Rethinking Leadership Development

Rethinking Leadership Development

Featured Article

Rethinking Leadership Development

An entire industry has been built up around leadership development that rests on a soft foundation tied to the traditional Industrial Era model of organizations.?The first questionable practice is determining who gets enrolled in this development.?Most people in these programs are judged to be “high potential employees” based on today’s criteria and not what might be in ten or 20 years.?Or they are already in leadership positions having been promoted to the level of their incompetence and are struggling. ?There is also a second even more fundamental flaw beyond assuming all leadership resides at the top of a hierarchy of authority.?Increasingly, work is done in teams, many self-managed.?This then gets to a third flaw – these programs are not really leadership development but are “leader development” focused on training people to exercise their authority and judgement to greater degrees as they are promoted up the organization hierarchy.

By focusing on the person as hierarchical leader, there is an implicit bias toward positional powers with some mention of personal powers because passive-aggressive behaviors can easily overrun positional powers alone.?But again, this overlooks how teams are now increasingly being used where there is often not a single leader but several variations such as participatory, shared, or rotating leadership roles.?In this view of work, the leader may only truly be recognized on the organization chart and the leader role becomes much more dynamic in practice.?Further, power changes with positional powers only important in clearing barriers and personal powers becoming more important, topics often overlooked in leadership development programs.?There is also a new power – that of Group Power – that becomes important in group settings.?The two group powers are rarely discussed in leadership forums since the focus remains on the single leader as a person, not a group activity.?Briefly, these group powers arise from collaboration where the brainpower of the team members working together is greater than the sum of their individual abilities.?This is the 2+2=5 phenomenon that arises when people are called together to brainstorm and solve problems. ?The other group power is actually a precursor to the first – Convening Power (Block, 2008).?This is the ability to call people together in the first place to focus on an issue.?This is one of the powers of the Purpose Alignment Team where they are not responsible for solving the problem, only that a group is convened to address the problem once identified.

Getting back to the confusion of enrolling leaders in a “leadership development” program is the direct connection between a leader and the functional execution of leadership.?The increasing occurrence of participatory, shared, and rotating leaders called traditional leadership theories into question where there was a single leader and multiple followers.?This conflict led to creating a higher order view of leadership – DAC (direction, alignment, and commitment) Leadership.?This is a functional view of leadership where leaders focus on the outcomes of their DAC actions.?However, by focusing on the functional activities of leadership one can realize that there are multiple ways of providing this functional activity separate from direct involvement by a designated “leader”.?

For example, setting direction may involve a single leader of a team with a deliverable that is then packaged and communicated across the organization.?Within this activity there are many ways to think about direction if you were to step back and think about the details. ?How is direction documented for communication??What are the artifacts that support the direction??This is where strategy execution often fails.?Developing a strategy and communicating it is not enough.?What remains as visible reminders to reinforce the message??How are work activities and behaviors altered??What supports these changes are often more important than who leads the effort.?Similarly, alignment is a key leadership function, but it can expand beyond a single leader construct to be replaced by a Purpose Alignment Team that does not manage work but sees that problems are addressed, and work processes are aligned with the organization’s purpose.?Technology is also playing a larger role in clarifying direction and aligning the organization’s work processes independent of any leader’s direct involvement.?Information transparency also shifts power from leaders to those who need the information to perform their job roles.?

The third part of DAC leadership (commitment) often involves the soft skills that are covered in leadership development programs.?However, these skills are too often framed within the leader-follower power imbalance instead of moving to higher Levels of Involvement for employees.?This shifts the discussion to followership, a topic that often exists in the backwaters of leadership development.?Commitment also gets back to alignment, not of work processes, but of the employees’ values, desires, and identity with that of the organization.?This is much more than what a leader can do alone since it involves recruitment & selection, job role assignments, and performance management, which is an entire subject itself when removed from Industrial Era Thinking.??

The opportunity then shifts from leader development of a select few “high potential” employees to leadership development across the organization.?Rethinking leadership within the DAC framework shifts the focus entirely from what someone does to the outcome of that activity.?With this shift in thinking comes much greater awareness of what drives DAC leadership outcomes and how many more levers are available for improving the delivery of the organization’s purpose.

In what ways are you limiting your thinking about leaders versus leadership outcomes?

Communicating with a Music Video

I am trying something new to see how it resonates with others as we try to get the word out that organizational improvement in new ways is possible.?The concepts in this video are foundational to many of the topics covered earlier as Featured Articles as well as what we are tracking as we follow the work of others on the path toward New Era Organizations.?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2sGRBYJeaA


New Era Organization Mastermind Collabs

Please contact me if –

1.????You consider yourself a visionary leader who believes there are improved methods of organizing for work.

2.????You consider your area of influence to be more important than your area of control.

3.????You are motivated and energized enough to take action once you know what’s possible.

4.????You would like to collaborate with others to generate ideas for constructing and managing a more effective Organization to meet the changing demands of the New Era of society and technology.?

5.????You want to establish flexible and purpose-driven organizations that are socially responsible with engaged employees who are committed.

Mastermind collabs are now forming.


Approaches for transformation to the New Era Organization

Pioneering New Era organizations generally are start-ups or organizations that faced a near death situation (with high survival anxiety).?That leaves most mature organizations that face bureaucratic dysfunctions but have not yet reach a crisis point.?To address this gap, there are four approaches that organizations can use when transitioning from traditional bureaucratic hierarchies to new ways of thinking about organizations, leadership, and change.?More at – ?

https://medium.com/painless-management/approaches-for-transformation-to-the-new-era-organization-2b9330298cac


What others are Saying

·?????Unbundling Organizations

The key promises of organizational unbundling ” is an introduction to rethinking organization structure by analyzing work flows and rebuilding the structure that makes sense while ignoring the current power hierarchy.?This is a Stage 3 (full implementation of the New Era Organization) structure built around autonomous microenterprises.?Haier employs this approach for its organization including dynamic contracting for transfer pricing to enable each microenterprise to have its own P&L statement.?Stream-aligned teams are briefly mentioned which would fit as a Stage 2 stepping stone where purpose clarification and alignment could be introduced, possibly formalized with a Purpose Alignment Team (discussed earlier).?In this construct, staff functions are organized as shared services that support internal customers, acting as independent microenterprises themselves.?Customer focus by the staff functions is guaranteed by the ability of each microenterprise to choose to use an internal unit, outsource, or start-up a new support unit that competes with the one that is failing to provide a desired level of service.

·?????Organizations built for change

Creating management processes built for change ” recommends a few practices that help bureaucratic organizations move to the New Era.?One Stage 1 transition exercise is a cross-organization series of mini-diagnosis sessions that ask employees to “identify the difficulties, defects, and dysfunctions encountered in their work and propose improvement initiatives.”?While this does not bring new thinking to the forefront, it does engage employees as cocreators for change (Level 5 Involvement).?Ideas that cannot be implemented locally can bubble up for consideration.?The authors do not mention how this can be taken even further by introducing an entrepreneurial mindset with the Principles of Effectuation – do what you can with what you have and partner with others to do more – moving into Stage 2 transformation by informally bringing in new thinking.?One added value of regularly scheduling these diagnosis sessions is sending the message that nothing is permanent, and anyone can identify points of friction for attention.?And, encouraging an entrepreneurial mindset will raise awareness of how work is interconnected thereby building informal work networks that can be leveraged when needed later as the scope of change expands.

·?????Leadership qualities of new C-level executives

The five new foundational qualities of effective leadership ” made the observation that many high potential candidates for the CEO succession plan were no longer suitable when examined four years later.?Instead, people who were highly rated earlier were later thought to be too attached to hierarchy and predictable approaches for business.?Succession planning has then started to look deeper into the organization for people who have new ideas and take change leadership seriously.?These are the people who “embraced uncertainty as a team sport.” However, another characteristic mentioned was “demonstrated mastery of the matrix” that seems to revert back to traditional thinking and requires high leader involvement in driving reorganizations and alignment.?It might be suggested that this can also be reevaluated with involvement of people in operational reviews and aligning work along natural processes and not forcing that work into a single hierarchy or compounding the complexity with a second hierarchy operating at cross purposes on an organization chart.?


Why this Newsletter

People are discovering that the old ways of working – aren’t working anymore.

They want ideas for constructing and managing a more effective Organization to meet the changing demands of the New Era of society and technology?

so they can establish flexible and purpose-driven organizations that are socially responsible with engaged employees who are committed.?

Send any questions or news you would like to see published to [email protected]


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