When is correct not correct?
When we work with leadership teams of technical leaders, we see:
- higher levels of protective or defensive positioning
- more arguments between experts
- lower levels of trust
- less collaboration in the decision-making process
- less collective accountability in the decisions made
All of these behaviours result in the leadership team being the wrong sort of role models. This kind of team, as it stands, will never achieve at the best level possible, yet it’s a very common pattern.
If you’ve just joined us, I recommend you read this first:
T-Shaped Leadership Part 1, “Towards Business Leadership”
Conflict and arguments echo through these teams – arguments that are frequently very difficult to resolve due to one or more of the experts being correct (from their technical perspective). Technical experts will often cite a technically correct answer, and experts from different disciplines will proceed to argue the merits of their technical solution in the firm belief that they have the correct solution.
Making the transition from an I-shaped, or functional leader, to a T-shaped business leader is a challenge for many people – expert leaders not least. But it’s a necessary challenge, if the leadership team is to be as productive and capable as it needs to be.
With a T-shaped leadership, we can collaborate with our colleagues and make decisions at a business level, but we can use our I-shaped knowledge and experience to help us to make this important transition. This requires us to work at the interface between I-shaped and T-shaped, adopting a new mindset, and an understanding that whilst the proposed technical solution may be technically correct, it may still be the wrong thing to do at a business level.
Which mindset works best?
Through this mindset, we use our technical knowledge to provide insights to inform the decision-making process, rather than an expert mindset where we use our technical knowledge to provide a technically correct answer.
Operating at the interface means that we need to take a broader perspective on decision making as a T-shaped leader – we need to consider a range of questions prior to drawing conclusions:
- What is our strategy?
- What are our values?
- What are our customer expectations and experiences?
- What is our reputational position?
- What is the right decision in this specific context?
Clearly, we need to address these questions as a leadership team, not as a team of functional leaders – and we each need to bring to bear our technical knowledge and experience but in a way which informs and influences the process in open and transparent collaboration with our colleagues. Bowman and Asche in their book, ‘Managing Strategy’ call this the “zone of uncomfortable debate” because it is uncertain, ambiguous, unknown and surrounded by a range of opposing ideas and tensions.
Operating in this zone requires a high level of trust and confidence in ourselves and our colleagues and really tests the cohesion and capability of the leadership team. This is especially true, when we are (as we are so often) searching for an answer that is somewhere between best case and least worst options as opposed to the singular correct answer.
Through our research and consultancy practice we have identified 10 higher order skills for the T-shaped business leader:
How does your leadership team rate?
- Translating knowledge and experience into useful insights
- Asking catalytic questions that stimulate thought and debate
- Keeping an open mind and not being judgemental
- Collaborating with high levels of trust and empathy
- Being open to challenge and prepared to embrace change
- Persistently pushing for the best option for the business
- Seeing conflict and disagreement as productive processes
- Demonstrating high levels of self-awareness and relationship management
- Viewing situations from a range of different and often disparate perspectives
- Authentically seeking to cocreate strategically aligned solutions
What don't you know?
As Revans observed, “clever people are those who know all the answers, wise people are those who recognise we only know the answers to the question we have asked and so continue to ask more questions.”
Leadership teams must learn the value of asking questions, seeking clarification, and trying to understand the world from others’ perspectives; then use these insights to craft a business level solution.
In a recent workshop with the global leadership team of an INGO, the Chair spoke about the high value of curiosity in leadership. The team were initially a little confused as to the message but as we explored the idea of curiosity, of questioning, of seeking understanding they came to the conclusion, as I did, that curiosity is a foundational element of T-shaped, business leadership.
Curiosity prompts us to ask more questions; curiosity encourages us to question our own certainties; and curiosity helps us to seek to understand others’ perspectives so that we may, together, envisage and embed a new reality that is beyond each of us, but is collectively within our reach.
T-shaped business leadership, then, is a mindset. It is an acknowledgement that we need to work together to make sense of our context and create a shared reality. It is a focus on questions; on wisdom above expertise; and, most of all, it is a way of co-creating a shared understanding, a shared commitment and a shared accountability to be the best version of our leadership team that we are able to be.
All it takes, in reality, is the openness and awareness to ask a question.
Check out our main page for more Insights like this. And if you do have any questions, we’d love to hear from you!