Leadership models ... LO26734

From: Ken Friedman (ken.friedman@bi.no)
Date: 05/27/01


Repling to LO26684 on leadership

Was interested by Eugene Taurman's models of leadership.

"1. Take the time to establish worthy purpose, direction, and expectations.

2. Align the interests of the organization and the individual. Shows
people how to fill their individual needs by meeting the needs of the
organization.

3. Provide the resources required.

4. Encourage mastery of personal skills. Demonstrate personal mastery
relevant to the purpose and encourage others to master theirs.

5. Seek and provide feedback for: Teaching Progress, Discipline
Learning Involving in the pursuit.

6. Promote candid exchange and real communication. Trust to be trusted.

7. Use intuition to set realistic but high and idealistic
expectations." (LO26684).

In response, I am posting two models of leadership. One is a model I
developed in the 1980s and updated in the mid-90s, (Friedman 1995b,
1995c). The other is W. Edwards Deming's Fourteen Points.

In Leadership for the Twenty-First Century, Joseph Rost defines

"Leadership (as) an influence relationship among leaders and followers who
intend real changes that reflect their mutual purposes." (Rost 1991: 102)

The old, industrial paradigm of leadership identified leadership with good
management. This may have been adequate for a different era with a
different work force. It is no longer useful in an era in which the flow
of knowledge determines the success or failure of every organization,
public or private.

The flow of knowledge involves more than the organizational need for
information. It involves the development of today's well-educated,
increasingly skilled work force required by contemporary organizations.
This work force requires effective leadership enabling individual workers
to activate their talents for the entire organization. To foster the
mutual purpose that Rost describes, organizations must nurture
relationships based on trust, shared values and ethics. Information is a
key resource in this process.

Leaders do three things.

1. They lead others.

2. They manage organizations.

3. They achieve direct personal results in one or more professional areas.

Only leading others is a leadership function. The other functions often
attend leadership positions but they are not leading. Leading means
achieving results by working through other people.

Leading others can be summarized in an inventory of eight tasks:

1. Determining appropriate goals and establish a strategy to achieve them.

2. Putting the right people in place to accomplish the goals.

3. Promulgating the strategy and goals to those who must realize them.

4. Ensuring that each person has the necessary resources to do his or her job.

5. Getting out of the way to let each person do his or her job in his
or her own way.

6. Monitoring activity and results.

7. Intervening only to remove obstacles to achievement.

8. Giving feedback, praise and appropriate coaching.

(Friedman 1995b)

W. Edwards Deming's fourteen points for realize these goals in operational
terms. While many subscribers to this list will know Deming, I am posting
these points and references for those who may not.

Deming's process involves a shift from ineffective management to effective
management. For Deming, management involves leadership, culture change
within organizations, and finally organizational learning. These operating
principles have been successfully tested in industrial organizations
around the world over the past fifty years.

Popular articles often describe Deming as a quality guru. This reflects
the fact that many people became aware of Deming at the time that Japanese
industrial production became associated with high quality more than it
reflects Deming's own views. Deming's first major exposure in the United
States came at the end of the 1970s with an NBC documentary by Reuven
Frank titled, "If Japan Can, Why Can't We." This, and David Halberstam's
magnificent book, _ The Reckoning _ brought Deming to the attention of
Western industrial leaders who had been shocked to discover that Japanese
manufacturing set the global quality standards of the era while remaining
competitive on price.

This shock and the search for answers brought Deming into wide public view
for the first time. The circumstances of his emergence gave him a
reputation in quality issues. Deming deserves this reputation, but he was
never a quality guru in any specific sense. Rather, he was a systemic
thinker on management and leadership.

Deming did not advocate high quality in a narrow sense. He proposed
principles for effective managerial leadership and good working practice.
His central point was that applying these principles would make business
and industry work as they should. Quality would emerge as one natural
consequence among many.

Quality is a natural outcome of a system that Deming terms "profound
knowledge" (Deming 1993: 94-118). Deming's method is based on the
development of social, intellectual and psychological values operating in
comprehensive organization-wide systems that capture and reinforce the
values and knowledge of an entire organization. Deming saw organizations
as organic entireties linked by the flow of knowledge. He understood and
outlined the leadership criteria, human criteria, and ethical criteria
that make it possible for knowledge to flow effectively through
organizations. Deming's system of profound knowledge was also the first
articulate leadership system of the information age.

"A system of profound knowledge," Deming writes, " appears ... in four
parts, all related to each other: appreciation for a system; knowledge
about variation; theory of knowledge; psychology.

"One need not be eminent in any part of profound knowledge in order to
understand it and apply it. The 14 points for management in industry, in
education, and government follow naturally as application of the system of
profound knowledge, for transformation for the present style of Western
management to one of optimization." (Deming 1993: 96)

Deming himself looked on his ideas as a combination of science, art, and
philosophy. He considered his fourteen points to be "principles for the
transformation of Western management" (Deming 1986: 18) and the
"transformation of ... industry" (Deming 1986: 23).

Deming's view is that the outcome of any process is shaped by a system.
Leaders must understand and shape the systems that give body to their
organizations -- human systems, information systems, mechanical systems.
Through years of practice and experimentation, he developed the fourteen
points that make organizational systems effective:

"1. Create constancy of purpose for improvement of product and service,
with the aim to become competitive and to stay in business, and to provide
jobs.

2. Adopt the new philosophy. We are in a new economic age. Western
management must awaken to the challenge, must learn their
responsibilities, and take on leadership for change.

3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need
for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the
first place.

4. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag.
Instead, minimize total cost. Move toward a single supplier for any one
item, on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust.

5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to
improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease cost.

6. Institute training on the job.

7. Institute leadership. The aim of supervision should be to help people
and machines and gadgets do a better job. Supervision of management is in
need of overhaul as well as supervision of production workers.

8. Drive out fear, so that everyone may work productively for the company.

9. Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design,
sales, and production must work as a team, to foresee problems of
production sand in use that may be encountered with the product or
service.

10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking
for defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create
adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and
low performance belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the
work force.

11. Eliminate work standards and quotas on the factory floor. Substitute
leadership. Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by
numbers and numerical goals. Substitute leadership.

12. Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his right to pride of
workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer
numbers to quality. Remove barriers that rob people in management and in
engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means, among
other things, abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management
by objective.

13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement for
everyone.

14. Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation.
The transformation is everybody's job."

(Deming 1986: 23-24; also see: Aguayo 1990: 121-122; Walton 1989: 33-36;
Scherkenbach 1991)

Deming viewed the human beings who work in and comprise organizations in
human terms. His system rests on solid ethical and psychological
foundations.

Deming portrays human psychology in its fullest dimensions. His
understanding of needs can be compared with Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
(Maslow 1998: xx, see also 1954, 1987; Hersey and Blanchard 1969: 22-40).

This also involves the issues of trust and shared value seen in the
leadership literature among scholars who view work is a profoundly human
experience, based on earned trust and shared values. These human issues
are central to the key leadership theories of recent years (see Bennis
1989; Bennis and Nannus 1985; Hersey and Blanchard 1969; Kouzes and Pozner
1991; Nannus 1989).

-- Ken Friedman

References

Aguayo, Rafael. 1990. Dr. Deming: the man who taught the Japanese
about quality. London: Mercury Books.

Bennis, Warren. 1989. On Becoming a Leader. Reading, Massachusetts:
Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc.

Bennis, Warren and Burt Nannus. 1985. Leaders: the Strategies for
Taking Charge. New York: Harper and Row, Publishers.

Deming, W. Edwards. 1986. Out of the Crisis. Quality, Productivity
and Competitive Position. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Deming, W. Edwards. 1993. The New Economics for Industry, Government,
Education. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Center for Advanced Engineering Study.

Friedman, Ken. 1995b. Introduction to Leadership. Seminar Handout.
Copenhagen: Nordic Doctoral Research Course in Information
Leadership. A cooperative program of the Norwegian School of
Management School of Marketing, the University of Gothenburg School
of Library and Information Science and the Royal Danish College of
Library Science.

Friedman, Ken. 1995c. "Nordic Leaders for the Knowledge Economy."
Svensk Bibliotekforskning [Swedish Library Research], 1995, no. 3-4:
81-92.

Hersey, Paul and Kenneth H. Blanchard. 1969. Management of
Organizational Behavior. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

Kouzes, James M. and Barry Z. Pozner. 1991. The Leadership Challenge.
How to Get Extraordinary Things Done in Organizations. San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Maslow, Abraham. 1954. Motivation and Personality. New York: Harper
and Row, Publishers.

Maslow, Abraham. 1987. Motivation and Personality. 3rd Edition. New
York: Harpercollins.

Maslow, Abraham. 1998. Maslow on Management. New York: John Wiley and
Sons, Inc.

Nannus, Burt. 1989. The Leader's Edge. Chicago: Contemporary Books.
ISBN 0-8092-4420-7

Rost, Joseph C. 1991. Leadership for the Twenty-First Century.
Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers.

Scherkenbach, William W. 1991. The Deming Route to Quality and
Productivity. Rockville, Maryland: Mercury Press.

Walton, Mary. 1989. The Deming Management Method. London: Mercury Books.

-- 
Ken Friedman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design
Department of Knowledge Management
Norwegian School of Management

Visiting Professor Advanced Research Institute School of Art and Design Staffordshire University

Norway

+47 22.98.50.00 Telephone +47 22.98.51.11 Telefax

Home office

Byvaegen 13 S-24012 Torna Haellestad Sweden

+46 (46) 53.245 Telephone +46 (46) 53.345 Telefax

email: ken.friedman@bi.no

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