Corporation Z Now Hiring . . . Leadership
Key Skill/Attributes Required
Corporation Z would like to hire new leaders who are:
- Visionary, intuitively aware of changes in the external environment, and truly creative and innovative, willing to take large risks. Can effectively evaluate long-term needs and opportunities.
- Focused on producing daily and weekly results, enjoy daily tasks, and who respond best to the immediate or near-term satisfaction of successful action.
- Detail-oriented, with the clear ability to manage processes, policies, and people. Must be enthusiastic in monitoring processes and systems to ensure compliance in order to promote order and cohesiveness to all processes. Must be committed to day-to-day operational efficiency.
- Committed to the long-term health of the organization in terms of effective inter-department, cross-functional collaboration, systems that work to enhance the maximum performance of the organization, and overall robust company culture.
If you clearly demonstrate all of these skills and attributes, please send your resume quickly!
Leadership and the Life Cycle Model
Yes, my example is clearly meant to set this up. Yes, most of you certainly realize that there is no perfect leader. However, it is extremely important for any leader to understand that they are simply not able to provide all of the necessary ingredients of leadership consistently in order to serve any organization’s real need for comprehensive leadership. Whether you are a fan of the DISC personality assessment, Myers Briggs type testing, or any of the various other tools commonly found in the business sector for evaluating skills, talent, and personality, you accept that people are different and bring different values to any organization and particularly, to leadership.
When building upon the work of Greiner and the Corporate Life Cycle model, Ichak Adizes refined this model with clear definitions of how various dominant leadership traits (forces or functional focus) influence the behavior of organizations as they move from stage to stage of this life cycle. As we further examine these leadership traits, please note that whether you accept these definitions or substitute or amend these definitions with any of the personality or leadership type traits from other similar tools (as those mentioned above), the key is to understand that the dominance or subordination of specific leadership attributes within a group or larger organization greatly influences the capacities and future of such a group or organization.
Short-Term/Long-Term & Effective/Efficient
In making decisions (a key part of leadership), there are generally two lenses that influence those decisions. The first lens one likely considers concerns time – short-term vs. long-term and the second lens examines efficiency vs. effectiveness. Consider this model developed by Adizes:
When making decisions, it is essential to consider both lenses together to fully consider goals, results, and resources. For example, a decision made to obtain some clear short-term results (effective) needs to be considered in light of whether resources are still available for the future (efficiency). Decisions made that clearly are effective for the long-term should be considered in light of whether that leaves enough resources (efficiency) to also continue to achieve the necessary shorter-term goals. You, as a leader or group of leaders, must evaluate the cost-value relationship of any decision in light of both the short-term and long-term value to the organization and the resources, costs and means of achieving those results.
Revenues are falling, creating pressure to fix this “revenue” problem. However, you also know that underlying this revenue loss is the fact that the market needs have shifted and your organization has not invested in creating the products that meet those needs. Do you throw more resources at sales? Do you discount products? Do you layoff people and cut costs to keep your margins up, knowing that this may impact your ability to create new products? Do you invest in new products?
Perhaps growth is skyrocketing and you feel the pressure to expand your resources to meet the growing needs? How much to you expand? Do you raise prices to dampen demand and capitalize on that demand instead of growing and the risk associated with that growth? Do you promote producers form within to lead growing teams or hire form the outside?
The need for decisions like this is common and the perfect leader would know what to do of course. After all, we see that the perfect leader has the skills and attributes to carefully consider all of the important issues. In reality, the perfect leader is going to be a collection of leadership in the company and decisions are going to be a collaboration of work by imperfect leaders sharing their strengths and weaknesses to work together.
PAEI
In Adizes work, he put forward four specific leadership types (or forces or functions) that work independently and together to address these two lenses. I introduced these four — Producers, Administrators, Entrepreneurs, and Integrators — at the end of my last post, “What is the Corporate Life Cycle Model?”
- (P)roducer – focused on the activity of attaining short term or immediate results.
- (A)dministrator – focused on the activity of minimizing waste in ongoing activities
- (E)ntrepreneur – focused on the activity of seeking out and recognizing new opportunities or new orientations to the environment
- (I)ntegrator – focused on the activity of coordinating shared resources and identifying and creating shared systems
When looking for a model that best reflected what I have personally experienced both in working within an organization and also leading an organization, I gravitated towards this model given that these four leadership types along with the life cycle model seem to best capture those experiences and offer the best framework from which to examine the past, present, and possible future of organization decision making. As we further explore these four leadership types, you can see the influence each might have in the growth and aging of an organization.
Producers (P) are focused more on the short-term and gaining short-term results (short-term effectiveness with less regard to efficiency in the long-term). Producers are absolutely necessary to every organization in order to get things done today and every day. However, if the producer thinking becomes too dominant, the long-term future concerns may get overlooked. At the same time, too little of the producer influence is surely the sign of an aging company that is more concerned with survival than re-investing in producing new innovative results.
Example: Sales resents the requirement to now use a CRM tool, because there is a failure to understand how the long-term value of this information outweighs their time now, time taken away form selling to fully use the CRM.
Administrators (A) are required if a company wants to be financially sound, function with some sense of order, maintain records, and generally stay working smoothly. But of course, if administration becomes too dominant, there is the risk of constricting of creativity, a reigning in important risk taking, and the possibility of developing an inward focused culture that cannot survive or grow. Administration is definitely focused on the present, the short-term efficiency and can lose site of long-term effectiveness. Of course, where there is little or no administration, there is the chaos associated with newly born companies or adolescent companies.
Example: The collections department creates new unbending policies on payments, delinquencies, collections to tighten up accounts receivables, but fails to fully consider the ramifications of long-term relationship with customers.
Entrepreneurs (E) are the reason that companies usually get started, and certainly the driving force for birth and re-birth of ideas, products, and new organizations. They keep dreaming and reaching, sometimes with success and sometimes with failure, while the organization continues marching forward. If given too much prominence, an organization might never get focused enough on today, might chase any and every opportunity, and may never really get organized enough to function efficiently over the long-term. On the flip side, how common is it to hear about an organization that struggles without the original founder or without an instrumental entrepreneur who has left that organization. The entrepreneurial force at work primarily fuels youth of a company.
Example: When the business just starts to hit its stride, the owner is bored and wants to now launch a new, unrelated business, because of a great new idea. This new idea has appeal and some key players move over to this business leaving key holes in the still fledgling business, now causing that original business to fall back in the life cycle.
Integrators (I) are many times unrecognized or certainly less recognized, but valuable contributors that focus on elements that make up the real “glue” within an organization. They are necessary to create and implement systems that tie things together, to build accepted routines and processes that make things work together for success, and to inspire what becomes the ultimate culture of the organization over time. These integrators stay focused on what works effectively in the long-term and usually only implement short-term fixes begrudgingly. In the corporate lifecycle, integrators rarely grow to a dominant level because they rarely have any real power in organizations. However, if the drive for integration grows strong at the same time that administration is dominant, this combination simply continues to focus the company inwardly in absence of vision and real production.
Example: The CRM system, supposedly purchased to primarily enable the sales force to capitalize on shared information, integration with marketing and lead generation, etc.; instead, was focused on the original secondary benefits of better financial forecasting, cutting cost through integrating back-end systems, and fails to meet the primary goal. This integrated solution does indeed provide little or no benefit to sales, but is an elegant “administration” system created by committed integrators.
Constructive Leadership Conflict
Why does all this matter? We have enough of a blend in our leadership team to cover this? The good news is that intuitively, many CEOs or other company leaders do manage to surround themselves with leadership teams that embody these four traits or functional points of view. The bad news is that more organizations do not deliberately evaluate how dominant or subordinate these functional views are within their organization on a regular basis and how this is shaping their organization in terms of their journey down the life cycle.
Recognizing these functional leadership forces and fully embracing the constructive conflict that exists between these creates real leadership and decision opportunities within the organization. The various combinations of these forces at work within the organization and the decisions made in terms of the conflict of these forces predictably shape a company’s “life journey,” certainly in a more accurate manner than just considering size o the company, actual age of the company, or even just attributing behaviors to market conditions. The PAEI forces are observable, many times obvious, and are key drivers that can be reviewed and specifically leveraged in order to ensure that your organization shapes its own life cycle.
The Common Journey Waypoints
In an earlier post, “Organization Effectiveness Quadrant: Where Does Your Organization or Group Fit?” I put forward a chart to demonstrate four quadrants that represented the four most common stages I have observed in terms of organizational effectiveness (or lack of effectiveness). Those quadrants are based on my own evaluation of the four most common life stages that companies are likely to identify with when you stop and truly analyze where you are.
While it is helpful to examine all ten of the life cycle points for a full understanding of the model, my experience and interactions with various businesses have led me to narrow down the focus to four very common stages that organizations likely fall into from a macro point of view. I have found that these stages are both influenced by the presence of the PAIE types of leadership traits, but also by the relationship between a clear shared vision for the organization and the overall effectiveness of the organization in terms of focusing on and executing that vision. Two of the common quadrants (Wild West and Growth/Synergy) are stages of growth, but very different to manage and experience. One quadrant (Stable-Aging) is at best a stable stage, but vulnerable to experience the early aging stage signs. One quadrant represents the many forms of an aging company (Slowly Dying).
In my next post on the topic of the corporate life cycle, I will further explore these quadrants, what you can learn from the life cycle model, and the normal and abnormal problems an organization faces in growing and aging.
From Entrepreneur to CEO offers a complete framework and set of coaching and consulting services to get you to PRIME and keep you operating at PRIME. We call this Lead-to-PRIME and you can learn more HERE.
