What if leadership wasn't a promotion?
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Josh Bersin recently wrote a stellar post titled "The End of a Job as We Know It." One of the jobs that might end is the one called "boss."
For me, a "boss" is someone responsible for the performance of a group. There is plenty of leadership without position going on every day, all over the world, but I write this blog specifically for the men and women who are organizationally responsible for group performance. That requires position as well as influence.
Well, if Josh Bersin is right, many of those classic boss positions may become a thing of the past. He's not alone in that prediction. I recently wrote "You can eliminate the bosses, but," sparked by one of Harold Jarche's posts. Many others have said similar things. The powerful part of Bersin's post, for me, was the way he combined two insights. Here's one of them.
"What this all means is that in today's high performing companies, people now take on 'roles' not 'jobs.' They are responsible for 'tasks' and 'projects' and not simply 'functions.'"
That's pretty straightforward. I've heard it from Susan Finerty in our conversations over the last year or so. Susan thinks that every organization is becoming a matrix organization, whether it's officially called that or not. That means multiple relationships and reporting points, and, often, less hierarchy. Now here's the other Bersin insight.
"And leadership, by the way, is just a 'role' like any other - with its own particular set of skills."
That resonates with me because I think that leadership is a kind of work. Some people are suited for it, want to do it, and will do it well. Others will not.
Moving from individual contributor to a leadership role is more like a career change than a promotion. It's like changing from engineering to architecture. Leadership work is important work, but it's not more exalted work.
If we see leadership as a role, not a promotion or a position in the hierarchy, lots of things become possible. People can lead in situations where their strengths leverage the strengths of others and their weaknesses are irrelevant. Groups and teams can select a leader, instead of always having the leader selected from above. People can try out the role and decide if they like it and, if they don't, they can never do it again, with no stigma or career penalty.
Will things turn out this way? We can't ever be sure of the details of how big changes will end up. Because the change looks so clear, it's tempting to think it will happen quickly. Probably not. If history is a good guide, this kind of change will take a generation cycle or two to become the norm, so probably twenty to forty years.
Does all this make sense to you? How do you imagine that things will change?
Additional Resources
Over at Results vs. Activities I used the same Bersin post as the starting point from some ruminations on how talent development may change. The post was titled "Talent Development in a Brave New World."
If the issues above interest you, I suggest that you become a regular reader of Harold Jarche's site: Life in Perpetual Beta.
Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.
Your position on leadership as a role and not necessarily position really resonated with me. Bosses and people in positions of power have certain characteristics and duties that other individual's personalities just cannot handle. And with those roles comes a certain responsibility to lead and not just demand.
You stated that, "For me, a "boss" is someone responsible for the performance of a group. There is plenty of leadership without position going on every day, all over the world, but I write this blog specifically for the men and women who are organizationally responsible for group performance. That requires position as well as influence."
According to Karl Wallace in "Ethics in Human Communication", "he is concerned that we have exalted the end of success in communication over the means used to achieve it."(pp. 20)
This particularly applies to the idea that leadership is a job rather than a role. In a job, the boss is expected to get his company or subordinates from point A to point B in a timely and efficient fashion. Therefore the boss is not necessarily a leader, but mostly a position responsible for the success of several positions underneath him/her.
The most influential point that you make is the differentiation between a role and a job, and the skill-set required by a truly leadership-driven individual who has the ability to keep the boundaries between them.
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Thanks for those thoughtful comments, Kelsea. As you note, how we get results is as important as the results we get. Also, I think that bosses have two jobs. They must accomplish the mission. And they must care for the people. It's helping both the team and the team members succeed.
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Hi Wally,
I might be arguing about the semantics here, but I don't think leadership is a role, it is a characteristic. You don't go to a company and someone introduced himself to you as a "Leader", he might be manager, a project manager, but he can't be a dedicated leader.
At least that's my opinion...
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I don't know that "arguing" is the right term for what we're doing, but we do have a disagreement. I prefer to describe leadership in terms of behaviors rather than traits. From my perspective that makes training possible and also avoids the trap of treating leadership work as somehow superior to management or supervision work. If you are a leader, you are so based on what you do, not on what you are. I'm also in the camp that thinks that bosses do leadership, management, and supervision work. They don't have a choice about whether they will do it, the only choice is about how. Thanks for adding to the conversation.
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Wally, I think this is one of my favorite posts! I linked to it here: "Who Moved my Manager."
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Thanks for the kind words, Laura. I think readers will also want to click through to your post for some more ideas on how things will change.
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