My partner Brooke Bovo and I had the pleasure and honor of leading a series of seminars at the recent National Property Management Association's Annual Education Seminar (NPMA.) Our experience there reinforced our long-held belief that “leadership” is often too narrowly defined in corporations. The most productive organizations find a way to embed elements of leadership in every position, at every level.

Leading well in the absence of authority is a highly productive form of leadership.

The members of the NPMA are asset managers who work for a range of high-powered organizations: Boeing, Raytheon, the Department of Defence, Northrup Grumman, among others. Others work for the various contractors who support and collaborate with these large entities. These managers have a key mission: Maintain the quality and readiness of the expensive inventories (equipment, buildings, land) these organizations use to fulfill their contracts.

The big issue the NPMA asked our team to address focused on the key issue these managers face:

--They are highly skilled technically, which they may not get credit for.
--They have far more responsibility that authority.
--They struggle to “get a seat at the table” when decisions are made about the sourcing and disposition of the inventory they manage.
--They fight for resources to do their job properly.

Does this sound familiar? Are there people in your organization that struggle with more responsibility than authority? Do your chains of command properly reflect where decisions should be made today (not ten years ago?)

Changing personal mindsets is the place to start.

The NPMA tasked us with sharpening “people management skills” to complement their members' high level of technical skills, so that they can start to build better bridges to all their collaborative partners. We had only 45 minutes per session, so we focused on simple tools as a foundation for building interactive skills:

--Focus on behavior styles to better work with different types of people, switching the mindset from “working with difficult people” to “working with different people.” Less judging, more valuing.
--Adopt a personal commitment to be forward thinking and action-oriented, to set a standard of behavior that others can emulate. (E+R=O, for instance: Focus on what you can control, and work actively towards outcomes you prefer.)
--Choose to lead, even in the absence of authority. People seen as constructive, action-oriented, and results-focused attract followers: Leading by example gains you the chance to lead in fact.

Our work with these asset managers reinforced once again our basic tenets:

--Organizations hire great people (we met lots of them at this event.)
--These people want to contribute at a high level.
--Lack of recognized authority (“ability to act”) inhibits their full contribution to productivity.
--“People management skills” can unlock this productivity by improving mindsets at all levels about how to work together to find common ground and develop joint goals.
--HR plays the pivotal role in championing the productivity gains that come from investments in employee development.
--Formal tracking systems must be put in place to generate the evidence that senior management needs to see!

The best organizations find ways to inject leadership elements in all positions, unlocking energy and innovation that can have only one result: Improve the bottom line! We got a lot of people very excited about it at the NPMA, reinforcing our belief that you can lead the same commitment to change within your organization, even in the absence of any formal authority to do so!