The Leader Who Had No Title

Cover via Amazon

Since I wrote Leadership From Below in 2008, there has been a steady flow of management books about bottom-up leadership. In The Leader Who Had No Title (2010), speaker Robin Sharma has put together a modern fable on success in business and in life. There are no revolutionary insights in this book, but its speaks to the frustrated, overworked American, which seems to be in the majority. Sharma also avoids being too patronizing. Instead of the traditional format he chooses a narrative form, which incidentally, means that instead of offering any kind of evidence, we are asked to trust the experience of the author indirectly.

We follow Blake, an uninspired worker who is presented with the chance to meet four somewhat unlikely leadership teachers in one day, a maid who is deeply passionate about her job, a surfer and skier who says to lean in on the steep slopes, seek out and face danger head on,  a former CEO now passionate about gardening who explains that business is all about relationships, and a shoe shiner who says you need to be a great person to be a great leader. All are lessons that ring true in the postmodern leadership scene where results only come if you balance your pursuits so that life and work mesh together.

The message might still be a bit radical for most people, although those who have thought about life and death more than once might agree at times:

All those things we believed were so important, things like titles, net worth and social position turn out to be so very unimportant.

As I predicted several years ago, it seems like the Zen of everyday life is becoming key to the western man and woman’s quest to reinvent reality.

But does that mean that hierarchies are going away? Or, does it mean that making a contribution as a team leader, a manager, a VP or a CEO does not matter anymore? Far from it, in my opinion.  The Forbes book reviewer and himself a leadership expert, SangeethVarghese, has it wrong, though, in dismissing the book in Everyone must be a leader. So What?:

Sharma seems to confuse leadership with mere exemplary work. He depicts leadership as a matter not of heading a team or directing change but simply of focusing on excellence in the work you do.

Rather, leadership from below, which is more an attitude to life regardless of your various roles, becomes important even as hierarchies matter. So, both Sangeeth and Robin are right: whatever you do, only take the lead if you mean it.

Related Articles

• Everyone Must Be A Leader. So What? (forbes.com)
• Job Lessons Learned From Steven Slater: How to Avoid Emergency Slides (ronntorossian.com)
• Hyper-Social Enterprise: What it Takes to Lead One (fastforwardblog.com)
• Social Media Book List: Networking is a Contact Sport and It’s Not Just who you Know (successful-blog.com)
• Personal Branding Interview: Jim Kouzes (personalbrandingblog.com)
• Top 30 Leadership Blogs 2010 | N2Growth Blog (n2growth.com)
• The Myth of Leadership (ictineducation.org)

Toddlers become Leaders

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There is a growing trend to use toddlers as a model for positive (and negative) leadership traits.  This is not lost on FT’s Lucy Kellaway who in the FT Business Life On Work column on 13 September 2010 describes Nicholas Brann’s theory of leadership:

● Toddlers are full of energy and enthusiasm. You can’t beat a toddler who is really into something and going for it 100 per cent.

● Toddlers are natural risk-takers. They throw themselves into climbing down the banisters in the boldest, bravest fashion.

● Toddlers are persistent. When told not to smear jam on a DVD, they will wait a couple of minutes and then do it again.

● Toddlers are inquisitive. They will not be fobbed off with a stock reply but go on asking “why? why? why?”

● Toddlers are creative. Their felt-tip drawings on walls and sofas betray the liveliest imagination.

● Toddlers have great interpersonal skills. They are good at thawing the hardest heart with hugs and sloppy kisses.

Leadership from below takes some getting used to.  Toddler leaders can be exhausting, demanding, and unreasonable. But they are effective. The interesting thing to start paying more attention to, is what happens in a group of toddlers. Think a toddler birthday party. There will be plenty material for new theories, books, and challenges to the initial theorem.

Bottom-up lessons from European CEO magazine

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European CEO magazine is currently running a story called: What’s missing from this picture? Oliver Mack, head of learning at Common Purpose writes:

“MBAs…left managers in a bubble…eventually we all need to step outside of our team or department where our position makes us the boss”.

The reason is that the problems we need to solve typically take place outside of our formal sphere of influence.  Mack continues to argue for education based on challenging leaders in “real life situations that shake them up” rather than relying on tutorials, leadership models, and Powerpoints from MBA professors.

Despite the obvious need to somehow involve professors, one could wonder what puts MBA programmes at such a disadvantage in terms of providing case study experience.   Also, Mack’s alternative to an MBA is a two day workshop, hardly a substitute, I would say.   However, Mack is essentially spot on: leadership from below is a significant source of power in the network society and knowledge handled top down won’t cut it.

So how can we all learn more self awareness?  Based on recent experience, I suggest keeping a job, having kids, remaining happily married, and living to tell the tale.   None of those situations really involve top down authority of any sort.  Only that there are very few hours to sleep should you choose to pursue that multi-tasking approach.  I would gladly take an MBA instead, if I thought it would help.  Mack’s two day workshop seems to be an easy way out, even if he will shake me up.

Related Articles

• CEOs with top college degrees no better at improving long-term firm performance than other CEOs (eurekalert.org)
• Top-ranking degree is no guarantee of a good CEO (theglobeandmail.com)
• Indigo MBA (elearnspace.org)

Cultivating Leadership

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- The leadership I want to explore here has nothing to do with position or authority; it is about influence and responsibility, it’s about leadership from below or from within, writes Patrick Bridgeman, in a new article on Cultivating Leadership in this Fall’s Positive Life.  Bridgeman is Editor of Positive Life, an Irish publication which aim to deliver uplifting, informative articles and information designed to enhance the quality of readers’ lives.  He continues:

I want to equate leadership not with being in charge but rather with the ability to inspire initiative and new thinking in those around us. At the core of this approach is the capacity to navigate new paths, build teams and broker between different points of view…

Sounds good to me! Although, I would not say that there is a contradiction between being in charge and being perceived to be in charge, nor between inspiring and actually being responsible for inspiring others.

The important thing is to maintain one’s grounding and facilitate other people’s growth, whilst still being able to focus your activity on the targets you have set for yourself and others.

So, what we need is a fusion between position based and place based authority, which is very different from believing the world is now unleashing an unbound process of wiki leadership as advocated by MacroWikinomics.  More about that later.

Leading the EU from Below

Finally, some praise for the EU’s choice of President and Foreign Minister of the EU.  The New York Times article on The EU’s New Leaders acknowledges that the choice of a Haiku-writing Belgian Prime Minister and a British baroness and EU Trade Commissioner was smart.

Why so smart? Well, because governance of a network cannot be based on pure hierarchical principles. For starters, because there is no clear hierarchy. Everything is alliances, soft power, give and take, symbolic gestures and horse trading.  Secondly, because hierarchy is not wanted. The EU is composed of 27 Member States each with their own idea of leadership. What they want is a negotiator, someone who can make the most of a near impossible situation.

Needless to say, this does not mean that top-down power will not be involved. The wonderfully strange thing about even such a surprising appointment is that it becomes power. In that sense, leadership from below is a very precarious state of affairs. It seldom happens, or rather, it happens quite often, but once it is recognized as such, it ceases to exist. Plain old leadership takes over. The disciple becomes the leader.

Another thing is that to Belgians, of course, the notion of their Prime Minister being an unknown figure is hard to fathom. This is another very interesting facet of leadership. It can actually be very local. Nobody is felt as more powerful than a tribal leader in a small community. Yet, his or her power seldom extends beyond a few hundred people and beyond a small physical territory. But to the locals, this does not matter.

The challenge with the EU has always been that its actions are slow to seep down to individuals. Even though the European policy debates are much more consequential than national policy debates, they are less talked about. The sociology of the whole thing is relatively straight forward. Whatever people think is real becomes real in its consequences. People refuse to believe that an organizational structure they do not understand and politicians and bureaucrats they do not know can have any power at all over themselves. However, if you have seen someone on TV, shaken their hand in a parade, and they talk about your top ten concerns (taxes, the economy, social benefits, safety, culture etc.), then you believe they really can affect change. Little do we consider the fact that politicians may well talk of things they cannot really deliver…

So, in a situation where the national scene is where heroes and villains are created, there is little scope for big Europe. And maybe that is the price we have to pay for real progress on policy issues.

The next few years will show whether this strategy works. I, for one, think that there is much to gain by testing the waters of networked leadership. The EU is the best example we have. The laboratory is a bunch of very much alive Europeans who are slowly recovering from a financial crisis. So, the stakes are high, but the results could be good, if not great. Not bad at all.

Norway Teaches The World Economics

Today’s New York Times article, Thriving Norway Provides an Economics Lesson, illustrates some aspects of the Scandinavian frugality, realism, common sense, welfare thinking, and, well, dare I say virtue, that characterize leadership from below. While there are a lot of issues to be had with the conditions for taking risks, funding, and exhibiting entrepreneurship in such a context, it does avoid the excesses that the rest of the world now is struggling with.

The global financial crisis has brought low the economies of just about every country on earth. But not Norway.

For now…

Good Morning Connecticut TV Interview

TV interview with Trond Arne Undheim on WTNH (Channel 8, New Haven, CT, USA) on Leadership From Below. The hardback is available on Amazon.com and the paperback is available on Lulu.com).

The Rise of China’s Good Old Ideas

We are about to discover China. When I say we I mean all non-Chinese plus those Chinese expats who might have forgotten some of their own finesse. When I say discover I don’t just mean the China displayed in Beijing Olympics 2008. That was just the beginning. Nor am I only thinking of China’s economic power. That is a given. No—the interesting part of China—the one it will take decades to discover and understand—is its cultural heritage. And with that comes culinary exploits, traditions, leadership theories—all of which will be mixed into the global reality that things need to be simple, trendy, and have mass appeal. Finally, when I say China, I actually mean the entire Chinese hemisphere—including Japan and Korea. Hence, in a few years, the Asian idea of Chi (sometimes spelled Qi or Ki in Japanese or Korean) will become commonplace. What will that mean?

The rise of Chi

Chi is Chinese for energy. Not the kind of thing we pay high Euro for in our houses to keep warm in winter, but the force that controls life itself. While it may sound strange to Westerners, even to diaspora Asians, the fact is that the Chinese have had a sophisticated civilization for several millennia, and that many of their ideas are timelessly important. Particularly that of Chi.  

Let us just enter into the logic of ki for a moment. The notion builds on the fact that you as a person constantly interact with others in a physical location. Furthermore, what we traditionally call social interaction consists of a mix of physical, social, and mental processes. These occur in and around your body, and comprise your presence. Becoming aware of ki, you can to some extent control or relay energy to where it is needed the most. However, there is no need to believe in the extreme variants of parapsychology in order to appreciate ki phenomena at their most basic levels. Gestalt psychology, a fairly established brain theory that emerged in the 1930s, holds that the whole is greater than its parts–directly in line with ki-sensitive thinking.

The rise of Chinese Medicine

One of the core ideas—one which is practiced in Chinese hospitals even today—is that healing your body has little to do with only medication. Painkillers in the traditional sense only numb the pain, they do not attack the root of the problem. The health of a person is governed by invisible energy flows inside the body, surrounding the body, and in a person’s surroundings. Hence, you treat the energy flows, not the person per se. Obviously, at a decent Chinese hospital they combine Western and Eastern healing—and many patients benefit from that.

The rise of Massage

Most people will have the sensation that foot massage affects other parts of the body. How is that possible? Well, even without accepting sophisticated and seemingly far-fetched theories like Yin and Yang and Meridians or Channels, we might have to concede there are things we yet do not understand. Many will already be familiar with some kind of Asian massage, whether it be Shiatsu, Acupressure, or any variant of Chinese massage. Asian massage is not the Swedish muscle-toned torture we know from Scandinavian massage, it is subtle pressure, often with far-reaching consequences way beyond the impacted body part. The Asian approach is to manipulate energy, although manipulate is a Western word. What actually happens is to release pressure, tension, and energy that is trapped—so the system restarts.

The rise of the Martial Arts

Chinese martial arts like Kung Fu as well as the Japanese Aikido all attempt to manipulate ki. The energy that flows inside you also likely is responsible for interpersonal dynamics – what we more commonly (in the West) call personal chemistry. In Aikido, all emphasis is on using the force of your opponent to your advantage, never adding your own negative force. Jiujitsu, another Japanese martial art, preaches the use of both positive and negative force. Martial Arts are part of global culture.

The rise of Chinese Leadership

The Chinese leadership model emphasizes connections, dignity, and trust, which are equally important for Western leaders. If you now assume I am thinking of Chinese Emperors, or even of the current head of the Communist party, Hu Jintao, or premier Wen Jiabao, you are partially right, but only partially. Chinese leadership is so much more. For one, it is in evidence every day the Chinese people make a consumer decision. Think of the consumer power of Chinese society. They will reshape post-credit crisis production and maybe transform the way we all business in the next decades. You might have guessed where this leads us: towards leadership from below.

Leadership from below, those of you who are following this blog will recall, is the view that leadership is more about attitude than position, more about peers than hierarchies. For more detail, consult my book, Leadership From Below (on Amazon.com). In any case, China is the perfect place to test the idea that leadership can indeed occur outside the establishment. If it can in China, among the most hierarchical, controlled countries on Earth, it can anywhere. Can we find examples of such things already happening in China? Sure.  Social entrepreneurs are slowly changing the makeup of Chinese society. Entrepreneurs are building companies with hybrid values—Chinese and global. But it will take time. 

Two quite interesting, and opposing forces are active in Chinese society—the force of Chi and the force of the Communist Party. The Rise of China’s Good Old Ideas will require one of them to cede. But whichever wins in China might not matter to the rest of the world (I said might). Clearly, the world has already chosen Chi—and that trend can be seen way beyond Chinatown in New York, London, or San Francisco. Just think of that when you buy your local potion of Ginseng, see your massage therapist, get acupuncture, eat your weekly ration of Asian food, or send your son to Martial Arts classes. We are all de facto believers in something so elusive that we prefer not to think about it too much. Chi—the word and the lifestyle will not go away. It signals a time where leaders must be in tune with their surroundings if they are going to lead at all. Not such a bad idea, one might say.

Leadership From Below: Lesson #9:

Successful leaders combine Eastern life principles and Western management principles. Charismatic leaders have a strong presence, are aware of how energy flows through human encounters. Energy (ki) is they key to health, intuition, as well as innovation. Discovering China’s good old ideas is worth it–regardless your ethic origin.

From me to we

While teams can be an effective way to organize, not all teams are effective. Leadership is always a shared commodity in a team, since nobody fully controls a team process. While discipline is crucial, if you want to succeed, social aspects cannot be overlooked.

Team members share roles and responsibilities crucial to their task’s success. In one project, you may be the formal leader but depend on others for key insights. In another project, you watch others excel but may have unique experience in a vital area. If you are very outspoken, you can rally people to support you when there is time to make a decision. You may be the social leader in the group. The important thing: You must think and lead simultaneously.

In the last decade, business has been seen rapid innovation. Those who fail to innovate die — unless they operate a monopoly. (And eventually, monopolies also die, due to government regulations or because an ever-changing business environment.) Innovation grows in importance. Fresh perspectives are held in high regard but cannot possibly come from the insiders alone. And while insiders are important, one person alone cannot change much. What matters: Look around yourself, and work with what you have. Within any organization, there are insiders and outsiders. A team has a great deal of knowledge that is inaccessible those not on the team. This holds true even for colleagues who have been part of a company for 20 years.

Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith’s 1993 classic The Wisdom of Teams posits that corporate teams must be small, diverse, and accountable. Their follow up tome, 2001’s The Discipline of Teams, indicated that successful teams depend not so much on bonding, togetherness, and empowerment but, rather, on discipline — all of which is true. But there is more: Meetings, for instance, must be issue-driven. You have to allow time to solve the issue. Do not stick strictly to project plans. Effective teams, wrote Katzenbach and Smith, alternate leaders even when completing one task. All members are mutually accountable.

A Hollywood soundstage or a large public-sector consulting project, are both examples of team settings. A team is a small group of people, usually twelve or less, working together for a limited time to achieve common goals. If the team is larger, additional people perform marginal roles or act as subcontractors to the main delivery. A successful team is a group whose elements (e.g., people, process, leadership, and resources) lead to deliveries that match or exceed initial expectations.

Teams command a set of resources and are affected by several factors specific to their task, the individuals on their team, the setting, and the sector. Other factors may intervene.

Successful teams believe in their task and command sufficient resources to reach their goal. They have a social leader, as well as a task leader (neither of which may be the assigned project leader), and they spend considerable time face to face. When forced to meet online, they are aware of the current limitations; communicate carefully and do not spend too much time on controversial issues.

The bulk of existing research on teams indicates that while all teams are working on a task or task, most teams devote equal time to maintaining the social relationships within the team.

Teams differ in degree of complexity, and you need to know which factors come into play in your own team. Even more importantly, as we will see, every team must become a “we” before anything useful can happen.

Can President Obama Exhibit Leadership From Below?

So Obama won, McCain lost. Republicans are out. Democrats are in.  What now? Obama has campaigned on change, on being the challenger, on being different. He has deployed a web savvy campaign strategy focused on micro contributions from hoards in addition to, not instead of, large donations. All of this is very trendy, very smart and very well known by now. See, for instance, Eric Legale’s blog on Obama as the President of the Internet Generation.

What few have pointed out is that Candidate Obama preached and practiced Leadership From Below. For a quick tutorial, check my post on What my Daughter Taught me about Leadership. But how can a President Obama exhibit Leadership From Below? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms? After all, it is arguably the most powerful position in the world. Why would the President need Leadership From Below?

In fact, there are five reasons why Obama still needs the bottom-up perspective:

1. Formal power if fine, but not enough

Leadership from below does not mean that you cannot have formal power. It does not mean that you need to be the underdog. It does not mean begging to lead or begging people to support you. Rather, it simply says: to enact change, I need to inspire followership. The recent book Followership: How Followers Are Creating Change and Changing Leaders by Harvard Kennedy School‘s Barbara Kellerman is right on. You can only lead when you are allowing people around you to voice their concerns. Leadership From Below means never assuming you are the only voice in the room, even if you always have the last word.

2.Macchiavelli is out of date

Macchiavelli, who has been the elite’s unchallenged management guru since the 15th century said it is better to be feared than to be loved. The reason is that when you are loved, you can still be fooled, but when you are feared any challenger is a fool. The trouble with fear is that it is very unpredictable. It was ok to be a feared dictator in the Italian Renaissance, it is not ok to be a feared President in 2009. Public perception is volatile. When markets operate in fear, they collapse. When people are afraid, they turn to terror. When co-workers fear you, they simply change employer. In short, Machiavelli is out of date. Leaders should recognize that centuries have passed and complexity has increased. Not by much, I would say, but enough that it is safer to be loved than feared.

3. The US has a complex constituency

Being President does not only mean being the President of a country. You are also a global actor. The case could be made that there are more Obama supporters who did not have the right to vote than did, if you count 2/3 of citizens in Europe, and many, many across the world. Seldom has a campaign invigorated so many non voting parties, people, and pundits. While the US President does have formal power over the US mainland, his powers over the world are severely limited. Well, his powers are limited unless he plays his cards well. I believe the George W. Bush era slogan was “if you are not with us you are against us”. It didn’t play so well. Leadership from below is the way to go when you are building partnerships, trying to enlist opponents, working through intermediaries, in short, when engaging in diplomacy.

4. To enact change, a leader must be consistent

Leaders without formal authority need tech savvy, listening skills, social antennas, and a good pitch. With these you can master any situation. Many Presidents have had at least the latter two, but have let all of these skills go when they took office. But Obama will need to maintain them. The credibility of his message depends on staying open, approachable, and diplomatic. The formal authority of a Presidential office might stay largely the same when a new President takes office, but what he or she makes of it does not.

5. Military and financial crises demand buy-in

It would be easy to think that the military and the financial sector are best governed top-down. After all, employees in both sectors are well used to taking orders from above. However, it seems clear to most people that this approach has not worked and will not work, at least not now. The US is slowly coming to terms with a world where followership is more important than leadership. In his new book Tribes, marketing guru Seth Godin talks about the renewed importance of the tribal type of leadership in contemporary society. We want a leader, but we want a stake in where we are being led and why. When the military spends most of its time winning hearts and minds instead of firing bullets, and the largest banks suddenly are state owned, the model is about to change. Stakeholder leadership is suddenly in fashion. As citizens we have bought ourselves a share in the the financial meltdown. As citizens of the world, we have a stake in reducing terror and unrest. A President that does not see it as his first priority to win buy in for his views, will fail. Unilateralism is out. Multilateralism is in. Buyout is out. Buyin is in.

May Obama and his advisers read this blog and have a great day. Enjoy the first day as President elect. Best wishes, and, my advice is, stay the underdog!