Reading the Room E-Book

David Kantor

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Serie: The Jossey-Bass Business and Management Series (US)
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 668

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

In Reading the Room, renowned systems psychologist and family therapist David Kantor applies his theory of structural dynamics to help leaders and coaches understand and improve communication within their teams. He helps readers understand how and why they and their teams communicate differently when faced with low-stakes or high-stakes situations, and he provides a framework to help improve leadership behavior in high-stakes situations. Acknowledging that early personal history and adult relationships have an impact on individual leadership and communication, the author discusses how leaders' awareness of their personal histories can help them become more effective in their leadership teams. Armed with the information outlined in this groundbreaking book, coaches and leaders will be able to: intervene effectively to produce positive change in both the group's dynamics and its outcomes, help people in the room alter their behavior to better reach their aspirations, identify the recurring sequences of behavior taking place in a group, understand why differing individual preferences for boundaries and rules affect their conversation, and much more. Written to help readers understand the reasons why leaders and teams get along--or don't--when they communicate in a group, this book will serve as the leader's "go-to" resource for insight and perspective in leading their team.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

APPLE NAME: 4-PLAYER MODEL

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

PREFACE: GETTING TO THE MODEL

STRUCTURAL DYNAMICS: EVOLUTION IN THREE CONTEXTS

EIGHT YEARS AT MONITOR GROUP

WHERE FROM HERE?

chapter ONE: Reading the Room

A CEO CHANGES JOBS

STRUCTURAL DYNAMICS: A LENS ON THE NATURE OF HUMAN DISCOURSE

THE BASIC CHALLENGE OF ALL CONVERSATION

LEADERS AND COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCY

REAL LIVES AND REAL LIFE STORIES

THE COACHING PERSPECTIVE

HOW THIS BOOK WILL WORK

PART ONE: A Complete Language for Understanding Leader Behavior

chapter TWO: Level I: Action Stances

FOUR ACTION STANCES

ART’S UNEXPECTED OUTBURST AT CLEARFACTS

BEHAVIORAL TENDENCIES AT LEVEL I

ACTION STRUCTURES, ACTION SEQUENCES, AND STRUCTURAL PATTERNS

BYSTANDING TO READ THE ROOM

GHOSTS AND OUTBURSTS AT CLEARFACTS

chapter THREE: Level II: Domains of Communication

THE LATEST CLEARFACTS WEEKLY MEETING

THE DOMAIN OF AFFECT

THE DOMAIN OF POWER

THE DOMAIN OF MEANING

THE VALUE OF ALL THREE DOMAINS

STANCES AND DOMAINS ACROSS THE CLEARFACTS TEAM

PROPENSITIES TOWARD DIFFERENT DOMAINS

COMMUNICATION AT THE INTERFACE

AN INSIGHT INTO IAN’S CHOICE OF DOMAINS

SURPRISE AT THE MEETING’S END

RON STUART: NEW HELP FOR RALPH?

WHERE COACHES CAN GET STUCK

chapter FOUR: Level III: Systems in Control of Speech

RALPH’S BOMB

NOT JUST A BAD MEETING: A SYSTEM OUT OF CONTROL

LEVEL III: OPERATING SYSTEMS

THE OPEN OPERATING SYSTEM

THE CLOSED OPERATING SYSTEM

THE RANDOM OPERATING SYSTEM

RALPH’S RANDOM-SYSTEM PREFERENCE AT CLEARFACTS

AS FOR RON . . . 

HOW LEADERS BENEFIT FROM SYSTEMS THINKING

chapter FIVE: The Behavioral Profile

A CLEARFACTS MEETING IN RALPH’S ABSENCE

A FUNCTIONAL TEAM IN A LOW-STAKES CONTEXT

THE VALUE OF BEHAVIORAL PROFILES

PART TWO: Identity and Leader Behavior in High Stakes

chapter SIX: Level IV: Stories, Identity, and Structured Behavior

IDENTITY IS LINKED TO LOVE

PERSONAL STORIES AND COACHING

STORIES

STORIES BEHIND A BEHAVIORAL PROFILE

TWO CHILDHOOD STORIES (PERSONAL MYTHS) OF LOVE

MARTHA AND LANCE—THE RITUAL FIGHT

A CHILDHOOD STORY’S NARRATIVE STRUCTURE

SHADOWS

RON’S STORY AND SHADOW

chapter SEVEN: Narrative Purpose

ASPECTS OF NARRATIVE PURPOSE

PRESENCE OR ABSENCE OF NARRATIVE PURPOSE

HOW TO BUILD AND SECURE A NARRATIVE PURPOSE

RALPH’S AND CLEARFACTS’S NARRATIVE PURPOSE

chapter EIGHT: Leader Behavior in High-Stakes Situations

MARTHA’S ERUPTION

VOICES, THEMES, AND TRIGGERS

FROM HIGH-STAKES BEHAVIORS TO SYSTEMS IN CRISIS

ANOTHER DONNYBROOK BETWEEN MARTHA AND HOWARD

chapter NINE: The Heroic Leader in Crisis

THE CRISIS MOUNTS AT CLEARFACTS

ENEMY AND “OTHER”

POSTURES OF MORAL JUSTICE: PROSECUTOR, ADJUDICATOR, ADVOCATE

HEROIC MODES OF LEADERS IN CRISIS: FIXER, SURVIVOR, PROTECTOR

THE FIXER

THE SURVIVOR

THE PROTECTOR

HEROIC SQUARE-OFFS IN TIMES OF CRISIS

SHADOW WORK AND WHY IT’S NEEDED

chapter TEN: Sources and Signs of Moral Corruption in Leaders

SONIA WATERMAN CALLS A SHOT

MORAL CHALLENGES AND MEANS OF CORRECTION

AN HOURGLASS OF MORAL CORRUPTORS

COMPREHENDING THE FRAUDSTER: SOME INSIGHTS INTO HOWARD GREEN

THE LITTLE WE KNOW

GOOD MODELS THAT GO BAD

SUMMING UP AT CLEARFACTS

PART THREE: Models and the Ultimate Leader

chapter ELEVEN: From Personal Model to Leadership Model

RALPH’S PERSONAL MODEL AND CURRENT FUNCTIONAL AWARENESS

ONWARD

chapter TWELVE: Building a Leadership Model

AN OVERVIEW

MODEL BUILDING AND THE MODEL OF MODELS

FINDING RALPH “ON THE GROUND”

ART’S DEPARTURE AND A NEW APPROACH TO HIRING FOR THE TEAM

RALPH BUILDS HIS LEADERSHIP MODEL

THE ESSENTIAL MESSAGE FOR LEADERS

chapter THIRTEEN: A Model for Living

THE MODEL FOR LIVING

MODELS FOR LIVING AND THE BREAKDOWN-BREAKTHROUGH STORY

BUILDING A MODEL FOR LIVING

RALPH, SONIA, AND A LIFE WORTH LIVING

chapter FOURTEEN: Beyond the Behavioral Profile

MUST WE REALLY?

RAISING THE BAR: TWENTY LEADER CAPACITIES

THE CLEARFACTS TEAM: INDIVIDUAL CAPACITIES AND CONTRIBUTIONS

chapter FIFTEEN: A Structural Dynamics Analysis of Barack Obama

OBAMA’S BEHAVIORAL PROFILE

OBAMA’S FORMATIVE STORIES

OBAMA’S IDENTITY QUEST

OBAMA’S HIGH-STAKES TENDENCIES

AFTERWORD: WHERE STRUCTURAL DYNAMICS GOES FROM HERE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Index

APPLE NAME: 4-PLAYER MODEL

The Kantor 4-Player Model Mini-Assessment will help individuals assess themselves to gain insight into the underlying drivers behind their most characteristic management and communications behaviors, which inform how they work with individuals, teams, and within organizations. With the app, users take a simple 11 question assessment to determine how they rate within Kantor’s four “Action Modes” (introduced in Chapter 2 of the book), which can be described in one of four ways: Moving, Following, Opposing, or Bystanding. After taking the assessment, the app provides users with a report that includes their Action Mode profile, basic guidance, and tips specific to their profile, as well as the associated talents and traps of that profile.

Functionality and features include:

An interactive in-app assessment with a graphic interfacePersonalized report generation based on your inputThe ability to share your report with others via emailSharing through your social media accounts including Facebook and Twitter

Copyright © 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

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All figures originally created by David Kantor, The Monitor Group, and the Kantor Institute.

Figures 6.1, 15.1, and 15.2 were illustrated by Kelly Alder.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kantor, David.

 Reading the room: group dynamics for coaches and leaders / David Kantor.—1st ed.

p. cm.

 Includes bibliographical references and index.

 ISBN 978-0-470-90343-8 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-22120-4; ISBN 978-1-118-23504-1; ISBN 978-1-118-25960-3

 1. Communication in organizations. 2. Communication in management. 3. Small groups. 4. Leadership. I. Title.

 HD30.3.K364 2012

 658.4'092—dc23

2012008211

To Meredith, my wife, my beacon, my muse, and my teacher in the ways of love

PREFACE: GETTING TO THE MODEL

There are communication problems, and then there are communication problems with billions of dollars and the careers of all involved hanging in the balance.

Reading the Room is a guide for coaches and leaders, designed to help untangle problems in communication in the office, at home, and in high-stakes situations. The text uses ClearFacts, a fast-growing green energy company, and the interactions of a credible cast of characters to unveil structural dynamics—a theory of communication that defines leadership behavior both in easy and hard times.

Following is an excerpt from Chapter Eight of the text, a typical testy interchange between Martha Curtis and Howard Green, two members of CEO Ralph Waterman’s management team.

MARTHA: Ralph? Ian? This is a key procedural issue. This is about decision rights. I want to know whether Art or Ron or I have the authority Howard has assumed. Where the hell is our touted transparency? What he’s done is irresponsible.

HOWARD: Don’t ever talk to me about irresponsibility. I work hard and I produce. That’s what leaders do.

MARTHA: You’re no leader in my book. Leaders guide; they do not bullwhip.

HOWARD: Wrong, Martha. What leader of note has not taken a whip to a dumb mule?

RALPH: (In a loud, cracked voice, almost shrieking) Whoa! Hold that cursed tongue, Howard; you sound like a slave-master. Not in this firm. Martha, you’re not in control. (Silence follows.) Sorry, I lost it. There is a blurry margin here. Why not put a stop to the wrangling you two get into and let Ian look into it?

Martha and Howard spar often, but generally manage to keep their underlying dislike and distrust under wraps when pressures on them are tolerably low. When the stakes sharply rise later, and the company faces a serious moral and financial crisis, they will clash violently, and their ability to make good decisions, the mark of good leadership in hard times, will suffer.

Notice in this exchange that Ralph stumbles into what I call the communicative field. In a session with his coach, Duncan Travis, we will learn what led him to temporarily lose control, what triggered him to take sides, and why, in that moment, he could not do what he’d learned he must do as a leader.

Utilizing both story and conceptual format, Reading the Room spells out the complete theory underlying the model of leadership Travis uses with CEO Ralph Waterman to speed his, Ralph’s, journey: a quest to become a great leader with a leadership model of his own.

This model of leadership did not spring up overnight. Rather, it is the product of my nearly fifty years as a therapist, teacher, and coach. Getting to the model has been an informative journey, and the story of its evolution will help you develop your own.

STRUCTURAL DYNAMICS: EVOLUTION IN THREE CONTEXTS

Structural dynamics is a theory of how face-to-face communication works and does not work in human systems. Its roots lie in systems theory, the study of phenomena as systems of interrelated parts. Like other theories that apply systems thinking to human organizations, this theory has its own notion of structure. In Reading the Room, I delve into this structure of face-to-face communication, define its parts, and examine how these interdependent parts interact.

As an undergraduate, I balanced my major in psychology with an interest in its social applications and the individual aspects of behavior. These interests led me in turn to sociology, social psychology, and social anthropology.

By the mid-1960s, I had been drawn into the burgeoning field of family systems therapy and its origins in systems thinking. I was captivated by Ludwig von Bertalanffy and Norbert Wiener.

In those exciting, paradigm-shifting times, psychoanalytically oriented therapies were being challenged by newly conceived systems-oriented theories and methods that focused not on the individual patient but on the family as the client system. These methods were initially taught at free-standing institutes, academia only taking over years later. I, with colleagues, launched such an institute in Boston in 1967; another in Cambridge four years later; then a third, under my name, six years after that.

At the Kantor Family Institute, structural dynamics theory was taught alongside those introduced by the pioneers. Formerly known as “methods” or “approaches,” I began to call them “models” instead, though my understanding of models would not fully mature until many years later when, in 1990, I formalized the idea of a “model of models.”

What I sensed in the 1970s and 1980s was that the family systems pion­eers were better at providing methods of intervention than they were at describing the theories that guided these treatment recommendations. Struck by this gap, I was determined to strengthen the links between my own theory and practice.

I was awarded an NIMH grant to study families in their own milieus.1 My staff and I set out to study twenty-one families in all: one third were families with schizophrenics living at home at the time of the study, one third were families that had sought therapy to improve functioning, and one third were families that had never sought help and appeared to be well functioning. Our research purpose was to study the nature of communication across the three family categories and to discover differences, if any, between them.

No one before had studied families in situ. After testing the project’s procedures in my own home, a special group of participant observers were brought aboard.2 Each took up residence in one of the study households 24/7 for thirty days and nights. Tape recorders in every room ran nonstop, capturing every word and recognizable vocal sound. We saw everything.

The live-in observers kept notes and left the households daily at quiet times to report and record observations the machines could not capture. Both the taped and human observations were transcribed by a secretarial staff of fifteen. Both sets of transcriptions, filling a 15-by-18-by-20-foot room floor to ceiling, were analyzed by myself and Will Lehr with the help of four handpicked research assistants over a period of two years. The final results were published by Jossey-Bass in the book Inside the Family in 1977.

By the project’s official end, the nascent theory with which we began had taken a big leap forward. Many of the concepts that appear in Reading the Room were established in the course of this research, notably the four-player model, the three domains of communication, and the three operating systems. Whereas we learned much about sequences and patterns of communication, yet to come was an explanation of why and how behavior changed when the people or the system itself was put under pressure.3

As you will see, it would take a closer look at couples to even begin to understand behavior change in high-stakes and crisis situations. I did this work in two steps: a study of one couple in their home and, several years later, a more elaborate study of twenty couples who had come to me for therapy and saw the value of simultaneously serving as subjects in research.

The First Step: The Friedmans

So, one year later, I moved tape recorders and cameras into the household of a young, recently married couple in a more limited but more focused study.4 What could a young couple just starting out tell us about the more established patterns of communication we saw in the full-fledged family study? I was curious as to how these patterns, patterns of communication and miscommunication, got started.

Every other day, in the hours surrounding the couple’s evening meal, a research assistant would visit, start the recordings, and leave. “The devices became mere parts of the landscape,” the Friedmans said. So much so that the tapes were often forgotten until they ran out. After reviewing the tapes, I would follow up with a visit, in particular to explore the origins of the couple’s fights.

They led me to the source, a very particular childhood story that was dra­matically cathartic for both Friedmans in the telling, and eye-opening for the reflective researcher in me. Such stories, hinted at over and over by the couples in the family study, had a structure all their own. I set out to confirm or disconfirm what I had seen. I could do this informally on my own in my clinical work with individuals, but the training context offered a unique opportunity to do so in greater numbers.

At the Family Institute of Cambridge, which I cofounded with Carter Umbarger and Barry Dym in 1974, my class alone contained as many as fifteen systems therapists at any given time. In a training feature meant to deepen self-knowledge and clinical expertise, trainees took part in an exercise designed to elicit their childhood stories, and were asked to do the same with at least three of their clients. Jane Pilemer collated and readied these stories for my inspection.

The stories were found to contain four elements. I called them the affect structure; the mood structure; the role structure, or who took on which of the four player actions; and a “missing” element, a figure “whose actions would make the story of wrongful love come out right.” The sample of over one hundred provided strong face evidence that another piece of the theoretical framework of structural dynamics was in place. I published the results in a paper called “Critical Identity Image” in 1980.5

The Second Step

The Friedmans helped establish a link between this critical childhood story and breakdowns in their communication, but the connection was vaguely defined. More research and a study that went deeper with greater numbers were required. The clinical context with couples seemed the best way to do this. Why? Because, whatever the reason couples first give for seeking therapy, sooner or later what it comes down to is, “Our communication sucks!” For many, these knockdown fights threatened the basic premises of their relationship. For an alarming number, they led to a breakdown in most sexual communication. “We’ve stopped making love!” It is plain to see that therapy with couples is an open introduction to one of the common forms that high-stakes situation take, and a key to examining it in other situations.

Twenty couples agreed to participate in this study. Their therapy went on as usual, but all session tapes over a period of at least six months were transcribed by my research assistant, Uli Detling. The couples received duplicate copies with the option to replay them as “homework.” Using data gathered prior to launch from my nonresearch couples, categories for analysis were tentatively established and applied to the study-group data for coding and analysis. From this happy marriage of research and clinical goals, a typology of high-stakes behavior was born. A structural dynamics theory of face-to-face communication, though far from complete, had reached a new level of explanation.

Between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s at the Kantor Family Institute, which I’d launched in 1979, the theory received another boost. Still troubled by what I perceived as an unclear understanding of the relationship between theory and practice by those, myself included, who purportedly used systems theory to guide their practice, I dug in at the Institute. To meet accreditation standards, trainees were required to take at least a first stab at articulating their models in a paper they would submit to fellow students for discussion. I was determined to hone my own model, both intellectually and in practice.

Just as family therapy with a systems focus sparked a blaze of fresh thought in the 1960s, systems-oriented organizational consulting was taking off in the 1990s. Sensing that the former’s firestorm of creativity was simmering down, I turned to the latter for new insight and inspiration for my restless quest to unify theory and practice.

The Culmination of the Model-Building Effort

My first stop on this new path, consulting with family businesses, was short lived. It was not simply that consulting for corporate leaders and their teams was more enticing. No, I was seduced by the quality of the thought of those who were writing the theories for practitioners, in particular Chris Argyris, Donald A. Schön, Ed Schein, and Peter Senge.6 Perhaps, I thought, the gap that haunted me in the therapy world would be filled here.

Though far from abandoning the family therapy and training world, I noted a shift in context for theory building that had occurred in the decade 1990 to 2000. Employed over this period by three companies that consulted for big business, I was to use structural dynamics concepts in the service of their consulting models.7 It was here that the art and science of model building took on shape and a new life. I could test, refine, and grow such concepts as the three phases of model building (imitation, constraint, and autonomy, introduced in Chapter Twelve), conceived at the Kantor Family Institute, in the organizational consulting context.

One other concept deserves special mention. It can be argued (and it is clear in my mind) that if structural dynamics concepts contribute anything of value to our understanding of face-to-face communication, the model of models stands out, along with the four-player model. The model of models (or meta-model) was conceived in a eureka moment in 1992, one late night after a session with a group of consultants I was coleading with Diana Smith. The idea then made its way into “Random Notes,” an ongoing document into which scraps of ideas are cast for later retrieval, but also left to incubate in the back of my mind.

Three years later, the model emerged mature when I joined Dialogos, a company founded by Bill Isaacs in 1995, to promote the practice of dialogue for “strategic use at all levels of leadership within and across organizations.”8 In 1998, I became part of a team along with Bill, B. C. Huselton, and Robert Hanig. We were to take dialogue, the core of the company’s theory and practice, to new levels with my model of models as a template. Months later, Dialogos’s Sea Change Model was born. It became for the company what we’d hoped, a far more powerful practice model that remains to this day the lynchpin of its consulting practices. For me personally and for structural dynamics, it was a climactic culmination of decades of singular concentration and credible support for my belief that it takes three theories, not one, to develop a formidable practice model with no end to its continuous growth.

EIGHT YEARS AT MONITOR GROUP

In 2000, Mark Fuller, chairman and president of Monitor Group, asked me to join the company as a thought leader and director of a business unit to be called Monitor Kantor Enterprises. A true visionary, Fuller saw my work as compatible with the groundbreaking ideas Chris Argyris had brought to the social sciences, to organizational theory and consulting, and, most important, to Monitor Group itself.9

My broad assignment, with much of its actual delivery left to my imagination, was to answer the challenging question, “How would you apply structural dynamics to leadership for use in the broad community, our competitive marketplace, with senior consulting staff and the clients they serve?” For the next eight years, I tried to carry this mandate forward. I am proud to say, much was accomplished.

WHERE FROM HERE?

This question is fully addressed in the Afterword, which forecasts where structural dynamics goes from here. What is left unanswered is a question that hangs heavy over any “theory of the thing,” whether that thing is team leadership, coaching, or couples or family therapy: How does that theory apply in practice? How does the leader, coach, or therapist intervene?

Intervention is a vast subject. It raises a daunting question: Is there one underlying theory that serves all or many different practice models—models, for example, that are designed for intervening with two-person intimate relationships, teams, families, executives who lead, and the coaches who coach them?

There is one reason why structural dynamics, a structural theory of face-to-face relations, may fill the bill. All of these target systems (teams, families, and so on) involve a system of face-to-face relationships and a practitioner bent on helping them improve their functioning.

Reading the Room can be thought of as a presentation of a two-pronged theory of the thing, examining both how leaders lead and how best to coach them. This book, however, does not contain a full-fledged practice model. A workbook companion to Reading the Room that will present such a model is already under way. Titled Making Change Happen, the book attempts to lay out in full the principles and practices of structural intervention from a structural dynamics perspective. Following the theories laid out in Reading the Room chapter by chapter, Making Change Happen will help you identify the kinds of dysfunctional structures that typically occur at each of the four levels or domains of communication structure: action, language, system, and deep story.

Notes

1. Before launching the family study, these two questions were raised: Would you be able to recruit families that would allow researchers to observe their most protected private lives? Would they hide their scars and scabs? Although the establishment of trust was pivotal in getting through the door, we were surprised by what we heard on the tapes once in. Some couples, in the midst of their ritual fights, seemed to address the microphones. It was as if they were saying (and one couple indeed did), “Listen to this, David; this is how it is.” We were witnessing reality TV being born.

2. My choice of participant observers was of more than administrative interest. Concerned that professionally trained observers would look for and find support, conscious or not, for theories they knew, I recruited “naïve” observers: undergraduate students on school breaks. Free of family constraints, they could live in; and ostensibly free of professional bias, they could report strictly what they saw and heard.

3. To pay the families back for their immense contribution to the field, we constructed, as promised at the study’s outset, a two-hour tape for each family, patching together excerpts from their raw data. We, Kantor and Lehr, met with the family for four to six hours to discuss “the story you have told us about your family and how it was contributing to science.” They loved it, as you might imagine. Sharing the results of the study was scientifically rewarding to an unexpected degree. It was, in effect, a test of validity. “Yes, that’s us! And how you describe us hits home, but you should know why we behave and communicate that way.”

4. The Friedmans, three months’ pregnant when we moved the cameras in, were eager to put themselves on display. Open about “serious communication problems” that were spoiling the anticipated joys of child bearing and child rearing, they wanted to be among the first couples to have the birthing filmed in-hospital and to get help in knowing what their fights were about. They were a perfect match for addressing our own research question.

5. Kantor, D. “Critical Identity Image: A Concept Linking Individual, Couple, and Family Development.” In J. K. Pearce and L. J. Friedman (eds.), Family Therapy: Combining Psychodynamic and Family Systems Approaches (pp. 137–167). New York: Grune & Stratton, 1980.

6. For two years in the early 1990s, along with Argyris, Schön, Schein, and Senge, I was part of an informal eight-member learning group that met monthly at MIT to share our different perspectives on systems and their structures, and how these applied in the world of business consulting. It only occurs to me at this writing that herein was sown the seed of a structural dynamics idea, the meta-model (the model of models), a missing link in the chain of concepts that holds my theory together.

7. There is no end to my thanking Innovation Associates, Interaction Associates, and Dialogos—especially their directors, Charlie Kiefer, Thomas Rice, and Bill Isaacs, respectively—for providing already enriched soil for growing new ideas, many of them spreading willy-nilly throughout Reading the Room without credit to those I worked with in developing them.

8. Isaacs, W. Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together. New York: Doubleday, 1999.

9. Monitor Group is a strategy consulting company with a penchant, spurred by its chairman, Mark Fuller, for breaking new ground while preserving its core practice. Before others saw the wisdom of and critical need for integrating strategy with systems-oriented behavioral theories, Fuller did, bringing Chris Argyris, who was still at Harvard, aboard. Business school geniuses who spat out numbers were asked to swallow and digest what they instinctively had little taste for. Argyris’s ideas, summed up as Action Science and implemented by him and protégés like Diana Smith, intended to change not only individuals put through the rigors of change but their culture as well. To my benefit, ground was broken for the arrival a few years later of another complementary set of ideas—structural dynamics.

chapter ONE

Reading the Room

Introduction and Framework

In the past decade, significant progress has been made in describing and finding good-to-great leaders and coaching them toward greater success, but both experts and high-placed leaders themselves still overlook this fundamental:

A leader falls short of greatness without great skill in face-to-face talk.

This is as true in the corporate world as it is in government, communities, and families. On some level, we “know” that effective talk in face-to-face relations and small group conversations lies at the heart of leading, but by and large, when we lead, we do not examine closely what dynamics are at work in a conversation, nor find ways to improve them.

The title of this book refers to a priceless leadership skill: the ability to read the room to understand what’s going on as people communicate in small groups, including how the leader himself or herself is participating, when the conversation is moving forward, when it may be just about to leave the rails, and possibly even how to guide it back on course.

First, the leader is able to read the room; second, the leader knows how to contribute in the moment to keep the team talking on track.

What do you know right now about your own skills at reading the room? These skills can be learned at any age and any point in a coach’s or leader’s career. From penthouse to White House, no matter how high a leader has risen, becoming truly skilled at reading the room will elevate one’s game.

A CEO CHANGES JOBS

Throughout this book I will trace the story of a CEO called Ralph Waterman, “the room” of the leadership team he directed, the members of his team, and a leadership coach called Duncan Travis. As the story begins, Ralph has already achieved much in his corporate leadership career.

At age forty-eight, Ralph was not the stereotypical CEO, but he had a glowing and well-earned reputation for turning around companies that had stalled or declined. In fact, he’d just done that before coming to ClearFacts. People joked about his love of quixotic slogans like “Think and ye shall find. Create and ye shall be given!” but they also considered him brilliant, visionary. Did they also notice how restless he was at how much his current company continued to rely on the status quo and how far it fell short of any great sense of moral purpose? Perhaps Martha Curtis, director of HR, could tell. Of the leadership team, she was closest to Ralph. He appreciated her warm and engaging way, the fact that she spoke out a lot, and her high emotional intelligence despite being only thirty-four. A short eight years before, right after college, she’d gone into management training and from there into human resources.

Of course, Ralph and Martha had personal lives as well. Ralph was married to and for him the barometer of their relationship was the quality of lovemaking. By that standard, despite his working late many nights, he thought of his home life as “better than ever.” Sonia, of a different nature, also loved Ralph and was committed to their marriage, but came at it from a different perspective. Martha Curtis’s marriage was passionate, but also stormy at times. One tension was that her husband, , was an artist, which made her the primary breadwinner. They had no children at this point.