Probably the first people to think about how to develop leadership for their world were
the Romans. In Rome they trained people in all the arts and skills necessary to be an
effective proconsul in a far-distant province. Then, essentially, they sent the new
proconsul over the hill or out on a boat and waited for news of the results of his reign.
The British adapted that model effectively in preparing people to send out to their
empire, vaster in geography than the Romans, but tied together with more rapid forms of
communication. And the British model became the model for training civil servants
everywhere.
In most of the industrialized world, the basic model that we use for leadership is
based on a command and control idea that the Romans developed based on what worked in
their army.
That model has served effectively and it has served well, but the world is changing.
A 1997 study by Gallup and San Jose State University found that Fortune 1000 workers
received an average of 178 emails per day. For two thirds of those workers, email is the
preferred tool for internal communications. We use a variety of tools to help stay in
touch, in fact. The study identified a range that includes mail, voicemail, email, fax and
phone and found that 71% of workers use at least two of these while 16% use four or more.
There are other forces at work, too. Waves of downsizing and re-engineering have moved
millions of folks out of corporate offices, only to be re-hired as consultants or vendors.
They work outside the main company offices, but are linked by email, phone and other
technologies.
Those "outsized" workers join an increasing number of telecommuters.
Telecommute America counts 11 million of them, and Olsten Temporary Services says that
more than half of major US corporations now allow some telecommuting.
Oh, yes, and let's not forget the vendors and customers who have access to corporate
extranets, or who join the network mix by means of electronic mail.
This new world demands that we take a new look at how we do leadership and how we
prepare leaders to be effective. We need to see what it is that leaders do, how
that’s affected by overall trends in leadership and management, and how the Net and
Web especially create new problems and opportunities for leaders everywhere. Then we need
to make a stab at sorting out what all of that means.
First, though, let’s make a brief side trip to my underlying beliefs about
leadership.
My first key belief is that leadership is not restricted to the top of the
organization. Even in a command and control model, I don’t think it ever was. In
every organization I’ve ever been associated with, and every one that I’ve read
about, there were formal and informal leaders at all levels. What exactly is leadership?
The literature in the last 20 years has seemed to make a clearer distinction between
supervisors, managers, and leaders. Often the refrain is, "we need more leaders and
less managers."
That misses the point. It’s not that people are or are not "leaders."
It’s that they have some leadership work to do in whatever job they happen to be in
or whatever situation they happen to be in at the time.
The research on groups and leadership and management points to three specific kinds of
roles for anyone who’s responsible for a group and its performance.
That being responsible for a group and its performance is the key thing that separates
people with leadership responsibility from those who are individual contributors.
It’s not better or worse to be a leader or an individual contributor. Some folks are
suited for hunkering down and doing the work that they do exceptionally well, and passing
that product on to others. They may work collaboratively with others. The thing that makes
them individual contributors, however, is that they are not responsible for the
performance of others.
When that happens, when a person becomes responsible for the performance of a group,
then the person has three kinds of work to do.
One of those kinds of work is supervision. Supervision deals with tasks and
individuals. You are doing supervisory work when you counsel someone who works for you
about a performance problem, or when you work in a training mode or coaching mode to help
that person develop skills or work more effectively.
In addition to supervision, there is work that relates to management. Management work
is about groups and priorities. When you’re doing management work, you’re
concerned with scheduling and budgets, and other balancing acts. You’re concerned
with achieving short-term goals through the group. That makes you responsible for how that
group works together and the interpersonal issues that make them effective or ineffective.
Leadership work is about purpose and change. When you’re doing leadership work
you’re concerned with why you and your group are here, what you’re doing, why,
and you’re concerned with how that will change over time.
Everyone who has group responsibility does al three of these kinds of work. The mix
varies from job to job and situation to situation. It varies up and down the hierarchical
pyramid. Folks at the top of the pyramid tend to have more leadership work to do and less
supervision, but they have some of both along with a bit of management work.
Folks at the very bottom of the hierarchical pyramid, first-line supervisors, have lots
of supervision work to do, but also do management and leadership work.
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What is Leadership Work?
Leadership work involves three clusters of tasks. Leaders establish
direction and purpose, communicate that direction and purpose, and maintain the thrust of
the group.
Establishing direction and purpose is "the vision thing." In stable
organizations within stable industries, this is more about reviewing purpose than it is
about establishing direction. In more volatile environments, leaders need to work hard at
establishing both direction and purpose for their groups. That’s true whether
you’re at the CEO level or the newest supervisor on a production line. In both
situations your leadership work involves establishing the purpose and establishing how
your groups performance and behavior needs to change in order to be most effective. To do
that effectively you need to be aware of the environment and its key forces. You need to
know how the environment is changing.
When you’re doing leadership work, one of the things you need to do is to be able
to establish effective purpose and define effective direction. You job doesn’t end
there, however.
You also need to communicate what that purpose and direction are. In order to do that
effectively, you and other leaders need to understand the communication tools you have
available and how you can use them most effectively.
Some of the most effective writing on this over the last several years has been done by
Harvard professor John Kotter. I remember how excited I was reading his first major work,
"The General Managers". I particular loved how Kotter zeroed in on the ways that
effective general managers use occasional incidents and chance encounters to communicate
effectively.
On the one hand, that was different than everything I’d read about effective time
management and formal communications channels. On the other, and this was what was
exciting, Kotter’s book effectively described what I saw effective general managers
doing.
Communicating is not enough. There’s also the need to maintain thrust. If you want
to use the "M word" – motivation – that’s OK. But the leadership
role involves understanding the things that happen to your group and exhorting, informing,
adapting, and supporting the performance necessary to deal with a changing environment.
The environment issue is important. The key change that’s been going on for us in
the last several years as networks have become more important is the change in the
environment in which leadership happens. But there’s another change that works with
the technology. That’s the overall change in the way we look at and think about
organizations.
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Thinking About Organizations in the New World
For a couple of thousand years, the basic model on which we built our
organizations has been the one developed by the Romans when they put their armies
together. To anyone who has read Caesar’s Gaelic Campaigns, the structure of most
modern organizations is an old, familiar one. The models endured for so many years for a
simple reason: It works.
What’s happening in organizations is a lot like what’s happened over the last
20 years in the way we think about systems generally. For years our mathematical and
intellectual models of how systems work were based on a kind of mathematics called linear
equations. In their simplest form, linear equations have a few simple variables and tell
you that the result goes up or down when X or Y goes up or down. It’s a little bit
more complex than that, but not much.
One of the reasons that those were our dominant models was that that was the level of
mathematics that we had the power to compute. We could understand another kind of
mathematics, non-linear equations, but they were almost impossible to handle with manual
calculators and the computing power wasn’t there to effectively model the systems we
saw.
It was actually a case of the old saw that "if the only tool you have is a hammer,
every problem looks like a nail." We use simple models because we have the tools to
handle simple models. Since the models work, there wasn’t much need to look for other
things.
But almost every person who’s thought about how organizations work has come to the
conclusion that linear models don’t work. We just never said that. I can remember
being a young manager and studying quantitative methods. The problem I had when I took
those equations back to the workplace is that the target always seemed to be moving
around. One or another of the variables looked different every time I tried to compute or
plan.
You hear that in almost every organization that tries to set goals or prepare budgets.
We get around that by creating "scenarios." In this sense that means best-case,
worst-case, and most likely.
In the late 60’s and early 70’s, scientists began to look at non-linear
systems. Those systems are far more complex than linear systems and we could look at them
because we suddenly had the computing power to be able to do so. That’s where the
talk of chaos theory and complexity theory come from.
Those concepts have affected the way we think about organizations.
The old model we had, based on what the Romans started, was a simple, linear,
hierarchical, and mechanical one. We put the people at the top of the organization who had
the most knowledge that could spread across a variety of areas. That worked because we
didn’t have the methods to spread information around.
We created functional channels, what have been called stove-pipe organizations, to move
information up and down and across to other stove pipes and down those as well. We did
that because we did not have the means to move the information more effectively, quickly,
and cost effectively.
We also structured our organizational thinking on the model that’s been dominant
since the late 19th century – the engineering model. We talked, in fact,
about organizations as "finely-oiled machines." We used terms like "gears
meshing" and "designing effective organizations." We did that because
it’s the model that worked and it worked well with the concepts we had.
As we borrowed things from science and as our environment has changed, we started to
think about organizations differently. We’re starting to see organizations as a
variety of organisms. An organism is a living thing that’s part of a community or
organisms. That thinking sees organizations as more complex, dynamic, and interactive than
the older, more rigid, hierarchical vision.
That vision also interacts with the environment where networking and communications
technology have become readily available, inexpensive, and easy to use.
This becomes a bit of a chicken and egg debate. Is it the networking and communication
technologies that foster the kind of communication that change the organization? Or, do we
change the organization by putting in the technology? And it seems, that the answer to
both of those is, "yes."
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Taking a Look at the Net and the Web
The Net and the Web are not just the Internet and the World Wide Web.
They also include technologies like telephone and fax and electronic broadcast. They are
all of the ways that we become connected with other people. Over the last two centuries,
and especially within the last 20 years, communication has developed a broader reach,
greater speed, and easier access.
That the way we communicate and share information, data, and knowledge is nothing new.
The Romans knew that when they sent their proconsuls over the hill. People in the late 18th
century knew that when they communicated by letters. And 19th century people
understood things differently when they could send trains rocketing across the continent.
Telephone and radio didn’t only provide a neat way to talk to each other, they
changed the fundamental nature of how we worked in our individual lives and in our
organizations. The Net and the Web are doing the same thing today.
Leadership Tools
There are three basic sets of tools that people doing leadership work
need to use to be effective in today’s world. They’re electronic mail,
collaborative applications, and hyperlinking (the Web).
Electronic mail is the most pervasive of the basic Net technologies. It’s
the one that people are most likely to use and the one they’re most likely to rate at
the top of their effectiveness list. To do leadership work effectively today, you need to
know about how to use electronic mail effectively.
One problem with learning to use email effectively is that most folks seem to think you
don't need to. Email just looks so easy. There are some things to keep in mind though.
Make sure you're clearly identified. If you have an alias or nickname that goes with
your mail address, make sure it's descriptive so folks know that mail is from you.
Learn the art of writing effective subject headers. The more specific your headers are,
the more likely your messages are to be read and generate the action you want.
Put the important stuff at the top. Studies tell us that email users don't scroll down
unless they see a compelling reason to do so. That means that your important content (or
an indication that something important is farther down) needs to be in the first 10 lines
or so of your message.
Use your signature line to give important contact and other information. Include your
phone number and email address at a minimum. Remember that over half the email that is
read is printed out. Make sure folks can contact you even if all they have is a printout
of your message.
Once you've mastered individual email, pay attention to using it for group work.
Encourage folks to use email to share good news and bad, questions and solutions. Use
email to a group to broadcast praise for an individual.
One of the most effective examples of this sharing is happening at Quaker Oats. There,
a daily email, dubbed "Oatmail" conveys important information to everyone who's
connected. Quaker Oats folks can also ask questions of top management via email. Some of
those are answered in the public email newsletter.
Email is also the way that many leaders keep up with current events. Electronic, email
based newsletters have become an essential way to gather information and news.
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Push technology applications (that delivers news to the desktop) like
PointCast are a sophisticated variation on basis news delivery that combines both email
and web technology.
Remember that your public website is also a communications tool. Your own people will
be checking it out, especially in times of crisis or uncertainty. When IBM announced that
it was purchasing Lotus, people from both companies jumped on the web to check things out.
In the first several hours after the public announcement, 80% of the visitors to the IBM
website were from Lotus or IBM.
We’ve also developed a number of what I call collaborative applications
over the last few years. Sometimes those are referred to as groupware, sometimes
they’re just the simple administrative support systems that ride the network, making
it possible, for example, to check several people’s schedules simultaneously to
select a meeting time.
Groupware applications do three things. They let members of a workgroup share a common
body of data or information. They allow members to track workflow. And, perhaps most
powerfully, groupware allows members of a group to work together on a joint project.
Some of the more sophisticated applications handle scheduling and workflow over
internal networks, but they're only the tip of the iceberg. Contact and information
managers such as Microsoft Outlook, Day-Timer, Sidekick and others now routinely allow
joint scheduling of meetings over a network.
New products such as Wintronix communications suite allow folks to use a common
whiteboard over either a public or private net. And links between email and pagers can
alert folks when something important comes up that requires their presence.
And there's the old warhorse of collaborative applications: Lotus Notes. It's been in
use for years by companies like Texas Instruments who credit some spectacular savings to
the Best Practices sharing process that uses Lotus Notes as a platform. Recent updates to
Lotus Notes have made it easier to use over corporate intranets and the internet.
Increasingly the communications lifeblood of organizations flows over networks using
communications and collaborative software, but there's another technology that helps all
of this happens more effectively.
Hyperlinking, especially hyperlinking over a network has given us new and more
effective ways to link information.
I’ve chose to use hyperlinking, rather than World Wide Web, as the key descriptor
here. The World Wide Web is one application of hyperlinking. It's an important application
to be sure. The effective leader in the Digital World certainly uses the Web as a way to
find the information that is the stuff from with vision and direction grows.
Hyperlinks on the Web combined with personal news services are powerful ways that
leaders can sift through the mass of information and news and data and find the important
stuff. Personal news agents are an emerging technology that will do this even more
effectively.
But hyperlinks are not limited to the Web. We can set up hyperlinks within documents
sitting on a single computer. Why is hyperlinking so powerful?
Hyperlinking is powerful because it enables individuals to use information in a way
that is intuitive, comfortable, and effective.
That’s because hyperlinking mimics the way the brain works. The human brain has
been described as, "natures connection-making engine." It’s impossible for
you to sit in one place and listen to a speaker, or even read an article without having
your mind jump off from different points to ponder, speculate, and investigate.
Well designed hyperlinks help you do that more effectively. When you put those
hyperlinks on an internal or external network system, the power increases exponentially.
Think of links as a way to really empower people, by giving them the ability to make
informed decisions by connecting them to information and to each other easily and
naturally.
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A Living Example: Marshall Industries
There's probably no comprehensive, perfect example out there of an
organization using all the tools and being dramatically effective. The issue of Leadership
itself is too complex for that and the environment is changing too fast. But it pays to
take a few moments and look at a company who has integrated Networked World thinking into
its leadership and strategy.
The company is Marshall Industries.
According to Vice President, Bob Edelman, the story has to begin with the business and
has to begin back before the Internet and World Wide Web were an important part of
anybody's thinking. That's because one dominant characteristic of Marshall's view of its
own Network is that it is enterprise wide and strategic.
So, let's let the story begin around 1990. At that point, Chairman, Gordon Marshall and
new CEO, Rob Rodin were confronted with a business problem that many have faced. The
problem was pretty simple. While Marshall had been successful for years, it was successful
in an industry that was beginning to change radically.
Marshall Industries is a $1 billion plus distributor of industrial electronics based in
El Monte, California. It’s part of the semiconductor business. In 1990 that business,
which had been in high growth mode, was beginning to mature. Industry margins were
dropping adding pressure to reduce costs.
At the same time, Marshall Industries was what Edelman calls,
"sub-optimized." It was made up of lots of different pieces, but the pieces
often worked quite independently. Warehousing had its own concerns, as did the field sales
force. And the folks who handled administrative operations had goals that sometimes
conflicted with both.
Just like in lots of businesses, what often happened was that the people in the
individual specialties cranked up their efforts for their own best interest at the expense
of other interests and perhaps the interest of the entire company. As Edelman points out,
it was a perfectly rational system.
"We would want them to do one thing, say, concentrate on a particular product
line," says Edelman. "But folks would look around and realize that they would
make more money, or get more praise if they did something else. So they followed their
best interests."
So, Marshall and Rodin took a look around for an answer. But it wasn't the Internet or
any other net, not yet. There were leadership issues that needed to be addressed first.
Like many other businesses, Marshall Industries took a look at Deming's Quality
Principles for improving both quality and innovation. They decided that was the place to
start because that would make a major change in the company.
The first step was education. People who worked for Marshall across a range of
functions were educated in the Deming principles. But that wasn't enough.
Step number two was to modify the compensation program. At that time Marshall was like
most industrial distributors. Compensation programs tended to reward effort in narrow
spheres and large commission rates on the sales end tended to warp things in a particular
direction. The compensation program that Marshall put in place in 1992 is still around
today. It simply pays people by means of salary and a sharing of corporate results.
That allows people to concentrate on the customer and on making good business
decisions. It’s s part of what Edelman describes as a need to align the company
structurally with its purpose.
The result of the quality principles and the change in the compensation program was
that people began to make good business decisions. They made those decisions in a variety
of places, in Human Resources, and Operations. They made those with an
enterprise-wide-type perspective (including both people and technology) and it's here that
the net begins to kick in.
That's because as decision making began to align, the information flows became more
important. And it appeared that this net technology would provide some of the answers for
helping Marshall work the way they felt they should.
It was 1993 and the Internet was not yet on the cover of Time Magazine. Sure, folks
were emailing back and forth and several businesses were connected. But this was not a big
interest yet. The folks at Marshall Industries decided, though, in early 1994 that this
Internet was going to be a business-changing event in which they must participate if they
were to be more effective.
That decision was a "vision" and it outlined the direction for change.
To be strategic, all of this needed to tie back to business purpose, to the need to
reduce costs and increase efficiencies and make sales more effectively. The outreach side
of that was one of the very first corporate Web sites in July of 1994.
It wasn't the first time Marshall had been technologically innovative. The company had
been using Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) for over 10 years. But EDI is a technology
that presupposes that there's already a strong relationship between parties. It doesn't
allow for anything spontaneous or for investigation, and it only really increases
efficiency in one or two parts of the business.
EDI didn't (by itself) fit the vision that the Net would be important for the total
business. The idea behind Marshall's first Web site and everything since, according to
Edelman, was "electronic commerce in its broadest sense. Not just selling, but
creating intimacy with the customer." And sharing information internally.
That search for intimacy and a broad look at commerce began almost immediately with
serious and continuing efforts to get information back from the people who visited the
site. "We saw right away that we didn't want people to just get information from
us," says Edelman. "We wanted them to interact with us so that we learn things
about them and they learn things about us."
That led to various technological ways for visitors to tell Marshall what they thought.
They could share suggestions, make requests, give reactions. It also led to some of the
first focus groups very early in the process to find out what purchasing agents and
engineers wanted from a supplier like Marshall.
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What was learned from those focus groups has become a driver for changes
in the design of the site and for the development of new services and ways to communicate.
In the beginning the site had product information only. Then more information services.
In 1994 Marshall began integrating databases with its Web technology to provide custom
solutions and active notification. By 1995, Marshall was beginning to offer the news
services that would ultimately become the Education, News and Entertainment Network.
By the end of 1995, Marshall was providing a broad array of information in dynamic form
to its customers as well as news and information to the industry at large. It was taking
orders and responding to inquiries using Net technology. Internal systems worked well
inside the company. It still wasn't enough.
Bob Edelman again: "What we had was fine for spontaneous users and for regular
visitors, but strong business partners need more than that. That's why in early 1996 we
began looking at an Extranet." Edelman is quick to point out that all of this was
driven by the original strategic vision and normal business purposes - the need to reduce
cycle times, to provide quick response to competitive initiatives, and to link information
inside the company with key partners along the supply chain.
An Intranet was already in place for employees where they could gather information for
commercial purposes, but also get training on a variety of issues including human resource
and personal growth items. It was time for an Extranet to link the strong business
partners and the internal people together, and for even more innovative uses of the
technology. One key area of communication is training.
Marshall's Net seminars help meet goals of education, training, and communication from
a studio in El Monte. The company can offer audio and video as well as pure information
based on customer needs. The seminars were originally offered only to Marshall employees,
but were soon expanded based on customer interest.
Edelman is quick to point out that "customer" in this sense is the broadest
definition. It includes customers both inside and outside the company and people who may
be customers for information but not necessarily, yet, for products.
The method of delivery is constantly improving. Marshall has recently discovered that
more than 50% of the users of its training facility are coming in on lines of 56 kb or
better. That allows a degree of use of multi media that would not be possible if their
connections were of lower quality.
Marshall has used its net to train suppliers, employees, customers, and others.
That’s part of the normal course of doing business and making yourself the supplier
of choice. But they’ve become so good at it, and gotten so many requests, that
Marshall starting to offer training services outside its normal supply chain through its
ENEN subsidiary.
All in all, Marshall Industries has done an excellent job of establishing direction and
purpose, communicating the vision, and maintaining thrust. They've seen the Networked
World as an opportunity-riddled environment and also as a way to achieve corporate goals.
That's what leadership is all about. In the Networked World, the tools may be
different, the environment and direction may change, but the basic work of leadership
remains the same. It is an opportunity and a challenge.
To seize the opportunities, learn how to gather the information that helps establish
your vision. Learn to use the network tools to communicate and maintain thrust. And keep
growing and changing along with this exciting environment.
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