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Part III: The Methods Of Values Leadership

Chapter List

Part Overview

Inner leaders prioritize traditional American values (Terry) that foster a return to community - like respect for life, freedom of action, unity, justice, and happiness, along with a few other operationally useful values. These values are espoused by most Americans and anchor a unifying value system acceptable to most leaders and their work-community colleagues. In this way they create moral meanings for work-community members. They carry a burden of ethical responsibility, the center of which is service to their stakeholders. They create values systems that prioritize both work community productivity and worker satisfaction.

The values they set are statements of the oughts, formulations of the desirable each person sets for him or her self. They represent settled ideas about the way one measures experience and relationships. They are also the prime cause of individuals' behavior. The leader's values characterize much workaday experience and give meaning to that experience. Inner leaders see their work as articulating meaningful values systems that define their own leadership and the work ethic of their community of coworkers. These tasks are not as daunting as it might first appear. Most adults have internalized value systems that serve them throughout their lives - including their work lives.

Inner leaders serve followers' values needs as together they work to serve the common good. This kind of leadership is the reverse of much of past leadership literature. Rather than attempt to dominate followers, inner leaders work to provide all things necessary for followers to transform themselves and successfully complete their work tasks. They enhance their followers' moral selves as they also help confirm followers' beliefs in their own inherent self-worth.

The values-oriented techniques discussed in this Part separate inner leadership from other workplace functions. Basing their leadership, as they do, on values, inner leaders are able to achieve successes unlikely if they used more values-sterile approaches. These values techniques reflect vital elements of the specialized knowledge, skills, and techniques that define the leader in the middle and not at the top. They circumscribe inner leadership and establish its context - a context full of values connotations (Klenke). These techniques include orchestrating meaning within the group, emphasizing values, creating a higher moral standard, servant leadership, and celebrating success.

Chapter 10: Method 7: Orchestrating Meaning in the Work Community

Defining Meaning-Making

Orchestrating meaning involves the leader in creating and communicating meaning to workers about the organization and their joint work (Plas). Inner leaders concentrate their full attention and that of their work community on the vision they have created for their community, that is on what they - as leaders - think the vision means and the value they attach to it. Engineering meaning takes place via every action leaders take, every word spoken and every decision made. The most visible expression of community meaning-making is in the vision statement leaders create and promulgate throughout their work community.

Making-meaning is a symbolic role that applies unique meanings to words, objects, ideas, work processes and policies making them specific to that work community in a given time frame. The task is one of reflecting core values in the community's icons, its symbols of itself (Peters and Austin). These symbols become referents to desired performance and to relationships with others. They are based on the inner leader's values. These symbols define the true meaning and character of the work community more than do organization charts or policy manuals.

The Technique of Meaning-Making

The scope of the vision statement sets the work community's outer limits of possibility. A vision is a present declaration about the community's intended future that also connects members with their collective past. Visions are charged with meaning and have meaning only as followers see them as true - both today and tomorrow. These truths about their collective future must be grounded in basic human truth. Life, liberty, justice, unity, and the quest for satisfaction and happiness are examples of such truths. They compose the values-set guiding collective work effort. Values like "being the best," or seeking "high quality," or "excellence" or "broad market control" are not of the same caliber. In creating a meaning structure based on the leader's core values, inner leaders demonstrate several common behavior patterns. Bennis and Nanus suggest they include managing attention, making meaning, engendering trust, and acquiring self-knowledge (Carson).

Leadership in the middle of the corporation is about the sharing of intentions. Engineering meaning in groups is more likely to be helpful when it comes from inner leaders with strong character. These leaders attend to choices made by all persons in relationship with them. Meaning-making tasks are about persuasion, about right or wrong, about finding shared understanding (Bennis). They are not about coercion or force. Inner leaders train, educate, and coach followers in vision-directed tasks. They ascribe a compelling meaning to the common work, one that gives followers a reason to self-motivate and get involved in appropriate networks. Once understood, this common understanding of why the community and its work are important frees followers from situational constraints that may hamper their growth or transformation to full effectiveness. Followers respond to their leader's values and the meaning they attach to actions and events as the leaders base their leadership on wholeness, shared values, and concern for the human side of life - not just on the materialistic paradigm characteristic of past leadership models (Caill).

Methods Of Practicing Meaning-Making

Operational efficiency in the middle of the corporation is based on democratic leadership. Inner leaders base their relationships with coworkers on values that honor and extol democratic interaction between leader and led. The reason is pragmatic. Work-community members do not have to follow the inner leader, they choose to do so. Unless the work community supports and facilitates followers' realization of their goals, members will not respond to the largely personal appeals for cooperation from their leader. Making meaning for what are essentially volunteer work-community members asks the inner leader to master several techniques. These techniques help followers see the leader's intent and purpose for the joint work as useful to them. Among the meaning-making techniques inner leaders use are focusing follower attention, creating a vision, setting expectations, and using symbols.

Focusing Follower Attention

Inner leadership asks the leader to think inwardly - to think past today's problems toward the possibilities of what the work community and its members are and can become. Inner leaders challenge the work-community members to become more than they now are, to redefine themselves, to make a difference in both their personal and professional lives. Meaning-making is seen in conscious actions the leader takes that focus stakeholders on and reinforce the work community's self image. Indeed, all that the leader does reinforces this image. It is part, for example, of promotions given, rewards dispensed, people hired, speeches made, orders written, and all other leader actions.

Fundamentally, meaning-making is nothing more than continually paying attention to what the leader thinks is important. Everyone pays attention to something. Leaders select and consistently focus attention on what they want and need for themselves, for the work community, and for stakeholders.

Paying attention also involves communicating a consistent values-laden message to all coworkers, clients, suppliers, and the greater communities of which this work community is a part.

On one level, creating a meaning is simply a matter of priority. What leaders pay attention to, what they focus on, determines whom they lead and how committed followers are to them and the values promulgated. Mid-level leaders must importantly pay attention to the right values, that is, to the few values most community members will accept and respond to. Among the core American values most relevant to leadership in the middle are the following (Fairholm):

1. Respecting and valuing the intrinsic humanness of all people.

2. Honoring each person's need for satisfaction and happiness.

3. An intrinsic desire people have to be united with others in working toward something good that is also greater than themselves.

4. A need to be treated fairly.

5. A desire for justice in their relationships with coworkers.

Paying attention to human needs, for quality services, to innovate (be creative), to trust and be trusted, to excel in something, for enthusiasm, for self-esteem, and to be passionate about their work is also central to successful inner leadership. These familiar needs must be part of the values mix inner leaders adopt and reflect in their relationships with community members.

Creating a Focused Vision

Leading in the middle ranges of the corporation is much more a function of the individual leader's personal agenda and the relationships he or she develops with followers than it is a subset of corporate direction and planning (Crosby). Many now see it as a kind of psychological contract in which the leader and follower cooperate voluntarily according to agreed-upon core values and a common view of what the work community is and can become. Indeed, the inner leader's vision defines this work community's values-laden meaning and purposes. The power of the leader's vision comes from the power of the values, experiences, and assumptions developed by both leader and led over time. Work-community members come to feel related to the community's vision statement and to feel connected on a personal, even spiritual, level.

Creating a work-community vision, therefore, is a function of what the leader is as a person and what he or she prioritizes in terms of his or her work life. His or her statement of the work community's vision becomes a vital part of his or her meaning-making task. Understanding the technique of visioning, therefore, becomes a key inner leader skill. Visioning is more than goal setting. It involves activating the emotions, as well as the mind. It has a strong values connotation that reflects the leader's spiritual core and therefore is a more-than-rational statement of personal and community intent.

Visioning is analogous to setting the superordinate goal that Pascale and Athos discussed or what Bradford and Cohen called overarching goal-setting. Creating a vision statement involves the inner leader in creating an attractive, powerful, challenging, and compelling statement of the future for the work community, valuing that vision through his or her actions, and programing its implementation. In also involves the leader in communicating the vision context (meaning) to all members of the work community - not just as a sterile statement of future intent but as a central, guiding purpose toward which they can bend their mutual efforts.

A vision is a challenging, unifying, unique, and creditable statement of what the work community is and can become. The vision statement can be articulated in only a few words that summarize what is unique and special about the work community. It is a guideline all members can use as a focus for what the work community stands for. Illustrations of work-community vision statements might include the following:

1. A personnel department might decide to focus on providing training and procedures that would enable managers to "manage humanely in a growing organization." A suitable motto or slogan might be "personal concern."

2. A payments department manager might select a vision to "work with clients with an attitude of solving their problems with imagination. Their slogan could be "creative service."

By themselves, these statements can be meaningless; it is only when the inner leader believes in and constantly talks about them and uses them in all his or her interactions with followers that they come to life; they become inspiring to all members of the community.

Creating a creditable vision statement asks inner leaders to follow a general pattern of thoughtful action including the elements listed in the following section.

Characteristics of a Work Community's Vision Statement

Useful vision statements reflect the work community's core purposes. They articulate a clear, challenging, broad-based, and feasible goal. This vision outcome has a significance beyond the immediate work objectives. Acceptance of it alters the nature of the relationship between the inner leader and work community members. It provides a common purpose. It allows for a better resolution of conflicts. It keeps the leader and led focused on their larger issue - horizon goals. It constitutes the raison d'être for all the work-community activities. It serves as a standard by which decisions are reached. In sum, a well-crafted vision statement makes clear the directions of the group, it defines the community's horizon outcomes and gives them meaning.

The Importance of a Vision Statement

The inner leader's job is to create and articulate a vitalizing vision that challenges the work community to go beyond its current level. A vitalizing vision becomes a vehicle for change and growth, a result not often attained unaided by the inner leader. It alters the leader's relationships with coworkers and provides a common focus for work-community activity and energy use. Clear, simple, and broadly known visions make conflict resolution easier by tying conflict to agreed-upon overarching goals competing parties can relate to. Such a vision keeps the leader and followers focused on the larger issues of concern to the work community's survival and growth. They provide the basis for inspiration of followers and sustain attention on excellence. Vision statements have a stretch quality to them. Effective vision statements are made by leaders who understand their members, tie the vision to members' specific work tasks, and use it to secure member commitment. In the absence of a vitalizing vision, the leader falls into a maintenance role, which role has a management orientation.

The Process of Forming Vitalizing Visions

The process of forming a vision for a work community of any size is the same. In the final analysis, the task is the duty of the leader. Members can help, but the responsibility for creation of a meaningful future is manifestly a task of leading, not following. It asks inner leaders to create and then validate a vision and to articulate, interpret, and apply it to all aspects of the work community's work. The leader must ensure that the vision statement meets the characteristics criteria noted earlier.

Preparation is necessary to ensure effective, directed action. The steps are first to prepare the group. Well before the first visioning meeting, inner leaders have prepared their followers to be effective and comfortable in sharing decision making, planning, and specific methods or work processes. Also, before the work-community members get involved, inner leaders write down several possible vision statements that are consistent with the overall work community work processes, goals, and mission objectives. These draft vision statements are more than a restatement of the work community's purposes. They are distinctive and suited to the specific unit's purposes. They must imply a larger significance than work tasks. And each must be challenging.

Followers are useful to help refine the draft vision statements written by the inner leader. The work-community members' roles in this process are not a sham - a way to get the leader's vision accepted - it is a vital part of the process. Members can provide additional values, knowledge, and perspective the inner leader lacks. Working together in this way they can ensure that the final vision will better meet the community's needs.

Making meaning via visioning takes thought and creativity. The process involves - both for the leader's preliminary visioning activity and for subsequent collaborative effort - the following kinds of activities:

1. Identify what the work community does for its clients, the corporation itself, and society.

2. Select a central activity of the work community. In any work community, there are a variety of possible central purposes. The inner leader needs to look beyond routine activities and probe deeply into underlying purposes. This is a task of reinterpreting existing work-community goals; looking at the nature of the unit's tasks, technique usage, and possible techniques it may use; assessing available technical expertise needed of self and coworkers; and looking at the relative abundance or scarcity of needed resources.

3. List the output produced - documents, information, services, goods, and so on.

4. Identify the leader's interests, skills, and areas of commitment. (Visions are personal as much as they are institutional.)

   Examine current and past work experiences.

   Examine formal education and training.

   Examine avocational experiences and capacities.

   Assess present leadership skills, styles, abilities.

5. List relevant capacities, skills, and knowledge.

6. Identify the work community's clients and customers.

7. List internal "customers" and key relationships.

8. List external constituency groups and key relationships.

9. Match external client needs and internal personal capacities and interests.

10. Write out a vision statement - or motto - based on this analysis. Develop several versions. Write out each alternative.

11. Select the vision statement with the most "fit."

12. Present it to members. Persuade them of its usefulness, secure their understanding and commitment, relate it to the work community and its clients.

13. Determine relationships of the vision statement to internal work-community concerns.

14. Help members to see all relationships and how important the statement is to the work community, its customers, and to you - the leader - so each member will personally buy into it - assuming it meets his or her legitimate needs.

Setting Expectations

As inner leaders set high expectations for performance for the group, they are making use of another technique of meaning-making. Inner leaders' expectations focus and direct vision, values, and standards. Their expectations define the meaning context for their work community. Leaders deliberately engage in behaviors that acquaint followers with their expectations for them and for the work community. Whether the objective of these expectations is simply to direct and control member behavior or to reorient their thought processes, the result is to create meaning for them.

Using Symbols

Another simple, yet effective, technique inner leaders use to make meaning for their community members is by using symbols to communicate their ideas, values, and behavioral standards. Every work community has its symbols of itself. Ideas, words, objects, work methods, and other items are used to represent aspects of the work community's culture, values, and view of itself. These symbols define the character of the work community more than do organization charts or policy manuals. Inner leadership is a function of using symbols, legends, and traditions as much as anything else to direct work-community members in desired ways and in vision-focused directions. By these actions, inner leaders engage the heart, as well as the head and the hands of followers (Fairholm).

Every work community has its symbols - things representing aspects of its culture: traditions that define the work community, stories that color personalities, values, programs, and visions. Symbols include physical surroundings, who gets invited to meetings, seating arrangements, the order of the agenda, as well as its content, the location of meetings, and many other factors. Language is also symbolic. Language is a way to focus attention. At Disney, customers are "guests"; at Peoples Express, every employee is a "manager"; and at Wal-Mart, they only hire "associates." Each designation connotes specific attitudes and orientations about workers and their relationships with each other and their bosses. Stories, too, are powerfully symbolic (as in the example of Perdue's chickens). They communicate attention, excitement and values, and corporate vision.

Of course symbols can also communicate negative connotations.

Discussion Issues And Questions

Issues

1. Inner leaders expend energy in almost every action they take to focus themselves and their stakeholders on what they consider to be critical.

2. Orchestrating meaning involves the leader in communicating meaning to workers about the institution and its work.

3. Meaning-making is a symbol-using task that places new, unique meaning to words, objects, ideas, work processes, and policies making them specific to that work community in a given time frame.

4. A vision is a present declaration about the community's intended future that also connects members with their collective past.

5. Inner leadership involves the leader in thinking inwardly, in thinking past today's problems toward the possibilities of what the work community can mean to its members.

6. The inner leader's vision defines the interior work community's values laden focus.

7. Creating a work community vision is a function of what the leader is as a person and what he or she prioritizes in terms of his or her work life.

8. By themselves, vision statements can be meaningless; it is only when the inner leader believes in and constantly talks about them and uses them in all his interactions with followers that they come to life and become inspiring.

9. The inner leader's expectations that focus and direct vision, values, and standards define the meaning context of the work community.

10. Inner leaders make meaning via the use of simple symbols to communicate their ideas, values, and standard behaviors.

11. In the absence of a vitalizing vision, the leader falls into a maintenance role, which role has a management orientation.

Questions

1. Do I link day-to-day work with the vision and direction of our work community?

2. Have I taken the time to understand and articulate the essential nature of the work we do and the community we work in?

3. How have I connected the work we do to the values we hold?

4. Are others in the work community able to articulate our purpose and direction?

5. Can those we serve recognize our values and vision through the work we do?

6. Do I take the time and the many opportunities I have to teach followers our vision and values?

7. Have I established a culture that encourages new ideas and independent thought that enhance the organization's vision?

8. Do I help others interpret direction and guidance based on the organization's values and vision?

Orchestrating Meaning Activities

Inner leaders engage in specific behaviors. The following activities may be useful to both individual leaders to gain experience and comfort in creating meaning for work community members.

Activity 1: How-Tos for Creating Work-Community Meaning

Instructions. Steal some quiet time by yourself. Imagine your work community at a time in the future being "the best it can be." What would be true about it?

1. Record your thoughts. Listed below are some considerations.

   values	levels of achievement
   team contributions	leadership and employee development
   diverse talents that contributed to success	recognition received
   obstacles overcome	partners and alliances created
   customer satisfaction	revenue, market-share, growth levels
   best practices and innovations	risks that paid off
   changes made	teamwork that strengthened the community
   flexibility to respond to change	span of influence
   symbols of success

2. The next step is to shape your thoughts into a message or a few thoughtfully crafted statements that will help you share your vision of the future with others and enlist them in it.

Activity 2: Creating a Vision Story

Instructions. Throughout history stories have been a most effective means of communicating. A vision story can serve as an innovative way to communicate a work community's vision and values, so that everyone is included and can see his or her part. To try it, you will have to tap into your creative talent.

• Pick a person, an event, a problem, a happening from the past experiences of your work community.

• Write a story about that person, event, or problem that reflects not only what happened but the way the values, purposes, and ideal processes of your work community helped shape the result. Include in the story descriptions of the risks, struggles, achievements, and rewards encountered along the way to completion of the event or solution of the problem.

• Give the story a title.

• Share it with everyone in your work community.

• Publish it in your work team and elsewhere as appropriate.

• Talk about it often.

• Reevaluate it occasionally.

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