The data were clear. Three supervisors were doing a great job. Three others were struggling or failing outright.
The CEO instinctively approached the survey results as a tool to pinpoint deficient managers. But our experience suggested that the problem lay less in any one individual’s failures than in the overall variation of leadership within the organization.
For such a wide disparity of frontline leadership to exist, we pointed out, the manager overseeing all six of the supervisors had to have been asleep at the switch. But so, too, had the plant manager, the vice president, and, ultimately, the CEO himself.
“I followed you right until the last point,” the CEO said with a laugh. But in the coming months, he, with remarkable courage and humility, took full responsibility for having allowed poor leadership to persist as long as production numbers were being met.
Edgar Schein once suggested that organizational culture is created primarily by leadership behavior and choices. Building a healthy and effective workplace is therefore particularly dependent on the commitment and engagement of leaders of leaders.
Imagine, for example, the municipal workforce of a mid-sized city. If any night janitor ends his shift in the courthouse feeling unrecognized and uninvolved, if any records clerk goes home with no clear idea of why the work done today was important, the city manager is not doing her job.
She might not have interacted with either of those employees. She might, in fact, never have occasion to do so, at least not personally. But neither has she ensured that the system of leadership she heads was suffused with the elements needed to sustain superior organizational performance.
Subordinate leaders can and do make mistakes. But senior leaders must understand that the effects of organizational authority stretch from the very top of the workplace to the very bottom. Problems in the middle are problems at the top.
Truly owning the implication of that chain of responsibility – and not succumbing to the temptation to shift blame or scapegoat – is one of the truly seminal challenges of leadership.
But that chain also presents leaders with an unparalleled opportunity, for it allows the multiplication of constructive practices across an organization, thereby increasing the quality of functioning throughout.