Nothing happens unless you make it happen.
As a leader, everything is your responsibility,
because you always could have chosen otherwise
Peter Koestenbaum
Foreword
Welcome to the first issue of EDGE FIRST, a groundbreaking email magazine dedicated to making you a better leader.
Our goal is to provide the two key ingredients of effective leadership:
- provocative thinking about what it means to be a leader
- the tools, techniques and best-practice models that drive leadership improvement.
Thinking about leadership
We're going to kick off with two different takes on the same subject - successful leadership. The first is about picking great leaders, and we suggest you read it as a potential candidate - from a 'customer's perspective. The second is more philosophical, more personal, and potentially much more rewarding. Here goes!
(1) Corporate governance - choosing the right leaders
Harvard Business Review authors Warren Bennis and James O'Toole (Don't Hire the Wrong CEO, issue of May-June 2000) say that 'Chief Executive churn' - a late twentieth century phenomena - is mostly the fault of the boards which make the selections.
They pick the wrong people, the authors say, because they don't pay attention to real leadership as a selection criterion.
What then is real leadership? Forget the new economy, Bennis and O'Toole say, it's what it has always been - an ability to demonstrate integrity, provide meaning, generate trust and communicate values. Energising their followers, pushing people to meet challenging goals, and developing leadership skills in others. But real leaders, most of all, have the ability to move the human heart.
And that's part of the problem, they say. Moving the human heart is a hard thing to quantify - especially for boards of directors making decisions as risky and second-guessable as selecting a new chief executive.
If boards don't pick leaders for their leadership skills, what do they base their too-often-wrong decisions on? In brief - measurable but poorly diagnostic proxies for leadership like increases in stock price or market share, balance sheet improvements, overseas experience, or a merger and acquisition track record. Technical skills - engineering know-how or marketing wizardry - may also be influential. As Koestenbaum says - see below - when the going gets tough, we tend to default to the hard numbers.
So what to do? Must boards persist in looking for love in all the wrong places?
No, say Bennis and O'Toole, not if they follow this prescription for success:
(1) Agree on what leadership is. Try a little test. Ask board members for their own definitions. All the same? Not likely! Debate the differences. Render a unified version. If it doesn't say something about the ability to move human hearts, go back to the start.
(2) Resolve strategic and political conflicts amongst the board. An agreed strategic direction will make choosing a leader - one who can deliver what the organisation needs - much easier. It'll make the new leader's job easier as well.
(3) Measure candidates' soft qualities. The hard stuff is important, but easy. Soft qualities are harder to assess, but critical. Bennis and O'Toole recommend interviewing a candidate's superiors, peers and direct reports. Ask about ability to inspire trust, to hold people accountable, to delegate, to grow new leaders, to articulate and communicate purpose, vision and values, to share information, resources, praise and credit, to energize, and to listen.
(4) Beware of articulate, glamorous, charismatic dreamers with glossy pitches. Remember Drucker's observation - a sure way to spot leaders is the presence of willing followers. Concentrate on what people have done, discount what they say.
(5) Accept that real leaders are threatening. A leader who can motivate will be destabilising, and discomfort personal-agenda-driven insiders. That's one reason why it's easier to build a consensus around a candidate with technical competence than it is around one who genuinely smells of leadership. And that's also the reason incestuous, immature and a-processual dotcoms and tech firms pick wrong so often.
(6) No-one should just inherit the top job, even if (especially if) they've been fingered as the heir apparent by the outgoing leader.
(7) don't make hasty decisions. Hiring the right leader is a slow process at best. Ultimately, the surest way to find the right person is to cultivate and nurture in-house talent.
How does this help you to be a better leader?
You're not likely to sit on a board, or ever be a chief executive (OK, we're not into mindless motivation, but why not!?). So what's the point? It's this. Think about the people you report to as your 'board of directors.' Think about the people you work with as potential leaders. Use the Bennis and O'Toole guidelines when recruiting for positions of responsibility. Think about what you need to do to make it as easy as possible for people to recruit you to positions of responsibility.
In short: Think like a candidate for leadership advancement, and you're day-to-day leadership skills will surely improve.
(2) Do you have the will to lead?
If you instinctively take a step forward when the call goes out for volunteers, you'll have found yourself leading in many different areas of your life. At work, probably, but also in your social activities, in your recreational time, and in the volunteer organisations (school, church, community) that you inevitably get pulled into. Lots of people in 'leadership as duty' roles don't think much about the nature of what they're doing. They've assumed the responsibility, or it's come their way because everyone else took a step back. So what does it mean? How can they - how can you - be effective and successful at this tricky leadership stuff?
Start by asking, as Polly LaBarre does in the new economy magazine Fast Company (issue 32 page 222), Do You Have the Will to Lead?
Answering LaBarre's question was Peter Koestenbaum, a classically trained philosopher with degrees in philosophy, physics, and theology from Stanford, Harvard, and Boston, and author of Leadership: The Inner Side of Greatness (Jossey-Bass, 1991). Email him at pkipeter@ix.netcom.com or find him on the web at http://www.pib.net. More than 25 years ago, Koestenbaum traded the cloistered halls of academia for the front lines of the global economy. His agenda: to apply the power of philosophy to the big question of the day - how to reconcile the often-brutal realities of business with basic human values - and to create a new language of effective leadership. “Unless the distant goals of meaning, greatness, and destiny are addressed,” Koestenbaum insists, “we can't make an intelligent decision about what to do tomorrow morning - much less set strategy for a company or for a human life.”
“Everything I do,” he says, “is about using themes from the history of thought to rescue people who are stuck.” His logic: Change - true, lasting, deep-seated change, the business world's biggest and most persistent challenge - is too often approached as a technical challenge rather than by developing authentic answers to basic questions about business life.
Why does being a leader feel so hard today? LaBarre asked.
Because reckoning with freedom is always hard, Koestenbaum replied, and the powerful paradoxes of the new economy make it even harder. We're living in a peculiar time: a soaring stock market, the creation of tremendous wealth, an explosion in innovation, and the acute alienation that occurs when the global economy hits the average individual have created a 'new-economy pathology' that's driven by impossible demands - better quality, lower prices, faster innovation.
Resolving those paradoxes requires an evolutionary transformation of who we are, how we behave, how we think, and what we value.
Difficult, says Koestenbaum, because the average person is stuck fast in the objective domain. That's where our metrics are; that's where we look for solutions. We'll do anything, he says, to avoid facing the basic, underlying questions: How do we make truly difficult choices? How do we act when the risks seem overwhelming? How can we muster the guts to burn our bridges and to create a condition of no return?
There's nothing wrong with technical solutions, he says, they're excellent; they're creative; they're even necessary. But they shield us from the real issues: What kind of life do I want to lead? What is my destiny? How much evil am I willing to tolerate?
Being reflective, though, doesn't mean being indecisive. In fact it generates the inner toughness effective leaders need. Think of leadership as the sum of two vectors:
- competence (your specialty, skills, know-how) and
- authenticity (your identity, character, attitude).
When companies and people get stuck in the objective, they tend to apply more steam - more competence - to what got them into trouble in the first place: “If I try harder, I'll be successful,” or “If we exert more control, we'll get the results we need.” That, incidentally, is a troublesome contradiction in performance excellence models such as the Baldrige Award, and it's also at the centre of the conflict between innovation and 'quality.'
The problem is, when you're stuck, you're not likely to make progress by just trying harder, Koestenbaum says. Instead, you need first to understand yourself better - your identity, character, attitude. Second, you need to change your habits of thought: how you think, what you value, how you work, how you connect with people, how you learn, what you expect from life, and how you manage frustration.
How do you persuade colleagues to go along with this kind of thinking? LaBarre asked.
The best leaders operate in four dimensions: vision, reality, ethics, and courage, according to Koestenbaum.
Visionary leaders think big, think new, think ahead - and, most important, are in touch with the deep structure of human consciousness and creative potential.
Reality is the polar opposite of vision. The leader as realist follows this motto: Face reality as it is, not as you wish it to be. The realist grapples with hard, factual, daily, and numeric parameters. A master in the art of the possible, the realist has no illusions, sees limits, and has no patience for speculation.
Ethics refers to the basic human values of integrity, love, and meaning. This dimension represents a higher level of development, one ruled not by fear or pleasure but by principle.
Courage is the realm of the will; it involves the capacity to make things happen. The philosophic roots of this dimension lie in fully understanding the centrality of free will in human affairs. Courage involves both advocacy - the ability to take a stand - and the internalization of personal responsibility and accountability.
The real challenge? Develop all four of these often-contradictory modes of thinking and behaving at once. Many leaders operate on two at most. Reality dominates, ethics comes second. Vision might be one of the most overused words in business, but in fact vision - in the sense of honing great thinking and fostering the capacity for ongoing inventiveness - is rarely practiced. And courage is demonstrated even more rarely.
Taking personal responsibility for getting others to implement strategy is the leader's key polarity. It's the existential paradox of holding yourself 100% responsible for the fate of your organization, on the one hand, and assuming absolutely no responsibility for the choices made by other people, on the other hand.
So how do you motivate people? Not with techniques, but by demonstrating your own courage. You don't teach it so much as challenge it into existence. You cannot choose for others. All you can do is inform them that you cannot choose for them. In most cases, that in itself will be a strong motivator. The leader's role is less to heal or to help than to enlarge the capacity for responsible freedom.
There are some themes in the discussions above that EDGE FIRST will return to in future issues. We'll attempt to weave together emerging ideas and conventional wisdom to create a leadership model that will add real value to your day-to-day activities, making you a better leader, and better able to judge the leadership of others.
Next issue - women leaders
Four dynamic women drive a world-class Telco through the e-transition, creating what investment bank Goldman Sachs calls “one of our favourite companies in the Asian telecom universe.” Is there something different about the way women lead? If there is, here's a great test!