by Peter A. Arthur-Smith

“Vital advances in chip technology were threatened by design boundaries and material limitations. Fresh breakthroughs were required to render more advanced chip manufacture. Equally, we face similar challenges and limitations with our current executives that require a boundary-breakthrough outcome – one that focuses more on people than pure numbers?”

Conceptually, driving your favorite car or vehicle is not much different from spearheading your current team or venture. With your car it hopefully has a sleek, attractive body, as well as a powerful engine, steering wheel, accelerator and brake. It also has a gearing mechanism that can increase or reduce your vehicle’s speed and momentum.

By the same token, your current team or venture provides a product or service that embodies its “outward” proposition: its reason for being there in the first place – hopefully as sleek and attractive as your favorite vehicle body. You’ll likely have talented people with an inspired culture as your engine. Your leader-ship mode acts an accelerator, while your management one acts like a brake. Your steering and gearing mechanisms are enacted by your vision and strategies, which determine how fast you can expand and grow.

Now turn to the below pictograph and compare it with your current team or venture’s position. Depending upon its current operating culture will determine how well it’s positioned to grow and succeed. Like your car or vehicle, it’s more likely to reach optimum speed with the right combination of leadership and management.

­­­­­­­­­            To your left you can note conventional management (CM) with its designated structure and systems that are usually fixated on numbers; designed for building steady and consistent performance. However, since CM is so often intertwined with five curses that interact layer upon layer with each other, they determine the extent of inherent constraints placed upon your “employees” or ventures. These are depicted as follows:

1. Bureaucracy – Traditional policies, procedures and rules are incorporated into most ventures to hold them and their people in line. They yield to both internal and external bureaucracy to accomplish this. Governments at all levels are our bureaucratic role models that are reinforced by our legal and financial advisors. Bureaucracies instill one-way communication where policies and procedures are cast in stone. Within our teams and ventures, sooner or later, our penchant for bureaucracy is designed to ensure everyone abides by it – usually with no questions asked. Numbers are its currency of communication.
2. Hierarchical Formations – Command and control structures are imposed to keep everyone fixated on required goals and numbers at hand and remind us of all inherent power-brokers.
3. Efficiency-Efforts – Bureaucracy demands that we structure, squeeze and perfect the numbers without realizing that we so often undermine our organization’s longer term effectiveness. We often keep digging within and perfecting the same holes, while we should be digging somewhere else.
4. Negative Messaging – We’re inclined to fixate everyone on what’s going wrong or could go wrong in everything we do that could affect the numbers, instead of how we could make things even more right. Such messaging impacts everyone’s ongoing morale and success-attitude.
5. Forms of Corruption – Too often we allow various forms of corruption, be that financial, moral, customer gouging, etc. When these are at play, they typically distract everyone from overall success.

One or more of these can act like touching the brake pedal. They hold our teams or ventures back and inhibit vital people-performance, growth and momentum. How can we avoid or overcome them?

To your right, we introduce the antidotes of enlightened leadership (EL) with their more inherent and natural architectures and configurations, as an alternative to man-made structures and systems. More natural shapes and linkages minimize constraints and impediments that are often imposed by CM. The right people architectures and configurations assist natural flow and draw upon more inspirational forces that surround them. Structures and systems can often impose unnatural “box-like” and linear mechanisms into your team or venture’s journey; hence act as unhelpful brakes on your desired momentum.

When we survey our coastlines we witness natural, non-linear beaches or headlands, where oceans interact with land masses. We don’t see any box-like or linear features other than man-made ones; piers, boat-yards, docks, lighthouses, etc. Additionally, those natural geographic features are affected by winds, currents, waves and tides that act in random and powerful fashion to shape our coastal environments. Increasingly, environmentalists try to capitalize on them. Together they form nature’s architectures and configurations that interact and impact us on an hourly, daily, monthly and yearly basis. Depending upon Mother Nature’s designs determines how quickly or slowly change occurs.

So, as an alternative, we ought to build our teams or ventures with more dynamic people-architectures and configurations to take advantage of inherent forces available to us; ones that can more naturally enhance momentum and performance. And so we introduce five inducers that act as antidotes to CM’s five curses. These are as follows:

1. Two-way Communication – It facilitates all modern, instant forms of communication – cell phones, computer systems, internet, video-conferencing, media services, and so forth. We can pretty much interact with anyone, anywhere, at any time. Additionally, with these features we can readily orchestrate focus groups, workshops, breakthrough meetings, briefings and so on, either virtually or in-person, which don’t require bureaucracy to facilitate them. They can instigate the sharing, discussing, and clarification of vital information in real-time. We only need a framework of guiding principles and best practices to promote two-way communication. We don’t need bureaucratic manuals and proced-ures to pursue most commonsense activities. Two-way communication, listening as well as speaking, minimizes Chinese walls and traditional communication barriers. Bureaucracy inhibits momentum.
2. Heterarchical Formations – With leaders at the center rather than at the hierarchical pinnacle, they can orchestrate events like conductors. Their Visionists, Strategists, Team Leaders and frontline “Contributors” – not employees – facilitate events rather than have many “Chiefs” with their minions.

3. Effectiveness-Efforts – These focus on the fundamental drivers of progress, as well as innovative breakthroughs and value-oriented solutions. They don’t keep digging within the same hole when a better one is to be found nearby. Effective initiatives can then be fine-tuned through efficiency-efforts once “effective” opportunities are determined.
4. Positive Messaging – Focuses everyone on “what’s going right” and “what can go even more right” to sustain morale and build positive momentum. Difficulties and setbacks are dealt with in a positive framework rather than as impediments.
5. Optimum Integrity – Teams and ventures take a more principled and honest approach to all their activities. They take great pride in encouraging honorable behavior wherever possible.

And so we realize the inherent performance thrust induced by EL’s architecture and configuration approach that takes advantage of natural forces and concepts. It’s clear that we often lose much along the way with our reliance on CM. CM relies upon daily control, while EL depends upon ongoing inspiration; where people “want to” rather than feel they “have to.” Generational forces, today’s teams with their performance challenges, demand that we take a fresh approach toward leadership and management – exactly as with computer chips!