Your Extended Leadership Team is a Power Multiplier

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Your extended leadership team, or ELT, is a wonderful thing – if you know where to find it and what to do with it. Some companies do, but quite a lot don’t. These relatively senior managers are a hard bunch to identify, sometimes, and they’re very often only engaged as a part of a big, generic group of “leaders” or, perhaps, “managers.”

And that’s a shame because, due to the kind of people they are and the space they occupy in your company, they’re quite different, and uniquely valuable.

So let’s start with who they are. In a company of scale, say a hundred or more employees, the ELT is the next level down from the top of the house. They are the leadership team’s leadership teams. They are the people who manage the people managers. Your company might call them directors, VPs, partners or senior managers.

To illustrate the potential of this group, let’s look at a couple of examples.

We were working a few years ago with a company in the professional services sector. They had a small group of veterans who ran the place, and beneath them a population of several dozen younger senior managers. This group was relatively diverse in age, the youngest being in their early thirties, the oldest maybe mid-forties.

They were exceptionally bright, and had reached that plateau of technical experience and idealistic energy that is hard to reach but exceedingly easy to fall off. They were experts in their craft, knew the business, and understood the sweeping implications of new technologies and profound changes in the way people live and work.

This next-level group of leaders was fiercely passionate about the future of the business, and had a remarkably clear vision for what the ambition and strategy of the firm could be. They were, in short, the secret to the company’s success today and tomorrow.

We ran an event in which they were freed from the usual shackles of politics and deference, and it was obvious that they should be given a strong voice in the direction of the company and empowered to take all kinds of big, important decisions. Further, it made sense for them to be the face of strategy and change to frontline employees.

It didn’t happen. The executive team couldn’t let go. These exceptional young leaders were denied their say. Many of the brightest left. Who knows what might have happened if they had been given the keys to the firm?

Contrast that story with the approach of another organization, this time in the healthcare space and, with thousands of employees, far bigger. In this case, the executive team recognized the potential of this next, up-and-coming generation of leaders and determined to put them to good use.

They saw the potential of turning this disparate band into a cohesive, cross-functional community. They brought them into visioning and strategic planning conversations. They invited them to define new cultural principles, knowing that they would be the most effective ambassadors for change in the organization.

With a mixture of excitement, confidence and trepidation, the executive team relinquished a significant amount of control in order to harness the intelligence and passion of the group.

Today, the organization has new energy, momentum and direction. The extended leadership team – a constantly evolving force – is defining and owning what happens next. They’re the bridge between the executive team and the frontlines, a role they’re perfectly equipped to play because they truly understand the concerns of both. And with their dynamism and ambition they’ve brought a tangible sense of adventure and innovation to the organization’s strategy.

So how do you start to harness the potential of these leaders?

First, make sure they’re a truly cross-functional community. Give them forums – offsites, meetings, online communities – in which they can build a sense of affiliation to each other, voice their concerns and aspirations, and develop shared perspectives. Make being a part of the ELT a thing.

Second, bring them into conversations about the future, the projects the organization is prioritizing, and culture. Give them ownership of the why, what and how of the organization.

Third, invite them to lead change programs. Put them on stage when you’re highlighting successful initiatives. Showcase them in videos. Let them host conversations with their team members. Don’t micromanage what they say – they’re smart enough and experienced enough to translate strategy into calls to action.

To summarize: this group of leaders is smart, responsible, energetic, experienced, passionate, connected, influential, empathetic and vital to your future.

Why wouldn’t you set them loose?

Jeremy Morgan is co-founder of The Narrative House.

Making Humanity a Leadership Priority

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A few months after I had my daughter, I asked a female senior leader how she balanced family obligations with a demanding work schedule.

“Closely guard how much information you share with people at work when you take time out for family stuff,” she said. “Don’t let it look like being a mom is getting in the way of your job.”

I was so disheartened. Even in an apparently progressive and innovative company, parents with young children were being asked to pretend they don’t have lives and priorities outside of work.

In order to assimilate into the corporate culture we had to leave the most important parts of ourselves in the lobby. This created significant emotional and practical strain.

This is just one example of how employees suffer when an organization’s culture – its spoken and unspoken expectations and norms – demands homogeneity. Despite years of well-intentioned Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) programs and plenty of talk about bringing your whole self to work, companies are still haunted by bias and unreasonable expectations that limits the opportunities for employees who are challenging these cultural norms.

All of this leads me to ask two questions. First, does it matter? And, if so, how do we fix it?

 

Yes, inclusive culture should be a leadership priority

We all know employee engagement and culture are important to the bottom line. Gallup noted in a 2012 report that “Work units in the top quartile in employee engagement outperformed bottom-quartile units by 10% on customer ratings, 22% in profitability, and 21% in productivity.”

Our experience supports this. The most successful organizations that we’ve worked with have been led by executives who create a culture in which everyone feels like they are welcome – that they belong.

More specifically, those cultures all had common characteristics: openness, creativity and freedom from judgement.

When leaders consciously try to create an open culture, it results in a dynamic where people are free to speak up, to push back and challenge authority. Leaders who create cultures of openness foster curiosity, celebrate failure, and know that feedback and debate lead to better outcomes.

We’ve also seen leaders in every sphere, from banking to healthcare, succeed when they strive to foster a creative culture. Creativity is often seen as a defining trait of the marketing department, but we would argue that any team can approach their work creatively. When creativity is central to the culture, ideas for new and better ways of doing things are welcome, and everyone is empowered to bring fresh thinking to their work.

From our perspective, freedom from judgement is both the most important element to bring to a culture, and the hardest nut to crack. When we asked our clients to describe scenarios in which they couldn’t bring their full selves to work, the sense of being judged was central to every one of them. Employees felt their colleagues devalued them for having priorities outside of work; they felt pressure to wear certain clothing in order to fit in; they restrained their commentary in meetings so as to not rock the boat.

These are all fear-based actions. Famed shame researcher Brené Brown states, “the opposite of belonging is fitting in.” When we see employees going out of their way to fit in – rather than show up more fully – it’s a signal that they do not feel truly welcome as they are.

We describe cultures that are rich with openness, creativity and freedom from judgement as human cultures – places where anyone can collaborate and do their best work because they are, as author and Harvard professor Amy Edmondson puts it, “psychologically safe.”

 

Creating a more human-focused workplace

So how do we make humanity in the workplace more pervasive? D&I programs are often, unfortunately, spot solutions at best – knee-jerk responses to the latest cultural assessment or buzzworthy idea. Often they serve only to add more complexity into the system.

Clearly there are no easy answers, but we believe that organizations need to get back to the basics – to create a culture in which employees connect with each other on a deeply human level.

A good place to start is asking leaders to put humanity at the top of their list of desirable leadership characteristics. They have to walk the talk on this one. It is all about role modeling the behaviors you want to see in your culture.

Here are some ways that you can start:

Practice vulnerability by asking for feedback and admitting mistakes. That means taking down your armor and opening yourself up to connect authentically with your people.

Empathetically listen to your people. Ask for their input and care enough to really hear what they have to say.

Build connections with your people by taking time to get to know them, investing in team-building activities or creating flexibility and space in their workday to forge connections with each other.

Employ a learning mindset and curiosity, instead of blame and judgement, to better understand a situation and create psychological safety for your teams.

Small changes in the way you show up and how you respond to your employees will create a more welcoming, inclusive and productive workplace.

But beyond this, we believe that leaders who embrace humanity will be on the right side of history. When we look back ten or 20 years from now, we will celebrate the executives who succeeded by caring for their people on a deeply human level.

 

Layla Kajer is co-founder of The Narrative House | Email us to continue the conversation hello@thenarrativehouse.com