Chapter 16. The Newest Leadership Skills
Randall P. White and Philip Hodgson
Effective leadership is finding a good fit between behavior, context, and need. There is no one right way, no all-explaining theory, but theories do matter.[1] We all have theories of how our world works. Our theories help us anticipate and explain what might happen next. If you have a theory, you must continually chip away at it to see if there's a better way or if it can be made more comprehensive or thorough. This process can be applied to leadership theory.
Historically, the most useful question we could ask was: "Where did the leader come from?" When leaders were rare and unusual beasts, many of them were chosen for leadership roles because of their background. So asking where they came from told you a lot more than asking questions about their skills, behavior, or personality.
Even today, there are some frequent suppliers of leaders—certain families, universities, etc. However, it would be wrong to suggest that the assumption that leaders are born remains strong. Today, leaders can come from anywhere. Everybody feels that they could be a leader, whereas in earlier times most people felt excluded irrespective of their talent, skills, or aptitude. Today, defining leadership is a complex matter. Before, it was simple: Leadership was what leaders did.
Identifying New Leaders
It is arguable whether there was a single moment when there was a dramatic shift from choosing leaders because of their background to choosing leaders because of their skills, behaviors, and competencies. However, we would identify World War II as one of the most significant turning points in the progression of leadership understanding and development. Prior to that time, there was little research or structured work done on selecting leaders for their skills and competencies.
During the World War II, competing organizations needed to rapidly identify and understand what effective leaders did and then work out how to select them. Each side had to tackle the same problem. Where do we find new commanders who don't come from the traditional sources? Each camp approached the problem in remarkably similar ways. They developed various versions of what we now would call the assessment center. They analyzed the activities, behaviors, and attributes necessary to be an effective military leader, and then sought ways of identifying people who had those skills or that potential. Assessment techniques like the paper-and-pencil test, the psychological inventory, the structured interview, and so on were all developed around this time. The War Office Selection Board (WOSB) in the United Kingdom and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in the United States were early examples of the assessment center technology, which would go on to have a major influence.
The Task and the People
After World War II, the researchers who had done this work went into industry or back into university psychology departments. What emerged became classically quoted cases. Scientists reported that the behavior of leaders could be categorized on a map. The leaders' behavior was composed of two main aspects: concern for the task and concern for the people who did the task.
There followed a series of debates about whether effective leaders were chiefly concerned with the task or the people. Eventually, it was identified that the situation the leader was trying to handle was the key influencer in the style and behavior that the leader should adopt. How then to identify the situation?
One popular method, situational leadership, described the development of the follower. The follower, who knew little on entry into the organization (or job), would need clear structure and instructions to perform well. The leader would take full responsibility for the task and would give clear instruction to the follower so that the follower could achieve useful output.
Command and Control
This is command-and-control leadership. The effective leader can supervise his or her followers, because the leader knows at least as much about the task as the follower does. Because the leader knows a lot about the tasks, he or she can structure, support, coach, or delegate to followers appropriately. It has to be said that many managers, while aware of the need to change their style according to the followers' need, actually have strong preference for a particular style and often tend to use that one style inappropriately. This can lead to all kinds of problems and issues as followers receive too much or too little structure, for instance.
The command-and-control style can be a very effective way of thinking about leadership when known tasks are being done by people who know how to do them. Many consulting firms and partnerships employing specialists use this type of leadership because it is an information-based approach. The senior partner knows more than the junior partner, and therefore applies that knowledge to guide the junior. At the time when these ideas were first being discussed (in the 1970s), there was little distinction made between management and leadership. The words were for most purposes interchangeable. Now we notice that many people describe this type of leadership behavior as management.
I Have a Dream...
What do you do if you don't know how to achieve your goal? What happens if you want to attain a dream? You have a vision. However, visions don't work unless the people who have to find their way to the vision are empowered to take the actions necessary to reach the vision without continually needing to refer back to their leader.
Compared with command-and-control leadership, empowering leadership was designed for a different context, offered different kinds of outcomes, and required very different behavior. People who had grown up with command-and-control leadership continued to expect predictability, accuracy, and the dominance of knowledge and experience. They were frequently disappointed. The true visionary leader allows followers to be highly empowered so that they have the flexibility to take the actions necessary to achieve the vision. Many leaders from the previous era were unwilling to give up their own power.
So, the two main forms of leadership used and understood in organizations are the command-and-control approach and the empowerment and visionary approach. Sadly, when we look around many organizations, what we find is empowerment words and control actions. This results in the worst of both worlds. We want people to be imaginative, risk-taking, and creative but still to return their project on time, and on budget. Organizations need to more clearly recognize which of these two leadership styles is more appropriate to which context. Both are fine in the right context. Both will work very badly in the wrong context.
Unfortunately, there is an emotional difficulty to be overcome. For the most part, people find the notion of being visionary leaders more attractive than being controlling managers. Hence, the command-and-control approach tends to have a poorer image than that of the empowering and visionary leader. However, both methods work well in their own contexts.
Learning Leadership
What do you do if you don't have a vision? After Lou Gerstner took over IBM in 1993, he observed: "The last thing IBM needs now is a vision." He knew that the company had a huge amount of talent, but he didn't really know what the talent was capable of or what opportunities there really were. What happens if you aren't ready for vision yet? What happens if, like Jeff Bezos when starting up Amazon.com, you really don't know what could be sold on the Internet? Could you have a clear vision of the future?
In such cases, people in leadership roles face huge levels of inherent ambiguity. They feel uncertain and stressed. However, they move towards the uncertainty—not away from it. There is a third style of leadership emerging—that of learning leadership—and its defining feature will be leaders who head towards uncertainty and ambiguity.
The visionary leader is normally quite clear and quite certain about what the vision should be. There is much uncertainty in interpreting the vision of the leader, but this now becomes a communication issue, not a direction issue. The visionary leader says to the followers, "Let's work together on how to make my vision happen." The leader in ambiguity says, "Let's work together on how we can learn what the vision should be."
In our 1996 book The Future of Leadership, we defined the leader's role as "Identifying productive areas of uncertainty and confusion and leading the organization into those areas to gain competitive or other kinds of advantage." This is the situation in which many of today's executives find themselves. Many of their instincts are to avoid ambiguity and uncertainty, to install certainty by making clear and firm statements. The problem is that today's organizational world is in such a volatile state that it is much harder to accurately make clear and firm statements than it was 20 years ago.
The pressures on this new kind of leader is immense. First, to what extent can they really admit to their followers that they don't know? An equally tough requirement for learning leaders is to recognize that learning from their mistakes needs to be at least as public as learning from their successes. Everyone in the organization has to engage in continuous learning, and some of that learning may challenge existing concepts and require genuinely original solutions. Here the leader's job is to take the organization toward things it doesn't know in search of fruitful new ideas and original learning.
If you are a learning leader, then you want to spend much of your and your organization's time doing things that are difficult to learn but are of high value to the organization. The only thing that guarantees your success is the quality of learning that your organization can muster. Because you don't know how to do the things that you will come across, you must learn rapidly under tough conditions to survive and prosper. It is certainly not for everyone! But, people who operate at this level will describe it as thrilling, exciting, and challenging.
Do you want to test how much your organization is using the third model of leadership? Try this. Ask your people to name five important products, services, and production techniques now taken for granted, but which a previous generation of managers would not have known. Now list five trends in products, services, and production techniques that the next generation will take for granted but which you can hardly fathom. The pathway to installing those trends so that they become real is the amount of difficult learning that you and your colleagues face. If it is substantial, then develop your difficult learning skills or get out of the business.
A Final Word
The leaders of today and tomorrow are both free and constrained. They are free to choose from a wider range of strategies and opportunities than has ever existed. At the same time, they are constrained as leaders to be responsible for the potential of the new and undiscovered. Their uncertainty skills will be fully tested if they are to be responsible for a continually coherent, improving, and relaxing world rather than a continually dysfunctional, unraveling, and stressful world.