Speaking to Schuitema’s human excellence consultants, who have countless years of experience consulting and coaching leaders in various organisations, there is unanimous agreement that the general understanding of the role of a leader is starting to mature. Previously, particularly during the 90’s and 2000’s, leaders unashamedly declared, without much variation of opinion, that leadership is a matter of achieving a result through people.
These days this is still one of the dominant answers to the question “what is the role of the leader?” There is however increasingly a greater discomfort with many people with this answer. Thankfully, leaders are starting to realise that their role is not actually to get the results. Rather their role is to look after their subordinates and facilitate the conditions under which subordinates flourish and achieve excellence. We thus see a greater “employee focus” entering into the common understanding of the role of the leader.
This is a very positive change as it captures the truth about the role of the leader, particularly in a more advanced economy where workers are required to be accomplished in the execution of more complex tasks which require higher levels of expertise and self-management. What we find, particularly in the modernizing work environment, is that a leader who is always trying to manage the result in fact gets in the way of things and succeeds only in disabling his employees, and consequently the result also suffers.
Ultimately the leader does not have direct control over the results that are produced. Results are produced a level, or a number of levels, down the chain of command. What the leader has direct control over is the quality, expertise, attitude, well being, and working environment of his/her people. The role of the leader of course must involve that which he has direct control over. This clearly means that the role of the leader is correctly understood as taking care of and growing his/her direct reports. So there is thankfully a gradual improvement in our common understanding of the role of the leader.
There is a question then of the role of results. Someone might ask, “are you of the opinion that results are completely irrelevant to the leader? And, if they are not irrelevant, then in what sense are they relevant?”
Results are clearly not irrelevant for the leader. A leader has to always be aware of the results. A leader that is unaware of the results is completely blind. Just because the leader needs to be aware of how well his people are doing does not however mean that his job is getting good results. It is always the workers job to get good results.
The leader has to be aware of the results only because such awareness is necessary for him to do his job, which is once again looking after his workers and making sure they are always willing and able to get good results. People are the job of the, results is what helps him do that job. Results are like the scorecard which lets the astute and effective leader know how well his people are doing and whether and where he needs to intervene to address performance issues, and take disciplinary action if needs be, depending on the nature of the issue. The effective leader uses results as an guide to doing his job of bringing out the best in his people.