Transforming The ELT (Part 2 of 5): Through ROLES
When leaders take collective ownership of challenges, collaborate cross-functionally to find solutions, and support one another to achieve the organization's overarching goals, they embody an Enterprise Leadership Team.
This is an excerpt from an article our team wrote in September – Transforming the ELT: An Introductory Overview – where we considered the efficacy of transitioning from an Executive Leadership Team to an Enterprise Leadership Team.
Recently, we helped a client’s leadership team assess their performance using our proprietary PRIDE Model. After completing their team assessment, their aggregated results revealed that their greatest opportunity was to clarify roles. While this leadership team had made significant progress in understanding the shifts needed to operate as a true enterprise team, there seemed to be a need for clearer role definitions and better collaboration to avoid confusion and ensure alignment, especially when working across functions.
A key question remained: How can we work as an enterprise leadership team — with inherently less separation between roles — while maintaining clarity about our distinct responsibilities within the organization?
Expanding Role Definition
Another way to frame our client’s question could be: What do our roles look like in an enterprise-led organization?
As they sought clarity, they uncovered a critical insight in their shift from a traditional top-down, siloed approach to a spokes-and-wheel model. What they ultimately discovered was that in an enterprise mindset, clarity might not mean more rigid, detailed definitions on paper, such as traditional job descriptions. Instead, clarity could take the form of an open invitation to engage more deeply in each other’s work. In this context, achieving clarity might actually require embracing broader, more interconnected roles.
Case in point: The way in which this leadership team collectively owns Human Resources demonstrates the enterprise leadership model quite well. There is a shared responsibility and accountability for the health and wellbeing, as well as the management and development, of their people. In this case, the traditional reporting lines are blurred on purpose, encouraging all employees direct access to all members of the leadership team. This provides a holistic line of sight into the talent, productivity, and health of the organization. While a leader may have responsibility for the work of their direct reports, all leaders have accountability for the success of each other's functions, and therefore the organization.
This is an important distinction that became super clear when the team dove deeper into broadening their own roles. They realized that the key lay in understanding the difference between accountability vs. responsibility. Think, RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed). There is often confusion between the R and the A; being responsible means you are the person completing a task, while being accountable means that you ensure the work is done and ultimately achieves the end result. When this is understood clearly, and we see that everyone has a stake in shared goals regardless of whether or not they’re responsible for the work, it suddenly becomes logical to create an organizational structure that has a network of “dotted lines” of accountability – a way to trace who has skin in the game, even if they’re not the ones who check the box that something has been done.
While you might think dotted lines would create confusion in the system, they can actually create efficiencies and greater empowerment across the entire enterprise.
The Ah-Ha Moment
“Everyone has a dotted line to me,” one team member proclaimed when the ah-ha landed. According to the organizational structure (org chart), this particular leader has only one direct report, while the rest of the employees report to other team members.
This ah-ha goes for them all. Now, with this new mindset, everyone has permission to work closely with team members who may report to other leaders, and they have an open invitation to attend meetings that impact the whole of the organization, without having to triangulate. In other words, everyone has an open road to go directly to the source.
With this new mindset, the team members were challenged to expand their roles from their own functions to ones that dipped into and considered all perspectives across teams. This allowed everyone to support a central purpose, through their collective ownership of human resources (read more on that in Transforming the ELT (Part 1 of 5): Through PURPOSE).
Developing New Skills
Transforming into an enterprise leadership team may require developing new skills, knowledge, and capabilities along the way. Take for example the scenario above, where this team shares responsibility for Human Resources. While everyone does not need to be experts in Human Resource Management (as that is what the HR Manager’s role is), they do need to understand basic employment law, how to collaboratively contribute to employee performance management, how to support talent across the organization, and how to develop their next level leaders. This is where expanding role definition offers an opportunity to learn new skills and expand one’s knowledge and capabilities, supporting and modeling a culture of continuous learning.
Assessing and Developing Your Own Team
Interested in understanding how well your team’s roles support an enterprise mindset? The following statements can be rated on a scale of 1-4 (1 being strongly disagree and 4 being strongly agree).
Roles: An important factor in the development of your team is how each member contributes to the work. Effective organization design and talent development are crucial for each team member to pursue independent tasks while working as a whole.
Our team structure (roles, reporting, job descriptions, etc.) is effective within the larger organizational structure.
Each team member has clearly defined roles and responsibilities that also allow for flexibility to achieve shared goals.
Everyone sees their role as accountable to the results of the organization.
Our team collaborates effectively with other teams and stakeholders across the organization.
Our unique skills and talents are valued and utilized on our team, and there are ample opportunities for growth and development.
As you move towards implementing an enterprise approach to leadership at all levels, this is a great place to start along your journey, and you can have your teammates answer them as well. Here’s the full assessment based on the PRIDE Model.
To further foster enterprise leadership, try this feedback exercise:
Exercise: Start, Stop, Continue
Give each person index cards, 1 for each person in the group (i.e., if there is a group of 5 people, each person will get 5 index cards).
Take 1 index card per team member and write down your recommendations for what that person might start, stop, and continue to do to support the team
Share cards one-by-one with each other, giving each card to the respective person
Once everyone gets their cards, they will then take their final index card and write down their commitments in the form of start, stop, continue, with their colleague’s feedback in mind, in addition to their own reflections. This ought to be a synthesis, rather than a laundry list.
Each person states and shares their commitments with the rest of the team.
This exercise combines self-reflection with peer feedback, promoting accountability and the development of roles that support the larger team with permission to hold each other accountable.
When each and every person’s roles are tied to the organization’s greater purpose, and when leaders are inherently expected to act cross-functionally, everyone’s actions become a driving factor in creating an enterprise leadership team, all accountable for the results of the organization.
Stay Tuned
Be sure to look out for next month’s article, the third in our 5-month series, focused on Transforming the ELT by way of our proprietary PRIDE model, where we’ll focus on the importance of Infrastructure when building an enterprise team.
Integrated Growth has been developing leaders, mobilizing teams, and transforming organizations since 1998. Founded by Gretchen Reid, their team of highly skilled consultants and executive coaches are known for building award winning leadership development programs, facilitating strategic planning and team development initiatives, and providing executive coaching to help you achieve your greatest mission. We invite you to schedule a free consultation or visit www.integratedgrowth.com for more information.
AUTHOR – Gretchen Reid is the Founder and Chief Change and Leadership Architect for Integrated Growth. She has spent over 25 years coaching leaders and creating award-winning Leadership and Talent Development Programs, directly contributing to multiple awards for her clients, including Fast Company’s 50 Most Innovative Companies, Forbes America’s Best Employers List, Forbes Best Employer for Diversity, and ASTD BEST. She is an Adjunct Professor of Change Management in the Strategic HR Masters Program, Denver University, University College. (MS, Career and Human Resource Development, Rochester Institute of Technology, BA, Psychology & Business Management, University of Rochester)