When discussing leadership at work, I said that the ultimate goal of the leader is to make him or herself obsolete. I was met with a few protests to this, therefore I thought I would write about it to clarify what I meant.
Most leaders in an organisation has two roles, that of a Leader and that of a manager. At times these two roles conflict with each-other and sometimes they are both needed in a longer process.
The difference between the role of leader and manager is that the leader has a longer and more strategic role while the manager has a short-term role dealing with details and situations. You may call the managers role a transactional one, meaning that it deals with day to day situations and decision making. The managers goal is for the day to day work to function with satisfaction, trying to keep the team together and making decisions that needs to be made.
The leaders role however, is very different from this. It’s main purpose is not for the company to function smoothly and to be effective, but rather to develop over time. It functions as a kind of teacher, not telling people what to do, but to coach them in their development so as to empower every single employee to take responsibility for their own work and life and start to manage themselves. A successful leader will therefore eventually make him or herself unnecessary, because every individual will be guided from within, not needing any external authority or guide.
This is not only part of every leaders job. It is the job. And it is one of the most difficult jobs of all.
It’s difficulty does not lay in it’s day to day function but in it’s long term problem. The problem of creating a support system for the individual and then adapt it accordingly as the individual grows. As the other person develops you will less and less be a manager and more and more it is expected of you to be a leader. Management might never disappear completely, but it will shrink as the other person becomes self-sufficient.
The resemblance between leadership and other fields such as teaching, parenting, training or politics is apparent. Even though many are not aware of it, this dual role of leadership and management is equally true from them.
A child that is born is helpless in this world without the support of a parent. This obviously doesn’t need to be a biological parent.
It’s role in the beginning is that of the managers. Feeding the child, keeping it safe and showing it how things work. As the child grows, it is given harder and more complex challenges all suitable to the child’s development. As it grows however, the parent must also teach the child how to be independent of the parent, because the parent is not going to be around forever. Every human being and so also the child has an instinct to be independent of it’s surroundings which will eventually lead to the age where the child starts to challenge it’s parents control. This is most notably seen in it’s teens.
The problem with us humans however is that we have been conditioned into thinking of people and events in this world as static. We create an image of how things are and when this image is in place, it becomes hard to change it.
For the parent this is the tendency to look at the child as it was, instead of how it is now, thinking it is less capable to manage itself than it actually is. For the leader the problem is now to cede it’s management aspect granting the child or employee more and more room to move in.
If the parent is unable to see this when it happens the child or teen will feel held back and suffocated and it will increase it’s effort to break free and become independent.
I don’t think it is necessary to give any examples of situations like these of conflict between parents and it’s teen. We can see it all around us and we have most likely been in this situation ourselves at least once.
This kind of battle between control and freedom is easy to spot in all aspects of life, and it is by far the most problematic issue to deal with. Not because of the situations it creates but because of it’s subtle effect it has on our thinking and identity.
The role of parent is both natural and needed for the child to survive at all, but because of our conditioning to think about things, situations and our identity as fixed, we have a tendency to start seeing things in one way and then keep on seeing things that way. And when the situations change, we will often unconsciously rationalise our thinking and behaviour in order to avoid changing with the situation.
A perfect example of this is the Russian revolution in 1917.
The goal of the communist ideology is to create a society with as much personal freedom as possible. The theory behind this was that an enlightened elite of philosophers and politicians aware of the problems of class society would start a revolution and overthrow the bourgeois rulers. It would then in it’s place create a dictatorship of the people in order to change society and when in control through education and leadership empower the people to the degree where they have as much personal freedom and possibilities as they can, and then dissolve the dictatorship and give the power back to the now enlightened people, creating a communist society.
But as we all know, this never happened. The revolution succeeded and in the beginning it looked really good, giving the communists in other parts of the world incentive to start their own revolution, but as the years march on, things changed.
It is easy at this point to polish the saying that ”power corrupts” or that communism is dangerous, but doing so we might miss how important this phenomena is for all human life.
We, as humans, often think of ourselves as having certain traits. Often we also think of these personality traits as something that is given us from birth or acquired in our childhood and then stay that way for the rest of our lives.
It is therefore logical to think that when I have power, or when I am in a leadership position, I know already how I will behave because I am a such and such person, but what happens is that every situation is new to us and will always modify our way of being and thinking.
Our view of how things are and should be will therefore change, but in a such a subtle way that we might not be aware of it. We therefore have a tendency to answer to these new situations and thinking that we have always thought like this, forgetting that when we started out we had different opinions and views about things.
Because of this basic yet massive failure, most people today still have no clue what communism was meant to be
Returning to the parent, it will look at the child as less capable and not being responsible enough to handle it’s new freedom without realising that the child can not show how responsible it is without the parent ceding some of it’s control, allowing the child to learn and make it’s own mistakes. Instead of being supportive in the child’s development, he or she becomes a hindrance, slowly killing the child’s natural striving for more and more freedom.
Instead of being a positive and supportive leader creating an individual with high self esteem capable of managing him or herself, the child becomes insecure, doubting it’s own abilities and out of this comes a mutual dependence that will always create conflict.
As time passes both parts in the relationship of leader-led, employer-employee, parent-child, teacher-student will get used to this way of interacting forgetting that things could be different.
The employee will start to rely on external authority, it’s manager, for it’s answers and how to deal with all situations instead of thinking creatively for him or herself. He or she will run to the manager with all kind of simple questions because of fear of doing something wrong and the manager will start to feel about their employees that they are lazy and untrustworthy that won’t lift a finger unless motivated by the stick or a carrot. The manager will only give out simple and monotonous tasks to it’s employee, because it has no trust that the person will handle new challenges in a responsible way.
The student will learn how to give the correct answer to the teachers question instead of thinking creatively and find more than one answer and they will rely on text books as absolute authority without criticism. In religion people will rely on holy scripture written in an old and different culture with the consequence that they will apply outdated logic to a completely different world, using an image of god as comfort when afraid instead of reading between the lines and getting the essence of it’s wisdom.
The hardest task for any person is to be aware of these situations realising when they are in a position of power and actively work to cede this power when necessary, to step out of the way when someone else takes initiative. To ”grow smaller”. It is very easy to say to yourself that it gets done faster if I do it myself.
It also means to be on the lookout for when you yourself avoid to take responsibility for your actions or thoughts, giving away your initiative to someone else because it is more comfortable and easy. Because if you are unaware of this, you will take these roles of being with you into every new relationship repeating the same problems and conflicts over and over again.
Think of how the woman in a relationship often takes the role of the mother, and the man that of the irresponsible boy, or how the woman acts stupid or weak and men come running to help out. It is all an act to avoid taking responsibility. And we have all done it.
If you break a leg, crutches might be needed to get around, but when your leg has healed it is time to start walking again.
And as the ending to this long post, I publish below the brilliant poem by Kahlil Gibran:
On Children
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
