The Leaders We Need, And What Makes Us Follow

by Michael MacCoby

  In this book, we’ve met natural systems thinkers like Dave Levin of KIPP, Father William Wasson of NPH, and Dr. William Mayo of the Mayo Clinic. Each of these leaders designed social systems with a distinct purpose—the well-being of the people they served. Each of their organizations became collaborative cultures based on shared values and principles, with processes and measures that reinforced the purpose. Sure, they still needed some bureaucratic-type rules, but these were kept to a minimum. A role of leaders in the organizations they’ve built is to educate and persuade people to internalize the principles so the rules won’t be needed.

  As corporate executives try to transform bureaucracies, to twist silos into networks, they can learn from the Mayo Clinic that organizational culture can be more effective than formal rules in strengthening the role of network leaders. When patients arrive at Mayo, internists are assigned as the leaders of their treatment. In complex cases, these doctors bring together the specialists who decide on and integrate their treatment. They form an effective team not because the internist-leader has any power over them, but because they believe that working together is the best way to achieve the Mayo Clinic’s purpose, patient care.

  One way to learn systems thinking is to study business cases like the Mayo Clinic. At the high point of the industrial age, the Toyota system became the gold standard for car companies, the model most others tried to copy.23 Toyota is an exceptional example of an advanced industrial company that employs and teaches systems thinking. Recently, I visited a supplier to a number of automobile companies. I asked whether there was any difference in how Toyota related to them as compared to other car companies. There was. When the supplier had a quality problem, other customers just told the supplier to fix it. “Toyota,” the plant manager said, “is deeply involved. They won’t relent until they understand how the system is causing the problem. The other companies just want the problem to go away. We sometimes work around the problem and that adds cost. Toyota partners with us. Their system solutions improve quality and cut costs.”

  In the knowledge age, there is no best way to organize work. We saw in chapter 8 that knowledge organizations can learn from, but not copy, each other. However, to learn from the best cases of effective organizational systems, case writers at business schools should be systems thinkers who are sensitive to the interaction of roles, processes, competencies, operating principles, and values and be able to evaluate all these elements in terms of how well they work together to further the system’s purpose. Few of the business school cases I’ve seen, where I’ve worked within the company or government agency described, meet this test.

  Toyota tries to teach systems thinking to its suppliers in their kaizen workshops. The engineering manager of the supply company I visited said, “Getting people to learn systems thinking is hard. In the workshop, they may suddenly get it. But then they go back to their factory and try it out. Sometimes they can’t do it, or it doesn’t work right and the other managers discount it. You can’t develop and use it without top management support.”

  A way to develop systems thinking in a company is for top management to organize workshops in which teams made up of managers from different divisions apply systems thinking in creating a new offering or business. Together with Russ Ackoff, who begins the workshop by teaching principles of systems thinking, I’ve led workshops like these where we’ve also focused on the kinds of leadership capable of creating the collaboration needed to design and implement innovative visions.

  The most direct way to educate managers about social systems is to get them to take part in transforming their own organizations. I’ve facilitated this process in a few companies, including the MITRE Corporation, which does technical consulting and R&D for the military and Federal Aviation Administration. Faced with increased competition and complaints from MITRE’s clients, then-CEO Barry Horowitz recognized the need for change and asked me to help. In the past, MITRE had developed new technology and then sold it to its clients who sometimes had trouble using it. Now, clients wanted business solutions integrating the technology, and that called for better understanding and collaboration, both with clients and within MITRE. The essential story is that Horowitz and the MITRE vice presidents redesigned the organization to achieve the new purpose. This called for new client relationships, adapting organizational structure, evaluating MITRE professionals on marketing and managerial as well as technical skills, and instituting supportive training programs. MITRE had the advantage of a tradition of working with technical systems, so there was a relatively easy acceptance of the need to understand social systems. Furthermore, some MITRE executives—like Jack Fearnsides, who was trying to transform the air-traffic control system, and Lydia Thomas, who became president and CEO of the company’s Mitretek Systems spin-off—also learned to apply knowledge of personality and social character in placing managers and coaching them to collaborate.

  An essential quality for leaders in the knowledge age is the ability to keep learning, and specifically to keep developing and employing their Personality and Strategic Intelligence. Change—whether new technologies, competition, or political and environmental dangers—never ends, and new people constantly come on stage. The time is long past when executives could preside over a smooth-running stable bureaucracy, or national leaders could ignore the larger world. However, the good news is that there are many people with leadership qualities ready and willing to respond to the challenges of our time, to become the leaders we need. Those of us who study and teach leadership have the challenge of helping them to succeed.

  As much as they might want it, they won’t be helped by getting new techniques and lists of things to do. Some need help to change mind-sets formed in the bureaucratic-industrial era. Others, the technical professionals who chose careers in technology to escape the messy world of people, need help to move out of their comfort zones to connect with the human side.

  A final reminder to would-be organizational leaders: keep in mind that the people you need to help you succeed aren’t all just like you. Increasingly, they won’t follow the good parent model of leadership. To make them willing collaborators, especially the Interactives, first of all you’ll have to engage and convince them of the purpose of your work together. Then, by understanding them and fitting them into roles where they can demonstrate and develop their strengths, you’ll gain their respect, maybe even their trust. Only then will the people you lead become collaborators who help you succeed.

  APPENDIX

  Social Character and the Life Cycle

  FOR THOSE READERS SEEKING a more comprehensive understanding of the social character shift, I’ll zoom in on the differences between the bureaucratic and interactive social characters and how each develops through the life cycle.

  I’ve used Erik H. Erikson’s theory of personality formation through eight stages of life to contrast how the bureaucratic and interactive social characters are formed.1 Erikson, like Fromm, is among the rare breed of psychoanalysts who have tried to revise Freud’s theory of personality by factoring in cultural influences. Erikson based his stages on the idea that people had to respond to the challenges of both their maturing bodies and their culture’s expectations of them at different ages. How they met these challenges formed their competencies, values, emotional attitudes, and identity. Table A-1 illustrates positive life-cycle development of bureaucratic and interactive social characters, where those challenges are successfully met. Table A-2 lays out the negative implications of these life stages.

  But what Erikson first wrote in 1950 and revised in 1963 was in a context that has changed almost beyond recognition, a culture that formed the bureaucratic social character. If you were born in the 1970s or ’80s, it’s hard to imagine a culture where two-thirds of families were headed by a single wage earner, the father; where few women in this pre-pill era of The Feminine Mystique aspired to leadership roles in business and government, and most of those who did identified with their fathers.2 At that time, even the
most educated women were repeatedly told their role was to create the warm culture of the home, a haven from the rough and tumble of the corporate battlefield. That’s what Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic presidential candidate, advised the graduating class of Smith, the elite women’s college, in 1955. Of course, all that has changed. The twenty-first-century emphasis at Smith is strengthening the department of engineering so women can gain management jobs in technology companies.

  TABLE A-1

  Positive life-cycle development: Bureaucratic and interactive social characters

  Bureaucratic Interactive

  Basic trust Focused on parents Focused on parenting network

  Autonomy Self-directed conformity Negotiating with parents

  Initiative Knowing your place, learning the role Interpersonal competence, team- work

  Industry Passing the tests Learning to learn

  Identity Choosing a career and belief sys tem Seeking a vocation, finding a center

  Intimacy Mutual care and focus on male success Mutual development, building a network together, and focus on male and female success

  Generativity Parenting, protecting Coaching, facilitating

  Ego integrity Playing the bureaucratic role with dignity and effectiveness, resisting illegitimate commands and corrupting pressures, detachment Pragmatic development of ideals, living with contradictions and uncertainty without losing hope, staying engaged

  At the present time, when most couples are both in the workforce and there are as many families headed by single women as there are traditional families of the 1950s, it’s much harder to describe a typical experience for a child growing up. Clearly, these different types of families also differ in wealth and opportunities for children to succeed, and, as I’ll note, richer parents get involved early on in their children’s careers. Yet, with universal access to current events through TV, radio, movies, and the Internet, few children are unaware of what they have to do to succeed in a world of fierce competition and global business where capability for knowledge work is the key to success.

  TABLE A-2

  Typical developmental problems: Bureaucratic and interactive social characters

  Bureaucratic Interactive

  Basic trust versus basic mistrust Dependency on mother; hot- house environment Feeling abandoned; detachment

  Autonomy versus shame and doubt Obsessive conformity Lack of boundaries; impulsiveness

  Initiative versus guilt and anxiety Oedipal struggle and over- identification with parents Anxiety about group acceptance causing over- conformity

  Industry versus inferiority Loss of self-confidence—poor grades, performance Overestimation of self as defense against loss of self esteem

  Identity versus role confusion Compulsive conformity to parental role model or peer group Self-marketing and lack of a center

  Intimacy versus isolation Tribalistic relatedness Superficial coupling

  Generativity versus stagnation Becomes a narrow role Nothing to teach

  Ego integrity versus despair Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Illich—the lost self Burnout; anomie

  As we contrast the eight stages of life of bureaucratic and interactive social characters, what it takes to prosper in this new world will become clearer.

  Do national cultures make a difference? What I’ve concluded after interviewing managers in Europe and Asia is that while national differences exist, the common culture of global business is pulling the most educated young people toward a common interactive social character.

  Erikson’s stages were a speculative framework, and in building on it, I’ve made use of studies from developmental psychology and sociology that were made after Erikson’s time, combined with my own observations and those of colleagues.3

  The eight stages with approximate ages are:

  Trust versus mistrust: From birth to age 1

  Autonomy versus shame and doubt: From 1 to 3 years

  Initiative versus guilt: From 3 to 6 years

  Industry versus inferiority: From 6 to 12 years

  Identity versus role confusion: From 12 to 20 years

  Intimacy versus isolation: From 20 to 40 years

  Generativity versus stagnation: From 40 to 65 years

  Ego integrity versus despair: From 65 on

  These stages should not be thought of mechanically, as though we moved through life on a track, stopping at fixed stations to wrestle with psychosocial challenges. Although our success in mastering the challenge of each stage increases greatly the chances of our success at the next level, failure at a particular stage doesn’t mean we are forever blocked in developing ourselves. Despite early setbacks, some people, often with help, can recover and find their way back on the path.

  BASIC TRUST VERSUS MISTRUST

  We’re all born with a rudimentary sense of identity, me versus not-me, but up to two to three months of age, “me” includes mother. Then we begin to recognize ourselves in the mirror and even recognize other babies. In the bureaucratic family, the infant is focused almost exclusively on the mother. The attitude of basic trust and love of life grows from connection with a loving mother and expectation that she’ll satisfy basic needs. Ideally, the bond between mother and child includes a deep sense of knowing each other, sensing and responding to each other.

  The typical developmental problems at this stage have to do with overdependency—failure to break the umbilical cord—sometimes because a mother is so intensely attached to her children. Of course, problems with basic trust also stem from a cold, frightened, inadequate mother or a rejecting or ambivalent mother who resents the mothering role that keeps her trapped at home.

  In the interactive family, mother usually starts out as the main infant caretaker, continuing the physical symbiosis of childbearing. But early on, when she returns to her paid work, others share this role. (Over 60 percent of women with children under age six work outside the home.4) Increasingly, the father also participates in caring for the baby, and babies may also be put in day-care centers or in the care of hired nannies.

  On the positive side, as infants receive care from others, trust is expanded beyond the mother. On the negative side, children may lack the security of deep maternal attachment. Feeling insecure and abandoned, they become more distrustful, anxious, and self-protectively avoidant. Later in life, this makes it harder for them to develop intimate relationships and accept the deep feelings of need for others that they’ve repressed. 5 While the quality of day care also makes a difference for the infant’s trust and sense of well-being, studies show that “a mother’s sensitivity to her infant had a lot more to do with attachment security than whether or not an infant was in alternative care. Moreover, under some circumstances, high-quality day care appeared to counteract the negative effects of parenting.”6

  There is still debate about day care, and some conservatives blame absent and working parents and day care for belligerent and aggressive children, juvenile obesity, psychoactive drug use, and teenage sex, among other problems of the young in our time.7 However, the psychologist Diane F. Halpern, in her presidential address to the American Psychological Association in 2005 wrote that “there is an emerging consensus that effects are more likely to be negative when the work schedules of the caretaking parents (usually the mother) [are] erratic and unpredictable; the hours are long and she faces other significant stressors, such as poor health, poverty, and little control over work-related events. In other words, children, families, and work suffer when the parent has few sources of support and stress is high.”8 Professor Halpern believes that it’s time to end the “mommy wars” and “games of mother blame” and focus on basing policy on the best evidence of what benefits children and families.

  I fully agree.

  AUTONOMY VERSUS SHAME AND DOUBT

  About the age of two, children want to act on their own, and they show a rebelliousness to adult authority, the start to achieving a sense of autonomy. Kids want to do things for themselves, express themselves without losin
g loving support from parents. By this self-expression, children try to avoid the shame of being seen as babies who can’t control their bodily functions, dress themselves, or handle a fork and spoon. They want to be able to feel good about themselves. Parents should treat this rebelliousness by setting limits and giving reasons why.

  But not all parents respond this way. In the bureaucratic family, some parents impose overly strict demands, such as too-early toilet training. The danger is that the child will avoid humiliating shame by obsessive compliance, the uptight, superclean, and humorless anal character described by Freud. Alternatively, the child is plagued by doubt and needs constant reassurance that he or she is doing the right thing. But all shaming isn’t bad. Although extreme shaming of a child at this age can cause deep hurt and anger, which may be repressed, without some homeopathic shaming, children don’t learn to conform to social expectations and are vulnerable to more serious humiliations later in life.

  The child in the interactive family may have to deal with various parenting figures, less consistency, and less certainty. Sensing their parents’ insecurity about standards and their guilt about not being around when needed, two-year-old children begin to negotiate with parents for more freedom, playthings, or a later bedtime.