Tools of management are not only ineffective, but they actively get in the way of transformational leadership intended to inspire deep change. Neither the sincerity of intentions, nor the soundness of the ideas can guarantee that the leader’s behavior will be perceived as constructive. The cultural, psychological, and political complications of any power position can lead the audience to misunderstand the leader’s goals.
Even when managers reach out and act in ways they think of as democratic and respectful, the behavior can be seen as threatening and manipulative.
• The first right of a manager is to give instructions and be obeyed. Managers insist on the obedient silence of their staff, obliging them to listen. However, the orders can be perceived as interference in the intellectual integrity of the employees.
• Managers generally have the right to a private office. But this doesn’t necessarily help connect managers with the people they need to lead. If often takes managers physically and emotionally further away from them.
• According to Jim Collins in From Good to Great, the first thing a leader should do is to hire the right people. However, a leader can be accused of playing favorites and offend the staff that was there already.
• Firing people can end up by keeping the people who know how to work the system, who know how to play organizational politics. The people with connections, who fit into the existing way of doing things and who tell the bosses what they want to hear.
• Managers get the right to give bonuses or promotions. This might make people do what they’re told, but usually they do it unenthusiastically and grudgingly. Incentives also lead to gaming the system.
• Bargaining with employees and negotiating for better performance doesn’t spark the generous enthusiasm that is willing to go the extra mile without any reward. Managers usually quickly run out of rewards to offer for all the things that need to be done to get superior performance.
Once upon a time, people lived and worked where they were born. They shared common assumptions, beliefs, and values. The world was static, and nothing changed. Men had jobs; women stayed at home with the kids. Within organizations, communication was top-down, where people had no choice but to accept the word of those in authority. A few owners of property had control. Bottom-up communication hardly existed. In a static world, there was little possibility of persuading one’s higher-ups to change. Politics was run by insiders and there was no thought of persuading the populace to accept whatever had been decided. In the family, the parents’ word was the law.
In this world, those in authority were in charge. Leadership was hardly needed and top-down command-and-control methods of communication got the job done.
That world is now a distant memory.
Audiences are much more difficult than they used to be. People are tired of being talked at and directed. They expect to be treated as adults and talked to as intellectual equals. And in the modern economy, the workers often have key means of production: knowledge. So, their demands can’t be ignored.
Audiences also became more diverse. They consist of different gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, lifestyle, age group, and geographical location. Common assumptions, values, and beliefs are the exception rather than the rule. How can you connect with people when they have different views about virtually everything?
Leaders nowadays need to set aside the idea of imposing their will or moving their listeners to a predetermined position. The task is rather to enable the audience to see possibilities that they have missed and to create the capability in the audience to view for themselves the world and their relations with others in a new and more truthful light. It involves pointing a way forward for people who find themselves cornered by the current story that they are living and enabling the audience to recognize a new, different, and more promising story that they could be living, which they for some reason have not visualized until now.
