Amplifiers. Tom Finegan
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throughout the organization and how to determine the composition of followers on staff. It's natural in a leadership transition that many alienated follower holdovers will leave. Many pragmatist followers will also leave with a leadership change at the top, especially one where stated change is necessary, which undermines the very safety that pragmatist followers require. The exemplary followers under the previous leadership likely have loyalty to each other, the organization, or the mission. However, these exemplary followers will quickly size up the new leader to determine whether or not they will follow them.
When new CEOs are appointed or promoted, one of the first activities they do is to replace key team members. Jim Collins emphasizes the necessity for great companies to have “the right people on the bus.”3 How then do companies find themselves in this position where the new CEO needs to make these replacements? Great companies are constantly adjusting the team at the top to have the best possible executive leadership—or in management teams throughout the company for that matter. But, far more commonly, teams evolve and settle into their operating ruts, and before you know it, there are weak links in the chain.
Cross-functional teams and matrixed organizational structures create more of a challenge for the titled executive. In this construct, their straight-line chain of control is pierced by the matrix. In situations when the executive lacks leadership experience, infighting and turf wars emerge. It is amazing to see how many companies have these unnecessary internal skirmishes when the real adversary is a competitor or product substitute.
Instead, the most successful organizations also create dynamic, or in some cases permanent, cross-functional teams. Assembling these cross-functional teams is as important as assembling a proper organizational chart. One of the traps leaders have is that they pick the same people for high-profile teams. This is dangerous for many reasons. Selection bias is an issue for most companies, and many are trying to address this bias with varying degrees of success. Executives and managers within companies tend to select people who are like them to fill positions on teams. This perpetuates narrow thinking and prevents the true diversity of thought and ideas that is necessary for the best decision-making to occur.
Some professionals are driven entirely by status. Status can be achieved in many different ways. Status can be achieved by the position you occupy in the organizational chart as well as how many teams you've been chosen to participate in. There is a real risk in assigning the same people to too many teams, letting teams become too large and unwieldy or not sunsetting teams when their stated purpose has been accomplished. The best leaders and executives shared a common theme with me in how they peer into critical team composition and assignments to ensure that each team member actively participates and quickly jettison team members who seem to be observers only. They look at a network analysis of the core strategic teams in the company. This conscious effort to analyze and remove people from teams is as essential as ensuring that the teams themselves are composed of key decision-makers and influencers to be successful. Finally, although it's impossible to limit the size of certain teams, smaller teams with a clear objective seem to fare better in any organization.
Leadership Lessons: The 20-60-20 Rule
Early in my tenure as CEO of our firm, I was agonizing over another seemingly big decision that I needed to make that I knew was not going to be popular with everyone. I say seemingly because in hindsight I can't recall most of the decisions I agonized over. But I would stew over them desperately wanting complete approval from the hundreds of consultants who worked for us. After sufficient discussion and review of our options, the time would come when we made the decision, and I would communicate the decision to the broader company. Feedback would come back to us and even in situations where I felt the decision was entirely negative yet necessary, I would get emails or texts from people letting me know they appreciated the decision and were fully supportive of the direction. The more this occurred the more I realized that in most big controversial decisions, people fall into the “20-60-20 rule”. Twenty percent of the people think the decision is genius, 20 percent of the people think the decision is a disaster and wonder how we ever got to the position we're in, and 60 percent of the people trust that it's probably best and move on. This realization lets us sit back and weigh the decisions we're making and filter them through the 20-60-20 rule so that we could ask ourselves, “Will this decision or direction skew the distribution?” As a leader it's impossible, and in fact not wise, to never piss people off. As is frequently referenced by Colin Powell, sometimes it's necessary to piss people off. Once I no longer felt the need to have everyone's approval for every decision we made, it liberated me to make decisions much more effectively.
Notes
1 1. Meriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/charisma.
2 2. S&P Capital IQ, Clarkston research.
3 3. Jim Collins, Good to Great (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 41.
3 Followers Versus Subordinates
What really makes managers effective is a good team of employees. Some of these employees are subordinates, and many are followers. There are important distinctions between subordinates and followers. Effective managers can get subordinates to deliver output at a high level of productivity. However, followers not only have the capacity to produce high-quality work but also to amplify the manager's effectiveness. Great managers recognize that exceptional followers have the ability to transform how the organization can deliver superior results. Being able to identify followers from a sea of subordinates is important to drive that success.
Subordinates
Anyone who has been responsible for managing staff members understands the difference between an employee who is strictly a subordinate and one who is a follower. In some cases, subordinates are actually easier to manage. Because they tend not to employ critical independent thinking skills for their given assignment, they will simply carry out the orders or directions you give them. However, they may require more interaction because they are less capable of resolving issues or any nonconforming item that comes up in their workflow, process, or assembly.
Good subordinates do as they are told, typically no more and no less. Employees with this operating style are generally easy to predict and can produce reliable and repeatable output in their tasks or position. However, because they lack critical independent thinking skills, they are susceptible to leaders with bad motives or ill-conceived strategies. Any company with a large percentage of subordinates versus followers runs the risk of pursuing a failed course and underachieving their potential.
Subordinates are motivated to work because they have to; it's a necessary evil. They have mixed, if any, career aspirations. Their work is a job, not a vocation. However, being a subordinate in and of itself is not a bad thing. Most companies, including great companies, have a large number of subordinates among their workforces. Great companies are able to channel the energy of these hard-working and dutiful employees toward the ultimate mission and destination of the company strategy. Furthermore, they are able to spot subordinates with followership potential and raise them up along the followership continuum in order to tap their skills and unleash greater career potential for them as professionals.
Many subordinates are not qualified to become managers, and in fact, many do not aspire to manage others. Some subordinates are seasonal, transient, or in entry-level positions that are hired for a particular individual contributor role where management responsibilities do not make sense. That said, subordinates are core team members and are essential for the company's success.
The characteristics of subordinates are quite different than those