Motivate staff to achieve deliverables

We have to go as one, we want to live as People’s Temple, or end it. We have chosen. It is finished.”

These are some of the words found in an unsigned suicide note titled “Last Words” written by one of the 909 people who killed themselves in the largest mass suicide in modern history in Jonestown, Guyana on November 18, 1978.

Elissa Haney on the website infoplease sheds more light on the macabre event.

According to her report, The Jonestown cult (officially named the “People’s Temple”) was founded in the United States in 1955 by Indianapolis preacher James Warren Jones who had no formal theological training, but based his liberal ministry on a combination of religious and socialist philosophies.

In 1977, Jones and many of his followers relocated to the South American country of Guyana in a place they named Jonestown, located on a tract of land the People’s Temple had purchased and begun to develop.

Relatives of cult members soon grew concerned and requested that the US government rescue what they believed to be brainwashed victims living in concentration camp-like conditions under Jones’s power.

Open fire

In November 1978, California Congressman Leo Ryan arrived in Guyana to survey Jonestown and interview its inhabitants.

After reportedly having his life threatened by a Temple member during the first day of his visit, Ryan decided to cut his trip short and return to the US with some Jonestown residents who wished to leave.

As they boarded their plane, a group of Jones’s guards opened fire on them, killing Ryan and four others. Some members of Ryan’s party escaped, however.

Upon learning this, Jones told his followers that Ryan’s murder would make it impossible for their commune to continue functioning.

Rather than return to the US, the People’s Temple would preserve their church by making the ultimate sacrifice: their own lives.

Jones’s followers were given a deadly concoction of a purple drink mixed with cyanide, sedatives, and tranquilisers. Jones apparently shot himself in the head.

Meanwhile, three decades later in a continent across the Atlantic, a minister is alleged to have been involved in what the media has nauseatingly dubbed the “maize scandal” and his followers take to the streets in Eldoret, running riot and threatening to burn and pillage if their leader is removed from power.

It doesn’t matter that he may have been suspected of wrongdoing, even if the financial benefits of such wrongdoing never trickle down to the fans.

The fact of the matter is, he is a leader and his followers were ready to be shot at by riot police if that’s what it would take to pledge undying loyalty.

While the two stories are totally unrelated, the outcomes are inexorably intertwined: People who are willing to give up life and limb for their leaders.

How come this has never happened in the workplace?

Why don’t we see CEOs and heads of institutions that can stand in front of the workers, speak with unending fervour and quivering passion that ignites the workers into a stupendous frenzy?

Why are there leaders who can drive people to leave their daily activities and go out in the street to demonstrate against a perceived threat to that leader, or worse still, die in their misplaced belief that their leader has been wronged and the only solution is to give up their life in support of him?

While it is very easy to rubbish these kinds of people by saying that they clearly have their priorities mixed up, are easily brainwashed or simply have nothing better to do, one must pause and give consideration to the fact that these are ordinary human beings with families and responsibilities.

The people who died in Jonestown were not ordinary simpletons, amongst them were university educated professionals including doctors.

It brings into focus two kinds of leadership that we find in the workplace, namely transactional leadership and transformational leadership.

Transactional leadership stems from the notion that team members agree to obey their leader totally when they accept a job.

The “transaction” is usually the organisation paying the team members in return for their effort and compliance.

The leader has a right to “punish” team members if their work doesn’t meet the pre-determined standard.

But transformational leadership is found in leaders who inspire teams through their own enthusiasm and passion.

The transformational leader extracts from his team members their absolute best based on their complete understanding and buy in of the leader’s vision.

A transformational leader may not necessarily be a detail-oriented or a hands-on worker; he has people who can do the actual work.

This, therefore, opens an incendiary can of worms as it gives rise to the argument that our business leaders may not necessarily be leaders as much as they are managers.

The transactional leader is in actual essence a manager; he manages a team that has an expected output, rewarding those that deliver the output and executing consequences on those that do not.

He manages by performance, paying keen attention to the periodic deliverables that he has committed to his stakeholders to produce.

Achieve targets

He is called the managing director because he manages the direction of the organisation, where direction is not the noun defining the trajectory of the company’s future but rather that emanating from the verb “to direct” which is to manage his people.

The transformational leader on the other hand is the true leader, recognising that only by firing up the emotive side of his workers will the deliverables be achieved.

The workers are motivated to the point of frenetic self initiative aimed at ensuring that the leader is happy as the organisation meets its deliverables.

The transformational leader inspires creativity and out of the box thinking from his workers who have seen a vision that can only be actualized by doing things differently.

I dare say that leadership is a misnomer in the business world.

What we have are good managers of businesses and institutions that can deliver results to the shareholders and owners.

The managers execute by directing people to deliver, rewarding them for good delivery and punishing them for non-delivery.

The true leaders are those that can inspire people who can go wild to make a point and even die for their causes.

You might call it bad leadership, but where someone can get me off my educated feet and die for them, I call that leadership, period!

Carol.musyoka@bungani.com