Ideas: Management Notes: Learning To Lead

IDEAS: MANAGEMENT NOTES
Learning To Lead

Leading by control? Died in the Eighties. Leading by example? Dying in the Nineties. Leading by inspiration? What's that?

By R. Sukumar

Leadership, as even the most diffident student who passed through the portals of any B-school will affirm, is, typically, exercised at 3 levels. The individual level, where leaders mentor, coach, and motivate employees; the group level, where they build teams and resolve conflicts; and the organisational level, where, by imbuing the company with a set of values and beliefs, they build culture. This classical view of leadership has remained unchanged over the last 5 decades. With good reason: the 3 levels remained discrete in most organisations and were easily distinguished. But the knowledge economy--specifically, the notion of the organisation as associates who come together to perform specific functions and then disband--threatens this notion of leadership.

Knowledge workers require little direct supervision from managers; they respond to inspiration, not monitoring. Leading the organisation of the future, then, will require a different skills-set. And to paraphrase Howard Gardner, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who developed the concept of multiple intelligences, it is all in the mind.

Gardner, who suggested that additional intelligences--like visual/spatial, bodily/kinesthetic, musical, inter-personal, and intra-personal--co-exist with the 2 original intelligences--verbal/linguistic, and mathematical/logical--posits that a knowledge of multiple intelligences can facilitate leaders to build super-teams, make the best possible decision at every stage, and solve problems. And the best leaders use this knowledge to build stories that influence the people who work for them to follow a certain course of action.

These stories are not dressed-up vision-and-mission statements. They are the organisational equivalent of the archetypal road-film, where a group of people sets out from Point A to Point B and, finally, make it after facing several obstacles. Gardner believes that the stories that motivate employees best are exclusionary stories that highlight the adversarial relationship between people. The competitive nature of these narratives pushes employees into the achievement mode.

How does this help the leader? By providing a means to alter the thoughts and behaviour of employees. Or, to be a change-manager. The mechanics of being a raconteur-leader: build a narrative around an organisational goal, identify the issues that need to be addressed--and the various ways in which they can be addressed--and create a mechanism that can monitor the individual's and the organisation's progress towards that goal. The catch lies in making people believe in the narratives, which can be done by ensuring sufficient strangeness to capture their attention while being credible enough for them to assimilate it into their own consciousness.

Is that all it takes to be a good leader? Actually, no. And the definition of the additional requirement can again be traced back to the inter-personal and intra-personal components of intelligence, which Daniel Goleman popularised as Emotional Intelligence. EQ, not IQ, is an equal parts mixture of self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skill. Goleman's analysis of the leadership profiles of the CEOs of 188 companies identified EQ as the one factor common to good leaders. The part of the brain that governs analytical and technical ability is the neocortex, at which most leadership training programmes are aimed as it absorbs concepts and logic intuitively.

Emotional Intelligence, however, is regulated by the brain's limbic system, which learns best through motivation, practice, and feedback. That is, a leader's EQ improves with age, but only if she has some of it to start with. So, what will it take to lead the knowledge-intensive corporation of the future? Leading by example is out; it is inconceivable that Bill Gates can write better code than Microsoft's nerdy programmers. So is leading by control. Leaders of the future must inspire their employees with a vision wrapped in a narrative, and then, hold their hands while they go out and demolish everything that stands between them and the happy ending.