A critical responsibility of any leader is keeping its people motivated and ability-updated to succeed. This is pretty understandable. People face greater working demands and increasingly challenging and competitive environments. People`s motivation is under permanent pressure and its ability to deal with those challenges is lessening overtime in a rapidly knowledge-evolving economy. The same is true for leaders. So then, how to make people and organizations permanent-motivated and able to succeed? And, more precisely, how to deal with these critical shortcomings in the internal leadership?
I have developed this conceptualisation to represent an idea about leadership that I personally think that has been played down by the current praxis on the matter.
Structural leadership represents an internal configuration of ideas and organizational structures that provide orientation and support for the successful implementation of strategies. It provides orientation in terms of being a clear institutional vision about what the company actually is and represents; and it is a support by means of configuring incentives and rewards about individual and collective behaviours inside the organization.
Structural leadership is about building internal systems that can boost organizational capabilities in an effective and permanent way, providing support for principles and ideas that are believed to lead to long-term success to the company.
Any leadership structure requires individual leadership in the long run as every individual leader requires structural leadership in the short run. These mechanisms, at certain extent, are useful for leaders as control and orienting tools in the day by day, keeping motivation and direction in the employees, and allowing leaders to supervise that behaviours and structures are correctly aligned. By so doing, leaders can regulate their direct exercise of leadership for critical situations where direct motivation, guidance or supervision is required, avoiding that leader`s attributes and reputation could wear down overtime for excess of exposure. Can you imagine yourself listening to a great motivational speech of your boss to encourage the team to increase work output? What would it happen to you after four years listening to the same thing, every morning, five days a week? Individual leadership can wear down, and that is one of the critical functionality of the structural leadership: to attenuate that process and provide an additional source of internal leadership.
A charismatic leader without an institutional support is nothing else than a “caudillo” with a low chance to make desired-changes become institutional. Structural leadership allows individual leaders to get support from the organization for their actions and decisions, and it provides to them with ethical validation and orientation.
An example of institutional leadership is extracted from the educational field.
When working with schools, one of the main objectives is bring high quality education to youngsters. The meaning with “high quality” and “education” could widely vary from one culture to another. Let`s say, for example, that “high quality” is to be measured with a series of knowledge, ability and individual tests applied along the way. Those tests can be indicative of how much relevant knowledge students exhibit, and about their key abilities that are expected to be shown in several fields, i.e., mathematics, language, social, ethics, psychological and health. Each of those fields uses a different set of measurement tools. As a general vision we decide, for example, to promote a “permanent development attitude” on the students, that can encourage to strongly believe in themselves and in their increasing potential of their abilities (knowledge, skills, personal attributes, and so on). We operationalise this vision as: “educating self-stringent learners”.
Well, to provide support for that vision, rewards and incentives structures should promote and validate permanent evolution of those metrics according to individual basis. We should offer an answer for questions such as: what kind of students and teachers reward orientation we will implement? What kind of evaluation orientation? Which are the teachers`, parents`and students` roles in such a system? Are students and teachers incentives aligned with our vision? Which performance metrics would indicate that we are in the right way? What kind of actions we can undertake to influence over those metrics?. And surely many others.
How to know if we are doing right? Well, we need make a permanent process of evaluating if there are contradicting incentives in our leadership structure. The essential knowledge here is which measures to use, and if they are aligned with the desired organizational outcomes. In other words, following our example, we need answer the question: Is our current leadership structure in the school actually encouraging and upbringing self-stringent-learners according to what we actually defined is a “self-stringent learner”? We do can answer to that by using knowledge and research methods on a permanent basis in the management activities. That is basically management of leadership structures in the organization.
For additional information on the subject, please contact:
Rodrigo Figueroa Reyes
rhfiguer@gmail.com