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Effective Leadership. Unleash Their Thinking

“People don’t need to be managed, they need to be unleashed”
Richard Florida, 2002

Effective leadership is today more important than ever before...especially if we talk about employee motivation.

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In his book, Quiet Leadership, David Rock from Results Coaching Systems explains why businesses are in desperate need for a new kind of leader. The majority of the content of this article comes from his book.

Our leadership practices are not keeping up with the realities of organizational life.

The result is a gap between how people WANT to be managed and the way they ARE managed. You just have to look at the results of company surveys to see how wide that gap is…and it seems to be increasing.

The purpose of this article is to explain why we need to start managing people’s thinking, instead of managing their behaviour. We will look at how the need for a different way of leading employees emerged in the times that we live in today.

Let’s have a look at a model, called “The Caesar Model” to explain effective leadership today.

The Caesar Model

To understand effective leadership for today’s organizational challenges, we will look at two different sets of values. The old, more common ones and the new ones that are required for effective leadership.

Let’s have a look at the old values first.

As you see, Caesar is clearly on top of this structure. He has all his troops and workers below him.

All the employees below the “doing” line are the workers of the organization. All those above this line are the management and leaders of these workers.

The Values of This Increasingly Redundant Leadership Approach is:

I, Caesar, know all the answers. The answers of how to run the business, how to make money, and what you as employees need and want.

Since I, Caesar, know all the answers, I expect you as the workers (those below the doing line) to do what you are told. You don’t need to THINK or question what I say. You just have to do it.

Because I don’t trust that you will do what you are told to do, I need my troops of middle management to control and watch over you. Their job is to control you and tell me what is occurring in the organization.

You, the workers, will have a guaranteed job for life (or at least for a very long time). The belief is that if you, the workers, just do what you are told, and do it well, you will be employed for life. It is the old social contract.

So what’s wrong with these old values?

Nothing. Except for the fact that it was designed for another era. However, it worked well in that era. There was a time, not so long ago, when this was effective leadership.

However, the world is changing so quickly that these values are hard to uphold. Lets have a look the reasons why.

Change In The Nature Of Work

About one hundred years ago, most people were paid for their physical labor. Managing people were simple.

Effective leadership in those years was to find ways how people could improve the way they hit a hammer or use a plow. It was basically a master/apprentice relationship.

By the mid twenties, much of the work involved executing codified processes that required less physical exertion.

This shift was driven by the arrival of electricity and mechanization.

Workers were paid to do repetitive tasks like entering data, filing paper and running machinery.

The dominant leadership paradigm became the management of processes. Scientifically analyzing linear systems to find even greater efficiencies.

I believe this is where our current school system is getting it wrong as well. Just look at how we put people in linear rows and lines in classrooms. It is a system that was designed for the industrial era…and it never really changed.

Anyway, that’s a different story for a different time.

In the past few decades, anything that could be codified or systemized has been either computerized or outsourced.

By 2005, because of all this computerizing, outsourcing and other process improvements, 40 percent of employees were to be consider knowledgeable workers.

With middle management and higher, it is closer to 100 percent.

So most people in companies are now paid to THINK. The problem is that the management models that we use today are still those of the process era.

Like David Rock, author of the book, “Quiet Leadership” mentions, “We haven’t yet taught our leaders and managers how to improve their thinking.

Moving from Managing Hands to Managing Minds

People are better educated today than any previous generation. I remember how my grand parents spoke about how educated you were when you finished school in their time.

Today, even a MBA is less of a distinction and more of a requirement.

People are also more wealthy and independent than previous years.

The challenge is that we still manage these ever increasingly educated and independent employees pretty much along the same lines that we did in previous eras.

The Generation Gap

The needs of generation X and Y are different from that of previous years. They want their skills to be nurtured. They don’t necessarily look for long term employment.

They adapt better to change. In fact, they thrive in change. They want constant change.

They enjoy diversity. They want to be developed personally.

It’s not difficult to see that effective leadership for these generations doesn’t mean command and control.

The Pace of Change

The pace of change is getting faster and faster. In previous years, changes were rare. In addition, if it did happen, there was a long period of stability until the next change came along.

Just look at sport. In the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s people use to stay world number one for years in a particular sport. Who of you remember the Borg, McEnroe and Lendl years in tennis? Today, you are lucky if you stay there for 6 months.

So we have change upon change upon change today. This requires a very different kind of leader.

The New Way Of Effective Leadership.

Let’s look at Caesar again

In this day and age of constant change, we need the following values for effective leadership.

Caesar (or the head of the organization) proclaims and realizes that they don’t have all the answers.

Caesar then hires workers whose main purpose is to do what is right…To do the THINKING themselves. To serve the customer. Both internal and external.

Since Caesar cannot tell them all the answers anymore, employees need to do what they know will produce the most value and develop loyalty from the customers…in other words, they need to THINK.

So what’s the role of senior and middle management then? They need to provide coaching, trust, support and guidance to the employees, so they can THINK better and do what is right. It becomes managements job to remove obstacles so workers can do their work (and thinking) better.

The contract of “job for life” doesn’t exist anymore. Most organizations today can’t provide it and today’s employees don’t expect it. So what does the company give the employees in return?

The guarantee that employees will grow and learn during their tenure at the organization.

They will have more options for employability due to the growth and development commitments from their leaders.

Do this activity with your employees, which will clearly demonstrates that to empower your employees takes up much less time and energy in the long run.

And here is a link to an article about Leadership Styles

The Conflict Between the Two Sets of Values

Employees can’t have the new values of a supportive, coaching management team that is vulnerable and admit they don’t have the answers AND still want management to do the thinking for them. They can’t wait to be told anymore.

For many employees, it is scary to trust themselves and to THINK about what is right for the customer. It is because it means employees are accountable for both the good and the bad results.

Performance is Just the Tip of the Iceberg.

There is a metaphor, called the Iceberg model, used by cognitive behavioral therapy and various behavioral sciences.

The Iceberg model describes how performance is driven by our sets of behaviors, or habits. These are driven by our feelings, which in turn are driven by our thoughts. There is a detailed explanation in this article.

In the Iceberg model, our performance and some of our behaviors are visible. Other behaviors, feelings and thoughts are below the water.

There is a lot more driving our performance than just the few habits we see on the surface. And at the base of all this is the way we think.

The problem is that most people today focus on change of behavior if they want different results in other people. This is true for most managers and even parents and teachers. We waste a lot of energy here.

They rarely discuss which habits is driving employee’s performance. Or discuss their feelings. They almost never discuss the thinking behind all of this.

Effective leadership today would be to improve the thinking of your employees.

I want to make one thing clear. We are talking about IMPROVING the thinking of employees here. We are not trying to unravel or to understand it. We are not psychologists…well most of us are not.

In summary, effective leadership today is about how to learn to improve people’s thinking. Thinking is what many employees are being paid to do, after all. Many employees are highly capable individuals who will thrive on this new way of effective leadership.

They want to work smarter, they want to BE smarter and they are crying out for help.

If you want me to help you with Leadership Developmemt, read more about my Leadership Program, Unleash Potential Through Leadership here .

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