What can HR do for… leadership?
Gary Saunders
a partner At fe3 consulting,
believes leadership is better it it is shared around
The dangers of ‘charismatic leadership' have been graphically illustrated over the past year. Jean-Marie Messier led Vivendi Universal to the brink of disaster and Conrad Black is currently waging a very public war with the board of Hollinger. These are examples of what can happen when charismatic and successful leaders become so powerful that their boardroom colleagues are unable to challenge them until it's too late.
Past commentators on leadership have produced lists of Herculean attributes that leaders should, and in many cases do, possess. Unfortunately, both leaders and followers have absorbed their own publicity, so that they expect anyone in a position of power to be omnipotent. As a result, such leaders can be difficult to challenge.
We believe HR has a key role to play in alerting the board to the dangers of charismatic leadership, creating a platform for the change to shared leadership, and, on this platform, setting up structures and policies that encourage organisational commitment.
The Alliance for Strategic Leadership is helping to make the case for less God-like leaders. The Institute believes that a key skill of future leaders will be to learn to share leadership with the rest of the senior management team.
Jim Collins, in his book From Good to Great, echoes this – that the best leaders are often quiet, unassuming team players. Jon Katzenbach argues that the best companies are those that develop leaders at all levels. As Steve Buchholz, author of Aftershock put it: not leadership, but a ship of leaders.
This is not to encourage merely a shared view. Conflict can make for creativity, and disasters of ‘groupthink' litter the pages of history and the business press: from US humiliation at the Bay of Pigs to, less fatally, the decline of Marks and Spencer.
So effective shared leadership comes through management by commitment rather than simply consensus. HR thus has at least two potential roles: to be the equivalent of a corporate whistleblower, and to engage the rest of the organisation.
Potentially the most difficult step is to confront issues of alignment and authenticity. Part of the power of charismatic leadership is in making people believe that everything is possible – and acceptable.
If they are to succeed in challenging this, HR managers will need to possess personal conviction, political savvy and, in all probability, data – hard numbers that eschew the emotional and grasp the commercial. This may mean uncovering where customer expectations are disappointed and where employee expectations are not met, and tracking the source.
Commitment is the Holy Grail of current organisational thinking and it is here, particularly through the lens of customer service and the internal brand, where HR can help to create leaders up and down the organisation who deliver “what it says on the tin”. HR needs to take a central role in the development of the brand.
Admittedly, this can lead to a potential turf dispute with marketing colleagues. But many brand failures occur precisely because corporate advertising says one thing, but staff on the ground deliver something else.
A prime example is BP, reported in the Financial Times in January for mishandling oil spills in Alaska . Those making allegations against the company were its own workers – showing that marketing doesn't just reach an external audience, and that HR involvement is key in processes and motivation.
If HR can step up to the challenge of pinpointing where the organisation is not delivering its promises, it can present an argument for change that should benefit both internal- and external-facing parts of the business.
In addition, HR can facilitate collaboration between functions that might otherwise never work together to develop shared vision, and, as part of that, shared leadership.
