How to Cultivate Leadership That Is Honed to Solve Problems
Achieve
breakthroughs by bringing together experts who love challenges.
In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013,
the terrorists responsible for that act took the life of a police officer, Sean
Collier, who worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Those
who knew and loved him at MIT resolved to commemorate his memory. J. Meejin
Yoon, head of MIT’s department of architecture, designed a memorial to honor
Collier’s love of the outdoors and spirit of service, while reflecting the
university community he served. The memorial is composed of massive interlocking
granite blocks. Making them stand up required a feat of engineering that pushed
the technical limits of the material. A multidisciplinary group assembled to
figure out how to complete the project. The group included faculty, students,
and staff with expertise in architecture, construction, engineering, and
masonry, as well as consulting experts in structural and civil engineering,
landscape architecture, and lighting design. No one person directed the project
from start to finish; instead, teams stepped up and stepped out, forming for
just as long as their expertise was needed. The Collier Memorial was unveiled on April 29, 2015, just a few days
after the second anniversary of the officer’s death. It stands today on MIT’s
campus as a tribute to a life given in service to a community that rises to
meet challenges.
When a collaborative project like the Collier
Memorial comes to fruition, it might seem to happen without leaders. But in
reality, the many leaders involved were following a model of leadership that is
hard to spot until you know how to look for it. We call this approach
challenge-driven leadership. These leaders are propelled by the intrinsic
desire to solve problems and meet challenges creatively. They are not motivated
by the trappings of authority, status, or showmanship. They don’t particularly
want to lead, and they certainly don’t want to be led. But they excel at
choreographing and directing the work of others, because their expert knowledge
enables them to spot opportunities to innovate in a way that cannot be done by
working alone.
Challenge-driven leadership is not right for
every situation. But where innovation and entrepreneurship are required — and
in particular where developing a solution requires drawing together diverse
talents and perspectives to discover novel approaches — it tends to work well.
No wonder we find it in many places where people are dealing with “wicked
problems,” a term coined in 1967 by design theorist Horst Rittel that refers to
broad challenges with no obvious solutions. This is the kind of leadership that
many companies, government agencies, and nonprofits would do well to recognize
and cultivate.
Anti-Leadership Leadership
When we first encountered challenge-driven
leadership, we were looking for something that might explain MIT’s unique
impact. MIT-educated people create enormous economic value, on top of their
constant contributions to basic science and technology development. According
to the Kauffman Foundation, MIT alumni have launched more than 30,200 active
companies, employing roughly 4.6 million people and generating roughly US$1.9
trillion in annual revenues. If these alumni made up a single nation’s business
community, it would land between the world’s ninth-largest GDP, Russia ($2.1
trillion), and the 10th-largest, India ($1.9 trillion). Beyond the impressive
statistics, we saw evidence on a daily basis of interesting, high-impact work
conducted by teams at or connected with the school. Yet MIT isn’t often thought
of as a breeding ground for leaders of large enterprises the way Harvard and GE
are. Clearly, big things get accomplished here in a way people don’t recognize
as traditional leadership.
We ultimately found that there is in fact a
distinctive kind of leadership taking place at many levels of MIT, evident
everywhere from student projects to faculty startups to alumni enterprises. It
is based, in part, on the personal qualities that MIT people share. Many arrive
as introverts, relative outliers in their past environments, and find joy in
becoming part of a community of people more like themselves — those who love
science and technology, and who hold the same deep curiosity to solve the
planet’s mysteries. But there’s more to challenge-driven leadership than just a
scientific personality; it’s also evident in the arts, among many
entrepreneurs, and in social ventures. MIT happens to be one place where the
conditions are ripe for challenge-driven leadership to emerge, and is thus a
good launching point for observations and hypotheses about it.
Studying
leadership at MIT is a little like looking for dark matter in the cosmos. The
evidence for it may exist, but it isn’t disposed to reveal itself. Many MIT people
don’t even like the word leader, and don’t show any eagerness to
apply it to themselves. Dava Newman,
who is the Apollo Professor of Astronautics and Engineering Systems at the
school and also the former deputy administrator of NASA, puts it this way:
“They’re very comfortable in their skin” as technologists, mathematicians, and
so forth, but giving them the label of leader “might be a
little shocking to them.” Those jockeying for leadership roles are often seen
at MIT as ambitious, self-promoting, political, and power hungry — not as
committed to making progress toward goals.
If you are an executive seeking a similar
level of of challenge-driven leadership, how should you cultivate it? You have
to create conditions under which it would flourish. Do this routinely, and you
will develop your company’s capacity for ongoing, high-impact innovation. Below
we spell out the factors that we believe, on the basis of our interviews and
observations, can make the most difference.
A Problem-Solving Ethos
Recently, a group of leaders from another
renowned university visited with MIT faculty, looking for insights on how to
spark the boundary-spanning innovation that seems to happen so naturally in
Cambridge. The visiting school’s dean asked, “What does it take to get that
magic? How much money do we have to invest? Do we need to dedicate a space?”
The MIT faculty shook their heads, but seemed unable to name the secret — until
one said, “You have to start with really hard, edgy, cool problems.”
If people at MIT don’t want to be leaders,
then what do they aspire to? Problem solving wins them prestige and brings them
satisfaction. They recognize the value of being generally knowledgeable and
well educated, but they pride themselves most on their deep expertise in
particular areas. They don’t want to delegate their most creative, in-depth,
specialized work, so they take on the burden of generalist leadership
reluctantly, and cede it readily. Leadership becomes an intermittent activity,
in which people with enthusiasm and expertise step up as needed, and readily
step out when, considering the needs of the project, another team member’s
strengths become more central. One student put it this way: “A lot of times
when people…hold leadership positions here at MIT, it’s not that they
necessarily want to, but…they feel like they have to. [They’re] personally
motivated for an idea.”
Take
the Hyperloop project, which formed after the firm SpaceX announced it would
give a prize to the university team that could design a critical component of a
new high-speed transportation system envisioned by Elon Musk. For the MIT team’s “pod”
to win, it had to have adequate speed, braking, stability, and levitation. That
demanded students in aeronautics, mechanical engineering, electrical
engineering, and computer science, all tackling the problem together. After the
team won the competition, leader John Mayo described to a Boston Herald reporter
why they had been motivated to work so hard together. “Hyperloop has the
ability to have a good impact on the environment…and just advance physical
transportation in general,” he said. “That’s why we go to school, [to] meet
challenges and solve problems.”
MIT faculty member Rebecca Saxe, who conducts
groundbreaking research on brain function and resilience, said her most
effective colleagues are those who “don’t say, ‘You’re crazy.’ They say, ‘OK,
when do we start?’” Challenges are cherished at MIT because they offer
opportunities to test and prove one’s skill and push the boundaries of what is
possible. Presented with some barely achievable objective, people dive in to
“work the problem,” and the more wicked the problem the better. The iconic
tradition of MIT, the hack, captures this in microcosm. Pulling off a stunt
like putting a police cruiser on top of the MIT dome is anti-authoritarian, yet
it requires leadership. Understand the joy MIT folks take in the ingenious
solution and you begin to see the school’s ubiquitous “hackathons” in a new
light. These events are not invitations to egomaniacal eggheads to trounce
their peers. The real opponent is the previous level of capability someone brought
to bear on a similar problem.
More than just tolerating hacks, the school
encourages practical application of knowledge outside the classroom in ways
that have lasting impact. It celebrates and provides support for
student-initiated efforts such as the MIT electric vehicle team. Its faculty
launch startups and involve students as interns and employees.
The
problem-solving ethos doesn’t fade with financial or worldly success. When
Google bought the Israeli navigation app company Waze for more than $1 billion,
it constituted one of the biggest “exits” for startup investors in Israeli
history. “On the one hand it is a great feeling,” Waze cofounder Uri
Levine told a group of MIT students and
entrepreneurs. “On the other — they took away my baby!”
Levine added that he has had other ventures in the past and expects more
problem-solving ideas will come to him in the future. “The exit is not what
drives an entrepreneur,” he said. “Rather, it is the tremendous urge for change
and challenge.”
Challenge-Driven
Talent Strategies
If you want to foster challenge-driven
leadership, you can’t treat people purely as “human resources,” placed by
budget allocation into any spot that will have them, and motivated with
incentives to take on work that does not intrinsically interest them. An
effective challenge-driven talent strategy focuses on spotting the right people
for a project and attracting them to it, rather than on motivating and
developing people you have been handed through a budget allocation process.
MIT
alumnus Drew Houston — who cofounded Dropbox, a $10 billion file transfer and
sharing company, with fellow MIT-trained computer scientist Arash Ferdowsi —
shared his thoughts on talent recruiting with MIT Technology Review:
“First, you have to keep inventory of the best people you or your team has ever
worked with.” Then it’s a matter of getting them intrigued with the problems
you are working on. “You introduce them to the company, and you sort of
tastefully educate them on everything that’s going on in the company.” At
Dropbox, he says, there are “a bunch of reasons” for their excitement about
their projects. “After we explain it to them, it’s pretty easy to get other
people excited, too.”
Recruiting in a challenge-driven leadership
model comes down to a constant search for people with problem-solving passion
and ingenuity. Creating the conditions for challenge-driven leadership starts
with bringing in a critical mass of people who are intrinsically motivated to
hone their skills and work the problem. This is the quality that Amazon founder
Jeff Bezos told friends he valued in his wife Mackenzie: “[She’s] a woman who
could get me out of a Third World prison. Life’s too short to hang out with
people who aren’t resourceful.”
NASA’s
Jet Propulsion Laboratory is another place where this sort of talent is at a
premium. Adam Steltzner, a well-known JPL engineer who was part of the project
to build the Curiosity rover that landed on Mars, said that
when recruiting, he looks for “the right kind of crazy:” extreme, maybe even
obsessive, dedicated to the end result.
Having assembled the right people, you must
allow these individuals to keep practicing their problem-solving skills and
fueling their passion for challenges. A winning organizational structure allows
people to move fluidly from project to project, and in and out of leadership
roles. Even better are structures that invite people to put themselves forward
to work on the challenges that inspire them most, rather than being assigned to
top-down funded projects that need their skills.
This principle applies even to entry-level
employees. When Newman connects MIT students with internships, she insists that
companies present interns with meaningful, technically difficult problems. “I
advise SpaceX or wherever to just please give [our students] problems you think
they can’t solve.… Don’t give them run-of-the-mill work as the low engineer on
the totem pole. They may never come back to your industry.” Indeed, if a
project doesn’t attract anyone, then maybe leaders should ask: Is that project
really worth doing?
Talent
development for challenge-driven leaders should focus on creating what Ideo CEO
Tim Brown calls “T-shaped” contributors: people who can go deep in their
particular, vertical specialty while maintaining a high-level understanding of
other fields — and who can make connections between the two. This has serious
implications for talent development. Development should focus more on
developing singular strengths, and less on transitioning people from being
individual contributors to being generalist managers. One person we interviewed
used the phrase “Jedis in training” to describe the ongoing process of honing
skills. In the Star Wars film franchise (which is, of course,
popular at MIT), a qualified knight must master a series of skills, not just
one, and each of them with deep proficiency.
In a challenge-driven culture, it’s a given
that the individuals who exercise leadership can be imperfect — idiosyncratic,
eccentric, lopsided in abilities — and still be effective. They succeed despite
their shortcomings because they are trusted, both for their essential
competence and for their intentions. It helps, too, that these leaders are not
in positions of authority for very long. Their bundle of attributes, helpful
and not so helpful, can be borne; it won’t last forever. (In a few cases,
however, individuals have led so many teams so successfully that they are drawn
to taking that role more permanently.)
Teaming on the Fly
To be
sure, staying at the forefront as a specialist requires an investment of time
that makes it very hard to develop additional strengths. We heard this in
an iLead talk from
Vivienne Ming, cofounder of machine learning company Socos and a visiting scholar at UC
Berkeley’s Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience. “I’ll be blunt,” she
said, when asked about her leadership style, during her presentation at
the MIT Leadership Center. “I’m
a pretty mediocre manager. I try to do the right things, but I’m much more
focused on problems than I am on people, and that’s not always that healthy.”
Her own strengths, she said, were in creative problem solving, “all the way
down to writing the code myself.” And like other challenge-driven leaders, she
was unwilling to give up that direct involvement.
To operate effectively at a larger scale
while continuing to practice and hone her skills as an individual contributor,
Ming has mastered the art of assembling teams of contributors. “For a long
time, I tried to be the whole package. I put a lot of energy into making
certain that I was shepherding everyone along, doing all the right things for
my teams. Then I realized,” she said, “if I can get some people who are really
good at the things that I’m not, then I can focus on my strengths.”
Beyond specialized proficiency, the right
people also master three general attributes. First, they gain the ability to
recognize, using a well-informed understanding of the field, when a previously
intractable problem can be tackled. Second, they hone the ability to
communicate that vision, opening other people’s eyes to the challenge’s world-changing
promise. Third, they acquire the ability to size up other potential
contributors’ disparate strengths and to assemble a team wherein every
individual offers “superpower” skills.
Because such teams routinely organize
themselves, people do not expect to follow others indefinitely. Teams usually
disband after the successful conclusion of the mission. In a permanent group, a
leader is expected to delegate assignments and design incentives for people to
do work they would not otherwise find compelling. But in a team made up of
challenge-driven leaders, the key abilities to acquire are identifying cool
problems, intriguing and inspiring others who might want to be part of the
solution, and collaboratively assessing how the problem might be solved, in
light of state-of-the-art technologies and understanding.
At
MIT, this sort of self-organizing collaboration is manifest everywhere. As new
undergraduates arrive at the school, they rapidly discover that it is
impossible to succeed solo. Undergraduate study groups form immediately and
spontaneously in the face of MIT’s infamous “p-sets” (problem sets), which are
homework assignments with four or five challenging problems in which, as one student blogger wrote, “a 15-word-long question might turn out to be an
hour-long mindbender.” Putting first-year students and sophomores through
an extraordinarily hard process forces humility and compels them to rely on the
strengths of other people. It’s the intellectual equivalent of Marine Corps
boot camp — the individual finds his or her limits, and viscerally discovers
the value of working in a team.
A
Challenge-Driven Way of Life
The
final condition we found that could make a significant difference in
cultivating challenge-driven leadership involves transcending the immediate
picture. One individual who exemplifies all the qualities of the leaders we’ve
described above is biomedicine and nanotechnology researcher Jeff Karp. Karp
leads the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, a joint Harvard–MIT project that churns
out a steady stream of important medical innovations, many involving
bioinspiration, or taking cues from nature’s solutions to analogous problems.
For example, Karp developed an adhesive for patching holes in the heart (often
in newborns with congenital defects) that replicates properties from snails and
slugs to maintain its grip on wet tissue while accommodating the growth of the
organ. In 2015, Boston Business Journal named Karp one of its
“40 Under 40” leaders, crediting him with an outsized impact on the region’s
economic and civic health.
Like other challenge-driven leaders, Karp
identifies himself more as a problem-solver than as a leader of people. When
asked why talented people want to work with him, he credits the intriguing
challenge of the work, rather than any charismatic presence or power-endowed
position of his own. But he also, significantly, mentions how critical it is to
have a clear design process for helping people easily move from idea to product
and back to new idea. He has learned to repeat the challenge-driven leadership
process in an organizational setting.
Experienced
challenge-driven leaders develop a bigger-picture, longer-term perspective that
transcends the expediencies of the moment. Amar Bose, an MIT professor and the
renowned acoustic technologist behind Bose Corporation, epitomized this
perspective. One of his former students, Ken Jacob, joined the company and,
after working on it for 10 years with a team of five engineers, created a
breakthrough software program called Bose Auditioner, used to model and correct acoustic problems. Jacob
later learned to his amazement that Bose had doubted, for most of that time,
that the project could achieve its goals. But he allowed the project to
continue nonetheless. Bose later explained himself to Popular Science,
saying “the problem was tough enough and the team was talented enough that I
thought their research would yield something good. Besides,
Ken was so passionate about his idea that I couldn’t bring myself to hold him
back.”
Challenge-driven leadership is especially
well suited to initiatives and enterprises trying to make headway against
seriously hard, big, and previously intractable problems. It isn’t the only
approach suitable for guiding an organization, or the best in every situation. Indeed,
many challenge-driven leaders are weak in such domains as demonstrating
emotional intelligence, building consensus, or supporting purely institutional
objectives. If the goal is to scale up an already well-designed business, or to
meet quarterly financial goals with no surprises, other leadership styles might
fit better. Nonetheless, having studied them so thoroughly, we’re inclined to
believe the world could use more challenge-driven leaders.
So call it anti-leader leadership if you
want. It’s a kind of leadership made for pushing boundaries — technical,
scientific, organizational, artistic. And in the end, it’s a kind of leadership
that consistently produces results. A medical procedure that challenged
conventional wisdom is saving lives. A commercial venture has been launched. A
gravity-defying memorial now stands where none stood before. Leadership must
have happened somewhere in there, but for us, it followed naturally from the
challenge
by Deborah Ancona and Hal Gregersen
https://www.strategy-business.com/article/How-to-Cultivate-Leadership-That-Is-Honed-to-Solve-Problems?gko=6eab0&utm_source=itw&utm_medium=20171031&utm_campaign=resp
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