A little more than a year after McGraw-Hill released their groundbreaking book Boundary Spanning Leadership: Six Practices for Solving Problems, Driving Innovation and Transforming Organizations, co-authors Chris Ernst and Donna Chrobot-Mason are spanning boundaries in their own careers.

Ernst, a longtime senior faculty member and researcher at the Center for Creative Leadership, will join Juniper Networks in Silicon Valley on a new assignment as Organizational Effectiveness Thought Leader. Juniper, one of the world’s largest providers of networking technology, is pursuing a vision to “Connect Everything, Empower Everyone.” This requires not only practicing disruptive innovation in technology but also developing new organizational leadership models. Ernst will advise Juniper’s executive team and human resources group on spanning boundaries throughout the company, while also conducting next generation research. He will remain a senior adjunct faculty member at CCL.

“Given the “interdependent” nature of our business model, deepening our boundary spanning leadership capabilities is mission-critical to our continued success,” said Steven Rice, executive vice president of human resources at Juniper Networks. “We are thrilled to have Chris join Juniper Networks as a “thought-leader in residence,” enabling our most senior leadership team to apply his breakthrough work to help us achieve our business strategy.”

Chrobot-Mason, associate professor of psychology and director of the Center for Organizational Leadership at the University of Cincinnati, will spend a six-month sabbatical writing academic articles and working with CCL faculty on a variety of projects that focus on boundary spanning leadership. Beginning this month, Chrobot-Mason will be analyzing data from hundreds of CCL program participants to explore the relationship between boundary spanning skills and organizational outcomes. She will also be working closely with CCL faculty to design and administer a survey to evaluate organizational change as a result of participating in a network analysis and boundary spanning workshop.

“Donna is a savvy scholar and leader who has been a superb collaborator in pioneering the practice of boundary spanning leadership,” CCL President and CEO John R. Ryan said. “We’re delighted to work even more closely with her in the months ahead on projects that we believe will truly help clients drive organizational change.”

All too often, in organizations like this one, too few people play too critical a role in connecting people across the organization. The reason is simple – spanning boundaries is hard work. It’s much easier to work within your own function, own region or geography, or own box on the organizational chart. Research bears this out. Studies show that boundary spanning can be associated with higher levels of role conflict, overload, and burnout. No wonder “keeping heads down and tucked” like a turtle is the way many of us cope with the ever-increasing pace and demands thrust upon us.

The problem, of course, is that the work that matters the most today – whether it be solving a mission critical problem, breakthrough innovation, or leading transformational change – sprawls outside formal organizational boundaries. Keeping heads down and tucked simply isn’t going to solve the challenges that matter most today for creating a better tomorrow.

One promising solution is to migrate boundary spanning from just an individual capability to more of a collective capability. At CCL, we intend to explore this further in our upcoming research and development. Can group or team level boundary spanning behavior help rebalance and add strength to networks such as the one we investigated above? Can more interdependent boundary spanning networks create more agile, flexible, and sustainable organizations than independent networks that rely upon a few key, often heroic individuals to bind people together? And can these new approaches support all of us to experience less role conflict and burnout and more personal thriving and well-being in our work?

We look forward to addressing these important questions and reporting our findings along the way. Stay tuned in the New Year.

For the past year, my CCL colleagues and I have partnered with Rob Cross, Associate Professor at the University of Virginia and the leading organizational network expert, around several successful client engagements. Now we are excited to explore the possibility for even greater impact by more deeply integrating network and boundary spanning perspectives. As we look around – both locally and globally – the time for new innovations for fostering large scale collaboration has never been greater.

The complex challenges we face in business and society cannot be addressed by organizations working alone. To fulfill an organizational mission, whether it be to win competitive battles in the global marketplace or feed the hungry in Africa, require creating empowered networks that sprawl across traditional organizational boundaries.

Coming into the conference event, these are some of the questions – organized by the levels of individual, group, organization, and society – that capture our imagination.

Individual: What are the network practices and values of effective leaders resulting in personal effectiveness, well-being and engagement? What are the links between personal effectiveness  and strategic change?

Group: How are direction, alignment, and commitment across group boundaries created as a result of more effective network and boundary practices? How is cross-boundary direction, alignment, and commitment related to strategic change?

Organization: Can we build more interdependent leadership cultures by developing more effective network and boundary spanning beliefs and practices?

Society: What role do networks and boundary spanning initiatives play beyond the single organization in supporting positive, large-scale societal change?

What are your leading edge questions? Share your thoughts to this blog or you can engage with the conference attendees on Twitter@CCLdotorg. Use the hashtag: #AIL2011 in your Tweets.

Unfortunately, the boundary spanning aspirations in most organizations are not living up to reality. Our research at CCL shows that 86 percent of senior leaders say that working across boundaries inside and outside their companies is extremely important. Just 7 percent, however, believe they are very effective at it.  

That’s a huge gap – but the story doesn’t end there.

CCL research also suggests that the pressure to span boundaries may be greatest on middle managers shifting to senior-level jobs.

Boundary spanning is important for middle managers, according to 91 percent of senior executives surveyed. But only 19 percent of middle managers were seen as effective in working across boundaries — a gap of 72 percent between perceived importance and effectiveness of boundary spanning capability.

The ability to shift from a bounded, within-group mindset to one that skillfully bridges vertical, horizontal, stakeholder, demographic and geographic boundaries is a key challenge for leaders and organizations as a whole. Leaders recognize that innovation, by its very nature, requires intense and sustained collaboration across wide-ranging boundaries.

The IBM report suggests that organizations need to work beyond borders requires organizations to do three things:

Cultivate creative leaders. The IBM study says leaders need to develop “a flair for thinking about opportunities and challenges in completely different ways. These leaders must be able to provide direction to, as well as to motivate, reward and drive results from an increasingly dispersed and diverse employee base.” It’s the intersection where boundaries collide, intersect, and link that the source of new ideas and creative solutions emerge.

Mobilize for greater speed and flexibility.  “Companies must be willing to simplify processes and provide fast, adaptive workforce solutions to meet the requirements of a quickly changing marketplace. A responsive human capital supply chain and the ability to fluidly allocate resources are essential for competitive differentiation in today’s tumultuous environment.” The leadership advantage increasingly goes to organizations that can quickly integrate far-flung people and resources to capture emerging opportunities.

Capitalize on collective intelligence. “Tapping into a broad base of institutional knowledge is critical to developing and maintaining an innovative culture. Enterprises must adapt innovations, apply them across their organization and find new ways to connect people to each other and to information, both internally and externally.”

The old challenge for leaders involved how to operate effectively within the boxes and lines of traditional organizational charts. The new challenge is how to think and act beyond yesterday’s boundaries to discover innovative new frontiers.

At East Carolina University, the Brody School of Medicine and the College of Nursing are separate units within the Division of Health Sciences. Several years ago Dr. David Taylor, Chair of the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, was challenged by the Division’s senior administration to consider having his department teach that subject for Nursing. He agreed, and decided to teach the course himself.

Some of the Nursing faculty were openly pleased with the idea, while others evidenced unspoken concerns about an interloper doing an end run around the normal curriculum process; in one instance he was asked pointedly and behind the scenes to adopt classroom management practices typical to the College of Nursing. Many doubted that he could communicate with Nursing students, a concern that Dr. Taylor initially shared.

Once the class began, his humor and upbeat style quickly engaged the students. His own concerns about being able to make the transition eased when he realized that it was much easier to observe mental light bulbs coming on in these students than among the tough crowds typical to Medicine classes.

Once the evaluations of instruction were turned in, it was found that the students were motivated and thriving under Dr. Taylor’s instruction. When the Nursing faculty saw this, their attitudes softened significantly and connection was possible. Success for those whom all valued became a true bridge.

Reflecting on the experience, Dr. Taylor said that one key was his willingness to work in Nursing’s territory as opposed to having students come to the School of Medicine, and this meant he had to jump into an unfamiliar environment as well as unfamiliar material and a different social structure. He found that you have to prove yourself; it’s essential to have the respect of any tribe you want to work with. With positive connections now made, Dr. Taylor’s department is now working with the College of Nursing on new programs and “discovering new frontiers.”

I have often wondered if the Six Boundary Spanning Practices should be sequential, from Buffering to Transforming. This example suggests that such a lock-step sequence might be impossible where multi-dimensional boundaries are involved. For example, there were Vertical boundaries between the faculty, the chairs and the Vice-Chancellor, and the permeability of each was different. There was an obvious Horizontal boundary between the School of Medicine and the School of Nursing, but in the end it was the Stakeholder boundary around the students that made the most far-reaching difference when spanned.

With such complexity, the sequence of the Practices became more emergent than predetermined. Dr. Taylor Connected initially with the division administration as well as with the leadership in the School of Nursing. As he and the students began to visibly Mobilize, Buffering and Reflecting could succeed between him and the Nursing faculty members (something that did not turn out well earlier), enabling additional rounds of Connecting and Mobilizing that led to the Weaving of new collaborations and offerings.

Dr. David Collier is a general pediatrician who spends 75% of his time working with programs in childhood obesity, arguably the most costly medical problem in Eastern North Carolina. Obesity can be described as the perfect medical problem. Only 1/100 to 1/1000 of the onsets are medical, and the rest are behavioral; however, obesity caused by behavior begins to create other medical problems that in turn affect behavior, and the vicious cycle begins to spin out of control. Currently, 30% of the children in Eastern North Carolina are obese in contrast to the 15% average nationwide.

This combination of behavioral and medical problems can only be treated with the combination of medical and social approaches, and this demands that he find collaborators with skills he does not have. For instance, in behavior management it is useful to work with psychologists as well as business people who understand how we all make purchasing decisions. Collaborations of this nature require a willingness to think beyond one’s usual discipline.

As an example, Dr. Collier is working on an obesity program with 4-H, commenting “They know kids!” In another case is working with the university’s Department of Physical Therapy to understand lower extremity problems; there is no value in changing someone’s behavior with an exercise program that blows out their knees.

Collaborations of this sort can be difficult in Medicine. Basic science students and medical students matriculate under completely different circumstances, and it affects their views of each other for years afterward. Whereas medical students take on a tremendous amount of work through a rigorous schedule and highly structured clinical settings, basic scientists have to create their own rigor and structure in the course of their learning and research.

Each has to make a choice about the scope of their impact on the world. A practicing physician can achieve clear outcomes, but one patient at a time. A research scientist on the other hand can impact millions but acknowledges that the odds of achieving the clear outcome can be long. To some extent each can feel envious of the other and it can contribute to dysfunctional relationships. Add this dynamic to the overall competition for rewards and resources in a medical school, and collaboration becomes a high art.

Accordingly, it can be easier to create such partnerships outside of one’s own institution than within it. Trust is essential, but Dr. Collier believes that success in complex collaborations is most likely where the people involved have skills that are complementary, with little redundancy. For example, when doctors collaborate with 4-H, there is low redundancy of capabilities but high shared interest. The next key is a willingness to relinquish control in the interest of creating an equal partnership. When the basic and clinical tribes do come together, there is a sweet spot with a high payoff that rewards the commitment to span boundaries.

Next week, I’ll share the insights of a faculty member who spanned boundaries to create new horizons with an academic unit outside of the Brody School of Medicine.

By John B. McGuire

 When did taking the easy way out become the way to do business? Or to boost the economy, build communities, improve our schools, raise our kids and solve our problems? When did we decide that leadership was a cushy job?

 Deep down, don’t you remember the thrill of taking the hard road? The anxious anticipation of uncharted territory, the uncertainty of crossing into new frontiers?  The surprises and different views encountered as you stepped into new territory, the ability to do what seemed beyond reach? The pride of personal achievement and the camaraderie of shared experience?

 For too many leaders, it’s become all-too-easy to win “their way”, drive the numbers, or hammer home their point of view.  “I did it my way” was great for Sinatra, but is a failed pathway where collaboration across boundaries is a requirement for doing business.

 Others take the route of avoiding the big, long-term challenges in favor of their own short-term gain.  The two year—I got mine (take the money and run) personal economic ethic is too prevalent in too many corporations.  Sustainable, strategic, long-term organizational health is a hard road.

 Leaders take on the big complex challenges—managers take on the easy, quick wins.  In today’s complex, interdependent world, big challenges always requires working together across multiple groups effectively.  The short-term, task orientation of just kicking the can down the road is an all-too-easy, well-established strategy in both business and public life. Even compromising – which only gives a nod to multiple views ­– has become just an easy out.

 The problem is that none of these easy roads take us where we need to go. They circle around the tough stuff and drain our energy. Meanwhile, the complex challenges loom above.  Like building clouds that threaten dark days ahead, these tactics of avoidance make certain that storms of calamity are pushed off for uncertain tomorrows, rather than leading through them today.

 So, how do we tackle conflict and complexity? How do we move beyond “Us versus Them” and create genuine win-win options? How do face up to options that are good for customers, constituents, consumers and our employees simultaneously? How do we look at the challenges and integrate all the right answers into innovative, best-for-all solutions? How do we – together – take the difficult journeys and become even stronger and more capable?

 At CCL, we’ve seen business, government and community leaders answer these questions through collaboration, creativity and commitment.  Working together across groups, organizations and even countries  is tough.

 Collaboration moves beyond compromise in which everyone loses something in hopes of gaining a little. Collaborative work uses dialogue, not debate, to deeply understand the problems we face. Then it generates multiple options, integrating the best ones into sustainable solutions. Collaboration fosters a creative process that combines and integrates the perspectives of the many into something new.

 Collaboration is a shift to problem-solving. It is a shift away from blame and political one-upmanship and, instead, demands that collective leadership take 100 percent responsibility for outcomes. This is the no-blame zone. In this zone there can be no “Us versus Them” because the we are them.

 The complexity of our leadership challenges requires creativity. We need new mindsets—bigger minds–and new processes to explore multiple right answers and to integrate them into the best solution available now.  Creativity is an attitude of learning in the moment, paying attention and telling the truth about root causes. Only with creativity will we find collaborative, sustainable solutions to the complex problems our institutions, businesses and communities are experiencing.

 But to collaborate and create effectively, we need to build the trust and stamina that comes from deep commitment. The hard work of leadership across boundaries involves setting direction, creating alignment and fostering shared commitment. It is especially challenging – and essential – when facing a situation that is big or complex, messy, unclear or emotion-laden.

 You strengthen and show your commitment when you:

 Resolve to stop arguing and start talking. Forget about “I’m right and you’re wrong.” Listen to understand and learn.

 Resolve to stop blaming.  Leave behind fault finding. Instead, focus on outcome-based bridge building.

 Resolve to stop fighting for resources. Taking what you can, when you can, because you can is no way to lead (and no way to live).

 Resolve to take responsibility for shared success. Let go of the illusion that you are not connected.  Leadership isn’t about your own success; it’s about the success of your clients and customers, your suppliers and employees, your local neighbors and your global connections.

 Resolve to grow bigger minds. Take time out for learning, reflection and possibility. Consider the problem or opportunity through a larger or different lens.

 Finally, resolve to take the right, hard road. It may be painful at times, but I promise: the view is worth it.

 John McGuire is a senior faculty member and Transformation Practice Leader at CCL and co-author of Transforming Your Leadership Culture.

By John B. McGuire

Across our cities, our countries, and our world, leaders are in crisis. They – we­ – struggle with practical fiscal and policy issues while wrestling with deep, values-based questions: Who and what do we represent? What do we need to do to work across all the boundaries required to be effective–how do we need to behave as organizations? How do we survive in challenging times and move toward an uncertain future?

 Permeating many of our challenges is a fear of change.  This fear itself is a boundary beyond which lurks the unknown. Business, political and community leaders alike are overwhelmed by the rapid change they’ve experienced already and the complexity and ambiguity that the future holds. Many of us hesitate to lead in the face of change, uncertain of the both the process and the outcomes.

 To face the challenges of the future we must learn to work together across myriad boundaries, and to do this our ailing systems need to be transformed. Local institutions, governments, educational institutions, non-profits, and businesses (both large and small) must be able to shift and adapt as organizations – which requires leaders who will step up to lead in fundamentally new ways. We need leaders who are able to change mindsets in order to change behaviors in order to change organizational practices in order to transform their businesses, their communities and the future.

 Sound too far “out there” to be practical? Maybe so, but when the stakes are high and no one knows what “business as usual” means anymore, we’ve found that investing in leadership transformation is a powerful strategy. The question is, then, how does this transformation take place?

 At CCL, our research and work with executives has revealed some fundamental facts about how transformation can happen in organizations – and that work offers a roadmap for our local and regional leaders as well. Here’s some of what we know:

 You can’t wish away change and uncertainty. Transformation in organizations begins when leaders embrace ambiguity and uncertainty rather than hiding from it, or dismissing it with a well-rehearsed response. Instead of trying to master uncertainty and avoid complexity through tactics, procedures, micro-managing or denial, leaders need to accept the VUCA world. Describing the context of leadership as Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous is almost a cliché in some circles, but surprisingly few leaders understand or accept the implications that a VUCA world has on their organizations, customers, supply chains and communities.  The post-global financial crisis is a mega-example.  Every community faces the ripple effects of fiscal challenges and shrinking resources.

 You can’t ask others to do what you won’t do yourself. Leaders who want their organizations to change and adapt must change themselves first. They need to grow bigger minds to deal with bigger issues. They must stop looking outside for someone or something else to change and take a hard look at their existing beliefs. They need to develop the ability to spot what no longer works and replace them with better ideas.

 KONE , a global leader in the elevator and escalator industry, needed to build trust and openness within the senior leadership team in order to address business challenges. As CEO Vance Tang says, “We had to appreciate that we had to change ourselves first in order to change the culture.”

 You must cultivate interdependence. Now is the time to pursue a new leadership culture, one that enacts (not just pays lip service to) collaboration, flexibility and boundary spanning. For several years my colleagues and I have been focusing on leadership culture, driven by the core idea that we need to develop not only individual leaders, but also collective, interdependent leadership.

 Here’s what we’ve learned: leadership is a social process, and there is a hierarchy of leadership cultures – from dependent to independent to interdependent. Each advancing stage of culture is more capable of dealing with complexity, working effectively across boundaries and leading change. So, if you need to solve complex problems, adapt quickly, generate future-ready strategies and drive change, you need to develop interdependent leadership.

 Senior managers of a global consulting organization put their goal for leadership culture change into writing:  they wrote and posted a “Declaration of Interdependence” as a commitment to their connectivity and shared success. They understood that they needed to truly collaborate, using dialogue, beyond debate, to deeply understand the problems they and their clients face. Collectively, the senior leadership agreed to model the mindset and the behaviors that will lead to multiple options, creative solutions and a highly flexible organization of groups working collaboratively with each other.

 Transforming leadership culture begins with senior leaders taking these three steps. But how that takes place and where those steps lead is not quick, easy or formulaic. But it can be done. Do you wonder what it would look like if it were done in your own organization and community?

 John McGuire is a senior faculty member and Transformation Practice Leader at the CCL and co-author of Transforming Your Leadership Culture.

***

Ketchum is a global public relations company of 2000 employees.  Our top executives attend Ketchum Leadership Institute to learn the latest in leadership concepts as well as practice behaviors that help Ketchum reach its business goals.

In 2010 we introduced CCL’s concept of interdependent leadership.  Our executives found this concept fit their daily experience well – that working across boundaries of all kinds, internally across groups and regions, externally across clients and partner agencies, composed their most pressing challenges.

In each of the programs, run with groups of approximately 40 leaders, in Dusseldorf, San Francisco and New York, the reality of complex boundaries that needed crossing was in the room.

In San Francisco one of the boundaries present is between Ketchum and one of its successful new units, Access Communications, located in San Francisco along with the Ketchum office.  The two groups have the potential to work together more closely.  The program and the concept of interdependence are a good setting for raising tough issues within a context of mutual goals.

To capture the common enthusiasm at the end of the program for working interdependently, Peter Fleischer, Ketchum’s head of business development and a member of KLI’s teaching team, developed a “Declaration of Interdependence”, which participants could publicly sign at the conclusion of the program.  Here’s the text of the declaration (Peter says you are welcome to adapt it):

DECLARATION OF INTERDEPENDENCE

When in the course of agency events, it becomes critical to dissolve the traditions which have shaped the course of our destiny, respect for both the opinions of our colleagues and the storied history of our firm require that we should declare the causes which impel us to this course of action.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all profit centers are created equal, that they are endowed by their agency with certain unalienable goals, that among these are growth, client service and the pursuit of profit—and that if our form of leadership becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right, in fact, the duty of our leaders to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new leadership model, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to succeed..

We the leaders of Ketchum  do, therefore, in the Name, and by the Authority vested in us by the  Executive Committee of this agency, solemnly declare that we are Absolved from the tyranny of heroic and independent leadership,

And that as men and women of free will, we commit ourselves through this Declaration to the establishment of a Free and Interdependent leadership model based upon a genuine, shared appreciation for each other’s talent, intellect and judgment – as well as a clear understanding and profound appreciation that in this era of global growth and connectivity, none of us can succeed unless all of us succeed.  Together.

Here’s a photo of the group – the signed Declaration of Interdependence is behind the group on the right.

Ketchum Leadership Institute, San Francisco, 2010

Want to know more? Feel free to write us at Ketchum and we’ll tell you all we know!

robert.burnside@ketchum.com; peter.fleischer@ketchum.com

Robert Burnside, Ketchum ‘s Chief Learning Officer

Applying boundary spanning to the drilling and plugging of oil miles under the Earth’s surface was not a topic I ever considered. Yet, Marcia McNutt clearly saw a connection based on the several months she spent down in the Gulf.

Likewise, CCL is currently developing a new boundary spanning program for another large global energy company. It’s a multi-level engagement focusing on the intersection of boundary spanning and creating an organization-wide safety culture.  “Danger knows no boundaries, ” as one of the company executives put it. “As such, our safety culture must know no boundaries too.” The premise is that by developing leaders capable of sharing knowledge, information, and resources across levels, functions, and areas of specialization, increased safety will follow.

As this engagement unfolds, I’ll report back with updates.