Avoid Mistakes That Plague New Leaders: An Interview with Warren Bennis

A noted authority on leadership with more than 25 books to his name, Warren G. Bennis is University Professor and Distinguished Professor of Business Administration at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business, and founding chairman of the school's Leadership Institute. His most recent book is Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls, coauthored with Noel M.Tichy (Penguin Group, 2007).

Bennis began examining the nature of leadership more than 50 years ago when he was one of the youngest U.S. infantry commanders fighting in Germany, service for which he was decorated with the Bronze Star and Purple Heart. 

He and I spoke in 2006 about the mistakes and missteps that plague newly appointed leaders and how to avoid them. Here is an edited record of our conversation. — Christina Bielaszka-DuVernay, Editor

CBD: I once heard a fascinating keynote address delivered by a young executive at a world-famous medical products company. He spoke frankly about how close he came to failing in his first high-profile leadership role some seven years earlier, and how he turned his performance around. In your experience, what distinguishes leaders who can pull away from disaster from those who plunge right over the edge?

WB: The understanding that they can't lead alone. The myth about leadership is that it's a solitary act, that "it's lonely at the top." But effective leaders know the truth of this passage from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451: "We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?" Talk to us about our 28 day program to strengthen your innovation capabilities to drive growth.

Leaders, like the rest of us, have all sorts of ways of not looking at themselves, of overlooking shortcomings. For that reason, leaders need not to be alone. They need to be "bothered" by people who will give them what I call reflective back talk.

How can a leader make sure that the right people are giving him or her "reflective back talk"? How can leaders encourage those with less power to feel comfortable doing this?

I'll answer your second question first. To get people to bother you, you have to bother them. Otherwise, people won't take you seriously. Putting out a suggestion box, advertising an open-door policy, even walking the floors and asking, "What can we do to improve?" — they're all well-intentioned actions, but, unless there's a deep culture of trust and openness, people won't tell you what they really think.

It's analogous to the heart: for it to do its job and keep the body healthy, the right amount of oxygenated blood needs to get to the right part of the heart at the right time. Likewise, it's critical that enough true, honest opinion and information make it to leaders for them to be effective and keep their organization fit and healthy. A leader, at whatever level, has to make a real effort to create a culture in which people feel free to commit candor.

As for making sure the right people are bothering you, you have to keep widening and widening your sources — you need to practice "open source management." You need to get your information from everywhere. This serves three purposes:

1. It increases the chances that you'll learn something important. The more sources you use, the more certain you can be that you're being bothered about the right things.
2. It will loosen up your own people. If someone in your closest circle is tempted to withhold information from you, they'll think twice about this when they realize that someone else might reveal it.
3. People learn from dialogue — it stretches them. I know that I don't know all that I know until I'm in conversation. Engaging in dialogue with a wide selection of people both inside and outside the organization uncovers knowledge and awareness the leader didn't even know she had.

Let's go back to your story for a moment: Can you tell me what made the leader aware that he was failing — what it was that "bothered" him?

It was an official letter from HR putting him on notice that his performance was unsatisfactory. It was, in his words, a "2 X 4 moment" — he'd thought he'd been doing great! When he started probing, he was told that the biggest problem was that his failure to delegate had caused morale among his top team to plummet. They thought he didn't trust or respect them.

Learning to delegate is difficult. It's tempting for all of us, especially ambitious business professionals, to believe that unless we do something ourselves, it won't be done right.

What new leaders need to understand is that by not delegating, they're disrespecting not only others but themselves. They're not using themselves to their best advantage, and they're demonstrating that they haven't learned one of the key truths about leadership, which is that the only way to make your weaknesses irrelevant is to respect others' strengths and use them.

What steps can new leaders take to become better at delegating?

In my experience, most leaders and aspiring leaders are, with very few exceptions, driven type As. They're perfectionists. But delegation requires letting go of perfection and relinquishing control. It's very difficult for some people to let go, but being an effective leader absolutely requires it.

For one, if you're not delegating, you're not doing your job. As someone moves up in an organization, their job becomes less about their facility at the functional tasks that, earlier in their career, defined their performance and more about their skill at making the best use of all the capabilities and talents that surround them.

By definition, an organization is a system of collaboration and interdependence. The work of leading an organization — whether a team, a business unit, a regional division, or an entire corporation — is to fit together the organization's independent pieces so they create the most value. It's to increase the sum of the parts. If you can't delegate, you shouldn't be in this business.

For another, as the leader in your story learned, a failure to delegate appropriately drives down motivation and morale. Competent, creative, hardworking people want their talents and effort recognized. I was reminded of this rather poignantly in a conversation with a friend of mine. An extraordinarily gifted person, she chose to take early retirement from an organization where she'd worked 30 years because she said she never felt that her full talents were utilized.

What else is crucial to making the leap to leadership — and succeeding at it?

I'll single out two things. One is attentiveness — keeping your eyebrows raised all the time. You know, even if a leader has surrounded herself with trusted advisers who give her straight talk, she still needs to cultivate attentiveness. That means whenever an issue or crisis arises, asking herself, What have I done to create this situation? What did I contribute to this mess?

The goal is not to blame but to understand. Accepting failure is pretty easy; to understand it is the hard part.

In the case of a crisis, the dangerous response is to look for someone to blame. But always pointing the finger at yourself isn't good, either; there are some people whose self-esteem is so low that their default response is to blame themselves. Brooding about one's failings, obsessing about them, is not productive.

What leaders want is a certain detachment. They should aim to be observing participants. But they don't want to be so detached that they're always in the balcony observing things; they have to spend time in the fray.

The other is contextual intelligence. Get the business literacy down pat. Just as a musician has to master the scales before he can become a master, so a leader has to gain a command of the basics to break free of the grid of technique and become an eminence.

It also means knowing the whole industry: what it's about, what makes one an expert in that particular space.

Finally, it requires knowing your company inside and out: the products, how customers see you, the culture — and what employees particularly value about it. This is where [former Hewlett- Packard CEO] Carly Fiorina really stumbled. She said she wanted to preserve the best of the HP culture, but she never really got the culture in the first place. While she paid lip service to [William] Hewlett and [David] Packard, and the company's early days, she never truly saw the company from the employees' perspective.

 via blogs.hbr.org

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