Chapter 10
Tend the Soil ~ Mencius
Around Forum: 2012. When Ed left and our new CEO took over, we on Forum’s executive team knew we’d have to pull up our socks, ready at all times to discuss in detail the performance of our respective areas of the business. We went at it with a good will and socks pulled high. Unfortunately, each month the earnings projections for quarter, half, and year dropped a little more, falling well short of originally promised amounts. Our CEO was always scrupulously well-informed about the gaps; problem was, he had little idea what to do about them. Neither, it turned out, did we. We came up with plenty of ideas, most of which could be filed under “S” for “Sell harder”: lead-generation campaigns, sales incentives, beefing up sales pursuit teams, and so on. I had my own group, R&D, devote more time to sales support while keeping product development going as best we could. But nothing seemed to help much.
Meanwhile our boss was demanding ever-more-frequent reports and rescue plans. His focus was accountability: he didn’t think we had enough of it. When a team assessment pointed to lack of accountability as one of our shortcomings, he seemed to feel vindicated.
Looking back on it, I can see we were all running around trying to reap more corn from a field that hadn’t been tilled or watered for some time. The boss told us to be accountable, and we felt accountable, so we reaped more vigorously. But swing the sickle as hard as you like: if the crop is meager, you won’t get much. And in fact—again, this is clear only in hindsight—the field hadn’t been truly well-tilled for more than a decade. The pressure for short-term results had risen with the Pearson purchase in 2000 and had only intensified since then, hindering efforts to foster long-term success factors such as good people, innovative products, and happy clients. It’s not that our various corporate owners hadn’t invested in us; it’s just that their investments had gone mostly toward sickles rather than water and plows.
One might draw the moral that there’s little an individual leader, let alone an employee, can do to counteract faceless corporate forces. I am more optimistic. For one thing, Forum eventually emerged from the slump and, under new leadership and combined with another respected training firm, began to rise again. It would be trite to say “better than ever”; still, when I had lunch the other day with an old colleague—a freelance facilitator who delivers the workshops of many training providers—he opined that the company’s content is still the best out there. The efforts of my team (not to mention all the R&D teams since Forum began) to keep product development going through the rough patches had, I think, a lot to do with maintaining that high quality.
For another thing, our influence as individuals exists and persists apart from any organization to which we happen to belong at a given time. You may not be able to turn an entire company’s performance around, but if you have a reputation as a cultivator, then not only will your projects be more successful, more people will want to hire and work with you, leading to greater personal success for you in the long run. Take Ed: he went on to accept a leadership role with a global consultancy and, having retired from there, now travels the world as an adviser to nonprofits and NGOs. And everyone else from that executive team is doing something similarly valuable and rewarding. In our years at Forum, we learned how to sow, till, and prune. Today we’re reaping the results, and the fields are full.
Pulling on Rice Shoots
[There was a man] who worried that his rice shoots weren’t growing fast enough, and so went around pulling at them. At the end of the day, he returned home exhausted and said to his family: I’m worn out. I’ve been helping the rice grow. (Mencius III.2)1
Mencius, the best-known Confucian, lived roughly two centuries after the philosopher whose ideas he developed (see “The Sage: Mencius,” here). Like Confucius, he was a roving intellectual sought by rulers for advice on how to lead in times of turmoil. His advice might be summed up thus: “Get your heart right, and the rest will follow.”
One of the most analyzed passages in the Mencius focuses on ch’i (or qi). Meaning “life force” or “vital energy,” ch’i is the basis for much of Chinese medicine. Qigong—literally, “life-force cultivation”—is a system of physical forms and motion used to help ch’i flow and flourish.* Daven Lee, a Taoist practitioner and instructor in Santa Fe, explains that the central idea of qigong is maintaining harmony between yang and yin: up and down, sky and earth, outer and inner. In the West we tend to be yang-oriented, rewarded for running around in busy accomplishment, smiling and shining and being “on.” But equally important, says Daven, is our ability to slow down, draw the curtains (actually or figuratively), and turn inward to the quiet, self-reflective yin. The buried seed gathering nutrients in winter is invisible; it is that long nourishment in darkness, however, which results in the flower we see blooming in summer. Qigong practice is intended to create this sort of harmony—up with down, outer with inner—through precise movements that circulate and nurture ch’i.
Kung-sun Ch’ou, one of Mencius’ disciples, asks him what he means by the “ch’i-flood” and how to cultivate it. Here’s what Mencius says:
It’s ch’i at its limits: vast and relentless. Nourish it with fidelity and allow it no injury—then it fills the space between Heaven and earth . . .
You must devote yourself to this ch’i-flood without forcing it. Don’t let it out of your mind, but don’t try to help it grow and flourish either.
If you do, you’ll be acting like that man from Sung who worried that his rice shoots weren’t growing fast enough, and so went around pulling at them. At the end of the day, he returned home exhausted and said to his family: I’m worn out. I’ve been helping the rice grow. His son ran out to look and found the fields all withered and dying.2
According to scholar David Hinton, the book that bears Mencius’ name was very possibly penned by the sage himself, or if not, is a pretty faithful rendition of his actual words.3 Although written in the third person, the chapters are filled with anecdotes that convey a first-person perspective, making us feel as though we’re listening in as Mencius travels around, visiting and conversing with emperors, dukes, and students. Government and leadership are his constant themes; so are family relations and friendship. Like his inspirer, he extols ren (humaneness) as the supreme moral quality, but while Confucius preferred to stay focused on outward behavior, Mencius looks within to the humane heart and mind (which, you’ll recall, are the same word in classical Chinese). Per Hinton, Mencius sees the heart-mind as naturally good and therefore believes the key to a flourishing society is leadership “that allows our inborn nobility to flourish of itself.”4 But it’s not enough to behave virtuously: the true leader rejoices in virtue, causing others to rejoice as well. When that happens, says Mencius, everything falls into place without struggle or strain, for “all beneath Heaven is transformed.”5
We laugh at the silly man tugging on rice shoots to make them grow, but we’ve all done it. Executives facing shortfalls in the numbers throw incentives at the salesforce in an attempt to boost revenue fast. Project managers facing missed deliverables either plead for more resources or drive the team harder. Nor is this attitude restricted to the workplace; when something goes wrong in a personal relationship, there, too, we want to fix it. What “fix it” looks like will depend on our habitual approach to such things—some will get angry, some will suggest couples therapy, others will bolt for the door—but whatever we choose to do, it’s likely to be aimed at solving the immediate problem as we perceive it. Rice shoots not tall enough? Give ’em a yank. Still not tall enough? Yank harder.
Mencius goes on to say:
In all beneath Heaven, there are few who can resist helping the rice shoots grow. Some think nothing they do will help, so they ignore them. They are the ones who don’t even bother to weed. Some try to help them grow: they are the ones who pull at them. It isn’t just that they aren’t making things better—they’re actually making them worse!6
Just as bad as pulling on the shoots is neglecting to weed the rice paddy in the belief that “nothing will help.” While some Eastern philosophers (most notably the Taoists) toy with a do-nothing approach, the Confucians are not among them. Anyone from an agricultural society knows crops don’t flourish on their own but need to be cultivated, and cultivated long before the harvest. Unfortunately, many of us fail to apply this obvious truth to our human (vs. agricultural) relationships. We leave the crops unwatered until suddenly we notice things aren’t growing. Then we leap in and start tugging, but it’s too late.
Some well-meaning souls try to avoid such predicaments by being relentlessly helpful to everyone they encounter. Mencius tells of a prime minister, Lord Ch’an, who had two rivers in his territory across which he would ferry passengers himself. “He was certainly kind,” Mencius says, “but he didn’t know how to govern.” Instead of serving as ferryman, he should have arranged for footbridges and cart bridges to be built. Then travelers could have avoided the ordeal of fording the waterways, and Lord Ch’an would have had time to run the country. Good leaders don’t ferry people across rivers one by one. “It’s impossible to govern by making people happy one at a time,” says Mencius; “there aren’t enough hours in the day.”7
Quiet Influence Practice 10: Attending to upstream factors more than downstream results
Cultivating the upstream sources of results rather than pushing directly for those results is the theme of the book I wrote with Ed Boswell and Forum’s head of research, Henry Frechette. Its title is Strategic Speed.8
The book begins with the observation, backed by multiple studies, that most strategic initiatives fail to implement successfully and on time, even with a clearly mapped course and plenty of hands on deck. Why? Most leaders focus on the wrong things. They focus too much on pace and process and not enough on people, thereby creating superficial speed (like a hamster on a wheel) rather than speed that leads to genuine, sustained progress.
The worst leaders emphasize pace: they announce “We’re moving fast!” and then, when the inevitable hitches occur, scream “Hurry up!” Slightly better leaders emphasize process: they gather masses of data, weave it into intricate charts and graphs showing how the work will proceed, distribute the PowerPoint—and then, upon discovering that the best flowchart in the world has zero power to inspire anybody to do anything, grow despondent over their organization’s presumed resistance to change. But the best leaders focus on people: specifically, three “people factors” which, our research indicated, are the keys to strategic speed.
Before I say what those three factors are, let me explain how we came to the conclusion that speed is mostly about the people. For the main research study that fed the book, we worked with the Economist Intelligence Unit to identify, from a group of several hundred companies, a set that were faster at execution and another set that were slower. We then asked leaders within the companies to think about the characteristics of a strategic initiative they believed was successful and about the habits of their organization as a whole. For each of twelve items, we asked, “Was the initiative [or is your organization] more like A or B?” Then we compared the responses from the faster and the slower companies.*
On ten of the twelve items, the two sets of responses were strikingly different. For example, leaders in the faster companies said that “teams capture and communicate lessons learned from initiatives,” while those in the slower companies said “teams move on to other assignments without a formal debrief.” In the faster companies, “team members are comfortable talking about problems and disagreements”; in the slower ones, people “believe in keeping their cards close to the vest as the best way to get ahead.” Senior leaders in the faster companies “are closely aligned and committed to the success of initiatives”; in slower companies, “initiatives succeed in spite of lack of unanimous senior-level support.”9 And so on.
The two sets of organizations, it seemed, had very different approaches. In the slower companies, the emphasis was on maintaining a quick pace, being efficient, and not worrying too much about “soft stuff.” The faster companies, in contrast, were actually being propelled forward by supposedly soft practices such as alignment, openness, flexibility, learning, and teamwork. The irony is that managers in the slower companies thought that by charging ahead without regard for soft stuff, they would move faster. They equated attending to people issues with “having to wade through a morass of human emotions, questions, quirks, and complaints.”10 In a quirky human world, however, there is no way around that morass. Effective leaders, knowing this, wade right into the swamps and marshes, digging channels for the water to flow. (See “Influence in Brief: Tugging or Tending?” here)
The three people factors are clarity, unity, and agility. Clarity is a shared, clear understanding of your situation and direction. Unity is agreement on the merits of that direction and on the need to work together to move ahead. Agility is the willingness to turn and adapt quickly while keeping strategic goals in mind.
Speed of execution can be predicted by looking at these factors. With high clarity, unity, and agility, you can expect to achieve rapid, sustained progress. With low clarity, unity, and agility, your endeavors will move slowly and clumsily no matter how hard you crack the whip; at best, you’ll be driving a team of very fast hamsters, little paws scrabbling on their wheels.
Influence in Brief: Tugging or Tending?
I was an obnoxious 23-year-old brat who was going to step on anyone to get my way. It was all about achieving, achieving. As a junior account manager, I had no authority over anyone. I was doing very well at my job with clients—I was part of the biggest sale of our supervising program ever, almost a million dollars—but internally, I was not well loved. In one meeting, the other junior staff lambasted me. One of them said, “You don’t care who you step on to get where you want to be.” Then we had to go through the Influence program, and I got slammed in my feedback report. I was devastated. My manager took some time to explain to me how to translate those values into behaviors. I believed fervently in the power of that program, because I had seen it firsthand.
–Tracy Hulett
Influence is about a full range of support in a web of relationships. Offers and requests are part of this nexus of relationships. A direct request, in an Asian culture, has pressure; it brings the force of the relationship into that request. It would be very uncomfortable, should the person be unable to comply, for them to say “No.” You and they would lose face. So more likely you would take an indirect approach: discuss the situation and ask for advice.
–Molly McGinn
Strategic Speed includes many examples of clear, unified, agile organizations and teams, from a UK-based telecom company to an Indian provider of satellite television to the American University of Iraq. The example I’ll share here comes from Forum itself.
When in the early 1970s Forum began hiring salespeople, a requirement was set that every account executive (as they were called then) spend ten days each year in the classroom, teaching. Some AEs sampled the whole Forum library while others preferred to specialize in one or two programs, but whether they went broad or deep, every AE acquired firsthand knowledge of our content and how it played out in client situations. As a result, the whole salesforce had clarity about the firm’s mission and products; had a sense of unity born of being in the trenches with peers, instructors, and senior staff (who also were required to teach); and had developed the kind of tap-dancing agility that sweeps over you when it’s 8:40 a.m., the class materials haven’t arrived, and a roomful of participants is staring at you expectantly. On sales calls, AEs thus equipped could do much more than spout lines from a product fact sheet. They could carry on authentic, experience-based conversations about the value Forum offered.
But ten days teaching meant ten days not selling, and sometime around the turn of the millennium the requirement was dropped. AEs’ time was better spent doing their real job, went the theory. It’s a perfectly reasonable perspective—for the short term. When I look at the long term, though, I see a gradual decline in salesforce capability that ultimately weighed us down.
In executive meetings a decade later, when we were discussing ways to boost the numbers, someone would occasionally muse: “Why not bring back that teaching requirement for the salespeople?”
There would be a short pause. Then someone else would say, “Yeah . . . but right now we really need them all out in the field.”
So out in the field they would stay, tugging on rice shoots.
Western Pitfall 10: Obsessing about the short-term future
As we go about our days trying to get things done, there are four points in time where we might place our focus: past, present, short-term future, or long-term future. Westerners tend to see the points as separate, even at odds with one another, and are a bit obsessive about the third—the short-term future—while Asians (again, these are generalizations) will more likely see, not points, but a fluid continuum that must be considered as a whole. The stories of three legendary leaders will illustrate what I mean.
After Confucius, the figures about whom Mencius speaks most often and admiringly are Yao, Shun, and Yü—the “sage emperors” of China’s misty past. Grand Historian Sima Qian (see Chapter 6) included their biographies in his annals; like Mencius, he was drawing on a centuries-old written and oral tradition. If ch’i is the heart of Chinese medicine, the sage emperors are the heart of Chinese political and ethical thought, held up by teachers down the ages as models of leadership, indeed of human virtue in general. “What would Shun do?” Mencius asks, offering the question to his lordly clients as a touchstone for hard decisions.
Emperors Yao and Shun are the stuff of myth, but with Emperor Yü, founder of China’s first dynasty (the Xia Dynasty, ca. 2100 – ca. 1600 BCE), we are on slightly firmer historical footing. In the time of Yao, writes Sima Qian, floodwaters covered the land and the people of the lowlands suffered famine, sickness, and death. Yao gave the task of mitigating the floods to a man named Kun, but Kun—described as competent but untrustworthy—did a terrible job. After Yao died, his successor, Shun, asked around for a new minister of works and was referred to Kun’s son Yü. Motivated partly by his father’s failure, Yü went above and beyond: he spent the next thirteen years surveying the entire country, appraising the soil and crops of each region, dredging channels for the rivers, setting up irrigation systems, and cutting roads through mountains and marshes. After his labors, “the nine lands were all set in order . . . the nine mountain ranges were all marked for roads, the nine waterways’ headwaters were cleared, the nine lakes were banked, and the world assembled together.”11
When Emperor Shun asked Yü for his secret, Yü touched his forehead to the ground and said, “Ah! What should I say? I think only of keeping myself busy every day” (which reminds me of Quiet Influence Practice 9: Doing the daily work with persistence and focus). Yü’s character, according to Sima Qian, “was impartial, his personality was endearing, his words were trustworthy, his voice was the law, his behavior the standard . . . And so earnestly, so reverently, these qualities became the net’s head-rope, the yarn’s guiding-thread for his people.”12
Shun chose Yü to follow him, and ever after the engineer-turned-emperor has been called Yü the Great, Regulator of the Waters. The title seems fitting, for even if Yü’s life is colored by legend, it’s clear that his rivers, dams, and roads helped found a civilization that has thrived for 4,000 years. Longer-lasting influence would be hard to imagine.
Infrastructure projects tend to be large investments with far-off horizons. You might think such investments must be undertaken on faith, trusting that your efforts will pay off years hence and ignoring today’s falling profits. Certainly, some short-term pleasure and treasure must often be sacrificed; during his years of river-channeling, Yü spent barely any time managing his own farm (says Mencius), so he probably didn’t get quite the yield he might have. But the good thing about big digs is that, undertaken in a spirit of ren, they actually bear fruit at all four points on the time continuum: long term, short term, present, and past.
Looking again at Amabile and Kramer’s The Progress Principle (see Chapter 9) we learn that endeavors with long-term impact have short-term impact, too. Catalyst is the term the authors use for anything that facilitates completion of high-quality work, and catalysts, they found, have an instantaneous effect on inner work life, even before those catalysts could possibly affect the work itself:
As soon as people realize that they have, for example, clear and meaningful goals, sufficient resources, or helpful colleagues, they get an instant boost to their perceptions of the work and the organization, their emotions, and their motivation to do a great job. But as soon as goals are jumbled, resources denied, or the ball dropped by a colleague, their thoughts, feelings, and drives begin to crumble.13
These findings suggest we should see long-term investments as complementary to, not competitive with, short-term efforts. Think of it like physical exercise: you may not see visible results until a few months after starting a running regimen, and it may be years before you can complete a marathon; nevertheless, you’ll feel a boost in mood and energy immediately after each jog. At Forum, keeping the R&D engine going in tough times meant that a decade later there would be good products to sell; it also meant that in the short term, the salesforce had something to talk about with customers, the marketers had topics for blogs and news releases, and new ideas vibrated throughout the company from week to week. The converse was true, too: when we stopped the teaching requirement for AEs, although their product knowledge didn’t immediately atrophy, it seems to me there was an immediate drop in their internal sense of competence and confidence. Dance teachers have a saying: if you skip one day of class, nobody will notice—nobody, that is, except you.
Big digs, then, shape the present as much as they shape the future. They also have the ability to shape the past, for people who diligently tend the soil, channel the waters, and build the roads, trusting in long-term outcomes and persisting through short-term droughts and storms, often cause others to see their whole life in a new light.
Mencius tells the story of sage emperor Shun and his famously depraved father, Blind Purblind, who in his son’s youth tried to murder him by (among other horrible methods) setting his house on fire and sealing him up in a well. When Shun ascended the throne, he was in the power position and no one would have blamed him had he severed all ties with his former abuser. Instead, he continued to set an example of filial devotion, going to visit Blind Purblind “full of respect, veneration, and awe,” treating him as if he were a loving father.
It took years, but, says Mencius, “Blind Purblind finally understood.”14 He finally saw what he and his son had always been, were now, and could be to each other. Shun, with his patience and vision, had transformed his father’s yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s best-known poem begins, “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree.” Xanadu has come to mean a fantasia of idyllic beauty, a somewhere-over-the-rainbow. Coleridge clearly thinks such places exist only in dreams; Mencius, however, believes in our ability to construct them for real, both in the physical world and in our human relationships. He quotes lines from China’s ancient Book of Songs about a man who didn’t just dream Xanadu, but built it:
He planned the sacred tower and began.
He planned it well and managed it well,
and the people worked with devotion,
so it was finished in less than a day.
He planned and began without haste,
and the people were children coming.
With the emperor in the sacred gardens
there, the deer lay in pairs at ease,
paired deer all sleek and glistening,
white birds all bright and shimmering,
and with the emperor at the sacred pool
there, the fish leapt so strong and sure.15
The next quiet influence practice is Staying engaged when things get heated.