Changing on the Job: Developing Leaders for a Complex World
This book delves into adult development, a field that explores ongoing growth throughout adulthood. What I love about Jennifer’s book is her stance of using the theory to deepen our understanding of one another, and to assist others to overcome obstacles they face in tackling challenges with less stress. The book ties this concept to the workplace and how to enable personal growth on the job, which I really like. It’s about supporting ourselves and others to grow, aiming to help saving a world in trouble.
Simple Habits for Complex Times: Powerful Practices for Leaders
Here, Jennifer and Keith outlines habits that can enhance effectiveness in complexity. The book introduces three core practices: taking multiple perspectives, asking different questions, and seeing more of the system. Its central premise is that in complexity, it’s more beneficial to act on possibilities rather than probabilities, often necessitating new habits. For instance, by asking questions that explore unknowns, we can embrace more possibilities in uncertainty.
Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps: How to Thrive in Complexity
In this book, Jennifer identifies common mindtraps that impede effective action in complexity. She defines a mindtrap as an instinctive human response, suitable for simpler times but often misleading in our complex, unpredictable world. Examples include having a desire to be right, which can prevent us from noticing what’s really happening, and the need for control, frequently driven by the fear of not achieving desired outcomes.
Unleash Your Complexity Genius: Growing Your Inner Capacity to Lead
Jennifers latest book where she together with Carolyn Coughin explores how to navigate complexity. Jennifer discusses practices like recognising the action urge, how to choose a helping breath, the importance of acting non-attached to outcomes, how to use humble nudges to introduce change, and the benefit of laughing to open up our senses to what is happening. These strategies are designed to tap into our nervous system, reactivating our innate abilities to thrive in complexity.
Immunity to Change, how to overcome it and unlock the potential in yourself and your organization
Robert Kegan is a developmental pshychologist and a former professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is a main authority in the area of adult development, describing how we as adults may continue to grow throughout our lives. One key aspects of his theory is the subject to object move, where things we are unaware of, and which are impacting how we act and react, may become objects in our awareness which we can control.
’Immunity to Change’ presents a method for individuals and teams to identify underlying assumptions and narratives that block desired changes. This approach, rooted in Kegan’s research on adult development and the subject-object transition, helps uncover unconscious internal assumptions and identity-defining stories that shape behavior and often act as defense mechanisms. For example, a self-narrative like ’I cannot speak in front of people’ might prevent someone from public speaking, even when necessary. Kegan’s method brings such assumptions to light, enabling you to consciously challenge and reshape them through deliberate experiments. This process facilitates vertical growth, broadening perspectives and possibilities
I’ve personally used this method, both in understanding my responses to stressful situations and in coaching others. It’s a powerful tool for self-reflection and development.
I recommend this book to people curious about understanding how our minds work, and to use it in your own self-reflection. Use it with care if you would like to guide others through the method; do it in partnership and let the other person set the boundaries on how deep they would like to go. I would say that this is a tool mainly for coaches. but this is an interesting read for anyone interested in why change can be challenging.
An Everyone Culture – Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization
In this book the authors describes how to become a deliberately developmental organisation (DDO); i.e an organisation that not only enable horizontal development for all people in the organisation (improving your craft by getting new knowledge), but also enable vertical development (growth on a personal level). The book builds on Kegans research on adult development and heavily uses the Immunity to Change method as a tool for personal growth.
I do not recommend this book because it was the most entertaining book I have read; because it wasn’t, but since I find the message in it highly important and engaging. They describes, and exemplifies mainly by three different organisations they have studied, a possibility to both create organisations that welcome the whole persons to daily work, and to enable an environment where people can be transparent with weaknesses as a way to get support on working on them. The premise of the book is that we grow as humans when we surface our underlying assumptions and mental models from which our behaviors emerge. This is the “subject to object” move which enable us to take ownership of what was previously owning us unconsciously. DDOs helps us increase awareness of our inner state, our assumptions and conflicting commitments that has been conditioned throughout our life, and gives us support to overcome and change them with something more helpful where you are now.
It was some years since I bought the book and last year I had it a second try reading it, so I cannot say it is an easy read. The style is a bit dry and academic, and I definitely wouldn’t like to work in some of the organisations they uses as examples throughout the book. But, as they also stresses; you do not become a DDO by copying practices from other companies; you find your own way to enable personal growth guided by the principles described in the book. The book provides some proof of the business benefit of moving towards a DDO. Here you maybe need to put some faith in what they are describing (which I do), but by creating an environment where everybody helps each other overcome limitations, you will most likely, at least, deepen the personal relations between colleagues. From what we know about high performing teams, where team members not only support each other reaching their shared goal, but also supports each other in personal development, the business case for DDOs should be quite evident!
This is a book for you if you are interesting in what could be described as the next level of an learning organisation!
Presence-Based Leadership -. Complexity Practices for Clarity, Resilience, and Results That Matter
In this book, Silsbee describes an integrated view of leadership, which should be interpreted broadly. Everyone acts as a leader in one way or another, themselves and others. He combines system and complexity thinking, adult development and practices like mindfulness in a remarkable way, and the book touched me deeply.
The book outlines 9 panes of leadership through which you can, as he states it: “become more present to what is and more able to lead with clarity and resilience towards results that matter”. He constructs a model using two axes: Sensingm Being, and Acting on one, and Context, Identity, and Soma (body) on the other. This framework forms a matrix of nine perspectives, aiding in understanding and acting in complexity:
- Sensing is about how you can increase your ability to receive information, both from the environment and from your inner landscape.
- Being is how you can shift you inner state to enable more constructive and powerful behaviours
- Acting is what you can do to move forward.
- Context is your surroundings, the environment you act in, and people you meet.
- Identity is our self-perceptions and the narratives we are telling ourselves of who we are and what we can and cannot do. Our Identity is constructed and we are actively enhancing and defending in every moment of life
- Soma is our body with all the sensations and feelings, whether we are conscious of them or not.
A key message of the book is the automatic and embodied nature of our actions, shaped by past experiences. We react and act in response to what is happening around us, responses that are not always helpful in navigating through complexity effectively. By increasing our ability to be aware of our context, our current narratives and reactions in our body, we get the possibility to shift our Being to enable more constructive behaviours. For example, intersection between Being and Context in the model describes the benefit you get from decoupling your inner state from the context, allowing experiences to be influenced but not determined by what is going on around you.
For those interested in personal leadership development or seeking inspiration in this field, I highly recommend this book. I usually skip exercises in books, but something caught my attention from the start in this one, and got quite many insights from doing them.
The mind of the leader – How to lead yourself, your people, and your organisation for extraordinary results
This book really resonated with me where they connects the benefit of mindfulness to leadership, together with stances of acting form selflessness and with compassion. These three abilities combined create what they call the MSC-leadership.
The authors define mindfulness as the capacity to remain focused and conscious, rather than being scattered or reacting unconsciously on autopilot. Selflessness is our ability to avoid acting from our ego, to instead understand that our role as leaders is to act for the good of the whole in mind. Compassion is our ability to see the challenges of others in order to open our hearts to a state of helping.
An MSC leadership starts inside your own mind, and then continues outward towards your employees and your organization. By deepening self-awareness, you can lead yourself more effectively, By leading yourself, you can also lead others, and through this, your organization more effectively.
The foundation for this is practicing mindfulness. Research shows that practicing mindfulness helps you improve how you sense both your inner landscape (thoughts, feelings and physical sensations), and the outer landscape (other people and what is really happening around you). By doing this you avoid the tendency to trigger the autopilot when reacting on what is happening to you. Mindfulness also strengthens our ability to feel compassion, which in turn increases our awareness and to become more selfless. These three abilities thus reinforce each other as a system.
With the above as a base, the book consists of three parts, where the first is about understanding and leading yourself. Part 2 is about understanding and leading the employees, and part 3 about understanding and leading the organization.
For example, in part 2, leadership is very nicely described by a quote by a Chinees philosopher Lao Zi; ”A leader is at his best when people barely know he exists. When his work is done and his goal is achieved, they will say they got there themselves”. This is servant leadership, where you through mindful presence cultivates an environment build on trust, you coach and guides people to grow and excel, and you focus on creating the conditions your employees need to be successful.
This book is a must read for all professionals in leading positions. It is a leader’s responsibility to increase their self-awareness and their ability to serve the employees and the organization to grow, to be able to create results that matter, and feeling meaningfulness through their efforts.
The responsibility process – unlocking your natural ability to live and lead with power
Christopher Avery’s book, where he describes a model of how we process and act upon challenges,, is a love of mine that never grows old. I learned about the Responsibility Process before Christopher wrote and published this book and I am still struck by how often I benefit from this model, where it helps me move away from blockages to instead move forward in a direction that is more creative and impactful.
Christopher describes our innate tendencies to become stucked in various blocking, mental states when we face challenges. These mental states are ways for us to handle difficult situations, and are triggered to protect ourselves from emotions we do not want to confront. According to Christopher, the mental states function as a number of stepping stones, on which we can get stuck or manage to invalidate to move to the next. This invalidation can happen unconsciously and instantaneously, or we can get stuck in a state regarding a challenge for many years. The mental states are, in the order we process them:
- Lay blame, meaning that we point outwards towards others as the cause of the problem I have.
- Justify, the cause of the problem is generated by the circumstances and environment (it has nothing to do with me)
- Shame, we point inward towards ourselves as the cause of the problem, that one is not competent, not worthy.
- Obligation, we can begin to act to address the problem. However, one is still in a blocked state, with negative feelings about the existence of the problem and what happened, and the driving force is to do something quickly to avoid dealing with what happened
- Quit, if the feelings about what happened are too difficult, there is a mental state that is a refuge, one shuts down. One stops acknowledging the existence of the problem, suppresses the feelings, and flees from doing anything to fix what has gone broken.
If one manages to get past these blocked states, it is possible to shift towards Responsibility, to cross the line up towards a mental state where one acts according to one’s intention, with creativity and the ability to turn the problem into an opportunity to create.
Christopher describes 3 tools to reach a state of Responsibility:
- Intention, to decide on an intention to lift oneself towards Responsibility in the face of mistakes and problems
- Awareness, to train one’s ability to notice when one has ended up in a blocked state
- Confront, to confront oneself by questioning whether what a blocked, mental state says is true or not.
The Responsibility Process is a simple model that is a life journey to master. I really recommend my network to explore this, and to read the book. I cannot count the times when my awareness of this process has helped me lift myself towards acting according to who I want to be, and to heal/address what happened.
Helping, How to offer, give and receive help
At the core of helping others solve their actual problems is Humble Inquiry (detailed in another one of the author’s fine books), which is both an attitude and a process. It starts with genuine curiosity and interest in the other person, recognizing that you don’t have all the answers or knowledge relevant to the situation at hand. Through this attitude, you explore the other person’s situation together to build knowledge and understanding of what is truly challenging and problematic. Schein describes the process as four levels of inquiry:
- Pure inquiry; involves asking open-ended questions that help the other person describe their situation, building a shared knowledge base.
- Diagnostical inquiry; directs attention to different areas of the other person’s situation to help them see the bigger picture, such as emotions, actions taken, or planned actions to resolve the situation.
- Confrontational inquiry; involves suggesting potential solutions once enough trust and shared knowledge have been established. Suggestions should be offered as possibilities, with the attitude that it’s the other person that has the knowledge to decide if these are real possibilities or not.
- Process-oriented; inquiry shifts focus from the specific situation to the relationship dynamics between the helper and the person being helped. This meta-inquiry assesses how the conversation is progressing and whether there is advancement or not. It can be used throughout the conversation to build a partnership in working towards insights that help the other individual.
The book describes the social and psychological dynamics that underlie all helping relationships. Unaddressed, these dynamics often lead to resistance from the person needing help and frustration on both sides. When we are asked to help another, it’s easy to too fast act as an expert, sharing knowledge and solutions, or to act like a doctor by attempting to diagnose without first understanding the problem deep enough. Starting with Humble Inquiry gives us a better chance to help the other person, transitioning to the role of expert or doctor only after both parties are certain the right problem has been identified and enough information is available.
The book also includes a chapter on teamwork, where Schein provides a wonderful definition of effective teams, as those where members helps each other, and teams evolve by development and maintenance of the reciprocal helping relationships among all the members. Love it!
Helping people change – coaching with compasion for lifelong learning and growth
This book recommendation by Boyatzis, Smith, and Van Oosten follows the same theme as Scheins book above; how we can act in a way that our ambition to help others is actually helpful for them. As the authors write, even help coming from good intentions often becomes unhelpful. The reason is often that we focus on trying to fix people, correcting their challenges by trying to move them from their problems to a place where we think they should be. Instead of this, the authors describe a coaching method that shifts to helping individuals find their own dreams that can pull them forward towards what they desire most in life.
The authors base the message of the book on emotional intelligence and research showing how we react internally when coached towards external goals (what others think, or what we believe others want us to move towards), compared to when we are coached towards our own visions and dreams. Being coached towards externally set goals risks triggering fears and blockages that close people off and therefore hinder real change. In comparison, being coached towards dreams triggers a sense of safety and openness, helping us find steps forward.
The authors present a model that starts with finding a personal vision for oneself, then helping the client gain clarity on who they are today, both strengths and weaknesses, and finally, identifying experiments they can do to try to move towards the vision.
Attempts to help another person needs be guided by a genuine sense of compassion for the other person. The help is about them, not about yourself and your own needs to appear knowledgeable and helpful, but instead the focus is entirely on providing support and encouragement, as well as facilitating the exploration of the other person’s dreams and passions and ways forward towards them. This may seem obvious, but if we look inside ourself when we trying to help onther person, and are true to what we see, I believe we often find that this is not always the case. It is human to be driven by our own need to be competent and helpful, but if this exists within us, it is difficult to actually help another person grow and address their current challenges.
This is a book for all of us who want to be helpful to our fellow human beings, and actually be able to act in a way that is truly helpful. It is not only a book for coaches, but I highly recommend it to everyone regardless of their role; managers, team leaders, team members, and others. I found the book to be very inspiring and insightful.
Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life
This is a fantastic book where Marshall describes how we can communicate with each other in a way that increases our mutual understanding, both in everyday conversations and challenging discussions. The Non-violent part in Nonviolent Communication (NVC) refers to the natural state of compassion that we return to when violence is no longer in our hearts. It captures an underlying purpose of NVC, to communicate from the heart, from one person to another, and to remain humane even in difficult conversations and situations. NVC guides us to observe and recognise situations and specific behaviours that affect us, and to identify and express what we want. It leads us to an empathetic approach to other people.
The author describes a communication format that helps us open up about what’s within us and provides a structure for giving feedback to others about their behaviour. The format have four parts: observation, feelings, needs, and request. For example, in a scenario where a colleague frequently arrives late to meetings:
”At our last 5 meetings you arrived after the meeting started. I feel frustrated that we can’t start meetings as planned when we have many things to discuss. I need respect for our agreements. I have a request that you come on time to our future meetings. What are your thoughts on this?”
It’s important to distinguish between a request and a demand (it’s not ok to disagree with the request). In NVC, the goal is to seek dialogue by expressing oneself clearly and opening up about feelings and needs. Requests are an invitation to further dialogue about what has happened and to explore possible mutual agreements going forward. The core here is curiosity and empathy, meaning that we express a request and then act from curiosity and empathy towards the other person’s response. In a dialogue based on NVC, you help the other person express how they see things and what needs they may have that drive their behaviour. Through this, we build a relationship where both sides feel heard and open up to the other person acting curiously and empathetically in return.
The above is the first part of the two parts of NVC communication; honestly expressing oneself to the other and then, in the second part, listening for the four components in what the other person is saying (or helping the other person express it through questions). Conversations based on NVC invite us to change our own behaviour to meet the other person’s needs, thus helping us avoid being critical and coercive towards others, which often creates resistance to change.
The book begins with a wonderful quote from the author which encapsulates how I want to live:
I want to live a life with compassion, in a flow between me and others that is based on giving from the heart.
This book serves as a guide on how we can live that life!
