The English word “command” was originally synonymous with “commend,” as in “I commend to your care,” or “I commend your courage.” So “command” actually has the sense of entrusting, and of praising what is worthy. Its root is the same as “mandate,” and comes from two Latin words, “man” which means “hand,” and “dare” which means “to give.” “Command” means to give into worthy hands, to entrust a duty to a worthy person.

Here’s an example.

When I sailed as chief mate on the 145′ tall ship CALIFORNIAN, Captain Andy Reay-Ellers would sometimes issue commands with his ball cap. This simple gesture transformed my understanding of command.

Most of the time Captain Andy got us ready to tack the ship (a complicated maneuver for turning a traditional sailing ship that requires the crew to handle all the ship’s sails, releasing them on one side of the ship and pulling them in on the other, in the right order, with the right timing and in a hurry as the ship turns) by calling out the initial command of “Ready about.” Then it was my job to organize the crew for the various tasks. There was a fair bit of shouting across the deck directing each person, and I believed that the smoothness and efficiency of the operation relied on my voice. The crew had learned to believe this too. They were all listening to me. But we learned a more elegant and effective way from Andy’s cap.

We often had a crowd of tourists on board for a day sail, serving drinks and refreshments on deck, and the crew were expected to mingle with the guests to answer questions and tell our sea tales. In this context of hosting a party, my shouting over the heads of the passengers may have been nicely salty, but it wasn’t very elegant.

So Andy taught us all to keep an eye on his ball cap as we mingled. When it was time to tack he would turn the brim of the cap to the side over one ear. This was “Ready about.” One of the crew would notice, and excuse themselves from their conversations with the guests and move to position at a sail. Others of us would notice the first person moving and move too, and our noticing rippled among us until everyone was in place. No need for me to tell them where to go, they knew the job and if a station were already covered they’d go to another. When I could see that we were all in position I’d signal Andy and he’d turn his ball cap backwards, as the command to tack. I gave no directions for individual tasks, and the crew found their own rhythm, watching and synchronizing with each other. If something wasn’t right I could correct it as we went.

This is the difference between “command and control” and “command and trust.”

Giving command requires us to be careful of what we give. When I felt I had to hold the smoothness and efficiency of tacking the ship myself, by giving directions for every step, I reduced the crew to just doing what I said, and I reduced their sense of their own worthiness too. With those shouted directions I gave dependence and myopia. What Andy gave with his ball cap was broad awareness, initiative and shared responsibility. And real trust; the qualities that make any ship, or business, or family, run well. If something wasn’t right, I could see and correct it more easily undistracted by my own shouting.

Both approaches tacked the ship, but the silent ball cap was a better commander than my shouting. Command is a generosity practice, and its goal is to bring out the worthiness in everyone. Then the best outcome follows easily.

Alice worked in a company where her team had weekly all-team meetings. She told me they were hellish occasions, thick with territoriality and blame, a regular weekly gut-shot to morale, creativity and effectiveness. They were also male-dominated and hierarchical, with an entrenched and fearful leadership. Alice, in a new position at the bottom of the ladder, hardly said anything, and what she did say was dismissed.

Everyone else seemed resigned to this culture as the norm. To introduce some softness into this inhospitable environment, Alice began bringing small flower arrangements to put on her desk. Finally one week, she took her flowers and put them on the side table against the wall in the meeting room before people came in.

When the meeting started a few people commented on the flowers, some surprised, some cynical, and the meeting proceeded as usual. Alice brought flowers for several more weeks, and put them on the side table. Then, when the flowers became an accepted norm, she brought a low arrangement and put it in the middle of the meeting table. She thought someone might say, “Get that off of there.” But no one did. Some even thanked her.

After several more weeks, when flowers on the table become an accepted norm, Alice baked cookies and bought fruit. She put them on the table with the flowers. People ate them, and said thanks. They started offering them to each other. As the weeks went on, flowers, cookies and fruit became the norm.  Eventually one of the men asked, “Can you make pecan sandies? Those are really my favourite.” Alice said, “No, but maybe you’d like to bring some next time.” And he did. Others brought favourite things, and the group began to discuss who would bring what next time. A culture of sharing began.

Alice didn’t need to bring food any more, but she still offered flowers. Her colleagues began to ask her what kind they were, and sometimes straightened one that drooped. Flowers and food became the first five minutes of the discussion, and the meetings ended with someone carrying the arrangement out into the office where they could all see it through the day.

Over the many weeks of Alice’s expanding intervention, the meetings lost some of their grimness. As people offered each other cookies, they began to offer each other the benefit of the doubt, so that they could start to listen. A little mutual regard began to surface, and people could bring some creative ideas forward without being squashed. Alice found that her own voice could now also be heard, and that her fresh perspective and gentle clarity were a welcome alternative to the habitual tone. Her colleagues began to turn to her and ask, “Alice, any thoughts on this one?”

Plenty of dysfunctionality persisted of course, but it was a start. Alice told me she felt she’d found a way to contribute to a more healthy society at work, and that the meeting culture was starting to shift.

Alice couldn’t shift the culture on her own. She needed strong allies, and there weren’t any in the team members. She found her allies in the flowers and cookies.

Why did this work?

Because Alice didn’t hand out articles on being a team player, or propose made-up team-building activities. A frontal assault invites resistance. There was little to resist in Alice’s approach.

Also, her flowers and food were real, not made-up “activities,” and they had the power of real things. She shifted the environment the people were in, and the environment shifted the people for her. Her approach was not directive. It was cultural.

She applied her technique in stages, allowing its influence to accumulate. When she suggested one of the men buy pecan sandies to bring, it might have backfired. “I don’t bring cookies. That’s your job, isn’t it?” But her ongoing generosity had already taken things beyond that.

Her flowers and food were soft and nurturing, but they also had a commanding edge of gentleness that cut through some of the nastiness, and so created the conditions for a cultural shift.

But let’s not over-simplify. Flowers and cookies were not the solution to this team’s problems. They had a long way to go, and Alice had more to offer than decor. Her clarity and gentleness, her patience and openness; these were powerful in their own right, and once she created the conditions where her qualities could be seen, she began to uncover the submerged qualities of gentleness, appreciation and cooperation in her colleagues too.

When a cultural shift is needed, the indirect approach, finding allies in the environment, can be far more effective than meeting the issue head on.

Let’s say you’re responsible to lead someone who doesn’t take initiative. They’re always coming to you with questions they could answer themselves, especially if they can use their question as a way to avoid making a decision themselves.

To talk with this person about their attitude, first you need to find out what’s stuck. You might say, well, their initiative is stuck. But that’s too simplistic. Telling them, “You need to show more initiative” probably won’t get results.

Are they stuck in thinking it’s more important to avoid mistakes than it is to achieve excellence? Are they stuck in a lack of personal confidence? Are they stuck in really not liking their job? Are they stuck in caring for aging relatives or worrying about a delinquent teen, and they just don’t have the energy to take on any more responsibility?

In order to help them get unstuck from any of these, you have to know which it is. What’s actually stuck?

You can’t change something you don’t understand.

The second question is: Why is it stuck? Are they focused on avoiding mistakes because, in spite of the organization’s values statement on the wall of the reception area that says, “We value initiative and risk-taking,” the person knows all too well from past experience that the subtle punishments for failure are severe?

Or if they’re stuck in some other way, why is that?

The Conversation Roadmap

So here’s a conversation roadmap that can help you uncover what is stuck. You’re part is all questions, so you can follow the three rules for effective questions:

• Open-ended questions are your friends.
• Accusations and directives are your enemies.
• And leading questions, accusations and directives disguised as questions, are snakes in the grass.

One point is really important because it sets the tone for the whole thing: expect the best from them. They’ll be able to tell if you’re expecting the worst, and that’s what you’ll get. So expect the best.

Also, what’s the minimum outcome that will make this meeting worthwhile? If they deny there’s any kind of problem, but they’re surprised to hear you think there is, that surprise may be all you need as a first step, because it invites them to look more closely. Then you can ask them to think about it, see if it’s true, and talk with you again in a while. There may be several stages in this process. Don’t force too much into the first stage.

You might start your conversation with, “How‘s the job going for you these days?” This can invite the person to talk about the parts of the job they really like, letting them remind themselves of what’s good about their situation. If they don’t talk about the parts they like, you can ask.

Then, if they haven’t brought the problem issue up themselves as part of their first answer, you might say, “I notice you come to me a lot for direction. Is that how it feels to you?”

If they say no, what are you talking about, you take a different approach that we’ll talk about in another post.

But if they acknowledge that they do come to you for direction, then ask, “Why do you think that is? What’s it about?”

Keep Asking Questions

When they answer, go deeper. Try to get below the surface. “But why is it like that? Where does that come from? What’s your insight into what’s really going on?”

If they make a point, invite more by saying, “Tell me more about that. Can you flesh that out a bit more for me?”

At some point, gently begin to bring some weight to the issue. Ask them, “What do you see are the consequences of this issue? Do you find that it’s getting in your way?” Or the team’s way, or the customer’s or client’s way? This is very different than asking, “How is it affecting your performance?” That’s a snake in the grass, implying their performance is a problem. Asking if it’s getting in the way implies that if you could remove this obstacle together, their performance would be unhindered.

Only at this point, when you’ve really looked at the issue from their point of view, can you begin, gently, to direct the conversation toward them. “Do you have a role in that yourself? Is there anything about what you’ve been doing or thinking that you feel contributes to that problem?”

The New Attitude

At this point, if they acknowledge that their attitude may have a role in the problem, you can ask, “Are you getting what you want to get out of this situation? Are you getting the best results you can imagine? Or is there a different approach that would be better for you?”

If they have any suggestion to make here, any at all, you’re off to the races. End by asking what they will do to implement a different approach, and when they want to talk with you next about their progress. Wish them good luck, and give them a warm goodbye.

When we’re responsible for the personal development of others, we have two choices. We can treat people like students, with programs and resources, teaching and correcting, guiding and managing, passing down knowledge from our seniority. Or we can treat people like colleagues, inviting them into the trenches with us, promoting their independence alongside us, letting them see that we’re in it together. In my experience, the second is by far the most effective.

Here’s an example:

My brother David, 11 years older than me, was a hot shot racing sailor in college. One summer day when I was about 10 years old, it was so windy that, to my great relief, my sailing class was canceled. Then David said, “Get your boat rigged up, it’s time to learn some heavy weather sailing.” “No way”, I said, over and over. But David won the argument and we headed down to the beach.

I had seen photos in David’s ocean sailing books of small yachts with nothing up but tiny handkerchiefs of storm sails, racing down the slopes of mountainous ocean seas to their doom, as I imagined, in the trough at the bottom of the wave. Our little bay, covered with whitecaps on waves maybe two feet high, seemed like much worse conditions to me and my little square-nosed pram. I was scared.

The pram wasn’t big enough for the two of us but David was planning on coaching me through this horror show, so he set out in our rowboat, HEZEKIAH, a heavy, flat-bottomed, slab-sided workboat. On mild days I loved to row HEZEKIAH, chasing my toy catamaran, a model I had that really sailed. Sometimes it sailed so fast I could hardly keep up, and sometimes it would capsize and I would rescue it.

The irony of the role reversal was not lost on me, as David rowed beside me with instructions and encouragement. I just hoped I would be better at staying upright than my toy.

HEZEKIAH was as easy to row in these conditions as a donkey. David pulled valiantly at the oars but rowing against the wind and waves was really making him work. I saw that this was actually as hard for him as it was for me. Sometimes, when I lost control of the boat and drifted helplessly, sail flapping violently, David would be able to rest for a bit, drifting downwind beside me, helping me learn how to maneuver out of my predicament. But once I got going he’d have to follow me upwind again, and after a while I was getting good enough that I just kept sailing away from him and he’d call me back around.

That was the amazing part. I was getting good at it. After a couple of hours I could keep my pram under control and make progress against, or rather with, the violence of the wind and waves. It was a revelation, the realization that I may be frightened, but I can proceed on that basis.

The situation David offered me for my learning was as valuable as the wind in fostering my self-discovery. He didn’t take me to the yacht club in the next town where he taught and had all the facilities of the sailing program, to send me out in an unfamiliar boat on unfamiliar waters while he followed along in a motorboat with a bullhorn, as he did with his racing team. Instead, everything in the situation was familiar, just amped up a few notches, and he was right in the middle of it with me. This let the wind be my only obstacle, and made David my close ally. The single focus and the intimacy of our mutual effort were able to hold me long enough to wear out my fears. The yacht club option, or anything else that added complexity and separated him from me, would have overwhelmed me, and I would have bolted for shore, believing that the wind really was too much for me.

Intellectual learning is important, but we learn best when we’re physically and emotionally part of something, and right there with those we need to learn from. What more can we do to invite our people in?

I’m offering a once-a-year opportunity to share the heart of the leadership experience with me, at sea, during the Nova Scotia Sea School’s Professional Development voyage, September 17-21, starting from Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. Join me for this program for a broad range of people who lead groups: entrepreneurs, educators, corporate and government leaders, community development professionals. It’s a challenging adventure voyage mixed with leadership principles and discussion, and lots of learning from your peers. For more information, go to: http://cranestookey.com/leadership-development-at-sea-with-crane/, or contact me at crane@cranestookey.com.

Captain John Beebe-Center was captain of the schooner HARVEY GAMMAGE when I sailed aboard her as Chief Mate, second in command. It was my first job on a sailing ship, and I had a lot to learn, especially about working hard. The HARVEY GAMMAGE was known in those days as the HEAVY DAMAGE. She was old and tired, and lots of things kept breaking. Capt. John wanted any ship under his command to look sharp, so the crew and I often worked into the evening hanging over the side painting, chipping at rust on deck, repairing worn rigging aloft. It was exhausting, tedious work, and I balked at the endlessness of it. I felt it wasn’t really our problem. The ship’s office should be paying for newer gear.

Capt. John thought I was a spoiled slacker who needed to learn that if the crew don’t take care of the ship, the ship can’t take care of the crew, and in a storm that could be trouble. He was right, and my attitude set a bad example for the crew.

Capt. John rode me pretty hard much of the time, and pushed me beyond what I thought were proper limits. We chafed against each other in a downward spiral of recrimination and resistance.

Then one evening at anchor, the electric generator that lived in a box on deck stopped running. Capt. John didn’t know much about engines, but he tried to fix it. I had the night off, and was getting ready to go ashore. John had the generator taken apart on deck and as I passed he asked me to hold a flashlight for him for a moment. I grudgingly did, and asked if he knew how to repair engines. He said no, but he might figure it out, and if it ran we’d save a lot of time and money getting it fixed. If it didn’t run, all he’d lose was an evening.

I couldn’t believe it. Why would anyone waste their time like this? We should just get it fixed in the morning by a mechanic. It wasn’t our problem, the ship’s office should give us better gear. But as I held the flashlight I watched him work. He was covered with grease, a couple of knuckles were bleeding, the daylight was fading, and he’d been crouched on his knees for an hour already. But he seemed content. He was gentler and more relaxed than I’d seen him before. Something about his doggedness, his private determination to do his best even if he failed, was suddenly compelling to me, and I saw him in a different light: not the unreasonable taskmaster, but the committed captain taking his responsibility seriously. I kept holding the flashlight.

We didn’t talk. I knew nothing about mechanics and had no suggestions to make. He urged me several times to go ashore for my night off, but I stayed. It was a clear, quiet night. Eventually he had the generator reassembled, and it wouldn’t run. He said, “Well, it was worth a try,” and went to bed. I went to bed too, but my view of work had changed. I began to see myself as Capt. John saw himself, as someone who could take responsibility for what was needed, and my resistance began to weaken.

The right kind of friction can cut through the ways that we’re stuck more effectively than someone trying to un-stick us. John’s earlier badgering had been the wrong kind of friction, more like chafe, and had only pushed me away. In contrast, his quiet doggedness was compelling, and caught my attention, so I could really see him, without worrying about what criticism of me I’d hear next. The friction I needed to wear down my resistance to hard work was John’s personal example, which, through the course of the evening, wore through my sense of my own limits. Even then, I would have resisted any admonitions from him about working harder, but he just worked away, and let me draw my own conclusions.

We often confuse chafe with friction. Chafe grinds us down, friction polishes our brilliance. Chafe entrenches whatever way we’re stuck. Friction wears through our stuckness. This friction can be gritty and rough, like the challenge of climbing a mountain or the long hours needed to take care of a ship, but it doesn’t have to be. Friction is simply anything that cuts through the ways that we’re stuck. Capt. John’s spacious, uncompromising example was just the friction I needed, and after that evening, we chafed against each other much less.

I’m offering a once-a-year opportunity to explore friction and chafe as leadership skills, at sea, during the Nova Scotia Sea School’s Professional Development voyage, September 17-21, starting from Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. Join me for this program for a broad range of people who lead groups: entrepreneurs, educators, corporate and government leaders, community development professionals. It’s a challenging adventure voyage mixed with leadership principles and discussion, and lots of learning from your peers. For more information, go to: http://seaschool.org/professional, or contact me at crane@cranestookey.com.