Beware of Fake Leadership

Why We Are Again Reinventing the Wheel?

My claim is that at least for the past several decades all great companies, all industry winners, all companies Phil Fisher, Warren Buffet and other qualified investors invested in - all of them followed the same good leadership practices to attain long term success. Even more-many great hierarchical corporate leaders and many great strong willed entrepreneurs dramatically changed their leadership style to secure the new level of development for their organizations. Let's just take rigorous research behind Jim Collins's book From Good to Great as a piece of evidence.

In 200 competency and values based interviews with top executives, investors and entrepreneurs conducted over the last two years we repeatedly discovered same set of competencies and values which led them to success. Our audience comprised leaders from Belgium, Canada, Check Republic, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Netherlands, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, UK and USA. Aged between 30 and 65, with varied experience and backgrounds, they consistently provided us with examples of competencies which fit well into Bill's matrix (or Jim's matrix, or Jack Welch's matrix, or <enter your choice of matrix here>) of the new breed of leader.

Unfortunately it doesn't mean that the new style of leadership already won everywhere. It is just the result of proper selection of people who practice the right style of leadership. We found no evidence that ‘right' stands for ‘new' and ‘wrong' means ‘old'. For successful long term entrepreneurs we interviewed it was rather a genesis from old style to new through their leadership tenure.

The Broken Heart of Business

Successful long term entrepreneur is an old-fashioned naturally born leader who carries deep in his heart a dream of creating a company that will eventually live longer than him (her), preferably perpetually. Driven by this dream even the most authoritarian entrepreneurs use all their will, drive and power to design organizations for longevity. This integrity of strong willed, powerful individuals guided by a binding need for longevity and sustainability of their organizations helps them to eventually curtain their authoritarian traits. Caring for people is another mandatory trait of a business leader required to successfully resolve the dilemma of people being both the biggest resource and the largest risk for business. It is a happy business indeed. And it is a continuing learning by mistake improvement process. There is not such thing as an accomplished leader. But leader can be finished.

The time comes when scale starts to matter. In large privately held companies the heart of business may still be warm and caring but you can already feel ‘cold legs' of ignorance and cynicism at the level of regular staff. It is the time to select the right CEO.

Selecting the Right CEO

Our CEO selection tool was indeed very simple. We compiled a list of 400+ CEO's of leading global and local brands assuming that they already were selected by all possible ways and means. Then we gave our university student interns assignment to approach them directly with an invitation to contribute a leadership lesson (a one hour competency and values based video recorded interview) to an unknown startup venture with a mission to improve the quality of leadership.

It proved to be the best single test on CEO's level of arrogance. It also measured well the overall temperature of their organizations. Later on in our interviews we discovered that arrogance (as an antonym to love or caring for people) is probably the largest single pitfall an executive can have.  This pitfall at the CEO level leads organizations to slow deterioration in good times and to rapid collapse in bad.

Attracting the Right Shareholder Base

Bill George also sites CEO of Unilever Paul Polman who in his recent interview for FT claimed: "I do not work for the shareholder, to be honest; I work for the consumer, the customer". A bit arrogant, isn't it? However in the interview Paul gives an outstanding clarification.

When Unilever stopped offering earnings guidance to the stock market and the share price went down 6 per cent, his reaction was: "A lot of that actually was hedge funds moving out. I don't think they were the long-term investors anyway."

"I think that, if you want to attract the right investor base long term, it's increasingly easier to have those discussions, to explain a socially responsible business model," he says. "They look at more numbers than just the balance sheet and the income statement ...It's not either results or responsibility, it's both/and... It's doing good and doing well, which I don't see as a trade-off."

Happy Business

Thus the equation to make business happy is truly simple: take caring and competent CEO add caring and competent shareholder base. Together for many happy years they will be doing well by doing good.

We support every effort to promote sustainable leadership. Sustainable leadership is based on passion (some call it love), integrity and life long commitment to excel. Our project is helping young leaders to find right workplace mentors. We believe that only "craftsman-apprentice model" (as a part but not as an opposite of learning organization) works for developing true business leaders. There are no shortcuts.

Beware of Fake Leadership

Some people claim that arbalests once changed the rules of war, since an inexperienced arbalester could kill a knight who had a lifetime of training. There are many people ready to by an "arbalest of leadership". It seems there are enough who are ready to sell.

Selling hard skills - "arbalests" in accounting, finance, marketing, logistics and so on is no longer enough to make a decent profit in business education. These are commodities. There are too many offers of decent quality for affordable price. But business schools should be careful in switching their focus on soft - leadership skills development. It is not core competency for most of them. Today selling a degree in leadership is like selling an arbalest that you can only put on the wall. It's not even a commodity. It's an imitation. It becomes a forgery, if you sell it for the real thing.

Business schools successfully fulfilled their destiny by making the knowledge of business fundamentals commonly available commodity. Now to keep the position of high end educational institutions they need to reinvent their business. It might require a bit more thorough marketing and fundamental research than just another rephrase of definitions of leadership.

In the beginning of this month Nitin Nohria was named next dean of Harvard Business School. It is an important indication that HBS is taking the new challenge dead seriously.