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James O’Toole Leading Change: The Argument for Values-Based Leadership Buy this title or join our Management Literature Club and have a chance to GET IT FREE! |
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by Robert Morris It is extremely difficult to overcome what James O’Toole calls “the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom.” In Leading Change (published by Jossey-Bass). O’Toole explains why. Organizations and their leaders must not simply change to accommodate new realities; they must transform themselves effectively. According to O’Toole, “today’s executives believe they are struggling with an unprecedented leadership challenge to create internal strategic unity within a chaotic external environment....Executives know what needs to be done and even how to do it. Nonetheless, they are unable to lead change effectively. Explaining the sources of this paradox and offering a practical way to resolve it are the purposes of this book.” Leading Change is divided into two parts within which O’Toole addresses three related questions: For O’Toole, values-based leadership is provided by those who he calls “Rushmoreans”: They possess courage, authenticity, integrity, vision, passion, conviction, and persistence. To vary degrees, “Rushmoreans” listen to others, encourage dissenting opinion among their closest advisers, grant ample authority to their subordinates, and lead by example rather than by power, manipulation, or coercion. Granted, history produces very few Washingtons, Jeffersons, Lincolns, and Roosevelts. Nonetheless, according to O’Toole, there is much of value to learned from them by those who struggle with an unprecedented leadership challenge to create internal strategic unity within a chaotic external environment. In Part One, O’Toole explains why values-based leadership is more effective than any other, notably “tough” or “amoral” leadership which is frequently (and inaccurately) characterized as being “realistic.” For O’Toole, democratic leadership “is not about voting; it is about the democratic value of inclusion. There is nothing oxymoronic, chaotic, or ineffective about leadership based on that moral principle.” In Part Two, O’Toole shifts his attention to followers in order to discover why we all resist change that would be in our self-interest to embrace, and, why followers so often resist the leadership they claim to crave. For O’Toole, Shakespeare had it right when explaining resistance to change: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars/But in ourselves.” In Chapter 7, O’Toole briefly examines 33 of the most popular hypotheses concerning the root causes of change. They include the usual suspects: homeostasis (i.e. change is unnatural), stare decisis (i.e. status quo is preferable), inertia (i.e. difficulty of altering course), self-interest (i.e. What’s in it for me?), and fear (i.e. of unknown). Of course, there are exceptions to each of the 33; also, all 33 are never present in the same situation; moreover, no single one can totally account for all forms of resistance to change. Peter Drucker asks a very important question: “What is the environment ready for? One has to do it [i.e. seek change] at the right time.” Hence the importance of timing as well as having all of the Rushmorean values. But together, they are still insufficient if (for whatever reasons) there are no followers. In Chapter 9, O’Toole discusses J. Edwards Deming in order to illustrate this “curious and troubling aspect of human behavior”: reasonable men and women often resist acting on social knowledge which will advance their collective self-interest.” How ironic that Deming’s managerial methods that were so effective in helping to defeat the Japanese during World War II were then rejected by American industry but refined and employed by the Japanese to win world markets and then, and only then, were Deming and his managerial methods embraced by American industry in desperation to learn the “secrets of Japanese management.” In Chapter 10, O’Toole shifts his attention to Robert Owen (1771-1858) whose “paternalistic” treatment of his own employees earned an immense personal fortune for him but, meanwhile, he was widely reviled for mollycoddling the workforce (and thus not creating even greater profits) or for being a manipulative capitalist “in the government’s pay.” Alas, as O’Toole notes, “Owen never learned how to overcome the deeply rooted resistance to change, a skill that is a prime characteristic of great moral leadership.” As a result, “humanity suffered for nearly a century from that singularly consequential flaw of one of history’s gentlest souls.” In the final two chapters of Leading Change, O’Toole examines what he calls “the despotism of custom” and “the ideology of comfort.” Anyone in any organization (regardless of size or nature) who has attempted to be a change leader is already familiar with both. The question remains, how to overcome them? Everything that precedes these two final chapters creates a frame-of-reference within which O’Toole correlates and galvanizes his key points. Obviously, he fully understands why there is such great resistance to change. Also, he fully understands why visionaries such as Robert Owen fail to attract the support they need. He concludes this brilliant book with a rejection of leadership by command, manipulation, or paternalism...insisting once again that only value-based leadership can be both moral and effective. “Once a leader makes that commitment, all the other pieces will eventually fall into place, bit by bit.” Order Leading Change here. Find the full list of Robert Morris's Business Nuggets featured by Eastbook.com here.
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