Part I
The Ghosts of Leadership:
Past, Present, and Future

1 Leadership in the 21st Century

A leader is best
When people barely know he exists,
Not so good when people obey and acclaim him,
Worse when they despise him.
But of a good leader, who talks little,
When his work is done, his aim fulfilled,
They will say:
We did it ourselves.
—Lao Tzu

HOW DOES THIS PERSPECTIVE FIT with your own ideas about leadership? Do you feel comfortable with the idea that a leader should not be obeyed or acclaimed, and in fact should barely be recognized? When you are called upon to lead do you prefer to take charge or to help others find their own way? These timeless words of Lao Tzu were written well over 2,000 years ago, yet they send an important message worth considering as we enter a new age. The recent end of the millennium seems particularly symbolic. We are living on the cusp of one of those rare technological turning points in history. Over the past two decades the information revolution emphasized computers and software. But this was only prologue to the main event—the Internet. Mankind is becoming truly “connected” and life will never be the same.

Of course, this revolution in information has substantial ramifications for our social systems. As one example, the way many of us go about our daily work has changed radically because of one communication capability: e-mail. Our patterns of daily work are just very different than they were ten years ago. And it will change further—e-mail is going wireless. The initial technology is already here; by 2010 most of us will have the capability to be connected wherever we are, wherever we go, whenever we want.

But this is a book about leadership—how one person influences others. How will the technological revolution change the nature of leadership? We believe the effect will be extensive and profound. We are in the midst of a vastly changing social fabric where technology is transforming business, family structures, schools, governments, and even religious institutions. Indeed, all of us face a very challenging arena for exercising leadership in the 21st century.

As only one example, how does one person lead another
when that person is located at a remote place?

In this book, we propose a different form of leadership, one that emphasizes the empowerment of others. We call this form of leadership SuperLeadership—that is, leading others to lead themselves.

The industrial age with its hierarchical command-and-control form of organizing is past. The information revolution is causing the deconstruction of organizations. That is, hierarchy is no longer needed to filter and facilitate the movement of information required for task integration. Instead, agents of the organization can now communicate directly and with greater speed, flexibility, and effectiveness.

The key to organizational success … will be to have the right person solving the most important business problems, no matter where they are located in the company hierarchically, organizationally, or geographically.

—James Citrina and Thomas Neff

Of course, this requires that people possess the skills and knowledge to conduct their information-rich transactions in a speedy manner. The true assets of organizations will no longer be bricks and mortar, but the knowledge invested in their human capital.

And how do we lead these knowledge workers? We believe first that the ultimate control comes from within—that the essence of leadership in today’s information age is to develop the capacity of people to lead themselves. The real challenge is to maximize the potential of human capital by unleashing this inner self-leadership. The most effective leader of the 21st century will be a SuperLeader, one who leads others to lead themselves in the information age.

As a quick preview, consider the following sample of distinctive strategies of a SuperLeader that will be presented throughout this book:

Listen more and talk less.

Ask more questions and give fewer answers.

Foster learning from mistakes, not fear of consequences.

Encourage problem solving by others rather than solving problems for others.

Share information rather than hoard it.

Encourage creativity, not conformity.

Encourage teamwork and collaboration, not destructive competition.

Foster independence and interdependence, not dependence.

Develop committed self-leaders, not compliant followers.

Lead others to lead themselves, not to be under the control of others.

Establish organizational structures that support self-leadership, such as self-managing teams, virtual teams, distance working.

Establish information systems through the Intranet and Internet that will support self-leadership.

Establish a holistic self-leading culture throughout the organization.

THE TECHNOLOGICAL REVOLUTION

Think about the typical organizational employee of the 21st century. More specifically, Consider the situation of Alica, a 30-year-old consultant who is indeed “connected.”

Alica has a desktop at home and also works with a 2.5 lb. lightweight laptop with a full size keyboard and screen, although she finds herself using the voice recognition routine more than the keyboard.

But the real jewel in her array of devices is her communication platform—an all-in-one lightweight device about the size of today’s palm computers, but one that has 100 times the computing power of today’s Pentium III desktop. This device is a computer, PDA, cell phone, and even has a mini-videoconferencing capacity.

The device is made by Nokia and is an advanced version of the so-called “3G” family of all-purpose communication devices, sometimes known as the Universal Mobile Telephone System, or UMTS.Voice conversation is just one of its many capabilities. Of course, the Nokia has Internet capabilities, voice recognition, and also wireless synchronization with Alica’s desktop and laptop computers. The screen is a color display that provides entry to her personal calendar, news, Internet, Intranet, address book, personal files, etc. She uses a small wireless “ear bud” to receive transmissions, but so far she has refused to have the “implant” behind her ear that would make reception and transmission instantaneous.

At home and in the office she is connected by broadband, a communication protocol that seems like instantaneous transfer to her. She is easily able to transfer information from one device to any other.

As a consultant, Alica is mainly engaged in “information work” and some would call her a “knowledge worker.” (Michael Dertouzos defines information work as “the transformation of information by human brains or computer programs.” In 1997, Dertouzos estimated that 50 to 60 percent of an industrialized country’s GNP consists of information work. Clearly, this will continue to increase significantly.)

Alica has one place that she prefers to do “alone” type work.This place is her home, and this is where she still uses some old-fashioned books and paper materials. But most of her personal reference data is stored on her personal file system and is accessible wherever she is. And of course she has the powerful research tool represented by her company’s Intranet and the larger, more public Internet.

Alica does not have a real office outside her home. Since she is a consultant, her office typically is a transitory place located at her client’s venue, a broadband-wired hotel room or a “drop in” office. She is a walking, talking, data-receiving-and-sending communication entity.

Alica is a member of several teams or task forces, although she seldom meets with a team as a whole. On a day-to-day basis they typically communicate through their various systems. But most of her teams try to meet on occasion to do some personal bonding.

Despite all this technical augmentation, she values face-to-face opportunities and worries about becoming captured and consumed by the technology. She is concerned about privacy because she knows that with her communication platform, her actual physical location is available to others. Most of all she wants a high degree of control and discretion about where, when, and how she goes about doing her job. She wants to come and go when and where she desires, and uses the communication technology to help her do this. She also has a keen sense of dressing the way she wants versus knowing when and where to “wear the costume.”

She frequently asks “why” and expects an answer. She wants to be evaluated and rewarded on the basis of end results rather than how she got there. She still has a high degree of anxiety about the seemingly endless conflicts between her work life and her personal life. She wishes she could find more balance, meaning, purpose, and even spirituality through her work. She has become very advanced in terms of using the tools of information technology but she sometimes pauses to wonder about the meaning of it all.

Most of all, Alica is indeed a very independent person, one who has a special capacity to lead herself.The technology is forcing a critical reevaluation of how we go about doing our work.

THE ORGANIZATION OF THE 21 ST CENTURY

This is a book about leadership for the organization of the 21st century. There’s no question that our world has become very complicated and that it is changing at an unprecedented rate. Unfortunately, many of our management practices have not kept up with these changes. One of the greatest opportunities for change and advancement centers on the meaningful mobilization of human effort and innovative behavior through contemporary organizations. Many of these new forms of organizing cry out for innovative ways of leading and organizing people at work. The potential payoffs are immense. Information and knowledge work is transforming organizational processes. Here are some changes we can expect to see:

By 2005, 75 percent of global enterprises will require major overhauls of people management, workplace policies and workforce planning in response to a shift to knowledge as the center of wealth production.

The impact is on the workplace—the people and how they work—and the focus is on knowledge as the primary source of capability and competitive advantage.

Efforts to Internet-enable employees represent initial steps in fueling profound cultural change. This will impact not only the manner in which such enterprises act as suppliers and customers in the world of e-business, but also the character of their workforce and their workplaces.

Enterprises in North America spend an average of 2.9 percent of revenue on technology, which is an average of $7,756 annually for each employee.

Since our own experience relates primarily to business organizations, they will generally be the focus of our discussion. We believe, however, that these fundamental challenges stretch to nearly all aspects of our lives—our relationships, the way we raise our children, the educational process, and so forth. The business organization is clearly moving from an industrial enterprise model toward a knowledge-based enterprise model. The table on the following page shows some of the differences between these two perspectives.

How is organizational structure changing to reflect the technological revolution? The baseline for comparison is the old vertical pyramid, with its emphasis on hierarchical command and control. For example, in the 1960s one new recruit to the management ranks of Ford Motor Company traced the actual chain of command from himself to the CEO, Henry Ford II. He found a total of 13 levels—that is, a chain of 11 “bosses”—between himself and Ford.

Several forms of organizational structure have emerged as more appropriate for the 21st century. Probably the first type that comes to mind for most is the horizontal organization, with a flat structure, large spans of control, and short chains of command. A second type is the pure project-based organization; that is, work is accomplished through transitory teams, each of which has a finite beginning and end. The life of an employee in this organization is a series of memberships from one team to another. Career advancement in these types of structures takes on a whole new meaning—it’s hard to “climb the ladder” when there are very few rungs.

Another structural form is the networked organization, or a type of consortium or alliance of legal entities, each of which depends on the other to exist. In today’s world of manufacturing high-tech products, for example, very few companies now elect to go the route of true vertical integration. Instead, partnerships are forged through networks, joint ventures, and integrated supply chains. The glue that makes all of this possible is the “b2b” (Internet-based business-to-business) communication network, where information flows through the Internet (or an Intranet) in a speedy and timely fashion.

For most of these newer organizational forms, teams are the norm rather than the exception. There are many different kinds of teams: concurrent engineering teams, product or quality improvement teams, product launch teams, focused task forces, self-directed teams, top management teams, and so on. A critical feature of these teams is that they are invested with a significant degree of empowerment, or decision-making authority. (More about teams in a later chapter.)

PEOPLE OF THE INFORMATION REVOLUTION

These new organizational structures are typically run by people who demand a different kind of culture than the old command-and-control format. Today, people are better educated and demand more from their jobs than a paycheck. Frequently, employees are more committed to their profession than to their company. This means that most people won’t stand for being closely managed and directed anymore, and they would probably be wasting their unique talents and capabilities if they did. Over a decade ago, in his prescient book The Gold-Collar Worker, Robert E. Kelley emphasized the deeper significance of the emergence of the younger, upscale, educated work force. He discussed a “new breed of workers” and called for business to adapt to their special characteristics.

Truly valued employees will be valued not so much for their hierarchical position, what they do, or even for what they know, which is the traditional definition of a knowledge worker. Instead, the most valued employees will be characterized by a keen capacity to learn, or what they are capable of knowing quickly.

It’s not what you know,
it’s how fast you can learn.

Knowledge and learning will become the differentiating assets of the 21st century. Employees will know how to quickly access information, and more importantly how to filter, evaluate, summarize, and condense information into an action plan. They will possess a high degree of flexibility and adaptability in keeping up with the ever-advancing technology, yet will be increasingly adroit at dealing with people. They will not see their career as climbing a hierarchical ladder in a single company but will have a strong sense of mobility and will be highly motivated by moving from challenge to challenge. Self-fulfillment will replace corporate loyalty as a dominant value. They will not be uncomfortable with periods of self-employment or even unemployment, and will occasionally take a hiatus for educational renewal.

LEADERSHIP FOR THE 21 ST CENTURY

Empowerment is the key word—the oil that lubricates the exercise of knowledge. According to Jack Welch, the organization of the 21st century will concentrate on the objective of assuring that each person has the information and authority they need to make decisions.

There will be many ways of doing things right, not just one right way. Both individuals and teams will be empowered, but this empowerment will represent something more advanced than the buzzword usually implies today. People will be empowered to be true self-leaders, and will increasingly possess the capability to handle this vast increase in authority.

We find ourselves today on the cutting edge of a chain of causation. The technological revolution is causing a change in the ways organizations structure themselves. The changes in structure require rather radical changes in the culture—the social systems within these organizations. The essence of this cultural change is the investment in and emphasis on knowledge work, the way people process and transform information. This emerging culture places high value on mentorship, learning, initiative and creativity. To be truly effective, the knowledge worker needs to be empowered at an advanced level. Talented and empowered human capital will become the prime ingredient of organizational success. Most of all, people need to be able to lead themselves.

The future is coming so fast, we can’t possibly
predict it; we can only learn to respond quickly.

—Steven Kerr

This brings us full circle, back to the primary leadership challenge. How can a leader develop the self-leadership needed to run the organization of the 21st century? The old model of the charismatic lone star will be gone. Later in the book, we spell out this new mode of leadership—SuperLeadership—starting with ideas for how to lead individuals to be self-leaders, moving on to the ideas for leading teams to be self-led, and then suggesting ideas for developing a total culture of self-leadership throughout an organization.

First, however, let’s cover a few fundamental ideas about how a leader can lead others to lead themselves.

WHAT IS SELF-LEADERSHIP AND SUPERLEADERSHIP?

Over the past twenty years, through our consulting, research, and writing, we have developed a set of ideas that we believe can help meet the challenge of leading in the 21st century. We use the labels of self-leadership and SuperLeadership to characterize a different approach to leadership. Since these terms are the keystone of our ideas, it’s worthwhile to briefly define them.

Self-leadership is an extensive set of strategies focused on the behaviors, thoughts, and feelings that we use to exert influence over ourselves. Self-leadership is what people do to lead themselves. In some ways, self-leadership might also be thought of as a form of advanced followership or, perhaps more accurately, leadership focused on oneself that enables a redefining of traditional follower-ship. That is, if they are given the autonomy and responsibility to control their own lives, what specifically can followers who are becoming self-leaders do to meet this challenge in a responsible way?

We have heard the employee who complains, “They say they want us to be empowered around here. As of today, I’m supposed to be ‘empowered.’ I don’t understand what that means. What am I supposed to do that’s different?” In answer, self-leadership provides a set of guidelines for how an employee can responsibly meet the challenge of so-called empowerment.

Self-leadership is focused on the behaviors and
thoughts that people use to influence themselves.

Developing each person into an effective self-leader is a formidable yet fascinating challenge. The leader who does this is called a SuperLeader, a term that applies to the manager and executive who has responsibility for leading others, especially their direct-report employees.

More specifically, a SuperLeader is one who leads others to lead themselves. The SuperLeader designs and implements the system that allows and teaches employees to be self-leaders. The approach consists of an extensive set of behaviors, all intended to provide so-called followers with the behavioral and cognitive skills necessary to exercise self-leadership. The SuperLeader asks, “What can I do to lead others to lead themselves?”

A SuperLeader is one who
leads others to lead themselves.

In the pages that follow, we will develop these ideas in some detail. We will present the behavior and thought-focused strategies that are the essence of self-leadership—understanding self-leadership is a critical first step to understanding SuperLeadership. And we will especially focus on the skills that form the basis for Super-Leadership. We hope these ideas will not be seen as a panacea—they’re not—but as a carefully designed game plan intended to capitalize on the long-term potential of each person.

EMPLOYEE SELF-LEADERSHIP IS THE KEY TO 21ST CENTURY LEADERSHIP

We propose a fundamentally different approach to leading people that will become increasingly important as we move further into the 21st century. We refer to this approach as SuperLeadership: leading others to lead themselves. Our ideas are rooted in the view that essentially all control over employees is ultimately self-imposed. Regardless of where controls come from (for example, from a manager or a company policy), the effect they have depends on how these controls are evaluated, accepted, and translated by each employee into his or her own personal commitment.

Just as organizations provide their members with standards, evaluations, rewards, and corrective feedback, individuals provide and experience these same basic elements from within. Employees have expectations regarding their own performance, and react positively or negatively toward themselves in response to their own self-evaluations.

The ultimate control
is controlling yourself.

This is a most important point to make. Typically, organizational attempts at employee control do not recognize the important role of the person’s “self.” Organizational standards will not significantly influence employee behavior if they are not accepted. Similarly, organizational rewards will have a limited effect in producing behavior that is controlled from within. Regardless of how employee performance is appraised, the performance evaluations that will carry the most weight will be the evaluations that employees make of themselves.

We believe the principal means of establishing the commitment and enthusiasm necessary to achieve true long-term excellence in an organization is to unleash the self-leadership potential within each person. Tight external control that undermines or displaces an employee’s self-control system may produce compliance. Commitment to excellence, however, flows from the powerful leadership potential within.

To be effective, a leader must successfully
influence the way people influence themselves.

Over-reliance on external control can produce some very dysfunctional outcomes. External control can result in bureaucratic behavior in which people focus their efforts only on what is measured and rewarded by the organization, neglecting many other important activities. It can also lead to other dysfunctional behaviors and outcomes, such as the feeding of management information systems with inaccurate data that artificially enhances individual performance standings, compliance rather than commitment, and a number of other problems.

A rigid performance appraisal system for salespeople that focuses on established sales procedures and standards may be effective in producing short-term sales increases, for example. But long-term performance can suffer because of a lack of attention to servicing existing clients. Moreover, this external control process can interfere with the unique creativity and interests an employee needs to express in order to become committed to the job.

An overemphasis on external rewards at the expense of internal (or natural) rewards can undermine important aspects of individual motivation. If the emphasis is placed on what people will get for doing their work (money, promotions, and so on) rather than on the positive aspects of doing the task itself—the natural enjoyment of a job well done—then, we would argue, meaningful commitment to high achievement is at risk. This suggests that the way control and leadership are viewed is all too often very limited. We propose a new viewpoint for leadership as we look ahead to the coming decades—one that utilizes the unique self-leadership capability within each person.

SUPERLEADERSHIP VERSUS TRADITIONAL VIEWS OF LEADERSHIP

SuperLeadership is fundamentally different from traditional views of leadership. In the next chapter we review these differences in detail The main objective of SuperLeadership is to stimulate and facilitate self-leadership capability and practice and, further, to make the self-leadership process the central target of external influence. Self-leadership is viewed as a powerful opportunity for achieving high performance rather than as a threat to external control and authority. In fact, if leaders really want followers to develop into high performers, providing them with the autonomy and responsibility to be more in charge of themselves and their work is essential.

The top-down, hard-nosed autocrat will become an artifact of history, replaced by leaders who are obsessed with the development of their followers.

In our research we have observed striking examples of employee self-leadership when companies implement new forms of “team” organization. In work systems using self-managing teams, we saw the workers themselves make many work-related decisions such as assignments to equipment, the handling of quality and personnel problems, adjustments to work-shift scheduling, budget recommendations, and many other concerns that have traditionally been the responsibility of management. We also noticed employees talking about “our business,” actively striving to eliminate quality problems and to increase productivity, solving technical problems, and, most of all, working with not against management to make “their company” more profitable. Workers even did what traditionally have been viewed as “crazy” things like staying after a shift was over to lend a hand if it was needed and dropping in on weekends, without pay, to make sure the equipment was shut down properly.

Most of all, these employees seemed to believe in and be committed to their work to a degree we had not previously thought possible. More and more these evolved management practices that originally emerged in manufacturing systems, especially the use of empowered teams, have swept across service- and knowledge-based work settings.

Interestingly, as we look to the future of the information-based organizations of the 21st century, our best model of leadership may derive from experiences in manufacturing, where team-oriented SuperLeadership has shown significant increases in effectiveness and productivity. Attempts to force people into some externally designed mold not only undermine individual potential, but are likely to deprive an organization of its long-term opportunity to achieve high performance. The 21st-century leader should strive to unleash the full talents of people by stimulating their own capability for self-leadership.

The unleashing of self-leadership is a very different way of viewing the process of leadership and control. Such an approach, however, is not entirely new in practice. In fact, several trends are apparent that suggest that such changes have been under way for some time. For example, almost two decades ago, in his best-selling book Megatrends, John Naisbitt identified several future trends that are very consistent with an increased emphasis on self-control. Four of the ten trends he identified were moves from centralization to decentralization, from institutional help to self-help, from representative democracy to participative democracy, and from hierarchies to networking. These trends, now clearly under way, represent a move away from more formalized structures and institutions toward greater diversity and an emphasis on grass roots in our society. Most of all, they suggest a recognition of people as individuals and as uniquely valuable resources.

SuperLeadership is about a fundamentally different approach that stimulates and facilitates self-leadership in others … that recognizes self-influence as a powerful opportunity for achieving excellence rather than as a threat to authority.

As highlighted in the beginning of this chapter, the increase of people working autonomously in their homes (telecommuters) with the aid of fax machines, home computers, the Internet, PC-based videoconferencing, and other technological tools, has created a significant trend toward increased reliance on self-leadership in organizational practice. How do we provide leadership to people who are located in remote places? In addition, many organizations—fre-quently the better performing ones—have been increasingly emphasizing empowerment and various forms of autonomy as a means of increasing the capability and performance of their workforce.

D. Quinn Mills, a professor at Harvard Business School, discussed the consequences of traditional leadership on a corps of younger middle managers. When a new CEO issued his edict about the objectives of the company, Mills discusses how an observer could see “. . . the lights go out in many eyes. The same managers in whom [the CEO] had once sensed a seemingly genuine desire to have a bigger, better company suddenly appeared disaffected and sullen. Even when [the CEO] announced the chance of hefty bonuses … enthusiasm among the assembled managers was conspicuous by its absence.”

Mills further described the longer-term consequences of this action: “Within a year, several of the company’s best managers had quit. Competitors were still gaining on the company, yet morale was so low that no one was pushing to turn the situation around.” This CEO was no SuperLeader! He had forgotten the importance of gaining the commitment of younger managers as a critical step on the road to success.

The time is ripe for a new perspective on leadership…. SuperLeadership—leading others to lead themselves—can help meet this challenge.

We are very optimistic about our economic future because we realize that we have barely scratched the surface of our most powerful resource for economic and social progress—the vast potential for self-discovery within each person. The tremendous power of committed, motivated, self-led people can be the key to economic and social progress beyond what our world has ever seen.

Traditional control methods will not allow this potential to be unleashed. For years, too many organizations have experienced employee compliance rather than commitment, mediocre productivity and quality, and dissatisfaction among their workforce. Increases in globalization and international competition have made it all too apparent that such traditional controls can no longer be tolerated if companies are to survive and maintain their world standing. Achieving the ideal of commitment to high performance calls for a new era of facilitating the internal energy and potential of people through widespread self-leadership. Striving to meet this challenge through SuperLeadership is at the heart of this important quest.

THE CHALLENGE AND OPPORTUNITY OF LEADING IN THE NEW ERA

As we move further into the new century and the new millennium, we believe this is a great time to be in business. Employee productivity and product quality have risen significantly in the last few years and American business has reemerged as a world leader. Opportunities for achieving great things and for experiencing fulfillment in work and life have never been greater. Medical advances and increased standards of living have enabled people to enjoy longer and healthier lives. Educational opportunities are fantastic, and the war on ignorance has had many victories—preschool, primary school, colleges and universities, continuing and adult education, home computers, the Internet … the tally is impressive. And scientific advances have provided many impressive technologies, such as automated factories, robotics, palm computers, biotechnology, advanced information systems, and so on, which only a few decades ago would have seemed impossible. If we take stock of the positive opportunities that exist for corporations and their employees, it is difficult to be blind to the potential.

But the challenges, obviously, are great. It’s highly unlikely that people can reasonably expect to learn everything they’ll need to be successful in their careers during “school years.” It’s no longer what you know, but knowing how to learn. Lifelong learning is no longer a luxury; it’s now a requirement for survival. Most people cannot possess all the knowledge required to perform their work. If we truly aspire to high performance, we need to be continually learning and benefiting from the knowledge of others.

The 21st century has brought many challenges and many opportunities. Self-leadership is the key to enhancing the learning that is necessary to enable us to meet the challenges of this information-rich and knowledge-based era. And SuperLeadership provides the tools for leaders to be able to create this self-leadership in others.