Leadership Toolbox 3: Developing Distributed Leadership for the Right Context

Distributed Leadership for the new Era

In an era of continuous change and uncertainty, stakeholders' requirements become more complex. In order to meet those requirements, our team needs to be agile and adaptable as a whole and this is enabled by the leader taking a distributed leadership initiative.

• For task accomplishment, the leader delegates the decision-making power to their team members to respond accordingly, and empowers them to act as they deemed suitable for the development of the team, department or organization.
• The leader is knowledgeable in exploring with the team members on identifying the contexts they are operating in and facilitates team’s responses relevant to the contexts.

Adapting Hill model for Team Leadership into Practice

To effectively put the Hill model for Team Leadership into practice, Northouse (2019) suggests the following conditions to be fulfilled, or to be attempted.

On Team

1. Purposeful Goal: a clearly defined goal or purpose that justifies the team's existence.
2. Performance Structure: availability of a structure for the monitoring and providing feedback to individual performance.
3. Team's Competencies: members are equipped with the right competencies to achieve the team's objectives.
4. Unified Commitment: team's goal has priority over individuals' goals.
5. Collaborative Climate: genuine sharing among team members on information, their perceptions, and feedback.
6. Standards of Excellence: team members have high expectations to improve their performance.
7. Supportive Structure & Climate: required resources are given to the team for the job-to-be-done.

On Leadership

1. Goal Focus: the leader explains the purpose of the team's goal, even when the need to adjust the goal arises.
2. Strengthening the Collaborative Climate: the leader consistently creates a safe climate to allow genuine discussion of any issues, relating to team's success, among team members.
3. Amplifying Confidence: team members' contributions are being acknowledged and recognized by the leader constantly.
4. Demonstrating Technical Know-how: the leader understands the technical issues encountered in accomplishing the team's goal.
5. Priorities Setting: the leader effectively prioritize tasks among the team.
6. Performance Management: the leader works authentically to resolve any team members' performance issues.

Understanding The Cynefin Framework

Looking from a broader perspective, Snowden and Boone (2007) offer four different contexts relevant to an ordered and unordered domain to help us expand our views on problem definition. A relevant video is shared below for a comprehension of the different contexts before we dive into the VUCA-Organizational Decision-making Model.

Now, with a better understanding of the different operating contexts and the respective responses, let's us look at the more common contexts often presented to organizations in today's context.

VUCA-Organizational Decision-making Model

In this VUCA-organizational decision-making model, only complicated and complex problems are specified as these nature are more commonly sought-after in an organizational setting. For simple context, employing established best practices (which are easily available) would suffice for decision-making; whereas, in the chaos context where time is the essence and immediate actions are required, authority (or dictatorship) is needed to make quick decision. In an organizational setting, chaos context is seldom seen due to the nature of "no cause and effect relationship can be determined" explained in the Cynefin framework.

Individuals’ actions are determined by their mental models, and depending on how their heuristics were developed, different individual has different behavior towards problem-solving and decision-making. In this section, we will walk-through the VUCA-Organizational Decision-making model to appreciate how problems are assessed and approached with relevant decision-making processes, and how these responses are fed back to individuals as learning.

Problem Assessment

Problems or challenges can come from the day-to-day business-as-usual space as the business progresses over time in a particular industry, or problems can also be seek from the innovation space where change evangelists establish new problems or challenges in the aim to transform their business. In this problem assessment stage, the identified problem is assessed whether it belongs to a complicated or complex nature.

It is frequent that people are confused between complicated and complex contexts and have applied approaches effective in a complicated context to a complex context, which resulted in missed opportunities. To better differentiate the two different operating contexts, Benjamin and Komlos (2019, pp. 42-47) offered some key questions to guide the leader to identify between complicated and complex context as below table.

VUCA Response

Under the VUCA Response, there are two decision-making processes, namely the analytical decision-making process (“thinking slow”) and the adaptive decision-making process (“thinking fast”). The distinct difference between these processes is that the time consumed, for the problem-solving, decision-making and implementation stage, is vastly different.

Analytical Decision-making process

Analytical Decision-making process (Thinking Slow) is employed if the problem belongs to a complicated nature. Due to the known causes and available solutions in a complicated problem, the time taken to analyze the problem is relatively longer. As seen in the VUCA-organizational decision-making model, more time and resources are taken in the problem-solving and decision-making stages. The steps are illustrated below.

Upon the detailed analysis of the problem and determining of suitable alternative, the solution will be deployed and monitored for effectiveness from the outcome. The results from the outcome will be fed back as an environmental feedback to the individual learning in the integrated model of organizational learning within the organization – refer to the VUCA-Organizational Decision-making Model. 

Adaptive Decision-making process

Adaptive Decision-making process (Thinking Fast) is activated when the problem is of a complex nature. With unknown causes and fuzzy solutions, it will be difficult to define the problem in the initial stage and is deemed that the problem definition will be a continuous task with the appropriate prototyping and testing with the users. This is exemplified in the VUCA-organizational decision-making model with shorter problem-solving and decision-making cycle and a longer implementation cycle. More time and resources will be allocated in the implementation stage, as show in the steps below.

With an adaptive approach, the problem will be constantly refine as only patterns are observed in the problem-solving stage and several problem statements and associated alternatives will be generated. These hypothesizes and alternatives will be prototyped and get tested with the real users to recognize and realize real needs. Once the needs are satisfy, the real solution will be deployed and monitored. The results from the outcome will then be fed back to the environmental feedback for individual learning, similar to that of the analytical decision-making process.

As Northouse (2019) indicates that there also exists a situation where the problem could be both complicated and complex at the same time (also known as technical and adaptive problem respectively) in his book portraying the model of adaptive leadership, in this case, the problem should also be treated as complex as there are some elements of complexity in which the answers are not known and the implementation requires learning. As a consequence, the adaptive decision-making process will also involve learning from the experts in the form of articles, whitepapers, consultation, product / solution demonstration, etc. to explore potential solutions or alternatives relevant to the problem statements. 

Integrated Model of Organizational Learning

Integrated Model of Organizational Learning. This concept is adapted from Kim’s (1993) theory. As illustrated in the VUCA-organizational decision-making model, Kim (1993) explains that individuals’ actions are influenced by their mental models of frameworks and routines that are crafted from their conceptual and functional learning, and have effect on the organizational guiding principles forming its worldview and standard operating procedures (“SOP”) respectively. The elements’ interactions from the individual learning, development of mental models and organizational guiding principles are bilateral, each having an effect from the preceding and to the subsequent elements. Successively, these mental models are the drivers to individuals’ behaviors to respond to challenges or problems. As explained earlier, the learning and experiences gained from the decision-making processes circle back to Kim’s (1993) model of integrated organizational learning through the environmental feedback. 

Continuous learning and environmental scanning

Additionally, the activities of continuous learning and environmental scanning send valuable inputs to the environmental feedback and further strengthening the individual learning. 

Conclusion

In conclusion, with the conditions of the team leadership employed, the team now behaves more autonomously in their goals achievement and self-development. Subsequently, the collective knowledge of how the Cynefin framework operates and applying the VUCA-Organizational Decision-making model to identify their operating context will better position and navigates the team's self-organizing nature towards the right direction.

References

Benjamin, D. & Komlos, D. (2019). Cracking Complexity: The Breakthrough Formula for Solving Just About Anything Fast. Boston, MA: Nicholas Brealey Publishing. 

Kim, D. (1993). THE LINK BETWEEN INDIVIDUAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING. Sloan Management Review, 35(1), 37–50. Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/1302989040/. 

Northouse, P. G. (2019). Leadership: Theory & Practice. 8th Edition. California: SAGE Publications.  

Snowden, D. J., & Boone, M. E. (2007). A leader's framework for decision making. A leader's framework for decision making. Harvard Business Review, 85(11), 68–76, 149.