Leadership Opportunity E-Journal
Russ Volckmann, PhD
Almost Monthly Explorations to Focus and Support Leadership in Business and Life Through Coaching
Volume I, No. 2 - April 2001
Table of Contents
- Leadership Quote
- Article: Leadership On Purpose
- A Leadership Coaching Tip
- Summary (publications worth noting)
- Thanks
Leadership Quote
"There are lots of things in life that are worth the pain," he says. "Being a leader is one of them."
-- Ronald Heifetz, Fast Company
In the last issue I wrote about our need to transcend and include the limiting model of heroic leadership. It isn't that we have no reason to value heroic acts of leadership. They continue to be important to us. We need to recognize both the heroic and the collective. In the remarks that follow, I am concerned with business leadership. However, they might apply equally to any context.
One analogy that may make this point clearer is to think of the heroic act of leadership as a snapshot. The collective act of leadership is more like a movie. Heroic leadership is episodic. Certainly, it may last more than an instant, but it is Act 1, Scene 2; it is not the whole play. Without Scene 1, Act 2 the play would fail. And without all of the other acts and scenes the play would virtually cease to exist.
The essence of heroic leadership is the individual and his/her relationship to the collective. These are often thought of as followers, but that term is too narrow, too limiting for a broader understanding of leadership. The heroic leader is a leader because of the realization of their intentions through action in relation to a broad set of stakeholders. For example, taking action to improve service immediately impacts employees, customers and others, like vendors or suppliers. Taking action to cut costs will impact this same set of roles almost immediately. Investors may have to wait a while.
The term, stakeholders, is useful because it includes a wide variety of roles in relation to business and business leadership. In addition to customers and investors there would be employees, contractors, vendors and suppliers, government regulators, even unpredictable innovators outside the company. (By the way, if you don't think government regulators are important learn a bit more about what is happening to business in the current California energy crisis.)
OK. Heroic leaders take action in relation to stakeholders. When we look at a single event or episode that is very clear. But in business we can't just focus on one event. What is true about strategy is also true about leadership. If it is important, as the Balanced Scorecard approach is demonstrating, that we need to consider the relationship between action and strategy in relation to internal, external, financial and innovation aspirations, then it is equally true that we need to recognize that leadership around this level of complexity is not one individual act by one individual heroic leader. It is a complex set of actions by many leaders. And these actions must be examined over time, like strategy formation and implementation, to be properly understood.
So what does this mean for leadership in business? It means that we need to appreciate the intentions and actions of individual heroic leaders. AND we need to appreciate the collective aspects of leadership equally.
What is a collective act of leadership? An example might be Steve Jobs at Apple. When he came back to that company he demonstrated heroic leadership by refocusing the company on innovating to generate recovery through reversal of their falling market share and value. How did that strategy come about? I don't know the inside story, but I'll bet there were many conversations with other leaders that created the strategy.
Furthermore, the success of that strategy depended on many leaders working with Jobs to generate the successes that Apple has had since Jobs' return. Apple has once again become the computer of choice if you want speed, excellent media capability, interconnectivity, cross platform capacity and so on.
The parallel with the heroic leader who proceeds by translating intention into action is that collective leaders build a culture of leadership that generates individual and collective action in support of business objectives and strategies. This is so important because many aspiring leaders have floundered in cultures that would not respond.
In subsequent issues of Leadership Opportunity, we will explore these ideas further. In the meanwhile, I hope this is useful food for thought. Your ideas and contributions are always welcome. Email russ@leadcoach.com..
When coaching an individual leader in a business, explore her/his assumptions about the individual and collective aspects of leadership in their experience. Ask them to tell stories about each and identify what important learning there was. Some sample questions might be:
- What were your intentions?
- What did you do?
- What was the result?
- What does this say about your leadership?
Then ask them to look at a leadership opportunity that they are facing. Ask a similar series of questions. Then explore the collective dimension. For example
- Who else needs to exercise leadership?
- How are they aligned with your intentions?
- What actions do they need to take?
- What conversations need to happen to support that?
We would value any stories and comments you can share with us about your experiences with this Leadership Coaching Tip. Email russ@leadcoach.com.
Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton.
The Knowing-Doing Gap.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press, 2000.
Pfeffer and Sutton studied what it is about businesses that make it so difficult for them to implement what they know. The gap is the product of a number of factors. For example, people act on the basis of experience drawn from the past rather than thinking about and analyzing current situations. Or the focus is on measurement instead of using the range of knowledge available. Or the development of cooperative, rather than competitive, internal cultures.They offer eight guidelines for action:
- Why before how: philosophy is important.
- Knowing comes from doing and teaching others how.
- Action counts more than elegant plans and concepts.
- There is no doing without mistakes. What is the company's response?
- Fear fosters knowing-doing gaps, so drive out fear.
- Beware of false analogies: fight the competition, not each other.
- Measure what matters and what can help turn knowledge into action.And most interesting to the question of leadership:
- What leaders do, how they spend their time and how they allocate resources, matters.
"Leaders of companies that experience smaller gaps between what they know and what they do understand that their most important task is not necessarily to make strategic decisions at all. Their task is to help build systems of practice that produce a more reliable transformation of knowledge into action…to create an environment in which there are lots of people who both know and do. Leaders create environments, reinforce norms, and help set expectations through what they do, through their actions and not just their words."Perhaps they are suggesting that people who both know and do can exercise leadership?
Thanks for taking the time to consider this epublication in a world of data overload. For leaders, collaborators, consultants, academics and coaches alike, I welcome you to some ideas and a dialogue that may benefit us all. I hope you will contact me soon with your idea, reference or article. Suggestions on improvement are welcome.
Russ Volckmann, PhD
Coaching Leaders in Business and Life
Email: russ@leadcoach.com
Web: www.leadcoach.com, Tel: 831.333-9200, FAX: 831.656-0110
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