Creating Organizational Agility Through Leading with Heart

What Fears are Holding You Back? 

The message here is fear is a part of life. It is a necessary experience that saved the lives of our prehistoric ancestors and is still useful today. The authors discuss how you need just the right amount of fear in an organization and yourself to create a healthy sense of urgency. 

Too little fear, and you get an “everything’s groovy” culture. Even though there is evidence of significant problems, no one is motivated to do anything about it. Too much fear and everyone is too scared of consequences to do anything to improve things.

With just the right amount of fear, cultures have an urgency for something new out of fear of not surviving. You may have noticed the reference to psychological safety in the needs graphic above, and that’s not a coincidence. Psychological safety must exist to allow room for people to take risks and challenge the status quo.

This chapter also reviews the three fear responses: fight, flight, and freeze. I have a client who used to freeze at the onset of fear. His fear was the common “imposter syndrome.” After being promoted, he was afraid he had not really earned the new title, when in fact he had.

We worked on naming this fear and getting to know it better. He then noticed his tendency to freeze in the moment. He realized that just because he is the team's leader does not mean he should have all the answers. He was then able to permit himself to ask questions. Team dynamics improved dramatically with this behavior change.

What Desires Drive You, And which Might Derail You? 

In this chapter, Baird and Sullivan state, "In our framework, needs are those things we must have to feel fully resourced, resilient, and ready to do our best work. Desires, on the other hand, are those things within us that motivate us to do our best work." 

In discussing desires, they use a framework of five desire groupings developed by psychologist Steven Reiss:

I discovered many gems in this chapter. One of my favorites was the clarification that inclusion is not consensus. Conflating the two can create bureaucracy and slow you down unnecessarily. Inclusion means that all voices impacted are heard and considered. It does not mean that every decision is debated openly and goes to a majority vote. 

You want to include the right people in decision-making. However, you do not need to invite every person impacted to the meeting. For example, if the People/HR Team is deciding what benefits to offer, you don’t want that decision debated by every employee until everyone agrees. Instead, you could include every employee's voice by doing a survey, then have the final decision made by a select team drawing from what was learned from the survey.

Creating inclusion takes more time than a traditional hierarchical decision. Creating a balance of speed and inclusion to provide optimal decisions is challenging. The benefit is a higher-performing culture where people feel heard and valued. 

What Are Your Greatest Gifts? 

Baird and Sullivan start by dispelling a few myths about gifts, which I think are important:

This chapter was like listening to a wise advisor tell me what they know about gifts. The subheadings give you a feel for the content, so I'll just list them. If any of these ideas whet your appetite, as they do for me, I encourage you to get the book!

• Using our Gifts to Get Into Flow
• When our Gifts Are Underutilized
• Finding the Gifts in our Flaws
• Claiming the Gifts Born From Our Pain
• Too Much of a Good thing
• Overdone Strength in Teams
• Every Poison Has an Antidote
• Assembling Constellations of Gifts
• When We Fail to see Each other's Gifts
• The Apex Gift: see other People's Gifts
• What Makes Us Forget our Gifts

Finding the Gifts in Our Flaws and Claiming the Gifts Born From Our Pain I found to be particularly useful. It is helpful to see how “negative” experiences or aspects of ourselves are resources for our growth and success. For example, raising my son with behavioral challenges is one of the most difficult things I do. But, as it turns out, he is my biggest teacher, and my life is more fulfilling because he’s in it.

What Is Your Purpose? 

Here you will find some great stories highlighting the benefits of having purpose and how specific leaders have found theirs. These stories may be just the inspiration people need.

When you ask yourself, “what is my purpose?” you may not get much of an answer. If so, you can inquire more about your needs, fears, desires, and gifts. Without some investigation into these first questions, our purpose gets blocked. Take the connection between our purpose and our gifts, for example. Without understanding our gifts, it is harder to find purpose. And if you think you don’t have a gift, think again. Everybody has multiple gifts. It may be latent, but rest assured, it’s there.

For an organization, it is vital to link purpose to culture and values. The Agile Leadership Journey has a full curriculum focused on culture—how to think about, discover, and change it. The connection between leaders and culture is strong. Some mid-level managers believe they have no impact on culture. Even if your circle of influence does not include the entire organization, you impact team culture. And the overall organizational culture is the collection of team cultures.

Helping Your Company Lead With Heart

The book's last chapter outlines steps to make these questions and the pursuit of their answers part of an organization's culture. It contains valuable exercises.

My favorite, which I include in my facilitation repertoire, is the Temperature Reading. Originally developed by Virginia Satir, it is a series of simple questions at the beginning of any team meeting for people to express themselves and get connected. The adapted version presented in this book is:

• What or whom are you grateful for today?
• What are you worried or concerned about?
• What are your hopes and wishes for this meeting?

If it’s a shorter meeting, I frequently adapt to only the first question. I find it’s a great way to get any collaboration started.

Conclusion

With ample research and case studies, the authors detail five insight-provoking questions. In addition, they include actionable steps for moving leadership and organizations forward. Following the guidance given in this book, leaders will be more ready to adapt to the constantly changing environment while keeping people centered in their decisions. In other words, the practice of Leading With Heart creates organizational agility.