In Chapter One, we described a number of situations that raise questions in the minds of leaders. Many of these come about because of changes that organizations face. Reductions in force, restructuring, changes in a boss, loss of a job, and new job opportunities all affect leaders. Many of these organizational changes result from external forces such as greater competition, loss of revenue, or other economic forces. All of these changes affect what leadership opportunities are available to you, the nature of the opportunities, the challenges they bring, the kind of leader you want to be, and what you can accomplish. These changes also influence how leaders are expected to act, be, show up, and lead.
These issues often cause some leaders to ask, "Is being a leader worth it?" Unrealistic expectations or criticism from others can leave you paralyzed or drifting. Perhaps your team expected you to be a heroic figure and save the organization or to continue driving the mission like the former senior leadership team. But is that (and its costs) what you had in mind?
Thus, the first step toward discovering the leader in you is to gain more understanding of your personal leadership situation. To aid your thinking, this chapter briefly describes recent trends in organizational life. It explores the impact of organizational life on current expectations of leaders, leaders' own expanding views of leadership, and perceived costs of leading. Reviewing this part of the leadership framework should give you insights into why you are adrift and possible steps and choices that can help you get out of drift.
We can no longer define organizations as clearly as we once could. Many have become so diffuse and pluralistic that static models like command-and-control hierarchies and interrelated systems (organic or machine) are no longer as relevant. Back in 1995, management guru Peter Drucker portrayed organizations as inherently unstable because they "must be attuned for innovation, for the systematic abandonment of whatever is established, customary, familiar, and comfortable" (p. 77). Today the external environment continues to change constantly, and so too must organizations and their leaders.
In 2007, CCL researchers published survey data from nearly four hundred participants in CCL's Leadership Development Program. A little over half were from the United States, and most held middle or upper management positions. Most (84 percent) said the definition of effective leadership had changed in the past five years. When asked how, respondents mentioned needing more flexible, cross-boundary, collaborative, and collective leadership skill sets. Were we to repeat this survey in five years, a few new factors would likely emerge. The point is that to be effective as a leader, you must be a student of the contexts in which you lead and develop or refine your leadership skills to meet new demands.
We've all heard the story about the buggy whip industry in the early twentieth century, about the time when automobiles entered the marketplace. Some buggy whip companies thought that they were in the business of making buggy whips. Others realized that they were part of the transportation industry. Most of the former went out of business since buggy whips were not all that useful in getting autos moving down the road. Those who understood that they were in the transportation industry stayed in business, albeit with different products and business models. Most leaders these days are like the buggy whip manufacturers of one hundred years ago. It's easy to become a disengaged, out-of-touch leader, knowing that you have to change but acting along the lines of a common definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. If you pay keen, multisensory attention to the changing context inside and outside your organization, in your private and your public life, and you adapt to the challenges and opportunities change brings, then your leadership effectiveness will grow. It requires using all of your senses, and it's not easy work, since what's happening around you is often not clear.
Let's take a look now at some broad contextual factors that affect organizational life today and the changing requirements of leaders worldwide:
The current organization-customer relationship
The changing definition of careers and work
Diversification of the workforce
The rise of globalized organizations
Technological innovations
If these factors don't fully capture your reality, take a moment to identify additional ones that are important to you and the context in which you lead.
Many years ago when flappers danced the Charleston and what was good for General Motors was good for America, status and hierarchy were understood and accepted as primary qualities of organizations. This time of innocence was marked by a common understanding of assets, ownership, employees, bosses, and customers. Distinctions among roles were clear and accepted. Organizations owned or controlled whatever they considered their business. Efficiency was a question of continuous high levels of production and sales that pushed volume beyond a fixed break-even point: the greater the volume, the greater the profitability. Customers were on the receiving end of organizational outputs or products, and customization for the customer was not a part of the organizational lexicon.
But change was in the air even then. Technological advances led to continuous change, faster communication, and new product lines. Products became more sophisticated. More assets became intellectual than physical. And customers began to have a direct influence on the future plans of organizations.
Today the Internet provides customers with knowledge, power, and access to competitors' products and the ability to rate the quality of products for everyone to see. Buyers expect more for their money and will cross whatever oceans, deserts, or Web pages may be necessary to find the right product or service. They need no longer walk into stores or drive to distant malls. Because customers now demand customization, product and service options have multiplied.
In response, organizations now strive for highly competitive, quality- and cost-conscious environments where flexibility and responsiveness are paramount. Rapid cycle time is now seen as a major source of competitive advantage, and the norm is to have the next version of a product gearing up before the last one has fully rolled out. Innovation, entrepreneurial ventures, and new distribution channels are the name of the game.
Structurally many organizations are moving from primarily hierarchical structures to collective forms to meet customer needs anywhere and at any time. This often causes a movement toward decentralization or regionalization. A competing force or tension is that in order to grow, large organizations must acquire smaller ones or establish key partnerships if they want their business to grow. Growing in size often leads to centralization of services, yet at the same time, dispersal of authority and expertise and a decentralization of power are necessary to meet customer needs.
In light of these changes, think about the following questions:
How have increased customer demands affected your organization and your role as a leader?
How has your organization responded to dynamic changes in the broader marketplace, and what are the implications of these changes for leadership needs in your organization?
What structural or role changes have taken place in your organization in response to customer demands?
What differences have these changes made to your relationships with peers, your boss, and people who work for you?
Have any of these changes left you adrift? In what ways?
As authority disperses and organizational structures alter, employment arrangements have also changed. Employees are increasingly likely to change jobs and organizations many times over their career. The proverbial gold watch for "lifers" is now rare. Organizations no longer have the obligation or desire to employ everyone full time. Increasingly, organizations are using temporary, part-time, flexible, partnered, telecommuting, outsourced, and interim manager roles. By such arrangements organizations manage particular risks, such as avoiding the high cost of layoffs in a downturn yet preserve the labor they need to respond to peaks or emergencies. Role flexibility and fiscal responsibility become paramount in workforce strategies.
Such changes can fracture engagement and loyalty if they are not managed carefully. Keeping a disconnected and temporary workforce engaged, focused, loyal, and committed is not an easy leadership task. Finding common motivations and purpose is more difficult. When employers spend more time managing risk and less time valuing employees, loyalty diminishes on both ends. Resulting higher turnover can be costly to employers and compromise customer service when organizational knowledge walks out the door.
These employment changes have triggered new orientations to jobs and careers, with a greater emphasis on tasks and assignments and less on ongoing jobs. Increasingly, although workers perform tasks, they also need to create their own tasks to become more entrepreneurial. The location of work is also shifting, from brick-and-mortar sites to networks spanning oceans. More people work from home, on planes, in hotel rooms, and in other settings. More people are "vendor-minded" temporary workers, looking for unmet needs to which they can apply their skills, and interacting with peers, bosses, customers, clients, and organizations through social networks. In short, how future work gets done and who is involved will largely be up to individuals who are managing their own negotiations, not by traditional organizational decision-making structures using traditional work processes.
Think about the following:
What has been the impact of this new orientation to work and careers on you?
How has it changed the way you lead and the pressing leadership challenges you face?
How can you better manage your own career?
What strategies can you and other leaders use to increase engagement and commitment around the work?
What can you do to maintain your own commitment and engagement?
Over the past several decades, the workforce has diversified dramatically. Research and discussions in workplaces and at home proliferate about trends: the aging baby boomer generation on the brink of retirement; the presence and impact of Generations X and Y and the millennials; the increase in the number of women in the labor force; and the increase in Hispanic/Latino, African American, and Asian workers.
Attracting and retaining a diverse workforce has become a business financial imperative, from having enough of the right resources to understanding the increasingly diverse customer pool in order to provide the right products and services. In James Canton's (2006), list of the top ten workforce trends for 2009, six of the ten relate to global talent, the aging population, women, and broader diversity issues. Understanding, attracting, retaining, leading, and engaging a diverse workforce have never before been more important.
How do these trends relate to drift? As a member of the workforce, we all want to be valued and understood. Drift may be a result of not feeling valued or not finding the right fit within an organization or with an entrepreneurial venture. It might be the result of not feeling that you have sufficient power or influence over your own career choices. Drift might also result from uncertainty in how to motivate and retain individuals who are different from you. Reflect on how the factors discussed below bear on you and your leadership situation as it relates to drift or to the process of discovering the leader in you.
Considerable attention is given today to the number of generations working side by side in organizations, and it's commonly assumed that major differences between generations cause conflict and dissatisfaction in the workplace. In particular, a common stereotype is that the younger generations (for example, Gen X, born between the mid-1960s and the late 1970s, and Gen Y, born between 1980 and 2000) are very different from each other and from earlier generations (baby boomers and the silent generation). Despite the common notion that generations are fundamentally different, Jennifer Deal (2007) argues that there are more similarities than differences between generations, especially in the area of personal values such as family, integrity, achievement, love, competence, and happiness. Why is the belief that different generations have different values so prevalent? Why do so many of us extrapolate from that belief that it's difficult for leaders to create cohesion among teams and work groups composed of differently aged workers, and that it's difficult for young and old workers to get along at work? Deal explains that the differences are found in how people of different generations act on those values, not in the values themselves. When one group of people acts differently from another group, people of either group make faulty attributions about the causes of behavioral differences and often blame different values rather than chalking it up to the different ways people have for interacting with the world.
While people of different generations behave somewhat differently (especially when it comes to communication or the use of technology), many underlying values, beliefs, and aspirations are more similar than dissimilar. Generational conflict in the workplace is more likely due to issues of control, power, and authority than to more fundamental problems. As Deal (2007) argues, a lot of the conflict experienced at work emerges in struggles of authority and power, which are often exacerbated between older and younger workers: younger managers seek authority and power, and older managers often want to maintain the authority and power they have built over the years. We could reach the same conclusion about differences of race, socioeconomic status, or other such factors. Many so-called differences come down to power, control, and authority. A perceived lack of power, control, and authority can often lead to drift when it creates a sense of not feeling valued or not finding the right fit with an organization.
Do generational issues play a part of the context of your leadership? If part of your current organizational context labels you as a member of a younger generation than the current leadership and so detracts from your being taken seriously, how might you reframe the situation and make different attributions about the values and beliefs of older generations? If you lead multiple generations, how can you lead differently? If you are managing a person twenty years older than you, how might you better bridge any misunderstandings or conflict?
If generational issues don't have an impact on you as an individual or leader, gender issues might. For many years, research, articles, programs, and informal discussions have focused on a number of gender questions. Why don't more women hold the top positions in organizations? Do men and women lead differently? Are men or women seen as more effective leaders? Do women and men bring different communication styles to organizations? Why do fewer women than men occupy line positions? What impact do different cultural attitudes toward men and women have on leadership practice and potential? These and other questions have led individuals and organizations to examine their assumptions, beliefs, policies, and practices about both men and women in the workforce.
In the United States, statistics related to gender have changed dramatically over the past five decades. For example, Gail Collins (2009) notes that in the early 1960s, "women were vigorously discouraged from seeking jobs that men might have wanted" (2009, p. 20). She compares that sentiment to today, when women claim almost half of the seats in U.S. medical and law schools. These trends continue: more women than ever before are enlisting in the military, becoming engineers, and starting their own companies.
Another data trend shows that in the 2008 economic recession, more men than women lost their jobs. This is due in part to more women than men in part-time positions and in lower-paying jobs. However, women now make up over 50 percent of the labor pool and are being recognized as strong consumers in the marketplace. Women make purchasing decisions on 94 percent of home furnishings, 92 percent of vacations, 91 percent of homes, 60 percent of automobiles, and 51 percent of electronics (Silverstein and Sayre, 2009). Organizations now look to their female employees for product and service ideas to attract this consumer base.
In addition, more research studies conducted in the United States have reported the positive financial contributions that women make in the workplace (see, for example, Desvaux, Devillard-Hoellinger, and Meaney, 2008; Shipman and Kay, 2009). All of these forces have led Heather Boushey and Ann O'Leary, the authors of The Shriver Report (2009), to identify the coming decade as one of transformation comparable to the age of industrialization, the civil rights movement, and the creation of the Internet.
What is the effect of these trends in organizations? Some women are finding their way to more senior levels in organizations. Some are leaving to start their own companies. Some are achieving equal pay for equal work, but many are not. Some are leading the charge for more flexible work arrangements. And others are facing challenges related to leadership choices as they address their own questions: Where do I best fit? Can I balance the responsibilities of a demanding leadership role and family responsibilities? Can I break into an established network?
Men are not immune to these same challenges, and they certainly experience drift and uncertainty in considering themselves as leaders and how they might lead. They are also choosing to start their own businesses or work part time; others, due to the economy, are being forced to change their work hours, become the stay-at-home spouse, or make other career choices that they had never before envisioned. Both men and women encounter gender differences, stereotypes, and bias. Because of these changes in how both men and women work, negotiation increases at home over family schedules, household chores, and travel conflicts.
All of these changes affect organizations, leaders, and individuals. How do leaders ensure that they have the right talent, whether men or women, in their organizations? How can leaders combat gender bias and stereotypes? How do gender issues at work and at home affect you? How might this dynamic contribute to or inhibit discovering the leader in you?
With changing demographics and a more globally connected world, diverse cultures have proliferated in our schools, communities, neighborhoods, religious institutions, and organizations. As the world gets smaller, we experience differences in traditions, communication patterns, language, personal space, consumer habits, humor, orientation to time, attitudes toward work, responses to authority, family expectations, expressions of identity, norms, how knowledge is acquired, and responses to change. These differences have changed how employees interact with bosses, how teams work together, how groups communicate across geographical distances, how work gets done, and how conflict gets dealt with or not, and how leaders need to engage a diverse workforce. Cultural diversity also affects how well the supply chain works, how global partnerships succeed or fail, and how governments determine new policies. What does it mean for all members of a workforce to feel valued and appreciated? What members of a diverse culture might be more prone to drift? How does this trend affect you, and in what way might it contribute to your feelings of drift?
Now think about the following questions and how all of the changing demographics of your workforce affect your role now and in the future as a leader:
How would you describe the changing diversity in your organization (generational, gender, ethnic, cultural)? What impact is it having?
What do you anticipate as further changes around diversity that will arise in the next five years?
How is your organization taking advantage of the new workforce playing field in order to be more competitive?
How might these trends be connected to your challenges or feelings of drift as a leader?
In various respects, how would you describe your status as minority or majority? How might that status influence your behaviors or your feelings of value as a leader?
As you look forward five years, what skill sets and worldviews do you need to develop to be a more effective leader in an increasingly diverse world?
Is the world indeed flat, as Thomas Friedman (2005) claims? He argues that technology innovations allow individuals and organizations around the world to grasp unprecedented opportunities by reducing the obstacles to labor, resources, and markets to the same level for every organization. But when Richard Florida (2005) examined global economic data, he reached a different conclusion. He argues that the world is spiky, full of growing disparities and inequities (peaks and valleys) that vary across populations and geographies. Indeed, he found that although more people were living in urban areas than at any other time in the world's history, the economic output of the world's largest cities varied greatly. He also found that by various measures of innovation, there are tremendous differences across regions, countries, and cities. For example, in 2002, 85 percent of the patents granted came from just five countries: the United States, Japan, South Korea, Germany, and Russia. Whether seen as flat or spiky, the world is more connected than ever before because of technology and communication developments that create more opportunities to lead growth.
The global recession beginning in 2008 illustrates the tight connections among economies of different countries and different organizations. When businesses and nonprofit services in the United States suffer an economic downturn, small and large countries around the world feel that pain. In November 2009, for example, after years of explosive growth in Dubai, the global economic recession caused massive debt, and the country struggled to pay off loans. Its request for a six-month reprieve on its bills caused an immediate drop on world markets and led neighboring Abu Dhabi to provide significant economic assistance. Likewise, when a single, large multinational company goes out of business or into bankruptcy, as Lehman Brothers and General Motors did, the reverberations are felt far and wide.
The rise of globally connected companies causes many leaders to talk about the challenges they face in working across time zones and cultures, ranging from the mundane (such as finding a suitable time for a conference call involving people from different countries) to the critical and complex (cultural differences that can derail a project because of miscommunication or misperceptions). Global connections have also led to more opportunities to live abroad and take on the challenges of expatriation.
In 2008 and 2009, CCL researchers asked senior executives who participated in its Leadership at the Peak program about such boundary-spanning challenges. Most of these leaders (86 percent) reported that it was extremely important for them to work effectively across boundaries in their current leadership role. They needed new leadership skills to address problems at the intersections of all kinds of organizational, cultural, demographic, and geographical boundaries. Leaders increasingly realize that they need to operate beyond the boxes and lines of the organizational chart. Yet only 7 percent of those whom CCL surveyed believed they were very effective at it (Ernst and Yip, (2008).
Think about the impact of globalization on you and your organization:
Does your organization have a global reach? What leadership opportunities are available to you beyond where you live? If you lived in a different city or country, how would that affect your future effectiveness as a leader?
What is the impact of globalization on your leadership? Compared to five years ago, do you have more or fewer boundary-spanning tasks?
What challenges do you face working across time zones, geographies, cultures, or religions?
How does the complexity of working globally and across boundaries contribute (or not) to feelings of drift?
Technological innovations give individuals unprecedented global access to people and information. Technology has also led people to work more synchronously (through teleconferences, Web meetings, and the like) and asynchronously 24/7 (by e-mail, recorded Web-based presentations, and such). Smartphones, mobile phones, and a host of digital accessories connect more and more of us to colleagues, reports, and customers at all times and in all places. Disconnecting from work, even for a few hours, now takes a conscious effort.
Technological changes have been profound and continuous. In response, organizations look to instill a culture of innovation in order to compete more effectively in an ever changing environment. Pressure to create lines of new and innovative products continues, as evidenced by the 92 percent of the senior executives polled by CCL who called innovation a top driver of organizational strategy. What kind of leadership supports innovation? Is that the leadership to which you aspire? Think about the following questions:
What has been the impact of technology on you as an employee? As a leader?
Is your role about finding the next innovation for the organization or preserving a cash cow?
Has this trend contributed to your feeling adrift and unable to adapt to the changing environment? If so, in what way?
Is burnout from the 24/7 access people have to you contributing to the drift you might be experiencing?
Do you believe you can keep up with all of the technological innovations relevant to your work?
We've just discussed trends that are changing the way that organizations, leaders, and individual contributors work. What other trends could we have listed that affect you now?
Shifts that are external and internal to organizations often demand that leaders think and behave differently from the past. Being attuned to these shifts and resulting demands keeps leaders at the forefront of what organizations need and maintains their value to the organization.
In Chapter One, we wrote about the need for leaders at all levels in organizations (what some might call collective leadership), not just at the top. Now you know why. In order to increase flexibility and speed in responding to customers, organizations need to decentralize management and provide leadership at numerous intersections across functional boundaries and at more customer touch points. As a result, all levels of the organization need shared understanding of organizational vision, strategy, and execution. Old patterns of command and control are replaced by or mixed with patterns in which who controls and who commands are in constant flux. More than ever before, leadership is as much about influence and interdependence as it is about authority. The growth of collaborations, alliances, and value chains has shifted the boundaries of effective management so that the emphasis falls on working relationships fueled by good communication. Leadership also means paying attention to organizational culture, since culture guides employees and how they interact with customers.
John McGuire and Gary Rhodes (2009) distinguish three types of organizational cultures:
Dependent. Those in formal positions of authority are responsible for leadership.
Independent. Leadership emerges based on technical knowledge and expertise.
Interdependent. Leadership is a collective and interdependent activity.
As leaders face more complex challenges that defy easily identifiable solutions, McGuire and Rhodes argue, they need to move from dependent and independent leadership cultures to an interdependent one.
What does all of this mean for your own leader skills and perspectives? It means you have to understand the complex issues involved in coordinating systems and promoting collaboration across boundaries, and develop the means of paying attention to the interdependencies among various people and systems. Leaders must continuously respond to a variety of work routines, communication patterns, and performance standards. Harnessing collaboration becomes more important to leaders than worker supervision and managing upward. Leaders must develop the ability in themselves and their staff to discern customer needs and to be innovative, responsive, flexible, and comfortable with ambiguity and change. The days are gone when a leader can simply stay the course and manage incrementally. In organizations large and small, leaders need to reexamine and reenvision all aspects of the organization-customer interface. They must also reach out and function effectively across boundaries of time zones, geographies, gender, countries, cultures, religions, and worldviews, leading a diverse and dispersed workforce.
Take a moment here to review the contextual challenges your organization faces and the impact they have on your own leadership and the leadership of your colleagues. It's important to consider both the potential benefits of these changes (for example, opportunities to be involved in leadership roles even when you don't have the formal title, or chances to work on issues that make important differences in the lives of others) and their costs. Unknown costs may push you into drift, making you temporarily unable to take action. Think about what you have seen going on around you, and consider the implications for how you lead, how you can be even more effective as a leader, and how you might work your way out of drift:
How do these contextual challenges manifest themselves in your organization and industry?
What implications have the changes had for leaders in your organization?
Do you see different kinds of leaders evolving now than in the past?
How has the changing nature of leadership affected you? What new skill sets or perspectives do you need to develop in order to be effective in the years to come?
What opportunities for leadership are presented to you that a decade ago may not have been possible?
How have these changes helped or challenged you recently as a leader?
How have any of these trends or changing skills contributed to drift in your work?
How have other individuals failed because they didn't adapt to the changing times?
What do you want to do differently as a result of gaining insight into your current context?
As organizations have become more complex and the problems that leaders face more challenging, definitions of successful leadership have also expanded. Let's look at how views or perspectives on leadership have evolved over the years, beginning with the idea that leaders aren't necessarily identified by title or job description and that current diverse and rapidly changing contexts mean that new and different leaders can emerge at any time. Expanding your perspectives on leadership can be both motivating and overwhelming. Your challenge is to understand the impact that contemporary perspectives have on your own views and images of leaders and leadership. You will also want to think about the compatibility of your views with those of others, and how these may contribute to feelings of drift or your own perceptions of choice. Think too about what view you wish to instill in others.
The nine common perspectives on leadership that follow blend fact and fiction, stories and experience—the received, unquestioned beliefs of a particular culture. Each perspective carries its own implications, though people can easily hold several of them simultaneously. Some perspectives deal with who becomes a leader and how, and others with how a leader should lead. As you read them, think about how they might affect your sense of yourself as a leader and the ways you interpret that role. Also think about the contexts in which you lead and which of these perspectives is appropriate—or not. Keep in mind that there is no single right perspective; one size does not fit all.
This fixed mind-set holds that some people are born with leadership talent and others are not. In other words, only certain people can learn to lead effectively; they're naturals. If you were born with it, you are destined to lead. If you were not, you will never lead.
In this view, you can study leadership carefully, practice what you study, and become a more effective leader, no matter how good you are now. This is the opposite of the genetic "leaders are born" view. Research in the social and neurosciences increasingly suggests that human characteristics we once thought of as permanent (like IQ, personality, and some cognitive skills) are actually malleable through learning.
From this perspective, the only good leaders are those who perform risky, courageous, wise, and benevolent feats that are beyond the rest of us. These heroes, always handsome or beautiful, are extroverted and charismatic, and they command attention whenever they walk into a room. Think about the characters portrayed by John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Denzel Washington, Angelina Jolie, and Meryl Streep. Some are leaders with the uncanny ability to get the rest of us out of trouble. Or think of real-life recent heroes such as Erin Brockovich (in the toxic wastewater case against Pacific Gas and Electric) or executive Sherron Watkins, who called out Enron's massive fraud.
This is the view that leadership happens only at or close to the top of an organization. In command-and-control environments, your role is to simply follow orders unless you occupy a top position. If you're not on the senior leadership team, you are perceived as having little leadership to offer. Members of management hold the cards, for better or worse.
When it's your time to lead, you'll be asked. When asked, you should accept and be grateful. After all, not everyone is asked. Social scripts create expectations about who is likely to be asked to lead and, when asked, how a leader should behave given the context in which he or she functions. We often internalize such scripts from powerful influences from early family life and our surrounding cultures; although sometimes difficult to identify, their effects are profound.
If you're in the job and have the title, you're the leader. This notion is traditional in bureaucracies and highly structured organizations, and it carries some validity even in less hierarchical systems. If your title says "director of" or "head of," your leadership abilities and effectiveness are assumed unassailable. You have power, authority, and possibly a corner office.
Some leaders view the deep involvement of other people in setting direction and making decisions as the cornerstone of a leader's success. In this view, the leader's goal is to unleash the talents of others. The view focuses on the collective and interdependent processes we discussed earlier in connection with transformational leadership. As Lao Tzu is quoted as saying, "A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves."
Organizations lacking a pipeline of leadership talent are often forced to select a sometimes reluctant leader with an "interim" title or status, to fulfill a leadership function. Individuals often take on such roles because they are persuaded to do so or are strongly committed to the organization. Some grow into their leadership role and by mutual agreement become officially more permanent. Others accept the assignment for a limited time while the organization selects a more permanent leader.
A call to lead out of a desire to serve others can be quite compelling to some people. It involves a deeply felt sense of mission, private purpose, inevitability, or legacy. The call may be so powerful that the person feels practically unable to turn down a leadership opportunity. A calling isn't always rational, but it's personally passionate. The servant leader doesn't leave it to others to judge whether his or her desire to serve others is valid or appropriate. Equally compelling might be the absence of that inner voice.
Each of these views is worth exploring and can lead you to unexpected places. When a particular view doesn't match the organizational context, for example, questions can arise as to whether a leader is the right fit for the organization: Can this person be successful in this role or this environment? When the view is reinforced and rewarded, value and excitement can be realized.
Some organizations may operate as a strict hierarchy, despite signals of a more equally competitive environment or the advances in communication technology. Other organizations reward individuals for following a social script. Some organizations may intentionally change the kind of leadership perspectives that it rewards, and so confusion may run rampant. You may need to do some digging to understand which view or set of views predominates in your organization. History, culture, and existing leadership will have a great influence here.
Consider this story about a servant leader whose own questions of fit led him to seek other choices.
For many years, Paul wished he were helping others see their potential as individuals and as members of a tightly knit community. An early career in sales had been disappointing: it made a living and the products were honest, but they didn't come close to touching lives.
Paul left sales for the seminary and became a minister, but ministry didn't work for him either. To him it seemed too parochial and ritualistic. Next, he accepted an offer from a nonprofit organization that needed a manager to run a unit that provided development experiences for people across the country. Paul did well at this work. His staff liked him, and his counseling skills were useful. For a while, the world seemed fine. Then Paul found that the organization's growth meant that his leadership role was becoming more about managing than serving. So at a time of peak effectiveness in his organizational career, he stepped away from running a department and became an individual contributor within the organization. Paul found he could promote his deeply held values more explicitly when he worked side by side with others and could serve as a sounding board and mentor.
For now, at least, the world seems fine to Paul. He's found a comfortable and effective way to be what he wants to be. We believe that in his new role as an individual contributor, he will have ample opportunities to be a leader, even if his span of control is narrower than it was previously and his budget lower.
The views of leadership we've described aren't mutually exclusive, and your own are no doubt a blend of many ideas, experiences, worldviews, and theories. Views of leadership are informed by success, trial and error, input from others (such as coaches, friends, family, and coworkers), and observing the good and bad practices of leaders. You're much better off if you're aware of your own views and how you and others might be affected by them.
If you pay attention to your own changing views and the views of others, you can develop yourself to take better advantage of opportunities and overcome inevitable obstacles that can cause you to drift into inaction. Certain choices about leading may seem desirable and make more sense to you than others do. It's important to maintain broad attention and see how these philosophies or views of leadership may be relevant to your work today.
The difference between managers who are comfortable as leaders and those who aren't is that the former can articulate the views and images of leadership that guide them through thick and thin and that integrate career, family, and community. That awareness helps them recognize how well they match the leadership roles their organizations envision, and they make work and career decisions accordingly.
To help you integrate the views of leadership in your environment and in yourself, we encourage you to develop a flexible but sustaining personal view of leadership. How you think about leadership should be based on what you want to accomplish in life. Why are you leading? Your views of leadership aren't cast in stone. At each stage of your life and career, you will need to question and rebuild your views based on new learning and new experiences. The more comprehensive your view and the more frequently you reflect on it, the better it will serve you as an integrating tool.
Some of the following questions may sound simple, and you may already have addressed them. But if you haven't taken the time to stop and reflect on your answers in some while or have never considered the power of such questions to illuminate your decision to serve as a leader, we encourage you to do so now:
How will being a leader help you create the impact you desire?
Which views about leadership (from those previously described or those you have experienced elsewhere) resonate with you? Why?
Which view or views about leadership are disagreeable to you? Why?
How conscious are you of your leadership views? How do they play out in your behavior?
What views of leadership have been preferred in organizations in which you have worked?
How closely matched are your views and those of your organization, or how closely matched are your views and the views of people you lead?
What changes in your view might make you a more effective leader in the contexts in which you now lead?
By now, you recognize the amount of complexity flowing from continuous change in organizations as well as from expanding views of leadership. This complexity is not without its consequences or costs, which is where our discussion now turns.
More leaders than ever before question whether they were right to have chosen the leadership path. Many ask: Is being a leader worth the effort and sacrifice? For example, a survey by Adecco Group North America found that 61 percent of employees would decline to take their manager's position with its greater pressures (Winter, 2009).
In the letter excerpted below, a senior leader who attended a CCL program articulates how he needs to better allocate his time across work and nonwork activities so that the cost-benefit ratio of leading is more favorable to his overall well-being. This is the first of several excerpted letters that we include in this book. These letters were written by executives to themselves as part of a classroom-based goal-setting activity (they are all italicized to help you find them easily):
Dear—
It is time for you to reflect on your life and decide how you will spend the next half of it.
It's time to decide to be a happier person by taking more time for yourself, taking family trips to the coast or the mountains. Travel to places you have never been and return to those that you love. Play your guitar more, write songs that have been waiting to come out. Describe the world as only you can see it. Visit those that are special to you and tell them so. Play music and share it with others.
Continue your education, not for some fancy degree, but for the experience and for the sake of learning something new.
Follow your passion, not your pension.
Be more loving and affectionate to those you love most, your family—
Most of all, love yourself. Care less about others' opinions of you and more about your heart. Be kind to yourself. Relax and enjoy the ride.
It's important to understand the demands inherent in many leadership positions. Use all of the information at your disposal to determine what those demands are in your case. The managers we spoke to while writing this book never hesitated over questions about costs, sacrifices, and difficulties. They told us about high stress levels, irritability, dealing with problem performers, or having to lay off employees. Some bemoaned a loss of freedom. These costs were obviously painful, though, as one said, "If you assume the mantle, you've got to pay the price." Understanding these demands helps you develop strategies to offset them, ignore them, neutralize them, or seek a different role where the costs are lower.
Here are the types of costs that were frequently mentioned. Of course, what is a cost to one leader may be some kind of reward for another.
You're in the fishbowl, and all eyes are on you: "Who's she spending time with?" "Who's he including in his meetings?" "Why is she having lunch with him?" "Did you hear what he did to her?" "Take a look at what she's wearing today." "He's in a bad mood—must be fighting with his wife again." As one executive said, "Just walking out in my work area (there are ninety folks in my operation), I know they watch me all the time.... It's like walking a tightrope."
The higher you rise in an organization, the more you appear as its brand and spokesperson, and so the more you take on public relations responsibilities. You give speeches and make introductions for other speakers. Your attendance is required at community dinners, cocktail parties, receptions, fundraising activities, and so forth. You greet and entertain visiting dignitaries. These are important tasks. Shirk them at your peril.
The leader is no longer one of the gang. The former peer group is gone, and the new one sometimes is made up of people who are competitors for other choice spots. It's important for leaders to maintain some personal distance from their colleagues. Relationships that become too close can lead to faulty decisions or considerable pain when, say, reducing staff. It's not that leaders must be isolated socially; rather, they often lose long-lasting, genuinely comfortable relationships that are hard to replace. They miss the few people with whom they can openly talk.
Leaders are responsible for those they lead and are often expected to take care of others. Care ranges from helping others improve in their roles, to setting performance expectations, to listening to personal disappointments. These activities are important and require time and energy. On many managers, responsibility for direct reports weighs heavily. One executive we spoke with observed, "You have a significant measure of control over people's lives. You know—promotions and demotions and firings. You have to be willing to understand that and make judgments and do it extremely carefully. In a way, you're really fulfilling a trust that some organization is putting on you."
Trust is the foundation on which relationships are built and in the collaborative climate within which current organizations operate relationships are how work gets done. Therefore, leaders feel tremendous responsibility for not violating any trust as they navigate to meet organizational and individual needs.
Leadership requires energy, stamina, and the ability to impart to others. It often brings with it long hours, long meetings, loads of e-mail, and little time for family and recreation. Don't mention the travel, with its stuffy waiting rooms, bad food, cramped seats, and delayed flights. Exhaustion hovers, and you have to take care of yourself. CCL research indicates a strong correlation between health and leadership effectiveness. Leaders with better health status (as measured by physiological factors such as blood lipid and blood glucose levels and body-mass index ratings) were more likely to be seen by peers, direct reports, and bosses as effective leaders than were their less healthy counterparts.
Leadership roles are not secure. Most senior executives in public and private organizations rate job security lower than anything else about their organizations. Senior leaders are judged on the basis of the success of the whole enterprise, which results from many influences beyond their control. Merit is defined and rewarded more selectively for leadership than for professional roles. And leaders can't discount politics or career dynamics. Someone else may really want your spot, or just may not want you in it anymore. In cases of mergers and acquisitions, leaders can find that they are redundant.
The higher you climb in an organization, the greater the need is to tightly regulate your words and expression of feelings. People will weigh your speech more heavily than the speech of those below you. You can't think aloud because people may interpret your musings as directives. You may want to relax, joke around, and be one of the gang, but even in relaxed situations, people are keenly aware of what you say and how you behave. You must always be aware of your image.
You must keep an eye on the bigger picture (people expect you to see around corners and beyond the horizon) while focusing attention on current priorities. You must also be able to determine which small brush fire might turn wild. You receive few easy breaks and may take work home every night just to stay on top of your priorities. Even on weekends or on vacations, you're probably mulling over work issues. Your name is first on the emergency call list, and you are copied daily on, say, a hundred or more consequential e-mails. One bank executive told us, "I think my family has probably paid more than it should. I have a tendency to be a workaholic, and so if anything has suffered, it's been my personal life. I have this psychological thing, you know—as long as it's light out, I can work. When the sun goes down, I go home." Another executive reported, "The biggest cost is actually to the self, because you're forced into limited time for self and family, and so the self goes far down on the list. Family takes a hit, and you feel bad about the family. So you try to take more and more out of the self portion to prop up the family."
When you need honest appraisal the most, you are less likely to find it. The higher your rise in an organization, the less useful the feedback you receive is. Everyone else seems to have some personal bias or agenda; information is plentiful, but the truth is elusive. People are prone to tell you what they think you want to hear rather than what you need to hear. Good leaders sometimes identify truth tellers in the organization to mitigate this problem, but such people aren't easy to find because there are often consequences to being the truth teller (for example, others in the organization may view truth tellers as simply trying to advance their status with the boss).
These costs we've discussed don't comprise an exhaustive list. You may have other costs that are specific to your leadership scenario. Do those costs contribute to your leadership drift? Do they push you into action? Think about and document the costs you experience.
Of course, there are also rewards, though these can also lead to drift. Sometimes you can be so attached to a reward that you stay in a role too long. We discuss benefits and rewards further in Chapter Six. There you will have the opportunity to weigh the costs and benefits of your current and future leadership choices.
In this chapter, we described changes in organizations and the resulting expectations placed on leaders, and the fact that more than ever before, leaders wonder if the cost is worth the rewards. Our discussion surveyed shifting perspectives and views about leadership today that can complicate your choice to lead.
Reflect on the following final questions to better understand your leadership context:
What are the most important organizational factors that have an impact on you?
Have changes in the context pushed you into a state of drift?
What are the current leadership demands on you that provide motivation or frustration, or both?
Have you clarified your own views on leadership and how they are compatible with others in the organization?
What are you experiencing as the costs of leading right now, and do you need to reduce the costs to be a more effective leader?
What insights about drift in your own leadership scenario have you gained from this chapter?
In Chapter Three, we look at leadership vision and how it can clarify your actions and choices and lead you out of drift.