Quiet Leaders - Can Change Agents get anything done without Yelling?
On the change agent journey, many have asked me if these exceptional people are always the alpha, extroverted, inspirational leader. The answer is no. I have seen many change agents with enough patience to quietly wait for their moment to lead. These people are a type of change agent I term a “dogged conceptualizer.” A new book explores the idea of quiet leaders, and this HBR article caught my attention. I really liked this exchange from the Q&A with the author Joseph Badaracco:
Q: When most people think of leaders they think of real brash types, even rebels. In business, for example, Jack Welch springs to mind as a well-known leader. The idea of a quiet leader seems almost the flip side of that.
A: It is the flip side of a standard or stereotypical view of a leader who speaks the truth or says what has to be done, who inspires others to do it in a critical moment. But I’m skeptical that in the countless meetings Jack Welch spent his career going to, in each one of these meetings it was the Jack Welch Show, and that he heard what everybody had to say and then announced the right thing and inspired everybody to do it. You have the famous example of Rosa Parks, saying, “I’m not sitting in the back of the bus.” Well, while that was a remarkable act of courage on her part, and in some degree was kind of a spontaneous event, she’d just had enough of this kind of treatment from one particular bus driver. She’d even stopped riding on his bus and got on by accident. She’d been to a number of civil rights training programs. After she was arrested, the people in the civil rights movement sat down and asked themselves, “Is this the right person, is this the right time, is this the right case to challenge segregated busing?” So there’s a lot of preparatory work and a lot of careful work afterwards. Quiet leadership is not really the flip side. If you look behind lots of great heroic leaders, you find them doing lots of quiet, patient work themselves.
