Exceptional Leadership by Design

How Design in Great Organizations Produces Great Leadership

Rob Elkington, Madeleine van der Steege, Judith L. Glick-Smith, Jennifer Moss Breen

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781787439016
• eBook ISBN: 9781787545021
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Imagine a world with great leadership. What would that world be like? Would it be a better world or a worse one? Now ratchet great leadership up to exceptional leadership and suddenly we have cause for optimism. But how do we design exceptional leadership, and would we even know it if we saw it? Traditional paradigms of leadership have celebrated decisive top-down control and analytical decision-making. But times are changing. The world is more connected, complex, fluid and interdependent. 

This book debunks the myth that leaders need to be creative like designers to apply Design Thinking. Applying design approaches and practices to organizational leadership is not just about its leaders becoming more creative. It is definitely not about the person at the top coming up with the grand answer. Design thinking starts with the 'pain point' related to the problem you are trying to solve. You get to the heart of the issue. It is a collaborative effort that neatly leads stakeholders and representatives affected by the problem to design novel leadership solutions that actually work. 

This collection of stories, examples and narratives about exceptional leadership by design provides readers of all levels of experience with tangible, real, and heartfelt examples of how the design process can be applied to leadership. It will show how we:  

• Inform great leadership with design
• Strengthen our own leadership by design
• Redesign hero leadership for more inclusivity
• Redesign organizations for Fe+Male leadership synergy
• Design leadership for a VUCA world
• Design flow-based leadership
• Design organizations that build resilient leadership
• Design leadership for innovation
• Design culturally intelligent leadership
• Build leadership into our spaces and places

PROCESS OF DESIGN

5

REDESIGNING THE HERO LEADER: LEVERAGING EMERGENT LEADERSHIP

ROB ELKINGTON

Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.¹

– Drucker and Maciarello

Key Takeaways

Reading this chapter will help shape your thinking about leadership in the following ways:

• You will create space for leadership to emerge in surprising ways at surprising times from surprising places.
• You will perceive leadership as a process of design rather than a role of dominance.
• You will understand that your organization is not a static entity but a living organism, a complex adaptive system.
• You will uncover the incredible wealth that exists within your organization in the form of the people who are the social capital and human capital that you are able to support and release. These people are released to do great things when you implement an organizational design that embeds social capital and human capital as structural capital.
• You will relinquish some of the loneliness that accrues with leadership because you will design policies and processes that enable you to share the load of problem-solving across a number of areas and key people.

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!”

He could not sleep (Fig. 5.1). He needed to figure out a way to overcome the complex problem of the low productivity exhibited by his offsite programmers. The company faced major market share loss if it did not quickly respond to the in-roads into the sector by disruptive newcomers emerging from developing countries. Their programmers were hungry, they were hardworking, and they were certainly not bound by old-style thinking!

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?

Fig. 5.1: Mark Cannot Sleep, by James R. Martin Jr (PhD).

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.

MARK MEETS KARLIN AND ENCOUNTERS LEADERSHIP BY DESIGN

Mark was nervous, strangely so. It was not like him to feel apprehension about meeting someone, it was something he enjoyed and thrived on. Yet, as he reflected on his disposition, he realized that his apprehension lay in two domains. The first was that he would have to expose his feelings and personal struggles to a stranger, and that was extremely discomforting. The second was that, should this encounter prove to be a bust, the terrifying reality would be that he still had to try to correct the sinking ship alone – something h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Concept of Design
• Process of Design
• Context for Design
• How to Test Your Own Effective Leadership by Design Prototype
• Index