Are you, like me, a little hooked on those reality shows where star talents compete for a title like Top Chef, winner of Project Runway or Design Star? If so, you hear a lot of advice about how to lead. Please don't take that advice to work with you.
I love watching gifted people execute their craft, especially when it involves food. I don't love everything that competition brings out in people, and hopefully you're well past using competition as a cheap motivating tactic, with all its nasty side effects, in your own company. But it's the judging after the team challenges that really gives me heartburn. Typically two unfortunate contestants are asked to lead teams of their competitors to create a restaurant, design a fashion collection, decorate a home. One member of the losing team is always sent home, almost invariably the leader of the team.
Then we get to hear a judge, Tom Colicchio or Michael Kors or Vern Yip, provide them with some parting coaching about how to lead more effectively. "You didn't execute your vision," they say. "You let them move you off your plan." "A leader has to be able to step up and direct things." The underlying assumption seems to be that if you are the leader, it's your job--and yours alone--to have a vision. The rest of the group executes, and you make sure they do so to the highest standard.
That's a common take on leadership. It's also one that's increasingly irrelevant and even problematic in today's organizations. As someone who has studied and taught about leadership for a long time, I don't like seeing that same misguided message conveyed in so many places.
None of those celebrity chef judges seem to be espousing a 19th-century Escoffier-style dictatorship. None of the designers seems to run a sweat shop. And what they say about leadership probably has worked for them. It may work well in a kitchen or a studio (although I don't for a moment believe it's the only way to lead effectively in a kitchen or a studio). But they're basically running a high-end assembly line. They are not trying to lead the complex negotiated collaborations that are so necessary in modern matrixed organizations. Matrix leaders means people who have the tough job of having accountability for delivering bottom-line results while relying on people and resources that don't report to them to do so. They depend on the whole organization working together freely and well toward a greater purpose.
This year, we at the Hay Group, a management consultancy, wanted to learn more about how the Best Companies for Leadership create conditions for matrix leaders to be effective. The Hay Group's annual Best Companies for Leadership study identifies the top 20 companies from around the world, nominated by their peers and their own employees, that best develop high-quality leadership for the future. Take a look at these two characteristics of the best, described by their own employees, that strongly distinguished them from the rest:
--They have programs designed to develop leaders who can creatively bring together resources across different parts of the organization (100% of the best, compared with only 65% of the rest).
--They expect people to lead regardless of whether they have formal positions of authority (90% of the best as compared with only 53% of the rest).
The worrisome part of these trends is the flip side: Some 35% of companies that responded to the survey do not focus on developing leaders who can mobilize others to collaborate, and 47% don't expect you to lead if you don't hold a management position. They are not prepared--and they are not preparing their employees--to lead in the world of the future.
The best recognize: The more leadership the better. The more you have people who can mobilize others to identify a shared vision and solve a problem together, the better off your organization is to meet the future.
Matrix structures exist because functional or product-based or geographic structures alone can't enable companies to bring their resources to bear in creative, swift ways to identify and meet the opportunities they find in the market. Matrix leaders inevitably share accountability with their peers for making things happen--without ever having complete control over the resources they need. We at Hay Group have been working on a qualitative study of outstanding matrix leaders to learn what distinguishes them from those who struggle in such roles. Here's some of what we have found so far:
--Outstanding matrix leaders have a solutions orientation, a willingness and ability to work with colleagues to understand their needs and to create a joint vision.
--They are courageous. They not only speak up to senior leaders about obstacles to their negotiated vision, they are accepting and even welcoming of wildly different points of view from their peers.
--They are emotionally mature. They can set aside their individual interests for the greater good, are comfortable with the ambiguity inevitable when disparate parties have to work something out together and have patience for complex negotiations with colleagues.
Working toward shared vision, showing courage and patience--that's a kind of leadership that's not realistic when you're leading a team on TV under a crazy time limit. But the world of reality, as opposed to reality TV, is different. The contestants on these shows are stuck with the rules of the game. How might you change the rules in your workplace?
Ruth Wageman is global director of research for Hay Group. She has taught leadership at Columbia University's Graduate School of Business and the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, and most recently has been a visiting scholar in psychology at Harvard. She has spent 20 years studying what it takes to lead teams effectively, most recently the special challenges of leading teams of leaders.
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