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Ironically, "responsibility" is one of those buzzwords that gets thrown around with reckless abandon in contemporary management literature.  But what does it really mean?  How do we act when we feel "responsible"?  How do we act when we don't? And what are the implications for our organizations and our colleagues?

I've written twice before about valuable lessons I've learned from people at the Trium Group, a management consulting firm with an unusually strong grasp of the interpersonal factors that contribute to high performance.  And in keeping with their understanding of the dynamic relationship between individual actions and organizational strategy, Trium has a compelling perspective on the meaning of responsibility.

I was first introduced to Trium's thinking on the topic last year by my Stanford colleague Sharon Richmond, who has a copy of the graphic below pinned up outside her office door.  (I've taken the liberty of creating a web-friendly version, and I hope the friendly people at Trium see this as a fair use that promotes their brilliant thinking.)

Trium's original graphic adds the following first-person perspectives on the two mindsets:

Responsible Mindset
I view myself as an integral factor in all situations.  Every situation occurs and unfolds as it does in some measure as a direct outcome of my actions, non-actions and interpretations. I believe there is always something I can do to affect the situation.

Victim Mindset (for reference only)
I view myself as separate and disconnected from situations as they occur.  Circumstances and events happen to me. I believe there is nothing I can do to affect the situation.

(Here's a one-slide PowerPoint [56 KB] of my version of the complete graphic.)

A recent discussion among my colleagues about responsibility and accountability got me thinking about Sharon's Trium graphic, and I decided to look into it a little further.  This led me to Stanford professor Jeff Pfeffer's 2005 article on Changing Mental Models in Human Resource Management (the basis for a chapter in The Future of Human Resource Management), which provides a brilliant overview of Trium's thinking about responsibility, and which I take the liberty of quoting at some length:

Some colleagues at...The Trium Group...have been reasonably successful at helping companies make mind-set transitions, thus enhancing the companies' effectiveness. Although their work focuses on several mental models, one important focus is on what they call the "responsibility" mind-set, which they contrast with the "victim" perspective.

An important introductory comment: Responsibility is not the same as accountability. Responsibility is probably a good thing for companies and their cultures, but accountability is actually somewhat more problematic. Accountability is, of course, an idea very much in vogue these days. People in companies and even schoolchildren are supposed to be held accountable for their decisions and actions—what they do has consequences, and they must feel those consequences, be they positive or negative. There is a lot of evidence, however, that the growing emphasis on individual accountability—something, by the way, that is completely inconsistent with the lessons of the quality movement—hinders learning and even discovering mistakes...

Responsibility implies something different. Responsibility entails feeling efficacious and believing one has some obligation to make the world, including the organizational world, in which one lives a better place. Building a responsibility mind-set or, for that matter, changing mind-sets in general, is a process that requires two things: (1) getting people to acknowledge and accept that how they think about situations is under their volitional control—choice is possible; and (2) having them both emotionally experience and think about the pros and cons of alternative ways of thinking about situations.

What Trium does is have people pair up with someone attending the same workshop or meeting. One person in the pair is then told to tell the other a story that has the following characteristics: (1) the incident is real, (2) it is work-related, and (3) the person telling the story felt like a victim—not in control, things were happening to the person, there was little or nothing they could do about what was occurring, and they were unhappy with what occurred. They are told to tell the story in as convincing a way as possible, so their partner actually believes the story and feels their emotions. Then the roles are reversed, and the partner tells his or her "victim" story to the other person. The questions posed are: What does it feel like to be a victim? and What are the advantages and disadvantages of the victim role? One advantage of being in a victim role is that one gets sympathy, and, in fact, we often see people in subunits who bemoan their shared and unfortunate fate with each other, thereby building social solidarity...

The next step in the mind-set change process is to have each partner tell the same stories they just told each other, but now trying to imagine what it would be like to be more in control or more responsible for what transpired. Being in control does not mean things would have necessarily turned out perfectly—organizations are interdependent systems, and almost no one gets to have their way all the time. But the responsibility mindset is simply seeing oneself as an actor affecting, or trying to affect, what goes on rather than being in a more passive role of having things happen to oneself.

The debriefing then continues by having people think about the emotions they experienced with this responsibility mind-set and, again, discussing the advantages and disadvantages of adopting a responsibility mental model. Not everything is great about being responsible; it is, for instance, hard work and can feel burdensome. Feeling responsible also has many positive emotions and advantages associated with it, including feeling more powerful and more connected. The point of the exercise is not to have people necessarily come to believe one way of thinking is better than another. The objective is to have people recognize that each of us has a choice—or actually a series of choices—we make each day about how we approach the world and the problems and opportunities it presents to us.

We can be victimized or responsible. In a similar fashion, we can choose how we view opponents and rivals and we can choose what assumptions we make and hold about people and organizations and their capabilities and potential... Each choice has consequences—for how we feel and, more important, for what we do, the decisions we make, and how we act in the situations we confront in seeking to make our organizations more effective and successful.

In my work as an executive coach I continually stress the importance of choice and agency with my clients.  It's all too easy--and even encouraged, in some organizational cultures--to focus on our lack of choice, our frustration, our powerlessness in the face of forces beyond our control.  But as Trium and Pfeffer make clear, we always have the power to choose how we interpret a given situation and the mindset we adopt in response.

This isn't to suggest that we should always make the best of bad situations--there are times in life when we truly are victims of circumstance, and trying to hold ourselves responsible is counterproductive.  But in almost all professional situations we can choose to adopt a responsible mindset or a victim mindset--and that choice will have a significant effect on our ability to contribute to a desirable outcome.

Ironically, "responsibility" is one of those buzzwords that gets thrown around with reckless abandon in contemporary management literature. But what does it really mean? How do we act when we feel "responsible"? How do we act when we don't? And... Ed Batista

We don't necessarily associate great leadership with kindness, particularly when discussing Vince Lombardi-era football.  But former NFL player and longtime college coach Bill Curry had this to say in an interview with Tom Tolbert on KNBR this afternoon:

Unexpected, undeserved, unrewarded acts of kindness from great leaders...make great teams.

He was referring to the kindness showed to him as a rookie Green Bay Packer in 1965 by veteran African American players who took him under their wing and, in his words, "taught me how to behave."  Curry had no black teammates in college at Georgia Tech and initially found the diversity he encountered in the NFL hard to handle.  But influential team leaders such as Willie Davis apparently went out of their way to reach out to Curry and helped him adjust.

Curry expressed profound gratitude for his teammates' kindness, and in his retelling, that kindness was as instrumental as Lombardi's legendary toughness in shaping the '60s Packers into a tight-knit, cohesive unit.  I'm not suggesting--nor was Curry--that Lombardi's approach was wrong, or that kindness alone would have had the same affect.

And yet it feels as though we hear about leaders' toughness all the time, and we never hear about their kindness.  But when I think about the most effective leaders I've known and worked with, they had the ability to be both tough and kind as needed, and those aspects of their personality didn't cancel each other out.  Rather, their skillful use of one approach complemented the other; their kindness meant even more because I knew how tough they could be.

I wrote yesterday about leadership and kindness, just as Carol Hymowitz was declaring that Effective Management Remains an Art Steeped in Good Relationships in her "In The Lead" column for the Wall Street Journal:

The more executives I interviewed and wrote about [after launching "In The Lead" nearly a decade ago], the more I realized that the effective ones review their own performance at least as frequently and as thoroughly as they review the work of their employees.  They also constantly adapt their management styles to meet different challenges and to motivate different employees...

The best leaders...studiously avoid being self-absorbed.  They celebrate their employees' ideas, knowledge and commitment, and they understand they must be both bold and kind to attract talent. [my emphasis]

Hymowitz echoes Bill Curry on the importance of leaders' kindness in building and maintaining high-performing teams, and again I'm struck by how often we cite leaders' boldness and toughness and how rarely we cite their kindness when seeking to understand effective leadership.

Postscript: Sadly, this was Hymowitz's final "In The Lead" column, as she has accepted a buyout offer from management, apparently as part of the paper's post-acquisition restructuring.  (Jeff Bercovici has suggested that Hymowitz's departure reflects a larger pattern of bias against women at Murdoch-owned papers.)  I truly appreciated Hymowitz's perspective, and "In The Lead" will be missed.  Here's hoping she finds another outlet for her talents soon.

I wrote yesterday about leadership and kindness, just as Carol Hymowitz was declaring that Effective Management Remains an Art Steeped in Good Relationships in her "In The Lead" column for the Wall Street Journal: The more executives I interviewed and... Ed Batista

We don't necessarily associate great leadership with kindness, particularly when discussing Vince Lombardi-era football. But former NFL player and longtime college coach Bill Curry had this to say in an interview with Tom Tolbert on KNBR this afternoon: Unexpected, undeserved,... Ed Batista

I'm struck by the parallel between A) the work I do as a coach and organizational development consultant to improve interpersonal skills and B) the role of technology in a networked world.  Interpersonal skills, by definition, can't be mastered in isolation.  We need other people to become better communicators; if a message isn't received, it wasn't delivered effectively.  And as technology becomes an ever more important way to socialize and connect with others, the same becomes true of our technical skills.  You can't be a tech-savvy user in isolation; your effectiveness is determined by the perception of others.

In an organization or a social network, interpersonal skills help you build relationships, speed information-sharing and gain influence with others, allowing you to be more effective--which is exactly what technology allows you to do today.

One implication of this is that leaders need not be "techies," in the conventional "IT" sense of the term, but their effectiveness in an organization or a network is increasingly dependent on the extent to which they can employ technology as an interpersonal skill.  Charisma can--and must--translate online.  (Obama: 1, McCain: 0)

I'm struck by the parallel between A) the work I do as a coach and organizational development consultant to improve interpersonal skills and B) the role of technology in a networked world. Interpersonal skills, by definition, can't be mastered in... Ed Batista

I'm struck by the parallel between A) the work I do as a coach and organizational development consultant to improve interpersonal skills and B) the role of technology in a networked world. Interpersonal skills, by definition, can't be mastered in... Ed Batista

Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols opens with 44 aphorisms, including four he describes as "Questions of Conscience":

37. You run ahead?  Are you doing it as a shepherd?  Or as an exception?  A third case would be the fugitive.  First question of conscience.

38. Are you genuine?  Or merely an actor?  A representative?  Or that which is represented?  In the end, perhaps, you are merely a copy of an actor.  Second question of conscience.

40. Are you one who looks on?  Or one who lends a hand?  Or one who looks away and walks off.  Third question of conscience.

41. Do you want to walk along?  Or walk ahead?  Or walk by yourself?  One must know what one wants and that one wants.  Fourth question of conscience.

I wouldn't look to Nietzsche for guidance on any number of subjects--um, gender relations, to take just one.  But I'm struck by the universality of these questions--they're relevant for just about every coaching client I've worked with--and by their pointed, direct nature.

I'm hardly modeling myself after Nietzsche's example, but there's something in the challenge he poses to his reader that reminds me of the role an executive coach can play with a client.  Coaches rarely (if ever) have The Answer, but a good coach will be able to ask powerful and provocative questions that allow a client to identify the answers that are true and meaningful for them.

That's just how I feel reading the passage above.  For example, I often strive to "run ahead," to distinguish myself in some way.  Am I seeking to contribute to the betterment of others?  Or to glorify myself?  Or am I running away from something?  Nietzsche's no help with the answer, but I'm grateful for the fearlessness and pugnacity with which he poses the question.

Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols opens with 44 aphorisms, including four he describes as "Questions of Conscience": 37. You run ahead? Are you doing it as a shepherd? Or as an exception? A third case would be the fugitive. First... Ed Batista

Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols opens with 44 aphorisms, including four he describes as "Questions of Conscience": 37. You run ahead? Are you doing it as a shepherd? Or as an exception? A third case would be the fugitive. First... Ed Batista

Photo by social_d.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Photo by social_d. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons. Ed Batista

David Rendell recently published a compelling Change This essay entitled The Freak Factor: Discovering Uniqueness by Flaunting Weakness:

[T]he three primary lessons of this manifesto.

1. There is nothing wrong with you.
(Weaknesses are important clues to your strengths.)

2. You find success when you find the right fit.
(You need to match your unique characteristics to situations that reward those qualities.)

3. Your weaknesses make you different.
(They make you a freak and it’s good to be a freak. )

I'm struck by the parallels between Rendell's imperatives and concepts that are at the core of three texts that are fundamental to my own perspective on personal growth and development:

1. From Co-Active Coaching, by Laura Whitworth, et al:

The primary building block for all co-active coaching is this: Clients have the answers or they can find the answers.  From the co-active coach's point of view, nothing is wrong or broken, and there is no need to fix the client.

2. From Peter Drucker's On Managing Oneself:

[M]ost people, especially highly gifted people, do not really know where they belong until they are well past their mid-twenties.  By that time, however, they should know the answers to the three questions: What are my strengths?  How do I perform?  and, What are my values?  And then they can and should decide where they belong.  Or rather, they should be able to decide where they do not belong... [emphasis mine]

3. From Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones' Why Should Anyone Be Led By You?:

[S]howing weakness...is typically a by-product of the authentic leader's overarching goals and passions.  Because they really care about the organization,the reveal themselves...

The reason for this inevitable connection between leadership and personal risk is complex.  it begins with an understanding that leadership is for a purpose.  There is some superordinate desired end state, which energizes the leader who in turn gives energy to followers.  Effective leaders really care about this goal.  They care enough to reveal their authentic selves.

A common theme I hear running through all of these texts is: Know yourself; accept yourself; be yourself.  And the challenge is to do just that while also striving to learn, grow, and be more effective.  They're not mutually exclusive, but so often in the world of personal development and leadership education we focus on "overcoming deficits" or on "fixing problems," and don't pay enough attention to the importance of helping people know, accept and simply be themselves.

David Rendell recently published a compelling Change This essay entitled The Freak Factor: Discovering Uniqueness by Flaunting Weakness: [T]he three primary lessons of this manifesto. 1. There is nothing wrong with you. (Weaknesses are important clues to your strengths.) 2.... Ed Batista

Given the topics I've discussed here over the last few years--leadership and management, personal and organizational development, and the effective use of technology--if you're reading this, it's a safe bet that you're someone with an interest in making change happen and that you see opportunities to help your organization or your community find better ways of doing things, particularly when technology is a factor.

So here's a mental model to help make the process of leading change easier: Technology is soft.

Let me make a brief detour in order to explain what I mean by that.  In the late 1970s Tom Peters, Bob Waterman, Richard Pascale and Anthony Athos developed a framework for analyzing organizations known as the "7s Model" which looks at different aspects of an organization and which I still find highly useful.  (The graphic at left is from BuildingBrands.)  The 7s Model is often interpreted as dividing organizations into "hard" and "soft" elements--the former category includes the three concepts in red at the top of the graphic:

• Strategy
Your high-level goals and how you plan to achieve them.

• Structure
An organization's "blueprints": how people and resources are allocated, how work and responsibilities are distributed.

• Systems
All the ropes, pulleys and gears, so to speak, that get things done in an organization.

These elements of the model are seen as "hard" because they're more easily reduced to tangible artifacts--plans and documents and infrastructure--but that designation also reflects a value judgment in our language.  "Hard" stuff can be complex and difficult, but it's also serious and important.  "Soft" stuff, in contrast, is ambiguous, unreliable, secondary.  (I hope it's apparent that I think this is bias needs to be challenged, and Tom Peters agrees.)

We've traditionally located technology among the "hard" elements of an organization, and that's what usually comes to mind when we think about "Information Technology."  We have IT plans, IT departments (or people whose responsibilities include IT), and, of course, IT systems.  Thinking about technology from this perspective may seem logical, but I believe the implications are profound, unhelpful and increasingly outdated.

Some aspects of technology will always be classic "IT": hardware, storage, connectivity.  But these are commodities.  You get the best price you can for them, and you don't expect them to add strategic value to the organization.

I believe the strategic aspects of technology that have the greatest potential to actually make a difference in an organization fit into on the other side of the 7s Model, the "soft" side:

• Staff
Not the org chart--that's part of the Structure--but the real, flesh-and-blood people, and all their strengths, weaknesses, hopes and aspirations.

• Style
Management style, or organizational culture: The tacit norms that govern how work gets done and how people interact.

• Skills
The full range of competencies possessed by an organization, including interpersonal skills, learning.

Thinking about technology as "soft," as an aspect of an organization's staff, style and skills, may seem counterintuitive, but increasingly this is where it truly resides (and it's where you'll have the greatest leverage when driving technology-related change.)

Let me illustrate this approach with an story from my work at Stanford's Graduate School of Business:  As a Leadership Coach at the Center for Leadership Development and Research, I'm a member of a team with many interdependent sub-teams that often collaborate virtually on long-term projects involving multiple sets of stakeholders.  When I started at the beginning of 2007, the tools available to support these collaborations were 1) email and 2) shared network drives.  These tools met our most basic needs, but they were hardly optimal, and we found ourselves frustrated with their limitations.

It was the perfect opportunity to introduce a wiki, and as the unofficial techie on our staff of executive coaches and organizational development consultants, I was in a position to make that change happen.  But in retrospect I can see that I focused on the "hard" elements of the 7s Model.  I developed a strategic IT plan that included a wiki, I explored in great detail how the wiki would be used and how it would fit into our existing organizational structure, and I spent a good bit of time exploring various wiki platforms to find the best system to meet our needs.

I was able to get it up and running, but adoption by my non-technical colleagues was hit-or-miss.  Some people loved it, but others found it confusing or didn't really understand how  it was an improvement over email.  I think part of the problem was the language I used to introduce it.  I'd say, "I have a new system that'll help us collaborate more effectively."   Well, when you say "new," people hear "change," and they realize that means "more work," at least in the short run.  And when you say "system," people  hear "IT," and they know that means, "someone else's responsibility."  So when you say "new system," what people really hear is "more work that shouldn't be my responsibility in the first place."   Not exactly an appealing message.

So as we were about to begin a new academic year last Fall, I took a new approach.  I stopped worrying about the strategic IT plan--I didn't even update it.  I stopped thinking about how the wiki fit into our organizational structure.  And with the system already in place, I didn't have any technical work to do at all.

Instead, I starting thinking about the "soft" side of the organization.  I thought about my colleagues as individuals.  What were they like?  What were their needs?  How did they work?

I thought about our organizational culture.  Although Stanford has a certain culture, and the business school has yet another culture all its own, the Center where I work is a small, informal, entrepreneurial place where we can't do things by the book because it hasn't been written yet.

I thought about our collective skills--not just (or even primarily) technical skills, but our interpersonal skills.  How do we connect with each other?  How do we collaborate?

So rather than asking my colleagues to conform to a "hard" plan, I began asking how "soft" technology like a wiki could conform to them.  And rather than trying to "train" them on this new system, I began having a series of short conversations--sometimes just 5 minutes--about how they were working and what they were doing.  I took advantage of every small opportunity to help people think about the wiki as an integrated element in our organizational culture, and as an extension of their collaborative skills.

Today, just a few months later, we're the most intensive wiki users in the business school, and we're probably among the most intensive non-technical wiki users in the entire university.  I had to lay the "hard" groundwork to initiate the project, but my sustained focus on the strategic plan, the structure, and the system actually delayed our progress, and the wiki's ultimate success is directly related to its integration with the organization's "soft" side.

The 7th circle at the center of the 7s Model represents Shared Values, the commonly-held aspirations that give an organization a collective spirit, a sense of mission.  And if you value the effective use of technology, and you want your organization to adopt and embody that value, I encourage you to remember this the next time you're seeking to promote change: Technology is soft.

Photo by fotologic.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

7s Model graphic by BuildingBrands.

This post was adapted from remarks I made on May 12, 2008, to the second graduating class of ZeroDivide Fellows.  Congratulations and good luck to all the past and current Fellows, and thanks to ZeroDivide for having me.

Given the topics I've discussed here over the last few years--leadership and management, personal and organizational development, and the effective use of technology--if you're reading this, it's a safe bet that you're someone with an interest in making change happen... Ed Batista

A number of people wind up here after searching for "double-loop learning," a topic I've addressed before while discussing meta-work, executive coaching and feedback, so I thought I'd provide a simple graphic overview.  (Here's a 2-slide PowerPoint file of the images below, 64 KB.)

Most learning can be described as "single-loop."  We start with a set of goals, values and strategies that yield results.  We assess the results, refine our techniques, and try again.  One loop.

But our goals, values and strategies rest on a set of underlying assumptions that are implicit and unchallenged.  Single-loop learning can help us pursue a goal more effectively by altering our methods, but it doesn't help us determine whether the goal is worth pursuing in the first place.

As I wrote in 2006...

In most circumstances, the learning we undertake is aimed at improving our performance relative to a set of goals and other factors that are taken for granted. Feedback from our performance (or "learning from our mistakes") typically cycles immediately back into our analysis of the strategies, tactics or techniques that led to our performance. This is important work, but it's inherently limited by those initial factors that are taken for granted at the outset and that remain unchallenged by an assessment of the performance results.

Double-loop learning occurs when we expand the analytical frame to explicitly identify and then challenge any underlying assumptions that support our stated goals, values and strategies.

Rather than only ask, "How can we achieve our goals more effectively?", we look deeper and also ask...

• What assumptions support our goals, values and strategies?
• How can we test these assumptions?
• Having tested these assumptions, should we change our goals, values or strategies?

Again, as I wrote in 2006...

In contrast, if we can pull back and expand the frame of our analysis, we begin to call into question some of the factors that we usually take for granted. Our performance results aren't simply used to assess the strategies that have been derived from those factors--they question the factors themselves.

I realize that this can seem somewhat abstract, so it may be useful to refer to the posts mentioned above, which discuss double-loop learning in the context of meta-work, executive coaching and feedback. I've also found Mark Smith's essay on double-loop learning at Informal Education extremely valuable.

And continued thanks to Chris Argyris, who first developed the concept of double-loop learning, and whose thoughts on theories of action and organizational learning inform my own work on a daily basis.

A number of people wind up here after searching for "double-loop learning," a topic I've addressed before while discussing meta-work, executive coaching and feedback, so I thought I'd provide a simple graphic overview. (Here's a 2-slide PowerPoint file of the... Ed Batista