How Mantel Group became a Great Place to Work — Part 4 of 4

The Importance of Leadership & Conclusion

Preamble

This is the last in a series of four articles that describe the approach and philosophies that underpin the organisational culture at Mantel Group. We’re proud of the team that we’ve built over the last 4+ years and hope that by reading these articles you gain insight and inspiration for the evolution of your own organisation.

Released over a four-week period, the articles will cover the following topics:

• Part 1 — How “Reinventing” the organisation created strong foundations
• Part 2 — The importance of a holistic approach to Culture and Values
• Part 3 — The importance of Followership
• Part 4 — The Importance of Leadership & Conclusion(this article)

The Importance of Leadership

While the concept of Leadership is well studied, finding a good definition is hard as many people include the style of leadership (typically relating to power or authority over others) as part of their definition.

Leadership is a process of social influence, which maximizes the efforts of others, towards the achievement of a goal

— Kevin Kruse

This definition is simple, and concise, and doesn’t conflate the process and goals of leadership with how it’s implemented in an organisation.

It’s also important to distinguish between Leaders and Managers. The simplest explanation is that leaders inspire while managers oversee. Leaders work to motivate and encourage their teams to achieve common goals, whereas managers typically focus on organising and executing tasks. It’s also fair to say that while all Leaders need to manage from time to time, not all Managers are leaders.

If the followers in an organisation are doing the majority of the work, it’s the leaders that provide vision and outcomes and energize their team to work together to achieve common outcomes or goals. Leaders also role model and signpost expected behaviours and are cultural and behavioural champions for the team.

Understanding the Leadership style that best suits your organisation

As social and organisational structures have grown and changed over time, leadership styles have needed to adapt to new values and cultures. Leadership has needed to evolve from solving simple problems for small groups to solving more complex problems with larger, more adaptable and diverse teams.

“If you believe lack of authority prevents you from leading effectively, it is time to rethink your understanding of leadership.”

— Mike Bonem and Roger Patterson, Leading From the Second Chair

Additionally, more recent Leadership styles have emerged that consider both the needs of the organisation and the team. Leaders can no longer rely on authority or hierarchy in progressive organisations, and now need to consider meeting the needs and well-being of employees as well as achieving company goals.

Common leadership styles, and how they influence employees in pursuit of company goals can easily be mapped onto the organisational paradigm where they are most effective.

With this information in mind, you can refer to the top right (What I do) and bottom right (What we do) quadrants of your Reinventing Organisations Model to see which leadership styles may be more effective for your organisation.

When the leadership style is misaligned with the organisational values and culture it can cause team dysfunction and dissatisfaction, even if the goal is achieved.

For example, if the leadership dimensions you are looking for are predominantly Green or Teal, then a leader demonstrating Predict & Control behaviours such as encouraging competition is likely to cause disharmony in your company.

Our Leadership style at Mantel Group

Presenting leadership as a list of carefully defined qualities (like strategic, analytical, and performance-oriented) no longer holds. Instead, true leadership stems from individuality that is honestly and sometimes imperfectly expressed. … Leaders should strive for authenticity over perfection.

― Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook and Founder of Leanin.org

Early on at Mantel Group we decided that leadership needed to be different. With distributed and evolving team of teams working independently across brands, leadership based on hierarchy was not going to create the culture we were looking to build.

As a professional services organisation, we also had the added complication that traditional line management would not be effective as our teams would form and change for each new client engagement.

At Mantel Group it was obvious that Amber or Orange leadership styles were not aligned with our desired culture. We wanted leadership to encourage people to bring their whole selves to work, to help our team grow, but still be disciplined and keep an eye on goals and outcomes.

Ultimately, a blend between Servant and Authentic Leadership styles looked to be ideal for us:

• Servant Leadership — empowering the team and supporting their success, putting the team first
• Authentic leadership — being free to bring our own style, be human, be passionate but disciplined.

You can see this expressed in the following relationship between our preferred leadership styles and the leadership values of our delivery practice.

Conclusion

The traditional approach for organisational transformation is based off changing structures and reporting lines. This approach is flawed as true team member engagement comes from shared vision, values and a sense of ownership.

The dimensions of the Organisational Culture Model supersede structure — the Values, Leadership and Followership that you create remain a constant and provide stability even in the face of organisational change and disruption.

However it is important to take a holistic approach and consider all four dimensions — the temptation to consider changing only one dimension without considering the impact on others is likely to result in failure.

For example, many Agile transformations struggle because they focus on agile frameworks, flattening hierarchy and increasing team accountability. However, Leadership styles often remain unchanged (particularly in senior leadership) and poor results and disharmony occur when teams (who are trying to work like Partners) clash with executives who still operate from Command & Control or Predict & Control leadership styles.

Other organisations may do a good job of improving Values and Leadership but not Followership — resulting in underperforming teams that still operate in an Amber/Yellow paradigm because it’s still not clear that they need to take initiative and not wait for leadership to tell them what to do.

At Mantel Group we’ve been lucky that this holistic approach to organisational culture has been a focus of our leadership team from the very beginning. Our five principles, servant and authentic leadership, and courageous followership styles have worked together to put us on the path towards being a Teal organisation with higher team member engagement and satisfaction. In a professional services business, where nearly every team member interacts with our customers, this has been critical to client satisfaction and ultimately our success.

This strong culture has also helped us build a shared identity through three acquisitions (CMD, Itty Bitty Apps and Aginic) in the last four years. The cultural fit of a potential acquisition is considered just as important as the new or improved capabilities that they may bring. It’s important that all team members from a new brand are already closely aligned and living the same culture as the rest of the team.

While we’re proud of what we’ve built together, we are well aware that the journey is as important as the destination. We’re always looking to see what we can improve and make better — for us the Great Place to Work survey is not the outcome, it's integral for us to take stock, measure and find ways for us to be an even greater place to work.

In closing, we hope that this model and our approach to building organisational culture has been thought-provoking and acts as inspiration for your own journey. We’re all on a journey of discovery and evolution and we’d be keen to learn from the approaches that others have taken to create a Great Place to Work!