It’s time to end the myth of the complete leader praises ,the flawless who’s got it all figured out !.....its all nonsense to people who can see glaring coverups of their worst weakness and incompetence instead.
In today’s dispensation we no
longer need camouflaged leaders' command and control but those capable of cultivating and coordinating the
actions of others at all levels of the organization. Only when leaders
come to see themselves as incomplete—as having both strengths and
weaknesses—will they be able to make up for their missing skills by
relying on others. Those are MCAs , MPs, Senators and Governors we want.
leaders incapable of diagnosing their own capabilities, identifying their unique
set of strengths and weaknesses, are those who choose only to pile people who mirror
themselves, are likely to find their organizations tilting in one
direction, and missing essential capabilities needed to survive
in a changing, complex world, resulting in mediocre delivery , that can only survive through mechanical praises instead .
That’s why it’s important to examine the
whole organization to make sure it is appropriately balanced as well.
It’s the leader’s responsibility to create an environment that lets
people complement one another’s strengths and offset one another’s
weaknesses. In this way, leadership is distributed across multiple
people throughout the organization.
**********************************************************************
**********************************************************************
Below Explains the spirit of this article profoundly .......FROM HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW .
We’ve come to expect a lot of our leaders. Top executives, the
thinking goes, should have the intellectual capacity to make sense of
unfathomably complex issues, the imaginative powers to paint a vision of
the future that generates everyone’s enthusiasm, the operational
know-how to translate strategy into concrete plans, and the
interpersonal skills to foster commitment to undertakings that could
cost people’s jobs should they fail. Unfortunately, no single person can
possibly live up to those standards.
It’s time to end the myth of the complete leader: the flawless person
at the top who’s got it all figured out. In fact, the sooner leaders
stop trying to be all things to all people, the better off their
organizations will be. In today’s world, the executive’s job is no
longer to command and control but to cultivate and coordinate the
actions of others at all levels of the organization. Only when leaders
come to see themselves as incomplete—as having both strengths and
weaknesses—will they be able to make up for their missing skills by
relying on others.
Corporations have been becoming less hierarchical and more
collaborative for decades, of course, as globalization and the growing
importance of knowledge work have required that responsibility and
initiative be distributed more widely. Moreover, it is now possible for
large groups of people to coordinate their actions, not just by bringing
lots of information to a few centralized places but also by bringing
lots of information to lots of places through ever-growing networks
within and beyond the firm. The sheer complexity and ambiguity of
problems is humbling. More and more decisions are made in the context of
global markets and rapidly—sometimes radically—changing financial,
social, political, technological, and environmental forces. Stakeholders
such as activists, regulators, and employees all have claims on
organizations.
No one person could possibly stay on top of everything. But the myth
of the complete leader (and the attendant fear of appearing incompetent)
makes many executives try to do just that, exhausting themselves and
damaging their organizations in the process. The incomplete leader, by
contrast, knows when to let go: when to let those who know the local
market do the advertising plan or when to let the engineering team run
with its idea of what the customer needs. The incomplete leader also
knows that leadership exists throughout the organizational
hierarchy—wherever expertise, vision, new ideas, and commitment are
found.
We’ve worked with hundreds of people who have struggled under the
weight of the myth of the complete leader. Over the past six years, our
work at the MIT Leadership Center has included studying leadership in
many organizations and teaching the topic to senior executives, middle
managers, and MBA students. In our practice-based programs, we have
analyzed numerous accounts of organizational change and watched leaders
struggle to meld top-down strategic initiatives with vibrant ideas from
the rest of the organization.
All this work has led us to develop a model of distributed
leadership. This framework, which synthesizes our own research with
ideas from other leadership scholars, views leadership as a set of four
capabilities:
sensemaking (understanding the context in which a company and its people operate),
relating (building relationships within and across organizations),
visioning (creating a compelling picture of the future), and
inventing (developing new ways to achieve the vision).
While somewhat simplified, these capabilities span the intellectual
and interpersonal, the rational and intuitive, and the conceptual and
creative capacities required in today’s business environment. Rarely, if
ever, will someone be equally skilled in all four domains. Thus,
incomplete leaders differ from incompetent leaders in that they
understand what they’re good at and what they’re not and have good
judgment about how they can work with others to build on their strengths
and offset their limitations.
Sometimes, leaders need to further develop the capabilities they are
weakest in. The exhibits throughout this article provide some
suggestions for when and how to do that. Other times, however, it’s more
important for leaders to find and work with others to compensate for
their weaknesses. Teams and organizations—not just individuals—can use
this framework to diagnose their strengths and weaknesses and find ways
to balance their skill sets.
Sensemaking
The term “sensemaking” was coined by organizational psychologist Karl
Weick, and it means just what it sounds like: making sense of the world
around us. Leaders are constantly trying to understand the contexts
they are operating in. How will new technologies reshape the industry?
How will changing cultural expectations shift the role of business in
society? How does the globalization of labor markets affect recruitment
and expansion plans?
Weick likened the process of sensemaking to cartography. What we map
depends on where we look, what factors we choose to focus on, and what
aspects of the terrain we decide to represent. Since these choices will
shape the kind of map we produce, there is no perfect map of a terrain.
Therefore, making sense is more than an act of analysis; it’s an act of
creativity. (See the exhibit “Engage in Sensemaking.”)
The key for leaders is to determine what would be a useful map given
their particular goals and then to draw one that adequately represents
the situation the organization is facing at that moment. Executives who
are strong in this capability know how to quickly capture the
complexities of their environment and explain them to others in simple
terms. This helps ensure that everyone is working from the same map,
which makes it far easier to discuss and plan for the journey ahead.
Leaders need to have the courage to present a map that highlights
features they believe to be critical, even if their map doesn’t conform
to the dominant perspective.
When John Reed was CEO of Citibank, the company found itself in a
real estate crisis. At the time, common wisdom said that Citibank would
need to take a $2 billion write-off, but Reed wasn’t sure. He wanted a
better understanding of the situation, so to map the problem, he met
with federal regulators as well as his managers, the board, potential
investors, economists, and real estate experts. He kept asking, “What am
I missing here?” After those meetings, he had a much stronger grasp of
the problem, and he recalibrated the write-off to $5 billion—which
turned out to be a far more accurate estimate. Later, three quarters
into the bank’s eight-quarter program to deal with the crisis, Reed
realized that progress had stopped. He began talking to other CEOs known
for their change management skills. This informal benchmarking process
led him to devise an organizational redesign.
Throughout the crisis, real estate valuations, investors’
requirements, board demands, and management team expectations were all
changing and constantly needed to be reassessed. Good leaders understand
that sensemaking is a continuous process; they let the map emerge from a
melding of observations, data, experiences, conversations, and
analyses. In healthy organizations, this sort of sensemaking goes on all
the time. People have ongoing dialogues about their interpretations of
markets and organizational realities.
At IDEO, a product design firm, sensemaking is step one for all
design teams. According to founder David Kelley, team members must act
as anthropologists studying an alien culture to understand the potential
product from all points of view. When brainstorming a new design,
IDEO’s teams consider multiple perspectives—that is, they build multiple
maps to inform their creative process. One IDEO team was charged with
creating a new design for an emergency room. To better understand the
experience of a key stakeholder—the patient—team members attached a
camera to a patient’s head and captured his experience in the ER. The
result: nearly ten full hours of film of the ceiling. The sensemaking
provoked by this perspective led to a redesign of the ceiling that made
it more aesthetically pleasing and able to display important information
for patients.
Relating
Many executives who attempt to foster trust, optimism, and consensus
often reap anger, cynicism, and conflict instead. That’s because they
have difficulty relating to others, especially those who don’t make
sense of the world the way they do. Traditional images of leadership
didn’t assign much value to relating. Flawless leaders shouldn’t need to
seek counsel from anyone outside their tight inner circle, the thinking
went, and they were expected to issue edicts rather than connect on an
emotional level. Times have changed, of course, and in this era of
networks, being able to build trusting relationships is a requirement of
effective leadership.
Three key ways to do this are
inquiring, advocating, and
connecting.
The concepts of inquiring and advocating stem from the work of
organizational development specialists Chris Argyris and Don Schon.
Inquiring means listening with the intention of genuinely understanding
the thoughts and feelings of the speaker. Here, the listener suspends
judgment and tries to comprehend how and why the speaker has moved from
the data of his or her experiences to particular interpretations and
conclusions.
Advocating, as the term implies, means explaining one’s own point of
view. It is the flip side of inquiring, and it’s how leaders make clear
to others how they reached their interpretations and conclusions. Good
leaders distinguish their observations from their opinions and judgments
and explain their reasoning without aggression or defensiveness. People
with strong relating skills are typically those who’ve found a healthy
balance between inquiring and advocating: They actively try to
understand others’ views but are able to stand up for their own. (See
the exhibit “Build Relationships.”)
Read more
We’ve seen countless relationships undermined because people
disproportionately emphasized advocating over inquiring. Even though
managers pay lip service to the importance of mutual understanding and
shared commitment to a course of action, often their real focus is on
winning the argument rather than strengthening the connection. Worse, in
many organizations, the imbalance goes so far that having one’s point
of view prevail is what is understood as leadership.
Even though managers pay lip service to the importance of mutual understanding, their real focus is on winning the argument.
Effective relating does not mean avoiding interpersonal conflict
altogether. Argyris and Schon found that “maintaining a smooth surface”
of conviviality and apparent agreement is one of the most common
defensive routines that limits team effectiveness. Balancing inquiring
and advocating is ultimately about showing respect, challenging
opinions, asking tough questions, and taking a stand.
Consider Twynstra Gudde (TG), one of the largest independent
consulting companies in the Netherlands. A few years ago, it replaced
the role of CEO with a team of four managing directors who share
leadership responsibilities. Given this unique structure, it’s vital
that these directors effectively relate to one another. They’ve adopted
simple rules, such as a requirement that each leader give his opinion on
every issue, majority-rules voting, and veto power for each director.
Clearly, for TG’s senior team model to work, members must be skilled
at engaging in dialogue together. They continually practice both
inquiring and advocating, and because each director can veto a decision,
each must thoroughly explain his reasoning to convince the others’ that
his perspective has merit. It’s not easy to reach this level of mutual
respect and trust, but over time, the team members’ willingness to
create honest connections with one another has paid off handsomely.
Although they don’t always reach consensus, they are able to settle on a
course of action. Since this new form of leadership was introduced, TG
has thrived: The company’s profits have doubled, and employee
satisfaction levels have improved. What’s more, TG’s leadership
structure has served as a model for cooperation throughout the
organization as well as in the firm’s relations with its clients.
The third aspect of relating, connecting, involves cultivating a
network of confidants who can help a leader accomplish a wide range of
goals. Leaders who are strong in this capability have many people they
can turn to who can help them think through difficult problems or
support them in their initiatives. They understand that the time spent
building and maintaining these connections is time spent investing in
their leadership skills. Because no one person can possibly have all the
answers, or indeed, know all the right questions to ask, it’s crucial
that leaders be able to tap into a network of people who can fill in the
gaps.
Visioning
Sensemaking and relating can be called the enabling capabilities of
leadership. They help set the conditions that motivate and sustain
change. The next two leadership capabilities—what we call “visioning”
and inventing—are creative and action oriented: They produce the focus
and energy needed to make change happen.
Visioning involves creating compelling images of the future. While
sensemaking charts a map of what is, visioning produces a map of what
could be and, more important, what a leader wants the future to be. It
consists of far more than pinning a vision statement to the wall.
Indeed, a shared vision is not a static thing—it’s an ongoing process.
Like sensemaking, visioning is dynamic and collaborative, a process of
articulating what the members of an organization want to create
together.
Leaders skilled in visioning use stories and metaphors to paint a
vivid picture of what the vision will accomplish, even if they don’t
have a comprehensive plan for getting there.
Fundamentally, visioning gives people a sense of meaning in their
work. Leaders who are skilled in this capability are able to get people
excited about their view of the future while inviting others to help
crystallize that image. (See the exhibit “Create a Vision.”) If they
realize other people aren’t joining in or buying into the vision, they
don’t just turn up the volume; they engage in a dialogue about the
reality they hope to produce. They use stories and metaphors to paint a
vivid picture of what the vision will accomplish, even if they don’t
have a comprehensive plan for getting there. They know that if the
vision is credible and compelling enough, others will generate ideas to
advance it.
Read more
In South Africa in the early 1990s, a joke was making the rounds:
Given the country’s daunting challenges, people had two options, one
practical and the other miraculous. The practical option was for
everyone to pray for a band of angels to come down from heaven and fix
things. The miraculous option was for people to talk with one another
until they could find a way forward. In F.W. de Klerk’s famous speech in
1990—his first after assuming leadership—he called for a nonracist
South Africa and suggested that negotiation was the only way to achieve a
peaceful transition. That speech sparked a set of changes that led to
Nelson Mandela’s release from Robben Island prison and the return to the
country of previously banned political leaders.
Few of South Africa’s leaders agreed on much of anything regarding
the country’s future. It seemed like a long shot, at best, that a
scenario-planning process convened by a black professor from the
University of the Western Cape and facilitated by a white Canadian from
Royal Dutch Shell would be able to bring about any sort of change. But
they, together with members of the African National Congress (ANC), the
radical Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), and the white business community,
were charged with forging a new path for South Africa.
When the team members first met, they focused on collective
sensemaking. Their discussions then evolved into a yearlong visioning
process. In his book,
Solving Tough Problems, Adam Kahane, the
facilitator, says the group started by telling stories of “left-wing
revolution, right-wing revolts, and free market utopias.” Eventually,
the leadership team drafted a set of scenarios that described the many
paths toward disaster and the one toward sustainable development.
They used metaphors and clear imagery to convey the various paths in
language that was easy to understand. One negative scenario, for
instance, was dubbed “Ostrich”: A nonrepresentative white government
sticks its head in the sand, trying to avoid a negotiated settlement
with the black majority. Another negative scenario was labeled “Icarus”:
A constitutionally unconstrained black government comes to power with
noble intentions and embarks on a huge, unsustainable public-spending
spree that crashes the economy. This scenario contradicted the popular
belief that the country was rich and could simply redistribute wealth
from whites to blacks. The Icarus scenario set the stage for a
fundamental (and controversial) shift in economic thinking in the ANC
and other left-wing parties—a shift that led the ANC government to
“strict and consistent fiscal discipline,” according to Kahane.
The group’s one positive scenario involved the government adopting a
set of sustainable policies that would put the country on a path of
inclusive growth to successfully rebuild the economy and establish
democracy. This option was called “Flamingo,” invoking the image of a
flock of beautiful birds all taking flight together.
This process of visioning unearthed an extraordinary collective sense
of possibility in South Africa. Instead of talking about what other
people should do to advance some agenda, the leaders spoke about what
they could do to create a better future for everyone. They didn’t have
an exact implementation plan at the ready, but by creating a credible
vision, they paved the way for others to join in and help make their
vision a reality.
Leaders who excel in visioning walk the walk; they work to embody the
core values and ideas contained in the vision. Darcy Winslow, Nike’s
global director for women’s footwear, is a good example. A 14-year
veteran at Nike, Winslow previously held the position of general manager
of sustainable business opportunities at the shoe and apparel giant.
Her work in that role reflected her own core values, including her
passion for the environment. “We had come to see that our customers’
health and our own ability to compete were inseparable from the health
of the environment,” she says. So she initiated the concept of
ecologically intelligent product design. Winslow’s team worked at
determining the chemical composition and environmental effects of every
material and process Nike used. They visited factories in China and
collected samples of rubber, leather, nylon, polyester, and foams to
determine their chemical makeup. This led Winslow and her team to
develop a list of “positive” materials—those that weren’t harmful to the
environment—that they hoped to use in more Nike products.
“Environmental sustainability” was no longer just an abstract term on a
vision statement; the team now felt a mandate to realize the vision.
Inventing
Even the most compelling vision will lose its power if it floats,
unconnected, above the everyday reality of organizational life. To
transform a vision of the future into a present-day reality, leaders
need to devise processes that will give it life. This inventing is what
moves a business from the abstract world of ideas to the concrete world
of implementation. In fact, inventing is similar to execution, but the
label “inventing” emphasizes that this process often requires creativity
to help people figure out new ways of working together.
To realize a new vision, people usually can’t keep doing the same
things they’ve been doing. They need to conceive, design, and put into
practice new ways of interacting and organizing. Some of the most famous
examples of large-scale organizational innovation come from the
automotive industry: Henry Ford’s conception of the assembly-line
factory and Toyota’s famed integrated production system.
More recently, Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, invented through
his company a new way of doing large-scale retailing. His vision was of
an online community where users would take responsibility for what
happened. In a 2001 BusinessWeek Online interview, Omidyar explained, “I
had the idea that I wanted to create an efficient market and a level
playing field where everyone had equal access to information. I wanted
to give the power of the market back to individuals, not just large
corporations. That was the driving motivation for creating eBay at the
start.”
Consequently, eBay outsources most of the functions of traditional
retailing—purchasing, order fulfillment, and customer service, for
example—to independent sellers worldwide. The company estimates that
more than 430,000 people make their primary living from selling wares on
eBay. If those individuals were all employees of eBay, it would be the
second largest private employer in the United States after Wal-Mart.
The people who work through eBay are essentially independent store
owners, and, as such, they have a huge amount of autonomy in how they do
their work. They decide what to sell, when to sell it, how to price,
and how to advertise. Coupled with this individual freedom is global
scale. EBay’s infrastructure enables them to sell their goods all over
the world. What makes eBay’s inventing so radical is that it represents a
new relationship between an organization and its parts. Unlike typical
outsourcing, eBay doesn’t pay its retailers—they pay the company.
Inventing doesn’t have to occur on such a grand scale. It happens
every time a person creates a way of approaching a task or figures out
how to overcome a previously insurmountable obstacle. In their book
Car Launch,
George Roth and Art Kleiner describe a highly successful product
development team in the automobile industry that struggled with
completing its designs on time. Much of the source of the problem, the
team members concluded, came from the stovepipe organizational structure
found in the product development division. Even though they were a
“colocated” team dedicated to designing a common new car, members were
divided by their different technical expertise, experience, jargon, and
norms of working.
When the team invented a mechanical prototyping device that
complemented its computer-aided design tools, the group members found
that it facilitated a whole new way of collaborating. Multiple groups
within the team could quickly create physical mock-ups of design ideas
to be tested by the various engineers from different specialties in the
team. The group called the device “the harmony buck,” because it helped
people break out of their comfortable engineering specialties and solve
interdependent design problems together. Development of a “full body”
physical mock-up of the new car allowed engineers to hang around the
prototype, providing a central focal point for their interactions. It
enabled them to more easily identify and raise cross-functional issues,
and it facilitated mutual problem solving and coordination.
In sum, leaders must be able to succeed at inventing, and this
requires both attention to detail and creativity. (See the exhibit
“Cultivate Inventiveness.”)
Read more
Balancing the Four Capabilities
Sensemaking, relating, visioning, and inventing are interdependent.
Without sensemaking, there’s no common view of reality from which to
start. Without relating, people work in isolation or, worse, strive
toward different aims. Without visioning, there’s no shared direction.
And without inventing, a vision remains illusory. No one leader,
however, will excel at all four capabilities in equal measure.
Typically, leaders are strong in one or two capabilities. Intel
chairman Andy Grove is the quintessential sensemaker, for instance, with
a gift for recognizing strategic inflection points that can be
exploited for competitive advantage. Herb Kelleher, the former CEO of
Southwest Airlines, excels at relating. He remarked in the journal
Leader to Leader
that “We are not afraid to talk to our people with emotion. We’re not
afraid to tell them, ‘We love you.’ Because we do.” With this emotional
connection comes equitable compensation and profit sharing.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs is a visionary whose ambitious dreams and
persuasiveness have catalyzed remarkable successes for Apple, Next, and
Pixar. Meg Whitman, the CEO of eBay, helped bring Pierre Omidyar’s
vision of online retailing to life by inventing ways to deal with
security, vendor reliability, and product diversification.
Once leaders diagnose their own capabilities, identifying their
unique set of strengths and weaknesses, they must search for others who
can provide the things they’re missing. (See the sidebar “Examining Your
Leadership Capabilities.”) Leaders who choose only people who mirror
themselves are likely to find their organizations tilting in one
direction, missing one or more essential capabilities needed to survive
in a changing, complex world. That’s why it’s important to examine the
whole organization to make sure it is appropriately balanced as well.
It’s the leader’s responsibility to create an environment that lets
people complement one another’s strengths and offset one another’s
weaknesses. In this way, leadership is distributed across multiple
people throughout the organization.
• • •
Years ago, one of us attended a three-day meeting on leadership with
15 top managers from different companies. At the close of it,
participants were asked to reflect on their experience as leaders. One
executive, responsible for more than 50,000 people in his division of a
manufacturing corporation, drew two pictures on a flip chart. The image
on the left was what he projected to the outside world: It was a large,
intimidating face holding up a huge fist. The image on the right
represented how he saw himself: a small face with wide eyes, hair
standing on end, and an expression of sheer terror.
Most leaders experience a profound dichotomy every day, and it’s a
heavy burden. They are trapped in the myth of the complete leader —the
person at the top without flaws.
We believe that most leaders experience that profound dichotomy every
day, and it’s a heavy burden. How many times have you feigned
confidence to superiors or reports when you were really unsure? Have you
ever felt comfortable conceding that you were confused by the latest
business results or caught off guard by a competitor’s move? Would you
ever admit to feeling inadequate to cope with the complex issues your
firm was facing? Anyone who can identify with these situations knows
firsthand what it’s like to be trapped in the myth of the complete
leader—the person at the top without flaws. It’s time to put that myth
to rest, not only for the sake of frustrated leaders but also for the
health of organizations. Even the most talented leaders require the
input and leadership of others, constructively solicited and creatively
applied. It’s time to celebrate the incomplete—that is, the
human—leader.
FROM HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW .
