The governor began dictating demands for resources, including boom—the ribbonlike oil-containment countermeasure deployed close to shore. These demands were his gets. Neffenger did his best to outline what he knew of the current response efforts in the governor’s state though noted that the initial efforts were concentrated on states in more immediate danger. Enraged, the governor demanded that Neffenger call him for a one-on-one conversation. Neffenger consented and the conference call ended.
There was a long moment of silence in the command center. Neffenger looked drained.
“Admiral,” Lenny then said. “You are in the basement.”
“You’re right,” Neffenger agreed. “I am completely in the basement.” And so was the governor.
Admiral Neffenger’s experience offers a useful frame of reference—a map—for situations in which multiple stakeholders are affected in distinct ways. Each of the four states faced different risks. Their governors focused narrowly, protective of their jurisdictions and constituents (their gaps and their gets). Neffenger, however, looked broadly at the overall requirements and allocated resources in the Gulf-wide response. What could he give to whom, accounting for the limited resources?
In Washington, the Map-Gap-Gives-Gets equation was much different. Officials were as concerned with the politics and optics of the situation—how it appeared to voters and the media—as they were with the technical details of the oil spill response. Thus, they turned to political advisors as well as subject matter experts in their deliberations about the oil spill. The Obama administration did not want this event to be “Obama’s Katrina”—an outcome that would tarnish the new administration and have both short- and long-term implications for their political future.
Local officials had a pragmatic, on-the-ground view. During the oil spill response, Billy Nungesser, the president of Plaquemines Parish in Louisiana, gave daily interviews to CNN’s Anderson Cooper, each night accusing the federal government of dereliction of duties (a nationally broadcast and embarrassing gap). When the Coast Guard eventually dispatched a liaison officer to work with him and respond to his concerns (a “give”), Nungesser shared his newfound satisfaction with Cooper. No longer newsworthy, the daily interviews ended. His silence was a get for beleaguered federal officials.
Later, Neffenger recounted that the telephone duel with the governor completely changed his perception of his leadership role in the situation. He arrived in New Orleans ready to address an oil spill in the Gulf. Instead, his first days there revealed that the spill itself was just one of many situations requiring his attention. Neffenger had to perceive and understand each of the discrete events—including the politics—both separately and as part of a larger narrative. The essence of Neffenger’s meta-leadership challenge was attending to these many interrelated situations, and when he could, influencing events toward a positive outcome.
The Situation Connectivity Map
In your own situations, you may face a CEO, not a governor. Your parish presidents may be department heads. The dynamics, however, are the same: Who plays which role in expanding the range of situations? How can you expect them to behave? What are their perceived risks and potential rewards? What motivates them? What are their basement tendencies, and how will you lead them up and out? The more deeply you consider these factors from the outset, the less surprised or distracted you are as the situations unfold. Drive the POP-DOC Loop to understand each situation. Use the Cone-in-the-Cube to discern different perspectives. Apply the Map-Gap-Gives-Gets exercise to build connectivity exchanges. Use the resulting answers to champion a compelling vision that inspires unified effort.
In driving connectivity, it’s your challenge to understand how different stakeholders align, differ, and compete. The more accurate your information, the more effectively you will assign limited resources. The better you are at interpreting different motivations and interests, the more judiciously you will guide yourself and others to the best possible outcomes.
Reflecting on Admiral Neffenger’s experience in the Deepwater Horizon event, we developed the Situation Connectivity Map to help leaders navigate complexity. It is a tool for visualizing multiple sub-situations, ascertaining the stakeholders in each one, and discerning connections among them. An oil spill in the Gulf was not one situation. It was many situations: political, environmental, economic, health, and cultural, to name but a few. As a meta-leader, your job is to see and work the full map of stakeholders and build the connectivity necessary to meet the situation at hand.
To create your Situation Connectivity Map, draw a circle for the main incident in the center and surround it with sub-situations, as illustrated in the figure. Add stakeholders for each situation. Look for connections, alliances, and conflicts (Map-Gap-Gives-Gets). Assume a wide meta-perspective as you add to your map until you capture the range of key themes, pressure points, evolving problems, and possible solutions.
Once you’ve created your map, briefly set it aside. When you return to it freshened, you probably will find that there is more to add. After doing this revealing exercise several times, you will find yourself tracing connections with a mental map in real time. It will become second nature.
The goal for you and others is to perceive patterns central to sense-making, which will help you forecast what might come next. Apply the POP-DOC Loop. If your perceptions are correct, you will get in front of the situation, even with incomplete information. If you lag behind, the situation will overtake you. As a meta-leader, you are forward-looking. Anticipate and direct activities to keep yourself and your followers a step ahead.
In that effort, it is critical not just to recognize patterns that are familiar to you. Actively attend to discovering and becoming familiar with new ones. Assemble fresh patterns by undertaking new experiences, acquiring new skills, and engaging a variety of people. If the crisis is happening someplace else, eventually go there physically to see it for yourself.
As you think about the gives and gets, consider the basis of your connections: are they grounded in organizational agreements, personal relationships, mutual interest, shared values, contracts, or some combination of these? Evaluate their structure: are they formally enshrined, or are they simply informal understandings? Assess their quality: are you connected to the right people, organizations, and resources at the right time and in ways that allow you to work together toward desired outcomes that you share? Gauge the robustness and resilience of the connectivity: will it endure through personnel changes or marketplace shifts?
These are not either-or questions: connectivity’s colors are shaded along a spectrum, reflecting stronger and weaker linkages. In your network, both organizational and personal, who are your stronger relationships, and who are your weaker and less reliable connections?
Connectivity goes beyond relationships alone. It is also a transactional process of giving and getting—a marketplace of sorts intended to create value. What do you hope to gain through your connectivity, and what are you willing to give in order to achieve it? Your connections may offer both tangibles (money, space, equipment, data) and intangibles (recognition, endorsement, introductions to other possible connections). In discovering what you can offer and what you hope to gain—the potential gives and gets—you both learn about and inform others. What are the expected transactional priorities, intentions, and outcomes? The rapport you build and the connectivity you shape motivates the quest for new value: the benefits that flow from a more deeply engaged enterprise.
There is a flip side to these questions. You cannot be connected with everyone. The more value you bring to the table, the more people will want to be connected to you. Allowing for too many connections creates the very distractions that can get you off track. Spreading yourself too thin, you lose your mission and do not take care of yourself.
Be strategic about those with whom you connect—and those with whom you do not. Think in terms of networks. Your connections with other organizations might not be direct—with its burden
of responsibility—but indirect, through intermediaries, networks of connections, or professional associations. Be clear about your priorities, as well as those of others, and decide and act accordingly. Your Situation Connectivity Map can be a useful tool in constructing that strategic network.
Connectivity in Practice
Connectivity is first a personal and social process of subtle cues and communication. Much is found in Dimension One, the person. Your individual qualities and tendencies signal your attitudes about connectivity, which often are embedded in your emotional intelligence. If you are a natural connector, others will perceive this, and those who also are connectors will respond to you with interest. If, on the other hand, you find yourself challenged by or resistant to connection—perhaps you are introverted—others will detect your behavior and be less likely to engage. You transmit cues as you note those of others. Be intentional.
Another factor is the situation, Dimension Two of meta-leadership. Connectivity is contextual. What is happening? What will motivate action? Who else is affected? How do they perceive the situation? How will the situation affect important relationships? Every situation is seen differently by stakeholders, who can either drive or impede success.
You have a wide range of choices in building connectivity. Determine who your actual or potential friends and helpers are, craft positive linkages with them, and nurture those relationships.
Be alert to those who could disrupt or defeat your efforts—the “forces against” you. However, don’t cut yourself off from your adversaries completely. Talk with them and you may learn important and significant information. Remember the words of the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu: “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”
“Competitor” is a relative term in a world in which individuals and organizations are combatants on one front and collaborators on another. Connectivity varies. For example, the footwear makers Nike and Adidas are fierce rivals in the retail marketplace. Yet they actively share information through the Fair Factories Clearinghouse to ensure that the factories manufacturing their products adhere to high ethical standards. Because the same subcontractors often serve both firms, each factory benefits from coordinated standard-setting, reporting, and performance auditing.
One important aspect of connectivity is forging strategic partnerships. Carefully assess the connectivity you have and the connectivity you need in order to accomplish your priorities. Survey your marketplace. If your competitors are building strategic alliances that erode your value or market share, consider what your counteractions might be. Isolating yourself from potential allies marginalizes you and your organization. Link and leverage where you find strategic advantage to your purposes as well as those of others.
Connectivity potential is all around you. If there are friendships, alliances, favors owed, or shared history among bosses or subordinates that can be useful in your relationship with other stakeholders, leverage them. If you have the full support of your boss, that’s an advantage you can deploy to spur action or reinforce urgency. These assets bring added relevance and significance to your endeavors.
Getting this right is essential to your success. Building collaboration and fostering connectivity are core meta-leadership competencies. The meta-leader consistently matches and rematches objective to strategy and situation. As circumstances change, today’s competitor may be tomorrow’s enthusiastic ally. Be flexible and adaptive.
There is value to connectivity. It can sometimes be measured in dollars, and at other times it can be measured in goodwill and community benefit. The Schlumberger HSE for Youth program is an example. It illustrates Map-Gap-Gives-Gets connectivity in action.
Schlumberger is a global energy services company. Operating in eighty-five countries, the company employs more than 100,000 people representing 140 nationalities. Recognizing its importance to both employee well-being and its corporate reputation, Schlumberger prioritizes its health, safety, and environment (HSE) function. While many companies view HSE as a matter of compliance, Schlumberger views superior HSE performance—in everything from field operations to trip monitoring and cyber security practices—as a disciplined mind-set that differentiates it in the marketplace.
Since 2014, we have worked with HSE executives to embed meta-leadership in the company’s crisis management capabilities. A common vocabulary, tool set, and training experience foster connectivity and coherence across the enterprise. Relationships build as skills are absorbed, all contributing to corporate HSE connectivity of effort and making Schlumberger managers better able to lead through adversity, from natural disasters to geopolitical disruptions in whatever region they are operating.
In our work with the company, we met an emerging leader who shared her story of thinking broadly about connectivity. Muriel Barnier joined Schlumberger as an intern. In that role, she helped develop HSE for Youth as a way to share Schlumberger’s commitment to HSE with the communities where it operates. Now a full-time employee, she is passionate about the program and its impact. “As an organization, we have deep expertise in HSE,” she noted, “and we felt that knowledge could be useful to people beyond our employees in their everyday lives.” The HSE for Youth trainings, delivered around the world to both children of employees and non-employees, educates on relevant HSE topics, such as driving safety, HIV/AIDS, malaria protection, safe cyber security practices, and personal security. Each year, HSE for Youth reaches approximately five thousand children through as many as two hundred workshops.
HSE for Youth fosters connectivity among a range of stakeholders: local governments, communities, employees, and corporate management. In Russia, although the program had to be approved by the government, officials enthusiastically granted that approval after seeing a pilot program in action. The goodwill generated by the program has a halo effect that benefits the business. “HSE for Youth lets us demonstrate our core values as a company, engage with key constituencies in ways that demonstrate our expertise, energize our employees, and make people safer,” Barnier said. “That’s a win for everyone.”
The most important benefit, however, is the impact on the ground. Barnier told us about a driving safety program in Abu Dhabi, presented specifically for the children of Schlumberger employees. School buses in the emirate have seat belts, though children rarely wore them. Kids, it seems, like to defy authority no matter where they are from. After participating in the HSE for Youth program, one girl convinced her friends that it was cool to wear seat belts. A few weeks later, her bus was in an accident. “It could have been catastrophic,” Barnier said. “Instead, because they were wearing seat belts, there were no serious injuries.”
Schlumberger created additional connectivity by using volunteer employees and employee spouses as trainers in the programs. The inclusion of spouses “creates a special bond and respect between them and Schlumberger,” Barnier said, “as does delivering HSE for Youth workshops to their kids, their kids’ friends, and the community at large.”
Attentive to the larger, meta-view of HSE education and training, and having learned from what has worked with children, Barnier continues to explore ways to improve the company’s HSE offerings. One change is the transformation of the adult HSE training for employees from instructor-led, PowerPoint-heavy sessions to interactive workshops with more engaging discovery exercises and virtual reality components.
What’s next? Barnier wants to give “ownership to the kids.” She envisions a youth leadership program through which young people will develop and design projects to bring HSE to their communities.
HSE for Youth is more than a “feel good” gesture by a big corporation interested in public relations. In fact, Schlumberger is rather quiet about this initiative. They identified critical stakeholders in their business, considered how they could and should be connected, and took tangible, meaningful steps to share the benefits. Executives appreciate the social capital deriving from the meta-leadership connectivity with community constituents. This was the
ir Map-Gap-Give-Get exercise. HSE for Youth is simply one component of those efforts.
Mutual Success
As a meta-leader, you understand that your success is interdependent with the success of others, from subordinates and your boss to your peers and an array of external stakeholders. You judge your results by whether you succeed and also by how many others succeed along with you.
Work today is increasingly team-based and collaborative. It is more complex, interdependent, and dynamic. Information flow is more open and democratic. With these changes, organizations have become flatter and more networked. Accountability is faster and more transparent. Employee engagement is increasingly measured and correlated with overall performance. Workers in an organization come and go with increasing frequency. Circumstances shift more quickly. Teams form on the fly.
Given this evolution, connectivity can pay significant dividends. Allowing others to thoroughly invest and share pride in what they accomplish together creates a more productive and resilient enterprise. Success rarely comes solely from the acts of one individual. Typically, it is the result of the well-calibrated endeavors of many people and organizations, connected and able to work together toward a common goal.
Leadership is dynamic. It is not simply a matter of choosing whether to be connected or to be detached from others. People and their situations shift based on circumstances, relationships, and objectives. Meta-leadership is about the constantly adaptive process of balancing your interests, the interests of your subordinates, the interests of those to whom you report, and the interests of other relevant stakeholders (see more on this in Chapter 11). You ask, “What are we each trying to achieve?” and when there is an intersecting answer to that question, “How might we strategically align what we do and how do we do it to best achieve those shared objectives?”
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