I’ve long been a fan of Ed Schein, and his book Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling is one of my favorite leadership books. I wrote about Schein several years ago and a colleague recently pointed me to a recent interview where he discusses the ramifications of humility on leadership and strategy. He begins by contrasting traditional and humble leadership.
So many CEOs don’t know how to ask their people what to do. They think they have to own it all. They have to be the big-shot hero, and the world expects them to be. In contrast, there are humble leaders who are appointed to fix or improve things, who take on that responsibility but are very smart about how dependent they really are on many other structures and people and processes. Being responsible does not mean for them that they have to do it alone, and they realize that they cannot implement the new and better things without the involvement of others.
We like to think the role of a leader is to set a direction, but before direction is set a leader needs to ask questions and develop a process.
We have to have a lot of talk before the sense of direction emerges. Maybe the direction he needs to set is to create a safety program, or maybe it’s to create a new career program. But that will only come from figuring out, first of all: Who is he and what does he need to do as a manager? And then, what might be a better way to do it? Then he becomes more leaderly. But he has to figure it out in terms of the here and now: What’s wrong? What’s worrying him? What is the competition doing? It’s very down-to-the-ground stuff, and he won’t know all the answers. He’s going to have to ask a lot of people before he even knows what he should be doing differently.
Moving Beyond Transactional Leadership
Ed Schein then goes deeper into discussing the importance of getting to know each other on a more personal level so that we help create a culture and environment where asking questions can be meaningful.
One of the problems of the managerial culture is that it is built on a transactional concept of how people should relate to each other. You have your role, I have my role. And we maintain a lot of distance because, if we get too close, I’ll be giving you favors and it’ll be too uncomfortable. Let’s stay in our boxes and in our roles. But when we look at Gary Kaplan and Lee Kuan Yew and these other people, it’s clear that you can’t get the job done that way. We have to get to know each other. We have to find out in a much more intimate way how we each work, because the job requires tight collaboration.
To move beyond a transactional relationship Schein says we need to “personize” – not “personalize” – the interaction. Get to know and understand what is important to each person, which is more than just getting to know them. Ask questions to get to know the individual, their wants and needs from a personal and organizational context, which can then lead to questions about the role the organization and leadership can play to create improvement. Trust and understanding creates a quality relationship.
The Problem with Purpose
Schein has a major problem with the concept of purpose.
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