I recently had a conversation with a very good friend who related a story of a chance meeting he had shortly after the Vietnam War with someone during a long airplane trip back from Asia. The individual that he sat next to was in the military and was involved with biological research. My friend eventually asked a question pertaining to how the effectiveness of biological weapons was determined. The answer surprised him. It wasn’t the mortality rate that his seatmate cited. It was the receptivity of the environment to the particular pathogen that would be introduced. The environment’s ability to support and grow the pathogen was the key to determining the pathogen’s effectiveness.
Results in an organization emerge in direct correlation to the aspects of the environment that most nurture them. Similar to my friend’s airplane conversation, think in terms of disease resulting from bacteria or virus growth in an organism. If the “environment” within the organism (the health of and relationships amongst the various organs, systems, and bodily functions) is not conducive to a noxious bacteria or virus taking root and growing the organism will remain free of the disease – which may be thought of as the “result” called good health (or profitability for a company). Similarly, disease can be thought of as simply a result that is directly correlated to the receptivity of the organism’s “environment” to support the growth of a particularly noxious bacteria or virus (think of a disengaged workforce where fear is a chief motivational tool and you’ll likely find poor product or service quality). In nature bacteria and viruses of all kinds are always present – and they don’t always take root and grow. The receptivity (or not) of the environment is the key.
Looked at this way, leadership is an outward facing activity. Outward in the sense that an effective leader is continuously attending to their environment – the “space” that they and their organization occupies that makes certain results likely.
As a leader, I need to attend to defining the space in which I move and the environments on which I most want to have influence. I do this not by managing tasks but by focusing on the type and quality of the interconnected relationship that are required to produce the results I desire. Leadership is about defining space; management is about the execution of tasks.
This gives rise to two unorthodox claims: To effectively look outward an effective leader cannot be preoccupied with task accomplishment. For that matter, it is also unwise for leadership (as an activity) to be unduly focused on any particular result. Results are simply a metric that indicates what the environment is designed to produce. Therefore, if I as a leader am not getting the results I want the place to look is to the type and quality of the myriad interconnected relationship within our organizational environmental “space”.
