About Author/s:

This is an unusual business book in that it has been written by a family group. There are plenty of couples who have written books together, but Kim, Jonathan and Erin Clark are father, son and daughter – and all have individual merit to be sole authors had they so chosen. Kim Clark was dean of faculty at Harvard Business School for 10 years from 1995, before becoming President of Brigham-Young University, where is he a Distinguished Professor of Management.

Jonathan Clark is a professor of management at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where he has also been an associate dean – his work focuses on precisely Ideas for Leaders definition of leadership ‘on helping leaders create the conditions under which individuals, groups and organizations do their best collective work’. [Our definition of leadership is ‘leaders are people who create the conditions for others to achieve their best work in pursuit of a common objective’!]

Erin Clark is a managing director with Deloitte Consulting – Human Capital, where she works with clients to improve their performance , drive change and create sustainable advantage through people.

Their work is clearly very aligned across the generations.

Context

Are you happy? Is your workplace full of energy and do you look forward to embracing it every day? Organizations are structured groups of people who align their energies to achieve common objectives, and when they do it well the sum of those individual energies far exceeds its constituent elements. That is the basic equation of how humanity has progressed – we are good at organizing ourselves into collaborative work units to achieve extraordinary results.

But if the individual energies are not aligning, and those energies are not optimized, then the organizations opportunity to outperform is seriously compromised. In a world where most organizations are knowledge-based, whether that be their actual product (advice) or the work of management to align the parts, and even where more traditional work tasks of production are involved, a business that is not optimizing the conditions for its workforce to flourish and thrive, is seriously harming its productive potential.

The authors’ view is that most organizations are failing in this task. There was an early moment of energy released in the initial, dark days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when large parts of the workforce were given the responsibility and agency to work-from-home, and the emerging crisis was serious enough to align technology, innovation and purpose to extraordinary results, but with the receding of the panic, we have frequently regressed to old top-down command-and-control approaches which have brought with them the old disengaged, low productive energy that is now endemic.

Core Idea

This book is about how we can break from this low-energy paradigm, that the authors term Power Over, to a new more invigorating one of Leading Through.

This is a refrain frequently preached – but that requires ever more repetition – that, to quote the Clarks “when we loosen our grip on consolidated power and control and expand our myopic focus on short-term costs (to prioritize people, purpose and real productivity) something great – even miraculous – can happen’

The book is split into four parts, the first sets out the differences between the traditional Power Over paradigm and the new Leading Through one; the second explains why Leading Through works, and its impact on the soul, heart and mind of leaders. These are worthy and worth reading, but none of it is really new ground for those who have been immersing themselves in leadership for a while. Nonetheless, it is always good to revisit and revise the basics to further embed them.

It is really the final two parts of the book that provide the key to unlocking how we can adopt a Leading Through approach. At the heart of this is the Clarks’ concept of leadership modularity. As they explain, modularity is very familiar in manufacturing and tech products – our laptops and phones are made up of many different modules; it is not just the systems though – the apps we use on our phones are modular too. As the authors note:

“…modularity is valuable because it makes possible freedom of action – ingenuity, initiative, and innovation – within the groups working on the modules, while clear specifications for modular integration ensure a cohesive unified whole across modules. Thus modularity is a principle of both freedom and unity.”

The rest of part three dives into the prerequisites for a modular leadership system:

• a framework for action
• visible information
• the role of power / power dynamics

The final part explores how we can put all of this into action, and make Leading Through a reality. With their focus on modularity, they understand that it is not feasible to shift from the Power Over to the Leading Through paradigms in a single step, it needs to be done gradually – and as with all long journeys, it begins with a single step.

The steps they suggest are their ‘touchpoints’. There are seven of them that relate to the six elements of the new paradigm:

• Virtue (the soul / moral context)
• Empathy (the heart / LIVE (Love/Inspiration/Vitality/Expression) framework)
• Ownership (the mind / leadership process)
• Candor (visible information)
• Respect (power through dynamics)
• Trust and Teaming (framework for action)

With these operating together a leadership that can permeate through the whole organization is established. The authors’ focus is primarily on senior leaders, those that are best able to influence the culture of organizations; and they offer three steps for them to get started. Like all impactful and implementable processes, there is a beautiful simplicity to this – but by clarifying and highlighting it, it makes it much easier to get started:

• Step 1: Talk with and listen to people. Firstly this colours the context you are operating in and adds detail, it shows your desire to get transformation; it brings others into the conversation; and highlights that change cannot be brought about alone – it needs collaboration
• Step 2: Establish a baseline. Identify or validate existing values in the organization. Bring in HR and communicate progress across the organization
• Step 3: Make Progress in the Flow of Work. Nothing will sustain unless it is woven into regular work – and this is the objective here, taking the change from mobilizing to empowering.

Conclusion

Slowly organizations are waking up to the need to shift to a more agile, empowered and purposeful culture to ensure that they are harvesting the optimal energy from their employees. Harvesting, of course, is just the kind of word that we associate with Power Over approaches, but in reality it is why this shift is required. Yes, as Bob Chapman, who is extensively quoted in this book, recognized Everybody Matters, and it is a morally sound approach to treat your employees with that in mind; but Chapman also heads-up a $4billion organization and flies in his private jet – using his human-centred leadership approach works for his business as well as his staff. And that is the paradigm we need to embrace by Leading Through.

The Clarks’ framework of modular leadership is in many ways quite similar to the British Army’s Mission Command approach, and it gives us another method to achieve this level of actuation within organizations. It is clearly set-out and readily achievable – all it needs is for senior leaders – and we hope middle managers too – to put it into action.

BUY THIS BOOK

• Title: Leading Through: Activating the Soul, Heart and Mind of Leadership

  Author/s Name/s: Kim B. Clark, Jonathan R. Clark and Erin E. Clark

  Publisher: HBR Press

  ISBN: 978-1-647-827-61-8

  Publishing Date: September, 2024

  Number of Pages: 272

• Author Knowledge Rating: 1-5 (based on their years of experience, academic expertise in subject areas, and exposure to cross-functional thinking in the area)
  Readability: 1-5 score(1=dense and v academic; 5=frantic; page turner)
  Appropriate Length: (1=could have been written in 25% of the length;5=could have been longer)
  Core Idea Value: (1=nonsense (or entirely esoteric); 5=game-changer)