Latino Diversity and the Adaptive Leadership Model

7/28/2019 Latino Diversity and the Adaptive Leadership Model

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Latino Diversity and the Adaptive Leadership Model

Jos Francisco Cruz1996

A leadership that is concentrated on the ideas of one person is very limited. Genuine leadershipinvolves getting all the wisdom that is available in a group, and helping that group come to a

better decision than any one of its members would have been able to achieve him. The servantleader is the person who gets the unsuspected best out of his group of people."

In the ten years between 1980 and 1990 my adopted hometown, Providence, RI, has seenthe fastest growing Hispanic population in the country. Unlike other communities where thisgrowth has been primarily of one or another national group, i.e. Cubans in Miami, Puerto Ricans,in New York City, or Mexicans in California, Providence has experienced an influx ofsignificant numbers of immigrants from most of the 22 Spanish-speaking Latin Americancountries.

Given the political, cultural and economic diversity of this population it is not surprisingthat, aside from a language commonalty, these groups have little reason to consider one anotheron the same side of any agenda. As a result of this heterogeneity, there has been a leadershipcrisis in the Providence Hispanic community that, I believe, is rooted in an outmoded paradigmof leadership and/or the attributes of a leader.

The leadership paradigm shared by most Hispanic groups is explained with great clarityby Peter Sense in his book: Our traditional views of leaders-as special people who set thedirection, make the key decisions, and energize the troops-are deeply rooted in an individualisticand non-systemic world view, he writes. Especially in the West, leaders are heroes-great men(and occasionally women) who "rise to the fore" in times of crises. Our prevailing leadershipmyths are still captured by the image of the captain of the cavalry leading the charge to rescuethe settlers for the attacking Indians. So long as such myths prevail, they reinforce a focus onshort-term events and charismatic heroes rather than on systemic forces and collective learning.At its heart, the traditional view of leadership is based on assumptions of people's powerlessnesss, their lack of personal vision and inability to master the forces of change, deficits which can beremedied only by a few great leaders.

Changing is about learning, learning is empowerment and leading is teaching. I submitthat if the Latino community in Providence, and elsewhere, is to make progress in today's climateof change, the first thing that needs to be accomplished is to dispel the myth of the Leader-heroand its disempowering leadership paradigm; and replace it with the paradigm of the Leader-servant with its message of empowerment through learning. In a world where change is the onlyconstant, the real achievement is the creative and collective achievement of individuals workingtogether. To accomplish this, today's Hispanic leader -any leaderhas to have the ability toidentify the key task of the group, assess the amount of learning that needs to take place toaccomplish the task, and teach empower the members of the group to do it together. It's thatwillingness to make yourself competent in the task that's needed that creates leaders


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In this paper, I will attempt to create an outline for a 30 hour workshop that will helpcommitted individuals in the reexamination of the definition of leadership and the unlearning ofthe conventional conception of the term. The objective will be to help the learners with thefollowing: Distinguish between leadership and authority. Distinguish the difference betweenformal and informal authority. The adaptive challenge, leadership as opposed to the exercise of

leadership.

In 1990 Peter F. Drucker wrote, "There are simply no such things as "leadership traits"or "leadership characteristics." Of course, some people are better leaders than others. By andlarge, though, we are talking about skills that perhaps cannot be taught but they can be learnedby most of us

The focus of these workshops will be to aid people in the identification of the gaps intheir own leadership skills and develop them. The objective is to familiarize the with the coreelements of the adaptive leadership model: Adaptive Work, Authority, Conflict, HoldingEnvironment, Attention to Issues, Partners, Responsibility, Values, and Work Avoidance. We

expect that the outcome will be a shift from the Leader-hero paradigm of leadership to theAdaptive Leadership style we are advocating.

One of the first things that need to be done is to guide the learners in the adaptive work ofidentifying their values. They will need to learn the nature of adaptive work: i.e. the learningrequired to address conflicts in the values people hold, or to diminish the gap between the valuespeople stand for and the reality they face. To put it in dialogical terms, we need to help themidentify the difference between their espoused theory and their theory in use.

Using the case in point method, for example, I would point to a group of Latino learnersin Providence that the basic adaptive challenge that our community faces is the fact that peoplein positions of so called leadership often use their position to further their personal ambition asopposed to fulfilling their personal aspirations. There is, then, a necessity to empower thelearner to identify these adaptive challenges.

A second goal would be to help them distinguish between leadership and authority. Theobjective would be to help define the new paradigm of leadership in which formal authority isnot always necessary to influence the behavior of individuals in groups. This portion of theworkshop would focus in the advantages and disadvantages of leading with or without authority.It would also emphasize the difference between formal and informal authority and when and howeach is applicable.

My perception is, for example, that people in Providence believe that having authority isthe same as having leadership. My experience has been that people perceive someone with anyposition within city government as being a leader regardless of what kind of authority, if any, heor she has. Another observation is that some groups authorize certain individuals but not others.Learners of leadership need to be clear on the point that authority is the amount of influence thatis legitimately granted to an organizational position or to a person; if others do not consent to thebasis of legitimacy (promotion, election, and so on), the person may have formal authority but no


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influence. Of course, the flip side of the coin is when a person has no formal authority but exertsinfluence, even with people who do not agree with his or her views. (Heifetz, 1994)

The next goal, how to manage and/or orchestrate conflict, is crucial to the ability toidentify what are the external pressures. Heifetz writes that community and company interests

frequently overlap and clash, with conflicts taking place not only among factions but also withinthe lives of individual citizens who themselves may have competing needs. Conflict is importantbecause conflict and heterogeneity are resources for social learning. It is through conflict thatpeople are mobilized to do adaptive work.

From the perspective of the situation in Providence, it is important to show the Latinoleadership how to use conflict among themselves and with the Anglo community as data to beused in the identification of adaptive challenges. For example, what is the reason behind theAnglo leadership's demand that the Hispanic community speak with only one voice? What arethe consequences of this?

Holding Environment

Heifetz defines the holding environment as "any relationship in which one party has thepower to hold the attention of another party and facilitate adaptive work." The holdingenvironment can generate adaptive work because it contains and regulates the stresses that workgenerates.

For the learners in these workshops, the introduction of this tool will play a part inallaying the anxiety of engaging in the kind of conflicts that are needed of adaptive work.

IssuesDirecting disciplined attention to the issues is one of the more difficult tasks of

leadership. The temptation is great to avoid doing adaptive work by paying attention to issuesthat provide easy solutions for problems. For people to comprehend the opportunities andchallenges presented to them in adaptive work, the issues need to be framed according to theirripeness. The ripeness of an issue is determined primarily by identifying which issues arecurrently generating a widespread feeling urgency.

With so many issues to pay attention to in the Providence socio-political environment,this tool will be of great help in sorting out the community's priorities. The Hispanic leadershipneeds to learn how to focus attention to elicit the optimal results from their adaptive work.

Partnering

The workshops have to stress the importance of partners and partnering to effectivelycounter the leader-hero model of leadership. As Heifetz points out, each of us has blind spotsthat require the vision of others, and passions that need to be contained by others. Peopleattempting to lead need partners who can put them back together again at the end of the day andprovide perspective.


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This would be a key element for the situation in Providence where the various factionsand sub-groups are in dire need to form effective alliances. I think that this partnering failure is amajor adaptation problem in the community that the Latino leader ship needs to recognize inorder to take full responsibility for it.

Responsibility

In the conventional model of leadership, leaders are expected to carry the responsibilityfor the problems and their solutions. People look to their leaders to absorb the responsibilitymostly because it will be easy to blame it on the leader if the issue is not resolved. Heifetz writesthat a community can fail to adapt when its people look too hard to their authorities to meetchallenges that require changes in their ways. Leadership will often require cutting against thegrain of expectation, one has to become sharply aware of what those expectations are in order toset strategy.

The learners in these workshops need to have a keen awareness of their responsibility as

leaders to avoid colluding with work avoidance. They need to learn how to resist the temptationof shielding their followers from responsibility and pain by giving the work back to people.

I believe that values are the core of the Heifetz model of leadership. He writes: "Aleader's primary task is to identify the adaptive challenge by identifying the discrepancy betweenvalues and behavior. Every time we face a conflict among competing values, or encounter a gapbetween our shared values and the way we live, we face the need to learn new ways. A leaderhas to engage people in facing the challenge, adjusting their values, changing perspectives, anddeveloping new habits of behavior."

Helping the learners to identify their values will be the critical task of these workshops.They need to recognize the values they share, the values that separate them, the values they haveto discard, and the new values they have to adopt to be able to help their constituencies adapt tothe social environment. This might entail the developing of a self-examined set of valuesincluding the capacity to distinguish and integrate personal aspiration and personal ambition orthe meshing of individual desires with caring for people

Work avoidance is a natural response to the distress caused by adaptive work. It is areflexive reaction to the pain and discomfort associated with the learning involved in theexamination of values. The effective leader needs to have the tools to counteract the resistanceto change and help people learn despite this resistance.

Latino leaders in Providence would benefit from an understanding of work avoidancemechanisms as they themselves engage in such work avoidance patterns such as scapegoating,blaming authority, externalizing the enemy, finding a distracting issue, and denying the problem.


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Methodology

Is the teaching of leadership an adaptive challenge in itself? If we embrace the idea thatadaptive leadership is something that can't be taught, how will people learn it? The conceptualpresentation of the adaptive leadership model necessitates the perfect balance between lecture,

case study, and case-in-point methodology of teaching. People, I believe, can learn it throughDialogue. For this, I will be drawing from Bill Isaacs and his MIT course Dialogue,Organizational Learning and Structural Intervention.

Dialogue, or the ability of any group of people to think and talk together --to increase thequality of their shared inquiry and collective thinking, to overcome "group-think",-- is emergingas one of the most central competencies in building learning organizations. In the case of theAdaptive Leadership Workshops, a Dialogical approach would aim to develop competencies inbuilding learning communities.

Dialogue comes from the Greek word dialogos. Logos means the word', and dia means

`through'. The picture or image that this derivation suggests is of a stream of meaning flowingamong and through us and between us. This will make possible a flow of meaning in the wholegroup, out of which will emerge some new understanding. This shared meaning is the `glue' or`cement' that holds people and societies together.

The collective thought is more powerful than the individual thought. If people were tothink together in a coherent way, it would have tremendous power. If we have a dialoguesituation --a group which has sustained dialogue for quite a while in which people get to knoweach other and so on-- then we might have such a coherent movement of thought, a coherentmovement of communication.

I would add that if we used this methodology in the conceptual presentation of theadaptive leadership model we will attain a "coherent movement" of learning.

The Adaptive Leadership Workshops will need to be adaptable to the audience and tohave body of reading that will give the learners of leadership a common ground from where tostart. I would also consider attempting to develop an alternative terminology that is more suitedto the audience. The use of metaphors for example, has to also be adapted to be culturallyaligned with Latino learners. The workshops would have a controlled number of participants,(i.e. the maximum number of people that can comfortably seat in a circle) and could beconducted in ten sessions of three hours each using as a basis the five strategic principles ofleadership:

1. Identify the adaptive challenge

Diagnose the situation in light of the values at stake.

Unbundle the issues that come with it.

2. Define the holding environment


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Diagnose what kind of holding environment you will be using

Determine if it is strong enough for the task at hand

3. Keep the level of distress within a tolerable range for doing adaptive work

Keep the heat up without blowing up the vessel

4. Identify possible partners and allies

Who would complement your weaknesses?

Who can you look up to that will help contain your excesses

5. Focus attention on ripening issues and not on stress-reducing distractions

Identify which issues can currently engage attention

Counteract work avoidance mechanisms like denial, scapegoating, attackingindividuals rather than issues

6. Give the work back to people, but at a rate they can stand.

Place and develop responsibility by putting the pressure on the people with theproblem

7. Protect the voices of leadership without authority.

Give cover to those who raise hard questions and generate distress--people whopoint out to the internal contradictions of the society.

8. ResponsibilityIs the responsibility equally shared in the group?

Who is carrying the bulk of the burden and why?

9. AuthorityWho carries formal authority?

Who carries informal authority?

Is there a clear distinction between the two?

10. Assessing the newly acquired skills


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Have we developed the relevant competencies?

Notes

1. Senge, Peter M., The Fifth Discipline, Doubleday, 1990. P. 340

2. Drucker, Peter F., Managing the Non-Profit Organization, Harper Collins, P. 22

3. Ibid, P. 18

4. Bohm, David, David Bohm Seminars, 1990, P.1

5. Ibid, P 7-8

6. Ibid, P 8

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Latino Diversity and the Adaptive Leadership Model