Old School to Evolved
Relevant for the Now
Legacy cultures too often become reinforcing systems of conditioned people dependencies, rather than ones of strategic levers, nodes, and smart modular designs that people innovatively serve.
Evolved cultures aspire to be learning cultures. Learning cultures are daring cultures. They design themselves not to merely follow the status quo, and instead build from courage, sensing, and responsiveness.
To disrupt your own ways is confronting, feels risky, and presses on your ego (fear that might look like bluster, dismissing or denying.)
The modern leader equipped to evolve a system is a kind, strong, ever-changing, and emotionally present adult. Mastery is momentary and implementation is dimensional. The measuring stick is your aware actions, observable behavior, aligned communication, and people's unprompted, positive narratives about your impact on them and the delivery of outcomes.
- Old School Manager
- Modern Leader
- Takes what her Manager says and acts as the “flow-er down-er”
- Curates top line vision + strategy collaboratively to then be shaped into priorities locally
- Instructs the team
- Builds spaces for purpose, strategy, priorities + outcome delivery designing with the team
- Manages the silo
- Represents the teams' purpose and strategy within the broader, macro environment of the organisation
- Absorbs and takes care of all tensions felt and fallout by those in the team e.g. rescues, over-functions, and triangulates
- Stands up meetings with smart designs and intelligent protocols as healthy forcing functions to function effectively
- Ignores, dodges, and denies
- Stands up meetings with smart designs and intelligent protocols to distribute accountability, shape authority, and expect agency
- Creates dependencies, parents, teaches collective helplessness
- Expects while also holding space and nurturing growth
- Controls time
- Builds operating systems designed to deliver scoped and strategic outcomes - systemically, organisationally, and individually
- Manages processes
- Builds open, connected systems through software technology, principles, practices, meeting and communication tooling for a dynamic teaming platform and strategic priority outcome delivery
- Consensus and/or non-existent decisioning
- Decisioning technologies and clear role boundaries
- Thinks vertically, locally, and mechanically
- Thinks spatially, strategically, systemically, and emergently
- Manages a siphoned off vertical
- Maintains sphere boundaries for scope, purpose, strategy, system intelligence and prioritisation while ensuring open, optimised lines horizontally
- Delegates projects, tasks, and beingness
- Routes priorities and capacity weighting (not tasks) collaboratively as a dynamic metric and overt decision mechanism of teams’ operations
- Picks and chooses what information to share; protects information and visibility from the children
- Ensures visibility of information (~95%) understanding the interconnected nature of delivery, accountabilities, and timelines — and to abate cultural infantilising of the adults
- Runs ad hoc interference on team members work, flow, delivery, decisioning, and voice
- Surfaces lack of clarity, slippage, capacity etc. across re: work, flow, roles, decisioning within practices and tooling
- Plans, aligns, assigns, and cascades
- Builds modern, cyclical operating models, rhythms, prioritisation methods, and dashboarding that dovetails with vision, timing, and objectives
- Builds fixed systems expecting the world to stand still
- Actively and continuously builds fluid, moveable structures to expose and handle the system’s dynamic nature, strategic functioning + outcome-focused delivery
- Creates fixed jobs and drafts job descriptions that easily become outdated
- Facilitates creation and clarity around roles needing playing on teams and within functions for a better choreographed, capacity-weighted system dance
- Gets involved everywhere in how work gets accomplished
- Honors own role, its boundaries, accountabilities, and decisioning options — allowing others’ expression and execution — held by smart operating system, meeting, and tooling designs
- Owns and operates the mysterious and/or magical budget
- Creates some version of financial transparency to enable agency, maturity, and accountability, on the whole and fractally, around cash, flow, and budgeted spend
- Unilateral authority
- Operates within the boundaries of her/his collectively understood authority
- Tells people what to do
- Respects the authority and accountabilities of role holders to deliver outcomes woven into and synched with smart meeting designs and intelligent practices
- Lobs work over the fence; creates illogical urgency
- Holds own portfolio of strategic project priorities and expected delivery outcomes as a part of any team’s portfolio; e.g. does real work on real targets in real timeframes and builds out that work flow as intentionally as everyone else
- Taskmaster and Timekeeper
- Understands how laying groundwork to design smart operating structures and lead from clear architectures builds trust, innovative thinking, and loyalty