In the next two chapters, we delve into two distinct conditions for connectivity: first, in your boss-subordinate relationships that are affected by authority connections, and second, in relationships outside your direct hierarchy, in which formal authority is less relevant.
Questions for Journaling
Across your many leadership activities, how does connectivity vary? What adjustments would you make? How would you actualize those changes?
Take a problem or opportunity you’ve encountered and apply the Map-Gap-Gives-Gets exercise to it. What do you find?
What might you do to improve your personal capacity to optimize connectivity? Are you a natural connector, or is this something for you to work on?
NINE
CONNECTIVITY
Navigating Authority Dynamics
Societies—including nonhuman societies—are arranged in hierarchies. It’s one way individuals make sense of their immediate social surroundings. Think workplace bureaucracies and troops of monkeys in the Amazon. Who sits where in relation to others may be determined by strength, age, knowledge, expertise, formal rank, coolness, or attractiveness. The criteria vary by species, culture, organization, group dynamics, and values, as well as from generation to generation. Ultimately, hierarchy helps people understand both relationships and productivity.
The bulk of the literature frames leadership within formal chains of command, as a top-down arrangement within the confines of the “four walls” of a single organization. The charge to those at the top of this arrangement’s formal chain of command is to raise the productivity, compliance, and conformity of subordinates.
Although important, hierarchical leadership is but one facet of your connectivity development. Particularly in times of change and crisis, much of your leadership activity occurs outside formal chains of command and involves people beyond your authority. You lead also in situations defined more by informal influence than by ranked position and authority. Doing so requires skill and agility, especially when navigating diverse authority and power structures. Recognizing this bigger picture and how to work within it puts the “meta-” in meta-leadership.
As a guide, we break connectivity into four directions: leading down to your direct reports, over whom you have formal authority; leading up to your boss, who has formal authority over you; leading across to other internal stakeholders within your organizational structure; and, as discussed separately in the next chapter, leading beyond to people outside your organization. Aware of all four directions your leadership can take, you emphasize one over the other as the situation demands.
The contours of institutional authority are changing. Societies everywhere are experiencing a transformation of hierarchical relations, the relationship between work and production, and social expectations. Some of this change is generational—older versus younger—and some reflects digital enthusiasm versus analog loyalty. People are more apt now to work remotely or in a shared workspace, and overall, organizations are flatter. It takes an abundance of awareness to traverse these changes and be productive at the same time.
Observe this evolution through your meta-leadership lens. How people worked back then likely does not work as well today. Organizations certainly will be different tomorrow. Not every organization or function evolves in sync. In a tech company, a visionary founder, rich in the “new” skills that spur a high-growth enterprise, may retain the highest rank even though lacking the “old school” experience and expertise to steer the structure and discipline needed in a large company. Ultimately, it is important to get the right person in the right job—someone with all the relationships needed to guide a company’s work and evolution in a productive manner.
Despite changes in how we work, many organizational relationships are still governed by lines of formal authority, ordered communication, and prescribed decision-making structures down, up, and across the institution. Even alternative organizational forms, such as decentralized, self-organizing holacracies, have agreements that delineate who does what. Informal networks and processes also emerge in every organization. Whether the relationships through which you lead are formal or informal, hierarchies arise among the people involved. These hierarchies are revealed by who has more influence, who is more respected, and who has access to important resources. As you observe different people and the effect they have on relationships and decision-making, look for opportunities to forge connectivity and unity of effort that leverages who you are and what you do, together. The answers are dynamic because, as you engage others, the circumstances of your connectivity can change.
Within your organization, whether large or small, authority is embedded in job titles and encoded in the laws, policies, protocols, organizational charts, contracts, and culture that govern what you can and cannot do. There are times you more actively exercise those prerogatives, taking charge, issuing orders, and being the commander. There are also times to more thoroughly encourage the opinions of your followers and engage them in extensive deliberations.
As a meta-leader, you apply the Cone-in-the-Cube metaphor to elicit, integrate, and ultimately connect different perspectives. Each choice, in whatever direction, is geared toward generating productive processes and a positive outcome. You continuously balance obedience and persuasion, speed and inclusiveness, decrees and guidance, authority and influence. In the end you are answerable for the decisions and results that derive from your efforts to better link and leverage work and relationships.
There are checks and balances, such as delineated decision-making authority and rules that ensure consistency and avoid mischief, putting limits on what any one person can do alone. Large organizations are divided into departments, professional groups, offices, or bureaus, each with separate functions that contribute to the operation of the whole. These divisions demarcate who knows what, who can do what, and how decisions are made. One lesson of the #MeToo movement is that, in many organizations, these check-and-balance systems have not worked to ensure employee safety and personal discretion. Male bosses—and to a lesser extent female bosses—have used organizational authority to hide (and in some cases sanction) sexual harassment. It takes tremendous courage, tenacity, and leadership to speak truth to power and, in doing so, elevate accountability, responsibility, and personal security.
The mistake by many executives is to see a report or disclosure of sexual harassment as the crisis. It is not. The harassment itself is the crisis, especially for the person involved. Start by looking through that peephole in the cube. Everything else simply cascades from the original incident. Resolving the first crisis promptly with fairness, firmness, empathy, and transparency makes it possible to deal with the subsequent concerns more effectively. Otherwise, you will create a downward spiral of negative consequences.
Societies are in the midst of the evolution from an industrial to a digital age, with many organizations operating with a mix of the two orientations. The new economy is based on the constant flow of knowledge, goods, services, and funds over digital networks. Consequently, organizations—and the challenges of leading within a chain of command—are shifting. Processes are becoming more dynamic and value chains more complex. Today’s leader is more often a visionary and a sense-maker who connects and collaborates with others to perceive a bigger picture, make things happen, and recalibrate operations in response to fluctuating conditions. Think meta-leader.
Today organizations continue to become ever more complex. Research by David Krackhardt and Jeffrey R. Hanson shows that much work in an organization is accomplished through undocumented shadow networks that people use to circumvent formal channels. Customers, and even competitors, are involved in multiple aspects of your operations. Markets and the news move in milliseconds. Innovation and agility are prized. Outsourcing and strategic alliances are common.
As a leader, you rely on people and entities you don’t fully control to do work whose complex technology you may not fully comprehend. You assess when to deploy a tightly control
led, linear process and when to rely on emergent self-organization. You learn to become comfortable with independent decision-making by your subordinates. You hope for the same from your boss.
Part of your job is to focus on enabling others to solve problems. As a present-day meta-leader, you take a more nuanced view of authority and you exercise it more nimbly. And here again we see that influence, even within formal organizational structures, is more robust than authority for solving multifaceted challenges.
Leading Down
“Leading down” through a chain of command describes your role as boss. If you founded your business or enterprise, you are the boss because you got the operation off the ground. Most bosses, however, are given the job by someone else.
As your leadership career advances, you are likely to find that with each promotion, more and more people are calling you the boss. Eventually, your direct reports supervise their own subordinates. Your administrative span swells as your responsibilities and the scope of your work expand. You may ultimately lead hundreds or even thousands of people further down in the hierarchy. Your expanding responsibility offers you the opportunity to realize significant impact. Your workforce becomes a force multiplier for what you hope to accomplish.
There are many different types of bosses: great ones, lousy ones, and every kind in between. There are laissez-faire bosses and taskmasters. Some bosses are concerned only about the next promotion, and others do little more than play defense in the hope of retaining their current position.
As boss, you develop a style and a strategy for leading subordinates based on your personality, training, experience, lessons learned from previous bosses, and instructions given from above: the CEO, the board of directors, and the larger milieu in which you operate. Ultimately, however, you choose the type of boss you will become through the decisions you make over time.
People follow you. In an ideal world, you handpick your team to ensure that they possess the skills and attitudes that make your leadership job gratifying. They grasp organizational priorities, are committed to the mission, offer new ideas and abundant energy, and embrace even the thankless though necessary jobs along the way. Few bosses, however, have such a perfect array of subordinates. In any existing organization, you inherit at least part of your team as well as the legacy culture. You play the hand you are dealt.
One goal of your meta-leadership is encouraging connectivity as you lead down, building and developing your team to reach their full potential. As a meta-leader, you ask: How can I link and leverage the work we are doing to make it most productive and fulfilling for my stakeholders? How can I help make each member of my team a success—given each individual’s unique capabilities—and then make us a success together? How do I support my reports in their work, providing appropriate independence, intervening when necessary, and letting them make mistakes that are in the realm of the reasonable? How do I best reward their productivity and support them when things go wrong?
Your job is to demonstrate to your subordinates that you value and appreciate the work they do, both individually and collectively. In so doing, you encourage each of them to value and appreciate what they are doing together and the distinctive contributions of each member of the team. You all do more because there is greater satisfaction and success in getting it done together. You shape your team.
Eric McNulty has held numerous supervisory positions. One of those positions was leading an in-house creative services group within a much larger organization. Morale was low when he started in his position, thanks to unrelenting pressure to produce more in less time. Employees had to bill their hours to internal clients, who were in turn rewarded for keeping company costs low. Given the overhead of a large organization, the in-house rates were higher than those of the outside freelance alternatives against whom Eric’s group had to compete. It was hard to win at this game.
The team received little recognition within the company. It was their clients who got the accolades, because the organization rewarded revenue and profit, not the collateral work that helped generate that income.
The unit’s survival depended on producing high-quality work for its clients, and that objective required attracting and retaining talented designers. These designers were a small but critical component of the larger unit. When one of Eric’s most creative and productive people threatened to resign after a frustrating client encounter, he went to the basement. If Eric couldn’t craft a compelling vision that reframed the situation for his subordinates and satisfied their clients, they all would soon be looking for jobs.
Eric could have griped to his superiors and fought for more internal acknowledgment. He knew, however, that any such recognition would feel forced and wouldn’t do much to bolster his team. In this case, there was a clear hierarchy within the company: revenue-generating business units were on top and support units were underneath them, a situation that was unlikely to change. Eric had to lead down with what resources and ideas he had because of his limited options for leading up. He took a two-pronged approach to improving the morale and motivation of his followers.
First, he carved out a small budget to enter the team’s work in external design award competitions. His group would contend against outside freelancers, advertising agencies, and design firms. They entered only contests whose judging criteria included the results achieved. This made for a solid business case for entering these competitions.
There were plenty of benefits: his people and their work were judged against their peers, free of company politics, and when they won—as they did several times—the team felt triumphant. Winning was also good for the designers’ careers; entering their work in these competitions showed that Eric cared about their next steps, whether in the company or elsewhere. In the meantime, their internal clients—their colleagues—could share in the glory. It won the team much-needed credibility that helped build relationships that went beyond billable hours and deadlines. As a result, they were seen differently within the organization.
The second part of his new approach was an unorthodox but intriguing attempt to shift the mind-set of the group and build the self-confidence of its members. Eric introduced the metaphor of the character actor—the performer who does consistently great work without getting top billing. The group talked about deriving satisfaction simply from a job well done. They discussed the importance of craft. They shared how gratifying it was to be highly regarded by one’s collaborators. They began to develop confidence based on how good they knew they were, not on how many accolades they got in the company newsletter.
As the group explored this idea, the actor Brian Dennehy surfaced as someone they had all enjoyed in one role or another. Dennehy, it turned out, was taking a star turn as the lead in Death of a Salesman on Broadway. Eric decided to take the group from Boston to New York to see the production. He also wrote to Dennehy, explained the mission, and asked if he would meet the team after the performance. Remarkably, the actor agreed.
“It was a great day for the entire team,” McNulty recalled. “I decided that the company would contribute the day off, but each person would pay for their own ticket to the show and their share of the van rental to New York. Dennehy was brilliant as Willy Loman in the play. Every person was moved by his performance. And then, to spend a few minutes backstage with him was a treat for everyone. He was exhausted from the show but shared fascinating insights about acting.
“It bonded us as a team and brought to life the idea that satisfaction comes first from within. It cemented the culture of the group as one where we would value each other’s contributions. The excursion was also a bit of an outlaw adventure, as I did not get official sanction for the trip. It gave me ‘boss credibility’ as someone who would take a risk to support my people.”
Entering his team’s design work in competitions and taking them to see a Broadway show weren’t just examples of leading down with authority. They also exemplified Eric’s meta-leadership. He leveraged limited authority to help
the team develop a new attitude toward what they were doing. As a result, they struck a new balance both with each other and with the company. Productivity rose along with the satisfaction that comes from being on a team of people—including the boss—who value and care for one another.
The most troubling predicament faced in leading down is the subordinate who is intentionally disruptive, inappropriate, ineffective, or acting without integrity. It happens. Ultimately, you as boss are responsible. You work within the framework of your organizational authority. There are procedures and contractual agreements to follow, including notifications, documentation, and grievance processes.
After a thorough and fair review, you decide that the reasonable choice is to terminate this individual’s employment. Remember that you are judged by more than what occurs with just one employee alone. All your other employees are watching to see how you respond, as are your boss and colleagues. Have you been just and sensible? Or rash and volatile? Have you perceived the problems in a timely manner and with reasonable clarity? How have your actions with one employee affected your relations with others? Are they relieved to see the troublemaker go, or are they feeling more vulnerable and wondering if they may be the next to go? Remember, you demonstrate your character, values, and priorities in how you respond to this situation.
In the good times, you reveal much in how you conduct yourself with your reports. You also do so in bad times, when you need to pay even greater attention to your actions. Everything you do affects the morale and productivity of those who report up to you.
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