slow leadership

Slow Leadership

EARCOS Leadership ConferenceBangkok, ThailandNovember 2, 2013

Kirsten Olson, Ed.D, PCCOld Sow Coaching and Consulting

Boston, MA-USA@olsonkirsten

1Monday, October 28, 2013

How I Came To Slow• Work as an organizational consultant and leadership coach for 20 years

• Adrian Savage

• Paradox: Movement for slow leadership as information worlds speed up

• Charter school movement in the US: incredible prizing of speed, efficiency, tangible results based on data

• Culturally create contrast to ‘old, slow’ hierarchies of existing systems/educational monopolies

• To be fast is to be new, right


“Don’t just do something,stand there.”

Fast may be inversely correlated with quality?


Developmental growth requires pauses

• Teams and leaders require reflection on practice to grow developmentally

• Moving from Kegan’s Stage 3 to Stage 4

• Expert to Achiever (Torbert, Loevinger, Cook-Greuter)


Cognitively-overloaded brain

"E-mails, meetings, texts, tweets, phone calls, news—the unstructured, continuous, fractured nature of modern work is a tremendous burden on the brain's control network and consumes a huge amount of the brain’s energy. The resulting mental fatigue takes its toll in the form of mistakes, shallow thinking, and impaired self-regulation. When overwhelmed, the control network loses the proverbial reins, and our behavior is driven by immediate, situational cues instead of shaped with our priorities in mind. We go on autopilot, and our brains fall back to simply responding to whatever is in front of us, regardless of its importance.Success as a leader requires, first and foremost, creating just a few clear priorities and gathering the courage to eliminate or outsource less important tasks and goals. Executives must also reset their expectations for what constitutes a viable workload, basing them on a realistic understanding of what their brains can handle. It’s less than what most of us try to accomplish."

Cognitive scientists Adam Waytz and Malia Mason (2013) “Your Brain At Work” http://hbr.org/2013/07/your-brain-at-work/ar/1


New leadership requires complex

cross-system ‘knowing’People are most comfortable working within one way of knowing, but real change in complex systems requires more than one way of knowing.


“Work Devotion Schema”• “Working long hours is a way of signaling youʼre really committed, that

youʼre really devoted to your job. Itʼs a way of displaying what the sociologist Mary Blair-Loy has called the work devotion schema. The work devotion schema–communicates that work should be the central focus of your life, unencumbered by family responsibilities; that it entails deep emotional ties with your work. Work is the chief place that you get your sense of identity, the chief place you get your sense of moral worth. “I would do anything for my clients [or students]” is a very common thing to hear. For example, lawyers say, “Iʼm always available when my clients need me.”

• -Joan C. Williams, Distinguished Professor of Law at University of California (2013) http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/08/working-fathers-need-balance-t/


Long hours prove worth

• Particularly for white collar men

• “The work of Joseph Vandello, who wrote a very important article called “Precarious Masculinity,”– showing that although femininity is something that happens to women automatically as they mature, masculinity is seen as something that not only has to be earned, it has to be earned over and over and over again. One of the key places that it’s earned, for more privileged men, is on the job.” Joan C. Williams

• So to prove your worth as a man, you ‘need’ to work very long hours and be overly busy


Work with leaders and teams• Just a few practices

• Creating the conditions for ‘going slow’

• Demonstrate how this is attached to positive outcomes for the organization

• Work with a high-performing team whose work is ‘stuck’ due to rushing, over-emphasis on efficiency


Slow Leadership At Work

• Begin meetings with silence, “taking a good minute”

• Find your body and create a mini-release

• Bring attention to your back body for listening, creativity


Basic Premise of Leadership Coaching

“The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice.

And because we fail to notice what we fail to notice,there is little we can do to change

until we notice how failing to noticeshapes our thoughts and deeds.”

-R.D. Laing, 1954 11Monday, October 28, 2013

What’s your typical day?


What’s the traffic in your head?


Make a list of what’s typical...


Pause. Breathe.


Creating An Island of Calm:

3 Minute Body Scan


What’s the difference between those two

experiences?


Big Ideas

• “Leadership is too important to rush” (Adrian Savage)

• Paradox: What made you successful may hold you back

• Technician to Manager

• What needs slow cooking?


Technician To Manager• Specialist who likes to

work narrow and deep

• Technicians do one thing and do it well

• Key actions: deliver on area of expertise, build expertise

• At school: administrator, librarian, custodian, nurse, AP teacher


Manager...

• Gets things done THROUGH other people

• Key actions: listen, discern, coordinate other’s actions, support and coach, direct, orchestrate

• At school: superintendent, principal, teacher leader


“Managers get paid to help other people do

things, not DO things.”22Monday, October 28, 2013

Blessing/Curse

What’s Yours?


What’s yours?


What did you hear?


Self Evaluation: In your leadership life now, where are you

putting out fires vs. slow cooking?


Why?


What do you want to slow down?


What are the ingredients of slow cooking for you?


Share Out


What can you start noticing today?

New practice for tomorrow?


“The story is told of a South American tribe that went on a long march, when all of a sudden they would stop

walking, sit down to rest for awhile, and then make camp for a couple of days before going any farther.

They explained that they needed the time of rest so that their souls could catch up with them.”

-Wayne Muller, Sabbath


Resources• Adrian Savage, Slow Leadership: Civilizing The

Organization (2006)

• Mary Blair-Loy, Competing Devotions: Career and Family Among Women Executives (2003)

• Robert Kegan developmental theory: In Over Our Heads (1998) and http://www.slideshare.net/JessicaTraylor/kegan-constructive-developmental-theory


slow leadership

Education