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February, 2007,
Volume 11, Number
5
CONTENTS
The World Economic Forum: A Call to Exercise Global
Leadership, Not Simply Self Interest
Developing Leadership Talent: The Wharton Leadership
Conference, June 7, 2007
Leadership Impact:
Accelerating the Leadership Pipeline at The Hartford
The Psychology of Leadership: The American
Psychologist on Leadership Research
The World Economic Forum:
A Call to Exercise Global Leadership, Not Simply Self
Interest
This year’s convening of
the
World Economic Forum in
Davos, Switzerland, brought together approximately 2,400
corporate executives, heads of government and leaders of
organizations like the World Bank and Human Rights Watch
to debate issues ranging from global warming to the rise
of the Internet and the future of the Middle East.
Michael Useem, editor of the Wharton Leadership
Digest and director of Wharton’s Center for
Leadership and Change Management, attended the five-day
event. He offers his report on what he calls Davos’
“culture of transcendent leadership,” which he defines
as “a willingness by those with company or country
responsibilities to make decisions that benefit those
far beyond the decision maker’s own organization or
nation.” This article also appeared in the February 7
issue of
Knowledge@Wharton.
A Unique Marketing Platform
For many participants, the 2007
annual meeting in Davos provided unique opportunities to
discuss wide-reaching business concerns, such as the
state of the auto industry, as well as public policy
concerns, such as the need to move free trade
negotiations back onto the front burner. It presented an
exceptionally unique marketing platform as well,
especially for country leaders envious of the enormous
rise of foreign investments in China. For example, in a
session attended by more than 1,000 people, Brazil’s
recently re-elected President, Luiz Inacio Lula da
Silva, declared that during the past four years, his
policies have lifted 11 million citizens out of poverty
and created five million new jobs. The message for those
in the audience running multinational companies and
private equity funds was clear: Being bullish on Brazil
is good strategy.
Mexico’s newly elected President,
Felipe Calderón Hinojosa,
declared that his country had “decided in favor of the
market and democracy,” and although the country has not
yet reached the “promised land,” it was growing rapidly.
By 2040, he predicted, Mexico would join the world’s
largest developing economies – Brazil, Russia, India and
China, known as BRIC. At that point, Calderón
suggested, the acronym should be changed to “BRIMC.”
Again, the message was that foreign investment is not
only welcome but also needed to help make this happen.
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shaukat
Aziz reported that his country’s per capita income had
doubled over the past eight years, in large part because
of liberalization of the economy, downsizing of state
bureaucracy and a growing “absorbtive capacity for
reform.” He observed that foreign direct investment in
Pakistan has grown more than 15-fold since he introduced
the reform initiative, from $300 million in 1999 to more
than $5 billion this year. Pakistan’s liberalization has
come with a social component as well. The Prime Minister
noted that eight of his cabinet ministers are women, as
is one-fifth of the parliament. These economic and
social reforms should also make Pakistan an attractive
target for the world’s investors.
A Culture of Transcendent
Leadership
Yet while the pursuit of such
tangible benefits as increased foreign investment
brought many to Davos, the event also served to define
and reinforce a shared culture among participants.
Central to that culture is an emphasis on transcendent
leadership – the idea that standing above all other
values is the ideal of a joint commitment to bettering
the planet. Corporate and political leaders, said
speaker after speaker, should deploy their resources not
just for company or country gain. Those most responsible
for the globe’s greatest institutions must, they
contended, also devote their energies to collective
goals.
Some speakers, for example, warned
that unchecked globalization is heightening inequality,
displacing millions and destabilizing countries. German
Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that everybody would
“have to look beyond their own noses” if globalization
is to become a fair and equitable force. “I’m
convinced,” she said, “that the essence of globalization
today provides the world with many more opportunities
than risks,” but for it “to benefit everyone, we have to
create a new balance of power – in world trade, in the
consumption of resources, in education, in the fight
against AIDS…. To put it in a nutshell, we need a global
economy which complies with the rules of a fair
regulatory environment.”
Jordan’s King Abdullah warned that the era’s political
imperatives require joint action as well, since all will
suffer if the problems remain unresolved. In particular,
he argued, bringing the Israeli-Palestinian discord to
an acceptable end is essential. “We must act,” he
concluded, “and we all have a contribution to make.”
Several prominent figures argued
that the flattening of the world is reducing the normal
trade-offs between private interest and public purpose,
making the embrace of transcendent leadership less
costly at home. British Prime Minister Tony Blair, for
instance, told a packed hall that countries, companies
and other institutions have become so interdependent
that their self-interests are increasingly coincident
with global interests. “If we let Sudan and Somalia slip
into the abyss,” he said, “the consequences will extend
far beyond the region.” If Afghanistan and Iraq “fall
back into failed states,” he warned, it will affect us
all. If global warming is left unchecked and trade
protectionism allowed to increase, all will bear
enormous costs.
Business leaders, the British prime
minister suggested, must therefore move beyond
“corporate social responsibility” to embrace a
“strategic engagement with the moral imperatives of the
era.” Rather than modest engagement in good works, he
contended, individuals everywhere must take active
leadership in what he sees as the three most important
issues of the day: climate change, world trade and
African poverty. To do so is not only in the public
interest, suggested Blair, but increasingly in
countries’ own interests as well.
Ukraine Gets an Earful
Forum participants were told many
times, in many different ways, that each has a
contribution to make to improve the economic environment
for all citizens. The candid dialogue prevailing in some
Davos sessions helped political and business leaders
leave with a more realistic appraisal of exactly what
their contribution should be.
Consider a private luncheon focused
on the future of Ukraine. Prime Minister Viktor
Yanukovich reported that he was strengthening his
country’s democratic process, creating better
transparency in national decision making, improving
corporate governance standards, achieving 7% annual
growth and joining the European Union. Yet four
subsequent speakers explicitly cautioned the Prime
Minister – now seated next to them on the luncheon stage
– that his momentum behind these improvements was not
yet sufficient. Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga
warned him that “the speed of reform in Ukraine has been
too slow.” Investor George Soros said that the country
required “greater transparency.”
The European Union Commissioner for
Enlargement, Olli Rehn, cautioned that Ukraine must
still embrace “the rule of law.” The former President of
Poland, Alexander Kwasniewski, urged that Ukraine engage
its neighbors in more active dialogue. Former U.S.
President Bill Clinton said in a videotaped message that
Ukraine “will need to open its economy to go for EU
membership.” The Latvian President told the Ukraine
prime minister in closing, “Make up your mind, do it,
and we are with you!”
Though rarely scolding, candor and
criticism wove through other sessions as well. And just
as at any corporate off-site event, lighter moments
lessened the tension. Having promoted reform for seven
years against deeply entrenched interests, for example,
Pakistan’s Aziz said he would like to rewrite Newton’s
Third Law: For every action there is an equal and
opposite reaction. While applicable to the physical
universe, Aziz said that in his political universe, the
Third Law should instead read: “Every action brings an
unequal and gross reaction.”
Gordon Brown, Britain’s Chancellor
of the Exchequer and likely successor to Prime Minister
Tony Blair, found ironic delight in a slogan that he had
seen at a recent rally: “World-Wide Campaign against
Globalization.” And a beleaguered Tony Blair,
anticipating that he would return to the Forum’s next
annual meeting as a private citizen, said, “I look
forward to coming back to Davos to tell other country
leaders how they went wrong and how easy the job is.”
A Call to Action
The Forum’s motto, “Committed to
Improving the State of the World,” was emblazoned
virtually everywhere, a reminder of the responsibility
that the participants have for addressing global
challenges. The Forum’s more prominent figures
reinforced this point during the event’s final meeting.
E. Neville Isdell, CEO of Coca-Cola and co-chair of the
Forum, warned that the outside world sometimes viewed
Davos as “the epicenter of ego” – and that the calling
was now for all participants to make it, instead, “the
epicenter of commitment.” James J. Schiro, CEO of Zurich
Financial Services and another co-chair of the Forum,
followed with a call to action. “I’ve been coming here
for 15 years, and what’s evident is the rise of a focus
on leadership and change.” Consequently, “I would ask
everybody, when you return home, to exercise your
leadership.”
Accepting the values of the Forum
will not necessarily translate into what the business
and political leaders will do at home. Culture and
behavior are not always consistent, and in a final
underscoring of the Forum’s ultimate purpose, WEF
founder and executive chairman Klaus Schwab closed the
entire gathering with this pointed comment: “We invite
back those who are concerned about the world and will do
something about it.”
Links to related articles in
Knowledge@Wharton:
Delhi in Davos: How India Built its Brand at the World
Economic Forum
View from Davos: Leadership Today Requires More Caution,
Less Exuberance
Globalization with a Human Face – and a Social
Conscience
Global Governance: The View from the 2005 World Economic
Forum in Davos
Developing
Leadership Talent: Wharton Leadership
Conference, June 7, 2007
How Organizations Prepare Their
Present and Future Leadership
The 11th Annual Wharton
Leadership Conference,
Philadelphia,
June 7, 2007
This one-day intensive
conference is devoted to exchanging ideas about how
managers and organizations can best build their present
and future leadership. Presenters draw upon their own
organization’s experience to find, identify, recruit,
prepare, and train their talent for positions of
responsibility. Where are the best sources of talent?
What are the best development experiences for building
leadership capacities? When is the time to invest in
leadership development? Who has the best programs for
fostering leadership – and what are the secrets of their
success? The presenters bring not only the
developmental methods of their enterprise but also their
own personal developmental experiences into active
dialogue with conference participants.
Confirmed speakers include:
Kirbyjon
H.
Caldwell,
Senior
Pastor
of
Windsor
Village
United
Methodist
Church
in
Houston,
Texas,
and
author
of
The
Gospel
of Good
Success
(1999)
and
co-author
of
Entrepreneurial
Faith
(2004);
under
his
leadership,
Windsor
Village
membership
has
risen
from 12
to more
than
14,000,
and it
now
includes
more
than 120
ministries.
 Jennifer
J. Deal, research scientist at the Center for
Creative Leadership, manager of its World Leadership
Survey and the Emerging Leaders research project, and
coauthor of Success for the New Global Manager
(2002).
Richard Greene,
consultant, author of
Words that
Shook the World: 100 Years
of Unforgettable Speeches and Events
(2002), and
judge
for The Learning
Channel series on
“The
Messengers”
intended to
identify the nation’s greatest upcoming speakers.
 Stephen
G. Harrison, chairman of Lee Hecht Harrison, a
worldwide
career management services and leadership development
company, and author of
The Manager’s Book of Decencies: How Small
Gestures Build Great Companies (forthcoming).
 David
Nadler, vice chairman of Marsh & McLennan Companies,
a global professional services firm with annual
revenues of approximately $12 billion,
chairman of Mercer Delta
Consulting, and author or editor of 16 books including
Executive Teams, Champions of Change, and most
recently, Building Better Boards: A Blueprint for
Effective Governance (2005).
 Thomas
A. Stewart, editor and managing director of the
Harvard Business Review and author of
Intellectual Capital – The New Wealth of Organizations
and The Wealth of Knowledge
(2003).
 Tim
O’Toole, is managing director and CEO of the London
Underground Ltd., and former chief executive of
America’s Consolidated Rail Corporation (Conrail).
Information for registering online for the conference
will appear in the next issue of the Wharton
Leadership Digest.
leadership impact:
Accelerating the Leadership Pipeline at The Hartford
By Mary McCabe, Bob Sawicki and
Rick Slivka
Over the
past several years, The Hartford,
one of the largest investment and
insurance companies in the United States,
experienced record growth and success. But developing
leaders at all levels of our 30,000-strong workforce
remained a challenge. Our 200-year-old company had a
leadership curriculum in place, but it was not anchored
to The Hartford’s business strategies.
All that
changed in 2005, when The Hartford’s Leadership and
Professional Development Group initiated a series of
conversations with the company’s senior leadership. We
asked: What do managers coming up through the leadership
pipeline need to succeed? What emerging skills are
needed to drive business strategy? How do we ensure that
we have a rich and ready pipeline of leaders across the
enterprise? Out of this dialogue emerged our new
Leadership Development Strategy.
The strategy: Build and
sustain a pipeline of ready, highly effective leaders
and successors who will profitably grow the business
amid intense market conditions. Bringing this strategy
to life required a variety of tactics.
First, we wanted to drive
accountability and make managers responsible for
developing potential new leaders. Second, we needed to
develop people who have the greatest potential to make a
difference in our company. Third, we wanted to
revitalize our leadership curricula in order to build
core skills – the result of which is our “Prepare to
Lead” curricula. It is a curricula that accelerates
leadership development at all levels of the enterprise.
Accelerating Leadership
Development
During our 2005 discussions, one
message came through loud and clear: Leaders are not
developed through training alone. Potential leaders need
a combination of classroom learning, on-the-job
experience and managerial support to develop their
skills. When all three components work in tandem,
development accelerates. To visualize this model, we
have created the D³ formula:
Our D³ approach is integrated into the “Prepare to Lead”
curricula. Because The Hartford’s goal is to develop
leaders at all levels of the enterprise, we designed
four separate curricula, each targeting a different
level of experience.
The first-level curriculum, “Before
You Lead,” targets individuals who have not yet reached
leadership positions, but have the potential to do so.
These leadership candidates learn self-management,
relationship building, emotional intelligence, decision
making and planning. “Leadership Essentials” is the next
level, offered for individuals who are new to
management. These newcomers focus on managing
expectations and performance, setting goals,
communicating, and coaching. For managers with 18 months
or more of experience, the “Leadership Acceleration”
course teaches business acumen, managing change,
retention and engagement, team effectiveness, and
influence and presentation skills.
Finally, for individuals with
extensive management experience responsible for leading
the business, The Hartford offers “Strategic
Leadership,” a curriculum focused on driving innovation,
organizational savvy, industry and economic context, and
talent management.
Solving Real-World Problems
To develop the
mid-level leaders targeted in the “Strategic Leadership”
curriculum, The Hartford designed a ten-week “Leadership
Impact” program, which exposes participants to different
aspects of the enterprise and engages them in actual
business projects.
Launched September,
2006 with 28 participants from offices around the U.S.,
“Leadership Impact” began with a five-day off-site
meeting, Phase One. Four of The Hartford’s executive
leaders, two from Property-Casualty and two from Life,
presented participants with high-impact business
opportunities and areas in which the companies could
improve. Participants were divided into four teams, each
charged with tackling one real-life business problem.
“What impressed us
was the passion of the executive sponsors. They had so
much confidence on our ability to shed light on these
business issues. At the beginning, we felt we could
solve world peace,” recalled Tammi Wortham, a
“Leadership Impact” participant and assistant vice
president for Life Investment Product Services, whose
project focused on how to increase assets and retention
in The Hartford’s public retirement plan.
To help the teams
get started, leading business experts gave presentations
on innovation, organization redesign and other key
topics, with content tailored to the specific projects
at hand. Facilitators from The Hartford’s Leadership
Development staff also joined each team to assist with
team dynamics and project discussions. Executive
presentation coaches helped teams prepare their scope of
work, which they presented to their executive sponsors
on the final classroom day.
With Phase One
complete, participants returned to their normal work
sites and began a challenging eight weeks of
virtual collaboration with project team members. Tammi
Wortham described how she and fellow team members faced
the demands of doing both their usual work and the
leadership project work. “It’s like we had two jobs. It
was hard to juggle. But we all said, ‘When are you ever
given plenty of time to get something important done in
today’s business environment?’ Our team made a
commitment to meet our deadline.” In keeping with the D³
approach, managers were asked to support the extra time
commitments of participants. In addition, managers
worked one-on-one with participants, identifying areas
for improvement. This dialogue provided an element of
accountability, as managers checked in with participants
at the end of the program and provided further feedback.
When the eight weeks were over,
participants reassembled for Phase Two, three days in
December, where teams presented their recommendations to
executive sponsors in addition to receiving further
leadership development content. The sponsors engaged
team members in lively exchanges and were charged with
informing team members on whether or how their
recommendations might be implemented. To wrap up,
participants received feedback from team members and
created a development plan to apply what they learned
back at their jobs.
Is it Working?
Having spent so much energy
creating this new leadership program, how can we be sure
it’s working?
On the qualitative side, we looked
at program evaluations from participants and executive
sponsors, which were very positive. In evaluations
completed after Phase Two, many participants wrote how
“Leadership Impact” helped them see their own work in a
more strategic, enterprise-wide way. “I have a broader
understanding of our overall business and will approach
issues with more of an eye toward its fit within our
overall business strategy,” wrote one participant.
Networking with colleagues, improving communications and
thinking longer term were other areas of improvement
participants mentioned.
On a quantitative side, the Talent
Management and Development group will be tracking the
participants for the next 18 months. As participants get
promoted, we will meet with the “Leadership Impact”
graduates and their managers to determine what impact
the program had on their advancement. This dialogue will
be important to find out exactly what role the
“Leadership Impact” experience had in increasing the
readiness of the leader for their expanded
responsibilities.
Having
invested in this new approach to leadership development,
we are looking forward to reaping the benefits, as we
observe leaders at all levels accelerate through the
pipeline.
Authors’ Note:
Mary McCabe is director of the “Prepare to Lead”
curricula and can be reached at
mary.mccabe@thehartford.com. Bob Sawicki is the head
of The Hartford’s Leadership and Professional
Development Group and is responsible for enterprise
leadership development initiatives. He can be reached at
bob.sawicki@thehartford.com. Rick Slivka is the
program manager for Leadership Impact and can be reached
at
richard.slivka@thehartford.com.
The Psychology of
Leadership: The American Psychologist on
Leadership Research
By Mark Hanna
 Why
do so few introductory general psychology or even social
psychology textbooks cover leadership? (Note 1) Robert
Sternberg of Tufts University asks this question in his
introduction to American Psychologist’s January
2007 issue, which is devoted to the subject of
leadership.
The editors of the American
Psychologist rectified this oversight by assembling
a small, lively team of leadership scholars who
judiciously cover a few major topics in leadership,
including trait, situation, contingency, and systemic
views. [For more comprehensive treatments, see works by
Lowe and Gardner, 2000; Antonakis et al., 2004; Yukl,
2005; or Northouse, 2006. (Note 2)] The editors directed
the various authors to read each other’s drafts and
incorporate each other’s views into their final
articles. The result is a rewarding, free-wheeling
exchange on what needs to be done to take leadership
studies to the next level.
Who Said What?
The overall thrust of the articles
is this: leadership studies need to be more
collaborative, integrative, context-sensitive,
systematic, and concerned with higher-order cognitive
attributes like wisdom, successful intelligence, and
creativity. They also need to be more willing to address
critical present and future world issues. What follows
is a quick tour of four of the six articles appearing in
the January issue.
Warren Bennis of the University of
Southern California writes in “The Challenges of
Leadership in the Modern World” that “Although we do not
yet know what a [future] theory of leadership would look
like, we do know it will be interdisciplinary, a
collaboration among cognitive scientists, social
psychologists, sociologists, neuroscientists,
anthropologists, biologists, ethicists, political
scientists, historians, sociobiologists, and others” (p.
4). The discipline, he writes, could even include
performance art, rhetoric, and media studies. (Anyone
who watched the first televised U.S. presidential
debate, the Kennedy-Nixon debate of 1960, can attest to
the power of proper television makeup, a good shave, and
a vividly contrasting suit vis-à-vis the background in
making or breaking a presidential campaign.) Bennis also
argues that the four major threats to humanity today are
a nuclear or biological catastrophe, a world-wide
pandemic, tribalism, and poor leadership of human
institutions. To solve the first three threats,
exemplary leadership is required.
Stephen Zaccaro of George Mason
University provides a lively and insightful commentary
on trait theory in his article “Trait-Based Perspectives
of Leadership,” in which he makes four critical points:
-
Leadership trait theory can not be limited to a
simple listing of leader attributes; rather,
leadership represents a complex pattern of behavior,
explained in part by multiple leader attributes or
traits;
-
Rarely do leadership studies consider how joint
combinations of leader characteristics influence
leadership behavior, nor how they operate in complex
multiplicative or curvilinear ways;
-
Trait and attribute approaches must consider and
account for the situation as a corresponding source
of significant variance in leadership;
-
Leader traits may differ in their relative stability
or malleability over time and the degree to which
they are specific to particular situations.
The Zaccaro article details the
history of the ebb and flow of the leader trait
perspective and provides a useful model of leader
attributes and performance.
Bruce Avolio of the University of
Nebraska at Lincoln provides a delightful commentary on
the future directions for leadership theory in his
article “Promoting More Integrative Strategies for
Leadership Theory-Building.” Leadership research needs
to move to the next level of integration by considering
the complex interplay of leader and follower vis-à-vis
prior, current, and emerging context. In creating such
an integrative theory, Avolio urges leadership
researchers to pay more attention to five aspects:
cognitive elements, individual and group behavior,
historical context, proximal context (i.e., “close to a
central point of reference”), and distal context
(“distant from a central point of reference.”) Toward
the end of the article, he reviews recent work on an
integrative view of authentic leadership development.
In this reviewer’s opinion, Robert
J. Sternberg of Tufts University gets the American
Psychologist leadership issue award for higher-order
thinking. In his article “A Systems Model of Leadership:
WICS,” he emphasizes that an effective leader needs to
have three higher order cognitive attributes operating
simultaneously. Those three attributes are wisdom,
intelligence (of the successful variety), and
creativity, synthesized. Specifically, the
leader needs to have “creativity to generate ideas,
academic (analytical) intelligence to evaluate whether
ideas are good, practical intelligence to implement
ideas and persuade others of their worth, and wisdom to
balance the interests of all stakeholders and ensure
that the actions of the leader seek a common good” (p.
34). One can translate the phrase “common good” to mean
an integrative, win-win solution. Toward the end of the
article, Sternberg also relates how WICS can apply to
behavioral, contingency, transformational, and
situational approaches to leadership.
Some Observations
After reading these articles, one
might ask how these various leadership insights apply to
Bennis’ list of pressing world problems. Suppose one
were to take Avolio’s advice about integrative
leadership theory and combine it with Zaccaro’s insights
about multiple attributes and Sternberg’s ideas on
wisdom. Now apply these multiple perspectives to the
issue of tribalism. What three “wisdom attributes” would
one want a world leader to have in dealing with
tribalism, given a situation of relative peacefulness? A
basic stance of kindness consistent with the principle
“first, do no harm?” A strong capacity for being
nonjudgmental? A dedication to the principle of free
will for self and others consistent with one’s own
self-defense, health, and safety?
Now imagine a situation in which
another tribe suddenly metastasized into an aggressive,
hostile empire-builder—see, for example, Mel Gibson’s
recent movie Apocalypto, an exploration of the
ancient Mayan culture and their practice of human
sacrifice. Would those three leadership
attributes still hold, or would they be replaced by more
Machiavellian traits like cunning, stealth, and
deceit—the virtues of Realpolitik? The readers are left
to decide this issue on their own, and they might well
consider the role of Sternberg’s ideas on successful
intelligence and creativity as a way of thinking outside
the box.
The state of leadership studies is
like a rough-cut diamond with a few shiny facets. The
facets are the various theories and frameworks, each
representing a different point of view, providing
scintillating insights on some issues but strangely
silent on others. There are many more facets to be cut.
Ultimately, understanding is asymptotic. One gets closer
and closer, but never really arrives at the heart of the
mystery of leadership. American Psychologist
succeeds in this issue in taking readers a little closer
to that mystery.
Author’s note: Mark Hanna is
a freelance business researcher and writer based in
Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He can be reached at
markhanna@mchsi.com.
Notes
1.
If you doubt this phenomenon, gather together a
few introductory psychology textbooks and look at their
tables of content and indices. If you don’t have access
to a collection of psychology textbooks, go to the
homepage of the American Psychological Association <
http://www.apa.org/ > and look at the section called
“Psychology Topics.” You won’t see leadership listed.
And it isn’t just the psychologists. Go to the homepage
of the American Sociological Association at <
http://www.asanet.org/ > and click on the link
called “Sections.” You won’t see a formal group of
sociologists devoted solely to leadership.
2.
For an excellent comprehensive journal article on
leadership theory as of the year 2000, see K. B. Lowe
and W. L. Gardner, “Ten years of the Leadership
Quarterly: contributions and challenges for the future,”
Leadership Quarterly, volume 11, no. 4, 2000, pp.
459-514. There are also several good introductory books
on leadership theory. See: J. Antonakis, Cianciolo, A.T.,
& Sternberg, R.J. (Eds.), The nature of leadership
(Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2004); also G. A.
Yukl, Leadership in organizations (Upper Saddle
River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2005); as well as P. G.
Northouse, Leadership: theory and practice
(Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc., 2006). |
