Theories abound about the differences between leadership and management, but in these times, and in the organizations with which we work, it seems that everyone is called upon to be a leader. In this column, we look at how you can bring out the leadership potential within your organization and why it is especially important to do so today.
The Comfort Zone: Leaders and Managers in Theory
What do you do when you get a great idea for innovation in the workplace? Maybe you attended a seminar that planted the idea in your head of starting a whole new program with new ways of funding it. Or, maybe you decided that the public health department needs to improve its customer service, perhaps by redesigning the public entryway or changing the standard operating procedure for greeting and helping clients. Are you the type of person who gets caught up thinking about all the great things the organization can and should do, or the type who gets caught up thinking about how it will (or will not) get done, how much it will cost, or how many personnel will be needed? Or, are you somewhere in between these two extremes?
Some research suggests that the difference between these types of behaviors constitutes the difference between "leaders" and "managers." Louis Rowitz, in Public Health Leadership: Putting Principles Into Practice, summarizes the difference between leadership and management: "Leaders are more oriented to their vision and the overall public health system, whereas the manager needs to concentrate on making the agency effective and efficient."1(p42) According to Louis Rowitz, these different primary orientations require different characteristics and strengths. For example, a good manager needs to be able to think straightforwardly about tasks and goals, to focus on the bottom line, and to be what Louis Rowitz calls the "classic good soldier."1(p11) A manager needs to ask the difficult questions of how and when this task will get done, who will do it, and why it will not work. A good leader, on the other hand, must step back from the minute details and look at the system as a whole. The leader focuses on the wider prospect, the long-range goals, and the people outside of the organization. A leader asks what can be done and why we should do it, placing the how and when in visionary, not linear, terms.
We all constantly lead by example, and, especially in small organizations, leaders must also manage and managers must lead. In public health, with its multiple stakeholders and limited individual decision-making power, this may be even more true than in other sectors. Both the "idea" skills and the "pragmatic" skills are crucial, sometimes at the same time. How can you capitalize on the strengths of leadership and management in the governmental public health sector?
The Leaderful Organization
Joseph Raelin, Northeastern University College of Business Administration scholar and the author of Creating the Leaderful Organization: How to Bring Out Leadership in Everyone,1 has developed the concept of "the leaderful organization," or the organization in which leadership is a mutual, collaborative endeavor. As Joseph Raelin describes it, the leaderful organization is open to a shared sense of power and responsibility; ideas are shared freely, with all members of the staff given the opportunity to help make decisions and put those decisions into practice. In an ideal organization, according to the theory, different people are "the boss" on different projects, concurrently, and collectively. Put in practical terms, everyone gets a chance to lead, whether as an individual or in a team, everyone is asked to speak up at meetings, and those "in charge" by virtue of their titles are not necessarily "in charge" on the ground.
Frankly, most public health organizations are not at this point "leaderful" in the sense of totally shared leadership responsibility and credit. When Joseph Raelin talks about resistance to his model, he generally talks about the difficulty of getting lower-level managers to take on leadership roles. In our experience with health care and public health, it is just as often the entrenched powers at the top that may keep an organization from tapping the potential leaders throughout the ranks.
Whatever the reason, in most public health organizations, different staff members have their roles and their own domain of decision-making responsibility, large or small. If you have ever come to your business manager with an idea only to get bogged down answering questions about how, precisely, you plan to fund that idea, you have come up against the power of "domain" in public health organizations. At the same time, your business manager may be frustrated by the grandiose plans that land on her desk to be implemented with "blue sky" ideas-and no hard cash. If this is the case in your organization, how can you deal with it and try to take advantage of the untapped potential for ideas, expertise, and leadership among all staff?
Leaders and Managers in the Organizational Setting
Leaders, as the name suggests, have "followers." A follower is not necessarily a subordinate, and following is always voluntary. This situation makes the leader's personality very important: Who wants to follow a tyrant? If the titular leader of your organization is a tyrant, other leaders, with better people skills, will spring up among the staff. Colleagues will go to these individuals, rather than to the actual boss, with complaints, suggestions, and thoughts about the organization's activities and direction.
Now, most leaders are probably not tyrants, but they can be difficult to approach or work with for other reasons. For example, a leader must have a vision for the organization, but if a leader cannot communicate his or her vision, that vision will be difficult or impossible to implement. "A vision is something you can see" is a phrase often heard, and it is true: A leader has to be able to make the vision comprehensible, in specific terms, to those who are thinking about the "how" and "when." For a leader who is most comfortable with abstract ideas, this translation into specifics can be very difficult.
Some people feel very comfortable with complexity. Looking at the big picture, they can consider all the gray areas of rules and regulations (these people like to challenge the status quo). They take the long-range view and allow for the notion that sometimes doing the right thing is a little messy in transit. Others may not feel quite so enamored of the gray areas. An individual whose primary role is that of the business manager (for example) cannot always take the nuanced view of rules that someone whose primary role is that of idea generator can; the manager must deal, in great detail, with these rules to get things done. In fact, for a good manager, a stubborn rule is a problem to be solved, within the confines of the status quo. It is not complex, but black and white-and that is a good thing too, because chaos would reign if it were otherwise!!
During times of stress, including stressful economic times or times of transition, people with strengths in these two ways of approaching work-the abstract visionary thinker and the concrete practical thinker-need to come together for best organizational results. Everyone has a vision for the organization. If the organization does a good job of instilling an understanding of its mission and assures everyone of his or her role in that mission, everyone there will have ideas-even visionary ideas-about getting that mission done. The benefit of asking the more practical colleague to be part of leading the organization is that this type of worker often has a much easier time putting his or her thoughts into concrete terms than the more abstract-thinking colleague. Thus, through a collaborative, leaderful approach, that "vision that you can see" can actually be implemented.
The Time for Leadership: Change and Transition
We recently had an emergency meeting of executive education program directors at the North Carolina Institute for Public Health. The message for some of our programs: "Change, or die." In short, because so many of our customers are being squeezed by the economic crisis, our programs may need to change to meet their new reality.
One new reality is that many of our out-of-state public health customers no longer have travel budgets, which means they cannot come to Chapel Hill for all of the on-site sessions of our executive education programs. At our meeting, we brainstormed many quick changes we could make to our programs to keep ourselves afloat, the most obvious one being to replace some of the on-site time with distance learning options. Our customers, of course, have it worse than we do because they are more dependent on governmental funding and are more subject to the whims of political priorities. Another quick change we considered was broadening our target customer base to include some who could pay for those in the governmental sector.
These would be big changes, quickly made, to get instant results. However, no matter what changes we make now, the changes will be part of a larger transition for our organization. William Bridges,2 in Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change, defines the difference between change and transition in these terms: Change is an event, it happens relatively quickly, and it is defined by its results. Transition is a human process, it usually happens more slowly than change, and it is defined by its phases. Over the last several years, we have made changes that are helping us now: First, some of our programs have gone from being primarily grant funded to being primarily receipt funded.* This change was necessary because grant funds do not last forever, but it turned out to be good for the programs as well. Although our receipts from our primary customers are down right now, the model has given us flexibility with the program design and scope and allows us now to at least consider other customers and other revenue streams.
Second, we have stayed up to date by instituting Web 2.0 technology into the programs, so the change, or partial change, to distance education would not be alien to our students or our staff and faculty. These changes are not without their stresses, however. How can a leader of a leaderful organization approach such a situation?
Leading Through Transition
Leaderful organizations can weather these types of changes through empathetic and transparent communication and collaborative decision making at every stage. First of all, it is important to anticipate the reactions to the changes people are being asked to make, which make up the transitions. During what William Bridges calls "the ending" phase, a time of relinquishing the old ways, individuals may find themselves stressed and in denial about the need for change. In our situation, we have at times become preoccupied with putting out fires and at times find ourselves falling back on (and idealizing) the old and familiar. Those of us who focus on the details have been thinking about paying the bills and balancing the budgets; those of us who are more comfortable with the big picture have been worrying about losing that "vision we could see" we painted so well 10 years ago. What will replace it?
It is important in this situation to empathize with these sentiments and acknowledge the value of the old ways. In the case of adding distance learning components to a well-established program, of course it is good for people learning interpersonal leadership skills, or building networking opportunities, to get some face-to-face time with each other. At the same time, we must articulate why it is time to move on, not only because we cannot do it the old way but also because there are valuable reasons to do it in a new way. This is a perfect time for collaborative leadership: Everyone needs to be brought into the discussions about how to transition-how to honor the past, find a way to say good-bye to it symbolically, strengthen what is not changing, and basically take the time to let go.
Phase 2 of transition is called "The neutral zone." This is the in-between time when the old is gone, but the new is not fully working yet. Although this phase can be confusing, it is also a great opportunity for creativity and innovation. What helps people during the neutral zone is having a sense of control over the situation, gaining understanding, and feeling that they are supported. Those among us who are "big picture" thinkers must recognize the need of more concrete thinkers for a sense that things are changing within a recognizable framework. William Bridges suggests setting up a temporary structure to keep the uncertainty from being overwhelming. When we were transitioning to the receipt-supported model for the Management Academy for Public Health, some of us doubted whether any public health agency would be able to pay the $4 000 or so tuition for the 9-month intensive program. As a sort of security blanket, we were able to keep a small line of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention money coming into the program. These funds made a big difference as we took the steps that needed to be taken.
At our emergency meeting of program directors, we started out disheartened by the idea that some of these programs might change quite a bit for the new cohorts. But then one of the teammates, one we can always count on to keep us grounded on concrete ideas and details, began describing work he does for an on-line course at a school of public health-the ways he brings people into discussions, shares materials, and holds on-line seminars for scholars who live all over the world-and suddenly the room was brighter. There are some real opportunities for growth, some excitement, suddenly, at the new reach our programs could have if we consider new ways of delivering information and creating a "community of practice."
William Bridges's final phase of transition is called "the beginning." This is the time when people discover a renewed sense of purpose and develop a new identity that fits within the transformed reality of the workplace. In this phase, as new problems arise, all can work together to solve them and revise the plan as necessary to avoid problems in the future. It is especially important that all work together to create new rules and guidelines for going forward. Having a hand in creating these rules and guidelines may help everyone recognize their value as time goes by-even those of us who may want to bend them someday!! Obviously, some people will not eagerly, or ever, accept the changes and get to "the beginning," no matter what a leader does to support them. These people might remain in "the ending" phase for a long time. In these situations, the manager needs to decide how best to work with these people or help them to leave.
Having a leaderful organization in place will help you manage transitions that ensure that no one change will destroy your organization's vitality and viability, no matter what challenges you face.
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