Leadership and groups

Leadership is often seen as something that is part of a group. In corporations groups are a way of life. And leadership can be for the corporation as a whole or for subgroups. Subgroups are created when dividing the corporation into departments with specific tasks. But they can also be created for a specific temporary task.

Departments
Most organizations that grow beyond twenty persons, automatically divide themselves into specialist groups. Accounting, purchase and sales, cleaning, they are all part of the organization. Specialization has its advantage over generalization, when it comes to certain organizational tasks. These departments often do not really need leadership. Especially when the members are highly specialized and highly trained. Often the specialists know exactly what to do and only need someone to keep them up to date with higher management and in contact with other departments.

Taskgroups
Groups that are specially formed for a certain task often have need of internal leadership. But they also need external leadership, to support their work. Especially if the task has implications for the company policy or if it is to prepare change.

Internal leadership of groups is needed to make the group work efficient and effective. However this internal leadership does not necessarilly has to be filled by one person. Belbin showed that the success of a group is defined by the fulfillment of nine roles. In which one person can very well occupy two group roles.

The external leadership is needed to make it possible for the group to do its work. But also to let the groups work have effect. Without the external leadership the work the group has done could very well get lost in the politics of any organization that is larger than 50 members.

Leadership and even more success

How important is it for a leader to define his own success? Should a real leader not need to focus on the success of others? Or what can he do to make others succeed? In that case the definition for the success of a leader would be: "Under his leadership everybody realized their goals."

Such a definition is tasking for a leader. First of all he is dependent on how many people he leads. Because the larger the group, the more difference between all the goals of group. And how do you support all those different goals.
Secondly he is dependent on the amount of support he receives. Because the larger the group the more support he needs.
It also means, that a leader should be willing to receive help with his leadership. The support however has to sides. The one side is the help offered to and accepted by the leader. The other side is the acceptance of the leaders help by those being helped to achieve their goals.
Thirdly a leader should be willing to be open to goals that are not his own. He has to let go of his ego, and make the goals of others his goal. He should be able to gain pleasure from the pleasure others have achieving their goals.

Leadership and more success

Okay, so success is just a case of choosing the right definition. And success as a leader is the first of its kind. Because most leaders define their success at the start, by telling us at which points they want to succeed. It is just a pity that their success is just a number, and most often it is even a percentage of a previous success.
"Dear Sirs, the board plans make the companies business grow with 10% in comparison to last year, which should result in a 5% raise in profit. We think it is possible to achieve these goals, by selling more products in new markets like ..."

But why do I call this a pity? Because I do not call this success. I would call this freshman calculus. Real success would be defined like:
"People we want 50% more satisfied customers this year (50% of course is only possible if you had less than 66% satisfied customers last year.) And we want our employees to go home with a 10% salary raise, compared to last year. We will try to achieve these goals, by listening to our customers and employees. We will use this information to create products, that fit the wishes of our customers. We expect that by creating more satisfied customers, they will buy more products, so we can pay our employees more. If by some fluke it will be impossible to pay 10% more than last year, the board will take a 50% cute in salary, so to enable our employees to go home with a nice bonus.

As you can see, the chosen definition of success, makes clear that most people who are in a leading position are more often managers than leaders.

Leadership and success

Success a real nice and vague term. It is completely dependable on the definition used. Success is in no way comparable to a law of nature. As water is fluid between 273 to 373 degrees Kelvin. Or masses attract each other. Or a ball can only fly so far at has been thrown through air.

But success is completely defined on the basis of a norm. If my norm is money. Those with the most of it are successful according to me. If my norm is speed. Those who are the fastest over 100 meters are successful. So success can not be measured the same way as when there is air or not.

But one way or another, we live by certain definitions of success. If someone reaches the age on which his entitled to a pension, and he has ten million dollars, we call him a successful person. Even if there are three other persons with three billion dollars each at that moment. However if that same person would retire with only a state sponsored pension and fifty years work for the same employer, we would find him pitiful and even would call him a looser.
We would not look at we the person had done in those fifty years. We would let ourselves be seduced by our definition of success so much, that we forget to take anything else into account.
Because what if the person who earned a ten million dollar pension did that by firing 10.000 men personnel? Or even worse, he sold enough guns to kill a million humans? Whereas this person that only has a state pension helped 10.000 persons and saved them from a death by hunger? Who would we call successful now?

Our inclination is to use a small definition for success, and more often then not an useless definition. We do not define success on terms of most happiness to most people. But we take a definition which carries in it the chance that the success of the one person is based on the misery of many others.

But maybe that is exactly the reason why we find ourselves so successful as a species?

Leadership and more rules

Rules are an important part of the life of a human. Some rules are good to exist. For example the rule of gravity, without it we would be drifting around in a dark and empty universe, without stars and planets. But there are more rules we have devised ourselves and on which we act without thinking.
It are those self made rules, that are important when it comes to leadership. Because many of those rules oblivious used rules hinder a humane kind of leadership. Take for example the rule, that a leader should not mingle with his employees in a friendship like manner. The strange thing however is, that the leaders who act out of a kind of friendship achieve the best results and have the greatest successes. But still this rule of non friendship stays alive.

So it seems to be important to avoid taking rules as a basis for ones leadership, without thinking about their influence on you behavior as a leader. Because often there is enough evidence to proof that an exception to the rule works better. Specially when you want to create a humane kind of leadership, that also gives the successes that are expected.