John P. Kotter on What Leaders Really Do

John P. Kotter

• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Year: 1999
• Print ISBN: 9780875848976
• eBook ISBN: 9781422140840
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Unternehmensfinanzen

Widely acknowledged as the world's foremost authority on leadership, John Kotter has devoted his remarkable career to studying organizations and those who run them, and his bestselling books and essays have guided and inspired leaders at all levels. Here, in this collection of his acclaimed Harvard Business Review articles, is an astute assessment of the real work of leaders, as only John Kotter can offer. To complement the HBR articles, Kotter also contributes a new piece, a thoughtful reflection on the themes that have developed throughout his work. Convinced that most organizations today lack the leadership they need, Kotter's mission is to help us better understand what leaders--real leaders--do. True leadership, he reminds us, is an elusive quality, and too often we confuse management duties and personal style with leadership, or even mistake unworthy leaders for the real thing. Yet without leadership, organizations move too slowly, stagnate, and lose their way. With John Kotter on What Leaders Really Do, readers will learn how to become more effective leaders as they explore pressing issues such as power, influence, dependence, and strategies for change.

1

Leadership at the Turn of the Century

FOR 30 YEARS I have been studying the actions of those who run organizations, trying to record and clarify what they do, why they behave as they do, and what effect their choices have on other individuals and enterprises. I did not begin this work with an explicit focus on “leadership” in mind—indeed, the word can be found rarely if at all in my early writings. Nevertheless, it is toward leadership that my efforts have ultimately been directed, a fact that says something important about the evolving nature of what we call “managerial” work.

After conducting fourteen formal studies and more than a thousand interviews, directly observing dozens of executives in action, and compiling innumerable surveys, I am completely convinced that most organizations today lack the leadership they need. And the shortfall is often large. I’m not talking about a deficit of 10% but of 200%, 400%, or more in positions up and down the hierarchy. This is not to say that untalented, unenergetic people occupy managerial positions. The typical case is just the opposite, with bright, experienced, and hardworking individuals, some quite extraordinary, almost all trying to do what they believe is right. The problem is that far too few of these people are providing the leadership that is increasingly needed in business, government, everywhere.

Some say that there has been a dearth of quality leadership throughout history This may or may not be true. What is clear is that the increasingly fast-moving and competitive environment we will face in the twenty-first century demands more leadership from more people to make enterprises prosper. Without that leadership, organizations stagnate, lose their way, and eventually suffer the consequences.

The central issue here is not one of style. I often hear people say that we need a “new leadership style” for the new century. In a globalizing world with a better-educated workforce that is no longer inclined to be seen and not heard, a new leadership style is in fact called for, but style is not the key leadership issue. Substance is. It is about core behavior on the job, not surface detail and tactics, a core that changes little over time, across different cultures, or in different industries.

There are those who say that the consequences of inadequate leadership are minimal because so many factors inside and outside enterprises affect performance. While I would agree in general that many elements contribute to an organization’s results, most of these factors can be influenced by good or bad leadership. When that influence points in the wrong direction, in no direction despite rapid change, or along a reasonable trajectory at inadequate speed, the consequences can be tragic. In extreme cases, enterprises fail, jobs are lost, customers and communities and financial interests are hurt, careers are derailed. In less extreme situations, firms underperform, essentially dealing with the same consequences as their ailing counterparts, but to a lesser degree. These failures show up in numbers that are sometimes easy to interpret but are often subtle, as when an enterprise turns out a performance similar to that of its competitors but actually should have done much better, given its assets and starting position.

More dramatic than any numbers are individual cases of real human beings who suffer under tyrants or incompetents or even well-meaning bosses whose failure to lead helps bring down the ship. The pain, broadcast loudly or suffered silently, can be huge, as people lose their jobs to incompetent reengineering or strain under the pressure of propping up a shaky bottom line.

Confront those at the very top of organizations with these facts and many will argue, or at least quietly disagree. “Yes, we could be doing better, but . . .” “Competition forces us to do . . .” “What do you expect in an industry where ...” This simple confrontational test often separates those executives who understand effective leadership from those who do not.

The leadership gap exists for many reasons, and correcting the problem is made difficult for many additional reasons, not the least being the complexity of the issues. But the problem is not that there is only a limited number of people out there with leadership potential. Even if only one person in a hundred had any potential at all, we would have tens of millions of individuals around the globe providing leadership. This is far from the case today, a fact that should tell us something important about a failure on the part of educational and work organizations, and probably on the part of many families, too.

Instead of nurturing talent, encouraging people to lead and to learn from mistakes and successes, organizations all too often ignore leadership potential, offer no relevant training or role models, and punish those who make small errors while trying to lead. Individuals, too, get in their own way by failing to assess their developmental needs realistically and to proactively seek means of meeting those needs.

The confusion around some of these points occasionally strikes me as staggering. People say “leadership” but describe “management,” talk only of a commanding style, serve up speeches about how more than one leader creates chaos, or talk in mystical terms. I have witnessed this cluttered thinking endless times in intelligent people. When capable individuals make such remarks, we have a clear indication of the need for a better understanding of what leaders really do.

TEN OBSERVATIONS

The body of my work on these subjects has been reported in more than a dozen books and a series of articles. The most important of these articles are six published in the Harvard Business Review between 1979 and 1997. These six pieces, along with my integrative commentary, form the mass of this book.

The material collected here deals with the challenges inherent in what is called managerial work and with what differentiates effective from ineffective responses to these challenges. The articles in the first part of the book focus explicitly on leadership and change, that part of organizational activity which I think has become more and more important over the past few decades. Part 2 shows how managerial work today is less about wielding power than about coping with dependence, how managers are put into a far more complex web of interaction with influential others than any organization chart can suggest, and how from these observations important implications follow The two parts connect through the notion, much clearer to me now than when I wrote the articles, that more change demands more leadership, which places managers in more complex webs of interaction.

The evolution of these ideas began when I discovered that the most effective people in managerial jobs seemed to act in ways that defied stereotypes of managerial behavior. Later I decided that this “unusual” behavior was mostly related to leadership, which in turn was related to change, one of the central themes of our times.

Reflecting on the six articles now, in 1998, I think hindsight and a bit of finagling put all the big ideas into a set of ten central, interrelated observations. (See Exhibit 1-1.) Each of these observations reflects important changes that continue to occur in the contexts in which managers work, changes driven by powerful forces associated with technology, the globalization of competition and markets, and workforce demographics. These forces have been destroying the mid-twentieth-century stability and pushing up the speed of so much, demanding from managers both incremental change and bigger leaps.

In the mid-twentieth-century world of oligopolies, monopolies, and many barriers to global competition, the longer jumps were not as necessary. Industries changed more slowly, demanding in turn less organizational change. Incremental shifts were for the most part sufficient, perhaps accompanied by a leap every decade or two. In an increasing set of industries today, this behavior is insufficient and can lead to disaster. Thus the number of efforts to transform organizations has increased dramatically in the past few decades, efforts that go by the names of reengineering, restructuring, restrategizing, quality programs, cultural change, and mergers and acquisitions.

EXHIBIT 1-1

Ten Observations About “Managerial Behavior”

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1. When managers produce successful change of any significance in organizations, the effort is usually a time-consuming and highly complex eight-step process, never a one-two-three, hit-and-run affair. Managers who opportunistically skip steps or proceed in the wrong order rarely achieve their aspirations.

2. Although change generally involves a complex, multistage process, regardless of the setting, some essential actions taken by effective managers with transformational goals always vary from case to case to fit key contingencies in their situations. An insensitivity to local contingencies, a one-approach-fits-all attitude, can produce disaster.

3. For a number of reasons, many people influenced by twentieth-century history and the corporate cultures it created—even capable, well-intentioned managers—often make a predictable set of mistakes when attempting to institute significant, nonincremental change.

4. Leadership is different from management, and the primary force behind successful change of any significance is the former, not the latter. Without sufficient leadership, the probability of mistakes increases greatly and the probability of success decreases accordingly. This is true no matter how the change is conceptualized—that is, in terms of new strategies, reengineering, acquisitions, restructuring, quality programs, cultural redesign, and so on.

5. Because the rate of change is increasing, leadership is a growing part of managerial work. Far too many people in positions of power still fail to recognize or acknowledge this most important observation.

6. Increasingly, those in managerial jobs can be usefully thought of as people who create agendas filled with plans (the management part) and visions (the leadership part), as people who develop implementation capacity networks through a well-organized hierarchy (management) and a complex web of aligned relationships (leadership), and who execute through both controls (management) and inspiration (leadership).

7. Because management tends to work through formal hierarchy and leadership does not, as change is breaking down boundaries, creating flatter organizations, more outsourcing, and the demand for more leadership, managerial jobs are placing people in ever more complex webs of relationships.

8. Because managerial work is increasingly a leadership task, and because leaders operate through a complex web of dependent relationships, managerial work is increasingly becoming a game of dependence on others instead of just power over others.

9. When one starts to think of managerial work in terms of networks and dependence, not just hierarchy and formal authority, all sorts of interesting implications follow. Ideas that would have traditionally sounded strange or illegitimate—such as “managing” your boss—suddenly take on importance.

10. What a manager / leader does on a minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour basis rarely fits any stereotype of manager, heroic leader, or executive, a fact that can create considerable confusion for those in managerial jobs, especially newcomers. Daily observable behavior is nevertheless understandable if one takes into consideration the diverse tasks (including both leadership and management), the difficult work (including both maintenance and change), and the web of relationships (which goes far beyond formal hierarchy) that come with the territory.

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Observation #1

When managers today produce successful change of any significance in organizations, regardless of the specific approach, the process is time consuming and highly complex, never a one-two-three, hit-and-run affair

In the most successful change efforts, people move through eight complicated stages in which they (1) create a sense of urgency, (2) put together a strong enough team to direct the process, (3) create an appropriate vision, (4) communicate that new vision broadly, (5) empower employees to act on the vision, (6) produce sufficient shortterm results to give their efforts credibility and to disempower the cynics, (7) build momentum and use that momentum to tackle the tougher change problems, and (8) anchor the new behavior in organizational culture.

Each of these eight actions associated with successful leaps takes time. Step 1 alone, pushing up the level of urgency, may require many months in a complacent organization of any size. Formulating an appropriate vision and strategies might be done in weeks, but it often requires 12, even 24 months. Creating all the conditions necessary to make a new set of actions stick, not evaporate over time, can take years. These time frames are incomprehensible to shortterm, reactive managers. Partially because they are not proactive—indeed, are always trying to catch up with the best competitors—they find the temptation to skip a step or two, or to run through the process too quickly, irresistible. So the reengineering, restructuring, etc., only pushes the organization incrementally, often at great cost.

People do create the appearance of successful change both more quickly and more easily. The big acquisition is made, the structures and systems rationalized, and the process seems to be completed in five months. But appearances deceive. The biggest chore associated with an acquisition of any size is to merge the two (or perhaps more) different cultures. Five months into the process, cultural integration typically has barely begun. Yet if this part of the transformation is ignored or handled poorly, problems will surface for years, maybe decades. Two different ways of operating and two different teams will clash in subtle and obvious ways, diverting attention from the real business of the enterprise.

Observation #2

Although change generally involves this complex eight-step process, regardless of the setting, some essential actions taken by effective managers with transformational goals always vary from case to case to fit key contingencies in their situations.

Differences appropriately arise around the degree to which the vision should be set in stone early on, to which large groups of people should be involved in determining and / or implementing the vision, and to which resistance from various quarters should be heeded.

Many factors affect the choices that need to be made in any specific situation, including the amount of resistance anticipated (the more resistance, the harder it is to push through it); the stakes involved (the bigger the stakes, the more important it is that the vision be right, even if getting it right takes more time and involves many revisions); and the extent to which lower levels in the organization are needed to construct or implement the vision (more dependence on lower levels means allowing them more involvement and participation).

People often get into trouble when they try to apply the tactics that worked in their last change experience without considering how the new situation is different. If, for example, an approach heavy on training has succeeded again and again in helping to empower employees, managers are likely to try it again, even if the central problem is resistance from supervisors and managers, not uneducated subordinates. Or if an approach based on maximum speed has worked well historically, executives continue to charge ahead even though more time is needed to deal with a much more powerful group of resisting employees. In general, the longer a set of tactics has worked, the more oblivious we become to new contingencies. The better a hammer has served in the past, the more all new problems look like nails.

Observation #3

For a number of reasons, even very capable and well-intentioned people can make a predictable set of mistakes when they are attempting significant, nonincremental change.

Failure is associated not only with the untalented. The very capable sometimes allow too much complacency up front. They put together too weak a guiding coalition. They fail to create enough vision, or undercommunicate the vision, or fail to remove sufficient obstacles to change. Their plan to create shortterm, credibility-building results is insufficient, they declare victory too soon once initial results are in. They fail to sufficiently connect new approaches to the culture or to create new cultures that can support these approaches. More tactically they may educate when they need to apply pressure, negotiate over details when better communication is needed, manipulate when being supportive would work much better.

If we all had more experience dealing with major change these errors would occur much less often. But too many people have been trained for and raised in a more stable world, a world that, for the most part, no longer exists. Too many people have been trained only to manage the current system or to make incremental shifts. They have not been shown how to provide the leadership necessary to make bigger leaps.

Observation #4

The issue of leadership is centrally important here because leadership is different from management, and the primary force behind successful change is the former, not the latter Without sufficient leadership, the probability of mistakes increases greatly and the probabilit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Chapter 1: Leadership at the Turn of the Century
• Part 1: Leadership and Change
• Part 2: Dependency and Networks
• Notes
• About the Author