While royalty is born to his or her station in life, ordinary people have to work to achieve a position of power. It is often difficult for individuals who have finally arrived to suddenly discover that the strength of their power (or influence) rests in the hands of others – usually the people they manage.
Middle and upper managers who were trained in the command and control management school “know” that collaboration is important in today’s rapidly changing business environment. While providing lip-service to the subject and often sponsoring staff training sessions on collaboration, they still find it disconcerting, difficult and even impossible to give up their imperial role.
What’s the fun of being boss if you can’t boss?
Legislators, law enforcement, the workforce and investing public have watched the tsarist activities of senior executives with their financial mismanagement and financial greed. Individuals and organizations have begun to seriously question the disturbing trend of the cook eating before the rest of the family and guests…and gorging themselves with wild abandon!
There is a paradigm shift taking place that says the provincial bureaucratic corporate pyramid has outlived its usefulness and that micro-management is no longer feasible or desirable.
Power Examples - Heads
The easiest way to illustrate and understand the Achilles heel of the command and control approach and dated corporate pyramid is to look at the success/failure of specific business leaders and their ability to share/control power.
Andy Grove, former CEO and chairman of the world’s largest chip manufacturer – Intel, operated in a cubicle in the center of the firm’s offices rather than a corner office. The same is true of Charlie Barrett who took the helm of the global giant when Grove reached the company’s obligatory retirement age. In fact, they shared adjoining office cubicles so they would be readily available and in the center of the action.
Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft and a frequent lightning rod for corporate criticism, functions as chief technology officer and chairman of company. Steve Ballmer, a long-term Microsoft employee, runs the day-to-day activities and has been more visible and more vocal regarding the company’s direction and growth plans. Both men encourage direct communications with staff members rather than filtered ideas.
Michael Dell, founder and chairman of Dell Computer, works closely with Kevin Rollins the firm’s president. In fact the two share a common glass wall at the firm as they continually fine-tune and enhance the global enterprise’s product line, production/delivery activities and just-in-time supply chain.
Jack Welch, during his tenure as president/chairman of General Electric, was the business world’s icon for everything that was right about free enterprise. Before his planned departure from GE he ensured an orderly transition of the company to Jeff Immelt. While personal, family and financial scandal have tarnished Welch’s star; his operating and staff treatment philosophy continue to be widely studied and followed.
Herb Kelleher, the founder of Southwest Airlines, set the stage for enjoying your work and putting the customer first by empowering everyone. He passed the management mantel to his long-time assistant Colleen Barrett, who while not as boisterous as Kelleher still puts staff and passengers first. While other transportation firms struggle the company continues to show growth and profit.
Tales of ticket agents, baggage handlers and others making decisions on their own to satisfy customers have become the legends of optimum customer service. Associates have been continuously stimulated and encouraged to use all of their abilities to do right by the customer. Even if the decision cost Southwest money in the short-term, the decisions were supported.
A consummate professional executive, Lou Gestner took the helm of IBM at a time when the company was bleeding red ink so profusely many experts questioned his sanity and his ability to resurrect the company. Committed to action, Gestner has been quoted as saying that the last thing IBM needed was a vision and mission statement but rather action. In his first year at the helm he circled the globe meeting with employees and customers to learn first-hand what needed to be done. Part of his plan of action was to bring in Sam Palmiseno who replaced Gestner as CEO and who has enhanced the transition of the company from a hardware manufacturer to service organization.
Did Gestner get his message of customer action spread throughout the organization?
We met one of their sales engineers at a trade show once and she was asking about a storage solution our client sold to IBM. She wanted to know about immediate availability. We advised her that the products were sold to and through IBM. Her response was that she was aware of that and the company preferred that they get products through corporate channels. However, she and every sales engineer could go direct to the source when necessary when customer requirements called for immediate delivery.
Power Examples – Tails
Perhaps the most visible example of micro-management is Disney’s Michael Eisner. And his second in command is ????
If you look at his annual earnings you have to say the buck not only stops with him but it also starts there. Because the company has underperformed – according to many – the last few years many detractors say the problems lie in his inability to share management power. The palace revolt left him striped of his chairmanship while the Hollywood blood-letters smirked over cocktails.
Steve Jobs, one of the founders of Apple Computer and its resurrected leader, is an anomaly. He has done a lot of things right to put polish back on the fruit. He has made a number of missteps during the period as well. He accepts the accolades with fanfare and showman modesty. But he also – if reluctantly – takes the responsibility for the stumbles the company has endured.
Perhaps the poster child of command and control management, Apple has no visible second in command. While Jobs’ bold design and product decisions are widely credited with change the look and feel of computers, the level of information security (and punishment) makes military strategists envious. His move to change the delivery of audio content has forced the music industry to look for new entertainment delivery models.
The question remains to be answered if the singular point of control will stand the test of time as the company’s PC share steadily dwindles. What new opportunities can he unearth.
Carly Fiorino, the embattled CEO of HP, thus far has more wins than losses on her balance sheet. While the company’s money-making printer group hides mediocre performance in other areas, she is working to move the company in two directions -–simultaneously. On the one end of the spectrum she wants to compete head-on with the nimble Dell Computer that has sourcing/production/delivery/cash receipt down to a science. At the same time, Dell using its proven model, has committed to capturing a respectable portion of HP’s printer/printer supplies business.
On the other end of the spectrum, she is determined to capture the integration/services business that EDS, Anderson, IBM, Seimens and others experienced in the field hold. In between she must maintain and nourish the firm’s more traditional partners – resellers and integrators.
Her number two person? To the company’s credit, it has a seasoned set of managers especially after the company’s tempestuous acquisition of its major competitor – Compaq. By the same token, many of the best have been plucked away to head other organizations. A strong micro-manager who knows how to vocally rally staff personnel, resellers, Wall Street and shareholders; many corporate strategists wonder if she can maintain her attack on all fronts while consolidating her organization.
New Environment Forces Change
Today we operate in a knowledge economy. You can’t order people to work harder, smarter, or faster and to ignore the information that surrounds them. Knowledge workers get their information from all sides, not just from the top down. If they were properly hired and trained, they know more about their work than their bosses and supervisors. Monopolistic management doesn’t work. People need to be free to adapt and innovate. Effective individuals and teams need to be empowered to drive the success of the separate organizations, functions and activities. If this isn’t constantly encouraged the organization's future is in jeopardy.
Although command-and-control leadership has been under assault since the end of World War II, it continues to be widely practiced, usually to the organization's detriment. Almost everyone pays lip service to the notion that today's information-driven organizations need to be more collaborative and less hierarchical to be at their most effective. But collaborative organizations don't grow themselves. They are created, and the people at the very top are the ones who must insist on their creation. But the dirty little secret is that many leaders are uncomfortable with such structures. Many organizational leaders tend to cling to imperial roles, in large part, I suspect, because those roles feel marvelous—they provide the biggest jolt to the leader's ego. Sharing power and sharing information—the prerequisites for collegial organizations—do not enhance the top dog's sense of well-being. They only make all the others feel better.
There is a growing pile of evidence that more collaborative organizations are better adapted to solving the complex problems we face today.
only its central leader reported feeling good about the experiment. The isolated nonleaders in the Wheel had little enthusiasm for the task. In contrast, on the more complex task, the Circle was not only superior, but all the participants also reported relatively high morale.
He said that the alpha-male model of leadership may feel natural to us, as primates, but what today's world requires is more like the "sophisticated interdependent systems of social insects."
Surely changes in information flow are reshaping leadership. But I like to think that leaders are capable of changing themselves as well. One way they can encourage others to be collaborative is by doing it themselves.
A spirit of power-sharing can be implemented even in organizations that are assumed to be hopelessly hierarchical. He made sure that the crew knew what he was thinking, and why, and he urged his crew members to tell him what they really thought. Abrashoff made a fetish of walking around and talking to crew members on a daily basis. He communicated using every possible means, using the ship's public-address system so often that he became known as "Megaphone Mike." The more everyone knew, the better performance and the higher morale.
To encourage leaders to share power and foster collaboration, their compensation—even their continued employment—can be tied to it. But wholesale change will only come, I suspect, when leaders have a change of heart and discover what Abrashoff and Michael Dell have learned: Only when everyone in the organization believes that it's their ship can the organization truly thrive, and only then has the captain truly succeeded.
Warren Bennis
Warren Bennis is distinguished professor of business administration and founding chairman of the Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business. He has advised fours U.S. presidents and more than 150 CEOs and is author or coauthor of more than 20 books on leadership, change, and management, including Organizing Genius and his most recent, Co-Leaders. (3/99)
Never has the subject of leadership been of greater interest to managers, or to management writers. Richard Donkins, writing in The Financial Times, describes "a fixation bordering on obsession [with] the qualities needed for corporate leadership." It is, he adds, a "contagious" obsession, spreading in scope and intensity throughout our society, and suggesting that Americans have lost their way.
If it is an obsession, it is a useful one for any organization concerned about the future -- but I understand the source of the frustration Donkins and others display. For all the ink it gets in scholarly, business, and popular journals, leadership remains an elusive concept.
However, whether or not leadership is well understood, its impact on the bottom line is dramatic, according to a study by Andersen Consulting's Institute for Strategic Change: the stock price of companies perceived as being well led grew 900 percent over a 10-year period, compared to just 74 percent growth in companies perceived to lack good leadership. And Fortune, in its 1998 round up of America's most admired companies, identifies the common denominator of exemplary organizations. "The truth is that no one factor makes a company admirable," wrote Thomas Stewart, "but if you were forced to pick the one that makes the most difference, you'd pick leadership. In Warren Buffet's phrase, 'People are voting for the artist and not the painting.'"
Generating Intellectual Capital
My own observations of organizations and leadership lead me to two conclusions about what it will take to survive in the tumultuous years ahead:
The key to future competitive advantage will be the organization's capacity to create the social architecture capable of generating intellectual capital. And leadership is the key to realizing the full potential of intellectual capital.
"organizations ensure that [people] use only 5 to 10 percent of their abilities at work. Outside of work they engage the other 90 to 95 percent." The challenge for leaders, he adds, is "to learn how to recognize and employ that untapped ability." His assessment is supported by data on both sides of the Atlantic. Nearly two-thirds of companies surveyed by Kepner-Tregoe say they don't use more than half their employees' brainpower. And employees themselves are even less optimistic; only 16 percent said they use more than half their talents at work, according to a recent UK survey.
On the other hand, huge benefits accrue to organizations that, as Barnevik urges, learn to employ their collective brainpower, know-how, ideas, and innovation. A recent study of 3,200 U.S. companies, conducted by Robert Zemsky and Susan Shaman of the University of Pennsylvania, showed that a 10 percent increase in spending for workforce training and development leads to an 8.5 percent increase in productivity; a similar increase in capital expenditures leads to just a 3.8 percent increase in productivity.
Such findings explain why General Electric's Jack Welch says he has only three jobs as CEO: selecting the right people, allocating capital resources, and spreading ideas quickly. Welch typically asks the hundreds of GE managers
Qualities of a Leader
Although Donkins implies that our search for the qualities of leadership is futile, research points to seven attributes essential to leadership. Taken together they provide a framework for leading knowledge workers:
* Technical competence: business literacy and grasp of one's field
* Conceptual skill: a facility for abstract or strategic thinking
* Track record: a history of achieving results
* People skills: an ability to communicate, motivate, and delegate
* Taste: an ability to identify and cultivate talent
* Judgment: making difficult decisions in a short time frame with imperfect data
* Character: the qualities that define who we are
Senior executives seldom lack the first three attributes; rarely do they fail because of technical or conceptual incompetence, nor do they reach high levels of responsibility without having a strong track record. All these skills are important, but in tomorrow's world exemplary leaders will be distinguished by their mastery of the softer side: people skills, taste, judgment, and, above all, character.
Character is the key to leadership, an observation confirmed by most people's personal experience, as it is in my 15 years of work with more than 150 leaders, and in other studies I've encountered. Research at Harvard University indicates that 85 percent of a leader's performance depends on personal character. Likewise, the work of Daniel Goleman makes clear that leadership success or failure is usually due to "qualities of the heart" (see "The Emotional Intelligence of Leaders," Fall 1998). Although character is less quantifiable than other aspects of leadership, there are many ways to take the measure of an individual (see The Anatomy of Character).
Demands of Followers
Power in the knowledge economy resides more with knowledge workers than with owners or managers. Serving the needs of those workers is a new leadership imperative. Research shows not only the characteristics of effective leaders but also the expectations that followers have of their leaders. Whether in a corporation, a Scout troop, a public agency, or an entire nation, constituents seek four things: meaning or direction, trust in and from the leader, a sense of hope and optimism, and results. To serve these constituent needs -- and ultimately to unleash an organization's intellectual capital -- leaders can foster four supporting conditions, which in turn can create four respective outcomes.
EXEMPLARY LEADERSHIP
To satisfy followers' needs and achieve positive outcomes, leaders must provide four things.
In Service of
Constituent Needs for: Leaders Provide: To Help Create:
Meaning and direction Sense of purpose Goals and objectives
Trust Authentic relationships Reliability and consistency
Hope and optimism "Hardiness" (confidence that things will work out) Energy and commitment
Results Bias toward action, risk, curiosity, and courage Confidence and creativity
• Providing purpose. Effective leaders bring passion, perspective, and significance to the process of defining organizational purpose.
If you're not confused, you don't know what's going on.
One starts with passion; perspective is harder to come by -- but is essential in a world of rapid change. For most people in organizations, the question is not only what happens next, but what happens after what happens next. As hockey great Wayne Gretzky explains, "It ain't where the puck is, it's where the puck will be." One Fortune 500 CEO puts it differently: "If you're not confused, you don't know what's going on." Because the fog of reality is so pervasive, constituents want not just a vision of where we're heading but also where they've been and where they are now. People want leaders to provide context.
Finally, knowledge workers -- the best of whom have significant choice in the place and terms of their employment -- want a sense of significance.
What is the meaning of our work?
What difference or larger contribution does it make to others?
How do we measure success?
And what are the positive outcomes of that success?
By making time for such reflection leaders build support for organizational goals and objectives.
• Generating and sustaining trust. Since 1985, 20 percent of the American workforce has been laid off at least once. In a time when the new social contract makes the ties between organizations and their knowledge workers tenuous, trust becomes the emotional glue that can bond people to an organization.
These are the factors that generate trust -- at work or in a partnership, a marriage, or a friendship: competence, constancy, caring, candor, congruity.
What I call congruity -- or authenticity, feeling comfortable with oneself -- is a further reflection of character. It is at the heart of any honest relationship. But congruity goes beyond simply knowing yourself; it is being consistent, presenting the same face at work as at home.
Candor is perhaps the most important component of trust. When we are truthful about our shortcomings, or acknowledge that we do not have all the answers, we earn the understanding and respect of others.
Exemplary leaders create a climate of candor.
Exemplary leaders create a climate of candor throughout their organizations. They remove the organizational barriers -- and the fear -- that cause people to keep bad news from the boss. They understand that those closest to customers usually have the solutions but can do little unless a climate of candor allows problems to be discussed. Especially during times of change, exemplary leaders share information about what's going on in the organization, the industry, and the world. They treat candor as one measure of personal and organizational performance, which can be gauged through employees' response to such statements as, "My organization encourages people to take the time to communicate openly, even about difficult questions." Or, "There is little fear of speaking openly about important issues."
Without candor there can be no trust. And by building trust, leaders help create the reliability and consistency customers demand.
• Fostering hope. Exemplary leaders seem to expect success; they always anticipate positive outcomes. The glass for them is not simply full but brimming.
Hope combines the determination to achieve one's goals with the ability to generate the means to do so. Hopeful people describe themselves with such statements as:
I can think of ways to get out of a jam.
I energetically pursue my goals.
My experience has prepared me well for the future.
There are ways around any problem.
Prize. That psychological hardiness, the sense that things generally work out well, creates tremendous confidence in oneself and in those around one. And that kind of confidence influences others. It builds energy and commitment, and that in turn influences outcomes. In short, every exemplary leader that I have met has what seems to be an unwarranted degree of optimism -- and that helps generate the energy and commitment necessary to achieve results.
• Getting results. As leaders we can provide meaning, build trust, and foster hope, but all of that counts for little unless an organization produces results.
Most leaders coming into a new position or facing a moment of truth are afforded some time and resources to deliver. That is what makes a collective sense of purpose, trust, and hope so important -- they can carry people through what they know will be a difficult time. But these assets will dissipate if leaders do not get results. And of course we deliver results only by taking action.
That does not mean that every action will be successful. But, as Gretzky reminds us, "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take." Exemplary leaders never forget that they must ultimately take their best shots -- and create a climate that tolerates missed shots yet demands that everyone continue to take them. Moving from talk to action is imperative, but, especially in the times we live in, it requires commitment, enterprise, curiosity -- and courage. It requires leadership.
Results-oriented leaders see themselves as catalysts. They expect to achieve a great deal, but know that they can do little without the efforts of others. They bring the zeal, resourcefulness, risk-tolerance -- and discipline -- of the entrepreneur to every effort of the organization. Nothing less will get break through the noise, clutter, and competitive pressure of today's marketplace.
To be sure, we are paying unprecedented attention to the subject of leadership. We also are seeing the importance of intellectual capital to strategy, organizational design, leadership development, employee retention, and virtually every business practice that matters. Organizations that don't take such issues seriously, or that fail to make the connection between leadership and the quality of their intellectual capital, will probably not be in the phone book in 2001.
One CEO says, "We are making the topic of leadership an issue we have powerful conversations about. We encourage people to talk about it. We reward coaches. We want people to develop ways of getting feedback." They do so not as an exercise but a way to compete. Exemplary leaders believe they have a responsibility to extend people's growth and to create an environment where people constantly learn. Those are the surest ways to generate intellectual capital and to use that capital to create new value. In the next century, that will be every leader's ultimate task.
The Anatomy of Character
There are many definitions of character, but for exemplary leaders character goes beyond ethical behavior (although that is essential). The word itselfcomes from the Greek for engraved or inscribed. For the leaders I have studied, character has to do with who we are, with how we organize our experience. The great psychologist William James described it as "the particular mental or moral attitude [that makes one feel] most deeply and intensively active and alive ... a voice inside which speaks and says, 'This is the real me.'"
Effective leaders -- and effective people -- know that voice well. They understand that there is no difference between becoming an effective leader and becoming a fully integrated human being.
Many aspects of character -- such as our degree of energy or our cognitive skill -- are probably determined at birth; others are influenced by our family life, our birth order, our relationships with parents, teachers and friends.
Yet character develops throughout life, including work life. Leaders can help others become more aware of their innate capacities. For example, by examining the kinds of decisions they make and don't make, senior executives and those they manage can develop their own character and cultivate new leadership throughout the organization.
For executive leaders, character is framed by drive, competence, and integrity. Most senior executives have the drive and competence necessary to lead. But too often organizations elevate people who lack the moral compass. I call them "destructive achievers." They are seldom evil people, but by using resources for no higher purpose than achievement of their own goals, they often diminish the enterprise. Such leaders seldom last, for the simple reason that without all three ingredients -- drive, competence, and moral compass -- it is difficult to engage others and sustain meaningful results.
Collaborate - To learn more about this author, visit Andy Marken's Website.
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