Fact: More Good Stuff Gets Done When Everyone Leads

Perhaps more than ever, today’s organizations need great leadership.

Trouble is, too many people assume “leadership” can be—or even should be—exercised only by those who have been formally annointed with authority. That view can be costly.

Here’s an example.

Phil was general manager in the marketing division of a major consumer products company. With the professed purpose of discussing a new promotion campaign, he called a meeting of his staff. These were smart, seasoned people. They knew the industry, knew the product, knew the competition, and knew the target audience. But after only a few perfunctory questions and nothing even approaching real dialogue, Phil announced his own plan for a multi-million-dollar campaign. He prided himself on recruiting and hiring “the best and the brightest,” then he dumbed them down by denying the opportunity to engage in meaningful give-and-take.

A lamentable consequence of our debate culture is that we’re usually more adept at advocating than inquiring. And the “advocating” we see is often done more as leadership-by-announcement than as part of a true dialogue environment.

We have plenty of public models of this. The programming at major news networks is heavily weighted with loud and overbearing people whose purpose in life is to ram their views down someone else’s throat.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that good leadership requires gathering endless reams of “input” before a decision is reached. Neither am I suggesting that decisions must always be preceded by a dialogue session. If the building you’re in catches fire, you wouldn’t expect the fire marshal to tiptoe into your meeting and launch into timid inquiry: “Excuse me, folks. May I ask, how do you feel about smoke inhalation?” You would want him to say something like, “Please stay calm. There’s a fire in the building. Leave this room immediately and proceed to the nearest exit.”

The reality is that your business (and in some special circumstances, perhaps even your life) is in better hands when your operational culture honors—and uses—the brain power of every team member.

That’s the view of Ed O’Malley and Julia Fabris McBride. They’re authors of When Everyone Leads: How the Toughest Challenges Get Seen and Solved.

O’Malley is president and CEO of the Kansas Health Foundation. In 2007 he founded the Kansas Leadership Center, a nonprofit group that has helped hundreds of companies, organizations, and communities catch—and practice—the vision of emergent leadership. The “Everyone Leads” model is an antidote for polarization, stagnation, and divisiveness. McBride is chief leadership development officer at the Kansas Leadership Center and a certified coach. Her previous book was Teaching Leadership.

Rodger Dean Duncan: You rightfully point out that leadership has nothing to do with role, but everything to do with seeing and seizing moments to help a group or cause move forward. Why does that view seem so rare compared to the traditional “leadership as position or title” paradigm?

Ed O’Malley: We are hard-wired to see leadership and authority, or role, as the same thing. Who is the leader of the school? The principal. The leader of the town? The mayor. The leader of the company? The CEO. Society has built that into us. This idea that leadership is about seeing and seizing moments to help groups make progress is counter-cultural on one hand. But on the other hand, we all know it to be true. We’ve all seen so called “leaders”—people with the big jobs—fail to exercise leadership, fail to see and seize those moments!

Duncan: What do you regard as the primary advantages of the “everyone can lead” paradigm?

Julia Fabris McBride: When we adopt an “everyone can lead” mindset, it makes everyone responsible. No one is off the hook. You can’t simply shrug your shoulders and say, “Well, it’s not my fault, I’m not a leader.” This new paradigm is empowering, and everyone is implicated.

It also takes some weight off those in authority. We’ve seen so many people in big jobs take way too much on their shoulders. We can’t make progress on our toughest challenges without those in authority doing their part, but their part is insufficient. This new paradigm helps that be evident.

Duncan: You say leadership is mobilizing people to close the gap between current performance and desired performance. What’s the key to identifying and articulating that gap in a way that inspires people to invest their energy and ingenuity in closing it?

O’Malley: The key is to engage others in identifying that gap. It’s collective, not solo work. Those skilled at exercising leadership—when facing a daunting challenge—lead with questions, not answers.

Three simple, yet profound questions help others identify the gap:

• When you think about the future of our organization, what concerns you the most?
• When you think about the future of our organization, what is your greatest aspiration?
• What makes progress hard at closing that gap between our current concerns and our future aspirations?

People rarely have conversations about “the gap.” Sure, countless meetings and conversations take place about your, or someone’s, preferred solution to whatever problem. But our toughest challenges, the ones that need more leadership, require deep diagnosis. We need to help people engage on a different plane. Do that, and you get people vested, energized, and committed to progress.

Duncan: What are some of the most common barriers to progress in organizations, and how can people with neither title nor position power help overcome the barriers?

McBride: The first thing that comes to mind is loss. Progress requires loss. People don’t necessarily hate change. Good change is fine with most people. But change that requires letting go of a tradition, a norm or something of comfort is hard.

O’Malley: Think about the professional sports team that realizes it needs to trade away its star player, who is beloved by fans, but takes up so much of the salary pool that fielding a winning team is impossible. That team lets go of something it cherishes in hopes of progress. That’s tough. It’s risky too, because you don’t know if it will work out.

McBride: Another thing that comes to mind is the idea of competing values. For example, a rising vice-president values avoiding conflict. What happens when progress requires her to run toward rather than from conflict?

The best thing people with neither title nor position power can do to help overcome these issues is to ask about them. Questions like, “I love the vision for where the company is going. What might we need to let go of to make it happen?” or “What do we value most?” can encourage people to start thinking adaptively.

Duncan: People often focus on where they agree while tiptoeing around—or completely ignoring—conflicts. What are some best practices for putting uncomfortable issues on the table and discussing them openly, honestly, and productively?

O’Malley: I was in a meeting recently with about 20 people in positions of authority who focus on ending hunger. David Beasley, the head of the world food program, was in this meeting. We were all talking about what we could do to end hunger. There wasn’t any heat until one woman, who was one of the few grassroots-type people there, spoke up and said, “I don’t think we’re going to figure out how to make progress if we don’t have more people around the table who are like me, dealing with poverty personally and working daily with people who are hungry.” That’s heat, and it changed the tenor of that conversation.

You need the heat or tension to be productive when putting a tough issue on the table. Here are three ways to do that:

First, who is your version of that woman who spoke up at the hunger meeting? Invite them into the conversation. Their comments and presence will bring productive heat.

Second, connect to purpose. Talk about the uncomfortable issue in the context of how it is getting in the way of your groups purpose.

Third, have someone facilitate the discussion who has lots of credibility but little or no stake in the outcome.

Duncan: When facing big challenges, some people seem to be easily seduced by the proverbial quick fix. What’s the key to avoiding that tendency?

McBride: It goes back to the gap. The things that concern us the most or that we most aspire to—for most companies—have been issues for a long time. Simply pointing that out can often help serious people realize a quick fix likely won’t be available. But this also gets to the key idea of helping people understand the difference between adaptive challenges and technical problems. When you teach someone to identify adaptive challenges, you make it likely they’ll avoid the quick fix seduction. They’ll know real progress will take time.

Duncan: Leadership can be risky. What steps do you recommend for managing that risk?

O’Malley: Three things: One, frame your efforts as experiments, which implies they might work, but might not. It’s a way of setting expectations for difficult work. Two, start small. Don’t swing for the fences. Pick experiments big enough to matter, but small enough that if they don’t work all is not lost. Three, don’t surprise people in authority. You’ll need their support and they tend not to like surprises.

Duncan: When they don’t have title or position power, how can people “authorize themselves” to exercise leadership in ways that expand their influence?

McBride: Break apart the distinction between authority and leadership. It’s hard to authorize yourself to lead if you are stuck thinking, “Do I have enough authority to do this?” But leadership is an activity. It can be done by anyone.

Realize you might not have influence over everybody to solve a problem. But you do have influence over some people, and you can at least start to exercise leadership with them. You have more influence than you realize. Use it.

Duncan: Asking questions, you point out, is a leadership practice that’s available to everyone. How do good questions help people deal productively with leadership challenges?

O’Malley: What’s key to remember here is that leadership isn’t usually about providing answers. It’s about mobilizing others to think differently and act differently. Questions are the gateway to new and different thinking. It’s why the Socratic method of teaching has been so successful for thousands of years. Good questions spur discernment and discovery, which is always needed to make progress on your toughest challenges.

Duncan: What question do you wish I had asked, but didn’t … and how would you respond?

McBride: Maybe a question directly about the title? When Everyone Leads is a provocative idea, but it’s based on our research that shows that it’s literally when you get everyone—enough of everyone—exercising leadership that progress finally takes place on our toughest challenges. The biggest challenges require a culture of leadership for progress. A culture is just the sum of all the behaviors of everyone in the group. It’s when you get everyone seizing their moments to exercise leadership that you create a game-changing culture capable of seeing and solving the toughest challenges.