The Schoolboy,with Shining Face
October 28, 2007
The first leadership experience is an agonizing education. It’s like parenting, in that nothing else in life fully prepares you to be responsible, to a greater or lesser degree, for other people’s well-being. Worse, you have to learn how to do the job in public, subjected to unsettling scrutiny of your every word and act, a situation that’s profoundly unnerving for all but that minority of people who truly crave the spotlight. Like it or not, as a new leader you are always onstage, and everything about you is fair game for comment, criticism, and interpretation (or misinterpretation). Your dress, your spouse, your table manners, your diction, your wit, your friends, your children, your children’s table manners – all will be inspected, dissected, and judged.
And nothing is more intense than the attention paid to your initial words and deeds, as any first-time presidential candidate can tell you. It’s said of psychotherapy that the first ten minutes between doctor and patient are the most critical, and studies show that friendships formed by college students during orientation are the most enduring. Social psychologists have found that we base our judgments of people on extremely thin slices of behavior.We decide whether we are in sync or out of tune with another person in as little as two seconds.
So it is with leaders and organizations. Your first acts will win people over or they will turn people against you, sometimes permanently. And those initial acts may have a long-lasting effect on how the group performs. It is, therefore, almost always best for the novice to make a low-key entry. This buys you time to gather information and to develop relationships wisely. It gives you an opportunity to learn the culture of the organization and to benefit from the wisdom of those who are already there.
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Posted by Maximillian | Filed Under Insight
The Infant Executive
October 25, 2007
For the young man or woman on the brink of becoming a leader, the world that lies ahead is a mysterious, even frightening place. Few resort to mewling, but many wish they had the corporate equivalent of a nurse, someone to help them solve problems and ease the painful transition. Instead, the fortunate neophyte leader has a mentor, a concept that has its origins in Greek mythology. When Odysseus was about to go off to war, the goddess Athena created Mentor to watch over the hero’s beloved son, Telemachus. The fact that Mentor had the attributes of both man and woman hints at the richness and complexity of the relationship, suggesting a deeper bond than that of teacher and student. In the real world, unfortunately, goddesses don’t intervene and mentors seldom materialize on their own. While the popular view of mentors is that they seek out younger people to encourage and champion, in fact the reverse is more often true. The best mentors are usually recruited, and one mark of a future leader is the ability to identify,woo, and win the mentors who will change his or her life.
When Robert Thomas and I interviewed two generations of leaders for our book, Geeks and Geezers, we met a remarkable young real-estate and Internet entrepreneur, Michael Klein, who had recruited his first mentor when he was only four or five years old, as Robert and I wrote in our Harvard Business Review article,“Crucibles of Leadership.” His guide was his grandfather, Max Klein, who was responsible for the paint-by-numbers craze that swept America in the 1950s and 1960s. The fad made Klein rich, but none of his children had the least interest in that business or any other. But little Michael did, and Max jumped at the chance to coach and counsel him, often in the course of long telephone conversations that continued until a few weeks before Max died. In effect, the older man served as a first-rate business school of one for his grandson, who became a multimillionaire while still in his teens.
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Posted by Maximillian | Filed Under Insight
The Seven Ages of Leader
October 22, 2007
My initial plunge into leadership came during World War II. I was a lieutenant in the infantry, 19 years old, and scared out of my wits. My orders were to assume command of a platoon on the front lines in Belgium. I arrived in the middle of the night, when most of the men were asleep. The platoon had taken up residence in a bombedout shell of a house. I was led into the kitchen by the platoon’s runner, and he offered me a bench to sleep on. Instead, I put my sleeping bag on the floor, next to the rest of the men. Not that I slept. I lay awake all night, listening to the ombs explode. I was as green as can be and knew little about command – or the world, for that matter. When the others in the house began to stir, I heard one sergeant ask another,“Who’s that?”“That’s our new platoon leader,”the man answered. And the sergeant said, “Good.We can use him.”
Without realizing it,without having any idea what was the right thing to do, I had made a good first move. My entry had been low-key. I hadn’t come in with my new commission blazing. In fact, I pretended to go to sleep on the floor.As a result,without drawing attention to myself, I learned something important about the men I would be leading. I learned that they needed me–or, at least, they needed the person they would subsequently teach me to be. And teach me they did. Over the next few weeks in Belgium, my men, who had already seen combat, kept me alive. They also taught me how to lead, often by example. The sergeant who had greeted my arrival with approval became my lifeline, quite literally, teaching me such essential skills as how to ride through a war zone without getting blown up.
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Posted by Maximillian | Filed Under Insight
What We Can Learn from Bad Leaders
October 19, 2007
While the optimism of a Ronald Reagan can be highly inspirational – and even effective – as Reagan’s own presidency showed, it can also lead to simplistic ideas about who leaders are and what they can do. Reagan himself provides us with many examples. Biographer Lou Cannon pointed out one: “The president was so cut off from the counsel of black Americans that he sometimes did not even realize when he was offending them.”
People can easily accept the idea that there are lessons to be found in success stories. But it’s a mistake to assume that we can learn nothing from fallen leaders. Indeed, some leaders achieve great things by capitalizing on the dark sides of their souls. Richard Nixon – relegated by many to the realm of mere “power wielder” after Watergate –was able to inaugurate diplomatic relations with China by capitalizing on his famous paranoia. No one thought that a suspicious and obsessed Nixon would be soft on Communism! Even monsters can teach us something about how to lead people. Hitler, for example, was a master of manipulating communications.
Likewise, many a lesson can be learned from business leaders’ blunders and even from their malfeasance.Take the case of Howell Raines, the former executive editor of the New York Times. In the last several years, no leader has fallen further faster than Raines, who was forced to resign after only 21 months on the job. According to popular analysis, Raines had to go because reporter Jayson Blair committed multiple transgressions on Raines’s watch. Raines might have survived his trial by fire if only he had not had a reputation for being high-handed and callous.
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Posted by Maximillian | Filed Under Insight
Where the Leadership Theory Went Wrong
October 16, 2007
To grasp how dramatically we have moved in our thinking on leadership from Machiavelli and Hamilton, it is helpful to see how the words “leader” and “leadership” in everyday language have acquired an inherently positive bias. Consider Lawrence Summers’s speech when he assumed the presidency of Harvard University in 2001: “In this new century, nothing will matter more than the education of future leaders.”Harvard’s “Statement of Values,” published in August 2002, picks up this same optimism when it says that the university “aspires…to prepare individuals for life, work, and leadership.” In both cases, the words “leader” and “leadership” have been transformed from their Hamiltonian sense. Of course, Harvard is not alone in equating the word “leader” with outstanding human qualities. Yale president Richard Levin claims that the university’s goal is to become truly global by “educating leaders.” As we have already seen, most popular books on business leadership also equate the term with good leadership, and many books on political leadership follow suit.
The start of the transformation of leadership into something overwhelmingly positive can be traced in part to James MacGregor Burns. A biographer of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Burns is a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and political scientist of impeccable repute. In 1978, Burns published Leadership, an analysis and distillation of what he had learned about the subject in his lifelong study of politics. The book had a major impact both because of Burns’s stature and because it appeared just before the teaching and study of leadership began its rapid growth. In it, Burns differentiated between “leaders,” who by definition take the motives and goals of followers into account, and lesser mortals whom he labeled “power wielders.”
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Posted by Maximillian | Filed Under Insight
Leaders Weren’t Always Nice
October 13, 2007
Although most contemporary scholarship is focused on leaders who are blemish-free, it was not always that way. Throughout history nearly all the great political theorists have recognized the reality of bad leaders, often accentuating the need to control their malicious tendencies. Influenced by religious traditions that focus on good and evil, and often personally affected by the trauma of war and internal disorder, political thinkers in former times took rather a jaundiced view of human nature.
Consider Machiavelli, a player in fifteenthand sixteenth-century Florentine politics and often a witness to brutal warfare. Famous for his advice to political players in his classic book The Prince, Machiavelli outlined opportunities associated with forceful leadership. For most of us, coercive leadership almost by definition equals bad leadership. But as someone who was familiar both with the ways of the world and with the human psyche, Machiavelli argued that the only truly bad leadership is weak leadership. His philosophy was predicated on the assumption that some leaders need to use force to hold personal power and to maintain public order.
Machiavelli, therefore, actually admired unscrupulous leaders who exercised power and authority with an iron fist. And in The Prince, he wrote with apparent calm about the occasional need judiciously to apply “cruelties”: “When he seizes a state, the new ruler ought to determine all the injuries that he will need to inflict.…Whoever acts otherwise, either through timidity or bad advice, is always forced to have the knife ready in his hand, and he can never depend on his subjects because they, suffering fresh and continuous violence, can never feel secure with regard to him.”
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Posted by Maximillian | Filed Under Insight
Leadership: Warts And All
October 10, 2007
We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion once wrote, to explain the unfounded optimism human beings display. Good stories make the world more bearable. Inevitably, therefore, we want to tell – and be told – stories that make us feel better, even if that means that we don’t get as complete a picture as we need.
People who study leaders have fallen victim to this instinct in a big way. In the leadership literature of the past several decades, almost all successful authors have fed into their readers’ (and perhaps their own) yearnings for feel- good stories. Just reflect on some of the best sellers of the last 20 to 30 years: Thomas J. Peters and Robert H.Waterman, Jr.’s In Search of Excellence; Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus’s Leaders: Strategies for Taking Charge; John P. Kotter’s A Force for Change: How Leadership Differs from Management; and Jay A. Conger and Beth Benjamin’s Building Leaders. Although a few authors have recently taken exception to the blind belief in the inherent goodness of leadership – notably Sydney Finkelstein in his book Why Smart Executives Fail and What You Can Learn from Their Mistakes – most of the hugely successful scholars argue, often with passion, that effective leaders are persons of merit, or at least of good intentions. It almost seems that by definition bad people cannot be good leaders.
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Posted by Maximillian | Filed Under Insight
Question Authority
October 7, 2007
Ronald Heifetz (ronald_heifetz@harvard.edu) is a cofounder of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a partner at Cambridge Leadership Associates, a consultancy in Cambridge.
Emotional intelligence is necessary for leadership but not sufficient. Many people have some degree of emotional intelligence and can indeed empathize with and rouse followers; a few of them can even generate great charismatic authority. But I would argue that if they are using emotional intelligence solely to gain formal or informal authority, that’s not leadership at all. They are using their emotional intelligence to grasp what people want, only to pander to those desires in order to gain authority and influence. Easy answers sell.
Leadership couples emotional intelligence with the courage to raise the tough questions, challenge people’s assumptions about strategy and operations – and risk losing their goodwill. It demands a commitment to serving others; skill at diagnostic, strategic, and tactical reasoning; the guts to get beneath the surface of tough realities; and the heart to take heat and grief.
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Posted by Maximillian | Filed Under Insight
Go for the Gemba
October 4, 2007
Hirotaka Takeuchi is the dean of Hitotsubashi University’s Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy in Tokyo. Self-awareness, self-control, empathy, humility, and other such emotional intelligence traits are particularly important in Asia. They are part of our Confucian emphasis on wah, or social harmony.
When books on emotional intelligence were first translated into Japanese, people said, “We already know that. We’re actually trying to get beyond that.”We’ve been so focused on wah that we’ve built up a supersensitive structure of social niceties, where everyone seeks consensus. In the Japanese hierarchy, everyone knows his
or her place so no one is ever humiliated. This social supersensitivity – itself a form of emotional intelligence–can lead people to shy away from conflict. But conflict is often the only way to get to the gemba – the front line, where the action really is, where the truth lies.
Thus, effective management often depends not on coolly and expertly resolving conflict, or simply avoiding it, but on embracing it at the gemba. Japan’s most effective leaders do both.
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Posted by Maximillian | Filed Under Insight
Keep It Hone
October 1, 2007
Carol Bartz (carol.bartz@autodesk.com)is the chairman, president, and CEO of Autodesk, a design software and digital content company in San Rafael, California.
A friend needed to take a six-month assignment in a different part of the country. She had an ancient, ill, balding but beloved dog that she could not take with her. Her choices boiled down to boarding the poor animal, at enormous expense, or putting it out of its obvious misery.
Friends said,“Board the dog,”though behind my friend’s back, they ridiculed that option. She asked me what I thought, and I told her, kindly but clearly, that I thought she should have the dog put to sleep rather than spend her money keeping it in an environment where it would be miserable and perhaps die anyway. My friend was furious with me for saying this. She boarded the dog and went away on her assignment.
When she returned, the dog was at death’s door and had to be put to sleep. Not long after that, my friend came around to say thanks.“You were the only person who told me the truth,”she said. She came to appreciate that I had cared enough to tell her what I thought was best, even if what I said hurt at the time.
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Posted by Maximillian | Filed Under Insight
