Humble Leadership (2nd Edition) with Peter A. Schein
Jan 4, 2024
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The podcast delves into the evolution of leadership values and organizational culture, emphasizing transparency, collaboration, and risk management in leadership. It discusses the importance of fostering openness and trust for innovative solutions and navigating work relationships for success.
Humble Leadership emphasizes values and open relationships over programmatic concepts, rooted in trust and personal connections.
Maintaining level two relationships amid organizational growth prevents siloization and fosters innovation and collaboration.
Deep dives
Overview of Humble Leadership Second Edition
The second edition of Humble Leadership written by Ed and Peter focuses on the concept of Humble Leadership evolving from their prior works. Drawing from 50 years of organizational behavior research and Silicon Valley experience, the book emphasizes values over programmatic concepts, rooted in establishing open and trusting relationships. Significant additions in this edition include a dedicated chapter on organizational culture, highlighting its intricate relationship with leadership and change, entwining values such as Humble Leadership with cultural initiatives.
Understanding Relationship Levels and Organizational Dynamics
The podcast delves into the different levels of relationships within organizations, ranging from negative one to three. It dissects how organizational growth transitions these relationships from personal to transactional, potentially leading to the siloization within institutions. Emphasizing the importance of personal relationships to foster innovation and trust, it explores how maintaining level two relationships amid organizational expansions prevents transactional dynamics that can hinder progress.
Utilizing Relationship Mapping for Improved Collaboration
The podcast introduces the concept of relationship mapping as a tool to visualize and categorize the influential connections within organizations. By assigning relationship levels to these connections, individuals can identify impediments or strengths in their work dynamics. Through unstructured relationship-building activities, like walking or casual conversations, the podcast underlines the significance of personalizing relationships to enhance collaboration and trust.
Navigating Knowns and Unknowns Through Humble Leadership
The discussion highlights a risk matrix approach presented by Peter, categorizing risks into known knowns, unknown knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. It articulates how Humble Leadership is crucial for addressing unknown unknowns, representing unforeseen challenges that require openness and trusting relationships to navigate. It underscores the value of fostering relationships that uncover answers to questions not previously considered, essential for adapting to unforeseen circumstances and fostering innovation.
Ed Schein is a former Professor Emeritus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Sloan School of Management. In 2009 he published Helping, a book on the general theory and practice of giving and receiving helpfollowed in 2013 by Humble Inquiry which explores why helping is so difficult in western culture. It won the 2013 business book of the year award from the Dept. of Leadership of the University of San Diego.He continues to consult with various local and international organizations on a variety of organizational culture and career development issues, with special emphasis on safety and quality in health care, the nuclear energy industry, and the US Forest Service. An important focus of this new consulting is to focus on the interaction of occupational/organizational subcultures and how they interact with career anchors to determine the effectiveness and safety of organizations.
Peter Schein is a strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. He provides help to start-ups and expansion-phase technology companies. His expertise draws on over twenty years of industry experience in marketing and corporate development at technology pioneers. Peter spent eleven years in corporate development and product strategy at Sun Microsystems. At Sun, Peter led numerous minority equity investments in mission-critical technology ecosystems. He drove acquisitions of technology innovators that developed into multi-million dollar product lines at Sun. Through these experiences developing new strategies organically and merging smaller entities into a large company, Peter developed a keen focus on the underlying organizational culture challenges that growth engenders in innovation-driven enterprises.