Do we really need flamboyant visionaries to run our companies?

Photo by Hamed Saber

The Economist decided to wage an all front attack against humility in leadership and management. One of Its recent columns discusses what kinds of leaders make the best CEOs. The argument?

In general, the corporate world needs its flamboyant visionaries and raging egomaniacs rather more than its humble leaders and corporate civil servants. Think of the people who have shaped the modern business landscape, and “faceless” and “humble” are not the first words that come to mind.

It looks like this claim comes just out of the best management books of the beginning of the last century. As Bill Taylor from Harvard Business Review Blog points out, most of the claims in the column are not only wrong, but plainly misleading:

The crux of The Economist’s argument relies on what’s known as the Great Man Theory of History. After trumpeting the virtues of business geniuses such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Lou Gerstner, and Jack Welch, it then generalizes from this handful of larger-than-life moguls: “The best ambassadors for business are the outsize figures who have changed the world and who feel no need to apologise for themselves or their calling.” It’s an intriguing essay and a good read. It’s also a false choice — and a bad reading of history. For one thing, when it comes to larger-than-life CEOs, I can name as many scoundrels and failures as I can geniuses and world-changers.

My view? Three things are wrong with The Economist’s view.

First, the assumption that there is only one way. Maybe, for some companies and in certain situations, the flamboyant visionaries are the best fit as CEO’s. But not in every situation. Some companies need the quiet leadership behind the scene, the steady hand that improves and creates processes that lead to growth and innovation. Taylor’s choice of the historic Great Man Theory seems appropriate. It too claimed that only certain people are fit for leadership roles. We know today that this attitude was plain wrong.

Second, the assumption that the flamboyant visionaries must be in the top of the pyramid. You can be in a leadership role and create change in your company, without being the CEO, especially if the CEO in that company needs to deal more with management issues, where the “raging egomaniacs” are just not cut out to do the job. Management and leadership are different things that require different talents. The column refers to Bill Gates. We need to remember what Bill Gates is doing today: As Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton: write in their book Now, Discover Your Strength:

“…[Y]ou will excel only by maximizing your strengths, never by fixing your weaknesses. This is not the same as saying ‘ignore your weakness’. The people we described did not ignore their weakness. Instead, they did something much more effective. They found ways to manage around their weakness, thereby freeing them up to hone their strengths to a sharper point. Each of them did this a little differently. Pam liberated herself by hiring an outside consultant to write the strategic plan. Bill Gates did something similar. He selected a partner, Steve Ballmer, to run the company, allowing him to return to software development and rediscover his strengths’ path…

Third, when you read the column you feel almost like there have never been hugely successful leaders that changed the world while acting humbly. Has humble leaders never brought change and created value to society? Michael Dell comes to mind as someone who succeeded doing both. The research and consulting advice that The Economist is complaining about did not come out of thin air and it is based both on empirical evidence and experience. But what does that have to do with anything. The Economist wants a good story. A flamboyant leader, even if he will be less effective.

I am amazed how even a respected journal like The Economist falls prey to the conventional wisdoms and continues to harbor management principles that are almost a hundred years old, although we have so much research and experience suggesting otherwise.

Elad

Shorts: Jim Hart in HBR Blog on communicating with your team

This is a quote from Jim Hart’s post in Harvard Business Review Blog titled In Tough Times, Help Your Team Remember Their Purpose:

In his book, It’s Not What You Sell, It’s What You Stand For, Roy M. Spence Jr. writes something we have been coaching CEOs and executive leaders on for 30 years: “A real purpose can’t just be words on paper. It has to get under the skin of every member of your organization….If you get it right, people will feel great about what they’re doing, clear about their goals, and excited to get to work every morning.” This is especially important in turbulent times…

Very strong statement. Reminds of the idea of Vital Signs I write about a lot. And this:

And I think, this can also teach us a lesson as managers and leaders. There is no doubt that one of the most important things we need to do as managers and leaders is to communicate. But we have so many channels. Just using one of them for all our communications is not enough. We need to create the right mix and to send the right messages using the right tools. We need to remember that some people are listeners and some are readers. We need to remember that some people like to get all the information online (on a computer and all the time) and some prefer to do it offline (not on a computer and postponed to a different time).

Elad

Shorts: Customer Experience Matters on leadership

I read so many things each day that are relevant to the subjects I write about in my blog . However, I don’t always have the time or the ability to write a full blog post about them. Usually, there is one quote I like, which it too long to tweet about. Therefore, I decided to start a new series of posts called: Shorts. Each of these posts will have the word: “Shorts” in the title, with the name of the source I am referring to and the subject. These posts will only include a short introduction by me, and then a quote.

Today, I am going to start with a post from Customer Experience Matters. Bruce Timken Quotes a few people interviewed for U.S. News & World’s America’s Best Leaders 2009 list. Here is the quote I like in particular, as talks about the balance between team and individuals in management:

Roy Williams, head coach of North Carolina, listed his three guiding leadership principles:

“(1) Everyone on the team must focus on the same goal. It’s my job to effectively communicate those goals to the team; (2) Emphasize those goals every day; and (3) Understand that although everyone has a common goal, individuals also have goals, needs, and dreams that must be cared for.”

Elad

It’s not about you

Photo by David Boyle

On B-net Australia, Steve Tobak, writes about The Ten Rules of Great Teams:

Great groups and great leaders create each other

Every great group has a strong leader

The leaders of great groups love talent and know where to find it

Great groups think they are on a mission from God

Great groups see themselves as winning underdogs

Great groups always have an enemy

People in great groups have blinders on

Great groups are optimistic not realistic

In great groups, the right person has the right job

The leaders of great groups give them what they need and free them from the rest

I was going through this list and noticed something. The list mentions the idea of leadership a number of times (even though I think mostly management is a better term in this case), but it does not differentiate the concept from the group. The leader and the group are both part of one concept. And that reminded of something I wrote a few weeks back:

They way to create a shared story is not using your employees as instruments, but treating them as partners. And if you treat them as partners, the results will follow. It is more than making sure the job gets done. In order to get the job done, you can put processes in place. But a manager needs to think beyond getting the job done and beyond the process. A manager, as a facilitator, needs to create the conditions in which these processes take place. Conditions that lead to flow, joy and happiness.

Authority is not about telling people what to do either. The worst damage you can do is giving clear instructions because it prevents the communication inside the team and prevents the development of people. It means that there is a big chance the team will fail when you would not be there. And it is not about you, it is about your team. It is about completing the task together.

As things happen these days online, connections are created . Just a few minutes after reading the B-net article, I read Marshall Goldsmith’s post on the Harvard Business Review blog “Leadership isn’t about you“:

Charlie thought about my question. “As a coach,” he said, “you should realize that success with your clients isn’t all about you. It’s about the people who choose to work with you.” He chuckled; then he continued: “In a way, I am the same. The success of my organization isn’t about me. It’s all about the great people who are working with me.”

Maybe it is time to stop worrying about ourselves. It is time to realize that nobody cares about us. Being a great manager or leader is not about us. It is about connecting people to something bigger. It is about creating a shared story. It is about creating great people and great teams.

Elad

Learned Helplessness and Managerial Uncertainty

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This post is the fifth (and last) post in a series of posts I am writing on lessons about managing people from the book Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely (for more post in the series, see 1, 2, 3, 4).

In the additions to the 2nd edition Ariely added a chapter called Thoughts about the Subprime Mortgage Crisis and Its Consequences. In it he writes this:

All creatures (including humans) respond negatively in situations where things don’t seem to make sense. When the world gives us unpredictable punishments without rhyme or reason, and when we don’t have any explanation for what is happening, we become prone to something psychologists call “learned helplessness.”

Let’s think about a business environment. In your office or in your team, how much uncertainty is present? And no, I am not talking about general uncertainty which is a part of every business. I am talking about managerial uncertainty. It is a kind of uncertainty that revolves around what behaviors are expected and what will be the rewards or punishments to them. It is uncertainty about how decisions that affect people are being made.

Just think about all the times that your manager waited until the last moment to give his team the news. The last time there were rumors in the office about what is going to happen. The last time you knew something is going on, but did not understand what is going on. The last time you got a decision dictated to you without understanding why.

I wrote here a number of times that I think a leader’s job is to take care of the future. To try and dissipate the natural fear that is part of the uncertainty the future holds. But managers have to deal with uncertainty as well.

In investment theory there is a term called systematic risk. This term defines the risks of the entire market. This is differentiated from the unsystematic risk which is specific for a company or industry. What is the difference between them? You can take care of the unsystematic risk with diversification, while you cannot care of the systematic risk.

A manager cannot take care of the systematic risk. The future. It is a leader’s job. It is the leadership uncertainty. A manager is in charge with the present. And he needs to take care of the risks associated with it. Take care of managerial uncertainty.

So, how do you take care of managerial uncertainty of the present? One word. Transparency.

As managers we need to make sure that our employees do not get to a state of learned helplessness. That they understand the connection between cause and effect in the workplace. That they understand how decisions are being made. That they understand the process of management. In the legal field there is term called Procedural Justice:

The notion that fair procedures are the best guarantee for fair outcomes is a popular one. Procedural justice is concerned with making and implementing decisions according to fair processes. People feel affirmed if the procedures that are adopted treat them with respect and dignity, making it easier to accept even outcomes they do not like.

When people understand the system and the system works “the way it is supposed to”, they don’t have to live in a state of uncertainty, even if the result itself is uncertain. They don’t have negative reactions and they don’t go into a state of learned helplessness. It is time we put some transparency to work in order to deal with the managerial uncertainty.

Elad

Confusing leadership

Photo by db*photography

Earlier this week I had a job interview and one of the first questions I was asked was: “what do you think leadership is?”. Those of you who have been following my blog must be smiling, as you know this is a subject I write about a lot and feel comfortable talking about. So, although I did not get the job, I do feel that my answer to that question was very good: “leadership is about dealing with the future”.

I mentioned a number of times in this blog that I get frustrated by the fact that people confuse leadership with management. Though some people need to do both jobs, they are in fact very different jobs. Management is about the now. It is about helping the people around you excel. It is about support and making sure things happen. With leadership, the main thing is about dissipating fear of uncertainty and fear of change.  

Today I was reading this interesting post in Harvard Business Review Blog called “Decoding Leaders“. In it, the author Norm Smallwood, starts well by describing the inflation of leadership theories, books and names:

On Amazon, there are 480,881 books today that have to do with leaders as the topic. If you ask 30 leadership development experts to define leadership, you get 31 different answers. No wonder we’re confused.

So, how did they go and try to solve the confusion. By interviewing:

“…recognized experts in the field who had already spent years sifting through the evidence and asked two simple but elusive questions:

1. What percentage of effective leadership traits are basically the same?

2. If there are common rules that all leaders must master, what are they?”.

After all that, They came up with five rules to decode leadership.

I have a lot of respect for all of these experts that spend their lives dealing with leadership. But I don’t understand how a solution to the problem can be achieved by averaging the thoughts of many people, be their expertise as they may be. Can we really have an average of ideas? Could it be that the answer to what leadership lies in some kind of popularity contest? I find that hard to believe.

I think that first we need to decide what the big goal is. Then, we can start dispensing rules.

Why, just a few posts before, on the same blog, a post named “Humility as a leadership trait” can be found. This is off course a trait that could not be found on the five rules list. Not that I think humility is not important or should not be advocated. On the contrary. A little more humility could do great things for the world. But I am not sure this is a required trait for leadership. Actually, I think it is important for managers, whose main work is working with others and resisting the temptation of giving answers. And how do the authors think humility should be achieved. Here is one example:

Look to promote others. Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman note in their seminal text, First, Break All the Rules, that a characteristic of successful managers is their ability to promote others, sometimes to positions higher than their own. Such managers are talent groomers, they are ones upon whose leadership success of the enterprise rests.

Is it only me? Wait – leaders? Managers? Future leaders? Grooming talent?

Are you confused? I know I am.

In the atmosphere of humility I must admit that I might be wrong. Maybe leadership is not about the future. But trying to solve the confusion by making an average of ideas will not help solve the confusion. Albert Einstein famously said: “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler”. Let’s try to find a simpler definition for leadership.

Elad

Lessons on teamwork from “Mistborn”

Photo by Wikipedia

I mentioned in the past that I am a keen Epic Fantasy reader. I am constantly amazed by how accurately the authors of some of these books describe the complex concepts of leadership and management. I was reading the fascinating “Mistborn” by Brandon Sanderson and came across these few lines:

“All right, let’s talk. We’ve got something of a task ahead of ourselves, and the sooner we begin outlining a plan, the better”.

“I thought you had a plan,” Yeden said uncomfortably.

“I have a framework,” Kelsier said. “I know what needs to happen, and I have a few ideas on how to do it. But, you don’t gather a group like this and just tell them what to do. We need to work this out together, beginning with the list of problems we need to deal with if we want the plan to work”.

What are the lessons I see in these lines?

• Outcome management – this is a concept I wrote about a few times before. Good managers give a framework and desired outcomes and don’t tell their team how to do the work. They usually know better.
• Respect your team – no matter who you are working with, they are people, they have abilities, ideas and personality. And they are unique. As one of my Professor once said: “there is no one person who is as smart as two people”. Trying to tell your teammates what to do, not only disrespect them, it also kills good ideas.
• Transparency leads to cooperation – if people are a part of the process, they understand the big picture, their role in it and how it relates to the roles of others. It not only creates physiological buy in, but it also improves the efficiency of the process.

Elad

Re-thinking tradeoffs

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During the last few weeks, as part of our AGSM MBA integrative experience, we participated in a simulation with a software called Markstrat. The simulation allowed us to run companies in teams as part of a competitive environment, making decisions about operations, marketing, strategy and more. In the end of the two weeks experience we each had to write a short essay about what we learned from the experience.  Here is a short part of what I handed in:

As future managers we should be aware of that and think carefully about the implications each decision has on our cognitive resources. Attention and time are the scarcest resources a manager can allocate, even more then money. Thus, they should be considered in a decision like any other scarce resource.

This relates to an idea I have been writing and thinking about a lot lately. Tradeoffs. I think as human beings we have the immediate tendency to want everything. To try and be everything. To try and be the best at everything. Maybe instead we should focus our attention on being the best at something. Just one thing that will make us stand out. Not because being good at everything is bad. It is because it is so hard to achieve all at once. Because success is so many times the result of tradeoffs. Of actively deciding not to be good at something, because we put all our resources on something else.

Maybe, in our multi-tasking world, we need to re-learn what our forefathers, the hunters, knew how to do so good – focus on one thing. Become your prey. Follow it enough and you will understand it, start to think like it and finally hunt it.

I was reminded of this concept yesterday while I was reading Seth Godin’s post: “Spare no expense!“. Godin, makes the same point about tradeoffs in a different setting. The resources companies put into making one customer happy. A short excerpt:

The reason we get trapped by (c) is that, “I’m doing the best I can” is always much easier than, “we need to be disciplined and help more people, even if that means that some special cases will fall through the cracks. The internet makes this even more difficult because people who fall through the cracks are able to amplify their complaints ever louder.

The way around it, I think, is to set expectations early and often. If you’re going to give me your phone number, you better answer it. If you’re going to offer a warranty, you better honor it. If you position yourself as a company with real people eager to make every single person happy–you better deliver.

No matter what, you should decide. In advance. How much do you want to spend on ad hoc emergencies, how much do you want to reserve on design and helping the masses improve their experience?

The hard part is making the decision and sticking to it. We see many companies saying things like – “we put our people first” – but when it comes to making the actual choice, the actual tradeoffs, they don’t. It is not only about not fulfilling your promises; it is about not making the right tradeoffs even though you decided to make them.

So, what are your actively chosen tradeoffs? And what do you to keep them?

Elad

The fallacy of the all knowing General-Leader

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I think it is already a commonplace knowledge that leadership is about managing change. It is about the future and people’s fear of the uncertainties the future holds. It is about painting a clear picture of what the future would look like and articulating what it would feel and why it is a worthwhile journey to take.

This process is difficult. Difficult for the followers as people, generally, prefer the devil they know on the devil they don’t. Change also means work. It sometimes means, like president Obama said a while back, that things will get worse before they get better. People don’t want things to get worse for an unknown future of better. It is to flimsy of a concept. These difficulties lead to a reluctance to change. Leads to push-backs. And sometimes leads to total opposition.

This week, as part of our adaptive leadership workshop one of our instructors pointed us to the fact that many of the names that pop to mind when we think about leadership like Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, Mahatma Gandhi and even Jesus (and my own Israeli Example, Yitzhak Rabin) are people who were killed when they tried to bring on change.

Probably these people are extreme examples and the next change initiative you will lead in your company will not result in your murder, but still it is a valuable example to the difficulties we face when we bring a message of change. We need to consider the feelings of the people standing in front of us when we try to lead a change initiative and understand their actions in light of these feelings.

That is why the ability to articulate a vision and communicate it clearly is so important. The less uncertainly people will feel about the future, the clearer it will seem to them, the less afraid they will be and the less they will be prone to actions of resistance.

But an important thing leaders tend to forget it that having a clear vision of the future and painting the picture of the future does not make it a reality. It does not make something unbreakable. The future, like the future, will always remain uncertain and unknown. The only thing we can be sure about is that it will come. Even the best leaders make mistakes when they try to predict it. So, the process of communicating should a two way street. Not only is the leader’s job to articulate it, it is his job to dive into the uncertainties of the people. To try and understand them. And if needed, accommodated them into his vision.

When you think, learn or read about leadership and especially when you discuss it, there is always a tendency to resort to military examples. So many leadership quotes are taken from generals. Many analogies have been made between leadership the work of a general. I think it is about time we abandon this leader as a commander type of thinking. In the battle field, the general is the final word. In real life, and especially in business, it is not a sustainable practice. There is too much wisdom to gain from people who “oppose” you. The days of leading a group of “yes men” or of a leader that knows more than the rest are over. Today, the chances you will know more or better than your employees are slim. You might blame the Gen Y; you might blame the internet; I think it is just commonsense and it should have always been like that.

The fallacy of the all knowing General-Leader could lead to disastrous results. We are probably living an example of that these days. Change is not only hard for the followers. It is also hard for the leader. It is time to incorporate transparency and vulnerability into our leadership instead of complete obedience and self-confidence.

Elad

Getting down from the ladder

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Our integrative experience in the AGSM MBA this week included a big chapter on adaptive leadership. One of the concepts that were mentioned time and time again was that of rank. How we perceive our and other people’s rank and what effect it has on our assumptions and behaviours.

One sentence that one of our facilitators mentioned (he actually quoted someone else, whose name I don’t remember) struck me as especially interesting. He was talking about rank in organizations and about people “going up the ladder”, being promoted. Then he said:

“When we go up the ladder, we look down and see a lot of shiny happy faces. When they look up, they see…”

Well, he did not finish, so I don’t feel I need to. But that reminded me of the “Toxic Tandem“. People in positions of power tend to be oblivious to the needs and actions of the people who have less power than them. Or in other words, as we described it in class: “managers are usually blind to their rank”. As a manager, it is easy to forget that you are there on the ladder. That means that the focus of all eyes is on you. And it also means that you are in a different position than everybody else is. Which means it is harder for you to understand them.

Too many managers get to a management position and continue to do what they always did. Their work. Which is good, but not great. The problem is that now their work is being a manager. And that is a totally different job. A job you cannot do without leaving your desk. With our being active about it. without a little, MBWA.

So, the fact that you went up the ladder does not mean you have to stay there all the time. From time to time, you can climb down from the ladder and let the people see your happy shiny face, instead of your…

Elad