When to change how you lead
It’s fashionable to
say we live in fast-changing times. Does that mean leadership itself must
change?
Is leadership an
immutable endeavor in which we
learn as much from Alexander the Great and the Bhagavad Gita as
from GM’s Mary Barra or Apple’s Tim Cook? Or does the role of the business
leader change with the changing times? This ageless question formed the
starting point for a wide-ranging discussion at a recent meeting of advisors to
McKinsey’s Leadership Development Practice. The group included Helen Alexander,
former CEO of The Economist Group; Robert Kegan, the developmental psychologist
and author, from Harvard University; Nadir Mohamed, former CEO of Rogers
Communications; and McKinsey partners Claudio Feser, Mary Meaney, and Tim
Welsh.Quarterly editor in chief Allen Webb moderated the
discussion. While conclusive answers may have been elusive, the conversation
generated insights into a number of key aspects of leadership, including the
effect of success on leaders, the benefits of failure in developing resilience,
and the role of maturity and self-awareness.
The Quarterly: Is leadership timeless? This is one of
those issues where it is easy to say both yes and no, so Claudio and Tim are
going to kick things off by staking out relatively extreme positions.
Claudio Feser: The case for leadership being a timeless
endeavor, in my opinion, rests on the fact that the ability to lead is strongly
linked to personality and character. Several studies suggest that open-minded,
conscientious people who are emotionally tuned to take charge tend to be
stronger leaders than people who aren’t.1 And while leadership skills can be learned, personality
and character are pretty much given by the time you enter the workforce and
don’t change much over time. In this sense, one could say that some people are
more predisposed to lead than others, and that hasn’t changed in the past 50 or
100 or 1,000 years.
Having said so, we all
can lead better by developing a better understanding of ourselves, so we can
make the best of what we have. Our research suggests that leaders who are
self-aware—who know themselves or, as we put it, are “centered”—are up to four
times more effective in managing change than people who aren’t.2
Tim Welsh: I think the case for a more flexible
model of leadership rests on our understanding of the elements of leadership.
Clearly, you have to have some sense of who you are as a person—that’s always
an element of leadership. A second is to have the skills required for the job.
And a third is to have the knowledge that is relevant for the job. In order for
leadership to be timeless, we’d have to believe that those three elements are
immutable.
There’s a reasonable case to be made for the
first one being timeless: leaders have always had to have a strong sense of
themselves. But there’s almost no case to be made for the second or the third
elements being immutable—in fact, quite the opposite. We know that many jobs
today didn’t even exist 40 years ago, so a lot of people had to learn a whole
set of new job-related skills. And then, from a technical perspective, we know
that there’s never been so much data created in any given year. By definition,
you’re constantly having to learn new things about even the most rote
professions—and leadership is far from rote!
So you can say that, yes, one element of
leadership is timeless: the “know who you are, lead yourself” element. But the
other two can’t be timeless, and therefore leadership in itself is not timeless
but more of a contextual set of attributes.
The Quarterly: Anybody want to articulate a balanced
perspective?
Robert Kegan: You might think about leadership as
having to do with the intersection of psychology and business knowledge. All
leaders have both an agenda they’re driving and an agenda that’s driving them.
The agenda you’re driving is the business part of it. The agenda that’s driving
you is the psychology part.
The agenda that you’re driving seems to me
highly mutable because it’s dependent on lots of things: the context of the
organization, the bigger epochal life cycles, and the smaller life cycles of an
organization. You can see that different leaders are called for at different
times, with different kinds of agendas.
An awareness of the agenda that’s driving the
leader—that, to me, is a more timeless dimension. The self-awareness and
understanding needed would seem to have been needed hundreds of years ago and
will be a hundred years from now. “Leader, know thyself.”
Mary Meaney: I agree. There’s a core of leadership
that is timeless while other aspects evolve, depending on the external context.
So a focus on achievement, results, inspiration, and setting a vision—those
attributes of leadership are relatively constant. Whereas agility, the ability
to change, and participative decision making—those elements are particularly
important in certain contexts and less so in others.
Helen Alexander: Leadership is about learning. It’s about
taking in the signals—recognizing and creating patterns—and I don’t think those
sorts of things change. The primary leadership trait for me is to have the
antennae up. You have to be looking outside the organization, learning all the
time, seeing patterns, and trying to bring them into the organization. And that
seems timeless to me.
There are people and organizations that don’t
have those antennae up. I mean, take the media industry. There are still many,
many media companies really struggling with going digital today, and this is 15
years on.
Nadir Mohamed: Yes. In my own view, one of the most
important attributes of a leader is to understand when a cycle’s about to
change, so that you can embrace the changes required. That is quite fundamental
in business. And these cycles, to me, are getting shorter. And so it’s really a
big leadership attribute to actually be able to say, “OK, I get it; there’s a
change happening. You know, we have to approach life differently.”
The Quarterly: So if different leaders are called for
at different times, as Bob suggests, how do you know which kind of leader is
right for which circumstances?
Nadir Mohamed: We’d probably all agree that there are
different styles of leadership—that there isn’t only one style that by
definition makes a good leader and that the needed style of leadership may
change according to circumstances and context. A founder and leader may be a
visionary, a classic “divide and conquer” entrepreneur completely engaged in
detail. It’s not uncommon for people to describe the successor as
collaborative, teamwork oriented, open, and so on.
Now, is that an accident—just someone with
different characteristics happening to be in that position at that time? Or
does it reflect an organization’s shift from a build phase to one where it
needs to make money and become an institution and, you know, go from junk bond
to investment grade and so forth, which calls for a leadership style that is
different from the founder’s?
To me, what’s most interesting is whether any
one style is better in a given context or whether the same style can work in
different contexts. I think people want and expect consistency in your
leadership traits. You can’t work “sensibly” one day and suddenly turn into a
jerk the following day, right? Yet what I’ve observed is that many times there
are people who act like jerks who nonetheless are great leaders and perform
really well. We might say to ourselves, “My God, I could never subscribe to
that person’s worldview,” but there’s no denying that some of them build great
organizations. This would suggest that a fundamental part of leadership is to
be truly yourself.
The Quarterly: “To thine own self be true”—even if
“thine own self” is a jerk?
Mary Meaney: Well, not necessarily. As I think about
the organizations, leaders, and CEOs I’ve worked with, I sometimes ask myself
where have I seen things go catastrophically wrong. More often than not, it has
been because of arrogance. People who’ve stopped listening, stopped being
open—who haven’t had the antennae up, as Helen put it. As I think about the
greatest failures, many of them resulted from lack of humility, of openness,
listening, willingness to question yourself. Many leaders fell into the trap of
believing that they were invincible, invulnerable, and infallible.
Yet these leaders weren’t always arrogant.
Over time, they lost certain traits that they had once had. They lost their
openness, willingness to listen, to probe, to hear different perspectives, to
challenge themselves, to question themselves. I think humility is all too easy
to lose once you have become senior and are in a position of power.
Robert Kegan: We have a tendency to think about this
in terms of individuals. But the organization itself is implicated in the fact
that we allow people to get more and more isolated—to be less and less called
to account—the more senior they get. So it’s also kind of a caution or a
challenge to the ways we structure organizations, not just the failings of individuals.
Nadir Mohamed: Some CEOs can be described as
aggressive, absolutely maniacal in terms of focus. Often that’s one of the
primary reasons a company is as successful as it is. But that focus can also
blind a company to big changes that are about to happen. So if you take the
challenge of learning, how are you going to take these strong CEOs, who are
often founders—these driven individuals who take no prisoners, who won’t listen
to anybody about “why this may not work”—how are you going to help them not get
blindsided by disruptions lurking around the corner?
Helen Alexander: I think there is something to be said
for a time limit. Maybe leading a business is not a job you can or should do
forever.
Claudio Feser: Part of what is timeless is the tendency
to stop listening because you’ve become wedded to a strategy that’s yours. It’s
an almost innate problem that, maybe, a time limit or term limit could solve.
Robert Kegan: I think we can all tell stories about
the ways people stop listening. And I suppose there may be an increased
probability of that after you’ve been in a role too long and start to get
arrogant, to use Mary’s term. But you can also tell stories about people who
don’t fall into that trap. A lot of this comes down to Carol Dweck’s ideas about
whether you have a fixed or a growth mind-set.3 We’re seeing that it’s difficult for people to grow and
change, but they definitely can do so under the right circumstances and the
right conditions. People can actually come to see more deeply into themselves
and their world.
The Quarterly: Those leaders who do grow and develop as
they progress in their roles—what characterizes their ability to do so?
Claudio Feser: If you visualize the self as a kind of
container, you have two opportunities. One is to put more good things into the
container—by learning new strategies and skills, for example—and another is to
change and expand the container itself. Now, for some people, amplifying the
container is easier than it is for others. Does this have to do with
intellectual ability? With culture? With humility or education? What has it to
do with?
Robert Kegan: It’s the $64,000 question. A lot of
people feel humility is an absolutely key thing—a person’s willingness and
comfort not to have it all together and not to pretend to have it all together,
to be open to the possibility you might be wrong.
There’s a lot of time spent looking at
learning and learning organizations, but we don’t give as much attention to all
the ways we prevent ourselves from learning. Not only the ways we do that
individually but also the ways organizations get built to cover our weaknesses
and call each other to account. All of those activities, which are ways of
avoiding discomfort and anxiety and so on, systematically promote nonlearning.
We need to know as much about how we systematically prevent learning,
individually and organizationally, as how we promote it.
The Quarterly: Is there anything else we should look
for?
Robert Kegan: People who have been too successful can
actually be really risky hires because they haven’t failed and picked
themselves back up again. So it’s important to ask what is a person’s history
of mistake making? Do people have a deficit of failure in their backgrounds?
Mary Meaney: We’ve been looking at this as part of
work on women and women’s leadership, and it’s really striking to see that the
women who have reached the most senior levels are often the ones who have the
resilience that comes through learning from failure.
Claudio Feser: Failures are important for learning. It seems there is a
part of leadership that is immutable—having a sense of who you are and acting
authentically, in accordance with it—and another part that’s more contextual,
such as skills and knowledge. However, what seems to be common to both of those
parts is that they are developed over time and with practice. They are
developed by learning from mistakes and successes. Having a growth and learning
mind-set is crucial. Not only at the individual level, though. Leaders are also
formed in a context. By organizing companies and building corporate cultures
that promote challenge and debate, company leaders create learning
organizations that accelerate the speed at which they and others grow.
http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/leading_in_the_21st_century/when_to_change_how_you_lead?cid=other-eml-alt-mkq-mck-oth-1506
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