Undertaking a Multi-Level Effort

SoL consultants and internal consultants are designing ways to weave new thinking tools and techniques into the fabric of the NSA culture. They have been helping NSA’s senior leadership team redefine roles and responsibilities as a result of significant organizational restructuring, describe new leadership standards, develop an efficient decision-making process, and begin to run NSA like a business.

In addition, early in the change process, General Hayden identified a cadre of leaders who would champion the effort throughout the agency. Consultants are working with these leaders as well to help align their thinking and actions with NSA’s strategic and business imperatives — and to model new attitudes and behaviors for others at all levels within the agency. These change leaders recognize that in order to model new behaviors for others, they must first transform themselves. In moving away from a traditional hierarchy, many have found that they need different skills, such as the ability to lead change, foster collaboration, and empower employees.

To develop these skills, these leaders are working with what we call reflective partners, usually internal consultants or change agents who volunteer to support an executive in learning new ways of leading. Reflective partners in turn receive training from experienced coaches. This process allows both the leaders and their partners to improve their interpersonal skills.

The role of reflective partner takes different forms, depending on the leader’s needs. The goal of the relationship is to create time for leaders to reflect on how they interact with their peers and subordinates. Partners act as mirrors, helping executives gain insights into their actions and encounters with others. For instance, a reflective partner might accompany a leader to a meeting to observe and take notes on the interactions. The partner later provides feedback about the dynamics he or she observed and helps the leader learn from the experience.

Over time, leaders learn behaviors that can help them lead more effectively — and unlearn those that interfere with performance. The first people to notice changes in the leader are his or her direct reports. Once executives come to trust their reflective partners, they often invite them to work first with their direct reports and then with their larger organization to bring innovative ideas to more and more people.

We call this process spiral integration (see “Spiral Integration”). So far, we have noticed two types of spirals: a downward spiral (from executive to direct reports, as people further down the ranks become involved in learning different ways of working together) and an upward spiral (from executive to upper echelons, as interest in the change initiative surfaces from above). Spiral integration occurs naturally; it is not a program or a project to be managed. Instead, leaders model productive new ways of thinking and acting and then help others adopt those same behaviors. In this way, spiral integration is facilitating change throughout NSA.

Building In-House Capability

By increasing our capabilities within NSA to maintain momentum around continuous learning and change, we lessen our need for outside help. Two organizations — one formal, Corporate Development Services, and the other informal, the Learning Leaders — assist individuals, teams, and organizations in their efforts to change. Linked to the work being done by SoL consultants, these two internal groups provide continuity by sponsoring training courses, hosting learning events, and offering consulting services to people who are trying to transform how they and their organizations work.

Corporate Development Services is composed of NSA employees who have advanced training and education in applied behavioral sciences, specializing in organization development. This organization’s work is supported by the Learning Leaders, an informal network of NSA employees from a wide variety of disciplines who have a passion for innovative thinking. The Learning Leaders began more than four years ago as a grassroots effort to help bring about fundamental change at NSA. Many people in this network support spiral integration by serving as reflective partners, facilitators, and champions for change wherever they work.

Preserving the Best

The first year of the transformation initiative was marked by unprecedented changes as we implemented federally mandated reforms, restructured the organization, and named new leaders throughout the agency. The work with SoL focused on educating the top leadership team, building internal capability to support the change process, and beginning to work with mission teams. The second year was characterized by the launch of a reflective partnering practice for senior leaders, spiral integration in many parts of the organization as managers introduced new tools and techniques, and a “settling in” to the new organizational structure. In this coming year, we will expand our capability at all levels, work more with mission teams, and communicate stories and lessons learned to the workforce.

We have found that this gradual approach to change ensures that the best of NSA’s ethos — a dedication and passion for serving America — is being preserved. At the same time, the organization is developing the collaborative skills, agility, and speed we need to tackle the emerging challenges of the 21st century.

Rebecca Owens Pille leads Corporate Development Services and is the focal point for the Learning Leaders network. She has worked in the change arena within the federal government for over a decade and formalized her experience with a master of science degree in applied behavioral science from Johns Hopkins University.

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This process usually begins with the CEO. Pressured by shareholders’ demands or analysts’ expectations, top executives sacrifice their personal lives by working 70-hour work weeks. At the same time, they demand that everyone in the organization do the same, pressuring them to produce more with fewer resources. However, results do not necessarily follow. Instead, tension increases, and commitment, energy, and creativity all decline.

Executives justify sacrificing their souls because they believe that everything is secondary to the bottom line. However, this assumption is based on the erroneous belief that people need to work harder in order to produce better outcomes. This is not true. Working harder tends to produce more—but of the same. If companies want to increase their competitiveness, they need to constantly create new products and services, new strategies, new processes, and often a new organizational culture. As the cliché goes, they need to work smarter, not harder.

Feeding the Soul

But current working conditions don’t support working smarter. According to quality pioneer Edward Deming, our prevailing system of management is based on fear. Fear of failure, fear of being embarrassed, fear of not getting a promotion, or fear of getting fired. Fear is the dominant emotion—the main source of energy and the impetus to action.

But when human beings are in a state of fear, do they behave in innovative or habitual ways? Habitual, of course! When we’re afraid, we almost always revert to our most ingrained patterns of behavior. In fact, brain physiologists explain that the primitive part of the brain takes over—the limbic system, where our “fight or flight” programming resides.

Why does management by fear still persist? Most organizations are still designed based on what Douglas McGregor termed “Theory X”—the idea that employees are unreliable and uncommitted, and work merely to earn a paycheck. From this perspective, people need to be bullied or frightened into acting on behalf of the organization. “Theory Y,” however, offers another possibility—that employees are responsible adults who want to make a contribution. Based on this alternative mindset, it is possible to consider aspiration as a source of action—one that is far more effective than desperation ever could be.

Businesses can learn a lot from sports and the arts in this regard. Ask an athlete what usually happens when she mentally repeats “Can’t miss” or “Can’t fail” before or during a performance versus repeating “I’ll make it” or “I’ll get it.” Thinking about what you want to create works much better than thinking about what you want to avoid. Picasso pointed out that if you trace the history of any great piece of art, the crucial moment in its development inevitably came when the artist had the vision of what needed to be created. Why would business be different? Being able to articulate what deeply matters to us is a powerful source of energy. As the old saying goes, “Dreams feed the soul.”

Accessing the Soul

Visualizing what we want to create doesn’t mean escaping reality; it means being present in a new way. The martial arts offer an excellent example of handling challenges from a posture of creativity rather than fear. The essence of disciplines such as karate and aikido is to develop a capacity to be more and more quiet, centered, and relaxed in dangerous situations. Martial artists know that, by doing so, they can produce outstanding results.

During the last several years, the Society for Organizational Learning has sponsored a research project involving interviews with more than 150 leading scientists, artists, and government, business, and religious leaders. One of the conclusions reached by the researchers has been that the internal place from which a leader operates matters; in other words, the quality of consciousness determines the quality of performance.

If these ideas seem too abstract, take a moment to reflect on the best decisions you have made in your life, professionally or personally. Now remember where you were when you made those decisions. Were you in the office, feeling stressed or desperately grasping for an answer to your problems? Or were you taking a shower, driving quietly, or observing your kids? I wager it was the latter.

When Leonardo da Vinci was painting “The Last Supper,” the church commissioner was impatient for the painting to be completed and complained to the Duke that Leonardo occasionally took long breaks from his work. The commissioner argued, “If a gardener doesn’t take his hands off his scissors during the whole day, why does [da Vinci] need to leave his paintbrush?” But Leonardo understood that he needed incubation periods, away from the work, in order to produce his best. With humor, he replied to the Duke, “Great geniuses sometimes work better when they work less.”

Different fields of knowledge have alternative explanations for this phenomenon. Psychologists would say that our unconscious mind processes information, in quantity and speed, thousands and thousands of times more effectively than our conscious mind. When we turn off our conscious mind, we let the unconscious mind work better and the answer suddenly comes to us. Spiritual leaders would say that, in silencing our mind, we access our soul, which is our full potential and knows all.

Connecting Souls

Although individual performances are important, companies increasingly rely on decisions and actions taken by teams. Here, again, businesses can take lessons from the world of sports. High-performing sports teams sometimes find themselves “in the zone,” where they experience peak performance. Bill Russell, the star center of the 11-time world champion Boston Celtics, spoke of those special times:, “Every so often a Celtic game would heat up so that it became more than a physical or even a mental game, and would be magical. That feeling is very difficult to describe, and I certainly never talked about it when I was playing. When it happened, I could feel my play rise to a new level. It came rarely, and would last anywhere from five minutes to a whole quarter or more. … It would surround not only me and the other Celtics, but also the players on the other team, even the referees.”

In researching all kinds of high-performing teams—heart surgeons, firefighters, astronauts, trial lawyers, business teams, and others—Carl Larson of the University of Denver found the same phenomenon reported in different terms: the atmosphere of the room becomes “super-charged”; there seems to be a “group mind” or “collective wisdom”; team members experience the sensation of being “a conscious part of even a more conscious whole” and feel a “luminous transparency” between all the participants. David Bohm, the famous quantum physicist, once explained this experience to consultant Joseph Jaworski as “a single intelligence that works with people who are moving in a relationship with one another.”

If you want scientific proof that this “single mind” could exist, consider the experiment by Mexican neurophysiologist Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum. Two people meditated together for a period of 20 minutes, aiming to feel each other’s presence. They then entered separate Faraday chambers (metallic enclosures that block all electromagnetic signals) while attempting to maintain their direct communication. One of the subjects was shown a flash of light that produced electrophysiological responses; the responses were measured by a machine. In about one in four cases, although no electromagnetic signals could have been transmitted between the two subjects, the brain of the person who hadn’t been exposed to the light showed electrical activity quite similar to that displayed in the first subject.

In my work as consultant, I have seen several groups experience this special kind of connection. Most of the time, the precipitating factor was that people talked openly and listened deeply—or, as I prefer to say, talked and listened from the heart. And as many ancient cultures believed, the heart leads directly to the soul.

Stop Giving Up, Start Using It

In modern society, we take for granted the existence of gravitational and magnetic fields. Executives and managers must also learn to recognize that every company produces its particular social field, created by people’s thoughts and emotions, relationships, and the organization’s physical space. This field is an invisible but powerful force that influences the quality of shortand long-term performance.

Giving up your soul doesn’t create a promising field and it doesn’t produce the best possible results, even over the short run. The alternative strategy: Start really using your soul—feeding, accessing, and connecting. By doing so, you will produce much better outcomes in all senses—financial and material, but also physical and spiritual. As Joseph Jaworski says, “Anyone who walks into a locker room of a championship team can feel the energy, the excitement, the mutual trust and the extraordinary sense of the possible.” Why can’t you feel the same when entering your office? It can be this way, as long as you bring your soul along for the ride.

Tácito Nobre is a senior consultant with Axialent (www.axialent.com).

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