Leader in Name, or Leader in Fact?-Minyanville

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Leader in Name, or Leader in Fact?

John Hoover Sep 09, 2008 10:00 am


		Get your staff to perform like a NASCAR pit crew.

Your organizational mothership can’t bestow the leader-in-fact designation any more than it can vest you with popular authority. That little detail, however, doesn't absolve you of the responsibility of gaining the leader-in-fact status from your people, just as your stand-up performance over time will earn you popular authority.

I invoked names like Alan Mulally, president and CEO at Ford (F), Jack Welch, formerly of General Electric (GE), W. James McNerney, currently leading Boeing (BA), Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-A), the Google (GOOG) triumvirate of Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and CEO Eric Schmidt, Indra K. Nooyi at PepsiCo (PEP), Susan Lyne of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (MSO), and Southwest Airlines (LUV) founder Herbert D. Kelleher, and even the leadership team at Ambac (ABK), because just the association of individuals’ names like these illustrates the importance of leadership-in-fact. When it's there, the results are staggering. When all you have is leadership-in-name, the results can bring an organization and all of its stakeholders to its knees.

Here’s where too many executives go wrong: They believe that invoking their institutional authority (acting out the leader-in-name-only scenario) is all their organization wants or needs them to do. Imposing their expertise or ignorance on a less-powerful population of subordinates for no reason better than “because I can” is not living up to the leadership mandate their organizations are paying for.

Investing the time, energy and personal growth necessary to become a leader-in-fact is an unspoken expectation behind that paycheck, benefits package and title. Acting consistently in the best interests of your direct reports and the mothership will build trust, loyalty, the respect you want, and set the stage for your team to perform like a NASCAR pit crew.

The most effective leaders over time, who also usually happen to be the most highly paid and often promoted, understand that unspoken expectation and deliver on it. That's how and why popularity as a leader (a.k.a mutual respect between you and your peers and team members) is directly and quite tangibly tied to your compensation and overall career success.

Those policy makers above you on the organizational food chain will accept you as a leader-in-fact when they see that your people aren't just running around doing things, but systematically and methodically getting things done.

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tags:

LOYALTY, LEADERSHIP, PEERS, POPULAR, EFFECTIVENESS, EXECUTIVE, ORGANIZATION, TRAINING, RESPECT, REPORTS, AUTHORITY, CONSISTENCY, DIRECT, INFLUENCE, LEADER, PROMOTION, RESENTMENT

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