Chapter 7
The Leader as Warrior and Peacemaker
Conflict is an unwelcome but inevitable feature in relationships, groups, and organizations. When it surfaces, people typically try to smooth it over or avoid it. Left untended, it intensifies and festers, undermining communication, encouraging plots and sabotage, and producing disruptive explosions. People dislike and avoid conflict because they see it as dangerous, fear the emotional turmoil it generates, or distrust their own skills in confronting it. But conflict plays an integral role in leadership, and savvy leaders recognize its benefits: “a tranquil, harmonious organization may very well be an apathetic, uncreative, stagnant, inflexible and unresponsive organization.”1 When leaders handle conflict well, they can break through logjams, stimulate innovation and learning, and make their institution a livelier and more effective place.
In this chapter, we will look at two stances that leaders can adopt in handling conflict: warrior and peacemaker. We’ll examine a dramatic example of the two stances at work, with Apple’s Steve Jobs epitomizing the warrior, and Walt Disney’s Bob Iger serving as peacemaker. We discuss when and how leaders can adopt each role.
STEVE JOBS: THE WARRIOR
Artist, entrepreneur, futuristic visionary, and brilliant marketer—Steve Jobs was all of these. He was also an aggressive pugilist ready to slug it out for any project or cause he championed. His combat style relied more on persistence and brute force than compromise and subtlety. A case in point was his battle with Michael Eisner, the Walt Disney Studios CEO, over kids’ movies. The skirmish traced back to 1986, when Jobs bought 70 percent of the computer division of Lucasfilm because he thought its technology was “really cool.” Over the next several years, Jobs poured more than $50 million into the business, even as it kept losing money. As things started to turn around, he persuaded a player with deep pockets—Walt Disney Studios—to finance the studio’s first feature film, Toy Story.2
The Disney deal saved the business—now called Pixar—but at a price. Disney got full ownership of the first three films, leaving Pixar with only a sliver of the revenues. After Toy Story’s success, Jobs flew to Hollywood and doggedly renegotiated the deal with Disney’s new chief, Michael Eisner. Jobs got what he wanted: cobranding and 50 percent ownership of the next two films. But in sealing the transaction, he and Eisner got off to a bad start, initiating a rocky relationship that was to deteriorate even more as time passed. A full-scale feud emerged several years later in 2002, when Eisner publicly criticized “computer companies” for promoting digital piracy. Eisner didn’t name names, but everyone knew he was talking about Apple and iTunes. Whether he wanted a war or not, he had inflamed a dangerous adversary. He and Jobs traded salvos as the Disney-Pixar deal was coming up for renewal. At that point, Eisner made one of the most common political mistakes in business and life: he misread the balance of power and escalated a battle he was destined to lose.
Jobs, as a shrewd warrior, began to assemble his allies. He cultivated relationships with key members of Disney’s board, including Walt’s nephew, Roy Disney. Jobs spread the word that there would be no new deal as long as Eisner was CEO. Eisner countered with a memo to the board insisting that Disney was in the driver’s seat because it owned all of Pixar’s characters—Woody, Buzz Lightyear, and the whole gang. In addition, he maintained that Pixar’s bargaining position was about to get weaker because he’d seen their next film and it wasn’t very good. The memo backfired. Someone leaked it to the Los Angeles Times, and Jobs was predictably infuriated. Even worse, Eisner had seriously underestimated Pixar’s next film. Finding Nemo won the Oscar for animated films and became Disney’s most successful film yet.
Two proud and stubborn warriors dug in for a battle that many observers viewed as more about ego than substance. Eisner forced Roy Disney off the board and threatened to make Toy Story III with no help from Pixar. Jobs countered that he was cutting off negotiations with Disney and broadcast his assessment that, except for Pixar, Disney had produced nothing but flops in recent years. The impasse was broken only when the Disney board decided they needed Pixar more than they needed Eisner. They fired their CEO and replaced him with his deft, good-humored second-in-command, Bob Iger, “even though Eisner reportedly told directors Iger wasn’t up to the top job.”3
ENTER BOB IGER: THE PEACEMAKER
Bob Iger began his career as a weatherman on a local television station in upstate New York. He later joined ABC and worked his way up to become president of ABC Television. When Disney acquired Capital Cities/ABC, Iger came over to serve as chief operating officer under Eisner. Described as a leader who does more listening than talking, Iger “was as sensible and solid as those around him were volatile” and “had a disciplined calm, which helped him deal with large egos.”4 His friend Warren Buffett offered a similar impression: “He’s always calm and rational and makes sense. He runs things without a heavy hand.”5 In viewing the Eisner-Jobs conflagration, Iger observed, “Every negotiation needs to be resolved by compromises. Neither one of them is a master of compromise.”6 As soon as he became CEO, Iger embarked on peacemaking initiatives. He reconciled with Roy Disney and brought him back into the fold. He worked even harder to repair the relationship with Jobs and Pixar.
Iger agreed with Jobs on the issue that mattered most: Disney’s animated hits in the previous decade had all come from Pixar. It helped that Iger and Jobs had worked together previously on a deal to put some of ABC’s shows on the iPod. Iger had come on stage at one of Jobs’s signature product launches to celebrate the partnership. Iger recalled, “It signaled my way of operating, which was ‘Make love not war.’ We had been at war with Roy Disney, Comcast, Apple, and Pixar. I wanted to fix all that, Pixar most of all.”7 As soon as he replaced Eisner, Iger got on the phone to tell Jobs he wanted to make a deal. It took extended negotiations. Even though Eisner made a last-ditch effort to throw a monkey wrench into the works, Disney agreed to buy Pixar for $7.1 billion in stock. Jobs became a billionaire and Disney’s biggest shareholder, and Pixar’s leadership took over Disney’s animation.
ORCHESTRATING CONFLICT: RAISE OR LOWER THE FLAME?
Bob Iger and Steve Jobs embody two basic approaches to conflict: those of the peacemaker and the warrior. Organizations need both. Warriors are resolute fighters who raise the heat and intensify the conflict. Peacemakers work to lower the temperature and defuse conflict in the hope of minimizing destructive, lose-lose dynamics. Blessed are the peacemakers, but great leaders are often warriors. You will be a more versatile and powerful leader if you know how and when to play either role.
The Peacemaker: Cooling the Flame
The battle between Michael Eisner and Steve Jobs typifies conflict situations that carry the potential for mutual destruction. Conflict takes on personal and emotional overtones, and the parties feel convinced that “we’re right and they’re wrong.” Such highly charged situations touch hot buttons for leaders and create the risk that raw emotions and jangled nerves will impair their capacity to produce a positive outcome. Like Bob Iger, a leader may be caught somewhere between contending parties, hoping to find some mutually acceptable resolution. But finding a suitable middle path is rarely easy. It requires adaptation by parties wed to their current stance. Leadership often has to challenge existing beliefs and emotional investments, asking others to review where they stand and what they know or value.
This is not easy, but leadership experts Ronald Heifetz and Martin Linsky offer an optimistic note: “The hope of leadership lies in the capacity to deliver disturbing news and raise difficult questions in a way that people can absorb, prodding them to take up the message rather than ignore it or kill the messenger.”8 They emphasize the importance of distinguishing technical from adaptive problems. A technical problem is one for which available information and procedures can produce a solution that meets accepted criteria for success. When leaders have the information and expertise to make a workable decision, they can do what their constituents expect: solve problems so everyone can move on. Adaptive problems, however, are messier. They don’t offer well-defined paths to solution, and differences in values, purposes, or beliefs make it hard to agree about what constitutes a good option. Unilateral decisions usually fail because the audience isn’t ready. Adaptive leaders help parties understand why the problem is so difficult and become more willing to find and accept a solution.
Several guidelines can help peacemakers do their work well.
Be Patient
When the baby is not yet ready to be born, rushing the process makes things worse. Skilled peacemakers understand that conflict resolution takes time, effort, and learning. This often requires working against the grain and being prepared for predictable resistance and criticism. Rather than fulfilling others’ expectations for quick answers, leaders need to pose questions and encourage dialogue.
Listen and Inquire: Understand Parties’ Interests, Thinking, and Feelings
Inquiry and listening are critical for two reasons. One is to ensure that you understand the political map: Who are the players? What are their interests? What moves are they likely to make? Answers to these questions help you anticipate the flow of the game and assess which solutions are feasible and which are not. Listening is also critical because parties who feel they have been heard and understood are better able to put emotions aside and focus on solving the problem.
Engage the Parties: Put People to Work
Consider the case of John Alden, the academic vice president in a large state university. Under a mandate to make significant budget cuts, he invited his deans to participate in the process, but they persuaded him to make the decisions himself. After all, they told him, he had the broader institutional perspective needed for something so important. Alden collected data, developed criteria, and conducted a thoughtful analysis to generate a list of tentative cuts. He intended them as a starting point for discussion, but when they became public, he became the problem. It was “Alden’s plan” and “the vice president’s budget axe.” Those who liked his proposals mostly watched from the sidelines. The opponents were vocal, visible, and persistent. The ensuing firestorm marked the end of a promising leadership career. For Alden, it was painful and devastating, and he chose to leave the academy to work in the private sector. Meanwhile, the campus could blame him and evade responsibility for addressing the financial realities.
When parties are deeply in conflict, leaders need to orchestrate a process that engages them in understanding the issues and searching for a way forward. The leadership task is to bring together different sides to engage in a conversation that the parties would often prefer to avoid. Leaders need to create arenas with rules, roles, and referees and be prepared to tightly manage the exchange. When these tasks are done well, they increase the chances that participants can learn from the dialogue and find a way out of the impasse. Alden intended to move in that direction, but backed off in response to the deans’ successful effort at upward delegation.
Defuse Emotion and Depersonalize Criticism
Conflict stirs up powerful feelings. The challenge for leaders is to recognize and acknowledge those emotions without being overwhelmed by them. Others’ feelings may seem unreasonable or wrong, but that does not make them any less real. You can listen and acknowledge without agreeing, and that often helps lower the heat.
It is inevitable that leaders will make mistakes and enemies. Even when leaders are right, some people will think they’re wrong or will react emotionally to what they experience. A conflict situation is the wrong place for a leader to look for love. When criticism wounds and feels unfair, remember that others are usually responding more to your role in a messy situation than to you personally. One of the hardest and most important tests of professionalism is to “keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.”9 When your emotions run hot, as they sometimes will, slow down, take a deep breath, and buy time before doing anything rash. “Go to the balcony” and try to gain another perspective on the action. Talk it over with someone you can trust. Stay on task, and focus on the purposes you’re trying to achieve. That makes it easier to depersonalize an emotionally charged situation and to keep your emotions from goading you into impetuous and regrettable actions.
The Warrior: Turning Up the Heat
When conflict burns too hot, it overwhelms reason, undermines dialogue, and increases the likelihood of destructive warfare. Such cases call for peacemakers. But, in business and elsewhere, you often face competitors or opponents whose goals and values are fundamentally incompatible with your own. If you win, they lose, and vice versa.
The combativeness we saw in Steve Jobs is not exceptional among the entrepreneurs who have built great business enterprises. It’s true of contemporary leaders such as Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Oracle’s notoriously feisty Larry Ellison. It was also true a century ago. Kodak founder George Eastman was a warrior as well as an innovator. “Peace extends only to private life,” he observed. “In business it is war all the time.”10 Cornelius Vanderbilt on occasion defended his business interests with his fists. In his later years, he was less physical but no less combative. On one famous occasion, some associates tried to wrest control of his company while he was away on business. He fired off a famous letter:
Gentlemen:
You have undertaken to cheat me. I won’t sue you, for the law is too slow. I’ll ruin you.
Yours truly,
Cornelius Vanderbilt.11
Ruin them he did.
These examples all tell the same story: leaders often need to confront conflict head-on rather than fear it and back away. Both modern research on leadership and ancient wisdom on strategy teach that successful warriors combine four basic ingredients: spirit, mind, skill, and power.12 Spirit gives warriors passion, courage, and persistence, the “fire in the belly” that propels them forward in the face of the perennial challenges of combat: risk, confusion, danger, obstacles, and reversals. Mind gives warriors the direction and guidance that enables them to recognize and choose the best available moves on the chessboard of life, while avoiding snares, ambushes, and blind alleys. Skill determines how well a leader fights and leads. Power furnishes the resources that enable leaders to win.
Each of these ingredients provides the warrior leader a potential path to victory: (1) overcoming a less determined or more fearful opponent with superior courage and passion; (2) outsmarting a more confused or less disciplined opponent with a better game plan or tactical superiority; (3) besting an opponent through greater skill; or (4) winning by putting stronger assets on the field—a larger force, better players, or superior weaponry.
Four guidelines can help leaders achieve victory in combat.
Fight with Passion and Persistence—or Avoid Combat
Passion, or heart, is vital to leadership. It is rooted in a deep, sometimes obsessive, personal and emotional commitment to a cause, group, or task. It is a basic quality of all great warriors and leaders. It energizes, sustains courage, and fuels persistence. It is also contagious. The leader’s passion, or lack of it, is known and felt by followers. Almost anyone who worked for Steve Jobs acknowledged that he was a notoriously difficult boss, but his passion and commitment to a larger cause made it all worthwhile. Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton was all of twenty-seven years old when he started his business with the second-best variety store in tiny Newport, Arkansas, but he was always a happy warrior who loved people, and loved winning even more. His passion led him to work harder, travel more, and spend as much time as he could in his competitors’ stores looking for any idea he could steal.13
Out-Think Opponents—Win with a Better Game Plan
Passion fuels the warrior, but without direction and discipline, passion may lead to ruin. Mind without spirit is sterile, but spirit without mind is reckless, often suicidal. The effective leader needs both. Operating in better light than your opponent gives you a substantial edge. If you know the playing field better than your opponents and know more about them than they do about you, the odds shift in your favor, even if they have superior resources.
Clear thinking is never more important than before you embark on a campaign. It is foolish to go into combat without knowing what you are fighting for and what price you are willing to pay. Yet this principle is violated regularly, often with tragic results. Leaders overreact to immediate pressures and provocations, allowing passion or truncated judgment to take them down a road that will confront them with a terrible dilemma: they cannot afford to lose, yet the price of victory is more than they can pay.
Once your purpose is clear, you need a game plan: a strategy for achieving your purpose. In sports, business, or any other competitive arena, if you think harder and better than your adversaries do, you usually win. Sam Walton entered a mature and crowded retail industry, dominated by big national players such as Sears and JCPenney with better experience, scale, and financial resources than Walton could hope to match. He bested his competitors with a simple but powerful game plan: cut costs, sell for less, offer a money-back guarantee, and go where your competitors aren’t. The competition owned the cities and suburbs, so Walton gradually built his empire in rural America. Only when Wal-Mart had become a retail juggernaut did he invade the cities.
Recruit and Rally Your Team
In combat, you want comrades at your side, and they need a reason to support you. To get their support, you need to cultivate relationships and offer compelling reasons for joining your team. Sometimes followers will be spontaneously so spirited that you need only stand out of their way. More often, you need to rally your troops. Knowing the group psyche is vital: rallying constituents involves making an offer so attractive that they are eager to sign up. Such an offer needs to respond to five vital questions: What is the larger purpose of the enterprise? What makes this effort worthwhile? What is the personal meaning for each individual? (What’s in it for me?) What is my role? and Will we succeed?
Steve Jobs consistently demonstrated mastery of this process, as when he recruited John Sculley from Pepsi to Apple by asking him if he’d rather sell soda or change the world. Sam Walton was an astute judge of people who drew them in with his warm, folksy touch. Even as his company grew, he stayed connected—visiting stores, talking to customers and sales clerks, asking for their ideas and suggestions. His common touch helped maintain a positive, almost warm and fuzzy image for Wal-Mart in the minds of employees and consumers, an image that only began to dissipate after Walton’s death.
Build and Leverage a Power Base
No warrior wants to go into battle without the resources to win. In the old days, warriors needed physical weapons—swords, lances, bows, and the like. The modern warrior leader needs social and institutional power. Four power assets are paramount: position, allies, organization, and resources.
The power of position lets generals outrank colonels, which gives them more authority, visibility, and access to other powerful players. Allies are a second vital source of power. Smart leaders understand that they need friends. The solitary warrior, the courageous and indomitable hero, is deeply rooted in legend, myth, and movies, the central figure in many of the stories we read or watch. In film, one individual often defeats an army, fulfilling a deep hope we all share: that with skill, courage, and luck, one person can change the world. In the real world, solitary warriors usually lose, outnumbered and overwhelmed by opponents who mobilize a larger force.
Allies are all the more potent when they are welded into an effective organization or a tightly knit team. A small army can easily defeat a much larger mob. Teams and organizations are tools—sometimes very powerful tools—in the hands of anyone who can control them. Larger organizations are typically more powerful than smaller ones, because they can do more things and have more resources. But size can breed complexity and unmanageability. A fast and heroic horse may be invaluable, or useless, depending on how well you can ride it. Sam Walton demonstrated how a smaller, nimble competitor could outmaneuver and eventually overwhelm much larger competitors. The final power asset is resources—things that you own and control that give you leverage. Money, land, and a variety of physical assets can all augment leaders’ ability to achieve their ends.
A CASE EXAMPLE: LOIS PAYNE
Suppose that you are a sales manager, and Lois Payne has worked in your unit for eight years. Like most employees, she has strengths and weaknesses. She meets her sales targets, and her customers like her, but she is not a top performer and can be difficult to work with. Usually friendly and charming, she nods when you make requests or offer suggestions. But then she seems to ignore your input; she’s fiercely independent and likes to do things her way.
Payne tells you that she has received a job offer from a competitor that would give her a significant pay bump. She says she’ll stay if you match the other offer, give her a new company car, and increase her expense account. You don’t want to lose her, but she’s asking for more than you think she merits. If you met her demands, she’d be earning more than your top salespeople who are significantly more productive than she is.
The job offer is real, but you suspect that Payne is bluffing and doesn’t really want to leave. She’s familiar with your company’s product line and her current customer base, and she’d have a fairly steep learning curve at the new job. You’re comfortable telling her that she’s a very valuable member of the team but that you’re not able to make a counteroffer at this point.
Meanwhile, one of Payne’s customers has written to your boss, the sales VP, saying he knows about her job offer and might have to change vendors if she leaves. Your boss doesn’t know Payne well, but your company is still recovering from the business downturn of recent years. After hearing from the customer, your boss sends you an email telling you to “figure out a way to keep her.” It doesn’t help that your relationship with your boss has been strained in recent months because he thinks your group should be doing better on customer retention. In light of the ideas in this chapter, how might you handle this situation?
Start by asking yourself what you’re up against: Does this situation call for a warrior or a peacemaker? If you choose to become a warrior and go to battle, who is your opponent? What would constitute a win? It’s easier to see costs than benefits in going to war with your boss, but you might be tempted to do battle with Payne. You suspect that she orchestrated the customer note that’s adding to your problems with your boss, and you might feel that her political maneuvering is unacceptable and insubordinate. If you choose to go down the warrior path, though, remember that passion without discipline can lead to ruin. What’s your goal? How well do you know your opponent? If she’s politically smart, as the case hints she may be, might you start a war that costs more than it’s worth? What’s your strategy? Are there allies or resources you need in order to increase your chances of success? Unless you have good answers to these questions, a battle with Lois Payne could turn into the kind of self-destructive mistake that Michael Eisner made in battling Steve Jobs.
Contemplating questions like these might convince you that this is a better time to become a peacemaker. You’re enmeshed in a three-way conflict without an obvious solution—unless you can orchestrate a meeting of the minds. But there’s reason for optimism about a win-win solution. What if you could find a way to retain Lois Payne at a price you can afford while also improving your relationship with her and your boss? How might you go about this? Our guidelines for peacemakers counsel starting with patience: plan to spend the time needed to orchestrate a solution. The second guideline—listen and inquire—suggests spending time with both Lois and your boss (in person if possible), making sure that you understand their concerns, interests, and feelings. Ideally, this will help you strengthen your relationship with each of them and give you a clearer sense of what solutions might be workable. Payne has framed all her demands in financial terms, but you might learn, for example, that there are other, noneconomic incentives she would value.
The third guideline says to engage the parties in working on the issue. You could begin in your meetings with each of them. As you hear from Lois and your boss about their perceptions, you could ask “What if . . . ?” and “What about . . . ?” questions to test directions for coming up with solutions. You might also engage allies to assist. If, for example, you know that some of your salespeople have a good relationship with Lois, you could encourage them to talk to her, both to learn more about her thinking and to nudge her thinking in a productive direction.
A process like this does not guarantee a particular outcome. Lois Payne may stay or may wind up moving on. But you will know that you have done your best to understand what’s at stake and to lead the parties toward a resolution that makes sense to everyone.
CONCLUSION
Conflict is intrinsic to leadership and can be a barrier that prevents leaders from achieving their dreams, particularly when they fear it or handle it badly. But in the hands of gifted leaders, conflict can also be a powerful lever for change. Sometimes conflict burns too hot, and leaders need to be peacemakers who find ways to lower the flame. Listening, engaging others, and depersonalizing the conflict all help to do this. In other situations, leaders need to be warriors who turn up the heat to increase their chances of success or to get people’s attention and involvement in the issues at hand. But before going to war, leaders need to be sure they know what they hope to achieve, and have a strategy and tools that offer a reasonable prospect for success.