Session 2: Hypotheticals

Key Takeaways

[Music] the idea is to take some hypothetical situations that you've either seen in the movies read about or been in depending on your experience in the public sector ask you at tables to think of your best advice to the people in the situation in each hypothetical effective leadership in the public sector we are asserting requires different strategies behaviors and qualifications than effective leadership in the private sector the key difference is being able to facilitate consensus building decisions made by all not just by the leader they know how to provide Direction without taking control empowering others to make decisions and helping to resolve conflict among stakeholders and interest groups and we talked about doing those things as a form of service we alluded to but didn't get into much detail about facilitation RIS responsibilities both at the table where you're trying to work with a group and away from the table on behalf of the group before the group comes together there are things that the facilitative leader can do must do to make the chances of succeeding when they are together at the table increase at the table and away from the table we'll be using that phraseology the next several sessions and we talked about facilitative leaders who both encourage advocacy on the part of the people they're working with and inquiry on the part of participants and that's not easy to do some people find that their advocacy impedes their capacity to inquire enabling discussion of undiscussable issues you want to provide leadership in the public Arena and you're assisting a group there are things that they really need to talk about if they're going to reach any kind of informed agreement when a facilitative leaders seeks to bring a group into a conversation about things which for some of the people very uncomfortable how do they do it it's part of the facilitative service that they provide they have to know how to make the undiscussable discussable any hope of working through and resolving their disagreements hinges on moving all of the participants in a public dialogue from positions to interest not a guarantee that that's going to get you to agreement but if all people are doing is repeating their demands you're not going to get anywhere a facilitative leader seeks unanimity but settles for overwhelming agreement you don't vote you're not interested in what the majority wants and the reason if you say unanimity is the measure of the decision you invite black you have some actors in the group whose primary objective is to sabotage the group and they're happy with that in many quarters of the world people think of this as the UN problem you're saying we can't do anything unless everybody agrees and some oh good we're still on that that's great that'll mean nothing or bad will happen that I don't like so here's the first scenario the mayor has appointed a blue ribbon committee to advise her on a new process of public budgeting one that will ensure greater public engagement the mayor named a leading corporate figure in the community the CEO of the largest employer in the city to chair or lead this advisory committee there's an immediate back clash in the press the community is convinced there's no way this person should have been named to be the leader of this group question to you what's your advice to the CEO regarding a how to introduce himself to the rest of the committee and the public secondly how do you think the CEO should prepare for the first meeting of this committee and third how can the CEO establish credibility with the other members of the committee let alone the community at large so we're looking for your table's best advice to this CEO how could this person Be an Effective leader is it inappropriate to suggest that he resign as that's what I was thinking and not necessarily from the whole committee like but then like are they still a leader after that I feel like that could be contentious it kind of like you know like it feels like a little bit of a slap in the face of the mayor I mean it is a budgetary committee and I do think there's like a lot that the public sector learn in some ways from the private sector what is his commitment to the community how is his business give it back to the community maybe taking a back seat on like the next couple meetings kind of just saying like I'm here everyone layer ideas out the table so maybe have dominating meetings as much as could or they could but eventually he's the chair I agree like he cannot dominate but he will be asked to intervene at some point if his role is a facilitator like at the end of the meeting like giving giving that like unbiased summary of like what's happening it's not skewing anything or only pulling out the opinions he he agrees with but really like giving a summary of like everything that was covered at this table um we threw out a couple of um sort of different options kind of mostly centered on the question of how does how does this person establish credibility right off the bat in the first meeting what can be done and then will here had a great idea which was what if the person sets up meetings beforehand with a representative sample from this committee so that when everyone does show up to this first initial meeting those people can see that the CEO person has taken their advice on board and has listened to their their concerns and their thoughts we were discussing and biani spearheaded the idea of recognizing the backlash that is preceding this CEO trying to not subvert the backlash but address it headon in a one-on-one setting that allows someone in a structured format to air their grievances but also their interests so that you aren't entering into the first committee meeting in sort of like a a cacophonous room full of maybe miscon ception stereotypes not only in a sense of like establishing credibility but also from a purely like facilitative standpoint I don't want to say control the narrative but maybe set the record straight from where they intend to come in we were talking along kind of similar lines about this role of transparency specifically in the first meeting for the CEO to go in and very clearly delineate what their expertise is within this setting and what their expertise is not and so in that sense open in up space for the other members of the committee to take on leadership roles in sharing their own expertise and also creates an opportunity as well for the CEO to express his own interest and true desire to learn from the other members of the council and from the community as a whole one of the things we were talking about not necessarily hearing from folks before the first meeting but really using that first meeting to kind of establish guidelines checks and balances systems and the process that's going to come about um to really kind of focus around trust building and Coalition building during that first meeting or first several meetings like really taking an unbiased view of like taking notes and listening to all of the different people who are in that room and then giving a very unbiased feedback or like recap of that um and so then people begin to understand that they can you know voice their opinions voice their thoughts without anything being kind of overlooked or brushed over because they're not in agreement with this leader identifying himself as a human being and not just this kind of powerful figure and then being really clear about you know how he will be held accountable and how you know this process will work I'm curious to hear thoughts on this whether it would be appropriate given how poorly uh the process started for this CEO in the first meeting to offer voluntarily to resign as chair I don't know off like say anyone else in the room we can come up with a new process for finding a new chair but then we also talked about maybe that would be insulting to the mayor in this context resigning you know and leaving that just confirms the fact this was the wrong person to take on a leadership role in the public sector but possibility is changed if they recognize the danger of proceeding in the way the people are immediately upset about and they say not an assistant a co-chair and they have to make sure before they put the mayor in the position of announcing that that the coaches will be able to work together so then they're delivering to the mayor a proposal that's already been worked out that that's how I would respond to the resigning idea it's interesting that it becomes about who the CEO is and why they were appointed rather than who the mayor is and why they appointed that way and I think it it's more reflective of actually what the mayor wants and how they wish to lead if they're going to appoint a CEO theoretically based on the fact that they think this person can operate this steering committee from a hierarchical point of view how is it reflective of the mayor and what they want and how they wish to lead and what sort of leadership stance they prioritize actually makes me want to put the attention on that person versus like the person who's appointed and how they need to then figure out what to do in order to to deal with someone else's decision about them if you ask ask what's it take to Be an Effective leader in the public sector I would argue more than whatever the skill is and the experience is that work for you in the private sector some other additional ways of building trust as a way of establishing credibility and not assuming you can count on your title and your history as a source of credibility I had imagined we would be through several scenarios by now and I don't want to keep you from dinner while you're having dinner I will ask you to talk about a second scenario so I'm going to uh switch the context in this scenario scenario takes place in a different city different metropolitan area in one of the inner suburbs the school committee being attacked from all sides the teachers have voted no confidence in the superintendent the teachers union is demanding that the superintendent resign the elected school committee is divided some backing the superintendent and some supporting the teachers union there are a whole raft of policies behind this that are dividing the community when whether current efforts to ensure student safety in the buildings are adequate who's to blame for the very low scores on Statewide exams in this city as compared to other schools in nearby cities the need for either more or less parental control over the content of the K through six curriculum whether or not more investment should be made in advanced courses for the most gifted students the desirability of mainstreaming versus or rather than separating special needs students all these issues this division sharp division between teachers and the superintendent between and amongst teachers amongst family members what's your best advice to this superintendent under this circumstance given all of this all of this hostility all all of this difficulty how would you help this person get things back on a useful track as the leader in the schools and education area in this community so the idea is to have table discussion and then we'll see where you come out and see if we get any differences in my previous job we talked a lot about making sure that like we come in with a clear goal and like like what is actionable from like this feedback like not just going in general get feedback but like coming in with concrete ways that the feedback can actually be used setting expectations like this is what we can change this is what we can't side the conversation could impact that probably better to just be un FR with like what's in our realm as right now and even like short-term long what could we change this year what would we need to work on that will probably take 10 your own workers who are not believing in you like their trust is completely lost in you and it depends on them for your whatever plan you have to be successful they're not feeling hurt or they're not having you know vested trust in their their quote unquote leader that you know creating mechanisms for um kind of Distributing that that leadership amongst the teachers you know I would first see what the problem I would after that I'm going to be like okay now let me get a team of experts all the issues that were highlighted to be I would try to solve the issues and like give that confidence to whoever cares about it I'm going to use say the next 6 months to remedy this and you will see this kind of change and like make these kind of short-term goals for people to gain confidence in them account I think the makeup of those boards doesn't have to be like the people who brought it up at the you know whoever is most qualified to be yeah like what are the pivotable are plac like where change could be made are they the right person to do it so like what does res me like it doesn't even have to necessarily be immediate what is a succession thing look like how can I come someone else to be able to take this on or point out who I think should be able to see me if it's clear that like I suspect that it might not happen through like a presentation or you telling people that but you actually need to get people in the room and then start guiding the conversation towards this common realization we're all here for the same thing right we all want the same thing right the one thing you could actually do is to get representatives from this room um from these different subcommittees in one room and then you start to get them to think together about Solutions it's like oh if we mainstream these kids what's going happen with these other resources that are going to come from mainstreaming them you know can we do something with that just like collab get them to collaborate with each other interesting idea maybe having like representatives of each interest part of the committee like it's not siloed by interest but it's like like a representative Committee of all the interests yeah that's they're forc to talk with each other and that there isn't this like arm wrestling between the silos they would probably choose the one who has the largest voice who's kind of a fighter but but these kind of people may not be good to putting a negotiation uh process I think part of being a facilitative leader is also preparing each of these folks to be able to best advocate for themselves so then you go back to that oneon-one relationship again so before you have that meeting where you start to do the collaboration you need to do preparations with them but it's also kind of difficult because they have you're not biased towards any specific concern so let's say safety of the students in schools um k to6 curricula um the mainstreaming of the special needs students like you have to sure you're not biased or every single one that's the hard part yeah I think that would also support the uh problem that you're bringing up that you don't want to just bring the guy the loudest voice to the table you kind of want to give others a chance that's part of facilitating the process cuz you're helping everyone improve the mindset of being ready to collaborate essentially a decision needs to be made that's like in favor of one party instead of the other I think that's the part about pairing them and then letting them do the negotiation amongst themselves at the table kind of builds that trust that you're not biased because people are putting their own skin in the game you're not they sort of like bring order to the space enforce rules bring things to yes this hypothetical is uh what the vast number of people who see themselves as leaders in the public sector are dealing with daytoday these are the circumstances that people are being prepared to work in and when conflict has overwhelmed whatever forward movement somebody who thinks their the leader has they have to have some idea some strategy what do you do when all this conflict has wrapped itself around whatever the functional responsibilities are were you trying to think of ways of resolving the conflict telling the superintendent you can do this this this and this to resolve the conflict were you mostly thinking about talking to the superintendent about how to proceed with the work that needs to be done in spite of the conflict you think that a leader in this position can do something to wipe the conflict away to resolve it if not what are they supposed to do about the work that's supposed to get done it's completely Frozen because everybody's at everybody else's throat are they supposed to mediate this all these different disputes that they're the focus of I know they can resign it's not you don't have to I number of years people are in positions is getting shorter and shorter in the public sector in the United States and in other countries conflict is om thepresent people either don't know of a way to proceed in a leadership role and trying to resolve the conflict so they walk away or they're thrown out because they don't appear to be able to solve the conflict whether they leave voluntar or not their term is short because the conflict is overwhelming so our group um held that you know there's accountability to improving the system um and accountability by the superintendent to either acknowledge you know their role in it um also to um either facilitate or be adjacent to an ad hoc committee that can facilitate a Discovery process or audit of what exactly has been going wrong within the school system um even making considerations for conducting uh like investigations and interviewing with other parts of the school system and key stakeholders to um help facilitate a transition process and um inheritance of a new a better system that where we understand the challenges that are going on um and ways that can adjust moving forward the superintendent still would probably be recommended to to leave um at that point um however I do think that their institutional knowledge of the issue is relevant to identifying the key issues of the system do you believe that if they could just solve one of these conflicts and have it clear that it was their doing that resolved it and they'd be accepted in that role of trying to resolve them because they resolve one thing first yeah I mean I think it seems to be a complex issue where there is um pivot Points where there is the most uh upside if it is resolved um so potentially solving one and finding out the the positive impact from that might give a vote of confidence so you would entertain that proposition that if they can do something and actually take one of these clear conflicts in the community and get the people who are primarily the key actors and secret them away somewhere and help them work that out and then come out together with them and announce look we've solved this and if we can solve this we can solve all of our conflicts trust me not exactly one I think it requires a more comprehensive strategic approach but solving a big issue first might be a first pillar of or milestone for that what about setting a lot of different people in motion with responsibility for trying to resolve or mediate different disputes now there is not being the one to resolve these disputes but saying I have this person I don't I don't know if they're loyal to me or not but maybe they would say they would accept responsibility over the next six weeks for this particular conflict between this group and this group because they're close to both sides and I'm asking them to see what progress they can make and I'm giving them authority to act on that and then you've set a lot of different people carefully chosen on the grounds that there's no chance the superintendent can solve all these problems they're the source of most of them or at least the symbolic source of most of them what I'm asking is as you think about your personal theory of practice and you have one whether you confront it regularly and build it or not you have one what do you assume about the management of conflict and the role of leadership there are sides the union this and the people who are managing the union I found in real life as a person assigned as a mediator from outside they don't even know what they're fighting about they're really really angry they'll tell me a topic I'll sit with everybody privately confidentially I'm just an outsider I'm just asked to see if there's any way to help there's no way will accept the Librarians not having the final control of which books go in the library for K through six that's it no chance no way okay why what do you mean why well couldn't there be an occasion in which the Librarians mostly do this but if somebody has a concern that the Librarians and some other people have a conversation about it and you can asked for a chance to discuss this without saying the only ones who make the decision of the Librarians we never did it that way I know that but I'm trying to see whether it's possible to invent a way forward that meets your underlying interests differently from what's been done in the past well I don't know if my people will accept it if I were to be in a conversation where that was being discussed well could we try it and see right getting people to discuss the undis what they think is undiscussable how do you how can you facilitate that we shifted to a different um Direction and thought about hiring experts or a technical Advisory Group of sorts to work alongside the superintendent on the issues that were identified uh because it's not that the superintendent can solve it all I don't think the Advisory Group or the experts can solve it all as well what we discussed was to have people who were more knowledgeable of those particular issues and could have a better understanding of how to solve them and then we also talked about releasing a memo of sorts which outlines the plan of how the superintendent and his team can tackle these issues uh because what you were saying about oh if the super intendant solves one issue will that be enough for him to start working on others and I think in a lot of cases that is true uh because to gain the trust back of these different stakeholders even saying that okay I'm starting to solve this one issue I mean not one in like one issue but like starting small I think is important to gain the trust back of these stakeholders so I think even starting small definitely helps gain trusts of communities and other like union leaders and people yeah it's a highrisk strategy to assume that if I could just find the Lynch pin solve this one quickly then everything's going to fit together my hunch is in this particular kind of story where the superintendent is supposedly the administrative leader but also is the object of the conflict for many of the parties that waiting for them to pick one of these disputes and resolve it through their intervention so they can wave a flag and say you can all have confidence in me look I solve this probably a losing strategy whereas if the superintendent could have private conversations with a lot of the folks who are complaining about something that the superintendent's doing and say well would you be willing to take responsibility for the next period of time of getting this this this and this together and coming up with your suggestion of what should be done together I don't want to hear a summary of what you disagree about I'm looking for you to produce positive proposals and nobody's tried to convene these folks and I think they would trust you to do that they're not making final decisions they're making suggestions together for ways are resolving issues and if we could get a half dozen different people if the leader can facilitate the engagement of other participants and help build their role in leadership I'm arguing that the leaders role is enhanced I think a lot of times this strategy is used the one you're describing but my problem with this is that you're asking those people to do more labor who are already experiencing these problems and in a lot of cases when I worked with uh communities especially is that they do not want to take responsibility because they're already frustrated all these stakeholders and then me going in as a superintendent for example and saying oh maybe you can help me solve this and it's like but that's your job do do you understand so I feel like it sometimes puts a lot of blame and a lot of work and a lot of labor on these different stakeholders and my question is how to address that how to approach this in a way that it doesn't look like that instead it looks like we are trying to uh co-create Solutions so how do you approach that next time I'm going to give you a list of a dozen what I called my micro skills of facilitative leadership one is how do you convince someone to take responsibility for helping to solve up the problem that they think you're the part of you can either do that or you can it's not about how sweetly you talk it's not about being smarter than the there's a set of principles for how you get someone who's opposed to you to agree to help solve the problem with you what does it take to develop Your Capacity to facilitate to turn around a conflict situation to set an agenda for a group that's Has No Agenda to set ground rules to how people in a rockus meeting are dealing with each other the final session I really want to ask you to assess your sense of yourself Your Capacity to become or to be a facilitative leader or to say I don't see it that's not my role I don't see myself in that capacity I really want to get you to take the micro skills to take the things that we talked about last time and this time and say do I see myself functioning in this kind of situation if you were in the like the superintendent with lots of people mad at you partly because of the symbolic positions you have partly because of the things you've said and done partly because they just believe different things from you can you see yourself going to work or not can you deal with conflict my sense is if you don't have a pathway in your mind for transforming those conflict situations into more workable forms of collaboration then you you're not going to be able to keep it up it's too hard you need to Envision some path you need to imagine that you have a half a dozen micro skills that it takes to work effectively in that situation so we will come to that before we stop I want to come to the the the gender and race questions that people raised last time in the case you were just looking at were you imagining the superintendent male female One race another race does it matter to your analysis of the situation how should we see how do we see gender and race intersecting with questions of leadership now that we've talking about facilitative leadership uh in the public Arena I mean if you question yourself do you imagine you were seeing things in a certain way because you were presuming the superintendent was male or female and because it was female you imagined there were certain options open to her male no we constantly say we should consider gender and race and a variety of other other attributes as independent variables are they in fact relevant variables in any of the conversations that we've had I have personally witnessed women of color and positions of power and I think if they were in this hypothetical situation they would be forced to resign or there would be this almost like Witch Hunt happening and I think I mean I'm coming from a field of architecture but I've seen it happen with leadersh ship within that realm faculty or like deans of colleges in that same realm and it happens very often so I think I mean like in my mind I was just imagining a male in this situation I didn't imagine like a race but I think that when it's specifically I'll only speak to like a person of color um I I think the repercussions and the processes there are a lot different often times because of the expectations of the community around them or because of their own sense of themselves I think it's because the expectations are higher from the community around them and then even if they're meeting the same kind of threshold as potentially like a a a white male um the expectations are so much higher of them that it's almost impossible for them to succeed in that capacity because there's it's just someone's only human so can you think of a pathway or a set of steps that would make that diagnosis less likely to be the case I have a question where is these scenarios are located in the US and where exactly because I mean we keep referring about those cases in the previous session and in this session is are they Global because the MS like the values the the are completely different from country to Country and within a country are completely different from region to region or from Urban to rural uh you mentioned in your case before in the first scenario that's why you ask that questions why you choose a CEO of a company that perhaps here in the US with you know the values in certain parts of this country the values of a a competition or the values Trace from a meritocratic system or capital system makes that that person is a person that eventually could be admired by the society and perhaps the mayor we don't know the hidden agenda of the major choose that person to represent that committee but in other parts of the world people do not have that values of whether is a a razor company or computer company or hiding people or lead people because leadership is about completely different value that making money or having a big Corporation I'm not saying that those are the values here in the US please don't take me wrong but I or take me wrong but but the question I'm saying is very important that we have a very specific context where this scenario happen in order to respond those questions and if be aware as well that we have to understand the scenario before we take a decision because one decision in one country could be completely the opposite in another one if you understand the scenario perfectly are you empowered differently I I'm accepting the premise you would be more informed in what ways are you empowered by being more informed what does it make you more um optimistic about the moves you're making and that likely to likely increase your Effectiveness from a deontological perspective I think that I will be more legitimate to provide advice your legitimacy because of the mov you an advisor I'm talking about yeah I'm I'm trying to convince myself that there's a way to talk about race and gender in the context of leadership that has nothing to do with personality and that has something to do with being able to use the same skills of facilitative leadership that another facilitative leader has in a situation because there's either a match or a mismatch I don't know which between the race and gender of the person who wants to act as a leader and the constituency or the context in which they're working either that or it doesn't matter I'm too old to believe it doesn't matter I've lived through too many things where race and gender have mattered to think that there could be a way that they don't matter so now I'm trying to figure out well how do they matter and how can instruction build on what it takes given that they matter but I I don't see it yet clearly what instruction differently not differently to females that want to take on a facilitative leadership role do they have to learn different things do they have to learn it with more confidence do they have to learn how they're seen they learn the same thing but they learn how what they've learned is seen by others and so they can make adjustments before it's even necessary because of how others are viewing them not teaching anything different I'm not assuming that anything different will play out in terms of the logic of leadership but I I believe this makes some difference in terms of the perceptions you talked about um women of color in positions of responsibility who expect they're going to be judged more harshly than a a a a white male counterpart would be in the exact same situation and if I assume that's true therefore what can we do to help bolster the person maybe I can't do anything about bolstering the person maybe it's the context and if I have no power to change the context doing something different for with the person won't add up to a different outcome I don't know which I believe it is think about the questions that came up about the scenarios I will focus on micro skills that I think an effective facilitative leader has to have I will enumerate them I will probably use a screen and talk about what those skills are and when I think they come into play and how uh you can learn them perfect them develop them that's going to be the focus next time I want to talk about those micro skills of facilitating and empowering and turning a conflict situation into a joint problem solving situation and shifting people from positions to interests which I think is as I said essential as a step in the process of trying to be effective as a leader I'll see you again next week [Music]