The usual initiatives to engage employees are paternalistic. They merely scratch the surface because they leave the conventional heroic leadership model in place. The problem with heroic, transformational leadership is that the more heroic the leader, the more dependent employees can feel.
Much of what is called employee engagement is nothing more than old motivational factors that we have known about for at least 40 years in most cases. To take employee engagement to a higher plane, we need to recognize that there are 4 levels of employee engagement. The usual initiatives such as providing clear direction, career development, good communication and creating a great place to work are all at the first level.
The second level involves teaching employees to think of themselves as self employed suppliers of services. This means seeing their managers as customers and viewing career development as business development, something they must learn to do for themselves as opposed to the current paternalistic approach of doing it to or for them.
The third level of employee engagement means moving from heroic to a postheroic leadership model. Briefly, this means that managers need to ask questions to draw solutions out of employees instead of promoting their own ideas.
The fourth level goes a step further and recognizes bottom-up leadership. Recognizing employees as leaders when they promote new products or process improvements can make them feel that they have a real stake in the organization's future.
It's become a truism today that leaders need emotional intelligence. But this "fact" assumes that leadership means being an executive. Of course, anyone in a position of responsibility needs to be trustworthy and sensitive to the needs of stakeholders.
However, what are we to make of an important aspect of leadership, namely challenging the status quo to promote a better way? Wasn't this what Martin Luther King was doing when he challenged the US and Alabama governments to end segregation on buses?
Leadership, in my view, is badly mixed up and confused with management. For me, leadership really means promoting new directions. This is the only way to make sense of bottom-up leadership - where innovative knowledge workers promote new products. This form of leadership is based on taking risks to stand up for your convictions. Such leadership can be shown by an aggressive presentation. If you can demonstrate that your idea works, it doesn't matter if your influencing style is a bit abrasive. The bottom line, for me, is that managers need emotional intelligence but leadership does not require it. I have recently written an article spelling out this idea in more detail. If you are interested, here it is: http://www.iveybusinessjournal.com/article.asp?intArticle_ID=804
Is leadership a role, a type of influence process or a relationship? Is it a combination of all three or something else altogether? Leadership as Role
In our efforts to define leadership, it is tempting to see it as a role. Leadership is what people in certain roles do. It is a set of actions that makes them effective in that role. In a group, of whatever size, there can only be one top leader. Some organizations have two chief executive officers, but this is the exception rather than the rule. In small teams, there is only one leader. It’s not like a group of sales people, where every member can be a sales person. Being a leader in a group means being the sole occupant of a particular role. We talk about dispersed leadership but we really mean a form of sub-leadership, a hierarchy of leaders where one person is still the top dog. Such distributed leadership does little to water down the concentration of power of a conventional hierarchy. Leadership as Influence
One way of moving away from the notion that leadership means occupying a role is to see it as an influence process. On this view, leadership is shown when one individual influences others in the group to act in ways that they would not otherwise. This is an improvement but it has two problems associated with it. First, many who see leadership as influence have not moved fully away from their role-based image of leadership. When they talk about leadership as influence, they often still have in mind the person in charge of the group who is doing the influencing. They may extend leadership to informal leaders but they still see leadership as occupying a role within a group. The second problem with this way of conceptualizing leadership is that it focuses on inputs. As a result, we immediately associate leadership with a particular style of influencing, normally one that is transformational, inspiring or considerate of others.
Leadership as Relationship
There is a growing feeling that followers play a more important part in leadership effectiveness than previously thought. On this view, leadership is a relationship between leaders and followers where outcomes are not so much a matter of a leader influencing followers in a one-way fashion but a joint determination that results from ongoing, two-way influence and discussion. Two arguments for regarding leadership as a relationship are: 1. Leadership entails followers. There can be no leadership without someone following, thus they are inextricably bound together. 2. Relationship skills are increasingly acknowledged as essential requirements for effective leadership. However, there are problems with this view of leadership. First, the idea that leadership is a two-way relationship between leaders and followers rules out showing leadership to people the leader does not know. It can be argued that Martin Luther King, Jr. had a leadership impact on the general population, the U.S. Government and the Supreme Court when his protests against segregation on buses led to its being made unconstitutional. This is one of many examples where leadership is shown without there being any sort of relationship between leader and led.
It is also reasonable to feel that King and non-violent leaders like Mahatma Gandhi are still having a leadership impact on people long after they are dead. Suppose a group of activists decides to conduct non-violent protests directly as a result of studying the actions of Gandhi. Is this not a leadership impact? Clearly, no two-way relationship is possible with a dead leader. Leadership, like all forms of influence, can be carried out on a face to face basis where people directly exchange ideas and feelings or it can be done at a distance. Think of advertising for instance or the impact of reading history. We are influenced every day by people we don't know and who are long dead. The leadership as relationship model takes it for granted that leadership can only be shown within groups where people are working together to achieve a common end. This is an assumption that is open to question.
Leadership as Outcome
To say that leadership is an outcome is to say that it is only shown when followers buy the influence attempt of the person striving to show leadership. The idea that leadership means influence is on the right track. We just need to free influence from position and focus on its output rather than the input. The point of this move can be made clearer by comparing leadership to another form of influence: selling. If you were a used car salesman, you might be a master of every sales technique in the book, but if no one buys your cars then you are not making any sales. Instead, you are only making sales pitches, attempts to make sales. A sale is made when a deal is closed and not before. When we add up our profits from sales, we are talking about sales that have been closed. Similarly, there is only a leadership attempt until followers have bought the idea the leader is promoting. So, on this view, leadership is a result, an achieved effect, an impact that worked.
All of our talk about what it takes to be a leader focuses too much on inputs. This is the manufacturing mindset whereby we decide in our own heads what people want and then make it for them. The customer-focused mindset recognizes that value is in the eye of the customer. The reason that there are no universal leadership traits – not intelligence, charisma or even integrity – is that what it takes to achieve a leadership impact on a group of prospective followers is totally dependent on what is important to them.
When we focus on outcome, it makes sense to say that influencing style is purely a matter of what works with particular audience. A group of engineers, for example, might only be convinced by hard evidence even if it is delivered in a dry, uninspiring manner. This way of looking at leadership also makes sense of leadership-at-a-distance, the leadership of dead leaders, or the green leadership of people like Al Gore who might have a leadership impact on communities all over the globe without his actually meeting any of them let alone having a two-way working relationship with them.
The word “selling” is sometimes used as a synonym for “influence” although selling is strictly speaking only a particular kind of influence. But focusing on “selling” helps to make clear the fact that it is a process that comes to an end the minute the sale is closed. Yes, a good sales person will cultivate a long term relationship with customers but that does not invalidate the point that a particular sale has an end point that does not imply helping the buyer implement what has been bought. There are important implications of this fact for our understanding of leadership. Because we find it so difficult to wean ourselves off the leadership-as-position image of the leader, it is common to visualize leadership as a journey whereby the leader takes a group from point A to point B and is actively involved in achieving the goal. But when we see leadership as a successful influence outcome, a closed sale, it becomes apparent that leadership does not necessarily entail any involvement in the journey itself. Instead, we could say that leadership sells the tickets for the journey and management drives the bus to the destination. This is a reasonable way of viewing leadership even if the merits of the journey need to be resold periodically enroute.
In fact, this is the only way to make sense of leadership-at-a-distance. Such leadership is not only not a relationship between leader and led, the leader has no involvement in implementing the ideas that the followers have bought.
The Bottom Line
In a knowledge intensive, highly complex and fast changing world, business has become like guerrilla warfare where leadership is required from all employees. As the power to move organizations in new directions shifts from positional authority to the ability to devise new products and services, we need a model of leadership that is not role-based. Leadership, in the 21st century, needs to be seen as an episodic act, one that merely promotes new directions. This sort of leadership has the organizational benefit that all employees can show it even if they have no skills or interest in being a “team leader”.
For more on this way of viewing leadership, see my other Fast Company blog postings or my book: Burn! 7 Leadership Myths in Ashes, 2006.
Despite many valiant attempts to separate leadership and management, most people equate them or mix them up in one way or another. The problem is that we think of the person in charge when trying to separate leadership from management. This is like trying to differentiate sales from marketing by observing an entrepreneur who runs a small business and personally handles all aspects of sales and marketing. It’s easy to separate these functions in a large organization if for no other reason than because they are carried out by different departments. But suppose you’re a small business owner speaking to a customer about your latest product. Are you engaged in sales or marketing? We can’t tell by observing you. We would need to know your intentions, whether you were trying to build a brand or sell your product to this customer. But then, perhaps you are doing both at the same time.
So, where should we start in our efforts to differentiate leadership from management? For some leadership thinkers, it is all a matter of style. A leader is inspiring or transformational while a manager is controlling or transactional. For others, it is a matter of function. Leaders focus on change while managers preserve the status quo and “keep things ticking over.” Either way, management is a very limited, rather negative, function in the view of most leadership thinkers. As the world becomes more complex, however, we need greater specialization. As it is, leadership is overburdened and bloated while management is virtually sidelined. We need to upgrade management to give it a greater share of the work and a more constructive role to play in modern organizations.
Consider the journey metaphor as used by Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner in The Leadership Challenge. For them, leaders take their followers on a journey. One useful feature of this metaphor is that it prompts us to realize that a journey has two phases. First, followers need to be sold on the merits of undertaking the journey and, second, they need to reach the destination.
Now, we have a simple opening to differentiate leadership from management. We could say that leadership sells the tickets for the journey while management drives the bus to the destination. This move doesn’t preclude the occasional need for further injections of leadership at times during the journey if followers start to wonder why they are on this trip. Nor does it rule out one person carrying out both functions.
Crucially, however, if leadership merely sells the tickets for the journey, it’s not involved in coordinating or facilitating reaching the destination. Further, management now has a much bigger role to play. The first journey to the moon, for instance, is much more complex than merely preserving the status quo or “keeping things ticking over.” Execution of complex journeys calls for sophisticated skills, not only of coordination, but also of motivating people. And if we throw out the style approach to differentiating leadership from management, we’re free to say that both can be inspiring. We just need to say that an inspiring leader moves us to do something we wouldn’t otherwise do, like undertake this challenging journey, and an inspiring manager inspires us to put our backs into reaching the destination. Examples of Leadership Without Management
To strengthen our case for restricting leadership to selling the tickets for the journey, we need to find examples where leadership is shown to a group of people but without the person showing it having anything to do with execution and without even being recognized as the group’s leader, even informally.
Martin Luther King, Jr. had a leadership impact on the U.S. Supreme Court when his demonstrations against segregation on buses led that organization to rule such discrimination unconstitutional.
Mahatma Gandhi’s protests led Britain to grant independence to India.
Jack Welch’s requirement that all GE businesses be first or second in their markets led other companies around the globe to follow his example.
Green leaders such as Al Gore could have a leadership impact on communities in far-flung places that he has never visited.
A front-line knowledge worker convinces top management to adopt a new product thereby showing bottom-up leadership.
Apple led the way for Microsoft in developing the graphical user interface.
These examples of leadership share three critically important features:
The leaders were not even members, let alone in charge of, the groups that followed.
They had no involvement in managing the implementation of their proposals.
Their leadership was based on pure influence, not decision making.
These features are vitally important because they illustrate how leadership is possible in situations where those showing it have no managerial authority or position within the affected groups. Their leadership amounted to showing or promoting a better way, not to making decisions, either for or with the affected groups. In each case, leadership amounted to no more than selling the tickets for a journey. Leadership stopped once the tickets were bought. Those who signed up for the journey managed getting to the destination on their own.
Actually, the same is true of leading by example. Suppose you’re an exceptionally good retail sales associate and you’ve just joined a new retail store where the sales and customer service skills of your colleagues are not even in your league. Suppose, without attempting to have a leadership impact on your new colleagues, you simply go about serving customers as you have always done. You’re so much more successful in winning sales that your colleagues gradually start following your example. So, you have shown leadership by example without explicitly taking charge, organizing or directing the efforts of your colleagues. Furthermore, suppose you are quite disorganized and completely uninterested in being a manager because you enjoy selling so much. Thus, you may never be in charge of a team or even recognized as an informal leader within one (bearing in mind that an informal leader in the conventional sense is someone who is granted a certain ongoing authority by a team to make decisions for it and direct its efforts to some extent). As a result, your leadership is simply an influence process. It has nothing to do with facilitating a journey, nothing to do with managing others and nothing to do with execution.
The Bottom Line
The most important form of leadership in this discussion is bottom-up leadership. Organizations that compete on the basis of rapid innovation desperately need to foster more of this type of leadership. But, the only way to make sense of such leadership is to see it as doing nothing more than selling the tickets for a journey. After all, front line knowledge workers would not be recognized as even the informal leader, in the conventional sense, of the senior management team. And, the latter might manage the implementation of the knowledge worker’s ideas through other people if they don’t see this employee as an effective manager of people or projects.
Leadership and management are clearly differentiated in this way, even if one person carries out both functions. However, it is quite possible to operate in one function and not the other. By getting rid of the totally dysfunctional style approach to differentiating leadership and management, we are also free to say that leadership does not need to be inspiring or visionary. It can be factual or evidence-based, as it often is in technical or scientific organizations, such as R & D or health care. We have backed ourselves into a dead end by requiring leaders to be inspiring. The only reason this way of thinking developed is because of our tendency to think in binary terms. The early history of writing on leadership and management talked about task versus people styles which later morphed into transactional versus transformational.
In conclusion, leadership is an influence process that shows or promotes a better way. This means it has nothing to do with making decisions for the follower group. Management works through two processes: decision making and facilitation. This means that management can be strategic, not merely operational. Any strategic decision is a management decision, by definition. Leaders promote new strategies; managers decide on them. Also, using facilitative skills in brainstorming sessions, managers can preside over a very innovative, rapidly changing organization. So much for preserving the status quo or just “keeping things ticking over.” Leadership, however, does not decide or facilitate. It promotes new ideas, challenges the status quo and shows the way to a better future.
The idea of heroic leadership has become something of a dinosaur in recent thinking. When people attack this notion, they have in mind senior executives who think they have all the answers, who take all the credit and who call the shots without consulting colleagues. This is a rather self-centred, egotistical or narcissistic image.
The “new leader” is supposed to be humble, such as the level 5 leaders discussed by Jim Collins in his book Good to Great. New leaders are supposed to be participative. They work closely with people to decide new directions, recognizing that they don’t have all the answers.
Something about leadership has been lost in this new version, however. People are naturally hero worshippers. Think only of sports heroes. Then there are movie and rock stars, not to mention charismatic politicians. Hero worship can be a bad thing, as in cult worship, but people also need role models, people they can aspire to be like.
What is a hero, anyway? Someone who accomplishes extraordinary feats is greatly admired even if not necessarily a hero. The key seems to be taking risks, especially if the hero’s life is at risk. Someone who rescues people from a burning building or a war zone is normally considered a hero. But we also draw a distinction between everyday and super heroes, so being heroic seems to admit of degrees.
The problem with heroic leadership, however, is that the conventional concept of leadership is badly confused with management. There is certainly little or no room for heroic management. If we define management as coordinating the efforts of others to get work done through them, then managers are like orchestra conductors. Clearly, a conductor cannot perform a symphony alone. An effective conductor is one who gets the best out of every player in the orchestra and who facilitates an outcome that is somehow greater than the sum of its parts. Sure, there are some egotistical conductors but they need to be great facilitators and motivators too. They can’t do it alone.
What sorts of risks do great leaders take, risks that could make us see them as heroes? Clear examples that come to mind are people like Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. These three leaders had very different styles but they all challenged the status quo. King challenged various levels of government and the general public to eliminate segregation on buses, among other things. Gandhi challenged the British government to grant independence to India and Mandela challenged the white government in South Africa to give up their hold on power.
Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, in their popular book, The Leadership Challenge, present 5 ways in which leadership is shown. One of these is called “challenging the process.” This sounds like challenging the status quo, but they equivocate on this principle by telling us that leaders do not so much directly challenge the process as make it possible for others to do so. But, this equivocation only arises because Kouzes and Posner have no place at all for management in their account of leadership. A constructive place for a facilitative, empowering and inspiring form of management could allow them to clearly state that leaders do in fact challenge the status quo.
The Bottom Line
Leadership needs to be reinvented. We need to bring back challenging the status quo to promote a better way as a defining feature of leadership. This means leaving everything to do with getting things done through people to a reinvented concept of management.
As a result, we can again see leadership as potentially heroic. The heroism of leadership, however, can range from the everyday promotion by front-line employees of relatively low risk changes in how things are done to high risk forms of advocacy that put the leader’s life on the line. By contrast, management cannot be heroic for the same reasons that proponents of "new" leadership cite: no one executive has all the answers. Both heroic and unheroic leadership can be focused on a very narrow, specific issue. It is easier to be heroic, however, when the task at hand is not so complex that it takes a large team of specialists to get their heads around it. Heroism requires quick decisions and it normally occurs in rather black and white situations where the only question is whether someone has the courage to act. Managers, by contrast, have to deal with very complex organizational issues. Like orchestra conductors, they need to integrate a large number of diverse inputs into a coherent, unified output.
For more on my somewhat unconventional views on leadership, see my other Fastcompany blog postings or my book: Burn! 7 Leadership Myths in Ashes, 2006.
Leadership and selling are both forms of influence. They differ primarily in the fact that selling is self-interested. It’s a way of making a living. The salesperson is interested in making money by selling products or services. Leadership also influences people to do things they might not do otherwise, but is not self-interested. For example, a green leader like Al Gore promotes more environmentally friendly living by pointing to the benefits for the environment. He is not selling a product to make a living.
But all forms of influence, including leading and selling, also share another characteristic. They come to an end once the deal is closed. This is easiest to see with selling. If you buy a used car, the salesperson’s efforts to make the sale, to influence you to buy, are over the moment you sign on the dotted line. Out of courtesy, the salesperson might continue to be friendly until you leave the showroom, but he could just as easily start answering his phone and looking around for other customers to serve even while you are signing your life away. In other words, selling comes to an end once the buyer has bought the product. In construction or other consulting work, the person selling the contract helps the client implement the service, i.e. by building the bridge that the client has agreed to pay for. Although the contractor might make an effort to maintain a good relationship with the client for the sake of future business, the sale of the present contract was over the minute the client signed the deal.
This fact about selling can help us see leadership in a new way. Conventional theories of leadership associate leadership with influence but it is also associated with being the person in charge of the group. This person not only sells the need to do something different, he or she also coordinates and facilitates the achievement of the objective. Execution of the goal that the leader has advocated is not just an add-on, but part of the very meaning of leadership. On this view, leaders not only influence people to strive towards achieving a target, they also help them get there.
However, if we stick more closely to what it means to influence people, selling a used car just being one form of influence, then we have to say that, if leadership really is a form of influence too, then it also must come to an end once the intended followers have bought the leader’s proposal. Take another example of influence. If you are trying to persuade your children to eat their broccoli, as soon as they start eating it, you can stop persuading them and finish eating your own meal. You don’t need to keep persuading them. This is a fundamental truth about influence. Yes, if you want people to keep doing something over an extended period of time, something they are not keen on doing, you might need to keep influencing them until the task is finished. But if you want people to undertake a short-term, brief act like buying a car or eating vegetables, the influence process comes to an end once the target party has taken action.
The bottom line
If we agree that leadership, like other forms of influence, comes to an end once the target audience agrees to act, then we have a great rationale and method for separating leadership from management. We simply say that leadership sells the need to act while management takes care of execution. The implication of this move is that leadership has nothing to do with managing people or getting things done. This is management’s job. Why should we want to limit leadership to merely selling the tickets for the journey? Because this is the only way to develop a general theory of leadership that covers all cases of leadership. Consider the following examples of leadership that do not involve the individual who shows leadership having anything to do with execution:
· Martin Luther King, Jr. had a leadership impact on the U.S. Supreme Court when that body ruled segregation on buses to be unconstitutional as a result of King’s protest marches and speeches. · A front-line knowledge worker succeeds in persuading top management to adopt a new product thereby showing bottom-up leadership. · Jack Welch’s emphasis on the importance of being number one or two in a market influenced companies around the globe to do likewise. · Apple Computer’s innovative graphical user interface influenced Microsoft to develop a similar interface called Windows.
Clearly, Martin Luther King did not manage any part of the U.S. Supreme Court so he had nothing to do with implementing what he was advocating. The same is true of the other examples which clearly demonstrate how it is possible to show leadership without being involved in implementation. These instances of leadership, like car sales, come to an end once followers follow suit. In the case of Jack Welch, he wasn’t trying to show leadership to the world, just to GE, but leadership happened because other companies followed his lead. Similarly, Apple didn’t even want a competitor following their lead, but Microsoft is a good follower so leadership was shown to them in this instance.
What can we say, in general, about such leadership. The only thing these disparate instances of leadership have in common is that they show the way, they point to a better or new way of doing something. It is a form of influence that, like all forms of influence, has nothing to do with managing anyone or getting things done through people.
So, what? Well, the reason this shift in perspective is important is that we are now in a knowledge driven age where companies are fighting a war of ideas, where innovation is the key to success. This means that leadership needs to shift from the notion of getting things done through people to what we might instead call thought leadership, the promotion of a better idea. Growing complexity requires increasing specialization. We need to divide the executive role into separate subfunctions. This means upgrading management so it is seen as a more positive, empowering, inspiring and nurturing function, not just a controlling one. Also, we need to see employees who promote new products as showing leadership even if they have no inclination or ability to take charge of anyone in a managerial sense. This can be a powerful way of fostering better employee engagement, motivation and retention.
“Leaders” can’t fully empower employees as long as we continue to associate leadership with position, whether senior executive or “team leader”. Organizations desperately need to empower employees more fully in order to foster more innovation faster. But they won’t get as far as they need to until they start recognizing that front-line knowledge workers who promote new products are showing bottom-up leadership and that the role of the person in charge is to be a facilitator, coach, developer, catalyst or enabler. The key point here is that these support roles must be recast as managerial, where management is properly upgraded to encompass such activity. We must rid ourselves of the currently popular myth that these ways of behaving constitute leadership.
Here is why “leaders” (in the conventional sense) cannot fully empower employees. The problem is that our conventional concept of leadership is paternalistic and disempowering at its very core. To see this, think of one of the colloquial uses of the word “leadership” – what a tour guide does. Suppose you are with a group of tourists in a foreign country and you have signed up for a guided tour. When the group is fully assembled, you say to your tour guide: “OK, we are all here. Lead the way. We are in your hands.” The clear implication of this request is that the tourists are powerless to find their own way and, thus, totally dependent on the “leader” to guide them. The tour guide might “empower” them to stop occasionally to visit some shops along the route, but this is pretty minimal empowerment and it doesn’t lessen the group’s dependency on the tour guide to lead them throughout the tour and get them back to their starting point safely.
The bottom line is that our popular concept of leadership creates a feeling of dependency in employees. It is not entirely the manager’s fault. Employees are equally to blame. They collude with their managers in creating the expectation that being in charge means knowing where you are going and how to get there. Being a leader, in the conventional sense, means having some magical insight into the future that will guide us to a better world. This is a colossal myth and we need to get rid of it. Today, we recognize that those in charge don’t have all the answers because the world has become too complex. Hence, why new concepts of leadership are emerging thick and fast from every direction. We have shared leadership, relational leadership and level 5 leadership, to name a few. All of these new ideas are based on the recognition that no one person has all the answers and that new directions need to be decided by groups working and thinking together.
So far so good, but all of this is just a half-way house because we can’t seem to let go of the comforting myth that the “leader” is someone who has a special insight into reality that the rest of us lack. We won’t fully rid ourselves of the paternalistic overtones of conventional leadership with its associated dependency until we can bring ourselves to stop calling executives leaders. The truth is that they are managers, where management has been suitably reinvented to make it a supportive function rather than a narrowly controlling one. Think of the managers of sports people like Tiger Woods, for example, if that helps.
Leadership also needs to be reinvented. If leadership can be shown bottom-up by knowledge workers who champion new products or more efficient processes, then we need to define leadership as being nothing more than showing or promoting a better way. It is critical to notice that promoting a new product to senior management has no implication that the knowledge worker will be involved in implementation. Leadership thus comes to an end once the target audience buys the need to change. Crucially, this concept of leadership is totally separate from management.
This is not to say that executives cannot show leadership. But there is a world of difference between “showing leadership” and “being a leader.” In the former case you are engaged in an occasional activity. In the latter you are something by virtue of who you are or the role you occupy. This is a dominating, ongoing position rather than an occasional activity. Executives show leadership by promoting change. As soon as they switch to getting the change implemented by working through people, they have donned a managerial hat. If there is resistance during implementation, then the executive can provide a further, one-shot injection of leadership, but most of the work associated with execution requires effective management, not leadership. Everything to do with motivating and coordinating the people who execute the change needs to be seen as good management, not leadership.
More fully empowering employees doesn't mean letting them make fundamental directional decisions. It's about recognizing them as showing leadership, which is about influence. Senior executives, accountable to shareholders, need to decide among the proposals made via bottom-up leadership. Executives are effectively customers or investors in this context. But making decisions on any bottom-up proposals is management, not leadership. Because leadership entails influence, all decision making is managerial action. Top level decision making is only mistaken for leadership because conventional leadership is a confused mixture of management and leadership. Thus, pushing leadership downward must be done in conjunction with reframing it as an influence process, not a decision making one.
Benefits of Reframing Leadership and Management
The largest benefit of this shift in perspective is greater empowerment for all employees. This is a huge culture change, however. Neither executives nor employees have created the mess we currently call leadership. It stems from our biological drive to form ourselves into hierarchies of power, but this form of organization has zero survival advantage in a world that has become so complex and fast changing. This is because, in a war of ideas, the power to lead organizations has shifted from what it takes to gain the top slot to the power to think creatively and develop new products. Leadership needs to shift accordingly.
To rid ourselves of this debilitating culture, employees need to be supported to cast off their dependency, their fear of thinking for themselves and their reluctance to challenge their managers. Simultaneously, managers need to become more receptive to upward influence. Employees who promote a better way should be inspired by the thought that they are showing leadership rather than just making timid suggestions for the real leaders to decide upon. This is what organizations that depend on rapid innovation need to start doing if they seriously want to inspire, engage and retain their core talent.
For more on this way of viewing leadership and management, see my other FastCompany blogs or my book: Burn: 7 Leadership Myths in Ashes, 2006.
You may need charisma to get elected to high office, but there is such a thing as small scale local leadership. For example, a technical expert could promote a new product idea to her colleagues by demonstrating how it works or by making a hard-hitting factual case for it. Our concept of leadership is totally distorted by our narrow focus on business and political leadership - what it means to get appointed to high office. Style is only a situational matter. You may need to be inspiring if you are advocating a fundamental change in people's values or way of life, but lots of examples of leadership in business are far more mundane, that is, if you define leadership as simply influencing people to think or act differently regardless of their position.
Everyone wants to be a leader. No one wants to be a manager. Why is leadership glorified and management reviled? Someone said that you can manage things but only lead people. Leadership, as a result, is overburdened. It’s like saying get rid of marketing; sales can handle both functions. Where did we get this negative attitude toward management and how can we rid ourselves of it? Management’s fall from grace happened in the late 70’s when the U.S. was reeling from the shock of the Japanese commercial invasion. A scapegoat was needed and management was fingered for this role for being bureaucratic, controlling and risk averse. Management was said to stifle innovation, to preserve the status quo. The solution was to kill off management, to replace managers with leaders. Needing something to blame, we threw the baby out with the bath water instead of upgrading management
Earlier, very little effort was made to distinguish management from leadership. Instead we debated the merits of various styles. A common theme kept emerging – task versus people orientation. You could initiate structure or show consideration for people, be theory X (people are not responsible) or theory Y (people are responsible). You could be transformational or transactional. The former meant being inspiring while the latter merely exchanged rewards for work done. After the Japanese invasion, management got tarred with the bad guy side of these pairings while leadership was awarded the good guy role. Now we say that leaders are people orientated and inspirational while managers are task focused, controlling and mechanical. What was once a mere matter of style became a way to differentiate leadership from management. It is time to correct this error and bring management back from the dead.
As I see it, leaders use influence to convince people to change direction, while management takes care of implementation. On this view, both leaders and managers can be inspiring. One inspires us to change direction while the other inspires us to work harder. In my last two posts, I explained how I define leadership. In my view, leadership just sells the tickets for the journey while management drives the bus to the destination. This means that managers, seen as empowering, enabling and supportive coaches, take care of everything to do with managing people and implementation.
Actually, it's not quite this simple. I said that leaders influence people to change direction. Managers can preside over a rapidly changing organization as well either by deciding new directions or by facilitating a decision making process that leads to new directions being decided by the group. So, management can operate in either of these modes - decision making or facilitation. Managers are also catalysts, coaches, coordinators and developers of people. They show leadership when they influence people or persuade them to change direction and only then. On this view, management can do much more than merely maintain the status quo or "keep things ticking over."
Management is like investment. Managers have resources to invest – their own time, talent and human resources. The goal (function) of management is to get the best return on such resources. This doesn’t imply being mechanical or narrowly controlling. The manager’s style is a personal or situational matter and it has evolved over time. With highly skilled and self-motivated knowledge workers, the manager must be very empowering. Where the workforce is less skilled or not very motivated, the manager may need to monitor output more closely. Skilled managers know how to flex their style, coach and motivate diverse employees.
For more on this way of viewing leadership and management see my book, Burn: 7 Leadership Myths in Ashes, 2006
In my view, we need to reinvent leadership for our digital age. The power to move people is switching to ideas because of the increasing role of innovation. We need to move away from leadership-as-position.
For me, leadership is an influence process and an impact. To see this, it helps to think about other influence processes. Take selling. It is also a process and an impact. The process of selling only leads to a sale if someone buys your product, otherwise it is merely an attempted sale. I use the word "impact" rather than relationship because, you can obviously sell things to people you never meet, as on ebay or through TV advertising.
We have a distorted concept of leadership because we focus exclusively on the business model where the leader is the boss and the followers are subordinates. But, as I discussed in my last post, you can show leadership as an outsider, such as when an independent green leader like Al Gore advocates green policies and a company with which he has no involvement decides to follow his lead. This is a perfect illustration of the point that leadership is a one-way impact.
Of course, if you are trying unsuccessfully to sell something, you might be influenced to modify your sales pitch based on the reaction of your prospective customers. But each new attempt you make to sell your product to these prospects, is still a one-way pitch that is either accepted or rejected. When someone buys, you have made an impact on them, you have achieved a result.
The beauty of this way of looking at leadership is that it becomes a very transient, occasional event, like selling or any other form of influence. Now, we can say that everyone can show some leadership occasionally. Say, for example, that you have no inclination to be a manager and don't have the organizational or interpersonal skills to get appointed to such a position anyway, even informally. But you could still show occasional leadership by working smarter, by setting an example for your colleagues or by making a suggestion that they adopt.
This is important because we need to find new ways of fostering innovation. It takes empowerment a big step forward if we can call front-line knowledge workers leaders when they convince top management to adopt a new product.
Isn't this just what everyone is already calling dispersed, distributed or shared leadership? No, these ideas are really just old wine in new bottles. They are talking about what everyone has always called "informal leadership" - which is virtually the same as conventional formal leadership except for the source of the person's authority. Formal and informal leadership are the same in that they both entail taking charge of people and helping them achieve a goal. My concept of leadership STOPS once the target audience accepts the need to change. It has nothing to do with taking charge or implementation. It needs to stop there, otherwise we can't make sense of how it is possible to show leadership to people you have never met, where you then obviously can't take charge of them or help them achieve a goal. Clearly bottom up leadership doesn't entail a front-line knowledge worker becoming even an informal leader, in the conventional sense of this term, over the senior executive team.
In conclusion, leadership, like all influence, including selling, is a one-off, one-way impact that, like selling, doesn't require you to hold a position of any kind to do it.
For more on this way of viewing leadership, see my book, Burn: 7 Leadership Myths in Ashes, 2006.
