In the last few decades many giants of industries have undergone high-profile dismissals of their most senior executives.
Each of these circumstances was unique, according to John Costa, but he opines that they collectively point to a widespread desperation to bring a redefined leadership to bear on an ill-defined business climate. John Kotter observed recently that many companies in contemporary times “suffer from being over-managed and under-led.” In other words, many people still assume that leadership is only an advanced form of management.
Leadership comes from authenticity and requires above all unflinching self-assessment and self-knowledge. Real leaders have followers and treat those followers as allies. Real leaders focus on the future but work hard to learn from the past. Real leaders place the good of the whole above their personal fate. Real leaders hold themselves and their associates accountable for results. Real leaders listen.
According to Stephen Covey, leadership really is the enabling art. “The purpose of schools is educating kids, but if you have bad leadership, you have bad education. The purpose of medicine is helping people get well, but if you have bad leadership, you have bad medicine. Illustration after illustration could show that leadership is the highest of the arts, simply because it enables all the other arts and professions to work.”
Covey also reminds us that we live in a knowledge worker age, but we “operate our organisations in a controlling Industrial Age model that absolutely suppresses the release of human potential.”
It is one of the ironies of human nature that leaders are often the last to understand the need for change. Historian Barbara Tuchman gives several graphic examples of leaders and institutions that stubbornly persisted in mistaken strategic behaviour, even when it was obvious that this action would finally undermine the whole organisation. She gives one example as when the United States persisted in fighting Vietnam even after the resolve of the enemy was clearly understood; ideology became the victim of practicality. In Tuchman’s analysis, these are examples of folly, of “policy pursued contrary to ultimate self-interest.”
Folly, as the opposite of wisdom, Costa believes, represents the denial of new connections and interdependencies, rather than their synthesis and interpretation. He believes that the growing gap between the compensation for employees and management is one expression of leadership folly. Although a few executives have earned the respect of their employees, most directors and senior executives have granted themselves increases in compensation regardless of performance. This general trend has exacerbated the alienation of many employees who longer in organisations. Increasingly, it also raises the indignation of shareholders and board members. “Such misjudgment at the top proves that although the language of business is now of collaboration, the behaviour to often remains elitist and authoritative.”
These fixed attitudes about authority are slowly changing as more single-minded businesses are recognising that there is no protection against accelerating pace of global competition and are beginning to understand all their stakeholders need each other. Companies in conditions of interdependence need a leadership that builds bridges, creates commonalities, and achieves a balanced sense of proportion in everything from executive salaries to risk-taking. So where is organisational leadership going from the current interpretation of leadership art?
Seductiveness
The very nature of doing business is changing. Where once the game simply involved beating the competition, today success requires interactions with other companies, suppliers, and sometimes even competition. This is already obvious. In future, companies will compete for fewer resources – be it natural, human, technological, or capital. In this world of growing scarcity, the leader will succeed not by driving organisations, but by “seducing” the talent and resources needed for that company.
The mobility of the “knowledge worker” described by Peter Drucker will continue to shift the power in business from those who have the money and jobs to those who have the ideas, knowledge, and creativity. This reversal requires leadership that, instead of granting privilege of employment, will seek the privilege of engaging best employees.
Fast Learning
Many top executives have usually ascended to their position by accumulating important knowledge and experience, and by demonstrating the ability to motive other people to follow their ideas and directions. In the knowledge economy, it is increasingly impractical and undesirable for the leader to be the grand and ultimate repository of information. Nor, with the complexity in the marketplace, is it feasible for the leader alone to be the source of the “big idea.”
The notion of leadership as a “library” will give way to the concept of leadership as “laboratory.” This will be scary for many. For the past decades, leaders have been talking in visionary terms, but for the most part behaving introspectively. Results have been achieved through consolidation and cost-cutting, sharpening only the reductive skills of productivity enhancement.
When creating value through knowledge, the expertise of efficiency is less important than that of catalyst. Fast change, quick innovation, and constant experimentation will be imperative because, just as the medium is the message, the company is now the product. This means that top management will need to be as good at learning as they are at judging, as willing to experiment with structure and strategy as they are at launching new products.
Provide Morality
There is wide acknowledgement that “top-down” decision-making is too time consuming and onerous is today’s fast-moving economy. As befits the mold created by business heroes, leaders must “set the standard,” inspire “the troops,” and then “get out of the way.” While the demands of customisation require ever-deeper, more genuine delegation, the one aspect of management that may remain in the realm of dictate is setting moral principles. “Moral clarity is the generative energy needed for real vision.” It is the essence of what the leader provides.
The autonomy of empowerment must be moderated by a heightened sense of morality. The greater the autonomy for the individual manager, the more explicit and demanding must be the moral direction imposed by the leader. It may seem contradictory to argue that senior executives should tighten their grip on the moral structure of the company at the same time that they are loosening the reigns of traditional power. However, while a they cannot anticipate and guide every business decision made by subordinates, the clarity of moral expectation ensures that the spirit of the vision set by the leaders is upheld in every eventuality.
To earn the right to set such standards, leaders must also set the example. They must live, as well as define, the vision. Prof Robert House believes that the most effective people in spearheading change are those “driven by the satisfaction of building the organisation, seeing people develop, and accomplishing things through others.” The traditional motivations of money and position are secondary. Although the sense of practicing what is preached is obvious, the wisdom to so remains rare. “That may be because values have been embraced for their optics rather than from deeply held personal conviction.”
Eventually wisdom involves empathy. “If you wish to transform and elevate people, sympathy and preaching are not enough, because both compel the listener to concede the falseness of how he has been living until now. The first requirement is empathy. Only when a person senses that you identify with his circumstances and understand his truth will he be open to change.”
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