The Leader as Activist

Written by Mitch McCrimmon, Ph.D. | 06 July 2010

In our postmodern world of rapid change, complexity and chaos there are no final authorities. Without arrogant presumption, no single person can direct a postmodern organization that is a boundaryless network of strategic partners. To move such an amorphous beast, a lone individual can only prod it to think differently. The postmodern leader is an activist.

Indeed, it may be that the terms leader and manager have outlived their usefulness and should be replaced by activist and facilitator. Activists promote change from the sidelines with neither the authority nor sufficient wisdom to decide matters for a crowd. Facilitators coordinate the efforts of people to help them achieve their goals without actually controlling them.

How the world has changed

Leaders and managers lived in a world of stable structures with clear boundaries and fixed roles arranged in a neat pecking order. Similarly, in the middle ages, the earth was the centre of the universe and there was a definite up and down. Now there is no centre, no absolute up or down, or even solid objects, just chaotic collections of particles seemingly with a mind of their own. A world in constant flux has few stable structures.

Organizations driven by constant innovation have also become unstable and loosely structured. They are fragmenting just as surely as physical objects that try to move too fast. As a result, our efforts to understand leadership must shift from the statics of structure to the dynamics of rapid change. As in the physical world, leadership is no longer a role in a stable structure but a discrete impact that induces an organization to change direction.

The main destabilizing force in business today is the shifting balance of power. A hierarchy is a power structure. Those at the top got there by claiming to know best where to take the organization and how to get there.

But the rise of the knowledge worker, what Richard Florida calls the creative class and Daniel Pink the "whole new mind," levels the playing field. There may still be a hierarchy of positional authority but no longer one of knowledge or insight. Level 5 leaders, facing the fact that they lack the answers, draw them out of their teams. This shift in emphasis heralds the demise of any form of top-down leadership that purports to know better. Authority of position minus authority of knowledge equals zero authority in a knowledge driven, evidence-based world. As knowledge workers come to know more than their bosses, direction flows bottom-up.

Better decisions emerge from crowds but with added chaos because of the resulting loss of control. If leadership means providing direction, it must come from a crowd where wisdom resides instead of flowing top-down as of old. Crowd-sourced leadership is a discrete act, not an ongoing, stable role. As a type of action, such leadership can be shown by groups, not just individuals. It also originates from the front-lines or outside the organization altogether.

These  momentous changes are summarized in the following table:

These changes are not hitting all organizations equally. Proliferation and diversity now rule. Just as there is a magazine or website to suit every taste, organizations range from the stable structures of yesterday such as street gangs and ancient tribes to rapidly changing, loose networks driven by incessant innovation. Simple groups might carry on as before, but where change is rapid and continuous, we need a more dynamic model of how a business works.

Leaders as activists

In his book, Leading the Revolution, Gary Hamel called on all employees to become activists. He labelled employees activists who advocated new products to top management, such as the Sony employee who convinced his bosses to develop PlayStation. He had the courage to challenge the status quo notion that Sony could not make toys. Unfortunately, Hamel did not flesh out the connection between showing leadership and being an activist other than to hint at such a relationship in the title of his book.

Martin  Luther King Jr, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela were all activists. So are green campaigners. When activists resort to violence and destruction, we rightly label them criminals or terrorists. But when they use constructive approaches to influence us, and are successful, we classify them as leaders.

Activists, by definition, must campaign for their causes because they have no authority to make decisions for the group they seek to influence. If they succeed in having a leadership impact, it might be a once-in-a-lifetime episode. The actual showing of such leadership is not related to occupying a role within the target group. Moreover, many activists might have no interest or qualifications to be an ongoing leader in the conventional, positional sense. Further, they might rely on hard facts to make their case while lacking charisma or emotional intelligence.

If leadership is not a role within a group, then it needn't be limited to individuals. Thus activist groups like Green Peace could have a leadership impact on other groups.

The word activist captures the sense that people and large organizations are hard to shift from their current path unless someone actively promotes a better way and agitates to be heard. An activist is a change agent which is what postmodern leadership needs to be. Like Martin Luther King, an activist challenges the status quo with the courage to risk rejection for the sake of a better way.

Further, activists are clearly not necessarily managers within the groups they affect. They may be insiders but with no positional authority. Talk of being an activist rather than a leader may finally enable us to separate management from leadership because activists are promoters rather than implementers.

Finally, the term activist recognizes that leadership can be shown as readily bottom-up as top-down and that it is often younger, more creative, rebellious types trying to make their mark who are most likely to be activists. This is important because businesses need to create a culture that encourages just this sort of creativity-based leadership from its younger employees with a fresh perspective as Gary Hamel has powerfully argued.

But what does a postmodern organization look like that replaces leaders with activists and managers with facilitators? If being an activist or facilitator is independent of role, should we eliminate structure and roles altogether? No, because execution demands accountability which, in turn, requires individuals to occupy roles.

Accountability also fosters ownership and commitment. Moreover, complexity breeds specialization which also encourages individual accountability even if a group is better at making complex decisions. It's a matter of getting the balance right. Individuals need to be accountable for execution, even if only for a small part of the whole even if groups might be more effective for innovation.

Execution versus innovation

All businesses have two distinct tasks: (1) to execute their short term goals as profitably as possible and (2) to create their future through innovation. The former depends on structure and organized effort while the latter requires free thinking. Critics of hierarchy overlook the fact that both structure and freedom are important to achieve two such distinct tasks. It's a case of both-and, not either-or.

Innovation needs the "wisdom of crowds" to flourish: networking and group brainstorming. Ideas for new directions must be sought throughout the business and outside it. Conversely, some sort of structure works best for execution, especially for complex tasks like making a movie or flying to the moon. The inputs of diverse specialists are best coordinated and used efficiently with some sort of structure. Even in a self-managing team, the work of execution must be divided up among individual team members so there is no escaping individual accountability.

Hierarchy may be avoidable if a self-managing group can provide its own structure. The main point here is that business needs some combination of structure and freedom to address two distinct tasks.

New roles for the CEO

If an episodic, dynamic model of leadership is confusing, we might drop the term leader altogether. Conventional, positional leadership is breaking down into its constituent parts. The traditional concept of leadership is a complex mixture of being in charge of a group, promoting or deciding new directions and then helping the group reach the new destination. There are three elements here:

1. Being in charge of a group and making decisions for it
2. Advocating new directions
3. Facilitating the achievement of new directions

A CEO is an executive by virtue of the role. It is tempting to call management and leadership sub-roles that executives engage in occasionally. However, to fully capture the dynamic nature of modern business and to make it clear that all employees can both lead and manage, it may be better to call them activities rather than sub-roles. Or, we might talk of activism in place of leading and of facilitating or enabling instead of managing.

Thinking of the leader as an activist captures the sense that leadership is an influence process. Conversely, calling a CEO a leader doesn't really work because we judge executives by the decisions they make for the group. But making decisions for people isn't an influence process, so it can't be leadership. Thinking of leadership as a role has always been like trying to cram a square peg into a round hole.

Executives can, of course, show leadership when they behave like activists promoting a better way to enlist support within or outside the organization for an unpopular new direction. They also make decisions about how to allocate resources, but this is a managerial activity and shouldn't be confused with leadership.

Executives engage in four activities:

1. Doing things - negotiating with suppliers, customers and strategic partners, reporting to the Board, representing the company to shareholders and government representatives, etc.
2. Making strategic and operational decisions.
3. Facilitating - coordinating, operating as catalysts, coaches and developers of people.
4. Advocating new directions as activists.

1. Executives as doers

Many of the things CEOs do neither directly lead nor manage the organization, especially those activities that relate to dealing with external stakeholders, customers or suppliers, negotiating an acquisition or reporting to the Board of Directors.

2. Decision making

Strategic and operational decisions should be classified as managerial actions if leadership is an influence process.

3. Facilitating, enabling and coaching

Employees at all levels can help others and themselves achieve goals by operating as facilitators, enablers, coaches or catalysts. They facilitate their own goal achievement by prioritizing and organizing their efforts to obtain the best return from all their resources including their limited time. This can be called managing if management is suitably reinvented as a supportive function. Alternatively, we could drop the term manager altogether and just refer to the component activities of coaching, developing, nurturing, coordinating, etc. These activities encourage and enable; they don't make decisions for people.

4. Advocating new directions

Advocating a better way is not a decision making activity but an influence process aimed at promoting a change of direction. Whenever a new direction is advocated or shown by example and accepted, leadership is shown, whether by the CEO, a front-line employee, an external partner or a competitor. This model of leadership recognizes that no single person has all the answers. Thus an individual can only advocate a better way. It also acknowledges that groups make better decisions than individuals, groups where multiple parties, inside or outside, can propose new ideas for the group to consider, thereby to show leadership as a discrete impact.

Viewing the leader as an activist, and groups as the best decision makers, is more democratic, a totally appropriate shift in a world dominated by intelligent knowledge workers who, as creative class types, need to have input in order to feel fully engaged.

Why bother?

Breaking down CEO activity into four categories is undoubtedly somewhat arbitrary. It is merely an illustration of one way to divide the pie in order to make two important points (1) that a CEO is not a leader, and may not even show leadership, simply by virtue of being a CEO, even an effective one and (2) both leadership and management need to be seen as activities that anyone can undertake, that we must stop seeing them as roles or the exclusive domain of those in charge of people.

Businesses competing through rapid innovation need to move faster. To compete, they need to encourage all employees to share the load of leading and managing. They need employees to be activists as Gary Hamel rightly argues. In a more dynamic context, we need to think in terms of discrete actions instead of ongoing roles. Talk of roles conjures up images of a static pecking order appropriate to industrial age organizations.