THE FISHER LEADERSHIP PARADIGM

THE FISHER LEADERSHIP PARADIGM

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 14, 2009

“Leadership requires the capacity to see and the ability to serve. Leadership is committed to growth and development. Management is committed to maintenance and survival of the business. Leadership deals with people as the collective force to accomplish the mission. Management deals with things as the mechanism for monitoring its health and achieving arbitrary goals. For the past fifty years, there has been no leadership only management. Profits have taken precedence over people. Workers have become things to be managed, monitored, manipulated and maneuvered to improve the bottom line. The disconnect between the organizaion's will and the workers' spirit has resulted in the organization stumbling blindly in the dark with forward inertia.”

James R. Fisher, Jr., “Six Silent Killers” (1998)

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True leadership is not concerned with leadership style or any synthetic indices. Leadership is concerned with purposeful performance.

Leadership thinks in terms of its followers because followers are the best guides to how to lead.

Leadership understands the work climate and knows its must be trustworthy to be trusted. In other words, it must be trusting to be trustworthy.

Leadership knows the organizational culture must be open and flexible, resourceful and creative to meet and master unanticipated accelerating demands.

Leadership senses how internal stress and strain can be debilitating. This can result in missed opportunity or throw operations off a purposeful course.

Leadership doesn’t recruit people of high profile. Leadership develops people of high profile.

The people needed to mount organization challenges are already there. The problem is not recruitment; the problem is development.

When leadership is in evidence, every worker and manager has a career roadmap with an electronic computer profile of developmental needs required, readiness for promotion, and opportunities available.

Growth and development are greater incentives to workers and managers than all the entitlements that could be imagined.

Good people are going to leave the organization, which is actually a compliment to the leadership. Better that high performers leave then stagnate or become embittered negatively affecting the possibilities of others to rise to their level.

The subtle difference between leadership and management is more psychological than functional. It is the way workers and managers are perceived, as well as how they are dealt with as individuals.

If a machine performed leadership and management, leadership and management would be interchangeable. But they are not. Management does mechanical things well: planning, budgeting, organizing, controlling, and dispatching through formal authority.

Leadership, while doing many of these same things, educates its people to think as well as do, to improvise as well as innovate, and to inspire as well as enable others consistent with the vision of the leadership.

Given this rationale, these are ten possible criteria of the FISHER LEADERSHIP PARADIGM:

(1) The leadership is sensitive to all workers as persons.

(2) The leadership does not play politics with the lives and livelihood of the workers.

(3) The leadership is transparent, which means it communicates openly and honestly with workers and managers on anything that might impact them in a personal way.

(4) The leadership sets policies that reduce the bureaucratic nature of the organization improving the accessibility to information and decision-making.

(5) The leadership is as economical with scheduling meetings as it is with handling the budget. Meeting for meeting sake is passé. Meetings must have a purpose, agenda, and a discrete time line, and be scheduled as infrequently as possible so as not to distract workers and managers from the tasks at hand.

(6) The leadership, once it has been so attentive to the needs of workers and managers, can direct its full attention to the demands of the marketplace with an external as opposed to an internal focus.

(7) The leadership leaves tactical operations and short-term goals to workers and managers, while it concentrates on strategic operations or long-term goals.

(8) The leadership supports individual initiative but awards all in kind once the mission is accomplished or exceeded. There are no awards or bonuses when the organization has failed, but there are awards and bonuses for all when it has succeeded.

(9) The leadership in the interest of horizontal integrity and vertical integration operates within the framework of these dimensions. That means there is no mahogany tower, no mahogany row, no separate executive building, no private parking, no corner offices once symbolic of power, but a functional layout in which the main conduits of information and decision-making flow ergonomically to the optimize center or centers of operations.

(10) The leadership, knowing the importance of innovation and the dangers of covert hostility to it, is alert to such interference, quick to expose and eradicate it in order to ensure operations consistent with its policy of innovation.

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The challenges to leadership are great since the destruction of the family. Workers come into the workforce with little or no obedience training, with little sense of impulse control.

This makes the role of leadership more difficult but not impossible. The leadership, because of this fault line, needs to have a firm, fair, consistent and equitably enforced policy with no exceptions. The emphasis is on behavioral change or correction rather than punitive retribution.

Behavior that cannot be corrected or changed is counterproductive to operations, and impedes reaching organizational objectives. This must be identified and dealt with swiftly, judiciously and honestly. Everyone must understand the nature of the enforcement and correction policy, and the consequences should behavior be unresponsive. The key to leadership success is trust, and trust is predicated on organizational integrity. No person can receive special treatment or be exempted from abiding by the consensus standards. With such a organizational mindset, any obstacles no matter how challenging can be met and dispense with effectively.

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PERSONAL SYSTEMS AND PERFORMANCE SYSTEMS

Workers bring their cultural and personal baggage to the organization. This consists of their values, beliefs, expectations, experiences, and perceptions. It constitutes their PERSONAL SYSTEM.

The organization has a PERFORMANCE SYSTEM. This consists of these or related criteria:

· The purpose of a system is what it does.

· The structure of the system facilitates and carries out the organization’s mission.

· Every worker and manager must know and understand the PERFORMANCE SYSTEM, and their respective roles in it.

· Work is organized to be congruent with the PERFORMANCE SYSTEM, which in turn is organized to meet the organization’s short-term tactical benchmarks and long-term strategic goals. Work is not structured to create conflict but conflict is inevitable in a free exchange of ideas, information and work. In a PERFORMANCE SYSTEM, however, work is organized to “manage conflict,” knowing that workers and managers need not like each other to work effectively together. Disagreements may be frequent but polite as opposed to infrequent and violent. Workers need to respect each other’s contribution in order to accomplish the mission. No discipline is more important than any other; no group is more esteemed than any other; no group can isolate itself from any other with its technology or jargon. The key to operations is to make all disciplines and functions user friendly.

· The structure supports teamwork, but also leaves room for individual expression and creative pursuit when and if such talent has such needs or demands.

· The structure of work fosters cooperation, collaboration, and open communication. It is a climate where workers and managers are free to express their differences and register their suspicions and complaints openly and candidly. It is a voluntary arrangement as compared to one of compliance where workers and managers are forced to comply with arbitrary guidelines in which they have had no voice in their creation.

· Work is love made visible because workers and managers are there because they choose to be there. If workers or managers find the workplace culture and the working climate stultifying or not consistent with their PERSONAL SYSTEM, they should leave. If it is not fun at work, and not spiritually uplifting, then work is not reinforcing. Since workers and managers spend most of their time working and thinking of work, it is a counterproductive idea to be where work is draining.

· The structure and function of work create a climate for purposeful enterprise. The common goal is not only to do a good job but also to constantly improve on the job that is being done.

· The PERFORMANCE SYSTEM supports individual growth and development, recognizing that when any group is performing as well as it might, it is at the expense of some other group. The corollary to this is that if a system is behaving as well as it might then none of its parts will be. That is because the holistic mission is the focus rather than the fragmented objectives of departments and disciplines.

· The PERFORMANCE SYSTEM does not award one group at the expense of another group. If the organization succeeds in reaching or exceeding its mission, then all benefit equally, or no one benefits at the expense of some other group. The byword is all for one and one for all. This includes the leadership, which is part of the system and not separate from it.

The PERSONAL SYSTEM of workers and managers, and the PERFORMANCE SYSTEM of the organization must always be on the same page so that they can get off on the same dime. The moment there is discord between the two there is the distinct possibility of drag on performance, which may utlimately translate into missed schedules, mounting rework and ultimatly, failures.

The importance of the FISHER LEADERSHIP PARADIGM is that is a psychological as opposed to a hierarchical or physical leadership model. It is a system that has little tolerance for passive behavior or collective passivity. This often occurs in pockets of discontent in an organization. Discontent is driven by the appearance of the exception being treated as the rule.

Just as there are chronic technical problems in an operating system that must be isolated, addressed and resolved, so it is the case with chronic psychological abnormalities. The PERFORMANCE SYSTEM must be on the alert to address chronic psychological problems, not after they occur but when symptomatic evidence is apparent that they exist.

Such evidence is palpable when workers and managers fail to step out of their roles to help a colleague when it is needed; when people come in late and leave early; when assignments are not completed on time or efficiently; when rumors sabotage operations; and when workers and managers withhold vital information necessary to the completion of projects because they can. These symptomatic behaviors are caused by chronic discord that must be addressed, posthaste.

The FISHER LEADERSHIP PARADIGM does not confuse self-demands (the personal needs of the individual) with role demands (the performance needs of the organization) nor should any worker or manager.

If the purpose of an organization is what it does, then all effort must be directed to that end, or find the reason it is not being achieved. This in outline form is a means to make that an accomplished fact.

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REFERENCE: Six Silent Killers: Management's Greatest Challenge (CRC Press 1998)by James R. Fisher, Jr.