‘Walk the talk’ is a general management expression. It exists because in reality, it’s rather a walking contradiction just as Green Day sings it.
In their song, Walking contradiction, the band Green Day already sang what many leaders should actually say if they told you the truth: ‘Do as I say, not as I do, because the shit so deep you can’t run away.’ Green Day already described the nature of today’s leadership culture in big companies: full of contradictions.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s nothing deliberate. It’s just that leaders don’t know that they don’t know it. They need the window of self reflection to be opened. More actively they need to open it for themselves. Why? Because they need to be conscious about what they are looking at, an actual window or a screen. How to distinguish a window from a screen? Both have their frames and a picture within it, but one shows the reality while the other… well, it depends.
Many studies show that diversity is crucial for the evolution a company has to take in order to adapt to ever changing circumstances and strive in the market. One basic tool is letting people speak up openly and freely so that every available aspect gets on the table when discussing a sensitive or complex situation. So opinion sharing is key. Yet, due to the hierarchy, free speech is not that obvious. Therefore democratic leaders tend to stimulate Q&As (questions and answers) and try to involve employee opinion, or just try to get some feedback from employees. However, along the way, many make unconscious mistakes that ruin everything. Let’s check some of those.
Maggie was a hard working and loyal employee. She had been working for her company for over a decade and she was still delivering the results with the same enthusiasm as if it was her first day. Yet, she hated meeting the management. The top management were always saying weird and annoying things they shouldn’t have said.
When mobile apps became a thing, there was a shift in the development approach. To ensure the same experience and usability on both the mobile app and the webpage, companies implemented the mobile first approach which meant that they would create the solution for the mobile app and they adapted the solution to the web after. Beforehand it was the opposite, the development had focused on the web. As the screens are different and you control your mobile with your hand gestures, it is easy to acknowledge why you need something different from the classic web development. Well, Maggie’s company was proudly speaking about the fully responsive webpage they created. That’s how they translated the mobile first approach: they created a webpage first and they made it responsive. No, it is not mobile first.
To be an ever evolving and adapting community, many companies try to establish the culture of failure. It is about learning from the mistakes for the sake of developing the way of working instead of searching for those who made the mistake and blaming them. It suggests an open and honest culture where people take responsibility and share their difficulties and everyday struggles so that others could avoid the hard ways. Well, once Maggie was attending a project meeting that was about a heavy impediment caused by the unclear roles and tasks the project members had had to face. It was a difficult situation with some sensitive and personal aspects. One of the managers was quite angry and frustrated because of the failure of delivery, so he was deeply involved in the clarification and at the end he said: ‘If it happens once again, you will face the consequences!’ No, it is not a culture of failure.
In the Q&A session of one of the management forums, Maggie’s management team was talking about a competitor that had merged with another, and someone asked a question about the topic based on the publicly available information. The CEO knew far more details, even the non-public ones, so he laughed at the question and called it stupid. He did it unconsciously, but still, the audience got a clear feedback: they should be in line with the CEO or you get swept off. If you don’t want to get a negative evaluation, you’d rather stay quiet, that cannot hurt, right? Opinion sharing was not on the table anymore. In pursuit of involving the employees, nothing that happened after mattered. The discussion died soon. No, it is not an open and inclusive culture.
If you tell these examples in training, I’m sure, everyone would know what’s wrong. But practice is different. We are human and we might fail in simple situations as well. Because we come with our habits and routines and we are not always aware of the effects.
First of all we need to understand that today’s top managers usually were born a long time ago, relatively. In many cases, companies have managers of the generation X. Let’s be clear, there are no bad or good generations. Why it matters is that the socialisations of the generations are different. Gen X people were born in an offline and more closed world where digitalisation had no impact on productivity or culture and things changed at a lower pace. Hierarchy was acknowledged and earned its respect by definition. Since then the world and how we exist in it changed dramatically, meaning that the pace of the change is at its all time highest.
Gen X started their careers in a more rigid, ‘employees are just another cogwheel in the machine’ kind of approach in which professional expertise and hard skills mattered more than the human skills. Now the human aspects of life are more researched, known and followed.
When someone is promoted due to their hard skills and hard work, they define work ethics and performance according to their experience and progress. Nevertheless they search for their succession according to the same values they lived by. In this way, they recreate the old, familiar and ‘this is the way things should be’ approach which might lead to the inability to evolve with the ever changing circumstances and at the end to decline.
This is an unconscious process. Many top managers are very good at their jobs. They are clever, experienced and successful in many ways. So they must be doing something pretty well. And they do. Yet, they live by a bit of outdated values and they get to know the new notions of management. One is by heart, the other is by mind. One is instinctive, the other is learned. And that leads us to the contradictions. They understand the benefits of the new techniques, but living by those is a different thing. So the learning remains on a cognitive level, they know it, they can talk about it and they might recognise it, but when it counts and there is high pressure, they tend to get back to what’s in their guts.
Have you ever felt that whatever happens in the outside world or in the company, or no matter what the change is about, you see the same old faces in the driving seat? Well, you are not alone, it happens sometimes.
To a certain extent, it might be okay. People learn and improve. If you’re good at managing topics and teams, you will get by with another topic and in another team. You can easily add the necessary new connections and know-how.
But when it comes to cultural change, be aware. Think of it twice. Do those managers who performed well in the past in a certain setup and with a certain mindset have what it takes to elevate the organisation to the next level? Do they live by the values that are required in this change, or did they just learn about it? Are they good at everything, or are they able to represent the new authentically? Some will be fine and some won’t make it well enough, and you’ll have to change the management so that you facilitate the reformation.
Let’s get back to the hard and human skills. For those who have responsibility for the performance and work with people, both kinds of skills are important. Yet, many researches have proved that to excel in performance and delivery, we need to excel in human relationships. And just as any skill, human skills can be easier for one and more difficult for another. As a leader, you must be good at it.
There are many interpretations of being a manager and being a leader. Here are a few aspects of the differences:
It is obvious that you need both mentalities. Successful companies have been successful in both. Successful leaders have been successful in both. The question is the ratio and how it changes over time and over the different and also higher and higher positions you are in throughout your career. They say that the higher you get, the more you need from the leader's mindset. Actually, it is more about the responsibility and the impact you have. The more people you are responsible for, the more it counts to act in favour of the wellbeing of those people. I encourage you to improve and exploit your leadership skills right from the beginning.
Learning about something or living by that are completely different. If the mindset does not get internal and integrated into your actions, it will not be real. Self consciousness is crucial, you must learn about psychology and most importantly about yourself. Those who can question themselves can remain open enough to the new impulses, thoughts and trends so they can observe and try those at least. This is the key to change the trajectory we all have. This is how we can evolve. This is how you walk the talk.
Until that - and in case of all the novelties - you can still do some basic approaches. As a first step, you just need to listen and don’t react immediately. If you don’t know it by heart or you don’t understand why the other is telling you something unexpected, just listen. Even without reacting pro or con, listening means acceptance. You don’t have to agree. You don’t have to be explicit about whether you agree or not. You simply show that you accept the opinion.
Acknowledge that there is no wrong question and show that you don’t want to silence those who dare to speak up in a big corporate forum. Even if you feel that something is obvious or should be known by now, never judge the question, simply answer it without prejudice. Just never brush off what others tell you. You can make notes. You can think of it later. Embrace the thought that there can be other things that can exist.
Be aware that when you don’t understand something, you immediately judge that thing so you can put that somewhere between good and bad, between opportunity and threat. You can be conscious about letting it rest for a while. But never react and judge it, until you get closer to it.
You can get closer to a new opinion by asking about more details. Ask the other person to get deeper, to reveal the arguments and reasons behind the thought. Try to understand the context and the underlying story to know more about the whys. What you hear and how the other sounds can often be acknowledged only if you have an answer for the why.
And finally, let’s get back to the window of self reflection. Many mistakes you can make are unconscious which urges for self reflection. Johari window suggests a simple, yet powerful framework. In our blind spot, we just don’t know that we don’t know something. That’s where many of the unconscious happen.
But how to get to know the blind spot? By self reflection, getting honest feedback, searching for and learning unknown territories like psychology. Johari window is a window showing the reality of our relationships. It is hard or even painful to face it sometimes, but without it, all you get is an artificial screen that can be misleading.
