leading from the center: mobilizing a dynamic ......collaboration, and adaptability is critical to...

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LEADING FROM THE CENTER: MOBILIZING A DYNAMIC LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT SYSTEM

COPYRIGHT © 2017 DUKE CE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. LEADING FROM THE CENTER

The unparalleled pace and scale of change today is creating seismic global shifts across social, economic, and political systems. These shifts, in turn, are converging rapidly to transform an already volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) ecosystem into a powerful vortex that has the potential to destroy organizations.

The key to avoiding the strengthening pull of the VUCA vortex lies in ensuring organizations develop a leadership system that operates in a perpetual state of readiness for the unexpected. Organizations must know which people, process, and technology levers to pull at what moment to avoid being drawn in to the vortex.

Perhaps contrary to traditional thinking, Duke Corporate Education (Duke CE) believes the leaders who operate in the middle of the current hierarchical leadership system, or middle managers, are the greatest source of leverage to build the responsiveness, resilience, and adaptability the modern-day enterprise needs.

Leaders who operate in the middle are the greatest source of leverage against the VUCA vortex.


The middle manager role gained prominence during the mid-20th century as large industrial organizations sought to bridge the widening gap between setting direction at the executive level and taking action at the line manager level. As these organizations grew in scale and reach, so did the layers of middle managers required to translate strategy and coordinate activity to deliver results and drive change.

In the 1980s and 1990s, globalization, deregulation, and technology adoption ushered in the re-engineering movement that advocated horizontal business processes, the delayering of organizational structures, and the integration of information technology to drive continued growth. During this transition, middle managers came under strong scrutiny and criticism for being reactionary and change-averse, maintainers of bureaucracy and control, and focused on self-preservation as opposed to organizational growth.

In 1988, Peter Drucker argued “whole layers of management neither make decisions nor lead. Their main role is to serve as relays. Information based organizations threaten that.”i Taking this argument a step further, Lynda Gratton has claimed that “Technology itself has become the great general manager,”ii as the translation and coordination activities typically carried out by middle managers have been automated via enterprise software systems.

Based on this history, some reason that the extinction of the middle manager is imminent, if not long overdue. Just as the dinosaurs who failed to adapt to disruptive change disappeared from their ecosystem, so, too, will the middle manager.

Others assert that middle managers should be viewed as dynamos as opposed to dinosaursiii, given their unique ability to influence and impact the organization’s strategic and transformational processes.

This paper will argue that those who lead from the center play a critical catalyzing role in enabling their organizations to become more responsive, resilient and adaptive.

A CRITICAL CATALYZING ROLE

Middle Manager: Dinosaur or Dynamo?


Today, managers situated at the center of the leadership system play a catalyzing role in navigating two key polarities. These polarities create tensions and tradeoffs that perpetually vex organizations:

NAVIGATING POLARITIES

The Strategy/Results Polarity: A perennial challenge for every organization is to ensure that its strategy is executed in a way that maximizes value creation, delivery, and capture. Today, the interdependencies between strategy formation and execution are far more fluid and dynamic. Strategy and execution are no longer discrete problems to be solved at the top and bottom of the leadership hierarchy. Instead, they are two polarities that must be navigated from the center of the leadership system. In proactively navigating the Strategy/Results polarity, Center-Leaders must adopt a broad, long-term strategic view while simultaneously delivering exceptional day-to-day operational results

The Change/People Polarity: Today, developing a culture that fosters innovation, collaboration, and adaptability is critical to an organization’s survival. Center-Leaders play a critical role in increasing the ability of others to respond to change by providing the structure, resources, and support for experimentation and learning required to grow the business. In proactively navigating the change/people polarity, Center-Leaders become intermediaries who ensure that innovations and change initiatives that influence an organization’s strategic direction are nurtured and that people feel fully engaged and motivated to adopt the new mindsets, structures, systems and processes required for the organization to evolve.

Our model leverages these two polarities to create an “action field” within which mid- level managers must see, think and act differently in order to become successful Center-Leaders.

LEADING FROM THE CENTER


Across each polarity and within each leadership lens there are four levels where Center-Leaders must take differentiated action:

• Ecosystem: The larger, external environment within which the organization exists and must compete

• Business: The enterprise and functional levels of the organization

• Others: The cultural and interpersonal levels of the organization

• Personal: The individual leader level

Strategic Leadership Lens:Scanning, formulating, evaluating, and adjusting organizational strategy

Change Leadership Lens:Championing innovative growth opportunities and cultivating change responsiveness

People Leadership Lens: Optimizing talent acquisition and enabling purposeful engagement and development at work

Results Leadership Lens:Ensuring operational excellence and building agile, accountable high-performing teams

Leadership FoundationEstablishing credibility, building influential relationships, navigating complex decisions and maintaining personal resilience

BREAKING DOWN THE MODEL

The Center Leader model is comprised of five discrete leadership lenses. Each of the four poles corresponds with a Leadership Lens.

• Leadership Foundation

• Strategic Leadership

• Results Leadership

• Change Leadership

• People Leadership

LEADING FROM THE CENTER

THE LEADERSHIP FOUNDATION

At the core of the model is Foundational Leadership. To successfully navigate the polarities, and address the transitions and tensions they create, Center-Leaders must draw upon a strong leadership foundation.

Building this foundation involves establishing authentic credibility, building relationships and networks, influencing and persuading others, driving complex collaborative decisions, and maintaining personal resilience.

• Establish Authenticity and Credibility: Center-Leaders must communicate with presence, impact, and authenticity to a wide variety of stakeholders outside their traditional sphere of control. This requires developing trust by openly sharing personal experiences and establishing ongoing communication practices that are authentic, specific, and clear.

• Build Relationships and Networks: Center-Leaders must leverage both the formal organizational hierarchy and informal collaborative networks to get things done. This requires purposeful development and leveraging of the strategic, operational, and personal networks needed to move the organization forward.

• Influence for Results: Center-Leaders must influence a wide variety of stakeholders with differing agendas and perspectives to align around a particular course of action. This requires understanding the various agendas, engaging others to recognize the broader perspective, communicating with clarity to align with that perspective, and negotiating between parties to move forward.

• Collaborate on Complex Decisions: Center-Leaders make frequent and important decisions that deliver on both long-term strategic intent and short-term results. This requires understanding the complexity of the decision at hand, adhering to a structured decision-making process, being inclusive in seeking input, and avoiding the pitfalls of unconscious-bias in making decisions.

• Maintain Personal Resilience: Center-Leaders navigate multiple competing priorities and address shifting stakeholder interests on an ongoing basis. This requires having the mental agility and the physical energy to remain resilient during times of swift and significant change.


We believe that strategy development is no longer a set of activities assigned to discrete levels in the organizational hierarchy and carried out in a linear and logical sequence.

Center-Leaders now play a critical role in facilitating a more fluid and adaptive strategy development process by scanning the ecosystem, formulating and adjusting strategy, inviting strategic debate, and ensuring personal versatility.

• Scan the Ecosystem: Center-Leaders must develop a deeper understanding of the external ecosystem in which the strategy is playing out. This requires adopting an outside-in perspective on the business by routinely scanning the external environment for signs of change and making sense of the implications these changes may have on the organization.

• Formulate and Adjust Strategy: Center-Leaders must facilitate strategic conversations and information flow across multiple levels of leadership to enable a more fluid and adaptive strategy development process. This requires communicating, aligning, and adjusting strategic direction regularly based on the broader implications that existing strategy will have on the organization.

• Invite Strategic Debate: Center-Leaders must invite and encourage multiple, diverse, and often competing perspectives on how to optimize and/or adjust the strategic choices made across the business. This requires effectively synthesizing and conveying these competing perspectives to senior management as a foundation for debating the ongoing viability of the existing strategy when compared to alternative courses of action.

• Ensure Personal Versatility: Center-Leaders must be versatile in shifting focus between strategy and execution, and deliberate in choosing how to engage with stakeholders to deliver results. This requires a strong understanding of one’s personal strategic versatility to ensure that individual preferences or defaults do not undermine strategy execution.

THE STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP LENS


Organizations that over-rotate on delivering results develop a fixed-mindset and a rigid set of practices that ultimately inhibit their ability to see and seize new opportunities for growth.

Center-Leaders now play a critical role in optimizing value creation, delivery, and capture for organizations by ensuring that its resources, capabilities, and partnerships are consistently tuned to deliver optimal business results. Center-Leaders achieve this by analyzing the competitive landscape, tuning for operational excellence, building agile and high performing teams, and embedding ownership and accountability.

• Monitor the Competitive Landscape: Center-Leaders must constantly monitor and analyze the competitive landscape to understand how rivals are reconfiguring their resources, capabilities, and partnerships to increase speed, scale, and value capture. This requires ongoing external monitoring of competitive moves and internal adjustments to systems, processes, structures and partnerships to counteract these moves.

• Tune for Operational Excellence: Center-Leaders must ensure that the varying components of the operational system align and configure to deliver optimal value. This requires an in-depth operational and financial analysis of Supply-Chains, Value-Chains, and Partnership Ecosystems to ensure they are tuned to deliver maximum value at the lowest cost.

• Build Agile and High Performing Teams: Center-Leaders must build effective and collaborative cross-boundary teams. This requires nurturing an operating environment where teams can pivot to adapt to the rapid pace of change and develop the best solution for the opportunity or challenge at hand.

• Embed Ownership and Accountability: Center-Leaders must imbue their organizations with a strong sense of ownership and accountability. This requires that they communicate expectations effectively and provide teams with the ongoing guidance and support they require to deliver the desired outcome.

THE RESULTS LEADERSHIP LENS


Change is a constant in today’s business environment. Change is no longer something to be managed or solved in a planned and orderly manner. Instead, change is profound and persistent, requiring frequent rebalancing of the ongoing tensions and tradeoffs it creates for organizations.

Center-Leaders play a critical role in addressing the multiple drivers of organizational change, including the execution of new strategies, the implementation of a new business models, the launch of innovative new products or services, as well as the transformation of organizational structures, systems or processes. This requires initiating disruption, championing innovation and inclusion, creating change responsiveness, and avoiding default thinking.

• Initiate Disruption: Center-Leaders must learn to not only anticipate and respond to change but to initiate change and become disruptors themselves. This requires learning to see weak signals, framing and reframing problems differently, being open to multiple perspectives in decision making, and conceiving of new and novel ways to create value for customers.

• Champion Innovation and Inclusion: Center-Leaders must identify and cultivate innovative ideas within the organization and bring them to top management’s attention. This requires that they champion innovation by convening entrepreneurial teams that have the broadest diversity of thought, experience and perspective around a specific opportunity or challenge facing the organization.

• Create Change Responsiveness: Center-Leaders must work within the corporate culture as change catalysts to increase the ability of others to respond to change. This requires that they provide a safe space for experimentation and learning, as well as the structure and resources that foster a growth mindset within the organization.

• Avoid Default Thinking: Center-Leaders must understand the various ways people react to and resist change. They must also uncover their own personal resistance to change and work diligently and deliberately to avoid falling into default thinking by unconsciously supporting the status-quo.

THE CHANGE LEADERSHIP LENS


In this world of constant change and volatility, talent is a key differentiator. Organizations should view people not as resources to be optimized, but rather, as relationships to be nurtured. Work is done by and through people. Discretionary effort increases when employees have a strong relationship with their superior and feel included, valued, and influential to the organization.

Center-Leaders play a critical role in establishing and nurturing these relationships. This requires growing the talent value proposition, connecting to purpose, embedding development in work and recognizing personal style and impact.

• Grow the Talent Value Proposition: Center-Leaders must offer the right employee value proposition to attract and retain the best talent. This requires that they understand how to build and manage a changing workforce that is increasingly global, virtual, part-time, contract-based, and multi-generational.

• Connect to Purpose: Center-Leaders must create a work environment that energizes people by

connecting to the broader purpose, clearly emphasizing why the organization is selecting a particular course of action, and articulating how employees’ actions are meaningful to the organization. This requires collaborating across boundaries while inspiring team members to share openly and contribute discretionary effort, as well as designing and implementing inclusive processes and cultures.

• Embed Development in Work: Center-Leaders must embed a deliberate developmental approach that leverages the day-to-day work activity as an opportunity for feedback and coaching as a means to empower employees and create a climate that encourages ongoing growth and improvement. This requires implementing ongoing interactions, practices, and routines that encourage shared learning within and across the organization.

• Recognize Personal Style and Impact: Center-Leaders must lead with intention by adapting and adjusting to the needs of their organization and its people. This requires understanding their personal leadership style and recognizing how the way they engage with others impacts performance and overall business results.

THE PEOPLE LEADERSHIP LENS


THE LEADING FROM THE CENTER MODEL


As we reimagine leadership as a system with rapid and synchronized decision-making across multiple levels, we should avoid focusing on

“best practices” to improve discrete systems, structures, or processes. Instead, we should consider developing “next practices” that focus on transforming middle managers into Center-Leaders who can catalyze a leadership system that delivers the responsiveness, resilience, and adaptability today’s business environment demands.

Center-Leaders can catalyze a whole leadership system to deliver in today’s complex environment.



iDopson,S . & Stewart, R. (1990) What is happening to Middle Management? British Journal of

Management.

iiGratton, L. (2011). The End of the Middle Manager. Harvard Business Review.

iiiFloyd, S.W and Wooldridge, B. (1994). Dinosaurs or Dynamos? Recognizing Middle Managers

strategic role. Academy of Management Executive.

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