are simply adapting ourselves to live with it. It is also quite obvious that when we cannot find an answer to a particular problem, we may have not defined correctly.
Indeed, as far as the employee motivation issue, we may have been searching for solutions within the wrong perimeter.
We suggest that there may a flaw in our perspective and that we should reconsider the underlying frame of reference in which the question is put. Indeed, if we ask how to motivate personnel, we are assuming that fundamentally, their nature is to be unmotivated, or that they may run out of motivation, like a car runs out of gasoline. That assumption may just be entirely false. What if the equation was upside down? What if employees were naturally intrinsically motivated and committed, and were just not able to express their interest, in an impoverished work environment?
- Instead of motivating personnel, organizations just need to stop restraining them until these feel they have no right to move.
- In the place of trying to retain employees, the real question may be “how can we stop alienating our personnel until they wish to leave?”
- Instead of looking for ways to empower personnel, the real issue may just be “how can we learn to support their useful initiatives?”
Can we stop saying that it is the natural state of personnel to be unmotivated, uncommitted, and want to leave for another company at a pin’s drop? This position is self-confirming as people generally fit into the behaviors and job definitions that their management suggests.
We can take an honest look at the way organizations are run and question how to transform management culture in order to let naturally empowered employees deploy their inherent motivation and begin to grow, develop and flourish. This position is cheaper and much more effective. It is also self-confirming. Positive organization cultures know how to naturally attract the best talents and retain them on the long run. They just let them naturally develop within an empowering learning environment. This often happens with less need for perks, training trips and expensive compensation packages.
Etymologically, the word “motivation” is also related to “motion” or “movement”, to “motive” which is a need or desire that causes one to act, and to “emotion” that means to stir up. This indicates that motivation, movement and emotion are very closely related. Consequently emotions are kin to needs and desires, and are fundamental to motivation and movement, at least as far as human beings are concerned. In organizations, the principal factor for individual motivation is the emotional quality of operational interfaces within an employee’s immediate environment, in other words within their immediate team and with their immediate leader. To have motivated employees, it is simply necessary to develop performing teams and effective managers.
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The European Leadership Crisis
Is the current leadership crisis anouncing a shift in paradigm
The recent European search for a Union president has surely been very revealing. The heads of states of the EU have faced the fact that they have finally agreed to a constitution that stipulates a new position is to be filled: that of Union president. They also reached a consensus that this president should definitely not be a charismatic leader who would want to push significant agendas. Indeed, the preferred search was out for a low profile and humble person who would not make waves. The Belgian Herman Van Rompuy has thus become the first European Union president
To be sure, each country would have been flattered to have one of their nationals named as the first European president. Nationalisms die very hard. But each country was just as sure that it did not want another country’s national to assume that position and certainly not if the person was to demonstrate real leadership. We can conclude that the European Union clearly didn’t want a real leader to be named into its presidency. For once we all agreed.
This situation has provoked an avalanche of sarcastic analysis from political observers, numerous humoristic observations from journalists, and just as many cynical comments the world over. The subject is also what is motivating this text. In a question form, the object of this article is “what can the recent process to designate the first EU president reveal about the real expectations Europeans have from their leadership?
Leadership crisis
Also note that the expression of leadership crisis is rather common in everyday conversations. It is generally used to give an easy explanation to the troubled social, political and economic times we are living. Poor leadership can indeed provide us with a quick and simple explanation for our day-to-day difficulties and low hopes for the near future.
When we hear this expression, however, we can wonder to what level of reality the words “leadership crisis” apply and how they should be understood.
- Do we understand that there is a crisis concerning our leaders, who they are, what they decide, how they behave?
- Or do we understand that we are going through a crisis that questions our frame of reference about the very concept of leadership?
Concerning the first dimension, numerous media analysts, trainers, consultants and other specialists are extensively covering the field. All the world leaders are daily being scrutinized, analyzed, categorized and judged. Probably more than ever in past history, all our leader’s speeches, behaviors, beliefs and habits are constantly dissected, criticized and publicized.
But what if our whole frame of reference about the concept of leadership had changed? What if our leaders were chosen to assume a position and play a role that was no longer perceived as useful in our current society? What if we were electing people into positions and offices that no longer correspond to a real social and political need? What if we were all slowly and subtly evolving to the point of no longer needing leaders?
Today, we may just be naming leaders into offices because the offices are there. But our current world may be working in such a way that real leaders are no longer necessary or useful.
An international perspective
Taking that hypothesis to an international level, let us consider the following: Twenty years ago, a few countries played key leadership roles on the international scene. The US and the Soviet Union were polarized in a competitive east-west relationship that structured world politics. In Europe, the same could be said, with two partners, Germany and France on one side facing the UK on the other. The three pretended to lead Europe’s destiny and define its construction.
These times were easy. We knew who were our leaders, we had role models and clearly defined enemies, we could choose sides and follow footsteps. Worldwide, most countries were aligned with their chosen leaders while a few others were choosing to remain non-aligned. Paradoxically, some countries were trying to be the leaders of the non-aligned. Those were the good old days.
Interestingly, we could also perceive the same type of dynamics in numerous sub-systems worldwide. Within countries, political parties, public organizations, private companies and teams, leaders fought, won or lost and did what they could to lead. All others watched, followed, or chose to remain unaligned. Everyone knew whom to consider as a potential leader, whom to follow and whom to ignore.
Today, things are much more confusing. Either there are no more true leaders or many more candidates have the potential to hold the position. But if at any given time, everyone is a potential leader, then no one can really lead. Internationally, today’s leading countries are not so clearly positioned. Some of our old champions such as the US and Russia may still have residual power, but numerous new players are rapidly accessing to equal or stronger positions.
Times have also changed on the European scene. Try as they may, the past partnerships between key players can no longer structure today’s progress. Germany and France have their own separate agendas. Separately or together, they no longer have the credibility to play a leading role. Next to them, a host of newer members are actively reconfiguring continental equilibrium. Although these new players cannot be leaders, they can keep any other country from legitimately holding the position. Hence the current situation, with a non-choice of a non-president.
It seems that worldwide, the very possibility of a country holding a strong leadership role is no longer a desirable option. Although many countries would love to assume the role of leader and are still endlessly maneuvering to appear to be leading nations, it is just not happening. The real change in our society of nations is that the position of leadership can no longer be held by any one country, nor by any one coalition.
Some statistics from Western Europe
Let us approach the issue from the angle of training in Europe. Consider a few figures from the Observatoire Cegos who has interviewed 2355 employees and 485 H.R.s and training managers from organizations that have more than 500 employees in Western Europe. This study took place in France, Germany, the UK and Spain over a 3-year period from 2005 to 2008. According to this study, 72% of the French employees had received professional training, against 52% of the British, 29% of the Germans and 24% of the Spanish.
For some, the difference from one country to another may be quite a surprise. The fact that the British are not first in Europe may be an eye opener for many who have a Anglo-Saxon bias and approach to training and coaching. Indeed, one could imagine that if a country trained their personnel 40% more than another, that country's training tradition may be rather developed, and worth attention. If French organizations train their employees so much more than English, German and Spanish companies, what is can their experience teach others? What are their results? How do French programs and ways of delivering training compare to other countries? What is similar and what do they do differently? Just out of interest, what are some differences in training content and strategies that specifically apply to Latin cultures? What companies extensively call on French consultants and trainers, and what results do they achieve?
Other numbers: According to the study quoted above, a particularity of the French training market is that only 6% of the personnel had followed leadership training programs, against an average of 15% for the other countries in Western Europe, and 25% in the UK. This is a huge difference. France implements 40% more training than the UK, but the UK is sending four times more personnel to leadership training than France. In fact, 50% of UK training focus is on leadership, and less than 10% in France.
There can be many interpretations to explain this difference. One concerns the obvious US cultural influence on the British market. The US and UK focus on leadership may not be so trendy in France. But then, the UK also sends many more employees to leadership training than any other European country in the study. Are there so many people that need leadership training there? There could also be more people that need to be flattered by being sent to a leadership development program. Or is there more of a need to develop leaders, whereas France and the rest of Europe already has them? Of course, there are many other questions to be asked.
Excess focus on leadership
Another explanation to these statistics concerns a possible difference in the continental European Community culture which is just outside the field of Anglo Saxon perception Continental Europeans may be more concerned with communication, negotiation, peer collaboration, cooperation, mediation, conflict resolution, etc. rather than with leadership. The European issue may be how to work together between peers, how to give and take, get along, etc. These are very different issues from just focusing on leadership, having a vison statement, a mission statement, and the lot. We should also remember that leaders absolutely need followers, and that these may need to know how to work together, in a less individualist way. Now who is training them?
To be sure, so much focus on the individual leader may just not be so European or continental. Focus on teamwork may be much more so. Incidentally, note that publishers in France also avoid to have the word leadership on book titles. The word and concept just don't sell. On the other hand, leadership books really sell in Anglo-Saxon contexts.
Acknowledging this state of affairs can help us understand the emergence of a new political paradigm on the international scene, and can provide a few insights as to the evolution of leadership in our society as a whole. Several questions emerge as to the direction in which we are going or growing.
- Can this current international and European state of affairs be an advance indicator of the disappearance of the very concept of leadership in all levels of society?
- If the leadership is no longer a structuring role internationally, within nations, organizations and teams, what will replace it, or what has already started to replace it?
The Continental European Model
As an emerging international network of nations, the European Union countries have been struggling with the validation of a formal constitution. Although numerous countries have had difficulty ratifying this constitution for very different reasons, its future effect is very clear. This new European constitution will permanently serve to ensure that no one, two, three or more member countries will ever have the possibility of exerting a permanent leadership role in the future union.
There will be no future legitimacy in having specific nations assume statutory leadership positions. From now on, France, Germany, England, the Benelux and other big “founding members” will have to consider every other newer member country as an equal partner. That may be hard to accept for a lot of the older countries, but that is the new reality. Lets face it: Europe wants to be a network, a number of project-oriented teams, a loosely-woven confederation of partners, anything but a formal system headed by a strong leader.
In effect, the present European constitution has ratified the largest formal international leaderless network system ever experimented.
Indeed, it is obvious that the current European Union doesn’t need any one state or pair of countries to act as leaders. The Union doesn’t need any one country president or leader to try to lead the Union, much the contrary. The message to each state leader is stay out of European leadership. If you want to act as a leader, stay within your country, (and see if you can succeed there).
Within the Union, different leadership positions are conceived within such a quick rotational system that we are ensuring that officials will not have the time to push significant personal agendas. To have a chance of being elected for most European posts, candidates better be humble, transparent, diplomatic, consensual and patient.
Consequences
If this state of affairs concerning leadership in Europe is a perceptible truth, then we need to start considering some of the consequences. Should such a change towards leaderless systems be taking place on the European level, there will surely be numerous effects on all other levels of European reality. We may already be in a transitional process that questions the very necessity of strong, visible and charismatic leadership on all levels of our society and in all our social and economic systems.
The need for leadership in Countries, companies, administrations, teams, communities, cities and provinces may in fact be in the process of being completely questioned. This may explain why all over Europe, people perceive a leadership crisis. We are simultaneously looking for direction through visible leadership and ready to do away with the very need for leaders as a structuring role to achieve collective ambitions.
Enter leaderless networks
Unfortunately, for numerous people, the very concept of working or living in a leaderless collective system is still impossible to imagine. For those people, working or living within an efficient and effective peer network or federation without any one member taking over a permanent leadership role is practically inconceivable. Leaderless systems are the equivalent to chaos.
In some organizations, however, temporary network teams or project teams have been designed to achieve a given goal and then dissolve into the background. These temporary flat and reactive teams are often difficult to understand by traditionalists, but they work. The reporting systems of network teams are often complex and their decision-making circuits difficult to explain, but they achieve results. A close look at network teams most often reveals that they do not have strong leaders. In fact, that is what makes them effective. In general, humble and diplomatic temporary pilots represent many of these project-oriented systems.
Interestingly, network systems and project teams often do manage to achieve objectives in a way that more classical systems cannot. Network systems have the reputation of being much swifter, lighter, more effective and more collaborative than most formal systems in leadership-ridden organizations. These networks are generally designed to work across the very boundaries erected by territorial and competitive leaders. Project teams are flat systems that are built on the principle of goal-oriented cooperation and collaboration.
If leadership driven systems are on the wane, are flatter project-oriented systems on the rise? Is this the new paradigm that is slowly being created while we focus on annulling all our potential leaders’ capacity to lead? This may be a slow and natural evolutionary process that is so close to our eyes that we do not perceive it.
Coaching as a model for non-leadership
Interestingly, in the past fifteen years, coaching as a profession has spread the world over, proposing a new model for relationships in the consulting arena. Much in the same way as some project management pilots, coaches question, reformulate, accompany and facilitate dialogue to allow the emergence of new solutions. They do not push their solutions or agendas on their clients, they do not take the lead on client ambitions or goals, nor do they drive for client results. Avoiding all knowledge-based expertise, power-based or contractual leadership, coaching rests on the principle of sharing responsibility to progress in concert, within a respectful peer relationship.
Interestingly, the non-leader coaching posture and corresponding coaching communication tools interest numerous managers who are in search for a new paradigm to accompany teams and organizations to success. This new manager-coach is searching for ways to create learning environments that allow for all employees to take responsibilities and initiatives, grow and succeed together. This collaborative approach spills out and affects a new type of relationship between teams, with suppliers and clients, and with the larger environment. In Europe, with the gradual disappearance of the old leadership model, it seems that more community-building and collaborative attitudes, strategies and tools may be on the rise.
Why Should Managers Learn Coaching Skills?
The preliminary question is: What do managers really need? Do they need knowledge or do they need skills? Do they need a another fashionable diploma or do they need to change the way they manage people in their everyday context?
- If the answer is that managers need more kgeneral nowledge and theory to understand coaching and how it may apply to leadership, designing visions and goals, elaborating values, motivating people, etc. then practical training on coach skills is not very useful.
- If the answer is that managers need to develop more practical communication and relational know-how, they need to revisit and modify their day-to-day way of relating with their employees, with their clients and with their business partners, then acquiring coaching skills and behaviors can definitely be appropriate.
Coach training workshops are paper-and-slides-free behavioral learning environments providing each participant an active context to acquire very practical pragmatic skills. In these workshops, participants learn by doing and practicing rather than by absorbing knowledge about practice.
indeed, workshops differ from seminars. The privileged approach is not focused on theory nor on concepts but on physically or behaviorally acquiring skills by repeatedly experimenting competencies until they become a second nature, naturally built-in communication reflexes. To use a sports metaphor, seminars teach students theory about muscle and concepts on ideal styles. Workshops offers active workout environments to build muscle and develop a personal style.
Outcomes
Consequently, after following a workshop, the measurable result for managers is that they change their day-to-day behaviors within their immediate professional environments if not in all their relationships. They very practically implement what they have already repeatedly practiced. Within coaching workshops,
- Managers develop the motivation to use coaching skills because they personally experiment achieving very positive results with these skills.
- Managers become competent in the use of coaching skills because they practice them time and again with a masterful trainer and coach in a well-designed learning environment.
In coaching workshops, however, managers also learn much more than behavioral skills. They change more than skin deep. There is a paradoxical observation about learning new behaviors and acquiring very practical skills: when managers really change how they communicate, they gradually change who they are.
People often think that learning different behaviors is just a superficial process. It just takes time. If you want to improve your service in tennis, for example, just practice serving one thousand times. You will almost automatically achieve your goal and improve your service. Indeed, practice makes perfect. In coaching, managers can also learn new behaviors in the same way. Learning how to listen and then ask powerful questions just takes practice.
Note however that in general, learning by sheer repetition is not perceived as very validating, motivating nor committing for participants. This type of behavioral learning is looked down upon as if it were too mechanical and not noble enough for elevated minds. Consequently, numerous managers come to skills training with the idea that they are just acquiring tools, in a superficial way but that they will not fundamentally change.
One becomes what one does
Observation in training situations seems to prove otherwise. To become a pofessional pianist, one needs to practice hours, days, months and years. Acquiring a discipline in any domain requires minute practice, regular practice and then more practice. Only through practice does one really achieve mastery. In coach training workshops, as managers espouse behavioral changes, they also gradually change their perspectives on management and that in turn may modify their more fundamental nature. They may even change physically. Note that tennis players gradually develop one arm to become much stronger than the other.
So any regularly practiced management activity is different and each develops very different qualities. Just like in sports, different activities modify personal equilibrium, distribution of strength, capacity for speed, personal resilience, heart rhythms, team skills, precision in details, individual concentration, systemic strategy, will power, etc. The same happens in coach training environments such as workshops. All the behavioral skills that are acquired by the managers help them acquire more than personal competencies. These skills gradually change how they are as managers and sometimes how they are perceived in their leadership position. More deeply, these changes may affect how they perceive themselves and their own roles as leaders.
Consequently, by practicing new skills in workshops, managers learn to use them. Behaving differently changes the way they relate with others. Changing how managers relate modifies how they are perceived. This in turn changes their perceptions of their work environment and of who their employees are. If this process is tailored towards accompanying personal growth in the work environment by the development of how we manage people, then we become much better managers.
In coaching learning environments and workshops, managers do not only learn how to do coaching or management. They also learn how to become profound coaches and effective managers with real people skills.
To conclude, coach training environments for managers are designed to have them acquire powerful people-coaching skills. These are communication competencies that can be used within a large number of other professions that deal with people such as in sales, recruiting, counseling, training, etc. Acquiring coaching skills for professionals in any of these fields not only helps them succeed better in their profession, it also helps them develop to become better people.