hands on leadership – Page 2 – The Conservation Leader

A Model of Assertiveness for Purposeful Conservation

Simon Black –

I am involved in a lot of work with assertive behaviour training, coaching and support for conservation professionals working in the field, in office bureaucracies, in laboratories and in zoos.

The basic mindset of an assertive leader is to think win-win – to keep a strong value for yourself and your needs, but also be mindful and work with the needs of others. if you simply ride roughshod over other people’s interests you will destroy trust and erode support. remember compliance in not the same as commitment. A leader who thinks that a team simply ‘doing what it is told’ is performing at its peak is deluding themselves.

Win-win (Covey 1987) means looking to strongly but fairly assert what is needed to enable the project to succeed – to keep tasks on track and accurate, to keep the team dynamics effective, and to keep individuals developing and performing to potential. of course in the real world many things can compromise this success – money , resources, climate, luck. what you do not need is for manageable things – like your own behaviour as a leader, or the behaviour of others in the team, to get in the way on top of this.

The model which I introduce to people in training and coaching sessions follows four segments of behaviour: Effective Assertive/Responsive behaviours and Self-Defeating Aggressive/Passive behaviours.

Assertiveness Model that I use for training

Assertiveness (Smith, 1975) enables you to access a range of behaviours in the green win/win areas of behaviour to influence others (Coppin and Barratt, 2002). You can show low level assertion by simply giving clear information or instructions. You can you higher level of assertion by giving reasons.

The skills can be learned and practiced.

The trick is to avoid the Aggressive and Passive behaviours yourself and in your team’s behaviour. This will not be achieved 100%, but aim to operate in the Assertive/Responsive boxes most of the time. I describe these effective win/win behaviours as “Above the Line Behaviour”.

Assertive behaviour is consistent with systems thinking. It gives colleagues clear inputs and feedback to allow them to make decisions about how to operate. If we have clear values that are consistent with the purpose of our team and a win/win mentality, we can use assertiveness to encourage people to work effectively with us and together with colleagues (Kouzes and Posner, 1995).

There is much to learn about interpersonal behaviour, and a huge amount to gain form new skills. it is not a matter of psycho-babble and game-playing. Quite the opposite. Assertiveness cuts through all the garbage.

References

Coppin, A. and Barratt, J (2002) Timeless management. Palgrave MacMillan, NY.

Covey, S. (1989) 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Simon & Shuster, New York, NY.

Smith, M. (1975) When I say no I feel guilty. Bantam Press, New York, NY

Kouzes J.M. and Posner B.Z. (1995) The Leadership Challenge. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA

Matching capability with purpose

Simon Black –

Any team needs to deliver the work that achieves its purpose. Getting people up to the right level of ability is important. This capability covers skills, awareness of the work, clarity on the goals and a sense of purpose that enables (i) prioritisation of effort, (ii) decision making and (iii) problem solving.

A recent study in Mauritius by Stebbings et al (2016) identified that operational teams made up of significant numbers of new starters (e.g. seasonal volunteers or incoming professionals) found that those new colleagues only achieved the desired level of performance part-way through the peak breeding seasons for working with endangered birds.

The arrangement for taking on new staff was historical and fitted a plan of when people would be at their busiest. However this study showed that taking people on earlier and training them to a higher level would make them more productive at the busiest times.

Reading:

Stebbings, E. , Copsey, J. , Tatayah, V. , Black, S. , Zuël, N. and Ferriere, C. (2016) Applying Systems Thinking and Logic Models to Evaluate Effectiveness in Wildlife Conservation. Open Journal of Leadership, 5, 70-83. doi:10.4236/ojl.2016.53007.

Consequences of over-management: total cost

It is not often that we get a chance to observe the consequences of management. In this stark case below we consider resourcing.

Insightful satire on resourcing by Erik Meijaard (click to enlarge to full size)

Of course whilst the example given above is ‘tongue in cheek, the message is not – why do we design funding and resourcing in a way that constrains the use of that very resource or constrains the direction and type of work that a programme undertakes?

Clearly the funders set the rules and we as project leaders may have no inflience over those rules. Instead we have an alternative consideration – is it worth our while to chase funding that will constrain or distract us from our work?

The only way we can look at this is to consider the concept of Total Cost. Is the total cost of following a path worth the short term advantage of taking the resource (or work) on? It is similar to considering making savings when building a house. If we cut corners now, will the house be functional or safe in the future – short term gain versus long term pain.

The only plan is to gain knowledge

Simon Black –

Traditional change management follows a linear approach, defining a goal, identifying a plan and delivering to that plan. The process is logical and surely unquestionable. However this is an example of linear thinking, which is rarely the appropriate way to consider complex conservation problems.

Ecosystems, landscapes, habitats, communities, species, populations do not act in a linear fashion, they are much more complex. This means that if you change one thing then something unexpected is likely to happen somewhere else – and what you had intended may or may not happen.

Of course understanding systems can be a difficult thing to do. Instead, managers either resort to ‘giving their view’ on things, or setting success measures based on those views. Having a view on why things are a problem is one thing, but it is better to get knowledge by collecting data (Deming 1993; Seddon 2005).

It is better to define the following:

Purpose is the definition of why we are here, best understood from the species or ecosystem perspective.
Measures allow us to understand what is likely to happen in future if the system (including human community interactions, commercial industrial or agricultural land use, wildlife trade etc) doesn’t change.
Method – can be addressed when we understand the data derived from our measures.

manatee-deaths — Manatee deaths due to watercraft collisions in Florida. Knowing the occurrence level (Measure) can we do anything (Method) to reduce unnecessary mortality of manatees (Purpose)?

Systems Theory tells us that Purpose, Measures and Method are fundamentally linked – it is a systemic relationship. This systemic relationship can either work for you or against you depending on how you set things up.

The paradox is that in this system, change requires no plan. For Seddon, change is simply an emergent property. It can only occur if you set things up that enable people to innovate with interventions in response to the real system of species and ecosystems – what happens.

Any attempt to plan change otherwise is fiction.

Reading

Deming, W.E. (1993) The New Economics, MIT CAES, Cambridge MA.

Seddon, J. (2005). Freedom from Command and Control. Buckingham: Vanguard Press.

When the ‘purpose’ of work is forgotten…peril and failure

Simon Black –

Probably the most fundamental aspect of leadership is to keep yourself and your team focused on the purpose of your work (Black et al, 2013; Black 2015).

Although this might seem obvious, it is actually very easy to be distracted. Sometimes it is the distraction of personal ambition, the needs of stakeholders (including one’s managers), ‘interesting work’ and so on.

Here is a stark example of a lack of focus on purpose (conserving black-spotted turtles) leading to a mess up, exacerbated by (probably) panic and further blatant negligence (reported by witnesses). This did little for the turtles or the people charged with protecting them.

Turtles were rescued from illegal smuggling (purposeful).
They were taken to a release site, the Indus river (purposeful).
The turtles stored in an office so that the release could be photographed the next day (a plausible approach to publicity, but not purposeful).
The turtles died in the bags, or during handling (negligence).
The bodies were discarded into the river (negligence).

All could have been avoided with either:

(i) a night-time release (if animals were healthy / disease free).

(ii) quarantine or pre-release in the pool facility which had been used on previous occasions

Both (i) and (ii) are purposeful – to conserve the turtles.

The opposite to negligence is diligence – leaders and team members must be diligent in their focus on the true and valuable purpose of work.

Read the article here:

http://tribune.com.pk/story/1181317/road-freedom-official-negligence-results-turtles-death/

Further reading:

SA Black, Groombridge, J.J. and Jones, C.G. (2013) Using better management thinking to improve conservation effectiveness. ISRN Biodiversity, Article ID 784701

Black, S.A. (2015) A clear purpose is the Start Point for Conservation Leadership. Conservation Letters. 8 (5): 383–384. DOI: 10.1111/conl.12203

How the last Montserrat ‘mountain chicken’ frogs could save their species

Simon Black –

The “mountain chicken” frogs on the Caribbean island of Montserrat are in a perilous and seemingly irredeemable situation. It’s worth questioning whether attempted recovery is even worth the effort. After all, this species, one of the world’s largest frogs, will have to recover from just two individuals.

Hunting, habitat destruction from the 1995 volcanic eruption, and the arrival of the recent fatal fungal infection, Chytridiomycosis (or “chytrid”), has devastated the population of these frogs.

Rarely has any species naturally recovered once reduced to a few individuals, without some sort of human assistance. The Seychelles kestrel is one exception. Species declines are largely caused by human activity, whether that be through direct killing, destruction of natural habitats, or the introduction of species like cats, rats or the chytrid fungus.

Mountain chicken frogs are surprisingly large. Jeff Dawson, Durrell

The lack of action in these cases was caused by bureaucracy, aversion to risk, politics, misplaced priorities, and professional bias; human rather than biological factors. Thankfully, other examples demonstrate a better way.

Bringing a species back from near-extinction

North America’s black-footed ferret was thought lost in the 1980s until several were discovered in Wyoming, which inspired a recovery programme. The California condor was reduced to 27 individuals sparking a controversial, but successful, captive-breeding initiative.

The Chatham Islands black robin: rescued from a single pair. leonberard/flickr, CC BY

In New Zealand, the Chatham Islands black robin was rescued from a single breeding pair. On Mauritius, once the island of extinction, the local kestrel was considered a lost cause by the mid 1970s and was then the rarest bird in the world, yet decades later the population has been recovered by active management and now hundreds of pairs of birds live free on the island.

These cases required pioneering innovations, such as double-clutching (removing eggs to encourage pairs to breed again), using common species as adoptive parents, and training captive-bred animals for wild release. Leaders such as Don Merton, Tom Cade, Noel Snyder and Carl Jones shared ideas with colleagues across continents, fuelling knowledge and experimentation. Actually getting on with the work is important. For Jones, too many people “talk about conservation…but we’ve got to do it rather than talk about it”.

Rare species are not just an interesting entry in the catalogue of life. They have a function in the natural world. Amphibians are important in controlling insects and other invertebrates. In Montserrat, for instance, some farmers have noticed increased levels of crop pests since the frogs disappeared.

In practice, action first means setting short-term goals. For the mountain chicken frog, this involves moving the female into the male’s territory, building artificial nests, and protecting locations from threats.

The work must also pursue a long-term vision. A sustainable wild population of frogs means that captive-breeding, already undertaken in bio-secure facilities, is not the sole answer. Threats like chytrid need to be understood first to inspire possible solutions. The disease will not disappear just by increasing the numbers of frogs (though frog population is of course critical).

Fieldwork requires painful attention to detail, literally sitting with the animals to prevent disturbances, then monitoring offspring survival, assessing and carefully improving habitats, and moving individuals to new, safe locations. Conservationists need patience and determination to overcome disappointments. They must seek to understand changing circumstances, keep open to ideas and be willing to develop new approaches if things do not go well. Carl Jones suggests that recovery requires about 20 breeding cycles. That means 20 years for species that breed annually. Improved understanding can however, accelerate recovery.

Recent efforts in the US with the California Channel Islands fox restored a handful of surviving individuals to a thriving population in just a decade. The near-extinct Mauritius kestrel bounced back to a free-living population from just four birds. India’s unique pygmy hog was reintroduced after successful breeding of a few animals taken from the wild. Conservation is getting smarter and more effective.

So on Montserrat, people must act fast while hope remains. A sustainable frog population must be a priority. If people carefully use their knowledge, this extraordinary giant, the mountain chicken frog might withstand threats of disease and habitat pressure on its tiny, volcanic island home.

The original version of this article appeared in The Conversation

https://theconversation.com/how-the-last-two-montserrat-mountain-chicken-frogs-could-save-their-species-58681

Celebrating a great conservation leader – Professor Carl Jones MBE

Simon Black –

This week Carl Jones was awarded the 2016 Indianapolis Prize which was instigated in 2005 to celebrate the men and women who have made extraordinary contributions to the sustainability of wildlife.

Carl, the Chief Scientist for Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust and Scientific Director for the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation, received the award for his momentous victories saving species and restoring ecosystems. These are all well documented elsewhere (for example see the Durrell site), but in a nutshell, Carl’s achievements in saving bird, bat and reptile species on Mauritus and Rodrigues account for about 10% of all recovered species globally. His bird recoveries (Pink Pigeon, Mauritius Kestrel, Echo Parakeet, Rodrigues Fody and Rodrigues Warbler) account for 19% of all saved bird species.

For all of his accolades, Carl is most satisfied that, through the award, the importance of these less well-recognised species of Mauritius has been honored.

What is important in Carl’s work, aside from the fact that animals still exist in the Mascarene forests today which would otherwise be limited to a few dusty museum skins, is that he has pioneered a method. Species conservation is about doing it not just talking about it. Hands-on skills are vital, as is a commitment to short-term goals, but always with a long term vision of what could be achieved.

For Carl, leadership is not about the leader, but about leading others in the work, and enabling them to take up the mantle, to apply and further develop skills and techniques. Hundreds of people have been ‘apprentices’ in Mauritius and now work all over the globe directly influenced and taught by Carl. His is a great example of distributed leadership.

It is a pleasure to work with Carl, picking out the do’s and don’ts of conservation management. It was fantastic to see his career of over 40 years recognised for its outstanding achievements. Long may his influence continue to enable the recovery and sustainability of wildlife on the planet.

Black, S.A. (2016) How the last two Montserrat ‘mountain chicken’ frogs could save their species. The Conversation https://theconversation.com/how-the-last-two-montserrat-mountain-chicken-frogs-could-save-their-species-58681

Leaders must focus on ‘what’ & worry less about the ‘how’

Simon Black –

So, we are grappling with the idea that conservation professionals need to be more effective at leadership. This demands a whole new set of skills – an almost overwhelming array of strategic, mental, interpersonal and management techniques. What on earth should we work on first?

The emerging consensus over recent decades in discussions about leadership and management behaviour has emphasised that a leader needs to ‘change the way that they lead’. Although the ‘how you do it’ and ‘what you do’ both contribute to effective leadership, the research literature is overwhelmingly focused on the how (Kaiser et al, 2012). Hunt (1991) reviewed the body of published scholarly articles on leadership and estimated that 90% of them were focused on interpersonal processes. It is also most likely that the majority of leadership developers and consultants have a ‘how’ bias, which may influence the debate. The focus is on how you go about things.

But do leaders know ‘what’ to do? Should we agree aims, develop a vision, inspire people, create teams, empower, engage, delegate, set targets, punish, reward, restructure, enable, measure results, improve services, prioritise, plan or problem-solve? What do these things mean? Which things are helpful and which things just cause problems?

Let’s be clear, our own styles and preferences (hows) are different to each member of out team. We need to be able to adapt in order to interrelate with others. But that may just be the icing on the cake. If we don’t get the ‘whats’ right we will only be deluding ourselves.

But as a conservation leader focus first on what needs to be done:

providing clarity on purpose
developing knowledge (of species, ecosystems, threats and methods)
setting useful and meaningful goals
building robust and practical plans
enabling problem solving and encouraging learning
setting clear roles for people
manage the work (with the people who do it)
adapting plans to suit circumstances

There are also some definite ‘No-No’s’ to avoid. For starters I suggest that you DO NOT do the following things:

set targets (numerical targets DO NOT motivate/focus people) N
blame people for mistakes (its not their ‘fault’ 90% of the time) O
manage people (focus on the work instead) |
make point-to-point comparisons, like this year v last year N
(instead look at the body of data over time). O
!

Get clarity in what you think and what you say. Be straight with people and don’t play psychological games. Once those things are clear in your ahead, work harder of the softer skills – they will make life easier and more fun.

Reading:

Black S. A. (2015) A clear purpose is the start point for conservation leadership. Conservation Letters, 8(5), 383–384. doi: 10.1111/conl.12203

Black S.A. and Copsey J.A. (2014) Does Deming’s ‘System of Profound Knowledge’ Apply to Leaders of Biodiversity Conservation? Open Journal of Leadership 3(2) 53-65. DOI: 10.4236/ojl.2014.32006

Deming W.E. (1982) Out of the Crisis, MIT CAES, Cambridge MA.

Hunt, J. G. (1991). Leadership: A new synthesis. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Management is NOT about ‘Doing it to People’

Simon Black –

A typical definition of management and leadership is:

“Managing: gets the most efficient utility from people & resources;

Leadership: gets people to do things they would not otherwise do.”

IS THIS REALLY TRUE, AND IF TRUE, DOES IT MAKE IT RIGHT?

In a nutshell those previous statements on management and leadership summarise conventional wisdom accrued since 1900, first through either traditional ‘scientific management’ methods or later ‘human relations’ approaches. The latter approach, pioneered by Elton Mayo, was apparently devised to counteract the rigidity and hierarchies of the former. Unfortunately both approaches have the same defective focus – ‘doing it to people’. They are both a reflection of a command-and -control mindset which many would percieve as ‘managerialism‘.

There are two basic reasons for hiring people – to do the work and to improve the work (a tag line which I attribute to the psychologist and author John Seddon). Managerialism involves neither activity – so why do we have managers and leaders? A leader’s job is to enable workers to do those two things and provide a context for understanding that activity.

Improvement comes from understanding the system and making meaningful improvements to ensure better outcomes. ‘Doing it to people’ does not achieve this, but simply adds new layers of new ‘work’ – appraisals, briefing meetings, writing reports, filling in forms. Worse still this work assumes that for people to be effective they need to have stuff ‘done’ to them – like an inoculation for inherent bad characteristics – perhaps laziness, lack of intelligence or (potential) insubordination. This is the darker side to a manager’s mindset.

Whilst most managers and leaders do not want to be working for the ‘dark side’ and genuinely want the better for their teams, they must understand that if they follow the scientific/human relations approach the consequences of their actions are: de-motivation, a loss of dignity, a diminished sense of purpose, and reduction of productivity in their staff. In other words the effect on their team is just as if they actually had a negative attitude towards those people. In other words their staff will not like it and work will be negatively affected.

In knowledge industries, additional contributions to the total cost of this disruption is hidden, for example losses of skilled workers, high staff turnover and recruitment and so on. In conservation projects these costs can be proportionally high and the impact on project continuity and sustainability huge.

The choice is clear: managers and leaders need to find a better way…

Reading:

Hanlon G. (2015) The Dark Side of Management: A secret history of management theory, Routledge

Roscoe, P. (2015) How the takers took over from the makers. Times Higher Education, 26 November, p48

Seddon, J. (2003). Freedom from Command and Control. Buckingham: Vanguard Press.

Counter-intuitive truths about working with people

Simon Black –

Working with people often involves bumping into ‘counter-intuitive truths’ (Seddon, 2003): ideas that contradict everything which we have been taught about managing people.

Leaders therefore need to think seriously about the people they are leading and their needs (i.e to enable those people to get on with the work) far more than thinking about the ‘principles of good leadership’. In other words, think about ‘followers’ more than yourself as ‘leader’.

In conservation, this allows us to avoid problems of working in remote sites (often in close proximity), having multicultural (or at least cross-cultural) teams, working in second languages (or with translation), having multi-disciplinary teams or mixes of unskilled and technical workers, and so on. Here are some of the realities and things to watch out for:

• Don’t ‘do it to people’: understand the system of work first – how work should be purposeful and how the flow of work (the order of tasks) can be made helpful

• Don’t chase things that don’t
exist (like supposed ‘trends’ in data) or arbitrary targets

• Build knowledge, not opinion

• Culture change is not something that you 'do' to people Don’t rely on top down change; take a lead yourself and start small if necessary.

• Teamwork is about Purpose, Goals & Process more than about Behaviour. A conflict between people may not be a personality clash but actually be about work organisation.

• Decision-making can involve people in many different ways. Participation and input from others will only help if they have insight and useful knowledge. It will also be really unhelpful if knowledgeable and insightful people in the team (or local community) are ignored.

• Change can be quick & painless at the right point of intervention (especially if you don’t ‘do it’ to people)

• Doing things that are ‘nice’ to people (appraisals, recognition, involvement), might not be nice for those people – especially if the obvious problems of work are not addressed.

Reading:

Beckhard, R. (1972) Optimizing Team Building Effort, J. Contemporary Business. 1:3, pp.23-32

Seddon, J. (2003). Freedom from Command and Control. Buckingham: Vanguard Press.