The Leaders We Need, And What Makes Us Follow

by Michael MacCoby

  CHAPTER 6

  Leaders for Knowledge Work

  THE LEADERS WE WANT are not always the leaders we need. This has been true throughout history, and the result of getting the leaders people want has sometimes been the fall of nations and collapse of companies. Remember that, despite warnings from the biblical judge Samuel, the Israelites wanted a king, got one, and were sorry later. And in our time, boards of directors have hired dominating, charismatic CEOs who turned out to be costly busts. People continue to elect inept and corrupt leaders. Some of these leaders have satisfied unconscious and irrational transferential needs. The bureaucratic social character has been drawn to father-figure leaders—tall, commanding, and confident. But Interactives want to be collaborators, not followers. They’d most like to join a band of brothers and sisters, and if they want a leader at all, it will be someone who’ll stay around only to provide a service for them. But just because they know what they want doesn’t guarantee they’ll get the leaders they need.

  In this age of turmoil and transformation, we demand more of our organizations than ever before. We want companies to continually innovate, producing ever better products at lower costs. We want to travel farther and faster. We want more energy for light, heat, and air-conditioning, but, shocked by the suddenly limited supply of fossil fuels and the huge threat of global warming, we want companies and government to give us clean, cheap solutions. As brilliant technicians automate away jobs and companies send work overseas, we want our schools to educate the young—not just the elite, but everyone—to fill the roles in these organizations. And as our aspirations to live longer and healthier lives grow, we want healthcare organizations to perform what in the past would have been thought miraculous.

  This chapter and the two that follow describe the kind of leadership required to organize knowledge workers to meet these new demands.

  The challenge for leaders in these organizations is to transform bureaucracies in which individuals comfortably played autonomous roles into collaborative communities. And to meet this challenge they need to understand the people who will be the leaders and collaborators, and develop their Personality Intelligence so that they’re not misled by transferential distortion. For just as the bureaucrats got in trouble by seeking a daddy figure, the Interactives risk disillusionment in their quest for leaders who make no demands on them.

  Rowena Davis, an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford University, won the Templeton Prize in 2005 by describing as the ideal leader the kind who appeals to Interactives.1 Jonathan (she doesn’t tell us her subjects’ last names) connects people who want to collaborate and then gets out of their way; Nita, another admired leader, builds networks for change. Davis says that these leaders “create space and opportunity for action.” And they listen to the people they serve. They aren’t full of themselves, they avoid acting superior, and they don’t cause inequality. One admired business leader of this sort is Dee Hock who built the nonhierarchical Visa network.2 Pierre M. Omidyar, founder of eBay, is another example. But these leaders didn’t just create space. They had a business strategy and built the processes that businesses and customers could use.

  They are in fact more like the executive type of leader described by Bryan Huang, a thirty-two-year-old interactive entrepreneur from Beijing who has organized an Internet conversation about leadership in China. He tells me, “There are two kinds of good leaders. One is the emergent leader who facilitates the flow.”3 Examples would include Rowena Davis’s ideal leader and the network leaders who are needed to gain collaboration across organizational boundaries. The other, says Huang, is the executive leader “who has a vision people want to follow and can show how to make it happen.”4

  A danger for Interactives is insisting on filling leadership roles with nonleaders, people no one follows. Years ago, the sociologist David Riesman pointed out this problem in his study of how university presidents were being selected. He observed that increasingly the selection process resulted in choosing someone who satisfied all constituencies: faculty, alumni (for fund-raising), football boosters, diversity groups. Such an individual might be a good facilitator or mediator, even a network leader, but not a visionary with strong views.5 And recently, some visionaries who have made it through the selection process, such as Larry Summers at Harvard and Ed Hundert at Case Western Reserve, have provoked faculty censure and haven’t lasted long in their jobs.

  But in this time of historical change, even the most effective network leaders are not the only kind we need. They won’t stretch us out of our comfort zones, they won’t inspire us to tackle the big problems facing our country, they won’t transform bureaucratic organizations for the knowledge age, and they won’t make the tough decisions that have to be made when there’s no consensus. For that, we need different types of leaders who collaborate. Knowledge-age organizations need a leadership system rather than a set of individual leaders.

  In the age of knowledge work, leadership has become more essential as well as more complex than in earlier times. We saw that farmers and craftsmen work alone or in a relationship of master and apprentices, and that the bureaucratic manager controls a hierarchy of people with autonomous objectives and formatted tasks. In both these modes of production, the social character supported strong parental transferences that bound followers to leaders. In both, leaders knew their followers’ work better than the followers themselves did. But knowledge workers are specialists challenged to collaborate across boundaries. They usually know their work better than their bosses, and their closest ties may be to colleagues.

  We saw in chapter 2 that these Interactives don’t want to follow bureaucratic bosses and may even rebel against them. Paul Adler, a professor at the University of Southern California business school, describes a group of interactive software developers who flat-out refused to follow a bureaucratic manager, even though they recognized his technical expertise. They thought they’d function better as a collaborative heterarchy, in which leadership would shift according to which specialist had the relevant knowledge for the task at hand.6 Teams like these need leaders, not managers, to set and interactively communicate a meaningful purpose, and then make sure things happen as planned. The team can pretty much manage itself.

  This chapter and the next cover the spectrum of knowledge work and describe the kinds of leaders needed in the knowledge organizations I’ve worked with, studied, or learned about from other researchers. Clearly, business leads government and not-for-profits in designing organizations, strategies, and styles of leadership for knowledge work. That’s because business must continually compete to survive. Those leaders who make use of the best ideas succeed, so they constantly scan the business world to find out what works. But business by itself can’t solve the needs we have for health care, education, a sustainable environment, energy independence, and national security. That takes a combination of policy, programs, and organizations in both the public and private sectors, working together.

  THE KNOWLEDGE WORKPLACE

  To understand the kinds of leaders needed for knowledge work, consider the existing jobs in the United States. About 80 percent of them are labeled service work by the Department of Labor, but we can view these jobs in terms of a national employment space bordered by a horizontal axis of service work and a vertical axis of knowledge work (see figure 6-1). Each axis goes from low- to high-paid jobs. Low-paid service jobs include janitors, hotel workers, waiters, maids, security guards, and cleaners. High-paid service would be international fashion models and professional athletes, jobs that of course demand some knowledge. Low-paid knowledge work describes lab technicians, accountants, translators, and simple programmers; high-paid knowledge work includes editors, marketing experts, scientists, mathematicians, economists, financial analysts, product developers, and inventors. Bisecting this knowledge-service space is a vector of solutions— the application of knowledge so that it becomes a service. This vector rises from simple transactions like sales to teaching, medical, lega
l and financial consulting to the kinds of leaders needed to give purpose to, integrate, and operationalize the knowledge work. This is a dynamic space, constantly changing as inventors and programmers on the vertical axis automate transactional and, increasingly, professional and consulting work. Telephone operators disappear, ATMs replace transactional bank tellers, buyers and sellers use the Internet and displace middlemen. However, these knowledge workers don’t just destroy jobs. They can also create new jobs in renewable energy, health care, nanotechnology, and so on. But that requires leaders.

  FIGURE 6-1

  The need for leaders

  In knowledge-creating companies, we find three kinds of leaders who have to work together. They are:

  Strategic visionaries: The leaders who, envisaging the need for a new strategy and organizational transformation, prod, push, and persuade others to follow. They are often productive narcissists, bold innovators, like Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, and Bill Gates. But they can also be more collaborative marketing types like Bob Iger of Disney who was smart enough to buy Pixar, thus getting John Lasseter’s creativity, as well as Steve Jobs as a board member. The collaborative strategist seeks to build the vision through discussion with collaborators rather than authoritative pronouncements from on high. The history of IBM shows the contrast between the industrial and knowledge modes in sharp terms. When Thomas Watson Sr., the productive narcissist, wanted to establish the values for IBM to live by, he wrote them down, published them, and continually repeated them. But we saw that when Sam Palmisano, a more interactive marketing type, wanted to transform IBM for the knowledge age, he opened the company’s intranet to all employees for frank, freewheeling “jams” in which he participated as an equal, and from which new values and ideas emerged.

  Operational implementers: These are systematic obsessive types, also usually needed in organizations. They make sure the strategy is implemented; they turn shared purpose into results. There are a number of well-known examples of successful partnerships between obsessive operational leaders and narcissistic visionaries, including Herb Kelleher and Colleen Barrett of Southwest Airlines, Andy Grove and Craig Barrett of Intel, and Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer of Microsoft. Indeed, many narcissistic visionaries, like Don Quixote, would survive only if partnered with a downto-earth obsessive Sancho Panza. The operational types sometimes architect the processes that sustain a system, but in a collaborative knowledge mode, they work less through tight controls and organization charts and more through process alignment and cross-boundary conversation. To transform resisters into collaborators, they need to learn to be interactive “doctors” rather than dictators.

  Bridge-builders: Advanced solutions companies need network leaders with the ability to develop trusting relationships across organizational boundaries. These leaders, usually a combination of helping and marketing types, but sometimes with a strong dose of narcissistic ambition to transform, may do more than sustain networks; they may build bridges, not only across corporate departments, but also between companies and different national cultures. Lynda Applegate, a professor at Harvard Business School facilitated the Global Healthcare Exchange, combining companies to cut transaction costs and gain stronger bargaining power with suppliers. DAI, an international development consulting firm, used the bridge-building leadership of Joan Parker to bring together pharmaceutical companies with development consultants and national governments to address the problem of HIV/AIDS in African communities. Navy captain Linda Lewandowski was put in charge of the Sense and Respond Logistics (SARL) project in the Pentagon’s Office of Force Transformation to facilitate the rapid delivery of weapons and ammunition to battlefield units. She had to enlist different U.S. and allied services to participate in a network of communication and response, a dramatic change from the old way of negotiation between the bureaucratic service hierarchies. Of course, this role is better filled by the interactive social character who is used to bringing people together to solve problems than by a bureaucratic expert who is used to directing people to follow instructions. Bridge-builders may have little formal power—their power comes from their skill in creating consensus. An interactive bridge-builder tells me that she sees her role as getting people to understand each other. “People allow me to take this role,” she says, and she agrees that she has authority because it’s freely given to her, more than if she had a formal bridge-building role. Having had this role myself at AT&T where the goal was to transform a rigid bureaucracy into a learning organization, I can testify that bridge-builders don’t need a formal managerial role, but they do need support from the top. And in fact, having a formal role could limit effectiveness by identifying the bridge-builder with the interests of one or another unit.

  It takes these three kinds of leaders working together to achieve a common purpose, especially in complex knowledge companies. And of course, whatever their style, effective leaders infuse energy into an organization with their passion and conviction; they stretch people to perform beyond their comfort zone, and they insist on results.

  LEADERS FOR SOLUTIONS

  While traditional leaders view Interactives as hard to lead and as having an anarchic ideal of leadership, Interactives better fit the needs of many companies moving away from product-based business models to knowledge work and particularly solution strategies. To avoid narrowing profit margins for products that are becoming commodities, companies like GE have been wrapping products in services that require employees to work collaboratively with customers.

  In the late 1990s, I was a consultant to ABB (Asea Brown Boveri) in Canada at a time when the company’s electrical products were becoming commodities and margins were disappearing. To boost profits, we explored the potential of doing business with large customers like the zincmining and -smelting company Cominco, which proposed partnering with ABB (rather than merely buying equipment) to increase energy efficiency and decrease environmental pollution.7 To pursue this opportunity, ABB had to pull technical people together from its different business units to collaborate with Cominco’s engineers, and this called for network leadership. ABB had it in Borje Fredriksson, a productive marketing type with an interactive social character.

  Fredriksson had to persuade traditional bureaucratic ABB managers that other large customers from paper and pulp companies and utilities really wanted to buy solutions rather than products. He did this by bringing the customers to management meetings and letting ABB’s managers question them directly. Fredriksson and I then interviewed managers about what organizational changes would be needed to realize the new solutions strategy. We again brought the key managers together in an interactive process to design the new system. Recognizing that they would have to communicate the results to their own teams, these managers decided they would continue the interactive process, and they defined it as follows:

  Dialogue—meeting of the minds

  Constructive engagement

  Seeking logic

  Full trust—openness

  Understanding each other

  Common language

  Openness to different perspectives

  They also defined what it is not:

  Telling people

  Explaining to your staff

  Just listening

  After using an interactive process to design the structure, processes, and measurements needed to implement a solutions strategy, they answered their own question: Why use the interactivity process?

  Interactivity is the glue that makes the whole bigger than the sum of its parts

  Otherwise the strategy will not be fully understood

  Interactivity will continuously develop and improve the strategy itself

  Regrettably, Fredriksson’s initiatives and efforts to develop the solutions strategy were undermined by ABB’s bureaucratic top management, which kept in place a business unit (BU) structure and incentives tailored for delivery of products, not collaborative solutions. BU managers could reach their targets and win bonuses by selling lots of products
, but they weren’t paid to spend a lot of time developing relationships with people from other organizations within ABB and with customers, even though that would have benefited the company as a whole. So ABB had the creative network leader in Canada but not the visionary needed at the top in Zurich.

  Many companies are like ABB, where employees with the bureaucratic social character are much more comfortable with a clear line of authority than with collaboration. But those companies that are shifting from selling products to coproducing solutions with their customers recognize they need to move away from traditional hierarchical bureaucracies. They need to redesign processes and change measurements and incentives, and they need bridge-building network leaders like Fredriksson. Jay Galbraith, another professor at the University of Southern California, has written about efforts to make this sort of shift and about the network leadership sought at companies such as Nestlé, Nokia, and Citibank. He describes the shift in terms of forming cross-boundary networks that require leaders who can build trusting relationships to facilitate consensus-based decision making. He reinforces the point that the best bridge-builders don’t need formal authority and adds that formal authority without talent, which includes Personality Intelligence, won’t succeed.8 Bridge-builders succeed only when the operational collaborators grant them authority and the visionaries at the top empower them.

  This kind of leadership system is needed not only in solutions-creating technology companies, but also in healthcare organizations, which need to produce solutions for health problems. The next chapter describes the best of these organizations and the leaders they need.