Build bridges where there are borders: Boundary Spanning

Emerging technologies, evolving global demographics, and escalating globalization are swiftly breaking down structural barriers in organizations worldwide. Concurrently, a spectrum of challenges - from soaring unemployment rates to climate change and energy security - poses a risk of creating divisions among us.

Boundaries create borders that pull groups apart, even as leaders try very hard to facilitate collaborative work and bring groups together. Leaders often find themselves 'caught in the middle' between groups with widely differing values, beliefs, and perspectives.

In this article, I want to share some ideas that I have taken from "Boundary Spanning Leadership: Six Practices for Solving Problems, Driving Innovation, and Transforming Organizations," a book by Chris Ernst and Donna Chrobot-Mason. In this book, you can find ways to bring groups together and help them achieve very remarkable results.

The boundaries that are most challenging for leaders today are more psychological in nature. They involve relationships and are thus associated with strong emotions such as loyalty, pride, respect, and trust.

According to Ernst, there are five types of leadership boundaries:

• Vertical boundaries: Leading across levels, rank, seniority, authority, and power.
• Horizontal boundaries: Leading across functions, units, peers, and expertise.
• Stakeholder boundaries: Leading at the interchange between an organization and its external partners, such as alliances, networks, value chains, customers, shareholders, advocacy groups, governments, and communities.
• Demographic boundaries: Leading between diverse groups, including the full range of human diversity from gender and race to education and ideology.
• Geographic boundaries: Leading across distances, locations, cultures, regions, and markets.

In companies, it is essential to develop teams in order to achieve optimal results. However, most groups within an organization have inherent boundaries between them, such as gender and nationality. It is crucial to lead across these boundaries, although it is no easy task.

Distrust can hinder effective group collaboration, particularly when groups have a history of negative interactions. Researchers Dora Lau from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and J. Keith Murnighan from Northwestern University have introduced the concept of 'faultlines' to explain the occurrence of dividing lines in intergroup interactions.

Faultlines are 'hypothetical dividing lines that may split a group into subgroups based on one or more attributes.' Although these faultlines are always present, they often remain dormant.

But, what kind of events activate 'faultlines' between groups? In the research conducted by Chris Ernst and The Center for Creative Leadership, four major categories of events were identified that create dividing lines within teams:

• Breach: This occurs when members of one group feel they are treated differently than members of another group.
• Side-Swipe: This happens when one group offends, insults, or humiliates another group.
• Submersion: This occurs when one group expects another group to blend into the organization, fit in with others, or assimilate. The members of the group that are expected to blend in feel that their identity or sense of self is threatened; they are expected to change who they are, along with their values, beliefs, and practices.
• Clash: This happens when group boundaries in the workplace collide. A clash occurs when groups hold diametrically opposed beliefs or values. What is seen as 'right' by one group is seen as 'wrong' by another.

Leaders may feel that divisions between teams are inevitable and that all one can do is brace for the chaos and attempt to minimize the damage. The good news is that it is possible to create conditions for very positive results from the intersection of group boundaries. As leaders, they play a key role in spanning boundaries and transforming divides into new frontiers.

Boundary Spanning Leadership involves creating direction, alignment, and commitment across the five types of boundaries. There are six important practices to follow for positive results:

1. Buffering: This is about defining group identities and involves shielding or protecting groups from outside influences or threats to identity. The result is building intergroup safety: the state of psychological security that develops when intergroup boundaries are defined and maintained.
2. Reflecting: In the same way that a mirror, a photograph, or a body of water casts a reflection of an image for others to see, the practice of reflection involves showing an image of each group to the other. It involves sensitizing each group to the other's needs, values, beliefs, and preferences and similarities between groups; and helping each group understand the identity of the other and develop respect for their differences as well as commonalities.
3. Connecting: This involves creating a neutral space that enables the groups to get to know one another as individuals. The practice of connecting seeks to forge relationships by creating person-to-person linkages rather than group-to-group linkages. The result is intergroup trust: a state of mutual confidence and integrity that develops when boundaries are suspended and new relationships are built.
4. Mobilizing: This encourages groups to "move outside" their smaller group identity and "move inside" a new, larger, more inclusive identity that is shared by all. Mobilizing is designed to activate a shared and inclusive identity in which "everyone can belong." Generating intergroup community within an organizational context is the "social glue" that binds groups together. Community is about the experience of belonging emotionally, spiritually, and psychologically to a larger group.
5. Weaving: This involves drawing out and integrating group differences within a larger whole to interlace boundaries and advance intergroup interdependence. This requires managing the thoughts and feelings between divided groups, and the leader must understand how those contradictory thoughts and feelings reside within.
6. Transforming: This is about intergroup reinvention: the state of renewal, alternative futures, and emergent possibilities that develop when intergroup boundaries are cross-cut in new directions. Current experience and expertise are used only as a starting point toward new, emergent, and often undefined ends. When the goal is reinvention through transforming, the leader must accept that he or she doesn't know exactly how things will turn out. Combining ideas from the fields of social psychology and organizational development, the practice of transforming seeks to bring together different people (the who) using different approaches (the how) to cross-cut boundaries of identity and enable intergroup reinvention.

The nexus effect

When safety, respect, trust, community, interdependence, and reinvention characterize the interactions between groups, those groups will be able to achieve something together that is above and beyond what they could achieve on their own. This is the ultimate goal, and it can be achieved if the groups follow all six steps of Boundary Spanning Leadership.

The Strategy

There are a few tips that leaders can follow to apply these practices in their organizations:

1. Consider the Challenge: It is recommended that the leader starts with the end in mind. Answer questions like: Which boundary is most difficult to span? What are the groups' expectations?
2. Clarify the Strategy: Is it necessary to create safety and respect? Is the goal to build trust and develop ownership? Depending on the initial state of the teams, the leaders may have to take one action or another.
3. Start Simply: It is recommended that the leader begins where they can, find some allies, tap into the power networks, and build for the organization's success.
4. Experiment and Modify: A particular tactic may not always work with different groups and situations. It is important to consider the context and modify the actions accordingly.

Just as in the world, boundaries in organizations are common. As leaders, we must manage these boundaries and build more inclusive, productive, and happy companies. Are you ready?