Some years ago, Jerry Harvey developed a survey about organization practices. Responders were asked to mark each item on the survey as true or false. One item said, “Occasionally, it is necessary for a manager to lie to or deceive others in his/her organization in order to achieve organizational objectives.” Being realistic, most people responded “true.” After all, managers have to stay in role and not get too friendly with employees. Managers are taught, “Keep a professional distance. If you know a layoff is scheduled, act like you don’t know. If a merger is in the offing, pretend ignorance. Don’t think of employees as people or get too involved with their concerns. Think of them as resources you have to manage - human resources.”
The next item on the survey said, “I work most effectively with those who occasionally lie to me.” Trying to respond to that item often produced an internal conundrum in the responders because they could not mark it as “true” to match the first item. They knew what we all know, that if we don’t trust our managers we are less effective because we find ourselves doing things like withholding problems and not admitting mistakes, resulting in us and our organization being much less competent. However, we also know that “keep your distance and stay in role” is well-accepted management theory. It is what the gurus tell us we are supposed to do – a conundrum.
Interestingly, one of those management gurus, a very famous one, Ed Schein, is now saying, it is time managers created stronger relationships with employees. Rather than staying in role, managers and employees need to see each other as whole persons, and he advises that managers should develop more personal relationships around shared goals and experiences. Quite a shift!
In his new book, Humble Leadership, Schein explains this shift by describing leadership in terms of relationships. He identifies four levels of relationship a leader could have with employees:
Level Minus 1: This relationship is total impersonal it depends on domination and coercion. It is like the relationship between prison guards and prisoners, or managers of sweatshops and their workers or between leaders and immigrants who, though they are often mistreated, say nothing out of fear of being deported.
Level 1: This relationship is transactional, role and rule-based leadership. The manager described in the above survey item has a Level 1 relationship with employees. The manager stays in role, keeping his/her distance, even lying and withholding information when the role requires it. It is the relationship surgeons have with nurses and in most organizations it is the relationship that managers have with employees.
Level 2: This relationship is personal, cooperative, and trusting. It is the way friends relate to each other. It involves knowing each other as whole persons, knowing about each other’s families, ambitions and disappointments. Level 2 leadership achieves a kind of collaboration that is built on deeper trust and openness. It acknowledges joint responsibility and honoring commitments. Both parties trust that neither will undermine or harm the other. Nor will they lie or withhold information from each other.
Level 3: This relationship is emotionally intimate, with total mutual commitments
. These are the relationships we hear about among military platoons or Navy seal teams or like the relationship the Apollo 13 astronauts had with their ground crew.
Schein says that managers need to move from Level 1 relationships to Level 2 to achieve the kind of collaboration and trust necessary in the current work environment. He says the complex and multi-disciplinary tasks that much of the workforce is now trying to accomplish requires Level 2 relationships. Level 2 relationships provide psychological safety, that is, members of a team, including the team manager, are willing to acknowledge mistakes, are candid about needing help, and are willing to discuss differences of opinion openly rather than privately. Those types of actions don’t happen with Level 1 relationships because everyone is protecting themselves.
I find Schein’s description of leadership types, based on the nature of the relationship, a very useful way to think about leadership and about what needs to change. It is a change at a more significant level, than most leadership gurus talk about. I agree with Schein that most current leaders need to move from Level 1 to Level 2. And he may be right that groups are more effective when facing complexity, if they have Level 2 relationships. However, I see a more fundamental need for the shift. I believe Level 1 relationships have made our organizations toxic. They allow neither managers nor team members to be fully human at work. We all spend too much of our work lives in places where indifference, manipulation, or worse, lying and concealing are the norm. We cannot grow and develop as human beings in that kind of environment. We need managers to move to Level 2 relationships because it supports human flourishing.