MISALIGNMENT AT THE TOP – THE IMPACT OF DESTRUCTIVE LEADERSHIP
(by Deon Crafford, Managing Director, Barnstone Corporate Services)

Much has been and is being written about leadership and its importance to the success and sustainability of enterprises and institutions – the premise being that leadership is what holds things together and what causes performance and progress. There can be no doubt that good quality leadership will exert positive influence on the course of institutions, but at the same time failure in leadership will destroy significant value in the strategy and purpose of these institutions or enterprises. In more than 20 years of advisory work within organisations of all types and their respective leadership teams, I have too often noticed that the backbone of the organisation lies not with its leadership, but much rather with the managers and practitioners on lower levels in the organisations. It has often led me to the point of analysing whether a particular organisation will do worse if it were to lose its entire leadership team in an instant. The answer more often than not is a strong no.

Perhaps the single biggest contributor to the destructive impact of leadership is the ever-elusive condition of leadership alignment. Again this is a concept so often used that it has almost become as familiar as profit and loss. But true leadership alignment is something that only comes about after deep and incisive intervention within the leadership team, regularly resulting in some resignations or terminations of leadership roles. Poor leadership alignment is so pervasive in business, politics and social processes that it seems to have been accepted as an unavoidable condition – one that the organisation and its stakeholders would just have to live with. But it should not be accepted. It is possible to bring about leadership alignment, even if it may carry with it the cost of losing those who finally cannot find their way through to “being fully on-board”. Something with such destructive power and yet controllable should not be left unmanaged.

Contributors to leadership misalignment

People who become part of a team by default because they have attained a certain rank or position don’t necessarily start from the premise that they shall not agree with anyone else. It is thus fair to assume that misalignment is not intentional but comes about as a result of any if a number of factors. These include:

Leaders lack sufficient understanding of what they’re dealing with.

When executive committees are asked to make decisions on key organisational matters, they are often informed by subject matter experts who have a much more advanced understanding of the issues at hand than the executives. They have to attempt then to package such understanding in ten or twenty-minute bite-size chunks that they hope will get them to the point of an affirmative decision by the executive team. There is every reason to believe that executive teams make decisions on things they think they fully understand, but in reality have a limited grasp on the full picture. The result then is that as the full picture starts to become clearer, the initial agreement sentiments start to transform into misalignment realities.

One way I have witnessed this reality being turned on its head was with a mining house that was facing the implementation of a major management information system, also referred to as ERP or Enterprise Resource Planning. In this particular case the visionary CEO decided to literally “stop the bus” and have the entire business strategy and vision be reviewed in light of this new technology. He was not shy of spending executive time in assuring proper understanding of something inherently alien to the average miner. This particular system implementation and assimilation is to this day the best I have ever known of or witnessed.

They come representing the wrong constituency.

Very few executive leadership teams achieve a strong enough cohesive core to have its members identify with the team rather than with the part of the organisation they seem to be representing on the team. Too many times we have witnessed how executive teams sacrifice their effectiveness and alignment because its members come to the team with agendas aimed at advancing their respective organisational components, rather than the totality of the organisation itself. Executive team members seem to be quick to forget that being part of this level of decision-making in the organisation, assumes that one has now left behind the silo-orientation of leading different organisational components. In this environment overt or apparent alignment mislead the team and mask the individualism and mistrust that has taken root. Leadership alignment in these circumstances remains a futile objective.

The worst of these situations I have witnessed was in playing an advisory role in a state-owned entity that was restructuring in the aftermath of the democratic transformation of South Africa. In this particular instance the inherent mistrust was so rife that members of the executive team had their offices “bugged” and meetings with the CEO was held off-site. Even deep and incisive interventions with the team could not fully counter he degree of mistrust that had formed and it came as no surprise that this team disintegrated soon after. It was a situation that only the most thick-skinned person would have been able to endure. While one may be tempted to claim that this was due to the high degree of country-political dynamics still present, it needs to be noted that this happened at least six years after the democratic transition. Even though this is a radical example, there are many more that are less overt, but equally damaging to the organisation.

They are not sufficiently prepared.

Executive teams need to cover a substantial amount of information in their decision- making roles. They also have the tendency to focus on too much operational detail and in so doing lose the strategic role they are required to play. In all of this there is every chance that leadership teams are under-prepared or at least inconsistently prepared to make critical decisions with respect to organisational change initiatives. And often those requiring the decisions are themselves to blame when the resultant leadership misalignment brings things to a halt. It is sometimes convenient to reveal selectively the realities of change initiatives e.g. costs and other business case realities, in order to avoid the difficult questions and expedite approvals. So the sufficient preparation of the executives is also the responsibility of those leading the initiatives.

A clear example of this was in an organisation responsible for significant capital project execution amongst other roles. This particular organisation required some major internal restructuring in order to serve its client base better. In the beginning the entire leadership team came on board with what needed to be done, but as the realities of the project started to take hold, some members of the team cried foul and started to behave in an obstructive and passive-aggressive manner. They claimed that what was transpiring was not what they “voted” for at the onset of the initiative. Eventually some of them chose to resign but not before a fair amount of disruptive damage was caused. Others had to be pushed out because they refused to alter course.

Lack of a convincing vision leads to short term thinking.

One of the critical mandates of a leadership team is to be the developers and custodians of a compelling and motivating vision for the enterprise or institution. Without such people and management are bound to develop their own versions of the future and align their behaviour to what they ascribe to. While this most certainly happens lower in the organisation hierarchy, the signs of leaders acting according to their own versions if the future truth is visible in many of the teams we have worked with. Not only this, but the absence of a clear and compelling vision also causes leaders to be non-committal in decision making and support for major strategic interventions.

A privately held company with it roots stretching far back in the history of enterprise development in South Africa fell on hard times due its inability to transform itself into a fully competitive market player, often choosing the easier route of living in the past – a highly regulated and state-interventionist environment. Its leadership team reported to a board made up almost entirely of significant shareholders and interestingly enough competitors. This board gave various mixed messages about its intentions with the company and left the leadership team to try and craft a vision that could serve to cement more commitment from the people to support the changes required to make the enterprise more competitive. It came as no surprise that there was little leadership commitment and that internally focused and self-preservation behaviour was at the order of the day. The board through its chairperson later found it good to commit itself in front of all staff to the future of the company and the investments required – only to sell off the business (and benefit handsomely in individual capacity) a very short while later. The leadership team was left floundering and at the mercy of the new shareholders – who duly replaced a number if them.

Intimidation causes superficial or fickle alignment

Despite the fact that executive leaders in organizations are purported to have the wisdom and guile to act strategically for the sake of the business, this is all too often misdirected by emotional positions based on conflict avoidance and team leader intimidation. Where the team is led by a strong-willed and forceful individual who does not take kindly to being questioned or crossed, one is likely to find a very superficial form of alignment which is only shown up when the implementation of decisions or initiatives falter. Leadership team members would often lament the dysfunctional impact of the forceful approach in the team in one on one session, but hardly ever does so in the open forum. This brings about triangulation – people talking about other people, but never directly to them – which is severely damaging to the team’s productivity and successful decision-making. The true test for this is to see with what kind of common purpose and urgency decisions or initiatives are implemented. Problems here indicate problems with alignment higher up.

In working with a Senior Leadership team of a major hospitality group on improving their effectiveness as a team – an exercise possibly prompted or commissioned by the board of the company – it very quickly became evident that this was a team dominated by the views of the highly intelligent Chief Executive. As the intervention with this team proceeded we realized that this team was going to be hamstrung in effectiveness if it kept pandering to the forceful and sometime emotional nature in which the CE was communication his views and positions on certain matters. The team clearly did not subscribe to this approach but seemed unwilling to address the matter directly in the open forum. A couple of vain attempts to do this were met with hefty counter-reaction, which quickly set the tone for the rest of the engagement. It came as no surprise then to later detect that despite the niceties when together in the team environment, the organization was rife with indirect and sometimes subversive activities to deal with the nature of the engagement by the CE.

There may be other forms of misalignment present in the leadership structures of organizations but these reported on above are the most common ones we had picked up during our extensive work with leadership teams. But the causes of misalignment is perhaps less important than the impact thereof. Misaligned leadership teams can cause significant value destruction in organizations as indicated below.

The impact of leadership misalignment

While the impact of poor leadership alignment may be pervasive through the organization, the following are regarded as the most critical:

Key strategic initiatives are retarded. There is no force more powerful to neutralize urgency in an organization as when the leadership team is not in full alignment and endorsement of what should be done. Despite the fact that the imperative for the initiative(s) may have been presented and confirmed over and over, the lack of complete buy-in at leadership level will retard the decision to go ahead. This is however not often the case in the beginning. Because leadership misalignment may only become evident later i.e. it was not properly assessed upfront, the strategic initiatives may already have kicked off and progressed quite a distance, before it is abruptly stopped. The collateral impact of this is not difficult to work out.

Significant capital investment and expected returns are being put at risk. As with the situation above, the conclusion, which often follows from unresolved leadership alignment, is a decision not to continue with the original initiatives or in its original form. By then quite a bit of many may already have been spent on the initiative with little if any returns – both monetary or in impact on the organization and the way it concludes business. The converse is however much more prevalent. By then some disruption may have already occurred to the way in which the business operated and to return it to the original decision now comes with a significant total cost (i.e. money, impact on people, loss of skills, loss of morale, disrupted processes, higher compliance risk)

The company slides in market and competitive position. If you were competing with a company where leadership alignment was questionable, it would present a window of opportunity to make major gains on them. Companies held up by leadership misalignment, spends too much energy and focus internally and too little outwardly. They take their eye of the ball in terms of the market and their competitors and are highly likely to be usurped by shrewd and more internally aligned competitors. It is often the analysts that will pick up on this situation and when they detect it, they are likely to take a different investment view of the company. Wouldn’t you?

Staff morale is dented. People often get sold on a vision or a new set of objectives based on which the company expects of them to develop a high degree of excitement and commitment. When they do and they run into a “system blockage” cause by leaders not being able to be on the same page in their thinking and acting, they can easily become disillusioned. They then tend to develop a watchful eye and ear to not in future be caught up in the hype of something new and “game changing” for the organization. It then becomes even more difficult in future to get people to fall in behind a new initiative.

Critical and experienced skills are lost to the business. Highly talented individuals disillusioned by organizational retardation as indicated above, don’t tend to stick around. Unless they are shackled by extraordinary rewards, they, in keeping with their intellectual prowess and desire for challenge, would easily be lured away to pursue such opportunities elsewhere. On the other hand they may not leave physically but as indicated above may just themselves “shut down” as a self protective mechanism and in so doing significantly reduce the value or impact they can have on the organization.

The organization develops a diseased culture. When leadership misalignment becomes a chronic condition in an organization it sprouts a culture of non-commitment and individualism. Coupled to that it becomes commonplace for people to back-out of previously agreed decisions and directions. It culminates in a culture of fragmented activities and initiatives where everything centers on the promotion of organizational fragments rather than the whole. Organizations like these often find themselves entangled in a confusing web of many different and conflicting initiatives.

Facilitating positive leadership alignment

Perhaps the key starting point in addressing the issue of leadership alignment lies in the awareness that it does not happen by itself. It is important to understand that the differences in human beings are even wider when it comes to playing key strategic and executive roles in organizations. Leadership alignment must be a managed process and it needs to be done throughout the lifetime of the team.

It is helpful to involve a trusted advisor to assist the team with managing its alignment and to act as an independent assessor of the strength of alignment in the team during its lifetime. Clearly the choice of this advisor may also be an issue of misalignment and it is this obvious that the credibility and independence of such an advisor shall be above reproach. Finding appropriate assistance in the process is a good strategy.

Leadership Alignment deals with emotions, perceptions, communication and behaviour. It is not an instant fix but requires continued hard work and commitment of all those to whom the performance of the team is a non-negotiable reality. When leaders are serious about doing what is best for the company or the organization, they also get the challenge of working towards staying aligned.