Leadership in complex companies
In the last 20 years, organizations have become massively more complex. Driven by globalization and enabled by information technology they operate in multiple cultures, locations and across timezones with highly diverse sets of employees.
Organization structures have become more complex too. Matrix organizations are common with multiple reporting lines and competing priorities. Virtual working is common where teams rarely (if ever) meet and work on several teams at once.
Yet our expectations of leadership have barely changed. If I look at a typical leadership training program, I see many of the same approaches I would have seen in the 80s.
Some of our leadership “sacred cows” are now actively getting in the way of leadership effectiveness in complex companies. Here are just a couple of examples.
1. It’s all about teamwork
We created a cult of cooperation in simpler times. Today teams are expensive and complex to run and face to face time is scarce. However, teamwork is now a corporate value and appears in our leadership and appraisal criteria. How did this happen? – teamwork is a technique not a value. In today’s complex organizations we think there is too much cooperation going on. The symptoms of this are too many meetings, teams and conference calls. People tell us they spend 2 days a week in meetings and calls and that half of this is irrelevant to them.
2. Communication will make it better
Every training program ends with participants vowing to communicate more. Yet if we look at how we spend our time, we have so many unnecessary emails and other forms of communication it is hard to get anything done. We think communication is the problem not the solution. Leaders need to cut down on the amount and improve the quality of communication – we can save a day a week of unnecessary meetings and communication by being more selective.
3. Focus on the leader
We continue to over-invest in leaders and under invest in followers – and there are far more of them. Complex and distributed organizations require decentralized decision making or everything is escalated and delayed. Unthinking followship of a great leader is not what these organizations need.
Complex organizations have also created some new challenges for leaders. As change and ambiguity increase, it is difficult to plan everything or to use traditional control mechanisms. Leaders need to build and inspire trust but complex organizations are full of mechanisms that subtly undermine trust.
- A lack of face to face contact and “out of sight out of mind” can make leaders lose confidence in people in multiple locations.
- Time zones can limit communication and delay responses to problems.
- Cultural differences can cause misunderstandings or change expectations about the importance of deadlines, hierarchy or relationship building.
- Matrix organizations create, by design, divided loyalties and competing priorities.
When leaders feel less confident they tend to respond by increasing control, and this can set up a vicious spiral of increasing control, and reducing trust. This leads to delay, cost and dissatisfaction.
Leaders in this environment know they need to empower people but they also want to keep their jobs! Often they are squeezed between the reality of their jobs and the expectations of more senior leaders who became successful in simpler times - this can be an uncomfortable place to be.
To make empowerment systematic, leaders need to focus on creating real capability to cope with this environment in their people and themselves. Once capability is in place the challenge is to develop confidence to allow people to operate in a more decentralized way.
Finally, leaders need to establish new support structures (not endless meetings, reports and escalation procedures) to enable them to be accessible when needed but not interfere in daily operations when they add little value.
It’s a tough world for leaders out there. HR professionals can support them by:
1. Updating their learning and development offerings to reflect this new reality
2. Companies constantly reorganize and in a complex world, structure is not the solution. Worse, by disrupting the networks that actually make things work, reorganizations make success even more difficult to achieve. HR people could help by dissuading senior mangers from constant reorganization
3. Recruiting, developing, rewarding and promoting enabling leaders who develop real capability in their people rather than highly visible macho leaders (or worse corporate politicians)
Finally – be realistic about what leader can achieve
If I read the leadership criteria for many leading organizations it looks like a wish list of behaviours for a leader of a major world religion. Most mid- and even senior level leaders have many personal tasks to perform in addition to people leadership – wouldn’t it be better if leadership capability was distributed throughout the organization, rather than vested in a small number of leaders?
Listen to Kevan’s “Life in a Matrix” podcasts at www.lifeinamatrix.com
