CONTENTS 

Creativity and Conviction:  Wharton Leadership Conference in San Francisco on
     February 2, 2005
Achieving Lasting Leadership:  25 CEOs Show the Way
New Lessons in Leadership:  Teamwork in a Shock Trauma Unit
National Leadership Initiative:  New Zealand
National Leadership Initiative:  South Africa
Executive Coaching:  Learning to Lead with a Personal Mentor
 

Creativity and Conviction:  Wharton Leadership Conference in San Francisco on February 2, 2005 

The second Annual Wharton West Leadership Conference is an intense one-day exchange on how great leadership is developed and applied in the private, public, or non-profit sectors.  Great Organizational leaders turn uncertainty into inspiration and obstacle into opportunity, and requires both creativity and conviction, the subject of the conference.  Presenters include: 

Vivek Paul, Vice Chair, Wipro Technologies
Michael Crooke, CEO, Patagonia Inc. and parent company The Lost Arrow Corp.
Jackie Kane, Senior Vice President of Human Resources, The Clorox Company
John Goldman, President, San Francisco Symphony
Brent Assink, Executive Director, The San Francisco Symphony
Mark Bernstein, President, Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)
Anne Livermore, Executive Vice President, Hewlett-Packard
Nancy Higgins, Executive Vice President, MCI
Susan Lucia Annunzio, CEO, Hudson Highland Center for High Performance
John Barr, President, The Poetry Foundation, and Chairman, SG Barr Devlin (an
       investment banking unit of Société Générale)
Peter Cappelli, Professor of Management and Director, Center for Human
       Resources
Michael Useem, Professor of Management and Director, Center for Leadership
       and Change

Special opportunity for readers of the Wharton Leadership Digest:  If you register for the conference by December 17, you will receive a complimentary copy of the new book, Lasting Leadership: What You Can Learn from the Top 25 Business People of our Times (see below).  

Conference Registration is $975, but an “early bird discount” is available for those who register before December 17.  Online registration is available here and telephone registration at 800-255-3932, ext. 3331.  For the Lasting Leadership book offer, enter “Leadership Digest Book Offer” in the “Special Needs” field of the online application or report it during your call.
 

Achieving Lasting Leadership:  25 CEOs Show the Way

The Nightly Business Report (NBR) – a daily television program broadcast in the U.S. by American Public Television and the Public Broadcasting Service – worked with Knowledge@Wharton to identify the 25 most influential business leaders of the past quarter century.  NBR’s viewers nominated more than 700 business people from around the world, and a faculty panel selected the top 25.  Mukul Pandya and Robbie Shell have profiled the 25 in their new book, Lasting Leadership: What You Can Learn from the Top 25 Business People of our Times.  The 25 business leaders are:

Mary Kay Ash, founder of Mary Kay Inc.
Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com
John Bogle, founder of The Vanguard Group
Richard Branson, CEO of Virgin Group
Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway
James Burke, former CEO of Johnson & Johnson
Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Inc.
Peter Drucker, the educator and author
Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft
William George, former CEO of Medtronic
Louis Gerstner, former CEO of IBM
Alan Greenspan, chairman, US Federal Reserve
Andy Grove, chairman of Intel
Lee Iacocca, former CEO of Chrysler
Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computers
Herb Kelleher, chairman of Southwest Airlines
Peter Lynch, former manager of Fidelity’s Magellan Fund
Charles Schwab, founder of The Charles Schwab Corp.
Frederick Smith, CEO of Federal Express
George Soros, founder and chairman of The Open Society Institute
Ted Turner, founder of CNN
Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart
Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric
Oprah Winfrey, chairman of the Harpo group of companies
Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank  

Drawing upon the profiles of each, the author have identified eight leading capacities:     

• Identifying and catering to underserved markets
• Using price to build competitive advantage
• Enhancing organizational brand
• Revealing the full truth
• Building a strong corporate culture
• Managing risk
• Seeing the invisible – especially winning trends – ahead of rivals
• Learning fast

New Lessons in Leadership:  Teamwork in a Shock Trauma Unit  

From Knowledge@Wharton  

Imagine that you, as a mid-level manager in your company, have been assigned to a six-person team asked to complete a top-priority project on a very short deadline. As it turns out, some of the people have never worked together before, members of the team change every hour or so, leadership constantly shifts between three different individuals, and any mistake by even one person could have disastrous, even fatal, consequences for the project's outcome.

Katherine Klein, Jonathan C. Ziegert, Andrew P. Knight, and Yan Xiao spent 10 months studying such teams in action at the Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore, Md., a world-renowned urban facility that treats more than 7,000 patients each year, most of whom arrive with severe, often life-threatening injuries.

The composition of the team changes frequently "as the individual members cycle on and off the team. Team members work shifts of differing lengths. Thus, the make-up of the team that assembles to treat one patient may differ from the make-up of a team that assembles to treat a second patient one hour later," the authors note in their paper. Team composition also shifts from day to day, week to week, and month to month especially as team members complete their trauma unit rotations and others begin. The lifetime of a team is short, usually 15 to 60 minutes - about the time it takes to stabilize the patient.

Although Klein and her colleagues had assumed that each trauma unit team had a leader, "we were wrong. Not only does leadership not reside in a single person, it does not reside in a single position," the authors write.  Rather, trauma unit team leadership resides in a hierarchy of three positions: the top-ranked position, held by the "attending" surgeon, followed by second-ranked "fellow" position, followed by the third-ranked "admitting resident." ... The active leadership role shifts frequently and fluidly among the three individuals who occupy the team's three key leadership positions."

The system of investing leadership in three key positions "accommodates frequent changes in team composition.  Individual leaders come and go but the leadership positions remain. Second, it creates redundancy, enhancing the reliability of patient care ... Finally it allows relatively novice leaders (i.e. the admitting residents) to assume a primary leadership role in a setting that affords them and their patients, protection and support."

The researchers note that trauma unit leaders perform three key functions: They provide strategic direction, monitor the performance of the team, and teach team members by providing instruction - all tasks that match those the researchers identified in the functional team leadership literature and which are applicable to business settings.

Klein and her colleagues offer a novel and counter-intuitive way of viewing leadership. They see it "as a system or a structure - a characteristic not of individuals but of the organization or unit as a whole." It is a different approach to how you build leadership, says Klein. "The lesson for a company would be not to focus only on selecting better people or training better people; think about putting structures and norms in place that allow leaders to be more effective. The role should be sufficiently established, and the norms sufficiently clear, so that whoever steps into the role will do it effectively."

This approach, taken to its extreme, is perhaps nowhere more evident than in a trauma unit, where terms like "life and death decision" and "working on deadline" have an unambiguous urgency. And while these trauma units present a "microcosm of many of the challenges contemporary organizations face," it wasn't initially clear to the researchers just how the teams functioned. As Klein notes: "We walked in there and said, 'This leadership system doesn't look like anything we have ever heard of.'"

This structure, the researchers say, leads to a "paradoxical leadership system characterized both by rigid hierarchy and dynamic fluidity." The hierarchy means that junior members know whom to defer to in times of uncertainty or crisis; when senior leaders delegate authority, junior leaders benefit from the learning experience; and when called for, senior leaders seamlessly reassert their authority to prevent errors in patient care. "It is a dynamic, integrated system," the authors write, whose very fluidity is one of the reasons for its success.

Note:  Katherine Klein can be reached at kleink@wharton.upenn.edu, and fuller commentary on her article can be found here. 

National Leadership Initiative:  New Zealand  

The University of Auckland Business School has launched the New Zealand Leadership Institute – Excelerator – with Everest mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary serving as its Patron. 

The purpose of the institute is to enhance the understanding and championing of leadership in New Zealand, and to ensure that the country will have talented and skilled leaders for both its commercial and community organizations.  “We are encompassing leadership in business, education, community, charity, government, sport and the creative arts,” said Excelerator CEO Lester Levy, and “input from top thinkers on leadership and leading institutions in New Zealand and internationally is integral to Excelerator’s strategy.” 

Formed in partnership with Westpac (bank), Bell Gully (law firm), Deloitte (accounting firm), Hudson (human resource specialist), Sleepyhead (manufacturing firm), and Tindall Foundation (philanthropy), the institute has been named Excelerator to signify its mission of creating leadership development opportunities and preparing future leaders.  Its goals are:  

1. To grow and develop leadership in New Zealand across all sectors.
2. To build leadership theory, research, and application to enhance the understanding and practice of leadership in New Zealand.
3. To enhance the teaching and research of leadership at the University of Auckland.

Excelerator has initiated a nationwide search for 60 outstanding young New Zealanders to participate in the Institute’s inaugural Future Leaders Program.  The institute’s other initiatives include programs for developing both corporate and non-profit leadership; a regional leadership program in collaboration with local companies and Maori tribes; and an “Advanced Leaders Program” for high potential leaders from across the country.  “We want to inspire leaders committed to a life of learning and action,” explained Levy, “that is focused on increasing the collective leadership capacity within their communities.”  

Excelerator has identified five initial research agendas:  

1.  Global leadership insights:  What can we learn from leadership research in other countries? 

2.  Distinctive leadership:  What are the unique challenges and opportunities for leadership in New Zealand? 

3.  Antecedents of successful leadership:  What are the formative experiences in New Zealand that build leadership?   

4.  Enabling the next generation of leaders:  What do New Zealand’s future leaders require if they are to reach their full potential? 

5.  Leadership of diversity:  What are the most important considerations when leading a culturally diverse organization or community?   

Excelerator is building ties with leadership development and research initiatives in other countries, particularly those concerned with building national leadership across all sectors.  

Note:  Information on Excelerator is available here and by contacting General Manager Mark Bentley at m.bentley@auckland.ac.nz.
 

 

National Leadership Initiative:  South Africa  

Dictum Publishers, a South African press directed by Ana-Maria Valente, had annually given a workplace leadership award for more than a decade when it decided in 2002 that leadership deserved greater attention and prominence in South Africa.  It established the Leadership Forum to host annual summits on leadership with prominent corporate executives, academic researchers, and thought leaders.  

The mission of the Leadership Forum is to establish a network of leaders and institutions committed to discerning and implementing the principles, values, and actions necessary for wise leadership of South African organizations in the years ahead.  The underlying intent is build a community of individuals and institutions committed to addressing new leadership challenges, and to encourage sound leadership practices across all institutions in South Africa. 

The Leadership Forum’s annual day-long, invitation-only summits are held in May or June in Johannesburg.  Participants in the three summits to date have included the Governor of the Reserve Bank and the Commissioner of the South African Revenue of Services, and each of the summits had produced a published volume:  

2002:  Blueprint for Workplace Leadership in the 21^st Century.  

2003:  Best Leadership Practice.  

2004:  The CEO Book: Models and Mindsets for the new Mandates (forthcoming).  

2005:  Uniting Values, Experience, Knowledge and Vision (planned).  

Note:  Ana-Maria Valente can be reached at anamaria@dictum.co.za. 
 

Executive Coaching:  Learning to Lead with a Personal Mentor 

By Monica McGrath, Jeremy Robinson, and Deb Giffen

Executive coaching is growing up.  Two decades ago, it was clearly the remedial rescue operation. Today, while there may sometimes be a remedial component, coaching is much more focused on developing high potentials in the organization.

Estimates are that there are now more than 10,000 coaches worldwide. In many organizations, coaching has moved from a process of personal growth to an integral part of organizational strategy and professional development. Where companies once relied upon good feelings that coaching was working, they now are looking at concrete business returns on their investments. Where training was once ad hoc and by trial and error, new certification and university-based programs have rapidly emerged to define and strengthen the competencies that are needed to be a successful coach.

The rise of coaching has been driven by external forces such as the dramatic failures of go-it-alone executives at Enron and other organizations. The rise of coaching has also been accelerated by the acceptance of tools such as 360-degree feedback and recognition of the power of emotional intelligence.  Research shows that emotions in organizations are contagious and negative leaders result in high levels of absenteeism and lower performance. This means coaching is not just something that affects a single career but can have dramatic effects on the success of the entire company. 
 

Recent studies by Hay Group and MetrixGlobal show that over 50 percent of the Fortune 500 now offer some form of coaching to executives, and the number of coaches in organizations is expected to grow by up to 30% to 40% over the next year.

As coaching has spread, organizations have become more sophisticated in how they approach the process.  Many major companies now have someone who understands the process of coaching and has a knowledge of the organization, and they monitor the progress and results.  Results are measured by achievement of the executive's objectives or through interviews and other feedback before and after the coaching engagement.

Better internal management of the coaching process has led to more rigorous qualifying requirements.  This has created a demand for better education and certification, a demand that many institutions are rising to meet.  A decade ago, coaches made up the profession as they went along.  In recent years, a growing number of programs have begun to clarify, codify and cultivate the knowledge and skills needed by successful coaches.  These range from short training programs to full certification programs at universities and business schools.
 

Many organizations expect at least a master's degree or MBA of an executive coach, and some require a Ph.D.  More than 1,000 coaches have completed the International Coach Federation (ICF) certification, and about 500 have received its highest certification of master coach.  At the same time, there is an art to coaching that can't be entirely reflected in the letters after a coach’s name, including good listening and personal empathy.

Note:  Monica McGrath is an executive coach and president of Resources for Leadership (and can be reached at mcgrath@wharton.upenn.edu); Jeremy Robinson is founder of Executive Coach Academy and serves on the certification committee of the International Coach Federation; and Deb Giffen is an executive coach and program director in Wharton Executive Education.  In January, 2005, they are initiating a new educational program entitled Wharton Executive Coaching Workshop: Building Partnerships to Drive Performance.

Copyright 1996-2004, Wharton Center for Leadership and Change Management
 University of Pennsylvania.