What I learnt about remote leadership

Last Thursday I was fortunate to have the opportunity to attend a conference on remote leadership hosted by the Centre for Army Leadership (CALConf21). The day included sessions from a range of army and civilian experts including General Stanley McChrystal, Dr Keith Grint, Siobhan Sheridan, Matthew Syed and many more.

While the topic was broadly on remote leadership the discussion extended widely to include how we can develop adaptive and resilient organisations. A few people in my network have asked me to summarize from my perspective the  key takeaways on how this relates to wider civilian organisational contexts  -  so here goes (please refer to the Centre for Army Leadership website https://www.army.mod.uk/who-we-are/our-schools-and-colleges/centre-for-army-leadership/  for more details on the speakers and the sessions).

1.     The military are experienced in creating the culture for successful remote leadership

       In the current lockdown context, the skills to build teams, communicate, create trust and lead by direct example have never been more relevant. The Military have long been familiar with the concept of “dispersed fighting” where conflicts involve small independent formations requiring a greater focus on proximate leadership. Where the VUCA (Volatile Uncertain Complex Ambiguous) world is highly disrupting; shared leadership with highly empowered teams will be the key to organisations being both adaptive and resilient to change. Teams and organisations will increasingly need to be able to absorb, adapt and re-engage in more competitive ways. In these situations, organisations should clearly distinguish 3 separate types of activity: command, leadership, and management. Command and the control it offers requires hierarchy and authority – it is top down and involves positional power. (Wait to be told what to do). Leadership: if done right, is empowering, creating more leaders to be able to delegate decision making to the lowest possible level i.e. closest to the context where the decision has impact (Take action and do the right things). We can all remember those amazing customer experiences where people are empowered to solve our problems and we also remember for less positive reasons those where “there is nothing I can do” was the default answer. Finally, there is Management - the efficient and effective use of your resources once you are clear on what must be done (Do things right). It raises interesting questions in COVID, which of these strategies did organisations default to and what combinations proved most effective?

2.     The Hedgehog and the Fox – building an adaptive organisational mindset

       Dr Keith Grint introduced Isaiah Berlin’s essay on “The Hedgehog and the Fox” which originated from the ancient Greek parable by Archilochus. 

"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." 

In essence hedgehog organisations view the world through the lens of a single idea while foxes draw on a wide variety of experiences – for them the world (and their business) cannot be boiled down to a single idea. Hedgehogs are one trick ponies – highly focused on a certain outcome while the fox is the jack of all trades. While the hedgehog benefits from its focus, execution excellence and efficiency the fox gains in adaptability, innovation, and flexibility. In times of stability; where we can be clear and certain, hedgehogs can be very effective and in times of disruption and VUCA it may pay to be a fox. So, the pervasive mental model in an organisations has a huge impact on their ability to adapt to change. Is McDonalds a fast-food business or a real estate / franchise business?  Was Kodak a photographic film company or a company that helped people capture their most precious moments? Is BP an integrated oil and gas company or are they beyond petroleum? What are Amazon and Netflix? How many organisations fail to realise what business they need to be in before it’s too late? How do you educate and enrol your people in this vision to make it a reality?

3.     Alignment or autonomy and other paradoxes and why trust is critical

With the disruption from COVID it is easy to get locked into seeing challenges as binary dilemmas: work from home / come to work, centralised / decentralised crisis response. In a world of change our evolutionary programming screams “Same is safe. Different is danger” so unsurprisingly our instinct is for command and control. You will want to be more proximate and hold on tighter to what is happening as you experience a greater threat response. Sometimes as leaders we do need to get into the detail – “I didn’t know about it” doesn’t work well in the court of public opinion – but the opposite of control isn’t moral abdication or looking the other way. As an analogy imagine you are a Napoleonic general mounted on your horse, surveying the battlefield, moving your units with precision as per your strategy. In this world you seek Alignment (do what I say) from your organisation as well as accurate information – alignment and obedience, flawless execution of the superior plan and timely, reliable intelligence. This can manifest itself as exhaustive requests for reports and information to give to the senior team to “get a better picture on the problem”. Paradoxically the problem is generally well understood by those having to fill in the reports who ironically don’t have the time to solve the problem because they are too busy filling … you get my point.   At the other end of the spectrum from Alignment is Autonomy – fog has now descended onto the battlefield, you can’t see what’s happening and are receiving conflicting, unreliable information and communication to your units has been cut off. Autonomy is needed (do what you think best) which is more akin to actual warfare where “no plan survives contact with the enemy “and local leaders are entrusted to take decisions. So, do we want alignment, or do we want autonomy? The reality is we can have both. You can create alignment and you can provide autonomy – this is the concept of mission command – conveying the overall strategic intent and allowing junior leaders to interpret how they can best achieve the mission. The military excel at this and senior leader impress on their people “if the order is wrong, execute the order we should have given you”.

Alignment and Autonomy

Of course, it requires something many leaders and organisation don’t have – trust. The leader has to trust that her team will get the job done and the team have to trust the leader has their back. It is this understanding that drives the military to be so focused and expert in leadership and team development. In organisations I have worked in we’ve called it different types of leadership – empowered, servant, distributed etc. In essence it means leaders need to clearly communicate and ensure buy in to the why (strategy), work with others to co-create the what ( what things will we accomplish / goals/ objectives) and empower their teams to deliver  the how ( support, development, remove obstacles). In remote leadership this distinction is even more important as you must magnify your impact through consistency and high repetition connection to build trust. Micromanagement is just another word for distrust and it’s important not to confuse contact with connection. Loneliness of remote workers in lockdown has been a lack of connection rather than a lack of contact. Connection is the human experience that only great leadership and inclusive teams can provide. So we must trust our people, ensuring alignment, and empowering for autonomy. Then in most cases as leaders we should just focus on how we can help remove obstacles and provide the material/ psychological support, connection, and empathy to build their trust in us.

4.     Adaptability and Efficiency – it’s not complicated, it’s complex

       An Airbus A380 is a complicated machine. It is made up of 4 million parts from 150 companies in 30 different countries. However, it is constructed in a predictable way, and governed by laws of physics and therefore it is possible to accurately predict how this complicated machine will operate in a wide variety of situations. A human crowd is complex – it is made up of many similar parts (humans) and is governed by a range of processes that are inherently unpredictable in terms of how it will behave in different conditions. The difference between complicated and complex situations has implications for how organisations can best respond. A complicated problem might favour a focus on efficiency, structure, highly functionalized / specialized resources, all perfectly choregraphed to fit and solve complicated and predictable challenges. A complex world of uncertainty would favour adaptability, the ability to detect early weak signals of a changing situation and rapidly adapt and retool to best fit to the new context. The military have been fighting for many years against complex enemies, highly adaptive, networks that reconfigure, defy conventional disruption, almost appearing to reemerge stronger after disruption (see Antifragile). The military therefore has had to adapt its conventional, complicated, hierarchical structures, their command and control processes and culture to meet these new enemy formations network to network. General Stanley McChrystal gave an inspiring account of his time leading JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) in Afghanistan (see his book “Team of teams”) where he changed the culture and the processes of JSOC delivering exponential results. He did this not by restructuring the organisation. First, he extended trust and created shared consciousness and a common picture for the organisation. He extended his daily briefing calls from his top 90 to include over 7500 service personnel. This created a shared context, understanding for the mission and enabled far greater speed, alignment, and synchronicity. Teams were able to connect unencumbered by hierarchical information flow. The structure was not changed but what changed was how information flowed and how decisions were taken. Secondly, he delegated more, so that as more operations were undertaken, he only sanctioned the most sensitive operations trusting junior commanders with decision making. His advice…

       “delegate decision making to a level until you are uncomfortable and then go one level lower”.

      Thirdly, he set himself and the team exponential goals and stuck to them even when initial success wasn’t forthcoming. In addition, despite having the surveillance technology available, he did not try and personally direct operations instead maintaining an “eyes on, hands off “leadership style.

In 2003 JSOC were executing 4 raids on high value targets every month, by 2006 JSOC were running 300 raids a month, 10 every night – trust, alignment, synchronicity, connectivity, and exponential goal setting – but no restructuring. Through COVID we have had to lead in more remote ways.  How have organisations measured up to this approach? Did we focus on leadership vs command? Did we adopt a “hand-off leadership” style? Did we resist the temptation to demand excessive reporting to stay “in control”? And did we focus on big restructures vs identifying elements of culture and practices to adapt in more focused ways?

The military  have long lived in a VUCA world ( they coined the phrase) and while much of the military and civilian contexts are different, it would be a mistake not to take advantage of their experience in both remote leadership and in how to equip organisations to be adaptive and resilient to change. In conclusion I have paraphrased Chief of the General Staff General Sir Mark Carleton Smith KCB who opened the conference

“Disruption is the law of tomorrow… (organisations) with an industrial age mindset, skillset and structure are faced off against digital opponents which renders old systems obsolete. It requires us therefore to re-imagine the future."   

I’ve tried to convey the session I joined as accurately as possible adding my own points along the way; these are my recollections and reflections as an audience member. I want to thank again to Lt. Colonel Langley Sharp MBE and the team at the Centre for Army Leadership for hosting such an excellent and thought-provoking event and to all the speakers from the day.

Robin Lilley

Director of Leadership, Learning and Development at Coca-Cola and retired Infantry Captain