Four Requirements for Positive Influence

When Otto Lilienthal tried to pilot a glider without effective flight controls, he lacked the ability to adjust to changing conditions, crashed, and died. When the Wright brothers used Lilienthal's incorrect tables to design the wings of their glider in the summer of 1901, Wilbur crashed and hurt himself. Without flight controls, properly designed wings, an engine, and air, an airplane is in danger of crashing. Similarly, when a person is not purpose-centered, internally directed, other-focused, and externally open, that person is in danger of exerting negative or neutral influence rather than positive influence.

To understand how these four characteristics of the fundamental state of leadership work together to increase how positive a person's influence is, imagine a real estate agent who is showing homes to a family. If she is purpose-centered, internally directed, and other-focused but not externally open, then even though she wants to find the family a home, acts with honesty and integrity, and wants the family to be happy in their new home she will ignore or deny feedback as the family goes through the process and will be less likely to learn the nuances of what the family wants. If she is not other-focused, she will not care about the family and will place them in the first house she can find that will make her a profit. If she is not internally directed, she will not try to live her professional values, perhaps investing less than her full effort into the project or cutting corners with the family, the sellers, the mortgage broker, or others. If she is not purpose-centered, her work will be less clear and meaningful, making the family's need for a home a problem to be solved rather than an opportunity to contribute to the family's lifestyle, security, and happiness. Any of these omissions can diminish the positivity of the real estate agent's influence.

The reason why omitting characteristics from the fundamental state of leadership would diminish the positivity of our real estate agent's (or anyone else's) influence is that each of the four characteristics of the fundamental state of leadership embodies a particular type of moral responsibility. They are grounded in prominent moral philosophies. For the sake of accessibility we will not discuss these philosophies in detail, but we will note the connections. For example, the purpose-centered characteristic is grounded in teleology because it involves an inquiry into possible and appropriate ends. The internally directed characteristic is grounded in Aristotle's virtue ethics because of its focus on living our values. The other-focused characteristic is grounded in relational ethics such as Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative and Martin Buber's relational attitudes because of its focus on seeing others as valuable in and of themselves. The externally open characteristic is grounded in pragmatism because of its focus on learning from and adapting to particular situations.

Each moral philosophy brings important insight into our understanding of appropriate ways to be, to act, and to influence others, but each philosophy has also been criticized as having specific weaknesses. The benefit of embedding them in the competing values framework is that it enables us to figure out how, in practical experience, to integrate these philosophies in ways that amplify their benefits while compensating for or overcoming their weaknesses. The philosophies that fall on opposite sides of the CVF represent competing—or even opposing—values. In other words, the externally open characteristic is the opposite of the internally directed characteristic, and the results-centered characteristic is the opposite of the other-focused characteristic. But these are not opposites in the way we normally think of them.

Usually we think of opposites in terms of positive and negative. The CVF, in contrast, suggests that we can have positive opposites. For example, the negative opposite of humble is arrogant, but the positive opposite of humble is confident. Similarly, the negative opposite of confident is timid, whereas the positive opposite of confident is humble. Confidence and humility are positive; we keep our confidence in check with our humility. Otherwise our confidence might become arrogance and our humility might become timidity.

In a similar way, we need to keep our own desires (the results we want to create when we are purpose-centered) in check with our concern for others (the empathy we feel when we are other-focused) or we will become self-focused, and we need to keep our focus on others in check with our purposes or we will become comfort-centered (trying only to find comfortable solutions to problems that others define for us). The same is true for the relationship between the externally open and internally directed characteristics. It is by keeping all four of these characteristics in play that our real estate agent can be a positive influence in finding a home for her clients and we can be a positive influence in the situations we encounter.

The CVF, and the four moral philosophies its quadrants represent, help us understand why we need four characteristics, and why we need these four characteristics in particular, to lift ourselves and others. Like the engine, wings, air, and flight controls of an airplane, if we leave any characteristic out we are in danger of decreasing the positivity of our influence. To experience these four characteristics, however, we need to understand each individually. Thus, our next step is to examine what each characteristic consists of, why we don't experience the characteristics more often, and what effect they have on us and on the people around us.

The next eight chapters review each of the four characteristics of lift in sequence. The final three chapters describe the fundamental state of leadership as the integration of these four characteristics. To help you keep track of which characteristics we are reviewing and how it fits into the overall framework, we will use the following icons at the beginning of each chapter.