Enhancing workplace harmony: The role of leadership

Effective lead­ers take personal interest in the long-term development of their employees, and they use tact and other social skills to encourage employees to achieve their best. It is not about being ‘nice’ or ‘un­derstanding’ – it is about tapping into individual motivations in the interest of furthering organisation­al goals. In a groundbreaking article in the early 1960s, W C Prentice rejected the notion of leadership as the exercise of power and force or the possession of extraordinary analytical skills. Prentice defined leadership as “The accomplishment of a goal through the direction of human assistants; and a successful leader as one who can understand people’s motivations and enlist employee participation in a way that marries individual needs and interests to the group’s purpose.” He called for democratic leadership that gives employees opportunities to learn and grow – without creat­ing anarchy.

Problems and illusions

Rudimentary forms of leader­ship rely solely on single source of satisfaction such as monetary rewards or the alleviation of fears about various kinds of insecurity. The task is adhered to because following orders will lead to a secured job and deviation will lead to unemployment.

Arguably, such forms of motiva­tion are effective within limits. In a mechanical way they do attach the worker’s self-interest to the interest of the employer or group. But no one can doubt the weakness of such simple techniques. “Human beings are not machines with a single set of push buttons. When their complex responses to love, prestige, independence, achieve­ment and group membership are not recognized on the job, they perform at best as robots who bring far less than their maximum efficiency to the task, and at worst as rebellious slaves who conscious­ly or unconsciously sabotage the activities they are supposed to be furthering.”

Relations with people

When leaders succeed it will be because they have learned two basic lessons: people are complex, and people are different. Human beings respond not only to the traditional carrot and stick but also to ambition, patriotism, love of the good and the beautiful, boredom, self-doubt, and many more dimen­sions and patterns of thought and feeling that make them ‘Homo Sapiens.’ But the strength and importance of these interests are not the same for every worker, nor is the degree to which they can be satisfied in their job.

To the extent that the leader’s circumstances and skill permit them to respond to such individual patterns, they will be better able to create genuinely intrinsic interest in the work that they are charged with getting done. And in the final analysis the ideal organization should have workers at every level reporting to someone whose span of authority is small enough to en­able them know as human beings those who report to them.

Pitfalls of perception

For followers to recognise their leader as she really is may be as difficult as it is for her to under­stand them completely. Some of the worst difficulties in rela­tionships between superiors and subordinates come from misper­ceiving reality. So much of what we understand in the world around us is coloured by the conceptions and prejudices we start with. Our view of our employer or superior may be so coloured by expectations based on the behaviour of other bosses that facts may not appear in the same way to her and to us. Many failures in leadership can be traced to oversimplified misper­ceptions on the part of the worker or to failures of the superior to recognize the context or frame of reference within which the subor­dinate will understand managerial actions.

In business, a worker may perceive an offer of increased authority as a dangerous removal from the safety of assured, through gradual, promotion. A change in channels of authority or reporting, no matter how valuable in increas­ing efficiency, may be thought of a personal challenge or affront. The introduction of labour-saving pro­cess may be perceived as a threat to one’s job. A new fringe benefit may be regarded as an excuse not to pay higher salaries, and so on.

Too often, the superior is entire­ly unprepared for these interpreta­tions, and they seem to her stupid, dishonest, or perverse – or all three. But the successful leader will have prepared for such responses. She will have known that many of her workers have been brought up to consider their employers as their natural enemies, and that habit has made it a second nature for them to ‘act like an employee’ in this respect and always to be suspicious of otherwise friendly overtures from above.

Troubles of a

subordinate

Another and still subtle factor may intervene between employer and employee – a factor that will be recognised and dealt with by successful business leaders. That factor is the psychological difficulty of being a subordinate. It is not easy to be a subordinate. “If I take orders from another, it limits the scope of my independent decision and judgment; certain areas are established within which I do what the superior wishes instead of what I wish. To accept such a role without friction or rebellion, I must find my reflection of some form of order that goes beyond my own personal situation, or perhaps find that the balance of dependence and independence actually suits my needs. These two possibilities lead to different practical consequenc­es.”

For one thing, it is harder to take orders from one who we do not consider in some sense superior. It is true one of the saddest failures in practical leadership may be ex­ecutives who stoop so low in social interactions with subordinates that they lose all respect and destroy any vestiges of awe employees had for them, and therefore question why they should take orders from such executives. An understanding leader will not let their workers think that they consider them as inferiors, but they may be wise to maintain a kind of psychological distance that permits them to ac­cept authority without resentment.

To make dependence tolerable, the lines must be clearly drawn between those decisions that are the prerogative of the superior and those that can be made by or in consultation with the subordinate. Once those lines have been drawn, it is essential not to transgress them any more often than is absolutely necessary. Ideally, the subordi­nate should have an area within which he is free to operate without anyone looking over his shoulder. The superior should clarify the goals and perhaps suggest alterna­tive ways of achieving them, but the subordinate should feel free to make the necessary choices.

Goals in development

No decision is worth the name unless it involves the balancing of risks and rewards. Mistakes are inevitable. What we must expect of employees is that they learn from their mistakes, not that thy never make them. It should be the manager’s concern to watch the long-term growth of direct reports and to see that they learn, and their success increasingly outweigh their failures.

This concept of long-run growth is a vital part of leadership. Each person must be permitted to know that their role in the group is subject to development and that the development of that role is limited only by their contributions. Especially subordinates must see the leader as the person most interested in and helpful towards their growth.

In the final resort, an executive must use skills and human insight, as does an orchestra leader – to capture individual satisfactions in common enterprise and to create fulfillment that holds subordinates on their part. A leader’s job is to provide recognition of roles and functions within the group that will permit each member to satisfy and fulfill some major motive or interest.

BY CAPT SAM ADDAIH (RTD)