If anything goes semi-good, we did it.
If anything goes really good, then you did it. That’s all it takes to get people to win football games for you!
—Paul “Bear” Bryant (1913 – 1983) was an American college football player and
coach. He was best known as the longtime head coach of the University of
Alabama football team. During his 25-year tenure as Alabama's head coach, he
amassed six national championships and thirteen conference championships. Upon
his retirement in 1982, he held the record for most wins as head coach in
collegiate football history with 32 wins.
Everyone promotes, praises, and rewards great leadership,
but it’s the workers who actually do the work and deliver the product or
service, and they’re followers. Over the
last twenty years, the types of workers have changed as the nature of work has
changed from manufacturing to knowledge based.
These changes demand a change in how project teams interact. Leadership training attempts to teach
managers actions they should take to motivate teams of workers to accomplish a
desired result. It also teaches mangers
how to use group dynamics to achieve that result. But in order to be a leader you must
have willing followers. The followers
are people who (consciously or unconsciously) agree to let the leader make the
critical decisions and then follow those decisions to achieve the stated goal.
Most of us have seen projects that failed or fell short of
total success because team members didn't fully support the leader. The tendency is to blame the team leader
because he didn't motivate the team, but maybe the team members are to blame
because they wouldn’t follow the leader.
As a consulting project manager, Allen once managed a
cross-functional team for a client company.
Two of the team members worked for the same consulting firm I did; the
other five members of the team worked for other consulting firms. These five team members approached the
project meetings as if they were the general project manager rather than
subcontractors. Some of them believed
their company should have been hired to manage the total project, but most of
them just never learned to follow, and the entire project was hindered because
of this. Eventually, the project was
completed, but it was a lot harder than it needed to be. Henry Ford said, "Asking ‘who ought to
be the boss’ is like asking ‘who ought to be the tenor in the quartet?’ Obviously, the man who can sing
tenor." In the same way, at some point
the people doing the work must agree on “who can sing tenor” and lead them!
Teams are really about the division of labor. Most managers give lip service to this
concept, but they never really understand it.
For the typical worker, the division of labor means that he does this
part of the work; others do another part of the work; a product or service is
created and then I get paid! For
the typical manager, the division of labor means that this worker does that
part of the work; others do another part of the work; a product or service is
created and then I look good! But
for the great leader, the division of labor means that he removes most of the
obstacles while this worker does that part of the work; others do another part
of the work; the product or service is created and everyone succeeds! Scott Adams, the creator of the satirical
business cartoon Dilbert™, said, “I’m slowly becoming a convert to the
principle that you can’t motivate people to do things; you can only
de-motivate them. The primary job of
the manager is not to empower but to remove obstacles.”
Most businesses are organized as hierarchies. The people at the top supervise those at the
bottom, and the people at the bottom try to please those at the top. In the hierarchy organization, workers are
categorized as non-skilled, skilled, professionals, or managers. Workers follow because that's their place in the
chain of command. But as the nature
of work changes and requires higher education, workers are much more likely to
be categorized as professionals or managers.
Work today demands educated workers and those workers are
more likely to understand the entire scope of the work as well as many of the
other job skills used to complete the work.
Many workers today are more ambitious and aspire to be managers, so the
old style of management that says, do what I say because I told you, no
longer works.
Because of the complex nature of knowledge-based work,
workers may have a deeper understanding of the details of the work than their
managers do. The higher a manager is
within an organization, the less likely he or she fully understands all the
intricate details of the work. So the
manager must rely on a team of experts for that level of understanding. Sometimes this causes political turf wars as
some knowledge-workers hoard their information or won’t cooperate with others
when they feel management decisions are wrong.
Other times technical power is abused for personal advancement. In either case, the knowledge-worker has
never really learned to follow.
Good followership consists of giving our leaders the best of
our thinking on every subject and then executing his decisions with our full
support. Part of leadership is accepting
the team expert's advice and not giving directions that conflict with that
advice. Of course, sometimes the advice
is to spend $10,000 but the budget is only $5,000; good leadership will clearly
explain these constraints to the team.
When these types of roadblocks occur, the team may not be able to
deliver and the project may not succeed; however, if the team understands the
constraints, they may be able to find creative ways to work around the
roadblocks in order to arrive at the destination.
Encouraging knowledge-workers to be willing participants
means giving ownership of ideas and goals to every team member. It’s hard for followers to support a leader
who doesn’t support them. An example of
good followership is being a passenger in a car. The passenger accepts that someone else is
driving and agrees not to grab the steering wheel. The passenger can advise the driver about
faster routes or dangers on the road, but they trust the driver to make the
right decisions and get them to their destination safely. But the passenger won’t get into a car in the
first place unless the driver agrees to take them where they want to
go.
A good leader shows they believe in their team members by
trusting and supporting them as well as listening to and following their
advice. But when a leader decides not to
follow the team’s advice, he owes the team an explanation. On the other hand, good followers should give
the same support to their leaders that they would want from the other team
members. It’s hard for a leader to
support followers who won’t support them.
This means that there are times when a leader must eliminate a problem
team member for the good of the whole team.
Leaders must accept responsibility for a team’s failure, but the team
gets the credit for its success.
Followers usually don't work very hard for a leader who blames the team
members for failures but gets all the credit for its success.
Being a good follower is a prerequisite to being a good
leader. Most of us will spend the
majority of our working careers in followership positions. Constantly second-guessing the leader makes
his or her job one-hundred-times harder.
By working for an organization, you’re willing to get into the car and
allow someone else to drive. So
constantly asking, “are we there yet?” only makes the ride miserable.
Think back on the team experiences you had in school or work
that were not very good. More than likely,
there were team members who didn’t want to cooperate with others making the
project harder than it had to be. You
may have been one of the unlucky few that had to pick up the slack for those
uncooperative team members.
Now think back on the team experiences you had in school or
work that achieved outstanding results.
Did the team seem to function as efficiently and effectively as a Swiss
watch? Remember how great it felt when
your team was able to effectively produce something? The cooperation in the team more than likely
was due to good followership. By being a
good follower, you too could help your team achieve phenomenal results.
