The Leaders We Need, And What Makes Us Follow

by Michael MacCoby

  In knowledge work, productivity depends not just on good processes and getting workers to follow rules, even though that may still be important. But even more important is leadership that succeeds in creating a common sense of purpose and collaboration based on shared operating principles. Once that’s achieved, exactly how knowledge workers do their job can be left up to them.

  In the 1990s, there was a rise in knowledge work and a change in worker attitudes. The greater the competence required from a knowledge worker, the more likely a basic principle of both craft and industrial work no longer held, namely that the boss knew the job better than the worker. Scott Adams’s Dilbert cartoons make us laugh at the inept manager of engineers, but the cartoons don’t answer the question of how to lead knowledge workers.

  And this is not just a matter of leading professionals, as I learned from the union representative at FP&L and directly at an AT&T business service center, where a young service technician named Penny controlled a multimillion-dollar corporate account. She was highly motivated by her relationship with the customer, who wanted to do business with her and her alone. Despite their attempts to connect with the customer, neither the account executive nor Penny’s manager were invited to customer meetings. I asked Penny whether she had the skills to satisfy the customer’s needs. She answered that she got other technicians to help. For example, she was good at solving voice problems, but she needed help from her friend Annie on data problems. So what was her boss’s role? He should keep her informed about business strategy, products, and pricing. He needed to be a teacher. Then, Penny would want to collaborate, not because he was a human relations expert, but because he would be teaching her things she had to know to do the job. He would be adding value for her so she could add value for her customer. He would be treating her as a collaborator, not a follower.

  McGregor and Maslow wrote their theories at the very start of the revolution in organization and work resulting from information and communication technology. As I write this, knowledge work has come to dominate the fields of health care, software, telecommunication, much of industrial work/design, engineering, marketing/sales, and financial services. While Penny was a special case at AT&T because she was empowered by the customer, more and more knowledge workers are empowered by their expertise. To be effective, organizations have to modify, even break down, traditional bureaucratic hierarchies into collaborative heterarchies where leadership shifts according to which person has the relevant knowledge.

  Anabel Quan-Haase and Barry Wellman at the University of Toronto studied an information services company with two departments, programming and marketing. In the programming department, the programmers have more specialized knowledge than their managers. In a chapter describing the study, Quan-Haase and Wellman explain that “the type of work done by these high-tech employees has reached such complexity that the boss often cannot give much input for dealing with a technical problem. Such circumstances preclude direct hierarchical-bureaucratic supervision . . . management needs to trust and rely on their employees to provide them with the necessary information to make decisions because they are dependent on their expertise.”12

  In software companies like this—Yahoo! and Google are examples—it’s not a matter of getting workers to cooperate. Individual workers have to collaborate to do their jobs.

  The other department described by Quan-Haase and Wellman was marketing. There, individuals who worked directly with customers were managed in a more traditional hierarchy because hierarchy was more effective. Employees didn’t need to collaborate so much with coworkers, but to do their jobs, they did need coaching from their managers.

  By viewing the personalities of leaders and followers through the lens of a needs hierarchy, leadership thinking missed what was happening in the workplace. This is not to say that Maslow and his followers were all wrong. It does make sense to think of lower versus higher, more developed needs. But as I’ll try to show in chapter 4, these needs should be viewed in the context of social character. The farmers working in a rural factory had a need to leave work early, not because they were on a low level of the needs hierarchy, but because they wanted more time for their independent farming. And the women working on the assembly line who preferred socializing to taking on more complex tasks didn’t lack creative needs. They just satisfied them at home, cooking, weaving, and caring for their families.

  I’ve puzzled about why Maslow has had such an appeal both to tough managers and soft liberals. The answer I’ve come to is that his theory seems to justify the prejudices of both groups. First of all, part of the theory has a certain face validity. Of course, hungry people think of little else other than food. Proponents of economic development can use Maslow to make the compelling argument that starving people won’t be productive, that if you don’t satisfy basic needs, there will be no economic development.

  Furthermore, Maslow’s view of human nature—that all people have the potential to be creative if their basic needs are met—has its roots in the humanistic philosophical tradition going back to Aristotle’s Ethics. This view gives hope that the most downtrodden people can someday build a productive society.

  As for the hard-nosed managers using Maslow’s theory, they argue that lower-level workers need to be controlled. Because these workers are interested only in making money, there’s no point in fussing with more difficult participative management. I heard this argument from a manager in New Delhi in the mid-1980s. He said he’d just become CEO and had tried to engage the workers in Theory Y–type management, but they had resisted, and he believed Maslow’s theory explained the reason why. He invited me to a meeting with worker representatives so that I could see for myself. At the meeting, I asked the CEO to describe his idea of employee participation. He did, and I then asked the union leader for his response. “We are not interested,” he said, and I asked him why not. “Because we want more money,” he said. “You see,” said the CEO, “they are low on the needs hierarchy, so they don’t need to participate.”

  I had a hunch and asked the worker, “Have you always felt like this?” “No,” he said. “Before this CEO arrived, we did have a scheme to participate, but we were promised a share in the productivity gains. We improved productivity, but we didn’t get the money we were promised, so why should we trust management now?”

  The CEO might have found this out if he hadn’t coded information according to the needs hierarchy. Has Maslow’s theory ever been tested? Edward E. Lawler III, a leading expert on motivation at the University of Southern California, reports there is “very little evidence to support the view that a hierarchy exists above the security level.”13 That means that once people have enough to eat you can’t predict what will be most meaningful to them by referring to the hierarchy of needs.

  I’ve interviewed hundreds of workers at all levels of companies and given surveys asking about their values to thousands more. Rather than fitting into a single hierarchy, all the needs or values cited by Maslow are shared by all people, as well as other needs that he doesn’t include, such as needs for play, dignity or respect, and meaning.14 Each need or instinctual tendency has its own developmental hierarchy. For example, Jean Piaget, the great Swiss psychologist, describes how the need to play develops from infancy to adolescence.15 Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, the Harvard psychologist, described a hierarchy that’s missing from both Maslow and McGregor, namely levels of moral reasoning.

  Piaget described how children grow out of egocentrism and authoritarian reasoning only when they start to cooperate with other children and learn to see things from another’s point of view. Kohlberg’s lowest level is unquestioned obedience to authority . At the next level, people conform to a limited view of what is good for their family or organization to a limited view of what is good for their family or organization. At higher levels, they decide what will benefit others beyond the immediate group.16

  As knowledge-work organizations become more complex, they require communication among work
ers and trust that people are acting according to higher-level moral values. This is not just a question of the worker’s personality. Leadership makes the difference in the moral level of an organization, whether people are ruled by fear and expected to obey without question or whether they are trusted to do what is best for the organization and its stakeholders, even if this means criticizing the boss. The recent history of corporate corruption has eroded trust in corporate leaders. But creating moral organizations is not only a matter of having leaders who stay out of jail. Autocratic leaders reinforce egocentrism that blocks open communication. That’s because everyone tries to please the boss they fear, and other workers become rivals, not collaborative colleagues.

  Although the theories of Maslow and McGregor had the value of getting leaders to think beyond Taylorism, they were too flawed to provide a guide for the age of knowledge work. They failed to understand context, both the changing nature of work and the social character.

  LEARNING FROM MACHIAVELLI ABOUT PRINCES AND CEOS

  So far, I’ve focused on organizational leadership below the very top. In thinking about why people follow a CEO, theorists often refer to Machiavelli to justify harsh management. But, while Machiavelli has much to teach us, his lessons are poorly understood because they aren’t seen in context.

  What can we learn from Machiavelli? If we’re not put off by his cynicism; his praise of immoral leaders who succeeded by cruelty, lies, and betrayals; or his amoral advice, we can find bits of wisdom. Hitler, Stalin, and Saddam Hussein, among other despots, used The Prince as a guidebook. But Machiavelli is more than a guru for monsters. In a course taught by Leo Strauss, the Machiavelli scholar at the University of Chicago, I learned that Machiavelli not only describes how a leader gets results in different contexts, but also what kind of a leadership personality succeeds with different types of followers.

  The Prince was written in a time of continual war.17 As he reviews the history of his time, Machiavelli concludes that princes need to learn not only the art of war but also how to get people to follow. But most of these followers are frightened and disorganized. Machiavelli advises princes to be ruthless, to make themselves feared rather than loved, because they can control fear. He cautions that unless you’re a prince who is totally in charge and already feared, gaining love by being benevolent is always an uncertain venture. That’s because your followers will be loyal only as long as they have to follow you out of fear or want to follow you out of greed. Machiavelli writes: “A prudent lord, therefore, cannot observe faith, nor should he . . . And if all men were good, this teaching would not be good, but because they are wicked and do not observe faith with you, you also do not have to observe it with them.”18

  We should view all this is in the context of sixteenth-century Italy, a time when war and betrayal were the norm. But when Machiavelli looks back at ancient Rome, he tells a story about two generals who led a different breed of followers. One, Valerius Corvinus, was kind and considerate. He treated his men, who like him were Roman citizens, as equals. The other, Manlius Torquatus, was harsh and a stickler for the rules, so much so that he had his son publicly beheaded for disobeying his orders. Who was more effective? Both were, says Machiavelli, because they were true to their natures, consistent, and virtuous, so the troops knew what to expect from them. The troops could trust them.19

  Notably, Machiavelli appears interested only in the effectiveness of the generals—their results. Their troops were willing to follow, in contrast to other generals whose troops deserted or rebelled. Did the troops want to follow these generals? Machiavelli doesn’t tell us. Maybe he assumes that the troops would naturally want to follow successful generals for the booty and glory they’d share. What he doesn’t consider is that these troops, especially those following Valerius Corvinus, might have projected strong father transferences on to these generals.

  Machiavelli concludes, “It does not matter much in what way a general behaves, provided his efficiency be so great that it flavors the way he behaves, whether it be this way or that.”20 Every personality has defects and dangers, he notes, but they can be corrected by outstanding virtue, at least enough to be an effective leader.

  However, personality does make a difference for Machiavelli in its fit with the challenges of the times. He writes in The Prince that when there is a great deal of turmoil and uncertainty, an impetuous person is more likely to succeed, while in times of relative peace, a cautious, patient person will have the advantage.21 Can’t people change their behavior to fit the moment? That would be the view of some modern proponents of situational management. Machiavelli doesn’t think so, because he observes that people can’t and don’t deviate from their natures. Of course, we can learn new techniques, but how we apply them is always flavored by our personality; and when it comes to the almost instinctual way we approach big decisions, our nature (personality) largely determines how we’ll act.

  Machiavelli’s observations illustrate the difference between situational management and contextual leadership as described in this book. Some management writers contend that personality doesn’t matter, that leaders can tailor style to fit any situation. Obviously, this is true to some degree. Almost all leaders can be commanding or consultative. Any leader can learn when to be close and when to increase distance from the troops. But as Heraclitus wrote twenty-five hundred years ago, character is man’s fate. There are limits to behavioral plasticity, and when a leader is stressed, personality prevails. A CEO put it neatly when I asked his view of situational leadership: “Most of my interactions are taking place in chaos. I can’t stop and think about what my style should be with different people. My style is my personality.” Given this, certain leadership personalities fit better in certain contexts.

  APPLYING MACHIAVELLI

  Leaders still look to Machiavelli for lessons on leadership, but they take away misleading advice, because they read Machiavelli in only one context, the chaotic state of wars and revolutions in sixteenth-century Italy.22 Regrettably, Machiavelli’s advice to the prince, to appear humane and compassionate while grabbing power through lies and betrayals, can still get results, especially when disorganized and frightened people want security and protection, even at the price of their liberty. There are all too many Machiavellian leaders in organizations, psychopaths able to charm their way into power.23

  But even more benign bosses provoke fear. When I give workshops on leadership to midlevel managers and executives from large companies and government agencies, sometimes I ask them to estimate how much fear of the boss exists in their organizations on a scale of 1 (little or no fear) to 4 (high level of fear). Generally, the mean estimate is 2.5–3.0. Then I ask what they think the level should be; the result is almost invariably about 2.0. What comes out in our discussions is that most managers don’t trust people to want to follow. They think that without some fear of the boss, the people in their organizations would not always follow. But beyond this, isn’t it inevitable that people will always feel some fear of a boss who evaluates them and has the power to reward, punish, and fire them? The only subordinate who feels no fear at all is one who doesn’t need the job.

  However, if we apply Machiavelli’s methodology of analyzing leadership effectiveness to our time, I don’t see that we’ve advanced very much from his thinking. Take the most popular business leadership book of recent years, Jim Collins’s Good to Great. Like Machiavelli, Collins describes the personality of effective business leaders and gives advice to modern-day commercial princes. Collins’s great leaders are described as “disciplined, rigorous, dogged, determined, diligent, precise, fastidious, systematic, methodical, workmanlike, demanding, consistent, focused, accountable, and responsible.”24 They are also described as “humble” and “self-effacing.”25

  To a large extent, these leaders are like Machiavelli’s cautious and patient type as contrasted to the impetuous risk takers. But unlike Machiavelli, Collins does not take the intellectual step of describing the context of his fi
ndings. Almost all of Collins’s CEOs run retail or commodity businesses, where they have succeeded in reviving a mature company by streamlining processes, cutting costs, and getting rid of people who don’t add value. None of these businesses have produced innovative products, unless you include marketing innovations like Gillette’s Mach 3 razor blades. Collins misses the point that Machiavelli astutely observed: in times of rapid change, as in our time, risk-taking and self-promoting rather than self-effacing CEOs—larger-than-life figures like Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin—are the ones who exploit new technologies and, with their products, change the way we work and live.

  Instead of seeing different personality types in context, as did Machiavelli, Collins’s hierarchy of leadership qualities expresses a bureaucratic mind-set that inhibits contextual thinking about leadership. At the bottom of his hierarchy is the capable employee, then comes the competent manager, then the charismatic but egoistic visionary, and at the top of the hierarchy, the self-effacing great executive who puts the good of the organization above his own needs. (There are no women in Good to Great because only male CEOs fit the researchers’ criteria of exceptional financial results.)

  The two types at the top of Collins’s hierarchy fit two personality types I’ve written about, the dogged obsessive and the charismatic productive narcissist.26 These two types provide a classic contrast that I’ve found pops up in many different cultural contexts. Narcissists like Napoleon and Hitler in politics, and Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller in business, boldly grab hold of power in tumultuous times but often overreach themselves, while the obsessives carefully build sustainable institutions in more stable times. Good to Great was published right when the narcissistically led dot-com bubble burst and grandiose CEOs like Jean-Marie Messier and Bernie Ebbers crashed. Naturally, the disciplined self-effacing obsessives, with their steady results, seemed not only safe but also appealing.