The importance of actionable levers for effective leadership

Leadership and decision-making series: In a polarised world with geopolitical tensions, economic uncertainty and fast paced technological change, the leaders we choose, and the decisions we make, matter – whether we are consumers, employees or citizens. Understanding human behaviour is central to this. This series looks at academic research trying to unravel these issues.

When organisations struggle with employee performance or engagement, leaders can sometimes look for easy explanations. For instance, a poor office culture, ineffective leadership, or a lack of trust or fairness in an organisation. It is generally easier to find explanations for workplace issues than to know exactly how to resolve them.

The fact is, many popular explanations are either vague or not directly actionable. Explanations like culture and leadership are like smoothies, which combine numerous ingredients, but one can only guess what these ingredients are. “A leader cannot simply decree that workplace culture should be better. Bosses cannot demand that employees trust management more,” explains Joerg Dietz, Professor of Organisational Behaviour at HEC Lausanne, who has conducted research on these issues.^1,2

Actionable levers

This is where the concept of ‘actionable levers’ come in. These are specific, observable behaviours in organisations that can be adjusted deliberately and tested empirically. “While culture itself cannot be changed directly, leaders can change what they do. For example, they can decide to spend time walking around, listening to employees and inviting feedback. This is a concrete lever that can be precisely calibrated: from zero minutes per day to fifteen minutes per day,” details Professor Dietz.

The organisation must then assess whether using this precise lever alters how employees perceive the workplace culture, say after three months of having walked-around for fifteen-minutes a day.

The same logic applies to fairness. Leaders cannot command employees to feel fairly treated, but they can examine the underlying causes of perceptions to do with unfairness. For instance, pay levels and whether they are competitive relative to the market. Increasing wages is an actionable lever that can then be easily calibrated.

“Workplace culture is not a lever for change because it is too broad. Fairness is not a lever for change, because fairness itself has root causes. If we look at leadership styles, we still have a useless lever. Why? because leadership styles are not behaviours per se but rather combinations of various leaders do and how followers evaluate it”, states Professor Dietz.

Then, to tell a leader to use, for example, an authentic leadership style is like giving a baker a recipe that says ‘only bake a good‑tasting cake.’ The recipe describes the outcome, but not the ingredients or the process.

Instead of fixating on an outcome, leaders need to be more analytical and dig into the corporate ingredients. He adds: “Finding an explanation for workplace issues is important for our understanding, but solving problems requires leaders to move from an explanation to pinpointing precise levers for action, enacting them, and assessing their effectiveness.”

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