‘Good leaders have empathy, respect employees and set the example. If you want to change things, you need to have a purpose, bring others along, plan properly, organise resources and implement the changes. Great organizations give people autonomy, their leaders communicate well and, above all, exhibit great alignment with their business goals’.

The above 3 statements belong to what I call ‘Impossible to disagree with school of management’ and represent a great deal of content seen in posts, books, reports and, even worse, ‘the latest research’. This lazy thinking brings zero value to the party. It is however, easy to produce and highly magnetic. It generates lots of ‘I could not agree more with you Peter’ which grows quickly in the LinkedIn petri dish.

Infuriatingly, people who jump into declaring agreement, don’t just say ‘I could not agree more with you Peter’ (exasperating in itself) but tend to repeat the proposition. That is ‘I could not agree more with you Peter. Indeed, good leaders have empathy, respect employees and set the example’.

I am highly suspicious of anything that seems to produce tranquilizer effects in the mind, that does not generate the slightest restlessness. In a recent post, whose authorship will remain private, I found an article that happily declares 20 reasons why change fails. You could easily add ‘bad weather’, ‘climate change’ and ‘long Covid’ and the article would stand, obviously highly enriched.

The ‘Impossible to disagree with’ school of management might as well also be called ‘The School of Not Thinking’.

The famous ‘Not even wrong’ category, attributed to physicist Wolfgang Pauli to describe a very poor argument that does not even reach ‘wrong’, should have a sister category in our Platitude Management Industry called ‘Not even challengeable’. My view is that entire libraries of management books, HBR articles and ‘latest research’ could dwell happily there.

Please disagree. Even, just a bit.

The real question is, what do you want to see happening so that you can say ‘people are empowered’?

The traditional model of change is the one I call ‘destination’ type, that is, how to go from A to Z, fixing something, achieving something, installing something.

An entire lucrative industry of ‘Steps’ has been created around it. Successful or not (and most people agree to an average of 30% success), that was it. Done. Here is the bill. Learning? What do you mean? Yes, learning, I mean. Well, we have just finished and done, arrived at Z.

Another problem, another challenge, M&A, cultural transformation, customer-centrism, safety culture, digitalization, agility? Well, we’ll start again.

There is slow learning in one-off (‘steps’) change management methods, so they carry a fair amount of opportunity lost, and, dare I say, waste.

It’s 2022! We can’t afford this! We need an approach in which we arrive at Z with enough ‘capability built in’ to tackle the next one, and the next one, and the next one. It’s Z today, N tomorrow, X next month. So be it. The system is here ready to tackle it. A change management method that does not build change-ability/change-capability, is a waste. Of course many of those approaches would claim that they do but look carefully and see what you find beyond the expensive slide pack. You may be surprised how much empty space there is. I suppose, you can call the same consultants again?

So, is there something that builds that long term
capability, whilst, at the same time, reaching
that destination or destinations?

Yes. It’s called a Mobilizing Platform, which for us is Viral Change™. What matters in Viral Change™  ^[2]is to create the behavioural DNA conditions , the ‘structures’, the ‘governance’, the rules of the game in which the company does not need another ‘method’ any more. The way of dealing with any of these examples of challenges or transformation as above, is now embedded. Change-ability is inside. It’s a way of life.

The change method is dead. The ‘implanted’ Mobilizing Platform takes care of any method, so much that the word method disappears from the vocabulary.

Although everything could be considered ‘a method’ (a method is a trick that you have used twice before), not many people would talk about ‘your leadership method’ or ‘your management method’ or ‘your cultural method’.

Change should get exactly the same treatment.

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If you want to learn more – join me for a LinkedIn Live session later today hosted by Sinan Si Alhir ^[15] called: De-X-Constructed: Remarkable Organisations & Social Movements Powered by Viral Change™. ^[16] 

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For a deep dive into the 5 Principles of Viral Change™ listen to this podcast  ^[17]from The Culture Lab, where I’m interviewed by Aga Bajer.

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If you want to discuss your behavioural and cultural change needs – let’s talk. Contact me at: [email protected] and my team will arrange a suitable time for us.

Organizations, like organisms, have embedded mechanisms of survival, of growth and also of self-sabotage.

These are 3 self-sabotage systems to be aware of:
1. Inner civil wars

Internal infighting is a potential feature of any complex organization, business or not. We see the caricature of this, and its high cost, in political parties or social movements. Usually we see the features of the inner civil war in newspaper headlines or on our television screens. Often it triggers in us a feeling of ‘how stupid can these people be? they are killing it’. And sometimes they do. In business organizations the mechanics of inner civil war are the same. The ones that worry me most are those that do not have 100% visibility: the hidden turf wars, the passive-aggressive reactions between corporate functions, the by design unhelpful collaboration, the cynical comments expressed in the corridor, restrooms, by perhaps senior people, against  senior people.
2. Employee disengagement

The industry of Employee Engagement (and there is one) tries to measure a mixture of satisfaction, happiness and willingness to run the extra mile. Year after year the rankings, for whatever they are worth, are terrible. We know more about the diagnosis than the treatment. I have written about the difference between being engaged with the company or within the company. The within (doing lots of stuff to make people ‘happy’) is a distraction. However, you define engagement, running the system with high degrees of a ‘lack of it’, is pure self-sabotage.

Leaders need to spend time on this, but it’s not about ‘improving a ranking’ but about gaining a deep understating of the motivation and ‘the chattering in the corridors’. It’s seeing, feeling and smelling. Some leaders can, others meet budgets.

For more on Employee Engagement see August’s Issues of BackInAWeekorso ^[18].
3. Dysfunctional leadership

For any functional or aligned, serious Leadership Team I meet in my consulting work, there will be four or five dysfunctional ones. Most of them look like juxtapositions of people reporting to somebody, but not a single entity ‘collective leadership’ type. It’s a journey, though. You don’t achieve high levels of sophisticated leadership in a week. But you have to work on it. I don’t have a big problem encountering dysfunctional leadership teams but I do worry when six months later they have not moved a bit. Or it seems they have via multiple changes and ‘musical chairs’.

These 3 areas, the inner wars, the hidden or not-that-hidden disengagement, and dysfunctional top leadership, are particularly toxic. The sad part is that they tend to come together like brothers and sisters in a dysfunctional family.

If any of these sound familiar, to stop and think would be a great investment.

PS. Don’t try to correlate success. Some successful organizations are dysfunctional. Some functional ones are not successful. The issue for the perhaps successful ones working with high self-sabotaging levels is how more successful could they be.

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Organizational Design
Your house is more than the sum of the number of bricks. Your organizational life is more than the sum of management activities and solutions.
Contact my team at The Chalfont Project ^[11] about creating smart organizational design and strategy or to find out more visit: Smart Organizational Design. ^[19]

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Leadership Accelerators
We prefer the term ‘practising leadership’ to ‘developing’ to emphasise the real-life essence of leadership. Busy-ness has taken over and leadership is now a series of ‘how to’. Yet, there is hardly anything more precious in business than individual and collective leadership capabilities.
Find out more about our leadership interventions and workshops  ^[20]

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Previous Issues of BackInAWeekorso:

September
The best organizational model is to have more than one under the same roof ^[21]

August
Unprecedented Times? Sure, let’s move on please ^[22]
Empowerment, Engagement and Ownership Culture must meet at same point. Obvious, simple and incredibly forgotten ^[23]
Employee Engagement Frameworks and the Productivity Magnet ^[24]
Is Employee Engagement whatever is Measured by Employee Surveys? ^[25]

‘Meetings’ and ‘teams’ are two different things. Team equals meeting, is a cancer. Our language has been perverted. ‘Let’s bring this to the team’ usually means let’s put it on the agenda of the next meeting. But the best team is the one that never meets. Does not need to meet.  It’s a 24/7 affair. For a true team, meetings are an add-on, not the essence.  Tip: team, as a noun, is a structure. Forget managing nouns. Manage their verbs.  Translation: we need teaming up, not more teams.

Teamocracy may be the worst form of people collaboration except for all those other forms that have been tried from time-to-time. Churchill said that of democracy as a form of government.

Our organizations have become teamocracies. Teams appear like mushrooms and stay for ever. Our default ‘concept-form’ of human collaboration is the team.  We have equated team to a structure, which components and org chart can be powerpointed. Worse, we then equate the whole ‘team-concept-structure’ to a ‘meeting’. ‘Let’s bring this to the team’, often really means ‘let’s bring this to the meeting’. ‘Team equals meeting’ is a cancer. Team and meeting are a forced marriage. The best team is the one that does not need to meet.

In the glorification of ‘team-the-noun-the-structure’, we have forgotten the verb teaming-up. We have been trapped in the structure ‘team’ for too long. We don’t need more teams, but we need more teaming up

‘Team concept’ feels very much at home in the sports arena. Also in the military and other places. But not all that collaborates and joins up is a team. Jesus Christ did not create a team of 12 apostles, not a high performance team certainly with a bunch of rather hopeless fishermen.  There is no such thing as a team of monks in an abbey.  Or a team of a mother, father and 3 kids. We usually don’t refer to the family as a team. Except when the mother has left the father on his own with the 3 kids for the weekend to go and visit her mum, and the father and the kids welcome her back with ‘we are a good team’. Which means we have just survived.

A sales team may be the least of a team you have. But the label accredits a bunch of possible individualistic employees, possibly paid by their individualist performance, with something bigger and glorious. Oh! Teamocracies! They rule the organizational and business world. We love them.

But here is the truth. Teamocracy is exhausted. But it does not dare to admit it.  I suggest we give teamocracies a break, perhaps a sabbatical, dare I say prepare a retirement party.

There is plenty of evidence that a lot of good stuff takes place in the informal networks of the organization, not in the teams. If teamocracy is looking for a retirement package, networcracy comes in. It’s the network stupid!

‘We need a team to do X’, is the wrong start. ‘We need to do X, what behaviours do we need to have in place for that to happen?’, is the right one. Then, who needs to get involved, (which includes skills). Then processes. Then structure, with an open mind: from a bunch of people teaming up, to a network across the company, to (include) individuals tackling X with limited connectivity, to, yes, maybe, a new team. The team must not be the default, automatic pilot answer without critical thinking.

Can we put a moratorium on automatic new teams?

Trapped by the structure, freed by behaviours. Start with behaviours, and you will have a greater chance to decide if you need a team. Start with team, you’ll be a prisoner. There is a choice: team, the noun, the structure, or teaming up, the verb, the behaviour.

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Our Team Management and Development suite of interventions are designed for any organization that requires novel, differentiated, innovative and highly effective organizational development and change techniques and tools.

They are not team building games or management training exercises or courses. They invite people in organizations to shape their world through real work focused on the specifics of your challenges in your organization. But this is done in a fast, sharp, focused and efficient way and in a surprisingly short period of time.

And, yes, in doing so, you create a common sense of purpose and align the team as well!

For more information please Contact Us ^[11] or email
[email protected]. ^[26]

Find out more about our short term Team and Management interventions:

• Reboot! The Game Plan  ^[27]
• Applied Critical Thinking ^{[28]  [28]}
• Disruptive Ideas ^[29]
• InnovACTion! ^[30]
• Plot Your Position on the Attitude to Change Scale ^[31]

Welcome to my weekly focus on culture change, leadership and organizational design. This week, I focus on what culture is, how behaviours create culture and the importance of peer-to-peer networks in achieving large scale, sustainable cultural change.

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Extracts taken from my book ‘The Flipping Point‘. ^[32] 

Culture is hard stuff

Culture is the difference between 30 people making a decision in 30 days, or 3 people making the same decision in 3 days. Culture is the difference between hiring costly employees and retaining them, or hiring costly employees and losing them after 6 months. Culture is the difference between making a decision and implementing it, or making the same decision and waiting to see if it sticks or people take it seriously. Culture is the difference between agreeing the plan in the meeting room, or trashing it at the break in the toilets. Culture is hard stuff. Do you need me to give you an ROI on these differences?

I use lots of these examples to show that culture is ‘hard’, not ‘soft’. Anybody with a calculator can see it.
Behaviours create culture, not the other way around. Change behaviours get culture.

Behaviours are copied and scaled up peer-to-peer. Everybody copies everybody but some people are more copy-able than others. It turns out that 5 – 10% have very high (non-hierarchical) influence. Find them, ask for help and give them support. Tell stories of success all the time. Make sure leaders do support the peer-to-peer work, but don’t interfere. This is the ‘what’ of Viral Change™  ^[2]in a box. The ‘how’ is what I do for a living.
Peer-to-peer is stronger than managerial top down
Peer power: if managers say, ‘safety is first’, the impact may be relative. The dictation is totally expected. This is what they are supposed to say. If my peer says, ‘safety is first’, I’m beginning to pay attention. It’s not expected, we were talking football and holidays. (what is the matter with him?) But I hear it. Tell me more. Peer-to-peer is stronger than managerial top down.

Peer power: Peer-to-peer is the strongest source or engine of change and mobilization inside any organization.

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Peer-to-Peer Influence

More and more, the neat and innovative work is taking place outside the formal, hierarchical structures, in the informal networks of the organization. Extend your reading on this topic – with free material available on our Academy ^[33] site, material includes:

• 3 Articles written by Dr Leandro Herrero:
• 1 Video (accessible via Pdf)
• Time to REFLECT: 4 Questions for you to increase your learning outcome
• Time to SHARE: A summary of main take-aways you can share with friends & colleagues or via social media

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Behavioural Based Change Resources

Behaviours are at the heart of Viral Change™ ^[2] because only behavioural change is real change. Behavioural change is sustainable and scaleable as behaviours creates cultures – not the other way around. For a deeper dive into this area, download our Behaviours Part 1 ^[34].  This material includes:

• 4 Articles written by Dr Leandro Herrero:
• 2 Videos (accessible via links in Pdfs):
• Time to REFLECT: 4 Questions for you to increase your learning outcome
• Time to SHARE: A summary of main take-aways you can share with friends & colleagues or via social media

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Previous issues on behaviours:

Habits have no meaning, they create it. Start with behaviours,
get meaning

Only behavioural change is real change ^[35]

For those of you not yet familiar with the change. Daily Thoughts has evolved. New name and format. Rather than daily, I will share with you a weekly focus on culture change, leadership and organizational design fit for the future.

This week, I continue my focus on behaviours, looking at the importance of habits in creating meaning when it comes to large scale behavioural change.

Habits have no meaning, they create it. Start with behaviours, get meaning

In my organizational consulting work, and in behavioural terms, I am very used to being told, and challenged, that there is no point focusing on behaviours (as we do with my team) if people ‘don’t mean it’. The conventional wisdom is that meaning is first (intellectually, from your heart) and then behaviours are the output, the consequence; that behaviours by people who ‘don’t really mean it’ are simply useless.

There is a logic behind this. It is the Homo Sapiens logic. The well regarded view-of-our-selves that makes us feel superior, in full control of our actions.

This is, however, in contradiction with reality, where, every day, we all have plenty of things we do as habits, which would be very difficult to associate to a ‘previous meaning’.

We do things, we establish routines, and we don’t ask ourselves whether we mean them or not.

We just do them.

This is important because behaviours are copied (Homo Imitans) and therefore good routines and habits, if collective, are likely to be copied and multiplied. I have just described culture in the above line.

With my behavioural hat on, I prefer, a thousand times more people establishing some habits, adopting some behaviours, whether they mean it or not (and see afterwards the consequences of the circumstances that they themselves have created) than being stuck looking for the cognitive full understanding first. Translation: for example, in large scale organizational change, start adopting some key behaviours, creating some critical mass and then ‘find the meaning’. I know that this is unconventional and a bit counter intuitive in traditional organizational development. I also know that Homo Sapiens readers interpret this as a rejection or dismissal of cognition, reflection and critical thinking. Far from it. But in organizational terms, we cannot simply wait for the sequence ‘understanding-internalization-emotional integration-aha!-action’, for everybody on the payroll.

Routines and habits create meaning, at least as much, if not more, than the other way around.

People going to the gym every day become more aware of their health, more than people aware of their health decide to go to the gym. Religious rituals create belief, more than belief creates religious rituals.

In large scale behavioural change, define key behaviours and make them live and multiply them; and don’t worry about whether people ‘mean them or not’. Meaning will come.

I know Homo Sapiens do not like this, but I am writing here on behalf of Homo Imitans. ^[36]

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Daily Thoughts has evolved. New name and format. Rather than daily, I will share with you a weekly focus on culture change, leadership and organizational design fit for the future.

As we move into a new month, my focus is now on behaviours. “There is no change without behavioural change”.

Only behavioural change is real change

You can map new processes and re-arrange the organization chart. Install a new corporate software (ERP, CRM, etc.) and explain to people why this is good and necessary. Create a massive communication and training campaign and make sure that everybody has clearly understood where to go. Perhaps you’ve done this already and noticed that many people hang on to the old ways. That is because there is no change unless there is behavioural change. It is only when new behaviours have become the norm that you can say that real change has occurred. If you want a new culture, change behaviours. Cultures are not created by training.

You need to uncover the non negotiable behaviours

The trouble with value systems is that, very often, they have no proper translation into pragmatic and visible expectations that can be rewarded or not, accepted or not, and into something with unequivocal meaning. I have just defined ‘behaviours’.

For those of us sitting with one foot in the Behavioural Sciences, the use of the term ‘behaviour’ is far more restricted than the average often seen next to many vision and mission statements. For many years now, since the word ‘behaviour’ became more fashionable in the corporate and HR language, behavioural statements have populated Values/Mission/Vision sets, added there with the hope of increasing their ‘practical weight’.

But adding or labelling something as ‘behaviour’ does not make it one. Many behavioural translations of Values remain trapped into circular explanations, saying the same with different words. ‘Honesty’ as a value, as an example, could be ‘translated’ and explained as: ‘Act with sincerity and authenticity; be candid and open; create trust’. Which explains absolutely nothing about honesty, but looks like a solid line of ‘explanations’. Just hope that the consultant’s bill was not too high.

Creating a set of behaviours that are visible, reward-able, concrete and, above all, have unequivocal meaning, is key to being able to use them as a currency in the organization. (Honesty, sincerity, authenticity, candour, openness and trust do have equivocal meaning. None of them are behaviours).

Behaviours create cultures. Master behaviours, agree upon them, declare the non negotiable ones, spread them, and you’ll get culture. 

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Homo Imitans

The Art of Social Infection; Viral Change™  In Action

Behaviours change culture, not the other way around. The spread of behaviours is the real source of social change. Behavioural imitation explains how social change happens, how epidemics of ideas are formed, how social fashions appear and how company cultures shape and reshape themselves. This book addresses Viral Change™ in action, showing that the more primal ‘Homo Imitans’ is still a powerful force. Understanding how social, behavioural infection works is the basis for the orchestration of any ‘epidemic of success’, be it a successful change inside a firm or a counter-social epidemic to tackle negative socio-macro phenomena.

Read chapter extract here ^[38]

There is only one strategy test: what will you tell the children?

There is only one strategy test: what will you tell the children? Try this: Son, I got up every day and went to the office to maximise shareholder value. I also participated in lots of Lean Teams. Ah, and I was an agile employee. In my time, our employee engagement scores went up from 4.5 to 7. Just try. Rehearse this by saying it to yourself in the mirror. Yes, what will we tell the children. That’s probably the only question that matters.

 My children, your children, their children, the children. Apply wisely and broadly. Once you look them in the eyes, you’ll know straight away if the grandiose strategy you are proclaiming has any legs. What we will tell the children is ‘the red face test’ of leadership.

If the company is overheating and has no thermostat, every day without an explosion is pure luck.

If the company is overheating and has no thermostat, every day without an explosion is pure luck. Leaders are the thermostats. Amongst other things.

Inspired by the very readable anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen ^[39]. I love his book ‘Small Places, Large Issues’ which has had several editions. His ‘Overheating: an anthropology of Accelerated Change’ was published in 2016. If you read one single book on Anthropology, read his ‘Small Places’.

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Find out more about the range of books written by Leandro Herrero: Books ^[36]

‘Daily Thoughts’ is paused, to assess its value and its next  ‘presentation of  life’. Bear with us. In the meantime, we will post some short vignettes from Leandro Herrero’s book The Flipping Point. ^[32] Contact us if you need anything or if you wish to share any insights about how Daily Thoughts is of value to you. Thanks for being here. Don’t go away! The Chalfont Project team [email protected] ^[40]

Decouple influence and hierarchy. You may be high up in the hierarchy, but your influence is very limited. If you are high up in the system and wanted to unlock influence, chances are there are more powerful people than you. If you are the CEO, this is a 100% probability. Unless you suffer from egomania, my strong suggestion is that you find out about those people who have real power.  The natural leaders and highly connected individuals.  Forget the organization chart. The lady in the mailroom is a good start. After all, she sees a hundred times more people than you every day.

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The only way to address differences between us, is to find the common and shared spaces and then work from that territory first. Surprises may come up and differences may blur a little bit. Without the shared spaces, it will always be a shouting game.

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Find out more about the range of books written by Leandro Herrero: Books ^[36]

Organizational transformation equals organizational life. Sometimes we add an adjective to signpost a direction. For example, digital transformation. Very often I am not sure what the adjective adds.

My average, large company, client has at least seven big initiatives running in parallel. There is Six Sigma here, leadership programme there, employee engagement cascade workshops, simplicity, diversity and inclusion, quality improvement, innovation programme, talent management programme, you carry on please.

Each of them have their own sponsor, likely their own budget, their own tribes, their own need to deliver, their own defence mechanisms, their own identity and their own self-inflicted blindness to their neighbouring initiatives.

Ah, by the way, they all compete for the most precious currency in the organization’s life: airtime.

That the staff are often confused should not surprise us. Being clear would be surprising.

Programmes that are constructed as A,B,C, steps 1 to 8, number of workshops, number of activities, will be favoured. So all those trains will depart from the same station at different speeds and avoiding collision, what else?

There will be transformations, however, that don’t fit into a 1,2,3, a,b,c engineering style. They are more like a journey, where you need good equipment, a sense of direction and a shepherd if you are trying a Himalayan one. (You don’t need a shepherd to go to the grocery store on the corner).

Those real, true transformational programmes are harder because they need a leader (a) who can trust others,  (b) who is prepared to accept the unplanned and emergent, and who (c) does not have to have all the answers pre-cooked.

There are those leaders around, but not many. But these are the ones who can exploit the full, real richness of the journey.

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Read about GSK Vaccines’ culture change journey, powered by Viral Change ^[41] (article written by: Hilton Barbour).

Or watch our Change Journey video ^[42] and hear how Viral Change is successfully driving change across many organizations.

This is one of the many pearls of wisdom from Confucius ^[43].  Your revenge may kill the adversary but a bit of you will be dying as well.

Let’s get a less dramatic interpretation. When we inflict pain on fellow human beings, some of us will require some painkillers at some time as well.

Leaders are required to lead with a good dose of emotional and social intelligence, not precisely new concepts, but perhaps never fully captured. Leaders lead, and in doing so, they are impacting on the lives of others. I am stating the obvious. Many leaders seem oblivious to the consequences of their leadership. Some with a macho style may sound like this: ‘I need to make the tough decisions so, I am sorry, it’s not me, it’s the tough decision, and anything else will be weak leadership, and seen as weakness’.

But nobody says the leader should not make ‘the tough decisions’. This is perfectly compatible with being very sensitive to the consequences, particularly the negative ones for the life of the followers.

In my consulting work for many years I have seen, and still see today, the whole spectrum of sensitiveness. I have seen, and see, leaders laying off people and doing so in an extraordinary sensitive and human way. I’ve seen, and see, the opposite. I’ve seen gratuitous power exercised. I have seen leaders with the social skills of a dead fish. I’ve seen great leaders with a sense and knowledge of their environments that not even a dozen Employee Engagement surveys could provide.

So, here is another leadership question: how deep is my grave? How is the digging going?

If you are not a good, sensitive, emotional and social intelligent leader, carry on, but be careful when moving around with that hole in the ground that seems to get bigger every day.

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Featured in my latest book: Camino – Leadership Notes on the Road. ^[44] Now available in paperback.

New book extract – for a preview of the book: Extract Camino Chapter 1 ^[45]

Order your copy now

Amazon.co.uk ^[46]
Amazon.com ^[47]
Waterstones ^[48]
Barnes & Noble ^[49]
and more….

To find out more:
Watch the book launch on demand webinar ^[50]

Corporate grade, reporting lines and membership of leadership teams in organizations often go together. But unbundling these components is a healthy exercise and a powerful rule in the maths of change.

If you report to Joe – CEO, divisional director or country manager – chances are you share this with another eight or ten people who constitute Joe’s management team, executive committee or leadership team. This is what the organization chart says. Most management teams are formed by what the organization chart dictates; by an ‘accidental’ reporting line. Everybody reporting to Joe is de facto a member of his management team.

In medium-sized or large corporations, structures are very often cross- or multi-functional. Imagine a Business Unit composed of a large Sales function, a smaller Marketing function and then a series of support functions such as HR, Finance, Legal, IT and perhaps a very small Strategy Team. The leadership team of that Unit is bound to be composed of the Director of Sales, the Director of Marketing, the Finance Controller, Legal counsel, the Head of IT and the Head of the Strategy Team. I suggest that this happened by default, by the dictation of the organization chart and that nobody ever questioned it.

But a legitimate question may be, “does everybody need to be part of that leadership team?” Many people in business organizations would of course say ‘no’. But the way we sometimes solve the issue is by promotion/demotion. For example, we may say only directors are really part of the management team. This is managing by grade, not by brain and it’s not what I am suggesting.

Grade in the corporate structure (VP, Director, Manager, Head) should not be a criterion of membership of a particular leadership team. Membership should be by invitation only. And only those who are in a capacity to add value to the role – whether they are in charge of a large part of the cake or not – should be invited.

It may be that, on reflection, the leadership team of the above Business Unit example should be composed of the Director of Marketing, the Director of Sales, the Head of HR and two Country Managers who do not report directly to the top leader of the Business Unit, but who are called upon to serve on that leadership team.

There may be alternative arrangements, but the principle is one of ‘by invitation only’. A principle that forces you to stop taking for granted the fact that membership will happen automatically or that grade or rank are a form of entitlement. It may be counterintuitive at first, but it is very effective. Much of the counterintuitive aspect comes from the fact that we tend to have pre-conceived ideas about how the organization should work. Sometimes these ideas carry flawed assumptions:

1. We must be inclusive. Yes, I agree but it is inclusiveness by invitation. If people feel the need to have all the direct reports together from time to time or, indeed, on a regular basis, they could have some sort of ‘Staff Committee’ (of all direct reports) if there were reasons for them to meet. But Staff Committee is not the same as a leadership team.
2. We must be fair. That assumes that all reporting lines to Joe are equal. In the above example it may have been considered unfair to the Financial Controller not to include him in the leadership team. There is nothing unfair about a selection made on transparent grounds. Inclusiveness and so-called fairness, sometimes result in gross unfairness to the group, because the artificial composition makes the team ineffective or highly unbalanced.
3. We must be democratic. Democracy is a form of government, not a type of organization (unless you work for a company that ballots everybody to elect a CEO!).

When you question management team compositions for the first time and, de facto, try to unbundle corporate grades, leadership and reporting lines, you will encounter some negative reactions and a few puzzled faces. But once this has been accepted as a legitimate questioning of the status quo, a breeze of healthy fresh air will start to flow through your organization!

Something that you may want to try as a model to follow is the Board of Directors. Though there are some differences between countries, a Board of Directors in public companies is usually composed of a few executives and some non-executive directors, who are either representing some shareholder sector or participating as members on their own capacity, background, experience or particular expertise. We have accepted this kind of designed composition as normal when it comes to the Board, but this is far from common for executive and leadership committees. But there is no reason why you could not mirror this, unless you want to stick to the default position because, “we have never done it like that.”

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Featured in my latest book: Camino – Leadership Notes on the Road. ^[44] Now available in paperback.

New book extract – for a preview of the book: Extract Camino Chapter 1 ^[45]

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