T H O U G HT S ON L EA DE R S HIP
SENIOR LEADERS Senior leaders, wishing to remain free of the boss bubble, will lead adaptively and inclusively.
MIKE DEGROSKY
Senior leaders, those assigned to lead other leaders and managers while overseeing organizational functions, regions, units or the entire organization, exercise enormous influence with the people they are charged to lead. People look to their leaders for signals and cues; paying attention to the leader’s actions; observing them, scrutinizing That makes senior leadership a big responsibility. However, the pressures of senior leadership can lead senior leaders into a trap, a self-defeating pattern that makes redeeming this enormous responsibility tougher than it already is. We all know that either an effective leader or a less than fully effective leader at the top of an organization or organizational unit can have far reaching consequences for the productivity, job satisfaction and commitment of people as well as both the efficiency and effectiveness of the organization. Feeling the pressure of enormous expectations, if not careful, senior leaders can trap themselves in what I call the boss bubble. In the boss bubble, senior leaders feel smarter, wiser, cleverer than people they lead; surround themselves with people who reflect their own thinking and reinforce them; and cut themselves off from the people close to the work. Soon, you’re breathing your own exhaust; acting on erroneous beliefs, assumptions and outdated information; and failing to make use of the talent in your organization. So, what’s a senior leader, who wants to stay out of the boss bubble, to do? First, an effective leader in today’s complex and turbulent environment must practice adaptive leadership. An adaptive leader builds collective 8
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OCTOBER – DECEMBER 2020
understanding and shared action throughout the organization. They engage the organization in continuous learning and adjust the organization’s operations based on shared knowledge. Adaptive leadership requires enabling the organization to constantly assess its actions and acknowledging that the organization will have to continuously adjust and adapt their operations as they examine the outcomes of decisions and learn from them. That requires nimbleness that centralized decision-making does not allow. Effective, adaptive leaders also maximize transparency in their decision-making and accept both challenges and feedback from the people they lead. In today’s world, a major challenge faced by senior leaders is that their operating environment changes all the time and the leader can be quite isolated from the contradictions and realities of critical operations. The best senior leaders I know can acknowledge and accept that they are often not the most knowledgeable person in the room, defer to the expertise residing in their organization, and streamline their decision-making, trusting, and relying on, experienced and knowledgeable staff. Conversely, when senior leaders feel the need to be the smartest person in the room or the centralized decisionmaker, they often revert to risk-averse and isolated decisions that feel safe but often prove inadequate and leave their most knowledgeable personnel feeling less than empowered or even excluded. When leaders acknowledge their humanness, their imperfection, and their fallibility, they create an
