Uplifting Leadership: How Organizations, Teams, and Communities Raise Performance

Introduction: Uplift

The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low and achieving our mark.

—Michelangelo

How does a giant multinational company turn itself around after seventeen straight quarters in the red? What does it take to transform a tiny developing country into a global economic powerhouse within a single generation? How can you be a top sports team when you’re choosing from the smallest pool of players and have fewer resources than all your competitors? How do you do a lot with a little, create something from almost nothing, and turn failure into success?

These are the kinds of challenges we uncovered and questions to which we found answers when we studied fifteen organizations and systems in business, sports, and public education between 2007 and 2012. We set out to discover how each of these groups dramatically improved their performance against unfavorable and even overwhelming odds. Eventually, after analyzing hundreds of interviews, and writing thousands of pages of case reports, the answer came down to one word: uplift.

In aerodynamics, uplift is the force created by airflow, momentum, and wing design that enables large birds or huge aircraft to take off against gravity. Among people and within organizations, uplift is the force that raises our performance, our spirits, and our communities to attain higher purposes and reach unexpected levels of achievement. This book is about uplift, its effect on performance, and the ways to achieve it. It’s a little word that makes a big impact.

Up is one of the first words we respond to when we are babies. We hear it spoken with a raised pitch. We lift up our eyes and stretch out our arms. Two letters. One syllable. Up.

Up is a direction, the way to get to a place we want to be. It pulls and invites us towards our destination. It is as viscerally inviting as the very first times we heard it when our parents lifted us into their arms.

Up is more of a process than a state. If you feel up about something, you are being optimistic. If you are picking up after an illness, you are starting to improve. We use up when we want to express that we’re making progress towards our desired state—even though we haven’t quite arrived.

Being up isn’t always positive, of course; you can be uprooted, experience upheaval, or feel upset. But in general, it’s better to be up rather than down. If you’re up, starting up, or moving up, you are usually headed in the right direction, and you’re definitely further along than you used to be.

Uplift has three interlocking meanings that are concerned with emotional and spiritual engagement, social and moral justice, and improved performance in work and life. Let’s look at each of these.

Emotional and Spiritual Uplift

Being up is one thing. Getting up is another. It takes effort. The force that moves or holds us up is lift. Authors Ryan and Robert Quinn describe lift as the force that pushes a solid body upwards through the air.1 The inspiration for their book, Lift, is the pioneering contribution to early aviation of Orville and Wilbur Wright. The Quinns explain that before the Wright Brothers famously launched their first manpowered flight from Kitty Hawk in North Carolina in 1901, they built a wind tunnel out of a soapbox to measure the effects of wing design and wind-speed variation on the relative impact of the forces of lift and drag—two forces that their German predecessor Otto Lilienthal had first identified in his ultimately fatal experiments with gliding. The Wright brothers concluded that in order to achieve successful lift in flight, you need the right kinds and combinations of forward motion, currents of air, and a navigation system of wing technology and steering controls. These forces, Ryan and Robert Quinn argue, apply not only to physics but also to personal and organizational change as well.

Often in human relationships, we can get an emotional or spiritual lift. At times like this, we say that we feel uplifted. Powers of levitation and ascension are central to Buddhist, Hindu, and Christian theology. Great myths and true stories have the same effect when they describe people who have overcome adversity, survived ordeals, dramatically turned their lives around, or sacrificed themselves for the sake of others. People felt uplifted by Mother Theresa’s actions to give her life to destitute children of India’s slums, and by Nelson Mandela’s forgiveness of the enemies who had imprisoned him on Robben Island. By enabling us to empathize with other people’s example, such stories about acts of courage, humility, and selflessness inspire extraordinary effort in ourselves.

Uplifting actions and words are infectious; their effects spread out and influence others. We uplift others when we uplift ourselves, and vice versa. We lift each other’s spirits, raise each other up to higher moral ground, and surpass ourselves.

Emotional and spiritual uplift is the beating heart of effective leadership. It raises people’s hopes, stirs up their passions, and stimulates their intellect and imagination. It inspires them to try harder, transform what they do, reach for a higher purpose, and be resolute and resilient when opposing forces threaten to defeat them. Uplifting leadership makes spirits soar and pulses quicken in a collective quest to achieve a greater good for everyone, because we feel drawn to a higher place as well as to the people around us as we strive to reach it.

Social and Community Uplift

Up says things not only about our emotional state, but also about our power and status. If we go upmarket, we are appealing to higher-status customers. Uprisings can overthrow oppressive regimes. And upward mobility improves people’s opportunities and life chances.

The idea of uplift has been a driving force of struggle and improvement within African American communities for more than 150 years.2 All labor that uplifts humanity, Martin Luther King Jr. told us, has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.3 More recently, Barack Obama has written about how he was lifted up from his surrounding circumstances when he attended a magnet school. He in turn now endeavors to uplift the American people as their president.4 Uplift is a collective force that leaders create together to raise everyone’s prospects—especially those with the least advantages.

Uplifting Performance

Uplift’s emotional, spiritual, and collective social powers mean that it also has the power to improve people’s performance and results. It makes individuals and organizations do better than they had before, helps them to outperform their opponents, and inspires them to succeed despite meager resources. Uplift enables people to take off and then stay aloft. The way they achieve this is through uplifting leadership.

Uplifting leadership raises performance by creating spiritual, emotional, and moral uplift throughout an organization and among the wider community that it influences. It draws on and uses many of the soft processes or skills that have made a comeback in business in recent years.5 Countless sources tell us that sustained high performance comes from focusing more on values than on profits.6 Great companies encourage exceptional performance when they inspire a driving passion for the work that their people do.7 Enduring success occurs when we feel that our work is creating emotional and social value—not just financial returns.8 Employees want their organizations to stand for something important, to contribute to something that is worthwhile, and to improve people’s quality and experience of life.9

Improved performance doesn’t just come as a result of a focus on soft processes, though. It’s not just about wishing and hoping, or even about having more emotional intelligence or giving better support. This doesn’t mean that the pursuit of excellence should be hard-nosed, callous, or cynical, either. But we can only realize high performance through hard work. Businesses that go bankrupt ultimately create no social value for anyone. And if people are going to achieve their dreams, they will need perspiration as well as inspiration.

Combining soft skills and hard work is central to sustainable success—not only in the corporate world, but in public services too. Indeed, the public sector offers some of the best examples of soft skills around—not surprising, perhaps, given that this is where some of the best women leaders are to be found. In public education, for example, schools that succeed in the face of overwhelming odds inspire their teachers and students with bold visions and also set impressively high expectations for everyone involved.10 Though leaders in this field insist upon relentless dedication, they know that it cannot come at the expense of burning people out. There is great pressure on everyone to improve, but there is also constant support for the adults in the school to bring out the best in their students. When whole systems with hundreds of individual schools succeed despite their challenging circumstances—and manage to do so over many years, not just one or two—this is because they bring together what other people too often drive apart—pressure and support, passion and performance, the insatiable desire to learn along with the uncompromising demand for success.11

Investigating Uplift

We have more than a few clues, then, about the different factors that produce sustained high performance, especially in circumstances where we might least expect it. But there has been little firsthand investigation of what these factors look like across very different sectors, or of what it is that holds them together.

This is what our book sets out to do: to explain and exemplify the actual practice of what we call uplifting leadership from our seven-year study of fifteen organizations in business, sports, and public education in eight countries across four continents. Details of our multiple case-study methodology are presented in the Appendix.

Our original research question was: What characteristics make organizations of different types successful and sustainable, far beyond expectations?

The cases included in this book had to meet two or more criteria for performing above expectations:

They did considerably more with less in terms of having relatively weak investment, experiencing limited resource capacity, or encountering very challenging circumstances.

They performed better than they had previously.

They performed better than similar organizations or systems.

We concentrated on analyzing organizations and systems that had done a lot with a little, could create something from almost nothing, or had turned failure into success. We also did our best to ensure that none of our cases had obvious records of unethical performance in the way they treated workers, clients, and the community. Indeed, we rejected cases where there was disregard for environmental responsibility in business, lavish spending on players to boost success in sports, or statistically questionable manipulation of achievement data in education.

The organizations we studied had been performing well for some time when we investigated them. But we know that high performance is not a permanent state, even for those at the very top of their game. The performance of many of the excellent companies identified by Peters and Waterman, for example, later plummeted—some of them quite quickly.12 And in How the Mighty Fall, Jim Collins acknowledged that a number of the outstanding companies he had identified in his previous books had not endured.13

Our own work is about enduring achievement, not everlasting success. Many businesses suffered to some degree or other during the global economic collapse of the past few years, and our business cases too were among some of these. One or two of the sports teams fell back a little after our study was completed, though they rebounded again just as quickly later on. Although the high performers in public education have been the most impressive in maintaining long-term success, even they have not been immune to changes in the systems within which they have had to operate.

Analysis of our extensive database on sustained high performance beyond expectations condensed around six factors of uplift and uplifting leadership that together make up a kind of journey in which all of them play equally significant roles.

What Uplifting Leadership Is NOT

Before we introduce these six factors of uplifting leadership, it’s important to be clear what uplifting leadership is not. Many all-too-common approaches to improvement and turnaround actually drag people down rather than elevating them to higher levels of performance.

First, uplifting organizations and their leaders in our study didn’t make it their goal to be at the top. It wasn’t their sole purpose to be Number 1, top of their league, or even best in class for their own sake. They were not driven by how high they wanted to go, or what rank they could achieve as their overriding purpose. Interestingly, the nations that have ranked among the highest on international tests of student achievement, such as Singapore, Finland, and Canada, didn’t get there by wanting to be Number 1, or even in the top five.14

Second, uplifting organizations and their leaders didn’t follow others to the top. They weren’t merely imitating the practices of those organizations that made it there before them, by following the paths they had already taken or by borrowing the strategies that they deployed. Indeed, if you follow the path that others have taken, it is unlikely you will get any further ahead than they have.

Third, uplifting organizations and their leaders didn’t concentrate solely on hitting every milestone along the way. They didn’t just set targets and define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that their people were required to meet, in order to reach every milestone on the way, on time, and on target. Yes, KPIs can often help team members to attain high performance; however, when they feel under excess pressure to meet these KPIs in situations where goals are unclear or the consequences of failing are punitive, people typically adopt self-defeating practices driven by fear of failure rather than ambitions for success. In business, this often results in focusing efforts on quarterly returns at the expense of long-term strategy.15 In education, it leads to narrowing the curriculum and constantly preparing children for tests, rather than actually teaching them how to learn.16

Fourth, uplifting organizations and their leaders didn’t push people to the limit to deliver results in line with imposed targets. They didn’t place undue reliance on relentless top-down pressure to hold people accountable for their desired outcomes. They knew that too much top-down pressure as well as insufficient bottom-up support would hold people down rather than lifting them up.

Last, uplifting organizations didn’t race to the top as quickly as possible in a feverish attempt to beat out everybody else.17 Indeed, those who adopt this fast-track strategy find that they expend all their resources too quickly, and wear people out before attaining their goal.

Uplifting Leadership

So, if uplifting organizations and their leaders didn’t aim to be top, race to the top, drive people on towards the top, set milestones that people had to reach on the way to the top, or try to get to the top by following others’ paths—what did they do?

What the organizations and leaders we studied did do was to engage in a process of uplifting leadership involving six interrelated factors that compose a journey to improbable success. Each of these factors also exhibits some inner tensions between what people conventionally consider to be soft and hard parts of leadership and management—tensions that uplifting leadership welcomes and capitalizes upon, rather than avoids or eliminates.

Together, these combined factors create the process of Uplifting Leadership as illustrated in Figure I.1. They also make up the framework of the next six chapters. They are

Figure I.1 Uplifting Leadership

Dreaming with Determination

Creativity and Counter-Flow

Collaboration with Competition

Pushing and Pulling

Measuring with Meaning

Sustainable Success

We outline each factor before going into detail in the following chapters.

1. Dreaming with Determination

The journey of uplifting leadership begins by defining a clear and compelling dream or destination—and determining how we’ll get there from an unwanted or underestimated departure point. This destination also resonates with or revives people’s sense of their own best identity. The process requires that we set out for a distant and improbably fantastic destination from a lowly, unlikely, and even stigmatized starting point. It is a compelling journey, necessitated by a moral imperative that is greater than anyone undertaking it—to support or even save the community they serve, or to create something of new or greater value that did not exist before. In this courageous and committed quest, destiny and destinations are connected to what people feel part of, to where they have come from, and to the best of what they have been before. Later, we will see how the incoming CEO of UK-based retail giant Marks & Spencer (M&S) reminded his workforce of the company’s historic commitment to quality, price, and value, while becoming a leader in environmental sustainability. This is more than merely rebranding; it’s about making a coherent connection between a motivating future and a well-remembered past.

In uplifting leadership, the dream is worth fighting for, and pursuing it is a matter of resolution and persistence as well as imagination and inspiration. Doing so builds momentum and helps ensure the effort does not fall short of the mark. In the quest to achieve and sustain high performance far above normal expectations, progress is typically uneven, adversity is abundant, and obstacles or even enemies have to be surmounted and surpassed. But the memory or prospect of failure is a constant force that deters backsliding and fuels determination to keep on moving forward to fight for a higher purpose rather than taking flight from the fray. Failure is not fated. Rather, it fuels the determination to keep forging ahead. We will see examples of companies who had to fight off rivals in order to reach extraordinary levels of performance—just as global auto-manufacturing giant Fiat Auto is constantly challenged to do. You may even need to take on opponents as formidable as the Terminator in order to secure justice for the children in the state where he is your governor. But the battle is more of a moral fight for what you believe in than a fight to kill off opposition for its own sake.

2. Creativity and Counter-Flow

Uplifting leadership forges creative pathways to reach the desired destination. You won’t always be able to take the easiest or most obvious path. In part, creativity consists of flair, fantasy, and playful speculation about alternate possibilities to what already exists.

But the creativity of uplifting leaders is also counterintuitive. It goes against the flow at the risk of provoking doubt and derision. Uplifting leaders see opportunities that their competitors miss. They use opposing forces to their advantage. They do not follow in others’ slipstream, but head into the wind to force a change of direction. Dogfish Head Craft Brewery began by putting ingredients in its ales that were inconceivable in mainstream beers; yet it is now one of the most successful independent breweries in the United States. Later, we will see how this success has come about not just from having unusual ingredients, but also from building a culture among the employees that is just more fun and funky than comparable competitors.

3. Collaboration with Competition

Part of the counterintuitive approach to uplifting leadership is to collaborate and combine with actual and potential competitors. Leaders and members of uplifting organizations know that competition and collaboration are not mutually exclusive alternatives, but coexist in unlikely combinations. Competition is the driving force behind most team sports, and is particularly intense in the sports-crazed nation of Australia. Yet, as we will show in this book, Australia’s national organization for its top sport—cricket—took a business idea from two professors from Harvard and Yale to collaborate with their biggest competitors for financial advantage. We will also see how a private nonprofit company, The Learning Trust,