On Leadership, Governance, and Language
Not only did Virgil add ANOTHER great comment to my response, Jeff De Cagna has also joined in the discussion, responding to Virgil’s comment about “ungovernance.” There’s a lot to talk about among all these posts and comments, so please read them and chime in, dear readers.
Let me try to summarize a bit. In my post about vanilla leadership competencies, I echoed a point from an HBR article that says we focus too much on developing individual leaders and not enough on develop system-wide leadership. Virgil’s response had several points: (1) we need to develop individual leaders earlier on in their engagement; (2) we need to prepare them to lead via groups and committees, rather than as powerful individuals; and (3) the governance structure IS leadership because that’s where decision making and fiduciary responsibility lie.
I responded in the next post about the group/individual piece, pushing back a bit, suggesting that even individualistic types had to work in groups to get to the top of their industry. Virgil’s second comment points out that certain industries are known for more individualistic control than others. Point taken, although I personally think the trend overall is moving away from this. The book, X-Teams, that I am reading right now, has some interesting things to say about that, by the way. Honestly, Virgil, I don’t hold up your examples—academia and government—as “best practices” for leadership and management. But Virgil also provides a list of different “types” of volunteer leaders and what motivates them. I’d be curious to hear other’s reactions to that.
And Jeff’s post respond’s to Virgil’s post about governance (and ungovernance). I, too, would push back on the specific phrase Virgil used: “governance is just another term for leadership.” I agree that governance is about decision making, and that leadership involves decision making, but leadership is much more than that. I agree, Virgil, as Jeff did, that you have to have a system at the top for decision making and responsibility, but I think we are fooling ourselves into believing that all the decisions and responsibility lie there. Or even most of them. One of my takeaways from Jeff’s ungovernance session in Chicago was that traditional governance systems fail us because they are based on assumptions about power and control that are no longer valid (that is, they place those things too much at the top). There is definitely power and control at the top, just not as much as we think. My understanding of the “ungovernance” concept is that we need to create a governance system that is more in line with the way the world works. The problem is the term “governance” has a built-in bias towards control and exercise of power, so we need a new term. We just don’t have one yet. Language really does matter.
2 Comments
Lisa Junker
Jamie says above: “I responded in the next post about the group/individual piece, pushing back a bit, suggesting that even individualistic types had to work in groups to get to the top of their industry. Virgil’s second comment points out that certain industries are known for more individualistic control than others. Point taken, although I personally think the trend overall is moving away from this.”
This is more of a question than a comment: I wonder if there’s a difference between trade and professional associations here–particularly with regard to trade associations with lots of small business members? While the trend in a lot of professions may be moving away from individualistic control, in small business, individualistic control could be the reason a person became a small business owner in the first place.
I’ve never worked at a trade association, so I may be operating from faulty assumptions. But I wonder if there’s an additional challenge there from trade association execs and the volunteers they work with.
Virgil Carter
This is a very good discussion and hopefully we can get more to chime in.
I think we are all in violent agreement, at least on the important stuff!
Comments from earlier good posts:
–Governance and leadership are challenging enough, but may become more so when your governance or leadership team has sincere and engergetic folks who haven’t played nice on teams before (academics and government types for example–ever worked with a group of wardens?), or simply don’t want to for their own reasons. These aren’t “best practices” (they may be worst practices, actually), the point being that they simply exist and are real. We have to try to constructively understand and deal with such folks.
–“Power” and “Control” when applied to governance or leadership are negative attributes–hardly the values of enlightened, much less consistently successful governance or leadership which most of us would like to emulate and practice. Of course there are those individuals for whom P & C represent why they aspired to governance and leadership. Phooey on them! Who needs em?
But at the end of the day, if a decision is needed, then someone ultimately has to make it and be accountable. If “everyone” makes the decision, who is the accountable person?
–There are certainly differences in governance and leadership between IMOs and trade organizations, just as there are with philanthropics and cause-related organizations. That’s one reason why United Way got a tainted reputation.
It’s probably not good to overly generalize, but one of the characteristics I’ve observed is that most of the board members and officers of a trade organization are the chief executives of their own organization, some of whom have huge organizations. Thus they tend to value time, performance, results and can easily and comfortably delegate association management to the CEO and staff–so long as communications are good and results are forthcoming. Not every IMO (including mine) can say that.
On the other hand, organizations of any kind that are primarily composed of sole proprietors, particularly consultants, service providers such as trainers and entreprenures are often highly energetic, ego oriented and must be strongly individualistic just to keep food on the table.
So goes the world….
PS: Ungovernance is a GOOD term, but like all new-speak it needs a definition.