Transcript

Kate: Hello, and welcome back to Leading in Conversation. We’re really excited to have with us today, Dr. Michel Kenmogne. We’ve been trying to get him on our podcast for years now. We’ve worked together in our leadership team for the last 9 years, Dr. Michel has been our boss, and Nelis and I are really excited for this conversation with him today. Welcome, Michel!

Michel: Thank you very much, Kate. Morning, Nelis.

Nelis: It’s great to be with you, Michel, and, conversational leadership has been part of your journey of leadership in the last 9 years as we engaged in leadership you were an inspiration in that. You helped do it in practice. And one of the things we’d like to hear from you is, how did you develop that leadership style? What are the sort of foundations for that for you? What’s your story, when you talk about conversational leadership?

Michel: I think I can talk of two basic places of inspiration about conversational leadership as it applies to me personally. I think the one inspiration I would mention is actually the context and the situation in which I had to take the leadership of our organization. I remember being at the Board meeting, following my appointment, and trying to discern where the Board was seeing the organization going into the future. I can tell you that I saw the board heading into at least four directions at the same time, and I felt like, “Wow, where is this organization headed?”. So that was a first observation. And secondly, I tried to look at the organization, which is global in nature, I mean spreading all over the world, with various contexts, various different realities. And I started to ask myself, “How do I lead these people? How do I lead people who are so diverse in terms of their context, in terms of their understanding, and so on?”. And at the same time that people were different in terms of what they believed or thought the organization should do, or where the organization should go, I could at the same time realize that, always speaking from a place of deep motivation and a deep sense of commitment to the organization, so it was not like there are some good people who think the good things, and there are some wrong people on the other side. So I started to ask myself, “How do we blend all the perspectives that are here?”. I started to ask myself, “How do we help people who speak genuinely, maybe from their context, from their experience. How do we help people to hear the various experiences and contexts that are around the room or within the organization?”. So all of these things caused me to feel like, even as a leader, I cannot just stand and make pronouncements and tell the people what it should look like, because whatever I say, would be based on my own perspective and my own view, which can never represent the views of everybody. 

Nelis: So is that also partially because you were new in the organization and felt you needed to first listen and then talk? Is that… because otherwise you could have said, “Well, I know the organization. I can tell you what we need right now.”. 

Michel: Partially. Yes, I was new, and there was a need for me to learn and I was actually learning a lot. I read a lot of books on the history of the organization. I went to former leaders to just talk with them in order to understand who they were and what the organization really was. But also I would say that was the aspect of being new to the organization. The other reality, which was really really important, was the fact that the context and the realities we had engaged with in the past had shifted so much, so that it was not possible to just think that we could just carry on our business as usual. So, it’s a combination of both.

Nelis: Yeah, yeah. How does that connect with your leadership experience from before? You were a leader in an African context, an African organization, then you were coming to a global organization. How does that compare? And how have you seen that transition for yourself? 

Michel: I think your question actually gets me to the second aspect of what I wanted to say in response to your 1st question, and it has to do with the cultural aspect that I bring into this as well.

I happen to have grown up in a typical rural African context where I observed African leadership for what it is. Probably not a fancy description of that leadership in terms of maybe the theories, and of this and that. But I did observe leadership, the way it applied in my village context, for example, and if I would tell you that leaders appear or are thought to be very autocratic in the African context, but when I observed the dynamics in our larger family setting, or even at the village level, I could observe that leaders were very respected, and when leaders said things it was like, “Oh, they just say it, and people obey”. But that was not the case. The reality was that leaders were having various spaces where they had conversations with the people like the chief of the village before, when there is an issue, he would make sure that he listens to the people, he would make sure that he hears the perspectives of the people and forms an opinion, and often he will even test his conclusion or his perspective with the people before he stands out to give the final say. So when he says it and people kind of agree, and nobody questions or challenges it, it doesn’t mean that they are just submitting without any discernment. It is actually because the conversations have happened. It is because people are in tune with the leader. And I can even go ahead and tell you something, an anecdote from my village. People may say, does anybody ever challenge the leader in that kind of context? And I tell you, people don’t know, but leaders are often quite, much, challenged by the people they lead. But the thing is that again, you have to have the right space to challenge the leader. If you challenge the leader publicly and you shame the leader then you are definitely in trouble, and it’s not even the leader who will rebuke you. It is the other people of the community who rebuke you because you’ve done the wrong thing. But take in my village, for example, when the chief has done something really unacceptable, something that is wrong, there is a specific room in the palace where the notables who represent, like the leadership team of the chief, they would respectfully say, “Hey, Chief, we want to meet in that room, in that specific room”. 

Nelis: And then he knows he’s in trouble? 

Michel: Exactly. So when he’s invited in that room, he knows he’s in trouble, and in that room what happens is that the lights are off. Nobody sees the face of any other person, because it’s a shame culture. And when they are in there people would really say, “Hey, Chief, when you behave in such and such a way, when you do this or that kind of thing, that really does not honour us. That really is not what we expect of you as our chief”, and so on, and the rule in that place is that the chief does not respond, and the chief does not rebuke anybody from saying that. And the chief does not.., the chief just has to listen. And the rule is that once they have left that room nobody talks about it again, and the chief has heard, and the people know they have communicated to the chief, and everybody is supposed to behave as it is appropriate.

Kate: That’s a really powerful and fascinating insight into a shame culture, and how through conversation you manage saying the difficult things. I love that story. Thank you. So, looking back at the start of your leadership in our organization, you began conversationally with something that you called “Remembering our journey”. How did that come about?

Michel: Yes, as I indicated before, when I saw the organization speaking in very many different voices. I started to ask myself how we could draw the people together. And when I heard the people speaking in different voices, I could feel that people had joined the organization at different times. There were still people who were thinking with the mindsets of maybe the 1970s, or thinking the organization was still there. Others were thinking, maybe with the realities of Gen Zs, and differently. So I was asking myself, “How do I help the organization, how do we learn about where we’ve come from, where we’ve been, what we’ve been through and where we are today?”. And I felt like the best way to do that… I could not, there was no way I could do it just on my own to say, “Oh, this is our journey. And this is what we have to remember”. No, how could I do that? So I again – and this is about conversational leadership – I invited a group of very diverse people. It was a team of 15 people. And among the 15, I had 5 who were people who had been in the organization, even some from the 1950s. And I got some people who were like part of the current leadership and administration, and I also got 5 people who had joined the organization from very unconventional or unusual paths. Bringing all of those people, I knew that there will be a very divergent, there will be a huge divergence of perspectives around the room. And what I did was just to say, “Hey, if our organization started in 1934 and we are here in 2015…” And I drew a line from 34 to 2015. And I said, “Think above the line, think of, what was the war like in 1934, and underneath the line, think about what was our organization?”. And I asked the people, as you think about the world, think about the sociopolitical context of the world, think about the economic realities, think about mission and church. Think about all of this. And I asked the people and people started to describe, “Oh, yeah, 1934…”, people say, “Oh, yeah, we were just coming out of the Great Depression, and economically it was very hard”, and so on. People were still remembering all the consequences of the 1st World War and all of that. And we started to get sticky notes and we put them on the wall to just capture those things. And we said, “Okay, how did that reflect on the organization?”. And some people started, “Oh, yeah. The first people who joined our mission were people who had been at the war front, and they had then joined the mission, and they were really very pragmatically approaching things like in a military conquest”, and all of that. And we started to gain insights into how we went about things. But then we continued in the history, and we went to the sixties, for example, and people said, “Oh, yeah, many African countries became independent, and there was more assertiveness happening in those countries and could no longer be as usual”. And so on, and we started learning and growing along the years. And then, with all of the data that we had put on the wall, people started to say, “Hey, we have been changing. We have been evolving. This organization has never been the same, from 1934 to 1960s to 75 to 2000s, and then to 2015”. So it was the people realizing that we have been changing. It was not somebody telling them, “You have to change, or… ”. 

Michel: Exactly. And that was really the point, because often we think that documents or products, as we often create them, we think that those products are what matters. No, the product in itself is not what transforms the people. It is the process that you use to create a product that is actually transformative. So with that document, and also coming back to your point, Nelis, about me being new to the organization, actually, I found that document to be very inspiring and insightful and informative. But I just said to myself, if I just go out there to tell the people, “Hey, I have seen the light. This is what you need”, nobody would listen to me. People would say, “Hey, you are just so new here. What do you actually know?”, and so on. I said to the group, “Hey, I’m a new guy here and I’m learning certain things, and I want us to learn together. Please teach me and let’s learn together”. And then I submitted the essay to the people, and said, “Hey, let us let us reflect together”. And actually it turns out that there were many people who were learning and discovering the history, although they had been in for many, many years, and of course there were some good insights that were given, and that also enriched me, and even enriched the essay because there were several iterations of  improving that essay and at the end of the day it was a serious learning process which was not just about learning about the history and being maybe experts of history, of the history of our organization. It was actually about understanding that we have been on a journey of change, and that we had come to a new place where we had to reassess how we go about our mission if we wanted to stay relevant and meaningful in our new context. And that is what we wanted to see to do through that “Remembering our journey” process.

Nelis: I’ve observed that, and often reflected back on how foundational that was to the change, because it’s doing a few things. One is reaffirming our identity. This is, change has been part of our story all along, but the foundation stays solid. So this sense of appreciation, the sense of a solid identity, that change isn’t going to take that away. The sense of appreciation for people throughout history, that when we change, it doesn’t mean that we’re rejecting people. And those kinds of things are, I think, so essential in conversational leadership, when you embrace change, that you first have a foundation of understanding where you stand, and that the choices you make are not a rejection of the past, or something like that. I think that’s really essential. 

Michel: Yeah. And that goes back to the point that I made initially about the fact that all of our people, they are people who are here because they are motivated by the deep beliefs that they have, and they believe in the change that they want to make in the world. They really believe. And they are volunteers. They are not motivated by the income that they receive from the organization. They are here because they are deeply, independently motivated.  And that is why I thought that leading change would not be a matter of telling the people this is the best strategy, it would be about helping the people to see how the realities and the circumstances are changing so that they can change in order to respond to the changing realities and circumstances as well. And that is how, I believe change leadership and change management should happen, because, especially in nonprofit and voluntary organizations, we have to inspire people through the way we invite them into change rather than impose decisions on them. 

Nelis: Kate and I were just talking about that today, when we talked about change in a volunteer organization, how different that is. Yeah, Kate, any thoughts? 

Kate: Well, I was just going to say, that “Remembering our journey paper” that was written, that was co-created, back in 2015 and refined, and added to through an iterative process, is still bearing fruit ten years on. I recently shared it with a group of 30 young leaders who we gathered together in Kenya last summer and we asked them to read that paper, and they came back saying, “Now we understand our organization. Now we understand why things are the way they are”. So it’s still bearing fruit. And I think I’ve said to you before, I’d love for us to write the next chapter, you know the chapter that we’re living in right now. It’s probably not ours to write. It will be written retrospectively by others, perhaps. But yeah, it was a great process for us as an organization.

Kate: So organizational culture change seems to have been a significant part of your leadership. Would you talk a little bit about that? How you experienced it, and how you’ve done that in a co-creational conversational way, and led others in that. 

Michel: Yeah, yes, you know, organizational culture change, people go about it in many different ways. There are people who think that change should simply happen as a matter of changing the structures, and then people will just adapt to new structures, and then they will change. I think you can change structures and have people walk through new structures. But you will not, you cannot guarantee that internally and deep in the hearts and minds of people that they have embraced the new reality you want to enforce. That is why, for me, organizational culture change had to do, not just with addressing the surface level issues, it had to do with addressing the deeper level issues, addressing the core narratives that can actually drive the organization. Because when you shift those narratives you can be sure that at the surface level things will also change. And that is why my focus on organizational change was about shifting the narratives. And actually, when you go back to the “Remembering our journey”, from the essay, we teased out some of the stories which kind of describe the narratives that that kind of drove the organization, and often narratives are things that people cannot just stand up and articulate and say, “Oh, these are the… this is what is driving us”, but when you shift and you talk, you touch those narratives, you can be sure that you will shift the culture. And in order to do that, one of the things that was very helpful for me was again in alignment with the fact that I want the people to participate and to own the change that they are invited into. One of the things was to adopt the double loop learning, and by double loop learning, I mean that often when we plan in an organization, we are always going from the assumptions that we have to derive the strategies and then the actions that lead to results. But often when we don’t get the results that we expect, we generally review our strategies to say, “Hey, what strategy do we need to change in order to still be effective?”. But there comes a time when the circumstances have changed so much so that tweaking the strategies does not help anymore. And at that time you have to not just review your strategies. You have to go all the way back to reassessing your assumptions to see if they are right. And that is why the double loop learning was so important to us, to rethink what are the assumptions that we hold in the place of ministry. And thinking about the assumptions, we had to realize that our ministry was started in the earliest 20th Century and we were here in the early 21st century. So our assumptions, even about the people, the context, the methods, the approaches that we had to use in the 20th Century could no longer be the same in the 21st Century. And that is why the double loop learning allowed us to assess the new assumptions and realize that some of our assumptions were outdated, and once you shift your assumptions, you can be sure that your strategies are going to shift, and also your actions and whatever follows. And that is how we went about it.

Nelis: Yeah, I, and I’ve seen you do, that sense of the assumptions is not something you tell people “These are your assumptions”. This is something that is really again a co-creative process, because it’s like an insult when you tell somebody, “This is the assumption you’re going from”. But when you do it together, yeah, you can actually go through the sometimes painful process and then wait a second, we’re operating from those assumptions. And they’re kind of scary sometimes. 

Kate: And they’re outdated. They were once valid assumptions. But, like you say, the world has changed. We’re still operating based on those assumptions, and that’s why it’s not working. 

Michel: Exactly. And I think this is where you get to the heart of conversational leadership, which is primarily about asking questions. Asking questions. Why do we do this? What informs our choice to do it this way rather than in a different way? So by asking the questions you actually help the people to think through, and to discover the assumptions that are often really just deep seated in their hearts and minds. But they don’t, they’re not always aware of those and and asking questions is actually, very, very important in the context of conversational leadership. And not only asking questions, but also framing the spaces for conversations to happen, so that it is not, it will not just be an individual process of thinking about MY assumptions. But it’s also about thinking about our shared assumptions, and to discover our shared assumptions we have to do it through conversations that help us to feel like, “Oh, yes, so this is how we do it, because we believe in this or that”.

Nelis: I really appreciate that sense of you’re touching on some key tenets of conversational leadership, of framing, of asking questions, of co-creation, of the reality of structures not being the core of how it works. But what I find interesting is that you talked also about this togetherness and I’ve heard you rant almost around the individualism in the organization and in our culture, and how you are looking for a more community sense. And Kate was obviously part of that when she got the charge to work on helping us to be a community with God, with each other and with leadership, and and building those connections. Can you say a little bit more about that community aspect, and how that shapes conversation and conversational leadership and change? 

Michel: Yeah. And by the way I will always premise that, thank you to Kate, because, yes, I still remember when we started this process and just saying, how do we move forward together? And I remember charging Kate back then to say, “Hey, your job is to help us all, to draw closer to each other and to together draw closer to God”. And I believe this is really at the heart of what God has called us to do, this is really at the heart of who we are, I mean, my desire was for us to draw together closer to one another, because together, of course, we are stronger. Together, we are successful. Together we are, our impacts can be greater. Whereas when we are divided and we go at different ways, of course, our impacts can only be very minimal, or actually our impact would even not be visible. So, drawing together and also drawing together closer to the ideal, to the vision, to the mission that we hold together. So that was the calling. And I also realized that this togetherness was so important because none of us… we often claim individualism, but none of us thrives individually. We all are relational people. We all thrive as we connect to other people, and even look at working in environments wherever you are, and look even at how the training of people in universities and so on is happening more and more. People are trained in teams, in cohorts, in groups, because it is understood that nobody works in isolation. And for that reason emphasizing the notion of community within our organization was so so important, because already the nature of the work that we do is one that invites us to collaborate and cooperate with others, and therefore working together in community and growing that sense of community was so critical in order for us to be effective. 

Kate: Definitely. Yes, I see my son, who’s just started at university studying architecture and all of his assignments are done in pairs, in groups and teams, because as an architect, you will never be working solo. You’re always working with clients or colleagues or teams. So reframing the identity of the organization in the 21st century was a key aspect of your task. And what you have achieved as we look back. We developed a new vision and mission and goal statements that we call transformation statements. How did you seek co-creation around that? Could you tell us a bit about that, as one example of how you led. 

Michel: Yeah, it was all about co-creation from the start, because the process of the “Remembering our journey” that we talked about initially led to the question of what is our identity and purpose in the new context in which we find ourselves. And that question of our identity and purpose caused us to realize actually our identity, our deepest fundamental identity has not changed. We remain the same organization. But while we remain the same organization, we need to find new ways of stating and expressing who we are so that we can be understood, and we can be meaningful to the people of this generation. And that is why we had to really set a process that involved all of our staff to input into that process. It involved our Board. It involved, of course, the leadership that was acting as an integrator of all the voices and perspectives that we gathered. And the perspectives we gathered were sent back to the staff to the board for people to bring inputs into it, so that at the end of the day, when the Board made the motion to adopt a new set of vision mission and goal statements. It was not like the Board is telling the people “Oh, we have seen the light just informing you about…”. People who had been part of it, and people could say, “Oh, yeah, this is our vision”. And people could know why they were adopting that vision, and it was not even something that I, as a leader, would just say, “Oh, yeah. I’ve created a new vision”. There’s no way I could do it on my own. But all of you were part of it. All of us in the organization were part of it, and the Board was fully part of it, and that is about the co-creation. 

I find it interesting when you’re talking about that, and my memories go back to that as well. It’s like how you talk about both the continuity and the change aspect. So we’ve changed. We need a new vision, a mission. But at the same time, there’s this strong sense of continuity in that. And it’s the continuity part that could easily get people to reject a new vision and mission. And I think many people organizations have seen that there’s a new vision that just doesn’t resonate because it doesn’t connect with the past. And I remember when we started, there was a sense like, “Oh, can we really touch those?”. And in the end it didn’t create much push back at all, which is sort of a testimony to how conversation leadership can even touch on almost sacred things. 

Kate:  I think we had, of our 4,300 staff in those days, we had over a thousand staff actively contribute to that conversational process. Not everyone wanted to. People weren’t required to. But we invited everyone and kept inviting feedback. We had multiple stages of refinement where we invited people, and I was really happy that we had over a thousand people actively contributing. Hopefully a representative group of people. And I think that’s part of the reason that it did go so much more smoothly than I had expected,

Michel: I think, especially in large organizations like ours, you can’t expect everybody to speak up. Some some people who are motivated, and people who feel like speaking, they need to realize that there is a space, and there is an opportunity to speak up and when you do it, though even those who do not speak actually are satisfied, because they know that the leaders are indeed listening and hearing their perspectives, and even if some do not participate, they do value what the outcomes of the processes are, because they know that those processes were thoughtful, they were consultative, and they really allowed many inputs and insights to be provided.

Nelis: It almost reminds me a little bit, that process about the dark room. We, as leaders, weren’t telling you this is right or this is wrong. We were just listening, and almost in that dark room, hearing all the voices. It was not to be a rebuke, but it’s good, this sense of withholding responding.

Kate: It’s important to be willing to be rebuked, isn’t it? And I think, as leaders, you have to be open to that, and staff have to be able to bring their fears to us, their concerns, and really ask the hard questions. And if you’re not that kind of leader that is that approachable, then you’re in trouble. 

Michel: I think that some of the tragedies that have been observed especially in leadership in our century, is the fact that leaders have built like some ivory towers in which they hide themselves. Nobody can talk to them anymore, nobody. They are immune to any criticism and as a result of it often people just watch the collapse of the leader because they could have been struggling with issues or… and generally, and even in our modern stories, when leaders have fallen, people have said, “Oh, yeah, I had seen this. I had observed that”, and so on, but often, when there is no way to to speak up, when there is no way, when there is no loop through which the leader can listen to the people then actually he becomes a god. But are our leaders gods? I don’t think so. 

Neli: They’re normal people!

Michel: And that is actually the genius of conversational leadership. The conversational leader is not just the one who always leads from the front. It is the leader who often leads just from within the crowd. It is the leader who also even leads from the back, allowing others to step forward. And that is all part of the modes of conversational leadership. And often it can be very challenging to some heroic leaders who have taken leadership as “Okay, I’m always going to be in the limelight and wherever I go…”. But no, humility is actually at the heart of conversational leadership.

Nelis: That’s definitely a quotable quote. Humility is the heart of conversation leadership? 

Nelis: So we need to start to work, going towards wrapping up. You’re at the end of your time as leader of the organization. In a few months you’re stepping down and we’ve been talking about conversational leadership. When you look back, what are some of the key lessons learned for you personally, and maybe for us as an organization?

Michel: Yeah. I think the first lesson I can mention, touching on conversational leadership: I think when an organization faces adaptive realities that it needs to address, really conversational leadership from my experience is the way to go, and that is one lesson I have learned, and I’m convinced about it. And it seems to me that in this 21st Century many, many organizations are in that place of needing to review the way they go about leadership. And I would suggest, offer, that conversational leadership can help and could help many organizations as they approach change in leadership, change in change management and organizational change. More so because when you face adaptive issues, you don’t only need the leaders to work on it, you have to let everybody, all of those who are involved with the issues, be part of seeking the solutions because they will have to live with the consequences of the decisions that are made. So that is one lesson that I learned. A second lesson that I learned is that conversational leadership is actually, it requires a lot of trust. Trust, not just in our own power, but trust in the community, trust in our colleagues and staff. It also requires much trust in God, too, because to really not hold to one’s view, but lead open-handedly. You have to trust that your colleagues and the group are able to do the right things, and you have to trust that ultimately God can work through you all together in order to do the things that matter. So that is another key lesson that I learned. And the third lesson that I learned is that when you lead conversationally – and that is my feeling at this time – even at the end of your time, you don’t feel like regretting, or whatever, because you have been transparent from the outset to say, “Hey, here are the issues. How do we deal with those?”. And you also provided the space to hear all the inputs and the perspectives that would allow us to make the best decisions possible. And because of all of that, I feel like conversational leadership actually, I would say, saves the leader, and allows the leader to have even a next step after they have completed their current job. Like in my case, I feel like, okay moving into the next season, I feel like what I had to do in this season has been completed, and I don’t feel like there is something I needed to do which was not done. Not to say that all of the organizational issues have been addressed, or that the organization is perfect. No, there is so much, so much to still do. But I feel like, as to the part that I had to play during this time, I feel like I’ve played my part, and it is up to the following leaders to take it to the new places and to the new dimensions where the organization needs to go.

Nelis: I love what you’re saying there about trust, and about no regrets and doing your part. It also is linked to this sense of when you’re stepping down there are all these people, are still there. The people in the organization that you trusted, that you worked with will continue to carry it. It’s also an expression of trust when you’re thumbed down.

Kate: and the conversation continues.

Michel: And the conversation continues, of course. And yes, and the conversation needs to continue.

Kate: Michel, thank you. This has been wonderful. I’ve really enjoyed listening to you, looking back  and hearing your perspective on the years that we’ve lived together so intensely these last 9 years. It’s been a joy to have you on the podcast.

Michel: Thank you very much. Kate. Thank you. Nelis. It’s been nine full years. It’s been nine very exciting years, and I would say, probably the most exciting years of my life, because I mean, we’ve been through so much. And I hope that for you it’s not, it was all joyful, I mean. Not that we didn’t have tough times. I trust that at the end of the day you still count the best moments to outweigh the ones that were not that good.

Kate: Absolutely!

Nelis: Absolutely, definitely. Thank you very much. And it’s as we said, it’s been a joy.

Michel: Yeah, thank you very much, Nelis. Thank you, Kate, so good. 

Nelis: And the conversation continues.

Kate: Yes, thank you, to our listeners, the conversation continues. Although this is the final episode of Season 2. We hope to be back in the future, but we will be taking a break. Thank you for listening.

Nelis: Bye-bye.