Boston Herald
What's in a word? Plenty, especially if it's the ``L'' word. The word ``leader'' is about as loaded as a drunken sailor, and just as unpredictable.
That's because our culture automatically confers the title ``leader'' on anyone in charge. We routinely impose leadership expectations on our elected officials and the engineers, lawyers and financial executives who run our businesses. Are they leaders? Well yes, some of them are truly outstanding leaders.
However, success as a politician, lawyer or financier does not translate easily into success as a leader. What's worse, we treat business, sports and show-business celebrities as leaders simply because they're in the news. Regrettably, we're rarely exposed to the true leadership found every day in community service, education, health care, art, small business and military circles. In recent years, the leadership cart has been well behind the celebrity horse and, well, the view has been pretty messy. We have to hope that times are changing.
I bet the CEOs of Enron, Global Crossing, ImClone, Rite Aid, Tyco and WorldCom were all praised in recent years as great leaders. So, too, the Catholic Church hierarchy has demonstrated that leadership is not simply the product of rising to the top.
Leadership means giving voice to an organization's values and vision - personally and with complete integrity. Great leaders instinctively understand this link between leadership and communication. Indeed, the two words are virtually synonymous. Great leaders embrace communication- in substance and symbolism - as the only means to give voice to their vision. Organizations get stuck in neutral or worse when their top officials choose not to personify leadership in an unrelenting campaignof communicating and modeling their values, vision and expected behaviors.
There's one problem. Managers traditionally rise to the top through narrower confines of expertise, such as finance or even religious doctrine. Then, suddenly, they are thrust into a higher calling where communicating with people openly and consistently matters far more than managing budgets, blueprints or buildings. This makes some would-be leaders uncomfortable, especially as they are required to lead increasingly diverse people who may not look, think or act like them.
There are five warning signs when executives fail to lead by communicating. Regrettably, the Catholic Church hierarchy today illustrates them all. First, communication is always diminished by arrogant, autocratic, ``My way or the highway'' approaches. The church serves as a textbook example of how communication fails when organizations turn a deaf ear to those they lead.
A colleague once said to me that we'd survey our employees over his ``dead body.'' His justification? ``We'll just have to deal with their complaints,'' he said. Is it any wonder that Bernard Cardinal Law has wanted to thwart formation of parish councils? Perhaps he's not interested in what some executives label that ``touchy-feely stuff.''
Next, the church has a pathological need for secrecy and control. To the contrary, the best executives understand that releasing power to employees, customers or even parishioners in an ongoing, two-way dialogue is the hallmark of successful leadership. Besides, great leaders know that secrets of public consequence do not remain secret for long in today's media-saturated culture.
Then there's the question of size. The church is an extreme example of what some global corporations have become today - too big, distracted and defensive to sustain meaningful, timely communication to customers, employees or investors. Successful leaders of large organizations understand this disadvantage. Sure, they have all the technology and staff that money can buy. However, they know that most of their waking hours must be spent communicating their vision - up close and personal. Indeed, the more time officials in large organizations spend managing things, the less successful they'll be at leading people.
And that's the next warning sign. When bosses say they're too busy to communicate, or do so only episodically, they're really saying they're too busy to lead. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mahatma Gandhi, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Winston Churchill and Nelson Mandela were all pretty busy, but they never missed an opportunity to communicate and personify their vision. In business, the just-retired CEO of General Electric, Jack Welch, and Southwest Airlines' Herb Kelleher found the time, as does eBay's Meg Whitman today.
Autocracy, secrecy, control, size and time all work against effective leadership. But the problem cuts even deeper. Church leaders actually seem to fear communicating. A recent exchange on NPR's ``Diane Rehm Show'' said it all. Baltimore's Cardinal Keeler started his response to a question about possible pedophilia cases in his diocese with, ``Well, Diane, we've gone past the time that has been allocated for me to speak with you, and something else is waiting for my attention.'' Cardinal, that's Baltimore, right, not Dodge City?
Top officials lose their leadership voice when they fear discussing subjects that make them uncomfortable. The church is at a clear disadvantage here, since it has declared many subjects off-limits. Remember the Reagan administration's handling of the AIDS crisis? An administration that brilliantly would talk down the Berlin Wall had a Keeler moment, unable for years to muster the vocabulary needed to address a deadly epidemic. This dereliction of duty is being repeated right now in southern Africa, where leaders are afraid to talk about their own AIDS crisis, let alone deal with it.
Remember the line from ``Cool Hand Luke'' when the prisoner (Paul Newman) is knocked to the ground? ``What we have here is a failure to communicate.'' Well, what we truly have in failing to communicate is a more destructive failure to lead. The church provides a powerful and painful lesson.
Mass leadership requires mass communication, and effective communication means rising above the arrogance, secrecy and fear that can otherwise disable leadership.
What's in a word? Plenty, especially if it's the ``L'' word. The word ``leader'' is about as loaded as a drunken sailor, and just as unpredictable.
That's because our culture automatically confers the title ``leader'' on anyone in charge. We routinely impose leadership expectations on our elected officials and the engineers, lawyers and financial executives who run our businesses. Are they leaders? Well yes, some of them are truly outstanding leaders.
However, success as a politician, lawyer or financier does not translate easily into success as a leader. What's worse, we treat business, sports and show-business celebrities as leaders simply because they're in the news. Regrettably, we're rarely exposed to the true leadership found every day in community service, education, health care, art, small business and military circles. In recent years, the leadership cart has been well behind the celebrity horse and, well, the view has been pretty messy. We have to hope that times are changing.
I bet the CEOs of Enron, Global Crossing, ImClone, Rite Aid, Tyco and WorldCom were all praised in recent years as great leaders. So, too, the Catholic Church hierarchy has demonstrated that leadership is not simply the product of rising to the top.
Leadership means giving voice to an organization's values and vision - personally and with complete integrity. Great leaders instinctively understand this link between leadership and communication. Indeed, the two words are virtually synonymous. Great leaders embrace communication- in substance and symbolism - as the only means to give voice to their vision. Organizations get stuck in neutral or worse when their top officials choose not to personify leadership in an unrelenting campaignof communicating and modeling their values, vision and expected behaviors.
There's one problem. Managers traditionally rise to the top through narrower confines of expertise, such as finance or even religious doctrine. Then, suddenly, they are thrust into a higher calling where communicating with people openly and consistently matters far more than managing budgets, blueprints or buildings. This makes some would-be leaders uncomfortable, especially as they are required to lead increasingly diverse people who may not look, think or act like them.
There are five warning signs when executives fail to lead by communicating. Regrettably, the Catholic Church hierarchy today illustrates them all. First, communication is always diminished by arrogant, autocratic, ``My way or the highway'' approaches. The church serves as a textbook example of how communication fails when organizations turn a deaf ear to those they lead.
A colleague once said to me that we'd survey our employees over his ``dead body.'' His justification? ``We'll just have to deal with their complaints,'' he said. Is it any wonder that Bernard Cardinal Law has wanted to thwart formation of parish councils? Perhaps he's not interested in what some executives label that ``touchy-feely stuff.''
Next, the church has a pathological need for secrecy and control. To the contrary, the best executives understand that releasing power to employees, customers or even parishioners in an ongoing, two-way dialogue is the hallmark of successful leadership. Besides, great leaders know that secrets of public consequence do not remain secret for long in today's media-saturated culture.
Then there's the question of size. The church is an extreme example of what some global corporations have become today - too big, distracted and defensive to sustain meaningful, timely communication to customers, employees or investors. Successful leaders of large organizations understand this disadvantage. Sure, they have all the technology and staff that money can buy. However, they know that most of their waking hours must be spent communicating their vision - up close and personal. Indeed, the more time officials in large organizations spend managing things, the less successful they'll be at leading people.
And that's the next warning sign. When bosses say they're too busy to communicate, or do so only episodically, they're really saying they're too busy to lead. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mahatma Gandhi, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Winston Churchill and Nelson Mandela were all pretty busy, but they never missed an opportunity to communicate and personify their vision. In business, the just-retired CEO of General Electric, Jack Welch, and Southwest Airlines' Herb Kelleher found the time, as does eBay's Meg Whitman today.
Autocracy, secrecy, control, size and time all work against effective leadership. But the problem cuts even deeper. Church leaders actually seem to fear communicating. A recent exchange on NPR's ``Diane Rehm Show'' said it all. Baltimore's Cardinal Keeler started his response to a question about possible pedophilia cases in his diocese with, ``Well, Diane, we've gone past the time that has been allocated for me to speak with you, and something else is waiting for my attention.'' Cardinal, that's Baltimore, right, not Dodge City?
Top officials lose their leadership voice when they fear discussing subjects that make them uncomfortable. The church is at a clear disadvantage here, since it has declared many subjects off-limits. Remember the Reagan administration's handling of the AIDS crisis? An administration that brilliantly would talk down the Berlin Wall had a Keeler moment, unable for years to muster the vocabulary needed to address a deadly epidemic. This dereliction of duty is being repeated right now in southern Africa, where leaders are afraid to talk about their own AIDS crisis, let alone deal with it.
Remember the line from ``Cool Hand Luke'' when the prisoner (Paul Newman) is knocked to the ground? ``What we have here is a failure to communicate.'' Well, what we truly have in failing to communicate is a more destructive failure to lead. The church provides a powerful and painful lesson.
Mass leadership requires mass communication, and effective communication means rising above the arrogance, secrecy and fear that can otherwise disable leadership.