Hidden leaders are all around you within your organization. You have worked with them, encouraged them, and seen them rise within organizations to positions of power and influence. You may have been a hidden leader early in your career.
You and others have called these workers smart, crucial, effective, or an important part of the company. You have seen them work effectively with people at many levels within the organization, from front lines to executive suites, regardless of their formal positions. But if you thought at all about these employees’ abilities, you probably categorized them as having natural talent that couldn’t be replicated. You didn’t see them as leaders.
We believe differently. We believe these hidden leaders are a source of great strategic advantage in your company. They can be defined, identified, nurtured, and encouraged to help an organization develop a competitive edge. Some of these leaders will move up the organizational chart, accepting positional power as their personal influence and power develop. Others will prefer to stay at a certain level in the organization and bring their personal influence to bear on the work they love to do. As modern organizations develop new structures, both flat and virtual, we believe it is important to know how to spot and encourage hidden leaders and bring their abilities to bear on the toughest challenges in an organization. We also believe focusing on the skills and characteristics of hidden leaders can make all your employees more productive and satisfied.
Hidden leaders are not invisible to the people around them. What makes them “hidden” is not that their coworkers and supervisors do not value them as important players within the company. It is that management does not think of them as leaders with the potential to drive excellence throughout the organization.
Many people define leaders as people high up within management ranks or those likely to be tapped as future managers and executives. This definition implies that leadership flows downhill from those in acknowledged high positions. It also positions leaders as somewhat above the everyday challenges that characterize frontline responsibilities.
Our definition of hidden leaders is that they are the powerhouses within organizations who help galvanize people toward excellence. Generally, hidden leaders have little or no positional power. They are in frontline jobs or possibly lower-level supervisory positions. They may not be viewed as people likely to take on managerial responsibilities. Their leadership is disconnected from the traditional positional power of supervisors, managers, and executives. This disconnect does not undermine their leadership; it simply hides them from those with more traditional views of leadership.
Hidden leaders guide people’s decisions on many levels of an organization. They are the origin of the upflow of leadership. This grassroots leadership is powerful because it emerges from people on the front lines who see the daily impact of executive decisions on products, processes, customers, and stakeholders. By leading from lower in the hierarchy, hidden leaders provide new insights to executives and official leaders who no longer experience frontline challenges.
The power of hidden leaders is obvious to those around them. These top individual contributors are known as the ones to approach for tough problems, the people new hires are directed to meet to understand the company’s inner workings, and the anchors of productivity, creativity, and innovation.
We propose that hidden leaders are not just great workers: They are leaders in their own right. Managers who identify and treat them as leaders gain an important strategic and competitive advantage over the competition.
Hidden leaders provide the underlying energy that drives organizations forward, in our estimation. It’s the hidden leaders throughout an organization who galvanize others to do their best work. They might become team leaders when a company depends on cross-functional teams to develop products or services. Where organizational charts flatten, hidden leaders create cores of productivity and help others get what they need to succeed. Hidden leaders are truly hidden in virtual organizations, especially short-term ones where people are working at a physical distance from one another and must find ways to be productive as a unit in spite of it.
Identifying hidden leaders isn’t just about finding people who can become supervisors and managers or fulfill an organization’s succession planning. Not all hidden leaders will want to move up the organization, nor should you expect to be able to promote each one.
As a manager, the better you can uncover the hidden leaders within your organization, the more you can encourage, develop, and promote them and their work. Hidden leaders can become a core strategic and competitive advantage for a company. Cadres of hidden leaders free managers and executives to focus on the organization’s cutting-edge challenges. They become de facto supervisors in small groups or teams because others look to them for advice or help. Hidden leaders are also courageous enough to speak the truth to management, which usually leads to uncovering and solving problems below the radar of everyday actions.
Hidden leaders bring a company’s value promise to life in ways no competitor can identify or match. These leaders do not appear on the organizational chart. They don’t stand out on a company’s roster with any specific, role-based characteristics. Their influence on innovations and processes is invisible to an outsider. This makes hidden leaders one of your most important competitive advantages. No one else can see them, much less replicate their influence. Hidden leaders address all three areas of innovation, process, and customer intimacy naturally.
Unfortunately, hidden leaders can be driven out of an organization if it punishes them for their very talents and skills. A wise supervisor or manager will notice what happens to an organization’s hidden leaders. There may be cultural mismatches, signals of upcoming disasters, or evidence of a falling market share in the way a company treats its hidden leadership.
Hidden leaders affect the bottom line of an organization in several ways. They strive to fulfill the company’s value promise; they enable effective shortcuts to be devised without sacrificing quality; they inspire others around them to do their best work. When the time comes to find potential supervisors and managers, of course, being able to spot and develop hidden leaders is crucial. But when such succession is not at issue, hidden leaders positively influence the energy of an organization, which can result in more creativity, productivity, and profit.