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.
