What leadership does your organisation actually need, and can it tolerate it?
When organisations think about building their leadership pipeline, there is usually no shortage of activity.
There are talent reviews, succession plans, leadership programs, competency frameworks and assessments designed to identify who has potential and what they need to develop.
But there is a question that needs to come before all of these:
What leadership does our organisation actually need?
It sounds obvious, but it is easy to start with the people and processes we already have rather than the organisation we are trying to become.
This is how organisations can align strategy with leadership and culture, rather than seeing them as separate.
Different organisations need different leaders
In a recent session with Talent and HR professionals and leaders, my colleague Sonia Tallarida and I asked participants to consider three very different organisations.
Imagine a startup that has grown quickly and now needs to scale: It may have succeeded because people moved fast, worked around processes and made decisions on the fly. The leadership it needs next may need to bring more structure, discipline and clarity without losing the entrepreneurial energy that made the organisation successful.
Now imagine an organisation trying to rebuild its reputation after losing the trust of customers, employees or the community: It may need leaders who listen differently, acknowledge uncomfortable truths and are prepared to challenge practices that have previously gone unquestioned.
Or consider a large government department that needs to innovate: It may need leaders who can experiment, work across boundaries and challenge established ways of working, while still understanding how to navigate a large and complex system.
The point is not that one type of leadership is better than another.
Leadership is useful in relation to what the organisation needs.
The leader who is exactly right for one organisation, or one point in its evolution, may be less effective in another.
This is why I think we need to be careful when we talk about identifying “future leaders” as though there is a universal set of attributes we should be looking for.
Future leader for what?
Are we developing leaders for where we’ve been or where we’re going?
After discussing these different organisations, we asked participants a question:
What leadership capability will your organisation need more of over the next five years?
It’s a useful question to ask before looking at your succession plan or deciding who belongs on your next leadership program.
What is changing in your strategy and environment? What will your organisation need to become better at? What kind of leadership will make that possible?
Only then can we ask who already demonstrates some of those capabilities and who could develop them.
Otherwise, there is a risk that our talent processes simply reproduce what has worked before.
Our leadership frameworks are usually built from our experience of leadership to date. The people seen as successful are often those who have learned how to operate effectively in the existing organisation. Those are useful inputs, but they may not tell us everything about the leadership needed for what comes next.
This doesn’t mean abandoning leadership frameworks, succession planning or talent programs. It means putting strategy and context before process.
But even when an organisation gets clear about the leadership it needs, there is another problem.
What happens when someone actually brings or develops these skills and attributes?
Imagine the government department decides it needs more innovation and challenge. What happens when someone starts questioning established ways of working?
The organisation rebuilding trust decides it needs more candour. What happens when a leader starts saying things senior people would rather not hear?
The startup decides it needs more discipline and structure. What happens when someone starts challenging the informal ways of working that the founders and early employees are attached to?
There can be a gap between the leadership an organisation says it needs and the leadership it is comfortable experiencing.
This is where Sonia and I introduced the idea of the organisational immune system.
Every organisation develops patterns over time about how things are done, how decisions get made, what good leadership looks like and what is considered credible. Many of these patterns are informal and largely invisible. Together, they create a strong pull towards what is already familiar, and reject what doesn’t fit.
Like our immune system, organisations can react to what feels foreign.
This means that finding a leader with the capabilities you need is only part of the challenge.
The relationship between that leader and the system matters too.
If someone is too far outside what the organisation can currently accept, their ideas may be ignored and their influence limited. At the other extreme, if they adapt too much to fit the organisation, they may end up reinforcing the very patterns that need to change.
Building a future leadership pipeline is not only about finding talented people and developing their capabilities. It is also about understanding the organisation they are being asked to lead.
The leadership your organisation needs next isn’t always the leadership it currently rewards.
The next article will be about what it means to lead at the edge: bringing enough difference to help an organisation evolve, while maintaining enough trust and credibility to influence it.
This article is part 2 of a series reflecting our conversation at the recent Melbourne Talent Meetup , written by Sonia Tallarida and Megumi Miki . Please follow/connect/like/comment if you’d like to see the next few articles which will expand this thinking further.
