Emerging leadership in organizations can be developed, suppressed or ignored. Unfortunately, rather than encourage the emergence of leadership, it is often not considered, or even worse, suppressed.
Leadership, as distinguished from management, is present when unprecedented results are produced through a process of committing to a vision of the future, enrolling others into committing to that vision, identifying barriers and breakdowns obstructing its realization, and creating breakthroughs.
In my career, I have assumed responsibility for leading already existing organizations several times. In one case, the executive I replaced was the only person in the organization who had the overall picture of what was going on. He was the one that met one-on-one with his boss to present status. His staff meetings consisted of his asking questions and handing out detailed assignments. His direct reports were rarely asked to recommend a course of action. Not surprisingly, when he was asked to put together a list of people in the company who could replace him, none of the people who reported to him were on the list.
In another situation, I succeeded a manager who had trained his people to bring him virtually every decision. In my first week on the job, I was told several times how glad people were that I was there because there were lots of decisions to be made and having the top job open had delayed progress. At one point during the first week, I was ushered into a very large conference room full of people and led to the one empty chair. The group then proceeded to present a list of decisions that needed to be made regarding the projects they were working on. When I asked them why they were bringing these to the new kid on the block, the answer was “Our previous bosses always did it this way.”
The managers in these examples had trained their people to look to the person at the top for direction about what to do. The boss made all the important (and in some cases unimportant) decisions. The boss was responsible so the people did not have to be. Even worse, the people were not permitted to be responsible for very much. In both cases, the people who reported to these bosses were not given much authority or opportunities to demonstrate leadership. Rather, they were simply assigned tasks. In the extreme, they were micromanaged.
Because people who are managed this way are generally uninformed about the big picture, they are unable to see opportunities for synergy with other parts of their organization. If the boss did not see an opportunity, no one in the organization who did see one had the chance to make a difference.
Years ago in a company I worked with, the CEO stated in a large management meeting that the organization was too large and diverse to be managed centrally. Subsequently, in a small meeting where his assertion was disputed, his retort was “None of you can see what I see from the top, and I am the only one that can see it.” He would not even listen to the ideas of a group of smart people in a private meeting. It was no wonder that this CEO got replaced shortly thereafter by someone who subsequently proved him wrong.
Managers (I hesitate to call them leaders) who operate like the ones in my examples do not create a climate conducive to the development of leaders. Running organizations in the ways described suppresses the expression of leadership. This series of articles describes concrete steps toward encouraging and developing the leadership capabilities of the people in organizations. It is written primarily for people who lead or aspire to lead organizations.
Leadership and Speaking
Developing leaders in an organization will occur when the boss creates the right environment. The first way to do this is to take people at their word. I once took over an organization where I had to present project status periodically to my management in headquarters. In preparing for my first report, I had the people who worked for me present their status to me. A few days later when I returned from headquarters, all of my direct reports were standing outside my office and asked to see the slides I had used in my status report. When I said that I had simply used the slides that they had presented to me, they were astounded. “Our old boss never used our slides. He always made his own version,” they said. I told them that I expected them to stand behind what they told me, and that I would stand behind it too. That was why I had used their slides.
Another example was when I was a manager on the IBM corporate technical staff. The staff was populated with young, high-potential people around 30 years old who, up to that point in their career, had been at most middle managers. Their time on the staff was largely a test of their abilities and potential; and, after a one to two year assignment, they would be promoted if they measured up.
New people were assigned to cover a specific product area of the company, one outside their prior experience. They would then visit the associated engineering locations and get familiar with their future plans. Twice yearly when each product area presented its plans to the top corporate management, the corporate staffs were expected to concur with these plans or raise issues. The person assigned the area would discuss what they found with the technical staff executive, a man named Bob Evans. He would always ask if there were any issues, and invariably the new staff person would describe problems that had been found. Bob would immediately pick up the phone and call the executive in charge of the associated product area to say that the staff had issues and would need to negotiate solutions. It was always fun to watch the face of a rookie when this happened to them for the first time. The young person would then be sent to negotiate.
After a few weeks he or she would usually come back with a resolution. In many cases, when a new person did this and showed the Bob what they had negotiated, he would say “not good enough.”
You had to watch what you said around Bob Evans because he always took you at your word. And, he would not let you get away with not saying anything at all. People either grew out of the experience or failed. Nearly all of them got the point and grew as leaders.
The point is that a mark of leaders is that what they say has meaning, that there is commitment behind it. Bob Evans was a living example of this and expected the same from every person he worked with. We all got bigger around him.
To put it a different way, the first quality of a leader is that her/his word always means something. There is commitment and integrity behind it. Further, leaders expect those around them to behave the same way. Around leaders, talk is not cheap.
Read more…
Part 2: Leadership and Delegation
Part 3: Leadership and Listening
Part 5: Leading and Organizational Culture
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