You Asked, We Answered: Questions from my live Coaching.com session
Well over 1,000 participants joined in live for my Coaching.com session, “The Permissionless Organization Has Arrived.” Many asked wonderful questions that we didn’t have time to get to in the session. Here are a select few with some responses.
What is the purpose and benefit of a permissionless future? How do you think the concept of a permissionless future will impact traditional industries and the way we conduct business?
The idea behind the permissionless organization is that it can react with far greater velocity to challenges from the environment than a traditional bureaucracy can, because decisions can be made as close to what I call the “edges” of the organization as possible. There are many great examples already – Netflix, Spotify, The Morning Star Company, Semco – but the practices that make this possible are not yet widespread and mainstream.
In a permissionless organization, the fundamental unit is a small team given the freedom to problem-solve and use their human ingenuity without the functions of traditional management – control, resource allocation, specific KPI’s. Indeed, with the advent of powerful new technologies, information systems can take over many management tasks, which saves the organization managerial overhead and allows people who actually know what is going on to decide what course of action makes the most sense.
What I suspect will happen is that the speed with which permissionless companies can move will accumulate in such a way that traditionally organized competitors will find it difficult to compete. The traditional ones will then get acquired, split up or disappear.
Would love to hear more specifically about a couple of ideas on how coaches could support leadership with succession plans.
What a great question! There are many things coaches might be able to do. Here are some ideas:
Gather data in confidence from those who work with or for potential candidates and give direct and honest feedback to the decision-makers on whether they are a good fit for the demands of the role;
Facilitate discussion committees that might bring candidates to the surface, making sure that the conversations are well-rounded and the succession pool is broad;
Identify those potential candidates in the organization who don’t necessarily push themselves forward but who have the right qualities for a bigger role. Similarly, provide prudent warnings about the people who skillfully manage “up” so that the image they present to the leadership is different than the way they actually manage;
Make sure the pool of potential candidates has at least 2 “diverse” people if diversity is a goal – research shows that if you only have 1, that makes that candidate look especially risky and unintentionally worsens their chances of being hired;
Insist that the criteria for a role be written down in advance of any candidate being interviewed – research shows that unconsciously, decision-makers rewrite the needs of the role once they have decided that there is a candidate they prefer.
Give some of these ideas a spin and let me know how they work out!
How do you break down the tendency for executive leaders to hold onto their
domains of controls and propagate this top-down authoritative approach that
undermines intrapreneurship?
This is a tough one, as the people who are on the “top” of a hierarchy have pretty nice lives and it feels like giving something up if they yield control elsewhere. As Bob Sutton says, there are 4 P’s that virtually guarantee executives will try to hang on to their roles. It’s almost impossible to do if the most senior leader is opposed or offering only lukewarm support. There are a few things, though, that I have observed at least mitigate against the tendency.
Fear of competition or fear of not being fit for purpose. This was one of Kathy Murphy’s motivations at Fidelity Personal Investments – although the firm was doing well, it was organized around products, wasn’t picking up enough young people and was taking too long to do just about everything. This got her started on a quest to find a radically different way of working, using small teams, lots of information flows, leaders who emphasize “multiplier” behaviors as Liz Wiseman would say. The change sparked a whole new phase of growth for her part of the firm.
Fear of an unfavorable shift in the regulatory or institutional framework that would make a slower-moving firm less competitive. For instance, the traditional record companies would have far preferred to sell CD’s (pay for 18 songs when you only want 1!) but with the advent of Napster realized that the advance of technology was going to force their hands. That in turn led to an agreement with Apple to sell single songs on the iTunes store and of course, to the eventual emergence of Spotify and other streaming platforms, built much closer to the permissionless model.
Pressure from the Board or from shareholders. In some cases, Boards decide that management is looking after its own interests rather than those of the company and its shareholders and become a force for change. Indeed, there is some fascinating research that shows that companies with “distracted” owners make decisions that are much more favorable to leadership than they would have when the owners are paying attention.
Faddishness. Unfortunately, we see this one a lot. Some new management method or practice becomes fashionable and everybody adopts it. Darrell Rigby of Bain for years tracked how tools came in and out of fashion, often after disappointing results on implementation. Remember balanced scorecard? Business Process Re-engineering? Total Quality Management? Benchmarking? Zero-based budgeting?
Becoming uncompetitive in the market for talent. If a firm is known as a stifling bureaucracy, there is no way the best talent will work there. So sometimes it is the workforce that puts pressure on management to change, and if they don’t, vote with their feet and walk out.
In my own context (hospital) the idea of continuous customer feedback seems
imperative. How does an organization create mechanisms to facilitate real
“market feedback” on a continuous basis?
In his wonderful book “Broken: How Our Social Systems are Failing Us and How We Can Fix Them”, Paul LeBlanc offers the example of the University of Utah Health System’s CEO Dr. Lorris Betz. When his own wife experienced a sudden and acutely painful case of kidney stones, he experienced firsthand how poorly his own hospital responded. He later learned that patient complaint letters were routinely collected, but that he never saw them – he only got the ones that seemed to tell a happy story. As Paul puts it, “Those unhappy stories helped fuel his work to improve the health-care system he led. Lorris made videos out of the most troubling stories and showed them to doctors, nurses and other staff so they could once again see the real people they were serving (often poorly) and understand the real consequences of forgetting their needs. He says they still make him cry when he sees them.” Betz emphasized the importance of respecting patients and giving them an exceptional experience, backed up with metrics and scorecards.
The turnaround of the system used task forces, special focused efforts and changes in incentives, but the heart and soul of it was truly understanding the patient experience. I suggest you have a look at the book for more details.
Regarding the board’s hiring people not necessarily for the real reasons they need to be successful, is there a set of competencies or capacities that you find are a good basis? Example Hogan Assessments model, do psychometrics like this help overcome these issues? Could you give an example of the skills hired for versus skills needed that you referred to?
A great reference on this is Henry DeWolf’s discussion of the abysmal state of CEO selection. You can find the writeup at this link. As he puts it, “the leadership advisory firm ghSMART conducted the CEO Genome project over 10 years, building a database of over 17,000 in-depth assessments and logging over 13,000 hours of interviews. They determined that there is clearly a costly misalignment between what it takes to get hired into the CEO role and what it takes to perform well.”
This piece in Sloan Management Review offers a nice overview of how the process should work.
I perceive that a permissionless culture is not a “laissez-faire” culture, but one where the rules are implicit, easy to understand and they guide the employees to what is correct and what is incorrect, then they run with all their abilities to their objectives, what you get is an implacable execution. Am I right?
You got it!
I have been a huge fan for over a decade. Your work inspired the League of Intrapreneurs, and we continue to learn from you. The question is how coaches can help make the case for intrapreneurship and allocate meaningful budgets for intrapreneurial teams to innovate beyond the innovation theater. Many intrapreneurs get into trouble for acting without “permission.”
I’m honored! The failure to consistently invest in innovation is something that continually amazes me. As Robert Burgelman and colleagues have found, intrapreneurship is strangely cyclical. Making a case for it involves being radically candid about the prospects of the core business of today, creating a strong external focus and operating with the right discipline, as in handling disappointments effectively. The rewards and incentives in the organization have to be aligned as well – if you only reward what goes on in the business of today, that’s all you are going to get.
A perspective I also think is valuable comes from Paddy Miller and Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg on “stealth innovation.” They suggest 4 approaches: finding allies who can support you on the sly; building a proof of concept; accessing funds on the quiet; and developing a good cover story to deflect unwanted early attention from your idea.
Remember, with truly uncertain new ideas, you don’t want a big budget or a large team.
Would love to hear your thoughts on ‘the age of heroic leader is gone’ (or should be gone)?
We will always love stories featuring heroic people – we’re hard-wired to love a good one! And most movements need someone to be their public face, so I don’t think that goes away. I do think we are in an era where ‘leadership’ can be recognized at many levels and in many people. Have a look at Hitendra Wadhwa’s wonderful book Inner Mastery, Outer Impact for what I think is one of the more clearheaded descriptions of what leadership today looks like. You can learn a lot from this fascinating video he recorded.
Do you see Haier's "Micro-Enterprises" exhibiting the principles and traits of a "Permissionless Organization"?
From what I have read about what they are doing, yes. A great example is the GE Appliance division that they acquired which went from being a terrible laggard to one of the most innovative, high-growth organizations in its sector.
Would it be fair to assume that a permissionless future can only be permitted (ironically) by top leaders with adequate agency?
Yes, I think there is some truth to that – leaders need to be willing to cede traditional controls and trust that new kinds of mechanisms could work. But if you look at the performance of companies like Amazon, you see this remarkable combination of high-agency executives (I mean, everybody knew Jeff Bezos was the boss!) with lots of initiative and freedom throughout the organization. I think it’s the combination that is the most powerful.
If coaches can be a resource in building and managing these teams, what needs to change in coach training currently to enable this expertise?
A great summary can be found in this wonderful HBR article by Herminia Ibarra and Anne Scoular. They describe a variety of coaching models – directive, non-directive and situational, and argue that facilitating coaching needs to become an organizational capability. You’ll also see in this article that they recommend variations of the permissionless concept to respond to a rapidly changing environment as well.
People can be encouraged to start small - what can you do now that you don’t need permission for?
That is a great point! Let me refer you to this Thought Spark in which I describe how you can take a bottoms-up approach to becoming more agile and reducing bureaucracy.
Are there examples of organizations that have experienced success by switching to this permissionless leadership model in the US?
Yes, Fidelity Personal Investments would be one.
Correct me if I am wrong but I believe you said leadership development has taken a backseat for priority or necessity because of attrition in the workforce and the research that shows the younger generational workforce average time at a job is 2 to 3 years. It seems job design needs to include incentives for growth personally and financially over the course of time.
Absolutely. It’s a shame, but in a lot of companies they neither provide the training and development nor the support that leaders need today. My colleague Ron Boire and I believe that one way of counteracting that is through creating peer-to-peer networks. You can learn more about our program at this website.
The books mentioned:
Erin Meyer - The Culture Map and No Rules Rule
Amy Edmondson – Right Kind of Wrong and The Fearless Organization
Kim Scott - Radical Candor
What advice do you have about a permissionless future for those leaders who are eager to have everybody be in the office 5 days a week?
They need to be very clear about why they want everybody there. As Keith Ferrazzi has found, depending on “serendipitous bonding” on a team only gets you to half the team’s potential. Instead, if you really want a team to be great, you need to invest in intentional bonding activities. I think way too much of this “get back in the office” stuff takes place because we mistake presence for intentional team building.
You can measure the effectiveness of your teams using a simple instrument I developed. To find more, check out our team effectiveness website.
That was a lot of fun – thanks for all the great questions, all!
What we’re working on at Valize – Impact Network, Future of Work & AI-first consulting!
Are you in a big leadership role but feeling anxious, unsure, lonely and unsupported? You might benefit from joining our Impact Peer-to-Peer Network. Are you in HR and worried about appropriately developing your top talent? Consider it as well. More info here.
Are you ready to learn about the human future of work? My colleague Hitendra Wadhwa and I, supported by Emeritus, are starting a movement! Join in!
Or what AI-first consulting is going to be like? Check out this very cool video from Kes Sampanthar and Scott Wolfson!
Get in touch – we’re cooking up some cool stuff on those projects.