A633.8.3.RB_SchreterPaul

Often times the answers are already within a person, which just needs to be unlocked. This is why we may go to a friend during our troubles or a trusted confidant, as the act of talking it through helps unlock passageways that may not have otherwise been obvious to us. This is why coaches provide value because talking with them helps reveal paths that may not have otherwise been noticed.

Obolensky mentions that the GROW technique is a “coaching questioning technique designed to enable the person being coached to find a way through a problem. It assumes a level of knowledge by the person answering the questions and is very much a ‘pull’ technique.” (Obolensky, 2010) What this means is that as a coach we would need to ask open-ended questions that aren’t suggestive. The non-suggestive questions are key, as it allows them to have ownership over the solution. Having ownership allows for a greater commitment.

An article in the Harvard Management Update states that “coaching can have a positive impact on performance, but it is not a short-term process. Coaching prospects should be people you think can be even greater assets to the organization than they already are.” (von Hoffman, 1999) What this means is that coaching is vital to both leadership and overall strategy when the coaching prospect is someone of high organizational importance. In essence, when the expected long-term return on investment is far greater than the actual cost of a coach. Perhaps this is why executive coaching and consulting can be considered such lucrative businesses.

My organization, the United States Air Force, already has internal coaching/mentorship at all levels. In our Professional Development Guide, it states the following:

“10.20. Assignment of Mentors:

10.20.1. The immediate supervisor or rater is the primary mentor (coach, counselor, guide, role model) for each of his or her Airmen. This designation in no way restricts the subordinate‘s desire to seek additional counseling and professional development advice from other sources or mentors. Supervisors and commanders must make themselves available to Airmen who seek career guidance and counsel.

10.20.2. Key to the mentoring process is direct involvement by the commander and supervisor. Commanders and supervisors must continually challenge their Airmen to improve. They must provide clear performance feedback and guidance in setting realistic near-, mid-, and long-term professional and personal development goals.” (PDG, 2013)

What this means is that from the very beginning we’re trained to become coaches for our subordinates and those that we work with. Even officers have their own coaches when it comes to the Chiefs that are assigned to them and the officers appointed over them. What this means is that coaching is valuable for any organization that plans to keep and maintain their people. With most enlistment contracts in the military lasting for at least six years, it would behoove the military to continue with its coaching mentality.

References

Obolensky, N. (2010). Complex Adaptive Leadership. London, UK: Gower/Ashgate.

Professional Development Guide (Vols. AFPAM36-2241). (2013). Department of the Air Force.

von Hoffman, C. (1999). Coaching: The ten killer myths. Harvard Management Update , 4.

A632.7.4.RB_SchreterPaul

In my current line of work we create custom test equipment for the use by other maintainers. What we do directly affects other stakeholders by reducing maintenance times and improving quality of troubleshooting. Within my team, for the first time ever are we all collaborating on the same project to produce something amazing. However with collaboration comes the occasional conflict.

While we have been able to handle conflicts internally, after this week I am becoming more and more a strong believer that we need to get other stakeholders involved. I’ve always had the mindset of what would the customer want, but I’ve never actually involved them just yet. A part of this week’s blog assignment is to identify some ways stakeholder involvement can help make us make better decisions:

1)   What does the customer want? Right now we’re assuming we know what the customer wants without actually talking with them. Considering we work in the same building, we really aught to.

2)   They can provide insight into something we don’t know. None of us have actually done what our customers are doing; we only know it in theory and concepts. By talking with them, perhaps they can point something out that we are blinded too.

3)   Are we heading in the right direction? Even if we know what they want, are we doing it right? Are we taking the correct path with the process?

4)   Do our bosses think were doing the right thing? Its not just about creating products. What we really need to consider is are we developing products that create the most bang for the buck?

5)   Neutral party for conflicts. During internal conflicts, an outside stakeholder can provide neutral conflict mediation.

Again, this is something that we STILL have to do, as everything is internal right now. Our bosses did say they wanted us all to work on this project together, but that was about the full extent of their input. There isn’t anything yet to reflect back on, as this is an ongoing progress.

A633.7.3.RB_SchreterPaul

After reading chapter 10, I’ve quickly realized the type of leadership style that I regularly refer to. Furthermore, I’ve been able to reflect on the last six week and noticed a couple of small tidbits that I will likely take with me with my future leadership goals. The three things I’ll be reflecting on are the leadership style I naturally fall to, how to get followers to change, and finally a reflection on this chapter and content learned in a previous course.

Taking the quiz, my answers regularly fell under strategy 3: involve. The involve strategy is used “either when the leader does not know or chooses to hold back to allow others to discover the solution.” (Obolensky, 2010, p. 172) The biggest aspect to this is that it assumes there are no major time requirements (for example an emergency). Another aspect is that it’s great for educational purposes when trying to develop a follower. But as the quote mentions, this is a strategy often used when the leader doesn’t know the answer. For most of the questions, I didn’t know the right answer. If a subordinate is having problems, I’ll often come to them and ask what they think they could do to solve the problem. If no solution can be found is when I might chime in with my own ideas.

Chapter 10 builds off of chapter 9, which is about the development and shaping of a follower. This chapter I found fascinating because a basic and simple framework was given that shows the roadmap from a level 1 follower to level 5. When trying to build and maintain an upward style of leadership, it’s important to have followers with high skill and high will. To slowly get them to where they need to be, one must follow the chart shown in Figure 9.4. (Obolensky, 2010, p. 161) This chart is something that I can easily follow in my primary duty as a fighter aircraft avionics maintainer. When I’m working with a subordinate, I can slowly shape them to become self-sufficient work machine without having to seek my approval.

Finally, a quick reflection on chapter 10 as a whole: what I learned was that there are many different leadership styles and that we need to be able to balance our style with the situation that we’re in. This requires being incredibly mindful of our surroundings, how we behave, and how others react. This is a fine balance between everything and I noticed that this falls very well in line with Boyatzis and McKee’s book, Resonant Leadership. (Boyatzis & McKee, 2005) To simply what resonant leadership is, “resonant leaders are in tune with those around them. This results in people working in sync with each other, in tune with each other’s thoughts and emotions. Leaders who can create resonance are people who either intuitively understand or have worked hard to develop emotional intelligence, namely, the competencies of self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. They act with mental clarity, not simply following a whim or an impulse.” (Boyatzis & McKee, 2005) In order to fully grasp chapter 10 to its full advantage, we need to be in tune with what’s around us. Hence why I find these two topics so closely related and synergistic.

Discussed were the main leadership style that I use, a reflection on my thoughts with chapter 9, and finally my connection of chapter 10 with another book written by Boyatzis and McKee. This has been an interesting six weeks and incredibly insightful. Everything that I’ve learned in this class has been incredibly worthwhile and I will regularly be finding myself finding quotes from our materials.

References

Boyatzis, R., & McKee, A. (2005). Resonant Leadership. Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing.

Obolensky, N. (2010). Complex Adaptive Leadership. London, UK: Gower/Ashgate.

A632.6.3.RB_SchreterPaul

I will have to admit this week assignments were ridiculously difficult for me because of the fact that I can’t recall too many conflicts that I have had! One conflict that probably took longer than it needed was maybe only a few weeks ago with the rest of my team. An incident occurred where the section that we belong to used an unapproved program of ours to help troubleshoot their components. I’m of the mindset that as long as they complete their due diligence, that it’s fine if they want to take that risk. Members of my team however, believe they shouldn’t have any access until we are 100% done with the program. Metaphorically speaking this is equivalent to wanting to release ALPHA or BETA versions of software so that the people in the field can still use something, even though it may be buggy.

The ten principles of new thinking involve the following:

Believing in abundance

Creating partnership

Being creative

Fostering sustainable collaboration

Becoming open

Forming long-term collaborations

Relying on feelings and intuition

Disclosing information and feelings

Learning throughout the resolution process

Becoming ResponseAble

I was of the mindset that perhaps we should try to come up with an agreement where everyone can win. I would like the section to still have access to our software because it would help them, my other team members don’t think they should have any access. We spent nearly all day discussing this and trying to come up with a solution when we could have been focusing on finishing the program and getting the product done sooner.

Eventually, I caved in because it’s not an issue I felt as passionate about and the other members were trying to do the right thing. It’s interesting because Steward Levine talks about becoming the mediator for a number of other people and employing these 10 principles of new thinking. By having everyone work within the same framework, it’s much easier to collaborate with one another. However, unless everyone works within the same framework, collaboration does become slightly more difficult. That being said, I was able to use a few take away such as becoming open and disclosing all information and feelings. This made it easier to try to come up with an agreement in principle. Overall I learned that during a conflict or negotiation if everyone is open with one another it’s far easier to come up with something that everyone could be happy with.

Works Cited

Levine, S. (2009). Getting to resolution: Turning conflict into resolution. Williston: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

A633.6.5.RB_SchreterPaul

Reflecting on the vicious circle above, I personally don’t feel like this is something that’s drastically affecting my organization. We have a very small team of three people with administrative leadership falling outside of this team. If someone doesn’t know how to do something or does something poorly, we bring up to one another that there are better/smarter ways of handling the situation. We then use this as an opportunity to learn.

However I can see how this vicious circle can make someone more insecure about his or her own personal abilities. For example, let's say a new guy comes into the office and this individual is tasked to fix a particular problem on an aircraft. If a “leader” jumps in and takes a more hands-on approach without turning it into a learning opportunity, for example the “leader” just does the job for them, it will lower the followers confidence and create a much more ineffective work dynamic. 

The best way I believe to modify this circle is to simply change how the leader makes the hands on approach. By turning it into a positive learning experience for the individual, the individual should in theory come out feeling more confident, not less confident, in their abilities. But at the same time, not to be overly critical about everything as to make them second-guess themselves with even the smallest of details. It takes time for people to process information, so too much too fast may be overwhelming and cause more damage than good.

References

Obolensky, N. (2010). Complex Adaptive Leadership. London, UK: Gower/Ashgate.

A632.5.5.RB_SchreterPaul

The problem that I have with this week’s assignment is that we have to come up with our own protected values, where we would not sacrifice anything to give up those values. (Hoch & Kunreuther, 2005) With everything that I ever picked up in life, the one thing that I learned is that there is no black or white, only shades of grey. Maybe 10, maybe 20, maybe 50, I don’t know; but certainly not black or white.

Michael Sandel brings up an interesting question on what’s the right thing to do? (Sandel, 2009) In his first question he asked an audience to imagine they were in a trolley car going down a track with five workers at the end of it. The brakes don’t work and inaction will cause the five workers to get run over and die. Just before the five workers is a sidetrack and the trolley steering does work, but on the end of the sidetrack is one worker. How many people will turn the trolley to run over the one worker as opposed to the five?

In most cases the majority of people will choose to turn the trolley to kill one person as opposed to five; it’s the lesser of two evils. In which case, people will take on a hard principle (even myself) that if presented with two evils we must always choose the lesser one. However, if instead there was no sidetrack and the trolley only had one way to go, but we were on a bridge over the track with a fat man leaning over the edge, would we push the fat man off the bridge? As in, inaction will cause a trolley to run over five workers and action (murder) will kill one person but save five.

As far as outcomes nothing has changed: either one person will die or five. But the second scenario puts the individual closer to the action. Most people will have trouble pushing the fat man off the bridge to save five. So while it’s easy to say we can have protected values, those values really aren’t protected if we can make some sacrifices but not others.

Kevin Dutton introduces a similar scenario but instead of a trolley, the individual is in a room with baby Hitler. (Dutton, 2013) A protected value could be thou shalt not kill. But knowing that baby Hitler will one day kill millions and millions of people, is it justified to kill a baby to save the lives of others?

My point is that I don’t think I can have a protected value because I’m sure I can always imagine a scenario where I would be willing to give up that protected value.

References

Dutton, K. (2013). Would You Kill Baby Hitler? (And Other Psychopathic Musings, with Kevin Dutton). Retrieved 2015, from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDVvYzEdp_s

Hoch, S. J., & Kunreuther, H. C. (2005). Wharton on making decisions. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons Inc.

Sandel, M. (2009). Justice: What's The Right Thing To Do? Episode 01 "THE MORAL SIDE OF MURDER". Retrieved 2015, from TED: http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_sandel_what_s_the_right_thing_to_do

A633.5.3.RB_SchreterPaul

After watching the exercise being done I quickly realize that sometimes it’s better to just let things run their course without trying to meddle with it too much. (Obolensky, Who needs leaders?, 2008) To describe the situation in the video the following rules were given to those involved:

Pick two individuals to be your reference points

Move until you are of equal distance to your reference points

Take the shortest path possible

The more people that are involved with this exercise the more and more complex the exercise becomes. Everyone who’s never participated in the exercise almost always assumes the process will go on forever, but as it turns out, it settles and enters a stable state very quickly. Everyone had the authority and ability to get done what he or she needed to get done without any sort of bureaucratic control. Put the same scenario into the hands of one leader and nothing would get done.

What this means to me is that in a highly complex environment, we need to be able to trust our employees to handle any situation and to make the calls needed to get the job done. Two of the key features that Obolensky points out in his book that allow for this exercise to complete with such success are (Obolensky, Complex Adaptive Leadership, 2010):

Skill/Will of Participants: As leaders we need to ensure that those under us have the proper training and skill to accomplish a task. If they don’t have the knowledge, they won’t have the will to proceed.

Discretion and Freedom of Action: Assuming they have the skill, then we as leaders need to be able to trust them to accomplish what needs to get done. Having to wait for permission will halt the organization in its tracks.

There are other important factors as well that include:

Clear individual objective

Simple rules

Clear boundaries

Continuous feedback

Purpose

Tolerance for ambiguity/uncertainty

All of these play a role in building an organic organization over a machine. I’m glad I’ve seen this exercise because it puts things into perspective for me. Trust is huge and sometimes we just need to have that faith in others to end up on a more prosperous path.

References

Obolensky, N. (2010). Complex Adaptive Leadership. London, UK: Gower/Ashgate.

Obolensky, N. (2008). Who needs leaders? Retrieved 2015, from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41QKeKQ2O3E