Just Seven Things

Is Traditional Corporate Leadership Fundamentally Flawed?

Pyramid Restoration by Dyoptria

I was struck today with the thought that the traditional corporate structure has a fundamental flaw. This flaw relates to its ability to harness the power of its peoples’ ideas.

I may be wrong, but it seems that the traditional corporate structure is predicated on the workers doing the doing, the managers doing the managing and the CEO/ Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) (with Board consultation and expenditure on consultants) doing the thinking.

The flaw for me is that unless the CEO/ CSO spends time directly talking to the people doing the doing, they’ll only ever be hearing from the managers managing the same thing they’ve always managed (with the expected change/ transformation that all corporates go through)

Where are the structures for the CEO to actively ask the questions of the people who perform the company’s activities and (arguably) are the best people to advise on how things are done better?

Is bringing in a firm of consultants to ask your staff for the answers the best investment of shareholder funds? Will the consultants end up filtering the message to what they ‘corporately anticipate’ the Board want to hear? I do not (totally) mean to be unfair to consultants in this in terms of their value add and business model in strategic decision-making – thinking independently is always of benefit.

Further to this, I believe that the aggregation of the average messages or required actions is also a structural flaw. If you seek to hear the ‘noise’ of an issue and prioritise action/ change on that basis, you’re by definition missing the silent issues or improvement opportunities. It does not bear testing to assume that in a sophisticated organisation of client or process focused roles that any broader ‘noise’ can be heard past questioning the lowest levels of the organisation.

I run recurring six monthly reviews with every member of the company (granted only 75 now: scale will require solutions). We spend half an hour and I ask them whether, beyond things that they’re working on with their line manager, there are things that I could enable or effect change on that would increase their happiness/ role enjoyment/ enjoyment of the company. Even in a situation where they are completely happy, I push them on how I could make them even happier. I also take the whole team away every six months and similarly we work up (and on) the things that we should be stopping, starting or continuing. My senior managers are not involved in guiding these conversations. Just facilitating.

As you would expect from the tone of the rest of this post, the stuff that they come up with is brilliant. I end up with pages worth of actions. And why? Because each of them has time whilst doing their job to think about how they could improve the activities of the company that they are undertaking. Managers think about how they can get better managing. So in act the CEO and the front line team are the ones that should be having the regular 121 conversations.

…but how to practically do this?