Leading Without Command: A Humane Leadership Perspective For A VUCA World - Softcover

Mutizwa, Joe

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1482806568 ISBN 13: 9781482806564

Publisher: PartridgeAfrica, 2015

Synopsis

Leading Without Command offers practicing and aspiring leaders in business and other disciplines a new way to lead in a world defined by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. The compelling argument in this book is that leading through command, control, and deployment of raw positional power can no longer guarantee superior organizational performance on a sustainable basis. A new leadership model based on a humane perspective anchored on people-centred principles and supported by a set of appropriate skills and behaviours is put forward. This book is essential reading for anyone in a position of authority or influence over people and for anyone who needs to come to terms with the demands of a globally integrated and hypercompetitive world driven by digital technology, knowledge, and the redistribution of power from leaders to followers in organizations, nations, and societies.

About this title

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Leading Without Command

A Humane Leadership Perspective for a Vuca World

By Joe Mutizwa

Partridge Africa

Copyright © 2015 Joe Mutizwa
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-4828-0656-4

Contents

Part I: Setting The Context Of Leadership, 
Chapter 1 Founding Tenets For A Humane Leadership Perspective, 5, 
Chapter 2 Review Of Changes That Have Affected The Role Of Leaders In Organizations, 10, 
Part II: The Seven Levers Of Leading Without Command In Turbulent Times, 
Chapter 3 Expanding Organizational Awareness, 33, 
Chapter 4 Path-Finding And Communication Of A Clear Direction, 38, 
Chapter 5 Developing The Talent Pool, 47, 
Chapter 6 Shaping The Culture Of The Organization, 57, 
Chapter 7 Developing Adaptive Capacity, 78, 
Chapter 8 Unleashing Organizational Energy, 91, 
Chapter 9 Nurturing Organizational Health, 104, 
Part III: Skills And Behaviours For Leading Without Command In A Vuca World, 
Chapter 10 The Ten Master Skills Essential For Leading In A Vuca World, 117, 
Chapter 11 The Five Behavioural Attributes Required For Leading Without Command, 128, 
Chapter 12 Conclusion: A Holistic Model For Humane Leadership In A Vuca World, 133, 
Endnotes, 137, 
Index, 149, 

CHAPTER 1

Founding Tenets For A Humane Leadership Perspective

How can we exercise power, do anything at all as agents without dominating? It is the great question of our historical psyche perhaps of human nature, how to act without dominion, without oppressive control and yet accomplish?

James Hillman

What Are the Roots of My Humane Leadership Perspective?

The development of my humane leadership perspective cannot be traced to one source but can be explained in terms of the cumulative impact of many diverse influences that go back to my upbringing, education, and experiences throughout my life. These gave me a perspective of the purpose of leadership—the reason why leaders lead others. I can identify some of the key influences as follows:

• Lessons from My Father

He was a great humanist, charitable, and possessing an unfailing readiness at all times to render assistance to those who needed it. Despite having little formal education, he was a true entrepreneur—always innovating, improving things, and experimenting. In this way, he instilled in his family a burning desire to learn, to be curious, and to be outward-looking, always searching for solutions. The enduring memory that I shall always have of my father is of his desire to improve the welfare of everyone he came into contact with. This is the legacy that my father left me with.

• Encouragement from My Teachers

In both elementary and high school, I was fortunate to have teachers who encouraged me to do only my very best. My high school history teacher Grey Chivanda and my literature teacher Peter Jarvis taught me how belief in myself could unlock my full potential. At London School of Economics and Oxford University, I developed an orientation that embraces multiple perspectives, open-mindedness, and tolerance for diversity.

At London Business School, Professor Sumandra Ghoshal and Professor John Stopford shared with me great examples of those who typified leadership with humility.

• Lessons from My Mentors, Heroes, and Experiences

In my career, I have been privileged to be mentored by leaders like Enos Chiura, Michael Rigby, Dr Robbie Mupawose, and Patrick Rooney at Delta Corporation Limited in Zimbabwe. All were leaders who had a genuine interest in seeing others grow and fulfil their potential. Over three decades as a business leader, I gained first-hand experience of what it takes to move organizations forward in both stable and turbulent environments.

The humility and other-orientation of Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Joshua Nkomo, Abraham Lincoln, the Dalai Lama, and Pope Francis have had an indelible impact on me. These are my enduring heroes. I have been repelled by the examples set by murderous dictators, such as Hitler, Idi Amin, Mobutu, Gaddafi, and Pol Pot among others. The leadership styles caricatured by George Orwell in his novels Animal Farm and 1984 and by Chinua Achebe in Things Fall Apart personify, for me, the antithesis of humane leadership. At Wha Wha prison, as a young political detainee, I learnt that the dignity of individuals was inviolate at all times.

• Influences from Modern Writers

I have found succour in the humane writings of Warren Bennis, Peter Drucker, Bob Buford, James Hillman, Ali Mazrui, Wole Soyinka, and Albert Bandura.

The Tenets of Humane Leadership

Over the years, I have come to distil the convictions guiding my leadership philosophy down to five key tenets. These tenets provide for me a holistic answer to the question 'Why do leaders lead?' I believe that leaders have a special mandate that goes beyond the improvement of financial outcomes for the organizations that they lead. Leaders have a responsibility to ensure that their stewardship leads to the building of wholesome organizations which allow individuals to fulfil their potential. The tenets that I embrace are as follows:

• My Destiny Is Shaped by the Choices I Make

I believe that I am capable of dealing with life's challenges and that the choices that I make as an individual influence my destiny. I believe that I am the captain of my ship and I am guided by the simple motto that I have lived with throughout my life: 'If it is to be, it is up to me.' I also believe that people in leadership positions—teachers; parents; organizational, national, and societal leaders; as well as significant others—have a crucial responsibility to get individuals to own up to their responsibilities and to shun too much dependence on others. A significant part of this challenge is how to inculcate self-belief and confidence in the minds of individuals under their leadership or influence.

• Belief in Human Potential for Growth

I embrace a world view that sees every human being as being capable of growth and being endowed with latent potential. I am convinced that organizations that embrace this perspective will devote resources towards optimizing human potential for the mutual benefit of the entity and the individual members of the organization.

• Respect and Concern for Others

My cultural heritage is deeply rooted in the traditions of ubuntu, whose bedrock philosophy is that 'one is a person because of other persons'. This world view drives my ideal of organizations and societies as humane communities whose governance should be guided by a desire to optimize the common good. This view says that it is inhumane for leaders to see and treat people that they lead as expendable objects to be used as means to an end. It requires leaders to feel empathy and compassion for others inside and outside their immediate organizations.

• Embracing Inclusivity and Diversity

I believe that forward-looking and fair-minded leaders should pay attention to issues such as gender balance, racial, religious, and ethnic diversities throughout their organizations. I argue here that greater inclusivity and diversity can only strengthen an organization particularly in turbulent times. I take the view that diversity and inclusiveness are also about being open-minded and having tolerance for multiple perspectives and different views and opinions. I consider such a mindset as being essential for adaptation to change and for innovation.

• Quest for Societal Justice, Equity, and Sustainability

I embrace a holistic view that sees business organizations as subsidiaries of society, earning their licence to trade from the societies within which they operate. I believe, therefore, that leaders of businesses should not focus solely on short-term shareholder value creation but should concern themselves with finding and providing solutions for community and societal problems, including addressing societal problems caused by inequitable income distribution, poor access to essential services, and poor governance, as well as threats to sustainability caused by environmental degradation.

Only by extending their gaze beyond the confines of the corporate can business leaders begin to play a meaningful role in building humane societies.

This view does not discount the need for business leaders to pursue superior shareholder returns. It simply says that leaders should not focus exclusively on this measure of corporate success but, instead, take a more expansive view of their role as leaders.

The world view that I have painted through these five tenets cannot be a prescription for everyone. These five tenets are simply an illustration of how leaders can clarify their own principles which they bring into the leadership arena for use as a foundation that helps them when they face challenging decisions.

Such principles then provide a starting point for addressing the fundamental question 'Why do leaders lead?' In other words, I am wrestling with the question 'To what end do corporate leaders lead?' Is it just to grow revenues or profits or free cash flow or the size of the organization or total shareholder returns or the market value of their companies? Is that all there is to corporate leadership, or is there, or should there be, a more encompassing, more moral mandate that leaders pursue as they lead organizations?

The broad world view captured by the five tenets shared here suggests that there can be a legitimate and more compassionate mandate for leaders—a mandate that goes beyond worrying exclusively about the corporate bottom line. This view drives the rest of this book.

CHAPTER 2

Review Of Changes That Have Affected The Role Of Leaders In Organizations

Nothing is, everything becomes; no condition persists unaltered, even for the smallest moment; everything is ceasing to be what it was, and is becoming what it will be.

Heraclitus of Ephesus (545 BC–475 BC)

In this chapter, I want to explore how the business environment has transformed over the last few decades and how this has generated pressure for leaders to transform their approach to leadership driven by necessity if not by moral conviction. Among the transformative changes I discuss in this chapter are the following:

• the reality of leading within a VUCA world

• the changes in the relative importance of factors of wealth creation

• the impact of digital technology and social media

• the impact of international competition in a globally integrated world

• the phenomenal increase in complexity

• the broadening of measures of organizational success.

Let me explore each of these developments and the impact they have had on the role of leaders in organizations and how they lead.

1. The Reality of Leading within a VUCA Environment

In his book The Essence of Chaos (1995), Edward Lorenz refers to the question he asked in a public speech in Washington in December 1972:

'Does the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?' Since this question was asked, the concept of the butterfly effect has received wide attention and debate. Global integration has increased this effect with seemingly small events in distant parts of the world causing ripples in global markets. The ubiquity of the Internet and social media has accelerated this phenomenon. This is the new reality of the VUCA world in which four siblings—volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity—are constant companions of business organizations everywhere.

What all this has done is to disrupt any old assumptions of order and stability. It has resulted in heightened risk profiles for organizations while simultaneously creating abundant new opportunities for those who are aware of and alert to the emerging realities.

Given the new reality of a world characterized by what Philip Kotler and John Caslione (2009) have referred to as a world of interlocking fragility, it is necessary to revisit the leader's toolkit to see what is still appropriate and what has ceased to be useful.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has alerted us to the possibility of 'black swans', which he refers to as 'large-scale unpredictable and irregular events of massive consequence' (such as the financial meltdown of 2008, which few predicted). His main argument is that we should recognize the reality that major disruptions in history have always been the consequence of unforeseen events and, therefore, desist from seeking to predict the unpredictable.

This increased unpredictable turbulence has a number of implications for how leaders lead in organizations.

No single leader in a normal business organization has the capability to run the organization single-handedly and behave like a corporate saviour of the kind described by Rakesh Khurana in Searching for a Corporate Savior (2002) or by Michael Maccoby in Narcissistic Leaders (2003). Instead, the leader we should be looking for in modern organizations should be more like the integrator and facilitator that Les Mckeown describes so well in his 2002 book The Synergist.

A permanent VUCA environment implies inbuilt fragility of the operating environment. Should leaders expend energies trying to build predictive models that seek to 'domesticate' such an environment? Nassim Taleb warns in his book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012) that we should welcome disorder and turbulence as they make us stronger. He describes as futile any attempts at trying to bring order and predictability through strategic planning and forecasting.

2. Changes in the Relative Importance of Factors of Wealth Creation

Since the Industrial Revolution, there's been a tremendous transformation in the relative importance of factors of wealth creation.

To the traditional factors of production, land, labour, and capital have been added technology and knowledge as the new drivers of wealth creation particularly in advanced economies. However, Thomas Piketty cautions us in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) that capital—old money—continues to reap greater rewards than labour, leading to widening income disparities in most economies. So from a position of distribution and creation of wealth, capital is the biggest winner so far according to Piketty and not technology and knowledge.

Brynjolfsson, McAfee, and Spence argue in their 2014 article 'New World Order' that both labour and ordinary capital have been commoditized and that what is emerging as a real game changer is digital capital in the form of robots, networks, computers, software, and artificial intelligence. They argue that digital capital combines with knowledge to create a new powerful driver of wealth creation. There is increasing evidence that this is in fact taking place as machines are replacing labour in an increasing number of industries. This process can only accelerate as ordinary labour and ordinary capital become commodities.

Indeed, as early as 2000, Tapscott, Ticoll, and Lowry in their book Digital Capital: Harnessing the Power of Business Webs predicted how digital capital would flatten and force radical change in business models, resulting in the traditional vertically integrated business model being replaced by business webs that cut across companies.

We will see in Chapter 12 how these changes impact on the way leaders of organizations can leverage structure, systems, and processes as an effective way of leading in turbulent times.

So where does all this leave us? The commoditization of labour and ordinary capital and the deepening of certain forms of capital into digital capital, which when combined with innovative knowledge defines the new and dominant ways of creating value, present the leader in an organization with significant challenges and opportunities. A leader, in order to lead effectively in this new environment, requires new tools and new competencies.

It is important to pause and reflect on the fact that while for many developing countries the scenario painted here may appear too futuristic, this is where all countries are headed. This is the global trend, and opting out does not look like a feasible option.

3. The Impact of Digital Technology and Social Media

We have already seen above how the emergence of digital capital has become a game changer in the sphere of value creation—especially when combined with creative ideas. We saw how labour and ordinary capital have become commoditized.

In this section, I want to identify other important developments that can be expected from digitization and the ubiquity of the Internet—developments which potentially have large implications for how leaders lead organizations.

• The Key Characteristics of Digital Progress: Exponential, Digital, Combinatorial

In their important book The Second Machine Age (2014), Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue that the world has reached a significant inflection point with digital technology where the following properties of change in the digital age will produce unprecedented and difficult to comprehend changes:

Exponential

According to Moore's law, computing power constantly doubles every eighteen months or so. The power of this constant doubling leads to exponential growth. At this rate of doubling, all bets are off as to what the future will look like because the rate of change is such that it is no longer possible to see the future as a projection of the present. The true insight of these authors is to warn us that the future will be so radically different from the present that present models may have no relevance to future reality. This should indeed be a scary thought for business leaders whose mandate is to intercept the future.

What it essentially says is that people are likely to underestimate the rate of change that is coming our way.

What are the implications of this for those leaders who embrace the notion that the future is a projection of the past and present? What surprises await such leaders and with what consequences for their organizations? How does one lead in a world characterized by the turbulence of exponential digital change?

Digitization

Digitization can be defined as a process of converting analogue information into the language of computers.

Once digitized from analogue data, information can be reproduced and distributed at almost zero value and without loss of quality. Further, digital content can be generated freely by users of the Internet.

Digitization, therefore, has dramatically reduced costs of acquiring and distributing information. It has also led to the Internet of things as machines digitally talk to each other.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Leading Without Command by Joe Mutizwa. Copyright © 2015 Joe Mutizwa. Excerpted by permission of Partridge Africa.
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Edition details

• Publisher: PartridgeAfrica
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1482806568
• ISBN 13: 9781482806564
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 166