Slow Leadership

Slow Leadership

EARCOS Leadership Conference
Bangkok, Thailand
November 2, 2013
Kirsten Olson, Ed.D, PCC
Old Sow Coaching and Consulting
Boston, MA-USA
@olsonkirsten
Monday, October 28, 2013

1

How I Came
To Slow
•
•
•
•

Work as an organizational consultant and leadership coach for 20 years

•

Culturally create contrast to ‘old, slow’ hierarchies of existing systems/educational
monopolies

•

To be fast is to be new, right

Adrian Savage
Paradox: Movement for slow leadership as information worlds speed up
Charter school movement in the US: incredible prizing of speed, efﬁciency, tangible
results based on data


2

“Don’t just do something,
stand there.”
Fast may be inversely
correlated with quality?


3

Developmental
growth requires
pauses
• Teams and leaders require reﬂection on
practice to grow developmentally

• Moving from Kegan’s Stage 3 to Stage 4
• Expert to Achiever (Torbert, Loevinger,
Cook-Greuter)


4

Cognitively-overloaded
brain
"E-mails, meetings, texts, tweets, phone calls, news—the unstructured, continuous, fractured nature of modern work is a tremendous
burden on the brain's control network and consumes a huge amount of the brain’s energy. The resulting mental fatigue takes its toll in
the form of mistakes, shallow thinking, and impaired self-regulation. When overwhelmed, the control network loses the proverbial reins,
and our behavior is driven by immediate, situational cues instead of shaped with our priorities in mind. We go on autopilot, and our
brains fall back to simply responding to whatever is in front of us, regardless of its importance.Success as a leader requires, ﬁrst and
foremost, creating just a few clear priorities and gathering the courage to eliminate or outsource less important tasks and goals.
Executives must also reset their expectations for what constitutes a viable workload, basing them on a realistic understanding of what
their brains can handle. It’s less than what most of us try to accomplish."
Cognitive scientists Adam Waytz and Malia Mason (2013) “Your Brain At Work” http://hbr.org/2013/07/your-brain-at-work/ar/1


5

New leadership
requires complex
cross-system ‘knowing’
People are most comfortable working within one way of knowing, but real
change in complex systems requires more than one way of knowing.


6

“Work Devotion Schema”
•

•

“Working long hours is a way of signaling youʼre really committed, that
youʼre really devoted to your job. Itʼs a way of displaying what the
sociologist Mary Blair-Loy has called the work devotion schema.
The work devotion schema–communicates that work should be the
central focus of your life, unencumbered by family responsibilities; that
it entails deep emotional ties with your work. Work is the chief place
that you get your sense of identity, the chief place you get your sense
of moral worth. “I would do anything for my clients [or students]” is a
very common thing to hear. For example, lawyers say, “Iʼm always
available when my clients need me.”
-Joan C. Williams, Distinguished Professor of Law at University of
California (2013) http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/08/working-fathers-need-balance-t/


7

Long hours
prove worth
•
•

•

Particularly for white collar men
“The work of Joseph Vandello, who wrote a very important article
called “Precarious Masculinity,”– showing that although femininity is
something that happens to women automatically as they mature,
masculinity is seen as something that not only has to be earned, it has
to be earned over and over and over again. One of the key places that
it’s earned, for more privileged men, is on the job.” Joan C. Williams
So to prove your worth as a man, you ‘need’ to work very long hours and be
overly busy


8

Work with
leaders and
teams
• Just a few practices
• Creating the conditions for ‘going slow’
• Demonstrate how this is attached to positive
outcomes for the organization

• Work with a high-performing team whose

work is ‘stuck’ due to rushing, over-emphasis
on efﬁciency


9

Slow Leadership At
Work
• Begin meetings with silence, “taking a good
minute”

• Find your body and create a mini-release
• Bring attention to your back body for
listening, creativity


10

Basic Premise of
Leadership Coaching

“The range of what we think and do is limited by what we
fail to notice.
And because we fail to notice what we fail to notice,
there is little we can do to change
until we notice how failing to notice
shapes our thoughts and deeds.”
-R.D. Laing, 1954

11

What’s your typical
day?


12

What’s the trafﬁc in
your head?


13

Make a list of what’s
typical...


15

Pause.
Breathe.


16

Creating An Island of
Calm:
3 Minute Body Scan


17

What’s the difference
between those two
experiences?


18

Big Ideas
• “Leadership is too important to
rush” (Adrian Savage)

• Paradox: What made you successful may
hold you back

• Technician to Manager
• What needs slow cooking?

19

Technician To Manager
•

Specialist who likes to
work narrow and deep

•

Technicians do one thing
and do it well

•

Key actions: deliver on
area of expertise, build
expertise

•

At school: administrator,
librarian, custodian,
nurse, AP teacher


20

Manager...
•
•

Key actions: listen, discern,
coordinate other’s actions,
support and coach, direct,
orchestrate

•


Gets things done
THROUGH other people

At school: superintendent,
principal, teacher leader

21

“Managers get paid to
help other people do
things, not DO things.”

22

Blessing/Curse
What’s Yours?


23

What’s yours?


25

What did you hear?


27

Self Evaluation:
In your leadership life now, where are you
putting out ﬁres vs. slow cooking?


28

Why?


29

What do you want to
slow down?


30

What are the ingredients of slow cooking
for you?

32

Share Out


33

What can you start
noticing today?
New practice for
tomorrow?


34

“The story is told of a South American tribe that went
on a long march, when all of a sudden they would stop
walking, sit down to rest for awhile, and then make
camp for a couple of days before going any farther.
They explained that they needed the time of rest so
that their souls could catch up with them.”
-Wayne Muller, Sabbath


35

Resources
• Adrian Savage, Slow Leadership: Civilizing The
Organization (2006)

• Mary Blair-Loy, Competing Devotions: Career
and Family Among Women Executives (2003)

• Robert Kegan developmental theory: In

Over Our Heads (1998) and http://
www.slideshare.net/JessicaTraylor/keganconstructive-developmental-theory


36

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