Corporate Training Magazine

Leadership Is Everyone's Business
Vol 2 Issue 2- Mar 2006

By Gunter Rochow and Bryn Meredith

When Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat to a white man while riding the bus on December 1, 1955 in Mont- gomery, Alabama, her actions were not intended to start a movement, but rather a simple act of personal courage.

Indeed, in a 1994 interview Parks talked about her reluctance to even be regarded as a leader during that time. She stated, "I did not get on the bus to get arrested. I got on the bus to go home." She said she simply decided that day to go home as a full citizen of the United States, not a second-class citizen. She had no formal authority; yet when she died on October 24, 2005 at the age of 92, the world remembered her for inspiring a generation to fight for civil rights.

Leaders come in all shapes and forms. In Rosa Parks' case, she was a seamstress and a secretary by trade and had no formal role in any of the civil rights organizations of the time. But she was most definitely a leader.

As in society, the workforce has many leaders of all types and at all levels of the organization. And while the formal corporate structure assigns management duties to specific individuals, leadership is everyone's business.

Management is a hierarchical function by virtue of a position that exists for planning and control to achieve organizational objectives effectively and efficiently. While management depends on formal authority, leadership can manifest itself informally at any level of the organization‹both among managers and "the managed". This informal structure operates by virtue of moral authority, the compelling quality of ideas, the commitment to lead by example and the ability to inspire others to embrace values, goals and processes that are likely to benefit an organization, a movement or an initiative.

While both management and leadership skills are critical to fostering the productivity and competitiveness of organizations, it is relatively more difficult to develop leadership skills than management skills. Whereas the achievement of the latter can be compelled as a condition of appointment to a management position, the former must be nurtured in a voluntary, innovative environment by stimulating the opportunity and the will to lead.

There is a critical need to foster leadership in an organization, regardless of formal authority. Companies and organizations need leaders, not only to succeed in their endeavors, but to survive. The problem is in determining how to foster a leadership culture among its employees that will push that organization to new levels of excellence.

In an ideal world, managers at all levels would not only be effective at "managing", but they would also be leaders in their own right, and one of their formal managerial tasks would be to develop leaders throughout all levels of their organization. This can be accomplished in a number of ways.

1. Create an Environment for Innovation
Leaders emerge from an environment that encourages thinking, the expression of feeling and the freedom to do things differently while pursuing an organization's mandate, vision and objectives. Such an environment should exist from the cradle to the grave and should pervade the parental home, the school and the workplace.

McMaster University recognized this when they launched The McMaster Solar Car Project (MSCP). The MSCP is a student-run, non-profit organization working strategically to design and build a high-performance, solar-powered vehicle. With the vision of developing an environmentally friendly energy alternative for commuter travel, MSCP demonstrated a high dosage of unconventional thinking, coupled with the potential for failure.

It takes nothing less in the workplace. In an innovative environment, employers have to set employees free to think and not penalize them if their efforts should fail. As Tom Kelley pointed out in The Art of Innovation, "Prototyping, brainstorming and observations. These are the fundamentals‹the reading, writing, and arithmetic of innovation. Great teams provide the charge that makes these basic skills flow through the company."

2. ncourage Open Communication Across All Levels of Formal Authority
The fundamental ingredients of open communication are team consciousness, trust and respect. The entire team must understand the organizational goals and be committed to their achievement. Insiders must know new developments before outsiders do, and everyone's contribution is valuable and treated with respect.

Effective communication itself is much more than sharing data or information. It must comprise factual, emotional and symbolic qualities. If these dimensions are free to find expression in an organization, open communication flourishes and leaders blossom.

3. Foster Recognition of Manifestations of Leadership
Emerging leaders can be recognized by the quality of their ideas, their ability to communicate those ideas and the extent to which others are attracted to their ideas. Successful companies foster manifestations of leadership regardless of the hierarchical status of the emerging leader. This can be done by encouragement to pursue ideas and by publicly recognizing their initiatives through monetary or other means.

4. Create Opportunities for Leaders to Develop
In their article "Exploring the Relationship between Learning and Leadership", published in Leadership & Organization Development Journal in 2001, Lillas Brown and Barry Posner reported that better learners consistently engage in leadership practices more frequently than those in the low learning category. We also know that the best leaders are constant learners. To create an environment of 'engaged leadership' and encourage learning, opportunities for leadership development in the workplace should be both informal and formal. Informal opportunities include encouraging employees to suggest occasional company events and promoting company-sponsored activities. Formal opportunities might include participation in leadership development workshops.

Formal leadership development opportunities are short "mountain peak" experiences for obtaining a panoramic view of the leadership territory. And while leadership will be inspired at the mountain top, the potential leader must return to the valley to exercise his or her leadership. This development process should address basic skills for personal and strategic leadership, the ability to communicate effectively, the ability to foster a culture of innovation and the need to empower managers to coach their employees in the pursuit of excellence.

Gunter Rochow is president of the consulting firm CAPRA International. Bryn Meredith is president of Bluepoint Leadership Development (Canada).