A MODEST PROPOSAL FOR THE USE OF THE WORD “LEADERSHIP” – PART 1

John Pickering, Ph.D., President

Commonwealth Center for High-Performance Organizations (CCHPO), Inc.

In an earlier blog here on the ICMA Center for Management Strategies website, we introduced CCHPO’s HPO Diagnostic/Change Model (HPO Model) © for thinking about, assessing, strategizing about, and improving the performance of organizations.  The Model is a classic “systems model” with 6 Change Levers (Leadership, Vision, Values, Strategy, Structure, and Systems) and 7 Key Diagnostic Questions (What is high-performance for us, how would we know if we were, according to whom are we high performing, why be high-performing, are we doing the right things, how good at we are doing what we do, and how are we going to treat each other, our partners, and stakeholders?). Every part of the model interacts with every part, so efforts to improve performance must work on all the levers simultaneously. 

Today, we’d like to side step a discussion of the Model for a moment and examine the term used to label our first Change Lever:  Leadership.  When you see that term, what’s the first notion that pops into your mind? In seminars for over 35,000 federal, state, and local government executive (and some private sector executives, too), the first responses are invariably something like:  “those at the top” or “somewhere above me” or “it’s above my pay grade” (often followed by a phrase like: “I’m just a worker bee here”).  Interestingly, then, the word “leadership” has become synonymous with level in the hierarchy – with managerial level:  top management = leadership. 

What does that use of the term say to the rest of us who aren’t at the top?  Does it say:  “if I’m not at the top, then leadership is not in my job description?”  Does is also follow that if I’m not a formal managers in the hierarchy, then I also don’t have “managerial” responsibilities?  And when exactly did leadership become only the responsibility of “the top?”  Before the Industrial Revolution, would a farmer or shoemaker have said that planning for the future, treating clients honestly, dealing with the bank on loan rates for land and equipment, deciding on the crops to grow or shoe models to produce given market conditions, ensuring that resources were efficiently applied, or delivering on schedule and on budget were not his/her responsibility? Clearly not, because “who else was there to do them?” These were leadership and management responsibilities, and everyone had to learn and execute them flawlessly or ……… you lost the farm or the shop.  Of course, you also had to be good at plowing/ planting/harvesting/storing crops or making shoes, as well – that is, you had to be good at the task/technical work.   There was no need for a complex personnel evaluation process here; if you got it all done and survived, you got to do it again!

The Industrial Revolution caused a massive change in the way people viewed “the nature of work.” It was during this period that the word “leadership” came to mean “the top.”   For the first time in human history, large numbers of workers could put in their hours during the workday, feed their families, and didn’t have to worry about “outcomes” – is the business successful or not, are we creating innovative ways of doing things and meeting the client’s/citizen’s needs.  Managers (and their expert consultants) designed production processes, divided work into smaller and smaller parts, watched the workforce follow their directions (they needed a platform up high in the factory so they had “super vision” over what was going on at the floor level). Leadership, management, and task – which were integrated in the farmer/craft model – are separated in the industrial model:  leadership is at the top of the pyramid, management is in the middle, and task is at the floor level.  No wonder, then, that the first level workforce often does not see innovation, improvement, efficiency of processes, or customer service as being their jobs. Further, personnel systems quickly enacted this perspective into job descriptions. 

Most organizations today carry a heavy dose of the “us” vs. “them” which emerged from this view of the “nature of work.” On the one hand, we often encourage employees to “think outside the box,” or“take ownership” of the work and the unit/small business they’re a part of, or be “empowered.” Then, of course, we respond with a purchasing system that says “you need 17 signatures of more important and trustworthy people above you in the hierarchy before you can buy a pencil.”  Wait!  What just happened to “empowerment?”

We’ll explore another way to think about the term “leadership” in a following blog – stay tuned…….