What is the role of a leader? If you pose this question to a ordinary group of people occupying leadership roles the answer you will get is something like: “leadership is about successfully achieving results through people.” This is the dominant understanding of what it means to be a leader. On this understanding a leader is someone who gets people to do things in order to produce a result, in most organisations this result is profit and a good leader gets good results.
Here at Schuitema Associates we think that this understanding of leadership is not only false but is also destructive. The problem lies in the relation the leader has to his subordinates. The above understanding of leadership views the subordinates as tools. It is the job of the leader to use the skills and abilities of his subordinates to achieve the desired results, in a similar way in which it is the job of the gardener to use his hedge clippers to ensure the hedges stay beautifully manicured. This is a fundamentally flawed and deeply immoral view to have on one’s subordinates. Predominantly it is flawed on two counts. Firstly, It is naive to believe that the leader produces anything, it is the worker on the end of the line who produces the results. To require a leader to make results his job is to have your leader trying to do the job of his subordinates. Secondly, subordinates are not tools, they are human beings. The above view of leadership is immoral because it reduces humanity to mere means.
So what then is the role of a leader? Here at Schuitema Associates we feel that the ordinary understanding of leadership needs to be inverted to give us something like: “leadership is about achieving people through results.” This inversion sounds counter-intuitive but it is not. The inversion recognizes the fact that it is the end line people or workers who get the job done, not the leader. The leader does have a role though. The role of the leader is to enable the workers. The job of the leader is in fact to care for and grow his subordinates. Care and growth is the only mandate of a good leader. The leader’s job is to produce excellent people whose job then is to produce the result. This is a fundamentally moral understanding of leadership as it recognizes our humanity and has us treating employees as ends and not as mere means.
Schuitema Associates has been involved in a large number of interventions where this understanding of leadership, with all its accompanying specificity, has been applied and been very successful. The aim of these interventions is to produce leaders who care for and grow their 
people, up and down the line. If the entire leadership structure of an organisation is in line with care and growth then the organisation will function efficiently and productively.
This is of course very theoretical. To help to illustrate what a good leader is like here are three examples of the kinds of things that one should expect a good leader to say. These three things were actually expressed by mine overseers in an interview with Pam Pretorius, a senior consultant at Schuitema Associates.
1. I will go miles to make sure that my people understand everything that they need to do their jobs.
A good leader will ensure that his subordinates have everything they require to do their job. This includes things such as the right tools, the right skills, and also the relevant motivation. A good leader gives his subordinate a good reason to come to work, over and above just offering a salary. A good leader then ensures that his subordinates have both the means and the ability to get the job done.
Crucially a good leader will also hold his subordinates accountable which is the crucial element to help the subordinates grow. The issue of accountability is explored in this article by Etsko Schuitema.
2. Mining is not a career, it is about developing relationships with people, both up and down the line.
The mine overseers that expressed this recognized an important aspect of being part of the leadership structure of an organisation. A good leader must not concern himself about climbing the corporate ladder. He/she must view himself as part of a community and be deliberate about building relationships of mutual support and cooperation with both superiors and subordinates.
Essentially a good leader recognizes the value of cooperation. He/she recognizes that each person in the organisation has a role and his job is to help them, by “them” I mean in particular his subordinates, fulfill it. A good leader has a cooperative instead of a competitive demeanor.
3. My people’s problems are mine, if they come to me with problems, my job is to find a way to solve them.
This beautiful testimony of these mine overseers illustrates exactly the ideal understanding of leadership. The leader has only one job, to look after his people. A leader who makes his people’s problems his problems fundamentally cares about his people. All he does will be in the interests of his people. He will cultivate excellent and committed people who will do their job excellently.
If a leader has the attitude expressed by these mine overseers they are almost guaranteed to run an efficient, productive and healthy operation. This is because the leader genuinely cares for his people. More than anything it is this attitude that characterizes the good leader. Care is the primary requirement for a good leader. If one does not have a genuine concern for one’s people, one should not lead.
Comments
One response to “3 Things a Good Leader Might Say: Lessons From Mining”
I salute these mine overseers – otherwise know as mine captains- for they grasp the essence of what it requires to lead people with power. Mining is a very demanding occupation with workers descending into the bowels of the earth around 5am and rising to the surface at the end of a shift to return home in the late afternoon, rest and repeat the same cycle the next day. It is the impact of the leaders in the lives of the workers that brings a sense of meaning and purpose to this existence.
Mining is commonly defined as the extraction of valued minerals. These leaders understand that mining is about enabling people to become their best as human beings – using the job as tool for their enablement.
I pray that every worker connected to this industry will at the end of their working stint be able to look back with gratitude at what they were able to achieve having offered their lives on a daily basis in the mines.
It is the job of the leader, like these Mine Captains, to help them realise this aspiration.