True leadership isn’t positional
May 29, 2008 by Miki Saxon
Post from Leadership Turn Image credit: Daniel Voyager from TSL
An interesting post over at Collab@work led me to the Executive Summary of an HBS study on how multiplayer games hone leadership
skills.
“…the authors studied people who headed up teams in online games. They also sought the insights of gamers who have led real-world business teams at IBM.”
“The authors identified three distinctive characteristics of leadership in online games that, as workplaces and the overall business climate become more dynamic and gamelike, will be essential for tomorrow’s leaders: speed, risk taking, and acceptance of leadership roles as temporary.”
It is the last condition, people acceptance that leadership roles are temporary based on the needed skills at that particular moment and for that particular effort, that will be the hardest sell.
In his blog post, Romuald says, “…in those games, leaders are not designated but rather elected… All team members want to win… So they will elect the one leader that can bring them victory.”
The researchers say that “…nonmonetary incentives built into a game economy strongly motivate individuals to accomplish group aims.”
Temporary leadership happens all the time, but because companies, churches and government insist on connecting ‘leadership’ to ‘position’ via assumptions—if you’re in X role then by definition you’re a leader—makes getting ‘leaders’ to admit that leading is a temporary function all the more difficult.
How would you make leadership less positional?
Your comments—priceless
I’ve seen this issue in my Masonic Lodge. We have guys who would make great leaders (or at least managers…I need to read the 7 posts about leader/managers) for a particular event and instead of taking charge and moving they wait for permission on every decision or expect the duly elected officer to take care of everything.
Just because someone is elected to serve in an office doesn’t mean their skill set is truly suited for doing all of the work of the organization.
Finding a way to break the habit of people assuming that because someone is elected they will be able to accomplish all of the aspects of the role. Sometimes you can only focus on one or two things and someone else (particularly in a volunteer organization) will have to step in to focus on the other aspects.
Luke, As to the actual capabilities of the duly elected to achieve anything you have only to look at politicians to know how off-the-wall that idea is. Getting elected has nothing to do with getting things done—let alone done right.
So before looking to change the guys who wait, take a look at the people who were elected. No matter their skill set or ability, the real question is will they let go of the power. Just because they aren’t capable or are overloaded doesn’t mean they’re willing to delegate the authority to get things done along with the actual work. For some, having people constantly coming to them for permission/approval is a great ego boost.
Let me know if you’d like to develop some strategy to address the problem.