Abstract
The contents of this paper have been summarized from my book, Communicating On Purpose — The Art of Framing, which will be published in spring 2011.
What do Gandhi, Churchill, Kennedy, Clinton, Lincoln, and Shriver all have in common? The ability to frame their message purposely, in a way that moved and inspired people! As a project manager, you need to frame your message so that your stakeholders are not only moved but also committed to your leadership and the mission of the project. Join Bill Richardson for an entertaining and informative look at the art and science of framing and, more importantly, how you can make it one of your signature skills. If your success depends on your ability to influence and inspire others to action in both the written and spoken word, then this seminar is for you.
Introduction
This paper has three objectives:
▪ Explain the art and science of framing
▪ Explain how framing and reframing can make a difference in your leadership and management effectiveness
▪ Explain the framing techniques in the broad spectrum of the PMI knowledge areas
The Communication Context
Effective communication is fundamental to effective leadership. Commitment from team members to willingly offer up their “discretionary efforts” is needed to help make sure the outcome is maximized. This commitment to the outcome is dependent on team members clearly understanding the vision and purpose of the initiative. Clarity of vision increases the probability that team members will be willing to commit to the vision and the leadership of the person promoting the vision. Ambiguity, or lack of clarity, will dramatically decrease the probability of commitment to the vision and will most likely result in compliance behavior, at best. Ambiguity is the enemy of commitment.
Unfortunately, ambiguity is more the rule than the exception, primarily because each of us creates meaning about our world through the creation of mental models of how things should work and what reality is. We see this played out often in teams when team members do not share or ascribe to the same meaning of events, circumstances, or plans. Each of us essentially evaluates what people say or do to us through a specific lens or mental model. By sizing up situations and formulating our communication goals, we manage meaning. Unless we find a way to understand and influence these mental models, commitment will continue to be an elusive prize.
Alignment and solidarity of purpose happen when people share the same meaning of events or activities and, in doing so, are more focused in the common goal or objective. Persuading and influencing people to adjust or rethink their mental models are what leaders do to obtain commitment. Facilitating shared meaning by shaping how people see your vision of an outcome and the path to get there is what framing is all about. Essentially, it involves the selection and highlighting of one or more aspects of a subject or topic while excluding others. It is a skill that leaders and managers employ to manage meaning, and it is also how all of us develop and use our mental models. Ultimately this skill will increase our chances of implementing goals and obtaining people’s agreement. Most importantly, opportunities for framing occur in every communication, and effective communication is clearly the lubricant for teamwork and positive relationships.
Harnessing the Power of Framing
Tools and Techniques
The objective is to develop memorable frames that help people understand the vision, mission and values. There are five basic tools for framing:
Metaphors—show a subject’s likeness to something else. It is used when you want a subject to take on a new meaning.
Jargon and Catch Phrases—describe a subject in familiar terms to enhance meaning.
Contrast—describes a subject in terms of its opposite. It is often easier to describe your subject in terms of what it is not.
Spin—puts a subject in a positive or negative light. It can reveal your subject’s strengths and weaknesses.
Stories—frame a subject by example. They attract attention and can build rapport.
Framing as an Essential Component of Facilitative Leadership
Leadership is about managing meaning through framing, which involves the selection and highlighting of one or more aspects of the subject while ignoring others. Leaders need to be ready to frame communications both spontaneously and in a prepared format. Quite often, situations arise for leaders in which team members need help making sense of events or interpreting information. These situations require a quick but well-thought-out communication that will help team members remain engaged and productive. For example, in conflict resolution situations, a leader can be called upon to frame people’s positions as a precursor to examining the needs and underlying assumptions of each position. Leaders build trust and accelerate the conflict resolution process when they are able to quickly and accurately describe the opposing positions to the satisfaction of the conflicting parties. This step also greases the wheels for open dialogue.
Leaders need to be able to effectively frame the vision, mission, and values of the company and demonstrate how they tie into the vision, mission, and values at the project and program level. Team commitment and levels of engagement depend on how well the stakeholders make this connection. Well-framed vision, mission, and value statements help to mobilize and sustain teams. Ultimately, people will choose to follow you as a leader when they feel they are aligned with your description of the future, your depiction of a mission or purpose, and your articulation of how we want to act or behave during the pursuit of the vision. In the absence of shared vision, mission, and values, stakeholders will tend to construct their own, which could have a very good chance of being misaligned with your intended direction.
The Power of Framing in Action
Framing and reframing skills permeate almost all influence situations:
▪ Making a vision clear and compelling — Any one of the framing tools can be pressed into action to help achieve clarity and focus. The key is for people to be able to have a line of sight from the vision to their individual contribution on the team. To facilitate this as a leader, you need to formulate and crystallize your own mental model of the overall company’s vision so that you can “frame” it in the appropriate way for your team. Team members need to be able to make the connection between the corporate vision and how their work contributes to this vision. Without your framing and communication effort, this important connection may not happen effectively.
▪ Inspiring passion for responsible action — People need to have information and ideas packaged in a way that enables them to see not only the compelling organizational need for the task, but also the “what is in it for them” aspect. Generally, if there is a lack of clarity around the need for a task or its relevance, people will not make a solid commitment to its completion. When people are inspired to be accountable, they are doing so because they believe it is the right thing to do. When people are simply motivated by some extrinsic reward or punishment, their interest will generally remain high only as long as the motivating factor is present. Effective framing has a much higher probability of getting to the “inspire” level.
▪ Galvanizing support for the purpose of an initiative — A key role for project and program managers is influencing stakeholders to take certain actions or initiatives. Effective influencing often depends on building a pool of shared meaning about a subject, so that all parties feel it is safe to provide their input to the pool without fear of repercussions. Getting support, for example, from a stakeholder group for a more robust application of risk management techniques will require the leader to frame the purpose of risk management in a simple but objective manner. This framing starts the ball rolling toward understanding the different mental models about risk management held by the stakeholder group. Through the understanding and acknowledgement of the different perspectives on how risk needs to be managed, the leader can ascertain the best approach (sell, enlist, negotiate, etc.) to obtaining stakeholder support and buy-in for the investment of additional effort in risk management. This will ultimately determine whether the leader has obtained commitment or compliance.
▪ Expanding context for problem solving and decision making — Being a thinking partner is an important role for leaders, because it helps people grow and forces them to become self-managed. The opposite of being a thinking partner is being a thinking replacement, whereby the leader is very prescriptive in the solutioning to a problem. Part of being a thinking partner is helping team members reframe the data or information in a situation, in order to facilitate new perspectives and ideas. Without the impetus or new perspective brought about by reframing, the team will either remain stuck or choose a solution that is less than optimal.
▪ Demonstrating understanding of other points of view — Influencing others requires that leaders allow themselves to be influenced. The essence of dealing with conflict that is inherent in most crucial conversations is demonstrating you understand and respect other people’s mental models or ideas. Framing skills allow you to demonstrate this understanding by restating the other points of view in a way that confirms you have listened and understand. Often the leader’s framing of the point of view will add clarity and more precise meaning to the originator. This concept is critical to effectively resolving conflict. By definition, conflict represents a clash of points of view. By effectively framing the positions in a conflict situation, the leader can lower the “emotional temperature” significantly because, simply put, people feel that they have been heard.
▪ Acknowledging what team members give, achieve or demonstrate about their commitment — The power of acknowledgement is a cornerstone behavior for leaders in sustaining momentum and engagement. By managing meaning through effective framing of what team members bring to the table and exhibit about their passion and care, a leader demonstrates first, to the individual, that they are valuable to the team and second, to the team members, that acknowledgement is an important aspect of team development. Weaving the value contribution of a team member into a simple real-life story that all team members will appreciate is one of the highest forms of acknowledgement. Framing skills allow you to harness the power of acknowledgement.
Effective facilitative leaders get the link between framing and effective influence and can do it spontaneously. To do it spontaneously, framing starts from within. Leaders need to take the time to understand their own mental models about such things as what good leadership looks like, what the purpose of the project is, what principles matter, what the company will look like in five years, etc. Clarity within your self will enable more effective, spontaneous, outward framing of vision, mission, and values. These mental models remind us and our teams of what to pay attention to and what’s important. A clear mission will help focus energies and the wise use of resources. Values will define what really matters. Vision supplies the specific direction to follow and reminds us that decisions made today will affect the future.
Facilitating Development of Framing Skills in Others
Leadership is about helping your team members become self-managed so that they can think, lead, and communicate effectively without the leader “being in the room.” Framing, and the associated work with mental models, is fundamental to all three.
An effective way to help people pick up a new skill is the application of the T.E.A.M. approach:
▪ T is the first letter of the phrase Teach It —Teaching concepts to others immediately following the introduction of those concepts is a very good way of reinforcing the learning. In the case of the art of framing, teach the concepts and tools described in this paper to your team. Open their eyes to the concept of mental models and the power of shared meaning. Often, the awareness that there is a very good chance that various team members will have differing mental models or expectations about almost everything can change the way people respond to other points of view.
▪ E is the first letter of the phrase Expect It — Begin immediately to expect your team to use the terminology, even if not all the concepts are fully ingrained. The idea for you as a leader is to facilitate the introduction of these new mental models about framing in a way that takes one step at a time. Context, which is how people think and what they expect, is an element the leader can begin looking for in team meetings and in day-to-day dialogue.
▪ A is the first letter of the phrase Anchor It — People have different rates of learning and adsorption of change. Introducing new concepts around framing will require a common base or picture of what it means. Job aids, diagrams, checklists, cue cards, etc., can be effective ways to reinforce or anchor the key concepts, tools, and approaches required in becoming move effective at framing. One good way to anchor anything is to ask the receivers of the information what kinds of approaches or documents would work best for them.
▪ M is the first letter of the phrase Model It — Leading the way is a fundamental and generally accepted way of providing a behavioral example for team members for any new behavior or concept. In this case, the leader can be proactive in explaining the rationale behind certain communications and in demonstrating the questions to ask when seeking to understand more about opposing views and other perspectives. One of the best approaches is inculcating the language of framing, mental models, context, and shared meaning into daily conversation and dialogue.
Application to Project and Program Management
The Knowledge Areas of the PMBOK® Guide
Project Integration Management
While widely acknowledged as one of the fundamental elements of successful project management, integration requires efficient and effective communication among all stakeholders. Effective communication is based on both trust and the willingness to ask and answer the right questions. The facilitative leadership style promotes the capacity for self-management where people feel confident asking the difficult questions, staying in dialogue, building the pool of shared meaning, and striving to understand context. The integration Knowledge Area requires this kind of focus and energy on the part of the team, as opposed to the task being left solely up to the project manager.
Project Scope Management
Facilitative leadership is predicated on leveraging the power of facilitation to enable people to do their jobs more effectively. The scope Knowledge Area deliverables are at the heart of project management — if you don’t get the requirements right, the chance of optimizing the outcomes for all stakeholders is greatly diminished. A strong facilitative leader will quickly be able to pick up on the points of resistance, identify the cause, and then work effectively toward transforming to an advocacy position. Advocacy level of support, when established in the early stages of the life cycle, will pay big dividends in later stages, where the cost of changes is significantly higher.
Project Time Management
This Knowledge Area essentially answers the questions about when the project will be complete and what happens if we change something. The planning processes that go into creating a valid schedule require interface with a number of stakeholder groups. Mobilizing a team and sustaining its efforts throughout the planning phase requires as much leadership as management. While management provides the control, facilitative leadership will provide the mobilization and sustainment elements that will be required for stakeholders to buy into and ultimately advocate the creation of sound project schedules. How information is framed and reframed can influence buy-in and commitment to the time baseline.
Project Cost Management
The facilitative leadership principles that energize a team to buy into producing sound schedules will also apply the cost component. The idea is to influence people to consider managing costs as part of their responsibility by virtue of being part of the team.
Project Quality Management
This Knowledge Area requires a constructive environment that embraces conflict and resistance. Quality processes typically find problems late in the project life cycle that are a prime source of conflict across a wide spectrum of stakeholders. A strong facilitative leader will orchestrate the resolution of the predictable conflicts in a professional manner, while continuing to build stakeholder trust and advocacy. Framing skills allow the project manager to communicate complex information in a manner that all stakeholders understand and therefore appreciate in terms of priority and urgency. Quality assessments can trigger strong emotional responses from any stakeholder group, especially if more problems are being detected than expected. Facilitative leaders apply the thinking partner concept, to help team members expand their “frame” when looking at the components of a problem. It is one thing to know that a deliverable is not within standard, it is another to know definitively why.
Project Human Resource Management
Facilitative leadership, through framing and managing meaning, provides a framework for managing and leading the human resources on the project. By framing the organizational vision, mission, and values in a way that allows team members to make the connection to their project contribution, leaders build full engagement and overall commitment to outcomes, not just deliverables. Application of the T.E.A.M. approach for introducing new skills or improving existing skills is a valuable tool for any project manager in this domain. Becoming a thinking partner with team members not only builds capacity in people for self-management but also lays the groundwork for team members to grow during the project assignment. Project team members learn to embrace conflict, understand and leverage personality factors, and most importantly learn a personal accountability for growth and development. Ultimately they will learn the criticality of managing meaning through the effective use of framing and mental models.
Project Communication Management
While facilitating the process of communication is in itself valuable, the real enabler for this Knowledge Area is learning to frame information in such a way that everybody gets it. The information could be the vision, mission, or values both at the organizational and local levels. Project managers need to determine the expectations of their stakeholders before they can optimize the outcomes for each stakeholder. By developing a trust relationship with all stakeholders where all expectations are surfaced, the probability of success for the downstream communications deliverables like the communications plan and stakeholder management process are greatly enhanced.
Project Risk Management
As vanguards of change, project managers must balance risk and reward continuously. Risk management is a team game that requires everyone to be engaged in looking out for the greater good. Once a facilitative leader has mobilized their team, the common vulnerability is sustainment. Most project teams can do a decent risk assessment at the beginning of the project life cycle, but then fail to sustain vigilance downstream. A facilitative leader understands the critical role of sustainment which comes down to the quality of their relationship with each team member. By acknowledging the contributions and achievements of team members through the effective framing of stories and situations, leaders sustain commitment and continue to build trust. Team members who have signed up to be advocates of the PM and their vision (which includes process excellence) are much more likely to pick up on that one very important risk trigger that was overlooked by the leader. It’s about volunteered accountability based on the fact that since the leader cares, so do the team members.
Project Procurement Management
This Knowledge Area needs project managers who can build relationships and achieve results simultaneously. Facilitative leadership is based on the premise that while vendors have some form of contractual obligation to deliver, the working relationship with their client is very much influenced by the character and competence of the project manager. From the character point of view, the facilitative leader is communicating authenticity and adaptability in dealing with the relationship. From the competence point of view, the facilitative leader is conveying the ability to navigate or facilitate through the procurement process in a way that is both collaborative and flexible. A strong facilitative leader manages the meaning around contracts, mental models of contractors, and the difference between treating a vendor like a pair of hands and treating them like a partner.
Examples of Communicating on Purpose
The Ernest Shackleton Story
There are several books on the market chronicling this amazing leader’s strength of character and professional competence. My preference is Leading at the Edge, by Dennis Perkins. The Shackleton expedition to the Antarctic is one of the most exciting adventure stories of polar exploration. It is a story about a leader and a group of explorers who endured conditions of hardship and deprivation more extreme than most of us could imagine.
Shackleton was clearly a facilitative leader who transformed resistance into advocacy to the greatest extent possible given the extreme conditions. He demonstrated the ability to keep the ultimate destination in mind, while at the same time being able to mobilize his scarce resources to create momentum for the short-term needs which ultimately ensured survival for him and a number of his men.
A great example of Shackleton’s facilitative leadership was when his ship, called Endurance, sunk. At this point his crew’s anxiety level could have been over the top, but because he focused and channeled their energy, any resistance was transformed into advocacy despite the reality that some of their activities did not produce positive results. Through their 18 months together, he created a team with such strong bonds that, on the verge of starvation, they were willing to share their last rations. It was a team that worked together against all extraordinary odds to prevail over significant obstacles. Although he failed to cross Antarctica, he did deliver on the promise contained in the original advertisement for the expedition: Those who sailed on Endurance did receive honor and recognition.
Despite his detractors, most believe he embodied everything a leader should be.
The Alexander the Great Story
Alexander of Macedon conquered most of the known world in 320 BC and in many respects could be a poster child for facilitative leadership. He framed his purpose in a way that caught the attention and hearts of his army. He made his vision easy to understand and connect with emotionally. Alexander’s “never panic, never quit” attitude set the pace and attitude for both his generals and his men.
He communicated his core values in both word and deed and led based on who is was [who he was?] versus what he owned or controlled. His core values of service and respect for his men won their respect and loyalty regardless of the situation. Case in point was his willingness after each battle to work with his surgeons to put gravely injured solders out of their misery humanely, but not before some appropriate acknowledgement of the soldiers’ contribution to the battle.
Like any strong facilitative leader, he concentrated on the big picture while at the same time facilitating and sustaining a constructive environment where his generals were encouraged to contribute to strategic and tactical battle planning. He was also a master at crisis management and facilitating quick changes both on the battlefield and politically.
Like any great leader, Alexander had flaws and critics, but he remains today an excellent example of an influential leader who left a powerful legacy of capturing the hearts and minds of his men.
The Panama Canal Story
The Panama Canal was a $300 million plus project completed in 1914. While the project had several project managers over its 15-year life cycle, an engineer by the name of George Washington Goethals was chosen by President Theodore Roosevelt to manage the last seven years of the initiative. Goethals was educated at West Point, where he graduated second in a class of 52 people, and was a natural-born teacher. Before being appointed the PM for the Canal project, he served with distinction in a number of engineering projects for the U.S. Army.
Goethals is a great of example of the premise that strong leaders are teachers and coaches. When asked what the most difficult aspect of delivering the Canal was, he said “the human element.” Like all strong facilitative leaders, trust was the cornerstone of his personal appeal. With as many as 45,000 persons of many nationalities and languages working on the canal, Goethals made himself accessible to all, heard complaints, and visited every aspect of the project. This is true facilitating and sustaining of a constructive environment.
The Panama Canal was a major accomplishment in its day and Goethals, true to his team-oriented style, made sure that an important contributor to its success—John Stevens, who built the project WBS before he left due to illness— was appropriately recognized in the official opening ceremony.
George Washington Goethals was a great example of an excellent project manager who was also a powerful leader.
Summary
Project and program managers need to practice successful management and leadership behaviors. In either behavioral dimension, the signature skill required for success is good communication.
How the meaning of events or circumstances is communicated (in writing or verbally) can have a big impact on the extent of team members’ engagement and overall commitment to positive outcomes, not just deliverables. Without guidance or help, team members will construct their own meaning of events, circumstances, or data.
Project managers provide important leadership to their teams when the take responsibility for managing the meaning of events and circumstances. They do this through a skill called framing, where they highlight certain aspects of a subject and ignore others in a responsible fashion. This framing skill is predicated on the idea that how information and events are framed will affect levels of engagement, effectiveness, and overall morale in a team. The language of leadership centers on the mental models that people hold about the picture of the future (called a vision), why the team exists (called a mission), and, most importantly, how the team wants to act on the journey to this vision (called values. By being able to connect for people how their role in the project supports the organization’s vision, mission, and values, project managers can inspire and motivate commitment to optimized outcomes regardless of the obstacles.
By being conscious of context (how their stakeholders think and what they expect), project managers can promote a shared understanding of how things work (mental models) and where they do not in order to facilitate a dialogue to understand why not and an approach that will respond to mutual purpose and respect. Effective framing, management of meaning, and understanding of the context foster a more collaborative and effective approach to conflict resolution, problem solving, communication, obtaining support for ideas, fostering accountability, and providing acknowledgement for team member contribution.
Project managers need to develop these skills in themselves and in their team members because they are the bedrock for inspiring team members to look beyond their self-interests and focus on organizational goals, which is the true definition of full engagement.
Fully engaged teams believe there is no problem they cannot solve. And they are usually right!