Leaders: Expert in The Organization’s Core Operations?
Since the 2007-2008 financial crisis there have been organizational and leadership failures too numerous to list. Why? I can provide one answer that may not be “the” answer but it is one important answer. We have too many people reported to be “great leaders” but who do not know their core business functions well enough to spot critical problems in their organizations before they read about them in the news.
In a previous post I described the warnings Hayes and Abernathy (1980) provided in their article. They argued those selected to manage organizations should be selected primarily from the organizations core business functions rather from legal or finance support operations. In the excerpts below it is clear this line of research continues today but without much echo or follow-up. That the person in charge should be deeply knowledgeable in the organization’s core business function seemed so common sense to me, I could not understand why this factor did not play a larger role in senior leader selections. Kaiser and Curphy (2014) provided an answer that agrees with my own experience; they wrote:
"Research shows that a majority of people in positions of authority are ineffective leaders (Hughes, Ginnett, & Curphy, 2012), so asking them what it takes to lead is like asking your doctor for investment advice. He or she will have an opinion but it may not be any good." (Kaiser & Curphy, 2014, p. 297)
In other words, if your organization CEO is clueless about the core business functions (e.g., lawyer or finance expert) and a consultant suggests organizational failures might be remedied by promoting senior executives with more core business operational expertise, the CEO will probably not agree because that might be admitting his or her own weakness? I have seen many instances of inexperienced bosses surrounding themselves with even less experienced staff to avoid the embarrassment of being seen as less knowledgeable than their subordinates.
Collins (2001) and his research team selected 11 companies that financially out preformed the stock market by a multiple of 3 for 15 consecutive years (i.e., sustained superior performance under the same CEO). Collins found that 10 of the 11 great companies had selected their CEOs from within the company rather than recruiting from outside. These CEOs had deep understanding of their companies’ core business functions. Goodall (2009) studied the top 100 research universities in the world and discovered the most successful of those universities were led by presidents who were themselves world-class researchers. During the past 15 years spending on leadership development has surged from $7B to more than $14B and yet the number of leadership failures continues to grow (Kellerman, 2012; Curphy & Kaiser, 2014; Pfeffer, 2015). In fact a, “recent National Study in Leadership Confidence published by the Harvard Kennedy School reports that 70% of Americans believe that we have a nationwide leadership crisis and that the country will decline if we do not get better leaders. (Kaiser & Curphy, 2014, p. 295)
Gen McChrystal and ADM McRaven
From a military perspective there are life and death consequences of poor leadership. So how do we select the senior leadership of Special Forces units like the Navy SEALs and the U.S. Army Special Forces? For example, General Stanley McChrystal commanded at every level of organization beginning as a platoon leader (12 soldiers) to large organizations like the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Throughout his long career he was always in special operations whether as a line soldier and commander or as a staff officer.
Admiral William McRaven is yet another example of expert leadership. He served as a U.S. Navy SEAL on SEAL Team 6 under the founder of the SEAL concept Richard Marchinko. ADM McRaven also commanded at every level from the small SEAL teams to large organizations such as the United States Special Operations Command (4-Star billet). No matter where ADM McRaven served he had always done the same jobs that he had to ask others to do…therefore his leadership was based on the credibility earned through all of his previous special operations assignments. These two senior military leaders earned great credibility with those under their commands because everyone knew these two officers had performed and excelled at the same jobs they were now asking their subordinates to do.
[BTW: If you search YouTube for ADM McRaven’s University of Texas commencement address it is well worth watching. He talked about personal responsibility and leadership lessons he learned as a Navy SEAL that would help the graduates do whatever they chose to do after graduation. (Not the usual fluff stuff)]
Below are several excerpts from the important books and articles mentioned above. I hope my research will provoke constructive discussions on how to select and develop more effective leaders. Questions to think about: Does your current supervisor, manager or boss know enough about your work to effectively evaluate your performance? Or, are performance evaluations based on whether the boss likes you? Does your boss know enough about your work to mentor you to perform even better? Are you the boss who knows your subordinates’ work well enough to see a potential failure in time to stop it before it brings down your organization or are you the boss who discovers your organization’s failure when you read about it in the news? Take the time to learn your core business operations on a deeper level than mere PowerPoint slides.
V/R,
Dr. C
Excerpts from Collins’ Good to Great
Larger-than-life, celebrity leaders who ride in from the outside are negatively correlated with taking a company from good to great. Ten of eleven good-to-great CEOs came from inside the company, whereas the comparison companies tried outside CEOs six times more often… The good-to-great companies paid scant attention to managing change, motivating people, or creating alignment. Under the right conditions, the problems of commitment, alignment, motivation, and change largely melt away. The good-to-great companies were not, by and large, in great industries, and some were in terrible industries. In no case do we have a company that just happened to be sitting on the nose cone of a rocket when it took off. Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice. (Collins, 2001, p. 11).
Quote from Goodall’s Socrates in the Boardroom
It is important to emphasize early that scholarship will not be viewed here as a proxy for either management experience or leadership skills. An "expert" leader must have expertise in areas other than scholarship. Also, it should not be assumed that all outstanding researchers will inevitably go on to make good managers or leaders. Before their step to the top position, most university presidents have gained management experience as provosts, pro-vice vice chancellors or deans, or by running major research centers or labs. (Goodall, 2009, pp. 5-6)
The attention paid in this book to a leader's technical ability sits in contrast to recent emphasis on the managerial skills of university presidents. Over the past two decades, politicians in a number of countries have sought to introduce a business or "managerialist" culture into the public sector, often called "new managerialism" or its less ideological counterpart, "new public management." (Goodall, 2009, p. 9)
Institutional heads must always have managerial experience and some minimum level of leadership talent. Being an expert, or a top researcher, is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for being a good leader. To succeed in any organization this is, of course, normally the case. I argue that it is also important to establish what level of technical expertise about the core business an individual should hold as a prerequisite to other factors. For example, the head, or chief of the Air Staff, of the Air Force will first have served some required period as an officer, normally a pilot, and may also have seen active duty. The head of a school has usually spent an amount of time as a teacher; and the CEO of a car manufacturer typically knows something thing about the industry because he or she has spent time in it. (Goodall, 2009, p. 13)
Research universities should be led by brilliant scholars, not merely talented managers. That, at its simplest, is this book's underlying message. In proposing it, I have drawn upon qualitative evidence from interviews with heads of some of the world's best-known universities, and upon quantitative evidence of various kinds. My focus has been on research universities, but the message of the book may be a wider one. In a range of settings in which knowledge is central to an organization, it will often be desirable to let experts, experts, not expert managers, be at the helm. This is partly because over decades those experts have acquired a deep, inherent, instinctive understanding of the core business. (Goodall, 2009, p. 136)
Excerpts from Barbara Kellerman’s, The End of Leadership
Being a leader has become a mantra. It is a presumed path to money and power; a medium for achievement, both individual and institutional; and a mechanism for creating change sometimes— though hardly always— for the common good. (Kellerman, 2012, p. xiii)
But there are other, parallel truths: that leaders of every sort are in disrepute; that the tireless teaching of leadership has brought us no closer to leadership nirvana than we were previously; that we don’t have much better an idea of how to grow good leaders, or of how to stop or at least slow bad leaders, than we did a hundred or even a thousand years ago; that the context is changing in ways leaders seem unwilling or unable fully to grasp; that followers are becoming on the one hand disappointed and disillusioned, and on the other entitled, emboldened, and empowered…
Bottom line: while the leadership industry has been thriving— growing and prospering beyond anyone’s early imaginings— leaders by and large are performing poorly, worse in many ways than before, miserably disappointing in any case to those among us who once believed the experts held the keys to the kingdom. (Kellerman, 2012, p. xv)
Kaiser & Curphy --- Leadership Industry Failure
"In the past 15 years, annual spending by U.S. corporations on formal training and development for leaders has surged from $7 billion to nearly $14 billion." (Kaiser & Curphy, 2014, p. 294)
There is scarcely any evidence that all this spending on development is producing better leaders. To the contrary, there is widespread concern about the state of leadership today. Civil protests from Wall Street to Tahrir Square attest to unrest about how things are being run in both private and public sectors. And no wonder, with a steady stream of media reports of corruption, fraud, scandals, cover ups, insider trading, rate fixing, industrial accidents, economic crises, unemployment, and disengagement among those fortunate enough to have a job. To quantify the level of concern, a recent National Study in Leadership Confidence published by the Harvard Kennedy School reports that 70% of Americans believe that we have a nationwide leadership crisis and that the country will decline if we do not get better leaders. (Kaiser & Curphy, 2014, p. 295)
“We believe that a core shortcoming of the leadership industry is that it often operates on a faulty definition of leadership” (Kaiser & Curphy, 2014, p. 297). [i.e., If you are in charge of something, then that makes you a leader.]
There are two common views on leadership that obscure its essence and set practitioners down the wrong path. The first defines leadership as position: If you are in charge of something, then that makes you a leader. But as our colleague Bob Hogan likes to point out, think about the qualities that distinguish those who advance in any large organization: hard work, persistence, political skill, the right connections, being male, and even luck. Rarely do leadership skills factor into the advancement equation. The second view is just as misleading. Most public and private institutions define leadership using competency models—a list of the knowledge, behaviors, and skills needed to perform a job or role. The standard way to build these models is to ask senior managers to identify the competencies needed in various leadership roles. And therein lies the problem. Research shows that a majority of people in positions of authority are ineffective leaders (Hughes, Ginnett, & Curphy, 2012), so asking them what it takes to lead is like asking your doctor for investment advice. He or she will have an opinion but it may not be any good. (Kaiser & Curphy, 2014, p. 297)
One category was focused on the individual leader and included “standing out” variables (leadership emergence, being selected to a leadership role, and promotion rate) and “approval” variables (ratings of the individuals’ behavior or effectiveness). The other category was focused on the group and included process variables (employee motivation, team dynamics) and outcome variables (productivity, financial performance). The majority of measures were focused on individual leaders, prompting us to conclude that the leadership research literature says more about how to get ahead in a managerial career (by standing out and gaining approval) than it does about how to motivate employees, build teams, and get results. (Kaiser & Curphy, 2014, p. 298)
Excerpts from Jeffrey Pfeffer, Leadership B.S. Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time
Leaders fail themselves: Dominique Strauss-Kahn, possibly on his way to being president of France before his arrest for sexually assaulting a New York hotel housekeeper; the former Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson, booted out for claiming on his résumé that he had a computer science degree when he didn’t. (Pfeffer, 2015, p. 1)
The leadership industry has failed. Good intentions notwithstanding, there is precious little evidence that any…recommendations have had a positive impact. Indeed, many prescriptions for leaders are often more problematic and invalid than generally acknowledged. And as a consequence of all this failure, both workplaces and many individual leaders are in bad shape. Even worse, there are few to no signs that things are getting any better. (Pfeffer, 2015, pp. 4-5)
References
Collins, J. (2001). Good to great. New York: Harper- Collins Publishers Inc.
Goodall, A. H. (2009). Socrates in the boardroom: Why research universities should be led by top scholars. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
Kaiser, R. B., & Curphy, G. (2013). Leadership development: The failure of an industry and the opportunity for consulting psychologists. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 65(4), 294.
Kellerman, B. (2012). The end of leadership. New York: Harper Collins Publishing.
Pfeffer, J. (2015). Leadership B.S.: Fixing workplaces and careers one truth at a time. New York: Harper Collins Publishing.