Can you lead from below?
Some decisions are simple. Chocolate or strawberry? Acura or BMW? But the decisions that executives must make are quite complex. These decisions often require significant data inputs and their outcomes have significant consequences for employees, shareholders, and often their own job.
The evidence tells us that while leaders know the decisions are complex, they spend insufficient time considering and making these strategic decisions and suffer from what we call decision compression.
Decision Compression
Simply put, decision compression is when top executives get “bunched up” at the lower altitudes of managerial work and abandon their much-needed strategic view.
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In one organization we found that while Corporate expected their general managers to spend 50% of their time making strategic decisions (e.g., longer-term business oppportunities, technology, innovation), on average they were only spending about 5% of their time on the strategic work.
Conversely, while they were expected to spend only 20% of their time engaged in tactical, day-to-day operations, they were in fact spending upwards of 60% of their time dealing with those issues.
In this first in our series on Leading at the Right Level, we explore the most common reasons for this compression. In later blogs we will explore the types of compression we see, the real and often significant implications of working at the wrong level (nicknamed WAWL), and finally we will share strategies for avoiding this all too prevelant leadership challenge.
Leaders Fail to Embrace the Scope and Responsibilities
So, why after working so hard to attain senior leadership positions, do so many leaders fail to embrace the scope and responsibilities of leading at the next altitude?
The reasons are many, but we find a few most frequently. You’ve heard the saying that “you know what” rolls downhill? The same is true for WAWL. When the senior-most leaders in an organization fail to elevate their focus to the more strategic issues and opt instead to focus on day-to-day details, they leave little room for those below them to appropriately enact their roles.
Everyone ends up working down a level or two. In one organization, the executives expected their direct reports to know, and be able to recite, their most recent performance metrics or the minute details of every initiative underway, at any time.
They dubbed this “knowing your business cold” and didn’t realize they were forcing a degree of false precision that required senior leaders to constantly dive into the details of their direct reports’ work. The result? No one was actually empowered to do their job and even more concerning, no one had their eyes on the future. Empowering leading from below is crucial.
Effective leadership begins from both above and below. These blogs explain how:
Sometimes the reason for this is a real or perceived lack of capability at lower levels – a weak leadership bench – and a belief of senior leaders that the people below them aren’t capable of doing their jobs. This feeling of arbitrary leadership certainly does not help.
Sometimes the opposite is true. Senior leaders themselves don’t feel capable. Instead of stretching into their next role, they continue to do the work they are most comfortable doing. They focus on centralized leadership.
Regardless of the reason, when the conductor leaves the podium, the orchestra is often just a sea of noise.
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