Managing Leadership^®

I once saw a review of some writing by Mary Parker Follett by a modern day guru who professed hesitation about reading it, because he might discover that she anticipated some of his “work.” The truth is, very little new insight is available that cannot ultimately be traced directly to her.

For example (this isn’t where MPF comes in, yet), last December Steve Roesler, of All Things Workplace, published a brilliant essay I’ve been wanting to comment on called Inhibiting Change: Will We Grow Businesses in a Risk-Avoidance Culture. This piece is a fascinating integration of academic work on personality and psychology with the world of work, and if you missed it, please take a moment to view it now; Steve is brilliant at helping us establish context from which we can make sense of what is going on.

Another thing he does well is prompt intelligent and vigorous comment chains to his posts. Wally Bock, of Three Star Leadership, offered this one:

I think there are two other factors at play in risk-avoidance. One is that we insist on making failure/success activities out of what should be learning activities, also called experiments. The other is that we allow people to make decisions based on their position in the organization rather than their fitness to make the decision.”

“. . .we insist on making failure/success activities out of what should be learning activities. . .” Do any of you recognize that? It is a tendency that we all fall prey to, and it is a major contributor to the shortcomings of our talent development programs.

Here’s the Mary Parker Follett part: “. . . we allow people to make decisions based on their position in the organization rather than their fitness to make the decision.” This is vintage MPF; “vintage” because she saw this well over 75 years ago, and “MPF” because it is still viewed as so radical.

The phrase, “fitness to make the decision,” is interesting because it can refer either to ability or to location. For example, the decision might involve a technical matter, and we allow the technical expert in our organization to make it. I recently had a problem with my website, and the customer service representative didn’t hesitate to call in a technician with specific experience in the area. I happen to know that this isn’t their protocol, but she did it anyway in order to solve the problem right then and there.

Or, a decision might simply be begging to be made at one of the customer/vendor/competitor interfaces with your company, and we may want to authorize the employee at that interface at that moment to make the decision. Years ago, I was calling AT&T to get an 800 number. Somehow, I wound up talking with an engineer on an assignment deep in the bowels of the company. He was the one who was available, and on learning of my request, he didn’t redirect me; he simply pulled up the company database and worked with me to find a number I liked.

Mary Parker Follett was a lifelong student of how democracies organized societies in the United States; she came to business consulting late in her life, but brought many of her intelligent insights with her. Moreover, she was able to see many American and British organizations already employing them.

If you haven’t read her yet, see my review here, and pick up your own copy of the best compilation available of her work here.

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Today’s tip: A main purpose of this site is to reopen the dialogue about the putative difference between a “leader” and a manager. It is interesting to see Miki Saxon, at Leadership Turn, doing just that, with a seven-part series on the topic starting here. She doesn’t reach my conclusions, but she conducts a rigorous, honest examination. Please stop over to see it.

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