Step One: Get to Know the Backgrounds, Experiences, Philosophies, and Observations of Those Who Need to Provide Breakthrough Leadership

Search me, O God, and know my heart;
Try me, and know my anxieties;
— Psalm 139:23 (NKJV)

Jesus knew everything about His disciples, just as He
knows everything about you. Human leaders don’t have
the advantage of omniscience and usually make a
mistake when they believe that they know their
colleagues, bosses, and subordinates well or that they
don’t need to know them any better. Although human
leaders cannot know others as well as Jesus can, they
should still attempt to learn a lot more.

Most people go to great lengths to protect parts of their
backgrounds, experiences, philosophies, and
observations from others in the organization where they
work or volunteer. Workers and volunteers play carefully
self-selected roles, much as comedians do in following
scripts of written stories and jokes, that people think will
serve their interests well.

Mitchell and Company’s clients have made breakthroughs
much more often after we helped the leadership teams to
know and understand one another better. I’m sure this
observation sounds like a self-aggrandizing statement,
and I apologize if it seems that way. I don’t mean for the
observation to be taken by you as self-promotion: I
believe that virtually any ethical outsider could have
played the same helpful role, and I will be completely
sharing what we have done so you can repeat it.
Let me explain.

If you go to a meeting or a party where most people don’t
know one another, the mingling and conversations will
mostly occur because of those who are gregarious and
those who happen to find others with similar interests,
whether of a superficial or a serious nature. Instead of
leaving it up to the guests to make the connections, the
meeting or party organizer could arrange for each guest
to receive a little advance information about the
background, interests, and expertise of each guest before
the party, and that information would lead to many more
people seeking each other out to converse about subjects
of mutual, significant interest.

Similar to the well-organized meeting or party planner
who provides advance information about the guests, our
firm has been helping leadership teams to discover
important, mutual interests that weren’t previously
known among people who thought they already knew
one another well. Our method has focused on making it
safer and more desirable for leadership team members
to share their most secret thoughts and experiences
with one another. Here are the steps our firm has
followed to facilitate those discoveries and exchanges:

• Following our recommendation, the organizational
leader (often the CEO of the organization or unit)
agrees to let trustworthy outsiders interview each
person on the leadership team for an hour on a
confidential basis (meaning that nothing said in the
interview will be revealed for attribution without that
person’s permission) as preparation for a group
meeting to improve communications scheduled to occur
within a month (the shorter the delay between the
interviews and the group meeting, the better).
• In consultation with us, the organizational leader
decides who will be interviewed and who will attend
the group meeting (usually these are the same people).
• The organizational leader alerts the participants about
the group meeting and the confidential interviews,
describes the purpose of these activities, and relates
the ground rules.
• The organizational leader coordinates setting the dates
for the group meeting and the interviews.
• The organizational leader is interviewed first by
Mitchell and Company. The other people are interviewed
in the order of their availability unless the organizational
leader expresses a preference for a certain order. After
the standard interview ends, the organizational leader is
also asked to describe her or his views of each person’s
role in and contribution to the leadership team and the
organization.
• Each person is asked the same questions in the same
way during the standard interview. If an interviewee
raises an important subject not covered by the
standard interview, that subject is explored in whatever
depth the interviewee wants to share. In the ideal
circumstances there are two interviewers so that one
can focus more on asking questions and relating to the
interviewee while the other pays more attention to
taking notes. Avoid recording devices because they
inhibit interviewees. In each step of the interview,
clarifying questions are asked by both interviewers to
be sure that the interviewee is being correctly
understood. Here is the structure of each standard
interview:

— Interviewers introduce themselves.
— Interviewers describe the project and repeat the
organizational leader’s instructions, including the
promise of confidentiality.
— Interviewers ask the interviewee

□ to describe his or her background from birth
through reaching the current position.
□ to describe why she or he decided to work or
volunteer for this organization.
□ to describe the best day he or she had ever
experienced at work or in volunteering.
□ to describe the best day she or he had
experienced in his or her personal life aside from
work and volunteering.
□ to describe the organization’s and organizational
unit’s missions.
□ to describe the organization’s and the organizational
unit’s top three priorities.
□ to describe what that person has to do to
accomplish the mission and top three priorities.
□ to describe the organization’s and the organizational
unit’s biggest on-going problems that have
long been unresolved and why those problems
have been unresolved.
□ to describe the organization’s and the organizational
unit’s biggest missed opportunities that
have long eluded the organization and why the
opportunities have been missed.
□ how the leadership group could function more
effectively.
□ what else the organization should be doing to
become more successful and why it isn’t yet
doing what the interviewee recommends.
□ how and why he or she thought that other people
in the organization would answer any of the
questions differently than she or he did.

— Interviewers repeat the ground rules about the
anonymity of responses and ask the interviewee
which responses might be identified by other
members of the management team if they were
not paraphrased or otherwise disguised. (In many
cases, interviewees then insist, without being asked, on
giving permission to quote them for attribution when
the point is an important one.) The interviewers also
indicate they will be back in touch if they have any
further questions after reviewing their notes.

• Interviewers compare their notes and recollections to
create one set of detailed corrected notes that express
the consensus of what both interviewers heard. If the
interviewers cannot agree on a point, the interviewee
is contacted for clarification. The notes contain as many
quotes as possible.
• One of the interviewers combines the responses from
all interviewees into a tabulation that both interviewers
review to see what the major areas of leadership team
agreement, disagreement, understanding, and
misunderstanding are.
• The interviewers review the tabulation to isolate major
themes that should be the most valuable to focus on
during the group meeting. One major theme that will be
addressed is whether there is a hidden consensus among
the leadership team members about what needs to be
done and the reasons for improving.
• The interviewers review all of the quotes to find ones
to share with the group that best express the issues that
the group needs to resolve. Where necessary, these
answers are turned into paraphrases to help protect the
identity of the person who is the source and prefers to
remain anonymous.
• A written report is prepared by the two interviewers
and presented to the organizational leader in the manner
that the interviewers propose to use for the group
meeting. In addition, the interviewers discuss how the
responses and their impressions of the interviewees are
different from what the organizational leader had led
them to expect. Confidentiality is maintained in this
process; but if substantial issues about individuals have
unexpectedly arisen, those issues are presented as
things that the organizational leader needs to investigate
and potentially to resolve (such as the manufacturing
vice president who drank three pitchers of beer while
being interviewed during a brief lunch and the strategy
chief who responded to questions by staring blankly out
the window for ten minutes at a time in a way that
suggested being overmedicated with tranquilizers). The
organizational leader suggests changes to the report and
to the structure of the proposed meeting. The
interviewers recommend that the organizational chief say
as little as possible during the meeting to provide a better
opportunity to hear what others have to say in as
uninhibited a way as possible. Ideally, the organizational
leader should remain silent after making some opening
comments to encourage other members of the team to
share their thoughts and observations candidly with no
personal risk. Leaders are reminded how Jesus
remained silent when unjustly accused.
• The written report is distributed in advance of the
meeting whenever possible so that all attendees can
informally discuss its contents with one another before
the meeting if they wish.
• Meetings are scheduled away from the office and
include informal time together so that one-on-one
conversations can occur. One of the interviewers
facilitates and presents the findings at the meeting,
and both interviewers are present during the meeting
to answer any questions about the report or the
interviews.
• The facilitator encourages those attending to ask any
questions they want and to comment and elaborate on
any points that were made by any respondent in the
interviews or during the group meeting. These
discussions continue until everyone seems
comfortable that they understand the information.
• The facilitator describes the portrait of the leadership
team that emerged and comments on how that portrait
is the same as or different from other leadership teams
that have gone through the same process.
• After the report is presented and commented on, the
leadership team members are asked what they want to
do differently in response to what they have just heard.
The purpose of the question is to open the floor for
interviewees to lead the group in addressing issues that
concern each person.
• The facilitator’s role shifts into encouraging everyone
to participate and to share their previously unexpressed
issues and concerns. In addition, the facilitator seeks to
determine if there is a hidden consensus among the
leadership team members about what needs to be
improved and why. In performing this role, the
facilitator is employing the leader’s authority with
permission to elicit more participation and also trying to
serve as a role model for the organizational leader to use
in future meetings.
• The group meeting usually lasts at least one day and
often continues for a full three days, especially where
the organizational leader wants to start the process of
resolving issues that have been pending too long. During
a longer meeting, there may also be time to introduce
solution tools such as learning and applying the 2,000
percent solution process. The longer the meeting lasts,
the more likely individuals are to voluntarily claim
authorship of the quotations that were sourced from
them and to use such moments to open new lines of
discussion.
• Before the meeting ends, the facilitator encourages
the group to agree about what next steps are needed
to do better.
• As the meeting closes, the organizational leader praises
the leadership team for being candid and for working hard
to improve matters, to create mutual understanding, and
to enhance communications. The organizational leader
also pledges to do better in areas where the meeting has
indicated that improvements are needed and encourages
the leadership team to alert him or her whenever she or
he isn’t doing the right thing or enough of it.

Copyright 2010 Donald W. Mitchell, All Rights Reserved.