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The Tension Between Forceful and Enabling

In the past, when executives and students of management made the distinction between a forceful and an enabling approach to leadership, their tendency was to oppose the two or to place one at a disadvantage. The widely used terms autocratic and participative, for example, leave no doubt which is the more desirable.

The same is true of “Theory X” and “Theory Y,” as conceptualized by Douglas McGregor (1960). This highly normative dichotomy captured the imagination of academics and practicing managers alike and has had great staying power in the field. What McGregor did brilliantly was expose the fallacious thinking behind heavy-handed leadership. Theory X is a set of assumptions about human nature that holds that the average person doesn’t like to work and avoids responsibility, and therefore must be directed and even coerced into getting his or her work done. Hence, forceful leadership is required.

If Theory X sets up a negative self-fulfilling prophecy, Theory Y does the opposite. It assumes that the average person is perfectly willing to work hard and take responsibility if the work is at all interesting and if he or she is treated like an adult and not like a child. The idea is to replace a vicious cycle with a virtuous cycle.

McGregor’s model of leadership is a carefully reasoned polemic against overcontrol. He has much company today in people who look askance at what they regard as the traditional command-and-control model of leadership.

There are, however, people who have serious misgivings about empowerment and its de-emphasis on the power of the person in charge. Abraham Zaleznik regards the contemporary preference for empowering leadership as part of the American love affair with fraternal leadership—with leader as brother. In a 1989 book subtitled Restoring Leadership in Business, he argued that strong, charismatic leadership is critical to organizational effectiveness, and contended that “personal influence is leadership,” as long as it is not self-serving (p. 237). In fact, the democratic ethos that sprang up in U.S. organizations in the 1980s, thanks in part to the quality movement featuring employee involvement and teamwork, seems to have resulted in a backlash by people who feel that decentralization and cooperative processes have been overdone.

I have worked with some executives who feel this way. One such individual, whose company had pushed quality for ten years with considerable success, decried the muffling effects of a strong orientation toward process.

This company has gotten caught up in the bad, terrible part of process, which implies lack of edge, lack of accountability, lack of consequences, lack of responsibility. And when you focus so much on process, you tend to forget the role of personality and leadership.

Personality to this executive means the sort of aggressive, charismatic leadership that Zaleznik calls for.

To another executive I worked with, leadership means sharp definition.

This corporation needs people with more of an edge, more of a bite. A whiff of brutal clarity, if it’s based on reality, is an essential component of leadership.

This executive is also an advocate of periodic drastic change to maintain a company’s competitive position. And,

if you have a change agenda, you have to overweight the agenda to get it going. You have to overweight it since you’re up against inertial tendencies. That’s where passionate energy and leadership are required.

To “overweight” is to apply force, to be forceful.

Some are particularly critical of fellow executives who in their view go overboard in the effort to create favorable conditions for their people. One complained: “This corporation is full of round-worded, nice people who don’t make a change.” Another characterization I’ve heard is “go-along.” Or “get-along, go-along.” What concerns the individuals delivering this critique is that “feel-good” comes at the expense of taking the tough action necessary to make organizations operate effectively, which of course in the long run is no favor to people. In a misguided effort to be good to people, the argument runs, leaders who avoid inflicting pain when it is unavoidable ultimately let people down. As one executive commented, “I don’t trust feel-good. When they have to execute, they can’t. If you don’t deliver, what’s it all about?”

Thus, both camps—those that have no faith in an empowering, people-oriented approach, and those who have no use for control-oriented management—tend to discredit and dismiss the other.

In fact, each critique has more than a grain of truth in it. But each attack is valid only when its target is the other side taken to an extreme. McGregor was quite right in pointing out that extremely tight control, as a basis for designing jobs and supervising people, leads inevitably to having employees react in ways that seem to justify tight, if not tighter yet, control. And critics on the other side are likewise quite right in attacking power-sharing and high people-consideration when these abdicate the unpleasant parts of the job or fall into unfocused, undisciplined execution. Again, these criticisms are valid as commentaries on the excesses of the other side.

If each set of critics has truth on its side, it is at best a half-truth. What each camp misses is the value of the other approach when it is used effectively. As it stands, each reacts to the other’s excesses. Each equates the other with its excesses and in the process misses the things that work. My purpose here is to consider simultaneously what is useful about both approaches to leadership. I will juxtapose the best of what enabling leadership has to offer and the best of what forceful leadership can bring, while remaining mindful of what happens when either type is taken to an extreme.