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Chapter 3

The Need for Leaders at Every Level

The importance of releasing the potential of every person

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“In the Industrial Age, leadership was a position. In the Knowledge Age,

leadership is a choice.”

–Stephen R. Covey

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The most highly motivated people in any organization tend to be its leaders.

Leaders are the people who are responsible for results. They “own” the results, good or bad, so they’re highly committed to producing the best results possible. Leaders are far more likely to take initiative and care about their goals than “followers” are. After all, followers are not responsible.

People who own things take care of them. They wash their cars, repair their homes, tend their gardens. They take care because they care. On the other hand, non-owners care little, if at all:

Who washes a rental car? No one.

Why? The person doesn’t own it.

In government organizations, the leaders are owners; they own goals, projects, initiatives, and systems. A big challenge for leaders is to get other people—the non-owners—to care about those things. Many in government contend they are hindered in driving results because they cannot provide performance incentives or “fire” a poor performer like those in the private sector. There may be some truth to that argument; however, the reality is that followers—no matter the compensation; no matter the promises, benefits, or opportunities for advancement—simply don’t care in the same way leaders do. Followers don’t own anything.

A Brief History of Leadership and Management

Ever since the founding of the first government organization (whatever it was), leaders have struggled with this problem: How do you motivate people to give their best? Age after age of autocratic leaders used fear as the primary lever for engagement. Compliance was key. In the last century, scientific managers used the “carrot and stick” approach that was well suited to a population of workers with minimal education and low expectations. Then around mid-century, things changed. People became more educated and their expectations rose, forcing leaders to involve them more. That led to the rise of “participatory management,” which was originally supposed to flatten out hierarchies and democratize the organization.

It didn’t work. Just the opposite happened as bureaucracies grew, hierarchies became more entrenched, silos popped up everywhere, turf wars became the norm, and politics nosed into the relationships between leaders and followers.

We invite you to look around your organization and consider how (or if) that statement applies to your circumstance. What signs of entrenchment, silos, turf wars, and politics exist that are impeding progress on your mission?

You likely noted a few impediments—impediments that have negative consequences toward achieving your critical goals. No doubt your predecessors worked to overcome these challenges by creating organizational policies that grew larger and larger in an effort to address every issue that might arise. If leadership is defined as “someone who has a supervisory position,” then the majority of your organization is likely comprised of “followers.” And if almost everyone is a follower, you have to spell everything out for them. An overemphasis on Industrial Age-style hierarchies inevitably produced the psychological impact of knowing “I am not as important as you.” No one moved until the “boss” told that person to do it. Matrix organizations were supposed to soften this impact, but they also generated confusion. The more complex the organization, the more helpless people felt. By the year 2000, in the words of some astute observers, there was a wave of “increasing urgency in the…frustration at all levels with pointless layers of hierarchy, egotistical leadership, autocratic decision making, and bureaucratic bungling.”11

Now, many leaders—most importantly, government leaders—are frankly bewildered. They are caught between accomplishing a highly important mission and desperately trying to figure out how to lead and motivate followers: “Am I the boss or the best friend? Am I going to be a controlling manager or an empowering manager? Am I a ‘Theory X’ manager, handing down orders and showing who’s boss, or am I a ‘Theory Y’ manager, nurturing, egalitarian, and sensitive? Am I the great visionary or the button-down analyst? Am I a systemizer or a humanist?”

Stanford Professor Harold Leavitt beautifully described today’s leadership dilemma this way: “Humanizers focus on the people side of the organization, on human needs, attitudes, and emotions. They are generally opposed to hierarchies, viewing them as restrictive, spirit-draining, even imprisoning. Systemizers, in contrast, fixate on facts, measurements, and systems. They are generally in favor of hierarchies, treating them as effective structures for doing big jobs. Humanizers tend to stereotype systemizers as insensitive, anal-retentive types who think that if they can’t measure it, it isn’t there. Systemizers tend to caricature humanizers as fuzzy-headed, overemotional creatures who don’t think straight.”12

Of course, most managers vacillate back and forth across this spectrum as they develop a certain sense about which style to use, depending on the situation. Some try for a balance between distant boss and approachable colleague, but it’s an extremely tough balance to strike. In practice, managers keep seesawing between the styles—somebody’s floundering over there lacking necessary expertise, so you have to go micromanage them. Meanwhile, everybody else feels abandoned, other people start to flounder and, eventually, you’re micromanaging them. And so it goes, as you run from one crisis to another.

Professor Leavitt concludes that this typical approach to organizational leadership “breeds infantilizing dependency, distrust, conflict, toadying, territoriality, distorted communication, and most of the other human ailments that plague every large organization.”13

The problem, however, is not how to strike a balance between two dysfunctional styles of leading people: The problem is in your paradigm of a leader.

In government, leaders have always been defined by their titles. Military and law-enforcement personnel wear their ranks on their uniforms. Politicians and career civil servants are often referred to by their title or level instead of their actual name. It is not uncommon for someone to introduce himself or herself with a title consisting of several words, each creating more ambiguity around actual responsibilities. Stephen R. Covey often discussed how leaders aren’t defined by their block on the organizational chart. The person on top is “no more likely to be a leader than anyone else.” What he meant was that a grant of formal authority doesn’t make you a leader. It makes you accountable, but owning a title doesn’t make you a leader any more than owning a pair of skis makes you a downhill racer. A title doesn’t automatically entitle you to anything.

A title doesn’t automatically entitle you to anything.

Think about leadership in two ways: formal authority that comes with a title, and moral authority that comes with your character. As you look at the leaders you’ve known, you know some of them have had little influence despite their title. In fact, many on their teams are simply “waiting them out.” The built-in churn among government leaders often fosters this mentality. On the other hand, there are the unofficial leaders everybody trusts.

The truth is that anyone can be a leader, regardless of title or job description. Gandhi energized the entire Indian nation and won its independence but never held a formal title. Every organization has an informal network of “go-to people” for wisdom, advice, and solutions. They are often neither senior leaders nor managers, but they have earned “informal authority” because of their experience and influence.

Having a few leaders deciding everything just bottlenecks the whole organization. Important issues often stack up waiting for a decision from the front office. Just think of how long it takes to get the boss to sign off on something. We have grown accustomed to this, assuming this is simply how government works. Gary Hamel challenges all organizations to rethink this mindset saying, “We still have these organizations where too much power and authority are reserved for people at the top of the pyramid…. We have to syndicate the work of leadership more broadly.”14

Everyone Leads

So if you want to motivate people, and leaders are the most motivated people, why not make everyone a leader?

It’s entirely possible to create the conditions where everyone can be a leader if you change your paradigm of what a leader is. When you no longer think of leadership as the sole province of a few select people, you realize that all people have primary leadership qualities that can be leveraged. Initiative, resourcefulness, vision, strategic focus, creativity—these qualities are in no way limited to the front office. Even small children can become leaders.

Thousands of schools have adopted the 7 Habits as a way to teach leadership to children. Usually, “student leaders” are a small group of gifted, outgoing kids who are always the class officers, the top athletes, or the leads in the school play. But in schools we’ve worked with, all students are expected to be leaders. Every child is a leader of something. Organizing books, announcing the lunch menu, collecting homework, greeting guests, dispensing hand sanitizers—these might not seem like “leadership” roles, but leadership starts here. The children learn what it feels like to be responsible. They learn that being a leader means being a contributor.

Most students take huge pride in their responsibilities. Some don’t want to miss a day because of their desire to fulfill their leadership roles. As they mature, so do their responsibilities: they take over marking attendance, teaching lessons, leading projects, mentoring other students, even grading homework. Every student can lead something. An autistic boy who struggles to keep track of time does small daily routines in the nurse’s office. He is so excited to fill his leadership role that he watches the clock like a hawk and is never late for his job. Another boy with a history of discipline problems is assigned to lead the office staff in doing several tasks once a day. He not only shows up for his “shift,” but comes back two or three times a day wanting to know if he can help; his discipline problems have evaporated.

These children will grow up seeing themselves as leaders no matter what “positions” they hold in their careers. They will understand the key difference between an office holder—or perhaps someone stuck with an additional duty—and a leader. They will learn to understand the difference between formal authority and real authority. This paradigm has had a profound impact on academic performance, which has dramatically increased over the time the school adopted this “leadership framework,” and has led to a marked decrease in discipline issues. At the time of this writing, more than 3,500 schools have followed this model with remarkable results.

Patrick tells the story of an extraordinary government leader he had the opportunity to interact with over a twelve-year period. “In 1998, I was assigned to work on a project at a U.S. Air Force base. My work focused on studying and documenting highly complex financial-management processes. The project required me to meet with various subject-matter experts, conduct interviews to understand aspects of the overall process, connect the dots to define the entire system, and work with my teammates to create a handbook that would be used throughout the Department of Defense (DoD). In all honesty, the project was a bit daunting. After all, with a system that complex, where does one start?”

The first day on the job, Patrick met Rick and was informed that if he needed any guidance, Rick would point him in the right direction. “When we first met,” Patrick explains, “I didn’t realize that I was standing in the presence of the one of the best leaders and change agents I would ever meet. In hindsight, the initial introduction was rather prosaic. Rick was sitting in a cubicle space like everyone else in the building, had no ‘block’ on the organizational chart, and introduced himself using only his first name. He was friendly and said he was willing to help me if I needed anything.”

As it turns out, in addition to being a wealth of knowledge about how Patrick could tackle his work, Rick was working on a major project of his own. Where Patrick’s project was complex, Rick’s assignment proved to be a tortuous labyrinth. He was tasked to define the Air Force’s requirements for a multiservice computer system. The project required him to travel often, make recommendations to senior leaders, and keep his team on track as they worked to accomplish a number of high-visibility deliverables. Patrick later learned that while others ran from the thought of working on the project, Rick volunteered—he stepped up to lead his part of the endeavor. In doing so, he played an invaluable role in getting the solution right for the thousands who would use the system in the coming decades. While others were saying the project wouldn’t work or would be too daunting, Rick took ownership.

If he had done this once, it would have been remarkable, but leading out on tough issues became a hallmark of Rick’s careers. Over the next decade, Patrick saw Rick not just as one of a hundred program analysts working in a cubicle farm, but the one program analyst who chose to lead from where he sat and changed the trajectory of the organization. Rick volunteered his best and played active roles in creating a DoD-wide cost accounting system; establishing several workforce-development programs, including the certification of thousands of employees; and negotiating a relationship between the U.S. government and one of the nation’s top universities to establish a graduate-studies program for high-potential government employees. Rick did not seek out formal leadership positions—in fact, he turned down the ones he was offered. Nonetheless, he was a strong leader, made huge contributions, owned numerous projects, mentored many people, led lots of teams, and left a legacy that is felt throughout the Air Force.