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Leading amidst ambiguity and uncertainty
So who needs leaders?
Do you find yourself surrounded by managers when your business is crying out for leaders?
Does the responsibility of moving your business forward rest on too few shoulders?
Are your key people technically solid, but lacking in drive, urgency, influence and presence?
We know that strong leadership is critical in that it requires people to take the action that delivers excellent business results. Unfortunately, many senior and high potential people spend too much of their time just managing, and they often struggle to understand what it means to be a leader and to fully grasp what is required of them.
Managing to survive
If your market place is stable, competition is low, there is clear agreement about what needs to be done and how to do it, and if this is unlikely to change for the foreseeable future, then not only is a coaching model of leadership inappropriate, it is arguable that leadership itself is an unnecessary luxury. What you need, rather, is steady state management.
In such situations, the imperative is to: Establish and operate effective formal / legitimate processes; define roles and jobs; set up and manage appropriate procedures for information distribution and decision making; and manage performance.
In charge, but not in control
For those of you to whom the above applies, you can stop reading now. The rest of us find ourselves increasingly in a world of heightened competition where change and uncertainty are the norm. Such situations of ambiguity and persistent change require strong leadership if we are to navigate them successfully.
One of the hardest but most important things to acknowledge as a leader in such circumstances is that although you are in charge and held accountable, you are not in control. Modern leaders have to live with the immediate paradoxes and complexities of organisational life, where they must act with intention whilst having no certainty of outcome.
Leadership in extra-ordinary times requires that we create the conditions which foster innovation and renewal. Formally imposed rules and values are unlikely to achieve this any more than are many of the idealised models and processes that are found in much of the change literature. What we need to create is energy, engagement and passion, not compliance.
The creativity, innovation and change which enlightened leaders so often seek to promote will occur spontaneously under certain conditions. The factor which is most likely to assist such a flowering is the quality, richness and range of conversational life within the organisation. This is an activity in which all must freely engage and participate so as to perpetuate and maintain new ways of working and thinking. Another way of describing such a dynamic situation would be as a fully embedded coaching culture.
The extra-ordinary leader
Conversations are important because successfully leading through changing times requires working to increase the flow of information. Critically, this is not electronically mediated information. The main challenge for a leader as coach is to connect and engage with other people, face to face, eyeball to eyeball, and to ensure that all those who work for him / her do the same.
As well as fostering connectivity, the leader needs to promote diversity, so that there is a healthy clash of ideas and differences. Power differentials also need to be reduced to a minimum, or compliance is the best that can be hoped for.
The extra-ordinary leader plays the informal processes and networks tirelessly. Using classic coaching skills, he /she promotes “strategic” conversations, clearly states their intentions and fosters inquiry. Although always encouraging initiative, such leaders also clearly articulate constraints and limits, whilst at the same time challenging norms, habits and routines.
Engaging in urgent conversations
Effective leaders know the results they want to create, but fully engage with others in order to get there. They ask challenging questions and listen intently to the answers. They capture people’s attention, encouraging them to disrupt the status quo and to express what they really believe. They generate excitement by expressing emotion and are always open to and embrace unexpected outcomes.
Dialogue versus discussion
At the heart of the concept of leader as coach is the distinction between dialogue and discussion.
Dialogue is about engaging in an open and free exchange during which we fully suspend our own judgements and prejudices. It is a spirit of collective exploration and discovery out of which something new and creative is likely to emerge. It is collective sensemaking.
Discussion is sadly much more commonplace in organisations. It has the same linguistic root as percussion and concussion. It means to break things up. It emphasises the idea of analysis. The resulting behaviour is like that of a ping pong game, where ideas are batted back and forth and the idea is to win or score points.
The job of a leader is to promote dialogue ahead of discussion.
The three themes
In the first article in this series we challenged you to rethink your assumptions of leadership by examining what we know about behaviours that deliver results in challenging situations (click here to go to this article if you missed it).
In this, the second article, we have considered the leadership qualities required to deliver sustainable business and cultural change in uncertain conditions, and have found that many of these are closely related to the skills and qualities displayed by an experienced coach.
In the next article, to be published shortly, we will explore some of the practical skills required to make this happen.
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