Leadership in Transition : Circle of Impact
A series of reflections on Chapter Four of the Circle of Impact: Taking Personal Initiative To Ignite Change.
The following is a selection with a comment from chapter four, Leadership in Transition, from my book, Circle of Impact: Taking Personal Initiative To Ignite Change.
“Are you a leader?”
I often ask people this question. I want to know if they see themselves as leaders. When I first began to ask this question more than two decades ago, I was surprised by the pushback that I got. My assumption was that people would be complemented by my question. They weren’t. Most of the time people said no. Their response wasn’t a nice sort of humble deflection of a compliment. Instead, I felt that I had offended them. This did not make sense to me.
I would then dig a little deeper and ask why. Almost universally, their response would be either “I don’t want to be the boss” or “I don’t want all that responsibility.” They saw leadership as setting a person apart for responsibility and recognition. In their view, leaders have a target on their back. It was a position of vulnerability and exposure to scrutiny that they didn’t want. Many times, they told me of ruined friendships because one of their colleagues became their boss. Don’t call them a leader because it means isolation and pain.
Leadership is a kind of universal term that represents some kind of superlative. “She’s a leader in her field.” “He’s a thought leader.” “We are the industry leader in…” Leadership isn’t an object. You can’t go buy it online. We see it as a title or an organizational role. Yet it comes out awkwardly if we say, “I work for Leader Jones.” It isn’t a thing, but a quality that we use to describe someone or something.
Our Perception of Leadership
The most basic, universal use of the word “leader” is to distinguish a person from those who are followers. This is not how I am using the word. Why is this person designated as a leader and that person a follower? Is it the role within an organization or a particular social structure that they have?
Think about the teams that you are on. To achieve your goals, each of you performs as a leader and a follower as necessary. On teams, and in other collaborative environments, we need the skills and the mindset to be both, sometimes at the same time. The old hierarchical structure of organizations assumed that there was one leader. Whomever was in charge was the leader. Everyone else was a follower. Leadership, from this 20th-century perspective, was about top-down delegation of work. Those days of leadership are fading quickly. The technical sophistication of organizational life and the pace of change mean that no one person has all the knowledge or expertise to be the sole leader. Leadership is quickly shifting from an organizational role that a person is assigned to perform to the function of people within the role that they have. Character and creativity are marks of leadership that each person within an organization can now demonstrate.
There is a simple explanation as to how we came to view leadership as an organizational role. Our perception is based on how organizations have been structured. With the emergence of the modern industrial organization, the roles of people changed. In the past, they may have been shopkeepers, farmers, teachers, or clerks in an office. The advent of the factory assembly line meant that work was delegated, regulated, and repetitive. A new economic class of middle-class managers emerged. The social dimension of work became what happened during breaks or after work. This was a transformational change in how society functioned. Now a new transition is taking place, from the mass production assembly line to customized manufacturing on a global scale.
I saw this transition firsthand in a change project for a textile company. The 17-step process for making socks was broken. Each step existed as a separate process, disconnected from the one before and the one after. The people who worked each step were trained only for that one step. Their job each day was to do their assigned task for eight hours. No cross-training. No integration of the process to produce efficiency and possibilities for growth. No consideration for inventory control, as each step generated its own level, our project’s purpose was to integrate the process. As a result, the time for making a pair of men’s dress socks was reduced from six weeks to six days.
We have spent, as a society, a millennium or more with a view that there are bosses and workers, leaders and followers. Our job is to follow. This experience is now changing. In the future, companies will become leader-rich organizations because the complexity and scale of change that is happening requires more people to take a greater responsibility for the outcome of the business’ operation.
People are human beings who by their very nature are creative and social. When organizational leaders began to realize this, they started talking about followership as a component of leadership, a positive step forward in understanding the value of people in an organization. Yet even from this perspective, leadership is still defined as a role within the structure of the modern organization. In effect, where you fit in the hierarchy defines your value to the organization.
The cultural dominance of the hierarchical model remains with us. It influences how we view the world at large. It is a difficult perception to change. It is why people still push back when I ask the question, “Are you a leader?”
Even More In Transition
Five and a half years later, it is clearer that the global transition that we are in is not simply about leadership as an institutional role and title, but a representation of the collapse of the modern institutional structure.
What is it that is failing? It is the premise that modern organizations are machines and the people who work in those organizations are cogs in the mechanism of the machine.
We should see this transition as not from one absolute form to another absolute form. Instead, we should see that new forms, plural, are emerging. These forms are derived from the initiative of people linking up with others to decide how they want to work together.
As I have written often over the past couple years, we are witnessing the rise of decentralized responses to crises. We are seeing how the Center of society no longer holds, and the people and communities on the Periphery are looking for ways to build stronger local networks.
In seeing the number of people who decided that they would rather quit their jobs than go back to the office after the COVID pandemic, they weren’t say, “I will not work.” It produced an interesting phenomenon.
Commercial real estate in many large cities are now empty. And in smaller communities, discussions are now being held to determine how to create affordable housing as people leave the cities, establish collaborative work environments, and seek a new direction for their lives.
The Great Unrealized Challenge
At the beginning of this chapter from my book, Circle of Impact, I describe how I found that people did not like the idea of being referred to as leaders. I don’t see this has changed much. The reason is that we still are operating with a hierarchical, mechanistic view of leadership.
That perception doesn’t go away with a swipe of a hand. It can only change as we individually decide that I have something to contribute, I can make a difference that matters, and that my life, my family, and my community needs me to take initiative.
Not seeing this is understandable. It is a product of the Culture of Simulation that I have written about.
When we decide to discover what our real value to the world is, we learn to take personal initiative that creates impact that makes a difference that matters. When you start doing this, you are no longer a cog in the machine, but a living person of impact in all the places where you life has come to matter.
In the next post in this reflection on chapter four of Circle of Impact, we look more closely at what taking initiative consists of.