On Leadership
By Patrick Lencioni
One of the best ways to predict the future, I suppose, is to look back in time and ask whether you would have been able to foresee what was coming. What has really happened in the world of management and leadership in recent years?
Not that much, really. There have been plenty of books and articles written, but whether the ideas put forth were new is the question. Most great ideas having to do with management and leadership – and a host of other topics, for that matter – are merely a repackaging of what has already been said.
And that’s not a bad thing. Samuel Johnson once said that “people need to be reminded more than they need to be instructed.” I couldn’t agree with him more. Most of the wisdom and insight about being a good manager or running a good organization amounts to reminding people about common sense and basic courtesies that they tend to forget in the heat of leadership. I suspect that will be true in the future as much as it is today.
Ken Blanchard, one of the true management giants of our time, greeted me after I came off stage at a leadership conference. I had never met him before, although we have since become close friends. But what he said to me that day I will never forget. Essentially, he asked me a question. “Pat, do you know why your books and theories have caught hold so well?” I shrugged, not knowing what he was getting at, so he finished. “Well, it’s all rooted in The Bible.”
Though I wasn’t completely surprised by Ken’s observation, neither was I aware of its truth at the time. Today I know that he is right.
Which leads me to believe that in a few years, and for that matter in 250, most of what we talk about and practice in the area of leadership and management will be what we talk about and practice today.
Of course, leaders will be managing people doing different things in the future, just as they are managing different kinds of employees today than they were in the past. I’m guessing that the world will be even more global than it is today, something that is equally exciting and frightening, depending on the nature of social trends. It is reasonable to assume that employees will have greater choice and input, as labor shortages and increasing standards of living continue.
If that is the case, leaders and managers will have to continue to inspire their subordinates more than they, well, subordinate them. They’ll have to appeal to connect people’s work to their desire for personal development and meaning, or risk losing them to other, more fulfilling, work. Great companies will have to figure out how to institutionalize this, which is no small feat, given the tendency to bureaucratize instead.
But then again, that is true today. For every big airline that relies on oligopoly and government bail-outs for survival, there is a Southwest Airlines that treats customers and people the way they think everyone wants to be treated. For every fast-food chain that relies on desperate employees without employment options, there is an In-N-Out Burger or a Chik-fil-A that sees employees as being worthy of respect and investment.
Which makes me hope that in the future years the world is full of Southwest Airlines and In-N-Out Burgers and Chik-fil-As and companies like them. And that leaders and managers routinely lead and manage in a way that puts employees and the customers above hierarchy and politics.