The Horizons of a Good Question
Your leadership stance and the questions you ask have everything to do with how you see the world around you, what you are able to see and how you deal with what you can’t see. Perspective and the ability to hold different perspectives simultaneously is critical for conversational leadership, especially when leading in complexity.
How we see things matters. The ability to take on different perspectives about the same thing is a key capacity of a leader and only really comes from growth and an increasing development of mental complexity. How we see things leads us to how we understand them, make meaning and then how we approach them.
How you deal with what you can’t see is almost more important than being able to handle what you can see. It is also even more a matter of maturity. It is simple and straight-forward to deal with the seen, but, do you have a discipline of checking for blindspots, testing assumptions and uncovering the unknowns? What do you do when something you didn’t expect appears? How do you help yourself and others deal with this? How do you gather information that is not easily gathered or understood? How do you make sense of different or competing information? And how do you integrate this information in a useful and helpful way toward growth and helpful ideas and growth practices?
If you are trying to lead, you are trying to create something good, true or beautiful in the world. Most leaders are striving to build something better in the world and are driven by passion.
Much as in a story, the tone and impact of the story’s arc has a lot to do with what point of view - what perspective, the story is being told from. As you use conversation as your key process for leading and creating culture - for weaving the meaning and action you need in your movement or organization - perspective taking has an important role in your ability as a leader. Perspective taking and the ability to make sense of many different points of information is key to effective and inspiring leadership. People need to feel heard, understood and compelled in their own journey and contributions. The most effective leaders are those who can see multiple perspectives and invite everyone in and see their contributions woven into the larger mission and vision.
Horizons
Finding ways to develop your skill at accessing different perspectives is an effective way to improve on your ability to lead well. One of the places this is talked about most clearly is the work of Ken Wilber and others who’ve created the four quadrant model.
The four-quadrant model is a way of learning to attend to each of the four quadrants or perspectives if we are going to have a more integral approach. The discipline of viewing things from each of these four quadrants is a key discipline for growth as a leader and your ability to more accurately understand what you’re seeing. This is important for many reasons but of course one of the key ones is how you listen, how you talk, how you identify the problem and what solution you move towards depends a lot on your way of seeing.
When you use your language as a leader, your influence will grow as you are more able to integrate these different perspectives.
IF you speak in systems (ITS) without including the experience of your people (I) you are missing the parts of the whole
If you speak in terms of culture (WE) and don’t ensure that the quality of your product (it) then you may have little more than a great team going out of business.
If you are biased to or more comfortable in seeing things from a certain perspective: for example from the WE perspective you might think that cultural intervention is always the solution even when it’s a systems problem or a you problem even a quality assurance problem you will overuse that “muscle” and not develop other areas of strength you could use.
You have so much more potential as a leader if you intentionally work to develop those other perspectives and access them in a balanced way. And you can develop that balance.
The work of a leader is to develop the skill in accessing the different perspectives and being able to highlight them for those on the team and to draw in the different perspectives. The best solutions engage different possibilities and considers all the options.
Blind Spots
Dealing with blind spots is also an important part of conversational leadership. This can be a difficult and even painful journey. If you think of it in terms of driving in today’s vehicles, engineers have developed all sorts of new techniques and technologies to assist us in “seeing” around our vehicles. In much the same way, we need to access tools to “see” into and around ourselves. This work is not easy and often relies on us accessing others’ perspectives and tools to reflect and see into our behaviour and our impact on those around us. It is something that needs to be repeated and that we need to approach with an open heart. Sometimes we may ask for the feedback or reflection but we are not ready to hear what comes back, which can lead to inaccurate feedback and a failure to truly illuminate the blind spot. To truly develop our conversational leadership skills, uncovering and eliminating our blind spots is essential. Feedback, reflection and deliberate practice are essential skills for leadership development.
“The task of leadership is to be intentional about the way we group people and the questions that we engage them in.”
