These Paradigm Shifts, practices, and operating system are absolutely fundamental to success now. Each requires changing people’s hearts and minds in fundamental ways. Changing behavior is about the hardest challenge anyone ever faces. (If you don’t think so, just consider how hard it is for you to change your behavior.) It’s a great challenge, but the shift must be made. This book will show you how. The paradigms of the past might have been good for the times, but you can’t afford to live by them now. In the face of the public sector’s growing competitive cauldron, you will lose the ultimate mission essential: people who bring talent, passion, determination, and focus to the success of your organization and its mission.
The Need for Leaders at Every Level
The importance of releasing the potential of every person
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“In the Industrial Age, leadership was a position. In the Knowledge Age,
leadership is a choice.”
–Stephen R. Covey
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The most highly motivated people in any organization tend to be its leaders.
Leaders are the people who are responsible for results. They “own” the results, good or bad, so they’re highly committed to producing the best results possible. Leaders are far more likely to take initiative and care about their goals than “followers” are. After all, followers are not responsible.
People who own things take care of them. They wash their cars, repair their homes, tend their gardens. They take care because they care. On the other hand, non-owners care little, if at all:
Who washes a rental car? No one.
Why? The person doesn’t own it.
In government organizations, the leaders are owners; they own goals, projects, initiatives, and systems. A big challenge for leaders is to get other people—the non-owners—to care about those things. Many in government contend they are hindered in driving results because they cannot provide performance incentives or “fire” a poor performer like those in the private sector. There may be some truth to that argument; however, the reality is that followers—no matter the compensation; no matter the promises, benefits, or opportunities for advancement—simply don’t care in the same way leaders do. Followers don’t own anything.
A Brief History of Leadership and Management
Ever since the founding of the first government organization (whatever it was), leaders have struggled with this problem: How do you motivate people to give their best? Age after age of autocratic leaders used fear as the primary lever for engagement. Compliance was key. In the last century, scientific managers used the “carrot and stick” approach that was well suited to a population of workers with minimal education and low expectations. 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