The Pivotal Role

Leadership is different to other roles

To fulfil the core nature of leadership roles, that is, to help others succeed at doing what needs to be done, it is important to understand its difference to other roles.

Firstly, leaders cannot achieve their goals by doing things on their own. The very nature of the role requires working with, directing, coaching, supporting, resourcing and motivating others. The shift into this type of work can be challenging for first time leaders who are used to doing their allocated work as required. Depending on the nature of that work they might not have to deal much with others, let alone take responsibility for helping others to know what to do and get it done.

Secondly, the nature of the leadership role changes as it exists at different levels in the organsation. It is a big step to move from being an individual contributor to supervising and leading the work of others. This is the move into management. A manager is responsible for a particular unit or area in an organisation, depending on the level of management. Typical levels are a team supervisory, a unit manager who may supervisor a team of supervisors or a branch manager who may supervise a team of unit managers.

Common leadership layers

Beyond management leadership roles there are also executive leadership roles. The shift from management thinking to executive thinking is one of the key steps in leadership, similar to the step from individual contributor to management.

At an executive level a leader has to leave management thinking behind. The difference between management and executive thinking is that management thinking is focused on a particular unit or section in the organistion. Executives have to focus on the whole of the organisation as the CEO's team. This shift in thinking can be hard for executives, particularly if the organisation designs their performance agreements the same way they design management agreements.

While it is true that executives typically have responsibility for a region, group or division in an organistion, this is a different reponsibility to that of a manager. To make things more confusing, some executives will still have the term 'manager' in their title, such as General Manager or Group Manager. The difference is that the executive takes on a portfolio for responsibilities to lead on behalf of the executive team around the CEO. Teamwork for an executive is about working with the CEO and their peers to ensure the ongoing balance of investment, resourcing, delivery and development is happening across the organisation, when and where it needs to happen. Many executives fail to make this step and continue to think like managers, only responsible for their patch, much to the disappointment of their CEOs.

In the Agenda Load the types of actions required by different role levels in an organisation are explored in more detail.


The Three Responsibility Levels of a Leadership Roles ¹

The three levels of responsiblity for a leadership role are:

1. Create a self-sufficient team.
2. Cover their backs.
3. Contribute to the leadership team.

These levels are relevant at all levels of leadership, thought they vary in how they are done at each level. How a front line supvervisor acts on these responsibilities will be different to how a senior executive does.

These levels are explored below.
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1. The original inspiration for this two tiered approach to management and leadership roles came from Clay Carr's two phase model of management. See Carr, C. (1995). The new managers survival guide: All the skills you need for success. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

What self-sufficiency looks like

The elements of a self-sufficient team include:

• People know their purpose and what they have to do
• They have the tools they need
• They have the required skills
• They are motivated
• There are clear expectations about schedules and quality
• They cooperate to maintain workflow and solve problems
• People take responsiblity for what they do or don't do
• They communicate well with each other
• They address the full range of responsbilities as a team

This is not an exhaustive list. As leaders grow in understanding of the purpose of the unit, the attributes of the people in the team and how the unit fits in the organisation, they will develop a more nuanced understanding of what the team needs to be self-sufficient.


How a leader builds self-sufficiency

The contribution of the leader to estalish a self-sufficent team will require, to varying degrees, a range of leadership actions. These include:

• Setting the direction of the team, strategically and operationally
• Building the quality of relationships within the team
• Defining expecations, for performance and culture
• Providing plans and directions
• Providing ongoing performance improving feedback
• Establishing an environment of wellbeing that feeds productivity
• Developing, including by direct coaching, the capabilities of the team
• Facilitating cooperation and responsibility among team members

Again this list is not exhaustive but it is a good starting point.


What a leader does at level one

What the leader does with any particular team will depend on their level and the attributes of the team. Typically leaders have to apply contingency or situational leadership. This means adapting their leadership actions to match the requirements of a situation. Typically, a new team member requires more direction than an established team member. A team going through change requires more interaction and efforts to reestablish certainty.

There are many resources available to leaders to structure their work building a self-reliant team. These range for interpersonal dynamics, role clarification, feedback methods, management systems and knowledge resources. Some of the options are explore in the Effort Reducing Factors section later on.

Protecting and enhancing people's ability to achieve

There is no point setting up a self-sufficient team if the leader is not going to cover their backs. As individual contributors focus on their work they need to know that their supervisor is actively supporting them, directly and indirectly, now and into the future.

There are various elements a team must have in place if its members are to perform well. It must:

• Create value that enriches the organisation, its investors and customers.
• Invole stakeholders in constructive, supportive and productive relationships.
• Align itself around a direction, processes and practices that produce results.
• Work together to build shared responsibility for a productive culture of wellbeing.

Creating value to enrich

Whatever type of business your organisation is in, it exists to enrich others. The nature of that enrichment varies, according to your business and who the stakeholders are. This is explored in depth in the Performance Panel. Here it is enough to note that the financial, social, public policy or solution producing results you have to produce, they are all about making people better off. Even a common business activity like retail covers a wide range of value creation. Customers are seeking food, entertainment, furniture or transport. The owners and investors may be seeking a financial return or be trying to create a better society. However the people involved identify and measure the value they want, the organisation has to create that value for them.

At the second level of leadership, the leader has to help the team understand the value they are creating and design ways to deliver it effectively. Designing how to deliver it might be a complex as product development one part of the organisation or as pragmatic as improving team processes and efficiencies in another part. In both cases the leader is working to ensure the team's efforts are focused on creating the value that others need.


Involving stakeholders

This is a big one for leader. While the individual contributors in the team are pursuing their tasks the leader has to cultivate key relationships to support them. Some key relationships to manager are:

Suppliers: making sure resources arrive on time and as required so people can focus on their work knowing they will have what they need when they need it.

Customers: keeping in touch with customers, especially long term, repeat customers, to make sure their needs are met and that they remain emotionally connected to the organisation.

Distributors: keeping up to date the internal and external parties that represent your products and services to others.

Investors: again, internal or external, depending on your role, making sure they are getting the return they need so they will continue to support your business or team.

Neighbours: taking care to cooperate and support neighbours, in the business, industrial park, retail complex or community, so that your business doesn't interfere with them and they support your needs in the local area.

Regulators: whether internal or external, ensuring that your build their confidence that your business or team are complying with reguilations and negotiating business friendly ways to do that.

Part of covering the team's back is to take the information and issues that come from dealing with these stakeholders and making sure the team operates in a way that accommodates them. The responsibility for protecting the team's ability to perform is a shared responsibility.


Aligning the team

The leader has to develop the plans, processes and systems that the team uses. Many leaders do this with the team, since they have practical knowledge about what works and what the implications of the decisions are. The Japanese Kaizen process, that continuously seeks improvement feedback from everyone in the organisation, has proved a valuable source of ongoing quality improvement and employee motivation. It is a safe assumption that team members want things to go well because that makes their lives better, increases personal satisfaction with what they do and builds their esteem among their peers.

At an operational level there are three critical things that every team must achieve. These are:

Generate revenue: Whether directly, as in sales, or indirectly, as in production or product development, all activity in the organisation has to help generate revenue. Even volunteer organisations need revenue, so the quality of work by volunteers has to be sufficient to attract sponsors. Leaders have to help teams identify the revenue link to what they do so people understand that what they do is linked to the financial wellbeing of the organisation, including their pay-packets.

Increase value: The work of everyone in the organisation must help build the underlying value of the organisation. This value sits in the knowledge capital, the care of plant and equipment, the building of company or brand reputation, the influence of networks and relationships to promote and support the organisation. Leaders help people eliminate shoddy or offensive practices and focus on ways to increase the value of the organisation, its reputation and brands.

Maximise security: This happens at a corporate and personal level. At the personal level it is about workplace health and safety, keeping everyone safe. It's about good quality work, building an responsive and adaptive team that can add value as role requirements change over time, driven by customer needs or technological advances. At a corporate level it is about the alert and responsible use of information, so issues can be pre-empted and the organisation is not surprised by crises or disasters that harm people and the value of the organisation. It is about regulatory compliance, corporate governance and responsible practices that keep the organisation on a sure footing. The leader has to help people keep these issues in mind so they don't inadvertently undermine their own work or security.

These elements are addressed in further detail in the Performance Panel.


Working together

Teams have their own culture, usually as a sub-culture of the overarching organisational culture, professional or trade culture, and broader community culture and sub-culture. A leader doesn't want to get bogged down trying to unravel all of this. But a leader has to help a team build a culture that promotes their wellbeing and productivity. The two go together. Treated separately they can set a team up to fail.

It is important that a leader helps the team to notice and pay attention to their assumptions about how they do things, the organisation, customers and other parts of their daily activity. Assumptions are the many things we take for granted because we have to. We can't be investigating and second guessing every thought and decision. We'd have no time to get anything done. We operate out of assumptions, often unaware of or forgetting how those assumptions were first developed. A leader guides the team to address redundant or unhelpful assumptions so they can build alternative ways to approach things, ways the help the team.

Some typical assumptions that hinder teams that could be challenged are:

• This is how we've always done it - what made us successful at another time under other conditions might not be what makes us successful now or next year.
  
  
• Head office can't be trusted - whether or not this is true it has to be challenged! Typically head office is looking at a whole of organisational agenda, dealing with things not obvious at a local unit level. The leader has to help bridge this gap.
  
  
• I only have to worry about my work or my team: - Every team is dependent on other teams, as is every role. It is important to make sure team relationships work well and cooperation between teams is effective.
  
  
• It's management's responsibility - While it is true that some things are delegated to management, making the organisation safe, successful and valuable to customers is everyone's responsibility. In many ways organisations still infantilise employees, creating a parent-child relationships instead of a network of mutually responsibile adults coordinating their skills, knowledge and roles. A leader builds up the capability of teams to take responsibility for problem solving and constructive outcomes.

These are only a few examples of the many types of assumptions that can undermine teams. Leaders help teams build up cultural assumptions of shared responsibility, diligence, cooperation, respect, problem solving and the many attributes that create productive wellbeing.

The importance of working with others

An effective leader never acts in isolation. Evidence shows that their relationships with their boss and peers are critical for their success. Working as part of a leadership team is an important part of effective leadership and is the thrid level of the pivotal role.

Very early in the research into leader transition, John Gabarro's research into managers who didn't succeed in their roles identified what he called the 'lone ranger' syndrome. The unsuccessful managers operated in a more solitary way that the ones who succeeded. This didn't only include the involvement of their boss or peers but also how they involved their reports in their work. ¹ While we spent time looking at the engagement of the team in level 2, here we focus on the importance of the leadership team relationships.


The nature of your leadership group

One of the first questions to ask and sort our with your boss and peers is: what is the nature of your leadership group? Is it a federation or a team?

A federation is a group of independent entities who have a common representative for various issues that affect all of them but are beyond their area of control. In government this is usually seen as a relationship between state governments and a federal government, which looks after issues like defense and international trade agreements. In organisations it looks like managers with business units that do their own thing but have a common boss who deals with high level policy and budget allocations.

A team is a group that works together for a common purpose, sharing work and cooperating on a regular basis to achieve their shared goals. They work together to develop their policies, resource sharing and key relationships. The do not see themselves as independent activities with some common interests, as in the federal model, but as coordinated activities around the same interests.

How you, your boss and peers define yourselves, as a federal or team model, will significantly influence when and how you work with your colleagues.


The purpose of collegial work

Regardless of the style of your leadership group, team or federation, there are certain outcomes you need to seek working at level 3. Outcomes the leadership group is after are:

Problem Solving: This is the most important, day to day goal of leadership cooperation and collegiality. Each leader has their own strengths. Some are great problem sovlers, action drivers, strategic thinkers, influencers or sensitive to people issues. Drawing all these strengths together helps each individual leader be more effective as well as the whole group. Many of these problem solving conversations will happen outside of formal leadership group meetings. ²

Strategic Thinking: It is a shared responsibility for leaders to gather together and think strategically about the future of the business. The results of this thinking informs where resources are allocated and what innovations or projects are needed to prepare for the future.

Shared Projects: There are always projects and organisational needs that span accross different business areas or need dedicated project teams. Leaders work together to make these projects work, guiding them, resourcing them and ensuring their results can be used beneficially throughout the organisation.

Resource Efficiencies: One of the key attributes of a healthy leader is the recognition that the resources they direct are not their own. They are there for the benefit of the organisation. Additionally, organisational units periodically encounter issues or find opportunities that are beyond their current skills, knowledge or productive capacity. Within the leadership group, leaders can cooperate to share the strengths and capabilities of their different units to get better outcomes for the organisation.

Risk Management: Sharing information and experience, especially about emerging issues, helps the team to manage risk. The shared thinking and coordinated action that results can increase the security of the organisation.

Integrated Delivery: When leaders cooperate, different units that deal with the same customer or distributor can coordinate their work to manage their needs more effectively. This reduces duplication, contradictory messages or missed opportunities. It leads to better knowledge management and customer services.

Invest time into building rapport

One of the key things you can do as a leader is to invest time in building rapport with your colleagues. This does not only happen in formal meetings. How you build rapport will vary, according to your personality, interests and social styles. Whatever your attributes, look for areas of common interests.

At its simplest this may mean organising some coffee or lunch breaks, where you get out of the office and talk about work and life with your colleagues. Volunteering for projects gives you a more formal way to build shared experience with colleagues while getting to know each other's working styles, priorities and strengths. There may even be out of work opportunities, like attending a sports event or show, especially if a group of leaders can be organised to go together. Remember, in this latter case, even though it is a social setting, you are still their for professional reasons.

An important factor in rapport is to build trust. This permeates every dealing you have with your colleagues. They need to know that you keep your word, are open with them, maintain confidences and work for mutually beneficial outcomes. Your level of trustworthiness is something you create but others decide. This also works the other way around.

You have to guage the level of trustworthiness of your collegues, which is not always easy when one or other of them gives you reasons to doubt it. At the end of the day you are not trying to like your collegues, which is a bonus if you do. You are trying to work out how you can work together, productively, reliably and without stress. When you doubt the trustworthiness of a colleague, focus on figuring out their predictability as a substitute for trust. This means getting to know how they act, what drives them, when they will be truthful and reliable and when they won't. With this insight you can accept them as they are and figure out ways to work safely with them. Of course, when you are in this situation, keep a keen eye to the ethics of the situation and your legal responsibilities.

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1. Gabarro, J. J. (1987). The dynamics of taking charge. Boston MA: Harvard Business School Press.
2. One discussion of leadership team strengths, using their four domains model is: Rath, T., & Conchie, B. (2008). Strengths Based Leadership. New York: Gallup Press.