RPO and Talent Management Blog by Ochre House | Ochre Talk

The hidden leadership problem

Ninety percent of the organisations I work with have a leadership model. Despite this, nearly all continue to have the same issue – a deployment “gap” somewhere around Board-1 or Board-2 level, a kind of leadership version of “The Doldrums”. The symptoms manifest as problems translating strategic intent into functional objectives, difficulties with prioritisation and managing complexity, poor alignment and implementations which don’t fully deliver. Try as they might, it won’t go away. Does this ring any bells?

Over the years, I’ve developed an opinion as to why this happens. I think it’s because we are looking in the wrong place for solutions. For those who keep a copy of HBR in the downstairs loo, the theory behind my view is called “Levels of Work” by Elliot Jaques, but I prefer to sum it up in the following question: are the people you put in key senior translation roles, patrolling the critical space between organisational thinking and individual doing, REALLY able to get on top of the complexity of these roles in a 2012 world? The answer is all too often…not nearly often enough.

Perhaps the key organisational product of leadership is context, yet all too often our senior people are reasonably bright, politically adept but act like deer in the headlights when faced with incomplete data, a lack of clarity and an absence of being told what they should do from Board level. Result? Large parts of the organisation either doing nothing because they don’t know what to do, or trying to do everything because nobody has told them what not to do. This isn’t the fault of those further down the organisation – they just want to do their best at work, be rewarded for it and have fun. This is a leadership issue which has arguably been propagated by an approach to talent which fails to adequately distinguish between senior management and business leadership. The assumption is too often that having enough of one means you automatically have the other. But I just don’t buy this, and neither do some other organisations out there.

In today’s corporate world, as in film-making, black and white is a thing of the past. It has been replaced by shades of grey, paradoxes, conflicts, trade-offs, uncertainty and more-for-less. This is an environment where tolerance of ambiguity, judgement, pragmatism and flexibility are the new value differentiators at leadership level. Being able to work with minimal data, make the percentage-play, be directionally tactical, provide decision-making filters and balance complexity with impact, risk and speed are vital. Yet how many organisations really engage with topics like this (and their implications on organisational structure, assessment, development and career pathing) as opposed to more traditional “leadership competences” – many of which, in 2012, I would expect from most managers?

It’s been my experience that this issue lies close to the DNA of business effectiveness, pretty much independent of organisational type or sector. I would argue that focusing on these translation capabilities will bring greater benefit than simply promoting experienced managers with acceptable communication skills. I would go so far as to say that if you don’t consider this, there’s not much point doing all the other stuff since it won’t really make much difference since, as the saying goes, the “problem is the problem”.

But then again, I’m apparently a bit of a maverick!

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Comments

1. Andy Young says:

   January 18, 2012 at 3:09 pm

   This is an excellent post. It identifies a real, live issue across many an organisation. And In my privileged position of meeting some fantastic talent and placing them in quality organisations, I still see many treating management and leadership as much the same thing. In my view, it requires the very top of the organisation to ensure that HR AND L&D have strategic roles within the business and a place on the board. I still see too many companies treating HR as a necessary evil to carry out admin tasks that other managers don’t want to do! HR should be a key part in the shaping an delivery of the long term business vision. Then you’ll truly begin to see a more intelligent way in which this issue is tackled.
2. Matt Ballantine says:

   January 18, 2012 at 3:22 pm

   I have a feeling that the problems might lie in thinking that strategy needs to be set at the top, and stuff happen down below – but that the speed of change in most sectors these days means that the planning cycles for that top-down approach to work are just too long for the plans to be implemented in a timely way. Hence everyone in the middle being left to implement on plans that made sense when they were planned, but are out of context today…