ο»ΏHey everyone, Kumar Dattatreyan here with another episode of the Meridian Point. Today we're going to be talking about leadership. I know we've done other videos on leadership in the past, but it's topical for me. So I've asked my good buddy, Glenn, to engage in a little conversation about leadership, specifically servant leadership and leadership as a service. After all, this being an XSCALE episode, we thought why not sort of bring back the concept of servant leadership and leadership as a service, compare and contrast the two, and see how these models can help leaders or managers become true leaders.
So without further ado, I'm going to invite Glenn to the stage. You know, Glenn, this has been topical, top of mind for me because the organization I'm supporting right now is going through a transformation. And as with any transformation, I think we did a talk a few weeks ago about change, about how you handle and manage change and how change really can't be managed. You have to sort of - all you can really do is manage the environment and hope that it leads to the change that you want. If you remember that.
And so as part of this transformation, there's a lot of debate in the organization about servant leadership, and people are, I don't know, maybe they don't like the sound of the word "servant" in front of "leader" or "leadership" or something to that effect because people are resistant to that. And, again, referring back to the talk we had a few weeks ago about resistance being a feedback mechanism, it's something for me, at least, and certainly in this talk, for both of us to think about. You know, what is it about servant leadership that is a trigger for some people? Or have you experienced that?
I have, and the first thought that comes to mind when people hear the term is, "You mean I'm supposed to go get coffee for the team?" So it's important to quickly put that one to bed. That might be, unless you go into a discussion, that might be the source of it. "I'm not going to be a servant. I'm a leader." Focusing on the S word and forgetting the L word.
Yeah, maybe that's it. And I'm wondering if this goes deeper than that because being a servant leader means that for more traditional people in leadership roles, giving up a certain amount of control. Right. What do you think?
Here's the thing, though. Humans are constantly doing this, but this "control" in quotes is an illusion. We do not have control. All we can do is, we're like surfers. You know, we're on the right wave and we're riding it. We don't control the wave, but with skill, we can ride it. You know, there are other analogies. But this is going to require a big mindset change, and it's going to take courage. Some people are not comfortable with that.
What I've always found in situations like this is don't try and train everybody. Pick a couple of people who are open-minded, who are keen to learn stuff and be better. Focus on them. Get them to a good place. Use that as an example and leave the naysayers to the end.
Yeah, but I don't know if servant leadership is something that you can train. It's a mindset, right? And it's almost like, not almost, it requires a certain amount of self-awareness and self-discipline to be in service to others. And if it's not something you can train, then how can you just go and say, "Okay, we're going to move to a servant leadership model and you all need to come along and we're going to make this change."
I'm not sure I'd agree with that. It's about, as you said, creating the environment, facilitating. I think you want to have a discussion with everybody. You obviously need the leaders on side and they obviously need to bring the team along. But really, it's about, "OK, here's what we need to do before I would tell you how to do it. Now, let's talk about what the best way is to do it." So it could be very simple. And, you know, "I really want to hear from you folks. You folks are actually doing the work. You're the best, even though I may have been doing it a few years ago. You people have your boots on the ground. You're the best people to decide how to do this. So I want to hear from you before I give you a directive." So it can be very, very subtle.
And then when you hear from them, then you could go β there might even be a transition. Then you could go into command and control mode with the plan that you β the team came up with. Of course, you want to go one step further, but there still is accountability on the manager's part. This is just a how.
Yeah, I agree with that. I think that maybe before we got on this recording, we were talking about what comes first. Is it servant leadership or leadership as a service? Maybe not necessarily those words, but is leadership as a service maybe an on-ramp to true servant leadership, or is it the other way around?
And before we go there, you know, leadership as a service is a pattern that has been made popular in the XScale framework, and it describes a set of behaviors that leaders can use to, in my view, practice servant leadership. And before going into the behaviors, if you will, what is your response to that?
I like leadership as a service. I don't think it's as widely known as servant leadership. It feels more of a... set of rules that are fairly simple, really, on how to delegate things. So I don't want to say prescriptive, but it feels a little bit prescriptive, and it's so simple. And the best way to introduce it is with a game. And I've used this game, and maybe you and I should do a video on that. So it's very simple, but it does require discipline. Servant leadership seems more subtle. And "How do I do it?" immediately comes to mind. Whereas I think leadership as a service is a nice set of practices, but for organizations, I think it's probably a bigger step.
Yeah, I'm more and more inclined to think that maybe it could be an on-ramp to servant leadership and I'll tell you why. I've had an experience where I've helped a department implement leadership as a service in their leadership team, as part of their leadership team. And one of the four or five rules in leadership as a service is decentralized decision-making through the application of directly responsible individuals.
Over the course of the year that I was in this organization, I could see subtle changes in how these leaders operated, where when I started, it was more traditional, top-down, hierarchical. People in their leadership meetings were always kind of looking at the VP, the head of the table, for approval. And towards the end of my engagement there, a year or so later, I remember the leader, the VP looking at me as a reminder that he wasn't supposed to make any decisions. He was supposed to defer decision-making to his direct reports and the people that were closest to those decisions and to delegate that decision-making authority to them.
Right. And so the short story is it took a while, but I almost feel like just the rules, if you will, allowed this environment to take root, that leaders have certain roles and responsibilities. People on a team have certain roles and responsibilities, and the people best equipped to make a decision are the people closest to the work. That's one of the things. What do you think?
I was thinking as you were talking about which comes first. Maybe, and it's not clear, but maybe start with servant leadership and quickly introduce leadership as a service as a way to practice servant leadership. But we should probably take a step back. What other ways are there to practice servant leadership other than leadership as a service? What would that look like?
Yeah, that's a good question. I'm thinking that if, again, hearkening back to the video we did a few weeks ago on change, maybe setting up an environment that rewards the type of behaviors that you want to see in a servant leader, you know, people that are more self-aware, that are more empathetic, that are more transparent, that exhibit a growth mindset, which means that the environment has to reward people taking risks and chances and maybe even failing so that they can overcome their fixed mindset notions. Well, I can't fail because I look bad or whatever those things are.
So maybe it starts really at the top. It starts with senior leadership making changes. They don't have much that they can control at those levels. I mean, certainly they have a lot of control on the surface, it might seem like they do, but depending on how large the organization is, they have some levers. All they have is levers that they can pull and push. They can force change down, but it likely won't stick because people are people that are complex systems that we're dealing with thoughts, thought patterns and so on, or they can change. They can adjust the levers, the rewards that they give people, how they make decisions, how they reward people for delegating the work that is not theirs to make a decision on. Things like that. I'm rambling. What do you think?
I think I like your list. I think there's one thing that needs to be added to that list, though, and that is this has to be an improvement over what came before. Sure. And you need to have a directive in your back pocket. There may be times when you need to fall back, but you need to make it clear that you prefer not, but if we get stuck or we're driving off the road, I'll pull this out. So I think that's an important thing to keep in mind.
This isn't about treating people nicely, although that's obviously a good idea, but it's about empowering people and autonomy, but with an objective and some kindness and respect along the way, of course. But this isn't an academic exercise in making people feel better. This is about getting better results. So I think it's important to keep that in mind.
I think that's where servant leadership by itself gets tripped up because people see this list of qualities or characteristics that they are told they need to develop. And if I'm a leader and people tell me you're not self-aware, you don't have empathy, you are not transparent, you don't have a growth mindset, you don't empower your people, you don't listen actively, you don't practice inclusivity on your team, you're not humble. I'm going to be pretty defensive. Like, what do you mean? I mean, I've been a leader for a long time and you're telling me that I've got to improve in all of these areas. And yet these are the characteristics of a servant leader, right?
Rather, if you, again, play with the levers and change the environment that rewards these types of behaviors, maybe what you get is a servant leader. I think Peter Merrill from ExGill talks at length about reward models being a critical lever. And I agree they are, but you've just caused me to evolve my thinking. Those things are nebulous and kind of hard. And if you're not used to them, it's EQ stuff. Look, I'm more a directive person. I'm not into that all that soft stuff.
So now I've kind of changed my view. I think actually it would be a good idea to start with leadership as a service. Give some kind of an intro as to where you're going. And then here's a tool to use. And the tool is pretty specific about delegation and how decisions are made. So I'm coming around. I think give an intro, but move quickly into leadership as a service. And I think that would be helpful for people who might be struggling with some of the more subtle, soft stuff.
I think so. I think so. Just talking this through with you, Glenn, has also altered my thinking. My thought was that people can start with servant leadership and evolve to leadership as a service, but I'm almost thinking the other way now is that, yeah, introduce these characteristics, but what you, along with that, what you also introduce is a framework, this leadership as a service framework that allows leaders to practice these things. And it's actually changing the levers, right? These leaders are then evaluated, not just them, but their teams on the outcomes that they produce, right? The real tangible outcomes that they produce. And I think that teams that practice leadership as a service do produce better outcomes, because, again, the pattern rewards empowered employees or empowered doers that are close to the work.
Well, it's even stronger than that. The doers can override the DRI if they are all unanimous. So it works very, very strongly.
Yeah, maybe you can explain the whole DRI model, Glenn, just as a refresher for me and also for our audience that may not know what that is.
Okay, I hope we got this straight. The key point is that a DRI is appointed by somebody in a position of authority, as the directly responsible individual. They decide. Typically they would gather a team and the idea is that they make a decision. The critical point is that what the DRI thinks goes unless the team is unanimous. If the team is unanimous, they override the DRI. Otherwise, what the DRI says goes. And this includes everything, including "We're not ready to make a decision. We need more time." And then that cascades up to the next level. So that's a very brief description.
Yeah, that's a good one because it clearly states the role of the leader here. The role of the leader is to break ties, I guess, or maybe a better way of saying it is when there's no consensus on the team. If the team has not reached an agreement and they haven't requested more time, then the DRI, the directly responsible individual for that decision that's been empowered and trusted to make that decision will make the decision. And the protocol is very clear. Everyone understands it and accepts it. But if the team is unanimous, they disagree with the DRI, they overrule.
Correct. And the leader doesn't choose. All the leader does is choose the DRI and then the DRI.
That's right. Yeah. So the leader's role is really to support the decision-making that the team does. And so this talks a lot. We're talking a lot about accountabilities and decision-making. But leadership as a service is more than that, right? There's a focus on business throughput. So the team is focused on improving some metric within the organization, some business throughput-related metric. And so their focus isn't on pleasing some leader's number, right, necessarily. It's about improving the throughput of some part of the process to bring value to the customer.
I think it's more general than that, isn't it? It's, you know, whatever you're β there's a question, we need a decision. Okay. You make the decision. You're the DRI. Go take care of it. It could be for anything. It's not necessarily for throughput.
No, that's true. You're right about that. I was moving past the DRI thing and more on the role of β one of the other principles of leadership as a service is a focus on business throughput, right? In general, like everything that they're doing should be focused on improving business throughput.
Let's take a step back here. Let's pretend for the sake of discussion, we don't have leadership as a service in our toolbox. How would you go? Imagine that I've called you in. "Hey, Kumar, let's go and roll out leadership as a service. You drive, you figure out the best way." What would you do if you didn't have leadership as a service?
If you told me to implement leadership as a service and I didn't have it?
If you didn't β no, no. Implement, did I say that wrong? Roll out servant leadership, but you-
Ah, okay. That's a really good question. And that's what prompted me to, before we got on this conversation, call to think about that because just rolling out servant leadership alone, I've seen that happen in many different organizations and it fails, it falls flat for the reasons I mentioned earlier is that it just seems so theoretical. And touchy-feely.
And touchy-feely, right? And not that it hasn't happened. I mean, I've seen where there was another engagement where I was one of the coaches that was brought into an organization where we were there to coach the leaders, really, on a lot of the qualities of a servant leader, self-awareness, empathy, growth mindset, transparency, all that stuff. And so I would say that process, trying to change an individual's mindset across a number of leaders in an organization, that can be very time-consuming, especially if the environment doesn't change, if it still rewards behaviors that run counter to what you're trying to achieve.
So how would you even do that? Just talk to them how empathy is important, consultations, and just, you know, here, do these 10 things?
Well, I mean, I think that's part of it, right? So some people, some leaders are more interested in that kind of stuff. They want to improve. But typically what happens is they go through this process, they become more self-aware, they become more empathetic, they become more transparent, and their team is maybe doing a little bit better. But the organization as a whole isn't, right? So as soon as the coaching impetus leaves, that catalyst leaves, then these teams sort of snap back over time to pre-coaching behaviors, right? Because the environment hasn't changed. People are still being rewarded for the same things that they were rewarded before. That's just, I mean, my experience. I mean, I'm sure there are probably examples of servant leadership initiatives that have been successful, but I suspect and I bet that the reason they were successful is because there were other changes that were made in conjunction with the behavioral changes at the leadership level.
One way to measure servant leadership is staff satisfaction and have specific questions. Do you feel empowered? Do you feel directed? Do you feel your manager listens to you? Do you feel they care about you? That kind of stuff. But that is fairly indirect.
Yeah, no, this was a really good conversation. I've definitely come around. I think leadership as a service is a critical tool in rolling out services. I think we talked about this maybe a year or so ago and, you know, leadership as a service as an on-ramp for a lot of things, including other patterns within X scale, like the Camelot model, for instance. I think we talked about that maybe a year ago when we were doing more X scale focused talks. And I think leadership as a service could be an on-ramp for a lot of things, for a lot of organizational change type efforts, just because it's not simple. It's just the pattern is not that... It's not that hard to understand. There's no fluff there.
I think it would be a good idea in a future video to get very specific about how to do leadership as a service. We gave up the high level because leadership as a service is not that common or not that popular, certainly common in the X scale world. But we need to start spreading the word on this. I think this is a powerful, important, and useful tool, and we need to get it out there.
Well, we have seven-ish minutes. Do you want to take a stab now or you want to do this in another video, get deeper into leadership as a service?
Let's do it in another video. I was thinking of doing a bit of prep. And there's that simulation that I found to be...
Oh, yeah, yeah. That's right. Yeah. I wonder how we would do that in a video. But we could talk through it and then maybe even invite people into a workshop where we did that. You know, use the video as a way to promote that, perhaps.
Yeah, we need at least four or five people.
Yeah, exactly. All right. Well, Glenn, this was fun. Thank you for indulging me today in this leadership conversation. Do you have any sort of closing thoughts or things that you might want to share with the audience on leadership, servant leadership, or leadership as a service?
Just to summarize what I said earlier, when I came into this conversation, I wasn't sure which one came first. Now I'm convinced. Do a bit of an intro to servant leadership, and this is the tool you use to get started.
Yeah, I like that. And so for those in the audience, we'll put some links for you to refer to on what leadership as a service is. I wrote an article yesterday, actually last night, because it was bothering me so much. So I wrote a blog post on servant leadership and leadership as a service. But I'm thinking I'm going to rewrite it and rewrite it with that sort of pattern in mind that it may be just an intro to servant leadership, but then really the on-ramp is leadership as a service and how you would do that. How might you sort of use leadership as a service to change the mindsets, leadership mindsets on a more sustainable basis?
I think there's another key point here, and that is that introducing servant leadership is hard. Some organizations are doing it through measuring employee feedback but that's really hard and really indirect. This is something you can do quickly. We want all the other soft stuff but this you can do - this you can do tomorrow.
Yeah, good point. Just follow the rules.
All right, awesome. Well, thanks Glenn for joining me and for all of you out there viewing the video, appreciate it. We will be back in about a month on another topic related to Agile and XSCALE. And we will dive deep into leadership as a service. Thank you. Thank you.
