Conscientious Leadership Green Group Boya Jiang Yingfei Shen
Conscientious Leadership Green Group Boya Jiang, Yingfei Shen, Keqing Song, Yiqun Sun, Nanhua Yang
Today’s Key Words ▪ Adaptive leadership: The idea that leadership in complex, crosscultural, disruptive environments requires adaptive rather than technical expertise. ▪ Moral trust: The idea that it is a leader’s role to foster an organizational moral compass that creates a climate of shared values, trust, and mutual accountability. ▪ Resilient leadership: The idea that conscientious leaders learn from failure.
The Theory Behind the Practice Heifetz, Grashow, Linsky. Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World. ▪ The research of adaptive leadership helps to understand: ▪ The relationship among leadership, adaptation, systems, and change ▪ Explain the evolution of all the life, especially for human life ▪ What can we learn from adaptive leadership? ▪ Change that enables the capacity to thrive ▪ The importance of the past ▪ Experimentation ▪ Diversity ▪ Displacement, reregulation, and rearrangement of DNA ▪ Time effort
The Theory Behind the Practice 1. Interaction between People and System ▪ “Social system is the way it is because the people in that system want it that way. ” ▪ The authority want the organization like current situation rather than something new. 2. Technical Problems vs. Adaptive Challenges ▪ Technical problems: ▪ complex and critically important ▪ can be solved through the authority and the organization ▪ Adaptive challenges: ▪ changes in people’s priorities, beliefs, habits, and loyalties ▪ may be resisted due to involving losses ▪ Successful adaptive leadership enables people get more benefits than losses
The Theory Behind the Practice 3. Leadership vs. Authority ▪ Leadership ≠Authority, power, and influence ▪ The leader gets reward from the authorizers ▪ The leader needs to meet authorizers’ expectations ▪ The leader takes risks such as disruption and disorientation ▪ Core responsibilities: direction, protection, order
The Theory Behind the Practice 4. Disequilibrium ▪ Conflict, frustration, confusion, disorientation, fear… ▪ Disequilibrium increases and changes in the process ▪ To deal with the disequilibrium: live into the disequilibrium ▪ manage yourself ▪ help people to release the discomfort ▪ be patient and persistent
The Theory Behind the Practice 5. Three Key Activities: Observation, Interpretation, and intervention ▪ discover and collect the data ▪ hypothesize and analyze ▪ design and practice 6. Taking ‘Smart’ Risk ▪ Improve skills
The Theory Behind the Practice 7. Engagement: Heart, Mind, Spirit, and Courage ▪ When exercising leadership, first engage with yourself, and then connect with others. 8. A Shared Purpose ▪ clarify the values ▪ identify the purposes ▪ provide guidance, sustenance, and inspiration
The Global Moral Compass for Business Leaders Lindsay J. Thompson ▪ The Global Moral Compass: a leadership tool for managing moral complexity in a globalized business culture ▪ Demonstrates the value of the Global Moral Compass: 1. Globalization, with its undisputed benefits, also presents complex moral challenges that business leaders cannot ignore. ▪ Unequipped for the challenges of leadership in a global arena of competing and conflicting value claims ▪ Discovery that even carefully crafted deliberative decisions may be undermined
2. Managing moral challenges is the work of leaders ▪ Leadership is a moral trust; leaders are moral agents with responsibilities toward ▪ Ignore social issues to focus on profitability ▪ Moral leadership in response to social issues is now widely considered part of a leader’s responsibility ▪ leaders are challenged to enlarge their understanding of the broadly universal character of leadership ▪ Improve their effectiveness in orienting profitable business decisions toward sustained alignment with human values ▪ Leaders need tools for engaging and managing the human values and moral will in moving forward to accomplish strategic business goals
The Global Moral Compass for Business Leaders 3. Managing the moral complexity of globalization requires an adaptive framework for linking diverse value positions and wisdom traditions. ▪ Adaptive Leadership: the role of leaders in constructing knowledge to understand the pressure of adaptive dynamics and in using that knowledge to lead change more effectively ▪ To identify and respond effectively to adaptive challenges involving conditions of risk, danger, and uncertainty that call for new wisdom as well as new knowledge ▪ The Global Moral Compass : an expanded epistemic value framework as an aid to understanding and managing moral complexity in a globalized business culture
The Global Moral Compass for Business Leaders ▪ A generic moral framework that links diverse social identities and locations to structures of shared meaning without distorting ▪ Clarify personal morality and to build moral solidarity in work teams, organizations, or communities comprised of diverse members ▪ Four parts: vision, code, fitness, and performance ▪ Moral vision is the ”true north” of the moral compass. ▪ An intentional, normative moral code is the rational aspect of moral identity that complements the symbolic, intuitive moral vision. ▪ Moral fitness is the symbolic aspect of moral agency; it is ritualized action that expresses and reflects the vision and values of moral identity. ▪ Performance is the ‘‘proof of the pudding’’ – the intentional aspect of moral agency demonstrated in concrete decisions and behavior.
http: //www. bp. com/en_us/bp-us/media-room/videos/safety-video. html Deepwater Horizon oil spill - a 'classic failure' of BP management About BP: • one of the world's seven "supermajor" oil and gas companies. • has operations on six continents, located in over 80 countries, headquarters located in London, UK • largest operating division is BP America, in Houston, TX
How the tragedy happened ▪ 20 April 2010, Deepwater Horizon Platform exploded ▪ Fire burnt for 36 hours ▪ 11 people died as a result of the accident and 17 others were injured. ▪ Oil leaked for 87 days, 5 million barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico -- The largest accidental release of oil into marine waters in history https: //www. youtube. com/watch? v=S-UPJy. EHm. M 0
BP’s Values In 2009 In 2011 Safety Respect Excellence Courage ▪ Responsible One team --> Meet energy demand of today and tomorrow --> Changed visible things to have a quick payoff, but did not redesign itself ▪ Progressive ▪ Innovative ▪ Performance driven
BP’s CEO Tony Hayward ▪ Joined BP in 1982, as a geologist with a Ph. D. ▪ Appointed as CEO in 2007. ▪ 04/29/2010, Hayward asked fellow BP executives, “What the hell did we do to deserve this? ” ▪ 05/14/2010 “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume. ” ▪ 05/18/2010 “I think the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to be very, very modest” ▪ 05/31/2010 “The first thing to say is I’m sorry. We’re sorry for the massive disruption it’s caused their lives. There’s no one who wants this over more than I do. I would like my life back. ” https: //www. youtube. com/watch? v=EAew. AQfr. Vcc
The Key Public ▪ Residents that relied on the Gulf of Mexico to make a living. Residents of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida ▪ American people in general as well as BP stakeholders.
Discussion: • Based on above information, what lessons of failure we can learn from BP’s case? • You may use the keyword pool to demonstrate your argument: • Adaptive leadership, Moral trust, Resilient leadership, Shared values, Mutual accountability, Moral challenge, Transparency, Globalization, Responsibility, Honesty, Organizational Culture.
Five Leadership Lessons from the BP Oil Spill 1. Crises expose dysfunctional organizational cultures. 2. Leaders must recognize when a crisis can’t be spun. 3. Leaders need to work together rather than scoring points or deflecting blame. 4. Leaders are there to serve their companies, people and communities. 5. True leadership exists beyond title and office — elected leaders should remember this.
Open forum ▪ Have you seen successful leadership cases in crisis?
Unexpected Consequences ▪ Catastrophic failures have common causes ▪ Technology played a small part in most disasters ▪ The root causes are organizational dysfunctions, group dynamics, and cognition issues at an individual level ▪ ex: 2009 financial crisis, BP oil spill, Haiti earthquake VS Chile earthquake
How can we improve? ▪ Respond speed & efficiency level ▪ Technology necessary for failure prevention or mitigation. ▪ Driven to a root cause level ▪ Event preparation and relief responses efforts rather than as ad-hoc strategy after an event occurs. ▪ Right regulations
DUPONT CASE DISCUSSION Bring the concept of conscientious leadership into the discussion.
TWO COMPANIES ▪ Du. Pont Chemical Company ▪ Conceal the knowledge of PFOA's toxicity and presence in the environment. ▪ Continuing refusal to accept responsibility. ▪ Taft Law Firm ▪ Face a large economic revenue loss ▪ Still support the lawyer to "do the right thing"
“ Du. Pont had for decades been actively trying to conceal their actions. They knew this stuff was harmful, and they put it in the water anyway. These were bad facts. ” - Rob Bilott, the lawyer
VIDEO: REMARKS ON DUPONT'S LEADERSHIP let corporate criminals like “ Du. Pont. Wegetcannot away with murder. Someone needs to be held accountable more than just a lawsuit. It is time to break out the handcuffs and put these people into jail. Their actions have ruined people’s lives, and they did this intentionally. - ” Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins
Small Group Discussion ▪ How would you compare the leadership of Du. Pont Chemical Company and Taft Law Firm? How could they do better?
FYI: FACTS TIMELINE 1951 1984 1990 Du. Pont started purchasing PFOA (C 8) from supplier to manufacture Teflon. Du. Pont specified that PFOA should not be flushed into surface water, but over decades, Du. Pont pumped PFOA powder into Ohio River. Du. Pont continued to conduct secret medical studies on PFOA. Du. Pont found the presence of PFOA in local water supply, and the levels were 3 times of its internal safety limit. Du. Pont declined to make the information public. Du. Pont’s scientists understood that the landfill drained into Dry Run Creek and found a higher concentration of PFOA, but did not disclose this fact. 1993 The supplier ceased production of PFOA. Instead of using an alternative compound, Du. Pont built a new factory to manufacture the substance for its own use. 2000 Du. Pont developed an alternative to PFOA, but the discussions at the corporate headquarters decided against it, because of the PFOA’s huge annual profit of $1 billion. 2001 2013 Du. Pont requested a gag order to block Bilott from providing information about PFOA to the government. After it failed, Du. Pont re-evaluated the safe exposure level to a new threshold to avoid the lawsuits. Du. Pont ceased production of PFOA, and replaced PFOA with an alternative with unknown human effects.
Small Group Discussion ▪ IT'S YOUR TURN NOW! As a business leader, you want to pursue the maximum profit for the whole group. But it may happen that your decision, which you think is correct, conflicts with the whole group’s decision. Will you insist your own statement or let all the people to vote for a result?
THANKS! Any questions?
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