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Recently, I have been coaching several frustrated executives who are, in their words, “having a hard time holding my people accountable for results.” I created a simple model, which I call “The Ladder of Management,” to help guide the executive in understanding the requirements for accountability and the appropriate managerial actions.
The Foundation: Work to Be Done
An accurate and complete description of the work to be done is the foundation on which we set the ladder of management. Job descriptions, product specifications, statements of work, and other such documentation clearly define the work to be done. An organizational authority must share this information with both the worker and the manager.
Standards and Agreements
As the employee and manager climb the first rung of the Ladder of Management together, the manager will assign the work, establish the performance standards for the job, and obtain agreement from the person doing the work to those standards. Any expectations must be both shared and agreed upon by all of the people involved. The manager’s role is to negotiate an agreement with the person or people doing the work. It only takes one person to set an expectation or standard, and they may try to judge and punish a person for being a bad mind-reader. This common practice is unfair and ineffective, which is why we require the agreement of all involved at this rung before moving up.
Availability
Managers must validate and allocate workers’ physical presence to do the work. It makes no sense to assign work to someone on vacation or leave. This rung may seem obvious, but it can be a performance stumbling block in today’s global, remote, and virtual workspaces.
Capability and Resources
Managers must next validate the capabilities of the worker(s) who are tasked with the work. Do they have the competency, knowledge, skills, and experience to do the job? Managers must also allocate the resources required to complete the work.
Authority
At this rung of The Ladder of Management, the manager delegates a defined amount of organizational authority to the worker(s) so that they can make the necessary decisions to complete the work, and/or determine the authority boundary within which they know to seek higher-level approval.
Responsibility
Responsibility means that someone has agreed to accept the duty to respond to a situation as they are able. Managers delegate responsibility for the desired work outcome, in line with agreed-upon standards, to the people doing the work.
Accountability
Accountability is neither positive nor negative emotionally, but people may have a triggered, residual emotion toward the word accountability based on past experiences of being “held accountable.” Accountability is an agreement on a time, place, and method for a person to give an account of what they were or were not able to do based on their accepted responsibility. Accountability sessions are learning and recognition opportunities. The manager’s role in accountability is to evaluate the worker(s)’ accounts of how well they fulfilled their responsibilities.
Logical Consequences
The top rung of The Ladder of Management is administering logical consequences based on the manager’s evaluation of the worker(s)’ accounts and final work products. If the work was at or above standards, then the logical consequences are praise, recognition, appreciation, and more. If the work was not to standard, then the corrective discovery process begins by climbing all the way to the base of The Ladder of Management with the worker(s) to assess the root cause of the performance issue, learn from it, and provide corrective actions to increase the odds of successful future performance.
The manager’s role is to investigate the root causes of the outcome.
Was the work clearly defined?
Were the agreed-upon standards reasonable, understood, and attainable, given the actual work environment?
Were the workers available to work?
Were the worker(s) capable and adequately resourced?
Did the worker(s) willingly fail to uphold their responsibility?
Can the worker(s) give an account for the lessons learned and make recommendations for performance improvements?
What is Managing for Performance?
A manager’s primary role is to evaluate and allocate resources to pursue organizational and operational excellence. Managers negotiate, allocate, delegate, evaluate, and administrate at different phases of work. Using the Ladder of Management helps to ensure workers are set up for success and provides opportunities for logical consequences for job performance.
Accountability need not be a mystery. Managers must understand and provide the necessary components that build accountability.
If you might benefit from some executive coaching around using The Ladder of Management or any other executive function issue, please get in touch with me.
Very few business people have any idea what the word leadership actually means or how to use it effectively to help their organization change.
Sorry, leaders, you have been thinking about and doing leadership all wrong. You may have been brainwashed into believing leadership is a more evolved, effective, and humane form of management. Or maybe some guru convinced you that leaders do leadership to followers. You have likely been led astray by people who desire to profit from continuing the failed philosophy of leader-centrism. Anything with “leadership” in the title seems to sell, even if it is just mislabeled management practices or organizationally unhelpful neuro-psychological pseudoscientific nonsense. Leadership and management are not synonymous and are labels for different social phenomena.
In an era of rapid technological disruption, geopolitical instability, and workforce evolution, traditional notions of leadership—centered on charismatic, top-down “great men” (or women) who self-identify as leaders—are obsolete and organizationally toxic. That’s the core argument in a provocative new essay by Matthew Chodkowski, EdD, Co-Founding Director of the Institute for Postindustrial Leadership. Published in the Cadmus Journal, Volume 5, Issue 5, on December 8, 2025, Chodkowski’s piece calls for a radical overhaul: ditching the popular fixation on individual leaders and embracing a “postindustrial” model in which leadership is a shared, interactive organizational change process that is engaged in by “collaborators.” Leaders do not necessarily engage in leadership.
For executives and managers grappling with talent retention, innovation stagnation, and hybrid work challenges, this shift isn’t just academic—it’s a blueprint for thriving in the 21st century. The winners in today’s interdependent, ambiguous, volatile, and rapidly changing business operating environment will be the organizations that become highly adaptable, able to change quickly and with agility. Relying on the leader-centric model of leadership has organizations paralyzed, awaiting the arrival of a great savior leader, while the more collaborative organizations naturally get busy adapting with ease.
The Outdated Leader-Centric Model
Chodkowski traces the roots of modern leadership back to ancient Egypt and to philosophers such as Plato. Still, he pins the current paradigm on 19th-century thinkers like Thomas Carlyle, who championed the “Great Man” theory: history as the biography of heroic figures with innate traits. This evolved into the 20th-century industrial model, where leadership equated to the actions of bosses wielding authority over passive followers. Popular books, from Stephen Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” to Jim Collins’ “Good to Great”, reinforce this by focusing on leader traits and behaviors, rather than the relational dynamics of 21st-century leadership.
The result? A “crisis in leadership” caused by a toxic mind virus that causes a gross misunderstanding of the word “leadership” and an exaggerated overestimation of the actual value of leaders. Surveys cited by Chodkowski, including a 2019 Gartner report showing only half of leaders feel equipped to inspire teams and a 2015 World Economic Forum poll where 86% saw a global leadership shortfall, highlight the fallout: disengaged employees, toxic cultures, and billions in lost productivity (Gallup estimates $550 billion annually in the U.S. alone). Critics such as James MacGregor Burns and Barbara Kellerman echo this, arguing that we’ve obsessed over leaders while ignoring the collective process. As Chodkowski puts it, “We know far too much about leaders and far too little about leadership.”
A Postindustrial Shift: Collaborators Over Hierarchies
Drawing on scholars like Joseph C. Rost, PhD, Chodkowski redefines leadership as “an interactive influence relationship among collaborators who intend and enact real significant changes that reflect their mutual purposes.” Gone are disjointed roles of “leader” and “follower”; in their place are collaborators who conjoin in interactive influence, sharing power and aligned by mutual purposes. This is not mere semantics—it’s a response to today’s realities: flatter organizations, diverse global teams, and problems too complex for solo hero-leaders.
Chodkowski critiques the “leader-follower dichotomy” as a historical error, rooted in perceptual biases like “hypocognition” (our inability to conceptualize beyond hero narratives). He introduces “collaborator conjoinment,” in which individuals psychologically bind to shared goals, fostering collective intelligence. In practice, this means executives must move beyond commanding to co-creating: encouraging bidirectional influence, valuing diverse inputs, and focusing on systemic changes rather than quick wins.
For managers, the payoff is clear. In volatile markets, collaborative leadership builds resilience—think agile tech firms like Google or Spotify, where cross-functional teams drive innovation without rigid hierarchies. Chodkowski warns that clinging to industrial models perpetuates issues such as ego-driven decisions and follower disempowerment, thereby stifling adaptability.
Reeducating for the Future: The LEAD Approach
Reconceptualizing leadership demands reeducation. Chodkowski details his LEAD (Leader Education and Development) program, a principle-based “learning laboratory” for all organizational levels, not just bosses. Unlike trait-focused trainings, LEAD emphasizes unlearning old paradigms through experiential workshops, coaching, and reflection on scientific principles (e.g., behavior as a function of the person and the environment, per the social psychologist Kurt Lewin, PhD).
Participants confront myths—such as equating management with leadership—and internalize five foundational principles and 64 guiding ones to shift mindsets. The goal: develop collaborators who collaborate authentically rather than performatively. Chodkowski reports transformative outcomes, with alumni applying principles to real-world challenges, from team restructuring to cultural overhauls.
Executives might balk at the introspection required, but in a talent war where 50% of workers prioritize collaborative cultures (per recent Deloitte insights), investing in such reeducation pays dividends. It’s not about creating more leaders—it’s about enabling everyone to lead organizational change collaboratively. This approach democratizes leadership responsibility without diminishing management’s authority and responsibility.
The Call to Action
Chodkowski ends with a summons: Usher in this paradigm one collaborator at a time. For businesspeople, this means auditing your own models—are you training mislabed management, such as servant or situational leadership? Are you empowering well-trained, collaborative teams, or idolizing status-seeking, power-hungry individuals who are fighting to be recognized as a “great” leader?
In a world of AI-driven change and generational shifts, postindustrial leadership isn’t optional; it is essential for sustainable success. As economist John Maynard Keynes noted, the real challenge is escaping old ideas that we believe are true, but prevent us from being highly adaptable. Chodkowski’s essay provides the map—now it is up to businesspeople to think in new ways about leadership so that they can develop collaboration as a core organizational competency, before it is too late.
What comes to mind when you think about what a leader does in business? Is leader just another word for a good manager? Does an effective, highly humane, beloved boss automatically qualify as a leader? If you imagine a current or historical great leader, what behaviors qualify them to be bestowed with the honorific title of “Great Leader”? How would you define the word leader in a business context?
I have been wrestling to adequately answer these questions and reconcile my thoughts with the constant AI-generated pro-leader propaganda and platitudes polluting my LinkedIn feed daily. I decided to try to return to the root of the issue and find meaning in this cult-like fetishism for using the word leader.
To understand each other, we must accept standard definitions of words. A word miscommunicates when it lacks a common understanding of its intended meaning. I started my research on the word leader at etymonline.com. The image below shows its historical meaning.
Newsflash: Leaders lead, march at the head of, go before as a guide, accompany, and show the way. Nowhere does the origin of the word leader refer to a manager. All LinkedIn posts comparing leaders and managers, and the goal of a leader is to make more leaders, are nonsense. We have been led astray.
What if leaders have no value in modern organizations except during a fire drill, where the leader leads others to the nearest exit and out of the building to safety?
I already feel Maxwell’s ardent servant leadership disciples looking for their pitchforks and torches to rid themselves of a heretic like me for even asking such a question. Molding heroic leaders out of mere mortals is BIG business, even if it has not led us to the promised land of improved business performance. Leaderists advise us to keep doing more of what has not worked until everyone is a leader. Once everyone is a leader, we will all enter Utopia Inc.
But Isn’t My Manager My Leader?
A dictionary would say a manager is only your leader when they know the way to the nearest fire exit and command, “Follow me!” On any typical day, your manager is managing, not leading. (I’ll pause for a moment to give you time to collect the scattered bits of your blown mind.)
So, back to eymonline.com to learn the meaning and origin of the word manager, which you can see below.
Managing is Horsemanship, Not Leadership
Managers manage, direct, and control. As a recovering former manager myself, I love that folks in the 1560s had pretty much figured out the modern manager’s challenge of needing to “handle, train, or direct a horse.” Managing is horsemanship, not leadership! Now we know why we can lead a horse to water, but cannot make them drink. Leading isn’t managing. Leadership is not good management! Modern managers still appropriately control and direct by administrative ability, just like in the 1570s.
Management and Leadership Divorce in 1991
Joseph C. Rost, Ph.D., was a little-known leadership scholar who published a little-read book in 1991 titled “Leadership For The Twenty-First Century.” In only 220 pages, Rost offered a critique of the flawed understanding of what he termed “Industrial Leadership” and redefined the word leadership to reflect a new leadership paradigm already supplanting the obsolete Industrial Leadership paradigm in the late 1980s. Rost was perhaps the first to announce the divorce of management and leadership. The two social phenomena no longer need to be mentally married as synonyms and must now go their separate ways due to their different organizational purposes.
Rost cites Stogdill’s (1974) statement about the origins of the words leader and leadership in his “Handbook of Leadership”, Bass (1981) repeated the information in his edition of the “Handbook”: “A preoccupation with leadership as opposed to headship based in inheritance, usurpation, or appointment occurs predominately in countries with an Anglo-Saxon heritage. The Oxford English Dictionary (1933) notes the appearance of the word “leader” in the English language as early as the year 1300. However, the word “leadership” did not appear until the first half of the nineteenth century in writings about political influence and control of British Parliament.” p. 7.
Rost quoted James MacGregor Burns’ 1978 book, “Leadership,” in which Burns concluded, “Leadership is one of the most observed and least understood phenomena on earth.” p.2. Burns also mused that if we know far too much about our leaders, we know very little about what leadership really is.
After an extensive review of the available leadership literature in the 1980s, Rost concluded two important things in his book. First, “The reality is that, as of 1990, scholars and practitioners do not know, with certainty, what leadership is. This uncertainty about such an essential question must end in the 1990s. There is no possibility of framing a new paradigm of leadership for the twenty-first century if scholars and practitioners cannot articulate what it is they are studying and practicing.” p.6.
“The second problem with leadership studies,” wrote Rost,” as an academic discipline and with people who do leadership is that neither the scholars nor the paractitioners have been able to define leadership with precision, accuracy, and conciseness so that people are able to label it correctly when they see it happening or when they engage in it. Without an agreed-upon definition, all kinds of activities, processes, and persons are labeled as leadership by scholars and practitioners.” p.6.
So What Is Leadership?
Rost defined the now obsolete Industrial Leadership paradigm as, “great men and women with certain preferred traits influencing followers to do what leaders wish in order to achieve group/organizational goals that reflect excellence defined as some kind of higher-level effectiveness.” p. 91
Rost’s original 1991 Postindustrial Leadership paradigm definition of leadership was augmented by Matthew Chodkowski, Ed.D., Founder of The Institute for Postindustrial Leadership, in 2025 to become:
“Leadership is an interactive influence relationship among collaborators who intend and enact real, significant changes that reflect their purposes.”
21st-century leadership is finally divorced from its common business-law marriage of leadership being good management done by leaders (great managers). Leadership is now recognized for what it actually is: a collaborative organizational change process. As Dr. Chodkowski likes to say, “Unbelievable, but true!”
Who Leads Change Efforts?
So if you have stayed with me this long, you may be wondering, “If leaders have no main organizational role and don’t do leadership to followers, management isn’t leadership, and leadership is an interactive relationship among collaborators seeking to enact significant organizational changes aligned with their mutual purposes, who leads change efforts? There is a new role that is the key to organizational adaptability. The role of collaborator. This requires another click to etymonline.com and the development of many new skills.
Interactive relationships, meaning non-coercive and multidirectional influence, are formed by collaborators (people working together) who align a significant change effort with their mutual purposes. This collaboration in action is leadership.
Collaboration is an essential skill, yet it is often lacking in organizations that still cling to the obsolete Industrial Leadership paradigm based on leader centrism and command and control. In brief, researcher Paul W. Mattessich, Ph.D., defined collaboration in his 2018 book with Kirsten M. Johnson, “Collaboration: What Makes It Work,” as: “a mutually beneficial and well-defined relationship entered into by two or more organizations to achieve common goals. The relationship includes a commitment to mutual relationship and goals; a jointly developed structure and shared responsibility; mutual authority and accountability for success; and sharing of resources and rewards.” p. 5.
While Rost and Mattessich were unaware of each other’s research, you can see the unity of their thinking. Mattessich was focused on different organizations collaborating, but in personal conversations with me, he agreed that the definition remains valid when applied at the individual organizational level as well. We replace the word organizations with people.
Developing collaboration as an organizational competency is critical to create a highly adaptable organization that can withstand the impacts of today’s increasing rate of disruptive changes. The most highly adaptable organizations are the most likely to survive, and so it is critical to adopt the Postindustrial Leadership paradigm and stop wishing for a mythical heroic savior leader to deliver us. We do not need more leaders; we need more highly competent collaborators.
While Mattessich identifies 22 keys to collaboration success, I tend to focus my consulting and organizational training efforts on the core 7Cs of Collaboration.
Leaders lead. Managers manage. Collaborators collaborate. Who initiates an organizational change process? For a long time, I have been trying to redefine the word leader to add a business usage definition, which would make the leader’s function a temporary role that could be assumed by anyone who envisions a possible organizational change and initiates persuasive dialogues to lobby and influence others, leading them to support the leader’s envisioned change. After many LinkedIn posts, a couple of blog articles, and conversations with Matthew Chodkowski, Ed.D., I have come to appreciate the futility of my efforts to save the word leader. Leader, as a word, has little value in the business context. It is too overused and misdefined. It connotes status, power, authority, management, and even godlike kingship. Everyone believing they are responsible for serving as a leader prohibits effective collaboration.
I am mentally dating the word innovator as the temporary organizational role for a person with an idea for a significant organizational change to assume. I do not know if I will become professionally married to it yet, but it certainly looks promising. Below is the result from my final visit to etymonline.com.
So What’s the Point?
As Chodkowski writes in his “Lead Foundations” program, “Management is about reducing complexity and increasing stability. Leadership is about increasing change and reducing complacency. Complexity requires management. Change requires leadership.” p. 165
“No company has the luxury of having leaders who do not manage. But: No company should tolerate managers who do not understand leadership.” p. 166. Chodkowski also writes, “Managers must develop competencies based on the traditional functions of management (planning, organizing, directing, coordinating, and controlling). Controlling means: measuring, testing, or verifying by evidence or experiments, and adjusting as needed to achieve the desired outcomes.
“Collaborators must develop consciousness based on the contemporary Postindustrial paradigm of leadership (profound principles, mutual influence, and mutual purpose.” p. 167.
“A person’s leadership paradigm informs his or her management philosophy–not the other way around. Leadership principles influence management practices.” p.167.
Internet legend has it that Albert Einstein once said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used to create them.” Continuing to follow the leader-centric train will continue to lead us to a frustrated future destination. Adopting the Postindustrial leadership paradigm and internalizing foundational principles allows people in today’s organizations to become highly adaptable and out-change their competitors. If we understand each role’s required skills and behaviors in the change process, we can collaborate to co-create our desired futures.
See Ya Later Leader! We Cannot Afford To Follow You Anymore
Goodbye, leader. It’s been nice knowing you. Let me know if you smell smoke, and I’ll follow you out the door. Otherwise, we have to work together collaboratively to change the future before it becomes an unsuccessful present.
I apologize if I ruin your future LinkedIn scrolling pleasure, because once you change your leadership paradigm, you will see how much nonsense is pawned off as wisdom.
Please contact me if you want to explore changing your leadership paradigm so you can begin future-proofing your career and organization.
Certification of Human Creation: This post is written by its author without the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) unless specifically noted. AD Growth Advisers Inc. is the sole copyright holder and reserves all rights to its use and prohibits the unapproved use for AI learning or content creation without prior permission from the copyright holder.
In today’s hypercompetitive business landscape, organizations often focus on optimizing processes, cutting costs, and leveraging technology—yet many overlook their most critical asset: human relationships. Poor workplace dynamics cost companies billions annually in lost productivity, employee turnover, and stalled innovation. Enter Relational Quality Control (RQC), a systematic approach to cultivating high-performing teams by treating relationships as strategic assets. For businesspeople, RQC isn’t just about “soft skills”—it’s a data-driven framework that drives measurable outcomes.
What Is Relational Quality Control?
Relational Quality Control (RQC) applies psychology, sociology, neuroscience, and industrial quality management principles to human interactions. As manufacturers inspect products for defects, RQC empowers managers to identify and resolve relational inefficiencies proactively. The goal is to create a culture where trust, collaboration, and accountability become embedded in daily operations. Research by Gallup and others has consistently shown that the most critical relationship that must be healthy for people to sustain engagement and performance is the direct interpersonal relationship between the manager and employee.
Consider Toyota’s famed kaizen philosophy, which prioritizes continuous improvement. RQC applies this mindset to interpersonal dynamics, ensuring relationships are regularly assessed and refined. The result? Teams that communicate seamlessly, resolve conflicts constructively, and align around shared objectives—key drivers of organizational agility.
Why RQC Matters for Businesspeople
Reduced Turnover Costs: Replacing employees costs 1.5–2x their annual salary. RQC addresses the top reasons employees quit: poor management and toxic cultures.
Faster Decision-Making: Teams with high relational quality share information freely, avoiding silos that delay critical choices.
Innovation Acceleration: Psychological safety, a cornerstone of RQC, encourages risk-taking and creative problem-solving.
The 7 Core Behaviors of RQC-Driven Management
1. Build Trust Through Transparency and Consistency
Trust is the currency of effective management and collaborative change leadership. Without it, even the most talented teams underperform.
Actions:
Publish Decision-Making Criteria: When introducing a new policy, explain the data and stakeholder inputs that shaped it. For example, if shifting to hybrid work, share employee survey results and productivity metrics that justified the change.
Create Reliability Rituals: Hold weekly “priority alignment” meetings to review commitment progress. Communicate revisions promptly if deadlines shift.
Protect Confidentiality: Use encrypted tools for sensitive discussions and never disclose personal challenges employees share.
Business Impact: Trusted managers see less absenteeism and higher customer satisfaction scores.
2. Foster Open and Active Communication
Miscommunication and misunderstandings are organizational inefficiencies. RQC turns dialogue into a strategic tool.
Actionable Strategies:
Implement The“No Surprises” Rule: Require project stakeholders to flag risks in real-time.
Conduct “Pre-Mortems”: Ask teams: “What could go wrong before launching initiatives?” This surfaces concerns early.
Leverage Asynchronous Updates: Use videos or bullet-point emails to align remote teams without endless meetings.
Business Impact: Companies with strong communication practices are likelier to outperform peers.
3. Demonstrate Empathy and Emotional Maturity
Empathy isn’t about coddling. Empathizing is understanding what drives each person and recognizing and valuing different subjective perceptions.
Actions:
Map Motivational Profiles: Use tools like The Reiss Motivation Profile® to create compatible workgroups and to tailor assignments to employees’ passions.
Host “Walk in My Shoes” Sessions: Have executives spend a day shadowing frontline staff to grasp daily challenges.
Normalize Mental Health Support: Partner with mental health providers to offer counseling and model work-life balance by avoiding late-night emails. Make it Okay to admit you are not feeling Okay and encourage seeking support to feel emotionally better.
Business Impact: Empathetic organizations report lower burnout rates and higher productivity.
4. Demonstrate Integrity
Act in ways that are consistent with your espoused beliefs and values. Always walk your talk.
Actions:
Publicly Admit Mistakes: When a product launch falters, conduct a transparent post-mortem instead of blaming external factors. After-action reviews are profitable learning opportunities, and the organization has already paid the price to take advantage of them.
Tie Bonuses to Ethical Metrics. Reward people for achieving goals the “right” way. Ethical shortcuts and expedient actions are not allowed or rewarded.
Reject Toxic 24/7 Culture: Discourage allowing people to compensate for inefficient systems or understaffing by overtime or weekend work.
Business Impact: Ethical companies have a history of outperforming competitors.
5. Prioritize Reciprocal Commitment
Loyalty is a two-way street. Invest in employees, and they’ll invest in you.
Actions:
Co-Create Career Paths: During reviews, ask, “What skills do you want to develop in the next six months?” Then, fund relevant certifications.
Offer “Innovation Sabbaticals”: Allow top performers to spend 10% of their time on passion projects aligned with company goals.
Business Impact: Companies with strong learning cultures tend to enjoy higher retention.
6. Recognize and Reward Contributions
A simple “thank you” can boost engagement.
Actions:
Gamify Recognition: Use platforms like Bonusly to let peers award redeemable gift points.
Celebrate Failure: Host quarterly “Best Lesson Learned” awards for people who took smart risks but missed targets or obtained unexpected outcomes.
Personalize Rewards: Offer high performers choices like extra PTO, conference tickets, or charitable donations in their name.
Business Impact: Recognized employees are 4x more likely to go above and beyond.
7. Address Conflicts Proactively
Unresolved conflicts are estimated to waste 2.8 hours or more per employee weekly.
Actions:
Train Mediators: Certify managers in proven mediation techniques to resolve disputes fairly or hire professional outside mediators.
Adopt AI Sentiment Tools: Use platforms like Culture Amp to detect team friction through survey analysis.
Document Patterns: Track conflicts in a CRM-style system to spot recurring issues (e.g., interdepartmental resource battles).
Business Impact: Teams that resolve conflicts swiftly deliver projects faster.
Implementing RQC: A 90-Day Roadmap
Deploying an RQC strategy will require senior executive support and learning and development resources. Here is a sample approach:
Week 1–4: Audit current relational health via anonymous surveys.
Week 5–8: Train managers on 2–3 high-impact RQC behaviors.
Week 9–12: Pilot RQC in one department, measure KPIs (e.g., retention, project velocity), and refine.
Relational QC: The Bottom Line
Relational Quality Control isn’t a feel-good initiative—it’s a performance multiplier that benefits businesses. By institutionalizing these seven behaviors, businesspeople can build organizations where talent thrives, innovation flows, and loyalty becomes a competitive edge. In an era where automation handles tasks, human connection remains the ultimate differentiator. The question isn’t whether you can afford to invest in RQC but whether you can afford not to.
Start today: Pick one behavior to refine this quarter, measure its impact, and scale what works. Your future ROI will thank you.
Note: The products and vendors included in this post are used as examples. Mentioning or hyperlinking to outside products or vendors does not imply endorsement by the author or AD Growth Advisers Inc.
“What am I going to do?” is a common question frustrated coaching clients ask.
My go-to strategy is:
Devise a plan you think has a chance of succeeding.
Create safe-to-fail small experiments to test your approach.
Learn from the results of your experiments.
Adapt your plan based on your learning. In short, you’ll manage your way through it. This process has been how humans have adapted to and overcome change since their beginnings.
You can feel stuck and indecisive because we tend to value not losing something more than gaining something. Some clients find working through the various possible scenarios helpful when they are at a crossroads.
Here are six common outcomes from any decision to take action:
Things get better in expected ways. The situation improves along anticipated lines, following predicted patterns or meeting planned objectives. This could mean steady, incremental progress or achieving specifically targeted goals.
Things get better in unexpected ways. Positive outcomes emerge through unforeseen paths or produce additional benefits beyond what is initially envisioned. This could include fortunate side effects or serendipitous developments.
Nothing happens, and no change. The status quo remains unchanged, either because no action was taken or because any actions have had no meaningful impact on the current state.
Things get worse in expected ways. The situation deteriorates in ways that could have been anticipated, following known risks or vulnerabilities. This might involve predicted challenges materializing or known weaknesses being exposed.
Things get worse in unexpected ways. Adverse outcomes arise from unforeseen circumstances or produce additional problems beyond what was initially considered. This could include unpredicted complications or cascading failures.
Mixed Better/Worse Outcomes. The outcome includes positive and negative elements, which could affect different stakeholders in varying ways or produce contradictory effects that resist simple categorization.
The key is estimating the likelihood of each potential outcome, the tolerance for that outcome, and the ability to respond secondarily if an outcome occurs.
The late James MacGregor Burns, Ph.D. wrote in his seminal 1978 book, Leadership, “If we know all too much about our leaders, we know far too little about leadership. We fail to grasp the essence of leadership that is relevant to the modern age and hence we cannot agree on the standards by which to measure, recruit, and reject it… Leadership is one of the most observed and least understood phenomena on earth.” p. 2.
A search of Merriam-Webster’s Online English Dictionary does not offer a business use case for the word leader.
We have allowed the words management and leadership and leader and manager to become synonymous when they are descriptions of different phenomena.
Harvard Professor Barbara Kellerman, Ph.D. wrote in her 2012 book, The End of Leadership,
“Hero-leaders are part of our collective psyche—they serve a psychological purpose. Mythologist Joseph Campbell wrote, “Freud, Jung, and their followers have demonstrated irrefutably that the logic, the heroes, and the deeds of myth survive into modern times.” Freud certainly was fixated on both leadership and followership, convinced not only that “the leader of the group is still the dreaded primal father,” but that the group itself, all groups, long for a strong leader. “The group,” he maintained, “has an extreme passion for authority”; and individuals have “a thirst for obedience.” Similarly, Jung developed a heroic archetype, a hero-leader who appears and reappears, everywhere, throughout human history.” p.3.
Burns and Kellerman both approach leadership from a political science perspective. The governmental context greatly influences their leadership paradigms and keeps them locked in a leader-follower relationship. One must contemplate the different organizational and role requirements of business and government to differentiate between the two distinct contexts.
In 1991, a little know researcher, Joseph C. Rost, Ph.D., a contemporary of Burns, published his book, Leadership For The Twenty-First Century. Rost offered a scientifically derived re-definition of leadership that dramatically changed the leadership paradigm for industrial to postindustrial. Rost defined leadership as, “an influence relationship among leaders and followers (later revised to collaborators by Matthew Chodkowski, Ed.D., Founder, of The Institute for Postindustrial Leadership at the University of Indianapolis.) who intend real changes that reflect their mutual purposes. p. 102. Chodkowski explains more at https://youtu.be/gOAn3huShys
Leadership is not synonymous with good or effective management. Leadership is nearly synonymous with collaboration. Leadership is a change-focused collaborative relationship among collaborators.. A postindustrial leadership paradigm creates clearly defined organizational roles and responsibilities which can be trained and developed.
We have an opportunity to clarify between manager and leader and between the distinctly different social phenomena of management and leadership and help our commercial organizations to evolve past the obsolete hero-worship of leaderism.
Leaders are not a more evolved or desirable aspirational elevation of managers. They each serve different roles of different situational value.
Managers are responsible for the ongoing organizational governance and administration. Managers seek organizational and operational excellence through the organization’s value-creation system.
A leader is a naturally willful person who is sensitive to and intolerant of feelings of dissatisfaction with the current or anticipated future situation. A leader can exist anywhere in an organization. A leader must be curious to explore situations to understand how they might alter them in ways the leader believes to be desirable. A leader must be courageous to voice their perspective in an influential way. A leader must be committed to the political process of persuasion and influence to win others over to their way of thinking. Leaders must be culturally savvy to navigate the system they wish to change successfully. A leader is wise to be self-aware of their cognitive biases and blind spots. A leader leads others to enact their envisioned innovations or changes.
A collaborator is a person, empowered by management to episodically collaborate with others using mutual influence to enact significant changes aligned with their mutual purposes. If there is no sensed dissatisfaction with the current or envisioned future Warren ting a significant change, then there is no organizational need for leadership and management will provide continuity of operations.
In a business context, leaders do not do leadership to followers. Collaborators do leadership together to enact real changes.
When one clearly defines the appropriate roles of managers and leaders, they can train and practice the required skills to create collaborative change leadership as an organizational competency. They will no longer worship at the Leaderist alter and will not rest in the unrealistic hope of a heroic leader riding into the C-Suite on an armored war unicorn to save the mere followers from disruptive changes caused by a complex and unknowable future.
Researchers and scholars have been trying to understand how we make sense of our experiences for ages. Chris Argyris and Donald Schoen created the ladder of inference model to describe human decision-making. This model shows how we become consciously aware of available data and attribute meaning to that data, ultimately influencing our actions. For example, let’s say you observe the weather widget on your phone, which indicates that the outdoor temperature is 100 degrees Fahrenheit. You might interpret this data as meaning that it is very warm outside. As you continue to climb the ladder of inference with this now meaningful data, you may conclude that it is too hot to go outside because you believe it will make you very uncomfortable. Since feeling uncomfortably hot is undesirable and being in a cooler temperature is more pleasurable, you decide to stay inside. This process occurs frequently throughout our days. We need to recognize that we have the ability to consciously choose to reassess our subjective interpretation and meaning of the data as we go up or down the rungs of the ladder. For instance, if we were in the Mojave Desert where temperatures regularly exceed 120 degrees Fahrenheit, then 100 degrees may seem comparatively more inviting for outdoor activities.
What is a ladder of inference made of?
Our values form the rungs of our inference ladder. They influence our selective perceptions, judgments, attention, emotions, and actions. Based on the studies of Prof. Steven Reiss, Ph.D., there are sixteen basic human needs that we all naturally value. However, what sets us apart as individuals is the way we prioritize these needs and the quantity necessary to achieve temporary satisfaction. Our values play a crucial role in our conscious awareness.
We naturally are consciously aware of what we value or what matters most to us personally. We tend to ignore things we do not value. So, if we look at the data pool our ladder of inference rises out of, we are much more likely to focus on data that aligns with our values and ignore conflicting data. Some refer to this natural tendency as a preference or bias. But, as you will see from this brilliant infographic below from visualcapitalist.com, we have many built-in biases that influence our sense making processes and memories.
Advocates of the ladder of influence advise to try to never climb any higher than you must to form an appropriate response. The higher we mentally climb up the ladder, the more removed we become from the actual data.
Testing our inferences
Consultant Richard Schwarz offered a simple series of questions that we can use to test the validity of our inferences.
What data am I considering and not considering?
What is the simplest and most generous way to explain this data?
What are the likely consequences if I act on my inference as if it is true? What are the likely conequences if I act on my inference as if it is false?
How can I test the validity of my inference?
What is a wise response to my inference?
Now, the biggest question: What about this data matters most to me? This step asks you to consider your values.
We often use our inferences to tell us a story that we believe is true to explain or make sense of whatever we are thinking about or experiencing. Using the ladder model can help us to consider the possibility that there are other possible explanations for the data or that our story is incomplete or wrong.
We forget we wear glasses
We view everything we see and think through the lens of our values. We use our values so instantaneously that we often are unaware that we are making value judgments. It’s like we forget we are wearing our sunglasses indoors until we finally realize the room is darker than it should be. Our values are our primary filter to sort out what data we notice and what we ignore. This is why our values are our foundational framework used to create the ladder of inference.
What matters to me?
We naturally know what matters most to us based on our values, but we may not be able to rationally prioritize our values. We also may find it difficult to communicate our values to other people, especially if they have opposite values. Professor Reiss addressed this issue by creating the Reiss Motivation Profile®. This tool measures how you prioritize the sixteen basic human values and how intensely you experience these values compared to other people. Armed with this critical values data, you can better understand how you choose the data you notice and how your values influence your judgment at each rung of the ladder of inference. The data represents what information is available to consider, and your values predict why you will be motivated to notice some data and ignore other data.
Everyone uses a different ladder
Everyone uses a different ladder of inference created out of their values system. This is why we each have different perspectives, inferences, opinions, and conclusions. Ignorance of the fact that we each experience a different subjective version of reality in near real-time causes frustration, interpersonal conflicts, and reduces the effectiveness of collaboration.
Dialogue is our most effective means of understanding another person’s ladder and explaining our own. We cannot assume our inference is the only possible explanation for the data we encounter. The view is likely very different a few rungs up on someone else’s ladder of inference. Multiple perspectives can conflict and yet all be true or at least believable. It is unwise to believe one person’s viewpoint is the only way to make sense of the true story. Before you try to collaborate, talk about each other’s values and then invite everyone to use their ladders to share their version of the story that makes sense to them.
“If you want to be the boss, you must deal with a lot of sh#t!” said my usually reserved Dad, who was then President of Dix Enterprises, Inc., a mid-sized athletic equipment reconditioning company. I worked with my Dad the month before I started graduate school, and I had asked him what it was like managing a business.
Now it’s many years later, and I am President of AD Growth Advisers Incorporated. I have worked for many companies, and I have consulted for even more. I can honestly say that my Dad was right! Every company, no matter the size, is a POOP factory.
POOP is my acronym for:
Problems
Obstacles
Opportunities
People Issues
If you are an executive or manager, you are probably knee-deep in POOP daily. If you do not deal with it, the place starts stinking. Even if you try to deal with it, any aspect can bind up the organization and cramp performance. Executives often don’t know if they need a plumber or a business consultant to flush out their systems.
Whenever we look to make positive changes to turn the fertilizer into fertile ground for business growth, we need to remember the four areas that enable a business.
People
Processes
Technology
Finance
POOP can stick to all four areas and cause severe performance issues. Fortunately, one can use a systematic approach to understand the root cause of the POOPy situation and then can create some managerial MiraLAX® to relieve the situation.
I recently worked with a business owner who was an engineer by training. I reviewed with him a performance formula to help explain what drives businesses. P=f(P1 x P2 x T x F x E)-I. Performance (P) is a function of people (P1) interacting and experiencing processes (P2), technology (T), funding (F), and the working environment, minus interference (I), or what I call POOP. The key point is that performance is a dependent variable, and the rest are independent variables subject to our influence.
If we want to change performance, we must change some or all the other variables while minimizing interference. Changing one variable may also have an unintended negative impact on others.
Fortunately, as a performance improvement specialist, I can help you to assess performance issues and get to their root causes accurately. Then we can co-create strategies to eliminate or control the issues and return your business back to healthy performance.
If you are tired of dealing with POOP alone, let’s have a POOPy conversation and see if we can clean up the mess and get you back to work. My expertise is with people performance problems. I work with highly experienced colleagues at Apeiron Network who are experts in processes, technology, and finance. We can work with you to create a holistic approach to take care of the POOP and allow you to focus on growing your business.
Use this link to schedule a convenient time to discuss your situation.
Reading LinkedIn posts on #leader and #leadership has me frustrated, confused, and more than a little discouraged. Most people have no idea what the words leader and leadership mean. Do we even understand what we are talking about regarding leaders and leadership?
Merriam-Webster offers the following two definitions of the word leader relevant to business usage:
(1) a person who directs a military force or unit
(2) a person who has commanding authority or influence
The next time you see a feel-good business quote on leaders like “the best leaders take the best care of their followers,” ask yourself, do they mean someone directing a force or using commanding authority or influence? Do we even understand what the word leader means anymore? Do we care about its true meaning and creating shared understanding with others?
The word leader has become so overused and misused that it has become so vague as to be meaningless. If two people see someone doing something, would they both identify the activity as leading? Leader can mean so many different things to people that it no longer communicates a shared understanding of what it attempts to describe.
Dr.Matthew Chodkowski, Co-founder of the Institute for Postindustrial Leadership at the University of Indianapolis, fears leader and leadership have both become misunderstood. In a recent LinkedIn post, Chodkowski wrote, “Leadership slogans and clichés are nice; at best, they are harmless; at worst, they are inaccurate. But when pressed actually to define the word “leadership,” it becomes apparent that virtually no one defines leadership and virtually everyone describes a leader. This is because we are under the influence of the obsolete industrial leader-centric leadership paradigm. Still today, so-called “leadership” books are stories about leaders – – and so-called “leadership models” are about leader behaviors.
“Leadership for the Twenty-First Century” by Joseph C. Rost, Ph.D., is exceptional.
We can no longer cling to the industrial paradigm of a leader in a world moving toward the postindustrial paradigm of leadership. Leading followers and following leaders is not leadership. Leadership is an influence relationship among collaborators who intend and enact real significant changes that reflect their mutual purposes. The crisis in leadership in 2022 is not understanding what leadership is. Leadership was never just the leader. Leaders and followers BOTH practice leadership when they become COLLABORATORS through reeducation and personal growth and development. This is neither a “demotion” for a leader not a “promotion” for a follower.”
In a subsequent post, Chodkowski commented on a leadership infographic. He wrote, “Another platitude and misguided cliché. This is a classic example of being influenced by the leader-centric mindset. Do you see how easily the word “leader” produces the mental image of someone good or great – – or maybe even heroic? (We all know there have been unethical, immoral, narcissistic, arrogant, and evil leaders). Interestingly, we do not automatically ascribe the qualities of goodness or greatness to the word “manager.”
Leadership is not a more highly evolved version of management.
We must overcome our obsession with leaders. We must stop making the word “leader” synonymous with “leadership.” When we understand that leadership is an influence relationship among collaborators who intend and enact real significant changes that reflect their mutual purposes – – we will stop idolizing and romanticizing leaders. Creating leaders is not leadership.
There will always be leaders and followers. But leading followers and following leaders is not leadership. We can no longer cling to the industrial paradigm of a leader in a world quickly moving toward the postindustrial paradigm of leadership.”
Why does any of this matter?
Artifacts of the misuse and misunderstanding of leader and leadership have contaminated organizations. We have created a cult of heroic leader worship in companies that limits their success.
It is common to have impossible-to-achieve competencies such as “Lead by example” and “Be a proactive leader” appear in people’s job descriptions and evaluations. How can these vague directives and expectations be observed, measured, and evaluated? Do you just “know it when you see it?”
I am beginning to believe that we have experienced so much ineffective, bad, and sometimes sadistic management that business gurus are trying to rebrand management, governance, administration, and bossing as leading and leadership. A leader is thought to be a more advanced, emotionally intelligent, empathetic, caring, and inclusive person in authority. Billions of training dollars are invested annually to equip people to be leaders and to do leadership. According to leadership researcher Joseph C. Rost, Ph.D., most leadership-centric and leadership development training is mislabeled management training. This training is not bad, but it doesn’t teach executives and others how to do leadership, which is collaborative problem-solving and co-creation activities.
We are teaching people to take command and direct as leaders in a world that has evolved into expecting inclusive collaboration. People’s response to being commanded in the name of leadership is quiet quitting and the Great Resignation.
We need more collaborators and not more leaders
Our organizations have become complex. Operating in a matrix organization reduces the effectiveness of a hierarchical organizational structure with command and control as its primary mode of operation obsolete. Success depends on organizations enacting significant changes with agility and speed. We do not need more leaders trying to be in charge and do leadership to other people so that they will do the leader’s will. We need highly effective collaborators who can work with each other to reach consensus rapidly and then execute changes and innovations, and capitalize on opportunities throughout organizations.
This means executives and business owners must rethink what skills are taught in leadership training and what expectations are placed in job descriptions.
Organizational Skills that Lead to Success
I work with executives and business owners to develop collaboration as a cultural value and organizational competency. Extensive research conducted by Paul W. Mattessich, Ph.D., has identified 22 success factors for effective collaboration. When we think of leadership as collaboration and collaboration as a way to solve problems and co-create innovations, we can start teaching people new ways to work together better.
If you want to increase performance and reduce much of the turf wars and silo defense holding your company back, then let’s talk about collaborating to bring my Working Better Together Collaboration Workshop to your organization.
The next time you read or hear the words leader and leadership, ask yourself, “what do they mean?” Once you develop a Postindustrial Leadership mindset, you will find most leadership conversations actual nonsense. Then you will be ready to collaborate for better solutions.
Donald Clark offered some incredible history and context for the rise of the cult of leader as hero worshipers in his ISPI Conference presentation.
As a collaboration coach, I help workgroups and organizations become more effective collaborators. Unfortunately, many people misunderstand and misapply collaboration and never realize the full benefits of a collaborative approach to work and especially change leadership.
Hearing an organization cough up them
Medical doctors listen to ill patient’s describe their symptoms. The first symptom of organizational dysfunction I listen for is employees’ use of a particular four-letter word during my initial assessments. The symptomatic word is “them.” When I hear a Senior VP of Marketing referring to the Operations staff as “them,” it pings my consulting radar and as soundly as running headfirst into a concrete silo’s wall. Ouch! Everyday use of the word “them” to describe other organizational stakeholders inside or affiliated with the organization indicates that I am probably dealing with a four-letter organization, where collaboration is likely not a core competency. Four-letter companies manage functional verticals and view the organization’s purpose vertically. I typically find turf wars, information hoarding, conflicting priorities, and office politics in four-letter organizations.
Healthy We and Us
The opposite of a four-letter firm is a two-letter organization. Two-letter organizational cultures feature the words “us” and “we” in much of their interdepartmental conversations. Two-letter companies usually have fewer organizational silos and interdepartmental rivalries and conflicts. Two-letter companies have employees who are more unified in their identities and view the organization horizontally across functional areas in the same way as their customers. Silos and swim lanes are rare in two-letter companies and are fertile ground for collaboration to grow and thrive.
Collaboration can be an organization’s superpower
Why is collaboration an essential organizational competency in a highly competitive, complex, and complicated environment? According to years of academic research, collaboration is the most effective way to lead significant change.
Most people misdefine collaboration. Researcher Michael Winer defined collaboration as a mutually beneficial and well-defined relationship entered into by people or organizations to achieve common goals. The collaborative relationship includes a commitment to mutual relationships and goals; a jointly developed structure and shared responsibility; mutual authority and accountability for success; and sharing of resources and rewards. Cooperation and coordination are complementary yet distinctly different human processes from collaboration.
Collaboration depends on establishing and sustaining trust, shared vision, communication, and many other factors. Further academic research has identified 22 essential elements for effective collaboration. Collaboration is a potentially powerful game-changer for organizations that view the ability to be agile and successful in change initiatives as mission critical.
Watch your language
My first organizational lesson in creating collaboration as a competency is to sensitize participants to their language, referring to the other people they work with and their key stakeholders. We try to plant the seeds of a growing “us” and “we” organization while pulling the toxic weeds of “them.” Perhaps I should have my next client make a “them jar” and fine people who use that four-letter word to describe a fellow team member. 😊
There is only “us” in any organization. “We” have to figure out how to protect a unified “us” concept so as not to become distracted by intermural issues. If you are interested in creating a two-letter organization, I welcome a chance to talk more with you. I am happy to share how you can use The Science of Motivation® to improve collaboration. Let’s work together so your employees will work together better.
