What if the CEO had no authority?
Take it a step further: What if you had no authority either? Same job, same responsibilities. You gauge success the same way you gauge it today. The only difference is that you can’t exert your authority and make it stick.
How much would change? Very little, I hope. Those who frequently rely on their authority to make decisions and make them stick are “leading” (in quotes because they aren’t leading in any meaningful sense of the term) a dispirited collection of unmotivated second-raters whose hearts aren’t in their work and heads aren’t in the game.
Some of the second-raters could be first-rate employees under decent leadership; the rest of the potentially first-rate employees left long-ago to work in healthier organizations.
Authority isn’t merely over-rated. It’s a hazard to effective leadership. Just as money is the lazy manager’s motivational alternative to creating an energizing work environment, so authority is the lazy manager’s alternative to making effective decisions, and its absence is the excuse for failing to provide leadership.
Did I say lazy manager? I should have said manager-who-will-never-reach-the-executive-ranks-and-shouldn’t. Because if you aspire to become a business executive, you had better recognize that persuasion and influence trump authority and control in just about every situation that matters.
Imagine two middle managers, both of whom want to join the executive ranks. One considers her path to success to be finding a big and important idea and making it happen. She spots an important trend and develops a strategy for it. She does her homework and works hard to turn it into a working strategy that will help drive revenue through the roof.
She calculates the Return on Investment (ROI) and determines that it’s well above the hurdle rate.
She wants to take responsibility for making it happen, so she takes her business plan to the CEO, explains it persuasively, and asks for the authority she’ll need to turn it into reality.
The other middle manager also figures his path to success is to find a big and important idea, and to make it happen. He spots an important trend, but instead of doing his homework to develop a workable strategy, he takes a different approach.
He shares his thinking with every top executive in the company, talking it up, asking their opinions, and in general finding out how he needs to shape the idea to maximize support throughout the executive team.
When he has the idea fleshed out into a form most of them like, he asks to meet with the CEO, and the rest of the executive team. He presents the overview, asks the CEO what he thinks of it, and directs most of the questions to one or another of the executives in the room, saying to the CEO something like, “Bill and I have talked this over … Bill, would you mind sketching out how that would work?”
At the end of the discussion, the CEO informs everyone that before they make their decision, another manager has also developed a promising idea, and he’d like them to hear her out before choosing between the two. And they will have to choose, because the company only has enough bandwidth to handle one of them.
The first manager joins them and walks everyone through her proposal. She explains the concept. She describes the marketing plan, the manufacturing plan, distribution, customer service … the works.
When the CEO asks the assembled executives for their reaction, the head of marketing, who hadn’t seen the marketing plan before the meeting, says, “It’s an interesting idea, but I don’t see it working here.” The heads of manufacturing, distribution, and customer service have similar reactions.
Of course they do: They helped develop the second manager’s proposal but have no stake at all in what the first one put together.
And so she leaves for home, knowing her idea was the better of the two and convinced she’s been the victim of politics.
She’s almost right. Politics is the art of leading from the side, when you have no authority and still take responsibility for making important things happen. She wasn’t a victim of politics. She was a victim of her failure to see informal consensus-building … politics … as a higher form of leadership than authority.
The other manager had figured this out. He understood that his job isn’t to be right.
Being right is for debaters. Executives make sure the organization is right enough.
Absolutely true – except that in many organizations the “leaders” who lead via fear and intimidation have made it to the top by being the best at currying favor to those above and beating down those below. Even though they aren’t “leading” they are steering the organization and negatively affecting the culture.
I agree with you whole heartedly. The two key examples (and one other) I will tell you in a two or three sentence description. *NEVER* *EVER* give anything close to supervisory power to a technical person. I have witnessed first hand what it does to these people they end up tearing apart the entire department the only phrase I can come up with is “Napoleon complex”. Terror and desertion amongst the troops or even worse a person that does not have any computer background and does not have the sense to say “Let me think about that” before speaking.
The third napoleon complex is a guy in the Army that think he is
a king and no one better say “No”.
I went from a technician to a supervisor and I was frankly an average supervisor. Yes I did make some dumb mistakes and I could not connect with the people for anything. I went back to being a technician at another company (for more money) and loved it and I also learned that politics in some environments is toxic.
Nicely done…
Thanks!
Scott
P.s. You’ve illuminated quite a few concepts I’ve not forgotten even since the ’90s. And, since I embody this one, about developing ideas cooperatively, it won’t be forgotten either.
P.p.s. If you’re interested, I have some thoughts on why this tendency to co-develop ideas comes naturally to some and not others. Just let me know if you’d like a brief description to see if it’d be useful fodder for you.
This is a slight variation on Toyota’s nemawashi [literally, “digging around the roots” in preparation for transplanting]. They consider it their “Art and Science of Consensus Building”. It has two major dimensions, Relationships and Communication.
There are four basic principles to the Relationships Dimension: Be Personable, Build Partnerships, Be Proactive and Build the Pyramid. There are also four basic principles to the Communications Dimension: Be a Provider, Begin with Peers, Break for Preview and Bare Prospects.
“Authority isn’t merely over-rated. It’s a hazard to effective leadership. Just as money is the lazy manager’s motivational alternative to creating an energizing work environment, so authority is the lazy manager’s alternative to making effective decisions, and its absence is the excuse for failing to provide leadership.”
I find this to be overstated in two ways. First of all, money is a required motivator. If you disagree, please send me half of your salary every year and I will concede your point. It should be money and an energizing work environment, although I aggree with your point about EXTRA money substituting for an energizing work environment. Being worried about how you will pay for groceries or your mortgage with absolutely nothing left for entertainment or education will drain the energy from the work environment.
Authority is necessary. If the CEO lacked authority it would be noticed by those working for him and he would lose any chance at leadership. Think about it, if you were working for a CEO that could never make a decision, or whose decisions were often countermanded how could you follow him? You would have no way of knowing which direction he was actually going.
Again it is the abuse of authority that you should be objecting to not merely the use of it. Of course, it could just be that we use authority differently. You may be referring mostly to authority of position, rather than authority of person. For example the troops immediately follow the veteran sargeant rather than the green officer because his authority is based upon the respect of the men rather than his position within the organization.
I’ve been a faithful reader since the “old days” when you authored a column for InfoWorld, and this piece easily makes it into your “Top Ten”.
Were you at my last executive staff meeting? You must have been, and you must have watched me go down in flames just like that smart woman in your column.
Hyperbole, actually. The last time I was that dumb was a decade hence. But I thought this column was spot-on and a great reminder of how organizations actually work.
Great column!
Wow. Bob, I’ve been reading your columns for years (since you were at infoworld). This one really threw me after the description of manager number 1. I didn’t see manager 2 coming. Nice job, I’ve learned something important today! Now if I can only put it into practice….
Great, spot-on article. This is how good executives and good organizations work. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this concept explained so clearly and succinctly.
You know, of course, that many of your readers are rank-and-file technical people (who, Mr. Gould, would probably be perfectly good managers but who like what we do better.) As a system analyst/application developer I often have the interesting sans authority problem of knowing more about a business process than the manager responsible for it does (or is willing to learn). That can definitely lead to some interesting “leading from the side,” usually in the context of an urgent problem in need of a decision I am not authorized to make but can provide essential guidance on. Your column today will help!
And then there was the manager who had plenty of authority, but knew not how to lead:
“You imbeciles! You never get things done correctly and you are always behind schedule. No more breaks and mandatory overtime without pay for the next six weeks!”
You rarely maximize the harvest of honey by kicking the beehive……
Wow! Of all the great articles I’ve enjoyed from KJR, and in InfoWorld before that, this is probably the most important. Certainly, the first that got me to post a comment. I’ve know for some time that good management was all about relationships, or at least mostly about relationships, and effectively managing them.
But I’d never made the connection between relationship management and office “politics”. Certainly, politics has its well deserved downside but the idea that effective relationship management is politics done right is genuinely revelatory.
Thank you.
Excellent job on this article. It feels very relevant to my current situation and company make-up. The summary sentences around what politics and informal consensus-building are really made an impact with me; I shared this article with my co-workers. Thanks!
Sounds good…but in practice…not so good. Because what I’ve seen is upper management listen to both presenters and then make some incredibly stupid decision based on neither and force the rest of the organization to accept it.
In fact, in my entire 30+ career, I can say I have never seen upper management make a good technical decision because they simply don’t listen to the people who understand the technology. Or they just accept what the last person who spoke to them said (this is by far the most frequent scenario–consensus doesn’t matter, order of presentation does, especially if one has the CEO’s ear).
Sorry if that sounds like sour grapes. We’ve tried consensus building. We’ve tried just building a decent technical case. Both fail when upper management decides to say HOW something will be done, rather than stating the end goal they wish to accomplish and allowing the technical experts to develop a solution to MEET THAT GOAL.
Upper Management has no business making technical decisions. They will always make the wrong decision, because they are no longer technicians when they reach the higher levels. And yet they insist on making those decisions and forcing the organization to do things in the worst possible way, rather than sticking to what they are good at: defining goals.
Too many mistake goals and overall strategy for specific technical methods and detailed strategy to meet a goal.
Too bad because it makes consensus meaningless.
I see the point in your posting, but I just can not bring myself to gush that this is one of your greatest.
I find that all too often when someone sees a trend and starts building a case for it with the existing executives, the end solution looks exactly like what they already have. Unless the company is in crisis mode, most executives do not want to rock the boat enough to make a meaningful change when they feel their position is somewhat stable already.
Building consensus among the executives does not make me on my way to being an executive, it makes me their top technician. Eventually there needs to be a case to unseat an executive to be able to replace them, especially when the executive team is relatively young. I don’t see that happening by consensus.
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A fine, successful thought piece that has brought forth much comment– an indicator of its resonance on so many planes.
But it’s not usually so simple as this–the body politic is a complex living, breathing beast. Just think if one variable in the mix were changed–that the CEO recognized some of the value of the ‘homework’ and was suspect of some of the consensual agreement
What would the CEO as a leader, do so that the company moved in the best direction? Is it ever this black and white, or rather, if consensus is the model, should it be?
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