The org chart is a half truth - part 2
Where baboons explain the difference between leading and managing
Introduction
This is the post I promised in The Org Chart is a Half Truth – the Murmuration in Your Organization. Some parts of this will make more sense if you read it first.
It’s the second of three in a series proposing new paradigms for organizations, leadership, and management. In the third in the series I offer new definitions. This post eases us into them.
Untangle leadership & management
People like “actionable ideas” so here’s a great one: completely separate leadership and management in your mind. It requires breaking ancient habits but will bring clarity I promise.
We start with two stories. I offer them with some trepidation. No mountain peaks are scaled; no triathlons completed in hostile environments; no vagabond crew is whipped into shape in a cinematic montage; and no great orations turn the tide of history.
It’s dull stuff but they demonstrate the difference between leadership and management and both involve primates so there’s that.
Troop movements
If you spend enough time around something like baboons, you start to look at humans differently. - Robert Sapolsky
Baboons live in stable and highly cohesive troops of up to one hundred males and females. The entire troop forages together over wide areas, usually a different area each day. Baboon troops are strongly hierarchical. In human terms, they have a well understood organizational chart that portrays the troop’s command and control structure and fits squarely in the “autocratic, authoritarian, and coercive” school of organization.
The question that puzzled researchers was how troops decide where to forage. Because they’re hierarchical it was initially assumed that the head baboon issued marching orders but there was no sign of that. So, does the management team confer and then set off with the others in tow? Or are orders passed in some mysterious fashion?
A research team1 placed GPS collars on 25 wild baboons representing about 80% of a Kenyan troop, and when they analyzed the results found what they called “movement initiations” where one baboon moved off and was either followed or wasn’t. In each instance, if the first baboon couldn’t attract the troop, it always returned. There were no lone pioneers. Every morning the rest of the troop watched various movement initiations and then decided which to follow.
The likelihood of being followed increased with the level of agreement among initiators. The more baboons that started to set off in the same direction, the more likely the troop is to follow.
Most surprising to the researchers was that any baboon can lead. Leadership had nothing to do with the org chart. Confidence and cohesion determine who leads, not hierarchy.
The dominant male did not have the highest probability of being followed, dominance rank did not correlate with initiation success, and no sex differences existed in initiation success despite males being dominant over females. Instead, we found that baboons are more likely to follow initiators who move in a highly directed manner….
The failure of high-ranking individuals to dominate movement decisions highlights an important distinction between social status and leadership (Emphasis mine) in wild baboons. Although field-based experiments suggest that dominant individuals, when highly motivated, can shape group movement patterns to their advantage, our results provide evidence that the decision-making process driving day-to-day movement patterns in baboons is fundamentally shared.
Substitute “Management” for “social status” in the quote and we have a finding of “an important distinction between management and leadership”. Baboon managers respond when quick decisions are required such as a predator attack and deal with routine administrative matters such as sorting squabbles, allocating resources, maintaining relationships, and choosing of mates.
Where food may be safely obtained that day is another matter. There’s time for deliberation and, because they forage together, Information about food sources is distributed across the troop, so the vector of ideas is horizontal. (Resign yourself to references to The Three Vs of Ideas.)
Better that the choice benefit from all available information. Heading in the wrong direction is a costly waste of time at best and dangerous at worst.
Mission, permission, desperation, and vacuum
In all of Biz Lit you are unlikely to find a recommendation that you create a leadership vacuum. Until now. Sometimes you need it to suck in the right person. In this instance the combination of mission, permission, and desperation created the right conditions for the most junior person in the room (but with credibility and subject matter expertise) to reluctantly lead.
The story is entirely unremarkable, the sort of thing that happens in workplaces all the time. That is what makes it useful. As William Blake reminds us, we can see the world in a grain of sand, so the lessons we draw from an event have nothing to do with its scale. This is the moment I saw the value of actively deploying leadership as a corporate resource not instinctively treating it as a management monopoly. Well, actually that moment occurred a bit later when I figured out how what had worked in practice worked in theory.
I am the senior baboon in this story.
At the time I’ve been head of legal services for the Government of Nova Scotia for less than a year. Drafting and publishing regulations isn’t a major part of our work but it is highly visible and, because it is chaotic, damaging our reputation. Drafting and publishing require very different skills and are the responsibility of two very different directors, both reporting to me. They hold contradictory views about how the two processes should work together. Things are a mess.
I have two problems.
First, both directors are good performers, fully committed to the highest standards as they see them. If they were bad employees, it would be easier for me. There are lots of tools for dealing with poor performance and bad attitudes. If they cared less about their work, they might have patched something together. They might get along better. Instead, their professional differences have become personal as the situation festered over the years.
Second, and more to the point, they are expert in their respective fields and I’m not.
I decide to use my diplomatic skills and call them to a meeting on a Thursday afternoon to chat about how we might improve service. My diplomatic skills turn out to be no match for their intransigence skills. We quickly reach an impasse. I don’t know enough about their work to be able to tell them what to do or counter their arguments against my suggestions. All their suggestions are aimed at fixing the other director’s work or the other director. At 4 o’clock I have another meeting and the only thing I can think to do is express dissatisfaction and determination. I tell them we’ll meet every Thursday from 2 to 4 until death us do part or we come up with a system acceptable to me.
We meet again, with the same result. The third week, for no more reason I suppose than that I want to share the pain, I invite their administrative assistants. I succeed in doubling the number of sullen people in the room. However, the following week one of the admins – fed up and seeing progress as her only means of escape – leans past her boss to her counterpart and suggests a process change. I can still see her doing it. Her counterpart readily agrees. Both directors attempt to intervene, but I shush them, and the admins continue to trade ideas with growing enthusiasm. After about ten minutes of this, the directors cannot help themselves and begin to contribute ideas as well. They are, after all, good people. In the remaining hour we resolve the process problems if not the interpersonal ones.
I’d like to say I’d masterminded the whole thing, but I hadn’t. I’d accidentally created a micro context where the org chart got out of the way of the murmuration and the non-managers led the managers through an impromptu process improvement exercise. I, the top of the org chart was the simple notetaker - but for maintaining the right conditions by shushing the directors at a key moment – until the very end when I reasserted the org chart, pronounced myself satisfied, and told them to implement the changes and replicate the results day in day out.
What?
In abstract terms, here’s what happened; management created a micro context consisting of four elements:
a team of subject matter experts,
a clear objective: process improvement without dictating the improvements,
constraints and consequences that eliminated doing nothing as an option,
conditions where the org chart ran in the background and “the right person” - in this case a person with credibility and specialized knowledge - could and would lead.
Then, when the ideas had been generated and assessed, management brought back the org chart to run in the foreground to do three things:
ratify specific ideas - the new process,
see to its implementation, and
account for the results.
So what?
You might say there is nothing new here. You no doubt are constantly cultivating the bright young people in your organization. I did. I invited the two admins after all.
Of course, junior employees make suggestions all the time. But do they lead routinely and safely, or only occasionally and courageously? Despite all the talk of flat organizations and servant leaders, it is still far too easy for managers to discourage leadership either unintentionally by taking up all the space on the implicit assumption that managers are the leaders; or intentionally, in the belief that leaders threaten managers – or just because dominance is fun for some.
This is not to say that some leaders aren’t a threat to management or that some people are better suited to leading than others. The point is that the right person to lead depends on the situation not the hierarchy, and crushing potential leaders is easy for managers and sub-optimal for organizations. In this example, I had to stifle my desire to help and tendency to think aloud. The situation didn’t call for my ideas. It called for her ideas and that required desperation born of awkward silence to dispel the assumption that the manager was also the leader. I am proud to add that she was never so reticent again and lead on many subsequent ocassions.
Now what?
The point for me – and perhaps for you – is that by articulating new and better paradigms for organizations, leadership and management, I had a better idea of when and how to turn the org/bird coin2 to unleash the murmuration. I did it better and more often deliberately and inadvertently flipped the coin less often.
Just a reminder, this is Part 2 of three. Part 1 proposed the org/bird coin as a paradigm for organizations. Part 3 offers new paradigms for leadership and management.
Shared Decision-Making Drives Collective Movement in Wild Baboons. Ariana Strandburg-Peshkin, Damien R. Farine, Iain D. Couzin, Margaret C. Crofoot. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6241/1358.full
If you haven’t read The Org Chart is a Half Truth, you probably should or this won’t make any sense.