Leading From Below

The Wall Street Journal published a great article on leadership, “Leading From Below,” in its March 3-4 weekend edition. Executives and managers below the “C-suite” level must look at themselves for leadership initiative and risk-taking because senior managers may be distracted by “demands from investors and analysts for immediate results.” The authors, James Kelly and Scott Nadler, studied managers in two areas that are rarely at the top of a company’s agenda: environment, health and safety and corporate social responsibility. The authors found certain “common threads” among those lower-profile managers who shifted to leadership positions.

The bullet points for the aspiring leader include:

• Make the decision to become a leader.

• Focus on influence, not control -- do your job with your colleagues. “[G]etting people to act on their own to achieve the goals you have in find is far more effective than having them react to your direction.”

• There may never be a “perfect” time to risk taking the lead, so just look for situations where you may be assert your leadership and do not wait for an invitation from the C-suite.

The authors note that in many of the cases they studied, the managers were able to demonstrate leadership without any support from the C-suite. But the authors also recognize that senior executives can take steps to encourage leadership development such as:

• Seeking a broader range of perspectives and encouraging managers, especially those aspiring leaders, to do the same.

• Creating vacuums by identifying important issues without “dictating the source or nature of answers.”

• Posing “what-if” questions that require others to think through the consequences of each step of a proposed course of action. Different approaches may prove to be preferable and managers will become more comfortable with exercising critical thinking skills, rather than merely accepting a decision and executing directives from above.

In my view, the ideas presented in the article apply to all aspiring business leaders regardless of their area of managerial responsibility. At the macro level, the business world may be moving towards a more collaborative model (e.g. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything). At the micro level, a collaborative model may be even more powerful because, as the authors note, "[p]eople simply react more enthusiastically to being enlisted in a common cause than they do to being ordered around." The complete article is on the website of the MIT Sloan Management Review, a “journal of management research and ideas.”