Shifts in Approaches to Leadership

In the August 17, 2009, edition of BusinessWeek, Jack and Suzy Welch’s long-running backpage commentary had been replaced by the sage words of Henry Mintzberg, a management professor at McGill and author of numerous excellent books on the topics of management and leadership. The move brought forth wonderful ideas but also signaled some important changes that are afoot in the study and understanding of leadership in the business world.

In contrast to Jack and Suzy Welch, Henry Mintzberg is a very different kind of authority on leadership. He has always been a scholar and educator that promoted deep thinking about the hard work of organizational structure, process, the right (limited) role for strategic planning, and how to create the right kinds of culture. In addition, he has always struck me as being among the most humble of gurus. One time, several years ago, I had the honor of sharing the stage with him at some event in China; I was there to give a talk about some aspect of economic development in China and he was there to get some quite significant honor. We spent some of the next day together and I found him to be an engaged, intellectually curious, and unassuming figure, especially given his international prominence.

As for substance, Mintzberg’s views voiced in the BusinessWeek commentary, which not surprisingly reflect his larger body of work, are a breath of fresh air. The article, entitled “We’re Overled and Undermanaged: Too many ‘leaders’ fancy themselves above the messy, but crucial, work of managing,” is an excellent treatment of how we need to shift our thinking in how we teach, nurture, train and what we emphasize for leaders. Too often, educators, consultants, corporate boards, and CEOs themselves emphasize the issues of charisma, courage, and vision at the expense of the difficult day-to-day work of mentoring, designing organizational processes, analyzing the structure of the organization, and working toward building the right organizational culture. As Minzberg notes “CEOs [today]… don’t manage so much as deem – pronouncing performance targets… that are supposed to be met by whomever is doing the real managing.” Minzberg goes on to remind us that “American enterprise, so admired around the globe, was not built by the currently fashionable ‘heroic’ leadership but with leaders tangibly engaged in managing – and without today’s bonuses.” There are many ways to think about leadership, but following Minzberg, in my own approach to teaching executives and MBA students, I place much more emphasis on analysis, organizational design and the creation of a culture of innovation. Building a lasting culture of creativity, innovation, and passion that transcends a given leader is the ultimate expression of excellent leadership. But how is this achieved? How do leaders construct truly innovative organizations? I focus below on 3; they are surely many more. But the main thing to notice here is that these are qualities that are as much about rolling up your sleeves and doing the hard work of analyzing environments (and ourselves) and building appropriate organizational processes that align with them.

Understanding Complexity--It is a little too easy to take pot-shots at the fields of strategy and economics right now, but it is relevant for our discussion here, so I must. For three decades, economists have been content to analyze the world through theoretical mathematical models, which are impressively complex in terms of math but horribly simplistic in their assumptions about the real world. Such approaches contributed greatly to the accounting scandals of 2000-01 and the economic meltdown of 2008. However, truly creative leaders recognize that complexity is something to be cherished, examined, analyzed for opportunities; it is not something to be assumed away for the elegance of a theoretical mathematical model. Complexity exists on two levels: (1) the macro-level complexity of the environment in which the organization is embedded; and (2) the micro-level complexity of the human dynamics on which the organization is built. Let's face it: organizations are messy; they are human, organic, political, rife with power struggles and inequalities; and the leaders that face and embrace this fact perform better than those who want to simplify the world and pretend those power struggles or politics don't exist in their organizations. Similarly, those that believe you can simplify the world, that global complexity can be captured in abstract theoretical modeling, are simply missing what is happening in the global economy today.

Analysis and Alignment--In 1977, Harvard Business School Professor, Abraham Zaleznik, set a new course for the field of leadership when he penned the essay “Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?” From that point forward, the field of leadership has been defined around individual personality traits, as visionary, intuitive, inspiring individuals who understand work and interpersonal relationships differently than other people do. What was lost in the personal and individualistic turn in leadership was the importance analysis. In our approach to creative leadership, we shift the discussion away from individualistic traits like charisma, personality, and style. Instead, we emphasize an analytical approach to organizational design focusing on alignment—creating harmony among all of the organization’s component parts. Truly creative leaders do not lead by intuition or charisma but instead by having the patience to take a step back and think analytically about how the complex parts of their organizations fit together. They think deeply and carefully about how to put the structures in place that will produce a culture of innovation and change.

Introspection--Ultimately, the most difficult, yet also the most important, thing for leaders is knowing themselves: knowing their strengths; knowing their weaknesses; knowing their style; knowing the things that tend to set them off or respond in certain (unproductive ways); and being honest about these qualities. The best leaders surround themselves with people who can help to compensate for and balance their qualities.

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The fact that BusinessWeek replaced Jack and Suzy Welch with Professor Minzberg should probably not be taken as some fundamental shift in business reporting. Who knows, perhaps it is just a one-week guest appearance. Nor is this a dramatically new approach to these issues: scholars like Mintzberg, Mike Tushman, Richie Freedman, and many others have been making this case for years, but in recent years, it seems that the charismatic and heroic leader approach has been winning at least in the popular media and with corporate boards (witness the many ridiculous appointments of CEOs to Fortune 500 companies in the last 10 years). That is why we need to think more about what it takes to be a good leader in today's global economy, and Minzberg's voice is a welcome addition to this conversation (especially in venues like BusinessWeek). It is easy to imagine all the great individual qualities that might help leaders to be effective (courage, charisma, vision). And it is all too often the case that prescriptions for leadership focus on changing individual personalities. But the real key to effective leadership is a deep analytical understanding of the organizations these individuals run; having the courage to embrace the complexity of the world in which the organization is embedded; having the courage understand who you are as a leader and surround yourself with individuals who will complement and compensate for your weaknesses; and having the wisdom to listen to those people. Leadership is hard work and it is much less about powerful speeches than it is about rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty in the details of the organization you are leading.