WHARTON LEADERSHIP
DIGEST
August,
2002, Volume 6, Number 11
CONTENTS
Leadership
Profile: Interview with Ann
McLaughlin Korologos
From
School to the Office: How
Leadership Can Be Taught in the Workplace
Reading
Leadership: The Quarterly Book Club
Transformation
Leadership Training: It Makes A
Difference
Leadership
Profile:
Interview with Ann McLaughlin Korologos
 By
H. Brad Brown, Wharton MBA Graduate, 2002
 The
situation occurred during Ms. McLaughlin’s service as chair of the Aspen
Institute. Founded in 1950, the
Aspen Institute “provides neutral ground on which different points of view can
be exchanged among diverse participants.” The institute helps others resolve
conflict, but now it faced discord of its own.
In the late
1990s, the Aspen Institute’s chief executive officer announced his retirement.
As chair of the governing board, Ms. McLaughlin appointed a search
committee to identify a replacement, and with confidence in its membership and
procedures, she did not intrude into its recruitment process. She and the board accepted the committee’s final nominee,
but within several months of his appointment, it had become clear that he was
not right the person for the job.
With an open
style of leadership, Ms. McLaughlin would not consider an oblique campaign to
oust the newly appointed CEO. Nor
with a collaborative style of leadership would she tell the board to oust him.
Rather, she wanted the trustees to reach their own conclusions about the
chief executive, and to this end, she asked a board committee to review the
CEO’s performance. Instead of
filling it with her own loyal supporters, she picked trustees known for their
independence. She also met with the
institute’s staff to hear their own appraisal of the chief.
Throughout the
review, Ms. McLaughlin avoided disclosure of her own dissatisfaction with the
CEO. Her understanding of board
dynamics and staff instincts told her to wait for the complaints to surface on
their own – and as she had
anticipated, they very much did.
Perplexed by
the chief executive’s failure despite his glowing outside recommendations at
the point of recruitment, Ms. McLaughlin double-checked his references, and she
found that many were dated. One of
the recommendations had come from the president of the search firm itself, and
the search firm had withheld another when it had cast doubt on the candidate’s
suitability.
Ms. McLaughlin
and the governing board had been, in her opinion, “snookered” and now it was
time to correct the error. She
described her appraisal of the chief executive to the board, the review
committee independently reported the same conclusion, and the board quickly
endorsed her proposal to dismiss the new CEO.
She subsequently confronted the search firm and obtained a $1 million
payment for the damage its flawed search had caused.
Ms.
McLaughlin’s open, collaborative, and fact-driven leadership style served her
well during the tumultuous succession events.
“Look for the common interests and trust the process,” she advises.
“It will serve you well.”
Note:
Brad Brown can be contacted at brad.brown.wg02@wharton.upenn.edu.
FROM
SCHOOL TO the Office:
How Leadership Can Be Taught in the Workplace
 By
Joe Andronaco, Director, Venture
Development, Washington Gas
MBA
programs commonly teach students to evaluate core competencies and create
business plans. Less often,
however, do MBA programs help students assess their own leadership competencies
or develop their own leadership plans.
As
a student in the Executive MBA program of the Wharton School, I was fortunate to
take part in two such courses – “Foundations of Leadership” and
“Leadership Development” – and they have proven of immediate practical
value in my company. Upon
graduation, I have directly drawn on the courses to design a leadership
development program for the top 20 managers of the businesses that I help manage
at a large energy and utilities company.
The
instructor in the first course – “Foundations of Leadership” – helped us
appreciate the capabilities that define good leadership through case analysis.
In one case, for instance, we learned that R&D director Roy Vagelos
of Merck & Co. confronted a disease in Africa whose victims could never
afford a medication he might develop. He
developed the drug nonetheless and then gave it away on the premise that it was
the right thing to do and that it was in line with the company’s mission of
putting patients before profits. In
another case, we learned that CEO John Gutfreund of Salomon nearly ruined the
firm when he concealed an illegal act by one of his bond traders.
He delayed telling the government for many months, and in doing so he
ended his career and cost the firm dearly.
Transcendent thinking and decisive action, it seems, are among the
foundations of effective leadership.
A
third analysis focused on the actions of U.S. Civil War commander Joshua
Lawrence Chamberlain. At a turning
point in the war, he inherited a group of mutinous soldiers, and he soon managed
to convert their antipathy into loyalty – not by ordering it but by appealing
to their ideals. Their conversion
would later prove vital for Chamberlain’s successful defense of a crucial
Union position during the battle of Gettysburg, and to fully appreciate the
point, we later visited the Gettysburg battlefield to walk the ground where
Chamberlain executed his historic defense.
Reviewing and then reliving Chamberlain’s actions reminded us that it
can be vital to build our team around common values well before its support is
needed.
The
instructor in the second course – “Leadership
Development” – helped us learn how to assess our own leadership skills and
to design a program for developing both our own leadership and that of others.
We came to appreciate that the strongest developmental experiences are
those that are customized around each individual manager, and those that
explicitly help managers extract enduring lessons from their personal
experience.
Drawing
on these considerations, I have built a leadership program for my top 20
managers around these six steps:
1)
Beginning with a tour of the Gettysburg battlefield, we explain the
program’s purpose and framework. The
Gettysburg visit is also used to emphasize the strengths and weaknesses of
various leadership styles, a key focus of the program.
2)
We assess the participating managers’ leadership competencies with a
360-degree assessment tool.
3)
The 360-degree assessment is provided to the managers, and they are asked to
reflect on the appraisal.
4)
We then group the managers into learning teams, and drawing on their
team’s suggestions, each member identifies a near-term plan for his or her own
leadership improvement.
5)
Working both with their learning teams and individual leadership
“buddies,” the managers subsequently
design their own long-term development plan with measurable goals.
6)
With the long-term plan in place, the managers meet quarterly to discuss
their own progress, and they are annually assessed on their long-term goals.
In
keeping with the warning of T. S. Eliot that people often have a fruitful
“experience but miss” its “meaning,” we appoint a coach to work with
each learning team, and we ask each manager to maintain a personal journal to
record and reflect upon their leadership experiences.
Recent
examples of failed leadership at major companies point to the importance of
leadership development programs. Leadership
capacities ranging from communication and teamwork to
integrity and decisiveness can be learned, and MBA graduates can usefully
draw upon their own leadership coursework to build analogous developmental
experiences for managers in their own organizations.
Source:
Joseph Andronaco can be reached at JAndronaco@washgas.com.
Information on Washington Gas is available at http://www.washgas.com.
Reading Leadership:
The Quarterly Book Club
By Carol Bloom, AdvancePCS
I work for
AdvancePCS as Senior Director of Strategic Marketing and Product Planning.
AdvancePCS is the nation's largest independent provider of health improvement
services, touching the lives of more than 75 million health plan members and
managing approximately $28 billion in annual prescription drug spending.
AdvancePCS offers health plans a wide range of health improvement
products and services designed to improve the quality of care delivered to
health plan members and manage costs.
I’m a firm
believer in learning how to make the engine run better, faster, and smoother.
The business environment today is harder than just three years ago, and I
have found it useful and invigorating
to look outside the box to learn how other industries are dealing with tougher
challenges.
A
Quarterly Book Club that I’ve established is one way that I am now helping my
management team to learn from other companies and outside the healthcare
industry. Its purpose is to help them become better at addressing the
challenges and taking leadership roles in the company.
Our goal is to read one new book on marketing, strategy, or leadership
per quarter.
Each team
member recommends a book, leads the group in a discussion on what he or she has
learned from the book, and identifies how we can bring one new “learning
awakening” into our operation. Our
current book list includes:
Inside
the Tornado, Geoffrey Moore
Leading
Change, John P. Kotter
The
Profit Zone, Adrian J. Slywotzky & David J. Morrison
20/20
Foresight, Hugh Courtney
The
Loyalty Effect, Frederick F. Reichheld
The
Innovators Dilemma, Clayton Christensen
Living
on the Fault Line, Geoffrey Moore
Entrepreneurial
Mindset, McGrath & MacMillan
Crossing
the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore
Good
to Great, James Collins
Sun
Tzu & The Art of Business, Mark McNeilly
Four
Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive, Patrick Lencioni
Execution, Larry Bossidy & Ram Charam
Source:
Carol Bloom can be reached at carol.bloom@advancepcs.com.
Information on AdvancePCS is available at www.advancepcs.com.
TRANSFORMATIONAL
Leadership TRAINING:
It Makes A Difference
Four
researchers contrasted the impact of the training of a set of military officers
in transformational leadership with the training of another group of officers in
other leadership styles. They
defined transformational leadership as “broadening and elevating followers’
goals and providing them with confidence to perform beyond” their
“expectations.” The
investigators theorized that transformational leaders should have greater impact
on their followers’ self-confidence and motivation,
independent thinking, and appreciation for the organization’s values and
goals.
Taly Dvir, Dov
Eden, Bruce J. Avolio, and Boas Shamir followed officer candidates that the
Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) trained in platoon leadership, and then followed
the new officers into their post-training assignments for the next six months as
they in turned trained and developed new recruits.
In three-day leadership workshops, the IDF trained one group of officer
candidates in the principles of transformational leadership, and it trained the
other group in a diverse set of other leadership principles.
The
researchers found that the non-commissioned officers (NCOs) under the command of
the transformational officers did indeed become more self-confident, motivated,
independent, and committed than NCOs under the command of the other officers.
Moreover, new recruits under the transformational officers in turn more
fully mastered the army’s obstacle course, physical requirements, and weapons
use.
The
investigation confirmed that those trained in the principles of transformation
leadership more effectively developed not only their direct reports (the NCOs)
but also their indirect followers (the new recruits).
Source:
Taly Dvir, Dov Eden, Bruce J. Avolio, and Boas Shamir, “Impact of
Transformational Leadership Follower Development and Performance: A Field
Experiment,” Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 45, 2002, pp. 735-744.
Copyright
© 1996-2002, Wharton Center for Leadership and Change Management
University of Pennsylvania
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