(Note:  I started this back before vacation.  I’ve just returned to the series.  Sorry for the delay).

In my introductory post, 12 Vital signs of Organizational Health, I listed the 12 signs.  Here is sign #4:

A healthy organization has an effective leader/leadership team.

The jury is pretty much in — there is a shortage of good leaders in America today.  This is an across-the-board shortage.  It is a shortage in business, in education, in the public arena, the political arena.

Maybe our expectations are too high.  Maybe great leadership is simply very, very rare.  I recently read the terrific book by Paul Tough, Whatever it Takes, about remarkable leader Geoffrey Canada and his work in creating the Harlem Children’s Zone.  (read my blog post about this book here).  One of the interesting observations/questions/challenges is this:  what do you do if you don’t have a Geoffrey Canada?

When you read stories of genuinely great leaders, there is some circumstance in their life, usually a very difficult circumstance, that shaped them.  Their experience, and what they learned and gained from it, shaped their leadership as much as any reading or training or opportunity ever could.  In other words, there may not be many leaders who become great leaders because they went through a good leadership training program.  Yes, such a program can make good leaders better leaders.  They can help them know much more fully “what to do.”  But it may be that there is something inside a person that you can’t quite teach or train.

So, this is one area of organizational health that may be quite difficult to “create.”  Yet, it is tough, probably impossible, to find any organization that is great without a great leader – and a great leadership team.

Let’s start here:  watch this short video from an episode of The West Wing.  In it, Toby proclaims that a leader “grabs” the opportunity and “holds onto it.’’ In other words, a leader can’t wait to lead – a leader can’t not lead.  A leader leads because he or she is a leader.

The stories of folks who were promoted into leadership positions (supervisor, manager…) and then fail at the task are too numerous to mention.  The stories of failed leadership – CEOs who did not deliver, political office holders who could not get it done, leaders who made the wrong decisions…  the list is long, and growing.

But the stories of great leadership are truly few and far between.  And how they got to their reputation as a great leader is even more perplexing.  Consider Steve Jobs.  Was Steve Jobs a nice man?  A good husband, father?  Not in anybody’s book that I know of.  But was he a great leader?  Well, it’s tough to argue for any greater business leader in recent memory.  As Walter Isaacson put it in his biography, Steve Jobs:

Steve Jobs became the greatest business executive of our era, the one most certain to be remembered a century from now. History will place him in the pantheon right next to Edison and Ford. More than anyone else of his time, he made products that were completely innovative, combining the power of poetry and processors. With a ferocity that could make working with him as unsettling as it was inspiring, he also built the world’s most creative company.

Right next to Edison and Ford…  Pretty rare company.

But, now to the challenge.  Your company or organization needs a really good leader.  And that leader needs to be a leader who builds and nurtures and fully utilizes a capable leadership team.

It is a lot easier to describe what this looks like than to prescribe how to create such leaders.

Here are a few “thoughts” about leadership, from others (and we could add many more insightful quotes and observations):

The servant leader is servant first.  “It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first.”  The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. 
The best test is: do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society; will they benefit, or, at least, not be further deprived? 
Robert Greenleaf, Servant Leadership

“We lead by being human. We do not lead by being corporate, professional, or institutional.”
Paul G. Hawken, founder, Smith and Hawken, quoted in Encouraging the Heart by Kouzes and Posner

Every great leader has a great team above, around, and behind him or her.
Jeff Cannon & Jon Cannon, Leadership Lessons of the Navy SEALs

My job (as leader is) keeper of the team’s vision.
Phil Jackson, Eleven Rings:  The Soul of Success

Kouzes and Posner, in The Leadership Challenge (repeated in Encouraging the Heart) identify the five tasks of a leader this way.  Leaders:

• Challenge the process
• Inspire a shared vision
• Enable others to act
• Model the way
• Encourage the heart

Now, leading is not (just) managing; leading is not (just) supervising.  Leading is:

I’m Going here…
You’re Going with Me
And someday, you will be the one to say “I’m Going Here”

The old phrase says this:  “follow the leader.”  There is a pretty hefty clue in this phrase – if there are no followers, there is no leader.  The leader knows the path to follow, and leads others to take that path.  The leader knows it is his/her job to encourage in the midst of discouragement and/or disappointment and/or hardship, and then provides such encouragement – in order to keep the team progressing along the path.

In other words, “leadership” is not a title.  “Leadership” is something one does, because leader is something that one is.  And, let me repeat:  where there are no followers, there are no leaders…

This much I know.  If there is a vacuum in the leadership, you do not have a healthy organization.  You’ve got to have a good, effective leader, leading a good, effective leadership team, to have a good, effective, healthy organization.