WHARTON
LEADERSHIP DIGEST
October,
2002, Volume 7, Number 1
CONTENTS
Leading
with Integrity: 7th Annual
Wharton Leadership Conference on June 4, 2003
A
Leader for All Seasons: Learning
from the Crucible
Leaders
Closer to the Front-Lines: Firms Are Flattening & Paying More Like a Partnership
Leadership
Toolbox:
From Wildland Firefighters
Women
In Leadership in Business:
The Forté Foundation
Servant
Leadership: Leading Edge
Conference in November, 2002
Quotable
Quote: Rudolph W. Giuliani
on Leadership
Leading
with Integrity:
Annual Wharton Leadership Conference on June 4, 2003
Patricia F. Russo, president
and chief executive officer of Lucent Technologies
Clifford L.
Stanley, executive vice president of the University of Pennsylvania
Larry Sutton, training
unit leader for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management at the National
Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho
A Leader for All Seasons: Learning
from the Crucible
By Kate Faber, Wharton
Leadership Center
 In
Geeks and Geezers, Warren G. Bennis and Robert J. Thomas set out to
understand how one’s formative era shapes the character of today’s
leaders. Drawing on
interviews with forty-three leading “geezers” – individuals from the
“Greatest Generation” – and “geeks” – individuals from
“Generation X” – Bennis and Thomas discovered both what unites and
sets these leaders apart.
After growing up with
parents who survived the Great Depression, Geezers have sought stability,
loyalty, and financial security. Geezers
read the “great books” and led through “command and control” as
modeled by the heroic generals of World War II. They
believed that you could work your way up from the mailroom to the
boardroom. Hard work would
eventually lead to just rewards.
By contrast, Geeks grew
up with the notion that anything was possible. Raised
in front of the television, letting themselves into the house after
school, and “logging on” to get homework exercises, Geeks had
college-educated “baby-boomer” parents that stressed openness to new
opportunities yet keeping a critic’s distance. With
this upbringing, Geeks value their personal identity and principles over
their work identity and job experience. They
seek a balanced life, spending quality time with both family and office.
Geeks are impatient for the boardroom – if they are working hard now,
they need soon to see the rewards.
Despite such varied
backgrounds, Geezers and the Geeks share mutual ground on what leadership
entails and how it is created. Bennis
and Thomas report that four competencies are common to both generations:
1.
Adaptation: resilience
and “learning how to learn”
2.
Engagement: the
ability to create shared meaning
3.
Voice: emotional
intelligence and perspective
4.
Integrity: a strong
moral compass
The
authors argue that both generations acquired their leadership through
life-defining moments, what they call crucibles of experience.
A crucible may be as large as enduring years as a prisoner of war
or as limited as surviving a company’s “boot camp” for managers.
A
crucible is profound experience, reaching to the sinew of the individual
soul. Some emerge broken, but
others learn from and build upon it. For
the latter, write Bennis and Thomas, the crucible “both galvanizes
individuals and gives them their distinctive voice.”
All of the Geezers and Geeks that the authors interviewed reported
a formative crucible experience.
The authors close with a
prescription by American write Edith Wharton for learning from such
events: “In spite of illness, in spite even of the arch-enemy,
sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if
one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity,
interested in big things, and happy in small ways.”
Note:
Warren G. Bennis and Robert
J. Thomas, Geeks and Geezers: How Era, Values, and Defining Moments
Shape Leaders (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2002).
Kate Faber can be contacted at kfaber@wharton.upenn.edu.
Leaders
Closer to the Front-Lines: Firms Are Flattening and Paying More Like a Partnership
 By
Julie Wulf, Department of Management, Wharton School
Corporate
hierarchies are flattening: More
positions report to the chief executive officer and fewer levels remain
between the CEO and division managers.
Moreover, pay in flattening firms is becoming more like a
partnership: Division
managers receive lower salary and bonus, but higher pay in stock and
greater increments in pay upon promotion.
These
are the results of a study that I have just completed with Raghuram Rajan
of the University of Chicago. Using
a detailed database of managerial job descriptions, reporting
relationships, and compensation structures in over 300 large U.S. firms,
we find that the median number of positions reporting directly to the CEO
has gone up significantly in recent years:
In 1986 it had been 4, and by 1999 it had risen to 7.
This change was not a product of firm growth, merger activity,
changes in diversification, or the invention of new senior roles such as
the chief information officer.
We
also find that the number of levels between the lowest-level managers who
carry profit center responsibility – the division heads – and the CEO
has decreased, and that more of these division heads are reporting
directly to the CEO. Since
divisions within the firm are not becoming larger, the increase in direct
reporting is not because of enhanced resources in the division managers’
hands.
Instead,
our study suggests that layers of intervening management are simply being
eliminated, and that chief executives are in more direct contact with more
of their line managers, even at a time when managerial responsibility is
being extended downwards. Consistent
with this, we find that a significant driver of these changes is the
elimination of the position of chief operating officer at many companies.
Accompanying the
flattening is a change in the structure of pay. Annual
compensation and long-term incentives are becoming more like those in a
partnership. Salaries and
bonuses at lower levels in a flat company are less than for comparable
positions in a tall organization, but the pay differences are greater as
one moves up the ladder. At
the same time, employees in flatter organizations receive greater
long-term pay incentives such as stock and stock options.
We draw on recent
theories to explain both the change in the shape of the corporate
hierarchy and the shift in pay patterns.
With some evidence in support, we conjecture that human capital is
becoming more important relative to physical capital, necessitating both
better incentives and an organizational form that looks more like a
partnership.
Note:
Raghuram G. Rajan and Julie Wulf, “The Flattening Firm: Evidence from
Panel Data on the Changing Nature of Corporate Hierarchies,” October,
2002. Julie Wulf is Assistant Professor of Management at the
Wharton School and can be contacted at wulf@wharton.upenn.edu.
Leadership Toolbox: From
Wildland Firefighters
 By
Jim Cook, Training Projects Coordinator, U.S. Forest Service, National
Interagency Fire Center, Boise, Idaho
Wildland fire suppression
in the U.S. involves five federal land management agencies, fifty states
through their forestry or natural resource departments, numerous local
paid and volunteer fire departments, an increasing number of contract
firefighting organizations, and even on occasion the U.S. Department of
Defense.
The National Wildfire
Coordination Group works to coordinate these agencies and provide them
with a common grounding, and to this end it has established the Wildland
Fire Leadership Development program (described in the January,
2002 issue of the Wharton Leadership Digest).
Our leadership
development program includes a number of components that range from
establishing core values to a formal leadership curriculum.
But delivering it to such a diverse and far-flung set of agencies
has created a communication challenge for us, and to meet this challenge
we have now established a website with key resources and information about
the program. Located at www.fireleadership.gov,
many of its concepts have been developed with assistance from the U.S.
Marine Corps University in Quantico, Virginia and the Wharton Center for
Leadership and Change Management at the University of Pennsylvania.
The intent of the website
is two fold. The primary
short-term purpose is to provide an information source for fire managers
and fire training officers on implementing the national leadership
development program as it phases in over the next three years.
The long-range goal for the website is for it to become a robust
self-development resource to assist individuals who lead or aspire to lead
firefighters.
The website’s
Leadership Toolbox, for instance, allows individuals to pursue continuous
learning opportunities on the subject of leadership through all stages of
their career. This feature
provides a set of reference and assessment tools that can help individuals
work toward improving their leadership skills, with particular emphasis on
developing leaders early in their career who have a bias for action, who
communicate effectively, and who understand the responsibilities of
operating in a high risk work environment.
Other tools already in place include a Professional Reading
Program, a Tactical Decision Games Workbook, and a Leadership
Self-Development Plan format, and still others are slated for early 2003.
The underlying agenda is
to ensure that all wildland firefighters are led by those who can lead in
an extremely demanding, fast-changing, and always risky environment.
Note:
Jim Cook can be reached at jrcook@fs.fed.us.
Women In Leadership in Business: The
Forté Foundation
 The
Forté Foundation is an alliance of schools, corporations and
not-for-profit organizations focused on increasing the number of women
business owners and leaders.
Forté
is sponsoring a series of evening workshops for women in Atlanta, Chicago,
Dallas, New York and San Francisco. The
purpose is to educate women about business careers and how business
education and networks can help women reach their leadership, business,
and personal goals. Long-range
plans include scholarships, grants for research, outreach to middle school
and high school girls and support for corporate women.
For information on the foundation and its events, click here.
Servant
Leadership:
Leading Edge Conference in November, 2002
 The Phi
Theta Kappa Center for Excellence is
presenting its “Leading
Edge Conference” on November 14-17, 2002.
To held in Peachtree City, Georgia, the event provides a
development and renewal experience for those interested in leadership, and
the theme this year is "Teaching and Inspiring Tomorrow's Servant Leaders."
Conference Speakers
include Frances Hesselbein (left) of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation
and Isabel Lopez of the Robert Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership.
Online registration is
available by clicking here
and using the log-in number 1234863.
 “Leadership
does not simply happen. It
can be taught, learned, developed….
“Leaders have to
control their emotions under pressure.
While I was mayor, on the few occasions someone who worked for me
used ‘panic’ to describe their state during some crisis in their
bailiwick, I made it clear that it would be the last time they’d employ
the word. ‘Concerned’ is
the attitude I wanted. If it
turned out that an excess of caution had made us more concerned that we
needed to be, that was acceptable, but panic was not. You can’t let
yourself by paralyzed by any situation.
It’s about balance.”
Source:
Rudolph W. Giuliani, Leadership (Talk Miramax Books, 2002).
Copyright
© 1996-2002, Wharton Center for Leadership and Change Management
University of Pennsylvania
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