The challenge of leadership - Jobsworth and his successors

In the British employment environment there often seems to be a strange tension between two apparently opposite beliefs. On one hand there is a move among many of the country's more 'progressive' organisations towards group and team-working, with a great emphasis on interpersonal skills, group dynamics, and, in many, that largely devalued term 'empowerment'. On the other hand there are the - too frequent - high profile disasters and corporate embarrassments that feature in the news pages rather than the business pages. Whenever these sad stories appear, blame falls like monsoon rain on the leaders of the organisations. Often the competence of these 'leaders' is called into question quite forcefully and publicly.
So is there a fundamental misunderstanding of the working of the organisation?
Some say that strong leadership, directed effort and respect for the authority of experience is the way to avoid corporate chaos. Certainly we seem at times to have a catastrophic lack of leadership in some very important and prominent organisations. But there are others who loudly proclaim that the best, indeed only hope for the future lies in more teams, and more interactive teams, better collective decision making, greater workforce 'democracy' and in meaningful 'empowerment'. This cunning suggestion of such stark alternatives implies that the question is legitimate. But it is really a failure to address the important issue, which is that problems are seldom due to a lack of leaders - or at least would be leaders - they are due to a lack of leadership.

A precise definition of leadership is often seen as problematical, but if one seeks a consensus, agreement of around 75% of the required competencies emerges. Leadership involves, in rather dry terms, visioning, establishing direction, developing strategies, communicating, inspiring, motivating and empowering. Or in more basic terms, leadership is seeing what the future should be, ensuring that others 'buy in' to the vision and enabling everyone to contribute to the achievement of the vision. Clearly then, leadership is not 'management re-badged'. True, there are aspects of leadership in effective management in terms of the need to motivate others. There must be elements of management in leadership, or nothing would ever get done. But leadership has a particular set of competencies to which we as a nation need to pay more attention.
Leadership is not like one of those exotic plants that suddenly appear in the midst of wasteland; it doesn't thrive on neglect. Unless some steps are taken to cultivate it, leadership will not grow. At the least, leadership needs the environment to be turned into something approaching a growing environment. Like any hardy plant, it doesn't ask for a rich loam, just a decent chance to grow.

Over the years we seem to have turned many of our workplaces into environments that have stifled the seeds of leadership. Looking back, some of these stifling factors can be readily identified. In the middle of the last century we had a generation of managers who came from 'National Service'. With them came 'never volunteer!' - old soldiers never volunteered, because they had learned that in a hostile world volunteering exposed them to danger. In the workplace of the latter half of the twentieth century, security was widely seen as more important than change. Undoubtedly this keen concentration on static 'security' by many managers in ponderous organisations contributed to the decline of the UK's manufacturing base in the late twentieth century.

It is one of the challenges of the twenty-first century that we will have to learn to manage in the fastest changing, highest pressure work environment ever known without the experience of many of these same managers, managers who, whatever their 'negative tendencies', nevertheless steered so many of our country's businesses through the exceptionally turbulent waters of corporate and industrial restructuring of the late twentieth century. The desire to keep a steady course is the positive and desirable face of a characteristic that can otherwise be called ponderous and adverse to change. Many of the new managers of today have only known the good times; they will need help to deal with some challenges we can't even imagine at present, but which will surely emerge during their tenure.
Back in the 1970s, another characteristic of industry brought with it, amongst a number of equally amusing epithets, 'mushroom management', or 'the management keep us in the dark and periodically shovel horse manure on us'. Too many workforces arrived at too many factory gates only to discover they had been sold, closed or abandoned through no fault of their own.
This created huge cynicism, and meant that many workforces never knew what the decisions being taken were, or why, or how. In most cases, not even the information on which these decisions were based was available to the people that mattered, the workforces. The fashionable position that 'our major asset is our people' partly addresses this, but some of its characteristic 'solutions', such as misdirected empowerment by unreconstructed employers have not helped to develop the right environment for leadership to emerge.
Another anti-leadership factor running through the past forty years, like a much loved but fatally flawed TV personality, is our old friend 'Jobsworth'. Jobsworth made absolutely sure that they could not be blamed if anything went wrong, even if by doing so they ensured that nothing ever changed for the better. It is interesting today to see HR departments desperately endeavouring to create a climate in their organisations where people are not singled out as scapegoats when inevitably some mistakes are made in the faster changing climate of today's workplace. The weasel words 'no blame culture' are trotted out too often by managers who will still unhesitatingly point the finger of blame at someone else when things go, to borrow a term from the twentieth century, 'pear-shaped'.
At the start of this new century we need leadership more than ever. It is effective leadership which will enable workers to make the best use of their skills and knowledge that is growing faster than at any time in the past. The new skills and knowledge enables us to do things we never dreamed possible, many of which are desirable, some of which we should, with good leadership, decide never to use.