Earlier this year I was working with the management team of a logistics provider during an organisational restructuring brought about by the implementation of a new operating system.  As usual in these circumstances there was a fair amount of tension inside the organisation as the team members struggled to cope with closing out the old system, preparing to launch the new and come to terms with the new management structure.

The transition to the new system had been carefully planned in conjunction with the systems provider. The process changes to accommodate the new operating system had been mapped out and an extensive organisational re-design had taken place with supporting input from the existing team members.  An extensive training programme had been devised to support the implementation to ensure a seamless transition and a brief had been prepared for communication to the customer network.

A key focus of attention for the management team during the run up to implementation was to put in place an escalation process to deal with any issues as they arose to minimise customer disruption. The maintenance of the contracted service levels during the implementation was of paramount importance to secure the company’s future market position.

As the implementation drew near every team member underwent extensive training in how to operate the new system and the team leaders were given further training to accommodate the new escalation process. At ‘go-live’ all seemed well – customer feedback had been positive and no major issues had arisen during the run-up although team morale did seem to be on the wane.

In the weeks that followed the new system operated well but morale continued to fall with arguments becoming common place amongst the team members. Error rates were beginning to escalate and on several occasions customer deliveries had not been met.  I attended several team briefs during this period and also undertook ‘water fountain’ chats with individual team members to try to understand what was wrong.

It was during one of these chats that a picture began to emerge.

“ The problem is that the team no longer know who to turn to” confided one of the younger members.” In the old world everybody knew who the experts were. We didn’t need help from management – we knew who to go to and how to fix things ourselves “

“The thing is,” he went on “the old guard still think they are in a position to influence the team. The reality is that they are no longer the experts and the people that really do understand the new system cannot make themselves heard”

“Have you shared this with your supervisor?” I asked.

“Not much point really” he said. “The management are fine for the formal stuff but the real leaders are within the team – we need to fix this ourselves”

My responses to the couple of comments on last week’s blog set me thinking about how easy it is to form an opinion on the performance of a leadership team when the outcome is known. It reminded me of a conversation that I’d had a couple of years ago with a group of senior managers whose performance was under scrutiny following a particularly difficult year.

As you might expect in the circumstances the managers were feeling pretty defensive in response to their perception of the organisation resorting to blame culture. As the conversation developed over the evening it was pretty clear that the vast majority of the group felt that they were being unfairly treated and being held responsible for things that were totally outside of their control.

Interestingly what developed from this conversation was a really lively and informed debate on the subject of performance appraisal and hence what constituted ‘good’ leadership. The majority of the group were pretty comfortable with the notion that leaders should be both creative and innovative in moving the organisation forward although the detractors were quick to point out the restrictions that organisational structures and processes could have.

Where the debate really came to life, however, was when the discussion turned to what constituted the role of a leader and was this affected by context. After a lengthy and often heated debate the group pretty much agreed that leadership was contingent on circumstance and therefore whilst there was a considerable degree of commonality in leading in any situation the individual circumstance would promote differing behaviours.

As a consequence, therefore, a key element of the role of the leader is that of diagnostician; the ability to analyse and interpret the situation and subsequently anticipate the outcomes of the planned activities is fundamental to exercising good leadership practice. Unless the leader has a sound understanding of the context in which he is operating then his efforts will go unrewarded.

It was at this stage I entered the debate for the first time.

“So what is the implication of this on how you are being assessed?” I asked.

“Well there’s the paradox” came the response. “If they follow and the outcome meets the target and there’s no fall-out then we are good leaders; if they don’t or it doesn’t then we are not. Our performance is judged solely on the outcome of what THEY do”

Amen to that.

It never ceases to amaze me that the leadership intent and subsequent practice within organisations are often poles apart. I recently experienced this when working with the management team of a privately owned manufacturing company who were developing a strategy to expand out of their home market.

My discussions with the management team were fairly routine; their market was saturated, profits were stalling but opportunities to move into new markets provided the channels to grow the company whilst new products were being developed. The initial assessment looked good – it seemed that they would be able to replicate their home market advantage in most if not all, of the proposed new markets.

The strategy work was developing well under the leadership of one of the junior executives who headed up a cross-functional team. Plans were in place to acquire new facilities, staffing levels were being assessed and a recruitment and training plan was being developed. The impact on the company’s supply chains were also being evaluated as this was fundamental to achieving a smooth entry into the new market.

Encouragingly there was also a work-stream in place to assess how to ensure that the necessary leadership model was developed to embrace the requirements of operating in the new regions. “We recognise that getting the right leadership model and behaviours in place will be critical to the overall success of the venture” enthused the CEO. “We are really fortunate that the team leader is a real asset to this programme. He’s nearing the end of his MBA at a top US business school and has been able to save us a fortune in consultancy fees“

Later that day I met the team leader over coffee to discuss his plans. I naturally shared with him the conversation that I’d had with the CEO and confided how pleased he was that the company’s investment in his MBA was providing such rich rewards.

“That’s very strange” he responded “I’ve funded the MBA out of my own pocket and I have taken holiday to enable me to attend the course. When I asked the CEO to sponsor me he just said that he couldn’t see what benefit it could be to the company”. Just then his Blackberry rang. “Oh could you excuse me for a moment. I need to take this – it’s my headhunter”

Over the last couple of weeks I have been party to several discussions on the effective use of deadlines in a business setting and also heard a fascinating story of a senior executive describing how he fouled up the integration of a newly acquired overseas subsidiary by setting an unrealistic deadline on a key element of the integration of the
subsidiary.

Let me start with the senior executive and his subsidiary. It seemed to be a straightforward acquisition of an Asia based engineering company by a European engineering group. As part of the integration of the newly acquired subsidiary into a sub-division of the holding company the management team of the subsidiary led by an Asian national were given the task of implementing a change in working practices to come in line with the holding company. The timescale given, whilst challenging, was
based on the recent experience of implementing a similar change in a European subsidiary.

What wasn’t understood by the senior executive was that several elements of the proposed changes were culturally unacceptable to the Asian subsidiary. The subsequent failure to achieve the deadline resulted in loss of face for the Asian executive and his team and produced a deep rooted lack of trust between the newly acquired subsidiary and the holding company from which neither recovered.

I shared this tale of woe with a client one evening over dinner. His response was to share with me how effective his company was at managing deadlines though when I pushed him a little he did share with me that the majority of his projects over-ran and of more concern – to me at least – the projects were never fully closed out and very often failed to achieve the required quality standard. As our discussion developed around
the cause of these failures in spite of the intense focus on timescales it
became evident that the deadline setting process was at best arbitrary and the
organisational culture was to compromise quality of deliverable for apparent
timeliness.

I subsequently found myself explaining to him, based on my experience of working with other companies that it didn’t need to be like this. As his interest grew I shared with him an example of a project where a team came together, analysed the problem, agreed
the requirement and what constituted success in terms of deliverable and
allocated responsibilities amongst the team for individual work-streams. The
only instance where time was mentioned was to agree when they were next going
to meet to discuss progress. They kicked off the project, met on a regular
basis to review progress and subsequently closed out a first class project that
fully met the business need.

“But how did they know they were on plan?”  He asked me.

“You need to understand that their focus was on solving the problem to the best of their ability. Everybody understood how important it was so they naturally treated it as a high priority” I explained. “I have some material on this that might be of help you. Would you
like me to pull something together for you?”

“Yes, that would be terrific” he replied “when can you have it done by?”

During the summer period I was fortunate enough to work with several high profile ‘world class’ organisations along with some less well known emerging stars all of whom wished to address the same issue – matching their leadership style to the needs of their organisation and the markets they served.  These organisations spanned a wide spectrum in terms of maturity, sector, cultural diversity and the economic model to which they subscribed.

The ‘world class’ group conformed in the main to the western economic model of value creation described primarily from the viewpoint of the shareholder with other stakeholders’ demands taking a much lower profile. Their current leadership styles were representative in the main of the ‘classical’ or’ transactional’ areas of the leadership spectrum but almost without exception these organisations expressed a desire for their style to be more ‘visionary’ or ‘organic’ (see the work of Professor Gayle Avery for
a description of this model) though none were too clear as to exactly how this
expectation was to be delivered. Recent academic literature is littered with
research in this area the majority of which concludes that the basic economic
model to which these organisations conform is outdated in respect to the needs
of today’s global marketplace and a fundamental change was required to enable
these organisations to survive and prosper.

In contrast several of the ‘emerging stars’ were already occupying the visionary or organic areas of the leadership spectrum; indeed many of the organisations were created by individuals coming together with a unified sense of purpose to which they were all committed. It would seem that these organisations were a perfect fit for the structures being prescribed to meet today’s global requirements. The organisations could already be typified as ambassadors of the new genre of organisations capable of
matching the fundamental requirements of mutual acceptance, trust and respect that
form the cornerstone of much of today’s leadership theory.

Looking back the interesting point from my perspective was the response of this latter to group as they began to tackle the needs of embracing new markets or delivering new products as their organisations grew in size. Not surprisingly some, given their history,
continued to expand from their current position and adopted devolved structures
and styles that mirrored the values of the core organisation. Somewhat more
surprisingly however were the number of these organisations that began to adopt
structures and styles similar in nature to the ‘world class’ group with a
propensity to adopt a more ‘transactional’ leadership approach – it seems that
mutual acceptance, trust and respect has boundaries for these organisations.

To my mind this raises a question mark over much of the current research in this area. It seems to me that too much of this research is focused on the relationship between the validity of the economic model and market globalisation and ignores the basic strategic fundamentals of the organisation itself. It was to this latter perspective that the
organisations that adopted a more ‘transactional’ based model referred to
justify their decision.

The ever increasing need to compete across wider often global markets yield organisation structures and process landscapes that define both accountability and responsibility in increasingly prescriptive terms. In a previous blog I touched on the implications of this model in terms of its impact on creativity and innovation and also agility in response to competitive threat. In this blog I will develop this thinking a little by considering how organisations might view themselves.

One view of organisation structure would be to describe itself as consisting of a formal array of inter-connected charts that define the hierarchical nature of the structure and also the functional silos by which authority and control are exercised, approval can be sought and desired goals can be achieved through co-ordination of related activities. Organisations that describe themselves in this way have to be created – the lines have to be drawn, the relationships established, authority is explicit.

An alternative view would be to describe the organisation in the context of its people. Their talent, knowledge, thoughts, creativity, drive and determination; their ambition, flexibility, their natural tendency to communication in an open, lucid and meaningful way; their professionalism, motivation and values. They are knowledge rich, energetic, responsive, reflective and adaptive; authority is implicit. Organisations described in this way do not have to be created they already are.

Obviously all organisations can be described in this latter way and in so doing renders the implication for leadership clear. Leadership’s role is not to manage its people within the context of an artificial relationship between roles and functions that bear no relationship to the strategic objectives of the organisation but to release the natural motivation of the people within it.

Unfortunately I am old enough to remember the words of many a management sage from years gone by…… organisations can be described in two ways – the one written on the piece of paper and the one that works.

The ability to create ‘a compelling vision’ features towards the top of most lists of the attributes required of today’s leaders – no matter what the context. Whilst this is an intuitively appealing propostion I would argue that it is the translation of this vision into meaningful action that differentiates the successful organisations. To address this issue, organisations, particularly the larger variety, adopt a structured ‘goal deployment’ activity that is primarily designed to cascade a common approach to delivering the strategy whereby everybody in the organisation can understand how ‘their bit fits in’.

So ‘What’s wrong with this’ you might ask and the answer on the face of it, of course, is nothing. However, to undertake this activity successfully requires a level of understanding of organisational capability that most organisations simply do not possess – the appetite for benchmarking is a clear indication of this.It would seem that comparing operational efficiency between similar organisations can somehow form the basis of improved strategic effectiveness. When viewed in this way the flaw is somewhat obvious.

However, of greater concern is that a significant number (the majority?) of these organisations do not need to resort to benchmarking as they have the information they require to take effective action but are unable to present it in a way that enables the organisation to respond effectively. A primary reason for this is that progressively over time the organisation and its strategy become misaligned due to both strategic drift and often to a greater extent organisational change driven on the back of functional operational efficiency resulting in the performance measures becoming strategically blurred. It is this misalignment that creates both organisational inertia and intra functional tension so typical of these organisations.

So,before you going looking for the answer elsewhere like so many things in life, the answer to improved strategy deployment lies within….

Like many experienced managers I could be easily persuaded that the topic of Leadership has become overly complicated in recent years resulting in a confusing array of theories and concepts that are both complimentary and contradictory as the context in which they are applied varies. If one were to take a simplistic view and adopt the principle that those doing the leading would be followed by those doing the following if the benefits of doing so outweighed those of pursuing an alternative course of action in the given circumstance, then the subject would become somewhat more straightforward. Of course, life is rarely that simple and more often than not, particularly in a business setting, it is the existence of a wide range of ‘stakeholders’ and a formal relationship between the various parties governed by both processes and structure that lead to the complexity that render good leadership practices difficult to apply.
In recent years I have had many conversations with Leadership practitioners from a wide range of organisational and cultural backgrounds, academics from various disciplines and also several Leadership coaches most of whom recognise the influence that these factors might play but have not evaluated the degree to which the performance of the leaders is influenced by such relationships. My practical experience is, however, that in most instances it is the existence of these factors which frustrate even the most capable leader. Of increasing concern is that with a greater propensity towards globalisation, organisations are increasing the influence that these factors portray by the adoption of standardised roles, processes and organisation structures to achieve uniform levels of performance across a wide range of markets. Paradoxically the adoption of these practices also impacts the level of motivation within the organisation and stifles the organisational creativity that is the lifeblood upon which the organisation depends for its future. So the question for most organisations then becomes how to manage the trade between these conflicting priorities.
It is this theme to which I will continually return in future blogs as I explore the latest thinking from both an academic and practical perspective embracing a wide range of organisational models to explore how we can develop leadership behaviours that are more suited to today’s requirements.

Posts will be published on a weekly basis with a view to stimulating debate across a wide range of leadership topics. If we can develop a forum so much the better…

For a considerable part of my career I have been fascinated by the topic of leadership and in particular how ‘good’ leadership behaviours can be developed. I have been fortunate to have been led well on many occasions and also to have been led badly; often by the same person. In turn, I have both led well apparently and also, with greater frequency to have led badly. There seems to be a commonly held belief that most organisations, teams, groups, individuals would perform ‘better’ if the way in which they were led could be improved. Indeed research would suggest that the development of leadership talent is cited as being amongst the top 3 key concerns of business leaders. These reasons and many more justify the considerable investment made in Leadership Development yet, by and large, many of these programmes do not yield the leaders the organisations crave.
So what is it that we are missing…..