The transformational leader
Set a clear direction, trust your people and bring them together to shape the organisation’s future and build commitment to change.
Summary ideas
Bring people together
Complex change requires leaders to convene people and build commitment across a critical mass of the organisation.
Trust your people’s collective ability
Collaborative transformation depends on believing in your people and questioning assumptions that may limit confidence.
Stay visibly involved
Remain closely connected to the change process and demonstrate its importance through your own actions.
The operating model is a set of design choices that translates your business strategy into productive, aligned behaviour. As a concept, it really is this straightforward.
Changing your operating model to fit tomorrow’s needs requires a strategy of its own. Will you follow the path of conventional management orthodoxy? On this path, you see the organisation as a machine, assembling a small group of leaders to design it and trusting change management activity can convince people into positive perception. The design is done; install it.
Or will you follow the path paved by social science? This alternative sees the organisation as a social system, convenes the organisation in collaborative design and builds commitment for change. This is a very different strategy and makes different demands from leaders.
The operating environment has exposed the impossibility of the leader’s role to be the smartest person in the room, holding all the answers and telling others what to do. Instead, the leader’s agenda is to enable the system to develop and become the best possible version of itself. This requires a shift from telling the organisation what to do, to convening the organisation to create its collective and prosperous future.
Broad assumptions
1. Compliance view – This view assumes workers must be told what to do and require tight management. It builds a type of dependency or parent-child relationship within an organisation.
2. Commitment view – This view assumes people want to take responsibility, wish to grow and will engage if committed to shared objectives. This view fosters adult-adult relationships where each is respected for their strengths and wisdom.
Belief in people and collective genius
Complexity has long surpassed the abilities of top-down direction. In a simple environment, a leader might be able to see the entire chessboard and dictate every move. The rules and the competition are well defined and understandable. In today’s globalised, interconnected market, no single leader – no matter how brilliant – can possess a complete view of the whole.
Leaders often lament low engagement or slow execution, rarely considering that may be the indirect outcomes of leadership beliefs, behaviours and the culture they unintentionally create.
To steer a complex system effectively, leaders must embrace and live the commitment view. The job is to participate in the leadership task of setting business direction – the strategy, the constraints and the non-negotiable parameters of the organisation – and reaching alignment among organisation leaders and stakeholders. Once the ‘what’ and ‘why’ are established, the leader must convene the organisation to define the ‘how’, or how the future organisation will achieve its strategic aspiration.
Leaders who understand the inherent complexity in human organisations know they must involve the organisation to change the organisation. When a leader shifts from telling to convening, they access the collective genius within. There is a tremendous release of energy because employees are normally not accustomed to feeling valued for their opinions and being involved in shaping their future.
The act of convening also encourages a common database of valid information on which informed design choices can be made. This shared database allows the workforce to see the full end-to-end operation of the business rather than just their current functional view. This collaboration promotes social network development and a shared journey into a shared future.
This shift from telling to convening requires courageous leadership. It can challenge leaders steeped in the water of traditional management orthodoxy – the one that tells leaders they are in command and should know what’s best. A successful shift requires leaders to trust in their workforce when provided the right direction and a supporting environment. With this in place, they can lead the organisation towards a solution that is rigorous, ambitious, creative and supported by the people in the organisation that must make it real.
Your job as leader
Belief in yourself
Significant transformational change is difficult and expensive. There, it has been said. The problem is that leaders cannot command the outcome they want. Your organisation must travel through the messy middle together with you at the helm. In this sense, change is a great equaliser among organisations. The truth is that only you and your people can change the organisation.
Your job as a leader is to create context for change and play your part. Your role is to help your team achieve genuine alignment, make difficult decisions when consensus cannot be reached, manage key stakeholders and remain visibly engaged in communication and role-modelling throughout the change process.
A leader’s biggest personal challenge likely lies in control. When a leader chooses collaborative design, they unleash energy within their organisation, and it is this that transforms an organisation from its current state to its future state. Leaders must be comfortable in this energy and know how to ride its wave. Leaders who choose collaborative design have confidence in their ability to influence without coercion, have often seen for themselves how traditional, top-down change initiatives often fail to achieve their objectives and deeply believe in the collaborative, pay-now strategy for change.
CASE EXAMPLE
Leading through trust and involvement
Leaders who choose collaborative design tend to share several characteristics. They respect the knowledge and commitment of their people, recognise that they do not hold all the answers and are comfortable being transparent when they don’t know something. They remain visible and engaged throughout the process, working alongside design teams, modelling desired behaviours and maintaining strong relationships with key stakeholders.
One such leader was fond of saying, ‘Be hard on the issues while easy on the people.’. They understood the influence of the system on individual behaviour. They understood that people will rise to the occasion and internal leaders will emerge when invited to participate in a supportive environment. They knew the future design could not be theirs, but must be shared and owned in parts large and small by those who must make it work. In an environment created by these beliefs, members of the organisation rose to the occasion with superior design and implementation.
SOURCES
- Bridges, W. (1995). Managing transitions: making the most of change. Nicholas Brealey Publishing.
- McGregor, D. (1960). The Human Side of Enterprise. McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc.
- Schein, E. (1999). Process consultation revisited: Building the helping relationship. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc.