Correcting Bad Habits

One essential self-governance technique is that of helping to rectify followers' unfavorable habits—the things they do or fail to do that inhibit their effectiveness and performance (Bennis and Townsend, 1995). Inner leaders try to get followers to waste as little effort as possible on unproductive values, attitudes, and actions. They assess followers' personal traits, determine those that have potential of helping secure community goals and those that have low potential. Then they work on the helpful, but unperfected, traits and largely ignore those with low potential for assisting them in attaining their goals. Their energy, resources, and time go instead to maximizing follower competencies.

Using Their Talents Wisely

Inner leaders try to help followers position themselves where they can make the greatest contribution. This entails intimate understanding of follower capacities. It also requires leaders to time follower changes and learn how and when to encourage change in the way they work—even the work they do. Inner leaders teach followers how to place themselves where they can make the greatest contribution.

Practicing Self-Control

Most people have to learn to manage themselves (Drucker, 1988). Effective inner leaders have already done so, and they try to help followers do likewise. Self-managed people are relatively rare in work communities. They are so unusual, in fact, that both their talents and their accomplishments are often considered to be outside the boundaries of customary human conduct. For leaders who seek to share leadership with their followers, helping them discipline their work lives may be an even more important issue than assessing their personal and professional assets.

To be able to govern themselves, followers also have to deal with their personal sets of values. This is not merely a question of ethics. Ethics are only part of a person's value system. To work in a situation where the value system is unacceptable or incompatible with his or her own condemns that follower both to frustration and to underperformance. To be effective in the corporation, followers' personal values must be (or come to be) compatible with the work community's values. Otherwise, followers will not only be frustrated but also will not produce needed results. The inner leader's task is to facilitate values displacement and thus encourage ethical follower responses.

Developing Personal Self-Confidence

Self-confidence is a sense of personal identity (Deal and Kennedy, 1988) that includes the ideas of esteem and control. Developing that confidence takes directed personal effort. For inner leaders, the task is to encourage followers to develop self-confidence, to be centered, to have the ability to sustain balance, even in the midst of action. Being centered means not being subject to passing whims or sudden excitements. Centered followers know where they stand and what they stand for. They have a sense of stability and a confident sense of self. Warren Bennis (1999) says there is no greater teacher about self than responsibility. Good leaders learn that when followers are aware of their true feelings about working with others they are most effective. Thus, they develop sources of feedback.

Being Goal-Directed

The essence of success in any kind of leadership is having all involved direct their energies toward common goals and high personal performance. This requires some system of control and accountability. The primary mechanism inner leaders use for assuring goal-implementation and application, however, is not in the authority mechanism that top leaders typically use but in the attitude and behavior of the inner leader. Inner leaders focus their need and capacities upon future outcomes that are also consistent with those of their followers. The task of conforming work-community values and actions with the leader's horizon goals is a critical, if simple, process of defining goals and prioritizing values that support goal-accomplishment. While simple, it is not always an easy task. Nor is it always easy to induce followers to think and behave similarly.

Developing Follower Skills

Program success depends on the skill and knowledge of workers, especially if the leader intends for them to share governance of the common work. A key responsibility of inner leadership, therefore, is in ensuring that all followers are aware of and competent in doing needed work. This is a task of informing and training all work-community members in their duties and, in doing their work, to use their personal and corporate resources effectively to bring about preset goals. This information transfer is accomplished in the normal ways and particularly in the behavior of leaders as they model desired behavior. On the principle that you cannot teach what you do not know, leaders have to portray desired behavior before they can expect followers to behave that way. They reflect common values, methods, and outcomes in everything they do and say, both formally and in informal settings. For inner leaders, staff development becomes a mutual process of growth and change toward independent action.

Thinking Strategically

Leaders pay attention not so much to what is important today as to what will be significant tomorrow. They seek to discern the future through research, planning, and taking actions today that are intended to create a future that corresponds with their present goals and aspirations. In reality, nothing can be done today to affect the past. Understanding this, inner leaders spend their time on preparing their followers to ensure the work community functions effectively in the future, a place where they will spend the rest of their productive work lives.

Stimulating Leadership Behavior

Leading in the middle of the corporation asks leaders to prepare their followers to share in that leadership. Leaders take every opportunity to let followers take the lead in parts of the work community's functions. Thus, followers may be asked to head a task force or committee. They may substitute for the leader in his or her absence. Followers' advice may be solicited about possible plans, decisions that need to be made, or alternative programs under consideration. Each helps the follower develop the skill to lead.

It is sometimes stressful to the inner leader to do this. There 1s a risk inherent in letting someone else perform tasks and take responsibility for functions the inner leader normally assumes. The leader's most difficult task sometimes is to train followers to lead and then sit back and let them lead. There is a risk that the work will not be done, or it will not be done as well as the leader would have done it. Sometimes, even more frightening, inner leaders risk that the work will be done better than they could have done it. Preparing followers for self-governance is mostly a task of preparing the leader's mind to accept that the work will be done but be done differently—maybe better—than it otherwise would have been done.

Empowerment

Getting followers to accept their goals and values is not so much an exercise of the inner leader's personal power as it is of follower empowerment (Bennis and Nanus, 1985; Adair, 1986). The idea of increasing the self-control and self-direction of coworkers is a substantial part of self-governing community building. McGregor (1960) asked leaders to discover and make use of the unrealized potential in workers by letting them act independently. Burns (1978) suggests that we can lift people out of mediocrity to fulfill their better selves through transforming them (and empowerment idea). Bennis and Nanus (1985) say empowering followers also enhances and strengthens them. Inner leaders recognize this and change their behavior to share power with coworkers. Empowerment works because it supports deep psychological needs of people in work communities. People want to make a difference; and if the leader lets them and teaches them to do it, they become committed and productive followers.

Providing Participative Structures

The degree of sharing possible in a work community is dependent on the needs and preparedness of each follower. Formal decision committees and councils are helpful tools inner leaders use in this connection. They provide a necessary structural framework for dissemination of authority and responsibility throughout the work force. New structural enhancements and procedures and processes can also be introduced into the work community to formalize shared responsibilities. These can take the form of task forces, standing committees, or operating councils of workers and leaders. Such joint councils take responsibility for discussing obligations, developing policies, operating processes, and supervising job tasks. They form a distinct self-governance culture that supports both leader and led. An example of such a structure is stewardship.

Practicing Stewardship

The idea of stewardship depends for success on a special kind of organizational restructure aiding self-governance. Introducing stewardship ideas is, in fact, to propose a revolution in leader–follower relationship. Stewardship is not a single guiding principle but a compound of empowerment and partnership, as well as stewardship. Stewardship brings accountability while partnership balances responsibility among participants (Moxley, 2000). It is a sharing of the governance system so that each member holds control and responsibility in trust for the work community as a team. It is a relationship system (Crosby, 1996) based on mutual accountability. Stewardship operates at the whole-person— spiritual—level of existence and interrelationship.

Stewardship systems ask inner leaders to identify and articulate shared values and empowerment principles and to share leadership. Stewardship formats drive the work community beyond the bottom line, positively affecting both work and work-life satisfaction. In doing this, inner leaders capture the spirit, values, and principles of the work community and individual members.

Several elements of the idea of the leader as steward are discernable. Inner leaders use stewardship principles to unite them with stakeholders in the common enterprise. They free stakeholders to accept a personal stewardship responsibility toward those principles and to their vision. They force followers to be accountable to the group vision and to each other (Covey, 1997). They help followers take ownership of the common work. And they foster interdependence.

At its core, shared governance is a long-term, transformational approach to life and work. It is a way of behaving that has the potential for creating fundamental and positive change in followers (Spears, 1998). Stewardship emphasizes the trust that exists between the inner leader and independent stakeholders so together they can blend long-term socioeconomic, human, and environmental growth (Petrick, Scherer, Brodzinski, Quinn, and Ainina, 1999). Stewardship structures are based on the assumption that a successful corporation links individual knowledge workers in a manner that elicits a level of corporate commitment (or creativity, or loyalty, or integrity, etc.) that is greater than the sum of each individual's creativity.