http://www.dailygood.org/more.php?n=3257

Editor's Note: The excerpt below is pulled from a lesson at www.dailygood.org, a terrific non-profit sharing site.  It’s from a book titled “The Power Paradox” by Dacher Keltner.  Keltner highlights in a new form for me what I’ve long considered my most powerful leadership tool:  authenticity.  Said simply, I’ve always felt that if I can’t see my own weakness I will never be able to get team members to see theirs.  And recognition is always step one to progress.

 “The head of the lab, I'll call him Bob, was determined to bring about the needed change. The lab, which was affiliated with the Department of Energy and the Defense Department, was a place where managers were used to giving orders, and expecting people to follow them. So Bob issued the orders that everyone needed to start thinking differently, to get entrepreneurial and to get creative. And guess what? It didn't work!

So Bob called us in to help them think about a different way to do leadership.

We came in and tried a few experiments. One of them was that every manager, every executive, every leader had to have a 360 degree evaluation. Everyone who reported to them, as well as their colleagues and peers, would evaluate them as leaders. Each manager would then receive his or her combined evaluation. And Bob’s team would also evaluate him.

After this was done, they gathered the whole team together -- it was about 100 of the top leaders of one of America's nuclear labs.

Bob stood up and read his evaluation out loud. It was not pretty. There were lots of problems and weaknesses that his team had identified. He had basically flunked. As the 100 top leaders sat there, listening to Bob read his report, the place was absolutely quiet.

Then Bob said, "I'm going to post this outside my office. Then I’ll be getting to work on following these recommendations and changing how I lead. In three months I’ll be asking my direct reports to evaluate me again, and I’ll also post those results, so you can see my progress.”

He continued, “In these times of change, the only way that this organization, and our jobs, have a chance of surviving, is that we need to make some big changes, quickly. You’ve just seen my personal plan for change. Now I look forward to seeing yours.”

Then Bob walked out of the room. No one said a word.

During the next week every manager in the lab posted their own results outside their doors. You could see people stopping in the hall in front of doorways, curious, reading the managers’ evaluations. And the word was out: everyone had decided individually that they, like Bob, would go through the exercise again in another three months.

Something invisible, but very big, was changing. The power to get things done, which used to be top-down, was becoming “power that is given to us by others.” This power was available to everyone. People started wandering out of their offices, talking to each other, laughing more, having fun.”