FOREWORD

Goal

This work is intended to be a concise handbook for emerging and experienced leaders to provide a reality based systematic approach towards rapidly developing or enhancing competency and coherence in leadership.  Key references are cited and the intent is to provide a few new ideas framed in the backdrop of concisely summarized great works the reader should further explore on their journey of development.

I was raised on a farm and received a traditional Chemical Engineering education.  I was intimately involved in the execution of many critical manufacturing projects as a president, principal, project manager, engineer of record, field/commissioning engineer, field technician, labourer etc.  While this has firmly grounded me in physical reality, I also have an appreciation and an affinity for the abstract, but do not live in the realm of the abstract or imagination and see great danger in doing so.

We are faced with a new type of class conflict: Physicals against Virtuals:

“The thinking classes are fatally removed from the physical side of life… Their only relation to productive labor is that of consumers. They have no experience of making anything substantial or enduring. They live in a world of abstractions and images, a simulated world that consists of computerized models of reality – “hyperreality,” as it’s been called – as distinguished from the palatable, immediate, physical reality inhabited by ordinary men and women. Their belief in “social construction of reality” – the central dogma of postmodernist thought – reflects the experience of living in an artificial environment from which everything that resists human control (unavoidably, everything familiar and reassuring as well) has been rigorously excluded. Control has become their obsession. In their drive to insulate themselves against risk and contingency – against the unpredictable hazards that afflict human life – the thinking classes have seceded not just from the common world around them but from reality itself.” (Lasch, 1995)

We are also faced with a related rise, even an epidemic of narcissism and like narcissists the Virtuals are blind to the feedback of reality-based downstream consequences of their actions. 

The natural world and human civilization are composed of sets of interdependent complex systems.  Due to the increasingly powerful technologies at our disposal, and hubristic decision-making being made by narcissistic Virtuals in increasingly thick-walled ivory towers, catastrophic destabilization of these complex systems is on the horizon.  Reality-based decision making by humble servant leaders possessing Wisdom will help to ensure that we at least do not introduce further destabilization, and hopefully repair damage that has been done.

My desire in writing this work is to provide a leadership framework that will help emerging leaders that have grown up in a largely virtual world get grounded in reality and make better decisions.  At the core of the leadership model being advocated is Servant Leadership.  The focus will be on how servant leaders at all levels in an organization can work to maximize the positive impact they can have:

1.     On the lives of the people they are leading

2.     On the desired organizational results

3.     In their own lives staying healthy and sustaining high performance

What we need now is Wisdom driven competent leadership.

Stories and Gratitudes

There are a few stories and events in my personal life and family history that provide some context for this work.

A significant event for me was the Canadian Iron Ring Ceremony that engineers graduating from a Canadian undergraduate program in engineering can opt into attending.  I attended this first as a new graduate and then 15 years later was invited to “ring” a newly graduating engineer who was actually a mature student working for us as a co-op student and later full time.  This second time was almost like a renewal of wedding vows to the profession.  The whole ceremony is described here: Iron Ring Ceremony - EGM Heritage (enggeomb.ca).  The take away is that the people who take the oath seriously have a true commitment to service and a higher standard of behaviour.  This oath is firmly grounded in the all too real consequences of engineers failing in our work.  Thank you Trevor for the invitation and for being a great colleague.

Another significant event is having been part of the team to start up an engineering services business, then taking over as its leader and continued and accelerated its growth and eventually selling a majority of the business and transferring leadership to an internally developed leadership team.  Thank you to everyone at Cheme.

These experiences were highly informative to this writing as they grounded me in the realities downstream of decisions I made.  Thank you to our founding president Paul for your mentorship and guidance.

A big thanks to my dear friend who introduced me to his idea that is central to some of what will be discussed, that three personal characteristics are required to enable someone to become an effective leader:  Perseverance, Humility, Emotional Intelligence.  These are big seemingly abstract ideas that directly connect to reality.  Thank you, Spencer, for this and so much more.

A big thank you also goes out to Jenna, my career coach whose shared wisdom continues to be invaluable.

1. INTRODUCTION: Getting Results

After being critical in the foreword of oversimplification of complex systems I will immediately launch into a simplified modelling of something highly complex.  This is a common practice in science and engineering in order to be able to take a complex problem and at least reduce it to complicated and make design decisions.  The skilled engineer or scientist makes the right simplifying assumptions, AND is aware of the limitations and dangers inherent in those assumptions and when the model will break down.

The starting point for this discussion is the starting point of why organizations exist.  An answer is: To achieve a desired RESULT. See Appendix 2 for a more process-centric framing.

From a high level organizational perspective the desired result is expressed in a mission statement.

Organizations that lose sight of their desired result will inevitably drift off course and risk becoming corrupted distortions of what they were meant to be and do.

Where do results come from?  Actions:

Figure 1: Actions and Results

The ends (Results) do not justify the means (ie: Actions).  The journey to a destination is at least as important as the destination.  Leadership defines not only the destination but also the journey.  Good leadership is about guiding the organization’s actions in a principled and ethical way to achieve the desired results.  Quoting Peter Drucker:

“Only three things happen in naturally in organizations: friction, confusion and underperformance.  Everything else requires leadership”.

Shifting gears to an engineer’s analysis:  What factors determine whether the results achieved are as desired?  Certainly, there are outside influences, but the ones under a leader’s control are:

1. Competency of the Actors (C)

2. Amount of Action (A)

3. Coherence and quality of the Action Taken (Q)

These combine in a multiplicative fashion:

(Meaningfulness of Result) is proportional to C x A x Q

By meaningfulness of result we mean how close to the desired result we actually get.  If any of C, A or Q drop to zero, then the overall meaningfulness of the result drops to zero.  A good example is in the kitchen where we have a desired result of a delicious meal:

If you put someone with:

• no culinary competency (C)

• but with loads of energy who will work very hard (A) and

• good ingredients and a proven recipe (Q)

The result will likely be poor.

If you take a great chef that is totally burnt out and incapable of putting in the full effort, even with a good recipe and ingredients, the result will be poor.

If you have a great chef who has the energy to work and will put in the work, but has lousy ingredients and a lousy recipe, the result will be mediocre at best.

If you have a great, energized chef, a great recipe (with ingredients and equipment) we will now get the delicious meal we are aiming at.

In the above example there is coherence needed between the recipe and the ingredients.  A great recipe, but with missing ingredients is incoherent.  Often a single missing ingredient is enough to significantly reduce the quality of the result.

Visually we can look at the above as follows:

Figure 2: Components of Action

Energy is a subject that will come up again and again in this handbook.  Setting conditions the that will create a resonance and increasing energy level in the organization is one of the key roles of the leader.  This is more than the commonly described simple motivation.  A key part of raising energy levels is in the provision of an overall coherence to the organization in this book we will use coherence broadly to include the quality of action, but it’s much bigger than just the quality of action, and to limit the definition to quality of action is too much of a simplification. While positive resonance and energy lift is a desired outcome of effective leadership, alertness is needed from leaders at all levels to the opposite: negative resonances and decreased energy.

Underlying almost everything a leader does is communication: transmission and receiving of information.  A great leader must be a great communicator.  This is axiomatically and critically true.  While there will not be a section devoted to communication in this work, some aspects will be emphasized here and there.  However, communication alone does not make a great leader, it may even be able to create a simulacrum of a leader that is in reality a fraud.  Effective leadership requires bringing together multiple other competencies in addition to communication. 

With great communication of great strategy and great culture and actions that align, a sense of coherence is established.  This is of foundational importance.  A foundation is provided where people feel secure.  Their feet are on steady ground.

Another great Peter Drucker quote: “The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.”.  Communication is a two way street where a lot more than 50% for the leader is listening, and hearing what is said and not said.  A leader should never be only in transmission mode, and rather always be transmitting and receiving.  When a leader is transmitting communication there should be questions.  If there aren’t questions being asked by the team this is almost certainly a very bad sign, and the leader should be paying attention to what is not said vis-à-vis the lack of questions.  Are people afraid to ask?  Are they so disengaged that they don’t care enough to ask?  Do they not understand what was communicated well enough to ask any questions?

An essential companion handbook to this work is The Unwritten Laws of Engineering (King & Skakoon, 2001) that all leaders of professionals would do well to review.

The body of this handbook will cover the “how to” aspects of achieving high quality planned actions, developing highly competent people carrying out the actions, and high volume/capacity of action.  Appendix 1 and 3 will provide theoretical models:

1.     Generative aligned action

2.     Burn out leading indicator

The “how to’s” are essentially how to lead in a way that achieve the desired results while:

1.     Generating aligned coherent action

2.     Generating competency

3.     Generating and re-generating capacity

The regeneration of capacity is critical to prevention of burn out of the entire team, including the leader.

1.1     Second Order Results and Beyond

It is also worthwhile for leaders to look beyond the first order direct results their organization is working towards.  Achieving a particular result could lead to second or third order results, and this is one of the most dangerous aspects of human beings’ almost reckless and rapid adoption of new technologies without thinking of higher order results.  For example, the adoption of the internal combustion engine (ICE) while liberating, resulted in a number of higher order consequences:

• Creation of ICE powered automobiles

  • The use of leaded gasoline and the consequent lead poisoning of several generations of humans.

  • The anti-human design of north and south American cities centered on the automobile instead of on the human experience.

    • This, in part, explains the rise in obesity due to increasingly sedentary lifestyles.  Farming in the more distant past resulted in an extraordinary fitness level because it was a highly physical occupation.  Modern rural (ie: farming) living puts people at higher likelihood of obesity than the modern urban counterparts.

Certainly, there were positive effects as well, and with longer range thinking beyond just immediate results some of these negative effects can be mitigated.

We have been exhorted by leaders who are not connected with reality to move at “the speed of science” and to be “data driven”.  Science and technology are two very different things.  Human beings adopted the technology of fire 10’s or hundreds of thousands of years before there was even the remotest scientific understanding.  There are multiple examples in our history where we have done so to our regret in addition to the ICE:

• there is the prophylactic use of antibiotics in agriculture and the consequent rise of antibiotic resistant bacteria

• the use of powerful GMO herbicide resistant crops and the rise of resistant super weeds

• the use of neo-nicotinoid crop pesticides obliterating desirable insect life including polinators and soil dwelling insects necessary to have healthy ecosystems

• The use of industrial fertilizers enabling the breaking of cycles of crop rotation and fallow period to ensure healthy soil

As the power of technology increases leaders need to be more visionary and far sighted in attempting to see beyond the immediately desired results to make better decisions on what results they will aim for.

This does not argue against the adoption of technology, but rather to do so carefully and reversibly.