Businesses need chief executives at every level – which creates a significant development challenge
Generative AI, Web 3.0 and ongoing digital and business model transformation: executive leaders are juggling huge, complex challenges that can easily feel overwhelming. The scale and nature of these challenges mean that senior executives are no longer the smartest people in the room (if they ever were). They cannot do everything that’s needed by themselves. It’s time to embrace the power of the many, not the few.
This brave new world demands radical shifts in behavior from leaders, such as demonstrating openness and vulnerability. But it has another side. More than ever, it is imperative that leaders facilitate learning and leadership throughout their businesses – including for themselves, for other senior leaders, and for the ‘CEOs’ that are needed at every level of today’s organizations.
Creating a new age of empowerment
There are three critical developmental challenges facing leaders today (see graphic). They form the main axes of the leadership learning that is central to creating an empowering environment and sustaining business transformation success.
Enable: Maintaining digital relevance
Leaders today must develop fluency both in the language of digital transformation and in how these technologies enable business model transformation. However, executive leaders no longer have the strategic bandwidth to single-handedly ensure their organization’s credibility and relevance amid rapid, complex technological change. In fact, leaders are often far from the deep digital expertise that is possessed by others ‘lower down’ the chain.
Excel: Growing and empowering people
Workforce transformation – the rise of the blended workforce and the open economy, including independent workers – is as important as digital. Paradoxically, we need more humanity in our workforce in the form of creative and adaptive problem exploration. We are in a world where professional ‘robotic’ work previously done by humans is being automated, leading to more worker availability for higher-level, strategic roles. ‘Growing the workforce’ is both quantitative and qualitative.
Engage: Growing an empowering organization
Empowerment means creating room within the organization for a collaborative leadership development journey, so that individual contributors become ‘in-role’ CEOs. Empowerment demands new structures that enable a more flexible and agile workforce. This idea led to Jeremy Blain’s book Unleash the Inner CEO, a toolkit for guiding leaders and managers towards successful empowerment.
Breadth and depth
Arguably, there are only two kinds of people who experience an organization across its full breadth: the chief executive and the customer. You know this if you’ve ever been told during a customer service call that your issue is “the responsibility of another department.”
Recently, the CEO of a major Australian bank said that if they were to take full advantage of their full portfolio of businesses, something would need to shift in their leadership. The days of bankers specializing, focusing and executing only in their own businesses units were clearly over.
This bank’s experience resonates with what we are seeing across multiple industries: the relative value of leaders’ technical or domain skills is diminishing, while the value of collaboration is increasing exponentially.
Michael Chavez’s book with Sudhanshu Palsule, Rehumanizing Leadership: Putting Purpose Back Into Business, explores how we need more and better leadership to solve new, bigger and more complex problems, using the compass of purpose. Organizations have moved from focusing mostly on scale, efficiency and execution to emphasizing exploration, adaptation and renewal. They require leaders with breadth as well as depth.
This shift demands a new age of empowerment and learning for all. But how many senior leaders are willing to embrace this? This is a key barrier and challenge for leaders who are now forced to accelerate transformation and realize they need to transform too. The skillsets of many employees are as good – if not better – than their managers and leaders. As this capability gap narrows, we must learn together to unleash the power of the many at all levels, strategically and operationally.
This inverts the usual relationship between leaders and followers. Those in leadership positions need to recognize a healthy dependence on their ‘followers.’ They may feel more pressure to show strong social and ‘human’ leadership, something for which many leaders feel ill-prepared.
How we understand leadership
Once we start to look closely at organizations through the lens of dynamic change, we see signals that point to deep and dramatic shifts in how we think about leadership.
Leadership is no longer just a title
More and more individual contributors are adopting the role of “leader.” Recent work with a large California-based technology company showed that “leadership” also applied to individual contributors, based on the expertise they brought to bear on the organization’s challenges.
Leadership development is no longer just a program
After winning work with a long-standing banking client, it became clear to the combined team that the request for a proposal was already out of date. Old paradigms such as a cohort or program are being replaced, at least in part, by agile project teams and enablement.
Leadership development is becoming an ecosystem
We regularly hear from leaders that they are having to create a developmental environment around them. Data scientists and deep experts co-exist on project teams with generalists and client leaders. The new norm is for complex collaboration, not cordoned-off swimming lanes. That requires more staff to step up to leadership.
The unintended consequences of complexity
As complexity and ambiguity increase, the gravitational pull for leadership can, paradoxically, be downwards: closer and closer to managing “the work” and into the weeds to give direction. However, many organizations are realizing that this creates an unintended consequence: leadership dependency.
As leaders give more and more direction on micro-tasks, as an expedient way to get vast amounts of work done at speed and with high quality, they are in essence deferring the development of their staff, solidifying their dependency on micro-management. Those staff miss an opportunity to try to guide their sub-teams themselves, possibly getting some things wrong, but ultimately learning in fast cycles.
To counter this tendency, the developmental journey has shifted from learning to be efficient micro-managers, to clarity building.
In the words of Dr Elsbeth Johnson, professor of organizational science at MIT, this is the shift to “macro-management,” where leaders build clarity around the context needed to drive high-quality, complex work at speed, while offering meaningful autonomy at all levels. It requires a mindset shift away from managing via handcuffs to leading via guardrails. As Johnson states, “If external ambiguity is the new normal, internal ambiguity is the new enemy.” Clarity and meaning are the new currency at all levels, not just the C-suite.
A blueprint for success
Restructuring leadership and management systems to embrace horizontal principles has to fuel the adoption of a growth mindset that encompasses leaders in all sorts of roles, at all levels of an organization. Success is fueled by the many, not the few.
This is not just a case of changing mindset: it is also a matter of practical implementations, which is where so many change initiatives fall down. Leaders need a blueprint for success. Unleash the Inner CEO sets out that step-by-step guide to this transformation. Through assessments and collaborative coaching conversations, managers and individual contributors can themselves determine their own personal pathway.
These pathways should be tailored to individuals in three differentiated ways.
Stepping in: leaders are empowered in a specific role to make decisions, try new approaches, and create better processes
Stepping out: leaders step out of a specific job role and contribute to the wider team and function, as part of an empowered group effort
Stepping up: leaders are ready to contribute in role and more strategically to the business, in cross-unit projects and other initiatives.
Not every individual contributor is ready to step in, step out, or step up. But with this framework, leaders create the space for bespoke learning journeys, spanning the knowledge, behaviors, leadership skills, management skills, and personal skills needed to make distributed leadership a reality.
Six centers of me
For leaders who are stepping in, stepping out and stepping up, there is another aspect of development that is essential to success. It involves embracing your own personal, emotional development.
The ‘Six Centers of Me’ framework presented in Unleash the Inner CEO provides a way to measure the success of unleashing leadership from a personal perspective.
1. Autonomy
Do I feel a degree of independence, empowerment and freedom from constraints to unleash my inner CEO in my job role
and beyond?
2. Self-motivation
Am I energized and able to achieve my personal vision with commitment and enthusiasm, without feeling pressure
from others?
3. Self-confidence
Do I have belief in my own capability, energy and skills for success as an unleashed CEO?
4. Self-efficacy
Do I have the ability to control and deliver required results?
5. Job satisfaction
Do I feel appropriately recognized and rewarded for my contribution?
6. Relationships
Are my relationships meaningful, collaborative and productive? Am I able to bring others along with me?
How we feel, how we think and how we develop ourselves emotionally – not just as a performer in a role – is often overlooked in business. But any business seeking to become more sustainable has to reinforce the humanity of the organization. It is the critical component for success in an increasingly digital world.
Modern, agile learning cultures require a strongly human-centered, collaborative effort to grow the relational leadership skills of those individual contributors who might just find themselves leading an agile team.
One is not enough
One leader – one CEO – is not enough. We must leverage the power and potential within our broader workforce by creating a new age of empowerment in our organizations rather than paying lip service to distributed leadership, as we have for decades.
To ignite this potential, the golden thread for success is building a strong, parallel learning culture for executive leaders, managers and individuals. It is an all-level play.
Senior leaders must embrace humility and let go of the worry that by being in learning mode, they are seen as ‘not ready’ for leadership. They must start the process themselves by letting go
of power.
The prize will be not only raising the level of skills found right across our organizations, but also amplifying the very human endeavor of our businesses. It is a shift that is needed now more than ever, as we continue to adapt to a fast-changing digital world.
Michael Chavez is the former CEO of Duke CE, founder of Broad Vista Partners, and co-author of Rehumanizing Leadership: Putting Purpose Back into Business (LID Publishing). Jeremy Blain is CEO of Performance Works International and author of Unleash The Inner CEO: Make Distributed Leadership a Reality (Rethink Press)
