No Ego—No Blame
In most parts of the world, aviation is impeccably safe. That’s because aviation leaders long ago adopted a system allowing and encouraging pilots and others to self-report errors and safety problems. As long as there is no intentional negligence, people are protected by a no-blame culture of correction that extends from pilots to airlines, regulators, and mechanics. The accumulated information is incorporated into policies and practices that improve the design of aircraft and communication protocols, embedding the culture of safety. That assurance sure feels good when you are in the air. Health care and other industries are adopting the same mind-set.
Getting beyond blame requires a shift in thinking and culture. Getting beyond ego requires a shift in behavior and attitude. Leadership, with all its attention and perks, does attract people with aggrandized self-esteem. They mistake the collected efforts of many people for their own and expect solo credit. They are jealous of attention given to others. They are “me”-centric. Everyone has an ego—after all, it serves certain purposes—though when overgrown, the inflated ego defies surgical extraction.
The attitude shift is from solo to shared credit. The behavior change lies in acknowledging, appreciating, and celebrating the combined efforts of the whole cast of involved characters. The shared enterprise—the swarm—accomplishes more than what anyone could do alone. This changed behavior requires seasoned emotional intelligence, abundant self-confidence, and profound maturity—attributes found in the person of the meta-leader.
In large, complex endeavors, we find that when “no ego—no blame” is practiced, no one organization or individual snatches the credit for the mutual successes. And though there are always moderate mistakes and failures along the way, no one points distracting fingers of blame.
In keeping with the “shadow effect”—as explained in Chapter 9—this tone cascades from top leaders down through their operations. A genuinely collaborative tenor emerges among leaders at all levels of parallel organizations.
We observed “no ego—no blame” in practice during the Boston Marathon bombings response. Leaders from different agencies and elected officials shared the podium, shared the credit, and established the character of the response. They demonstrated a rare level of emotional intelligence in their work together. There was a mutual understanding that with no ego and no blame, infighting among agencies was less likely to erupt as a problem or a distraction. Leaders do not always behave well when situations are tense and emotion-filled. That week, self-awareness and self-regulation made a difference. And those attributes permeated the community. It was the backbone of the “Boston Strong” narrative.
A Foundation of Trusting Relationships
Situations carry unknowns, mystery, and risk. In an unpredictable situation, you can’t be sure what the outcome will be, whether good or bad. You hope for the best and prepare for the worst.
Though the situation is puzzling, you trust other people with whom you lead: people who follow you and people you follow. Trusting them, you predict how they will react in difficult circumstances. Confidently, you count on them. They have your back and you have theirs. However unpredictable the situation, knowing that the people with you, reassuringly, are predictable is the foundation of your meta-leadership through the difficulties of complexity, change, and crisis.
When Budge Upton was brought on as project manager to oversee construction of the wing at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (Chapter 9), he was faced with sharp differences of opinion, difficult decisions, and countless financial, timing, and design risks and uncertainties. Despite the ambiguities and critical consequences, Upton’s job was to get everyone involved connected and amicably working together. Recounting the story, he reflected on the relationship-building, trust, and confidence that formed the bedrock upon which differences were resolved.
A foundation of trusting relationships is particularly important in crisis leadership scenarios. A mega-crisis quickly overwhelms existing capacities within a single jurisdiction or organization, and so leaders from different agencies, areas, and specialties are brought in. It is often heard, “Don’t wait for a crisis to exchange business cards.” Know other leaders and build trust before the crisis hits. Drills, professional conferences, and even retirement receptions all play a role in getting to know the people on whom you may need to depend in a crisis.
When it matters most, that foundation of well-established and trusting relationships provides a measure of safety in unsafe times. “I can count on you. You can count on me.” Leaders demonstrate maturity, emotional intelligence and a shared commitment to the mission at hand. Those relationships, in shaping your swarm, become the basis for the connectivity and unity of mission you build.
The five principles of swarm leadership are a road map for bringing diverse people together. In 2017, we shared these principles with American Red Cross leaders as they responded to a series of disasters, including hurricanes and wildfires. Brad Kieserman, vice president of disaster operations, shared with us, “We’re baking swarm and ‘how can I make you a success’ into what we’re doing every hour. Our team is embracing it.”
What happens when the opposite side of swarm leadership emerges—when groups are working against one another?
From Swarm to Suspicion
The swarm can have a dark side: humans are innately tribal and can become scared, defensive, and loyal only to tribe mates. In the face of perceived threat, you naturally protect your tribe: your profession, family, work organization, gender, religion, cultural group, beliefs, or team. No matter how noble your goals may be, tribal affiliations—and loyalty to them—can prompt conflicts and wars, both offensive and defensive. Edward O. Wilson, who spent his career studying sociobiology, including swarm phenomena, warns: “We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions. We thrash about” and are “a danger to ourselves and the rest of life.”
Tribal suspicion builds antagonism, contest, and competition. It may derive from beliefs of superiority over others combined with the conquest impulse. The higher the stakes, the fiercer the fight. Leaders create the ideological basis for conflict and rally people behind it.
Looking at your own leadership experience and practice, what fights and battles have you witnessed? What was the rallying cry? How was the fight waged? How did others react?
Tribal suspicion leadership emerges when swarm principles are reversed:
Swarm Principles and Behaviors: Unity of mission
Suspicion Principles and Behaviors: Competing missions
Swarm Principles and Behaviors: Generosity of spirit and action
Suspicion Principles and Behaviors: Selfish focus on individual’s benefit
Swarm Principles and Behaviors: Staying in lanes to help others succeed
Suspicion Principles and Behaviors: Extending authority and turf, setting others up to fail
Swarm Principles and Behaviors: No ego—no blame
Suspicion Principles and Behaviors: Self-promotion: All ego—blame others
Swarm Principles and Behaviors: A foundation of relationships
Suspicion Principles and Behaviors: An environment of distrust and scheming
What has been your experience with leaders prone to suspicion behaviors? Think about your observations and readings of certain world events and leaders to understand the manifestations of tribal suspicion leadership.
How are swarm and suspicion connected? On all sides of a complex problem, there are “forces for,” “forces against,” and “forces on the fence” (see Chapter 3). People can be brought together, and people can be divided. Suspicion leaders apply swarm principles to promote an us-versus-them perspective, offering only a shared, defensive huddle of safety and security against a common foe.
Within the in-group, people swarm to battle the out-group. Suspicion and fear of the other side energize the in-group/out-group dynamic. Too often today, political discourse, intraorganizational hostility, and cultural differences refle
ct such divides.
In practice, swarm and suspicion leadership can be arrayed across a continuum. It is rare to see either practiced in its purest, most extreme form. Even your enemies have a measure of kindness. And the good guys too have their mean streaks. Assess where leaders put themselves on this continuum, observing the mix of their motives, practices, and results. And remember: both the good guys and the bad guys have innate tribal characteristics. Terrorists swarm too. It takes swarms to defeat them. In the Boston Marathon bombings response and in Jimmy Dunne’s response to the 9/11 decimation of his company, good people swarmed against bad guys, the terrorists.
Leading Beyond to Shape a Swarm
Kellie Bentz, of Airbnb, is a compelling meta-leader in the world of private-sector emergency management. She leads a team that helps meet the needs of survivors and response workers in crisis, utilizing the organization’s extensive, decentralized network of hosts. They provide support in a range of incidents, including terror attacks and natural disasters.
We first met Bentz when she attended our NPLI executive crisis leadership program at Harvard. At the time, she was director of disaster services programs at the Points of Light organization. Before joining Airbnb, she worked in the crisis management team at Target Corporation. “I first became engaged in this field,” she explained, “when I was in New Orleans working on a recovery project after Hurricane Katrina. I’d never been to New Orleans or to a disaster before, but was asked to start a volunteer project by Hands On Network, organizing spontaneous volunteers to get things done.”
Her path from there has hardly been linear. “I’ve gone from hyperlocal in New Orleans to having a global span of activities across 191 countries at Airbnb. I never could have predicted it.” She shared that her role progressed from individual contributor to team-builder as her career evolved. “I’ve leveraged an understanding of structure and an appreciation for the energy of an entrepreneurial setting.” In other words, Bentz assembles swarms.
Bentz’s personal journey and that of Airbnb are both stories of connectivity. Personally, Bentz used her professional network of NPLI alumni and others for peer support. “One of the challenges when you are the only one in the ‘crisis management bubble’ in an organization, that is not primarily focused on disaster or crisis, is that you often get ‘crazy’ ideas from people who want to do good things but don’t understand the implications. You begin to question yourself—am I being too cautious? When you connect with others in your domain, even in other organizations, you get reassured that you are competent and are raising the right issues.” She added, “I’ve had a bit of imposter syndrome along the way. Now, with more experience and connections, I fully know why I am in the room and I am confident that I know what I am doing.
“Articulating what I do and the need to explain to people who don’t fully understand the space is a challenge up, down, across, and beyond,” Bentz said. “My most effective tactics are to listen and continually educate people. I used to react a lot. Now I focus on reframing, taking a step back, and responding more thoughtfully. This helps me turn good intentions into good outcomes.”
Airbnb’s entire business is based on connectivity. Its platform brings together hosts and guests for short-term housing rentals across 80,000 cities in 191 countries. “Airbnb is hyperfocused on our community of hosts and guests,” Bentz said. “That’s how we got into disaster response.” She explained that the company was contacted by a host in the New York area after Super Storm Sandy in 2012. At the time, the lowest price to list one’s space was US$10.00 per night. The host wanted to list for free. The company agreed that it was an idea worth supporting. Bentz explained that a team of engineers worked around the clock to program and install the change. It became the company’s “disaster tool” and has since evolved based on field experience.
After this initial effort, Airbnb created “Open Homes,” an initiative that allows hosts to offer free rooms, both proactively and reactively. “It started as a great grassroots idea. We then built the platform and policies to make it sustainable,” Bentz said.
Open Homes is just one part of Airbnb’s global disaster response and relief program. Bentz described it as a blend of crisis management and corporate social responsibility. “We look to use our assets to help the greatest number of people,” she said. Airbnb monitors the news and weather to provide 24/7 notification of major events to hosts and guests. This fills an important gap: in previous crises, government officials have often had difficulty reaching the traveling public. Bentz and her team facilitate cross-functional coordination across the company. For example, they create event reports for customer service agents as they support people in the community. The team also creates preparedness and response messaging, which is particularly helpful with advance-notice events such as hurricanes, Bentz said. Across the enterprise, Bentz and her team serve as subject matter experts on crisis response, supporting Airbnb’s various functions and helping employees get involved in response efforts where they are able.
As Airbnb’s crisis response efforts grow, an increasing portion of Bentz’s work involves leading beyond to recraft relationships outside the company. She explained that Airbnb provides travel credit to response and relief workers in the organizations with which they partner, such as All Hands and Hearts as well as Team Rubicon. This helps solve a vexing challenge: finding housing for both survivors and relief workers in the aftermath of a major event. Airbnb enables a “housing surge” that helps communities rebound and be resilient in the face of adversity.
“What’s exciting for me is that we are finding new ways to build connectivity across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors,” Bentz said. “We are building capability and boosting capacity. I am glad that I learned about leading with influence beyond authority. That’s most of what I do every day.”
As a meta-leader, you are a connector. There is much for you to leverage in forging connection: authority down, up, and across your organization, as well as interests, motivations, and exchanges beyond your enterprise. It is a wide panorama of people, silos, stuff, and experience. You see the bigger meta-picture and discern ways to reconceive it so that it matters to many people. You make it happen: “you’re it.”
As you craft connectivity amid all this opportunity, you encounter an abundance of conflict and diplomacy. As a meta-leader, you negotiate the differences, build solutions, and resolve the conflicts. Embedding the necessary analysis and skills into your meta-leadership thinking and practices is the topic of our next chapter.
Questions for Journaling
Thinking beyond the borders of your organization—to the enterprise of people who are part of broader endeavors—is critical to meta-leadership. What has been your experience in this larger realm? What have you seen other leaders do in recrafting these relationships? List what works and what does not.
Whether in your family, workplace, team, or faith-based organization, what have been your swarm leadership experiences? What bound people together? What behaviors or challenges got in the way of a swarm?
What have been your suspicion leadership experiences? What was done to elevate those suspicions, and how did those actions affect followers? What divided people? Was anything done to temper those suspicions?
ELEVEN
THE WALK IN THE WOODS
Negotiating Differences and Resolving Conflict to Build Collaboration
Meta-leaders coordinate a wide cast of characters into cohesive effort. This is no easy feat. It requires understanding motives, finding common themes, building organization and communication, and finally, securing outcomes that justify investments. All that sounds good. Problem is, with so many people around the same table, there is going to be a lot to disagree about. It is a complex process.
Though onerous, conflict is a wall you surmount in your meta-leadership practice. When unresolved, conflict festers and distracts. These are not only differences that involve other people. Often you, the meta-leader, are at the center of the
squabbling. Your visibility makes you a convenient target. You tussle over philosophical, strategic, or tactical questions. The conflict is a burden constraining you and obstructing progress toward larger purposes. The struggles assume a life of their own. Your credibility and influence are affected, perhaps negatively, even when you win the battles.
Often the very purpose of your meta-leadership is convening divergent stakeholders, overcoming points of conflict, and galvanizing connectivity to reap the resulting advantages. When this is the case, your thrust is conflict resolution. It’s not always pleasant. It is a necessary part of the job. If that is what you face, what can you do to handle differences constructively?
To aid your meta-leadership practice, we developed a practical negotiation method for your problem-solving tool box. Applicable to just about every aspect of managing conflict, this method can be used to facilitate complex negotiations, build cross-silo teamwork, and resolve conflict. As a personal discipline, the method can privately guide you through one-on-one negotiations with subordinates, bosses, peers, or even family members.
The framework is called the “Walk in the Woods.” The Walk is based on the principles of interest-based negotiation. Through the negotiation process, this collaborative approach helps parties discover and develop mutually beneficial solutions. It contrasts with positional bargaining, which is oppositional and pursues win-lose outcomes.
The Walk assists stakeholders in (1) identifying their key interests; (2) understanding each distinct viewpoint; (3) finding imaginative, successful solutions; and (4) clarifying the give-and-get exchanges necessary for a mutually beneficial and acceptable outcome.
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