Businesses Need to Focus on "Everyday Leaders" to Succeed

Newswise — For businesses to succeed and re-establish public trust, organizations need to develop the very people they've long overlooked " the middle managers.

According to Vicki TenHaken, visiting associate professor of management at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, the celebration of "larger-than-life charismatic Leaders, with a capital 'L'" during the 1980s and 90s has, with disastrous results, diminished emphasis on the more important role played by those who contribute quietly every day.

"This focus on the Leader is at least a partial cause of the lack of trust we are witnessing in our business organizations today," she writes in "Everyday Leaders," an article published May 2003 in the International Economics & Business Research Journal. "Leaders believe they must behave in some larger than life way. With the expectation that they must see things the rest of us do not, they make riskier and riskier decisions, desperate to prove they deserve the role."

It hasn't helped, she notes, that managers in turn were denigrated in the CEO-enamored era. For example, in his best-selling 1989 book On Becoming a Leader, Warren Bennis used descriptions like "The manager is a copy; they leader is an original" ; "The manager imitates; the leader originates" : and "The manager accepts the status quo; the leader challenges it."

"Given these types of views, is it any wonder no one wanted to be considered a mere manager?" asks TenHaken. "Are we surprised that the leaders of our organizations aspire to be 'charismatic visionaries?'"

TenHaken says this unflattering portrayal of managers hid a crucial truth: that the mid-level "everyday leaders" are key in a variety of ways.

"The efforts of everyday leaders may not be noticed, but they matter," she says. "They matter because it is the everyday leaders who keep our companies running."

But priorities are changing. USA Today ran a cover story this month on managers' realization that "B Players" hold the cards to long-term success. In the past year, Fortune magazine announced that the "era of the dominant CEO died a quick and painful death" and a BusinessWeek search for leaders who had built solid companies with superior performance found none who were visionary recent recruits; instead they had a passion for their firms and had led their companies an average of 18 years.

"Perhaps now that we've seen the problems resulting from this Leader-focused approach to running our organizations, we can return to a more reasonable approach " one that is actually attainable by mere mortals " where many are called upon to be good, competent, everyday leaders," TenHaken says. "If we begin focus on developing the skills and characters of these everyday leaders, our organizations will not only be more successful, but surely more trusted than they are today."