A magazine of forecasts, trends, and ideas about the future
Forecasts for the Next 25 Years
THE FUTURIST, September-October 2002
Page 3.There's No Generalist Ladder to Leadership
Generalists may start as scientists or MBAs or lawyers or union organizers or civil servants or artists, or mobilizers of feminist or ethnic groups, or citizen-advocates of a particular cause. They may be managers who (as a committee of the International City Management Association put it) know how to "lead while being led." They may be judges who know that the law has to be molded to reflect both technological change and public opinion. There is actually no generalist ladder to leadership. Every young person starts as a specialist in something, but a rapidly growing minority of them, by accident or motivation or both, graduate into generalist leadership.They are, with exceptions to be sure, men and women who are not preoccupied with formal power or position, or with getting their faces on television or their names in the newspapers. They are people whose concern exceeds their confusion and may even preempt their egos, because they get busy and inventive doing something that hasn't been done before-and have fun doing it. But what makes them the shock troops of the get-it-all-together profession is, above all, their overriding concern for the general outcome of their efforts.
Some practicing generalists are legislators and editorial writers and other situation-as-a-whole people whose administrative responsibilities are comparatively light. But most of them are not only leaders but executives in business, government, or the independent sector-- that is, people who feel the need not only to point the way to the future, but also to figure out how to get there.
We who practice as executive leaders come in all sizes and shapes, pursue a wide variety of goals and purposes, and operate in many modes. But each of us is responsible for his or her behavior and decisions to people in general.
The Road to Leadership
If you regard yourself as a leader or have aspirations in that direction, I can with some confidence trace your career.
First you pick a specialty: legal services or health care, engineering or economics, accounting or architecture, production management or consumer advocacy, weaving or welding, brainwork or manual skill or some combination of the two. As you rise in your chosen field, you find yourself drawn into broader supervisory, managerial assignments, and then into the generalist role, either in your own right or (much more likely, at least at first) as staff assistant to a leader whose preoccupation with the whole you are expected to share.
You may be a clarifier, definer, critic, or teacher. Or you may be an implementer, manager, problem solver who will "redesign existing institutions or invent new ones, create coalitions and fight off the people who don't want the problem solved," as the late John W. Gardner put it. Or again, you may be counted among the "mobilizers" who "catalyze the social morale, help people know what they can be at their best, and nurture a workable level of unity." You may even come to be effective in all three roles; a good many people are.
This broader role requires a capacity for integrative thinking you didn't learn in school, "people skills" that were not graded and scored earlier in life, attitudes that differ in fundamental ways from those that made you a rising young specialist. Graduating from successful specialist to generalist leader is a wrenching, demanding, sometimes traumatic change of life.
As you shift gears, you will already have had a good deal of practice getting around in, and getting around, large-scale bureaucracies: foiling the personnel classification system, outwitting the budgeteers, hoodwinking the organization analysts, suffering the auditors, and even getting some better furniture for your office. You will also have learned, if you are considered a promising "comer," that despite those pyramidal organization charts, the real world of work consists of mostly horizontal relationships. Most people you see from day to day don't work for you, and you don't work for them. You work together, even if that isn't the way it looks on the chart.
You will thus already have explored in action the leadership of equals, and tried to get things done in consensual systems-learning, for example, that overt confrontation is more likely to produce resistance than results. This environment will also have required you to cultivate the suasive arts, to learn the constructive uses of ambiguity, to develop the self-restraint not to cross bridges until you come to them, and to practice such conventions of committee work as introducing your personal views by attributing them to others ("What I hear you all saying is...").
The geometry and gimmickry of bureaucratic behavior are sometimes taught as "business management" or "public administration," or even as "advanced management." They are, indeed, essential survival skills in societies full of public and private bureaucracies. The bird that never learns to get around in its environment-that is, to fly-will never go far. But the critical dimension of leadership, and the centerpiece of education for leadership, is not the technology of office work and committee sitting. That's the easy part. The hard part is organizing your mind for the analysis and projection of breadth.
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