Leading always requires listening and understanding the goals and values of the people in your organization.
Author
- Mel Rutherford
Professor and Department Chair, Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour, McMaster University
If your organization is in crisis – when the majority of stakeholders perceive a significant risk of severe harm to the organization – listening is indispensable, and your values are your lifeline.
In my recent article “Rebuilding with values-based governance ,” I describe using values as the foundation of governance and decision-making. I draw on analysis and reflection from leading my university department through crisis as the world was locked down due to COVID-19 restrictions.
I describe the approach, as well as my use of shared leadership, consensus decision-making and a compassionate approach to accountability, in my new book that examines my odyssey as a transman stepping into leadership during a precarious time.
Shared leadership during a crisis
Leading any organization can be a lot of work, but leading in crisis requires additional considerations. In addressing perceived risks of harm after a crisis, leaders must also navigate a situation or event characterized by what management researchers Christine M. Pearson and Judith A. Clair describe as ” ambiguity of cause, effect and means of resolution, as well as by a belief that decisions must be made swiftly .” Leaders face incomplete information, time pressure, unprecedented leadership challenges with unclear options and a threat to the group’s reputation.
The lack of clarity that results from incomplete information is a real leadership challenge. When faced with the unexplained, people have a need to assuage their confusion. The more fear-inducing the situation , the greater the urge to create a plausible explanation. Different people generate different stories, each consistent with the available information.
Once multiple stories are generated, a community is vulnerable to breaking into factions who can come to see each other as lacking rationality or even lacking morality .
With no shared understanding of the situation, and no clear road map, a leader’s best strategy becomes listening for constituents’ thoughts and values.
Co-creating shared values
I approached my term as leader with a vision of values-based governance. This involved firstly identifying core values and then considering implications for further actions.
In order to build a core values statement that included all of the voices in our department, we followed a rigorous process to listen to each other and co-create a core values statement.
A facilitator who is internal to the organization could follow these steps, but hiring a professional facilitator might bring more experience, and could contribute perceived impartiality if the nature of your crisis requires that.
Our facilitator met with four separate groups: faculty, staff and postdoctoral researchers, graduate students and undergraduate students. She taught each group social psychologist Shalom Schwartz’s values framework which identifies 10 personal values and showed them examples of other organizations’ core values.
Each group brainstormed values that seemed important to our department in its current state. Representatives from each group then met a couple of times to draft and refine a core values statement, naming values that guide:
our community;
research and scholarship;
teaching and decision-making;
and conflict resolution.
Finally, the draft was circulated for further feedback and finalized once that was incorporated.
Revisiting existing policy and procedure
Once an organization has named its core values, these can be put into action , employing processes that rely on shared values as a foundation.
Working together, your group can compare your standard operating procedures and policies to your core values. Notice any processes that do not align with the core values you have just endorsed, and update your documents so that you are living your core values.
Once your core values are explicit, you can now use a formal process to make decisions by consensus, something I’ve described previously. The process requires that proposals and objections to proposals must be framed in terms of the group’s values.
Accountability rooted in values
In times of crisis, accountability rooted in values and relationship is more effective than blaming or calling out. In the book Calling In: How to Start Making Change with Those You’d Rather Cancel , Loretta J. Ross, activist and professor of the study of women and gender, describes the harms of a “call out” culture , and the benefits of calling someone in when they have harmed or offended. This compassionate approach to accountability builds trust and restores relationships.
A group with explicit values can practise compassionate accountability. Instead of calling people out, pause, assume good intent and ask about the relationship between values and impact. You can compare intention with outcome and invite reflection on: “What might you do differently next time?”
LGBT youth line
My department is not the only organization to experiment with values-based governance. The Toronto-based LGBT Youth Line undertook to define their values and align with their processes with those shared values. The organization spent several months examining their governance practices. They wanted their values to be ” lived out loud .”
The youth line worked toward making their values explicit, and then noticed how these explicit shared values allowed them to “create a more intentional governance culture that shapes how decisions are made, who makes them and how.” In the wake of this experience, they have created a video describing its impact.
Values can anchor your leadership
What’s known as the “intuitionist model” for thinking about how people make moral decisions holds that when people are confronted with moral dilemmas, the solution comes quickly and intuitively, not deliberately and analytically. The deliberate analysis comes later, when people need to justify and explain those intuitive decisions.
Without explicit values, daily decisions can become unmoored and even contradictory.
Being explicit about the values that your group shares anchors your leadership. It makes those values available for every decision a leader needs to make. Eventually, I found that relying on our shared values became practised and easy.
As my new book details, when our department was in crisis, we were able to move beyond confusion and despair and build a culture aligned with our shared values using values-based governance.
We aligned our policies and practices with our shared values, we adopted a practice of consensus decision-making rooted in our shared values and we used compassionate accountability, calling in, to check in with our colleagues about how we all promote our shared values.
