What Kind of Leader Are You?

There are three types of leaders. Each is successful in a different context, says Michael Maccoby, a renowned business adviser who is an organizational psychologist and anthropologist. And you need all three on your organization’s top management team.

Drawing on nearly five decades of research and experience in both government and the private sector, Maccoby has developed several key insights on the aspects of leadership needed to transform knowledge-service bureaucracies, such as the Federal Aviation Administration, into collaborative learning organizations.

What Is Leadership?

Maccoby says leadership is a relationship between the leader and the led, and that it is always exercised in a context: “In one context, someone may be a leader and not so in another context.” He also observes that leadership -- unlike management -- cannot be delegated. “If people follow you because they want to follow you, you cannot hand that relationship over to someone else.”

He says that the three inherent qualities of a leader are: (1) to have a purpose, (2) to have a passion for this purpose, and (3) to have courage. Examples in government today include John Koskinen, who is leading the turnaround of the Internal Revenue Service, and Penny Pritzker, who leads the Commerce Department. Both have clarified for their organizations what needs to be done and why.

The rest of leadership can be taught, he says. In contrast, management is the execution of functions and processes. It is something that can be delegated, and training for management skills is worthwhile.

Three Types of Leaders

Maccoby notes there are different kinds of leaders, each for different contexts:

Strategic leaders help define the purpose, vision and values of their organizations, and look for patterns and partners. For example, with the retirement of the space shuttle, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden has refocused the agency’s mission on deep space exploration. “When we talk about going to Mars and going to deep space, we’re no longer talking merely about exploration. We’re talking about pioneering -- about setting up habitats where humans can live for long periods of time. Much of this research is being conducted on the ISS,” declares Bolden.

Operational leaders are key to the design and maintenance of organizational processes. They help improve productivity and cut costs. For example, Ellen Herbst, chief financial officer and assistant secretary of administration at Commerce leads many critical mission support functions. Among her duties, Herbst is the point person overseeing the multiyear renovation of the department’s headquarters building. The Herbert Hoover renovation project is a massive 13-year, billion-dollar undertaking. Herbst says, “This project has given the department an opportunity to think about how we should work and how we can make this building built in 1930 a more 21st century workspace.”

Network leaders may have no formal leadership role in their organization but are key to connecting experts across disciplines, organizations and regions. Kshemendra Paul, for example, is the program manager of the Information Sharing Environment for the intelligence community. Though he is not in the chain of command, his specific responsibilities as program manager are to plan for and oversee the agency-based build-out and management of the Information Sharing Environment. ISE is intended to be the information fabric enabling whole-of-government responses to national security and public safety challenges that face our nation. Paul employs a “top-down, a bottom-up and an outside-in approach” to engaging and networking with all the critical stakeholders that comprise the ISE.

Maccoby notes these different kinds of leaders require different skills and personalities, but that successful knowledge organizations need all three types -- and they need to be able to work together in a creative partnership. “In any context, strategic, operational and network leaders need to interact to develop a shared purpose and the products, practical values and processes necessary to achieve that purpose,” he says.

Leadership Depends on Followers

Maccoby cautions, however, that “leadership effectiveness also depends on the attitudes of followers.” If employees are not engaged in their work, then terrific strategic, operational and network leaders will not matter. Employee engagement is especially important when there are large-scale changes in the workplace. In the federal government this includes changes and uncertainties being driven by funding cuts and the delays in reauthorizing programs such as the Export-Import Bank and the Highway Trust Fund.

“The challenge for leaders is to engage people’s internally driven motivation, the intrinsic motivation to work and contribute . . . [organizations] with many employees who are engaged in their work are more successful than those with fewer engaged employees,” he says. “But only 13 percent of employees worldwide are engaged.” However, more workers are engaged in the U.S.  -- 30 percent -- than elsewhere in the world. Nevertheless, “they will be engaged and motivated only when work is meaningful, connected to their skills and motivational values, and rewarded fairly,” Maccoby says.

In part, this is why the White House is responding so seriously to the declining scores on the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey. After several years of decline, the White House in December issued a directive to agencies to improve employee engagement in their work by using management routines and tools such as designating an accountable senior official and tracking quarterly progress on “actions to enhance organizational culture and employee engagement.”

But directives can only go so far. Leaders need to create trust within the workforce as well.

Creating Trust

“A leadership philosophy that is communicated and practiced throughout an organization can create trust and give meaning to work,” Maccoby says. “Effective leaders of change communicate and practice a philosophy that shapes organizational culture and determines how decisions are made about products, people, processes, customers and communities . . . a leadership philosophy should define the purpose of an organization, the values essential to achieve that purpose, and the way results will be measured.”

Most importantly, leaders have to develop and communicate a philosophy that will determine the organizational culture. Their philosophy should reflect the purpose of the organization, the ethical and moral reasoning behind key decisions, the values needed to achieve the purpose, and how goals and results are defined -- consistent with these purposes and values.

“Without trust, people in organizations work for themselves, not for the organization and its stakeholders,” Maccoby says. To build trust, he adds, leaders must do the following:

• Communicate a philosophy and practice the values
• Follow through -- do what they promise
• Explain what they won’t do and why they won’t do it
• Don’t blame people for mistakes, but create a dialogue about the reasons for the mistake and what can be done to avoid future mistakes
• Listen and act on what they hear, institute processes to facilitate ideas, and recognize contributions from others -- give credit
• Work at understanding the people they lead

All three types of leaders need to incorporate these principles into their daily rhythm. How many of these actions have you or your leaders taken?

Note: Special thanks to IBM Center colleague, Michael J. Keegan, who is the host of Business of Government Hour radio hour. For this column, he profiled recent radio hour guests that exemplify the different leadership styles described in this blog post.

(Image via Maggy Meyer/Shutterstock.com)