LEADING THE WAY
by REGINALD DUMAS

EXTRACTS FROM AN ADDRESS TO THE ROTARY CLUB OF TOBAGO
Grafton Beach Resort, Saturday, August 26, 2006

I have been asked to speak on the subject “Lead the way”, your theme for 2006/7. Leadership is an issue which is very much in the news today, and I myself touched on it in a recent series of newspaper articles on the Tobago House of Assembly.

Warren Bennis, who was once President of the University of Cincinnati, has some interesting definitions of leadership that I’d like to share with you.

First, he says, a leader must lead, not manage. There is an important difference, he adds, because “many an institution is very well managed and very poorly led. It may excel in the ability to handle each day’s routine inputs yet may never ask whether the routine should be done at all.” He makes this distinction between leaders and managers: “leaders are people who do the right thing; managers are people who do things right.”

He charges that US organisations are “underled and overmanaged. They do not pay enough attention to doing the right thing, while they pay too much attention to doing things right.” In the case of companies like Enron and Worldcom and Tyco, it is clear that they did neither.

Where Trinidad and Tobago is concerned, this is something I’ve talked and written about for years without noticeable success. To do something efficiently is not by any means the same as doing it effectively.

To make things worse, we have many micromanagers at all levels of our society who set policy by vaps, if they set it at all, who actually boast about their ability and willingness to micromanage, as if micromanagement is a virtue, and who then happily blame others who are understandably unable to follow their erratic patterns of thought and behaviour. Indeed, you have the distinct impression that the erraticism is deliberate, because in that way they create confusion and thus retain control of the particular situation. This brings me to Bennis’ second point.

He says, and I quote, “Leaders must create for their institutions clear-cut and reasonable goals based on advice from all elements of the community. They must be allowed to proceed toward those goals without being crippled by bureaucratic machinery that saps their strength, energy and initiative. They must be allowed to take risks, to embrace error, to use their creativity to the hilt and encourage those who work with them to use theirs.”

From that quotation, I extract two points only for our purpose tonight. The first is the notion of receiving “advice from all elements of the community.” To the best of your knowledge, ladies and gentlemen, how many so-called “political leaders” in this country seek advice from all elements of the community and act thereon? For instance, on what basis does one draft a Constitution for a country? After wide consultation and exchanges with the communities to ascertain their views of society? Or does one sit in cloistered intellectualism to produce a document which is then handed down from the mountain top (or even higher, if what we have been experiencing in this country is a good guide) to us poor minions below to read and inwardly digest with enthusiasm and gratitude?

The second point I’d like to extract from the Bennis quotation is the notion of leaders encouraging those who work with them to use their creativity. In small societies like ours, to the contrary, leaders, not only in politics, usually do their best to discourage creativity and independent thought. They see such behaviour as threatening, even subversive, and what you often hear from them about someone who has dared to be constructively critical is “Like he want mih wuk. Ah go have to deal wit’ ‘im.” People with such a low level of self-confidence and self-esteem, which is what we have all around us in this society, are not serious leaders. They may hold the number one position in a hierarchy, but they are not leadership material. And, I firmly believe, never will be.

Bennis says that after several years of observations of, and conversations with, 90 of what he calls “the most effective, successful leaders in the (USA), 60 from corporations and 30 from the public sector”, he defined four qualities that were evident to some degree in every one of them. Here the concept of management comes up again, but it is management of a different kind. The four qualities found by Bennis were management of attention, management of meaning, management of trust, and management of self.

Management of attention comes through “a set of intentions or a vision, not in a mystical or religious sense but in the sense of outcome, goal or directions.” I leave it to you to decide whether a Vision 2020 (which, by the way, I first heard of many years ago from Malaysia) represents such a management of attention by bringing us to a place we have not been before.

Management of meaning is the communication of the leader’s vision so as to persuade people to buy into that vision.

Management of trust is getting people to count on you, to identify you with consistency and focus, even when they disagree with you. A few minutes ago I spoke of people who shift positions frequently to keep you off-balance in the pursuit of gaining or retaining control. Such persons do not inspire trust, and are therefore viewed with reserve and wariness by those with whom they have to interact.

Management of self means knowing your skills and deploying them effectively. If this quality is absent, or deficient, leaders can do more harm than good.

For their part, Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman, in their book “In search of excellence”, which drew lessons from America’s best-run companies, give several facets of leadership. I won’t list them all for you this evening, but I’ll set out some you can easily recognise.

Leadership is patient. It is meticulously shifting the attention of the institution through the mundane language of management systems. It is altering agendas so that new priorities get enough attention (and I take it that such priorities would not normally include sports complexes and dog shows). It is being visible when things are going awry, and invisible when they are working well. It is listening carefully much of the time. And it is being tough when necessary – it’s nice to be liked, but the leader who wants everyone to like him is not a good leader. If everyone likes you, you’re operating at the level of the lowest common denominator, and you’re being neither efficient nor effective. The irony is that in trying to be nice to everyone you end up being considered by the very people you’re trying to please as nice, yes, but also as hopelessly indecisive.

The leadership that Peters and Waterman talk about, ladies and gentlemen, is usually referred to as “transitional leadership”, that is, the necessary activities of the leader that take up most of his or her day. But there is another form of leadership called “transforming leadership”, which, according to James McGregor Burns in his book “Leadership”, “occurs when one or more persons engage with others in such a way that leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality.” The transforming leader is the value shaper, the exemplar, the pathfinder.

I spoke earlier in my remarks about leaders in small societies like ours. But it isn’t only a question of size. Our society is further complicated by race, religion, and politics which reflect racial divisions and, as we’ve seen recently, religious affiliations as well. In addition, there is the physical separation of islands, and the rôle of cultural differences.

Effective leadership is such a scenario demands an overall understanding of history, geography, psychology, etc that, at least at the political level, has not been satisfactorily apparent these last 50 years. Experts in the ways of one island generally fail to grasp the realities of the other island, assuming that the other island is simply an extension of theirs, and that all that is therefore needed is a projection of their thoughts and decisions and policies across the water. To this day it has not worked, and the penny still hasn’t dropped.

An editorial two weeks ago in the UK publication the Guardian Weekly criticised the British Prime Minister’s policies on the Middle East. It said, “Like a man who sets fire to his house and then discusses the flames, Tony Blair has a habit of drawing attention to his failures by analysing them. (In a recent speech he) described (the Middle East as) a region ablaze with conflict without recognising his rôle as one of the arsonists.” The editorial went on to say that Blair “appears to be driven by a personal obsession with leadership.” And it added: “Sometimes listening is better than leading.”

There, ladies and gentlemen, lies one of the most profound problems of leadership: the fusion of leadership with the leader. The Guardian Weekly editorial does not address the point, but in fact listening is a crucial part of good leadership; it is not one or the other, and you will recall what I quoted from Peters and Waterman a few minutes ago, that good leadership means listening carefully much of the time.

What has happened throughout the world, and it is particularly marked in small societies where space at the top is severely limited, is that the concept of leadership has been subsumed into the personality and views of the leader. No longer is there consultation with, and advice from, the communities. No longer is there careful, or any, consideration of views that may not be wholly in accord with the leader’s.

Rather, there now emerges the noble leader, frequently claiming righteousness and the support of God, who has been persuaded of his omniscience by the self-seekers around him, and who now seeks to persuade the rest of us that he knows and will do what is best for us, and that we should therefore unquestioningly entrust him with our fate and our future. The arsonist wouldn’t recognise the fire if he suffered third-degree burns from it; the Blair factor rules. This, ladies and gentlemen, is not leadership. It is an unrelenting quest to hold or obtain personal power, with scant regard for truth, logic, common sense and reality.

August 26, 2006                               Reginald Dumas