Bernard Ramanantsoa: “Leadership is the capacity to transform an organisation into an 'institution'"
Posted on Sep 25, 2015
Leaders League. What is leadership? And what is its essence?
Bernard Ramanantsoa. To give you an academic definition, I would say that leadership characterizes the ability to transform an organization into an institution. In other words, many companies are content to be organizations without soul and many leaders are satisfied with this situation.
We talk about leadership when a businessman/businesswoman or a politician endows the organization under his or her responsibility with an identity, when he or she manages to build a system of values ??shared by the employees; if you are very ambitious, we can even say that a leader is known by his or her ability to give sense to the employees’ activities, and this is beyond, of course, clichés such as "profit maximization," synonym of short-term effectiveness. An organization is a cold structure; an institution has a soul, a human depth, as well as a long-lasting project.
Leaders League. What difference do you make between a leader and a manager?
B. R. The two concepts have nothing to do with each other, even though they are most often, for convenience, confused one with the other. One day I read in the Harvard Business Review an excellent article by Abraham Zaleznik, in which he defined the leader as the person who gets to take into account the most complex and profound aspect of the human dimension of each of his or her employees. A leader knows that the employees are not machines, tools or relays. On the contrary, he or she understands the importance of their contradictions, and in certain cases even the important role of their desires and sufferings. Abraham Zaleznik wrote a very funny sentence: "Managers have no libido." I may nuance it by saying that managers conceal their libido and especially that of their employees.
Leaders League. What is the use of authority and power for a leader?
B. R. In every organization, many people are merely "exercising authority" in a position of responsibility, coordinating activities, departments, people, and so on. And we should not confuse this notion with power: power is what characterizes the leader as we have briefly defined above, and we should not squander this term. Power tends to grow from the understanding of human nature. It embodies thus necessarily an element of secrecy and, of course, could turn out to be dangerous once diverted.
Leaders League. Is being a leader distinct from being a man of power?
B. R. Power, as it is secret and dangerous, has always been and will remain a taboo concept. It is a dangerous word that we should handle with caution. It is negative if you say that someone is a man of power. In the minds and the mouths of people, power is suspect, dangerous and often "dirty," whereas leadership is "good and great." But we are in the semantic and connotation aspect!
Leaders League. Which three leaders inspire you? And why?
B. R. First of all, I would name General de Gaulle, who precisely succeeded to transform France into an "institution."
In another domain, I would cite Carlos Ghosn, for the art and the manner with which he transformed Nissan. The company was on the brink of bankruptcy, and he has turned it into a success story and recreated a sense of belonging among everybody: engineers, managers, workers... He has made the company a source of pride for many people.
Finally, to get further away from the political and economic world, I think of John XXIII. In contrast to the prediction that he would be a “pope in transition," he has actually revolutionized the Church deeply and radically.
Behind these emblematic figures, we must not forget that in some really small structures, there are also "leaders" who received little media coverage but were clearly recognized as actors of transformation, showing great interest in what constitutes the ultimate wealth of any organization in any case – the human substance of each and every one of us.
This interview was first published in French in the April issue of the “Décideurs” magazine (No. 126). We have chosen to translate it into English to pay tribute to Mr. Ramanantsoa, a great academic leader of thoughts on leadership. This article is dedicated to our fortnightly newsletter “Leaders Wisdom Journal”. To Subscribe.
Other articles of the same issue:
Ted Sarandos: the number-cruncher directing your viewing habits
Using certainty in persuasion: manipulation or leadership?