1. Leading Further

or, the road to the future

If leading is the answer-what was the question? After all, do my subordinates really not know what to do? But leading seems to meet a need. What's at stake here? It's about the Future. In one form or another, leading is always oriented toward the future. That is the core of leading, its essence.

The future is not only unknown (it always has been) but increasingly uncertain. More and more, it defies calculations of probability. Hardly anybody saw 9/11 coming, the global financial crisis, Covid, the war in Ukraine, the explosive development of artificial intelligence.

Ensuring survival

Leading as we understand it here is therefore at heart care. Care is not to be confused with worry, though it does imply concern-concern for the future and concern for others. Both are ancient principles of human self-preservation. By looking ahead and taking precautions, leadership "takes care" of our ability to face the future. From this follows the purpose of leading, the key task of which is to ensure the organization's survival.

The contribution of leaders to ensuring survival assumes that they deliver benefits in excess of their cost. This stipulation is less self-evident than it may sound. It is difficult to isolate leadership from the entire process of value generation; as a "contribution margin," it is scarcely measurable. What is more, we must consider the opportunity costs that may widen the gulf between possible and actual results. Yet these costs are never given a reliable price tag. Consider, for example, employee resignations under the full cost method. We know that people join organizations but leave executives. And yet, even though qualified staff is increasingly hard to come by, the link between leadership and an employer's attractiveness continues to be underestimated.

Three distinctions follow from these reflections:

Leading vs. seniority: When we speak of leading, the causal condition is risk. Executives lead their organization to the point where it can fail-in order not to fail. They take risks because otherwise the organization has no future. They do so not only by investing capital but also as employees who administer the investors' capital. If failure was not a possibility, we would have no need of leadership.

Risk also extends to executives themselves. An executive whose leadership job is absolutely safe may be in a position of seniority but is not a leader in the emphatic sense. What is lacking is that existential, disciplining force: danger.

Leading vs. managing: In the day-to-day running of a business, the boundary between leading and managing is fluid. Though the difference is stressed here, in analogy to the zeros and ones of an algorithm, it becomes problematic only when thought of in stark terms of either/or. Managing is a craft, the craft of administering and optimizing the status quo. It works within the system. It knows things and can do things. Leading is an attitude, it looks forward, calculating what has not yet happened, does not yet exist. It works on the system. It sees things and wants things. In short: managing is about the present, leading is about the future. In most organization, it is managing that dominates. The imbalance is pointedly expressed in the complaint "overmanaged but underled."

Principal concerns vs. incidental matters: There is no such thing as ideal leadership, effective in all situations. That is why, instead of attempting a precise definition, we shall focus on effective practices that work in a world in which seemingly straightforward cause-and-effect thinking (causality) is increasingly supplanted by thinking in terms of possibility (contingency). What is clear is that we understand leadership not as incidental-as something done, time permitting, on the side-but as a principal concern, a set of tasks leading a group of people into the future.

Leading to success

By what criterion can we measure somebody's contribution to an organization's survival? The usual suspects are "performance" or "results." But performance is an imprecise term while results come up against expectations that may be disappointed. Both are therefore at best preconditions for survival. By focusing on essentials, we see that leading is paid only for one thing: success.

Success means attaining a goal agreed upon by two or more partners. It may be measurable in such concrete terms as profit, sales, return on investment, market share, delivery times, cost cutting. But it may also be seen in quantitative terms, for instance, an organization's improved image in relation to the climate of opinion surrounding it. However they define success, it is by that definition that leaders should be measured and measure themselves.

Leading is therefore not a "position." It is not a box on an organizational diagram, nor is it necessarily tied to a particular rung in the hierarchy. No doubt it's helpful for an organization to gather a high degree of leadership ability when it comes to motivating the workforce or implementing goals. One may also accept degrees of success, or consider success in relation to different timeframes (short-term vs. long-term). But there is no such thing as leadership "as such" that can be weighed against the bottom line.

Against this background, popular oppositions seem increasingly questionable. Take that between "good" and "bad" leadership. In the sober light of day, everybody has their own idea of "good" or "bad" leadership, though people may agree on certain well-worn phrases. Yet this often directs attention away from the leader's success. The same applies to "value-led" leadership: in a pluralistic society, an organization must be open to a variety of values, traditions, and attitudes. Or to "leadership style": in a society of singularities, there is no longer a single kind of employee for whom a one-size-fits-all leadership style would be appropriate.

The same is true of the "location" of leadership. It has been suggested that leadership should by definition take place from the front, others see it operating behind the team, guiding it, others still walking alongside the team, coaching and accompanying it. Some observers would even do away with leadership altogether. Taken as absolutes, all these ideas are misleading. They fall into place only once (first) we recognize that people work for one another and (second) we develop a flexible notion of leadership, one that responds situationally to circumstances and individually to colleagues. But the welfare of the whole must remain the yardstick. An organization cannot humor every special request; a balance must be struck between homogeneity and diversity.

It follows that there are only two types of leaders: successful ones and unsuccessful ones. When an executive succeeds according to the terms laid down in advance and breaks neither the law nor the moral code in the process, there is no cause to demand corrections or to criticize their "leadership style." A business does not exist to provide education or therapy. Conversely, when success fails to materialize and that seems unlikely to change in the medium term, an organization must reassign the task of leading it.

However, success also requires a factor often underestimated in business: luck. A lucky break. Not everything is under our control. Hence Napoleon's far-sighted question when interviewing prospective generals: "Monsieur, avez-vous fortune?" ("Sir, are you lucky?"). Success is thus neither entirely predictable nor entirely accidental. What we as leaders can do, however, is to want success with all our might, to stay alert and be ready when fortune smiles on us.

So much for the purpose of leadership, its why. Let us now turn to the question of the fundamental tasks it has to fulfill in order to make an organization...