|
First Published in Management Skills & Development magazine |
INTERVIEW WITH WARREN BENNIS
Stuart Crainer interviews Presidential advisor, author and leadership guru, Warren Bennis.
Perpetually tanned, with a shining white toothed smile, Warren Bennis appears the archetype of the Californian popular academic. To many he is simply the regular Presidential adviser who brought leadership to a new, mass audience. But, there is more to Bennis than that. His lengthy career has involved him in education, writing, consulting and administration. Along the way he has made a contribution to an array of subjects and produced a steady stream of books including the bestselling, Leaders, and most recently, Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration.
Now in his seventies, Bennis was the youngest infantry officer in the European theatre of operations during the second world war. Returning home, he went to Antioch College as an undergraduate and fell under the influence of his mentor, Douglas McGregor, creator of the motivational Theories X and Y. Later, McGregor attracted Bennis to MIT.
From being an early student of group dynamics in the 1950s; Bennis became a futurologist in the 1960s. His work - particularly The Temporary Society (1968) - explored new organisational forms. Bennis envisaged organisations as adhocracies - roughly the direct opposite of bureaucracies - freed from the shackles of hierarchy and meaningless paperwork.
With the torrent of publications and executive programmes on the subject, it is easy to forget that leadership had been largely forgotten as a topic worthy of serious academic interest until it was revived by Bennis and others in the 1980s.
Bennis' book, Leaders, was a huge success. In it he argued that leadership is not a rare skill; leaders are made rather than born; leaders are usually ordinary people Ð or apparently ordinary Ð rather than charismatic; leadership is not solely the preserve of those at the top of the organisation Ð it is relevant at all levels; and, finally, that leadership is not about control, direction and manipulation.
Leaders involved 90 of America's leaders, including Neil Armstrong, the coach of the LA Rams, orchestral conductors, and businessmen such as Ray Kroc of McDonald's. They were right brained and left-brained, tall and short, fat and thin, articulate and inarticulate, assertive and retiring, dressed for success and dressed for failure, participative and autocratic, says Bennis. The link between them was that they had all shown 'mastery over present confusion'. Bennis' message was that leadership is all-encompassing and open to all.
From the leaders, four common abilities were identified: management of attention; of meaning; of trust; and of self.
Management of attention is, says Bennis, a question of vision. Indeed, he uses a definition of leadership as: 'The capacity to create a compelling vision and translate it into action and sustain it.' Successful leaders have a vision that other people believe in and treat as their own.
Having a vision is one thing, converting it into successful action is another. The second skill shared by Bennis' selection of leaders is management of meaning Ð communications. A vision is of limited practical use if it is encased in 400 pages of wordy text or mumbled from behind a paper-packed desk. Bennis believes effective communication relies on the use of analogy, metaphor and vivid illustration as well as emotion, trust, optimism and hope.
The third aspect of leadership identified by Bennis is trust which he describes as 'the emotional glue that binds followers and leaders together'. Leaders have to be seen to be consistent.
The final common bond between the 90 leaders studied by Bennis is 'deployment of self'. The leaders do not glibly present charisma or time management as the essence of their success. Instead, the emphasis is on persistence and self-knowledge, taking risks, commitment and challenge but, above all, learning. 'The learning person looks forward to failure or mistakes,' says Bennis. 'The worst problem in leadership is basically early success. There's no opportunity to learn from adversity and problems.'
The leaders have a positive self regard, that Bennis labels 'emotional wisdom'. This is characterized by an ability to accept people as they are; a capacity to approach things in terms of only the present; an ability to treat everyone, even close contacts, with courteous attention; an ability to trust others even when this seems risky; and an ability to do without constant approval and recognition.
While Bennis was mapping out potential futures for the business world, he was confronting realities as a university administrator at SUNY, Buffalo and as President of the University of Cincinnati. He found that his practice disappointed his theory Ð a rare example of an academic putting his reputation where his ideas are. He is now based at the University of Southern California where he is founder of the school's Leadership Institute.
Do you ever feel that you have been trapped in a pigeonhole labelled leadership guru?
So why move away? After all, you have said that you have been thinking about leadership almost as long as you have been thinking?
What is the difference between the groups you study and teams?
Which of the groups in your book really struck a chord with you?
Do great groups require great leaders?
So, the John Wayne or Indiana Jones type of hero is a creature of the past?
How would you describe the leaders of great groups?
But isn't this unrealistic? Not everyone is designing the first atomic bomb or inventing some incredible breakthrough. For most groups the stakes simply aren't that high.
Do you see yourself as a romantic?
But when you were a manager, running universities, you found that your theories failed to match reality.
What do you see your role as in the future?
W.B. Yes, to some extent. But it is probably a trap of my own making. My first major article came out in 1959 and was on leadership. Since 1985 most of my work has been in that area. You build up some sort of brand equity and there is a degree of collusion between that and the marketplace - people say leadership, that's Bennis. It makes life a little simpler.
W.B. Leadership has become a heavy industry. Concern and interest about leadership development is no longer an American phenomenon. It is truly global. Though I will probably be in less demand, I wanted to move on. In fact, the work behind my latest book, Organizing Genius, takes me back to my early roots. The book was actually born forty years ago when I became interested in how networks of gifted people have changed the world. My early work was on small group dynamics, more a classical area of social psychology. I moved from there to T-Groups, sensitivity training and then into change in social systems.
W.B. Teams has a Dilbertian smell to it. Everyone is talking about teams and there is a lot of bullshit written. I'm not sure how useful it is to business people. I think you can learn more from extraordinary groups than the run of the mill. None of us is as smart as all of us. These are exceptional groups with great intensity who have belief in their collective aspiration. The groups are a series of vivid utopias whether they are Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, the group behind the 1992 Clinton campaign, Lockheed's Skunk Works or the Manhattan Project which invented the atomic bomb.
W.B. My favourite is the Manhattan project because the consequences were so huge. Morally it was a disaster. I was in the war and on August 6, 1945 I was on patrol duty in Heidelburg. I was talking to an enlisted man who said that we'd unloaded a super bomb in Japan. Now we can have our lives back, he said. We were all set to go to Japan.
W.B. Greatness starts with superb people. Great groups don't exist without great leaders, but they give the lie to the persistent notion that successful institutions are the lengthened shadow of a great woman or man. It's not clear that life was ever so simple that individuals, acting alone, solved most significant problems.
W.B. Yes, the Lone Ranger is dead. Instead of the individual problem solver we have a new model for creative achievement. People like Steve Jobs or Walt Disney headed groups and found their own greatness in them.
W.B. He or she is a pragmatic dreamer, a person with an original but attainable vision. Ironically, the leader is able to realise his or her dream only if others are free to do exceptional work. Typically, the leader is the one who recruits the others, by making the vision so palpable and seductive that they see it, too, and eagerly sign up. Inevitably, the leader has to invent a leadership style that suits the group. The standard models, especially command and control, simply don't work. The heads of groups have to act decisively, but never arbitrarily. They have to make decisions without limiting the perceived autonomy of the other participants. Devising and maintaining an atmosphere in which others can put a dent in the universe is the leader's creative act.
W.B. True. Most organisation's are dull and working life is mundane. There is no getting away from that. So, these groups could be an inspiration. A great group is more than a collection of first-rate minds. It's a miracle. I have unwarranted optimism. By looking at the possibilities we can all improve. With T Groups in the fifties people said it is not real life. But it shows you the possibilities.
W.B. If a romantic is someone who believes in possibilities and who is optimistic then that is probably an accurate description. I think that every person has to make a genuine contribution in their lives and the institution of work is one of the main vehicles to achieving this. I'm more and more convinced that individual leaders can create a human community that will, in the long run, lead to the best organisations.
W.B. When I was at the University of Cincinnati I realised that I was seeking power through position, by being President of the university. I wanted to be a university president but I didn't want to do it. I wanted the influence. In the end I wasn't very good at being a president. I looked out of the window and thought that the man cutting the lawn actually seemed to have more control over what he was doing. One of the failures of contemporary organisations is that leadership doesn't remind people about what is important. Yes, there are jobs from hell but in a lot of jobs people seem to have no idea why they're doing it. There is organisational entropy. One of the facets of power and influence which has been totally ignored is the power of appreciation. The power of appreciation is not often understood or talked about. To appreciate the work someone else is doing, you have to abandon your own ego.
W.B. I am voraciously curious. People who cannot invent and reinvent themselves must be content with borrowed postures, secondhand ideas, fitting in instead of standing out. At the age of 72 I would like to open more doors for people.
By Stuart Craner