The new core of leadership: in-depth interviews with leaders across industries reveal the essential qualities

T+D, March, 2003 by Clark Aldrich

Quality has traditionally meant anything that's expensive. Cadillacs and Rolexes are considered quality items. So are Mont Blanc pens, but not Bics. The concept of quality has been warm, fuzzy, but everyone got it. Yet, it was useless from a business sense. Then something happened in the early 1980s. Instead of just meaning "high end," a few manufacturers redefined quality to mean "meeting the needs of the customer."

Customers could be either internal or external. Total quality management was born.

Incredibly, when companies from around the world came together to talk about quality, they now talked about the same thing, and they could learn from each other how to solve implementation problems. The knowledge base around quality deepened quickly. Product designers to start listening to customers. Consistency across a manufacturing process became critical, spawning the discipline of Six Sigma. Speed became king, prompting work into A delta T.

This new concept of quality was strongly supported, and strongly invested in, by managers, CEOs, even U.S. Presidents. The high-potential people, rather than staff, were put in charge of the programs. When TQM tried to move into the dynamic services world, it sputtered. Still, it remains essential in manufacturing circles.

Compare that to the current state of leadership. Getting two advocates to agree on a definition of leadership seems impossible. Covey, Blanchard, PDI, DDI, Kotter, and AchieveGlobal (just to name a few) compete tooth-and-nail. Many consultants have tried (and failed) to turn leadership into a cookbook-style skill, handing out recipes for anyone to follow. Meanwhile, thousands of academics have heaped layers of philosophical debate that make leadership undefinable, almost magical. David Gergen, director of Harvard's Center for Public Leadership, worries, "Had Roosevelt and Churchill nor rallied the Western democracies, civilization might have perished." That sets the leadership bar high for the rest of us, without helping us know how they did it.

Now, so it seems, everything good is due to leadership and everything bad is due to lack of leadership. That generalization has led many people to think (wrongly) what one manager from a pharmaceutical company recently told me: "Leadership has to be found or hired. It cannot be nurtured, taught, or developed."

But, in fact, the leadership planers may finally be aligning. Across the wealth of content out there, a common consensus about leadership is emerging. Experts may disagree on the fringes, but they're remarkably aligned on the core. Like quality, leadership is usable, diagnosable, and, yes, teachable.

This article is a result of a series of interviews over six months in the middle of 2000 with people identified as leaders within their organizations, including senior people, mid-level managers, and line workers, as well as people from the private sector and government. The interviews were preparation for developing SimuLearn's Virtual Leader leadership simulation.

Power

When all is said and done, leadership is accomplishment. Consider AlliedSignal turnaround executor Larry Bossidy, whose bestselling Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done serves as a timely reminder of the importance of leadership accomplishment. And GE's Jack Welch said it characteristically succinctly when he was recruiting: "I was really looking for people who were filled with passion and a desire to get things done."

But leadership isn't being satisfied with just completing assigned work. That's management. Few leaders can work in a vacuum. Therefore, a de facto definition of leadership is "getting a group of people to productively complete the right work."

Formal authority. To get a group to move in the same direction, the leader must have power. It can be formal authority, such as a title or credentials. Some leaders try to heighten their perceived authority by name dropping or by obtaining various and new certifications.

Informal authority. Power can also be in the form of informal authority, such as the friendship or alignment of others. It's critical not to underestimate a group's opinion of you. Hedrick Smith, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times correspondent, noted, "Jack Kennedy was the first successful presidential candidate to rely on personal appeal to win the top prize." Breaking trust, not walking one's talk, is one of the fastest ways to lose informal authority.

Political influence. Power even takes the form of political influence, earned from coming up with good ideas or being on the winning side of arguments. As professional hockey player Wayne Gretsky famously said, "You want to skate to where the puck will be, not where it is." U.S. National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice recently summed up the goal of power: "Power is nothing unless you can turn it into influence."

Leadership requires gaining power, but also sharing power. One of the most effective acts of leadership committed by Lyndon B. Johnson was to identify and praise Martin Luther King Jr. at the national level. Sharing power instead of applying it is how, in the words of Peter Block, author of The Empowered Manager, "one can demand commitment instead of sacrifice."