employee population in quadrant C. Quadrant C is where incremental progress occurs. Many companies can still be effective in the short run. This quadrant is full of low-profile companies operating at a baseline level of performance. In some cases, they operate in product or service sectors that are fully mature. These companies are rich acquisition targets due to their lack of revenue growth, operating performance, and steady cash flows. Alternatively, companies that exist in this quadrant were once high-flyers and have grown significantly but have evolved into a style of incremental management. They are too big to be acquired or too far beyond the ability to affect positive change. They have become large zombie companies.
Quadrant D is the most precarious. In this quadrant, there is strong leadership, potentially flash leadership in an organization filled with individuals who will carry out the tasks. Think of the individuals at Tyco in the procurement or accounts payable department who were responsible for buying and paying the bill for CEO Dennis Kozlowski's gold toilet seat or the toga party for his wife's birthday. In this example, there is a strong cultlike personality at the top job of the company. He had enough leadership, at least temporarily, to influence subordinates to engage in his outrageous behavior.
Another example is the GE travel team who allowed Jeffrey Immelt to have a backup jet available on each of his travel visits so that he would not be delayed. The enablement of these cultlike celebrity CEOs is the antithesis of good followership. Quadrant D is littered with bankrupt companies or companies that have fallen from grace. It is in this quadrant where more shareholder, employee, and societal damage occurs than anywhere else. Other traps in this quadrant consist of serial acquisitions with marginal payoffs. With this strategy, CEOs are often heralded in the media as rock stars because of the growth of the companies they have been tasked to manage. But debt and goodwill swells resulting in a magnified risk in the balance sheet. In a low-interest-rate environment, the strategy can be pursued for some time. Inevitably though, companies that pursue this strategy run out of runway and they crash and burn. One disastrous example was the strategic pursuit of Valeant Pharmaceuticals from 2008 to 2016 under the direction of CEO Michael Pearson. His rampant buying spree was a terrible long-term strategy, although his methods artificially propped up the stock price for a short and unsustainable period of time.
Obviously, it's not as simple as individuals existing in a particular quadrant for all the roles they play within the company. Most of what we do needs to interoperate among the many hats we wear when executing our jobs. For example, an executive vice president in an organization clearly needs to have strong leadership skills and strong followership skills. They may be responsible for leading geographic regions, strategic business units, or major operational functions. Despite these clear responsibilities, they are also a subordinate follower to their leaders. This dynamic highlights how closely aligned leadership and followership are and, when combined, can produce extraordinary results.
Simply because an individual or company exists in a particular quadrant does not mean they will stay there indefinitely. We've seen companies drift or change over time. It is usually the case when there is a major change in strategic direction, market conditions, shareholder activism, or CEO succession. This leads us to dig deeper to understand what the characteristics are for individuals in each of the quadrants. It also leads us to understand leading indicators that may demonstrate movement between the quadrants.
Note
1 1. Definition from Google search: https://www.google.com/search?q=what+are+the+dictionaries&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS795US796&oq=what+are+the+dictionaries&aqs=chrome..69i57j0j0i22i30l2j0i10i22i30j0i22i30l5.12572j1j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#dobs=leader.
2 Leaders Versus Titled Executives: Leadership Differs from Management
Leadership and management are not the same. Amazingly, people often get this wrong. Bosses are frequently confused with leaders, and subordinates are confused with followers. That said, a boss may very well be a leader, but it is not a foregone conclusion. Just because a boss has the title or power in the relationship, doesn't mean that boss is a leader. We have all seen these bosses in action—the titled executive or manager who oversees a large team but has no followers. Some employees do as they are instructed by the boss, but not because they are being led or because those employees are drawn to follow, but rather because they fear the boss's reprisals. This is not leadership.
Sometimes we see this demonstrated in nonbusiness settings, such as politics. All too frequently, we find ourselves governed by a politician who, although they were voted into office, they are not an actual leader. These individuals may not even have the credentials to be qualified for the role. Although they certainly have the position, they do not garner a broad following.
My favorite book on explaining the differences between leadership and management is A Force for Change by John Kotter. We confuse leadership with people in managerial functions. Kotter lays out the stark differences between mobilizing groups of people in a common direction (leadership) and organizing a group of people to accomplish a task or run a function (management). Kotter makes a special point to parse leadership from the commonly misused title of someone who sits atop a business function or organization, what we call in this book, a titled executive.
Kotter rightly argues that simply by virtue of holding a position at the top of a team, department, or an entire organization doesn't imply that the person is actually providing leadership. Despite the book having been written in 1990, we continue to imbue the elements of leadership unwittingly onto these managers and titled executives.
What is amazing, though, is when these teams or departments produce extraordinary results despite the lack of leadership at the top. How is it that teams can function despite this lack of leadership at the top? In some cases, it's momentum from a previous manager. In other cases, the product carries itself. But more commonly, success is driven by followership in action. Professionals who are not in the top spot are able to step up to fill the leadership void by wielding influence among their peers.
What motivates people to fill the leadership gap left by their managers? Some employees are motivated by their own career aspirations, seeing the void as an opportunity to demonstrate their capabilities. Others are motivated by serving the customer out of a need to simply do the right thing. These employees are driven by the greater purpose their organization is pursuing.
Titled managers or executives have power. Simply by nature of their title or position, these bosses can get others to do their work. Confusing this with leadership can lead to disastrous results. Some companies mistakenly have managers run leadership development training sessions. Such training sessions likely merge the concepts of leadership and management, but these two disciplines require very different skills. Companies can and should train separately for good management and for good leadership. Far too often, companies conflate the two and they wonder why the results are suboptimal.
Leaders do not need to be good managers, but depending on how high up in the organization the position, good management requires leadership. We have seen many good leaders who cannot manage well. If these good leaders are self-actualized, they recognize that they need to have good followers who are also good managers. They can delegate the management skill far more effectively than a follower can fill a leadership void.
Management Matters
There is an abundance of research on the science of management, and much has been written about how to manage more effectively. The “modern” father of management discipline is Peter Drucker in his
