In leading down, you cast a shadow, setting the tone for subordinate behaviors, relationships, and outputs. People observe what you do and how you relate. Then, in both subtle and noteworthy ways, they mimic those behaviors.
Likewise, the policies, procedures, and protocols you establish are carried out by people down your chain. If they are clear, collaborative, and transparent, those qualities are replicated in how others carry them out and everyone is better able to work together. Activity aligns to stated objectives. If policies, procedures, and protocols are unclear, conflicted, or ambiguous, then the message extending out to your reports is equally so. For better or worse, this shadow effect cascades down through the organization.
The first step in creating a collaborative environment is setting a tone of collaboration, within your operation as well as with your leadership peers. The openness to working together proliferates, informing interactions as well as policies and protocols. As a meta-leader, you talk the talk and walk the walk. Connectivity becomes the expectation for intra- and interorganizational dealings. This expectation extends to relationships with your customer base. In Chapter 2, we cited the collaborative and supportive tone set by Southwest Airlines executives. That attitude cascades down to flight attendants and gate agents and pervades the passenger experience. Southwest’s day-to-day work and problem-solving are defined by those behaviors and policies. No airline’s performance is always perfect; however, Southwest maintains its collaborative attitude through good times and bad.
By contrast, when leaders set a tone of antagonism and distrust, that likewise is transmitted throughout the organization and beyond. Conflict becomes the expectation for intra- and interorganizational competition. Political posturing and petty battles can erupt. The friction and discord reverberate in relationships with customers, suppliers, and communities. From your traveling experience, contrast Southwest Airlines with some other air carriers whose flight attendants are curt and gate agents are disinterested. Their bad attitudes did not typically start with them. Rather, they are extensions of a shadow spreading a tone of conflict and distrust from above.
As you lead down, you set the conditions for the continued employment and promotion of your subordinates. They want to please you, and they want your acceptance and endorsement. They replicate the behaviors, connections, and performance you model. So too do their subordinates. Be cognizant of the shadow you are casting, what it means for others, and how it affects what your enterprise is or is not doing.
Leading Up
On the flip side, you lead up to your boss. If you’re a middle manager, your boss is likely to have a boss. If you are a top boss, you still have constituents to whom you are accountable: a board of directors, a customer base, an electorate. If you work in a matrix organization, you may have multiple bosses. Though you lead down to many people, you lead up to one or at most only a few. Therefore, those to whom you are accountable loom large in your career and your success. Bosses vary, and so does your relationship with each of them.
You lead up to your boss in many ways. You provide reports and briefings about work for which you are responsible. If you are a subject matter expert, you make recommendations on strategy and operational priorities. If meta-leadership is “People follow you,” through this relationship, your boss may follow you at times, accepting your guidance and direction. When your boss is in the basement and you are the one to help him or her out, you have provided a potentially career-saving leading-up service.
Some bosses are terrific. Bringing contagious passion, motivation, and integrity to the job, these bosses are a delight to work for. They wake up every morning committed to figuring out ways to help make you and your endeavors a success. They are fair, supportive, and encouraging. They provide helpful guidance and make clear the connection between your contributions and the larger mission. A good boss values what you do and wants to hear from you. Unfortunately, this breed of boss is often elusive. And for the most part, you do not get to choose your boss. You adjust to the person who holds the position.
Why do you want connectivity when leading up? The more your boss is a champion for what you hope to accomplish and understands your contribution to the overall objectives of the organization, the better able you are to leverage capacities beyond your specific sphere of authority. Your boss helps make you a success, and you in turn help make your boss a success. The overall enterprise benefits if all are working toward similarly defined success.
The relationship is defined in part by the responsibility and reporting relationship between you and your boss. You do not have authority over your boss; he or she has it over you. However, you can find ways to positively influence that relationship to encourage productive cohesion of effort.
What if you are troubled by something your boss is doing? It could be priorities, behaviors, decisions, or outcomes. Whatever the cause, this is your “truth to power” moment.
You may feel compelled to express a contrary recommendation, voice an objection, or call your boss out on inappropriate activity. Or perhaps you choose not to. This is the most sensitive side of leading up. Your intent should be to open an exchange that strengthens your relationship with your boss, not a confrontation that ends it.
You are careful and thoughtfully diplomatic as you offer your boss contrary advice or criticism. Express your concerns, objections, and alternative opinions prudently, accurately, and respectfully. Consider how your actions and recommendations will alter the situation. Be open to hearing your boss’s rationale. You may be unaware of all that your boss knows, such as other business considerations at play or distinctly personal factors. Watch body language. Work to perceive the situation as accurately as possible and help your boss do the same.
What if an important contractor is paying local officials for favorable treatment? What if the company is shipping substandard products from one market to another with lower regulatory standards? What if you are a governmental subject matter expert and the elected official to whom you lead up is acting irresponsibly during a crisis? What if you discover that your boss is having a romantic relationship with a direct report? These examples are based on actual cases. All such cases have consequences; when possible, you want to ensure that you don’t own them.
When you recognize serious misbehavior, what is your obligation as a follower? If someone is breaking the law, you could be legally complicit if you are obediently compliant. “I was simply following orders” does not grant immunity from moral responsibility or legal prosecution. Honest and morally upright bosses will appreciate your forthrightness, if they respect your motives. Supporting broader purposes is quite different from simply trying to get your own way.
Challenging established power does not always lead to being fired. In fact, it might even be beneficial for your career. It’s all about the approach. If you do it right, you can cultivate legitimacy as someone committed to the larger mission. You say much about yourself and your commitment when you demonstrate the courage to take what could be a risky stand. Your candor could save your boss and your organization from a costly error.
There are some bosses who expect you to keep your reservations to yourself, no matter the circumstances. For this boss, personal loyalty trumps organizational responsibility. If this is your boss, it is critical for you to understand the potential conflict in your predicament: you work for your boss and you have a job to do for the organization. Document your concerns, recommendations, and thinking even if this record goes no further than your files. You may later need a record of what you said and the reaction to it, especially in a situation with legal ramifications.
Deliberating on these issues requires reckoning with your values, your sense of fairness, and your core beliefs. It forces you to ponder what the situation means for you as a subordinate, as a moral being, and as a breadwinner. Speaking truth to power would be easier if your financial welfare and that of your family were not dependent on your job. You may feel compelled to shut up when your fam
ily’s economic security is on the line. This is a powerful and sensitive reason to be concerned, though it cannot be an excuse for ducking necessary decisions, however difficult.
Confronting established power may well take you to the basement. Get yourself up and out. Carefully weigh the options and consequences. Remind yourself of why the truth is significant. Finding and drawing the line—balancing what you believe is important, your relationship with the person you must confront, and the impact on all of the stakeholders—is your responsibility as a meta-leader.
Take what appears to be the best course of action in the long run. Telling the truth as you see and believe it can feel uncomfortable in the short run. Assessing what you did and how you did it becomes far clearer in retrospect, when you can recollect whether you did the right thing given the situation and whether you had the intended effect.
Look first to yourself, Dimension One. Reflect on what sits right with your conscience. Still stuck? In an earlier chapter, we suggested flipping a coin as a way to uncover the pathway your unconscious mind would have you take. Flip the coin and pay attention to your emotional reaction as each option is revealed.
Now reverse the scenario. Reread the last few paragraphs with a boss mind-set. How would you want your subordinates to behave? This exercise may be uncomfortable and take you to the basement. However, if you want subordinates and external contractors who are forthright and transparent, if you prefer to deal with problems when they are in their infancy, and if you value knowing what is really going on, then you must be ready and willing to listen when others speak truth to power to you.
James “Jimmy” Dunne III is the senior managing principal of the investment bank Sandler O’Neill + Partners. You’ll meet him in greater detail in the next chapter. He was clear in his discussions with us about his view on speaking truth to power: “I want bad news to find me fast. I make it widely known that bringing me bad news fast actually puts me in a good mood. It allows me more time to work on solving the problem. Screwing up once will rarely get you fired here, but covering up will every time. Hiding bad news only makes things worse.” This attitude takes strength and courage. When “you’re it,” these are traits you muster and model for those who bring difficult truths into the conversation.
Marc Mathieu enjoys a vibrant career as a marketing strategist. He has worked for several major corporations, including the French food conglomerate Danone; the global beverage-maker Coca-Cola; Unilever, a British-Dutch consumer goods company; and most recently, Samsung, the electronics manufacturer. As an astute and experienced observer of authority and power, he has discerned how to work when you have them—and when you do not.
“In the next ten to twenty years,” he told us, “corporations are going to have to let go of leadership from the top and embrace leadership from the bottom. Mission, vision, and direction come from the top. Energy, ideas, and initiative come from the bottom.” He sees a power shift under way.
“There are two kinds of people: those managing for impact—they are willing to get fired—and those managing for input—they want to feel assured they have a job, so they offer their input only when it is sought and appreciated.”
In one early position, Mathieu was advised that “here, you don’t make life difficult for your bosses.” This organization valued cautious input, not boldness. He survived and thrived there for twelve years by learning that in leading up, he had to accept that he did not get to pick his bosses. He understood that he needed to work with them, not against them.
Over time Mathieu came to believe that, for him, organizational impact was the only alternative. He was willing to go to the mat for his principles. That mind-set, accompanied by energy and drive, does not always blend well into established corporate power structures where bold ideas are suspect. He moved on.
Later in his career, when he was being considered for the corporate marketing role to revive the iconic Coca-Cola brand, he gave his prospective boss two pages of initial thoughts. He laid out ten fundamental beliefs he had about what was important in his work. Strategy and tactics change. Attitudes toward teamwork and the power of an iconic brand do not. Mathieu wanted to make sure that he and his boss were on the same page. If they were not, he didn’t want the job. He was using his power as a desirable candidate and picking his boss. He believes that this is a conversation worth having before taking any new job or agreeing to work for a new boss. Are you clear that your core values about work are in sync with those of your boss?
Simply aligning with the boss, however, may not be enough when your work has impact across a global enterprise: “I was brought in to revitalize the brand icon in part because I am a ‘mischievous revolutionary,’ and I applied revolutionary principles to my work,” Mathieu said. “However, I was not aware enough that revolutionary activities and attitudes alienate institutional power. For future work, I became much more conscious of engaging senior people—not just the boss—and not distancing them.”
For inspiration, Mathieu looks to people who fought for ideals, not power, like Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. “Fighting for ideals galvanizes people and moves them,” Mathieu said. “Fighting for power just serves the leader.”
Mathieu may not fight for power; however, he clearly understands how to work with it. He developed the ability to remain true to himself and be a force for change, using leverage drawn from insightful leading up, perceptiveness about the marketplace, and a deepening commitment to his values.
Leading Across
The third direction of internal organizational connectivity is leading across to other silos and leaders—those who head other divisions, offices, or departments within your organization. These people are outside your chain of command though very much within the scope of your work. You don’t control them and they don’t control you. With them, you may share the same boss and governance structure, that affects all of you. These are compelling reasons to forge that leading across connectivity.
The best organizations amplify what they do by aligning “forces for” to work toward collaboration and productivity. However, when silos are arrayed for battles with one another—for budget, recognition, or authority—the successes of one silo become a “force against” for others. Internally ruthless organizations are less competitive externally because so much of their effort and potential is consumed by internecine rivalries.
Leading across is different from leading beyond because internal levers of authority within an organization can be exercised to mandate coordination of effort. A boss can order middle managers to meet and cooperate (though they have many subtle ways to resist). Even though there is the expectation that people within the same organization are on the same team, the question remains: what is the best way to encourage connectivity of effort between different organizational units? Tools for encouraging connectivity include executive decrees, rewards for collaboration, influence beyond authority, and simple enticements: free pizza offered at a meeting, for example, is a convenient lure to engagement. An informal get-together is a less threatening opening to collaborate that can evolve over time into a more formal cross-organizational endeavor.
Leading across is an intraorganizational Map-Gap-Gives-Gets exercise, as described previously. The meta-leader makes a compelling strategic case for cross-silo connectivity of effort, articulating persuasively the benefits and costs of both doing it and not doing it. In tangible terms, what can be leveraged by combining forces across your enterprise? When different divisions within your organization collaborate, knowledge, assets, and expertise can be shared for the benefit of the whole enterprise. You can point to gaps that create vulnerabilities or missed opportunities. For example, when related government, law enforcement, or intelligence agencies don’t appropriately share critical information about the activities and whereabouts of malicious actors, attacks are likely to increase.
The more complex your organization, the more difficult it is to generate enterprise-wide connectivity of effort. Within
a health care organization, efforts to encourage “population health” require that different caregivers, clinics, and outpatient units coordinate patient information and services. Compared with costly “fee for service” medical care, these “fee for quality” strategies promote healthy alternatives and lower overall health care costs. Getting the different silos of a health care organization to work together, however, requires changes in practices and reward structures. These efforts, spurred by external policy and reimbursement incentives, are often met with deeply engrained internal resistance.
In the corporate sector, aspiring leaders in global enterprises are required to transfer between different functions and regions so that, when they reach top corporate positions, they will better understand the full scope and scale of the company. They will have seen the company’s numerous divisions that link and leverage strategies, operations, and supply chains.
Though integrated cross-silo efforts can be mandated down the command chain, they also require leaders at all levels to leverage the advantages of coordination of effort. Your leading-across objective is get the balance right. Just as there are many strategic advantages to building intraorganizational collaboration of effort, there are potential downsides. These can include endless time spent in committee meetings, a laundry list of sign-offs before anything can get done, or a loss of focus as you try to satisfy too many customers.
Think of leading across as an investment. Establish your expected return on time and effort. Seek balance as you gauge potential collaborators and competitors. Weigh advantages and risks. On one side of the scale is activity, and on the other is productivity. The question is not simply whether there should be connectivity or not. It is better to ask: how can connectivity be organized and oriented to maximize efficiencies (in this case, gaining the most productivity for the least activity)? You meta-lead other organizational stakeholders to focus on shared priorities and ways to leverage capacities that are best achieved through collaborative efforts. You expect to reap benefits out of connectivity. It is not a good in and of itself; rather it is an effort that is both led and managed.
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