LEADING THOUGHTS

Are people who take leadership positions motivated mainly by selfish interests or the interests of their followers? It is easy enough to cite examples proving one side or the other but researchers Gillet (U Osnabrueck), Cartwright (U Kent), and van Vugt (VU Amsterdam) wanted to add rigor to the debate.

Among evolutionary biologists and psychologists, there are two theories on the origins of leadership. The dominant idea views leadership as the outcome of status battles between group members. The winner (leader) exercises power over lower-ranked individuals.

The alternative idea sees leadership as a coordination device that helps group members plan, execute group tasks, and divvy up resources. In this view, leaders serve the interests of followers.

To test these two ideas, Gillet and colleagues conducted two social decision-making experiments. They examined the behaviors of individuals in four-player coordination games in which the individuals had the option to go first (lead) or wait (follow); their decisions were associated with certain monetary pay-offs. The researchers then linked the players’ decisions to data from personality questionnaires and their earnings in the game.

“The core question in these games is who leads and how do they fare compared to followers in terms of their earnings in the game?” the researchers report in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.

Gillet et al found that leaders were more likely to be rated as pro-social rather than selfish. And they discovered that these “servant leaders” seemingly sacrificed some of their own gains for the benefit of the group.

“Leaders, on average, earned less money than followers and dispositionally social participants (on the basis of their social value orientation) chose to lead more often than selfish participants,” the researchers report. “Additionally there is no relationship between leadership and the kind of personality traits that are usually associated with selfish leadership, most notably personal dominance.”

As the researchers admit, the experiments were run in an anonymous setting that did not enable group members to form status and dominance hierarchies commonly seen in the brutish real world. So this line of thinking is a work in progress, albeit one that gives servant leaders a measure of redemption.

Gillet, J., Cartwright, E., & Vugt, M. (2010). Selfish or servant leadership? Evolutionary predictions on leadership personalities in coordination games Personality and Individual Differences DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2010.06.003

photo credit: Clinton Steeds

Professor Robert Hooijberg (IMD, Switzerland) studied 175 state government managers in the U.S. to assess whether or not leadership effectiveness is linked to integrity, as judged by the managers themselves, their bosses, their peers, and their direct reports.

Hooijberg found that goal-oriented behaviour — getting the job done — is far and away the strongest predictor of perceived leadership effectiveness. Integrity, by contrast, holds much less importance for a leader’s boss or direct reports. “Our study lends little support to the assertion that integrity is essential for effective leadership, a sobering thought indeed,” he writes.

Of course, there is more to this research. Hooijberg found, for example, that flexibility is a crucial value for leaders. And in his article, he lays out some important distinctions between the concept of “integrity” and what it actually means in practice. Sometimes acting with undiluted honesty can damage workplace relationships that need to be sustained. Do you really need to point that your colleague’s green-and-brown argyle socks clash with his black pin-striped suit?

Read the entire article here

Besides being a good friend of Leading Thoughts, Nick Nissley is Executive Director of The Banff Centre’s leadership development unit and a well-respected thinker in the area of arts-based management education.

Of late, Nick has been exploring the idea of “narrative leadership,” basically the use of stories — personal and otherwise — to effectively lead others. He delivers an entertaining overview of the idea, and throws in a few stories for good measure, in a TedX presentation from Calgary.

If you’re in a story and you don’t like it, change the story.

Here’s the clip. At the 6:00 minute mark, Nick tells us what researchers are learning about “narrative competence.” Researchers with the Center for Creative Leadership, for example, looked at how leaders develop; how do they learn what they need to know? The answer: 50% comes from experience; 20% from hardship or failure; 20% from mentors; and 10% from formal learning. That means that 70 percent of what leaders learn comes from their experiences, both positive and negative. “And we make sense of these experiences through stories,” Nick says.

At the 8:40 minute mark, Nick explains how effective leaders know their own story and lead with it. He follows it up at at 9:00 minute mark with the story of the M.S. Hershey Foundation and its role in lifting Nick out of life-limiting storyline and giving him a new script.

At the 13:30 minute mark, Nick says “we become the stories we tell ourselves,” with the implication being that we can change the world by changing our stories.

When it comes to fostering innovation in organizations, does less leadership lead to better results? After all, creative people have a high degree of “achievement motivation” and exhibit strong characteristics of autonomy, flexibility, cognitive complexity, self-confidence, dominance, and introversion. Given the nature of creative people, say researchers Byrne, Mumford, Barrett, and Vessey (U Oklahoma), “it is often thought that leadership influence is not always necessary.”

In fact, leadership has a substantial impact on the innovation process. Writing in the journal Creativity and Innovation Management, Byrne et al review the literature on leadership of creative efforts and advance a model of core leader functions tailored for creativity.

What do effective leaders of creative people look like?

They have substantial knowledge of the area in which they work and have creative problem-solving skills. According to the researchers, “Expertise allows the leader to: effectively represent the group; communicate clearly with the group; assess the needs of followers; and cultivate and encourage less experienced followers.”

They define the mission, providing structure and goal orientation. “Creative people are likely to respond better to concrete goals that guide project selection and evaluation, rather than idealized end states that rely on affective appeal.”

They provide support for ideas, the work, and social needs. “A leader’s role is to buffer her/his creative followers from the negative contextual influences that are often associated with large mechanistic organizations, while simultaneously capitalizing on the available resources and expertise provided by that organization.”

They have a broad understanding of their organization. “This understanding will allow the leader to tailor the creative ventures pursued
to the organization’s strategy, which in turn will make these ventures easier ‘to sell’ to top management.”

The authors suggest that leadership training should focus on creative problem-solving skills and reshaping the common assumptions often held about creative work. “Leaders must be able to recognize and respond appropriately to original ideas,” they write, “as well as be able to provide a direction for their followers’ problem-solving activities.”

“Examining the Leaders of Creative Efforts: What Do They Do, and What Do They Think About?” by  Cristina L. Byrne, Michael D. Mumford, Jamie D. Barrett, and William B. Vessey; Creativity and Innovation Management (Vol. 18 No. 4 2009; 256-268)

If you cannot find this journal is your local library, email me for a copy of the article at Alan [at] AlanMorantz.com

photo credit: jeanbaptisteparis

Augustine O. Agho (Indiana-Purdue U) administered  a three-page questionnaire to a sample of 302 senior executives. He wanted to determine what they thought were the distinguishing characteristics of effective leaders and followers. Survey says. . .

Ranking for Leaders
1. Honesty/integrity
2. Forward looking
3. Competent
4. Inspiring
5. Intelligent
6. Fair-minded
7. Courageous
8. Dependable
9. Imaginative
10. Straightforward

Ranking for Followers
1. Honesty/integrity
2. Competent
3. Dependable
4. Cooperative
5. Loyal
6. Intelligent
7. Supportive
8. Mature
9. Caring
10. Straightforward

Interesting that the executives did not think that leaders needed to be caring or supportive. How does this compare to your list?

“Perspectives of Senior-Level Executives on Effective Followership and Leadership,” by Augustine O. Agho; Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis; Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies (Vol. 16 No. 2, Nov. 2009, 159-166)

Here is a nice six-minute story from Fabienne Munch, Director of Ideation at Herman Miller, about how she transformed and energized her 15-member team in the space of five months.

Stealing an idea from Google’s playbook, Munch gave members of her team $5,000 each to pursue an idea of their choice. There were three conditions: the project had to relate to Herman Miller’s mission; the staffers had to invite an outsider to participate; and they had to be open to the idea of pooling resources with their colleagues. At the five-minute mark, Munch talks about what happened next.

In the final two minutes, Munch talks about workplace trends that are informing how Herman Miller is designing work spaces.

Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO of Gallup, says process improvement (Six Sigma, lean-management, and the like) was “the last big leadership evolution.” “Now companies are structured to do a magnificent job with that kind of data,” he says in an interview with Gallup Management Journal. “But it’s absolutely not enough anymore. There hasn’t been a big idea for leadership in 25 years, nothing that shows the huge sweet spots and pushes the big advancements.”

The next big idea, Clifton says, is for leaders to have an in-depth understanding of “states of mind” of their constituencies, which he describes as “their will to work, their will to live, their will to revolt, their will to follow you.” And it means understanding their emotions: how much stress your constituency feels about money, trying to get to work, or dealing with over-bearing supervisors.

That understanding has to be based not on anecdotes and gut feel but on behavioural economics and mathematics. According to Clifton, if you can quantify states of mind, you can better understand the emotions that cause behavior. An example: “Remember when everyone thought Middle Eastern Muslims hated Western freedoms? That’s dead wrong, according to our research. Freedom is one of the things they admire most about the West. It’s the politics they don’t like.”

Sounds a bit like an advertorial for the services of Gallup, though his call for greater rigor in decision making is fair comment. For the full interview, go here.

photo credit: majorlycool

Joel Klein, New York City School Chancellor, has some refreshing perspectives on how to manage the human resources of a school system. In the Oct. 12, 2009 issue of Fortune magazine, he talked about paying for performance and empowering principals. Excerpts follow.

On the culture of the public education system in the U.S.:
“Fundamentally, the only differentiator is seniority. The power in the system in fundamentally the power of the bureaucracy, of the political forces, of the union.”

On paying teachers based on performance:
“I think about it this way: Every university I know pays differently for science teachers than it does for English teachers. But I pay the exact same for a science teacher and physical education teacher. And then I pay the same whether you work in my highest-need school or in my most successful school. Money isn’t the only thing that drives teachers. . . but money is an ingredient in the mix of things that matter to people. Fairly compensating them if they take on tougher assignments, if they’re doing the work that’s harder to attract people, like science and math — that seems to me a critical component.”

On empowering principals:
“When I started, superintendents used to pick the principals and then pick the assistant principals. I said, ‘If the principal can’t put together his management team, it’s not going to work.’ And they said, ‘Well, Chancellor, you shouldn’t do that because our principals can’t pick assistant principals.’ I said, ‘If they can’t pick assistant principals, we’ve got to get new principals.’

“Isn’t that ridiculous? Shouldn’t principals be deciding which administrators they need, which guidance counsellors they need, what community programs they want to bring in . . . and start to differentiate based on their challenges and also take some risks in this game?

“I think people would be surprised by this: Every principal in New York City signs an agreement saying what their prerogatives are, what discretion they have, and also what their accountabilities are. And if they don’t meet their accountabilities, we can terminate them or close their schools. We do that. And that’s a very different way of doing business.”

photo credit: azipaybarah