CASE STUDY 4

LEADERSHIP IN EVERYDAY
PRACTICE

By Roger Klev, Assistant Professor, NTNU, Trondheim, Norway.

All too often we explain problems or successes in organizations with the acts of one
or several of the leaders at the top. It is never that simple. Yet leaders make a
difference, and when they influence people and organization the most, we tend to
call it leadership.

I first heard about plant manager Steinar as I, together with two colleagues at the
university, was contacted by a HR manager at an aluminium plant and asked to
contribute to a new leadership development program for foremen and middle
managers at the plant. As the HR manager described the plant, their principles, and
practices in leadership and organizational development, we got a sense that this was
something different than “industry standard,” if anything like that existed. She told us
about extensive training and competence development, about efforts in creating
leadership skills and practices among non-formal leaders, and she presented their
work of creating a cooperative climate between all levels and areas at the plant. This
was all very idealistic, of course, and we had heard managers tell such stories before
and experience reality as less impressive. But after a while as we met more people
and heard them describe the past, present, and future, their stories were in line with
those of the HR manager, and also seemed to have at least one vital ingredient in
common: namely, the plant manager, who himself rarely led the processes they
referred to, but seemed to be a point of reference when it came to explaining why
things happened. This case is primarily about this plant manager and his unique
ability to find a place for visible leadership in everyday work practice.

“This is where leadership is needed now”

As the aluminium plant got new owners quite a few years ago, Steinar came in as
the new leader of approximately 1,200 employees in a small town with 6,500 people.
The future of the plant was the future of the town. Not very long after Steinar was
appointed, he undertook a very effective symbolic action to send a message about
future change and about the leader’s role. One day he simply left his office in the
administration building (also called “the glasshouse”) right outside the production
site, and cleared a desk in a storage room in one of the main production halls. This
would be his new office for the next few years: “Most of our development efforts will
happen in the production area for the coming years. Therefore, this is where
leadership is most needed and this is where I will be found the most.” It was a big
surprise to most of the organization, not that new projects and programs for

1|Page
improvement would be introduced, but that the top plant manager actually
announced that he would be a direct part of it.

Training the team of leaders

When Steinar was given his assignment as new plant manager, one piece of advice
he got from corporate management was to “get rid of” the existing management
team. “They are not good enough” was the corporate evaluation, and the message
irritated Steinar enormously: “How can you simply give a person an evaluation score,
and then believe that you know anything about the potential? What kind of
perspective is this?” A few things seemed to upset him: he had a deeply held belief
in people’s ability to grow, and that people were willing to take real responsibility if
given the chance. Another was if someone suggested that this represented a “soft
leadership style”: “What is soft and what is hard: to believe in people, or to trust no
one?!”

So his ambition became to make a great team of leaders, without substituting any
one of them. During the first months, the team spent a lot of time together discussing
what they really believed leadership was at their plant, how they saw their roles,
what they believed was important in the organization, etc. They agreed that it was
important to let people take responsibility; they agreed that they as leaders should
enable others to be as good as possible, and so on. Some months later, they agreed
upon some shared values and principles that described how they would like to see
their own leadership at the plant: “We have done a lot,” the plant manager
summarized. “However, nothing of this has yet made any difference in everyday
performance at the plant. It is time for us to practice.”

So, the management team introduced weekly training tours in the plant, where they
went out in pairs to observe and to discuss what they saw and where their leadership
principles could make a difference in practice. One story of such a tour illustrates
their training. They were walking in the plant when they saw a truck drive outside the
designated area. Not much, but still outside the area. And they saw the foreman
observe it without doing anything. So what should they do? It was not easy. If they
did nothing, they really did not take responsibility for what had happened. How could
they then expect others to rake responsibility? If they stopped the truck driver, they
would reduce the foreman’s authority in the eyes of his employees, and that would
make it more difficult for the foreman to improve his performance later. This was
definitely different leadership training from classroom teaching.

The questions are as follows:

1. What is your idea of what makes good leadership? How would you describe
and evaluate Steiner’s approach to leadership compared to your idea of good
leadership?
2. Is good leadership pure craftwork, or is it better seen as skilled use of
research based knowledge?
3. Do you agree that we tend to give individual leadership too much credit when
we explain success in business performance?
4. Knowing what you now know after reading the textbook, how would you
approach the issue of the truck driver? Why would you use your approach?

2|Page