Leading has never been an easy challenge. Influencing and motivating others is usually not easy. And if leading is not easy, leading when you are no longer present is even much more difficult. And in addition to being difficult, I would dare to say that it is also more decisive and has greater importance, since in most situations, the project will spend more time without you than with you. I wrote the post “The Legacy” some time ago highlighting the importance of leading when you are no longer there, and of leaving a positive legacy in the people or organizations in which you have led.
Leadership experts, Frances Frei and Anne Morris authors of the magnificent book “Unleashed” explain well the importance of leading when you are no longer there, or as they say, “leading from absence.” With their experience researching leadership and having advised numerous leaders, they affirm that commonly, when a leader leaves the project, whether temporarily or permanently, collective performance usually stagnates or decreases. They believe that great leaders are those who ensure that their positive impact continues in their absence. And along these lines, they highlight that the teams are going to have to make most of the decisions without the leader. TO EMPOWER THEIR TEAMS AND PREPARE THEM FOR THE LEADER’S ABSENCE, THEY MUST USE TWO VERY POWERFUL WEAPONS: STRATEGY AND CULTURE. As their research shows, the most successful leaders invest a large amount of their time in defining their strategy and culture well and ensuring that these two elements reach every corner of the organization.
- STRATEGY is an extension of who you are as a leader. It empowers organizations by teaching workers how to unleash the resources they control. Additionally, the strategy sets your own values and beliefs in the organization’s behavior. Frei and Morris describe strategy as “how an organization wins.” They also recommend that the leader must know the strategy deeply so that he can describe it simply. In this sense, one of the leader’s most important challenges is to get the strategy to all corners of the organization. So if you want to lead in your absence, you must define the right strategy, talk about it with everyone, and review it often. As entrepreneur Morris Chang says, “Without strategy, execution is aimless. Without execution the strategy is useless.”
- CULTURE is basically how things are done in an organization. Culture can also be defined as unwritten norms or as the generalized consensus of what is true. MIT professor Edgar Schein defines organizational culture as “shared artifacts, behaviors, and basic assumptions.” One of the great challenges of the leader is to get his team to behave the way he wants them to in your absence. To achieve this, the leader has to get his team to “think” the way he wants them to think. Edgar Schein himself highlights the importance of culture in leadership development, stating that “The most important task of leaders is to create and manage culture.” In this sense, Tony Hsieh – who was CEO of the company Zappos for 21 years – highlights the importance of culture stating that “If you manage culture well, most other things will take care of themselves.”
So now you know, if you want to leave a good legacy as a leader and continue leading in your absence, commit to working on strategy and culture well.
