The Leaders We Need, And What Makes Us Follow Read online

  However, their weaknesses, like those of all social characters, are the obverse of their strengths. Not expecting loyalty from organizations, they aren’t committed to a company, even though they’ll commit to a meaningful project. Comfortable with technology and the Internet, it’s easy for them to escape to alternative worlds, second lives, and assumed identities. Quick to Google the answers, they overweigh superficial knowledge. While the bureaucratic social character could be annoyingly stubborn and self-righteous, the Interactives can be inauthentically ingratiating and self-marketing.

  This psychological shift changes the relation of leaders to followers. For the interactive social character, bonds of affiliation are often stronger with colleagues than bosses. Unlike bureaucratic employees of large companies a generation ago, the interactive social character does not idealize the boss and questions the very need for a leader. These people won’t be led by father figures, only by role models who engage them as colleagues in meaningful corporate projects, ideally creating a collaborative community. 13 But only if they are led toward goals they find meaningful by leaders who understand them will organizations be able to meet the challenges of our time.

  WHAT KIND OF LEADERS ARE NEEDED NOW?

  I’ve seen at first hand and by reading history that the kind of leaders needed always depends on the context—the challenges of the time and the social character of the people who are being led. Here’s an example. Right after I wrote The Leader, Samuel Carnegie Calian, then president of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, invited me to participate in a discussion on the book with academics and business executives; he also asked me to talk at morning chapel on my favorite leader in the bible. I chose Moses for two reasons, one more trivial and the other more profound.

  The trivial reason is that Moses is the only biblical leader with a management consultant—his father-in-law Jethroe, who counsels him that he’ll exhaust himself trying to judge all the many disputes among his people. He needs to delegate to lieutenants whose judgment he trusts and only deal with the tough cases that can’t be resolved by one of them. Of course, that’s still standard good advice for someone managing many people.

  The profound reason is that Moses took people who were slaves in Egypt and afraid of freedom and not only liberated them but also taught them how to be free. Once in the desert, the people who had followed Moses to escape from the backbreaking work of building the pyramids complained: “We don’t know where our next meal is coming from. Why have you brought us here? We were better off in Egypt. At least we knew we’d have food to eat.” The Talmudic rabbis believed that Moses took two generations, forty years, to transform these ex-slaves into a free, self-reliant people. He needed time to teach them the law and burn it into their psyches, to turn the fear of Pharaoh into the fear of God, to prepare them for freedom. Social character changes much more slowly than changes in the social environment. But Moses was not just forging a new social character—he also gave his followers the norms and processes to sustain a free and just society, and the hope that they could be God’s chosen people if they lived according to His commandments.

  Moses not only led slaves to freedom physically; he transformed a slave mentality. He not only took people to a new place; he took them to a new state of mind. He transformed their social character. Moses was the leader the people needed, not only to become free in body, but also in spirit.

  IT’S NOT ALWAYS MOSES WHO LEADS

  But people sometimes want the wrong leaders. Another biblical example comes from the Book of Samuel, a righteous judge leading the Israelites. Because they had been defeated by the Philistines and were afraid, the people wanted a warrior-king to protect them. Samuel warned that a king would enlist their sons as soldiers and grab their daughters to serve him as cooks and bakers; he would take their fields and tax them. Samuel predicted the people would regret their decision, but they’d be stuck with it. They would cry out, but the Lord wouldn’t hear them. And so it happened.

  Most Americans grow up believing that, notwithstanding a setback here and there, things will always turn out well in the end. Isn’t that our history? But there’s nothing inevitable about progress, and like the Israelites who wanted a king, people don’t always get the leaders they need. Inept, grandiose, or corrupt leaders hastened the fall of civilizations like Athens and Rome. We’ve seen sadly in the last few years that people don’t always get the leaders they need in corporations. And skillful bureaucrats continue to move up the ranks of business and government where they become poor leaders or petty dictators. Rakesh Khurana has shown brilliantly how corporate boards have recruited media stars who, after giving a short-lived boost to the share price, weaken a company.14 Even innovative entrepreneurs like Henry Ford can become puffed up by success and then lead their companies toward disaster. Recently, great companies like Westinghouse, AT&T, and HP have been led astray by inept leaders.

  Why do people follow bad leaders? Sometimes they have no choice. A Mao, Stalin, Castro, or Saddam Hussein sweeps to power in a revolution against corrupt and inept leaders. People are forced to follow. And sometimes people flock to a demagogue, like Juan Perón or Huey Long, who makes big promises he can’t keep. Sometimes people follow bad leaders because they’re frightened or hopeless and believe the leader’s promise of protection and a better future. In his book Escape from Freedom, Fromm analyzed Hitler’s appeal to the German people. 15 According to Fromm, Hitler’s first followers were small shopkeepers and low-level functionaries who shared a social character that was extremely patriotic, hardworking, parsimonious, stubborn, and moralistic. But their sense of self, their pride as successful people, had been crushed. They were humiliated by defeat in World War I and the loss of their father figure, Kaiser Wilhelm, and their hard-earned savings had melted away in the heat of postwar inflation. Also, the licentiousness in art and behavior in the Weimar Republic of the 1920s disgusted these rather traditional and moralistic people. Angry and seeking a champion, they were drawn to Hitler.

  Based on questionnaires filled out by German workers and employees in 1930, Fromm concluded that the original supporters of Hitler had authoritarian personalities; they admired strong leaders and identified with them, and they were contemptuous of weakness, including their own. Hitler appealed to both their resentment and ambition. He offered power to the powerless, revenge against those who had humiliated Germany, and, tapping into historic anti-Semitism, he blamed the Jews for the cultural decadence. He promised a return to greatness for the “racially pure” Germans.

  Once Hitler had taken over, other Germans who did not fully support his destructive vision followed the crowd to share in the spoils. With his early successes and their growing prosperity, Germans began to idealize Hitler. And many of those who did not agree with the Nazis were silenced by fear of the Gestapo, whose spies were everywhere. The regime tolerated no criticism, and those journalists and labor leaders who first resisted Hitler were taking a huge risk of being sent to concentration camps, even being executed for treason. On the basis of his study, Fromm predicted that while only 10 percent of Germans would be fervent Nazi supporters, no more than 15 percent had a strong enough democratic social character to resist Hitler. The majority, 75 percent, would follow as long as Hitler held power.16

  WHAT’S AT STAKE

  In the new context, understanding people becomes essential both for leaders and followers. Unless leaders understand the cacophony of personalities in this global economy, they won’t create the collaboration needed for economic innovation, political-military security, and environmental protection. And unless we understand would-be leaders, we risk being seduced by demagogues who won’t improve the world but will make things worse. We can’t afford that. Let’s be clear, it’s not always easy to see behind the mask a clever leader wears, especially in an age of media manipulation and manufactured identities. To avoid being seduced by Pied Pipers, our grasp of personality—our Personality Intelligence—needs a lot of improvement. To recognize the person givi
ng the spiel, and to be better able to predict how would-be leaders will act when in power, we need to understand their personalities. Correspondingly, with a better understanding of social character, would-be leaders for the common good will be better able to gain willing followers.

  In the bureaucratic world, trust in the leader resulted from paternalism, from an idealization rooted in unconscious father transference. (I’ll describe these dynamics in chapter 3.) In the new context, organizational leaders are willingly, even enthusiastically, followed not because of unconscious attachments (although these never fully disappear) but because they are good role models who articulate meaningful purpose, are transparent in their communications, encourage dialogue and truth-telling, and treat people as colleagues and collaborators rather than subordinates. This kind of openness scares executives who think they’ll run the risk of losing control. But in my experience they gain rational authority and willing followers.17

  Beyond this, people trust a leader who responds with heart as well as intellect. The leaders we need will develop their Personality Intelligence, which, as we’ll see in chapter 10, combines head and heart: knowledge of personality with direct experience of people’s emotions. This is what the Bible tells us that King Solomon asked of God: a heart that listens, wisdom and courage, the knowledge of what is the right and the willingness to risk acting on it.

  Here is a quick summary of the book’s organization:

  In chapter 2, “Revising Leadership Thinking,” I give a very abbreviated overview of the important leadership literature that has formed our thinking, highlighting the neglect of the motivation of followers and the underlying assumptions about them that no longer hold. In the new context, leadership theory must include understanding and engaging different kinds of personality.

  Next, in chapter 3, I turn to “Why We Follow: The Power of Transference.” People follow the leader for both conscious and unconscious reasons. The most powerful unconscious motivation is what Freud first described as transference of childhood images onto a leader. But Freud viewed transference in the context of the traditional father-dominated family. In this chapter we learn that as a result of the changing social character, the transferential glue that worked in the past no longer holds followers to organizational leaders and has shifted to a more sibling-like, collaborative dynamic as opposed to a parental, autocratic one.

  The leadership implications of this shift are profound. In chapter 4, “From Bureaucratic Followers to Interactive Collaborators,” I describe how and why the social character of interactive followers is different from bureaucratic followers, and the far-reaching effects this has on our attitudes toward leadership.

  In the transformed world of interactive leaders and followers, the crucial leadership competence is an ability to understand a diverse mix of people in terms of both their sense of identity and personalities. In chapter 5, “Understanding People in the Knowledge Workplace,” I explore what would-be leaders should learn about understanding people, and what all of us should learn about understanding would-be leaders.

  The leaders wanted by Interactives are not always the leaders they need. Chapter 6, “Leaders for Knowledge Work,” describes the different types of organizational leaders required for knowledge work and shows the role of social character in both facilitating and resisting the changes needed to make organizations more effective and efficient.

  The next few chapters look more deeply at “the leaders we need” in specific, important contexts. In chapter 7, “Leaders for Health Care,” I’ll show how healthcare organizations are prime examples of knowledge workplaces. The best of these—the Mayo Clinic, Intermountain Health Care, Kaiser-Permanente, Vanderbilt University Medical Center—have benefited from interactive leaders. Both businesses and not-for-profits can learn from their experiences in dealing with resistance to change and creating collaborative learning organizations.

  Education is not just about knowledge; it’s also about developing the social character that prepares people to succeed in a culture. In the era of knowledge work, where education makes the difference between success and failure, many children get left behind. In chapter 8, “Leaders for Learning,” I describe how the leaders of KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program), a remarkably successful program of some fifty inner-city charter schools, and Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos (NPH), a home for orphaned and abandoned children I’ve worked with for forty years, are showing that it’s possible to help some of the most disadvantaged children learn and develop the social character needed to succeed in the world of knowledge work. I’ll show how the leaders for these disadvantaged kids are in a sense transitional leaders, benevolent despots who provide the strong framework that allows the children to develop the attitudes needed for the knowledge workplace.

  The turbulent and eventful first years of the twenty-first century have made for a fascinating case study in gauging how our president measures up as “a leader we need.” In chapter 9, “The President We Need,” citing history and using psychological analysis, I describe the qualities of a president who would be able to mobilize Americans to meet the tremendous challenges of our time. We can’t always predict how a president will act from past behavior. I list the questions I think we should ask candidates to try and discover whether they have the qualities, and specifically the Personality Intelligence, we need in a president.

  Finally, in chapter 10, “Becoming a Leader We Need,” I explore why people become leaders and show how they can develop themselves to engage followers and collaborators. I describe how to develop Personality Intelligence, the ability to both recognize and experience personality patterns and emotions, and to understand organizations as collaborative social systems. These are essential abilities for effective leadership in an interactive world.

  I also include an appendix on “Social Character and the Life Cycle,” which contrasts the development of bureaucratic and interactive social characters from infancy to old age. By observing this development, we gain a richer understanding of how emotional attitudes have changed and what this means for leaders, followers, and collaborators.

  CHAPTER 2

  Revising Leadership Thinking

  LEADERS HAVE BEEN DESCRIBED throughout history in every way imaginable—as dictators, demagogues, commanders, bosses, benefactors, guardians, coaches, pastors, and trailblazers. But what has been missing is a definition of a leader that covers all these descriptions, and that is, a leader is someone people follow. We can expand this definition to state that people follow leaders within a particular context, since being a leader isn’t a personal quality, like intelligence. Rather, it’s a relationship that exists only as long as people follow the leader.

  Missing from the stacks of writings about leadership I’ve been burrowing through is a theory that fits the cultural context of our time. That’s because the kind of leadership needed for past eras doesn’t fit the age of knowledge work. Consider differences in modes of production and their leadership needs. In the craft mode of production, effective leaders are master craftsmen with apprentices who want to become just like their masters. In the industrial mode of production, they are managers who design roles and processes, set tasks, and evaluate performance within hierarchical bureaucracies. The most effective are the paternalistic leaders who forge emotional bonds of trust so that employees with bureaucratic social characters want to follow them. The knowledge mode of production is different: the workers typically know more about their work than their managers. The challenge of leadership is to create collaboration among diverse specialists with interactive social characters whose strongest emotional ties are with their colleagues, not their bosses.

  I am a knowledge worker, and I’d bet so are most of you who are reading this—in fields like research, health care, education, engineering, law, software, finance, sales and marketing, consulting, government, publishing, the media, entertainment, architecture, and design. Or you may be student knowledge workers who will someday enter one of these fields.

&n
bsp; Think of a leader you wanted to follow at work. (I’ll leave political leadership for chapter 9.) Why did you want to follow that leader? Because the leader was passionate? Because the leader had strong beliefs? Because the leader had integrity? Yes, these are all good qualities in a leader. But, we can all think of individuals in leadership roles who have had some or all of these qualities and yet we didn’t want to follow them. Why not? Because we didn’t believe they were taking us to a good place.

  Yet passion, belief, and integrity are often cited by CEOs when they make speeches about what it takes to be an effective leader.1 They aren’t lying, but they are avoiding the hard reality that a lot of their employees only follow them because they have to, not because they want to. Of course, people feel better following a person with integrity who seems convinced about a goal or strategy. Even if they don’t want to follow a leader, they may be more willing to follow an upbeat and seemingly honest person. And they may feel juiced up, at least temporarily, by a boss’s optimism and enthusiasm. No one wants to follow someone who is unsure, halfhearted, an untrustworthy flip-flopper.