Evolutionary Leadership

Last time I introduced the concept of the Evolutionary Organisation and its four components - Evolutionary Leadership, Evolutionary Governance, Evolutionary Alignment and Evolutionary Culture. Today we will look at the first of those - Evolutionary Leadership. We will start by looking at our current model of leadership and some of the issues that model causes.

Traditionally, leadership in an organisation has followed the industrial model of the machine with the operator in charge up on the control platform. It is concerned with control, decision making and delegation.

In our industrial view of an organisation as a mechanical thing, control is required to ensure that the machine operates as expected. Inputs are within the allowed range and all the parts of the machine are operating at the correct speed to ensure that the whole thing functions correctly. If a part is out of sync, an adjustment can be made to speed up or slow down that part to bring it back within operating parameters. This is traditional management - managing a system or process to ensure that it operates effectively. The systems no longer involve gears or clockwork but the job is the same - adjusting the machine to extract maximum performance while ensuring smooth running.

Decision making is the other big focus for leaders. In our traditional model of the organisation, decisions are made by the operator on the platform. The cogs and gears of the machine can indicate a problem, but they can’t act to fix it. All the power to act lies with the operator. In a real mechanical system, problems are identified by components by wearing out, consuming more lubricant, making strange noises or running too hot. In a more modern organisation, it is more likely that issues are identified by team members raising concerns to their team leaders, or through analysis of performance data. However the problems are identified, the decision to take action doesn’t live at the team level but somewhere above, so team leaders will raise concerns with their managers, who will raise them with their directors, and so on, until someone is found with the authority to make a decision.

The problems with this are well known - slow decisions, decisions made with limited access to actual data and so on. Efforts have been made over the past 30-40 years to delegate decision making - move the decisions to where the information is. In practice this usually means formally delegating decision making and control for a particular subset of the organisation to someone who can then further subdivide and pass decision and control authority further down. In essence, the operator on the platform is building another, smaller platform for a subordinate in order for them to take charge of a group of dials and levers to keep a particular part of the machine in order, while under the direction of the main operator of course. That sub-operator could then in turn create some smaller platforms so their subordinates could monitor a single lever or dial.

While this works in theory, in practice “under the direction of the main operator of course” has a massive impact on how this actually works. Delegation is almost never absolute, it’s always with the caveat that someone above must approve or endorse the decisions made at a lower level. In practice that means the psychological ownership of the decision remains at the top.

Those lower in the organisation tend to avoid, or escalate decisions upwards, because they are unsure of their decision making authority, they have no ownership of the decision, and they need to get it ratified by their leader (and leader’s leader) anyway. So why not push the decision upwards since it’s the boss who has the final say anyway? This is a major problem in many organisations but particularly in organisations where “wrong” decisions are punished.

So decisions tend to bubble up the organisation back to the chief operator. Delegation with approvals is not delegation.

While leaders are supposed to tune their machines for greater performance, and to make strategic decisions about future directions, in practice, with decisions coming at them from all sides and a busy machine to run, leaders often focus exclusively on the day to day execution of work. I call this being Trapped in Execution - leaders who are trapped in a system that diverts all their attention towards operational matters and leaves them no time or mental capacity to deal with their other areas of responsibility.

Getting trapped in execution is easy. Leaders exist in a world of competing priorities. Leaders are chronically time poor, and worse, have to switch contexts constantly, which adds additional mental effort on top of everything they do. Operational matters are often time sensitive and, by the time they have been escalated up to the leader, quite urgent. They tend to grab the leader’s attention over things that are longer term and more strategic in nature. We also have a natural bias towards dealing with operational things - most of us start our careers in operational roles, and we progress in organisations because we are good at them. All this leads to a natural bias in leaders towards a focus on the operational rather than the strategic.

Next time we will look at the next of our evolutionary perspectives - Evolutionary Alignment.