Facing the challenge developing new leadership to purposefully unleash the energy locked within participating peoples

Journal of the Academy of Business and Economics, March, 2004 by Marilyn E. Harris, Beverly Jones, Sandra L. Sell-Lee, Guilan Wang

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses creating NEW learning, NEW leadership, and NEW energy unleashed from people in organizational contexts. People (participants) become a new source of energy to develop and improve innovative capability of self, organizations, cultures and global systems. Key is in being successful is the full implementation of the Socio-Economic Equation, developing new leaders at every level to unleash human potential capable of innovating throughout the system. The paper shifts the quality of attention to generative learning in developing new leadership and uses a case developing grassroots leadership to demonstrate the realities involved.

1. INTRODUCTION

This paper strives to develop new understanding based on generative learning from innovative leadership practices in organization cultures, where individual's energy and capacity to learn has been purposefully unleashed. Ackoff (1984) finds that with understanding, in contrast to knowledge or information, one can design and create the future. Of late it becomes increasingly evident new understanding--understanding dependent on new learning is required to develop new leadership to purposefully unleash the energy locked within participating peoples.

First, the case developing "Grassroots Leadership" at Royal Dutch/Shell exemplifying generative learning in real time in a global organization culture is presented to provide some common background experience for readers as they examine the issues challenging leadership around the world today. Next there are three issues focused relevant to the unleashing challenge of new leadership: Tapping a Second Source of Learning, Managing the Complexity of Large Scale Change, and Assessing the Deep Levels of Knowing. Apart of these issues in practice are a number of other issues that need to be addressed. For example, success and sustainability when unleashing human potential becomes a priority using action research in systemic development engagements. These sections provide the support from relevant theoretical constructs and action research efforts opening the door to new understanding that can design and create a new future in current practice and beyond. Finally, the paper shifts the quality of attention to the generative learning gained through retrospective synthesis, concluding with implications for stepping into the future.

2. THE ROYAL DUTCH/SHELL CASE DEVELOPING "GRASSROOTS LEADERSHIP"

The example at Royal Dutch/Shell (Pascale, 1998) offers a powerful model of what leadership means--a recognition that commitment and creativity come from all parts and all levels of an organization. Steve Miller developed the grassroots approach at Royal Dutch/Shell to give the company an energy transfusion and to remind them that we could play at a more competitive level. Shell has always been a wholesaler. But every service station represents a commercial opportunity that any retailer would envy. The task in grassroots leadership was to tap the potential of that real estate, and the frontline troops were needed to pull it off.

The grassroots program developed was through bringing together six to eight person teams from a half dozen operating companies worldwide in an intense "retailing boot camp." One example, from Malaysia: In an effort to improve service-station revenues along major highways, a cross functional team that included a dealer, a union trucker, and four or five marketing executives were assembled. The first five day workshop introduced the model and the leadership skills the team would need to enlist coworkers back home, and prepared the participants to apply the new tools to a local market opportunity. That could mean improved performance at filling stations on the major roadways in Malaysia, or selling liquefied natural gas elsewhere in Asia.

Then the teams went home--while another group of teams rotated in. For the net sixty days, the first set of teams worked on developing business plans. Then they came back to boot camp for a peer-review challenge. At the end of the third workshop, each team sat with Steve Miller and his team in a "fishbowr' to review its business plan, while the other teams watched. The peer pressure and the learning were intense. At the end of that session, the teams went back for another 60 days to put their ideas into action. Then they came back for a follow-up to analyze both breakdowns and breakthroughs.

Grassroots leadership is working because Royal Dutch/Shell is seeing results around the world. For instance, our business in France was in terrible shape. We were in the red and losing market share. The advent of the hypermarkets had changed the game, and we weren't responding effectively to this new competitive threat. Fifty percent of our retail fuel market disappeared in two years! WE either had to find a way to become profitable and to grow, or we had to exit--because the way we were going, we couldn't stay in the game much longer. Sometime after, the marketing manager of the retail business in France wrote after just closing the books of that year: it recorded double-digit profitability, exceeded its growth target, and expects double-digit growth for the next year. More important, the manager reported that when he and his coworkers started to work on the problem, they were terrified. They didn't know how to solve it. Now they believe in themselves. As a result of this effort, they've got a whole new company. The truth is, it's scary as hell at the beginning. It's scary for me. It's scary for the team. But the track record has been incredible.