Leading the EU from Below

Finally, some praise for the EU’s choice of President and Foreign Minister of the EU.  The New York Times article on The EU’s New Leaders acknowledges that the choice of a Haiku-writing Belgian Prime Minister and a British baroness and EU Trade Commissioner was smart.

Why so smart? Well, because governance of a network cannot be based on pure hierarchical principles. For starters, because there is no clear hierarchy. Everything is alliances, soft power, give and take, symbolic gestures and horse trading.  Secondly, because hierarchy is not wanted. The EU is composed of 27 Member States each with their own idea of leadership. What they want is a negotiator, someone who can make the most of a near impossible situation.

Needless to say, this does not mean that top-down power will not be involved. The wonderfully strange thing about even such a surprising appointment is that it becomes power. In that sense, leadership from below is a very precarious state of affairs. It seldom happens, or rather, it happens quite often, but once it is recognized as such, it ceases to exist. Plain old leadership takes over. The disciple becomes the leader.

Another thing is that to Belgians, of course, the notion of their Prime Minister being an unknown figure is hard to fathom. This is another very interesting facet of leadership. It can actually be very local. Nobody is felt as more powerful than a tribal leader in a small community. Yet, his or her power seldom extends beyond a few hundred people and beyond a small physical territory. But to the locals, this does not matter.

The challenge with the EU has always been that its actions are slow to seep down to individuals. Even though the European policy debates are much more consequential than national policy debates, they are less talked about. The sociology of the whole thing is relatively straight forward. Whatever people think is real becomes real in its consequences. People refuse to believe that an organizational structure they do not understand and politicians and bureaucrats they do not know can have any power at all over themselves. However, if you have seen someone on TV, shaken their hand in a parade, and they talk about your top ten concerns (taxes, the economy, social benefits, safety, culture etc.), then you believe they really can affect change. Little do we consider the fact that politicians may well talk of things they cannot really deliver…

So, in a situation where the national scene is where heroes and villains are created, there is little scope for big Europe. And maybe that is the price we have to pay for real progress on policy issues.

The next few years will show whether this strategy works. I, for one, think that there is much to gain by testing the waters of networked leadership. The EU is the best example we have. The laboratory is a bunch of very much alive Europeans who are slowly recovering from a financial crisis. So, the stakes are high, but the results could be good, if not great. Not bad at all.

Å Lede Nedenfra: Statlige Lederes Rolle i Nettverksalderen

Nettgenerasjonens ledere er ikke ledere i vanlig forstand. Tvert imot, de muliggjør andres lederskap. Lederskap Nedenfra er et ledelsesperspektiv der påvirkning er viktigere enn kontroll. De som lykkes omfavner et knippe anti-trender: Ki (energisk autoritet), Gemeinschaft (organisk autoritet), og Nettverk (teknologisk autoritet). Lederskap Nedenfra er et perspektiv på livet der du trenger ikke kontor, tittel, penger, ansatte. Du kan og bør ta ledelsen når det trengs selv om du ikke er satt til å lede.

Norway Teaches The World Economics

Today’s New York Times article, Thriving Norway Provides an Economics Lesson, illustrates some aspects of the Scandinavian frugality, realism, common sense, welfare thinking, and, well, dare I say virtue, that characterize leadership from below. While there are a lot of issues to be had with the conditions for taking risks, funding, and exhibiting entrepreneurship in such a context, it does avoid the excesses that the rest of the world now is struggling with.

The global financial crisis has brought low the economies of just about every country on earth. But not Norway.

For now…

Amazon.com Top Twitters 21 Feb 2009

Leadership From Below is a Twitter bestseller! It was among Amazon.com Top Twitters on 21 Feb 2009. Tweetie Buy is a site that tells you what Twitter users are buying.

Good Morning Connecticut TV Interview

TV interview with Trond Arne Undheim on WTNH (Channel 8, New Haven, CT, USA) on Leadership From Below. The hardback is available on Amazon.com and the paperback is available on Lulu.com).

Lederskap Nedenfra, the Trondheim book launch

From me to we

While teams can be an effective way to organize, not all teams are effective. Leadership is always a shared commodity in a team, since nobody fully controls a team process. While discipline is crucial, if you want to succeed, social aspects cannot be overlooked.

Team members share roles and responsibilities crucial to their task’s success. In one project, you may be the formal leader but depend on others for key insights. In another project, you watch others excel but may have unique experience in a vital area. If you are very outspoken, you can rally people to support you when there is time to make a decision. You may be the social leader in the group. The important thing: You must think and lead simultaneously.

In the last decade, business has been seen rapid innovation. Those who fail to innovate die — unless they operate a monopoly. (And eventually, monopolies also die, due to government regulations or because an ever-changing business environment.) Innovation grows in importance. Fresh perspectives are held in high regard but cannot possibly come from the insiders alone. And while insiders are important, one person alone cannot change much. What matters: Look around yourself, and work with what you have. Within any organization, there are insiders and outsiders. A team has a great deal of knowledge that is inaccessible those not on the team. This holds true even for colleagues who have been part of a company for 20 years.

Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith’s 1993 classic The Wisdom of Teams posits that corporate teams must be small, diverse, and accountable. Their follow up tome, 2001’s The Discipline of Teams, indicated that successful teams depend not so much on bonding, togetherness, and empowerment but, rather, on discipline — all of which is true. But there is more: Meetings, for instance, must be issue-driven. You have to allow time to solve the issue. Do not stick strictly to project plans. Effective teams, wrote Katzenbach and Smith, alternate leaders even when completing one task. All members are mutually accountable.

A Hollywood soundstage or a large public-sector consulting project, are both examples of team settings. A team is a small group of people, usually twelve or less, working together for a limited time to achieve common goals. If the team is larger, additional people perform marginal roles or act as subcontractors to the main delivery. A successful team is a group whose elements (e.g., people, process, leadership, and resources) lead to deliveries that match or exceed initial expectations.

Teams command a set of resources and are affected by several factors specific to their task, the individuals on their team, the setting, and the sector. Other factors may intervene.

Successful teams believe in their task and command sufficient resources to reach their goal. They have a social leader, as well as a task leader (neither of which may be the assigned project leader), and they spend considerable time face to face. When forced to meet online, they are aware of the current limitations; communicate carefully and do not spend too much time on controversial issues.

The bulk of existing research on teams indicates that while all teams are working on a task or task, most teams devote equal time to maintaining the social relationships within the team.

Teams differ in degree of complexity, and you need to know which factors come into play in your own team. Even more importantly, as we will see, every team must become a “we” before anything useful can happen.

Best Practice Strategies in Government – A European Perspective

This was the speech I gave today at StrategyPark Central Government, 2008, a ManagementEvents UK gig held at Sopwell House, St.Albans, UK on 4 November 2008. The room was full of bigwigs from the UK government, I believe. The feedback from participants was great, really encouraging!

Effective Leadership Beyond the Hierarchy

Effective leadership has little or nothing to do with hierarchy and formal position. Rather, soon it will be entirely project based. Those who excel at being aware, sharing, and pooling knowledge, win. Once this is a reality, the workplace will be changed forever. I don’t mean that once you work project-based for a while you are part of this trend. In fact, a project here and there is not what this is about. I envision that hierarchy as we know it will disappear altogether. It won’t be needed and will have no function. Instead, a new hierarchy will appear: one purely based on knowledge and networks. This is a much more unstable situation. In effect, a given situation can determine who is in charge and e a hot topic can make an expert surface immediately. Whoever knows, and puts his or her knowledge to use, is in power. Given that some of this is happening already, why is it that hierarchy even still exists?