Perhaps in anticipation of the recent speeches given by all three leaders of the UK’s main political parties on ‘responsible business’(?!), governance experts at the FSA recently invited us to talk them through our paper Working With Team Dynamics and the Leaders Who Shape Them and the simple but challenging model we begin to map out there.
The FSA is currently being restructured en route to becoming part of the Bank of England. It is also working through how best to play its part in encouraging and supporting ‘responsible banking cultures’…
Influencing leadership behaviour
We were encouraged to see how the regulator is thinking beyond governance standards and is actively exploring how it might influence the organisational cultures of banks – perhaps by leveraging actual leadership behaviours.
We certainly believe that shareholders – and perhaps other stakeholders – will soon begin to show increasing interest in this ‘next level’ of levers for driving responsible business outcomes. This will increase demand for tools and frameworks that could help them use these effectively.
How does irresponsibility arise?
Our discussion with the FSA was rich – covering, amongst other things, the different forms of irresponsibility that can arise in and around the four leader-team relationship archetypes that we describe in our paper: i) risk-manager, ii) captain, iii) spider and iv) constellator. For example:
- when the leader plays the role of captain, whose style is to create a tight-knit team ‘all rowing in the same direction’, the danger lies in an overly charismatic or dictatorial leader, supported by uncritical or faint-hearted ‘group think’ in the team – and, indeed, the very opposite: an ‘insubordinate’ individual who goes to necessarily devious lengths to get their own way…
- when the leader manages his or her team as a spider, the danger lies in the lack of mutual accountability and collective scrutiny that a more rigorous form of team management provides – leading to the danger of a leader and a few individuals creating their own operational norms and sub-culture, which ultimately corrodes the integrity of the whole.
Building trust
We explained that our work often involves building constellator capability in the leaders we work with. At its heart, this is about growing the ‘response-ability’ of these leaders i.e. their capacity for acting sensitively in response to whatever is happening at the time, and their capacity to synthesise elegantly the strengths of the other three archetypes.
In our experience, there is a clear link between so-called ‘responsible’ business cultures, and the ‘response-ability’ of the leadership – and the levels of trust thereby generated through and around the business as a result.
The challenge for us
While the FSA seemed very engaged in these archetype descriptions, the discussion surfaced a familiar challenge for us, as we were asked for more detail about how, exactly, we make our diagnoses and actually intervene as consultants.
In short, would it be possible to codify this within our ‘model’, such that it could be used more easily by others to deliver shifts in leadership styles in their organisation – and greater corporate responsibility generally?
This provoked a deeper conversation, both about the limits of change consultants’ models generally – we are clear that, generally, they can only serve as a stimulus and guide, rather than deliver off-the-shelf solutions – and the more subtle, ‘systemic’ understandings underpinning our work, which ultimately determine the exact shape and feel of any particular intervention.
Responsible consultants?!
The catch-22 for us, is that we can only really pass on these deeper, systemic understandings to leaders and others through actually working with them. (Indeed, they are at the heart of our work to help leaders work more as constellators.)
And to work with people at this sort of depth requires a reasonable level of initial trust – which in turn requires that potential clients perceive us to demonstrate a high level of not only expertise, but also responsibility…
So it is this quality – response-ability: the capacity to meet the needs of any particular situation with a certain sensitivity and integrity – that we tried to model in our meeting at the FSA. (How successfully remains to be seen!) Just as we do with all potential clients and, indeed, as many of our stakeholders as we can….
Perhaps you’d also like to meet – to explore for yourself how much of a ‘response-able business’ we are, and how responsible we could help your organisation and its leaders become?
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