Giving Life to the
Organization’s Future
FOR MANY YEARS, Shoney’s restaurant chain had a close-knit group of executives at the top—people who knew each other well, shared history and beliefs, and generally thought they had it figured out when it came to how to manage the business. The problem was that there was a lot of cronyism at the top, too. It was really an old-boys’ network of white, male senior executives—and there was an underlying culture that promoted from the buddy system and left people of color by the wayside.
All of that changed, however, in 1992, when the company was forced to pay $132 million to settle a class-action lawsuit from 20,000 employees and rejected job applicants, who claimed discrimination in hiring and promotion practices. Since that time, a cadre of new leaders at Shoney’s has intentionally changed the company’s culture, launching a decisive campaign to broaden opportunity for qualified people of color. 1 In just ten years, Shoney’s has gone from an old-boys’ club to one of Fortune magazine’s “Top 50 Companies for Minorities.”
None of that change happened overnight, of course. The process began with an undeniable wake-up call (the lawsuit) regarding the reality of the company’s dissonant culture. Then the new leaders entering the scene had to identify an ideal vision that would guide hiring decisions in the future. And finally, the organization as a whole had to embrace that vision—become emotionally attuned to it—before lasting change could occur.
At Shoney’s, leaders took on reality, and they led the organization into a very different future. They knew that, just as is true for teams, identifying the emotional reality and norms of an organization begins the process for change. Leaders can initiate a widespread shift toward emotional intelligence when they identify a company’s emotional reality and habits—what people do together and how.
The real difference is that whereas the components of individual emotional intelligence competencies can translate directly to teams, organizations are more complex and thus the goal is broader: to foster emotionally intelligent leadership widely and deeply at every level, and to systematically create norms and a culture that support truth and transparency, integrity, empathy, and healthy relationships. That kind of transformation begins with leaders who are open to the truth, who can ferret out the emotional reality of the organization, and who can engage others in a compelling vision of their own future. When a company develops that kind of emotionally intelligent leadership at all levels, and when those leaders face up to reality, a transformed company can, and often must, emerge.
That first step, uncovering the truth and an organization’s reality, is the leader’s primal task. But too many leaders fail to invite the truth, which can leave them prey to the CEO disease—being a leader who is out of touch and out of tune. In their most benign form, such leaders seem to have no time for important conversations, and do not build the kind of affiliative or coaching relationships that result in deep dialogue about what’s working and what is not. They don’t have enough real contact with people in their organizations to get a sense of what is happening, living in a kind of rarefied air that leaves them out of touch with the underlying emotional reality of day-to-day life.
Less benign are leaders who use rigid commanding and pacesetting styles and who actually prevent people from telling them the truth. These leaders are clueless, or in denial about the reality of their organizations. While they may believe that everything is fine, they have in fact created a culture in which no one dares to tell them anything that might provoke them, especially bad news. That kind of silence can come at a very high price.
Consider the estimated 100,000 deaths each year in U.S. hospitals caused by routine medical errors—such as a doctor writing the wrong orders for a patient’s medicine, or the wrong bottle being attached to an intravenous tube. Often these mistakes could have been prevented if only the command-and-control culture in most medical organizations had been acknowledged and changed. 2 One physician, who belongs to an Academy of Medicine task force addressing these issues, told us: “In the culture of hospitals, a nurse who corrects a doctor—telling him he wrote too many zeroes in an order for a patient’s meds—can get her head bitten off. If medicine were to adopt the zero tolerance for mistakes that sets the norm for the airline mechanic industry, we’d cut medical errors drastically.”
Of course, no one tells nurses they may risk the wrath of doctors if they challenge them. Those are the kinds of lessons about organizational culture that people learn implicitly by picking up on cues in the environment, and those cultures are not easy to change. Creating a hospital culture that supported “zero tolerance” would mean, for example, building in a far greater level of systematic checks and cross-checks than the medical field has thus far accepted. It would also mean challenging the widespread pacesetting and commanding leadership styles that hierarchical cultures encourage—and, as the physician put it, making it “safe for that nurse to tell a doctor he’s made a mistake.”
When leaders operate with dissonant styles, the resulting culture is inevitably toxic. How does it feel to work in such an organization that lacks emotional intelligence? One manager we know described a leader and a toxic organization that ultimately left her physically ill and feeling as if she had lost her competence, confidence, and creativity. The cause was clear: a pacesetting leader who relied on threats and coercion to get things done.
Despite the company having public service and education as its explicit mission, the president focused instead on short-term profit. The company had very little competition, so in this leader’s mind, corners could be cut on quality with no risk of losing customers. Also troubling was that he openly expressed how little he cared about employees’ welfare. “Bring ’em in and burn ’em out,” he liked to say. Worse, he did not respect people; he was a bully. A typical example was the day a junior staff member mentioned to a few people, including the president, that it was her birthday, and offered them a piece of cake. While everyone else smiled and said “Happy Birthday,” the president said loudly to a nearby manager, “What’s this bullshit? Can’t you get your staff to work?” Then, turning to the junior staffer and looking her up and down, he said, “And you sure don’t need the calories in that cake.”
That leader’s negative style underpinned a set of highly destructive cultural norms. For example, as part of their jobs, staff members were expected to be duplicitous, making the customers feel as if they were elite and highly privileged and that the (very expensive) services of the company were the best in the world. In reality, the customers were just regular folks and the services hardly above average. The staff’s forced smiles barely masked the tension they felt—and customers became more and more demanding as they began to realize that the services they received were mediocre. Moreover, the high-profile personalities who were often brought in for the conferences showed up only for cameo appearances, since they didn’t enjoy working with the company either—frustrating both staff (who needed them) and customers (who wanted them). Unable to reconcile reality with the fantasy that they were charged with maintaining, many of the staff found their day-to-day work meaningless and emotionally draining.
The destructive habits in this company created a culture in which people stopped questioning how and why things were done and merely tried to muddle through, day after day, driven by harmful attitudes, rules, and policies. And because the leaders in this toxic organization systematically discouraged attempts to improve the underlying culture, change was all but impossible. Today, this company’s reputation has slipped considerably in the industry, and turnover is at an all-time high.
This sad story doesn’t mean toxic organizations cannot change. Quite the contrary: Change begins when emotionally intelligent leaders actively question the emotional reality and the cultural norms underlying the group’s daily activities and behavior. To create resonance—and results—the leader has to pay attention to the hidden dimensions: people’s emotions, the undercurrents of the emotional reality in the organization, and the culture that holds it all together.
In one large research hospital we worked with, this lesson was learned the hard way, but leadership did learn—and successfully transformed the culture.
The hospital reflected many of the ills experienced by U.S. health care in the late 1990s: increasing demands from patients for quality care and from insurance companies and government agencies for lower costs—demands in conflict with each other. As a result, local communities claimed that the hospital didn’t serve them well, and the hospital was losing business to other healthcare systems. The leadership’s answer was to craft a five-year strategy to overhaul almost every aspect of how it led and managed the institution. They commissioned the design of complicated software to manage financial data. They outsourced functions that could be managed better elsewhere. They moved people around and out with an eye toward efficiency.
But this hospital’s leadership team forgot about the primary foundations for change: attention to the emotional reality and to the culture. 3 They also failed to recognize how the staff felt about the change process itself. They imposed change from above—rational goals, clear mandates, and logical processes. But they ignored the force of the emotional realm: Within two years, the hospital was on the brink of spiraling downward, its vaunted new systems showing little return and turnover having doubled.
Our work with the hospital’s leaders focused on helping them to recognize the dissonance in the organization—and to recognize that the price of such discord could be a failed change effort. Gradually, the leaders began to find ways to let people discuss their feelings about what was and wasn’t working, through a process called dynamic inquiry. To their surprise, the leaders discovered that staff members didn’t believe that the culture—or the leaders themselves—supported real change, risk taking, or learning.
For example, while people were being asked to do things in new ways, the small amount of training they received was considered old-fashioned and irrelevant. In fact, because training had been disdained historically in the organization, people felt discouraged from attending new programs, and therefore could not learn new ways of doing things. Furthermore, staff believed that the change process was hindered by long-standing cultural habits. The confrontational way in which staff routinely treated one another, for instance, often amounted to rudeness and left people feeling beaten up and on the defensive. The atmosphere was rife with back-biting, vendettas, and petty warfare—discord that undermined any positive change program.
By engaging people in a process of discovering the “real,” the hospital leadership took a step in the right direction. They acknowledged that people’s feelings mattered and that the culture itself might need to change, and they provided a venue for people to talk about how to do that. Accordingly, momentum picked up and the tone became more positive. As the conversations continued and the management team committed itself to making critical changes, the staff began taking responsibility for its part in creating the new culture as well. Soon, people were feeling more positive about the change process: Resonance began to grow around the vision, and people responded with enthusiasm. There was a marked increase in attendance and participation at meetings to do with the new strategy, and the atmosphere at the hospital lightened dramatically. In other words, the culture and the emotional reality of this hospital began to improve, fostering positive energy rather than resistance, and resonance rather than dissonance. Today, it’s an institution that has remade itself: Organizational systems are streamlined, turnover is down and patient satisfaction is up, and the resonance-building norms that were established during the change process still foster commitment, high energy, and flexibility. Before the leadership’s emotionally intelligent turnaround, the hospital was a good example of how an organization’s underlying culture can kill even the best-laid plans. If the cultural norms don’t support passionate action, innovation, or resonance, leaders will find themselves fighting an uphill battle.
But perhaps the most unfortunate aspect of organizational dissonance is what it does to the individuals who work there: As their passion diminishes, they can lose touch with their own best qualities. In place of excellence and self-confidence, we’ve seen in such companies displays of false bravado, thoughtless compliance, or open resentment. People show up for work, in body at least, day after day—but they leave their hearts and souls elsewhere.
How can an organization transform itself from a place that discourages people’s best selves from making an appearance into a vibrant workplace where people feel energized and purposeful? That kind of change requires a great leap: from a thorough understanding of the reality to a profound engagement with people’s ideal visions—of both themselves as individuals and as part of an organization. Sometimes, however, to create resonance, a leader first has to fight the organization’s own underlying inertia. How do you do it, though? How does a leader uncover the emotional reality—and sow seeds of the dream—in a way that is motivating, not paralyzing?
Many large companies have processes in place for systematically evaluating employee attitudes, values, and beliefs—a kind of proxy for the emotional reality. These processes can be very helpful, but the problem is that surveys measure only what they set out to measure—and they rarely tap the more subtle layer of subterranean feelings and complex norms that flow through an organization. This blind spot can result in simply measuring what people want to know, but not what they don’t want known. And even when surveys do measure aspects of culture and leadership that are problematic, it takes focused effort and courage to address the issues. Too often, we see the results of such revelatory surveys just set aside.
A process called dynamic inquiry was developed by Cecilia McMillen of the University of Massachusetts and Annie McKee as a potent way to offset the “find what you look for” effect of most surveys and to enable leaders to begin to address the underlying cultural issues that are getting in their way. 4 This method of discovery uncovers an organization’s emotional reality—what people care about; what is helping them, their groups, and the organization to succeed; and what’s getting in the way. Through the process of discovering the truth about their organization, people begin to create a shared language about what’s really going on as well as what they’d like to see—their ideal vision of the company.
Dynamic inquiry involves focused conversations and open-ended questions intended to get at people’s feelings. While this may strike some leaders as a bit removed from the business issues, it is only when people talk about their feelings that they begin to uncover root causes of problems in the culture and the true sources of inspiration around them. Also, when people have authentic conversations about how they feel about their organization, there tends to be a very high level of agreement about what’s working and what’s not. As McMillen says, “People begin to paint a picture of the soul of the organization.” They create a language that captures the real truth about the forces that affect people’s day-to-day lives in the organization as well as their hopes for the future.
From these initial conversations (usually held with both formal and informal leaders at all levels, and with people who have a point of view), themes become apparent that are typically much more meaningful and less generic than those that usually emerge from attitude surveys or more traditional interview processes. These themes, when taken to small groups, tend to spark spirited conversations about the reality of the organization. Perhaps more important, discussions about cultural issues, the emotional reality of an organization, and how it feels to work there usually result in people feeling some ownership of the problems, the dream, and the process of getting from the real to the ideal. And, by focusing not just on what’s wrong with the organization but also on what’s right, people become aligned with a vision for change—and see how their dreams, and their personal contributions to the change process, fit with the big picture.
Once people are engaged in this kind of open dialogue about their culture and their dreams, it is very difficult to put the lid back on the box. Unlike surveys or one-time visioning sessions, dynamic inquiry starts a conversation that has momentum of its own. The creation of a shared language that is based on feelings as well as facts is a powerful driver of change. This shared language provides a sense of unity and resonance, and the resulting momentum helps people to move from talk to action. They feel inspired and empowered, willing to work together to address their collective concerns. This is exactly what happened at an Asian nongovernmental organization (NGO) when a leader we’ll call Lang Chen took on a top role.
Finding the Spirit at Work: Lang Chen and the Asian NGO
Imagine this: Your organization has 220 employees, and you serve a customer base of 150 million people. Needless to say, an organization of those dimensions will have a hefty bureaucracy to support it. That was precisely the problem when Lang Chen took the reins at the Asian division of an international nongovernmental organization.
Although this NGO’s mission of improving women’s and children’s health around the world was inspiring and very motivating for new employees, Lang Chen noticed that typically that initial enthusiasm became lost amid the day-to-day reality of the work. Passion and creativity seemed to fall by the wayside, and this leader sensed that the way people worked together and the systems that guided them were the culprits. The mission of the organization, in fact, seemed buried under its many regulations.
Partly because of the weighty bureaucracy, the pace of work at the NGO was slow and quality mediocre, despite increased demands on the organization and increased criticism from funding agencies and governments. Nothing seemed to happen when it needed to. People displayed the dull complacency that comes with “a job for life” (a common problem in many large NGOs), and there seemed to be little connection between competence and success. There was only vague clarity about what it took to do well in one’s job, and the organization had seemingly lost the capacity to evaluate itself; as long as the rules were followed, people’s strengths and weaknesses went unaddressed. And, in an organization dedicated in part to the needs of women, there were very few women in the office, and fewer still in responsible positions.
Furthermore, there was a real division between the support staff and the people who actually provided the NGO’s services—with the direct service providers getting all the accolades for any successes. In both groups, people were comfortable with the status quo and reluctant to change, even when sometimes urgent circumstances demanded it.
As a result of this environment, some of the NGO’s core values—such as compassion and integrity—were clouded by misunderstanding and old policies. It was clear to Lang Chen that, overall, the staff felt disconnected, and the resonance that once had been a natural by-product of the compelling mission was dwindling. Chen’s challenge was every leader’s: to find out what was working and what was not, and lead people to solutions. But how does a leader fight the inertia of a system? How does she develop an organization’s capacity to assess and monitor itself and to function well in a complex environment? How, in short, does a leader perform the alchemy that transforms an organization?
Lang Chen followed simple principles. She used an inclusive approach, employing dynamic inquiry and involving people in discovering the truth about themselves and the organization. She drew people together around their passion for the work and the dream of what could be: They saw her as visionary, and they followed. She became a model for the changes she wanted to see. Finally, she put systems in place to support new habits and ways of doing things. This last set of actions—changing the systems—was critical in sustaining the changes. As Ruth Jacobs of the Hay Group notes, creating human resource practices that foster emotional intelligence—recruiting and performance management, for instance—is key to supporting resonance and a healthy emotional climate. 5
Emotionally intelligent leaders know that their primal task is to look first to the organizational reality, identifying the issues with the full involvement of key individuals. They take the conversation to the organization as a whole, using engaging processes to get people viscerally involved in unearthing the current reality, while tapping into individual and collective hopes for the future. Like Lang Chen, these leaders enable people to identify both the best aspects of the organization as well as its faults, and they help to create a shared language about the current reality, releasing energy for the move to a shared vision of the future.
Once the cultural reality has been uncovered and explored, the next stage in working toward an emotionally intelligent organization requires defining an ideal vision for the organization that is in synch with individuals’ hopes and dreams for themselves. By acting from a place of emotional intelligence and modeling that behavior, leaders can help their employees embrace an ideal vision for the group. What does an organization look like whose members are attuned to a common vision? Consider Lucasfilm, headquartered in Marin County, California, and the parent company of a number of producer George Lucas’s creative media companies.
Perhaps the first things that strike anyone who meets Gordon Radley, the president of Lucasfilm Ltd., are the small tattoo hash marks on his cheekbone. Those tattoos mark Radley as a member of a tribe in Malawi with whom he lived for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the late 1960s. Thirty years later, he still stays in touch with his friends among the Malawi tribe, even making small grants to help them put tin roofs on their wattle huts or start a small business. “It’s unlike any place we on the outside know, yet it’s a coherent world that stayed very much the same,” says Radley, telling of a recent visit back to Malawi. “Being there put me in touch with how much I love these people. Being part of a tribe has always had some special meaning.”
Likewise, that almost tribal sense of belonging to a special group, of inhabiting a unique world together, characterizes places people love to work. For Radley, one of his responsibilities as a leader is to nurture and maintain the company culture at Lucasfilm. Of the empire George Lucas created and owns, Lucasfilm is the parent company for the legendary special-effects house Industrial Light and Magic, as well as a string of other creative media companies in sectors ranging from video games to sound systems for theaters.
For Radley, the best corporate culture is not unlike the tribal feeling he experienced in the Peace Corps. Radley’s mission: “How do you create that tribal feeling? It’s a hard thing to do, because it’s so evanescent it disappears as soon as you draw attention to it. But we want to make sure how we feel about what we do is just as important as what we do.”
One way such feelings emerge can be through creating extraordinary moments, experiences people go through together that become part of the shared mythology. “A few years ago, the company was feeling some very rough edges,” Radley recalls. “So I organized an all-company meeting. It had never happened before, getting everyone together in one room—we had to meet in the auditorium of a local community center. I started the meeting off in a routine way, with twenty minutes of financial results, corporate updates, and the like. And then I suddenly pulled back a curtain, and there was the cast of the Broadway musical Stomp! No one had been expecting anything like it.”
For two hours the entire company was galvanized by the performance, an entirely nonverbal, all-percussive enactment of spontaneous attunement. Stomp!’s ingenious choreography shows how, using prosaic objects like brooms, buckets, mops, and plungers, a single person can initiate a rhythm that others can join and elaborate in a gorgeous, creative synchrony. It’s a wordless ode to the power of a group in resonance.
“It was an electric moment,” says Radley. “It bonded everyone, without a word being spoken. I did it because I wanted to bring everyone together, to create a special sense that we’re all involved in working together for something bigger than just ourselves. We want to create a culture where people have compassion for each other. It’s like the Peace Corps: We’re serving each other. A great company culture has empathy—hopefully that becomes a shared value. You do these little symbolic things and hope they set the tone.”
That moment exemplifies what Radley calls “guerrilla development,” the subtle shaping of the company’s culture. But the fragile nature of a group’s culture means the shaping cannot be forced. As Radley says, “You set the table and hope people will come and sit down.”
For instance, Radley had to struggle with his own senior leaders at an early company meeting to get the chairs put in a huge circle. “The seating itself signaled that tribal feeling,” he recalls. “We had everyone introduce themselves and tell where they grew up. By the end of that introductory circle, everyone had the sense that we had come together from all over to be part of this group at this moment.”
Such transitory moments of good feeling, of course, mean little if they are not matched by the ongoing workaday reality. As a company, Lucasfilm has a reputation as a very desirable place to work—the kind of reputation that gives the company an edge in attracting and retaining talent in the San Francisco Bay Area’s competitive employment environment. The companies that form Lucasfilm are among the few that have shown up on “Best Companies to Work For” lists in such magazines as Fortune and Working Mother.
The degree of an organization’s “tribal feel” can be a good indication of how well it has identified its ideal vision and aligned people around that common purpose. But how do leaders help their organizations to unearth an ideal vision in the first place? They begin with a close scrutiny of themselves—of their personal dreams and of their ideal visions for the organizations that they lead.
Inspiration and the Hour of the Rat
Connecting with a vision that can build resonance starts within, as Antony Burgmans, co-chairman of Unilever, tells us. “As we launched into our growth strategy, I realized that I didn’t feel right: something was missing, and I knew we would need to look again at our plans. I trusted my feeling—you learn to listen to that inner voice. So, I looked for the source of my uneasiness. We were doing all the right things: a new, focused strategy; shareholder support; a new organization structure; and good people in place. But something was wrong—the critical piece was missing. What I saw was that even though we had a excellent change strategy, and an inspiring vision, what was really required to bring about change at Unilever was a new culture, a new leadership mindset, and new behaviors.”
Niall FitzGerald, co-chairman and co-creator of the transformation process, weighs in: “We knew where we needed to go, that was completely clear. We had all the organizational pieces in place—but it was like standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon. You know you have to get to the other side, but to do so you know you will have to take a big leap, then build a bridge. You feel anticipation, even deep uneasiness, but the excitement of the vision calls on you to build that bridge, take that leap. I paid attention to the feelings—especially the ones that let me know that something wasn’t quite right, not yet. These feelings were important—for me as a leader, they led me to see what we needed to do. At Unilever, the bridge we needed to build was all about people: we needed to tap into their passion; we needed them to see their business in entirely new ways; and we needed them to develop very different leadership behaviors.”
FitzGerald’s and Burgmans’s soul searching led to a radically fresh approach to transforming the company, starting with changing the mindset of Unilever’s top leaders. Today, Unilever is in the midst of profound change—but unlike many change efforts, there is tremendous clarity throughout the organization about what is being done and why. People know they are part of the change, and they know they need to change too. In terms of financial and organizational measures, they are ahead of schedule. All this because two leaders listened to the voice within.
To connect with the kind of vision that can move a culture toward resonance, emotionally intelligent leaders start by looking inside—at what they feel, think, and sense about their organizations. They act as highly sensitive instruments to connect with the company’s ideal vision and mission, and they notice the gaps between what could be and what is. This isn’t intuition—it’s using emotional intelligence to observe and interpret the subtle clues about what’s really going on, and it offers leaders a perspective that goes beyond other kinds of data about the company.
Tapping into that kind of insight can come more easily if a leader makes a habit of retreating to a quiet place to reflect on a regular basis. Reaching into the wisdom of the unconscious mind is like trying to pump water from a deep well: It helps to keep the pump primed—in this case by regularly spending time in reflection. Often that deep wisdom comes in the middle of the night, during what we call the hour of the rat—that dark, quiet time of the night when no one is around and things start to gnaw at you. It is those times of quiet reflection that can begin to offer a leader answers to nagging questions: “What’s bothering me so much that I just can’t seem to let it go, even at home? What’s confusing, muddled, ambiguous or just plain irritating? Where is the passion, excitement, and meaning in my work? What do I really believe in?”
By examining the sources of their anxiety and their passion—and by focusing on their own dreams—leaders can begin to identify aspects of the organization’s culture, of its overarching mission and vision, and of its leadership (including their own) that need to change. Only through articulating for themselves what keeps people in the organization—beyond just “a job”—can leaders connect with the kind of resonant vision that people will be able to see and feel.
To create the vision of a company, emotionally intelligent leaders need to move beyond a solo scrutiny of an organization’s vision to drawing on the collective wisdom of followers. Side by side with the rest of the organization, leaders co-create the vision that will serve to rally and energize the group as a whole. Involving people in a deliberate study of themselves and the organization—first by looking at the reality and then at the ideal vision—builds resonance and sustainable change.
Consider the examples that follow of leaders who have helped their organizations to rally around a common vision of what could be.
Attunement, Not Alignment
• Keki Dadiseth took over as chairman of Hindustan Lever Limited (HLL) at a time of rapid change in the Indian business environment. Successful and leading edge in its management practices and results over a period of time, the company nevertheless needed to shed a culture which, in the new environment, was seen as bureaucratic, closed door, and lacking in transparency. Activities were highlighted almost as often as achievements, and cultural norms supported the hierarchy, rather than full empowerment. Thus it was often difficult to get things done speedily. Although the company had a well-defined management development process, queries were raised regarding how people were promoted or rewarded because there was a perceived lack of transparency.
Keki Dadiseth took this challenge head on: He moved toward the ideal by becoming an exemplar himself. He modeled the changes he wanted to see, involving people in the process of creating a new vision and a new reality. His concept was centrifuged leadership—that the center of gravity was not just the chairman; everyone was central to success. Within a year, the culture changed, such that people acknowledged the openness, trust, and empowerment within the company. HLL continues, as in the past, to be one of Unilever’s most profitable and highly regarded businesses.
• The UNICEF immunization project in India was doing critically important work, but its Chief of Health, Monica Sharma, felt that the program itself needed a shot in the arm. While the project was inherently inspiring to the staff working closely with the health teams who immunized children in poor villages, most of the organization’s 400 staff people—clerks, accountants, and administrators—were too far removed from that energizing field work to feel inspired. Monica decided to bring the excitement of the front lines into the back office, so she devised a plan and encouraged all office staff to spend several days, regularly, in a district where the real work—immunizing children—was going on. The top leadership of the office—Representative Eimi Watanabe and her two deputies, Thomas McDermott and Lukas Hendratta—were instrumental in this success because they each personally backed her fully and encouraged this initiative. As a result, staff members got to experience for themselves the mission and ideal vision that underpinned their work, and they were able to bond with each other around a more unified purpose.
• The major restructuring process that the University of Pennsylvania undertook in the 1990s—although necessary—was painful for many of its staff. Until the changes, most people had felt a very special connection with Penn, an Ivy League school, and considered their employment there to be a job for life. But as roles and responsibilities shifted dramatically, people were shaken out of years of complacency—and security. Mostly, they felt demoralized about losing the image they had had of themselves. To keep Penn on track with its change agenda, President Judith Rodin and Executive Vice President John Fry looked to a broader agenda for inspiration that could be shared with the entire community. It was that word—community—that got them started on a process that created resonance and engaged people both inside and outside the university around a common vision.
Leaders often talk about wanting to get their people “aligned” with their strategy. But that word suggests a mechanical image of getting all the pencils pointing in the same direction, like a magnetic field lining up the polarity of molecules. It isn’t that simple. Strategies, couched as they are in the dry language of corporate goals, speak mainly to the rational brain, the neocortex. Strategic visions (and the plans that follow from them) are typically linear and limited, bypassing the elements of heart and passion essential for building commitment.
As each of the previous examples illustrates, getting people to really embrace change requires attunement—alignment with the kind of resonance that moves people emotionally as well as intellectually. The challenge is in how to attune people to your vision and then to your business strategy in a way that arouses passion. Emotionally intelligent leaders know that this attunement requires something more than simply making people aware of the strategy itself. It requires a direct connection with people’s emotional centers.
Attunement, rather than mere alignment, offers the motivating enthusiasm for an organizational vision. When this attunement takes hold, people feel the heat of a collective excitement, of many people being enthusiastic about their work. A vision that “tunes people in”—that creates resonance—builds organizational harmony and people’s capacity to act collectively.
The invisible threads of a compelling vision weave a tapestry that binds people together more powerfully than any strategic plan. And people, not the business plan alone, determine the outcome. Success depends on what an organization’s people care about, what they do, and how they work together.
Warren Bennis, University of Southern California professor and renowned leadership expert, has called attunement “managing attention through the vision”—something he says is the leader’s fundamental responsibility, as is using the group ideal to focus people’s efforts. 6 Attunement is especially important when the organization is undergoing significant change in how things are done—and is equally critical whenever a vision that built an organization’s initial success grows stale and needs freshening.
Attunement starts with involving people deeply in the process of looking at gaps between the organization’s emotional reality and people’s ideal visions of the organization, including visions of their own interactions within it.
However, the leader must go one step further and put the people in the organization in charge of the change process itself. That’s what each of the leaders in the previous examples did. Let’s take a more in-depth look at each of those scenarios and see how these leaders attuned their organizations to a common vision—and brought about lasting change.
Be the Change You Want to See:
Keki Dadiseth and Hindustan Lever
Keki Dadiseth, the new chairman of Hindustan Lever Limited, took over at a time of profound change in the Indian business environment. HLL had a rich heritage of management excellence and business growth and was regarded by its peers as a company that they most wanted to emulate.
Although HLL was well regarded and successful, Dadiseth quickly realized that in the present liberalization scenario in India, the company needed to change quickly and shed an ingrained culture that the new environment saw as bureaucratic and lacking in transparency.
To make inroads into such a deeply ingrained culture and attune the company to his vision, Dadiseth knew it would take more than just talk, new policies, or even training. He needed to demonstrate consistently the behaviors he wished to see. A framed Japanese print in his office came to be his motto: “None of us is as smart as all of us.” From the outset, he used the engaging style of affiliative leadership, backed up by a healthy dose of the democratic style—a combination that was not very common in the company. He gave up his scheduling diary and kept an open-door policy, never denying an employee request to talk with him. And he really listened when people talked: He took counsel from them, incorporating their views into the decisions that were being made. He broke down the hierarchy by eating with staff in the cafeteria, and he connected with people on a personal level. He came to know whose son was ill, and whose daughter had won a prize at school. He learned who really cared about their work, and he praised them publicly. And where he saw difficulties, he encouraged and empowered people to come up with their own solutions. He “centrifuged” decision making—pushing it as far down the organization as possible. In general, he called on people to look deeply into themselves to discover what was right for the business—and to act on it.
Although Dadiseth’s new style of leadership was at first suspect, soon it became clear it was not an act: This was the real thing. He was so available, so accessible, and so transparent that no one had to speculate or try to maneuver around him. His connections with people were sincere, and the outcome of these positive, very human, relationships was mutual trust and respect. What’s more, it spread: Other leaders began to see the value in redirecting people’s energy toward group commitment. People began emulating Dadiseth’s stance, and the norms of the culture gradually shifted toward openness and mutuality. The “managing up” mindset was broken: There was little time wasted in unnecessary speculation, and things started getting done faster and better.
Over time, as people began supporting each other through successes and difficulties alike, the cooperative spirit in the company increased. It suddenly felt safer to take on responsibility, making it easier for people to innovate and to become creative about their part of the business. From factory worker to senior manager, ideas began to flow in all parts and levels of the company, and efficiency and effectiveness increased.
While building strong, open relationships in the company, Dadiseth was careful to keep his eye on his goal: to improve the organization’s performance. As he put it, “Comfort in relationship brings discomfort in accountability,” and he made sure that relationships didn’t get too cozy. So even as he called on the company’s leadership to see their connections to employees as important to the business, he also insisted on a new sense of accountability: to the company, to one another, and to their own values.
As a result, things began to move more quickly and smoothly. Decisions that had taken weeks in the past now took hours or even minutes, even though more people were involved. Commitment to the decisions went up, partly because of the high degree of involvement, but also because people began to trust leadership more. People now found it harder to hide or to blame others. Relationships had become based more on trust and real connection, and leaders started taking more responsibility for themselves.
Within a year, performance across a range of behavioral criteria improved dramatically. The speed and effectiveness of strategy implementation were markedly increased, and the growth agenda was owned by virtually everyone in the company; people acted on it at all levels. Keki Dadiseth had led by doing. He demonstrated principles of the new organization that he and his team hoped to create: transparency, inclusiveness, honesty, rigor, and results; accurate and honest assessment of what was working and what was not; and linking rewards to accomplishments. By essentially using the powerful symbol that his office represented in order to model change, Dadiseth had helped people to understand and act on new standards of accountability. In short, he changed the ground rules, attuned people to a new vision for the organization, and created resonance.
Throughout this organizational alchemy, Keki Dadiseth took the time needed to follow some basic rules that can trigger change:
• Focus people’s attention on the underlying issues and solutions to create common ground and understanding about what needs to change and why. By helping to articulate problems and surfacing the covert, hidden habits that people take for granted, the real state of the organization becomes apparent and is a motivating force for change. Making the covert overt gives people a language to discuss what is working and what isn’t in the organization, and common ground to stand on while looking to the future.
• Focus on the ideal, combining resonance-building leadership styles to get people talking about their hopes for the future and to tap into the dedication people feel for the organization. Connecting people’s personal goals with a meaningful vision makes it safe to explore ways to reach the vision.
• Move from talk to action. This starts with the leader. Bringing people together around a dream, moving from talk to action, and modeling new behaviors—this is the leader’s charge. And it is something that UNICEF’s Monica Sharma understood as well.
Living the Mission: Monica Sharma and UNICEF
In 1989, when she became Chief of Health of UNICEF’s Health Section immunization project in India, Monica Sharma understood the importance of the work the organization was doing. Far too many children in that country were dying needlessly from common and preventable childhood diseases such as measles—and her project’s goal was to change that sad fact. 7 But early on, Monica sensed something that troubled her: Most of the 400 employees felt far away from the organization’s mission and the inspiring work that they themselves supported in their day-to-day jobs. Because most staff worked at desks in the main office, they didn’t have access to the sense of purpose that the health teams felt as they moved from village to village immunizing children.
Monica came up with a solution that would truly attune people to the common mission—by connecting them emotionally to their work and therefore with their own ideal visions of their purpose in the organization. “I hatched a scheme to get absolutely everyone involved in the field work of the project,” Monica told us. She lobbied UNICEF’s senior management to let her send every one of the over 400 office-bound staff people to work in village immunization clinics. Senior leadership supported her plan. Representative Eimi Watanabe and her deputies Thomas McDermott and Lukas Hendratta recognized that especially in a large bureaucracy, if there was going to be innovation and change, they needed to back the change agent. And they did.
Staff members were able to see—many for the first time—what their work was really about. They helped gather children together and bring them to the clinics; they saw, up close, the health teams at work. For the first time they were able to feel the raw emotions that underlay their daily work: excitement and hope, alongside the doubts and fears of the mothers, who themselves were scared by the syringes and were frightened for their children. Gradually, the workers in the home office came to see that each of their roles contributed to saving the life of a child, and that even seemingly unimportant or routine tasks were actually critical.
The story of one UNICEF driver is a poignant case in point. Whereas in the past he had seen his job as simply to shuttle the health team from one district to the next—never really connecting with the people in those villages—once he had spent time working in a village clinic, everything changed. He began to take a new interest in what was happening while he waited to take his passengers back to the office. He began to talk more to the workers and the village mothers. He saw the children’s and their mothers’ fear, and he saw how difficult it was for some mothers to comfort their children.
On his own, the driver started gathering small groups of mothers around his car, talking to them about why the immunizations were so important, reassuring them about side effects, and advising on how to calm the children down. He created his own miniseminars, contributing palpably to the success of each clinic. The driver’s impromptu work resulted in calmer, more informed parents—and clinics that ran with more ease and efficiency. Moreover, he improved how the doctors and nurses on the medical team viewed the contributions of office staff. And clearly, the driver himself felt a far deeper commitment to his work.
That deeper commitment made an enormous difference one day when he drove a team to a village where, after several hours, the vaccine still had not arrived. In the past, the driver might have shrugged and taken the team back to the office. After all, it wasn’t his job to get the vaccine there, nor would he necessarily be compensated for working overtime to help with the situation. Now, however, he understood how disappointed his “class” of mothers and children would be if they didn’t receive the vaccine they’d been waiting for. He set off on his own to a larger but distant village, and in a few hours he returned with the vaccine.
The driver was acting on the new cultural norms: Get involved, look for places to contribute, and live the mission. By getting people at all levels to embrace and attune to their mission, Monica Sharma fostered resonance that would far outlast any simple change program. In fact, the staff had joined her in creating that vision of their mission. Monica’s visionary leadership style helped people to see how their own small contributions—whether back in the office or out on the road—actually affected the children. She realized that, in order for people to make their efforts meaningful, they need to see and feel the results of their work, to see the ways in which what they do supports what they believe.
At the same time, it was possible that a one-time visit to the field might simply fade in people’s memory if the changes stopped there. But Monica understood that in order for these inspiring moments to translate into new ways of operating together—into new cultural norms that would be sustainable over time—people would need more. They would have to talk over their experiences, to share the feelings and their learning, and to tell each other the stories that would come to define their new culture.
To that end, Monica held open meetings on weekends at which people could come together to share their experiences. Then, as people began to talk about the challenges they encountered and ask for advice, Monica used a coaching leadership style to model interactions: People began to learn to coach each other. These meetings were marked by laughter, encouragement, and camaraderie. People were engaged and inspired—and felt wonderful about their work together.
Even now, years later, some of the staff in India remember Monica’s initiative as a turning point—perhaps the most inspiring of their work lives. What mattered, too, was their leader’s confidence in them, her belief that they could go to the districts and help, even though they were not trained. That confidence enabled many—like the driver—to go beyond their own expectations of themselves. And they remember that Monica made herself personally available to them, supporting their learning all through the process.
Of course, Monica knew exactly what she was doing: She was attuning people with the mission that exemplified UNICEF values, and providing them tangible ways to make the vision a reality. By working with people’s emotions and building on their very human need for meaningful work, Monica helped to attune people’s values and contributions to the greater mission. That is resonant leadership in action: engaging people’s passion and connecting them with a vision of what could be. Monica Sharma fulfilled her primal task as a leader.
But what about when an organization requires adjustments that reach far beyond attitude, adjustments that involve profound changes in the way people do their jobs? In the midst of that kind of change, resonance with a vision is sometimes the one thing that holds people together, staves off exhaustion, and keeps people focused and positive. We saw this at the University of Pennsylvania as it faced a crisis in the 1990s.
Attuning with the Community: Judith Rodin and John Fry and the University of Pennsylvania
In the mid- to late 1990s, the University of Pennsylvania underwent a major restructuring process in which staff members’ roles were completely changed, shaking many people out of years of complacency while their seemingly secure future disappeared. People felt worried about losing their jobs, but equally important, they felt demoralized about losing the image they had had of themselves as “privileged” to be working at Penn, an Ivy League school. Although the restructuring was important for the future of the school, the process itself made people fearful and reticent. 8
President Judith Rodin and Executive Vice President John Fry recognized that they needed to do something to mobilize people’s energy around keeping Penn on track with its change agenda. So they looked to a broader agenda—to the community outside the university—for the inspiration that would engage staff members’ hearts and minds and attune them to a common vision.
Their first move was to announce that it was the university’s responsibility to contribute to its outside community, rather than simply taking from it. It was a position that Penn—and the West Philadelphia community that surrounded it—hadn’t heard for many years. In fact, the university and the town had long experienced a strained relationship, arguing about when and where development and construction should take place, whose job it was to maintain a clean and safe environment, and who was responsible for dealing with increased crime.
Rodin and Fry’s vision was more than rhetoric; it led to concrete action. They worked with city officials, school teachers and principals, and police and real estate professionals to create new, brightly lit streets and parks, to enhance the quality of education in the local schools, and to make it possible for residents to access funds to restore their homes. They created a mortgage program that encouraged Penn professors and staff to move into the area surrounding the university, and they focused on developing new hotels, retail stores, and services that were attractive to residents and visitors alike. They also undertook an ambitious effort to employ local residents, and to contract with minority-owned and women-owned West Philadelphia-based businesses in construction projects and other business dealings.
As the benefits of getting onboard with this new strategy became obvious to people inside Penn, staff came together with energy and passion around the change process. Who could argue with building friendly relationships with the neighborhood? Who could argue with the new parks and lights, the dramatic decrease in crime, the attractive renovation of homes, and the chance to move to a vibrant, exciting urban area with the help of creative financing? The values driving the strategy—urban renewal and a commitment to a vibrant, diverse community—were intrinsically appealing and rewarding to people, making them feel good again about being part of Penn.
What that broad-based move did for West Philadelphia is obvious today in the way the city looks and functions. But what it did inside the university was equally impressive. By engaging people at the university in the West Philadelphia initiative, Rodin and Fry were able to also engage them in other, more difficult issues. Staff came to understand that their leaders really did believe in the values at the heart of the change process, and people began to trust them to carry through the more difficult internal change agenda with integrity. In the end, Rodin and Fry helped to create an organizational resonance in which people felt invested in the strategy because it was attuned to their personal values. That made the vision for change not only meaningful, but sustainable as well.
The notion that emotional intelligence is important at work is not new, though it’s only been recently that studies have begun to show how key it is to the success of any organization. Indeed, emotional intelligence and resonance in a workplace may draw on the ancient human organizing principle of the primal band—those groups of fifty to one hundred people who roamed the land with a common bond and whose survival depended on close understanding and cooperation.
In some ways, a band of hunter-gatherers on the ancient plains is not so different from the teams at Hindustan Lever, UNICEF, or Penn. In any resonant human group, people find meaning in their connection and in their attunement with one another. In the best organizations, people share a vision of who they are collectively, and they share a special chemistry. They have the feeling of a good fit, of understanding and being understood, and a sense of well-being in the presence of the others.
It is the responsibility of emotionally intelligent leaders to create such resonant organizations. These leaders involve people in discovering the truth about themselves and the organization: They recognize the truth about what is really going on, and they help people to name what is harmful and to build on the organization’s strengths. At the same time, they bring people together around a dream of what could be, and in the process create and demonstrate new ways for people to work together. They build resonance, and then they ensure that resonance can be sustained through the systems that regulate the ebb and flow of relations and work in the organization.
There are a number of rules of engagement that our research and our work with organizations suggest will help to create a resonant, emotionally intelligent, and effective culture. The research produced three key findings: discovering the emotional reality, visualizing the ideal, and sustaining emotional intelligence. Each is explored in some detail in the following sections.
DISCOVERING THE EMOTIONAL REALITY
• Respect the group’s values and the organization’s integrity. Visions change, but as the vision evolves, the leader needs to be sure that the “sacred center”—what everyone holds as paramount—remains intact. That’s the first challenge: knowing what the sacred center actually is—from the perspective of others, not just oneself. The second challenge is seeing clearly what must change, even when it is held dear, and getting other people to see it too. If core beliefs, mindsets, or culture really need to change, people need to drive that change themselves. It cannot be forced, so when people enter into such a change process, they need to be personally and powerfully motivated—preferably by hope and a dream, not fear. A visionary leader can impact this process positively by honoring the feelings and beliefs of the people around him, while steadfastly demonstrating the benefit of moving toward the dream.
• Slow down in order to speed up. A target-shooting coach we know tells his students, “If you’re in a combat situation, you can’t miss fast enough to save your life.” So too with building resonance and an emotionally intelligent organization—the shotgun approach to change doesn’t work. The process of slowing down and bringing people into the conversation about their systems and their culture is one we don’t see enough in organizations but that nevertheless is critical. Processes such as dynamic inquiry require a supportive, coaching approach and democratic style: The leader must really listen to what people have to say about the culture and the emotional reality of the organization. Both the coaching style—where a leader deeply listens to individuals—and the democratic style—where a group in dialogue builds consensus—can ensure that people are brought into the change process in a way that builds their commitment. Emotionally intelligent leaders rely on these styles as a way to slow things down enough to get a strong sense of exactly what’s needed to give people the support they need to flourish.
• Start at the top with a bottom-up strategy. Top leadership must be committed to facing the truth about the emotional reality of the organization, and they must be committed to creating resonance around a vision of the ideal. But that’s not enough: A bottom-up strategy is needed as well, because resonance only develops when everyone is attuned to the change. This means engaging formal and informal leaders from all over the organization in conversations about what is working, what is not, and how exciting it would be if the organization could move more in the direction of what is working. Taking time out to discuss these kinds of issues is a powerful intervention. It gets people thinking and talking, and shows them the way. Once the excitement and buy-in builds, it’s more possible to move from talk to action. The enthusiasm provides momentum. But the movement needs to be directed: toward the dream, toward collective values, and toward new ways of working together. Transparent goals, an open change process, involvement of as many people as possible, and modeling new behaviors provide a top-down, bottom-up jump-start for resonance.
VISUALIZING THE IDEAL
• Look inside. To formulate a vision that will resonate with others, leaders need to pay attention, starting by tuning in to their own feelings and the feelings of others. The facts alone—for instance, what is happening in the marketplace—do not provide enough information to create a meaningful vision that will touch people’s hearts. To do that, a leader needs to “see” at the level of emotion, then craft a meaningful vision with which people can identify on a deep and personal level.
• Don’t align—attune. For a vision to be compelling, it needs to touch people’s hearts. People need to see, feel, and touch the values and the vision of the organization to make these abstractions meaningful. Tuning people in to a meaningful vision has integrity at its heart: People need to feel as if they can reach for the organization’s dream without compromising their own dreams, their own beliefs, and their values.
• People first, then strategy. Leaders who use resonance-building styles model norms that support commitment, involvement, active pursuit of the vision, and healthy, productive work relationships. They create connection by focusing on what people really want and need, and by deliberately building a culture that supports good health in the tribe. When a leader focuses on people, emotional bonds are created that are the ground in which resonance is sown—and people will follow that leader in good times and bad. Resonance creates an invisible but powerful bond between people based on a belief in what they are doing and a belief in one another. For that to happen, people need to connect with one another in real time—not just online—around their work. They need to talk, laugh, share stories, and—just perhaps—build a dream together.
SUSTAINING EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
• Turn vision into action. At every opportunity, leaders need to demonstrate what the vision looks like, what it feels like, and how people can live it today as well as in the future. They use themselves as instruments of discovery and change, get close to the process, and don’t let go until they reach the goal. Ideally, in each interaction, each decision, leaders act consistently with their own values and with the values of the organization they intend to create. They lead through coaching, vision, democracy, and respect for the people around them. And they call on others to live up to their own values and the mission of the organization.
In addition to the primal leader’s stance, there are other necessary steps for turning vision into action: changing organizational structures and job designs, changing relationship norms, reshaping systems and performance expectations to better match the vision, and making what people do fit better with the organization’s mission.
• Create systems that sustain emotionally intelligent practices. People matter, but so do systems, rules, and procedures. Reminders of what is acceptable and what is not are powerful drivers of behavior, be these policies and procedures (that are actually enforced) or attention to the right leadership behaviors. Specifically, for an organization to sustain emotionally intelligent practices, the rules, regulations, and human resource practices have to be totally in synch with the desired outcomes. There’s no sense hoping for emotionally intelligent leadership when in fact it is not recognized in the performance management systems or reward systems—so change the rules, if need be, to reinforce the vision.
• Manage the myths of leadership. Myths and legends withstand the vagaries of the day-to-day grind—and the upheaval of change. When the right myths are in place—that is, those that support emotional intelligence and resonance—people have an easier time holding on to a positive emotional climate, even in the face of adversity. Leaders have an enormous impact on the overall emotions of an organization, and they are often at the center of the organization’s stories. Managing the myths, the legends, and the symbols of the office can be a powerful driver of change. By using the symbolic power of their role to model emotional intelligence, leaders can create new, positive myths through even small gestures and actions.
Creating organizations that are emotionally intelligent is ultimately the leader’s responsibility. It is up to leaders to help the organization identify its reality—including the cultural norms that hinder it—and then to explore the ideal vision of what could be and to help members of the organization uncover their own roles in that vision. And it is leaders who attune people to the vision and begin taking action toward change.
Emotionally intelligent leaders who use resonance-building leadership styles and create norms that foster healthy, effective working relationships (rather than using styles that breed fear and cynicism) will release a powerful force: the collective energy of the organization to pursue any business strategy. These kinds of leaders build with positives: They craft a vision with heartfelt passion, they foster an inspiring organizational mission that is deeply woven into the organizational fabric, and they know how to give people a sense that their work is meaningful.