Distributed leadership is broken. Let's fix it.
Summary
In many teams, distributed leadership is a neglected capability. People have unproductive experiences, because no one pays attention to the design of their distributed workplace. To shine a spotlight on this capability, I am building a distributed leadership self-assessment kit and I’d love to test it with you.
I want to tell you a story. The names of the characters don’t matter, so I’m going to fictionalise them. But the story is authentic. This week I spoke to a friend who works at a large, multinational tech firm. You know, one of those firms with really pleasant words in their values and mission statement. They’re the type of company whose brochures might make you marvel at them.
My friend; let’s call her Deeksha, told me the story of her first three months on a team in this company. Deeksha joined this team as a product owner. Her role is under the supervision of a product manager and she has a dotted line reporting to the team’s project manager and tech lead. As any reasonable person would expect, Deeksha hoped that this troika - the product manager, project manager and tech lead - would have planned to onboard her in a way that she could be productive in a short time. Deeksha was in for a surprise - an unpleasant one.
The leads on this team hadn’t put together any onboarding plan for new joiners. They expected Deeksha to “learn on the job”, by “talking to people” and “figuring things out”. The team and the company valued “self-driven learners”, they said. Deeksha shrugged her shoulders and accepted what seemed like a fait accompli. Little did she know how this story was to unravel.
In the next few weeks, Deeksha did her best to feel her way through the project, much like a blindfolded person would feel their way through a dark, unfamiliar maze. The first thing she needed to do was to learn about the product. If only that were easy. You see, learning about anything new needs a calm environment. Her team was anything but calm. People were well-meaning and fun to hang out with outside work, but at work, they were engineers of chaos. A lack of clear processes and a working agreement was visible.
On this team, people used four separate chat platforms. It wasn’t clear what exclusive purpose each platform fulfilled. One of those chat platforms was WhatsApp - a potential violation of information security norms. Meetings were a nightmare. Most calls had no agenda, no facilitator, and no meeting minutes. It was commonplace to see meetings go beyond their time box. Between ineffective meetings, ad hoc conversations, and multiple platforms, the team was living in what Cal Newport calls a hyperactive hivemind. Deeksha raised the issues with this unstructured, unprofessional way of working, with the project manager. All she got were assurances and platitudes, but not much else.
It also didn’t help that no one knew what their role was and what the team expected from them. Deeksha didn’t know where the boundaries lay, between her role, that of the product manager and the project manager. No one had bothered to set SMART(specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time boxed) goals that she’d have to achieve in her first performance cycle with the team. But surely, Deeksha could have asked, couldn’t she? Well, she did.
In a team where people barely wrote anything, it was already hard to find any useful documentation related to the product or her role. So Deeksha’s only way to seek clarity was to ask the product manager, project manager and tech lead directly. But these were people with packed calendars! She could only find them one-on-one. There began a game of telephone. The product manager said things completely different from the project manager. The tech lead had a unique perspective too. And no one was willing to write things down and help Deeksha, a new member of the team, gain clarity. Can you imagine how frustrating this may have been?
Fast forwarding to this week, Deeksha called me on my cell phone. She sounded like someone who wanted to talk to anyone else who’d listen. So I listened. She’d done what anyone in her situation would have done. Earlier in the week, she’d somehow finagled a time with all three of her bosses. She candidly explained her frustration and asked for a bit more support and clarity. Fair shout, eh? Errm… her bosses didn’t think so. The call soon unravelled into another nightmare for Deeksha.
Remember, that Deeksha had received no meaningful support or feedback till this day. But her bosses teamed up to say she was not the right fit for their team. They accused her of focusing less on the product and more on the process. After all, she was a product owner, right? Moreover, they said, she’d taken way too many leaves to be “available” for the team. My ears perked up when Deeksha told me this. I asked her how many leaves she’d taken. She mentioned seven planned leaves over the last three months, that she’d informed the team about, well in advance. Standard, paid time off. Deeksha’s company has a policy of unlimited sick leaves, to account for things like period leave. So on one day each, over the last two months, Deeksha had also taken a day of sick leave. That didn’t sound like “too many leaves” to me!
Anyway, the call had ended with a barrage of accusations against Deeksha. She didn’t know how to process these accusations, and so she reached out to me to share her predicament. What we spoke about after that, is irrelevant to the point I want to make. Deeksha’s story is one of several that I hear. Day after day. These stories have the same characteristics.
A poor documentation culture.
Unclear roles and expectations.
A clear lack of processes and protocols.
Non-existent people management skills.
A noisy work environment with constant interruptions.
Meeting heavy processes, made worse by an unmet need for written communication.
These dysfunctions are easy to paper over, in the high-fidelity environment of the office. But if leaders don’t pay attention to the design of their digital workplace, these problems create a toxic environment at work. Deeksha’s employers say they value “inclusivity” and “mentorship”. But if you notice how little support Deeksha had, it’s evident that even if the workforce is diverse, the workplace is anything but inclusive. And even if there’s a modicum of truth in everything that Deeksha told me, it shows a failure of leadership.
My anecdotal experiences may not be an indictment of leadership everywhere. It’s clear to me though, that in many teams and companies, distributed leadership is broken. People in these roles haven’t taken or had the time to think about how they can be effective when leading a distributed team. They’ve simply taken their office-centric model of management and leadership and crossed their fingers, hoping it’ll work just as well, when remote. That faith, as we all know, is misplaced. Distributed leadership needs a mind-shift and different way of thinking from a location, and time-centric way of working.
And so, I want to be part of the solution. I’ve been working on a distributed leadership self-assessment kit so that people who want to be effective in such roles can gauge their competency and improve. I already have an initial version of this tool ready and I’m looking for early users.
Representational image of the assessment
If you’re interested in this self-assessment, can you help me test it out? Taking the assessment takes an hour of quiet reflection. During the testing phase, I’d like to be on call with you, to see how you interact with the questionnaire and where you may feel confused. Mostly, though, I’ll be a fly on the wall and stay out of your hair!
When you finish this assessment, you’ll have access to a personalised dashboard and for the first few people who volunteer to test this tool for me, I’ll also offer a one-hour session to coach you through your action plans. Good deal? In that case, let’s talk!