When even a Stanford University professor like Jeffrey Pfeffer concludes that “the leadership industry has failed,” some critics are tempted to ditch the whole idea of leadership, as so much overblown nonsense. This would be a mistake.
In a time of accelerating disruption, the art and science of enabling change is more important than ever. Three sets of tools are available to those aspiring to induce change: inspiration, information and power, as shown in Figure 1. Leaders need to master all three, if they are to be effective.
The Growing Role Of Leadership In Management
Once we get beyond obsolete notions of leadership, such as leadership as a set of attributes, or as an organizational role, or as a kind of social status, or as autocratic communication, we can see that the capability to enable change is ever more central. In 21st century management, the number of people who need to be enabling change is greatly expanded, as shown in Figure 2:
· The organization as a whole functions as a network where ideas can come from anywhere: the sponsors of new ideas must be able to make their voice heard.
· Innovation plays a much larger role: many new ideas need champions to sponsor them.
· When self-organizing teams are a central element in the structure of work, leadership within every team also becomes crucial.
Figure 2
Principles, processes, and practices of 21st century management STEVE DENNING
In fact, the very reason that 21st century management has emerged is that traditionally managed firms were unable to adjust fast enough to deal with change.
The Shifting Nature Of Leadership
In 20th century management, leadership was typically transactional. Leaders worked within the existing culture, often relying on carrots and sticks, i.e. power tools. Leaders appealed to the self-interest of employees, just as the organization itself pursued the self-interest of the firm: maximizing shareholder value. Leaders and managers were seen as different kinds of people with different functions: leaders set direction, while managers were charged with getting there.
In 21st century management, management and leadership are fully integrated. Both management and leadership have a service function and collaborate to create value for customers and users. In effect, leadership is an aspect of management as shown in Figure 3, rather than something “above” management.
Figure 3
Relationship of leadership and management STEVE DENNING
The Limited Contribution Of Business Schools
In the ongoing transformation of management and leadership, the contribution of business schools has been limited. One reason is that business schools spend a vast amount of time and effort on academic research that has no actionable findings, as explained in a comprehensive review by Jone L. Pearce and Laura Huang in their article, “The Decreasing Value of Our Research to Management Education”.
In a follow-up article, former business school dean Roger Martin has estimated that the cost of producing such articles with no actionable findings is around $600 million per year: The Price of Actionability. His conclusion is that such research may promote conversations among academics but is not very useful for organizations or society.
Three Sets of Tools for Effective Leadership
Leadership occurs throughout society. In education, it is called teaching. In a family, it is called parenting. In politics, it’s called campaigning. In organizations, it is also called innovation.
In 21st century management, leadership is about creating new ways for the organization to create value for customers and users and to do so with truth and integrity. Figure 1 offers a summary of the main tools that leaders can use to meet the challenge. Effective transformational leaders rely mainly on inspiration and information tools, with occasional resort to power tools in a crisis. In this way, management and leadership can lead to the emergent phenomenon of an organizational culture in which most people share common assumptions and goals.
Inspirational Tools
Inspirational tools, particularly storytelling, are useful in terms of inspiring people to think differently about the opportunities that lie ahead and embrace them for their own lives. Why storytelling?
Slides leave listeners dazed. Prose remains unread. Reasons often inspire a contrary reaction. When it comes to inspiring people to embrace some strange new ideas, storytelling isn’t just better than the other tools. It’s often the only thing that works.
At the same time, it is worth noting that most leadership stories don’t work to inspire change. The stories that most corporate executives tell are ineffective or even counterproductive, through lack of storytelling expertise. The main characteristics of leadership stories that do work are as follows:
The story must be authentically true; there is great danger in telling stories that omit crucial pieces of information. (e.g. “1200 happy passengers arrived in New York after the Titanic’s maiden voyage.” When listeners discover, if they don’t already know, that the Titanic sank, the pushback can be devastating.)
The story must be positive in tone. Negative stories are useful for getting attention, but not for inspiring change.
Leadership stories need to be told in a minimalist form, so as to spark a new story in the mind of the listener.
If the persuader can manage to tell the right story in the right way, the story can resonate and start to become the audience’s story, as they begin to realize that the idea in question can open up new possibilities and opportunities for their own lives. If things go well, they will start to tell their colleagues and friends the story of this exciting new idea. With luck, the change idea can start to spread in a viral fashion and be well on its way to becoming part of the culture of the organization, as explained here.
Where the persuader has authority over the audience, there is a risk that the persuader will be tempted to spurn inspiration and and start offering multiple “tellings” of the new idea, and make same point is made over and over again in different ways. The result is usually sullen compliance and underground resistance, as yet another change initiative bites the dust. It doesn’t have to be this way, if the persuader makes better use of the available inspirational tools.
The Information Tools
Information tools also play a key role in 21st century management. The decentralized structure of 21st century management in the form of networks, rather than vertical hierarchies, with multiple self-organizing teams, means that access to reliable information as to how the work is progressing is essential. Amazon has shown the way in this area by insisting that, before any activity begins, there are agreed metrics that will reveal progress in real time in terms of costs and external customer outcomes, not just outputs or internal outcomes.
When it comes to inspiring change, the timing of information is crucial. One misapprehension that is common in the leadership industry is to imagine that giving people reasons to change will by itself generate buy-in for change. Paradoxically, when people already have a contrary belief about something, giving them reasons to change is not only ineffective. It tends to be counterproductive: people become even more opposed to change, as a result of the confirmation bias.
Power Tools
In many big corporations, there is often an excessive use of power tools, partly as a result of the prevalent transactional leadership but also partly as a result of a lack of skills in the use of the inspiration and information tools. Power tools can be effective in the short run in forcing compliance change, but they lay the basis for future implementation problems.
Yet power tools are not irrelevant. There are occasions when power tools are the only solution. For instance, former CEO Curt Carlson explains how in 1998 when SRI International was transitioning to 21st century management, the use of power tools was essential to his eventual success. As Carlson told me in 2015:
“In my first month, I got a phone call. I learned that a team had moved its laboratory from one part of the company to another without telling anybody. Imagine! I called up the vice presidents and said, ‘Do you want to undo this?’ They said, ‘No, it’s too hard to undo.’ So I called a meeting that brought everyone together. I explained that from now on, we weren’t going to behave that way. If anybody did this again, the entire management chain would have to go somewhere else. We couldn’t behave this way. It sounds like really crazy stuff, because that’s what it was: really crazy stuff. When an organization has been in decline for a long time, it becomes quite dysfunctional. There was all kind of madness and team-destroying behavior going on. Every week it was something else.”
Most of the heavy lifting for change at SRI was eventually done through inspiration. As he explained to me in 2015, he visited all the teams. He held forums where they brought people together. He went to lunch with different staff in the cafeteria every day he was at SRI. It didn’t take long for everyone to know that if Carlson sat down with them they were going to have a discussion about their value proposition. At its heart, value creation is continuous iteration, based on the core principles of active learning.
For leadership to succeed in 21st century management, eventually all of the organizational tools for changing minds will need to be put in play.
When you’re an individual contributor, your ability to use your technical expertise to deliver results is paramount. Once you’ve advanced into a leadership role, however, the toolkit that you relied on to deliver individual results rarely equips you to succeed through others. Beware of falling into the logical trap of “if I can do this work well, I should be able to lead a team of people who do this work.” This would be true if leading others were akin to operating a more powerful version of the same machinery you operated previously. But it’s not; machinery doesn’t perform better or worse based on what it thinks about you and how you make it feel, while humans do.
Occupying a leadership position is not the same thing as leading. To lead, you must be able to connect, motivate, and inspire a sense of ownership of shared objectives. Heightening your capacity to lead others requires being able to see how you think and act, and how your behavior affects others. Leading well requires a continuous journey of personal development. Yet people in leadership roles often eschew the long and challenging work of deepening self-insight in favor of chasing after management “tools”— preferably the “quick ’n’ easy” kind, such as personality type assessments that reduce employees to a few simplistic behavioral tendencies, or, for example, implicit bias workshops that are used as a band-aid solution for systemic discrimination, or stack ranking systems that purport to identify the best talent by requiring managers to compare employees to each other. Instead of being a short cut to effective leadership, this mechanistic approach is more often a dead end that misdirects leaders’ attention away from the linkage between their own behavior and employee outcomes.
As an example, I worked with an organization that had disengaged employees and frustrated managers who wanted to instill greater commitment and accountability in their teams. A few years earlier, the firm had overhauled its performance management system. The centerpiece of the new solution was a system that prompted managers to enter performance goals and ratings for their direct reports, schedule performance review meetings, and complete the annual performance appraisal process within a specified time period. When managers completed performance appraisals on time and the ratings they gave fit the target distribution, its sponsors claimed that the system had increased precision and accountability in performance management. What the system’s dashboard didn’t show — and its sponsors failed to appreciate — was that implementation had accompanied a downward spiral of employee morale and engagement. Employees reported that their managers didn’t appreciate their value and were uninterested in their development. Many were on the lookout for new opportunities elsewhere. For their part, managers felt that the organization made performance management cumbersome. They were also blind to their own contributions to a workplace climate that weakened commitment and accountability.
Tools can be handy aids to good leadership. But none of them can take the place of fearless introspection, feedback seeking, and committed efforts to behavioral change for greater effectiveness and increased positive impact on others. In my work with the organization above, I helped leaders learn that their greatest leverage to improve the commitment and accountability of their employees lay not in tracking their goal completion, but in creating and sustaining a motivating interpersonal environment. While we did use tools such as frameworks and checklists, their function was to help leaders note the quality of their own and their employees’ experience of work and shift it in a more collaborative direction; they weren’t to be used as replacements for this essential work. Leaders learned to recognize how their assumptions shaped their behavior and learned to consciously adopt mindsets and behaviors that produced better leadership outcomes.
Instead of hoping in vain for a magic tool to come along to help you manage your team, think of creating practices to increase your leadership proficiency. This involves taking an idea or research finding and translating it into behaviors that you can repeat systematically to create the desired result. You can use the following steps to design a learning practice for any developmental challenge you’d like to take on:
Start with a problem you’d like to solve or a future result you’d like to achieve. What outcome would make a meaningful difference for you? As an example, let’s say that you’d like to see your team members become more proactive in identifying and solving problems.
Articulate why it’s important to you now. Getting clear on your purpose and motivation increases the creativity and persistence you apply to designing and sustaining your practice. Perhaps you care deeply about being a wise steward of your organization’s human resources and about bringing out the best in your team members. You believe that more fully harnessing each person’s creativity will benefit the company and your team members. You’ve been feeling overloaded and believe that recapturing some of the time you currently spend overseeing team members’ work will help you be more effective. You also want to reduce the frustration you feel at having to generate all the ideas and plans for your team.
Seek quality information to base your approach on. You don’t know the best ways to encourage proactive problem solving, so you check in with your coach or mentor or search for some relevant books and articles. If I were coaching you, I might point you toward practical, research-based articles on encouraging proactivity, developing learning agility, and facilitating learning on your team.
Identify measures of success. What would increased proactivity in identifying and solving problems look like in practice? How will you know if you’re making progress? Based on your thinking about what you want to achieve and the reading you’ve done, you decide that you’ll keep track of how frequently team members make suggestions, offer additional ideas to help refine a course of action, and take ownership over implementing a decision. You’ll also monitor your own internal state and how you interact with team members, looking for reduced frustration in yourself and greater enthusiasm and ownership from team members. Finally, you’ll seek feedback from your direct reports.
Ground yourself with an intention. You commit to learning to support proactive behaviors. You place a sticky note with this intention on your computer where you’ll see it first thing each morning. Whenever you meet with team members, you call this intention to mind so that it functions like a beacon to guide you, keep you on course, and prevent you from sliding back into your habit of jumping in with the answer if no one else comes forward right away.
Choose behaviors to implement. From the reading you’ve done and discussions with your coach, you design the following practices:
Share your experience. To serve as a role model for self-directed learning, share your own learning process and experiences. Discuss the problems you’re working on and ask for ideas from team members about how to resolve them.
Ask the right questions. When team members ask you how they should proceed, stimulate their thinking with questions rather than answers. Ask team members to talk you through how they are thinking about work problems and what might help. Ask other people to contribute ideas.
Put yourself in their shoes. When you feel frustration at a team member arising within yourself, label the feeling as an opportunity to learn something about leadership. Try considering the situation from their point of view instead of reacting from frustration.
Acknowledge achievements. Recognize and praise proactive behavior whenever you see it occurring.
Seek feedback. Tell your team members that you’re working to support their proactive problem solving and that you need their feedback to help you get better at this. Ask them to let you know whenever you do something that either hurts or helps. Let’s say that a few people note that you tend to shoot down others’ suggestions and micromanage when you’re under stress. Based on this feedback, commit to refrain from criticizing ideas and instead ask team members to assess the pros and cons of each idea.
Review and celebrate progress. Within a few weeks, you’ll be able to tell that you’ve made progress if team members are engaging more actively in problem solving on a regular basis. You’ll have a newfound appreciation for the creativity of some employees. If you’ve continued to seek feedback and the team has responded, you should now be able to spend more time clarifying desired outcomes with team members and less time overseeing their work, resulting in a net gain of time and energy. You’ll feel more enthusiastic about leading your team and realize that you have more capacity to develop yourself as a leader than you previously appreciated.
It’s one thing to want to hold a leadership role; it’s another to want to do the deep work that learning to lead entails. Resisting the developmental journey of leadership is like flying to an exciting locale, but then spending your whole time there in the airport bar. On the other hand, interest in and commitment to continuous learning and development as a leader will keep you fresh and vital. There’s a valley to cross before you reach the peak. And there’s another valley between that peak and the next one. The developmental journey is fascinating and fulfilling if you embrace it. You don’t have to wait to be trained; you can design leadership development practices any time you want.
(Miss this week’s The Leadership Brief? This interview below was delivered to the inbox of Leadership Brief subscribers on Sunday morning, Nov. 8; to receive weekly emails of conversations with the world’s top CEOs and business decisionmakers, click here.)
You don’t get to be a four-star general, responsible for defending North American airspace from attack, by surrounding yourself with shy subordinates. Throughout her career Lori J. Robinson, who retired from the U.S. Air Force in 2018 and now serves on corporate boards and think tanks, invited brutally honest feedback. “Everybody wants to tell the boss the good,” says Robinson. “Nobody wants to tell the bad and the ugly. At the end of the day, what really is needed is the bad and the ugly.”
Her methods fueled her rise. Robinson is one of a handful of women to reach the four-star rank, and when she served, she was the senior-most woman in the entire Department of Defense. Robinson most recently served as commander of both the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and U.S. Northern Command during a tense period when North Korea launched 23 ballistic missiles in a period of 24 months, some with the potential to hit the mainland U.S. In addition to her board work, she is a senior fellow with the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she is an expert on leadership and international security. She recently joined TIME for a conversation on leadership lessons from the military, building diverse teams and the need to push back on the boss.
(This interview with retired general Lori J. Robinson has been condensed and edited for clarity.)
As a general, you have led diverse teams with people from a wide range of backgrounds. What is the best way to unify a team or a squad or a country, and what lessons from your Air Force background would you share with the country at this point, when there is so much division?
I contemplate all the things that we in the military have done over time. We bring together all these different cultures, and we all focus on a single goal: supporting and defending the Constitution. I was part of something bigger than myself, and I poured my heart into making the institution better.
There is tremendous anxiety in the country now and worry about how divided the nation is. Do you think the country is going to be O.K.?
I’m an eternal optimist. Our democracy is messy. It’s a work in progress. But thank heavens we are in a democratic society. I don’t want to get into politics, but we really do have to talk to each other. And we have to not just talk. More importantly, we have to listen. There is not just a single way of thinking about things. There are multiple ways. That’s why listening is so important.
In the course of your military career, you had the ability to build a staff on multiple occasions. How do you build a diverse team?
It’s about making sure that no matter who you picked—male, female, African American, pick a race or a gender or a background—that they had to be capable. Everybody needed to know that that person wasn’t picked because she was a woman. She was picked because she was the best in the job.
How is the Air Force doing in terms of having a pipeline of diverse candidates for leadership positions?
Over time, we have become much more sensitive to ensuring we have a diverse force, a diverse table sitting around providing advice to whoever is sitting at the end of the table. Diversity isn’t just race or gender. It’s background, it’s ideas, it’s all those things to provide the person at the end of the table the best advice.https://6e7bb18cfc5ba8dbd7eebe9f288ce497.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html?n=0
How do you develop your staff from different backgrounds?
As important as having amazing candidates is giving them the voice. And in order to give them the voice, you have to set the tone. You have to set the tone that says it’s O.K. for you to disagree with me. Everybody wants to tell the boss the good. Nobody wants to tell the bad and the ugly. At the end of the day, what really is needed is the bad and the ugly.
How do you handle pushback?
As long as somebody wasn’t suggesting something illegal, immoral or unethical, I needed to hear what they had to say because the higher you get, the less of an expert you are. But at the same time, when a decision is made, then everybody has to march to the same drummer.
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As long as somebody wasn’t suggesting something illegal, immoral or unethical, I needed to hear what they had to say. ”
When you have four stars on your shoulder, is it hard to get subordinates to be candid with you? Have you had to make any adjustments?
Let’s say I’m sitting down to get a “course of action” briefing that I’m going to present to my leadership. Well, I can’t rip their heads off after the first slide. If there’s anything that shuts anything down, it’s that, right? So I had to learn that I had to listen to everybody. I really had to teach myself the patience to do that.
Do CEOs share the characteristics of military leaders? Can you picture them in the service?
I’ll put it this way—I think people are where they should be.
Here’s a typical headline from the period when you were responsible for defending the U.S.: “North Korea Threatens Nuclear Strike on U.S.” What are your most vivid memories of that period?
My deputy and I had to make sure 24 hours a day, seven days a week, that one of us was always able and capable to make a decision if we needed to. If I was coming home on a trip, he could not go anywhere until I was either in the office, in the op center or at my house. That structure of scheduling between the two of us was very important. I remember on several occasions sleeping on my couch with my cell phone so that if the operation center needed me, they could call me on my cell phone first, and then I could get to a secure line.
How much at risk was the U.S.? Did we get close to the edge?
He [North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un] had good capability, and that’s why I had to take every single event as a possibility that it could hit the United States.
If push came to shove, were you the one who would have to make a decision in terms of how to respond?
It would depend upon who was available and the speed with which things happened. But I was definitely in the chain.https://6e7bb18cfc5ba8dbd7eebe9f288ce497.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html?n=0
Was someone following you around with a suitcase?
Let’s not confuse nuclear with ballistic missiles, but when I traveled, I had communication capability.
That went on for months. How would you unwind?
I don’t think you ever really unwind, especially in that job. To be honest, I think I finally unwound from that job when I retired. And it took me time. I tell people that you don’t know how much stress you’re under until you don’t have it anymore. And my husband was always there for me. I don’t know what I would have done without him. We would always call ourselves Team Robinson.
“ There is not just a single way of thinking about things. There are multiple ways. That’s why listening is so important. ”
Your husband was a top pilot in the Air Force and part of the elite Thunderbirds, and yet chose to retire as a two-star general to prioritize your career. What are the lessons learned from that situation?
What I try to tell everybody that has two people in a household both earning a living, whether it’s military or whatever, that it’s so important to have that conversation beforehand. How far are you willing to live apart? How long are you willing to live apart? Whose career comes first? Because if you do it when there’s no tension, then you can do that rationally and not emotionally.
What is it with the military and all the acronyms?
I have learned that the corporate world has their acronyms also.
What is the coolest piece of technology that you encountered in your Air Force career?
I’ve always been amazed at our ability to take different sensors and to fuse them into something that’s manageable and usable in real time. We can sense something and project it visually on a screen.
Did you bark orders?
I never barked orders.
What was the angriest you got during your command?
I got very angry one time at one of my airmen. It was a Friday night, and he was on a motorcycle. And he was racing a semitruck on I-40 [in Oklahoma]. I got about five inches from his face, and I asked him, “Why should I trust you? Why should I trust your judgment? Why should I allow you in one of our airplanes to talk to fighter pilots? And I don’t want to have to tell your mother and father you’re dead.” It wasn’t an angry that I threw off the cuff. It was an angry where I knew exactly what I wanted to say to make a point to this young man.
Back to the state of the nation, what is your level of concern about public discourse and how well institutions are standing up right now?
I always said this is about supporting an idea. And that idea is freedom.
