Organizational Management

Then this is what I'd like you to do: make an attempt at creating a Leadership Canvas. Your "leader" will be me, based on my role as your facilitator this semester. Read through the steps of creating a Leadership Canvas in this posting, then create an "as-is" picture as well as a "to-be" picture.

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You may never cease to be amazed by the talent and energy that you'll see in the organizations you'll join. Sadly, much of it is squandered by poor leadership. Blue ocean leadership can help put an end to that.

The Leadership Canvases give people a concrete, visual framework in which they can surface and discuss the improvements leaders need to make. The fairness of the process makes the implementation and monitoring of those changes far easier than in traditional top-down approaches. Moreover, blue ocean leadership achieves a transformation with less time and effort, because leaders are not trying to alter who they are and break the habits of a lifetime. They are simply changing the tasks they carry out. Better yet, one of the strengths of blue ocean leadership is its scalability. You don't have to wait for your company's top leadership to launch this process. Whatever management level you belong to, you can awaken the sleeping potential of your people by taking them through the steps summarized here.

Blue Ocean Leadership

Blue ocean leadership rapidly brings about a step change in leadership strength. It's distinct from traditional leadership development approaches in several overarching ways.

Here are the three most salient:

Focus on Acts and Activities

A mistaken assumption in some leadership "training" is that changes in a leader's values, qualities, and behavioral styles ultimately translate into high performance.

But when people look back on these programs, many struggle to find evidence of notable change.

Blue ocean leadership, by contrast, focuses on what acts and activities leaders need to undertake to boost their teams' motivation and business results, not on who leaders need to be.

This difference in emphasis is important. It is markedly easier to change people's acts and activities than their values, qualities, and behavioral traits.

Connect Closely to Market Realities

Traditional leadership development programs tend to be quite generic and are often detached from what firms stand for in the eyes of customers and from the market results people are expected to achieve.

In contrast, under blue ocean leadership, the people who face market realities are asked for their direct input on how their leaders hold them back and what those leaders could do to help them best serve customers and other key stakeholders.

And when people are engaged in defining the leadership practices that will enable them to thrive, they're highly motivated to create the best possible profile for leaders and to make the new solutions work.

Distribute Leadership Across All Management Levels

Blue ocean leadership is designed to be applied across the three distinct management levels: top, middle, and frontline. It calls for profiles for leaders that are tailored to the very different tasks, degrees of power, and environments you find at each level. Extending leadership capabilities deep into the front line unleashes the latent talent and drive of a critical mass of employees, and creating strong distributed leadership significantly enhances performance across the organization.

Steps in Blue Ocean Leadership

See Your Leadership Reality

Without a common understanding of where leadership stands and is falling short, a forceful case for change cannot be made, so achieving that understanding is the objective of the first step. It takes the form of what we call as-is Leadership Canvases, analytic visuals that show just how managers at each level invest their time and effort, as perceived by the customers of their leadership. An organization begins the process by creating a canvas for each of its three management levels.

Quite simply, the customers of leaders are asked which acts and activities-good and bad-their leaders spend most of their time on, and which are key to motivation and performance but are neglected by their leaders. Getting at the specifics is important; the as-is canvases must be grounded in acts and activities that reflect each level's specific market reality and performance goals.

The second step in creating a canvas prompts interviewees to think beyond the bounds of the company and focus on effective leadership acts they've observed outside the organization. Here fresh ideas emerge about what leaders could be doing but aren't.

To process the findings from the second round of interviews, the subteams apply an analytic tool called the Blue Ocean Leadership Grid (see the exhibit by the same name). For each leadership level the interview results get incorporated into this grid. Typically, this step begins with the cold-spot acts and activities, which go into the Eliminate or Reduce quadrants depending on how negatively interviewees judge them. This energizes the subteams right away, because people immediately perceive the benefits of stopping leaders from doing things that add little or no value. Cutting back on those activities also gives leaders the time and space they need to raise their game. Without that breathing room, a step change in leadership strength would remain largely wishful thinking, given leaders' already full plates. From the cold spots we move to the hot spots, which go into the Raise quadrant if they involve current acts and activities or Create for those not currently performed at all by leaders.

Select to-be Leadership Profiles

Finally, in a meeting with the subjects, everyone in attendance has a clear picture of the current Leadership Profile of each level, the completed Blue Ocean Leadership Grids, and a selection of to-be Leadership Profiles that could create a significant change in leadership performance. Armed with this information and the votes and comments of attendees, the top managers convene outside the fair room and decide which to-be Leadership Profile to move forward on at each level.

Now, for comparison, here are the "as-is" and "to-be" canvases for both frontline leaders and middle managers:

And by contrast, here is a canvas for senior leaders:

Essentially, the gift that fair process confers is trust and, hence, voluntary cooperation, a quality vital to the leader-follower relationship. Anyone who has ever worked in an organization understands how important trust is. If you trust the process and the people you work for, you're willing to go the extra mile and give your best. If you don't trust them, you'll stick to the letter of the law that binds your contract with the organization and devote your energy to protecting your position and fighting over turf rather than to winning customers and creating value. Not only will your abilities be wasted, but they will often work against your organization's performance.