Leadership
Leadership is “one of the most observed and least understood phenomena on earth” wrote one man in a position to know. In business writing, the subject has been divided into three:
- the nature and behaviour of leaders;
- the nature and behaviour of those who are led; and
- the structure of the organisation in which the leading takes place.
Most is written about the first of these strands. There is a visceral fascination with leaders and their character, and with the great issue that surrounds them: can leaders be made or can they only be born?
There is no general agreement about what are the qualities of a leader. Field Marshal Montgomery thought that a leader “must have infectious optimism, and the determination to persevere in the face of difficulties. He must also radiate confidence, even when he himself is not too certain of the outcome”. Henri Fayol, an early French writer on management, said that the leader’s task is “thinking out a plan and ensuring its success”. It is, he added, “one of the keenest satisfactions for an intelligent man to experience”.
David Ogilvy, founder of an advertising agency, Ogilvy & Mather, and himself a leader of some quality, thought: Great leaders almost always exude self-confidence. They are never petty. They are never buck-passers. They pick themselves up after defeat … They do not suffer from the crippling need to be universally loved … The great leaders I have known have been curiously complicated men.
This view of the leader as a complicated personality is borne out by the characters of some undeniably great leaders, such as Napoleon and Winston Churchill. It may also lie behind the fact that up to 60% of presidents of the United States and prime ministers of the UK lost their fathers before they were 14.
However, the leadership of people like Alfred P. Sloan, the legendary boss of General Motors, owed more to the structure and systems that they put in place in their organisations (based in Sloan’s case on the theory of “decentralisation and co-ordinated control”) than they did on the personality of the leader. Henry Ford II’s success in revitalising his family’s firm after the second world war depended largely on his reorganisation of the company. The man himself was a jet-setting playboy who rarely met the David Ogilvy standards of a great leader. The same could be said of many other post-war bosses of big corporations.
The leading management thinker on leadership in the later years of the 20th century was Warren Bennis, a professor at the University of Southern California. He said that successful leaders follow an almost universal principle of management “as true for orchestra conductors, army generals, football coaches, and school superintendents as for corporate executives”. He found that the vast majority of successful leaders were white males who remained married to the same person all their lives. When they came to head an organisation, successful leaders “paid attention to what was going on, determined what part of the events at hand would be important for the future of the organisation, set a new direction, and concentrated the attention of everyone in the organisation on it”.
In Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge, Bennis lists four competencies that leaders need to develop:
- forming a vision which provides people with a bridge to the future;
- giving meaning to that vision through communication;
- building trust, “the lubrication that makes it possible for organisations to work”;
- searching for self-knowledge and self-regard.
In this context, Bennis says: “I think a lot of the leaders I’ve spoken to give expression to their feminine side. Many male leaders are almost bisexual in their ability to be open and reflective … Gender is not the determining factor.” The worst problem for leaders, says Bennis, is “early success. There’s no opportunity to learn from adversity and problems”.