T-shaped leadership
« Those who want to achieve great things must think deeply about the details. »
Paul Valéry
T-Shaped Leadership is a leadership model that combines strategic vision and collaborative leadership across silos (the horizontal bar of the “T”), along with the ability to dive deep into a few key topics that are critical to business success, while also valuing individual expertise (the vertical bar of the “T”).
T-shaped leadership enables organizations to capitalize on expertise, knowledge, and ideas to create value and break down silos. The more T-shaped a company’s management system is, the more it can:
Increase operational excellence
Stay strategic in implementing its vision
Stay the course
And, paradoxically, boost empowerment and recognition of expertise
This type of leadership complements the traditional hierarchical model and helps leaders stay connected to the field while maintaining the strategic perspective required for their role. This management concept was popularized by Tim Brown, founder of IDEO, as a way to boost creativity and solve complex problems.
Being an expert and collaborative leader
In many companies, trying to solve a problem across expert departments quickly turns into negotiation, or even conflict, to determine which perspective will prevail. The result is often a "gray" compromise: the lowest common denominator between all viewpoints becomes the solution. Unfortunately, this rarely leads to great accomplishments.
Similarly, while executives must maintain a high-level vision, they also need to be able to dig deeper, move down the hierarchy, and “crack” specific issues. This keeps them connected to the field, allows them to meet their teams, verify managerial alignment, and reinforce their legitimacy. In short, it prevents them from becoming “disconnected”, a common criticism of top leaders.
Another key benefit of integrating a T-shaped leadership model is the creation of positive customer experiences, a concept well established in the luxury industry and now expanding to retail. For leaders, this requires paying special attention to delegation, empowering team members on non-strategic topics they’re capable of handling. It also means diving into the details without demotivating direct reports.
1. Integrating T-shaped leadership with facilitation
A T-shaped leader is able to view problems from multiple angles and put themselves in the shoes of various stakeholders to understand their perspectives.
Actions of a T-shaped leader include:
Identifying 2 or 3 strategic topics where they intentionally dive into details
Gathering and prioritizing requests from stakeholders
Collaborating with other teams
Structuring and coordinating execution follow-up
Deciding whether or not to share their roadmap with the team
Connecting people to those who hold the right information
An Accenture study showed that managers spend an average of 2 hours a day searching for information, and half of what they find is useless. The T-shaped leader connects the right people to the right information. That’s what’s called the "facilitator" role.
2. Maintaining expertise and hiring T-shaped leaders
Despite the so-called “generalist” nature of modern education, most school systems still produce specialists with limited exposure to fields beyond their own. The workplace then becomes the space to develop new expertise. To spot and promote future T-shaped leaders, companies need to identify individuals who stand out through mindset and natural curiosity for areas beyond their domain. This curiosity is key for continually integrating new expertise.
If, during an interview, a candidate talks about team projects and the role others played in their success, there's a good chance they will naturally collaborate with other teams and become a future T-shaped manager.
180° and 360° assessments, discussed in a previous article on The Quantified Self, are also valuable tools to evaluate a team member’s ability to collaborate.
3. Developing your expertise and collaborative leadership
Having a good grasp of your strengths, weaknesses, and what can be easily delegated is central to T-shaped leadership. Leaders who understand this can more easily identify situations where another expert can take over, freeing up time for themselves.
Choosing to develop a new area of expertise is also key, it brings a fresh perspective to long-standing issues.
For example, one of my clients, a non-expert retail executive, chose to focus on cold chain logistics when he stepped into his role. His fresh eyes allowed for a new approach, broke down some long-held team beliefs (“we’ve always done it this way…”), and raised the performance bar for his expert teams.
In Conclusion
We are now seeing various leadership styles emerge. The mission of the T-shaped leader is to explore and identify the form of leadership that best aligns with who they are, what their teams need, and the kind of business they run.
To do so, they must pinpoint where to deepen their own expertise in strategic topics, and identify areas where their teams seem weaker, to challenge them and boost performance. They should also choose these focus areas based on the priorities of their business unit.
The goal: to foster collaboration and cross-fertilization within their teams while fully owning their role as a facilitator, in addition to being a manager or executive.
#coaching #executive #leadership #expertise #collaboration