A goal isn’t a mission

strategy+business, January 30, 2023

by Theodore Kinni

Illustration by VectorInspiration

There are missions, and then there are missions. One type of mission is an achievable task with a fixed goal that is often tactical and short-term in nature. The other mission is a high-level aspiration that provides direction and motivation to an organization over a long period of time. Leaders who mix up the two can put the future of their companies at risk.

The distinction between the two types of missions is dramatically illustrated in the recording of a White House meeting held on 21 November 1962. During the meeting, President John F. Kennedy and NASA’s chief administrator, James Webb, whom Kennedy appointed, had a heated argument about NASA’s proper mission.

It had been 18 months since Kennedy had called out a piloted moon landing as one of his top priorities in a special address to Congress, declaring, “First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” Now, Kennedy was considering whether he could move the target date for the first lunar landing from 1967 to 1966, and he was grilling NASA’s leaders about the feasibility and costs of doing so.

As they wrangled over the size of the special appropriation that would be needed to fund an accelerated schedule, Kennedy suddenly tacked. “Do you think this program is the top-priority program of the agency?” he asked Webb.

“No, sir, I do not,” answered Webb. “I think it is one of the top-priority programs….” With that, an argument began that revealed the chasm between Kennedy’s view of NASA’s mission and Webb’s view. Read the rest here

Rethinking Hierarchy

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

MIT Sloan Management Review, January 25, 2023

by Nicolai J. Foss and Peter G. Klein

Chris Gash/theispot.com

For all the hype and promise swirling around the idea of eliminating management to create agile, flat organizations, bosses and corporate hierarchies have remained extremely resilient. As we argued in the pages of MIT Sloan Management Review in 2014, under the right conditions, having such hierarchies in place is the best way to handle the coordination and cooperation problems that beset human interactions. They allow human intelligence and creativity to flourish on a larger scale. They provide a larger structure, with predictability and accountability, for specialists to do their work.

But that doesn’t mean traditional, command-and-control organizations are right for today’s environment. We see a confluence of business and social trends influencing the development of new kinds of hierarchies. Rapid technological progress, instant communication, value creation based on knowledge rather than physical resources, globalization, and a more educated workforce require us to rethink how we wield managerial authority. Meanwhile, individual views on politics, religion, and culture also inform our attitudes toward hierarchies — such as whether we value autonomy or admire authoritarian figures. All of these factors point to a new, different role for hierarchy to play in meeting the challenges of the 21st century.

The key challenge for designing and operating hierarchies today and tomorrow is to balance two opposing forces. The first is the desire, common to us all, for empowerment and autonomy, which helps companies mobilize employees’ creativity and exploit their unique knowledge and capabilities. The other is the need — particularly in environments characterized by rapid change and interdependent activities across the enterprise — to exercise managerial authority on a large scale.

Companies need clear, fairly enforced policies and procedures that achieve coordination and cooperation while respecting employee desires for empowerment and relative autonomy. Managers have to figure out when to intervene and when to let employees handle problems themselves.

These are tough issues without easy solutions. Which decisions should be decentralized (or delegated)? How much discretion should employees have over the decision areas delegated to them? How are these employees incentivized and evaluated? How do executives make sure that all these decentralized decisions mesh together? A central lesson of theories and evidence on organizational structure is that there are no universally “best” answers to these questions, only trade-offs that depend on the contingencies facing the company. Identifying and acting on those trade-offs — not decentralizing everything, everywhere — is the key to successful leadership. Read the rest here.

Can bossless management work?

strategy+business, January 10, 2023

by Theodore Kinni

Photograph by Tom Werner

If you’ve been feeling like your leadership contributions are underappreciated, add a copy of Why Managers Matter to your reading list. In it, Nicolai Foss, a strategy professor at the Copenhagen Business School, and Peter Klein, the W.W. Caruth Chair and professor of entrepreneurship at the Hankamer School of Business, Baylor University, examine the various iterations of manager-free organizations that have been proposed—and occasionally adopted—over the past 50 years or so. Their conclusion: nonsense!

Foss and Klein lump the ideas of management thinkers, such as Gary Hamel, Michele Zanini, and Frederic Laloux, and approaches to decentralized management, such as holacracy and agile, into what they call the bossless company narrative. “The basic thrust of the genre is that while bosses are still around, the less control they exercise the better,” they write. “What the Harvard historian Alfred D. Chandler Jr. called the ‘visible hand’ of management should give way to worker autonomy, self-organizing teams, outsourcing, and an egalitarian office culture.”

Then the duo bales the entire genre into something resembling a straw man and puts a match to it. “The near-bossless companies—and there aren’t many of them—with their self-managing teams, empowered knowledge workers, and ultra-flat organizations are not generally or demonstrably better than traditionally organized ones,” declare Foss and Klein. “Bosses matter, not just as figureheads but as designers, organizers, encouragers, and enforcers.”

Foss and Klein make a detailed and extended case against the bossless company narrative with which it is hard to take issue, especially in the realm of large enterprises. Schemes like holacracy, in which decisions are made by teams, may work for small companies with distributed ownership, such as boutique consultancies and other kinds of partnerships, but they haven’t worked in large companies like Zappos, which have many more employees and require far more coordination. Agility, too, tends to work better for running projects than for running whole companies. In short, hierarchical management structures are, as the authors put it, “the worst form of organization—except for all the others.” Read the rest here.

Bad Apples or Bad Leaders?

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

MIT Sloan Management Review, January 3, 2023

by Charn P. McAllister, Jeremy D. Mackey, B. Parker Ellen III, and Katherine C. Alexander

Leaders typically take responsibility when employees perform poorly but not when employees behave badly. It’s like there’s an unwritten rule that protects leaders when employees engage in deviant workplace behavior. Perhaps this protection stems from the notion that it isn’t fair to hold leaders accountable for the actions of a few bad apples.

Our research suggests that surprisingly often, this view of workplace deviance is misguided. We’ve found that leaders have a strong effect on whether employees engage in deviant behaviors. Thus, when employees act badly, their leaders would be wise to take a step back and consider whether and how they may be complicit in that behavior.

Workplace deviance includes employee behaviors that violate organizational norms in ways that threaten the well-being of companies and their employees. Sometimes these behaviors are directed toward individuals, such as when an employee physically or verbally lashes out at a colleague or gossips with coworkers. Other times, deviant behaviors are directed toward an organization, such as when an employee steals workplace property or leaks confidential company information. The consequences of workplace deviance include productivity and inventory losses, as well as a host of other expenses that ultimately cost organizations billions of dollars annually.

Some leaders dismiss workplace deviance as an unavoidable side effect of apathetic or rebellious employees who either don’t care for or actively dislike their colleagues or employers. These bad apples do exist. Research shows that employees low in the personality traits of conscientiousness and agreeableness are more prone to workplace deviance. So are employees who exhibit socially malevolent personality markers referred to as the dark triad: Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy.

Given these findings, it’s easy to conclude that the “bad apple” argument makes sense. The problem is, research into the role of personality in workplace deviance does not consider the role that leaders play in employee behavior. Read the rest here.