Edgar Schein Quotes
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The only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture. If you do not manage culture, it manages you, and you may not even be aware of the extent to which this is happening.
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A pattern of shared basic assumptions invented, discovered, or developed by a given group as it learns to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration that have worked well enough to be considered valid and therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think and feel in relation to those problems.
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Culture is the deeper level of basic assumptions and beliefs that are shared by members of an organization, that operate unconsciously and define in a basic 'taken for granted' fashion an organization's view of its self and its environment.
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The Culture of Do and Tell The main inhibitor of Humble Inquiry is the culture in which we grew up. Culture can be thought of as manifesting itself on many levels—it is represented by all of its artifacts, by which I mean buildings, art works, products, language, and everything that we see and feel when we enter another culture.
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The only thing of real importance that leader do is to create and manage culture.
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The need for such cathartic relief derives from the fact that even the best of organizations generate “toxins”—frustrations with the boss, tensions over missed targets, destructive competition with peers, scarce resources, exhaustion from overwork, and so on (Frost, 2003; Goldman, 2008).
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Checklists and other formal processes of coordination are not enough because they cannot deal with unanticipated situations. Through Humble Inquiry teams can build the initial relationships that enable them to learn together. As they build higher levels of trust through joint learning, they become more open in their communication, which, in turn, enables them to deal with the inevitable surprises that arise in complex interdependent situations.
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Remember that the person requesting your help may feel uncomfortable, so make sure to ask what the client really wants and how you can best help.
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We know that negative reinforcement or punishment works well for behavior that should be eliminated. And we know from feedback theory that the best kind of feedback is descriptive because the client can then make the evaluation. These are valid guidelines but they don’t solve some of the subtle issues that can arise in the relationship.
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We would never consider for a moment paying the team members equally. In the Olympics we usually have some of the world’s fastest runners yet have lost some of the relay races because we could not pass the baton without dropping it! We take it for granted that accountability must be individual; there must be someone to praise for victory and someone to blame for defeat, the individual where “the buck stops.” In fact, instead of admiring relationships, we value and admire individual competitiveness, winning out over each other, outdoing each other conversationally, pulling the clever con game, and selling stuff that the customer does not need. We believe in caveat emptor (let the buyer beware), and we justify exploitation with “There’s a sucker born every minute.” We breed mistrust of strangers, but we don’t have any formulas for how to test or build trust. We value our freedom without realizing that this breeds caution and mistrust of each other. When we are taken in by a Ponzi scheme and lose all our money, we don’t blame our culture or our own greed—we blame the regulators who should have caught it and kick ourselves for not getting in on it earlier.
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The point is that no matter what you do or don’t do, you are sending signals; you are intervening in the situation and therefore need to be mindful of that reality. Unless you are invisible you cannot help but communicate, so your choice of communication should be based on what kind of intervention you intend.
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In my personal life, especially as I am aging, I find that the biggest mistakes I make and the biggest risks I run all result form mindless hurrying.
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If a client insists on getting a recommendation from you, always give him at least two alternatives so that he still has to make choice.
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Everything You Say or Do Is an Intervention that Determines the Future of the Relationship.
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When we don’t get acknowledgment or feel that we are giving more than we are getting out of conversations or feel talked down to, we become anxious, disrespected, and humiliated.
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Don’t we all know how to ask questions? Of course we think we know how to ask, but we fail to notice how often even our questions are just another form of telling—rhetorical or just testing whether what we think is right. We are biased toward telling instead of asking because we live in a pragmatic, problem-solving culture in which knowing things and telling others what we know is valued.
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Help in the broadest sense is, in fact, one of the most important currencies that flow between members of society because help is one of the main ways of expressing love and other caring emotions that humans express.
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Telling puts the other person down. It implies that the other person does not already know what I am telling and that the other person ought to know it.
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How does one produce a climate in which people will speak up, bring up information that is safety related, and even correct superiors or those of higher status when they are about to make a mistake?
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The culture of Do and Tell does not teach us how to change pace, decelerate, take stock of what we are doing, observe ourselves and others, try new behaviors, build new relationships.
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We build coalitions in order to gain power and, in that process, make it more necessary to be careful in deciding whom we can trust. We assume that we can automatically trust family only to discover betrayal among family members. Basically, in our money-conscious society of today, we don’t really know whom to trust and, worse, we don’t know how to create a trusting relationship. We value loyalty in the abstract, but in our pluralistic society, it is not at all clear to whom one should be loyal beyond oneself.
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Leadership is the ability to step outside the culture to start evolutionary change processes that are more adaptive.
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Check out your own emotions and intentions before offering, giving, or receiving help.
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When our true intentions are something other than providing help, such as getting a job done or beating someone in a game, we are most prone to falling into the traps described throughout this book.