I've had the extreme benefit to have had two long careers in businesses about as different as can possibly be, but also polar opposites in terms of the leadership equation.
One was a long standing, staid business, the other a sexy start up. Each had their benefits and not-so-great aspects. But having experienced 30 years of observing corporate life through these two lenses has had me thinking a lot about how businesses should be, rather than how they really are.
The negatives of each weighed heavily upon me. To the point that they eclipsed the enjoyment of the benefits.
By nature I am an optimistic person most of the time, so the realization that the negatives tended to outweigh the positives left me dumbfounded. The good things were really good. Why couldn't it always be good I wondered? Was I overly sensitive? Was I simply not well suited for corporate life, being somewhat of a free-thinker and not fitting well within any structured environment, especially when controlled by others? This view seemed to win out after i started my own business, and I found less to be unhappy about even though I was not making as much money. Like an old colleague once said "listen Hinsch, when you become the owner, you can do what you damn well please, until then keep quiet".
At least my success and failures were in my own hands now and a causal relationship between my actions and results could be seen, rather than obscured by other factors. or other's intentions.
After reflecting a lot on this it hit me: most of the unhappiness I experienced was directly related to the "leader's" imperatives shifting as the business evolved. In their quest to be successful themselves, a common denominator emerged: In both businesses, the pressure mounted on the leaders and they took steps to turn the businesses around. In doing so they adhered to close counsel of just a few people rather than seeking wisdom from others or attempting to unleash the power of the spirit of their workers. In both instances, a tendency to allow independent action in a more entrepreneurial earlier phase of the business gave way to less tolerance for individuality as "things became more serious". in both instances my own spirit, usually strong and intact, became infected when this push came to shove.
This exposed my problem areas. The obverse side of my independent nature and ability to operate well without a lot of direction (good things usually wanted in a worker) was that when more control needed to be applied so that the org's direction could be assured, my independent and self-actualizing mode stood out like a peg that needed to be hammered down to the same level as the whole. Marching in lockstep to the vision becomes the most important thing. Anyone not doing this threatens the advance in a new direction.
Yet, ironically, times of change creating the crucible that push leaders to administer more control, is also the time when independent action is needed most. This is anti-intuitive —a dichotomy hard for leaders to navigate.
It takes a person with a secure sense of self to see when independence is a good thing, and when its not, and requires great skill in differentiating the duality in dealing with people so their spirit is not broken and the independence that is at the heart of innovation is preserved and even put to service toward the changed direction.
All too often, as with me, a knee-jerk reaction is to call out the ones that do not conform as being "not on the bus" and therefore candidates for extraction from the tribe. When formerly the independent streak could be seen as a positive tendency toward innovation, it now was seen as threatening to the combined effort necessary to get through the challenging times—in other words, a distraction. Its like when in a lifeboat separated from the downed mothership. if you want to make it to the next shore, best not to have folks in it that want to do their own thing.
But what if their thing is constructing sails that get you faster to the shore? It may not be seen clearly what the outlier is up to. It takes careful assessment, and maybe even talking to the person to gain their perspective rather than automatically assuming, because they are not in lockstep they lack the necessary conforming gene.
This is where real leadership gets to be a real challenge.
This becomes even more of a problem in the future as work teams get more dispersed by geographies, the work becomes irrelevant fast to the individual with goals for themselves that supercede the organization's and there is less culture and loyalty sufficient to bind people together making control easier. "Go fuck yourself boss—I have my kids ballgame tonight".
What becomes apparent is that all people within the org need to become their own leader, rather than dependence upon the archaic leadership approach born in the industrial revolution and still hampering us today where "the leader' is seen standing on the ramparts, pointing the way, and cajoling all the proletariat to follow, pistons pumping and gears turning in synchrony.
Today's world is increasingly asynchronous. Workers are smarter, they have their own minds about things. There's a rift between the diverse multi generation's world views. A millennial may as well be an alien species to a boomer, and vice versa.
The designated leader increasingly finds herself needing to be an orchestrator of activity rather than the font of knowledge whom can't be seen as not having "the answer" both to her minions "below her" or her "superiors"' whom she "reports" to. Even the language gets in the way, so hierarchical it's as stifling as living in a caste society.
When leaders can give way to orchestrator's and everyman becomes his own leader, we have a recipe for the new org. In stream with it will probably be a legion of freelancing specialists networked with those on the inside and also their own networks on the outside, an extension that benefits the org without the additional overhead.
In this, America leads the way. It might be the last thing we truly lead the world with, but it might also be our salvation since an operational model such as this defeats the low cost labor paradigm that advantages low paying economies still invested in the command and control model we are freeing ourselves from.
Bill Hinsch is an artist and thinker living in the rustbelt.
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