Why you can lead with and without authority
In part 2 of this blog post series, I defined leadership as an activity: Leadership means mobilizing people to take on and make progress on their collective challenges. If you think of leadership as an activity, it becomes clear that you can lead both when you have a lot of authority in a group and when you have very little authority. What is also clear is that both situations have advantages and disadvantages.
If I have a lot of formal authority, then I might be the CEO, the team lead, the facilitator, or even the president or chancellor.
Leading from a formal authority role brings with it certain advantages, the most important being attention and resources: When I invite people to a meeting, they show up; when I give a speech, they listen. Therefore, I have opportunities to draw attention to collective problems. Furthermore, I am more likely to have the resources to engage people in problem solving and learning. For example, I can set up working groups for my staff to work our problem together.
The big disadvantage to leading from such an authority role is that people expect me, their boss, to solve their problems – and not to give the work back to them. “That's why you're the boss,“ they’ll tell me. If I expect people to develop new capacities, to endure losses, or question privileges, many will not be pleased. To exercise leadership as “the boss” is therefore a balancing act between meeting and disappointing expectations.
In my work as an executive coach and trainer, I often encounter the assumption that leadership is only possible from a formal authority role – or at least, that that makes leadership much easier. I’d like to vehemently disagree with that! Leadership is very much possible from a position of low formal authority. Typical examples of such roles are: The activist, the whistleblower, or – most mundanely – the new hire or intern.
First, the disadvantages:
I have little attention and limited or no resources.
Few people listen to me.
Maybe I'll even be dismissed as a troublemaker.
When I make suggestions, they’ll tell me it’s all be tried before.
Discouraged? You shouldn't be, because your situation also has advantages for leadership:
Low formal authority means that people do not expect you to solve their problems. This can make it much easier to bring up a sore subject.
At the same time, you’re likely to have fewer responsibilities (for example, for the company's success or for staff satisfaction) and therefore less to lose. This allows you jester’s license – using it requires courage, of course, but offers many possibilities.
Think of climate change: Here, we see leadership coming from both Greta Thunberg (with very little formal authority), and Angela Merkel (with high formal authority). At the Digital UN climate summit in December 2020, Chancellor Merkel pledged 500 million Euros for climate protection measures in poorer countries and she declared that Germany will uphold its commitment to doubling its climate contributions. Despite having little formal authority, Greta Thunberg used the attention she’s gained to criticize the summit's results on Twitter: "Atthe Climate Ambition Summit, leaders celebrate their shameless loopholes, empty words, inadequate long-distance goals, and the robbery of current and future living conditions – and they call it ’ambition.’ There are no climate leaders. The only ones who can change that are you and I. Together.”
Let’s turn away from world politics and towards mundane worklife: What does leadership with little formal authority look like in the corporate world?
An example from my company, KONU: Fortunately, our team is growing. This means that staff are frequently working together for the first time on a client project. One of our partners recently set up a weekly team meeting. So far so good. What would often happen next is that the formal authorities decide how the meeting will be run and what will be discussed. Not so with us. During meeting number two, three staff came forward asking to share a challenge they recently encountered: Working on a client project, there’s been some internal friction: Some staff felt they’d done too little to prepare a workshop, especially in light of the many innovations it contained. Others felt it had gone great: The workshop went well, and the client was happy. Debriefing their experience, the staff felt that what they were experiencing was symptomatic for our growing company – and therefore worth delving into more deeply at the staff meeting. This took courage: In many workplaces, disagreement is something you’d hide – particularly from authorities – and not something you’d purposefully try to shine a light. Through that courage, the staff were able to foster organizational learning – and also set a standard for what we discuss in our team meeting (namely, the uncomfortably!).
As you can see, everyone can lead! Give it a try!