Enterprise Leadership: Beyond the Matrix
6 minute read
Increasing your influence with Enterprise Leadership can end up changing your whole world view.
In the cult sci-fi film series, the Matrix, Neo (the hero of the franchise) is seeking to understand the truth about reality. He tracks down a shadowy guru called Morpheus who apparently knows the answers to Neo’s questions. When Neo and Morpheus finally meet, Neo is offered one of two pills as a symbol of accepting one world view or another.
The “red pill” will fully reveal the unpleasant truth – nothing is as it seems and current ways of living are a distraction from how life should be. Taking the “blue pill” however will wipe all memories of this alternate perspective and will leave Neo in blissful ignorance, living out his life as everyone else does.
Leaders will know that there are many different views on ‘what a good leader does’. Here at FiveAndCo. we love to talk about Enterprise Leadership: A “red pill” approach that can open your eyes to “what is” and “what could be”. The “blue pill” approach (“functional leadership”) is certainly useful for driving delivery and tends to be preferred by many, but it is an approach that may not help you as your reality changes.
Even in the face of good evidence, it can be hard to move on from a favourite world view, particularly when employers and business in general do not incentivise new ways of leading and managing.
Here is the revolutionary idea that some businesses may still find unpleasant to hear: Enterprise Leadership starts with the simple premise that it is no longer about “Me and My Team”. Instead it is “We and Our Organisation”.
Enterprise Leadership is not new, but it is an increasingly important concept. Particularly in a society where global shocks are becoming more regular, leaders need to be confident in adapting and overcoming challenges and getting others to change direction with purpose. At its heart, Enterprise Leadership has the potential to reveal something new about your business.
At FiveAndCo. we talk about becoming an Enterprise Leader by looking at three distinct parts of leadership; how you relate to others, how you are talking, and how you are thinking.
How do you relate to others?
Research has shown across a range of industries that servant or humble leaders have the humility, courage, and insight to admit that they can benefit from the expertise of others[1], particularly those who may have less power than them[2]. In our Enterprise Leadership framework we encourage leaders to consider not just who to connect to, but how and why.
Enterprise Leaders have effective networks inside and outside their organisation. They take the time to understand other perspectives. In traditional functional leadership, relationships are often transactional - driven by ‘what you can get’ from other teams or services. This can create apparently effective teams within which long serving specialists can flourish but that individual team’s success often comes at the expense of others and the wider goals of the organisation unless incentives and goals are very well aligned.
For the Enterprise Leader, the aim of these networks is to build influence within the organisation and to bring in fresh insight from outside the organisation. This is particularly important in creating an organisational culture which is curious about the world around it and uses disruption from the outside world to change perspective.
How are you talking?
For Enterprise Leaders, communication is about sharing power in a way that ensures that together, we succeed more often. Their personal approach to communication is about cadence, consistency, significance and values. Enterprise Leaders own the style, pace and clarity of communicating culture to their team.
Functional Leadership structures often need systems like Team Brief to ensure centrally derived messages are clearly cascaded into each silo. Functional communication strategies tend to minimise human interaction and interest rather than supporting a culture of transparency and accessibility that thriving organisations need.
Staff engagement in functional organisations is like watching a ski lift that takes ideas from the bottom of the mountain and carries them off to the lofty heights where apparently a decision is made about what comes back down the mountain again.
In an Enterprise Leadership culture, communication happens laterally between teams and interested individuals. The Enterprise Leader values and shares knowledge. They value a learning culture that ensures we gather good data and intelligence as we go and use it many times to enrich different aspects of the business. The good news about others’ success is shared and drives us to ask what we can learn with every interaction.
How are you thinking?
The Functional Leader can get caught out when the market moves quickly – they may miss important changes in the bigger picture. This is often because they are too close to day-to-day functional or operational matters in a way which prevents them from stepping back and ‘thinking differently’. Faced with a way of working that tends to find ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answers, functional leaders can become paralysed by decisions which may work against their own success but might work for another team or for the organisation more broadly.
Enterprise Leaders take a more integrative approach (that is, leaders are more willing to consider holding two or more opposing ideas in their heads at once) and then come up with a new idea that contains elements of each but is superior to both[3].
At FiveAndCo. we find ways of challenging our thinking; broadening our thinking to see outside the initial problems, deepening our thinking to see what may lie beneath the surface and finally, shifting our thinking; looking at the same problem but in different contexts (for example inviting other leaders to speak to our issues or seeking inspiration from other industries or disciplines).
Conclusion
A functional leader can be very successful at meeting their own objectives and leading their team to high performance. They can look extremely successful on the surface but often find it harder to adapt, overcome and increase their influence.
The Enterprise Leader has the capacity to take those positive attributes and combines them with a generous, curious, and humble leadership approach. They are interested in the success of others, learning whenever they can, and actively redesigning their own role to ensure the wider organisation wins more often in a socially responsive and responsible way.
The outcomes can be profound – higher levels of staff engagement, stronger performance over time[4] and high levels of social capital.
Are you and your business willing to take the “Red Pill” and move beyond your current leadership worldview?
[1] Jie Li et al (2016) ‘The Effect of Humble Leader Behaviour, Leader Expertise, And Organizational Identification On Employee Turnover Intention’ The Journal of Applied Business Research. July/August 2016 Volume 32, Number 4
[2] Dan Cable (2018) How Humble Leadership Really Works HBR
[3] Roger Martin (2009) The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking Harvard Business Press
[4] CEB Leadership Council (2015) Creating Enterprise Leaders
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