|
Everyday Ambiguity
Arrogant authors who come across as
know-it-all gurus can be found on many best-seller lists. Joseph Badaracco asks
more questions than he gives answers, and his new book, Leading
Quietly, belongs on the best-seller lists. Badaracco spent four years studying
the behavior of individuals who took everyday actions that represent a form
of leadership that gets little attention, but matches well with what most of
us face as we conduct our business lives. Here’s an excerpt:
“ … the vast
majority of problems calling for leadership are everyday situations. These
situations don’t come labeled as strategic or critical, and they aren’t
reserved for people at the top of organizations. Anyone can face these
challenges at almost any time. Hard choices don’t involve ‘time out’ from
everyday life, but are embedded in its very fabric.
Imagine, for example, that you could hover over a town, lift the roofs off
houses, and other buildings, and watch what is going on inside. In one home,
a couple is arguing about moving the man’s father into a nursing home. In an
office, two government officials are talking quietly about investigating a
long-term employee rumored to be pilfering funds. The head of a hospital
emergency room stares at a spreadsheet, wondering if she can avoid imminent
reductions in the number of indigent patients her unit treats. A loan officer
at a bank has just discovered a serious accounting error: Should he report it
and create an organizational mess or just leave things alone?
These are everyday problems, routine and unremarkable – or, at least, that’s
how they look at first. But closer inspection reveals something else. Ostensibly
ordinary problems can be incredibly messy, complicated, ambiguous – and important.
As such, they are real leadership challenges.
Take the case of the loan officer. What could be more mundane, even tedious,
than an accounting problem? But once the loan officer stopped and looked
carefully at the issue, he found there was nothing simple about it. Why, for
example, had such a large problem been overlooked for so long? One dismaying
possibility was that senior management had buried the error and wanted it to
stay that way. Bringing the problem to light could cost a colleague a job and
cause one of the bank’s clients to go bankrupt. But concealing the problem
would be a violation of the law and the loan officer’s sense of
professionalism and integrity. In this case and many others, the ‘everydayness’
of problems disguises their real complexity.
The loan officer, like men and women in organizations everywhere, was dealing
with just one of a multitude of difficult, commonplace challenges. What do
you do, for example, when you don’t have the time or the resources to do what
you really believe you should do? What if doing the right thing involves
bending or breaking the rules? What if a situation is so murky and uncertain
you don’t even know what the right thing is? What is someone with a lot of
power is pressuring you to do something wrong? Questions like these define
the complex territory of responsible, everyday leadership.
The loan officer did the right thing – but in ways that don’t fit the heroic
model. He found a way to disclose the problem, get the loan restructured,
protect his colleague’s job, and avoid risking his own. He accomplished this
without doing anything dramatic or heroic. Instead, he followed many of the
guidelines presented in this book. His efforts were cautious and well
planned, he moved shrewdly and kept his political antennae fully extended,
and he bent some of the bank’s rules in the process of doing what was right. In
short, he resolved his problem through a distinctive, unorthodox, and
extremely useful way of thinking and acting.”
Leading
Quietly describes the actions of many people who lead in ways that don’t
often stand out. In many situations, this style of leadership can be
extremely effective. Badaracco provides practical, real-life, advice in this
book, and leaves readers confident and comfortable in taking paths that may
be anything but direct.
Steve Hopkins, March 13, 2002
|
