The Innovative Four
Leaders with style
Four are often vital to the
health of an organization because they're not bound by tradition and
usually able to view things from a new slant.
Looking in from the outside has a
distinct advantage. The point of view that
sometimes compels Fours to focus on what's missing has a big bright side –
they're rarely guilty of groupitis, the subtle virus that keeps
groups
from looking at their own process. The Fours I've coached have usually
been out-of-the-box thinkers. They can keep an organization from slowly dying out of untested
and outdated assumptions.
One executive, now a successful Director of Sales for a
manufacturing company, had an earlier career as a photographer. "I photographed
things no one else could see," he said. "A segment of the side of a
building, a part of the body, a view of a tree that shows a pattern but isn't
identifiable in the usual way."
Another
Four expressed intense dissatisfaction with his role in an
organization that was traditional and unoriginal, to his way of thinking. When asked what
type of organization he'd prefer, he answered without hesitation, "Ben and
Jerry's!" It was no surprise that he picked an unorthodox organization whose
founders expressed their values through the organization and the people they hired.
To give you the full flavor of how this Enneagram point might show up in
a business organization, let's look in on Nick Penelli. When I coached Nick, he was being
groomed to take over the top human resources (HR) job for an international company. "I
think I'm creative, open, and expressive," said Nick. "Some people
ask me into a conversation just because they know I'll come at it from a totally different
angle."
Nick's boss said, "He drives the people crazy who develop
policy, but I consider that a compliment." Nick understood the business and
line managers respected his
sense of urgency. People trusted him with confidences and found him to be genuine and
candid. This had been a particular strength in his relationships with line managers
because they were used to what they described as "bull-shit" from the typical HR
representative.
Because he held their trust, Nick had been able to advocate changes that
benefited employees without their managers feeling they'd been cornered or unjustly
accused. They described him as "genuine, sincere, empathic,
friendly, and candid. People trust him with confidences and they know he's a shoulder to
cry on."
Nick had an interesting personal background.
When his parents were
courting, his Italian Catholic father told his Greek Orthodox mother he was Greek.
After they fell in love and decided to marry, his father converted to the Greek Orthodox
church in order to win the approval of his future in-laws. "I always felt like an
outsider in the community I grew up in," Nick recounted. "I was
the only one with an Italian last name."
So why was I asked to coach Nick to his full leadership potential? He
was sometimes seen as unapproachable by his subordinates. They'd look in his office, see
his furrowed brow, and not want to disturb him. From his boss's perspective Nick had
given up on some projects when the going got tough: "He's just too
moody."
Others said "He has a tendency to live in
stages of gray and discontent." "He gets frustrated when things go
wrong and despairs and agonizes." "He needs to challenge the status quo
more, focus on what can be done about it, accept his part in it, be
accountable for working the friction when it occurs, and take on
changing other peoples' positions."
When I
started coaching him, Nick acknowledged he had a
tendency to wallow in his own emotional state: "I really care about people.
But
that just feeds my moodiness. A guy came to talk with me recently because he got demoted,
and it reminded me how organizations thrive on blame and conquering instead of recognizing peoples' strengths in the job for the time they were there, and
rotating them into something that's now more appropriate."
"I buy into the 'vale of tears' theory of life," he
continued. "I think life is extraordinarily hard. I've always had compassion for
others but it also comes from personal tragedy. Like Thornton Wilder I think life is random and unpredictable, and you try, sometimes desperately, to control what you
can. I've committed to memory the end of Wilder's Bridge of San Luis Rey:
'But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have
left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love
will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even
memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and
the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.'"
The same talent that allowed Nick to see things "differently"
also led him to wonder why he rarely saw things the way others did. Historically, he'd
tended to question his own reality: was he unique or was he flawed? "As I've
gotten older and become aware of my own flaws, I've mellowed somewhat," he
reported.
This internal tension, however, was still sometimes reflected in his
losing steam when one of his innovative ideas had been accepted, but met with the typical
organizational resistance to change. Instead of tenaciously championing his ideas, Nick
was in danger of sinking into gloom.
Furthermore, he admitted his occasional melancholy could be
compelling, like pushing a tongue against a loose or aching tooth. His "existential
angst," as he described it, played out in a kind of redemptive sorrow for the
world (another one of his favorite books was Victor Frankl's Man's
Search for Meaning). Of course, he was so overwhelmingly
sorrowful when he focused on his organization's problems, the pain never really went away.
Nick came to understand he could use his wonderful empathy to
understand the reluctance of others to change, and through his interpersonal skills help
others see possibilities beyond what was already being considered.
Enneagram theory tells us Fours need to develop more
equanimity to reach their full potential.
Through our work together, Nick created a personal vision that balanced his habit of
imagining how things could be better with acceptance and even appreciation for some realities of organizational life. He came to recognize the negatively self-fulfilling
aspects of wishing "If only we could..."
In
coaching Fours my rule of thumb is to meet them at their
strength for unique and innovative ideas. I knew Nick had made a personal study of
leadership biographies. I also knew Lincoln was known for problems
with "melancholy." So I gave Nick an "ambiguous" homework assignment
to re-read his Lincoln biography, with the directive, "You'll discover the
solution to your problem somewhere in Lincoln's history."
The assumption of an ambiguous assignment is that clients
know how to solve their problems and will find a solution while engaging
in the assignment. I had no clue what he'd come back with, but soundly
reinforced his observation that even when Lincoln was at his most melancholy, he would
continue to meet with people and conduct his duties as President while lying on the
couch in his office.
Nick also learned to reframe his so-called
flaws in more
positive ways; for example, reviewing his life as a "Hero's Journey," noting the
strengths and resources he'd been able to draw upon and what he'd learned through the
hard times.
As the outcome of our work, Nick became more emotionally available to
his boss and to his subordinates, less moody, and more able to work
through his
feelings instead of being blocked by them. In our last conversation he described his role
as leader of a new cross-functional task force to design
and implement an
innovative organizational re-design that he had conceived and sold to the organization.
