HRDConnect: Social Leadership in the Pandemic

My latest article in HRD Connect builds on some previous posts on social leadership, and my CoLab at the HRDSummit back in February:

"As the working world changes, so too does the nature of working itself. HRD Thought Leader Jon Ingham explores this further, supposing that organisations now have an opportunity to shift their approach to leadership and explore more project-based, distributed methods of working."

Jon Ingham
 

More about me:

@joningham, http://linkedin.com/in/joningham 
info@joningham.com, +44 7904 185134

Top 100 HR Tech Influencer - Human Resources Executive 
HRD Thought Leader - HRD Connect
Mover and Shaker - HR magazine

Also develop your Strategic HCM capabilities at my new Strategic HR Academy

HR LEADer Summit

I'll be speaking at the HR LEADer Summit the day after the Innovation one, on the 15th May.

"HR departments are faced with tremendous changes in the industry due to the rapidly developing situation in the world with COVID-19 pandemic. In the many organizations the value system is undergoing tremendous changes with the way employees interact, stay motivated, and adapt to the technology. These days HR leaders are expected to be able to implement the external changes into the internal transformation.

It's time to get focused on the areas you need help with."

You can get a free pass for this summit too.

Jon Ingham
 

@joningham, http://linkedin.com/in/joningham

info@joningham.com, +44 7904 185134

Top 100 HR Tech Influencer - Human Resources Executive

Mover and Shaker - HR magazine

HRD Connect: Does your Function need a Meeting

I’ve been writing on Linkedin about other ways of organising and the need to shift focus from vertical hierarchies to eg horizontal teams. Doing this offers a lot of benefits in terms of increased effectiveness and efficiency.

However, it’s not even always necessary to shift focus in order to gain these benefits. Sometimes simply understanding the current focus is enough. Eg to realise that when we do have vertical hierarchies that we don’t have to treat groupings of people working at the same level and for the same manager like horizontal teams!

I’ve written about this in the context of functional ‘team’ meetings at HRD Connect.

Jon Ingham
 

@joningham, http://linkedin.com/in/joningham
info@joningham.com, +44 7904 185134

Top 100 HR Tech Influencer - Human Resources Executive
Mover and Shaker - HR magazine

HRD Summit CoLab on Social Leadership

I facilitated a colab on social leadership at the recent HRD Summit in Birmingham, UK.

Their colabs are supposed to be a workshop type event co-developing new insight on a topic, although I think many of these were quite presentational. And I did deliver a short, 20 minute presentation in mine too:

I explained that I think social leadership needs to change because traditional ways of leading of losing traction, and also because the urgency of change is now increasing too.

Photo credit: Cheryl Allen

However, the rest of the hour long session was focused on thinking though how social leadership differs from traditional leadership, and in particular, how it changes across each of the organisational groups I refer to in The Social Organization and my recent articles on this.

I'll be posting on the insights shared by participants later in the month.

Jon Ingham
 

@joningham, http://linkedin.com/in/joningham
info@joningham.com, +44 7904 185134

Top 100 HR Tech Influencer - Human Resources Executive
Mover and Shaker - HR magazine

HRD Live Podcast on Strategic Leadership

I facilitated this podcast on 'What makes true Strategic Leadership?' earlier this week, together with Mark Bouch from Leading Change and Cath Bailey, HRD at Avon - both also speakers at next year's HRD Summit in Birmingham at the start of February.

I thought it went well - have a listen and let me know what you think.

https://www.hrdconnect.com/2019/11/14/what-makes-true-strategic-leadership-hrd-live-podcast-with-jon-ingham-cath-bailey-and-mark-bouch/


Oh, and if you want to come to the Summit as my guest, let me know about that too.


Jon Ingham
@joningham, http://linkedin.com/in/joningham
info@joningham.com, +44 7904 185134
Top 100 HR Tech Influencer - Human Resources Executive
Mover and Shaker - HR magazine

Social Leadership CoLab HRD Summit 2020

I'll be running a session at the next HRD Summit in Birmingham on 3 and 4 February 2020.

My session is a CoLab (collaborative solution focused discussion) on Social Leadership: 

Social Leadership

Social Leadership: A leadership style the focuses on the development of groups and networks, rather than just individuals working in functions. 

Many businesses are making more use of horizontal teams (process, project, agile, etc.); communities and networks. Some organisations have all of these in place at once. The requirements for leading each of these differ, yet so far there has been little thinking about how leaders need to act differently, firstly, from the traditional focus on leading individuals, and secondly, across each type of group, e.g. in leading a community compared to leading a project team.

In addition, leaders may be leading different groups at the same time, so how can they develop the dexterity to change styles and approaches across the different groups they participate in? 

This CoLab will explore the ways leaders can be supported in growing their social leadership capabilities.

Tuesday 4th February 2020

14:00 - 15:00

See this post for more explanation too.

Hope to see you there, and let me know if you're after a guest pass (senior, strategic HR practitioners only).

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Social Leadership panel, plus Linda Hill and Julian Stodd

I participated in a panel at Symposium's Talent and Leadership Development conference earlier this month. The panel was on social leadership, which I thought was an interesting though rather surprising topic to be discussed in this sort of form. And I was even more surprised when the conference chair opened the session by suggesting that social leadership was an increasingly topical term.

However, I was pleased by the suggestion and do believe that social leadership is something we should be talking about, although I'm still not sure that many people are.

If it is a topical term, then this must be mainly due to the efforts of Julian Stodd, author of the Social Leadership Handbook, as well as various other linked publications and his blog. 

For Julian, social learning and leadership are required responses to the current Social Age, enabled by digital technology. I disagree with Julian on quite a bit of this. I don't think social collaborative technologies are a key part of social leadership, though they are certainly part of the reason that social leadership is needed. But leadership needs to be social however it's done, the technologies are just tools to help do it.

I also don't agree that social leadership subverts hierarchy. Hierarchical leadership isn't going to go away (neither are work, jobs or careers) and needs to be social as well.

And I don't agree that women are going to continue to earn less than men in the Social Age. I deal with this in The Social Organization. Social leadership is very much based on traits traditionally linked to women. This doesn't mean than men can't learn and demonstrate them, but it's often not the most natural way for many incompetent men to behave. The future belongs to socially competent women, and a few men, and rewards are going to shift to what's really important in this new world (I talked about this in my reward presentation in California too).

I'm also much more positive about HR!

But I do love Julian's key ideas about social leadership, eg that it is "authentic, grounded and free to anyone to develop, adapt and share. The starting point is 'How can I help you succeed?, not 'How can I get you to do...?'" And that humility sits at the heart of it. I also love the way that Julian acts as a social leader personally too. I may be an influencer / mover and shaker, and this can only be based on personal rather than positional influence (since I don't have a traditional position). But it's also achieved in rather traditional and perhaps rather egocentric, rather than more modern or social ways. I believe social leadership is important but I'm not putting myself forward as a role model of a social leader!

However, social leadership is something which is now being talked about by other people, even if they don't use the term. For example, at the California HR conference at the end of August, where I was speaking about reward innovation, my favourite session was from Linda Hill, author of Collective Genius. Linda spoke about leading innovation, but explained that this is about encouraging creative abrasion - a diversity of often competing and conflicting ideas; creative agility - testing ideas eg through design thinking by getting closer to the people you're designing for; and creative resolution - effective decision making vs either compromise or domination. So this is social leadership too.

I agreed with Linda's points, though I thought a lot of this was about organisation, not about leadership. Leaders need to ensure that the right organisation architecture is in place, but they don't necessarily need to design that architecture - this is a specialist competency and responsibility. What leaders need to do is to lead their people, and increasingly the networks between their people. This is the social bit. So I was pleased that Linda also recommended HR helping executives understand the network side of what they do.

However, this shouldn't just be about leaders' own personal, ego networks, which were the focus of Linda's presentation. It needs to extend to the development of broader organisational (and ecosystem) networks too. 

It also needs to extend to leaders' ability to form the right relationships and have effective conversations too. Linda referred to Boris Groysberg's work on leadership as a conversation which I think is great too.

But in my Symposium panel, I suggested that the role of leaders is also more complex than this. Firstly, leadership needs to be much more distributed than it is now. We do need everyone in any organisation to be a leader.

In addition, leaders need to lead all the various groups I refer to in The Social Organization. These include the teams doing the work of the organisation (especially when these are horizontal teams, not just groupings of individuals working in functions); communities of people relating with each other (I think communities can take a broader role than Julian); and the broader, more distributed networks of connections across the organisation. Innovation needs all of these to play an effective role (see Michael Arena, Adaptive Space) so leaders need to lead in each of these spaces too.

The main issue, which I describe in The Social Organization, is that leaders today tend to lose empathy as they rise up the organisational hierarchy (see, for example, Adam Galinsky, Friend & Foe). Is this because we promote and select the wrong people into leadership positions? (yes) Or because increasing power corrupts the people working in leadership positions? (yes as well) Either way, the move towards teams, communities and networks should help reduce the focus on hierarchy which is more evident and impactful in traditional functions.

But at the moment, there's not enough focus on helping executives, and others, develop empathy and humility, plus intimacy, interactivity, inclusion and intentionality, and create and support personal and organisational networks, and harness these in an increasingly varied set of organisational groups. So there are example of organisations that are doing great things in all the aspects of social leadership I've mentioned. And I was very impressed with the stories my co-panelists, Aimee Badcock at Philips and Robert Ritchie at Salford University, were sharing.

But I don't yet know of any companies which have completely transformed their approach to leadership development to do everything I've just listed here (eg differentiating leadership of communities from leadership of horizontal teams). And it is this which I think is now required as an effective response to the Social Age.

I've been doing more work with leadership teams on this agenda recently and do contact me if you want to know more:

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Overall Reflections on Creating Inspirational Business from WOBI

I really enjoyed WOBI (World of Business Ideas) last week, and it's definitely had me thinking. I don't think I've changed my mind on anything, but I've connected a few things together a bit differently.

So what were my main insights? Firstly, that there wasn't a lot of focus around the conference's non-social media tagline, Exponential. I might go for something like Inspirational. I'm not saying it was, though I wouldn't say it wasn't, but I'm not one of those who look for inspiration from speakers, I look for insight. But there was a lot of focus on running business in a way that will inspire employees (Hamel, David, Sinek and SMR Covey) customers (Lindstrom) and society (Porter).

So how do you create an inspirational business and / or organisation? Well, I think in a number of ways Hamel got very close. I do think becoming more human is the key. I just don't agree that eliminating bureaucracy, especially managers and management layers, is the main way to achieve this. Managers do add costs and layers do make businesses inefficient, but they're not the biggest thing to point at. Using Porter's ideas they're part of operational effectiveness or execution, they don't impact strategy. Using my terminology, they're value for money, not adding or creating value.

Layers are becoming more important with an increasing focus on being more human, and on employee experience, etc. And I accept that if you were to design an organisation just to develop a compelling experience, you probably wouldn't invent hierarchy to do it. But hierarchy doesn't really get in the way of experience that much. I don't agree with Hamel that being 8 layers down in an organisation feels like being buried under the other 7. I accept that organisational life is often awful and we do need to be more ambitious the way we sort that. But do we really need to start with layers to do that. In my view, not so much. For one thing, hierarchy provides some really useful benefits that it's still difficult to provide as easily through other means. Eg I thought Porter made a very good case for a hierarchical aspect to strategy in our interview.

I'm absolutely not saying that we don't need to redesign our organisations. As Hamel says, our business models have changed but our organisation models haven't done so to anything like the same extent. They now need to do so. That's why I think the opportunity of applying Porter's thinking about business strategy to our organisations is so important.

I loved the way he described this in our interview: "Competition is about what you actually do in the marketplace to achieve value for the customer. Then you back up and that’s where the resources are. There is a cause and effect. We can keep on going further and further back up, keep going upstream to look at cause and causes. Supporting every piece of the value chain there’s another value chain like activity which are the steps you take to get there. And as get more about insight about management we have more insight into what some of those things are. What’s helpful is that we’re getting up the causal chain. Business strategy is about what you do in the marketplace but how you get to doing that is a fascinating question. That’s why I’m interested in the dynamic view of strategy."

We need to start thinking about creating unique and differentiated organisational strategies by developing best fit activities in the organisation value chain. These activities then need to provide the right outcomes which will add and create value for the business. Porter seemed to agree with this perspective too, saying: "if they’re good resources they can be an advantage, part of doing it better."

 

But as well as what our organisation needs to provide, we also need to think about how it is going to do this. So Hamel is absolutely right in suggesting that we need to set clear organisation principles. These provide an additional driver for our organisation design.

And because employees are now more important we need to include their expectations as the third main driver, so that we don't just end up trying to make horrible organisations less awful for people through things like journey mapping (putting experience lipstick on a nasty pig). Or, and this may be the one change I have come away with, we introduce more of a shared value perspective by focusing on societal expectations here.

If these three objectives indicate that we need to reduce hierarchy then so be it, but in my experience that's not the main result most of the time. What I think is a more common result is that we align our organisational groups with the business that needs to get done, including through the use of horizontal teams, networks and, as Hamel mentioned, communities. Doing this ensures that people can get their work done easily and provides a much better basis for their engagement than worrying about bureaucracy.

I think the above steps need to take place before we do anything else, but they're not the most important thing. Hierarchical thinking is a bigger problem than hierarchical structure. And sorting this is about developing David's emotional agility, Sinek's infinite game or Covey's trust and inspiration. Which could of course be principles for  the organisation design. Or simply deeply embedded leadership behaviours getting people to act differently and to provide time and attention for themselves and each other. My worry is that this is difficult to achieve unless you've got the right organisation in place first, so again, I think redesigning the organisation is the most urgent thing. But then you can move on to the most important (I admit I was inspired by SMR Covey's father) and ensure people are acting in a human way in the newly human organisation. (In The Social Organization I call this these the organisational society and architecture).

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Digital HR Summit: New Leadership Competencies

My second session at the Digital HR Summit is with Jennifer Jordan from IMD on leadership competencies in the new digital world.

Virtual teams can work better than face to face, but don’t have the same opportunities for knowledge sharing, so leading these teams is a challenge

Power is more distributed so leaders need to be better at working in the open

We need to get out of our comfort zones eg moving from being a functional expert

Leaders don’t need to know digital technology procedurally but be savvy enough to know what is possible, and be able to build a network around it.

 

Leadership was all about the individual but now is all about the network they create around them, so they pull in other people’s technical expertise, and be mentored by others from across the organisation.

This means the new competencies include connecting with other, facilitation skills, etc. In my discussion group we talked about the more digital the environment, the more important our human and relational skills become (why in The Social Organization I write about knowledge workers becoming relationship workers).

Also balancing data with gut insight (my ‘wisdom artist’ point again).

 

Specific competencies in IMD's model include:

Humility and self awareness (learning from experience, and especially failure)
 

Adaptability and comfort with uncertainty (being both opinionated and adaptable)
 

Visionary (having and being able to sell and emotionally influence or persuade people around this; simplifying; learning, building and measuring in a scrum type way, outside of software design)
 

Engaged (being in an ongoing listening mode).
 

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Book Review: Incompetent Men Leaders

I love Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic’s new book, ‘Why do so many Incompetent Men become Leaders’. Actually, I was already sold before even opening it, as I’ve long thought the skills and attitudes required for today’s leaders are more likely to be held by women than men. In ‘The Social Organization’ I note that I personally expect to see a fairly rapid reversal in the pay gap and that we will soon need to start thinking about how we keep men’s pay at something close to that received by women. (I also suggest that we should expect to see business start to look and feel a lot more like HR, and for similar reasons, that we don’t have to worry about dressing up ‘soft skills’ as something more masculine.)

But there’s plenty of additional thinking and evidence around women’s leadership roles in TCP’s book.

Firstly, I do agree that we’re starting from a very low base. TCP notes that most people would struggle to name one famous business leader - other than Siri and Alexa apparently! (and isn’t it interesting that the deepest thinking business AI, Watson, is named after a man).

I also agree that we’re misinterpreting the traits we need in leaders today (that’s my argument in TSO too). We miss negatives like overconfidence and self-absorption or misread them as something like charisma. And we don’t realise that whilst women are busy developing others, men are focusing on advancing their own careers. “The result is a pathological system that rewards men for their incompetence while punishing women for their competence.”

TCP singles out two clear problems which all affect men most - narcissism and psychopathy.

However, there are more nuanced issues too. In particular, we assume confidence indicates competence. I’m rather conflicted on this. I tend to think that confidence, and even over confidence helps, not just to get a job but to do that job too. It expands opportunities, allowing people to take on more projects and get more experience, and in a range of situations helps them to perform better too. Eg TCP notes that overconfident CEOs can often attract more suppliers and investors and their firms have lower employee turnover. Their aura of success creates a new reality around the because people believe in them. Well, that’s OK - that’s largely what leadership is about. TCP’s examples of dentists and airplane pilots don’t really relate here. I’m not fussed at all about my dentist’s confidence levels, but I don’t want a nervous CEO. And yes, overconfidence may just hide insecurity, but I think we all suffer from imposter syndrome to a large extent. And projecting confidence makes us feel more confident internally too. It’s often a good thing when we’re more confident than our actual competence would suggest.

TCP also takes a swipe at Brexit, suggesting that David Cameron suffered from a typically masculine over confidence in his ability to gain a stay vote in the referendum. Actually, I think that was fine - I believe in democracy and he gave the country a chance to say what it wanted. But since the referendum we’re suffered from a crisis of under confidence, with Theresa May capitulating to the EU (eg not arguing forcefully for the need to discuss withdrawal and future trade agreement together which could have negated the need for a backstop) and being unwilling to promote and argue for a direction in her cabinet, government or parliament, rather than just bunkering down and waiting for time to run out. Personally I’d have preferred Cameron, or even Boris Johnson, or possibly even Donald Trump to run the negotiations. Or Andrea Leadsome, Penny Mordaunt, or Liz Truss. Or, of course, Margaret Thatcher. (Please note I’m not a fan of Donald Trump but I suspect that in this particular case, he might have achieved a better outcome for the UK than Theresa May. Though it’s interesting that whilst TCP seems very careful in stating he is not calling Elon Musk a narcissist, he doesn’t bother flagging this in his discussions on Donald Trump. Or Steve Jobs, or especially Vladimir Putin and Silvio Berlusconi.)

Possible TCP’s best argument on over confidence is that whilst men often only need to appear confident to succeed, women have to confident, competent and caring. In fact, we can be put off confident women - just as we can by friendly, empathetic and agreeable men. But that just means we need to be more robust about applying the right criteria, and consistently selecting people against them.

We also need to ensure that confidence is complemented by competence, which can be difficult to assess, and can often be confused with having had good luck. So we also need good feedback, and not just on our strengths. “In fact, negative feedback - feedback that highlights a deficit in potential or performance - is the most useful type.” TCP also criticises the recent trend to eliminate negative comments from performance reviews. “This trend turns the performance review into a futile exercise ingratiation where the best that employees can hope for is the ability to read between the lines to gauge what their managers want from them.”

However, for feedback to work, we also need to ensure people are aware of their weaknesses and have a realistic sense of their limitations.  So we also need to select for self-awareness, especially as experts and clueless people often have simile self perceptions of their abilities.”The most inept individuals will also make the last accurate evaluations of their talents, grossly overestimating where they stack up against their peers. Meanwhile, the most competent people will exhibit much self-criticism and self-doubt, especially relative to their expertise.” (The graph is from TCP’s presentation at AHRI last time I was speaking there.) Once again, I’m a bit conflicted on this. Eg I think our tendency to enhance our egos rather than accept a brutal reality check is generally a positive characteristic (especially as so much of how people see our performance will be distorted anyway), though this can obviously be overdone.

So, for me, we should continue to fake it till we make it, and in fact I often work with (mainly women) HR groups to get better at this.…

The book also includes an interesting chapter on charisma, which I’m not going to review as I’ve already gone on long enough, but I draw a similar conclusion to the above - we need to avoid confusing charisma for broader leadership performance, but again, charisma is a generally useful thing. TCP notes companies with charismatic CEOs often have inflated market values - that’s not a basis for sustainable success, but it’s a nice enabler. And he also suggests charisma often links with being highly connected within the organisational network, which again is a very positive enabler for leadership roles (see notes on organisational networks in ‘The Social Organization’). We just need to assess connection, not use ‘charisma’ as a sloppy substitute.

There are some other interesting sections in the book too, eg suggestions all of with which I agree that potential is more important than talent, and on the importance of intellectual capital, and especially social capital - which I think should also be seen as an important aspect of leadership potential. And also on the link of leadership to culture - “There is as much variability in groups’ and organisations’ cultures as there is in individuals’ values.”

Putting all of this together, TCP recommends that we focus less on diversity programmes aimed at placing more women at the top of business and instead change the competencies we use, which will have the supplementary benefit of selecting more women.

I don’t go that far - I think diversity programmes are really helpful and deserve a key place. I do agree though that their purpose shouldn’t be to help women emulate men - eg I’ve never thought ‘Lean In’ was a particularly good idea. (TCP seems to suggest this may have contributed to a rise in narcisstic women.)

 
Importantly, this isn’t about training leaders - some characteristics like leadership are hard to change, and leadership development isn’t working (see another slide from AHRI). “Bad leaders are unlikely to turn into talented, inspirational, or high performing leaders”. Good coaching does work, but I still think TCP is right to emphasise the need to select leaders based on appropriate criteria that treat confidence and charisma with care, and especially don’t favour narcissists and psychopaths. And formal assessment mechanisms which assess people appropriately against these criteria.

Or, as I often summarise it, we should never recruit or promote anyone into leadership unless they are interested in people, and competent and committed to lead them.

This may require organisation changes too. My favourite option in many firms is a dual career stream.

If not this, there are increasing opportunities for self management. Or we should get people to vote for their own leaders (more simply, project based organisations may be able to allow people to just select their own individual line managers).

If these options don’t work, I think the time may be coming for HR to take over and start to line manage everyone in the business, allowing incompetent men (and women) just to manage the performance of these people on projects. Since HR is mainly populated by women, that might be another way of getting more competent women into leadership positions too?

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