Double Decker Leadership

I heard a very senior and well known HR Leader and Consultant, who was delivering a talk on leadership to a batch of MBA students at SIMSR. He explained business leadership with the metaphor of a two tier vehicle: the top deck consists of entrepreneurs, the founders- owners or just the very top layer. At this level, the state was like an ‘amoeba’ , he explained, the metaphor was to evoke the image of a continuously evolving, dynamic and uncertain, because of interfaces with a high intensity VUCA environment. An outsider may struggle to make sense here. He may conclude that there is no method, no structure, no fixed patterns of thoughts and actions. At this entrepreneurial level, creating something out of chaos and grayness, a sudden sense making, seizing on a sudden flash in the mind and putting it all down requires an equally swift and creative process. Often it may show up in volatile moods, impatience, and irritability because of a wildly creative process.

At the lower deck, the picture is just the opposite. To translate the decisions of the top tier, there needs to be order, excellence in execution, discipline and consistency. Systems, processes, structures have to be designed and deployed to deliver in a predictable manner what the organization captains decide. The leadership job is to stand on the bridge between the two decks, to interpret and to convey. They thus perform a hydra headed , dichotomous role ; deal with ambiguities of a high order of the top deck and making sense of their wants , at the same time using influence to drive order, discipline and consistencies in the performance of employees at the bottom deck.

The classical way of leadership that succeeded in a traditional business environment of yore, of an era of little or incremental change, stemmed from the belief that all the variables in business were controllable and predictable. Increasingly a new hypothesis is being presented that emerging market leaders (operating in BRIC countries for example) are actually more suitable to the way the world is evolving. One of the things such leaders have had to do, as a way of life, was deal with enormous ambiguity, relentless currents of change.

The phenomena of ambiguity tolerance among leaders has been widely researched. One of the study finds enabling and disabling behaviour patterns in this regard (https://www.clomedia.com/2010/03/28/ambiguity-leadership-its-ok-to-be-uncertain/Ambiguity Leadership: It’s OK to Be Uncertain by Randall White)

The enabling behaviour of leaders on ambiguity have been categorized in a very interesting way as Mystery seekers ( curious, following a path simply to see where it goes); Risk tolerators( willing to make choices with incomplete information); Future scanners( fluid thinkers aware how a business operates and constantly consider how it will play out in future states); Tenacious challengers( tireless problem solvers); Exciters( loving what they do , and wanting everyone to be in that mode) ; Flexible adjusters ( being able to admit they’re wrong and to selling change to people whose self-interest is against the change); Simplifiers( simplify complicated ideas and help everyone in an organization to understand where the organization is going); and Focusers ( ability  to identify and attack the critical few actions that need to be done, as well as shift to a different set of actions at the right time).

The disabling behaviour of leaders on ambiguity tolerance also has similarly some stereo types: Poor transitioners ( difficulty shifting from one kind of task or behavior to another); Wet blankets ( lacking enthusiasm for own work and dampening the fervor of co-workers); Conflict avoiders( overly accommodating, averse to potentially controversial or heated situations); Muddy thinkers( confusion ,often self-inflicted); Complex communicators (unnecessarily complicated language and jargon ); Detail junkies( obsessed with smaller tactical issues ,excluding more strategic points); Narrow thinkers ( focused on the moment and sometimes blind to new possibilities); and Repeaters Tethered to the past).

How to deal with ambiguity in the most effective manner? According to Simon Critchley, who is the Hans Jonas professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York ( reported in Learning How to Tolerate Ambiguity: The Key to Leadership. https://squirrelers.com/learning) there are three ways most people approach ambiguous situations: use either instructionist, learning or selectionist mindsets. Instructionism is a way of avoiding uncertainty by restricting oneself to slow-to-change environments. Causal mapping, in which people decide that certain actions achieve certain outcomes, prevents the distress that comes with ambiguity. Learning approach let people to alter assumed rules on the basis of perceived changes in their environments. Finally, the selectionist, one who is ready to unleash an array of projects to check which one produces the greatest benefit.