Crucibles of Leadership

How to Learn from Experience to Become a Great Leader

Robert J. Thomas

• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781591391371
• eBook ISBN: 9781422163290
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Experience may be a leader's best teacher--but there's a hitch. Two people can have identical experiences, but one blossoms while the other is depleted. The same can be said for any pair of fired CEOs, unsuccessful political candidates, or rookie supervisors.

In Crucibles of Leadership, Robert J. Thomas concludes that what matters most is what one makes of experience, particularly the traumatic and often unplanned crucible events that challenge one's identity as a leader. What distinguishes leaders who grow through a crucible experience? Their approach to learning. Like accomplished athletes or artists, they practice as strenuously as they perform. And because the line between performance and practice is often hard to discern, they learn how to practice while they perform.

But theirs is no ordinary practice. It's a regimen tailored to individual aspirations, motivations, and learning styles--a Personal Learning Strategy. Building on insightful and moving stories told by accomplished leaders, Thomas offers probing self-assessments and innovative tools designed to help you develop your own Personal Learning Strategy.

Provocative and original, with examples drawn from business and politics as well as from the inner workings of the Mormon Church and the Hell's Angels, Thomas's book will revolutionize the way you think about leadership and learning.

PART ONE

EXPERIENCE MATTERS—BUT THEN WHAT?

[ 1 ]

HOW DO YOU FIND WHAT MATTERS IN EXPERIENCE?

Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.

—John F. Kennedy (speech prepared for delivery in Dallas, Texas, November 22, 1963)

ARE YOU THE MOST EFFECTIVE LEADER you can be?

Most people will admit they aren’t. They read books and articles and attend the occasional workshop. In moments of doubt, they will search out a coach or a mentor. Like Tony Soprano, a surprising number watch the History Channel, hoping to glean some insight about how leaders are born and grown. Their intentions are good, but still they struggle to find a way to increase their leadership acumen—and that frustrates them.

The struggle is understandable. Time is scarce. People in management roles, whether in business, in government, or in nonprofits, work so hard and so long that they just don’t have time to spare, even for things that they might truly value, like developing themselves as leaders. It’s hard to learn just from books and seminars. A classroom is a sterile environment, and the half-life of most training is notoriously short. Learning styles vary enormously, and too often there isn’t a good fit between teaching style and learning style. Off-site workshops may be good for clearing the head, and a barefoot stroll over hot coals may boost self-confidence, but it’s tough to keep the learning fresh when you go back to a situation that’s completely unchanged. And finally, it’s difficult to learn just through observation. Too often people say they can only snatch a glimpse of good leadership in action; and hearing someone deliver a great speech is not the same as sitting them down and picking their brains about how they do what they do.

Still, some people do grow and improve as leaders. Like consummate actors and athletes, they find ways to take it up one notch and then another and another. If they’re not reading more or attending more classes or they don’t have loads of free time to reflect, how do they become more proficient? The answer is experience. For all the wide-ranging theories of effective leadership, almost everyone agrees that anyone who seeks to lead must get firsthand experience: get their feet wet and their hands dirty, seek out challenging assignments, volunteer for foreign postings, work for great leaders (and even for bad ones)—and learn as much as possible.

But there’s a hitch. Two people can have the same experience and come away with profoundly different reactions: one may blossom and grow while the other is unchanged or even depleted. The same can be said for any pair of fired CEOs, successful project leaders, failed entrepreneurs, rookie supervisors, and those on international duty.

Experience by itself guarantees nothing.

To complicate matters, many memorable leadership experiences don’t occur at scheduled times or in convenient places, like work or school. For instance, when pressed to identify an experience in which they learned something important about leadership or about themselves as leaders, the men and women interviewed for this book rarely pointed to events experienced in conventional training courses and MBA curricula. Instead, they described transformative events that occurred outside their professional lives as often as they cited ones that happened on the job. The most profound among those experiences—the crucibles that led to a new or an altered sense of identity—were nested in family life, wartime trauma, athletic competition, and/or personal loss far more often than in work assignments.

What exactly is a crucible? In medieval times it was the vessel in which alchemists attempted to turn base metals into gold. In a leadership context, then, we can think of a crucible as a transformative experience from which a person extracts his or her “gold”: a new or an altered sense of identity. A crucible is not the same as a life stage or transition, like moving from adolescence to adulthood or from midlife to retirement. Life stages can be stressful, even tumultuous; but, unlike crucibles, they tend to be gradual, reasonably predictable, and patterned.¹ Crucibles are more like trials or tests that corner individuals and force them to answer questions about who they are and what is really important to them.

Consider Bob Galvin, Motorola’s visionary former CEO and chairman of the board, who shepherded the company from analog to digital technology and into the coveted status of preferred supplier to auto giants like Toyota. When I asked him to tell me about a time when he learned an important lesson about leading, Galvin remembered an event from his early years when he worked in one of his father’s factories.

Galvin was just seventeen, and he’d just made his first big mistake—one that shut down an assembly line. He knew that the plant supervisors could easily have had great fun at the expense of the boss’s son. Instead, they helped him resolve the problem in minutes and said something that encouraged him to keep learning for the rest of his life: “I overheard one foreman saying to another, ‘No problem with Bob. If he happens to screw it up, we can point it out to him and we can get on and get the job done right. Hopefully he does it right most of the time.’”² A small compliment, perhaps, but one that had a lasting effect on Galvin and on the company. Galvin credits that factory foreman for helping him gain the confidence to make mistakes and to learn from them.

The moral of Galvin’s story? While experience matters, what matters more is what one makes of experience: how a person comes to recognize in a crucible experience that something new or important is happening, to see beyond the discomfort, perhaps even the pain, of new and unexpected information and to incorporate that information as useful knowledge, not just about the world but, as likely, about oneself. Extracting insight from experience is a competence especially relevant to men and women in leadership positions in business and government, and to those who aspire to leadership, because their professional lives so often consist of complex, uncertain, and fluid situations for which there is no practical guide and where resolution depends on the exercise of judgment. Judgment can only be acquired through experience.

What distinguishes men and women who grow through a crucible experience is not breeding or intellect. Talent plays a role, undoubtedly, but it is a supporting role. No amount of native talent can prepare a leader for the infinite variety of circumstances she will face or the challenges she must surmount. No gene for resilience ensures that gems of wisdom will suddenly appear amid the turmoil of a crucible.

Instead, what sets these leaders apart is their approach to learning. Rather than wait for the right moment to arrive, they discover and exploit learning opportunities. Rather than partition their lives into periods of action and periods of reflection, they do both, often on a daily basis, sometimes in precisely the same moment. Rather than complain about the scarcity of time to learn, they make time. Like accomplished performers in sports or music or the arts, they practice as strenuously as they perform. And when, as often happens to organizational leaders, they find themselves onstage much of the time, they learn how to practice while they perform—not simply to learn by doing, but to learn while doing.

This is a book about leaders who are skilled at transforming crucible experiences into lessons that make them personally more effective and that, more importantly, result in improved performance on the part of the organizations they lead. But this is a book for anyone who aspires to leadership. I say that because one of the most important findings of the research on which this book is based is that the ability to mine crucible experiences for insight can be learned. In fact, intensive, long-term conscious practice at it can trump native talent. Practice establishes a state of continuous preparedness: awareness of oneself and one’s capabilities and alertness to important events, like crucible experiences, so that they can be learned from.

Crucible experiences are not only defining moments; they can also be a valuable starting point for discovering a form of practice closely attuned to an individual’s aspirations and motivations—something I refer to as a Personal Learning Strategy. That is, crucibles trigger a search for meaning: Why did this happen? Why did it happen to me? What should I learn from this for the future? Handled properly, crucibles can catalyze a vigorous and sustained interior dialogue that leads to deeper self-understanding and enhanced performance.

By paying close attention to the words and stories of a wide variety of leaders, we can gain skill in recognizing the context and the trajectory of a crucible experience. Moreover, we can become alert to the “warning signs” of an impending crucible and identify the skills necessary to cope, respond, and learn. The goal of this book is to render that process visible and practical.

CRUCIBLES AND THE LESSONS THEY OFFER

This exploration of crucibles—what they teach and how leaders learn—builds on a foundation that Warren Bennis and I set in our book, Geeks and Geezers. That research was designed to uncover the ways that era (or the social, political, cultural, and economic milieu of one’s maturing years) influences a leader’s motivations and aspirations. We interviewed forty-three of today’s top leaders in business and the public sector, limiting our subjects to people born in or before 1925, or in or after 1970.

To our delight we learned a great deal about how age and era affect leadership style (for a brief summary of key findings, see the box, “Geeks and Geezers”). Our older and younger leaders had very different ideas about paying your dues (interestingly, not about whether they should be paid, but how), work-life balance, the role of heroes, and more. But they also shared some striking similarities—among them a love of learning and a strong sense of values. Most intriguing was the fact that both our geeks and geezers told us again and again how certain experiences inspired them, shaped them, and, indeed, taught them to lead.

“Geeks and Geezers”

IN Geeks and Geezers (published in paperback as Leading for a Lifetime), Warren Bennis and I had the opportunity to interview at length a group of remarkable leaders who taught us a great deal about what distinguishes truly outstanding leaders from the rest. Three qualities, in particular, stood out as common to outstanding leaders, young and old (see table 1-1):

• Adaptive capacity is the ability to learn—about yourself, about the world around you, about what it takes to adjust to, and to make, change.

• Engaging others through shared meaning is teaching and, in turn, listening—being an interactive leader, one who can enlist as well as command, and one who is capable of mobilizing the best in people through shared vision.

• Integrity is about knowing what you stand for—possessing a strong moral compass—and having the courage of your convictions; it is a process of self-knowledge that provides a core identity and a spine that remains strong even when circumstances demand that you adapt. Integrity is what keeps the leader from becoming a hollow dissembler or a leaf in the wind.

Adaptive capacity, the ability to engage others, and integrity are qualities that characterize outstanding leaders. They are not static, however. They are not achieved once and forever. They must be renewed continuously because the circumstances that leaders face change constantly—and change demands a continuous demonstration of each quality if it is to remain a legitimate description of the leader.

TABLE 1-1

Qualities of outstanding leaders

Qualities	Attributes
Adaptive capacity	• Resilience
	• Creativity
	• Openness to new experience and a willingness to learn
	• Acute observational skill
Engaging others through shared meaning	• Deep sense of purpose and focus
	• Self-awareness and emotional intelligence
	• Obsessive and skilled communication
	• Comfort with dissent
Integrity	• Clear values and voice
	• Balance among ambition, technique, moral compass
	• Able to work with value conflicts
	• Knowledge of when to lead and how to follow

We came to call the experiences that shape leaders “crucibles,” and for the leaders we interviewed, the crucible experience was a trial and a test, a point of deep self-reflection that challenged them to step up and be someone or do something they’d never been or done before. In some instances, crucibles were momentous events shared by many people, like World War II or the Great Depression; in others, crucibles were far more individual and private, like the loss of a loved one or a bankruptcy. Either way, crucibles required these leaders to examine their values, to question their assumptions, to hone their judgment. And in virtually every instance, they emerged from the experience stronger and more sure of themselves and their purpose—enhanced in some fundamental way.

Although we found the stories of our leaders studded with insight, we barely lifted the lid on the box of crucible experiences. We could not say, for example, whether crucibles followed a similar trajectory or whether, since some people reported being oblivious to what they were enduring at the time, conscious recognition of crucibles was necessary at all. And we only speculated as to whether the qualities that we found among learning leaders were themselves capable of being learned.

We also did not anticipate the resonant chord that the crucible concept struck with readers and listeners. Many wanted to share their own stories. Inadvertently, we’d tapped a rich vein of common experience—a highly personal and consequential event or relationship—that people felt not only shaped them, but also helped explain them. Sometimes their stories were emotional, cathartic even, and other times they were quite sublime. Sometimes they were told in private, over coffee, and other times they were shared in classrooms, boardrooms, or auditoriums. But in every instance, we found people driven to convey their own distinctive meaning, in much the same way an artist might employ light, color, and shape or a musician might invoke pitch and rhythm to articulate something deeply personal and yet also profoundly universal.

PUTTING CRUCIBLES AT CENTER STAGE

In this book, I examine crucibles from several different angles as I search for answers to the challenging questions readers and leaders have raised. For example, what is life like inside a crucible? Is it possible to spot a crucible approaching or to divine when one has arrived? How do people make sense of their crucibles, much less learn from them? If, as we argued in Geeks and Geezers, adaptive capacity—or the ability to transcend adversity—is a defining quality of lifelong leaders, then is it possible for anyone to harness the power of experience? And finally, can organizations more effectively use crucible experiences to accelerate leader development?

A recurring point of comparison in this book will be between the crucibles experienced by organizational leaders and those experienced by men and women in other pursuits—for example, accomplished performers in the arts and athletics. While mindful that leading an organization is not the same as commanding a football team or choreographing a ballet, we will find a great deal to be gained from comparing the arc of learning and mastery that characterizes the careers of outstanding athletes, performing artists, and organizational leaders. In fact, my research provides valuable clues about expert performance and how it is the product of talent, experience (large and small, crucible and day-to-day), and disciplined practice.

HOW THIS BOOK IS ORGANIZED

I have organized this book around four major findings from the research I’ve done since the publication of Geeks and Geezers. First, that crucibles contain two vital lesson...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Foreword by Warren G. Bennis
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Part One: Experience Matters—But Then What?
• Part Two: Crafting a Personal Learning Strategy
• Part Three: The Big Picture
• Notes
• About the Author