Please provide a response to the discussion post below:
When leaders/managers Model the Way by jumping in to do the work along side the followers, I am inspired to contribute even more to a project or challenge. It is extremely demoralizing to have to undertake a large project completely on your own, when it is the work of many people that is needed to bring it to fruition/success. Leaders modeling the way not only supports the actual work but also provides validation of the project/idea, as someone from the “top” is devoting their time to it.
I once had to set up an activity for 1,000 people on my own and it was the most disheartening experience. It was also a potential recipe for disaster had I not recognized the situation early enough (the afternoon/evening before the event), as I never would have been able to pull it off day of. I did it, but it was exhausting and demoralizing, as it felt like this high-profile event/activity was only being supported by me. Yet it was high-profile and expected to deliver, so failure was not an option. Working that way however is not sustainable. The issue here was a lack of shared commitment between two teams.
And while Inspiring a Shared Vision is similar to/reinforcing of Model the Way as it is critical to knowing that my efforts are an integral part of achieving a greater goal/objective that is valued by the company, the one of the five that I found most personally enlightening was Challenge the Process. Before reading the description, I felt that challenging the process had a somewhat negative connotation. After reading the description, I realized that challenging does not need to be confrontational; rather it can be seeking to improve through experimenting, innovating, and taking risks – and in the process generating small wins and learning from experience/ failure (Kouzes & Posner, 2017).
I’ve applied this learning to a project I am currently working on, where it would have been easy to use an existing manual process. I instead positively challenged the process and worked with our analytics team to set up an efficient automated platform for an online volunteer activity. It was certainly risky in terms of creating something new and debuting it in a short time frame, and it also required trust in my partners to achieve something greater than I could have created on my own. Nerve wracking at times, but it worked, providing the company with a new tool, and making me glad I was brave enough to improve upon the good enough status quo. I put in the same amount of effort to create something new and better that I would have spent fulfilling the project under the existing manual process. In that way I was leading and innovating the process, not just competently completing the task.
The one practice that supports efforts to Challenge the Process is Enabling Others to Act. In the example above, I was given license to act upon my idea and was trusted to make it happen. My manager’s operating principle is to Enable Others to Act, although until I read this chapter I would not have known to describe it as such. She is changing the culture of our team and department from one that is siloed to one that is collaborative across functions, and the results have been to actualize our projects in a much quicker fashion, higher level of functionality, and better quality. The specific behavior that she is engaged in to achieve this is fostering relationships both within our team and across the company.
References
Kouzes, J. & Posner, B. (2017). The Leadership Challenge. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
