Category: Managing People

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Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones: Authentic Leadership

Why should anyone be led by you?

It’s a fair question. And here’s another:

Why should anyone work here?

These two strikingly simple and obvious questions have been answered rather well, by two British management thinkers, Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones.

Rob Goffee & Gareth Jones - Authentic Leadership
Rob Goffee & Gareth Jones – Authentic Leadership

Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones

Rob Goffee is Professor of Organisational Behaviour at the London Business School and is a long term academic. Gareth Jones, on the other hand, has alternated between academic and corporate roles, teaching at LBS too, and also the University of East Anglia, Henley, INSEAD, and currently, IE Business School, in Madrid. But he has also held senior HR roles at Polygram and the BBC.

Authentic Leadership

Their first collaboration was a relatively unremarked book, called The Character of a Corporation. But it introduced ideas that they were to return to in their second, breakthrough book, and then again in their recent fourth book.

Their second book was called Why Should Anyone be Led by You? It introduced a mass business audience to the concept of Authentic Leadership. This was emphatically not their creation, tracking back to classical Greek thinking, and the Delphic injunction to first know yourself.

But their articulation struck a chord. It came at the right time and was delivered compellingly. Goffee and Jones argued that companies are led in far too much of a technocratic way, by people acting as managers and bureaucrats. They lack sufficient human connection with their people, and self awareness about their shortcomings.

Real leaders, they argued, are confident in who they are and what they stand for. They are not afraid to put that on show and constantly act with integrity in the way that they live the values they espouse. They are able to communicate well, and remain true to themselves, whilst still coping with and adapting to rapidly changing events. Consequently, they can inspire people to extraordinary levels of commitment.

Leading Clever People

The next book Goffee and Jones wrote addressed the challenges of leading an organisation or team made of smart, creative people. This is a typical challenge for many of today’s start-up businesses. It is also important for established businesses that want to bring together innovation teams, and for professional service businesses that want to create a great culture. The book is called Clever: Leading Your Smartest, Most Creative People.

A summary of the do’s and don’ts might look like this:

Do

  • Explain and persuade
  • Use expertise
  • Give people space and resources
  • Tell them what
  • Give people time
  • Provide boundaries (simple rules)
  • Give recognition
  • Protect them from the rain
  • Talk straight
  • Give real world challenges with constraints
  • Create a galaxy
  • Conduct and connect
 Don’t

  • Tell people what to do
  • Use hierarchy
  • Allow them to burn out
  • Tell them how
  • Interfere
  • Create bureaucracy
  • Give frequent feedback
  • Expose them to politics
  • Use bullsh*t or deceive
  • Build an ivory tower
  • Recruit a star
  • Take the credit as a leader

Creating an Authentic Organisation

Goffee and Jones’ latest book is Why Should Anyone Work Here? It applies many of their earlier ideas to making a great organisation. At its heart is a simple mnemonic that spells out the six ingredients they argue are needed for a ‘dynamic and future-fit’ workplace: DREAMS.

Difference

Diversity increases creativity, which decreases with uniformity. Don’t do diversity because legislation compels you to. Do it because it has a positive impact on the bottom line: more creativity, better decisions, happier workforce.

Radical honesty

(I know – a bit of a fix)

The more open and transparent you are, the happier people will feel. And if being open is likely to expose unfairness that will anger people, radical honesty will compel you to fix the problem, rather than hide it beneath dissembling..

“You need to tell someone the truth before someone else does,” said Jones. “Think of BP’s failure to control information after the [Deepwater Horizon] oil spill. Reputational capital is much more important and much more fragile than we ever thought.”

Extra value

(This acronym-building is tough!)

This is not just about improving the business; it’s about adding value to the people within your business… as a means of improving your business.

Authenticity

There it is… Their earlier work popularised the concept, so its front and centre here too.

But, reflecting on how the ideas have settled in over the years, Goffee and Jones note that in the US, authenticity is too often read as ‘be yourself… find your true north.’ But their view is that an effective leader needs to be ‘yourself more skilfully.’

Meaning

This is about ensuring everyone in the business understands the real purpose behind the tasks they do.

Simple rules

(one last shoe-horn!)

Businesses need systems. But this too easily leads to over-bureaucratisation. Rules need to work for the business and enable staff to do what’s right, not just prevent every single possibility of doing wrong.

 

 

 

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Charles Margerison & Dick McCann: Team Management

Charles Margerison and Dick McCann developed one of the leading tools to help managers with team performance.

When you want your team to perform well, there are two approaches you can take:

  1. Manage them well
  2. Select them for a good balance

There are tools available for each, though there are fewer to help with selecting a balanced team. Of those there are, without a doubt, Meredith Belbin‘s Team Roles is the best known by far.

But it is not the only game in town. You might choose it for its simplicity. But for sophistication, let’s look at the work of Charles Margerison and Dick McCann.

Charles Margerison and Dick McCann
Charles Margerison and Dick McCann

Charles Margerison

Charles Margerison grew up in the 1940s in the UK. He studied economics at the University of London School of Economics, securing a BSc. He remained to research a PhD in educational psychology. In 1967, he moved to Bradford University, and in 1971 was awarded his second PhD, in social science.

Some time after this, he moved to Australia, and joined the staff of University of Queensland. He was Professor of Management from 1982 to 1989.

From 1982, he worked with Dick McCann to research team management. And, in 1985, they co-founded Team Management Systems. He remains a part of the business, as well as being a director and President of Amazing People Worldwide.

Charles Margerison has written many books, including one with Dick McCann.

Dick McCann

Dick McCann also grew up in the 1940s, but in Australia. From 1961-5, he studied for a bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering, at the University of Queensland. He followed this with a PhD. In 1969, he moved to England, to work for BP Chemicals. There, he worked as a research engineer, and also trained as a certified accountant.

In 1974, he returned to Australia, to become a research fellow at the University of Sydney. In 1982, he started his collaboration with Charles Margerison.

In 1985, Dick McCann became the Managing Director of Team Management Systems in Australia. At the same time, his co-founder focused on European and US expansion.

Dick McCann stepped down from his director role in 2015, but remains involved in research. He is author of four books. They include Team Management: Practical New Approaches, which he co-wrote with Margerison.

Margerison and McCann’s Contribution

Margerison and McCann have developed a fair number of interconnecting models. There is too much to attempt to describe them here. They include work on:

  • Workplace values
  • Influencing skills
  • Opportunities and Obstacles

We’ll focus on their most widely used model, the Margerison-McCann Team Management Wheel. But before we can get to it, we must first understand the work that underpins it: the Margerison-McCann Types of Work Wheel.

Types of Work

Margerison and McCann interviewed with over 300 managers. They wanted to find what made a difference between good and poor performance.

When they assessed the team members’ activities, their data fell into eight work functions. They describe them as:

Advising
Gathering and reporting information

Innovating
Creating and experimenting with ideas

Promoting
Exploring and presenting opportunities

Developing
Assessing and testing the applicability of new approaches

Organising
Establishing and implementing ways of making things work

Producing
Concluding and delivering outputs

Inspecting
Controlling and auditing the working of systems

Maintaining
Upholding and safeguarding standards and processes

From their work, they suggest that different jobs have different critical functions. These need people with the right skills and competencies, to perform them well.

Margerison and McCann present these types of work in a trade-marked Types of Work Wheel, which we present here with a link back to the TMS website.

Margerison-McCann Types of Work Wheel
Margerison-McCann Types of Work Wheel http://www.tmsdi.com

Critical Work Functions

Let’s compare two examples that they offer. For each, they give three ‘critical work functions’. These make the difference between good and poor job performance.

Finance and Accounting
The critical work work functions are: Organizing, Producing and Inspecting.

Design/R&D jobs
The critical work functions are Advising, Innovating and Developing.

Team Management

From here, it isn’t hard to see how Margerison and McCann relate their work functions to individuals’ work preferences.

This creates their concept of ‘role preferences’. These are the roles in a team that people are most likely to enjoy. When people’s critical work functions match their work preferences, they are likely to:

  • be happier in their job
  • perform better

Team Role Preferences

The role preferences are:

Reporter-Adviser
Supportive. Enjoys collecting and sharing information. Knowledgeable and flexible.

Creator-Innovator
Imaginative, creative, and able to embrace complexity and uncertainty. Enjoys researching new ideas.

Explorer-Promoter
Enjoys exploring possibilities, looking for new opportunities, and then selling them to colleagues. Persuasive, fast thinking, and easily bored.

Assessor-Developer
Analytical and objective. Enjoys ideas, developing and testing new opportunities, and making them work.

Thruster-Organizer
Highly results-focused, Likes to set up systems, push forward and see results. Analytical, but quick to make decisions.

Concluder-Producer
Highly practical. Enjoys systematic planning and work processes. Takes pride in efficiency, effectiveness, and quality of outputs.

Controller-Inspector
Enjoys focusing on and controlling the detailed aspects of their work. Good at checking and enforcing standards, but less skilled with informal influencing.

Upholder-Maintainer
Likes to uphold standards and values. Can be conservative in the face of change, but has a strong sense of purpose.

How Margerison and McCan Identified their Role Preferences

Margerison and McCann worked with four measures related to how people approached work. They were strongly influenced in the choices by Carl Jung’s psychological types. So you’ll see a strong relationship to the work of Isabel Briggs-Myers and Katharine Briggs.

Margerison and McCann’s measures are:

  • How people prefer to relate with others
  • How people prefer to gather and use information
  • How people prefer to make decisions
  • How people prefer to organize themselves and others

These measures lead to RIDO scales (Relationships, Information, Decisions, Organization). And the scales showed a strong relationship to the Types of Work.

Like the Types of Work Wheel, they present their team role preferences as a Team Management Wheel. Again, we present this trademarked model with a link to the TMS website.

Margerison-McCann Team Management Wheel
Margerison-McCann Team Management Wheel – http://www.tmsdi.com

The Linker Role

At the centre of the wheel is the ‘Linker’ role. Every jobholder needs this role to be successful in their job. It involves integrating and co-ordinating other people’s work. This is both within the team, and with external players.

This role is particularly important for the team leader, as you’d expect.

Linking comprises thirteen skills:

  • six people skills
  • five task skills
  • for the team leader, two leadership skills

These, however, are the subject of a whole other model, the Linking Leader Model.

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Robert Blake & Jane Mouton: Managerial Grid

If you are looking for one simple model that can more than pull its weight in understanding management, then look no further. Robert Blake and Jane Mouton developed their Managerial Grid in the 1950s and early 1960s. Its simplicity captures vital truths about management styles and their implications.

Every manager should understand the basics of the Managerial Grid. Even if you are not familiar with it, there’s a good chance you will recognise its organising principle. And if you don’t, then read on. This is fundamental stuff.

Robert Blake & Jane Mouton
Robert Blake & Jane Mouton

Robert R Blake

Robert Blake was born in Massachusetts, in 1918. He received a BA in psychology and philosophy from Berea College in 1940, followed by an MA in psychology from the University of Virginia in 1941. His studies were broken by the war, where he served in the US Army. On his return, he completed his PhD in psychology at the University of Texas at Austin in 1947.

He stayed at the University of Texas as a tenured professor until 1964, also lecturing at Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge Universities. In the early 1950s, he began his association with his student, Jane Mouton, which led to their work together at Exxon, the development of the Managerial Grid, and co-founding of Scientific Methods, Inc in 1964. The company is now called Grid International.

Robert Blake died in Austin, Texas, in 2004.

Jane S Mouton

Jane Mouton was born in Texas, in 1930. She got a BSC in Mathematical Education in 1950, and an MSc from Florida State University in 1951. She then returned to the University of Texas, completing her PhD in 1957. She remained there until 1964 in research and teaching roles.

It was at the University of Texas that she met Robert Blake. They were hired by Exxon to study management processes after Blake collaborated with Exxon employee, Herbert Shepard. The work led to their development of the Managerial Grid and, in 1961, to the founding of Scientific Methods, Inc (now Grid international).

Jane Mouton died in 1987.

The Managerial Grid

In many ways, Blake and Mouton’s Managerial Grid is a development of the Theory X, Theory Y work of Douglas McGregor. The two researchers were humanists, who wanted to represent the benefits of Theory Y management.

They did so by defining two primary concerns for a manager:

  1. Concern for People
  2. Concern for Production
    (sometimes referred to as Concern for Task)

Although their work is often simplified to a familiar 2 x 2 matrix formulation, it was a little more subtle. They created two axes and divided each into nine levels, to give a 9 x 9 grid. It was the extreme corners, and the centre, of this grid that they labelled and characterised. They recognised that most managerial behaviours fall within the grid, rather than at the extremes.

Robert Blake & Jane Mouton - Managerial Grid
Robert Blake & Jane Mouton – Managerial Grid

The Five Styles on the Grid

The five styles they originally identified are at the corners and in the centre. They are still best known by the first labels Blake and Mouton published for them (shown in italics in our illustration). Blake did later refine those labels, as well as define two additional styles. This was after Jane Mouton died, in 1987.

Indifferent
Impoverished Management | Low Results/Low People

This is an ineffective management style, in which an indifferent manager largely avoids engaging with their people or the needs of the job at hand. Such managers reason (wrongly) that if you don’t do much, little can go wrong, and you won’t get blamed. The Peter Principle suggests managers rise to their level of incompetence, and here is the style we may see as a result.

This style is only suitable as a calculated decision to be hands off and delegate to a highly capable and strongly motivated team. Even then, a retreat into the very corner is not appropriate.

Dictatorial
Produce-or-Perish Management | High Results/Low People

Authoritarian managers want to control and dominate their team – possibly for personal reasons, or an unhealthy psychological need. They don’t care about their people, they just want the results of their endeavours. Away from the extreme, this Theory X-like approach can be suitable, in a crisis.

The theory X origin of this behaviour mean managers here prefer to enforce rules, policies and procedures, and can view coercion, reprimands, threats and punishment as effective ways to motivate their team. Short term results can be impressive, but this is not a sustainable management style. Team morale falls rapidly and compromises medium and long-term performance.

Status Quo
Middle-of-the-Road Management | Medium Results/Medium People

This is a compromise and, like all compromises, it is characterised as much by what the manager gives up as by what they put in. A little attention to task and a bit of concern for people sounds like balance, but it also reflects a level of impoverishment – not much concern for either.

This is neither an inspiring, nor developmental approach to management and can only be effective where the team itself can meet the leadership deficits it leaves behind. A good manager could only legitimately use this approach where this one team is a low priority among other competing demands, and the manager is confident they can manage themselves to a large degree. If not, mediocrity will be the best result the manager will achieve from this strategy.

 

Accommodating
Country Club Management | High People/Low Results

Sometimes, you need to rest your team, take your foot off the accelerator, and accommodate their needs. These may be for a break, for team-building, or for development, perhaps.

However, as a long term strategy, it is indulgent, and leads to complacency and laziness among team members. There is little to drive them, yet we know pride in achievement, autonomy, and development are principle workplace motivators. Without a sufficient focus on production, the team will get little of any of these.

The work environment may be relaxed, fun, and harmonious, but it won’t be productive,. The end point will also be a lack of respect, among team members, for the manager’s leadership.

Sound
Team Management | High Production/High People

According to Blake and Mouton, the Team Management style is the most effective approach. This is routed in McGregor’s Theory Y. It is the most solid leadership style, with a balance of strong concern for both the means and the end.

A manager using this style will encourage commitment, contribution, responsibility, and personal and team development. This builds a long-term sustainable and resilient team.

Peaks and troughs in workload and team needs will mean a flexible manager with stray away from the corner from time to time, either towards accommodating or dictatorial styles. But this flexibility and their general concern for both dimensions will prevent them from an unhealthy move right into the corners.

When people are committed to both their organisation and a good leader, their personal needs and production needs overlap. This creates an environment of trust, respect, and pride in the work. The result is excellent motivation and results, where employees feel a constructive part of the company.

Two Additional Styles

After Mouton’s death, Blake continued to refine the model, adding two additional styles.

Opportunistic Management

Some managers are highly opportunistic, and are prepared to exploit any situation, and manipulate their people to do so. This style does not have a fixed location on the grid. Managers adopt whichever behaviour offers the greatest personal benefit. It is the ultimate in flexibility, and is highly effective.

What matters is motivation. Some managers are highly flexible for reasons of great integrity others for purely self-serving reasons.

Paternalistic Management

The loaded label represents a flip-flopping between accommodating ‘Country Club management’ and dictatorial ‘Produce-or-Perish management’. At each extreme, this managerial style is prescriptive about what the team needs and how they will supply it.

The subtlety of sound team management adapting to the team’s needs is not present. Such managers rarely welcome a team trying to exercise its own autonomy. They will feel it as an unwelcome challenge.

 

 

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Robert Tannenbaum & Warren Schmidt: Leadership Continuum

Among many types of model of leadership is one that is particularly useful to practical day-to-day managers: situational leadership. And by far the best version of this idea was developed by two UCLA professors, Robert Tannenbaum and Warren Schmidt. Their 1958 article (reprinted in 1973) is one of the most reprinted from Harvard Business Review.

Robert Tannenbaum & Warren Schmidt
Robert Tannenbaum & Warren Schmidt

Robert Tannenbaum

Robert Tannenbaum was born in 1916, in Colorado. He studied at The University of Chicago, gaining an AB in Business Administration in 1937, and his MBA in 1938. The following year, he started his PhD in Industrial Relations also at Chicago, but his studies were interrupted by the war.

After serving as a Lieutenant in the US Navy, he returned to his PhD, which he defended in 1948. From there, he went to teach at the UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, where he remained until his retirement in 1977.

Warren H Schmidt

Warren Schmidt was born in 1920, in Detroit, and took a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism at Wayne State University. He then became ordained as a Lutheran minister.

He changed direction again, and after gaining his PhD in Psychology at Washington University, he went to teach at the University of Southern California and UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, where he met Tannenbaum.

By the by, Schmidt is the first of our Management Thinkers and Doers who has won an Oscar. In 1969, he wrote an Op Ed piece for the LA times, titled ‘Is it Always Right to be Right’. This was well received and turned into a short animated movie, narrated by Orson Welles. It won the Academy Award for Best Short Animated Film in 1970.

The Leadership Behaviours Continuum

In what is regarded as a classic 1958 Harvard Business Review article, ‘How to Choose a Leadership Pattern‘, Robert Tannenbaum and Warren H Schmidt set out a range of leadership behaviours.  They set out seven distinct stages on a continuum, which vary from telling team members their decision, through selling their idea and consulting on the problem, to handing over decision-making.

Tannenbaum & Schmidt - Leadership Behaviour Continuum
Tannenbaum & Schmidt – Leadership Behaviour Continuum
A range of behaviours from the purely authoritarian ‘Manager makes a decision and announces it’ through five intermediate styles, to the most democratic ‘Manager allows group to make a decision’ within appropriate constraints.

Equally valuable is their assessment of how a manager can decide how to lead and choose which of the styles will work best.  They argue you must consider three forces:

  • Forces in the manager
    Your values and style, and your assessment of the risk
  • Forces in the team-members
    Your assessment of their readiness and enthusiasm to assume responsibility
  • Forces in the situation
    Time pressure, the group’s effectiveness, organisational culture

This article is a foundation for what is now known as ‘Situational Leadership’, and the two trademarked models developed by Paul Hersey and Kenneth Blanchard.

The Seven Leadership Behaviours

1. Manager makes the decision and announces it
This is a purely authoritarian style of leadership, with no consideration given to other points of view. Most appropriate in a crisis, the manager sets clear instructions and expectations.

2. Manager ‘sells’ their decision
The manager takes  the role of decision-maker but advocates their decision, appealing to  benefits to the group. Valuable when you need the group’s support.

3. Manager presents their decision and invites questions
The manager is still in control, but allows the group to explore the ideas to better understand the decision. The manager answers to their team, without committing to honour their opinions.

4. Manager presents a tentative decision, subject to change
Now the group’s opinions can count. The manager identifies and resolves the problem, but consults their team before making their own decision.

5. Manager presents the problem, gets suggestions and then makes a decision
Still the manager retains ultimate decision-making authority. But now, they share responsibility for finding the solution with the group, who can influence the final decision.

6. Manager defines the limits within which the group makes the decision
Now decision-making sits with the team. The manager defines the problem and sets boundaries within which the group can operate, which may constrain the final decision.

7. Manager allows group to make decision, subject to organisational constraints
The group has as much freedom as the manager is able to grant them. The manager may help the group and again, commits to respect the decision the group arrives at.

For More Information

This model is fully described, with analysis, in The Management Models Pocketbook.

 

GAC RIP 2/5/2010

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Rensis Likert: Participative Management

Rensis Likert made an important contribution to management in the 1960s, which was to influence many large corporations in the US and Japan. Do you:

a. Strongly Disagree – b. Disagree – c. Neither Agree nor Disagree – d. Agree – e. Strongly Agree

Almost all of us have, at some time, had to use this type of simple perceptual scale. It is called a Likert Scale, after Rensis Likert, who invented it early in his career. But there is more to him than that, as we shall see.

Rensis Likert, 1903 - 1981
Rensis Likert, 1903 – 1981

Short Biography

Rensis Likert was born in 1903, in Cheyenne, Wyoming. In 1922, he went to study Civil Engineering (following his father) at the University of Michigan. However, during a Sociology class in his senior year, he realised he was more interested in people than in things, so switched subject and won his bachelors degree in Sociology and Economics, in 1926. In 1932, he was awarded a PhD for research in the new field of Social Psychology, by Columbia University. As a part of his research he developed a simplified scale for gauging opinions, which bears his name today. His research demonstrated that, despite its simplicity, it was able to achieve equally reliable results, when compared with more sophisticated approaches.

Likert then took on a series of increasingly important roles: lecturer in psychology at New York University, Director of Research at the Life Insurance Agency Management Association, and then  in 1939, he became a Director responsible for surveys at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Gradually his role in Government surveys expanded, and during the US involvement in the Second World War, he headed up a part of the Office of War Information.

After the war, Government contracted and surveys were no longer mandated by Congress. So Likert, along with his colleagues sought to establish a centre for reseach into surveys at one of the universities. In 1946, they settled at the University of Michigan and founded the Survey Research Center with Likert as its first Director. The centre changed its name in 1949 to the Institute for Social Research (ISR) and has grown and thrived ever since. Likert remained Director until his retirement in 1970, when his co-founder, Angus Campbell, became the second ISR Director.

During the 1950s and 60s, Likert directed his research interest towards management. His 1961 book, New Patterns of Management, proved highly influential. It introduced his four systems of management and articulated his advocacy for ‘System 4‘. He followed this, in 1967, with Human Organization: Its Management and Value. This further detailed System 4, and contains his most widely quoted statement:

‘…the greater the loyalty of the members of a group toward the group, the greater is the motivation among the members to achieve the goals of the group, and the greater is the probability that the group will achieve its goals.’

In 1970, he established his consulting business, Rensis Likert Associates, to capitalise on his thinking, and he also continued to develop and publish his ideas. His 1976 book, New Ways of Managing Conflict, was also very successful.

Rensis Likert died in September 1981.

Likert’s Four Management Systems

Likert articulated four styles of management. We can easily see these as an extension of the Theory X / Theory Y approaches that Douglas McGregor articulated.

Rensis Likert - the Four Systems of Management
Rensis Likert – the Four Systems of Management

The four systems are:

System 1. Exploitative-Authoritative

Decision-making takes place at the top of the organization and these decisions are imposed on others without consultation. There is little sense of teamwork and not much communication, other than threats, which form the primary means of driving performance (motivation). Consequently, it is only upper management who feel any sense of responsibility for the organisation’s goals.

System 2. Benevolent-Authoritative

This is a patriarchal, patronising system based on a master-servant relationship between management and employees. Rewards are the  motivators and teamwork, communication, and a sense of ownership of the organisation’s goals are still minimal.

System 3. Consultative

In this style, managers trust subordinates but not wholly. They motivate with both rewards and involvement, and expect a higher level of responsibility for meeting goals. There is  a moderate amount of teamwork and some communication across and between levels.

System 4. Participative

Participative management is based on trust and confidence in employees. Goals are determined collectively and form a basis for motivation and rewards. This fosters a collective sense of responsibility for meeting company goals, and incentivises collaborative teamwork and open communication.

The Characteristics of Likert’s System 4

Likert felt strongly that System 4 was the optimum system for managing an organisation, as McGregor argued for Theory Y as a means of motivating individuals.

He set out four principal characteristics of successful System 4 management:

  1. Supportive group relationships, both within the group and between the group members and the leader. A sense of care and collaboration.
  2. Each person’s individual contribution, needs, value, and development needs to be equally respected.
  3. The group undertakes problem solving together, and aligns behind their eventual consensus solution.
  4. Different groups overlap, with certain individuals playing the role of ‘linking pin’ between them. These are people whom Karen Stephenson refers to as ‘Gatekeepers’.

This all has a very modern feel to it and it is hard to feel the sense of novelty Likert’s ideas had in the 1960s. This, I suggest, is a measure of the importance of Likert’s ideas. So I choose Option e. Strongly Agree.

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Liz Wiseman: Multiplier Effect

Liz Wiseman is a former senior executive at the Oracle Corporation, where she ran their Oracle University. There, she became interested in leadership development and has, since leaving and setting up her own business, taken up a research-based approach. Her research into why some leaders seem to get the best from the people around them, while others equally shut down contributions, led to the powerful idea of Multipliers and Diminishers, and two best-selling books.

Liz Wiseman

Very short biography

Liz Wiseman was born and grew up in the San Francisco Bay area. She attended Brigham Young University, studying Business Management and getting her bachelors degree in 1986, followed by a master’s degree in Organizational Behaviour, in 1988. From there, she joined Oracle, where she stayed for 17 years, becoming a Vice President with responsibility for leading the Oracle University.

Wiseman left Oracle in 2005, to found her own leadership consulting business. She is currently president of The Wiseman Group (formerly known as Mindshare Learning). She cites CK Prahalad as her career mentor.

She has written three books, most notably Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter (2010 – with Greg McKeown), which was followed in 2013 by The Multiplier Effect: Tapping the Genius Inside Our Schools. Her most recent book, Rookie Smarts: Why Learning Beats Knowing in the New Game of Work (2014), introduces another interesting new idea about leadership.

The Multiplier Effect

Wiseman’s big idea, which she researched with British consultant Greg McKeown, is that some leaders seem to get vastly more from the people around them than others. She calls them Multipliers. She made this observation while at Oracle and then researched just what it is that they do differently from otherwise equally intelligent leaders, who seem to suppress the contributions of others. She calls those Diminishers.

Multipliers are able to access the intelligence of the people around them and somehow grow that intellect, making them feel (and maybe become) smarter still. They ask questions and make challenges in much the same way as Bernard Bass referred to in one of his four dimensions of Transformational Leadership: Intellectual Stimulation. They seem to see more capabilities than  other leaders and therefore make bigger asks of people.

By multiplying the intelligence of your people, Multipliers have a disproportionately positive effect on your business. They can harness under-utilised capacity of busy but bored people, by expecting more and giving them the opportunity to deliver it.

Wiseman identifies five characteristics of Multipliers, and six skills that allow those characteristics to blossom.

Multipliers are Talent Magnets

This is almost the definition of a Multiplier. They seek out and attract people with ideas and talent, and draw their genius from them.

Multipliers are Liberators

They create the kinds of environments that free people up to do their best work and contribute their most innovative and critical thinking.

Multipliers are Challengers

They are able to define a challenge or opportunity and set people the responsibility to excel themselves and meet it. This way, they get the very best from their people.

Multipliers are Debate Makers

They can drive sound decision-making by creating rigorous evaluation and thorough debate. They encourage people to apply all their intellect fearlessly by caring more about the quality of discussion, than about personal gain or loss – we all win when we make a good choice together.

Multipliers are Investors

They invest in other people’s development and growth, and allow people to feel ownership for their careers and the results they achieve.

The Six Skills

The six skills that Wiseman teaches are:

  1. Asking questions that spark innovation and intelligence
  2. Creating debate that drives the best decisions
  3. Identifying and utilizing genius in others
  4. Creating space for others to think and contribute
  5. Transferring ownership and accountability for results
  6. Generating learning from mistakes

Rookie Smarts

It is worth briefly discussing Wiseman’s other big idea, captured in her 2014 book, Rookie Smarts: Why Learning Beats Knowing in the New Game of Work. Even more so than her Multiplier Effect, this reminds us powerfully of the work of Carol Dweck on Growth Mindset.

The idea behind Rookie Smarts is simple: new people in an organisation bring a freshness and energy with them. They question the absurd and want to change things because , as an outsider, they have no allegiance to the ways of the past.

Long-serving leaders, on the other hand, easily get trapped into a mindset of ‘that’s the way we do things around here’ , and consequently lose their passion for change and drive to innovate.

What Wiseman advocates is that we ignite our curiosity, fire-up our energy, and become Perpetual Rookies. She says that:

‘Learning beats knowing’

and in so doing, she echoes precisely the principle of the Growth Mindset.

Liz Wiseman in her own words

The 2-minute intro…

And a longer 16 minute talk…

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Herb Kelleher: Employees First

Herb Kelleher was for many years one of the most innovative, unorthodox, and successful corporate executives. He delivered profits to an airline business every year of 20 years as CEO, in an industry where other airlines could not manage 5 years of profits, and he did so by sticking to a simple mission and placing values first. But the whacky reputation of Southwest Airlines, which he co-founded, belies the clear-sightedness of its long-time CEO.

Herb Kelleher

Short Biography

Herb Kelleher was born in 1931, in New Jersey. He studied English and Philosophy at Wesleyan University, before going on to study law at New York University, from where he graduated in 1956. He spent a couple of years clerking for the New York Supreme Court, and another couple at a Newark Law firm, before moving to Texas, from where his wife had come.

In 1961, he set up a law firm in San Antonio, where one of his clients was Rollin King, who owned a small airplane charter business. One evening in 1966, over drinks, King outlined an idea for a different kind of airline, which would serve the main three Texas cities, with point-to-point services, rather than scheduling to meet international hub flights. Famously, they sketched a schedule on a bar napkin, for flights between Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. Kelleher was sold on the idea and invested $10,000 for a 1.8 per cent stake.

As Chief Legal Counsel, Kelleher led the acrimonious legal battles to secure the licences and slots that Southwest would need, to fly. This led to court cases all the way up to the Texas supreme court, but in 1971, the company started trading under experienced airline CEO, Lamar Muse. It took three years to become profitable.

In 1978, Muse resigned, and lawyer Kelleher was appointed president, and then CEO four years later. This inspired appointment led to phenomenal growth for the business – in both monetary and reputation terms. Kelleher built Southwest into a widely admired business, which many have tried to emulate (rarely successfully). The figures speak for themselves.

1982, Kelleher becomes CEO

  • Airplanes: 27
  • Staff: 2,000
  • Revenue: $270 million

2001, Kelleher retires as CEO

  • Airplanes: 344
  • Staff: 30,000
  • Revenue: $5,000 million

Kelleher retired as CEO in 2001, and as Chairman of the Board in 2005. He remains a prominent and outspoken contributor to US business life.

Kelleher’s Secret

Kelleher’s secret is far from being secret: it is plain to see for anyone who observes the Southwest Airlines business (and there have been countless business school case studies), and Kelleher has spoken of it many times.

Put simply, Kelleher adopted the attitude of:

Employees first; customers second; shareholders third

Compare that with the behaviour of most corporations and you will see it is exactly the ‘wrong way round’. Yet it has worked phenomenally well. And if you say that there are many who do espouse this sequence of priorities, I’d agree. But the truth is, very few truly (I mean TRULY) do the ’employees first’ thing, and do it properly.

However, this is not the first time we have encountered the ’employees first’ philosophy at Pocketblog: take a look at this post about Vineet Nayar, from 2010.

Stick to the Mission

Kelleher was always determined to stick to the mission of the company – they never did anything that was outside of the airline industry, nor indeed outside of the confines of a point to point US service. Sticking to what you know and do well, can be a powerful way to stay focused and deliver stability and excellence.

And Kelleher stuck to his philosophy of what his business aimed to do, which he articulated as being about happy customers and low costs. This led to a no-frills service that focused hard on keeping costs low, and a business that became famed for its customer care. He achieved both by a fierce loyalty to his staff, which they reciprocated.  This is manifest in two particular ways.

Serious Fun

Kelleher has a love of fun and practical jokes, that means he rarely takes himself seriously. He has been see in Elvis costume, on a Harley Davidson, and has arm wrestled another CEO for the right to use a disputed marketing slogan (and lost).

His staff took his lead and Southwest is famous for on-board pranks, and singing flight attendants. Some of the in-flight announcements have gone viral on social media because of their wit or novelty. Yet all their staff do take their jobs seriously and the airline has never had an in-air fatality.

Staff Care

Kelleher’s commitment to staff care has meant that Southwest has ridden out the peaks and troughs of a particularly volatile industry without ever laying off any staff nor even imposing furloughs (compulsory leave of absence to save the company money). Instead, they have taken numerous hits on short-term profit. The result has been enviable staff loyalty (with among the lowest turnover rates in the industry) and exceptional productivity. Putting staff interests ahead of shareholder returns has, paradoxically, maximised shareholder returns over the long term.

So,what do we learn?

  1. Unorthodox works
  2. … but only when done with the integrity to stick to your values.
  3. Low costs and customer care deliver profits
  4. … especially when your employees share your commitment to both
  5. Exceptional culture delivers great results
  6. … but you need to set the tone, deliver on values, and get out of the way, as a leader.

‘The Business of Business is People; Yesterday, Today, and Forever’
Herb Kelleher in his own words

 

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Mary Kay Ash: Golden Rule

The scale of the organisation that Mary Kay Ash built is impressive. Wanting to test some of the wild figures I found on the the web, I went to the Mary Kay website for their own facts… and found the biggest number yet. But we have to treat that as authoritative. In their words: ‘3.5 million people worldwide are Mary Kay Independent Beauty Consultants.’ Wholesale (not retail) sales are $4 billion per year*.

Mary Kay Ash

Short Biography

Mary Kathlyn Wagner was born in 1918, and grew up in Houston, Texas, graduating high school in 1934. She married a year later, and worked to keep her young family during the war. Shortly after her husband returned, they divorced.

Ash became a salesperson for direct sales business, Stanley Home Products. She hosted parties to encourage people to buy household items. She was good at it and, in 1952, was hired by another direct sales company, World Gifts. There, she spent just over a decade at the company, before she finally quit  – or ‘retired’, as she described it – after watching yet another man whom she had trained get promoted above her and earn a far higher salary.

Ash decided to write a book for women in the male-dominated business world.  The mythology here is lovely: she sat down and made two lists on a yellow legal pad.  One list had things that the companies she had worked for had done right. The other had the things she thought they could have done better.  Looking at the lists, she realized that she had inadvertently created a marketing plan for a ‘dream company’. This was one that could give women every opportunity to achieve personal and financial success.

So, with a small investment from her savings, and hep from her younger son, she formed Mary Kay Cosmetics, in 1963 (AVGY), just months after the early death of her second husband. She opened her first store in Dallas.

The business was profitable in its first year and made nearly $1 million in revenue in the second year. As with her previous experience (do what you know is a feature of many successful entrepreneurs) she sold her cosmetics at home parties and other events. Sales representatives – termed consultants – bought the products from Mary Kay at wholesale prices and then sold them to their customers at retail prices. They also earned commissions from recruiting new consultants.

However, she innovated in the way she organised her sales representatives and, notably, in the way she treated them. Her incentive programs and avoidance of traditional ‘sales territories’ were consistent with her fundamental belief in the ‘golden rule’: treat others as you want to be treated yourself. She also applied the motto: ‘God first, family second and career third’ and emphasised the importance of a healthy balance between work and home life, making her business a highly attractive place to work for women.

Ash wrote a number of books, from which we can learn much about her people-centred philosophy on business.

Her business went from strength to strength, earning itself and Ash (who married Mel Ash, in 1966) numerous awards and honours. She remained active in Mary Kay Cosmetics until suffering a stroke in 1996. Mary Kay Ash died in 2001.

What Mary Kay Taught us

Her books provide a wealth of wisdom about respecting and engaging the people who work for you. It’s easy to think of her aphorisms as easy cliches. The reality is that there is nothing easy about doing the basics well and consistently. Ash did exactly that.

Let’s consider some of my favourite lessons:

  1. The Golden Rule: Treat others as you would want them to treat you. Ash made this a foundation of her business and management philosophy.
  2. Praise People to Success. Ash profoundly understood the motivating impact of recognition in the workplace.
  3. The Invisible Sign. Ash imagined that everyone she met was wearing an invisible sign, which she could read. It says: ‘Make me feel important’. She did.
  4. Build with people. Not only did she believe that ‘people are the company’s greatest asset’, but she prioritised developing those people and promoting from within the business.
  5. Be a Follow-through person. Ash thought it vital for people to feel that they can count on you, especially as a leader.
  6. The Speed of the Leader Is the Speed of the Gang. Lead from the front, roll your sleeves up, and get stuck-in. The pace a leader sets is the pace of the organisation.
  7. People will support that which they help to create. If you want to avoid people resisting change, you need to involve them in the design and decision-making processes.
  8. Less stress. Ash’s commitment to work-life balance was underpinned by a belief that stress stifles creativity.

 

* Facts retrieved from http://www.marykay.com/en-US/About-Mary-Kay/CompanyFounder/Pages/Company-Quick-Facts.aspx on 22/12/2015.

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Samuel Walton: Retail Giant

Sam Walton founded Wal-Mart, growing it to over a thousand stores. He is a serial early-adopter whose commitment to innovations made them ubiquitous and his investors extremely rich.

Sam Walton

Short Biography

Samuel Walton was born in Oklahoma, in 1918, and grew up on the move in Missouri, during the great Depression, as his father worked at a series of sales jobs. Walton worked too, during his education, pausing to take a degree in Business at the University of Missouri at Columbia.

On leaving, he started working as a management trainee at JC Penney, where he also started learning the management skills that would help him grow his own business in the future. As for many young men of his age, the Second World War put the brakes on his career, when he served in the US Military Police. Returning to civilian life in 1945, he decided not to return to JC Penney, but to open a franchise Ben Franklin store in Arkansas, funded by a loan from his father-in-law.

This thrived, but he was unable to renew his lease, so opened a new one in a nearby town in 1950. Gradually, he bought more and grew his empire, using a light aircraft to get from one store to another and to scout possible new locations.

In 1962, he opened his first Wal-Mart store, on a new model he’d seen in Chicago – a Kmart, owned by competitor Sebastian Kresge. He had started his experiment with bulk retailing. Over the coming years, he experimented further in stock lines and layouts, and opened a second Wal-Mart in 1964. Then, in 1970, he raised $5 million in equity through a stock issue (at $16.50 per share), and opened six new stores and a distribution warehouse. By the time of his death, one of the original Wal-Mart shares had grown in value to $26,000 and the Wal-Mart empire was the biggest retailer in the US, with over a thousand stores.

Sam Walton stood down as CEO of Wal-Mart in 1988, to fight both leukaemia and bone marrow cancer; and finally died of it in 1992.

Five Retail Lessons from Sam Walton

1. The Personal Touch

Walton would get to know his employees (or Associates, as they are known) personally in the early days. He maintained this as long as he could, having gained a pilot’s licence so he could fly from store to store. The use of the term ‘Associate’ was a deliberate choice to create a sense of inclusion and what we would now call engagement. Indeed, he encouraged managers of new stores to take shares in the business to create a sense of their ownership. Walton practised, from his earliest days at JC Penney, a management style that can be called MBWA: Management by Walking About.

2. Rigorous Standards

In visiting stores, Walton set and expected strict quality standards. If he did not find them, he was sanguine about just shutting the store and not re-opening it until the management and staff could get it right.

3. Control your Supply Chain

There is a story about Walton that reminds me of one I recounted about Ingvar Kamprad (founder of Ikea). In the early days (his second Ben Franklin store), when a local competitor sold out of a product – women’s rayon underwear – instead of ordering himself a stock, he bought the distributor. In one move, he deprived his competitor of stock and assured his own supply chain. The money he raised in 1970 from a stock issue was used in part, not to expand his retail base as much as possible, but to fund a distribution centre. Like a good military general, Walton understood the criticality of his supply chain. He invested heavily in warehousing, logistics and, early on, in networking his stores and warehouses to one another.

4. Embrace the New

Less of an innovator and more of an early adopter, Walton frequently saw and rapidly embraced new ideas that would help him grow his business (Jim Collins’ Flywheel principle). I mentioned satellite networking of his stores, above, but other examples abound:  self-service retailing, discounting, and hypermarkets. Each step made him more successful.

5. Experimentation

Walton believed in achieving the best results he could, so he was constantly experimenting to test the effects of different layouts, promotions, and stock lines. Once again, the flywheel principle at work, but the salient lesson for me is test-evaluate-improve – then test something new.

If all this sounds a little familiar, take a look back at the blog on Ingvar Kamprad, which I posted just over a year ago. I cannot help feeling that these two retailers, born only eight years apart, are kindred spirits.

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Rosabeth Moss Kanter: Change Master

Rosabeth Moss Kanter is one of the foremost academics working in the management arena. Her academic CV is second to none, and it is the sophistication of her insights and the depth of her research that have earned her the huge respect she has garnered. But hers are not merely incremental ideas – her work has charted some of the biggest issues facing organisations from the 1970s to today.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter

 Short Biography

Rosabeth Moss was born in 1943 and grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. She was educated at the elite Bryn Mawr College, where she studied English and Sociology, where she also met her first husband, Stuart Kanter.  She graduated in 1964 and went on to earn an MA and PhD in Sociology, at the University of Michigan.

Following her PhD, Moss Kanter’s first academic appointment was at Brandeis University, as Assistant Professor of Sociology. She stayed there until 1977, during which time her first husband died and she married Barry Stein, with whom she later (1977) founded a management consultancy, called Goodmeasure Inc, to sell her consulting services to many of the largest US corporations.

1977 was a key year for Moss Kanter. She also moved to become a Professor of Sociology and Professor of Organisational Management at Yale, where she remained until 1986, when she moved to Harvard Business School as a Professor of Business Administration. From 1979 to 1986, she was also a Visiting Professor at the Sloane School of Management at MIT.

The centrality of 1977, however, is because it was the year that saw the publication of the first of Moss Kanter’s books – and one that made a huge impact. It was lauded in its own right and has been seen, in retrospect, as the first of a triptych of connected and hugely important works. We will look at them below.

As well as being an academic and consultant, Moss Kanter has a slew of prestigious awards,and is also notable as the last academic to edit the Harvard Business Review (1989-92) and as an advisor to presidential candidate Michael Dukakis.

But it is the breadth and depth of Moss Kanter’s work we need to focus on. And there is so much of note that we need to get started right away.

Moss Kanter’s Big-three Works

1977 saw the publication of a revolutionary book; ‘Men and Women of the Corporation‘. It analyses the distribution of power within a large US corporation and how white men dominated, leaving women and ethnic minorities disempowered. Her research demonstrated that it was not the behaviours of women and minorities that created this power gap, but the very system within which they worked, and the structures of power and opportunity. At the time, this was a revolutionary insight. Moss Kanter showed the importance of creating change to empower everyone.

With the great pressures for change that she identified, we can see a logical progression in Moss Kanter’s next book, 1983’s ‘The Change Masters: Corporate Entrepreneurs at Work‘. Shockingly, this astonishingly good and important book is out of print; to me, it is her most important. It describes how some companies and some individuals master the process of change through integrating and innovating, moving right to the edge of their capabilities, and benchmarking themselves against their aspirations, rather than against the status quo in their market place.  She refers to ‘New Entrepreneurs’; change masters within a business that radically improve it, rather than leaving and starting afresh somewhere else. They transform vision into reality. Once again, the concept of empowerment features strongly, as does the need for joined up networks of communication, and decentralisation of resources.

The third book in the triptych looks at the changes US corporations needed to make to remain competitive in the global environment of the 1980s and 90s. Published in 1989, ‘When Giants Learn to Dance‘ likens the global economy to a sporting competition. What struck me was her articulation of seven skills that characterise the most successful ‘business athletes’;

  1. ability to get results without authority, through influence alone
  2. competing positively, through co-operation, rather than negatively through aggression
  3. maintaining the highest ethical standards
  4. self confidence tempered by humility
  5. an understanding of the importance of process for getting things done
  6. relationship building, across functions, departments, and organisations
  7. achievement focus – what McClelland would describe as a high nAch

More Recent Work

It is only space, not a critique on the works themselves, that prevents me from detailing Moss Kanter’s works, from 1992’s ‘The Challenge of Organizational Change‘ to ‘Move: Putting America’s Infrastructure Back in the Lead‘, published a few months before this blog, in spring of 2015. Along the way, there have been:

A Summary of Moss Kanter’s Themes

Rosabeth Moss Kanter is notable as an academic of business, but her approach has always remained a staunchly sociological one. Her focus on empowerment has followed closely on that of previous thinkers in humanistic management and particularly echoes the work of Mary Parker Follett, whom she admires greatly. Like Follett, she takes a very much integrative attitude, valuing holistic management structures, rather than segmented corporations. This is a theme that comes out strongly in both Change Masters and Giants. She describes these as characteristics of a ‘post-entrepreneurial firm’, where innovation is the principle benefit of combining the the strength of a large organisation with the agility of a small one.

Her writing is characterised by three admirable characteristics that are often not found together: subtle and complex ideas, detailed research evidence, and a highly readable writing style.

The Advanced Leadership Initiative

I want to end with a short reference to Harvard University’s Advanced Leadership Initiative, which Moss Kanter leads, as Chair and Director. It aims to prepare ‘a leadership force of experienced leaders who can address challenging national and global problems in their next stage of life’. These are men and women who, after their primary income-earning years, want to contribute to community and public service for their next years of life, using the skills they already have, to make an impact on significant social problems, in health, welfare, children, and the environment. I know little more about it than this, but what a wonderful initiative. A kind of lower-key version of The Elders, I guess.

 

 

Moss Kanter talks about leadership as being about leading positive change in this 17 minute TED talk, ‘Six keys to leading positive change‘.

And more…

There is a good selection of short videos and articles by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, on some of her latest thinking, on the Big Think website.

 

 

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