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Can Leaders Be Manufactured?
On the one hand, Professor Abraham Zaleznik was a typical HBS lifer: After earning his MBA in 1947, he stuck around to earn his doctorate in commercial science and subsequently spent more than four decades on the faculty. But he wasn’t typical, really. More interested in the social psychology behind leadership than in how to squeeze a few more dollars out of a product, Zaleznik also spent more than a decade studying at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society & Institute and twenty years as a practicing clinical psychoanalyst while teaching at HBS.
Zaleznik’s early work was in keeping with the thinking of Elton Mayo in that he sought, in instances of worker dissatisfaction, an answer that lay in the worker’s unconscious mind rather than in the actions of managers themselves. Along with coauthors C. Roland Christensen, George Homans, and Fritz Roethlisberger, his 1958 book, The Motivation, Productivity, and Satisfaction of Workers: A Prediction Study, explained that the worker brought at least part of his dissatisfaction to work with him. Zaleznik later explained the thesis: “Underlying their behavior was a need to protect themselves from, and achieve a measure of control over, authority figures in the factory, community, and society.”
But that was chewing over old turf. Where Zaleznik broke new ground was in a 1977 article he wrote for HBR, “Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?” The question was very timely—by the late 1970s, American managers’ high self-regard had become so deep-seated that leadership development had become profoundly conservative, overemphasizing competence and control at the expense of inspiration, vision, and passion. In short, America had been “overmanaged” and “underled.” While it was too late to avoid the effects of that shift—the country never saw its economic comeuppance coming—the article nevertheless served to spark a revolution in the priorities of business schools that suddenly found that they were selling a product no longer in demand. Zaleznik’s question was on point, but few could have foreseen the monumental—and not entirely positive—changes that it unleashed.
Indeed, the article’s future impact can be traced to just nine words: “managers and leaders are very different kinds of people.”1 How different? Managers are competent. They focus on process. They make the trains run on time. Leaders are imaginative. They focus on substance. They decide where the train is going to go. Per author Matthew Stewart: “Managers are people who do things right; leaders are people who do the right thing.”2 Wallace Donham had wanted Harvard MBAs to be both. But suddenly, it seemed, one had to make a choice.
While there’s no question as to the value of strong leaders, there’s a huge one about whether business schools have made any contribution whatsoever to helping produce them. Barbara Kellerman, a lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School, puts it simply in Hard Times: Leadership in America, when she says that the leadership industry “has failed over its roughly forty-year history to in any major, meaningful, measurable way improve the human condition.”3
The first problem is simply one of definition. What, exactly, is leadership? Even if we could agree on that—and we can’t—the second question is whether it can be taught in the same way as, say, accounting, or if it is more of an emergent quality and context-specific. (In other words: Can one be a leader without portfolio?) William Deresiewicz, author of Excellent Sheep, points out that while every college in the country claims to be producing leaders, no one seems to know what they mean. “There seem to be two possibilities,” he says. “The first is that it means nothing at all, or whatever definition is useful at any given time. The second is that it simply means being in charge.”
Find an honest business school professor, and even they will admit as much. “Even today, three-plus decades in, there’s no real definition of it,” says John Van Maanen, a professor of management at MIT Sloan. “We can make people more conscious of ethical dilemmas in business, of the difficulty of directing people in times of adversity, and the confidence and communication skills necessary to do so. But the idea that such skills can be transmitted so that you can lead anybody at any time, that’s ideologically vacuous.”4 But that hasn’t stopped HBS from claiming that they can. The School’s mission, after all, is to “educate leaders who make a difference in the world.” “It’s difficult not to be frustrated by the excessive focus on it,” says Van Maanen, “but it’s become so popular that we apparently can’t teach enough of it.”
To be fair, this is not just a business school thing. As Kellerman pointed out in her 2012 book, The End of Leadership, if you read their mission statements, all of Harvard is in on the joke. Harvard Law School (“To educate leaders who contribute to the development of justice and the well being of society”), Harvard Medical School (“To create and nurture a diverse community of the best people committed to leadership in alleviating suffering caused by disease”), Harvard Divinity School (“To educate women and men for service as leaders in religious life and thought”), Harvard Kennedy School (“Our mission is to train enlightened public leaders”), Harvard School of Education (“To prepare leaders in education and to generate knowledge”).5
HBS, of course, has been trying to teach it for years. But in the late 1970s, when the managerial class was under fire for having mismanaged the economy, HBS suddenly found itself downplaying their entire legacy of management-by-control and overemphasizing management-by-inspiration. A 1979 report released by the Associates of HBS cast yesterday’s managers in a decidedly unpleasant light: “With the decline in acceptability of an authoritative management style, leadership becomes a more important requirement of the manager in large groups and in small. He must have the independence, objectivity, and ability to stand up against an unacceptable higher authority, group consensus, or public opinion. He must demonstrate more than an inarticulate managerial competence. . . .”6
But was HBS-style leadership really the right cure for what ailed America? Consider for a moment at least one cause of the country’s late 1970s economic malaise: Japan. Japanese companies had outflanked their U.S. competitors using managerial models that were much more about collaboration than American ones. That’s not to say they weren’t hierarchical, but they were certainly predicated more on teamwork. With its newfound overvalorization of the idea of an individual and heroic leader, HBS was effectively doubling down on that which hadn’t worked in the first place. “How can you react to the rise of competitors based on a collaborative model by articulating an even more individualistic model of leadership?” asks Christopher Grey, head of the department of organizational studies at the University of London’s School of Management. “It’s totally baffling.”7
Even if that was the answer—and it wasn’t—the idea that business schools should take the lead on leadership was hardly self-evident. Peter Drucker said so himself: “It is a mistake to say that business schools are charged with educating leaders. They are charged with educating competent mediocrities to do competent work. That’s also true of medical schools. They are not charged with educating leaders but physicians who don’t kill too many people. . . . You can’t educate leaders, well, you can in the sense that leaders need to know a lot. But the purpose of professional schools is to educate competent mediocrities in large numbers. And that is what we are doing. Whether we are doing it well or not, I do not know. That’s another matter.”8
In their paper “Can Business Schools Humanize Leadership?,” INSEAD professors Gianpiero and Jennifer Petriglieri argue that the problem with most leadership teaching is that it dehumanizes leadership itself. Business schools achieve that unintended result by either narrowing students’ understanding of leadership into a goal-focused activity that is broken down into a set of skills, or by elevating it to the status of a virtue, “a kind of resolute equanimity unaffected by the pulls of incentives and the push of emotions.”9 HBS is guilty of both, but its recent focus on the absurd notion of “authentic leadership” leans toward the latter. (For more on that, see page 315.) But doing either, argue the Petriglieris, severs the whole not
ion of leadership from its ties to identity, community, and context.
How so? Because “it makes leadership models and leadership development methods easier to trademark and sell, and it sustains the belief that leadership can be acquired or revealed once and for all and then deployed across contexts.” In other words, it allows you to make a blanket statement that you “educate leaders.” The result? “[It] reduces the uncertainty and anxiety that might accompany the acceptance of leadership as ambiguous, contextual and dynamic, something that can neither be clearly defined nor fully owned.” When you tell your incoming class that they are already America’s future leaders, in other words, you’re not only lying to them, you’re also making it less likely that they might eventually become so.
One prominent bias in leadership studies, at HBS and elsewhere, is that of conflating leadership with formal authority and hierarchical supervision. While there’s general agreement that the mere fact of being a boss does not make one a leader, the error that most business schools—and HBS in particular—make is that they have implicitly assumed that it’s still necessary to be someone with formal authority (that is, a boss) in order to be a leader. In other words, to be a boss is a necessary but not sufficient condition for leadership.
According to the professors, “The image of leadership that predominates is of an individual ascending to, or occupying, a position of hierarchical power; competently adapting to his or her environment; and yielding his or her influence to achieve financial (or otherwise measurable) results and, in doing so, rising further up the ladder.” And where do you find these kinds of heroes? In HBS case studies, of course. When HBS professor Michel Anteby analyzed the cases—and accompanying teaching notes—in the School’s core curriculum, he found that 62 percent of them depicted action as being driven by a solo protagonist, not by teams or groups. “In the same way that US corporations tend to position managers as agents of change,” writes Anteby, “many notes depict protagonists as almost heroic figures.”10 The idea that leaders are “crafters of their own fortunes,” he adds, reflects a broader U.S. managerial culture that favors something called “meritocratic individualism.” But if it’s every man for himself, can anyone claim to be a leader?
The fact that HBS attracts self-styled future leaders also raises the question of whether someone whose goal is to be a leader is actually the right candidate to be leading anything. Deresiewicz recalls an anecdote of one Harvard admissions interview: “Harvard is for leaders,” the interviewer said, “so what do you want to be the leader of?” The answer: “I don’t know . . . something.”11 That’s not leadership. That’s aimless and unfocused ambition. “What they mean is nothing more than getting to the top,” says Deresiewicz. “Making partner at a major law firm, or running a department at a leading hospital, or becoming a senator or chief executive or college president. Being in charge, in other words: climbing the greasy pole of whatever hierarchy you decide to attach yourself to.”
There’s also the fact that asking managers to be leaders of anything other than their narrow corporate hierarchies might not be the best idea anyway. The business elite of the United States has been in a decades-long retreat from their midcentury role as social and cultural leaders, a shift documented with precision by Mark Mizruchi in his 2013 book, The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite. The Petriglieris also point to a 2012 study by Paul Piff and colleagues showing that contrary to what one might expect, members of the upper class are more, not less, likely to break the law, cheat, or endorse unethical behavior at work. “Most tellingly,” the professors write, “they demonstrated that these tendencies were mediated by positive attitudes toward greed.”12
Pointing to two broad criticisms of business school education—its abstract curricula leaves students unprepared to actually deal with the demands of real-life leadership and its leadership “development” is too heavily weighted toward career advancement and corporate financial performance—the professors conclude that “either by negligence or design,” current leadership development efforts are dysfunctional. What we’re left with is utterly useless—and absurdly quantified—statements such as current HBS dean Nitin Nohria’s suggestion that “the difference between good and bad leadership is about 40 percent in terms of performance.”13 Plug that into your spreadsheet, and your company can’t possibly miss its targets.
Nohria isn’t the only one who thinks leadership is a number. As Barbara Kellerman points out, the notion that leadership can be “codified and summarized and packaged” is widespread. She points out that Harvard University’s Center for Public Leadership lists seven “essential competencies for public leadership”—personal, interpersonal, organizational, systemic, catalytic, contextual, and theoretical. If seven is too much for you, you can use Linda Hill and Kent Lineback’s three “imperatives for becoming a great leader”—managing yourself, managing your network, and managing your team. Or, if you need more specificity, you might want to try the five things that Jeffrey Gandz and his colleagues think good leaders do—analyze the environment, formulate winning strategies, execute “brilliantly,” evaluate outcomes, and build for the future. Asks Kellerman: “Can leadership possibly be so simple, so neat, so perennially positive an undertaking?”14
Most of it is bullshit. Unfortunately, there are few business school faculty who could ever summon the courage to admit such a thing. But some do, and using the same language. If you need more convincing, see Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeffer’s 2015 book, Leadership BS.15
So HBS tries to teach leadership. Does it demonstrate it as well? Interestingly, while the School is a major player at Harvard proper when it comes to fundraising, they ironically lack any other noticeable form of campus leadership. The rationalizations for that will be numerous, including the HBS faculty’s disdain for reflection and intellectual pursuits as self-contained aims. Whatever the case, at Harvard, HBS remains, in large part, an island unto itself.
When it comes to intellectual leadership within the business school community, much of its curricular development seems to be just the opposite, a reaction to the prevailing ethos in American society rather than a shaper of that ethos. The School churned out competent mediocrities exercising heavy-handed managerial control until the very moment that the economy had finally been strangled of forward thinking. It celebrated the conglomeration movement until the movement buckled under its own weight. At that point it turned on a dime and started sending its graduates to Wall Street in droves, one job of which was to dismantle the very companies the School’s previous graduates had built. On the subject of corporate social responsibility, it endorsed it when it was convenient to do so in the 1950s and 1960s, and pulled back from doing so as it embraced Wall Street’s single-minded focus on shareholder returns. It has lately come back around again, but that’s only because that’s what its students are demanding. Where is the leadership in any of that?
“What people usually mean by a leader now,” says University of Virginia professor Mark Edmundson, “is someone who, in a very energetic, upbeat way, shares all the values of the people in charge. Leaders tend to be little adults, little grown-ups who don’t challenge the big grown-ups who run the place. . . . When people say ‘leaders’ now, what they mean is gung-ho ‘followers.’”16
But they are followers who have come to know themselves. “Because leadership is thought to be a matter of personality, the gurus focus mainly on psychological growth,” says James Hoopes. “The therapeutic orientation that Mayo applied so assiduously to workers is now devoted with far more intensity to managers. Leaders are change agents prepared not just to ‘take control of a political structure’ but to transform it, just as they have already done with their own personality through some lonely ‘psychodrama’ that has qualified them to lead others toward their revolutionary vision.”17
This brings us back to HBR. Since Zaleznik’s article, the magazine has surely dedicated more pages to promising its readers that they, too, can be great leaders, than it has
to any other subject. The cover story of the November 2015 issue of HBR was “What Makes a Great Leader?” (Of course, perhaps a new inquiry is totally appropriate, as Daniel Goleman’s 2004 article, “What Makes a Leader?,” clearly failed to cover “great” leaders.) But the man who has run furthest with the topic is Professor Bill George, with his concept of authentic leadership.
A Baker Scholar from the Class of ’66, George went on to a storied career in business, capped by a thirteen-year career at medical device maker Medtronic, which he joined in 1989 as president and COO, rising to chief executive in 1991 and adding board chair to his title in 1996 for his final six years at the company. George teaches leadership at Harvard, and has written four bestselling books, including True North and Authentic Leadership. At the time of this writing, he sat on the boards of Goldman Sachs and Exxon Mobil, as well as the Mayo Clinic. He’s also got the modern executive’s knack for the well-crafted sound bite and is one of the school’s most quoted authorities on management, leadership, and the moral authority of . . . people like himself.
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