Leadership is often portrayed as a glorious and heroic pursuit, where the manager is a font of knowledge and runs the team with the deft touch of a quarterback running the two-minute drill. But the truth is often much less sexy and more humble than that. In a recent article, management guru and BusinessWeek contributor Marshall Goldsmith addresses the apparent contradictions of leadership through the story of a high-level manager at big-name company whom he once coached.
As Goldsmith tells it, this manager dove headfirst into his coaching program, setting up an involved project management system and involving his team very closely in the process. Goldsmith recounts that the amount of time he spent coaching this manager was inversely proportional to his improvement, which led to a rethinking of his role as a coach.
Contrary to the popular view of the leader as an expert, an agent of change and the key to a team’s success, it became clearer to Goldsmith that it is really more about the team. Putting too much faith in one person, a coach or manager, to come in and cure all your ills is folly. It is the people doing the work that must drive change and ultimately provide the results. Goldsmith’s article serves as a reminder that bringing in an expert or stepping in as a manager is largely a matter of breaking the inertia and starting the team along the road to change. It’s about getting a commitment from the members of the team, getting them excited about a task and then facilitating the completion of that task. The lesson being that staying out of the spotlight will ultimately bring you the glory.
