Engage the staff and learn technique of non-leadership

First came enrichment. Then empowerment. Now the buzzword in employee relations is engagement, and to make it work, a Cass School business professor advises using a novel form of leadership: non-leadership.

As a company’s management approach moves to one of employee engagement, a corresponding change in leadership approach is required. istockphoto.com

Staff engagement is a hot topic. But it’s only the latest of three loosely related concepts that have focused on how organisations can increase their employees’ commitment, motivation and productivity.

From the 1970s through to the mid-1980s, much was written about enrichment – creating challenging jobs and giving people autonomy. Management thinkers argued that the best way to get the most from employees was to redesign their work to make it more interesting.

From the mid-1980s through the 1990s, thinking moved from enrichment to empowerment. Rather than merely making jobs more interesting and more challenging, companies sought to give workers greater responsibility. Supervisors became working team leaders. A tier of management shifted, and organisations empowered employees by pushing responsibility down – by delegating.

Now the management buzzword is engagement.

Employers want their staff to feel a sense of commitment and an affinity to their organisation. They want workers to feel that they have a stake in the organisation and therefore care about it.

When you have high levels of employee engagement, people self-instigate. They do what their feel is right for the company, because they feel they have a responsibility to do so. This feeds into a more innovative culture and better performance.

As a company’s management approach moves to one of employee engagement, a corresponding change in leadership approach is required. Engagement is more about political engagement with people feeling they own a stake in their organisation, and thus in its decision making. This requires a corresponding openness in decision making from the leadership team.

Other factors are also at play in evolving workplaces and changing leadership styles.

One factor is a change in social attitudes in organisations tied to generational shifts. Baby Boomers, occupying many of the senior management positions, are starting to leave the workforce. Generation X and Y are moving up.

In a recent report, After the Baby Boomers: The Next Generation of Leadership, by Cass Business School and the executive search firm Odgers Berndtson, 58 of 100 senior executives said they believed that a different leadership style would be needed to motivate future employees as Generations X and Y replace the Baby Boomers. Fewer than half (41) of respondents thought their organisation was ready.

Another factor is a shift in attitudes to corporate social responsibility, and being a socially responsible firm. Organisations need to be seen as acting in a responsible way, so it shapes the way in which they are led.

I would like to make the case for non-leadership. This is a form of leadership that involves deliberately not intervening.

How does it work in practice? The first thing is to decide on the nature of the leadership situation or decision to be made. Is it something which is discrete and contained, or is it open and ambiguous? If it’s the former and predictable, then a non-leadership approach will not work because the parameters are too narrowly prescribed.

Increasingly, though, work in organisations is open and ambiguous. For example, processes of organisational change, of innovation and creativity or matters relating to social responsibility, are usually ambiguous and hazy.

In the early stages of a project when you are asking: “How do we build a football stadium?” or “What should the aeroplane look like?”, there are a number of possible answers. These situations cry out for a non-leadership approach.

Next, frame the problem or the situation in the broadest possible terms to create the best conditions for engagement. For example: “How can we become more sustainable?” is a more broadly framed topic than “How can we improve the packaging on a particular product?”.

This allows people to be very creative in their thinking around problem-solving. It allows more people to get involved and to interact, so you get the “wisdom of the workforce” effect.

With a non-leadership model, you also avoid constraining your employees on the implementation of these ideas. Once a non-leader has posed a question – “How can we improve our record on sustainability as an organisation?” – the employees must be allowed to come up with ideas, and have the opportunity and space to enact and refine those ideas.

This is about implementation as a collaborative process – employees are involved in both problem identification, and seeing through a solution.

It takes courage to adopt a non-leadership approach, and to resist the temptation to step in and direct. That is one reason this style of leadership has taken so long to start to develop.

Research tells us that groups make better decisions than individuals. So why not allow the ecosystem of employees to be decision-makers? Leaders of a truly engaged workforce create the conditions where people feel they have a voice and a stake.

It’s still leadership, but not as we know it.

Cliff Oswick is the professor in organisation theory at Cass Business School and teaches in the school’s Dubai-based EMBA programme