Teaching Kids to Lead

The Riverside School in Ahmedabad, India is an amazing experiment in empowering children and creating future leaders.  Founded in 2001, Kiram Bir Sethi and her team have created a unique learning environment where “common sense is common practice” and the overriding goal is to infect each child with the “I can” bug.  Besides developing a place where children are empowered to blur the lines between school and life, the unique curriculum has also yielded academic success.  Based on a benchmark study of 2,000 schools in India, Riverside beat the top 10 schools in math, science and english.

Even more exciting however, the school provides us with a great example of how to use simple, inspiring processes to driving dramatic change and tap into the multiplier effect.  In 2009, the school launched a contest called “Design for Change” where students are challenged to implement an idea to solve a problem they are passionate about. The only criteria for the idea is that it be of benefit to many people, look to solve an existing problem from a fresh prospective, and have the potential to see change in the lives of others as well as the students.  Using a powerful combination of inspiration and simplification, the contest reached 32,000 schools in India in its first year and has now spread to other countries.

So how did the school’s simple contest spread like wildfire and evoke such excitement and commitment?  While there are undoubtedly a host of reasons, here are a couple I think are most relevant for other leaders.  First, the contest uses a simple step-by-step process which leverages the school’s four phase development model; see the change (feel), be changed (imagine), lead the change (do) and spread the change (infect).  This model focuses on empowering the children to connect with an inspiring purpose, as well as puts the change process squarely in their hands.  The children not only have the autonomy to choose their team and brainstorm ideas, but they are responsible for designing a simple implementation plan and putting it into action.  Second, reflecting on the outcome of the change and sharing it with others is a required part of the process.  This allows the students an opportunity to cement their learning and at the same time infect others with their passion and results.  Finally, as the children share their stories they are able to be recognized by their community for their efforts.  Recognition received by parents and peers is a powerful motivator for future action.

This combination of inspiring with a purpose, driving engagement through autonomy and sharing stories of success creates intrinsic motivation in the hearts of each child and turns the competition into a powerful force for social change.  Similar to what we discovered in our work with front line supervisors and managers, effective change isn’t about the tools or techniques of process improvement.  Success is a function of how well you empower people to challenge their beliefs of what’s possible and build a change process which is simple to implement and share with others.  When people are inspired with a purpose and confident in their ability to shape the change, their creative spirit is unleashed and infused with the fuel of confident expectations.

Starting a Movement

It is rare I come across information on the practice of leadership rooted in actionable advice and useful for my clients.  Recently however, I discovered a brilliant 3 minute talk on the role of leaders in starting a movement.  The creator, Derek Sivers, is the former CEO of CD Baby, and now travels the world as a self-proclaimed “nomad” researching, speaking and volunteering his time.  I was so impressed with the content and the delivery of his message, I formally integrated it into a Coaching Camp I created.  The following are a few of the key leadership lessons Derek covers:

First, a leader needs to have the guts to stand out of the crowd and risk being ridiculed.  During the initial phase of any new initiative, success is directly correlated to force of will and willingness to take a risk.  Second, leadership which seeks to engage the people in the change is less about the leader and more about the followers.  The first follower fills a critical role.  Identifying and recruiting the first follower “turns the lone nut into a leader” and future followers look to the first follower for guidance rather than the leader.  Next, to fully engage the follower, the actions must be easy to follow and the leader must embrace the follower as an equal.  This, combined with making the movement public allows the first follower to attract others and spread the change quickly and effectively.  Finally, when each of these elements are in place, more and more followers engage, making the movement less risky and creating an “in crowd” that others want to join.

So what can we take from this?  Creating a movement is more about attracting and nurturing the first followers than it is about the actions of the leader.  By keeping actions simple to learn and reproduce, and ensuring the movement is visible to the organization, the leader is able to create “pull” until the movement reaches a tipping point and takes on a life of its own.  Finally, being a leader is risky.  If you are not willing to take a risk and move the organization in a radically different direction, neither will anyone else.

Leadership and the War of Art

Recently, an executive asked me to help develop a profile for recruiting new sales managers.  The company currently uses a highly refined and successful selection process which hires results-oriented sales managers who aren’t afraid to give pointed feedback and hold people accountable.  This approach has catapulted the company to great success and led to numerous industry leading benchmarks.  Over the past few years however, results have plateaued and traditional methods of leading a salesforce have reached a point of diminishing returns.

To solve the problem, the company wants to move from a traditional top-down “carrot and stick” culture to one that is driven by high levels of employee engagement and intrinsic motivation.  This requires a different type of leader who can connect with people, inspire them to embrace the challenge to grow, and engage them in the process of making daily improvements.  It requires a leader who understands that true accountability is less about waving a big stick and more about creating an environment where people own their results and find joy in continuously pushing themselves to get better.

So how do you find a leader like this?  In my experience, you can’t find them around every corner and they don’t all share similar backgrounds, education and experience.  They do however, possess similar characteristics that enable them to connect with others and create high performance teams.  Novelist Steven Pressfield outlined some key characteristics of successful creative professionals in his book, The War of Art: Breakthrough the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles that I believe are consistent with some of the characteristics we should be looking for in a leader.

First, the type of leader we are looking for is not afraid to act in the face of fear and endure adversity.  Second, he or she accepts no excuses and “plays it as it lays.”  Next, he or she is dedicated to mastering technique but does not show off as their skills improve.  Fourth, we need a leader who recognizes his or her own limitations and does not hesitate to ask for help.  Finally, regardless of the outcome of any singular event, he or she does not take failure (or success) personally.  They understand that “everything can look like a success or a failure in the middle” (Rosabeth Moss Kanter) and thus is never afraid to take on new challenges and risk being wrong in the pursuit of discovering what is right.

Tribes

David Logan researches and writes on Tribal Leadership.  Interesting topic and I think we have much to learn from his work when it comes to better understanding how groups of people naturally organize around commonalities and bond to get work done.  Of particular interest to me is the size of tribes.  Logan states that tribes are predominantly between 20-150 people.

If 20-150 is the magic number for naturally occurring groups, maybe we need to rethink how we implement change on an enterprise level.  Instead of asking the question, how do we implement change across 1500 people in our organization, maybe the better question is how do we create tribes of people which have no more than 150 people in them and use this naturally occurring structure to better create relational bonds between tribe members and implement change faster and more effectively…