If you are interested in maximising the impact of your investment in leadership development, this article is for you.
You will be introduced to two theoretical concepts that you can immediately apply when analysing the needs of your organisation. But first, let’s go back ten years to a team of change facilitators. These internal resources in a rather large healthcare organisation were perceived as not delivering as expected. An HR specialist, responsible for competence development in that organisation, asked me to design a workshop in change management. Which I did, and so the day of the session arrived.
It took about 20 minutes to realise that my well-thought-out plan was best suited for the bin. In a mix of anger and disheartenment, the participants told me how they were met with everything from questioning to mockery by the management teams with which they were supposed to collaborate. It was clear that my mission was based on the incorrect analysis that the lack of impact was due to these specialists’ insufficient competence. On the contrary, based on how they reasoned when we discussed, my impression was that they mastered theories, tools, and methods.
Against this background, we can now dive into the promised theoretical concepts, namely role-giving and role-taking. When I analyse role-giving in an organisation, I examine the conditions for the roles, which in practice is quite a long list. One example is the meeting structure. Another example is the degree of clarity in mandates. A third concerns the extent to which clear agreements or shared interpretations of the purposes of collaborations exist within the organisation. The examples I have listed are in themselves not new to you, but perhaps the concept of role-giving is, and you see that an organisation can have varying degrees of role-giving ability.
With that established, we move on to the concept of role-taking ability. To explain this, consider the traits and competencies you possess. Having a good role-taking ability means that you actively choose which ones you should bring into a specific role in a specific context. Let’s see how this applies in the context of performance reviews. When leading such a conversation, actively bringing in your curiosity and benevolence will benefit the dialogue. Another aspect of role-taking ability is how well you can filter out aspects of your personality that do not fit the role. Imagine a manager who is not known for their poker face. In the context of performance reviews, they will benefit from holding back their sarcasm when an employee responds to negative feedback with “I have no clue what you are talking about!”
Now let’s return to the assignment with which I started this article. The request from the HR specialist was based on the fact that the change facilitators were not having an impact, and so far everyone agreed. But then two related issues emerge. The problem that needed to be solved was that the change process that the organisation was undergoing was not embraced by the line managers. The lack of acceptance meant poor role-giving for the change facilitators. And at the risk of stating the obvious, that problem is not solved by improving their role-taking ability.
Which leads us to the second issue, namely that I had the wrong principal. The problem with the lack of acceptance could only be solved in collaboration with the director who oversaw the line managers. If I had gained access to him, we could have delved into the analysis. I would most likely have suggested a workshop in which the director and the line managers could have cleared up misconceptions about the reason for change. Ultimately creating not only acceptance but enabling the line managers to actually endorse the change. That would have provided significantly more bang for the buck.
Let me wrap this article up with a fundamental principle from the theory that underpins this text: An organisation’s role-giving ability trumps individuals’ role-taking ability. This means that before we start developing individuals’ skills, we should examine the conditions for the roles that individuals are to take. I encourage you to take a closer look at your own organisation. When doing so, can you discern leadership challenges in your organisation that deserve to be understood more in terms of the organisation’s role-giving ability rather than the managers’ role-taking ability?
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