Abstract
Most of the executive teams that we have worked with either wonder if or know that they are not working at the right level for most of the time they are together. When we ask them what they mean by this, we receive replies such as “We spend too much time in the detail” or “we are not very strategic”.
Members of these executive teams know that what they are doing and how they are doing it is making them ineffective, producing inferior business outcomes and generating significant personal frustration. They know that the way they are operating has a significant impact and cost to their organisations, but they are almost always at a loss to know what to do about it, or, we suspect, what they might do differently.
We have found the three concepts below particularly helpful in addressing this confusion. From these core concepts, organisation-specific practices and processes can be developed that will help executives recognise, and interrupt unhelpful leadership and management patterns.
Each organisational system is unique, and changes over time, so there is no ‘silver bullet’ that will work in all places or at all times. Instead, it is in fact part of the work of any high-performing executive team to learn how to apply these principles to their own immediate situation and to deal with how they are interacting at the same time as the ‘what’ that they are interacting about.
Levels of complexity
Elliott Jaques, while controversial to some, is one of only a few practitioners in organisational studies to have researched and described a coherent approach to the complexity of work in organisations. We have discussed elsewhere our application of Jaques’ work. What will be particularly important for this paper is the understanding of the Strata of work.
In this paper we are focusing on an executive team headed up by a Business Unit Leader or General Manager who is responsible for the profitability of a business unit. Under her or him would be Operations (units responsible for the ‘business of the business’), Service (people who support the operations, such as ‘back office’ in financial services, or asset management in an industrial operation) and Support (functions that provide advice to Operations and Service leaders, think Finance, HR, Communications).
Given the above context, we would expect that
- The General Manager’s work should be at Stratum IV with a significant portion in Stratum V; that is, her or his work should be concerned with the integration and optimisation of the various Operations, Service and Support systems that make up the business unit (Stratum IV) and the interdependencies, relationships and boundary conditions between her or his organisation and its external stakeholders (both other business units, head office, community, customers, government, etc).
- Individual direct reports to the GM would have some work at Stratum IV (the integration of systems between their unit and those of their colleagues) and most of their work at Stratum III (the design and optimisation of linear business processes and systems)
When these people come together, they should be working to support the outcomes of the GM. The focus of their thinking and discussion should be about the Stratum IV problems and issues of the business and its Stratum V stakeholder relationships. It would be rare that Stratum III issues of functional process or system design should be discussed at these meetings; it should be even more rare that Stratum II ‘performance’ issues should get to the table. This would be a waste of this groups time and should be a discussion had by different people in a different place.
And yet, unfortunately, that is what seems to dominate much of these types of teams meeting agendas, each direct report to the GM directly reporting on what has been going on in their part of the business. This is what becomes dishearteningly boring! And an enormous waste of money and human capability.
- Stratum V: is the conversation and thinking about the relationship of the business to its external stakeholders? Is it about how the business might need to redesign itself or be repositioned given external conditions?
- Stratum IV: is the conversation about how to integrate systems and the inter-dependencies?
- Stratum III: is it about the design of/ maximising/ optimising one particular process system/ function?
- Stratum II: is it about implementing an existing system, performance of an existing system, dealing with exceptions/ errors within a particular system?
Practical suggestionsA practical application of these insights might look something like the following:
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Wilber’s 4 Quadrants and integral thinking
Why do approximately 85% of business and organisational change efforts fail to deliver the value that was promised?
Ken Wilber examined this and other questions relating to how humans change, and over two years studied hundreds of historical and current theories, research studies, management texts and documented evidence of what people did and did not do. The distillation of his work looks something like this.
When you apply this thinking to most current practice, especially in ‘change management’, what you quickly discover is that the vast majority of time, money and thinking are applied to Quadrant 4 (Q4). Typically a much smaller proportion of resources are applied to Quadrant 2 (Q2) issues, typically through ‘training’ initiatives. None or very little attention is paid to Quadrants 1 and 3 (Q1, Q3).
The problem with this is of course that any Q4 system or strategy will be undermined and will be ineffective if there are Q3 stories, cultural myths, or adverse power and political dynamics at play. Similarly, no amount of Q2 training or performance management will survive a Q1 ‘disempowering belief’ I might have about my capacity to effect any change to my situation or the world in general. See How you can get in your own way and what you can do about it.
Practical suggestions
Make sure you attend to all aspects of whatever it is you are deciding/ changing/ transforming:
Q1.What mindsets will be required from different stakeholder groups who have an interest in this thing we are planning on doing? What are our personal beliefs about our own or our collective ability to undertake this work? What are our stakeholders’ hopes and fears about this? Q2.What skills and knowledge are required from our people for us to be successful? What performance will be required? What behaviours will support us here? And from whom? Q3.What relationships need to be cultivated? What unspoken agreements need to get busted? What is the power and political system at play here? What cultural stories could we create or tell that will assist people to support what we are trying to do? Q4.What systems will get in the way? What processes will need to be redesigned? How will these changes impact other operational systems? |
Levels of thinking and adaptive capacity
Kegan has written extensively about adult mental, emotional and spiritual development and posits several distinct phases of adult development. For complex problem solving at or above Stratum III, an Independent level of thinking is generally required to deliver outcomes for work at this level of complexity. This is called an 'adaptive challenge'.
The Leadership Circle are among several groups and institutes that have conducted research into leadership effectiveness and business performance. They have identified several key management competencies that are highly correlated with both leadership effectiveness and business performance.
Practical suggestions
In executive team meetings, have team members agree to challenge and support each other to exhibit the following adaptive capabilities at all times. Agree that team members can constructively challenge each other (and the GM) if the following are absent from their behaviour and interactions:
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Practical tools
Use the three templates below in team meetings to track and then have a 1o minute process reflection at the end on how strategic your meeting was. One person can do all three simultaneously, or you can ask three different people to track the three different aspects:
- level of complexity of the work the team is doing in the meeting,
- how integrated across all 4 quadrants their thinking is, and
- how they are communicating with each other.
Remember, the point of this exercise is not assessment, and it does not matter if people disagree with various estimates of proportion of time spent. What is important is that during the meeting there is a shared expectation of what the work of that group is and how they have agreed to go about being strategic in their thinking, and that people have a dialogue about how they went and if they want to do something different next time.
