Are we looking for the right qualities in our leaders?
 

Photo: www.lumaxart.com

Suppose someone asked you to list the most important qualities you want find in any genuine leader. What would you say? Toughness? Authority? Decisiveness, perhaps? Tenacity? You could make a case for all of these. Today’s conventional thinking about leadership tends to stress the more active, resolute qualities in a leader. Leaders are expected to get results and remain effective under the constant pressure of reeling markets.

What I want to suggest to you is a little different. The qualities of the strong, Hollywood-style leader may make for good newspaper copy, but they aren’t the ones that will create the kind of leader we really need today.

They are too superficial, too much the product of stereotypes. They over-emphasize action and underplay the need for leaders who can go beyond setting a direction to coax the best from everyone around them.

For that you need three far less glamorous qualities: restraint, generosity, and mercy.

Restraint

Lack of restraint is a common failing of tough, macho leaders. They cannot hold themselves back from taking charge. They cannot hold themselves back from making decisions where none are needed, or where any choice will be premature. They interfere constantly with other people’s jobs, micromanaging and over-supervising in their constant need to be doing something—anything—to stay active and involved. When people say a leader like this is “on top of things,” they are more truthful than they realize. She is constantly imposing herself from above where she is not needed.

Leaders need restraint for to hold back from rushing into action when time is needed to wait for the situation to clarify. They need it to keep from doing things, or making choices, that are the responsibility of their subordinates. Much of the reason why executives today are so over-burdened with work is an inability to delegate. They are so convinced that they must stay on top of everything that they demand to be involved in every decision of any magnitude.

The results are plain to see. Decisions are delayed because the people in charge are overwhelmed; choices are made by those least able to see what is needed, because they are furthest from the action; subordinates’ jobs are reduced to carrying out instructions sent down from on high. Add to all this that many decisions are made that were never needed, and which perhaps made matters worse, and you have the causes of many of today’s problems: self-inflicted wounds.

Generosity

Generosity used to be the defining quality of kings and great lords. The word even began by meaning ‘noble’ or ‘of high birth’. Kings and princes were expected to be generous with gifts, favors, and attention. It was how they held sway over quarrelsome petty nobles without constant fighting. A mean-minded king quickly faced rebellion or found his nobles transferring their allegiance to a more generous neighbor.

Today’s organizations are very like medieval kingdoms. There are the same petty lordlings, each with his or her own group of followers; the same turf wars and quarrels about influence and status; the same need for each person in charge to be able to rely on the loyalty of followers who have their own concerns about making a living; and the same requirement for those at the top to practice generosity as a means of holding everything together.

I don’t simply mean generosity in giving material rewards—though many top executives could benefit from remembering that nobles of the past who enriched themselves at the expense of their followers usually ended up as victims of palace rebellion. Today’s leaders need to be generous with their time, their attention, their recognition of good work, their listening, and their help for everyone around them. The leader’s role is to serve her followers by making sure they have the resources and know-how they need to achieve the objectives laid before them. You cannot do that by sitting in your remote castle on the executive floor, counting your stock options.

Mercy

We all need mercy—often. We need to be forgiven for our mistakes and blemishes; to be given a second chance to get things right; to be saved from the consequences of our own, foolish actions. Mercy has always been seen as a quality of greatness.

Ordinary leaders delight in exercising power. Poor leaders go further, seeking to bolster their insecurity by appearing ruthless and punishing every fault. Only great leaders realize that to be merciful is the true proof of authority; and that forgiving people’s honest mistakes (and helping them do better next time) not only builds a stronger group, but cements their loyalty. Tough, unbending leaders inspire fear. Merciful leaders inspire love. Which is better for motivating people to give their all, even when you are not there to watch them?

Restraint, generosity, and mercy: leaders who possess all three have the raw material to become truly great. Of course, they still need know-how, experience, and some technical skills, but these are rarely in short supply. It is the inner aspect of great leadership that is misunderstood—and rare enough to be worth more than any pile of stock options. The sooner everyone comes to realize that, the sooner we will have organizations we can be proud of.

Technorati Tags: qualities of leadership, great leaders, restraint, generosity, mercy, true leadership, what makes a leader

Leadership Should Create Meaning, Not Destroy It
 

Most of us have learned to suspect the motives of management because we’ve been fooled before.All the fine words about valuing people and wanting to preserve employment aren’t matched by actions when things get tough. The first action of those same executives is too often to save their own fat salaries and bonuses by laying off thousands of ordinary people. No one likes to feel duped—still less to be duped repeatedly.

Leadership creates meaning—or should do. It should act in ways that bring a sense of shared purpose and direction to the whole organization. You cannot do that when those beneath you know they will be sacrificed the minute their presence begins to threaten the earnings of the top guys. When that happens, what you get is meaninglessness: the feeling that neither you, nor the job you do, count for anything; that you are totally expendable at any moment.

Integrity can be seen

When leaders the time to work out the right thing to do, then do it with courage and honesty, people will trust them. Integrity isn’t some vague abstraction; you can see it wherever words and actions match up and honesty is chosen over deceit without hesitation.

It is a matter of values. If you truly value integrity, you will accept losing rather than compromise your honesty. If you value winning at any cost—as we have been taught to do by the unscrupulous and macho pseudo-leaders of the recent past—how you play the game wonʼt matter, so long as you win. If dishonesty works and costs less, why choose any other path?

So can manipulation

Manipulation is rampant today. People just about always interpret it as dishonesty and react accordingly. It’s said there are three statements in this world that are never true:

• My check is in the mail.
• Of course I’m not simply trying to get you into bed with me.
• As your manager, I’m here to help you.

Too many management fads and fashionable techniques are just thinly-disguised ways of manipulating people to do what you want, when it’s not in their personal interests to do so.

Macho management, of course, is highly manipulative, as well as brutal and bullying. Its rhetoric may be full of appeals to heroic sentiments, but it is always about getting people to work harder and faster to benefit others—mostly the executives of the business and the shareholders: those who main source of income comes either directly from returns on share capital, or indirectly from the same source via incentives linked to increases in share valuation.

The destruction of meaning

We all crave something to believe in. Yet it isn’t the case that any meaning will do. Meaning needs to be based on values we can trust; on stories that inspire, not tales of trickery and deceit or examples of outright bullying. Integrity produces meaning because it is transparent and can be trusted. Manipulation destroys it, because it relies on deceit and hidden agendas.

Too many of the leaders and managers of the recent past have built their careers on acting tough, critical, and intimidating, seeking the quickest way make the biggest profits, regardless of who gets hurt. When a manager threatens people or makes it clear they will suffer if they don’t do this or that, employees usually do what is asked—even if it isn’t anything they believe in, or it makes no sense to them. Some of today’s organizations are such horrible places to work that brute force is probably the only way to get anything done.

Without meaning, there can be no motivation other than fear. Employees become little better than slaves, doing what their masters demand without question. Resentment rises. People leave as soon as they can. Work becomes nothing more than a financial necessity —something that should have died out along with steam-powered factories, smog-laden air, and all the similar signs of early industrialization.

There is a way out

The cure for manipulative management is simple to state, but harder to achieve. You must do the right thing for one reason only: because it’s the right thing to do. Leaders have ethical duties as well as all the others, and many management decisions are as much moral as economic. Many managers ignore this and try to absolve themselves from their ethical responsibilities by portraying every business decision as merely pragmatic. This cannot be done honestly. Life is a series of ethical choices, no less in business than anywhere else.

Technorati Tags: business ethics, manipulative management, leadership, integrity, trust, authenticity, meaning

Related articles by Zemanta

• Authentic Leadership
• 8 Steps to Charismatic Leadership
• It’s Our Ship: Book Review
• The Six Pillars of Character

Remind me again, what was so bad about hierarchies?
 

Here’s a question for you. What is the fundamental type of management structure which has been invented independently on many occasions in human history, all over the world?

As clues, I can tell you it has been continually refined through a process of trial and error up to modern times. The Egyptian Civil Service and the Roman Army organized themselves this way. It also seems to respond to something deep in the human psyche, which needs order and structure if it is to work effectively.

I’m talking about hierarchies of course. For an idea that seems so natural, and has been independently discovered so often, it’s surprising that the idea is in such disfavour now. “Hierarchical” is almost a swearword, unless we are speaking of databases.

What’s the problem?

Leaving aside the obvious point that any form of organization can be well or badly run, there’s a basic misperception about hierarchical organizations; one that has been encouraged by those who write about them without ever having worked in one. They assume that hierarchies are rigid structures in which every idea and every initiative has to go through endless, multiple layers before anything is decided. In most people’s minds, hierarchies are linked with Max Weber’s descriptions of bureaucracies, which even those who have never heard of Weber have absorbed by osmosis. (If you’re interested, Weber was describing an “ideal type” of organization, not something that actually existed).

In realty, a well-organized hierarchy is a sophisticated device for ensuring that work gets done at the most appropriate level. In most organization, work—sales inquiries, letters from the public, requests for assistance—comes in at or near the bottom. In a properly constructed hierarchy, issues which are entirely routine are dealt with at the lowest feasible level. Those which require more thought are passed up to the next level, and so on. In that way, only the most important and difficult issues ever get to the top of the organization. Conversely, those at the top can ask questions in the knowledge that somewhere below them is an expert, whom they may not even know, who will have an answer.

However, a hierarchy only works properly if two conditions are fulfilled:

• It has to be based on promotion by merit. Those above must have the confidence of those below, and should ideally have done the same or similar jobs earlier in their career.
• It has to be based on a long-serving workforce, capable of developing a common culture, and tackling problems in much the same way. These concepts, pioneered by the British Civil Service in the 19th century, were deliberately based on the way the Chinese ran things several millennia before.

Why are hierarchies out of favor?

Partly, it’s a confused idea that they are inappropriate to what we like to think of as a ‘democratic’ era. (Ask yourself how ‘democratic’ the average flat management structure is.) Partly they’re a victim of populist folklore about inefficient bureaucrats and the benefits of unleashing entrepreneurial independence . . . or something like that. There are other and more worrying reasons too:

1. If it ain’t broke, there’s no money to be made in fixing it. The Maoist permanent revolution required by the consultancy industry generates profits by developing expensive new structures which then fail, so they have to be replaced by even more expensive alternatives. Much of the money spent on organizational consultancy these days is to repair the damage caused by earlier reorganizations. Systems that people design for themselves generally work well and last a long time.
2. Hierarchies are an easy target for cost-savings. How often have you heard about “stripping out unnecessary layers of management”? Have you wondered why these layers of management were ever introduced in the first place, if they weren’t necessary? Have you ever tried to fight your way through a flat, non-hierarchic organization in search of someone who knew what they were doing and had the authority to decide something? Or have you ever been a manager in a flat structure overwhelmed with queries from subordinates? (If in doubt, human beings always refer problems upwards.)
3. Most importantly, attacks on hierarchies are a way of avoiding responsibility. If you are the leader of a twelve-person team, you’re responsible for their welfare and development—with power comes responsibility. But if you are one of several reporting points for matrix-managed, ad hoc ‘tiger teams’, you can afford to forget about that and concentrate on your career. Most organizations long ago stopped promoting people because they were good at managing others. The attack on hierarchies makes the promotion of the ruthless and the ambitious much easier and more acceptable.

Trying to abolish hierarchies is pointless: people will simply re-establish them unofficially. Every time you ask a more experienced colleague for advice, you’re creating a virtual hierarchy. If organizations realized this, and spent some of the effort that goes into destroying hierarchies to make them work better, organizations wouldn’t be in the mess they are.

Technorati Tags: organization, management, hierarchy, leadership, organizational structure

Related articles by Zemanta

• If you’re working in a big group, you’re fighting human nature
• The Everything 2.0 discussion - the real issue

Why leaders need to let others share responsibility for coping with tough times
 

Drawing of Lao Tzu

The personal power of leaders only extends so far. But as the Chinese philosopher, Lao Tzu reminds us, great leaders empower their people.

Remember this today.

There are some great books on leadership and, increasingly, some great blogs; and there has certainly been a fascination with the subject of management and leadership over the last 20 years.

Indeed, most generations seek to redefine “leadership” according to their own times. Yet, while each new generation adds to the body of knowledge, sometimes it can pay to revisit the earliest leadership writings.

The limits of power

Lao Tzu was a contemporary of Confucius. He is credited as the author of ‘Tao Te Ching’—a book which is now widely quoted in management teachings.

One of my favorite quotes comes from Chapter 17:

Fail to honor people, They fail to honor you. But of a good leader, who talks little, when his work is done, his aims fulfilled, they will all say, “We did this ourselves.”

Great leaders know that personal power extends only as far as one’s personal reach. This is power by control. However, as Jamie Notter points out, “leadership is effectively a capacity within the entire system,” When it works this way, ownership in the efforts of an organization rests with the entire team. By honoring the efforts and input of your village, leaders effectively transform their businesses with little resistance. After all, one does not need to “sell-in” a change when the change is self-initiated and driven by the individuals in your team.

As Positivity Blog points out on the ‘Positivity Blog’, Lao Tzu is about “getting things done”—which is another way of managing to outcomes. And as a leader, there can be no greater satisfaction than seeing your team celebrating their own leadership successes.

Applying this learning to today

In times like these, we must, more than ever, leverage the diversity of our people and avoid hitting the panic button. Our emotions affect how we respond to changing conditions as well as to one another—and they’re highly contagious.

When we experience negative emotions—especially fear and distress–-we tend to spiral into avoidance, paralysis or hysteria. These mindsets feed off one another, clearly inhibit productivity, and can swell to epidemic proportions if collectively embraced. As leaders, we have to be vigilant about infusing passion and positivity into everything we do if we want our teams to be focused and optimistic in turn. After all, we have large and difficult challenges to face individually and collectively—and we will need every ounce of innovation, creativity and collaborative teamwork to move forward.

How can you best reward risk taking while concurrently discouraging over-zealousness? Look for the leaders amongst your teams—those that demonstrate strong emotional intelligence. Look for those who are resilient, confident and highly communicative, infusing their teams with those same qualities and energy.

Nurture your team’s abilities to cope with stress and negativity, and you will be rewarded with people with enhanced confidence who can deliver stronger performance and success.

Technorati Tags: coping with tough times, nurturing others, leadership, avoiding negativity, handling emotions, empowerment, dealing with stress

Related articles by Zemanta

• Modern of Chinese look back to ancient teachings
• Lewis Green: What Makes a Great Leader
• Confucianism as China State Ideology?