Building self-adjusting purposeful cultures and leadership teams

A former colleague, Brigitte Morel, argues in Is the leadership bar raised impossibly high? that

we may be entering an era when the bar of leadership effectiveness is raised so high that it’s simply out of reach to the numbers required to fuel business growth, at a time when there is a scarcity of ready-now leaders equipped to tackle the next major economic shockwave that will send ripples throughout the world economy.

I respond:

I would argue that yes, expectations (external and self-imposed) of leaders are always rising and that that is not a bad thing. I think, though, that the challenge is that the expectations rise faster than the capability to individually adjust. All significant contextual issues are becoming more complex, more variable, more dynamic, and subject to greater incident rate of black swan events: the economy, technology, regulation, domestic political environment, global political environment, personnel diversity, legal environment, customer diversity, sources of competition, supply chains, manufacturing, training and education, etc.

There is a limit to what any individual can incorporate and demonstrate mastery of, regardless of his/her purposefulness or agility.

I think what is happening is that this differential between increasing contextual complexity (all the above issues interacting together) and the capacity of individual accommodation is putting a premium on Culture and Team Leadership in a way that is different from the past. The leaders with such high expectations of them perforce must build more robust and resilient cultures to accommodate complexity as well as demonstrate effectiveness in cultivating diverse executive team leadership. The team can’t simply be the sum of the expert parts but has to function as a constantly evolving capability. Hierarchy is necessary in all cases and is particularly well suited for predictable and non-variant environments. The challenge for the modern leader is to create hierarchy which can evolve collectively to accommodate fast changing externalities. I think the issue is not just that expectations are rising but that the form of those expectations is changing as well.

I think the practical limit on the bar of expectations is not so much to do with individuals but the capacity to build self-adjusting purposeful cultures and leadership teams.

Individuals will always matter but individual expertise and capability is, in increasingly complex environments, beginning to ever more clearly take second place to institutional capability.