Great Leadership

What It Is and What It Takes in a Complex World

Antony Bell

• Publisher: Davies-Black
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780891063971
• eBook ISBN: 9781473643833
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Distilling the wisdom of the past with an eye toward the future, Great Leadership cuts through the complexity of leading organizations, operations, and people to make leadership development manageable and greatness attainable. Whether you are looking to lay a solid foundation for a lifetime of great leadership or searching for a curriculum to guide your self-development, Antony Bell has mapped out a journey of discovery to help you uncover what drives your leadership style and do what it takes to practice leadership that is both noble and competent.

PART I
THE FOUNDATIONS FOR GREAT LEADERSHIP
Clarity from Confusion

1
THE IMPORTANCE OF A LEADERSHIP FRAMEWORK

Understanding What’s at Stake

Great careers are built on great leadership. At the end of your career—whether you retire as a CEO, a senior executive, a project manager, a department head, or a team leader, it makes no difference—you will be remembered by the quality of your leadership.

Not only will you be remembered by your leadership, but you will also judge yourself by it. If you could right now fast-forward to the conclusion of your career and look back at your leadership, you’d most likely focus on the major decisions that shaped your professional path—the Rubicons you crossed and the ones you didn’t, the Alamos you fought and the ones you didn’t. And you would be right to do so, because those decisions would all be significant—both the good choices and the poor choices that reflect great leadership and poor leadership.

And as you looked back over the decades, you would probably wish you had found a way to improve the consistency of those decisions—some kind of framework that would have helped you consistently practice great leadership.

Rewinding the tape back to the present, you can now look ahead with the confidence that such a framework does indeed exist. That’s what this book is about—giving you the framework to make the choices for great leadership, so that when you get to the end of your career, you can look back over a consistent pattern of great leadership.

If you were to rewind the tape even further and look into the past before your own past, you would see that what is true for your personal history is true for the broad sweep of human history. You would see that the impact of history is the impact of leadership. At the fulcrum of momentous events and movements have stood personalities whose leadership tipped the balance for good or for evil. What would American independence have been without Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, or Washington? Or the Civil War without Lincoln? Or opposition to Hitler without Churchill? Or Indian independence without Gandhi? Or even Communism without Lenin or terrorism without bin Laden?

Some tipped the scales for good; some tipped it for bad. Many were inept, and their ineptitude made them memorable. Historian Barbara Tuchman devoted a book—The March of Folly—to what she called “wooden-headed leadership,” which assesses “a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts.” Such leadership, she says, is “epitomized in a historian’s statement about Philip II of Spain, the surpassing woodenhead of all sovereigns: ‘No experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence.’”

THE COMPLEXITY OF LEADERSHIP

If great leadership was elusive in the past, it is even more so today. Consider these trends:

The expectations for business performance have never been so high on such a widespread scale. The extraordinary economic growth that began in the 1980s and accelerated in the 1990s set expectations for business performance that are for the most part unsustainable, and—with a population increasingly engaged as investors—those expectations are no longer limited to institutional investors and market analysts.

The level of scrutiny has never been so intense. Scrutiny has never come from so many sources (sometimes simultaneously): the government (in all its many forms), the shareholders, the customers and their advocates, the employees, and the community. This scrutiny is beginning to keep some out of the race. The Economist quoted one chairman of a major publicly traded company as saying, “I spend my life advising friends of mine not to become chief executives of quoted companies, and by and large they take my advice.” Those who don’t take such advice don’t stay in one place as long as their predecessors did—witness the accelerating turnover rate in CEOs triggered by the unmet expectations of demanding constituencies.

The scope of business has never been so broad. Many organizations operate in multiple countries, in multiple markets, and with multiple products. The tension between global expansion and local relevance has never been so acute. This is true whether or not you work for a globally active organization; even if your focus is your domestic market, you are subject to the trends and forces of globalization. Globalization is not a fad. It is a reality, and it’s here to stay. The more the inevitable cross-exposure of different national and ethnic cultures shapes and defines local and global business interchange, the more organizations will depend on leaders who operate comfortably and intelligently in ethnically diverse and varied marketplaces.

The pace of innovation has never been so rapid. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that the sum total of human knowledge doubled between 2000 and 2002, and this is in line with estimates suggesting that it doubled ten times between 1950 and 2000. Doubling, by the way, is exponential: doubling ten times (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, and so on) actually means human knowledge was 1,024 times greater. In contrast, knowledge doubled only once between 1900 and 1950.

The structures of organizations have never been so complex. The sheer size of organizations today itself complicates the task of leading them. Much of their growth has come from acquisitions, so to the challenge of coping with size has been added the challenge of blending cultures. The Wall Street Journal observed that the average annual revenue of the fifty largest public companies in the United States was 70 percent higher by the end of the 1990s than it was in 1984. In the mid-1980s, eighteen companies employed more than 100,000 people; by the end of the 1990s, that number was over fifty. For such organizations, choices are multiple and complex, and with every acquisition and every joint venture or alliance another layer of complexity is added. With the recession at the dawn of the twenty-first century the pace slowed, but it didn’t take long to pick up again.

The span of control has never been so broad. Corporate demographics have changed, particularly in terms of reporting structures. With the continual erosion of middle management over the past fifteen years, more and more people report to fewer and fewer leaders. The paradoxical consequence is that leaders have more responsibility, but they have less time to think about how to fulfill that responsibility.

The confidence of the public in corporate leadership has never been so low. We’ve seen plenty of cases of corporate leaders enriching themselves at the expense of their employees, and the sense of betrayal is all the greater because of the increased social role corporations play in today’s society—for many people, their work is the only place they experience anything close to a sense of community. When leaders defraud a corporation, they betray the community that appointed them as guardians of that community; the betrayal is social as much as economic.

The honeymoon for a new CEO has never been so brief. Time is not on the side of business leaders: there isn’t much room for mistakes, and there isn’t time to grow.

THE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE OF GREAT LEADERSHIP

With all these challenges, it stands to reason that any organization that provides the leadership to overcome them has a huge competitive advantage. These challenges don’t mean that great leadership is impossible; in fact, great challenges have a way of uncovering great leaders. “I am apt to think,” Abigail Adams once wrote in a letter to her husband, commenting on George Washington, “that our late misfortunes have called out the hidden excellencies of our commander-in-chief,” and quoting English poet Edward Young, she added, “Affliction is a good man’s shining time.” No less so today, despite many examples of poor leadership; some leaders still prove capable of rising, under pressure, to the levels of greatness their organization needs. And fortunately so, because no single factor shapes the results of an organization more than the kind of leaders it raises and recruits.

The leadership an organization embraces ultimately determines the results it generates. “In the old days, I would have said it was capital, history, the name of the bank,” John Reed once said when he was running Citicorp. “Garbage—it’s about the guy at the top.” Many organizations claim that their people are their greatest asset, but that’s not so, even for those that genuinely believe it (few do). An organization’s leaders are its greatest asset, and an organization that takes care of its leaders takes care of every other asset, including its people.

Research bears this out. Great leadership was one of the critical ingredients in Jim Collins’s research for Good to Great—it was in fact the first critical ingredient in the transformation of average companies into great companies. A recent MIT study gave further empirical support to the intuitively obvious fact that similar companies led by different leadership styles produce very different results. In strategy alone, for example, some focused on organic growth and others on growth by acquisition; some held more cash and others more debt (the latter in both cases did less well). The differences in style and strategy led to very different results in performance and profitability.

Not only is the impact of great leadership felt at an organizational level, it is also felt at an individual level. Leaders who know how to evoke talent stand out, and they deliver dramatic results, as demonstrated by Gallup’s research in First, Break All the Rules, where extraordinary individual performance is attributed to the critical role of leaders who know how to bring out the best in the people they lead.

Not surprisingly, the importance of leadership is increasingly a matter of perception as well as fact. Consulting company Burson-Marsteller tracks such perceptions by measuring the impact of the CEO on the company’s overall reputation, and from 1997 to 2003, it went from 40 percent to 50 percent. However effervescent or self-effacing the CEO, that one individual disproportionately but decisively shapes the perception of the company.

FIGURE 1. THE BOTTOM-LINE IMPACT OF GREAT LEADERSHIP

Of course, great leadership plays all the way down to the bottom line, as illustrated in Figure 1. When great leadership is exercised in its three main dimensions—external relevance, internal efficiency, and people selection and development—employee behaviors and their alignment with the organization’s direction inevitably raise the level of the organization’s productivity. When the organization’s productivity is raised, costs are contained, cash flow grows, and profits build—boosting the valuation of the organization and the shareholder returns it generates.

All told, not a bad return for investing your organization with great leadership.

HOW LEADERS HANDICAP THEMSELVES

For all the importance of great leadership, it doesn’t happen by itself. Without a framework, leaders often handicap themselves in a number of significant ways:

Leaders tend to operate from intuition and experience. While both can serve a leader well, neither is infallible: intuition cannot compensate for the blind spots every person has, and experience is a tutor with a limited perspective.

Leaders tend to become leaders because they are technically competent. Being good at something singles them out for promotion. But what makes people effective at one level can make them ineffective at another.

Leaders tend to operate with the skills that were most useful two levels below their current level. In part because of the way they were chosen for the leadership track, they tend to maintain the mind-set of the level where they last felt real mastery.

Few leaders are taught to lead. Because most leaders learn intuitively from experience, that experience is seldom analyzed with any depth, consistency, or systematic feedback. A few leaders have the good fortune of being taught informally by a particularly effective boss or mentor, but such teachers are rare. Even fewer leaders are taught formally; academic institutions focus on the organization of work more than on the application of leadership. MBA programs don’t teach leadership, or, at best, they teach only a narrow portion of it. Many corporations offer inhouse programs, but few combine strong teaching with the kind of in-depth coaching that guarantees its application.

Leaders tend to stop learning in midlife. By the time people hit their forties, many rely on their previous knowledge and have only a shallow commitment to ongoing self-education and self-development.

Few leaders lead from a clear sense of purpose. Even fewer lead from a clear sense of noble purpose.

Few leaders know how to pass on what they know. Not having been taught, they have little idea how to help others develop their leadership skills.

To overcome these obstacles, leaders need some guidelines; they need a framework for understanding and exercising great leadership.

SOME LE...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I The Foundations for Great Leadership Clarity from Confusion
• Part II Character in Leadership Soul, Heart, and Mind
• Part III Competence in Leadership Knowledge, Skill, and Talent
• Conclusion Your Leadership Development Curriculum
• About the Author
• Index