Olaf Lewitz:
Welcome, it’s an amazing morning in Austin, Texas and afternoon in Berlin, Germany. And I’m here with my friend, Christopher Avery. A friend and mentor and a guide into leadership and responsibility. I want to continue the thing that I’ve started a while ago, a series of video conversations, which I call Leadership Nuggets. Since so much of my work and so much of my inspiration about leadership has come from you, it’s a great chance to start these conversations with you. And I look forward to having even more conversations with you because I know that it’s not going to be done in one.
So how did this whole responsibility and leadership thing start for you? I do not actually know if your focus on responsibility and your curiosity and discovery of the responsibility process started from a leadership perspective or if you started with responsibility and then discovered that it was a “great leadership gift” as your big leadership program is called.
Christopher Avery:
Yeah.
Olaf Lewitz:
So how did that come about?
Christopher Avery:
Yeah, thank you, Olaf. Here we are in our kitchens doing Leadership Nuggets, which makes me want to go over there and get something that I can pop in my mouth. So let’s see if we can deliver some tasty treats here.
Olaf Lewitz:
Absolutely.
Christopher Avery:
All right, so how did it all start? I mean, one of my signature stories and the reason I know so much about responsibility is that I spent so much of my life avoiding it. I’m one of those Americans that spent eight years getting a bachelor’s degree in speech, went to three different colleges, flunked out of my first one. So I was serious about taking life easy.
So what happened was that I finally woke up in my PhD program and became a serious scholar. So I looked at the career opportunities and for some reason, I did not want to be a tenure track professor, I thought that universities were probably the most politicized environments on the planet, so I’d rather work in corporate America. I was working in a little consulting firm, which is where I learned my consulting and training chops and I created a training for IBM. I had befriended a software manager who transitioned into being an education director after working for many years as a manager in software. I asked her, “What gives you knots in the stomach?” and she said, “I wish there was a way to teach software project leaders how to build teams.”
Now, Olaf, this is pre-PMI.
Olaf Lewitz:
Yep.
Christopher Avery:
We’re talking 1990, this is when I had this conversation. So I went off and recruited a couple of my friends in adult learning and my brilliant professor friend who knew the sociology and psychology in group research like this. We started putting together just a simple three-day project team leadership workshop for project software leaders. And first of all, we knocked it out of the park and had a huge business. So that was the beginning of me being in business. I spun out of the consulting firm and started Partner Works, which is now The Responsibility Company.
I was looking for the one thing to typify everything about teamwork and collaboration. When you’re an expert in a body of knowledge, you realize that you have to figure out a way to get somebody else to get the essence of it without caring about all of their stuff the way you do. So I was trying to typify this huge body of knowledge down to a three-day training, down to a couple of nuggets.
Olaf Lewitz:
Yes.
Christopher Avery:
The one thing that I noticed that nobody else was paying attention to was shared responsibility. When teams come together, not even when they gel, but when they just even start to come together and when they’re willing to invest in figuring out how they’re going to do this together, then what’s happened is they’ve already started to step up to something that’s bigger than themselves, bigger than their own job, bigger than their own accountability. And I don’t remember exactly when or where I realized this, but I went “Bingo, that’s it. I’m going to hang everything I do on shared responsibility and I’m going to go figure out what this stuff is.” In terms of human dynamics and human psychology, where does it come from? And how does it get there? And if somebody doesn’t have it, can you install it?
Olaf Lewitz:
Can you download it somewhere?
Christopher Avery:
Yeah.
Olaf Lewitz:
Patch the operating system.
Christopher Avery:
Yeah, absolutely. So that’s where my interest in responsibility really started, it started because of my interest in collaboration, teamwork, and partnering. Realizing that for any of that good collaboration, teamwork, partnering stuff to happen in corporations 30 years ago, you had to overcome all of this horrible structure that the corporation puts in place to keep you from teaming and collaborating.
Olaf Lewitz:
Exactly.
Christopher Avery:
All the departmentalization, the specialization, the individual roles and responsibilities and the individual performance and all of that. So that’s where it started. I was a new PhD and so I still had scholarship chops and I was very committed to being a coach consultant trainer. I was just in a search for understanding responsibility and that’s when I ran into the responsibility project that was producing what I now call, the responsibility process. And that was in 1991, I think, that I was introduced to that.
So I went to a seminar called Money and Year and it was all taught with flip charts using what today you would call … what’s it called? Training from the back of the room?
Olaf Lewitz:
Yep.
Christopher Avery:
Is that it? Well, so back then it was called super-learning or accelerated learning, which is the version I learned. It was all taught with flip charts and the flip charts were hung up so you could refer to all the models. On one of the early flip charts, he wrote the word “lay blame”, then the word “justify”, then a middle line, and then the word “responsibility”. He just briefly explained that when things go wrong, humans naturally blame and tell stories and make excuses and justify. But all of that is below the line in terms of being ineffective and not owning your role in the world.
Olaf Lewitz:
Yes.
Christopher Avery:
That’s being a victim. But above the line is the ability to respond. We all have a place in our mind where we can be creative and generative and we can overcome any problem.
Then they proceeded to throw us into a game and in the debrief of the game, I and everybody else were blaming the instructor and justifying the rules. And the instructor, he just went over and stood next to the flip chart.
That got inside of me in a big way and I said to myself, “I want that. I want to understand that. I want to integrate that into my being – big time.”
Olaf Lewitz:
Yes.
Christopher Avery:
So I said to myself, “I am a big freaking crybaby. I’m smart, I’m ambitious, I’m intelligent and I spend all of this time blaming and justifying why I don’t have whatever I want.” And what if I could just spend a little less time in blame and justify and maybe I’d spend a little more time in that creative part of my mind, that part that’s connected and plugged in and tapping into my genius and my inspiration. What if I could transfer 1% from below the line to above the line every month, every three months? Grow it 4% utilization a year. Wow, that’d be pretty cool. So that was it, I was sold.
Olaf Lewitz:
Awesome.
Christopher Avery:
I already had my doctorate, I’d already seen tons of models of psychology, and this is the most brilliant model of normal psychology I’ve ever seen. So I bought it, hook, line and sinker, Olaf.
Olaf Lewitz:
Yep.
Christopher Avery:
So that’s the origin story.
Olaf Lewitz:
Beautiful. I have one follow up question and this might be a question for a second conversation. But it came to my mind when you started with team building and shared responsibility and one of the questions I get asked most by leaders is, or rather the hesitations that they utter, it’s not actually a question, it’s that it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work when multiple people take responsibility for something. Responsibility needs to be assigned to one person and then that person needs to be held accountable. You all know the metaphor of the single ring-able neck, which is so ingrained in the way that corporations are built, you mentioned that. It was definitely worse in the nineties, but I see a lot of that in organizations today.
A big part of my work is keeping startups from building all of these functions like they have 20 people and already 50 different job titles with vice presidents and whatnot. Where I go like “Why don’t you focus on building products and making and growing your organization? Instead of growing your job titles and growing your egos and growing the different ways in which you cut responsibility into pieces.” Is there a key gift that you could give to those leaders who believe that responsibility needs to be assigned to a single neck or nose or pair of eyes or heart, whatever it is. So that they can start believing that teams owning something are actually so much more effective and greater and much more fun.
Christopher Avery:
Sure. For me, helping a manager understand that teams can be more effective and more fun is maybe a little bit different than the difference between responsibility and delegation or accountability. If I’m trying to help an executive or a manager move into more effectiveness, I think I would help them differentiate responsibility as an internal dynamic of ownership or lack of ownership. From accountability or delegation or performance measurement as an external.
Olaf Lewitz:
Yep.
Christopher Avery:
In my case, I work in a self-organized team, seven teammates, and the discipline that we have, and you know this from Scrum teams that you’ve worked with, is, we start with what we’re trying to get done and then move that down to prioritized goals and then we task it out. And the last thing we do is say, “Okay, now who is going to take what part?” We know who is doing what.
So the only thing that’s different there is instead of a manager assigning who’s doing what, we assign it for ourselves. So for me more gets done faster when a team takes ownership and has the execution conversation among themselves, rather than having some boss think that they know who should do what and assigning it.
Olaf Lewitz:
Yep, absolutely.
Christopher Avery:
You get more of what you’re an expert in, which is what I’m going to have a conversation about some time. So you get more of the invitation.
Olaf Lewitz:
Oh, yes.
Christopher Avery:
You get more of the person showing up because of the invitation rather than the assignment.
Olaf Lewitz:
Yeah, that’s a beautiful idea for our next conversation, talking about the relationship between invitation and responsibility.
Christopher Avery:
Yeah, absolutely.
Olaf Lewitz:
That’s a strong one. Thank you so much, this was interesting and new.
Christopher Avery:
Your welcome.
Olaf Lewitz:
I’m really looking forward to the next conversation.
Christopher Avery:
Me too. Thank you.
Olaf Lewitz:
Thank you.