Sweat poured down Marks face as he awoke feeling anxious and clenching his teeth! The challenges confronting him in his leadership role felt like the turbulence of a small plane flying through a thunderstorm. This sense of anxiety gripped his thoughts all day every day. He felt all alone because he knew he was the one responsible for the success or failure of his company, Thumasai Inc., a global technology firm. He was concerned about the uncertainty associated with the tech sector in general along with the volatility in his company. “But,” he reminded himself, “As CEO of Thumasai you are the leader, and so you need to find solutions to these challenges!”
It was clear to him now that the organization he agreed to lead a few months ago was beset with internal and external threats that made it seem like the company was in a tailspin to destruction! These were threats that he could not have anticipated or foreseen, actually no one could have, because they emerged stealthily and quickly. “But, you are the leader and so it is up to you to find a way to bring the company through!” He told himself again. At that moment, a quote from Deming surfaced quietly in his mind: “A bad system will beat a good person every time!” He remembered this quote from a “Leadership and Systems” seminar he attended a year ago. What did that mean, and why had he drawn that thought from so deeply within his subconscious? Was it possible that the challenges he currently faced were not about him but about the system? Could it be that in complexity there are no solutions, only choices?
It was at that moment that clarity surfaced in Mark’s mind and he reached for his phone and Googled: “Executive Coaches.” Within seconds, Google rendered 392,000 results for his region. Mark glanced quickly at the list and then typed the following brief e-mail to his assistant: “Sandra, please create a short list, with profiles, of the ten top Executive Coaches in our region and have those on my desk by noon today. Thanks, Mark.”
DESIGNING LEADERSHIP – FLOURISHING FOR ALL
In our Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous or “VUCA”2 world, leaders like Mark, who every single day lead under duress, are common. Is it possible that part of the problem is the narrative these leaders espouse, namely, the social construct that success or failure rides on the capacity and acuity of the individual leader?
This is designer leadership at its best; choose the smartest, most highly qualified, and most experienced person to lead, and success will follow. One of the major challenges that we face with this narrative and this selection process is that leadership is highly context sensitive. A great example of this is Winston Churchill who was praised as a “wartime” leader, but was jettisoned by his country and his party once the war was over. In the twenty-first century especially, a leader’s effectiveness depends on many complex factors that intersect at critical moments to forge leadership outcomes.3 Just because I am hired as a leader does not mean that I am de jure a leader in every context. History is littered with examples of leaders who functioned well in one setting but did horribly in another setting, or leaders who led well at one level but fumbled at another level. This is the notion of designer leadership, where the traits of an individual cause us to believe that they are predisposed to “lead.”
Instead of looking for designer leaders, could we invert the perspective to look for leadership by design? You might be asking yourself: “So what’s the difference, isn’t this just a play on words?” In fact, it is not. It is a deep philosophical paradigm shift on the nature of leadership and the role of the leader. In this chapter, we unpack the difference between designer leadership and leadership by design by looking at the challenges faced by Mark, the CEO of Thumasai Inc., and the role of a skilled coach in moving him from designer leadership to leadership by design in which he is a core component4 of a complex adaptive system5 designed to facilitate leadership emergence,6 experimentation at the margins,7 rapid reflection forces,8 and vision as culture.9
When we reflect on the role of context in determining leadership effectiveness, it is clear that if we cannot change the VUCA context in which leaders find themselves in the twenty-first century perhaps, we can design organizational contexts that address this VUCA reality in ways that not only support leadership survival, or organizational thriving, but also, perhaps, even global flourishing.10
The first step in moving toward leadership flourishing is to think through the design of an organization, and by implication, the design of the leadership structures and processes that support that organization. In observing leaders, and researching leadership, I am struck by the manner in which one leader thrives, while another struggles, falters, and ultimately fails. This failure of leadership often has profound implications for the leader, the organization, and even society.
One need only think of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, or the Enron debacle, or the Bernie Madoff scam, as negative examples arising from poor leadership and ineffective design of organizational structures and leadership processes to counter these pathological impulses. A great example of the type of exceptional leadership and impoverished leadership we are contrasting in this chapter is found in the wonderful book: Leading at the Edge: Leadership Lessons from the Extraordinary Saga of Shackleton’s Antarctic Expedition.11 In the preface the author states:
In the north, the crew of the Karluk found themselves transformed in the months that followed into a band of self-interested, disparate individuals. Lying, cheating, and stealing became common behaviors. The disintegration of the team had tragic consequences for its eleven members who died in the Arctic wasteland. In the frozen south, the story of the Endurance could not have been more different. Shackleton’s expedition faced the same problems of ice, cold, and shortages of food and supplies. The response of his crew to these hellish conditions, however, was in almost every respect the obverse of those of the Karluk’s crew. Teamwork, self-sacrifice, and astonishing good cheer replaced lying, cheating, and rapacious self-interest. It was as if the Endurance existed not just in a different polar region, but in a different, contrary, parallel universe.
What made the difference? When reading the book and listening to the related HBR podcast it is evident that leadership made all the difference. However, it is not just that leadership existed, but it was the way in which the two leaders approached the process of leadership that made the difference between survival and extinction. It came down to the design of the leadership processes and the design of the team function. In the next section, I include a diagram to illustrate leadership by design, and use the rest of this chapter to discuss that diagram as a tool to implementing leadership by design in your specific context.
