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July, 2007,
Volume 11, Number
10
CONTENTS
The Tests of a Leader: Initiation, Failure, and
Reinvention
Virtual Ties That Bind: Leading Distributed Teams
Leadership News: Five Executives Win Excellence Awards
Feedback: 11th Annual Wharton Conference on
Leadership
THE TESTS OF A LEADER: Initiation, Failure, and
Reinvention
By Thomas A.
Stewart
The following
article is a condensed, edited version of the
presentation by Thomas A. Stewart at the 11th
Annual Wharton Leadership Conference on June 7, 2007.
 I
want to start with two stories. The first is about Queen
Elizabeth I. The year is 1588, and Elizabeth is a single
woman, the monarch of a Protestant country. All of
Catholic Europe hates her, and all of Europe is
Catholic. England is a second-rate power, diminished by
nearly 200 years of civil war. And now the most powerful
nation on earth, Spain, has sent a hostile armada to her
shores.
She comes down
to Tilbury docks to address her armed forces and says:
“I have come amongst you not for my recreation and
disport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of
battle, to live or die amongst you all. To lay down my
life for my God and for my kingdom and for my people, my
honor, and my blood, even in the dust. I know I have the
body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the
heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England
too.”
That speech
defined Elizabeth’s reign. You can hear echoes of it in
the speeches of Churchill, Nelson and English leaders
today. It was a great and defining moment for a leader
and her nation.
The second story
takes place three centuries later, in 1893, when
Mohandas Gandhi was in South Africa. He boards a train
with a first-class ticket but is ejected because of his
skin color and dumped in a freezing, unheated waiting
room. Gandhi wrote later, “My overcoat was in my
luggage, but I did not dare to ask for it, lest I be
insulted again. So I sat and shivered.” In that moment
of humiliation and suffering, Gandhi found the key to
overthrowing the empire Elizabeth had started to build.
He discovered something about the leader he was going to
become.
Why do leaders
love stories like these? Two reasons. The first is we’re
all vain enough to cast ourselves in the heroic mode;
“As Churchill led his island people, so I will lead my
magazine staff.” But the second and more important
reason is this: Leaders are always being tested, whether
they want to be or not.
Today I want to
talk about three leadership tests. One is the test of
initiation: picking up that orb and scepter for the
first time. Two is the test of facing failure. Three is
the rejuvenation test: how to endure as a leader when
you are no longer that young hot shot, and when you need
to reinvent your mandate and agenda.
The Test of
Initiation
When people
become a boss for the first time, they usually screw it
up badly. Too often people think being the boss means
“doing what I used to do except, except on a larger
scale, and now I’ve got people I can order around.”
Both parts of
that definition are wrong. Leaders often fail to
recognize they are no longer workers. You may be working
hard, harder than ever, but now you work through
other people. When you’re under stress, it’s easy to
fall back on your comfort zone. This happens to a lot of
bosses; the first time things get difficult, they want
to roll up their sleeves and go back to the talents that
got them in that leadership position in the first place.
But as you move up, the most important decisions become
the decisions of who you are going to hire or promote,
and how you’re going to develop them. That may require
set of skills very different from the ones you’re used
to using. You have to be patient, deciding when, for
example, to refrain from doing something you’re good at,
because John or Jane need to learn to do it themselves.
As Linda Hill, a
Harvard Business School professor, has written, the
biggest shock for first-time managers is that they’re
not the boss. They may have worked with spreadsheets or
widgets before, but now they work with people, and
people are much less tractable. They are messy and
complicated, and that makes for difficult work.. One of
the terrible facts is that most first-rung and or even
second-rung managers have very little power.
An analogous
thing happens when you become CEO. Michael Porter, Jay
Lorsch and Nitin Nohria wrote in an article several
years for Harvard Business Review, entitled
“Seven Surprises for New CEOs.” The first surprise
is “You are not the boss.” For a CEO, of course, the
board is the boss, but the point of the article is more
subtle and profound. We think of bosses as people who
give orders. But as Porter, Lorsch, and Nohria point
out, giving orders is very costly; it uses up a lot of
political capital. The right to lead has to be won
regularly. You get some legitimacy when you are named
leader, but organizations have all kinds of ways of
ignoring you if they feel you are no longer legitimate.
As Jack Welch once said to me, “Too many people think
the high point of their career is the day they become
CEO.” You have to be constantly earning it.
The Test of
Failure
One of the
gravest tests a leader faces is the test of failure. If
you are any good, you’re going to make mistakes, and not
just once. Each time you goof, it will be on a slightly
larger scale, with slightly larger consequences. The
test of failure is three-fold.
First, how do
you handle the actual crisis? In particular, what do you
do to minimize the damage your misjudgments have
inflicted on the people around you? When the crisis
comes, you’re either going to gain immeasurable amounts
of organizational capital, or you’re going to lose it
and never get it back.
Second, what are
you going to learn from your failure? Think about John
F. Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs. When he came into the
White House, plans for an invasion of Cuba were well
underway, in spite mounting evidence that it wouldn’t be
successful. The process had all the hallmarks of classic
group think, including a lack of diversity of inputs;
Bobby Kennedy took the tough guy role of quelling
dissent, precisely so his brother wouldn’t hear things
he didn’t want to hear. And, as events proved, the
naysayers were right; the invasion was a debacle.
A couple of
years later came the Cuban Missile Crisis. In this case,
the president learned to protect his dissenter, Adlai
Stevenson. Kennedy’s other men were saying, “Get this
pacifist out of the room,” but in the end the policies
Kennedy adopted grew out of Stevenson’s thinking. So
Kennedy protected dissent, made sure he had a diverse
team, did not move too quickly to make up his mind—and
showed he had learned from his earlier mistake.
The last part of
the failure test is whether you make a comeback. As
Jeff Sonnenfeld and
Andrew Ward put it, you have got to
rediscover your heroic mission. That is the stage of
saying, “I screwed up, but I’m not done yet.” You can
still prove your mettle to yourself and the world.
The Test of
Reinvention
When you apply
for a job, you’ve usually got a plan, with maybe 10
things on a to-do list. You come in saying, “I know
exactly what we’re going to do; I know exactly how this
asset is underutilized.” Three or four years later,
you’ve done five of those items on your list; you tried
to do two other things and failed; and three of them are
no longer relevant, because the world changed. Now what?
One of the most
difficult tests for a leader is the act of reinvention.
There’s a reason why people have a seven-year itch. In
the Episcopal Church, if you’ve been a rector of a
parish for seven years, they send you off to a special
retreat where you learn how to be a long-lived leader.
That kind of
reinvention is extraordinarily difficult, because it
involves a certain amount of stepping outside yourself.
At the same time, leaders are always being watched.
Everything you do sends a message. There’s a joke at GE,
that if the CEO asks for a cup of coffee, somebody might
go out and buy Brazil. It’s hard to say, “I have a crazy
idea.” In a way reinvention is the hardest test: Can you
run a leadership marathon rather than just a leadership
sprint?
Questions for
the Mirror
At the end of
the day, you come to the test that only a leader can put
to him or herself: Can you tell yourself the truth? As
Robert Kaplan, former vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs,
points out, the higher you get in an organization, the
harder it is to hear the truth. So you have to be able
to tell it to yourself. The leader needs to be able to
look in the mirror and ask:
-
What are my visions and priorities? Do I have
a vision? Do I communicate it? How do I manage my
time? What is the cognitive dissonance between my
vision and my Outlook?
-
Feedback: Do I do it well, or is it messy? Do I have
several people around me who will tell me the truth
or do I live in a bubble?
-
Have I identified my successors? If so, have I done
anything about it? Am I building them up? Does
anyone else know my plan?
- If
I were starting this company from scratch, would I
organize it the way it is now? What would the clean
sheet of paper look like?
-
How do I react to stress? Do I bully? Do I quail? Do
I go out and have a drink?
-
Staying true to myself: When I get to the office, do
I feel like I have to zip my lip and be politically
correct all the time? Am I the person I want to be?
That’s the
ultimate test of the leader: whether or not a leader can
look at him or herself and see authenticity there.
Because that’s what’s communicated to others and that’s
what makes organizations work.
Copyright 2007
Harvard Business School Publishing. Reprinted by
permission.
Author’s
Note: Thomas Stewart is the editor and managing
director of the Harvard Business Review and author of
Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations
and
The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the
Twenty-First-Century Organization.
ALSO FROM THE
LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE: Knowledge@Wharton
reported on the presentation at the Wharton Leadership
Conference of Tim O'Toole, the managing director and
chief executive of the London Underground,
"Turning Around the London Subway System: From Terrorism
to the Olympics," Knowledge@Wharton, June 27,
2007
VIRTUAL TIES THAT BIND: Leading Distributed Teams
By
Mark Hanna
When one’s team
members are halfway across the world, working together
effectively is no small achievement. Start with minimal
or no face-to-face interaction, add differences of
expertise, geography, time zone, culture, and perhaps
language, and one ends up with, to put it mildly, a
leadership challenge.
How to navigate
those challenges, especially in projects requiring
complex innovation, is the subject of a February, 2007,
article in the journal Academy of Management
Perspectives. “Leading Virtual Teams,” authored by
Arvind Malhotra,
Ann Majchrzak,
and
Benson Rosen is a tidy
compilation of techniques and suggestions for making
distributed teams work well together.
Two of the
authors, Malhotra and Rosen, are in close proximity to
each other at the
Kenan-Flagler Business School
of the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill. The third author, Majchrzak, is across the
continent and three time zones away at the
Marshall School of Business,
of the University of Southern California.
Together they constitute a virtual team, so they speak
from experience.
Six
Ways to Strengthen Ties
When team members are separated by
hundreds or thousands of miles, even the simplest of
leadership tasks requires careful thinking, as Malhotra,
Majchrzak and Rosen discovered through their research.
The authors followed a virtual team at Boeing-Rocketdyne
through its entire life cycle, and then did a
large-scale follow-up study in which they attended
meetings of 55 successful virtual teams in 33 different
companies and interviewed team leaders. Finally, they
boiled down their observations and conclusions into six
clusters of recommendations, which are briefly
summarized here.
1. Establish
and Maintain Trust Through the Use of Communication
Technology
Just as in face-to-face teams, two of
the biggest trust builders in virtual teams are having
members do what they promise and “show up” at the
meetings they are expected to attend. But virtual teams
require additional up-front maintenance. Project
leaders, for example, must establish initial common
norms and procedures about how communication technology
should be used. In “eRooms” or other electronic
discussion forums, team members need a common
understanding about what to post, when to post, who owns
documents, and how to inform others of documents’
whereabouts; in addition, all members must subscribe to
an electronic etiquette and similar “tone of voice.” In
audio-conferencing, norms have to be established, such
as whether or not members identify themselves before
commenting. These up-front norms and procedures may have
to be modified as the group members gets used to
interacting with each other. For example, e-mail
attachments may be OK at the beginning at the project
but then become outlawed midstream as members discover
that their inboxes start overflowing. “Virtual
get-togethers,” such as conference calls or e-mail
exchanges, allow members to iron out these minor process
issues along the way.
2. Ensure
That Team Diversity is Understood, Appreciated, and
Leveraged
Team members show up with a diverse
array of skills, expertise, and life experiences. A
leader can take three actions to make sure this
diversity is fully understood and utilized. First, a
leader can post an “expertise directory” at the
beginning of a project, which could take the form of a
skills matrix, collection of C.V.s, or list of articles
written by the members. Second, the leader can pair
diverse members in common tasks and rotate members
throughout the project, both practices that enhance
bonding and feed the creative fires. Third, the leader
needs to establish an interplay between synchronous and
asynchronous communications. Topics brought up during
the synchronous, real-time audio-conferences or
“webinars” can be later dissected in asynchronous forum
discussions or e-mail exchanges. Team members who may be
shy about speaking up in the presence of senior team
members during conference calls may be more willing to
unwind in a later series of written discussions.
3. Manage
Virtual Work-Cycle and Meetings
Successful real-time, virtual
meetings are, by definition, highly choreographed
events. Virtual team leaders must oversee an
interlinking set of practices prior to, during, and
after the meetings. Time between meetings should be
spent on idea divergence and exploration (asynchronous
idea generation.) Meetings should be used for idea
convergence and conflict resolution (synchronous idea
convergence.) Together, these two modes of communicating
optimize the work cycle.
Before a meeting begins, team
pre-planning is crucial. Have electronic discussions
before the meeting and post these discussion threads.
Identify areas of disagreement to discuss during the
meeting. Circulate a clear agenda in advance with time
allocations. Post progress on the repository, linking
them with project timelines, action items, and
responsibility charts.
During the meeting, ensure through
"check-ins" that everyone is engaged and heard from.
Electronic voting is one way to quickly take a group’s
pulse, with results displayed instantly on screen. Some
teams reported using "minutes on the go" during the
meeting, that is, rough minutes logged in a virtual room
side window. Only results are recorded, not debates and
discussion.
At the end of the meeting, make sure
the final polished minutes and future work plans are
posted to the team repository. Also, between meetings,
encourage idea generation divergence and discussions
through threads, instant messaging, e-mail exchanges,
and auto-notification of postings.
4. Monitor
Team Progress Through the Use of Technology
Team leaders found it helpful to
scrutinize asynchronous and synchronous communications
closely to monitor team progress. That progress was made
visible to team members through shared project timelines
and balanced scorecard measures, in a simplified
dashboard or one-page summary format – another helpful
practice.
Leaders frequently reported their
monitoring of technology and procedures evolved over
time. One team leader put it this way:
Our database matured. We initially
had a discussion database. Then we added IM. Then we
added change request capability. Then we added a call
tracking database. Then we added an issue log. Then we
created a view called “management view” with schedule,
costs spent to date, and project status. Then we added a
working section view just for the team. We tried
videoconferencing but stopped using it when the team did
not find it helpful.
While not all leaders may be
comfortable with this rapidly changing management style,
such fluid evolution of oversight was a common story
among virtual team leaders.
5. Enhance External Visibility of
the Team and Its Members
The study’s authors observed that leading a virtual team
requires parallel processing. While focusing on internal
activities, team leaders also had to continuously and
clearly represent the team’s work to external
stakeholders including project sponsors, local
executives, and internal and external customers.
This external reporting function was handled in a
variety of ways. One leader organized a steering
committee of departmental managers and client
organizations and then regularly briefed this committee.
Another leader expected each team member to “report out”
to his or her sponsoring manager. Regardless of which
approach was used, leaders usually asked team members to
approve reports intended for managers and external
audiences to encourage buy-in for the report-out
process.
6. Ensure Individuals Benefit from
Participating in Virtual Teams
Part of any good leader’s job is
making sure team members get the rewards and recognition
they deserve. Virtual leaders had the same goals,
although they achieved them in different ways,
including:
-
Having virtual reward ceremonies,
including sending gifts to each individual;
-
Starting each virtual meeting
with recognition of specific successes;
-
Suggesting to high level
executives pleased with team members’ briefings to
pass on the good word to the members’ respective
managers.
Some team members respond more to
intellectual challenge and fun, so it’s important to
provide them with opportunities for lectures,
conferences, and other avenues for personal growth. The
key is to understand what makes each individual tick.
Concluding Observation
Imagine a
carbon-epoxy jetliner with gracefully curved wings
slipping through the clear blue sky at 35,000 feet.
Contented passengers are sipping their beverages and
tapping softly on their laptops. The pilots are chatting
quietly about World Cup soccer in a serene cockpit
brimming with sophisticated avionics. This scene is
from a jetliner project with effective virtual teams.
Contrast this
scene with another jetliner project literally stranded
on the ground. It’s over budget, past deadline, and
hopelessly mired in controversy. Engineers from two
different continents are scratching their heads over why
body module components made in twenty-five different
countries don’t fit together and why the wiring panels
don’t match. Discussions in the back offices are getting
heated and loud. The managers of this project have yet
to master the art of leading distributed technical
teams.
When innovation
and creativity are called for, the crucial factors for
success are increasingly the virtual ties that bind.
Author’s Note:
Mark Hanna is a freelance business writer based in Cedar
Rapids, Iowa. He can be reached at
markhanna@mchsi.com.
In mid-June, the
Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership
at the United States Naval Academy and the
Harvard
Business Review
announced the first-ever recipients of the
Leadership Excellence Awards,
which recognizes top executives of U.S.-based companies
who consistently exemplify a commitment to personal
integrity, fellow employees and business success.
“The caliber of
finalists set a tremendously high bar,” said
Vice Admiral Michael Haskins, United States Navy
(Ret.) and dean of the Stockdale Center in a news
release. “Selecting winners from such a deeply qualified
pool proved an extremely gratifying challenge. The
winners are corporate role models who embody principles
we should all emulate.”
Haskins joined
other senior-level business and military officials on
the award selection committee. They culled a field of 13
finalists to select five executives to receive the
award:
-
Charles T. (Tom) Burbage, executive vice
president and general manager of F-35 program
integration, Lockheed Martin Corporation
-
Wes Bush, president and chief operating officer,
Northrop Grumman Corporation
-
Jennifer Daley, M.D., senior vice president,
clinical quality/chief medial officer, Tenet
Healthcare Corporation.
-
Randolph (Randy) Melville, senior vice
president, sales, Frito-Lay North America, PepsiCo,
Inc.
-
Robert A. (Bob) McDonald, vice chairman, global
operations, Procter & Gamble
Award recipients
will be honored at a banquet dinner on July 18 at the
U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md. as part of the
Leadership Excellence Summit, a three-day business
leadership conference exploring ethics, integrity and
character. Winners will also participate in panel
discussions exploring the role of ethical leadership in
business today. More information is available at
www.leadershipexcellencesummit.com.
FEEDBACK: 11th Annual Wharton Conference
on Leadership
On behalf of
the team who organized this year’s conference, I wanted
to thank all those who attended. We look forward to
continuing the conversation on leadership. To that end,
we posed two questions to conference participants:
1.
What leadership theme or idea resonated for
you most powerfully?
2.
What concrete
personal leadership goals formed in your mind
during or after the conference?
Here is a
selection of responses. – Michael Useem
The theme that
resonated most powerfully with me was how leadership is
used in all facets of life and business, even though it
means different things to different people. Leadership
will be the driving force that determines our role in a
global economy, and it starts with “the person in the
mirror.”
Tom DiSabatina
Vice President, Commerce
University/Commerce Bank
It was interesting to see the similarities that exist
between the Marine Corps and the civilian sector.
Before the conference, I had never interacted with
anyone who held a leadership position in the business
world. In talking with such leaders at the conference,
it was enlightening to see how much we had in common.
Bottom line: It does not matter if you are a Marine
Corps Officer or in an upper-level management position,
the basics of leadership remain the same.
Major Jim Hoover
U.S. Marine Corps
Leading with humility was the idea that resonated most
with me. Imagine a world led by humble leaders! Rather
than helping me form any concrete goals, the conference
reassured me I am on the right path toward where I
wanted to be in the near future.
Ida Kalley
Development Manager, SEI
Investments
Two
themes resonated for me most powerfully. First, I
learned that effective leaders have to have competence;
we need to understand exactly who we are leading, and
how we will do it. Second, we have to have compassion
for others, whether that means stopping to have a word
with the secretary or janitor, because those are the
very people who will contribute to the organization.
Having compassion says a lot about the kind of leader
you are, and it can prevent you from becoming arrogant
and big-headed.
Reverend Carl Brown
Youth Pastor, St. Paul United
Methodist Church (Md.)
I learned about the importance of
pauses. Richard Green showed us that the difference
between a good speaker and a great speaker is... the
pause. David Nadler revealed how long-term leadership is
a series of acts, and that what works for Act One will
not work for Act Two; hence the critical need to pause
and reinvent one’s approach. Steve Harrison spoke
passionately about pausing to perform human decencies
like opening a door or writing a thank-you note.
Kirbyjon Caldwell gave us pause to consider how
encouraging the best in others can creating a rising
tide that lifts all boats. Dana Gioia eloquently showed
the power of the pause as he recited poetry,
demonstrating how lessons from the arts can be
intertwined with business principles to stimulate
creativity. I know now that taking time to pause will
make me, and those that I develop, better leaders.
Meredith E. Friedman
Senior Human Resources Business Partner,
Independence Blue Cross
Thomas
Stewart’s comments about Gandhi were very powerful
because the leadership capabilities of a man who
overthrew the British Empire were based on humility.
That story made me recall a
speech Robert Kennedy gave in Indiana to a predominately
black audience after Martin Luther King Jr. was
assassinated, when he
said,
“For those of you who are black and are tempted to be
filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such
an act, against all white people, I would only say that
I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of
feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was
killed by a white man.”
This was
a leadership moment for Robert Kennedy and a great
moment in United States history; he bridged the racial
and social divide. He was able to do this because he
suffered from his own tragedy, learned from it, and then
led and comforted others.
Jacqueline Sturdivant
Corporate Strategy and New Product Development,
ETS Elementary and Secondary Education
Rev. Caldwell’s idea of how “values create value”
resonated most powerfully with me. It seems obvious that
an energized and happy workforce would be more efficient
than a stressed and unhappy one. But what I didn’t
realize is how much effort needs to be directed at the
people you lead. As Rev. Caldwell said, “If you want to
add value, you must make people an absolute priority.”
In
addition to cultivating happiness, though, you’ve got to
cultivate truth. He said, “You need to have an
assessment tool that will not lie.” But the truth can be
delivered “compassionately.” We don’t need to give or
receive sugar-coated answers. We need straight facts
given in a respectful manner.
Michael
Lewis Mayfield-Brown
High
school student (home-schooled),
Reston, Va.
The conference reinforced to me the
ironic fact that the triangular form of any
organization’s hierarchy – with leader at the top and
followers at the bottom – is neither realistic nor
practical in today’s world. Only when that structure is
turned on its apex does it reflect things as they are
and should be: leaders as people who serve their
followers.
Richard Kang
Director, Allied Health Practitioners,
Frankford Health Care System
When David Nadler said, “The things
that contributed to your success in the past could
ultimately lead to your failure,” a red light went off
in my head. I was successful in my two most recent jobs.
My current organization hired me based on that
experience, so I approached my new job drawing on what
made me successful in the past, and it hasn’t been
working.
After hearing Nadler speak, it dawned
on me that I have to change my approach in order to be
successful at my current job. This was perfect timing,
because a day after the leadership conference, I had a
meeting with management to discuss how I can add value
to our project. The leader of the project and I agreed
that I should be in a role where my strengths can be
utilized. I have been trying to fit a square peg in a
round hole by trying to be something that I am not. I
left the meeting feeling empowered, knowing I will have
a role that will best use my strengths.
Chrissy Leonard
Global Wealth Platform, SEI
Investments
David Nadler’s presentation on
“Leading for the Next Act” resonated with me the most,
given magnitude of changing business conditions. Senior
leaders need to adapt their style and managing processes
around what ‘act’ they are in.
As a personal goal, I plan to make a conscious effort to
identify my current ‘act’ and ask the right questions:
What are the business conditions? What can I do to have
the biggest impact in the shortest amount of time, while
not demanding too much of others?
Nancy Veno
Human Resources Director,
DuPont
“Organizational life is the only place where square pegs
can actually fit into round holes,” said Tom Stewart in
his presentation. That’s a powerful image that reflects
not only how badly people want to fit in, but the
lengths to which they will go to do so. Throughout the
day we heard examples of how we enable this process,
whether by creating organizational myths or failing to
recognize when it’s time to shift to the second act, or
take a bow and gracefully exit the stage.
Leaders need to set the example for
integrity when it’s hardest to do so. Pastor
Caldwell gave a number of examples of how leaders need
to ask whether the policies and practices they are so
proud of are real or a façade. It’s great that the
restaurant owner takes pride in talking with customers
about their meals, but raves don’t tell the whole story.
“The trash never lies,” said Pastor Caldwell. My
personal goal is to check the recycling as well.
Anne Pauker Kreitzberg
President, Cognetics
Corporation
Several
ideas resonated with me because they are related to the
exact situation I am in today. First is the idea David
Nadler presented on how leadership has different acts.
Second is the idea Tim O’Toole of the London Underground
presented, that we need to train our people so they can
act independently. These two ideas led to my leadership
goals: to think carefully about whether my actual style
of leadership is the most appropriate one, and then
adapt according to my analysis; and to develop and
empower the people around me to the maximum of their
abilities.
Reinilde Heyrman, M.D.
Executive Director, Clinical Development,
Daiichi Sankyo Pharma Development |
