Ira Chaleff

January 31, 2012 By Ira Chaleff

“Executive Coach” President
Coaching High Performers to Better Results

Ira Chaleff is the founder and president of Executive Coaching & Consulting Associates. He has been named one of the top 100 leadership thinkers by Executive Excellence Magazine. He practices the high-stakes art of helping talented people prepare for and succeed in senior level roles. Whether working in the public sector with Senior Executive Service leaders or in the private sector with CEOs and leadership teams, he brings clarity to core success issues, and provides savvy and supportive guidance in tackling them.

As a coach, Ira provides a stimulating and safe environment for executives and their teams to examine and improve their leadership and followership styles and processes. One-on-one onsite or remote coaching identifies and focuses on the strategic, organizational and political challenges and opportunities his clients face. When interpersonal dynamics need remedying, he involves all those who have a stake in the change process, analyzes their input and provides frank, constructive feedback. While focusing on the individual client, he engages the wider group in supporting the coaching process to give it the time needed to achieve the desired results.

As a consultant, Ira conducts in-depth analyses of organization strengths and weaknesses and facilitates strategy reviews and organization retreats. He helps clients streamline core business processes, navigate organizational and business transitions and enrich internal communication. He helps boards and senior executives clarify problematic situations, identifies options for addressing these and guides the leadership team in moving the organization from its existing state to a more desirable condition. He particularly enjoys working with mission-driven organizations whose social value generates deep commitment at all levels of the organization.

For examples of the type of work Ira does, see cases histories, Merging Exec Teams, Interpersonal Conflict, and the Strategic Planning Retreat workshop.

As an author and speaker, Ira focuses on the vital relationships between leaders and followers, exploring the rarely examined dynamic styles of followership that contribute to leadership and organization success. His groundbreaking book, The Courageous Follower: Standing Up To and For Our Leaders, 3rd edition, is recognized as a classic in the field and has been translated into multiple languages. The text book he has co-edited, The Art of Followership: How Great Followers Make Great Leaders and Organizations has been chosen for the highly esteemed Warren Bennis Leadership Series. Ira speaks about and conducts workshops on leader-follower dynamics for a wide range of organizations. For more information about this work see www.courageousfollower.net. Ira’s most recent book, Intelligent Disobedience: Doing Right When What You’re Told to Do Is Wrong was named the best new leadership book of 2015 by the University of San Diego, and is attracting attention from senior levels of the military to those engaged in early childhood development. For more information see www.irachaleff.com

Ira was a founding partner of the Institute for Business Technology, US. IBT now known as PEPWorldwide, conducts its popular “Personal Efficiency Programs” globally, providing seminars and coaching in work flow management for many Fortune 500 companies and government agencies. Ira has published numerous articles on Workload Management in the information age.

Ira has served as executive director of the Congressional Management Foundation, a non-profit group providing management training and consulting to congressional offices. He has facilitated over a hundred team building and planning retreats for individual congressional offices and has authored and edited several books and studies on management in political environments, Ira is now Chair Emeritus of the foundation.

Ira’s clients have included a wide range of organizations, among them:

Private Sector: Ernst and Young, LLP, GlaxoSmithKline, Kraft, Volvo
Non-Profits: AARP, Council of International Schools, Credit Union National Association, Georgetown University, National Democratic Institute, National Public Radio, Radio-Free Europe, National Rural Electric Cooperatives
Government: Federal Executive Institute, NASA, The Smithsonian Institution, US Department of Agriculture, US Army, US Navy, Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, EU Commission

Ira holds a degree in Applied Behavioral Science and is a Board Certified Coach from the Center for Credentialing and Education. As of January 1, 2018 he completed two terms of board service for the International Leadership Association and is a Visiting Leadership Scholar at Cambridge University in England. Ira lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains outside of Washington, D.C., where he is adjunct faculty at the Federal Executive Institute in Charlottesville, Virginia.

This work at times includes designing and facilitating sessions internationally for organizations supporting democracy growth or even for the political leadership of emerging democracies themselves.

NIGERIA

Ira Chaleff was asked to design and conduct a strategic planning retreat for the leadership of the Senate of Nigeria which was held on February 3rd and 4th of 2001. The leaders and/or deputy leaders of the three major parties were present as well as several key committee chairmen. The retreat was sponsored by the National Democratic Institute which is deeply involved in helping Nigerians develop their democratic institutions after many years of living under military government.

We established four objectives for the retreat, all of which were met:

To develop the foundation of a shared vision, mission and values on which to build a strategic plan that has the passionate commitment and support of the Senate Leadership.
To identify mission-critical goals which the Leadership will proactively pursue for the balance of their term, and the processes for successfully implementing them.
To provide an experience of strategic planning which the participants can transfer to their other roles as party leaders and heads of their individual Senate offices.
To prepare the Senate Leadership for leading the full Senate Retreat the following week and maximizing the opportunity to win the strong support of their colleagues for their strategy to develop the institution and strengthen Nigerian democracy.

While political parties inherently vie with each other for power within a legislature, the Nigerian Senators demonstrated an impressive commitment to working together to strengthen their democratic institutions.

In a country of one hundred million citizens, in which ethnic and regional differences threaten the cohesion of the nation, National Unity emerged as the single most shared value to guide the political and policy choices the Senators would need to make during the remaining two years of their term.

The other widely shared values which emerged were Justice and Fairness, Fear of God (which I interpret to mean accountability to God), Service, Accountability and Transparency, to which the Senators individually, and collectively, committed themselves.

Six goals were drafted to form the core of the institution strengthening effort over the next two years, for discussion, modification and ratification at the full Senate retreat. The goals covered the issues of Institutional Development and Independence, Leadership Process, Budget Process, Intra and InterParty and Executive Relations, Committee System and Public Education on the legislative process.

It was an honor to work with such motivated, focused and collaborative political leaders, determined to seize the opportunities that history presented them to make a difference. The group adopted as its motto, “If not now, when?”

A similar, scaled-down version of the planning retreat was also held for the leadership of the House of Representatives. There was similar enthusiastic response to the tools offered them to help form a unified vision and plan.

In February 2004, Ira returned to Nigeria to help facilitate another retreat under the auspices of the National Democratic Institute for the full Senate of the National Assembly following the elections of 2003. This four-day retreat was attended by 102 of the 109 members of the Senate. It resulted in a communique outlining its resolutions for strengthening the workings of the Senate in the performance of its legislative duties. An implementation process has been established and will be closely monitored to ensure maximum benefit is derived from the excellent work that was done at the retreat.

The approach and processes used by ECCA in facilitating strategic planning are always adapted to the unique needs of the organization, its prior experiences, culture, governance structures, resources and preferences. When there is sufficient commitment to the process by an organization’s leadership, the group emerges not just with a written document, but with a “living” shared vision and set of values that the leadership team uses continuously to guide the organization.

SIERRA LEONE

In June, 2008, Ira Chaleff traveled to Sierra Leone to co-facilitate a Leadership Development and Planning Seminar for the leaders of the 3 political parties in the Sierra Leone parliament.

His co-facilitator was Ken Nnamani, former president of the Senate of Nigeria. Senator Nnamani and he autographed copies of their books for the parliamentary leaders.

The retreat focused on clarifying the roles of parliamentary leaders and the processes for maximizing collaboration across party lines. Mutually agreeable goals were identified for the leaders to bring back to their party membership as a step towards increased collaboration and parliamentary effectiveness.

Be Very Careful How You Use Measurements

January 23, 2012 By Ira Chaleff

by Ira Chaleff

Executive Excellence – September 2000

There is a disturbing trend in companies and government agencies. Increasingly, key statistics are manipulated and used to drive up the price of a company’s stock or the funding of government agency programs, instead of being used for their intended purpose.

Any operation needs to develop measurements. Measurements can’t substitute for the many observations and interactions good management makes, but they provide a shared sense of how things are going. The essential function of measurements is to help focus a company or program, monitor and analyze its successes or failures, and take actions that reinforce or remedy them as appropriate. This function has always been subject to distortion for the sake of image and rewards. Recently, this misuse of measurements appears to have worsened.

We have witnessed the consequences of placing excessive value on the literal act of “making the numbers.” In the corporate world, high-tech flyers distort accounting principles to make quarterly earnings look attractive to investors. Large fines have been levied for deceptive practices (e.g., counting promotional items as capital expenditures). The market has severely punished other deceptive practices once they are discovered, such as counting verbal agreements as hard revenue.

A CEO can put enormous pressure on divisional executives to make their numbers. Out of sheer fear, subordinates “game” the numbers to make them appear to have been met when they have not. This was a key factor in the dramatic demise of “Chainsaw” Al Dunlop at Sunbeam.

The phenomenon manifests itself perhaps even more destructively in the public sector. In the last year we have witnessed the scandal of teachers providing students with answers to standardized tests so their schools will rank favorably. Worse, we have seen police departments unwilling to take reports of crimes in their jurisdiction as these would jeopardize downtrending crime statistics! Behind these unethical acts are excessive pressure to “make the numbers” and reap the rewards that go with doing so.

It is now common practice for large accounting firms to be both the auditors of, and consultants to, their clients. This practice further weakens the restraints on playing fast and loose with numbers. It threatens the integrity of information on which investors rely. Either the accounting firms will reform themselves, or regulators will do it for them.

But a deeper management issue is at play here. The old saw “You get what you measure” has a lot of power. Management must always be thoughtful about what it measures and how such measurements reflect the underlying values and mission of the organization.

It is less appreciated that management must pay equally close attention to the quality of the reports it uses to track these measurements. Just as “the map is not the territory”, measurements are not the same thing as the actual products, relationships or events they measure. They can just as easily misrepresent, as represent, the actual conditions they are supposed to be alerting management to.

If management values “customer renewals” as a prime measurement, it needs to be very concerned if these trend downward, and equally curious about sudden upturns. In either case, intelligent management will explore the causes, and the resources for remedying or reinforcing them. Only then will it reward or correct those responsible for the underlying actions which contributed to the success or failure.

By contrast, poor management will simply reward or punish those associated with the numbers themselves. This has the dangerous effect of encouraging those responsible for the numbers to “make them” any way they can, regardless if they are fudged or fabricated. Because management obviously doesn’t care, as long as it can flash the numbers it wants to investors, the legislature or city hall.

Of course, the chickens eventually come home to roost and careers are broken, investments squandered, constituents betrayed and left more cynical than ever.

All of this presents a need for senior management to rethink what they reward and how they do so. They cannot expect to parachute in, hand out fat bonuses for “the highest ever quarterly sales figures,” and airlift back out. If this is all management does, it will generate padded figures. People become endlessly inventive about how to pad the figures when they have enough incentive to do so.

The steps management can embrace to make valid and constructive use of measurements include:

Values: Clarify them, talk them, walk them. At staff retreats, explore performance situations which would test adherence to these values. Flush out contradictions and mixed messages.
Constellations of measurements: Require several measurements for each key function which balance quantity with quality, short-term with long-term results, shareholder with stakeholder value. Tracking only one measurement or giving it undue weight, often introduces a distortion into the system.
Rewards: Avoid linking excessive rewards (or penalties) directly to measurements. Link rewards to excellence in creating the underlying conditions that contribute to a measurable improvement.
Head out of the sand: Good managers know intuitively when things don’t add up. If the reported numbers “smell,” don’t ignore or avoid them. Dig around and find why there is an inconsistency between the numbers and other indicators.
Systems answers: If numbers prove to be fudged, you may need to make an example of the offender to show you value honesty above “performance.” But don’t stop there. Examine the system, including your own style and policies, to determine how it may pressure individuals to game it.
Accountability: If your people fudge numbers to look good, accept accountability whether you condoned the specific deceptive practice or not. Leaders set the ethical tone and cannot duck responsibility for doing so.
Industrious enquiry: When important measurements are declining, don’t harangue others to improve the numbers. Use appropriate analytic tools to discover the root causes. Then you can push all out for effective responses to those causes.

To use measurements well, you need to value your reputation for integrity above your reputation for performance. No one likes to perform poorly but you can live through and learn from performance failures. It is not so easy to recover your good name once it is tarnished. Make sure yours isn’t tarnished in the effort to “drive up the numbers.”

© Ira Chaleff 2004

Revitalize Your Organization

January 23, 2012 By Ira Chaleff

by Ira Chaleff

If your organization is missing a high-spiritedness or is rife with discord and anxiety and you want to turn this around, read on. In working with organizations of many types and sizes I have observed seven common factors in an organization losing its vitality:

Loss of faith in leadership

Leaders get insulated from staff, even in moderate sized organizations. Staff cease to see what a leader is doing and believe the leader is ignorant about what the organization should be doing. The leader needs to spnd more time being visible to the staff. One of the most important ways of doing this is to delegate authority that has needlessly been retained. This empowers leadership at lower levels which is often full of pent up creative energy and it frees the leader to spend more time connecting with those who will make the organization succeed or fail. Delegating real authority to lower level managers and teams is much more important than the endless organization chart restructuring to which organizations often resort.

Lack of successes

Organizations exist to achieve specific results. Morale cannot be sustained in the absence of results. Winning teams need successes to feel like and behave like winners. Identify achievable results, make them happen and draw attention to them even if they are small. The losses that do occur are not as important as the attitude of the team towards those losses. A leader must convey optimism and hope in the face of losses. This is not to say that the leader denies the losses. It means that the leader is responsible for maintaining faith in the capacity of himself and the team to prevail.

Intramural warfare

Bitter fingerpointing and distrust between two interdependent departments is debilitating. Enormous amounts of productive energy are wasted by the friction in each interaction. The problem seems to be personality based and therefore unsolvable. It is, however, often soluble through energetic leadership. The solution requires zero tolerance of the dysfunctional status quo. It must be clear that the leader is emotionally prepared to let one or both parties go for the good of the organization. When this willingness is unmistakably genuine, the parties tend to rise above their entrenched positions and work to understand and meet each others= legitimate needs..

Loss of founding purpose

Organizations are usually founded with a crystal clear mission and vision. As the organization succeeds, the vision often fades into the background and the processes and activities associated with its success become what the organization most values and preserves. This works for a time but eventually is insufficient. The organization loses its internal guidance system and implicitly or explicitly makes the very largest decisions based on expediency rather than a coherent value system. Discontent begins to pervade the organization because, at the deepest level, human beings demand their lives have meaning, and meaning requires coherency. An organization at this juncture must create the forums in which fundamental conversations can occur about the organization=s identity and unique role.

End of business life-cycle

Organizations which have built their success around a service or product that once met a societal need which has now changed often go through protracted deaths. Leading and working in this environment is highly stressful. Expectations are based on historical achievements not future potential. Layers of systems are in place to keep the organization going so it hangs on in a sadly diminished capacity. There are only two alternatives for organizations in this stage – on orderly wind-down or a complete reinvention in which the business idea itself – the unique match of capabilities and needs which generates wealth – is fundamentally restated. The sooner this reality is accepted, the greater the options that remain open in either direction.

Lack of decency

Decency is about how people treat each other as they go about their lives and work. Whether an organization behaves decently is determined by the culture instilled by the founding team and the values and behaviors of the current team. Organizations which are successful can thrive despite a lack of decency because they have the resources to pay staff enough to put up with a demeaning environment. Organizations struggling to survive don=t have this luxury. Leaders seeking to revitalize a struggling organization must be very thoughtful about their staffs= feelings and perceptions and take great pains to communicate what they are doing and why. How they implement tough decisions is as important as making the decision. It sends a strong message as to whether people are valued or expendable. Staff will act accordingly.

Lack of re-investment in organization

Morale slowly drains in organizations which do not continue to invest in their own development. Old equipment, outdated software, junky furniture or office space, inadequate staffing and training all fly in the face of management=s exhortations for excellence. There are many reasons organizations are denied the investment they need. Regardless, revitalization requires finding creative solutions for renewing the organization=s infrastructure. While plant investment will do no good if organization purpose and design are deeply flawed, it must be factored into a revitalization effort. And while solutions are being sought, staff must be kept fully informed and invited to participate by contributing their ideas for renewal.

There is a bonus factor in all this. Anyone working to revitalize an organization is paying a steep personal price as the demands are often heroic. If they are to take good care of the organization over the long run, they must also take good care of themselves. They require opportunities for reflection and renewal, harbors in the storm to refresh and collect themselves. If you are one of these, organize your life so you have the time, space and support for this reflection. It will serve your organization well.

Doing Good Incrementally

January 23, 2012 By Ira Chaleff

by Ira Chaleff

Recently, a group of management consultants and writers got together to discuss how their work was helping companies and the world. Most felt very good about their ability to help the clients who retained them. But, alongside this feeling was a gnawing question: What if I’m helping my clients do better but the corporation they are part of is not behaving in a socially responsible way? Am I really helping the world to be a better place?

I suspect that this thinking parallels the experience of managers and executives in large companies. They know that they are doing their best to fulfill the expectations of their boards and shareholders and senior management. But, beyond the widgets they make, is all their hard work ultimately adding up to the world being better or worse off? To their communities being better or worse off? Or, in some cases, is it even adding up to their companies being better off in the long run versus the short run?

Most executives and managers are under such intense pressure to manage change, produce quarterly profits, remain strategically competitive and hold their personal lives together while doing all this, that they don’t have time to indulge in such philosophical questions. But somewhere in their consciousness these questions exist and sometimes they gnaw at their consciences.

DILEMMA

There appears to be a dilemma. The few management thinkers who do raise questions about the sustainability of a system which demands constant growth and increased profitablity, regardless of the societal or environmental or health costs of such growth, seem to challenge the very fabric of our free enterprise, capitalist system. If we pay attention to them we begin to question the very system which is providing so many of us with materially abundant lives. This is too threatening to do. So the management thinkers seem doomed to be like Cassandra who was given the gift to see the coming crises but cursed with the inability to get others to treat the threats she saw seriously.

This only becomes a dilemma if we assume that we must overthrow or radically change the system in order to improve the situation. We know that this is a quixotic venture. It is unlikely we could ever radically change the system and, history teaches us that, even if we did, we would not necessarily wind up with a better system. Things could get a lot worse as they have done in many countries who tampered with the free enterprise system.

Thus we do nothing. And the warnings the Cassandras try to give us go unheeded, to our mutual peril. There is another approach. We can listen to the Cassandras and recognize that there is some truth in their warnings, without having to buy their exhortations to overthrow the system.

LEVELS OF CHANGE

There are three levels of change that are always possible,with many points in between: radical change, significant progressive change and incremental conservative change. Radical change overthrows the whole power structure of a system and is only appropriate in rare, revolutionary situations such as existed when the Soviet Union collapsed, or the internet burst onto the scene.

Significant progressive change is typical of companies who are market leaders or aspire to market leadership. It includes such bold acts as the innovation of family friendly policies or smokestack scrubbers before they are commonplace.

Incremental conservative changes are possible and productive in any company or society that is holding its own. Examples might be reducing the amount of lead in gasoline or extending health care benefits to legally recognized domestic partners.. Such seemingly narrow changes can keep improving life without a large risk of unintended and counterproductive consequences.

The targets for improvement are only limited by our imagination. One of the most powerful tools a company has for improving its own workplace, the community, or even the world, is to get clarity on what it values and then figure out how to measure that. What you track, measure and reward is what you will get more of.

For example, if you run a successful fast food chain but are concerned about the long term impact of the amount of deep fried food on your customer’s health, clarify your values. Perhaps this would result in a statement such as: Our values are to be a market leader in profitably providing the kind of fast food our customers want while finding ways of successfully reducing the percentage of saturated fat they eat in our food. This might spawn a program to test incremental menu and promotional changes which serve this value. The measurable might be: reducing saturated fat consumed by customers from 50% to 40% of their purchases. The first region to successfully do this while retaining or increasing market share will receive a $100,000 bonus to be divided by area managers.

IT ADDS UP

The key is, just as we are proactive about steps to improve customer satisfaction and the profitability of our business, we can be proactive about improving how our business or industry impacts our employees, our communities and the world. If we organize ourselves to be consistent about this, over time, incremental improvements add up to large, progressive improvements. Ironically, these may preempt the need for disruptive radical change or burdensome government regulation at some future point.

And we are more proud of what we are doing in the world.

The key to doing good is your commitment to doing good. As soon as you recognize that consistent, incremental change is within your power and is not threatening, you can organize the collective energy within your company that shares this value to collaborate with you. Together you can steadily, incrementally, build a better place for people to work, and a better community, environment and world in which to do that work.

Full Participation Requires Courageous Followership

January 23, 2012 By Ira Chaleff

by Ira Chaleff

A company chartered to provide insurance to physicians had a new president and CEO. He was energetic, bright, respectful of others and attuned to organizational development needs. The management team and staff saw him as a boon to their company which was struggling to retain its footing in a niche market. Unfortunately, the CEO had a blind spot.

He had hired a college buddy as VP of Marketing. This buddy turned out to be a slacker; it soon became apparent to the other executives and many staff that he was not pulling his weight. He was rarely available, taking off for the golf course at every available opportunity, and was slow to respond to requests when he was present.

It was clear to the staff that the CEO and VP Marketing were very tight, socially and professionally. The instinct for self-preservation restrained the other executives and marketing staff from raising the issue of the VP’s non-performance with the CEO. They filled the gap his physical and mental absence left as best they could. A couple of VPs, braver in these matters, did raise the issue with the CEO and were told in no uncertain terms the CEO was not going to turn on his friend. From this, they too reached the conclusion it would be best to not raise this issue again.

It took a year and a half before the CEO realized how much damage his buddy was causing. Though it pained him greatly, he fired his friend, tempering the act with the usual obfuscating language used in the public announcement.

Reading this you can say, what POOR judgment for a CEO and it took him FAR too long to correct the situation. Of course, you’d be right on both counts. But, let me suggest, this would not be the primary critique to make about the situation. We could just as justifiably, and more productively say what TIMID and IRRESPONSIBLE behavior on the part of the executives and staff to let the CEO make this error for so long.

What I am suggesting is that viewing the primary failure here as a failure of followership rather than a failure of leadership is potentially more productive. Why? For the simple reason that all leaders, being human, have frailties and blind spots. To leave the onus on the leader to detect, own up to and remedy the blind spot is as unreasonable as asking you to scratch your back with your elbow. You can’t reach there. Leaders can’t reach their blind spots. So in both cases, outside help is needed.

Now we could say that this is a function for the Board to take up with the CEO. That’s a reasonable argument. But how does the board detect the need? Most boards don’t see very deeply into an organization. If one of the CEO’s reports brought the matter to the board’s attention they might address it. But going to the Board without first raising the issue with the CEO and giving the CEO a chance to correct it smacks strongly of disloyalty. Even if done out of a higher loyalty to the organization, approaching the board without first approaching the CEO and letting him know how strongly you feel about the situation has a high chance of backfiring and the CEO would find the action virtually unforgivable. Therefore, boards rarely are the first line of help with these matters.

Who does that leave to help the CEO see his or her blind spots? It leaves the people who report to the CEO, directly or indirectly. Now as we know, it is a very tall order asking these individuals to confront the CEO on matters that in all probability will generate significant defensiveness, if not retribution. So what is the ingredient needed to do so? Let me suggest that it is that old fashioned ingredient called COURAGE which Aristotle deemed the highest virtue because it was needed to exercise all the other virtues.

Lack of courage by those serving senior leaders has contributed to the downfall of many once powerful leaders. But even in the absence of dramatic topplings, the price organizations or groups pay for lacking the courage and skill to address dysfunctional behavior by leaders is high. You can’t have a truly participatory workplace environment if the tough issues get swept under the rug and are only discussed cynically behind the backs of the group’s leaders.

Let’s take another, more common scenario. A young analyst recently went to work for a mid-sized energy company. Within a few weeks he made an observation. Regardless of what staff were working on and the importance of that work to internal or external customers, if a line superior made a request it was always put at the top of the priority list while other matters were delayed. The executives making the request (read: order) were in the all-too-typical fire-fighting mode and asked for everything on a more or less rush basis. They rarely enquired what the impact of their request would be on other priorities.

Once again, however, the blame dear Brutus lies not with the organizational stars but with ourselves. The analyst observed that virtually no one paused to do any of the following:

seek to understand the context of the order and its true priority;
clarify further what was wanted in order to gauge the appropriate amount of time to spend on implementing the request and to avoid future rework;
inform the executive issuing the order what would be delayed as a result and getting either additional resources or a ruling on the relative priorities.

Is this the quality of participation that will make a difference? Will such behavior lead to better customer service? To faster cycle time? No, no and no. Yet you see this type of behavior occurring all the time in organizations. Unless you address this aspect of the culture — orientation to authority rather than to the mission, the customer and the processes and projects that produce and improve service to the customer — all other efforts you make to improve participation and quality will fall short. The question for the practitioner is who will address this aspect of the culture and how will they do so?

In my book, The Courageous Follower:Standing Up To and For Our Leaders (Berrett-Koehler) I posit that this change in culture can occur at any point in the organization where an individual can understand his or her own power to effect change, tap into the courage to take the stand required, and display or develop the skills to effectively reflect back to the positional leaders the consequences of their policies and behaviors. Clearly, this is a very tall order. But short of this, creative, energetic and committed individuals who see their leaders falling short of the actions needed to create such a culture become somewhat cynical and alienated, depriving the organization of the vitality it needs to continually improve or reinvent itself.

Of course, you can also affect the culture by training the leaders to fully understand the imperatives that comprise quality as a few organizations have managed to do. But any practitioner in the field knows that in many organizations leaders only pay lip service to change efforts and don’t engage in the training, self-examination and discipline required to actually make these changes. Do you just give up in this case? Not necessarily. You still can work with the followers.

A primary question is how does a follower find the strength to do what does not come naturally to most people – act from conviction rather than from a desire to stay in with favor those in authority? This strength comes from a combination of courage and power. Productive staff have more power than they realize and courage flows from a variety of influences. Since few of us are entirely altruistic, the corollary question is why should a follower act from conviction and risk disfavor? Aside from the obvious higher reasons, paradoxically it is often just this willingness to risk that singles one out for future leadership roles.

Take the example of a young editor with two small children who worked for a publishing house in the days when many publishing houses were privately held and run by the founder. The editor was bright, committed and a hard worker. He soon became the publisher’s fair haired boy and a rising star. But as he rose in the organization, the editor gained more access to the publisher and began to observe his method of operating more closely. Unhappily, he found serious instances of the publisher mistreating authors. Rather than remain quiet about these, the editor drew on the courage of his religious convictions which were unusually strong, and began speaking out though no one else dared to do so. At first the publisher became apoplectic and repeatedly threatened to fire the editor. After awhile he began seeking the editor out when he had a problem as he knew he would be forthcoming in his views. The screaming abated. When the publisher retired, he named the editor as his successor. Of course, not all situations work out as happily as this which is why it really does require courage to take a stand.

A second question is, how does a follower develop a relationship with a leader that permits him or her to effectively engage the leader? While on rare occasions a brave soul from down in the ranks of an organization can reach a CEO about a troubling issue affecting the organization, the executives one or two echelons below a CEO have far more opportunity to do so. The degree to which these executives can effectively engage the leader on issues that may be uncomfortable to raise is directly proportional to how well they are serving the leader and the organization and how fully they have won the leader’s trust.

The president of a national trade association hired a woman to run the association’s for-profit subsidiary which provided specialized products and services to member organizations. He hired her based on her strong track record but with some trepidation about her equally strong reputation for outspokenness. Within three months the president listened to and sought out her opinion on many difficult issues. What had happened? Trust had gelled.

The bedrock of the trust was the woman’s business acumen – her ability to get results. Equally important, she took pains to keep the president well informed so he was never blindsided in his dealings with member organizations or his board. She alerted him to potential pitfalls and to shortfalls and how they were being dealt with. When she made recommendations she alerted him to who would not be pleased with that course of action and suggested how to minimize the fallout. In short, she served her leader well and he knew it. As a result, when she took the occasional position that countered his own he did not interpret it as an act of disloyalty; he paid very serious attention to her.

A third question is, what options are open to a follower if the leader is unresponsive? This immediately begs the question How skillfully is the follower giving the leader feedback about his or her policies or behavior? Some people do so intuitively, others need models for providing feedback effectively so they minimize the leader’s tendency to become defensive.

Assuming that feedback is being given effectively, the next single most important strategy is persistence. Telling a leader something once does not absolve us from responsibility if the leader doesn’t immediately change his or her counterproductive behavior or policy. The hard part is being willing to persist in our feedback to the leader over time. It raises the risk of the leader viewing us as a nuisance and finding ways to consciously or unconsciously marginalize us. But it is precisely this persistence that is needed to effect a transformation.

In order to help a leader transform (often viewed as a requisite to organizational transformation) we sometimes must first go through our own transformation. If it has been our pattern to shut up when a leader ignores or rejects our feedback, then we need to work on transforming this behavior in ourselves before we can influence the leader’s behavior. The chief of staff to a political figure was accustomed to the politician setting the office agenda. When the politician moved on to head up a private sector organization he brought the chief of staff along to be director of a critical set of functions. The new director was dismayed at times at the former-politician-turned CEO’s inability to stay focused on the large issues rather than on the small political touches which still absorbed a lot of his energy. But he could not help the politician grow into his new executive role until he himself unlearned the habits of a political chief of staff and became willing to articulate and operationalize an agenda for his unit without waiting for the CEO to do so. Using this agenda, he was now in a stronger position to help the CEO stay focused on the strategic priorities.

Sometimes, despite our best efforts, we do not have sufficient influence to help the leader or organization make the changes needed in order to do well. At a hydraulic manufacturing plant in the mid-west the purchasing manager was on contract from the parent company in Scandinavia. He had lots of ideas about how to improve operations and repeatedly tried and failed to get his American boss, the VP for Operations, to support or champion these ideas. Eventually, the purchasing manager realized that the combination of cross-cultural factors, interpersonal dynamics and conflicting business models would not permit any real change to occur. Though he had the option to renew his contract which would have been desirable from his family’s perspective, he chose leaving rather than continuing in a situation in which he would only become embittered at the road blocks to meaningful change. This, too, requires a form of courage.

A final question is how in our role as leader (and many positional followers are simultaneously positional leaders) can we create the conditions that foster courageous followership among the people who report to us? There are many strategies we can employ but at their core they all recognize that people are easily discouraged from true participation and especially from speaking unpopular truths. Therefore, we must treat every instance in which we are given critical feedback as a vitally important opportunity to send a message throughout the organization that we really do value this, despite our natural tendency to feel defensive. And we need to supplement these spontaneous learning moments with structured anonymous vehicles for eliciting honest feedback, such as 360% evaluations which have become popular. But heed this caveat: don’t ask for this feedback even anonymously unless you intend to pay careful attention to it. Otherwise, the effect will be to only heighten cynicism and reduce future participation.

To summarize, the quality of participation in an organization is directly related to the degree of courage and skill in interpersonal dynamics existing or developed in those who surround the organization’s formal leaders. While leaders can and should work to create the conditions that bring out these characteristics, organization’s can’t always rely on leaders to do so. Those who care for that organization or have an interest in its success do not have to shrug their shoulders in despair at this. We can each be the author of these characteristics within ourselves and, by doing so, be models our colleagues and even our leaders can emulate.

Ira Chaleff is president of Executive Coaching and Consulting Associates in Washington, D.C.