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Leading disruptive change requires that we develop and support other leaders so that we can scale the disruption. One of the most important ways to do this is to develop a sense of agency in every single person in your organization, regardless of their title. This requires that you create an environment that nurtures agency with structures and processes that provide clear guidelines on what can and can’t be done.
To be competitive, it’s no longer enough to be innovative – you must have a strategy for disruptive growth, a plan to identify and seize an opportunity no one else has the audacity or confidence to reach for. Disruptors don’t just blow things up – they also create and build things that result in huge, positive change. Welcome to The New Rules of Disruption with Charlene Li. For the past two decades, Charlene Li has been helping people see the future and thrive with disruption. She couples the ability to look beyond the horizon with pragmatic advice on what actions work today. She helps executives and boards recognize that companies must be disruptive to compete, not just innovate.
New Rules of Disruption Ep6_FC
Wed, 11/17 7:01 PM • 22:15
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
people, organization, customer, leaders, scaling, leadership, edges, create, disruption, transformation, agency, gatekeepers, employees, middle, charlene li, elevations, permission, fence, pushing, define
00:00
Hi there, it's Charlene. I'd like to thank Adobe for supporting this podcast, Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences, find out more@adobe.com.
00:18
Leaders have never been challenged in their career as much as they are today. With technology and powering the forces of customers, many leaders are realizing that we're now in a perpetual state of always-on transformation. It's time for disruption, a transformation of leadership, and a transformation of ourselves. But what roles do we play by when you want to create this change? This podcast is about how we as leaders, must transform ourselves to make it all work. My name is Charlene Li, and these are the New Rules of Disruption.
01:06
As a leader, one of the most important jobs we have is developing other leaders. It's this idea of being able to scale your leadership to make sure that as many people as possible, are being the best leaders they could possibly be inside of your organization.
01:23
In order to do this, one of the most important ideas to grasp is this idea of agency, the idea that each person has the ability to have a direct impact on the outcomes of the things that are important to them. That they can act as owners of a particular project in even of the organization, even though they may just be a frontline person. And this idea of agency is something that's very foreign to many of us, I spoke about it earlier in this podcast series, that most people don't ever experience agency. And when they come across a leader who says no, you have agency, they don't know what to do with it. And this is the key thing around scaling leadership. Because if we fundamentally believe that everyone has the opportunity to create change, to be the leader, who can find that change, identify it, and then create the circumstances for that change to happen, that every single person needs to feel a sense of agency. They need to feel a sense of ownership, that this is their company to. W
02:34
I definitely benefited from early in my career, having a fantastic leader help me find my voice and develop my agency. I was working on a project. And like most typical college grads kind of sat in the room, I just didn't say anything. I did a lot of work, but I just didn't think it was my voice to ever speak up and to raise my hand. And the leader pulled me aside and he goes, Look, Charlene, you have a lot of good ideas. You'll bring them up with me one on one. But then you don't say anything. I have you sit in these meetings, I have you at that table because I believe you have something to contribute. Now prove it. You have a voice and you should use it. And I said, But I'm just a brand new employee. And he said you have a perspective that nobody else has. And you have that power to share that perspective. And it will be heard and I will ensure that.
02:34
When I begin a new engagement with a client, I like to arrive there about an hour earlier and ask for permission to walk around the floor and ask people three questions. Those questions are, who is your customer? Who's your future customer? What's your strategy to reach that customer? And third, show me your personal dashboard. So I can see how you think of yourself contributing to the execution of that company strategy. Almost no company can do this. And yet, when I work with disruptive organizations, I find that many, many people at the frontlines can answer all the way. They know who their customers are, they know what the strategy is, and they know what their role is in executing that strategy. This is what scaling leadership looks like. And my hope is that you will have the skills and the knowledge to be able to make sure that leadership scales inside of your organization.
04:34
Rebecca Macieira-Kaufman is seasoned CEO with years of executive leadership experience at companies like Citibank and Wells Fargo, and the author of the new book FIT CEO shared how she scaled her leadership.
04:49
I don't actually think leaders are supposed to have all the answers. I think leaders are supposed to create an environment that the team who's closest to the client can who really knows what what's going on, can get the answers and do the right thing. So really, I view the leader as creating an environment of empowered employees to solve the issue. There's no way I could know, everything. I had 5000 employees in one of my roles, there's no way I could know what they were doing six or seven levels down for me with a client, but I wanted to set a culture that said, solving the need for the client, ethically, you know, in compliance, you know, profitably win-win for everyone is the right thing to do.
05:35
That is what scaling leadership looks like. It's about creating that space so that other people can step into the void. It's making sure that people see the opportunities, pushing them gently, maybe sometimes more forcibly into that space, so that they can experience it.
05:54
One of my favorite examples of scaling leadership is happening at Comcast. Now, Comcast, as a cable company has a long-standing reputation as being not customer friendly, not customer-oriented, having bad customer service. Now, they've been trying to turn that around.
06:13
They recently turned the entire company into focusing on net promoter score on NPS. So everything is measured in terms of how well they're doing in terms of customer satisfaction. And they realize that a key part of that success rested in the call centers. Because the call center is a group that hears and connects with those customers, first and foremost. They are those front lines, handling all of those problems and complaints. And yet, in many organizations like Comcast, the call center is at the very end of the line, that's a place where all the ideas and problems go to die. If there's something that's happening, they need to take care of it, there's no opportunity for them to go back up the chain of command to go back into the organization to give their feedback.
07:03
So Comcast decided to change that they created these huddles. So teams would get together on a regular basis, and share what they're seeing and finding. And one of the outcomes of these huddles are things called elevations, where they can elevate an idea, a product example, a marketing pitch gone wrong, a sales opportunity, anything that they see that they want to be poured back into the organization and elevate for somebody to consider. These elevations are treated like gold. When somebody in another department gets an elevation, they must respond to it, they must acknowledge it, tell them, this is what we're doing already on it, thank you very much, we're reinforcing that we need to do something around this. And this goes all the way up to the CEO, who on a regular basis would take these elevations and respond directly back to that team, back to that person, to say thank you very much, this is what we are doing.
08:02
Now imagine how those people in the call center at Comcast feel. Imagine the type of relationship they now have with the organization and with each other. And imagine the sense of agency of ownership that they now have in the strategy, in the intention of Comcast to become a great customer service organization. They're no longer stuck at the very end of all of these decisions. The other ones now pushing for change, advocating for a different approach to working with customers, because they themselves are the voice of the customer.
08:39
This is what scaling leadership means for your organization. How do you shift the power to the very front lines, encourage people who never thought of themselves as leaders to take ownership in the strategy, and see themselves as part of the solution in creating that impact? When your employees, when your team members, feel a strong sense of agency and ownership, they are thinking about not only themselves, they are now thinking about that customer, thinking about that future customer in making them the center of everything that they do.
09:13
My work in my research with organizations has found that the number one determinant of customer experience, of great customer satisfaction, are amazing employees. When the employees feel like they have a stake, they are the ones responsible for creating that great customer experience. This is a way to connect the need to see the future to be able to serve these future customers is one of the driving reasons why scaling leadership needs to be a top priority of your leadership.
09:47
Many companies make disruption their goal they believe if they develop just the right innovation. They will disrupt their markets forever and drive the kind of growth worthy of a magazine cover story. My latest book, The Disruption Mindset is where I explain that that's not how disruption works. Disruption doesn't create growth. Instead, growth creates disruption. Growth is hard, and disruptive growth is exponentially harder. It requires companies to make tough decisions in the face of daunting uncertainties. Should we bet our company's future on next-generation customers? Or today's reliable ones? Should we abandon our current business model for an entirely new one, making bold changes, demands bold leadership, and often massive cultural transformation. Drawing on interviews with some of the most audacious people driving disruptive transformation today, I wrote this book to inspire leaders at all levels, to answer the call to lead disruptive transformation in their organizations, communities, and society. You can get your copy right now by visiting CharleneLi.com, that's ch, ar, le, ne, li.com. To transform your leadership today.
11:17
One of the biggest challenges of any transformation is the middle management, also known as the frozen middle, also known as the permafrost. This is such a frustrating experience I hear from so many leaders. They've got their top executives all bought into the transformation agenda. The people at the front lines absolutely love it. They love the sense of agency, and the people in the middle just completely suck, they do not want to change they do not want to move. And that is because their job for the longest time was defined as being gatekeepers. Gatekeepers of information flowing up into the organization, and gatekeepers of decisions flowing down. This happened in a world where information is scarce, and so you needed these gatekeepers. But in a world where we have technology, the internet, fluid collaboration platforms, where power distances are reduced and minimized, people can fluidly communicate with each other. So all of those middle managers are wondering, what's my job now?
12:26
When the top executives can talk directly with the employees, an employee can say something, and the top executives can respond back to them. What am I doing? What's my value? What's my role in the organization? When we think about scaling leadership, we also need to think about how it is impacting our really important middle managers, because they're the ones whose jobs need to be redefined. Change from being gatekeepers to being facilitators. Instead of slowing down things, they're speeding things up. They can see where there are sticking points and connect with each other because they see so many different things happening, they can go and find those areas and remove those sticking points. They can apply to leadership around healthy conflict, being able to see where people may be not connecting, creating a sense of team and inclusion to make sure people get unstuck. When they can redefine themselves as facilitators, they develop a new sense of agency to be able to take on this new role. And then, therefore, no longer be the group that doesn't create change. And is that actually accelerates it.
13:42
What I found is when organizations really truly focus on the middle managers and see them as the linchpin for transformational efforts, then we see the transformations finally accelerating and moving into that exponential stage. Up until that point, you're really pushing, pushing, and pushing the organization to try to enter into this transformational flywheel. The key to that is, again, activating those middle managers so that they can be the accelerant into the transformational change.
14:15
Now, you may be thinking to yourself, I've got 10s, hundreds 1000s of these middle managers, how on earth do I activate them? Because for the most part, they've never done this before. And they are each going to be saying to themselves, well, I'm not going to take the first step. I'm going to wait for somebody to give me permission. And then when they asked me and tell me I have to go do this, then I will do it because until then, I'm going to play it safe. I don't want to be the first person sticking my neck out there for somebody to chop off the minute I do something wrong. Now you can understand this. I think we can all empathize with that situation again, which is why it's so easy for them to remain that frozen middle management layer.
15:04
What I have found the best way to get people unstuck is to realize that exercising agency requires structure. If you want people to be open, to explore all these new areas, you can't just throw open the doors and say go for it. It'd be frozen in place not knowing what to do. Instead, identify a small change a small step that they can take, and clearly define what that means, what it looks like, what is agency and ownership mean? What do you have actual ownership on? And this first step will be extremely hard. Because we've never defined it before. We've always defined things as what not to do, don't do things, here's a whole long list of what not to do. We rarely define them as areas where you have the agency to exercise that power. So define it for them. In the beginning, it may just be a small area that if you see a customer doing something, you have the ability to go make that right within that, say 50, 100, or $200. As long as it doesn't cost more than that, just go make it right, you don't have to ask for permission. That's one of the most amazing things that people are doing now to say, look, I trust that you know, what's going to be the best thing for the customer. But I don't trust you to go spend $10,000 on that. If it's an easy fix, just go and do it, you never have to ask permission.
16:32
Now, having that first level of agency, the ability to have that impact is incredibly empowering. Because for the very first time, you can do something that you believe is right, without having to ask anybody if it's okay, you just know that it's right. And as people become more comfortable, you can make those guidelines make those edges of what is possible, bigger and bigger and bigger.
17:00
I remember early on when I was working with a legal department at a bank, and they really wanted to review every single tweet, like every single tweet that they were sending out, including the ones that were sent to people that said, thank you for opening the account. So the social media manager agreed. He said, Okay, I'll be in your office four times a day with a stack of these things printed out for you to approve. And the legal counsel said fantastic. So day after day, they kept doing this, approving every single tweet. And after three months, after three months of doing this, the legal counsel said, you know, I think we're getting the hang of these, the tweets that said, thank you for opening the account, I don't need to prove those anymore. But there was progress.
17:46
So in the beginning, you may have to define that playing field very, very narrowly, because that's where people are comfortable. But keep expanding it, keep pushing up those edges. And in fact, the bigger the edges that you have, the more uncomfortable people are going to be, make sure that you take them out to the very edges of what is within those playing fields. And take them over to the edge, show them what the edges looks like. And take a moment to look over that edge. And look over that side. And it's going to feel really scary for everybody, like, that's too far, that's too disruptive. And then take one step back, and know that once you arrive at that place at that place of solid ground, you're going to be safe, you're okay. But then encourage your team to stay out there at that edge do not retreat all the way back to where they started from all the way back to their comfort zone, stay at that edge. And as you grow comfortable, extend the edge even further.
18:47
It is a systematic way of working with your teams. And you can scale it because you have these guidelines. So instead of having to do this for each person individually, you can use these guidelines for the entire organization to say we're going to move forward, as long as you stay inside of these fences, of these walls, you will be fine. And I expect you to be at those very edges and push it because we have so much to do to chase after our future.
19:19
Just to give you an analogy, we've all seen children playing on a playground, and they will go all over the place. But they will especially go right to the very edges of those fences. They have some reason there's a it's like a magnet drawing them to that fence. But that's because they know that fence is a place of safety. They can push themselves out away from the center, explore the edges, and know that they are so safe. But what about children on a playground where there was no fence? Guess where they stay? They stay right up close near the playground structure because they don't know how far they can go.
19:55
Your employees are like the children on that playground. They need to know how far they can go where the fence is so that they know that anything inside of that fence, they are able to do, they do not need to ask for permission. It's when you don't have fences, when you don't have guidelines that you create a culture and a behavior that people always need to ask for permission, because they don't know what's allowed, what's permissible.
20:20
A leaders job is to not just be a leader themselves but to develop leaders at scale. And in order to do that, you need to be very clear about what the definition of being a leader is, especially in a transformational organization, one that is focused on speed, developing trust, so you can chase after that future customer. If you want to have that, then a key part of scaling that leadership is being able to be very clear about what the playing field looks like. Being able to define very clearly what leadership is and what is not.
20:57
Rule number six, create a sense of agency.
21:10
Hey there, thanks for listening to the New Rules of Disruption. We created this podcast with a hope that you would be inspired to become a disrupter. Disruptors don't just blow things up, they also create and build things that result in huge positive change. This is a change that the world needs now, more than ever, and we want to hear what change you are creating in this world. You can send us your disruptive story by visiting CharleneLi.com slash podcasts. That's ch, ar, le, ne, li.com/podcast. If you are enjoying this podcast, I have one major ask. Please share it with a co-worker, manager, or a friend. Let's build communities of disruption together.