I will begin with the Dabbawala … Mumbai Lunch Box delivery company operating since 1880
THERE IS LIGHT:
This is an organisation that has targeted its vision - "delivering home made meals to loved ones" - mission - "the war against time" - has a laser sight on its goal - "always delivering on time" - and has optimised their understanding and configuration of the network, transportation, warehousing & inventory.
They have then created an organisation that has a very simple instruction set (encoding system) that harnesses the benefits of the optimised logistical elements & have identified the critical rules of the game - waves of network aggregated & disaggregated delivery/return, fixed time windows for transportation.
Within this environment and abiding by these rules, talent and ingenuity are free to play - an engaged workforce with clarity of purpose & always performing. (note: literacy is not a sufficient measure of talent)
To me the secret is that they have cracked the essence of WHY they are in business, WHAT the essential components are in order to deliver and HOW the activity MUST be guided in order to enable a workforce of any level of intelligence to be a value contributing asset.
This is my definition of Institutional Leadership - it is a collective creation and sadly, todays media popularises the individual and more appallingly, their ego ….
DO WE EXIST IN A VOID OF LEADERSHIP:
Most organisations don't know why their company is truly in existence, what the essential work is that needs to be done therefore have no true guidelines for autonomy at the activity level - therefore, many of the activities they perform, don't align to the work that needs to be done, in the time & within the pace that it needs to be done. Decisions & directions are being made/given at localised levels, within a context of end-to-end blindness, creating major distortions across functions & supply chains.
I call this the "functional-dysfunction" at the organisational level and "supply chain dysfunction" at the Value chain level level
Now the people in this environment are frustrated, agitated and unsatisfied as much of their efforts are not tangibly delivering benefits.
I always thought that there must have been something in the colour coding of the Dabbawalla system that realised such operational excellence with such low levels of literacy at the worker level - but, from what I can see ... the Dabbawalas are an example of institutional leadership - the system has been designed to lead & energise the people operating within it and sets out clear guidelines regarding the rules for success.
On a more fundamental level, I am experiencing this issue of "functional dysfunction" almost every where I look. The worrying thing to me is that almost all companies (a bit of a broad statement I know) seem to be void of true leadership - which I define as creating the Dubbawalas type system. There seem to be many intimidating personalities that wield big axes delivering modest returns from each blow, but there is nothing that I can see by way of a leadership system within which talent can blossom and awareness can cultivate. Smaller companies seem to be more able to create it, but, once they grow it is all over.
About 18 months ago I went to a session by a Professor from Harvard. He spoke about talent and how talent performed once it moved from one company to another. It struck me that everybody was acknowledging that the social system had a huge impact on the performance of what they were categorising as talent. They referred to it as the nebulous "Culture" ... So the the objective of the "War on Talent" is to get the best performing people from other companies to join your company. I believe that this is a flawed strategy.
I could not help but think that there are 2 categories of Talent - and it depends on which side of the "awareness curtain" you are on. This professor was referring to the talent that is to my mind, behind the curtain, in the dark - unaware that the environment that they are in will have a direct impact on their ability to perform. They are not aware that the conditions of their environment need to be changed in order for the results to flow. They get frustrated when they cannot perform at the level of their previous environment. They then put demands on the system to put in place touch points that they were familiar with and associated performance with. In the world of IT this is when a new person comes into an organisation and immediately demands XXX system. Because they had it in their previous role and it helped them perform. What they are not realising is that - almost like the Bull Frog effect - the social system that they are introducing this information system into does not have the operating conditions for success.
On the other side of the curtain are the talent that are aware of the social system and the environmental changes that need to take place for the "behind the curtain talent" to perform. Furthermore, there is awareness that the environment should cultivate the development of people such that they come out from behind the curtain.
BE THE TALENT & CREATE THE LIGHT:
Now, Ken Dovey pointed out the collective nature of the "aware talent" - and that is the ability of talent to surround itself with other talent; people who will constructively confront one; whom one can trust; amongst whom there is the kind of mutual respect that allows creatively abrasive communication to occur on 'what really matters'. In this sense, talent as Ken points out a 'collective' concept and not related to an individual.
So if you subscribe to the idea that Leadership is not about the individual it is about the system creating the conditions for successful operations regardless of participants literacy levels - and you subscribe to the theory that Talent is also a collective construct not simply an individual designation then if you are not in such a leadership system, you need to search out and bind with talent, establish your leadership system and displace or fill in the void ….
Just a thought ….
No comments:
Post a Comment