Reversed leadership makes organizations more resilient. The need for resilience has never been greater than now. As Peter Drucker said, “The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic.” How can management go beyond yesterday’s logic? By practicing reversed leadership.

Leadership has little to do with hierarchy and everything to do with exerting influence that brings about change. Exerting influence and playing a reversed leadership role is grounded in two fundamental behaviors: practicing wise ignorance and listening to the edges.

Drucker Forum 2020

This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the fully digital 12th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “Leadership Everywhere” on October 28, 29 & 30, 2020.
#DruckerForum

Practice wise ignorance

Leaders need to live attitudes of wise ignorance, learning to say, “I don’t know”, inviting questions and debate. They need to embrace uncertainty and ambiguity, knowing that no one has all the answers. They must be able to admit they do not know everything. And by encouraging everyone in the organization to do the same they create a culture stronger than one based around agreements and consensus. Trying to build consensus decreases resilience because it limits the number of opinions and options when a crisis comes, and decisions are needed.

The diversity of thought and ideas that result from wise ignorance and an open and participatory leadership style enable the organization to be better prepared when a crisis happens.  Unfortunately, few leaders understand this.

In my annual global surveys, I asked approximately 300 organizations if their leaders had an “open and participatory” leadership style. In 2013, only 13% “strongly agreed” and in 2018 that proportion had barely crept up to 19%. If we include people who replied “somewhat open and participatory”, we only reach approximately 50%. These figures are discouraging. They stagnated as shown by four surveys over a six-year period and indicate that top leadership in most organizations is stuck in a hierarchical, command-and-control mindset. When unexpected events occur, their automatic reaction will be to look at best practices and benchmarking–all based on the past–and unlikely to be suited to the present context.

Listen to the edges

Staying in touch with the present reality means being close to the action. People on the edges are often customer-facing and see more of the external world than do people in the inner parts of the corporation. They are the organization’s eyes and ears, picking up signs of disruption and changing needs faster and earlier than their more internal colleagues. These front-liners are usually far from the decision-making center, and the reality they see is too often blurred by management filters. Understanding the constantly evolving context requires connections and interactions between the edges and the center.

Act with today’s logic

Peter Drucker’s message rings stronger than ever. Leaders must go beyond yesterday’s logic and act with today’s logic. This means building a new work culture that encourages questioning the status quo, continually scanning the horizon and listening to different voices that challenge ingrained practices. The wealth of information, diversity of ideas and new energy that flows from this style of leadership leads to new, unimagined opportunities. This approach personifies reversed leadership. People are mobilized to influence change from wherever they are in the organization. A foundation is built for proactive resilience that prevails through turbulent times and beyond any given crisis.

Do you have reversed leadership?

Ask yourself these four questions to see if reversed leadership exists in your organization:

1. Are people regularly encouraged to give input to business goals and plans?
2. Do people feel free to challenge business models and work practices, to question the status quo, and to propose new ways of working?
3. Is it relatively easy to get a new idea to someone at the senior executive level?
4. Are there systems for getting input from the edges, such as from the customer-facing colleagues?

About the Author:
Jane McConnell, author of The Gig Mindset Advantage: Why a Bold New Breed of Employee is Your Organization’s Secret Weapon in Volatile Times, (available in April 2021) and has conducted 12 years of research on organizations in the digital age.

This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the fully digital 12th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “Leadership Everywhere” on October 28, 29 & 30, 2020.
#DruckerForum

• How does the gig mindset differ from a traditional approach to work?
• Is it just a question of nuance, of degree, or are there real, meaningful differences?
• What does it mean for people and their individual development?
• What impact does the gig mindset have on organizations? Does it build resilience, and trigger innovation? Does it create disorder and increase risk?

The “gig mindset” research is based on eight behaviors (see figure below). The traditional mindset and the gig mindset are posed as opposites on the table, but in reality, people find themselves at different points along the spectrum, and individual people see themselves at multiple points on the spectrum depending on context and circumstances. The eight behaviors were defined with the help of my Advisory Board.

The first phase of the research was a short online survey involving 297 people around the world who feel an affinity to the gig mindset as we defined. The second, ongoing phase involves a series of interviews and focus groups in Asia, Australia, Europe and North America.

Initial observations

The gig mindset is above all an identity

A technology leader in his late 40s in a large highly regulated sector shared his moment of self-discovery after completing the survey:

“This has been an interesting process. I have assumed that I am just a ‘square peg’, and although I feel that I have much to contribute to the organization, it feels as though it is me that does not fit and that it is up to me to become a better ‘corporate citizen’.… For the first time I can now point to something and say ‘Hey I’m a gig-mindset worker! You like the outcomes – so how about lightening up on the corporate stuff!”

Another survey participant talked about his manager and how they often disagreed on policies and practices:

“I liked him as a man but I didn’t really care for his decisions. So it was his identity that conflicted with my identity. As I’m building the context for my team, what I’m doing is giving them room where they can find their own identities. And I’m giving them a narrative where we can build an identity together. And that identity is about doing innovative things, adding value to our colleagues, and that kind of stuff. Right?”

The gig-mindset person is a rare resource, serving a role in organizations that is often neither recognized nor rewarded

A woman working on an enterprise transformation project in an international company headquartered in France explained to me how she has seen the gig mindset in her current and previous companies:

“People with a gig mindset are not solitary cowboys roaming the wild west of organizations. They have charisma and know how to bring people together around a project, around a mission. They often work undercover, in the gaps between official initiatives, bringing life to spaces in the organization where previously there was nothing. When the project takes shape and is sustainable, often someone else takes over, as the organization prefers a visible project manager with a clear, understood profile.”

One manager explained why the gig mindset is a threat to hierarchy and therefore hinders career advancement:

“The spectrum outlined in the survey questions confirms why it is difficult for organizations to work collaboratively. Those that seek to maintain the status quo are increasingly working with a growing number seeking change. The tension is unresolved. Power remains with those that seek to maintain the status quo and is used to promote those of a like mind who are not a threat.”

The gig mindset requires resilience on an individual level, which may, in part, come from age and experience

The survey data show that older workers are more likely to have a gig mindset approach to work whereas the younger age groups self-assessed at the lowest level in the survey population. Unsurprisingly, the younger workers rate themselves significantly lower on behavior 4: assuming responsibility outside of hierarchical systems. This could mean that the least experienced people try harder to “fit in”, while more experienced people feel freer to act as they think best.

A woman in the 45-52 years age group, working in learning and development, explains the gig-mindset survival tactics in her organization:

“Those with a gig mindset simply get on with their work their way. There has definitely been some attempt to discourage this way of working as senior leaders are all of a certain age and have the same perspective of looking at work, which is hierarchical. Having said that, the few of us who do operate from a gig mindset simply choose to ignore them. If we achieve the expected results then there is very little they can do to us.”

Inter-generational influence can go both ways

Older workers are more likely to seek opportunities to work with different types of teams and with people from different roles. They are more comfortable with activities and responsibilities defined by skills rather than roles and hierarchy. They can help younger workers acquire more flexibility by making sure teams have diversity in age.

On the other hand, younger workers are more likely to be comfortable opening up early by “working out loud”, and taking feedback from outside the project team into account in early stages of a project. By involving older workers in their working out loud practices, they can help them experience firsthand the benefits of open sharing.

Most people in the survey, regardless of age, agree that advancement via a personal growth path is more important than a career path. However, the older workers have realized that networking is a lever for personal growth more than have the younger workers. Inviting them into their networks can be mutually beneficial.

The future leans toward the gig mindset

The CEO of a 3000-person organization in the US wrote to me:

“The gig mindset will be the real competitive advantage during the digital transformation era.”

A senior manager in a UN agency in Geneva predicts:

“Gig-mindset people are like early adopters. There are not many today, but their numbers will grow gradually”.

In one of the first focus groups in Paris, 18 people from large global organizations discussed how they thought a gig mindset will change organizations in the future, enabling them to:

• Better inspire and attract talent.
• Build a stronger network, inside and especially outside the organization, thereby getting to know customers better.
• Have a stronger capacity of creativity and innovation, bringing evolution of products and services to customers.
• Be a game changer in their area of activity.

A senior leader in a specialty chemicals company in Europe came up to me after I launched the research initiative a few months ago at a conference. His question:

“What can we do to grow the gig mindset in our company?”

Answers to this fundamental question are emerging through interviews and real life examples from survey participants. Future posts will focus on how to facilitate a gig mindset from both individual and organizational viewpoints.

Please get in touch if you would like to be interviewed about the gig mindset, sharing how you perceive it in yourself and people around you, and how think it will shape organizations in the future.

– – – –

Jane McConnell, independent advisor and researcher (Netjmc) has conducted extensive research for 10 years with over 300 organizations around the world in annual surveys on “The Organization in the Digital Age”. Her foundational framework has been used by many organizations to help define their internal digital strategies. The 2016 report was included in Boston University’s “Leading in the Digital Age”, edX course. In addition, she has worked as a digital strategy advisor with large global organizations in Europe and North America for 18 years.

About the author:

Jane McConnell (NetJMC), based in Provence, France, is an independent digital strategy advisor and analyst, who works primarily with large organizations headquartered in Europe. www.netjmc.com.

This article is one in a series related to the 10th Global Peter Drucker Forum, with the theme management. the human dimension, taking place on November 29 & 30, 2018 in Vienna, Austria #GPDF18

This article first appeared in LinkedIn Pulse

Among the key questions and challenges to be addressed at the 2017 Global Peter Drucker Forum is “determining a new equilibrium between global and local as well as centralized vs. decentralized to support a sense of belonging, joint purpose and community building”. I would add two more areas where equilibrium is needed: between desk-less and desk-based workers and between the center and the edges of the organization.

Accidents happen

A new balance must be built between these accidentally separate groups of people. Accidental because the separations are not intentional. They happen because digital and transformation initiatives tend to be driven from the center. The result? Organizations end up off balance. Global viewpoints are favored over local ones; centralized decisions over decentralized. Desk workers have better access to information than desk-less workers; so do people at headquarters compared to those working on the edges of the organization. Improving reachability is a first step to restoring equilibrium and building a sense of community and belonging.

Digital reachability is the starting point for inclusiveness.

Digital technologies, deployed and adopted intelligently, increase reachability throughout the organization. Social networking, enterprise search, people search, real-time chat, collaboration spaces and so on are available today in most organizations. Unfortunately, these systems do not always encompass the entire organization and small and even large pockets of people are not reached. (See data at the end of the post.)

Over the past few years, mobile access has extended reachability, especially for the frontline workers. Today, many organizations are implementing BYOD (bring your own device) strategies, letting desk-less workers not only interact with others in the organization but also share ideas and information in ways that were impossible a few years ago.

Inclusiveness grows through new work practices based on visibility.

Visibility means peoples’ voices reach beyond their physical place of work. When people are able to express opinions in blogs, internal social networks and open online communities, when they can react and comment on news, and in general make their voice heard, it is a big step towards inclusiveness.

Inclusiveness becomes even more powerful when people start to work out loud. Working out loud means narrating one’s work and working in a transparent, observable context on a platform such as an enterprise social network or in open project spaces. On-going work is visible to others in the organization. People outside the project team from anywhere in the organization can volunteer to help, bringing expertise on demand to the project team.

Common purpose and a sense of belonging develop naturally in a culture of inclusiveness.

Global collaboration energizes organizations and builds a sense of belonging in all who participate. Examples include crowd-sourcing and enterprise jams where people are mobilized to participate in generating and evaluating ideas to solve problems, respond to challenges, create new services and so on. Cross-organizational involvement including global and local teams, desk-less and desk workers, central people and those on the edges sparks new relationships and catalyzes organizational change.

One step beyond global collaboration is cooperation. Cooperation is both a mindset and behavior. People share and take the time to help others freely and voluntarily, not just because they are part of the same team. For example, someone asks for information or help via the social network, and has dozens of responses in hours. People point others to experts and resources, and in general work with a mindset that goes beyond structured, individual team projects or organized, global initiatives to a broader sense of community.

Do you have technologies and work practices that cultivate inclusiveness?

The items listed above are indicative, not exhaustive. They are intended to provide food for thought and practical leads on how to increase reachability.

How would you answer these 10 questions?

1. Does your digital work environment reach the entire workforce?
2. Does everyone in your organization have access to the enterprise social network?
3. Can people throughout your organization reach people they don’t know personally, using criteria such as skills and expertise?
4. Can people anywhere in the organization find information – even if they do not know the source?
5. Can customer-facing people reach the information and experts they need when serving clients?
6. Can individuals from anywhere in the organization express themselves openly and directly using tools such as blogs, wikis, Twitter-like tools or other?
7. Do people and teams work out loud, making their work visible to people outside the project team before it is finished?
8. Are customers included in online communities with the workforce?
9. Do you have initiatives such as enterprise jams or crowd sourcing (including frontline people) to solve problems and generate new ideas?
10. Is there participatory leadership where people are encouraged to give input to business goals, and to challenge ideas and work practices?

Organizations that achieve reachability for the entire workforce will have taken a giant step towards equilibrium between global and local, desk-less and desk workers, and the center and the edges. The resulting balance will change the DNA of the organization to one of genuine inclusiveness, where diverse voices and ideas will mix to form common purpose and a sense of belonging.

About the author:

Jane McConnell (@NetJMC), based in Provence, France, is an independent digital strategy advisor and analyst, who works primarily with large European organizations. www.netjmc.com. Her latest research is published in her 10th annual report: The Organization in the Digital Age. http://www.organization-digital-age.

The entrepreneurial work culture is one of experimentation, creativity, and risk-taking in the belief that the outcome will be beneficial. Experimentation and creativity have long been stifled in many organizations. Command-and-control leadership, overly complex processes and slow decision-making are among the reasons for this unfortunate state. Data from my 10^th annual research with 310 participants in 27 countries confirm this: 47% say their C-level managers have command-and-control leadership styles, 53% say their organizations have complicated processes, and 40% say slow decision-making is a serious concern holding back transformation initiatives.

Only 37% agree that people freely challenge ideas, including the business model and work practices. How can people be engaged, giving their most and enjoying life in these organizations? It is unlikely that new ideas will be born, developed and delivered in such environments.

In the economic and social environment today where business leaders are concerned about new competition, changing customer demands and even long-term survival, it is time to pose a fundamental question. How can organizations create work cultures where motivated people produce new ideas and work with a passion for achieving them? In other words, how can you trigger and sustain an entrepreneurial-friendly culture?

Some companies are injecting entrepreneurship into their businesses by creating incubators where small, nimble teams, isolated from the rest of the organization, do “lean innovation.” These initiatives, positive as they are, do not address the fundamental question of how established organizations can build an entrepreneurial mindset, learn to experiment and create new value for customers.

In my research, I asked respondents to indicate their agreement with the statement: “We have a work culture of freedom to experiment and take initiatives.” Only 15 organizations strongly agreed with the statement, and, interestingly, the organizations are very different. They range in size from under 500 to over 100,000 employees and are based in Europe, North America, and Australia. They work in different sectors including consumer retail, banking, food and agriculture, government, humanitarian, construction and professional services.

The demographics are extremely diverse, but work practices are highly similar across the organizations in this entrepreneurial sample.

We will look at four pairs of work practices:

Pair 1: Responsibilities of individuals

• Individuals self-manage and self-direct their work as they see best, setting their objectives in 87% of the entrepreneurial sample vs. 55% of the full group.
• People’s objectives are visible across the whole organization (53% vs. 18%).

Pair 2: Transparency of business goals

• Business goals and plans are communicated throughout the organization (100% vs. 78%).
• People are regularly encouraged to give input to business goals and plans (87% vs. 39%).

Pair 3: Team autonomy and visibility

• Teams set their goals and self-manage (86% vs. 53%).
• Teams make their work visible to the larger organization as they work, and before the work is finished. They “work out loud” through continual, ongoing use of internal communication channels (53% vs. 31%).

Pair 4: Responsibility and accountability

• Teams have business responsibility and are accountable for producing actionable output (100% vs. 69%).
• Teams are enabled to act and, when necessary, shortcut enterprise processes to advance rapidly (66% vs. 25%).

The overall impression is that individuals and teams are trusted and accountable. There seems to be broad visibility of activities, including work in progress. A closer look at the four pairs, however, reveals that the first item is specific to the individual or the team; the second relates to its impact in the cross-organizational context. In each pair, the first item is at a much higher percentage than the second item, for both the entrepreneurial group and the full group.

Summarizing the four pairs of practices, we see that individuals can set their objectives, but these objectives are not necessarily always visible across the organization. Business goals may be communicated broadly, but people throughout the organization are less encouraged to give input. Teams can set their goals, but it is rarer for them to work out loud—sharing with the organization as a whole. Teams often have business responsibility and are accountable for producing actionable results, but they are not allowed to shortcut enterprise processes to get faster results.

The full group data has more extreme differences in the four pairs than the entrepreneurial group, where the gaps are smaller. The data that a distinguishing feature in entrepreneurial work cultures is the strength of the cross-organizational context and flows.

Seeding Work Practices

What does this show us about building an entrepreneurial culture? The work practices discussed above have risks and benefits. It is often the second point in our pairs of work practices above — the one that touches the enterprise or cross-organizational dimension—that represents a greater risk as well as a greater benefit. Shortcutting enterprise processes can result in errors and sanctions, or it can accelerate getting a new product to market. Working out loud on a project can result in other people seeing and misinterpreting intermediary project discussions and disagreements, or it can catch the attention of people outside the project who have valuable input to contribute.

An entrepreneurial work culture cannot be created overnight and involves much more than the points covered in this article. However, work practices are a starting point. Like seeds, once planted, they will spread if growing conditions are right. Our entrepreneurial sample suggests that strong, cross-organizational flows are part of a conducive growing environment. The resulting horizontal energy counterbalances the traditional top-down control still common in many places. It helps build a workplace where experimentation and creativity live intelligently alongside risks that are worth taking.

About the author:

Jane McConnell (NetJMC), based in Provence, France, is an independent digital strategy advisor and analyst, who works primarily with large organizations headquartered in Europe. www.netjmc.com. Her latest research will be published in October 2016 in the 10^Th annual report: The Organization in the Digital Age. http://www.organization-digital-age.

I have explored obstacles to digital transformation in my online surveys with organizations around the world over the past nine years. I have grouped the toughest ones – those considered to be serious and holding us back — into five categories:

• Decision-making: Slow or stalled decision-making caused by internal politics, competing priorities or attempting to reach consensus.
• Value perception: Inability to prove business value through traditional ROI calculations, resulting in lack of senior management sponsorship.
• Rethinking work: Too much focus on technology rather than willingness to address deep change and rethink how people work.
• Reality awareness: Lack of understanding operational issues at the decision-making level and difficulties when going from theory to practice.
• Fear and control: Fear by management or central functions about losing control, and fears that employees will waste time on social platforms.

Work cultures either accentuate or alleviate these obstacles. By work culture I mean the underlying assumptions and expectations about how people interact and get things done. The 2014 survey participants rated their internal work cultures on a scale of 5 to 1 for the following opposing characteristics:

• Strong, shared sense of purpose vs. weak, inconsistent sense of purpose
• Freedom to experiment vs. absolute compliance to rules and processes
• Distributed decision-making vs. centralized, hierarchical decision-making
• Open to the influence of the external world vs. closed to the external world

These characteristics are not mutually exclusive, obviously, but data show that organizations tend to be stronger in one area rather than the other three. Out of 280 organizations, 93 indicated the highest level for only one of the four characteristics. 17 indicated the highest level for 2 or 3 of the characteristics, and no one indicated the highest level for all 4. This lack of overlap lets us refine our understanding about which characteristic alleviates or accentuates which obstacles.

A strong, shared sense of purpose alleviates many obstacles, especially those of internal politics.
A strong sense of purpose alleviates political resistance: people are moving in the same direction driven by shared values. A low sense of purpose makes it difficult for people to come to agreements and decisions. They are 5 times more likely to face obstacles from internal politics, 5 times more likely to be concerned about employees wasting time and 3 times more likely to suffer from lack of senior management sponsorship than organizations where there is a strong, shared sense of purpose.

Freedom to experiment helps prioritize, make decisions and rethink work.
Freedom to experiment helps organizations prioritize. When people are not free to experiment or take initiatives, it is difficult to consider different ways of working. Without experimentation, there is little basis for prioritizing and making decisions.

These organizations are twice as likely to suffer from hesitation to rethink how we work and twice as likely to be held back by fears by management of losing control.

Distributed decision-making gives people at the edges of organizations a voice in digital transformation.
Organizations with distributed decision-making rarely face resistance to rethinking how they work. In contrast, centralized decision-making places control in the hands of people the least likely to be in touch with the reality of the edges — the front lines where people interact with customers. Far from operational issues, they worry about losing control, and are more comfortable talking about issues such as technology — which is important but not core to transformation. Fears about people wasting time will justify the need to keep tight controls. They are three times as likely to resist rethinking how they work. This is the single most negative work culture explored in the survey.

Organizations that are responsive to the influence of the external world are more likely to understand the value digital can bring.
Organizations that are open are more exposed to what is happening in the external world. People throughout, including senior management, are better informed, and this broader perspective helps them focus on their own priorities and be clear on ROI. Organizations that are closed to their external environment are twice as likely to report obstacles of competing priorities, slow decision making, hesitation to rethink how we work, no strong business case, ROI or proven value.

Digital Transformation —“Freedom Within a Framework”
A single individual can trigger change, but if other people do not get involved little will happen. Organizations whose work cultures show one or more of the four characteristics discussed earlier have a balance between individual freedom and organizational agreements. People are digitally enabled and organizational processes already are or are becoming collaborative and social. They also treat the digital workplace as a strategic asset — with senior level involvement, appropriate guidelines and governance. This balance between individual freedom and organizational strategy is conducive to digital transformation: it means people can engage with confidence in experiments and initiatives.

If you want to nudge your work culture towards one or more of the four work culture characteristics discussed here, consider establishing the strategic principle of freedom within a framework. The trick is to figure out how much freedom and how strong a framework. Each enterprise must find its own answers to these questions, and understand that the balance between freedom and framework is fluid. Times of crisis may require a stronger framework; periods of market changes may require greater freedom.

Exhibits with data relevant to this post can be found on http://www.netjmc.com/digital-transformation-and-work-cultures/

About the author:

Jane McConnell (NetJMC), based in Provence, France, is an independent digital strategy advisor and analyst, who works primarily with large organizations headquartered in Europe. www.netjmc.com.