Many observers have noted that leadership, as viewed from some of the modern leadership movement’s many corners, is bound up with people and the relationships between them, if you can imagine that. Indeed, one such thinker has enthused that it should really be called “peoplership.”
This aspect of leadership covers a wide range of loosely related ideas about what leaders do, such as trusting people, involving people, coaching and training them, or building teams and teamwork. More generally, it identifies leadership as principally being about motivating, inspiring, and energizing employees.
Is that persuasive to you? Do you accept the proposition that the central function of leadership is, essentially, cheerleading? Do you see a board of directors, for example, eager to have a real leader as CEO, putting the call out for someone who can trust people?
How about the motivational side of this collection of presumptively central leadership functions? Inspiration is a major theme in the liturgy of leadership. But my concern about that is that if you come to work to be inspired by your leader, rather than by your work, then everyone has real problems that will be surfacing soon enough.
Training staff and building teamwork seems more reasonable. It certainly serves the purposes of developing capability and establishing a functionally collaborative work environment enabling joint action in pursuit of corporate goals.
But that’s pretty close to the textbook definition of management. It seems pretty clear that whatever elements of it that might be established – or even just informally viewed – as leadership are, at least in this context, intimately bound up with management. Moreover, they are elements of management which managers use as a perfectly ordinary and routine, albeit important, subcomponent of their work.
In the stampede to cobble together the exalted calling of individual leadership, some pretty flimsy stuff has been startled out of the underbrush. This group is clearly among them.
If you want to be an effective manager – indeed, if you must, a leader in the more business-like sense of the term – you will do well to avoid such effusively celebratory, and marginally meaningful, depictions of leadership. Spend more time thinking about essential functions at work in your organization, and less about yourself as the exalted functionary. Take the focus off of yourself, and put it on the job at hand; you’ll discover that you and your reputation will both do fine.
Next week we will briefly turn this conversation in another direction before bringing it to a close. But first, tomorrow we will cover one more group of characteristics widely seen as distinctly leadership functions – see you then!
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Today’s tip: Speaking of incautious conclusions drawn from peculiar examples of what is imagined to be leadership, consider this list of the 10 Brainiest Places to Retire. The evidence for one is that its residents are inclined to attend such functions as the “screening of a film on urban organic farming in Cuba. . .” That’s just one end of the spectrum; see the item for other retirement activities you may find more stimulating.
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4 Comments
Hey Jim. I completely agree that the inspiration part is more hype than substance. But I do think that there is a huge “people” component to leadership, although that’s partially because my bias is towards the people issues in organizations anyway. It’s not about inspiration for me, but there is a big part of creating a space where the people can learn and grow continuously. That’s not easy and it’s a huge part of organizational success.
First, we must understand what leadership is and that can only be done by examining how followers operate, not the leaders.
Leadership exists in a workplace because followers are always following and they constitute a large majority of the workforce, perhaps as much as 95%.
What do they follow? They follow what they experience, actually the value standards reflected in what they experience. Most of what the employee experiences is the support or lack thereof provided by management – such as training, tools, parts, discipline, direction, material, procedures, rules, technical advice, documentation, information, etc. If these reflect very high standards of all values, employee performance will be very high.
Leadership is not a process any manager can change. It happens inexorably every minute of every day because of the way people are. The only choice available to a manager is the standard (good, bad, mediocre or in between) which people will follow.
Unfortunately, most managers use the top-down command and control approach to managing people. Top-down concentrates on producing goals, targets, visions, orders and other directives in order to control the workforce and thereby achieve organizational success. Thus, top-down treats employees like robots in the “shut up and listen, I know better than you” mode, and rarely if ever listens to them.
Since top-down demeans and disrespects employees it sends them very negative value standard messages. The standards reflected in this treatment “lead” employees to treat their work, their customers, each other and their bosses with the same level of disrespect they received. This is the road to very poor corporate performance as compared to the results that would be achieved using a better approach. Top-down managers are their own worst enemies.
Best regards, Ben
Author “Leading People to be Highly Motivated and Committed”
Hello Jamie,
I agree that people and relationships are a core area of concentration for management. My concern is that they not become the central idea of some form of “leadership” that is focused on the individual supposedly providing it and/or that is only tangentially related to the work at hand.
I think your observation that it is important to create “a space where the people can learn and grow continuously” is on the mark – particularly when you, as you did, harness it to organizational success. That’s a major part of what effective managers do: create an environment which facilitates the – sustainable – success of their organizations.
And isn’t it the truth that it’s not easy!
Thanks for your visit, and for the depth you’ve added to the discussion!
Hello Bennet,
Thank you for your visit and your very interesting observations. I would like to remark on a couple of them:
To begin with, my view of leadership ultimately removes it from singular – and even exclusive or limited numbers of – people, placing it elsewhere altogether. Accordingly, I am uncomfortable with the word “follower” since it typically suggests (according to the modern leadership movement) the cultivation of some sort of amorphous mass of people trained to be specially in tune with the unique leader at the top, in order to best express the “musings,” as one guru puts it, of that person.
But that doesn’t really seem to me to be the way you are using it here. It appears that you refer to them as staff, awaiting direction, and the tools and training to implement it. Thus, your excellent reference to their experience as employees consisting in how well those expectations are met by management. That is an excellent perspective from which to approach one of the key duties of management.
You note that management can’t change leadership, which I take to mean that “leaders” can’t simply make pronouncements which unfold throughout an organization, spreading enlightenment and inspiration in their wake. Rather, you seem to identify it (leadership) as something that is inherent in and arising from the workplace itself, which managers can only influence.
I’m with you on that, also. You’ve drawn some interesting conclusions from your experience and observations in the Navy and elsewhere. I encourage viewers to click over to your site and visit your depiction of how you came to them.
In the meanwhile, I certainly hope you’ll stay with the conversation and continue to drop in with your thinking now and then!
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