weLEAD Online Magazine
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Copyright 2001 ã weLEAD,
Inc.
weLEAD Leadership Series
Exclusive
interview with Michael Useem
Interviewed by Greg Thomas
Michael
Useem is a respected leadership scholar who has energetically directed his career
in management and leadership studies. He is a Professor of Management at
Wharton College, Director of the Center for
Leadership and Change Management at Wharton, and editor of
the Wharton Leadership Digest. Michael also holds numerous professional
career and teaching awards. As an educator, author and consultant he has a
unique perspective in the field of leadership studies. Our thanks to Michael
for this opportunity to examine his personal thoughts and ideas about
leadership in the 21st century.
Michael, there
certainly appears to be a tremendous interest in the subject of leadership.
Along with the growing number of books, articles and college courses,
leadership is becoming a distinct subject of interest. How would you define
leadership and why do you believe there is a sudden growing interest at this
time in history?
For
management writer Peter Drucker, leadership is having followers who “do the
right thing.” For political historian James MacGregor Burns, leadership is a
“calling.” For president Abraham
Lincoln, leadership is appealing to the “better angels of our nature”.
Leadership is also a matter of making a difference.
Drawing
on their insights and the experience of many others, leadership in my view
entails building a winning strategy and revamping an organization to pursue
it. Leading requires us to make an
active choice among many plausible alternatives, and it depends on bringing
others along, on mobilizing them to get the job done. Leadership is at its best when the vision is strategic, the voice
persuasive, and the results tangible.
Academic
research has confirmed that leaders have greatest impact on organizations when
their environments are least predictable.
With the globalization of markets, rapid changes in technologies, and
growing number of competitors, firms are coming to appreciate that good
leadership throughout the ranks is vital for staying on top of their
increasingly uncertain and fast-changing environments.
As editor of the Wharton Leadership Digest
(http://leadership.wharton.upenn.edu/digest/index.shtml)
published by the Wharton Center for Leadership and
Change Management, you certainly have a pulse on the growing field of leadership
and change management. What are the biggest changes you see occurring in the
study of leadership?
As
companies carry out more outsourcing and joint ventures, they require new
methods of execution. The skill of
delegating work downward to subordinates is being supplemented by a talent for
arranging work outward with partners.
Lateral leadership — leveraging your partners' strengths instead of
directing subordinates' actions — is required for achieving results when
managers have no authority to guarantee them.
As
companies have delegated responsibility downward, they've also been
increasingly demanding that managers be able to lead their own bosses. If their superior lacks data, they need to
ensure that the boss receives what's needed; if the boss is missing the boat,
they need to help get him or her aboard before it's too late.
Outward
and upward leadership is about taking charge when managers are not formally in
charge. It assures that advice arrives from and information flows to all points
on the corporate compass, not just from the top down. But for these
distinct forms of leadership to work well, they also require inward
self-assurance and personal self-confidence.
Leadership,
then, is coming to be viewed as a four-pronged capacity – downward, outward,
upward, and inward – and the study of leadership is moving in all four
directions.
At this period
in our history, which of the four-pronged capacities for leadership do you feel
is most lacking and needs more emphasis or study?
Because
the downward capacity has traditionally defined what leadership is all about,
the other three features are less well appreciated. The complete manager, however, requires an aptitude for working
all cardinal points of the leadership compass, and we had thus better go on
with the task of mastering the outward, upward, and inward components as well.
What
are the biggest challenges you see occurring in the study of leadership?
We all
recognize that leadership requires strategic thinking, decisive action, personal
integrity, and other worthy qualities. Yet converting such abstract concepts
into practice remains an elusive process.
Indeed, few behavioral concepts defy translation into reality as much as
those that involve leadership. We thus
need depth studies of leaders and leading organizations that have successfully
done so, for it is in observing how they applied the concept to create their
reality that we can better understand how to do it as we face our own real
challenges.
Like many e-based organizations today, weLEAD Incorporated does a fair
amount of advertising on the web. One of the top leadership search phrases
generated on the major search engines is “servant leadership”. What are your
feelings about the growing interest in the research, concepts and books
originated by Robert Greenleaf?
Serving
others and subordinating your self-interest to their collective interest are
integral to the very definition of leadership, and Robert Greenleaf’s Servant
Leadership has certainly helped establish that point.
Managers
may be tempted to put their own careers or favorite groups first, but if they
do not consistently place first priority on the ultimate ends of the
organization, their capacity to lead can be gravely undermined. The strength of a firm depends on leaders
who are concerned with doing what is best for all stakeholders – whatever the
personal costs. A Civil War dictum said
it well: if you’re a cavalry officer,
feed your horses, feed your soldiers, then feed yourself.
This
November a new book you have written will be published entitled Leading Up:
How to Lead Your Boss So You Both Win (Crown Business/Random House). Give
us a little background on what inspired you to write this book!
We have
long thought of leadership as a largely downward action, mobilization of those
below you. But we also are coming to
appreciate that upward leadership can be equally important, bringing the best
up to those above you.
We’ve seen leaders fail because the
people who work for them were reluctant to challenge their command. This tragically was evident on February 9,
2001, when the nuclear submarine USS Greenville abruptly surfaced into a
Japanese fishing boat, the Ehime Maru, sending nine passengers to the bottom of
the sea just nine miles south of Honolulu’s Pearl Harbor. Had those reporting to the commander warned
him that his surfacing was proceeding too rapidly, one career and nine lives might
well have been saved.
This all came home to me personally when we encountered a mountaineer
during one of our annual leadership treks to Mount Everest. She explained how she had been trapped on
the upper slopes of Mount Everest when a killer storm hit on May 10, 1996, and
how her guide had given instructions that were to prove lifesaving. But she also explained how she had
under-appreciated how her guide’s own life was at risk (and he later perished
in the storm). For the next several
days as we wended our way up to a vista point of more than 18,200 feet near
Mount Everest, her comments kept coming home in a pleasant way. I was one of the co-leaders for the trek,
and every few hours, one trekker or another would solicitously ask me, “how are
you doing?”
Many
organizations are still hierarchal, highly resistant to change, and view
leadership as a largely downward action. How can upper management promote a
philosophy of upward leadership?
Even if
upward leadership now seems a distant concept in your organization, its absence
is often more a matter of conceptual blinders than inherent incapacities. There’s no “leadership pill” to get you
where you want to go, no silver bullet, no magic ten-step program that will
turn inherent followers into budding leaders, but upward leadership can be
inspired if you’re willing to take the time to build a company-wide mindset for
leading upward. Once established, such
a culture can serve as a kind of inertial guidance system, continually
reminding managers that they are obliged to stand up without the need for any
superiors to say so. For building that
mindset, four initiatives are in order:
1)
Identify managers for development: Finding those with a capacity for upward
leadership is an essential first step.
Who has shown fearlessness when a leadership vacuum above threatened a product
or program? Who seems willing to look
in both directions for opportunities to lead and listen?
2) Coach
managers one-on-one:
Begin by engaging those closest to you in a dialogue on upward
leadership; then ask them to do the same with their associates. It is especially useful to discuss your own
moments of upward success and setback, and then to ask them to synthesize
lessons from their own past experiences.
3)
Create development programs:
Introducing an upward component into existing or new management
development programs is also useful. In
1999, Ford Motor Company did just that:
It initiated an annual “new business leader” program built around an “up
and out” thrust, for some 2,000 managers.
4) Focus
managers on upward experience:
Another avenue is to ask your managers to consider what others have
achieved when their opportunity for upward leadership was either skirted or
seized. By examining in detail what
others have done, we can better appreciate what we should do ourselves. The more that past experience can be brought
to life, the better it can inform present behavior.
Thank You
Michael!
Comments
to: editor@leadingtoday.org
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About the author:
Michael
Useem
The
William and Jacalyn Egan Professor; Professor of Management
Director,
Center for
Leadership and Change Management
PhD, Harvard University, 1970; MA, Harvard University,
1966; BS, University of Michigan, 1964
Academic
Positions Held
Wharton: 1990-present (named The William
and Jacalyn Egan Professor, 1997; Director, Center for Leadership and Change
Management, 1996-present).
Career
and Recent Professional Awards; Teaching Awards
Helen Kardon
Moss Anvil Award for Teaching Excellence in the Graduate Division, 1992;
Graduate Division Award for Excellence in Teaching, 1992-95, 1998;
Miller-Sherrerd MBA Core Teaching Award, 1993-2000
Professional
Leadership 1996-99
Consulting Editor, Leadership
Quarterly, 1992-98; Corresponding Editor, Theory and Society,
1981-present; Advisory Board, Liberal Education (Journal of the Association
of American Universities and Colleges), 1990-98; Editoral Board, IRQ: A
Quarterly Journal of Investor Relations and Corporate Value, 1997-present
Consulting
Astra/Merck; Bell Atlantic Corporation; CARE; National
Policy Association; National Research Council; United Nations; World Education;
and many other organizations
Research
Areas
Organizations and management; leadership and governance;
corporate change and restructuring; institutional investors; company social and
political programs; education and employment; the organization of development
programs
Current
Projects
Company leadership in a globalizing equity market;
leading organizational change and restructuring; the lessons of leadership during
periods of challenge, stress, and uncertainty.
Representative
Publications
The Leadership Moment: Nine True Stories
of Triumph and Disaster and Their Lessons for Us All. New York: Times
Books/Random House, 1998.
Investor Capitalism: How Money Managers are Changing the Face of Corporate
America. New York: Basic Books/HarperCollins, 1996.
Executive Defense:
Shareholder Power and Corporate Reorganization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1993.
To
access faculty papers and research, visit Knowledge@Wharton