One of the typical questions from such leaders is, “What should I do every day?” This query often arises because managers in companies have many operational tasks to do every day. However, leading an organisation is more than checking off tasks: it’s also – and I’d say, more importantly – about helping people grow. I see many managers so busy in the “daily business” that they don’t have time and often don’t see the most important part of their work: growing organisational competencies!
As a minor side result of our “ELSE—Emergent Large Scale Evolution,” we have created a sort of “instruction manual,” a “checklist” that leaders can use to remind them every day of all the value they could bring to the organisation by doing “the other part of their job” that disappears in their daily busyness. We call these the “Leadership Control Surfaces.”
The Control Surfaces
Leadership has several Surfaces they can and should act on: they should work to…
1. Grow people’s capabilities, both as individuals and as teams: This is a fundamental part of the leaders’ role, from hiring the best talents to helping them grow and evolve.
2. Foster the development of other leadership figures within the organisation, both present and future. Leadership development is essential for cultivating successful organisations. As James O’Toole and Bruce Pasternack stated, leadership should be considered an “organisational trait” (https://ceo.usc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2000/05/2000_08-g00_8-When_Leadership_is_Org_Trait.pdf), rather than merely a characteristic of individuals.
3. To reduce accidental complexity in the organisation, work on the structural aspects that cause and support it (https://go-else.org/index.php?title=Accidental_Complexity).
4. Grow their capability to work as a leadership team. Yes, all companies have “leadership teams”, but I observe that they rarely work as a real team. They usually split the work to be done in parts, and each of them “do their part”, therefore sustaining silos thinking and the Accidental Complexity of the organisation and, in the worst cases, even investing comes in political games. Working as a real leadership team means developing together a systemic view of the company and acting in the interest of the company, even though it might seem a step back in “my” part of the organisational system: we’re in a quest to globally optimise the organisation, not locally! One interesting observation I’ve made many times is that the capability of making agility systemic in a company is limited by the ability of the leadership team to address their work systemically: the more they collaboratively work together on the system, the better the results we can get from agility.
5. They also need to work on themselves: individual egos, fears, and blind spots, … are all impacting how we work together, and leaders, being role models, should take every opportunity to grow individually.
Conclusion
Obviously, there is more to this, and the Leadership Control Surfaces diagram provides the next level of details. Please note that we don’t recommend actual “tools.” For example, for leaders to successfully grow “current and future leaders”, they need to learn how to coach. This is imperative for performing effectively in that part of the role. How you do it is part of your journey: enjoy the ride!
If you want to learn more about creating systemic agility using ELSE, feel free to contact us, have a chat, or take part in one of our classes.