PICATINNY ARSENAL, N.J. (August 5, 2015) -- We all have boundaries--at home, work, within our communities and personal relationships. They've remained quick and convenient ways to understand our individual roles, as well as another's role, within groups and projects.

However, when those boundaries remain inflexible, especially within leadership, it can hinder personal development and the mission, suggested Thomas Gaffney during his June 23 presentation on "Boundary Spanning Leadership" at Picatinny Arsenal.

Gaffney is an employee from the Center of Creative Leadership.

The Center of Creative Leadership, or CCL, is a non-profit educational foundation that focuses solely on leadership. By exploring topics such as communication and connection, it aims to teach its participants about leadership styles, what constitutes a good leader, the types of boundaries that can affect leadership, and how to use these lessons to create an effective organization.

As CCL's strategic partner in government solutions, Gaffney helps people to determine their individual and organizational leadership needs, and then seeks to provide a timely and cost-effective program to meet these needs.

Gaffney manages CCL's work with the U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the intelligence community.

To maintain strong leadership, according to CCL, its model has three pillars that an organization needs: direction, alignment and commitment.

Direction means that all members know where the team is headed and understand the end goal. It may not be a direction that you set, or voted for, but it's the direction of your organization, unit or agency and each person should be ready to support it, said Gaffney.

Alignment implies that the team has the appropriate people and resources to accomplish its goal. On the other hand, commitment focuses on ensuring that team members are not simply compliant, but dedicated and consistently rewarded for their efforts.

"When you get all three of those things--direction, alignment and commitment--then leadership is happening," explained Gaffney. "If you have only two out of the three, such as direction and alignment, and no commitment, you might be coordinated and headed in the same direction, but you won't have a real, substantial continuing momentum.

"And this is not a one-time commitment," added Gaffney. "You don't establish your direction, alignment and commitment, and then retire in eight years. It's a process where you're always moving back and forth, and so you need to continuously be balancing those issues."

Without this direction, alignment and commitment, leadership cannot successfully grow and span over its boundaries. According to CCL, boundaries are like a fence or a barrier between where you work and where you normally don't work.

These boundaries can create borders and divide groups into 'us' versus 'them,' fracturing relationships and results. However, it also can create frontiers, forming new ways to collaborate, develop innovation solutions and ultimately transform organizations.

Gaffney also identified five organizational boundaries: vertical, horizontal, stakeholder, demographic and geographic.

Vertical boundaries imply that an organization, or a team, is separated by rank, class, power, or authority. Horizontal boundaries suggest that teams are divided by their expertise or functions.

Meanwhile, stakeholder boundaries mean that members are split, based on their value chains or customers.

Demographic boundaries indicate divisions between gender, nationality, culture, or ideology. Geographic boundaries may include members organized by location, region, markets or distance.

Typically, an organization has more than one boundary, which can differ between departments, groups and individuals.

During his presentation, Gaffney demonstrated this concept by placing five signs around the conference room--each one representing an organizational boundary--and asking Picatinny employees to stand under the sign that the each thought represents what boundary ARDEC works with best.

Some employees said that the U.S. Army works as a chain of command, and thus ARDEC worked best with its vertical boundaries. But, others stated that ARDEC offered many ways to improve one's technical and personal skills and hence worked best with its horizontal boundaries.

When asked what boundary ARDEC could work with better, some employees suggested that ARDEC expand its geographic boundaries. Others said that ARDEC could improve its demographic or stakeholder boundaries.

To span over these boundaries, and create a "nexus of collaboration," Gaffney said there are three stages, (managing boundaries, forging common grounds, and discovering new frontier) which can be broken down into a six-step process. The six-step process includes buffering, reflecting, connecting, mobilizing, weaving and transforming.

Throughout the buffering stage, groups define who they are. The intent is to create a safety space, allowing members to appropriately filter and identify people, roles and information. In the reflection stage, the aim is to create respect between groups and establish unity by recognizing each other's differences and similarities. Rotating jobs or inviting members outside your group into meetings are two ways to foster this new connection.

Afterward, in the connection stage, people put their group differences on hold and step into a third space, known as "the neutral zone," where members with individual similarities connect, as a way to establish mutual respect and trust.

"The biggest threat to this stage is not doing the initial two steps properly," Gaffney said about the connection stage. "The second one--because this does tend to be an issue with military organizations--is the rotation of leadership, and whether leadership sticks with it."

At the mobilizing step, groups strive to "move inside" their new, larger boundary and craft a common purpose for the new group.

Although recognizing the new group's core set of values is a helpful tactic, Gaffney also suggests harnessing the power of the narrative by developing a storyline that solidifies the group's purpose, or creates a common goal, bringing different members together to work on a single project.

The final two steps, weaving and transforming, are focused more on the future. Weaving uses the power of group differences and the new integration. It intends to generate a more creative space by working together while simultaneously capitalizing each member's strengths.

In the transforming stage, though, groups are encouraged to continuously reach beyond their "known" context and establish new interactions, where members can reimagine and reinvent what is and what could be.

"What we're trying to do within boundary spanning leadership is create a shared mission and a sense of understanding, as well as commitment to that mission, that develops and includes all of our team members," said Gaffney.

"When this happens--and you have that direction, alignment, commitment across all boundaries--you have more energy, and then can move forward."