Student Global Leadership Conference 2021: Leading and Following in Uncertain Times, by Basil Read

Hello and welcome back to the FIE Student Global Leadership podcast series. Today’s podcast comes to us from Dr. Basil Read. Basil’s background includes a distinguished career in the US Navy, experience as a University Professor, and service as a Professor and Associate Dean for Leadership Development in a US government agency. Dr. Read combines practitioner and academic experience to provide realistic insights into leadership theory and practice. Without further ado, Dr. Basil Read.

 I hope you find his thoughts on leading and following in today’s challenging times inspiring. We’ll link to previous publications and presentations in our show notes if you’re interested in learning more. That’s all from us for today - tune in next time for the next episode in FIE’s Student Global Leadership Conference podcast series.

Dr. Basil Read - Troy University, Publications
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Transcript

Victor:

Hello and welcome back to the FIE Student Global Leadership podcast series. Today’s podcast comes to us from Dr. Basil Read. Basil’s background includes a distinguished career in the US Navy, experience as a University Professor, and service as a Professor and Associate Dean for Leadership Development in a US government agency. Dr. Read combines practitioner and academic experience to provide realistic insights into leadership theory and practice. Without further ado, Dr. Basil Read.

Basil Read:

Greetings. Welcome to this session on leading and following in uncertain times, through influence, collaboration and engagement. I'm Basil Reed, an adjunct professor and global leadership at Troy university in the United States. And today we're going to gain some purchase about what it means to lead and follow in the 21st century. How can we have a positive impact on our organisation, regardless of the position we find ourselves in? I want to start by taking a look at what we think about leadership. Many people have a tendency to think of leadership as something that belongs to the leader. However, the late Bosch Schmear, I think had better purchase on this. He thinks that leadership is an outcome. In other words, leadership is something that you experience. Now, if you think about it, we've all had good leadership experiences. And we've had leadership experiences that have left something to be desired. What caused that? It's the way that the leader and the follower or followers interacted, according to Shamir leadership is something that is co created or co produced by the leader and the follower coming together and inputting to each other. So when we think about leadership, we have to get rid of that concept that leadership belongs to the leader, leadership belongs to all of us, everyone that's involved in a particular situation is contributing to what the leadership is, what's its character and quality, what type of experience is it? Now, unfortunately, some of our understanding of leadership is based on our 20th century lens. In other words, that Industrial Age lens. And if you think back to the industrial age, it was all about hierarchy. It was all about command and control. Think about the assembly line, which is kind of the epitome of the industrial age, or the paramount example that people use when they think about the industrial age. Thinking about that assembly line, we can think about one of the earliest ones, the one invented by Henry Ford. And if you know anything about the automobile industry, Ford was one of the first to introduce an assembly line. And essentially what happened was the automobile chassis moved along to various points. And each point workers did something to the automobile before it moved on to the next station. So let's say that you are on this assembly line. And your job is to put on a door handle. So the chassis moves in front of you, you pick up your tools, you pick up the handle, and you attach it. And you're going to repeat that over and over and over again. How much thought and effort goes into attaching a door handle? Well over time very little. All that's necessary is some muscle memory. And where's the leader? Well, in this case, the leader might be the shop foreman, who's standing over your shoulder making sure that you're putting each one of those handles on the doors correctly. There is no thought there's no need for you to bring any knowledge or any real skill to the organisation. That's completely different from where we are now in the 21st century. We're in the knowledge age, where our employer expects us to bring our talent, our skill, our thought process, our innovation, our ideas into the organisation to help it become more agile, to help it become better to help it compete on the global stage against similar organisations. Now there's another way to look at this idea of the industrial age versus the knowledge age. And this comes from Ira Chela, who is one of the leading people thinking about followership nowadays. And Ira says that in the old paradigm, the leader was the centre. The leader was kind of the son, if you will, and the follower orbited around the leader. So everything was about the leader, the follower was simply an order taker doing his or her job. But in the new reality, we've changed that the centre now is the purpose, what is the purpose or the mission of the organisation? What is it that we're trying to accomplish? What are we trying to enact? What are we trying to bring forward? In this new reality, the leader and the follower are working in tandem, and they're orbiting that purpose. They're working together to accomplish a mission. What is this being this means potentially the follower is just as important as the leader. And I want to show you a video to demonstrate exactly that concept. If you've learned a lot about leadership and making a movement, then let's watch a movement happen start to finish in under three minutes and dissect some lessons. First, of course, a leader needs the guts to stand alone and look ridiculous. But what he's doing is so simple, it's almost instructional. This is key, you must be easy to follow. Now here comes the first follower with a crucial role. He publicly shows everyone else how to follow. Notice how the leader embraces him as an equal. So it's not about the leader anymore. It's about them, plural. Notice how he's calling to his friends to join in. It takes guts to be a first follower, you stand out and you brave ridicule yourself. Being a first follower is an underappreciated form of leadership. The first follower transforms a lone nut into a leader. If the leader is the Flint, the first follower is the spark that really makes the fire. Now here's the second follower, this is a turning point, it's proof the first has done well. Now it's not a lone nut, and it's not two nuts. Three is a crowd and the crowd is news. A movement must be public, make sure outsiders see more than just the leader. Everyone needs to see the followers because new followers emulate followers, not the leader. Now here come two more people then three more immediately. Now we've got momentum. This is the tipping point. And now we have a movement. As more people jump in, it's no longer risky. If they were on the fence before, there's no reason not to join in now, they won't stand out, they won't be ridiculed. And they will be part of the in crowd if they hurry. And over the next minute, you'll see the rest who prefer to stay part of the crowd, because eventually they get ridiculed for not joining. And ladies and gentlemen, that is how a movement is made. So let's recap what we've learned. If you are a version of the shirtless dancing guy, all alone. Remember the importance of nurturing your first few followers as equals. making everything clearly about the movement. Not you. Be public, be easy to follow. But the biggest lesson here, did you catch it? Leadership is over glorified. Yes, it started with the shirtless guy and he'll get all the credit. But you saw what really happened. It was the first follower that transformed a lone nut into a leader. There's no movement without the first follower. See, we're told that we all need to be leaders, but that would be really ineffective. The best way to make a movement if you really care is to courageously follow and show others how to follow. When you find a lone nut doing something great, have the guts to be the first person to stand up and join in. You'll remember that I said that leadership is co produced. And here's a perfect example of where we see the co production happening. The movement started with the leader dancing alone, but who made him successful, it was the first follower and who turned into a movement? It was the other followers who joined in. I think that Seavers makes a very important remark in in narrating this video. And that's that it's the followers who actually make the leader successful. James McGregor burns when he articulated his transformational leadership theory, talked a lot about how the leader transforms the followers. But what has been lost from his early work is that he also believed that as the leader transformed the follower, the follower was simultaneously transforming the leader. So it's this idea of mutual transformation that gives us this idea that we are co creators when we're in our follower role, we're helping to co create, what leadership looks like, what it feels like, how we interact with it, and how we see it. Now I want to go and look at the three types of followers that we just saw. There's some work that was done a few years ago by Carsten, and her colleagues. And what they discovered was that there are really three types of followers. They're called passive, active and proactive. The passive followers are what we think of as those Industrial Age workers. They're order takers, they're waiting to be told what to do, they do it. And then they wait again until they're told to do something else. They take no initiative, they put new, no extra effort into the work. They're simply there as a resource. You saw some of these passive followers. Even at the end of the video, there were still some people sitting on the ground, because they were waiting to be told what to do. The second type of follower is the act of follower, the act of follower will actively engage with their opinions, their ideas, and they'll bring new innovation into the workplace. But they have to be asked to join in. Think about the video again, we saw that first follower, what did he do? First, he emulated the leader learning what it was that he was supposed to be doing. And then he invited other members of the crowd to join in. Those other members of the crowd are the active followers. As soon as they have that invitation, they join in, and they are active contributors into the purpose. Finally, we have the proactive followers. And we can think of this as the first follower in the video we just saw, the proactive follower doesn't wait to be invited, and certainly doesn't wait until be told, they automatically see where they can bring their talent, their skill to bear on the situation. And they are firmly entrenched in what the purpose is. And they want to make the purpose better. We know who the proactive follower was, in this case, it was the first follower that we saw in the video. This is where we all want to be in our organisations, we don't want to wait to be told, we don't want to ask to be joined in, we want to actively engage. And we want to do that in a proactive manner. So when we think about this, and being proactive, what we're really thinking about is being in total partnership with the leader, we want to show the leader high support when the leaders actions and behaviours are contributing to that purpose contributing to that mission. However, when the leaders actions or behaviours are detracting from the purpose or the mission, if you will, then we want to challenge the leader, we want to suggest that there's a better way of doing things. We want to partner with them to make sure that they stay on the right track, that they're moving the mission or the purpose forward. And that they're also looking at the organisation of vision. That vision is the idea of not where the organisation currently is, but where the organisation aspires to be. So being a follower and being proactive, put you in that position of partnership, working together with the leader for the betterment of the purpose, and for looking at how we can take that vision and move it on to the next level. So let's go back to Shamir for a minute. Shamir says the character and quality of leadership is a direct outcome of leader follower interaction. So therefore, it must also be true that the character and quality of followership also results from leader follower interaction. What does that mean? It means that the better that we foster our relationship with the leader, the more that we partner with the leader, the better the outcomes are going to be for us on an individual level and for our teammates as well. Now, how do we get there? How do we move forward? Well, I like this quote that comes from Adlai Stevenson. Stevenson was an American politician in the 20th century in in 1952. He was running President of the United States, and Stephen said, who leads us is not as important as what leads us. Steve is talking about the purpose. It should be the purpose that leads us not the leader. That should be the purpose. So what I want you to do is I want you to think about what is the purpose of the organisation you're currently in? Be it an education, organisation, or work? Or even in your relationships with your friends and colleagues? What's your purpose? What is the trying to be mutually accomplished? Take a moment and jot something down. Alright, now that you've talked about some sort of organisational purpose, be it where you work where you go to school, or perhaps an organisation that you belong to. The next question is, what is your personal purpose? Where do you want to go and grow? What is your purpose? What gives you meaning in life? Take a moment and think about that and jot something down. All right, so the final thing I'd like you to do here is look at what you wrote down for the organisational purpose, and then look at your personal purpose. How do these align? How do they correspond to each other? How did they work to get you to that point where you want to be. But one of the ways we get to where we want to be is through self leadership. Through self leadership, we can find that we can take a lead role, regardless of our position in the organisation. A lead role means that we have influence in the outcome, it does not necessarily mean that we are the leader, we don't need to have that formal title, or be in that formal position in order to take a lead role and make a difference from right where we are. And we can do this through a very cool way. And I refer to it as being cool because the acronym for it is ice. The ice factor is the idea of leading from where you are through influence collaboration and engagement, leading from where you are through influence, collaboration and engagement. Studies have shown the people who have influence, collaboration, engagement succeed in the knowledge age, they are seen as great contributors to their organisation, and they are certainly purpose focused. So let's look at each one of these and think about how we can gain influence, collaborate effectively, and better engage around the purpose. So let's start with gaining influence. I want you to take about 15 seconds and think about what you do right now. To gain influence within an organisation. Again, be that where you work and organisation that you belong to, or even gaining influence in your studies. Okay, I hope that you came up with something had a chance to write it down. Let's take a look at some factors that go into influence and see if what you wrote down shows up on the screen. First, in order to gain influence, we have to be knowledgeable. It's not enough to only know our own job or our own role within the organisation. It's important that we understand the overall purpose of the organisation that we know what the organisation is about, that we understand the factors that impact on the organisation Then we know where the organisation fits into the greater scheme of society, and how our organisation interacts with similar organisations and interacts with other things, who include people, governments, and anything else that might impact the organisation. How knowledgeable are we? Now, if we're going to be knowledgeable, it's not important that we know everything. What's really important is that we know where to find things. And one of the ways we can do this is by expanding our networks. Let's say that you work in a large organisation, and the organisation has 10 divisions, and each division has three to five departments, it's probably going to be difficult to know everything about everything within each one of those departments. But if you know someone who is knowledgeable within each of those departments, who is willing to share with you, because you're willing to share with them, you've now created a network, you've now become a valuable resource, to your leader and to your team. Because you know where to go to get knowledge where to go to find things out how to get things accomplished all through your network. The next thing we want to do is be dependable. Being dependable simply means doing what we say we're going to do, it's more than just about showing up and being on time, it's really about being someone who can be counted on. It's someone who the leader or Remember, the team can give a project to and turn away and not worry about it, because they know that that person will see it through to completion. So being dependable is another way in which we can gain influence. To go along with being dependable, we want to do a little bit of the unexpected. And that is we want to go beyond our own role. We constantly want to seek out ways for us to grow for our own personal growth, but also to help out the leader and the team. So we want to look for those opportunities that are out there. And we want to be among the first to volunteer. Finally, we want to support the leader in the team. If we're going to gain influence, though, we have to be seen as being trustworthy and reliable. And part of being trustworthy and reliable is showing support for our co workers and the boss. So that's what I've have there for gaining influence. I hope that that intersected was something that you wrote down. Let's turn and look at collaborating effectively. Again, I'd like you to take just a moment to think about what you do now how do you collaborate? And how effective are you at collaborating and jot something down? All right, let's take a look at collaborating effectively. And see again, if what you wrote down matches up with something here on the screen. First, to collaborate effectively, we have to hold ourselves accountable, not just for our own work, but for the work of the team. By holding ourselves accountable for the work of the team or for higher up in the organisation, perhaps our division or maybe the organisation itself, we have better purchase. We are looking at beyond ourselves and beyond our own work. And we're seeing how, by being accountable, we are more likely to interject and we're more likely to work towards influencing a positive outcome. So being accountable is extremely important, if we're going to collaborate effectively. The second thing that we can do is we can anticipate the needs of others. We again don't want to be in that Industrial Age period where we're waiting to be told what to do. If we've got our part of the job done. Let's look around and see what others need in order to finish their part of the job. Let's be proactive. We also want to actively listen. And actively listening means that we want to listen to understand. This means slowing down our own thought processes and not worrying about getting our own ideas in at the moment, what we want to do instead is we want to listen carefully, we want to understand the context in which someone else is speaking, if necessary, we want to repeat back or paraphrase to make sure that we are truly understanding what they have to say. We also want to make sure that we're bringing all of our skills and all of our talent to the organisation, and particularly to our team. Again, just because we've been assigned a particular role, doesn't mean that we can't step in and help others out by bringing forth a talent or skill that perhaps is uncalled for in the parameters of our own job. Finally, we need to be willing to do more. It's not enough to be sitting there and saying, well, I got all my work done. It's time for me to go home, we need to look at the team. What is the team need from us? Is there a way for us to contribute? Is there a way for us to do a bit more for the organisation to move that purpose forward? So that's some thoughts on collaborating effectively. Let's look at engagement. Again, I'd like you to take just a moment or two, and think about how you engage in the workplace and jot something down. Okay, I hope that you've had a chance to think of something. And let's see how that lines up with these thoughts about engaging. First, we want to value other people's opinions and ideas. If we go in and we say, Oh, that's never going to work. We've just closed off our colleague. If instead, we were to say that's an interesting idea, and have you considered, or perhaps you might say something like, could we build on that we don't want to shut people down, we want to engage with people. And we can enhance that engagement by showing that we value what they bring to the organisation. We also want to be inclusive and ensure everyone has a voice. I'm sure you've been in a situation where you've had a mix of extroverts and introverts, and it seems like the extroverts take up all the time and all the airspace, we want to make sure that we are bringing in those introverts, we want to hear from everyone in the room. And that may mean that we have to take the initiative, we may say, you know, these are all great ideas, but we haven't heard from James yet, or we haven't heard from Elizabeth. Let's hear what their opinions are, what their ideas are, and bringing them into the conversation. We also want to promote the contributions of others. We want to thank people for a job well done. And we want to make sure that they get the recognition that they deserve. Doing this creates a we mentality. It's not me here just doing the job. It's the team and I working together. We are here because we all have value. And we all bring value to the purpose or to that mission. And finally, we want to orient ourselves on the mission and focus on the vision. Remember, the mission is what we do in the day to day. And the vision is that altruistic future that we want to try to take the organisation towards. We want to move ourselves along that way. So you should be constantly asking yourself, how am I fulfilling the mission? And what am I doing to contribute to the vision to contribute to that aspirational place where we would like to see the organisation go. So we've talked now about gaining influence collaborating effectively, and enhancing engagement. What I'd like you to do is I'd like you to take 30 seconds. And I'd like you to think about these three things influence, collaboration, and engagement. And I want you to write down what you will do or do differently in the next two weeks. To gain influence, collaborate effectively and enhance engagement. All right, let's uh, let's continue on. If you couldn't come up with something that's okay. Think about this tonight, or next week, and think about how you can up your game and influence collaboration and engagement. So in closing, we have moved from the industrial age to the knowledge age. We now know that we want to be proactive, and we want to partner with the leader to achieve the best possible outcome. And that means that we highly support the leader and we highly support the members of our team, but we're willing to challenge them when their actions or behaviours detract from us reaching the overarching goals of our purpose. Remember that you can lead from any role within the organisation to influence collaboration and engagement. Thank you for your attention, and I'll be happy to take any questions you may have.

 Victor:

Thanks very much for that Dr. Read. I hope you found his thoughts on leading and following in today’s challenging times inspiring. We’ll link to previous publications and presentations in our show notes if you’re interested in learning more. That’s all from us for today - tune in next time for the next episode in FIE’s Student Global Leadership Conference podcast series.