Week 3, 2023—Issue #239
Dealing with the Paradox of Single-Threaded Leadership in Role-Based Organizations
How and why two seemingly opposing design patterns can co-exist.
It’s time to tie up some loose ends.
Tweets included for support and context:
1. Paradoxical Leadership
A few months back I wrote about something called Paradoxical Leadership. Helen Bevan summed it up nicely on Twitter:
Dealing with paradox is an essential leadership skill in the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world in which we now live.
2. Single-Threaded Leadership
Fast forward a few weeks and I happen upon this Twitter thread by Brett Adcock (Founder of Figure, Archer, and Vettery):
Threading is a programming concept. Applied to organizations, single-threading stands in stark contrast to ‘traditional’ multi-threaded organizations.
3. Role-Based Organization
Last but not least, I wrote a couple of posts back in 2021/2022 extolling the virtues of role-based organizations. Here’s one example:
In role-based organizations, there’s a 1-Many relationship between a person and his or her job roles. That is to say, one person can have multiple roles and vice versa.
This sounds like a paradox, yes?
Assuming we agree that both single-threading and role-based organizations are good ideas (I do!), we should ask ourselves how these two concepts can co-exist. If single-threading is about a singular focus on one thing, isn’t that the opposite of the 1-Many relationships enabled by role-based structures?
Yes, but:
- Single-threading means that there needs to be a Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) for each KPI. Also, such KPIs should be Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive (MECE, see #122). It doesn’t mean the individual can’t have other accountabilities as well.
- It’s not like role-based organizations encourage multitasking. Quite the opposite. They too want to afford individuals with the ability to focus, etc. Roles are simply an acknowledgment of the fact that roles emerge, evolve, and fade as the organization grows.
In short: role-based organizations that use single-threaded leadership should aim to provide individuals with singular job roles. While at the same time, acknowledging that such a singular focus is unlikely to be possible in real life. They should try anyway.
That is a paradox. And that’s OK.
How can we build better organizations? That’s the question I’ve been trying to answer for the past 10 years. Each week, I share some of what I’ve learned in a weekly newsletter called WorkMatters. Subscription is free. Back-issues are published to Medium after three months. This article was originally published on Friday, January 20, 2023.
