Degree of Personization as the Critical Differentiator of Levels

Personization is not a typo but the introduction of a new concept to clarify what is the ultimate difference between the levels and to differentiate this concept from “personalization,” which has come to be associated with customization, the process of offering services or products to people on the basis of their personal choices or needs.

Personization is the process of mutually building a working relationship with a fellow employee, teammate, boss, subordinate, or colleague based on trying to see that person as a whole, not just in the role that he or she may occupy at the moment. Personization begins to occur when either party, early in the conversation, asks something personal or reveals something personal. Personization implies that one or both parties in the conversation have invested themselves to a considerable degree and have made themselves vulnerable to being ignored or dismissed or disrespected. In all interactions, we invest something and expect something in return. Personization is intrinsically a reciprocal interactive process.

Why would you as a manager want to personize your relationship with your direct reports? Why would you as an employee want to personize your relationship with your boss? Our basic argument is that you would want to do this in order to maximize the possibility that you will be open and honest with each other and will feel safe in reporting when things are not going well, when you don’t understand each other, when you don’t agree with each other, and, most important, when you need each other’s help. You will want to build this relationship in order to be able to trust that your direct reports or peers or your own boss will make commitments in the service of shared goals and will deliver on whatever promises have been made. In building this relationship, you will also want your direct reports or peers or boss to begin to feel that they can trust you to be open and honest with them.

Personizing has nothing to do with being nice, giving employees good jobs and working conditions, generous benefits, or flexible working hours. It has everything to do with building relationships that get the job done and that avoid the indifference, manipulation, or, worse, lying and concealing that so often arise in work relationships.

In the interactions that occur between you and your direct reports, you will minimize “subordination” in order to emphasize collaboration, joint responsibility, and your own willingness to help them to succeed. Moving to Level 2 is expressing, in actions and words, “I want to get to know you better so that we can trust each other in getting our jobs done better.” We don’t need to become friends and learn all about each other’s private lives, but we have to learn to be open and honest around work issues.

We believe that it is possible to have a closer, more open and trusting relationship in the work situation while being quite sensitive to boundaries of privacy and propriety. We can know each other well enough at work to trust each other and get the job done without necessarily becoming friends or doing things together outside of work. At the same time, if the work demands a higher level of collaboration (as might be typified by a team of Navy Seals), we can build more reflexive or intimate relationships as needed to support the higher level of trust and communication that extreme circumstances may demand.

In summary, it is crucial to understand this personizing process because it is ultimately the mechanism by which the level of trust that we need in interdependent work situations is built. We need to understand that there is some trust in each level but for Humble Leadership we need a level of trust that is most closely associated with Level 2 relationships. Let’s look at each level from the point of view of how personization influences openness and trust, especially how Level 1 managerial culture has evolved in a way that undermines openness and trust.