Invert the pyramid! Do it for your employees, for your company and for the world

I stumbled upon this image surfing the web just briefly after having read Schein’s Humble Leadership [1]. Smiling or even laughing is probably the typical reaction to it but it was not my case. If you stop one minute to reflect, this image reveals the tragedy many people live daily. It is a waste of talent, soul light and human prosperity. 

How many companies are still like this? How many companies that have long ceased to be like this still tolerate areas and divisions run by leaders that create this culture and instill this feeling in their team members? (probably referred to as subordinates).

Employees experiencing these types of environments undoubtedly advocate to have a strong divide between personal and professional lives and bring different selves to each life. In fact they have a harder challenge to be better human beings and parents and have a higher chance of raising bullies.

But who would want this divide if given the chance to be their true self at work? People should enjoy both and be able to connect the achievements and successes of one part of their day to fuel a smile to start the next part of it creating a never ending, positive loop of continuous flow, joy and fulfillment.

Schein [1] describes a relationship as a “set of mutual expectations about each other’s future behavior based on past interactions with one another”. A good relationship comes from a feeling of comfort with the other person based on the sense of knowing how the other will react. He calls it “trust”.

Based on this definition one can observe three levels of relationships in the professional world:

• Level -1: Total impersonal domination and coercion
• Level 1: Transactional role and rule-based supervision
• Level 2: Personal cooperative trusting relationships 

I think that equivalently, we can identify three types of organizations that deploy cultures that reflect a prevalence of one of these three types of relationships:

• Toxic cultures in which Level -1 relationships prevail (like the crow’s image)
• Command and Control cultures in which Level 1 relationships are the norm
• Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose cultures in which Level 2 relationships flourish

Toxic cultures can happen across the whole organization (hopefully less and less) or inside some areas or divisions of companies slightly more evolved. Inside them we find bosses and subordinates. Every boss is a subordinate to another toxic boss as you can’t avoid leading by example (you just offer a good one or a bad one). 

• Tells his subordinates what to do in detail
• Knows more than his subordinates (that is what he thinks)
• Is smarter (also what he thinks)
• Wins every argument (with his subordinates)
• Loses every argument (with his boss)
• Earns more money than his subordinates (which is a confirmation to him he knows better)
• And finally has the power to lay his subordinates off

Command and Control cultures are the next evolutionary link of organizations, probably the norm today, much better than toxic ones but still doomed to disappear soon to those among their competition that embrace the next level. Inside them we find leaders and individual contributors. Fortunately leaders in command and control cultures usually are far better than bosses in toxic organizations. 

In those organizations, as we want to get results fast we divide and conquer, we track activity metrics to control that everyone does his job well or, what is worse, presence metrics to at least control that everyone is “at the job”. Since we are wise planners, we expect that the pieces will fit together and magic will happen. Then it does not happen and we blame the people, those lazy, change resistant, individual contributors that need to be controlled to be productive. And the self-fulfilling prophecy reinforces itself.

The Tayloristic approach is wrong for the 21st century; divide and conquer creates friction and local optima does not grant holistic success. A system is not the sum of its parts but the product of their interactions [2] 

Leaders in C&C cultures try to create mechanisms to avoid errors but humans err, all the time, and we will continue to do so. We have not become the dominant species of the planet by being the best at avoiding errors but by being the best at learning from them. Wanting to avoid errors creates fear to err. Fear creates paralysis, makes people hide information and erodes trust. The worst of all, fear defuses learning and if your organization does not learn it will not be able to react to change.

Command and Control works well in slow changing environments that allow for planners to have a chance to predict the future. Does anyone know anyone that works in an industry where this last sentence continues to be true today?

Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose [3] cultures are the only option to address the three main challenges companies [4] face today: 

• heightened customer expectations, 
• high speed of change and ambiguity and 
• a plethora of emergent technologies that could create competitive advantage

To move from a C&C to an A-M-P culture we need to move away from the old plan-do mentality to make room for an envision-experiment mindset that lets the data decide; this can only be achieved by inverting the pyramid and redefining leadership completely.

Schein [1] defines leadership as “wanting to do something new and better and getting others to go along”, the uniqueness of this definition is that it completely removes hierarchy out of it.   

One aspect that is true about bosses across cultures is that they have the power to lay-off. The only one who can lay-off everyone in a company ranging from the last recent hire to the CEO is the customer, by choosing the competition and driving the company bankrupt. On the other hand leadership is a contact sport, decisions are better made close to the field and not from a far away ivory tower. 

If we believe in these two ideas the customer should be the one at the top of the hierarchy of any organization. The individual contributors who deal with the customer experience on a daily basis should be the stars, for which the whole organization works. We should start by renaming them as heroes (leaders of customer value creation). Organizations should be architected to become frictionless environments in which these heroes can thrive. Below them, servant leaders should focus on providing clarity through communication, to create alignment and to help those heroes flourish.

The magic happens when the “why” is clearly articulated by servant leaders at the bottom, “what decisions” are driven by the voices of heroes at the top (usually introverts [5]) and we all sit together to co-create “how” we will constantly reduce the friction from our operational model. 

It is imperative to invert the pyramid and promote servant leadership. Executives need to acknowledge that the world is too complex and that the fast pace of change makes it impossible to have all the answers. They need to embrace their vulnerability [6] and build psychologically safe environments [7] full of collaboration and trust. 

Many more people are joining a rising movement. Several speakers advocate for it from Jurgen Appelo and the Management 3.0 movement to Simon Sinek, champion of the infinite mindset [8]. 

The highway to an A-M-P organization is a CEO that actively sculpts the culture in the right direction but, in absence of her, many things can be done by individual contributors and middle managers who choose to be leaders by having the courage to do something new and better.

I am sure many will go along with them.

#InvertedPyramid #Collaboration #AutonomyMasteryPurpose #HumbleLeadership

Acknowledgements:

Special thanks to Alejandra Vial, Daniela Acu?a, Helen Macqueen, Maya Vilà, Susana Gregori and Vanesa Tejada; six amazing women in business that were kind enough to go through an initial version of this article and provided valuable feedback that helped me to improve the text in a way I could not have accomplished alone.

Notes:

[1] Edgar Schein, Humble Leadership

[2] Russ Ackoff TED talk before TED talks were invented

[3] Dan Pink, The puzzle of motivation

[4] Gary O'Brien defines the challenges in Digital Transformation Game Plan

[5] Susan Cain, The power of introverts

[6] Brené Brown, The power of vulnerability

[7] Amy Edmondson, Building a psychologically safe workplace

[8] Simon Sinek, Most leaders don’t even know the game they are in