EVERYONE A LEADER
A Guide to Leading High-Performance
Organizations for Engineers and Scientists
David Colcleugh
658.4'092
C2013-905004-3
Contents
List of Figures
Preface
Acknowledgments
PART ONE: The Meaning of Leading and Leadership
1. Leading: The Catalyst for Change
Influencing People: The Process
Change: The Work of Leaders
Making Change: Getting Results
Values: The Foundation for Positive Change
2. Developmental Leadership
Learning Frameworks
The Nature of Leadership Activity
Developmental Leadership Activity
The Best Leaders Are Competent Leaders
PART TWO: Preparing Yourself to Lead
3. Role Model Leading and Leadership
The Developmental Learning Process
Role Model Leader Designation
Leadership Competency Model
4. Thinking Effectively
Thinking Effectively Model
5. Skills Capability
Functional Expertise
Harmonious Relationships
11. Viability
Creating a Harmonious Relationship with Customers
Organizing Around Value-Add Processes
Developing an Effective Change Process
12. Vitality
Creating Harmony among Employees
Working Effectively in Teams
Developing a High-Performance Culture
13. Virtue
Creating a Harmonious Relationship with Society
Treating People Fairly
Making Decisions to Do the Right Thing
Epilogue
Index
Figures
Preface
What will employers expect of me? Most young people ask themselves that
question as they contemplate a career in engineering or the sciences. It makes
little difference whether they are considering a career in for-profit business or
not-for-profit. I know that many years ago, when I was starting out as an
engineer, this question was on my mind.
Early in my career, I was certain that my employer expected me to contribute
on the basis of my technical capabilities. I was a research engineer completely
dedicated to improving manufacturing processes. I suppose I was like many
other engineers who want order and structure and logic in their lives and who
dedicate themselves to the practical sciences. I had little interest in
collaboration in those early days. Of course, I knew that working together was
important, but I was sure that success was largely going to be a function of my
engineering and technical skills.
My journey from engineer to leader-engineer began about five years into my
career when a certain supervising senior engineer influenced me to understand
that the business side of engineering was important and that I needed to become
an integral part of that business. He also helped me realize that I could leverage
my contributions and skills by working with and influencing others. Several
years after that, as a reasonably successful technical manager, I experienced
another moment of understanding. A group of us concluded and eventually
proved to ourselves and others that leadership was the key to a successful
company. This long journey from engineer to engineer-leader to leader-engineer
has convinced me that I can add to the understanding of what employers truly
expect of us as engineers and scientists.
It is an important question because graduating engineers or scientists are
confident that their education will open up a lifetime of challenging and
rewarding work. They also know that how well they succeed will depend
greatly on how well they, as practising engineers, meet the needs of their
employers. And to a large extent, it will also depend on their ability to satisfy
societys needs more generally.
Many graduating engineers believe that they will satisfy their employers
needs, and societys, by applying the skills they learned in college or university.
They believe that their engineering training is what the employer wants. When
these people ask me to verify as much, I reply in a way they do not expect.
What I tell them is that the vast majority of employers expect the technology
graduate to have four distinct traits (see below) in addition to engineering skills.
Indeed, society as a whole expects them to have and use those traits. I urge them
to consider all four very carefully as they enter the workplace, for I believe this
will help them set and achieve their career goals. I also believe that they will
benefit from learning at an early career stage what they will need to offer in
order to meet the needs of employers, business organizations, and society as a
whole. Our technologically rich world is the ultimate beneficiary of engineering
and scientific competence.
Those four traits are as follows: It will help you succeed if, first, you bring
to your career a determination to continuously expand and upgrade your
engineering / science skills. Most people would agree with that, but,
unfortunately, some people stop there. The most successful engineers have
recognized that there are other requirements they must satisfy. So the second
trait leading to a successful engineering career is a willingness to develop
yourself emotionally, socially, and physically. Competence in what are often
referred to as the soft skills is extremely important to employers, for it is
those skills that enable all of the organizations people to work together
effectively and with high levels of energy, which points to the third trait selfmotivation, or will. That is, you need to be strongly motivated to contribute well
beyond your job description and to seek ways to contribute beyond the current
or daily problems presented to you for solutions.
In this book I will be discussing those three traits in terms of the preparation
required to lead. As I will show, strong leaders display a competence that
extends beyond engineering skills. They are self-starters who seek challenges
beyond the current ones. They look for ways to benefit the employer into the
future. They are the ones who raise their hand at meetings and ask the best
questions, such as Have we thought about trying this? Would doing it this way
make our company stronger? When you are a strong leader, others notice it.
All of this leads me to the fourth trait of successful engineers, which is the
ability to build on the first three so as to develop competence in leading others
that is, in influencing people, teams, groups, and the entire organization to make
changes that will generate higher performance. Employers may not articulate
their needs in terms of leadership, be it of self or others indeed, most do not
but all of them notice potential leaders when they encounter them, including
among recent engineering graduates. Deliberately or not, employers look for
highly trained people who are willing to grow their capabilities, both as
engineers and as leaders.
This book presents a pathway for developing the ability to lead oneself and
others. The aspiration presented here is simply this: Everyone a Leader. This
book will help prepare you to create and lead a high-performance organization,
which is defined here as one in which all the people are motivated to achieve
ongoing positive change and to get results that satisfy the needs of all
stakeholders owners, employees, customers, and society.
The key to achieving that goal efficiently and effectively is for everyone in
the organization from the executive suite to the sales office to the plant floor
to actively learn to become a role model leader: that is, for everyone in the
organization to be constantly engaged in learning to achieve higher levels of
leadership competence, and, importantly, for them to learn to think completely
and in an orderly way about all things that are important to achieving goals and
getting high-performance results.
And at the same time that the organizations people are developing
themselves individually as exemplary leaders, all of them are working together
to develop a high-performance business organization. The route to achieving
that future state entails establishing high-performance work systems dedicated to
sustaining, growing, and serving all stakeholders.
The developmental leadership framework for an organization is best
understood by comparing it with the conventional leadership framework. The
leaders in a conventional organization are at the top of a positional hierarchy;
from there, they direct the work of the managers, who in turn direct those whom
they are managing, and so on. In the developmental leadership model, by
contrast, everyone is learning to be a competent agent of change. Leading in a
developmental organization is not a position it is a process followed by all the
people in the organization.
The work done in a conventional organization is most often carried out in a
tightly controlled manner. In this sort of organization, change is incremental and
transactional and is planned based on past experience. In contrast, a
developmental organization emphasizes ongoing positive, transformational
change dedicated to achieving aspirational goals and results. To accomplish
this, the organization emphasizes that everyone is learning to be a leader; it also
establishes flexible and robust processes for everyone to continuously improve.
Working developmentally that is, by process is in contrast to working by
structure, which is the approach taken by conventional organizations.
Every individual in a developmental organization will be leading in some
particular circumstances and following in others, depending on the work at
hand. But even when an individual is in follower mode, the individuals
competence as a leader will continue to enhance the organizations
effectiveness. Transformational change can result from this.
The Design of the Book
Part One: The Meaning of Leading and Leadership
This section defines leading and leadership in terms of influence, positive
change, and values. This is followed by an introduction and discussion of the
developmental leadership model and its defining elements.
The model presented in this book was developed and implemented in a science
company by engineers, scientists, and other practitioners of technology. It was
developed for the purpose of creating a more effective and growthful
organization. It was not developed by academics, consultants, psychologists, or
others for the purpose of better understanding the behaviour or characteristics of
leaders. Instead, it was developed by people doing work in a real organization
for the purpose of improving the performance of their organization as measured
by the most demanding of audiences: customers, owners, other employees, and
society at large.
Many of the examples and stories in this book relate to DuPont Canada1
because that is where I worked for decades, starting as a research engineer and
eventually becoming CEO. At DuPont Canada we set out deliberately to
improve our organizations performance. We were already well aware of and
practising the principles of democratic leadership. But we needed more: we
needed something that would truly transform our company. So we began to
develop a new model of leadership one that, while rooted in previous
leadership approaches, would enhance them significantly.
Very early in our development of this model, we achieved results that
convinced us we were taking the best possible approach. On the way to turning
ourselves into a learning organization, we improved productivity, achieved
better quality, and strengthened our relationships with customers, employees,
and society. We became a high-performance organization as measured in terms
of service to stakeholders.
A second test of this books developmental leadership framework happened
in classrooms at the University of Toronto, in the Faculty of Applied Science
and Engineering, where for six years the leadership model presented here has
been taught to undergraduate and graduate students through a course titled
Leading and Leadership in Groups and Organizations. That experiment has
succeeded: these aspiring leaders have embraced what that course has taught
them and have benefited from it in their own measured opinion.
This is noteworthy for a number of reasons. First, it signifies that material
developed in an industrial environment has transposed well into an academic
one. This is the reverse of what typically happens when intellectual material is
presented. Second, if this books premise is correct that is, if all engineers,
scientists, and technologists working in organizations around the world would
benefit from acquiring leadership competence then surely they should start
doing so while they are still in school.
Acknowledgments
I humbly acknowledge the following people who are the reason this book could
be written:
First and foremost, I thank the people at DuPont Canada, whom it was my
privilege to work beside for many decades. In the mid-1980s, we began
working to transform the company. During those years, many people too many
to mention dedicated themselves to creating a new way to operate a complex
business organization. All of those people were driven to become better, more
competent individual leaders and organizational leaders as the means to grow
the enterprise. The direct result of their commitment to excellence has been a
strong and loyal and vital culture.
Next, I thank Charles Krone, who worked with many of us from the beginning
of our leadership project and who became a friend of the company, not just a
consultant. Charles developed with us many critical thinking concepts, including
Levels of Thought and Function / Being / Will ( Charles Krone Associates,
with permission), and worked alongside us providing inspiration as well as
opportunities for us to develop our learning capacity. His influence is evident
throughout the book in the various frameworks and models I will be presenting.
Without his influence we would not have been as successful as we were.
Third, I must point out that this book has grown out of, and supports the
program of, the Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering (ILead) at the
University of Toronto. Professor Doug Reeve is the Director of the Institute,
which evolved from the Leaders of Tomorrow (LOT) initiative in the
Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry at the University of
Toronto. I am proud to say that I am an alumnus of the university. The visionary
leader, Professor Reeve, and his essential partner in the work, Professor Greg
Evans, asked me to prepare a course based on my DuPont experience, to deliver
it to their students, and finally to write the book.
EVERYONE A LEADER
A Guide to Leading High-Performance Organizations
for Engineers and Scientists
PART ONE
Let me start by asking you to think about a significant event in your life that
inspired you so that you said to yourself or to others, That changes everything!
Why hadnt I thought about that?
All of us have experienced important changes in our worlds. You have
almost certainly linked each of those changes to particular individuals. We seem
to find it natural to identify important changes, positive or negative, with agents
of those changes. Even when many people contributed, we seem to want to link
those changes to individuals.
Often in our memories, the change agents who have inspired us are great men
and women, many of them engineers or scientists, such as Henry Ford, who
revolutionized mass production, and Albert Einstein, who reinvented Newtonian
physics. Then, at the personal level, there are people that we actually know who
inspired us to change our lives. Perhaps it was a mechanical engineer on your
project team who pointed you towards a design change that eliminated a major
bottleneck; perhaps it was a civil engineer you know who started a small but
thriving construction company; perhaps it was a high school physics teacher
who inspired you to pursue a career in engineering.
Let me tell you a story about continuous, difficult, inspiring change that has
had an impact on me. The story, which is ongoing, summarizes a long and
complicated series of events, all of them related to extraordinary engineering
creativity and difficult decision making over a long period of continuous
change.1
The story revolves around a discrete business unit (Package BU) in the
polymer materials marketplace. It was one of a number of discrete business
units within a large, consolidated technology company (Materials Co.), whose
purpose was to create solutions for customers.
Carol had been a research engineer in Materials Co. for many years. She
worked largely on other peoples ideas, moving those ideas forward by making
small but important changes that generated successes. But that would change as
she developed from a technical person with a great deal of drive into a person
determined to be an agent or catalyst for change.
Carol had an idea that became a passion that she believed could have a
strong, positive impact on Materials Co. The concept involved a radically
different packaging system for foods one that would have little environmental
impact and low cost. She recruited others in the company to the idea and started
a project, and after a long and sometimes frustrating period of experimentation
involving many people, she was able to start Package BU. My experience has
been that most successful business developments require enormous time, effort,
and energy, and that was definitely the case here.
Even after the business was launched, there were a series of major issues to
be addressed relating to less than robust technology and to a marketplace that
had become disenchanted with the product. All of these seemingly
insurmountable issues were dealt with by Carol and a host of others associated
with Package BU. By then, the team she had formed was legendary within the
company. They were always setting goals and achieving them. They had
embraced a mantra that worked: listen to the customer, reduce costs, boost
productivity, and take responsibility for making things better.
Each challenge the Package BU team faced led to innovations, and each
innovation allowed the small unit to grow. That growth was slow at first, but
within a few years the unit was of considerable size, though still relatively
small within its parent company. All the while, however, Carol and her team
had to contend with a series of senior managers at Materials Co. who kept
pointedly asking her and her team, Why should we continue to support Package
BU when it is so small and so different from the rest of our business?
These strategic concerns within the company were a distraction, but Carol
often reminded her team, We need to listen and find answers to their questions
and persuade them to understand us these executives are our customers, too.
And they did find those answers, and they continued to get the support of these
senior managers, albeit reluctant support.
This challenge became almost a daily one, or so it seemed for Carol and her
team and their supporters within the company. Throughout this phase of the
story, Carol served as an inspirational role model: she urged her team to move
forward and meet their goals, while at the same time communicating and
interpreting their work to the company strategists who were constantly asking
probing questions about how her Package BU fit into Materials Co.
Eventually, the conflict reached a turning point, with Carol on one side and
the companys senior managers on the other, both equally determined. Materials
Co.s senior managers decided that their strategists were correct, that Package
BU was not a good fit, and that Carol should stop spending time and resources
on growing the business. Carol and her team went to work, delivering the same
message again and again: unless it kept growing, Package BU would die. But
they could not change the minds of the senior executives this time, and the cash
outputs of Package BU were soon being diverted to support the companys core
businesses.
Finally, the decision was made to shut down or sell Package BU. It was too
small and too different, and it was generating too little profit to survive within
Materials Co. Carol and her team were depressed. I remember discussing this
turn of events with her. Though deeply disappointed, she was adamant that her
team would persist and change the minds of the companys senior managers.
I remember asking her whether this might not be the time to give in, to
disband the team and go back to solving other peoples problems and
developing solutions that, so it seemed, mattered more to the company. I
remember her saying that her role was to see the strength in both perspectives
and to use that to find even better reasons to grow Package BU as a unit of
Materials Co.
Very soon after this, one of her team members had an idea and convinced
Carol and the team members of its validity. As a group, they asked for a meeting
with the companys senior leaders. The idea they had was simple: if Package
BU was too small to fit comfortably in the larger company, then transform it into
a much larger BU, and do it rapidly by acquiring a company in a related
technology and marketplace. As a result of this reconcile, Package BU would
become a better fit within Materials Co. in terms of size and market, and, in fact,
transform Materials Co.2
After much discussion, the senior leaders told Carols team, Prove your
concept to us and we will consider. So Carol and her team, after engaging in
more discussion, experimentation, and persuasion, set out to find candidates for
acquisition.
This is an ongoing story, and it isnt clear yet whether the story will be one
of success. The outcome of all the work, all the discussion, all the engineering
and scientific advances, and all the emotional ups and downs is not the actual
point here. Rather, the message is that the events described here were all
catalysed by a person who demonstrated leadership capability. Carol influenced
many people throughout the company to move beyond the status quo. She
inspired her team to reach for a better future; she was tenacious in her pursuit of
that future; and she incorporated the best ideas of others while moving her unit
towards the future she wanted it to achieve. Finally, Carols work improved the
lives of many people: the employees of Package BU, whom she motivated so
well; the environment, which benefited from the products her unit produced; and
the customers, who benefited from the innovative products the unit produced. As
an aside, an acquisition was made and the story of this business unit moved to a
different phase of continuous change.
I believe we were put on this earth to improve the lives of others. Few people
would dispute that; most would agree. Most of us focus our actions to
accomplish that goal on those who are closest to us: family, friends, our
community, people who share our values, and so on.
How are we doing?
Many people have succeeded at improving the lives of others there are too
many to ever list, and all of us have our lists. But if we step back and add it all
up, we cannot be satisfied with the results. I am certain that it is possible for all
of us to do more than we have done. There is too much suffering, too much
conflict, and too much waste of potential around the world for us to be satisfied.
Most people would agree that at the forefront of the work to improve the
lives of others, and to improve the world for the better, are those who are
functionally competent in science, technology, and engineering. Rapid advances
in the various sciences and technologies and in their implementation (by
engineers) are many and well known. To fill this books pages with examples
would be superfluous.
There have been many advances, many disappointments, and many mistakes
in the development of science and various technologies as well as in their
implementation. But most of us would agree that overall, science and its
outgrowths have made our lives better.
How are we to strengthen this progress fuelled by science, technology, and
engineering? How are we as engineers to make our work even more productive,
even higher in quality, and even more attuned to peoples needs? What actions
can we take to improve peoples lives even more than we already have?
I suggest that we require a catalyst to answer these questions and to achieve
the goals that are inherent in them. A catalyst like Carol.
Speaking as a chemical engineer, I can assure you that catalysts are
wonderful things. A catalyst is a material that has a strong, positive effect on the
rate of a chemical reaction and on the amount of energy required to complete
that reaction. Yet it is not consumed or destroyed by the chemical reaction it is
supporting it remains to do it all again. In my mind, the leader of an
organization is a sort of catalyst a person who guides the organization
passionately towards positive change, doing it effectively, learning from that
experience, and doing it again and again better each time. This is what Carol
and her organization did.
Although a catalyst is not consumed in a reaction, it may be poisoned or
deactivated in some way, or perhaps coated in waste products. Unfortunately,
the same can happen to aspiring leaders who have not prepared themselves:
who either have not learned to be leaders or believe they were born leaders. I
contend in this book that only those who learn to be leaders will succeed in
changing things for the better by influencing the people who follow them.
Leadership competence is not born in any of us; we all need to develop it.
To extend the analogy, a catalyst must be designed carefully for the task it is
meant to accomplish. This cannot be done casually. A catalyst, if designed
carelessly, can just as easily take the chemical reaction in a bad direction so that
the desired outcome isnt achieved. So a catalyst that is, a leader must learn
to become competent in the leadership tasks at hand in order to succeed in the
incredibly difficult work of changing the world for the better.
More questions flow rapidly from all this: What is leadership? How do we
define it? Why is it important? The academic and practitioner communities have
been debating those questions for many years. Everyone is convinced we need
way that engineering, accounting, and selling are the activities engaged in by
engineers, accountants, and salespeople, respectively. All of these people are
functionally competent to do specific work.
A functionally competent engineer can learn to be a leader. That does not
mean this person stops being a value-add engineer. Depending on that persons
role in the organization, the leader-engineer will spend more or less time as an
engineer, or alternatively, more or less time as a leader. An engineering
department head in a large, multifunctional company will by the nature of the
activity be spending almost all his time in leadership activities. But he will do
that job better if he is and remains a competent engineer. It is my philosophy,
described in this book, that all people can learn to lead and that all who do so
will benefit both themselves and everyone else in the organization and in
society. It is not a premise of this book that those who learn to lead lose their
other functional competencies or that those competencies should be allowed to
deteriorate. The premise is quite the contrary the competent leader-engineer
will add value to the company and to society by growing all the functional
capabilities in his or her possession.
Competent leader-engineers, whether their role is largely leadership
activities or largely functional engineering activities, are engaged in problem
solving and changing things for the better. Having both functional capabilities is
advantageous for all concerned.
As I noted earlier, a catalyst is a material that can increase the rate at which
a chemical reaction occurs. In terms of leading and leadership, this chemical
reaction is, quite simply, change. In the world of science, technology, and
engineering, advances are made by solving problems and making things and
situations better.
The work of leading is making positive change, and the primary process
for accomplishing that is influencing people. In this book I will be using the
following two definitions:
Leading is influencing people to make positive change.
Leaders are people who influence others to make positive change.
is, influencing others has many value-add steps, as well as systems and
subsystems. In this book you will encounter extensive discussions about this.
Leading by process is very different from leading from a position in a
hierarchy. At DuPont Canada and at many other companies in the 1980s, the
focus was on hierarchical leadership. As part of the evolution towards
Everyone a Leader, we shifted our focus from positional leadership to a more
developmental, process-oriented form. This process-oriented way of leading is
the essence of the message you will read about in this book. Carol, in our
opening story, was a catalytic, process-oriented leader in a company that up to
that point had emphasized positional, hierarchical leadership.
Many, many people are tied to the notion that a leader is, quite simply, a
position in a hierarchy. In many, perhaps in most groups and organizations, be
they profit-oriented or not-for-profit, people progress up a variety of
hierarchical ladders. Consider the progression from junior engineer, to senior
engineer, to supervisor of a small group of engineers, to manager of a larger
group, and then to the much-desired leader designation. This progress, which
is measured in terms of pay and relative authority, reflects the positional
definition of leadership.
By contrast, the premise of this book is that, in fact, a leader is someone who
engages in leading who does leading by engaging in leadership activities in
a disciplined and systematic manner. Furthermore, those leadership activities
can take place anywhere in an organization, at any level of its hierarchy.
Leading is as likely to occur, and leadership is as likely to be encountered on a
shop floor as in the executive suite. This process definition of leading and
leadership will be thoroughly investigated and advocated in this book.
What, then, is successful influencing? What causes people to agree to make
positive change in their organization and, by inference, in themselves?
There are three main points to bear in mind regarding how leaders can
influence or catalyse people to accept a new direction.
Admired Leaders
The link between admiration and influence can be strong. People admire others
for many reasons physical, social, emotional, and mental intelligences are
involved in varying degrees. People are more easily influenced by those they
admire.
Much depends, quite simply, on the leaders competence. This verges on a
tautology: if you as a potential follower recognize a person as a leader that is,
if you admire that persons leadership competence you will allow yourself to
be led by that person.
I learned about this very early in my career. After a few years in DuPont
Canada, I was given a first-level managerial role. That was an exciting time for
me. I had been assigned a group of people as well as specific objectives, and
now I had to achieve results through the efforts of these people whom I barely
knew. So to start with, using my authority as a manager as an aspiring leader
I ordered them to do certain things. Most of the people said Yes! Some said
nothing. The work was completed over a few months, but the project was a
failure.
I had just learned a valuable lesson about leadership: If you want people to
accomplish extraordinary things, you have to earn admiration for your
leadership.
Ordering people to do things is easy; influencing them is hard. But
influencing them always generates more successful outcomes. Often, when
people are ordered to do things, they say yes but then go into a mode of
behaviour that is really no sir or on my terms, sir. This is closet
rejection. When a less competent leader discovers less than satisfactory
results, only then does he reap the consequences of poor leading. And often the
less competent leader will blame his own failure on the incompetence of his
followers. If only the people were better, he tells himself, then the results
would have been better. And he responds by ordering them to do it again, and
the project fails again, and so on.
All of which generates this question: Can a person learn to be an admired
leader, a competent leader, a role model leader? The answer is yes, and part
two of this book will describe in detail how role model leadership can be
learned.
Reciprocal Maintenance
We next consider the phenomenon of reciprocal maintenance. What this
means, quite simply, is that people feel obligated to do things for those who
have done things for them. You are influenced to give something to someone
who shows a willingness to give something first to you. The very best technical
salespeople know this. I know agricultural chemicals technical salespeople who
have made it their practice to send detailed weather forecasts to farmers on a
regular basis, along with all kinds of similar useful items that reflect the values
and needs of their customers. These are often small, proactive service gifts that
help farmers do their work. This effort bears fruit many times over in the form
of increased sales. It is the same for aspiring leaders if you want to influence
people, start by giving them something they value highly.
The first thing that may come to mind when I say give something to
someone is a tangible material reward, such as bonus pay or some other
monetary reward. Those sorts of things can be well intended indeed, they can
be valuable but they are unlikely to have a lasting impact. So offer those things
for the right reasons, while also recognizing their downsides: they have at best a
for the factorys future or its role, mandate, or profitability. We can measure the
changes in the widget business, but this will have little impact on the businesss
long-term future. We have made an incremental change one that is significant
enough to be measured, but incremental nonetheless. The distinction here is
between transactional and transformational change. Transactional here refers
to asking others to take small, easily understood actions. Transformational
refers to asking others to see the benefit of major, not so easily understood
directions.
Many profit-oriented organizations are content to make incremental changes
because their culture sets a high value on stability, control, and regulation. This
is often a characteristic of governments as well, and of other organizations that
favour transactional over transformational change. It is also common among
organizations run by people who are more comfortable managing than leading.
Managing is more about controlling present boundaries than seeking new ones.
Managers are more likely to launch incremental changes in their role of
controlling and improving a current state.
This is not to suggest that incremental change doesnt involve leadership.
Indeed, incremental change may require leadership when the task at hand is the
first step towards more aggressive, future-oriented change. That is, leaders may
experiment with incremental changes as a way to prepare the ground for more
dramatic changes. This can help minimize risk when failure in the early changes
could have disastrous effects on the organization and its people and other
stakeholders. For example, when considering changes in a bridge design, if
dangerous stresses cannot be completely ruled out, it may be prudent to focus on
incremental change. It may even be prudent to bring about more dramatic change
through a series of incremental steps, measuring and evaluating changes in the
design in an orderly manner along the way to an improved future state.
All incremental changes of this type involve leadership, for they entail
managing transactionally with the long-term goal of leading
transformationally. Perhaps this is a play on words, but it helps us understand
that incremental change can be useful as an interdependent idea when combined
with continuous improvement change or transformational change. It also
illustrates that organizing effectively requires leading and managing processes,
often by the same person.
Continuous improvement goes beyond incremental change. It is change that
leads towards a new direction for the organization. It is a systematic and
disciplined approach, and it reflects a commitment by leaders and the
organization to make things better.
As noted, incremental change entails small but measurable steps that may
have little impact on the organizations future performance or aspirations.
Continuous improvement, by contrast, is large, measurable, and planned. It also
has ongoing effects on the organizations future performance as measured by a
One final point: The strongest leaders are highly motivated to make major
transformational changes. But they achieve those changes through a series of
continuous improvement projects, which in turn are composed of many and
varied incremental change steps. All of these efforts are focused on the
transformational goal and implemented through a disciplined, systematic, and
highly integrated set of work processes.
Making Change: Getting Results
Leaders are accountable for the direction of the company, business unit, or
project, and they must be committed to implementing that direction. A leader
will do a great deal of thinking, researching, consulting, collaborating, and
seeking of shared purpose in many different ways before crafting that direction.
But after all that after that direction has been crafted and then presented to the
organizations followers and stakeholders the direction amounts to a decision
to go forward, and the leader is dedicated to making the change and getting
results.
The very best leaders are passionate about making meaningful change and
getting measurable results. Getting those results is not the last thing the very best
leaders think about and do. The best leaders think about getting positive results
all the time.
There is a fallacy in the minds of some tragically so in the minds of some
aspiring leaders that role model leaders sit in a corner office thinking about
visions of a future, take those visions to the organizations people, say go do
it, and then walk away. The false idea here is that leaders set the direction for
others to then implement. In other words, leaders only watch change happen.
That is at best an exaggeration, and most people know it. The reality is that the
very best leaders are engaged in the entire process of change. They are driven
by the value they place on meaningful change and by their overwhelming desire
to get results. But they also hold it to be true that the very best way to change
things for the better is to influence people to follow their direction in the most
effective manner possible.
The very best leaders believe indeed, they know they must work in
unique and different ways than those whose primary roles are managing and
following. Furthermore, they must do so at the action and results stages of the
change process. Leaders often participate in projects by adding their functional
skills to those of the team. Even so, their most important task getting results
is accomplished not by contributing to the functional work but by leading.
The organization needs to sense the leaders role in taking action and getting
results. That leader needs to be seen, heard, and felt when change is being
implemented. Sometimes this means that the architect of the change effort must
be seen as working with the team hands on. Sometimes the leaders, having
designed and set the direction, can make their ongoing impact felt by asking
appropriate questions and by personally coaching the people on the
implementation team. There are many ways that leaders can make their impact
felt, depending on their unique capabilities. What is most important is that they
be passionate about the action and results stages of the change process, not
merely interested. This point is discussed at more length later in the book.
The very best leaders know and are motivated or driven by the complete
process of leading: by thinking, directing, influencing, doing, and getting results.
None of these elements of the leading process is more important than the other.
All of these elements are about changing things about getting results that
improve peoples lives.
I have said that leaders are passionate about meaningful change and getting
results. An equally good word for that is ambition: role model leaders and
aspiring leaders are extremely ambitious.
In most of the lecture series that I give students on leading and leadership, I
ask them, All those who want to change the world for the better, raise your
hand. Of course, they all do. They are all aspiring leaders. But they do not yet
know how to lead or what to do. They may not understand what Im really
asking, but they place great value on the idea of service to people. They are
ambitious! And that is what young aspiring leaders need to be, but that is just the
start.
Big results require big ambitions.
Michael Hammer and James Champy7
As aspiring leaders, these students are motivated and ambitious but not yet fully
competent. They cannot yet answer the how and what questions of leadership.
The aspiring leaders ambition and competence are important interdependent
concepts when a company is seeking to get great results from leadership
activities. One learning framework that can help with that understanding is a
simple 2x2 matrix, reflecting the high and low scales of competence and
ambition.
When I first became a supervisor in a technical organization many years ago,
I had a conversation with a capable engineering technician one of the people
in the group I was managing. We were talking about career aspirations. He told
me that his ambition was to be the technical manager of the R&D organization.
This surprised me this man was good but not excellent at his job. He was
certainly experienced, but he was aspiring to a role that was many, many
competency levels above his current level. We explored together the questions
Why? How? and What? relative to this idea, this ambition he had to get the
result he wanted, which was to get a promotion to this distant hierarchical level.
We agreed it was a superordinate target, but he insisted it was doable. He was
Emerson elegantly makes another point: the very best role model leaders have
noble ambition and work very hard to get the best possible results from the
direction they have given others. While implementing the direction, they do
different work than those managing and those following; but they work as hard
and in some cases harder than others.
A certain manufacturing manager, a good engineer and my colleague for many
years, is the best example of noble ambition in my experience. He was
determined to serve others and teach them the developmental way to create
sustainable, positive results. He made himself available to share his competence
as a leader and an engineer. He designed learning frameworks as his instrument
of choice when working with people who, like him, were ambitious to get
superior results. He was an authentic person whose quiet confidence,
competence, and ambition inspired people to do more.
Noble ambition is a determination to learn to be a high-performance leader
or to go beyond and to have a work ethic that says to those following, I want
you to follow my direction and I will work hard to influence you to follow, and
I believe so strongly in you and in the direction that I will work very hard with
you to accomplish it.
There is an important reality about the interaction of leaders and followers
when change is being implemented: it is never a linear process. It is not step by
step, as in, The leader has an idea The leader influences people to accept
the idea The leader and followers do the hard work The change happens
Gradually, however, the leader begins to gain the trust and credibility
required to persuade people that the transformation is necessary and that it will
make for a better future. The resistance yields to getting it to understanding
why that transformation is important for the organization and its people, who
begin to better and truly understand the benefits that change will bring as a result
of their participation.
The length of time it takes to move from resistance to getting it is a direct
function of the leaders skills, character attributes, and behaviours, which
together define the competence of a leader.
Simple logic and experience has revealed to me the catalytic effect of
Everyone a Leader. In a given group, if there are many among the followers
who have developed their own competence as leaders, the time and energy
required to move from point 4 to point 5 in the figure will be markedly less.
Values: The Foundation for Positive Change
If we are to understand the word positive as a descriptor for the change that
leaders work to achieve, then we need to understand values. Here, values
refer to those things that are valuable or positive for people. A new car is
valuable because it is worth something in terms of cash, but it is also valuable
in terms of personal beliefs that is why so many people nowadays are opting
for an electric car or a hybrid, or why they are moving into an inner city where
they can travel by public transit.
Leaders are dedicated to creating positive change indeed, they are defined
by that effort and the outcome of their efforts is improvement in the lives of
people. People is arguably the most important word in the definition of
leadership that I am using. By that word, I am referring mainly to those within
the organization who are following at any point in time; but here are other
important stakeholders in the leadership equation. For example, individual
customers often participate in the creation of positive change, typically by
encouraging companies to change their product specifications. These customers
then evaluate whether the changes meet their specific needs for value-add. What
Ive just noted about customers can also be said of society as a whole.
So, leadership has an impact on people within the organization, on
customers, and on society as a whole, and each of these in a given situation will
have different needs and priorities. Generally speaking, customers need their
business to be strengthened by the changes the supplier organizations leader is
making; society needs the well-being of its various communities to be enhanced
by the change. At the same time, those in the organization who are following
need to be inspired, or at a minimum see benefit for themselves in the change.
When poor leaders do harm, it is usually because they are focused on serving
themselves or a handful of stakeholders. Examples are legion. This is not the
definition of positive change, nor does it reflect developmental leadership.
A leaders values are, at root, personal ones. That is, the changes a leader
works towards making are motivated by personal values. To be effective,
leaders must be guided not by egocentric or reactive personal needs but by
needs that are purposeful that is, by needs that have a purpose beyond selfservice and that involve service to others.
In the case of the leader-engineer, or leader-scientist, this is especially
important. It is equally important for leader-artists, leader-teachers, leaderpoliticians, and so on; but engineers and scientists, being the stewards of the
worlds engineering and scientific technologies, need to be especially conscious
of their power to do the right things. And doing the right things means serving
peoples needs and improving their lives.
2 Developmental Leadership
value to the business even while we were reaching for it. It was something we
worked on in groups and that the CEO, the plant manager, and the research
director all worked on with us. The zero injuries mandate was viewed as an
actualization of the companys core value: Do no harm to oneself or others.
Everyone I spoke to on those first few days was very clear: we would work
as individuals to achieve the target of zero injuries. Doing so would be part of
our functional work (in my case, engineering research), and part of our business
work (in my case, creating a new class of polyethylene products that would add
value in the company). In this way, the goal of zero injuries was bound together
with the engineering work and the business work I was engaged in with others.
It had been drilled into us that our work would be less than acceptable if any of
us were injured while we accomplished it. In the simplest of terms, if I was
injured, the work would suffer. This was not a threat, not an order. It made
sense even in these early days.
Throughout my thirty-nine-year career, the intensity of the learning work, of
continuous improvement, did not lessen. Did we achieve zero injuries? Yes, we
did, in some places, for long periods of time, and many people went many years,
some their entire career, without an injury. Did we achieve zero-injury
performance everywhere, all the time? No, we did not, but we learned from
those experiences, just as we gained a great deal from the effort to achieve zero
injuries. A minor recordable injury could occur among a large group of people,
entire manufacturing plants, marketing divisions, and senior executive teams,
after years of zero injury. They would immediately undertake a systematic
analysis to learn what needed to be changed to prevent another incident.
Everyone believed it was possible to achieve zero injuries. We had learned
early to see it as a realistic goal, a future state, and a focused aspiration. And
the results we achieved from trying for embracing zero injuries as a corporate
aspiration were world class. At whatever level plant, country, division a
DuPont plant was the safest place that anyone in the community could be:
sometimes ten or even 100 times safer. DuPonts safety record has often been
recognized as a model for others.
But setting an aspirational future state is the easy part. Many people stop
there, as if they expect that state to simply come about, wished into being. A
target cannot be achieved that way. That target must represent a future state that
everyone in the company desires, and it must generate passion among the people
whom the target will affect enough passion that they will work hard and long
and intelligently to achieve it, however difficult it is. At DuPont, zero
workplace injuries was viewed as that kind of target. Everyone, at any
company, wants to go to work and return to their family at night without injury.
They will be willing to work hard as individuals and with others in the
workplace towards that particular target. DuPont employees know that with
hard, intelligent work they will make progress towards their goals, and they will
be confident that they will make things even better for the next person as they
move closer to the theoretical zero.
But there was another benefit to setting zero workplace injuries as an
aspiration. Doing so, and setting out to achieve it, taught all of us as individuals,
and the organization as a whole, to develop processes and systems capable of
achieving other high-performance goals; we learned to think effectively and in
an orderly way about a host of systematic ways of operating. All of this resulted
in people who performed at a higher level. The safety process as described
allowed us to aspire to zero negative change targets related to ethical
incidents, product quality incidents, environmental releases from our
manufacturing sites, and so on.
Here is another example of an aspirational target: everyone, especially the
engineer and the scientist, understands the aspiration of the perpetual motion
machine. And everyone understands that this aspirational target is impossible
in our world. But this has not stopped machine design engineers from trying to
achieve the target of a 100 per cent efficient machine. Engineers who accept that
aspirational challenge the perfect machine create better designs than those
who do not.
All of these aspirational targets entailed the development of leadership
processes and systems that led to improved results for the business and its
stakeholders. This chapter will offer insight and guidance for understanding a
developmental leading and leadership learning framework.
Learning Frameworks
Learning frameworks, as I use them in this book, will help you understand the
way things are or could be. They can be used in just the same way an engineer
uses a physical framework when building an automobile. The physical shape of
a car is fixed, and a variety of elements or things or systems are then hung on
that framework to create or describe the car. In the same way, I will be
describing leading and leadership concepts or ideas or systems by presenting
learning frameworks that describe certain features and relationships. These are
often visual, geometric representations of realities, which are useful when
explaining the complexities of leading and leadership.
Engineers and scientists use learning frameworks all the time. Many
scientific theories and empirical relationships are described with graphs, or as
functions, or in other visual ways in the same way, for example, that a civil
engineer uses stress / strain curves to explain the behaviour of concrete.
Three-Term Framework
The triad is a powerful and flexible learning framework that can represent any
number of things and that lends itself easily to the questions that are used
frequently throughout this book; indeed, this books structure reflects the Why?
How? What? rubric:
Part One: Why are we motivated to learn and prepare ourselves to lead?
Part Two: How do we prepare ourselves to lead?
Part Three: What is the work of leading and leadership of the business organization?
Four-Term Framework
The four-term framework is perhaps the most used and most useful of the
learning frameworks. Its generic form, referred to as a tetrad, is illustrated in
Figure 2.1. In this book you will be encountering this framework repeatedly.
What this tool helps us learn is that any leadership activity any activity at all
can be understood as an interaction of four elements of mental activity or
thought. For this reason, the tetrad is sometimes referred to as the doing or
understanding learning framework.
In the following sections of this chapter and the rest of this book, the triad
and tetrad learning framework tools will be used to help you grasp the
complexities of leading and leadership. These more simple learning frameworks
are used as important components to construct more complex mental models.
The developmental leadership model and the derived leadership competency
model are examples. These mental models help the reader understand the
complex nature of the meaning of leading and leadership.
Figure 2.1 The Tetrad
and the derived leadership competency model are valuable and represent (a) the
elements, concepts, and systems you need to learn in order to prepare yourself
to lead, and (b) subsequently, the work that competent leaders must do to
develop high-performance business organizations.
The Nature of Leadership Activity
A number of years ago, a member of DuPont Canadas board of directors
introduced me and others to an extraordinary person named Bonnie Schmidt.
Bonnie had recently graduated with a PhD in physiology and had just started a
business organization called Lets Talk Science. She had recognized after
graduating that she wanted to change the world. Her idea, her passion, was to
increase awareness of science and engineering in the minds of all people. She,
like us, believed that the world would benefit from this; she believed that the
best way to accomplish this would be to engage young people in learning the
power and benefits of science and engineering.
DuPont Canada became a founding sponsor for Bonnies Lets Talk Science
business organization. The company believed that her vision, her commitment,
and her talent could be a powerful force in society.
Bonnie and her extremely talented associates have developed innovative
course materials for young people from preschool to high school age and
convinced teachers to use these materials. She has also assembled a large group
of volunteers, most of whom are science and engineering graduate students.
These volunteers take their highly developed skills into schools, where they
deliver classes under the guidance of the regular teachers.
It is a wonderful thing to watch PhD students in nuclear physics or
mechanical engineering describe to public school students what they are
learning about science. Most regular teachers do not have that kind of highly
specialized knowledge, so they value the materials these volunteers provide and
work to integrate them into their classes. The students in these classrooms relate
easily to messages delivered by twenty-year-old scientists. What we have here
is a confluence of talents directed at young minds that are open to influence.
Bonnies organization has become very successful. Its developmental
learning work is based on and driven by a desire to change the world by
enhancing young peoples awareness of science and engineering. Bonnie is
changing their perceptions and creating more scientists and engineers, which
demonstrates the nature of leadership. She is an active catalyst for changing the
perceptions and actions of young people relative to science and engineering.
She influences them to believe that their future will be more interesting, indeed,
more fun, if they embrace science. She leverages outcomes by influencing
teachers to understand as well. She and her organization teach the teachers and
the young people why science is important in improving our world; how science
can be a positive force in their lives; and what to do to learn more about science
and engineering. Her future state vision of a better world is one in which all
people have an awareness and appreciation of how science, engineering, and
technology improve their lives.
A Generic Framework
In chapter 1, I proposed a working definition of leading and leadership:
Leaders are people who influence others to make positive change.
And, furthermore,
Leaders are those who are engaged in the processes of leading and the
activities of leadership. A leader is not a person occupying a position in a
hierarchy.
The generic framework for all leadership activity captures those definitions
in a tetrad (see Figure 2.2). That tetrad serves as a learning framework for any
change or leading process. It also represents a simple but powerful descriptor
of leadership activity. The terms it contains serve as the first-level elements of
leadership activity. In the sections below, The Developmental Leadership
Model and The Leadership Competency Model, I will be building on this
first, generic level of thought to complete the road map for the rest of the book.
This first-level framework provides a means for thinking strategically about
activities during which change is occurring and thinking carefully is important.
My colleagues and I have used this generic framework to think strategically
about product and process improvements, organizational change, mergers and
acquisitions, and a host of other important tasks where objectivity is important.
The same framework can be used in other environments for example, to
understand governmental or political change, social change, or academic
pursuits. In short, it is suitable for thinking about any leading process.
This generic framework considers three specific interdependent processes:
changing things for the better, taking action, and thinking about future states.
Changing Things for the Better
Changing things for the better is a primary activity of leadership. In chapter 1, I
offered a working definition of leading and leadership: influencing people to
make positive change. The generic framework I propose to represent the
process of changing things for the better is this dyad:
Ground state Ideal goal
When the leader-engineer decides to change things for the better in a given
model year, decisions must be made regarding which systems need or do not
need to be changed to make the new model better. In the terms we are using in
the generic framework, the systems to be changed comprise the ground state.
The leadership activity described as changing things for the better is
represented in the generic framework as the sum of many leading and leadership
activities related to moving from a ground state to a set of ideal goals for each
of these activities.
I was the general manager of the paint business for DuPont Canada for a
number of years. The leader-engineers of the automobile manufacturers would
contact and consult the leader-engineers in the paint business at DuPont Canada
to discuss changes in the painting systems for their new automobile models.
Teams would be assigned and goals established to meet the needs of the
painting systems for the new models.
Collectively, as a business unit, all the people in DuPont Canadas various
project teams the chemistry team, the logistics team, and the customer service
team would spend many hours working on the ground state. Then, once we
understood what needed to be changed to meet the needs of all stakeholders
especially the customer we would shift to defining and then working on goals.
Taking Action
The change from ground state to the goals described in the previous section is
the sum of many discrete actions taken after change has been thought about and
decisions about what to do have been made.
The very best leaders are people of action and are passionate about getting
results. This was discussed in chapter 1. The very best leaders are energetic,
hard-working, and believe strongly in continuous learning. When the word
action is used to describe the nature of leadership, many think of a
charismatic, hard-driving, extroverted workaholic. Actually, there are many
personality descriptors of leaders. The one just mentioned is outdated; indeed, it
has been found that leaders who can be described that way are less successful in
the long term than the Level 5 leader personality described by Jim Collins in
Good to Great.1 For Collins, a Level 5 leader is someone who builds enduring
greatness through a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional
will. My interpretation of Collins and my own experience in observing
leaders at every level is that character is more important than personality.
Behaviour must be purposeful, not ego driven. The best leaders have learned the
skills, character attributes, and purposeful behaviours that they require to
influence other people to act.
Thinking about Future States
I have asked many people to define leadership. I have done so in classrooms
and at conferences attended by CEOs. In the right place, at the right time, it is a
good conversation starter because everyone has an opinion and the answers
vary widely enough to stimulate debate.
I have never said no to any answer I hear, or at least I havent yet in all my
question-and-answer sessions. And those answers have ranged from telling
people what to do through operating the business to describing a vision, to
changing things. After a long discussion, most people are comfortable with the
working definition I offer in this book: leadership is influencing people to make
positive change. But that comfort is short lived because many people next want
to understand precisely what those words mean. They especially want to know
what the nature of the work is: what leaders think about and do.
The discussion of making positive change is an opportunity to introduce
direction and future state as important leadership topics. I tell the group that
the most unique aspect of leadership as an activity is that it looks towards the
future and takes a future-oriented perspective to influence people to carry out
changes.
The best leaders are able to create inspiring targets for the work of others. A
leader who is an engineer knows that the purpose of building a bridge across a
river may be to build the best bridge in the world or to build a better bridge than
the last. But a more inspiring purpose is to build that bridge so that people can
enjoy the other side of the river and thereby improve their lives.
The best leaders set targets for their change work. Those targets provide a
direction for the work that others and the leader do. They provide direction for
everyone on the team and for their goals as individuals. The alternative is a
large number of projects that have little direction, which leads to inefficiency
and ineffectiveness.
Focusing entirely on building bridges to cross rivers will lead to efficient
results to low-cost, high-quality, rapid construction of bridges that cross
rivers. Effectiveness is different; it means working on bridges that are designed
to do many different things, such as cross rivers or cross rough terrain or cross
deep canyons. Or it could mean building all-stone bridges, for example, or
suspension bridges that use and require a variety of technologies.
Leaders are more focused on effectiveness. That is because when we aim for
effectiveness, we find ways to develop bridge-building technology and we
thereby become capable of extraordinary things, such as building bridges over
ever-wider rivers. When we choose our targets intelligently, our business can
focus on growing through innovation. Focusing on effectiveness will always
lead to efficient results: it is a two-for-one proposition.
The very best leaders are future looking in that way. They are motivated to
succeed, and they are capable of setting extraordinary targets for their
followers. And when they can do that, they earn the admiration of others.
Surveys have shown that this is one of the most admired attributes of leaders.
A target can be more specific or less so: which one depends on the level of
positive change whether it is incremental, continuous, or transformational (see
chapter 1).
A company of leader-engineers who do transactional work (i.e., incremental
or continuous improvement work) associated with building bridges over rivers
will require a more specific target, such as Become the lowest-cost builder in
North America.
A company of leader-engineers working on getting people across wide
spaces will benefit from transformational change targets that are much less
specific, such as Become the mover of people over wide expanses. A target
like that allows the freedom to innovate, to be creative, and to grow in an
orderly way. It inspires people to build on each success and on each goal that is
successfully achieved.
When the target for a future state offers more freedom, people can move in a
direction that is somewhat less clear. This in turn allows a variety of less
specific actions to be taken, though the steps can still reflect order. The
keywords here are order and freedom:
Borlang inspired his followers to implement many projects that gave life to
this cause. The instruments that he and his followers used were science,
engineering, and various technologies. He and his followers developed diseaseresistant varieties of wheat that enabled food production to be made enormously
effective. Ultimately, his work saved millions of people from starvation.
Borlangs work was driven by science, by his leadership competence, and by
his dedication to an aspirational future state.
Another example: If you were to list the most amazing engineering feats in
history, what would they be? I suggest that one on a very short list would be
landing a man on the moon.
That engineering project involved new science, a multitude of complicated
inventions, and multiple sets of problems solved. It required many dedicated
engineers, scientists, and technologists, all of them working energetically
together and all of them motivating themselves, leading, and inspiring others to
accomplish the impossible.
And this work began in 1961 with a speech by an amazing leader who
understood that this engineering miracle would influence the worlds people to
see the United States as an admirable nation and one worth emulating. In that
speech, President John F. Kennedy defined the aspirational future state:
Time for a great new American enterprise time for this nation to take a clearly
leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future
on earth I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before
this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.3
Those words captured the hearts and minds of a nation and its scientific and
engineering community. The aspiration provided the inspiration that fuelled the
accomplishment an extraordinary future state.
Developmental Leadership Activity
Developmental leadership refers to specific activities that are necessary to
develop high-performance work systems in an organization. A high-performance
work system is one that, by definition, is constantly doing things better.
Developmental leadership, to me, is best understood in terms of two sets of
tasks. The first set has to do with individuals developing their leading ability as
individuals learning how to lead themselves. This entails learning and the
continuous development of individual competence. The goal here is to achieve
an ideal state of competence called role model leadership.
The second set of tasks, which depend on understanding and acting on the
first, involves leading an organization towards its ideal state. The goal here is to
achieve a high-performance work system, and it is achieved through collective
and collaborative work of the organizations members. The role model leader
makes this possible.
The purpose of developmental leadership activity is to achieve ongoing
growth in the organization, and that happens when everyone devotes themselves
to learning to do things better all the time.
Consider the role of a mechanical design engineer who is responsible for
designing a new reactor to make chemical X within a large, multi-product
manufacturing operation. There are two ways for him to execute this role. The
first is the conventional way: project management. Then there is the
developmental way: the engineer knows that his role is to improve the way
things are done, not simply to do things the same way forever or to make
incremental changes in procedure. So he sets out to learn what the function of
the reactor is from a variety of perspectives, such as the chemistry of the
reaction and the business objective in building a reactor. Put another way, he
sets out to understand the requirements of the reactor from the perspective of
those who will be using it: the chemical engineers and technicians, the
maintenance people who will be maintaining it, and the customers who will be
using the reactors products. Through developmental leadership, the mechanical
design engineer is trying to understand something about the needs of those who
will be using his design. The conventional approach to designing a reactor
mainly involves managing and controlling procedures and standards. All of this
managing and controlling is part of the developmental approach as well. What
distinguishes developmental leader-engineers in this example is that with each
project, they are always seeking better reactor designs as well as better ways to
be more productive and to produce higher-quality decisions, with the goal of
better satisfying the users needs. They are carrying out the project not only
efficiently but also more effectively, by finding ways to enhance their
contribution to all stakeholders.
Figure 2.3 Developmental Leadership Model
lives; thinking about future states; and taking action. This developmental
leadership model is derived from those three activities. What unites the two
component frameworks, as you will see, is the action of continuous learning.
Self-leading and organizational leading are developmental processes. Both
are continuous and are dedicated to learning to be better individual leaders and
better organizations.
Taking Action
Developmental learning is the action an individual must take; developmental
work is what the people of the organization do to achieve positive results from
learning. In the previous example, one aspect of learning to be a safe person
was developmental learning as an individual that is, learning how to work
without injuring yourself or contributing to an injury to others. Leadership work,
by contrast, is done by all the people in the organization to change things so that
fewer injuries occur.
Developmental Learning
Developmental learning starts with an individual aspiring leader that is, with
someone who is highly motivated to improve her individual capabilities as a
person and as a leader. The motivation to learn to develop oneself is
arguably the single most important attribute for an aspiring leader and is
something that all successful leaders possess.
Some people contend that leaders are born that at least some leadership
qualities are an accident of birth. Undoubtedly, some people are born with some
traits that help make them leaders more and more observers believe that such
traits can be innate. But even those who are so fortunate still have to develop
those innate qualities by committing themselves to learning.
Charisma will sometimes get you in the door, but even then, it is the
leadership competencies you learn that will keep you inside, where the real
work of leading is done. It has often been contended that a leader must be an
extrovert. That view is less widely held than it used to be there are plenty of
introverts these days in the executive suites of successful firms.
So the answer to the question Are there born leaders? is Yes, but
And the answer to the question Can leadership be learned? is Yes,
absolutely And more relevant than either of these answers is this point: the
very best leaders develop themselves through continuous learning. Indeed,
people who are not innately capable of positively influencing people can learn
the skills and character attributes that can provide them with that capability.
Similarly, naturally charismatic people who can easily influence the actions of
others do not become exceptional leaders unless they are willing to lead with
When you develop yourself into a competent leader of self, leading others
flows naturally from that. All the work you have had to do to develop your selfleadership skills will find its way naturally into the organization you lead,
which is another way of saying that self-leading is a necessary precursor to
leading a business organization. You are leading an organization well when you
inspire the other people in your organization to become leaders of self. Indeed,
high performance depends on it.
Competent leadership of self can be an end in itself: quite simply, it makes
you a better person, a better citizen, and a more competent human being. Plenty
of people have little interest in leading others in organizations. There is no
reason why they should have to want this perhaps they only want to be better
engineers, better doctors, or better researchers. Certainly, there are many
valuable roles that do not focus on leading people in complex organizations. All
of us would benefit from learning self-leadership whether or not we extend that
new competence beyond ourselves to leading teams or organizations. Learning
that competence is justified on the basis of service, to ourselves and to others.
Changing Things for the Better
An aspiring leader engages in a continuous process of becoming a better leader.
A leader who succeeds at this becomes recognized as a role model leader. It is
important to remember that leadership is a process and is something one never
stops learning. There is no award for becoming a leader; there is no certificate
that says you have become one; there is no end point. A role model leader is
someone who is still learning and still motivated to become one. The specific
skills, character attributes, and behaviours required for role model leading
competency will be discussed in part two.
A word about the ground state for role model leaders: they have answered
the question of why they want to become one. Having done so, they have
positioned themselves to ask how and what: how they are to prepare themselves
and what they will have to learn.
And a word about the ground state for high-performance work systems: they
begin as conventional organizations. There are a variety of designs for these
work systems, but usually they have been designed around hierarchies, whether
they are referred to as functional departments or business units or something
else. For example, a company might have a CEO at the top, and down from that
person cascades any number of functional departments: manufacturing,
engineering, marketing, R&D, operations, and so on. And each of those
departments will likely have its own subdepartments. And this hierarchy will be
further complicated by the variety of markets and regions that the organization
serves. That sort of hierarchy is typical of what I will be calling a conventional
organization.
organization.
People who have committed themselves to a future state will use that as
guidance when setting goals for their ongoing change efforts. At any given point
in time, a developing organization will have a number of individuals who have
developed into strong role model leaders, many others who have just begun
developing their leadership competence, and some who are not yet motivated to
learn to be leaders. An organization needs to have a clear purpose it must
have as part of its vision a future state that all can embrace, for then all its
people will have the same target as they develop competence. Connected to this
purpose, the organization will benefit from looking collectively into the future
towards the target they share as a group.
Earlier in the chapter, it was shown that the framework for thinking about
future states varies with the kind of change being considered. When thinking
about small, well-defined incremental changes, the future state is best described
as a plan; when thinking about extensive continuous improvements, the future
state is best described as a vision; and when thinking about transformational,
extensive, ongoing, difficult change, the future state is best described as an
aspiration. This hierarchy for thinking about future states is useful when
appropriate targets are being considered for the leadership development
activities described in this chapter.
Developmental leadership activities are ongoing, evolutionary, difficult, and
transformational. Leaders need to direct their efforts at superordinate
aspirational targets. Those who are still learning to become role model leaders
those who havent yet learned to want to be leaders need to be shown that
the organization has a worthwhile aspirational target and have to see this target
if they are to develop themselves. And, in the same way, those people need to
have and see a worthwhile aspirational target for the tough work of
development of their organization as a natural outcome of the individual
aspiration.
An Aspiration: Everyone a Leader
The aspiration the future state for the activity of developing into a competent
leader of self is Everyone a Leader.
Setting aspirational targets such as zero workplace injuries and Everyone
a Leader has spillover effects for the people who embrace those targets and for
the organization as a whole, in all dimensions of productivity, quality, and
service to stakeholders. So if individuals can motivate themselves to accept an
aspiration as a valid, pragmatic target, this will clear the way for all of them to
develop themselves into successful leaders and for the organization to become a
high-performance one.
Scientists and engineers deal pragmatically with perfection every day.
When engineers build better bridges and factories, or develop better chemical
processes, they have been inspired by scientific theories about perfect states.
They work developmentally, always improving existing processes and always
seeking innovative solutions that approach the same perfection as the scientific
theories they have learned.
Engineers produce a vast array of materials, often by following complex
manufacturing processes that involve potentially hazardous raw materials.
While doing this work, the engineers at DuPont believe that zero injuries is a
realizable target; by inference, they do not believe that some injuries are
acceptable. They are convinced that perfection is a practical target and all their
work is better because of that conviction and because the efforts they have made
to achieve it are delivering measurable results. Put simply, there is nothing more
practical than a theory accepted. Believing that everyone can learn to be a
leader has the same sort of impact accepting it provides the motivation
required to become one. In turn, if everyone accepted the idea that zero injuries
was not possible, then there certainly would be injuries; an undesirable
outcome.
An Aspiration: The High-Performance Business Organization
The aspiration of a high-performance business organization relates mainly to
moving beyond the constraints of conventional business organizations. In a highperformance business organization, all the employees are individually
motivated to achieve the target of Everyone a Leader and they work together to
achieve that goal for the company as a whole. Such an organization focuses on
these aspirational outcomes:
The organization has created an admirable set of core values and lives those
values.
All individuals have learned to be role model leaders and are continually
developing their leadership competence.
The organization has created and sustained a harmonious level of service for
all stakeholders.
Productivity and quality measures are all higher than in other business
organizations and are growing sustainably, with no wasteful processes or
outcomes.
Again, lets use safety as an analogy. If everyone in an organization is
committed to zero injuries, then they will be highly motivated and inspired by
others working beside them to work on leading the organization to a state of high
performance in safety and in all other activities.
The Best Leaders Are Competent Leaders
differently, and as a result we learned to formulate fresh ideas about the real and
pressing issues we were dealing with in the company.
Krones three words and the earlier ideas of G.I. Gurdieff (see the various
writings of P.D. Ouspensky), who described ways and means for human beings
to develop themselves, have helped me to clarify the word competence:
Will: Why I am motivated to prepare to do things and then to do them.
Being: How I prepare myself as a human being to do things.
Function: What I do.
Once you answer all the questions guided by the willbeingfunction model
and analyse the results, you will be better positioned to decide whether you
have the motivation to take the job that is, to prepare for the role and execute
it.
Sports analogies are overdone, but the will to win in organizations as
diverse as hockey teams, football teams, and curling squads is well documented.
Unless there is a will to win, even the most talented team can lose. Think about
the Canadian mens hockey team at the 2006 Olympics, or the U.S. mens
basketball team at the 1972 Olympics. There was much controversy around both
losses, but even if the U.S. basketball team had won the game by a point instead
of losing by a point, it would still be an example of how low levels of will and
being can cause even a much superior team in terms of function to lose.
Business leaders like to say We have the best engineers We have the
best scientists and so on. In practice, though, organizations tend not to differ
much in the functional capabilities of their people. Where they do vary is with
regard to the sum of the function, being, and will of those they employ. There are
many examples in the business world of how will, being, and function are all
necessary to achieve extraordinary performance. The very best leaders and
managers in business organizations know that it is virtually impossible to
achieve high levels of performance solely through the functional capabilities of
their people.
What is not so easy is raising the level of the organizations being, which can
only be done by developing the character of its people and their collective
vitality. This in turn depends on the will of those people to share personal and
organizational values and to be inspired by those values by the virtuous goals
of the organization.
For many years, I have used the following framework whenever I have
needed to think about my own leadership capabilities or those of others. It is
how I have learned to help me decide whether people are performing up to their
potential, whatever their role.
Leadership Competency Model: An Introduction
The approach I take extends the Krone model to a second level of complexity,
so that it serves as a learning framework for leading and leadership competency
of self and organization.
Will: Why are individual and collective leaders motivated to take action to do the work
that is necessary to grow themselves and the business organization?
Being: How are aspiring leaders to prepare themselves? And how are they to work
together in an organization to influence positive change?
Function: What actions by individual aspiring leaders or collective activities by the
organization need to be taken to bring about positive change?
The value-add work of the engineering department involved many things, but
a large part of it was directed at capital project execution. Our company
spend here was many tens of millions of dollars per year, comprising a
multitude of small / medium and occasionally very large capital projects. It was
essential that the departments engineers be competent.
One of those major projects was the design and construction of a large
expansion to one of our major polymer manufacturing operations. The
complexity of this project related to its size in financial terms (it would cost
many millions of dollars), its technology (it involved launching a new,
innovative process from our R&D organization), and its timeline, which for
business reasons was much shorter than was normal for our company. It was
essential that this project be done well.
Terry (I will call him that) had come to our company around the same time I
did after graduating from a very good engineering school. He wanted to
contribute to the organization as an engineer and was not interested in being a
manager or salesperson he wanted to be a high-performance engineer who
worked on delivering projects. Over the years, he and I saw a lot of each other
in the beginning, we worked together, and now I was a business unit leader
and a customer of his.
Terry had developed into an excellent project engineer. He was sought after
by all those who had a capital project to be executed because all his projects
were completed safely, on time or faster than scheduled, and at or below
planned cost. No one was ever injured during the design or construction of any
project he led, that I can recall.
Terry was always straightforward, confident, tenacious, and hard-working.
He also communicated well, not only to business managers but to all the people
on his project teams. When I first discussed the project with him, he was
immediately excited and began to quiz me about the business goals, asking a lot
of questions that started with why. He said he needed to understand the business
goals so that he and his project team could add value, and that could only
happen if he knew the business strategy and objectives.
So we assigned the project to Terry, and he put together the project team.
Many of the department engineers wanted to work with him. They admired him
because they knew he was a good leader whose skills as an engineer and coach
were well known. But mostly they wanted to work on his project because of his
character and his ability to develop the people on his team. Terry would always
take time with his team to teach. The team he put together included me, as the
business leader, and a number of the R&D people who had developed the new
technology. He persuaded all of us to be active members. Communicating with a
diverse team is always a challenge, but he had a track record for succeeding at
it. The teams engineers gained much from his ability to understand and
communicate the needs of the projects customers.
As the project progressed, it became clear to me that his team members were
delivering the project in terms of safety, schedule, cost, and quality. Also, the
team members were learning from Terry and from one another. The engineers
were becoming more skilled as engineers, but also more skilled as team players
that is, they were learning to work with others more effectively. By the
projects end, because of Terrys success in leading them, all of them would be
more valued as engineers on future projects. This only strengthened his
reputation as a role model.
All of Terrys engineering talent and all the concern he expressed for people
reflected his motivation to do the right things for the business organization. You
knew from his behaviour that he would do everything possible to deliver. Terry
was a role model leader-engineer who knew how to contribute at a highperformance level to the leadership of the business organization. And yes, the
project was completed well all objectives were met or exceeded.
I end this part of the book by describing a leadership competency model
(Figure 2.4).
Figure 2.4 Leadership Competency Model
Again, as with the model for developmental leadership, this figure shows
three aligned interdependent frameworks. Each has three specific actionable
elements relating to the generic terms function, being, and will. In addition,
each leg of the model has a fourth action element that is unique. The element
thinking effectively is important for determining the competency of leading self;
serving stakeholders is a critical set of processes and activities to be learned
by those who aspire to lead organizations.
Each of these two processes to be learned thinking effectively and serving
stakeholders has elements of function, being, and will. For example, thinking
effectively requires us to think about why a person is motivated to think, how the
individual prepares to think about things, and what the individual is thinking
about doing. Similarly, serving stakeholders of the business organization guides
us to consider and learn to understand why serving society is so important to the
success of the enterprise, how the business can advance by achieving shared
purpose with employees, and what needs to be done to continuously add value
by serving customers effectively.
The Self-Leading Competency mental model will be detailed more fully in
part two of this book. The Organizational Competency mental model will be
described in part three.
PART TWO
trained engineers. Kalev said, OK, lets get to work lets form a team lets
accomplish the impossible.
There was a group at DuPonts international headquarters in Delaware the
New Venture Group and Kalev told us he had already scheduled a meeting
with them to tell them what we were planning and to ask for their financial
backing. All of this was quite exciting, but it was also worrisome because I did
not know much about the technology. I had been involved in polymerization, but
in polyethylene not nylon technology, which involved chemistry that was quite
different. Kalev reassured me when I told him of my concern. His answer was
typical: You can do it just get to work and learn. Another concern was my
lack of experience as a supervisor, given that my Polymer Technology Group
was large and experienced. Again, Kalev was supportive: You can do it we
can get together and discuss what leaders need to know. We can do that on
weekends.
Kalev formed his team. Then he went to the meeting in Delaware. He told
them his team had the capability to develop this new reactor technology in two
years: We will deliver the report before Christmas day two years from now.
The New Venture Group was persuaded and gave us the funding to do six
months of preliminary work; they told us they would provide more support if the
data justified it. This outcome surprised all of us on the team: Kalev had
actually convinced DuPont world headquarters to fund us not fully, but enough
for us to start. The surprising aspect of this was that the idea was no more than a
concept and had no supporting data. Even more surprising, the New Venture
Group received many requests for funds. There was not enough money for all of
them, but somehow it was there for us.
Our team consisted of a small group of technology-competent people, a
marketing person to ensure that we stayed focused on customer-oriented
solutions, and, of course, Kalev, the leader. He called our team CR-8 (Canadian
Research, eight-blade reactor). It had a nice ring to it. We had T-shirts made.
This was the core team, and Kalev made it clear that we would be free to
decide how we would organize our human resources to support the development
work, but that everyone would be involved in the highest-priority endeavour
the CR-8.
This was Kalevs way of telling us we would be accountable for our work
on the CR-8. All of us would need to give our real jobs a lower priority,
though those secondary assignments would still have to be carried out on time
and on budget. My real job involved mathematical modelling. As an aside, all
of us on the CR-8 team were able to accomplish our original goals including
my groups work on the mathematical model. We accomplished this while
dedicating considerable effort to the project that Kalev had launched.
At the outset, Kalev participated on the CR-8 team as an engineer, but very
soon after, he shifted his focus to the following:
Everyone working with Kalev Pugi knew he was a role model leader. We
did not use that term it simply wasnt in our minds but we still knew he was
one. Kalev did not know he was a role model leader, but he knew he was
motivated to be a better leader every day.
To enlist in a common cause, people must believe that the leader is competent to
guide them where theyre headed If they doubt the persons abilities, theyre
unlikely to join the crusade.
Kouzes and Posner, The Leadership Challenge1
The rest of part two discusses the learning required to progress towards the
state of role model leading and leadership. A final note before we start: the
developmental leadership model teaches us that the development of individual
leading and leadership competence is the precursor for successful
organizational development. The organizations people will be developing
themselves and their organization at the same time. Developmental learning
within the organization as a whole is enhanced by the rapid development of the
individuals who comprise it.
Leadership Competency Model
The leadership competency model describes the capabilities that an aspiring
leader requires in order to become a role model leader (see Figure 2.4). The
focus will be on three terms: skills, character, and behaviour. A persons
competence as a leader is a reflection of the cascading sum of these and how
well they are integrated to create the competence required of the individual role
model leader.
Skills: The capabilities that allow the leader to function effectively that is, to do things.
Character: The inner human attributes that prepare the leader to function effectively.
Behaviour: Expressions of the persons motivation to prepare him / herself to function as
a leader.
Individual leading competency: The total, integrated expression of skills, character, and
behaviour.
These elements, once learned and learned well define the role model
leader. In this part of the book I will be discussing them as qualities that
aspiring leaders can learn. That is, they are what leaders learn to do and be;
they reflect how leaders prepare themselves to become exceptional; they suggest
why such people are willing to dedicate themselves to learning to become role
models for others.
The above elements, all together, are what define role model leaders. The
important point here is that they are linked a change in one results in some
degree of change in the others. That is a good thing, because a positive change in
any one of these will measurably improve the others and, it follows, the
individuals overall competence as a leader.
Interestingly, an individual who is following might sense a high level of
leadership skill called honesty; another might sense, in the same leader, a high
level of behaviour called honesty; still another, a high level of character
called honesty. They are all sensing the same positive attribute, yet they
experience and reflect on it in different ways.
As we all must have experienced when following a leader, we can always
tell when a positive attribute is not present. There are too many so-called
leaders who do not have the competence of role model leadership, and these
people cannot hide. And their followers have no difficulty articulating which
specific skills, character attributes, and behaviours that these leaders are
lacking. In so doing, the followers reinforce the need to further develop these
characteristics in themselves.
The developmental leadership philosophy is defined by Everyone a Leader.
In other words, everyone, whatever they are doing at any point, whether it is
leading, managing, or following, is learning to become more competent in the
skills, character attributes, behaviours, and thinking capabilities defined and
discussed here.
In practical terms, in any group, team, or organization, some will be more
motivated to learn than others, and some will learn more rapidly than others.
Some will be able to dedicate more mental, emotional, social, and physical
energy than others to the task. An organization that is dedicated to
developmental learning will, at any given time, have people with growing
leading and leadership competence, but they will be progressing at their own
pace. There will be people at different levels of competence.
The ideal state, in our model of role model leading competence, is a moving
target.
4 Thinking Effectively
be learned. Those three simple questions and their answers will offer a
disciplined, systematic approach to thinking effectively and thoroughly about
complex ideas related to the role and practice of leadership.
As I noted earlier, skills, character, and behaviour are linked together.
Change one, and you change the other two in some way. For example, if you
strengthen your character attribute of trustworthiness by learning from other
admired leaders, this will improve your skills your behaviour as well perhaps
as it relates to your capacity to inspire others.
There is, though, one desirable capability that relates to all three that is a
skill, a character attribute, and a behaviour: the ability to think effectively. To
become a transformational leader who changes the world, you must somehow
learn to think broadly, critically, and thoroughly about things. You must be able
to explore ideas holistically not just in terms of actions, and not just in terms
of your own beliefs. And, importantly, you need to learn to think systematically.
The term conventional wisdom has been used by people over decades to
reference limited thinking when considering new ideas. J.K. Galbraith
referenced the term in his famous 1958 book The Affluent Society. If we are
satisfied with thinking about things in conventional, well-understood ways and
using old concepts, progress and change will be resisted. Aspiring role model
leaders who are engaged in changing things and influencing others direction
need to go beyond conventional wisdom. This takes both will and mental
energy; it requires mental tools as well as practice at using them skilfully.
Henry Ford, obviously a very accomplished engineer, was a great proponent
of thinking deeply about things. He explained that others were reluctant to think
because it is hard work. He, of course, was right.
David Garvin and his co-author of Rethinking the MBA have written that
business leaders are asking for MBA schools to incorporate thinking skills and
more leadership development into their curricula.1 His is another way of saying
that to become a role model leader, you must learn to think effectively and
completely, and that takes skill, character, and purposeful behaviour.
Essentially, the framework for thinking effectively has three steps. Those
steps move us from sensing that something must be done, through thinking about
what we must do, to taking positive action. In effect, thinking requires us to
answer these three questions: Why? How? and What? Below, I expand on this.
This learning framework, presented in Figure 4.1, is used extensively in this
book. It was Charles Krone, in the early 1980s, who introduced his nine levels
of thought model to us at DuPont Canada. These nine levels of thought have ever
since been an important tool for my thinking about leading and leadership. With
Krones permission I will be using the nine levels of thought in various places
throughout the book (my version, though, is somewhat different from his) as the
basis for the learning framework for thinking effectively and completely about
The common view is that leaders see or hear something they sense it and
then they are able to successfully execute an idea from that limited input. This,
however, often has less than optimal results. The admonition just do it rarely
if ever works. It works well enough when we sense we are out of shape and
start to run and lift weights. But even in cases like that, it would be better to
think about how far we should be running and how much weight we should be
lifting. The argument most often advanced for going from sensing straight to
doing is that it saves time. Thinking takes too much time, people suggest. Yet
it has been shown again and again by engineers engaged in the planning and
execution of capital projects that when enough time is given to doing effective,
up-front design work, costly mistakes of omission and commission are
minimized and the length of time from start to finish is often quicker than the
just do it approach.
The admonition think before doing is a practical approach that minimizes
both errors and time. So, the process to be recommended is
Sensing Thinking Getting Results
The next section will address the following question: How complete should
the thinking process be? (See Figure 4.1.)
Figure 4.1 Thinking Effectively Model
Developing Meaning
This step requires us to take our sensations as inputs and construct ideas. To
develop meaning, ideas of all kinds confusing ones, insightful ones, ideas that
come long after the sensations have gone need to be constructed. Ideas will
come if aspiring leaders are open to them if they have prepared themselves by
developing goals, ambitions, high levels of mental energy, and high levels of
motivation, and if they have the will to receive ideas. When our thoughts have
value to us, we hold on to them; when they dont, we let them go. Whether they
have value will depend on how well they align with our beliefs, philosophy,
and principles.
Beliefs: Those ideas we hold to be true.
Philosophy: A composite of those beliefs we are willing to live by.
Principles: Guidelines to help us turn our philosophy into action.
By this approach, leaders develop ideas that align with their personal values.
For role model leaders, that alignment is utterly necessary. Without it, our ideas
will be empty of meaning for others, for they will mean nothing to you, and your
followers will realize this intuitively. You have to be genuinely committed to
your ideas or your followers will know instinctively that you are not.
Conversely, if they know your commitment is genuine, the way is open for you
to influence them to work relentlessly to put your ideas into practice. We always
knew that Kalev was deeply committed to his causes. He was very clear about
his values for the work we were doing.
That tells you why beliefs, philosophy, and principles are important: they are
the values that other people see in you. From this process of aligning values
with ideas, the following answers emerge:
The evaluation stage is, in fact, ongoing. With every evaluation you make,
you adjust the actions you have implemented based on the results your actions
are generating.
At this stage, your thinking will be highly tactical: you monitor the project,
evaluate whether you are achieving the results you want, and you make
thoughtful decisions to change what needs to be changed. At this critical stage,
role model leaders engage with managers and with other followers to ensure
that everyone understands the purpose of the work and that everyone is focused
on achieving the results expected. The goal here is to influence people to take
actions that will result in the desired outcomes.
In summary, the premise in this section is that thinking an idea through in an
orderly and disciplined manner before taking action will yield better results:
Sensing an idea about something important
Thinking about what specific actions should be taken to get results from
implementing those actions
so, in some instances, there will be great benefit in taking the time to parse the
thinking process of a group or an individual into all nine levels of thought.
Doing so can be very helpful when the thinking is directed at a complicated and
important change or transformation where the aim is common purpose and
understanding. In other instances, however, it can be enough to integrate the
levels into the three triads of thought (see Figure 4.1) Why? How? and What?
An Example of Thinking Effectively
THE SCENARIO
A group of engineering students discuss the idea that both they and society in
general would benefit if leadership development were made part of the
curriculum. These students conclude that a leadership course could strengthen
the engineering curriculum. They decide to do some disciplined thinking about
this idea, using the thinking model they have learned.
A summary of the nine-level thinking process is provided below. Note that it
gives only one statement for each of the levels of thought. In the real world,
before a result was obtained, there would need to be many statements and
choices at each level.
THINKING ABOUT AN IDEA
Belief: Engineers in the workforce today are not helping improve the world as
much as they could and should.
Philosophy: If engineers learned leadership skills, character attributes, and
purposeful behaviours early in their university years, they would become
better engineers and better citizens as well as agents of positive social
change.
Principles: The Faculty of Engineering will strongly encourage its
undergraduates to learn about and apply leadership skills, character
attributes, and purposeful behaviours.
Concept: Engineers with leadership capability are the ones best equipped to
lead transformational change across a broad spectrum of society.
Strategy: Leadership learning opportunities are to be provided throughout the
undergraduate curriculum and experience.
Design: A series of academic courses and leadership experiences are to be
provided in each undergraduate year and in graduate programs.
Action: One important action step: experienced leaders will be asked to teach
leadership courses to those students who wish to learn something about the
craft.
Audit: The Engineering Faculty will conduct a disciplined, credible self-audit
5 Skills Capability
The specific work of leaders is to make changes that improve their own
capabilities as well as those of other individuals and entire organizations. Our
leadership framework goes beyond the development of skills; skills, though, are
the starting point.
As I noted in the preface, at a point in time, DuPont Canadas senior leaders
decided to markedly improve their companys performance by embarking on a
strategy: that everyone would learn to become a competent leader. Over the
years, to accomplish this goal, they made many changes to processes and
systems.
One of these initiatives involved management by objectives (MBO). Many
conventional organizations use this well-known tool: managers set objectives in
co-operation with the individuals in their organizations. They then measure the
performance of those individuals to establish their pay. DuPont Canada had
been using this tool for many years; now, though, it was decided as part of the
evolving design of the developmental leadership organization to redesign it in
ways that would allow everyone to self-manage. This new SMBO approach
shifted accountability for setting short-term work objectives onto each
individual and joint responsibility for review of outcomes onto that individual
as well as the persons manager. More will be said about self-management in
part three of this book.
Around the time the SMBO system was introduced, I was leading and
managing a small group of engineers that was dedicated to the design and
construction of capital projects. We switched, like everyone else, to the SMBO
approach. Early on in this transformation, I observed behaviour that encouraged
me to believe that our strategy of Everyone a Leader was making DuPont
Canada a better company.
A number of people in my group set SMBOs that were not much different
than those that had been set for them under manager-directed MBOs. But over
the years following the change, more and more of them became motivated to
improve their functioning capability by setting personal objectives that were
more challenging and more developmental.
The less motivated, at least at the beginning, set more traditional engineering
functional objectives: performing specific design tasks more efficiently,
communicating well with the business sponsor to keep them informed, and so
on. But the more motivated engineers set personal objectives not just to
communicate well with the business leaders they would seek out those leaders
to learn from them; they would determine any unrecognized business needs that
would make their projects more successful; and they would help them extend the
potential of their projects. Instead of taking conventional approaches, they set
out to explore the potential for innovation.
In one case, an enterprising leader-engineer wanted to explore ways to
shorten construction times in the Far North during the winter. His unit took the
time to experiment with ideas and materials that would shorten concrete cure
times at ambient temperatures far below freezing. Their experiments succeeded.
Also, many of these aspiring leader-engineers set the objective of learning
more about their engineering specialties. To that end, they took outside graduate
courses at night, or they participated in a variety of self-learning initiatives. The
message for me was that when people are encouraged to take accountability for
leading themselves, they often develop their functional expertise and become
more skilled at their work.
Functional Expertise
Expertise, here, refers to the skills people have that are the focus of their
professional contribution to society. These might be engineering skills, science
skills, machine maintenance skills, or sales skills. They are the functioning
capabilities in which the individual is capable of becoming an expert.
Engineers, scientists, or technologists, to become effective leaders, must
continuously develop their capability as a functional expert in their chosen
field. They must be prepared to maintain and indeed expand their knowledge
and understanding of their field.
The philosophy of Everyone a Leader is what motivates the individual to
develop as a role model leader. A closely related idea here is Everyone a
Functional Expert. There is enormous power in a team of people with diverse
and highly developed functional skills in financing, marketing, engineering,
manufacturing, and so on. Even more powerful, then, if in addition, each of these
talented people is developing leadership competence. Such a team is equipped
to meet the most challenging transformational goals.
I did some consulting work with a company that invented and manufactured
medical devices. I had the opportunity to meet with other consultants who were
medical doctors. One doctor was especially interested in leading and he was a
senior manager in a large medical device sales and distribution company. He
told me that he was a more effective leader because he was still a good doctor
and was continually renewing his skills by taking shifts in a local hospital
emergency ward.
Even the most senior leaders the ones at the very top of the organizational
hierarchy need to maintain and grow their functional expertise. Leading my
company was a welcome challenge for me in terms of my leadership skills. It
would have been much more challenging had I not been convinced of the need to
As you go about constructing your personal mission statement, you will have
a picture or a sense of what you want to accomplish in your life at a personal
level. These goals can be and should be practical, indeed visceral things like
I want to be seen by others as successful, I want to dedicate my life to
serving others, I want to be seen by others as important, and so on. It is
important, though, that you be honest with yourself. Many people spend so much
time trying to do the right thing as perceived by others that they find it difficult to
separate that from their real, personal life goals.
The second dyad focuses on the thinking and doing on the operational
work you will have to do to reach your goals:
Personal Values and Direction
Here you need to think about, define, and reaffirm to yourself your personal
values those beliefs you hold strongly about yourself, your work, and your
life. Also, you must develop a direction to bring about that future. For example,
if you envision yourself as a senior leader in your company, or to go in
another direction as an accomplished senior engineer at your company, you
need to develop a strategy for achieving that future. Will you need to change
jobs to gain more experience at leading different kinds of organizations? Will
you need to do things differently to gain other experiences? Will you need to
take time off from your company and go back to school to acquire a new set of
skills? Deciding which actions to take may well require that you take time to do
research, and to consult with others to get it right in your mind.
The second part of this second dyad is priority work activity. Here you
need to further define the work you should be doing to realize the vision and
strategy you have described for yourself. For example, if your direction is to
become a senior engineer, you will want to seek out work that will improve
your leadership skills; and you will seek opportunities to network with senior
managers, to learn more about the companys technologies, and so on.
Knowing Yourself
This skill is based on learning who you are, not who others consider you to be.
It is important to do this in an ongoing manner to constantly be learning more
about who you are as you seek to improve yourself. Maxwell Maltz developed a
thesis about this in his well-known book Psycho Cybernetics.2 In that work, he
maintained that individuals must have a measure of self-awareness an accurate
and positive view of themselves before setting any life goals; otherwise, they
will never achieve those goals in their entirety.
Knowing oneself is a benefit to individuals and to others: a clear example
was demonstrated to me when a talented research scientist working in a biotechnology company decided that he was not meant to be a manager giving
orders to others. He decided he could learn to be a leader and influence others
and the company to dedicate resources to moving in a different direction. He
saw the benefit to the company and to himself in engaging in medical end-use
research and development, which was his personal competency and passion.
I noted earlier that it is important to learn the character attributes of role
model leaders. I will introduce these later on, but I will mention here that you
cannot hope to strengthen your character unless you begin with a solid
understanding of yourself. Perhaps the best tool for achieving understanding of
yourself is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).3 Everyone, I believe,
should take the test and have it evaluated by an expert. Doing so will give you
tremendous insights; indeed, some people will tell you that the assessment
cannot help but change those who take it. Perhaps that is going too far, but I
believe that within certain boundaries, it is possible to change ones
personality. For example, you can learn to become more extroverted or more
introverted if you have the will to do so and the skills to learn how, and the
MBTI can help with that.
As an example, it is valuable information to know how much of an introvert
you are. Having learned about introversion and extraversion, you can choose
whether to act on that knowledge as part of an effort to change. You will, along
the way, realize that role model leaders can be introverts or extroverts. What
matters more is how you manage your personal energy. Introverts need to
manage their personal energy in different ways than extroverts.
Leaders who have come to know themselves will have developed insight
into how they react to various emotional stimuli. Every role model leader has a
preferred and well-communicated leadership style. It is also true that role
model leaders, to be maximally effective, need to be able to change their
dominant style when facing a crisis. How well you know yourself and how well
you are able to adapt to situations will determine how able you are to change
your dominant style at critical moments. Various leadership styles will be
discussed in the following pages.
willing and active mentor and you share that persons energy.
The skill of learning how to know others, and the capacity to benefit from
that, is largely a matter of active sensing, active listening, and active
observing. The best advice in terms of active listening and active observing is
simply this: Stop talking! The very best leaders the ones who understand the
benefits to be gained from knowing others are often the ones sitting quietly in
the room and listening and observing. Less skilled leaders sometimes
misinterpret this active listening and observing as a sign of weakness, laziness,
or disinterest.
Active thinking is another beneficial skill one that when coupled with
active sensing can be very powerful. Listening to and observing others and
measuring their ideas, actively comparing them with your own, often leads to
even better ideas.
But be careful whom you decide to learn from. Many aspiring leaders
indeed, most people generally gravitate towards charismatic personalities.
Through the centuries, role model leaders have often been understood as
charismatic leaders as the archetypical great men or great women. There
is nothing wrong per se with charismatic leadership; charisma, when coupled
with thoughtful competence, is better than the magnetic attraction of a powerful
personality who says follow me and then takes you nowhere or, worse, to a
place that you (or the entire world) never wanted or needed to see. Furthermore,
charismatic leaders often get caught up in their own personalities and become
enthralled with themselves. For such people, ego satisfaction becomes a more
powerful driver than any vision of a better future.
The Power of Interdependency
The very best leaders know how to deal with ambiguity; they know how to see
both sides of the situation at hand. That is how they can develop good relations
with diverse groups and individuals. Poor leaders and others who are less
competent than role model leaders do not deal as effectively with ambiguity.
As a result, they come across as indecisive, which in turn confuses the people in
their organization. These followers simply cant tell what their leaders really
want. In real-world organizations, this sort of interpersonal confusion tends
towards the following results:
Discussions end with agreeing to disagree, which is never the right result.
Discussions end with meeting halfway, which is never the optimal result
either. For example, price negotiations almost always end up halfway
between the original price positions. Such compromises are overrated: both
sides lose something, and time has been wasted in the negotiations.
These two engineers decide to apply the reconcile model to seek a better
solution one that has elements of both ideas. They agree that cost reduction
must be an element of the solution, and they also agree that more advanced
technology ought to be an important element. They decide to purchase the most
A Win-Win Process
First
They open their minds to see the problem from the others point of
Second view; they seek to understand by comparing the others beliefs and
principles to their own.
Third
They each take the others side, seeking ways to give expression to
the needs and concerns of the other instead of simply stating and
restating their own positions.
Fifth
Sixth
Together, they select one idea that is different from the original two.
They test this new idea as to whether it is a reconcile that is
acceptable to both.
leadership style will get the best results in a given situation? Which of our best
engineers will we place in charge of a given project? Role model leaders soon
learn that for most important questions, there are no single correct answers. So
instead, they establish the options for accomplishing the tasks at hand; then they
make their choices unencumbered by the need to always choose a single right
answer. They learn to spend their time and effort on a measured, limited number
of possible answers usually three. It is always easier to decide among three
options.
It is also easier to make decisions when three people work together. Two
people can discuss, argue different logics, and have great difficulty deciding
between two right answers to an issue or decision. When a third person is in the
room, that person often listens and hears the two arguments and sees and feels
the argument both logically and emotionally. This third person can then
intervene and raise the level of understanding and decision making to the point
where conclusions can be drawn and decisions can be made from all the
possible answers. This is another useful way of using the reconcile model.
There is another useful skill a tool that is a well-known outcome of the
concept of diversity of thought. That tool is often referred to as diverge /
converge. It is a simple but effective tool for reaching a decision where a
number of alternatives are possible. To illustrate, say that you are seeking an
answer to an important strategic or tactical issue. A good approach is this:
List all possible answers. Take lots of time, for the tendency is to select the
right answers too quickly.
Expand on your or the groups understanding of the rightness of each
answer. Again, take your time to list the pros and cons for each.
After this thorough and disciplined divergence of thinking, start to work on
convergence:
Read and discuss all the divergent information.
Rate each item on the list youve developed on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is
a high degree of rightness and 5 is a low degree. It is often wise to have
each participant do this in a quiet spot where each can study all the pros
and cons.
Collect all the information, measures, and opinions, then converge on the
most right answer together sometimes it will be the one with the highest
score, sometimes not.
This is a simple approach, but it is based on some important principles:
Role model leaders respect the opinions of others and diversity of thought.
Role model leaders are comfortable with ambiguity but also have a passion
for action preceded by systematic thinking.
influence. That is, they strive to increase the number and importance of issues
they can influence successfully. If their influence stops growing, it will
inevitably deteriorate. This may seem odd, but remember that there are many
oppositional forces to change and that those forces are constantly growing. So a
role model leader must expand his influence simply to stay ahead of those
forces.
The final point to be made about prioritizing relates to urgency. Time is
managed best when the manager / leader minimizes less important activities and
focuses mainly on those that are most important and most urgent. However,
many people make the mistake of neglecting the most important, less urgent
things, which often include activities relating to the role model leaders
personal development. The best examples involve learning activities such as
keeping up to date on the latest advances in our own technical specialty and,
importantly, developing ourselves as leaders. These learning activities need to
be a priority.
Another aspect of time management is speed. Todays world is moving more
and more quickly, to the point that speed has actually become a commodity that
the market will pay for. People are not willing to wait for things to just happen.
Those who understand the quickening pace of todays world will have an
advantage in the marketplace.
Many aspiring leaders would agree that speed is important and that so is its
primary measure, which is productivity. But many also confuse saving time with
acting impulsively. That is a mistake: higher productivity is more likely to be
achieved by thinking and by taking the time to consider the best ways to move
forward. Thinking before acting is the best approach to accomplishing the right
things in the shortest time. Such is the magic of front end loading. The very
best project engineers know how important it is to spend considerable time
thinking completely and effectively in the early stages. In this way, wasteful
steps can be eliminated and innovations can be developed. Only then, after they
have committed to a well-considered project design, do they start to spend
money on the work itself. And the work will be completed more quickly the first
time with no need to correct mistakes and repeat the work.
So, you often maximize speed and productivity by going slow until you are
certain it is time to go fast.
Learning from Experience
Everyone knows that experience is a great teacher. Experiences of all kinds
offer us opportunities for learning to become better leaders. There are two
extremes. There are those who spend a career, indeed a lifetime, learning the
same thing over and over again from their experiences. Then there are others, at
the opposite end of the spectrum, who learn more efficiently by developing their
capacity to get the most out of every learning experience they encounter. The
latter people learn more from opportunistic experiences they sometimes
deliberately design such experiences. That is the height of learning effectively,
and it is what role model leaders do.
Those of us who play golf watch professional golfers swing a club and are
inspired to work harder at the game. It is unlikely that watching Rory McIlroy or
even a journeyman pro will raise our functioning capability to professional
levels, but almost certainly we can learn something from the experience of
watching those magnificent swing mechanics. And even when we do not learn to
function on the course as well as we might hope, the experience of watching
will enhance our preparedness, our spirit, our being, and our character and
cause us to be more motivated to improve our functional skill to swing a club
better than before.
Learning from observing can achieve a positive outcome. But learning from
experience is meant to stimulate action. This can be doing something and making
a mistake or doing something right the first time. Many will tell you making
mistakes and learning from those mistakes is the preferred route. This has
always caused me some concern. Of course, making mistakes is a natural
occurrence when taking action in the engineering, scientific, and business
worlds, and coupled with a root cause, analysis and corrective action is a route
to positive learning. But, the preferred route is disciplined, orderly thinking
before taking action and learning from the experience of successful outcomes.
The point here is that learning from experience is itself a leadership skill.
Role model leaders need to demonstrate a passion for doing so. This is the
height of practicing reciprocal maintenance. On a team, if team leaders seek out
learning experiences by observing, listening, interacting, and sensing the
contributions of others who are following in the team process, those followers
will give back to the leaders and see a common purpose in assisting the leaders
in their role.
Learning experiences can and should be designed by both individuals and the
organization. All individuals at all times learn from what they see and do, but
this is an unorganized, ad hoc approach to learning from experience. A better
alternative is to use tools such as the levels of thought to systematically design
learning experiences.
The organization that is encouraging an Everyone a Leader strategy will
design a system that encourages progress in leadership skills and reward
individuals on the basis of their progress. In the high-performance organization,
such systems are very similar to those used in all organizations for encouraging
and measuring the growth of other functional skills (e.g., engineering, marketing,
and so on).
Figure 5.2 Levels of Accomplishment
A recent engineering graduate has just joined a firm. Both the entry-level
engineer and the company expect her to develop as an engineer and as a leader.
We will call the engineer Ashley.
The company assigns Ashley to a project group that is one of a number of
important teams dedicated to building a new plant to produce a new product that
is expected to have a strong impact on the companys fortunes. This is an
important and early opportunity for Ashley, and she knows it.
On that team, Ashley has many opportunities to work one-on-one with the
team leader, Ken. Ken is a role model leader dedicated to ensuring that the team
achieves its goals and to developing the leadership capabilities of his team
members. After some considerable opportunity and time, Ken judges Ashley to
After about a year, the project team meets its goals and is disbanded. Ken, the
project team leader, is asked by the senior project leader to evaluate the
performance of his team members both their functional competence and their
leadership capabilities.
In his evaluations, Ken is critical of two of his team members: they have not
met all their personal objectives and have needed considerable help from
Ashley and Ken in order for the team to stay on track. Also, they have not shown
strong leadership capabilities, especially in terms of self-motivation and work
habits. However, Ken is very pleased with how Ashley has developed. She is
judged to be a highly competent engineer and has demonstrated considerable
potential as a leader. She has taken the time to get to know the people on the
team; she has shown very positive energy and has a tenacious often aggressive
approach to finding ways to get things done. She has often looked for better
ways to do things.
In short, Ken believes that Ashley has demonstrated leadership capability.
She works effectively with others in a change environment; she is doing some
public service work outside the firm; and she is learning about the stakeholders
in the communities near the plant. And, importantly, she is increasingly admired
as a role model leader by a growing number of her peers.
ROLE MODEL LEADER
A few years have passed, and Ashley has continued to perform well as an
engineer and as a member of a number of successful teams. She has been
recognized as a go to person. When a team leader needs to get something done
and done well, they go to Ashley. As a result of her exemplary performance as
an engineer and a developing leader, she is given the opportunity to lead a team
that has just been formed in another department of the company. That department
is developing a new process in a field outside Ashleys functional competence,
so this will be a challenge for her. If she hopes to excel, she will not be able to
rely on her capabilities as an electrical engineer. In this new environment, she
will need to focus on her leadership capabilities. As part of her new
responsibilities, she will need to work with the department head to pick some of
his team members and to develop a set of team objectives.
Ashley consults with other leaders in the company and is able to convince
them to transfer some key people from their departments to her team. She is able
to do this because these leaders recognize that their own people will benefit
from the experience of working with Ashley, who many now recognize as a
strong developmental leader as well as a good coach and role model.
Ashley assembles her team and works with them in a two-day meeting to
craft a set of team and individual objectives. Included in the objectives are
metrics for measuring performance as well as an aggressive schedule for
carrying out the work. When crafting the team objectives, Ashley commits a
significant amount of resources to leadership development. She researches the
subject and consults with others she respects. With the team, Ashley develops a
team mission statement that links its work to the companys vision. This
exercise is much appreciated by the team, for the resulting statement links its
objectives to the needs of the various stakeholders.
Moving forward in time, the team has met all its objectives another success
for Ashley, who is now recognized within the company as a role model leader.
She is now being given more and more leadership responsibilities on larger and
more important teams. She continues to work deliberately on her leadership
skills, character attributes, and purposeful behaviours and as a result she is able
to learn more with each new responsibility. She is respected and admired as a
competent role model leader in the company.
ORGANIZATIONAL LEADER
Ashley has demonstrated great competence as the companys senior leader. She
is greatly admired by the entire company. She has become a legend in her own
time a superordinate leader. She has created a great deal of change most
would say transformational change in many of the companys systems, as seen
by customers, employees, and shareholders. Those changes have grown the
company markedly and in many dimensions.
Ashley has been recognized outside the company as a visionary as a highperformance leader who also serves society in many ways. At the same time,
her character and behaviour are admired as value based and performance based,
not personality based. In fact, many perceive this accomplished leader as
humble and as more interested in service than in herself.
Many inside and outside the company would agree Ashley is a highperformance organizational leader. But Ashley knows that the goal is to achieve
more to reach for higher-performance leadership. Leadership is a
developmental journey during which there is always more to be learned and
more to achieve.
The Development of Tarah, the Aspiring Leader-Engineer
Tarah, a talented engineering graduate, has the ambition to become the
companys chief engineer. This is a highly functional role, one that involves
acting as an internal consultant to all of the companys business leaders. It is an
extremely important role and is rewarded well, financially and emotionally.
Tarah decides to focus on ascending the engineering functional ladder. This
ladder describes the levels she will need to rise through and the competencies
she will have to demonstrate at each rung. But she also buys into the idea that
she will be a better engineer and a better person if she achieves some identity as
a leader that is, if she learns and gains and practises some leadership
capabilities. So she consults the leadership progression hierarchy and
determines to set herself the goal of achieving the competency expressed by the
identity called Developing Leader. She makes this decision based on her
belief that a chief engineer will be of more benefit to the company and to herself
if she shows leadership in a team environment. The alternative to participate
on teams only as required, without a focus on team objectives and on the needs
of others would benefit no one.
So Tarah dedicates time to learning leadership capabilities and demonstrates
them at every opportunity. The CEO often asks her to consider moving up the
leading and leadership ladder. Tarah resolutely declines to do so, pointing out
that her career goal is to be chief engineer. She achieves her goal, and everyone
tells her that she is the best chief engineer the company has ever had. A large
part of her achievement is her always evident and growing leadership
competence.
Tarah and Ashley developed differently: one as a competent leader-engineer,
the other an equally competent engineer-leader. And, each recognized the
importance of becoming more valuable to themselves and their organization
through learning to be more functionally competent in leading and leadership
and their field of expertise.
6 Character Attributes
Skills describe how role model leaders function; character attributes describe
their humanity. Character attributes are the foundation of the role model
leaders social and emotional level of performance. To illustrate this point,
when you first meet someone, you perceive that person as intelligent and
likeable. The first attribute, intelligence, relates to function; the second
attribute, likeability, relates to character. It is largely on the latter trait that you
will base a relationship. Character, then, relates mainly to social and emotional
intelligence and less so to mental intelligence. The latter is what delineates a
leaders functional skills.
In a conventional organization, the engineer doing process work in a
manufacturing plant or design work in an engineering department is dedicated to
achieving objectives. This entails carrying out tasks that will have clear outputs.
Designing a distillation column for a new manufacturing area in a
pharmaceutical company is challenging work, and the engineer and his
supervisor or manager will agree on the expected result within a given time
frame. It is different in the developmental organization, where everyone is
developing leadership competency. The engineer who is designing a distillation
column will be expected to achieve the same results as those in a conventional
managing process, but he will be encouraged to look for ways to carry out the
task in innovative ways by changing things and making them better than the last
time. And in seeking better ways to carry out the functional work, he will also
be seeking better ways to interact with others, including with the supervising
leader. Clearly, then, the leader-engineer will be expected to exhibit strong
interpersonal capabilities along with functional skills. For example, he will be
expected to exhibit the character attribute of tenacity in pursuing a design that is
more efficient and effective than previous ones. The leader-engineer will seek
input from others, and not necessarily in his immediate area perhaps he will
approach the companys marketing people to determine the customers quality
needs. In this way he will be demonstrating respect for the opinions of others.
Also, the leader-engineer will communicate clearly and often with all those
directly engaged in the work and with those who are less engaged but who are
still affected by the work. In short, the leader-engineer in the developmental
organization will demonstrate strong character and humanity as an essential part
of the work.
When I think about people of great character in a work environment, I think
about an engineer I know well, who rose above others equally talented in terms
of skill and functioning ability. Bryan (not his real name) was the research
engineer on a business team I knew well at DuPont Canada. The team was
interfunctional and was comprised of seven highly skilled people. Five were
engineers or scientists; the other two held degrees in English literature and
sociology, respectively. Each member made a diverse but valuable contribution
to the teams work. But that is not the story I want to tell here.
That team had a challenging goal, which was to develop a new (at the time)
specialty fibre for automotive air bags. Our Kingston nylon operation produced
a variety of products, but this one would be unique because often it would make
the difference between life and death in a car crash. And we would be
developing it here in Canada, at DuPont Canadas own research facilities.
The challenges during the early stages were often technical ones, and Bryan
took the lead in meeting them. It was he who provided the team with the muchneeded technology input. The teams marketing person was a talented engineer
as well, as was the finance person, who had come out of the R&D department
many years earlier to become a talented financial analyst. These two team
members were both a challenge and a help to Bryan, because they sometimes
reverted to their engineering expertise and gave advice to him advice that was
sometimes useful, sometimes not. Bryan would listen intently and either accept
the advice or reject it. But he always gave good reasons for rejecting it; he had
great respect for his team members. They sometimes didnt like his answers, but
they were pleased with his attitude.
From the time the team was formed, the other members admired Bryans high
technological competence. They saw him as a humble, quiet, introverted person
with a good sense of humour that only sometimes came out and that was much
appreciated when it did. Like any good comic, he picked times when the team
needed to have its spirits raised.
The teams designated organizational leader encouraged the members to give
Bryan time to speak and participate. A number of the team members were
inclined to talk rather than listen; Bryan was the opposite. But when he did
speak, everyone listened because his contributions were vital to the teams
success. At this point in the products life cycle, there were a multitude of
product and process issues, and he expressed his ideas about them in a way that
benefited the whole team.
Bryan was passionate about his personal goals as part of the team. He knew
that meeting those goals would be important to the teams success, yet he always
communicated to the others that their goals were equally important. At almost
every team meeting, he would connect his personal work to the teams goals.
Everyone felt good after Bryan made a presentation.
Bryan was a master of communication not in quantity, but in quality. His
points were always valid and he knew how to make them clearly. Also, he was
truthful at all times about the technology issues he was dealing with he did not
brag about his successes, nor did he sugarcoat his failures. As a consequence,
the team trusted and respected him for telling it like it is. He had a compelling
way of weaving the personal values that he held for the business into our project
discussions. For example, he once explained to the team that his goal was to
increase the strength of the air bag fibre while reducing the size of the filaments,
while at the same time reminding us that what was important was not the
ultimate lower cost of the stronger fibre but the safety of the people in the
vehicles that used it.
Bryan had great respect for us, our customers, and society, and the team
respected him, trusted him, and learned from him. And probably because of that,
they liked him a great deal. This role model leader of great character inspired
the team with his technology contributions, his actions, and his character. He
contributed greatly to the goals they achieved. Ultimately, his team met all of its
challenges and DuPont Canada became the supplier of a large share of the
worlds airbag nylon.
An aspiring role model leader must develop character attributes if he hopes
to lead himself and thereby learn to lead others. I distinguish between
personality and character. Personality is your visible persona. Shyness,
extroversion, cheerfulness, and charm are all personality traits. Character has
to do with whether you are reputable, admirable, honourable or not.
Character attributes can be learned. For example, you can learn that it is
important for leaders to be able to inspire others. You can then dedicate your
intelligence mental, emotional, social, physical to developing that character
attribute. Having done so, you can apply that attribute to influence others. In the
following pages I discuss those learnable character attributes that best prepare
people to become role model leaders.
Future Looking
A role model leader is an optimist, always looking forward, always seeking a
better future state. The current state is important, but as the ground for
formulating and launching new directions.
Future looking includes the natural or learned capacity to think in the long
term from five to as many as twenty years forward. That is so far into the
future that it is a difficult to be specific, so the role model leader will often
describe a concept to his followers but not its details. His vision or aspiration
is clear enough to provide direction but not specific enough to allow instruction.
So he describes the future in terms that, while deliberately vague, are clear
enough to be perceived as possible. Too many details would be
counterproductive, for the followers would tend to respond by focusing on the
pros and cons of implementation rather than on the potential, future holds. The
role model leader wants to express to his followers that their world can be
better, not to describe what to do to get there. He wants to make it clear to them
how much promise the future holds, not what the future will be in detail.
Some people use the past to extrapolate the future. If as an engineer you have
had five years of relative calm in manufacturing process variables, then the
planner in you will often predict the same for the next one to three years, with
minor variations. The reason for this conservative approach to planning is to
avoid failure. Managers are often risk averse because their job is to control
situations. When managers think ahead, it is in terms of recent past experience.
The role model leader, by contrast, focuses on the better future, not on the
ongoing current state, which is where managers live. In part one, I
distinguished between aspirational and visionary and planning future state
thinking. Each type of thinking is important and needs to be learned by the
aspiring role model leader. In terms of levels of thought, the first is more of a
belief; the second, a concept; the third, much less future oriented and more a
managing action. The benefit of focusing on the future state is that it enables
followers to see a better future. The leader can then influence people to develop
paths to achieve that future state.
Inspiring Others
The ability to inspire others is arguably the most important character attribute of
role model leaders. Inspiring is an action word perhaps the most positive of
all action words.
Inspiring others is a positive, energy-building action. In some ways, it is like
teaching people to breathe. The only difference is that breathing is a natural
action, whereas inspiring others is a deliberate one. When we are inspired by
others, we are moved to believe in those individuals, their messages, their
beliefs. That is inspirations power. The leadership attributes that are capable
of inspiring others include the following:
Willingness to work for a cause.
Positive emotion, passion for something.
Energizing others to work for a cause.
In difficult times, working to create a more positive future while
communicating a message of we will succeed.
A history of success at leading positive change, especially during difficult
times.
It is important to recognize the difference between motivation and
inspiration. Motivation is something we all have; it is what pushes us to do
things. Inspiration is the ability to dramatically influence others, to convince
people to be passionate about positive change. How do we learn the character
attribute of inspiring others? The above list suggests where we can start, for all
of its items can be learned and practised.
and then one day the organization finds out its leader really means
we will steal from this customer, once
then the leader will be viewed as dishonest as not credible and may well
lose the ability to influence and lead. This points to why role model leaders
interact regularly with the people in their organization: to truly understand them,
and they him, so that the values of leader and followers are aligned.
Returning to the honesty triad, we can expand this logical discussion of the
character attribute we call honesty. As noted earlier, the three related ideas that
together define honesty in the role model leader are truth, integrity, and ethical
behaviour. The first two are related to the levels of thought we have referred to
as beliefs and philosophy. The third is related to the third level of thought
principles.
Truth: A belief I and most others hold.
Integrity: A philosophy or set of beliefs we hold to be true.
Ethics: Principles, or guides to action, that I am willing to use as my definition of ethical
behaviour.
handling process. I told him that it would require a significant, perhaps major
innovation. He replied, Let me know what resources you need, and you will get
them, except for more time. Then let me know when you get the job done. The
result was achieved in a different way than Kalev expected, but we let him
know when the problem was solved. He was pleased he was purposeful, he
had no problem with different methods, and he had great respect for people.
Leaders understand that people want indeed, need to be trusted to do the
good and right things. They also know that people want to be held accountable
for the results of their work. Holding people to account for results is a mark of
respect for their capacity to do the good and right things. For role model
leaders, the ideal situation is one in which there is mutual respect for and from
people who are working collectively to achieve a better situation for all. This
mutual respect is achieved when everyone in the organization is engaged in
high-performance work within a high-performance work system.
High-performance work is realized when people work together to solve
problems, respecting one anothers abilities, motives, and spirit. Highperformance workers expect their leaders and managers to trust them to do the
work; to present them with goals, strategies, and a vision; and to provide them
with opportunities to learn the necessary capabilities to do the work effectively.
High-performance workers then expect to be held accountable for their highperformance results. They expect their role model leaders to do different work
than they do, but also expect them to work to the same standards of excellence,
to learn continuously, and to get outstanding results as they influence and inspire
others.
There are people who have squandered the opportunity to earn others
respect. These people have done things to others or to themselves that cause
enough harm that showing respect towards them afterwards is difficult if not
impossible. Many of us, unfortunately, have had the experience of losing respect
for someone.
Unfortunately, I have experienced a few instances when talented engineers
lost the respect of others in the organization. Those situations almost always
involved people taking credit for technical advances that they had not earned.
Often, the cause was emotional or mental pressure on the individual. A scientist
I knew for many years was under personally imposed pressure to succeed after
a series of failures in his research. He took a great idea for the design of an
experiment from a technologist on his team. The experiment was completed and
opened the door for a successful project and a patentable process, and he was
highly praised within the organization. Only later did I discover where the idea
had actually come from and that this scientist had not given that source the credit
for it. This caused me and many others to lose respect for that individual. When
I discussed it with the scientist, he admitted to the failing and corrected the
perception in the organization. He had shown respect for others, albeit later than
that person (or organization) will answer No! to your requests for substantive
change. You cannot be a leader unless you and your followers trust one another.
A leaders role is to provide direction to others and to influence them to make
change sometimes major change. Until you have the trust of those you are
trying to influence, the change you want to make cannot happen. That is because
followers decide to follow or not based on whether they trust you.
Having said all that, a person can learn to be trustworthy. The following list
might provide guidance on how an aspiring leader can develop trustworthiness.
A role model leader who is trusted will be guided by these principles:
Do what you say you will do.
Be reliable over a long period.
Be recognized as someone who shares successes, not just failures.
Get trust by giving trust.
Develop a history of correct decisions and of getting results from them.
A CEO-engineer of an electronics company I know was judged by senior
managers in his company to be untrustworthy. The company results were poor
and deteriorating rapidly. This continued until the CEO recognized the
prevailing opinion of the managers. He took action, by structuring a mentorship
process with a retired CEO he knew and respected. Together they reinforced the
importance of learning skills and character attributes for leading others,
including trustworthiness. The companys results began to improve as the trust
between the CEO and others improved.
It is important, but also difficult, to always do what you say you will. The
importance is obvious, but the difficulty is equally necessary to understand.
Leaders are engaged in changing things, not in doing the same things over and
over again. Their task is not to control or stabilize things but to change them. So
the possibility always exists that leaders will influence people to make changes
that have unforeseen negative consequences. When that happens, the people
involved and observers on the sidelines may interpret this as the leader not
doing what he said he would do. This in turn may cause a withdrawal from the
emotional bank account of trust between leaders and followers. Is this
possibility a good reason not to strive for change? No! The role model leaders
will have prepared themselves they will have developed an inventory of skills
and various character attributes that will enable them to recover from the
setback and regain the balance in the emotional bank account.
The aspiring leaders will have reached the goal of role model leadership
when they have a history of correct decisions, positive changes, and
achievement of results. Recovery is always possible from bad decisions and
poor results, but not from a long and consistent history of negative results. That
is the reality. The way to ensure a history of right decisions, right results, and
positive change is to never stop learning the skills and character attributes
required by role model leaders, along with the behaviours we will be
discussing later on.
Effective Communication
All role model leaders have learned to communicate efficiently and effectively.
You will markedly improve your chances of influencing people in an
organization if you are recognized within it as an excellent communicator. When
a leader communicates well with all employees, misinformation and rumours
are much reduced. Either of these cause low productivity as well as less
focused, less purposeful behaviour among the organizations people.
Role model leaders understand why it is important to be an excellent
communicator, and how best to communicate what is important to communicate.
The audience for the role model leaders communications includes those people
they have determined they want to influence as well as any other stakeholders
they need to influence as part of the change process. There is a large body of
literature on how to communicate efficiently and effectively. I would only add
here a few practices that have helped me to be a better communicator:
Communicate the important message often, looking for ways to vary the
delivery to keep it fresh.
Be authentic, match your actions to the message.
Look for opportunities to deliver the message face-to-face rather than not.
It is vital that the role model leaders be recognized as great communicators.
That leaders credibility will be much stronger if they can describe clearly the
future state being advocated; deliver the message with clarity and passion; and
answer questions about the direction with equal clarity and passion. If the
message is inconsistent, if the leaders cannot deal with questions and
controversy, if they are unable or unwilling to deliver the change message
clearly and often, shared purpose will be elusive.
But there is another dimension to role model leaders communications: the
message must be more than functional that is, clear and purposeful; it must
also resonate at the emotional level, for it is this second level that inspires
followers to do extraordinary things that they perhaps would not have done if
they had made their choice to follow based solely on logical arguments.
Is this a form of selling? Is it charisma? A gift for speaking well is a valuable
asset, but that gift is not the subject of this book. Certainly, being able to
perform like Sir Laurence Olivier at the speakers podium would be strongly
desirable and it is perhaps even learnable. But gifts like those do not in
themselves make a role model leader, however helpful they might be. More
important is for role model leaders to be aware of their listeners needs in terms
of how the message is delivered and to tune their communication style to
maximize their receptiveness. No opportunity can be missed to convey a
message in a style that matches the audiences needs. The recipients of the
message may be influenced by a quiet style delivered to small groups, or by the
opposite a stage show where the message is delivered as theatre. (Steve Jobs
product roll-outs were a superb example of the latter.)
Role model leaders need to be capable of delivering messages that meet the
needs of their followers. While words are obviously important, other things,
such as body language, can be very powerful. The great actors know this
Robert De Niro and his peers can move us with a shrug or a wry smile.
Social Well-Being
Role model leaders characters are directed at seeking whole-self benefits.
By this I mean that leaders prepare themselves to interact constantly with all
elements of society, inside and outside work, including family. Much has been
made by many about life balance that is, about balancing work, family, and
recreation. No one can say precisely what balance is best for someone else;
only individual leaders can decide for themselves.
A role model leader puts effort into enhancing family harmony. This relates
to both the amount of time and the quality of that time. Growth in personal and
family harmony contributes greatly to a role model leaders capacity to serve
others effectively.
Networking with other leaders and capable people is a means for role model
leaders to learn from and to teach others. Professional associations, think tanks,
and self-initiated forums all provide opportunities for networking of this kind. I
think of my own experience as a member of the Canadian Chemical Producers
Association. This was a group of leaders of small, medium, and large Canadian
chemical companies. The associations work was rewarding and fun. I had the
opportunity to learn from a diverse group of thinkers and to offer my companys
functional services to much smaller, embryonic companies that served the
industry and the country. The most rewarding of these experiences were the ones
where these embryonic companies had great technologies and a great value
proposition to offer society and thereby improve the lives of others. But the
embryonic company was lacking some technical expertise or other resource, and
we could provide it and improve the industry in so doing.
All role model leaders are driven to serve society. There are many ways and
many opportunities to give life to that character attribute, which is learnable.
The customer and the shareholder / owner are important albeit unique elements
of society, and providing service to those is understood even in conventional
organizations. The aspiring developmental organization sees great mutual
7 Purposeful Behaviour
Behaviour is the final element in the triad of capabilities that aspiring leaders
must learn in order to prepare themselves for role model leadership. A leaders
behaviour is a function of motivation and style.
Motivation
To learn the required skills and character attributes described in earlier sections
of this book requires considerable self-motivation and will. This wilfulness to
behave as a role model leader expresses itself as what I call purposeful
behaviour. Behaving in a reactive or ego-driven way is not purposeful.
People can be inspired and influenced by others to do things and to do them
in certain ways, but they must motivate themselves to behave in certain ways.
For example, parents and perhaps other role models can influence or inspire a
young person to go to university and study engineering, but that young person
must motivate herself to study hard and become a graduate engineer. In the same
way, people must motivate themselves to exert the mental energy to learn the
skills and character attributes required to become competent leaders capable of
influencing others.
Reactive behaviour occurs when aspiring leaders respond to external stimuli
that are not totally aligned with their own values. Some examples: special
interest groups or particular individuals may demand that you as a leader-
engineer or your organization act in a certain manner; you may be tempted by the
allure of an easier but unethical means for achieving your organizations
environmental remediation goals. Leaders who take the reactive route even if
it is just sometimes are demonstrating to their followers that they are not
developing themselves as role models. And importantly, those followers will
often be confused about their leaders intentions because they will have learned
to expect that external stimuli will come along and change their leaders
expressed intentions again and again.
Ego-driven behaviour occurs when aspiring leaders focus on selfsatisfaction. These leaders do things that meet their own needs rather than the
needs of others. An example of this is a leader-engineer who takes credit for the
ideas and work of others and uses his success to enhance his own reputation.
Another example would be an aspiring leader who takes the organization in a
direction that does not reach for transformational goals and who is satisfied
with easier, safer change even while others in the organization are developing
themselves and their teams by reaching for goals that will grow the organization
and benefit others, even though risking failure. Yet another example is a project
leader who pushes for her own approach to solve a problem and rejects others
approaches without discussion or investigation. These are examples of poor
leaders. Unfortunately, all of us have observed talented and skilful people who
have chosen to benefit themselves by behaving in ego-satisfying ways. People
who demonstrate this behaviour can severely damage the careers and even the
lives of others. The worldwide mortgage meltdown of 2008 is an outstanding
example of this the worlds economy is still recovering, and only slowly, from
the ego-driven greed of others.
The best-known proponent of the philosophy of service is Robert Greenleaf,
author of the 1970 essay The Servant as Leader.1 This essay is often quoted,
although his ideas were not new even in 1970. Indeed, the philosophy of service
by leaders goes back to very ancient civilizations and religions. Even so,
Greenleaf provided a very valuable teaching just prior to the 1980s and the rise
of democratic models of leadership. I do not fully accept all aspects of
Greenleafs model of service, largely because of my perception that it distances
the leader from being in the work of the organization, but that is not so
important in the context of this discussion.
The developmental leadership model presented in this book calls for us to
take action to do work to improve other peoples lives by working to make
things better. It calls for individuals to exert mental energy to develop
themselves throughout their lives. Developmental role model leaders strive to
nourish their enterprises; they purposefully wilfully do the right things for
themselves and for their stakeholders.
Leadership Styles
Before I describe the leadership style model in more detail, lets summarize
the key points that define the challenge for the aspiring role model leader:
Leadership style is extremely important and it helps define the leadership
identity of the individual.
Leadership styles can be learned and practised. How well they are learned
and practised depends on how well the aspirant is learning and growing his
or her competence as a role model leader.
Role model leaders do not deny their natural dominant identity, but they learn
alternative styles in order to enhance their ability to do the work to achieve
positive change.
When taking the expected thoughtful, purposeful approach to a given situation
and / or cultural challenge, the role model leader must make a choice: utilize
his or her dominant style, or adopt a different leadership style temporarily.
As noted earlier, the components of the leadership style model reflect four
archetypal behaviours. Each of these behaviours is discussed below.
THE AUTHORITARIAN
This archetypal leader influences people by applying power and authority. This
authority may be rooted in the leaders position in a hierarchy, or it may be
vested in that person by the other people in the organization. In other words, it
can result from action by the leader or from action by the people in the
organization.
The authoritarian leader in our model is not a dictator. Dictators use force,
often violent force, to accomplish their objectives. Authoritarian leaders, by
contrast, influence others through the power of persuasion. The purposeful
behaviour of the authoritarian leader is coupled with a powerful confidence that
he is the most competent person to make the important decisions relative to
organizational values, strategy, and action. Less commonly, the people in the
organization decide to give significant authority to a leader because the situation
requires rapid decision making. An example of this would be a crisis in a
company that can best be addressed by a particular competent leader with the
capability to make all the decisions. Most people would associate this style
with ego-driven motivation. But this style can also be motivated by service, that
is, by a purpose beyond self.
For example, an army general who needs to rapidly capture ground from the
enemy will not necessarily be concerned about the immediate wants and needs
of others. Instead, he will act purposefully on the premise that the action will
serve society and create positive change. He will be concerned about the state
of readiness of his assets and people, and he will have prepared them for an
attack. He will not accept anything other than full acceptance of his orders. This
Organizations in extreme crisis, or those that have had extreme change thrust
upon them, often benefit from a strong-willed and competent authority figure.
Such an organization can benefit from a leader whose strength of character and
undeniable skills are attuned to the reality of the crisis and who steps forward to
take charge. Similarly, there will be followers who recognize that the situation
demands that they step forward and place their trust in this leader. So there are
situations where an organization and its stakeholders can benefit from
authoritarian leadership.
The term power based is often used to describe this style of leadership in
the sense that all power in the organization is in the hands of the leader.
Unfortunately, the word power has become demonized in todays leadership
practice that places a high value on collaboration. The reality is that all leaders
seek the power to influence others to change and that there are many examples of
positive results being generated from the use of power. Power, then, can be a
positive thing. Yet the fact remains that authoritarian leaders give orders without
attempting to inspire others or influence them with logical argument.
The behaviours of an authoritarian leader include the following traits. First
and foremost, she does it all by declaring what, when, where, why, and how
things will be done, with little input from the group. She is the singular force in
the group. Her every action is designed to maximize her authority and personal
influence within the group. That groups goals and objectives are based on the
leaders defined needs in the given situation.
A unique trait of authoritarian leaders is that they tend to look outside the
group or organization for alliances and partnerships. There are several reasons
why. First, this sort of leader does not want to share influence or decisionmaking authority with those in the group, within which he has based his
leadership on the authority of one. Also, he will use outside experts as an
opportunity to gain capability or to share any failure. Authoritarian leaders are
not stupid: they want to make good, purposeful decisions, so they often seek
outside counsel who, not coincidentally, can also serve as scapegoats as
necessary. An authoritarian leaders worst fear is of being solely blameworthy
for failure, for this would destroy his reputation as well as his ego. So he takes
steps to ensure that there will be others to share responsibility or blame for any
failure.
So authoritarian leaders behave in certain ways, and some get positive
results while others do not. As with all leadership styles, the results depend on
the situation and on the culture of the organization.
Many people considered Steve Jobs of Apple to be an authoritarian. Many
successful founder-led organizations in the IT field are authoritarian in nature.
Dick Cheney in the George W. Bush White House was an authoritarian leader.
You will be able to think of many others.
A final important point: each of the leadership styles discussed in this book
The administrative leadership style is based on the power vested in rules and
policies. It is based on efficiency on rapid, low-cost decision making. Under
the authoritarian style, the individual leader is the instrument that exercises
power; in the administrative style, the instruments are organizations rules,
policies, and norms, which are in the hands of the administrator leader.
During our discussion of the authoritarian style, I commented on the common
bias against the word power. Here, in talking about the administrative style,
the common bias today is often against rules. Many people reject a leader
who believes that rules are a legitimate basis for leading. Yet we see rules
being applied everywhere, and legitimately so.
Man is born free, yet is everywhere in chains.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Our lives are often regulated by rules by speed limits, tax rates, office
hours, and so on. All of these rules have been established by leaders and
accepted by society. Indeed, rules can bring out the best in people. Tight budgets
often make people more creative when it comes to changing things, cutting costs,
and getting positive results.
Another characteristic of the administrative style is that it tends to subject
people to strict controls. The administrator-type leader believes in carefully
thought out rules and policies and is inclined to set rigid standards and measures
to control her followers actions. Such a leader influences people to carry out
their work in precise, specific ways, believing that this will ensure reliable and
precise results.
A good example of a situation where a pure administrative style would be
appropriate is when hazardous chemicals are being handled. Clearly, the leader
will want to influence people to accept carefully crafted rules and procedures
and to implement them to the letter. Generally, safety policies require strong
rules and procedures.
The archetypical administrator leader will have people and followers in the
organization who are highly competent functionally. This is necessary because
the instruments this leader applies rules and policies are bureaucratic by
The organizer-leader gets results through the actions of inspired people. The
authoritarian leader does not need inspired people, only followers who will do
what is asked. The administrator leader does not need inspired people, only
functionally capable people who follow rules and policies. You will learn next
that the coach leader finds ways to inspire people to find their better selves in
order to get results. Each of these leadership styles influences people to get
results, but they do so in very different ways.
The organizer is dedicated mainly to influencing people to work in groups in
a disciplined and systematic way. A business organization led by such a person
has groups and teams everywhere both expert functional teams and
interfunctional business teams. These groups and teams do both strategic and
tactical work. They participate fully in the organization through leading,
managing, and planning. The organizer is a leader of leaders and is willing to let
others lead. This leader of leaders is analogous to an orchestra conductor.
Everyone in the orchestra is a competent functional person and leader of self but
is inspired and led by the organizer-leader.
The emphasis on working in groups gives many people the opportunity to
learn more about both leadership and followership. The organizer leader
teaches the people in her organization, providing them with the opportunity and
responsibility to understand why it is important to develop leadership skills as
well as how they can do so. The organizer influences people to do their work
both strategic and tactical by structuring the work into coherent processes as
well as into sets of processes called systems. The result is a disciplined,
systematic approach to doing work and achieving success.
I came to know a large manufacturing company in the automotive parts
industry; at one point the prevailing market conditions required them to find
ways to reduce internal costs. Instead of adopting an authoritarian leadership
style and arbitrarily reducing costs, they opted for a strong emphasis on the
organizer style. This resulted in a company-wide initiative to redesign key
operating processes and thereby reduce their infrastructure costs.
This is an example of an organizer-leader who decided to change the
companys cost structure at a time of crisis by mobilizing the people into teams
that were accountable for all cost elements. These teams were directed by the
overall purpose as described clearly by the organizer. Each team was inspired
by that person to share in the overall objective. And the organizer was involved
in the work by playing a functional role as well as a business and a leadership
role.
The organizer style of leadership is highly democratic. The organizer
establishes the companys direction as well as the purpose for the work of the
various teams. She then ensures that the whole organization is operating
harmoniously. At the same time, all the people in the organization will be
consulted in all aspects of the work and at all stages. The organizer is looking
for the most effective means to achieve her vision of the future. She knows that
there are many ways to achieve success; she also knows whether the people in
the company are capable functionally and whether they have the necessary
leadership skills to achieve the goals that have been outlined for them.
This style of leadership does not absolve the leader from accountability for
the decisions made. The organizer consults, and she allows teams both to follow
direction and to help craft it, but she reserves important decisions for herself
and will certainly have 51 per cent of the vote in key decisions. So this is
democracy, yes, but the future state is still directed by this leader of leaders.
Organizers are sometimes referred to as process leaders. However, that
term is often used to suggest that such leaders are more interested in processes
than in results. That is far from true. The organizer believes strongly in
following a disciplined approach that involves accumulating detailed
knowledge before any action is taken. The result is very likely to be that
decisions are implemented better and more quickly than otherwise. This
process-oriented, front-end-weighted approach results in high-quality decisions
in the run-up stages before the project is actually implemented. It also means
that fewer mistakes reveal themselves once implementation starts. The optimum
approaches have all been developed before any expensive implementation steps
are taken.
A good example of an organizer-leader is Jack Welch, former CEO of
General Electric (GE), especially in the later stages of his career. He engaged
people in learning to be leaders, and he did so in very disciplined and
systematic ways that enabled people to develop themselves through experience.
In addition, there was no question in anyones mind at GE that Jack Welch was
the chief architect of the future state for the company. He was an inspiring,
visionary, process-oriented leader who got results.
In summary, the organizer creates an effective set of processes, systems, and
structures. She ensures that the people in the organization are competent; that
they have considerable self-leading capability; and, importantly, that they are
inspired to play active roles in leading the work to achieve the future state that
their leader has crafted for them.
THE COACH
PART THREE
Even Hollywood could not have embellished the story of Eleuthre Irne du
Pont. He was a French immigrant to the United States at the height of the French
Revolution; he was a refugee from oppression who had a passion to start a new
life and a successful company. His story is unique in many ways, in part because
of his entrepreneurship and that of the company that still bears his name. His is a
story of role model leadership and the founding of a high-performance business
organization.
In Delaware in the early nineteenth century, while E.I. du Pont was
establishing his business, he began to develop a values-based organizational
culture. His early leadership in that regard has inspired generations of DuPont
employees to this day.
The company that E.I. du Pont founded grew rapidly and succeeded quickly
indeed, it became one of the most successful enterprises in North American
history. The company has survived and prospered for more than 200 years,
which makes it one of the oldest in the world. Of course, as with all enterprises,
it has encountered disappointments and failures. But its successes have been
legendary.
It was Pierre S. du Pont, a descendant of the founder, along with Alfred
Sloan of General Motors, who largely invented professional managership and
strategic business centres. That model has been the standard design for
businesses ever since. And both of these business leaders were engineers.
But there are other aspects to this story. Before fleeing France, E.I. du Pont
had been the assistant to Antoine Lavoisier, long regarded as the founder of
modern chemistry. In North America, du Pont would base his business on his
practical knowledge of that science. He started by producing and selling
gunpowder obviously, an extremely hazardous material requiring deep
technical knowledge. His technical skills and the values on which he built them
would spawn a culture of invention and innovation. Between 1950 and 1970, its
scientists and technologists would develop an unprecedented number of classes
of materials essentially, the DuPont Company invented the polymer industry.
And it continues to invent new products. To this day, DuPont refers to itself as a
Science Company.
The DuPont Company can be commended for many things: for helping to
invent the modern corporation; for developing high-performance systems for
materials innovation; and for showing others how to develop ideas into
inventions and then into products that satisfy customers. But perhaps its most
important contribution to corporate history was that it was among the first
The organization has created and sustained a harmonious level of service for
all stakeholders.
Productivity and quality measures are all higher than in other business
organizations and are growing sustainably with no wasteful processes or
outcomes.
Earlier, I described the company founded by E.I. du Pont as a highperformance business organization. Does this mean the company meets all the
criteria described above and that it meets its targets all the time? The simple
and obvious answer is no. The metrics listed above are aspirational. They are
meant to clarify the meaning of a high-performance business organization and
what it hopes to achieve and to suggest how it can set out to become one.
I know the DuPont Company very well; I know that its people strive to
improve all the time. And I know that there are times when its people, including
me when I worked there, make mistakes that result in setbacks in productivity,
quality, and other measures. But when mistakes are made, DuPonts people
recognize them and take disciplined, systematic actions to rectify them and
continue moving forward. That, quite simply, is what developmental
organizations do and what separates them from others. And in doing so in
continuously striving for perfection as the target they rapidly improve the lives
of others and themselves.
All engineers and scientists know that there is nothing more practical than a
theory believed.
9 Sustainable Growth
What this means is that all successful business enterprises need to find ways
to grow, or they will die. Maturity cannot be sustained, and neither can zerogrowth operations. This is largely because world-class competitors will grow
and take customers away from the business.
Growth is a mentality created by the companys leaders.3
That is, the successful leaders of these world-class business enterprises are
the intuitive starting points for a growth strategy. It is their expectation their
truth if you will that growth will happen in their business enterprises.
Define a growth trajectory so that everyone in the company can understand it.4
That is, these world-class leaders all believe that growth is a responsibility
shared by everyone. As we say here in this book over and over again
Everyone a Leader, for superordinate success. Charan and Tichy and many
others who write about successful business enterprises know that the goal is
growth grow or die and they also know that the role of business leaders is
to grow their enterprises.
In my world, the target concept for all people is Everyone a Leader, and the
defining characteristic of leading is influencing others to make positive
change. The irreducible outcome of these future states is rapid, sustainable
growth, and the expected additive outcome is the satisfaction of all
stakeholders, that is, sustainable development. And all of this results in a
sustainable and responsible business enterprise one that, as it grows,
improves the lives of all people.
True leadership is about creating domains in which we continually learn and
become more capable of participating in our own unfolding future.
Joseph Jaworski5
when the outcomes expected are not well understood by the people who have
been tasked with achieving them.
The measures of success for a mission of rapid, sustainable growth are best
described in terms of productivity, quality, and service.
Productivity is a generic measure of output / input. Inputs are, basically, the
actual things and processes that people work on, along with the energy they
exert on these. Outputs are the results of the work they do. Quality is the generic
measure of perfection. Specific measures of quality most often involve
calculating the reduction of waste from value creation and value realization
processes in other words, less waste means higher quality. For example, in a
manufacturing process, a common measure of quality is first pass yield,
defined as the amount of 100 per cent acceptable product produced in a
manufacturing process the first time through, with no need for recycling or
rework. Service measures refer to key performance indicators of stakeholder
needs satisfaction. For example, in a commercial business, a common customer
service measure is repeat sales to a given customer. A satisfied customer will
buy again and again.
An important point: role model leaders act rapidly and competently when
growing their people, just as they do when growing goods and services. It is
people who do the work of growing things; but people also need to do the work
of growing themselves. Here we are referring to the growth of leadership skills,
character attributes, and purposeful behaviours, in addition to the growth of
functional expertise in engineering, marketing, manufacturing, accounting, and so
on. For an organization to grow, its people need to develop and grow their
organizational capabilities. I discuss these in the following pages.
more beneficial than its predecessor to the organization and its highperformance work system. Furthermore, each requires an increasing level of
leadership competence and mental energy.
This first level of shared purpose is best discussed in terms of the following:
internal stakeholder satisfaction (i.e., that of employees) and external
stakeholder satisfaction (i.e., that of customers and society).
Internal Stakeholders Needs Satisfaction
The internal stakeholders are the people of the organization and that means all
the people, whether they are at the top of any hierarchy or at the bottom, and
whether they are engaged in leadership, manufacturing, marketing, research, or
any other function.
The most important need for the organizations people is meaningful work.
This is followed by reward and recognition for the work they do.
The reward (or pay) for the work is satisfying to employees when they judge
it to be fair compensation for the work done. In this regard, fairness is a function
of the personal values the beliefs, philosophy, and principles of the
individual employee. Most employees, however, make this judgment based on
comparisons with other people both inside and outside their organization. It is
common practice for business organizations to measure the pay rates of other
organizations, and leaders do this with great transparency so that their
employees will perceive their compensation as fair.
Many employees consider recognition for work done to be as important as
pay that is, as long as their pay meets their needs. When pay is inadequate as
perceived by the employee, recognition may become of secondary importance,
though it will still be very important. There is nothing more satisfying to an
individual or a team than for an admired leader to say thank you, good
work, we appreciate your effort. This is a synergistic event: the employee is
being satisfied, and the leader is growing as a role model in the eyes of the
employee.
Reward and recognition satisfy important needs for employees. But even
more important to them is meaningful, challenging work. In conventional
organizations, a common fallacy among managers, leaders, and followers is that
some people just want to do the work, get paid, and go home. In my experience,
this is not true. These people are not being given the right work, in the right
way, in the right place. An important challenge for leaders is to satisfy the
unrealized needs of individual employees.
Meaningful work, whether recognized or not, is work that challenges
employees mental, emotional, and social intelligences. People want to engage
in work that requires them to expend energy. There is nothing more damaging to
the human condition than boring, monotonous work.
People want to better themselves and serve others. The best highperformance work systems recognize this and challenge their employees to
develop new capabilities. They also set goals for employees that can be and are
measured in value-add terms that is, value-add for customers and for society.
This includes productivity measures such as delivery-time improvement for
customers; quality measures such as the amount of material manufactured within
customers specifications; and service measures such as reductions in emissions
and waste materials released into the environment.
External Stakeholders Needs Satisfaction
Many organizations, regrettably, make little effort to seek out the needs and
opinions of external stakeholders beyond the minimum that is, beyond
communicating with customers as necessary. Many organizations routinely
ignore societal stakeholders, such as the communities around their facilities,
plants, and offices.
These comments may sound extreme, but they reflect my experience, which is
that some companies are oblivious to the needs of their external stakeholders
beyond the requirements of satisfying either customers or the ego needs of the
organization. So, I next illustrate what I mean by satisfying the needs of all
external stakeholders.
Soft drink manufacturers are in business to improve the lives of people. So
are the operators of medical clinics. That is the purpose of all businesses. Their
products and services and all other outputs are directed mainly at satisfying
customers wants and needs. Those who buy a soft drink are seeking a taste
experience that will improve their lives at least at that moment. The medical
clinic is improving perhaps even saving the lives of its customers. Each in
its own way is improving its customers lives.
The workers in the bottling plant that makes the soft drinks receive pay for
their services. Clearly, this improves their lives and the lives of their
dependents. The same applies for the employees of the medical clinic and for
every other business.
Then there are the people beyond the customers and employees that is, the
communities affected by these businesses. It must be the purpose and intent of
the business organization to improve society. For a business not to have that
goal would be sheer folly a business, after all, can continue to exist only with
societys permission. Even the most backward society has the power to destroy
a business by resorting to punitive laws or by giving way to its citizens
activism.
And the final stakeholders to be considered are, of course, the owners that
is, those customers of the business or highly motivated members of society or
sometimes employees who have provided the means (typically money) to start
and sustain the business. Clearly, the owners will expect their lives to be
improved by the organizations actions as well as by the results it obtains. For
profit-seeking enterprises, this, of course, is measured by financial returns. But
the concept of return on investment (ROI) also applies to not-for-profit
organizations, which look for their investment to cause certain effects a
principal one being the happiness of the donors, who are special stakeholders at
not-for-profit organizations. A related ROI for not-for-profit donors is the
emotional satisfaction of doing the right thing.
Stakeholders Loyalty
As I have said repeatedly, every business exists in order to serve people,
specifically its stakeholders. A competent business organization succeeds at this
and strives constantly to succeed even better to delight its stakeholders, if I
may put it that way. When stakeholders are delighted with the performance of a
business, they become loyal to it not just satisfied, but deeply loyal.
Loyalty is a powerful word, and a business that has been able to inspire it is
in an enviable position. When a businesss stakeholders are satisfied enough
that they are loyal, the competition becomes less relevant. As an example,
consider the customer stakeholder. In a normal business relationship, customers
compare the products and services they receive from Company A with those
being offered by Companies B, C, D, and so on. A customer who is delighted
with the products and services of Company A will feel less need to investigate
those of competitors. Instead, that customer will vest any need for change in
Company A, fully expecting it to continue to outdistance the competition. That
is, this customer fully expects Company A to demonstrate not only that it is able
to provide the best, most satisfying products and services but also that it is a
high(er)-performance company. This reflects the customers belief that
Company A has leaders who will change its outputs in ways that will justify
continued loyalty.
As an organization seeks loyalty from customers, its high-performance
leaders influence it to proactively develop new and improved products and
services for the customer, without that customer having to ask. They also
provide customers with the very best information about their own customers. In
other words, they partner with their customers, helping them find new business
opportunities.
Loyalty between customers and the business organization is possible only
when role model leaders exist in great numbers within the latter. Role model
leaders are continuously improving their company, regenerating it when
necessary in order to sustain the loyalty of the customer base. The leaders of a
high-performance organization, as they seek loyalty from customers, influence
their organization to innovate continuously, to factor their customers into all
11 Viability
list customers. And the organization will also often offer preferred pricing.
A values-based partnership creates innovative opportunities that add value
for both partners. A harmonious, trusting relationship establishes, in effect, a
new enterprise that works on and exploits entrepreneurial opportunities in the
collective value chain of activities. Leaders in the two partnering businesses
work together on those opportunities. In this values-based partnership, each
partner has confidence in the role model leadership of the other.
When the business organization has a harmonious relationship with its
owners, those owners get a rapid, high return on their invested money and the
business acquires an ongoing resource that is essential for success. Owners are
a unique customer of the business organization. Most investors recognize that the
best action a business can take is to develop competent, future-looking leaders
that is, role model leaders who aspire to and are capable of developing an
innovative high-performance business organization.
Organizing Around Value-Add Processes
Stephen (not his real name) was a very good engineer. He had been an excellent
student during his university days and after graduation he joined a small machine
manufacturing company, SmallCo, where his talents were highly valued. He
contributed much to the company, and he, in turn, always said that he learned
how to be a better engineer at SmallCo. Unfortunately, family issues required
that he move to a different city, and he left that company.
He was recruited to head the engineering division of LargeCo, a much bigger
company that manufactured heavy machinery. He always said he was lucky to
have been offered that position, but the industry by then knew he was a talented
engineer and leader.
Stephen soon noticed that LargeCo was not nearly as successful as SmallCo:
by almost all productivity and quality measures it was a weaker company.
LargeCo had two distinct parts: about half its people and other resources were
directed at a single large-volume product (product A); the other half were
directed at seven much smaller-volume products (products B to H).
Stephen also learned quickly that LargeCos engineers worked in a very
different way than SmallCos. At SmallCo, the work was organized by a valueadd process and it had been organized that way for years. Each job was broken
down into specific steps, and then competent people were assigned to those
steps. That system worked well.
By contrast, work was carried out at LargeCo according to a structure. The
much larger engineering division he had joined was a freestanding unit that was
similar to other functional units such as human resources, R&D, finance, and
accounting. Also, LargeCo was broken down into strategic business units
(SBUs), and each SBU contained various marketing and manufacturing people
and assigned representatives from the various functional units. The heads of the
functional units managed administration, pay, and benefits of the functional
people in the SBU, but the SBU heads managed the work of the functional
people in the SBU.
This was a conventional structure: the SBU as an interfunctional business
team. The leaders of the SBUs told Stephen that the role of companys functional
organizations was to provide competent expertise to the SBUs and to serve the
needs of customers as defined by the SBUs leaders.
This was quite different from his experience at SmallCo, but he understood
that LargeCos intention was to stock each SBU with the required skills.
When he discussed this with his new co-workers in the engineering division,
they seemed quite content, and they understood that their job was to satisfy the
needs of the SBU manager. Stephen was impressed with their work they were
highly skilled engineers. However, many pointed out that the rigid structure
often made collaboration more difficult and actions more time consuming.
Stephen was troubled the differences between LargeCo and SmallCo went
beyond those you might expect to result from company of that size. At SmallCo,
the manager had always been reminding him that his role was to serve
customers, not the manager or the SBU. At SmallCo, needs had been determined
by talking to the sales representatives and sometimes to the external customers
directly. Once the engineering work required to satisfy the customers had been
determined, that work was mapped out step by step in way that would maximize
the value-add. These steps were then assembled into logical value-add chains
(VACs). Finally, engineering people were assigned to do the work as outlined
by the VACs. In this way, the work needed to satisfy the companys customers
was matched to people who were competent to do the work.
During Stephens early days with LargeCo, he talked many times with the
president who had hired him. At one point, he discussed an idea he had for
improving the effectiveness of his engineering division. Intrigued, the president
asked Stephen to expand his idea and make specific recommendations before he
got caught up in the present system.
Stephen asked two other experienced engineers to help, and they got to work.
They met with the SBU managers and determined the specific expectations of
these important people. He learned that the expectations placed on the assigned
engineering division people varied widely from one business to another.
Product As SBU leader required his assigned engineer to be primarily an
expert in machine maintenance technology and practice. The seven smaller
SBUs needed a wide variety of capabilities: one SBU needed the assigned
engineer to be a capital project manager, another needed the assigned engineer
to do considerable engineering design work, and others placed different
emphasis on various engineering skills. But what really surprised Stephen was
that a number of SBUs were asking their assigned engineers to carry out a
Inputs are the people, the raw materials, and the hard and soft assets
associated with the business organization. Outputs are the products of the work
done on those inputs. Later I will discuss this in more detail. For now, lets
simply refer to this concept as The Guppy, because the diagram for it looks
something like a fish.
The fish is a very old creature in evolutionary terms. So is the idea, in
business terms, of value-add. Whenever someone launched a discussion of The
Guppy at DuPont Canada, we knew we were about to engage in a discourse on
functional effectiveness and value-add and that the issues on the table would
also include substantive discussion of organizational effectiveness and
leadership.
The concept of value-add has a strong impact on our understanding of
business leadership. All businesses, profit or not-for-profit, are built around the
idea of adding value.
For example, a mining company starts with a stretch of bush or mountainside,
mines it, and transforms it into raw ore chunks of rock and dirt that sometimes
contain only a few percent of metal. A milling company then takes this raw ore,
processes it, and transforms it into a high-grade concentrate that contains a much
higher percentage of metal. A steel company then takes this high-grade
concentrate, processes it, and transforms it into steel. A manufacturer takes that
steel, processes it, and transforms it into rods, beams, plates, and fasteners. A
construction company then takes those rods, beams, plates, and fasteners,
assembles them, and transforms them into an office tower.
We can see from the above example that adding value is rarely a single-step
process. It almost always entails multiple steps that are linked together to form a
value-add process or chain. The output of a given step is the input for the next,
and so on.
Lets further our understanding of value-add and its importance to
organizations by considering the task of producing an automobile. It takes
countless inputs to produce an automobile on an assembly line. A very
incomplete list includes the auto parts themselves, the fasteners, the various
pieces of equipment, and even robots. And those are just the physical assets
the things that are required before any work can be done. The outputs are the
assembled automobiles. The work includes all the actions that people take to
manipulate those inputs until the result is the finished product, the automobile.
Every step in any functional process manufacturing, marketing, R&D, and
so on relies on a multitude of value-add steps. To thoroughly understand any
one of these functional processes, we have to break down the process into its
value-add steps, whether that process involves manufacturing a given product,
marketing it, or developing it. Breaking down or mapping, as it is
sometimes called is an important skill for engineers to acquire to improve a
given process.
Competent engineers can break down a process into its value-add elements
almost as second nature. Doing so working with processes is part of their
basic education. When solving problems, they think almost automatically about
material flows. In our example of producing an automobile, there are a multitude
of functional steps: manufacturing parts and the whole automobile; researching
and developing components; accounting for the costs of producing an
automobile; and so on. And each of these steps can be further broken down into
even fundamental value-add steps. For example, in the overall process of
manufacturing an automobile, painting the side door on a Taurus can be viewed
as a specific value-add step in a chain of steps. The inputs for that particular
step would be materials such as the side door, the paint shop, and the correct
colour of paint. The output would be the painted side door of a Taurus. The
work would include such things as the physical and mental actions of the trained
painters who manipulate the paint, the side door, the paint robots, and the
machinery in the paint shop.
Many, many such value-add steps go into manufacturing an automobile. I
have barely scratched the surface, if you allow a bad pun. For example, there is
the action of delivering the correct colour of paint to the paint shop, which in
turn can be further disintegrated into the action of ordering the correct colour of
paint from the paint supplier. Each input to a value-add step can be subdivided
by the manufacturer into component value-add steps so that a value-add chain is
described where one value-add output becomes the input of a subsequent valueadd output. That chain becomes what we call a value-add process (or simply a
process).
Figure 11.2 Value-Add Process and Value-Add System
Another point is that B and E are obviously related systems and the framework
(Figure 11.3) recognizes that point.
All of the subsystems are important but the design encourages change
because there are no rigid dependencies. Each system can be considered a
standalone set of processes to be changed as necessary.
The reversing connections between the systems are meant to refer to all the
important developmental actions, such as communication, defining strategic
issues, and solving problems between work systems.
In summary, the most significant difference between a high-performance
work system and a conventional organization is that the former focuses on
learn what it is that role model leaders must do in order to inspire their people
to make changes collectively or individually. This will involve a series of steps
that have the potential to teach the organizations people how to make change
steps that have the potential to call people to action to implement change and get
results.
All of this competence will in turn help create a high-performance work
system one in which positive change is the goal for a better future for
everyone involved: Everyone a Leader, everyone engaged in the process of
change.
Figure 11.4 The Change Process Model
the time, each set of values reflected a somewhat different, albeit specific, set of
beliefs, philosophy, and principles.
Here I introduce the idea of change values as a way to describe the beliefs,
philosophy, and principles of people in a high-performance work system. Why
are role model leaders motivated to change things? We can answer that question
by asking questions such as these:
What are the individual role model leaders beliefs about change in relation to
the collective beliefs of the group, team, or organization?
What principles, guides to action, or behaviours exist in the minds of the
organizations leaders in relation to changing the work their organization is
doing?
The answers to questions like those draw out the beliefs, philosophy, and
principles about change and the meaning of change for the people in the highperformance work system.
Here I need to reintroduce the idea of the catalyst. This refers to a leader
who has an idea for changing things to improve some aspect of the organization.
Say, for example, that Linda, a research engineer in the R&D organization, has
an idea that she has fully explored and thought about. She decides that this idea,
which would result in significant change to the companys major product line,
must be a priority for the company. Linda, here, is a change initiator or catalyst.
She must find a way to influence the companys other leaders to join in a
common purpose that relates to her idea for change. This will be easier for her
than it would be in most companies because her organization has embraced the
concept of Everyone a Leader and its people are learning to be leaders; all are
therefore open and motivated to make continuous change and seek to improve
the organization. The other people in her organization already have the
individual leading skills, character attributes, and purposeful behaviours of
leaders. Linda realizes that other, more conventional organizations have not
embraced that mantra and thus individuals in those organizations would be
harder for her to influence than those in her company.
Linda also realizes that she must first develop meaning for the change she has
in mind. To that end, she must establish her own set of change values and then
influence others to align with those values. Ideally, the others in her company
will achieve a state of shared, harmonious values that align with her idea. She
recognizes that even though her organization has accepted the philosophy of
Everyone a Leader, this will require considerable work on her part. What does
Linda do? Her approach is as follows:
She clarifies in her own mind her beliefs about the change. For example, I
believe that the product modification is important for the company. I also
Here we have a statement of values that begins by defining the business and
then states and defines the beliefs of that business. Clearly, this company aspires
to be an innovative organization that takes prudent risks. In its statement one can
feel the organizations energy and the priority it places on change.
Another example is from a large and diversified energy company. Its stated
values are as follows:
Profitable Growth: Seeking sustainable, profitable growth by encouraging relentless
pursuit of our vision, simplicity of style, speed of action, innovation and leadership in
all of our chosen business activities.
Positive Change: Embracing and capitalizing on change, recognizing that every employee
must be empowered to stimulate continuous improvement in all aspects of our
business.
Enthusiastic Customers: Enhancing our reputation as a company that customers can rely
on to deliver products so excellent in their quality, and service so outstanding in its
responsiveness, that it will always be recognized for leadership in the marketplace.
Involved Employees: Striving for a workplace where opportunity, openness, enthusiasm,
diversity, teamwork, accountability and a sense of purpose combine to provide a
rewarding professional experience that promotes fairness, dignity and respect for all
employees.
Confident Shareholders: Managing all parts of our business in a manner that builds value
into the investment of all shareholders, confirming their confidence in participating in
the ownership of this company.
Responsible Citizenship: Conducting our business with the highest standards of ethics,
adherence to the law, and doing whats right thereby continuing the legacy of
encouraging a healthy and safe workplace, responsible government, a highly
competitive free enterprise system, environmental responsibility.
model (see Figure 11.4) answer the questions Why? How? and What? These are
the three essential questions for the leader-engineer when thinking about things
to change and when changing things to create high-performance work systems
and improve the lives of people.
Formulating Direction for Change
In the previous section we considered this question: Why are we motivated to
change something? The determination, dissemination, and acceptance of change
values (i.e., beliefs, philosophies, and principles) are the first steps in any
orderly change process. The goal of those steps is to develop a shared purpose
in the organization that includes the leaders who are the originators of the
change. Once the shared purpose is achieved, the change process can move to
the next step: formulating direction. The formulating or setting of direction for
change answers this question: How do we plan to make the change that the
organizations leaders have proposed? At this stage, the elements or levels of
thought are concept, strategy, and design.
Also, as noted in the previous section, developing meaning for change entails
fostering the required will among the people in the organization by motivating
them to accomplish the change being proposed. This section deals with our
necessary preparedness as human beings to make the changes the being state
that people must reach so that they can envision and plan the changes.
At this stage, the organization and its leaders are energized they are willing
to change in order to satisfy the organizations fundamental beliefs, philosophy,
and principles. Put another way, their values are aligned with those of the
organization so that they are ready to be influenced to move to the next level of
change. How, though, are they to envision that change?
In part one, I introduced the important aspect of leadership that I referred to
as future state targets. I also introduced three hierarchical levels that ranged
from planning targets to aspirational targets. Planning targets provide a precise
future state relating to shorter-term transactional change; and at the other end of
the scale, aspirational targets describe a future state where both leaders and
followers enjoy considerable freedom of interpretation. An aspiration is a
superordinate target, a statement of theoretical perfection; though necessarily
vague, it also offers a great deal of choice when it comes to achieving broader
and longer-term change. A vision is somewhere in the middle of this spectrum:
it is suitable for processes of ongoing, important, continuous improvement of a
transformational nature. This kind of change is more often the norm in
organizational change. I will use this measure of a future state target in the
following description of the change process.
DEVELOPING A FUTURE STATE VISION AND MISSION
This is arguably the most important step in the change process. In terms of levels
of thought, it is at the concept level. At this step, the leaders are proposing a
new future state: they are opening the door to a better future and asking their
followers to understand what that future will be to accept it as their own and
to do the rigorous work required to implement it successfully. In the simplest of
terms, the leaders are saying, This is the concept for the future, now lets do the
thinking and work to get there.
In the previous section, we focused on shared organizational values; here, the
focus has shifted towards shared beingness (i.e., togetherness, spirit) among
the leaders and followers. Leaders influence their followers to move towards a
better future state by appealing to their shared values and character attributes.
Role model leaders are able to engineer and give substance to the future state
for which they are calling. The two most common means to this end are vision
and mission. Each serves a purpose, and each provides a conceptual view of
change more concretely, a picture of a better place than the current state as
seen by the role model leader.
VISION
Vision has been written about and talked about extensively. By now, it is either
revered as the most important attribute of a leader, or it has become an object of
cynicism as a result of overuse.
What is vision? Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus, great teacher-leaders,
defined it this way:
A vision articulates a view of a realistic, credible, attractive future for the
organization; a condition that is better in some important ways than what now
exists.2
Of course, a vision is better in some important ways than what now exists
only if the leaders are able to influence their followers to accept their view of
the future. A leaders view or perception needs to become a reality for her
followers.
Vision is what differentiates leaders from everyone else. It is a description
of something different from what is current something no one else has
achieved. It is an understanding shared by all who are part of the organization. It
answers this question: What will the organization become? Vision is a picture
of the organizations future that serves the interests of all important
stakeholders: customers, employees, and society.
Let us consider some examples of visions written for organizations that are
quite different from each other. The first is from a company called EcoSynthetix.
To be one of the worlds leading technology and market developers of bio-based
Broadly speaking, vision statements come in two generic forms. One form
speaks to an ideal world and indicates what a perfect world would look like,
and this companys vision statement is clearly one of these. In this vision
statement EcoSynthetix perceives its ideal future state.
The second broad type of vision describes not an ideal world, but an ideal
organization. There are many such statements. I provide an example to illustrate
this approach. This one is from a biofuels company called Biox.
Our company will build, acquire, own and operate a network of biodiesel production
facilities, utilizing our proprietary process technologies capable of producing the
highest quality biodiesel fuel in jurisdictions where clearly defined renewable fuel
standards policies exist. Our goal is to be the leading value-added integrated supplier
to the existing fuel distribution network.
Each of these companies is looking into their future in different ways. Both
are young, innovative engineering and science intensive organizations. In
chapter 2, in the section Thinking about Future States, I made a distinction
between two boundary conditions. First, a plan is a future state that is very
actionable and second, an aspiration is a statement of a future state that is more
philosophical. And vision is somewhere between these two boundaries. The
Biox vision is clearly leaning towards the plan boundary, but it is not
specifically a plan, but it is a conceptual vision of their future. EcoSynthetix
chose a statement, a vision that is close to an aspiration.
The importance of vision cannot be overemphasized. A clear vision allows
everyone to rally around a common direction, even in crises. It serves as an
anchor in turbulent times. It helps the organization to see what could be and
should be, and it provides guidance and inspiration for the difficult work that is
necessary to achieve a better future.
A vision must strike a balance between vagueness and specifics. It needs to
be specific enough to provide clear guidance to the organization and relevant
enough to be achievable. Perhaps most important, it must also inspire. At the
same time, though, it must be vague enough to allow people to turn their
imaginations towards an improved future state. It also needs to be vague enough
to appeal to all kinds of people, to different functional categories of people, and
to people with different levels of will and openness to change.
And finally, a vision needs to be relevant under a variety of future
conditions. This is an important point. Visions or future states cannot and should
not be rewritten every few months. If they are not fairly permanent, they will
lose their impact as thoughtful descriptors of a future target. It is appropriate to
Milestones:
Revenue generation: $X per year
Value realization: Y new customers
Strategic relationships established: Companies A and B
Both are owned by the organizations leader as well as by others who have
been fully engaged in formulating them.
Both are meant to influence, inspire, and energize the people in the
organization so that they will understand and act on the leaders new
direction.
Both describe what is possible. Mission statements, it must be pointed out, are
sometimes too focused on what is, or they too closely reflect the current state.
This is not useful.
Differences
Catalyzing an energy revolution to address the number one threat facing our
planet: climate change.
Defending our oceans by challenging wasteful and destructive fishing, and
creating a global network of marine reserves.
Protecting the worlds remaining ancient forests which are depended on by
many animals, plants and people.
Working for disarmament and peace by reducing dependence on finite
resources and calling for the elimination of all nuclear weapons.
Creating a toxic free future with safer alternatives to hazardous chemicals in
There are many definitions of strategic intent, but the one this book will use is as
follows: strategic intent relates to the things we put in place to accomplish the
future state change.
This book also distinguishes between strategic thinking and strategic
planning. The difference is a large one. Planning is something that managers do
and often entails extrapolating from the past in order to predict the near future. It
is an extension of an annual budget, something that is calculated. Strategic
thinking, by contrast, is something that leaders do. Strategic intents describe
steps towards the future state; they are more visionary than calculated; they are
more about potential than action plans.
An example of strategic planning: For the next three years we will grow
the business at a rate of 1 per cent per year beyond the experience of the past
three years, primarily by introducing our new product X broadly to our
customers in North America.
An example of strategic thinking: We will continue to grow our business
by introducing a broad range of new products designed to reach our goal of
being the largest company in our market.
This example of strategic thinking provides the basis for further utilization of
the level of thought tool. The next step is to take this to the design (see part two,
chapter 4) level of thought. I see this as the opportunity to develop potential
scenarios or strategic projects.
For example, if it is our strategic intent to introduce a broad range of
products to accomplish a vision of the future, then there needs to be further
strategic thinking to develop strategic projects that are the best routes to the
future we desire. We might think about three to five different products that are
feasible offerings for the market. These are real, not concepts. They are real
because we will test them with engineering, R&D, marketing, and manufacturing
competencies to ensure they are real. But at this point, we are not taking action
or making choices. Rather, we are thinking about the possibilities and becoming
The vision is the anchor. It describes what the organization will achieve in
the distant future. It is vague in its wording but clear in its aims, and it is
achievable. The mission creates unity and develops a commitment to achieving
measurable results. It is focused on a shorter term three to five years, but
sometimes shorter than that. The strategy is a set of statements that are more
specific. They are guides to measurable actions.
Of these three, the strategy is the most flexible. It is a refinement of the
organizations vision and mission, and it focuses on actionable projects. It is a
tool that leaders can use when selecting the means and ways to create the
changes encompassed by the vision and the mission. The leader has both the
opportunity and the flexibility perhaps even the responsibility to consider
changes in strategy. Indeed, a role model leader should consider changes in
strategic intent at least every year or two or even more often. When doing so,
she should ask these questions: How have things changed in the past few months
in our environment? What have we learned that might suggest a new strategy?
How have our competitors changed, and does this force us to change our
strategy? What changes does our organization need to make to meet the new
challenges of a changing environment and challenging competitors?
In many ways, the skills, character attributes, and purposeful behaviours of
the role model leader are tested more when strategy is being defined than at any
other time. There is a calmness, a thoughtfulness to developing a vision and a
mission; strategy, by contrast, is usually formulated when times are more urgent.
Strategizing is a high-energy process. Leaders who succeed at defining the right
strategies truly are admirable role model leaders.
Strategy encompasses all the thinking that is required in order to utilize
human, physical, financial, and technological resources with the intent of
achieving the organizations vision. It can also be thought of as a means to seek
a competitive advantage. The advantage has been realized when the organization
has placed itself in a better position than its rivals to meet the needs of
stakeholders.
Competitive advantage is important to both profit-oriented organizations and
not-for-profit ones. In a profit-oriented business, competitive advantage flows
from a strategy that has placed the organization in a better position than its rivals
to create economic value for customers. Those customers then reward the
organizations efforts with sales revenues that can translate into sustainable
growth. In a not-for-profit organization, competitive advantage flows out of a
strategy that places it in a better position than other service providers to create
real and perceived value for society. Society then rewards these efforts with
donations of money, time, and energy, which in turn can translate into
sustainable growth for the organization.
Implementing Change
The levels of thought that define the stage we call implementing change and
achieving positive results are as follows:
Action: Examine what needs to be done to accomplish change and get results.
Audit: Examine what the organization is doing, then identify what, if any, variation exists
between the target and the strategy for achieving it.
Evaluate: Examine performance relative to expectations.
This step of implementing change deals with the functioning capability that
the organization and its leaders need to apply in order to make the required
change happen. A multitude of studies have found that many businesses fail
because of poor execution. It doesnt matter how good the strategy is; excellent
execution is always more important if you hope to get the results that you and the
other stakeholders expect.
Lets be clear about what we mean by getting positive results. Those results
are, in effect, the measures of the transformational change promised by the future
state direction. They are signifiers of progress from a similarly measured
current state. For example, if our goal is a workplace safety frequency of 2.0
injuries for every 200,000 hours worked by all the people in the organization,
and if we experience an organizational injury frequency of 1.0 injury per
200,000 hours worked last year, then we have succeeded at making positive
change. We havent yet achieved our aspiration, which is zero injuries, but this
is a positive result nevertheless.
An action is a clearly defined and planned event that requires an output of
energy by the elements and resources that the organization has dedicated to it. At
this stage in the change process, the leaders role is to influence the people in
the organization to think about, plan, manage, and lead the work. Role model
leaders contribute to this by leading the design of the work processes, by
ensuring that their people understand the importance and urgency of the work, by
ensuring that the people thus engaged are dedicated and (one hopes) inspired to
do the work, and by ensuring that the people doing the work are functionally
skilled and have the right mix of character attributes and purposeful behaviours
to be effective.
All of this requires the leaders ongoing involvement. This is not leading by
mandate.
The very best role model leaders are not doing the work; rather, they are
being seen, heard, and felt by their people as being in the work. At the getting-
results stage of the change process, the very best role model leaders have a
visible and well-understood approach to leading.
People think of execution as something leaders delegate while they focus on the
bigger issues. Their idea is completely wrong. Execution is a discipline and a
system.
Larry Bossidy4
strategic planning.
Emergent strategy is very different. It flows from day-to-day priorities
established by leaders, managers, and followers, all of whom will have a hand
in implementation. People who develop strategies in emotional or intuitive
ways do not recognize the consequences as strategic decisions or as different
from tactical ones. Role model leaders will recognize when a strategy needs to
be changed because they have positioned themselves to take part in the
implementation, which is when that need makes itself visible.
Role model leaders encourage both these approaches and have the
competence to influence people to engage in both to accomplish the necessary
results. They also understand when to stabilize a strategy and when to change it.
How to Use the Change Process Model
To illustrate the utility and flexibility of the change process model, I offer the
following examples. The principal characteristic of the model demonstrated
here is its flexibility. It is designed to meet the users needs and can be applied
in its entirety or in part. It allows for complete strategic thinking from belief to
action or, alternatively, for targeted strategic thinking whatever is required of
those who are leading the change. The examples offered are all hypothetical.
PARTIAL UTILIZATION OF THE CHANGE PROCESS MODEL
The companys most senior leader receives a message from the people in his
organization: they have noticed an increase in the number of injuries in the
companys manufacturing plants. This leader tells himself that the organization
both its leaders and its followers must somehow dramatically reduce these
injuries if not eliminate them entirely. This will require transformational change,
not just an incremental reduction in injuries.
The leader decides to utilize the change process model as a means of
collaborating effectively with his leadership team and a group of other thought
leaders. Together they will think about the Why? What? and How? of the
change.
His senior people and thought leaders are all experienced practitioners of the
change process model, so they recognize its flexibility and power to guide the
thinking of change agents. They also recognize that it can be used for situations
that border on crisis as well as for situations where more time to think is
available. Clearly the present situation, where people are being injured, is a
crisis that demands change. They agree that the change process model must be
used in its entirety and that this can be done efficiently and will benefit the
organization. Spending the time upfront will benefit the organization in the long
run. That time might be well used as follows.
DEVELOPING MEANING FOR CHANGE
1. The change agent and the thought leaders meet and decide to list all their
beliefs surrounding the facts of a large increase in injuries in the organization.
2. The group spends many hours collecting a wide variety of beliefs. These
beliefs both confirm previous beliefs and reinforce the bedrock idea of seeking
to do no harm to other people.
3. Many of the groups beliefs underscore the need for an honest discussion
of individual and organizational competence relative to the issue. It is vital that
this group not argue, but instead display tolerance for one another as they seek
the right answers. At this stage, it is not the goal to reconcile differences of
opinion.
4. The group of leaders then take all the beliefs they have gathered and
construct a statement of philosophy. Here the idea is to look for agreements so
that a broad but powerful statement of the organizations thinking can be
developed. An example might be, All injuries in the workplace are preventable
and we are committed to move towards a future state of zero injuries. This
statement, remember, has flowed from a long and thoughtful discussion whose
goal has been to develop a coherent statement of values. Statements like this
answer these questions: What do we stand for? Why do we need to change?
What will we need to change?
5. Next, the group considers the statement of philosophy it has established
and, from it, develops five to ten statements that will serve as guides to action.
These statements may well include the following:
We will ask our people to seek ways to prevent injuries to themselves and
others in the organization as a condition of their employment.
We will continuously inform all our stakeholders, inside and outside the
company, about our company value of doing no harm to people.
We will reinforce with our employee stakeholders our resolve as senior
leaders to not tolerate any injuries at any time.
We will reinforce with our employees that they are individually accountable
for their personal safety and the safety of others within the work system.
The transformational change contemplated focused on reinforcing with
employees the importance of sustaining organizational values. An examination
of the companys past collective actions revealed that they had not reflected
those values, and now the senior leaders are determined to do what is necessary
to get on track again. This in turn may mean taking unusual actions
countercultural actions or developing a new strategic direction.
The leaders decide they have done a thorough job of creating the atmosphere
of collective thought at a level of guides to action. The meaning of the
required change, but not the strategy or actions, has been determined.
A shared purpose is possible. Now it is necessary to somehow determine
how to act on the principles and formulate a direction for change.
FORMULATING DIRECTION FOR CHANGE
1. The group now moves to the next element of the change process. Here they
consider these questions: How do we plan to change the level of injuries in the
organization? What must we think about and do to support our beliefs,
philosophy, and principles our values as they relate to the increase in injuries?
2. They begin to think about concepts. Concept here can be defined as an
idea we pursue and how we would like things to be. It is a stated vision of the
future that will inspire people in the company and all other stakeholders.
3. The concept is developed, along with the concepts meaning for
stakeholders a necessary element if shared purpose is to be achieved.
Everyone, after all, must be able to see a benefit to themselves when their
company changes direction. The concept in the example at hand is stated as
follows: Zero injuries is the goal for the company. This is a powerful
(because it is clear) view of a future one in which all stakeholders can see
something for themselves.
4. The leaders are satisfied that their work so far has resulted in a concept
that will move the company towards a more forceful statement of intent on the
subject of safety. The leaders, quite simply, are demanding action. This
direction will be somewhat less democratic than before, but it will not entail a
change in culture or leadership style.
5. The next step is to develop some strategic intents with the goal of
providing more actionable steps for the companys employees. This means
developing a few additional strategic intents and not throwing out the present
strategy, which has long been, All people will work diligently to continuously
improve safety performance. The strategic intents developed from this process
are as follows:
The company will consider the safety implications for our people in all forms
of work. If the work cannot be done safely, it will stop until it can be made
safe.
The development of our organizational functional competence on behalf of all
stakeholders, especially employees, will take into account the implications of
doing no harm to people.
IMPLEMENTING THE CHANGE
The final step in the change process model takes a very long time for the group.
They recognize the importance of it. They also recognize that they have done
good work in terms of crafting a reinforced set of safety values along with a
more specific (but additive) descriptor of a future state related to safety in the
workplace. They have decided that the implementation actions they are about to
develop next will have to be prescriptive, but in a way that will not damage the
organizations culture, which is developmental, aimed at continuous
improvement, and develops leaders.
In the end, they establish the following three action steps. These will be
communicated to the stakeholders specifically, the employee stakeholders
for immediate implementation.
1. The company expects that all work will be done safely. If this is not
possible, every employee has the obligation to stop the work and participate
in making it safe.
2. All employees will act as their work partners protector or brothers
keeper by ensuring that work is carried out in a safe manner.
3. Safe conduct and working safely will be conditions of employment in the
company.
There will be other specific detailed actions that flow from these high-level
actions. Each department or function will have specifications that flow from
these.
The senior leaders feel they have benefited from applying the change process
model thoroughly and effectively. It has allowed them to formulate a set of
actions that have the potential to transform the existing unacceptable situation in
a way that will not damage the companys culture.
In summary, the change process model can be used in its entirety, or selected
parts of it can be used in specific situations. It can be used by large
organizations that are contemplating large or transformational changes or by
small organizations contemplating small, incremental changes. Finally, it can be
applied to processes of incremental, continuous, or transformational change.
Change requires thinking and doing. Role model leaders need to be
disciplined and systematic as they seek to improve the lives of others. Again, I
remind the reader that thoughtful, complete thinking about all things, when done
effectively and up front, will create better results and the results will happen
more quickly because there will be no wasted actions or restarts.
12 Vitality
The previous chapter described the leadership role that Stephen played at
LargeCo. He changed the company in positive ways by improving the
organizational design of the engineering division and the entire company through
a focus on value-add work in support of both internal and external customers.
This led the company to develop a systemic change process beyond the
engineering division one that further enhanced the organizations functioning
competence. As a result, the SBU and company measures of financial success
improved over an extended period.
In the engineering division leadership team meetings, Stephen and his people
were excited about the results they were getting. But there was always an
underlying theme at these meetings: We can do even better. Some people
shared ideas they had gleaned from their family life; others talked about the
positive energy they generated doing work for a Rotary Club or a youth sports
team. Everyone realized that this sort of energy did not exist in LargeCo that
there was a lack of spirit within the company. Each engineer talked about the
level of spirit in each of their SBUs. Many sensed a lack of spirit and positive
energy but some disagreed and saw the opposite, a great work environment. A
common theme emerged: in the SBUs where the leader created an environment
where all people were treated as real human beings rather than tools for
getting work done, there was positive energy and a positive working-together
environment. One of these engineers was Ed, who had been at LargeCo for many
years. In his attempt to explain the energy in his SBU, he quoted Henry Ford,
one of his engineering idols: Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together
is progress. Working together is success.
Ed said that the people in the company needed to work together to serve one
another as well as they had learned to serve customers. He pointed out that the
SBUs were functioning as separate islands and that while each was getting good
results, the company as a whole had no identity. Everyone identified with an
SBU or a function; no one identified with the company.
The engineering divisions leaders came to believe that their division, the
SBUs, and the other functional units needed to come together if they were to
work effectively, and that this would entail yet another organizational change.
In effect, Stephen and his engineering division had concluded that an
important element when discussing high-performance work systems is vitality.
The word as used here refers to life that is, the life of the organization. In a
business organization that enjoys an abundance of vitality, the people are
competent, confident, energetic, and spirited. They work together to move the
are partners, we are all in this together. This vitality was, of course, stronger
when people were achieving their targets, which often happened. Employees at
all pay levels made the connection between themselves and the organizations
purpose.
An even more powerful strategic way we found to create a harmonious
partnership between the organizations goals and those of its people entailed a
universal approach to learning and developing leadership capabilities. It
involved a cross-organizational strategy of leadership development: Everyone a
Leader. Everyone wants to learn, and people will become a leader with an
organization that gives them the opportunity to learn while they are working.
That is because they sense that the company is interested in them as human
beings and that it is encouraging them and investing in their personal
development.
The Everyone a Leader approach to leadership underscores that encouraging
personal development fosters harmony between the business and its employees
and that the organization will be transformed as a result. Everyone wants to feel
satisfied with their work and to feel proud when they tell people where they
work. In the simplest of terms, people want to feel a sense of common purpose
with their employer. They do not want to go to work feeling bad or alienated
from their employer. Unfortunately, too many of them do. People want to be part
of a high-performance work system where the benefits of work are shared and
so are their personal values, and where their purposes are common.
Working Effectively in Teams
The vitality, spirit, and energy of people are all greatly enhanced by
collaborative work. Almost everyone agrees that teams are the best venue for
accomplishing work. Yet if you ask a group of people in a business
organization, a social action group, or any other experienced group, Are the
teams you have participated in as a member or a leader effective? Do they get
the desired results? the answer is likely to be surprisingly negative.
The task, then, is to establish teams that work as intended teams that
increase the vitality of the people working on them and teams that thereby
maximize the results of the work they do. And in a high-performance work
system, that task belongs to leaders.
Hierarchy of Teaming
In this section, I classify teams as high-performance or underperforming. There
are, of course, many shades of grey. But this simple distinction will allow us to
learn more about the characteristics of successful teaming.
Besides the dichotomy just mentioned high-performance and
underperforming there are other useful approaches to understanding highperformance teams. Other collective processes worth exploring in this regard
are core teams, competency networks, working groups, and virtual companies. I
will be discussing each of these for understanding the purpose, utility, and the
characteristics of these various collaborative approaches to doing work,
especially those where I have experience, and to highlight the ones that are most
likely to be useful in given situations.
First, though, readers may be wondering whether it is possible, in a highperformance work system, for a person to contribute as an individual to an
organizations success. The answer to that question is a resounding yes. It is
possible, indeed often desirable, for an individual to do work that is purposeful
and directed at increasing the success of the entire organization. I can think of a
number of examples of positive individual effort:
Thinking about ideas at different levels and developing ideas before
presenting them to others or influencing others to work together on the idea.
Working on improving certain skills and character attributes to reach higher
levels of leading and functioning capability.
Carrying out limited, specific tasks that support a teams objective, but doing
so from outside the team.
So, yes, individual work within a high-performance work system can be of
very high value. Most often, though, it is valuable because it is contributing
necessary inputs to a broader project or because it is a necessary precursor to a
group or team effort.
High-Performance Teaming
I begin this section by summarizing the six characteristics of high-performance
teams that have stood out in my experience. In so doing, I hope to make it clear
how role model leaders in high-performance work systems can lead an
organization most effectively.
1. SMALLER IS OFTEN BETTER
Many who have studied the characteristics of successful teams have concluded
that small teams work best. That is also a personal observation. If there are
fewer than five members there will not be enough functional capability to satisfy
the teams goals. If there are more than nine or ten members, conflict is likely to
develop in a way that limits the focus on the team. There will be too much
energy in a group that large and too little focus on the task.
Many years ago, one of the teams on which I participated had a member who
researched this phenomenon. He found that in prehistoric times, a hunting party
was about nine people, each of whom had different skills. For example, there
would be people skilled in tracking (i.e., sensing, smelling, seeing, hearing),
there would be the killers, there would be the haulers, and there would be those
with skinning and dressing skills. There were around nine people in hunting
groups in most cases. So perhaps even in prehistoric times, teams that had a
specific goal required an optimum number of people for success. At the very
least, this is worth remembering.
The empirical evidence I have gathered over the years has convinced me that
each team will find its optimal vitality in part from an optimum size. Too few
people, and the team will suffer from a shortage of capability; too many people,
and the teams energy will dissipate. The role model leader will often
experiment with the team size for a given task and have the competence and
courage to make changes early in the process.
2. HIGH-PERFORMANCE TEAMING REQUIRES HIGH-PERFORMANCE MEMBERS
The members of a team must have the capabilities the project requires. So a role
model leader must evaluate people carefully before assigning them to the team
to ensure that the group will have the capabilities that the project requires. But
at the same time, the team must not be overloaded with more people than the
project requires. It is better to select a handful of highly capable people than a
larger number of people with fewer capabilities.
It may be important to select members with the required skills, character
attributes, and behaviours, but it is essential to select members who can work
collaboratively. The best role model leaders of high-performance teams will
take the time and exert the energy to seek out those members who are most likely
to deliver the best results. The best people will be motivated to do the work
contemplated, will be the most competent people to carry it out, and will have
had importantly relevant experience at the work.
In part two of this book, I described a number of capabilities required for
role model leadership. The characteristics I listed there are also required for all
members of a team. Indeed, it is in the cauldron of the high-performance team
that the competency of role model leading, the idea of Everyone a Leader, is
evident. The more role model leadership the team has, the higher its
performance will be. And the higher the functional capabilities of these role
model leaders, the more likely it is that the team will succeed.
Imagine a team on which everyone has the character attributes of
trustworthiness, respect for people, tenacity for getting work done, and honesty
in dealing with tasks and other team members. This is a high-performance
teaming environment. Then add to that team the functional capabilities of role
model leading first and foremost, the ability to think effectively and to
communicate with others at all levels of thought. Then add to that the ability to
reconcile different points of view and to create innovative solutions, and the
ability to prioritize work and bring extensive experience to the team.
And then imagine recruiting people with role model leading behaviour:
members who are not ego driven, who will not disrupt the teams work with a
personal agenda, and who will not seek ways to gain the upper hand over others
or to leverage the teams performance for their personal benefit. Highperformance teaming is highly dependent on purposeful behaviour ideally, it is
dependent on values-driven behaviour.
And finally, there are few high-performance teams that would not benefit
from engineering and scientific functional capability. This is true even of those
teams formed to deal with organizational issues that would be considered nontechnical. The problem-solving capabilities of a competent engineer or scientist
can add considerable value.
3. DISCIPLINED, SYSTEMATIC PROCESSES ARE REQUIRED
The work of a team must be sharply defined and fully thought out. A useful tool
for this essential component of high-performance teaming is what I call the task
cycle. Each high-performance team needs to collectively develop each
component of this framework, which will then guide the teams actions. This
cycle should be conducted more than once as the team carries out its work.
Also, the task cycle must be conducted jointly, with all members heard, so that
they can determine the need for any revisions to the task. In a newly formed
team, conducting a task cycle should be the first step.
The Task Cycle Model
The task:
Express the teams work in a few words to see if all understand the task in the
same way.
The purpose:
Expressing the teams purpose begins by answering the Why? question. The
answer will serve as the reason the work is being done as it relates to a future
state. The What? question is then asked, and the answer which usually starts
with To do... will be a broad statement that summarizes the actions the team
is to take that will result in the goal being achieved. Lastly, the How? question
generates a series of steps that the team will take to meet the goal. The
documentation of this is often in the What? How? Why? order.
The expected result:
This part of the task cycle requires the team members to clearly and fully
express the outcomes they consider their goal. It also includes specific
quantitative performance metrics that reflect the goal. At this point, it should be
clear to the team how achieving the outcome will bring positive change to the
organization and how the teams success will meet the needs of each
stakeholder on the team and those of the business organization as a whole.
The team process:
There needs to be a discussion and an early decision on the value-add process
the team will apply to determine the steps required to do the work. Will there be
discussion, presentation, subteam work? Will there be regular meetings? The
process to be used needs to be disciplined, orderly, and systematic. It can
evolve once the project has begun.
The functioning capability:
This refers to the skills, character attributes, and unique behaviours required to
achieve the outcomes expected of this specific team. It includes a commitment
by the team leader to help her team members develop leadership competence. In
fact, the selection of team members should be based on whether the people
being chosen are motivated to learn leadership capabilities while serving on the
team. Those who will are the ones who should be chosen. Here is where the
identity of the people on the team is described and where the questions are
answered regarding who will be executing what, where, and when.
An Example
The task:
The manufacturing plant managers will be working together to improve safety
in their plants.
The purpose:
(What) To rapidly reduce the level of measurable injuries across the
companys manufacturing plants.
(How) The senior leaders of all the manufacturing plants will work together
and learn together for the purpose of finding ways to change things in a
positive manner to improve safety in the workplace.
(Why) In order to achieve the future state goal of zero injuries in the
workplace.
The expected result:
A path towards a 10 per cent year-over-year improvement in recordable
The role model leader will emphasize the need for all members of the team to
accept accountability for the teams success.
Specifically, the role model leader of the high-performance team will accept
personal accountability for achieving the teams goal. Also, that person will
influence others on the team to hold one another accountable for the results. All
members will have personal objectives related to meeting the teams goal, and
they will influence, encourage, and assist the other members to assume their
personal responsibilities for achieving that goal as necessary.
Integral to this collective acceptance of individual and team accountability is
honest collective feedback. Each person on the high-performance team needs to
feel responsible for providing feedback to the team on its performance and also
to feel responsible for providing feedback to other individuals on the team with
regard to their performance relative to the goal. All of this will require the
teams role model leader to teach the skills, character attributes, and purposeful
behaviour required teaching and developing the requisite leadership
competency in each member.
And finally, there must be accountability in the team to achieve the teams
goals do the work, meet the goals, end the work, move on to other tasks.
5. EVERYONE NEEDS TO BE ENGAGED IN LEARNING
The previous discussion on accountability described the need for role model
teaching and performance.
First, the leader of the high-performance team needs to exhibit exceptional
leadership competence. That person must also be prepared to engage the entire
team in the ongoing development of leadership competence. The most effective
way to do this is by integrating the work directed at achieving the goal with
developmental teaching. For example, if the teams goal is to improve some
aspect of workplace safety, then the development of leadership capability might
focus on behaving ethically, achieving reconciles, respecting other people, and
so on.
The difference between a high-performance team and a team that is merely
effective has mainly to do with the leadership development that is part of the
high-performance teams agenda. The leader of a high-performance team
understands that the competence concentrated in that team provides a great
opportunity to develop future role model leaders for the organization as a
whole. Extra time will be required to inject the work of leadership development
into the project the team has been assigned, but that extra effort will pay off in
the future for the organization. There is no better environment for developing
leadership than in the cauldron of a high-performance team doing work of great
importance and urgency.
A leader who is skilled at teamwork will state at the outset that one objective
is to maximize team performance. He will realize that teamwork is an
opportunity for developing the self and for learning to be a better person and
leader.
This leader will also be aware that another key aspect of his role on the team
is to protect its members from outside influences that might distract them from
their goal. In other words, this leader will influence those outside the team to
support his team members and their goals. Moreover, if some people in the
organization threaten to interfere with the team, the role model leader will need
to protect his team from them. Recall from part two that Kalev Pugi was superb
at this aspect of leadership: he won support for his project at headquarters and
made sure that his team had the funding, resources, and time to develop an
important new manufacturing process.
This is not to say that all outside influences are negative. The role model
leader also needs to be open to positive outside influences and provide a
conduit for them. For example, the role model leader can locate the necessary
technology and other potential value-adds as the team requires them.
The role model leader of a high-performance team needs to realize that unless
the team has a continuous improvement mentality a developmental mentality
it may not perform to its potential. Generally, an underperforming team has one
or more of the following characteristics:
The team members do not collaborate. This fault is then magnified because
those individuals who are experiencing difficulties are not being supported
by others.
The leader and the members have not created a disciplined process for the
work, which leads to wasteful actions.
Overall, the team leader has not established a team commitment to a clear
goal. As a consequence, the members are focusing on themselves rather than
the goals.
Other Organizing Entities
As I noted earlier, there are other approaches to collaboration that role model
leaders can find very useful. These should be absorbed as integral parts of a
high-performance work system. If used effectively, each has the potential to
improve the vitality of the organizations people.
CORE TEAM
A core team is a coordinating team for a related group of other teams with all
the attributes of a high-performance team. Each member of the core team is a
leader often a role model leader and each is the accountable leader for the
related teams. A core team is important for large strategic projects in which a
number of teams must all be coordinated to achieve an overall goal. The core
teams purpose is to ensure the effectiveness of each of the related teams so that
the overall goal of the strategic project is achieved.
An example is the core team at the very top of a company: the CEO, CFO,
CTO, and so on. It includes all of the people who are accountable for
developing their own leadership competence and leadership competence of the
enterprise and those who are accountable for setting the companys overall
direction to achieve the companys aspiration. There can be core teams at all
levels of the organization: large engineering projects may benefit from the
direction of a core team; dealing with strategic customers may require the
attention of a core team; and so on.
WORKING GROUP
A group is not the same thing as a team. A working group comprises a number of
To flesh this out, a culture is the attitudes, skills, and behaviours that
characterize an organization. It is the set of characteristics that everyone in the
organization knows and that outside observers notice most clearly, though
perhaps not as clearly as insiders.
Every organization of any kind has a distinct culture. Almost everyone would
agree that an organizations culture affects how it does things and how its
people behave. Much research has shown that high-performance companies are
more likely to have a well-defined, well-understood, and sustainable culture.
Organizations like these are stronger because they are able to generate more
unity of purpose and behaviour. A strong culture has developed a system of
informal behaviours and attitudes, which its people then internalize, adapting
them as necessary. This internalized system of attitudes and behaviours tends to
align people in their work. The stronger the culture, the more collective action
and loyalty exist among its people.
Over many, many years, DuPont Canada developed a strong and welldefined culture. In simple terms, the company existed because it expected its
people to be innovative and developmental; it also expected them to look out for
one another and to show care and concern for all stakeholders. We felt a
collective loyalty to the organization; we were DuPont Canada people, not
engineers, accountants, or some other function.
Role model leaders know that a strong organizational culture is important to
their work of influencing people to make positive change. They also know they
must take into account the organizations culture when exerting that influence. It
can be difficult to change things in a culture that strongly resists change. At the
same time, if the culture is strong, the positive impact of change can be greater
than if the culture is weak because the people who have been influenced to
accept the change are more practised at working together. These people, after
all, recognize that their culture is strong, and they value that strength. So once
they have been influenced to change, that change is likely to be more
sustainable.
The leader must understand her organizations culture and apply that
understanding when influencing people to make positive change. Only in this
way can she hope to be effective as a change agent. Having grasped the culture,
she can work within it, sometimes changing certain aspects of it in order to
create a new future state.
When engaging an organization in a change process, the role model leader
has choices to make:
Introduce change in a direction that does not affect the organizations culture.
Introduce transformational change that will require major changes in the
culture where the change in culture will be integral to the change in direction.
Some hybrid of these two.
Whichever option is chosen, the role model leader must take into account the
existing culture when setting the direction for change.
Any significant change in culture needs to be for the purpose of achieving a
better state that is, a high(er)-performance work system. That is a core
premise of this section.
Before discussing the elements of a high-performance culture, the reasons for
developing one, and the challenges of doing so, it would be useful to understand
the key elements of what I will refer to as the conventional organizing
approach culture. I say here and will repeat later: the elements of the
conventional organizing approach are the base and other elements are added to
achieve the culture of the high-performance work system. (These are discussed
in subsequent pages of this chapter.)
Proximate Environment
Under the conventional organizing approach and beyond, a culture develops
over time at least partly as a direct result of the outside worlds influence. By
outside world I mean the proximate environment in which the organization
operates. Key elements of this proximate environment are the realities of the
market and the industry and (often) the geography in which the organization finds
itself.
An activist, not-for-profit, service-oriented organization may operate in an
inner city, in public schools, or in any number of other well-defined sectors of
society. The space in which a Rotary Club operates will be quite different from
the one in which the Salvation Army operates, but each organization will be
well aware of its proximate environment and how it affects its members
character and behaviour.
Similarly, the people at Google can easily define their culture, and so can the
people who work for the Canadian National Railway (CNR). They operate in
very different market spaces and have quite different aims Google might say it
is moving knowledge; the CNR might say it is moving materials and people.
So the reality of your marketplace, and of the environment in which your
business operates, will do much to define the character and behaviour of the
people in your organization and often the skills they must have. Each
organization, given its proximate environment, must do certain things very well.
For any organization, it is the customers or service receivers who define the
marketing, selling, inventory, manufacturing, and other functional processes and
skills.
Customer needs and the character attributes of the customer base are
reflected in the organizations culture. This is easy to understand in reference to
a business organization that is a single-product, single-service provider. But
what about large, complex organizations that serve the needs of multiple sets of
customers? DuPont Canada was a large company with many diverse business
units when I was there. The customer base for the paint business was quite
different from the customer base for the synthetic fibres business. How could
people working in each of these business units be culturally defined as DuPont
Canada people?
In strong but complex organizations, the culture can be defined in terms of
character and skills. For example, DuPont Canada can be described culturally
as a marketing technology and manufacturing in potentially hazardous
environments company. The multitude of products and services offered by
DuPont Canada shared these cultural descriptors. Thus, people in DuPont
Canada and in similar business organizations with diverse business units
can recognize common behaviours and character attributes. Each business unit at
DuPont Canada was marketing functionally complex products; some of these
products were sourced from potentially hazardous manufacturing processes.
This created cultural bonds that in turn affected the behaviour and skill sets of
the people.
This point, about a coming together of skills and character attributes even in
complex organizations, is reflected in DuPonts tag lines as they have changed
over the years:
Better Things for Better Living through Chemistry
A Science Company
The global DuPont Company is about 200 years old. The phrases that its
marketing people have developed to describe the company have changed over
that time, but DuPont has always been and is to this day described by its
character attributes, behaviours, and skills. It is often described by the new
products it engineers and by its ability to regularly reinvent itself, its
technologies, and its products. This is one statement of culture as seen by the
proximate environment.
Traditions, Totems, and Taboos
In the earliest civilizations there were groups and organizations and leaders.
The leaders were often religious ones who developed rituals or traditions,
often to appease or interpret their gods. And there were always totems or
instruments that exemplified the myriad events and happenings that could not be
understood except as reflections of the behaviour of things they could
understand. For example, the indigenous people of North Americas West Coast
created and carved hierarchies of understanding and erected them for all to see
Core Values
I have discussed the importance of values when defining both individuals and
organizations. I have defined values as the sum of beliefs, philosophy, and
principles those things that are important both to us as individuals and to the
organizations to which we belong. They are the things we hold to be true and
that do much to guide our actions. The importance, to aspiring leaders, of welldefined values cannot be underestimated.
Core values help define the organizations culture. An organization with a
strong culture will have a clear and concise set of core values that everyone in
the organization aligns with. I said before when defining values that it is
possible for a role model leader to have certain values that are not fully aligned
with those established by the organization. But that leaders core values must
not differ. It is inconceivable that a role model leader could have core values
that differ from those of the other people in the organization.
Core values are those beliefs and principles that rise above other beliefs and
principles that might be held; they are values that verge on the mystical, the cultlike.
Examples are everywhere. McDonalds does not just believe in high quality;
they insist on it, and they have designed elaborate systems and processes based
on that core value. Just ask any employee. It is perhaps simplistic to say that
Japan has built its culture around reproducing quality everywhere in its products
and in its peoples actions; perhaps this is going too far, but it is the behaviour
and attribute that most would recognize as Japanese.
The DuPont Company has a set of core values. The best illustration of a
DuPont core value raised to the highest level where it defines the
organizational culture relates to safety. Adherence to the culture of safety and
to safe behaviour has defined the DuPont Company since its founder decided to
work alongside the people in his original explosives factory. As the senior role
model leader, he had decided to eliminate deaths from the unplanned detonation
of black powder in his factory. He designed systems and procedures to achieve
that end; then he decided that the best way to influence people to change their
way of doing things in the factory was to stand beside them and work with them.
This transformed the process for manufacturing explosives. The culture of safety
continued as the DuPont Company moved from a single hazardous product line
to others. The defining of the companys safety culture went hand in hand with
the development of the business. Employees are encouraged to live this safety
culture off the job as well.
The commitment to safety is also reflected in the products developed in the
DuPont laboratories, such as Kevlar aramid fibre. Kevlar is woven into fabric
used to make protective apparel that has saved the lives of thousands of people
around the world.2
I was associated with DuPont by observing and living its culture for more
than thirty years. From that experience I learned that a strong set of core values
helps develop a strong culture and a high-performance company.
Over time, strong values grow into core values. Essential to that process is
the reinforcement and support provided by a succession of strong leaders. There
are symbiotic relations among strong leadership, a strong culture, core values,
and high performance.
High-Performance Work System versus Conventional Organizing
Approach
Role model leaders in a business organization strive to move away from a
conventional organizing approach towards a more ideal state that I have been
referring to as the high-performance work system. All role model leaders pick
up that challenge.
I have discussed the elements that are important for developing a culture
under the conventional organizing approach. Those elements are the proximate
environment; the traditions, totems, and taboos; and the core organizational
values.
The difference between the culture of a high-performance work system and
that of a conventional organization is an important additive element: Everyone a
Leader.
The premise of this book is that everyone can benefit from learning and
practising the skills, character attributes, and purposeful behaviours of
individual leading. Extending that idea to the environment and design of the
business organization will have a powerful influence on its performance: people
will understand others better, they will be ready and willing to make change a
priority, and they will take every opportunity to change any and all aspects of
operations. Whether this involves incremental change or transformational
change, they will engage in change processes at each and every level of thought.
This does not mean change for the sake of change; it does, however, mean that
when opportunities present themselves, people in a high-performance
organization will not pass them up. They will influence the people around them
to reach for the opportunity to improve the organization.
The superordinate target, the aspiration of Everyone a Leader, can serve as
the definition of a high-performance culture, for it fosters ongoing positive
change.
So the difference between the culture of a high-performance work system and
that of a conventional organization lies in the additive element, the
developmental processes associated with role model leadership. Specifically, it
lies in influencing the organizations people to accept the concept of Everyone a
Leader and to accept the strategic priority of everyone developing leadership
competence. Contrast this with the more passive stance of accepting that
leadership is important but without doing everything possible to learn it and
develop it across the entire organization.
The difference between the high-performance organization and a
conventional organization is a cultural one that can best be understood by
segmenting the description into three parts:
The integrated person
The developmental mindset
The self-managing person
THE INTEGRATED PERSON
Canada. This was most evident when observing the work of functional experts
who emphasized that aspect of their triad of learned competency. For example, a
tax expert at DuPont was well known within and outside the company as a
member of various associations and government forums a true expert. When he
realized that he was not only a functional expert but also a business person and a
leader who had the opportunity to change things for the better, his contribution to
the company rose dramatically. His efforts to minimize tax paid changed to a
focus on optimizing the business process. He began to participate with others in
redesigning various business processes in the manufacturing plant so that they
would be more tax effective. That is, he looked for ways to minimize tax at the
start of the business process rather than after the money had been spent in the
early stages of making products. He also initiated an interfunctional network to
educate manufacturing people in the intricacies of the tax rules and procedures
so that they could find ways to optimize the tax regime an act of role model
leading.
Let me describe two other examples more generalized ones to further
illustrate the principle of everyone learning and practising the triad of
competencies.
An exceptional role model leader near the top of the company hierarchy was
engaged in leadership as his primary competency. But he was also an expert in
the functional role of purchasing he was an engineer and the companys
primary buyer for energy as well as the leader of the companys purchasing
function. In addition, he was challenged to transform the infrastructure the
back room of the company through a systematic review and redesign of its
component business processes and systems. In all of this work, he engaged many
other leaders, functional experts, and business people all of them integrated
thinkers. He enjoyed great success as measured by the waste reduction that
occurred. He demonstrated a disciplined, systematic approach to doing work the
right way.
One more example: One of our talented people was primarily a business
leader of one of our business units. He understood how to create value from his
manufacturing plants, but he also knew how to realize value through
extraordinary customer service and marketing functional work. He had
decided to lead but also to do business. He was the resident sales manager for
one of his businesss product lines. In addition, he organized a network of other
sales managers from other business units to seek other sales opportunities by
finding new customers who valued a basket of company products.
Again, this person was a leader: a business person and a functional expert
working to improve the quantity and quality of his contribution.
When all people functional experts and business people recognize that
they are leaders, and when the organizations culture encourages this integrated
approach, they will in a very natural way work together more effectively.
What this means in practice is that every person will dedicate considerable
effort to learning the capabilities, skills, character attributes, and purposeful
behaviours of individual leading. It also means that the functional capabilities
they brought to the organization as engineers, accountants, technicians will
need to be maintained and improved in the context of their work in the
organization. And these same people will need to become knowledgeable about
the companys business. That is, they will need to learn and think about its
value-add direction; about the needs of the stakeholders; about the key measures
of performance and success; and most important, about Why? How? and What?
their work will contribute to the success of the business. All employees will
continually learn more and understand their contribution to the leading,
functioning, and value-add of the business organization.
This effort and philosophy will apply across the high-performance work
system, thus increasing the vitality of the whole. Let there be no mistake as a
cultural ideal, this effort applies everywhere in the company, from the offices of
the senior executives to the workplaces of the front-line manufacturing workers.
The person who maintains the boiler in the factory is a leader: both a functional
person and a business person. He is charged with learning the capabilities of
leading and thinking about and making positive changes in his area in concert
with others; he is expected to be expert in maintaining boilers; he is expected to
understand at a certain level of knowledge, and hopefully at a conscious level,
the companys business. Understanding the overall business of the company will
allow this expert in boiler maintenance to understand at a functional and
emotional level his contribution to the business. This conscious understanding
will improve his vitality and the vitality of those around him. He will
understand, not just know, the value-add of his work and the work of others in
his area.
THE DEVELOPMENTAL MINDSET
Method A: Respond to the need to repair the pump when it fails. Repair the pump and
return it to its original pumping specifications and performance.
Method B: Develop a preventative maintenance system and seek to minimize the number
of pump failures. When a pump fails for whatever reason, return it to its original
pumping specifications and performance.
Method C: Working alongside other mechanics and engineers at the company, develop
new, improved designs for the pumping required in the plant. Continue to work on the
design and continue to improve the pumping function with zero failures as the goal.
Method D: Engage in a team with other functional people in the plant who are associated
with the manufacturing stream that requires pumping. These people could be engineers
who understand the places where the pumps are used, or accountants who understand
the various cost elements of the pumping process. The objective here is to modify and
thereby improve the manufacturing process so as to minimize the energy required to
pump and at the same time, to improve other aspects of the manufacturing process.
Method E: Make positive change in the manufacturing process that eliminates the need to
pump.
The stages of this example move from the conventional approach through
more and more developmental approaches to, finally, a superordinate or
aspirational or transformational approach.
When I was contemplating writing this book, I wanted to describe what I
experienced while working with the people of DuPont Canada. I discussed it
with some of my colleagues. One of them was an extraordinary role model
leader named Art Heeney. Art is an engineer and he moved through the
organization and served in many ways. A number of his roles were in
manufacturing. So I asked him to write a story that could help others
specifically, engineers developing themselves as leaders to better understand
the idea of the developmental culture and organization from the perspective of
those interested in operations and making things. This is what he wrote:
One of the earliest revelations in my manufacturing career was that the way we did the
work in our operations actually served to limit the contributions that individuals could
make to the business. This sounds rather ludicrous and, at that time, I couldnt have
articulated this thought, but there is ample evidence to support it.
I began my career in the role of a maintenance engineer at DuPont Canadas largest
plant in Kingston, Ontario, where close to a thousand employees worked in a complex
and demanding environment. The structuring of the work was equally complex, with
many specialized skills enshrined in a collective agreement. As an example, the
relatively simple task of changing a thermocouple in a hot polymer system required
the involvement of four people. A production operator had accountability for
managing the process and releasing the equipment to the maintenance organization in
a safe state. It was then the work of an insulator, a pipefitter, and an instrument
mechanic to complete the assignment. The principle underlying this approach was
based on a view that individuals capabilities were limited and that success lay in roles
and relationships that were rigidly defined and closely managed. This was a very topdown, efficiency-driven approach to work.
I should point out that DuPont Canada was, at that time, a highly successful
manufacturing company and that its approach to work systems was hardly unique. It was the
way work was organized, and the effectiveness of the approach was seldom questioned.
I recall a shop floor conversation I had with a maintenance mechanic regarding the work
he was engaged in. He told me, I check my brain at the gatehouse when I arrive at the plant
site. His role was defined for him, and creative excursions outside these boundaries were
forbidden. It was at this point that I began to sense the inherent weakness in this approach
to work. We hired talented people, possessing enormous potential, and then imposed work
systems that limited not just their contributions but their personal development as well.
Our managing processes focused on efficiency and gave little thought to the overall
effectiveness of the organization. It fascinated me that these same people could leave the
plant at the end of their shift and be transformed into township reeves, fire chiefs, lay
preachers, or small businessmen. The human potential to serve our businesses was being
squandered.
Fortunately, I wasnt the only one questioning the status quo. DuPont Canada was
blessed with enlightened and courageous leaders who saw these flaws and who initiated a
search for innovative approaches to work. Throughout my 36-year career with DuPont
Canada I was witness to a remarkable transformation. The essence of this transformation
was a fervent belief that individuals possess unlimited potential. The recipe for success is
in finding the means to develop this potential through the work in which people are
engaged.
Over the years, as we evolved our work systems to unleash the potential in our
organizations, it became apparent that there were a number of underlying attributes of this
more developmental organization.
The first and perhaps most powerful attribute was an unrelenting focus on customers.
And by customers I mean those delightful folks who actually pay for our products and
services. In manufacturing we sometimes convince ourselves that our customer is the
organization at the next step in our value-add chain. This is a mistake. Wherever possible,
personal contact with customers should be designed into the work. An organization that
understands the needs of customers will realize the consequences of process variances and
take corrective actions far more quickly than a conventional organization. When the
customer is truly felt in the organization, all of the manufacturing key performance
indicators will improve. There is no more potent source of energy for people than a
meaningful relationship with the paying customer. Weve always known this to be true for
marketing and sales people. Why should it be any different for the people who actually
have their hands on the product as it is being created?
Another over-arching attribute was the need for everyone to be involved in the work and
for all to work together in serving our customers. Being involved is far more than just
getting the job done. It requires each individual to see the larger picture and to appreciate
how their work contributes to the overall goal. Of necessity, these are team environments,
and the ability to work seamlessly with others is essential.
It is also essential for all to possess a willingness to take charge and to act with urgency.
The individuals who are closest to the value-add process are in the best position to
recognize variances and take the necessary corrective action. Too often we have relied on
the hierarchical leader to make the critical decisions. This leads to delays and needless
waste. Instead, provide people with the information they need so that they can make the
right decisions sooner. Information sharing needs to be a natural part of the work. The old
adage that information is power is still true, but leadership must have the courage to yield
and the goals of the team, group, or organization and its relationship to the overall
mission of the larger organization.
Personnel: The person who addresses the teams human resource capability for
example, this person sources people for the team and matches them to specific tasks.
Materials: The person who acquires and handles the materials and information the team
requires for example, raw materials, disposition of outputs, and shipping.
Planning: The person who forecasts the teams actions and outputs and who evaluates its
progress towards goals for example, by aligning monthly customer sales to output.
Operations: The person who maintains and renews the various processes, systems, and
structures within the teams purview for example, by continuously upgrading the
teams activities in order to eliminate waste.
All the members of the natural work team will be allocated to the various
points on the STAR model. There will be one or more people at each point
depending on the complexity of the team and the organization. They will be
allocated based on their interests and capabilities and expected to continuously
improve their capabilities at those tasks.
A final important feature of the system is networking. Competency in each of
the managing processes on the STAR model is enhanced when all the people in
the larger organization learn together in a competency networking process on a
regular basis that is, when all the people engaged in human resourcing in each
natural work team come together to learn to be better human resource people, to
learn the skills, techniques, and procedures to become expert in that role.
The great benefit of this individual managing model is that it challenges
people to learn more to learn to be competent in the organizations various
tasks. They will become more experienced, more integrated, more
developmental, and more competent.
At DuPont Canada, this mode of operation Everyone a Leader, everyone an
individual manager, the use of natural high-performance work teams was
practised in marketing and sales groups, in manufacturing plants, and in various
functional units such as accounting and engineering. Always, successes (or
failures) could be linked to the presence (or absence) of sufficient leadership
competence on the natural work teams.
Even when an experiment in individual managing was not entirely successful,
the vitality of the organization increased. People were energized by the concept
of self-management. Even when it was necessary to take a backward step by
introducing a conventional manager to the team, that team did not slide back all
the way. Instead, the replanted manager became a resource, not the boss. In
effect, the manager role in these circumstances became that of teaching
individual managing and leadership.
When the experiment succeeded, the vitality of the people on the team was at
a very high level and their performance as a unit was extremely high.
Then there is the question of whether individual managing can fail as a result
13 Virtue
Let me continue the story of Stephen and the engineering division. Some time
has passed and LargeCo has benefited greatly by transforming itself from a
conventional organization into a more developmental, process-oriented,
learning one. The companys other division leaders now recognize Stephen and
his engineering division as an organizational development laboratory.
One day, Stephen asks the president of LargeCo for time on the agenda of his
core team. The core team is the organizational entity that the president consults
with when developing the companys various functional and business leaders.
As the head of the engineering division, Stephen is a member of that team.
It is the third anniversary of the day Stephen joined the company. The week
before, he had decided that it was time to introduce a new idea to ensure that
LargeCos growth momentum will be sustainable.
In his presentation to the Business Council (which is what the president calls
his core team), Stephen compliments the team on the success they and their
people are having at growing peoples competence and organizational
effectiveness. LargeCos productivity, quality, and customer service measures
are all at historic highs, and so is morale within the company. But then he adds:
Growth can only be maintained if the company is sitting on a three-legged
stool. This gets their attention.
He continues: Were adding tremendous value through our work at meeting
the companys goals and objectives, and were working together across the
company in innovative, developmental ways. And, importantly, were
developing a strong developmental culture. He observes that LargeCo is
intensely focused on serving customers and developing people as leaders of
positive change. They all should be proud of this, he tells them, but they should
be taking action to always do the right things as perceived both by the
companys own people and by society at large that is, by all stakeholders,
broadly defined.
This sets the stage for a very rich conversation among the senior leaders of
LargeCo. As the meeting wraps up, Stephen, the president, and the other senior
leaders agree to create high-performance systems in the company that will be
dedicated not only to adding value and working together effectively but also to
doing the right things for society and for the companys other stakeholders. They
agree to work together to design some of these systems and to do so quickly.
Stephen is leading the company to concentrate on serving all stakeholders,
including society at large. This is something that many conventional
organizations neglect to do.
company makes mistakes, it must admit them publicly, tell the community how it
will repair them, and then repair them in a way that indicates the mistake will
not be repeated.
The alignment of will between the high-performance work system and
society at large is a result of the expenditure of large amounts of energy to create
this broad base of understanding. It is the development of aligned operational
philosophies. The philosophy that all societies everywhere in the world hold to
be true transcends culture, religion, economics, and just about everything else. It
is simply this: Improve the lives of people. All developmental organizations
must adopt this operating philosophy. They must then develop processes to
actualize that philosophy. For example, engineers and scientists from a local
business organization may take time to engage with students to help them
develop understanding and appreciation for engineering and science.
Treating People Fairly
An organization that recognizes the need to do the right thing as it conducts its
business will be perceived by its people as treating them fairly. Fairness is a
sweeping sort of word. People will say I very much enjoy my work it is
tough and challenging, but they treat me fairly. People often say that fairness
is the reason why they exert enormous effort to serve the goals of the
organization.
Leading a high-performance work system is largely about influencing people
to do extraordinary things, to change things for the better. Individuals will
engage with high energy in a high-performance work system when they perceive
they are being treated fairly.
Fairness is a broad term that encompasses the extrinsic and the intrinsic, that
has both material components and social and emotional ones. Fairness, like
leadership, cannot be defined precisely, but it doesnt really have to be all of
us recognize when we are being treated fairly. Below I describe some important
processes based on beliefs and principles that are part of my vision of a highperformance work systems ethic. They all relate to this principle:
The high-performance developmental organization treats its people fairly.
In an article in the June 2010 issue of the Harvard Business Review, author
Tony Schwartz cites a 2007 TowersPerrin study.1 That study, which was based
on a survey of 90,000 employees of organizations worldwide, found that only
21 per cent felt fully engaged at work and that nearly 40 per cent were
disenchanted or disengaged. Furthermore, those companies that had high levels
of engagement reported a 19 per cent increase in operating income; those with
low levels of engagement reported a 33 per cent decrease in operating income.
There are many causes of disengagement, so perhaps that study can only help
These objectives, having been met, exceed the expectations that the each of
these individuals originally held.
Say, for example, that a research engineer working on a new product for a
new market has challenging objectives. But this person also has a personal
development objective, which is, that she will do this work within a much
shorter time frame by influencing others, inside and outside the company, to
participate on a special team of experts; and she has another personal
development objective, which is to reach an understanding with a valued
customer that will allow her to use its facilities to test various products before
commercialization (the point being to allow faster and more cost-effective,
internal development of candidate products, albeit with some risk and cost to
the customer).
There is no greater inspiration for an employee than the achievement of
individual-directed high-performance goals. Role model leaders need to
challenge people to develop their capabilities by setting and meeting highperformance work objectives.
4. Asking People to Be Accountable
A virtuous business organization will have well-defined and developed
accountability processes for individuals, groups and teams, and the organization
as a whole.
At each of the stages of any change process designed to improve the
organizations viability, clear accountability must be established. This is the
right thing to do; it is also the fair thing to do. People cannot do their best when
they are uncertain of their accountability and that of their fellow employees.
Furthermore, when everyone understands their accountability and understands
that the company has strong procedures for ensuring it, this can significantly
improve the results of a change process.
Accountability brings structure, focus, and clarity to individuals actions.
Providing all three is necessary to role model leadership. Role model leaders
understand the critical balance between freedom and order when leading people
in a change process. They understand that without an emphasis on
accountability, and without mechanisms to ensure it, there can be no freedom.
Orderly processes that lead to predictable results provide space and time for
thinking and innovation.
Without order, there can be no freedom. If a business had to invent a process
for implementing a project each time it launched one, that business would be
consumed by those processes and its people would have neither the freedom nor
the time to engage in creative thinking to achieve extraordinary innovation.
There is a simple framework that leaders can use to organize people in a
work process with defined accountabilities so that there is no confusion about
their roles. It is called the RACI framework (or ARCI, as I will call it
here):
Accountability. Which specific individual in the organization and work
A
process will be held to account for the outcome of a given action or
objective?
R
Responsibility. Which of the individuals will collaborate on given action(s)?
consultation?
Inform. Which select individuals need to be informed about actions and / or
I
the outcomes of actions so that the accountable and responsible people will
leaders to measure outcomes. That is, the goals and objectives that define the
work to be done must be accompanied by specific promises to deliver specific
results. Every member of the strategic project team will have his or her
performance measured relative to the goals and objectives. These measurements
can be absolutes, ranges, financial ratios, or something else, as long as they are
specific. They need to be numeric whenever possible so that success can be
quantified.
Earlier in this book, I urged aspiring leaders to focus on productivity,
quality, and stakeholder service measures of performance.
Measurement is a precursor to inspiration and credibility. Role model
leaders seek to inspire those who would be led. They help followers set
aggressive but doable goals. They then work with their people to help them
accomplish those goals. Role model leaders in so doing will have inspired their
people to believe they can accomplish much; moreover, those people will
perceive as fair the demands being placed on them. When the measurable goals
have been achieved, the role model leaders credibility and trustworthiness will
have been enhanced. Role model leaders who set the direction for change,
challenge their people to be accountable, help them set aggressive
implementation plans and goals, and help them achieve measurable goals, will
have grown their emotional bank account with their followers and will be
perceived as influential and inspirational leaders.
Finally, it is important that leaders regularly review the actions and results of
the various groups, teams, and individuals working on strategic projects and
subprojects. These operational reviews are opportunities for the leaders and
the people in the work unit or project to communicate, to learn, and to receive
feedback on their actions and results. Each operational review has an expected
result, one that is often a new direction. And importantly, each one meets the
needs of the individuals who are seeking feedback on the importance of their
contributions.
5. Linking Peoples Work with Their Lives
The target here is to have individuals working with high energy and spirit to add
value to a high-performance work system. Role model leaders influence their
employees to dedicate that mental and emotional energy to their work. The
employees will perceive this as fair when they sense that the organization
understands that they have a life outside the organization a life, moreover,
with its own values. So a high-performance work system will develop ways to
honour that reality. This is yet another virtue that the organization needs to
develop.
A conventional organization acknowledges its employees lives outside the
organization by providing benefits. It makes these contributions in the form of
money in the budget for the additional work required to learn how to make it
safe? Other projects are progressing and are using the available funding.
At the meeting, the R&D and manufacturing people insist that this new
product would generate more profits and that the shareholders would be very
pleased. The customers would be pleased as well, in that the company would be
materially improving its business by offering them lower prices. The company
in turn would generate more volume from these customers, which in terms of
profits would more than compensate for the lower prices.
The companys employees would be pleased because their jobs would be
protected. There would, after all, be more volume and more work, and no threat
of lost jobs (which will occur if their customers lose the battle against offshore
competition). Also, the employees are willing to accept and believe they are
able to safely reduce the potential added risk of producing this new product. It
is time for Sean, the CEO, to speak. He is an admired role model leader who
has provided the company with inspirational leadership for many years. He asks
the group to assess the impact on the communities around the plant and beyond.
He also asks them to understand the need for the company to make right
decisions for all stakeholders as well as continue to create a virtuous highperformance work system, not just one that is viable and vital. They all
recognize the potential for harm to society at large.
He asks the group to find cost savings in the R&D budget by postponing other
promising R&D projects, and to reallocate costs to further R&D on product X.
And when the revitalized R&D work yields an equally good product, but one
with no negative impact on the environment or on employee safety, then it will
be possible to price this product somewhat higher than first planned and direct
the additional profits towards the R&D projects that have been postponed.
The customer will be pleased, even with the somewhat higher price, which is
still lower than that of the legacy product. The shareholders will be satisfied
because of the higher profits even if they are not as high as those of the
potentially polluting product. The employees will be pleased that the company
has demonstrated that it values their safety. And, finally, society will be pleased
because of the potential growth of the company and also because the company
will be telling the communities their products are safe and non-polluting.
Sean made a courageous decision. That is what role model leaders do in
organizations that strive to develop high-performance work processes and
systems. It was an innovative reconcile of opposing views (chapter 5) as well
as a courageous statement that all stakeholders need to be satisfied as part of the
design and philosophy of the high-performance work system.
The generic measures of performance for leading a high-performance
business organization to achieve sustainable growth were introduced in chapter
9. These were high productivity. high quality, and exceptional service to
stakeholders. The outputs of decisions can be thought about in terms of these
A wide body of thought suggests that the key to good and right decision making
is exceptional planning. In other words, we can logically analyse a situation and
then take all that information almost always heavily weighted to past events
and determine the best decisions. And since those decisions have been
systematically planned, the implementation will be efficient and effective.
Herbert Simon devoted a lifetime to the study of rational decision making.
He also pioneered concepts of computer-aided artificial intelligence. In his
book Administrative Behavior,2 he describes his belief that as individuals or
organizations acquire more information and knowledge, it is possible for them
to make better decisions. This is the essence of rational or analytical decision
making.
Decision tree models which are still popular are all about comparing and
organizing options and the outcomes of various decisions. They allow us to
decide among several plans. They generate a visual representation of the
various probabilities as well as the risk / reward outcomes of each option. The
decision tree method leads systematically to a preferred plan of action as well
as to a decision to move in that direction.
There are many other such models. All of them use a variety of premises to
sort and sift options and reach conclusions that lead to preferred action plans.
Some of these alternative models are easily found in the literature. These
methods entail logical processes and apply analysis as the overriding feature
when considering what the right decision is at a given point in time. The idea
here is that the best route to a decision is through facts and analysis; the best
results will then be reached.
In their book, The New Rational Manager, Kepner and Tregoe3 propose
logical methods to deal with problem solving and decision analysis based on
logic, procedure and disciplined methods. This book is a valuable summary of
the rational approach to deciding how and what to do when confronted with
difficult decisions and problems.
The appeal of the logical approach to decision making is that it is inherently
thoughtful, orderly, and complete. Most people would characterize scientists
and engineers as logical decision makers. The scientific method involves
making a hypothesis, then conducting experiments to test that hypothesis, then
adjusting it based on the experiments results, and so on until a satisfactory
conclusion is reached. All of this requires a series of logical, analytical steps.
An engineer is also thought of as primarily a logical decision maker, but the
engineering process allows for more intuition, and engineering design can
indeed have emotional elements. The best role model leaders in many of the
best institutions and organizations around the world influence people to utilize
and refine their tools for logical decision making, and thereby achieve excellent
results that is, right and virtuous decisions.
Yet logical approaches to decision making take quite a bit of time and
require additional resources. Diligent leaders and managers will often do too
much analysis. And, even after significant effort, it is sometimes found later that
the decisions were not particularly good ones. That is because when changes
are being made, there are always unanswered questions and murky variables.
The potential consequences cannot be sufficiently clear. Do we know enough
about the impact of the change on customers or on the environment? Many
ambiguities arise when an organization is setting a new direction, and even
more of them arise when that direction is being implemented.
This is where highly skilled role model leadership is a necessity. Role
model leaders who are experienced, courageous, and trustworthy will say: We
have all the analysis we need. Now is the time to stop the analysis and make our
decision.
MAKING DECISIONS IN AN INTUITIVE MANNER
Intuition relies on the mind of each individual. By mind, I mean the repository
of learning, experience, and past analysis that is available to the one who is
making the decision.
The smallest child makes decisions intuitively. Often those decisions are bad
ones, and parents are there to prevent the consequences: they prevent falls; they
remove foreign objects from the mouth; they help the child learn from
experience before any harm befalls him or her. World-class athletes, too, rely
on intuition and muscle memory to throw a strike, sink a long putt, or sidestep
a row of 300-pound defenders. These athletes make their decisions intuitively
from a large inventory of experience they have gained during practice.
In the airline industry from the 1940s to the late 1980s, there was
considerable evidence that pilot error was contributing to many crashes. Since
the 1990s, though, pilot error has contributed very little to disastrous failures in
commercial flying. In fact, the airline industry today is judged to be the poster
child for those who practise six sigma technology. We are much safer in an
airplane than we are driving to the airport.
What caused this seemingly miraculous change? It was accomplished by a
change in culture and leadership style. The leader or pilot in a commercial
aircraft in the 1950s was an authoritarian the absolute ruler in the cockpit. The
pilot made all decisions unilaterally, even in an emergency.
Then role model leaders decided that changes had to be made. Flight
simulators were developed, and pilots were required to take training in decision
making. They were subjected to situations that tested their abilities in many
different dangerous situations, and they were held accountable for learning to
resolve those situations safely. They were scored on tests, and they were
offered incentives to get better in the simulator. In addition, the culture in the
cockpit was changed so that pilots were strongly encouraged to work together
with the rest of the airliner crew to ask for advice in an emergency, to
communicate constantly with them even during routine take-offs and landings.
The same systems and measurements previously only available to the pilot were
now independently available to the rest of the cockpit crew. All of this working
together increased the vitality of the cockpit organization, which contributed to a
safer trip for everyone this was a more virtuous outcome. These changes,
directed and implemented by role model leaders, have resulted in an amazing
improvement in the lives of all the stakeholders in the airline industry.
Intuitive decisions are sourced in different ways and perhaps in different
parts of the brain than logical ones. Modern neuroscience has made huge
advances in understanding how the brain works. These new understandings tell
us that, anatomically, the right / left differences are actually more front / back.
However, brain anatomy and functioning is not the subject of this book. Suffice
to say that our brains make intuitive decisions in emotion centres in the brain
and logical decisions in separate reason centres, with quite different results.
Emotional or intuitive decisions are made on the basis of a brain
experience: the brain learns from failures that have been corrected or
successes that have been achieved. This is how children learn from their parents
to make rapid decisions in everyday life, such as whether to run or walk and
how to pronounce words. It is also how a pilot in an airliner today can quickly
correct a routine landing that has gone wrong because of landing-gear failure.
That pilot has practised this situation again and again in a simulator. The brain,
when asked, makes a quick emotional or feeling decision based on what it has
learned. It also has an enormous capacity to store and manage information and
experience to process it so that it can be used for intuitive decision making.
This is important: the brain has a huge capacity to store and manage experience
and learning, which in turn can be used to make productive decisions.
Patterns of productive thought and behaviour are important to recognize when
decisions are being contemplated. Both intuition and logic are linked to all
decisions, albeit in different proportions. The findings of modern neuroscience,
when applied to leaders decision making, can be extremely helpful in the
development of a high-performance work system.4
The following are guidelines, patterns, and rules of thumb that role model
leaders need to consider when making right decisions:
Difficult decisions, when there are a limited number of variables (say around
five), yield to a logical approach that is, analysis and planning. Example: A
decision about an important raw material for any company when the three
variables are cost, quality, and customer service and when there are a large
number of potential suppliers. This decision calls for a matrix of the three
variables for each of the suppliers, as well as a relative rating system of
some kind to measure the performance of each supplier versus the three
elements.
Decisions involving complex situations with many variables that could
significantly affect the potential outcome, with enormous repercussions for
the business, call for intuitive decision making. Example: A long-standing
research project that could materially change the direction of the company has
many different paths at this point. Each is very different; each has its
proponents in the organization; each will cost a lot of money to continue; and
once a decision is reached, it cannot be reversed. In this situation, logical
analysis of the many variables will very often result in more questions than
answers. Some analysis that fills the gaps in the experience of competent role
model leaders is often useful, but it is best that this decision be made
intuitively perhaps by a small panel of experienced and highly competent
role model leaders with pertinent experience who can share their conclusions
as they relate to the decision being contemplated. They will have formed their
own conclusions based on their store of similar experiences, past decisions
made, and results obtained. In other words, here it is best to call on the
learned capabilities of these leaders.
Complex situations like the one described above, where it is possible to break
down the decision making into segments, call for some degree of intuition.
Example: A proposed merger and acquisition is contemplated, and a large
number of potential partners are available. The first decision might involve a
logical decision-making process to reduce the number of partners to a
handful. At that point, it would likely be advisable to summon some
experienced role model leaders to make decisions intuitively, because of the
large number of variables involved in the final choice. In a situation as
complex as this, decision gates can be used. At the first gate, a few selected
variables are analysed; after that, a more emotional final decision is made
by a select group of role model leaders, reflecting the fact that too many
variables cannot be quantified. This approach often benefits from teams, with
each team dedicated to a specific element of the decision that is being made.
Quality of the Decision-Making Process
Decision making in a high-performance work system goes beyond making good
decisions in a productive manner. In the high-performance work system, the
decisions need to be right, not just good, and not just quick. In the previous
section I described how decisions can be made productively. Both rational,
logical ways and emotional, intuitive ways are appropriate in different
situations. But decisions also need to be of high quality and effective. The
impact of a high-quality right and good decision is most important for
customers and employees.
Mark is a production engineer in the manufacturing operation of an auto parts
company. He is the leader of a team of engineers that has been assigned the task
of redesigning the air conditioning system for a major model of a customers
line of trucks. He is scheduled to make a presentation to other team leaders
working on other aspects of the transformational work (e.g., drive system,
ignition system, entertainment systems) that the company is doing on this truck
model.
During the presentation, Mark describes a series of decisions he and his team
made to advance their work, such as hiring (a year ago) several engineers who
are experts in automotive air conditioning technology and systems. Also during
Epilogue
This book has described a unique model for learning about the processes for
leading an organization. It is based on the premise that it is essential for an
individual to develop certain skills, character attributes, and purposeful
behaviours as a precursor to becoming competent in the work of leading an
organization. It takes competent role model leaders to create admirable highperformance work systems.
Perhaps the most important feature of the learning framework that dominates
this book is the aspiration for the individual and organizational work required.
That aspiration is provided by the challenge of accepting and seeking two
theoretical states of perfection called Everyone a Leader and the highperformance business organization. Again, the first is the precursor of the
second.
The acceptance of scientific theory and then doing work to prove and live
out that theory is a common activity in the world of science and engineering.
These theoretical states of perfection provide the target for much innovation and
scientific positive change. It is no different in our leading and leadership model.
The superordinate potential as described by the high-performance business
organization will be evidenced by perfect harmony with stakeholders; by no
waste in work processes; and by all people continuously developing as
competent role model leaders and beyond.
This creative tension between the belief in the superordinate target of the
high-performance business organization and work dedicated to the development
of practical outcomes called high-performance work systems is the domain of
the role model leaders everywhere in the organization. This is a developmental
concept the target or theory that provides the aspiration for ongoing
development of high(er)-performance work systems.
The other creative tension is the one between the superordinate target of
Everyone a Leader providing aspiration for the active, energetic development of
practical outcomes and the creation of large numbers of role model leaders
continuously improving their leadership competence.
The culture created as a result of these positive tensions will be
characterized by high levels of thinking, learning, changing things for the better.
Again, there is a close analogy here with the functional work of inspired
engineers and scientists.
A practical key to successful outcomes from these creative tensions is the
rapid ongoing development of a body of role model leaders. That is, having
Index
Galbraith, J.K., 66
Gandhi, Mohandas, 19
Garvin, David, 66
General Electric (GE), 125, 132
General Motors, 19, 131
Gerstneer, Lou, 195
goals. See aspirational targets
Good to Great (Collins), 34
Google, 198
Greenleaf, Robert, 114
Greenpeace, 1712, 200
ground state, the: defined, 323
and developing a personal mission, 778
and developmental leadership model, 40, 45
and high-performance work systems, 434
and the nature of leadership activity, 334
and taking action, 34
and the tetrad, 30
growth. See sustainable growth
gunpowder business, 1312, 134
Guppy, The, 153
Gurdieff, G.I., 48
Hammer, Michael, 21
Hawking, Stephen, 111
Hemphill, J.K., 10
Hersey, P., 115
hierarchies: and authoritarian leaders, 118
and conventional organizations, 434, 14950, 152, 157
and hierarchical leadership, 12
the hierarchy of change, 1619
and natural work teams, 21011
and process-oriented change, 157
and teams, 1867
and totems, 199200
high-performance business organizations: and aspirational targets, 467, 133
stakeholders; work
Hill, Julian, 134
Hitt, William D., 116
honesty, 64, 1003, 233
Hopcke, R.R., 116
IBM, 195
implementing action, 68, 701
importance (focus on), 878
incremental change, xiii, 1617
individual leading competency: and ambition, 21
and charisma, 81
and developmental leadership model, 3940, 423
and Everyone a Leader, 46, 202
and fairness, 2201
and high-performance work systems, 1867
and honesty, 1002
and individual effort, 1867
and the integrated person, 2035
and knowing yourself, 7880, 103
and leadership competency model, 634
and motivation, 60
and personal mission statements, 778
and respect, 104
and self-awareness, 7880, 103
and self-management by objectives (SMBO), 745
and the self-managing person, 20912
and skills, 634, 66
and stakeholder service, 53
and thinking effectively, 52, 53
and vitality, 185. See also competence; developmental leadership model
influencing others: and administrator leaders, 1223
and admired leaders, 1213
and authoritarian leaders, 11819, 123
and change values, 1612
and competence, 63
Japan, 2001
Jaworski, Joseph, 137
Jobs, Steve, 19, 109, 118, 121
Kennedy, John F., 38
Kepner, Charles, 228
Kingston Manufacturing Plant, 5861
Kouzes, James M., 63
Krone, Charles, 48, 67
Krone model, the, 4850
Kurzweil, Ray, 15
Land, Edwin, 19
Lavoisier, Antoine, 131
leaders: defined, 1011
and hierarchies, 12
and motivation, 201, 11214
and personality types, 34, 41
values of, 25
leadership: and catalysts, 9
and change, 11, 1617, 223
and crisis, 656
and developmental leadership, xiiixiv, 26
and effectiveness, 35
goals of, 71
leadership competency model, 523
leadership defined, 912, 26, 312, 345
leading defined, 11, 312
and managing, 16
and professional development, xiii, 9, 11, 412
and thinking effectively, 159
and transformational change, 1819. See also competence; Everyone a Leader;
influencing others
leadership activity: and the change process, 1767
and changing things for the better, 334
and developmental leadership activity, 3940
defined, 43, 90
and developmental leadership model, 39, 40, 43
and diversity of thought, 856
and DuPont Canada, 5761
and Eleuthre Irne du Pont, 1312
and Everyone a Leader, 202
and functional expertise, 757
and future looking, 98
and growth, 138
and high-performance business organizations, 47, 133
and high-performance teams, 1878
and high-performance work systems, 2012
and influencing others, 60, 878
and leadership competency model, 503, 634
and leadership styles, 79, 118
as leader type, 43, 90, 92
and learning from experience, 8890
and organizational culture, 196
and role model leader designation, 623
and self-awareness, 79
and teaching others, 845
and tenacity, 106
and thinking effectively model, 69
and time management, 878. See also aspiring leaders; individual leading
competency; leadership styles
Rost, Joseph D., 910
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 122
rules, 1213
Salk, Jonas, 80
Sanger, Margaret, 19
scarcity, 76
Schmidt, Bonnie, 301
Schwartz, Tony, 218
scientific method, 228
self-leading competency model. See individual leading competency
self-motivation. See will
Senge, Peter, 80
sensing, 68
September 11, 2001, 656
Servant as Leader, The (Greenleaf), 114
service. See stakeholder service
short-term thinking, 137
silo effect, 44, 203
Simon, Herbert, 227
skills capacity: and developing a personal mission, 778
and diversity of thought, 856
and focus, 878
and interdependency, 814
and knowing others, 7881
and knowing yourself, 7880
and learning from experience, 8890
and self-management by objectives (SMBO), 745
skills defined, 634, 95
and soft skills, xii, 634
and teaching others, 845
and thinking effectively, 66. See also functional expertise
Sloan, Alfred, 19, 131
Small, D., 116
social well-being, 110
societal relationship, 21517
speed, 88, 139
sports, 49
stakeholders: and change, 25, 33
and decision-making, 2334
and ethical behaviour, 2246
and harmonious relationships, 1467, 1489, 163, 21517
and high-performance business organizations, 47, 133
and loyalty, 1456
and organizational culture, 198
and organizational purpose, 136
and organizational values, 163
and value-add processes, 151
and viability, 1489
1 For simplicity I will use DuPont Canada when referring to the Canadian organization and
DuPont when referring to the global company, which includes the Canadian organization,
rather than the legal entity names, unless there are places in the book where it is necessary
to be specific.
1 The names in this example are fictitious, but the events are real, as are most others in the
examples in this book.
2 In a reconcile, negotiations do not result in losers both sides benefit. This concept will
be discussed at length later in the book.
3 Joseph D. Rost, Leadership for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Praeger, 1993).
4 R.C. Davis, The Fundamentals of Top Management (New York: Harper and Row, 1942),
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1 The DuPont Oval logo, DuPontTM , Kevlar, and Sorona are trademarks or registered
trademarks of E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company or its affiliates. DuPont Canada is a
licensee.
2 Ram Charan and Noel M. Tichy, Every Business Is a Growth Business (New York: Three
Rivers Press, 1998), 241.
3 Ibid., 242.
4 Ibid., 88.
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Publishers, 1996), 182.
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1 Louis V. Gerstner Jr., Who Says Elephants Cant Dance? Leading a Great Enterprise
through Dramatic Change (New York: HarperBusiness, 2003).
2 The DuPont Oval logo, DuPontTM , Kevlar, and Sorona are trademarks or registered
trademarks of E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company or its affiliates. DuPont Canada is a
licensee.
3 John P. Kotter, Leading Change (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Press, 1996); Peter
Drucker, On the Profession of Management (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Press,
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4 Gary Hamel, Moon Shots for Management, Harvard Business Review 87, no. 2
(February 2009): 91.
1 Tony Schwartz, The Productivity Paradox: How Sony Pictures Gets More Out of People
by Demanding Less, Harvard Business Review 88, no. 6 (June 2010): 64.
2 Herbert Simon, Administrative Behavior (New York: Free Press, 1976).
3 Charles Kepner and Benjamin B. Tregoe, The New Rational Manager (Princeton:
Princeton Research Press, 1997).
4 David Kahneman, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).