Does ‘leadership’ matter?

The title is provocative and attention grabbing. Can the book live up to it? Well, it does.

Authors Marcus Buckingham, who heads people and performance research at the ADP Research Institute, and Ashley Goodall, senior Vice-President of Leadership and Team Intelligence at Cisco, challenge many assumptions we make about the world of work. And in the process open our eyes to a new way of looking at work.

Why do we have so many workplaces with disengaged employees even though the organisation may be doing everything by the playbook. That may be because the organisation is acting on popular beliefs that have never been challenged.

Caring for the company?

Do people really care which company they work for? Do people need feedback? Can people reliably rate each other? Does work-life balance really matter so much? Does the best plan win? Is Leadership a thing?

These and other assumptions like “best companies cascade goals” are questioned by the authors in an engaging format.

For instance, in the chapter on do people care which company they work for, there is an interview with Lisa, who has left Company A for Company B and then returned to Company A.

There are so many insights from the interview on what really mattered to Lisa and how her thought evolved about what she really cares for in her workplace.

When Lisa first considered working for Company B, it was the brand name of the company and its market leading position that was an important consideration, the job location as well as how well she would fit in. But through the interview, which cleverly makes Lisa introspect, what emerges is that finally what mattered to her was the culture, leadership, and the work she would be doing. And this is what led her to return to Company A.

The anecdotal interview is backed by all kinds of data on engagement, on local experiences (interactions with colleagues), why people leave companies and so on. There’s also a detailed case study from Cisco. This leads the authors to expose the lie that people care about companies.

Write the authors, “it sounds so odd to label this a lie, since each of us does indeed feel some sort of connection to our company, but you will see that while what each of us truly cares about may begin as “company” it quickly morphs into something else rather different.”

Work-life balance

Similarly, there is an interview on work-life balance where it emerges that the interviewee actually loves the stress!

Isn’t it better we love our work rather than look at work as bad and life as good, query the authors. After all isn’t this what the term work-life balance seems to imply.

The authors say there are aspects of work that we love, and aspects that we might loathe and it’s true of the rest of our life too. I

nstead of stressing about work-life balance, it might be more productive to identify the aspects of work that we loathe and deliberately weave them into the rest of the work so they are not irritants.

The chapter on feedback too really makes you think. In this, the authors extrapolate research work on happy marriages and on happiness and creativity to gauge the impact of appreciative feedback versus negative comments. Ideally, you should deliberately imbalance your negative feedback with several appreciative comments.

But how do you deliver the feedback — why, is it, that so often the advice that is given is not heeded? Feedback, according to the authors, often does not work, as every person does not have the same path to performance.

Instead of doling out advice, the alternative is to present employees with brushes and paints and let them work out the picture themselves.

A case against leadership

The final chapter on Leadership is the icing on the cake as it makes a compelling case against the concept. Ironically, one of the authors is a Vice-President of Leadership.

The authors point out how in the US alone, a jaw-dropping amount of $14 billion is spent every year in training and developing leaders. So many characteristics of leaders have been drawn out — from authenticity to being imperfect with vulnerabilities, and so many models of leadership created.

But the truth, say the authors, is that there is no real model for leadership as it all depends on the followers, who will all be very different and react in different ways. No two leaders create followers in quite the same way. “Leadership isn’t a thing, because it cannot be measured reliably. Followership is a thing, because it can,” write the authors.

Global study

The Appendix at the end which presents ADPRI’s Global study of Engagement and Seven Things learnt from Cisco are very interesting.

Apparently, the UAE has the highest percentage of fully engaged workers at 26 per cent, while China has the lowest percentage of fully engaged workers at six per cent, and India showed the largest increase in the percentage of fully engaged workers shooting up to 22 per cent.

All in all, the book is a very good mirror to existing management practices. And there is some humorous reinforcement by way of quotes from Scott Adams’ brilliant Dilbert toons.

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