Is There Autocracy in Snapchat’s Leadership?

How do prominent business or industry leaders choose to manage effectively?

Dictatorship probably isn’t the first thing that pops into one’s head when you think Snapchat. But I think there might be a case for it.

Before that, let’s warmup with some basics on leadership though.

42% of leaders fail during the first 18 months on the job (Nahavandi, A.)

While leaders don’t always get it right and while lower-level management sometimes appears superfluous to a business, competent leadership produces tangible results and possesses tangible qualities.

I think it’s important to think about leadership from a qualitative perspective at a minimum, both because of how common, important, yet vague leadership is as an abstract concept.

Give it a moment of thought.

When someone says “Sally is a better leader than Bryan,” or “I hear Mike is one of the best guys to work under,” how do we better conceptualize what they mean beyond our general impressions and intuition.

Recently, I’ve come across the Leadership Opinion Questionnaire (LOQ), and I’ve been putting it to use in testing out how it works when evaluating the actions and decisions of tech leaders I see in the news, like the controversial choices to cut employee bonuses and general workplace culture under the guidance of Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel.

In describing the likely results of an anonymous employee survey conducted to “…[ask] a broad set of questions to understand what they’re happy about, what they want to improve, and what they want to say,” after employee bonuses were cut that same year, Bloomberg Technology simply explains: “Grievances will be aired.” (Frier).

However, in the same article, Frier notes that Snap Inc. beat Wall Street expectations, causing its stock to surge by 47%.

Just thinking about the how the LOQ applies, we can easily conclude that the result will probably a low score on consideration and a high score on structure, two aspects we’ll discuss a bit later.

The rationale behind this is that while controversy has ignited regarding the questionable behaviors of Snap Inc.’s head of HR Jason Halbert and the unpopularity of the moves regarding employee compensation, the business has profited overall.

So people working are not the happiest, but the business is making money. You’d expect the culture to be a bit autocratic, and that’s exactly what these articles report about Spiegel’s penchant to hire people that don’t question his decisions.

So what are the dimensions of consideration and structure in leadership, anyways, and how do they relate to the LOQ?

Before exploring the details of the above application, let’s take a look at the history of the model itself, and why it’s still used.

First, let’s introduce Edwin Fleishman, Ph.D. and prominent figure as well as a historical voice on the matters of institutional and organizational psychology.

During his academic and professional career, Fleishman suggested a variety of measures and wrote on a number of topics on how to effectively obtain qualitative data about management.

One of his most well known models, the LOQ, was formulated during a series of leadership studies at Ohio State University in the 1950s.

So this sort of qualitative measure goes way back, and its common use today as a sort of litmus test or framework surrounding leadership proves the insights and value it contains.

In 1989, he re-proposed the novel notion of the LOQ, which specifically delves into two main dimensions concerning the nature of supervisory roles in management.

These two main dimensions signify discrete, yet interrelated concepts that compose the LOQ, and they are:

• Consideration
• Structure

To clarify, the context of these terms lies within a leader-subordinate relationship, perhaps best symbolized between a manager and his employees.

These terms sound relatively straightforward, but there’s a degree of intricacy to their interpretation that Fleishman really carves out for us when describing the initial definition and the gradient between competence and incompetence for each of these two dimensions.

On the quality of consideration in a leader, the LOQ model is best summarized by the following points:

• A bilateral trust relationship between the leader and subordinate.
• Equal treatment in the context of social interaction, despite workplace hierarchy.
• Respect for ideas proposed by either side.
• Showing concern for the feelings and the personal welfare of their subordinate.
• Doing small gestures of good-will from time to time.
• Appearing to be approachable and amiable.

Now, I know it sounds pretty obvious, but spelling out these points will help towards painting an overall picture in the end.

Leaders ranking as highly competent in the trait of consideration have good standing or high rapport with many of their employees, and promote mutual channels of communication.

In contrast, leaders with poor competency for consideration are frequently perceived as more secluded and less personal.

For structure, the idea basically boils down to, “is this leader specifying a goal that people understand and working towards it?”

The LOQ model again proposes several points that characterize structure.

• Does the leader set reasonable and timely expectations for his team?
• Is the scheduling of tasks and workflow consistent? Does the leader keep track of tasks and employee progress effectively?
• The creation of standard operating procedures or simply step-by-step instructions for complicated processes in the business.
• Communication. Which is a trait that also seems to belong in consideration, but you’re not going to get anywhere if you don’t tell people who you’re leading what you want them to do.
• The presence of constructive criticism and the consideration of new ideas. You don’t want everyone to be “yes men,” for instance.
• Giving the right tasks to the right people — delegation.

Essentially, leaders that give direction and activate their employees in efficient ways are competent structurally, while leaders that are more passive and inactive in direction are incompetent structurally.

That’s it. So you can have four possibilities in the framework of the LOQ.

• Low consideration, low structure. Nothing happens for the company.
• Low consideration, high structure. Snapchat’s the case given here. An autocratic style of management is likely to emerge. Whether that has any bearing on the company’s ability to be profitable is a different question.
• High consideration, low structure. People are happy but probably not as productive as they can be.
• High consideration, high structure. People are motivated and feel purpose in what they’re doing. Plus, they have a clear goal given to them that they feel fulfillment in working towards or achieving.

How do you think this model can be applied? Is it a bit outdated or do you think we might still be able to get some decent results simply based on the soundness of the framework?

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