On Leadership, Again

On Leadership, Again

Judy Olian

( Judy Olian is Dean of Penn State's Smeal College of Business and a leading expert in strategic human resources management .)

Surveys of business executives demonstrate a crying need for leadership skills. Yet leadership emerges in most surveys as the weakest skill among graduates, and among the toughest to teach or inculcate. You know it when you see it, and it's devastating when absent.

Professor Donald Hambrick, a leading expert on top management teams, paints the picture of "the total CEO". Examples of total CEOs are Meg Whitman from eBay, Howard Schwartz from Starbucks, Lou Gerstner from IBM, or Herb Kelleher from Southwest Airlines. These are leaders who are preoccupied with everything: internal and external values, hiring complementary talent into the top management team, orchestrating the team to work smoothly, being a model of energetic leadership, empowering others to exercise leadership, formulating and executing strategy - - crafting a vision, and artfully nagging for execution. Total CEO's never entirely delegate any of these activities and are preoccupied with the full range of leadership behaviors. That's a daunting job. How can you make leadership a manageable undertaking?

• Set goals and clarify what matters for your organization. After September 11, AOL Time Warner Chairman, Gerald Levin, announced that the corporation would spend heavily on its mission as a "public trust, even if that lowered profits." Jaws dropped, but it sure sent a clear message about new priorities, articulated important values, and signaled a shift in resource investments.
• Balance the larger vision with detailed attention to realizing the vision. For critical agenda items, follow through with artfully timed nagging, falling short of micromanagement. You're demonstrating that execution matters, and that you're attentive to delivery of results.
  
• Empower your employees and develop succession. There is no way you can do it all, and do it well. Your staff must be liberated to take ownership. You will retain the best of them because you foster their continuous growth. Ultimately, organizational succession is about identifying talented employees well before they are ready, and then developing preparedness through deliberate rotations and delegation. Every key manager in your organization should have a ready successor. At General Electric, the succession system produced three viable internal candidates for the CEO job in the post-Welch era, and the two "losers" were appointed immediately to major CEO positions elsewhere.
  
• Think about teams, and not just individuals. When hiring talent and orchestrating roles, each individual is one piece of a network of deliverers and managers. The star athlete model is often dysfunctional for a senior executive team. Hiring into that network means that attention to individual talent is as important as fit to the rest of the team.
  
• Care passionately about the culture, but stop short of involvement in personality clashes. There's a fine line between upholding the core values of civility, respect, support, and diversity, versus meddling in personality differences. Unless these clashes detract from the unit's capacity to achieve its strategic results, or the behaviors fly in the face of basic cultural beliefs, they should remain below the radar screen.
  
• Lead your organization with contagious enthusiasm and regular cheerleading, to energize organizational members for the next challenge. Think Herb Kelleher from Southwest Airlines who, through force of personality, unbounded energy, and craziness, has achieved the amazing feat of sustaining Southwest Airlines' freshness and profitability, ahead of any competitor. Every organization has down times, yet the leader must be the face of optimism.
  
• Work your way out of a job, and then get out of the way. In part, that's developing succession. But it is also about leaving your successors to shine in jobs you leave behind. At Xerox, observers attribute some of the succession fiasco from Paul Allaire to Richard Thoman to the fact that Allaire never left. He retained his title as Chairman and was constantly in touch with the Board of Directors, undermining Thoman's credibility. Managers are sometimes unable to divorce themselves from their old jobs, inhibiting their successor from coming into their own.

These are not "how to" menus, but issues that should loom large among those who lead. Indeed, leadership is a large responsibility.