Like everything else in life, the Position level of leadership has negatives as well as positives. Each of the levels of leadership possesses downsides as well as upsides. You will find as you move up the levels that the upsides increase and the downsides decrease. Since Position is the lowest level of leadership, it has a great number of negatives. On Level 1, I see eight major downsides.
1. Having a Leadership Position Is
Often Misleading
The easiest way to define leadership is by position. Once you have a position or title, people will identify you with it. However, positions and titles are very misleading. A position always promises more than it can deliver. Having a leadership position does not make you a leader; rather, it is an opportunity to become a leader.
When I received my first position as a pastor I didn’t understand that leadership was given to me but not yet earned by me. I arrived at my first meeting to find that a long-standing member of the church had been earning his influence through many positive actions over many years. Even though he did not have the official leadership title, people followed him—not me—as a result. Back then I defined leading as a noun (who I was) not a verb (what I was doing). Leadership is action, not position.
2. Leaders Who Rely on Position to Lead
Often Devalue People
People who rely on position for their leadership almost always place a very high value on holding on to their position—often above everything else they do. They often see subordinates as an annoyance, as interchangeable cogs in the organizational machine, or even as troublesome obstacles to their goal of getting a promotion to their next position. As a result, departments, teams, or organizations that have positional leaders suffer terrible morale.
Leaders who rely on their title or position to influence others just do not seem to work well with people. Some don’t even like people! They neglect many of the human aspects of leading others. They ignore the fact that all people have hopes, dreams, desires, and goals of their own. They don’t recognize that as leaders they must bring together their vision and the aspirations of their people in a way that benefits everyone. In short, they do not lead well because they fail to acknowledge and take into account that leadership—of any kind, in any location, for any purpose—is about working with people.
3. Positional Leaders Feed on Politics
When leaders value position over the ability to influence others, the environment of the organization usually becomes very political. There is a lot of maneuvering. Positional leaders focus on control instead of contribution. They work to gain titles. They do what they can to get the largest staff and the biggest budget they can—not for the sake of the organization’s mission but for the sake of expanding and defending their turf. And when a positional leader is able to do this, it often incites others to do the same because they worry that others’ gains will be their loss. Not only does this create a vicious cycle of gamesmanship, posturing, and maneuvering; it also creates departmental rivalries and silos.
I have yet to find a highly political organization that runs at top efficiency and possesses high morale. Just look at most of our government institutions and think about the leaders and workers in them. Most people could certainly use improvement, and moving away from positional leadership would do a lot to help them.
4. Positional Leaders Place Rights over
Responsibilities
Inevitably, positional leaders who rely on their rights develop a sense of entitlement. They expect their people to serve them; they don’t look for ways to serve their people. Their job description is more important to them than job development. They value territory over teamwork. As a result, they usually emphasize rules and regulations that are to their advantage, and they ignore relationships. This does nothing to promote teamwork or create a positive working environment.
Just because you have the right to do something as a leader doesn’t mean that it is the right thing to do. Changing your focus from rights to responsibilities is often a sign of maturity in a leader. Many of us were excited in early leadership years by the authority we had and what we could do with it. That power can be exhilarating, if not downright intoxicating. Each of us as leaders must strive to grow up and grow into a leadership role without relying on our rights. If we can mature in that way, we will start to change our focus from enjoying authority for its own sake to using authority to serve others.
5. Positional Leadership Is Often Lonely
Being a good leader doesn’t mean trying to be king of the hill and standing above (and apart from) others. Good leadership is about walking beside people and helping them to climb up the hill with you. King-of-the-hill leaders create a negative work environment because they are insecure and easily threatened. Whenever they see people with potential starting to climb, it worries them. They fear that their place on top is being threatened. As a result, they undermine the people who show talent, trying to guard their position and keep themselves clearly above and ahead of anyone else. What is the usual result? The best people, feeling undermined and put down, leave the department or organization and look for another hill to climb. Only average or unmotivated people stay. And they know their place is at the bottom. That develops an us-versus-them culture, with the positional leader standing alone on top. Leadership doesn’t have to be lonely. People who feel lonely have created a situation that makes them feel that way. If you’re atop the hill alone, you may get lonely. If you have others alongside you, it’s hard to be that way.
6. Leaders Who Remain Positional Get
Branded and Stranded
Whenever people use their position to lead others for a long time and fail to develop genuine influence, they become branded as positional leaders, and they rarely get further opportunities for advancement in that organization. They may move laterally, but they rarely move up.
If you have been a positional leader, you can change, and this book will help you. However, you need to recognize that the longer you have relied on your position, the more difficult it will be for you to change others’ perceptions about your leadership style. You may even need to change positions in order to restart the process of developing influence with others.
7. Turnover Is High for Positional Leaders
When people rely on their positions for leadership, the result is almost always high turnover. Good leaders leave an organization when they have to follow bad leaders. Good workers leave an organization when the work environment is poor. Interview people who have left and the odds are high that they did not leave a job. They left the people they had to work with.
Every company has turnover. It is inevitable. The question every leader must ask is, “Who is leaving?” Organizations with Level 1 leadership tend to lose their best people and attract average or below-average people. The more Level 1 leaders an organization has, the more the door swings out with high-level people and in with low-level people.
An organization will not function on a level higher than its leader. It just doesn’t happen. If a Level 1 leader is in charge, the organization will eventually be a Level 1 organization. If the leader is on Level 4, then the organization will never get to Level 5—unless the leader grows to that level.
8. Positional Leaders Receive People’s Least,
Not Their Best
People who rely on their positions and titles are the weakest of all leaders. They give their least. They expect their position to do the hard work for them in leadership. As a result, their people also give their least. Some people who work for a positional leader may start out strong, ambitious, innovative, and motivated, but they rarely stay that way. Typically, they become one of the following three types of people.
Clock Watchers
Followers who thrive in Level 1 leadership environments love clocks, and they want them visible at all times throughout the building. They evaluate every moment at work according to the clock: how long they’ve been there, how much time they have left, how long until break time, and how long until lunchtime. Clock watchers always know how much time is left before they get to go home, and they never want to work a moment beyond quitting time. But think about it: when the people who work with you can hardly wait to quit working with you, something is not working!
“Just-Enough” Employees
When leaders use their leadership position as leverage, the people who work for them often begin to rely on their rights as employees and the limits of their job descriptions to protect them from having to work any more than is absolutely necessary. They do only what’s required of them. They do just enough—to get by, to get paid, and to keep their job. When people follow a leader because they have to, they will do only what they have to. People don’t give their best to leaders they like least. They give reluctant compliance, not commitment. They may give their hands but certainly not their heads or hearts. “Just-enough” people have a hard time showing up. The only commitment they show is to taking off the maximum days allowed for any reason. Some spend a lot of mental energy finding creative ways of eliminating work. If only they used that commitment in positive ways!
The Mentally Absent
In a Level 1 environment, there are always individuals who may be physically present but mentally absent. They do not engage mentally, and they show up merely to collect a paycheck. This attitude is highly damaging to an organization because it seems to spread. When one person checks out mentally and doesn’t suffer any consequences for it, others often follow. Mental turnover and sloppiness are contagious. When the people who work for a team, a department, or an organization give little of themselves, the results are mediocre at best. And morale is abysmal. Success demands more than most people are willing to offer, but not more than they are capable of giving. The thing that often makes the difference is good leadership. That is not found on Level 1.
The greatest downside about Level 1 leadership is that it is neither creative nor innovative. It’s leadership that just gets by. And if a leader stays on the downside of Level 1 long enough, he may find himself on the outside. If a leader fails on Level 1, there’s nowhere to go but U-Haul territory. He’ll be moving out and looking for another job.