Friday, September 5, 2008

High-tech conflict requires a new, adaptive leadership

Most people and organizations are allergic to conflict. It makes people uncomfortable, and often they’ll do anything to avoid it. But conflict is healthy and necessary for high-tech companies dealing with wrenching change. Only by working through the conflict can you make real progress.

Exercising leadership in the technology industry used to be less complicated. There was a time when leadership was needed under one roof, roles were clearly defined, and we knew what to expect from each other to get the job done. Leadership meant getting everybody rowing in the same direction. But today, in order to drive your company forward, you need to work with people who are not in the same boat and respond to different captains. If you want to make progress, you have to orchestrate the conflict.

Collaboration is hard today because of conflicting priorities and blurred boundaries. Consider distributed software development with developers working in different countries and sometimes for different organizations. How do you mobilize people to focus on what’s most important? Whom do they listen to? How can you hold people accountable when there are so many factors in play?

An enormous asset in the technology industry is its problem-solving orientation. But the first critical skill is to diagnose the problem effectively, and then determine the type of leadership behavior that is needed. Problems fall into two categories, and the most common error is confusing the first kind of problem with the second.

If the expertise to solve your challenges exists within the company, then you are facing a “technical problem.” To solve technical problems, executives need to tell people where the organization is headed, define roles and responsibilities, set standards for success, ensure recognition for individual and collective effort, and create environments where people feel connected to the overall company direction. It’s a matter of focusing existing skills, competencies, and organizational models.
When the organizational expertise is not sufficient to address your challenges, you are facing an “adaptive challenge.” For example, a company that has had great success producing a software product faces an adaptive challenge when it must shift to selling software as a service. Moving to a subscription-based business model requires allocating resources differently, and changing the interaction among development, sales and marketing.

Tackling adaptive challenges is daunting. Rather than relying on problem solving by people in senior authority positions, solutions to adaptive challenges are developed by key stakeholders across multiple organizations, and require experimentation. New business models, interoperability and increasingly complex technology all place new demands to get work done. The appropriate leadership behavior, which can be exercised by anyone in the organization, involves finding ways to break through the status quo that are built on the success patterns of the past and become rooted in the organization’s culture, preventing progress in the new context.

With adaptive challenges, just asking for collaboration will not be enough to force systemic trade-offs. The key is to mobilize people and influence them to face facts they don’t want to face. You are challenging values, beliefs and behaviors that were essential to past success but must be discarded in order to move forward. 

Because adaptive challenges involve core values, conflict is inevitable. Orchestrating conflict is a key leadership skill when tackling adaptive challenges: instead of repressing or resolving conflicts, adaptive leadership involves surfacing and managing conflicts. People must feel free to ask even the most difficult and sensitive questions without fear of repercussion. It requires courage to face reality, see the value conflicts, identify gaps in competency, and connect to future.

You are influencing the organization to face its shortfalls, change, and seize opportunity. Yet this hard work is worth doing because well-orchestrated conflict can be an engine of breakthrough creativity.

 

Kristin von Donop is a principal of Cambridge Leadership Associates, a leadership consulting and training firm in Cambridge. She can be reached at kvondonop@cambridge-leadership.com.