Ensuring your organization fields the right leadership team
After the Vancouver Canucks named Henrik Sedin the team’s captain on October 9, he announced a decision that gives business leaders cause to reflect.
The top-scoring Swede named four assistant captains: Ryan Kesler, Kevin Bieksa, Manny Malhotra and brother Daniel Sedin.
That’s more than the three assistant captains former captain Roberto Luongo played with last year. And it’s twice as many as was the norm a decade or two ago.
Indeed, a 30-person business would likely be top heavy if it had a CEO and four vice-presidents, according to Daniel Skarlicki, who is a professor of organizational behaviour at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business.
There is no universal formula, however, for how many vice-presidents an organization should have.
Skarlicki says it depends on a number of factors, including:
- the complexity of the business;
- the technology that’s being used; and
- the geography where the company operates.
“I wish more companies were doing what the Canucks are doing,” Skarlicki said. “Often they end up with a small number of people who can take on the CEO’s job because they haven’t been trained at the vice-president level.
“Injuries happen. If [frequently injured defenceman] Sami Salo was the captain, the Canucks would probably need a lot of assistant captains because you just know that he’d get hurt.”
Aside from being a smart succession-planning strategy, having a large number of vice-presidents can also provide an effective structure to allow a CEO to delegate tasks and free up time so he or she can focus on achieving the corporate vision.
The key, Skarlicki believes, is for vice-presidents to have clearly defined roles. One sign that a company might have too many vice-presidents is a steady stream of meetings to debate who does what.
Those meetings are a drag on everybody’s time and are part of what’s described in business school as “process loss.”
“Vice-presidents are useful to the degree that they have their own specialization,” Skarlicki said.
“You might have a vice-president of finance who is in charge of a specific issue. The vice-president of marketing, same thing.
“Where real confusion comes into play is when someone has more than one boss. That calls for role conflict.”
Similar situations are increasingly common in organizations such as the Fraser Health Authority and Vancouver Coastal Health Authority, where some staff reports to bosses in each of the organizations.
In the 1989-90 season, the Canucks experimented with rotating the team’s captaincy. Trevor Linden, Dan Quinn and Doug Lidster each wore the “C” on their jerseys in alternating games, but that created confusion over who the team’s true leader was.
Linden alone wore the “C” the following year.
Research in Motion Ltd. has achieved good success with Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis acting as co-CEOs. But Skarlicki says it’s far more efficient for a company to have a clear chain of command.
Then there’s a final category of vice-president – one in which the employee gets no additional responsibilities and no additional pay.
It’s an example of the old adage that when executives can’t afford to give a pay raise, they give the employee a more impressive-sounding title.
When this is done, it’s best to make this clear to everybody at the outset.
“If this is not clear,” Skarlicki said, “the vice-president will say, ‘Why am I here if you’re not going to give me any authority? Or, if you keep meddling in my business or in my region … I feel very impotent and my people see me as impotent. They bypass me to go to the boss.’”
For example, the role of being an assistant captain with the Canucks is largely symbolic.
The team will count on Sedin to discuss disputed calls with referees and take ceremonial faceoffs. Sedin’s decision to have four assistant captains is widely seen as a gesture to show that leadership in the dressing room is a group activity.