Leader - Leader OR Leader - Follower

TURN THE SHIP AROUND!!

Which of these two organizational structures does your company fall into??

Last weekend I had the opportunity to read the extraordinary book by L. David Marquet Captain USN (Ret) and how he turned one of the poorest performing nuclear submarines into one of the top performing subs.

These are the main concepts: the two different structures –

“Managing” is a ‘do-this’ act; here is exactly what I want you to do.   Managers buy a person’s work with a paycheck, position, power or fear. 

A lot of companies practice this.  

But a human being’s genius, passion, loyalty, and tenacious creativity can only be volunteered by the person = Leadership is an enabling act to bring a person to that level of creativity.  The world’s greatest problems will be solved by passionate, unleashed, volunteers. Management is a position… Leadership is a choice. Leadership is a role.   Stephen Covey wrote – Leadership is communicating to people their worth and potential so clearly that they are inspired to see it in themselves.  

1) Many organizations have a leader-follower mentality.  A leader-follower role has workers following the orders, and not a lot of participation in the decision making.   ‘I will tell you what to do and how to do it’. In a top down leader-follower organization the rank and file doesn’t need to be thinking ahead, because the boss is doing it for them.  This is a bad pattern to fall into. In a top-down, leader-follower culture, when something goes wrong, everyone goes over the cliff. They follow the leader.  The do not query the leader; they do not learn.   

Does your organization play ‘bring me a rock?’ – Vague understanding of tasks because there is no clarity and no meaning behind the exercise?    A great example happened to me at one company I was working at – the SVP called an urgent impromptu meeting for the marketing department and said we needed to complete this research by tomorrow for the CEO on a particular topic – basically another damn fire drill.  I ended up in the elevator with the CEO that afternoon and asked her about the task. “Yes, this might come up at the board meeting next month, if you can prepare a one or two page backgrounder on this topic for me for next month that would be wonderful.” This was a far different exercise from the “URGENT FETCH A ROCK” exercise we received from the SVP.

2) A leader-leader environment has workers thinking for themselves – leading themselves.   Here is what needs to be done – figure out how to do it – think – come back with solutions – keep this big picture in mind – this is done with management guidance and of course in line with mission goals.  In this scenario employees begin to think, grow, and coincidentally, position themselves for promotion. In this environment you end up with a very strong, cohesive organization.

In order for the leader-leader environment to succeed, you need to have qualified staff. You need to train and have competent staff in order to allow them to be successful in a leader-leader role. Many organization hope they hire good people and then do nothing to help them.  What is your training budget for your group? For your company?  One company I worked at had many long tenure employees (i.e. 10-20+ years), code developers, who really know the products but had lost touch with the latest programming techniques including internet security and it left some gaping holes in our product that were exposed by hackers.  It reminded me of the CEO/CFO discussion on training; CEO – We need to budget money to train our employees, CFO – What happens if we train them and they leave?, CEO – What happens if we don’t train them, and they stay….

Here is a quick test to tell if your organization is a leader-follower or a leader-leader organization. The next time your manager is out the day of the staff meeting, does everyone find something else to do or do you still meet as a team?