Heroic Leadership Read online

  CHAPTER 2

  What Leaders Do

  ookstore shelves today groan with what sometimes resemble indoctrination manuals for some bewildering talismanic cult. Want to become a better leader? Consult any of the current works unlocking the mysteries of the leadership and management arts by revealing "7 miracles," "12 simple secrets," "13 fatal errors," "14 powerful techniques," "21 irrefutable laws," "30 truths," "101 biggest mistakes," and "1001 ways."

  We've long known what "outputs" we want leaders to deliver. Harvard Business School professor John Kotter, for more than thirty years a leading commentator on corporate management practices, offers as good and concise a working summary as any of what we think of as a leader's duties:

  • Establishing direction: developing a vision of the futureoften the distant future-and strategies for producing the changes needed to achieve that vision

  • Aligning people: communicating direction in words and deeds to all those whose cooperation may be needed so as to influence the creation of teams and coalitions that understand the vision and strategies and that accept their validity

  • Motivating and inspiring: energizing people to overcome major political, bureaucratic, and resource barriers to change by satisfying basic, but often unfulfilled, human needs.

  • [And largely as a result of these first three roles:] Produc[ing] change, often to a dramatic degreel

  In other words, the leader figures out where we need to go, points us in the right direction, gets us to agree that we need to get there, and rallies us through the inevitable obstacles that separate us from the promised land.

  We know what we think leaders should do, and we know that we have been experiencing a leadership deficit for more than two decades.

  So we're pretty sure we know what leadership looks like, and we can pretty easily compile a thousand-item checklist of "secrets," "irrefutable laws," and assorted pointers that promise to turn any one of us into effective leaders. Yet oddly enough, given all we think we know, no one seems to believe that our society has the broad leadership it needs. Again Kotter, offering a sorry indictment: "I am completely convinced that most organizations today lack the leadership they need. And the shortfall is often large. I'm not talking about a deficit of 10% but of 200%, 400%, or more in positions up and down the hierarchy." our hundred percent is a lot. Still, no critics derided Kotter for hyperbolism. No pundit has yet won prominence arguing the contrary, "don't worry be happy" vision that our companies and organizations are brimming with all the leadership they will ever need. The leadership deficit is widely accepted as real, not hype, and probably with good reason.

  So what do we know? We know what we think leaders should do, we know that we have been experiencing a leadership deficit for more than two decades, and we know that a steady stream of leadership prescriptions flows from a wide-open spigot. Yet we're still a tad shy-try 400 percent shy-of the leadership we need.

  THE JESUIT CONTRIBUTION TO LEADERSHIP WISDOM

  What does a collection of sixteenth-century priests possibly bring to this party?

  The Jesuit team doesn't tell us much we don't already know about what leaders do. Nor do they teach us anything about what leaders achieve.

  But they have a lot to say about who leaders are, how leaders live, and how they become leaders in the first place. In so doing, the Jesuits offer a leadership model that flows against the tide of most contemporary leadership models. It rejects quick-fix approaches that equate leadership with mere technique and tactics. Their approach scraps "command and control" models that rely on one great person to lead the rest. It finds leadership opportunities not just at work but also in the ordinary activities of everyday life. The Jesuit approach examines leadership through a very different prism, and refracted through that prism, leadership emerges in a very different light. Four differences stand out:

  • We're all leaders, and we're leading all the time, well or poorly.

  • Leadership springs from within. It's about who I am as much as what I do.

  • Leadership is not an act. It is my life, a way of living.

  • I never complete the task of becoming a leader. It's an ongoing process.

  We're all leaders, and we're leading all the time

  Harry Truman called leadership "the art of persuading people to do what they should have done in the first place." Good for Harry. But the early Jesuits do him one better. The job of Jesuit managers was not to persuade recruits what to do but to equip them with the skills to discern on their own what needed to be done.

  The Jesuit vision that each person possesses untapped leadership potential cuts against the grain of the corporate top-down model that continues to dominate thinking about who leaders are. Although corporate America is experiencing a leadership dearth, its leadership model has slowly insinuated itself into most notions of who leaders are. The stereotypical role models are those in charge: company presidents, generals, and coaches. The leader is the one who whips subordinates into the motivated frenzy that propelled Henry V's inspired, outnumbered soldiers "once more into the breach" for a glorious victory at Harfleur. Dramatic though such depictions may be, they are a bit insidious. They foster what might be called a "1 percent" model of leadership: 1 percent of the team, only 1 percent of the time. Yet the narrow focus on 1 percent of the team, the general, overlooks the challenges facing the other 99 percent, the troops. The even narrower focus on the 1 percent of the time the leader supposedly leads-the peak opportunity at battle's eve-ignores the other 99 percent of the opportunities he or she has every day to make a leadership impact. That's 1 percent of the chances to lead enjoyed by 1 percent of the potential leaders, or 1/10,000 of the leadership pie. Think of what's lost, and imagine the power of capturing that potential.

  The stereotypical role models are those in charge: company presidents, generals, and coaches.

  The early Jesuits were a little greedier and a little hungrier when leadership pie was served. Throwing aside the blinders that forced people to focus only on those in command as leaders, they developed every recruit to lead. They shunned "one great man" theories of leadership in order to focus on the other 99 percent of the potential leaders.

  Everyone is a leader, and everyone is leading all the timesometimes in immediate, dramatic, and obvious ways, more often in subtle, hard-to-measure ways, but leading nonetheless.

  All well and good for the Jesuits, but isn't "We're all leaders" mere feel-good sloganeering that conveniently defines away the very essence of leadership? After all, if everyone leads, no one follows, and without lots of followers there are no real leaders. "One great man" leadership theories may not be egalitarian, but they reflect the reality of leadership in the real world. Or do they? Most would agree that leaders influence others and produce change. But what kind of influence or change defines leadership? The company president's bold decision to merge will inevitably be praised as corporate leadership, as will his efforts to identify and develop his company's promising future leaders. Yet these are two completely different kinds of behavior. The merger creates immediate, material, and obvious impact, while developing subordinates is a subtle initiative that may not pay off for years. Yet few would have trouble recognizing both as displays of leadership, at least when it's the company president undertaking such initiatives.

  But if the president nurturing the company's future management is a leader, aren't they also leaders who years earlier taught these same rising corporate stars to read and write and think?

  If the general rallying hundreds of troops for a decisive engagement is a leader, aren't the parents who molded these same troops into conscientious, self-confident adults leaders as well?

  If the manager navigating colleagues through a work crisis is a leader, isn't the person who encourages a friend to tackle a difficult personal problem also a leader?

  In sum, who invented the yardstick that measures some as leaders and others as merely teachers, parents, friends, or colleagues? And what are the dividing line
s? Does one have to influence at least a hundred people at a time to be a leader? Or will fifty do? And if fifty, what about twenty, ten, or even a single person?

  And does a leader's impact have to become apparent within the hour? Or within a year? Are there not also leaders whose impact is barely perceptible within their own lifetimes but manifests itself a generation later through those they raised, taught, mentored, or coached?

  The confusion stems from an inappropriately narrow vision of leaders as only those who are in charge of others and who are making a transforming impact and who are doing it in short order. And the faster they do it, the more transforming it is, and the more people it affects, the hotter they register on the leadership thermometer.

  But the stereotype of top-down, immediate, all-transforming leadership is not the solution; it's the problem. If only those positioned to direct large teams are leaders, all the rest must be followers. And those labeled followers will inevitably act like followers, sapped of the energy and drive to seize their own leadership chances.

  Those labeled followers will inevitably act like followers, sapped of the energy and drive to seize their own leadership chances.

  The Jesuit model explodes the "one great man" model for the simple reason that everyone has influence, and everyone projects influence-good or bad, large or small-all the time. A leader all seizes of the available opportunities to influence and make an impact. Circumstances will present a few people with world-changing, definingmoment opportunities; most will enjoy no such bigtime opportunities in their lifetimes. Still, leadership is defined not by the scale of the opportunity but by the quality of the response. One cannot control all of one's circumstances, only one's responses to those circumstances.

  Leadership springs from within; it's about who I am as much as what I do

  Instead of rehashing well-worn tactical lists of what leaders do, the Jesuit approach focuses on who leaders are. No one ever became an effective leader by reading an instruction book, much less by parroting one-size-fits-all rules or maxims.

  Rather, a leader's most compelling leadership tool is who he or she is: a person who understands what he or she values and wants, who is anchored by certain principles, and who faces the world with a consistent outlook. Leadership behavior develops naturally once this internal foundation has been laid. If it hasn't been, mere technique can never compensate.

  A leader's greatest power is his or her personal vision, communicated by the example of his or her daily life. Vision in this sense refers not to vague messages and mottoes adopted from the corporate lexicon-"bringing good things to life" or being "the supermarket to the world"; instead, vision is intensely personal, the hard-won product of self-reflection: What do I care about? What do I want? How do I fit into the world?

  Leadership is defined not by the scale of the opportunity but by the quality of the response.

  To the chagrin of public relations gurus, company mission statements don't take root simply because they've been elegantly worded. They take root when subordinates see managers take a personal interest in the mission. Beating the competition comes alive for me not when I hear my manager parrot the goal but when I see his or her passionate commitment to winning. More simply, what springs from within makes the difference between talking the talk and walking the walk. Technique-how to spellbind a team, how to fashion long-term goals, how to establish objectives and win buy-in-can amplify vision, but it can never substitute for it.

  Leadership is not an act; it's a way of living

  Leadership is not a job, not a role one plays at work and then puts aside during the commute home in order to relax and enjoy real life. Rather, leadership is the leader's real life.

  The early Jesuits referred often to nuestro modo de proceder, "our way of proceeding," or in Americanese, "the way we do things." Certain behaviors fit nuestro modo; others didn't. No one ever tried to capture nuestro modo in writing, because no one could have and no one needed to. "Our way of proceeding" flowed from a worldview and priorities shared by all members of the Jesuit team. Their way of proceeding was a compass, not a checklist. If you know where you're heading, the compass is an infinitely more valuable instrument. And so it was for the Jesuits. Thrown into China's unfamiliar cultural terrain, a Jesuit found that the checklist of tactics that worked in Europe was useless to him in this foreign land. But his "compass"-his way of proceeding-served him well. By knowing what he valued and wanted to achieve, he oriented himself to the new environment, adapting confidently to unfamiliar circumstances.

  Technique-how to spellbind a team, how to fashion long-term goals, how to establish objectives and win buy-in-can amplify vision, but it can never substitute for it.

  Becoming a leader is an ongoing process of self-development

  The beguiling but misleading promise implicit in "seven steps to becoming a leader" is that one will actually become a leader by completing the steps. Anyone who has tried to lead oneself or a team knows that nothing could be less true. Personal leadership is a never-ending work in progress that draws on continually maturing self-understanding. The external environment evolves and personal circumstances change, as do personal priorities. Some personal strengths erode, even as opportunities arise to develop others. All these changes demand consistent balanced growth and evolution as a leader. For the weak leader, the ongoing process becomes a threat or a chore; a more attractive prospect is to arrive at some imaginary leadership plateau where one coasts and enjoys one's leadership status. In contrast, the strong leader relishes the opportunity to continue learning about self and the world and looks forward to new discoveries and interests.

  AN ODD LEADERSHIP DEFINITION COMPARED WITH OTHERS

  All the above makes Ignatius Loyola and his colleagues strange additions to the leadership bookshelf. They certainly look like those we call leaders today. And they do the things we expect leaders to do: innovate, take risks, and produce major change. They would have little trouble establishing their leadership bona fides.

  Still, they set themselves apart from the mainstream-sometimes uncomfortably so-by offering a unique vision of who leaders are and how they're molded. In our instant-gratification culture, there is something alluring about the prospect of buying a book before you board a plane in Chicago and arriving in New York a better leader. The Jesuit team offers no such handy promise. Their vision can't be distilled to mere technique; it comes with no ready-made list of tactics. They offer us direction but send us away with questions in place of pat, practical, and easily implemented answers. If all leadership is first self-leadership that springs from personal beliefs and attitudes, then each person must first decide what personal leadership legacy he or she wants to leave behind. If our leadership role is continually unfolding, we'll be making that decision more than once. And if we're influencing those around us all the time whether we realize it or not, we're usually not choosing our opportunities to lead; they're thrust upon us willy-nilly. Our only options are to respond well or to do a lousy job.

  But if these early Jesuits are leadership contrarians, they may also be better role models than what's usually served up to us-for the simple reason that their model was built for real people living real life in the real world. Consider, on the other hand, some of the gurus we've consulted for enlightened leadership advice as we embark on the third millennium.

  The general

  Attila the Hun, a.k.a. the "Scourge of God," has been celebrated in at least two leadership guides. No doubt, Attila deserves credit as a leader of sorts. He cobbled together a united Hun enterprise from disparate tribes roaming central Europe around A.D. 440. Moreover, he definitively "clarified" the Hun leadership structure by murdering his brother and coleader, Bleda. Secure in his authority, Attila articulated and pursued a clear strategic vision. His Hun horde rampaged Europe from the Rhine to the Caspian Sea, extorting tribute from hapless states in exchange for peace treaties terminating the pillage. He was probably the first entrepreneur to build a successful business on the pri
nciple that customers would pay him to stop providing his service.

  Attila's motivational powers must have been impressive, given what he asked his followers to endure. He drove the Huns against larger, better-equipped, technologically superior armies. If his team won, the spoils went largely to Attila and his inner circle. But if he lost, the bottom-rung Huns suffered the consequences disproportionately. When Romans, Franks, and Visigoths joined together to trounce the Huns at the Catalaunian Plains, Attila simply turned his horse around and headed home, leaving behind more than a hundred thousand dead Huns, proportionately one of the most horrifying death tolls in military history.

  Attila took this "heads, I win; tails, you lose" management philosophy to the grave: according to legend, those who buried him with his treasure hoard were summarily executed so that the gravesite would never be revealed and looted.

  Impressive though Attila's early extortionate forays may have been, one can hardly cite his Hun organization as a model of sustained excellence. After eight years of largely successful rampage, Attila lost his last two major campaigns, and the Hun dynasty began to slowly drift into eclipse even before his death.

  The insider turned management consultant

  Ignatius Loyola's historical contemporary Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) has been lionized in at least half a dozen leadership books.

  Six books. What did Machiavelli have that poor Loyola didn't? Certainly not leadership experience. True, Machiavelli's career started with promise. By age twenty-nine he was already a top bureaucrat in Florence; Loyola was forty-nine when he launched the Jesuits. But Machiavelli's inner-circle experience was embarrassingly short-lived. He was "downsized" while still in his early forties as soon as the famed Medici family reclaimed power in Florence. A year later he was briefly imprisoned under the probably unfounded suspicion that he was conspiring to overthrow them.