When the Leader Becomes Larger Than the Organisation (On Transformational Leadership)
I came across
the term “Servant and Transformational style of Leadership” that led me to
study more about various leadership styles. I realised that most of the forms
of leadership have similar characteristics and functioning style; i.e., in
reality, most of the leaders switch from one leadership style to the other,
often relying on one style that conforms to their persona. Various factors
influence a leader's leadership traits; viz. the internal environment in the
form of the organisation’s structure, work culture, its resources and people;
the external environment comprising of the organisation’s clients, vendors,
associates, investors, the geography and related economy, culture, political structures.
A Servant Leader(Would rather rephrase it as "Service Leader") has the traits of democratic, team, facilitative
(Coach), strategic, and visionary leadership; while the Transformational
leadership has an additional feature of Cross-Cultural Leadership. Irrespective
of the combination of leadership styles a leader may practice, he faces
challenges when he tends towards the Authoritative or Laissez-Faire style of
leadership.
The term
servant leader was coined in the nineteen seventies. This made me think, about
the bureaucrats, political leaders and the people in the service sector are
they not servant leaders? Then they too
should have the following attributes of a servant leader: Listener, Empath,
Caring, Mindful, Persuasive, Ability to Conceptualize, Foresight, Stewardship,
and Commitment to the growth of people;
Whereas, Educators and technocrats ought to be the extension of a servant
leader as Transformational leader with the ability to inspire and promote innovation.
A Leader's primary objective is to lead the organisation in achieving
its vision and mission. Let us understand when and how a leader tends to grow
larger than the organisation. Let us focus on four primary forms of leadership
based on the organisation along with its internal and external environment.
Individual Hierarchy: The first form of
leadership gives importance to the organisation’s structure. The organisation’s
hierarchical structure is to help the organisation in achieving its objective.
The organisation’s work culture is based on
the organisation’s functional hierarchy. All the systems and process are
very well defined and often quite rigid too. The Leader manages the functions
through superior- subordinate relationship, though he may address them as his
colleague. The leader defines the organisation’s functional objectives as his
subordinate’s performance targets that he uses to gauge their success in
achieving the functional objectives.
Collective Hierarchy: The second form
of leadership is similar to the Hierarchical form of leadership, except that it
focuses on integrating the organisation’s vision with that of the community.
The leaders in
these forms of leadership can be authoritative or have a transactional approach
to managing the functions. If the leader of such organisation practices
authoritative style of leadership, then all his subordinates practice it too.
Distributed Individual: The primary
focus of this form of leadership is on the client’s needs and preferences (the
external environment), and it reflects in the organisation's structure. Unlike
the previous two forms of leadership, the Distributed individual form has a
flexible organisational structure that can easily adapt to the change in the clients’ needs and
preference. It is more democratic and flexible compared to the first two forms
of leadership, yet this form leadership is not completely de-centralised in its
decision-making process.
Distributed Collective form of
leadership focuses on clients’ needs and preferences; unlike the distributed
individual, it's completely democratic with a de-centralised form of leadership
giving a lot of freedom to its people in the decision-making process.
These two forms
of leadership support Democratic, Coach, Visionary, Strategic- Servant form of
leadership with the philosophy of empowering and inspiring its people through a
shared vision to respond to change and dynamics of the external environment.
Therefore, it effectively keeps pace with the market dynamics.
An organisation may function "for profit" or "not for
profit"; in reality, it may combine with two or more of these four forms
of leadership to achieve its functional objectives. The leader of the
organisation draws the roadmap to devise the policies and strategy to
successfully achieve the functional goals; it is a perpetual leadership
function that begins with the inception of the organisation. This also becomes
a major contributor to the phrase, "Leader becoming larger than the organisation":
1. Founder Leader(s): When the leader is the founder of the organisation, then he is the
major contributor in designing the organisation's cultural ethos: principles,
work ethics in form of a framework in facilitating its functions. The advantage
of being a founder leader is the ease in making necessary changes to meet the
internal and external challenges the organisation faces while aligning its
short, medium and long- term objectives. It is not always a bed of roses for a founder leader, who has to anticipate
the future trends and dynamics to devise methods keeping pace with the changing
trends. Often, the organisations fail to take care of this need and become
obsolete.
“Enterprise without a purpose” The
organisation and its founder leaders fail when they embark on "an enterprise
without a purpose." This means the organisation's objective is not
completely aligned with its external environment resulting in a faulty
functional framework that affects the organisation's cultural environment too.
For instance, an entrepreneur begins an enterprise with the objective of
selling a consumer product in India that is quite popular in the western
countries. He devises all strategies
to push the
product into the market without the support of adequate market survey and
research to gauge the demand for such product in the local market. Anyone can
guess the fate of such an enterprise. Most of the leaders face this challenge
of "enterprise without a purpose". Let’s take an example of an enterprise with a purpose: India saw
the phasing in of the era of information technology when computers were
introduced into the workplace and people resisted the change fearing that
computers would replace the workers. The organisations and individuals took
adequate measures to quell this wave of fear by making people aware of the
benefits of IT in facilitating work and IT was phased into the organisations
without causing any retrenchment casualties.
Now you may question the current trend of Artificial Intelligence and
the toll it has taken on the IT workforce. How can we justify it as an
enterprise with a purpose? It is a debatable issue that needs a clear understanding and reality
check of the impact of AI in the internal as well as the external environment
of the organisation, be it the business
venture, a country- its population and economy, as well as its global impact.
Is AI mutually beneficially to the organisation using it and the country the
organisation is a part of? Does it have a positive impact on the country’s
economy, viz. generating employment; its impact on the infrastructure and the
natural resources? This holds good for the start-up business enterprise too,
now that India is experiencing a sudden spate of business-start-ups.
Let me
reiterate, when the functional goals and success of any enterprise are solely
based on numbers of earning profit for profit making organisation, or of a
non-profit making organisation to achieve a specific service objective without
doing the necessary reality check to validate the objective’s impact on the
external environment and the market dynamics, this results in a negative impact
and proves to be an enterprise without a
purpose. We can cite the example of “the.Com bubble bursting at the
beginning of the millennium.” At that time, the market dynamics did not support
the “.Com Bubble or Boom”. The leadership of education, steel, coal and mining,
chemical, petroleum, information technology, automobile, textile, telecom,
construction, consumer products - FMCG, financial, pharmaceutical and even
medical services has fallen prey to this challenge: “enterprise without a purpose” The leaders often explain any
negative result of the enterprise as the cyclic effect of the market trend and
resort to statistical analysis to justify their success or failure in framing
organisational principles, policies and strategies to achieve their goals. In
fact, the leaders ignore the root cause of the failure and resort to artificial
means of change management to cure the malady. Yes, you are right, such efforts
fall short of addressing the real problem: "an
enterprise without a purpose."
You may ask,
"What 'an enterprise without a
purpose' got to do with “a leader
becoming bigger than the organisation'?" The answer is quite simple.
An organisation with a hierarchical individual or collective form of leadership
has a centralised decision-making process. Therefore, in such an organisation,
the topmost leader influences the organisation's environment and the leader is
synonymous to the organisation. The
organisation's objective is identical to that of the leader. Therefore, the
leader's beliefs and persona influence the organisation's culture. Such
organisation may not prosper in the absence of the leader, especially when the
organisation does not practice succession planning and talent potential
management in sync with the principles of the organisation's development. Such
leadership often exhibits unflinching faith in its dream project and ignores doing its reality check before
bringing it to light.
Needless to say, in a distributed individual or collective organisation
that has a more visionary and democratic approach to leadership with the
de-centralised decision- making process, it is shared leadership that makes the
organisation flexible enough to take care of any change in the external
environment. Yet, it has its disadvantage; such an organisation is well
networked with the leadership taking care of the cultural diversity, and
encourages innovation and to embark on new entrepreneurial ventures, often
ignores the need for a seamless work culture that can take care of the adverse
effects of the diversity. This needs a strong team of leaders at all stages of
the organisation’s process and function to provide the necessary support as a
backbone to the organisation. Oh yes, Wikipedia, Red Cross are examples of such
an organisation.
2. Non-Founder Leader(s):
Non-founder
leaders of the Hierarchical individual or collective organisations may tend to
practice authoritative or transactional styles of leadership giving undue
importance to the traditional or conventional system and the process of the
organisation, turning a blind eye to the trends and dynamics of the external
environment. The leadership does not address them through necessary changes in
the organisation's functional framework. Non-founder leaders can also ignore to
address the change when the organisation has rigid organisational structure and
it becomes a herculean task of the leader to reform it in sync with the current
market trends and dynamics. For example, many IT companies ignored the need to
integrate the talent or potential management in its organisational framework
and have with great zeal have focused on adopting artificial intelligence.
When a dynamic
non-founder leader takes charge of a hierarchical individual or collective
organisation, even with a democratic and visionary approach to bring about
drastic changes
in the organisation, he may tend to be authoritative or may appear to be so to
the people in the organisation. The leader can easily achieve this objective
through authoritative and transactional leadership and become larger than the
organisation; but, the leader’s success lies in how well he is able to use the
reality check in convincing the people to the necessary changes in the
organisational framework and work culture without being authoritative. This can
be a big challenge in such organisational structure that does not encourage
shared vision and people empowerment.
In case of the Distributed individual or collective organisation,
though the leadership follows the democratic > visionary > coach >
servant > transformational styles of leadership, at times they have to be
authoritative to pre-set and motivate the team to overcome the negative
influence of cultural diversity, geographical difference, to name a few.
Mahatma Gandhi
who founded Khadi Gramodyog and Cottage industry to avert the negative impact
of rampant industrialization on the indigenous art, craft and handicraft;
Ravindranath Tagore, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and Sonam Wangchuk a founding
Director of Students' Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL) who
led the objective of bringing the education system more closer to reality for
the learners are examples of leaders, who became larger than the organisation.
Posted on LinkedIn on September 28, 2017: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/when-leader-becomes-larger-than-organisation-sunipa-sen/
Reference (Image Source):
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