Essay on Leadership and Productivity
March, 2010, Essay on Leadership and Organizational Productivity.
Words have power. A leader's assembly of words can inspire, resulting in amazing accomplishments and surprising productivity. Conversely, clumsy or callous words can drain an organization of its vigor, its initiative, and its chances of success.
In 1983, as a young Infantry enlisted man, I went through Officers Candidate School ("OCS") -- one of the courses that the US Army has used for decades to turn young leaders into the kind of junior officers that could successfully influence troops to accomplish incredible things under adverse conditions. In phase one of that course, candidates were required to learn -- internalize -- a number of written pieces that were considered "Required Knowledge." Those pieces, some of them maxims, others complete essays, had to be learned so completely that candidates could recite them at any time, under any conditions, through any distractions. They had to be known verbatim and the candidate was expected to understand not just the words, but the deeper message behind them.
One such item was the definition of Leadership. That's simple: "Leadership is influencing people to accomplish a mission." The focus, of course, is on the perfectly chosen verb, "influencing." There's a good reason why that verb isn't "ordering," or "berating," or "pushing." The reason why this is so critical to military organizations is that when it comes to performance, leadership is a multiplier. It fosters excellence and creates initiative. That is also true for other kinds of organizations. It's amazing how such a simple thing, known to be effective, can be so hard to demonstrate that it sometimes seems entirely absent.
Another such article of required knowledge was Schofield's Definition of Discipline. To this day, I think that if you lead an organization and this does not resonate with you -- or worse, if you even occasionally violate its tenets -- you are failing to create the organizational performance that you could, your organization is probably failing to capitalize on opportunities for excellence, and the construct you are building will lack the organizational solidity, stability, and bench depth owed to subordinates, supervisors, and stakeholders. Here is Schofield's short treatise, 130 years after being written and still remarkable:
"The discipline which makes the soldiers of a free country reliable in battle is not to be gained by harsh or tyrannical treatment. On the contrary, such treatment is far more likely to destroy than to make an army. It is possible to impart instruction and to give commands in such manner and such a tone of voice to inspire in the soldier no feeling but an intense desire to obey, while the opposite manner and tone of voice cannot fail to excite strong resentment and a desire to disobey. The one mode or the other of dealing with subordinates springs from a corresponding spirit in the breast of the commander. He who feels the respect which is due to others cannot fail to inspire in them regard for himself, while he who feels, and hence manifests, disrespect toward others, especially his inferiors, cannot fail to inspire hatred against himself."
Odds are good that you are not a soldier. So re-read the above, substituting "organization" or "company" for "army" or "country," and "co-worker" for "soldier." Read it while holding within you the thought that leadership runs both down, up, and horizontally through organizational hierarchies, and its foundation is respect.
Since graduating OCS, I've led platoons (30-100+ men), functional staffs, an Infantry company, retail stores, departments in private and Fortune 500 companies, and my own technology company. And a family, for that too requires leadership. I found that, having internalized Schofield's sage advice, I tried to be true to it. I sometimes failed. But I always knew painfully those times I allowed myself fail. When I failed, I hope I learned from those failures and I think that as a result my violations of Schofield's counsel have become increasingly infrequent over the years.
Only those who have looked to me for leadership over the years can truly say for sure. I hope the example I set for others who may one day lead their own organizations was a positive one, helping to prepare them for their own successes.
Due to my background and my internalization of these philosophies, I hold that they are critical to the long-term performance of an organization. More specifically, they are critical to fostering the kind of environment that creates innovation, professional pride, and a cultural ethic that sets everyone striving for perfect execution. In my eyes, those are the keys to productivity, because no matter what any senior manager believes, productivity rolls up from the bottom; it is not pushed down from the top. Individuals and teams going the extra mile is something that grows from within; it cannot be mandated.
Not everyone has it within them to be a Leader in the sense that it's proposed above. Organizations can exist, even thrive for short periods, under management bereft of positive leadership. That's a good thing for managers whose style tends more toward admonishment and negativity than influencing others toward excellence, understanding that to effectively influence people, you have to care about them -- something that cannot be faked. But for organizational health, senior managers whose motivational style tends toward the "Where there's a whip, there's a way," school of thought, managers who feel too little toward their co-workers to convey positive leadership, must accept the responsibility to find and emplace buffers and builders to do it for them.
Because the manager who discounts the value of leadership as defined above should realize he has no business interacting with wide swaths of the organization; he causes more harm than good. No matter what a manager's tactical or strategic brilliance, if he cannot hold within himself the spirit encouraged by Major General Jonh Schofield, he should find a right-hand man or woman who can and will, and put all day-to-day internal organizational communication and delegative power into that person's hands. To do otherwise creates organizational inefficiencies that do not have to and should not exist, nor be tolerated by those whom the company is serving.
I hope these musings help you when next you decide you wish to influence an organization to accomplish something, whether that organization is a club, a company, or your family, and whether you're leading from the top, the bottom, or from somewhere in the middle.
-Kevin Higgins
9 March 2010
Posted by khiggins at March 10, 2010 06:45 AM