#023 Harnessing shared leadership to improve strategic coherence | Jordan Ludlow

Jordan Ludlow, guest · [03:11]I think for me, coming from my traditional science background, I really was very heavily skewed towards an analytical, the pursuit of a single truth and a solutions-driven sort of determinist mindset where I really wanted to Have a high degree of certainty in my decisions. I wanted to be able to analyze data and make one single decision, which was that objective truth and that perfect way forward. And that for me was probably the greatest learning from the MBA journey. It really challenged that like fundamental worldview. Things like complexity theory, you know, really helped me to understand that there are such complex and emergent challenges for today's organizations that the, the knowledge can't simply be in the head of the leader. And that was quite liberating for me, understanding that as the leader, you don't have to have all the answers. And what that did for me, it paved the way to firstly be a lot more comfortable with that uncertainty and have a little bit more patience to allow patterns to emerge as I sort of probe things. It also allowed me to really embrace Multiple perspectives and really like leverage the diversity of the people around me and, you know, their own lived experiences and the lenses with which they viewed the same problems that I was seeing. And that really was probably my single biggest learning, really a fundamental change in the way that I viewed the world. You know, the relational elements and the dimension of, of organizations really also resonated strongly with me, and I, I, I really, really enjoyed the course.

Jordan Ludlow, guest · [05:38]So, you know, since, since my, my first position paper, I've really been fascinated with this sort of idea of Of real meaningful autonomy and how you actually create the conditions for this meaningful autonomy, for people to actually really take accountability for their own decisions. You know, I work in a very operational environment. There's a lot of day-to-day operational noise. And for me, as a leader in that space, It was really around trying to understand how I can allow people to take some of that operational noise out of my day-to-day role so that I can focus on some of my key objectives, and, and really how do I empower them to actually do that. And that really was the starting point. And, and it really started in position paper one, and, and there was a, a very, very close thread through a lot of my position papers. And really it was on, on, on sort of two key principles. It was on, on the complexity, the emergent nature, and the challenges of organizations, and the fact that those organizations have to adapt to challenges that are only seen sometimes in the day-to-day work by employees. and, and often the success of those organizations is determined by the speed between when they detect an, an adjustment or a change, and the response that they take. And that response It's very difficult to get quickly if you are running an old traditional hierarchical model of working. And then the second element really was around the, the human populated systems as organizations, and how complex they are just because of all those worldviews and different ways of viewing.

Jordan Ludlow, guest · [12:56]My major learnings, and, obviously quite difficult to, to condense, this down into, into a short conversation, but there were three key ones for me. The first one was, was around shared leadership. In terms of how do you enable this, this new type of leadership, the shift from a traditional hierarchical, command and control leadership paradigm to this new way of leading in the world. And, and obviously that's Was very much linked to the complexity, the fact that I wanted to try and empower people. So shared leadership really, for me, the three key ways or antecedents to shared leadership, which came out of my research, was how do you create shared purpose? So team members having similar meanings of the team's primary objectives and focusing on collective goals. How do you enable social support where team members provide emotional and psychological strength to one another, which improves the cooperation and a shared sense of responsibility for those outcomes? And then the third one is voice, the degree to which a team's members have input into how the team carries out its purpose. And those three were really, really important, and they came out very, very strongly in the research. The shared leadership is also very much like a relational dimension, and through exercising it, myself as a leader, and we'll talk about it a little bit later, has seen significant improvements in levels of strategic coherence within the organization. So that was the, that was the first learning. The second one was around the social constructs, culture, habitus, power. What I found through the research, and I had some ideas of it coming into the research about how strongly ingrained, the culture of the organization was, but it really, it really came to the fore when I started interviewing people, when they, when there was such a great degree of synergy between the different interviews. People were talking around characteristics like high energy, entrepreneurial, and impulsive culture, a culture of subjective decision-making, a culture dominated by informal and unstructured communication networks, and then very strong power dynamics in what people term proximity, how close you were to leaders or how well you engaged with leaders. That proximity had a very, very different effect depending on where you were in the organization and how close you were to some of the leadership team. And the research showed how markedly those Socially acceptable ways of practicing were impacting what people felt was available to them, and they were making decisions which they didn't entirely think they should be making, but purely on the back of, of the pressure of these social constructs, which were sort of just un, un, underneath, sitting underneath their action, and just slowly sort of manipulating how people behaved.

Jordan Ludlow, guest · [17:49]So for me, that shared leadership concept really, really resonated with me. But, so I've really tried within my own sphere of influence to try and Make a concerted effort to shift from that traditional heroic hierarchical vertical leadership to a more shared leadership. But also, for me, there's like a pragmatic realization that the magnitude of the shift is really, really large. And there are certain areas that this type of shift to a more shared, distributed, collaborative leadership is more beneficial for an organization. And, you know, there's, there's three areas from the research that I did, which if those characteristics are present in the type of work you're doing, there's a significant chance that a more shared, distributed leadership will have much better outcomes. And that's really around the, the level of interdependence in the work that you're doing. The degree to which it requires creativity and the complexity of that work. And for me, strategic work exhibits each of those three characteristics. And that's really why our foundation for me was around how do you create strategic coherence, a mutual understanding of an organization's direction amongst multiple levels of an organization so that people can make the right decisions in their day-to-day work and progress the organization forward, as opposed to just keep moving and churning.

Jordan Ludlow, guest · [22:25]Very much so. And, and, and that's why I sort of found that the, the practical application for me has been very much in the strategy space. So I've reshaped the way that my organization, because I've got, I've got the ability to influence that quite heavily, I've reshaped sort of the way that we, we practice strategy. and I've really tried to harness this more collaborative, shared, distributed leadership to try and create alignments and try and get a structural framework of transition rules, which allow those people, that are, that are within that strategy space to exercise true and meaningful autonomy, when they go about their daily work. And, you know, for me, some of the key elements, and they're quite simple, really, is, is around just alignment and access to information, which we, we often forget about. It's, it's about creating a space for debate, building shared understanding of the context and what we're going after, you know, what really are we going after. It's, it's about empowering individuals to take accountability to deliver. We've got really, really clearly defined expected outcomes in granular OKRs now from a strategy perspective with the priorities that we're setting. And then another key thing for me has been establishing consistent strategic meeting rhythms. We had a very much a, a ad hoc way of practicing strategy, and we've, we've now got into quarterly, monthly, weekly meeting rhythms, key stakeholders, granular OKRs, absolute accountability, full access to transparent information. And we've been running it since Since late last year, so, we're now into the fourth quarter that we're running it, or third quarter that we're running it, and I think I am seeing some significant improvements just in terms of the collaboration, the ownership, and a sense of purpose amongst the team.

Jordan Ludlow, guest · [26:58]I think for me, the key take out from my research, and, and, and I've gone through the shared leadership and, and, and other elements, but for me, the key take out from my research was we need to understand that organizations have this history, this, this incredible memory that sits underneath them, and As leaders, we need to really understand, especially if you're moving between organizations or you go into a, a, a new organization, is that there are these unwritten rules which are firmly, firmly embedded, and no one talks about them. But when you come in and you want to try and initiate change or, or get people to perform their duties in a different way or think differently, that We mustn't negate the power of that underlying, those social constructs that sit underneath the organization, and only through really trying to make them explicit will we start to understand them, as I, as I did now. When I presented my research, no one really thought about, about these things when I presented them back, and they were so, there were such common threads between the fourteen interviewees, from the people that had been there for twenty years to the people that had been there for two years, were seeing exactly the same things, and they were seeing so many positives about them, but they were also seeing in what context there can be negatives about them, and that would really be, that, that was my key learning and the key take out from this is don't forget about those social constructs and their ability to actually influence what people perceive as what type of action they can take and their capacity for action, because they can be very limiting.