Leadership or victimship?

Article Type: Strategic commentary From: Strategic HR Review, Volume 9, Issue 4

Thought leaders share their views on the HR profession and its direction for the future

If your organization is like most on this planet, you are probably busy trying to unlock some type of leadership behavior in your workforce. Whether you intend to grow accountability, responsibility, trust or a “shared business owner mindset”, you are likely to be focusing on designing and delivering sound communication and training initiatives.

Whether your organization believes in blue-blooded, aristocratic models of leadership where there is a “best and rest”, or is built around more meritocratic, Napoleonic principles where “everyone gets a chance”,there are plenty of ideas that would keep you busy for a long time.

However, I believe that our key challenge is not just to develop leadership,but also to eradicate victimship from our organizations. If leadership is the“ability to make changes that add value” (Bajer, 2009), then victimship is the “art of having a reason for not making things happen”.

Victimship prevails

We have entered a world in which leadership is often described by a set of theoretical and ideal outcomes, which unfortunately get sabotaged by a series of unavoidable, inauspicious circumstances and barriers. We feel that there is nothing we can do about that. I call that feeling, victimship. Today, it is too common to find leaders shying away from making tough decisions at the same time as they air victimship statements with conclusive explanations for the delay in their success: the context is not right, the timing is not good, the culture is not ready, people are not on board, etc, etc, etc. Years of training, coaching and rewards do not seem to predictably drive bold and courageous behaviors out of potentially great people. Instead, it is way too common to see victimship happily surviving our forever changing (structurally, at least) organizations.

One of the key drivers of victimship in organizations is that its “reasons”make utter sense. Blaming the traffic for our being late for a meeting frees us up from the responsibility of our own commitment to punctuality, while melting our accountability on the spot. Who would dare challenge my explanation for my delay? At least, not too overtly. At the end of the day, most of us share the same reasons, almost as if we belonged to a secret sect that successfully manages to cover for each other, justifying our conservative, below-the-line,fitting-in way-of-being.

You do not have to go too far to witness victimship in action. Just listen carefully to people during your next meeting and try to rate that meeting along the victimship-leadership scale (see Figure 1). Are people in that meeting talking about reasons why things cannot be done, are they beating about the bush avoiding more direct conversations, are they trying to agree too quickly or are they actively seeking the best outcomes for the organization?

The art of true leadership

True leadership needs no excuses. It deals with uncomfortable, unwanted,unrewarded circumstances, owning whatever context and making changes to add value. The only thing that great leaders have in common is that they all deal with difficult contexts. They do not waste much time explaining their situations or organizing endless consultations to “bring everyone on board”. They do not get distracted by the implementation of superficial or cosmetic initiatives. They stand for something they believe in and they take serious risks to make that something happen.

Imagine Mandela, Ghandi or any other inspirational leader. They had plenty of opportunities to delay their actions and explain the difficulties of the task at hand. They could have run surveys to understand people’s perceptions,“empowering” them to have endless discussions around the creation of the “right” value statements in the hope that change would happen naturally. They could have waited for a better time to make things happen. But they did not. They exercised leadership, took risks (often personal ones) and drove changes to add value.

The organizational backdrop

What if our organizations today are making it easier to exercise victimship rather than leadership? Even when we have amazing people, with great ideas, good intentions and renewed energy, we manage to distract them into politics, threats and bureaucracies. We implement policies, structures and processes to unleash leadership across our organizations. Are we sure that these are not feeding victimship instead? Consider the following:

• 1.

  Is your organization managing performance through forced ranking methods and getting surprised at the lack of collaboration between people?

• 2.

  Is your organization campaigning for the importance of long-term client relationships while rewarding quarterly sales and getting surprised at the lack of engagement across the ranks?

• 3.

  Is your organization trying to increase employee engagement by focusing on inward looking drivers (i.e. creating a better place to work) and getting surprised at the lack of a shared business mindset?

Of course it is important to continue to develop leadership at scale. But do not forget to remove the black holes of victimship if you want to see tangible business results from your efforts. Unless you have a good reason not to, but that, I am sorry to say, would be victimship.

Javier BajerFounding CEO of The Talent Foundation

About the author

Javier Bajer, PhD, works closely with the boards of global organizations such as Shell, Accenture, Hewlett-Packard, The Economist and HSBC, helping them develop leadership at scale and re-engaging their workforces. Javier Bajer can be contacted at: javier@workforceperformance.com