Is there any leadership left in large companies?

Everyone is familiar with the horrible public image projected by BP’s CEO during public talks on the gulf oil disaster. For an educated, experienced executive I don’t see how he could have come off any worse than he did. And that was his public image. I wonder what he’s like inside the walls of BP?

I was thinking about that this weekend while discussing management and job related issues with several friends and family members. It appears last weekend was the time for all job related concerns to surface.

What surprised me about the conversations I had with two of the people was I really wasn’t surprised. I have experienced so many similar occurrences in my history I almost expect it.

Both people were to say the least de-motivated. I’m not sure de-motivated is a word, but I can’t think of another that’s better suited. I say that because both people are self-driven, hard working, and results driven individuals that I’ve known for many years. What their management has succeeded in doing is converting a highly motivated employee into a disengaged employee.

I spent some time thinking about how that happens, and I have to admit it wasn’t that hard to understand. They both report to mid-level managers and middle management in a large company is not a great place to be. They are for the most part afraid. They make a decent to great salary and have a nice benefit package, they are usually middle aged or later, and they know if they get shown the door, the chance of them duplicating their current situation is slim. So they develop the “hunker down” mentality. Don’t make waves, don’t take risks, don’t do anything that might result in making a mistake. They become caretakers of their own organization filtering information up the chain of command. Innovation, creativity, leadership are all things that are best left to someone else, what if I make a mistake? Worse yet what will happen to me if I have a top performing employee that is visible to my bosses, they see that as a risk to themselves not as an asset to the corporation.

Leadership defiantly starts at the top, but effective leadership makes sure it’s carried through the entire organization. Top management is all too often fed sanitized data, and is unaware of employee issues, customer issues or anything other than earnings and stock prices. If the numbers are good all must be well. That’s how a guy can get so out of touch with reality like our friend from BP, but he isn’t alone.

I wrote an article a few years ago saying that I believe the large corporation is outdated and cannot survive in it’s present form. I have seen nothing that makes me believe otherwise. Large corporations are afraid of lawsuits. They deal with this fear by not delegating anything below a certain level of management. They try to offset this lack of delegation by volumes of processes and procedures to limit the exposure of middle management, wrongly thinking that level will escalate any exceptions.

Middle management is “hunkered down” and isn’t about to take the risk of telling anyone anything. So the system is flawed from the start.

Effective leadership doesn’t foster fear, and it allows innovation, open communication and even failure. Fear of failure results in no risks, no risk taking results in no innovation and no change. On change results in a slow certain demise of the organization.