Leadership Bank Account: Understanding the Dynamics of a Learning Culture

In the past few posts, I have focused on extra-ordinary situations where an organisation is in crisis and how a manager can best deal with the crisis in holistic terms.

I have expressed these views in management forums and I often get a “hot-cold” response.

• Hot - managers can see the value of the approach given.
• Cold - managers question whether their team has the emotional and intellectual skills and resilience to act inter-dependently and behave accountably during the time of crisis.

My retort is always the same – If your team isn’t up to the mark, whose fault is that?

Of course, there is always stock defences such as “employees expect more and do less these days,” or “Gen Y don’t care,” or “the employee turnover in our organisation is chronic.” But my refrain stays consistent – Whose responsibility is to ensure the team works productively to obtain required outcomes?

I suppose I have led these managers into a trap – where they are pressured to realise that performance at any point of time isn’t about “managing the moment.” Rather, performance is grounded in consistent and continued preparation through coaching, grooming, and mentoring, which is equivalent to a Learning Environment.

Surviving crisis is not only about actions undertaken at the time of the crisis. Surviving crisis is about all actions and events that have shaped the organisation up to and including the crisis.

Furthermore, a crisis is just another “event” or “happening” in the life of an organisation. Thus, every new “event” in an organisation is based on the sum of all past “events” experienced by the organisation and its people.

To understand these profound insights is to understand the basis of knowledge-based leadership and management. Let’s distil the message I am trying to give into a simple analogy: “The Leadership Bank Account.”

The rules of the Leadership Bank Account are very simple:

• Every time a manager does something to build a positive and resilient culture, the Leadership Bank Account gets credited.
• Every time a manager does something that directly or indirectly harms a positive and resilient culture, the Leadership Bank Account gets debited.
• Maintaining credit in the leadership bank account is far more difficult than going into debit. That is, credit is accumulated via small deposits, whereas debits to the account are generally large withdrawals.

At the root of the leadership bank account is the degree of loyalty, trust, and capability (resilience) a party brings to a relationship. In a knowledge-based organisation, if managers leadership bank accounts are “in the red” (debit) with their employees, then it is likely that a prevailing culture of blame, avoidance, and selfishness is in force. Alternatively, if managers have developed an account that is “in the black” then a positive and resilient culture will flourish.

The notion of the leadership bank account can be scaled from interactions between individuals to interactions between governments and even country alliances such the European Union and OPEC.

At a practical level, what can managers do on a daily basis to ensure small credits are going into their leadership bank account rather than large withdrawls? I will attempt to provide some sort of an answer to this question in the next post.