The Challenge of Leadership

“A leader is not a person who can do the work better than the followers; a leader is a person who can get followers to do the work better than he or she can, who can bring out the best in people.” -- Fred Smith, Learning to Lead

Achieving organizational goals requires a certain kind of balance – a balance that is tenuous at best and easily disrupted. Striking that sensitive balance, to ensure the right job gets done at the right time, demands commitment on the part of both the leadership team and the workers. By definition, a leader is anyone who has followers … if people in leadership fail to establish the standard in integrity, discipline and loyalty they merely occupy a position, and cease to lead. They cease to lead because no one will follow them.

Some “leaders” who fall into this trap typically resort to what would otherwise be considered to be Machiavellian methods to force compliance based on position power instead of leadership power. Machiavelli was the man who said that it is preferable for a leader to be both feared and loved, but if the leader must choose between the two then it is better to be feared than loved (The Prince). People who appropriate this concept and apply it to the art of management tend to view others as mere objects to be manipulated in the quest to achieve a desired result. While this approach has much to recommend it as a short-term fix, it sounds the death knell for any organization over the long haul. Why? Because it plays on the base fears of people, and will ultimately fail to inspire people to give more than they are compelled to give. It is the path of losers.

Manipulators fail to recognize or acknowledge that people are the most important resource in any organization. To bring out the best in people, the leadership team must convince the workers that they have the best interests of the workers at heart. When leadership becomes self-seeking, sacrificing the workers on the altar of self-aggrandizement, a trust is violated that will not be easily restored. Team chemistry is damaged.

In all fairness, the workers play a key role in maintaining workplace balance, too. One of the knocks against the current generation is that it is solely materialistic … they want to advance directly from the classroom to the boardroom without the benefit of working their way up the ladder. There is a special wisdom and a discipline to be learned in acquiring the knowledge of our jobs from the ground floor up. In this quest for as much as we can get, as fast as we can get it, we can lose sight of the organizational goals. Management is entitled to expect a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wage … whatever the work happens to be. There is a growing number of people in this workforce who feel that certain types of work are beneath them, and yet someone has to do it. What is the most beneficial medicine when your body is ill? Whichever one will provide what the body needs. The same principle applies to our work; if the job that is most needed to meet a deadline happens to be menial work, then that work should not be “beneath” any one of us. There is an appropriate time to subjugate personal wants and desires to team goals.

The key to all of this is mutual goal satisfaction … leaders who look out for the interests of their people, and people who do not lose sight of organizational goals. When both parties are working to preserve that fragile balance, it becomes a win-win situation for everyone involved.

© Gerry Young 2008