“Those doing the work are often the only ones who really understand the context. Leadership is helping build the structure and then protecting the space to do meaningful work.“ —Harold Jarche, work in 2018
Build the structure to do meaningful work
Few traditional meetings are built to do meaningful work. Instead, they unconsciously adopt an ancient model: a rote diet of lectures. Conscious meeting design, on the other hand, builds an appropriate structure that supports and leads to defined and desired outcomes, aka meaningful work.
Protect the space to do meaningful work
The old-school status roles baked into traditional meetings minimize useful connection and learning by defining in advance those who have something important to say. This makes it difficult and risky for the audience to share their own expertise and experience for everyone’s benefit.
“Leadership is helping build the structure and then protecting the space to do meaningful work.” When seen through the lens of participant-driven and participation-rich meeting design, I view Harold’s two-part definition as a perfect description of leadership for meetings.
Do your meeting designs truly support participants doing meaningful work? Do you provide leadership for meetings?
Almost all organization leaders today wield positional power: the power of a boss to make decisions that affect others. This is unlikely to change soon. However, the growth of the network era, where leaders and workers need to connect outside the workplace in order to stay up-to-date professionally and to be open to new and innovative ideas, is creating a shift away from traditional hierarchical power models.
Positional power
Harold Jarche writes frequently about positional power:
“One major change as we enter the network era is that positional power (based on institutions and hierarchies) may no longer be required to have influence in a network society.” —Harold Jarche, the new networked norm
It’s increasingly possible to have influence these days without being anyone’s boss.
Influence but no authority
As a consultant in various fields for 42 years, this is a familiar world: one where I have influence with a client but less authority than a janitor. Clients are free to ignore my advice. Sometimes they do, but clearly, I have useful influence that typically leads to significant change. (Otherwise, I wouldn’t continue to be hired and — usually 😀 — appreciated.)
Today, far more people work in the gig economy, which has grown in large part because the network era has made it much easier to find and hire specialized services on a just-in-time basis. This development has caused significant disruptions. Two examples are less long-term job security and the weakened ability for workers to advocate for their concerns en masse. However, there’s a positive side.
The network era
The network era is making possible a shift towards decentralized influence and power and away from the dysfunctional features of hierarchical societal and organizational structures that have led to much suffering and misery throughout human history. Today, there’s no reason to pick either positional or network-era power. We can create systems that incorporate the best features of both.
Here’s Harold Jarche again:
“…it is up to all of us to keep working on new structures and systems. This is perhaps the only great work to be done for the next few decades. We have the science and technology to address most of the world’s problems. What we lack are structures that enable transparency and action on behalf of humankind, and not the vested interests of the rich and powerful.” —Harold Jarche, chaos and order
This isn’t easy work. When consulting, one of my biggest meeting design challenges is to get the boss’s buy-in. Typically middle management is enthusiastic and onboard. But the most senior decision-maker will occasionally override everyone else in the organization. They make poor design decisions based on obsolete ideas about how people learn and a lack of understanding of how good meeting design can transform communities.
The network era is here, and its effect on power relationships isn’t going away. To improve the relevance and effectiveness of social structures, organizations, and meetings, leaders must understand and accept the potential and value of decentralized influence.
In June 2016 I stepped down as President and Executive Director of edACCESS, an association I co-founded 25 years ago. This was the third time I’ve left an association leadership position. Here are some valuable lessons learned from these association leadership transitions.
The Solar Association of Vermont
Although the rapid growth of the solar energy industry may appear to be a recent phenomenon, North American boomers will remember the late 70s and early 80s when the 1979 “oil crisis” hit and interest in alternative energy generation soared. I moved to Vermont in 1978 and joined the management of a fledging solar hot water manufacturing business. After a couple of years, I helped to found the Solar Association of Southern Vermont. Eventually, we became the Solar Association of Vermont (SAVE!) We’d hold monthly meetings in the tiny rural town of Brattleboro and sixty people would show up. SAVE went on to produce many of the earliest alternative energy conferences in the United States.
But in the 80s Reagan was elected. He removed the solar collectors that a colleague of mine had installed on the White House. By the mid-80’s oil prices had returned to pre-crisis levels. Interest in solar energy dried up and SAVE meeting attendance shrank to a few people.
What did we do?
We shut SAVE down.
We held a big end-of-the-association party, inviting everyone who had been part of this brief flowering of community interest. Little did we know that our work would set the stage for the meteoric rise of solar photovoltaic systems today.
Lessons
As time passes, the key motivations for an association’s existence can transmute, or even disappear. I’ve worked with hundreds of associations, and seen some continue to struggle on long after their mission has become irrelevant. Check regularly that your association’s mission remains congruent with its circumstances. If not, change your mission or your operations to stay relevant. Or, if necessary, close up shop (not forgetting to celebrate all your good work if you do!)
A local association
After a number of years serving as a board member of a local chapter of a national association, the board offered me the presidency. The national was recommending that chapters fundamentally change the way they operated, a change I agreed with. I told the board that I would happily accept the presidency if we allocated the resources needed to make this transformation happen, arguing that the change would improve our financial resources by allowing us to significantly increase our community fundraising.
Unfortunately, the board refused to allocate the resources I requested.
Consequently, I reluctantly turned down the presidency and left the board, as I did not want to lead an association whose board did not support the vision I had for its future.
Looking back on the subsequent evolution of the association, I don’t regret my decision, though I wish I’d been better able to convince the board that my approach was a better alternative to staying with the status quo.
Lessons
Before taking an association leadership role, share your vision for the future and make sure the rest of the association buys into it. If they don’t, don’t take the job!
edACCESS
In 1991 I co-founded edACCESS, a 501(c)6 that supports information technology staff at small schools. Initially, I had a professional interest in the organization’s mission for many years and served for free. As my consulting focus shifted increasingly towards meeting design, I moved into a paid part-time executive director role.
In May, 2016, I decided to give up the position, with the goal of making the handover to new leadership as smooth as possible. I announced my intent at the June annual conference and offered to stay for a year in a supervisory role, coaching new leadership as needed.
The existing leadership handled my announcement very well. I told them I would provide any desired assistance and advice around leadership changes, but felt it was important not to be intimately involved in ongoing decisions. I was gratified by the response, which to me reflects the fundamental health of the association I helped to create.
The transition went well. The full year’s notice allowed me to take new and existing leadership through an entire life cycle of the core association process. The association stayed in good shape after I left.
Lessons
I have seen (and experienced) a number of associations that were severely stressed by the sudden departure of leadership and the total lack of any leadership succession planning. To be honest, edACCESS is small enough that we did not have a formal plan in place. I am glad I have the flexibility to offer what will hopefully be sufficient time and support to allow the association to continue effectively carrying out its mission. Don’t assume that key association staff or board members, will stay with the organization forever, or give you ample warning before they depart! Pre-emergency planning for leadership, staffing, and succession will minimize the turmoil that can be generated without warning when key personnel leave unexpectedly.
Association leadership transitions
Have you made association leadership transitions? What lessons have you learned that others may value? Share in the comments!
Get rid of Human Resources. Human Resources: what an ugly term!
Wikipedia defines a resource as “a source or supply from which benefit is produced“. Is this how we think of employees—as resources for a company’s benefit?
I think it’s telling that many organizations still use this term to label the office that hires, manages, and fires employees. And such organizations, at least in the IT industry where I’ve had some experience of them, often don’t do a very good job.
Nowadays I’m noticing a trend in larger organizations to rebrand Human Resources as Talent Management. This is better—we’re not classifying people as resources like steel ingots. But the m-word—management—is still there, emphasizing the role of guidance on how employees work.
So here are a couple of alternative descriptions that I like better.
The first is Talent Leadership. As I’ve written here, I see leaders as influencers and facilitators of process rather than high-ups laying down the law. Organizations need both leaders and managers, but I think that forward-thinking institutions should have their talent led rather than guided.
Want an alternative? Google calls its Human Resources Department People Operations; employees shorten this to POPS. I think this neutral term is a sensible reframe of what “HR” does in a modern organization; covering the nitty gritty work while avoiding any connotation of employees-as-cattle.
“I rarely use the word learning these days. Business managers hear learning and think schooling and don’t want to invest a dime in it. I’m tired of having doors slammed in my face, so I now talk about Working Smarter. I’ve yet to meet a manager who didn’t want her organization to work smarter (even though learning is a major component of doing so).” —Bringing Informal Learning Up To Date, by Jay Cross
Given Jay’s experience, it surprises me how often people ask me how to justify attending participant-driven conferences that don’t have a nice neat program of sessions to show to the “I-decide-whether-you-go” boss. I’d like to think that managers are able to:
trust their employees possess the inclination and ability to learn what they need to know to do their job better.
be enthusiastic about conferences that effectively leverage the combined knowledge and experience of all participants rather than that of a few “experts”.
Sadly, it’s clear that many managers see learning as a dirty word however their minds define it: whether as schooling/training or as just-in-time, focused, relevant peer learning. Having to recast “learning” into “Working Smarter” to get management on board reveals management with a fundamental misunderstanding of modern business realities.
The industrial age, when employees trained in a static skill set generated long-term returns, is over. Management needs to embrace this simple truth. Continuous, self-directed learning in all its forms—experiential, social, and formal—is key to sustained business success today. To paraphrase Derek Bok: if you think learning is dirty, try ignorance.
Have you experienced push-back from management when you’re making a case for learning? Do tell!
There are many models of how people behave in groups, and each of them is useful in certain contexts. In the context of organizing and running a conference, how are group culture and event leadership interlinked?
I tend to employ an organic model, in which group members are seen in terms of their uniqueness, rather than categorized by their roles. An organic point of view allows and encourages people to find ways to work together in a variety of complex situations, and leads toward problem-solving that benefits everyone.
An example of organic leadership
For example, a conference steering committee I coordinated was offered the option of engaging a well-known, desired keynote speaker for a conference to be held in six months. Initially, his appearance fee was more than our budget could handle. But, at the last minute, he suggested appearing virtually, giving his presentation on a large video screen, at an affordable fee. We needed to quickly find out whether the conference site could support a virtual presentation.
If we had been using a linear approach to group organization, we would have already chosen the steering committee member responsible for technical issues and it would be her job to resolve this issue. If she were busy or sick, I’d have had to poll the other committee members for help and ask someone to take on additional work. In this case, our committee was comfortable with an organic approach, so I sent a request for help to all the steering committee members, most of whom had some technical expertise.
Because the committee culture was one of staying flexible in the face of unexpected circumstances, cooperatively working together to solve problems, and respecting each member’s unique constraints and contributions, I didn’t worry about treading on anyone’s toes by sending out a general request for help. The outcome: One of the committee members had some free time and immediately offered his expertise, while another, the speaker liaison, told us he thought the speaker would have the information we needed and would check with him.
How do you build this kind of culture for your conference organizing team?
This brings us to the question of what leadership means in the context of organizing and running a conference. Every book on leadership has a different approach; here’s what fits for me.
Author and polymath Jerry Weinberg describes organic leadership as leading the process rather than people. “Leading people requires that they relinquish control over their lives. Leading the process is responsive to people, giving them choices and leaving them in control”. Jerry’s resulting definition of leadership is “the process of creating an environment in which people become empowered.” This is what I try to elicit when working with a conference organizing team.
I also find Dale Emery’s definition of leadership helpful. Dale describes leadership as “the art of influencing people to freely serve shared purposes”. Bear this definition in mind as you work with your conference organizing team. It ties your interactions with them to your shared goal of realizing a vision, in this case organizing and running a conference.
Who on the team leads in this way?
Unlike the traditional, role-based version of leadership, any member can help build an atmosphere that supports this kind of leadership. Once the seeds of this culture are established, I’ve found that it tends to become self-perpetuating. People like working together in this way. Experiencing a conference team coming together, with the members enjoying their interactions while creating a great event, is one of the most satisfying aspects of my work.
Although the impetus for an organic approach can come from any team member, the conference coordinator is the natural initiator of these flavors of leadership. She is responsible for keeping the conference planning on track and avoiding planning and execution snafus. She does this, not by ordering people around, but through a respectful flow of timely reminders, check-ins, questions, requests for assistance, and appropriate redirections.
Some people have little experience working organically. They may join your team with the expectation that others will determine their responsibilities. Or, that a team leader will give them well-defined jobs to do. Often, given a relaxed and open environment where their ideas are encouraged, they will grow into a more active role. They become more confident in their ability to contribute creatively and flexibly to organizing and running the conference.
A helpful reminder for leaders of every kind
Jerry Weinberg suggests you assume that everyone you’re working with wants to feel useful and make a contribution. He quotes Stan Gross’s device for dealing with his feelings that people are not trying to contribute. “They’re all doing the best they can, under the circumstances. If I don’t think they are doing the best they can, then I don’t understand the circumstances.”
Such a mindset will help you focus on finding solutions to people problems that inevitably arise in any group working together on something they care about.
How do you see the intersection of group culture and event leadership? Is your model different? What can you add to these ideas?
Think back on all the conference presentations you’ve attended. How much of what happened there do you remember?
Be honest now. I’m not going to check.
Nearly all the people to whom I’ve asked this question reply, in effect, “Not much”. This is depressing news for speakers in general, and me in particular as, since the publication of Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love, I have been receiving an increasing number of requests to speak at conferences.
When I ask about the most memorable presentations, people (after adjusting for the reality that memories fade as time passes) tend to mention sessions where there was a lot of interaction with the presenter and/or amidst the audience: in other words, sessions where they weren’t passive attendees but actively participated.
Take a moment to see whether that’s your experience too.
Social learning
Conference sessions that are designed to facilitate engagement between rather than broadcast content provide wonderful opportunities for social learning: the learning that occurs through connection, engagement, and conversations with our peers.
Social learning is important, and here’s why, courtesy of Harold Jarche:
There are additional reasons why supporting social learning during conference sessions makes a lot of sense:
Active participants almost always learn and retain learning better than passive attendees.
Participants meet and learn about each other, rather than sitting next to strangers who remain strangers during a session.
Participants influence the content and structure of the session toward what it is they want to learn, which is often different from what a presenter expects.
Being active during a session increases engagement, creating better learning outcomes.
Actively participating during a session is generally a lot more fun!
A mission for conference presenters: incorporate audience engagement
Conferences provide an ideal venue for social learning; they are potentially the purest form of social learning network because we are brought together face-to-face with our peers. And yet most conference sessions, invariably promoted as the heart of every conference, squander this opportunity by clinging to the old presenter-as-broadcaster-of-wisdom model.
Of course, there are conference sessions that routinely include significant participation. Amusingly, they have a special name so they won’t be confused with “regular” conference sessions: workshops!
In my opinion, every conference session longer than a few minutes should include significant participation that supports and encourages engagement. If you’re a conference presenter, make this part of your mission—to improve your effectiveness by incorporating participation techniques into your presentations. Your audiences will thank you!
Are you a conference presenter? How much do you incorporate participation techniques into your presentations? Please share your ideas here!
At the recent Medical Group Management Association PEER Conference, I had the good fortune to attend a fascinating opening session created by Roger Nierenberg of The Music Paradigm. Roger, Music Director of the Stamford Symphony Orchestra and a guest conductor around the world, uses a semi-impromptu exploration of the work of an orchestral conductor to illustrate a host of lessons about leadership.
When we entered the large performance room, we found, not the traditional orchestral layout, but clumps of professional orchestra players scattered amongst our seats. During the session we sat “inside” the orchestra, experiencing Roger and the other musicians as the orchestra did, rather than as audience members.
Roger started by telling us that many of the professional musicians present had not worked with him before that morning and that the session was not scripted, and he asked players and the audience to be honest with their comments and responses.
Roger then conducted a ten-minute piece of orchestral music that was to be our musical touchstone for the session. During the remainder of the session, various excerpts from this piece were repeated, preceded with Roger’s instructions and followed by solicited observations from audience & orchestra members and Roger’s commentary.
Random audience members and musicians were asked for their honest responses and observations after each musical experiment; the session was in no way canned, and, being experiential, a written account obviously cannot do it justice. However, I’m sharing my notes in order to give a sense of the powerful learning a session like this can provide. I’ve italicized Roger’s words:
Roger compared his role as an orchestra conductor to the paradigm of leadership, to the work of leading change.
He began by instructing his orchestra I want this to be big & wonderful, and then proceeded to conduct “flat”, illustrating the problems that arise when leaders say one thing and do another.
Then Roger announced he would be very engaged, and over-directed a soloist. Afterward, the soloist described herself as “stifled”. Soloists, Roger told us, like to take control during solos and not have the conductor in their faces—they will shut out conductors who over-direct. The parallel to micromanaging staff was obvious.
It’s such an easy thing for an orchestra to hate a conductor.
Roger asked Why a conductor at all? He demonstrated this by not conducting a selection that included abrupt, unrehearsed change. The orchestra did a magnificent job but sounded ragged. Egos won’t help. The lesson: good leadership requires specific direction at the right time, so everyone can execute together. A leader becomes more critically important the more change there is. The soloist who had to start illustrated another lesson—she thanked the rest of the orchestra for supporting her.
The baton: The tools of leadership are pretty simple.
Roger shared …the conductor’s nightmare: I’ll commit and nobody plays.
He demonstrated the following concepts:
Don’t get out too far in front of the group.
The perils of an unclear signal.
I’ll show you the way, but you’ll go there.
Conductors listen for stuff going wrong and fix it. And they also listen for the things that people are doing right. Take what the orchestra gives you and work with it. Listen for what could be.
Roger illustrated having the first violinist as right-hand man when you’re not around.
It’s hard to separate out ego needs. Make it clear to players how they work together.
Shared leadership: Sometimes an instrument leads.
If they trusted me today, that was because of what I did. You can’t ask for trust, you can earn it.
There are a lot of conductors who specialize in passion. This nauseates the orchestra.
An orchestra notices that the conductor knows the score by heart.
On hearing something wrong during playing: Get together and check that note. Notice, I didn’t say who was right.
They feel more about your enthusiasm for their playing than my giving them a compliment.
Musicians are trained to work together; physicians are trained as soloists.
If you can see the big picture, the more you can help orchestra members see it.
Roger’s last comment particularly resonated with me, for the times when I’m facilitating group process at a conference: My connection with orchestra members is a conduit for them to connect with each other.
I thoroughly enjoyed The Music Paradigm, finding it an effective way to explore many aspects of functional & dysfunctional leadership via an audience’s experience of the ways a conductor might lead an orchestra. If you’re looking for a unique and effective way to demonstrate multiple facets of leadership and guiding principles to your organization, check it out! And, if you have the opportunity to attend a Music Paradigm session, don’t miss it!
“Leadership is about the role of the catalysts in organizations who influence and shape both strategy and execution, while management is the discipline that guides how large numbers of people efficiently accomplish complex work. Organizations need both catalysts and discipline.
…leaders are facilitators and their defining characteristic is their ability to enable connections that drive effective collaboration among large numbers of people. When leaders are facilitators, organizations adopt the disciplines of self-organized networks that are designed to leverage collective intelligence.
Rod was the COE of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Federal Employee Program with over $19 billion in annual revenues. I like how he distinguishes between leadership and management. Although he’s talking about organizations, his definitions apply beautifully to the roles of leadership and management at participant-driven meetings.
Replace “organizations” with “meetings” in the quotes above. Rod’s vision for the viable future of organizations becomes the same set of principles I’ve championed for effective, powerful conferences:
Supporting and encouraging conference participants to network & collaborate.
Using meeting designs that leverage the experience & expertise of the group.
Transforming meetings from top-down presentations to peer-initiated & led sessions.
Isn’t that interesting?
How do you see leadership and management roles play out in your meetings? What works, what doesn’t?
“[There are] almost as many definitions of leadership as there are persons who have attempted to define the concept.” —Ralph Stogdill, Handbook of Leadership: A survey of theory and research (1974, p.259)
I’m not going to add to the thousands of existing definitions of leadership. I believe that defining what leadership is—essentially, process that influences others to accomplish something—misses the point. What we need to understand first, is the purpose of leadership. Once we’ve decided that, we can think about what leadership qualities we need to carry out that purpose.
The task of leadership
Here’s the wonderful Peter Block musing in a recent book:
Too often our vision of leadership is clouded and restricted by 19th-century ideas of leadership, emphasizing autocratic, bureaucratic, and charismatic leadership styles that are still commonly held up for us as models of what leadership is about. Even though more enlightened leadership models (e.g. servant and transformational styles) are becoming more widely used, there’s still a tendency to revert to the old models in some situations.
Leadership at conferences
For example, how do we treat conference attendees?
At most conferences, attendees have very little say in what happens. The event revolves around a set of limited preselected session choices made by the conference leadership. Such an event culture implies a default passivity. Organizers, not attendees, make decisions—organizers who are, perhaps unknowingly, using leadership styles more appropriate for young children.
It’s perfectly possible, however, to offer freedom to conference participants. Unconference designs provide structure and support for participants to determine what they want to learn, share, and discuss. Participants are then free to make the event their own.
Most of us who are asked to try something new feel a natural reluctance or wariness. First-time attendees at an unconference often feel apprehensive about the prospect of taking a more active role. That’s why Peter’s phrasing confront people with their freedom is appropriate. Unconferences offer an environment that gently confronts attendees with their power to influence what happens. In my experience, once attendees experience what it is like to have a real voice in shaping their event, the vast majority of them embrace this new freedom.
What do you think of Peter Block’s musing on the real task of leadership?
What might leadership for meetings look like?
Almost all organization leaders today wield positional power: the power of a boss to make decisions that affect others. This is unlikely to change soon. However, the growth of the 
In June 2016 I stepped down as President and Executive Director of 
Get rid of Human Resources. Human Resources: what an ugly term!
There are many models of how people behave in groups, and each of them is useful in certain contexts. In the context of organizing and running a conference, how are group culture and event leadership interlinked?
