Ruthlessly Measure Outcomes. Never let anyone say that leadership gains are intangible or impossible to measure. Our Institute has an independent, full-time team led by an experienced research psychologist with the sole responsibility of measuring outcomes. Never let trainers measure their own outcomes; that’s like allowing the pitcher to call balls and strikes. Use rigorous measurement to guide what you undertake as development in your organization and for yourself. Don’t waste resources on things that don’t produce measurable outcomes. There are trendy leadership-development activities that do not produce measurable outcomes beyond temporary inspiration. Most leadership speakers, obstacle courses, leader yoga, and boot camps provide little in the way of measurable outcomes. This is one reason why people often find it difficult to measure outcomes: They are attempting to assess events that don’t produce outcomes. Do not waste time and resources on leader-tainment.
Have a Healthy Skepticism of Single-Demographic Approaches. We are cautious of single demographic qualifiers to the term leader, such as introvert leader, engineer leader, or female leader. There is no question that one can isolate and correlate leader qualities and leader challenges related to single demographic characteristics. One can also build and market programs catering to that demographic. Here is the catch: when a person actually leads, no single demographic characteristic is ever isolated – race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, socioeconomic status, national and cultural origin, and personal history all interact continuously. Such interaction is especially the case in global business or university settings, where cultural diversity is complex. Interestingly, our measures reveal that women, international students, and other underrepresented groups tend to participate in one-on-one coaching at slightly higher rates than does the overall student body, and to attain developmental goals at rates higher than their mainstream counterparts. Because of our highly personalized approach, we are able to consider the full spectrum of their demographic characteristics when those characteristics are important to their development or experience as leaders.We never slight the accomplishments of a leader by attaching a demographic qualifier.
Don’t Let Leader Development Be Displaced by Other Noble Aims. It is important to differentiate leader development (increasing the capacity or ability of an individual to lead) from training development (teaching leaders corporate culture or policies) or career development (mentoring into networks, internships, or other forms of advancing a person through an industry). Close inspection of many corporate programs reveals that leader development is frequently displaced by industry-specific training development. Close inspection of university or college programs often reveals that activities cast as leader development are often mostly career development, for example, job-focused internships, mentoring by successful industry volunteers, and other career-shaping initiatives. Consider your own experience: How much time have you spent in programs that developed you as a leader, but where the content was primarily organizational training or career development?
Investing in the Future
Personalized and direct development in the university environment can change the trajectory of an individual for 50 years or longer. Early intervention with young leaders will reap dividends not only for the leaders themselves, but for the countless colleagues, direct reports, and organizations that they will work with over the course of their lifetimes. I invite you to consider the words of two Rice University students who were coached this past academic year:
These coaching sessions have led me to understand the factors that affect my decision making. Growing in self-awareness has allowed me to stop making rash decisions and start making strategic, goal-oriented decisions that have increased my confidence as a leader.
I never had an opportunity before this experience to reflect on what leadership meant to me and how I could make leadership fruitful for me and those I interact with. I now realize that leadership experiences not only benefit me, but, more importantly, allow me to have the most positive impact on my community.
I predict that in 10 years, all top-tier colleges and universities will be more serious about leader development. The rest of us can be serious right now. Lessons in cutting-edge development from the Doerr Institute are practical in their application to corporate and personal development strategies: develop only those who want to lead, develop one-on-one, ruthlessly measure outcomes, develop as whole persons, don’t waste resources, don’t give in to distractions. The Doerr Institute invites you to look out the window with us and join us in our mission to develop the next generation of leaders.
Reflection Questions:
When do you think leadership training is most effective? Why?
Did you receive any leadership training in college/university? How valuable did you find it then? What value has it had since then?
What do you consider the qualities of a good leader? An effective leader? A successful leader? How are these different?
Research suggests that about 30% of leaders’ qualities could be inherited, but that roughly 70% of leader capacity is learned. That said, what do you think are the best ways to accelerate your learning to lead?
Notes
* The author is grateful to Dr. Ryan Brown and Ruth Reitmeier for their review and contributions to this chapter.
1. This chapter is excerpted, in part, from the author’s October 25, 2017, acceptance speech for the Warren Bennis Award for Excellence in Leadership, which he received during the annual Global Institute for Leader Development conference in Palm Desert, California.
2. S. Snook, N. Nohira, and R. Khurana, The Handbook for Teaching Leadership: Knowing, Doing, and Being (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2012).
3. Time Value of Leader Development is a term that is a key component of the Doerr Method–early leader development for the purpose of compounding the effects over time.
4. A. Soubelet and T.A. Salthouse, “Personality-Cognition Relations Across Adulthood,” Developmental Psychology 47 (2011): 303–310.
5. P.T. Costa, Jr., and R.R. McCrae, The NEO Personality Inventory Manual (Odessa, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources, 1985)
6. B.W. Roberts, K.E. Walton, and W. Viechtbauer, “Personality Traits Change in Adulthood: Reply to Costa and McCrae,” Psychological Bulletin 132 (2006): 29–32.
7. J. Arnett, “Emerging Adulthood: A Theory of Development from the Late Teens Through the Twenties,” American Psychologist 55 (2000): 469–480.
8. T.A. Kolditz, “Why You Lead Determines How Well You Lead,” Harvard Business Review, July 22, 2014, http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/07/why-you-lead-determines-how-well-you-lead/.
9. T.A. Kolditz, T. Casas, I. Klett, and J. Strackhouse, Are You a Leader of the Fourth Industrial Revolution? World Economic Forum, Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2017: Achieving Inclusive Growth in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, 38–40, http://www3.weforum.org/docs/AMNC17/WEF_AMNC17_Report.pdf.
10. Ibid.
25
The World’s Greatest Ophthalmologist
Pawel Motyl
Pawel Motyl has 20-plus years of experience in business, including 10 years in management consulting and executive search as well as 7-plus years in the CEO role (ICAN Institute – Harvard Business Review Poland publishing house and leading executive education firm in Poland). He is one of the leading European experts on decision making, leadership, personal effectiveness, and talent management; in 2016, he was chosen to join the 100 Coaches group, selected and led by Marshall Goldsmith.
A speaker at Harvard Business Review conferences in Poland, Pawel has delivered presentations with Marshall Goldsmith, Dave Ulrich, Andrew McAfee, Joseph Badaracco, Neil Rackham, Heike Bruch, and many others. He is a facilitator of C-level workshops and training programs and top-ranked trainer in executive education projects. As architect of consulting solutions and advisor to the management boards of leading companies in Poland, Pawel has managed and participated in numerous international assignments.
Pawel’s book, Labyrinth: The
Art of Decision-Making, became a Harvard Business Review Poland all-time bestseller in just four weeks. The book won many prestigious awards in Poland, including 2014 Golden Owl, and will soon be published in English.
More: www.pawelmotyl.com.
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I never predict. I just look out the window and see what’s visible – but not yet seen.
—Peter Drucker
In July 2017, I ran a quick poll among more than 30 of my friends, asking for their interpretation of these words by Peter Drucker. Each of my respondents came up with a response that fell into the same category: visionary leaders. Seeing things others cannot see yet is usually interpreted as having a vision. Thus, the quote evoked profiles of the greatest entrepreneurs and business people (from Henry Ford to Steve Jobs and Elon Musk); inventors and scientists (Nicola Tesla, Albert Einstein, and Stephen Hawking); spiritual, political, and military leaders (Alexander the Great, Nelson Mandela, and the Dalai Lama); and, a little surprisingly, a ski jumper from Sweden named Jan Boklöv, who back in 1986 was brave enough to introduce what we would call a breakthrough innovation today: a V-style of ski jumping.
I was not surprised. When I first came across this quote many years ago, I felt like the Back to the Future protagonist, Marty McFly, miraculously shot back in time to 1963 in Washington, DC, to watch Martin Luther King, Jr., expressing his compelling dream from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. That dream was a vision of the country and the society that was looming on the horizon, but was still invisible to many.
We have always been awed by such people.
In the years that followed, I found out that there is one more important perspective in Peter Drucker’s words, a perspective that goes beyond visionary leadership and often becomes paramount to one’s personal effectiveness.
Let me share a story that explains this perspective – my story.
I was born in Poland in 1975, during the Communist era, and as a teenager, witnessed the 1989 collapse of communism across Eastern Europe and the rise of a free market economy. After graduating from Cracow University of Economics and earning a postgraduate degree from Jagiellonian University, I was accepted for an internship with the Polish office of Hay Group. This began an eight-year journey that brought me from a junior consultant level to the team leader position, where I was responsible for the organizational research and diagnostics business in the Central and Eastern Europe region. In 2006, I decided that I wanted to understand general management better and I started looking for a CEO or a managing director position. In early 2007, after a very short recruitment process, I was appointed the CEO of ICAN Institute, Harvard Business Review Polska (Poland) publishing house.
I was proud to be part of the local edition of the world’s greatest business magazine, a member of a relatively small team of 30 super-professional, dedicated people. In the following months, I was interviewed by some business magazines in Poland, and enjoyed my new status as one of the younger CEOs in the country.
Now let me fast forward to 2013. The company was doing well: in spite of the 2008–2009 worldwide economic downturn that hit the emerging markets severely, the ICAN Institute continued to grow, with both its publishing and nonpublishing businesses thriving. We became the market leaders in executive education programs and conferences, and our latest additions – management consulting and organizational diagnostics units – were helping fuel our growth. The company grew to 200 people and it showed a healthy revenue structure and margins. People kept congratulating me.
And then I made a mistake.
I invited Marshall Goldsmith to be the keynote speaker at ICAN Institute’s November 2013 conference.
It was the first time I had worked with Marshall. He turned out not only to be extremely professional, but also amazingly open and easygoing. We had a couple of Skype calls before he came, discussing the event and the target audience. During Marshall’s two-day stay in Poland, we co-delivered a workshop for 100 managers of one of the country’s leading banks, had a fantastic dinner, and then worked together during the conference. The conference was an incredible success, with Marshall earning top scores in the customer satisfaction surveys. This was the highest-rated ICAN Institute’s event ever!
In the evening, when the conference was finished and participants were gone, Marshall asked if I had half an hour to talk. Of course, I gladly agreed and we had a coffee. After some small talk, Marshall asked me quite a surprising question:
“Do you think you are a good CEO?”
For a moment I did not know what to say, as these were the most unexpected words I could imagine, especially after such a successful event!
Being totally frank, I said:
“I am an average one. Being a CEO is a combination of two roles: the one of a leader, which is about vision, inspiration, and people; and the one of a manager, which boils down to execution, control, and concern for order. I am good at the former and weak at the latter, which makes me – statistically – an average CEO.”
And then Marshall shot the question that changed everything:
“So why do you spend your professional life doing something you are only average at?”
I was speechless. Marshall’s words were so obvious. So rational. So true. So powerful. So unexpected. So painful.
I had to admit that being a CEO was a compilation of good times and bad. I loved working with clients, delivering workshops, and acting as a consultant, speaking at conferences across Europe, and sharing know-how through articles, podcasts, or webinars. But I hated all the operational drudgery and quite often felt unmotivated on the days that were filled with this type of activity.
Marshall looked at me with this funny spark in his eye and finally said, “Pawel, why don’t you focus on things you are exceptional at?”
In a split second, I understood the truth: For many years, I had been held hostage by the expectations of other people and by the clichés that imposed a specific career path on me. The dream of each graduating student in economics is to climb the ladder to get to the position of a CEO, and then continue to move up that ladder.
Marshall’s questions unveiled a new vantage point for me. I understood that for my entire professional career, I had been blind, following the dreams of other people, dreams that had never been my own. Deep in my heart, I never wanted to be a CEO or to manage a company. What I always really wanted was to create, gather, process, and share business knowledge from the world’s best (sometimes counterintuitive) sources in order to help other executives become more effective and lead their companies in a better way. This was my unexpressed mission, my purpose, my professional raison d’être. And I had been compromising it because of what other people viewed as a career success.
In the nine months that followed the conference, together with the owners of ICAN Institute, I prepared a succession plan, finally resigning from my role in August 2014, with the CFO of the company assuming my duties.
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It’s time to come back to Peter Drucker’s quote.
Obviously, it is awesome to be a successful visionary leader, and there was a common denominator in the backgrounds of all the great leaders mentioned in the beginning of this chapter: their genuine passion for what they were doing. There is another quote from Peter Drucker that I love:
Your first and foremost job as a leader is to take charge of your own energy and then help to orchestrate the energy of those around you.
Let’s take one step backwards. Are we doing what we are best at? Are we in the right place? Do we realize our full potential? What are our perspectives for development? Are we happy with who we are and what we do? Do we really have genuine passion for that?
The point is, that when we look out the window, we usually see the picture that is either blurred or distorted by many triggers, both internal and external. There are expectations of others, there are stereotypes, there is our own ego. Consequently, sometimes we cannot see (or do not want to see) the truth.
In Marsha
ll Goldsmith, I met an exceptional ophthalmologist, who fixed my sight just by asking several questions. Today when I look out the window, I can see things as they truly are. Sometimes, these are the things that others cannot see.
This is my understanding of Peter Drucker’s words.
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How to get there? Following are several questions and exercises that you might find useful in adjusting your own vision.
1. Where Are You?
This question seems easy, yet exploring it almost always brings some surprising outcomes.
Start with what I call the Five-Color Calendar Test.
Book at least two hours of your time, prepare markers or Post-it™ cards in five colors. Print out your agenda from the past several months and stick it to a wall. Now, move backwards in time, analyzing the events on each day at work. Mark the printed calendar entries with five colors:
Green for events that were successful in business terms and motivated you
Red for events that were successful, but did not make you feel good or made you feel unmotivated
Orange for events that were unsuccessful, but made you feel energized
Work is Love Made Visible Page 20
