BizDeansTalk-español

Leadership | - "Women Leadership"

Celia da Anca, Professor of Global Diversity, Instituto de Empresa.

What is a leader and whether or not leadership qualities can be learned, as we can see by the comments on this blog, leads to an interesting debate, and I would like to introduce another element to the debate which is women in leadership; asking two basic questions.

1- Whether there is a leadership style for women.

2- Whether women should be in leadership positions, and if so why only 6% of women occupy boardroom positions in main European firms.

We can see by Santiago’s comments how thinkers such as professors Boyatzis and McKee, or Jim Collins, defend a leadership style based on a blended set of qualities: some of the more aggressive of the "Nietzsche" style combined with other qualities such as humility and the tendency to give credit to others and assign blame to themselves.

Interestingly enough, studies of the last decade on perceptions of male and female management leadership types conclude with a somewhat similar analysis. These studies depict male management as being transactional leadership: exchanging rewards or punishments with employees in return for performance. Female management is considered to be transformational: interactive, valuing diversity and encouraging participation or involvement in group work.

It is important to emphasise that having a stereotypical description of a female/male type does not imply that it applies to all women. It rather means that there is an ideal prototype labeled female or male regardless of whether women/men actually behave in such a way. There are men who tend to be transformational in their leadership way of behaving, and women who behave in a transactional style. Management traditionally was associated with the more "masculine type" with more "female" characteristics tending to be suppressed. What diversity studies now show is that both management styles are complementary and the differences need not to be repressed. On the contrary, they need to be reinforced.

It then seems clear for most management thinkers that leadership today requires the full set of all qualities: traditional ones as well as new ones that were traditionally relegated to feminine spheres. The idea behind learning means to identify the qualities that one normally uses as well as to improve other possible qualities that could allow us to use different styles in different situations. In my opinion that will help managers, as well as leaders, to work in the diversity that the business world today requires.

A more practical question for corporations nowadays is to understand why such small numbers of women arrive to business leadership positions in the USA as well as in Europe.

The question is whether women themselves are rejecting senior management positions, or if positions of this kind require a certain profile that many women simply do not have. This profile tends to be that of a person who is direct, outgoing, sure of themselves, somewhat aggressive and, of course, not liable to fall pregnant. It would appear that the feminine prototype does not fit the paradigm of the ideal senior director.

The business world, using a practical approach, has introduced during the last decade, policies to promote diversity at all corporative levels in order to serve an increasingly diverse market, and, in my opinion, in the diverse context the business world now operates, education can help to acquire the different qualities and styles necessary for leading others.

Leadership | -"Modern and Postmodern Conceptions of Leadership"

Santiago Iñiguez, Dean of Instituto de Empresa.

I believe that management is philosophy in action and that every management theory has a philosophical background. I do also believe that every manager has a view of the world, consciously or inadvertently, explicit or emergent, that conforms to a certain sort of philosophy. Interestingly, even affirming the contrary is in itself a philosophical proposition.

The same is applicable to theories on leadership: they can be ascribed to some philosophical movement or trend. In this regard, modern theories of leadership owe a lot to Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher of the 19^th Century, famous for his affirmation that "God is dead", whose contributions have been both influential and controversial. Nietzsche distinguishes between two types of morality: the "master morality" and the "slave morality". The first is applicable to the leaders of society, who create their own values for themselves. The "slave morality" is applicable to the herd and according to its standards the behaviour of masters is accounted as evil. But masters, sustains Nietzsche, stand "beyond good and evil": they are subject to their own principles, different to the norms enacted for the herd that favour mediocrity and prevent the development of higher-level persons: the true leaders.

Curiously, a passage from one of Nietzsche’s books could have been extracted from the management literature on modern leadership of the 1980’s:

"To give style to one’s character- a great and rare art! He practises it who surveys all that his nature presents in strength and weakness and then moulds it to an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason, and even the weakness delight the eye…It will be the strong, imperious natures which experience their subtlest joy in exercising such a control, in such a constraint and perfecting under their own law" (1)

Nietzsche’s theory reminds me of some characters of novels and movies from that same decade. The two most remembered icons are probably Gordon Gecko, the protagonist of "Wall Street", preacher of the "greed is good" maxim –a part of the Reaganite credo of the time-, and Sherman McCoy, the grieved executive of "The Bonfire of Vanities", qualified in the novel as a "master of the universe". Both characters feel, using the Nietzschean expression, "beyond good and evil" and not subject to the standards that affect the rest of mortals. A passage from one of Nietzsche’s works is appropriate again as a description of their attitudes in life:

"For believe me!- the secret of realising the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of the Vesuvius! Send your ships out into uncharted seas! Live in conflict with your equals and with yourselves! Be robbers and ravagers as long as you cannot be rulers or owners, you men of knowledge! The time will soon be past when you could be content to live concealed in the woods like timid deer!" (2)

However, both mentioned stories end similarly. Gecko and McCoy are caught and punished and they consequently loose their "supermen" status. We witness a moralistic finale, something that does not necessarily happen in real life.

In the past decade, business schools have witnessed the flourishing of postmodern theories of leadership that demonise Gecko and McCoy’s attitudes and propose new, renovated archetypes of business leaders. This has happened at the time of the renaissance of business ethics, concomitant with some widely publicised business scandals. If we search recent literature on leadership, we find interesting examples of this new approach. Let me mention just two. Jim Collins, the business best-seller author, proposes a new concept: the "Level 5 Leader", a model of executive who blends both classical leadership virtues -such as ferocious resolve or will- with some attributes that were not associated traditionally with descriptions of the charismatic leader, such as humility and the tendency to give credit to others and assign blame to themselves. This two latter attributes were, according to Nietzsche, virtues of the "slave morality" but not applicable to masters who execute their will of power. And in management theory there were intuitively linked more to the attitude of subordinates than that of leaders.

Another inspiring recent contribution is "Resonant leadership", a book written by professors Boyatzis and McKee. Its authors formulate a similar "antinietzschean" proposal: they defend that managers who aspire to become effective and enduring leaders need to be mindful, hopeful and compassionate.

A final mention to another contribution of contemporary optimistic literature on leadership: Sharon D. Sparks defends in her latest book that leadership is not an innate but an acquired skill, and thus can be taught and learned if the correct methodology is employed. Although the book slightly oversells Harvard Business School courses on leadership, it is a good antidote for sceptics on the subject.

Notes

(1) Nietzsche, F. "Die Frohliche Wissenschaft", quoted in Hollingdale, R.J.: "Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy" (Cambridge University Press; Cambridge, UK, 1999); p. 143.

(2) Ibid., p. 144.

Leadership | - “Leadership and learning are indispensable to each"

Santiago Iñiguez, Dean of Instituto de Empresa.

"Leadership and learning are indispensable to each": a quote from the speech that John F. Kennedy prepared for delivery in Dallas, that day in 1963.

I cannot agree more with this statement made by one of the most instantly recognisable leaders of our times. There has been a lot of talk about whether leadership is an innate or an acquired ability, a debate that I am not going to get into here. I will leave to biologists to discover the gene responsible for leadership skills. Following on in the spirit of JFK´s thoughts on learning, I would rather briefly talk about the importance given to learning and education by business leaders.

Today, it is almost inconceivable that leaders have arrived at their position, without the resilience for the necessary strenuous preparation, nor without the dedication to maintain and improve it. Leaders seem increasingly eager to update their perspective on society and business and to anticipate what comes ahead. It is part of their role. This in turn requires a constant striving for learning new things and adapting themselves to the permanent change experienced in every industry. I am frequently able to confirm this at our school, during the monthly meeting of CEOs of major corporations based in Spain, in a programme called "Leadership Forum."

The purpose of the programme is to discuss matters of current interest with one of our professors or other foreign personalities. Every time I attend, I am impressed at the preparation of the participant CEOs, in terms of their knowledge of management concepts and the detailed information they handle. After meeting the protagonists themselves, I have come to realise that they devote considerable time to study and to continuous learning.  I used to have the view that managers, particularly the ones at the top, were more people of action rather than of reflection.

Given that CEOs are the Olympians of business leaders, it would be interesting to explore how much time they devote to study, in order to see if I am right. Again, if we look at the diaries of top executives published in papers and magazines, we see their long work-days of 17 hours filled almost solely with meetings. But what is not apparent in those diaries is the time they dedicate in preparing those meetings and amplifying their knowledge. Recently, I had the opportunity to talk with George Soros, another undisputed contemporary leader. From our conversation I became aware of just how much time he devotes to reading and dealing with academics. However, Soros may not be a good example to prove my theory about the studiousness of managers, as he is an academic himself as well. Diverse studies show that managers do actually employ a substantial part of their busy agendas reading and studying. Some of those studies point out that one of the reasons for them to read is as a relief from the solitude of being at the top, something that reminds me of the celebrated quote of C.S. Lewis: "we read to learn that we are not alone".

Certainly, leadership is not only about chance or luck. It is not just a matter of having innate leadership skills and taking the command when the opportunity arises. Business schools educators have an important function here: to help potential leaders rethink their basic assumptions and enlarge their vision of the future. Having this in mind, I ponder about the flipside meaning of JFK’s aforementioned quote i.e., that leadership is indispensable to learning. Would it be that educators need to have some certain leadership skills?

(George Soros talking with Santiago Iñiguez at IE´s Business Leadership Forum)

Leadership | Diary | - "The varying shades of Leadership"

Santiago Iñiguez, Dean of Instituto de Empresa.

Unfortunately, the word “leader” does not differentiate between evil and good people: Stalin, Mahatma Gandhi, Hitler and Martin Luther King were all leaders. Next to some chilling examples of leaders, who in their thirst for power relied on terror, there is a risk that some misdemeanours perpetuated by recent business figures go unnoticed and unheeded especially by business school educators. Next to the undoubted evil in the world it is so easy to be numbed to lesser examples of business corruption which are further down on the scale of the difference between right and wrong. Paul Danos mentioned the word “honesty” in a recent post and I believe that the integrity upheld by business schools, sometimes with an academic honour principle, is fundamental to acting as a leader and in distinguishing the sometimes fine difference between right and wrong.

I was thinking about this yesterday, while watching a programme on the life of Sadam Hussein on my 13-hour flight to Santiago de Chile, where I am attending the Global Forum 2005. I was interested to know more about the man, given that he is now on trial for Crimes against Humanity. The programme portrayed Sadam Hussein as someone with a troubled childhood who later became a hired political assassin. It ended relating the shrewd means he used to ascend to power. I was particularly amazed at the cruelty of one particular chilling episode that happened the day after Sadam became president of Iraq. He summoned all the relevant politicians of the country in a big auditorium and announced that he was going to unmask all those who had plotted against his regime in previous days. The session was recorded by TV cameras. Dozens of people were arrested, without any explicit accusation and the rest of the audience was wondering whether the next one was going to be them. The documentary also shows a smiling Sadam, pleased with his purge. It was one of the most frightening testimonies I have seen.

The saying “It is safer to be feared than to be loved” is attributed to different authors, one of which is Machiavelli. I have sometimes heard it quoted by some business people as a maxim to be applied at work. I can not disagree more. In fact, we need to elaborate on the concept of leadership in order to weed out of its semantic map all those cases of evil leaders or "control freaks". Alternatively, we could focus more on how to nominate good managers who have ascendance and influence over people. The previous post of Professor Jose Luis Alvarez on “Shared Leadership” is a valuable proposal in that constructive way.

When reflecting on Della Bradshaw´s disappointment about Jack Welch’s response about the leadership question after Katrina, it reminded me of a study that was published recently in Knowledge@Wharton, based on a number of interviews with significant CEOs. One of the major conclusions is that leadership depends on whether a certain person does or doesn’t take the lead in some circumstances. Is that so?

Leadership | - "My Views on Leadership"

Della Bradshaw, The Financial Times Business Education editor.

I think I have found a new best friend in Professor Fernando Bartolome. Like him I have serious problems with the idea of teaching leadership, though perhaps for very different reasons.....

I went to a lunch a couple of weeks ago to hear Jack Welch publicise his new book and the question of leadership arose in the context of Hurricane Katerina. He said there was no leadership in New Orleans because nobody took control of the situation when the tragedy happened - everyone was out of town. So, is turning up and taking responsibility enough to make you a leader?

As journalists we turn up and take responsibility for the things we write on a daily basis. Does this make us great leaders? I suggested this to the people on my team and they just sniggered.

A professor at London Business School once explained the three rules of leadership to me.
1. Know who you are
2. Know the people who work for you
3. Know how to motivate them

I fell at the first hurdle - far too scary. And I know what will motivate the people who work for me - more money. I'm just not authorised to give them any.

Leadership? I think it's a myth.

Leadership | -"Shared Leadership"

José Luis Alvarez,  Professor of Organizational Behavior at Instituto de Empresa

Leadership is a conceptual construct full of different assumptions -academic and ideological-and one that can be looked at from many different perspectives. In a forthcoming book (November 2005) I coauthored with my colleague Silviya Svejenova (Sharing Executive Power: Roles and Relationships at the Top, Cambridge University Press) we focus on and question one of these assumptions: that leadership is exercised on an individual basis. Among the exceptions to this generalized assumption is David Heenan and Warren Bennis’ book on co-leaders, which provides a collection of accounts of collaborations between a leader and a leader’s lieutenant.

Recently, another exception has appeared in the volume Shared Leadership edited by Craig Pearce and Jay Conger. Shared leadership, which these authors define as a dynamic, interactive influence process among individuals in groups for which the objective is to lead one another to the achievement of group or organizational goals or both, has two causes in common with small numbers at the top. 1) Senior leaders of complex organizations do not usually possess all the relevant information and competencies; and 2) the complexity of the CEO’s job means that it is difficult to fill with one person.

Our focus is reflected in two articles on the topic: D. Sally (2002) and J. O’Toole, Jay Galbraith, and Edward Lawler III (2002). These authors provide splendid accounts of the existence of co-leadership and a wealth of evidence of its spread. Perhaps the main difference between our work and theirs is that we focus specifically on corporate governance structures. And having the length of a book at our disposal, we have been able to embed the explanations of the phenomenon within two traditions in organization theory: contingency theory and role theory.

An influential book by Rakesh Khurana (2002) contains a sociological inquiry into the excesses of individualism in corporate governance. Khurana uses Weber’s notion of charisma to explain the celebrity status of some CEOs in the USA in the 1990s, and some of the gaps between excessive expectations and delivery. Khurana argues that the contribution of people at the top toward the results of organizations is especially susceptible to biases in attributions because it is the executives to whom it is more difficult to give credit for organizational results. At the apex, the distinction between means and ends is more ambiguous, performance is over determined, and causalities follow the rule of equifinality. As a consequence, giving credit for organizational results becomes a social construction.

Investor capitalism has extended ownership rights to a multitude of dispersed small investors who cannot follow the nuances of the evolution of the shares in which they invest; nor can they easily understand the reasons for the performance of corporations or predict their future evolution. Consequently, these non-professional atomized multitudes, fed by an ever-increasingly influential financial press, have no option but to allow themselves to track external signs through which they try to infer the causes for corporate performance. Therefore, a variety of reasons ranging from our genetic cognitive biases through the individualism of western societies to the role of the press in legitimating business practices (see my work with my colleague Carmelo Mazza, 2000) feed the attribution fallacy that has enabled CEOs to gradually acquire an aura of causality and charisma. Thus Khurana argues that ‘Boards wish to find a new CEO with as much star power as possible, because a high-profile, high status appointment is almost certain to inspire public confidence in the company and immediately boost share prices (p. xii).

In Sharing Executive Power we build upon the work of all these authors who question two basic assumptions: 1) that executive leadership is a solely individualistic job, and 2) that trust based interpersonal relationships at the top must be viewed with suspicion.

One of the first things we should share with leadership students is that there is no easy answer to the challenges it poses, that there are different alternatives in conceptualizing it, many of them legitimate, and that leadership is an intensely personal affair, but not a solipsistic one, but one that is shared with others.

Full academic references of the books referred to are available through José Luis Alvarez (josel.alvarez@ie.edu)

Leadership | - "Sick and tired"

  Fernando Bartolomé, Professor of Management, Instituto de Empresa.

Personally, I am sick and tired of reading descriptions of leadership seminars, courses and workshops on leadership and of the thousands of "leadership products" generated by the leadership industry, from the most banal to the most arcane and esoteric.

My main objections are:

1. Most models about leadership reflect the unrealistic fantasies of academics and other management gurus. And they contribute to the development of unrealistic descriptions of leadership and, even more unrealistic, descriptions of leaders. A good part of the leadership literature describes heroic, humane, enlightened leaders that never existed. (Having built up these idols, many of these myth makers seem to disappear when the idols fall. At that time a new "leadership specialist" arrives to propose wonderfully logical and sophisticated theories about why those leaders failed. By doing this, the expert proposes an alternative model of "flawless, virtuous leadership". The message is: "If you had taken my course or read my book, you would never have made those stupid mistakes".

2. But leadership experts go beyond building unrealistic images of leadership. They proceed next to build sophisticated instruments to asses the leadership potential of individual managers. The effects of this can be devastating to the manager who finds that he/she lacks vision and the capacity to inspire others, is weak in self-awareness, has limited emotional intelligence and lacks a fine-tuned sense of ethics. (Fortunately, most of the people who became good leaders did not fill in those assessment questionnaires before they embarked in their adventure).

3. These courses and other pedagogical approaches are useless for another basic reason: most managers in any organization will never be asked to act as leaders but simply to act as managers in charge of implementing ideas and projects that emanate from the top.

Conclusion: It is about time that we give up the fantasy that we are in the business of helping people become leaders. And that we accept that it is good enough if they learn to be creative and effective as managers, who are basically asked to implement the ideas, good and bad that roll down from Mount Olympus. (Part of their creativity should focus on learning how to sabotage the many stupid ideas flowing from the top).

Leadership | - "Can leadership be taught at our schools?"

Santiago Iñiguez, Dean of Instituto de Empresa.

Our debate has been enlivened after the recent contribution of Peter Lorange, President IMD and I plan to make some comments in the near future.

Both dean Gupta and dean Peters have raised so many issues that to tackle all of them would need several discussions, so for now I will focus on just one, that being the concept of leadership itself and if it can be taught effectively by business schools. Both authors mention the need for schools to broaden their scope of teaching, in particular dean Gupta says “Classic business tools must be welded with fields too often dismissed as separate and exclusive of business”.

I agree with dean Gupta when he submits that leadership can indeed be taught and reinforced and that every class, no matter the subject, is an opportunity to reinforce leadership skills. Furthermore he states that candidacies to a business school should not be discounted due to a lack of leadership experience. Dean Peters sees as crucial the matching of the methods of teaching with the maturity of the receivers of management education, as well as the context and personnel that with which management education is imparted.

Dean Peters mentions the importance for a manager to have a multidisciplinary view of the world and that this is a challenge for business schools as “there is little cross-functional research at many institutions”. I would urge readers particularly interested in the topic of Research to read some of the articles already written about this elsewhere in the blog that deal specifically with this theme and particular that of Peter Lorange especially where he speaks of his particular approach "to create cross-disciplinary academic value".

Dean Peters goes on to say that: “There are simply not many faculty members who have the psychological understanding of human drivers and who have the experience of practically influencing social constructs: organisations.” implying that business schools have certain limitations when it comes to the finer points of leadership teaching.

What is more food for thought is that Peters quotes a study (Simpson, GMAC) which states that the pivotal age where the organisation dynamic need begins to take precedence over functional one is 28. I am sure that many leadership gurus might have something to say about that. In fact I have asked some experts on the subject here within my own business school, Instituto de Empresa, that they share their thoughts on the whole topic of leadership with us, i.e. José Luis Alvarez and Fernando Bartolomé.

I believe that a business school can and should provide all the necessary approaches for any given learning group and give the aforementioned need for schools have a certain size to be able to reach all segments effectively and the possible limitations pointed out earlier, would that infer that the industry of business schools is heading for a phase of concentration?

Due to the legal status of business schools that hinders the possibility of takeovers and mergers, as would be the case in other industries, does that mean that there will be more alliances and if so to what level of cooperation would that be. Will there be room for the smaller business schools that just cater to just one segment and is there a societal responsibility to cater for a region’s broader needs. As Peters said, especially the young would have need for a more local school?

Here at the Instituto de Empresa we had the honour of the presence of Ana Patricia Botín, Chairman of Banesto, at the opening of a new Master in Marketing program. She is a fine example of a leader and on Friday 14th October she received the “Europe's businesswoman of the year” from the Financial Times.

(Ana Botín, (second from left), a few days ago at the opening of the Masters in Marketing Management at IE, along with Diego Alcázar (second from right) President of IE, Giuseppe Tringali, CEO Publi España(right)