In my last blog post, I highlighted the importance of competence, flexibility, and a team orientation as key building blocks of change leadership. These are fundamental for a leader to create the environment for positive change and to lead the organization in sustained effective action.

It’s not easy to reach a minimum standard for these characteristics, partly because of a wiring bias in our brains. We each have a tendency toward either our left-brain (analytical thought, logic, science) or our right-brain (holistic thought, intuition, creativity). I am left-brainer – or in the parlance of Myers Briggs, an INTJ. And that’s great for dealing with the logic issues that I am faced with most days.

But leading has as much to do with right-brain functions, particularly holistic thought (seeing systems as a whole) and creativity. We are probably masters of one, but we have to be comfortable operating in either hemisphere. And competence is a trait that depends on the effective combination of the two.

When I joined the ranks of management consulting as a newly minted MBA, I thought I knew the book on business. You know the type – applies every b-school “framework” and “learning” to a client’s problem, without giving enough consideration to whether any of it actually applies to what the client hired you to do.

But I was lucky in that I had the opportunity to work with one of our founders and senior partners on my first engagement, advising a client who was seeking both brand and geographic expansion. I was immediately trying to apply all kinds of frameworks to the issues – Porter, BCG profit/growth, you name it – and thought I was doing a great job.

After about a week, he came to see me and said, “Russ, I’m not quite sure how to counsel this client because I cannot answer some pretty basic questions.” We had a long discussion about context and the relative value of frameworks and models (“hard” knowledge) vs. specific contexts (“soft” knowledge). And he talked a lot about the value of discussion and debate – he was one of our top partners, I was a freshman, but he wanted to have a debate about what we were going to do for the client and why. He emphasized the need to ask questions in order to learn and convinced me – quickly – that competence was an experiential learning process.

I sometimes think people view asking questions as some sort of sign of weakness. Shouldn’t a leader have all the answers? Actually, no. We derive the competence to succeed by constantly asking “big picture” questions rather than just applying a rigid formula. Yes, we need to know certain things before we talk to a potential client or teammate, but we also need to know that we don’t know it all. Here are some of the questions that I try to ask myself at least once a quarter, if not once a month:

• What are the factors that I have to change? Are they strategic, operational, cultural or all three?
• What is really happening in the market? What are our competitors up to? What is the worst thing that could happen to us?
• What are my priorities? What does my boss and my team think I should be doing? Are those the same or is there a disconnect?
• Who are the people, inside and outside the company, that are key for making the journey successful?

The questions are generally the same – it’s the context that changes. And in our technology markets, the context changes at an increasingly faster rate.
Competence is a process, not a state – and certainly not a formula learned in school or found in a book.

In my next post I'm going to talk about why sticking with “formulas” is the very definition of “rigid,” one of the deadly sins of leadership.

Read all four articles in this series:

1. The impetus for change leadership
2. Why soft knowledge matters just as much as the hard stuff
3. Rigidity to flexibility
4. Check the insularity at the door & learn to lead with an outward facing agenda