The Business of Leadership: An Introduction

An Introduction

Karen Dill Bowerman, Montgomery Van Wart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317458111
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Business

Specifically tailored to business students, this undergraduate textbook features a "how-to" approach and is filled with with current, lively examples and well-crafted learning tools. It takes readers from the kind of leradership they can exhibit in supervisory roles to the visionary leadership they must exhibit in management and executive roles.

1	Approaches for Motivating Followers, Achieving Results, and Inspiring Change

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more,
do more and become more, you are a leader.

—John Quincy Adams, U.S. president 1825–1829

What is the business of leadership? It is a business of delegation and direction. It is a business of energizing and compelling. It is a business of encouragement and influence and collaboration. It is the art of leading followers. Leaders are found throughout the strata of the business organization, and they act in varying capacities. They base these actions on a long history of theories and behaviors. From the depths of the basement stockroom to the heights of the penthouse boardroom, the behaviors of leaders are exercised. They inform us and bind us together. They challenge and motivate us to be our best. They inspire and cause us to dream, and they assist in our endeavor to achieve the satisfactory results for which our organizations strive. This is the business of leadership.

The epigraph at the beginning of this chapter is attributed to John Quincy Adams, a leader on many fronts, including the international front as a diplomat and the domestic front as one who helped formulate the Monroe Doctrine. But one need not be a U.S. president in order to be a leader or to know what a leader is. In fact, after Adams lost his second bid for the presidency, he served seventeen years in the House of Representatives where he led strategic initiatives to abolish slavery—many years before adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment. His quotation above, markedly similar to our twenty-first-century views of business leadership, frames a definition that will be used throughout this book.

As stated above, being a president or a CEO is not a prerequisite for being a leader. Leadership and the formal roles or titles one holds are different. We sincerely hope that CEOs and others in executive positions are indeed leaders, but leadership unfortunately is not always bestowed upon those who happen to end up in important or high-ranking positions. Just because corporate executives carry a title does not mean that they are able to inspire others to dream or do or become anything more than they currently are. Similarly, high formal positions are not always bestowed upon those who do inspire others or even those who may possess the qualities desired in leaders.

DESCRIPTION AND OPERATIONAL DEFINITION OF “LEADERSHIP”

One definition of “leadership” for the business arena is the art of motivating people to achieve a common goal. A related definition is that “leadership” is the process of social influence to enlist the support of others to achieve a desired goal. How does that common or desired goal come about? Is it necessarily the leader’s vision? Is it the leader’s vision that has been imposed on followers? Rarely in today’s complex business environment does a business leader have such unilateral power! More commonly, the goal is formed by the leader’s multifaceted influence on the organization to face its challenges and identify its opportunities. Note that the components in these descriptions involve clearly articulated motivation and inspiration for the purpose of achieving results. To paraphrase President Dwight Eisenhower, leadership is the art of getting troops to do what you want done because they want to do it. It is not a process of pushing people, but rather of pulling them along to a desired goal.

Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart, the largest retailer in America, always said that good leaders do whatever they can to boost the self-esteem of the people with whom they work because if people believe in themselves, it is amazing how high expectations and accomplishments can soar. In setting high expectations, leaders may have to swim upstream—one of Walton’s ten rules for success in business—while clearly communicating their vision, even if it ignores conventional wisdom. When he began, well-meaning individuals constantly told Walton that his fledgling business was headed in the wrong direction because a town with a population of less than 50,000 could not sustain a discount store. But Sam Walton’s operational description of leadership remained consistent with the more formal definition of motivating people to achieve common goals.

There is a conclusive link between efficiency and effectiveness and management and leadership. There is a pithy saying in the leadership literature that goes “management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” When you relate efficiency (using resources well) to management, and effectiveness (achieving goals) to leadership, it would imply that a parallel adage would be efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.” In other words, a leader must take the correct and appropriate course of action in order to be effective at achieving the desired results. Achieving results is the special focus of Part III of this text. It examines leadership, especially at the executive level, which is most responsible for developing vision and bringing to clarity an understanding of “the big picture.” It also discusses motivating the organization in order to achieve its common or desired goals. A simple, imagined vision is not good enough; the successful execution of that vision depends, in part, on both its quality and accuracy. The example of Sam Walton demonstrates how a qualitative vision can lure followers even though people may initially regard the vision as ill-fated.

From an operational perspective, business leaders tend to maximize human capital as they inspire others with a clear purpose and a vision that undergirds the tasks at hand. Leaders seek innovative, creative approaches in order to get the business of leadership, as well as the job itself, done. Leaders are willing to take calculated risks rather than become immobilized by challenge. Inspiring and innovating and taking risks may sound straightforward and undemanding, but are not necessarily either fun or idealistic. Ronald Heifetz, a psychiatrist and co-founder of the Center for Public Leadership at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University is clear that real leadership requires individuals to understand that leading change may take them out of their comfort zone because of resistance generated when change is mobilized. He noted that we must think of leadership as independent of authority, and that even leaders such as Marie Foster or Margaret Sanger, who did not have formal authority commensurate to the change they led, experienced calculated risks. “People such as these push us to clarify our values, face hard realities, and seize new possibilities, however frightening change may be (1994, 183–184).”

When a person is challenged with the difficult decision of whether to bother to lead when the process can be painful, Heifetz establishes parameters that “Shouldering the pains and uncertainties of an institution particularly in times of distress comes with the job of authority (251).” A leader must believe that motivating others for vital change is worth shouldering the burden of the organization’s problems for a time. There is not one distinct leadership profile. Rather, leadership profiles are quite often found to possess a conglomeration of characteristics. Business leaders can be charismatic or they can be boring. They can be predominantly results-oriented or predominantly people-oriented. They can be male or female. Business leaders can bring change incrementally or they can effect change transformationally. They can live with simplicity or in luxury. They can be from any academic major or they may not be a college graduate at all. They can rise up through the ranks of the organization, or they can be hired from outside the organization. They can be old or young. They can be unquestioned or, more commonly, controversial. But to be successful business leaders, they need to motivate followers, achieve results, and inspire change.

Mark Zuckerberg, born in 1984 and founder and CEO of Facebook, is an example of a young, controversial business leader who has changed people’s everyday habits with his vision for social networking. He was named by Time magazine as one of the world’s most influential people of 2008 and by Forbes as one of the 500 richest people in the United States. Not only did Zuckerberg inspire those at Facebook with his vision, but also his company inspired people around the world to participate in social networking. According to Nielsen ratings the average Facebook user spent more than 4 hours, 39 minutes on Facebook for the month of June 2009, just five years after the company was founded. Zuckerberg’s forward-looking vision of social networking cannot be diminished, but despite the founder’s obvious success in implementing an Internet vision, the origin of Facebook was subject to controversy following complaints filed by former classmates suggesting that he stole their idea. The purpose of citing this dispute here is not to render an opinion, but rather to affirm that business leaders who are profoundly successful are frequently controversial, often merely by virtue of their success.

Again, there is not just one leadership profile. In fact, leadership profiles are complex, varying greatly from one situation to another. Nevertheless, given the definition of leadership that opens this section, there are integral qualities of leadership upon which most researchers agree: “vision and integrity, perseverance and courage, a hunger for innovation, a willingness to take risks … an ability to read the forces that shaped the times in which they lived—and to seize on the resulting opportunities” (Breen 2005).

Examples of the types of behavior that demonstrate the attributes of integrity and perseverance can, at times, be difficult to pinpoint. But Ford Motor Company’s president and CEO Alan Mulally clearly exhibits those qualities. When the U.S. automobile industry plummeted in 2008, GM and Chrysler positioned themselves to receive federal bailout funds in order to sustain losses and remain in business. Ford Motors, however, took the risk of bypassing federal funds. Mulally would have found an easier road through a changing automobile industry had Ford accepted bailout funds, but the market, at least in the short term, rewarded his firm stance; Rasmussen Reports (2009) found that 46 percent of Americans said they were more likely to buy from Ford because it did not take bailout money. Likewise, prior to the federal bailout, 41 percent of consumers had a positive perception of Ford, but after Ford declined bailout money, the positive perception increased to 63 percent (Aloft Group 2009). Ford Motors turned an immediate third-quarter profit, gained market share, and saw sales jump 33 percent in December 2009 (Durbin and Krishner 2010). The company has now found itself on a road lined with unique opportunity in a changing and competitive market and some have alleged that CEO Mulally is in auto overdrive because Ford’s quarterly profits continued through the midst of the 2010 recession.

While the main focus of this book is on business leaders who are also managers, some of these leaders have neither much formal power stemming from a formal position, nor do they have the ability to reward or punish; nonetheless, they do have a strong influence over others. There are many such examples. A small group of people who are thrown together for the first time in order to get a project done quickly will find that one or two people emerge as leaders. Such leaders rely primarily on their expertise or force of personality alone. On a broader scale, some leaders without organizations actively encourage specific social chang...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Approaches for Motivating Followers, Achieving Results, and Inspiring Change
• I Traditional Theories of Leadership
• II Managerial Leadership Behaviors
• III Executive Leadership Behaviors
• IV Leading and Managing Human Capital
• References
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• About the Authors