Company and community

Just Enough Leadership
“Communityship” is not a word in the English language. But it should be—to stand between individual leadership on one side and collective citizenship on the other. In fact, I believe that we should never use the word “leadership” without also discussing communityship.
Sure, leaders can engage and involve others. But the concept remains focused on the individual—on personal initiative. Show me a leader, and I’ll show you a bunch of followers.
Communityship certainly makes use of leadership, but not the egocentric, “heroic” kind that has become so prevalent in the business world. We make a great fuss these days about the evils of micromanaging—managers’ meddling in the affairs of their subordinates. Far more serious is “macroleading”: the exercise of top-down authority by out-of-touch leaders. Communityship requires a more modest form of leadership that might be called engaged and distributed management. A community leader is personally engaged in order to engage others, so that anyone and everyone can exercise initiative. If you doubt this can happen, take a look at how Wikipedia, Linux, and other open-source operations work.
So maybe it’s time to wean ourselves from the heroic leader and recognize that usually we need just enough leadership—leadership that intervenes when appropriate while encouraging people in the organization to get on with things.
That is how IBM got into e-business. An enthusiastic programmer eventually convinced a middle manager that the opportunity existed. The manager stitched together a team with almost no budget. And when the initiative finally found its way to Lou Gerstner, then the CEO, he encouraged it. That’s all. Just enough leadership!
From Top-Down to Middle-Out
How can we rebuild companies as communities? Unfortunately, most of the hundreds of articles and books on how to manage large-scale change—transformation, revitalization, turnaround—focus on leadership. A popular example is “Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail” (HBR Classic January 2007), in which the author, John Kotter, outlines eight phases: First establish a sense of urgency. Then create a powerful guiding coalition, in which “senior managers always form the core.” This coalition should create a vision and broadcast it so that others are empowered to carry it out. The process moves on to planning short-term wins, consolidating improvements, and institutionalizing new approaches.
Kotter’s approach sounds sensible enough and has probably worked. But how often, and for how long? What happens when the driving leader leaves? Perhaps it’s time to rebuild companies not from the top down or even the bottom up but from the middle out—through groups of middle managers who bond together and drive key changes in their organization.
Can major transformation really begin like this, almost spontaneously, with small acts by people who are not part of the senior leadership? Well, think of the American Revolution, which started with a tea party, or the French one, which began with the storming of a prison to release a handful of inmates. In his recent book Community: The Structure of Belonging, Peter Block, an authority on workplace learning and performance, wrote, “Most sustainable improvements in community occur when citizens discover their own power to act…when citizens stop waiting for professionals or elected leadership to do something, and decide they can reclaim what they have delegated to others.” Imagine all managers as citizens of their corporations.