DC Velocity - April 2016

WE ARE SLOWLY BUT SURELY ACCEPTING THAT ONE DOES not one day decide to be (or become) a leader. Rather, other people—staff, peers, colleagues—choose to be (or become) followers. Research has pretty well established that genuine leadership consists of a complex and diverse set of behaviors that can, must, be learned and practiced—and are useless in the long run if not authentic to the practitioner.

So, the changing face is not at all similar to being two-faced. And the new look (with accompanying talk and walk) is not merely facing up to the perceived demands of the dreaded millennials, but is a recognition of the wants, desires, needs, and motivators of all generations in the workplace.

BUY ’EM BOOKS AND THEY CHEW THE COVERS

We have been very nearly buried in piles of books that claim to reveal the leadership secrets of any number of well-known individuals. Sometimes useful, in a transient way, these tend toward being essentially vanity publications that permit the famous to receive outrageous advance payments for books that go largely unread on their short path to the remainders bin.

The ostensible authors range from politicians to industrialists to military commanders. In the main, these self-congratulatory screeds seem to rationalize actions, decisions, and behaviors by organizing them into a structure, however rickety, that can masquerade as an organized leadership philosophy.

But they tend not to be systematically sustainable. That is, they appear to offer a concise set of values, beliefs, and principles, but are generally short on the details of how one develops and maintains them. They are slogans, buzzwords, and platitudes, and not so much programs with intentionally structured elements and observable, measurable outcomes.

ARE THE USER MANUALS WRITTEN IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE? All is not lost. We have more than the superficial pretenders to work with. To be blunt, truckloads of valid research have been published. But these works are not always well-written and suffer, probably unfairly, from academic origins. We can learn from them, but they typically do not make useful guidebooks for lay readers to use in crafting their own leadership pathways.

Happily, there are life-altering exceptions. Because each author

BY ART VAN BODEGRAVEN basictraining

The changing face of leadership

begins with an individual experience base and has his or her own philosophical biases, the specifics of leadership development programs can vary widely. No worries. What is important is not Method A versus Method B; what counts is how the reader adapts and maintains—and keeps practicing the principles with rigor, discipline, and consistency. And how the self-committed leader creates ripples in the pond by extending accountability of leadership throughout the surrounding organization.

PUT ME IN, COACH; I’M READY

Many of our leadership exemplars and imaginings come from the ranks of athletic leadership. And many of these are PR creations or last-century leftovers, or both. We have a romantic notion of a team being implored to win one for the Gipper, or to buckle down and shock the world with an upset win over a bigger, faster, smarter opponent. We think of Wayne Woodrow Hayes, Bear Bryant, Knute Rockne. Even such stalwarts as those icons acknowledged that a coach could only “motivate” a team for a couple of games a year; the rest were a matter of talent and tactics.

So, knowing that, how effective is the cheerleading leader likely to be over any sustained period?

Other notable cases come from the military— some exceptional, some mundane, some bureaucrats, some still figuring out how to fight the last war. Washington, Eisenhower, Patton, Grant, deGaulle, Rommel, MacArthur, Montgomery, Petraeus. There are ample cases of new-century military leaders who have turned the old command and control model on its ear. And there are legions who know that things are changing but don’t know exactly how.