Finding the Right Leader

Companies are looking at their leadership needs with the wrong mindset. They are trying to find ideal leaders rather than the right kind of leaders, the kind that fit their needs. Selecting and developing organizational leaders should be viewed from a systems point of view. This demands a profound change in the way executives and boards of directors think about leaders and leadership. Rakesh Khurama's study on how boards have recruited CEOs describes the ideal leader of the 90s as a charismatic, domineering, take-charge person with a big vision and ego to match (1). While some of these leaders dazzled Wall Street and hiring them caused the stock to jump, many of them proved to be disasters for their companies. Now business has latched on to an ideal which is almost the opposite of these narcissistic leaders. Jim Collins in Good to Great describes a new ideal leader as modest as well as conscientious and capable (2). For him, Abraham Lincoln exemplifies the ideal. However, some of the most effective and innovative leaders I've known had big visions and egos. As for Lincoln, his private secretary, John Hay, said, "It is absurd to call him a modest man . it was his intellectual arrogance and unconscious assumption of superiority that men like Chase and Sumner never could forgive. " (3) No Leadership Algorithm Effective leaders are not all the same and trying to fit all managers into the same suit of clothes only increases managerial stress and frustration. To place the right kinds of leaders where they will do the most good, we need to be clear about what we want them to do and to understand who they are and what we can expect from them. Here is an example from my consulting: "I have made leadership one of the company's key values," the CEO of an international technology company said to me. "But we are not getting the leaders we need. What's wrong? Can you help us? " "What kinds of leaders do you need," asked him. "What do you want them to do? " I thought I knew the answers to these questions, and he confirmed it: "We need leaders to produce change. We need innovation, new products, and our customers are demanding solutions that cut across the company's silos. That won't happen without leadership. " I started my assignment by interviewing the CEO's six direct reports. They had gone through some type of leadership training that they couldn't describe very well except for a 360-degree evaluation by subordinates, peers and the CEO. What did they learn from that? A divisional president learned that his team thought he was too pushy and talked too much. I asked what he was going to do about it. "Well, I should talk less, listen more and build consensus. " But wasn't his job to lead change, to teach and motivate his team? How would he get people who were comfortable with the status quo to leave their comfort zone without ruffling feathers? The other corporate VPs were skeptical about the 360-degree evaluation. The process was disruptive and it wasn't clear what to do about the results. Maybe it was useful for diagnosis for a manager with problems, but not for all managers. They also complained that attempts by senior managers to cascade their leadership training down the hierarchy didn't work. At other companies I've worked with, they call cascading "pouring water into the clay layer" of middle management. I brought the CEO's team together for a two-day workshop on leadership. I started by having them clarify their own leadership roles. What did each need to do to develop and implement the corporate strategy? Did the others agree with their descriptions of their roles? What did they need from each other? Using the results of a personality questionnaire I designed, members of the executive team openly discussed their leadership styles, with their strengths and weaknesses (4). The corporate goals required partnering among these executives with personality styles and skills that were different, but which complemented each other. …