Getting it together: Angela Ferguson of ThoughtWorks is co-managing director of the 200-person Australian operation.
Angela Ferguson is taking part in one of the world’s most interesting leadership experiments – where the top role is split among equals.
At the Australian arm of IT consultancy ThoughtWorks there is no “big chief”. The role is shared between Ferguson and Ryan Moffat as co-managing directors of the 200-person operation. At a global level, the 2500-strong company is led by a team of four chief executives.
This is a startling break from tradition and shows some companies are serious about rethinking what leadership means.
Is it the pinnacle of a career, where you become lord and master of everything you survey? Or do you strip the ego out of it, and turn the role of CEO into a position of service to the organisation and the talented people who work there?
Vineet Nayar, the former CEO of IT giant HCL Technologies (employing 90,000 people), was credited with driving the success of that company with his philosophy of “destroying the office of CEO” and empowering employees.
“I would say a global organisation is one that inverts the pyramid of the organisational structure,” he writes in one of his many popular blogs.
“It is more entrepreneurial. And it has to create what I call ‘the democratisation of the organisations’, where it is not people like us who are monitoring, managing, and hence, correcting what others should be doing.
“It’s all about reverse accountability – that we are responsible to help them achieve their goals, radically different from our conventional style of management.”
Like HCL, ThoughtWorks employs people who are highly educated and intelligent. With workforces like these, it makes sense for leaders to defer to the experience and specialised knowledge of their people.
In effect, they become “servant leaders” who set a direction, coach and clear the way for their employees to do their best work. The term can set teeth on edge, with its faux-humble undertones, but it is a concept that has some currency for organisations staffed with knowledge workers.
ThoughtWorks’ Ferguson says she struggles with finding an accurate description of her role as leader, once trying out the descriptor “helper”, which wasn’t quite right either.
“I think my role is to make sure everybody else can do their job”, she says. “I also dislike the term manager, [which] makes it difficult to form a team around you.
“With that sense of hierarchy, a certain type of language is not helpful. Words matter.”
ThoughtWorks’s job-sharing leaders were only appointed this year, so they are still working it out as they go, but Ferguson says the conversion from a single-leader model has gone better than expected.
Whether this kind of power sharing will work elsewhere will depend on the culture of the organisation, she says.
“If you have a culture based on control, it isn’t going to work. The people have to be self-directed and self-motivated.”
Bob Woods, professor of management at the Melbourne Business School, says that leaders have a lot of ego invested in the hierarchy.
“If you approach somebody [about shared leadership] and their identity is tied up with being a CEO, they will think of many reasons that it won’t work. Status quo and identity put up a pretty good fight.”
More ways to skin a cat
There has long been a recognition that the quality of management and leadership suffers in this country because we cling to the idea that the only way to advance is through promotion to management. This means that people who are at the top of their game in their specific role are drafted into managing other people, whether or not they are any good at it.
Some organisations are trying to overcome this by creating alternative career paths.
At manufacturer 3M it has long been the practice to retain technical experts in a separate, but equivalent career path. This “dual ladder ” means it is possible for the expert to be among the company’s best paid, most visible and highly regarded people without becoming a traditional manager.
Ferguson says ThoughtWorks also operates under this principle: “I am certainly not the most highly paid person at ThoughtWorks Australia”.
A project manager by background, she has elected the management option, but looks at it as a longer-term project that may be swapped for a reversion to her former career path.
“We call it the Luminary Path,” she says, of non-management promotion. “These are people who choose to focus on their strengths.”
Give responsibility earlier
Vibhas Ratanjee, the Gallup Organisation’s senior practice expert, based in Singapore, says research has identified that companies have an oversupply of people with operational experience at the level below the C-suite, but very few who have any strategic skills.
“It is scary from a succession point of view,” he says.
What companies need to do is give those up-and-coming leaders “breakthrough” experiences earlier in their careers, he says.
“In Asia, the direct reports of CEOs are the most disengaged in the world,” he says. The reason for this is that they feel they don’t get enough learning and growth opportunities.
“The organisations are sending their leaders to Harvard [Business School] and The Wharton School, but they are not getting their hands dirty,” he says.
Ratanjee says organisations need an individual to take responsibility: “You can have shared leadership, but you can’t have shared accountability.”
However, he says he is seeing some large companies, such as banks, developing “extended leadership”, where power is delegated down the chain of command.
“In one of the largest regional banks in Asia, they have extended leadership to about 200 people,” he says.
“Rather than having organisational leaders, they are giving responsibility to a team of up-and-coming leaders.”
This, he says, results in more creativity and less “group-think”.
Woods says the rapidly changing business environment will require leaders who can cope with change, complexity and ambiguity. They will also have to be able to trust their people to work wherever, whenever.
“We need leaders who can transcend their experience and understand that management is about complex and adaptive systems,” he says.
“You would have thought that modern technology would have freed us from that [command and control style], but it is still a big debate,” he says. “People hasten slowly”.
Narrators wanted
Woods says boards tend to want to recruit different, more dynamic leaders in times of change. “They should have good listening skills, adaptive use of language, able to construct a good narrative around what the strategy is . . . they bind people together.”
An ability to communicate well has become a core requirement of leaders who used to hide behind loyal personal assistants, communicating only with their executive teams.
Today, a leader may be expected to use Twitter(better than @rupertmurdoch who tweets in fractured shorthand), to blog and to look comfortable on video.
Managing director at Polycom (which sells telepresence and voice communication), Gary Denman, says the distributed workforce, with employees all over the globe, and teleworking mean that leaders must replicate the casual social interactions with staff by using technology.
“They need to use technology and different platforms to ensure they remain connected and maintain the kind of connections they would have if they bumped into people in the lift or the foyer,” he says.
“With that comes an awareness of social media tools and a passion for using them – not everybody is passionate about using them.”
Denman says not everyone is passionate about these platforms but leaders must be trained to use the tools so they are relaxed and get the tone right.
And they should prepare for major announcements as if they were going to deliver a TED Talk.
Birds of a different feather
In recent times, the most common backgrounds for CEOs have been finance, engineering, operations and marketing.
However, it is possible that boards will start to look for people who can bring a different perspective to the role.
To some extent, there have always been people who have broken the mould – Telstra’s David Thodey has a degree in anthropology, for instance, and businessman Geoff Cousins (also a gifted communicator and former CEO of Optus) started off in advertising.
The global chief executive of recruitment firm Kelly Services, Carl Camden, studied linguistics (he has degrees in psychology and speech, clinical psychology and speech communication, and a doctorate in communications), which he used in a career that included advertising and political advising.
In a conversation with this writer two years ago, Camden said his background proved very useful when interviewing people for senior positions because he was able to listen to what they saying in a different way.
Professor Woods says CEOs can come from any background, if they have the base knowledge and skills.
“I’m not a big fan of just focusing on interpersonal skills – people have to have the knowledge base.”
The CEO of Diversity Council Australia, Nareen Young, says the advance of women into higher levels of management and leadership prompts new thinking about the kind of people who are valuable in those roles.
However, she is disappointed about the lack of diversity among the women who make it to the top.
“It seems to me that the kind of women who are in the public eye, they are all very similar and have a similar background. If we are going to value things like cultural capability, people are going to have to look different from what they do now.”
Ratanjee says: “Most executive teams I work with, they even look similar. They have a similarity of thinking.”
Partner of the CEO and board practice of recruiter Heidrick Struggles, Judi MacCormick, says boards are starting to have the courage to look beyond the “usual suspects”.
“One role I am [recruiting for] at the moment, the chair wants us to map out the whole executive team and the CEO doesn’t have to have all the characteristics,” she says.“The executive team as a whole can cover all the characteristics.”
In this case, the CEO can bring expertise in culture-building, managing stakeholders, vision and strategy. The CFO can have all the financial skills and the COO may be able to cover all the detailed industry experience.
“This can be a workable model, but the challenge is for the CEO to recognise they don’t have to have it all.”
Leadership lower down
Ferguson says leadership in the future should be devolved throughout the organisation: “It will be at multiple levels, it will be much more of a mesh network.”
Director of Great Place to Work Australia, Zrinka Lovrencic, says the middle layer of management is the one that needs the most work.
Part of the problem, she says, is that management is no longer seen as a job. It is something people are required to do on top of another full-time job.
The Diversity Council’s Young says leaders must realise they can’t do it all.
“They have to realise that it is not about them. It is about the organisation and, if you are able to contribute to the organisation, then that is an absolute privilege.”
Why we need leaders who can talk, as well as walk
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