Strategies to Crack Well-Guarded Markets

Key ideas from the Harvard Business Review article by David J. Bryce and Jeffrey H. Dyer

The Idea

Tempted to jump into a market where incumbents are scoring handsome profits? Beware: newcomers to the most attractive markets earn returns 30% below those of entrants to other markets.

Still, you can crack these well-guarded markets, say Bryce and Dyer. The key? Attack indirectly—through combinations of three basic strategies: 1) Leverage your existing assets. For example, put a new product on shelf space you already own. 2) Reconfigure a value chain. For instance, bypass brick-and-mortar retail outlets and sell your product through a Web site. 3) Create niches. To illustrate, offer premium features at a price only certain consumers will pay.

Mix and match these strategies, and you carve out a toehold. From there, you can consolidate your competitive advantage—and attack incumbents’ strongholds. Red Bull discovered this firsthand: It broke into the energy-drink market by initially selling its product only in bars. After gaining a loyal following, it ultimately captured 65% of the $650 million energy-drink market in 2005.

The Idea in Practice

The three strategies—leveraging your assets, reconfiguring your value chain, and establishing niches—seem simple. But the magic lies in their combination. Deploy at least two of them simultaneously or sequentially.

Reconfigure the Value Chain + Create a Niche

Use this most powerful combination to create low-cost business models and stay off incumbents’ radar screens.

Example: Skype has reconfigured the telecom services value chain by letting people make inexpensive telephone calls over the Internet. It targets the niche market of cost-sensitive buyers who care little about the inconvenience or poor quality associated with using computers as telephones. Incumbents dismissed Skype as just another dot-com hopeful—giving it time to build scale and credibility. In 2005, Skype scored revenues of $25 million and boasted 100 million customers.

Leverage Existing Assets + Reconfigure the Value Chain

Your assets include plants, equipment, and real estate—as well as brands and know-how in design, manufacturing, or distribution. Combine asset leveraging with value-chain reconfiguration to make moves incumbents can’t copy.

Example: Warehouse club Costco entered the home furnishings market by leveraging its brand, no-frills/premium-products retail concept, and customers. It located Costco Home stores near its warehouse stores and let its 20 million-plus members join its home-store business. Its value chain slashes costs by avoiding the extravagant showrooms, plentiful inventory, lavish advertising, and huge sales commissions established furniture retailers use. Revenues from its first two furniture stores stood at $108 million in 2006. Incumbents haven’t copied Costco Home’s moves because they aren’t familiar with the process of creating membership-only warehouses that offer premium products at a discount.

Leverage Existing Assets + Create a Niche

Like the other combinations, use this one simultaneously or sequentially to get your foot in the door to an attractive market.

Example: Toys “R” Us simultaneously leveraged its assets and created a niche when it entered the apparel industry by opening its Babies “R” Us stores. It drew on its name recognition and store locations (most Babies “R” Us stores are situated next to Toys “R” Us stores). It also leveraged its relationships with real estate developers and its inventory management and distribution capabilities to go after the children’s product niche in the apparel industry. It overcame opposition from well-entrenched rivals to become the largest baby products retailer in the world by 2006.

The Cult of the Amateur

The Cult of the Amateur

HBR

Posted by Larry Prusak on May 24, 2007 5:07 PM

There is a battle looming between the techno-utopians and the defenders of traditional forms of cognitive authority. The battle is being waged here and there, in print, on the web, in various forums around the world. This battle represents only the tip of a much larger iceberg: How will the world look and be organized when much of the codified available information in the world is freely available to everyone at little or no cost, and anyone can create yet more information at will?

Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Ameteur adds an interesting polemic to this fight. The book's subtitle, How today's Internet is killing our culture, gives a strong taste of what he is up to. He bemoans the apparent decline of the traditional sources of cognitive authority and worries how these sources can be replaced by such democratic vehicles as the ubiquitous Wikipedia.

This book is fun to read. Is it correct? Well, yes and no. Let me give you some examples. He mentions Walter Cronkite as the sort of source one used to get ones news from: trusted, avuncular, with a strong TV news organization behind him. However Walter never mentioned on the air what he knew about some of the dangerous habits of John Kennedy. He never would have done so. Similarly, The New York Times did not much report on the Holocaust for all sorts of crazy reasons. One could easily go on. Had I.F. Stone lived in the same era as the Internet, many rash and awful things done by our government would have been exposed. On the other hand, without these sources of official opinion, who will have the resources to go to Iraq and see what is going on firsthand? How will investors fare if The Wall Street Journal becomes more "democratized" under Rupert Murdoch? Will the reporters there have the resources as well as the will to uncover another Enron, as they so valiantly did a few years back?

We can't put the genie back into the lamp. Technologies can't run backwards. We have the web, and it is used for whatever purposes people want to use it for. Short of outlawing things(gambling, child porn), it's hard to see how to stop the immense wave of blogs, nonsense, falsehoods, and all else that clutter up what was once a medium for scientists to share working papers. I agree with Keen about some things, but I can't see what can be done about it, except educate people about the differences between information -- which can be sent around the world at the click of a mouse -- and knowledge, which has a natural cognitive stature and is quite expensive to develop and transfer. Who knows how this story will end?

Learning from Success and Failure

Learning from Success and Failure

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Posted by Bob Sutton on June 4, 2007 4:02 PM

One of the mottoes that Diego Rodriguez and I use at the Stanford d.school is “failure sucks, but instructs.” We encourage students to learn from the constant stream of small setbacks and successes that are produced by doing things (rather than just talking about what to do). To paraphrase our d.school founder and inspiration David Kelley: “If you keep making the same mistakes again and again, you aren’t learning anything. If you keep making new and different mistakes, that means you are doing new things and learning new things.”

Although the concept of failing forward is widely discussed and makes sense, it has been the subject of limited academic research to date. But some cool stuff is coming out now. An especially interesting pair of studies has been published during the last couple of years in Journal of Applied Psychology by Shmuel Ellis from Tel Aviv University. There have been quite a number of case studies of the after event or after action reviews that are used in the U.S. Army after training exercises, and have now been extended to a variety of settings, ranging from firefighting to corporate actions such as mergers and layoffs. The basic idea is, as soon as feasible after some action occurs, a facilitator and/or teacher should have a conversation with the key participants about what went right, what went wrong, and what could be done better next time. Harvard's David Garvin talks extensively about after action reviews in his book Learning in Action: A Guide to Putting the Learning Organization to Work and presents some compelling cases and arguments about their effectiveness.

Shmuel Ellis and his colleagues have really dug into this issue with, first, a field experiment with two companies of soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces, who were tested for their performance on navigation exercises. The critical difference between the two groups was that -- following standard practice in the Israeli military -- the first company had a series of after event reviews during four days of navigation exercises that focused only on the mistakes that soldiers made, and how to correct them. The second company, in its after event discussions, focused on what could be learned from both their successes and failures.

Then, two months later, these same two companies went through two days of navigation exercises. The results showed that, although substantial learning occurred in both groups:

1. Soldiers who discussed both successes and failures learned at higher rates than soldiers who discussed just failures.

2. Soldiers in the group that discussed both successes and failures appeared to learn faster because they developed “richer mental models” of their experiences than soldiers who only discussed failures.

This study, earlier research, and a subsequent controlled experiment by Ellis and his colleagues show that experiencing failure does lead to more richer mental models than experiencing success. Consider some interesting twists from their more controlled laboratory experiments of after event reviews:

1. After people succeed at a task, they learn the most when they think about what went wrong.

2. After people fail on a task, it doesn’t matter whether they focus on successes or failures. They will learn so long as they do an after event review.

These are, of course, just two studies, but they have several interesting implications for management, assuming that the findings can be generalized to other settings:

1. After event reviews -- whether focused on failure alone or both successes and failures -- spark learning. Sure, you already knew that -- but it amazes me how many companies don’t have time to stop and think about what they learned, but seem to have the time to keep making the same mistakes over and over and over again.

2. After people succeed at something, it is especially important to have them focus on what things went wrong. They learn more than if they just focus on success (so, don’t just gloat and congratulate yourself about what you did right; focus on what could go even better next time).

3. When failure happens, the most important thing is to have an after event review to provoke sufficiently deep thinking -- whether you talk about successes or failures is less important.

Finally, Cisco is a great example of a company that successfully applies after event reviews. I have been especially impressed by -- and written about -- how they take time to do systematic reviews after each merger (and use other evidence-based practices), which may help explain why their acquisitions succeed at a far higher rate than most firms. To paraphrase David Kelley again, this means they make new and different mistakes in each subsequent merger.

The Seven Ages of the Leader

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Each stage of leadership brings new crises and challenges. They’re wrenching—but knowing what to expect can help you get through them.

Harvard Business Article

by Warren G. Bennis

My initial plunge into leadership came during World War II. I was a lieutenant in the infantry, 19 years old, and scared out of my wits. My orders were to assume command of a platoon on the front lines in Belgium. I arrived in the middle of the night, when most of the men were asleep. The platoon had taken up residence in a bombed-out shell of a house. I was led into the kitchen by the platoon’s runner, and he offered me a bench to sleep on. Instead, I put my sleeping bag on the floor, next to the rest of the men. Not that I slept. I lay awake all night, listening to the bombs explode. I was as green as can be and knew little about command—or the world, for that matter. When the others in the house began to stir, I heard one sergeant ask another, “Who’s that?” “That’s our new platoon leader,” the man answered. And the sergeant said, “Good. We can use him.”

Without realizing it, without having any idea what was the right thing to do, I had made a good first move. My entry had been low-key. I hadn’t come in with my new commission blazing. In fact, I pretended to go to sleep on the floor. As a result, without drawing attention to myself, I learned something important about the men I would be leading. I learned that they needed me—or, at least, they needed the person they would subsequently teach me to be. And teach me they did. Over the next few weeks in Belgium, my men, who had already seen combat, kept me alive. They also taught me how to lead, often by example. The sergeant who had greeted my arrival with approval became my lifeline, quite literally, teaching me such essential skills as how to ride through a war zone without getting blown up.

While few business leaders need worry about being blown up, my experience in Belgium was in many ways typical of first leadership experiences anywhere. I was coming into an existing organization where emotions ran high, relationships had been established, and the members of the organization harbored expectations of me that I was not yet fully aware of. My new followers were watching me, to see if and how I would measure up. Every new leader faces the misgivings, misperceptions, and the personal needs and agendas of those who are to be led. To underestimate the importance of your first moves is to invite disaster. The critical entry is one of a number of passages—each of which has an element of personal crisis—that every leader must go through at some point in the course of a career. Business school doesn’t prepare you for these crises, and they can be utterly wrenching. But they offer powerful lessons as well.

Shakespeare, who seems to have learned more every time I read him, spoke of the seven ages of man. A leader’s life has seven ages as well, and, in many ways, they parallel those Shakespeare describes in As You Like It. To paraphrase, these stages can be described as infant, schoolboy, lover, soldier, general, statesman, and sage. One way to learn about leadership is to look at each of these developmental stages and consider the issues and crises that are typical of each.

Major changes in the first six months will inevitably be perceived as arbitrary, autocratic, and unfair, as much for their timing as for their content.

I can’t offer advice on how to avoid these crises because many are inevitable. Nor would I necessarily recommend that you avoid them, since dealing with the challenges of each stage prepares you for the next. But knowing what to expect can help the leader survive and, with luck, come through stronger and more confident. And so first to the leader on the verge—Shakespeare’s infant, “mewling…in the nurse’s arms.”

The Infant Executive

For the young man or woman on the brink of becoming a leader, the world that lies ahead is a mysterious, even frightening place. Few resort to mewling, but many wish they had the corporate equivalent of a nurse, someone to help them solve problems and ease the painful transition. Instead, the fortunate neophyte leader has a mentor, a concept that has its origins in Greek mythology. When Odysseus was about to go off to war, the goddess Athena created Mentor to watch over the hero’s beloved son, Telemachus. The fact that Mentor had the attributes of both man and woman hints at the richness and complexity of the relationship, suggesting a deeper bond than that of teacher and student. In the real world, unfortunately, goddesses don’t intervene and mentors seldom materialize on their own. While the popular view of mentors is that they seek out younger people to encourage and champion, in fact the reverse is more often true. The best mentors are usually recruited, and one mark of a future leader is the ability to identify, woo, and win the mentors who will change his or her life.

When Robert Thomas and I interviewed two generations of leaders for our book, Geeks and Geezers, we met a remarkable young real-estate and Internet entrepreneur, Michael Klein, who had recruited his first mentor when he was only four or five years old, as Robert and I wrote in our Harvard Business Review article, “Crucibles of Leadership.” His guide was his grandfather, Max Klein, who was responsible for the paint-by-numbers craze that swept America in the 1950s and 1960s. The fad made Klein rich, but none of his children had the least interest in that business or any other. But little Michael did, and Max jumped at the chance to coach and counsel him, often in the course of long telephone conversations that continued until a few weeks before Max died. In effect, the older man served as a first-rate business school of one for his grandson, who became a multimillionaire while still in his teens.

It may feel strange to seek a mentor even before you have the job, but it’s a good habit to develop early on. I was recruited as a mentor years ago while in the hospital for several weeks following a “coronary event.” There, I had a remarkable nurse who seemed to anticipate my every need. We spent hours together, often talking late into the night. He told me of his ambition to become a doctor, although no one in his family in South Central Los Angeles had ever been to college. I was won over by his character and drive, as well as by the superb care he gave me. When he was ready to go to medical school, I did all I could to help, from putting him in touch with appropriate administrators to giving him a glowing recommendation. He had recruited me as skillfully as any executive headhunter and made me one of the first members of the team he needed to change his life. The message for the “infant executive”? Recruit a team to back you up; you may feel lonely in your first top job, but you won’t be totally unsupported.

The Schoolboy, with Shining Face

The first leadership experience is an agonizing education. It’s like parenting, in that nothing else in life fully prepares you to be responsible, to a greater or lesser degree, for other people’s well-being. Worse, you have to learn how to do the job in public, subjected to unsettling scrutiny of your every word and act, a situation that’s profoundly unnerving for all but that minority of people who truly crave the spotlight. Like it or not, as a new leader you are always onstage, and everything about you is fair game for comment, criticism, and interpretation (or misinterpretation). Your dress, your spouse, your table manners, your diction, your wit, your friends, your children, your children’s table manners—all will be inspected, dissected, and judged.

And nothing is more intense than the attention paid to your initial words and deeds, as any first-time presidential candidate can tell you. It’s said of psychotherapy that the first ten minutes between doctor and patient are the most critical, and studies show that friendships formed by college students during orientation are the most enduring. Social psychologists have found that we base our judgments of people on extremely thin slices of behavior. We decide whether we are in sync or out of tune with another person in as little as two seconds.

So it is with leaders and organizations. Your first acts will win people over or they will turn people against you, sometimes permanently. And those initial acts may have a long-lasting effect on how the group performs. It is, therefore, almost always best for the novice to make a low-key entry. This buys you time to gather information and to develop relationships wisely. It gives you an opportunity to learn the culture of the organization and to benefit from the wisdom of those who are already there. A quiet entry allows the others in the group to demonstrate what they know. And it allows you to establish that you are open to the contributions of others. It shows them that you are a leader, not a dictator.

In retrospect, I realize that officer-candidate school had prepared me for my small triumph in that roofless house in Belgium. Even as the officers tried to cram all the survival skills we would need into four months of training, they told us again and again that the combat-seasoned men under our command would be our real teachers, at least at first. The same holds true in any organization. In the beginning, especially, your most talented, most seasoned, most decent followers will be the ones that keep you alive.

When Steve Sample became president of the University of Southern California in the early 1990s, he did a masterful job of easing in. He went to the campus incognito at least twice, and during one of those visits he attended a football game and spoke to faculty members and students who didn’t know who he was. Those visits gave him a feel for the campus as it really was, not how the most assertive of his constituents wanted him to see it. And during his first six months, he did not make a single high-profile decision. He knew that the important things to be done could be deferred until the faculty, staff, and students were more comfortable with him and their relationships were more stable. Major changes in the first six months will inevitably be perceived as arbitrary, autocratic, and unfair, as much for their timing as for their content.

However, it is worth noting that, no matter what your first actions are, you can influence other people’s image of you only to a limited extent. The people who will be working under your leadership will have formed an opinion about you by the time you walk into the office, even if they have never met you. They may love you, they may hate you, they may trust you or distrust you, but they’ve probably taken a stand, and their position may have very little to do with who you actually are. The leader often becomes a screen onto which followers project their own fantasies about power and relationships. To some degree, all leaders are created out of the needs, wants, fears, and longings of those who follow them. Events that predate your arrival will also shape followers’ view of you. In an organization that’s been through a crisis—several rounds of layoffs, say—people are liable to assume that you’re there to clean house again and may respond with either open hostility or flattery in the hopes of keeping their jobs. Others may see you as their savior because of the bad leadership of your predecessor. Your first challenge is to try not to take your new followers’ assessments too personally. The second—and far trickier—challenge is to embrace the fact that certain elements of their assessments may be accurate, even if they put you in an unflattering light.

The Lover, with a Woeful Ballad

Shakespeare described man in his third age “sighing like furnace,” something many leaders find themselves doing as they struggle with the tsunami of problems every organization presents. For the leader who has come up through the ranks, one of the toughest is how to relate to former peers who now report to you.

Shakespeare painted a compelling portrait of the problem in Henry IV, Part II. Before Prince Hal becomes Henry V, his relationship with the aging rogue Falstaff is that of student and fellow hell-raiser. For all Falstaff’s excesses, he is often Hal’s wise teacher, helping the future king see beyond the cloistered, narrow education traditionally afforded a prince to glimpse what his future subjects feel, think, and need. But when it comes time for Hal to assume his royal responsibilities, he rejects Falstaff, despite their having shared a sea of ale and the sound of “the chimes at midnight.” Henry doesn’t invite Falstaff to his coronation, and he pointedly tells the ribald knight, “I know thee not, old man.”

Today’s leaders would instantly recognize the young king’s predicament. It’s difficult to set boundaries and fine-tune your working relationships with former cronies. Most organizations, with the exception of the military, maintain the fiction that they are at least semidemocracies, however autocratic they are in fact. As a modern leader, you don’t have the option of telling the person with whom you once shared a pod and lunchtime confidences that you know her not. But relationships inevitably change when a person is promoted from within the ranks. You may no longer be able to speak openly as you once did, and your friends may feel awkward around you or resent you. They may perceive you as lording your position over them when you’re just behaving as a leader should.

One mark of a future leader is the ability to identify, woo, and win the mentors who will change his or her life.

I know of a young executive, let’s call her Marjorie, who was recently promoted from middle management to head of the marketing department at a pharmaceutical company. One of three internal candidates for the job, she was close friends with the other two. Marjorie had already distinguished herself within the company, so it was no surprise that she got the promotion, even though she was the youngest and least experienced of the three. But the transition was much more difficult than she had anticipated. Her friends were envious. She would sometimes find herself in the awkward situation of attending an executive meeting at which one of her friends was criticized and then going straight to lunch with her. The new executive missed being able to share what she knew with her friends, and she missed their support. Her fellow executives had a more authoritarian style than she did, and some even advised her to drop her old friends, which she had no intention of doing. Her compromise was to try to divide her time between her new peers and her old. The transition was still hard, but she made a good early move: She had frank conversations with her friends, during which she asked them how they were feeling and assured them their friendships were important to her and would continue.

However tough it was for Marjorie, she had the advantage of knowing the organization and its players. The challenge for the newcomer is knowing who to listen to and who to trust. Leaders new to an organization are swamped with claims on their time and attention. Often, the person who makes the most noise is the neediest person in the group and the one you have to be most wary of, a lesson I learned more than 50 years ago from the renowned psychiatrist Wilfred Bion. At the time, Bion was doing pioneering work in the new practice of group psychotherapy. He warned his students: Focusing your attention on the most clamorous of your followers will not only anger and alienate the healthier among them. It will distract you from working with the entire group on what actually matters, accomplishing a common mission.

Knowing what to pay attention to is just as important—and just as difficult. In their efforts to effect change, leaders coming into new organizations are often thwarted by an unconscious conspiracy to preserve the status quo. Problem after problem will be dumped in your lap—plenty of new ones and a bulging archive of issues left unresolved by previous administrations—and responding to them all ensures that you will never have time to pursue your own agenda. When I arrived at the University of Cincinnati as president I was totally unprepared for the volume of issues that found their way to my desk, starting with the 150 pieces of mail I typically had to respond to each day. The cumulative effect of handling each of these small matters was to keep me from addressing what was truly important: articulating a vision for the university and persuading the rest of the community to embrace it as their own. It is at this stage that an inability to delegate effectively can be disastrous.

Newcomer or not, almost all leaders find themselves at some point in the position of having to ask others to leave the organization—firing them, to put it bluntly. This is always a painful task, if only because it usually devastates the person being let go and because the timing is never opportune. Facing you across the desk always seems to be the employee who’s just delivered triplets or bought an expensive house. There’s little available to guide leaders on how to do this awful business in a humane way; only remember that you have people’s emotional lives in your hands in such circumstances as surely as any surgeon or lover does.

The Bearded Soldier

Over time, leaders grow comfortable with the role. This comfort brings confidence and conviction, but it also can snap the connection between leader and followers. Two things can happen as a result: Leaders may forget the true impact of their words and actions, and they may assume that what they are hearing from followers is what needs to be heard.

While the first words and actions of leaders are the most closely attended to, the scrutiny never really ends. Followers continue to pay close attention to even the most offhand remark, and the more effective the leader is the more careful he or she must be, because followers may implement an idea that was little more than a passing thought. Forget this and you may find yourself in some less dramatic version of the situation King Henry II did when he muttered, of Thomas à Becket, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” and four of his nobles promptly went out and murdered the cleric. Many modern-day Henrys have mused along the lines of, “We should be looking at our technology strategy,” only to be confronted a few months later with thick PowerPoint presentations and a hefty consulting bill.

Followers don’t tell leaders everything. I know of an executive I’ll call Christine who had a close working relationship with the rest of her group. The department hummed along productively until the day one of her top performers, Joseph, showed up at her door, looking uncomfortable. He told her he’d been offered a job at another company and was planning to take it. The timing was terrible; the group was headed toward a major product launch. And Christine was stunned, because she and Joseph were friends and he had never expressed dissatisfaction with his position or the company. Why hadn’t he told her he wanted a new opportunity? She would have created a job especially for him, and she told him as much. Unfortunately, it was too late. The fact is, however close Christine and Joseph were, she was still in charge, and few employees tell their bosses when they’ve talked to a headhunter. And because Christine and Joseph liked each other and had fun working together, she’d assumed he was satisfied.

A second challenge for leaders in their ascendancy is to nurture those people whose stars may shine as brightly as—or even brighter than—the leaders’ own. In many ways, this is the real test of character for a leader. Many people cannot resist using a leadership position to thwart competition. I heard recently about an executive who had been well liked by his bosses and peers until he was promoted to head a division. Then those under him began to grumble about his management style, and it wasn’t just sour grapes. His latest promotion had been a stretch, and he may have felt, for the first time in his career, vulnerable. Shortly thereafter, his employees began to notice that he was taking credit for their ideas and was bad-mouthing some of them behind their backs. When confronted about his behavior, he seemed genuinely surprised and protested that he was doing no such thing. Perhaps he was unconsciously trying to sabotage those under him to prop himself up. But those who reported to him began to leave, one by one. After a year, his reputation was such that nobody wanted to work with him, and he was asked to leave.

In contrast, authentic leaders are generous. They’re human and may experience the occasional pang at watching someone accomplish something they cannot. But they are always willing—even anxious—to hire people who are better than they are, in part because they know that highly talented underlings can help them shine. Many of the greatest leaders of our times, including the Manhattan Project’s J. Robert Oppenheimer, Xerox PARC’s Bob Taylor, and even Walt Disney, had healthy enough egos to surround themselves with people who had the potential to steal their jobs.

The General, Full of Wise Saws

One of the greatest challenges a leader faces at the height of his or her career is not simply allowing people to speak the truth but actually being able to hear it. Once again, Shakespeare proves instructive. In Julius Caesar, that brilliant study of failed management, Caesar goes to the forum on the ides of March apparently unaware that he will die there. How could he not have known that something dreadful was going to happen on that inauspicious day? The soothsayer warns him to “beware the ides of March.” There are signs of impending evil that any superstitious Roman would have been able to read, including an owl hooting during the day and a lion running through the streets. And then there is the awful dream that makes Calpurnia, Caesar’s loving wife, beg him to stay home. She dreams that his statue gushed blood like a fountain with a hundred spouts. Shouldn’t that have been clear enough for a military genius used to amassing and evaluating intelligence? If not, consider that Artemidorus, a teacher in Rome, actually writes down the names of the conspirators and tries three times to thrust the note of alarm into Caesar’s hand, the last time seconds before Brutus and the gang fall upon him.

Caesar’s deafness is caused as much by arrogance as anything else, and he is hardly the only leader to be so afflicted. Like many CEOs and other leaders, movie mogul Darryl F. Zanuck was notorious for his unwillingness to hear unpleasant truths. He was said to bark, “Don’t say yes until I finish talking!” which no doubt stifled many a difference of opinion. A more current example can be seen in Howell Raines, the deposed executive editor of the New York Times. Among the many ways he blocked the flow of information upward was to limit the pool of people he championed and, thus, the number of people he listened to. Raines was notorious for having a small A-list of stars and a large B-list made up of everyone else. Even if Raines’s division of the staff had been fair, which it certainly was not in the case of now-disgraced reporter Jayson Blair, the two-tier system was unwise and ultimately a career ender for Raines. He had so alienated the vast majority of people in the newsroom who knew what Blair was up to that they didn’t even bother to warn him of the train wreck ahead, and he refused to believe the few who did speak up. The attitude of Raines and his managing editor, Gerald Boyd, was that their way was the only way. When a distinguished reporter dared to point out an error Boyd had made, Boyd literally handed him a coin and told him to call the Los Angeles Times about a job. The reporter promptly did, quitting the New York Times for the West Coast paper.

But the episode most clearly recalls Caesar’s situation in that Raines seemed genuinely surprised when he was forced out in the summer of 2003. He had no doubt read Ken Auletta’s lengthy profile of him that ran in the New Yorker in 2002, showing that Raines was widely perceived as arrogant. And he should have been a good enough newsman to be able to tell the difference between acceptance and angry silence on the part of those who worked for him. Arrogance kept Raines from building the alliances and coalitions that every leader needs. When Blair’s journalistic crimes and misdemeanors came to light, there weren’t enough people on the A-list to save Raines’s professional life. Authentic leaders, by contrast, don’t have what people in the Middle East called “tired ears.” Their egos are not so fragile that they are unable to bear the truth, however harsh—not because they are saints but because it is the surest way to succeed and survive.

The real test of character for a leader is to nurture those people whose stars may shine as brightly as—or even brighter than—the leader’s own.

I’ve mentioned the wisdom of avoiding major change in the early months in a new position. At this stage, the challenge is different, because leaders further along in their careers are frequently brought in with a specific mandate to bring about change, and their actions have a direct and immediate impact on an organization’s long-term fortunes. Hesitation can be disastrous. However, you still need to understand the mood and motivations of the people already in the company before taking action.

I wish I’d understood that when I arrived at the University of Cincinnati in 1971 with a mandate to transform the university from a local institution into a state one—a goal that was by no means widely shared among the faculty or, for that matter, the citizens of Cincinnati. One longtime university board member had warned me to keep a low profile until I had a better grasp of the conservative community and the people in it were more comfortable with me. I chose to ignore his wise counsel, believing that broad exposure of the university and, by extension, myself would benefit my cause. As a result, I accepted an invitation to host a weekly television show. Worse, the title of the show was Bennis! The exclamation point still makes me cringe. I might have been perceived as an arrogant outsider come to save the provinces under any circumstances, but Bennis! guaranteed that I would be viewed that way. That perception (all but indelible, as early perceptions tend to be) made it much harder to realize my vision for the university.

The corporate world is filled with stories of leaders who failed to achieve greatness because they failed to understand the context they were working in or get the support of their underlings. Look at Durk Jager, who lasted less than a year and a half at Procter & Gamble. Critics accused him of trying to change the company too much, too fast. But what Jager couldn’t do was sell his vision of a transformed P&G to its staff and other stakeholders. His very able successor, A.G. Lafley, seemed at first to back off from Jager’s commitment to “stretch and speed,” but in fact Lafley has been able to bring about change every bit as radical as any Jager spoke of, including going outside the company for new ideas, a reversal of P&G’s traditional “invented here” philosophy. How did Lafley manage? “I didn’t attack,“ he told BusinessWeek. “I avoided saying P&G people are bad…I preserved the core of the culture and pulled people where I wanted to go. I enrolled them in change. I didn’t tell them.”

Another model for doing it right is Carly Fiorina. She took over Hewlett-Packard with at least three strikes against her—she was a woman, she was an outsider, and she wasn’t an engineer. And the person who chose to battle her was none other than the son of a company founder and thus tradition incarnate—Walter Hewlett. But Fiorina cleverly honored the company’s illustrious past, even as she prepared for change, including the merger with Compaq. Her first annual report included a vision statement that starts with the word “Invent,” paying homage to the pioneering spirit that created HP while simultaneously rewriting the “rules of the garage.” She also appreciated the gravity of the threat presented by Walter Hewlett and systematically buttressed her support among the other members of her board. When the moment came, the majority of the members took action and removed Hewlett from the HP board. Time will tell how successful the Compaq deal will be, but Dr. Bion would have given Fiorina an A. She didn’t overreact to Walter Hewlett—she didn’t attack him, nor did she spend too much time trying to address his concerns. Instead, she stayed her course and kept the focus of all her stakeholders on what was truly important.

The Statesman, with Spectacles on Nose

Shakespeare’s sixth age covers the years in which a leader’s power begins to wane. But far from being the buffoon suggested by Shakespeare’s description of a “lean and slippered pantaloon,” the leader in this stage is often hard at work preparing to pass on his or her wisdom in the interest of the organization. The leader may also be called upon to play important interim roles, bolstered by the knowledge and perception that come with age and experience and without the sometimes distracting ambition that characterizes early career.

One of the gratifying roles that people in late career can play is the leadership equivalent of a pinch hitter. When New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., needed someone to stop the bleeding at the newspaper after the Blair debacle, he invited Howell Raines’s predecessor, Joseph Lelyveld, to serve as interim editor. The widely respected journalist was an ideal choice, one who was immediately able to apply a career’s worth of experience to the newspaper’s crisis and whose tenure was unsullied by any desire to keep the job for the long term.

Consider, too, the head of a government agency who had chosen to retire from his leadership position because he had accomplished all his goals and was tired of the politics associated with his job. When an overseas office needed an interim leader, he was willing to step into the job and postpone retirement. He was able to perform an even better job than a younger person might have, not only because he brought a lifetime’s worth of knowledge and experience but also because he didn’t have to waste time engaging in the political machinations often needed to advance a career.

The Sage, Second Childishness

As I’ve pointed out, mentoring has tremendous value to a young executive. The value accrues to the mentor as well. Mentoring is one of the great joys of a mature career, the professional equivalent of having grandchildren. It is at this time that the drive to prepare the next generation for leadership becomes a palpable ache. I wrote earlier of my relationship with a young nurse who had ambitions to become a doctor. Clearly, the young man benefited from our relationship, but so did I. I learned about the true nature of mentoring, about its inevitable reciprocity and the fact that finding and cementing a relationship with a mentor is not a form of fawning but the initiation of a valuable relationship for both individuals. My respect for my former nurse only grew over the years. When he graduated near the top of his class from the University of Southern California Medical School, I was there to watch.

When you mentor, you know that what you have achieved will not be lost, that you are leaving a professional legacy for future generations. Just as my nurse clearly stood to benefit from our relationship, entrepreneur Michael Klein was indebted to his grandfather, Max. But imagine the joy Max must have felt at being able to share the wisdom he acquired over a lifetime as a creative businessman. The reciprocal benefits of such bonds are profound, amounting to much more than warm feelings on both sides. Mentoring isn’t a simple exchange of information. Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky lived among wild baboons and found that alliances between old and young apes were an effective strategy for survival. Older males that affiliated with younger males lived longer, healthier lives than their unallied peers. Whether ape or human, individuals in a mentoring relationship exchange invaluable, often subtle information. The elder partner stays plugged into an ever-changing world, while the younger partner can observe what does and doesn’t work as the elder partner negotiates the tricky terrain of aging.

When we compared older and younger leaders for Geeks and Geezers, we found that the ruling quality of leaders, adaptive capacity, is what allows true leaders to make the nimble decisions that bring success. Adaptive capacity is also what allows some people to transcend the setbacks and losses that come with age and to reinvent themselves again and again. Shakespeare called the final age of man “second childishness.” But for those fortunate enough to keep their health, and even for those not as fortunate, age today is neither end nor oblivion. Rather, it is the joyous rediscovery of childhood at its best. It is waking up each morning ready to devour the world, full of hope and promise. It lacks nothing but the tawdrier forms of ambition that make less sense as each day passes.

When Followers Become Toxic

Few leaders realize how susceptible they are to their followers’ influence. A good set of values, some trusted friends, and a little paranoia can prevent them from being led astray.

by Lynn R. Offermann

Harvard Business Article

Douglas MacArthur once said, “A general is just as good or just as bad as the troops under his command make him.” Almost as he made that remark, his country’s president was proving the point. For in late 1961, John F. Kennedy, bowing to pressure from his advisers, agreed to the escalation of American intervention in Vietnam. Among the advisers pressuring him was the senior author of a report recommending military intervention. And that adviser’s trusted friend—an American general—was chosen by the president to lead the new U.S. command in Saigon. Given his loyalties, the general wanted to make sure things looked good on the surface, so he stifled evidence from the field about potential setbacks and obstacles in Vietnam, making it tough for the president to discern the truth.

That, according to author and journalist David Halberstam, was how President Kennedy and his advisers led the United States into Vietnam. The story starkly illustrates just how easily, and with the best of intentions, loyal and able followers can get their leaders into trouble. If an accomplished politician like Kennedy could be misled in this way, it’s no surprise that today’s business leaders often fall into the same trap. No matter who we are, we are all influenced by those around us. Some of us are leaders, but we are all followers. Indeed, Ken Lay, the disgraced ex-chairman of Enron, may not be entirely wrong in blaming unscrupulous subordinates and advisers for his company’s demise. As an executive coach to senior leaders in a variety of industries for more than 20 years, I’ve seen firsthand just how easily followers can derail executive careers.

How does it happen? In the following pages, I draw both on my experience as a consultant and executive coach and on decades of research in organizational psychology to describe when and why leaders become vulnerable to being led astray by their followers. In some cases, as the Kennedy story illustrates, effective leaders can end up making poor decisions because able and well-meaning followers are united and persuasive about a course of action. This is a particular problem for leaders who attract and empower strong followers; these leaders need to become more skeptical and set boundaries. At other times, leaders get into trouble because they are surrounded by followers who fool them with flattery and isolate them from uncomfortable realities. Charismatic leaders, who are most susceptible to this problem, need to make an extra effort to unearth disagreement and to find followers who are not afraid to pose hard questions. Charismatic or not, all leaders run the risk of delegating to unscrupulous followers. There’s probably little they can do to completely guard against a determined corporate Iago, but leaders who communicate and live a positive set of values will find themselves better protected.

When the Majority Rules

Although many leaders pride themselves on their willingness to take unpopular stands, research has consistently demonstrated that most people—including leaders—prefer conformity to controversy. And the pressure to conform rises with the degree of agreement among those around you. Even if widespread agreement doesn’t actually exist, the very appearance of it can be hard to resist.

People tend to be what psychologists call “cognitive misers,” preferring the shortcuts of automatic thinking over considered examination.

One of the most striking pieces of evidence for this was a series of experiments conducted in the 1950s by psychologist Solomon Asch. Asch showed participants a vertical line and then asked them to judge which of three other lines was most similar in length to the test line. Participants who made judgments on their own chose the correct answer 99% of the time. Yet when other participants answered as part of a group in which fake respondents had been coached to pick a particular incorrect line, almost three-quarters of the unknowing participants made at least one wrong choice and one-third of them conformed to the group choice half the time.

It’s worth noting that the participants conformed without any pressure from the fake respondents. Indeed, the fake respondents were strangers whom the participants were unlikely to see ever again. In workplace situations where continued interactions are expected and where there may be concern about possible loss of face, one would reasonably expect conformity to be even more marked. What’s more, most business decisions are urgent, complex, and ambiguous, which encourages people to depend on the views of others. We should hardly be surprised, therefore, to find that the ethical and capable individuals who served on the boards of companies like WorldCom and Enron turned “into credulous, compliant apparatchiks more focused on maintaining collegiality than maximizing long-term profitability,” as the Washington Post put it.

What happens is that leaders faced with a united opposition can start to question their own judgment. And they should question themselves—the reason that unanimity is such a powerful influencing force is simply that the majority often is right. In general, research shows that using social proof—what others think or do—to determine our behavior leads us to make fewer mistakes than opposing the majority view does. But as even the smartest leaders have had to learn the hard way, the majority can be spectacularly wrong.

One reason that even well-informed experts so often follow the crowd is that people by nature tend to be what psychologists call “cognitive misers,” preferring the shortcuts of automatic thinking over considered examination. These shortcuts can help us to process information more quickly but can also lead to monumental errors. For instance, product designers may assume that if they like a product, everyone will. Yet the flop of Dell’s Olympic line of desktop and workstation computers taught managers there that products must appeal to more than the company’s own technically savvy workforce. As Michael Dell put it, “We had gone ahead and created a product that was, for all intents and purposes, technology for technology’s sake rather than technology for the customer’s sake.”

Cognitive miserliness can be reinforced by culture. In the United States, for instance, Americans have long tolerated—even encouraged—people who form and express quick opinions. It is not a reflective society. Americans like to brainstorm and move on. That shortcut mentality can be particularly dangerous if the opinions are presented publicly, because people will then advance their views tenaciously.

In such public forums, it falls to the leader to push followers to examine their opinions more closely. Alfred P. Sloan, the former chairman of GM, understood this very well. He once said at the close of an executive meeting: “Gentlemen, I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here. I propose we postpone further discussion until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.”

Another factor contributing to the power of the majority is that leaders worry about undermining their employees’ commitment. This is a reasonable concern. Leaders do need to be careful about spending their political capital, and overruling employees one too many times can demotivate them. Indeed, there are times when going along with the majority to win commitment is more important than making the “right” decision. (For more on when it’s wise to go along with the majority, see the sidebar “Joining the Opposition.”) But other times, leaders need to listen instead to the single, shy voice in the background, or even to their own internal doubts. As Rosalynn Carter once said, “A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go but ought to be.” In going against the tide, the leader will sometimes boost rather than undermine his or her credibility.

Joining the Opposition
Fooled by Flattery

Being swept along by their followers isn’t the only form of influence that leaders need to be wary of. Sometimes, follower influence takes the subtler and gentler form of ingratiation. Most people learn very early in life that a good way to get people to like you is to show that you like them. Flattery, favors, and frequent compliments all tend to win people over. Leaders, naturally, like those who like them and are more apt to let those they are fond of influence them.

For their part, followers think that being on the boss’s good side gives them some measure of job security. To an extent, they’re probably right; even a recent Forbes guide to surviving office parties recommends: “Try to ingratiate yourself. In this market, people are hired and kept at their companies for their personal skills.” Indeed, a recent study indicated that successful ingratiators gained a 5% edge over other employees in performance evaluations. This kind of margin by itself won’t get someone ahead, but in a competitive market, it might well tip the scale toward one of two people up for a promotion.

Everyone loves a sincere compliment, but those who already think highly of themselves are most susceptible to flattery’s charms. In particular, leaders predisposed toward narcissism may find their narcissistic tendencies pushed to unhealthy levels when they are given heavy doses of follower ingratiation. Gratuitous ingratiation can create a subtle shift in a leader’s attitude toward power. Instead of viewing power as something to be used in the service of the organization, clients, and stakeholders, the leader treats it as a tool to further personal interests, sometimes at the expense of others in and outside the organization. This happens as a leader starts to truly believe his press and comes to feel more entitled to privileges than others. People often cite Jack Welch’s retirement deal as an example of executive entitlement gone haywire. The resulting furor drew public scorn for a longstanding corporate icon.

But one of the most serious problems for leaders who invite flattery is that they insulate themselves from the bad news they need to know. In her memoir, Nancy Reagan relates how then–Vice President George Bush approached her with concerns about Chief of Staff Donald Regan. Mrs. Reagan said she wished he’d tell her husband, but Bush replied that it was not his role to do so. “That’s exactly your role,” she snapped. Yet followers who have witnessed the killing of previous messengers of unwelcome news will be unlikely to volunteer for the role. Samuel Goldwyn’s words resonate strongly: “I want you to tell me exactly what’s wrong with me and with MGM even if it means losing your job.” As more staff ingratiate or hold back criticism, the perception of staff unanimity, often at the expense of the organization’s health, increases as well.

The rare individual who won’t join an ingratiating inner circle of followers is typically seen as a bad apple by both the leader and her peers. Even when this perception problem is acknowledged, it is tough to fix. Despite widespread publicity after the 1986 space shuttle Challenger disaster about the dangers of failing to attend to negative news, NASA is once again facing charges of having downplayed possible liftoff problems just before the Columbia disaster. In both cases, engineers allegedly did not inform senior NASA executives of safety concerns; they either withheld information or presented it in ways that diminished its importance or feasibility. Obviously, this tendency to withhold information is not limited to government agencies. Bill Ford, the new CEO of Ford Motor Company, believes that isolation at the top has been a big problem at Ford—a problem he has spent considerable time trying to rectify by a variety of means, including forcing debate and discussion among executives and having informal, impromptu discussions with employees at all levels.

In dealing with ingratiation, leaders need to begin by reflecting on how they respond to both flattery and criticism. In considering a follower’s advice or opinion, ask yourself if you would respond differently if a staff member you disliked made the same comment, and why. Are followers really free to voice their honest assessments, or are they jumped on whenever they deviate from your opinions? Bill Ford makes a point of thanking people whom he has overruled because he wants them to know that their honesty is appreciated. One simple test of whether you’re getting the feedback you need is to count how many employees challenge you at your next staff meeting. As Steven Kerr, chief learning officer of Goldman Sachs, says: “If you’re not taking flak, you’re not over the target.”

Organizational mechanisms can also help. Greater exposure to external feedback from clients, well-run 360-degree feedback programs, and executive coaching may be more likely to reveal the full truth. It’s hard to lead from a pedestal; open channels of communication can keep a leader far better grounded.

For honest feedback, some CEOs rely on longtime associates or family members, people who may even take pleasure at times in letting some of the air out of the executive’s balloon. (Your teenage children might particularly enjoy this, though they might not have as much insight into your business). Bill Gates, for instance, has said that he talks to his wife, Melinda, every night about work-related issues. In particular, he credits her with helping him handle the transition period when he turned over the Microsoft CEO title to his old friend Steve Ballmer. Ballmer, too, has been one of Gates’s closest advisers. Gates says of this peer relationship with Ballmer: “It’s important to have someone whom you totally trust, who is totally committed, who shares your vision, and yet who has a little bit different set of skills and who also acts as something of a check on you.” And Gates’s well-known friendship with fellow billionaire and bridge buddy Warren Buffett serves as a sounding board for both men. Disney’s Michael Eisner had a similar relationship with Frank Wells, until Wells’s death in 1994, with Wells enjoying the role of devil’s advocate, challenging Eisner to ensure that the best decisions got made.

In his book You’re Too Kind, journalist Richard Stengel gives an account of flattery through the ages, noting that “the history of how ministers have used flattery to control leaders did not begin with Henry Kissinger’s relentless and unctuous toadying to Richard Nixon…. Cardinal Richelieu was a famous user of flattery…and he was a famous sucker for it himself.” Stengel argues that corporate VPs who suck up to their bosses are no different than the less powerful chimpanzees who subordinate themselves to more powerful ones in the animal world. Though it may feel great at the time, stroking a leader’s ego too much, and protecting him or her from needed information, can have negative consequences for both the leader and the organization. It’s worth remembering the words of cartoonist Hank Ketchum: “Flattery is like chewing gum. Enjoy it, but don’t swallow it.”

It’s worth remembering the words of cartoonist Hank Ketchum: “Flattery is like chewing gum. Enjoy it, but don’t swallow it.”

Powers Behind the Throne

Caught between the Scylla of follower unanimity and the Charybdis of flattery, leaders might be tempted to keep their followers at a distance. But in today’s world, this is simply not an option. CEOs of major firms cannot know everything about their own organizations. In coaching senior executives, I often hear them lamenting that they don’t have full knowledge of what’s happening in their companies. They report sleepless nights because they’ve been forced to make decisions based on incomplete information. They must rely on others for full, accurate, and unbiased input as well as for many operational decisions.

From the follower’s point of view, this presents wonderful opportunities. He can learn and practice new skills as the leader relies on him more and more, and he may be presented with new opportunities for advancement and reward. At the same time, however, it opens the door for the occasional follower who uses his newfound power to serve his own interests more than the company’s.

So how can leaders guard against that problem? They can begin by keeping ethical values and corporate vision front and center when delegating and monitoring work. Only then can they be certain that followers have a clear framework and boundaries for their actions. As Baxter CEO Harry Kraemer says, the key to ensuring that followers do the right thing is “open communication of values…over and over and over again.”

Six Ways to Counter Wayward Influences
Leaders can also protect themselves and their companies by setting good examples. Followers—especially ingratiators—tend to model themselves after their leaders. Thus, straightforward leaders are less likely to be manipulated than manipulative leaders are. And a leader who is seen to condone or encourage unethical behavior will almost certainly get unethical behavior in his ranks. Take the case of former WorldCom CEO Bernie Ebbers, who allegedly ridiculed attempts to institute a corporate code of conduct as a waste of time even as he pressed his followers to deliver double-digit growth. He shouldn’t have been surprised to find that junior WorldCom executives cooked the books or at least turned a blind eye when others did.

Although competency is generally a good basis on which to grant followers greater influence, leaders need to avoid letting followers influence them based on competency alone. As W. Michael Blumenthal, former chairman and CEO of Unisys, once said, “When did I make my greatest hiring mistakes? When I put intelligence and energy ahead of morality.” The danger here is that astute but unscrupulous followers can find ways of pushing their leaders in unethical directions and may even use the leader’s stated values against him. Suggestions like “I know you like saving money, so you’ll love the idea of…,” followed by a shady proposal, force leaders into the position of having to choose between eating their words and accepting the proposal.

At the end of the day, leaders have to rely on their instincts about people. Fortunately, there is good news in this respect. Research by psychologist Robert Zajonc suggests that we process information both affectively and cognitively and that we experience our feeling toward something a split second before we intellectualize it. If leaders are attentive, therefore, they may be able to tune in to a fleeting feeling that something is not quite right or that they are being manipulated before they rationalize and accept what they would be better off rejecting. For example, one tactic favored by manipulative followers is to create a false sense of urgency to rush the leader into an uninformed decision. Recognizing that you’re being pushed too fast and reserving judgment for a time may save you from an action you may regret.

It’s not only the people you delegate to that you have to watch, it’s also what you delegate. Clearly, leaders can never delegate their own responsibilities without peril. Smart leaders understand that even well-intentioned followers have their own ambitions and may try to usurp tasks that properly belong to their leaders. Harry Stonecipher, now CEO of Boeing, likes to point to the great polar explorer Ernest Shackleton as an example of a leader who knew what responsibilities he could and couldn’t afford to delegate. Stranded on an ice pack and crossing 800 miles of stormy seas in an open boat, Shackleton knew the deadly consequences of dissension and therefore focused his attention on preserving his team’s unity. He was happy to delegate many essential tasks to subordinates, even putting one man in charge of 22 others at a camp while he sailed off with the remainder of the crew to get assistance. But the one task he reserved for himself was the management of malcontents, whom he kept close by at all times. Amazingly, the entire crew survived the more than 15-month ordeal in fairly good health, and eight members even joined Shackleton on a subsequent expedition.

One simple test of whether you’re getting the feedback you need is to count how many employees challenge you at your next staff meeting.

• • •

By understanding how followers are capable of influencing them, top executives can improve their leadership skills. They can choose to lead by steadfastly refusing to fall prey to manipulative forces and try to guide the way toward more open and appropriate communications.

Followers, for their part, can better understand their power to inappropriately influence leaders. Once they recognize the danger they pose to their leaders—and ultimately to themselves—ingratiators may come to realize that isolating leaders from reality can be as costly to themselves as to the company’s shareholders. Realizing the value of dissent may force followers to take more care in forming and promoting their opinions.

Understanding that some tasks are best left to a leader may help followers to know where to stop and leaders to know what not to give away. In the final analysis, honest followers have just as great an investment in unmasking manipulative colleagues as their leaders do.

Leading by Feel

Harvard Bussines Review

Empathy, intuition, and self-awareness are essential to good leadership, but they can be tricky to hone and dangerous to use. Eighteen leaders and scholars explore how to manage emotional intelligence.

Like it or not, leaders need to manage the mood of their organizations. The most gifted leaders accomplish that by using a mysterious blend of psychological abilities known as emotional intelligence. They’re self-aware and empathetic. They can read and regulate their own emotions while intuitively grasping how others feel and gauging their organization’s emotional state.

But where does emotional intelligence come from? And how do leaders learn to use it? The management literature (and even common sense) suggests that both nature and nurture feed emotional intelligence. Part genetic predisposition, part life experience, and part old-fashioned training, emotional intelligence emerges in varying degrees from one leader to the next, and managers apply it with varying skill. Wisely and compassionately deployed, emotional intelligence spurs leaders, their people, and their organizations to superior performance; naively or maliciously applied, it can paralyze leaders or allow them to manipulate followers for personal gain.

We invited 18 leaders and scholars (including business executives, leadership researchers, psychologists, a neurologist, a cult expert, and a symphony conductor) to explore the nature and management of emotional intelligence—its sources, uses, and abuses. Their responses differed dramatically, but there were some common themes: the importance of consciously—and conscientiously—honing one’s skills, the double-edged nature of self-awareness, and the danger of letting any one emotional intelligence skill dominate.

Be Realistic

John D. Mayer ( jack.mayer@unh.eduThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) is a professor of psychology at the University of New Hampshire. He and Yale psychology professor Peter Salovey are credited with first defining the concept of emotional intelligence in the early 1990s.

This is a time of growing realism about emotional intelligence—especially concerning what it is and what it isn’t. The books and articles that have helped popularize the concept have defined it as a loose collection of personality traits, such as self-awareness, optimism, and tolerance. These popular definitions have been accompanied by exaggerated claims about the importance of emotional intelligence. But diverse personality traits, however admirable, don’t necessarily add up to a single definition of emotional intelligence. In fact, such traits are difficult to collectively evaluate in a way that reveals their relationship to success in business and in life.

Even when they’re viewed in isolation, the characteristics commonly associated with emotional intelligence and success may be more complicated than they seem. For example, the scientific jury is out on how important self-awareness is to successful leadership. In fact, too much self-awareness can reduce self-esteem, which is often a crucial component of great leadership.

From a scientific (rather than a popular) standpoint, emotional intelligence is the ability to accurately perceive your own and others’ emotions; to understand the signals that emotions send about relationships; and to manage your own and others’ emotions. It doesn’t necessarily include the qualities (like optimism, initiative, and self-confidence) that some popular definitions ascribe to it.

Researchers have used performance tests to measure people’s accuracy at identifying and understanding emotions—for example, asking them to identify the emotions conveyed by a face or which among several situations is most likely to bring about happiness. People who get high scores on these tests are indeed different from others. In the business world, they appear better able to deal with customers’ complaints or to mediate disputes, and they may excel at making strong and positive personal connections with subordinates and customers over the long term. Of course, emotional intelligence isn’t the only way to attain success as a leader: A brilliant strategist who can maximize profits may be able to hire and keep talented employees even if he or she doesn’t have strong personal connections with them.

Is there value in scales that, based on popular conceptions, measure qualities like optimism and self-confidence but label them emotional intelligence? Certainly these personality traits are important in business, so measuring and (sometimes) enhancing them can be useful. But recent research makes it clear that these characteristics are distinct from emotional intelligence as it is scientifically defined. A person high in emotional intelligence may be realistic rather than optimistic and insecure rather than confident. Conversely, a person may be highly self-confident and optimistic but lack emotional intelligence. The danger lies in assuming that because a person is optimistic or confident, he or she is also emotionally intelligent, when, in fact, the presence of those traits will tell you nothing of the sort.

Never Stop Learning

Daniel Goleman is the cochair of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations based at Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology in Piscataway, New Jersey.

You can be a successful leader without much emotional intelligence if you’re extremely lucky and you’ve got everything else going for you: booming markets, bumbling competitors, and clueless higher-ups. If you’re incredibly smart, you can cover for an absence of emotional intelligence until things get tough for the business. But at that point, you won’t have built up the social capital needed to pull the best out of people under tremendous pressure. The art of sustained leadership is getting others to produce superior work, and high IQ alone is insufficient to that task.

The good news is that emotional intelligence can be learned and improved at any age. In fact, data show that, on average, people’s emotional intelligence tends to increase as they age. But the specific leadership competencies that are based on emotional intelligence don’t necessarily come through life experience. For example, one of the most common complaints I hear about leaders, particularly newly promoted ones, is that they lack empathy. The problem is that they were promoted because they were outstanding individual performers, and being a solo achiever doesn’t teach you the skills necessary to understand other people’s concerns.

Leaders who are motivated to improve their emotional intelligence can do so if they’re given the right information, guidance, and support. The information they need is a candid assessment of their strengths and limitations from people who know them well and whose opinions they trust. The guidance they need is a specific developmental plan that uses naturally occurring workplace encounters as the laboratory for learning. The support they need is someone to talk to as they practice how to handle different situations, what to do when they’ve blown it, and how to learn from those setbacks. If leaders cultivate these resources and practice continually, they can develop specific emotional intelligence skills—skills that will last for years.

Watch the Language

Colleen Barrett is the president and COO of Dallas-based Southwest Airlines.

I’ve always felt that my intuition was pretty darn good, and I think I can read people well. I rely a ton on my gut. I know the mood of our different work groups. I know the expectations of our employees. I think people are generally born with a predisposition for this type of emotional awareness. But I certainly believe you can enhance your ability just from experience and learning. I’ve probably gotten better at it over the years because I read and listen to everything, and I’m constantly observing. I watch body language and how people interact.

The other day, I was talking to one of our officers, and he said, “How do you do that?” and I said, “How do I do what?” He was referring to a meeting we’d both been at earlier. I’d asked one of the presenters at the meeting, a fellow who reported to this officer, if he was feeling OK. The officer thought the employee was fine, but, it turns out, the poor guy had had a pretty traumatic experience in his personal life the night before. His presentation went well, but he seemed off to me, distracted. I suppose in order to have seen that, I must have been fairly attuned to what this fellow’s presentations were usually like.

I often communicate on a passionate, emotional level—which can be a detriment, particularly for a woman in a predominantly male leadership group, as ours was for many years. There were times when I’d launch in on an issue and make gut-level assertions like, “Our customers feel this,” and “Our employees feel that.” Though everyone in the group would probably deny it, I know that part of their reaction to my outbursts was, “Oh, that’s just Colleen, and she’s on a tangent,” and they would tend to disregard what I was saying. I’ve learned to rely on calmer people around me to give me those raised eyebrows that say, “Lower the passion a little bit, and people will listen more.” When I’m making my arguments, I have to really prepare and try to be—and this is very difficult for me—factual and dispassionate.

I rely on calmer people around me to give me those raised eyebrows that say, “Lower the passion a little bit.”

Build Pathways

Steven Gutstein ( gutstein@connectionscenter.comThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) is a psychologist, autism expert, and codirector of Connections Center for Family and Personal Development in Houston.

I work with autistic children, a population typically defined by its lack of emotional intelligence. People with autism can’t connect—indeed, they aren’t really interested in connecting emotionally with others. Traditionally, the therapeutic approach with these kids has been to teach them to fake it. They are urged to make eye contact with others, to repress whatever distracting behaviors they may have, and to use social scripts. Many of these therapies have the appearance of being successful. People with autism do learn the scripts, and some even blend in.

The problem is, faking it never ceases to be work. So as autistic children become adults, they stop putting on the show. Among adults with Asperger’s syndrome (a form of autism marked by average or above-average IQ), fewer than 12% hold jobs. Only 3% leave home. These findings make the case profoundly that one gets only so far on IQ. People need to connect emotionally, and with flexibility, in order to succeed. These findings also demonstrate that traditional therapies have not been successful at improving quality of life for autistic people.

My approach to teaching emotional intelligence skills to children with autism, which I call “relationship development intervention” (RDI), takes a different tack. It begins with a belief that people with autism can be taught to value relationships, to seek out interactions that are not merely transactional (“I will deal with you because there is something I want from you”) but where the whole point is to enjoy the shared experience. Nonautistic people begin to have these kinds of relationships early in life; at about ten months, most babies start developing the capacity for social referencing, the appreciation that my actions should take into account your emotions. We now know from neuroimaging that at this stage some critical neural pathways are being laid down among all the structures in the limbic system, which regulates emotion and motivation. Autistic children typically don’t develop those pathways.

If people with autism can learn emotional intelligence, anyone can.

But with RDI, which uses cognitive exercises and activities to motivate the children to learn specific behaviors rather than social scripts, I think we can create the neurological traffic to establish those pathways. Mind you, we are not curing autism. But we are teaching emotional intelligence. If people with autism can learn emotional intelligence, anyone can.

Get Motivated

Richard Boyatzis ( reb2@cwru.eduThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) is a professor and the chair of the department of organizational behavior at Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management in Cleveland.

People can develop their emotional intelligence if they really want to. But many managers jump to the conclusion that their complement of emotional intelligence is predetermined. They think, “I could never be good at this, so why bother?” The central issue isn’t a lack of ability to change; it’s the lack of motivation to change.

Leadership development is not all that different from other areas in which people are trying to change their behaviors. Just look at the treatments for alcoholism, drug addiction, and weight loss: They all require the desire to change. More subtly, they all require a positive, rather than a negative, motivation. You have to want to change. If you think you’ll lose your job because you’re not adequately tuned in to your employees, you might become determinedly empathetic or compassionate for a time. But change driven by fear or avoidance probably isn’t going to last. Change driven by hopes and aspirations, that’s pursued because it’s desired, will be more enduring.

There’s no such thing as having too much emotional intelligence. But there is a danger in being preoccupied with, or overusing, one aspect of it. For example, if you overemphasize the emotional intelligence competencies of initiative or achievement, you’ll always be changing things at your company. Nobody would know what you were going to do next, which would be quite destabilizing for the organization. If you overuse empathy, you might never fire anybody. If you overuse teamwork, you might never build diversity or listen to a lone voice. Balance is essential.

Train the Gifted

Elkhonon Goldberg ( egneurocog@aol.comThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) is a clinical professor of neurology at New York University School of Medicine and the director of the Institute of Neuropsychology and Cognitive Performance in New York.

In the past, neuropsychologists were mostly concerned with cognitive impairment. Today, they are increasingly interested in the biological underpinnings of cognitive differences in people without impairments—including differences in people’s emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence can be learned, to a degree. It’s like mathematical or musical ability. Can you become a musician if you lack natural aptitude? Yes, you can, if you take lessons and practice enough. But will you ever be a Mozart? Probably not. In the same way, emotional intelligence develops through a combination of biological endowment and training. And people who don’t have that endowment probably won’t become deeply emotionally intelligent just through training. Trying to drum emotional intelligence into someone with no aptitude for it is an exercise in futility. I believe the best way to get emotionally intelligent leaders is to select for people who already show the basic qualities you want. Think about it: That’s how athletic coaches operate. They don’t just work with anyone who wants to play a sport; they train the naturally gifted. Business managers should do the same.

How do you identify the naturally gifted? I’d say you have to look for those with a genuine, instinctive interest in other people’s experiences and mental worlds. It’s an absolute prerequisite for developing emotional intelligence. If a manager lacks this interest, maybe your training resources are better directed elsewhere.

Seek Frank Feedback

Andrea Jung is the chair and CEO of Avon Products, which is based in New York.

Emotional intelligence is in our DNA here at Avon because relationships are critical at every stage of our business. It starts with the relationships our 4.5 million independent sales reps have with their customers and goes right up through senior management to my office. So the emphasis on emotional intelligence is much greater here than it was at other companies in which I’ve worked. We incorporate emotional intelligence education into our development training for senior managers, and we factor in emotional intelligence competencies when we evaluate employees’ performance.

Of all a leader’s competencies, emotional and otherwise, self-awareness is the most important. Without it, you can’t identify the impact you have on others. Self-awareness is very important for me as CEO. At my level, few people are willing to tell me the things that are hardest to hear. We have a CEO advisory counsel—ten people chosen each year from Avon offices throughout the world—and they tell me the good, the bad, and the ugly about the company. Anything can be said. It helps keep me connected to what people really think and how my actions affect them. I also rely on my children for honest appraisals. You can get a huge dose of reality by seeing yourself through your children’s eyes, noticing the ways they react to and reflect what you say and do. My kids are part of my 360-degree feedback. They’re the most honest of all.

My kids are part of my 360-degree feedback. They’re the most honest of all.

I grew up in a very traditional Chinese family. My parents were concerned that the way I’d been raised—submissive, caring, and averse to conflict—would hinder my ability to succeed in the Fortune 500 environment. They were afraid I couldn’t make the tough decisions. But I’ve learned how to be empathetic and still make hard decisions that are right for the company. These are not incompatible abilities. When Avon has had to close plants, for example, I’ve tried to act with compassion for the people involved. And I’ve gotten letters from some of the associates who were affected, expressing sadness but also saying thanks for the fair treatment. Leaders’ use of emotional intelligence when making tough decisions is important to their success—and to the success of their organizations.

Gauge Your Awareness

Howard Book ( hbwork@netsurf.netThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) is an associate professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of Toronto and an organizational consultant.

Self-awareness is the key emotional intelligence skill behind good leadership. It’s often thought of as the ability to know how you’re feeling and why, and the impact your feelings have on your behavior. But it also involves a capacity to monitor and control those strong but subliminal biases that all of us harbor and that can skew our decision making.

Consider, for example, a vice president who complained to me recently about his new hire, the head of sales. He found her to be unassertive, indecisive, unsure—hardly leadership material. When I talked to her, however, it turned out she felt her boss was sabotaging her career. The vice president had been hired only five months before she had, and he was oblivious to how his anxiety to please the CEO was causing him to micromanage. In doing so, the VP was undercutting the sales director’s independence and confidence. His lack of self-awareness directly impaired her performance.

Whereas cognitive intelligence is fixed by about the age of ten, emotional intelligence increases with age.

Experience and literature on the subject suggest that while both nature and nurture influence emotional intelligence, nurture is the more important factor. Indeed, this emphasis on environment is one of the hallmarks that differentiates emotional intelligence from cognitive intelligence, or IQ. Whereas cognitive intelligence is fixed by about the age of ten, emotional intelligence increases with age. So you can actually learn emotional intelligence skills like self-awareness. One simple way to measure your self-awareness is to ask a trusted friend or colleague to draw up a list of your strengths and weaknesses while you do the same. It can be an uncomfortable exercise, but the bigger the gap between your list and your helper’s, the more work you probably have to do.

Sniff Out Signals

Robert Goffee ( rgoffee@london.eduThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) is a professor of organizational behavior at London Business School and a cofounder of Creative Management Associates, an organizational consulting firm in London.

You need some degree of emotional intelligence to be an effective leader, but you do see some one-hit wonders out there—people who have limited emotional intelligence but can still excite a particular group. The problem is, they can’t transfer their success to another organization. They got lucky and landed in a situation in which their passions happened to connect with the organization’s passions, but they probably wouldn’t be able to replicate that at another company. By contrast, true leaders can connect with different groups of people in a variety of contexts.

To some extent, these one-hit wonders can learn how to be emotionally intelligent. One component of emotional intelligence is “situation sensing”—the ability to sniff out the signals in an environment and figure out what’s going on without being told. You can develop this skill through jobs in which you’re exposed to a wide range of people and have a motive for watching their reactions. For instance, Roche CEO Franz Humer is highly skilled at detecting subtle cues and underlying shifts of opinion. Humer told me and my colleague Gareth Jones that he developed the skill while working as a tour guide in his mid-twenties. Because he relied solely on tips for his pay, Humer quickly learned how to size up a group of as many as 100 people and figure out who was likely to give him a tip. That way, he’d know where to focus his attention. (For more on this example, see “Why Should Anyone Be Led By You?” HBR September–October 2000.)

If these skills are developed disproportionately, they can interfere with your relationships.

I’d caution against overemphasizing any one aspect of emotional intelligence; if these skills are developed disproportionately, they can interfere with your relationships. If you’re extremely self-aware but short on empathy, you might come off as self-obsessed. If you’re excessively empathetic, you risk being too hard to read. If you’re great at self-management but not very transparent, you might seem inauthentic. Finally, at times leaders have to deliberately avoid getting too close to the troops in order to ensure that they’re seeing the bigger picture. Emotionally intelligent leaders know when to rein it in.

Engage Your Demons

David Gergen directs the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He served as an adviser to presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton.

American history suggests not only that emotional intelligence is an indispensable ingredient of political leadership but also that it can be enhanced through sustained effort. George Washington had to work hard to control his fiery temper before he became a role model for the republic, and Abraham Lincoln had to overcome deep melancholia to display the brave and warm countenance that made him a magnet for others. Franklin Delano Roosevelt provides an even more graphic example: In his early adult years, FDR seemed carefree and condescending. Then, at 39, he was stricken with polio. By most accounts, he transformed himself over the next seven years of struggle into a leader of empathy, patience, and keen self-awareness.

Richard Nixon thought he might transform himself through his own years in the wilderness, and he did make progress. But he could never fully control his demons, and they eventually brought him down. Bill Clinton, too, has struggled for self-mastery and has made progress, but he could not fully close the cracks in his character, and he paid a stiff price. Not all people succeed, then, in achieving self-awareness and self-control. What we have been told since the time of the Greeks is that every leader must try to control his own passions before he can hope to command the passions of others.

Best-selling author Rabbi Harold Kushner argues persuasively that the elements of selfishness and aggression that are in most of us—and our struggles to overcome them—are exactly what make for better leadership. In Living a Life That Matters, Kushner writes of the personal torments of leaders from Jacob, who wrestled all night with an angel, to Martin Luther King, Jr., who tried to cleanse himself of weakness even as he cleansed the nation’s soul. “Good people do bad things,” Kushner concludes, “If they weren’t mightily tempted by their yetzer ha’ra [will to do evil], they might not be capable of the mightily good things they do.”

Let Your Guard Down

Sidney Harman ( sharman@harman.comThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) is the executive chairman and founder of Harman International Industries in Washington, DC.

Eight years ago, we acquired Becker Radio (now Harman/Becker) to help us develop the dashboard navigation and media systems that are now the major part of our business. In a meeting at Becker, several of the engineers there argued that the only way for us to take the lead in the emerging field of “infotainment” was to abandon tried-and-true analog systems and design and build totally new digital systems—a very risky proposition for our company.

Back home, I sat down with our key executives to talk about this disruptive idea. I went into the meeting with only a rough notion of how we should proceed. There was clearly anxiety and skepticism in the group, concern that we would be betting the company if we went digital. I realized that to provoke the creative thinking we needed, I would have to let my guard down and be willing to embarrass myself by floating unformed—and even uninformed—ideas. I assured the group that anything we said in the meeting stayed with us. Our discussion went on for six or seven hours. By opening up to my colleagues, and by encouraging them to think freely and improvise, I helped generate a novel perspective that no one of us had brought to the meeting: Commit all the company’s resources to this digital direction, facilitate the transformation by eliminating hierarchies and silos, and remove barriers between functions.

Today, our sales are approaching $3 billion, and our stock price is at an all-time high. We wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t taken the radical steps conceived in that meeting. And that plan would not have emerged had I failed to recognize and respond to the group’s apprehension and elicit its collective creative thinking. The leader who uses emotional intelligence to catalyze creative thinking subordinates himself to the team but elevates the company to achieve goals it otherwise couldn’t.

Watch Your Culture

Janja Lalich ( jlalich@csuchico.eduThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) is an assistant professor of sociology at California State University, Chico, and an expert on cults.

Cult leaders don’t do anything mysterious; they just know how to package themselves and their promises well and how to target responsive audiences. They’re very good at influencing, or, to be more precise, manipulating, followers. To do this, they rely on a keen ability to perceive others’ vulnerabilities and longings—to know what people want.

One way a cult leader manipulates is by exploiting followers’ eagerness to be part of something bigger than themselves. That desire often prompts followers to assign to a leader attributes that he doesn’t actually possess. A type of group contagion can take hold—a “true-believerism” mentality. Then followers can fall into what I call uncritical obedience, never questioning the leader’s claims. When followers give a leader this power, there are obvious dangers.

Cult leaders are also skillful at convincing followers that the leader’s ideas are their own. Once followers own the ideas, it’s difficult for them to extricate themselves from the leader’s message. For example, a leader may exaggerate his own importance. In the 1980s, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, a wildly popular Oregon-based Eastern guru, always surrounded himself with armed guards. That heightened sense of need for security led some of his followers to perform dangerous, antisocial activities in their desire to protect and defend their ashram and Rajneesh himself.

The differences between how cult leaders and conventional leaders influence their followers can be subtle.

Cult leaders also make it difficult for people to leave. They set up interlocking systems of influence and control that keep followers obedient and prevent them from thinking about their own needs. Cult leaders may offer “rewards”—sometimes material, more often ephemeral—that keep followers committed to the leader and to the organization’s goals. The differences between how a conventional leader influences followers and how cult leaders manipulate them can be subtle. Sometimes the only difference is their intent. And sometimes there is no difference.

Find Your Voice

William George is the former chairman and CEO of Medtronic, a medical technology company in Minneapolis.

Authentic leadership begins with self-awareness, or knowing yourself deeply. Self-awareness is not a trait you are born with but a capacity you develop throughout your lifetime. It’s your understanding of your strengths and weaknesses, your purpose in life, your values and motivations, and how and why you respond to situations in a particular way. It requires a great deal of introspection and the ability to internalize feedback from others.

No one is born a leader; we have to consciously develop into the leader we want to become. It takes many years of hard work and the ability to learn from extreme difficulties and disappointments. But in their scramble to get ahead, many would-be leaders attempt to skip this crucial developmental stage. Some of these people do get to the top of companies through sheer determination and aggressiveness. However, when they finally reach the leader’s chair, they can be very destructive because they haven’t focused on the hard work of personal development.

To mask their inadequacies, these leaders tend to close themselves off, cultivating an image or persona rather than opening up to others. They often adopt the styles of other leaders they have observed.

Leaders who are driven to achieve by shortcomings in their character, for example, or a desire for self-aggrandizement, may take inordinate risks on behalf of the organization. They may even come to believe they are so important that they place their interests above those of the organization.

Self-awareness and other emotional intelligence skills come naturally to some, less so to others—but these skills can be learned. One of the techniques I have found most useful in gaining deeper self-awareness is meditation. In 1975, my wife dragged me, kicking and screaming, to a weekend course in Transcendental Meditation. I have meditated 20 minutes, twice a day, ever since. Meditation makes me calmer, more focused, and better able to discern what’s really important. Leaders, by the very nature of their positions, are under extreme pressure to keep up with the many voices clamoring for their attention. Indeed, many leaders lose their way. It is only through a deep self-awareness that you can find your inner voice and listen to it.

Know the Score

Michael Tilson Thomas is the music director of the San Francisco Symphony.

A conductor’s authority rests on two things: the orchestra’s confidence in the conductor’s insightful knowledge of the whole score; and the orchestra’s faith in the conductor’s good heart, which seeks to inspire everyone to make music that is excellent, generous, and sincere.

Old-school conductors liked to hold the lead in their hands at all times. I do not. Sometimes I lead. Other times I’ll say, “Violas, I’m giving you the lead. Listen to one another, and find your way with this phrase.” I’m not trying to drill people, military style, to play music exactly together. I’m trying to encourage them to play as one, which is a different thing. I’m guiding the performance, but I’m aware that they’re executing it. It’s their sinews, their heartstrings. I’m there to help them do it in a way that is convincing and natural for them but also a part of the larger design.

My approach is to be in tune with the people with whom I’m working. If I’m conducting an ensemble for the first time, I will relate what it is I want them to do to the great things they’ve already done. If I’m conducting my own orchestra, I can see in the musicians’ bodies and faces how they’re feeling that day, and it becomes very clear who may need encouragement and who may need cautioning.

The objectivity and perspective I have as the only person who is just listening is a powerful thing. I try to use this perspective to help the ensemble reach its goals.

Keep It Honest

Carol Bartz ( carol.bartz@autodesk.comThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) is the chairman, president, and CEO of Autodesk, a design software and digital content company in San Rafael, California.

A friend needed to take a six-month assignment in a different part of the country. She had an ancient, ill, balding but beloved dog that she could not take with her. Her choices boiled down to boarding the poor animal, at enormous expense, or putting it out of its obvious misery. Friends said, “Board the dog,” though behind my friend’s back, they ridiculed that option. She asked me what I thought, and I told her, kindly but clearly, that I thought she should have the dog put to sleep rather than spend her money keeping it in an environment where it would be miserable and perhaps die anyway. My friend was furious with me for saying this. She boarded the dog and went away on her assignment. When she returned, the dog was at death’s door and had to be put to sleep. Not long after that, my friend came around to say thanks. “You were the only person who told me the truth,” she said. She came to appreciate that I had cared enough to tell her what I thought was best, even if what I said hurt at the time.

That event validated a hunch that has stood me in good stead as I’ve led my company. Empathy and compassion have to be balanced with honesty. I have pulled people into my office and told them to deal with certain issues for the sake of themselves and their teams. If they are willing to learn, they will say, “Gee, no one ever told me.” If they are unwilling, they’re not right for this organization. And I must let them go for the sake of the greater good.

Go for the Gemba

Hirotaka Takeuchi is the dean of Hitotsubashi University’s Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy in Tokyo.

Self-awareness, self-control, empathy, humility, and other such emotional intelligence traits are particularly important in Asia. They are part of our Confucian emphasis on wah, or social harmony. When books on emotional intelligence were first translated into Japanese, people said, “We already know that. We’re actually trying to get beyond that.” We’ve been so focused on wah that we’ve built up a supersensitive structure of social niceties, where everyone seeks consensus. In the Japanese hierarchy, everyone knows his or her place so no one is ever humiliated. This social supersensitivity—itself a form of emotional intelligence—can lead people to shy away from conflict. But conflict is often the only way to get to the gemba—the front line, where the action really is, where the truth lies.

Thus, effective management often depends not on coolly and expertly resolving conflict, or simply avoiding it, but on embracing it at the gemba. Japan’s most effective leaders do both. The best example is Nissan’s Carlos Ghosn. He not only had the social skills to listen to people and win them over to his ideas, but he also dared to lift the lid on the corporate hierarchy and encourage people at all levels of the organization to offer suggestions to operational, organizational, and even interpersonal problems—even if that created conflict. People were no longer suppressed, so solutions to the company’s problems bubbled up.

Balance the Load

Linda Stone ( linda@lindastone.netThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) is the former vice president of corporate and industry initiatives at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington.

Emotional intelligence is powerful—which is precisely why it can be dangerous. For example, empathy is an extraordinary relationship-building tool, but it must be used skillfully or it can do serious damage to the person doing the empathizing. In my case, overdoing empathy took a physical toll. In May 2000, Steve Ballmer charged me with rebuilding Microsoft’s industry relationships, a position that I sometimes referred to as chief listening officer. The job was part ombudsperson, part new-initiatives developer, part pattern recognizer, and part rapid-response person. In the first few months of the job—when criticism of the company was at an all-time high—it became clear that this position was a lightning rod. I threw myself into listening and repairing wherever I could.

Within a few months, I was exhausted from the effort. I gained a significant amount of weight, which, tests finally revealed, was probably caused by a hormone imbalance partially brought on by stress and lack of sleep. In absorbing everyone’s complaints, perhaps to the extreme, I had compromised my health. This was a wake-up call; I needed to reframe the job.

I focused on connecting the people who needed to work together to resolve problems rather than taking on each repair myself. I persuaded key people inside the company to listen and work directly with important people outside the company, even in cases where the internal folks were skeptical at first about the need for this direct connection. In a sense, I tempered my empathy and ratcheted up relationship building. Ultimately, with a wiser and more balanced use of empathy, I became more effective and less stressed in my role.

Question Authority

Ronald Heifetz ( ronald_heifetz@harvard.eduThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) is a cofounder of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a partner at Cambridge Leadership Associates, a consultancy in Cambridge.

Emotional intelligence is necessary for leadership but not sufficient. Many people have some degree of emotional intelligence and can indeed empathize with and rouse followers; a few of them can even generate great charismatic authority. But I would argue that if they are using emotional intelligence solely to gain formal or informal authority, that’s not leadership at all. They are using their emotional intelligence to grasp what people want, only to pander to those desires in order to gain authority and influence. Easy answers sell.

Leadership couples emotional intelligence with the courage to raise the tough questions, challenge people’s assumptions about strategy and operations—and risk losing their goodwill. It demands a commitment to serving others; skill at diagnostic, strategic, and tactical reasoning; the guts to get beneath the surface of tough realities; and the heart to take heat and grief.

For example, David Duke did an extraordinary job of convincing Ku Klux Klan members to get out of their backyards and into hotel conference rooms. He brought his considerable emotional intelligence to bear, his capacity to empathize with his followers, to pluck their heartstrings in a powerful way that mobilized them. But he avoided asking his people the tough questions: Does our program actually solve our problem? How will creating a social structure of white supremacy give us the self-esteem we lack? How will it solve the problems of poverty, alcoholism, and family violence that corrode our sense of self-worth?

Like Duke, many people with high emotional intelligence and charismatic authority aren’t interested in asking the deeper questions, because they get so much emotional gain from the adoring crowd. For them, that’s the end in itself. They’re satisfying their own hungers and vulnerabilities: their need to be liked; their need for power and control; or their need to be needed, to feel important, which renders them vulnerable to grandiosity. But that’s not primal leadership. It’s primal hunger for authority.

Many people with high emotional intelligence aren’t interested in asking the deeper questions.

Maintaining one’s primacy or position is not, in and of itself, leadership, however inspiring it may seem to be. Gaining primal authority is relatively easy.