The Leaders We Need, And What Makes Us Follow

by Michael MacCoby

  Lindahl later sent me to nine Asian countries to find out how local managers and expatriates viewed strategy, organization, and one another.9 Besides asking about these factors, I asked two other questions: “What is your view of a good manager?” and “What is your view of a good father?” The answers were always related—a good manager was similar to a good father. But there was a sharp divide between the responses of Westerners and those of many Asians.

  The Westerners, Americans and Scandinavians in particular, viewed good fathers and good managers as people who were helpful when needed but who generally allowed their followers autonomy. By contrast, the Asians—especially the ethnic Chinese in Taiwan, Singapore, and Indonesia—wanted a father-manager who protected them and taught them: a benevolent despot. In return, they would give the leader complete loyalty and obedience. Not surprisingly, these Asians also experienced Western leaders as bad parents who woefully neglected their children. However, young managers from Beijing, where the Cultural Revolution broke traditional family patterns, responded more like Interactives. They described the ideal leader as a good basketball coach who put people into the right roles, promoted teamwork, and knew how to adapt strategy to changing competition.10

  Differences between the West and much of the East are further amplified by the relative decline of parental authority in the United States and Western Europe. Managers from many Asian and Eastern European companies still come from traditional families, and thus tend to develop paternal transferences—so they often find it difficult to deal with American organizations increasingly motivated by maternal and sibling transferences. And Westerners often fail to appreciate Asian and East European organizations’ need for leaders who reward loyalty with paternal interest.

  A huge challenge for global managers is leading people you don’t see operating in different time zones, many speaking broken English and with different cultural values. The Interactives who from age ten or eleven have been in touch with global correspondents will, I believe, be a lot more comfortable with global management. Furthermore, global business, the Internet, and video games are creating common values at work and are shaping the interactive social character. One Interactive software expert remarked in a seminar I attended that leaders should forget trying to deal with different values and instead get everyone to sign on to a common purpose. That’s good advice.

  Meanwhile, researchers try to provide global managers with guidebooks on cultural differences. The pioneer in this field is Geert Hofstede, who in the 1970s surveyed employees of IBM in sixty-four countries. While Hofstede reported suggestive differences on four (later increased to five) dimensions, he advised that “to understand management in a country, one should have both knowledge of and empathy with the entire local scene.” Hofstede cites history and novels to describe the context of the dimensions he used, a good practice.11

  When I consulted in Finland to Nokia, Cultor, and Ahlstrom, I was advised to read The Unknown Soldier, a novel by Väinö Linna, about two officers in the Finnish war with Russia. One is distant and arrogant, hated by the soldiers who only grudgingly follow him. The other is modest and brave, lives just like the troops, leads them into battle, and is unquestionably followed. This is the ideal for a Finnish CEO, to be a role model not a father figure, but it presents problems when an admired leader is followed without question and followers don’t disagree with the boss, even when they think he’s wrong.

  Hofstede recognizes the limitations of findings based on responses to surveys. By themselves, they lack context, and none of the studies I’ve seen takes account of identity differences or social character differences among subcultures within countries. Furthermore, a statistically significant correlation may explain only a small percentage of the variance in the responses to survey questions. (These studies report product-moment correlations that when squared show the percentage of the variance explained. For example, a correlation of 0.5 may be highly significant, meaning it could occur by chance alone less than once in one hundred samples or more, but only accounts for 25 percent of the variance, leaving 75 percent unaccounted for). If this seems too academic, we can just say that these correlations are suggestive about cultural differences but leave much unexplained. And it bears repeating that correlations don’t prove causality.

  PERSONALITY TYPES—HOW WE ARE LIKE MANY OTHER PEOPLE

  Social character is that part of learned personality shared by people in a culture or social class. To understand the people you work with and determine which roles they’ll best fit, you’ll have to focus in on individual personality.

  Companies typically seek employees who demonstrate behavioral strengths, positive patterns of behavior. The Gallup organization offers a useful inventory of strengths that combine elements of genetic and learned traits and talents.12 But these behavioral traits, like “achiever,” “command,” creating “harmony,” “woo” (win others over), or being “strategic” can be performed in different ways with different motivations. For example, an achiever can be an obsessive perfectionist aiming to be the best at his game, like Tiger Woods, or someone driven to change the world with his products, to create a new game, like Steve Jobs. And a skillful wooer may be either caring, seductive, or inspirational. It’s good to focus on strengths, but we increase our Personality Intelligence by understanding the anatomy of these strengths.

  There is little agreement among psychologists about how best to describe individual personality. Each psychological theory views personality from a somewhat different angle. That’s understandable, since we are dealing with interpretations of complex behavior patterns, emotional attitudes, and experience. However, psychologists do agree about five genetically influenced personality traits that can be observed from infancy on. These traits of temperament, called the Big Five, are:

  Openness to experience, curiosity, interest in variety versus sameness

  Agreeableness versus suspiciousness

  Emotional stability versus emotional instability or neuroticism

  Conscientiousness, self-discipline, sticking with a task versus being easily distracted

  Extraversion, sociability versus introversion13

  Another approach to personality based on C. G. Jung’s theories describes “archetypes” that leaders can take on, such as “wise king,” “magician,” “nurturer,” or “warrior.”14 (Franklin Delano Roosevelt thought of himself at different times as a magician, a warrior, and a quarterback.) Some of these archetypes are similar to roles in the MMORPGs like World of Warcraft so popular with Interactives. These roles appeal more or less to the different personality types observed by Sigmund Freud and Erich Fromm that I describe in my book on narcissistic leaders. So far, I’ve referred to them in passing, but I’ll briefly review the four types here.15 They are: erotic, obsessive, narcissistic, and marketing. Keep in mind that no one is a pure type, but while we are all mixes, one type usually dominates a personality. Also, each type has positive or productive potentials as well as the negative or unproductive potentials that can result in personality disorders. Each type can be either good or bad.16

  The productive erotic type is a helper: caring, cooperative, idealistic, communicative—the kind of person who stimulates love and supports others. The unproductive erotics are dependent, needy for love, and gossipy. They tend to avoid conflict and to exaggerate their emotional reactions. Freud writes that erotics “are dominated by the fear of loss of love and are therefore especially dependent on others who may withhold their love from them.”17 You are especially likely to find professionals of this type in health care, education, and the arts. I’ve also found them in staff roles in companies, where they often attach themselves as helpers to top executives.

  The productive obsessive is the systematic type: inner-directed with a strong sense of responsibility and high standards, conscientious and reliable. The unproductive obsessives are nit-picking, overcontrolling, stubborn, and stingy, the elements of what Freud termed the anal character. This type can be effective
in leadership roles in the professions and industry, especially when the challenge is cost cutting, but less so when there is a need for innovation.

  Freud drew a distinction between narcissism, which we all have, and the narcissistic personality. Narcissism is essential for survival, since without a dose of it, we wouldn’t value ourselves any more than anyone else. Although any personality type can have an excess of narcissism in the form of egoism, or hubris, with success, the narcissistic personality is more vulnerable than other types to getting puffed up. That’s because narcissists care less than the other types about what others think of them. They answer mainly to their own internal ideal self.

  Freud describes the narcissistic personality as “independent and not open to intimidation. The ego has a large amount of aggressiveness at its disposal, which also manifests itself in a readiness for activity . . . People belonging to this type impress others as being ‘personalities’, they are especially suited to act as a support for others, to take on the role of leaders and to give a fresh stimulus to cultural development or to damage the established state of affairs.”18

  Narcissists, and Freud saw himself as one, have not internalized parental models, so—lacking a strong superego that programs a moral code—they are free to write their own. The gifted and productive ones are innovators, independent thinkers who want to project their vision onto the world and are the type best able to inspire followers with their passionate conviction.

  Unproductive narcissistic traits are arrogance, grandiosity, not listening to others, paranoid sensitivity to threats, extreme competitiveness, and unbridled ambition and aggressiveness. These traits have undermined narcissistic leaders, even those who have gone from great success to disaster, like Napoleon and Henry Ford.

  When Freud observed personalities in the early twentieth century, obsessives were the dominant type, the model for character development. This was because their personality type fit hand in glove with the social character formed in the era of craft and bureaucratic-industrial production. But as the mode of production and its cultural frame shifted to service and knowledge work, a new personality type emerged to fit its demands. Fromm termed this chameleonlike type the marketing personality. It has become the dominant personality type of the interactive social character.

  The productive marketing type combines independence with interactivity. Flexible to the point of being protean, marketing types are decisive when adapting to changing situations. I’ve described negative traits in chapter 4: lack of a center, insincerity, disloyalty, and superficiality. Like narcissists, marketing types lack a strong superego, because they don’t identify strongly with parental figures, but their moral code is continually programmed and reprogrammed by groups they consider essential for their success. The effectiveness of a leader with a marketing personality depends greatly on the quality of the leader’s close colleagues, since marketing types tend to form their views interactively, shaping them to what they think leads to success.

  Why do I suggest using these psychoanalytic types rather than simpler behavioral types? There are two reasons. One, although typologies like introvert versus extrovert describe observable traits, these are inborn elements of temperament, neither learned nor learnable. And behavioral patterns like the Gallup strengths don’t always predict how these strengths will be expressed. The psychoanalytic types may be influenced by inborn personality traits, but they are mainly formed in the socialization process. Each type expresses a particular constellation of universal human needs or emotionally energized values: motivational systems shaped in the stages of development described in the appendix. The genius of Freud included the ability to think systemically, to connect dynamic behavioral traits into types. Each psychological type describes the interaction of universal motivational patterns—fight-flight, attachment, play-mastery, pleasure-pain, exploration—but each type shuffles these differently, with one or another element as dominant. Furthermore, Freud worked at describing how these types develop in childhood, and although some of his descriptions are partial or unconvincing, they open up an area for further research of the sort Fromm and I reported in our study of child development in the Mexican village.

  Clearly, personality types should be viewed through the lens of social character. For example, the obsessive personality takes on a different coloration in the peasant, craftsman, bureaucratic, and interactive social character frames. The cautious and frugal farmer, the precise and hierarchical professional, and the expert and precise interactive knowledge worker all share obsessive values of mastery, autonomy, and hard work. All have tendencies to be overcontrolling, compulsively clean, and hoarding. But they use different tools and master different modes of production with different roles, rules, and relationships. They have internalized different cultural values. The marketing personality isn’t found in traditional peasant villages where identities are firmly rooted in family and place. It was formed in the postindustrial culture, where all types take on its elements of flexibility and interactivity. Given this relationship between individual personality and social character, the social character might also be called the cultural personality, a macro personality that both frames and colors all the micro personality types within a culture.

  The second reason I suggest using these psychoanalytic types is that I’ve observed these types in my clinical work as a psychoanalyst and supervising other therapists. The types were useful both in my research on Mexican villagers and study of corporate managers. Furthermore, in applying the questionnaire based on these types in leadership workshops, my students, colleagues, and I have been able to understand and predict styles of leadership. Not surprisingly, we’ve found that high-tech entrepreneurs who take the big risks are narcissistic visionaries, the executives who squeeze efficiencies out of every process in production companies are obsessives, and professionals who customize their services and sell their personalities are marketing types.19 Furthermore, these types are consistent with the observations of such diverse analysts as Machiavelli and Jack Welch about fitting personalities to leadership roles.

  When I’ve used the personality questionnaire with executive teams, the result has been a more open conversation. For example, vice presidents of one executive team complained that the CFO didn’t respond to their queries. The CFO’s questionnaire showed he was a (erotic) helper, but his interest in helping was directed solely to the CEO who he saw as a father figure. As a result of this discussion, which brought to light an attitude the CFO had not been aware of, stronger links were forged between the CFO and vice presidents. Furthermore, the CFO understood why he so often felt insufficiently appreciated by his boss who he’d unconsciously experienced as the uncaring father he was desperately trying to please.

  In these conversations about personality, team members have become more interactive with fewer examples of serial monologues. I asked Tony Barclay, CEO of DAI, a global development consultancy, what difference it made after his team had shared the results of the personality questionnaire. He said, “We began to talk to each other in a different way and ultimately to be more direct with each other. It saved time.” Barclay added that this process of discovery also sensitized executives to differences in cognitive style. For example, “Some people respond to new proposals right away. Others need time to digest them. If you respect that and don’t judge it as stubbornness, you sometimes get better results by waiting a while until they come back with their views.”20

  INTELLECTUAL SKILLS—HOW WE THINK

  In traditional bureaucracies, not much attention was paid to styles of thinking. Some people were considered brighter than others, quicker at solving puzzles and citing facts. Recruiters judged job applicants’ intelligence mainly on the basis of their grades. In the knowledge workplace, analytic intelligence, the kind tested as IQ, is still necessary, but not sufficient. We’ll see in chapter 10 that effective leaders also express different types of intelligence, such as emotional intelligence; strategic intelligence, including systems thinki
ng; and street smarts.

  How can you learn to understand the people you want to follow or collaborate with you? This chapter is meant to take the reader a step toward developing Personality Intelligence. However, while concepts like identities, social character, and personality can sensitize us about people’s values and patterns of relatedness, unless we are also fully present with them, listening with our hearts, we can’t really know other people, we can’t experience them directly. Even when they smile and nod their heads, we won’t know whether their enthusiasm is real or their feelings are really positive. Even when they cry, we won’t know whether they are sad or furious. To understand others, we have to listen actively, using the conceptual framework presented in this chapter as a context to understand what we see, hear, and experience.

  Clearly, the diversity of identities and personalities complicates leadership for the knowledge workplace, particularly since leaders can no longer count on the bureaucratic character’s paternal transferences. Interactives seem to grasp this better and to recognize that the capability to understand differences in culture and personality is essential for effective collaboration in knowledge work. However, they will become more effective leaders by developing their Personality Intelligence.

  In the next three chapters, I’ll describe the kinds of leaders we need in knowledge organizations, making use of my experience and research in business, health care, and education. Then, in chapter 9, I’ll speculate on the kind of president we need in this historic age of transformation.

  In chapter 10, I’ll describe in more detail what it takes to develop Personality Intelligence. Leadership development in the age of knowledge work requires continual learning, especially learning about people.