Leadership across boundaries is challenging, in part because it requires both individual and collective change. This book has focused on raising your awareness of the need for and possibilities of boundary spanning leadership. At the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL), we also recognize that leadership is not defined exclusively by an individual’s role. Organizations—businesses, agencies, communities, schools, governments—also must develop a collective leadership capacity if boundary spanning work is to take place in a widespread and sustainable way.
CCL’s Organizational Leadership Practice focuses on identifying and developing individual leadership capabilities; improving team, group, and organizational effectiveness; and developing the ability to create direction, alignment, and commitment throughout an organizational system. Increasingly, this work includes helping our clients meet the challenges and opportunities of spanning vertical, horizontal, stakeholder, demographic, and geographic boundaries.
For leaders seeking to improve their organization’s ability to work across boundaries intentionally and systematically, CCL offers several avenues for building on the ideas in this book. When an organization’s leadership strategy calls for building new collaborative boundary spanning capabilities, it can invest in three areas: talent systems, leadership culture, and applied learning systems.
Below, we briefly explain how talent, culture, and learning systems relate to boundary spanning leadership.
Talent Systems
Leadership talent involves an organization’s ability to continuously attract, develop, and retain people with the capabilities needed for current and future organizational success. Talent systems thus can be thought of as the work of designing and implementing the strategies and development processes needed for talent sustainability.
Career development approaches in organizations traditionally focus on preparing leaders for vertical advancement to higher levels of leadership responsibility. Career ladders, fast-track programs, and development focused on leading up and down the organizational hierarchy are common. But to develop individuals’ boundary spanning capabilities, career development pathways need to look less like a vertical ladder and more like a zigzag that crosses over vertical, horizontal, stakeholder, demographic, and geographic boundaries. CCL uses the term boundary-crossing assignments to define the rich experiences and powerful opportunities for learning that leaders encounter when they engage in cross-boundary assignments, roles, and tasks.1 Assignments such as working in a different function, managing a joint venture, and taking an expatriate assignment provide leaders with opportunities to deepen their collaborative boundary spanning skills and broaden their organizational perspectives.
Although improving the organizational mechanisms for developing boundary spanning capability is relevant to leaders at all levels, CCL research suggests that the greatest need lies with middle management. Not only do middle managers have roles that increasingly will demand boundary spanning work, they are preparing to shift to senior-level jobs.
In the Leadership at the Peak study, 92 percent of the 128 senior executives believed that the ability to collaborate across boundaries became more important as they moved from middle- to senior-level management. With each increase in level, there are more boundaries to span, a greater emphasis on cross-enterprise coordination, and an increased focus on bridging the organization with the external environment. Success at senior organizational levels requires a critical shift in mindset from leading within the boundaries of the function to leading the function across organizational boundaries in the context of the larger business strategy and vision.
In the same study, 91 percent of senior executives said boundary spanning was important for middle managers. But they reported that only 19 percent of middle managers are effective in working across boundaries, a gap of 72 percent between perceived importance and effectiveness.
An effective leadership talent approach should, among other things, provide employees with developmental experiences that allow them to work and lead across all five boundaries and not assume that boundary spanning capabilities will emerge once a manager is placed in a senior position. An organization’s talent efforts should include the following questions:
- What competencies must be developed if we are to be an effective boundary spanning organization?
- What experiences and support should be provided to improve boundary spanning capabilities among our employees?
- How does the organization recognize and reward managers and teams for engaging in collaborative work?
The answers will vary by organization; however, CCL’s experience has shown that certain assignments, as well as coaching and applied learning systems, are effective strategies for developing boundary spanning leadership.
Leadership Culture
Leadership culture refers to the web of individual and collective beliefs and practices in organizations for producing the outcomes of direction, alignment, and commitment. Many organizations are in some stage of a culture shift, moving away from being dependent on a few leaders at the top to becoming a culture in which many leaders throughout the organization collaborate and enact change.
The goal of leadership culture work is to build capability for new ways of working purposefully and actively. It allows for new thinking, beliefs, tools and processes that will result in organizational success. As the need for boundary spanning leadership increases and the practice becomes more complex, an organization must evolve its leadership culture so that it won’t systematically reject efforts to work more effectively across vertical, horizontal, stakeholder, demographic, and geographic boundaries.
At CCL, we work with senior leadership in organizations to clarify their leadership culture and determine the gap between the culture they have and the culture they need. Our research finds that organizations tend to fall into one of three categories, or levels, of leadership culture (see Figure below).
An organization’s leadership culture directly affects the way people respond to the challenge and opportunities of working across boundaries. Generally, interdependent leadership cultures have stronger boundary spanning capabilities than do other organizations. As the leadership culture becomes more interdependent, reaching across, bridging, and collaborating across internal and external boundaries will become an increasingly natural way to get work done. That said, the six boundary spanning practices can be applied in all leadership cultures.
In fact, as leaders, teams, and entire organizations experiment and develop new capabilities in each of the boundary spanning practices, the culture of the organization develops toward greater collaboration and interdependence as well. For instance, buffering and reflecting may be the primary practices in a dependent leadership culture. This is the case because the outcomes associated with these practices—intergroup safety and respect—are primary values in more authoritative dependent cultures. Yet as people in the organization engage in additional practices, for example, connecting or mobilizing, the leadership culture begins to shift from dependent to independent and eventually toward interdependent. To develop increased boundary spanning capabilities, organizations also must understand and intentionally develop their leadership culture in ways that enable the six practices to manifest and thrive.
Applied Learning Systems
Applied learning systems are leadership development approaches that involve learning from challenging real-work experiences. More than 30 years of CCL’s Lessons of Experience research has consistently found that there are five types of developmental experiences across cultures and contexts: challenging work assignments, developmental relationships, adverse situations, course work and training, and personal experience.3 Of these, significantly more lessons are learned from challenging work assignments (such as an increase in scope of responsibilities, initiatives that require creating change, and stakeholder engagement activities) than from any other type of event. In light of this finding, CCL’s applied learning systems seek to develop leadership at its most powerful source—in the course of work itself.
Applied learning approaches are uniquely suited to the fundamental challenges underlying boundary spanning leadership, requiring leaders to create direction, alignment, and commitment across boundaries in service of a higher vision or goal. For example, CCL’s Action Development methodology is a type of applied learning approach that integrates working on real strategic change goals while simultaneously developing the types of leadership capabilities described in this book. Leaders in Action Development initiatives engage collaboratively in cross-boundary teams to advance a strategic goal while receiving intensive support for individual and organizational development. In working interdependently across organizational boundaries, leaders shift from internal to external awareness of the environment and learn to lead from a more integrated understanding of the organization. Action Development enhances not just individual boundary spanning capabilities, but also the intergroup outcomes of safety, respect, trust, community, inter dependence, and reinvention needed to foster wide-scale collaboration to help organizations adapt to change.
Conclusion
In closing, CCL’s Organizational Leadership Practice accelerates organizational strategy by unlocking leadership potential. When your organizational strategy calls for building new collaborative boundary spanning capabilities and when talent systems, leadership culture, and applied learning systems are aligned in ways that support those efforts, your organization will be well positioned to succeed today and meet tomorrow’s challenges.
