Intrinsic Stability: How Organic Leadership Breeds Excellence

By Christopher Smith

Christopher Smith is a 29-year safety professional whose passion and experience for creating excellence has provided him with unique insight into the creation of excellence and the effectiveness of leadership in fostering that excellence. Chris answers the question, "if excellence is claimed to be understood by so many people, then why is true excellence so rare?"

There is so much incomplete information in the infosphere about creating organizational excellence and how growing excellence relates to leadership. There are very few truths in organizations more relevant to creating excellence than "the only excellence available to your organization is the excellence you create from your culture, at your maturity level, through your own wisdom".

Organizations spend precious resources attempting and re-attempting to turn themselves into other organizations' cultures for the purpose of emulating those cultures in the pursuit of creating excellence. Intrinsic Stability is simple to understand concept distilled from years of experience seeding organizations with the ingredients to create their own brand of excellence. These proven concepts can be scaled and applied at any organizational maturity level with the confidence that the organization will gain experience everyday these concepts are applied.

Since this method of breeding excellence within your organization, through Intrinsic Stability and Organic Leadership, is grown from "your" culture and "your" capabilities, it is 100% sustainable. No more half starts toward organizational transformations with delays that result in abandoning your efforts and precious resources spent due to new process constraints becoming unsustainable.

Chris uses a series of short stories, following major concept discussions, to provide an easy to understand frame of reference to allow the reader to better conceptualize Intrinsic Stability and Organic Leadership principles. There are no special certifications, expensive consultants or extensive organizational preparations needed. These concepts can be applied immediately.

In sharing his experience and wisdom in this book, Chris invites you to open the door to a brand of excellence that is uniquely your own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098363505

Christopher Smith

Christopher Smith has been the film critic for a major Northeast daily for 14 years. Smith also reviewed eight years for regional NBC outlets and also two years nationally on E! Entertainment Daily. He is a member of the Broadcast Film Critics Association.He has written three best-selling books: "Fifth Avenue," "Bullied" and "Revenge."

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Intrinsic Stability: How Organic Leadership Breeds Excellence

© 2021 Christopher Smith

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBN PRINT 978-1-09836-349-9 | ISBN eBOOK 978-1-09836-350-5

Table Of Contents

Foreword

About me

Fast-Forward to Today

Definitions of the Positions, Roles and Concepts

Job #1: Must Be Willing to Leave the Groupthink

(Herd) Leadership Culture

Caretakers and Groupthink (Herd) Leadership

Principles Are Good Bedfellows

Leadership Skills Trap

Ray Gun Sales: Best Practices Anyone?

Rethinking How Organizations Reach Excellence

Why Is Unique So Important When We Have So Many Great Examples

of Companies That Have Been Successful That We Can Model From?

Bruce Lee on the Formation of Jeet Kune Do

Maturity and Capability Collide: Intrinsic Stability Introduction

It’s the Culture, Stupid

Guidelines, Principles and Empirical Truths to

Strengthen Intrinsic Stability

The Remote

Change Always Seeks Equilibrium First

Learning Why Change Fails the Hard Way

Leadership Must First Learn to Tolerate

Change to Lead It Organically

Hosts, Invaders, Dinosaurs and Ray Guns Explained

My Personal Transformation to Stability and Organic Leadership

My Takeaways

Leaving My Leadership Lane in the Pursuit of Excellence

Maturity Matters: Building Intrinsic Stability Requires

Selecting Tools That Create Utility

How Can Scripting Our Path to Excellence

Be Described as Crippling Our Efforts?

Errors, Errors and More Errors

Organic Leadership Can Be Scary

The Value of Organic Leadership

Strategic and Tactical Leadership

Changing Leadership Engagement: The Organic Way

Rolling Up Our Sleeves at Every

Level Must Be Part of the Plan

We Need Some Leadership Courage to

Forge a Partnership Organically

The First and the Last Question Asked

Should be About the Impact on Culture

What Are Some of the Things We Can Do to Get Started?

Leadership Principles to Get Started

Basic Core Functions

Laying a Foundation

Strong Core Functions Require Strong Organizational Muscle

Leadership Focus for Strong Core Functions

Impact of Disengaged Leadership

All Good Things Spring from the

Fountain of Good Leadership

A One-Oar Boat Captain

Organizational Learning

Jumping to the End

Organizations Learn Like People Learn—At Their Own Pace

Building Organizational Muscle

It’s All About Execution, Right?

Going for the Championship!

Organizational Muscle Blueprint

Have a Common Methodology to Address Opportunities

The Process Stability and Managed Well Question

The Criteria Question

The Who Knows About it Question

The How Often is it Inspected Question

What Should We Expect When Allowing Culture to Grow Organically?

Organic Leadership Focus for Positive Outcomes at Each Level of Maturity

Core Functions Matrix

In Closing

Foreword

In an era of celebrity CEOs, corporate social responsibility and hypercommunication through too many social media platforms to count, I have noticed over the past decade or so that organizational leadership has adopted a culture that embraces low risk and conformity as a precursor to success. This leadership culture that embraces the latest book, rewards practitioners of specific organizational philosophies and turns successful organizations’ cultures into almost cult-like entities to be studied and emulated.

This new leadership culture sustains itself and validates itself through the groupspeak and the groupthink of The Herd. If you are to be a member of this new culture and want to be considered someone with leadership potential, you must keep up with the latest and greatest ideas, learn the lingo that The Herd quickly adopts and give the appearance of being innovative by distilling these new, popular ideas into their organizations as opportunities for growth.

This leadership culture homogenizes leadership traits and restructures their opinions quickly on the function of leadership roles inside of organizations based on the latest, popular theory on leadership strategies. The by-product of this groupthink, fad-driven and overly malleable leadership culture is the general acceptance that a paint by numbers approach can be applied to almost any effort an organization strives to achieve. The solution, it seems, is finding the correct combination of colors and an experienced practitioner to apply them. What is lost in this paint by numbers leadership culture is the nature of holistic and organic growth within an organization.

I have come to understand that too many people who hold leadership roles inside larger organizations have an imperfect understanding of where excellence comes from. Almost every leader I have encountered in my twenty-nine years of professional experience has proclaimed that not only do they know what an organization must do to create a culture of excellence, but they also have the skills to lead that organization’s cultural change. Over so many years of working in these organizations where these change leaders’ function and listening to their claims, I am left with the thought that if the knowledge to create excellence is so common and the number of practitioners is so high, then why is true excellence so rare? The next thought that comes to mind is: if you have the answers and plan to create excellence, then why haven’t you done it yet?

From my own experience, in most cases, I know the reason why they haven’t planted the seeds of excellence they claim to hold, and the answer is simply: they haven’t done it yet because it is hard! I don’t mean hard in theory; I mean hard in practice. Most companies that desire some level of transformation would struggle to sustain those improvements for the same reasons they would struggle to create them. When leadership looks to educate itself on the foundations needed to build organizational excellence, in today’s world, true resources are difficult to decipher within the 24/7 infosphere marketing cycle of information. Most of these accounts are given by people who did not build the excellence they experienced but claim to understand its origins as it relates to your organization’s development woes, but more on that later.

Like so many reading this book, I have functioned inside of organizations that are excellent in their industries. That experience, by itself, meant I could describe what excellence looked like through the lens of my functional role, but the areas of the company I rarely interacted with were more of a mystery to me in terms of what drives excellence for them.

When I think back to my early years, when I talked about what excellence looked like from my role in the leadership structure, I realized I was describing the symptoms of excellence without truly understanding the foundations of how it was created, or all the moving parts required to maintain it. This condition was especially true for my time as a leader in more mature companies who had achieved an excellent culture before I was hired into that culture.

I didn’t have a name for it at the time, but I was hired to be a caretaker of that culture through the functional role I held. I was required to uphold policies, norms and traditions that the company held. I was required to undergo leadership development to grow those critical leadership skills that the company felt was necessary for an effective leader to maintain its strong culture. Finally, I was graded often and promoted on my ability to execute my position’s functions using those critical leadership skill sets needed to sustain the company culture. All of what I described was very necessary for those organizations to sustain their level of excellence.

Over the many years of being a functional leader inside so many wonderful companies and working with some of the best professionals in their industries, I have discovered some common denominators to excellence that just seemed to get missed. Organizations knowingly or unknowingly waste valuable resources and strain their cultures attempting to improve the symptoms of excellence, which feel like a fake it until we make it kind of effort when you are experiencing it.

I have led within mature organizations that use many of the improvement philosophies used in the infosphere these days. Over the years, my function within these organizations began to evolve into a change leader position. Specifically, a change leader who served in portions of the organization that were recently acquired or portions that were legacy poor performers. The maturity of these organizations was generally lower than that of the parent organization, and the cultures were vastly different. Upon assignment, I was given short periods of time to show a measurable improvement, so effectiveness was critical.

Improvement methods such as those from a Lean culture were too foreign to these cultures. So out of necessity, I found myself distilling down some of these improvement philosophies into the most effective elements needed to drive excellence within an organization from my influential position. Over many years of refining this distilled process, I find it has become a reliable and repeatable method for me every time it is tried. Many people often marvel at how simple the concepts are to understand and wonder why it has not been assembled this way before.

Intrinsic Stability and Organic Leadership are two concepts born from my experience and accomplishment. When coupled together, these practices will create foundations for excellence in any organization and at any maturity level.

About me

I have been a husband for twenty years, and I’m a father of three children: one boy and two girls. Throughout most of my children’s lives, we migrated the country as I served as an internal troubleshooter for some of the largest and most prestigious companies in the world. My wife had taken on the responsibility of staying at home and educating our children since we moved so much.

All three of my children are currently studying full time in college and doing well. As a side note, having the expense of three full-time college students has certainly inspired me to write a book about my passion for building excellence.

I have been in pursuit of excellence my entire life. I spent much of my youth through my early twenties pursuing a large variety of sports. I enjoyed those years in sports, and I learned a lot about teamwork and the impact of effort on excellence. My academic interests took me through several colleges throughout my life. I studied accounting, economics, business, nuclear power and applied management. I will admit that during my younger years, I was more focused on athletics than academics. I used athletics to help me pay for my college. It wasn’t until I joined the Navy that my academic focus changed. It is ironic, looking back, that I chose a profession outside of all those fields of study. I have incorporated many skills from each of those disciplines to build the concepts of Intrinsic Stability throughout my twenty-nine year career.

To say I have had a diverse professional career would be an understatement. I have held licenses to operate a nuclear reactor on three separate naval nuclear-powered vessels to working for the most iconic brand in recreational vehicle manufacturing, with a few additional stops in my journey.

I began my career with a DOW 30 company as a maintenance manager, following my time in the Navy. During industry consolidations with this company, I saw an opportunity to lead an Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) function. That opportunity allowed me to discover my career passion in environment, health and safety. This position offered me a unique look at the topic of leadership and creating excellence. It is the one profession where there are no barriers inside an organization. There is no topic off-limits, and all levels of leadership are accessible to this position. It is the ultimate change leadership position. In a short period of time in this profession, I had carved out a niche as an internal troubleshooter. The influence of this profession provided leverage in every area of business to solve problems and, more importantly, create new synergies to help create excellence. This position has provided me a unique vantage point to understand the best and worst examples of how an organization creates, leads and sustains a culture of excellence.

The foundations for Intrinsic Stability was laid, for me, in the military while I served as a machinist mate in the Nuclear Navy. The Naval Nuclear Power School was rated the toughest school in the country the year I graduated. Ranking higher than MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Yale and others for difficulty and pace. The Nuclear Navy is also ground zero for many of the leading thinkers supporting the focus on human performance to create excellence in organizational performance.

As an enlisted Machinist Mate, I was the fastest qualifier in Naval Nuclear Power program’s history for the position of Engineering Watch Supervisor. This meant that I had the training to direct operations of the nuclear power plant in shutdown and operating modes under the permission of the officers in charge. This is the highest level of qualification for an enlisted person in this challenging field and a huge responsibility. Nuclear reactors aren’t cheap, and mistakes can ruin more than just your day. I achieved this feat in three years and two months into my six-year enlistment. Most people, in arguably the most elite field in all the services, reach this qualification in eight to twelve years. I understand that record, set in 1994, still stands today.

I didn’t know it was a big deal until a few years after I left the Navy. A friend of mine, who served in Washington D.C., told me a story about a meeting he attended for staffing in the Nuclear Navy regarding the supervisory NEC for my rating which required six years minimum service with a chance to wave one year with permission for exceptional performers. He said during that meeting, a sub commander stood up and said he heard a tale of someone qualifying with a two year and ten month waiver. My friend answered yes, his name is Chris Smith and I served with him on the USS Long Beach.

I admit I am indulging myself a little in telling this story focusing on this achievement, but that phase of my life took some effort to complete. I have learned that the certainty of my success in any endeavor is much higher if the effort given is equal to the objective desired. Nothing is lost in the pursuit of that endeavor; even if I fall short of my objective, the learning required to sustain that effort prepares me to reflect on that challenge. I can always reformulate my efforts, and my capabilities will improve from the previous effort. From this new and improved launching platform, I can attempt to reach that objective again. This is also the nature of continuous improvement in an organization and the basis for building sustainable cultures that reflect a strong Intrinsic Stability.

Fast-Forward to Today

Today, I often challenge leadership, who have come from more mature organizations and who have been tasked with creating organizational excellence, if they can recreate the excellence they experienced in their previous organizations. More specifically, if I presented them with an organization that was dysfunctional with sparse leadership, could they recreate their experience with excellence in that new business? Most people would say yes and then start describing the symptoms of excellence, viewed through the lens of their role within their previous organization.

The next comments from that change leader would sound something like: it’s all about the customers, it is all about the quality, or it has to be about your people. Generally, they reference their organizational focus points as the center of gravity and say that by creating excellence within those focus areas, the gravitational pull of that excellence will move everything else into its orbit. In my experience, yes, every one of the focus points I am given during such discussions is important, but the conversation starts to get muddy when the follow-on questions are as follows: What do you focus on first to start creating excellence in these areas? How would you prioritize your efforts within the organization to get started? The further down the rabbit hole we go, the more general their conditions get and more qualifications the organization must meet to continue down this de-evolving plan to create excellence.

I want to be clear on a point early on in our discussion on creating excellence. I feel that leadership has become too homogenized in thought and practice, but I don’t think leaders who participate in this homogenization are dumb