1.5 - About University

Creativity andinnovationTeamworkQualityAccountability✔ Be creative and innovative about how you elicit and deal with creativity and innovation.✔ Be creative about rejecting unsuitable ideas.✔ Use a team to introduce teams.✔ Have the leadership operate as a team.✔ Introduce teamwork in ways that are congruent with how you want your team to act.✔ Ensure the quality program is designed as a quality quality program.✔ Use quality tools to measure the success of and improve the quality program.✔ Be accountable for the accountability process.✔ Visibly model your accountability statements.These are a few recursive actions you could take to ensure congruence between the tool andthe process used to formulate, introduce, and sustain it. The key technique is to ask the recursivequestion, “If XYZ is such a good leadership tool, if we turned it back on itself, what wouldit tell us about how to understand it, introduce it, and sustain it?”H OW TO USE THIS LEADERSHIP TOOLRecursive sayings:Headline in the Economist, December 1999:“Rethinking Thinking”Marshall McLuhan: “The medium is the message.”Roseanne of TV fame “… Nobody gives you power. You just take it.”Groucho Marx made a career of recursive humor: “Sincerity is the key to success. If you can fake that,you’ve got it made.”Some upsides of recursive leadership behavior:✔✔People will be more likely to accept you warts and all, because they know you are willingto accept them warts and all.One of the most powerful ways to elicit model behavior in others is to model thebehavior you expect in others. People more often than not will mirror back yourbehavior.Like all leadership models, there are downsides to recursive behavior:✘✘Recursive behavior doesn’t always work. Some, for example, will take openness as asign of weakness and try to exploit it. This leads us to a leadership principle: Nothingworks all of the time when it comes to human behavior. Think about it: If behavior xalways elicited behavior y on the part of others, you could then manipulate others’behavior (and be manipulated!).Recursive behavior sets a very high, perhaps ideal, standard of leadership conduct.SECTION 1 FOUNDATIONAL CONCEPTS 27