‘Purposeful Conflict’ and the Senior Leadership Team
This blog is about the group of leaders who head an organisation. They are often referred to as a team, as in the ‘Senior Leadership Team’, ‘Executive Leadership Team’ or the ‘Management Team’. Which begs a question. Can we call the group of people, the senior leaders who run a business or an organisation, a team? This is a rather fundamental question, given the importance of this group to the organisation. And if they are a ‘team’ – what is this team for?
In a way, structurally, a senior team is not a team at all in the simple sense of having a framework of explicit and aligned roles which team members can wholly commit to and harmoniously support each other. This is different from say a sports team, surgical team or a group of actors performing a play. Conflict in these latter sorts of teams is a ‘bad thing’.
The special nature of the group of leaders at the top of an organisation is that this is a group of people who lead teams with quite different contributions to make, many of which inevitably create tension, or indeed conflict, with the others. In a nutshell senior teams are ‘arenas for conflict management’. Conflict explicitly and clearly addressed is therefore a ‘good thing’
You see, organisations in one sense, are structures that have evolved to manage the essential paradoxical demands of the pursuit of success - whether that be profit, customer satisfaction, societal benefit etc. This is not a philosophical point but the hard, practical reality of human collective endeavour. Organisations are essentially a forum where conflicting needs can be brought into the same space and negative tensions managed and the synergies that exist gained. And it is the leadership ‘team’ that is responsible for collectively managing this.
These conflicts include: short and long-term horizons, innovation versus standardisation, localisation versus globalisation, stability versus change, cost reduction versus investment, sales vs profit and dare I say it, loyalty to employees versus the shifting needs of headcount. There are many more of course. These are what Barry Johnson used to call ‘interdependent opposites’. Senior Leaders are in a special sort of team – one that is responsible for managing this ‘Paradox Agenda’.
More often than might be expected, the group of leaders at the top of the organisation dodge the responsibility for healthy conversation, often feeling inhibited and disengaged - leaving the Paradox Agenda highly dependent upon the CEO and perhaps a ‘favoured others’ to make critical calls. Thus, the critical agents of this challenge are silenced. Conflict is there alright but it is hidden, subversive or political. Worse than that often there is an implicit hierarchy within the group such that any attempt to raise divergent issues is met with abuse, mockery and bullying.
There are several symptoms of failure to manage the Paradox Agenda effectively. They would include:
economies of scale and scope – including cross-selling; standardisation; innovation; roll-out of initiatives etc are not delivered
prioritisation overload
failure, even early loss of new executive joins to deliver to expectations
poor or incomplete cross-organisation change
individual departments being unfairly blamed for being uncooperative e.g. finance, operations, purchasing etc resulting from a lack of insight into the success factors that have been defined for that department
a culture of complacency about the future - a kind of ‘well we’ve survived do far attitude” or ‘my bit of the business is doing well… “
In less turbulent times, organisations with relatively able leaders could deliver acceptable performance by focusing downwards on the efficient delivery of the part that they lead. However, the commonly stated organisational demands today for flexibility, agility - the ability to respond quickly to the market, and general intolerance for poor perfromance, means that senior leadership teams who continue to avoid the Paradox Agenda will fall behind.
Leading paradox and conflicting demands
What is it that enables a senior team to manage the Paradox Agenda and enable purposeful conflict? (Apart from managing the meeting room environment a lot more thoughtfully).
Most importantly, the team needs to be constituted with sufficiently mature leaders who have that ability to disengage from a subjective perspective which is coloured by emotional and motivational needs arising from an egotistical view of the self. The wisdom to stand-back and see what the ‘whole’ needs rather than just the self-obsessed self, is a core (and little understood) attribute of senior leadership.
The key motif for establishing the perspective of the ‘whole’ in senior leadership is connection:
Connection with the purpose of the organisation and the environment in which it operates.
Connection with the team you lead to understand how they need support and where they need challenging to ensure they deliver the richest contribution.
Connection with your peers, and the wider network of stakeholders, to be able to see complex issues through others’ eyes and to be able to understand and be understood. And finally, and most fundamentally
Connection with yourself. To see yourself in terms of your current effectiveness and the beliefs and assumptions that colour what you see and most of all - to understand how you might grow and change. For too many leaders and managers this is a total mystery!
So, a quick health check. Is the Senior Leadership Team collectively:
In touch with the broader environment, having a shared insight into how the market is evolving and the implications of that for the defining purpose of the organisation?
Demonstrating a willingness to look through the eyes of others in the team and support them most effectively?
Championing change at its most fundamental levels amongst their peers and the organisation as a whole?
Ensuring the teams that they individually lead deliver the highest level of performance, through leadership and coaching, to work in the most effective ways with others?
Demonstrating an individual openness to learn and change and an unwillingness to engage in pointless ‘defensive’ behaviours?
Finally, a thought experiment. What would it be like if a Senior Leadership Team was ONLY incentivised by collective bonuses rather than individual ones? How would team performance and behaviours change? Sceptical ? I recently came across a very successful sales team that was incentivised this way. People made sure each other could and did perform
#senior leadership; #executive teams; #governance #top team