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.
