Three Views on Leadership

Most of us enjoy the thought and the comfort that comes when we are able to hold someone else, namely, top management, responsible for the lack of effective leadership.

There is an emotional element to the view of leadership as well and it involves the difference between compliance and commitment.  When genuine commitment is needed, hierarchical authority becomes problematic.

While people often want the support of top management, they also don't want it telling them what to do.

Drucker notes that there are three generic roles played by leaders at all levels - designer, teacher, and steward.

If we look at the leaders who have significant business responsibility and "bottom-line" focus - they can create organizational subcultures that may differ significantly from the mainstream organizational culture.  Only then will they be able to begin to design learning processes that might spread such skills throughout their organization and eventually become embedded in how work is done.  This answers the question - "We feel we need new tools for working with our key corporate customers as learning partners."

Once these learning processes become established, then you become teachers.

This is where there are limitations that may not lend itself as a natural counterpart to a leaders strength.  Because their focus is primarily on their business unit, they may not think much about the process of learning (teaching) within the larger organization and typically they have little time to devote to this aspect.  They may also be unaware of and relatively inept at dealing with anti-learning forces in the larger organization.  They can become impatient when the larger organization does not change to match their new ideas of what works and may start to feel misunderstood and unappreciated.  They can easily develop an "us against the world" siege mentality, which will then make them especially ineffective in communicating their ideas to the "unwashed."

These innovative leaders are often more at risk than they realize.  They typically share a mental model that says, "My boss will leave me alone as long as I produce results, regardless of the methods I use."  Improved results are often threatening to others, and the more dramatic the improvement, the greater the threat.  Complex organizations have complex forces that maintain the status quo and inhibit the spread of new ideas.  Often, even the most effective leaders fail to understand these forces or know how to work with them.

Still, there will be no significant progress made without this type of leadership - stewarding passion is more important from you and will produce more results than any sincerely committed CEO.