Paradigm shift for leaders
Organizational agility
presents an existential crisis for middle management. While visionary leaders
looking at the big picture are still essential, much planning now is emergent
and bottom-up. And decision-making happens much more on the ground in real
time.
Consequently, in
an agile organization, the
traditional middle manager’s role – to communicate, direct, and control – is
tossed aside.
Some companies are even
removing all middle-management layers. They have a senior leadership team at
the top and everyone else is a front-line worker or front-line supervisor. “For
example, the Finland-based Agile home nursing company Debora has all of its 700
nurses working in self-managing teams and reporting directly to the CEO with no
layers in between.
What is required in
this paradigm cultural shift? One of the biggest challenges will be to transform
and reimagine the role of leaders.
As Colonel Stanley
McChrystal suggests in his book Team of Teams, “the temptation to
lead as a chess master, controlling each move of the organization, must give
way to an approach as gardener, enabling rather than directing.”
The Zappos CEO uses the
analogy of the mayor of a city to discuss the role of leaders, saying, the mayor
doesn’t tell its residents what to do or where to live. Instead, provides
certain infrastructure that a city must provide, such as the grid: water,
power, and sewage and basic laws that a city enforces. And for the most part,
what happens when a city grows and innovates is a result of the
self-organization that happens with a city’s residents, businesses, and other
organizations.
·
Research indicates the path to organizational
agility depends on the starting point. It is clear that leadership and cultural
challenges will be similar and especially acute for large, slow bureaucracies.
They must spur faster change despite a management layer that threatens to
sabotage agility out of fear and ignorance.
·
Managers are groomed and rewarded throughout
their careers for applying one set of behaviors. It will prove very difficult
to relinquish control and adopt a completely different approach to leading and
managing.
·
Only with a sense of humility and curiosity
will the leader of the future succeed. Once control is relinquished, an
executive’s understanding of the organization is inherently incomplete and
overly simple. The organization will often invent, innovate, move fast, and
become vastly smarter and more capable than the mere sum of the parts; but only
if executives can guide, influence, inspire, without controlling, and with
humility.
·
Leaders will need to spend more time doing
work and less time directing and controlling others. Successful organizations
will have a lot more leadership emerging bottom-up, a lot more value-adding
work getting done, fewer bosses and a lot less “bossing of others,” which
doesn’t particularly add value.
When I ask my two
daughters to unload the dishwasher, and the older one decides she will
“supervise” the younger one, two things result. First, the younger one becomes
disgruntled and unhappy. Second, the dishwasher gets emptied far slower. I have
learned my lesson - now I tell them both to unload the dishwasher and I will
supervise.
As the world gets more
agile, slow companies must get on board to keep up with the pace of change. To
do that, they will have to tackle their culture and the deep-rooted mindsets of
their people
by Aaron De Smet
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/the-organization-blog/paradigm-shift-for-leaders?cid=other-eml-alt-mip-mck-oth-1804&hlkid=8e13531f803c47d2b8493ba26e6cf1dd&hctky=1627601&hdpid=99cb12f4-139e-4997-8020-a6b489420c59
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