06 Aug, 2008

by Mark Ledden

What could be better than getting people to do what you want, all the time? Nothing, if you believe that influence is the ultimate measure of leadership. We’re not so sure. “KQ” is our way of thinking about a leadership proficiency that moves beyond influence.

Your “ken” is your understanding, or, more generally, your ability to make sense. KQ, or Kenning Quotient, is your ability to act as a purposeful sense maker, either through individual analysis and introspection or through collective interactions and collaboration. My colleagues and I have found again and again that sense-making capacity, or KQ, and leadership effectiveness are inextricably linked.

Contemporary business dynamics have only increased the need for leaders and entire organizations to build their KQ. Globalization of trade and currency markets, game-changing declines in all manner of transaction costs, and the explosion in the amount of information available to businesses and consumers and the speed with which that information moves through markets have all made once reliable command-and-control skills like influence less important. The ability to learn and adapt is now the only real sustainable advantage left, whether you are a manufacturer or a professional services firm.

Developmental Steps: Four Levels of KQ

We can think of KQ as a staircase comprised of four steps: Objectification, Understanding, Influence, and, finally, Collaboration.

Each of these four steps represents a mindset, a way of being in the world that determines how we think about others and how we interact with them.

Objectification means treating people as if they were objects with no interior life of their own. In other words, it means treating them as if they are “senseless” things to be moved or manipulated like a fork or a box or any other object. When we objectify, we do not seek to understand other perspectives because we do not really believe in the possibility of other perspectives. Nor are our own perspectives visible to us as perspectives- they appear as truths or “the way things are.”

Understanding designates the mindset we enter when, at some point in our growth into adults, we accept that others do indeed have an interior life and perspectives distinct from our own, and we begin to see the need to explore those perspectives. Skills like asking good questions and tools that describe personalities and preferences help us understand what makes others (and ourselves) tick. This is the domain of frameworks such as the Myers Briggs Type Indicator that promise us things like “better self management through better self awareness.” When we are oriented toward understanding, our goal is to make sense of people – of others if we are interacting with people in the outside world, or with ourselves if we are engaging in introspection.

Influencing, the highest form of technical interpersonal skill, entails using our knowledge of “what makes people tick” to deploy tailored strategies to get them to think what we want them to think or do what we want them to do. The interior thinking of someone attempting to influence usually sounds something like this: “based on what I know about this person, what assumptions can I make about her or his preferences, strengths, weaknesses, hopes or fears? How can I use that knowledge to act in a way that will make her or him most likely to do or think what I want them to do or think?”

For a person who has become skilled in using MBTI as a tool for understanding, the thinking that accompanies an attempt to influence might go something like this: “I know that people with a Sensing preference like details, practical thinking, and making improvements to things that already work rather than throwing out the existing and creating something new. I know that people tend to tell us what their preferences are by what they say and how they say it. Based on the amount of time Jane the plant manager has spent today talking about processes and specific points of fact, I conclude that Jane has a sensing preference. Therefore, as I try to persuade Jane that redesigning the layout of the entire shop floor is necessary, I will make my case by initially introducing Jane to a robust set of process improvement statistics developed in real-world pilots before turning the conversation to the idea of changing the layout.”

Make no mistake, influencing is a powerful skill and one any effective leader must possess. It is, however, a technical rather than adaptive skill because influence is all about getting the other person to change and nothing at all about changing ourselves or our own way of making sense. Influence implies an orientation toward problem-solving. In other words, the “influencer” is focused on understanding the problem the other person represents for her or him and deploying a strategy to fix or solve that problem.

Collaboration is a fundamentally different mode of being than influencing, because it springs from a different mindset. Whereas influence is all about trying to figure out how unilaterally to solve the other person, collaboration assumes that people are sense-makers and that any shared effort to resolve a situation or problem must begin by making people’s different ways of making sense visible to both parties. One way of thinking about this is to extend a metaphor popularized by the Harvard Negotiation Project. They say that successful negotiating requires simultaneously being “down on the floor” in the dance that is the negotiation and “up on the balcony” looking down at the entire dance.

We agree, adding only that true collaboration requires not only getting up on the balcony yourself but also getting the other person up on the balcony with you so that both parties can see the sense-making (e.g., what is it that you believe and what is the data you are basing that belief on?) of both parties. Collaboration, therefore, does not seek to make sense of the other person (Understanding), nor does it seek to make sense for the other person (Influencing). Instead, it seeks to make sense with the other person. Making sense with someone is an adaptive rather than a technical skill because its objective is learning rather than winning and it requires an openness to changing our own way of looking at a situation or problem.

Axes of growth: Curiosity and Transparency

Moving up the KQ staircase requires developing two characteristics that turn out to be essential for managing, leading, coaching, and conflict resolution: curiosity and transparency. Curiosity about ourselves is introspection. Curiosity about others is exploration. Objectification stifles both of these forms of curiosity. What would be the point of exploring someone else’s perspective if the possibility of someone else having a different perspective has no reality for you? Likewise, if a fundamental tenet of your own belief system is that people acting in their own self interest is a law of nature as certain an immutable as gravity, why would you question it or explore its validity?

Understanding, which takes as its goal figuring out what makes others (and you yourself) tick clearly requires much more curiosity. Influencing implies even greater curiosity, although the only change here is in the number of things one is curious about, not the kind of curiosity that is in play. We are curious not only about what makes people tick but also about how to leverage that understanding to get what we want.

Curiosity in the mode of collaboration is different from the kind of curiosity that activates efforts to understand or influence. Here, curiosity represents not just a desire to know but also openness to discovery, change, and growth. We are curious not just about the other person’s perspective and the effectiveness of the various techniques at our disposal to reshape that perspective, we are curious about the outcome of the interaction. We move forward knowing what we know, wanting to know what the other person knows, and open to the possibility that our own sense making may change once we have the benefit of clearly seeing both perspectives side by side.

Objectification tends to suppress transparency, our ability and willingness to show our sense-making to another person, in much the same way that it stifles curiosity. Why would you show your thinking to an object? What would be the use? Similarly, people operating in a mode of objectification typically struggle to “see” their own sense making. They cannot “show” their beliefs and assumptions even to themselves, let alone others. An assumption, for a person unable to move beyond objectification, is reality – the way things are.

Because seeking understanding is predicated on the ability to recognize that there is “something” inside others (and ourselves) that can be not just experienced but explored and understood, it implies an ability to show more of our sense making to ourselves. What we are willing to show others increases yet again when we attempt to parlay understanding into influence. We are willing to show what we believe, packaged in whatever way we think will be best received. What we do not show, typically, when we influence is our strategy for the conversation. For instance, we might well try to prepare someone for negative performance feedback by talking first about her or his strengths, thinking that covering the positives first will put the other person more at ease and make them more open to the difficult message to follow. It would be extremely unlikely, however, for someone deploying this strategy to say “how about if we start off with the good news so that you will be more comfortable and more open to the bad stuff I have to tell you?” We would not show our strategy to the other person in this way because we know instinctively that they would reject it. Collaboration requires making visible not just what we know and how we know it but also our strategy for the conversation.

Because true collaboration is certain about its goals but not about the necessary outcomes of shared sense making, it turns out that there is no need to hide our strategy, which in most cases sounds something like “how about if I show you what I think about this situation and all the data that I am basing my conclusions on, and then you fill me in on everything you know that I am missing, and then we try to figure out together what we should do?”

The Pull of Reflexes Collaboration as described here is not a natural act. As my colleagues and I have written elsewhere, we believe the best leaders in the world, whether shop-floor supervisors, CEOs, school principals or managing directors, have the ability to turn moments of uncertainty and stress into opportunities for adaptive learning. Most of us, however, most of the time, find stress, conflict, fear, shame, aggression, and desire pulling us down, not up, the KQ staircase. Being able to produce a collaborative act of curiosity or transparency when the chips are down, when the stakes are high, when time is short, when we least want to listen, when we are most sure we are right, is a learned skill. Fortunately, we don’t need adaptive approaches to manage every challenge. Many times, influence or even just understanding will do just fine. After all, the reason our black and white, fight or flee reflexes are so strong is that in many cases they are useful. The goal, then, for any leader (or parent, or spouse) is probably not to attempt to live on the mountain top.

What matters is the ability to produce collaboration when our other modes of being simply cannot help.