Leaders in an Agile Enterprise

Can leadership style be at dissonance with an organization’s incentive/rewards scheme? And what is its correlation to motivation?

An individuals motivation can be intrinsic or extrinsic. Intrinsic is when we act, not for external rewards, but for the simple pleasure or satisfaction of achieving something. Performing one of these activities is reinforcing in-and-of itself.

Laissez-faire leadership can be effective in situations where group members are highly skilled, motivated, and capable of working on their own, with very little guidance. Laissez-faire style is used in situations where followers have a high-level of passion and intrinsic motivation for their work.

So what happens when laissez-faire leadership meets people who are not good at setting their own deadlines, managing their own projects, and solving problems on their own, skills essential for an agile organization? How can leaders adapt?

Laissez-faire leaders are often seen as uninvolved and withdrawn, which can lead to lack of cohesiveness within the group. In such a situation, leaders need to change their style – easier said than done – and get more proactive, assertive and hands-on with the task or process needed to accomplish the task.

Eventually, as followers acquire more expertise, leaders might switch back to a more delegative approach that gives group members more freedom to work independently.

A major dissonance occurs when laissez-faire leaders implement rewards schemes, which in reality is a switch to a benevolent authoritative style. “Meet your targets and you will be suitably rewarded!”. The followers, even those who are intrinsically motivated, now must adopt performance to maximize rewards.

In this situation, the leader now uses rewards to encourage appropriate performance and listens more to concerns lower down in the organization, though what they hear is often rose-tinted, being limited to what their subordinates think the boss wants to hear.

And if the span of control is one to many (as is often the case), the leaders time has to be split across multiple stakeholders. Overtime, the leader chooses to listen more to those who think like they do (and is what they would like to believe), thereby reducing the space for dissenting voices.

Thereafter is a rapid spiral downward into a crisis.

In the final analysis, the source of the most insurmountable hurdle in achieving the goal of strategic agility is the organization’s leaders.