Leaders: Strategies for Taking Charge

by Warren G. Bennis, Burt Nanus

Overview

In this illuminating study of corporate America's most critical issue—leadership—world-renowned leadership guru Warren Bennis and his co-author Burt Nanus reveal the four key principles every manager should know: Attention Through Vision, Meaning Through Communication, Trust Through Positioning, and The Deployment of Self.

In this age of "process", with downsizing and restructuring affecting many workplaces, companies have fallen trap to lack of communication and distrust, and vision and leadership are needed more than ever before. The wisdom and insight in Leaders addresses this need. It is an indispensable source of guidance all readers will appreciate, whether they're running a small department or in charge of an entire corporation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060559540
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	05/22/2007
Series:	Collins Business Essentials
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.58(d)

About the Author

Warren G. Bennis is university professor and founding chairman of the Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California. He is also chairman of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard's Kennedy School and Distinguished Research Fellow at the Harvard Business School. He has written more than twenty-five books on leadership, change, and creative collaboration including Leaders, which was recently designated by the Financial Times as one of the top 50 business books of all time. His most recent book is Geeks & Geezers.

Burt Nanus is a well-known expert on leadership and the author of many books on the subject, including Visionary Leadership. Now professor emeritus of management at the University of Southern California, he was also research director of the Leadership Institute.

Read an Excerpt

These are the hard times inwhich a genius would wish to live.Great necessities call forth great leaders.

Abigail Adams1790, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson

"Leadership" is a word on everyone's lips. The young attack it and the old grow wistful for it. Parents have lost it and police seek it. Experts claim it and artists spurn it, while scholars want it. Philosophers reconcile it (as authority) with liberty and theologians demonstrate its compatibility with conscience. If bureaucrats pretend they have it, politicians wish they did. Everybody agrees that there is less of it than there used to be. The matter now stands as a certain Mr. Wildman thought it stood in 1648: "Leadership hath been broken into pieces."

At the same time, history effervesces with the names of individuals who have provided extraordinary leadership and risen to the challenges of their eras: Winston Churchill. Mahatma Gandhi. Golda Meir. Franklin D. Roosevelt. Their leadership built great nations. Tom Watson. Edwin Land. Alfred P. Sloan. Their leadership built great organizations.

Often the enormousness of present-day challenges and the pace of change seem unaccompanied by great notions and the great people to implement them. This void, like so many darknesses, may augur new leaders. And certainly in this moratorium new concepts of leadership have incubated. With the emergence of great men and women we can anticipate exciting new visions of power.

The need was never so great. A chronic crisis of governance--that is, the pervasive incapacity of organizations to cope with the expectations of their constituents--is now an overwhelming factor worldwide. If there was ever a moment in history when acomprehensive strategic view of leadership was needed, not just by a few leaders in high office but by large numbers of leaders in every job, from the factory floor to the executive suite, from a McDonald's fast-food franchise to a law firm, this is certainly it.

This book was written in the belief that leadership is the pivotal force behind successful organizations and that to create vital and viable organizations, leadership is necessary to help organizations develop a new vision of what they can be, then mobilize the organization to change toward the new vision. General Motors, AT&T, Citicorp, IBM, Chase Manhattan, Disney, Eastman Kodak and G.E. represent a partial sample of major U.S. corporations investing in major organizational transformations to ensure long-term vitality. The main stem-winder, in all cases, is the leadership. The new leader, which is what this book is about, is one who commits people to action, who converts followers into leaders, and who may convert leaders into agents of change. We refer to this as "transformative leadership" and will return to this concept throughout.1

But before going any further, we'd like to say a few things about leadership and today's managerial context, which makes leadership so problematic.

A New Theory on Leadership

Through the years, our view of what leadership is and who can exercise it has changed considerably. Leadership competencies have remained constant, but our understanding of what it is, how it works, and the ways in which people learn to apply it has shifted. We do have the beginnings of a general theory of leadership, from history and social research and above all from the ruminations of reflective practitioners such as Moses, Pericles, Julius Caesar, Jesus Christ, Martin Luther, Niccol• Machiavelli and James Madison, and in our own time from such disparate sources of wisdom as Gandhi, V. I. Lenin, Harriet Tubman, Winston Churchill, Eleanor Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle, Dean Acheson, Mao Tse-tung, Chester Barnard, Martin Luther King, Jr., John Gardner and Henry Kissinger, who have very little in common except that they have not only been there but tried with some candor to speculate on paper about it.

But folklore and reflective observation are not enough except to convince us that leaders are physically strong and abnormally hard workers. Today we are a little closer to understanding how and who people lead, but it wasn't easy getting there. Decades of academic analysis have given us more than 850 definitions of leadership. Literally thousands of empirical investigations of leaders have been conducted in the last seventy-five years alone, but no clear and unequivocal understanding exists as to what distinguishes leaders from nonleaders, and perhaps more important, what distinguishes effective leaders from ineffective leaders and effective organizations from ineffective organizations.

Never have so many labored so long to say so little. Multiple interpretations of leadership exist, each providing a sliver of insight but each remaining an incomplete and wholly inadequate explanation. Most of these definitions don't agree with each other, and many of them would seem quite remote to the leaders whose skills are being dissected. Definitions reflect fads, fashions, political tides and academic trends. They don't always reflect reality and sometimes they just represent nonsense. It's as if what Braque once said about art is also true of leadership: "The only thing that matters in art is the part that cannot be explained."

Leadership skills were once thought a matter of birth. Leaders were born, not made, summoned to their calling through some unfathomable process. This might be called the "Great Man" theory of leadership. It saw power as being vested in a very limited number of people whose inheritance and destiny made them leaders. Those of the right breed could lead; all others must be led. Either you had it or you didn't. No amount of learning or yearning could change your fate.

When this view failed to explain leadership, it was replaced by the notion that great events made leaders of otherwise ordinary people. Presumably Lenin was just "milling about" when a revolution pounced on his deliberations, and Washington was simply "on hand" when the colonies opted for countrydom. This "Big Bang" idea in which the situation and the followers combined to make a leader, like the "Great Man" theory, was another inadequate definition.

Like love, leadership continued to be something everyone knew existed but nobody could define. Many other theories of leadership have come and gone. Some looked at the leader. Some looked at the situation. None has stood the test of time. With such a track record, it is understandable why leadership research and theory have been so frustrating as to deserve the label "the La Brea Tar Pits" of organizational inquiry. Located in Los Angeles, these asphalt pits house the remains of a long sequence of prehistoric animals that came to investigate but never left the area.

Now, in a stasis uninterrupted by either Great Men or Big Bangs, we have a new opportunity to appraise our leaders and ponder the essence of power.

These days power is conspicuous in its absence. Powerlessness in the face of crisis. Powerlessness in the face of complexity. With contradiction and polarization of thought and action, power has been sabotaged while a kind of plodding pandemonium surges. Institutions have been rigid, slothful or mercurial. Supposed leaders seem ignorant and out of touch, insensitive and unresponsive. Worst of all, solutions have been jerrybuilt or they have not been built at all.

The Context of Leadership

All of which has created a managerial mayhem that can be more fully understood only if we examine the leadership environment of today. That can be summarized under three major contexts: commitment, complexity and credibility.

Commitment

Public Agenda Forum 2 undertook a major survey of the American nonmanagerial workforce in the early '80s with the following disturbing results:

• Fewer than 1 out of every 4 jobholders said that they were working at full potential.

• One half said they did not put effort into their job over and above what was required to hold on to it.

• The overwhelming majority, 75 percent, said that they could be significantly more effective than they presently were.

• Close to 6 out of 10 Americans on the job believed that they "do not work as hard as they used to."

In the absence of strong commitment, these workers proved unable to compete successfully with their hardworking and lower paid counterparts in Japan and Southeast Asia. Rather than inspire and energize them, however, America's business leaders chose simply to fire workers by the tens of thousands in wave after wave of "downsizing." As a result, in place of companies with underutilized workers, we now have a society in which millions of laid-off people are working below their capacity, many in part- time or dead-end jobs.

As many as half the surviving workers now report the opposite problem--heavy workloads, long hours, and high stress. But while fear of job loss may make some employees work harder today, loyalty to employers and job commitment seem to have decreased even further. Workers feel powerless. Few of them are willing to become fully engaged in a work situation and go the extra mile for an employer who regards them as easily expendable. Leaders: The Strategies For Taking Charge. Copyright © by Warren G. Bennis. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Table of Contents

Foreword To The Second Edition ..... ix

Acknowledgments ..... xv

Mistaking Charge ..... 1

A New Theory Of Leadership ..... 3

The Context Of Leadership ..... 6

Paradigm Shifts ..... 12

Leading Others, Managing Yourself ..... 18

The Four Strategies ..... 24

Empowerment: The Dependent Variable ..... 73

Plan For Implementation ..... 78

Strategy I: Attention Through Vision ..... 80

Vision And Organizations ..... 82

Paying Attention: The Leader's Search For Vision ..... 88

Synthesizing Vision: The Leader's Choice For Direction ..... 94

Focusing Attention: The Leader's Search For Commitment ..... 99

Strategy II: Meaning Through Communication ..... 102

Three Styles Of Social Architecture ..... 110

Tools Of The Social Architect ..... 129

Changing The Social Architecture ..... 136

Strategy III: Trust Through Positioning ..... 141

Organizations And Their Environments ..... 144

Quest For Position ..... 155

Lessons For Leadership ..... 171

Strategy IV. The Deployment Of Self ..... 175

The Learning Organization ..... 178

Innovative Learning ..... 182

Leading The Learning Organization ..... 190

Organizing For Innovative Learning ..... 195

Taking Charge: Leadership And Empowerment ..... 200

Management Education ..... 204

Dispelling Myths ..... 206

Toward The New Millennium ..... 211

A Final Note ..... 218

Notes ..... 221

Index ..... 227

Reading Group Guide

Introduction

In this groundbreaking study of corporate America's most critical issue -- leadership -- world-renowned leadership guru Warren Bennis and his co-author Burt Nanus seek to define the role of the new leader: "one who commits people to action, who converts followers into leaders, and who may convert leaders into agents of change."

In researching the working philosophies of today's leaders, Bennis and Nanus conducted a series of 90 interviews with CEOs and outstanding figures from the public sector. In the course of their dialogues, they asked their subjects just three questions: What are your strengths and weaknesses? Was there any particular experience or event in your life that influenced your management philosophy? What were the major decision points in your career and how do you feel about your choices now? The revealing answers to these questions enabled the authors to establish the four key principles every manager should know: Attention Through Vision, Meaning Through Communication, Trust Through Positioning, and the Deployment of Self.

In this age of "process," with downsizing and restructuring affecting many workplaces, many companies have fallen prey to lack of communication and distrust, and vision and leadership are needed more than ever before. The wisdom and insight in Leaders addresses this need. Leaders is an indispensable source of guidance all readers will appreciate, whether they're running a small department or in charge of an entire corporation.

Discussion Questions

1. Bennis and Nanus write about the importance of effective communication when a leader calls for great change or sacrifice. In yourexperience, how does open communication play a part in leadership?
   
   
2. Innovation is often perceived (from within and without) as a threat to any organization. The authors suggest that "staying the course" is the answer. Does this reflect your own experience of either introducing or responding to innovation?
   
   
3. How does the story of the tightrope aerialist Karl Wallenda reinforce Bennis and Nanus's theory of the importance of deployment of self and positive self-regard? Did you find this argument compelling? Why or why not?
   
   
4. "We've conclude that great leaders are like the Zen archer who develops his skills to the point where the desire to hit the target becomes extinguished and man, arrow, and target become indivisible components of the same process." At your best moments, does everything come together in this kind of perfect synthesis? Is this the metaphor you would use to describe yourself as a leader?
   
   
5. Who are some of the great leaders you've known or read about? What are some of their special talents? As you read Leaders, did you find any habits or philosophies that resonated with your own experience of leadership?
   
   
6. Bennis and Nanus describe true leaders as having the ability of "enrolling people in their vision through their optimism." How does a leader's optimistic outlook affect the experience of those being led? How does it affect the leader's perception of his own efforts?
   
   
7. How does a great leader communicate his or her vision? In your experience as a leader, what were the most effective approaches you used to address your vision?
   
   
8. What do Bennis and Nanus mean when they talk about the social architecture of a corporation? Could you relate to one of the three styles more than another? Which one?
   
   
9. How does Frank Dale's experience taking over as the new publisher of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner reflect the importance of a leader's gaining organizational trust? Does this incident call to mind any similar trust-building experiences you've had?
   
   
10. To what extent do you agree with Bennis and Nanus that "the great leader, like the great orchestra conductor, calls forth the best that is in the organization?"

About the authors

Warren Bennis is Professor and Founding Chairman of the Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California, and the author of over 30 books on leadership, including On Becoming a Leader and, most recently, Geeks and Geezers.

Bert Nanus is a renowned expert on leadership and the author of many books on the subject, including Visionary Leadership. Now Professor Emeritus of Management at the University of Southern California, he was also research director of the Leadership Institute.