Ed Batista

William Bridges on Transitions

Many of my clients have recently been through a transition, are going through one at the moment, or sense one on the horizon, and almost all of my MBA students at Stanford fall into one of these categories. One of the most useful resources on this topic is William Bridges' Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes. [1] Bridges' starting point is the fundamental distinction between transition and change:

Our society confuses them constantly, leading us to imagine that transition is just another word for change. But it isn't. Change is your move to a new city or your shift to a new job. It is the birth of your new baby or the death of your father. It is the switch from the old health plan at work to the new one, or the replacement of your manager by a new one, or it is the acquisition that your company just made.

In other words, change is situational. Transition, on the other hand, is psychological. It is not those events, but rather the inner reorientation and self-redefinition that you have to go through in order to incorporate any of those changes into your life. Without a transition, a change is just a rearrangement of the furniture. Unless transition happens, the change won't work, because it doesn't "take." Whatever word we use, our society talks a lot about change, but it seldom deals with transition. Unfortunately for us, it is the transition that blind-sides us and is often the source of our troubles... [page xii]

One of the causes of the difficulty that we experience with transitions is that they necessarily involve letting go of something, a process we often find unnerving:

Changes are driven to reach a goal, but transitions start with letting go of what no longer fits or is adequate to the life stage you are in. You need to figure out what exactly that no-longer-appropriate thing is... Whatever it is, it is internal. Although it might be true that you emerge from a time of transition with the clear sense that it is time for you to end a relationship or leave a job, that simply represents the change that your transition has prepared you to make. The transition itself begins with letting go of something that you have believed or assumed, some way you've always been or seen yourself, some outlook on the world or attitude toward others. [pages 128-129]

A consequence of the need to let go of something in the course of a transition is that "endings come first," which is one of Bridges' core themes:

All transitions are composed of (1) an ending, (2) a neutral zone, and (3) a new beginning. [page 4]

Every transition begins with an ending. We have to let go of the old thing before we can pick up with the new one--not just outwardly, but inwardly, where we keep our connections to people and places that act as definitions of who we are. [page 11]

First there is an ending, then a beginning, and important empty or fallow time in between. That is the order of things in nature. [page 17]

"Fallow time" refers to the period between crops when arable land is left unplanted, and Bridges frequently refers to agriculture highlight the contrast between our post-industrial society and other cultures that are more attuned to the organic rhythms of life. Bridges observes that today we not only fail to acknowledge endings, but also find ourselves distressed by the fallow period that precedes the new beginning. He invites us to take a different approach and to recognize that a fallow period serves an essential purpose in our lives, just as it does in all organic systems:

One of the difficulties of being in transition in the modern world is that we have lost our appreciation for this gap in the continuity of existence. For us, "emptiness" represents only the absence of something. So when what's missing is something as important as relatedness and purpose and reality, we try to find ways of replacing those missing elements as quickly as possible. [page 133]

You should not feel defensive about this apparently unproductive time-out during your transition points, for the neutral zone is meant to be a moratorium from the conventional activity of your everyday existence. [page 135]

There are three main reasons for the emptiness between the old life and the new. First, the process of transformation is essentially a death and rebirth process rather than one of mechanical modification... The second reason for the gap between the old life and the new is that the process of disintegration and reintegration is the source of renewal... The last reason for the emptiness between the stages of the life journey is the perspective it provides on the stages themselves... The neutral zone provides access to an angle of vision on life that one can get nowhere else. And it is a succession of such views over a lifetime that produces wisdom. [pages 140-142]

Bridges' emphasis on the fallow period and its importance, despite (or because of) the stress it causes brings to mind Kurt Lewin's model of change, which suggests that we must "unfreeze" before any change can take place and that we "refreeze" afterwards. [2]  "Unfreezing" can be a daunting process, as Edgar Schein has noted while elaborating on Lewin's work:

[H]uman change, whether at the individual or group level...[involves] painful unlearning...and difficult relearning as one cognitively [attempts] to restructure one's thoughts, perceptions, feelings, and attitudes. [3, emphasis mine]

These ideas are relevant not only to work with my clients and students, but also to two transitions I've experienced personally in recent years: I launched my coaching practice in 2006, and the following year I turned 40 and suffered the loss of several people in my life. In both cases I realized belatedly that I hadn't fully acknowledged what was ending--a 15-year career in organizational management on the one hand, and the illusion that mortality was an abstract concept on the other--and it was important to take some time to reflect on what I had accomplished (and failed to accomplish) both professionally and personally, to signify and recognize an end to one phase of my career and to one chapter in my life.

Acknowledging those endings also helped me to understand and work through the fallow periods that corresponded to the transitions I was experiencing and prepared me to step into the new beginnings that followed. It hasn't been a seamless process, by any means. There are moments when I miss management, and I wonder how I'll fulfill my desire to lead while serving as a coach and teacher. And there are times when I resist admitting that I'm in the second half of my life, with fewer years ahead of me than behind me. But navigating these transitions would have been much more difficult without the benefit of what I've learned from Bridges, Lewin and Schein, among others, and for that I'm grateful.

 

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Footnotes

[1] Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes (Revised 25th Anniversary Edition) (William Bridges, 2004)

[2] Why Change Is Hard

[3] Kurt Lewin's Change Theory in the Field and in the Classroom: Notes Toward a Model of Managed Learning (Edgar Schein, 1995)

Revised March 2019.

Photo by McKay Savage.

Thank You to HRWorld and MBA Explorer

If you'll indulge me in a little self-promotion, I'd like to express my appreciation to HRWorld, which named this site as one of the Top 100 Management and Leadership Blogs, and to MBAExplorer, which named it as one of the Top 50 Business Professor Blogs.  (As the latter makes clear, I'm not a prof, but my work as an executive coach at Stanford certainly gives me a good perspective on how B-schools are addressing leadership development and experiential learning.)

I'm honored by the recognition, humbled to be listed with such brilliant thinkers...and inspired to end my leisurely summer blogging schedule and get back to work.

I encourage you to check out these lists, and I'd specifically like to direct you to Bob Sutton, one of the most thoughtful and inspiring writers on management out there.  He's a perfect example of an academic who uses every channel at his disposal--books, articles and his blog--to reach a popular audience and spread his ideas among the culture at large.

Photo by Discos Konfort.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

The Trium Group on Responsibility

"Responsibility" is a buzzword in the literature on management--but what does it really mean? How do we act when we feel responsible? How do we act when we don't? And what are the implications for our organizations and our colleagues?

I've written before about lessons I've learned from people at the Trium Group, a consulting firm with a keen understanding of the interpersonal factors that contribute to high performance. [1] In keeping with their perspective on the relationship between individual behavior and organizational strategy, Trium offers a compelling definition of responsibility. I was first introduced to their thinking on the topic last year by my Stanford colleague Sharon Richmond, who had a version of the graphic above pinned to her office door. [2] Trium's original version adds the following commentary on the two mindsets:

Responsible Mindset
I view myself as an integral factor in all situations. Every situation occurs and unfolds as it does in some measure as a direct outcome of my actions, non-actions and interpretations. I believe there is always something I can do to affect the situation.

Victim Mindset
I view myself as separate and disconnected from situations as they occur. Circumstances and events happen to me. I believe there is nothing I can do to affect the situation.

Further research on the topic of responsibility led me to Stanford professor Jeff Pfeffer's recent work on the subject, which includes an extensive discussion of Trium's approach:

Some colleagues at...The Trium Group...have been reasonably successful at helping companies make mind-set transitions, thus enhancing the companies' effectiveness. Although their work focuses on several mental models, one important focus is on what they call the "responsibility" mind-set, which they contrast with the "victim" perspective.

An important introductory comment: Responsibility is not the same as accountability. Responsibility is probably a good thing for companies and their cultures, but accountability is actually somewhat more problematic. Accountability is, of course, an idea very much in vogue these days. People in companies and even schoolchildren are supposed to be held accountable for their decisions and actions—what they do has consequences, and they must feel those consequences, be they positive or negative. There is a lot of evidence, however, that the growing emphasis on individual accountability—something, by the way, that is completely inconsistent with the lessons of the quality movement—hinders learning and even discovering mistakes...

Responsibility implies something different. Responsibility entails feeling efficacious and believing one has some obligation to make the world, including the organizational world, in which one lives a better place. Building a responsibility mind-set or, for that matter, changing mind-sets in general, is a process that requires two things: (1) getting people to acknowledge and accept that how they think about situations is under their volitional control—choice is possible; and (2) having them both emotionally experience and think about the pros and cons of alternative ways of thinking about situations.

What Trium does is have people pair up with someone attending the same workshop or meeting. One person in the pair is then told to tell the other a story that has the following characteristics: (1) the incident is real, (2) it is work-related, and (3) the person telling the story felt like a victim—not in control, things were happening to the person, there was little or nothing they could do about what was occurring, and they were unhappy with what occurred. They are told to tell the story in as convincing a way as possible, so their partner actually believes the story and feels their emotions. Then the roles are reversed, and the partner tells his or her "victim" story to the other person. The questions posed are: What does it feel like to be a victim? and What are the advantages and disadvantages of the victim role? One advantage of being in a victim role is that one gets sympathy, and, in fact, we often see people in subunits who bemoan their shared and unfortunate fate with each other, thereby building social solidarity...

The next step in the mind-set change process is to have each partner tell the same stories they just told each other, but now trying to imagine what it would be like to be more in control or more responsible for what transpired. Being in control does not mean things would have necessarily turned out perfectly—organizations are interdependent systems, and almost no one gets to have their way all the time. But the responsibility mindset is simply seeing oneself as an actor affecting, or trying to affect, what goes on rather than being in a more passive role of having things happen to oneself.

The debriefing then continues by having people think about the emotions they experienced with this responsibility mind-set and, again, discussing the advantages and disadvantages of adopting a responsibility mental model. Not everything is great about being responsible; it is, for instance, hard work and can feel burdensome. Feeling responsible also has many positive emotions and advantages associated with it, including feeling more powerful and more connected. The point of the exercise is not to have people necessarily come to believe one way of thinking is better than another. The objective is to have people recognize that each of us has a choice—or actually a series of choices—we make each day about how we approach the world and the problems and opportunities it presents to us.

We can be victimized or responsible. In a similar fashion, we can choose how we view opponents and rivals and we can choose what assumptions we make and hold about people and organizations and their capabilities and potential... Each choice has consequences—for how we feel and, more important, for what we do, the decisions we make, and how we act in the situations we confront in seeking to make our organizations more effective and successful. [3]

In my work as a coach I emphasize the importance of choice and agency with my clients. It's too easy--and even encouraged, in some organizational cultures--to focus on our lack of choice, our frustration, our powerlessness in the face of forces beyond our control. But as Trium and Pfeffer make clear, we always have the power to choose how we interpret a given situation and the mindset we adopt in response.

This isn't to suggest that we should always make the best of bad situations--there are times in life when we truly are victims of circumstance, and trying to hold ourselves responsible is counterproductive. But in almost all professional situations we can choose to adopt a responsible mindset or a victim mindset--and that choice will have a significant effect on our ability to contribute to a desirable outcome.

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Footnotes

[1] Clinton Moloney on Trust and Agreement vs. Alignment

[2] Here's a one-slide PowerPoint of my version of the complete graphic.

[3] Changing Mental Models: HR's Most Important Task (Jeff Pfeffer, Chapter 19 in The Future of Human Resource Management, 2005)

Carol Hymowitz on Leadership and Good Relationships

I wrote yesterday about leadership and kindness, just as Carol Hymowitz was declaring that Effective Management Remains an Art Steeped in Good Relationships in her "In The Lead" column for the Wall Street Journal:

The more executives I interviewed and wrote about [after launching "In The Lead" nearly a decade ago], the more I realized that the effective ones review their own performance at least as frequently and as thoroughly as they review the work of their employees.  They also constantly adapt their management styles to meet different challenges and to motivate different employees...

The best leaders...studiously avoid being self-absorbed.  They celebrate their employees' ideas, knowledge and commitment, and they understand they must be both bold and kind to attract talent. [my emphasis]

Hymowitz echoes Bill Curry on the importance of leaders' kindness in building and maintaining high-performing teams, and again I'm struck by how often we cite leaders' boldness and toughness and how rarely we cite their kindness when seeking to understand effective leadership.

Postscript: Sadly, this was Hymowitz's final "In The Lead" column, as she has accepted a buyout offer from management, apparently as part of the paper's post-acquisition restructuring.  (Jeff Bercovici has suggested that Hymowitz's departure reflects a larger pattern of bias against women at Murdoch-owned papers.)  I truly appreciated Hymowitz's perspective, and "In The Lead" will be missed.  Here's hoping she finds another outlet for her talents soon.

Bill Curry on Leadership and Kindness

We don't necessarily associate great leadership with kindness, particularly when discussing Vince Lombardi-era football.  But former NFL player and longtime college coach Bill Curry had this to say in an interview with Tom Tolbert on KNBR this afternoon:

Unexpected, undeserved, unrewarded acts of kindness from great leaders...make great teams.

He was referring to the kindness showed to him as a rookie Green Bay Packer in 1965 by veteran African American players who took him under their wing and, in his words, "taught me how to behave."  Curry had no black teammates in college at Georgia Tech and initially found the diversity he encountered in the NFL hard to handle.  But influential team leaders such as Willie Davis apparently went out of their way to reach out to Curry and helped him adjust.

Curry expressed profound gratitude for his teammates' kindness, and in his retelling, that kindness was as instrumental as Lombardi's legendary toughness in shaping the '60s Packers into a tight-knit, cohesive unit.  I'm not suggesting--nor was Curry--that Lombardi's approach was wrong, or that kindness alone would have had the same affect.

And yet it feels as though we hear about leaders' toughness all the time, and we never hear about their kindness.  But when I think about the most effective leaders I've known and worked with, they had the ability to be both tough and kind as needed, and those aspects of their personality didn't cancel each other out.  Rather, their skillful use of one approach complemented the other; their kindness meant even more because I knew how tough they could be.

Technology Is An Interpersonal Skill

I'm struck by the parallel between A) the work I do as a coach and organizational development consultant to improve interpersonal skills and B) the role of technology in a networked world.  Interpersonal skills, by definition, can't be mastered in isolation.  We need other people to become better communicators; if a message isn't received, it wasn't delivered effectively.  And as technology becomes an ever more important way to socialize and connect with others, the same becomes true of our technical skills.  You can't be a tech-savvy user in isolation; your effectiveness is determined by the perception of others.

In an organization or a social network, interpersonal skills help you build relationships, speed information-sharing and gain influence with others, allowing you to be more effective--which is exactly what technology allows you to do today.

One implication of this is that leaders need not be "techies," in the conventional "IT" sense of the term, but their effectiveness in an organization or a network is increasingly dependent on the extent to which they can employ technology as an interpersonal skill.  Charisma can--and must--translate online.  (Obama: 1, McCain: 0)

Friedrich Nietzsche, Executive Coach

Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols opens with 44 aphorisms, including four he describes as "Questions of Conscience":

37. You run ahead?  Are you doing it as a shepherd?  Or as an exception?  A third case would be the fugitive.  First question of conscience.

38. Are you genuine?  Or merely an actor?  A representative?  Or that which is represented?  In the end, perhaps, you are merely a copy of an actor.  Second question of conscience.

40. Are you one who looks on?  Or one who lends a hand?  Or one who looks away and walks off.  Third question of conscience.

41. Do you want to walk along?  Or walk ahead?  Or walk by yourself?  One must know what one wants and that one wants.  Fourth question of conscience.

I wouldn't look to Nietzsche for guidance on any number of subjects--um, gender relations, to take just one.  But I'm struck by the universality of these questions--they're relevant for just about every coaching client I've worked with--and by their pointed, direct nature.

I'm hardly modeling myself after Nietzsche's example, but there's something in the challenge he poses to his reader that reminds me of the role an executive coach can play with a client.  Coaches rarely (if ever) have The Answer, but a good coach will be able to ask powerful and provocative questions that allow a client to identify the answers that are true and meaningful for them.

That's just how I feel reading the passage above.  For example, I often strive to "run ahead," to distinguish myself in some way.  Am I seeking to contribute to the betterment of others?  Or to glorify myself?  Or am I running away from something?  Nietzsche's no help with the answer, but I'm grateful for the fearlessness and pugnacity with which he poses the question.