Leadership
by
Charles Lamson
People get excited about the topic of leadership. They want to know: What makes a great leader? Executives at all levels in all Industries are interested in this question. They believe the answer will bring improved organizational performance and personal career success. They hope to acquire the skills that will transform an average manager into a true leader.
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Fortunately, leadership can be taught and learned. Leadership seems to be the marshalling of skills possessed by a majority but used by a minority. However, it is something that can be learned by anyone, taught to everyone, denied to no one.
What is leadership? To start, a leader is one who influences others to attain goals. The greater the number of followers, the greater the influence. And the more successful the attainment of worthy goals, the more evident the leadership. But we must explore beyond this bare definition to capture the excitement and intrigue that devoted followers and students of leadership feel when they see a great leader in action.
Outstanding leaders formulate and implement strategies that produce results and sustainable competitive advantage. They may launch enterprises, build organization cultures, win wars, or otherwise change the course of events. They are strategists who sieze opportunities others overlook, but they are also passionately concerned with detail---all the small, fundamental realities that can make or mar the grandest of plans.
Vision
The leader's job is to create a vision. Until a few decades ago, vision was not a word one heard managers utter. But today, having a vision for the future and communicating that vision to others are known to be essential components of great leadership. If there is no vision, there is no business. Leaders are painters of the vision and archetypes of the journey. A clear vision and communication of that vision leads to higher venture growth in entrepreneurial firms.
A vision is a mental image of a possible and desirable future state of the organization. It expresses the leader's ambitions for the organization. The best visions are both ideal and unique. If a vision conveys an ideal, it communicates a standard of excellence and a clear choice of positive values. If the vision is also unique, it communicates and inspires pride in being different from other organizations. The choice of language is important; the words should imply a combination of realism and optimism, an action orientation, and resolution and confidence that the vision will be attained.
Great leaders imagine an ideal future for their organization that goes beyond the ordinary and beyond what others may have thought possible. They strive to realize significant achievements that others have not. In short, leaders must be forward-looking and clarify the direction in which they want their organizations, and even entire industries, to move.
Visions can be small or large and can exist throughout all organizational levels as well as at the very top. The important points are that (1) a vision is necessary for effective leadership; (2) a person or team can develop a vision for any job, work unit, or organization; and (3) many people, including managers who do not develop into strong leaders, do not develop a clear vision---instead, they focus on performing or surviving on a day-to-day basis.
Put another way, leaders must know what they want. And other people must understand what that is. The leader must be able to articulate the vision, clearly and often. Other people throughout the organization should understand the vision and be able to state it clearly themselves. That's a start. But the vision means nothing until the leader and followers take action to turn the vision into reality.
Two metaphors reinforce the important concept of vision. The first is the jigsaw puzzle. It is much easier to put a puzzle together if you have the picture on the box cover in front of you. Without the picture, or vision, the lack of direction is likely to result in frustration and failure. The second metaphor is the slide projector. Imagine a projector that is out of focus. If you had to watch blurred images for a long period of time, you would get confused, and impatient, and disoriented. You would stop following the presentation and lose respect for the presenter. It is the leader's job to focus the projector. That is what communicating a vision is all about: making it clear where you are heading.
Not just any vision will do. Visions can be inappropriate and even fail for a variety of reasons. First, an inappropriate vision may reflect merely the leader's personal needs. Such a vision can be unethical, or may fail because of lack of acceptance by the market or by those who must implement it.
Second (and related to the first), an inappropriate vision may ignore stakeholder needs. Third, the leader must stay abreast of environmental changes. Although effective leaders maintain confidence and persevere despite obstacles, the time may come when the facts dictate that the vision must change. You will learn more about change and how to manage it later in this analysis.
Leading and Managing
Effective managers are not necessarily true leaders. Many administrators, supervisors, and even top executives execute their responsibility successfully without being great leaders. But these positions afford opportunity for leadership. The ability to lead effectively, then, will set the excellent managers apart from the average ones.
Whereas management must deal with the ongoing, day-to-day complexities of organizations, true leadership includes effectively orchestrating important change. While managing requires planning and budgeting routines, leading includes setting the direction (creating a vision) for the firm. Management requires structuring the organization, staffing it with capable people, and monitoring activities. Leadership goes beyond these functions by inspiring people to attain the vision. Great leaders keep people focused on moving the organization toward its ideal future, motivating them to overcome whatever obstacles lie in the way.
Many observers decry the rarity of strong leadership. While many managers focus on superficial activities and worry about short-term profits and stock prices, too few have emerged as leaders who foster innovation and the attainment of long-term goals. And whereas many managers are overly concerned with fitting in and not rocking the boat, those who emerge as leaders are more concerned with making important decisions that may break with tradition but are humane, moral, and right. The leader puts a premium on substance rather than on style.
It is important to be clear here about several things. First, management and leadership are both vitally important. To highlight the need for more leadership is not to minimize the importance of management for managers. It is to say that leadership involves unique processes that are distinguishable from basic management processes. Moreover, just because they involve different processes does not mean that they require different, separate people. The same individual can exemplify effective managerial processes, leadership processes, both, or neither.
Some people will dislike the idea of distinguishing between management and leadership, maintaining it is artificial or derogatory toward the managers and management processes that make organizations run. Perhaps a better or more useful distinction is between supervisory and strategic leadership. Supervisory leadership is behavior that provides guidance, support, and coercive feedback for the day-to-day activities of work unit members. Strategic leadership gives purpose and meaning to organizations. Strategic leadership involves anticipating and envisioning a viable future for the organization, and working with others to initiate changes that create such a future.
*SOURCE: MANAGEMENT: THE NEW COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE, 6TH ED., 2004, THOMAS S. BATEMAN & SCOTT A. SNELL, PGS. 366-368*
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