Then around mid-century, things changed. People became more educated and their expectations rose, forcing leaders to involve them more. That led to the rise of “participatory management,” which was originally supposed to flatten out hierarchies and democratize the organization.
It didn’t work. Just the opposite happened as bureaucracies grew, hierarchies became more entrenched, silos popped up everywhere, turf wars became the norm, and politics nosed into the relationships between leaders and followers.
We invite you to look around your organization and consider how (or if) that statement applies to your circumstance. What signs of entrenchment, silos, turf wars, and politics exist that are impeding progress on your mission?
You likely noted a few impediments—impediments that have negative consequences toward achieving your critical goals. No doubt your predecessors worked to overcome these challenges by creating organizational policies that grew larger and larger in an effort to address every issue that might arise. If leadership is defined as “someone who has a supervisory position,” then the majority of your organization is likely comprised of “followers.” And if almost everyone is a follower, you have to spell everything out for them. An overemphasis on Industrial Age-style hierarchies inevitably produced the psychological impact of knowing “I am not as important as you.” No one moved until the “boss” told that person to do it. Matrix organizations were supposed to soften this impact, but they also generated confusion. The more complex the organization, the more helpless people felt. By the year 2000, in the words of some astute observers, there was a wave of “increasing urgency in the…frustration at all levels with pointless layers of hierarchy, egotistical leadership, autocratic decision making, and bureaucratic bungling.”11
Now, many leaders—most importantly, government leaders—are frankly bewildered. They are caught between accomplishing a highly important mission and desperately trying to figure out how to lead and motivate followers: “Am I the boss or the best friend? Am I going to be a controlling manager or an empowering manager? Am I a ‘Theory X’ manager, handing down orders and showing who’s boss, or am I a ‘Theory Y’ manager, nurturing, egalitarian, and sensitive? Am I the great visionary or the button-down analyst? Am I a systemizer or a humanist?”
Stanford Professor Harold Leavitt beautifully described today’s leadership dilemma this way: “Humanizers focus on the people side of the organization, on human needs, attitudes, and emotions. They are generally opposed to hierarchies, viewing them as restrictive, spirit-draining, even imprisoning. Systemizers, in contrast, fixate on facts, measurements, and systems. They are generally in favor of hierarchies, treating them as effective structures for doing big jobs. Humanizers tend to stereotype systemizers as insensitive, anal-retentive types who think that if they can’t measure it, it isn’t there. Systemizers tend to caricature humanizers as fuzzy-headed, overemotional creatures who don’t think straight.”12
Of course, most managers vacillate back and forth across this spectrum as they develop a certain sense about which style to use, depending on the situation. Some try for a balance between distant boss and approachable colleague, but it’s an extremely tough balance to strike. In practice, managers keep seesawing between the styles—somebody’s floundering over there lacking necessary expertise, so you have to go micromanage them. Meanwhile, everybody else feels abandoned, other people start to flounder and, eventually, you’re micromanaging them. And so it goes, as you run from one crisis to another.
Professor Leavitt concludes that this typical approach to organizational leadership “breeds infantilizing dependency, distrust, conflict, toadying, territoriality, distorted communication, and most of the other human ailments that plague every large organization.”13
The problem, however, is not how to strike a balance between two dysfunctional styles of leading people: The problem is in your paradigm of a leader.
In government, leaders have always been defined by their titles. Military and law-enforcement personnel wear their ranks on their uniforms. Politicians and career civil servants are often referred to by their title or level instead of their actual name. It is not uncommon for someone to introduce himself or herself with a title consisting of several words, each creating more ambiguity around actual responsibilities. Stephen R. Covey often discussed how leaders aren’t defined by their block on the organizational chart. The person on top is “no more likely to be a leader than anyone else.” What he meant was that a grant of formal authority doesn’t make you a leader. It makes you accountable, but owning a title doesn’t make you a leader any more than owning a pair of skis makes you a downhill racer. A title doesn’t automatically entitle you to anything.
A title doesn’t automatically entitle you to anything.
Think about leadership in two ways: formal authority that comes with a title, and moral authority that comes with your character. As you look at the leaders you’ve known, you know some of them have had little influence despite their title. In fact, many on their teams are simply “waiting them out.” The built-in churn among government leaders often fosters this mentality. On the other hand, there are the unofficial leaders everybody trusts.
The truth is that anyone can be a leader, regardless of title or job description. Gandhi energized the entire Indian nation and won its independence but never held a formal title. Every organization has an informal network of “go-to people” for wisdom, advice, and solutions. They are often neither senior leaders nor managers, but they have earned “informal authority” because of their experience and influence.
Having a few leaders deciding everything just bottlenecks the whole organization. Important issues often stack up waiting for a decision from the front office. Just think of how long it takes to get the boss to sign off on something. We have grown accustomed to this, assuming this is simply how government works. Gary Hamel challenges all organizations to rethink this mindset saying, “We still have these organizations where too much power and authority are reserved for people at the top of the pyramid…. We have to syndicate the work of leadership more broadly.”14
Everyone Leads
So if you want to motivate people, and leaders are the most motivated people, why not make everyone a leader?
It’s entirely possible to create the conditions where everyone can be a leader if you change your paradigm of what a leader is. When you no longer think of leadership as the sole province of a few select people, you realize that all people have primary leadership qualities that can be leveraged. Initiative, resourcefulness, vision, strategic focus, creativity—these qualities are in no way limited to the front office. Even small children can become leaders.
Thousands of schools have adopted the 7 Habits as a way to teach leadership to children. Usually, “student leaders” are a small group of gifted, outgoing kids who are always the class officers, the top athletes, or the leads in the school play. But in schools we’ve worked with, all students are expected to be leaders. Every child is a leader of something. Organizing books, announcing the lunch menu, collecting homework, greeting guests, dispensing hand sanitizers—these might not seem like “leadership” roles, but leadership starts here. The children learn what it feels like to be responsible. They learn that being a leader means being a contributor.
Most students take huge pride in their responsibilities. Some don’t want to miss a day because of their desire to fulfill their leadership roles. As they mature, so do their responsibilities: they take over marking attendance, teaching lessons, leading projects, mentoring other students, even grading homework. Every student can lead something. An autistic boy who struggles to keep track of time does small daily routines in the nurse’s office. He is so excited to fill his leadership role that he watches the clock like a hawk and is never late for his job. Another boy with a history of discipline problems is assigned to lead the office staff in doing several tasks once a day. He not only shows up for his “shift,” but
