Crosby B.C., Bryson J.M. - Leadership for the Common Good (2005)(en)
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come receptive to change (Bridges, 1980; Bridges and Mitchell, 2002).
British businesswoman Anita Roddick is the founder of the Body Shop, a business that exemplifies the attention to social and environmental impact that the World Business Council for Sustainable Development promotes. She reports on her company’s collaborative approach to change. When the company had to restructure, “we talked to everyone in the organization. . . . For people who could not continue with the organization, or who didn’t want to, we offered retraining packages for the entire family. . . . We set up an Entrepreneur’s Club; we provided money to seed people’s own ventures, to work with the community, to come back as a consultant to the company. And we worked with everyone in the community— health care workers, social workers, police, psychologists—so they understood the process” (Hesselbein and Johnston, 2002a, p. 25).
Leaders may need to overcome the expectation that power should be concentrated in positional leaders. Raymond Gordon reminds advocates of shared leadership that this expectation is often deeply embedded in the culture of a traditionally hierarchical organization (Gordon, 2002; Drath, 2001). In such a culture, leaders are likely to have to blend directive and shared styles, at least for a time. Furthermore, if the culture places the highest value on individual achievement, then leaders need to communicate the value of collective achievement and combat devaluation of relational leadership styles. As Fletcher and Kaüfer (2003) note, this may be difficult when relational styles are associated with those people (for instance, women) who are less powerful in the organization.
Leaders need to think strategically about how and when to involve external stakeholders in a change effort. Despite pressure from San Francisco health professionals in the early years of the U.S. AIDS crisis, the director of the San Francisco health department deferred launching a crackdown on unsafe sexual practices in bathhouses until he could achieve consensus among the main stakeholder groups on that course of action. The result was a stalemate that contributed to the spread of HIV.
Key stakeholders don’t always have to be involved directly. Useful information can be gathered through individual interviews, surveys, and role plays. Forming strategic alliances with like-minded external stakeholders can be a way to develop a shared pool of
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information and other resources for coping with change (Nanus and Dobbs, 1999).
Planning for Succession
Among the changes that organizational leaders should expect is the likelihood of people in leadership roles moving on to other assignments, retiring, becoming disabled, or dying. Replacement leaders must be mentored and developed if they are to assume additional responsibilities (Dalton and Thompson, 1986; Charan, Drotter, and Noel, 2001). In addition to training programs, an organization may need specific policies aimed at facilitating leadership turnover (Taylor, 1987). The transition from one leader or a group of leaders who founded an organization is likely to be especially difficult; a process such as strategic planning may be required to review the organization’s mission and accomplishments, focus on strategic issues, and develop new strategies. A key strategy may well be hiring or promoting a set of leaders who have skills and orientations different from those of the old leaders. Ann Howard (2001) offers advice specifically for identifying, assessing, and selecting senior leaders; it is mainly aimed at the corporate world but applies as well to public and nonprofit organizations.
Jan Hively has a personal policy of moving on from an organizational leadership position when she feels “that a different style of leadership is needed to reinforce the organization’s capacity for follow through” (personal communication, July 2003). In 2002, she pressed for electing a formal VAN leadership group that could oversee VAN, and she worked to raise funds to pay for a permanent coordinator and other staff. She also made sure that the relationship of VAN to the University of Minnesota was clarified. She moved out of the role of coordinator and became senior adviser and vice-chair of the leadership group.
Building Inclusive Community
Inside and Outside an Organization
As innovation consultant Gifford Pinchot points out, creating a sense of community in the workplace has personal and organizational benefits (2002). Community within an organization resides
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in the network of supportive, synergistic relationships. Leaders nurture internal community by:
•Caring for self and others. Ultimately, leadership is a matter of the heart. Successful leaders are “in love with leading, with the people who do the work, with what their organizations produce, and with those who honor the organization by using its work” (Kouzes and Posner, 2002, p. 399). This does not mean, however, that they must do all the caring themselves; instead, they should establish social networks and supportive programs (such as health and fitness services, mentoring or coaching programs, grief counseling, outplacement services, or annual celebrations) that institutionalize the work of caring and compassion (see Dutton and others, 2002). Roddick urges leaders to give meaningful praise; she would include the amount of joy in the workplace in any measure of organizational success (Hesselbein and Johnston, 2002a).
•Promoting a shared mission and a culture of integrity, inclusion, learning, and productivity.
•Shaking up the hierarchy. Make people on the periphery more central; reduce markers of rank and privilege.
•Developing a “gift economy” and internal markets. As Pinchot (2002) describes it, this combination rewards people and units for giving resources away and encourages them to offer the best services to other parts of the organization.
•Providing resources, including knowledge of group process and organizational dynamics, to help people work together.
•Starting leadership development programs that are appropriate to the type of organization and to people’s roles in it.
Leaders build external community by joining other members of the community in solving common problems and contributing to community well-being. This interorganizational leadership is discussed more fully in Part Two; in general it involves building supportive and synergistic relations with allies and partial supporters, wooing neutrals, and struggling respectfully with opponents in particular issue areas.
Roddick explained earlier in this chapter how her company has fostered internal and external community. Conflict between
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units of the National Institutes of Health during the early years of the AIDS crisis in the United States demonstrates the harm engendered by lack of communal problem solving. By mid-1983 CDC researchers had gathered considerable specimens and other evidence about the incidence and effects of AIDS, and they needed the help of the National Cancer Institute to analyze specimens for clues to the nature of the retrovirus that was causing AIDS. A leading retrovirologist at NCI was far more interested in protecting his own turf, however, than in cooperating with CDC researchers. Additionally, he undermined external community (and impeded progress on identifying the AIDS virus) by hampering the promising research of AIDS researchers at France’s Pasteur Institute (Shilts, 1988).
Helpful Tools for Organizational Leaders
Exercise 3.6 can help you assess how well leadership tasks are being performed. To be most useful, the assessment should be completed and discussed by people from all levels and parts of the organization. The assessment can help you identify and understand strengths and weaknesses that leaders need to keep in mind as they use the tools about to be described.
Strategic planning (Bryson, 2004b) and scenario planning (Van der Heijden and others, 2002) are helpful processes for accomplishing the main tasks of organizational leadership. Both help people reframe change so that it is consistent with (or clearly connected to) the organization’s history (Bryson, 1995; Burt, 2002). Both can contribute to community building, by involving people from throughout the organization and from outside. John Kotter (1996) offers a useful process of organizational change consisting of eight stages:
1.Establishing a sense of urgency
2.Creating a guiding coalition
3.Developing a vision and strategy
4.Communicating the change vision
5.Empowering employees
6.Generating short-term wins
7.Consolidating gains and producing more change
8.Anchoring new approaches in the culture
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Exercise 3.6. Assessing Your Organization.
Respond to these questions by checking one of the three boxes after each:
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mission and philosophy statements? |
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How well do organizational |
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strategies link mission, goals, |
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policies, programs, and actions? |
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animated by an inspiring vision? |
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How flexible and transparent are |
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the governance, administrative, |
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and communication systems? |
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organizational purpose? |
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Are organizational ethics |
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emphasized? |
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Does the organization welcome |
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differing ideas and people? |
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Does the organization promote |
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learning and productivity? |
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To what extent does the |
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organization monitor internal |
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and external environments? |
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How entrepreneurial and |
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experimental is the organization? |
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Are management routines and |
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details effectively overseen? |
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Are collaboration and teamwork |
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emphasized? |
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How well does the organization |
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plan for change? |
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How well does the organization plan |
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for turnover of senior managers? |
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How well are social support systems |
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functioning? |
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organizational celebrations? |
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Exercise 3.6. Assessing Your Organization, Cont’d.
Respond to these questions by checking one of the three boxes after each:
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manage rewards? |
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To what extent is everyone involved |
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in problem definition and resolution? |
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needed resources and training for |
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doing his or her job? |
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When you are done with the ratings:
1.Develop a list of organizational strengths on the basis of the items ranked good/well. Note a few of the reasons these items were ranked highly.
2.Develop a list of organizational weaknesses on the basis of the items ranked poor/poorly. Note a few of the reasons these items were given a low ranking.
3.You might also note which aspects of the items rated OK/acceptably need improvement.
4.Referring to the lists can be helpful as people in the organization undertake strategic planning or any other change process.
Ronald Heifetz has developed an approach called “adaptive work,” in which leaders help constituents understand and deal with the “adaptive challenges” they face. He offers advice for managing distress, keeping people focused on the challenges, giving the work to the people involved, and protecting “voices of leadership from below” (Heifetz, 1994; Heifetz and Laurie, 1997). The “quality movement” also offers guidance for improving organizational effectiveness (see Cohen and Brand, 1993).
Several organizational leadership analysts recommend using multiple “lenses” or “frames” to diagnose problems and foster creative solutions (Morgan, 1997; Quinn, 1988; Terry 1993; Bolman and Deal, 2003). For example, Lee Bolman and Terrence Deal (2003) suggest four main frames for making sense of an organiza-
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tion: structural, human resource, political, and symbolic. They offer guidance for integrating the four frames and applying them to particular situations. In his Seven Zones for Leadership (2001), Terry recommends that the leadership approach depend on the degree to which an organization’s environment is “fixable and knowable.” His typology is described more fully in Resource C.
The “living systems” frame has received increasing attention from analysts trying to help leaders guide an organization through a chaotic environment (Senge, 1990; Senge and others, 1994, 1999; Eoyang, 1997; Youngblood, 1997; Wheatley, 1999; Allen and Cherrey, 2000; Marion and Uhl-Bien, 2001). Much of their advice is included in our sections on learning culture and adapting to change. Kanter’s Evolve! and Annunzio’s eLeadership offer advice for organizations seeking to thrive in the digital age (Kanter, 2001; Annunzio, 2001; see also Brown and Gioia, 2002).
Cameron and Caza promote a “virtues” frame, drawing on research that identifies extraordinary organizations that downsize with “caring and compassion”; recover from crisis with “maturity, wisdom and forgiveness”; and that seek “to do good as well as to do well” (2002, p. 34). These organizations adopt (and exceed) moral codes, establish a values-based culture, perform effectively, and focus on the highest human potential. An especially important virtue in these organizations is forgiveness, the “capacity to foster collective abandonment of justified resentment, bitterness and blame” and adopt in their stead “positive, forward-looking approaches in response to harm or damage” (p. 39). Barbara Nelson, Linda Kaboolian, and Kathryn Carver describe “concord organizations” that can work across diverse communities to be “incubators for larger political settlements or social changes” but that primarily maintain social and political changes in the wake of agreements to settle longstanding conflicts (Nelson, Kaboolian, and Carver, 2003, p. 8).
Many leadership analysts (see, for instance, Zaccaro and Klimoski, 2001; Kets de Vries, 1995) offer advice geared to the demands on people at the top of an organization. Several authors give helpful guidance for leaders in nonprofit organizations (Letts, Ryan, and Grossman, 1998; Nanus and Dobbs, 1999; Brinckerhoff, 1998; Riggio and Orr, 2004). Also helpful are Mark Moore’s Creating Public Value (1995) for leaders in government and his article “Managing
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for Value: Organizational Strategy in For-Profit, Nonprofit, and Governmental Organizations” (Moore, 2000). Martin Krieger (1996) offers an intricate model of entrepreneurial leadership that draws on religious notions of creation, tragedy, heroism, virtue, covenant, character, errancy, vision, revelation, and redemption. David Heenan and Warren Bennis (1999) offer advice for people who are second-in-command or a supporting partner of a highly visible leader. Craig Pearce and Jay Conger’s Shared Leadership offers guidance about when and where shared leadership is appropriate in a team or organization (Pearce and Conger, 2003). David Peterson and Mary Dee Hicks (1996) present strategies for coaching and developing the people in an organization. Robert Kelley’s advice in The Power of Followership is useful for people who are trying to promote organizational well-being from a less powerful position (Kelley, 1992). Wherever the leaders are in an organization, they must understand the opportunities and constraints that their position entails. As their positional power diminishes, they may need to give more attention to building a broad coalition to champion change efforts. Visa founder Dee Hock directs his leadership advice to managers, wherever they are in an organization. The first responsibility, he says, is to manage oneself, “one’s own integrity, character, ethics, knowledge, wisdom, temperament, words, and acts. It is a complex, unending, incredibly difficult, often-shunned task.” The second responsibility is “to manage those who have authority over us: bosses, supervisors, directors, regulators, ad infinitum.” The third is managing one’s peers: associates, competitors, suppliers, customers. The fourth and final is managing people over whom one has authority. This last task need receive only minimal attention if the manager has hired the right people for the job and given them adequate support (Hock, 2002, pp. 67–68). Terry (1993) advises everyone who seeks to lead courageously in an organization to develop a set of “exit cards” that outline options for leaving a current position if necessary.
Summary
Team leadership focuses on recruitment, effective communication, empowerment, and leadership development of team members. The main tasks of organizational leadership are paying attention
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to purpose and design, becoming adept at dealing with internal and external change, and building inclusive community inside and outside the organization. These leadership tasks track with researchers’ attention to transformational and transactional leadership. They have found that effective leaders engage in transformational behavior (being a role model in the service of an inspiring cause; promoting a challenging, meaningful vision; providing intellectual stimulation and individualized attention for followers) along with transactional behavior (specifically rewarding follower productivity; Avolio, 1999).
The next chapter explores how leaders work with individuals, teams, and organizations to create and communicate shared meaning (visionary leadership); to make and implement executive, legislative, and administrative decisions (political leadership); and to adjudicate disputes and sanction conduct (ethical leadership). Considerable attention is given to designing and using forums, arenas, and courts—the shared-power settings for visionary, political, and ethical leadership, respectively.
Chapter Four
Leadership Tasks in
a Shared-Power World
Visionary, Political, and Ethical Leadership
Hope and vision cause us to revalue the world, reconceiving our situation so that what was once even beyond hope is now within the realm of reality.
MARTIN KRIEGER
It doesn’t take courage to shoot a policeman in the back of the head, or to murder an unarmed taxi driver. What takes courage is to compete in the arena of democracy, where the tools are persuasion, fairness, and common decency.
GEORGE MITCHELL
Visionary leadership shapes the meaning of public problems and inspires commitment to proposed solutions. Political leadership achieves adoption and implementation of policies, programs, and projects incorporating the solutions. Ethical leadership helps settle disputes over those policies, programs, and projects, and it sanctions conduct.
Each type of leadership occurs in a characteristic setting— informal and formal forums for visionary leadership, formal and informal arenas for political leadership, and formal and informal courts for ethical leadership. This chapter describes these settings and the model of power on which they are based, before elaborating the tasks of visionary, political, and ethical leadership.
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