Leaders: Born or Made?
More and more companies are facing a daunting situation, namely, that they do not have the quality of leaders they will need in the future. Furthermore, the leadership training programs that exist in many of these companies will probably never provide these crucially necessary leaders.
One of the great truisms seems to be the first stumbling block in leadership development. To teach leadership, you must define it. Sounds easy, but wait a minute. None of the textbook definitions that have served as the basis for so many programs will suffice today. That is the problem.
Yet one of the oldest leadership guides may have the answer -- the I Ching, used by Confucius. "Radical changes require adequate authority. A person must have an inner strength as well as influential position. What a leader does must correspond with a higher truth.. If a revolution is not founded on such inner truth, the results are bad, and it has no success. For in the end, people will support only those undertakings which they feel instinctively to be just."
It's All About People
In today's world, leaders take this advice to heart because leadership is all about influencing people who operate in an uncertain arena. Ronald Heifetz, who teaches at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, warns that "Real leaders focus on helping people find their own way through adaptive challenges."
In other words, it is all the soft stuff that is so important. Roger Enrico, vice chairman of PepsiCo, adds, "The soft stuff is always harder than the hard stuff. Human interactions are a lot tougher to manage than numbers and P&L's. So the trick is to make the soft stuff hard, to operationalize it."
Move Over Maria Callas
That may sound like so much mumbo jumbo, but Enrico has put it into practice in his master class at PepsiCo, called Executive Leadership: Building the Business. Over a three month period, carefully chosen executives (each must have formulated one of their division's top three priority business-building ideas) work through Enrico's five major premises:
- Think in different terms. Leaders work on ideas that fuel growth in the future not today.
- Develop a point of view and build a consensus for it.
- Take ideas on the road and sell them to anybody who can help or hinder their success.
- Pull it all together.
- Make it happen by communicating, communicating, communicating.
People Are People Around The World
Amazingly similar, yet worlds apart, is the humanities workshop called Nidom (green forest), created by Yotaro Kobayashi, chairman of Fugi Xerox. "Organizations are made of people. As our activities become global, understanding other people in different parts of the world -- all the way to the roots of their thinking -- is very important. That means understanding the factors on which their values and sense of judgment are based."
One observer characterized the core of the program as trying to blow away the smoke from the leaders, to take them off their pedestals and make them human. Then younger, more junior people can recognize the kernels of leadership in themselves.
Both approaches, however, require that the people be in place in order to become part of all this. There is no question that the most important thing is to hire the right people. Jim Collins, author of Built to Last, says that companies cannot make people share their values. "They have to find people who share them and eject those who don't." Allied Signal's Larry Bossidy would argue that leadership cannot be taught; it is character and therefore somewhat genetic. Morgan McCall, at USC, puts it slightly differently, "I don't believe leadership can be taught, but it can be learned."
The best of this new wave of programs takes all this advice to heart and works at honing the skills of those who already have the leadership genes.