Download "Leadership and the De

"Leadership and the De-Jobbed Organization"
The Wall Street Journal recently ran a cartoon showing a man talking to a group that was meeting
around a table and saying, "Hi, I’m Bob and I’ll be your CEO today." We all know how important
temping has become, but few of us have seen it go this far.
The cartoon is prescient, however, for tomorrow’s organization is going to have to be far more
modular and flexible that today’s. As Peter Drucker has said, "Rapid knowledge-based change
imposes one clear imperative: every organization has to build the management of change into its
very structure."
For all we know, that imperative may lead to CEO-temps. It has already certainly encouraging the
use of executive temps in finance, IT, and marketing. But temporary CIOs and CFOs are not the
main impact that organizational fluidity is going to have on leadership. The main impact is going to
be that tomorrow’s leadership is going to have to be able to activate and focus the efforts of people
who lack long-term connections with or loyalty to the organization. You don’t lead a group of freelancers the way you lead a group of long-term employees, and tomorrow’s workers are going to be
far more like free-lancers than like yesterday’s employees.
Behind the headlines about continuing layoffs, the use of temps, virtual offices, and outsourcing is a
story that is only beginning to come into focus. That story is that the job—with its regular hours, its
description of duties and responsibilities, and its single reporting relationship—is no longer the best
way to get work done.
I have described the enormous implications of that change in JobShift®: How to Prosper in a Workplace
Without Jobs. Individuals who have built their lives around "my job" suddenly find themselves not
only out of work but without an identity. Outplacement programs that teach people job-search skills
may locate a new position for them, but that position turns out to be just as insecure and short-lived
as the last one.
Individually, the movement away from jobs leaves traditionally minded people confused and
discouraged. They say that there is no security any more. They say that there is no opportunity
anymore. They say that the rules have changed—but that no one will tell them what the new ones
are.
Organizationally, the changes are just as great—and nowhere is the change so important as in the
roles that leaders will play in the new organization. That is because the job-based organization linked
everyone together into triangular "webs", with leadership consisting of pulls on and signals sent
from the top corner of the web.
With the disappearance of the job, the webs break down—and with them, the old style of
leadership. In place of the webs are semi-autonomous project clusters of various sorts. These groups
are made up, not of the old job-holders, but of a combination of free-lancers, contractor employees,
and employees of the company itself.
The Freelancers
Some are independent professionals doing work that used to be done by the company’s job-holders;
in many cases they themselves were those job-holders before they left the company to go free-lance.
Others are consultants brought in on a time-limited basis to accomplish a particular task.
The Contractors
These people work for other organizations to whom the company has "farmed out" some of the
services or production that might otherwise be performed in-house. These contractors cover a wide
gamut: suppliers of raw materials, producers of sub-systems of the organization’s product,
distributors and sellers of the product, as well as providers of "outsourced" staff services.
The Company’s Own Employees
This is the famous "core" of those organizational designs that put organizational competency
holders at the center and a ring of "contingent" workers around them. But don't confuse these core
workers with present-day employees and don’t assume that they have to be technical professionals.
Consider, for example, that one of the essential "core competencies" of this kind of an organization
is the ability to coordinate the activity of these different kinds of workers. Consider, too, that
(depending on the situation) clerical assistance may be more of a core function than design or
production. (Remember, for example, that Lotus outsourced the design of its blockbuster program,
Notes.) Whoever they are, these core workers don’t have traditional jobs. They have assignments
and self-designated responsibilities.
To make matters more difficult, the composition of these project groups will change from time to
time as the organization’s needs change.
The leadership required by such a protean organization is of two kinds. First, there is the formal
leadership that is responsible for integrating, resourcing, and orchestrating the activities of the
various project clusters. Second there is the ad hoc leadership required by each of those projects
themselves.
The formal leadership (the first "leadership" above) has nothing to do with telling people to do
things or pointing to the top of the hill and yelling "charge!" It has far more to do with serving as
the primary spokesperson for the organization’s values and its vision. It is the softer side of
leadership that provides the "field" within which the dynamic forces that characterize this kind of
dejobbed organization can be aligned.
Dejobbed organizations also need formal leadership that sees its main operating role as that of
generating and delivering the resources needed by the various elements within the organization.
Robert Greenleaf’s powerful metaphor of the leader-as-servant fits the dejobbed organization well.
Many traditional organizations can also benefit from such servant-leadership, but traditional
organizations cannot deal as well with the ad hoc leadership that are required to make the projects
work. A traditional organization is hung upon a "skeletal" system or position-based leaders.
Dejobbed organizations, on the other hand, are patterned like an energy field, and leaders function
as energy nodes around which activity clusters. These ad hoc leaders tend far more often to be self-
selected than they would be in a traditional organization. They emerge in the natural course of
business.
Because the leadership required by the dejobbed organization is "softer" than that utilized by the the
traditional organization , it sometimes seems as though such organizations are "leaderless." But they
are not. The dejobbed organization is going to require more skilled leaders, not less.
A major task of training and development is going to be to strengthen the skills of those leaders. I
suspect that, given the degree of de-jobbing going on in today’s organizations, most of that training
is going to come from contractors, individual and organizational. So, if I were putting together a
personal plan for the future, I’d build into it a good dose of that training. As a leader, I’d be sure that
my organization was building it into its core competencies fast. As a trainer, I’d develop services and
products related to it. As an individual, I’d go out and find it wherever I could.
Newsletter Article from Spring, 1995, Volume 8, No.2