Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Strategic Leadership
Past leadership models were devised for a world that was much more stable and predictable than today’s (where change happened at a much slower pace). As such, they gave emphasis to continuity over rapid change. Any change was thought to be planned and conducted stepwise by leaders who stood at the top of the organization and had the means to do so. The main trait of those strategic leadership models is precisely this: they relied almost exclusively on the competencies and knowledge of the top leaders to set the course of the company. Those leaders held the most creative jobs and they alone possessed the knowledge and vision that enabled them to foresee the right direction to trail. From them radiated the crucial decisions that guided the enterprise. Change was brought about by top-down directives. The responsibilities of the rest of the organization, including its middle management, rested solely on implementing the vision that emanated from above. Strategic talent was the province of the top managers, and the amount of knowledge required to drive the organization was manageable by a few of its members. This idea of the leader as an heroic elder is typical of military organizations.
“One may define strategic leadership as the ability of an experienced, senior leader who has the wisdom and vision to create and execute plans and make consequential decisions in the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous strategic environment.”1
In today’s world strategic leadership must be much more than this. Uncertainty and ambiguity have increased tremendously in the past few decades leading to an exponential increase in the complexity of the challenges businesses face. The previous model may be adequate for a very hierarchical command and control (Newtonian cause-effect) structure such as the military (still even in that context we may challenge Guillot’s definition), but it is not fit for a contemporary complex knowledge organization. The challenges that an organization faces nowadays require a wider participation of all its human resources, resorting to a broader range of their personal and social capabilities. I prefer the concept of great groups as presented by Ireland and Hitt (1999) 2. An organization which can resort to the pool of talent and experience that emanates from the multiplicity of group configurations that can arise between all its employees, is much more flexible and adaptable then one based on rigid hermetic units and whose majority of members is refrained from expressing their creativity.
I would say that strategic leadership is the people’s ability to mobilize the necessary configuration of organizational resources in order to attain creative solutions for the essential problems that will determine the evolution of an organization.
I believe that the main drivers for unleashing the organization’s creative powers will be the quest for self-fulfillment and entrepreneurship (taking ownership) of empowered individual members of the organization who can freely associate in great groups. I would go so far as arguing that more than leaders, what a knowledge organization needs is innovators and entrepreneurs. Or maybe it is the word leadership that is far too loaded with meaning and the concept is in need of fundamental redefinition. I will attempt to build an argument to defend this point, even if the original idea is not my own. Let’s start with people.
Companies should increasingly focus on their most strategic resource, their human capital: “In today's knowledge-based economy, human capital may be the most important resource in corporations of all types.”3 Groups can naturally convene to address specific problems and then disband once the problem is solved. Responsibilities can shift and members can take turns at leading according to the specific necessities of the task at hand and their own skills and knowledge. The organization will be composed of juxtaposed networks of knowledgeable individuals.
Let’s suppose that one of the main problems (or rather opportunities) of an organization is the double-faced problem of the absorption of external knowledge and of management of the knowledge that flows internally through the organization. Every member, division or great group of the organization can have a positive impact in addressing this issue. Transversal teams could be formed in order to analyze the requisites for an efficient integration of information processes. Then an assessment of available tools could be undertaken and finally the chosen solution should be implemented. I have participated in such a team effort, which originated from a common felt necessity in my own organization, and had the good fortune to witness how this can come about if the group members are genuinely engaged and view the project as their own.
After developing the concept of great groups, Ireland and Hitt devote some space to explaining how to articulate individual self-expression within the organization and the necessity for coordination and ultimate accountability in a firm. That role will be the province of the top leader. So we are referred back to the concept of the great leader, though with some key changes: “Tomorrow’s organizations will still require a great leader to be successful. (…) What will be different in 21st century companies is how top managers discharge their strategic leadership responsibilities.”2 Ireland and Hitt’s prescriptions for a successful great leader is one that emphasizes the need for a constant dialogue with the entire organization.
I confess that I have some trouble with Ireland and Hitt’s prescriptions for what they call a successful great leader. I think they still over identify the role of strategic leaders with that of the great leader, the CEO or the top management team (TMT). As such, they rely too much on the great leader’s abilities and too little on the other members’ strengths. According to them, some of the main roles of the great leader are the traditional ones: “to set the general organizational purpose; to articulate a tangible vision, values, and strategy; to determine the direction of the company; to be accountable for the entire firm’s performance; to recognize external trends and interact with outside parties”. To those they add a few more, aimed at fostering great groups: “to create a culture of trust; to affect the behaviors of organizational citizens; to coordinate and integrate the great groups into a community;”
I am very much in agreement with Tsoukas statement on the indeterminacy of knowledge (radical uncertainty), and his emphasis on a higher degree of (emergent) self-coordination: “Firms are distributed knowledge systems in a strong sense: they are decentered systems. (…) Management, therefore, can be seen as an open-ended process of coordinating purposeful individuals. (…) The key to achieving coordinated action does not so much depend on those ‘higher up’ collecting more and more knowledge, as those ‘lower down’ finding more and more ways of getting connected and interrelating the knowledge each one has.”4
I should now came back to my original point and divest the word leadership from most of the meaning that has been loaded on its shoulders. Then it is possible to decouple leadership as a process from a leader as a person. According to Uhl-Bien et al., “(…) a complexity leadership perspective requires that we distinguish between leadership and leaders. (…) a view of leadership as an emergent, interactive dynamic that is productive of adaptative outcomes (…).5 It will consider leaders as individuals who act in ways that influence this dynamic and the outcomes.” Perhaps the enabling leadership and adaptive leadership that Uhl-Bien et al. introduce are what we may call the new entrepreneurship and innovation processes for the organization as a Complex Adaptive System (CAS).5
From this point of view, the key leadership activities/processes that organizations must engage in to address current challenges facing them are those of entrepreneurship and innovation through interconnection. According to Uhl-Bien, but in a somewhat different terminology, those must be advanced within the context of an administrative structure. 5
Tsoukas analysis implies that it is not possible to rely on the traditional hierarchical structure to guide a complex organization, because of the intrinsic nature of such a system. Rather (according Uhl-Bien), “CAS emerge naturally in social systems. (…) They are capable of solving problems creatively and are able to learn and adapt quickly.”5 Those systems will truly lead the organization towards unforeseen directions. Once again, the knowledge is in the network, so management should be concerned with nurturing the right culture to enable complex relationships to emerge and evolve naturally. Even tough administrative structure (let’s call it bureaucracy) is necessary to support an organization, it must be designed in a way that does not stifle entrepreneurship and innovation but rather facilitates it. Formal leaders may be necessary, but their role must be revised. They, increasingly alongside informal leaders, must be facilitators by fostering the conditions that enable the emergence and congregation of resources, akin to entrepreneurs. Regarding informal leaders, I am certain that given the right conditions (if they feel they can enjoy significant personal gains) they will sprout through the organization and will increasingly assume ownership for key processes.
“One may define strategic leadership as the ability of an experienced, senior leader who has the wisdom and vision to create and execute plans and make consequential decisions in the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous strategic environment.”1
In today’s world strategic leadership must be much more than this. Uncertainty and ambiguity have increased tremendously in the past few decades leading to an exponential increase in the complexity of the challenges businesses face. The previous model may be adequate for a very hierarchical command and control (Newtonian cause-effect) structure such as the military (still even in that context we may challenge Guillot’s definition), but it is not fit for a contemporary complex knowledge organization. The challenges that an organization faces nowadays require a wider participation of all its human resources, resorting to a broader range of their personal and social capabilities. I prefer the concept of great groups as presented by Ireland and Hitt (1999) 2. An organization which can resort to the pool of talent and experience that emanates from the multiplicity of group configurations that can arise between all its employees, is much more flexible and adaptable then one based on rigid hermetic units and whose majority of members is refrained from expressing their creativity.
I would say that strategic leadership is the people’s ability to mobilize the necessary configuration of organizational resources in order to attain creative solutions for the essential problems that will determine the evolution of an organization.
I believe that the main drivers for unleashing the organization’s creative powers will be the quest for self-fulfillment and entrepreneurship (taking ownership) of empowered individual members of the organization who can freely associate in great groups. I would go so far as arguing that more than leaders, what a knowledge organization needs is innovators and entrepreneurs. Or maybe it is the word leadership that is far too loaded with meaning and the concept is in need of fundamental redefinition. I will attempt to build an argument to defend this point, even if the original idea is not my own. Let’s start with people.
Companies should increasingly focus on their most strategic resource, their human capital: “In today's knowledge-based economy, human capital may be the most important resource in corporations of all types.”3 Groups can naturally convene to address specific problems and then disband once the problem is solved. Responsibilities can shift and members can take turns at leading according to the specific necessities of the task at hand and their own skills and knowledge. The organization will be composed of juxtaposed networks of knowledgeable individuals.
Let’s suppose that one of the main problems (or rather opportunities) of an organization is the double-faced problem of the absorption of external knowledge and of management of the knowledge that flows internally through the organization. Every member, division or great group of the organization can have a positive impact in addressing this issue. Transversal teams could be formed in order to analyze the requisites for an efficient integration of information processes. Then an assessment of available tools could be undertaken and finally the chosen solution should be implemented. I have participated in such a team effort, which originated from a common felt necessity in my own organization, and had the good fortune to witness how this can come about if the group members are genuinely engaged and view the project as their own.
After developing the concept of great groups, Ireland and Hitt devote some space to explaining how to articulate individual self-expression within the organization and the necessity for coordination and ultimate accountability in a firm. That role will be the province of the top leader. So we are referred back to the concept of the great leader, though with some key changes: “Tomorrow’s organizations will still require a great leader to be successful. (…) What will be different in 21st century companies is how top managers discharge their strategic leadership responsibilities.”2 Ireland and Hitt’s prescriptions for a successful great leader is one that emphasizes the need for a constant dialogue with the entire organization.
I confess that I have some trouble with Ireland and Hitt’s prescriptions for what they call a successful great leader. I think they still over identify the role of strategic leaders with that of the great leader, the CEO or the top management team (TMT). As such, they rely too much on the great leader’s abilities and too little on the other members’ strengths. According to them, some of the main roles of the great leader are the traditional ones: “to set the general organizational purpose; to articulate a tangible vision, values, and strategy; to determine the direction of the company; to be accountable for the entire firm’s performance; to recognize external trends and interact with outside parties”. To those they add a few more, aimed at fostering great groups: “to create a culture of trust; to affect the behaviors of organizational citizens; to coordinate and integrate the great groups into a community;”
I am very much in agreement with Tsoukas statement on the indeterminacy of knowledge (radical uncertainty), and his emphasis on a higher degree of (emergent) self-coordination: “Firms are distributed knowledge systems in a strong sense: they are decentered systems. (…) Management, therefore, can be seen as an open-ended process of coordinating purposeful individuals. (…) The key to achieving coordinated action does not so much depend on those ‘higher up’ collecting more and more knowledge, as those ‘lower down’ finding more and more ways of getting connected and interrelating the knowledge each one has.”4
I should now came back to my original point and divest the word leadership from most of the meaning that has been loaded on its shoulders. Then it is possible to decouple leadership as a process from a leader as a person. According to Uhl-Bien et al., “(…) a complexity leadership perspective requires that we distinguish between leadership and leaders. (…) a view of leadership as an emergent, interactive dynamic that is productive of adaptative outcomes (…).5 It will consider leaders as individuals who act in ways that influence this dynamic and the outcomes.” Perhaps the enabling leadership and adaptive leadership that Uhl-Bien et al. introduce are what we may call the new entrepreneurship and innovation processes for the organization as a Complex Adaptive System (CAS).5
From this point of view, the key leadership activities/processes that organizations must engage in to address current challenges facing them are those of entrepreneurship and innovation through interconnection. According to Uhl-Bien, but in a somewhat different terminology, those must be advanced within the context of an administrative structure. 5
Tsoukas analysis implies that it is not possible to rely on the traditional hierarchical structure to guide a complex organization, because of the intrinsic nature of such a system. Rather (according Uhl-Bien), “CAS emerge naturally in social systems. (…) They are capable of solving problems creatively and are able to learn and adapt quickly.”5 Those systems will truly lead the organization towards unforeseen directions. Once again, the knowledge is in the network, so management should be concerned with nurturing the right culture to enable complex relationships to emerge and evolve naturally. Even tough administrative structure (let’s call it bureaucracy) is necessary to support an organization, it must be designed in a way that does not stifle entrepreneurship and innovation but rather facilitates it. Formal leaders may be necessary, but their role must be revised. They, increasingly alongside informal leaders, must be facilitators by fostering the conditions that enable the emergence and congregation of resources, akin to entrepreneurs. Regarding informal leaders, I am certain that given the right conditions (if they feel they can enjoy significant personal gains) they will sprout through the organization and will increasingly assume ownership for key processes.
1 Col W. M. Guillot, USAF (2003). Strategic Leadership: Defining the Challenge. Air & Space Power Journal.
2 Ireland, R., & Hitt, M. (1999). Achieving and Maintaining Strategic Competitiveness in the 21st Century. Academy of Management Executive.
3 Ireland, R., & Hitt, M. (2002). The essence of strategic leadership: managing human and social capital.
4 Tsoukas, H. (1996). The firm as a distributed knowledge system. Strategic Management Journal.
5 Uhl-Bien, M., Marion, R., & McKelvey, B. (2007). Complexity Leadership Theory: Shifting Leadership to Knowledge Era. The Leadership Quarterly.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
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