Heroic Leadership

by Chris Lowney

  One supposes that the master motivators who devised this question expected to inspire the very same outstanding service it inquired about. Needless to say, it only succeeded in unleashing renewed torrents of complaints on these already put-upon souls in customer service. It didn't help customers, nor did it win employees over to the company's values or vision. The local union president commented, "Employees understand the values statement. But I don't know that they believe the company is following its own words.-.-.-. People sort of just look at the values statement and go, `yeah, right.' It's just a piece of paper."1

  One thing was right with the picture; a lot more was wrong. Excellence doesn't occur accidentally, so we can at least credit XYZ management with consciously targeting outstanding service as a goal. So far so good. But things drift downhill from there. First, there was the script. How many of the scriptwriters themselves had ever been inspired to excellent performance by a memo instructing them to perform excellently? None, of course. Why did they imagine the customer service reps would react differently? Outstanding service might have been the company's mission, but no process had made it meaningful to indi-vidual employees.

  They had been set up to failor at least to feel like failuresnot positioned to succeed.

  Second, even if XYZ's operators had enthusiastically embraced the mission, they weren't empowered to do much about it. Irritated customers were unlikely to feel they had received outstanding service no matter what the operators did, because the operators lacked the means to address root problems. They had been set up to fail-or at least to feel like failures-not positioned to succeed.

  Finally, and most damaging of all, managers didn't model the ambitions they preached. Operators didn't see their managers "following the company's words" and thus became cynics, drawing the logical conclusion that the values statement was just a piece of paper.

  LEADERSHIP THE JESUIT WAY

  The challenge, whether for individuals, teams, or whole companies, is how to move from cynical, going-through-the-motions performance to motivated, even heroic, performance. What separated the early Jesuit team from XYZ Telco? What made one an organization in which so many were fired up and convinced that they were contributing to the "greatest enterprise that there is in the world today" while the other suffered from weak management? Both companies aspired to outstanding performance within their fields. But the similarities end there. The Jesuit team took at least three steps that XYZ Telco didn't to turn their aspiration into a reality:

  • First, they invited recruits to turn a corporate aspiration into a personal mission.

  • Second, they created a company culture that stressed heroism, modeling the virtue themselves.

  • Third, they gave each person an opportunity to enlarge himself by contributing meaningfully to an enterprise greater than his own interests.

  Loyola's most powerful practical insight about heroic leadership was that it is self-motivated. The Spiritual Exercises enabled each recruit to personalize the company's mission. Invited to "go further still" than wholehearted service, each recruit made the personal choice to respond. Unlike the employees of XYZ Telco, the Jesuit recruit wasn't simply handed his company's vision. Moreover, he had to figure out what going further than wholehearted service-the magis-would mean in the concrete circumstances of his life. The dynamic of the Exercises highlights a key difference between heroic and run-of-the-mill organizations: widely dispersed leadership in which each person considers, accepts, shapes, and transforms a general mission into a personal one.

  Of course, those who made the personal commitment needed support. Jesuit recruits found that support in constant reinforcement from the top. Jesuit leaders relentlessly reinforced the commitment to excellence and to (holy) ambition. Loyola's exhortation to a team in Portugal was typical: "No commonplace achievement will satisfy the great obligations you have of excelling. If you consider the nature of your vocation, you will see that what would not be slight in others would be slight in you."2 His colleague Jeronimo Nadal rendered it in more concrete, personal terms for trainees in Spain: "The Society wants men who are as accomplished as possible in every discipline that helps it in its purpose. Can you become a good logician? Then become one! A good theologian? Then become one!-.-.-. and do not be satisfied with doing it half-way!"3

  Those words energized Jesuit teams only because they saw the Loyolas, Nadals, and others modeling the sentiments they preached. Personal commitment evaporates into cynicism when, as in XYZ Telco, individuals see managers talking the talk but not walking the walk. As it happened, the early Jesuit team boasted plenty of heroes walking the walk and made sure every Jesuit heard about those heroes. Esprit de corps soared as letters from the field, copied in Rome, were circulated throughout the Jesuit world. Jesuits in Brazil conveyed the impact of one such letter from Japan, describing how even its late-night arrival couldn't keep them from reading it: "From [midnight] till morning, there was none who could sleep, because the Father Provincial began at once to read the letters." After devouring what they called the "great news from Japan," the Brazil Jesuits wrote to headquarters, urging them to continue forwarding such reports and explaining that the "consolations" they derived from hearing of colleagues' exploits "excel all others."

  If making the mission personal and creating a supportive culture were two ingredients of the Jesuit formula for instilling heroism, the third ingredient was giving each individual the opportunity to contribute meaningfully. Jesuits in Brazil were not just sitting around reading about what their heroic colleagues were doing. After all, their own letters to Rome boasted of work so satisfying that it made them feel that they were "working to lay the foundations of houses which will last as long as the world endures." They had committed themselves to "go further still" than whole-hearted service, and unlike the employees at XYZ Telco, they were given a meaningful opportunity to do just that. The Jesuits believed what behavioral psychologist Frederick Herzberg would later observe: "You cannot motivate anyone to do a good job unless he has a good job to do."4

  The Jesuits had many good jobs to do-and heroes emerged to fill them. First were those who conceived a revolutionary new company-Loyola, of course, but Xavier and Lainez as well. Then there were scientific and cultural pioneers-Ricci, Clavius, de Nobili-as well as explorers like Goes and a long list of others: Pedro Paez, who first paddled to the source of the Blue Nile at Lake Tana; Jacques Marquette, who charted the Upper Mississippi River; and the "wise, visionary" Jakob Baegert, who already in 1771 foresaw the future of his remote outpost: "Everything about California is of such little importance that it is hardly worth the trouble to take a pen and write about it."5

  They were committed individuals who enjoyed meaningful opportunities to contribute their own gifts and visions. They came out of supportive environments where managers demonstrated the same commitment. Few organizations become so rich in these traits that observers call them heroic or visionary. Reaching that performance plateau is enormously challenging in its own right; remaining on that plateau is even harder. A restless, countercultural instinct to keep challenging the status quo was built into Jesuit heroism. The built-in energy of the magis pointed always toward some better approach to the problem at hand or some worthier challenge to tackle. The daily examen shed steady light on behavior or results that fell short of aspirations; the Jesuits' self-reflective habits denied them the luxury of "just going with the flow." And when a better path presented itself, their change-ready posture of "living with one foot raised" inclined them to leap into action instead of stewing indecisively.

  A restless, countercultural instinct to keep challenging the status quo was built into Jesuit heroism.

  Good leaders share this restless, eternally questioning posture. It keeps them a little ahead of the curve. It's what keeps them pointed toward the future, toward solutions and opportunities that others might overlook or be too timid to try or lack the energy to pursue. It's the scrappy, indefatigable, persevering spirit of "throw me out the doo
r and I'll find a way to climb in the window." Invigorating though such a leadership lifestyle may be, it can be difficult as well, as Jesuits learned.

  Undaunted by the various challenges that frequently derail would-be leaders, one Jesuit team pulled off something so remarkable that Pedro Ribadeneira gushed to King Philip II of Spain that "all the well-being of Christianity and of the whole world" depended on their work.

  He was speaking of high school teachers.

  While Ribadeneira was convinced that the world's well-being rested on the able shoulders of Jesuit teachers, he suffered no starry-eyed delusions about life in the classroom trenches. It's clear from his observations that the day-to-day challenges of teaching have not changed all that much from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first:

  It is a repulsive, annoying and burdensome thing to guide and teach and try to control a crowd of young people, who are naturally so frivolous, so restless, so talkative, and so unwilling to work, that even their parents cannot keep them at home. So what happens [is] that our young Jesuits, who are involved in teaching them, lead a very strained life, wear down their energies, and damage their health.6

  Heroic leadership is not just teaching high school kids but looking past the flying spitballs to see that the well-being of the whole world depends on what you're doing. Heroic leadership is motivating oneself to above-and-beyond performance by focusing on the richest potential of every moment. Jesuits characterized it more simply with their company motto, magis: the restless drive to look for something more in every opportunity and the confidence that one will find it. It's not the job that's heroic; it's the attitude one brings to it. The Jesuits weren't heroes because they were high school teachers; they were heroes because they brought a spirit of magis to their work. And magis popped up all over the Jesuit world. So it wasn't only Ribadeneira who saw himself involved in a world-changing endeavor; they all did. Witness the sentiment echoed by a Jesuit in Japan feeling no less energized about very different work: "Your Paternity should understand that this is, beyond a doubt, the greatest enterprise that there is in the world today." 7 Or by a Jesuit in Brazil: "We are working to lay the foundations of houses which will last as long as the world endures." 8

  Were they all delusional? No, like the rest of us they sometimes complained about dreary, monotonous work and irritating colleagues. But they could also look beyond these things, envisioning the richest possible outcomes of what they were doing. The spirit of magis transformed their work and their product. By approaching their work as the greatest enterprise in the world, it became just that. Their conviction and intensity of spirit, multiplied across thousands of opportunities, built the world's largest, most successful education system.

  HOW THE WORLD'S LARGEST EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM CAME TO BE

  It would make the Jesuits sound a bit more traditionally corporate to pretend that a task force emerged from a conference room one afternoon in 1543 with a master plan to dominate the world education market. It didn't exactly occur that way. It just kind of happened. And the truth is, more corporate successes have "just kind of happened" than any strategic planner would ever care to admit.

  To begin with, the Jesuits had a problem. The founders had made the naive assumption that the European educational system would churn out an endless stream of candidates fitting their recruiting specs. Bear in mind the candidates they sought: those who were spiritually engaged, totally committed, intellectually superior (in the top 1 percent of Europe's elite), capable of debating theology in Latin with leading Protestant theologians and of explaining the same ideas in the vernacular to peasant children, ready to cross the globe on forty-eight hours' notice, equally comfortable working in university lecture halls as in plague hospitals, ready to take orders or design their own strategies.

  What a surprise that such candidates weren't there for the picking. As the Jesuits later put it in their Constitutions: "Those who are good and learned are few."

  There might have been an easy way out of the predicament-lowering standards just a bit-but that wasn't an option for the Loyola who went to his grave wishing that he could have tightened standards even more. Only certain candidates were up to snuff, what one Jesuit called aptissimi, "the very best." It made for a memorable recruiting slogan: quamplurimi et quam aptissimi-"as many as pos sible of the very best." And since Europe's colleges weren't producing enough ready-made aptissimi, eventually the Jesuits resorted to molding the raw human material themselves. Already short-staffed, they decided to address the lack of qualified entrants by diverting Jesuits from already stretched field operations into training the new recruits. It wasn't the most appealing business solution.

  The scope creep of serving an unmet need

  What happened next was a classic case of scope creep, as corporate teams charged with a narrowly defined mandate to educate Jesuit recruits slowly watched their mission mushroom. Their initial plan addressed the problem at hand without excessively taxing Jesuit resources. They opened residential communities for their trainees within the precincts of universities at Paris, Louvain, Cologne, and elsewhere. Jesuit managers supervised trainee spiritual development while Europe's finest faculties provided academic formation. Problem solved. Well, not quite. Even at Europe's best universities, teaching quality seemed uneven to Jesuit managers measuring on a scale of one to aptissimi, and it soon seemed entirely sensible-and no great incremental burden-to supplement the university education their recruits were receiving with courses taught by the Jesuits themselves.

  And once they began tutoring their own recruits, the duke of Gandfa's proposal didn't seem an impossible leap: that they teach their recruits in Gandfa, shoehorning some of his non-Jesuit subjects into the classes as well. Why not? What extra trouble would it be to include a few others in classes they were teaching anyway? And the duke's offer to endow the school was welcome news to the cash-strapped company. But it was extra work and extended the thrust of Jesuit education in a new direction. There was no university in Gandfa at the time. So for the first time, Jesuits were doing all the teaching, not to mention running the school itself. It was little more than a year later that Messina, Sicily, city officials proposed yet another slight twist: that the Jesuits open a school there for the city's youth and shoehorn a few of their own Jesuit trainees into the classes.

  So what started as residential, nonteaching communities housing Jesuit recruits somehow morphed into Jesuit-staffed, Jesuitrun colleges serving lay students. Scope creep. The goal hadn't emerged as a brainstorm from their (nonexistent) strategic planning department; it just kind of happened. But we must credit the Jesuits with the savvy to recognize and jump all over a winning idea, however it had emerged.

  Recognizing and building on a good idea

  Loyola approved nearly forty college openings during the last ten years of his life. No Jesuit had ever run a school. Somehow the company managed to get more than thirty up and running before Loyola died: a dozen in Italy alone, others in Lisbon, Paris, Vienna, Louvain, Cologne, Prague, Ingolstadt, and even beyond Europe in Goa and Sao Vicente, Brazil. Nearly three-quarters of available Jesuit manpower was suddenly being poured into a business that hadn't been contemplated at the company's founding. By the company's fortieth anniversary, their 150 colleges formed the bedrock of Catholic higher education in Europe. Theirs was the world's largest, most influential higher-education network long before it reached its high-water mark of more than seven hundred high schools, colleges, and universities on five continents. Education historians have estimated that by the mid-eighteenth century, nearly 20 percent of Europeans pursuing a classical higher education were studying under Jesuits.

  Pundits would say the Jesuits were the first well-organized entrant into a market that was largely a vacuum, and their leaders were bold enough to bet the company on seizing the opportunity. But the real leadership came from the trenches, as motivated Jesuits in one region after another saw schools as the ideal way to make a unique, long-range impact while cementing local status and r
eputation. Scrappy managers fought to get schools up and running, shaking sponsorship and funding out of local communities and nobles and squeezing approval and resources out of Jesuit headquarters. Sponsorship was usually the easy part, relatively speaking; as the Jesuit reputation flourished, new school requests poured into Rome. Securing manpower from Rome was usually the tricky part.

  The education market presented Jesuits with a perfect opportunity. The existing system was badly fragmented at all levels. Education was a catch-as-catch-can affair. Most European cities and towns had no elementary or secondary education systems whatsoever. There were virtually no broad-based systems of free or subsidized education-those who were educated were those few whose families could pay. As a result, as few as a third of school-aged males and less than a tenth of females learned even rudimentary reading and writing skills. But the averages mask stark socioeconomic disparity: virtually all children of the wealthy received some schooling; virtually none of the less well off did. Because elementary teachers were not organized into craft guilds, there were no established minimum standards for entering the profession. Nor was there oversight or curriculum guidance from local governments. If one could attract paying students, one was a teacher. More than 80 percent of Venetian students in the late 1500s, for example, were served by independent operators running tiny schools out of their homes.9

  Protestant reformers deplored the obvious inequities and deficiencies of these education nonsystems. Martin Luther urged civil authorities to organize primary education systems, arguing the benefits to the state of a broadly educated citizenry. But the reformers' efforts focused almost exclusively on elementary education. The few networks implemented in response greatly improved elementary education in some regions. But these networks rarely crossed state borders or encompassed higher education, and in any case they were few and far between as the sixteenth century ended.