by Lee G Bolman
Consciously or not, we all read situations to figure out what scene we’re in and what role we’ve been assigned, so that we can respond in character. But it’s important to ask ourselves whether the drama is the one we want and to recognize that we have latitude as to which character to play and how to interpret the script. In adapting to cues of the theatrical moment, we don’t want to compromise our own sense of identity. But we have editorial license to alter the scene and recast the drama.
The essence of reframing is examining the same situation from multiple vantage points. The effective leader changes lenses when things don’t make sense or aren’t working. Reframing offers the promise of powerful new options, even though it cannot guarantee that every new strategy will be successful. Each lens offers distinctive advantages, but each has its blind spots and shortcomings.
The structural frame risks ignoring everything that falls outside the rational scope of tasks, procedures, policies, and organization charts. Structural thinking can overestimate the power of authority and underestimate the authority of power. Paradoxically, overreliance on structural assumptions and a narrow emphasis on rationality can lead to an irrational neglect of human, political, and cultural variables crucial to effective action.
Adherents of the human resource frame sometimes cling to a romanticized view of human nature in which everyone hungers for growth and collaboration. Human resource enthusiasts can be overly optimistic about integrating individual and organizational needs while neglecting structure and the stubborn realities of conflict and scarcity.
The political frame captures dynamics that other frames miss, but has its own limits. A fixation on politics easily becomes a cynical self-fulfilling prophecy, reinforcing conflict and mistrust while sacrificing opportunities for rational discourse, collaboration, and hope. Political action is too often interpreted as amoral scheming.
The symbolic frame offers powerful insight into fundamental issues of meaning and belief, as well as possibilities for shaping people into a cohesive group with a shared mission. But its concepts are also elusive; effectiveness depends on the artistry of the user. Symbols are sometimes seen as mere fluff or camouflage, the tools of a charlatan who seeks to manipulate the unsuspecting or an awkward attempt that embarrasses more than energizes people at work.
REFRAMING FOR NEWCOMERS AND OUTSIDERS
Martin’s initial encounter with Davis exemplifies many of the challenges and tests that leaders confront as they move forward in their careers. The different scenarios offer a glimmer of what they might run into, depending on how they size up a situation. Managers feel powerless and trapped when they rely on only one or two frames. This is particularly true for those who are less powerful, which may include newcomers and underdogs—women, minorities, and members of other groups who experience “the dogged frustration of people living daily in a system not made for them and with no plans soon to adjust for them or their differences.”1 These outsiders are less likely to get a second or third chance when they fail.
Although progressive organizations have made heroic strides in building fairer opportunity structures, the path to success is still fraught with obstacles for the less powerful. Judicious reframing can help them transform managerial traps into promising leadership opportunities. And the more often individuals break through the glass ceiling or out of the corporate ghetto, the more quickly those barriers will disappear altogether.
CONCLUSION
Leaders can harness frames as scenarios, or scripts, to generate unique approaches to challenging circumstances. In planning for a high-stakes meeting or a tense encounter, they can imagine and experiment with novel ways to play their roles. Until reframing becomes instinctive, it takes more than the few seconds that Olivia Martin had to generate an effective response in every lens. In practicing any new skill—playing tennis, flying an airplane, or handling a tough leadership challenge—the process is often slow and painstaking at first. But as skill improves, it gets easier, faster, and more fluid, and the role of a leader becomes less vexing and more rewarding.
NOTE
1. Gallos, J. V., Ramsey, V. J., and Associates. Teaching Diversity: Listening to the Soul, Speaking from the Heart. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997, p. 216.
Chapter 11
Images of Leadership
Can Crooked Kites Fly?
Ideally we would all be versatile leaders who see the world through multiple lenses. In reality, most of us have a narrower field of vision. We prefer some ways of interpreting reality and neglect others. If our preferences were measured and plotted on a four-dimensional grid, we’d look lopsided. The shape of our leadership “kite,” depicting our cognitive leanings, can position us for success—or disaster. It all depends on how well we can adapt our mental images to align with the challenges we face.
You don’t have to be equally comfortable with all four frames. If certain areas fall outside your comfort zone, expand your field of vision—or work with someone who can help cover for your blind spots. That approach paid off for Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The shy and geeky Zuckerberg is strong on ideas and technology but weak on executive presence. He was wise enough to complement himself with his chief operating officer, Google veteran Sheryl Sandberg. She brought a Harvard MBA, interpersonal skills, and a steady, adult hand to a company known for its chaotic, frat house atmosphere. “The dynamic on the management team,” Zuckerberg commented, “has improved a huge amount since she joined.”1 Sandberg focuses on management, public relations, and marketing, leaving Zuckerberg free to indulge his passion for the Facebook website. “Sandberg’s hefty portfolio and her fluid, trusting relationship with Zuckerberg are liberating for him. She does all the things he doesn’t want to do so he can focus on what he likes.”2
Every pattern has virtues and shortcomings, and works better in some situations than in others. In this chapter, we look at prominent business leaders who have made their crooked kites fly. As you study their examples, reflect on how well your preferences serve you now and will continue to serve going forward. (If you have not already done so, use the Leadership Orientations survey in the Appendix to assess the shape of your own leadership kite by completing the survey, plotting your scores on the figure, and connecting the dots. An online version of the instrument is available at http://www.josseybassbusiness.com/2013/07/assessment-leadership-orientations-self-assessment.html.)
METRICS MAESTRO: AMAZON’S JEFF BEZOS
In 2005, with Amazon’s profits and stock price sinking, a business journalist wrote that it was time for Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and longtime chief executive, to turn over the reins to a professional manager with deep operations experience.3 The writer pegged Amazon as a retailer gone adrift that needed someone to jack up profit margins. Bezos, who had much bigger plans for Amazon, ignored the advice and kept after his goal of expanding his company into the largest Internet purveyor of almost everything, including e-readers and web services. Seven years later, in 2012, Forbes rated Bezos the best CEO in America: “the corporate chief that others most want to meet, emulate and deify.”4 A brilliant strategist, demanding leader, and one of the smartest guys in any room, Bezos is a contemporary example of a leader whose strong structural orientation is central to his success. Figure 11.1 shows our estimate of Bezos’s frames configuration.
Figure 11.1. Jeff Bezos’s Leadership Configuration
The structural frame dominates, closely followed by a strong symbolic orientation. The combination is captured in a phrase Bezos uses to describe Amazon: “a culture of metrics.”5 Bezos has also shown political savvy in navigating Amazon’s many external battles with competitors and content creators (such as publishers and authors). At the heart of Bezos’s approach to leadership is a relentless focus on the customer: “Amazon tracks its performance against about 500 measurable goals. Nearly 80% relate to customer objectives. Some Amazonians try to reduce out-of-stock merchandise. Others race to build a bigger library of downloadable movies. Intricate algorithms
turn one group of shoppers’ past habits into custom recommendations for new customers. Hourly best seller lists identify what’s hot. Weekly reviews keep track of who is on course—and where corrective attention is needed.”6
Bezos’s focus is crystal clear: the best possible customer service at the lowest possible cost. He pays little attention to the human resource proposition: “if you take care of your people, they’ll take care of your customers.” He flattens subordinates with comments like, “Are you lazy or just incompetent?” or “This document was clearly written by the B team. Can someone get me the A team document?”7 Bezos believes in “coddling his 164 million customers, not his 56,000 employees.”8
He is obsessive about minimizing costs that don’t benefit consumers. That’s why Amazon executives fly coach and work at cheap, particleboard desks. At one distribution center, as an alternative to the cost of air conditioning, Amazon had paramedics on standby during heat waves to aid employees overcome by heat. Amazon’s tough approach produced various forms of employee resistance, including theft, unionization efforts, and one creative worker’s own do-it-yourself job enrichment program. He created a little cave for himself in an obscure corner of a distribution center, furnishing it with items borrowed from Amazon’s shelves. He punched in each morning, spent the day relaxing in his refuge, and punched out at night. His career was brief.
Bezos’s salary, less than $100,000, hasn’t budged since 1998 (though his Amazon stock has made him rich; Forbes estimated his wealth at $27 billion in late 2013). But he is a risk taker who will spend big to build the business. He invested heavily in Kindle for years before it finally became a viable product. More recently, he announced a plan to use midget drones to fly packages directly to the customer’s door.
Amazon’s success depends on making it as quick and easy as possible for customers to find what they’re looking for and get it delivered promptly to their home or office. This means that the website (where customers browse and buy) and the distribution centers (that turn digital orders into physical shipments) must be tightly aligned. Bezos and Amazon continually obsess over making sure systems perform.
Bezos is a hands-on leader who reads customer emails to stay in touch with what’s working and what isn’t. He tracks the metrics, pays close attention to operational specifics, relentlessly attacks waste, sets demanding targets, and is vigilant about ensuring accountability. Amazon has discovered, for example, that even a 0.1-second delay in rendering a web page can produce a 1 percent drop in customer activity, so Bezos pushes for constant effort to make the site faster and more responsive.
Amazon’s many metrics and huge database on customer behavior are a treasure trove for continuous improvement. Efforts to give you precisely what you’re looking for and to get it to you on time are relentless. In 2011, Bezos was proud that Amazon kept its promise to deliver goods to meet the Christmas deadline 99.99 percent of the time, but this still meant that they missed once in every ten thousand shipments. He wanted to get that number to 100 percent, and was not happy when many Christmas gifts missed the holiday because delivery partners such as UPS couldn’t keep up with the holiday demand in 2013.
Jeff Bezos’s leadership formula combines a strong emphasis on structure and technology with a demanding, customer-centric culture. One reason it works is that Amazon customers transact business with a website, not people. Amazon customers have learned not to expect friendly sales clerks who offer a cheerful greeting or in-depth product knowledge. Instead, customers reach a site that makes it easy to find preferred or panned needles in haystacks. The result is a business that consistently ranks in the top ten for customer service among online retailers. There are other ways to achieve success in online retailing, however. Surprisingly, one of the clearest contrasting examples is Zappos, a business that Amazon bought for roughly a billion dollars in 2009.
LEADER OF THE TRIBE: ZAPPOS’S TONY HSIEH
Zappos began when a frustrated shoe buyer, Nick Swinmurn, couldn’t find what he wanted in local stores or online. He decided to launch a website, shoesite.com, that he soon renamed Zappos.9 Needing capital, he approached Tony Hsieh and Alfred Lin, who headed a small investment firm with the playful name Venture Frogs. Hsieh and Lin eventually pumped in more than $10 million.10 Hsieh came on board as co-CEO and then took over when Swinmurn moved up to board chair. Hsieh had plenty of room to practice his unorthodox brand of leadership, centered on a few key ideas. Figure 11.2 shows our estimate of Hsieh’s frames configuration.
Figure 11.2. Tony Hsieh’s Leadership Configuration
Delivering Happiness is the title of Hsieh’s book about Zappos. Inspired in part by a customer who wrote that Zappos delivers happiness in a box, Hsieh is passionate about his conviction that if an organization delivers happiness to employees, they’ll do the same for customers, whose loyalty will make the business successful.
“Fun” and “weird” are two of the words most often used to describe what it’s like to work at Zappos. The company isn’t unique in offering its people free food and snacks, computers in an Internet café, or frequent parties. But it’s one of the few where singing, dancing, and costume parades are commonplace. Or where employee creativity shines in dozens of online videos about life at Zappos. These include a Zappos Family Musical11 and a clip showing a Zappos employee celebrating happy hour by slapping the CEO on his face.
Hsieh describes Zappos’s culture as the company’s number-one priority, and adds, “Our belief is that if you get the culture right, then most of the other stuff—like great customer service or building a long lasting, enduring brand—will happen naturally.”12 Zappos has anchored its culture in a set of core values that include “Deliver WOW Through Service,” “Embrace and Drive Change,” “Create Fun and a Little Weirdness,” “Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded,” and “Pursue Growth and Learning.”
Before Hsieh joined Zappos, he cofounded a successful Internet firm, Linkexchange.com, but eventually decided to sell the business (to Microsoft in 1998 for $265 million) because he no longer enjoyed coming to work. The fatal error, he believed, had been hiring for skill rather than cultural fit. Hsieh didn’t want to make that mistake again, and every Zappos job applicant is interviewed for alignment with the company’s core values. After they’ve been through initial training, Zappos offers new employees $2,000 to quit. Few accept, but it’s a powerful test of commitment and a way to weed out people who aren’t right for the culture.
All new employees, regardless of position, go through a training program that includes a week at the Zappos distribution center in Kentucky, and a tour at the call center talking to customers. Most of Zappos’s business comes from the website rather than the phone, but the call center gives new employees a way to get to know the customers and Zappos’s customer service values. Unlike most call center workers, Zappos employees don’t use scripts and aren’t measured on efficient use of time. Instead, their job is to do what it takes to make customers happy. If it takes an hour or two to solve a customer’s problem, or if they have to go to a competitor’s website to find what a customer wants, that’s what’s expected.
Creativity, fun, and weirdness intermingle to give customers more than they expect. Zappos customers often use the word “love” to describe their feelings about the site, raving about the selection, service, return policy, and free shipping in both directions. That pays off in loyal customers who keep coming back.
AUTHENTIC ENGINEER: XEROX’S URSULA BURNS
After twenty years of climbing the ladder at Xerox, Ursula Burns was ready to quit. She didn’t see much future in a company with a mountain of debt, no cash, and a corrosive culture of executive infighting. The stock price had fallen from $64 to $7 a share, and a CEO recruited from IBM had been fired after serving less than a year. Still, colleagues and board members told Burns that Xerox needed her, and the new CEO, Anne Mulcahy (profiled in Chapter Six) convinced her that she could help save the company.
Mulcahy and Burns were both X
erox lifers who had known each other for years, but they had come up through different paths: Mulcahy via sales, Burns through engineering and operations. One of the first assignments Burns took on for Mulcahy was to persuade unions that Xerox had to outsource many of its manufacturing jobs to survive. It was a tough sell, but Burns used her basic approach to leadership: “One of the things I’ve learned is that if you can know your facts, and you build up your opinions with some facts and data, as well as some emotional conviction, you can generally get people to listen to the general story and direction.”13
The unions bought her argument that fewer jobs were better than no jobs. When Mulcahy retired as CEO in 2009, she and the board agreed that Ursula Burns should take over the job. Burns’s promotion generated a rash of media attention because of two firsts: Burns was the first African American woman to head a Fortune 500 company and the first woman to succeed another woman as CEO of a major U.S. business. Figure 11.3 illustrates Burns’s leadership configuration.
Figure 11.3. Ursula Burns’s Leadership Configuration
Burns’s leadership configuration shows strengths across all four frames, but she is highest on structure and human resource, lowest on the political frame. The pattern reflects her background as an engineer who worked her way up to head worldwide manufacturing for Xerox. Her structural leanings were evident in her willingness “to do whatever it takes—dismantle the company’s manufacturing unit that shaped her career; cut back or eliminate products that once defined the Xerox brand; branch out into uncertain (and risky) new areas of business—in an effort to reposition the company in an era of technological upheaval.”14