The Hindu Business Line : Leaders as heroes? Not for long

SURE, your father, and perhaps legions of his colleagues, who worked all their lives in one company, may have thought of their firm's CEO as a hero who steered the fortunes of the ship leading from the front, telling employees what to do and how to do it. But in the 21st century, this model of heroic leadership, where followers looked up to one man to lead them through thick and thin, could well be coming to the end of its useful life, and not just because the younger generation is less respectful of the older.

Sounds like heresy? Not if you listen to Prof David Mayle, Head, Centre for Information and Innovation, Open University Business School, UK. In a recent talk at the IFMR here, Mayle says that the nature of the `follower' is changing, so willy-nilly leaders and leadership too will have to change. This century will be dominated by the knowledge worker. These jobs, says Mayle, are fundamentally different and the crucial difference is that knowledge work is increasingly not subject to conventional supervision. "You can't tell how well they are working. So, supervision could be in the past. Bang goes another layer of management," says Mayle. It's no longer about strength or dexterity anymore, but it's about hearts and minds. "You cannot manage that with traditional ways of supervision. In knowledge management systems, hearts and minds is where it is. This can be challenging for managements," he elaborates.

Managing so far had to do with power, with money, and with status but organisations may soon need to re-examine this. The current system, says Mayle, may subsist for a while as systems do not change overnight, but "in the next 50 years or so, the manager will be a professional who will level with you; he will not be expected to supervise. Management now is not about a bunch of skills and competencies dealing with other skills but it's about messy, complex human beings. The bad news is that it's going to be difficult and challenging. No longer can you sit in your office, work out what needs to be done and send out messages saying `do it like this'! The good news is that if you can find the key to knowledge people, the potential rewards for your organisation can be enormous."

He points to the success Sony enjoyed because of the style of leadership that Akio Morita followed. Sony employed tens of thousands of people, but Morita's contention was that he did not employ all those bright people and expect all of them to think alike. Mayle explains that it is a very key lesson there for organisations today as it means that you have to learn to respect diversity and people who see things differently from you are not wrong, they merely have a different perspective. "There will be times when their perspective can be as useful as yours; each has individual styles, strengths and weaknesses; that's why teams work so much better than individuals. If you can `unlock' the team, you can unlock people's hearts and minds. This is where your company creates and maintains a competitive advantage and gives you the ability to continue to reinvent the organisation, the ability to respond to situations, to see the changes coming, be agile and be flexible," he elaborates.

Mayle goes on to argue that today, increasingly, management is about empowerment at all levels. Empowered workers are not impressed by empty rhetoric; they value autonomy, respect integrity and most of all they resent arbitrary decisions. The empowered worker, says Mayle, is ambitious enough to want to contribute to a shared vision. "My argument is that a great leader does not make himself indispensable, he actually makes himself dispensable and arranges things so that if he were to walk under a bus, the organisation he helped create should continue. This is quite radical stuff in today's context," he says.

Mayle refers to a study by author Jim Collins in his book Good to Great, which tries to identify what distinguished great companies from the good ones. Collins' definition of a great company was one that had spectacularly outperformed the stock market by a factor of three over 15 years. Eleven companies matched the criteria: Abbot, Circuit City (an IT retailer), Fannie Mae, Gillette, Kimberley Clark, Kruger, Philip Morris, Pitney Bowles, Walgreens and Wells Fargo. Higher profile companies such as General Electric, 3M, Coca-Cola and Wal-Mart outperformed the market by only two-and-a-half times in the same time frame.

"You don't hear of the leaders of any of these 11 companies — the leaders of these companies are not heroic, charismatic leaders. If you look at the data, there is negative correlation between charismatic leaders and their companies' performance. That is the single most radical conclusion of the study," explains Mayle.

The study found that that the leaders had a modest lifestyle and were almost self-effacing about their achievements, shared credit and ideas.

"To list the attributes of these people who are presiding over high performing companies, it was found that they were honesty, integrity, modesty and humility, not words which you would associate with heroic leaders."

Going by his arguments, it looks like leaders and managements will need a makeover in the coming years.

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