When top leaders “abandon the podium” and work at the wrong level (WAWL), there are a host of undesirable consequences. Top executives end up doing managerial work and neglect their strategic and organizational capability-building work, putting the organization at risk and leading to leadership compression.
When your boss dives into your work and makes the decisions you should be making, the opportunity to stretch and gain experience to lead at the next level is taken away. Not only is competency not developed, leaders whose higher-ups “meddle in their work” end up feeling disempowered, distrusted, and diminished.
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This is Leadership and Decision Compression. It results in unclear decision rights and role confusion. It leads to excessive rework, commonly called the Checkers Checking Checkers syndrome and stagnation of leadership development.
Worse, when those who should focus on the future of the organization don’t, not only is talent not developed, market and competitive trends can be missed, innovation doesn’t thrive, a performance culture isn’t established or strengthened, and the business begins to run out of ways to grow organically and sustainably.
Different Kinds of Compression
There are three accompaniments to leadership and decision compression. They are – perspective compression, information compression, and authority compression.
Perspective Compression: When leaders work at too low an altitude for extended periods they literally lose their perspective – the vantage point – required by their role. There are three distortions of perspective that can be quite damaging to an organization:
- Loss of a comprehensive systems view, which results in narrow, insular thinking and decision-making.
- The long-term view can be overshadowed by the short-term, undermining the business’ ability to develop longer-term strategies.
- Loss of pattern recognition, possibly the most damaging, is where leaders fail to see important patterns from outside the business – from customers, competitors, regulators, the board – or from geographic or functional requirements inside the organization.
The ability to see and orchestrate all the pieces of an organization is unique to senior leadership roles. An organization’s top leaders have the unique temporal view necessary to look up and out toward the strategic priorities three to five years down the road.
Learn more about leadership compression with these blogs:
Stepping away from the podium and abandoning this perspective is a high-risk and potentially costly mistake for leaders, organizations, and investors.
Check out our blog for the next two steps of compression.