A
leader creates a climate of trust. Next, learn how to generate and
sustain trust. To do this, reward people for disagreeing, reward
innovation, and tolerate failure. Don't fire people because they
goof. But remember: A lot of trust comes not from a particular
technique, but from the character of the leader. To create trust,
you need three things: 1) Competence. Followers have to have some
trust in the leader's capacity to do the job. 2) Congruity.
The leader is a person of integrity. If you're an effective leader,
what you say is congruent with what you do, and that's congruent
with what you feel, and that's congruent with what your vision is.
People would much rather follow individuals they can count on, even
when they disagree with their viewpoint, than people they agree
with, but who shift positions frequently 3) Constancy. People want a
sense that their leader is on their side, that he or she will be
constant. Competence, congruity, and constancy-those are qualities a
leader must embody to create and sustain trust.
3. A
leader creates meaning. You start with vision. You build trust. And
you create meaning. A leader creates meaning by creating an
environment where people are reminded of what's important. The
leader helps define the mission of the organization and models the
behavior that will move the organization toward those goals. In
Eastern Europe, the people who have recently gotten into power all
seem to be people who can put words to goals and aspirations.
Whether it's a playwright in Czechoslovakia or the journalist who's
the prime minister of Poland, or the present prime minister of
Romania who's a poet-these are people who can use words beautifully
to express the collective goals of their people. That's important.
When leaders don't do that, people get disaffected. What creates
meaning is primarily the concept, the idea. Words are powerful.
Words endowed with relevance and purpose create meaning.
4. A
leader creates success, often from failure (mistakes). Successful
leaders perceive and handle "failure" differently. The word
"failure," to most people, connotes something that's terminal and
lifeless. But leaders embrace error. They see "failure" as a
"mistake," a "glitch," a "hash," a "miscue," a "false start," or a
"misdirection." Most leaders look forward to mistakes because they
feel that someone who hadn't made a mistake hadn't been trying hard
enough. Whatever walk of life they were from, whatever institution
they were presiding over, always referred back to some
failure-something that happened to them that was personally
difficult, even traumatic, something that made them feel that
desperate sense of hitting bottom-as something they thought was
almost a necessity. It's as if at that moment the iron entered their
soul; that moment created the resilience that leaders need. They
learned from their mistakes because they figured out what was wrong.
The
thing about failure is that it demands explanation. The people who
don't succeed are the people who look at failure and don't learn
from it. They blame somebody else, they blame the stars, but not
themselves. All the successful leaders I've met learned to embrace
error and to learn from it. And real leaders keep the message
moving; they make it clear to those they lead that there is no
failure, only mistakes that give us feedback and tell us what to do
next. When people turn away from leaders, sometimes it's because the
leaders aren't very good. There's no reason to be attracted to
incompetent leadership.
5. A
leader creates a healthy, empowering environment. We have a basic
ambivalence about authority in our society. We enshrine the myth of
the lone hero, the outlaw, the renegade, the John Wayne cowboy, Gary
Cooper in "High Noon." The celebration of self is deeply embedded in
our culture. In recent history, there's been a lot of disappointment
with leaders. Indeed, some managers do more harm than good. Think
about your own work experience. Have you ever worked for anyone who
made you nervous or made you a little nuts needlessly? A lot of
stress and burnout have to do with bosses who communicate mixed
messages. You're never sure where they're at. Or they're insecure
and they make your job impossible.
Effective leadership empowers the workforce. An empowered workforce
means one that's committed, that feels its members are learning,
that they're competent. They have a sense of human bond, a sense of
community, a sense of meaning in their work. Even people who do not
especially like each other feel the sense of community. A feeling of
significance is so important. Good leaders make people feel that
they're at the very heart of things, not at the periphery. Everyone
feels that he or she makes a difference to the success of the
organization. When that happens, people feel centered and that gives
their work meaning.
Leadership gives the workforce a sense of meaning, of significance,
of competence, of community, of commitment rather than compliance.
It also gives the workforce a sense of fun. It makes work something
you look forward to, something pleasant. You get a kick out of
work. Noel Coward once said, "Work should be more fun than fun."
6. A
leader creates flat, flexible, adaptive, decentralized systems and
organizations. Bureaucracies don't create leaders. They create
managers, and bureaucrats. They create people who wear square hats,
not sombreros. Bureaucracies are self-sustaining only in times of
stability, when the environment is placid. They are very ineffective
when times are changing. When the world is turbulent, the managerial
environment is elastic, fluid, and volatile. Then the bureaucracy
seems to be particularly inadequate because it keeps repeating
yesterday's lessons and fighting the last war. Bureaucracies tend to
suppress real leadership because real leaders create disorder and
instability, even chaos. Real leaders change the very system in
which bureaucracies are based.
Companies are being evaluated now according to their ability to
operate in the context of a zero-time-lag world. Managing change is
going to be the ultimate leadership challenge. We need strong
leadership in organizations based on a network or a flattened
hierarchy model-a more decentralized model where the key words are
acknowledge, create, and empower. Organizations that operate on the
model of bureaucracy-based on the words control, order, and
predict-are not going to cut it. They already aren't. Almost half
(47 percent) of the organizations that were Fortune 500 companies
between 1979 and 1989 are no longer there, because they weren't
adaptive enough. In this decade, we need more leadership and less
bureaucracy. It's either change or die.
For what research confirms employees would tell bosses - if asked,
send an email to
bs@futurevisions.org with
"MWS research on bosses" in the subject
and nothing in the body
