Leadership, Good or Bad?

Leaders can choose to lead in a good direction or a bad one. Actually, a full spectrum exists from exceptionally bad to exceptionally good. Every manager will by his/her actions will lead in some direction within this spectrum. This direction may not be understood or chosen by the manager, but that is irrelevant. This is always the leaders choice, whether or not the leader realizes it. First, what exactly is leadership of employees in a workplace by a boss? Leadership applies to people and denotes the sending of value standard messages to people which most of them then follow/use. Thus we say that they have been "led" in the direction of those standards. Leadership is one side of the coin called value standards, the other side being followership. Leadership in the workplace consists of the value standards reflected in everything that an employee experiences because those standards are what employees follow by using them to perform their work. Most of what an employee experiences is the support or lack thereof provided by management - such as training, tools, parts, discipline, direction, material, procedures, rules, technical advice, documentation, information, etc. Leadership is not a process any manager can change. It happens inexorably every minute of every day because most people follow more or less. The only choice available to a manager is the standard (good, bad, mediocre or in between) that employees will follow. Because of these characteristics, "followership" turns out to be a major force in managing peoople. Those managers who take advantage of it can become extremely effective at managing their human capital. For example, let's look at the top-down command and control technique which is the most widely used method to manage people. Top-down concentrates on controlling the workforce through directives such as goals, targets, visions, and orders in order to achieve organizational success. Focusing on giving direction prevents these managers from doing much of anything else. Top-down treats employees like robots in the "shut up and listen, I know better than you" mode, and rarely if ever listens to them. This approach ignores every employee's basic need to be heard and to be respected. It also makes top management ignorant of what is really going on in the workplace thus making their directives misguided at best and irrelevant at worst. In top-down, nobody listens to employee ideas, nobody values their opinions, and nobody gives them any recognition. The only way that the workforce can deal with managers who treat them in this way is to disengage and ignore their behavior. In the workplace this is seen as being sullen, uncommunicative, having a poor attitude, low morale and/or apathy.

(During my first 12 years of managing people, I used top-down and was never aware of how bad my leadership was. It was not until I started really listening to employees that I began to understand.) In this way and others, top-down demeans and disrespects employees sending them very negative value standard messages. The standards reflected in this treatment "lead" employees to treat their work, their customers, each other and their bosses with the same level of disrespect they received. Top-down also causes a huge amount of employee stress. This is the road to very poor corporate performance as compared to the results that would be achieved using a better approach. Top-down managers are their own worst enemies because by their actions they lead employees to the very worst performance. (In The Human Side of Enterprise, author Douglas McGregor named this Theory X and named the other extreme Theory Y, but he did not provide the tools to achieve it.) If you want your employees to produce very high performance, swing to the other end of the spectrum where organizational control is effected through self-control and managers "lead" toward the highest possible performance. To do this, first get rid of all traces of a top-down approach. Everyone wants to do a good job, but no one wants to be ordered around like a robot. Next, start treating employees with great respect and not like robots by listening to whatever they want to say when they want to say it and responding in a very respectful manner. Responding respectfully means resolving their complaints and suggestions and answering their questions in a timely manner to their satisfaction as well as yours, but most importantly theirs. It also means providing them more than enough opportunity to voice their complaints, suggestions and questions. Spend your time making your support reflect the very highest standards of all values by resolving their complaints and suggestions thus leading them to use the very highest standards in performing their work. And realize that the highest quality and most respectful "direction" is the very least direction since no one likes to take orders or really needs them except in emergency situations. Anyone routinely needing extensive orders should not be on your team. This treatment leads employees to treat their work, their customers, each other and their bosses with great respect. Listening and responding respectfully also inspires them to unleash their full potential of creativity, innovation and productivity on their work giving them great pride in it and causes them to love to come to work. You will be stunned as I was by the huge amount of creativity, innovation and productivity you have unleashed. Employees will literally love to come to work and stress will almost cease to exist.