SaLTy
I work in the Software industry.
I’ve been a part of organisations producing software for going on twenty five years. Over that time, I’ve been a part of, and cared deeply about, many many organisations I had to watch be ruined by lousy top-level leadership. If you were down with the kids, you might say I’m a bit salty about it.
Fortunately I now work for a company where we have great leaders. I’ve seen it done right.
However, I still observe this phenomenon with depressing regularity in the software industry at large. And increasingly, this problem has clothed itself with a new name.
About 15 years ago, I moved back from the United States, to the United Kingdom. Since then there’s been a growing trend toward a formation known as the Senior Leadership Team (SLT).
Although there is interest in this term in other parts of the world, it appears to be a particular obsession here in the UK.
When I looked at these stats, I wondered if it was just that interest in all things to do with leadership has been growing. So, I searched for the term Leadership. But, in contrast to the chart above, it appears to be decreasing. That’s true even if you restrict the analysis to just the UK.
Most people see leadership tendencies as desirable throughout their organisations. There’s nothing worse than a “team” of people where almost everyone is disengaged. You know the type — webcams off, mics muted. Everyone’s supposedly listening but they could have just gone out to get groceries — it’s hard to tell….
So this idea that there’s a “Senior” leadership team is a bit bizarre. Normally it’s just a proxy term for the group of most politically dominant individuals in an organisation.
If it’s emerged from a startup, it’s probably centred around the founding members of the organisation. The sales people usually make their way in because, y’know, they’re the ones who generate all the value. Or, sometimes it’s a group comprised mainly of financial stakeholders.Yes, I know we’re all stakeholders, but there are stakeholders and stakeholders… am I right?
Years ago, I had a manager who was fond of retelling the story of how he re-mortgaged his house to get the original business off the ground. He felt this gave him the right to provide leadership to the organisation. Perhaps he was right…
But this idea that leadership is somehow automatically aligned to the power structure is, I think, a bit of a red herring. I’ve recently been reading about Matt Black Systems in Mart Parker’s inspiring book A Radical Enterprise. If the book is to be believed, the owners are hardly ever in their own factory because they’ve devolved leadership to such an extent that they’re no longer the best people to do it.
Even the animals tend to do this better than us. Sure, the smaller herds and groupings have established hierarchies, and sometimes leadership does align with this power structure. But consider, for example, the Cape Buffalo:
The movements of a herd of buffalo are determined by specific individuals known as ‘pathfinders’. These are not necessarily dominant animals but they simply act as leaders to the herd. Each sub-herd within the major herd also has a pathfinder which will lead its members when the herd splits up. https://southafrica.co.za/buffalo-movement.html
I grew up in Kenya and let me tell you, these things are no joke. They’re not some placid grazing dairy cow. These things total cars. They’re known to kill lions. They’re recalcitrant, moody, evil monsters. We used to drive by herds of these things in the game park — thousands upon thousands. I used to cower on the floor of our Peugeot 405 estate car just waiting to be gored, disemboweled and stamped to death because they suddenly decided they didn’t like our paint job.
And yet, even these things manage to delegate leadership to those members of the heard who are specifically tasked with doing so.
If these demon cows can do it — surely, we big brains can manage something better than the SLT???
Thankfully It’s not just A Radical Enterprise that’s getting wise to the shift in leadership as we improve over time. In Six Simple Rules, Morieux and Tollman argue that management teams tend to fail because they don’t even understand what their people do. And this is a book which is all about management — it’s not saying that leadership is somehow redundant and it’s not even particularly progressive.
There’s an emerging consensus — it’s the siloed-off bubbles which undermine leadership in our organisations. It’s time to pop those.
In a recent edition of the 1960s classic The Human Side of Enterprise (Douglas McGregor) there’s a section of (thankfully) “Archived material” where the author seems to recommend that “A good leader must be tough enough to win a fight, but not tough enough to kick a man when he is down”.
The mind boggles.
Seriously! How can anyone consider as admirable, a characteristic which exists on a continuum where “too much” of it results in kicking “a man when he is down”?
I have no doubts that the emerging world of effective, humane working described in A Radical Enterprise is where we’re headed. Leadership is both a shared responsibility, and also a role to be focused on by skilled and motivated individuals. It can be taken on for a time and then handed off to others. It’s not some accolade to be achieved by overcoming competition.
Even considering the marketplace of competing companies, Morieux and Tollman say that “executive teams primarily compete on the quality of their insights about their own organisation”.
Hopefully SLTs and dominator-based leadership will soon become a thing of the past. Here’s hoping it gets thrown out with all the other toxic garbage we’ve found in the last fifty years.
Software is a complicated business. We need good leadership — and lots of it.
