Employing Differences, Episode 87: Do we need a leader?

Paul: 0:08

Welcome to Employing Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.

Karen: 0:14

I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: 0:16

And I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 0:18

Each episode, we start with a question and see where it takes us. This week's question is, "Do we need a leader?"

Paul: 0:24

So I want to start by distinguishing between two things, which is leadership and leaders. I am actually a big believer in leadership. I believe that leadership is important because what leadership really does is it allows for a group of people to accomplish something together that they could not accomplish individually on their own. Right, fundamentally, that is what leadership is for me. But leadership is a social process that results in that. And leadership can be undertaken by any member of a group at any time. One of things I talk with the groups that I work with about is that you can lead from whatever chair you're in. The scope of what you can do from that chair differs, the options you have available to you differ, but I believe it is possible for you to contribute to the group achieving things that you could not all individually achieve, regardless of whether or not you have any formal authority in the organization and in the group. Oftentimes, when people talk about leaders, what they really mean is people who have some sort of formal authority bestowed by the structure of the group or the organization. And that's actually, I think, what we are going to talk more about here today. Sometimes leaders exercise leadership. Sometimes they don't. So actually, I think where we're going to be exploring is more about "Do we need to have particular authority invested in individuals, in order to achieve our tasks and in order to achieve what it is that we're trying to do?" So that's kind of setting the stage of where we want to go. So with that, that's really the question. "Do we need to invest specific authority in certain individuals in order to get what we need to get done, done?"

Karen: 2:24

Yeah, and I think this is one of those that it's so situational. And a lot of it is, are we in a group where there is a willingness to exhibit leadership and to accept leadership without that positional authority. And most of us don't have a lot of experience with that. So my sense is that every now and again, I've been in a group where there is this incredibly sweet spot of everybody in the group kind of steps forward in leadership now and again, in this way, or that way without a great deal of formal assigning of roles. Although I will say even in those groups, there's often a passing of leader roles in a very kind of way. And often following a similar path. I'm in one group where we don't have a formally assigned facilitator, but almost every time we get together, somebody says, "Karen, are you going to facilitate today?" And I can say no. I don't very often, but I can. But there is that sort of pattern now in the group of, "Okay, this is a person who's good at this thing." And I land in that role of leader, but it's in a very casual friendly kind of way, if that makes sense. So I think even in those cases, I think we usually end up with some amount of role. But most of the time, the groups that we're in don't actually have that skill, to really show up with leadership each of us consistently and whenever there's a leadership vacuum, that someone steps into it. In my experience, that's pretty rare, without some sort of formally leader.

Paul: 4:25

For me, I've been in a bunch of learning communities recently, where we get put into small groups to go perform a task. We're given a chunk of time. There's a there's an activity we're supposed to do. And it's really fascinating watching because no one is formally designated as the leader of the group to help get the task done. And it's really fascinating watching how people either do or don't step into that kind of role. Because I think one of the things that formal authority is useful for is helping to create the conditions around a group that are going to help it succeed. And, attending to those without necessarily trying to manage and run all of them. It's one of the interesting paradoxes. So I do a lot of work with self-managing teams. And one of the things that we know about teams that work effectively, where they control the way that they get their work done, they are highly collaborative. They figure out,"Okay, this was our process for doing it, but there's actually a better way of doing it, so we're going to modify our process." They're not having a manager who controls rigidly the process that they do. They're responsible for sort of figuring that out themselves. Those teams are hard to set up unless there is something in the structure around them that says, "You are all on this team." That's a use of authority. "You're on the team or not." And the purpose of this team is, the mission of this team, setting the compelling direction. If that doesn't happen, then those teams rarely form and gel well. Because we all have different ideas about what the purpose is or what the mission is. What are we actually trying to do? Are we on the team? Are we not? Things like that. So in some ways, where we need a leader, even in the self organizing teams, we need a leader to establish the boundaries and the conditions around the team, so that we can lead ourselves. That's the paradox that we run into is we think that, "Well, because the team is going to self-manage doesn't mean any type of manager or any type of leader." And I think in fact, it does, it's just that what that looks like the authority needs in that type of group are just very different than what we're used to. But it doesn't mean that it doesn't need them at all.

Karen: 7:00

And I want to distinguish here between a leader and a boss. And because what I think we're often used to is that authority, the authority of a boss that says this is how it's going to be period. And we've probably all had bosses that were somewhat approachable. But when that authority is landing really heavily this is the person you go to to find out if you're allowed to do it or not that boss authority is very, very different than a collaborative leader, whose primary role is to say, "Okay, so group, I think we're saying we want to go here, am I getting that? Okay, then, how about this as a way? I am proposing we use this tool as the next thing. I'm proposing, we use the structure as the next thing," with an absolute understanding that anyone in the group can say,"No, that's not going to work for me." So leadership, although there's some amount of authority in saying, you know, we don't need 10 people to all show up with a structure for a meeting. We don't need to each be throwing tools in at the same time and fighting over which one. So there is something to be said for who's going to put the energy in ahead to be thinking about how we're going to function, that kind of formal authority. At the same time, I want to be careful to say, I don't think you need a boss. I don't think you need someone with the authority to dictate, to instruct, to assign in a firm kind of way. I think that we need that leadership role of someone who will suggest a course forward or name something if there's something going on in the room that we aren't naming and we need to name it, that will say the hard thing, those kinds of leadership tasks. And it's probably easier to do that when you have some sort of authority for that. But that's a very different thing than the dictator type authority that we often think of when we hear the word authority.

Paul: 9:04

Well, and this is a thing that I work a lot with organizational leaders with, with managers, directors, things like that. I think we have a relationship to the concept of authority that we need to each be aware of. Because what I tend to see in work that I do is that authority feels like the thing we either abuse or we abdicate usually because we're worried about abusing it. So your comment about the dictatorial boss who over-controls these things, who specifies we must do this, all this and the other thing, that's often that often falls into the abusive end. But then when you have people , who are nominally in a position of authority in an organization... The chair of a meeting, has authority. And if they do nothing to create structure for people to actually have conversations, if they abdicate that authority, then the group is often no better off. The failure modes are different for those two ends, and I think each of us will have a tendency to do one or the other, depending on our relationship with authority. So a lot of the work that I actually do coaching executives and directors and people who we would often point to and call leaders in organizations, is actually helping them see that they have a third option, which is actually to use their authority humanely and in the service of the group. And that can be hard. And so I think, "Do we need a leader?" is actually really a question about, "What are the tasks for which authority could be usefully and humanely employed to help this group succeed?" And in different groups, the answers to that are going to be different.

Karen: 11:07

Yeah, I think often there are some predictable answers to that. And they may not all land in the same role. But I think organization, like picking a path, picking a direction picking a strategy, like that sort of organization of the work often is one of those. And another big one is communication. How are we going to touch base with each other? How often are we going to touch base with each other? When are we going to have meetings? When are we going to check in by email? Do we need some kind of group communication tool? Are we going to set up a Miro board? What is the communication interactivity level and mechanism? And then making sure that those things actually happen. So those two big areas, I'd say, are pretty predictably in the mix, not necessarily done by the same person. But those are two areas, I think you can predict for any kind of project.

Paul: 12:01

Yeah. And this is where the fashion in which you actually carry those things out, there's a lot of flexibility in and can be tuned really usefully to the group. Because that can be done in a very dictatorial manner. "We must communicate and we will use this method." Or it can be done in a "I'm very firm about the fact that we need to have regular communication. What are the methods that might work well, for this group?" And then maybe I'm going to make a decision after I consult the group. So it sounds like, "Let's give this a try. Here's what I'm going to do. We're going to try this method and see how that results." But that's still saying, I'm making a decision about how we're going to do this. There is still some use of authority. And I think, where oftentimes those of us who do a lot of work in, in the leader-full groups, in self-organizing, self-managing, consensus-based sorts of groups is we shy away from saying even that. From doing the like, "So would it be okay, if maybe we..." And that's sometimes just not of service to the group. But if we don't practice actually using that authority, that structural power granted to us by the group, by the organization, if we don't use that, and practice it, we don't get good at it, at using it effectively and humanely.

Karen: 13:37

Yeah, one of the things that comes up for me, just as you're talking about that is the authority to form a proposal, which is a power structure in a group. The person who says, "How about we do it this way." It's way more likely to be that way now than any other. So there is a moment at which you're exerting some authority or some power in the group when you say that. On the other hand, if nobody ever makes a proposal, you can talk for days about,"Well, we could do it this way, and we could do it that way, and we could do it this way, and we could do it that way." At some point, somebody's got to say,"How about if we try this one?" Or, "It's not serving us to keep having this conversation. Can we go that way?" Have you ever been with a group of 10 people who are going to have dinner together and you got to figure out where? At some point somebody has to say, "I think we should go here." And for me, I'm often that person because my tolerance for the forever "Well, it could be this, and it could be that, and what if we go here, what if we go there" is pretty low. But typically, I didn't arrive with the idea. What happened was I listened for about three or four minutes and each person sort of chimed in, and maybe I already know we have a vegetarian and we have whatever's in the mix. And I say okay, "So of the five things anybody said, this is the one that seems like it works for everybody. Does it? And then we're off on our way to have dinner, instead of standing on the sidewalk outside the theater or something having this conversation for the next 20 minutes. So I think there is that piece of, does it exert power? Yes. Does it influence the outcome? Yes. Does that make it inappropriate or unfair or not useful to the group? Not if we do it, as you say humanely. Not if it is framed in a way that someone could say, "You know, actually, that doesn't work for me." And so that sort of proposal kind of energy. But I've seen a lot of groups where somebody brings an idea and we're in a consensus meeting, and people have concerns about it and there's other concerns about it. And the idea is,"Okay, so now we're going to give it back to the person who brought the idea and have them go work on it, and at the next meeting, they'll bring a proposal that takes into account all these other things." And so often, it's more useful if someone it might be the facilitator of the meeting, it might be the person who brought the proposal, it might be some other clever person with good leadership skills says, "Okay, so that was the original proposal. And we've heard this in this in this objections. Here's an idea that addresses all of those. What if we change the proposal like this?" And then we get it done that day. The person who brought the idea feels good about it. The group feels good about it. We got a thing done instead of just like kicking it down for more conversation and more process. So there are all kinds of ways in which the willingness to exert some influence, some power, suggest a direction actually serves the group incredibly well. And it can feel really vulnerable to do it.

Paul: 16:40

Yeah. The other thing that I want to say about this, and about authority in particular, is authority to do particular things. It's that you have the legitimate power to do particular things. And you draw on that either from the group itself, or the larger organization that the group is part of. And humans are actually really good at figuring out who has authority to do what. Even when we haven't explicitly said who has the authority to do these things, we've all got a pretty good idea. We can suss that out pretty well. So the thing is, there are certain tasks for which having clarity around who has the authority around those is useful to the group. It's useful to know who has the power to make a proposal. It's useful to know who's going to make the decision about what order we're going to consider things in. Because when there's that kind of clarity, we know how to engage with the process. When we lack clarity around who has the authority to do certain things, we don't know how to operate in the group. We don't know how to engage with it. And so I find, coming back to the question of, "Do we need a leader?" or what do we need to actually have designated authority for, I think it's for those tasks for which clarity is useful for the group. When the group needs to know where that authority resides, it can be useful to actually formally assign it. Because then people know how to engage with it. If I know that Karen is the person who's making the decisions about who's going to be on this committee, then I can go, "Hey, Karen, I know somebody who I think would be really good to be on that committee. I think Bob would be great for that." As opposed to me just going, "I wonder who I need to ask about this thing?" or things like that. So I think that do we need a leader is also really about what are the things for which it is useful for people to have clarity about who has the authority to do certain things.

Karen: 18:53

Yeah, I want to give one more frame to that, which is when we're thinking about giving authority to do certain things, one of the things I think about with that is, will the decision be a better decision because everybody made it than if we just gave the authority to one person to make it? Because in fact, one person making a decision is always more efficient. It's always less energy, it's always less time. And more efficient isn't always better. But for the sorts of things like what order are we going to talk about things in an agenda, almost always there are exceptions, but almost always the order isn't going to matter very much, and any one of us could make that decision and it wouldn't be better or worse than if we'd all tried to make it together. There just isn't enough difference between changing the order. And there's a lot especially of process type things like that, where the group process won't make it a better decision. And I also think see this, when I work with groups I work with community design a lot, so I'm often working with architecture developers or other professionals who know a lot more than the client group knows. And they'll say, "Oh, well, the group can decide between these things." Yes, but don't ask them to because they won't make as good a decision, or at least they won't make a better decision. They don't know enough about real estate markets or design. You know 10 times as much about that as anybody in this group. They're not going to make a better decision than you. And so at some point, even if it's their decision to make to just have the leadership to say,"This is what I recommend." So if in fact, a single person making a decision is likely to make at least as good a decision as having a group process, that's one of those moments where giving authority is really, really useful.

Paul: 20:55

Yeah. The whole question of decision making is ginormous. And how do we engage with that process? Who can make decisions? Who can make proposals? How do we ratify decisions? I think that there are a lot of different ways of distributing authority in groups. And so fundamentally, I think that's where we get to on a lot of this. The question of, "Do we need the leader?" is actually really, "How do we need to distribute authority so that this group is best set up to achieve its goals? To accomplish what it needs to do?" And there's no single answer to do we need a leader yes or no? In fact, the answer is almost certainly, "Yes, for these things, in certain situations, somebody needs to have the structural authority." And that may not be one individual. It may be a group of people, a subset within the group. These three people have to agree on how we're going to do this. But I think digging into that nuance, and understanding the ways in which we could distribute that authority is a thing that allows us to pick a structure, to have a method, a way of working, that is best suited to our situation, rather than just defaulting to what we always are sort of philosophically committed to."We must always have a strong leader who can make decisions and move things forward," or "We must always decide everything as as a ginormous group." I think that's an easy trap to fall into.

Karen: 22:30

So I think we're saying,"Do we need leaders?" Probably."Do we need leadership?" Certainly. And the extent to which we need leaders, how we structure them, length of their authority, the scope of their authority, how many of them might be involved this is all looking at how the group is functioning, what kinds of decisions they are making, what kinds of processes are in place, and frankly, how much other leadership capacity exists in an informal way within the group. And so when you consider all of that, that will lead you to some amount of structure of leadership, which could be anything from very informally short term roles to longer term, very formal roles of authority that are what that group needs to work collaboratively, well.

Paul: 23:27

Well, that's gonna do it for us for today. Until next time, I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 23:31

And I'm Karen Gimnig, and this has been Employing Differences.