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2016-01-14 10:59:35
Abraham Zaleznik
The traditional view of management, back in 1977 when Abraham Zaleznik wrote
this article, centered on organizational structure and processes. Managerial
development at the time focused exclusively on building competence, control,
and the appropriate balance of power. That view, Zaleznik argued, omitted the
essential leadership elements of inspiration, vision, and human passion which
drive corporate success.
The difference between managers and leaders, he wrote, lies in the conceptions
they hold, deep in their psyches, of chaos and order. Managers embrace process,
seek stability and control, and instinctively try to resolve problems quickly
sometimes before they fully understand a problem s significance. Leaders, in
contrast, tolerate chaos and lack of structure and are willing to delay closure
in order to understand the issues more fully. In this way, Zaleznik argued,
business leaders have much more in common with artists, scientists, and other
creative thinkers than they do with managers. Organizations need both managers
and leaders to succeed, but developing both requires a reduced focus on logic
and strategic exercises in favor of an environment where creativity and
imagination are permitted to flourish.
What is the ideal way to develop leadership? Every society provides its own
answer to this question, and each, in groping for answers, defines its deepest
concerns about the purposes, distributions, and uses of power. Business has
contributed its answer to the leadership question by evolving a new breed
called the manager. Simultaneously, business has established a new power ethic
that favors collective over individual leadership, the cult of the group over
that of personality. While ensuring the competence, control, and the balance of
power among groups with the potential for rivalry, managerial leadership
unfortunately does not necessarily ensure imagination, creativity, or ethical
behavior in guiding the destinies of corporate enterprises.
Leadership inevitably requires using power to influence the thoughts and
actions of other people. Power in the hands of an individual entails human
risks: first, the risk of equating power with the ability to get immediate
results; second, the risk of ignoring the many different ways people can
legitimately accumulate power; and third, the risk of losing self-control in
the desire for power. The need to hedge these risks accounts in part for the
development of collective leadership and the managerial ethic. Consequently, an
inherent conservatism dominates the culture of large organizations. In The
Second American Revolution, John D. Rockefeller III describes the conservatism
of organizations:
An organization is a system, with a logic of its own, and all the weight of
tradition and inertia. The deck is stacked in favor of the tried and proven way
of doing things and against the taking of risks and striking out in new
directions. 1
Out of this conservatism and inertia, organizations provide succession to power
through the development of managers rather than individual leaders. Ironically,
this ethic fosters a bureaucratic culture in business, supposedly the last
bastion protecting us from the encroachments and controls of bureaucracy in
government and education.
Manager vs. Leader Personality
A managerial culture emphasizes rationality and control. Whether his or her
energies are directed toward goals, resources, organization structures, or
people, a manager is a problem solver. The manager asks: What problems have to
be solved, and what are the best ways to achieve results so that people will
continue to contribute to this organization? From this perspective, leadership
is simply a practical effort to direct affairs; and to fulfill his or her task,
a manager requires that many people operate efficiently at different levels of
status and responsibility. It takes neither genius nor heroism to be a manager,
but rather persistence, tough-mindedness, hard work, intelligence, analytical
ability, and perhaps most important, tolerance and goodwill.
Another conception of leadership, however, attaches almost mystical beliefs to
what a leader is and assumes that only great people are worthy of the drama of
power and politics. Here leadership is a psychodrama in which a brilliant,
lonely person must gain control of himself or herself as a precondition for
controlling others. Such an expectation of leadership contrasts sharply with
the mundane, practical, and yet important conception that leadership is really
managing work that other people do.
Three questions come to mind. Is this leadership mystique merely a holdover
from our childhood from a sense of dependency and a longing for good and heroic
parents? Or is it true that no matter how competent managers are, their
leadership stagnates because of their limitations in visualizing purposes and
generating value in work? Driven by narrow purposes, without an imaginative
capacity and the ability to communicate, do managers then perpetuate group
conflicts instead of reforming them into broader desires and goals?
If indeed problems demand greatness, then judging by past performance, the
selection and development of leaders leave a great deal to chance. There are no
known ways to train great leaders. Further, beyond what we leave to chance,
there is a deeper issue in the relationship between the need for competent
managers and the longing for great leaders.
What it takes to ensure a supply of people who will assume practical
responsibility may inhibit the development of great leaders. On the other hand,
the presence of great leaders may undermine the development of managers who
typically become very anxious in the relative disorder that leaders seem to
generate.
It is easy enough to dismiss the dilemma of training managers, though we may
need new leaders or leaders at the expense of managers, by saying that the need
is for people who can be both. But just as a managerial culture differs from
the entrepreneurial culture that develops when leaders appear in organizations,
managers and leaders are very different kinds of people. They differ in
motivation, personal history, and in how they think and act.
Attitudes Toward Goals
Managers tend to adopt impersonal, if not passive, attitudes toward goals.
Managerial goals arise out of necessities rather than desires and, therefore,
are deeply embedded in their organization s history and culture.
Frederic G. Donner, chairman and chief executive officer of General Motors from
1958 to 1967, expressed this kind of attitude toward goals in defining GM s
position on product development:
To meet the challenge of the marketplace, we must recognize changes in
customer needs and desires far enough ahead to have the right products in the
right places at the right time and in the right quantity.
We must balance trends in preference against the many compromises that are
necessary to make a final product that is both reliable and good looking, that
performs well and that sells at a competitive price in the necessary volume. We
must design not just the cars we would like to build but, more important, the
cars that our customers want to buy. 2
Nowhere in this statement is there a notion that consumer tastes and
preferences arise in part as a result of what manufacturers do. In reality,
through product design, advertising, and promotion, consumers learn to like
what they then say they need. Few would argue that people who enjoy taking
snapshots need a camera that also develops pictures. But in response to a need
for novelty, convenience, and a shorter interval between acting (snapping the
picture) and gaining pleasure (seeing the shot), the Polaroid camera succeeded
in the marketplace. It is inconceivable that Edwin Land responded to
impressions of consumer need. Instead, he translated a technology (polarization
of light) into a product, which proliferated and stimulated consumers desires.
The example of Polaroid and Land suggests how leaders think about goals. They
are active instead of reactive, shaping ideas instead of responding to them.
Leaders adopt a personal and active attitude toward goals. The influence a
leader exerts in altering moods, evoking images and expectations, and in
establishing specific desires and objectives determines the direction a
business takes. The net result of this influence changes the way people think
about what is desirable, possible, and necessary.
Conceptions of Work
Managers tend to view work as an enabling process involving some combination of
people and ideas interacting to establish strategies and make decisions. They
help the process along by calculating the interests in opposition, planning
when controversial issues should surface, and reducing tensions. In this
enabling process, managers tactics appear flexible: on one hand, they
negotiate and bargain; on the other, they use rewards, punishments, and other
forms of coercion.
Alfred P. Sloan s actions at General Motors illustrate how this process works
in situations of conflict. The time was the early 1920s when Ford Motor Company
still dominated the automobile industry using, as did General Motors, the
conventional water-cooled engine. With the full backing of Pierre du Pont,
Charles Kettering dedicated himself to the design of an air-cooled copper
engine, which, if successful, would be a great technical and marketing coup for
GM. Kettering believed in his product, but the manufacturing division heads
opposed the new design on two grounds: first, it was technically unreliable,
and second, the corporation was putting all its eggs in one basket by investing
in a new product instead of attending to the current marketing situation.
In the summer of 1923, after a series of false starts and after its decision to
recall the copper engine Chevrolets from dealers and customers, GM management
scrapped the project. When it dawned on Kettering that the company had rejected
the engine, he was deeply discouraged and wrote to Sloan that, without the
organized resistance against the project, it would have succeeded and that,
unless the project were saved, he would leave the company.
Alfred Sloan was all too aware that Kettering was unhappy and indeed intended
to leave General Motors. Sloan was also aware that, while the manufacturing
divisions strongly opposed the new engine, Pierre du Pont supported Kettering.
Further, Sloan had himself gone on record in a letter to Kettering less than
two years earlier expressing full confidence in him. The problem Sloan had was
how to make his decision stick, keep Kettering in the organization (he was much
too valuable to lose), avoid alienating du Pont, and encourage the division
heads to continue developing product lines using conventional water-cooled
engines.
Sloan s actions in the face of this conflict reveal much about how managers
work. First, he tried to reassure Kettering by presenting the problem in a very
ambiguous fashion, suggesting that he and the executive committee sided with
Kettering, but that it would not be practical to force the divisions to do what
they were opposed to. He presented the problem as being a question of the
people, not the product. Second, he proposed to reorganize around the problem
by consolidating all functions in a new division that would be responsible for
the design, production, and marketing of the new engine. This solution appeared
as ambiguous as his efforts to placate Kettering. Sloan wrote: My plan was to
create an independent pilot operation under the sole jurisdiction of Mr.
Kettering, a kind of copper-cooled car division. Mr. Kettering would designate
his own chief engineer and his production staff to solve the technical problems
of manufacture. 3
Sloan did not discuss the practical value of this solution, which included
saddling an inventor with management responsibility, but in effect, he used
this plan to limit his conflict with Pierre du Pont.
Essentially, the managerial solution that Sloan arranged limited the options
available to others. The structural solution narrowed choices, even limiting
emotional reactions to the point where the key people could do nothing but go
along. It allowed Sloan to say in his memorandum to du Pont, We have discussed
the matter with Mr. Kettering at some length this morning, and he agrees with
us absolutely on every point we made. He appears to receive the suggestion
enthusiastically and has every confidence that it can be put across along these
lines. 4
Sloan placated people who opposed his views by developing a structural solution
that appeared to give something but in reality only limited options. He could
then authorize the car division s general manager, with whom he basically
agreed, to move quickly in designing water-cooled cars for the immediate market
demand.
Years later, Sloan wrote, evidently with tongue in cheek, The copper-cooled
car never came up again in a big way. It just died out; I don t know why. 5
To get people to accept solutions to problems, managers continually need to
coordinate and balance opposing views. Interestingly enough, this type of work
has much in common with what diplomats and mediators do, with Henry Kissinger
apparently an outstanding practitioner. Managers aim to shift balances of power
toward solutions acceptable as compromises among conflicting values.
Leaders work in the opposite direction. Where managers act to limit choices,
leaders develop fresh approaches to long-standing problems and open issues to
new options. To be effective, leaders must project their ideas onto images that
excite people and only then develop choices that give those images substance.
John F. Kennedy s brief presidency shows both the strengths and weaknesses
connected with the excitement leaders generate in their work. In his inaugural
address he said, Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that
we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend,
oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.
Is the leadership mystique merely a holdover from our childhood from a sense of
dependency and a longing for good and heroic parents?
This much-quoted statement forced people to react beyond immediate concerns and
to identify with Kennedy and with important shared ideals. On closer scrutiny,
however, the statement is absurd because it promises a position, which, if
adopted, as in the Vietnam War, could produce disastrous results. Yet unless
expectations are aroused and mobilized, with all the dangers of frustration
inherent in heightened desire, new thinking and new choice can never come to
light.
Leaders work from high-risk positions; indeed, they are often temperamentally
disposed to seek out risk and danger, especially where the chance of
opportunity and reward appears promising. From my observations, the reason one
individual seeks risks while another approaches problems conservatively depends
more on his or her personality and less on conscious choice. For those who
become managers, a survival instinct dominates the need for risk, and with that
instinct comes an ability to tolerate mundane, practical work. Leaders
sometimes react to mundane work as to an affliction.
Relations with Others
Managers prefer to work with people; they avoid solitary activity because it
makes them anxious. Several years ago, I directed studies on the psychological
aspects of careers. The need to seek out others with whom to work and
collaborate seemed to stand out as an important characteristic of managers.
When asked, for example, to write imaginative stories in response to a picture
showing a single figure (a boy contemplating a violin or a man silhouetted in a
state of reflection), managers populated their stories with people. The
following is an example of a manager s imaginative story about the young boy
contemplating a violin:
Mom and Dad insisted that their son take music lessons so that someday he can
become a concert musician. His instrument was ordered and had just arrived. The
boy is weighing the alternatives of playing football with the other kids or
playing with the squeak box. He can t understand how his parents could think a
violin is better than a touchdown.
After four months of practicing the violin, the boy has had more than enough,
Dad is going out of his mind, and Mom is willing to give in reluctantly to
their wishes. Football season is now over, but a good third baseman will take
the field next spring.
This story illustrates two themes that clarify managerial attitudes toward
human relations. The first, as I have suggested, is to seek out activity with
other people (that is, the football team), and the second is to maintain a low
level of emotional involvement in those relationships. Low emotional
involvement appears in the writer s use of conventional metaphors, even clich
s, and in the depiction of the ready transformation of potential conflict into
harmonious decisions. In this case, the boy, Mom, and Dad agree to give up the
violin for sports.
These two themes may seem paradoxical, but their coexistence supports what a
manager does, including reconciling differences, seeking compromises, and
establishing a balance of power. The story further demonstrates that managers
may lack empathy, or the capacity to sense intuitively the thoughts and
feelings of others. Consider another story written to the same stimulus picture
by someone thought of as a leader by his peers:
This little boy has the appearance of being a sincere artist, one who is
deeply affected by the violin, and has an intense desire to master the
instrument.
He seems to have just completed his normal practice session and appears to be
somewhat crestfallen at his inability to produce the sounds that he is sure lie
within the violin.
He appears to be in the process of making a vow to himself to expend the
necessary time and effort to play this instrument until he satisfies himself
that he is able to bring forth the qualities of music that he feels within
himself.
With this type of determination and carry- through, this boy became one of the
great violinists of his day.
Empathy is not simply a matter of paying attention to other people. It is also
the capacity to take in emotional signals and make them meaningful in a
relationship. People who describe another person as deeply affected, with
intense desire, crestfallen, and as one who can vow to himself would seem
to have an inner perceptiveness that they can use in their relationships with
others.
Managers relate to people according to the role they play in a sequence of
events or in a decision-making process, while leaders, who are concerned with
ideas, relate in more intuitive and empathetic ways. The distinction is simply
between a manager s attention to how things get done and a leader s to what the
events and decisions mean to participants.
In recent years, managers have adopted from game theory the notion that
decision-making events can be one of two types: the win-lose situation (or
zero-sum game) or the win-win situation in which everybody in the action comes
out ahead. Managers strive to convert win-lose into win-win situations as part
of the process of reconciling differences among people and maintaining balances
of power.
For those who become managers, a survival instinct dominates the need for risk,
and with that instinct comes an ability to tolerate mundane, practical work.
As an illustration, take the decision of how to allocate capital resources
among operating divisions in a large, decentralized organization. On the
surface, the dollars available for distribution are limited at any given time.
Presumably, therefore, the more one division gets, the less is available for
other divisions.
Managers tend to view this situation (as it affects human relations) as a
conversion issue: how to make what seems like a win-lose problem into a win-win
problem. From that perspective, several solutions come to mind. First, the
manager focuses others attention on procedure and not on substance. Here the
players become engrossed in the bigger problem of how to make decisions, not
what decisions to make. Once committed to the bigger problem, these people have
to support the outcome since they were involved in formulating the
decision-making rules. Because they believe in the rules they formulated, they
will accept present losses, believing that next time they will win.
Second, the manager communicates to subordinates indirectly, using signals
instead of messages. A signal holds a number of implicit positions, while a
message clearly states a position. Signals are inconclusive and subject to
reinterpretation should people become upset and angry; messages involve the
direct consequence that some people will indeed not like what they hear. The
nature of messages heightens emotional response and makes managers anxious.
With signals, the question of who wins and who loses often becomes obscured.
Third, the manager plays for time. Managers seem to recognize that with the
passage of time and the delay of major decisions, compromises emerge that take
the sting out of win-lose situations, and the original game will be
superseded by additional situations. Compromises mean that one may win and lose
simultaneously, depending on which of the games one evaluates.
There are undoubtedly many other tactical moves managers use to change human
situations from win-lose to win-win. But the point is that such tactics focus
on the decision-making process itself, and that process interests managers
rather than leaders. Tactical interests involve costs as well as benefits; they
make organizations fatter in bureaucratic and political intrigue and leaner in
direct, hard activity and warm human relationships. Consequently, one often
hears subordinates characterize managers as inscrutable, detached, and
manipulative. These adjectives arise from the subordinates perception that
they are linked together in a process whose purpose is to maintain a controlled
as well as rational and equitable structure.
In contrast, one often hears leaders referred to with adjectives rich in
emotional content. Leaders attract strong feelings of identity and difference
or of love and hate. Human relations in leader-dominated structures often
appear turbulent, intense, and at times even disorganized. Such an atmosphere
intensifies individual motivation and often produces unanticipated outcomes.
Senses of Self
In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James describes two basic
personality types, once-born and twice-born. People of the former
personality type are those for whom adjustments to life have been
straightforward and whose lives have been more or less a peaceful flow since
birth. Twice-borns, on the other hand, have not had an easy time of it. Their
lives are marked by a continual struggle to attain some sense of order. Unlike
once-borns, they cannot take things for granted. According to James, these
personalities have equally different worldviews. For a once-born personality,
the sense of self as a guide to conduct and attitude derives from a feeling of
being at home and in harmony with one s environment. For a twice-born, the
sense of self derives from a feeling of profound separateness.
A sense of belonging or of being separate has a practical significance for the
kinds of investments managers and leaders make in their careers. Managers see
themselves as conservators and regulators of an existing order of affairs with
which they personally identify and from which they gain rewards. A manager s
sense of self-worth is enhanced by perpetuating and strengthening existing
institutions: he or she is performing in a role that harmonizes with ideals of
duty and responsibility. William James had this harmony in mind this sense of
self as flowing easily to and from the outer world in defining a once-born
personality.
Leaders tend to be twice-born personalities, people who feel separate from
their environment. They may work in organizations, but they never belong to
them. Their sense of who they are does not depend on memberships, work roles,
or other social indicators of identity. And that perception of identity may
form the theoretical basis for explaining why certain individuals seek
opportunities for change. The methods to bring about change may be
technological, political, or ideological, but the object is the same: to
profoundly alter human, economic, and political relationships.
In considering the development of leadership, we have to examine two different
courses of life history: (1) development through socialization, which prepares
the individual to guide institutions and to maintain the existing balance of
social relations; and (2) development through personal mastery, which impels an
individual to struggle for psychological and social change. Society produces
its managerial talent through the first line of development; leaders emerge
through the second.
Development of Leadership
Every person s development begins with family. Each person experiences the
traumas associated with separating from his or her parents, as well as the pain
that follows such a wrench. In the same vein, all individuals face the
difficulties of achieving self-regulation and self-control. But for some,
perhaps a majority, the fortunes of childhood provide adequate gratifications
and sufficient opportunities to find substitutes for rewards no longer
available. Such individuals, the once-borns, make moderate identifications
with parents and find a harmony between what they expect and what they are able
to realize from life.
But suppose the pains of separation are amplified by a combination of parental
demands and individual needs to the degree that a sense of isolation, of being
special, or of wariness disrupts the bonds that attach children to parents and
other authority figures? Given a special aptitude under such conditions, the
person becomes deeply involved in his or her inner world at the expense of
interest in the outer world. For such a person, self-esteem no longer depends
solely on positive attachments and real rewards. A form of self-reliance takes
hold along with expectations of performance and achievement, and perhaps even
the desire to do great works.
Such self-perceptions can come to nothing if the individual s talents are
negligible. Even with strong talents, there are no guarantees that achievement
will follow, let alone that the end result will be for good rather than evil.
Other factors enter into development as well. For one, leaders are like artists
and other gifted people who often struggle with neuroses; their ability to
function varies considerably even over the short run, and some potential
leaders lose the struggle altogether. Also, beyond early childhood, the
development patterns that affect managers and leaders involve the selective
influence of particular people. Managerial personalities form moderate and
widely distributed attachments. Leaders, on the other hand, establish, and also
break off, intensive one-to-one relationships.
It is a common observation that people with great talents are often indifferent
students. No one, for example, could have predicted Einstein s great
achievements on the basis of his mediocre record in school. The reason for
mediocrity is obviously not the absence of ability. It may result, instead,
from self-absorption and the inability to pay attention to the ordinary tasks
at hand. The only sure way an individual can interrupt reverie-like
preoccupation and self-absorption is to form a deep attachment to a great
teacher or other person who understands and has the ability to communicate with
the gifted individual.
Whether gifted individuals find what they need in one-to-one relationships
depends on the availability of teachers, possibly parental surrogates, whose
strengths lie in cultivating talent. Fortunately, when generations meet and the
self-selections occur, we learn more about how to develop leaders and how
talented people of different generations influence each other.
While apparently destined for mediocre careers, people who form important
one-to-one apprenticeship relationships often are able to accelerate and
intensify their development. The psychological readiness of an individual to
benefit from such a relationship depends on some experience in life that forces
that person to turn inward.
Consider Dwight Eisenhower, whose early career in the army foreshadowed very
little about his future development. During World War I, while some of his West
Point classmates were already experiencing the war firsthand in France,
Eisenhower felt embedded in the monotony and unsought safety of the Zone of
the Interior that was intolerable punishment. 6
Shortly after World War I, Eisenhower, then a young officer somewhat
pessimistic about his career chances, asked for a transfer to Panama to work
under General Fox Connor, a senior officer whom he admired. The army turned
down his request. This setback was very much on Eisenhower s mind when Ikey,
his first born son, succumbed to influenza. Through some sense of
responsibility for its own, the army then transferred Eisenhower to Panama,
where he took up his duties under General Connor with the shadow of his lost
son very much upon him.
In a relationship with the kind of father he would have wanted to be,
Eisenhower reverted to being the son he had lost. And in this highly charged
situation, he began to learn from his teacher. General Connor offered, and
Eisenhower gladly took, a magnificent tutorial on the military. The effects of
this relationship on Eisenhower cannot be measured quantitatively, but in
examining his career path from that point, one cannot overestimate its
significance.
As Eisenhower wrote later about Connor, Life with General Connor was a sort of
graduate school in military affairs and the humanities, leavened by a man who
was experienced in his knowledge of men and their conduct. I can never
adequately express my gratitude to this one gentleman . In a lifetime of
association with great and good men, he is the one more or less invisible
figure to whom I owe an incalculable debt. 7
Some time after his tour of duty with General Connor, Eisenhower s breakthrough
occurred. He received orders to attend the Command and General Staff School at
Fort Leavenworth, one of the most competitive schools in the army. It was a
coveted appointment, and Eisenhower took advantage of the opportunity. Unlike
his performance in high school and West Point, his work at the Command School
was excellent; he was graduated first in his class.
Psychological biographies of gifted people repeatedly demonstrate the important
part a teacher plays in developing an individual. Andrew Carnegie owed much to
his senior, Thomas A. Scott. As head of the Western Division of the
Pennsylvania Railroad, Scott recognized talent and the desire to learn in the
young telegrapher assigned to him. By giving Carnegie increasing responsibility
and by providing him with the opportunity to learn through close personal
observation, Scott added to Carnegie s self-confidence and sense of
achievement. Because of his own personal strength and achievement, Scott did
not fear Carnegie s aggressiveness. Rather, he gave it full play in encouraging
Carnegie s initiative.
Great teachers take risks. They bet initially on talent they perceive in
younger people. And they risk emotional involvement in working closely with
their juniors. The risks do not always pay off, but the willingness to take
them appears to be crucial in developing leaders.
Can Organizations Develop Leaders?
A myth about how people learn and develop that seems to have taken hold in
American culture also dominates thinking in business. The myth is that people
learn best from their peers. Supposedly, the threat of evaluation and even
humiliation recedes in peer relations because of the tendency for mutual
identification and the social restraints on authoritarian behavior among
equals. Peer training in organizations occurs in various forms. The use, for
example, of task forces made up of peers from several interested occupational
groups (sales, production, research, and finance) supposedly removes the
restraints of authority on the individual s willingness to assert and exchange
ideas. As a result, so the theory goes, people interact more freely, listen
more objectively to criticism and other points of view, and, finally, learn
from this healthy interchange.
Another application of peer training exists in some large corporations, such as
Philips N.V. in Holland, where organizational structure is built on the
principle of joint responsibility of two peers, one representing the commercial
end of the business and the other the technical. Formally, both hold equal
responsibility for geographic operations or product groups, as the case may be.
As a practical matter, it may turn out that one or the other of the peers
dominates the management. Nevertheless, the main interaction is between two or
more equals.
Leaders tend to feel separate from their environment. They may work in
organizations, but they never belong to them.
The principal question I raise about such arrangements is whether they
perpetuate the managerial orientation and preclude the formation of one-to-one
relationships between senior people and potential leaders.
Aware of the possible stifling effects of peer relationships on aggressiveness
and individual initiative, another company, much smaller than Philips, utilizes
joint responsibility of peers for operating units, with one important
difference. The chief executive of this company encourages competition and
rivalry among peers, ultimately rewarding the one who comes out on top with
increased responsibility. These hybrid arrangements produce some unintended
consequences that can be disastrous. There is no easy way to limit rivalry.
Instead, it permeates all levels of the operation and opens the way for the
formation of cliques in an atmosphere of intrigue.
One large, integrated oil company has accepted the importance of developing
leaders through the direct influence of senior on junior executives. The
chairman and chief executive officer regularly selects one talented university
graduate whom he appoints his special assistant, and with whom he will work
closely for a year. At the end of the year, the junior executive becomes
available for assignment to one of the operating divisions, where he or she
will be assigned to a responsible post rather than a training position. This
apprenticeship acquaints the junior executive firsthand with the use of power
and with the important antidotes to the power disease called hubris performance
and integrity.
Working in one-to-one relationships, where there is a formal and recognized
difference in the power of the players, takes a great deal of tolerance for
emotional interchange. This interchange, inevitable in close working
arrangements, probably accounts for the reluctance of many executives to become
involved in such relationships. Fortune carried an interesting story on the
departure of a key executive, John W. Hanley, from the top management of
Procter & Gamble to the chief executive officer position at Monsanto.8
According to this account, the chief executive and chairman of P&G passed over
Hanley for appointment to the presidency, instead naming another executive vice
president to this post.
The chairman evidently felt he could not work well with Hanley who, by his own
acknowledgment, was aggressive, eager to experiment and change practices, and
constantly challenged his superior. A chief executive officer naturally has the
right to select people with whom he feels congenial. But I wonder whether a
greater capacity on the part of senior officers to tolerate the competitive
impulses and behavior of their subordinates might not be healthy for
corporations. At least a greater tolerance for interchange would not favor the
managerial team player at the expense of the individual who might become a
leader.
I am constantly surprised at the frequency with which chief executives feel
threatened by open challenges to their ideas, as though the source of their
authority, rather than their specific ideas, was at issue. In one case, a chief
executive officer, who was troubled by the aggressiveness and sometimes
outright rudeness of one of his talented vice presidents, used various indirect
methods such as group meetings and hints from outside directors to avoid
dealing with his subordinate. I advised the executive to deal head-on with what
irritated him. I suggested that by direct, face-to-face confrontation, both he
and his subordinate would learn to validate the distinction between the
authority to be preserved and the issues to be debated.
The ability to confront is also the ability to tolerate aggressive interchange.
And that skill not only has the net effect of stripping away the veils of
ambiguity and signaling so characteristic of managerial cultures, but also it
encourages the emotional relationships leaders need if they are to survive.
1. (HarperCollins, 1973).
2. Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., My Years with General Motors (New York: Doubleday,
1964).
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Dwight D. Eisenhower, At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends (New York:
Doubleday, 1967).
7. Ibid.
8. Jack Hanley Got There by Selling Harder, Fortune, November 1976.
A version of this article appeared in the January 2004 issue of Harvard
Business Review.
Abraham Zaleznik is the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership Emeritus at
Harvard Business School in Boston.