Instrumental leadership: The nuts and bolts of leadership

The nuts and bolts of instrumental leadership

Instrumental leadership focuses on the “what’s” and “how’s” of leadership and the nitty-gritty details. It has two main dimensions. The first is strategic leadership, which consists of 1) environmental monitoring – understanding an organization’s environment, identifying its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats; and 2) strategy formulation and implementation – developing programs and tactical policies to support the organization’s vision and setting specific organization-wide objectives and goals. 

The second dimension is work facilitation, which 1) helps followers achieve their goals through clarification of how to get there and provides the required information and resources; and 2) monitors the performance outcome of followers and corrects errors in a constructive way.

Research shows that while there is a significant relationship between transformational leadership and effectiveness, the effect of instrumental leadership is nearly three times as strong. Given the attention paid to transformational leadership in research and management development and the lack of attention paid to instrumental leadership, these results give business leaders a much-needed “wake-up call.”

In their organizational culture research, IMD Professors Denison and Hooijberg examined how well companies translate their vision and strategy into action. Out of a sample of over 1,000 companies, they analyzed the 25% that scored highest on having a clear strategy for the future, having a shared vision of what the organization will look like in the future, and having a vision that creates excitement and motivation for their employees. They then examined what percentage of the companies that are top in terms of vision and strategy were also top (i.e., in the top 25%) on the following variables:

1. Work is organized so that each person can see the relationship between his or her job and the goals of the organization.
2. Ignoring values will get you into trouble.
3. Working with someone from another part of this organization is like working with someone from a different organization.
4. There is good alignment of goals across levels.
5. We respond well to competitors and other changes in the business environment.
6. Attempts to create change usually meet with resistance.
7. People understand what needs to be done for us to succeed in the long run.
8. Short-term thinking often compromises our long-term vision.

Their results support the hypotheses on the need for instrumental leadership. On the positive side, they found that 73% of these companies were also in the top quartile of people understanding what needs to be done to succeed (No. 7). The strategy variables were also positively linked to line of sight (No. 1, 65%) and aligning across levels (No. 4, 65%). The lowest scores were on ignoring values (No. 2, 40%); working with others in the organization is like working with someone from a different organization (No. 3, 40%); and the ability to create change (No. 6, 45%).

These results further stress the need for instrumental leadership. That is, while it is a good start to get everyone to understand the vision and strategy, it takes a lot more work to translate that into action. As the points above highlight, we need to get people to understand how what they do contributes to the vision, that the values spelled out really matter, and that there is alignment across levels and across different parts of the organization so that real change is created. These represent some of the key struggles leaders face as they attempt to implement their vision. One particular struggle concerns the ability of the organization to act as “one,” as the results below illustrate.

Lessons learned from practice

It is easy to say that organizations should act as one and that the interests of the organization should come before those of individual business units or departments. Reality, however, is often quite different. To demonstrate some of these conundrums in practice, participants shared in an experiential exercise. They were divided into five different “organizations,” each with three business units (BUs). The organizations were assigned the overall strategy to make as many cubes as possible to sell to customers. The BUs had an inventory of materials with which to build their cubes and specifications about how the cubes should look. They were told how to calculate their profits and were given a strict timetable outlining meeting times with the organization’s other BUs to negotiate for supplies. During the time-pressured exercise, the groups experienced tense moments and pitfalls in aligning the organization’s overall strategy to individual BU goals.

Unlike many real life situations, the business units in all five organizations ultimately collaborated to maximize their organization’s overall profit but, in most cases, this outcome was not guaranteed. During organization-wide debriefs, the BUs shared what they had learned from their own behavior, how they perceived the other BUs, and the assumptions they had made during the exercise.

The knowing–doing gap

The exercise showed that although we know what should be done, we are often unable to execute accordingly due to personal biases, special interests and assumptions. In preparation for the event, Professor Hooijberg had sent a survey asking how participants would react to a series of instrumental leadership dilemmas and what failures they had experienced during their careers. As with the experiential exercise, the survey responses demonstrated that participants knew perfectly well how to manage the dilemmas.

Professor Hooijberg contrasted this with the many failures to act in accordance with what participants know should be done.

Participants cited failures in such areas as overlooking trends, misunderstanding organizational constraints, not adapting to threats and opportunities, failing to implement a well-adapted strategy, defining a well-adapted strategy but not working to reflect it in the organization’s practices, not providing the necessary resources and/or clarifications so employees could reach their goals, and not monitoring employees’ outcomes.

Participants’ key recommendations for narrowing the knowing–doing gap were:

• Communicate to create clarity, walk the talk; set clear expectations; collaboration; own the corrective actions (people, resources, know the passive resistors); reward achievements; and act on the consequences.
• Values – either live and comply with the values or leave and go somewhere else. You need to have the courage and take the personal pain to make this happen.
• Really making sure to break down the strategy into meaningful work and involving people to develop their individual goals and how they plan to achieve them.
• Be clear on the do’s and don’ts and measure how strategy is deployed. Then every employee can understand the why, what and how of strategy (i.e. how each employee contributes to making the strategy happen).
• Value tactics over strategies – then continuously learn from doing. This requires recognizing and being ok with failure, which is ok once but not all the time.
• Transparency on path and goal, how to get there. Sense of urgency of the change.

Conclusion

The current focus on transformational and transactional leadership must not outweigh the non-sexy role of instrumental leadership. Managers should use all styles to make tough choices, have difficult conversations, hold people accountable, ensure intra-organizational alignment and follow through on the delivery of the stated vision. Leaders struggle to ensure their visions are aligned with their choices and to establish vision-consistent processes. They often feel ill-prepared, under- or unsupported and face conflicting interests. Yet, instrumental leadership is essential for capturing the full value of transformational leadership and vision implementation.

Developing instrumental leadership requires rolling up your sleeves and making sure that the nuts and bolts are in place. Although this necessitates experience and dedication, the payoff in terms of effective leadership is worth it.

Discovery Events are exclusively available to members of IMD’s Corporate Learning Network. To find out more, go to www.imd.org/cln