Heroic Leadership

by Chris Lowney

  You fail to see (something still more surprising) that our father is obliged to keep the universal good in mind. Thus, besides providing you with sufficient manpower to carry on the works you have undertaken, he must remember others in which our Lord wishes to make use of the Society and its members. The college at Venice has only one priest, who has no knowledge of philosophy or theology; that of Padua has two who are weak in literature-.-.-. that of Medina has two who are only average in Latin and still mere youths.4

  Domenech was not the only short-staffed Jesuit, nor was he the only one to stick his arm into a hornets' nest by requesting help. The Dutch Peter Canisius manned the northern European frontlines of the Counter-Reformation, high-profile work that was as critical to the Vatican as it was to the Jesuits. Yet even Canisius had to go begging for reinforcements. And like his colleague in Sicily, all he got was a snappish rebuke: "You ought not to be so persistent in asking us for a new man every hour of the day. We are not rich in experienced teachers."5

  A COMMON PREDICAMENT, THEN AND TODAY

  The Jesuit predicament is a familiar one. Highly successful, rapidly growing companies inevitably face painful staffing constraints. The economic landscape of the late 1990s regularly featured more work opportunities than talented staff to fill them. Fast-growing-if, in retrospect, ill-conceived-"new economy" Internet start-ups battled one another and "old economy" businesses for the limited number of skilled workers. The business press coined a new phrase for the crisis: the "war for talent." And while innumerable carcasses of once-vaunted dot-coms now litter the economic landscape, their demise has not brought armistice in the so-called talent war.

  For it's no longer just fast-growing start-ups like the early Jesuit company or the dot-coms that struggle to find talent. The recent economic malaise may make the "war for talent" seem a quaint, outdated notion as employers today seem to have their pick of well-qualified candidates. But the United States's meager birth rate presages a long-term shortage of quality staff that will afflict companies in all kinds of industries. The baby-boom-fed U.S. work force, for example, grew 2.3 percent annually from 1975 to 1990; from 1990 to 2005, the work force will grow only 1.2 percent annually, its slowest growth since the 1930s. The peak-productivity population, workers aged thirty-five to forty-four, will actually decline by approximately 15 percent from 2000 to 2015. Worrisome though the statistics sound for the U.S. economy, the numbers are even worse elsewhere. Over the first twenty years of the new millennium, the total work force will shrink in four of the world's ten largest economies: Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, and France.

  Over the first twenty years of the new millennium, the total work force will shrink in four of the world's ten largest economies: Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, and France.

  Employers can't do much to shore up the supply side of this equation: the population of thirty-five- to forty-four-year-old workers for the year 2015 has already been born. It's too late to manufacture more. Even more liberal immigration policies would address only a small portion of the looming gap.

  Management consultants have become more than accustomed to coaching fast-growing start-ups through staffing shortages, and they would have had ready advice for Loyola and his overstretched colleagues: cast a wider net, recruit as aggressively as possible, and rush new hires through boot camp and into the field. Consultants would have reassured the Jesuits that their staffing woes were ultimately a good sign, the natural byproduct of business momentum arising from their first-mover advantage. They were dominating the emerging education market because competitors had not yet organized themselves to attack the opportunity. Above all else, the Jesuits needed to defend and grow their already dominant market share to lock out potential entrants.

  THE IMPORTANCE OF PERSONAL QUALITY

  If the Jesuits' predicament is not unique in corporate history, their response may be. A few of Loyola's lieutenants demonstrated the right stuff that might have landed them lucrative consulting posts had they lived only a few centuries later. They labored over the staffing shortage, brainstormed eighteen distinct recruiting tactics, and included them in a draft of the Jesuit Constitutions for Loyola's review. The draft boomeranged back with Loyola's brusque comment scrawled beside the recruiting proposals: "Take them all out, or, leaving a few, still make it very difficult [to gain entry to the Jesuit order]."6

  Perhaps the general was just having a bad day? Hardly. His rebuff of the recruiting program was no aberration. Indeed, while presiding over a company growing so rapidly that it had more promising opportunities than staff to handle them, Loyola was most concerned about admitting people into the Society too freely. He was far from worried about ratcheting up the recruiting intake; a colleague recalled Loyola confiding that "if there was anything that would make him desire to live on-.-.-. it was that he might be more stringent in admitting into the Society."7

  So the screening process became even more selective. Surely entry-level training was curtailed to rush recruits into resourcestarved worldwide operations? Not a chance. Recruits underwent a longer, more rigorous orientation than that of any other religious order or commercial enterprise-by a striking margin. Recruits of other sixteenth-century religious orders typically became fullfledged members after a year of novitiate training, an intensive introduction to the rules, practices, and lifestyle of their religious order under the tutelage of an experienced superior; Jesuit recruits marched through a spiritual boot camp that lasted twice as long. And after Jesuits had been out working in the field for years, they were reeled in for yet another year of professional development and for some midcareer selfreflection. The company officially called it a tercer probacion, "third testing," but early Jesuits also called it their escuela del afecto, loosely, their "school of the heart."

  After Jesuits had been out working in the field for years, they were reeled in for yet another year of professional development and for some midcareer self-reflection.

  As any consultant would have warned, Jesuit recruiting selectivity and extensive training inevitably bottlenecked efforts to reinforce operations. It took its toll. A dozen years after Loyola's death, the Jesuits' third general, Francis Borgia, was shuttering schools selectively, fearing that the talent base was being spread too thin. And the fifth general, Claudio Acquaviva, refused more than 150 new requests to open schools. We don't know what advice these Jesuit generals might have received from the seventeenth-century version of a management consultant. Today they would be warned that they were forfeiting their "first-mover advantage." But Jesuit leadership seemed unfazed. Far from panicking as a few opportunities slipped through their fingers, they reinforced their commitment to personal development: local Jesuit managers were instructed that under no circumstances were the Spiritual Exercises to be sacrificed in order to rush recruits into the field.

  At first glance, their instincts seem counterintuitive. They were already short-staffed. Surely Loyola and his successors should have focused on surfacing more recruits, not on tightening entrance requirements. By turning down new opportunities and protracting new recruit training, Loyola's successors would only imperil corporate momentum.

  But what transpired was far from a loss of momentum. Membership had swelled from ten in 1540 to approximately a thousand at Loyola's death in 1556-and mushroomed to more than five thousand by 1580. The company's first college had opened in 1548; more than thirty were up and running by Loyola's passing, and more than two hundred were established before century's end. In fact, the Jesuits' strategic instincts were anything but counterintuitive. While first-mover advantage features prominently in today's management consultancy lexicon, so does sustainable growth. An organization can grow only as fast as available capital, talent, and management capacity to oversee the growth. Many an enterprise has imploded from unsustainable growth. Twenty-first-century online customers thrilled by the promise of being able to mouseclick their way through holiday shopping became less enchanted with "e-tailers" who hadn't figured out the tiny detail of d
elivering the goods by Christmas morning. Most such overly ambitious online companies didn't survive to see a second Christmas.

  Jesuit leaders recognized their company's flourishing reputation as the direct result of unique, high-quality services. Municipalities across Europe flooded them with requests to open schools, requests that would likely continue so long as the company's reputation remained unimpeachably solid. The same dynamic explained the Jesuits' recruiting success: their reputation for selectivity, high standards, and outstanding results was precisely what attracted the most-talented recruits. The Jesuits certainly would have culled more recruits in the short term by cutting standards. But the tactic would have severely damaged their long-term ability to attract the recruits they really wanted, what they called aptissimi-Latin for the "very best" talent in Europe and beyond. By reining in overly aggressive growth and rejecting "bottom-fishing" recruiting practices, they sustained both their reputation and their steep growth trajectory. Or, paradoxically, the Jesuits kept growing rapidly by not growing too rapidly!

  The Jesuit case study, now approaching five hundred years, might have proved instructive to innumerable fast-growing startups that crashed and burned spectacularly after meteoric bursts of overly aggressive growth. But what does any of this have to do with self-awareness, the first Jesuit leadership principle and this chapter's theme?

  Everything.

  THE LINK BETWEEN SELF-KNOWLEDGE AND SUCCESS

  Neither Loyola nor his successors ever sat around discussing firstmover advantage or sustainable growth. They certainly worried about preserving their company's future and seizing the many urgent opportunities they saw around them. But by all indications, they focused predominantly not on grandiose, company-wide strategies but on the simpler strategy of forming quality Jesuits one by one-or what we might today call molding leaders.

  Loyola's final project was translating the Jesuit vision into a set of rules and procedures robust enough to govern the fledgling company. The result was the 250-page Jesuit Constitutions. Fully two-thirds is monopolized by guidelines for selecting and training recruits; every other aspect of Jesuit life is relegated to a measly eighty pages: rules for work, methods of governance, criteria for selecting managers, guidelines for entering new businesses, and so on. Presuming that Loyola didn't simply run out of steam after completing the section on trainees, the implied message in the lopsided Constitutions is obvious: ongoing success depends on turning recruits into leaders. Solve that problem, and the leaders you've molded will solve every other problem.

  Jesuit-style leadership formation had little to do with technical skills or vocational training. Jesuits were believers in on-the-job training who regularly tossed recruits into the deep end of the pool. Managers shipped junior Jesuits off on two-year ocean journeys to Asia, confident that each would successfully acquire the needed work skills: fluency in the language, assimilation into an alien culture-even, if necessary, the ability to operate an astrolabe, create a map, or build a cannon! The travelers didn't bring with them tactical handbooks addressing every foreseeable contingency. Instead, they brought the most important skill they needed to thrive in unfamiliar and challenging environments: self-awareness.

  More than four hundred years later, the Jesuits' uncompromising emphasis on self-awareness is finding plenty of validation. True, one would still be hard-pressed to find corporate annual reports extolling staff self-awareness with the same pride reserved for a lofty P/E ratio. But academics have begun to pinpoint the strong link between mature self-knowledge and success.

  Peter Drucker has been a pioneer in management and leadership studies for more than three decades. He has written persuasively on the ramifications of our changing economy, particularly the technology-driven shift toward a "knowledge economy." It wasn't so many years ago that work for most people entailed following orders and performing assigned jobs. Bosses parceled out tasks, and those tasks fit into an orderly and fairly predictable corporate routine. Not so today. Work roles have largely become self-managing, and the big picture is anything but predictable. There are far fewer supervisors to give direction. Companies have continuously and sometimes ruthlessly "delayered," eliminating middle management in pursuit of efficiency. Surviving middle managers are responsible for increasingly broad spans of control: they're too stretched to baby-sit subordinates. Most office workers are on their own most of the time, independently prioritizing and plowing through responsibilities. Moreover, in a more competitive and rapidly changing marketplace, companies must respond with ever increasing speed and urgency; this has further decentralized decision making. In the current business environment, "he who hesitates is lost." Employees who once might have been reprimanded for not clearing decisions with managers before making them will today more likely be penalized for not showing enough initiative.

  Drucker has focused on the human implications of this shift. How do workers succeed in such an environment? Skills once critical only for top management have become essential for everyone. No longer can one succeed-or even survive-simply by following orders. Each employee is more and more a self-manager, making decisions on his or her own. Moreover, with the accelerated pace of change, roles and tasks evolve constantly, requiring continuous judgment and the ability to learn on the fly.

  Who thrives in such environments? Those who can learn, innovate, exercise good judgment, take responsibility for their actions, and take risks. These traits aren't like the technical skills required of a good lawyer, accountant, or salesperson. They come from self-understanding, not vocational training. As Drucker argued in the Harvard Business Review, in this new environment, "successful careers are not planned. They develop when people are prepared for opportunities because they know their strengths, their method of work, and their values."8 Of course, success in any job is impossible without the requisite technical or vocational skills. But whereas those skills alone once might have constituted a success formula, employees today must also be able to assess their strengths, weaknesses, and how well their working style equips them for a fast-paced, constantly changing work environment. In other words, they need to become self-aware. Drucker singles out two practitioners of this best practice and offers his own, perhaps generous assessment of how powerfully their self-knowledge served their respective companies:

  John Calvin and Ignatius Loyola-.-.-. incorporated [ongoing self-assessment] into the practice of [their] followers. In fact, the steadfast focus on performance and results that this habit produces explains why the institutions these two men founded, the Calvinist church and the Jesuit order, came to dominate Europe within 30 years.9

  While more than a few historians would argue Drucker's claim that the Jesuits and the Calvinist Church came to dominate Europe within thirty years, less open to debate is his core thesis. The pace of societal and corporate change is accelerating, and whether in their personal or professional lives, individuals are forced to make more decisions and make them faster-with less guidance, incomplete information, and few relevant precedents. Successfully navigating such changed and changing landscapes tests one's self-confidence, good judgment, ability to learn, and comfort in making decisions.

  Daniel Goleman's extensive research in the broad field of mana-gerial self-awareness has resulted in two best-selling works, Emotional Intelligence and Working with Emotional Intelligence. Goleman has generally focused on why and how some senior executives succeed while others fail.

  We know what we want these leaders to do: establish direction and vision, motivate teams to pursue goals, smash through obstacles, and produce change for the better. Most corporations have a process for identifying smart, talented, and ambitious employees with the potential to assume leadership roles. But these selection processes don't always work very well. Many rising stars self-destruct, never achieving their early potential. No one really understands why some talented individuals become successful leaders while others crash and burn, why the first in the class is rarely the first in life, or why the hotshot junior ex
ecutive seldom makes it to CEO. Goleman has focused his research on this puzzle, and his insights have implications for more than just the world of senior executives. The more senior one's role within an organization, the less critical to success are intellect and technical skills compared with the bundle of skills Goleman calls emotional intelligence. "When I compared star performers with average ones in senior leadership positions, nearly 90% of the difference in their profiles was attributable to emotional intelligence factors rather than cognitive abilities." 10 Just what is "emotional intelligence"? In Goleman's terms, it comprises five core competencies:

  Self-Awareness: the ability to recognize and understand your moods, emotions, and drives.-.-.-.

  Self-Regulation: the ability to control or redirect disruptive impulses and moods; the propensity to suspend judgment-to think before acting.

  Motivation: a passion to work for reasons that go beyond money or status.-.-.-.

  Empathy: the ability to understand the emotional makeup of other people.-.-.-.

  Social Skill: proficiency in managing relationships and building networks; an ability to find common ground and build rapport.11

  Reread the list. How many companies interview candidates with the above criteria in mind? How many companies attempt to develop these traits in employees? And when companies identify "future leaders," how many do so on the basis of these human skills?