Rudy Giuliani could have shrunk from the awesome burdens created by the terrorist attacks of 9/11. He woke up that morning a virtual has-been, a wounded, end-of-term mayor whose ratings in New York and elsewhere had been in steady decline. New Yorkers were tired of his arrogance and bullying. A messy, very public divorce was beginning to turn him into an object of ridicule (his estranged wife and their children were living at Gracie Mansion, the mayor's official residence, while His Honor bunked in a friend's spare bedroom). Yet, as discussed in Chapter Fifteen, Giuliani seemed transformed on New York's bloodiest day. He sped to the scene, arriving in time to see smoke, chaos, and bodies falling from the sky. He brought his hand to his mouth as he battled back tears, and then he went to work. He closed bridges and tunnels, ordered the evacuation of the disaster area, and postponed the primary elections. "By mid-day, he had all of the city's commissioners sitting at a makeshift conference table at a temporary command center reporting on how their agencies were responding. Not just the police and fire and emergency management agencies: Every agency was present. That process created an immediate sense of discipline for a government that otherwise might have spun in confusion" (Coles, 2002).
Giuliani appeared repeatedly on television to offer calm, reassuring accounts of complex and horrible news. He resisted pressure to speculate beyond what he knew about the death toll, saying simply that it would be "much more than any of us can bear." Wearing spattered boots and a New York Fire Department baseball cap, he gave tours to visiting dignitaries. Determined to prove New York's resilience, the mayor pushed relentlessly to get Broadway theaters and the New York Stock Exchange reopened as soon as possible, overriding naysayers who said it couldn't or shouldn't be done. "He attended funerals, comforted survivors, urged residents to dine out and tourists to come in, all the while exuding compassion and resolve. The man who had seemed so finished just a few weeks earlier was now greeted with cheers wherever he went: Rudy! Rudy!" (Barry, 2001, p. A1).
In times of crisis we expect leadership from people in high places, and we are grievously disappointed if they fail to provide it. But it is misleading to imagine that leadership comes only from people in high positions. Such a view causes us to ask too much of too few. Rudy Giuliani insisted that the real heroes of 9/11 were firefighters, police officers, and rescue workers who risked, and in many cases lost, their lives trying to help others. Under conditions of enormous danger and confusion, often cut off from communication with their commanding officers, they improvised and exercised on-the-spot leadership that significantly reduced the death toll. They demonstrated clearly that we need more leaders as well as better leadership.
We begin this chapter by exploring what leadership is, what it is not, and what it can and cannot accomplish. We look at the differences between leadership and power and between leadership and management, and we emphasize that leadership is always situated in both relationships and contexts. We then review research on effective leadership and explore two leadership models popular with practitioners. We also examine the issue of gender and leadership. Finally, we explore how each of the four frames generates its own image of leadership.
Leadership is seen as a panacea for almost any social problem. Middle managers and workers often say their enterprise would thrive if senior management showed "real leadership." Conventional wisdom sees leadership as a good thing that we need more of, at least the right kind. "For many—perhaps for most—Americans, leadership is a word that has risen above normal workaday usage as a conveyer of meaning and has become a kind of incantation. We feel that if we repeat it often enough with sufficient ardor, we shall ease our sense of having lost our way, our sense of things unaccomplished, of duties unfulfilled" (Gardner, 1986, p. 1). Yet there is confusion and disagreement about what leadership means and how much difference it can make.
Sennett (1980, p. 197) writes, "Authority is not a thing; it is a search for solidity and security in the strength of others which will seem to be like a thing." The same is true of leadership. It is not tangible. It exists only in relationships and in the perception of the engaged parties. Most images suggest that leaders are powerful. Yet many examples of the use of power fall outside our image of leadership: armed robbers, extortionists, bullies, traffic cops. Implicitly, we expect leaders to persuade or inspire rather than to coerce. We also expect leaders to produce cooperative effort and to pursue goals that transcend narrow self-interest.
Leadership is distinct from authority and position, though authorities may be leaders. Weber (1947) linked authority to legitimacy. People choose to obey authority so long as they believe it is legitimate. Authority and leadership are both built on voluntary compliance. Leaders cannot lead without legitimacy. But many examples of authority fall outside the domain of leadership. As Gardner put it, "The meter maid has authority, but not necessarily leadership" (1989, p. 7).
Heifetz argues that authority often impedes leadership: "Authority constrains leadership because in times of distress, people expect too much. They form inappropriate dependencies that isolate their authorities behind a mask of knowing. [The leadership role] is played badly if authorities reinforce dependency and delude themselves into thinking that they have the answers when they do not. Feeling pressured to know, they will surely come up with an answer, even if poorly tested, misleading, and wrong" (1994, p. 180).
Leadership is often confused with management. But a person can be a leader without being a manager, and many managers could not "lead a squad of seven-year-olds to the ice-cream counter" (Gardner, 1989, p. 2). Bennis and Nanus (1985) suggest that "managers do things right, and leaders do the right thing" (p. 21)—managers focus on execution, leaders on purpose. A managerially oriented navy officer gave a ringing endorsement of his more leaderlike successor: "I go by the book; he writes the book."
Kotter (1988) sees management as being primarily about structural nuts and bolts: planning, organizing, and controlling. He views leadership as a change-oriented process of visioning, networking, and building relationships. But Gardner argues against contrasting leadership and management too sharply because leaders may "end up looking like a cross between Napoleon and the Pied Piper, and managers like unimaginative clods" (1989, p. 3). He suggests several dimensions for distinguishing leadership from management. Leaders think in the long term, look outside as well as inside, and influence constituents beyond their immediate formal jurisdiction. They emphasize vision and renewal and have the political skills to cope with the demands of multiple constituencies.
In story and myth, leaders are often lonely heroes and itinerant warriors, wed only to honor and a noble cause. Think of Jason Bourne, Joan of Arc, the Lone Ranger, or Rambo. But images of solitary, heroic leaders mislead by suggesting that leaders go it alone and by focusing the spotlight too much on individuals and too little on the stage where they play their parts. Leaders make things happen, but things also make leaders happen. The transformation in Rudy Giuliani's image after 9/11 from has-been to hero in twenty-four hours is a perfect illustration. Giuliani found himself center stage in an unplanned theater of horror and delivered the performance of his life. Another scenario would have required a different leadership role. No single formula is possible for the great range of situations leaders encounter.
Heroic images of leadership convey the notion of a one-way transaction: leaders show the way and followers tag along. This view masks the mutual interplay between the two. Leaders are not independent actors; they both shape and are shaped by their constituents (Gardner, 1989; Simmel, 1950; Heifetz and Linsky, 2002). Leaders often promote a new initiative only after a large number of constituents favor it (Cleveland, 1985). Leaders' actions generate responses that in turn affect the leaders' capacity for taking further initiatives (Murphy, 1985). As Briand puts it, "A 'leader' who makes a decision and then attempts to 'sell' it is not wise and will likely not prove effective. The point is not that leaders should do less, but that others can and should do more. Everyone must accept responsibility for the people's well-being, and everyone has a role to play in sustaining it" (1993, p. 39).
Although it is tempting to equate leadership with position, this relegates others to a passive role. It also reinforces a tendency for senior executives to take on more responsibility than they can discharge (Oshry, 1995). Leadership does not come automatically with high position; conversely, it is possible to be a leader without a position of formal authority. In fact, good organizations encourage leadership from many quarters (Barnes and Kriger, 1986; Kanter, 1983).
Leadership is thus a subtle process of mutual influence fusing thought, feeling, and action. It produces cooperative effort in the service of purposes embraced by both leader and led. Single-frame managers are unlikely to understand and attend to the intricacies of this lively process.
Two of the most widely accepted leadership propositions offer divergent perspectives. One asserts that all good leaders must have the right stuff — qualities like vision, strength, and commitment. The other holds that good leadership is situational; what works in one setting will not work in another. A proposition from the "effective schools" literature illustrates the right-stuff perspective: a good school is headed by a strong and visionary instructional leader. An example of the situational view is the belief that it takes a different kind of person to lead when you're growing and adding staff than when you're cutting budgets and laying people off.
Despite the tension between these one-best-way and contingency views, both capture part of the truth. Studies have found shared characteristics among effective leaders across sectors and situations. Another body of research has identified situational variables that determine the kind of leadership that works best.
One Best Way
Recent decades have produced a steady stream of studies of effective leadership (Bennis and Nanus, 1985, 2007; Clifford and Cavanagh, 1985; Collins, 2001; Collins and Porras, 1994; Conger, 1989; Farkas and De Backer, 1996; Kotter, 1982, 1988; Kotter and Cohen, 2002; Kouzes and Posner, 2007; Levinson and Rosenthal, 1984; Maccoby, 1981, 2003; Peters and Austin, 1985; Vaill, 1982). Many have been qualitative studies of leaders, primarily corporate executives. Methodology has varied from casual impressions to systematic interviews and observation.
No characteristic is universal in these studies, but vision and focus show up most often. Effective leaders help articulate a vision, set standards for performance, and create focus and direction. A related characteristic explicit in some reports (Clifford and Cavanagh, 1985; Kouzes and Posner, 2007; Peters and Austin, 1985) and implicit in others is the ability to communicate a vision effectively, often through the use of symbols. Another quality often mentioned is commitment or passion (Clifford and Cavanagh, 1985; Collins, 2001; Peters and Austin, 1985; Vaill, 1982). Good leaders care deeply about their work and the people who do it. Yet another characteristic is the ability to inspire trust and build relationships (Bennis and Nanus, 2007; Kotter, 1988; Maccoby, 1981).
Beyond vision, passion, and trust, consensus breaks down. The studies cited so far, along with extensive reviews of the literature (Bass, 1990; Gardner, 1987; Hollander, 1978; Yukl, 2005), generate a long list of attributes associated with effective leadership: risk taking, flexibility, self-confidence, interpersonal skills, managing by walking around, task competence, intelligence, decisiveness, understanding of followers, and courage, to name a few. Kouzes and Posner (2007) found that honesty came first on a list of traits that people most admired in a leader. Workers said of Pat Carrigan, a school psychologist who shifted to the auto industry and turned around two different General Motors parts plants: "She ain't got a phony bone in her body." Her truthfulness played a key role in gaining the cooperation of formerly disaffected employees. Collins, in his best-seller Good to Great (2001), insists that humility is a key quality of great leaders, while Maccoby (2003) argues for narcissism instead. The oldest reliable finding about effective leaders—they are smarter and work harder than other people—continues to find research support (O'Reilly and Chatman, 1994). But effort and IQ are found in people who are better at almost anything, and there are many brilliant hard workers who are hopeless leaders.
Blake and Mouton's "managerial grid" (1969, 1985) is a classic and still popular example of a one-best-way approach. Diffused through scores of books, articles, and training programs, the grid postulates two fundamental dimensions of leader effectiveness: concern for task and concern for people. The model arrays approaches to leadership on a two-dimensional grid shown in Exhibit 7.1. Theoretically, the grid contains eighty-one cells, though Blake and Mouton emphasize only five:
1, 1: The manager with little concern for task or people who simply goes through the motions.
1, 9: The friendly manager who likes people but has less concern for task.
9, 1: The hard-driving taskmaster.
5, 5: The compromising manager who tries to split the difference between task and people.
9, 9: The ideal manager who integrates task and people and produces outstanding performance.
Blake and Mouton have vigorously defended their conviction that a 9, 9 style is a leadership approach for all situations and all seasons (Blake and Mouton, 1982), but this claim has been heavily criticized. The grid approach focuses almost exclusively on task and people. It gives little attention to constituents other than direct subordinates and assumes that a leader who integrates concern for task with concern for people is effective in almost all circumstances. But if structure is unwieldy, political conflict is rampant, or culture is threadbare, the grid model has little to say.
Contingency Theories
Do leaders make the times, or do the times make leaders? In considering this age-old question, think about some examples. The Battle of Britain secured Winston Churchill's place in history, though the British public rejected him before the war and again right after. Much the same happened for Rudy Giuliani, who went from has-been before 9/11 to hero after it and then back to has-been when he ran for president in 2008. Jimmy Carter's intellect propelled him to success as a navy officer and governor, but could not save his presidency. Joan of Arc would not have rated a historical footnote without a war, a beleaguered king, and the dramatic circumstances of her death. Such examples argue for situation as the prime catalyst in leadership.
Several writers have offered situational theories of leadership (including Fiedler, 1967; Fiedler and Chemers, 1974; Hersey, 1984; Hersey and Blanchard, 1977; Reddin, 1970; and Vroom and Yetton, 1973), but most take a limited view of leadership and few have much empirical support. Many conflate leadership and management, typically treating leadership as synonymous with managing subordinates. In contrast, Burns (1978), Gardner (1986), Kotter and Cohen (2002), and Heifetz and Linsky (2002) argue persuasively that leaders need skill in managing relationships with all significant stakeholders, including superiors, peers, and external constituents. Contingency theories are a major area for further research. Almost everyone believes that widely varying circumstances require different forms of leadership, but evidence is still sparse.
These limitations have not kept approaches such as the Hersey and Blanchard notion of situational leadership (1977, 2007) from becoming widely popular in management development programs. Hersey and Blanchard use two dimensions of leadership similar to those in the managerial grid: task and people. Hersey defines task behavior as "the extent to which the leader engages in spelling out the duties and responsibilities of an individual or group" (1984, p. 31). Relationship behavior is "the extent to which the leader engages in two-way or multi-way communication." It includes "listening, encouraging, facilitating, providing clarification, and giving socioemotional support" (p. 32). Hersey combines task and people into a two-by-two chart that shows four possible "leadership styles." (See Exhibit 17.2). The labels for three of those styles have evolved over the decades (from telling, selling, and participating to directing, coaching, and supporting), but the basic message has changed little.
When is each style appropriate? It depends on subordinates' "maturity" (Hersey and Blanchard, 1977) or "readiness level" (Hersey, 1984). Hersey defines readiness in terms of subordinates' commitment (how willing they are to do a good job) and competence (how able they are to do the job well). Four levels of subordinate readiness determine the appropriate style.
For subordinates at the lowest level (low competence and low commitment), the model counsels managers to "direct": such people need their boss to tell them what to do. At the next level up (high commitment but low competence), subordinates want to do the job but lack skills—they need "coaching" from the boss. When subordinates are able but unwilling, the leader should "support" through a participative process of sharing ideas and discussing what to do. At the highest level, with subordinates who are both able and willing, the leader should simply "delegate": the subordinates will do fine on their own.
The model is very popular because it is intuitively plausible, but research has not provided strong support (Hambleton and Gumpert, 1982; Graeff, 1983; Blank, Weitzel, and Green, 1990). If, for example, managers give unwilling and unable subordinates high direction and low support, what would cause their motivation to improve? The manager of a computer design team told us ruefully, "I treated my group with a 'telling' [directing] management style and found that in fact they became both less able and less willing." Furthermore, like Blake and Mouton, Hersey and Blanchard focus mostly on the relationship between managers and immediate subordinates and say little about structure, politics, or symbols.
Leadership Models as Secular Myths
Dealing with people is a perennially perplexing aspect of managing. Managers are always looking for ideas to make the job easier. Too often, the search for simplicity overlooks important realities. Even so, a manager may conclude that any model or theory is better than nothing in the face of confusion and mystery. True believers may defend their faith with fervor, as the following case study illustrates.
From the beginning, humans have sought explanations for occurrences that defied their capacity to make sense. Things happen and we can't explain why. To maintain our sanity we create myths to bolster our faith. Thereafter our beliefs sustain us in the face of doubt and confusion, shielding us from the reality of how little we know. That is true of our approaches to leadership—unless we are able to entertain more than one theology.
Historically, research and writing on leadership focused mostly on men. The implicit, taken-for-granted assumption was that leadership is a male activity. More recent years, however, have seen a dramatic shift in women's roles and accomplishments. In breaking from masculine traditions and embracing more feminine conceptions of leadership, women have blazed new paths.
One example is Karren Brady, who became managing director of the Birmingham (England) City Football Club in 1993. At twenty-three, she was the youngest person, and the only woman, heading a professional English soccer team. As you might expect, she ran into a few challenges. There was the strapping forward who told her on the team bus that he liked her blouse because he could see her breasts through it. She looked him in the eye and replied, "Where I'm going to send you, you won't be able to see them from there." A week later, he was downgraded to a club a hundred miles away. There was the time the directors of another team told her how fortunate she was that they were willing to let her into their owners' box. She fired back, "The day I have to feel grateful for half a lager and a pork pie in a dump of a little box with a psychedelic carpet is the day I give up" (Hoge, 2002, p. A14).
Brady got plenty of media attention, but it often focused on her looks and wardrobe. One newspaper ran a full-page photo of her in a short skirt under the headline, "Sex Shooter." Another described her entry into a meeting: "Every inch the modern woman, she totters into the room on high-heeled strappy sandals and a short and sexy black suit." Brady was continually perplexed: "I came here to run a business, to put right a dilapidated, rundown operation with a series of business solutions. But the media, with the combination of my age, the way I look, and obviously the fact that I was a female—the first in a male-dominated world—went into a frenzy. It was unbelievable. I'd be in press conferences, and journalists would actually ask me my vital statistics" (Hoge, 2002, p. A14).
Still, Brady understood that publicity, even tinged with notoriety, was good for business. She took a team that had never shown a profit from the edge of bankruptcy to become one of the England's strongest teams, both on the field and at the cash register, with an estimated value in 2007 of more than $100 million. She even overcame the complications that might have arisen after she married one of her players. She bought and sold her husband twice, making over a million pounds in the process. She won businesswoman-of-the-year awards, and eventually even her fellow football executives recognized her talent, naming her to represent them in negotiations for the national television contract that yielded a big chunk of their revenue.
Women like Karren Brady have proven that they can lead in a man's world. But do men and women lead differently? Are they seen differently in leadership roles? Why do men still have such a disproportionate hold on positions of institutional and organizational power? Research on gender and leadership has asked these and other questions, and we turn next to some of the answers that have emerged.
Do Men and Women Lead Differently?
Helgesen (1990), Rosener (1990), and others have argued that women bring a "female advantage" to leadership. They believe that modern organizations need the leadership style that women are more likely to bring, including concern for people, nurturance, and willingness to share information. But the evidence is equivocal. We might expect, for example, that women would be higher on people attributes (warmth, support, participation) and lower on political characteristics (power, shrewdness, aggression). But examples like Karren Brady, Carly Fiorina as Hewlett-Packard CEO, and Margaret Thatcher as British Prime Minister tell us that things are not so simple. In fact, research gives such stereotypes limited support. Bolman and Deal (1991, 1992a) found no differences in frame orientation among men and women. Eagly and Johnson (1990) found no gender differences in emphasis on people versus task, though women tended to be somewhat more participative and less directive than men.
For the most part, the available evidence suggests that men and women in comparable positions are more alike than different, at least in the eyes of their subordinates (Carless, 1998; Komives, 1991; Morrison, White, and Van Velsor, 1987; Bolman and Deal, 1991, 1992a). When differences are detected, they generally show women scoring somewhat higher than men on a variety of measures of leadership and managerial behavior (Bass, Avolio, and Atwater, 1996; Eagly and Carli, 2003; Edwards, 1991; Hallinger, Bickman, and Davis, 1990; Weddle, 1991; and Wilson and Wilson, 1991). But the differences are not large, and it is not clear whether they have practical significance.
Why the Glass Ceiling?
If women lead at least as well as men, why does the so-called glass ceiling cap their rise to top positions? Growing numbers are now in the pipeline leading to the executive suite. In the United States, they are a substantial majority of college students and an expanding presence in professional schools—more than half of education and law students and close to half in business and medical schools. This is a dramatic shift (except in education, where they have long been a majority).
Nevertheless, at the end of the twentieth century, women still represented less than 10 percent of senior executives in business (Ragins, Townsend, and Mattis, 1998). And in 2007, women made up less than 7 percent of senior executives and 2 percent of CEOs in Fortune's Global 100 companies. More than half the companies did not have a single female officer. "In the race for talent, women are barely on the playing field in the most senior levels of the largest companies in the world," says Irene Natividad, co-chair of Corporate Women Directors International (Business Wire, 2007). "This is ironic, since the percentage of female workers, consumers, small business owners and investors continues to accelerate."
The story is similar in education. In American schools, women constitute the great majority of teachers and a growing percentage of middle managers, yet in 2007 they accounted for only 15 percent of school superintendents. That was about the same as in 1930, though it was up from only 2 percent in 1981 (Keller, 1999).
There is no consensus about what sustains the glass ceiling, but evidence points to several contributing factors:
Stereotypes associate leadership with maleness. Schein (1975, 1990) found that both men and women tend to link leadership characteristics to men more than women.
Women walk a tightrope of conflicting expectations. Simply put, high-level jobs are "powerful, but women, in the minds of many people, should not be. According to this set of beliefs, a powerful woman is distasteful, unfeminine, and even ludicrous. A strong woman can make both men and women uncomfortable by challenging the conventional understanding—unless, that is, she finds a way to exercise power that is recognizably different from the norm" (Keller, 1999; Belkin, 2007). For example, Brescoll and Uhlmann (2008) found that expressing anger was viewed as a positive for male executives, but a negative for women. Fisman, Iyengar, Kamenica, and Simonson (2006) found that women were attracted to intelligent men, but men tended not to like women who were smarter than they were.
The challenge for women is to be powerful and "feminine" at the same time, which is "an incredibly difficult role negotiation" (Brunner, cited in Keller, 1999). According to Eagly and Carli, women face pressures to "behave extremely competently while reassuring others that they conform to expectations concerning appropriate female behavior" (Eagly and Carli, 2003, p. 825). That was a distinctive challenge for Hillary Clinton as the one woman running for president in 2008. How could she demonstrate that she was tough enough to be commander-in-chief without seeming too aggressive or angry? How could she show feminine warmth and caring without seeming weak?
Women encounter discrimination. In ancient fairy tales as well as modern films, powerful women often turn out to be witches (or worse). Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew is typical of many stories with the message that a strong woman is dangerous until tamed by a stronger man. The historical association of powerful men with leadership and of powerful women with evil produces unspoken and often unconscious bias. Valian (1999) argues that prevailing gender schemata tacitly shape our ways of thinking and associate competence with maleness. Even though these differences are subtle and unconscious, they accumulate over the course of individual careers to give men a competitive advantage. Eagly and Carli report that bias against women leaders varies by situation and that "women face discriminatory barriers mainly in male-dominated and masculine environments and with male evaluators. Because higher levels of authority and higher wages are concentrated in such environments and are controlled primarily by men, this prejudice is highly consequential for women's advancement" (2003, p. 822).
Women pay a higher price. Shakeshaft (cited in Keller, 1999) argues that the rewards of senior positions may be lower for women for a reason. Compared with men, they have higher needs for success in their family and personal lives but lower needs for esteem and status. Almost 70 percent of women in one study named personal and family responsibilities as by far the biggest barrier to their career success (Morris, 2002). Executive jobs impose a crushing workload on incumbents. The burden is even more overwhelming for women, who still do the majority of the housework and child rearing in most dual-career families. That helps to explain why fast-track women are less likely to marry and, if they do marry, are more likely to divorce (Heffernan, 2002; Keller, 1999). It also clarifies why many women who do make it to the top are blessed with "trophy husbands"—those hard-to-find stay-at-home dads (Morris, 2002).
Women have made progress. Attitudes are changing, support mechanisms (such as day care) have increased, and cultural views have shifted. Perhaps the single strongest force for continued advancement is the tremendous talent pool that women represent—they make up more than half the population and have a growing educational edge over their male counterparts. In 1988, Benazir Bhutto became the first female prime minister in a Muslim country, and she might have returned to the job if not for her tragic assassination in 2007. In 2007, Nancy Pelosi became the first woman to occupy the powerful role of Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Her home-state support network included both of California's senators, Democrats Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein. In the same year, Hillary Clinton became the first woman who was viewed as having a strong chance of becoming president of the United States. Between 1986 and 2006, the proportion of female presidents of American universities more than doubled—to almost one in four—and Harvard put a woman in the job for the first time in 2007. Princeton accepted no women until 1969, and thirty years later, some of its mostly male alumni worried that their beloved alma mater might be on the skids when the first woman president appointed the first female provost. But grumbling at alumni gatherings could not change the fact that women were making gains even in America's most elite academic institutions.
Reframing offers a chance to get beyond constricted, oversimplified views of leadership. Each frame offers a distinctive image of the leadership process. Depending on leader and circumstance, each turn of the kaleidoscope can reveal compelling and constructive leadership opportunities, even though no one image is right for all times and seasons. In this section, we discuss the four images of leadership summarized in Exhibit 17.3. For each, we examine skills and processes and propose rules of thumb for successful leadership practice.
Architect or Tyrant? Structural Leadership
Structural leadership often evokes images of petty tyrants and rigid bureaucrats who never met a command or rule they didn't like. Compared with other frames, literature on structural leadership is sparse, and some structural theorists have contended that leadership is neither important nor basic (Hall, 1987). But the effects of structural leadership can be powerful and enduring, even if the style is subtler and more analytic than other forms. Collins and Porras (1994) reported that the founders of many highly successful companies, such as Hewlett-Packard and Sony, had neither a clear vision for their organization nor even a particular product in mind. They were "clock builders": social architects who focused on designing and building an effective organization.
One of the great architects in business history was Alfred P. Sloan Jr., who became president of General Motors in 1923 and remained a dominant force until his retirement in 1956. The structure and strategy he established made GM the world's largest corporation. He has been described as "the George Washington of the GM culture" (Lee, 1988, p. 42), even though his "genius was not in inspirational leadership, but in organizational structures" (p. 43).
At the turn of the twentieth century, some thirty manufacturers produced automobiles in the United States. In 1899, they produced a grand total of about six hundred cars. Most of these small carmakers stumbled out of the starting gate, leaving two late entries, the Ford Motor Company (founded by Henry Ford in 1903) and GM (founded by William Durant in 1908) as front-runners in the race to dominate the American automobile industry. Henry Ford's single-minded determination to build an affordable car pushed Ford into a commanding lead—until Sloan took over at GM.
Under Billy Durant, GM's founder, the company's divisions operated as independent fiefdoms. Durant had built GM by buying everything he could, forming a loose combination of previously independent firms. "GM did not have adequate knowledge or control of the individual operating divisions. It was management by crony, with the divisions operating on a horse-trading basis. The main thing to note here is that no one had the needed information or the needed control over the divisions. The divisions continued to spend lavishly, and their requests for additional funds were met" (Sloan, 1965, pp. 27–28).
Uncontrolled costs and a business slump in 1920 created a financial crisis. Chevrolet lost $5 million in 1921, and GM almost sank (Sloan, 1965). In 1923, Sloan's first year, matters got worse. GM's market share dropped from 20 percent to 17 percent, while Ford's increased to 55 percent. But change was afoot. Henry Ford had a disdain for organization and clung to his vision of a single low-priced, mass-market car. His cheap, reliable Model T—the "Tin Lizzie"—was a marketing miracle at a time when customers would buy anything with four wheels and a motor. But Ford stayed with the same design for almost twenty years. Ford dismissed the need for creature comforts in the Model T, but Sloan surmised that consumers would pay more for amenities like windows to keep out rain and snow. His strategy worked, and Chevrolet soon began to gnaw off large chunks of Ford's market share. By 1928, Model T sales had dropped so precipitously that Henry Ford was forced to close his massive River Rouge plant for a year to retool. General Motors took the lead in the great auto race for the first time in twenty years. For the rest of the twentieth century, no company ever sold more cars than General Motors.
The dominant structural model of the time was a centralized, functional organization, but Sloan felt that GM needed something better. He conceived one of the world's first decentralized organizations. The basic principle was simple: centralize planning and resource allocation; decentralize operating decisions. Under Sloan's model, divisions focused on making and selling cars, while top management did long-range strategy and made major funding decisions. Central staff provided the information and control systems senior management needed to make sound strategic decisions.
The structure worked. By the late 1920s, GM had a more versatile organization with a broader product line than Ford. With the founder still dominating his highly centralized company, Ford was poorly positioned to compete with GM's multiple divisions, each producing its own cars and chasing distinct market niches at different price points. GM's pioneering structural form eventually set the standard for others: "Although they developed many variations and although in very recent years they have been occasionally mixed into a matrix form, only two basic organizational structures have been used for the management of large industrial enterprises. One is the centralized, functional departmentalized type perfected by General Electric and Du Pont before World War I. The other is the multidivisional, decentralized structure initially developed at General Motors and also at Du Pont in the 1920s" (Chandler, 1977, p. 463).
In the 1980s, GM found itself with another structural leader, Roger Smith, at the helm. The results were less satisfying. Like Sloan, Smith ascended to the top job at a difficult time. In 1980, his first year as GM's chief executive, every American carmaker lost money. It was GM's first loss since 1921. Recognizing that the company had serious competitive problems, Smith banked on structure and technology to make it "the world's first 21st century corporation" (Lee, 1988, p. 16). He restructured vehicle operations and spent billions of dollars in a quest for paperless offices and robotized assembly plants. The changes were dramatic, but the results were dismal:
[Smith's] tenure has been a tragic era in General Motors history. No GM chairman has disrupted as many lives without commensurate rewards, has spent as much money without returns, or has alienated so many along the way. An endless string of public relations and internal relations insensitivities has confused his organization and complicated the attainment of its goals. Few employees believe that [Smith] is in the least concerned with their well-being, and even fewer below executive row anticipate any measure of respect, or reward, for their contributions [Lee, 1988, pp. 286–287].
Why did Smith stumble where Sloan had succeeded? They were equally uncharismatic. Sloan was a somber, quiet engineer who habitually looked as if he were sucking a lemon. Smith's leadership aura was not helped by his blotchy complexion and squeaky voice. Neither had great sensitivity to human resource or symbolic issues. Why, then, was Sloan's structural contribution so durable and Smith's so problematic? The answer comes down to how well each implemented the right structural form. Structural leaders succeed not because of inspiration but because they have the right design for the times and are able to get their structural changes implemented. Effective structural leaders share several characteristics:
Structural leaders do their homework. Sloan was a brilliant engineer who had grown up in the auto industry. Before coming to GM, he ran an auto accessories company where he implemented a divisional structure. When GM bought his firm in 1916, Sloan became a vice president and board member. Working under Durant, he devoted much of his energy to studying GM's structural problems. He pioneered the development of better information systems and market research. He was an early convert to group decision making and created a committee structure to make major decisions. Roger Smith had spent his entire career with General Motors, but most of his jobs were in finance. The numbers told him machines were cheaper than people, so much of his vision for General Motors involved changes in production technology, an area where he had little experience or expertise.
Structural leaders rethink the relationship of structure, strategy, and environment. Sloan's new structure was intimately tied to a strategy for reaching the automotive market. He foresaw growing demand, better cars, and more discriminating consumers. In the face of Henry Ford's stubborn attachment to the Model T, Sloan initiated the "price pyramid" (cars for every pocketbook) and the annual introduction of new models. Automotive technology in the 1920s was evolving almost as fast as electronics and the Internet in recent years. New models every year soon became the industry norm.
For a variety of reasons, GM in the 1960s began to move away from Sloan's concepts. Fearing a government effort to break up the corporation, GM reduced the independence of the car divisions and centralized design and engineering. Increasingly, the divisions became marketing groups required to build and sell the cars that corporate gave them. "Look-alike cars" became the standard, and consumers became confused and angry when they found it hard to see the differences between a Chevrolet and a Cadillac.
Instead of addressing this central issue, Smith focused more on reducing costs than on selling cars. As he saw it, GM's primary competitive problem was high costs driven by high wages. He showed little interest in efforts already under way at GM to improve working conditions on the shop floor. Ironically, his two best investments—NUMMI and Saturn—succeeded precisely because of innovative approaches to managing people: "With only a fraction of the money invested in GM's heavily robotized plants, [the NUMMI plant at] Fremont is more efficient and produces better-quality cars than any plant in the GM system" (Hampton and Norman, 1987, p. 102).
Structural leaders focus on implementation. Structural leaders often miscalculate the difficulties of putting their designs in place. They underestimate resistance, skimp on training, fail to build a political base, and misread cultural cues. Sloan was no human resource specialist, but he intuitively saw the need to cultivate understanding and acceptance of major decisions. He did that by continually asking for advice and by establishing committees and task forces to address major issues.
Effective structural leaders experiment. Sloan tinkered constantly with GM's structure and strategy and encouraged others to do likewise. The Great Depression produced a drop of 72 percent in sales at GM between 1929 and 1932, but the company adapted adroitly to hard times. Sales fell, but GM increased its market share and made money every year. Sloan briefly centralized operations to survive the Depression but decentralized again once business began to recover. In the 1980s, Smith spent billions on his campaign to modernize the corporation and cut costs, yet GM lost market share every year and remained the industry's highest-cost producer: "Much of the advanced technology that GM acquired at such high cost hindered rather than improved productivity. Runaway robots started welding doors shut at the new Detroit-Hamtramck Cadillac plant. Luckily for Ford and Chrysler, poverty prevented them from indulging in the same orgy of spending on robots" ("On a Clear Day ...," 1989, p. 77).
Catalyst or Wimp? Human Resource Leadership
The tiny trickle of writing about structural leadership is swamped by a torrent of human resource literature (among the best: Argyris, 1962; Bennis and Nanus, 1985, 2007; Blanchard and Johnson, 1982; Bradford and Cohen, 1984; Boyatzis and McKee, 2005; Fiedler, 1967; Fiedler and Chemers, 1974; Goleman, Boyatzis, and McKee, 2004; Hersey, 1984; Hollander, 1978; House, 1971; Levinson, 1968; Likert, 1961, 1967; Vroom and Yetton, 1973; and Waterman, 1994). Human resource theorists typically advocate openness, caring, mutuality, listening, coaching, participation, and empowerment. They view the leader as a facilitator and catalyst who uses emotional intelligence to motivate and empower subordinates. The leader's power comes from talent, caring, sensitivity, and service rather than position or force. Greenleaf concludes that followers "will freely respond only to individuals who are chosen as leaders because they are proven and trusted as servants" (1973, p. 4). He adds, "The servant-leader makes sure that other people's highest priority needs are being served. The best test [of leadership] is: do those served grow as persons; do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?" (p. 7).
Will managers who embrace such humanistic images be respected leaders who make a difference? Or will they be seen as naive and weak, carried along on the current of other people's ideas and energy? The Cindy Marshall case illust rates both sides. In one human resource encounter, Marshall seems more flunky than leader. In the other, she combines some of the virtues of both servant and catalyst. The leadership tightrope is challenging, and some managers hide behind participation and sensitivity as an excuse not to venture ahead.
There are also many human resource leaders whose skill and artistry produce extraordinary results. An example is Martín Varsavsky, an Argentine native who wound up in New York as a teenager after violence forced his family to flee the military dictatorship in his homeland. Over two decades, Varsavsky founded seven companies and picked up entrepreneur-of-the-year awards in both America and Europe. He made his first millions in New York City real estate before moving to Europe. There he founded two high-tech companies that he later sold for more than a billion dollars each. In 2005, he partnered with venture capitalists and Google to found FON, which soon became the world's largest WiFi network. His approach to managing people was pivotal to his success: "Martín developed management practices that would be keys throughout his career: create horizontal organizations without any hierarchy, communicate clearly what you intend before doing it, delegate as much as possible, trust your colleagues, and leave operating decisions in the hands of others" (Ganitsky and Sancho, 2002, p. 101).
Gifted human resource leaders such as Varsavsky typically apply a consistent set of people-friendly leadership principles.
Human resource leaders communicate their strong belief in people. Human resource leaders are passionate about "productivity through people" (Peters and Waterman, 1982). They express this faith in both words and actions, often formalized in a core philosophy or credo. Fred Smith, founder and CEO of Federal Express, sees "putting people first" as the cornerstone of his company's success: "We discovered a long time ago that customer satisfaction really begins with employee satisfaction. That belief is incorporated in our corporate philosophy statement: "People— Service— Profit ... In that order" (Waterman, 1994, p. 89).
William Hewlett, cofounder of electronics giant Hewlett-Packard, put it this way:
The dignity and worth of the individual is a very important part of the HP Way. With this in mind, many years ago we did away with time clocks, and more recently we introduced the flexible work hours program. This is meant to be an expression of trust and confidence in people, as well as providing them with an opportunity to adjust their work schedules to their personal lives. Many new HP people as well as visitors often note and comment to us about another HP way—that is, our informality and our being on a first-name basis. I could cite other examples, but the problem is that none by [itself] really catches the essence of what the HP Way is all about. You can't describe it in numbers and statistics. In the last analysis, it is a spirit, a point of view. There is a feeling that everyone is part of a team, and that team is HP. It is an idea that is based on the individual [Peters and Waterman, 1982, p. 244].
Human resource leaders are visible and accessible. Peters and Waterman (1982) popularized the notion of "management by wandering around"—the idea that managers need to get out of their offices and spend time with workers and customers. Patricia Carrigan—who, as noted earlier, was the first woman to be a plant manager at General Motors—modeled this technique in the course of turning around two manufacturing plants, each with a long history of union-management conflict (Kouzes and Posner, 1987). In both situations, she began by going to the plant floor to introduce herself to workers and ask how they thought the operation could be improved. One worker commented that before Carrigan, "I didn't know who the plant manager was. I wouldn't have recognized him if I saw him." When she left her first assignment after three years, the local union gave her a plaque. It concluded, "Be it resolved that Pat M. Carrigan, through the exhibiting of these qualities as a people person, has played a vital role in the creation of a new way of life at the Lakewood plant. Therefore, be it resolved that the members of Local 34 will always warmly remember Pat M. Carrigan as one of us" (Kouzes and Posner, 1987, p. 36).
Effective human resource leaders empower others. People-oriented leaders often refer to their employees as "partners," "owners," or "associates." They make it clear that workers have a stake in the organization's success and a right to be involved in making decisions. In the 1980s, Jan Carlzon, CEO of Scandinavian Air Systems (SAS), turned around a sluggish business with the intent of making it "the best airline in the world for business travelers" (Carlzon, 1987, p. 46). To find out what the business traveler wanted, he turned to SAS's frontline service employees for their ideas and suggestions. Focus groups generated hundreds of ideas and emphasized the importance of frontline autonomy to decide on the spot what passengers needed. Carlzon concluded that SAS's image was built on countless "moments of truth": fifteen-second encounters between employees and customers.
If we are truly dedicated toward orienting our company to each customer 's individual needs, we cannot rely on rule books and instruction from distant corporate offices. We have to place responsibility for ideas, decisions, and actions with the people who are SAS during those 15 seconds. If they have to go up the organizational chain of command for a decision on an individual problem, then those 15 golden seconds will elapse without a response and we will have lost an opportunity to earn a loyal customer" [Carlzon, 1987, p. 66].
Advocate or Hustler? Political Leadership
Even in the results-driven private sector, leaders find that they have to plunge into the political arena to move their company where it needs to go. Consider two chief executives from quite dissimilar eras: Lee Iacocca, who became chief executive of Chrysler in the late 1970s when the company was near death, and Carleton "Carly" Fiorina, who became CEO of Silicon Valley giant Hewlett-Packard in July 1999.
Iacocca's career had taken him to the presidency of Ford Motor Company. But then, on July 1, 1978, his boss, Henry Ford II, fired him, reportedly with the simple explanation, "Let's just say I don't like you" (O'Toole, 1984, p. 231). Iacocca's unemployment was brief. Chrysler Corporation, desperate for new leadership, saw Iacocca as the answer to the company's business woes.
Even though Iacocca had done his homework before accepting Chrysler's offer, he found things were worse than he expected. Chrysler was losing money so fast that bankruptcy seemed almost inevitable. He concluded that the only way out was to persuade the U.S. government to guarantee massive loans. It was a tough sell; much of Congress, the media, and the American public were against the idea. Iacocca had to convince them all that government intervention was in their best interest as well as Chrysler's.
Like Iacocca, Fiorina came in to head a troubled giant. HP's problems were not as bad as Chrysler's; it was a profitable company with more than $40 billion in annual revenue. But Business Week included HP as part of "the clueless establishment" (Burrows and Elstrom, 1999, p. 76)—customer service was deteriorating, bureaucracy was stifling innovation, and HP seemed to be falling behind the technology curve. Fiorina's arrival was big news for more than one reason. She was only the fifth CEO in HP's sixty-year history and was the first to come from outside since Bill (Hewlett) and Dave (Packard) founded the company in a Palo Alto garage in 1938. She was also the first woman to head a company of HP's size in any industry. She brought many strengths, including "a silver tongue and an iron will" (Burrows and Elstrom, 1999, p. 76). But she faced daunting challenges, especially after she set her sights on a merger with Compaq, another floundering $40 billion company. Her board supported her initiative, but Bill and Dave's heirs, who controlled more than 15 percent of HP's stock, didn't. Fiorina had to win a massive gunfight at HP corral or lose her job.
Ultimately, Iacocca got his guarantees and Fiorina got her merger. Both won their battles by artfully employing a set of principles for political leaders.
Political leaders clarify what they want and what they can get. Political leaders are realists. They avoid letting what they want cloud their judgment about possibilities. Iacocca translated Chrysler's survival into the realistic goal of getting enough help to eke through a couple of difficult years. He was always careful to ask not for money but for loan guarantees. He insisted that it would cost taxpayers nothing because Chrysler would pay back its loans. Fiorina, too, was realistic. Once she knew she faced a nasty public squabble, she zeroed in on one goal: getting enough votes to put the merger through.
Political leaders assess the distribution of power and interests. Political leaders map the political terrain by thinking carefully about the key players, their interests, and their power, asking: Whose support do I need? How do I go about getting it? Who are my opponents? How much power do they have? What can I do to reduce or overcome their opposition? Is this battle winnable? Iacocca needed the support of Chrysler's employees and unions, but they had little choice. The key players were Congress and the public. Congress would vote for the guarantees only if Iacocca's proposal had sufficient popular support.
Fiorina needed the support of HP's board, analysts, and, in the end, a majority of voting shares. She first went after her board's support but ran into a stroke of bad luck. Walter Hewlett, board member and son of HP cofounder Bill Hewlett, missed the July 2001 board meeting at which McKinsey consultants made the case for merger. A month later, Hewlett voted reluctantly to approve the merger, but he had serious misgivings. Substantial layoffs were touted as one of the merger's "synergies," but in Hewlett's mind this amounted to abandoning the HP Way. HP's stock dropped some 40 percent after the merger announcement, buttressing his doubts. A few weeks later, he announced that he would vote against the merger (Burrows, 2001). Fiorina now faced an uphill battle. Her job and her vision for HP both hung on the outcome. The key was making a case persuasive enough to woo analysts and shareholders who were still on the fence.
Political leaders build linkages to key stakeholders. Political leaders focus their attention on building relationships and networks. They recognize the value of personal contact and face-to-face conversations. Iacocca worked hard to build linkages with Congress, the media, and the public. He spent hours meeting with members of Congress and testifying before congressional committees. After he met with thirty-one Italian American members of Congress, all but one voted for the loan guarantees. Said Iacocca, "Some were Republicans, some were Democrats, but in this case they voted the straight Italian ticket. We were desperate, and we had to play every angle" (Iacocca and Novak, 1984, p. 221).
Fiorina's primary target was institutional shareholders, who held more than half the company's stock, and a few highly influential analysts. Armed with a fifty-page document that laid out the strategic and financial rationale for the merger, Fiorina and Compaq CEO Michael Capellas hit the road, speaking to every analyst they could find. Fiorina focused on the big picture while Capellas backed her up on the nitty-gritty details of integrating the two firms. A particularly vital target was Institutional Shareholders Services, an advisory firm whose clients held more than a fifth of HP's stock. ISS's recommendation could make or break the deal. Though initially skeptical, ISS's lead analyst for the merger, Ram Kumar, said that the Fiorina-Capellas team's persuasiveness and command of detail won him over. "They had a strong grasp of the technical aspects of the merger," Kumar said. "It was an exhaustive, detailed plan" ("Hewlett-Packard Merger Pitch ...," 2002).
Political leaders persuade first, negotiate second, and coerce only if necessary. Wise political leaders recognize that power is essential to their effectiveness; they also know to use it judiciously. William P. Kelly, an experienced public administrator, put it well: "Power is like the old Esso [gasoline] ad—a tiger in your tank. But you can't let the tiger out, you just let people hear him roar. You use power terribly sparingly because it has a short half-life. You let people know you have it and hope that you don't have to use it" (Ridout and Fenn, 1974, p. 10).
Sophisticated political leaders know that influence begins with understanding others'concerns and interests. What is important to them? How can I help them get what they want? Iacocca knew that he had to address a widespread belief that federal guarantees would throw millions of taxpayer dollars down a rat hole. He used advertising to respond directly to public concerns. Does Chrysler have a future? Yes, he said, we've been here fifty-four years, and we'll be here another fifty-four years. Would the loan guarantees be a dangerous precedent? No, the government already carried $400 billion in other loan guarantees, and in any event, Chrysler was going to pay its loans back. Iacocca also spoke directly to Congressional concerns. Chrysler prepared computer printouts painting a grim picture of jobs lost in every district if Chrysler went under.
Fiorina knew her biggest hurdle was the spotty track record for big mergers, particularly in the computer industry. Hewlett, her most potent opponent, used Compaq's acquisition of fading giant Digital Equipment in 1998 as evidence that the deal would be a disaster, noting the 80 percent decline in Compaq's share value after the deal. Fiorina developed a threefold argument based on competitive scale, cost savings, and management strength. She took this story on the road in countless meetings with analysts and institutional shareholders. Her audiences generally found her very persuasive. HP buttressed the case with a blizzard of press releases, advertising, and direct mail.
As the battle intensified, Fiorina even resorted to the business equivalent of an attack ad. HP put out a press release designed to gently but firmly discredit Walter Hewlett as a semiclueless dilettante: "Walter Hewlett, an heir of HP co-founder Bill Hewlett, is a musician and academic who oversees the Hewlett family trust and foundation. While he serves on HP's board of directors, Walter has never worked at the company or been involved in its management" (Fried, 2002).
Iacocca and Fiorina, as mentioned, both won their battles. Chrysler pulled out of its tailspin, repaid its loans, ignited the minivan craze, and had many profitable years before the return of bad times in the 1990s led to a sale first to German automaker Daimler Benz in 1998 and then to a private equity firm in 2007. HP's merger fell short of expectations, and the company drifted for three years until HP's board forced Fiorina out early in 2005.
Prophet or Zealot? Symbolic Leadership
The symbolic frame represents a fourth turn of the leadership kaleidoscope, portraying organization as both theater and temple. As theater, an organization creates a stage on which actors play their roles and hope to communicate the right impression to their audience. As temple, an organization is a community of faith, bonded by shared beliefs, traditions, myths, rituals, and ceremonies.
Symbolically, leaders lead through both actions and words as they interpret and reinterpret experience. What are the real lessons of history? What is really happening in the world? What will the future bring? What mission is worthy of our loyalty and investment? Data and analysis offer few compelling answers to such questions. Symbolic leaders interpret experience so as to impart meaning and purpose through phrases of beauty and passion. Franklin D. Roosevelt reassured a nation in the midst of its deepest economic depression that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." At almost the same time, Adolph Hitler assured Germans that their severe economic and social problems were the result of betrayal by Jews and communists. Germans, he said, were a superior people who could still fulfill their nation's destiny of world mastery. Though many saw the destructive paranoia in Hitler's message, millions of fearful citizens were swept up in Hitler's bold vision of German preeminence.
Burns (1978) was mindful of leaders such as Franklin Roosevelt, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr., when he drew a distinction between "transforming" and "transactional" leaders. According to Burns, transactional leaders "approach their followers with an eye to trading one thing for another: jobs for votes, subsidies for campaign contributions" (p. 4). Transforming leaders are rarer. As Burns describes them, they evoke their constituents'"better angels" and move them toward higher and more universal needs and purposes. They are visionary leaders whose leadership is inherently symbolic.
Symbolic leaders follow a consistent set of practices and scripts.
Symbolic leaders lead by example. They demonstrate their commitment and courage by plunging into the fray. In taking risks and holding nothing back, they reassure and inspire others. New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's leadership in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks is again a dramatic case in point. Risking his own life, he moved immediately to the scene. When the first tower collapsed, he was trapped for fifteen minutes in the rubble alongside other New Yorkers.
They use symbols to capture attention. When Diana Lam became principal of the Mackey Middle School in Boston in 1985, she faced a substantial challenge. Mackey had the usual problems of an urban school: decaying physical plant, poor discipline, racial tension, disgruntled teachers, and limited resources (Kaufer and Leader, 1987a). In such a situation, a symbolic leader looks for something visible and dramatic to signal that change is on the way. During the summer before assuming her duties, Lam wrote a personal letter to every teacher requesting an individual meeting. She met teachers wherever they wanted (in one case driving two hours). She asked them how they felt about the school and what changes they wanted. Then she recruited her family to repaint the school's front door and some of the most decrepit classrooms. "When school opened, students and staff members immediately saw that things were going to be different, if only symbolically. Perhaps even more important, staff members received a subtle challenge to make a contribution themselves" (Kaufer and Leader, 1987b, p. 3).
When Iacocca became president of Chrysler, one of his first steps was to announce that he was reducing his salary from $360,000 to $1 a year. "I did it for good, cold pragmatic reasons. I wanted our employees and our suppliers to be thinking: 'I can follow a guy who sets that kind of example,'" Iacocca explained in his autobiography (Iacocca and Novak, 1984, pp. 229–230).
Symbolic leaders frame experience. In a world of uncertainty and ambiguity, a key function of symbolic leadership is to offer plausible and hopeful interpretations of experience. President John F. Kennedy channeled youthful exuberance into the Peace Corps and other initiatives with his stirring Inaugural challenge: "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." When Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the March on Washington in 1963 and gave his extraordinary "I Have a Dream" speech, his opening line was, "I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation." He could have interpreted the event in a number of other ways: "We are here because progress has been slow, but we are not ready to quit yet"; "We are here because nothing else has worked"; "We are here because it's summer and it's a good day to be outside." Each version is about as accurate as the next, but accuracy is not the real issue. King's assertion was bold and inspiring; it told members of the audience that they were making history by their presence at a momentous event.
Symbolic leaders communicate a vision. One powerful way in which a leader can interpret experience is by distilling and disseminating a vision—a persuasive and hopeful image of the future. A vision needs to address both the challenges of the present and the hopes and values of followers. Vision is particularly important in times of crisis and uncertainty. When people are in pain, when they are confused and uncertain, or when they feel despair and hopelessness, they desperately seek meaning and hope.
Where does such vision come from? One view is that leaders create a vision and then persuade others to accept it (Bass, 1985; Bennis and Nanus, 1985). An alternative view is that leaders discover and articulate a vision that is already there, even if in an inchoate and unexpressed form (Cleveland, 1985). Kouzes and Posner put it well: "Corporate leaders know very well that what seeds the vision are those imperfectly formed images in the marketing department about what the customers really wanted and those inarticulate mumblings from the manufacturing folks about the poor product quality, not crystal ball gazing in upper levels of the corporate stratosphere. The best leaders are the best followers. They pay attention to those weak signals and quickly respond to changes in the corporate course" (1987, p. 114).
Lou Gerstner let it be known on his arrival as the new CEO of a troubled IBM in 1993, "The last thing IBM needs is a vision." People expected him to tighten and shake things up as he had done earlier at RJR Nabisco. But instead of making wholesale changes, he looked through a rear-view mirror to trace IBM's history. He found what he was looking for: old values and practices, now forgotten, that were just what IBM needed to revive its spirit and performance. His new vision artfully restored the gloss on tarnished symbolic commitments that had once made IBM the world's most admired corporation.
Leadership is a two-way street. No amount of charisma or rhetorical skill can sell a vision that reflects only the leader's values and needs. Effective symbolic leadership is possible only for those who understand the deepest values and most pressing concerns of their constituents. But leaders still play a critical role in articulating a vision by bringing a unique, personal blend of history, poetry, passion, conviction, and courage in distilling and shaping direction. Most important, they can choose which stories to tell as a means of communicating a shared quest.
Symbolic leaders tell stories. Symbolic leaders often embed their vision in a mythical story—a story about "us" and about "our" past, present, and future. "Us" could be a school's faculty, a plant's employees, the people of Thailand, or any other audience a leader hopes to reach. The past is usually golden, a time of noble purposes, of great deeds, of legendary heroes and heroines. The present is troubled, a critical moment when we have to make fateful choices. The future is a dreamlike vision of hope and greatness, often tied to past glories.
A version of this story line helped Ronald Reagan, a master storyteller, become America's thirty-ninth president. Reagan's golden past was rooted in the frontier, a place of rugged, sturdy, self-reliant men and women who built a great nation. They took care of themselves and their neighbors without interference from a monstrous national government. It was an America of small towns and volunteer fire departments. America had fallen into crisis, said Reagan, because "the liberals" had created a federal government that levied oppressive taxes and eroded freedom through bureaucratic regulation and meddling. Reagan offered a promising new vision: a return to American greatness by "getting government off the backs of the American people" and restoring traditional values of freedom and self-reliance. The story line worked for Reagan and resurfaced twenty years later for a Reagan acolyte, George W. Bush.
Such stories succeed because we want to believe them rather than to scrutinize their historical validity or empirical support. Even a flawed story will work if it taps persuasively into the experience, values, and hopes of listeners. Mohammed Said Sahaf, Saddam Hussein's information minister at the time of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, was dismissed by most Westerners as an unreliable source of lies and misinformation. He repeatedly predicted Iraqi victories that never materialized. Two days before Baghdad fell, he brazenly told reporters that there were no American forces in the city, despite the conspicuous presence of an American armored battalion at a presidential palace less than half a mile away.
But Sahaf became a media star in much of the Arab world, where many viewers saw him as more interesting and credible than the colorless U.S. military sources. His military uniform, pistol on hip, and rakish cocked beret expressed spirit and é lan. Arabs admired his creative and pungent insults for the Americans ("bloodsucking worms," "sick dogs," "donkeys"). They particularly relished the story Sahaf told with such flair and conviction: the infidel invaders were aimlessly plunging deeper into a trap and would soon be destroyed by heroic Iraqi fighters. Sahaf's star fizzled abruptly with the collapse of Saddam's government. But for a time, millions of Arabs who felt enraged and humiliated by the invasion of Iraq took great delight in a man who told the story they wanted to believe (Alderson, 2003).
Good stories are truer than true: this reflects both the power and the danger of symbolic leadership. In the hands of a Gandhi or a King, the constructive power of stories is immense. Told by a Hitler, their destructive power is almost incalculable.
Symbolic leaders respect and use history. When leaders assume that history started with their arrival, they typically misread their circumstances and alienate their constituents. Wise leaders attend to history and link their initiatives to the values, stories, and heroes of the past. Even as she unleashed massive changes at HP, Carly Fiorina told Bill and Dave stories and insisted on her fidelity to the HP Way. It might have worked had she not displayed a tin ear for the deeper values and folkways of HP's culture.
Sometimes the use of history is deliberately selective. When Hu Jintao became chief of the Chinese Communist Party in the fall of 2002, many wondered whether he would ever escape the long shadow of his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, who had bequeathed a party leadership stacked with his loyalists. Hu was unstinting in his praise of Jiang's legacy but began to differentiate himself symbolically (Eckholm, 2003). Hu enlisted a symbolic ally, Mao Zedong, the supreme hero of the Chinese Communist revolution. In December 2002, only a month after coming to power, Hu traveled to a small rural town that had been Mao's headquarters just before he took over China. In contrast to Jiang, who consistently touted the economic successes of his reign, Hu emphasized the need to help the poor and dispossessed deal with the changes sweeping over China. He referred often to Mao and rarely to Jiang, repeating Mao's call to the faithful to practice "plain living and arduous struggle" more than sixty times. As the editor of a party paper commented, "He showed that his legitimacy comes ultimately from Mao, not Jiang" (Eckholm, 2003, p. A6).
Though leadership is universally accepted as a cure for all organizational ills, it is also widely misunderstood. Many views of leadership fail to recognize its relational and contextual nature and its distinction from power and position. Shallow ideas about leadership mislead managers. A multiframe view provides a more comprehensive map of a complex and varied terrain.
Each frame highlights significant possibilities for leadership, but each by itself is incomplete. A century ago, models of managerial leadership were narrowly rational. In the 1960s and 1970s, human resource leadership became fashionable. In recent years, symbolic and political leadership have become more prominent, and the literature abounds with advice on how to become a powerful or visio nary leader. Ideally, managers combine multiple frames into a comprehensive approach to leadership. Wise leaders understand their own strengths, work to expand them, and build diverse teams that can offer an organization leadership in all four modes: structural, political, human resource, and symbolic.