Lead or Follow?

Can a good leader be a good team player?

In every organization, there are individuals who are both. Even Cabinet members, who are in major leadership roles, are part of the president's team.

These people face an inherent conflict of roles: They are expected to follow the norms of team behavior, while leaders must violate at least some norms as they lead. At the Pentagon, where I was deputy assistant secretary of Defense for installations, my desire to lead change often conflicted with the department's norms.

It was good practice, for example, to ignore the norm about checking everything with the General Counsel's Office, because most of its attorneys were ingenious at finding reasons for not doing what I wanted to do.

The most serious norm--preserving Pentagon prerogatives--was strangling the military. The Pentagon exercised extraordinary control over commanders, severely limiting how they could spend their budgets, and even specifying thermostat settings thousands of miles from Washington. I replaced a 380-page rule book with a four-pager that clearly put base commanders in charge. It was exceedingly unpopular throughout the Pentagon.

I compounded this norm-breaking approach by establishing the Model Installations Program, which delegated to base commanders vastly more authority.

My team was flourishing, growing in authority, job satisfaction and effectiveness. But, for the most part, members of my team-senior Pentagon executives-were displeased with me for diluting prerogatives.

My dilemma wasn't unusual-all leaders face it. Leadership often requires changing, not following, organizational norms.

In the early days of the reinventing government effort, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros led the Cabinet in transforming his department. He visited field offices to learn what was getting in their way. He sat at workers' desks and personally did front-line work. This earned him much praise from President Clinton and Vice President Gore, but some resentment from the rest of the Cabinet.

Cisneros was resolved to be a change leader, and persisted in that course with considerable success.

But faced with the choice between being a leader or a team player, many will choose loyalty to teammates. One example is when Congress freed several Defense laboratories from staffing limits in 1999. If a lab had money, then it could hire. Congress believed this flexi-bility would increase effectiveness. But lawmakers had not reckoned with the strong pull of team loyalty.

One of the universal norms of Defense teams is "no special treatment." So, the lab directors declined to exploit the opportunity. One said, "If I use my authority to hire more, it could mean that the other directors can hire fewer. It wouldn't be fair." The experiment was a flop.

What's the best way to negotiate a path between the obligations of team leadership and team membership? There's no simple answer. If the norms are disregarded, the organization disintegrates. But when they are followed slavishly, as so often happens at the Pentagon, they ensure the status quo. An old saying from the quality management movement captures it perfectly: "If you always do what you always did, you'll always get what you always got."

To lead an organization to change, executives have to break the norms. Since change requires speed, they must do it with some impatience.

If they do it with sensitivity, executives can lead change without destroying team relationships. They must explain just what they're up to and why. They should seek team members' advice on better ways to accomplish the goal with minimal damage to norms. Leaders must appreciate the team's contribution to the mission.

But be prepared to be considered by at least some teammates a maverick, a loose cannon, or worse. For, as Machiavelli wrote: "There is nothing more difficult . . . than the introduction of a new order of things."