MISLEADING MANAGEMENT
Management is the delusion that you can change people. Leadership is deluding other people instead of deluding yourself.
[Scott Adams, in Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel]
Leadership: it’s all the rage. Amazon has something like 10 000 books on leadership, and hardly more than a handful on followership. Find an organisation with a problem and leadership is inevitably the professed solution. But what if leadership is the problem? Or, at least, what if leadership too is not what we think? Read this chapter, and you might wonder about this too.
So we selected pieces for this chapter that bring leadership down to earth. To open, we turn to Farson again. He challenges the stereotyped image of the leader, conjuring up instead a more realistic picture of leadership distributed among a group.
Next comes an example of this in an interview with John Mackey about how Whole Foods was developed. Not how you might have thought. John Kay reinforces this point with his column in the Financial Times about how ‘A star executive does not make a company’. There are grave dangers in believing that ‘supremely talented individuals can single-handedly transform business’.
Henry Mintzberg follows with some rules for being a ‘heroic’ (destructive) leader. After this, it’s back up the mountain of leadership, about the need for some good sense in literally going up the mountain. We then close this chapter with a plea for more ‘communityship’ alongside ‘just enough leadership’.
There Are No Leaders, There is only Leadership
by Richard Farson
One of the great enemies of organizational effectiveness is our stereotypical image of a leader. We imagine a commanding figure perhaps standing in front of an audience, talking not listening with an entourage of assistants standing by. Or sitting behind a large clean desk, barking out orders, taking charge – aggressive, no-nonsense, a bulldog.
Such images of leaders get us into trouble not just because they fail to conform to reality, but because they set us up for roles that are ultimately dysfunctional. The macho image of leadership, associated with men like Vince Lombardi, Ross Perot, and Lee Iacocca, makes us forget that the real strength of a leader is the ability to elicit the strength of the group.
This paradox is another way of saying that leadership is less the property of a person than the property of a group. Leadership is distributed among members of a group, and they in turn play such vital roles as taskmaster, clown mother figure, and so on. Relying on one person – the manager for example – to provide all the leadership builds expectations that cannot be met. Moreover it robs the group of its powers, leading to overdependence on the manager. In turn, the leader’s response to this dependence is sometimes to micromanage, getting into areas of control and responsibility that represent a poor use of time and may far exceed his or her capabilities, actually reducing the productivity of the group.
Defined by the group
People who are leaders in one situation usually are followers in others. For example, they may be managers at work but just interested parents at a PTA meeting, or mere spectators at social gatherings. Leadership is situational, less a personal quality than specific to a situation.
True leaders are defined by the groups they are serving, and they understand the job as being interdependent with the group. We have all seen leaders who successfully move from one organization to another even though they may not be expert in the second organization’s business. They are able to do this because they define their task as evoking the knowledge, skills, and creativity of those who are already with the organization. They are secure enough in their own identities to be able to be influenced by new information and to accept the ideas of others in the group. They are especially able to elicit the intelligence and participation of group members who otherwise might not join the discussions.
In a well-functioning group, the behavior of the leader is not all that different from the behavior of other responsible group members. In fact, if it were not for the trappings of titles, private corner offices, desks with overhangs, a seat at the head of the table, and so on, it might be difficult to identify the leader in a group that is working well.
Making life easier
The best leaders are servants of their people. I once conducted a study aimed at trying to understand how people achieve power in a group. We found that those people who were most successful served it. They would go to the blackboard and perform what might be thought as secretarial task for the group. They would call on those who had not spoken; they listened attentively to everyone. They spoke their own views clearly and fully, but mostly they encouraged others to speak theirs. They helped the group to stay focused on the problem. In other words, they tried to serve the group.
Humility comes naturally to the best leaders: They seldom take credit themselves but instead give credit to the group with which they have worked. They characteristically make life easier for their employees. They are constantly arranging situations, engineering jobs, smoothing out the processes, removing the barriers. They think about who needs what. They define their job as finding ways of releasing the creative potential that exists within each individual employee and in each group with which they work …
Leaders we don’t recognize
We forget sometimes that leadership is a shared role played partly by people who are not titular leaders. Kings have regents whispering in their ears. Presidents have advisers. CEOs have consultants. Managers have assistants who help shape their behavior but who do not take the risks of leadership and who do not get the credit.
Indeed, leaders are themselves often led and managed by their employees, from the bottom up – colleagues whose ideas, assistance, arguments, and sometimes dogged resistance have real influence. Watching an accomplished executive secretary at work can make one wonder sometimes just who is managing whom.
I have found that there are two kinds of good employees. One is the willing assistant prepared to accept whatever tasks are assigned and to accomplish them with dispatch and good will. The other goes further, anticipating what the needs are going to be and then offering solutions, not problems, ideas, not complaints. This anticipatory role is seldom asked for; nevertheless, it is an important leadership role played by those who are not called leaders.
The most powerful force
Most of the actions of leaders don’t work, just as most surfers miss more waves than they catch. To complicate matters, there are so many different kinds and styles of leadership, and the actions called for are so complex, that there is no sure model to follow.
Yet leadership is the most powerful force on earth. Arguments can be made for other forces – greed, territoriality, guilt, fear, hate, love, spirituality – but without leadership to mobilize them, they are relatively weak. Leadership, therefore, deserves a great deal more attention than it has been given, especially if we want to make certain that it is exercised in ways that help our organizations thrive and our civilization progress.
Source: Richard Farson, Management of the Absurd, Simon and Schuster, 1997, pp. 144–147.
Conversations from the Corner Office
John Mackey talks with Kai Ryssdal
KAI RYSSDAL: John Mackey welcome to the program.
JOHN MACKEY: Thanks. Good to be here.
RYSSDAL: So I had a couple of hours to kill before you and I sat down; so I went downstairs to look for lunch and two things happened. One was I couldn’t figure out what to eat because this place has so much in it; but the other one was I kind of got lost because it’s so big. Is this what you had in mind 25 years ago?
MACKEY: No. Twenty-five years ago? No … There’s a misconception somehow or another that there was some, like, master plan and I’ve been, like, fulfilling the master plan that we made up 25 years ago, but … it’s a discovery process. We’ve been making it up as we go along.
I can’t tell you exactly how the company will be in five years. I think most CEOs who tell you where their company is going to be in five years either are making a big mistake or they’re lying.
RYSSDAL: But surely you have some strategic plan for this company … it’s not just bigger and more, right?
MACKEY: Well, I mean, it’s more like imagine for a second … there’s not like a map, that we’re following this map, it’s more like we’re writing the map as we go along. So we keep learning, so we keep changing the plan. Well, I’ll give you a great example.
In June we’re going to open our biggest store we’ve ever opened in London. It’s a great location in London. Now, if that store does extremely well, and we think it will, and if it does really well, say as good as our New York stores do, then we’re going to do a lot more stores in the UK, and we’ll probably try to do one in another capital in Europe, say in some place like Amsterdam, or Hamburg or Paris or Milan or something like that.
If the store bombs then we’ll certainly rethink how aggressively we’re going to go into Europe. So that is a big experiment and the results of the experiment will sort of tell us where we’ll be going. Our first store in New York was very successful. If it hadn’t been successful we wouldn’t have all those other stores in New York and we wouldn’t have several other stores in development there. So the plan continues to evolve. In other words, we keep making it up as we gain more information.
RYSSDAL: What was the short-term plan when you guys sat down and said let’s start a company called Whole Foods Market?
MACKEY: Well, we didn’t have a plan. My girlfriend and I started it … because we thought it would be fun. It was an adventure. Imagine a couple of young people that are taking backpacks and going to Europe and they know they’ve got three months over there but they don’t necessarily have a complete itinerary worked out, exactly where they’re going to go because they don’t know who they’re going to meet and they don’t know what kind of adventures they’re going to have … [T]he plan will unfold as they go along.
That’s kind of how Whole Foods has been.
RYSSDAL: Why groceries and food? Why not shoes or clothing or anything else?
MACKEY: Well, that’s a fair question. I got interested in food when I was in my early 20s. I moved into this vegetarian co-op to live … I wasn’t a vegetarian, but I figured the co-op would have a lot of interesting women living there.
[Laughter]
And …
RYSSDAL: And?
MACKEY: And they did … I met my girlfriend that I started the company with at the co-op, so I learned how to cook and I became the food buyer, I got very interested in food, I sort of had a food awakening about what’s happened to our food over the years, [how] … our food supply has become more industrialized; I learned about organics, I learned how to cook. And so I got very interested in food.
And so … I went to work for a small natural foods store, first time I’d ever worked in one, and first time I’d ever worked in a retail store, and I really liked it. I pitched the idea to my girlfriend … hey, why don’t we go do our own small store and she loved it and we went out and hustled everybody we knew and raised $45,000 and opened the first store.
RYSSDAL: And had some real problems with that first store? …
MACKEY: We didn’t know what we were doing … we lost $23,000, so half the money in the first year we lost. But … I’m a quick learner, so we made a small profit in the year two, and … the first thing I realized was the store was too small and we needed to get to a larger location if we were really going to be successful and compete.
RYSSDAL: It’s funny, because that’s not one of those intuitive things. You don’t necessarily think if you’re running a business, man, we’ve got to be bigger to succeed.
MACKEY: That’s exactly what the investors told me.
[Laughter]
They said look, I’m glad we’re profitable now, John, or we’re glad you’re profitable now … why don’t we stay here for a few years and get some of our investment back and I said well, because I don’t think we’ll be competitive here over the long-term. They still didn’t want to do it and basically they said look, we don’t want to put any more money in it this time, but if you could find other investors, we’ll consider it. And their basic strategy was that they didn’t think anybody would be stupid enough to invest in this business … [B]ut I was very persuasive.
I think entrepreneurs really believe in their dreams and they’re able to sell them and persuade other people to go along with the dream.
RYSSDAL: How did becoming an entrepreneur change you?
MACKEY: How didn’t it change me? I mean, I’m completely a different person now than I was when I was 24-years-old … [W]hatever choices you make in life affect you. I mean they change you. I’ve learned a lot more about people; I’ve learned a lot more about myself. I’ve certainly learned a lot about business. I’ve grown tremendously. I think. As a human being. I’m wiser and kinder and more loving and a better leader.
I’m a little bit more mature now than I was when I was 24 although my wife might argue with me on that.
RYSSDAL: It might be worth a mention here that you’ve got no business background per se. There’s no MBA there, there’s no, you know, none of that.
MACKEY: I have the perfect background, I’ve studied philosophy.
[Laughter]
RYSSDAL: Excellent.
MACKEY: And so I didn’t have any biases … I didn’t know how it was ‘supposed’ to be done. I didn’t have any preconceptions about how business had to be. So that … meant I made mistakes, I reinvented … we reinvented the wheel a few times but I didn’t know what I couldn’t do. And so I was free … we were free to be creative and inventive and try new ways of doing things and … Whole Foods is innovative in lots of different ways, it’s a different kind of organization than most other corporations.
RYSSDAL: In fact, I think I read some place while doing some research for this that year-over-year thinking innovation is the key now to Whole Foods’ future, to keep it growing the way it has been.
MACKEY: Yeah, it is.
RYSSDAL: What’s left in this space to innovate besides more organic and more naturalness?
MACKEY: Well, I mean, I’m going to give you an evasive answer on that. It’s sort of like when you asked the question about the plan … do I know the plan for the long-term and I don’t know what the innovations are … if I already knew what they were we’d already done it, right? Creativity is something that comes from within us and it’s somewhat of a mysterious process, I mean, there’s certainly a lot of studies been done on it, but you put disparate pieces of information together and new combinations come up and voilà, you have creativity.
The main thing is that Whole Foods has this experimental, innovative attitude so we’re constantly trying new things. Every store in a way is an experiment and the reason that’s important is that unlike most other retailers, let’s take … Starbucks or McDonald’s, for example, they come up with a prototype store and then they just replicate it over and over and over again so it’s not that they don’t ever make any changes, they might evolve their prototype, but then again they’re still kind of stamping out like the cookies, a very similar type store.
We’re more like custom home builders, … every store is unique, every store is an experiment, every store is creating new innovations, so we’re not just doing the same thing over and over and over again.
Source: Excerpted from interview transcript: American Public Media’s Market Place, 26 February 2007, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey talks with Kai Ryssdal.
A star executive does not make a company
by John Kay
The share price of Hewlett-Packard jumped when Carly Fiorina was appointed chief executive in 1999 and it jumped again when she was fired last week. In the meantime, it fell by more than half.
Ms Fiorina was headhunted by Hewlett-Packard from Lucent, then flying high. HP, once the most revered name in Silicon Valley, was looking for an exceptional person to restore the company’s fortunes. Ms Fiorina, who had reportedly stuffed crumpled socks in her pants to show the sales people that she had balls, apparently met this requirement.
Beauty contests for executive talent are common today. The competitive hunt for the best people in other companies supposes that general management skills are more important than specific organisational knowledge and that supremely talented individuals can single-handedly transform businesses with their vision and charisma. Rakesh Khurana’s Searching for a Corporate Saviour and Henry Mintzberg’s Managers not MBAs cruelly dissect these fallacies.
Ms Fiorina did the things expected of transformational leaders. She embarked on a public relations offensive. Within the company, ‘coffee with Carly’ took over from ‘the HP way’. On public appearances, the immaculately tousled hair of America’s leading female executive quickly made her the most readily recognised business figure in the country.
She demanded rounds of cost reduction from subordinates. Sometimes such economies lead to greater efficiency, sometimes they undermine the long-term prospects of the business. In the absence of intimate knowledge of the organisation in question, it is hard to tell. No matter: in either case the process enhances earnings per share in the short run.
But the real test of the corporate saviour is whether she can land the big deal. Ms Fiorina first made a pitch for the consulting business of PwC, only to learn that many of the opinionated folk in that business were unenthusiastic about a merger with a manufacturing company under her leadership. But she completed the acquisition of the ailing Compaq. The results were disappointing and last week Ms Fiorina paid the price.
The lesson from Hewlett-Packard is not simply that Ms Fiorina was not up to the job. It is that the role in which she so willingly cast herself is not one in which anyone is likely to succeed.
It is not always a mistake to hire an outsider for the top job. This move can be effective when the culture of an organisation has become so dysfunctional that it is almost necessary to start again. But the outsider who brings his or her own blueprint will almost invariably fail: the better approach to this task is to find and release the frustrated energy already present in the business. As the American pro-consuls in Iraq can testify, such reconstruction is no easy task. There is also a business role for larger-than-life personalities – such as Bill Hewlett or Dave Packard. Such figures make their principal contribution in the early stages of corporate development, when the positioning, identity and values of the business need to be established.
But there is a world of difference between the attributes appropriate to the founding entrepreneur and the political skills demanded of the effective manager of a larger organisation. Henry Ford defined the products and technology of the car industry but Alfred Sloan at General Motors defined the structures needed to run it, something of which Ford himself was quite incapable. It has been fashionable – and lucrative – for consultants, gurus and especially chief executives to blur this distinction between the entrepreneur and the professional manager. But the results of that elision have generally – as at HP – been unsuccessful and frequently – as at WorldCom or Vivendi – disastrous.
Great businesses depend on the talents of thousands of people, not just one. Their management requires a multiplicity of incompatible talents: both vision and attention to detail, both emotional intelligence and analytic capability, both self-confidence and self-criticism. The most effective managers possess an idiosyncratic balance of attributes appropriate for the situations they face, and the range of abilities successful companies require must be sought across a team rather than in a single personality. Rows of suits are less photogenic than Carly Fiorina but they are what really makes modern business work.
Source: John Kay, Financial Times, 15 February 2005.
Rules for Being a Heroic Leader
by Henry Mintzberg
- Look out, not in. Ignore the existing business as much as possible, since anything established takes time to fix. Leave that to whoever was not downsized.
- Be dramatic. Do the deal and promise the world, to catch the attention of the investment community. In particular, merge like mad: go after other established businesses – the devils you don’t know.
- Focus on the present. The past is gone, dead, and the future is distant. Do that dramatic deal now.
- Inside the company, favor outsiders over insiders; anyone who knows the business is suspect. Bring in a whole new ‘top team’. Rely especially on consultants – they appreciate heroic leaders.
- To drive the insiders, use the numbers. That way you do not have to manage performance so much as deem it.
- Promote the changing of everything all the time. In particular, reorganize constantly; it keeps everyone on their toes (instead of planted on their feet). Refuse to change this behavior no matter what the consequences.
- Be a risk taker. Your golden parachute will protect you.
- Above all, get that stock price up. Then cash in and run. Heroes are in great demand.
Source: Henry Mintzberg, ‘Heroic leader’, in Managers not MBAs: A hard look at the soft practice of managing and management development, FT/Prentice Hall, 2004, pp. 110–111.
A Descent in the Dark
by R.R. Reno
… Climbers use a term from romantic life to describe the difference: commitment. At the local crag, if you get tired in the early afternoon or if storm clouds threaten, then you can call it quits and head home for an early beer. On a big climb it’s not so simple. The commitment is not just a matter of size and difficulty. In the mountains, weather, glaciers, and rock fall create a dangerous environment. Climbers need to move quickly, not only in order to complete a long climb in a reasonable period of time but more importantly to minimize exposure to danger. Speed equals safety, and serious mountain climbers need to be decisive, bold, and confident. There’s no time for extra safety precautions.
The element of commitment is what makes for adventure. You set for yourself an objective that cannot easily be attained – and one in which failure will bring a great deal of suffering – and then you kick away the obvious supports and block the ready avenues of escape. Rather than assembling a crew on a larger, safer boat, the sailor sets out solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Rather than the sunny, gentle ridge to the summit, the mountaineer chooses the dark, dangerous north face.
These choices are mysterious, but I don’t think they are unfamiliar. The term adventurer was first used to describe the soldier of fortune, the man who entertains the dangers of battle not in order to defend his homeland or fulfill his duty, not even for the sake of conquest and booty, but to live as one who risks death. He takes his chances. He romances Fortuna, confident that his skill with the sword will carry him through.
To a great extent, this basic meaning of adventure has remained constant, even as the range of activities we think of as adventuresome has expanded far beyond the exploits of d’Artagnan and his comrades. That is why mountain climbing or solo sailing or extreme skiing is not at all like the thrill-seeking of bungee jumping, or simply a matter of collecting summits. Anybody who has drunk enough beer can strap on a bungee harness and throw himself off a bridge; once you jump, the rest is just an exercise in screaming and letting the carnival-like mechanism do its work. As for summits, you can drive up Pike’s Peak or take a helicopter to the top of the Grand Teton. Serious climbing is about getting to the top by a route that tests your competence with difficulty – and your will with danger.
A true adventurer is not foolhardy. He must realistically assess his capabilities and choose reasonable objectives. The sailor looks at himself and weighs his skills, and only then decides that he can cross the Atlantic in a smaller boat. The climber takes an inventory of his experience and judges himself capable of more remote peaks by more difficult routes. But as soon as the next step is taken, the margin of safety decreases. Bad weather, bad decisions, bad luck – all these factors crowd in more and more closely against competence and determination. That’s why the best adventures involve a strange combination of emotions: a strong expectation of success in concert with all sorts of doubts and worries about the consequences of failure …
Source: R.R. Reno, ‘A descent in the dark’, CommentaryMagazine.com, November 2008.
Leadership and Communityship
by Henry Mintzberg
We have this obsession with ‘leadership’. It’s maybe intended to empower people, but its effect is to disempower them. By focusing on the individual, even in the context of others, leadership can undermine a service of community. This is part of the syndrome of individuality that is sweeping the world and undermining organizations in particular and societies in general.
Just enough leadership
Of course leadership matters. And of course leadership can make a difference. But how often does this get magnified into a tautology: show the press a successful organization and it will show you a great leader. So much easier than trying to find out what has really been going on. ‘In four years Gerstner has added more than $40 billion to IBM’s share value’, proclaimed Fortune magazine in 1997 (April 14). All by himself!
Where leadership does matter, as it probably did in Gerstner’s case, what kind of leadership is that? Is it the heroic leadership so commonly portrayed in the press – the great one who rides in on the great white horse to save the day, even if he or she only arrived yesterday, with barely any knowledge of the organization, its history, its culture? This has more often proved to be a formula for disaster. According to one report (“Waking Up IBM” by Gary Hamel, Harvard Business Review, 7–8, 2000), IBM got into E-business because a programmer with an idea convinced a staff manager, who had more insight than budget, stitched together a team that drove the change. And what role did Gerstner play? When he eventually heard about the initiative, he encouraged it. That’s all. Instead of setting direction, he supported the direction setting of others. He provided less leadership. But appropriate leadership. Just enough leadership! What could be simpler, more natural, than that?
For starters, let’s recognize that separating leadership from management is part of the problem. Does anyone want to work for a manager who lacks the qualities of leadership? That can be pretty discouraging. Well, how about a leader who doesn’t practice management? That can be pretty alienating: he or she is unlikely to know what is going on. (These days, we distinguish leaders from managers. Half a century ago, Peter Drucker distinguished managers from administrators – and had exactly the same idea in mind! We keep upping the ante – soon we will be separating gods for heroes.)
We hear a great deal about micro managing these days – managers who meddle in the work of their reports. Sure it can be a problem. But far more serious now is macro managing – managers who sit on “top,” pronouncing their grand visions, great strategies, and stifle performance standards, while everyone else is supposed to scurry around “implementing”. I call this management by deeming.
We have too much disconnected leadership in this world – the hyped-up, individually focused, context-free leadership so popular in the press and the classroom. Courses and MBA programs that claim to create leaders promote hubris instead. No leader has ever been created in a classroom. Leadership grows in context, where it gains its most important characteristic: legitimacy. Enough of all these young, barely experienced people running around calling themselves “leaders”, worse still “young leaders” (who can really discern that?), just because some course or institution spilled the holy water of “leadership” on people they hardly knew.
Imposed vs. Earned Leadership
Mostly these days, we got illegitimate leadership, selected by outsiders and imposed on an organization or one of its units. A board of mostly outside directors, or a senior management gets charmed by a candidate whose internal practice of management they have never experienced. How remarkable that those people who know the candidates best, having been led, or at least managed, by them, are so rarely consulted on these choices. The current American ambassador to the United Nations was described in the congressional hearings on selection: as “a kiss-up and kick-down” sort of guy. The world is now loaded with such “leaders.”
True leadership is earned, internally, if you like – in the unit, or the organization, or even the nation that not only accepts the guidance of some person, but sought it out in the first place, and has subsequently sustained it enthusiastically. How many of today’s companies and countries can claim to be headed by people with that kind of legitimacy? How many current heads of state have been “drafted” by overwhelmingly popular will, as, say, Nelson Mandela in South Africa?
“Community-ship”
But even this overstates the case for leadership. People, of course, seek leaders, But often they fool themselves, by mixing up leaders with leadership. There is, in other words, need for more of what is called “distributed leadership,” meaning that the role is fluid, shared by various people in a group according to their capabilities as conditions change. Is that not how the Linux Operating System and Wikipedia work?
But calling this leadership really slights it, because its effectiveness lies not in any individuals so much as in the collective social process – essentially in community. Every time we use the word leadership, therefore, we have to bear in mind that it isolates the individual while considering everyone else a follower. Is this the kind of world we want: overwhelmingly of followers? Will that make our institutions and/or societies better places?
Our obsession with leadership, of any kind, causes us to build organizations that are utterly dependent on individual initiative. We don’t allow them to function as communities. So when they fail, we blame the leader, and seek a better one. Like drug addicts, each time we just need a bigger bit.
Just consider that ubiquitous organization char, with its silly boxes of “top”, “middle”, and “bottom” managers. This is no more than a distorted metaphor. What does it tell us, beside who has authority over what. The painting may not be the pipe, but far too many people, this chart is the organization.) Isn’t it time we began to think of our organizations as communities of cooperation. And in so doing, put leadership in its place: not gone, but alongside other important social processes.
What should be gone is this magic bullet of the individual as the solution to the world’s problems. We are the solution to the world’s problems, you and me, all of us, working in concert. In fact, this obsession with leadership is the cause of many of the world’s problems.
And with this, get rid of the cult of leadership, striking at least one blow at our increasing obsession with individuality. Not to create a new cult around distributed leadership, but to recognize that the very use of the word leadership tilts thinking toward the individual and away from the community. We don’t only need better leadership, we also need less leadership.
How about if we challenge every single speech, program, article, and book that uses the word “leadership” and does not give equal attention to “community-ship” in one form or another? This could have profound implications, not only for the effectiveness of our organizations, but also for the democracy of our societies.
Source: Parts of this were published as ‘Enough leadership’ in the Harvard Business Review (November 2004) and the Financial Times (November 2004). Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review, © by the Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation; all rights reserved.
The hero doth like the ape, that, the higher he climbs, the more he shows his arse.
Sir Francis Bacon