Today I was reading a blog
about so called ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ skills that leaders must have. In the blog the author said, “In reality, there is nothing ‘soft’ about
the skills needed to relate to people well enough to lead them.” The
theme here is the idea that an organization functions best when leaders
lead. It’s because the workers in the
organization supposedly need a leader.
What does the leader have to do according to the blog?
The leader must hold others accountable to their commitments; marshal
others to work together while following you; make timely and informed decisions;
define priorities and goals; see situations from a wide, organizational
perspective; etc.
That’s how the Army trained its leaders…until someone came
along who paid attention. It was General
Wesley Clark. When he worked at the U.S. Army’s National Training Center, he observed
that the incoming battalions never beat the resident “enemy,” even though the
visiting leaders were given lots of training and advice. General Clark began to wonder why. He got in
a jeep and went out into the field to observe the fighting. For the visiting army, all the strategy and
tactics were managed through the chain of command. This trickled down to the
frontline lieutenants, who were given a set of tactical instructions and expected to
execute the tasks as commanded. The soldiers just followed whatever reasonable
orders were given.
The training center’s resident enemy received no such
detailed tactical instruction. Their job was simple: to defeat the incoming
army by whatever means necessary. It was the initiative and ingenuity of the
frontline soldier that made the difference in the outcome of the battle. The
frontline soldiers worked in small teams, defined the problem they faced at any
moment, and invented a solution. They were free to behave as thinking adults.
That is why the smaller resident enemy always won the battle. No leader got in their way.
What General Clark realized what that the actions of senior
commanders could lose a battle, but their orders could not win it. Perhaps the best business leadership advice ever given
was advice Stanford Professor Dr. Robert Sutton gave to a CEO. He advised: “Hire a bunch of smart people,
and stay out of their way until they ask for your help.”
There is so much material out there covering the ‘How to’ for
leaders, that we take it for granted that the key to success is having great
leaders.
If you Google ‘books on business leadership’ your first hit will say this “Business Leadership Books - Millions of
titles, new & used.” Millions of
titles indeed!
But it’s not true.
Great organizations don’t need leaders.
And we have ample evidence that people don’t need leaders.
In a December Harvard Business Review article in 2011 the
author made the following observation about the assumption that you need
leaders. If you have 100,000 employees
and a 10 to 1 ratio of leader to employee, then you will need 11,111
leaders. That is a costly overhead. The article then goes on to talk about a very
successful 30 year old company that has no leaders, just workers.
In 2012, the Boston Research Group, along with Research Data
Technology and The Center for Effective Organizations at the University of
Southern California conducted a study that surveyed over 36 thousand employees
from the C-suite to the front line, across 18 countries. The single most important finding of this
research was that where employees had the opportunity to self govern their behavior;
the company out performed other types of management structures on all 14
measures used in the study.
There is structure to employee self-governance. We call it Peer Accountability and it is the
backbone of the work I do at both my companies: Tailwind Discovery Group, and
THNK. It works!
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