Leadership outside the MBA classroom

A 12-year in-depth study of how CEOs manage time was recently published in Harvard Business Review. The article shed light on how CEOs juggle competing demands on their time and one key takeaway was how little time CEOs in general had for self-reflection and deep thinking. 

As I transition into my new role as the Head of Digital and Marketing Effectiveness for Kantar Consulting, I had the rare opportunity to look back upon my last 3 years in growing and leading a team at Concise. What became clear to me quite quickly was how different leadership “out in the field” was from what I learnt in an MBA classroom (note: this takes nothing away from INSEAD’s excellent classes in leadership and organizational behaviour). Leadership in real life is much messier, more vulnerable and a more gradual process than what some people may imagine. Yet despite its elusiveness, good leadership has an incredible impact on long term business performance. A study by Deloitte found that effective leadership contributed up to 15% of a company’s market value. More revealing was the impact of weak leadership - investment analysts discount organizations with weak leadership by almost 20% on average. Research by Professor Charles O’ Reilly from Stanford University suggested that adaptable and detail-oriented cultures were more likely to have higher revenue growth, higher Tobin’s Q (market valuation) and higher employee ratings on Glassdoor. In turn, those cultural elements were directly influenced by the CEO’s personality – the extent to which a CEO demonstrates openness and conscientiousness. In summary, leadership, good or otherwise, matters a lot to business performance.    

While there are many excellent resources on leadership, I would just like to share 4 personal lessons I have learnt out in the field. 

1.      Leaders need to be adaptable

While there are many general prescriptions for good leadership, the “right” leadership style is often contextual. An open leadership model works best when the organization has positive momentum and is largely headed in the right direction. The same approach however, could be detrimental if the organization is spinning out of control or in a crisis. This “adaptability” applies to people management as well – every member in your team is likely to have distinct personalities and working preferences. Though it may be tempting for a leader to expect everyone to conform to his or her working style, you risk stifling dissenting voices and reducing diversity in the long term. As a senior leader, you need to create psychological safety for individual managers to express themselves and disagree. You also need to allow room for experimentation and alternative ways to achieving the same result. This can only happen if you adopt an open mindset and adapt your own way of working and communicating depending on the person and organizational context. Furthermore, leaders managing multi-generational teams (millennials, generation Z, baby boomers…) will find that the “one-size-fits-all” approach rarely works. Broadening your leadership and management toolkit is essential to helping your organization navigate an increasingly dynamic and complex business environment. However, it is also worth mentioning that adaptable leaders can risk being perceived as fickle-minded or indecisive. While leaders should be adaptable when it comes to “how”, leaders need to be resolute when it comes to values and principles. This way, your team understands that there is always room to debate methods, but fundamental principles are unwavering and will form a consistent basis for decision-making. 

2.      Leaders need to be multipliers

There is much debate about the difference between managers and leaders. Without going into the old cliché that managers ensure people do things right and leaders inspire people to do the right things, I will argue that great leaders are fundamentally “multipliers”. In other words, great leaders “multiply” the potential and effectiveness of the people they work with. In a consulting firm, it is not unusual for some young analysts to be labelled quickly as low-performers after a poor showing in a project. However, I have also personally seen how these “low-performers” transform if they ever get the opportunity to work with a great manager. Great leaders understand that people’s abilities are not fixed, and everyone has the potential to achieve more. Leaders become multipliers when they “push” and “pull” – push by setting a high bar for performance but pull by supporting and coaching their team members to succeed. Some leaders do one or the other, but it is much harder to walk the tight-rope between the two. Nonetheless, when leaders realize that their primary role is helping people maximize their potential, both personally and for the organization, they become true multipliers of performance.          

3.      Leaders need to be committed to lifelong learning

As a senior manager, time is often the ultimate luxury. For many of the more accomplished leaders in my Stanford executive program, balancing the demands of day-to-day work and family often mean little time for self-enrichment. However, what impressed me the most about my course-mates was their persistent pursuit of knowledge and personal growth. This was evident not only during the program, where they engaged in extended spirited discussions with each other and with the professors as though they were fresh out of college, but also after the program, where they continue to share new knowledge from books they read and seek advice from one another. Personally, over the past 11 years, I also had the opportunity to observe how the career paths of my peers and seniors have evolved. This is especially interesting given how technology has disrupted and re-defined work in the last 5 years. What I have come to realize was how much more difficult it was to continue to lead by relying on past experience in a world that is changing so rapidly. Leaders can’t lead by looking at the rear-view mirror - to make sense of the way forward, they will have to make learning a priority. Organizations that recognize this will invest heavily in training their best talent, but it is ultimately our own responsibility to ensure we don’t stop growing personally and professionally. Leaders who choose to focus solely on advancement over learning may find themselves confronting Peter’s Principle much sooner than they expect.

(Peter’s Principle is a concept in a book by Canadian educator and author Laurence J. Peter, where he suggests that in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his or her level of incompetence.) 

4.      Leaders need to prioritize their mental and physical health

I left this learning to the last because it is the most self-evident, yet controversial. The ethic of hard work is very much ingrained in many cultures. Stories of entrepreneurs, investment bankers and consultants who work 80 – 90 hours a week are often bandied around to equate hard work with success. Just to be clear, I do believe that people reap what they sow, and the amount of effort invested into an endeavour is often a good predictor of the outcome. Nonetheless, as a leader who cares about the long-term performance of your organization, we need to be mindful of the effects of prolonged periods of overwork. The health implications of sustained stress and lack of sleep are plentiful and needs no reminder. More importantly, leaders who consistently overwork themselves could set their teams and organizations up for failure in the future. Leaders must recognize that their mental state and behaviours are magnified many times in an organization. When leaders are not in a good mental and physical state, the effects ripple outwards and have an outsized impact on the rest of the employees. Like it or not, people notice little things about their leaders – the frown on their faces, the slouch in their shoulders, the slightly agitated tone of voice. Besides a negative impact on morale, a poor mental and physical state may eventually lead to slip-ups in decision-making, some of which could have significant financial consequences for the business. Employees multiply this effect when they mirror the “over-working” behaviours of their managers – the whole organization becomes constantly on-edge and prone to failure because every wire is wound too tight.  Moreover, overwork can severely diminish creative-thinking and experimentation, both critical to succeeding in an age of innovation and disruption. Of course, every organization has periods where it needs to stretch beyond its limits, and every leader sometimes simply needs to do what it takes to get the job done. Nonetheless, the caution here is ensure overwork is the exception, not the norm.

In our culture, there is often a desire to “lionize” our leaders. Whether in politics, corporate life or religion, we often expect much more from those who wear the mantle of leadership. We reason that if they are leaders, they must have more exceptional qualities relative to everyone else. Ironically, I think those expectations often end up creating worse leaders – leaders who are afraid to change, to take risks, to learn from others and acknowledge their limitations; leaders who are often driven to overwork at the expense of their health and family to prove themselves. Leaders need to avoid getting trapped by those expectations, and recognize that leadership is a journey, and not a destination. Most importantly, leaders need to realize they can achieve nothing on their own. The best leaders empower everyone else to think and act like leaders, preparing their organizations to thrive long after they are gone. In the end, the true testament of leadership is not what you have achieved, but what you leave behind.