Servant Leadership, Entrepreneurial Leadership

Leading Complex Organizations

The case "You have to lead from everywhere" is told from the perspective of Thad Allen, who is the national incident commander for the Deepwater Horizon response. The Deepwater Horizon event was considered to be a total government response, where different agencies were responsible for different components of the response. The challenge, as Allen describes, was "creating unity of effort," or getting everybody to perform their disparate roles in line with a common objective, in a time of crisis. Some of the more significant challenges that Allen identified were with respect to things that were not strictly a part of the response doctrine for oil spills under law -- things like seafood safety and behavioral health problems. The effort was further complicated by dealing with BP, and with the varying interests of both the public and of the different layers of government (Berinato, 2010).

Allen identified that it was necessary to create, quickly, a set of shared values that would guide the response, and that the leadership had to be able to identify a vision of what success looked like, and then execute on that vision. The phrase 'you have to lead from everywhere' refers to Allen's management of multiple stakeholders. He had to split his time between Washington DC and the Gulf, in order to ensure that all major stakeholders were given due attention.

The author, and Allen, does not identify something that "went wrong," but rather that there were specific challenges that were associated with the complexity of the event, and the multiple stakeholders that were involved in the disaster response. Allen noted in particular that leadership needed a high degree of flexibility. There are different ways to lead, and different ways to run a disaster response, but in dealing with citizens, military, government and corporations there are a number of different approaches. The people in each of those types of organizations will have their own worldviews, their own protocols and methods for dealing with things, so in that sense the leadership needed to be highly flexible in order to manage that challenge.

While this is perhaps a surprising admission, I have never run point on a disaster response. I have never seen anything even close to that level of complexity before. I have never had to fly to DC to talk to Congress about my project, appear on any news networks, nor faced angry questions from people whose lives are being ruined by the disaster I am trying to solve. I work in smaller organizations, or small components of large ones, and have never run a team much bigger than a couple of dozen. There is no reasonable corollary that I can draw from Allen's experience to my own.

But I have at the very least been able to provide guidance to people from a leadership position. Granted, the different stakeholders are all fairly similar in terms of their demographics, and are driven by a common objective that I merely need to frame. But as Allen had to be available to his different stakeholders, so too do I. I need to ensure that the messages I want to be conveyed are repeated, multiple times, so that there is a steady stream of reinforcement for the people who need to work together. The common objective needs to be defined and communicated so that everybody understands it.

One of the areas that Allen does touch upon is that leadership can be different when there is one clear leader (i.e. The military) and a chain of command, versus situations where one has to lead in more of a partnership with others. Allen notes that communication is important in both, but in the latter collaboration is also very important. You are communicating not just your ideas to subordinates, but you have to communicate with your partners as well. Everybody needs to be on the same page. This is the complexity that Allen had to deal with in the disaster scenarios -- and I have never faced that. Allen clearly needed to work with key partner stakeholders to determine what the agenda needed to be, and get everybody's support for that agenda. In his case, he needed to do this very quickly. He kept it simple, which I think was the right call, because it allowed for each stakeholder partner to then go back to their constituents and communicate the mission effectively. I though the idea that Allen had to write out a mission statement for Deepwater was a great one, and that is something that I would personally adopt as well, should I ever find myself working in a more complex organization.

The questions about the workplace situation seem to hint that a conflict situation should be examined, even though Allen was not in a conflict situation, and Allen furthermore did not indicate regrets about how he handled anything. I have little experience with conflict in a workplace situation. First, I encourage constructive dialogue. Second, I have clearly-established chains of command, so there are people in charge of making each decision. Third, decisions are made on evidence and facts. This is not to say that conflict can never happen under my watch, but ultimately conflict other than constructive debate is simply not a part of our organizational culture.

So how do I handle "incidents"? Well, first I don't consider some things to be incidents and other things not. Everything that transpires within our organizational context is part of doing business. There is no magic line where something is "an incident," as this simply creates a false dichotomy of what is ultimately a continuum of interpersonal interactions and interactions between different organizational stakeholders. People do not always agree, but it is toxic to consider a disagreement as an incident. Maybe this is why I can't think of some crisis that I have had to solve -- I run a better organization than that. We don't lurch from one crisis to another. This is actually how Allen seems to run his organizations either. He sets the tone from the outset, like with the speech he gave in Baton Rouge, and works hard to reinforce his messages. The result is an organization that can manage a highly complex situation without needless conflict. I like Allen's approach to his organization. Of course, the interview only presents his views -- he may overstate the harmony of his operation considerably for all I know.

Richardson (2008) opens up the discussion about the role that complexity plays in managing an organization. The more complex an organization, there more difficult it is to conceptualize how the different components of the organization work together. My organization is sufficiently simple that I can handle this fairly easily -- I'm not sure I'm on Allen's level but I do not have to be. Complex systems, especially when multiple complex systems interact, are usually broken down into smaller pieces, but ultimately somebody at the top of the organization has to understand how everything comes together to meet the organizational objectives.

Another key concept from the readings was authentic leadership. Authentic leadership reflects a leader that is "true to oneself," in other words that the leader knows who he or she is (has high self-awareness) and is true to this. People are more likely to follow that type of leader than they are someone who they view as being in authentic (Walumba, et al., 2008). Allen seems an authentic leader -- though we only have his own words to go by. But when he gathered the people after Katrina and gave his brief mission, that seemed to resonate well with people who were facing a very challenging situation before. He simply empowered them to do what should be done -- something that demonstrated his own humanity, or authenticity. I try to lead this way. I can be a bit prickly, but the big thing I try to convey is that I am always going to do the right thing for the organization and its mission, even where that means a sacrifice on my part. My approach to conflict -- why I don't have a great conflict story to tell you -- is rooted on that. I run the organization as I think it should be run, in a manner that seeks to do things so well from the outset that I do not spend my time on conflict resolution, fire-fighting or whatever else I am supposed to be writing about here.

Part II.

Kotter (2008) explains the difference between management and leadership as follows. Leadership is an old concept, rooted when humans first began to organize themselves into groups. The roles typically associated with leadership include motivating, inspiring, providing direction and providing support. Leadership, therefore, is inherently a human endeavor, the result of an interaction between two or more people (Kotter, 2008, p.3). Management, Kotter argues (p.3) is "largely the product of the last 100 years," and is concerned with organizing the resources and activities of complex organizations. Without management, such organizations would quickly become chaotic, regardless of leadership, Kotter argues (p.4).

Management and leadership are related, complementary, functions, but they are not the same. Management is needed to organize resources, but leadership is required to guide the human element of the organization. Management alone will not be sufficient to do this, because humans are unlike parts of a machine, and cannot simply be put into place and a result achieved. There are subtler elements to leadership, which has made the subject of leadership tougher to pin down.

Organizational systems are largely a management issue, but certain aspects of leadership are influenced by systems as well. Systems are the means by which resources are organized. The role of management is to develop those systems. However, leadership is involved in a couple of ways as well. Leadership is first involved in setting the organization's mission and vision. These provide the basic framework for what the organization hopes to achieve, and that framework is going to be the basis for the systems. The vision and mission will also provide a means for setting the performance mandates and benchmarks for the organizational system. So this is one fairly important role for leadership.

The other important role for leadership is to get buy-in from the people within the organization. This buy-in is required to implement the system, and it is required to ensure that people are working at their best to make sure that the system is effective. So this is another major role for leadership in ensuring that the organizational system works to its best. Leadership sets out the basic vision, and it provides the motivation and direction for the organization. Leadership and management thus have very complementary roles in this process.

How people lead is another matter altogether. The more traditional vision of leadership is basically management -- in the middle of the 20th century management was much more important than leadership. But as leadership has evolved, the older, more autocratic styles of leadership have fallen out of favor, and management now is just one function within the company, leadership arguably being more important. There are many different styles of leadership that work -- often the best style is situational, but in many cases the organization is built around a certain leadership style. There is no one-size-fits-all optimal leadership style, but it is good to be aware that the leadership style someone has should reflect who they are. There is a strong argument for authentic leadership (Walumbwa, 2008) as a cornerstone. Whatever a leader's style, as long as it is authentic, it is more likely to succeed.

It has also been determined the leadership today is largely situational in nature. Graeff (1997) argued that situational leadership is a natural response to the multiple different roles that leader plays within an organization. In order to be effective across the different tasks and challenges, a leader needs to be able to adjust his or her leadership style, preferably in line with situational requirements. Situational leadership has also proven to be beneficial in situations of organizational change. Situational leadership is often required because of today's rapidly-changing environments, so leaders need to authentically have a number of different leadership approaches in order to be fully effective (Luo & Liu, 2014).

Servant leadership was also discussed. This is one of the more unique conceptualization of leadership, basically that leaders demonstrate servant leadership by "empowering and developing people, by expressing humility, authenticity, interpersonal acceptance and stewardship" (van Dierendonck, 2011). It is worth noting that authenticity is again an element of this definition, highlighting the value of authenticity in leadership. Moreover, servant leadership all about empowering people, and ensuring that they have what they need to perform their tasks to the highest level. Management might determine what those tasks are, but the servant leader is the primary facilitator. Admiral Allen was more of a servant leader than anything else, which highlights the value of servant leadership in a complex organization.

Emotional intelligence is vaguely understood as one's ability to recognize others' emotions and deal with them. It's not really a leadership style, other than in one-on-one situations, so does not really fit in with the context of the current discussion.

Organizational entrepreneurship is the idea that organizations can be entrepreneurial In particular, leaders are often called about to foster innovation, and this is true regardless of the complexity level of the organization. Hartley (2013) notes that market competition is one means by which organizations foster entrepreneurship, but that does not imply much about the leadership of the organization. Yet there are forms of organizational entrepreneurship that are leadership-driven. Collaboration, for example, and building an entrepreneurial culture, are two ways in which the organization.

The key leadership qualities to foster innovation include having a vision for the company with respect to its innovation and entrepreneurship. Once there is a vision in place, then the next step is to ensure that the people within the organization are empowered to innovate. Servant leadership is one of the leadership styles that is most successful at creating this type of culture within the company, because innovation is usually at its best, and the organization at its most entrepreneurial, when there are fewer barriers to innovation within the organization.

So the course covered a lot of different leadership styles, and sought to find ways of explaining what the different styles can bring to an organization. The reality is that the organization will benefit from clear, coherent leadership style that aligns with the objectives of the organization. Further, the role that authenticity plays has one key result -- a leader can really only work within what he or she brings to the table. While it is important to have situational leadership, and be flexible with one's leadership style at times, people also need to recognize that they need to be true to what their natural leadership style and vision are.

The more flexible styles of leadership, things like servant leadership where the leader is focused on making the organization better, are the ones that are most likely to achieve success in things like innovation, but also in complex organizations. The reason something like servant leadership is effective in the latter is that there are only going to be a handful of people within a complex organization that are capable of understanding and guiding such an organization -- they need to be the architects and directors of change within the organizational context, which implies more of a servant relationship, helping the different stakeholders to come together under a common vision.

Paper 2: Learning Reflection

I felt like this course would help me to learn about the different types of leadership. I feel at times that I am locked into my leadership style, and while I find it effective, I mostly know how it works in one given circumstance. In order to better myself, I wanted to see what other people are doing, especially people who are better leaders than I. So in that sense, I feel that the course was valuable. It was particularly interesting to think about how different leadership styles are used in different types of organizations. We can all imagine very different organizations, but even within the context of a large corporation, two companies can have very different leadership styles. That for me is an interesting thing to have learned about. There was definitely this sort of inner conflict going on with respect to trying to apply the things I was learning to the things I already know. I cannot say that I would adopt someone else's leadership style for my current role, so instead I found it more useful to focus on things like how I could adapt my leadership style to hypothetical new situations.