|
May,
2008,
Volume
12,
Number
7
|
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Wharton Leadership Conference:
Emerging Trends in the Search for
Leadership

The annual Wharton Leadership Conference
is one of the gatherings most appealing
to, and most beneficial for, corporate
leaders, according to a recent report by
public relations firm Weber Shandwick
entitled
Five-Star Executive Conferences.
An article by
Forbes.com writer Matthew
Kirdahy on the report notes that the
Wharton Leadership Conference is second
only to the Fortune Innovation/iMeme
conference in the number of C-level
speaker participants.
This year’s speakers include Peter
Cappelli, Wharton professor whose new
book on talent management is excerpted
below; William Weldon, CEO of
Johnson&Johnson; Colleen Barrett,
president of Southwest Airlines; David
Gergen, director of Harvard’s Center for
Public Leadership; Captain
Wei
Jiafu, CEO of Chinese-government-owned
COSCO Group, one of the world’s largest
shipping and logistics service
providers; and S.A. Ibrahim,
chief executive officer of
Radian Group Inc., a global credit risk
management company headquartered in
Philadelphia. See
here for a complete list of
speakers.
Register now for the 12th
annual Wharton Leadership Conference on
June 18.
New Business Case:
Learning from WorldCom’s 2002 CEO
Search
This new business
case by Aneesha Capur and Michael Useem
with Dennis Carey considers the
selection of a new CEO for WorldCom in
2002, which was one of the
highest-profile CEO searches in the
history of telecommunications.
By September 2002,
WorldCom, Inc. had been set back by
bankruptcy, a multi-billion dollar
accounting restatement of its expenses,
and a major downturn in the telecom
market. Its shares had also been
delisted by the National Association of
Securities Dealers Automated Quotations
(NASDAQ). However, current management
believed the company could move quickly
to put its financial house in order.
WorldCom was already reorganizing under
Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and
restructuring its debt with creditors.
By spring of 2003, WorldCom intended to
emerge from Chapter 11 with a new CEO,
financial game plan, and a
re-invigorated stock. The company also
intended to re-emerge as MCI, Inc.;
WorldCom acquired MCI Communications
(MCI) in 1998, which was one of
history’s biggest merger and acquisition
deals.
WorldCom’s board and
creditors were dedicated partners in
hiring a CEO from outside the company
who could command the successful
re-emergence of the entire company,
including its finances, business
operations, strategy, and branding. This
case puts the reader in the position of
selecting the new CEO. Four candidates
have been shortlisted. The finalist
selected as WorldCom’s new leader has
the potential to emerge as one of the
most important corporate leaders in the
United States.
To obtain permission
to teach or review a copy of this case,
please contact
coursematerials@wharton.upenn.edu.
Authors’ Note:
Aneesha Capur is Associate Director of
The Wharton School’s Course Materials
Platform. Michael Useem, a Wharton
management professor, edits the Wharton
Leadership Digest. Dennis Carey, senior
client partner at Korn Ferry and leader
of the WorldCom search, assisted with
this case.
Beyond Organization Man: Talent
Management for the 21st
Century
By
Peter Cappelli
As a management professor and
director of the Wharton School’s Center
for Human Resources,
Peter Cappelli is an expert on human
resources. It may come as a surprise,
then, that in his new book,
Talent on Demand: Managing Talent in an
Age of Uncertainty (Harvard
Business School Press: April, 2008),
Cappelli calls on companies to think
about talent management not in terms of
human resources but in terms of business
objectives. In this excerpt from chapter
one of his book, Cappelli demonstrates
how talent-development practices today
largely derive from outdated, 1950s-era
ideas, and why companies need fresh
thinking, borrowed in some cases from
supply-chain management, to manage
talent supply and demand.
We
need a new way of thinking about the
challenge of talent management. The
first step is to be clear about the
goal. Talent management is not an end in
itself. It is not about developing
employees or creating succession plans.
Nor is it about achieving specific
benchmarks such as limiting turnover to
5 percent, having the most educated
workforce, or gaining any other tactical
outcome. Rather, the goal of talent
management is the more general and
important task of helping the
organization achieve its overall
objectives. In the business world, that
objective is to make money. And making
money requires that you understand the
costs as well as the benefits associated
with your talent management choices.
Helping the organization achieve its
goals begins with recognizing that the
most important problem faced by
virtually all employers is the need to
respond quickly to changes in
competitive environments. Employers now
change strategies, structures, and
operations quickly and repeatedly in
response to customer demands, competitor
innovations, regulatory changes, and
other outside factors. The developments
driving these responses are difficult to
predict, and mistakes in responding –
waiting too long to change or planning
for circumstances that fail to pan out –
are costly.
In this context, the fundamental problem
for organizations is to manage risk,
which we can think of as the costs
associated with events that are
uncertain or at least difficult to
predict. Business risk, driven
especially by uncertainty about business
demands, translates directly into risk
for talent management. The greatest
risks in talent management are, first,
the costs of a mismatch in employees and
skills (not enough to meet business
demands or too much, leading to layoffs)
and, second, the costs of losing your
talent development investments through
the failure to retain employees. These
risks stand in the way of the ability of
your organization to meet its goals.
The new way of thinking about talent
management is neither the bureaucratic
models of planning from the 1950s nor
the free agency model of the 1980s and
1990s, both of which were rooted in
unique and transient circumstances. This
new approach represents a balancing of
interests – between internal development
and outside hiring, between the
interests of employees and those of the
organization. Fundamental to this new
model is acknowledging the uncertainty
that appears to be a permanent part of
the business world and being able to
respond and adapt to it. That
acknowledgment means that you cannot
rely on the assumption that drove the
old models of workforce planning and
talent management – the assumption that
you can forecast away the uncertainty
and plan years or decades into the
future.
Fortunately, you do not have to invent a
set of new practices for responding to
uncertainty and risk. Many of the
challenges in contemporary talent
management are analogous to problems
already analyzed in the field of
operations research. For example, the
issues in managing an internal talent
pipeline – the ways employees advance
through development jobs and experiences
– are remarkably similar to those
involved in moving products through a
supply chain. In both cases, the
significant challenges are to reduce
bottlenecks that block advancement, to
speed processing time, and to improve
forecasts of need and thereby avoid
mismatches. Other techniques from
economics allow you to better manage the
return on your investments in
development, especially in an
environment where employees have a
market for their skills and your key
concern becomes retention.
One of the great conundrums in business
is that even though executives
acknowledge the importance of employees
in theory – “people are our most
important asset, and we really mean
that” – in practice they often
disparage, or at least ignore, the
management of people. It has been
difficult for them to see how most human
resource practices relate to the issues
on which they focus: the business
strategy challenges that define the
direction of organizations and the ways
they compete. Traditionally, internal
talent development practices have been
so long-term in their orientation that
they are disconnected from the immediacy
of contemporary business strategy
decisions; the outside hiring model is
reactive (after problems occur),
becoming an execution issue that often
disappoints not
only because of its costs but
also because it lags the need for
talent.
This new way of thinking about talent
management connects it directly to
business decisions. In virtually every
organization, people are the biggest
component of costs and the source of the
most important competencies, so it is
crucial to adopt approaches to manage
the risks associated with talent issues
in helping your organization manage
overall business risk. The ability to
get the right people with the right
skills into the right jobs in a
cost-effective way makes it possible for
an organization to adjust and respond in
the strategy arena.
This approach to talent is strategic in
the two most important uses of that term
in business: it involves choices or
strategies about managing human capital
that must be made based on each
organization’s needs, and those choices
also relate directly to business
strategy. If done correctly, talent
management feeds into the process of
strategy formation by outlining the
possibilities for those who are making
business decisions.
The Current State of Talent
Management
A recent survey reported that roughly
two-thirds of U.S. employers do no
planning for their talent needs. For
such organizations, every new need for
talent presents a serious disruption.
Every employee who quits represents a
calamity, and every new demand for
skills represents a crisis. A company
that does no planning – does not manage
its talent – basically waits for a need
to develop or current employees to leave
and then hunts for a solution.
A good illustration of the consequences
of not managing talent is the apparent
panic under way in many parts of the
business community at the idea that the
baby boom generation will begin to
retire soon and its skills, knowledge,
and competencies will be lost. Surely
nothing was more predictable than the
fact that a generation of individuals is
growing older and will eventually stop
working. Employees had been retiring
from companies for generations without
causing as much as a ripple in corporate
planning. The reason for the panic now
is that many organizations have just
begun to realize that they have no
arrangements for replacing these
retiring workers, because outside hiring
does not work for company-specific and
legacy skills of the kind many of these
older workers possess.
The only good news is that most
employers are essentially facing the
talent management challenge with a clean
slate: they have little idea how to
address the challenge. Unfortunately,
the advice they are getting is to return
to the practices of the 1950s. Foremost
among these practices are long-term
succession plans, which attempt to
identify which individuals will move
into what jobs, mapping out careers
years into the future.
That approach is a mistake. The
practices of the 1950s, including
detailed talent pipelines and succession
plans, no longer work because the
business environment to which they were
tailored no longer exists. The older
models were based on the assumption that
one could plan the future of an
organization years or even decades in
advance with reasonable certainty. Its
human capital requirements could then be
predicted with some certainty. A second
crucial assumption was that a company’s
internal pipelines of talent, through
which individuals advanced in roles and
responsibilities, did not leak and that
the supply of talent being developed
would be available when it was needed.
The title of William H. Whyte’s classic
book The Organization Man
reflected the historically distinctive
relationship between these candidates
and their employers. They were tied to
the organization over a lifetime in a
way previously associated only with
military or religious service.
Developing talent internally was an
imperative in this earlier period
because there was no alternative.
Competitors used the same internal
development approach, rewarding success
with promotions and pay increases. Even
if another employer wanted to hire
talent from the outside, only those
candidates who were failing to advance
in their current organizations were
interested in changing employers. This
was a classic adverse selection
problem, as they had to start in
other companies at a much lower level.
Because the failure to develop talent
meant not having the players needed to
run the organization, the costs of
internal development were largely
irrelevant, although internal accounting
systems were so poor that it would have
been difficult to assess the true costs
of arrangements as complicated as
developing employees in any case.
Development practices, such as
rotational job assignments, were so
deeply embedded in the operating
models of business that their
costs were rarely questioned.
The current environment for talent
management is fundamentally different
because the two basic assumptions that
underpinned the Organization Man model
no longer hold. First, product markets
are no longer predictable. The rise of
deregulation of product markets in the
late 1970s, increases in foreign
competition in the 1980s, and changes in
consumer tastes mean that it is now much
more difficult to predict what will sell
or, in the
not-for-profit world, what constituents
will demand. Customer demands change
much more rapidly as new products from a
larger group of competitors come
onstream more quickly. The idea that a
company can predict accurately what it
will be making ten years from now –
something that was common in industries
as diverse as telecommunications,
transportation, consumer goods, and
financial services until the 1970s – has
disappeared. The demand for talent
follows directly from business and
operating demands. So as business
forecasts and plans have shrunk from ten
years to five years to, in most cases,
one year, the ability to predict the
talent those plans demand also must be
scaled back. Years-long programs for
developing talent create a false sense
of accuracy and no longer make sense.
Second, the supply of internal talent is
no longer easily predictable. The period
of managerial layoffs beginning in the
early 1980s made jobs insecure from the
employee’s perspective, but from an
individual employer’s perspective, the
internal supply of talent was still
reasonably predictable until labor
markets tightened in the 1990s. Then
more companies began outside hiring, and
one employer’s outside candidate became
another’s
retention challenge. Talent pipelines
hemorrhaged as employees embraced the
overtures of executive search firms and
other employers. It became difficult to
predict what percentage of candidates
who began a development program would
remain when it ended. A company that has
a 10 percent turnover rate among its
managerial ranks – not an unusual level
– will lose half the candidates in its
management pipeline within five years.
Does it still make sense to call that
arrangement a pipeline, or is it better
thought of as
a sieve? Some number of employees will
make it through to the end, but it is
not clear exactly how many will drop out
and when they will do so.
As if these two complications were not
enough, another important change has
occurred: pressure exists to show that
there is a financial return associated
with every set of practices. Internal
accounting systems have gotten better at
estimating costs, and the arrangements
associated with earlier models of talent
management, such as maintaining jobs for
developmental purposes, proved to be
costly following the reengineering
trend. There is no trick to developing
talent if you don’t care how much money
it costs. Because outside hiring
provides an alternative to internal
development, the latter must demonstrate
its value just as does every other
practice and form of investment.
At this point, if you’re a thoughtful
executive you throw up your hands:
developing employees is too expensive
and uncertain, and outside hiring has
also become expensive and cannot meet
unique organizational needs. What can
you do? That is why you need to approach
the problem in a different way.
As noted earlier, talent management
should be about helping a business make
money, finding the most cost-effective
ways of meeting the organization’s needs
for talent. And the big challenge is
uncertainty. The type of talent
management that makes sense in this
economic context does not pretend that
it can eliminate uncertainty through
better forecasting and planning. Talent
forecasting cannot be any more accurate
than the business forecasts on which it
is based, and the latter are not very
accurate. Because every plan involves
commitments and commitments come with
costs, long-term plans end up being
expensive because they are often wrong.
Rather than pretend to eliminate
uncertainty, the better approach is to
find ways to manage it.
Note: The above passage was excerpted
from
Talent on Demand: Managing Talent in an
Age of Uncertainty by Peter
Cappelli. Copyright © 2008 Harvard
Business School Publishing Corporation;
All Rights Reserved.
NEWS FROM WHARTON EXECUTIVE EDUCATION:
Leadership Program for Philadelphia City
Leaders
By
Wendy Parsons
When
Mayor Michael Nutter assumed leadership
of Philadelphia in 2008, the task before
him was formidable. The City of
Brotherly Love had become infamous for
its homicides, including the slaying of
police officers. Children were dropping
out of high school at an alarming rate.
The citizens had become disheartened by
a government that no longer seemed to be
of, for, and by the people. And then
came Michael Nutter. With a vision of
government shaped by his passion for
public service and his business
background as a Wharton alum, Nutter has
set about changing the very culture of
the city.
Driven to breathe new life and hope into
the beleaguered city, Nutter set about
transforming the way city government
operates in Philadelphia. He views the
city as a $4 billion business that must
deliver outstanding service to its
customers and stakeholders – the people
of Philadelphia. To prepare for this
task, he reached out to his alma mater
to prepare his top city leaders for what
lay ahead of them. One hundred of his
key administrators attended a two-day
leadership program on April 10–11, 2008,
delivered by the University of
Pennsylvania’s Fels Institute of
Government, the Leadership Center at the
Wharton School of the University of
Pennsylvania, and Wharton’s Aresty
Institute of Executive Education.
“I realized a long time ago that most
governments don’t think of themselves as
a business,” Nutter remarks. “Because
there is no real business-based training
in government, I have long thought that
governments should send people to
professional development training. The
leadership program at Wharton was
exactly what I envisioned.”
The program focused on building
leadership strengths from an
interdisciplinary approach, integrating
leadership from Wharton’s business
perspective with legislative and policy
insights from the Fels Institute. The
program represents a launching pad for
an ongoing collaborative relationship
between Wharton and the city, according
to Tom Colligan, vice dean of executive
education. “This program is the first
outcome of a close working partnership
between the mayor’s office and Wharton,”
Colligan says.
Academic
co-director and Wharton professor
Michael Useem helped design the program
to support the mayor’s vision for
improving education, expanding jobs,
improving health, enhancing ethics,
reducing crime, and strengthening
services.
“In terms of bringing the mayor’s
vision into reality, the leadership of
the mayor and his team will make all the
difference,” Useem explains. “And to
that end, the Fels Institute and the
Wharton School worked with the city to
help his top team sharpen and strengthen
its leadership – an essential ingredient
for achieving the mayor’s vision during
the months ahead.”
Academic co-director Don Kettl, director
of the Fels Institute, says that
the program
represents a unique collaboration of
Wharton’s best faculty with cutting-edge
ideas from Fels for improving government
performance. “This signifies the very
best of interdisciplinary partnerships,
in service of one of the most important
urban transformations under way in the
country.”
The
mayor visited on the second day of the
program to address his team. “We’ve set
the bar high, and people want us to be
successful,” Nutter told city leaders.
“The driving force behind what we do is
to deliver higher-quality service. Your
obligation to the public is to provide
the leadership the city needs. You are
here because you care, and I could not
be more proud of you.”
The mayor views the city as a
24-hour-a-day business with a million
and a half shareholders – the people of
Philadelphia – who expect a return on
their investment. Nutter has dedicated
his efforts to reshaping the city’s
culture for both immediate and long-term
benefits. “We have to move beyond
thinking in the short term, because we
won’t have long-term impact. It’s not
about who gets the credit,” the mayor
says of his plan for improving the city.
“It’s about what the results will be 20,
30, or 40 years from now.”
The change in the city’s culture is one
that his managing director, Dr. Camille
Barnett, expects to be one of the
greatest organizational and city
transformations ever. “Our partnership
with the Fels Institute and Wharton
allows us to benefit from best practices
in both the public and business sectors.
This program gives our people the tools
they need to execute our five-year plan
in six key areas,” she says. “Our two
days at Wharton have given us a common
experience and a common language. But
most importantly, this program imbues us
with courage and hope, the leadership
values that are essential to
accomplishing what lays ahead of us.”
The six areas of Mayor Nutter’s plan for
Philadelphia include the following
immediate and long-term goals:
-
Transform Philadelphia into the
safest large city in the country and
reduce the homicide rate by 25
percent in 2008.
-
Make
Philadelphia one of the country’s
premier education cities, reducing
the high-school dropout rate by 50
percent in five to seven years and
doubling the number of
Philadelphians with a bachelor’s
degree in five to 10 years.
-
Increase
jobs, raise incomes, and add 75,000
people to the population in five to
10 years.
-
Foster
vibrant neighborhoods, decrease
litter, and increase recycling.
-
Maintain
the highest standards for ethics and
increase the number of citizens who
trust in their government.
-
Become a
national customer-service leader,
meeting customer-service standards
for all city services as measured by
citizen surveys.
The
Wharton/Fels program covered subjects
such as reengineering government,
successes and failures in city
governance, and developing strategic
leadership skills. The experience
gave attendees a more in-depth
understanding of how they could actively
work toward implementing the mayor’s
ambitious goals.
“Michael Nutter's vision for
Philadelphia requires city leaders to
think very differently about the
organization and its mission. This
program gave them the focus and
opportunity to think of themselves as
inspirational leaders and change
managers as they steer their teams
through this transition period,” says
Sandhya Karpe, Wharton Executive
Education senior program director.
The program also gave city leaders who
attended the time to reflect on their
roles and process what they learned,
according to
Deputy Mayor Everett Gillison.
“We don’t get that kind of time on the
job. The faculty understood the culture
we’re working in, and gave us tools we
could put to use immediately.”
Anuj Gupta, one of the mayor’s “Team
Performance” leaders who attended the
program, says that the experience at
Wharton represents a great step in what
the mayor hopes will be an ongoing
relationship with the university. “It is
vital for the administration to work
with civic institutions like the
University of Pennsylvania to achieve
results for the city.”
The future of
the city hinges on the success of the
mayor’s plan. Dedicated to making the
city the “crown jewel of the east,” the
mayor is convinced that a new approach
to leadership, a new culture for the
city, will make Philadelphia a magnet
for business and new residents. “If we
deliver, people will come back. If we
don’t, they will leave. People vote with
their feet. If we do the job right,
people will come back to Philadelphia.”
Note: Wendy
Parsons is
Director of Marketing Communications for
the Wharton School’s Aresty Institute of
Executive Education. She can be reached
at
parsonsw@wharton.upenn.edu.
Undergraduate Leadership Conferences:
Leading Diversity and Leading under
Pressure
By Chris Maxwell
It’s a question all leaders grapple
with: How to build and maintain an
organization that achieves its goals
while still valuing and promoting the
potential of each member. The U.S. Naval
Academy’s annual leadership conference,
held in early February, acknowledged
both the importance and challenges of
promoting diversity in organizations, as
reflected in the conference title,
“Leading Beyond Barriers.”
Addressing an audience of over 4,000
military cadets and civilian university
students, diversity consultant
Samuel Betances urged listeners to
develop cultural competencies, cross
barriers, and think outside of the box.
“Equal opportunity isn’t enough,” he
said. “It’s about freedom; the freedom
to pursue passions, to make a
contribution.” Citing a U.S. Army study
that found a lack of diversity in its
higher ranks, Betances offered a key
insight for leaders concerned with
diversity: “It’s not about
representation, it’s about utilization.
Give good assignments, really
challenging assignments, that can lead
to promotion.”
Focused on these challenging questions,
conference participants continued the
discussion in small groups of military
and civilian university students. Rahul
Parikh, an undergraduate at the Wharton
School, said, “The main question in our
discussion groups was, ‘What actions do
leaders need to take now and in the
future to promote or support
diversity?’” Although his group didn’t
arrive at a definitive answer, he said,
“The idea of destroying stereotypes was
a popular response. I learned how
harmful a racist joke can be.”
Richard Hillen, a senior at the Wharton
School who served as a panelist at the
conference said, “It is necessary to
explain why diversity is important, and
how it can help not only individuals,
but also the group as a whole. The
question is: How to deliver that
message? Leadership, we concluded, is
key: The leader not only explains the
need for diversity within the
organization, but also sets the tone
with his or her actions, so that
everyone sees the issue should be taken
seriously.”
Colonel Arthur Athens, director of
the
Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership
at the Naval Academy, wrapped up the
three-day conference on leadership and
diversity with three take-away points:
-
Reflect inwardly when someone
points out something about our
behavior that we may not recognize;
-
Set
the example by articulating
standards and confronting bad
behavior; and
-
Set
the tone with peers and
superiors by having the courage to
speak up when something is wrong.
Leaders can effectively promote
diversity in organizations and make a
difference, Athens said, but they must
deal with their own “unbalanced” views
and those of others.
Success in a Fast-Paced World
The
joint learning between Wharton and the
U.S. Naval Academy continued at a
conference in late February focused on
crisis leadership. The one-day event,
“Leading Under Pressure: Success in a
Fast-Paced World,” brought together 70
participants, including an invited group
of U.S. Naval Academy midshipmen and
faculty, who heard strategic
perspectives from leaders with a wide
range of backgrounds.
C. William Schwab, chief of Trauma
and Surgical Critical Care at the
Hospital of the University of
Pennsylvania, discussed how his team of
trauma surgeons has developed systems to
both improve outcomes for victims of
urban violence and develop leadership
skills in resident surgeons and trauma
nurses. As part of this new system, all
resuscitations – 3,000 per year at HUP’s
Trauma Center – are now video-taped and
reviewed, and resident surgeons review
their performance within 24 hours. At
the conference, Schwab showed two videos
of real-life resuscitations. In the
first, participants saw a surgeon,
easily identifiable in a red surgical
cap, calmly but firmly giving commands
to her team. In the second video, the
team leader did not wear a red cap or
exert authority; the scene was chaotic
and the examination progressed almost
randomly.
Schwab outlined several strategies for
success in crisis leadership that are
applicable to both the trauma room and
to business: Control yourself, control
the team, control the environment, have
a plan, take action, and be flexible.
The leader must be open to input but
also willing to make decisions.
Pre-assigned team roles and procedures
are critical to success in crisis.
Schwab demands that trauma center
surgeons take action and set a clear
course in each case they deal with, even
though that course may change rapidly,
because inertia under pressure can lead
to chaos. Finally, Schwab said listening
to contrarian viewpoints and asking “How
can we do things better?” are key
leadership skills both inside the trauma
center and out.
Evan Wittenberg, a senior manager at
Google, Inc. and former director of
Wharton’s Graduate Leadership Program,
focused on the leadership challenges at
the rapidly growing Mountain View,
Calif.-based firm, which has been
doubling its number of employees each
year. In contrast to the
command-and-control structure of
Schwab’s trauma room, Google favors a
rapid product launch and development
cycle in which end users provide
feedback for product improvement.
Employees operate within a largely
non-hierarchical structure, and Google
leaders ask employees to act on their
knowledge rather than waiting for
instructions from above.
Besides encouraging leadership at all
levels, the organizational culture at
Google favors displays of humility
(senior leaders wait in line and hunt
for parking spaces like everyone else),
clearing roadblocks so teams can get
needed resources, and focusing on
self-development.
Despite the wide differences in
environment, culture, and structure in
these two organizations, conference
participants found some key similarities
for leading under pressure. First, both
organizations ask leaders to take action
before inertia sets in – in the trauma
room to save lives, and at Google to get
new products out to be used and
improved. Second, both organizations
invest in the development of leaders at
all levels. Finally, as trauma surgeons
must listen to contrarian viewpoints and
Google executives must forgo some
trappings of high office, leaders in
both cases are called upon to lead with
humility.
Author’s Note: Chris Maxwell is
Associate Director of the Undergraduate
Leadership Program at the Wharton
School. He can be reached at
maxwellc@wharton.upenn.edu.
The Politics of Smiling:
Leadership Pointers from the Campaign
Trail
By John Baldoni
Most commentators seemed to agree that
Barack Obama was “off his game” in the
presidential debate held the week before
the Pennsylvania primary in late April.
The senator’s demeanor ranged from
rattled to bored, disengaged to
lethargic. Mark Shields commenting on
PBS’s NewsHour noted something
else: Obama did not smile. John Kennedy,
noted Shields, would have smiled. For a
politician with Obama’s gift for
connecting to audiences, his failure to
leaven his performance with a smile was
striking. It may be unrealistic to
expect someone who is being criticized
and critiqued on live television to
smile, but when you are running for
president you need to radiate
confidence.
Smiling is a visible form of confidence.
Voters want to know that the person they
may elect for the highest office in the
land is someone who knows how to take a
punch while remaining in control,
someone who is unfazed when things are
not going according to plan, someone who
can remain positive in the face of
intimidating odds.
For the past century or so, Americans
have always gone for a president who
smiles. Teddy Roosevelt bounded across
the American stage with a
larger-than-life personality and a
radiant smile that seemed to echo the
age, as America, an emerging
international power, was just beginning
to exert itself on the global stage.
Franklin Roosevelt used his smile to
radiate calm and uplift a nation in the
throws of the Great Depression.
Dwight Eisenhower’s expansive grin
provided a sense of home and comfort to
GIs fighting a tough and bloody war
first in North Africa and later Italy,
France and ultimately Germany. Ike’s
successor in the White House, John
Kennedy, conveyed the hopes of a new
generation with his sense of style and
of course a radiant smile.
Jimmy Carter’s toothy grin, much beloved
by political cartoonists, served as an
antidote to the scandals of the Nixon
era. His smile punctuated his promise:
“I will never lie to you.” Carter’s
successor outdid him in the smile
department. Ronald Reagan knew how to
smile for the cameras in ways that
seemed totally genuine. As a former
actor, he possessed that self-controlled
demeanor, but it also helped that by
nature Reagan was as cheerful off stage
as he was on.
A smile is no guarantee of success, of
course. Carter ran into difficulties
with the economy and Iran that no smile
would cure. Harry Truman boasted a
dynamite smile, but after FDR he would
always seem diminished by comparison.
Richard Nixon smiled prolifically, but
voters never seemed to buy his
sincerity. Poor Lyndon Johnson never
seemed to put on a smile in public,
though in private he was a born charmer
and preternaturally gifted persuader.
The day after the debate in Philadelphia
Obama seemed to regain his poise.
Addressing a friendly crowd, he beamed
like a newly crowned Miss America. He
also laughed and joked with the audience
as he distanced himself from his subpar
performance the night before. Obama was
back on his game.
Smiling may be an act, but it is an act
that people want to see in their
presidents and their leaders.
Author’s Note:
John Baldoni is a leadership
and communications consultant and
speaker, and author of the book,
How Great Leaders Get Great Results
(McGraw-Hill, December 2005). He can be
reached at
john@johnbaldoni.com
The Leadership Landscape Perspective:
Reframing Leadership
By Tom Cummings and James P. Keen
Why
do some leaders have an ability to
integrate the landscapes of their work
and lives while others do not? How do
some leaders possess the composure to
stay in balance yet adapt to changing
circumstances? How does one build and
sustain an integrated leadership
practice that can both respond and adapt
to the most urgent challenges while
weaving actions into a coherent
framework? Our study of leadership has
been oriented around these questions,
and years of research on and work with
leaders have led us to craft a new
approach to leadership, which we detail
in our new book,
Leadership Landscapes.
There
are two main, interrelated pillars that
lie at the heart of the Leadership
Landscapes approach. The first is an
image of a landscape.
Imagine you
are perched on a vista (“your job”)
looking out across the peaks and
valleys. What you might notice first is
the big picture, or the
macro-business landscape, which
reveals how you and your organization
relate to society and the world at
large. Typical focal points here are
sustainability, emerging technologies,
political systems, non-governmental
organizations, the broader regulatory
environment, social responsibility,
environmental concerns, social (im)balances,
and so on. Increasingly these
macro-factors include the global economy
and the planetary environment, and these
mountains in the background will have a
tremendous business impact, yet are
often less immediate than the sharper
peaks and valleys of the industry and
markets landscape. Here we find
challenges that relate to our direct
external business context, such as
demanding customers, changing markets,
shifting competition, and our most
direct stakeholders (e.g. investor
relations).
Yet
according to our research, few leaders
dwell long on the lofty heights, because
they are pulled into the morass of
the organization landscape. This
landscape mainly deals with issues of
organizational concern, such as how we
govern, how we attract and distribute
resources, how we org-chart our people,
how we setup, maintain, and live our
culture and values, and how we keep the
organization aligned and informed.
Subsequently, there are bands of
brothers and sisters on the team
landscape who require our attention.
This is where we manage the team, steer
it, chair meetings, do appraisals,
oversee recruitment and personal
development, and improve team
performance. Finally, we come to the
nearest environment, the individual
landscape, which involves the time
spent on our own development and
learning, reflection, coaching,
meditation, and other activities that
help maintain and strengthen our
physical and mental health.
These
five landscapes cover the areas where
“leadership attention” is typically
spent. Most leaders falter by
concentrating on a single landscape,
often the organizational landscape, at
the expense of others. Worse yet,
leaders are often taught only to
understand a single landscape, denying
them the ability to see the wealth of
factors and interconnections that could
underpin their decision making. The
Leadership Landscape Approach is
different because it encourages
sensitivity to the entire landscape.
Our
first pillar, the Leadership Landscapes
Perspective, allows you to look across
all the leadership levels
simultaneously and expand your
relational field of vision. It creates a
context for decision making. Yet a
backdrop is worthless if it is not
accompanied by an attitude, a state of
equanimity. In other words, a leader
needs to maintain a state of dynamic
balance.
The
equanimity shift, the second pillar of
the Leadership Landscapes Perspective,
represents a comprehensive view on an
attitude of mind. It is an attitude that
can be developed, nurtured, and
practiced. It is the idea of
equanimity – an approach that
underpins all we advocate in
Leadership Landscapes. It may at
first seem like an abstract or vague
notion, and it is in some sense elusive,
but we have found it to be the key to
optimal leadership.
Equanimity, or dynamic balance, can be
described in at least five aspects.
These aspects form an integrated set, in
which none is as powerful alone as when
connected to the others. Everyone
possesses some measure of equanimity,
and that measure can be increased
through practice. Like a muscle in the
body, equanimity gains strength through
a combination of everyday use, exertion
in meeting challenging circumstances,
and practices directly targeted at its
development. Just as muscles work in
sets, so equanimity can be seen as a
bundle of attributes with multiple
applications. The five attributes of
equanimity are: An Eye for Possibility;
Reframing; Presence; Recovery; and
Commitment. Through mastery of these
five areas, leaders learn to maintain
balance while applying these tools to
decision-making, inspirational
leadership, and peak performance.
When
the Leadership Landscapes perspective
and the equanimity shift are used in
tandem, they form a powerful tool for
any leader desiring mastery of his or
her craft. In our book we offer tools,
such as inquiry and scenario mapping,
that show how to apply the Leadership
Landscapes perspective to emergent
problems and how to develop sustained
practices that hone your abilities as a
leader.
Authors’ Note:
A former leadership executive at global
firms including Unilever and ABN AMRO
Bank,
Tom Cummings is founder of the
Executive Learning Partnership, an
alliance of executive development
professionals.
Jim Keen is an executive coach,
leadership development advisor and a
professor at Antioch College in Yellow
Springs, Ohio. For more information
about the book and its approach, visit
www.leadershiplandscapes.com.
Copyright
1996-2008,
Wharton Center for Leadership and Change
Management
University of Pennsylvania |