Leadership looks and sounds easy.
We all readily recognise a good leader or boss. They are visionary, intelligent, decisive and fair. They delegate, lead balanced lives, communicate well, are team players, cope well under pressure and embrace technology and change.
We also instinctively recognise a bad leader or bad boss. As Joanne Painter succinctly put it in an insightful article in The Age newspaper: “Bad bosses are autocratic, hierarchical, inconsistent and non-intuitive. The sort who kick heads and ask questions later.” She adds that they surround themselves with clones who are scared to offer diverging opinions and enjoy playing power games, such as intimidating staff or withholding information.
The essence of good and bad leadership
Most of us have no difficulty in defining the essence of good and bad leadership. A popular newspaper came up with some pretty good answers.
A leader:
– Has a creative vision for the organisation
– Is emotionally mature
– Has a firm grasp of technology and its implications for society
– Is a team player who is able to delegate and enable other team members to excel
– Thinks strategically and politically
– Is disciplined and fair
– Has achieved a work/life balance
– Welcomes divergent views but is tough and decisive when necessary
– Copes well during times of extreme change, pressure and uncertainty
– Tells the truth
A manager:
– Feels most comfortable dealing with the internal complexity of an organisation
– Lacks strategic vision
– Is intent on improving the status quo
– Enjoys putting someone else’s vision into practice
A bad boss:
– Is dictatorial, bullying and inconsistent
– Feels threatened by divergent opinions and will surround himself/herself with people of similar views
– Withholds information and uses his or her power to effect change
– Enjoys intimidating staff and is often autocratic
– Is one-dimensional
– Quells conflict rather than drawing differences out
– Is a workaholic with few if any close relationships
Source: The Age, 4 April 1998.
The BIG question
If it is so easy to see these positive and negative aspects of leadership, why is it so hard to practice them? Why are there so few examples of good leadership in today’s organisations? As the Melbourne Business School puts it in its 2005 Leadership Index Report: “If leadership starts at the top, then it is no wonder that there is not much of it in Australian organisations”.
Leaders and Followers
The very concept of leadership implies the existence of ‘followers’. A good leader inspires, motivates, persuades, communicates and manages followers. Sure, followers can be forced to follow leaders, but generally in normal peace-time conditions, followers will only follow those leaders whom they trust. Trust must be earned and does not develop ‘overnight’.
As we look around today’s organisations, there is ample evidence of a lack of trust, often a complete break-down, between leaders and their followers. In 2004, The Melbourne Age reported that an amazing 88% of staff were not happy at work, with most rating their boss as their number one problem at work. A more recent media report of a survey of employees across most industries showed that an 28% of staff were “actively disengaged” from their organisation. Professor John Croucher, the Professor of Statistics at Sydney’s Macquarie University, reported in April 2005 that only 40% of Australians have confidence in the organisation they work for, and only 42% had trust in the leader. A salutary message for all leaders!
In July 2007, a major human resources and recruitment firm, Talent2, released survey results which showed an amazing 58% of Australian workers regarded their bosses as ineffective, while 40% said their boss was no good at their job.
Building trust with others, the cornerstone of good leadership, requires a deep understanding of oneself – who I am, what makes me ‘tick’, how I behave, why I behave the way I do, why I react to others the way I do and so on.
Much leadership development a waste of time?
Thousands of books on leadership and management have been written over the past fifty years. A glance through your bookstore will reveal dozens of current titles. In addition, countless seminars, symposia, training programs, courses and conferences (often highly priced), are presented to offer supposed insights into the common yet elusive issues about how to achieve leadership success, how the people in organisations function, the way a CEO should think and behave and the way an organisation should work. In addition, a whole industry, the management consulting industry, is largely supported by these concerns. That industry responds to what organisations seem to want at the time. Many consultants dress up the current research, push the current fad, or claim to have new insights into organisational, psychological, and behavioural problems and approaches. Many miss the mark of what personal and organisation success are really about.
For the millions of hours and billions of dollars that have been spent on leadership improvement both in Australia and globally, the discernible improvement in the quality of leadership is miniscule. Much of the effort expended on leadership education has been wasted or has been of limited value. Perhaps this is another example of the “iceberg phenomenon”, where only the “tip” of leadership is really examined and we do not look at what’s really going on underneath, both in the organisation and in the people in it. What that means is that we need to refocus on the essence of leadership and what it involves, as well as on the essence of the ‘followership’ in the organisation and what that involves. We need to look more at the individuals who make up the organisation, whether they be followers or leaders.
One of the doyens of leadership thought, Warren Bennis, has written at length on the difficulties of teaching leadership, or rather the many qualities that make up leadership. It is difficult, for example, to teach judgment. It is difficult to teach decision making which relates to judgment, rather than the traditional MBA style of quantitative approaches to decision-making, where complex issues are reduced into a formulae-like process which ignore many of the realities of modern life, particularly the human and intuitive aspects. The former Chief Executive of the large Swedish company ABD observed that organisational success was due to 10% strategy and 90% execution. Of the 10% strategy, he thought that about two percentage points are accounted for by quantitative analysis, the remainder by intuition or gut feeling. Intuition and gut feeling, per se, certainly cannot be taught but it is beyond doubt that people can learn to follow or trust that side of their thinking, and indeed to recognise and develop it further as part of their normal process of relating to and behaving with people. In fact, most people are capable of trusting their instincts, but often don’t realise that they do it. Many try to put such tendencies to the side as if they don’t or shouldn’t exist. We are conditioned throughout our bringing up to be logical, factual, realistic, strong and unemotional and are taught to avoid that which is not “real” or quantifiable.
There is a need to connect the seemingly well understood leadership principles, which in the main are not ‘rocket science’ but simple statements of common sense, with a better understanding of human behaviour, particularly as displayed in organisational settings. In thisblog, I connect all these elements in a very practical “hands-on” way, so that you will be able to deal with real life leadership issues and situations as and when they occur in the workplace and to grow in effectiveness both as a leader and as an individual person.
The need to “connect” and emotional maturity
This connection is not being made at present. Most texts on leadership advise would-be leaders to be emotionally mature, meaning to be self aware, to act honestly and with integrity and to consider their impact on others. Most, if not all, readers of such advice would readily agree that yes, that is an essential prerequisite for a successful leader. That would probably be the extent of their thinking, because they would automatically assume that they were indeed emotionally mature – they were not the problem! But, if they stopped to reflect for a while on what that statement is suggesting, they may well come to a different conclusion.
Emotional maturity covers many different aspects of our behaviour:
– In making decisions, do I talk to staff?
– Do I really listen to what they say?
– Do I talk with them just because I am expected to? Is it a façade? Do I really honestly take on board what they say?
– Do I get annoyed in front of them?
– Do I not get annoyed in front of them?
– Do I show my annoyance?
– Do I show that I am angry or do I hide it?
– Am I myself in discussions with a staff member, or staff generally?
– If I am a CEO, do I really have to show all these emotions; do I need to exhibit all that? Surely it is emotionally immature to discuss how I feel and, even worse, I will be seen to be weak or not acting tough.
Most people, particularly senior executives, are reluctant to show their real feelings – they are afraid of what others might think or the feelings themselves are sometimes too painful. Are these valid reasons for ‘clamming up’? Of course not. Should I reveal my true feelings? The answer is an emphatic “yes”. You should discuss these things, to show you are honest in being who you are and to show who you really are. Your staff will readily see who you are, or who you pretend to be, in the organisation. If you don’t show who you really are, you will eventually reveal yourself in other ways, and those other ways are usually negative ways. As CEO you need to be up front and honest, and relate openly with staff. You need to “connect”. As a senior executive, the same thing applies. If you show real emotional maturity, most of your managers and staff will do the same, because they will see it as being permissible and safe to do so. If you show emotional immaturity, on the other hand, then everyone else will likewise show that, and hence the organisation will become very closed and dysfunctional and less effective.
Personal growth in maturity leads to organisational growth
The apparently simple issue of your emotional maturity thus opens up numerous other strands for thought – potentially revealing the need for some corrective behaviour. The challenge is to be able to recognise the level of emotional maturity you are currently displaying in different situations, to understand more appropriate and helpful forms of behaviour and to learn how to bridge the gap between the two. This handbook will serve as your guide for the real world, to help leaders and managers deal with situations we all know occur every day, if not every hour in all organisations. Other books on leadership only describe some principle you should be following. They do not detail how you can behave more effectively in various real-life situations, and they don’t prepare you for the probable responses (positive and particularly negative) you will get from your staff, colleagues, superiors or your CEO in different circumstances. This handbook gives you practical advice on how to successfully deal with and overcome those reactions. As you learn and grow, your organisation learns and grows, and so do your staff, all contributing to organisational success and greater personal satisfaction and happiness for you as their leader.
A word of caution. Many leaders (and aspiring leaders) are simply not used to or equipped to think in the “intuitive” way which is necessary for leadership success and excellence in organisational performance. We also need to factor in, too, the disturbing trend for greater emphasis to be placed on the short term, eg quarterly corporate results, which doesn’t allow for an organisation to be nurtured and grown and turned into a long term sustainable success. There are welcome signs, however, emerging in America, that slashing and burning in the Al “Chainsaw” Dunlap style is not enough. Creating an enduring, successful organisation out of the ashes left behind is a far more difficult and ultimately more satisfying and challenging task. For those prepared to meet that challenge, this handbook will help prepare you for your journey and the obstacles you will encounter along the way.
Where to next?
In this blog a number of basic psychological foundations of human behaviour are examined, using simple every-day examples rather than the jargon of psychology. I firmly believe that leadership success comes best from unleashing the capacities already within you and which, for many reasons which I describe, have not been fully understood, tapped and effectively applied in your everyday behaviour. A good example is communication. Fundamental to any relationship, at work or home, is the ability to communicate. I’m already great at that, you say. See what you think after reading all my posts.
