Leaders can also adjust an employee’s or team’s span of influence through the level of goals they set. Although the nature of a team’s goals drives its span of accountability (by determining the trade-offs team members can make), the level or difficulty, drives her sphere of influence. As Simons observed, a team that is given a stretch goal will often be forced to seek out and interact with more people and other teams than a team or person whose goal is set at a much lower level. Interdependence will be more likely to take place when aspirations are high.
Leaders can narrow the Span by requiring members of their organization to pay attention only to their own jobs; do not allocate costs across units; use single reporting lines; and reward individual performance. Conversely, they can widen the Span by injecting creative tension through structures, systems, and goals. For example, the leader can form cross-unit teams, matrix structures, and cross-unit cost allocations. These all encourage (or even require) interdependent perspectives and practices.
Span of Support: [External Locus of Control] [Supply Element]: This fourth span concerns the amount of help a project team can expect from teams and individual people in other organizational units – how much commitment from others the team needs in order to implement strategy—and how much interdependence is required (or at least requested).
Teams cannot adjust an employee’s span of support in isolation —for these teams reside in an interpersonal forest. This span is largely determined by people’s sense of shared responsibilities, which in turn stems from an organization’s culture and values. For a leader to narrow the Span of support they can use leveraged, highly individualized rewards, and clearly single out winners and losers. For them to widen the Span, leaders must build shared responsibilities through purpose and mission, group identification, trust, and equity-based incentive plans. The “softer” sides of span are critical. This is where empowerment comes to the fore.
True and enduring support in an organization comes not just from connecting with and receiving tangible or intangible support from other people, another project, another initiative or another agency in the organization. It comes from a Triangulation, wherein both you and the other entity link positively with a third entity (a shared mission, a shared vision, a shared commitment to and capacity to enable a more general and critical project in the organization). It is with the presence of a third entity that we find a form of love and shared commitment tht the Greeks called Agape and that Martin Buber (2000) identified as an I/Thou relationship. A triangulated structure is always stronger (able to withstand powerful external forces) than a structure with only two anchor points (or two sets of anchor points: a four-sided structure).
Job and Team Design: There are several notable crises that are associated with poorly designed jobs and teams. A crisis of resources is most likely to occur when leaders who oversee the work of specific employees or teams spend too much time thinking about control, influence and accountability, and not enough time thinking about support. A crisis of control is likely to occur in highly decentralized organizations and in organizations where separate operational divisions are created to be close to specific customers (or types of customers). Supply of resources (span of control plus span of support) exceeds a leader’s ability to effectively monitor job or team trade-offs (span of accountability) and to ensure coordination of knowledge sharing among employees and teams (span of influence). Silos of craft and artistry prevail.
A crisis of red tape can occur in any organization where powerful staff members or staff groups overseeing key internal processes (such as strategic planning and resource allocation) are inclined to design performance management systems that are too complex for the organization. Spans of accountability and influence are very high, but resources are insufficient and misdirected. The demand for resources exceeds supply. Genuine interdependence is likely to be nonexistent under each of these crisis conditions.
