On Leadership

There are almost as many different views on what a leader is as there are people, and every culture has different ideals that they look for in a leader. There is no set rulebook that can tell you how to be a leader and the amount of contradictory books on leadership can tell you that there are many approaches that can deliver a measure of success.

My attention was brought to this topic from reading a post from Jason Calacanis on his "community CEO" style of managing. This was in response to a poorly thought out piece on CenterNetworks criticizing Jason for this style. Now Allen Stern is not wrong because Jason is right, he is wrong because his argument is poor. He gives two reasons that the community CEO method is bad; The staff and the customers lose faith in the leader. For both he delivers no coherent argument to back up those claims, only conjecture with no factual backing.

If you are the leader of the ship, be the leader. And the CEO is the leader.

This is not true of leadership today. Leadership is not only hard to define, it is constantly evolving as the focus and complexity of business evolves. There are also differences in style dictated by market, product, customer segment and location, to mention just a few factors. One very clear trend for leaders today is that pronouncements from on high delivered with positional authority are becoming less effective and less trusted. Leaders are expected to engage more with their staff, customers and business partners to understand their needs and ideas. Now this is contradictory to the position put forward by Mr Stern, but can be backed up by actual research. In a 5 year research study by CCL, they found some interesting changes in the requirements of leaders.

Asking leaders to focus more energy on creating an environment where others can help them succeed is another important trend. This becomes apparent when comparing the individual skills deemed most important in 2002 with those expected to be important two years in the future. Participative management, building
and mending relationships, and change management rose to the top in the future, replacing skills such as resourcefulness, decisiveness and doing whatever it takes.

When examining an organization’s approach to leadership from the past to the future, we see movement from more individual approaches (i.e., leadership as a position) to those that are more collective (i.e., leadership as a process). Specifically,
respondents believe organizations will continue to move toward viewing leadership as a process that happens throughout the organization through interdependent decision making.

In this sense, Jason is doing some very clever things in managing his company. In engaging with his customers and his staff he gets more information about what is truly going on in his company. This is invaluable information that he cannot get without asking, and information that helps him to make better decisions if used properly. He also engages people in a dialog about Mahalo. This engenders a feeling of belonging and of goodwill in those who contribute. People like to have people ask their opinion and actually listen.

In the end it is the performance of the leader that will generate trust. While there are positives to engaging staff and customers, there is a balance to be achieved. If taken to excess it can distract a leader and hinder their focus and decision making. A fortune 100 CEO has large teams to interact with customers and staff and summarise the results. As the leader of a smaller company Jason has luxury to perform this interaction personally. I have not worked with Jason, so do not know how good a leader he is. His track record is fairly good though, and there is nothing inherently wrong with how he is conducting himself at Mahalo. I have written about Mahalo before and think there is some definite promise there. Like most things, time will tell.