Congruence
Heidi Araya recently published an article entitled Dear Executive: Incongruence Comes with a Cost.
Here are two snippets from the beginning of the article—
Another example of incongruence would be that management tells teams to work in a specific way (“agile” for example), but do not model this themselves. For example, teams must be transparent and report their metrics upwards, but leadership is not transparent with their decisions or metrics. A common one is managers saying they want people to “work more as a team,” but promoting individual metrics for productivity instead or assigning individuals to projects.
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Incongruence diminishes leadership credibility & trust immediately. And once lost, trust takes a long time to be re-established (if ever). I have observed that past negative events will linger in the organizational memory long after that leader has exited and years after the event has passed - through employee storytelling, the organizational trauma lives on. And this decreases employee engagement, ultimately leading to worse business results. Believe it or not, research backs this up -- incongruence impacts profits.
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Leadership “walking the walk” is referred to as “behavioral integrity” by researcher Tony Simons, who hypothesized that lack of this quality would have a measurable impact on business results and led research in this area over 20 years ago.
Comment
I love the notion of behavioral integrity. I’ve been emphasizing the importance of leaders walking their talk for many years. In my CAL class, sharing the idea that words carry little to no weight. That leadership behavior (and now integrity) is the true measure of an effective leader.
And as a Bonus, here’s another “Dear Executive” by Heidi on Transformations.
Sendatsu
Jonathan Kessel-Fell has written a 4-part series of articles on a leadership concept he’s exploring called Sendatsu. It has three primary parts of your Sendatsu leadership. Sendatsu as—
Leader
Guide
Pioneer
Here’s an explanation of the Sandatsu role.
So, what is a Sendatsu?
To understand this, we need to go back over a thousand years to the late Heian period, a time when the practice of pilgrims, samurai and emperors visiting Shinto shrines such as Kumano and Yoshino became popular. These enlightening journeys, through the deeply forested, mountainous regions like the Kii Peninsula, were not a single track but a network of trails with no official start or end point. In order to safely complete these pilgrimages through such dangerous terrain, especially at a time when maps, guidebooks and GPS were not available, you needed someone to step in and help.
That person was a Sendatsu, a spiritual mountain leader and guide, defined as “the one who has gone before”, one who acts as a pioneer to seek out new paths that enhance learning and spiritual growth during these pilgrimages.
And then, later on, exploring the notion of Guide—
For this role I specifically chose an icon of a Japanese Torii Gate. Unlike gates in other parts of the world, which block or deter entry and stop our onward progress, Torii gates are always open. They invite people take a step onto the path and start a new journey of exploration and learning.
As a leader it is our responsibility to help those people in our care to grow and develop. Not to push them down a certain path or force them to change, but to step onto the path ourselves and invite then to join us on a journey of discovery, learning and personal change.
Wrapping Up
Sometimes I like to share what I consider essential writing that perhaps hasn’t received the exposure I think it warrants.
IMHO, Heidi and Jonathan’s work falls into this category. I hope you find it interesting and worth your thoughtful consideration. Enjoy!
Stay agile my friends,
Bob.