Leadership between authority and purpose

During a recent three-week trip to Myanmar, I occupied myself with the question of the implicit place we (i.e., executives, managers, and consultants in Germany and let’s say in the German-speaking world) mentally assign to leadership on the continuum between authority and purpose.

In this context, it is not my intention to belabor well-known authors and publications on situational leadership, power based on creating a sense of purpose rather than position within a hierarchy, purpose-driven organizations, and the like. I would like to be able to use this blog as a platform for sharing my thoughts with the inclined reader, without raising claims of being scientific, and even allow myself to express thoughts from the gut.

I had the opportunity to observe how “leadership” works in Myanmar every day:

• For the terribly inhuman tasks, an overseer (always male) was positioned in immediate proximity to the female laborers. At first glance, the “span of control“ was between 5 and 6 workers. Here and there, our travel literature mentioned forced labor, and while I did not see any armed guards, I was nagged by the persistent question of whether what I was observing wasn’t in fact an example of forced labor.

In any case, this kind of work represents the most brutal kind of drudgery at the many road construction sites. Due to the congested traffic conditions, we were sometimes able to observe them for half an hour or more. Wearing flip-flops on their feet, boys and men use their naked hands to “claw” enormous boulders from the steep rock face directly on the expressway. Here and there, heavy machinery was in place, sometimes at such a steep angle to the road that we were frightened to be standing in the fall line of the equipment. A young man in slippers stood a few meters behind each machine; we didn’t understand exactly what his function was.

The large boulders are carried (or rolled) down to road level. Here, where the huge rocks piled up at the side of the road, there were a few men who actually wore work boots. They looked pathetically Chaplinesque. The shoes were obviously several sizes too big for them, and so they shuffled back and forth between the stones, trying not to lose the valuable protection that covered their feet. We could not detect any socks around their scrawny ankles.

• For the female road workers as well—to our surprise they could be seen at every road construction site—there was an overseer for only a few women. The women’s job was to break up the large boulders with a pickaxe. While some of them were striking the stones with their tools causing sparks to fly, others, in immediate proximity to the bouncing pickaxes, gathered up the chunks from the ground and piled them in a heap. From this heap, the women placed about 20 stones on a kind of round metal tray which, due to its apparently enormous weight, they then had to lift in pairs and sometimes in threes onto the head of a worker. Occasionally the nearby watchdog stepped in since two women together could not manage the task.

With this unbelievable load on her head, the worker in her flip-flops clambered to the next overseer some 30 meters away, who in turn helped her remove the transport container from her head and place it on the ground. As they covered this 30m stretch, the women stumbled in their slippers amid the sharp-edged stones, buckling here and there, although their heads and the loads they bore remained level, as if secured by invisible ropes.

• The next category of work did not seem so inhumanly harsh to us, but one can imagine that performing it under the given circumstances would not exactly contribute to a sense of fulfillment and happiness. This had to do with women tending gardens and parks near famous monuments (temples, city walls, pagodas, etc.) that had been prettied up for tourists. Here, the span of control seemed much larger, with each watchdog overseeing the performance and activity of about 20 workers. The women “scythed“ the grass with cutting tools the size of nail scissors; taking note of the results they achieved, the tools they used were apparently about as sharp as children’s handicraft scissors. In marketplaces and small villages, we often saw sharp machetes and big knives, but it seems they preferred not to equip these female workers with them.
• For activities entailing greater complexity, the span of control on the one hand, and the physical proximity of the “manager” to the team on the other, were distinctly reduced. Housekeeping tasks in a simple complex of huts on a beach will serve as an example. Here, the boss (a woman!) actually came along to the entrance of the hut, but then left temporarily, so that the two or three young women prepared the rooms in the huts with a certain degree of autonomy.

The huts were cleaned in sequence. So when hut No. 5 was finished, and the guests from hut No. 6 had not yet gone to breakfast, the housekeeping ladies lay down in the hammocks nearby and waited. The fact that hut No. 7 and the others after that had already been vacated seemed to have no influence. The crews waited in front of each hut until they could do their jobs in a tidy sequence — unless the manager intervened and reorganized things. Without instructions from the manager, the sequence remained unchanged.

The list of examples could go on. We observed similar arrangements, particularly in small and somewhat larger local restaurants, marketplaces, small workshops, and in mid-sized department stores. Of course, I can’t gauge what the situation would be like for more demanding or intellectual work.

We once had the honor of lunching with an old monk who was the abbot of a monastery and the head monk for a large catchment area. It came about by chance. The monk was almost deaf and blind and only seemed to have a vague sense of what went on around him. It did not escape his feeble attention, however, that we had given the monastery a small donation. He then invited us to share the room with him during his meal. The monks who cared for him and huddled very close, glanced at us only briefly from the corner of their eyes. Their attention was entirely devoted to the Master. It was only after the abbot signaled with his hand — and quite some time after we had been seated — that they sprang to their feet and offered us some biscuits to share with them and their Master. Once again, we had the impression of finding ourselves in an organization under strict hierarchical leadership.

I have long since returned to Germany and immersed myself in the everyday life of a consultant. A textbook on “Purpose-Driven Organizations” lies in front of me. Together with one of our teams, we are working on a project that involves “new work environments.” In these contexts, leadership represents the diametric opposite of what I saw in Myanmar.

Yet even in this country there are sufficient examples of leadership that might be paraphrased as “set goals and control every step” — and I am not necessarily referring to the field of “menial” activities. Fortunately, we are a long way from the working conditions I observed in Myanmar.

Is there a way to inspire people to achieve a goal, to win them over for an activity, if performing the task itself or the working conditions are inhumanly harsh, monotonous, and exhausting?