How to lead

After I Peter 5:1-4 

Shepherd the people given

you to lead; be watchmen,

not tyrants. Don’t lead

because you think you’re

forced to, but with the willing

spirit God has given you.

Leadership is not about

personal gain or enrichment,

a shameful thing. But with

an eager, serving spirit and

desire to serve, lead 

by example, by being what 

you want your flock to be.

Walk with your flock,

guide your flock, love

you flock, the chosen ones.

Do this, and the crown

of glory is yours.

 

Photograph by Biegun Wschodni via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Friday Readings

Good to Go! – Mark Daniels.

Genuflection – poem by Gilbert Luis R. Centina III at Kingdom Poets (D.S. Martin). 

The Holy Art of the Edit – Andrew Roycroft at New Grub Street.

Your Son Got in Trouble at School: A Case Study in Tribalism – Samuel D. James at Digital Liturgies.

The Good News About Being a Sheep – Michael Kelley at Forward Progress.

“Growth in Leadership” by Dr. Larry Little

For decades, management was considered a business “science,” a discipline that could be taught in business school classrooms and applied in the workplace. One of the primary exponents of management as science was Peter Drucker, who wrote numerous books on the subject including the business classic Management. Drucker’s writings tracked the rise of the 20^th century industrial order, and management was the pinnacle of that.

Management is still taught in business schools, but the order began to fray and unravel in the 1970s and 1980s. Inflation (the prime rate hit 20 percent at one point) and OPEC took a huge toll on the industrial order in the 1970s, and helped led to the convolution of acquisitions, divestitures, restructurings, and downsizings of the 1980s and 1990s. Overlay that with the electronic communications revolution of the 1990s and 2000s, and management as a “science” seemed rather faded and shallow in the face of so much turmoil and change.

What emerged from the turmoil as the operational principle for the workplace was the idea of leadership. The difficult is that leadership can’t really be taught in the classroom. It can be studied, yes. But leadership depends on the character and abilities of the individual, applied in the right way at the right time. Leadership is less a science and more an art. You can teach principles of art, and how art has developed over the centuries, but you can’t really teach an artist the desire and passion to paint, or sculpt, or write.

One the best discussions I’ve read on how leadership functions in the workplace is Make a Difference: Growth in Leadership by Dr. Larry Little (with co-authors Melissa Hambrick Jackson and David Rupert). As the book demonstrates, leadership is easy to understand – we know it when we see it or experience it – but is not so easy to actually do.

Little divides his description of leadership into six components – gratitude, responsibility, ownership, willingness, tough calls, and health. The discussion of each if structured by interviews with leaders at all levels and from all walks of life, people who are leading in their own organizations and circumstances. What emerges from this discussion is an understanding of leadership as something very real and immediate, and something that likely exists within each of us.

Leaders know how to give genuine praise – and why it matters.

Leaders take responsibility and are accountable; they know how to translate vision into reality, and then know that it happens through people.

Leaders are servants, and may follow as much as they lead.

Leaders make the tough calls, but they put others’ interests first.

And leaders know how to maintain their own and their organization’s “leadership health.”

The principles follow from having a broad array of people tell their leadership stories. The principles seem simple, and they are, but simple does not mean easy. Leadership is hard work. It’s also incredibly rewarding work.

And, as Make a Difference: Growth in Leadership demonstrates, as rare as it may be, it can happen anywhere. 

Illustration by Frits Ahlefeldt via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Employee or Leadership Engagement

The article below was first published Aug. 3 at InsideWork.net.

The other day, a group of us at work were having a conference call with a representative of an industry association. The association is actually useful—a collection of companies big and small who talk with each other about communications, sponsor studies, get consulting help and learn how others tackle similar problems. This organization also says it facilitates the sharing of best practices and key learnings, but I’ll forgive them for that.

One of our number asked the rep if there was any one question she was hearing from senior executives of member companies, any particular issue or concern or desire for information. In other words, “What’s on the minds of American corporate leaders about communication right now?” My first thought was that her answer would be “social media,” the current hot button in corporate communications. But I was wrong.

She said that there was one question that was coming up over and over again. And the question was—how do we get employees engaged?

The rep said this was the single biggest issue for member companies of all sizes, and some were beginning to sound desperate. They had tried everything – town halls, small group meetings with executives, special newsletters, one-on-one conversations and internal blogs. They had “segmented their target audiences” and “refined their key messages”—but nothing was working.

So I asked her a question: how many of those companies had recently been or were currently going through layoffs?

“Oh, about 80 percent of them,” she said.

So here’s a learning we can all share, and maybe one day it will become a best practice: When an organization is laying people off, employee engagement—with the business, with customers, with suppliers, with market conditions and competitors—is going to suffer, and for a considerable period of time.

Employees won’t get engaged until they know the answers to four questions:

1. Do I have a job?
2. Do the people I work with have jobs?
3. Is my organization changing, and what does the new one look like? And
4. Will I be expected to do significantly more work because there are fewer people?

Once those questions are answered and understood, then, and only then, can an organization realistically begin to entertain ideas of employee engagement.

When there are layoffs, answering those questions can take months, if not longer.

A more interesting question to me is, how could senior executives at so many companies not know this?

After the conference call, a few of us talked about it. And there is at least one answer.

At many organizations, leadership defines “interacting with employees” as town hall meetings, email broadcasts, and maybe a video or two. When leaders of such an organization decide they must lay off people, whatever the reason might be (even substantive ones), they make the decision and then move on. Their thinking is often six months to a year down the road. They decide to lay people off, and assign Human Resources and people managers to implement the decision. For the leaders, it’s a done deal and time to think about everything else they need to do. (It’s also unpleasant and often messy.)

The affected employees, on the other hand, are at the very beginning of the process. Sometimes it’s quick. Usually it takes at least weeks, but more often months. So if your own individual status with your employer is unclear, and you could lose your job, you’ll be less prone to take risks, create new programs, suggest changes or innovations that could save money, or volunteer for anything. Why should you? In fact, there’s an argument to be made that it would be irrational for employees to do anything else except hunker down and wait it out. Or find another job elsewhere, if that’s an option.

So there’s the rub. Employees are in the here and now. Leadership is in the future, and mystified about why employees aren’t engaged. If leadership gets addicted to layoffs as a routine form of cost savings, the problem will never disappear.

The solution lies with leadership engaging with employees in the here and now. Routinely. Walking around. Talking. Drawing people into conversation. Challenging people. Not letting HR be your conduit for feedback. Listening.

Leaders engage first. Ask Jesus.