Managing Leadership^®

Last Thursday, I told a story from my days in the Marines about an organizational success that transformed my unit from the worst to the best literally on the instant. Unfortunately, the event was so dramatic and impressive that I drew precisely the wrong conclusion about what brought it about.

It’s true that everyone else came to the same conclusion, but the issue then was not about their opinions, but about my ability to stay focused on the job and to properly command the units to which I was assigned. And so too, the issue today is not about the legions of advisors badgering you about about their paradigm-shattering leadership discoveries, but about your ability to remember your job, and to properly manage your own organizations.

It took me a long time to realize that I had it wrong, longer to figure out what I really should be doing, and even longer yet to come to an understanding of why. But still later than that, I finally stumbled upon the least well-known and easily the most important management thinker of the modern organizational age, Mary Parker Follett.

She put into words – words she wrote decades before I was born – what I was slowly coming to understand, and which I hope you will come to appreciate, also. I’m going to share two key insights of hers that relate to the present context. Consider this one, which is beginning to experience some currency, finally, today:

When there is identification with organizational goals, the members tend to perceive what the situation requires and to do it whether the boss exerts influence to have it done or not. In fact, he need not be present or even aware of the immediate circumstances.”

This is often interpreted as an affirmation of a kind of mission-oriented guidance, combined with a liberal and wide distribution of authority throughout an organization, enabling employees everywhere to give expression to it. But while that is saying a lot – and while a lot more about it remains to be said – the quote really aims deeper even than that.

It speaks more to leadership as an organizational – as opposed to an individual – characteristic. Let’s just examine one corner of that idea, from the perspective offered by this next excerpt from Follett, here quoting something said to her by a worker in a plant:

I don’t want to be led and I don’t want to be patronized, and I watch all the time to see if I am.”

I have news for you: the problems experienced by my platoon prior to my arrival did not arise from a deficit of leadership – they came from a surfeit of individual leadership imposed on men who didn’t want to be patronized. Sooner or later (as in my case) you learn to not patronize U.S. Marines – nor is it wise to patronize modern-day workers of, really, any nationality or culture.

If you do, and moreover if you actually have the organizational power to do so without meaningful resistance, then you will likely succeed to this extent: you will produce sulking, resentful employees who exhibit a child-like reticence and inertia, getting away with what they can, doing with conspicuous reluctance only what they are told, and perhaps only showing real enthusiasm when they know your instructions are likely to blow up in your face.

The Marines who transformed before my eyes on that US Navy ship that day in the Pacific didn’t do so because of me, specifically. They were not children seeking parenting, lost followers seeking leadership, or even aimless wanderers seeking guidance.

They were young men – Marines – who knew who they were, what they were capable of, and what they wanted to be permitted to do. My role in that transformation wasn’t to lead them out of their own deficiencies – but to inadvertently remove those unwittingly imposed on them by their previous “leaders,” and to act as the messenger bearing an opportunity for them to do what they knew they could do.

Their cheers in that room below decks, heard reverberating throughout the vast ship, were a celebration not of me, or of what I had done for them, but of themselves, of what they knew they could do for themselves and for their unit, and of how they would use this opportunity to give expression to the reality that already existed within them.

Certainly, I had a role, in this story. But the thing is that we all had our roles. The transformation occurred when we each did them side by side, mutually facilitating – rather than suppressing, or even straightjacketing – those of the others.

We’re going to be unpacking this idea over the next few days. For example, some of you may be thinking that perhaps it was the dramatic assignment that did the job. There is both more and less to that than one might think, and we’ll look at it tomorrow. I hope to see you then.

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Today’s tip: Speaking of the oppressive effects of individual leadership, please do take a moment to view this really quite enlightening piece from the Economist, discussing the cognitive effects of dividing people according to social power.

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