Sharing The Secret of Single-Mindedness

SHARING THE SECRET OF SINGLE-MINDEDNESS
by
Bill Cottringer

The most important gift a leader can share is the illusive secret of single-mindedness. No organization can flourish with consistent growth, abundant prosperity and genuine success without single-mindedness of purpose and effort. Sharing this great secret and orchestrating alignment with it is the greatest challenge confronting today’s leaders.

This priceless place goes by more than one name, yet it remains the same. Here is the short version of the journey of single-mindedness through time and cultures. Different religions called it The Way of Life and The Oneness; whereas the Native Americans refer to it as The Beat of the Drum. Philosophers Plato and Aristotle named it Realism and The Golden Mean and Psychiatrist Scott Peck labeled it as The Road Less Traveled. Then The Beatles took it underwater as The Yellow Submarine and Elton John brought it above ground as The Yellow Brick Road. Modern management gurus call it Excellence and the helping professions know it as Thriving. Perhaps Christ’s Golden Rule is the most personable, practical example of single-mindedness. And perhaps everything that has ever been written in one way or the other attempts to capture a personal version of single-mindedness?

What exactly is this mysterious single-mindedness? It is the real objects behind the words used to describe them: The permanent universal truths, principles and realities that exist in relation to our personal, partial and evolving perceptions, beliefs and intuitions about them.

Somehow, the leader has to facilitate single-mindedness to help the organization close the gap from where it is to where it wants to be. Translating this abstract secret into a practical, concrete game plan for others to join is extremely challenging. It requires some tough learning on the leader’s part:

• Learning how to get past the mental frustrations and emotional pains of reconciling conflicts that divide single-mindedness into personal preferences, and then figuring how to share that secret clearly and meaningfully with others.
• Realizing that “wrong” and “bad” behavior that appears to reject the truth of “right” single-mindedness is a real and purposeful part of everyone and will surface under certain conditions; And knowing that such behavior is not an intrinsic or innate characteristic of any person, but rather a product of incubating conditions. Wrong behavior and the person are not the enemy, circumstances are.
• Recognizing that clear communication of single-mindedness is extremely difficult because of people’s different levels of knowing it (information, knowledge, wisdom, and awareness) and the different methods by which they acquire it (thinking, feeling, intuiting and experiencing).

Today’s leaders are challenged to create a virtual map and guide their diverse teams through a sea of chaos towards this illusive, unified, single-mindedness. This is what it takes to do the gap-closing things that help the group accomplish its goal of successfully moving from the struggle to survive to the satisfaction of thriving. But there are serious obstacles ahead.

OBSTACLES TO SINGLE-MINDEDNESS

The main obstacle in the surviving-thriving gap is organizational conflict—huge and annoying differences in people’s thinking, values and behavior that make up their personal realities, especially when it comes to seeing the gap and choosing the way to close it. In the attempt to build support for the needed single-mindedness, there is always the perennial problem of wrong, unproductive behavior that gets in the way.

Of course, effective leaders realize the purpose and value of such conflict. This is because they know the discomfort of conflict is what provides the motivation necessary for positive change and the subsequent reconciliation of differences through sensible compromises. This in turn results in the team’s single-mindedness which opens the combination lock on the door to thriving.

There are certain incubating conditions that give rise to conflict and pose the potential for disruptive and unproductive reactions. These conditions include:

• Prevailing chaos and disorder • Anonymity
• Peer examples of bad behavior • Passive bystanders
• Rigid levels of power •Lack of control over destiny
• Lack of meaning and direction •Implicit permission to do harm
• Fear of the unknown •Absence of responsibility/accountability

CREATING A UNIFIED TEAM WORK ENVIRONMENT

A key challenge for leaders is to build the unified, single-minded work environment that facilitates effective conflict resolution and demonstrates the benefits of single-mindedness. Such a work environment enables personal growth, organizational prosperity and collective satisfaction; and it takes everyone from surviving to thriving.

Seven actions that weave together to help build a single-minded work environment are:

• Establishing a neat and orderly physical environment free of chaos and disorder.

• Providing clear direction and meaning.

• Imposing personal responsibility and accountability on everyone, consistently and persistently.

• Rewarding positive contributions towards a single-mindedness thinking and action by all.

• Keeping everyone well-informed about everything with good communication.

• Removing all implicit permissions to do harm.

• Allowing reasonable degrees of autonomy and freedom.

In the end, we are all leaders just trying to share what we know to help each other get in more sync with life’s single-mindedness that is pulling us. The more we all embrace that single-minded reality, the happier and more successful, prosperous and content we all become. And the real secret is that you don’t achieve single-mindedness through “right” behavior; single-mindedness results in right behavior, once you let go to it. And that is easier done than said.