Scaling Leadership: From Command and Control to Self Organizing Teams
“The board wants us to double revenue this year.”
I nearly spit out my coffee. I should be more careful about taking a sip right as someone is about to say something ridiculous.
“OK,” I said, mastering myself. “And just where does the board think this revenue is going to come from?”
This company was decades old, and had been growing a respectable 20% per year for a long time. Many of the board members were from an investment firm that recently bought a huge stake in the company, and now they seemed to simply just “decide” the company needed to double revenue. There was no strategy put forth, no guidance on how to do it. Just a target set arbitrarily.
My client took a deep breath and slightly rolled his eyes as he replied, “They have no idea. That’s what they want us to figure out.”
Even if it were possible, the way this commandment was handed down, like a stone tablet from a mountaintop, told to the CEO, who passed it on to the other executives, who slowly transferred it to their department heads, illustrated a command-and control-culture that was incapable of the changes necessary to achieve such an audacious goal.
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Many organizations still focus the majority of their decision making on one person or one small group of people at the top. This concentration of decision making isn’t just inefficient, it’s degenerative. No organization that maintains such centralized control over decisions will be able to adapt at the speed required by today’s markets.
By contrast, there are companies who have doubled their revenue in a year. They did it by building product teams that are fast and flexible enough to iterate, learn, and eventually nail product-market fit. And they don’t have a command-and-control culture.
Instead, modern high-growth businesses have shown us that a critical aspect of their performance is that their people have autonomy over their work, not just in terms of how they do it (the process), but also in terms of what they do (making decisions about opportunities and risks).
Leaders who want their organizations to grow and survive in today’s economy must find a way to relinquish decision making control, and build autonomous teams who can operate quickly and independently to respond to new opportunities and risks that may emerge at any time.
To promote autonomy in your organization, it can be helpful to think about it on three organization levels: the executive level, the management level, and the team level.
Strategic Thinking
To start at the top, executives need to invest considerable time (and money) in encouraging long-term strategic thinking throughout their organization. This creates clarity of purpose that is necessary for autonomous teams and individuals to be effective.
While leaders may in fact have a vision and strategy, it is common that it has not been fully articulated to the rest of the organization, or at least not in a way that teams can act on it. If the product teams are not clear on the strategy, they will not be able to act independently as new opportunities arise. They will be forced to stop and run decisions up the chain of command, waiting for instructions.
In many companies, the emphasis is on the short term, the next features, the next quarter’s sales numbers, and so on. There is a lack of long-term investment in tools, systems, and capabilities that will allow teams to do their jobs more effectively in the future. These organizations tend to have misalignment at the management level, and heaps of technical debt at the team level.
Encouraging long term strategic thinking at all levels of the organization will unlock growth potential in the long run.
Management Styles
The other key to promoting autonomy is to ensure individuals and teams have the skills they need to act on the clarity that comes from strategic thinking. Skills are honed through delegation. Managers must practice delegation to successfully develop new skills in their direct reports. And yet, good delegation skill is more rare than it should be.
Think about your own management style. The classic image of managers from the bygone days of industrial command and control still linger in many of our organizations. Leaders who are entranced by those old fashioned views feel they have to be the smartest person in the room at all times. They feel they need to have all the answers.
The problem is that if they need to have all the answers, there is no way to allow their people to operate without coming to them every time they get stuck. They’ll never be able to scale their organization beyond their own ability to make decisions.
Managers must coach and actively develop their key people to make decisions in their place. The manager’s job is less about making all the decisions and more about providing feedback that is specific, timely, and actionable on decisions made by their reports.
“In most situations, there are people around who have a deep understanding of the work, and in most cases they have not been challenged to teach and develop others. They can be very valuable if they learn to coach and develop others rather than doing all the thinking for themselves.” — Liker & Convis, The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership
In this picture from Toyota, the manager’s role becomes one of coach rather than dictator or expert, not key decision maker.
What’s more they must regularly solicit feedback from their subordinates, too. US President Lincoln was said to have surrounded himself with a cabinet of advisors who constantly pushed back on him and his ideas. That enabled him to be a better leader than would have been the case if everyone always told him, “yes, sir.”
Delegation and succession planning go together. Succession planning is critical to scaling an organization. Every leader should thus have a succession planning process in place for key positions, perhaps even all positions.
Delegation, not just for assignments, but for decisions as well, is used to groom successors to eventually take their manager’s place. If they are never given an opportunity to make their own decisions, that growth process is stalled.
If you have not identified potential successors for your job, and delegated some of your decision making power to them, what is stopping you?
Processes and Teams
Teams can then take the clarity they capture from long-term strategic thinking, the capabilities they’ve built by having decisions delegated to them, and combine them into action that is fast, flexible, and responsive. Or, agile, if you prefer.
While culture and mindset are very important in the shift to becoming a high-performing company, making small, incremental, and regular changes to process is a powerful way to encourage changes in culture and mindset.
Processes for making decisions in your organization may contribute to autonomy or they may prevent it. Processes are simply the company’s values codified into documented rules and procedures for getting work done. A company’s processes can tell you a lot about the company culture and values.
We have known for along time that teams are in the best position to make changes to processes that can dramatically improve outcomes. However, they aren’t always encouraged to do so.
When opportunities or risks emerge, there can be a limited amount of time to capture value or avoid disaster, and teams must not be required to escalate decision making to the top of the organization. According to Reinertsen (2009), your control strategy should focus on reacting most quickly to problems that age poorly.
A good heuristic to see whether your organization is promoting autonomy or command and control is to ask whether the process has been chosen and developed by the teams themselves, or imposed from above. If it is the latter, the leadership team is effectively exerting decision making control over the day to day activities of the teams. And that is not autonomy.
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Companies who succeed in the next decade of digital growth and expansion will be those who truly embrace autonomy in their organizations, who encourage long term strategic thinking, who delegate and plan for succession, and who encourage product development teams to make process decisions for themselves.
Those that attempt to maintain ever more control over their people, will fail to win marketshare, and will alienate their best employees. They’ll suffer attrition, slow or even negative growth, and eventually irrelevance. In the end, they will simply fade away. Maybe that’s not so bad.
