Best
Business Books 2016: Talent & Leadership
Is leadership an art or a science? The
consensus in recent years seems to have come down squarely on the side of
science, as behaviorists and social researchers have examined every aspect of
how people lead and are led. Armed with an ever-expanding battery of methods — from
functional MRIs and saliva tests that measure hormonal responses to
long-established personality tests to statistical patterning — experts have
been inundating us with data about leadership practices, perceptions,
effectiveness, and outcomes.
This rising quantity of quantification has
surely improved our understanding of what superior leaders can achieve,
and has given organizations valuable information to use when hiring and
developing talent. But has it improved the quality of leadership in the real world?
High turnover rates and a paucity of effective leaders suggest either that
there’s no correlation between studying leadership and leading or that the
scientific approach could benefit from a bit more art. After all, no one
depicted leaders with greater penetration than Shakespeare, who never conducted
a 360-degree assessment.
Interpreting
data insightfully is surely as important as compiling and presenting it. So
it’s no surprise that this year’s best business books on talent and leadership
merge art with science to offer distinctive insights that are useful in
everyday life and that resonate with human experience. Two of the books — new
offerings by the famously skeptical Jeffrey Pfeffer and the influential team of
James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner — document and lament the shortage of
outstanding leaders and propose wildly contrasting remedies. The third, a
noteworthy debut by Amy Cuddy, takes a novel approach to helping individuals
project the confidence that research shows is a chief characteristic of
leadership. Each of these books is valuable and deserves recognition, but I
choose Learning Leadership as the best business book of the
year on this topic — for its humanity and grace, and its ability to find truth
in a blend of art and science.
The Problem
with Myths
With
their five editions of The Leadership Challenge, Kouzes and Posner
have set the standard for much of leadership writing over the last 30 years.
The database that informs their work, based on millions of responses to
detailed assessments delivered in thousands of organizations in every sector in
both developed and developing countries, offers an unmatched resource in
documenting what constitutes effective leadership.
Their
new book, Learning Leadership: The Five Fundamentals of Becoming an
Exemplary Leader, is written with passion and insight derived from decades
of practice as well as research: Kouzes is ranked as one of the top executive
educators and is an executive fellow at the Leavey School of Business at Santa
Clara University, where Posner holds an endowed professorship. A glance at the
book’s table of contents might suggest a fairly generic offering — a framework
with five fundamentals, all of which sound more aspirational than concrete. But
the authors’ wisdom and humanity set their book apart. So, too, does their
conviction that good leadership is a skill that can be learned by anyone who
seeks it, and that such learning contributes substantively to the sum of human
happiness and fulfillment.
In addressing the perennial question of
whether leaders are born or made, the authors tartly observe that they’ve never
met a leader who wasn’t born, which is to say that everyone has the ability to
become a better leader. Leadership is not a trait, nor is it reserved for those
with charisma — those who, in the original meaning of the word, were kissed by
the gods at birth. The “born leader” trope, in the authors’ view, is
antithetical to the way real-life leaders operate. It functions as a fable or
folk legend that discourages people at every level from working to become
better leaders.
The
authors unpack five myths that support these legends. My favorite is the talent
myth, known in training and development circles as just finding the
right person. Bluntly stating that “talent is overrated,” Kouzes and Posner
cite research indicating that “getting better” bests “being good” when it comes
to leading (and pretty much everything else). Their own experience interviewing
thousands of people who have led others to make extraordinary things happen
demonstrates that a desire to achieve excellence, the grit to persevere, and a
willingness to engage people broadly in one’s effort are far more important
than innate talent.
They also make quick work of the strengths
myth, which holds that people increase their chances of success by playing to
their strengths and outsourcing what they are weak at. This approach all too
often results in people saying things like “I’m not a visionary, so I’m going
to avoid sharing my perspective” or “I’m not a natural at giving praise, so why
bother?” In fact, Kouzes and Posner’s research demonstrates that successful
leaders make a habit of challenging themselves on their weaknesses.
Leadership, they argue, is within everyone’s
reach, and the five fundamentals offer a template for how to get better by
thoroughly analyzing a situation and critiquing your own performance in a
constructive way. Self-awareness and a willingness to keep learning from every
experience are the basic requirements, and the authors provide self-coaching
exercises and reviews throughout that are useful, commonsensical, and free from
jargon.
Anyone with a desire to improve his or her
own leadership skills can benefit from reading this deeply encouraging book. My
only quibble is with the sometimes redundant recaps and “action summaries” that
conclude every chapter, which seem to have become de rigueur in business books.
Leaving it to people to imagine how they might apply what they have learned
instead of providing templates for every step might enrich how readers
interpret a book’s insights.
The
Pose of Power
Amy Cuddy is a Harvard Business School
professor and social psychologist with an engagingly informal writing style, a
compelling personal story, and a talent for ferreting out endless research
studies in support of her thesis: that personal presence is a key to success in
virtually any endeavor and that even the most nervous and insecure can learn
how to comfortably project it.
There’s been an increased interest in
leadership presence over the last few years, perhaps because simply being
present has become one of the chief executive obstacles in our highly
distracting 24/7 culture. The devices with which we constantly interact virtually
require our minds to be in two (or more) places at once, making it impossible
to fully inhabit the present moment. A frantic air of distraction hardly
conveys leadership. Indeed, many positional leaders seem so preternaturally
relaxed only because they are able to outsource their technological
interactions. Reclaiming the capacity to communicate coherently and clearly,
and to be fully available for what is happening in the moment, has thus become
a way to hold ground and distinguish oneself as a leader.
What
is presence? In Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest
Challenges, Cuddy defines it as the state of being attuned to and able to
comfortably express our true thoughts, feelings, values, and potential. It is,
then, both an inside and an outside job. When we feel present, she notes, our
speech, facial expressions, postures, and movements are aligned, synchronized,
and focused: They add up. This harmony creates an internal–external
convergence, otherwise known as poise, that others read as trustworthy and
persuasive and that we ourselves experience as relaxed and calming.
But it’s tricky to achieve this state. Cuddy
notes that self-affirmation, one of the most frequently advocated techniques
for projecting confidence, is ineffective because it requires us to simply
affirm what we may not actually believe (“I’m going to be great!” “I’m a
winner!”). She cites numerous studies that confirm this. For example, social
researchers have failed to find any decrease in cortisol, the stress hormone,
in subjects who practice affirmations. The scientific literature bears out what
common sense suggests: You can’t talk or think yourself into believing
something you don’t actually believe.
You
can, however, act yourself into feeling confident even if you are
not. All you need is a clear and well-prepared message, control of your breath,
and a knowledge of what physical postures are helpful and what postures can
undermine you and betray your fear and feelings of powerlessness. Cuddy’s
ingenious ways of showing people how to perform their way into presence are
what made the TED talk that preceded her book a viral sensation. Having
experienced a serious brain injury when in college, Cuddy came to this
realization through painful personal learning. Her quest inspired her many
experiments aimed at discerning precisely what helps people become more
confident and forceful, and how they can feel powerful and able to influence
events.
For example, she demonstrates the mechanisms
that enable people who assume specific poses to become more relaxed, feel
stronger, and manifest those positives to others. Mind follows body, she notes,
because the body is continually sending information to the brain; this is also
why breathing exercises, which she advocates, calm the autonomic nervous
system. By practicing effective “power poses” — standing tall with arms akimbo,
leaning in when standing at a table, raising your arms in a wide V while preparing
for a speech, and in general being comfortable taking up space — even the
nervous can calm the hormone storm within and inhabit a more persuasive way of
being. Although deliberately practiced, the projected confidence is not
fake because you don’t simply manifest it, you also feel it: Your body sends
signals to your mind that you’re relaxed and in control.
This delightful book will be useful to anyone
seeking to project a more powerful and relaxed presence as well as to
leadership and development professionals looking for tools that can help their
clients. It also offers a compendium of research on topics relating to
presence, effective communication, and self-awareness. I do think the
accumulation of citations, and Cuddy’s habit of backing up even tangential
observations by referencing various studies, can start to wear on the reader.
Perhaps this is understandable, given that this is Cuddy’s first book and she’s
an academic. Still, it’s a promising, enlightening, and rewarding addition to
the literature of leadership.
The
Contrarian
Jeffrey
Pfeffer’s previous bestseller, Power: Why Some People Have It — and
Others Don’t(HarperBusiness), landed in 2010 like an icy blast amid the
soft-hued descriptions that had recently become prevalent of how power is used and
manifested in organizations. Thus did the Stanford Graduate School of Business
professor introduce himself to the wider public as a fierce contrarian and
realist in the Machiavellian mode. Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and
Careers One Truth at a Time is sure to fortify this reputation.
Pfeffer’s target in the new book is “the
leadership industry” — the authors, speakers, trainers, and consultants who
have, in his view, offered myths and fables that aim to inspire people but that
have little to do with how leadership is actually practiced. He also strongly
objects to leaders who collaborate on books or leadership development programs
(here’s looking at you, Jack Welch!) that whitewash their many faults and skim
over the terrible compromises they’ve made in pursuit of success. Such an
approach has set people up to feel disillusioned when leaders in their company
fail to exhibit socially popular traits, or when they themselves are penalized
or sidelined for trying to function as “servant leaders.”
Pfeffer
takes particularly sharp aim at values-laden advocacy that urges would-be
leaders to practice modesty, authenticity, truth telling, trust building, and
putting others first. Although these might be highly moral traits, they are
extremely rare among leaders, many of whom are narcissistic, put their own
interests first, mask their true intentions, and practice situational ethics.
It’s no coincidence that there are far more players than saints at the top of
organization charts. Pfeffer offers specific examples of a few leaders
who doengage in inclusive behaviors that benefit their organization
in the long term, such as Alison Davis-Blake, former dean of the Ross School of
Business at the University of Michigan, and Ken Thiry, CEO of DaVita, a kidney
dialysis provider. But such cases are, in his view, exceptions in a world where
those who are lionized for success can be dangerous to know.
Although
Pfeffer’s pessimism is relentless, Leadership BS offers a
useful and necessary corrective to leadership conversations that tend to become
untethered to reality in their anticipation of a nirvana where people in power
will all practice a kind of leadership Zen. And it is indeed noteworthy, as
Pfeffer points out, that despite increasing resources devoted to leadership
training and a strong market for leadership literature meant to motivate and
inspire, people in real organizations report unprecedented levels of
dissatisfaction and even misery, and are highly critical of the behavior of
their bosses.
The spread of highly demanding, even
invasive, technologies is no doubt partly to blame. But many organizational
cultures have in effect become toxic, which is an indicator of purely human
failure; Pfeffer is not shy about citing examples. In our collective zeal to
inspire, we cause people to bring unrealistic expectations to their jobs and so
set them up either to fail or to become corrosively cynical. He is especially
scathing about the recent vogue for “authentic leadership,” worrying that
by urging people to share their true responses rather than strategically
assessing situations and adapting their behavior accordingly, we are telling
them fairy stories about what is expected at leadership levels.
Pfeffer’s disdain for the role of
storytelling as opposed to rigorous scientific investigation of how people
actually lead suggests he has little tolerance for approaches that view
leadership as an art or interpretive methods that seek to find a moral in the
kind of narratives that people find helpful in their daily lives. To Pfeffer,
storytelling is essentially a con. The reality that stories have been an
artifact throughout human history and make up a formative cultural expression
cuts little ice with this cold-eyed observer. Yet his unrelenting skepticism is
expressed with wit, and his style is graceful and lively.
Pfeffer intends his work to be provocative,
and he succeeds significantly. And as the other authors of this year’s crop of
useful volumes point out, there is a big gap between much leadership advice —
prescriptive, exhortatory, and aspirational — and how people actually
experience their leaders. If we can’t muster up the presence of mind to
recognize this state of affairs, we have little chance of learning better
leadership.
by Sally Helgesen
http://www.strategy-business.com/article/Best-Business-Books-2016-Talent-Leadership
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