In India, we still place undue emphasis on strong leadership. We perceive a strong leader as someone who articulates a vision and then aims to “align” the organisation around that vision. This presupposes that the leader “knows” what needs to be done — and the process of getting a buy-in involves engaging the rest of the organisation, patiently dealing with all the resistance, till they finally get it.
In every public institution in the country, we still seek decisive leadership. We see leaders as authority figures who know exactly what the future holds — and can marshall resources and act as shepherds, protecting the flock from harsh conditions. We value hard-charging leaders who are able to conjure up smart strategies and drive change across the organisation.
We cling to this worldview on leadership, despite strong evidence to the contrary. Today, businesses are faced with a plethora of adaptive challenges. Changes in markets, competition, society, customers and technology are forcing businesses to deal with unknown variables, develop new strategies amidst uncertainty and discover new ways of working. Ask any CEO and they’ll tell you that mobilising people to do adaptive work remains one of the toughest jobs. These adaptive challenges manifest every time you, a business, seeks to restructure, develop new strategies or get cross-functional teams to work. And they blunt a firm’s ability to execute and sustain change.
Sure, leaders play a critical role in building organisations that remain relevant in future. What needs to change though is our obsession with leaders who are meant to “take charge” of our destiny, instead of learning to tap into the collective intelligence of the organisation.
So what needs to change? I can think of at least a few things.
One, consider the way we look at the leadership development process itself. One of the country’s most ambitious software firms has an elaborate leadership development process already neatly mapped out, with enough resources earmarked to help its top leaders broaden their perspective and learn to be more agile. Except that it is, for most part, disconnected with their core work or helping them develop a better way to meet the business goals. So every time, a business leader is nominated to go through the training process, it means pulling him out from his regular work. And most supervisors are reluctant to do so, in these times of stiff quarterly targets. The result: the program hasn't gained any traction.
Two, we’ve got to stop looking at strategy formulation as a technical challenge that requires deep technical expertise to solve. People lie at the heart of any adaptive challenges. And there are now enough processes and collaborative design tools available to mobilise collective action. Now imagine a CEO who faces uncomfortable questions from a maverick employee about a strategic initiative that he has helmed at a town hall. Most often, the chances are that he will seek to parry it or sidestep the real issue. After the town hall is over, the employee in question will receive a dressing down from his superior for embarrassing the CEO. Instead, the CEO could have allowed the issue to be surfaced as a way to build a wider conversation and drawn the attention of the larger organisation. That may have provoked fresh thinking and offered a new dimension to the challenge that may have been otherwise overlooked. Now, in many successful Indian organisations, this remains a key challenge. Even when answers are unknown or ambiguous, leaders at all levels believe they must know all the answers or indeed, be the final authority in taking the decision. And by not getting out of the way and helping frame the right question, they miss out an opportunity to return the creative problem solving work back to the people. The result: they lose a valuable opportunity to instill great creative self-confidence in the organisation.
Three, think about how businesses deal with bad news, such as a product recall, or a sudden decline in valuation or even a sharp fall in customer satisfaction scores. I’ve seen business leaders struggle to deal with such adverse situations. The common refrain: “Let’s not overwhelm people with such news. They’ll get spooked. After all, what’s the point in sharing bad news?” Now, that’s the real bad news. In a world where it is becoming more or more harder to remain opaque, it is well-nigh silly to assume that people don't have the capacity to deal with bad news. Again, this is a missed opportunity to grab the bull by the horns, generate a debate and to not allow things to be swept under the carpet. Leaders need to utilise this creative tension well without letting things slip out of control. And openly sharing bad news in the organisation is a good way to force people to question existing assumptions, reset the debate and realign priorities.
Seen in this light, leadership needs a new learning strategy that allows people to sense, anticipate and respond to adaptive challenges on a continual basis.
The writer is co-founder and director at Founding Fuel Publishing Pvt Ltd, a learning platform that aims to serve a community of entrepreneurial leaders
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
