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It was a great pleasure last week to join Rohit Gautam on his Curiosulus Chronicles podcast, and the episode is now available on YouTube:

We were of course focused on the recent publication of Wholehearted, and Rohit was not the first to be intrigued by Chapter 3, Mutual Trust Building, and in particular, a section titled “Models of trust-building leadership”. This section covers:

The inverted pyramid, aka reverse hierachy, in which the CEO is still at the “pointy end” of the organisation, but that sits at the bottom. In this model, the job of the organisation and its leadership is to support those who serve the customer. More easily said than done!Servant Leadership, the title of Robert Greenleaf’s classic book. The metaphor doesn’t work for everyone, but I can’t fault Greenleaf’s starting point: leaders that fail to meet the needs and expectations of their staff will lose their legitimacy in that role. Seems kinda obvious now, but in the 1970s, still the era of the “job for life”, ahead of its time.Host Leadership, which I wish was the title of Mark McKergow and Helen Bailey’s Host: Six new roles of engagement for teams, organisations, communities, movements. This and the next one illustrate very well something I learned for myself as a senior manager: sometimes it’s not so much about your different competencies or the different stances you are capable of adopting, what matters is your ability to move quickly and fluently between them, even in the course of a single conversation.Clear Leadership, after Gervase Bushe ‘s book of the same name, speaks to a core theme of Wholehearted, your organisation’s capacity for communication and decision making, on which are founded your organisation’s adaptive capacity and thereby its resilience and its ability to innovate. On the topic of trust, how can you expect to be trusted if you can’t even trust yourself? That requires you to be in command of yourself. That doesn’t mean emotionlessness, it means listening to and acknowledging your feelings, and as appropriate, being transparent about them and about where you’re coming from. If several of my books emphasise curiosity, it may be skilful transparency (or “descriptiveness”) that earns you that right.Intent-based models, via Stephen Bungay , L. David Marquet , and Stan McChrystal , mission command (aka commander’s intent) and some fascinating developments thereof. It manifests itself as efficient communication with just the right balance between prescription and ambiguity that leaves room for others’ expertise, autonomy, and innovation, but that’s just the beginning.

I feel the need sometimes to reiterate my belief in leadership. Self-organisation doesn’t preclude it! Wholehearted could well be described as a leadership book! Organisations need people who are engaging on the right challenges, inviting others to participate, and celebrating their successes [1]. And at any given level of organisation, absent presence, availability, a good nose for what needs attending to next, and the drive to build a more trusting and trustworthy organisation, it becomes increasingly difficult for the operational and strategic aspects of the organisation to understand each other. Sooner or later, and for lack of context, bad decisions will be made. Alongside the issues of communication and decision-making capacity, that so-called “context challenge” is a fundamental organisational constraint and one to which leaders must allocate significant personal effort. Those models aren’t the whole story – it would be foolish to think that in something as complex as an organisation that there is ever only one story – but in what is a difficult task, they do help.

Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation hit Amazon last month. You can find both print and Kindle editions on amazon.co.uk, amazon.com, amazon.de and other Amazon sites around the world. The e-book is also available on LeanPub, Kobo, Apple Books, and Google Play Books.

[1] Engage, Invite, Celebrate: Leading “wholeheartedly” for innovation (July 2024)

Previously: Prescriptive vs descriptive