(This is a continuing story – please go here for Part 1)
I know that I called this series “Servant Leadership in ACTion”, explicitly using the term ACT, which stood for Associate CIP Team – but ACT is a later construction. We really started this under my term for the group, which I used so much creativity to construct – the Focus Group.
My vision before the first Focus Group meeting was for this group to solve their own problems. In the immortal words of Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, “Kein Operationsplan reicht mit einiger Sicherheit über das erste Zusammentreffen mit der feindlichen Hauptmacht hinaus“, or for us English speakers, “No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy forces.“
Fear and trepidation drove me into the first Focus Group meeting. I’d assembled the Associate Satisfaction Survey results, prepared potential solutions to prime the pump, arranged the conference room. I was trying to control what I couldn’t yet trust.
The survey gave us indicators – ‘I have confidence in my management,’ ‘I feel valued at work’ – consolidated feedback, on forced questions, that could be universally applied, but said nothing about the “why” of the selection.
As the meeting started, and I walked through the feedback charts and graphs, I felt naked, exposed in ways I could not express. The results from the Associate Satisfaction Survey were inadequate to describe the conditions participants faced, and I felt the full weight of their scorn.
Their pain was visceral. The time clock was a significant impediment, even though HR had constructed policies that, at least from the management side, felt generous. One participant – I’ll call her Shelly – had just had a baby. Attendance issues were the wolf at her door, and she responded in anger to what she was facing.
Fred was silent for most of the meeting, only enumerating the policies (which I didn’t really know, being new to the location, and not subject to the time clock).
Shelly was not having it.
The impasse was palpable and felt insurmountable. Yet we could not focus on Shelly’s issues alone – all eight participants had needs, and they represented departments full of other needs.
We moved into my blank slides and abandoned the Associate Satisfaction Survey quickly. It didn’t resonate. It formed a ‘management thinks’ hedge against the ‘I’m feeling’ desperation. But this first meeting was wild. Almost a visceral snarling of a caged animal finally having a hand stuck into their domain, a hand that could be mauled.
I felt the mauling. I was new to the organization, new to the location, and I was a ‘Bosch guy.’ This location had been integrated three years prior, but no change activity or development had been done. They didn’t know the history of Bosch. They didn’t really know how they were contributing. All Bosch was to them was a paycheck and a smattering of logos and platitude signs.
I came in with 25 years of Bosch – knowing the tempo of how it operates, experience with the German culture embedded deeply inside the company even though they try to excise it. It is a proud heritage, even a noble one, one that has stood over 100 years. However, the fact that they did not know any of this was a deep wound that no one had acknowledged.
I started gathering pain points from the participants. Shelly was vocal – but I didn’t let her dominate. It was me typing furiously to capture this initial set. Not just the time clock issues, but others. Two or three slides that I remember. The meeting ended with just open questions on slides and a request to gather more from their departments.
Fred and I, a little worse for wear, said little to each other as we hunkered down for the next storm.
Later Revelations upon Reflection
Shelly needed resolution for the impossible tension between being a new mother and the time clock’s demands. Not a policy explanation. Not optimization. Resolution – which might mean changing the system itself, or might mean something else entirely that could only emerge through genuine engagement with her wound.
I didn’t know that in the first meeting. I just knew my prepared deck was worthless and their snarling was real.
The Inadequacy of “Others-First”
I came into that first Focus Group meeting as an “Others-First” leader. I’d assembled the data. I’d prepared solutions. I was ready to help them solve their problems efficiently so they could be more productive, more engaged, more aligned with organizational goals.
But “Others-First” leadership has no space for the visceral snarling of people who’ve been ignored for three years. It has no response to Shelly’s wolf at the door beyond enumerating policies. It treats wounds as problems to be solved rather than pain to be honored.
The blank slides weren’t a technique. They were surrender. I had to abandon my prepared solutions because servant leadership requires what NYLT calls the EAR model – allowing people to Express their wounds, the leader Addressing and upholding that pain, and creating space to Resolve (not solve) what they’re experiencing.
Servant Leader Lessons
As we moved through the meeting, I felt the stirring of new lessons that were deeply applicable:
Listening – not to gather data for optimization, but because Shelly and the others had inherent worth and wisdom that deserved reverence. Even when that listening meant sitting in the mauling. Even when their snarling exposed my inadequacy.
Awareness – not keeping an eye out for disturbances I could manage, but turning the spotlight inward first. I had to surface my own awful truth: I was the Bosch guy carrying 25 years of corporate culture into a wound no one had acknowledged. My prepared solutions were part of the problem, not the answer.
