Improving The Way Organizations Run

Thinking about quality ... of Life...

Where is Leadership
and Followership Today?
by Laurence R. Smith
Editor, Journal of Innovative Management
GOAL/QPC

When I was thirteen we lived in a house owned by my mother’s sister and her husband. One day
my mother answered a knock on the door. It was a couple wanting to look at the house. Mom’s
sister and brother-in-law put the house up for sale without telling us, although they had promised
that if they ever wanted to sell the house they would tell us first and give us the opportunity to buy
it. They didn’t fulfill that promise.

When I reflect on that, I can say that what happened was a moral and ethical issue concerning
human and family relations. C’est la vie. But it was also a leadership issue! A family is, in a sense,
a kind of organization. How functional or dysfunctional the family is reflects how competent and
ethical its leadership and management is.

When we view the workplace today, we see similar “leader and manager” behavior. People are
living their lives in what they may consider “their company,” trying to do the best job they can,
when suddenly they find that their leaders have sold their house—their company and their job—
out from under them. And we somehow want to call the people who did that “leaders.” We see
this kind of behavior in politicians, too, who sell-out the voters in favor of some special interest
with little, if any, regard for the common good. We see it in other places too, such as where justice
is subservient to rule of law, and where medical professionals kill tens of thousands of patients
every year because many doctors and administrators refuse to learn and institute patient safety
processes. I would not define any of those people as leaders, and I think it is dangerous for
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Improving The Way Organizations Run

citizens in a free society to accept that kind of leadership.

So what can be done about it? Lots! But it won’t be quick and easy. True leadership in any
organization would include the consistent practice of an effective management model that served
customers, employees, shareholders, and the community/state/nation/world. That could take the
form of an integrated management system like the Criteria for Performance Excellence, from the
Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award program. Following are a few excerpts from the
Baldrige Criteria:

The Baldrige Criteria provide a systems perspective for managing your organization and its key processes
to achieve results—performance excellence. The seven Baldrige categories and the core values form the
building blocks and the integrating mechanism for the system. However, successful management of
overall performance requires organization specific synthesis, alignment, and integration. Synthesis means
looking at your organization as a whole and builds upon key business requirements, including your
strategic objectives and action plans. Alignment means using the key linkages among requirements given
in the Baldrige categories to ensure consistency of plans, processes, measures, and actions. Integration
builds on alignment so that the individual components of your performance management system operate in
a fully interconnected manner.
A systems perspective includes your senior leaders’ focus on strategic directions and on your customers. It
means that your senior leaders monitor, respond to, and manage performance based on your business
results. A systems perspective also includes using your measures, indicators, and organizational
knowledge to build your key strategies. It means linking these strategies with your key processes and
aligning your resources to improve overall performance and satisfy customers. Thus, a systems
perspective means managing your whole organization, as well as its components, to achieve success.

If you want the Performance Excellence Criteria, you’ll find it at the program’s website: www.
quality.nist.gov. My guess is that the reason we don’t see more organizations using management
models like Baldrige is because leaders lack the courage to do so, and followers lack the courage
to demand it. The truth is that while we say that we want a better world, we live in a world that we
have individually and collectively created through our actions and inactions. We may say that we
want things to be better, but I’m thinking that the world will improve when we all take steps to
improve it.

Your membership dues help us continue this work, and the quarterly Journal is one
continuous benefit—a free knowledge sharing benefit—that you get from your
membership investment in GOAL/QPC.

GOAL/QPC members receive the quarterly Journal of Innovative Management free. If you're not a
member you can join now for only $99 a year (U.S. -- Canadian and foreign slightly higher).

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Improving The Way Organizations Run

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