You Asked, We Answered Questions from my live Coaching.com session
Well over 1,000 participants joined in live for my Coaching.com session,
“The Permissionless Organization Has Arrived.” Many asked wonderful questions that we didn’t have time to get to in the session. Here are a select few with some responses.
What is the purpose and benefit of a permissionless future? How do you think the concept of a permissionless future will impact traditional industries and the way we conduct business?
The idea behind the permissionless organization is that it can react with far greater velocity to challenges from the environment than a traditional bureaucracy can, because decisions can be made as close to what I call the “edges” of the organization as possible. There are many great examples already – Netflix, Spotify, The Morning Star Company, Semco – but the practices that make this possible are not yet widespread and mainstream..
Would love to hear more specifically about a couple of ideas on how coaches could support leadership with succession plans.
What a great question! There are many things coaches might be able to do. Here are some ideas.
How do you break down the tendency for executive leaders to hold onto their domains of controls and propagate this top-down authoritative approach that undermines intrapreneurship?
In my own context (hospital) the idea of continuous customer feedback seems imperative. How does an organization create mechanisms to facilitate real “market feedback” on a continuous basis?
This is a tough one, as the people who are on the “top” of a hierarchy have pretty nice lives and it feels like giving something up if they yield control elsewhere. As Bob Sutton says, there are 4 P’s that virtually guarantee executives will try to hang on to their roles. It’s almost impossible to do if the most senior leader is opposed or offering only lukewarm support.
Rita McGrath
In his wonderful book “Broken: How Our Social Systems are Failing Us and How We Can Fix Them”, Paul LeBlanc offers the example of the University of Utah Health System’s CEO Dr. Lorris Betz. When his own wife experienced a sudden and acutely painful case of kidney stones, he experienced firsthand how poorly his own hospital responded. He later learned that patient complaint letters were routinely collected, but that he never saw them – he only got the ones that seemed to tell a happy story.
Regarding the board’s hiring people not necessarily for the real reasons they need to be successful, is there a set of competencies or capacities that you find are a good basis?
Example Hogan Assessments model, do psychometrics like this help overcome these issues? Could you give an example of the skills hired for versus skills needed that you referred to?
A great reference on this is Henry DeWolf’s discussion of the abysmal state of CEO selection. You can find the writeup at this link. As he puts it, “the leadership advisory firm ghSMART conducted the CEO Genome project over 10 years, building a database of over 17,000 in-depth assessments and logging over 13,000 hours of interviews.
I perceive that a permissionless culture is not a “laissez-faire” culture, but one where the rules are implicit, easy to understand and they guide the employees to what is correct and what is incorrect, then they run with all their abilities to their objectives, what you get is an implacable execution. Am I right? You got it!
Rita McGrath
I have been a huge fan for over a decade. Your work inspired the League of Intrapreneurs, and we continue to learn from you. The question is how coaches can help make the case for intrapreneurship and allocate meaningful budgets for intrapreneurial teams to innovate beyond the innovation theater. Many intrapreneurs get into trouble for acting without “permission.”
I’m honored! The failure to consistently invest in innovation is something that continually amazes me. As Robert Burgelman and colleagues have found, intrapreneurship is strangely cyclical. Making a case for it involves being radically candid about the prospects of the core business of today, creating a strong external focus and operating with the right discipline, as in handling disappointments effectively. Would love to hear your thoughts on ‘the age of heroic leader is gone’ (or should be gone)?
Rita McGrath
We will always love stories featuring heroic people – we’re hard-wired to love a good one! And most movements need someone to be their public face, so I don’t think that goes away.
Do you see Haier's "Micro-Enterprises" exhibiting the principles and traits of a "Permissionless Organization"?
From what I have read about what they are doing, yes. A great example is the GE Appliance division that they acquired which went from being a terrible laggard to one of the most innovative, high-growth organizations in its sector.
Would it be fair to assume that a permissionless future can only be permitted (ironically) by top leaders with adequate agency?
Yes, I think there is some truth to that – leaders need to be willing to cede traditional controls and trust that new kinds of mechanisms could work. But if you look at the performance of companies like Amazon, you see this remarkable combination of high-agency executives (I mean, everybody knew Jeff Bezos was the boss!) with lots of initiative and freedom throughout the organization.
Rita McGrath
If coaches can be a resource in building and managing these teams, what needs to change in coach training currently to enable this expertise?
A great summary can be found in this wonderful HBR article by Herminia Ibarra and Anne Scoular. They describe a variety of coaching models – directive, non-directive and situational, and argue that facilitating coaching needs to become an organizational capability. People can be encouraged to start small - what can you do now that you don’t need permission for?
That is a great point! Let me refer you to this Thought Spark in which I describe how you can take a bottoms-up approach to becoming more agile and reducing bureaucracy.
Rita McGrath
Are there examples of organizations that have experienced success by switching to this permissionless leadership model in the US?
Yes, Fidelity Personal Investments would be one.
Correct me if I am wrong but I believe you said leadership development has taken a backseat for priority or necessity because of attrition in the workforce and the research that shows the younger generational workforce average time at a job is 2 to 3 years. It seems job design needs to include incentives for growth personally and financially over the course of time.
Absolutely. It’s a shame, but in a lot of companies they neither provide the training and development nor the support that leaders need today.
What advice do you have about a permissionless future for those leaders who are eager to have everybody be in the office 5 days a week? They need to be very clear about why they want everybody there. As Keith Ferrazzi has found, depending on “serendipitous bonding” on a team only gets you to half the team’s potential.
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Rita
McGrath
Want to spark some thinking in your own organization?
