The Leaders We Need, And What Makes Us Follow

by Michael MacCoby

  History aside, what Collins misses is that at the top of organizations today, it’s become essential to select managers whose personalities fit the role they play, who want to do what they need to do for success; and the right candidate doesn’t always fit Collins’s model of greatness. In his book Winning, Jack Welch, a great business leader who is not at all humble and self-effacing, shows his acute awareness of personality types when he describes how he picked people for leadership jobs. For a commodity product business he chose a leader who was “in his element with people who sweated the nitty gritty details like he did, talking about ways to squeeze efficiencies out of every process. He was a master of discipline.” This is the obsessive type that Collins spotlights. In contrast, the head of an innovative risky business required a visionary, a person who “hated the nuts and bolts of management . . . But he sure did have the guts and vision to place the big bets.”27 Probably also a big ego that gave him the confidence to take these risks.

  Like Welch, the best professional football coaches have learned which personalities fit best in which roles. For example, the best offensive linemen typically are conservatives who uphold authority and protect the quarterback, while the best defensive linebackers are rebels who take pleasure in smashing the quarterback—they challenge rules and regulations and are harder for coaches to control.28 Because personality can make the crucial difference among players with similar skills, these coaches need enough Personality Intelligence to understand followers and collaborators.

  However, some coaches and managers have become aware that the attitudes of followers have changed, that the kind of leadership effective in the past no longer gets results. This is not only because the challenges at work have changed, but also because the social character of followers is not the same as it was a generation ago.

  In the early 1970s, when I studied leaders and followers in high-tech companies, like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Texas Instruments, most of the craftsmanlike engineers had an obsessive bureaucratic social character. Within the hierarchy, they valued their autonomy. They liked to work at their own pace, and it was hard to get them to communicate and to cooperate among themselves, as well as to inform management about the status of their work. Some were entrepreneurial, but this usually meant trying to sell an idea without any evidence that people would buy the product. This mind-set at AT&T Bell Labs led engineers to try unsuccessfully to sell picture-phones while rejecting cellular telephones.

  In my book The Gamesman, I described a young manager at one of these companies, then in his early thirties, who seemed to me a prototype for the kind of antibureaucratic leadership needed for companies to innovate and succeed in competition that was just beginning to heat up.29 In retrospect, this manager seems like a warmer, less self-promoting version of Jack Welch. He eventually reached the top of his company, but rejected the CEO job.

  I gave him the name Jack Wakefield, but subsequently, the business press discovered he was Dick Hackborn of HP.30 Hackborn saw early on that to get results, he had to light a fire under the obsessive engineers, threaten that their slow pace would doom their product, but excite them with the promise of glittering success. He was also a teacher and coach, educating the engineers about the business, the competition, and corporate strategy, loosening them up in a playful way to create teamwork and collaboration.

  Hackborn, like Welch, saw himself as not growing people up a hierarchy of needs but developing them to fit the company’s needs. Both Welch and Hackborn spent much of their time with their people, answering their questions, responding to their arguments—all the while projecting a vision of success.

  Although both Welch and, less so, Hackborn provoked some fear in their followers—because it was clear they wouldn’t tolerate anyone who didn’t get with the program and perform—for the most part, people were persuaded. Once they wanted to follow, they could be trusted with considerable authority to make decisions on their own.

  Hackborn had the foresight to realize a generation ago that the new knowledge workers, a term he found by reading Peter Drucker, would no longer accept paternalistic control, that a leader had to create loyalty not to himself, but to a winning team and a shared purpose.

  Leaders can still learn from the way Hackborn and Welch engaged their followers. However, in the thirty years since I wrote about Hackborn, the social character of followers has been changing. There are fewer of the obsessive, uncooperative, bureaucratic types. The emerging interactive social character is naturally more collaborative, but as Hackborn predicted, less responsive to paternalistic control, and with stronger sibling ties (as I’ll describe in the next chapter). At one high-tech company, the MITRE Corporation, members of project teams are free to work whatever hours they want at home or at the workplace. The CEO tells me he doesn’t worry about performance, because team members won’t stand for anyone who isn’t getting results.31 The manager needs to be a leader who communicates purpose as the collaborators manage themselves.

  The best professional football coaches have reflected on the shift in the attitudes of players. The tough-talking paternalistic coaches of the past like Vince Lombardi, who’d berate and shame his team when they lost, would just alienate many of today’s players. Coaches like Joe Gibbs of the Washington Redskins, Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots, Andy Reid of the Philadelphia Eagles, Lovie Smith of the Chicago Bears, and Tony Dungy of the Indianapolis Colts model an attitude of collaboration and shared responsibility, older brothers rather than fathers. If there are mistakes, they work together with players to understand and remedy them. Redskins quarterback Mark Brunell said of Gibbs after a Redskin loss in the fall of 2005, “He’s always positive. He expects us to work. He’s not asking us to do anything he’s not committed to doing himself. The best thing about Coach Gibbs is that we’re all in this together. And that’s the way it should be.”32 To avoid making criticism personal, Dungy and Smith use processes like objective grading systems for game behavior, with consequences for loafing or missing tackles.33 In contrast, Tiki Barber, the Pro Bowl running back of the New York Giants, blamed his team’s postseason losses on his coach’s autocratic style. “I think he has to start listening to the players a little bit and come our way—their way—a little bit.”34

  After some losing seasons, Sasho Cirovski, coach of the University of Maryland soccer team, hit on the way to create winning leadership for Interactives. Using a survey with questions such as “Who do you rely upon when your team needs unity and motivation?” he found the team’s natural leader and made him captain. In other words, he dropped any attempt to use a father transference to inspire the team and instead engineered unity with a trusted sibling figure, who incidentally wasn’t even one of the best players. But with an interactive leader, Maryland went on to a national championship.35

  I expect some readers of this book will immediately identify with the interactive social character while others will find it harder to do so. I believe this is because we are in a period of transition in which both the bureaucratic and interactive social characters coexist. In the next two chapters, I’ll compare them, with a focus on the kind of leader each wants to follow.

  CHAPTER 3

  Why We Follow

  The Power of Transference

  I GOT INTO A CONVERSATION with George Raymond (not his real name) on a flight to London on my way to teach a seminar at Oxford on coaching leaders. George is a thirty-four-year-old leader of a technical team in a large media company. He tells me his boss is a bureaucrat who doesn’t listen to good ideas, even when they’ll save money. The boss wants to be admired, told that his ideas are great, but George just sees the boss as an obstacle, an evil. George describes his own team as a collaborative community where information flows easily, where he leads within the group, not above it. George grew up in a family where both parents were professionals, but his close ties were with friends and brothers, even more than with parents. He loved playing video games, MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-play
ing games) in which he was creating international teams and making quick decisions with no need for a boss. This boss tells him he’d better play by the company rules or else, but George says he is ready to quit if he can find a job with a company that respects what he can do. A few months later he e-mails to tell me he’s now joined another company where he’s a lot freer, and he gets along well with a boss who is more of a colleague. There will be many more people like George who follow a bureaucratic boss only as long as they have to.

  At the end of the twentieth century, historic changes in the experience of life in families and workplaces formed an interactive social character that began to shove aside the bureaucratic personality. But the bureaucratic experience has deeply engraved a powerful model of leadership in our thinking, buttressed by the various schools of psychology. Even Freudian psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on the father transference, reflects the typical attitude of the bureaucratic personality in organizations—the idealizing of paternalistic bosses. In this context, sibling transferences are viewed as rivalrous, like Cain and Abel competing for God’s favor, or Jacob outmaneuvering his brother Esau to gain Isaac’s blessing. For the interactive personality, in contrast, sibling transferences can strengthen a band of brothers and sisters allied against an irrational boss. It’s time that we focus on the psychology of followership that fits the new context.1

  Let’s be clear about the exceptional importance of leadership in a world of individualistic knowledge workers. Leaders are needed not only to drive for results but also to adapt and change organizations and to build bridges and networks to connect people who are diverse in skills, outlook, and identity. In any business, good leadership may be the most essential competitive advantage a company can have. Furthermore, without exceptional leadership, we won’t solve our national problems: new sources of clean energy, quality education, and health care for everyone. It’s not surprising, then, that management scholars focus relentlessly on the attributes of successful leaders.

  But in the effort to grasp and master the skills of great leaders, we tend to lose sight of the fact that there are two parts to the leadership equation. For leaders to lead, they need not only exceptional talent but also the ability to attract followers. And the problem is that followers get short shrift in the management literature, where they are described largely in terms of the leaders’ qualities. In other words, they’re seen as merely responding to the leader’s charisma, passion, integrity, or caring attitude. What most analysis seems to ignore is that followers have their own motives and identity, and they can be as powerfully driven to follow as leaders are to lead.

  I’ve noted that followers’ motivations fall into two categories—conscious and unconscious. The conscious ones are well-known. They have to do with our hopes of gaining money, status, power, new skills, or entry into a meaningful enterprise by following a great leader—and our fears that we’ll miss out if we don’t. What can be even more powerful are the unconscious, sometimes irrational motivations that lie outside our awareness and therefore beyond our ability to control them. In part, these motivations are rooted in emotional attitudes formed early in life, but in large part they also arise from the strong images and emotions in our unconscious that we project onto our relationships with people who have power over us.

  THE POWER OF TRANSFERENCE

  Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, was the first person to provide some explanation of how a follower’s unconscious motivations work. He explained how different characteristics like superneatness, obstinacy, and stinginess fit together in what he called the anal character.2 This insight into character formation is the foundation of psychoanalytic understanding of personality. However, Freud also discovered a process that explains a lot about why people want to follow leaders. After practicing psychoanalysis for a number of years, Freud was puzzled to find that his patients—who were, in a sense, his followers—kept falling in love with him. Although most of his patients were women, the same thing happened with his male patients. It is a great tribute to Freud that he realized that his patients’ idealization of him couldn’t be traced to his own personal qualities. Instead, he concluded, people were relating to him as if he were some important person from their past—usually a parent. In undergoing therapy—or in falling in love, for that matter—people were transferring experiences and emotions from past relationships onto the present. Freud thought the phenomenon was universal. He wrote, “There is no love that does not reproduce infantile stereotypes,” which, for him, explained why so many of us choose spouses like our parents.3

  Freud called the dynamic transference, and it was one of his most important discoveries. Indeed, for Freud, patients were ready to end therapy when they understood and mastered their transference and no longer idealized the therapist. And even today, identifying and dissolving transferences are the principal goals of psychoanalysis.

  But as important as it is, the concept of transference remains little understood outside clinical psychoanalysis. This is unfortunate, because transference is not just the missing link in theories of leadership—it also explains a lot about the everyday behavior of organizations.

  Typically, transference is the emotional glue that binds people to a leader, that makes them want to follow even when they are unclear about where the leader is taking them. Employees in the grip of positive transference see their leader as better than she really is—smarter, nicer, more charismatic. They tend to give her the benefit of the doubt and take on more risk at her request than they otherwise would. And as long as the leader’s reality is not too far from the followers’ idealization—and she doesn’t start to believe in their ideal image of her—this can work very well.

  The transference dynamic is most likely to get out of control during periods of organizational stress. In such situations, followers tend to be more dominated by irrational feelings—in particular, the need for praise and protection given by all-powerful parents. At the same time, the leader is preoccupied with handling the crisis at hand and, as a consequence, is probably less alert to the likelihood that his followers are just acting out childhood fears. This is what happened to a vice president of AT&T whom I was advising in the mid-1980s, during the breakup of the Bell System. While he was focusing on strategy, his followers felt frustrated that he was not dealing with their anxiety and reassuring them. Even though he was charting a promising new course for his division, employees complained that he wasn’t leading them.

  Another example of how transference is triggered by doubt and stress is the way people feel better just by going to see a doctor, even before the doctor has done anything for them. In large measure, this phenomenon can be explained by patients’ trust, which transfers the childhood experience of being cared for by parents when sick. This type of transference makes it extremely hard for scientists to evaluate certain medications, such as moodaltering drugs. Clinical studies show, for example, that up to 30 percent of people respond as well to placebos—again, trust—as to antidepressants. People who volunteer for a study in hopes of finding a cure for their ailment may be especially receptive to placebos.

  As well as being quite subtle in its workings, transference comes in many guises. It is blind to both age and gender, so stereotyping is very dangerous. A male leader, therefore, should never assume that he is a father figure or a brother figure—nor should a female leader assume she’s a mother or a sister. Psychoanalysis has shown that someone can have a paternal transference with a woman in authority and a maternal transference with a man.

  Clearly, positive transferences are closely linked to productivity. Suppose an employee believes that her boss will care about her in a parental way. To ensure that this happens, she will make superhuman efforts to please her leader. As long as she perceives that these transferred expectations are being met, she will continue to work hard. Will this benefit the organization as a whole? Yes—she’ll want to follow the leader, and this will be fine as long as it’s just a matter of following direction
s. But she’s also less likely to think for herself, and this may limit her potential for the kind of creativity needed in a knowledge company.

  Transferences can be negative as well as positive. Commenting on my article on transference in the Harvard Business Review, Stephen Schneider wrote about his experience consulting to a company with a highly effective COO “unusually committed to her work” and to her boss, the CEO. When, following an acquisition, the CEO became less available for her, the COO, who had been so eager to please, suddenly became distant and aggressive. Schneider found that on a rational level, the COO was clear about her role and content with her status. However, unconsciously, she was angry that the relationship with the CEO was no longer the same. The COO had idealized her boss when he had time to nurture her—he represented all she had never experienced from a distant father. When he turned away to work in the acquisition, the boss became the “bad father” of her childhood, and all her resentment from the past was projected onto him.4

  Another big risk in transference comes from the fact that it’s a twoway street. Just as a follower projects his past experiences onto his leader, the leader responds by projecting her past experiences back onto the follower. Freud called this phenomenon countertransference and saw it as one of the most serious obstacles to resolving patients’ psychological issues. The danger was that a psychoanalyst would respond to a patient’s transferential protestations of love by accepting that love as real. As a result, the analyst might assume the role of a protective parent, furthering the patient’s dependency. Or the analysis might end in a love affair rather than a cure. Countertransference is at least as big a problem for business leaders as for psychoterapists. In his novel Disclosure, Michael Crichton describes how a ruthless and dishonest woman is promoted above a more qualified man because she reminds the CEO of a favorite daughter who was killed in an auto accident. The CEO does not see her as she is but responds to her as though she were his beloved daughter. It’s often the case that a boss will favor a subordinate who shows him filial admiration.