Creating Leadership

Philip Goodwin, Tony Page

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781947441194
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

This informative and inspirational handbook describes how to successfully lead mergers and change in complex organizations. Drawing on a real-life experience, the authors share their insights on how leaders can deliver sustainable change by growing the capacity of everyone within an organization to deliver performance gains, behave like a leader, and encourage leadership in others. It is a book by practitioners for practitioners telling the real-life story of a leader and a facilitator working together in the complex reality of a multinational organization. It deepens this insight by drawing on a wealth of wider research by academics and leadership practitioners. Here you will find immediately useable tools, easy to relate to real-life examples, and a little bit of magic in the form of a fable that will sustain you and your colleagues through the twists and turns of what is certain to become an intensely human journey.

PART 1

The Challenge

Hippo collapsed foreground; gazelles background

CHAPTER 1

Why Must Leaders Create Leaders?

In October 2015, the government of Hungary decided to close its borders. It was an attempt to stop the inflow from neighboring Croatia of refugees fleeing the war in Syria. In response, the government of Croatia redirected the flow of refugees westward toward Slovenia. By closing borders and redirecting the flow, both countries were pushing the challenge presented by this mass movement of people somewhere else, literally moving it on. But the refugee crisis was not going away.

Citizens across Europe were thrown headlong into a crisis that emerged suddenly from nowhere and raised lots of angry questions: Who is responsible? Who needs to take charge, to lead? What is the solution? (And importantly) Where did it start?

Five years earlier, in December 2010, a Tunisian fruit vendor, Tarek el-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi, had set himself on fire and died. It was a desperate act. In a note he left behind, he said that it was a protest in response to harassment and the confiscation of his wares by a municipal official and her aides. His despairing action became a catalyst for protests and political change in Tunisia that escalated into protests and violence across North Africa and the Middle East, reaching Syria—over 2,000 miles away from Tunisia—where challenges to the established regime resulted in civil war. With the resulting displacement of an estimated 11 million people, 5 million left the country as refugees.

This example illustrates the challenges leaders face in an interconnected world: Our action in one part of the globe—in this case Tunisia—can unlock a flow of consequences that ripple outward over thousands of miles, affecting millions of people. For those living in a border town in Hungary the problem they are facing—the influx of refugees—arrives inexplicably from beyond their horizon. Any solution they attempt will at best be temporary. The Syrian refugees are just as powerless, at the mercy of forces over which they have no influence. Their immediate problem—to find refuge and safety—is denied when they are simply moved along.

Similarly, as a leader of an organization, whether you are operating in a single country or across many countries, if you don’t know exactly what is the root cause of the problem that your organization is facing, how can you work out a solution? Think of the banking crisis of 2008 and its impact. Think of Brexit. Too big, too complex you might say. Yet such is the operating reality in the 21st century for the leaders of organizations big and small. We operate in such a complex world, with so many linked and moving parts that the cause of our problems is often distant from us, and the wider effects of our actions (including the unintended consequences) can neither be anticipated nor seen. Those we seek to influence are grappling with other pressing events that we don’t know about. We and the other players in this game are operating blind, interfering with and blocking one another’s moves. When events spiral out of control, it becomes urgent to scale up our response, making it necessary to reflect on how we are operating as leaders.

To add to the leader’s woes, this increasingly complex world is moving at a faster and faster pace. Our connectedness over greater distances creates the impression of time being compressed, so that we are forced to take action ever more quickly. Compare this with the luxury of the late 20th century, when a written response might take 2 or 3 days to arrive, giving you the time to reflect and consider before acting. Today, with a whole range of instant messaging tools at our disposal, the lack of an instant response shows indecisiveness or inefficiency. It can feel as though any response will do as long as it is quick and gets the problem off your desk, like a game of pass-the-parcel.

Alongside the added complexity and pace, the incredible amount of information at a leader’s fingertips via the Internet is a treasure trove that our predecessors could only dream of. Leaders can analyze ad infinitum, as if peeling off layers of a giant onion only to find more. We risk becoming buried under information, unable to make a decision. How often have you said, But we need more data; let’s just do a bit more research; we’ll get the consultants to complete the analysis. How does a leader know when enough is enough?

Taken together—connectedness, scale, speed, and information—can leave us feeling overwhelmed as leaders. This effect runs across our teams and ultimately to the entire organization. What can we do in the face of this challenge? How should we equip everyone to survive?

One defensive response is for the leader to place the responsibility for solving a complex organizational problem in the hands of a single person, or a few designated people, relying on their authority and the usual hierarchy. Helpfully, this limits the number of perspectives and voices, producing a sense of certainty and clarity. The challenges no longer seem so complex after all. But this simplifying response does everyone a disservice. It is only a comfort blanket for those you lead who crave the strong, single voice.

A leader’s second defense is to focus on projects to adjust the organizational structures, culture, and process. But this brings everyone’s eyes off the ball to focus internally instead on defending what you have. It might work in the short term, for the larger organizations with the muscle to withstand external shocks. But it is not a strategy for long-term success because you are leaving new opportunities every day to be grabbed by more nimble competitors, while new challenges requiring immediate responses arrive unnoticed. Your organization moves unerringly toward irrelevance.

The third defensive response for a leader faced with organizational uncertainty is to create committees and working groups without authority. These can insulate you from accountability and defer decision making. The buck never stops with you, as long as you constantly surround yourself with a blur of urgent busyness.

Those three defensive strategies are flawed because the leader only creates the illusion of control, while failing to deliver a timely or an adequate response.

So what can we do instead for our organizations to thrive? We believe that the job of the leader, the team, and the organization is to position themselves to respond to the one certainty: The world is going to change, and quickly, and probably unexpectedly. The answer we will describe is to create conditions in which everyone can get smarter and faster. We want to create conditions in which the organization uses its collective wisdom to learn and adapt, and at speed. This approach has resilience at its core.

We call it dispersed or distributed leadership. By leadership we mean any activity that influences the motivation, knowledge, or practice of other organizational members (Spillane, 2006). The proposition is that, since we want to increase the speed and intelligence of our organization’s response to change, we need our people to share what they know, to integrate it quickly with what others know, and to take decisions on the basis of that information. Just because they have a particular title, no one is written into or out of a leadership clique. While there are formal positions in the organizational hierarchy, dispersed leadership allows the role of a leader or follower to be dynamic, because the organization’s best response arises when no one is rigid or impervious to the information and influences that arrive from partners, customers, suppliers, and colleagues, outside the hierarchy of our own line management. We use the term leader for anyone who influences other organizational members, earning that label in the moment by undertaking the leadership activity itself. We can be followers in one moment or situation and leaders in the next. This is real life. We are constantly influencing one another, making the choice to be adaptable leaders who are at the same time followers listening to and influenced by all the leader–followers surrounding us.

But how do we do this? How do we create the adaptable organization thriving in the face of an uncertain and rapidly changing world? The answer might appear simple: Leaders create leaders.

It’s a clear proposition and here we are giving you the story of how we came to it. The story includes real up and downs, successes and failures—and we will share what we learned from that journey. It is a story about sparking the motivation in others to be leaders, and it is about you finding your true work as a leader. At its heart is a kind of leadership shift that must happen in all our organizations and society at large, if we are to find the courage not only to survive the most difficult and frightening challenges facing us today, but also to contribute to making things better.

Read on . . .

CHAPTER 2

Preparing for Change

When Tony and Philip first met some years ago in a wet and rainy London, Philip’s organization had just embarked on a new global strategy. This was long before the credit crunch and the refugee crisis in Europe. Philip’s executive board had given him the difficult task of leading a merger of the East and West Africa business units to form a new integrated region. It was quite a tall order because these very disparate regions were delivering poor performance and operating largely in isolation from each other and from the wider organization.

As one of the board’s newly appointed regional directors, Philip was left in no doubt about the urgency or the scale of transformation required. He wanted to move quickly in merging his East and West Africa teams, to get them operational as soon as possible. To do that, he needed a business vision and a plan for delivering it. He wanted the new region to be at the forefront of the wave of change rolling across the global organization; otherwise, he feared, they could all too easily become victims of it.

So newly promoted, bright eyed, and eager to move at once, Philip decided to call his new senior managers together. But he wasn’t naïve about what he was taking on. He would be working with a wide range of experienced executives who between them had seen it all. Everyone regarded this territory as a no-hoper, languishing at the bottom of the company league tables. No one expected investment here to deliver big results, and it was expensive to operate in such a volatile environment, so they lived with the constant demoralizing threat of cuts. Might there be resistance to change?

How would Philip’s arrival be greeted? Would colleagues feel resentful toward a younger and less experienced peer promoted over them, and would his West African colleagues be suspicious toward one previously based in East Africa? There would be multiple agendas in the room. How could Philip possibly see all these agendas? How would he bring these into the open? How could he bring people to engage with each other? How would he achieve alignment and build a team?

Philip wanted a facilitator to share the heat, and a colleague who had read Tony’s book, Diary of a Change Agent, suggested Tony. Philip was drawn to the reflective approach described in the book, which chimed with his own belief that the immediate business gains you can achieve after mergers or change will only be sustained if at the same time you work toward long-term culture change. Tony brought Ben Parker, a colleague from his consultancy network, to the meeting. They struck Philip as a good combination: Tony using questions to draw Philip out and coaching to explore and grip the issues, while Ben was being the hard man, more in the face, trying to clear a path through the jungle. For Tony, the project in Africa contained the familiar challenges of leadership and engagement during any complex program of change, but brought these into a totally unfamiliar and multicultural context. While excited by this, Tony was also wary not to get blinded by Philip’s obvious enthusiasm. He asked Philip what outcomes were needed and Philip almost too quickly replied, “At the end of three days, I want a shared vision and an agreed transition plan.”

When Tony pushed him to articulate what he intended to happen longer term, Philip replied, “I’ve learned that real success only arrives if you can push leadership down so that people take responsibility, joining up in teams to address their common problems, and what I really want is to release the creativity and intelligence of all 500 people in my business.”

It was unusual for Tony to meet a leader so confident in the potential of other people. Philip’s words carried experience and humility, and made a lot of sense: Here was a real chance, and a rare one, to build a high-performance organization, and this ignited Tony’s enthusiasm. Suddenly he felt willing to invest the energy to take on the challenge.

They explored Philip’s vision further and it became plain how ambitious it was. The current reality was 500 people physically divided across 11 different countries, split between East and West Africa. Typically working in isolated offices of around 40 staff, people knew and cared very little about the merger. Mostly African, the majority of staff were doing routine, relatively low-paid jobs, with their instructions passed down through a hierarchical chain of command from an expatriate UK country director. Each country had a different culture, with a particular blend of ethnic, tribal, and religious influences, but most shared a colonial legacy that still affected the feelings and behavior of staff. Philip noticed a feed me attitude, even among quite senior people: Staff failed to deliver on promises, avoided responsibility, and passed problems back up the line. Philip wanted a high-performance culture and believed that this required a fundamental transformation of attitudes and behavior. When Tony asked how he intended to release the intelligence of 500 staff, Philip just said, “We will begin by bringing together 30 leaders.”

At the start, we did not know how the 30 leaders would carry forward the merger with the wider staff of 500; we were simply seeking to create an aligned leadership community. Philip’s initial questions about engaging the leadership community were as follows:

• Who are the most important people to have in the initial group of 30?
• How do I bring the opportunity to the...