One of the most challenging transitions that leaders need to make is the move from being a functional leader into being a business leader. Decisions made from a functional perspective are very different to those made from a organisational perspective. Technical challenges often have a definitive answer whilst business challenges usually require looking at the issue from a range of perspectives, blending experience and insights to make a considered decision which is usually somewhere between the best-case and least-worst options as opposed to being the definitively correct answer, because that often does not exist.
For many people, their early-stage career pathway takes them up the levels of technical expertise within their function – for example, engineer to senior engineer, to principal engineer, to engineering manager. Through this career journey, functional experts use their qualifications and experience to build a knowledge base that enables them to provide the correct technical answer, and through this process create value for their organisations.
As a functional expert or technical leader, we can see, however, that the primary contribution is from a technical or functional perspective – what is the correct engineering or accounting answer?
In visual terms, we see this as I-shaped leadership in that their focus of attention and scope for “decision making” is primarily within their technical discipline.
As one progresses up the functional career, ladder the work becomes more strategically focused and the challenges become more complex, but we still find that the perspective is principally from within the domain of technical expertise.
I-shaped leaders will almost always answer the question, “what do you do?”, with their job title – “I am the FD”, or “I am the Engineering Manager”, because their identity is heavily influenced and informed by their functional expertise and, therefore, their functional role.
By contrast, an organisational leader takes an enterprise-wide perspective which we can see visualise as T-shaped in that their primary perspective is organisational, supported by their functional expertise.
Here, then, we see the decision-making process begin with what is right for the business, rather than what is right from a functional perspective.
T-shaped leaders will typically answer the question, “what do you do?” with an organisational focus, supported by a functional focus – “I am a member of the senior leadership team with responsibility for finance”, which shows that they are looking at the organisational contribution as their primary means of adding value.
Making the transition from I-shaped to T-shaped is frequently a very challenging process with the difficulties being cited as:
- “I know what I am doing as a technical leader, but I don’t fully understand the business perspective.”
- “I am confident in my functional knowledge, but it all seems more grey and ambiguous at a business level and therefore I contribute far less.”
- “As a functional leader, I know the correct answer – this is so much harder to see now that I work in the leadership team, where decisions are more nuanced.”
- “I don’t feel able to comment on other team members work, as I don’t have their expertise and don’t want to appear disrespectful.”
These very typical challenges tend to have a predictable effect on the leadership team, which often comprises functional leaders. We typically see:
- Strong and assertive contributions from a functional perspective and weaker or less frequent contributions in business debates.
- People focusing on their function and paying less attention to others – we see this most evidently in the roundtable reports at leadership meetings, where people talk about what they have done or are going to do, and other functions pay little attention, as it doesn’t concern them or their function.
- Leaders being too much in the weeds and unable to take a strategic or objective perspective.
- Micromanagement, as leaders remain within their functional safe space, rather than stepping into the more challenging T-shaped space.
The academic and lead contributor to Action Learning, Reg Revans, once said that, “there is nothing so powerful as a well framed question” – and this is, quite simply, the very best route from I-shaped to T-shaped. As a functional leader, we are comfortable and confident in our knowledge, and certain in our decision making. The opposite is true when we make the transition to T-shaped and therefore we need to ask more questions, of ourselves – of our colleagues and of our leadership team. The more questions we ask, the more we understand and the more able we become at working with complexity and uncertainty.
In our coaching and leadership development work, we always encourage leaders undertaking this journey to focus, in the first instance, on working at the interface between I-shaped and T-shaped. This requires them to utilise their subject matter expertise to provide insights that will help the leadership team to make effective and appropriate decisions.
In recent conversations about this, I have heard leaders express, in various ways, their anxiety of letting go of their functional expertise or power, leaving them feeling exposed and vulnerable. As a consequence of this, they have tended to revert back to their SME safe space and, in doing so, unwittingly focused on being an individual leader within a team of leaders rather than a business leader with individual and collective accountability for the business.
Making the transition is, for many, a very difficult challenge. In the next Insights we will explore how best to achieve the journey to becoming a T-shaped business leader; exploring mindset, tools, approaches and accelerated development approaches.