Three Abilities to Look For

 To break through the barriers to strong leadership, compa­nies must look for executives with three rare qualities:

• Ability to articulate a vision. Leaders must create a com­pelling vision that takes people to a new place and then trans­late that vision into reality. Former Scandinavian Airlines Systems chief executive Jan Carlzon was exemplary in this respect. His vision was to make SAS one of the few air carriers that will still exist in the year 2000. To accomplish this, he developed two goals: to make SAS one percent better than its competitors in 100 different ways and to create a market niche. He chose the business traveler. To attract them, he broke away from the traditional pyramid-shaped organization and created small, autonomous work groups. He put in profit-sharing plans and charged groups with making every single interaction with customers a meaningful "moment of truth."

• Ability to embrace error. Failure, error, and mistakes all require explanation. Moreover, the ability to embrace error is an important component in creating an atmosphere in which risk taking is encouraged. As successful film director Sydney Pollack tells his people, the only mistake is to do nothing.

• Ability to encourage "reflective back talk." Real leaders know the importance of having someone around who will tell the truth. Lee Iacocca encourages what he calls "contrarians." One of the most intriguing discoveries that I made in my research on chief executives is that almost all were still married to their first spouse. The reason may be that the spouse is the one person they can totally trust. The back talk from the spouse, the trusted one, is reflective because it allows the leader to learn, to find out more about himself or herself. Plato had it right as usual: All learning, he said, is basically a form of recovery and reflection.

Three Questions to Ask

A leader's effectiveness can be gauged by asking these three questions:

•        Do workers feel significant? When a leader is truly lead­ing, people feel that what they do has meaning.

• Is the work felt to be exciting? Leaders will "pull," not "push" workers toward a goal. They do so by making the work stimulating, challenging, even fun. This "pull" style of influence attracts and energizes people, motivating them to achieve by identification. In the long run, it's far more effective than moti­vating people through coercion.

• Does the leader embody the organization's ethics and values? If the unofficial norms of a corporation differ marked­ly from either the formal code of ethics or the chief executive's personal behavior, then there's bound to be trouble. Sending mixed messages to employees on ethical issues, more than anything else, is one of the most destructive things a leader can do.

  For what research confirms employees would tell bosses- if asked,  send an email to
    bs@futurevisions.org with "MWS research on bosses" in the subject and nothing in the body