That is because people tend to take on the characteristics of those who have power or influence over them. The shadow phenomenon exists for anyone who is a leader of any group, including a parent in a family. Therefore, if you want to shape any element of your culture, your teams need to model the desired behavior. Chances are you can still see at least remnants that have made an impact many years later.īecause of the size and complexity of organizations today, the most important shadows come from teams at the top specifically, the CEO’s team and the teams of those who report to the CEO. To better understand that, just ask about the values and preferences of dominant founders of a company or early leaders who left their mark. There are often “ghosts” of past leaders evident. The same is true in all organizations, at least from a historical perspective. The impact Herb Kelleher had on Southwest Airlines is also apparent. It’s clearly visible in companies such as Wal-Mart, where Sam Walton had such a distinct impact on the culture. The values, habits, and biases of the founders and dominant leaders left an imprint on the organization. This was easy to see in the field studies that were conducted of smaller firms. The central finding is that, over time, organizations tend to take on the characteristics of their leaders. You could substitute many things, including: blaming, stress, lack of coaching, resistance to change, hectic, hierarchical, risk-averse, and so on. Lack of collaboration is only one cultural trait impacted by the shadow of the leaders. We asked people at lower levels in the organization why they didn’t collaborate better, and they said in various ways, “Why should we? Our bosses don’t.” They were generally polite and non-confrontational, but they had a habit of appearing to agree on a decision in a meeting but then not supporting the decision outside the meeting.Īs we dug deeper, we found that many of the same behaviors existed at the second level of leadership in the teams that reported to senior team members. They didn’t speak with one voice to the organization. They were not fully aligned or mutually supportive. While the CEO wanted us to help “fix” the organization, it didn’t take long to see that the issues were largely a reflection of the senior team members. He felt they could go from good to great if they could collaborate better across the organization and get more synergies from the different business units.Īs we started the cultural diagnostics, it became clear that they had turf issues between corporate and business units and between different functions.
They had high performance expectations, committed hard-working employees, good basic values, and fairly good performance. In this excerpt from their seminal book, “Winning Teams–Winning Cultures,” Senn Delaney Chairman Larry Senn and President and CEO Jim Hart describe the concept of the “The Shadow of the Leader” and contend that only when the top team lives and breathes the changes it wants and expects from its organization will such changes succeed - and stick.Ī few years ago, a CEO asked us if we could help shift one aspect of his company’s culture. Yet even as issues of organizational culture lie at the heart of merger clashes, strategy failures, and change initiatives, too many senior executives approach organizational culture as they might the weather: everyone talks about it as if there’s nothing that can be done about it.Īgainst this backdrop, it’s useful to remind leaders of the influence they can and do exert on the cultures of their organizations– for good or ill. The importance of culture and its effects on organizational performance should by now be well known.
“A leader doesn’t just get the message across he is the message.” - Warren Bennis Both are based in the Huntington Beach, Calif., office. Senn is chairman and founder of Senn Delaney. Hart is president and CEO of the culture-shaping firm Senn Delaney, a Heidrick & Struggles company. This post was written by Jim Hart and Larry Senn.
THE SHADOW YOU CAST QUOTES FULL
This post was excerpted from the Heidrick & Struggles report “The transformation mandate: Leadership imperatives for a hyperconnected world.” View the full report.
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