What makes a Superleader? Several years ago, Warren Bennis, one of the most influential and prolific students of leadership ever, set out to determine what makes a superleader by interviewing 90 top corporate executives, university presidents, public officials, publishers, and winning coaches. His investigation turned up five major qualities.
The first is vision – the capacity to create a clear picture of a goal which inspires people to perform.
The second is communication – the ability to portray the vision in a way that enlists the support of followers.
The third is persistence – the ability to stay the course regardless of obstacles.
The fourth quality Bennis calls “empowerment” – the ability to create a structure that harnesses the energies of others to achieve the desired result.
The fifth is organizational ability – the capacity to measure the performance of a group, to learn from mistakes, and to use the resulting knowledge to enhance effectiveness.
Bennis also found that the most effective leaders did not pay much attention to fads in management theory or get-rich-quick schemes. They were all simply devoted to a vision of excellence and achievement and all very good at transmitting that vision to followers. Finally, Bennis’s superleaders all had a healthy disregard for risk; in other words, they consistently demonstrated courage without flirting with disaster. They put very little energy into protecting themselves against failure and most of their energy into making their visions real.
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Next Generation Calls for Collaboration
The Next Generation (NGen) project, funded by American Express and convened by Independent Sector, recently released a report on the major concerns of the 2009-2010 class of NGen Fellows, all aspiring leaders under the age of 40.
In essence, the report concluded that professionals under 40 feel that collaboration across sectors is necessary to solve society’s problems and agree on the most important issues to address, but don't know how to connect with people in other sectors working to solve these problems.
The top issues facing communities, the nation, and the world, they concur, are education, poverty, health, and the environment. Unfortunately, however, NGen Fellows had great difficulty identifying any of their peers who were currently effective at solving those significant social problems. Of the Fellows polled, 1,300 skipped this question altogether, and of the 1,000 who did answer it, the top vote getters were Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, who received just ten and eight votes respectively.
Finally, the Fellows believe that the nonprofit sector is best positioned to take the lead in engaging other sectors (government and for-profit business) to solve comprehensive social problems. They also believe that they need more leadership development, especially for the challenges of collaborating across the sectors.
The report goes on to recommend expanding the traditional definition of a “leader” and to stress the need for collaboration to reach out, find common ground, and build bridges.
Want to know more? Check out the summary yourself at http://buildingmovement.org/pdf/ngen_fellows_09_report.pdf.
In essence, the report concluded that professionals under 40 feel that collaboration across sectors is necessary to solve society’s problems and agree on the most important issues to address, but don't know how to connect with people in other sectors working to solve these problems.
The top issues facing communities, the nation, and the world, they concur, are education, poverty, health, and the environment. Unfortunately, however, NGen Fellows had great difficulty identifying any of their peers who were currently effective at solving those significant social problems. Of the Fellows polled, 1,300 skipped this question altogether, and of the 1,000 who did answer it, the top vote getters were Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, who received just ten and eight votes respectively.
Finally, the Fellows believe that the nonprofit sector is best positioned to take the lead in engaging other sectors (government and for-profit business) to solve comprehensive social problems. They also believe that they need more leadership development, especially for the challenges of collaborating across the sectors.
The report goes on to recommend expanding the traditional definition of a “leader” and to stress the need for collaboration to reach out, find common ground, and build bridges.
Want to know more? Check out the summary yourself at http://buildingmovement.org/pdf/ngen_fellows_09_report.pdf.
Sunday, July 17, 2011
To Collaborate or Not?
Here on “Leading Together,” we consistently promote the benefits of cooperation and collaboration over competition and inflexibility.
There are, of course, times when competition is not only appropriate but even necessary, and times when staunch commitment to principle is not only valid but even critical. Virtually all historians and social scientists would agree, however, that citizens of the United States inhabit the most individualistic and most competitive culture in the world, and possibly in the history of the world. In that context, we more often need reminders about the advantages of cooperation, collaboration, and willingness to compromise.
These issues are certainly prominent in the current debate about our national debt and the advisability of raising the debt ceiling to pay the bills we have already incurred. A national poll conducted last week, for example, asked respondents from both of the major political parties to state their preference for compromise in relation to their preference for “sticking to our guns.” It seems that one party is significantly more willing to compromise than the other, and the other is much more committed to “sticking to our guns” regardless of the issue or the problem.
The results indicated – at least as of last week – that one party favored compromise over “sticking to our guns” by 68% to 32%. The other party, meanwhile, favored “sticking to our guns” by 66% to 34%. Taken altogether, the poll’s participants favored cooperation by 53% to 47%. (Since we try to avoid partisan posturing here at “Leading Together,” you will have to figure out for yourself which party is which.)
The poll made no reference to any particular issue or any particular reasons for choosing one strategy over the other. Thus the difference between the two parties in this respect may lie deeper than any issue or any rationale for decision. In turn, the results of this poll may provide no clues to what we should be doing about any of the challenges we face, but it does seem to provide a clue to why we have so much trouble reaching any agreements at all.
There are, of course, times when competition is not only appropriate but even necessary, and times when staunch commitment to principle is not only valid but even critical. Virtually all historians and social scientists would agree, however, that citizens of the United States inhabit the most individualistic and most competitive culture in the world, and possibly in the history of the world. In that context, we more often need reminders about the advantages of cooperation, collaboration, and willingness to compromise.
These issues are certainly prominent in the current debate about our national debt and the advisability of raising the debt ceiling to pay the bills we have already incurred. A national poll conducted last week, for example, asked respondents from both of the major political parties to state their preference for compromise in relation to their preference for “sticking to our guns.” It seems that one party is significantly more willing to compromise than the other, and the other is much more committed to “sticking to our guns” regardless of the issue or the problem.
The results indicated – at least as of last week – that one party favored compromise over “sticking to our guns” by 68% to 32%. The other party, meanwhile, favored “sticking to our guns” by 66% to 34%. Taken altogether, the poll’s participants favored cooperation by 53% to 47%. (Since we try to avoid partisan posturing here at “Leading Together,” you will have to figure out for yourself which party is which.)
The poll made no reference to any particular issue or any particular reasons for choosing one strategy over the other. Thus the difference between the two parties in this respect may lie deeper than any issue or any rationale for decision. In turn, the results of this poll may provide no clues to what we should be doing about any of the challenges we face, but it does seem to provide a clue to why we have so much trouble reaching any agreements at all.
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Zero-Sum Games
As I prepare this blog for publication, the President of the United States and several House and Senate leaders from both parties are trying to hammer out a deal whereby our nation can avoid defaulting on its debts. According to the most reliable economists and historians, an actual default would be catastrophic in several ways; they also tell us that there is no credible reason for us to be in such a precarious position in the first place. But we are.
The underlying causes for the impasse, it seems, are more about the kind of political games that are being played than any rational insights about spending cuts and taxation. The two sides – that is, the two political parties – are playing a zero-sum game, which means that one party will win and the other will lose. Just as in every sporting event ever played in the history of sport, the number of all the wins is exactly the same as the number of all the losses – hence the zero sum.
A non-zero-sum game, by contrast, leads to a positive outcome for both sides, or what we sometimes call a win-win outcome. Win-win outcomes also benefit people who aren't even playing the game but who are influenced by its outcome. People who study human effectiveness know that we can almost always achieve win-win outcomes as long as nobody is driven by non-rational ideologies or dysfunctional emotions like unjustified fear and anger. (Stephen Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, lists “think win-win” as habit number 4.)
In the budget and deficit tangle now engulfing our national politics, it is becoming more and more evident that the larger good of the whole nation seems less important to some of our leaders than the narrow interests of some portions of the nation and certainly less important than victory over the other political party. Some of the beliefs driving the participants are in fact based on no rational evidence; they are really just ideological creeds. And a creed with no rational evidence behind it is really nothing more than an intellectual addition – what I like to call an ideaddiction. More than 30 years ago, John Gardner, one of the most insightful observers of our national life, called this kind of thing “the war of the parts against the whole.”
Non-zero-sum games are what most of us play most of the time. Education is a non-zero-sum game because everyone benefits from an educated population. Business is as well, since a successful business satisfies the needs of customers and clients and supports suppliers and the general community. Businesses cannot endure if they only satisfy their own desires; the function of any business is to provide goods and services for others. (It’s also true, of course, that businesses compete against each other in zero-sum kinds of ways.)
The fact is that groups, cultures, and nations can only survive, let alone flourish, if they play enough non-zero-sum games to create lots of win-win situations. The kind of extremist competition we are now witnessing in our political culture is ultimately destructive every which way, and if there is no progress from the talks going on in Washington right now, the destructive results will start to show up real soon.
Collaborative leadership, of course, attempts to play exclusively non-zero-sum games that lead only to win-win outcomes. Such leadership downplays or skirts the compulsion to compete and to perceive people with different ideas as dangerous or misguided. Leading together takes patience, empathy, and wisdom. That’s why it usually takes a long time to show results. But when results start to show up, they are virtually always durable and satisfying. When people are all in the same boat, it is always better to work together than to fight each other. And in this global community we now inhabit, we are all in the same boat just about all the time.
The underlying causes for the impasse, it seems, are more about the kind of political games that are being played than any rational insights about spending cuts and taxation. The two sides – that is, the two political parties – are playing a zero-sum game, which means that one party will win and the other will lose. Just as in every sporting event ever played in the history of sport, the number of all the wins is exactly the same as the number of all the losses – hence the zero sum.
A non-zero-sum game, by contrast, leads to a positive outcome for both sides, or what we sometimes call a win-win outcome. Win-win outcomes also benefit people who aren't even playing the game but who are influenced by its outcome. People who study human effectiveness know that we can almost always achieve win-win outcomes as long as nobody is driven by non-rational ideologies or dysfunctional emotions like unjustified fear and anger. (Stephen Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, lists “think win-win” as habit number 4.)
In the budget and deficit tangle now engulfing our national politics, it is becoming more and more evident that the larger good of the whole nation seems less important to some of our leaders than the narrow interests of some portions of the nation and certainly less important than victory over the other political party. Some of the beliefs driving the participants are in fact based on no rational evidence; they are really just ideological creeds. And a creed with no rational evidence behind it is really nothing more than an intellectual addition – what I like to call an ideaddiction. More than 30 years ago, John Gardner, one of the most insightful observers of our national life, called this kind of thing “the war of the parts against the whole.”
Non-zero-sum games are what most of us play most of the time. Education is a non-zero-sum game because everyone benefits from an educated population. Business is as well, since a successful business satisfies the needs of customers and clients and supports suppliers and the general community. Businesses cannot endure if they only satisfy their own desires; the function of any business is to provide goods and services for others. (It’s also true, of course, that businesses compete against each other in zero-sum kinds of ways.)
The fact is that groups, cultures, and nations can only survive, let alone flourish, if they play enough non-zero-sum games to create lots of win-win situations. The kind of extremist competition we are now witnessing in our political culture is ultimately destructive every which way, and if there is no progress from the talks going on in Washington right now, the destructive results will start to show up real soon.
Collaborative leadership, of course, attempts to play exclusively non-zero-sum games that lead only to win-win outcomes. Such leadership downplays or skirts the compulsion to compete and to perceive people with different ideas as dangerous or misguided. Leading together takes patience, empathy, and wisdom. That’s why it usually takes a long time to show results. But when results start to show up, they are virtually always durable and satisfying. When people are all in the same boat, it is always better to work together than to fight each other. And in this global community we now inhabit, we are all in the same boat just about all the time.
Sunday, July 3, 2011
The Pursuit of Happiness
Tomorrow is the Fourth of July, so it seems appropriate to blog about the main themes of the Declaration of Independence, signed 235 years ago in Philadelphia. Let’s take a look at the phrase that is probably the most famous phrase in that famous document: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of the Declaration, claimed that those three items are “inalienable rights” – in other words, rights ordained by God and inherent in every human being, since we are all “created equal.” (We’ll skip the hassle over the reference to “all men” and assume that the phrase really meant “all people.”) Documents internal to the group that helped Jefferson draft the Declaration indicate that “life” and “liberty” were quickly accepted, but that “happiness” required a bit more conversation before it was accepted for the finished document.
One report notes that there was some support for the phrase “life, liberty, and property,” but that apparently seemed too mundane and materialistic. More interestingly, to my mind, is the report that an early draft qualified the term “happiness” as “public happiness.” Apparently the founders of our nation eventually felt that “happiness” was inherently and obviously bound up with the public good and thus there would be no possibility that anyone would misinterpret “happiness” as a simple self-centered preoccupation with personal pleasure, gain, or success at the potential expense of others. In that era of enlightenment thinking, happiness itself was seldom thought of as a selfish or self-centered proposition.
As we look back, perhaps the founders should have been more precise and retained the full phrase, “public happiness.” Philosophers of all persuasions have consistently noted the inseparable and reciprocal nature of freedom and responsibility to the community that provides that freedom. Contemporary psychology is now rehabilitating our notions of “public happiness” in its recognition that authentic happiness is never just a matter of self-aggrandizement, but is intimately bound up with networks of relationships, with one’s place in the community, and with larger visions of meaning and purpose.
Every Fourth of July we should all celebrate and give thanks for the blessings of life, liberty, and opportunities to pursue happiness, but we should also reflect a bit on our responsibilities as citizens.
Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of the Declaration, claimed that those three items are “inalienable rights” – in other words, rights ordained by God and inherent in every human being, since we are all “created equal.” (We’ll skip the hassle over the reference to “all men” and assume that the phrase really meant “all people.”) Documents internal to the group that helped Jefferson draft the Declaration indicate that “life” and “liberty” were quickly accepted, but that “happiness” required a bit more conversation before it was accepted for the finished document.
One report notes that there was some support for the phrase “life, liberty, and property,” but that apparently seemed too mundane and materialistic. More interestingly, to my mind, is the report that an early draft qualified the term “happiness” as “public happiness.” Apparently the founders of our nation eventually felt that “happiness” was inherently and obviously bound up with the public good and thus there would be no possibility that anyone would misinterpret “happiness” as a simple self-centered preoccupation with personal pleasure, gain, or success at the potential expense of others. In that era of enlightenment thinking, happiness itself was seldom thought of as a selfish or self-centered proposition.
As we look back, perhaps the founders should have been more precise and retained the full phrase, “public happiness.” Philosophers of all persuasions have consistently noted the inseparable and reciprocal nature of freedom and responsibility to the community that provides that freedom. Contemporary psychology is now rehabilitating our notions of “public happiness” in its recognition that authentic happiness is never just a matter of self-aggrandizement, but is intimately bound up with networks of relationships, with one’s place in the community, and with larger visions of meaning and purpose.
Every Fourth of July we should all celebrate and give thanks for the blessings of life, liberty, and opportunities to pursue happiness, but we should also reflect a bit on our responsibilities as citizens.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
The Pitfalls of Success
Everybody wants to succeed, to be a success. Yet strangely enough, success can be one of the hardest things of all to deal with – especially for leaders.
Leadership emerges in a group when the group faces a problem, and the worse the problem is, the more group members are willing to give leaders power. On the other hand, if a group is doing just fine, not facing any particular problems, it doesn’t need much leadership. So those who hanker after the power, prestige, and visibility that comes with leadership should recognize that leadership can also be a booby trap.
If a leader is called upon to solve a group’s problem and actually does solve it, then there is no more need for a leader regarding that particular problem. This is one reason why totalitarian or autocratic leaders spend so much time manufacturing crises and telling their followers that terrible problems will ensue if someone else is made their leader. Hitler was a genius at it. This is also the reason why groups are often better off without leaders if they can solve their problems for themselves.
There is really only one way a leader can remain a leader and still compile a consistent record of success and effectiveness, and that is by rolling with fate. Persistence is a good trait in a leader, but stubbornness is not. Winston Churchill may be the 20th Century’s best example of a leader who served brilliantly under one set of circumstances – namely, war – but failed to keep his credibility after his side won the war.
Business leaders and entrepreneurs who succeed time after time do so mostly because they have a knack for responding to or anticipating the fickle demands of the marketplace, not because they have any power to dictate the decisions of consumers. Once a group’s problem is solved, members almost automatically seek new problems and challenges. If leaders don’t want to get run over by their followers, they have to seek new problems and challenges too.
Leadership emerges in a group when the group faces a problem, and the worse the problem is, the more group members are willing to give leaders power. On the other hand, if a group is doing just fine, not facing any particular problems, it doesn’t need much leadership. So those who hanker after the power, prestige, and visibility that comes with leadership should recognize that leadership can also be a booby trap.
If a leader is called upon to solve a group’s problem and actually does solve it, then there is no more need for a leader regarding that particular problem. This is one reason why totalitarian or autocratic leaders spend so much time manufacturing crises and telling their followers that terrible problems will ensue if someone else is made their leader. Hitler was a genius at it. This is also the reason why groups are often better off without leaders if they can solve their problems for themselves.
There is really only one way a leader can remain a leader and still compile a consistent record of success and effectiveness, and that is by rolling with fate. Persistence is a good trait in a leader, but stubbornness is not. Winston Churchill may be the 20th Century’s best example of a leader who served brilliantly under one set of circumstances – namely, war – but failed to keep his credibility after his side won the war.
Business leaders and entrepreneurs who succeed time after time do so mostly because they have a knack for responding to or anticipating the fickle demands of the marketplace, not because they have any power to dictate the decisions of consumers. Once a group’s problem is solved, members almost automatically seek new problems and challenges. If leaders don’t want to get run over by their followers, they have to seek new problems and challenges too.
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
The Business of America
Calvin Coolidge is one of the least quoted America presidents because he was usually reluctant to say much of anything. But one thing he did say has stuck with us. “The Business of America,” said Calvin Coolidge, “is business.” His declaration epitomizes an influential school of thought which claims that business is and should be the dominant American institution. Some have proposed, in fact, that the United States government should be run like a business.
The notion that leadership in all sorts of organizations and enterprises should mimic the behavior of business leadership is rooted in the history of business itself. About 160 years ago, when large-scale formal organizations first began to appear all over the landscape, business organizations had one definite advantage over democratic governments and other multi-purpose organizations. The clear and constant discipline of the bottom line, which separates profit from loss, gave business leaders a target and a method to measure all aspects of performance. The development of management as an academic subject made its initial gains in the world of business. Nowadays management principles are taught to leaders and would-be leaders in education, religion, government, medicine, and dozens of other fields.
In times of economic recession, the pressures of budgets make the application of business methods even more logical. Ironically, the success of business management principles, the affluence produced by American business, and concern for certain side effects like environmental pollution, have given rise in some quarters to a shift in emphasis from production to service and from preoccupation with the bottom line to social responsibility. One of the most promising developments in the realm of organizations, including businesses, is the focus on the "triple bottom line:" people, profits and the planet. If Calvin Coolidge were around today, he might be tempted to revise his most famous remark. “The business of America”, he might say, “is America.”
The notion that leadership in all sorts of organizations and enterprises should mimic the behavior of business leadership is rooted in the history of business itself. About 160 years ago, when large-scale formal organizations first began to appear all over the landscape, business organizations had one definite advantage over democratic governments and other multi-purpose organizations. The clear and constant discipline of the bottom line, which separates profit from loss, gave business leaders a target and a method to measure all aspects of performance. The development of management as an academic subject made its initial gains in the world of business. Nowadays management principles are taught to leaders and would-be leaders in education, religion, government, medicine, and dozens of other fields.
In times of economic recession, the pressures of budgets make the application of business methods even more logical. Ironically, the success of business management principles, the affluence produced by American business, and concern for certain side effects like environmental pollution, have given rise in some quarters to a shift in emphasis from production to service and from preoccupation with the bottom line to social responsibility. One of the most promising developments in the realm of organizations, including businesses, is the focus on the "triple bottom line:" people, profits and the planet. If Calvin Coolidge were around today, he might be tempted to revise his most famous remark. “The business of America”, he might say, “is America.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)