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LEADERSHIP FROM WITHIN
Conversations On The Leading Edge Of Knowledge and Discovery With Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove COPYRIGHT (C) 1998 THINKING ALLOWED PRODUCTIONS Reprinted with permission from Thinking Allowed Productions
MISHLOVE: Well, leaders are people with vision, people who are able to articulate a vision and enlist other people in sharing that vision, getting other people to want to help out in that vision -- I suppose as opposed to managers who can kind of manipulate the rewards-and-punishment system to force people to comply with stated goals and objectives. KOUZES: Again, if you take the distinction between leading and managing, and if we take a look at the traditional way we approach the subject, traditionally managers are viewed as people who use rewards and punishments in order to control other people's behavior. So we have incentive systems established in business to offer people rewards, whether it's stock options, or whether it's a salary increase or a promotional opportunity or a wonderful new assignment in a new location, something that will advance the person's career -- we're looking at bonuses at the end of projects. All of those are available to business people, and we tend to rely upon them. There was a book written called The Great Management Principle not too long ago, and the great management principle, the author said, was what gets rewarded gets done. Well, we questioned that notion, because in our research it wasn't the extrinsic rewards that people were valuing, it was something intrinsic, something that came from within, some sense of a dream, some sense of aspiration or a goal, something that for the greater good, common good, was important. They wanted to go for that, not just the extrinsic rewards. And in fact many were rewarded extrinsically, but it wasn't that external reward or the avoidance of punishment that drove them, but something from within, as well as the people that they enlisted. MISHLOVE: I guess, then, the key to finding that leader
within oneself is to find that area where we find ourselves intrinsically
rewarded for what we're doing.
MISHLOVE: It seems as if -- if we can draw on the analogy of the mythical journey of the hero again -- it's the journey into the underworld; it's being willing to face what disturbs you, to look at that darkness squarely and to shine the light on it, rather than to kind of run away. KOUZES: Absolutely, absolutely. Any person in a leadership role has experienced some crisis in their life, whether it's Martin Luther King, who had to face people who were threatening to him when he was at the seminary, and he felt the urges to attack and fight back, but again by reading Gandhi and understanding that Gandhi had a similar experience in his life and wanted to fight and fight back, his dedication to his nonviolent philosophy was even strengthened and he was self-assured in that process. So directly facing it -- looking inward and dealing with that, or looking outward and having to deal with your enemies, your detractors, the people who don't necessarily agree with the direction, and being able to feel comfortable with yourself. MISHLOVE: One of the quotes that I enjoyed the most in your book The Leadership Challenge was you said an engineer has his slide rule, a computer professional has his computer, but the tool of a leader is himself or herself. KOUZES: Thinking again of anyone who has to give from within in order to work with other people -- that's the only instrument that we have. If you're a musician, you at least have some aid in the process. That doesn't make it any less difficult to play; but in fact all the leader has is him- or herself -- skills and abilities, attitudes, feelings, emotions. This is what we have, and how people see us using that has a lot to do with whether or not they'll follow us. MISHLOVE: Many people have no image of themselves as a leader. Even though when you question them about their personal best they'll have a story of leadership, if you ask them, "Are you a leader?" they say, "No, not at all, not me." KOUZES: It's absolutely true that many people, if you ask them about whether they see themselves as leaders, will deny it, but in fact if you ask other people that they've worked with, particularly during these times of personal best, they'll say absolutely, this person demonstrated those qualities. I think it's because we've created this whole other mythology about leadership, and that's perhaps the negative side of the hero mythology -- that we've created the Luke Skywalkers and the Lee Iacoccas of the world. People say, "I can't possibly be like that," without really thinking about times when they have behaved in similar ways, taken on challenges, whether it's with the local community, or whether it's the church or the school. And it angers me a bit, because we end up saying, "Well, you can't develop leaders. We can't be better. We have to wait around until some Messiah arrives and saves us from ourselves." In fact, our belief is that most people have demonstrated these, and we would do well to believe more that we can develop leaders, because if we believed that we would spend more energy to do it, and in fact all of us would be better off if we believed that we could develop ourselves as leaders. MISHLOVE: There is a delicate balance here. You know, there's the old saying, "Too many cooks spoil the soup," and in many organizations people are expected to lead, but within limits, not too much. KOUZES: Well, in a recent experience we had, we set out to study four leaders and put them on videotape and to use them as a case example. My colleague Tom Peters, who was the principal investigator in this, found, as he said, "I looked for four leaders and found four thousand." That's the essence of our message. When everybody is leading, when everybody is saying we're not happy with the status quo, we're continuously improving -- we don't look for satisfaction in work anymore. We have a phrase, "We don't go to work; we go to continuously improve. We don't want satisfied customers; we want customers who are delighted with us. We don't want satisfied employees; we want employees who love it around here." With that kind of attitude we're constantly challenging ourselves to do better, and in that sense we are leading. We have a good idea, we make a suggestion. It challenge the way we are currently doing things, but at least we can share that idea, that vision, that dream, that hope, with others, enlist them in it, get their support, be an example to others, encourage other people, and in that process we're leading. MISHLOVE: There are many factors, however, in our culture, and particularly in the way organizations are structured, that tend to mitigate against leadership. KOUZES: Absolutely. In our research we found something very interesting. When we asked superiors, "What do you want from your leaders; when you look up or you look out for leadership, what do you want?" they said, "We want people who are honest, competent, forward looking, and inspiring." And then we asked those same people, "What do you want in a follower?" They said, "We want people who are honest; we want people who are competent; but we want people who also are cooperative and dependable." So we want vision and change and newness and dreams and hopes from leaders, but from followers those same people don't want those things. Those are much lower on the list. What they want are dependability, loyalty, and cooperativeness. There is a tension there. We create organizational systems that tend to get people to submerge their desires to make the world a better place, and we make it possible only for those in charge to be in control of the vision or the strategy of the company. And so you're right; we do create systems, we create procedures, structures, that mitigate against people learning to lead and taking the lead. MISHLOVE: Well, are you suggesting that this is unhealthy,
or that we don't need to do this -- that there's another way?
End Part II. Join us next month for Part III of this interview
with James Kouzes.
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