Why Things Get Done: An Embodied Leadership Perspective
I spent about 25 years teaching high stakes project teams that things get done because of the network of agreements (when done well it becomes a network of personal commitments) between team members. By shifting the planning and navigating conversations from a focus on tasks and durations to who needs to deliver what to whom, my consulting partners and I regularly helped produce 30-50+% improvements in productivity. And it is important to point out that most of those productivity gains were about quality, doing things right the first time. *
I’m proud of those results, AND, I’ve since learned that I was missing another critical point of leverage for producing sustainable performance improvement. In studying with Bob Dunham at his Institute for Generative Leadership, I learned that to get to the next level of team performance, we need to tap into the personal cares and concerns behind the network of requests and commitments that get things done.
The fundamental piece that I was missing, is that when one team member makes a request of another, it is always based on a concern of the requesting team member. Obviously, in a high stakes project context, one level of concern is producing a quality output on time. But behind that there are always deeper concerns and cares. The cares that motivate each individual to show up to work and be a part of this specific team. And behind that, the cares about how success (or failure) on this project will shape an individual’s personal future, and maybe shape the future of the world. And then an infinite number of other possible cares based any individual’s specific history.
I’ve also learned that these personal cares and concerns reside in our bodies. They are not directly detectable or observable (often even to the individual) and so must be deliberately brought out in our conversations about what we want to get done. And this is the job of a leader – to make sure a team’s conversations about what they intend to get done are made up of request and commitments, and connected to team member’s deeply held cares and concerns.
In order to help their team members get in touch with these personal cares and concerns, leaders first have to be in touch with their own deepest cares and concerns, and this is a key part of what is accomplished in a practice of embodied leadership. In our Leader Lab courses we explain why it is that each of us is not just already completely in touch with our cares and concerns^. Anyone who has delved into an embodied learning practice can tell you that by getting out of your head and into your body, you learn things about yourself that you didn’t know. Most likely things that were holding you back in your intended goals and aspirations.
In a directed study of personal embodiment (like what we do at EV Leader Lab), through guided exercise intended to put you in touch with your body, you will discover both your deeper cares and concerns, and what is preventing you from acting on those deep cares and concerns. When leaders can connect their deepest cares to the projects they are leading, and help their team members do the same, performance (and just as importantly, personal satisfaction) will dramatically shift to a new level.
It is important to understand, we are not just asserting that this is why things get done when leaders get in touch with their bodies and can skillfully make these connections with their teams. It is agreements based on deeply held cares and concerns that are driving a team’s performance whether you are aware of these embodiment distinctions or not. Of course, when the team is not aware of these distinctions, it is almost certain that many important conversations are left out, many agreements are poorly constructed and communicated and fall apart, and the potentially conflicting cares and concerns behind each team member’s actions and outputs are left unexamined. In order to make sense of the breakdowns and mediocrity that crops up even in the best organizations, we simply need to understand why it is that things get done.
*Look up Timm’s 3 books and numerous articles to see several specific documented improvement cases.
^Kagen and Lahey also demonstrate this common disconnect in their book “How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work”. (Jossey-Bass, 2001).
