Leaders and Servants

“The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between, the leader is a servant.” ― Max De Pree

I bumped into an unhappy former colleague at an industry meeting a while back. He told me that the insurance world had changed, and that now claims executives were expected to practice something called “servant leadership.” He rolled his eyes as he emphasized “servant.” He seemed genuinely concerned but I suspected he, like most people, probably wasn’t entirely clear on what the term “servant leadership” meant. So I asked him to tell me more.

His CEO, fretting over lackluster results, decided it was time to transform the company’s operating culture and improve results by reducing the employee turnover rate and increasing customer satisfaction and persistency. He had hired a consulting firm to engineer a leadership team makeover, to move the group away from a “transactional” leadership mindset and into a “servant” leadership mindset. The firm was scheduled to be on site the following month.

“What exactly are you concerned about?” I asked.

“I don’t want to be a servant. I am a senior executive, a leader. My job involves establishing strategy, securing resources, attracting and developing good people, setting performance objectives, measuring performance, and delivering results.”

Of course, he had done some research and discovered Robert K. Greenleaf, who launched the modern servant leadership movement in 1970 when he published The Servant as Leader. He showed me Greenleaf’s paper on his phone, but at 27 pages long it was too onerous to be immediately useful. He read somewhere else that servant leaders believe in the concept of an inverted pyramid organization in which top management “reports” upward to lower levels of management and ultimately to front line employees.

“Imagine that—30 years in this business and now I am supposed to report to my employees? That’s ridiculous.”

He had another commitment, so we agreed to get together later that day to talk further. Curious, I pulled up the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership site:

A servant-leader focuses primarily on the growth and well-being of people and the communities to which they belong. While traditional leadership generally involves the accumulation and exercise of power by one at the “top of the pyramid,” servant leadership is different. The servant-leader shares power, puts the needs of others first and helps people develop and perform as highly as possible.

Larry Spears, CEO of the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership, identified ten servant leader characteristics:

• Listening
• Empathy
• Healing
• Awareness
• Persuasion
• Conceptualization
• Foresight
• Stewardship
• Commitment to personal growth
• Building Community

Dr. Kent Keith, the former CEO of the Greenleaf Center, offered a definition of servant leadership that includes this explanation:

Greenleaf said that "the servant-leader is servant first." By that he meant that that the desire to serve, the "servant's heart," is a fundamental characteristic of a servant-leader. It is not about being servile, it is about wanting to help others. It is about identifying and meeting the needs of colleagues, customers, and communities.

Nothing particularly nettlesome so far, but what about the inverted pyramid?

Ken Blanchard, in Servant Leadership Revisited, argued the pyramid should be right side up for matters such as vision, mission, values and goals, but inverted when it comes to implementation or execution. His inverted pyramid has customers at the top and customer contact people right below them. The customer contact people are responsible for meeting customer needs, and the managers and executives below them on the inverted pyramid are responsible for helping the customer contact people succeed in doing that.

When I got back together with my former colleague later that day, I asked him to think about the ways in which he was responsible to his employees. In other words, what did he provide that they expected and needed from him? His list included strategic clarity, adequate tools and resources, fair and measurable performance objectives, timely and accurate communication, feedback opportunities, inspiration, trust, integrity, honesty, accountability, coaching and career development. We talked about the pyramid, and how responsibilities and expectations flow both ways, so he made a similar list of the things he expected and needed from his employees.

Finally, we looked at the Oxford Dictionary definitions of servant:

• A person who performs duties for others, especially a person employed in a house on domestic duties or as a personal attendant.
• A person employed in the service of a government. 
• A devoted and helpful follower or supporter

The first definition bothered him, the second didn’t apply, but he liked the third and agreed he definitely had a responsibility to be a devoted and helpful supporter of his employees.

I told him I thought he would probably have an easy time of it with the consultants because it appeared he was already thinking like a servant leader—even though he had never thought of himself in those terms.

“We’ll see,” he said. “Unfortunate choice of terms, though. Why couldn’t they have called it something less provocative?”

“Ask the consultants,” I suggested.



Dean K. Harring, CPCU, is a retired insurance executive who now enjoys his time as an advisor, board member, educator and watercolor artist.  He can be reached at dean.harring@gmail.com or through LinkedIn or Twitter or Harring Watercolors

Bristling with Adaptive Capacity

 

One of my favorite leadership books is Geeks and Geezers, by Warren G. Bennis and Robert J. Thomas, in part because the book introduced the notion of "adaptive capacity" in leaders:

... adaptive capacity is applied creativity. It is the ability to look at a problem or crisis and see an array of unconventional solutions.

According to Bennis and Thomas, adaptive capacity permits individuals to:

...confront unfamiliar situations with confidence and optimism. Those with well developed adaptive capacity are not paralyzed by fear or undermined by anxiety in difficult situations. They believe that if they leap, a net will appear--or, if it doesn't, they will be able to find or fashion one in time. Where others see only chaos and confusion, they see opportunity.

If you are in the insurance business, you know that good claims leaders absolutely bristle with adaptive capacity. Flexibility and resiliency are requisites for managing claims, and successful claims leaders find meaning and strength by grappling with the adversity and uncertainty they face every day. The best claims leaders also have the confidence and the will to get personally involved in contentious and difficult situations and creatively move them toward successful resolution. They embrace challenges, overcome obstacles, and learn and grow and become more confident as they go. In other words, they act a lot like Teddy Roosevelt!

I was watching the Ken Burns documentary The Roosevelts: An Intimate History last week and I was reminded of a story I once read about the 1912 presidential campaign. Teddy Roosevelt had served two terms as president and had decided not to run again in 1908, so his Secretary of War and hand-picked successor William Howard Taft won the presidency. Teddy wasn't happy with Taft's term, however. He also missed the action and excitement of national politics, so he decided to challenge Taft and seek the Republican nomination for president in the 1912 election. He didn't secure the nomination, so he decided to run as a third-party candidate representing the new Progressive (also known as Bull Moose) party.

It was an arduous campaign, raucous and hard fought. So intense and relentless that at one point Roosevelt was shot in the chest during a campaign appearance in Milwaukee, but went on to deliver a 90 minute speech before agreeing to go to the hospital. He was fighting an uphill battle with voters, and his campaign was running short of time and money, but his staff decided to push forward and print an elegant pamphlet with Teddy's photo on the cover for distribution to voters during the final round of whistle-stop tours.

They had three million copies printed, but as they were readying the pamphlets for distribution someone noticed that Moffett Studios in Chicago held a copyright on the cover photo of Teddy. Unfortunately, no one had bothered to obtain permission from Moffett Studios to use the photo. The potential penalty for unauthorized use was staggering-- $1 per pamphlet, or $3 million. The campaign didn't have the time or funds necessary to reprint the pamphlets using another photo, and simply moving forward and incurring the penalty and bad publicity associated with using the photo without permission was not an option. Staff members knew they had no choice but to strike a deal with the photographer, but they hesitated because they believed their bargaining position was weak.

Enter George Perkins, executive secretary of the Progressive Party and Roosevelt's campaign manager, who after being briefed on the situation took immediate action, sending this cable to Moffett:

We are planning to distribute millions of pamphlets with Teddy's photo on the cover. This will be great publicity for the studio who took the photo. How much will you pay us to use yours? Reply immediately.

Moffett replied immediately:

We've never done this before, but under the circumstances we'll offer you $250.

Problem solved!

I have always enjoyed that story, and I've told it many times to illustrate what adaptive capacity looks like. While you might not agree with his approach to Moffett, Perkins was a successful businessman, a heavy hitter, well connected to financier J. P. Morgan, and he knew how to get things done. He had the ability to look at a problem and quickly come up with an unconventional yet brilliant solution, and in this situation he converted a $3 million exposure into a $250 revenue item rather handily. Adaptive capacity, personified! Of course Theodore Roosevelt himself could have served as an adaptive capacity poster boy--a charismatic leader who also happened to be a tireless and prolific writer, an innovator, a problem solver, an obstacle surmounter and an odds-defying achiever and adventurer. Take a look at what he accomplished during his remarkable life here.

Well, the pamphlet got distributed as planned, but as we all know Woodrow Wilson went on to win the 1912 election with 42% of the votes, followed by Roosevelt at 27% and Taft at 23%. The Progressive party nominated Teddy as its presidential candidate again in 1916, but he refused the nomination and never got directly involved in politics again. Two and a half years later he died in his sleep at Sagamore Hill, his family home at Oyster Bay, NY.

Dean K. Harring, CPCU, CIC is a retired Chief Claims Officer and an expert and advisor on property casualty insurance claims and operations.  He can be reached at dean.harring@theclm.org or through  LinkedIn or Twitter.

When It Comes to Learning, Let’s Treat Adults Like Adults

When I retired from QBE last year, I thought it might be interesting to do something totally different, so I got myself appointed as an adjunct faculty member at our local community college, where I teach courses in management, leadership, business writing and presentation skills. Since I am in the School of Continuing and Professional Studies, my students are adults.

Recently, my connection with the college led me into a project with a Maryland defense contractor, and as part of that project I did some background research on adult learners--how they learn, what motivates them to learn, and what learning strategies are the most (and least) effective. Now that I am well read on the topic of Andragogy (the art and science of teaching adults), I can tell you something you may already know based upon your own personal experiences--adults and children learn differently. Instructional strategies that work well with children do not work well with adults.

As learners, adults:

• Are wary of formal classroom learning. They may feel uncomfortable or "at risk" in the classroom since their self-esteem and ego and reputation are on the line. That being said, adults learn better in a classroom setting when they are treated with respect and when their knowledge, abilities and achievements are welcomed and acknowledged.
• Choose what they will learn. They are more strongly motivated to learn by intrinsic rewards (personal growth, satisfaction, self-esteem) than by extrinsic rewards or requirements (promotions, increase in compensation, licensing or certification.)
• Need to know why they are being asked to learn something, and why it is in their best interest to learn it. They routinely weigh the benefits of learning against the consequences of not learning. To move into a state of learning readiness, they may need to be convinced they have a critical learning gap that needs to be filled.
• Prefer learning that is problem or task-centered, not subject-centered. Ideally, content should have relevance and immediacy so they can apply newly learned concepts to real world problems and situations.
• Prefer to learn by doing. They dislike lectures and survey courses, but are increasingly fond of self-directed and self-paced instructional media such as self-study, programmed instruction, and computer or web-based training. In the classroom, active learning experiences involving problem solving, judgment, reasoning, questioning, critical thinking, exploration/research, and group relationships and dynamics are most effective.
• Need to be given time and space to integrate new ideas, particularly if those new ideas conflict with what they already know or believe.

Of course I don't have to worry about running a Claims operation any longer, but for me Claims is still a powerful personal frame of reference. Once I understood these adult learning principles (having given myself the time and space to integrate them with what I already knew, of course!), I suddenly had more informed insight and a new and potentially useful perspective into why so much of the training I experienced, and designed, and delivered at insurance companies over the years inevitably failed to fully achieve learning objectives. For whatever reason, in most cases the training just wasn't designed with adults in mind. It didn't appeal to what motivates adult learners, it didn't consider their learning preferences, and it didn't employ the most effective instructional techniques to help them learn. That was unfortunate, in retrospect, since one of the first steps in designing any instructional approach usually involves a detailed analysis of the learner group so the training can be tailored to their needs and preferences.

Perhaps your training strategies are sound, but I sense an opportunity to review and possibly improve claims training outcomes simply by incorporating and considering adult learning theories and principles that have been around for decades. If you want to learn more about those principles, just do a search on Andragogy or start here.

Dean K. Harring, CPCU, CIC is a retired Chief Claims Officer and an expert and advisor on Property Casualty insurance claims and operations. He can be reached at dean.harring@theclm.org or through www.linkedin.com/in/deanharring/

Leadership Toxicity

I was reminiscing with some former colleagues over the holidays and, as often happens in such situations, we were laughing it up as we shared anecdotes about some of the highly placed, handsomely paid, sometimes incompetent and occasionally "toxic" leaders we had worked with over the years.  Of course it's easy and maybe even therapeutic to laugh about such people once they are in your past and no longer part of your daily life experiences, but I think it is fair to say that the truly toxic leaders weren't ever really funny--they were dysfunctional and destructive.  If you have worked with one, you know what I mean.

What is a toxic leader?  Toxicity, like beauty, may be in the eye of the beholder, but when Dr. Marcia Lynn Whicker (Toxic Leaders: When Organizations Go Bad) classified leaders by type, she used three categories:  trustworthy, transitional and toxic. The toxic leaders were described as maladjusted, malcontent, malevolent and malicious enforcers, street fighters and bullies who destroy productivity, operate with a sense of personal inadequacy, and who are selfish and clever at concealing deceit.  It gets worse:  according to Col. George E. Reed, US Army, toxic leaders are viewed as "arrogant, self-serving, inflexible and petty" and they "rise to their stations in life over the carcasses of those who work for them." Andrew Schmidt has even developed a Toxic Leadership Scale that considers five dimensions of toxic leadership:  abusive supervision, authoritarian leadership, narcissism, self-promotion, and unpredictability.

One of my favorite books on this topic is Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters by Barbara Kellerman.  She describes seven types of bad leadership that are most prevalent--incompetent, rigid, intemperate, callous, corrupt, insular and evil--and illustrates them with stories about public figures from business and politics.  Several years ago, I worked with a group that used Kellerman's categories as a framework to try to articulate what bad leadership looked like in their workplace so they could root it out and eliminate it.  The finished product looked something like this:

 

Incompetent	Lacks knowledge, skill or will to sustain effective action Oblivious to his/her lack of knowledge, skill or will  Focuses on peripheral or unimportant items Gets in the way of direct reports (trips the players on their way out of the dugout) Foolishly and inappropriately confident and arrogant High maintenance
Rigid	Stiff, unyielding, smug Unwilling to consider and adapt to new ideas, new information or changing times Believes he/she has superior knowledge (smartest person in the room) Gets trapped by bad decisions (unwilling to admit mistakes)
Intemperate	Lacks discipline and self control in professional or personal habits and behaviors Has tantrums, screams, throws things, slaps the table, slams the door Substance and/or people abuser Uses inappropriate language or makes unprofessional comments Needlessly hostile and provocative
Callous	Uncaring and/or unkind Ignores or discounts needs, wants and wishes of others Acts without respect Bullies subordinates and/or treats them with contempt Makes disparaging comments about employees to other employees
Corrupt	Lies, cheats, misrepresents, or steals  Takes the credit, avoids the blame Conspires against, demeans and marginalizes others  Deals dishonestly or disingenuously with others Says one thing, does another
Insular	Disregards the health and welfare of others  Fails to listen, or listens to the wrong sources Micromanages Intolerant of alternate viewpoints Ridicules opposing opinions
Evil	Vindictive Intimidates and demoralizes others Hurtful and mean-spirited Uses pain and fear as an instrument of power

Sadly, the CEO at that company was the person exhibiting most of these behaviors, but he was a "kick down, kiss up" kind of guy and the board that had hired him apparently believed he was an outstanding executive.  I have always wondered how people who behave this way ever landed a leadership position, never mind kept it, but I suppose the more interesting question is how and why  such "leaders"  have any followers at all.  Jean Lipman-Blumen, in her book The Allure of Toxic Leaders, points out that people exposed to a toxic leader often come up with excuses to tolerate the abuse--job security, paycheck, prestige--thus the behavior goes unchallenged. So while we usually have three choices when we are facing something we don't like--(1) grin and bear it, (2) change it, or (3) leave it behind--most of us either find a way to put up with it, or we leave it behind, so we generate little or no pressure for change.  Unfortunately, this emboldens toxic leaders and encourages them to stay the course.

Then this week when I read an article in Strategy and Business entitled Are You Your Employees’ Worst Enemy? I realized that while toxic leaders are a problem, a more insidious and prevalent leadership problem might be this:  according to the article, a majority of employees surveyed, even in successful companies, viewed their leaders as an obstacle to their effectiveness.  Apparently many well-intentioned leaders get caught in a "hindrance trap", described as "a cognitive bubble in which leaders erroneously conclude that the success of their teams is a reflection of their good leadership", so they inadvertently derail their employees by:

• communicating purpose and direction poorly
• not considering organizational capacity when rolling out new initiatives
• failing to set policies to help the organization achieve superior performance

Sounds a bit like early stage leadership toxicity to me.  Is it any wonder that leadership consulting, training and coaching have emerged as high profile growth businesses?

Dean K. Harring, CPCU, CIC is a retired Chief Claims Officer and an expert and advisor on Property Casualty insurance claims and operations. He can be reached at dean.harring@theclm.org or through www.linkedin.com/in/deanharring/