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WHARTON
LEADERSHIP DIGEST
July,
2003, Volume 7, Number 10
CONTENTS
Communication
Secrets: Listening as
Leadership
Character
in Action:
Coast Guard Leadership
Selfless
Mission: India’s Sam
Pitroda
Personal Leadership:
Absolute Impact
Communication
secrets:
Listening as Leadership
 By
John Baldoni
Leadership by nature is
an active process. Leaders
want to and are expected to imprint their stamp on the organizations they
lead. They proclaim the vision, delegate responsibility, coach for
development, and measure results. These are overt actions but sometimes
leaders need to act in ways that call for a more passive role – listening.
The story goes that an up
and coming Army officer named Omar Bradley, along with his colleagues, was
feeling pretty proud of himself. He
and his fellow officers were responding to all the requests their
commander, General George C. Marshall, the newly named Army Chief of
Staff, was throwing their way. The year was 1939 and the war in Europe had just
erupted; the U.S. military was getting ready.
Marshall soon punctured Bradley’s balloon of self‑assurance
with the statement, “You haven’t disagreed with a single thing I’ve
done all week.” Marshall
later explained that “Unless I hear all of the arguments against
something I am not certain I have made the right decision or not.”
Good leaders are
good listeners. It is an easy
thing to state, but very often hard to put into practice; leaders give
listening short shrift because they have so many other things to do.
The trick is to turn listening into an action step, one that can
help the leader ensure organizational understanding and ultimately drive
for results. Here are some
ways to do this:
Implement the “brief-back.” The best way to check for understanding is to make sure
people understand what you have said.
Ask your listeners to tell you what you have just told them. This inversion of speaker to listener is called “brief
back.” It’s a time-onored tradition in the military and useful to any
civilian organization.
Designate an
information source. Leaders
need to iterate the message repeatedly but they also should delegate
others who can speak for them. This
designation accomplishes two things: one, it frees the leader to focus on
other issues; two, it shares the ownership of information in ways that
make everyone more informed.
Invent communication
loops. Conventional communications are one‑way: the leader
speaks, employees listen. This
practice is good for getting a message out, but is lousy for determining
its impact or for allowing people to react.
Leaders need to open the channels of feedback by “thinking out of
the office,” e.g. invite employees for breakfast, meet employees for
coffee, hold an informal lunch. (Hint: During all the activities,
try refrain from speaking too much, just focus on listening.)
Stay in the loop.
Leaders can too easily fall into the trap of being cut off from
what’s really happening. The
closed door leads to the closed mind.
It is up to the leader to meet and mingle with people of all
levels. Another good way is to ask questions regularly.
Winston Churchill was an inveterate questioner of his wartime
generals. So, too, were Rudy Giuliani and Herb Kelleher of their
respective subordinates. If
you want to know something, ask. And
of course listen.
 Listening
is by nature a passive activity, but when transformed into an active
process it may be one of the most important actions a leader can perform.
Active listening leads to greater understanding of the situation, the
challenges, and most importantly, the people who look to the leader for
inspiration and results.
Note:
John Baldoni is a leadership communications consultant who works
with Fortune 500 companies as well as non‑profits including the
University of Michigan. He is the author of four books on leadership, the
newest being Great Communication Secrets of Great Leaders
(McGraw-Hill, 2003) upon which this article was based. His website is www.johnbaldoni.com,
and he can be reached at jbaldoni@lc21.com
Character
in action: Coast
Guard Leadership
By Kate Faber,
Coordinator, Wharton Leadership Center
 Imagine
an organization where every member is willing and able to wear many hats,
communicate quickly, and question the status quo with direct superiors.
This is how one of the most efficient agencies in the federal
government operates, according to Character in Action: The U.S. Coast
Guard on Leadership.
Drawing on the U.S. Coast
Guard experience, authors Donald Phillips and retired Coast Guard admiral
James Loy outline how an organization can become effective in its
leadership while maintaining a genuine care for individual and group
well-being.
The top of the
organization, the authors argue, must first establish the fundamental
beliefs and norms. “Without
a definitive culture,” they write, “individual values begin to
disintegrate. That’s because culture nurtures the fundamental human
relationship between individuals and their group. Largely an emotional element for people, culture is primarily
brought to bear through character. It
engenders pride and breeds loyalty and commitment. People want to be part of something larger than themselves.
It is quite simply a basic human desire to want to take pride in
your day-to-day work and in the organization of which you are a part.”
The Coast Guard draws
upon the basic human desires for productivity and community to get its
work done well. All members of the Coast Guard are asked to manage several
distinct tasks and to pick up the slack when they see something incomplete
or amiss. They are well
trained for not only their specific assignments but also to perform a
variety of other duties. To
support this capacity, the Coast Guard frequently communicates with all of
its crew members to ensure that they can appreciate both the bigger
picture and their own role in it.
To encourage the open
flow of information, when commanding officers meet they are asked to leave
their “shoulder boards” (indicative of rank) outside the room.
Without the formal display of rank, subordinates are more able to
challenge ineffective policies and provoke change.
The basic leadership
tenets of the U.S. Coast Guard should be applicable to virtually any
organization: Choose the best
people; treat every person as you would like to be treated; don’t cut
corners; be open-minded; and communicate until your throat gives out.
Note:
Kate Faber can be reached at kfaber@wharton.upenn.edu.
The book: Character
in Action: The U.S. Coast Guard on Leadership,
by Donald T. Phillips with James M. Loy (Naval Institute Press, 2003).
Selfless
MISSION: India’s Sam
Pitroda
 By
Arifa Khan, Wharton MBA Student
This
is a story about an unusual entrepreneur, a leader, Sam Pitroda. Stories
abound of entrepreneurs who were compelled to achieve and in the process
amassed wealth and glory. But Sam’s story is different. While the best
brains of the world were busy solving problems of the rich, Sam espoused a
mission for the masses of a developing country that would not count for
much in the world economy.
Sam
dreamt a dream of fixing one of the many problems that plagued India. The
1980s were the years when the migration of educated young people from
India to developed countries mirrored more than career aspirations. It
also reflected a willingness to leave behind family ties to join a world
of modern communication. Sam
focused on India’s problem – an infrastructure of 2 million telephones
for a population of 750 million was woefully inadequate – and he
resolved that “he was going to fix India’s problem.”
For
a year, Sam Pitroda sought an appointment with Prime Minister Indira
Gandhi. On being granted an appointment for 10 minutes (the time-keepers
thought neither he nor the prime minister needed more), he declined to
meet until he was given nothing less than an hour. After what became a
famous hour-long meeting, Mrs. Gandhi observed, “This guy is possessed.
He wants to do it. I don’t know what, but he will do it.”
The
prime minister required a year to be convinced that Sam’s was indeed a
selfless motive. When Mr. Pitroda was asked to quote his terms, he
responded with a budget of 36 million rupees and 36 months to show his
work, and an annual salary of 1 rupee for the next decade. Thus was
conceived the Center for Development of Telecommunications that would
eventually lay the foundation to make India the software hub that it is
today.
India
also needed to develop its own hardware, and Sam Pitroda declared,
"We will build our own.” Soon he had assembled 300 young
technicians to assemble a parallel processor from scratch with a budget of
30 billion rupees in 3 years. Thus also began a computer revolution
in India.
Sam’s
secret of success was selfless sacrifice. When your mission is to make a
difference to the world rather than make a personal gain, you can draw
courage from outside as everyone seeks to help you achieve that mission.
Sam also believed that working from the top down was essential for
a country like India with its 400 million illiterate citizens.
Like
Sam, the best brains of India need to be inspired to give selflessly to
their country. Every key
player in India’s independence movement was a foreign educated
barrister, and now every foreign-experienced hi-tech Indian migrant needs
to think of coming back to aid the country’s economic movement.
Note: Arifa Khan can be
contacted at anh@wharton.upenn.edu.
By Matthew May
 [Note:
In Absolute
Impact: The Drive for Personal Leadership, author Matthew May
focuses on achieving one’s life’s best work.
He defines “absolute impact as an” unequivocal “yes” to one
question – “have I made the most of what I have to offer the world?” – and personal
leadership is the ability to lead oneself to that answer.
The book is a fable in which four characters – a fading prince
and three trusted courtiers – debate the strategies that the prince’s
heir, Maximus, should follow if he is to lead a life of accomplishment.
In the excerpt that follows, the prince and courtiers are
discussing challenge of clarifying one’s cause.]
The Prince looked
directly at his Courtiers, and said: “In my absence it will be upon you
to guide Maximus to find his purpose within his role as Prince, just as
the everyman must find his own.”
The Courtiers nodded in
full acknowledgement of this weighty challenge.
“It is here that I
struggle with the pragmatism,” admitted Dutamis. “We have said that we
should seek to bring more of who we are to bear on our present enterprise,
correct? So, how can we practically help one struggling to find purpose in
his present work? Might there not be a tangible means by which we can
ensure personal cause is clarified?”
“I believe I have the
solution,” offered Artenza. “We can begin with the assumption that
most will err in discovering and defining their raison
d’être. I think we are on safe ground to say that most are not
practiced in this most critical area.”
Artenza began to pace as
he thought out loud.
“We can begin with a
simple descriptive statement of position. To use an easy example, let us
take the Census Taker who has mistakenly defined his aim in terms of
effort, rather than effect; to wit, ‘I
exist to accurately collect household information and compile thorough
reports for the Court.’ An acceptable hypothetical?”
“Absolutely,”
approved Dutamis, while the Prince and Trutorio nodded their assent.
“Would not a simple
serial inquiry as regards the significance of such a positional definition
eventually lead us to real cause?” posed Artenza.
Dutamis looked unsure.
“Play it out for me, if you will.”
“Certainly!” rejoined
Artenza. “Collecting household information and compiling reports – why
might that matter?”
“Because it gives the
Court the best and most current information available on our Provincial
population,” replied Dutamis, easily.
“And why is that
important?” asked Artenza.
Dutamis took a bit longer
this time before making his reply.
“Because we can use
that knowledge to understand the dimensions of the human condition within
our Province better than we could by any other means,” answered Dutamis.
Artenza pressed on.
“And the import of that?”
“Well, it helps the
Court make informed decisions of critical importance, for one thing,”
replied Dutamis, taking even longer.
“And why is that so
important?” challenged Artenza once more.
“Because it enables the
Court to improve the social welfare of our land!” stated Dutamis
triumphantly.
“Voilá!”
cried Artenza. “And our Census Taker’s true cause?”
“To help improve the
social welfare of the Province by enabling the Court to understand the
population!” exclaimed Dutamis. “Thank you!”
“An elegant technique,
Artenza!” approved the Prince proudly.
“A method universal in
its utility!” said Trutorio. “The motivational power and resulting
impact from a conviction in one’s deeper cause is undeniable.”
“And illustrative of
the freedom and reinventive power of higher purpose,” noted Artenza.
“Our Census Taker may now take on a variety of new and different
positions in pursuit of his purpose.”
“I see what you
mean!” exclaimed Dutamis. “An occupational position as actuarial,
auditor or accountant would enable him to serve like purpose!”
“He remains true to his
cause regardless of function!” cried Trutorio. “It is not one’s
cause that differentiates, but one’s expression of it! ”
“A mighty advantage, is
it not?” observed the Prince. “In times of great change, one’s
steadfastness to cause paradoxically provides the very element of
continuity necessary to fend off obsolescence at the hands of time. Our
specific vocation is merely a descriptive vessel for our voyage – a
means through which we pursue our deeper cause. We may have many careers
and hold many occupations in the course of a lifelong quest to serve our
purpose.”
The Courtiers were silent
for a moment, absorbing the power of constancy to cause.
Source:
Mathew May can be contacted at matt@aevitas.com.
The book: Absolute Impact: The Drive for
Personal Leadership (Peloton,
Fall, 2003).
Copyright
1996-2003, Wharton Center for Leadership and Change Management
University of Pennsylvania.
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