Leader as Curator
This is part 5 in a series about leadership amid complexity. Find part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here and part 4 here.
Organizations live in a state of shifting flux, susceptible to misalignment between individuals, processes, platforms, and goals. This physical tendency toward entropy poses an essential challenge to leadership. Leaders must actively counter misalignment, ensuring systems move towards well-defined joint objectives while avoiding downstream disruptions.
It is ironic that success itself can become a hurdle to future growth. Unchecked expansion can morph into the tyranny of urgency, where short-term pressures stifle deeper strategic thinking. Similarly, blind adherence to metrics can lead to the tyranny of measurement, where quantitative proxies trump qualitative realities. Navigating this paradox requires a delicate balancing act. Leaders must foster healthy growth without succumbing to fragmentation or bureaucracy.
Some phenomena leaders can look out for are:
- The Watchdog Effect aka The Hawthorne Effect: Observation alters reality, not just records it, as workers modify their behavior under supervision.
- The Zeno Effect: Movement gets paralyzed by the very act of monitoring it, leading to stagnation while under microscopic scrutiny.
- Goodhart’s Law: Fixating on metric optimization inadvertently warps its meaning and usefulness, inviting manipulation.
- Poor Proxies: Simplistic substitutes for deeper analysis, often represented by numbers, figures, or check marks, can offer convenience and efficiency. However, over reliance can distort reality and lead to misguided actions as organizations focus on achieving the proxy metric rather than the desired state.
- Misinterpretation of Metrics: Beware the siren song of rankings and comparisons; context and goals matter more than superficial appearances.
- Expert Identification Problems: So-called experts, identified just by their number of years in a field or affiliations, rather than astuteness, can be overly confident and biased, leading to poor judgement.
- Perverse Incentives: Rewards designed to encourage good behavior can backfire if 2nd and 3d order effects are not correctly anticipated, driving unintended and harmful consequences.
- Value Capture: Intermediaries siphon off the lion’s share of benefits generated by others, resulting in an unreasonable distribution of value, trickling down to loss in morale and economic disincentives.
Instead of delving deeper into the intricacies of these common pitfalls, we use a solutions approach to highlight various concepts that leaders can employ to be intentional curators of strategy, people, structure, and purpose.
Curate a Self Environment
Leadership starts with the self, a deep understanding of one’s own “action logic” and reality. For this, we borrow several terms from philosophy:
Dasein, Heidegger’s term for human existence, is the unique subjective experience of each individual within the world.
Conatus, a concept developed by Damasio and highlighted in his book The Strange Order of Things, refers to the internal drive, motive, urge, or otherwise taken-for-granted force that puts our creative intelligence and language to work “almost automatically”.
Habitus, as Bourdieu explains, encompasses the personal space, environment, and state where one thrives. Understanding Dasein helps us tailor and tweak our Habitus — personalized rituals, work space, organizational tools and even friends, podcasts, books etc. — for building the right rhythms, habits, and goals.
Doxa is the dynamic relationship between an individual’s Habitus and the embedded system one operates within. This “fit” can be positive, fostering synergy and flow, or negative, leading to tension and conflict. Doxa influences our interactions, decision-making style, and conflict resolution approach. Note that as an individual moves in, out, and across organizations, their Doxa may change dramatically.
Applying these terms to leadership involves acknowledging our unique human experiences, being honest about our temperament and skills to take up requirements and roles, and transforming any negative energy in service of self-development and organizational vision, for example, by investing time and resources in tenacity, experimentation, and mentorship.
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Leaders must have extreme levels of self-awareness to position themselves as role models for their organization. Sustained practice within a calibratable feedback system (reflection, peers, mentors, role models, industry leaders etc.) helps leaders perform at their highest levels and develop a “nose for the business” and “feel for the game.”
Curate a Team Environment
We know that team outcomes are not simply the sum of the individual team members. Instead, emergent team-level phenomena, such as shared mental models and team cognition; team efficacy and cohesion; and collaboration, decision-making, and collective action are the most proximal determinants of team effectiveness. — Kozlowski et al.
Leaders foster team dynamism by ensuring team activities and goals are relevant, by shaping agency within their team, and promoting a stable and energizing presence. As a starting point, leaders can use:
Goal rollup is the explicit alignment of individual/team goals within the broader organizational objectives. Imagine rowing a boat without seeing the shoreline. The boat might paddle furiously, but is it actually heading in the right direction? In the absence of policies or priorities that emphasize goal rollups, teams can feel adrift from their initial expectations or the bigger strategic picture, leading to frustration, disengagement, and even resignation. Worse, they might expend tremendous effort, but in the wrong direction, jeopardizing organizational success. When rolled up appropriately, goals consistently serve as lighthouses, offering clarity and reminders to teams about how energies and tactics should be deployed.
Goals are also attractor states (from complexity science), exerting a powerful pull that charges ambition and captivates people above the background chaos. The proper rollup and alignment of goals creates a synchronized chain across the organization; when even the lowest level goal is achieved, the energy in the entire chain is activated!
Collaboratively achieving goals also stimulates a surge of oxytocin and dopamine, activating the brain’s social bonding and reward system. This process, coupled with elevated neuroplasticity, enhances people’s mental models, team-work, and team cognition. These neurochemical effects cascade to wider-scale emergence of joy, connection, and future-orientation among the team.
Meso-scale agency, is what we define as doing work at the “Goldilocks” or “just right” realm of responsibility. Distinct from micro-scale agency (working below your pay grade) or macro-scale agency (being out of your depth), meso-scale agency is about establishing scopes of work where people can uniquely bring the most value while enjoying connection and meaning. Meso-scale agency is finding the balance between micromanagement and offering no-guidance. This term aims to recognize the sweet spot of creativity and productivity in a team’s felt experience and contribution.
Deliberate calm is the practiced ability to control and harness emotions in the wake of stress. While helpful to the leader themself, this greatly valued skill shines through in the leader’s voice and non-verbal signals, keeping teams focused and cogent especially in times of crisis.
Applying these terms to leadership, we encourage leaders to curate environments that promote a natural coherence between the individual, the team, and the collective.
Curate a Performance-focused Environment
Output alone is insufficient; employees must be able to reliably deliver high-quality work. We identify two hard-to-pin-down but insightful phenomena in the context of performance:
Metric and Role metamorphosis. As companies undergo changes, their goals naturally undergo a transformation. In tandem, essential roles to meet those goals, along with the corresponding metrics (used as indicators, encompassing both quantitative and qualitative aspects), objectives, and job descriptions, also experience evolution. Instead of waiting for dangerous tipping points that compel dramatic re-orgs, leaders should attentively listen to the rhythm of external changes and be ready to instigate internal adaptations. For metrics, this means leaders should regularly reevaluate what metrics to use (such as the effectiveness of a metric to relay a specific view), how metrics are calculated (who are the users, what are the uses), who is responsible for producing which metric, and even the frequency at which a matrix is produced. Applied to roles and skills, leaders must be aware of the competencies being asked of their teams, consider the strength between competency and performance metric, anticipate the necessity for new roles, acknowledge when old roles should be phased out, and be prepared to discuss strategies for adapting to evolving performance criteria. Netflix’s talent management philosophy of retaining only “A” players and gracefully letting go of people whose skills no longer fit, no matter how valuable their contributions had once been, is a testament of tactful metric and role metamorphosis.
Next is tensegrity: think of a structure where struts — strong in compression — hover seemingly unsupported, but are held in place by a network of taut cables. This is the magic of structural tensegrity, a design principle where tension — not mass — dictates form.
For organizations, this concept translates to companies built on interconnected, self-organizing teams, each a pillar of competence, bound together by clear goals and shared purpose. Just like cables pulling struts into alignment, communication is the lifeblood of the organization, ensuring swift adaptation to market shifts and a constant refocus on performance. Embracing the fluidity of tensegrity encourages information to flow meaningfully so that decisions are made by the right person at the right time with the right data. Tensegrity also empowers individual initiative and a framework of linked accountability that ultimately results in a high-performing, resilient organization that bends but never breaks, contacting new horizons of success and achieving unstoppable performance.
One company that embodies the principles of tensegrity in their organizational structure is Spotify. The Swedish music streaming giant thrives on a culture of information sharing and distributed decision-making. Teams are cross-functional and fluid, as employees are encouraged to collaborate outside their immediate areas of expertise. Spotify embraces “squads:” small, autonomous units that own specific projects and are supported to make decisions without seeking excessive and unnecessary approvals. This approach fosters a culture of ownership and agility, allowing Spotify to quickly respond to trends in user preferences and contributing to its dominant position in the streaming market.
Conclusion
💡The soul is dyed the color of its thoughts. Think only on those things that are in line with your principles and can bear the light of day. The content of your character is your choice. Day by day, what you do is who you become. Your integrity is your destiny. — Heraclitus
The increasing volatility of the corporate world brings disorder, but leaders who embody flexibility, hold an unwavering commitment to integrity, possess a keen eye for order, and prioritize team synergy alongside delivery will achieve desirable outcomes: intentional environments, sensible structures, healthy team psyches, and high performance.
While acknowledging complexity is commonplace, what is challenging is insisting on organization wherewithal, maintaining balance, and driving the processes and tools to carve out and sculpt through to the right decisions and actions. Optimizing our relationship with ambiguity is a crucial attitude as well as skill. We hope the terms listed above and across our previous articles summarize useful concepts for leaders to use in their pursuit of excellence. Thank you for reading.
By Zainab Khan and Travis Vollmer
