If you want to be a good manager today, you need to come to terms with the fact that disruption is here to stay. By understanding the difference between strategic leadership and operational leadership, you can develop the skills and perspective you need for leadership during disruption. This blog post explains what leaders must do (and what they must stop doing) to make the shift from merely babysitting teams to driving real business impact.
This is the age of disruption.
—Sebastian Thrun
Right now the business world is getting slammed by a lot of changes that are coming our way all at once and shaking things up. New technologies, economic uncertainty, and workforce shifts are forcing leaders to rethink how they operate.
These disruptions to many familiar business practices and strategies have led to slowdowns in multiple sectors. But the changes themselves aren’t the true causes of those slowdowns. The real problem is that too many leaders are managing as though it’s still yesterday. Researchers at McKinsey agree that when it comes to leadership, the times have indeed changed: “There are distinct differences between the personal attributes, best practices, and approaches to leadership development required in today’s organizations and those of yesteryear.”
Too many of today’s leaders are drawing on an outdated playbook that doesn’t give them the tools and knowledge they need to guide an organization through uncertain terrain. Rather than engage in strategic thinking that moves their organizations (and their own careers) forward, they’re buried in operational details, such as solving problems their teams should be handling and reacting to issues instead of anticipating them.
In short, their leadership consists mostly of babysitting employees. In a world moving this fast, however, that kind of leadership simply doesn’t work anymore.
How Old Leadership Habits Break Organizations
We cannot direct the wind, but we can adjust the sails.
—Dolly Parton
A decade ago, leadership teams typically focused on only a handful of major issues at one time. Leaders were involved in solving every problem and spent time constantly putting out fires. Because decisions flowed upward, teams had to wait for direction. When leaders got bogged down with operational concerns, they often became the bottleneck, and either work slowed or nothing got done.
Today’s leaders have to navigate increasingly complex and rapidly shifting waters teeming with ongoing technological change, workforce shifts, global uncertainty, and expanding stakeholder expectations. Leaders who continue to focus on operational issues don’t have the time or energy to do the strategic thinking needed to address those new factors. Such disruptions don’t create leadership weaknesses but actually expose the ones that are already present.
How Leaders Fall into the Babysitting Trap
A leader’s role is not to control people or stay on top of things, but rather to guide, energize, and excite.
—Jack Welch
Leaders don’t intend to become babysitters but often end up in that role unintentionally. Armed with good intentions, they jump in to help their employees, answer questions quickly, double check work, and actively support their teams in a myriad of small ways.
In the moment, this hands-on approach feels efficient. Over time, though, it leads to three unintended consequences:
- Teams stop thinking strategically. When leaders provide all the answers, employees stop developing their own judgment.
- Leaders become overwhelmed. The more problems leaders solve, the more problems people bring to them.
- Decision making slows down. Everything gets funneled through one person, who has only so much capacity to move things forward.
Instead of building capability across the organization, this leadership model puts everything on a single person’s shoulders. A model that focuses all operational tasks and decision making on one individual simply cannot keep up with the nonstop flow of disruption.
How to Change Leadership Practices to Handle Disruption
The key is to embrace disruption and change early.
—Ryan Kavanaugh
The leaders who are successfully navigating disruption today aren’t working harder but rather are working better. They’ve recognized the need to let go of yesterday’s command-and-control management style and have embraced an approach that decenters the leader and instead focuses on developing empowered teams that are able to confront challenges head on.
By making changes to leadership behaviors in three key areas, leaders can greatly improve their own (and their organizations’) ability to weather disruption:
- Replace control with clarity. Leaders often believe that they must be involved in everything in order to ensure results, but they achieve far better results when they instead communicate clear priorities, expectations, and decision authority to their teams. When people understand what their destination is and what guardrails they need to follow to get there, they can move faster without constant supervision.
- Prioritize ownership over oversight. Instead of answering every question, effective leaders push their teams to gather information and make their own decisions. Rather than tell teams “Here’s what you should do,” those leadersask “What do you recommend?” Trusting employees to do their jobs well builds confidence, judgment, and accountability throughout the organization.
- Emphasize decision speed over waiting for “perfect” information. Many organizations stall because leaders feel pressure to make “perfect” decisions. But in fast-moving environments, waiting for perfection can result in missing opportunities completely. Rather than make everyone wait on decisions from the top, high-performing leaders create operating models that allow decisions to move quickly through the organization, thus building speed into a competitive advantage.
Case Study: A Real-World Leadership Shift
Recently I was coaching a senior executive who was frustrated by how slowly decisions were moving across his organization. Every major initiative seemed to stall: marketing required input from operations, operations needed alignment from finance, finance wanted approval from the executive team, and so on.
The ultimate impact of this merry-go-round of decision making was that everything landed back on his desk. “I feel as though every important decision in this company eventually comes to me,” he said. Because there’s only so much one person can handle at a time, he often ended up being the logjam.
The problem wasn’t his workload, though. The problem was an organizational culture in which no one felt empowered to make the call. Because everyone sought alignment or consensus for each action (and protection for any actions that might not turn out well), decisions kept getting pushed up through the organization until they all reached the senior executive and had nowhere else to go.
Together, he and I unpacked the leadership patterns that drove this process. Instead of defining who owned which decisions, his organization’s leadership team had decided to have everyone review all decisions together. Their intended goal was to foster collaboration, but in practice this approach just ended up slowing down the entire organization.
For my client, the leadership shift he needed to implement wasn’t about asking better questions but about clarifying decision ownership. Within a few months after he defined which decisions belonged to the executive team, which decisions belonged to functional leaders, and which decisions never needed to be escalated at all, things had changed dramatically at his organization. Decisions that used to take weeks were made in days. Leaders stopped escalating issues that belonged to them. And the executive team suddenly had time to focus on strategy instead of getting caught up in approvals. Because leadership stopped being the bottleneck, the organization became much faster and was therefore much better positioned to handle disruption.
How to Outlead Disruption
When you’re a large company with significant market share, it’s tempting to view market disruptions as a threat, but we view them as an opportunity.
—John T. Chambers
It’s time to say goodbye to “how we’ve always done things before” and to recognize that effective leadership now requires new approaches in order to adjust to whatever comes our way. With the pace of disruptions accelerating, leaders shouldn’t be asking themselves “How do I keep up with everything happening around me?” but instead should challenge themselves with “Am I leading in a way that allows my organization to move faster than the disruption around us?”
Leaders who stay focused on operational issues—and stuck in babysitting mode—will always feel overwhelmed. But leaders who create clarity, foster ownership, and support speedy decision making will survive disruption by outleading it and set their teams (and their organizations) up for long-term success.
