A Crucial Element of Democracy

This is a blog by Robert Gutierrez ...
While often taken for granted, civics education plays a crucial role in a democracy like ours. This Blog is dedicated to enticing its readers into taking an active role in the formulation of the civics curriculum found in their local schools. In order to do this, the Blog is offering a newer way to look at civics education, a newer construct - liberated federalism or federation theory. Daniel Elazar defines federalism as "the mode of political organization that unites separate polities within an overarching political system by distributing power among general and constituent governments in a manner designed to protect the existence and authority of both." It depends on its citizens acting in certain ways which Elazar calls federalism's processes. Federation theory, as applied to civics curriculum, has a set of aims. They are:
*Teach a view of government as a supra federated institution of society in which collective interests of the commonwealth are protected and advanced.
*Teach the philosophical basis of government's role as guardian of the grand partnership of citizens at both levels of individuals and associations of political and social intercourse.
*Convey the need of government to engender levels of support promoting a general sense of obligation and duty toward agreed upon goals and processes aimed at advancing the common betterment.
*Establish and justify a political morality which includes a process to assess whether that morality meets the needs of changing times while holding true to federalist values.
*Emphasize the integrity of the individual both in terms of liberty and equity in which each citizen is a member of a compacted arrangement and whose role is legally, politically, and socially congruent with the spirit of the Bill of Rights.
*Find a balance between a respect for national expertise and an encouragement of local, unsophisticated participation in policy decision-making and implementation.
Your input, as to the content of this Blog, is encouraged through this Blog directly or the Blog's email address: gravitascivics@gmail.com .
NOTE: This blog has led to the publication of a book. The title of that book is TOWARD A FEDERATED NATION: IMPLEMENTING NATIONAL CIVICS STANDARDS and it is available through Amazon in both ebook and paperback versions.

Friday, February 3, 2017

SITUATIONAL vs. MODEL ADOPTIONS

This blog has reviewed what John Kotter[1] points out are the basic processes that effective leadership uses in instituting change.  Overall, he is advocating a set of procedural elements that do not detail what everyone in the business or organization must do.  Instead, the elements are offered as general functions that must be satisfied to accomplish fundamental change.
Beginning with visualizing a clear direction for a business or organization, a leader must develop strategies of how to accomplish that direction’s aims and goals.  He/she must identify and place the appropriate people in the positions to carry out the strategy(ies), institute the necessary communication to those people, collaborate with the people to formulate a shared understanding of the direction, convince the people the stated direction is worthy, and motivate them to accomplish the aims and goals, including attaining the spirit to overcome the inevitable barriers and trials.
Shorthand for these functions can be the terms developing direction, aligning, motivating, and inspiring the workers or volunteers.  What should not be lost is that a transformational leadership is not about either dictating the detailed steps or actions the staff will perform or counting on transactional payoffs to get people to perform in certain ways.  The key term is collaboration; that is, there is a shared ownership of what the leader is attempting to accomplish; it becomes their – those who make up the business or organization – aims and goals, not the leader’s aims and goals.
In that spirit, this posting wants to make a distinction.  There are two ways of looking at this process and the favored way is more in keeping with the philosophy that the process is promoting – the more federalist way of looking at change.
Michael Roberto[2] uses extensively, in his description of these processes, the work of Jack Welch as CEO of General Electric to illustrate what transformational leadership is.  Welch exemplified the processes outlined above.  Roberto goes on to point out that Welch also dedicated a lot of effort and resources to mentoring many of his underlings in the fine art of leadership.  This became evident as many of his people left General Electric and took on CEO positions at other large corporations.  Most of these people became successful; some did not.  What made the difference?
This question focuses on what this posting wants to add to the understanding of effective change.  Some of these protégées wanted to take the general ideas of Welch’s approach and apply them to their newer positions with high degrees of massaging those ideas into a new reality.  One can call this basic approach a situational leadership adoption.  Others, instead, wanted to apply the GE approach to their newer place with a high degree of fidelity; that is, to ape what was done at GE to this other business entity – a model leadership adoption.  According to Roberto, the situational leadership type proved much more successful.
Why?  Apparently, each collective – such as each corporation – has its own set of factors that give it its “personality” or culture.  Each has its own cast of individuals, tasks, chemistry.  These must be respected by the new guy/gal on the block no matter how high that person is in the pecking order.  So, the lesson from these CEOs – both the successful and unsuccessful ones – is that immersing oneself in the existing cauldron of values, attitudes, mores, modes of operations, and other situational elements is essential to institute fundamental change.
For example, a case that Roberto points out occurred when Bob Nardelli left GE to head Home Depot.  Apparently, Nardelli opted the model leadership approach and tried to duplicate what he left at GE in his new assignment.  While he was very successful at GE, he was not, according to Roberto, successful at Home Depot.  To begin with, GE is, at its core, a manufacturing business and Home Depot is a retail business.  This, in and of itself, is enough of a difference to dictate a different strategy.
What is often overlooked when considering federalist approaches is that as a collectivist view of social arrangements, it places a high degree of importance on the integrity of the individual.  It recognizes the reality of governing or administrating actions that do not sufficiently honor that integrity – that such an approach is doomed to failure.
But while this is true at the individual level, it is also true at the collective level.  Each organization, be it private or public, needs to be respected and its elements need to be given their due.  That is what is wrong with a model leadership adoption.  It fails to account for the distinguishing elements that make a GE a GE or a Home Depot a Home Depot.  Situational elements, therefore, need to be respected.



[1] John Kotter, Leading Change (Boston, MA:  Harvard Business Press, 1996).

[2] Michael A. Roberto, Transformational Leadership:  How Leaders Change Teams, Companies, and Organizations, (Chantilly, VA:  The Great Courses/The Teaching Company, 2011).

No comments:

Post a Comment