LEADERSHIP ON THE GROUND S4: THE TENSIONS OF LEADERSHIP
TENSIONS_06 – 18:12
You are listening to Leadership on the Ground, season 4: The Tensions of Leadership.
A tension is a gentle pull. A stretch that causes a strain. Or an emotional trigger that can cause a positive or negative reaction. When you are in a leadership role, you are confronted with tensions constantly. It’s what you do with these critical moments that matters most.
In this series, we learn how to identify and acknowledge these tensions. How to appropriately respond to them with our next move, and how to skillfully navigate through them when leading our self, leading teams, and leading at the organizational level.
This series is made possible by the international best-selling book, Leadership Rigor: Your Guide to Achieving Breakthrough Performance in Productivity.
And now, here are your hosts, Todd Schnitt and Erica Peitler.
Todd: Good morning and welcome back to our special edition series, Leadership on the Ground, season 4: The Tensions of Leadership. And as always, I am joined by my friend and colleague Erica Peitler. Erica, good morning, my friend. Good to be with you as always.
Erica: Hey! Good morning, Todd. How are you doing?
Todd: I’m doing great. Looking forward to today’s episode. Episode 6: the tension in leading organizations and being either an entrepreneurial or enterprise leader, and understanding how to diagnose your business life cycle stage, and establishing your leadership role clarity. Very, very important conversation. A lot of tension here. I’m looking forward to it. Going to be a great show. Before we go there, Erica, remind our audience what is meant by the tensions of leadership.
Erica: This is really going to be an exciting season for us because we’ve been engaging in this ongoing dialogue regarding leadership being a skilled profession, so it requires conscious discipline. It requires practice. And it’s all in this pursuit of performance and productivity.
So, in season 1, we really laid down some skills about how do you become a consciously competent leader. What do you need to do? How do you do it? And why do you do it?
And then we advanced into seasons 2 and 3 and we started to talk about practices of leadership. How do you practice in real time? How do you establish rhythm for working at the speed of business and putting some macro-structures in place?
In season 4, Todd, we’re going to change it up again, and we’re going to look at these tensions that leaders face as they progress in advancing their leadership practice. And these tensions are stresses. They’re pulls. They’re triggers. And they’re things that leaders must raise, wrestle with, and resolve or else. They’re going to struggle. They’re going to get stuck, and they’re going to stagnate themselves and their businesses. So, the stakes are really high on season 4.
Todd: Well, thank you for that, Erica. So, organizational tension here. And this is a whole different ball game and I didn’t realize there were two different ways to lead an organization. Walk me through what you mean by—do you have to be either an entrepreneurial or an enterprise leader. I don’t think you can be both, right?
Erica: You know, you really can, although I get challenges on this all the time, right, because people think that the answer is “well I’m a blend and I can do both”. Well, we naturally have a propensity to either be entrepreneurial or enterprise based, and when you talk about it a little bit, and you explore it a little bit, you start to realize, “yeah that makes sense”. They’re different profiles.
An entrepreneurial profile is much more about the hunter looking for the deal, trusting your intuition, kind of going with what your gut tells you, and following your hunches, and believing in your instincts.
An enterprise leader really has some fundamental beliefs in structure, process, systems, and they really help you operationalize your business, and get the trains to run on time.
So very different profile. Very hard to be both. Not that you don’t have elements of both. The challenge for this episode is for an organization to navigate through its life cycles, like you said, we’re going to talk about diagnosing them, you have to understand the appropriate balance that the organization is going to need, between entrepreneurial and enterprise practices. And they’re going to change over time with the life cycles.The challenge for the leader is to make sure that they have the appropriate leadership in place to match the life cycle.
Todd: Well, most organizations will start in—from an entrepreneurial mindset, right? And they’re going to have to shift and evolve into an enterprise mindset as they grow and develop. Therein lies where the big tensions are. How and when do we do that? You said something before, you said most of the time we do that transition poorly. Part of the goal here is to mitigate that and to understand—because look I mean, I agree with you because observing my own ability to lead my own organization, I have—I can’t do both. I’m not even good at both. But you have to fight yourself. And there are ways to hire on that too, right?
Erica: Exactly. And what is really important in this episode, and in helping the listeners really understand is, it’s kind of like when you’re thirsty. When you’re really thirsty, you’re already dehydrated, right? So when you’re really feeling the pinch of not being able to scale and sustain your business, you’ve waited too long to make some of the transitions between the entrepreneurial and the enterprise approach. So, what we can talk about today and what we can hopefully put out there for people to consider is, what are some of the telltale signs that you can ask yourself and sense that you know you have to start making that shift and that switch. And how do you do it? You know, what are the impacts and the consequences for the organization if you don’t?
Todd: One of the things you said was if you’re entrepreneurial, you can hire a COO who can help you do that. If you’re for enterprise—if you’re more enterprise focused, then hire innovation officers. Those are some very simple ways you can kind of flank those weaknesses.
Erica: Absolutely. And when you start at the top of the house—and I think it’s a good idea when you’re having this conversation at the organizational level to start at the top of the house. If the CEO is entrepreneurial, yes. There are ways to bring in people who are more process-oriented, or chief operations officer, or some directors of operations that can structure around you and give you freedom within structure—I love that phrase. You know what entrepreneurs need? This freedom within structure. And that’s not the box you’re in, or to make you less flexible, but to help enable you to do what you do on the outside in a way that can process the business and allow the organization to be productive and get the performance they’re looking for.
If you are that operational CEO, don’t stagnate. Don’t lose your mojo. Don’t wait to be disrupted by others on the outside. Make sure that you’re keeping an entrepreneurial spirit alive by having business development people that are hungry, that are outside looking to be the disruptor for you, and not getting disrupted.
Todd: Well, hearing you just say that, we now begin to understand how an organization can be disrupted because your leadership is focused on their own things, right?
Erica: [OVERLAP at 06:51] Exactly.
Todd: Fascinating. Herein lies what I think another really key problem and thinking about this is, I think there’s way too many organizations that don’t know what their life cycle is […] and talk about why that’s so important to understand that.
Erica: You know, this is so key because you go in and I’ll ask an organization, I’ll draw one of my […] little S-curves and I’ll say, “where do you think you guys are? Do you think you’re in transformation? Transitioning? Growth?” Most people say they’re in growth. Like, we’re growing or growth organization. Yeah, but really. Are you in growth or are you really transforming? Are you for example, doing in the ERP system? Are you completely renovating the base of your technology? Are you restructuring your sales organization? Are you going through an integration? There can be so many aspects to you growing but also in a state of transformation. Butif you don’t know what stage you’re’ in, you can’t match that appropriate balance between enterprise and entrepreneurialism.
When you’re in a startup, you don’t—in the first year or two when you’re hungry for scheding[?] the bits of information and getting your first clients—you don’t say, “hey, let’s do a talent management process because the three employees need to know where their careers are going to go, grow”, right? It’s irrelevant. But you start to become an organization of thirty. You start to become an organization of fifty, and you start to ask yourselves different questions around process and people. So you got to understand where’s the entry point for that.
Todd: And this idea I think another big conflict is the tension between strategy and operations. I mean I think that is problematic in so many organizations and I don’t know—I’ll never get their heads around that. Talk about that tension and how to resolve that.
Erica: Yeah, well this one is interesting because you can have a conversation just on the difference between strategy and operations which a lot of people don’t necessarily fully understand. But as an organization grows, you really start to see the difference for making the distinction between strategy and operations.
Making the trains run on time and getting the programs on the ground and implemented in the executional phase—that’s operations. Where are we going to play and how are we going to win is strategy. And when you don’t’ distinctly draw a line between those, you really start to have muddled conversations. Just like if you don’t draw the line between are we entrepreneurial or are we enterprise-based. Well, we’re both and we do a little bit of everything. When you do a little bit of everything, you don’t make appropriate choices. You actually choose to do nothing. Or you choose to confuse the situation.
So, having a conversation around operations and strategy, and distinguishing between those, and then structuring your organization—quite honestly here’s the tension. You start to get to a place in an organization’s life cycle where it’s been entrepreneurial, where it’s now enterprise, and you literally need middle management. You ever watch an organization go through the process of evolving from its founders, or its critical principles, and stakeholders to building its operational level? That’s the challenging process to go through. And it’s literally building that next generation of leaders, and if that group at the top don’t know how to build that bench and how to structure those processes, that could be a very difficult challenge. I have a couple of clients who have really built from the middle, you know? Where the middle kind of comes in and helps the organization develop the processes, and develop the structure. So, you have to either build it from the top or build it from the middle. But it’s okay to build it from either direction as long as you’re clear on the choice and you understand the tension that you’re trying to resolve.
Todd: And most organizations don’t succeed at that which is why they struggle. Okay. Erica and I will return after this short break. We’ll be right back.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK @ 10:27 – 11:28]Todd: Alright, It’s Todd Schnitt back with Erica Peitler. So, gosh, let’s talk now—because as you begin, the natural tension that arises as you’re evolving from a startup more entrepreneurial to more enterprise, there are things that have to evolve organizationally as you transition towards enterprise. One of those is your culture, obviously? How about you talk about this organizational excellence model—talk about how that all fits.
Erica: Yeah, so you know, what’s really important is getting a road map. It’s really important to have a road map as you start to evolve from an entrepreneurial to an enterprise organization and for me, one of the road maps that I use in helping my clients and CEOs understand is the organizational excellence model which says, listen there are six things that you have to do with the enterprise level. You have to understand what you can do to create an optimal environment for your team and your organization to put their talents on the ground, and to really, really deliver what it is externally and internally they need to deliver.
So, how do you create the right environment? And then, what’s the culture? I mean, how do we do things here and how do we do things at the entrepreneurial start-up stage of our life cycle is very different than how we do it at the more established growth phase of our life cycle.
So how we do things around here, things start to change. Processes start to change. Approval starts to change. How we make decisions. Who we involve in decisions. And how we communicate around those decisions all start to change when we move from an entrepreneurial to an enterprise—it becomes a lot more structured.
And the talent becomes pretty significant. Do we have the right people on the bus? We’re going to talk about it in our last episode how the business shifts and is the talent and skill level shifting to keep up with the business? And if it doesn’t what’s the tension there and how do we resolve that? Because those are some really tough choices.
Strategy and performance are other parts of the organizational excellence model. You know, you can get away with never really having a strategy discussion until you get to the enterprise level, yet in the enterprise level you start to get boards, and you start to get investors, people want to know what’s your strategy and how you’re going to measure performance. Just growing year over year is not acceptable anymore. What was your target and did you hit or miss it?
So, different types of lenses and stresses come in. the last piece is messaging. You know, in an entrepreneurial organization we have five great guys, or ten guys, thirty guys and ladies. You start to get into an enterprise, casual one to one conversation doesn’t work anymore. So the tension of people feeling included, informed, and on the same page is really key.
The organizational excellence roadmap can help you scale and sustain some of the fundamental practices that you have to have in places in the enterprise organization that may have been so informal when you were the entrepreneurial organization.
Todd: Right, right. As you shift from entrepreneurial to enterprise, you do have to focus on re-structuring and/or re-designing roles because the roles are going to change and evolve as this thing shifts, right?
Erica: They really do and thus takes back to a couple of episodes ago where we were talking about look there are real consequences to not building that bench, right? If we don’t have a team leader in place who’s building the future bench, the leader for today and tomorrow, we get to tomorrow and we have this large enterprise but we have talent in place who are still running from that entrepreneurial perspective. And whether it’s their capability, whether it’s their capacity, whether it’s their composure, they haven’t evolved fast enough to be able to now support us on this larger scale business platform that we’re running.
And now you have to ask yourself, okay, what do we do? We have people who have brought us to this part of the organization’s growth. Do we redefine their role? Does their role change? Do they go into a different role? Do we say that there’s no longer their role for us in the organization? You can imagine the tensions that start to develop if you haven’t thought simultaneously about how you’re going to balance the enterprise and the entrepreneurial approach around your talent.
Todd: Boy, I would think two other big tensions that you have to think about as an entrepreneur first then as an enterprise, and then more importantly when you shift from one to the other, is the speed of business and risk management. I think those have to be significant tension opportunities, right?
Erica: Those are huge tensions and you will find when you work in organizations that are going through a rebalance and you know, we’re kind of always going through a re-balance. The speed of business, let’s just take it from the top. The entrepreneur speed of business is now an ‘immediately’. The enterprise speed of business is we have a process in place, and we have some things that we need to make sure are in place from a quality standpoint, and from a risk management standpoint. So, we don’t need to get into analysis-paralysis, we don’t want to have rigor mortis. But we don’t want to be impulsive, right? Because we can make bad decisions too quickly by not doing the appropriate analysis and assessment. So the speed of business is attention and you have to find ways to balance that and collaborate on that.
The other piece as you said is risk management. You know, from an entrepreneurial standpoint, it was a very high risk, probably, environment that you could recover your small risks weren’t that great. At an enterprise level there can be greater legal consequences, or compliance consequences as your organization starts to grow. So, you need to be mindful about what becomes your risk tolerance in an enterprise model versus your risk tolerance in an entrepreneurial model. You have to be able to re-calibrate and have balance there.
Todd: Alright, good stuff. I’m looking forward to the next episode where we tie all this up. So, that’s all the time we have for today. Erica should anyone have any questions, how can they find you and learn more.
Erica: Yes, you can find me on Twitter, if you’re tweeting @ericapeitler. And you can also reach out to me via e-mail: [email protected]. Would love to hear from you.
Todd: Alright, thanks for that. So, join us next week for episode 7: the tension of leading organizations and being either an entrepreneur or enterprise leader, thereby enabling the organization to both scale and sustain itself.
So until then, and on behalf of myself and my co-host Erica Peitler, thank you for listening and we’ll see you next week on Leadership on the Ground, Season 4.