Gervase R. Bushe - Clear Leadership: Sustaining Real Collaboration and Partnership at Work

Praise for Clear Leadership

In a time when everyone knows they need to get different in their interactions and in the workplace, Bushe has given us a road map with plenty of examples.

Frederick A. Miller, CEO, The Kaleel Jamison Consulting Group, Inc.; coauthor, The Inclusion Breakthrough and Be BIG: Step Up, Step Out, Be Bold

A wise teacher, Bushe first takes us by the hand and patiently leads us deep into the mush that constitutes so much of the noncommunication of organizational life. Then, after we have recognized ourselves as the creators of that mush, he gives us the knowledge and practical tools we can use to break through the mush and create the clarity essential to effective leadership.

Barry Oshry, president, Power & Systems Inc.; author, Seeing Systems: Unlocking the Mysteries of Organizational Life

Clear Leadership is a thoughtful and thought-provoking book explaining how to untangle the hidden mush and brush limiting your own, your teams, and your organizations effectiveness. It is a masterful integration of theory and practice with extensive examples and skill exercises. It is an excellent resource for anyone who wants to be more effective interacting with others at work and at home.

Robert J. Marshak, author, Covert Processes at Work

Clear Leadership provides new contributions to the thinking on leadership. The skill sets are not just for leaders, but for everyone engaged in partnering with others to accomplish something; and in todays world, leading learning is just as important as leading performing.

David W. Jamieson, PhD, president, The Jamieson Consulting Group, Inc.; adjunct professor of management, Pepperdine University; adjunct professor, American University/NTL Institute MSOD Program

Rarely does one find a business model with as much impact on human behavior in the work of transforming relationships and organizations as the experience cube. This masterful and ingenious creation of Gervase Bushe has without reservation been our model of choice in dealing with executives and their aversion to having difficult and authentic conversations. I am in awe with the feedback our company receives after introducing the experience cube to organizations and their leadership teams.

Greg W. Nichvalodoff, president, Inscape Consulting Group Inc.

Bushe offers lessons for handling the most pressing problem for knowledgebased organizationsorganizational mush. He goes beyond the question of what is taking place in troublesome partnerships and looks into the essential question of how to be a competent partner and collaborator. Brilliant and utterly useful. In Scandinavia, many of our most committed and skillful leaders within business, civil service, and politics apply the theory and practice of clear leadership.

Anders Risling, PhD, licensed psychologist; founder, Provins fem

clear leadership

sustaining real collaboration and partnership at work

REVISED EDITION

Gervase R. Bushe

Paperback edition first published by Davies-Black, an imprint of Nicholas Brealey Publishing, in 2010. Original hardcover edition first published in 2009.

www.nicholasbrealey.com

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Copyright 2010 by Davies-Black, an imprint of Nicholas Brealey Publishing. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or media or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Davies-Black and its colophon are registered trademarks of Nicholas Brealey Publishing.

ISBN: 978-1-47364-359-8
eISBN: 978-0-89106-281-3

Printed in the United States of America.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bushe, Gervase R.

Clear leadership: sustaining real collaboration and partnership at work/Gervase R. Bushe.Rev. ed.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-89106-382-7 (pbk.)

1. Leadership. 2. Communication in management. 3. Labor productivity. 4. Industrial management. I. Title.

HD57.7.B874 2010

658.4092dc22

2009050737

REVISED EDITION

First printing 2009

In the first edition of Clear Leadership, I wrote about clear leaders as the kind of leaders required in empowered organizations. It has been ten years since I wrote that book, and my thinking has evolved. I now think of clear leadership as a set of skills that is indispensable to collaborative organizing. In this revised edition, I present clear leadership as a model of the skills required to lead organizational learning, clearing out interpersonal mush and sustaining collaboration, in the midst of work.

The clear leadership model is premised on the idea that collaborative organizing rests on peoples willingness to be in partnership with those they interact with at work. Partnership is a relationship in which people feel equally responsible for the success of their joint project or process. The clear leadership model addresses two problems of collaborative organizing:

We each create our own experience, although we think others create it.

We are sense-making beings and make up stories about others so that we can fill in the gaps of what we know about their experience.

The interpersonal mush that results becomes toxic over time, and partnerships fail. Collaborative organizations revert to a command-and-control approach in order to get things done in spite of the mush.

Clear leadership proposes that the willingness and ability to clear out the mush determine the level of satisfaction with and the longevity of any partnership. Clearing out the mush requires learning from our collective experience. Clear leadership assumes that teams and organizations need to perform and learn simultaneously, and rather than being about how to lead performing, clear leadership is about how to lead learning.

Where there is unequal authority among the people in the partnership, the depth of clarity is limited by what the leader is willing to talk about. Through their actions more than their words, leaders set the level of mush that will or wont plague the system, so clear leadership is a valuable set of leadership skills. But it isnt just a set of skills for leadersits a set of skills for anyone who wants to be an effective partner.

Like the first book, this edition is organized around the four Selves. Each Self chapter has been revised. The biggest change is the chapter on the Curious Self. This is what first motivated me to rewrite the book. There is now substantially more material on parking reactions, and Ive added two new elements: make it appealing and confront for insight. The chapter on the Appreciative Self has been revised significantly to look at the skills as used in partnership. The chapters on the Aware Self and the Descriptive Self have been updated with new stories and revised models. There is a lot more material on learning conversations and creating cultures of clarity, which are now discussed in two separate chapters. The chapters on interpersonal mush and self-differentiation and the four elements of experience have been updated, but there are no big changes.