Management Leverage Blog

Those who practice random acts of leadership will never inspire many to follow.

My post yesterday about LAME (Look At Me, Everyone) leadership inspired a record-breaking number of retweets (only 4, I know but hey, that’s my record right now), so I thought I would expand on my thoughts a little.

The quote was inspired by a Peruvian student of mine who attended a class I taught at a University in Guatemala. Listening to his comments, I realized I had not convinced him that leadership can be learned.

Data wasn’t going to convince this guy. He stubbornly clung to his argument. One can learn to be a manager, he said (as if a manager was somehow half a leader), but not a leader. In one of those blinding revelations for which I cannot take credit, I realized that his notion of leadership was charismatic leadership (which also proved to me what I had already suspected—he had not been listening to my oh-so-intriguing lecture).

And he was right. You cannot learn to be charismatic.

But

1. Charisma is not sufficient. Do you know any charismatic people who are not leaders? Might there be something else necessary?
2. Charisma is not necessary. Some leaders are charismatic. That’s not new information, I hope. But most great leaders are, in fact, humble (Jim Collins’ Level 5 Leadership is a good place to start here if you want more information).

You may not have the right stuff to become a world-class, biography-worthy  leader. But you can get a lot better than you are now. Unlike common sense, leadership is a series of behaviors, and behaviors are learnable.

Though my student’s efforts to pay attention in class were consistent with the efforts he made to become a better leader, I finally convinced him that leadership is a series of learnable skills. He just never learned many of them.

Learning to lead  is humbling work. Most simply don’t make the effort.

Those who think that leadership cannot be learned, tend to think great leaders are charismatic leaders.

Counting tumbleweeds with my sister on our family treks to El Paso could only hold our attention for so long, so we slept most of the way.  Except once. I heard Dad tell my mother that the highway was so straight that if he fell asleep at the wheel he would wake up in the same lane.

I knew this wasn’t true once I saw him make the little adjustments on the wheel as he was driving. So I decided to stay awake to make sure the car didn’t end up buried in a cactus. There really wasn’t much for else for us to hit.

Like Dad’s hand on the steering wheel, managers should use feedback to make small adjustments in behavior or to encourage behavior that they would like to see more of. Many managers avoid giving feedback until a major adjustment is necessary to correct a problem.

Major adjustments require a formal discussion, and would be a lot less necessary if managers would give feedback more often.

In a perfect world we would each have a personal board of directors to guide us through the daily minefield of organizational life. Prominent world and organizational leaders, Nobel prize winners, and management gurus, would gently guide us to the correct solution to the big hairy problems we need to deal with, as well as the correct choice in each of the little fuzzy decisions we make each day.

Unfortunately, most of us neither find ourselves with such connections on speed-dial nor the luxury of time to gather them all together several times a day in the closest break-out room. At least not yet.

But just because we don’t have the contacts or time (yet), doesn’t mean we shouldn’t build a board of directors anyway. The world is richer than we can see it alone.

So who would sit on your board?

People who complement your preferred management style. Each of us carries with us a preferred perspective of organizations, which correspond nicely with large arenas of organizational theory (Bolman and Deal do a nice job here).

We either prefer to see organizations as either

1. Logically structured, factories (even if we don’t work in manufacturing),
2. A family of complicated interpersonal relationships,
3. A political jungle, or
4. A theater, replete with symbolism, props, and actors.

But what if you believe all four frames are true?

You would be correct. But you also probably believe one of these four frames portrays the world of organizations as they should be. And since all are true in different circumstances, your decisions will be correct roughly 25% of the time if you make them by yourself.

So don’t. go it alone. Fill your board with people who see the world differently than you see it. You don’t have to know each member, but you do need to understand them. (Biographies help. Please don’t tell him, but John D. Rockefeller Sr. is on my board.)

If Santa is on your board, with practice you will be able to quickly instant message Santa to ask, WWSD (What would Santa Do)?