CHAPTER ELEVEN
CISCO
Collaborative Leadership
This chapter outlines a collaborative approach to engaging the entire
business in the design of a competency model to serve as the foundation
for the organization’s leadership efforts.
business in the design of a competency model to serve as the foundation
for the organization’s leadership efforts.
The capability and accessibility of emerging technologies are driving a relentless pace of change in global economic and market trends. At the same time, knowledge, power, and productive capability are more dispersed than at any other time in history.
This complex, decentralized business environment is creating the demand for new operating models and a new approach to leadership. Yesterday’s top-down, traditional command-and-control approach is no longer the most effective one, at least not for Cisco Systems.
Cisco Systems is a $37 billion company headquartered in San Jose, California. With over sixty-three thousand employees, the company does business in eighty-three countries across twenty-three time zones. With the boom of Internet 2.0, the organization is experiencing global growth at double-digit rates. With such growth rates, Cisco expects to be a $50 billion company by 2010. Its evolution will largely depend on Cisco 3.0, a global business initiative aimed at bringing Cisco closer to customers. At a time of increased market pressures and fierce competition, Cisco believes the key competitive advantage is a close and solutions-focused relationship with customers.
As Cisco enters new markets and new services, one of the first changes has been to the soft structure of the company. It is the largest functionally organized technology company in existence. To keep the organization agile and close to customers, Cisco operates with six cross-enterprise councils designed to bring leaders and experts from around the globe together on key business initiatives. This soft structure requires leaders to operate collaboratively and in the service of the whole rather than in the service of their respective functions.
Defining Collaborative Leadership
To effectively transform our leadership paradigm, the Cisco talent team, in partnership with the business, needed to define what collaborative leadership was (behaviorally) in a global company and, more important, what collaborative leadership was not.
C-LEAD, a Collaborative Leadership Model
In order to communicate and define expectations around collaborative leadership, the organization needed to construct a competency model. This model, embedded within each of Cisco’s leadership efforts, would effectively establish a common understanding and appreciation for the leadership traits associated with success in the company. To stay consistent with the vision, we wanted to demonstrate collaborative leadership in how the model was designed, how our success factors were identified, how the competency model was crafted, and how the model was branded and introduced to the organization. The result was the C-LEAD model, which stands for collaborate, learn, execute, accelerate, and disrupt.
We set out with seven operating guidelines:
1. Focus on differentiators for the future. The Cisco C-LEAD model needed to create leadership differentiation in the marketplace.
2. Align Cisco culture and leadership expectations. The leadership model needed to respect the history of the company and its culture while also being provocative about leadership and innovation needs in the future.
3. Establish a common language for leadership. The model, at a minimum, needed to provide a common language for leadership around the globe. Regardless of the function or theater, the core principles of leadership needed to mean the same thing.
4. Reliably predict success in leadership roles. The model was created not only to guide how we expect leaders to behave, but also to predict future leadership success.
5. Develop intelligence about Cisco’s leadership pipeline. The model needed to be leveraged to identify high-potential emerging leaders.
6. Facilitate internal searches and deployment of talent. The model needed to assist management with deploying talent, especially in critical or linchpin positions. We wanted future leadership capability aligned to the most critical strategic priorities.
7. Inform development programs and other investments. The leadership model would inform and align all training and development activities for managers and leaders.
Using Collaboration to Define Collaborative Leadership
The methodology for developing C-LEAD needed to be robust enough for the business to adopt yet practical enough to develop in a timely fashion. Our primary goal was to leverage the organizational leaders throughout the design phase, so at the end of the process, we could ultimately say that C-LEAD was designed both by and for these leaders.
Step One: Best Practices Review. The C-LEAD process started with a best practices review in the leadership literature for insights that addressed global high-growth industries. We set out to define global leadership for the future, anticipating all of the implications of collaborative technology. To help us arrive at the best definition, we paid special attention to research that applied to leadership trends in high-technology companies. We also looked at common leadership competencies across a variety of industries, leveraging in particular the Corporate Leadership Council’s research on executive competencies. Finally, we reviewed the previous two years of Harvard Business Review articles to look for patterns and themes related to the evolution of leadership.
Two key competency areas emerged as key differentiators regardless of industry:
• Continuous learning on the fly. This encompassed a leader’s ability to take in and integrate new information about self and leadership impact, as well as information about marketplace, technology, and customers.
• Ability to work in an increasingly uncertain, dynamic, and diverse global environment.
Step Two: Senior Leader Interviews. The Talent@Cisco team conducted thirty interviews with senior leaders across Cisco functions and the aters. Leaders were interviewed on their knowledge of Cisco’s business, their vision of the future of the organization, and their appreciation of the leadership challenges and capabilities required to lead the company forward.
Two questions were asked of each leader:
• What are the key challenges leaders will face based on current strategy and direction?
• What capabilities will differentiate successful leaders in this context?
Cisco is about to face the most strategic transformation in the history of the company. Leaders recognize the multitude of complexities that this transition creates: the need to grow globally, lead multiple business models simultaneously, and engage managers and employees in new and different ways given the changing demographics of the workforce. In addition, leaders recognized the workforce implications that the success of technology creates regarding workforce experience, workforce collaboration, and workforce productivity.
In an executive staff meeting, John Chambers, Cisco’s CEO, reflected what many other leaders had expressed when he said that the executives would all fail as leaders if they were to lead the business in ways that had worked in yesterday’s business environment. In order to support significant and rapid business transformation, he offered a call to action to the senior leadership team that became the basis for what we now call Leadership 3.0. C-LEAD was created in part as a response to this call to action.
Step Three: Collaborating with the Organization. Several hundred managers and leaders provided input into the leadership model, leveraging collaborative methods and technologies. Historically, Cisco sent out surveys to solicit feedback. Instead, the C-LEAD design team created a progressive, real-time feedback process that brought together an online community of leaders who used collaboration tools to communicate their ideas and provide ongoing feedback. The model was designed and redesigned iteratively as it moved throughout the organization, benefiting both the design and the adoption of the model.
Step Four: Engaging the Operating Committee. Both the model and the business case for change were taken to the operating committee comprising the most senior decision makers for review, discussion, and adoption. As the executive sponsor of the shift to collaborative leadership, the CEO is the primary sponsor of the C-LEAD model. The executive vice president of business operations, systems, and process has also taken the role of a key driver of the C-LEAD initiative. The overall time to conceptualize, create, and socialize the C-LEAD model with Cisco’s top twenty-five hundred leaders was approximately four months, a compelling example of the power of collaboration.
C-LEAD establishes five leadership competencies, each designed to answer an integral question:
• Collaborate: Does the leader work across traditional boundaries to achieve success on behalf of the customer and the enterprise?
• Learn: Is the leader building individual as well as team skills in order to succeed in a dynamic environment?
• Execute: Is the leader engaging others in the work and empowering the team to achieve exceptional results?
• Accelerate: Is the leader building bold strategies for the future as well as the capability (talent) needed to achieve those strategies?
• Disrupt: Does the leader promote innovation and change in support of Cisco’s strategy?
C-LEAD is now being embedded in all of Cisco’s leadership and people practices. It creates a common language and a clear definition of what Cisco’s leadership expectations and aspirations are. When a leadership paradigm is well articulated, even employees deep within the organization will be better informed regarding the right questions to ask and the best direction to take.
Developing Collaborative Leadership
C-LEAD provides important guidance that informs Cisco’s collaborative leadership development approach, but it provides only the foundation. Experiential programs are necessary for the creative environment for competencies to bloom fully into proven capabilities.
Leveraging Cisco’s Executive Action Learning Forum to Build Capability
The Executive Action Learning Forum (E-ALF), launched in fall 2007, is a signature development initiative for Cisco executives. The forum provides high-potential leaders with opportunities to accelerate the development of their general management and collaborative leadership skills by working on projects of high strategic importance to Cisco. E-ALF is the most effective means to develop executives at this level because it combines top-notch business school teaching with hands-on work on actual projects.
Each E-ALF project begins when the business uncovers a significant strategic opportunity that needs to be addressed. E-ALF provides both the methodology and the capability to solve the strategic opportunity by incorporating these elements:
• A customized executive assessment and robust development and planning tool, based on the C-LEAD competency model, that identifies key strengths and development needs for the leaders involved.
• Cross-organizational collaborative assignments that bring together senior leaders from around the globe to solve significant strategic problems for the corporation. Rather than being a one-time educational event, E-ALF intends to drive sustainable, transformational change for both the organization and the individual leader.
• Coaching and mentoring support that enables the collaborative leader to tap a broader base of knowledge and expertise regarding strategy and industry trends, operating principles, team and organizational dynamics, and personal leadership effectiveness. An internal coach is assigned to each participant, based on business unit and development need. Coaches play a significant role in three important ways: (1) they conduct the assessment feedback session and consult with the executive to translate feedback into a robust development plan, (2) they provide ongoing feedback throughout the action learning forum in support of reinforcing the leader’s development goals, and (3) they partner with executives after the action learning forum with the goal of sustaining the developmental changes.
• Executive exposure that provides a window into the role and the mind-set of a Cisco senior executive. Throughout the forum, senior executives formally engage with participants to provide executive insights regarding industry and technology trends and market transitions. During these sessions, participants are expected to present and test business concepts and product ideas. Executives regularly challenge participants in how they are approaching and leading the project.
Each forum comprises fifteen vice presidents and senior vice presidents who have been identified as leaders with potential to ascend into Cisco’s most critical (or linchpin) positions. These participants are divided into two cross-functional global teams that are charged with collaborating with each other to design strategy solutions for “disruptive innovation” business models for Cisco.
To help the participants navigate through the stress and pressure of the experience, an extensive network is put in place to provide support for the project teams. The support team is made up of subject matter experts, executive development coaches, technology advisors, business leaders, and team facilitators. The extensive use of technologies and tools enables the teams to complete projects collaboratively from around the globe and with minimal disruption to their normal business day.
Each E-ALF session extends over twelve to sixteen weeks and has three in-residence phases. Each session has these components:
• Self-directed learning. Prior to the in-residence session, participants complete selected readings related to the proposed strategic initiative. Business and industry experts select white papers and business cases to prepare participants for the session.
• In-residence. The program begins with a four-day in-residence session designed to develop participants on the topics of business strategy, disruptive innovation, and the disciplines of collaborative leadership. Corporate executives and faculty from Harvard facilitate this in-residence session.
• Strategy project. In the six-week period following the in-residence session, participants work in small strategy teams. From the start, participants are expected to demonstrate individual, team, and organizational leadership. As such, they self-govern in every possible way: they set vision and desired outcomes for the forum, they organize and self-govern, they hold each other accountable, and they leverage the capabilities of other strategy teams.
• Each team is assigned a team facilitator and an internal coach to guide them through the project.
• Teams have open access to board members and business executives, strategy consultants, technology advisors, and management consultants to help them flesh out their strategy concepts and business models.
• Project presentation. E-ALF concludes with another in-residence session where the strategy teams present their business plans to the operating committee.
• Evaluation. Each strategy team is evaluated for overall quality of project output and overall leadership. Specifically, strategy teams are evaluated against their ability to set vision and strategy, operationalize strategy, build an organization to execute strategy, communicate the business plan in a disciplined and inspirational manner, and lead collaboratively.
Measuring Impact
The primary measurement of success for E-ALF is twofold:
• Was a business strategy launched by virtue of the rapid prototyping methodology used for new strategies and business models?
• Did leaders elevate their understanding and capability to lead as collaborative leaders?
Several more specific measures are also used to help evaluate how well the actual program was delivered, including tools that measure the quality of the presenters, the quality of the content presented, and the actual administration of program details.
Action Learning in Action: The Case for Mexico
Theory and process are crucial, but results are the reason E-ALF exists. It is Cisco’s core methodology for technology innovation and is leveraged twice a year to vet new product and solutions businesses for the company. The most recent session developed two $10 billion business strategies to address the company’s targeted entry into software.
Financially, the forum must be measured as a reasonable return on investment. Today, the cost per participant is approximately $10,000, and the total cost of each forum is $160,000. Only when a business idea vetted through E-ALF comes to market is the return of investment literally realized. Obviously each participant’s expanded role and capabilities are more broadly leveraged and represent a return as well.
To illustrate how the forum works, I provide some perspectives directly from a team that recently went through an ALF for directors. Both the team coach and the team itself answered core questions to provide a fuller picture of the sum of their experiences.
Based on a previous positive experience with E-ALF, the senior vice president of the software collaboration group wanted a group of emerging executives to look at three countries for complete enterprise transformation: Spain, Germany, and Mexico. The team that shares their story is Team Mexico.
The seven members of the Mexico team were cross-functional and geographically dispersed high-potential emerging executives who had never worked together before. They spent ten weeks identifying the best approach to accelerate growth in a transforming economy. The Mexico market was in a crucial transition, emerging from a developing market into an established market. In addition to being an important market in and of itself, the market condition provided an opportunity to create a case example that could be a model for other emerging markets like China, India, and Russia.
The Mexico team was provided briefing materials from which to formulate a hypothesis and then a set of recommendations. These would be validated and presented to the Enterprise Business Council, one of Cisco’s six business councils formed to drive collaboration across the company.
What follows are the verbatim responses from team members and their assigned coach based on a basic set of questions:
• What issues did you face?
Team Perspective
It was like a pride of lions that needed to operate with collective leadership, leveraging the strength of the many to be the voice of one. Here we had to accept our peers as equals and develop trust with each other as individuals, and then as members of a team.
While the team had outlined and acknowledged that establishing trust early is critical to building cross-functional, effective teams, this is always easier said than done. It was clear from day one that we weren’t short of leaders and everyone seemed to struggle to some extent to subdue our natural tendency to lead from that front. Having our team coach act as our “Jiminy Cricket” was invaluable during those first days. He recognized a little tension in the team dynamic and encouraged us to share our thoughts amongst the team in an open and constructive manner. It took courage to share frustrations and receive feedback, but those first honest exchanges were critical in building the foundations of our ultimate success.
Having cleared the air, we made rapid progress during the first on-site session. However, the introduction of a tight deadline later in the week brought the “Mr. Hyde” out in some of us. Again, honest, open, and genuine feedback brought us back from the brink, ultimately strengthening a mutual respect and regard amongst the team.
Team Coach Perspective
Early on there were the issues around defining project scope and deliverables. The project sponsor had set some very broad stretch expectations that the team produce recommendations that were both concrete and out-of-the-box creative. The sponsor was looking for new ways of approaching the challenge of growing the Mexico market both in the short run and over the long term. On the other hand, the sponsor gave little guidance about the way to approach the problem or the range of options that might be considered. Given the execution orientation of many of the team’s members, the team was constantly pushed to move beyond their comfort zone around tactical dimensions of the problem, to focus on truly game-changing growth strategies. And the team had to constantly keep a view of how its recommendations might be relevant on a going-forward basis to other countries facing similar transitions to those facing Mexico.
Concerning team dynamics, the Mexico team started as a group of individuals with strong personalities, differing degrees of attention span and patience for discussion, and a penchant for talking over each other rather than building upon each others’ ideas and opinions. This mix was a potentially combustible chemistry that could have stopped the team in its tracks, stymied progress, and undermined its capacity to deliver a truly creative and compelling set of recommendations.
Furthermore, most members of the team were used to having the floor as leaders of their respective direct report teams. Here, they were faced with a task where command leadership would not serve them well. The collaborative leadership behaviors and skills of each individual would be chief determinants in the team’s success.
• How did this impact your work?
Team Perspective
Ultimately everyone put the team ahead of themselves and gave unselfishly to the common cause. This maturity combined with a rich mix of culture, business style, experience, and a shared passion to do the best we could carried the day.
We created a dynamic that allowed the team to partition work and to leverage the strengths of each individual. We also encouraged team members to take on roles where they did not have total confidence and comfort to support personal development. The feeling of inclusiveness was a key attribute that allowed the team to ensure all members were heard and represented in the process.
Getting to know each other outside of the work environment was key to creating personal bonds. Obstacles were more easily diffused as a result of these improved personal dynamics. Had we not known each other the way we did, I don’t believe we would have resolved things as quickly as we did and remained a team as tight as we are. We were able to maintain integrity and respect for each other throughout the process.
Team Coach Perspective
To the credit of each member on the team, the team developed a high degree of self-awareness around their mix of individual traits mentioned above, as well as very concrete disciplines for working through and rising above them. Over the course of the experience, the group of individuals transformed themselves into a team committed to each other, and to delivering their absolutely best, most creative effort. As their coach, it was truly a pleasure and a privilege to contribute to and watch this transformation. The Mexico team won top honors in the country project category. They received the highest accolade from one of our most respected senior vice presidents who said that their presentation was emblematic of how all board-level presentations should be made.
There are many reasons why the Mexico team was successful in transcending some potentially limiting traits. The bottom line was that their success was created by (1) the time they took to emotionally bond with each other, (2) their openness to learning and feedback, and (3) their individual and collective commitment to delivering their best.
• How did your work and example impact the organization?
Team Perspective
The team delivered recommendations that have been adopted and implemented by Cisco. However, the team feels that the greatest value of their work came from the insights we gained regarding our own strengths and weaknesses, the friendships we built along the way, and the fact that we can take both the business and life lessons learned and share them with our day-to-day teams.
We became a true team and required the input of every team member in order to be successful. We were able to maximize the strengths of each team member to create the final product, which ultimately created the winning presentation, but more important gave us the opportunity to contribute to a cause we all believe in.
Team Coach Perspective
Executive feedback indicated that the team provided the most balanced mix of concrete, implementable recommendations for the short term with strategic recommendations for changing the game and altering the country business model over the longer term. The CEO and his operating committee acted on one of the team’s strategic recommendations within a few weeks. The idea was to appoint a Mexico Board comprised of the most influential Mexican stakeholders from industry and government. The Enterprise Business Council also requested that one or two members of the E-ALF Mexican team be appointed to a key strategic body focused on globalization aspects of its Cisco 3.0 strategy, then an initiative focused on renewing Cisco’s customer-driven culture and processes.
From the Foundation to the Top of the Industry
Cisco’s C-LEAD competency model provides the framework and a common language for the leadership team. Anchored firmly in the core competencies C-LEAD articulates, E-ALF provides leaders with the opportunity to apply thought leadership in the pursuit of market leadership.
Rapid growth and technology advancements will continue to push organizations to deploy the best talent from around the globe to accelerate results. Collaborative leaders will be in the best position to leverage these global resources and work across organizational boundaries to create innovative solutions that deliver results. This is why, at least at Cisco, collaborative leadership has been embraced as the best approach for commanding success.
Conclusion
Regardless of the size of a company or the scope of its leadership development program, addressing each of these key steps will provide a sturdy framework for lasting impact. At Cisco, these building blocks created a comprehensive program that is positioning the company for continuous development, success, and innovation:
• Research. Gather both industry and insider intelligence. A review of leadership best practices combined with an in-depth assessment of Cisco’s specific needs created the basis for a program that provided an ideal combination of the two.
• Collaborate. Provide a way for leaders across the company to provide input. This approach improved both the design and the acceptance of Cisco’s program.
• Engage. The perfect program cannot succeed without executive support. Successfully engaging senior leaders helped create buy-in at Cisco and provided visible executive support at the highest levels.
• Embed. Use the language and the competencies in your model across all of your leadership and people practices. Cisco leveraged its program to create a common language and a clear definition that could help inform daily actions at every level.
• Execute. Theory is important, but action is what creates business results. Cisco’s Executive Action Learning Forum is a signature leadership and development process that puts competencies fully into practice on actual projects.
• Measure. Business impact is the only way to truly measure success. Cisco measured not only understanding and capability in leaders, but also the specific return on investment tied to business ideas that initiated in ALF.
About the Contributor
Annmarie Neal is a talent strategist, executive consultant, and psychologist who designs and develops strategic talent management solutions. She is the founder of Neal & Associates and currently serves as vice president of talent and diversity for Cisco Systems, where she leads global talent management and diversity efforts. She holds a doctorate and master’s degree in clinical psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology.
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