Are you still busy making decisions – or are you tackling Organizational Hygiene already?

Having managers "run" day-to-day business and perform regular trouble-shooting may be a kind of “leadership." But it is clearly not the leadership of the future

by Niels Pflaeging

Managers spend a lot of time in meetings. They have their eyes on the ball. Are decisive. Take on responsibility. Are committed to take action. Even if this commitment may lead to some reverse delegation. Or if this bias to action results in a bit of micro-managing. No big deal. Because making great decisions is the point of the manager’s work-life, right? Surely any manager who’s unwilling to make decisions should be judged a lame duck. Or so we think.

Let’s consider a different take on leadership that’s different from that heroic decision-maker image of the manager. Such an alternative approach to leadership might look like this:

Here, meetings are not about making decisions. In fact, the number of decisions that’s supposed to be made during meetings is zero: Most meetings will be a fair deal shorter as a result. Other meetings extend somewhat longer. They feel more like actual conversations. Here, as in all meetings in this different mode of leadership, presenting to each other is considered impolite and silly: When meeting, you will want to engage in discourse and critical dialog, without powerpointing at each other.

When joining a meeting, you, like everybody else, will be well-informed. You will have prepared for the meeting in advance. You are well-informed, or you better don’t take part in the meeting. Here, it’s considered normal to share numbers, and written information ahead of the meeting, so that the relevant information can be debated during the joint session.

Because responsibility is clearly assigned, decisions, here, will no longer have to be taken during meetings either: Individual people with appropriate mastery take decisions after consulting with peers, with experts or other people with mastery. In this context, meetings serve to stay on the same page, and to reach agreements: You want to be able to rely on each other! For top managers to take decisions themselves will be the exception, not the rule. Delegating back up will be considered impolite and just “flawed”. Nobody will let that kind of thing happen.

Here, a key role of managers is to perform Organizational Hygiene: To ensure that ineffective or wasteful practices, patterns, tools and rituals disappear, for good. Those things end up on the garbage heap of history. Annual planning and budgeting belong there. Performance appraisals. Fixed targets and incentive systems. Travel policies. Allocation procedures and committees. Internal controls of people’s time. Deviation reporting and cost management. Job descriptions and salary ranges. Strategic planning and internal surveying. Most forecasting. And of course: All ineffective meetings.

Keeping the organization neat and tidy like that is hard work. And it is good work. Are you still making decisions, or are you already decluttering the organization?