Rethinking Leadership in an Era of Change
By Drs. Ross Wirth & Reg Butterfield (2022)
Abstract
Shared, participative, and other newer forms of leadership are difficult to place within traditional views of leadership and leadership development. DAC (Direction, Alignment, and Commitment) provides a higher-level leadership construct that captures these and traditional leadership models. As a functional view of leadership, we can examine leadership effectiveness as the quality of its outcomes. This opens new ways of thinking of leadership where pathways to leadership outcomes can be examined separate from the leader as a person.
The Leadership Challenge We Face
Our traditional approach for leading organizations was designed for the Industrial Era and before that the Roman military. This design was based on a small number of people who had the knowledge and expertise to make the critical decisions that could be carried out by the masses of largely uneducated laborers. However, this is not the world we live in today. Today’s workforce is much higher educated than in the past and virtually all jobs involve a level of technology unheard of in the past. Further, the technology is advancing faster than our ability to raise the level of education needed to support its development further.
At the same time, this technology is speeding up the pace of innovation, customer expectations and environmental demands to correct many of the practices carried over from the past Industrial Era thinking are becoming more important. This range of challenges requires more knowledge of the underlying problems than a distant leader can be expected to master. Delegation of authority is now expected as work has shifted more to teams working on projects. This creates new ways of working that requires frequent reorganization of the formal leadership hierarchy as the informal organization’s attempts to workaround the problems created by the formal organization fail to keep up with the necessary adjustments to the formal authority required.
Further, worker expectations are also evolving, even more so after the disruptions brought about during the COVID lockdowns. The power balance has shifted to the worker, especially the skilled worker that is in short supply. Failure to meet the desires of a technically advanced workforce will only shift more costs to dealing with turnover. Historically, this turnover is driven more by the relationship between the worker and their direct supervisor — they quit their manager and not necessarily quit the company. However, how the organization chooses to structure itself for the production of work drives how decisions are made. And, work style is a choice that is reinforced in the organization’s culture thereby setting worker expectations and job satisfaction.
Authors have been writing about the shift from the Industrial Era to the Knowledge Era for over 20 years and the next generation of authors are now writing the same vision of the future. The problem is not the vision of the future but the lack of a pathway to that future. When we look back, we can see how today’s world and its standard of living has been built on successive levels of innovation. These advances have largely been driven by the many technologies invented along the way. Unfortunately, the level of similar innovation in how we organize for work using that technology has lagged to the point that outdated thinking about organizations, leadership, and change is now becoming a limiting factor for further advancement.
Rethinking Leadership
Organization structure and leadership are obvious places to start when trying to close the innovation gap between technology and the production of work using that technology. But leadership is quickly seen as the greater challenge of the two factors. Redrawing connections between work processes and job roles is fairly easy compared to how such a network of work will be accomplished. Even the concept of leadership is evolving from a single leader overseeing a group of followers to new leader constructs. Participatory leadership, shared leadership, and rotating leadership are now common in practice but not clearly understood within how leadership is viewed on the organization chart nor in how leaders are developed.
Leadership has been examined from multiple perspectives over the years including innate trait vs. developed, role & function, charisma, servanthood, dyadic relationship, followership, situational, power wielded, and many more variations. Similarly, leaders have been studied from the perspective of personality characteristics, behaviors & tasks performed, and interpersonal relationships. Further, leadership styles have be categorized from autocratic vs. democratic to laissez-faire vs. micro-management. Each has made some sense in explaining leaders and leadership for the circumstance at hand. However, in all these cases the leader role is best illustrated as in Figure 1 where the leader is at the front and the followers are carrying the weight.
Figure 1. Traditional leader and follower relationship
Image source — Pixabay
However, the study of leadership has run into some difficulty when moving beyond a leader to a group construct. For example, how is leadership defined when the leader function is apportioned among group members based on individual areas of expertise? Or when leadership is rotated among team members? Or shared as a group? Essentially, a broader view of leadership is needed to fully capture leadership suitable for New Era Organizations. Enter DAC (Direction, Alignment, and Commitment) Leadership. As a higher-level view of leadership, DAC captures the three key functions required of all leaders, thereby serving as an umbrella leadership model under which more specific models can be placed.
· Direction — purpose clarification
· Alignment — task integration
· Commitment — motivation & engagement
DAC provides a generalized model of leadership that also incorporates the traditional leader-follower-goal construction of leadership. Some may find the material a bit heavy in the original Drath, et.al. (2008) article, but it is fairly easy to push past some of the wording to grasp the significance of the DAC (direction, alignment, and commitment) framework of leadership and the impact on leader/leadership development. The greatest difficulty in reading the article is not the style or content, but the reader’s existing paradigm of leadership, which is greatly challenged by this new framework of leadership. The DAC framework shifts the focus on leaders acting on followers to the general examination of how groups produce collective outcomes. Once grasped, the reader is left with a better theoretical foundation for shared leadership and collective efforts for collaboration.
While DAC Leadership is now over ten years old as a construct, we continue to focus on the individual as a leader and not the function of leadership underlying what that person does. As an umbrella term, DAC captures heroic leadership, servant leadership, followership, and all the other leadership theories in addition to newer forms of shared, distributed, and participative leadership. It also captures an important aspect of how we might choose to organize ourselves for work if we think of leadership as a group activity in addition to one performed by individuals.
Diving into DAC (Direction — Alignment — Commitment) Leadership
In the DAC framework direction is the overall group mission and goals, alignment is the necessary coordination of action within the collective group, and commitment is the willingness of group members to put personal interests secondary to that of collective interest and benefit. The paradigm shift involves the changed view of leadership where “to practice leadership would no longer necessarily involve leaders, followers, and their shared goals but would necessarily involve the production of direction, alignment, and commitment (which may or may not involve leaders and followers)” (p. 636). Leadership may involve the traditional roles and relationships, but alternate processes may also be involved. Moving to a higher level for examining the production of direction-alignment-commitment permits additional viewpoints on how DAC can be produced. Note, this is not a replacement for the traditional leadership viewpoint, but one that is complementary by proposing there can be multiple ways of accomplishing the outcomes associated with leadership.
One paradigm breaking aspect of this approach is the proposition there are different ways to establish leadership and therefore, we need not be constrained by traditional paths. Action toward these ends is already underway in shared and distributed leadership models and new ways of organizing work, which are outside the leader-follower-goal leadership model, but consistent with the DAC framework (as is the traditional leadership model). In this expanded view of leadership, shared leadership is not constructed by a rotating leader role, but something different that is outside the traditional leader-follower dyad even when considering multiple dyad combinations. Leadership within a shared context moves beyond rotating asymmetrical influence of others or even mutual influence to a collective engaged in “mutual adjustment, shared sense-making, collective learning, or mutual transformation” (p. 650). Influence can be seen to be peer-focused in addition to being downward focused. In this DAC viewpoint leadership can result from a system of inter-relating individuals (p. 639) and is not dependent on a single point of leadership. This requires leader competencies distinct from vertical relationships, i.e., bi-lateral relationships that include both influence on and responsibility for results including peer relationships. DAC results are not dependent on asymmetrical influence of a single leader on followers even if the roles are rotated.
It is at this point where a theory of leadership blends with team theory. Drawing from elements of complexity science, it might be said that this is both, combining elements of multiple theories into one that is more inclusive of underlying theories. DAC is not a unifying theory, but somewhat closer in that direction than what existed earlier. Complexity also enters into the DAC framework in that something is created that is more than the sum of direction, alignment, and commitment. Each component individually is essential, but not sufficient to produce the leadership effect.
Producing DAC requires shared belief in the value of the effort required to accomplish each component — direction, alignment, and commitment. Agreement on direction may require blending personal goals with those of others, possibly with some element of exchange that is dynamically balanced over time. Maintaining agreed upon direction will require an understanding of group direction, but also how that direction relates to individual responsibility in order to clarify requirements for alignment and commitment. Alignment may be accomplished through informal agreement or by formal organizational structures, work processes, and reward systems. In this way alignment may be dynamic and fluid in how it is sustained.
Commitment requires willingness to subordinate individual goals to the goals of others, thereby establishing mutual commitment toward each other’s goals. Even in the most rigid structures, forced compliance (not commitment) can be met with passive-aggressive behavior to undermine the DAC effect. Effective production of DAC is an on-going effort required by all group members, not just a single leader and others who follow. Individual goals shift, the context outside the group is ever-changing, and the web of group relationships changes with turnover among group membership.
In this manner, DAC Leadership is conceived as a collective activity, but that does not eliminate the role of a single leader with followers in a traditional hierarchy. Because this framework is an umbrella for all leadership models, the path to achieving direction, alignment, and commitment can exist along a continuum of leadership styles with a focus remaining on the organization outcome. The framework also provides a pathway for organizations to bridge from traditional leadership models to the evolving forms of participative, shared, or rotating leadership.
However, little depth of theory has been built around the DAC framework, unlike the extensive theory that has developed around each part of the leader-follower-goal model. While a great deal is known about the leader-follower-goal leadership construct, little investigation has been done on the other extreme of distributed leadership where the unit of study is the collective action rather than aggregated, individual actions. The traditional model of leadership is not becoming less true, but is becoming less useful in providing an explanation of what leadership is becoming. As different views of leadership are constructed, there will need to be greater awareness of these possibilities and how they might interact.
“The collective practice of leadership might evolve from that of personal dominance (a social order based in a single dominant leader) to interpersonal influence (a social order based in exchanges of mutual influence) to relational dialogue (a social order based on mutual transformation). From this perspective, leaders and followers are framed not as essential elements but local-cultural ideas that are socially constructed for the purpose of providing a basis for social cooperation. As such, leaders and followers may become dispensable when the context bearing on social cooperation evolves.” (p. 641)
At this endpoint of how DAC might evolve as a theory of leadership, interpersonal influence may or may not be involved in leadership as constructed with direction, alignment, and commitment to produce an outcome. This then introduces the impact contextual conditions have on relationships and how they are negotiated over time. Such relational aspects within traditional leadership models are often problematic but can be constructed in DAC leadership as shifting relationships that are framed and reframed over time as context and shared meaning changes. In doing so, context moves from being an indirect influence from outside the leader-follower-goal model to being incorporated within the framework of the DAC leadership model.
Understanding Leadership separate from Leader
Putting the DAC framework into practice requires a shift in how we think about “leadership” when moving to the DAC construct. Drath, et. al. (2008) believed this shift is occurring naturally even if not yet widely accepted as a core part of the body of leadership theory. The traditional leadership models are possibilities that will be joined by additional ways DAC might be produced even without requiring leader and follower roles. Raising leadership to a higher level then moves the outcome of leadership from attainment of shared goals to the establishment of the means to attain the outcome. This shift is critical because successfully developing DAC becomes a short-term goal on the path to accomplishing longer-term objectives. Yet, producing DAC is an on-going effort as conditions and relationships change. This significance extends directly to leadership and leader development being two different processes instead of terms being used interchangeably as is often the case.
When differentiating between leader and leadership development, leader development needs to focus on individual competencies whereas leadership development focuses on the culture within which the group operates. In this approach, leadership development truly merges with organizational change instead of being a means to which individuals are trained to bring about change. However, the DAC model of leadership comes with a cost in the loss of some clarity of defining the boundaries of leadership, especially with the blending of aspects of organization development, organizational learning, and team development (p. 643). The DAC framework does not incorporate all parts of these disciplines, but only those involved in producing direction, alignment, and commitment within a group.
Within the group’s culture, a self-fulfilling prophesy may be active in how DAC is produced. Does the group believe that direction comes from a leader’s vision? Alignment from mutual adjustments? Commitment from agreement on shared goals? “When individuals work with others in a collective, they act on the basis of at least some of their beliefs and expect that others will do the same” (p. 644). These driving beliefs may be shared at the grassroots, possibly reinforced by those in positional power and authority. Yet these beliefs are not static since group membership is dynamic, newcomers bringing in new beliefs and other members leave taking with them their influence over others remaining in the group. Central to the DAC framework for leadership is the group’s shared belief in how direction, alignment, and commitment can be produced. This in turn has a direct impact on leadership development by raising awareness of and influence toward new belief structures in collective action. Such a framework supports all existing leadership theory as well as new leadership processes being developed now. Yet, there is resistance toward changing belief structures, which puts some challenge before the possibilities enabled by the DAC framework. This resistance is individual based, but reinforced within the group itself. Leadership development will need to incorporate aspects of organizational cognition and how mental models are developed and propagated within the group.
“Changing leadership practices ultimately calls for transformational change at the level of leadership beliefs” (p. 648). This is double-loop learning directed toward improving leadership practice. Over time the group must adapt to the changing context within which it operates. Unlike biological adaptation, this is social adaptation that requires shifting values and purposes that are dependent on the beliefs and experiences each group member brings to the collective.
Separating Leadership function from Leader the person
Traditional views of leadership and leader are tightly connected — leaders perform leadership activities. This follows with — leadership development really being leader development. The two terms are so integrated that the noun-verb interaction is assumed and treated together as one construct. However, DAC challenges this assumption by focusing on the outcome of leadership — setting direction, establishing alignment, and gaining commitment. If we step back, we can see that the “leader” role is often essential but usually supported in many ways that extend the reach of the person as leader.
Delegation of authority in a traditional organization hierarchy can be seen as not just empowering others but accomplishing an outcome through involving others in the leadership process. But let us go one step further and examine other ways this leadership process establishes DAC outcomes both directly and indirectly. For example, a strategic plan is often codified in a document that is widely communicated and pushed down into the organization for implementation. As such, this document all too often gets pushed to the side in the daily rush of activity. This reflects how the planning document is perceived, the end of the strategic planning process and the start of the budgeting process. It is a transitory document that is often quickly ignored. Granted, the primary value of strategic planning is the collective sensemaking and direction setting that occurs prior to creating the planning document for distribution. And, at some point the workflow is turned over to HR or an internal communication department for distribution via meetings and document routing. The document remains an artifact that supports other internal functions. But what if we think of this artifact as a critical component of leadership separate from the leader as the person facilitating its development?
Thinking of the planning document as integral to the desired leadership outcomes puts new light on how such a document is prepared and used. The purpose behind this part of the strategic planning process does not become a transitory document but a living way leadership is accomplished. In many ways, this approach gets back to the original intent of planning, setting direction and paving the way for alignment and commitment. This also shifts how such a plan is communicated. It is no longer a factual summary but a way of connecting individual action to the organization’s purpose. A communication meeting from this perspective is not just communication but a critical leadership activity. Those involved are not just taking orders to produce something for others in the organization but are actively involved in the organization’s leadership as well.
This is one example but there are hundreds more ways where organization activity can be reframed as being critical to DAC outcomes. The performance management system is no longer a control activity but leadership for alignment and commitment. DAC continues to bring the organization back to the fundamentals of what is important to accomplish the organization’s purpose. DAC is also easy to remember and use as a filter in daily decision-making and work organization. Problem-solving is then reframed within the DAC construct in identifying the core issue and how corrective action might be taken. How workflows are accomplished shifts from power struggles between organization silos to examining what is needed to accomplish purpose with a focus on DAC outcomes.
Principles and guidelines can also be used as a surrogate leader in fulfilling the leadership or management function. They can provide sufficient structure for daily decision-making and work integration without appealing to a superior for a decision or guidance. In this way leadership is much broader than that accomplished by “leaders”. In these examples we go beyond “leaders at all levels across the organization” to everyone thinking about leadership outcomes within their area of influence. Where does our Rethinking Leadership lead when we Rethink Organization Structure?
Rethinking Organization Structure
Traditionally, we think of a leader as someone who sets direction, works on aligning others in that direction, and gains commitment among the followers to move forward collectively toward that direction. However,
What if we thought of Direction, Alignment, and Commitment as organization activities that are not limited to specific individuals?
If we disaggregate leadership into three functional areas of focus, the traditional hierarchical structure can be reconfigured as three levels that influence each other without requiring traditional control systems. Further, by focusing on each leadership function separately, full attention can be attained for that activity.
The executive level of the organization can be reduced in size with narrowed focus on organization purpose (direction) and establishing relationships with synergistic partners and other external stakeholders thereby establishing a platform that supports that purpose. Some of the talent that would normally occupy the executive level of a traditional hierarchy can shift to a second level that focuses on aligning the organization with the purpose. This purpose alignment is often pushed aside by organizational firefighting, resulting in reactionary change when the status quo becomes unbearable. Included in purpose alignment is routine network weaving for resource allocation (especially talent) and adaptive structural change in the network of work teams. This second organizing level also serves as the conduit for knowledge diffusion across the organization, clarifying shared problems, addressing boundary conflicts, and capturing customer wants & needs.
By thinking of higher-level direction setting and alignment separate from commitment, we can now organize for work with a focus on what is essential for people to be truly committed to their work through broader and deeper involvement. The line-of-sight from that work to the organization purpose would already be addressed. This is not to say that first level operations would not require leaders but that their focus would be on gaining commitment to that work. The traditional management practices of telling and selling others what to do would shift to higher levels of involvement beyond testing and consulting of others to fully involving them in co-creation. This is a route to releasing passion and entrepreneurial spirit in the workplace.
The resulting three-level organization in Figure 2 is a radical flattening of a traditional hierarchy that replaces control through delegation of authority with bi-directional information flows sufficient to raise awareness of what actions are needed. In this way, the Purpose Alignment Team (Level 2) does not manage work undertaken by the network of teams (Level 1) but facilitates such action to be started and resourced. Similarly, the Executive Level 3 does not manage in a traditional manner but pushes purpose down to Level 2 while reflecting on customer and industry feedback collected from across the organization by the networking activity of the Purpose Alignment Team.
Figure 2. Rethinking organization structure as DAC integration
The delegation of authority for control that often drives bureaucracy would then shift to increased attention on work while also enabling routine adjustments to the organization structure with the Purpose Alignment Team working in conjunction with the topside direction setting. Further, the decision-right boundaries would be clearer, resulting in quicker decisions that are made by those most knowledgeable and impacted. Cross-organization connections would already be in place for problem-solving and decision-making — or could easily be accomplished when brought to the attention of the purpose alignment and network weaving level.
This approach to rethinking leadership opens up new ways of contemplating how we choose to organize for work with a bonus of better connecting people to their work and eliminating bureaucracy. This thinking also supports the three-level governance model in Futocracy that evolved from a deep analysis of how organization structure and operations are too often driven by controlling work and not the production of work.
Summary
In conclusion, within the DAC framework leader development cannot be accomplished in isolation from leadership development. Even though the leader’s influence over followers may be asymmetrical it is not uni-directional. Legitimization of the leader is rooted in the group’s culture and reinforced by accepted practices among followers including peer-to-peer relationships. Changes to the group’s leadership practices will require fundamental change to the accepted belief structure about what leadership is and how it is practiced within the group. Change in leadership practice does not require a change to the DAC framework, but it does change in the process by which DAC is created. Because the leadership culture is established through the shared beliefs within the group, DAC leadership is not individual-driven, but a shared, group process for organizing members within the group. Whereas the traditional leader-follower-goal model focuses on the dyad relationship, DAC scales beyond the dyad to the group or team, to intra-organization, and inter-organization, including artifacts, communication, and other ways that DAC outcomes can be accomplished beyond what a leader as a person can accomplish in that role alone. The path to DAC leadership also allows an easy transition since the shift in mental models of what leadership is and how it can be accomplished fits within traditional leadership structures while allowing a shift in focus from leader the person to leadership an outcome as followers become part of the leadership process. The key is thinking “DAC” and how it might be accomplished in the many ways that are possible.
We need to Think Differently about Organizations and Leadership to prepare for life in the VUCA World we inhabit. How do we reinvent the “Organization” to fit the needs today?
Reference
Drath, W. H., McCauley, C. D. Palus, C. J., Van Velsor, E., O’Connor, P. M. G., & McGuire, J. B. (2008). Direction, alignment, commitment: Toward a more integrative ontology of leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 19, 635–653. Retrieved on September 8, 2009, from ScienceDirect.
