Leadership: Listening, Understanding and Disagreeing At The Same Time

Reading the contents and comments on Paul Dyson's recent blog about "the Whole Team" and eXtreme Business I was reminded of a piece of dialogue from the West Wing: Josh and Toby are walking down the street arguing, and the conversation goes something like,

• Josh: You're not listening to me
• Toby: I am listening
• Josh: But you're not understanding me
• Toby: I do understand
• Josh: But you're disagreeing with me
• Toby: I am doing all three: I am listening, understanding and disagreeing simultaneously

Conversations of this form often seem to crop up in the context of running a business in an eXtreme manner and dealing with the "whole team". I think there is often a misunderstanding of the practice of "whole team" , confusing participation with democracy. If you think "whole team" means 'democracy' you're ignoring the factors of responsibility and accountability.

Running any business or team requires both leadership and management skills. Leadership provides the vision of the direction and formulates the goals for the group, which they can then work on together (so becoming a team). Management defines the constraints (like budgets and resources, choice of technologies, etc.) and ensures that there is consistency and achievement of the agreed goals over time. Both of these require a lot of listening and understanding of what the group has to say. However, the decision about what the direction, goals and constraints for the group must be made by those responsible and accountable for the outcome of the group's efforts. This is often where the disagreeing comes in, usually because participants think their opinions (which have been solicited by good leadership practice) have been ignored rather than appreciating there are often a huge number of factors they have not taken into account that outweigh their position. To me, this is one of the big differences between a team and a group - in a team, members understand that the have been listened to and appreciated even when the decisions seem to be against their thinking, moreover, they continue with the same amount of effort and don't throw down their teddy-bear.

My attitude towards leadership and management is strongly influenced by John Kotter's early work. Part of his position was that it is hard to find individuals who have both the leadership and management skill-sets sufficiently developed and balanced to provide that mythical "charismatic business leader" whose presence guarantees success. From my experience I think this is true - individuals are usually more one or the other - however, I think the Kotter model overlooks the practice of having a pair, or a trio, running a team or business.

Having a true pair working together means that one can be undertaking leadership practices while the other balances with management practices - often these role swap backwards and forwards between the two on the scale of minutes, hours and days. With businesses or large groups, I think three is a better "responsible team" size - this provides the extra mediator practices sometimes required to balance the conflicts that can occur between leadership and management goals. I have worked with this model both at Connextra and e2x and found it to be a most effective model. Though I don't ever say it explicitly, I also try to influence any teams I have created or work with to form this same triumvirate structure for the responsible group. Needless to say, with three it is often the case that one is listening, one is disagreeing and the other is trying to understand how to resolve and synthesise the situation (allusions of classical thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis). However, I find it works better than other forms of organization.