2017

When the Leader

Becomes Larger than
the Organisation
An Essay
Influence a Leader and his leadership style has on the primary forms of
organisation.
 When the Leader Becomes Larger than the Organisation

Individual Collective
Hierarchy Hierarchy

Distributed Distributed
Individual Collective

When a Leader Becomes Larger than the Organisation

I came across the term Servant and Transformational style of Leadership that led
me to study more about various leadership styles. I realised that most of the forms of
leadership have similar characteristics and functioning style; i.e., in reality, most of
the leaders switch from one leadership style to the other, often relying on one style
that conforms to their persona. Various factors influence a leader's leadership traits;
viz. the internal environment in the form of the organisations structure, work culture,
its resources and people; the external environment comprising of the organisations
clients, vendors, associates, investors, the geography and related economy, culture,
political structures.

A Servant leader has the traits of democratic, team, facilitative (Coach), strategic,
and visionary leadership; while the Transformational leadership has an additional
feature of Cross-Cultural Leadership. Irrespective of the combination of leadership
styles a leader may practice, he faces challenges when he tends towards the
Authoritative or Laissez-Faire style of leadership.

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 When the Leader Becomes Larger than the Organisation

The term servant leader was coined in the nineteen seventies. This made me think,
about the bureaucrats, political leaders and the people in the service sector are they
not servant leaders? Then they too should have the following attributes of a servant
leader: Listener, Empath, Caring, Mindful, Persuasive, Ability to Conceptualize,
Foresight, Stewardship, and Commitment to the growth of people; Whereas,
Educators and technocrats ought to be the extension of a servant leader as
Transformational leader with the ability to inspire and promote innovation.

A Leader's primary objective is to lead the organisation in achieving its vision and
mission. Let us understand when and how a leader tends to grow larger than the
organisation. Let us focus on four primary forms of leadership based on the
organisation along with its internal and external environment.

Individual Hierarchy: The first form of leadership gives importance to the

organisations structure. The organisations hierarchical structure is to help the
organisation in achieving its objective. The organisations work culture is based on
the organisations functional hierarchy. All the systems and process are very well
defined and often quite rigid too. The Leader manages the functions through superior-
subordinate relationship, though he may address them as his colleague. The leader
defines the organisations functional objectives as his subordinates performance
targets that he uses to gauge their success in achieving the functional objectives.

Collective Hierarchy: The second form of leadership is similar to the Hierarchical

form of leadership, except that it focuses on integrating the organisations vision with
that of the community.

The leaders in these forms of leadership can be authoritative or have a transactional

approach to managing the functions. If the leader of such organisation practices
authoritative style of leadership, then all his subordinates practice it too.

Distributed Individual: The primary focus of this form of leadership is on the

clients needs and preferences (the external environment), and it reflects in the
organisation's structure. Unlike the previous two forms of leadership, the Distributed
individual form has a flexible organisational structure that can easily adapt to the
change in the clients needs and preference. It is more democratic and flexible
compared to the first two forms of leadership, yet this form leadership is not
completely de-centralised in its decision-making process.

Distributed Collective form of leadership focuses on clients needs and preferences;

unlike the distributed individual, it's completely democratic with a de-centralised form
of leadership giving a lot of freedom to its people in the decision-making process.

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 When the Leader Becomes Larger than the Organisation

These two forms of leadership support Democratic, Coach, Visionary, Strategic-

Servant form of leadership with the philosophy of empowering and inspiring its
people through a shared vision to respond to change and dynamics of the external
environment. Therefore, it effectively keeps pace with the market dynamics.

An organisation may function "for profit" or "not for profit"; in reality, it may
combine with two or more of these four forms of leadership to achieve its functional
objectives. The leader of the organisation draws the roadmap to devise the policies
and strategy to successfully achieve the functional goals; it is a perpetual leadership
function that begins with the inception of the organisation. This also becomes a major
contributor to the phrase, "Leader becoming larger than the organisation":

1. Founder Leader(s): When the leader is the founder of the organisation, then he is
the major contributor in designing the organisation's cultural ethos: principles, work
ethics in form of a framework in facilitating its functions. The advantage of being a
founder leader is the ease in making necessary changes to meet the internal and
external challenges the organisation faces while aligning its short, medium and long-
term objectives. It is not always a bed of roses for a founder leader, who has to
anticipate the future trends and dynamics to devise methods keeping pace with the
changing trends. Often, the organisations fail to take care of this need and become
obsolete.

Enterprise without a purpose The organisation and its founder leaders fail when
they embark on "an enterprise without a purpose." This means the organisation's
objective is not completely aligned with its external environment resulting in a faulty
functional framework that affects the organisation's cultural environment too. For
instance, an entrepreneur begins an enterprise with the objective of selling a consumer
product in India that is quite popular in the western countries. He devises all strategies
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 When the Leader Becomes Larger than the Organisation

to push the product into the market without the support of adequate market survey and
research to gauge the demand for such product in the local market. Anyone can guess
the fate of such an enterprise. Most of the leaders face this challenge of "enterprise
without a purpose". Lets take an example of an enterprise with a purpose: India
saw the phasing in of the era of information technology when computers were
introduced into the workplace and people resisted the change fearing that computers
would replace the workers. The organisations and individuals took adequate measures
to quell this wave of fear by making people aware of the benefits of IT in facilitating
work and IT was phased into the organisations without causing any retrenchment
casualties.

Now you may question the current trend of Artificial Intelligence and the toll it
has taken on the IT workforce. How can we justify it as an enterprise with a
purpose? It is a debatable issue that needs a clear understanding and reality check of
the impact of AI in the internal as well as the external environment of the
organisation, be it the business venture, a country- its population and economy, as
well as its global impact. Is AI mutually beneficially to the organisation using it and
the country the organisation is a part of? Does it have a positive impact on the
countrys economy, viz. generating employment; its impact on the infrastructure and
the natural resources? This holds good for the start-up business enterprise too, now
that India is experiencing a sudden spate of business-start-ups.

Let me reiterate, when the functional goals and success of any enterprise are solely
based on numbers of earning profit for profit making organisation, or of a non-profit
making organisation to achieve a specific service objective without doing the
necessary reality check to validate the objectives impact on the external environment
and the market dynamics, this results in a negative impact and proves to be an
enterprise without a purpose. We can cite the example of the.Com bubble bursting
at the beginning of the millennium. At that time, the market dynamics did not
support the .Com Bubble or Boom. The leadership of education, steel, coal and
mining, chemical, petroleum, information technology, automobile, textile, telecom,
construction, consumer products - FMCG, financial, pharmaceutical and even medical
services has fallen prey to this challenge: enterprise without a purpose The
leaders often explain any negative result of the enterprise as the cyclic effect of the
market trend and resort to statistical analysis to justify their success or failure in
framing organisational principles, policies and strategies to achieve their goals. In
fact, the leaders ignore the root cause of the failure and resort to artificial means of
change management to cure the malady. Yes, you are right, such efforts fall short of
addressing the real problem: "an enterprise without a purpose."

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 When the Leader Becomes Larger than the Organisation

You may ask, "What 'an enterprise without a purpose' got to do with a leader
becoming bigger than the organisation'?" The answer is quite simple. An
organisation with a hierarchical individual or collective form of leadership has a
centralised decision-making process. Therefore, in such an organisation, the topmost
leader influences the organisation's environment and the leader is synonymous to the
organisation. The organisation's objective is identical to that of the leader. Therefore,
the leader's beliefs and persona influence the organisation's culture. Such organisation
may not prosper in the absence of the leader, especially when the organisation does
not practice succession planning and talent potential management in sync with the
principles of the organisation's development. Such leadership often exhibits
unflinching faith in its dream project and ignores doing its reality check before
bringing it to light.

Needless to say, in a distributed individual or collective organisation that has a more

visionary and democratic approach to leadership with the de-centralised decision-
making process, it is shared leadership that makes the organisation flexible enough to
take care of any change in the external environment. Yet, it has its disadvantage; such
an organisation is well networked with the leadership taking care of the cultural
diversity, and encourages innovation and to embark on new entrepreneurial ventures,
often ignores the need for a seamless work culture that can take care of the adverse
effects of the diversity. This needs a strong team of leaders at all stages of the
organisations process and function to provide the necessary support as a backbone to
the organisation. Oh yes, Wikipedia, Red Cross are examples of such an organisation.

2. Non-Founder Leader(s):

Non-founder leaders of the Hierarchical individual or collective organisations may

tend to practice authoritative or transactional styles of leadership giving undue
importance to the traditional or conventional system and the process of the
organisation, turning a blind eye to the trends and dynamics of the external
environment. The leadership does not address them through necessary changes in the
organisation's functional framework. Non-founder leaders can also ignore to address
the change when the organisation has rigid organisational structure and it becomes a
herculean task of the leader to reform it in sync with the current market trends and
dynamics. For example, many IT companies ignored the need to integrate the talent or
potential management in its organisational framework and have with great zeal have
focused on adopting artificial intelligence.

When a dynamic non-founder leader takes charge of a hierarchical individual or

collective organisation, even with a democratic and visionary approach to bring about
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 When the Leader Becomes Larger than the Organisation

drastic changes in the organisation, he may tend to be authoritative or may appear to

be so to the people in the organisation. The leader can easily achieve this objective
through authoritative and transactional leadership and become larger than the
organisation; but, the leaders success lies in how well he is able to use the reality
check in convincing the people to the necessary changes in the organisational
framework and work culture without being authoritative. This can be a big challenge
in such organisational structure that does not encourage shared vision and people
empowerment.

In case of the Distributed individual or collective organisation, though the leadership

follows the democratic > visionary > coach > servant > transformational styles of
leadership, at times they have to be authoritative to pre-set and motivate the team to
overcome the negative influence of cultural diversity, geographical difference, to
name a few.

Mahatma Gandhi who founded Khadi Gramodyog and Cottage industry to avert the
negative impact of rampant industrialization on the indigenous art, craft and
handicraft; Ravindranath Tagore, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and Sonam Wangchuk
a founding Director of Students' Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh
(SECMOL) who led the objective of bringing the education system more closer to
reality for the learners are examples of leaders, who became larger than the
organisation.

Reference:
http://www.pinsdaddy.com/servant-leadership-in-the-modern-
workplace_ug0aP6j3NlDsvDpppysD|64we4L2O99riOqIRTe6GLFXhfEF3qbRgd*KHEdCpTbFr
37Eu6H9C9MeM52o7TMc8A/gRaXy|an5bqLFzFHg4VseGQal3lzlCQSO0hBWnlQLrjYzu62a8
xOZb4R*XkBY*jL0QD9gkueoCtRl4zNdkZcv4nqyCQKQGxvaSYg*ixce3DEoDFS1g71lUICe
XODZqMkWS1OoTSwEkn|wlQguWiuPALaIK5iuZaRAVnQimb*fQI/
al
http://steppinguptraining.co.uk/leadership/level-5-award-certificate-in-leadership/

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weekly_L*5xK1whE5BQJhldAAQ5Z|btNpBXjE6u|zhLcU|vIhBLc93IwpQh4jO5eIAPcUmzC1
HZhOLhWaz6ljrdaj7M0w/1d5RGBIx8pvp*hms4hu1JYjcxq|pwbvvOmDWvgD8ZTdNSca6z4s5
aqpX39fagsKUVcWWVoS3BSJKFKwFaLAydEDoiIoRiu8GI*Zo5Doks*LA58CTciOP6M*j8||
Zliqz/

http://l450v.alamy.com/450v/a2jb8j/large-group-of-secondary-school-children-looking-up-at-
the-camera-a2jb8j.jpg

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