Exactly what does it take to lead people? And what do successful leaders do that unsuccessful leaders don't?
These two questions—simple in their phrasing but complex in their answers—are at the fault line of a discussion in the blogosphere this week.
The discussion focuses on CEOs, but the sum and substance of the discussion can apply to leaders everywhere. If you are attempting to bring about change through the discretionary effort of other people, in any organization anywhere, you will do yourself a favor by listening in.
After years of research on the real characteristics and abilities of CEOs, three business-school professors published their findings in an academic journal last summer. Perhaps someone, somewhere, was paying attention. But no one talked about it until Tuesday, when New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote about the treatise and several hundred readers quickly fulminated in response
In a nutshell, the professors asserted that successful CEOs were more likely to be coolly analytical than fervently emotional, more likely to be aggressive and hard-charging than social and collegial, more likely to be loners than team players, more likely to be self-absorbed than self-aware. Indeed, the authors come close to saying that the post-modern executive who looks and sounds like a cheerful politician is likely to be ineffective as a CEO.
President Coolidge, Meet Detective Callahan
Now this portrait of a cross between Calvin Coolidge and Harry Callahan in the corner office may hardly surprise you. But it flies in the face of two decades of important work by trail-blazing thinkers such as Jim Collins in Good to Great; John Kotter in Leading Change and The Heart of Change; Daniel Goleman in Emotional Intelligence; Warren Bennis in On Becoming a Leader, and Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner in The Leadership Challenge, not to mention all those writers (most notably Robert K. Greenleaf and John C. Maxwell) who champion the magical power of servant leadership.
To one degree or another, all of them have found an emotional aspect of leadership, a common search for meaning, and an exploration of purpose and intentionality to be profoundly powerful. That is all the more true now, in a cynical age.
In his column, Brooks blithely ignored all these writers and unquestioningly endorsed the research as he summarized and presented it, which was scarcely the whole of it. Moreover, he then took liberties in a further interpretation that just wasn’t sustainable. Fortunately, many bloggers and even Thursday’s letters to the editor in the Times demonstrated that the public isn’t so easily cowed.
Beware Biases Clothed As Research
On purchasing and downloading the entire study, I found it self-limiting in key respects, though duly decorated with pages of regressions and factor analysis. I have learned that academic studies often fall on the sword of their own design, which may well be flawed or small or both.
First, as the study’s authors acknowledge but Brooks ignores, the research was confined to the CEOs of privately held companies with a recent infusion of venture capital or private equity. That probably biases the findings in favor of small-cap and mid-cap companies without well-defined cultures and typically with short time frames for hard returns to investors or at least positive trend lines.
Second, unless I missed something, there is no analysis of characteristics and abilities associated with poor performance. We are left to presume that the absence or opposite of the identified traits will necessarily lead to failure, but we have no data or explicit conclusions in that direction. A personal friend of mine was CEO of two high-tech companies, both of which went bust. She had the traits the authors describe in spades. Granted, that is merely singly experiential and anecdotal, but it raises a question of negative correlation.
Third, the definition of high performance presumably has only the one dimension of profitability. Nothing is said to the contrary, that I could see. It is axiomatic that every company must be profitable, but to judge a CEO's performance by that metric alone begs some pretty big questions. As Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton argue in The Balanced Scorecard, using profitability as your sole measure of success is a little like flying an airplane with only a single gauge—say, for air speed, and no indicators for fuel or altitude or location or air pressure.
Balancing the Scorecard
In the Twenty-first Century, to the chagrin of Milton Friedman and perhaps even the frustration of Peter Drucker, companies cannot focus on profitability to the neglect of everything else. Other financial metrics such as revenue growth, return on equity, inventory turns, debt ratios, and more are critical measures of performance.
Moreover, companies have many other stakeholders beyond equity investors. Apart from financial metrics, companies are judged by the quality of their products and by their treatment of employees, their service to customers, their compliance with the law, their respect for diversity and privacy, their engagement and retention of staff, their advertising and packaging, their lobbying and public policy, the safety and cleanliness of their facilities, their research and innovation, and ultimately their transparency and contribution to society. All that was true a decade or two ago, but it is especially true now.
Missing the bar on any of these metrics, and especially on several or more, is enough to send a CEO home for good, as many of them have learned over the last five or ten years. By extension, we can hypothesize that leaders must operate in multiple frames of reference.
Having watched and worked with senior leaders quite a bit, I can attest to the fact that the most successful among them are fully realized human beings. Those who aren't send powerful signals to stay away.
My guess is that the scholars who produced this research may be on the right track, but only as far as they looked. They just didn’t look very far, and they certainly didn’t think very deeply. As for the columnist, whose work I generally respect, he should have taken a little more time on this one.
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