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What Is Leadership?
A leader must be an original, not a carbon copy
C.H. Becker
Editor's note: From 1941-68, Becker served as general manager of FS Services Inc., a regional farm cooperative based in Bloomington, Ill.. He retired in 1969 as senior vice president of FS Services. The co-op consolidated with Illinois Grain Corporation in 1980 to become GROWMARK. The article below is condensed from one Becker wrote for the May 1969 issue of Farmer Cooperatives, now Rural Cooperatives. Today, 92-yearold Becker lives in Phoenix, Ariz.
Several
years ago, a staff member - long since gone from FS Services - made a
recommendation that I adopted as head of this regional cooperative. Six months
later I asked why it wasn't working. He said, "I never was in favor of
it."
I said, "But you recommended
it." He then said, "I thought that was what you wanted me to
recommend." Now, he was a highly skilled person and very intelligent. But
he did not belong in a leadership position, and he was removed from it.
It is one thing to wait until you
have heard discussions and sorted out the facts. It is quite another to wait and
see which way the wind is blowing. A leader must be an original. He can't be a
carbon copy.
Certainly, I have no instant wisdom
to impart on leadership. But I do have some ideas, some reflections after many
years in the manager's chair of FS Services and as a board member at various
times in some 15 organizations.
How I see leadership. Basically, I see leadership as
the capacity to influence people, to take an idea of one's own or someone else's
and get it accepted, to have enough judgement to know what can or cannot be
sold, and to have the flexibility necessary to get it sold without sacrificing
principle. It involves the ability to compromise in order to move ahead.
Leadership cannot be conferred.
Often, people do not understand this. They think that appointment to a job or
election to a board or office endows them with leadership. It doesn't. It merely
offers the opportunity for leadership.
Some people discover that they don’t
want to be leaders. They are not willing to suffer the loss of face that goes
with the leadership. So they follow and pretend they are leading.
Right interplay between boards and
managers is vital. Cooperatives must have leadership from both board and
manager, but in the right perspective for each.
I would be naive to suggest that all
board members are equal in leadership capacity, or that by doing or not doing
certain things they can become equal. But if the board will recognize leadership and give it rein, it can
discharge its leadership function effectively.
And I have never seen a board that
would not respond to leadership. Many times I have heard
boards criticized as "impossible." People
would say the board was interfering with management, it
was trying to manage, it was always going off on
tangents, it was totally negative.
Most often the reason for these sentiments traced directly to
the manager or whatever the top officer was called. He was not giving the
leadership he should have. Today, as a board member, I can get impatient when a
manager doesn't provide leadership - when he says, "This is the problem,
what do you think we should do?" - or when he just says, "This is the
problem," implying that the board should do something.
Rather, the manager should say, "This is the problem as
I see it - this is what I recommend we do." Or perhaps he should say,
"This is the problem as I see it. I want the benefit of your views before I
formulate a recommendation next month, or I'd like a committee to work with me
on this."
As a board member, I want recommendations and I want them in
writing. But I don't want to be called upon to make a decision on the spur of
the moment. I want time to reflect. That is why, as a manager, I always tried to
introduce and discuss any significant recommendations a month or more before
asking the board for a decision on my recommendation.
I've seen literally hundreds of managers fail because they
didn't understand their proper leadership role. For every manager who usurps
board functions, there are three or four who ask the board to make management
decisions - and boards ultimately tire of both kinds.
Of course, the board is finally responsible and it must
decide the framework of policies within which management must function. But any
board on which I've served has viewed its executive as its leader in discharging
the board's responsibility. And if we felt he was not functioning properly as a
leader, we changed executives - no matter how brilliant or how popular he was.
But perhaps the board's greatest leadership role is selecting
a manager and creating a climate in which people carry out effectively the
organization's policies and objectives - because they want to, not because they
are told to.
And I believe it is a role of
leadership to recognize that we shouldn't just pick conformists in top roles of
the organization, thereby avoiding anyone who will come up with new ideas, who
will disagree on some major premises.
Healthy dissent is good for an
organization.
I've learned more from my critics
than those who didn't rock the boat. How often have I been urged to use my
influence to silence member company managers who were critical, sometimes
unreasonably so.
But I have always refused to do
so. First, because when the chips are down, they are always with us.
Second, if you silence or brush aside unreasonable criticism, you also silence
criticism you should hear.
Criticism is never sweet. It is
hard to take. But it is the price we pay for leadership. 
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