Goals and follow-through | Managing Leadership

Lighting a fire under them

We’ve been discussing goals this week. We discovered that they can have profoundly positive – or negative – effects on a group. One factor that determines which way those scales tip is where the goals come from.

We also looked briefly at how goals can discipline action and even generate a chain of “in-order-to” steps for planning, research, and preparation that may not have been initially anticipated by the managers responsible for the goals. These can come from anyone in the assigned group.

But yesterday we tried to surface what the difference might be that lies between these two concerns: where goals come from and what they do to an organization. We noted yesterday that a vital thing they do is bring the group to life; they instill it with purpose and the impulse to action.

At least, for a bit. We posited a situation in which a group of people knew they had been assigned to a project, but then were simply given the project’s goal and deadline, together with a statement of its intended contribution to the larger enterprise, and then were left alone to see what they would do on their own about it.

We asked several questions that seemed to reveal three possible outcomes: 1) no action without external instructions; 2) focus on the goal leading to planning, structure, action, and follow-through; or 3) apparent initial interest and cohesion, dissipated when outside directive intervention failed to materialize.

Some elements of this discussion – that about the effect goals can have on a group, for example – may have seemed straightforward. But the issue here is not really the goals themselves. It is leadership. The principle question here centers on what it does, as well as the related question of where it comes from.

So let’s look at the implications in this respect of the questions that we’ve examined this week, and your answers.

As you went over these it may have occurred to you that goals and leadership seem to have a lot in common. In particular, it is not difficult to see that goals can have the sort of electrifying effect on an group that is often attributed to individual leadership.

For the purposes of this format, let’s stipulate, if we may, that the issue isn’t so much that goals resemble leadership in some respects, as that they are tools used by leaders to extend their range of influence.

Does that sound right to you? Look again at the three alternatives we found yesterday:

Whether the group doesn’t even stir without specific external direction, or it just takes off on its own & accomplishes the goal, or appears to begin to do that but then fades in the absence of outside management intervention: what does that say about the general leadership environment of the group, or the presence or quality of the individual leaders who produced the goal?

In the first case, we appear to have neither an effective leadership environment nor effective “leaders.”

In the second, the leadership environment seems to be quite strong, while the influence of individual leaders external to the group appears to be negligible. Based on the posited behavior of the group, they likely could even have developed a similar project on their own had they been asked simply to do that.

In the third event, there appears to be latently the makings of a leadership environment, but the goal alone proved insufficient a core for it to coalesce around. What is the role of leadership in such an event? Or, better yet, of management?

We will consider that, tomorrow. Please stop by then!

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Today’s tip: Speaking of environments and the peculiar results they sometimes, of their own accord, produce, please see this item from the Science and Technology section of The Economist, describing under what conditions girls naturally do as well as boys in a subject previously understood to be owned by the boys, what subject area they don’t seem to be making any gains in, and which, on the other hand, still find the boys far inferior to the girls.

Then consider the speculation about how comparative advantage produces its own more “traditional” consequences after school, in career choices made by men and women. Worth a read.

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Management from the top | Managing Leadership on Friday, July 18, 2008 at 6:54 pm

[...] A short while ago, we discussed the importance of goals in the overall mechanism of organizational leadership. We connected them with the instinct to self-management that arises when people collect together in the collaborative pursuit of a larger joint goal. But we noted that it is possible – even probable – that these are insufficient (a group and a goal) in and of themselves to promote sustained action on a tasking in the absence of senior managerial intervention. [...]