Is Leadership a Role or a Function?
Leadership Fundamentals #1
How do you want to be remembered? By your title or your accomplishments?
Over the past half-century, the world of work has transitioned from the old industrial assembly line to the corporate cubicle. The effect has been to institutionalize our sense of who we are. Our identities are formed by our corporate connections, political affiliations, and consumer choices. We advance through our affiliation to these cultures. They mold us into loyal members of the institution.
There is an alternative to defining yourself by your role, your title, or organizational function and an institutional affiliation that you have.
Do see yourself as a human person with unlimited potential for creating impact?
If you do, then you get to create the impact that you want. You get to decide what your life’s meaning is. It isn’t conforming to a corporate culture or political ideology. It is being a person who acts on their desire to make a difference in the world. It is how we discover who we are and what our potential is.
Realizing who we are is found in understanding the distinction between being a product of the industrialization of work and being a person who creates impact. They don’t exist in isolation from one another. They are both present with us all the time. You can’t escape the former. It is like water to fish. The total, all-encompassing context of everything that we do. But, we must embrace the other because it isn’t an institutional structure, but a spiritual structure of human purpose and action.
We have to create the conditions where our potential can be released to make a difference that matters. Understanding this distinction here is where we begin to think for ourselves, make decisions about what our life means, and realize that there is a world waiting for us to be the person of impact.
This distinction has everything to do with what we think of as leadership. Is leadership an institutional role or title or is leadership an expression of the very best that we personally have to offer the world?
Distinctions
Charles Taylor, a Canadian philosopher, in his Sources of the Self distinguishes between
“a focus on what is right to do and what is good to do, of defining the contents of obligation rather than the nature of the good life.”
How is choosing to do what is right as an obligation different from doing what is right because it produces something good? We can frame this question in this way.
In your work every day, what do you do that you believe creates goodness for your company? I assume you are doing those things that are required of you. You are fulfilling your obligations to the company. But of those things, what is truly good? You decide what good is. I would say that good is the impact that makes a difference that matters. As a person, a human being, you can look at your life and decide was is good, and what is just doing the right things. We do the right things because it is expected of us. This is the institutional model.
Marshall McLuhan in his work, The Medium is the Message, says that “We make our tools, and then our tools make us.” We create industries and corporations, and then our industries and corporations mold us to be people who do the right thing because this is what we know to do. In this sense, some of our personhood is taken away from us.
We don’t automatically acknowledge this distinction as involving our identity. We grow into it unaware of the institution’s effect upon us. We find it normal to comply with the expectations and obligations of the organization’s culture. Our lives, then, become filled with moments of unacknowledged decisions. The institution’s impact is a kind of programming to respond in a particular way to situations.
Many people have expressed to me that they feel that their work life and their home life are so entirely different from one another that it requires them to be two separate people.
If you have read Circle of Impact: Taking Personal Initiative To Ignite Change, then you will remember William’s story in the first chapter. He had spent over two decades with the same company. Changes meant that he no longer worked for the company he had known since he finished college. He discovered that he didn’t really know who he was. He was no one when apart from the company. He had totally absorbed the company’s values as his own. He could not see this until he left and had to decide what he was going to do with his life. I’ve known many people like William. I am one of them, too.
Choosing to live according to what is good, as Taylor describes, means that our values take on an importance that may well have been missing as we conformed to institutional expectations. Our values should transcend the institutional relationships that we have. They should guide us to be persons of impact which is the essence of leadership.
Human Agency
In his collection of essays, Human Agency and Language, Taylor describes human agency as the capacity to evaluate situations and then decide what to do.
In its simplest form, it is like this. You are on a trip, driving down the highway. All of a sudden you realize that you feel hungry. Our animal instinct signals it is time to eat. Now if you were a wild animal, you’d pull off the road and might anything available. You might hunt down an animal, or eat some bark off of a tree, or some vegetation on the ground.
But we are human animals. We don’t always just act on instinct. We evaluate the situation. We look at the map and we see that twenty minutes up the road is a town. We decide to stop there for something to eat. We pull off the highway. There is a diner, a hamburger joint, a chicken fast-food place, and a taco truck in the parking lot of the gas station. The question is what are you hungry for? You think. I have another three hours of driving ahead. I need something substantial. So you go into the diner and have a meat and three vegetable meal.
This is a picture of how we evaluate our life situations. Taylor says,
“What is distinctively human is the power to evaluate our desires, to regard some as desirable and others as undesirable. … (the) capacity to evaluate desires is bound up with our power of self-evaluation.”
We are constantly in an evaluative mode. The more we are aware of the choices we prefer to make, the more we know about ourselves. And the more that we can choose the good or create goodness. We see here how our sense of identity gets formed. It is a lifelong process, and if like William, we have spent over half of our life working in an institutional environment, we cannot avoid its influence on how we think of ourselves.
Can we separate ourselves from the institution and see ourselves as unique, potential-filled persons desiring to create impact that makes a difference that matters?
This is not just a distinction related to our identity, but also the distinction that matters in regard to what is leadership.
What is Leadership?
Leading as a function of human life
Simple question. Is leadership a function of an organization or is it how we function in the fullness of ourselves as human beings? In other words, is the measure of a person’s life the leadership impact that they had? Do we desire to be remembered for forty years with the same company? Sure, yes, of course. But not because we lasted so long. But rather by our contribution to the company. However, do we know what that contribution is? More importantly now, do we know what our potential contribution is now and what our impact in the future could be? Most people I know doin’t even think this way.
Leading as an organizational role
Throughout the 20th century, leadership was viewed as an organizational role and a title. The senior executive, general manager, or owner are the leaders. Everyone else follows them. You know what that means. Do your job. Don’t ask questions. Don’t interfere in someone else’s work. Leave a neat desk at the end of the day.
This is a caricature of office work. If it was literally like that, no one but the most desperate person would do those jobs. I know that there is more freedom for doing good than we may ordinarily see. People want this kind of work environment.
The first obstacle to overcome is a belief in your own potential to make a difference that matters.
The second obstacle is the organization’s structure which makes it difficult to take personal initiative to create impact.
The consequence is that the organization becomes leadership starved. As the world has shifted from an industrial form to a corporate form, and now, to a more decentralized networked information-driven form, the complexity of the function of organizations makes the old forms inadequate. In other words, we need more leadership and it needs to be different than it has been.
This is what every organization that I have ever encountered needs.
Elevating a company’s leadership capacity
As I wrote in my post, The Future is More Than Complex, our world is becoming more complex. The old industrial/corporate model of organization is poorly equipped to adapt to these changes. We either collapse under the weight of the burden of sustaining that which can’t sustain itself, or we change. As a result, I see two changes that we need to begin to implement.
The first is how we define leadership.
It requires accepting that leadership as an elite role or title is no longer adequate for the times that we live in.
It is my conviction that we need to develop leadership capacity in the people who work in organizations. To do so, we begin by practicing the kind of leadership that I define as:
All leadership begins with personal initiative to create impact that makes a difference that matters.
This means that each person is equipped and supported to do specific kinds of activities that accompany what it means to create impact.
Impact is a change that makes a difference that matters.
In order for this capacity building to work, it requires a second change.
Organizations need to change how they are organized.
When individuals begin to take leadership initiative it puts a premium on their capacity to build relationships of respect, trust, and mutual accountability.
I am not suggesting that we rid the world of hierarchical organizations. I am suggesting that we change the leadership model and relationship patterns of behavior within them. Simply put we begin to organize around networks of relationships. See this diagram to understand.
The more difficult challenge before us is not the work of leadership capacity building in people. It is rather creating institutional structures for leadership capacity building. One of those areas of change is how we define roles and title people for those roles. In this scenario, one of the added roles for the CEO or the owner is to become the facilitator of leadership impact. A C-level initiative to develop leadership throughout the organization will transform the organization.
Leadership doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists as a human desire for solving problems and creating healthier communities. It exists in how we want our relationships to provide us a place for making a difference. Each of those already exists. What is missing are the institutional structures where we can find the opportunity to be leaders of impact.
I do believe that we are in transition, and this is the structural transition that we are beginning to experience. It is not one transition, but many that are happening simultaneously.
I am seeing a growing decentralization of society as leadership is dispersed from its traditional organizational center to the periphery of the lives of people worldwide. There is a reaffirmation of E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful perspective, as people move away from cities into smaller communities, as our networks of relationships expand at a global scale and the recognition that the changes that we are experiencing are leading us into a new era of human history.
My hope is that people will be able to say at the end of their lives: