This article was originally published in Leadership EDGE Journal
Does a modern world need a modern leadership approach?
The world has changed since the mills and production lines of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Danny Wareham asks if it’s time for our view of leadership to potentially change, too.
It might surprise you to learn that the study of leadership is a relatively new field. Though we have always had leaders, leadership didn’t appear as a dictionary definition until 1821, and the first academic research wasn’t considered until the middle of the 19th century.
From those early studies through to today, a leader has always been a person. The discussion then focuses around whether it’s the traits and attributes (Great Man and Behavioural Styles theories), the context and situation (Situational and Contingency theories), or the relationships between leaders and followers (Transformational and Leader-Member Exchange theories) – or some combination – that creates the leader.
These models developed alongside the textile mills of the 19th century and the production lines of the 20th. In these contexts, hierarchy was the norm and organisational design was simple and linear.
However, today’s matrixed organisations are complex, with individuals potentially operating via multiple accountabilities and reporting lines. Given the range of responsibilities, challenges and pressures facing contemporary leaders, locating all required attributes, for all situations, all contexts and for all followers within a single individual is unrealistic.
This has moved research towards ideas of shared or distributed leadership. In these approaches, leadership is external to the group, usually via a governance team, with group members then having some level of autonomy.
This approach is used within some educational settings in the UK, where several schools might be grouped together to form an Academy. Whilst an Academy has governance from a Board or local authority, who identify overall goals and budgets, the individual schools control how the budgets and approaches are applied locally.
A more familiar example might be an Agile project. The overall objectives are managed by a Product Manager, whilst a Scrum Master is positioned within the Sprint Team. The Sprint members have autonomy in how the goals are prioritised and achieved, within the confines of the methodology and the externally managed objectives.
This whistlestop brings us broadly up to date with the history of leadership theories – of which there are many. (In 1974, leadership author Ralph Stogdill claimed that “there are almost as many different definitions of leadership as there are persons who have attempted to define the concept”. Consider how many more models have been added since then.)
These theories might seem varied. But they share three commonalities:
- The leader has always been a person;
- The leader defines the destination (i.e., vision); and
- The leader influences how we get things done (i.e., culture)
If the direction is clear, and the rules (both implicit and explicit) of ‘how we get things done around here’ are understood by group members, this offers an intriguing question: Does a leader need to be a person?
This might sound fantastical. But there are real world examples of high-performing, self-organising groups, driven by a shared goal and common rules of engagement.
For example, if an earthquake occurs, the purpose becomes clear for all; we must save lives. We might find physically fit individuals are the first to start moving rubble and rescuing people. Well-connected individuals might be on their phones, arranging emergency help. Medically trained individuals would be tending to the injured.
No one has organised this. There’s no traditional leader providing mission statements or direction. Everyone understands what needs to be accomplished, and everyone knows how they can best contribute towards that shared objective – and, importantly, have permission to do so.
It’s not leader-less. The leadership role is no longer a person; culture and a shared goal orientates the team, its approaches, decision making, and behaviours. Culture has become the leader.
This is the basis of Constellation Leadership – a newly-proposed and academically-researched model, unveiled at Leadership Live.
In Constellation Leadership, each professional is an expert – a star – in their own right, surrounded by other professional stars. How do we create dynamic networks of the appropriate groups of stars – constellations – to achieve a specific goal?
If we revisit the example of an Agile project, we can see parallels between the leadership approach in the semi-distributed Sprint and Constellation Leadership. Under what conditions could the Scrum Master (leader) be removed from the Sprint process and performance would be either unaffected or would improve? (Figure 1 & 2)
The study interviewed Agile practitioners from a variety of backgrounds, industries and experience levels, across civilian and non-civilian participants to test the model, focusing on three main aspects within an Agile Sprint:
- What does success mean to team members?
- What are the preferred leadership approaches?
- Could the Scrum Master be removed from a Sprint without detriment to performance?
The first research finding was that the perceived competency of individuals within the team affected both the requested leadership style and the measures of success (figure 3). With lower experience, short-term, transactional success measures and directive approaches were the norm.
Participants prioritised clearing the project to-do list (the backlog in Agile) and delivering on-time as priorities. In experienced groups, the quality of the work handed over to the next stage and the team’s shared learnings were viewed as successes.
Leadership approaches followed a similar position. Low experience correlated with directive or instructional requirement; High experience participants preferred an autonomous, hands-off approach to leadership (Figure 4).
The more experienced individuals are perceived within a team, the more likely that the team unit will value learning together and delivering quality autonomously over a directive leadership approach focusing on volume of work items.
There was an outlier to this data: non-civilians. For participants operating in military contexts, experience or perceived competency didn’t significantly impact the likelihood of success.
There’s a perceived acceptance that everyone is already an expert and that a group member can trust that they will perform when called upon (Figure 5). As one interviewee stated, “If we’re on a mission and I get ‘slotted’, the mission doesn’t stop. Everyone steps up and performs.”
To achieve the same level of team trust and psychological safety in a civilian context could take up to eight years, the study suggests.
A second, more surprising, finding was that organisation size played a part in the perception of success, preferred leadership style and likelihood of the Sprint being a high-performance environment.
The data suggest autonomy and trust is greater in smaller organisations. This might bring to mind Twitter co-founder Ev William’s famous quote: “When you’re in a small boat, you can see who’s paddling hard and who’s looking around”.
There is, however, a tipping point. As group size increases, we begin to see a request for defensive leadership (“Leave me to do my job and stop other people putting work into my pile”) and, as we approach 150+ employees, even with high experience, there is a reversion to transactional performance. This means that, even where individual competency is high, the organisation’s size begins to undermine the competency, removing the autonomy and reverting to short-term success metrics and associated behaviours. Larger organisations appear to deliver lower quality work.
The non-civilian participants understand this potential risk, which might be related to a psychological threshold known as Dunbar’s number – a suggested limit for the number of social connections humans can sustain – as military organisations intentionally “silo” groups to a maximum of 150 individuals.
The research purpose was to introduce and study a new relational, theoretical model for Constellation Leadership, which asks if a leader can be the environment. Other distributed models have been shown to be a significant predictor of team effectiveness and deliver better performance than any other HR measure currently available, including team cohesion and consensus, confidence, trust, and levels of member satisfaction.
It was anticipated that greater perceived competency and the trust to utilise that competency towards a shared goal would allow leadership to become a method, rather than a position.
What was not anticipated was the impact of the organisation’s size. Larger scale may provide opportunity for in-role specialisation and increased capability, but group size may frustrate the potential benefits, leading to a by-the-numbers approach, with lessened ownership and innovation.
But this doesn’t need to be the case. If, like the military examples, we can create the team psychological safety that informs members that each other group member is competent, dependable and working towards the same overall goal, and we each understand the culture of how we get things done around here, then these Constellations can outperform traditionally led teams.
As with all leadership models, it is not necessarily suitable for all contexts and situations. Traditional vertical leadership is still required in creating the appropriate constellations.
But, as modern organisations struggle to handle the changes in contemporary working approaches, demands and risks, Constellation Leadership offers an opportunity to revolutionise how we lead and perform today.
The world has changed since the mills and production lines of the 20th century. Perhaps it’s time for leadership to potentially change, too?