Leadership

Picture a lawless town in the US wild west. The bad guys are running the show. Until one day a baccy-chewing loner wanders into town. She says very little, other than to order a shot in the local saloon. It doesn’t take long before the local hoods test her. Her squinting, contemptuous eyes suggest that she is not to be trifled with. It’s on. O.K. Corral at sundown…

Hollywood has a lot to answer for. This notion of the heroic leader pervades modern day leadership. The belief that one or a handful of individuals can save us from the bad guys, disruption, insolvency etc. is fanciful.

That’s a heavy burden for any individual to carry. It no doubt contributes to ‘learned helplessness’ as everyone outside of the c-suite become order-following automatons. The business schools refer to this as centralised leadership.

Dictatorships, benevolent or otherwise, have the advantage of decision-making speed. Covid-arrives, everybody must remain at home. No questions. “We will dominate the EV market” - resources align and dominance is secured.

Such decisions require a compliant citizenry / workforce. They also assume that the decision makers have both a clear view of the world at the time of making the decision and are confident that such a decision will make sense for a period, days, months or years.

Many decision-triggers today are both high impact and require a rapid response. They will likely need to be monitored in real-time as further inbound triggers approach. Think a bevy of inebriated and aggressive black swans waddling into your reception as if it was the final destination for some sort of never-ending street parade. Security can’t handle the situation and so the swans pile deeper into the building. Carpets are ruined and people are unable to concentrate. Eventually they make their way up to the c-suite…

So the scene is set at the O.K Corral. Ennio Morricone has been called in to amp up the tension. Lone wolf versus the bad guys – one versus many. The sun disappears behind the roof of the barbershop / dentists / operating theatre. Shots are fired.

Shortly afterwards, the scores are totted up and its two-one. Our hero took out two of the baddies. The baddies took out the lone wolf and will make the town folk pay for such temerity.

This highlights the problem of relying on one or just a handful of heroic leaders. It also highlights the issue of having a rogue c-suite team. Modern day leadership represents a single point of (possibly existential) failure for many organisations.

It’s worth highlighting that back in the wild west there were no CxO headhunters. There were no business schools, nor executive-targeted media. Today we have all three and they have symbiotically evolved to create an ecosystem that benefits greatly from the heroic leader paradigm. Investors and analysts seem to be unaware that this is a narrative and not a universal law of organisational design.

One might say that leadership is about setting direction and encouraging others to follow in a manner that leads to a positive outcome for shareholders / stakeholders. But even this definition is quaint. It suggests that followers would be reluctant to follow the vision unless a variety of carrots, sticks, levers and pulleys were applied. Even setting direction has a quaintness about it. Amid a ‘life-threatening’ environment, staying alive (ie viable) is the goal.

As the world becomes more uncertain, strategy and tactics begin to blur. Even the organisation’s ‘north star’ becomes a variable. Under these conditions, talent requirement become volatile. Those that can operate in a freelance / portfolio manner will be brought in and discarded based on present conditions. Such individuals will be very conscious that their next gig very much depends on how they perform in their current gig, so they will not need management or leadership ‘incentivisation’. They are intrinsically driven by the personal need to remain economically viable.

So leadership in this increasingly uncertain world distils down to governance and decision making. One might then conclude that, done well, leadership is less about one or more heroic individuals and more about the organisation’s nervous system. So leadership is less about people and more about organisational design.

It’s not a massive conceptual leap to realise that a distributed nervous system is more effective than one that is centralised. It would be quite a problem if my hand needed permission from my brain to let go of a red-hot poker. My fingers sit at the outer edge of my body, yet at the same time they play a significant role in how I engage with the environment.

Thus, I advocate the concept of ubiquitous leadership. An organisation is more likely to be in harmony with its environment if every individual is a leader. Governance is important here. We have a brain for a reason. Ubiquitous leadership is neither leaderless nor a ‘laissez-faire’ approach. It enables the organisation to respond in a timely manner to a volatile world.

That’s the theory. How is it implemented? The answer is with great difficulty if the organisation is built on contracts and coercion. Trust is the key ingredient to making this work. Knowing that each person on your team is looking for the same outcome reduces friction and so allows the team to move faster. Similarly knowing that the teams are similarly aligned allows the organisation to travel swiftly as one unit.

Implementing ubiquitous leadership is an exercise in autonomy distribution. Allowing people to behave as people rather than machine cogs. Allowing them to complement the corporate data with their own emotional data (gut feelings) unleashes tremendous value. The organisation is no longer an inert factory, but a living, sensing, opportunistic organism, ie an intelligent organisation.