🇪🇺 4-minute read
TENET: increasing the degree of team empowerment, renders ‘implementation’ increasingly obsolete.
Or: over-zealous leadership increasingly taking the initiative to change things in the org is negatively correlated with teams taking the initiative.
In traditional hierarchical organizations (most of them still are) there is a ruling assumption that’s been alive since Frédéric Taylor picked up his stopwatch to measure the productivity of employees. “Managers are the ones to think and employees should stick to working”. Back in Taylor’s time, when most people moved from being low-skilled farmers and became factory workers, this might’ve been a logical strategy.
The result is a systemic loop we could call the Messianic Change Loop. Here, teams await their messiah to steer them toward safer waters. Simultaneously leaders adhere eagerly to these heroic expectations. I might be exaggerating, but the broad strokes of the Messianic Change Loop are quite familiar. Let’s break it down a bit.
- It all starts with a tension that leads to the need of departing the current state – often an opportunity or threat, or sadly, a quirky ploy by leadership.
- Eventually, leadership takes initiative with epic, company-wide changes. But despite good intentions, grand scheming by leadership is a bad habit. Aside from other negative consequences, grant scheming is always followed by ‘implementation’ – the grueling and often failed attempts of ‘change agents’ (the thinkers) to insert something new upon others (the workers).
- I see ‘implementation’ as the assumption that you need traffic lights to regulate traffic. Whereas a roundabout is much more effective. Alas, most transformation programs demand people to adhere or disappear.
- Consequently, teams develop learned helplessness as they get used (addicted?) to being guided by leaders and their change agents. What follows is a culture of followers, of disciplined workers that adhere to directions from above, of dependent thinkers always needing to check with leadership.
- A lagging effect of over-zealous leadership is a culture of apathy, where teams will stop caring and decreasingly signal opportunities or threats around them as they assume leadership will spot & act upon them. In effect, leadership will feel the need to step up and enact even more change.
An alternative systemic loop might be called the Emergent Change Loop. It’s where change starts locally, and from there can spread out to the whole company. Hence, org change becomes something that emerges rather than being directed. Let’s break it down.
- a. Teams are best positioned to spot threats and opportunities. If they can act upon it, the org can move faster.
b. Leadership is often well positioned to see connections within and beyond the org. They should therefore give valuable guidance to teams (‘how to prioritize opportunities and threats?’). The art of leadership here lies in their focus on connections and how their support is delivered. If leadership spends a lot of time formulating strategic guidance, they’re probably stepping into the messianic loop. - Empowered teams are autonomous teams to the degree that they co-create the strategies on what to do and the tactics on how to do it. Often they will have to engage with other teams to achieve their goals – making a local change a wider org change. This requires coordination, however, the fixed hierarchical structure doesn’t facilitate seamless collaboration between teams. So to support the Emergent Change Loop, you might want to consider a different org design, such as setting up internal marketplaces* or dynamic governance patterns (as defined in sociocracy and holacracy).
- The only way for a company to thrive and survive is its ability to continuously reflect and learn to do better next time. This could similarly be an emergent feature, where a team takes its learnings to other teams to the point that org-wide patterns emerge. Here Liberating Structures can be a scalable format that might facilitate this.
- Learning opens doors to new tensions. Additionally, it feeds leadership so they can learn to provide better guidance next time.
Developing emergent change loops is much harder, less visible, and takes ages compared to grant scheming. It takes perseverance, endurance, dedication, and a high dose of selfless post-heroic leadership. From everyone. But taking that road puts trust in your teams and will result in much more sustainable and effective change, competitive advantage, and success. And it will render large transformation schemes, and thus implementation, obsolete.
Inspiration:
- Ackoff f-Law: there is nothing a manager wants to be done that educated subordinates cannot do
- Uncommon sense, common nonsense, Goddard & Eccles, p137:Catalytic mechanisms point the way forward
- *See The Democratic Organization by Ackoff (1993) and Humanocracy by Hamel (2022)