Intervention - How smart leaders lead

Still from late 2007
Greg Lewin was president of Shell Global Solutions from 2004 until 2009, and was my bosses boss through that period

The most commonly heard complaint I hear about the Leadership Team and especially about Greg is about the gap between the things they talk about and the everyday working lives of GS staff. Greg waffles on about grow east, innovation, fancy behaviours, snowballs. All very well, you say, but what space have I got to spend more than a tiny fraction of my time of this when I have a report to deliver by Tuesday, a bolshie customer on the phone, two staff fighting with each other and a boss bleating forever about chargeability. Oh yes, and the joys of promaster.
The misconception here is that Greg doesn't know what your everyday challenges are. He does. Only too well. But he trusts and expects you to be able to get these done, maybe with some help from your line manager. What he is interested in is what would otherwise NOT get done, at least not without his INTERVENTION.
The first time I heard this concept explained was actually from Jeroen van der Veer, sometime in the 90's in some retail conference. He was talking about his job in the then CMD, at that time quite a new job for him. And he talked about the change from a country/region based organisation to a business based one, which had just happened. He said that while we had a regional organisation, then he expected cross-business challenges within a region to be resolved by the line - his job was to look out for the business wide stuff spanning regions. Then when changed over, his job changed too, and his new role was to look out for what might be lost by not understanding cross-business stuff, within a country or region. Hence the country chairs report to EC and are their eyes and ears for this challenge.
This was interesting and new for me and has stuck with me since as a key insight - the idea of senior leaders focusing not on what their organisation line manages, but on what it will fail to manage.
One side thought is about organisation structure. The reality is that there is no perfect organisation, far from it. If you organise around one dimension, you will lose out in another. If you are not careful, you will see that failing, become obsessed by it, and reorganise in order to correct it... meanwhile forgetting that all the stuff you do well today (and are therefore invisible) will immediately become tomorrow's problems. I think this goes some way to explain Greg's fundamental hatred of organisational change (evolution is OK, but total change is a last resort to be deferred if at all possible). He knows that it causes disruption and distraction from the customer... and that things will probably be just as flawed even after it is done, only in different ways to today.
Having said that, there may not be a perfect organisation, but there is always an optimal, or least bad one. And maybe GS has by now moved so far from the least bad one that we ought to take a deep breath and go for it. Maybe more on that another day... but I can't see it happening on Greg's watch.
So then, smart leaders lead in areas where the structure will otherwise not successfully manage. Go back to the stuff he bleats on about:
Grow East - crosses all sorts of boundaries, lots of blurred incentives, many responsible but few accountable. Yet a clear strategic imperative for any tech services organisation striving to remain competitive. A classic candidate for intervention.
Innovation, behaviours, snowballs (at least super snowballs). Much the same.
And be clear, Greg is not expecting everyone to drop everything and only focus on the intervention topics. He needs some people (often project teams) to give them significant time, and he needs all of us to find just a little time, or use the topics as guiderails as we complete other tasks.
For me, that is smart and visionary leadership, and all too rare, in Shell or outside. It is the opposite of micro-management, if you think about it.
The only risk is that intervention is the enemy of simplicity, and people like Greg have to judge very careful how much an organisation has capacity for intervention. (Also explains why the rest of us love the simplicity concept - it allows us to ignore the interventions and to keep control). Arguably, Greg pushes this boundary too hard at times. But then would we be better off with a leader who kept things simple and intervened less? Where would we be in Grow East? Probably still talking about it.
Who would be role model intervention style managers? Jeroen still follows that mantra (Enterprise first a great example). Bill Clinton? John F Kennedy? Tony Blair? Richard Branson (OK, an extreme example, he doesn't bother managing his business at all!).
How can we all do a bit more intervention based leading and a bit less micro-managing? Probably asking our staff if they think we trust them to do their job would be a good first question.