Leadership That Is Possible
At the outset, most of us have to work at being interactive and listening—particularly those who have gotten into the bad habit of looking at the world only from our own viewpoint or of making abstract presentations to which the listeners are essentially irrelevant, and who are at significant risk of becoming our audience's “bitees.” If we work at listening, we can make progress. But however we manage it, true listening and interaction appear—paradoxically—at the moment willed effort drops away. We enter a state of flow or effortless effort. At such moments, the self disappears. We are at one with the object of our attention. We dissolve into attentiveness itself.9
Are there any CEOs today who are running real companies with interactive leadership? Tom Chappell of Tom's of Maine, Bill George of Medtronic, Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines, Tony Hsieh of Zappos, Howard Schultz of Starbucks, and Vineet Nayar of HCL Technologies are sometimes suggested as candidates.10 The forty or so “idea practitioners” Tom Davenport and Larry Prusak cite in What's the Big Idea? would also be candidates as interactive leaders.11 In any event, further research is needed. The fact that the list of candidates is relatively short may indicate how difficult it is to give birth to this new kind of leadership in the current context.
One possible clue to the conundrum is that there is no ancient Greek hero or god, no long-standing cultural archetype, whose conduct resembles the interactive leadership I'm talking about here. So there's little in the collective psyche that makes it easy for people to understand and slide into this mode of operating. And this may be part of the problem: society is trying to give birth to a new type of the human psyche that would actually encourage good people and innovation and still survive and flourish. Like anything worthwhile, the birth pangs are not painless or easy. Nevertheless the need is there.
Leadership That Fits the Modern Need
Over a quarter of a century ago, Charles Handy noted the tendency in organizations toward bigness and consistency:
If you are sitting near the top of an organization, responsible in whole or in part for its continued success, or at least survival, there is a strong urge to want to make it bigger and more internally consistent. There are good reasons for each of these tendencies…. The bigger you are, the more able you are to influence your own destiny…. And bigness brings clout…. Bigness brings flexibility and a built-in insurance. A loss in one area can be offset by unusual profits elsewhere…. Consistency is desirable for two reasons. If the future is consistent with one's expectations of it, then planning can be tighter…. Consistency is also forced on organizations from outside.12
Bigness and consistency bring with them an organizational culture that Handy calls Apollonian, named after the ancient Greek god Apollo, who was among other things the god of order and rules. According to Handy, “Size … brings formality, impersonality, and rules and procedures in its train. There is no way out of it. When someone cannot rule by glance of eye and word-of-mouth because there are just too many people, he has to lean on formal systems of hierarchy, information, and control. Similarly, budgets, forms, standardized methods, fixed reporting periods, common documents, and the whole barrage of bureaucracy. The ineluctable logic of efficiency drives organizations toward Apollo and the role culture.”13
These trends have been accentuated by both globalization and information technology and are now dominant. Yet even as Apollo seems triumphant everywhere, the forces undermining the Apollonian organizational culture are also inexorably at work. “For just as size creates an internal need for Apollonian methods, so the very strengthening of that culture tends to make the total organization less responsive to its environment, less capable of changing, more dinosaur-like than ever—impressive but out of touch and often out of control.”14
In particular, the managerial burdens of an Apollonian organization in times of rapid change become extraordinary. For the very top of the organization, the traditional management tools—command, control, regulation, analysis, and optimization—are simply too slow and ineffective to reorient the organization to meet the changing needs of the marketplace in a timely fashion.
For the middle and frontline manager, the situation is even worse. “Restrained by the rules and procedures dictated by the pressures for consistency, he must find a way of coping with inconsistency.”15 However, coping with inconsistency was never one of the strengths (or even objects) of the conventional management tools. Indeed, uncertainty for the middle manager derives from the very fact that these tools have become inoperative, since the purposes for which they were devised shift faster than the tools themselves can change. In effect, middle managers have to become leaders rather than managers, creatively generating new goals that can reconcile overall organizational goals with the realities of their units.
People on the frontline—those actually doing the work—also face dilemmas. They can see very readily the tension between the goals of the organization and the realities of what is going on where the work is actually done, and they often have excellent ideas as to how things could be done better. In the formal, role-based organization where command and control predominate, they have no way of making those ideas known and so improving the organization, which trundles on its way, oblivious.
For these dilemmas, the interactive approach to leadership, along with its accompanying narrative tools, is extraordinarily relevant. Suddenly the tasks of getting people to understand and implement complex new ideas, transmitting values, getting people working together, sharing knowledge, and leading people into the future become feasible.
Leadership That Is Not for Everyone
Nevertheless the interactive approach to leadership will not appeal to everyone.
It will be of little interest to those who are comfortable in the traditional management mode of command and control. Nor is it likely to attract robber barons, hardball strategists, upwardly mobile lackeys, fawning aides-de-camp, commercial mercenaries, paid-for politicians, or scheming demagogues. Such people have always used inauthentic narrative as a tool of manipulation and control. They have no need to be taught how to tell the quick lie, or how to profit from the devices of the shyster and the shill like foot-in-the-door or bait-and-switch, or how to deceive with political spin, character assassination, and negative campaigning. They need no advice to silence those who dare ask a question or discredit any who are critical of the status quo.16
Inauthentic storytelling may work in the short term, but it isn't a sound foundation for any individual, business, or society. If it is tolerated or even encouraged and taught in schools, whether by cunning, carelessness, ignorance, indifference, loss of confidence, or an inability to distinguish right from wrong, or by governmental fiat, then the society is accordingly impoverished, and we are all accountable for the loss.
These people will go on practicing their counterfeit leadership in offices, malls, courthouses, post offices, and parliaments, dangling the threat of layoffs or other disasters over people's heads while increasing the pace and intensity of the work. They will go on using pseudo-empirical studies crafted to contain creative people in cages of quiet desperation. They will seduce newcomers with duplicitous maneuvers. They will go on suppressing human potential, dismissing new ideas, promoting not knowing ahead of knowing, preserving privilege as a suit of armor polished to a shocking glitter.17 Using these techniques, they may prosper for a period, as they squeeze the last few drops from depleting business models and spend their energy making fresh rationalizations for their dominance.
Leadership That Is Relatively Free of Ego
The interactive approach to leadership is not concerned merely with making the deal. This is key, because if who you are gets defined according to the current rate of exchange in a marketplace, then the accommodation you make with the world will distract you, one degree at a time, from what matters. This is how the commercialized version of what it means to be a person brings people under its spell.18
True leaders do n
ot lead because they are expecting something in return. They lead because they have something to give. They may get something back, but this is a contingent event, not the goal. They give with a spirit of generosity. They are relatively ego free.
At their best, interactive leaders are willing to bear any suffering, even loss or humiliation, rather than show that their egos are more important than their goal. In this respect, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela have shown us the way. Once opponents realize they cannot intimidate such people, they eventually stop trying. Being relatively ego free will not exempt you from risk. But by removing ego from the game, you change the nature of the game, since the principal lever of those in the control mode is eliminated.
Being relatively free of ego means never exacting revenge. Revenge only strengthens the will to resist. You abandon all notions of a tit-for-tat fight. You don't give as good as you get, since you don't respond in kind. Instead you take the moral high ground of truth and authenticity. Thus anger against the adversary and anger against the self are inseparable. The thrust of the interactive leader is on curing the inner contradictions of those who do not see the future. Your opponents are oppressed by a larger foe—their own fear. You help them deal with this common enemy and teach them to relax their antagonism by showing them through narrative that the prospects are more positive than they apprehend.19
Leadership That Is Like Judo
When you take on the role of the interactive leader, aware of who you are, confident of your values, assured of the soundness of your mission, and competent to communicate it through a story, you will acquire supporters. But you will also become an immediate threat to the powers that be, the forces that support that status quo. So what do you do with these opponents? Here are some thoughts.
Above all, you need to feel the importance, the excitement, and the plausibility of your mission. If you don't feel it, no one else will. While you abstain from tilting at windmills, you also choose the biggest possible goal to fight for. Make a war too small, and it's yours alone; no one will join in the action. You ask for everything, because nothing less is worth having. People are more giving if your request challenges them to be heroic. Asking for small things simply makes people feel small. People are drawn to big ideas and big adventures more passionately than to small ones. The interactive leader defines the struggle in terms of a long-range campaign, not isolated skirmishes. No one episode is a defeat if the goal is large.20
You don't fight your opponents: you invalidate them. Those who bear the trappings of power don't necessarily have much authority. You behave as if you already possess moral authority. The board of directors may be holding you accountable. Your boss may control your current job. The state may control the army and the police. But they don't have moral authority over you. As a leader, you are an actualist, not an activist. You make your views true in action. You conduct your campaign entirely in the open and at close range. Truth and authenticity are your most powerful weapons. This is the method of resistance. It's not defiance, or subterfuge, or charm, but rather standing on firm moral ground. Resistance is the opposite of compromise. It means not fighting your opponents' battle or even anything like a traditional battle at all. It means enticing the opponents to engage on your ground, in your timing, where your goals determine the outcome.
Thus, in the interactive mode of leadership, dealing with opponents isn't about winning. Winning implies losers, and losers harbor resentment and bitterness that eventually will come back to bite you. You must make your opponents unwitting allies. This means neither hurting them nor eroding their confidence.
Instead you deal with opponents by besting them. Besting leaves opponents unhurt and even inspired. Besting is a mode in which you demonstrate to your antagonist your moral superiority. Through narrative, you offer a clear and inspiring new future—one that motivates everybody.
Thus at the national level, Gandhi bested the British overlords. Martin Luther King Jr. bested the racists. Nelson Mandela bested the apartheid regime in South Africa. Rather than conceiving a simple win against their opponents, they triumphed over them in such a way that eventually everyone could see that this was the way forward.
Besting means not fencing people in—you leave them room to change their minds. You behave as if your opponents are your allies, demonstrating your trust in them and giving them strength to do the right thing. You give them the courage to change by creating heroic expectations for them. The bigger the expectations, the harder they will try to achieve them.
You build a network of support to surround your opponents. A mesh of support is hard to attack because its strength is spread widely. You make sure others know what the network stands for. It becomes the embodiment of your idea. Once your opponents ask, “Who are they?” they are finally taking you seriously. They are no longer detached. They are beginning to see the world through your eyes.
Finally, you end the struggle cleanly, not prematurely. A good ending brings resolution and closure. Thus, at the national level, it eventually becomes clear to the British government that they must hand over India to Gandhi. It eventually becomes clear to the South African government that Nelson Mandela is right: the apartheid regime is unsustainable and must be eliminated. And on a more mundane level, it eventually becomes obvious that e-business is part of IBM's future and that sharing knowledge is crucial to the World Bank's goal of alleviating global poverty. A change in relations occurs as all participants recognize the need for the change.
Leadership That Has Feeling
Interactive leadership involves passion—another ingredient that is missing from the traditional mode of management. By putting its faith in logic, control, and optimization, command-and-control management has lost sight of the crucial role that passion plays in human action.
By contrast, the interactive approach to leadership thrives on feeling. This is not the demonized sense of feeling that Nietzsche characterized as Dionysian and associated with drunkenness and irrationality.21 Nor is it the kind of primitive animal instinct that Freud baptized as the id. Most feelings have a rational aspect—as humans, we are happy or angry for a reason, in a context that we understand through narrative. As in all rational activities, we may make a mistake: the reason for a feeling might be the wrong reason, or an emotion may be out of proportion to the cause, but this doesn't disprove that feelings have a rational dimension. Emotions have “a narrative structure which ties together and makes sense of the individual elements of emotional experience…. To make sense of one's emotional life, including its surprises, it is thus necessary to see it as part of a larger unfolding narrative.”22
Thus, while not jettisoning the value of rational analysis, we also need to recognize the positive, rational dimensions of emotions. Neurological research by Antonio Damasio and others has shown that emotion is integral to the processes of reasoning and decision making. Thus he describes some people he studied “who were entirely rational in the way they ran their lives up to the time when, as a result of neurological damage in specific sites of the their brains, they lost a certain class of emotions and, in a momentous parallel development, lost their ability to make rational decisions.” He goes on to point out that these people still have the ability to reason. “[They] can still use the instruments of their rationality and can still call up the knowledge of the world around them. Their ability to tackle the logic of a problem remains intact. Nonetheless, many of their personal and social decisions are irrational, more often disadvantageous to their selves and to others than not.”23
Damasio concludes that while emotional upheavals can lead to irrational decisions, “emotion probably assists reasoning, especially when it comes to personal and social matters involving risk and conflict…. Well-targeted and well-deployed emotion seems to be a support system without which the edifice of reason cannot operate properly.”24
The interactive leader uses narrative to mobilize Damasio's “well-targeted and well-deployed emotion” so as to get
people into action. Passion is an inherent aspect of narrative because in a story, the listeners relive the narrative in their own minds. It is as if they are there inside the story and so they experience the feelings of the participants. By contrast, the controlling manager typically resorts to abstract analysis and assertions, from which passion is naturally absent.25
Another reason that the interactive leader resorts to storytelling is its aural character. The ear enjoys a privileged passageway to the heart, as may be seen in the emotional impact of music. Narratives told face-to-face use the same privileged passageway, which is also amazingly sensitive to the veracity of the content. Thus, research carried out by U.K. professor Richard Wiseman has shown that we can detect lies more accurately from listening to the voice alone. In an experiment in which deliberate lies were told over British television, on radio, and in print, the lies were detected best by the radio audience, next by the newspaper readers, and worst by the television viewers.26
The Leader's Guide to Storytelling Page 31
