I’m often surprised at how frequently many of the teams I meet in my work have organizational problems which are rooted in some leadership dysfunction. I can’t tell if this is just my own experience or it’s instead something that happens frequently in the IT world; hearing the stories from my colleagues, however, I would lean towards the latter. Anyway, it’s something I’ve seen way too many times to ignore, especially considering the kind of issues that come with that.
The problems I’m talking about show up when someone who is in the role of leader in the organizational chart doesn’t have the influence and/or the commitment that the role would imply; and the higher is that person’s position in the organizational chart, the more profound the effects of this dysfunction are on the team.
When official leadership isn’t working properly, the system (the team or organization) adjusts itself and, more often unconsciously than not, looks for a new leader, regardless of the organizational chart. This misalignment between the organizational structure – which has the highest priority – and the actual roles is prone to creating conflicts and to weakening the decisional capacity of the team. As a result, the team isn’t working efficiently, wrong or late decisions are made and people don’t work together as smoothly as they could.
So how come that a person isn’t fulfilling the role that his or her position would require? What are the dynamics by which the system finds the actual leader? What can we can do to improve? These are the topics I’d like to start discussing here and that will be further developed in following articles.
The "missing boss" is a term which I use to indicate someone who has the role of leader or manager in the organization but, in practice, isn’t fulfilling the tasks and responsibilities required by that role. In practice, the missing boss is someone who’s there and isn’t there at the same time.
There are many reasons why a person, despite his or her best intentions, may end up being a missing boss, so I’d like to start with a few scenarios.
Please note that these are just fictitious scenarios that I use to help you better understand how systemic dynamics might work in a team or organization. Each person and each team have their own characteristics and history and what I present here are not recipes you can straightforwardly apply whenever you encounter a similar situation, neither they are diagnostic practices. Common sense, experience, intuition and a particular inner stance are inherently required to understand an organizational system in the real world.
I’ll to start with the distinction among leader, leadership and leading: leader is the role that a person has in the organization; leadership is the set of relational skills that a person possesses to influence others; leading is the act of guiding a group of people towards a common goal. Effective leading requires both the leader role and the leadership skills.
So one reason (a very simple one, in fact) why someone might not be functioning properly as a leader is the lack of leadership skills, despite the fact that he or she is in a leader role in the organization.
Anybody who’s been working with companies or organizations for some time is likely to have seen a person who’s acquired a manager status for reasons that have little to do with that person’s leadership skills. I won’t question this fact, since I find more useful just to acknowledge it and to consider what can be done to improve what there is.
If the problem is a leader with poor leadership, what are the skills that that person would need to develop to lead? This is a subject that deserves its own books but, to summarize, the set of leadership skills includes: self skills, that the leader uses to manage his or her internal state in relation to the environment; relational skills, that the leader uses to influence others; strategic thinking skills, that the leader uses to plan for future actions; and systemic thinking skills, that the leader uses to understand the overall dynamics of the environment in which the organization or team operates.
Even from this short list it’s clear that leadership takes much more than a position in the organizational chart to generate effective and productive leading. Anyway, we are just looking at the tip of the iceberg here; for further reading, you might want to refer to the work of Robert Dilts.
There are other, more profound reasons to consider regarding leadership dysfunctions, that originate in the first system we come to be a part of: the family. The dynamics we learn in that system, since the moment we are born, extend to all the other systems we participate to in our life, including work and social relationships.
So another reason for dysfunctional leadership is related to one of the most fundamental family dynamics, the relation to the father figure, that represents authority, guidance and discipline. There are many reasons why a person might not have developed a good relation to the father, which are of course way too complex to discuss here, but the point is that such a person might find it difficult to guide others – and to be guided as well, but that’s a different story.
In other words, a person who has not learned to be led, with trust and respect, might not be effective as a leader, even though his or her official role in the company’s organizational chart states otherwise.
Sometimes the reason why a leader may be partially or completely ineffective in leading lies not in the leader, but in the systemic dynamics of the team. An example is when the subordinates are unconsciously sabotaging the leader by misunderstanding directives, delaying actions, making odd mistakes and so on – in other words, by doing whatever they can unconsciously do to diminish the effectiveness of leadership (let me reinforce once again the notion that we are talking about unconscious actions here, not deliberate ones).
How come that a team might unconsciously want to work against its boss? That may happen in response to the violation of some principles of people systemic, one of which is that those who arrived earlier in the system have more systemic "weight" than those who arrived later – and when a systemic principle is violated, the system reacts.
A classic, practical example is when a new leader takes over a former one and the old leader, who has been with the team possibly for a long time and who’s esteemed and trusted by the team, is not given full recognition of his or her work; or, in more general terms, when the succession happens in such a way that the teams, consciously or unconsciously, perceives as unfair; or, in even more general terms, when someone who had a part in the system gets excluded from it.
When the excluded person is a respected leader, the team, or part of it, may remain loyal to that person and unconsciously sabotage the new leader, implementing several different strategies, including the few ones I mentioned above.
The last scenario I’d like to cover in this article is a variation of the one presented above and it’s another possible consequence of exclusion that, in this case, is connected to the following dynamic: when someone (a group or an individual) in a human system is in discomfort or pain, someone else might unconsciously attempt to alleviate that pain by taking it on.
For example, this sometimes happens in family systems, when a parent is sick and one of the children gets sick too, unconsciously and irrationally thinking something along the line of “better me than you”. The reason for this unconscious behavior may have more to do with the survival of the system itself than with the love that the child feels for the parent: after all, that family system has a better chance of survival if the parent – who takes care of all the children – survives, rather than one of children.
When this dynamic is replicated in the corporate system, it might happen that a member of the team takes on the pain of someone who was excluded, playing the role of the excluded person and excluding himself or herself; this self-exclusion takes the form of reduced or zeroed interaction of that person with the rest of the system. Please note that this taking on someone else’s pain is not related to ethics, feeling guilty or such; it’s just one of the ways for the system to get back to a balanced state, by bringing back into the system a representative of the person that was excluded.
Since in this writing I’m discussing leadership – or, more accurately, the lack thereof – let’s bring the dynamics we just discussed into that context: if a former leader is excluded, someone in the team might unconsciously take on the pain of the excluded one; if the on-taker is the new leader, he or she may be incapacitated to lead by self-exclusion, becoming unresponsive to the team’s needs, even if that person is in a leader role and possesses leadership skills.
We have been discussing some scenarios of dysfunctional leadership. The next step is to consider the effects of weakened leadership in a team or organization.
Leading is the act of guiding a group of people towards a common goal, and it works on different levels:
When leadership on any of these levels is reduced, the system becomes accordingly inefficient, the actions of the people in the organization or team are incoherent with those of partners or teammates, and a great amount of effort is spent on making course corrections.
If meta-leading is weak, the organization as a whole is not moving in a clear direction with regards to its customers, creditors, suppliers and to the society. If macro-leading is weak, strategy is confused and there is little cohesion among the people in the organization; if micro-leading is weak, daily operations are inefficient.
We talked about how effective leading takes much more than the leader’s role in the organizational chart; we’ve also discussed how, when leadership is weakened, the team or the organization isn’t working effectively on different levels.
But all groups that intend to work together towards a common goal need some form of guidance and, if the formal leader of a group isn’t functioning properly, that group will find a new one (or new ones). How does this happen? By which criteria the group finds its leader?
People belonging to the same system are ranked (or ordered, if you prefer) according to a few systemic principles, which we are going to briefly discuss here. Before we proceed, though, please note that the systemic principles have nothing to do with moral, ethical or political principles: they are just the natural dynamics that make a system healthier, the mechanisms that work best for its survival – and this, in corporate systems, is directly connected to reaching the team’s common goal, because if the goal is not reached (for example, the project fails) the team or organization might “die” as well.
The first criteria we’re going to discuss is seniority, which means that those who arrived first in the system have precedence over those who arrived later; for example, a person who’s been in the team, or on the project, in the last year have more “weight” that someone who’s been there in the last week.
Another criteria is that those who are more important for the survival of the system have precedence over those who are less relevant. In practical terms this principle takes two forms: taking responsibility and being competent.
A person who takes on more responsibilities – in other words, who’s putting in more effort to take care of others and more work to reach the team’s common goal – have more systemic “weight” than those who take on less responsibilities.
Last but not least, there is competence: a person whose knowledge and contribution is more relevant for reaching the common goal, and therefore for the survival of the system, have more “weight” than someone who’s not as relevant.
All these criteria combine together to determine the rank or order of a person in the system; and sometimes things can become complex and dynamic. For example, there could be a team member with high seniority who is less competent about the new technical trends than a newcomer; or a young boss who takes on a lot of responsibilities, but doesn’t have the seniority of a team member who’s been there for a long time.
When formal, clear leadership is weak, the team will use this ranking system to unconsciously “elect” a new leader, whom may change depending on the circumstances: for some kinds of problems to solve or decisions to make, the team will pay more attention to the words of one person, while for other problems the team may turn to someone else.
Following this ranking doesn’t mean that the chosen unofficial leaders have leadership skills, neither that they have leader roles: this is just the best solution that the system can find, not necessarily the best possible one. An analogy is when, sometimes, the best solution for a stressed out person is to get sick, as an unconscious strategy to get some rest, instead of avoiding to reach that level of stress in the first place, which would be much more effective.
Another important implication of the team systemically electing its leaders is that it’s quite unlikely that different unofficial leaders share a common vision, mission and direction so, on the long term, the team will be acting confusedly and will spend a lot of time and effort to constantly make corrections to its path towards reaching the common goal.
It’s probably clear at this point that effective leadership is a fundamental driving force in a team or organization; it should also be clear that being an effective leader or appointing an appropriate one is not a trivial task.
To be effective as a leader, a person requires at least the following conditions: to be in the leader’s role; to possess leadership skills; to be systemically recognized as the leader by the team or organization; to be in a position where he or she is free from systemic drawbacks (such as impersonating an excluded person or being sabotaged by the team); and of course, to be willing to act as the leader.
When these conditions are unmet, there are corrective actions that may be taken to improve the situation, but those depend on the position of that person in the organization and, of course, on his or her willingness to walk that path.
So let’s say that you, the reader, realize that leadership isn’t working properly in your organization or team, and you wonder what you can do to make it better.
If you are in a high management position and you think that your subordinate managers aren’t leading effectively, you might want to hire a consultant specialized in organizational systemic. This doesn’t guarantee that things will automatically get better, but it’s definitely a good way to start.
If you are in a leader role and you find that your leading isn’t effective as it could or should, then you may want to work on yourself, possibly attending workshops and/or asking for counsel to a qualified professional.
If you are a member of a team which you think isn’t working properly because of leadership issues, but you are not in a leader role, there’s almost nothing you can really do, except finding yourself a better team; that’s just because you don’t have the organizational and systemic authority to influence people that have more “weight” than you do (you may be able to have a little influence by giving delicate and respectful hints, if you are in a relational position that allows you to do so and you know how to do it, but that’s a different story).
Finally, if you are a consultant with a team and you are in a position that’s transversal to the organizational chart, what you can do about leadership issues depends on the mandate that you received by the person who hired you: depending on that, you may be allowed to introduce changes as if you were in a managing (although temporary) position; or you may not be allowed to change anything, as if you were a team member with no leader role.
Now that we’ve briefly discussed the importance of effective leadership, and its dynamics, we can talk more specifically about how those relate to people dynamics in the IT world and to the process we use in that industry, such as the Agile methods. These will be the subjects of following articles.
Many of the concepts exposed in this writing come from the excellent work of others. For more information please refer to the References page.