Clear Leadership: Sustaining Real Collaboration and Partnership at Work

When you think about it, business is really all about communication.  What is the vision of the organization?  What does the customer want? What needs does the organization fulfill?  How does it fulfill these needs? What sets the business apart? What is the team supposed to be doing to fulfill those needs and forward the vision?  Successful execution of strategy, tactics and just the day-to-day stuff all requires communication.  And yet, more teams are mired in 'interpersonal mush' according to Gervase Bushe, author of Clear Leadership.  As organizations move towards more collaborative approaches using more tools for communication, the need to avoid miscommunication and foster trust is imperative. 

In this revised edition, Bushe tackles this need by outlining a model of the four selves of clear leaders and provides case studies and skill building tools to strengthen decision-making and alignment building. 

The four selves is an intriguing concept.  Bushe addresses the need for teams to understand that everyone in an organization is having a different experience and that our belief in our own experience and misunderstanding of the experience of others is what creates many of the problem patterns in teams.  Self-awareness is key and Bushe outlines ways to increase self-awareness such as enhancing your ability to know your moment-to-moment experience, using clear language that clarifies who is having what experience and learning to identify your own mental maps as compared to the world your mental maps describe. 

The concept of the Four Selves is outlined as:

1. The Aware Self: gaining self-knowledge
2. The Descriptive Self: communicating honestly
3. The Curious Self: helping others communicate
4. The Appreciative Self: inspiring the best in people

Awareness begins, according to Bushe, with understanding the four elements of your experience.  Each person has a different level of awareness in each element.  These elements are: observing, thinking, feeling, wanting.  We act from our experience and yet, many of us are unaware of how our experience is driving how we act.    For example, how much of what you react to and, therefore, how you communicate, is driven by anxiety? 

Clear language is really about understanding that what you experience on the inside is not necessarily the same as what is going on on the outside.  Not everyone experiences what you do in a given situation, yet our language about our experience tends to assert that our experience is the truth. Bushe provides some good examples of this phenomenon at work and then provides tools for learning to communicate more honestly and clearly while avoiding the trap of assumption about the other person you are communicating with.  I have used many of these tools when supporting teams to better communication and they really do support happier and more productive teams.  It is amazing how the simplest bit of communciation can be so misinterpreted by the listener who is making up a story about what you meant and why you said things the way you did...and in most cases the story is wrong and causes that interpersonal strife that bogs everyone down.  Just for this chapter alone, I really encourage people to read this book.