Foreword
My interest in the topic of organizational leadership got a new impulse when I was going through the training in Entrepreneurship last year in the Salem University. Most questions were posed in the course assignments and therefore I rearranged them trying to go from the general to more specific stuff. Some of my answers are based on real experience and I prefaced them with a [Personal] mark, also changing the real names of organizations and people. I wish to have had such training maybe 40 years ago at the beginning of my career – it seems that I came to some conclusions in a rather hard way.
Contents
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Definition of Leader and Leadership
Q1. Define a leader and leadership in your own words.
A1: Leader is a person in control of group of other people or dealing with specific situation. Group of people can belong to organization or just happen to be involved in specific situation, like a shipwreck or industrial accident. Leadership is a process or implementation of such control.
When we are talking specifically about the organization leadership, the first and the most important is understanding the general goal of the organization, what is its raison d'être (reason of existence): positive or negative? Positive example could be a startup developing new gene therapy for rare disease and negative - some swindler scheme to extort money from elderly people via internet scam. Depending on the goal leadership could require very different traits. In a “positive” organization people are normally do not need much external stimulus for productive work, they just strive for a reasonable organization of the work process and fair compensation. Leadership here can be performed in a natural way by people with moderate charisma and rudimentary managerial skills.
Meanwhile, in a “vile” organization employees feel (often do not really understand the reason) discomfort in their workplace; the real raison d'être is clandestine and cannot be revealed to them. Thus, coercion in various forms is required to leaders to move the things in their direction: “My way or highway!”.
Obviously, there many situations in between, incompetent employees can be working in healthy companies and so on. It is also quite often that leader can drastically change the course of organization from positive and productive to some kind of money laundering or personal enrichment. Good reading will be the story of acquisition of Allergan by TEVA in 2016.
Q2. Based on your experience, what do you consider to be the critical characteristics or traits for a leader?
A2: The most important criterion of leader’s power is the level of acceptance of his leadership by other people. The higher such acceptance – the easier to perform leadership, meaning to control people and lead them to achieve specific goals. It is worth to differ political leadership from business leadership that is the subject of this recollection. Essential conditions of leadership are desire to lead and take responsibility and charisma – the immanent ability to be liked by others and inspire confidence.
Leadership style is secondary: if people (employees) like you, they will accept almost any style. If the leader is imposed on them (not perceived as having the right to lead) then the type of leadership (autocratic, democratic, bureaucratic, etc.) becomes more important to the leader’s efficiency. In “normal” organizations most employees are ready to accept the existing leadership order, comply with the rules and adopt the leader’s style unless he/she makes their life unbearable. If the latter situation affects essential workers and they can leave – they leave, if not - they cease creative functioning and organization fails and … the leader gets promoted.
Q3. Define your leadership style? How do you lead? What are your strengths/weaknesses?
A3: [Personal] My leadership experience is not very extensive. I was leading a couple of technology groups of 2-5 people in different organizations with little involvement into strategic planning but mostly concentrating on routine managerial tasks: telling people what to do, when and how, sometimes why. Unfortunately, I do not have charisma and perform well only when my leadership role is supported by higher management. Poor in influencing. As soon as employees know about my authority, there is no problem to lead, no questions like “Why do we need to do what you say?” and everything goes well: the group can concentrate on actual work. When management to some reason does not want to empower me officially some sort of resistance always emerges. (See my story “Influencing” on www.dimus.me) More specifically my style involves engaging - explaining people why we need to do this work, providing them with a clear and realistic plan, and “leading by example” - showing how to do the most challenging part of the work, e.g., building prototype unit myself or performing dangerous operation, attention to details and taking ultimate responsibility for the project. My problem is keeping people accountable: I can easily praise a person for a minor achievement but uncomfortable to criticize.
Sources of Power
Q4. What do you consider to be sources of power? Explain why you have chosen these sources?
A4: There are 3 sources of leader’s power important for business organizations:
a) Positional power – comes with the formal managerial role in the organization. It can be exercised for good or bad depending on the selection of person and his/her personal traits. In most cases this role is given by the upper management but could be also a result of some form of democratic election. Positional power usually includes ability to affect the working career of subordinates: promotions and demotions, compensation, workloads. For a middle level managers, it is regular evaluation of their workers; in matrix organizations with multiple lines of reporting the most important boss it one who writes yours PBE – performance based evaluation.
b) Informational power – person who has special (important) knowledge can have substantial power and exercise control even over the formal leaders. Fairly normal case of special knowledge is technical of scientific in-depth knowledge of topics critical to organization’s business. Such person could be the key expert in the company and vital to its existence. He/she could have enough power to force a coworker to be fired: “I don’t want to or cannot work with X. Chose Me or X?”. Also, such expert could attract substantial resources to his laboratory or department and, thus, improve benefits for his coworkers. Another example of informational power is access to non-technical information. It might be HR manager capable to look into personal files (of leaders) or being somebody’s important relative and having access to political information significant for the business. Such person has at least the job security.
c) Personal power – usually evolves from natural gift of charisma combined with good looking, height, loud voice, and ability to manipulate and influence people. Often such people volunteer to do difficult job and take responsibility in cases when positive outcome is not granted. Other people admire or like them and try to establish good relationship, for example, offering something for free like an extra work: “- Bill, I will analyze your samples first”. Colleagues can “bet” on the charismatic leader guessing that Bill will grow or be promoted and will not forget the former coworker. I have seen at least three cases of so-called “chess castling” when manager was asked to switch positions with his subordinate but charismatic leader. If often happens that such informal leader can leave the company and start his own, taking many of the best people with him.
Q5. How have you been impacted by the use/abuse of power within your organization?
A5: [Personal] My last two organizations were pretty similar: the declared goals were noble, but both had established unreasonable and unattainable targets, like making cheap fuel from algae, mobilized substantial funds from investors and after 5-10 years completely transformed into the “vile” type (see A1), routinely falsifying data and coercing people to write fake reports. As usual, as repressions were getting harsher, all marketable people were leaving the company for good. At some point I was not able to play this game and expressed a bit of criticism, kinda “We cannot patent the method that was known already 200 years”. In the first company I got poor PBE - performance evaluation and was laid off soon after (nothing personal of course), in the second all three engineers from my group were laid off without letting me know and I left the company at will.
Q6. How would you use power as a leader?
A6: Supposedly, I will be working in a healthy positive type organization and placed into a leadership position in a formal way. First thing will be to secure a well-defined niche for my group or department: everybody needs to know what my group is doing and how it interacts with other groups and services. As much as possible, draw clear lines between what we are doing and what not. Then develop a work plan, calculate necessary resources, get plans formally approved. Next step human resources: find people to cover all work directions, gradually get rid of “not-relevant employees” and replace them with productive and/or perspective. Not necessary these new people should be experienced but should be capable to learn the new stuff and be enthusiastic about what they are doing and their occupation in general: graduated as engineer and wants to be an engineer. After that, back to work and keep everyone busy and happy.
Decision making and empowerment
Q7. How does empowerment interplay with decision-making and vice-a-versa?
A7: Empowerment means giving power to somebody to make decisions. It can be delegated by higher manager (board of directors) to the lower levels of hierarchy. You cannot empower your boss. Reasons and results can be very different, anywhere between complete failure and overwhelming success. Usually, the top manager empowers his ministers to guide the departments assuming they are specialists in their areas. If it is not the case, ministers empower their subordinates and so on. Ideally decisions will be made by competent people, but process can go further if empowered people do not have sufficient resources and/or reluctant to take responsibility. The most common reason of avoiding responsibility is the leader’s fear to lose his power when delegating it to others. Thus, experienced CEO can delegate technical questions to professionals but will keep under his control HR and finances. Empowering makes life of the boss much easier: you play golf in Hawaii while the empowered VP solves urgent questions, but the risk is at some point, somebody from the Board of directors can ask: “Do we really need this guy as CEO?”
Q8. How would you approach decision-making as a leader?
A8: The approach to the decision making depends on the level of my control as a leader (owner) of the situation. The higher the leader’s position, the bigger decisions he/she needs to make. Suppose that I am a leader of a small business with few employees and here are some challenges:
a) Conflict with customer (Should I refund customer? Or lose him? Will he sue?) - Here, will ask for legal advice. If we are covered and cannot be sued, decision will be made on moral grounds: who is the Client? What was his behavior in our conflict? How much he will suffer?
b) Human resources (Should I hire a new person that has potential but not trained enough?) - Human resources decisions in a small company are normally made using owner’s personal wisdom. There is no money to spend on in-depth study of incumbent’s background even if it usually makes sense. Let’s sat quick search on social networks did not produce anything of value, thus, decision happens on perception level: - Do I want to work with this guy and put an effort into his training, or maybe his tattoo with svastika means something?
c) Growth opportunities (Do we need extra printer? How soon we can recover costs?) - Investment and growth decisions need calculations, accountant help, tax adviser and mostly can have some measurable value attached. Yes, printer costs 5K, but we can layoff one of my people and it will save 12K in salary, but we also need to pay for printer’s maintenance, sales can drop in summer and anyway we need to layoff, and so on. Thus, first calculation, then analysis of uncertainty and after that a voluntary decision. It is also possible to have a discussion with managers, if any, but the result will be the same.
d) Special challenges (I am diagnosed with condition X? Should I tell people and what will be the outcome?). - Special situation needs special decision and there is no recipe by definition. Let’s say, doctor said you have 6 months left. Now transfer business to my wife/friend/son, write the will, say to people that I am taking a long vacation and sail away to enjoy the rest of the life.
Q9. What are some of the essential components of successful decision-making? Please provide examples to support your points.
A9: [Personal] The most important components are full information, right people, sufficient power (empowerment) and ability to analysis to forecast the consequences of the decision. Herein example from my engineering practice when wrong decision has led to a multimillion loss. I was working for international vitamin-making company and was assigned as a project leader for development of the new biotech process to make vitamin Z. After one-year preliminary studies in my lab we came to the critical decision which solvent to use for crystallization: A or M? All technical info was in favor of M: solubility 10x better (meaning all volumes 10x smaller), cheaper and not flammable. Meanwhile, M is more toxic than A and working with M requires special training and precautions that are normal in chemical industry - nothing is 100% safe, even water. Pilot plant was supposed to be built in the European country G and there was a pilot plant manager from their site - John. After a couple of meetings, I travelled to visit the G-site and we had in-person (not zoom) meeting with John and his team. He invited to the meeting 2 engineers, 2 consultants and 2 pilot technicians – all reporting to him. I made a 50-slide presentation summarizing US-lab results and recommendations to use M and only M, but John was still in favor of solvent A. His motivation was clear: he did not want to spend an effort training his people to deal with chemical M and take responsibility. As a senior person and pilot manager he was more empowered and proposed to decide by voting. Obvious result 7:1 and solvent A was accepted. I begged for economical analysis: to calculate how much an industrial plant will cost but John rejected the idea and presented it as premature and baseless fears. When I came back to my US office, my boss had shown me email from G where I was accused of ignoring people’s safety and hurting people’s feelings. Piloting lasted for 2 years, costed 12MM and was mostly successful. At that time manufacturing costs of Z by the new method were calculated and found to be prohibitively high. Vitamin Z project was shelved. John was not hold responsible since the critical decision was made in a democratic way by voting.
Q10. Describe what you would model as an empowerment leader.
A10: Classical example will be as an exclusion from politics: how the president of the country U deals with major epidemic. At first he is taking full responsibility for the country closure: – I am deciding when and what to close or open. But of course, I am getting recommendations from CDC specialists and follow the science, exponential models, flattened curves, etc. After some time, when the things are going sour, paradigm shifts and now: "The governors are empowered to decide how to deal with epidemic in their states”. If they open their state economy and everything goes more or less ok, this will be a great example of federal power sharing, empowerment, trust and wisdom. If the second wave of epidemic unfolds you have up to 50 governors to blame for voluntarism, lack of respect to the people’s health and not listening to the science of Dr.F.
Worth to note that governors are not stupid and delegate decisions on anti-epidemic measures like school closing to city mayors, mayors empower school districts and so on.
Theories of Leadership
Q11. What leadership theory do you find most relevant to your experience with leadership?
A11: I am a strong supporter of the Situational theory and Fielder’s contingency model. Leader has his style that is based on combination of personal traits (naturally got with the genes) and acquired experience (nurture): combination that can work or not in specific situation. Real leader is always passionate about the leadership status on its own, enjoys it and makes special effort to preserve his role in future. In other words, makes everything to keep his control position: “The object of power is power!” (G. Orwell). Sure enough, the result of such power grab can be good or bad depending on the general goal of the company and the person’s motivation. [Personal] I had several occasions to observe the evolution of a person with leadership ambitions in companies where I worked, but the most “textbook case” has happened in company NN. Sam - new VP of technology was hired about half a year before I joined the NN and actually Sam has hired me. NN was a startup company stuck at the stage of a new chemical reaction development and general corporate atmosphere was of an academic institution. In a few months Sam has started turning the steering wheel to the fast product commercialization aka making money, claiming his previous proven record of the avalanche of successes (fake). He promised billions to the Board of directors and won the trust of existing CEO charming him in a magic way. Pretty soon most of relatively experienced chemists and engineers had figured out that Sam is incompetent clown and expressed their opinion to Jack - VP of chemistry. The war was declared. At first Sam has strategically managed to transfer almost all Jack’s subordinate chemists to another boss and after that ousted “weakened” Jack from the company. Then he “wiped off” all opposition and hired several new people to the key positions. NN has practically stopped any research and started designing a huge chemical plant. Looking for investors Sam, CEO and some Board members had endlessly travelled all over the world (in the first class) and Sam was enchanting everyone using his charisma, manipulative skills and promising incredible profits. Obviously, NN could not deliver on Sam’s promises and investors one by one politely declined all proposals. Sam was ready: promptly accused existing CEO in all failures and managed to oust him getting all power for himself and his cronies. Most capable employees resigned, others were laid off and NN went bankrupt.
Q12. Describe how you would apply the "elements" of the theory of leadership, to your leadership style.
A12: Obviously, I would not apply Sam’s style to leadership, since do not have his motivation and ambitions. But some of Sam’s methods are worth to consider as highly efficient. First, his special individual approach to people: he was able to find a “weak” point in everyone and exploit it to his benefit. When necessary, he could be very complimentary and attentive. When interviewing me for position with NN, he has listened my presentation for about 3 hours(1), asking good questions and praising my achievements as incredible (flattering). Then he drew a beautiful picture of future work and I “was bought” even having grave concerns about business itself, safety, and its readiness for commercial production. Another thing that Sam was never afraid of confrontation with others publicly (at meetings). Even if he knew the subject less than his opponent, he skillfully used any bit of info to support his position and usually prevailed with his point of view. I believe it is a natural trait, but some self-training can be done. The last thing to add, leader should have exceptionally good memory (also natural trait), and Sam was remarkable in this point: he was able to quote any small conversation that took place two years ago and such ability gave him enormous advantage in discussion and proving his point when others were trying to find something relevant in their emails. There are methods of improving and training memory.
Transformational leadership
Q13. Transformational leadership has received much "press." Define the essential elements of transformational leadership in your own words.
A13: I would select the following elements of the Transformational leadership:
A) Vision – ability to see new opportunities or dangerous trends in current situation. Vision very much requires curiosity and interest in learning new things, especially outside of the current workspace or profession. Good example Elon Musk.
B) Desire to change things. In most cases changes are initiated and made for a good reason, but natural-born leaders just cannot accept anything routine for any significant time. That is the transformation spirit that inspires the followers: “we need to destroy the old concept, order, tradition, world”. Usually, leaders will recruit their base from two groups of the most susceptible people: poor or underprivileged people in general term, for example it might be employees in the organization that are happened to be in the less profitable department, those who can potentially win from eventual transformation. Second group is simply young people: 15-30 years old, maybe very well established in the “old world”, who just want to make something meaningful with their lives.
C) Communication – how ideas are delivered. Speeches need to be learned by heart – not read from notes, main ideas should be expressed simply and in a metaphorical form understandable to the audience, logic must be clear: “You vote for me or for war/or decline in profits/ or climate disaster/or the shameful status quo!”
D) Confidence and taking personal risk. People like when leader personally exposes himself to some kind of danger: being remoted by upper management, fired, or at least losing his own money.
Q14. Would you describe yourself as a transformational leader? Why or why not?
A14: [Personal] No, I am not a transformational leader: lacking charisma and communication skills. I neither had a chance or happened to lead a big organization, nor opportunity to change something significant. There were many situations when I tried to change an approach to the problem solving or technology in my area of work (process engineering) but in most cases was unable to bring people to my side. Meanwhile, my proposals were based on the knowledge of the subject and real vision of consequences: what would happen next if they are rejected (like with solvent selection in A9). As bad things happened, I was blamed that did not persuade (management, peers) in advance. In some cases, I cherished my idea so much that gifted it to others (charismatic leaders) refusing any authorship - only to see my idea implemented.
Q15. Give an example a transformational leader?
Q15: I was interested in the life of Lee Iacocca – former CEO of Ford Motors Corp. and later of Chrysler Corp. and read his book “An autobiography”. In his early years in the Ford Motors Iacocca was highly successful car salesman and relatively quickly was promoted to CEO and president. But even in this position he suffered very much from his boss Henry Ford II. As Lee describes, he had a vision to make small, economical and cheap cars in FM, but Ford did not understand him, humiliated in various ways and finally fired in 1978. Then Lee joined the almost dying Chrysler Corp. and brought with him few former colleagues from Ford. There Lee managed to realize his leadership skills, organized production of small cars, made Chrysler profitable and was honored as the savior of the corporation. He was renowned as iconic leader and also taught leadership to public in his books and popular presentations considering eight features of Leader: Curiosity, Creativity, Communication, Character (positive), Courage, Charisma, Competency and Common sense – Eight “C”s. Interestingly, Lee completely rejected theory of naturally born leader, but affirmed that real leaders are created in crisis situations.
Accountability
Q16. Why is accountability important for successful leadership?
A16: Accountability of leaders is mostly important for corporate moral and can be derived from the “leading by example” mantra. If people see that failures and wrongdoings of leaders are not recognized and has no negative consequences to the Leader, they lose respect in corporate management and lower the bar for themselves. Results of the decision errors for the employees themselves could be dramatically different: “What is permitted to Jupiter is not permitted to an ox”. Considering that the “normal” leader is generally reluctant to accept that he leads by fear only, one can expect that he/she should make at least an effort to support his image as a person of honor, capable to accept at least some portion of responsibility. There is a famous Russian comedian Mikhail Zhwanetski who said, “It is practically impossible nowadays to hear the words: - I was leading you and I will respond for everything!” It is worth to note, that very often employees do not know the obstacles that led to some disastrous decision and can blame the wrong person. For example, business was transferred to South Asia and after few years the American site was closed, and its people laid off. Workers blame CEO who advertised expansion and praised globalization, but that were the major shareholders who took this decision, and the CEO had no choice. Really, he had a choice to resign and lose few millions in compensation.
Q17. What are some concrete examples of accountability that you have experienced as a leader?
A17: [Personal] As I mentioned before, I did not take any serious decisions on my own, always getting an approval of the upper management. But there were a couple of cases when I was blamed or hold accountable for others blunders and gross mismanagement. As a director of engineering of a small startup, I was designing and developing a process for production of a special chemical for our client. Process was tested in the lab and pilot plant scale-up was a necessary next step. Following the decision of VP of technology, the building of the pilot plant was outsourced to some South Asian company and from there all equipment was shipped back to our US location. Quality of engineering and manufacturing was poor, wrong control instruments were used and after 9 months of a desperate work we were not able to start the pilot plant and commissioning effort was ceased for good. At the lessons learning meeting VP of technology clearly pointed on the “poor’ process design implying that engineering director (me) has dropped the ball. The Board of directors decided to lay off all management (including both of us) without extensive deliberations on who was responsible and who was accountable.
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