The single most damaging aspect of business could be the faulty belief that leaders are in control… of their organizations, their environment, their markets.
They are not.
Truly successful leaders earn that distinction precisely because of what they can achieve given an absence of control. It’s the professional manager who takes over the top spot without ever grasping the innate difference between the creative and managerial processes who espouses the idea that leaders control. This idea could not be more wrong, nor more damaging, to the foundation of business as we know it.
Leaders create. They make a future happen by aligning their organization’s will and focusing that will power on manifesting a particular vision. Leaders adapt and persevere, as a skier might when confronted with an unexpectedly large bump, or a patch of ice or even a tree. There is a give and take between the leader and his or her environment, just as between the skier and the mountain. No one is quite sure what is beyond the next turn… Great leaders engage in an artistic, creative process of give-and-take, assert and adapt, to ultimately get what they want. But to suggest that a leader ever controls the environment would be like suggesting the skier ever controls the mountain.
The faulty perspective of control is pervasive and insidious. Ram Charan, who co-wrote Execution and recently published Know How, offers some great advice for aspiring leaders. But take a look at how this advice is replayed in editorials and reviews, and you can quickly see how our language shifts from Ram’s subtle language of leadership and guidance to a more black-and-white language of management and control.
If business is to survive, its leaders are going to have to put their egos aside.
Already a shift is underway: Gen Y senses something inherently off in business and many of them are choosing to avoid the corporate world altogether rather than engage and change it from the inside. (Which is a shame… but that’s another story.) Future politicians are earning their stripes as corporate ethics police. And off-shoring is allowing businesses to demand the types of price concessions that can only be made by eliminating graft.Still, it’s not enough. External change will only go so far: if business is to survive in any form we know it today, it’s leaders must be far more responsible with the power they have. They must give up the idea of leadership as a position of control and privelege and accept leadership for what it truly is: a role of responsibility, service and an honor.
