ļ»æTransformative Leadership
Kumar Dattatreyan: Good afternoon, everyone. Kumar Dattatreyan here with Agile Meridian and the Meridian Point. This episode is going to focus on leadership and what leadership's role is in removing bottlenecks that exist in every company and organization. We'll explore what the true role of the CEO, president, or main person in a company really is. We're going to explore that with Glenn Marshall and myself.
The premise of this talk is: What if everyone in your organization thought like a CEO? What would that do to the company? How would that improve the way the company operates?
Glenn, what do you think?
Glenn: I think the way companies operate today leaves a lot to be desired. Leadership is just overloaded - everything has to go to them. The world's changing more quickly, and I think a lot of them are struggling. They necessarily have to make decisions with imperfect information and quickly, and this is highly suboptimal. When I heard this title, it really resonated with me. We can push down decisions to where the data lives for speed and effectiveness.
Kumar: One of the things we talk about in the disruptor method is that leadership bottlenecks limit organizational potential. It's not because they're doing anything wrong necessarily - it's just the way organizations are structured and the way leaders are rewarded that causes bottlenecks. We started to think about how we can remove those bottlenecks. It really starts with that transformational leader - the CEO, president, or whoever is at the head of the company. How do they need to change the way they lead and operate to empower and basically create a bunch of CEOs running around the company? That would do a lot to remove those bottlenecks.
Glenn: Not just a bunch - everyone. I want to add a point here. I've had discussions around this, and sometimes people say, "Oh, this needs to be anarchy - everybody running around doing everything and anything." But it's not. It's aligned to the CEO's objectives. So it's not a free-for-all; it's autonomy with alignment.
Kumar: Yeah, autonomy with alignment. That's something that Peter Merrill says quite a bit within the XScale framework. You want autonomy - you want to give people the power to do their best thinking and innovate. At the same time, you want them aligned to the company's goals. If you have alignment, then the autonomy can be really powerful. If you have misalignment, then maybe not so much. You have a different set of problems.
Glenn: The other thing from XScale and Agile is small cycles, small iterations. It's not like you're going to go off somewhere for six months. You have to have these small cadences where you show work and get the correct feedback and course-adjust. So it's actually not that dangerous - delegation, alignment, and regular check-ins with guidance.
Kumar: I agree. So there's kind of a mindset change here. Could you talk a little about that? Traditionally, leaders have been like a command center. It sounds like that model is going to have to change.
Glenn: For most modern companies - successful companies - there are a few exceptions where a command and control model is absolutely required. I think of Tesla in the 2016-2017 timeframe, right before they launched the Model 3. Elon Musk had to take charge and drive the troops, so to speak. But in most companies, that model doesn't work for very long. It's not conducive to driving innovation and change.
Kumar: We at Agile Meridian, with the disruptor method, really see the modern CEO as more of a system architect rather than running a command center. They need to be people who create environments where decisions can be made at any level. It's changing the mindset from a CEO thinking "I need to make all the decisions because I'm the one in charge" to "How do I empower the people closest to the decisions?"
Kumar: It doesn't have to be the line worker - it just has to be the next line of people that you lead. It's the VPs and the AVPs and so on. How do I empower them to make the best decisions possible? And how do I empower them to do that with the people they lead, and so on down the chain?
There's an example I'd like to use here. It was with a company called Denova, a consulting firm out of Colorado. We installed this leadership model with the president of the company through leadership development programs. It was sort of the beginning of the disruptor method with that client back in 2020, actually right after the pandemic. They credit this work that we did together, and the work they did implementing this leadership model, with helping them turn around their company and becoming wildly profitable. The president and the C-suite implemented this model of shared ownership, shared leadership, allowing people closer to the decisions to make them - autonomy with alignment. And it really paid dividends for them.
Glenn: I'm not at all surprised at that. Think about it - the time it takes to make a decision just shrank. So if nothing else, you're able to respond more quickly and get more work done. Just looking at it from that perspective alone, it's going to increase profits. The other big thing is staff engagement. Did they talk about that? How did the team respond when they were given the support?
Kumar: That client, I don't quite remember - it's like four years ago. But I remember they were a small company, maybe fifty employees with another fifty or so contractors. Since then, they've grown quite a bit.
Another example I might use is a client that grew beta by thirty percent year over year for three years in a row since they started using the disruptor method. It resulted in much more engagement, not only from the people on the factory floor - they're a manufacturing shop - but it also improved communication between silos, between departments and divisions, between engineering and sales, between sales and marketing.
Kumar: You might think that sales and marketing are so closely connected they should be always talking. That is not the case in most companies. They have separate P&Ls, separate budgets, and they sort of fight tooth and nail for the dollars they get to be able to do their jobs. The role of the CEO is to align all these different people and have them start thinking about the company goals, not just the sales goals, marketing goals, engineering goals, or whatever. It's about what's best for the company and having them start thinking like a CEO, which is what these patterns allow them to start experimenting with.
Glenn: You brought up an interesting comment about P&L. It's very important to align the reward models and practices with this. Having separate P&Ls for marketing and sales would seem to be introducing misalignment, for example.
Kumar: It sure does. I don't know to what extent the company I'm thinking about, BevCorp - their testimonial is on our website - I don't know the full details because I wasn't the coach there, but I can certainly find out. And we can talk about that maybe in future episodes. But I do know that they created a lot of alignment around the company goals. The C-suite from the president on down, they're all aligned. And all of her directs were aligned to the company goals. It created really good synergy.
You know, it seems like common sense that you'd want to do that. But most companies meet this way: The C-suite meets to talk about strategy once a year. Then after that year, they come up with their goals and they're off. They get together maybe in the third quarter, closer to the fourth quarter, to start planning their next year's goals. But they haven't really reviewed the goals they created nine months ago.
Kumar: And so there's no accountability, no real measurement of how well they did throughout the year. That's something they were able to change - they started meeting on a biweekly cadence. Rather than meet for three days every year, they're meeting in short meetings every two weeks and staying aligned. It's not enough to just gain alignment in one moment and then assume that you're going to stay in alignment until the next time you meet a year from now.
Glenn: I'll paraphrase what you said. I think you've made a critical point - what seems to be happening is you got them to dedicate a percentage of their capacity to this on an ongoing basis rather than three days at the end of the year.
Kumar: Correct. They were committing their time to work together as a leadership team. The term "team" gets thrown about quite a bit - "we work together as a team" - but this group of people were considered a team before we came along. They thought they were a team, but they really weren't. They were a group of people aligned by a common purpose, but they had conflicting goals.
What we were able to do and help them do is think about what was common between this group of people. It was the company. That's what they were trying to promote, what they were trying to build. And from the president/CEO on down, we helped them craft a set of goals that they could all stand behind. It was a shared set of goals.
It was also, to your point, the cadence by which they met. They met every two weeks to discuss where they were. We set up a Kanban system for them to help them track things that each department was working on. So there was visibility.
Kumar: One other thing about alignment - besides autonomy with alignment, you also need visibility and transparency into what people are working on. Otherwise, people can get misaligned really quick. Say you're in a small group of people and you align like, "OK, these are our goals," and you don't meet for a quarter. People tend to do things that are in their own best interest. And so when you meet again, you may find yourself misaligned and have to course correct quite hard to get back in alignment. That's exacerbated by the fact that there's limited visibility into what each of the players in this group are doing.
Visibility is another thing that we stress a lot. It's not just having autonomous teams that are aligned - it's also making sure that there's visibility and transparency so that people know what each other is working on. And you can self-correct if you need to, because you might realize, "Oh, I'm going off course here a little bit. I need to self-correct."
Glenn: I'd like to drill down to that a little bit. When you talk about visibility, along with visibility comes prioritization. So many people are working on multiple things. You've got to prioritize and focus. And for the things you're working on, you have to slice and limit the amount of work in progress. This is Kanban 101, but so many companies are working on so many different things that basically everything proceeds at a glacial pace. Whereas if they prioritized and sliced, they could focus, move things forward, and then reconsider the next highest priority item.
Glenn: I'd also like to go back to the command and control comment you made. I think you brought up an important point. There will be occasional emergencies where the CEO has to come in and get their hands dirty. The idea is not to take that off the table, but to limit it. And when you have to do it, do it for as brief a time as possible. But there will be emergencies, and you will still have to do this. So the CEO does have that in their back pocket.
Kumar: I think that's an important thing to keep in mind. Ideally, with a well-run organization, those times will be few and far between because the collective intelligence of the team - if this leadership team is now truly a team - the collective intelligence is greater than what one leader could possibly achieve.
I was reading an interesting article about ant colonies last night, and how collectively an ant colony is much smarter than an individual ant. They can solve problems better than human groups can, although individual humans can solve the same problem much faster than an individual ant. So it's proof that ants have this sort of collective hive mind that allows them to solve problems that humans aren't very good at, especially in large groups.
The larger the group of humans, the less ability that group has to solve problems because people are inherently in it for themselves. It gets to a certain size where the team becomes untenable. There's been a lot of research - six to nine people, whatever that number is. At that level, if the team can craft a set of goals that are shared and they can start to bond with each other, establish trusting relationships with each other, the collective intelligence of that group is going to be more than the individual's intelligence in most cases. Maybe not as good as ants, but more than individual humans anyway.
Glenn: The total is greater than the sum of the parts. That comment you made about the ants is fascinating, Kumar. Please be sure and put a link for that in the notes in the video. That's a powerful thing that we need to keep in mind - collective intelligence.
Kumar: The insect world is fascinating to me. Bees collectively are super smart. Individually, they're pretty smart, too. But anyway, that's going down a rabbit hole. We want to stay on the transformative leader.
Glenn: Okay. So I think we've talked about the attributes of a transformative leader. How do we actually go and build that?
Kumar: That's a really good question. Obviously, you have to have a leader that welcomes that kind of change, because it may not be something they're used to. What we do with the disruptor method, before we do anything, is conduct a personality assessment, not just on the CEO or president, but the entire leadership team or whatever team is going to be going through that program.
Kumar: The assessment is similar to DISC, if you're familiar with DISC, and it points out the strengths and areas of opportunity - I wouldn't say weaknesses - it just points out the personality profile of individuals mapped in a model, a quadrant model that shows where these people mostly gravitate to. Are they more command and control? Are they more analytical? Are they more team-oriented and supportive? What is their makeup?
What we want to see is a team of people that is well-rounded from a personality profile perspective. Most often what we see is that when you have a bunch of leaders and you do a personality profile, they're sort of skewed to the command and control and analytical side of the equation, with not as many people in the more supportive and coaching team-building makeup.
It doesn't mean that we fire everybody and get new people that fit the mold - no. But what it does do is highlight for these people where they need to focus. It doesn't mean that they can't do that; they just need to be made aware of what the personality profile of the team is as a group so that people can say, "Oh, we are lacking in these skills and we need to do a little bit more team building, trust building, so that we can operate better as a team."
We do that first, and that leads to a lot of education as to the dynamics in that group and how they need to work with each other, how they need to deal with each other, how they deal with conflict, in what way will they be accountable to each other, and how will they agree on what the accountabilities are. Those are all really valuable conversations.
And it starts with the leader - the CEO, the president, whoever it is - that says, "Hey, we need this. We want this because there are things in our organization that aren't working right. There are these leadership bottlenecks that exist that we want to fix, that I need to fix as a leader. I need to figure out how to fix it." It takes a little bit of vulnerability on the leader's part.
Glenn: You said something interesting, and I've observed this in my clients as well - that leadership tends to orient towards command and control. Coming back to your vulnerability point, this is getting into an area that's not their strength. It is essential to go there, but we need to be compassionate and recognize that this is hard, and it's going to take courage to go into a new space for a lot of leadership.
Kumar: You're right, it is hard. It doesn't work for every client that we work with. I can think of one client where we didn't get in at the top - we got in somewhere in the middle. These were mostly people who were one or two levels, maybe two or three levels below the most senior levels in the company. And so the most senior person there is a VP and this VP's peers, or maybe it's product management or VP of product management, people like that.
Yes, it had an impact at that level and below because we helped them think about how to operate better as a team and how to reduce the bottlenecks in getting products out to market, really analyze what their product lifecycle was like, what the value stream was like, all those things. So it had an impact. However, it didn't permeate up because these people didn't feel empowered enough to be able to coach up.
It really is important where you start. And it is also important, the level of influence that the group that you work with has or feels they have. In some cases, it may provide a lift, but it's not going to resolve all of the leadership bottlenecks that exist. Because again, unless you start at the top and build a thread from there down to the people that are doing the work - I don't want to say bottom because everyone's important in an organization, right? From the people that are on the factory floor all the way to the CEO of the company. If you're really going to develop a company where everyone thinks like a CEO, it's got to be the CEO, the president that starts this.
Glenn: Yep. And you're at grave risk if you do not have senior leadership involvement of things regressing. Hopefully, if you're starting in the middle, you're able to go and engage them and show sufficient improvement that their boss will be saying, "Hey, how are you guys doing that? I want more of that." And that's your opportunity to take it up.
Kumar: Exactly. That was the hope, but it doesn't always work. So again, you have to have the right engaged leader that has enough influence to be able to coach up if you're not getting in at the top. And if you are - if you are a CEO watching this - then it's really about how do you cultivate the mindset, not just within the team that you lead or the company that you lead, but yourself. How do you cultivate that mindset where you are more coach, architect, system architect of the organization, of the organizational culture, rather than "I need to make the decisions because that's what I was brought here to do." There is an element of that. It's a hard shift to make, but it's a valuable one.
Glenn: It starts even with the coach. The coach has to walk the talk to the CEO, and the CEO has to walk the talk. And if you're not walking the talk, we're just going to see right through it and go, "Yeah, yeah, sure." Yet another methodology and it'll go nowhere. If I can just back up for a second, your comment around "down to the bottom" - I'd like to propose that we're pivoting more from a hierarchical structure to more of a network structure where everybody's empowered. And there still are centers of control, of course. Somebody needs to sign off on the books, for example. But more and more things, it's really not so much hierarchical as it is a network structure.
Kumar: That's a good way to put it. It doesn't happen overnight, though. In my experience, these things take time, especially the larger the company, the more time it takes. Because there's HR to deal with - not deal with, but to bring into the fold. Legal has to be brought into the fold, and job descriptions need to be modified. Who reports to whom needs to be clear because in many organizations that's really important.
All of those things are things to think about, but the mindset is the most important thing. I think all of those things sort of pale in importance and become less important if the mindset is something that can be cultivated. Thinking like a CEO, being a transformative leader - no matter where you are in the organization, even if you're not a leader by title, but being able to think in that manner, being able to influence others in that manner becomes really more important, especially in today's world with the amount of change that we're going through with AI and the impact that it's having. I think being able to build relationships, trusting relationships with your peers, with your superiors and the people that you lead is going to become even more important than it was.
Glenn: I agree. Something that we also have to keep in mind when we're coaching is we need to meet people where they are today and change at their rate, not where we are. That does require some humility and, frankly, patience. Everybody's at a different spot, and everybody in the organization is different. Every team is different.
Kumar: You asked about prioritization. In the disruptor method, we do a lot of work to educate whatever level team we're working with, whether it's the C-suite or one or two levels below that, to help build business literacy across the organization. We start with the team we're working with and then help utilize that team to spread the message to their directs and so on. We almost use the team as a bullhorn - we multiply our influence and impact as coaches in the organization by using the voices of these leaders who are influential, who have gravitas and pull and respect in the organization, to educate people one, two, three levels down about the goals, the reason why the company exists, what the goals are for that year, and how they can leverage the intelligence and collective wisdom of the group to achieve those goals.
It becomes really important to prioritize the right things, both from a customer standpoint - what are you building? For whom are you building it? What impact is it going to have on the customer? What outcome is it going to provide for the customer? And what impact will it have on the business? It's important to see both sides of the coin. This is how it's going to benefit our customers, and this is the impact we think it'll have on the business. That way you can start to make trade-off decisions about what's most important to work on, and maybe even prioritize things that have a negative impact on the business. Maybe it's a loss leader for the company, but it's going to put your products in front of a thousand percent more people over the next year.
Glenn: The way I would suggest to start on that is get one of your best teams and give them some autonomy. Start small, prove it works, and then scale it up. This is going to be extremely disruptive to the organization. There's no question about it.
Kumar: Well, Glenn, this is getting to be a thirty-minute video. So I think maybe if there's one more question you want to ask and then we can wrap it up.
Glenn: This feels like a good break point. We talked about the goals of the leader and we talked about how to build that mindset. So this kind of feels like a natural break point. There's more stuff to talk about, of course - actually implementing it. I think that's a topic for our next session.
Kumar: That sounds good. This is a big topic. Empowering your team to think like a CEO is not something that you can watch in thirty minutes and go do. But it's to give you some ideas on how you might do that. And of course, you're always free to contact us at Agile Meridian. Our details will be in the show notes for this episode.
Just think about how this might apply to you. I'd love to hear your comments in the comments section on the various platforms where you'll be seeing this video or hearing the podcast. Thank you for joining and we'll see you next time.
Glenn: Thanks again.
Kumar: Bye bye.
