Why Most Leaders Are Replaceable (Even Thomas Jefferson)
Leaders rarely make a lasting impact
on their organizations—even the really, really good ones. Then out of the blue
comes a Churchill. Gautam Mukunda discusses his new book, Indispensable:
When Leaders Really Matter.
Harvard Business School
Assistant Professor Gautam Mukunda leads off his new book, Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter, with the results of social science research that executives
may wish not to consider: individual leaders rarely make a difference.
Although many heads of organizations
would like to think of themselves as truly indispensable—impact makers, history
movers, culture changers—few reach the bar set by Steve Jobs, Napoleon, or
Martin Luther King Jr., Mukunda says. (Even some people you might think would
be shoo-ins for the indispensable category don't make Mukunda's cut, including
Thomas Jefferson and Jack Welch. More on them later.)
Under most circumstances, a leader
is elected or appointed. And it makes no difference who ends up in power so
long as the person is experienced and is hired through the structured processes
that most organizations use to vet everyone from CEOs to military officers to
presidential candidates, Mukunda says.
"Are individual leaders truly
responsible for the end result, or do they just happen to be there, for better
or worse?" Mukunda asks. "We revere Lincoln. He must matter. But it's
not so clear that that this is the case, and it is certainly not clear that
every leader matters."
Out
of the blue
Every once in a while, though,
someone comes to power who is inexperienced or appointed in an unusual way. The
incumbent dies suddenly, for example. Or a country experiences extreme
historical circumstances. It's this person who has the potential to
become an unconventional, powerful leader—a Hitler, perhaps, but maybe a
Winston Churchill.
These people—total extremes on both
ends—are usually "unfiltered" leaders, those who are unproven in
their area of leadership, Mukunda explains. They are also, in most cases, the
ones who matter when history is written.
“Unfiltered leaders are much more likely to have a high
impact”
"Unfiltered leaders are much
more likely to have a high impact," Mukunda says. "Unfiltered leaders
will do extremely well or extremely poorly. Everything else boils out of
that."
In his research, Mukunda wanted to
identify "those particular individuals who were the right people, in the
right place, at the right time, to change history." By doing so, he hopes
to improve our understanding of contemporary leaders and "perhaps help us
choose better ones."
Mukunda knew he needed solid data to
answer the question of who mattered. So he made lists of US presidents and
British prime ministers that dated back to George Washington in 1789 and
Britain's Charles Grey in 1830. He noted how historians ranked them on
performance, how much political experience they had before entering office, and
how they got the top job.
The result was his Leader Filtration
Theory, or LFT, which states that a leader's impact can be predicted by his or
her career. The more unfiltered the leader, the larger the prospect of big
impact. The more a leader has relevant experience, the less chance of high
impact.
Filtering
a leader
There are three factors that social
scientists agree minimize the impact of leaders:
·
An external environment in which
responses of competitors limits the leader's discretion to act.
·
Internal organizational dynamics,
bureaucratic politics, or constituents' interests that leaders must respond to.
·
The selection systems used to pick
leaders, which he says homogenize the pool of potential CEOs and presidents.
These are especially important, Mukunda argues, because they preserve the
status quo and prevent incompetent or disturbed leaders from gaining power.
Take General Electric. What if GE's
board had picked someone other than Jack Welch as CEO? Would the company have
performed the same?
Most likely, GE would have chosen
someone quite similar to Welch had he not accepted the job, Mukunda says.
Because of this, Mukunda calls Welch a leader of "low individual
impact." It's likely that another candidate chosen by GE management would
have performed nearly or as well as he did.
On the other end from low impact
leaders are those whom Mukunda terms "extremes." These people, who
slip through the cracks of conventional leadership filtering processes, are
more likely to be high-impact and make their mark on history "for better
or worse." The book studies both kinds of leadership through historical
cases that Mukunda teaches in his courses.
In the book, Mukunda classifies
every US president from George Washington to G.W. Bush as "filtered"
or "unfiltered" based on their experience in offices that would
prepare them for the presidency, and how they became president. A filtered
president is one with a high amount of relevant experience, an unfiltered one
with little or no such domain experience.
George Washington, as the first
president, was an unfiltered revolutionary leader. Teddy Roosevelt was
unfiltered, because he was a vice president who got the top job following the
assassination of William McKinley. John F. Kennedy was a filtered leader with
13 years in the House and Senate. George W. Bush was unfiltered, Mukunda says,
because he spent less than six years as governor and was boosted by family
connections.
Mukunda's findings support the LFT
theory that unfiltered presidents often turn up at the high and low ends—four
of the five highest ranked presidents and four of the five lowest ranked ones
were unfiltered.
In case studies he analyzes three
presidents and two prime ministers: Jefferson, whom he called "the hardest
possible case," Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Prime Ministers Winston
Churchill and Neville Chamberlain, comparing their approaches to decision-making
with people who plausibly could have been in their shoes.
Chamberlain is a perfect example of
"how a British prime minister reaches the top of the greasy pole" by
climbing the political system and serving as postmaster general, minister for
health, and chancellor for the exchequer before becoming PM. He was a filtered,
low-impact prime minister who never willingly stood up to Hitler. Churchill, on
the other hand, was widely considered a "failed, right-wing
politician," named prime minister because Halifax, Chamberlain's Foreign
Minister, didn't want the job, not because the king and the cabinet decided
that Churchill was the best choice.
"They didn't have any
alternatives," Mukunda says.
“We revere Lincoln. He must matter. But it’s not so clear
that that this is the case”
An unfiltered, extreme leader,
Churchill made history. "His energy, his talents, his indomitable courage,
his rhetorical abilities, and his rigidity and inflexibility were enormously
unlike the vast majority of politicians," Mukunda says.
On the other hand, there is Thomas
Jefferson, whom Mukunda argues had low impact, despite his success as a
filtered president. There were others who could have easily taken Jefferson's
place, including James Madison and John Adams. While Jefferson secured his
place in history with the critical Louisiana Purchase, Mukunda argues that
"no diplomatic virtuosity or intellectual brilliance was required…there is
nothing in the events surrounding it that suggests any normal president could
not or would not have done the same."
Results
may vary
These two cases—Jefferson and
Churchill —illustrate Mukunda's theory that a filtered leader can deliver
excellent results without being extreme, and an extreme leader can be a force
for great change.
Mukunda hopes future research will
expand the Leader Filtration Theory, which he believes can be applied by
companies trying to make better CEO choices—and even in evaluating presidential candidates.
The trick for a company or country
picking an extreme leader is to realize that it is a high-stakes gamble, and
that the candidates are difficult to evaluate—it happens over time as they are
observed leading and making decisions. In the book Mukunda offers specific ways
to avoid making a poor candidate choice:
·
Avoid deceptive signals. Someone who
has ridden family wealth to high office, for example, may have accomplished
less than meets the eye.
·
Match the leader's characteristics
to your situation and remove them from power when situations change.
·
Take seriously the statements made
by unfiltered leaders before they take power.
·
Choose unfiltered leaders who have
been successful filtered leaders in other contexts.
·
Shape the position to fit the leader
you choose.
Want to see an unfiltered leader in
action? Check out the mercurial ups and downs of the nearest startup.
"They're always unfiltered," Mukunda says. "In pretty much every
case the personal quirks of the entrepreneur will have a huge impact."
Kim Girard is a freelance writer based in Brookline, Massachusetts.http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/7038.html?wknews=09052012
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