Are you leading the organization, or are you leading the people?

Leadership
Followers have a very clear picture of what they want and need from leaders: trust, compassion, stability, and hope.  ~Tom Rath and Barry Conchie
Are you leading the organization or leading the people, is a question that leaders grapple with every single day.  I think it’s one of the most challenging aspects of leadership.  Leading the organization means you are focusing on issues like the strategic plan, generating revenues, external stakeholders—all critical elements for every organization.  However, if the people aren’t following you while you’re focused on these aspects, then you aren’t leading.
Leading the people looks much different than leading the organization.  Leading the people involves listening, motivating, communicating, etc.  The Gallup Organization studied a random sample of more than 10,000 people over a three-year period and discovered that followers have a very clear picture of what they want and need from leaders: trust, compassion, stability, and hope.

Tom Rath and Barry Conchie, authors of Strengths-Based Leadership, said, “A major challenge for organizational leaders is that it is difficult to establish close relationships throughout an organization with thousands of employees.  When we asked followers more specifically about the “organizational leaders” and “global leaders” that have a positive influence, we found that people expect more general positive energy and “compassion” from high-level organization/global leaders – compared to much more intimate words (like caring) that followers used to describe their everyday leaders.” 

“As Standard Chartered’s Mervyn Davies explained, organizational leaders must have “a positive bias” because employees simply “don’t want to follow negative people around.”  On a personal level, Davies’ compassion was always shining through to Standard Chartered’s employees.  In addition to being very open with his own challenges as his wife battled breast cancer, Davies was just as concerned about his employees’ mental and physical health.  He initiated several programs aimed at helping employees boost their overall well-being, and he always encouraged his direct reports to put their family first.  He knew that for people to truly love their organization, it needed to have a heart.” 

For leaders to be effective, they need to accept the fact that these two aspects – leading the organization and leading the people – don’t have to be mutually exclusive.  As an example, a large engineering company makes all of the organization’s data and financial metrics, with the exception of payroll information, easily accessible to everyone in the company.  They also provide employees with regular updates on progress toward organizational goals.  And perhaps most importantly, leaders throughout the company help each employee see how he or she can directly affect the organization’s key metrics like costs, profits, and sales.  This gives employees stability and confidence and clears the way for rapid growth.

Leading the organization, alone, may create short-term results.  But long-term sustainability is a result of not only leading the organization, but also leading the people.  Give them what they want and need from leaders: trust, compassion, stability, and hope.

It’s personal.

Leadership
Management is science.  Leadership is art.  Management is transactional.  Leadership is personal.  ~Dr. Kathryn Scanland

A phenomenon that I periodically run across is people in leadership positions who are trying to lead by managing harder.  What does that look like?  They create more transactions.  If they want employees to change their behavior, they create a policy (or policy-like document) and send it to everyone.  Their immediate “fix” if things aren’t working is to evaluate processes, systems, and budgets.  They try to push change through the organization.

Leaders, on the other hand, would model the behavior they want their employees to emulate.  Leaders would first seek input from employees if things aren’t working.  In other words, leaders, get personal.  They pullchange through the organization.

This idea of getting personal shares similarities with what Max De Pree described as covenantal relationships.  In Leadership is an Art, Max said,

A covenantal relationship rests on shared commitment to ideas, to issues, to values, to goals, and to management processes.  Words such as love, warmth, personal chemistry are certainly pertinent.  Covenantal relationships are open to influence.  They fill deep needs and they enable work to have meaning and to be fulfilling.  Covenantal relationships reflect unity and grace and poise.  They are an expression of the sacred nature of relationships. 

Covenantal relationships enable organizations to be hospitable to the unusual person and unusual ideas.  Covenantal relationships tolerate risk and forgive errors. 

Rich DeVos, billionaire and founder of Amway, chose to close his recent memoir, Simply Rich, with this statement.  “I was blessed with a love for people and know that seeing the best in people, recognizing them as fellow children of God, getting to know them as unique individuals, and believing in them has been a key to success in Amway.  And also, I believe, to the success of families, our country, our communities, and to life itself!”  For Mr. DeVos, leadership was personal.
Maybe we could look at it this way.  When we are being managed, we agree and do what our supervisor has instructed or communicated.  When we are being led, we follow because it’s more than agreeing to a certain way of doing things; it is about embodying a certain way of being.  And that’s personal.  Maybe someone is great at handing out policies and instructions; but when things get dicey is that someone we would follow?  Or, would we be more likely to follow someone because they have a certain way of being?
For some who want to pursue leadership positions, this may be a deal breaker.  We’ve all heard the phrase “It’s business, it’s not personal.”  Well if you want people to follow you, the phrase might be, “It’s leadership, and it’s very personal.”

Could you stay the course?

Leadership
Stay the course: an idiom of the English language that means to persevere in the face of difficulty when the desired outcome is determined to be worth obstacles met along the way.  ~wisegeek.com

This past week provided me with several reminders that effective leaders stay the course.  I’m not a movie buff so I tend to be sufficiently behind on movie watching.  True to form, I just watched Mandela: A Long Walk to Freedom, and what a reminder that leaders stay the course.  The series of decisions that led Mandela to prison was a result of his “staying the course.”  I thought his decision after his release was even bolder and demonstrated to an even greater extent what it means to stay the course.

The people of South Africa were angry, and rightly so.  They had turned to violence because they believed it was their only defense and only opportunity for freedom.  After Mandela’s release from prison, he publicly denounced violence and stated that they would “never win a war, but they could win an election.”  He asked the people of South Africa to stop fighting and to seek peace.  Mandela had been in prison for 27 years; the people of South Africa had been fighting for 27 years; the people believed that they had a right not only to freedom but to revenge.

When Mandela went to prison, it was what the people expected.  When Mandela asked them to stop fighting and to seek peace, that was notwhat the people expected.  It was a very bold move, but Mandela continued to stay the course, because what Mandela was seeking (and always had been) was freedom, and revenge was not a route to freedom.

Another example.  This past week a leader of a large non-profit with a national and international platform made a bold move, then two days later rescinded that bold move.  Of course there were numerous factors involved in this decision, many of which I’m certainly not aware.  The initial decision resulted in upheaval in one direction, the decision to rescind then created upheaval in the other direction.  It has consequently become a no-win situation with constituents upset on all sides.  I’ve pondered this scenario every day this week, asking myself, what lessons in leadership can be gleaned from this somewhat chaotic and unfortunate situation.  Here are a few of my thoughts.

  • Bold moves are good; they demonstrate strong leadership.
  • Bold moves will have opponents.  Don’t expect everyone to enthusiastically support the decision.
  • If you’re going to make a bold move, be certain of that decision.  Ask enough questions from enough people so you can anticipate the aftershock of that decision so you’ll be prepared to respond and not react.
  • If you’re going to make a bold move, be prepared to stay the course.  As Nelson Mandela said, “When the water starts boiling it is foolish to turn off the heat.”

I would guess that most leaders make less than a handful of bold moves in their careers.  So select them carefully, judiciously, and courageously.  Effective leaders make bold moves andthey stay the course, because it’s a long walk to freedom.  

What’s your habit?

Leadership
The key to reaching your goals is not to visualize the end, but to turn these goals into actionable habits.  ~Senia Maymin & Margaret Greenberg

We probably all have them; goals that cause us to visualize a different future.  These goals come in many shapes and sizes: financial goals, home location goals, travel goals, accomplishment goals, etc.  While visualizing the end can be an enjoyable journey on its own, we don’t start to actually realize those goals until we begin to change or create some actionable habits.

To put this in the perspective of organizations, many organizations create a BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal, coined by Jim Collins), or a vision statement for the future.  What happens next is the key indicator as to whether or not they have a chance at reaching their BHAG.  Does the leadership team get excited, psyched, and hyped up; and then everyone retreats back to their offices and returns to work as usual?  Or, do they plunge into identifying actionable habits that they will each need to commit to as well as hold one another accountable to in order to move toward their goal?

This past week while driving, I started listening to the book Crucial Conversations.  Following is a quote that really caught my attention.  I see organizations frequently trying to tweak systems, revise processes and come up with a new structure, believing this will allow them to achieve their goals.  The authors argue that more times than not, the real problem is behavior (i.e., actionable habits).

Most leaders get it wrong.  They think that organizational productivity and performance are simply about policies, processes, structures, or systems.  So when their software product doesn’t ship on time, they benchmark others’ development processes.  Or when productivity flags, they tweak their performance management system.  When teams aren’t cooperating, they restructure. 

Our research shows that these types of nonhuman changes fail more often than they succeed.  That’s because the real problem never was in the process, system, or structure—it was in employee behavior.  The key to real change lies not in implementing a new process, but in getting people to hold one another accountable to the process.

Human behavior is a significant part of organizations that is all too frequently overlooked.  Or worse yet, we think that it’s the fluffy, touchy-feely things that have little impact on productivity and financial outcomes.  However, at the end of the day, I think we’d all be hard-pressed to come up with something other than “actionable habits” that will move us closer to our goals.  And, actionable habits = human behavior with accountability.

But don’t take my word for it; try it for yourself.  Dust off that BHAG or vision, and identify a few actionable habits (behaviors) that will move you in the direction of your goal and commit to those habits for a few months and see what happens.  Or, get your entire leadership team to join in the effort and hold one another accountable to those new habits.  Position it as a team building exercise, something that will not only help the organization but will also contribute to leadership development.

The Francis Effect

Leadership
You can’t govern without loving the people and without humility.  ~Pope Francis

This past week marked Pope Francis’ first anniversary.  Just over a year ago, I would dare say that the vast majority of the world would not have recognized the name Jorge Mario Bergoglio.  One year later, Jorge, who we now know as Pope Francis, has nearly single-handedly started a revolution not only for the Catholic Church but for all of Christendom. 

What fascinates me most is that his effect on us has not been because of his title, his title has merely introduced us to the man.  It’s the man who has taken us by storm.  Borrowing from Chris Lowney, author of Pope Francis: Why He Leads the Way He Leads, quoted in the Chicago Tribune, said, “In Bergogilo’s first days as pope, we were not watching someone trying to act like a pope.  We were watching a person unafraid to be who he was.”

Lowney describes a Jesuits’ years long training: “much of which revolves around self-examination and working among the people they seek to lead.  It’s ‘dirty-footed leadership’ with a focus on understanding other people and their circumstances and putting their needs ahead of one’s own.”

Tribune journalist, Rex Huppke, said, “The issue here is not one of religion or faith, but of encouraging people to look outside themselves.  I would argue that’s the right thing to do on a moral basis, but in the workplace, it’s also the right thing to do pragmatically.”

Lowney boils down Pope Francis’ leadership to this: “Commit to yourself deeply, including your frailties, and come to some peaceful acceptance of yourself and your calling to lead.  Then, commit to ‘get over yourself’ to serve a purpose greater than self.”

Shane Claiborne, visionary leader of The Simple Way, a faith community in inner city Philadelphia, recently said this about Pope Francis.  “The most remarkable thing about the Pope is that what he is doing should not be remarkable.  He is simply doing what Popes and Christians should do – care for the poor, critique inequity, interrupt injustice, surprise the world with grace, include the excluded and challenge the entitled.”

I agree with Shane, we shouldn’t view what he’s doing as remarkable, but it is simply what we all should be doing.  So why don’t we?  Why don’t more leaders follow Pope Francis’ example of leadership?  It’s clearly getting everyone’s attention and creating a movement within the Catholic Church in a very short time. 

I think we don’t model his leadership style because like it or not, we don’t want to admit just how ego-driven we really are.  We have not “come to some peaceful acceptance of ourselves, including our frailties.”  We don’t really look outside ourselves.  And maybe most significantly, we’re not practicing ‘dirty-footed leadership.’  We don’t focus (and that takes intentional time and effort) on understanding other people and their circumstances.  

We can’t lead without loving the people.