The Omega
Factor:
A
Values-Based Approach for Developing Servant Leadership
Brian Hall
Genuine
values emerge from experience, they are discovered, not imposed.
Philip
Selznick. The Moral Commonwealth, p.
19
Values are attitudes that people consider more meaningful than
other attitudes.... Valuing, like meaning making, happens within people and as
such is not accessible to direct observation. It normally ends, however, in
behavior that is external and observable. When behavior becomes public it becomes
a part of the culture.
Benjamin Tonna, A Surge in
Quality, 1999
My college, my self: choosing
a school means figuring out who you are.
US News & World Report, September 1, 2003.
Part I: Introduction and Beginnings
This paper is about values,
their measurement, and the presence of a values trajectory in our lives that
pulls us forward from the future. This future is what Teilhard de Chardin
called the Omega point, a process that I am calling the Omega Factor.
Traditionally, colleges and universities have always been about preparing
students to lead society into the future by passing on to them the values and
knowledge necessary to lead. But in the modern period of history, values are
often thought of as something defined by the culture rather than shaped by the
leadership in the culture. The concept of a universal telos or a trajectory of development in the life of a human being
has all but disappeared and been replaced by opportunity and choice around
personal success. I believe that higher education could profitably concern
itself with training what we’ll refer to as Servant Leaders—leaders whose
vision includes compassion for individuals and responsibility to the global
community.
In 1976 I had a series of meetings with Robert Greenleaf
about leadership. In our discussions, we agreed that an important dimension of
Servant Leadership was to create values-based organizations with leadership
that is collaborative and transparent in its communication. To quote his
thoughts about what he called the “new ethic”: “Looking at the two major
elements, the work and the person, the new ethic, simply but quite completely
stated, will be: the work exists for the
person, as much as the person exists for the work. Put another way, the
business exists as much to provide meaningful work to the person as it exists
to provide a product or service to the customer” (p. 142). Meaning making is a
central task of being human—it is living by our commitment to a set of values
that provides quality service to those we work and live with.
Aristotle talked of human potential in terms of the acorn
and the oak tree. The tree is the potential born into the acorn. One
perspective is that this oak tree is pulling the acorn to full fruition for all
of its life. The same is true of the human being—not just of the physical
person, but also of the individual’s spirit and psychology. There is, I am
suggesting, a potential set of values calling us all forth since childhood.
These values are within definable boundaries and they posit alternative futures
for each of us. As a beginning point, each of us forms values that pull us
through four phases of development—from a childlike perspective, based on
survival and security, to a global and systemic view of life.
Being pulled from the future is a fairly common
experience. It has to do with creating a vision of the life you want to
experience. Recently I spoke to a student of mine that I had taught more than
ten years ago. It was an experience that is fairly common to many teachers, I
am sure. She told me that she had obtained a graduate degree in counseling
psychology and now had her own counseling practice—she noted that this had been
a life dream for her. She then remarked, “It was all because of a remark you
made to me!” “What do you mean?” I said. She explained that after a particular
class in which she had completed an excellent paper, I apparently remarked to
her during the coffee break, “You do good work; have you thought of going to
graduate school?” She said that that affirmation introduced her to a future she
had never thought possible, and that it had awakened in her a dream, a vision,
that she had spent the last ten years fulfilling.
In my own life and practice I have had many formative
experiences that have opened a door to what values are about and how they
relate to the vision process alluded to above. There are two experiences in particular that I want to reflect
on.
Experience One: Day and Night
An early experience in London
at the beginning of World War II formed a lasting impression on me and became
associated with values as I grew older and more mature. I lived in a northern
suburb named Boreham-Wood, where my father was a fireman during the blitz. Much
of my time between the ages of 4 and 7
was spent in bomb shelters. Because of the war and its aftermath, school was
almost nonexistent for me until I was 15. What education I had—reading,
writing, and arithmetic—came from my mother, mixed in with an hour or two of
chess daily. My mother enjoyed a game of chess; it no doubt kept her mind off
of the war.
My most graphic memory is of many evenings after dark,
standing upstairs, alone in the house with my mother, looking through a large
picture window with all the lights in the house out because of the air-raid
rules. We watched the fires of London burning. I remember that the sky was a
total orange and yellow glow from left to right, punctuated with occasional
planes and barrage balloons. My mother was quietly afraid, and, like me,
somewhat in awe. Part of this memory is of the time spent in our bomb shelter.
My mother invited a German woman and her son to sit with us there during
air-raid warnings. A number of the neighbors called her a “Nazi lover,” but she
did it anyway, because, as she said to me, “It’s the right thing to do.”
At first appearance, this memory looks like a
doom-and-gloom picture. My father slept during most of the daytime and went to
fight fires at night. Both of my parents listened constantly to the radio for
daily news on the war and a possible imminent invasion, wondering what was
going to happen in the future. Of course, as a child I had a different
perspective than the adults. For my friends and me, the experience was a
mixture of fun and fantasy. I was just awed and wondering what it all meant for
us as a family. The implications of the war had little meaning to me as a
child. I was more worried about my mother’s worrying.
Recently I was privileged to have a coaching session with
Len Leritz (see bibliography), who developed a leadership development process
based on the work of James Fowler. We looked at my childhood experiences in the
war, and he talked to me about my “life script.” As a result of his coaching, I
learned two things:
1)
The
bond with my mother shaped many of my future values. Values, after all, underpin
all human relationships, but are for the most part unconscious. This was a slow
process of discovery.
2)
I
unconsciously decided that I was going to take my mother’s worry away from
her—I was going to make sense out of what was going on. As a result, making
sense out of life and what was going on around me became my life pursuit.
Conclusions: My mother infused a vision into me that was heavily
values-laden, but for the most part unarticulated, and as a result,
unconscious. The values formed by these experiences—Search for Meaning/Hope,
Care/Nurture, Empathy, Justice, and Human Dignity—became strange attractors for
me from the future. This is what a vision does for you, even though it is only
partially conscious. It drives the way you dream, learn, and act. It shapes
your future priorities.
In the 20 years since my colleagues and I began
developing the technology for creating individual values profiles, we have
carried out several thousand coaching sessions with executives. The profiles
have special “values cluster” reports that show an individual’s foundational,
day-to-day focus as well as future, or vision, values not yet actualized as top
priorities. We have found and confirmed in more than 3000 cases is that it is
these Future or Vision values that carry the most energy, and over time they
become the daily focus of a person’s life. Our vision draws us into the future.
Experience 2: Culture, Measurement, and Leadership
In the 1960s, Maslow
concluded that there are approximately 50 values that motivate and drive our
behavior. Rokeach, working at about the same period, decided there were 36.
Nobody had really methodically looked at how many there were. The concept was
that half a dozen of these values, as priorities, would explain any human
behavior. In 1979, after eight years of research with a group of international
associates on values, we concluded that every human being has access to
approximately 125 values. We also saw that the 125 values fell out
developmentally into four phases, each with its own world view, as illustrated
in the Development Map, Table 1. It was because of this work that I was invited
to teach and do research at the University of Santa Clara in 1979.
The four phases and eight stages of
development are the basis for measuring gaps in priorities and defining an
individual’s world view. For example, in a conversation between two people, if
one is functioning at stage 4 in the Development Map but the other is
functioning at stage 6, there will be a gap of two stages. Because their values
priorities are different, their communication will be difficult: the person at
stage 4 is concerned abut Competence, whereas the person at stage 6 will have
transcended that and is concerned about Being Self and issues around Human
Dignity. What we did that was unique is develop a measurement system in
parallel with the theory. The experience that follows is related to the early
development of this measurement system.
In 1979 a large international Roman
Catholic order asked me to do an analysis of their management document,
referred to as their Rules and
Constitutions. They were in the business of education and ran several
universities worldwide, including in the United States. This analysis resulted
in the first measurement instrument—document analysis.
Document analysis. Document analysis is done with software that includes a
5000-word thesaurus in several languages. The software scans a document to link
synonyms to any of the 125 values that are present in a document. It can then
identify the values in priority order in the document as a whole or within any
given section of a document.
The order’s document was about 100
pages long and had seen three previous editions, published in 1821, 1921, and
1961. In 1980 we prepared an analysis before the release of a 1981 revision. We
naturally saw values differences through the three previous historical
documents. But in the newly revised 1981 document, we found a series of
conflicts and discrepancies within the document itself.
One such discrepancy was in the definitions and
descriptions of the role of leadership. To understand this, we need to refer to
the Development Map again. An international council of eight people, elected at
large, led the organization. The council’s job was to ensure the longevity and
security of the institution. Our analysis showed that the council’s values
priorities were entirely from stages 1 and 2 in the Development Map. Their
values priorities, beginning with Self Interest/Control, are shown in Table 2.
At the next level of management, below the order’s council, there were not
quite 200 local leaders, elected locally, who were supposed to be pastorally
focused, trusting facilitators of those under their supervision. Their role was
described by stage 5 values, also shown in Table 2. The Development Map
illustrates that the first group is authoritarian or autocratic in its
leadership style, whereas the second group is facilitative and collaborative.
It was clear that the two groups, if they followed their role descriptions, would
be in conflict. Two questions were raised as a consequence:
• Do the values priorities reflect a conflict
in the lived situation as well as in the document?
• And if they do,
what is the quality of the relationship between the two groups?
Table 2. Contrasting Styles of the Council
and Local Leadership
|
Leadership Council: Stages 1 and 2 |
Local Global Leadership: Stage 5 |
|
Self-Interest/Control Wonder/Awe/Fate Self-Preservation Security Economics/Profit Territory/Security |
Integration/Wholeness Self
Development Sharing/Listening/Trust Empathy Search
for Meaning/Hope Generosity/Compassion |
It turned out that the values priorities in the document were reflected in the lived behavior of
the leadership. The quality of many relationships was conflicted, and resulted
in several people resigning and leaving the congregation. In addition, we found
that there were about 30 discrepancies in the document related to leadership,
policy, and decision-making that were related to daily behavior and activities.
All this led to a major revision of the document.
Over the next two years a development and validity
process yielded two more types of organizational values measurement tools:
individual and group reports. Each individual receives a personal report after
completing a 125-item questionnaire. The person sees what his or her values
are, in priority order, and what the implication is for his or her leadership
journey. Group reports show the value priorities of the total group and or of
any subset such as a department or executive team.
Two years later, 80 percent of the same Catholic order
was present for a second meeting to compare the earlier document analysis and
the now-available profile of the group as a whole. Each person now had their
individual profiles, the group report, and the previous document analysis. When
the values priorities in the group profile were compared with the document
analysis, something astounding was discovered: the top ten values priorities in
the documents, the group, and individual profiles were the same—for people who
had lived and worked in the institution for five years or more.
Conclusions: The conclusions that follow have been proven over and over again
since the measurement of that Roman Catholic order’s values. These include:
¨
Culture
is captured by the significant conversation in the organization and through its
management and policy documents, which in turn reflect the values priorities
held by the organization.
¨
The
priority values present in the management documents and policies and procedures
of the organization become internalized in its membership and leadership,
affecting the spiritual and emotional health of everyone in the organization.
Document analysis continues to be a powerful tool. In 1993, a collaborative
effort with several Spanish universities, spearheaded by the University of
Deusto in Bilbao, did a full analysis of all the documents governing public and
university education in Spain (see Albizuri et al. in the bibliography). As in
the above example, their analysis revealed many gaps and conflicts. These
documents were also rewritten and republished.
¨
Leadership
is partially a byproduct of the organization’s culture and values.
¨
Leadership
development and culture development must proceed hand in hand.
¨
Gaps
in stages of values development between individuals and groups cause conflict
and nonalignment within the organization, hampering its vision and mission.
¨
Values
measurement makes individual and system priorities explicit, explaining and
making sense out of conflicts and gaps in the organization.
In summary, values are the ideals that give significance
to our lives and are reflected through the priorities that we choose and that
we act on consistently and repeatedly. They are designated by special code
words in the spoken and written language and experienced through our feelings
and imagination, and they are experienced in individuals, by institutions, and
in the products of human effort such as works of art.
Part II: Trajectories and Development
These experiences changed my world view on what values are
about. What researchers like Paulo Freire understood and what we discovered
over and over again in 30 years of research is that human values are embedded
in the language, motivating and driving our behavior. Corporate culture is
human and therefore flows from a set of relationships—the relationships that
form the environment from which all decisions flow, including ethical and moral
choices. Why? Because all relationships, conscious or not, are underpinned by
the values priorities we hold in common. It is our collective priorities that
form the basis for all decision making—it is that simple.
Figure 1. Values World
When you know what the values are in a given situation,
you have access to a lot of hidden information. Reality encompasses both an
inner and an outer reality; it is not one or the other (Figure 1). Both
realities must be seen as a balanced whole that must be in harmony. Something
has to mediate the two realities, and that something is called values. It is our
values that carry the life-giving energy of the inner world into the external
world of family and society. Values stand between as a brokerage unit that
assesses information and enables the brain to synthesize it into everyday
decision-making. The values that lie underneath our daily activities are
tacit—often unconscious—knowledge. Therefore, all conversation is relationship
building and involves consciously, or more often unconsciously, sharing our
values.
While I was at the University of
Santa Clara I had the privilege of counseling both graduate and undergraduate
students using the values instrumentation in a coaching process. It was here
that the partial consciousness of values became evident. All students were able
to recognize their values priorities. But they were only able to identify 10 to
25 percent of them beforehand—it was a discovery process. But the experience of
younger and older students differed distinctly. The younger undergraduates (18
to 21 years old) often wanted to change their priorities because they reflected
the values of their parents, which were not always the values they themselves
held. They often changed their electives and major as a consequence. On the
other hand, graduate students from a counseling or business program (30 to 55
years old) recognized and agreed with the values and the priority order they
were in.
In both groups it was clear that the
students’ explicit awareness of their values dramatically increased their
capacity to learn and gain new knowledge or insights. Personal knowledge of
their values linked learning and motivation in a way that enabled them to
benefit more from their education.
The Trajectory
As individuals mature, various developmental patterns
emerge; these patterns are incorporated in the design of the measurement system
described above. The instrumentation was completely validated by 1989. By the
year 2000 it was available in an Internet format.
Of the 125
values, 29 are defined as goal values, while 96 are called means values. Goal
values are future-oriented and contain human purpose; they are partially
illustrated and shown in bold in Table 3, “Phases and Stages of Values
Development.” Goal values form a natural developmental track or path that
progresses through four phases and eight stages. Each phase represents a
distinct world view. Each stage builds on previous stages. For example, an
individual’s mastery and understanding of Human Dignity in stage 6 is
incomplete if the person does not have in place stage 1 and 2 values such as
Self Preservation and Security.
Table 3. Phases and Stages of Values
Development
|
Phase |
I |
I |
II |
II |
III |
III |
IV |
IV |
|
Stage |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
|
Goal Values |
Self- Preservation |
Security |
Self-Worth |
Competence |
Integration/ |
Being Self Human Dignity |
Truth/ Wisdom |
Global Harmony |
|
Means Values |
Food/Warmth/ |
Economics/ |
Courtesy |
Achievement/ |
Empathy |
Ethics |
Synergy |
Human Rights |
|
|
|
Affection |
Friendship |
Education/ Certification |
Search for Meaning/ |
Pioneerism/ |
Inter- |
|
The 96 means values are underpinned
by approximately 1000 specific skills. Healthy personal development requires
that means values always be related to goal values in an effective combination.
This developmental paradigm is the basis for discovering gaps in priorities and
world view that get in the way of effective communication. Each of us has
foundational values, derived from our family of origin and our life experience.
When our family is healthy, it keeps us stable and secure for much of our lives.
We also have values that pull us into the future and drive our meaning system.
These are the values in stages 6 to 8. These later values are the basis of our
vision for life.
Figure 2. Transitions and World Views
The phases and stages of the trajectory are at
the bottom. The bubbles illustrate that each phase is its own level of
consciousness and world view, and is contained and separate from previous and
future world views. The phase of primary importance is phase IV, which pulls
each of us to it from the future. Each phase has its own set of unique
attributes. Some of these are illustrated in Table 3: “Attributes and Behaviors
Related to the Phases and World Views.” There are of course an infinite number
of possible attributes such as governance systems, view of the family, and so
on. Table 4 is a selection of nine elements of worldview.
Table 4. Attributes and Behaviors Related to the Phases and World
Views
|
Elements of |
|
|
|
|
|||
|
1.
Individual Emotions |
Surviving Emotions dominate |
Belonging Reason begins to dominate |
Self-Initiation Integration of
reason and emotions |
Global Partnering Sensory intuitive integration |
|||
|
2. The
Organization |
Survival |
Traditional mechanical Hierarchical |
Partnership
|
Global Interdependence |
|||
|
3. The World Perceived by the Individual |
A
mystery over |
A problem with which I must cope |
A project in which I |
A mystery for which we must |
|||
|
4.
Individual Perception in the Organization |
Self is
the center |
Self seeks to belong by |
Self acts and initiates |
Self acts as “we” with others |
|||
|
5. Leadership Management Style |
· Autocratic | ||||||