Discussions of leadership often focus on the character of the leader himself or herself. What are the attributes of a successful leader? How can potential leaders be identified and trained? These things are indeed important, but they are not the whole story. Much depends on the leader in any organisation, and good leadership is critical to strategic success. But leaders do not act alone. The best leaders in the world will fail unless they have the trust and willing support of those around them, says Morgen Witzel, FSN writer and honorary senior fellow at the University of Exeter Business School.
This point was made forcefully by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones in their 2006 book Why Should Anyone Be Led By You? Not only do leaders not act alone, say the authors, but they cannot function without the support of those around them. This need for support extends not just to the top team, but to everyone in the organization. Fred Smith, founding chairman of Federal Express, once commented that by no means all of his company’s 260,000 people were leaders, or even had the potential to be leaders. But those who were leaders, including himself, depended absolutely on the rest of the 260,000 to get the job done.
Those who are not leaders are generally termed ‘followers’. This language makes some people, especially some academics, uncomfortable as they feel that the term ‘follower’ implies a subservient role. It need not do so; some very powerful leaders, ranging from Mahatma Gandhi to William McKnight, the man who turned around 3M and made it into a world-class corporation, have regarded themselves as the ‘servants’ of those they lead, not the masters.
John Adair, the doyen of British leadership experts, once defined leadership as ‘getting things done through other people, willingly.’ Back in the 1930s in his book Leadership in a Free Society, Thomas North Whitehead defined a leader as ‘chosen by the rest of the group as one who is both able and willing to assist them in doing that which they already wish to do.’ Neither of these definitions implies subervience. What they do imply is a relationship of mutual dependence between the leaders and the rest of the organization.
People have to want to be led. Another contemporary writer on strategy and leadership, Manfred Kets de Vries of the French business school INSEAD, has argued that even the worst tyrants rule with the consent of those they govern – even if that consent is extracted unwillingly. And in our modern Western businesses - which of course are all run on democratic and consensual lines with no hint of coercion or threat - the relationship between leaders and led is still more crucial. A chairman or chief executive who loses the confidence of his or her workforce and management is doomed to eventual failure.
The importance of this for strategy will of course be clear at once. If a leader wants people to execute a given strategy, he or she first has to have their consent. They have to want to execute the strategy, or at the very least, be persuaded that it is in their best interests to do so. Research has shown that the more willing and committed followers are, the better the chance that the strategy will be implemented successfully.
Second, the followers have to be capable of executing the strategy. Thus a lot of the leader’s task is making it possible for followers to do what they need to do, by motivating and encouraging them and smoothing out obstacles. Sir Stewart Rose of Marks & Spencer defines his task in these term: ‘I say [to our people], “Look, there is a hill. You may not think you can climb it, but I am going to show you a way of getting to the top of that hill.”’
But surely, it can be argued, the task of the leader is to give orders, and the task of everyone else is to obey them? That is how strategy is carried out in the army, navy and air force; is the task of the business leader so very different? Perhaps it is. Back in 1924 the American sociologist and political scientists Mary Parker Follett argued against the idea of ‘command and control’ in business organizations. She believed that ‘control’ is in fact an illusion. We might think that, when we give orders and people jump to obey them, that we are in control of those people and of the situation. But Follett mads the point again: people only obey because they want to, or because they believe it is in their best interests to do so. What we think of as control, said Follett, is actually ‘coordination’. Leaders do not direct the activities of others, said Follett; they coordinate the efforts of others so that all can achieve a mutually agreed end.
Even in the armed forces, with their strong discipline and punishments for refusal to obey orders, there is awareness of this. At the Royal Military College in Sandhurst there is a dictum which instructors have been passing on to cadets for generations: ‘Never give an order unless you know it will be obeyed.’ During the Vietnam War, untrained American officers believed that if they screamed loudly enough at their soldiers the latter would obey. Instead what sometimes happened was that the officers were ‘fragged’, shot in the back by their own men.
Successful leadership, then, is not a matter of giving orders and being obeyed, even if it sometimes looks like that on the surface. Successful leaders, who devise and execute successful strategies, are always in tune with their followers. No matter how authoritarian their manner may be, they know that they must rely on those around them to help implement the strategy and get things done. The late Peter Drucker summed up the matter with his usual directness. ‘The leaders who work most effectively never say “I”’, said Drucker. ‘And that’s not because they have trained themselves not to say “I”. They don’t think “I”. They think “we”; they think “team”. They understand their job to be to make the team function.’
