Leadership Conversations: The Importance of Influence over Authority
Ron Wastyn, Ph.D., Vice President, Chief Operating Officer, and Senior Leadership Consultant and Randy Richards, Ph.D., Consultant for Organizational Effectiveness and Leadership Training at Wastyn & Associates, Inc.
The nonprofit environment has changed in recent years, and all indications point to continued change in the future. The pandemic exposed infrastructure cracks in nonprofit organizations’ ways of delivering programs, compensating staff, raising money, and working. Rather than expecting to return to the pre-COVID ways of working, we must create new approaches to overcome these organizational fault lines.
Adapting to these challenges requires that we – as a society and organizations – understand the fundamental differences between leading and managing. If we never learn to distinguish between the situations that call for us to influence others from those that call for us to exercise our authority, we will not create the adaptive solutions required to meet these new challenges.
Why?
Quite simply, the management function of an organization coordinates the actions of people and processes to maintain or improve the status quo. It addresses issues like: When do people show up? Do they show up? Who does what when? Management requires the exercise of authority to address these and similar issues to solve known problems. To understand management, we need to understand the sphere of authority.
By contrast, leadership recognizes that the status quo is longer sufficient for the organization to thrive and that improving or even perfecting the status quo will not bring about the needed changes. The problems facing the organization are too complex for the exercise of authority; they require leadership.
Leadership works on wicked problems. Wicked problems do not respond to the exercise of standard measures of authority and its solutions. Instead, they require collective, collaborative efforts of people embedded in the problem who have a common purpose to solve it. These adaptive, wicked problems cross internal and external organizational boundaries. Leadership asks questions like: How can we readjust our delivery methods to meet the changing needs and desires of our constituents? Does society still need the services that we provide? How can we involve a wider inter-organizational approach to this set of problems? People who lead persuade other people who share the problem to come together in the collaborative pursuit of creating multiple experiments in response to those problems.
Why does this distinction between the work of authority and the work of leadership matter?
First, it alerts us to the fact that the differences between the two are not about the styles we use to manage or lead. Instead, it tells us that the key difference lies in the kinds of activities that we undertake. Simply put, the processes of management and leadership solve different problems. Management (authority) is best equipped to solve our technical problems – problems for which we know the answer, such as how best to create a workforce that shows up on time and works hard, or how to structure the workday to best facilitate the production of goods and services. Leadership challenges deal with our adaptive or wicked problems, the problems for which we do not know the answer, such as how an organization needs to change with respect to the virtual workforce, or how to keep our product or service relevant with increased competition.
Second, if we tackle leadership challenges as if they are rooted in the experience of management (authority), we risk not engaging the very people who may have the answer. Real leadership engages internal and external stakeholders in discussion over what to do – how to grow and change. Real leadership does not presuppose to have all the answers. Real leadership challenges us by telling us what we need to hear, not what we want to hear. Telling a struggling workforce that “things will be OK, trust us” develops complacency and fails to engage people as partners to solve the significant problems that confront organizations.
Think of all the nice memes about leadership: that leaders care about others, are honest, set a good example. None of this speaks to the kinds of problems that we must face in an organization. They mean that a very good person has the capacity to lead others. But, if they do not actually attempt to influence others to tackle the tough problems, THEY DO NOT LEAD. To lead requires that we engage other people in conversations about problems and solutions. To lead is to influence, not to command.
Ron Heifetz, who teaches leadership at Harvard, wrote one of the most influential books on contemporary leadership entitled Leadership without Easy Answers. Without easy answers when it comes to leading, people come to value authority over influence and resort to command-and-control tactics to institute change rather than working with people to create changes that reflect mutual purpose.
So, when we look to 2023 and the workshops that we will offer at Wastyn & Associates, we intentionally seek to have a better conversation about what it means to manage and lead other people. These conversations can get messy, but out of that mess will emerge an appreciation for how people can best use their authority to manage others and how they can create the capacity in the people around them to create groundbreaking solutions. That is why we structure our professional development programs to develop management competency AND leadership. You will learn how and when you can use your authority and when you need to lead (influence) and engage others in dialogue. We promise no simple memes. Instead, we will challenge existing norms about leading and then develop your ability to really make a difference.
We bring more than 60 years of experience of teaching leadership and working with real organization on real challenges. Please join us.
