FLIGHT PLAN FOR LEADERS

or The Puck, the Plaque and the Art of Jazz

By Warren Bennis
University of Southern California Professor
and Chair of the Leadership Institute

On numerous occasions I have expressed the simplistic but seminal distinction between leading and managing: Leading means doing the right things, and managing just means doing things right.

The leader's role is to impart a sense of vision, a purpose, the strategic intent, a dream, a mission. Whatever it is called, a leader must embody a powerful distillation of an organization's purpose and objectives. Management, on the other hand, is simply concerned with doing things right. Management is concerned with efficiency, with control mechanisms and the short run.

Essentially, the manager administers and the leader innovates. The manager is a copy; the leader is an original. The manager maintains; the leader develops. The manager accepts the status quo; the leader is always questioning and challenging gospel. The manager focuses on the systems and structure; the leader focuses on people. The manager relies on the control; the leader inspires trust. The manager has a short-range view; the leader has a long-range perspective. The manager imitates; the leader originates.

Wayne Gretzky...once said, "In hockey, it ain't where the puck is; it's where the puck will be."

The manager asks "how" and "when," and the leader asks "what" and "why." Effective leaders do not tell their direct subordinates "how." Instead leaders try to create a set of intentions-a tapestry of intentions.

The Over-managed and Under-led

Given the aforementioned definitions, I believe it is a truism that today's organizations are over-managed and under-led. By this I mean that they are overly concerned with policies, practices, procedures and rule books and not enough concerned with the important issues like empowerment, trust, and an over-arching and compelling vision. Basically, leadership is all about translating intention and vision into reality.

One of my heroes is the hockey player Wayne Gretzky, who has a marvelous way of putting things. He once said, "In hockey, it ain't where the puck is; it's where the puck will be." And it seems to me that that's what leaders do: they keep their eyes on the future. They keep their eyes on the horizon, not just on the bottom line.

In times of rapid change, there is no substitute for leadership. Unfortunately for dealing with change, most of today's organizations are based on an old fashioned form of bureaucracy, the mind-set of which can be summarized in three words: control, order and predict. Those are the things of management. If we existed in an environment where we could control, order and predict, a manager would be a terrific thing. Bureaucracy in a stable environment, as it was in the Victorian era, would be a great social invention.

But the problem is that today's organizations are unhinged. They are confusing and full of surprises. We are all children of chaos. And so we must help develop and educate leaders who originate, who innovate and who have the imagination to see what the future will be like.

A typical problem with failing organizations such as IBM, Sears, and Westinghouse, is that they all had leaders who were so immersed in details, with trivia-with 'administrivia'-and with the 'how-to' that they've forgotten what's important. For example, IBM used to have a plant in Lexington, Kentucky, that was losing money because it was manufacturing typewriters in this day and age. So the spent a half-a-billion dollars to re-engineer and reinvent the entire plant to make not typewrites but printers. But it turned out they were making the wrong type of printers because they didn't see the potential in the laser printer. And in a few months they were surpassed by Hewlett-Packard and Apple. It's a beautiful example of doing things right but doing the wrong things.

Portrait of a Leader

In general, I believe that leader will have certain traits in common.

First, they share a great deal of self-knowledge. They have a strong sense of who they are as a human being. Leadership is character, and character is knowing one's ingredients.

The second common characteristic is a strongly defined sense of purpose. If you look at achieving, successful leaders, it seems to me that they always know what is important. And they always are reminding people of what's important. It's not enough to just have vision; it's not enough to just know your objectives. Instead, a leader must be able to create an environment where people are aware of why they are there. You can see this even in a university setting. Occasionally when we will gather in the faculty club and talk, someone will say-always in jest, but sometimes a jest conceals a basic truth-"wouldn't this be a good place to be if only there weren't students around." Well, why are we there? Why are we administrating school systems and universities? Primarily we are there to help educate students to be successful in life. Everything else is a cost factor. Everything else is a commentary.

Third, leaders have the capacity to generate and sustain trust. And the way the tend to do this is by being candid, by communicating effectively and by exhibiting a sense of constancy and caring. If leaders can somehow communicate and in that communication show that they care, show that they're candid and indicate their competence, then they will generate and sustain trust.

Finally, leaders have a bias toward action. It makes no sense to just be in the dugout or kibitzing from the bleachers. Leaders are at bat. They play even if it means making errors. And when they make errors, they learn from their errors.

The most dangerous, and most common, leadership myth is the suggestion that there are some qualities that a leader simply is born with-that there is a generic factor to leadership. This myth denies the truism that leaders are made rather than born and asserts that people simply either have certain charismatic qualities or not. I think that's a lot of nonsense and rubbish. In fact, just the opposite is true.

In my opinion, the way we become leaders is by learning about leadership. And we learn about it through life experiences, not with university degrees. A BA or BS, a Ph.D. or MBA mean nothing. The only initials that really count are J.O.B. or L.I.F.E.

Most... communication must be done eyeball to eyeball.

Studies of how leaders develop make certain things clear. Leadership is nurtured with on-the-job education through role models. People learn to be leaders through difficult experiences and when they faced adversity. They learn through the pain and agony of having to come up with the hard answers. In some cases, being fired was the learning experience leaders looked back on as a focus of their leadership training; in other cases it was having to down-size. In one case it was having to take over an inexperienced group of subordinates. But ultimately the only way people learn about leadership is by being placed into situations from which they can really learn and get feedback from valued sources around them.

Leadership doesn't come from genes. It doesn't come from reading. It doesn't come from listening to lectures. It comes through the hard-earned experience in the arena rather than watching from the balcony.

Introducing Change

Leaders often face the challenge of introducing change to those who simply see no need for it. From my research on effective leaders, there are certain steps a leader must take to bring about such a change effectively.

Take as a leadership example school administrators who have the tough role of being change agents and leaders in a challenging environment. They must work within an organizational system populated by noisy, eloquent stakeholders who are continually scrutinizing every action undertaken. They work within a system that can be best characterized with the oxymoron "an organized anarchy," because most of the individuals in a school system have a great deal of education and are highly individualistic.

During my term as a university president, I encountered that kind of an environment. I always felt that presiding over the faculty was like herding cats. And my saying about faculty members is that "if you meet one, you meet one." But that individualism is part of what makes leading such a group so exciting. So the question ultimately becomes how does a leader rally individuals-from different disciplines and different areas of expertise-behind an over-arching and compelling vision?

The first thing all leaders must do, regardless of whether they are leading General Motors or IBM or a school system, is to clearly articulate a vision. Whether the leader calls it a strategic intent, mission, conviction, set of beliefs or vision, it must be communicated clearly, compellingly, forcibly and simply. And it isn't enough to talk generally about the organization's strategic goals or objectives. A vision must be communicated ceaselessly, indefatigably and endlessly in all sorts of ways. It isn't just enough to do it through memos or to put it in a newsletter or even put it on video or over a satellite broadcast. Rather, most of the communication must be done eyeball to eyeball. In addition, that vision must be anchored in organizational realities. Most organizations, I must say, have terrific vision statements. Companies are great at printing mission statements on three-by-five laminated plaques along with elaborate lists of company visions and values. Documents like this are dazzling-and completely useless.

I remember consulting for a large utilities firm in Southern California which had a wonderful vision statement. It was called the "Six Commandments," and every single office in the huge company had a gorgeous Lucite frame holding these commitments. But the reality was that not one of them was really anchored in the organizational reality and not one of them was implemented. For example, one of their commitments was "We believe in the autonomy of the worker and in self-managed work teams and in empowerment." In that same company you would have to get six signatures in order to take a 25-mile trip away from the office.

Another company I knew about said in its statement, "We believe in teamwork," yet there was an implicit norm in that company that one never brought to surface conflict or dissent or disagreement. Well, how can you create teamwork when you never bring to the surface differences, healthy dissent and creative conflict? Sometimes I believe that this zealotry of vision may have been prompted by the Lucite makers who manufacture those frames more than the reality that faces today's organizations.

What I mean by anchoring the vision is that companies must not just articulate a simple and compelling vision, but they must take this vision into account when they do everything that they do. The vision must be taken into account when thinking about recruiting and reward systems. The vision must be taken into account when considering empowerment and organizational structure and the markets to be pursued. The vision needs to be used as a template for decision making.

The only way a leader is going to translate vision into reality-an ability that is the essence of leadership is to anchor and implement and execute that vision through a whole variety of policies, practices, procedures, reward systems, empowerment systems and recruiting systems that will bring in people and empower people to implement the vision.

Finally, leaders must attempt to discover the individuals within their organization who are what I call-excuse the jargon-"variance sensors." These are people whose expectations are beyond reality, who are people a leader can depend on to see the need for change and who have the future in their bones. Only in this way can the leader be assured that their vision will continue to flourish even beyond their singular efforts.

I view any kind of change as sort of the three-act play. Act One is creating the vision. Act Two is changing the system and implementing it. Act Three is stabilizing and putting into effect those various system changes that went on in the second act.

This idea is similar to the old paradigm that Kurt Lewen talked about many years ago regarding the three acts of changing. He said that the first act is to 'unfreeze.' The second act is to 'start changing.' The third act is to 'refreeze.' And I would add that this cycle must be continual. After the freeze, unfreeze again; keep changing and keep refreezing.

I used to think that running an organization was equivalent to conducting a symphony orchestra. But I don't think that's quite it; it's more like jazz. There is more improvisation. Someone once wrote that the sound of surprise is jazz, and if there's any one thing that we must try to get used to in this world, it's surprise and the unexpected. In this world of chaos, there's no other way of doing things. Truly, we are living in a world where the only thing that's constant is change.

While change, as Machiavelli observed, "has no constituency," leaders must create an environment that embraces change not as a threat but as an opportunity. That requires leaders to be able to listen to-and act on-the multiple sounds taking place around them. Leaders must encourage their organizations to dance to forms of music yet to be heard.

About the Author

Warren Bennis, University Professor and Distinguished Professor of Business Administration, is Chair of the University of Southern California's Leadership Institute. He is an internationally acclaimed expert on the process of change in organizations and on the mystique surrounding superleaders and corporate power. Bennis is the author of more than 20 books, including An Invented Life, published in 1993. Prior to his USC appointment, he served as President of the University of Cincinnati and Provost and Executive Vice President of the State University of New York at Buffalo.

This article is reprinted from the Summer 1994 issue of USC Business.

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