Expanding our family through an international adoption has
shaped the last three years. The journey began in December 2009 and
in March of 2012 we brought two sisters, Meskerem and Tarikua, to Austin from
Ethiopia and into our home. The adventure continues and the
expedition has provided emotional lessons; some of them even apply to
leadership.
Leaders Explain:
Some of the mind-bending aspects of the adoption arrive in common events
of everyday life. For example, if I tell
you I will meet you on Thursday and today is Tuesday your brain creates a container
of time that you understand. The concept
of time is self-evident. An hour
consists of a certain number of minutes, a day of hours and a year of days. We
may define time,
but we rarely think about the fundamental nature of time.
Ancient cultures such as Incan, Mayan, Hopi, the Babylonians
and others have a concept of a wheel of time, a
non-linear view of time as cyclical and consisting of repeating ages. The western world tends to follow the Roman
concept that time is linear. Sir Isaac
Newton subscribed to this view, and hence it is sometimes referred to as Newtonian Time.
Meskerem and Tarikua arrived with no concept of time; wheel
or line. They are from a small town
called Areka in in the
Wolaita Zone of the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples' Region of
Ethiopia. Did they know what a year was? Nope. A
calendar? They had never seen one. Clock or watch? Might have been a Eudiometer for all they
knew. Where do you start? Fortunately that pliant organ called the brain
seeks to understand. If it was Friday and
we talked about something happening Sunday the girls would say, “We eat?” Yes “We sleep?” Yes “We wake?”
Yes “We eat?” Yes “We play?” Yes “We watch TV?” Yes…You get the picture. The girls created time by counting events
that would occur. If they understood the
events and knew the number of events, their brain could create a container of
time. We had to fight the curse of knowledge
to explain a basic concept like time to someone who does not know the notion.
Chip and Dan Heath wrote a book called Made to Stick and outlined
the danger of vague strategy statements.
They contend leaders love directives like “Delight Customers” or “Improve
Sales Productivity” because of the curse of knowledge. A leader may have years
of immersion in the logic of certain subjects.
When s/he speaks abstractly they are summarizing the wealth of data in
their head. But to folks not familiar with the underlying meaning it sounds
like Charlie
Brown's Teacher. As a result,
strategies don’t stick. “I want you to focus on the Customer Journey”
to someone on my team can be as abstract as “I will be gone at work for three days” is to an Ethiopian daughter.
A leader can add an unintended accelerant to the curse of
knowledge by blocking the ability for an employee to seek to understand. I made this mistake at a software company a
few years ago. I started with a vague
strategy statement, “I want us to focus
on managing the pipeline, not just the forecast” and then increased the
degree of difficulty for the team by inadvertently blocking their ability to ‘not
understand’. How? When I talked to the team about the new strategy
I used words like, “Really, this is not
complicated…this is one of the most basic task of field leadership” My
intent was honorable, I was trying to tell them it was easy. Yet making statements like, “This is a low IQ task to master” built a
barrier to their ability to understand.
If I thought it was simple, how could they come to me and admit they did
not get it?
What does a wrinkle in time have
to do with leadership? The application
is “Leaders Explain” A good leader takes
the time end effort to explain issues, strategies and plans in language and
stories that the team can understand.
And that leader will give the team the freedom to ‘not understand’.
“A powerful idea
communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it”- Marcel Proust
