The Power of Everyday Leadership

Article by Dr. John E. Kello

Much of what is written about business leadership addresses leadership at the top levels of the organization. Writings on leadership focus most directly on the issues that the CEO worries about – setting a Vision and Mission (ideally with the involvement of members of the top leadership team), setting and articulating a business strategy, inspiring the troops in word and deed, and more generally laying the groundwork for a positive, high-performance culture.

In my judgment, much of this leadership literature is not directly applicable to the masses of would-be (and should-be) leaders in the trenches of the organization. The interface between those valuable CEO-level strategic concepts and the daily leadership work of the supervisor or middle manager is not always obvious.

A modest bit of what is written about business leadership is in fact aimed more at the frontline manager, and thus at the craft of daily leadership. One of the most successful, widely read, and widely recommended of those books was The One Minute Manager, originally written in 1982 by the academician-turned-consultant Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson, who later also wrote the book, Who Moved My Cheese. Back to The One Minute Manager, this little book does at least two things which I think make a valuable contribution to the practice of daily leadership. First, and most critically, it asserts that the task of leading well on a daily basis is not a mysterious, impossibly difficult task, requiring rare and special gifts, and years upon years of practice for its successful attainment. Indeed, a core premise is that brief (one-minute) interactions, following a couple of simple and easily mastered guidelines, add up to effective daily leadership. Second, and more specifically, it identifies constructive performance feedback in relationship to agreed-upon goals as a critical task of daily leadership, one that is really quite simple, but often not done very well.

Numerous examples support the notion of the critical importance of daily leadership:

1.     Many of the questions in the popular Gallup Survey of Employee Engagement (Q12) relate to the role of the supervisor. Who takes the lead in setting expectations at work? Who is the main point of contact for getting employees the proper tools and equipment to do their job? Who is (or should be) the primary dispenser of deserved praise and recognition? Who is in the best position to care about you as a person (not just your outputs), encourage your development, value your opinions, talk to you about your progress...? The Q12 is largely asking, “how does your immediate supervisor do his/her job?”

2.     While there are many reasons why an individual might quit a job, a variety of survey tools have identified the single most common reason as “poor relationship with my supervisor.”

3.     A substantial body of research has yielded an interesting figure about the proportion of supervisors and managers who are seen by their organizations as poor fits. The ballpark figure that shows up in the research literature is “around 50%.”

4.     It was noted years ago, early in the development and application of the panoply of Total-Quality, Employee-Involvement, Process-Reengineering, High-Performance-Organization, etc., change efforts that swept through most industries and continue to do so today, that a primary reason for the failure of many of these efforts was failure to actively involve first-line supervisors in the change. Left on the sidelines, many supervisors felt threatened (in some cases for good reason), and/or lacked the knowledge and skills to go from “work boss” to “team facilitator.” To quote the title of a brilliant article from awhile back, “Why do supervisors resist employee involvement”? Because they are the critical levers, the linchpins between worker and management, and they are too often left out of the process, jeopardizing the whole effort. Even if workers are encouraged by top management to become more self-directed, or work in process improvement teams, etc., if their immediate supervisor does not support or even understand the change effort, how successful and durable will it be? By the same token, to engage supervisors themselves directly in a change effort is to maximize its chances for durable success.

The list could go on, but you get the point. Supervisors and middle managers are critical to the daily health and functioning of the organization. Other things equal, the better they do their daily leadership job, the better the organization excels, and the higher the quality of work life for the folks they lead.

Before I began my consulting career, I naively assumed that the poor supervision I had personally experienced at times as an employee was somehow the exception, not the rule. My consulting experience quickly convinced me that my own work experience was in fact the norm. I saw poor daily leadership as an unfortunate common denominator in the organizations I aimed to help.

Many supervisors are put in the role based on seniority or formal credentials, not leadership potential, and are largely left to their own devices to figure out what to do and how to do it. Some figure it out, and some don’t.

Warmth and Strength

I read a Harvard Business Review article that summarized research addressing the broad issue of leadership effectiveness. The bottom-line conclusion was that two key variables influenced the extent to which managers were perceived as highly effective leaders. One was warmth, a global interpersonal, behavioral variable related to how I come across to others – friendly, caring, and approachable, or not. The other variable was strength, a gauge of how competent I am seen to be at getting things done. The warmth variable more strongly influenced first impressions of the leader and determined whether the leader’s strength would be accepted and valued, or even feared and resisted.

Researchers have found that people tend to choose for themselves competence-related training (technical, job-skills oriented) more than warmth-related, interpersonal skills training. But when asked to identify the training that they would recommend for others (coworkers or bosses), they tilt strongly towards the warmth-related, interpersonal skills training.

I have had a similar experience in running leadership assessment centers. When participants are asked to profile the qualities of an ideal leader, they emphasize the warmth-related attributes. When separately asked to identify skills that they themselves want to build, they mostly emphasize technical, competence-related skills.

Leadership is exerted not just at the top of the organization, but also well below the corporate suite, in dozens, scores of daily actions and interactions – “moments of truth” -- in which victories are celebrated, problems are addressed, feedback is given and received, decisions are made and implemented, impressions are formed, relationships are built, and interaction patterns are set and reinforced.

The pursuit of excellence is designed at the top of the organization, in acts of strategic leadership; organizational effectiveness is executed and realized down where the work gets done, in positive acts of daily leadership by supervisors. Leadership at both levels is essential to truly high-performing organizations.