Leadership and Stop Lights

Pat Townsend & Joan Gebhardt
ptownsend@qualitydigest.com

Here’s a way to think about the difference between leadership and management:

Picture yourself at the wheel of your car and yours is the twelfth or fifteenth car in line at a red light. You can see the light from where you are, but when it turns green, you don’t move. Why not? Obviously, everyone would like to see as many cars as possible make it safely through the intersection before the light turns back to red. Yet there you sit.

You stay where you are, of course, because the car in front of you hasn’t moved yet… because that driver is waiting for the next car up the line to begin to move, right? Eventually, everybody does move, and the further back folks were from the front, the more they have to hustle to try to make up lost ground--distance that was lost because they sat still while others in front of them were moving. And not many actually make it through the light.

Imagine if you and all the drivers in front of you knew and trusted each other and had driven together for long enough that you knew each other’s strengths and habits. With that kind of relationship, when you saw the light turn green from your place 12 or 15 cars back, you could move your foot from the brake pedal to the gas pedal because you would know that the same thing was happening in every car in line; you would all start up together. A lot more cars would get through the light than if you waited until you were sure the car in front of you was going to move.

What’s this got to do with leadership and management? In the first case, you wait until you’re sure about what everybody in front of you is going to do because you don’t know or trust them. This is what happens when the chain of command is populated with managers. People don’t move until they’re certain of what the person in front of them is going to do. In other words, no one moves until the people who are higher up the chain of command actually commit to an action. No trust, no chance-taking, no risk--just slow, sure, self-protective steps that will keep things looking neat and orderly but probably won’t get you up to the light before it turns red again.

In the second case, every driver knows that all of the other drivers are “on the same page” and want to accomplish the mission. This model is much like leadership: trust, knowledge, cooperation and a common, well-understood goal.

The most disheartening case, of course, is when you’re sitting at the light, you see the light turn green, and the lanes to your left and right begin to move long before yours does. In the context of this example, the lanes to your left and right are filled with leaders while you’re stuck in a line riddled with managers. To further complicate matters, many of the people stuck in your lane are trying to switch to the other lanes. Are you curious about which departments in your organization will move with the green light and which will stall while the managers wait to make safe moves? Check the migration patterns within the company. Which departments consistently gain employees from other departments? Which ones always need new employees from outside?

The next time you’re sitting in traffic--or the next time you hear a boss promise something… but the actions haven’t reached you yet--make the decision to be a leader at your level and to do your personal best to ensure that, at the least, the people behind you will all have one less reason to wonder why it’s taking so long for the good news, the green light, to reach them.

About the authors

Pat Townsend and Joan Gebhardt have written more than 200 articles and six books, including Commit to Quality (John Wiley & Sons, 1986); Quality in Action: 93 Lessons in Leadership, Participation, and Measurement (John Wiley & Sons, 1992); Five-Star Leadership: The Art and Strategy of Creating Leaders at Every Level (John Wiley & Sons, 1997); Recognition, Gratitude & Celebration (Crisp Publications, 1997); How Organizations Learn: Investigate, Identify, Institutionalize (Crisp Publications, 1999); and Quality Is Everybody's Business (CRC Press, 1999). Pat Townsend has recently re-entered the corporate world and is now dealing with “leadership.com” issues as a practitioner as well as an observer, writer and speaker. He is now chief quality officer for UICI, a diverse financial services corporation headquartered in the Dallas area. Letters to the editor regarding this column can be sent to letters@qualitydigest.com.