Leadership

John O. Wynne

Landmark Communications
Darden School of Business Speaker - 10/2/03

Leadership definition: a leader is a person...

1. Responsible for people and results.

2.Who posses highly regarded cognitive skills, work experiences, and technical skills.

This would describe a manager. In addition, a leader is one who...

1. Seeks to create a vision and strategies for the future, which reflect a deep contextual understanding of the competitive marketplace.

2. Who aligns people behind visions and strategies.

3. Who consistently lives and reinforces great values in the culture of the organization.

4. Who communicates, communicates, communicates!

5. Who sees his/her job as primarily about finding, developing, mentoring, and motivating great people.

6. Who has empathy - a genuine interest in the success and well-being of those with whom he or she works... but is also tough-minded about results.

7. Regularly pursues and is excited about new learning and change.

8. Is flexible, self-aware, and determined enough to follow through and adapt, so that successful change is embraced and implemented.

9. Finally, achieves sustained, long-term results.

Prof. John Kotter, Harvard Business Review, May-June 1990, "What Leaders Really Do".

Leadership and management are different and distinctive, and both are necessary for business success.

The leaders primary responsibility is to lead meaningful change.

Companies emphasize management development too much and do not place enough emphasis on leadership development. Prior to the late 1970s, practically all the literature talked about management and management systems, and very little attention was paid to leadership, and the difference between leadership and management. Kotter would say that the ideal would be the combination of the two. It is rare when one is outstanding at both. It takes a team approach. It is extremely difficult to take the time to do both well, and besides, the skill sets are very different and sometimes conflicting.

The great leader delegates almost all management responsibility, but knows enough about operations, based on career experience, to monitor, support, and aggressively challenge those in operations. Beyond this, Kotter would contrast a leader as follows - a leader copes with change; a manager copes with complexity and organization. A leader sets direction, vision, and strategies; a manager plans and budgets. A leader aligns people behind change; a manager organizes and creates systems and staffs. A leader motivates and inspires; a manager controls and solves problems. A manager keeps the trains running on time to achieve targeted results. He or she coordinates through systems and defined responsibilities, the activities of an organization, to avoid inefficiencies, ineffectiveness and chaos. A manager delivers the plan.

Because of the need for predictable performance, most managers are highly resistant to change, and tend to only see the need for change belatedly, often after competitors have already started to move in a new direction. This is why leadership is so important to keep organizations viable and competitive in our ever-changing marketplace.

Confirm a company's commitment to developing leaders, and verify by seeing how many high potential employees occupy meaningful leadership positions where change in needed. If they wait to do this until someone has earned their management stripes and are in their 40's and 50's, beware.

Many aspects of leadership can be learned. You do need to have management experience to lead best, but you also need leadership experience where you are responsible for change. Most CEOs are leaders, much more than managers. If you want to lead, it rarely just happens naturally. It normally evolves based on experiences.

Most important factors: values, empathy, new learning, and developing great people.

1. Values, integrity, and high character are essential to sustain leadership. The vast majority of people respect those who are honest, fair, consistent, and hard working. When their boss does not reflect theses characteristics, uncertainty, fear and discouragement permeate an organization. Decisions are difficult and solutions are not always obvious. You need a set of core values to make difficult judgments that are logical, defensible and consistent, and yet provide a basis for fresh, innovative thinking. As a first step, assess your own values and priorities. Write them down. Some structure is important [like Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (and his 8th Habit)] that give you the questions you need to ask yourself. You need to develop your own list of what these probing questions should be, what you like and dislike, what's going to give you satisfaction, what are your aspirations, what do you just abhor doing. John O. Wynne does this every 10 years with fifty such questions. What will take you to and through the next level of engagement, so that you still have a dynamic future ahead of you? People often idealize or overstate the reality, so beware and share your thinking with a close friend who knows you well, and who can keep you grounded in reality.

2. Probe deeply about the values and culture of the companies you are considering working with. What are their distinctive values and how does the company reflect them? How will you fit with your values? How good is their top leadership? Everyone talks a great game. You need a feel for really what does make them click. There are only a handful of companies that have great values and deliver long term sustained results. Find someone who knows that field, and be sure your judgments about it are correct, so that you can understand, contextually, how that company fits into that business segment. If you join a company and then find that their values and expectations are not what you need, get out of there. Keep your skill set strong enough so that you have the mobility to do that.

3. The best leaders are those who are empathetic. They have a genuine interest in the success and well-being with those with whom they work, but who also are tough minded about results. You can't fake empathy. People know by your comments and actions whether you care about them, or only about yourself and your results. If you don't care, people feel manipulated and have reduced enthusiasm for their jobs. They feel like pawns, a commodity. Daniel Goleman says good leaders, in addition to being smart, experienced and skilled, have a high degree of emotional intelligence, which is twice as important as other factors in long term leadership success. He defines emotional intelligence as self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills ("What Makes a Leader?", Harvard Business Review, Nov-Dec 1998). Empathy is the real differentiator. Most senior leaders are terminated through the loss of respect and confidence by their direct reports. They stopped caring about their people, and cared too much about what they were trying to get done. How much do you care about others succeeding and doing well? Does your personal contact with them reflect this? Are you willing to give credit to others? Do you take the time to bond over a meal with them? Do you listen to learn, not merely processing responses instead of trying to absorb their full message? This is very important for respect. Without a major life-changing event like loss of a job or death in the family, people have a hard time learning empathy. It can't be faked on a consistent and sustainable basis. People know what is real and perform best for those genuinely interested in them. Take a look at how generous or tough they are with their family and health benefits. Check the depth and breath of their development programs. Jack Welch at GE was was empathetic. He bonded with people, developed them like mad, but insisted upon results. He was fair, everyone knew the rules. Empathy does not mean that you have to rationalize poor performance.

3. New learning is essential for meaningful leadership. The status quo in business is maintained when change in the business environment and other new learning is not understood and brought into the organization. You would be amazed by how little time is devoted to this task by most managers and even many leaders. Your learning curve in a university is fairly vertical. When you return to the workplace, don't let it stop. Read, get new training, establish discussion groups, allocate time, insist on it, and stick with it. When looking for a job, probe this point deeply. Find out how an organization and its people pursue new learning. is it formalized or is it just expected as part of the job? Be careful. How does a company share new learning and changes in an organized way across the entire company? When hiring, find ways to probe how consistently the person pursues new learning, and how they embrace change. Find out what jobs they have had, and how they have changed. It is hard to change a business successfully if there is not a deep contextual understanding of new variations and probabilities.

4. The best leaders' top priority is finding, developing, mentoring and motivating the best people. If you do this well, and delegate, and mentor appropriately, you can get out of the way almost literally and achieve great results. Unless you start to discipline yourself in your first leadership position, you will spend too much time on yourself, and not enough developing people to build lasting and broad-based strength in an organization. In fact, developing others may be the most selfish thing you can do, and thus enhance your own value. The CEO at Cummins Engine requires their high-potentials to spend at least 2 or 3 years in HR to learn this lesson early and how to do it well. He had done it. How many of you would think that an HR job would enhance your career right now? Not many, I would guess, and I would not have either at this stage of your life. Think about it. The best leaders spend much of their time finding and developing the best people. They actively mentor, but they are fair about it and just don't favor those they mentor. When looking at a company, check this out. Is mentoring embraced in the company, or simply a topic of conversation? How many top managers were promoted from within? Does the company have formalized training, like GE's Crotonville - John F. Welch Leadership Center or Landmark Communications Senior Leadership Development Program? If they don't, be careful about all these things.

Hopefully, some of this will resonate with you and cause you to think deeply about some of this as you go forward. But you have to do it, live it, and observe how others do it. You want to be proud of the people you are working with. Be consistent, true and honest. Many companies talk this game, but very, very few live it. See Jim Collins book, "Good to Great".

People + Values + Systems (how we do it to achieve great things) + Ethics

Without leadership, an organization cannot thrive long term. Be able to follow through, adapt and implement change. Ask interviewers for examples and ask to meet some of those people. Stability vs. change. Leverage comes from utilizing teams, people subordinating their egos to work together for the greater good, alignment and ownership. Some people peak out because they resist change (often in their late 40's and 50's) unless you figure out how to re-create yourself. These people hadn't.