Action or Force? Reflection or Delay?

As a Maestro-level leader, you lead an organization and prepare others to be executive leaders. Those potential successors will need abundant practice and opportunities to reflect and improve as they guide specific projects and processes while also growing their ability to read and lead people. This blog post touches on the process and project part, particularly when matters aren't flowing as one prefers.

Matters not going the direction you prefer can have many faces:

• it is taking longer than you like,
• it feels rushed,
• you aren't sure you have the right talent around you,
• you are under pressure from above, beside or below, or whatever.

What is your normal response when you want IT * to be different and you feel responsible?

Forcing is a problem. You might not intend to force, but many do once they begin to feel an urgency. Regardless, forcing is born from a fearful impatience.

Delaying is also a problem. It also can be unintentional or deliberate. Delaying comes from trying to create distance when feeling forced or rushed.

These two responses grow when uneasiness or anxiety gets hold of a person, and self-protection or escape trumps all other impulses.

So . . .an organization becomes wobbly and off its stride when, instead of complementing each other, action-oriented and reflection-oriented people shift to the shadowed side of their orientation: action becoming force and reflection becoming delay. Worse, forcing can be covered by goal-laden language such as "we have to hit our numbers" or religious language such as "doing something for God." Delays can be covered with governance language such as "someone needs to write a policy for this." And yes, requests for "more study" or "further discernment" are used as a means to delay and create distance far more than as a means to actually study or discern.

Action-orientation --> Forcing

Reflection-orientation-->Delaying

A lot of forcing and delaying is instinctual, even unconscious. They are still misuses of power.

And remember that many consciously choose to use force or delay as a tactic. Forcing is often accompanied by yelling for the sake of applying pressure. Delay is often accompanied by asking endless questions to avoid, extend, and distract.

Intentional engagement is the better way to transcend both forcing and delay and return them to the complementary strengths of action and reflection. You engage by not delaying a conversation or rushing it. It is an art to strike the balance, but it is possible. Striking the balance begins with a deep breath and a choice to be your better self, a person mindful of objectives and the values by which they must be achieved, a person who can apply pressure or release it in a way that gives shape rather than destroys.

Several colleagues put together a little e-book with me some years ago that touches on these themes. It's called the Tao of Action-Reflection. If you click the link, you'll be taken right to it.

-mark l vincent

 * IT--the thing you are working on. IT often starts with a sentence like "We need to figure it out." What is the "it" in that sentence? It is often hard to define. The precise definition of it helps us design a process and determine adaptive moves along the way to successfully address IT.