Leading Change / Monthly Mentor - April 2009

Leading Change / Monthly Mentor - April 2009

Leading Change

by JB Hunt

"Victory belongs to the most persevering." – Napoleon Bonaparte

Leading reengineering efforts is not so different from leading any reform or change, but it helps to know what real leadership is.

I've often expressed the simple but seminal distinction between leading and managing: Leading means doing right things, and managing just means doing things right.

The leader’s role is to impart a sense of vision, a purpose, the strategic intent, a dream, a mission. A leader must embody a purpose.

Management is simply concerned with doing things right, with efficiency, with control mechanisms and the short run. The manager administers and the leader innovates. The manager is a copy; the leader is an original. The manager accepts the status quo; the leader is always challenging the gospel.

The manager focuses on systems and structure; the leader focuses on people. The manager relies on control; the leader inspires trust. The manager has a short-range view; the leader has a long-range perspective. The manager imitates; the leader originates. The manager asks “how” and “when,” and the leader asks “what” and “why.” Effective leaders tell their direct subordinates “how.” Leaders create a tapestry of intentions.

Today’s organizations are over managed and under led—overly concerned with policies, practices, procedures, and rules and not enough concerned with empowerment, trust, vision. Leadership translates intention and vision into reality. Leaders keep their eyes on the future, on the horizon, not just on the bottom line.

No Substitute for Leadership

In times of change, there is no substitute for leadership. Unfortunately, most organizations are based on an old-fashioned form of bureaucracy, the mind-set of control, order and predict. Those are the things of management. If we worked in stable environments where we could control, order and predict, a manager would be a terrific thing. But today’s organizations are full of surprises. We are all children of chaos. And so we need leaders who originate, who innovate, and who have the imagination to see the future.

Senior executives of most failing organizations are so immersed in “how to” details, with trivia—with administrivia—that they forget what’s important. Effective executives, on the other hand, have a strong sense of purpose. They know what is important, and they remind other people of what’s important. It’s not enough to just have vision and objectives. A leader must create an environment where people are aware of why they are there. They share a great deal of self-knowledge.

Leadership is character, and character is knowing one’s ingredients. Leaders also have the capacity to generate and sustain trust by being candid, by communicating effectively, and by exhibiting constancy and caring. When leaders show that they care, that they’re candid and competent, they generate and sustain trust. Finally, leaders have a bias toward action. They don’t just sit in the dugout or kibitz from the bleachers. They’re at bat. They play even if it means making errors. And when they make errors, they learn from them. Some people suggest that there is a genetic factor to leadership—that people either have certain charismatic qualities or not. I think that’s nonsense; in fact, just the opposite is true. The way we become leaders is by learning about leadership through life and job experiences.

Leadership is nurtured with on-the-job education through role models. People learn to be leaders through adversity.

They learn through the pain and agony of having to come up with the hard answers, of being fired, of down-sizing, of having to take over an inexperienced group of people. But ultimately the only way people learn about leadership is by being placed into situations from which they can learn and get feedback from valued sources around them. Leadership comes through the hard-earned experience in the arena rather than watching from the balcony.

Introducing Change

Most leaders today have the tough job of being change agents in a challenging environment. They must work within a system populated by noisy stakeholders who are continually scrutinizing every decision and action. So the question becomes: How does a leader rally individuals from different disciplines and areas of expertise behind an overarching and compelling vision? Leaders must first articulate a vision, strategic intent, mission, conviction, or set of beliefs. They must communicate clearly, compellingly, forcibly, simply, and ceaselessly in memos, meetings, newsletters, videos, satellite broadcasts, and most of all, eyeball to eyeball. Their vision must be anchored in organizational realities. Anchoring the vision means taking it into account in everything that they do—recruiting, rewarding, decision-making, policy-making, and empowering. Finally, leaders must discover the individuals who are “variance sensors”— people whose expectations are beyond the reality, who see the need for change.

That’s the only way to be sure that their vision will flourish beyond their efforts.

I view any change as a three-act play: Act One is creating the vision; Act Two is changing the system and implementing it; and Act Three is stabilizing and putting into effect those various system changes that went on in the second act. There’s a lot of improvisation, surprise, and chaos, but there’s no other way of doing things. We live in a world where the only constant is change. And while change, as Machiavelli observed, “has no constituency,” leaders must create an environment that embraces change, not as a threat but as an opportunity.