The Opening of this Show.

In the Studio

HATTIE: Hi, I'm Hattie Bryant. What is it about leadership that is so difficult to describe and define? There are dozens of books about it and hundreds of gurus who speak about it and you would think that by now, everyone would know what it is. Every business owner who has been on our program is a leader. But when it comes to explaining why they are so effective, it's difficult. In our work to produce video companions for some 30 college and graduate school textbooks, we've had the pleasure of reading and talking with many authors.

Today you'll meet Dr. Keith Grint, who will help us understand this large word leadership. We now know how to recognize it. In 30 minutes you'll know too. As Dr. Grint talks with us about power, charisma, communication and motivation, we'll take you to meet effective small business owners who are truly leaders.

(Voiceover) Our guest has published seven books and over 40 articles on topics ranging from business process, reengineering to appraisal schemes, organizational theory and sociology of work. His current research focuses on leadership. We went to the Saïd Business School, Templeton College, Oxford to meet Dr. Keith Grint, its Director of Research.

1

DR. KEITH GRINT: (Voiceover) There's an argument that leadership can either be about positions or it can be a process, which is a different kind of way of understanding this. There is some degree of control generated by your position, but I think it's also worth considering whether in fact leadership is to do with a process rather than a position. That is to say that you might want to argue that anybody who persuades somebody else to do something, they wouldn't have otherwise done, is taking a leadership role.

HATTIE: What is power?

DR. GRINT: Power is not so much a possession but a relationship. It's not so much a cause, but a consequence. When your boss says jump, what tends to happen is you think about it and you think about whether you should jump or not. They can't make you do these things. There's almost no instance where somebody can coerce you into doing something. You might want to argue that if somebody points a gun to your head and says if you don't do this I'm gonna kill you, you don't have any choice. But you still have a choice. You can say go pull the trigger. So you still have a choice about doing this.

So, in this instance what subordinates do appears a need to be very influential in establishing whether the leader has power or not. So to put that another way around, if a leader says jump and the subordinates jump, then leaders have power. Not before it, but after the event. So power becomes a consequence rather than a cause of subordinate action. That's a -- that's a complete reversal of our normal assumptions about power. And that explains why I think negotiations are so important for leaders, because by and large they have to negotiate their way through organizational control. You can't simply say, 'I'm the boss you must do it.' You can say, 'I'm the boss, if you do it I'll pay you.' Or, 'If we do this together we might achieve something.' If you were to push me into say which is the most important skill of leadership, I would suggest probably negotiation. It sits very high up on those skills.

HATTIE: Is the biggest flaw you see in most leaders arrogance?

DR. GRINT: Yes, I think it's an issue that arrogant people tend to assume that they in some sense are an extreme version of everybody else. So what motivates them motivates other people, but they're just better at it. So, if you're motivated by money that means everybody else must be motivated by money. So I think we tend to assume that whatever intrigues us intrigues other people. So if you extrapolate that and put it down to a leadership role, what motivates other people, it motivates me. And of course that isn't the case because many leaders are quite different from their employers or their subordinates. So almost by definition in this instance, leaders need to think beyond themselves and to do that they need to engage in conversations with their subordinates.

2

HATTIE: (In the Studio) Dr. Grint said, leaders need to think beyond themselves. This is the difference between a business owner who grows a business and the business owner who stays small.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) While most of her industry is stuck in the past, Pam McNair is the perfect example of the leader who is thinking beyond herself.

PAM MCNAIR: When we started we had just a full service salon. HATTIE: (Voiceover) Pam McNair is founder of Gadabout Salon and Spas. She has created 225 jobs and millions in sales. How did she do it? She's your neighbor next door who mastered the art of team building.

JENNIFER: Pam builds things as a team. This whole company is probably a team. So the office naturally falls into that, that everybody's always bouncing everything off of everybody. Our marketing ideas come up probably though excitement. She's totally invested in the people who work for her. She works for the people who work for her.

PAM: I think you have to look at the allover picture, check and see if your mission and you vision is there and then you need to get out of the way. You need to be able to delegate with a design so that other people can duplicate what you do. Or do it better. And I'm not the star, I build stars. So it allows other people to be in the forefront and it allows me to have the time to do what I need to do to make them look better and to be better.

3

DR. GRINT: Conventionally we distinguish between hierarchies and anarchies. Hierarchy would be formal positions of power in a particular organization whereas anarchy would be the absence of formal positions of power. Nobody in control. I think if you look at the historical record, there are no organizations that persist across time successfully that are run as anarchies. They are all to some extent hierarchical. But the question is what kind of hierarchy do you have? Now, one way of understanding this would be to think about heterarchies. A heterarchy is a movable hierarchy where people would replace leaders on a temporary basis. This would be the kind of equivalent of a research team, or a project team. Where different people would take positions of power, for more appropriate roles given their expertise. And you can see this in, in all kinds of small informal groups where different people play different roles of leadership. They are better understood as heterarchies than as hierarchies.

HATTIE: (Speaking to Eric Rose on the construction site of one of his projects.) And so how big is the house?

(Voiceover) Many strong companies like E.M. Rose builders operate as heterarchies. The right talent is assembled project by project. Merriam-Webster says a heterarchy is a form of organization resembling a network or fishnet and authority is determined by knowledge and function. Employees at Altoon and Porter have their own share in computer, but move to new desks when assigned a new project. Renegade Animation taps particular talent for particular jobs. Goshow Architects is all about everyone's best ideas being brought forward, and the same is true at Boardroom Inc.

DR. GRINT: A different way of putting that would be that they are engaged in deep leadership. That is to say leadership occurs throughout the organization and is not constrained to the formal positions in the hierarchy. What I'm suggesting is, there are two things. One is the formal leaders need to be constrained by their subordinates who are willing -- this is another way of putting this would be to talk about them being constructive dissenters. People who have the best interest of the organization at heart, they're constructive. But they're happy to dissent from the main ideals of the organization or the decision making of the organization. Which is the reverse of destructive consenters.

People who are willing to say yes of course that's right knowing that it's actually not the right way to go about things. Most organizations are full of destructive consenters, yes people. As opposed to constructive dissenters who are the thorns in people's sides that are actually very unpopular but necessary to keep an organization from going in the wrong direction. You need to surround yourself with a group of people who are willing to tell you when you're going wrong.

ED: Actually you know Wing can't tie shoes. He can't barely get his hair combed out or anything. He's disorganized, but he's a great marketing man. The one thing that he does, he does better than anyone alive.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) Ed is Wing Lam's younger brother and Wing is the force behind Wahoo's Fish Taco, their 22-location surfer food joints. All traditional leadership roles were thrown out the window by these three brothers because they were more interested in success than their own egos. The baby brother, Mingo, is the CEO. And they recruited a fourth partner, Steve Karfaridis, a Greek with 5-star restaurant systems experience to be the COO.

4

DR. GRINT: The basic assumption is that all leaders are flawed. And by definition we are all flawed to some extent, therefore all leaders must be flawed, therefore, they cannot be perfect leaders. They must be imperfect. They must make mistakes. So the problem is not whether you can get a perfect leader, because you can't. The problem is how do you stop an imperfect leader making too many mistakes that threaten the organization. And that's a big problem for leaders across space and time, is as they get more senior in the organization they tend to assume that they are probably the person most equipped to take the decisions in that organization, and therefore the advice that they get from other people will not be adequate. Therefore they'll take more decisions on their own, or they surround themselves with sycophants, with people who are simply yes people, as we would call them now.

Consequence of all of that is that you tend to get poorer and poorer decision making as you go up organizations unless you take Casteleoni's advice to heart and find somebody or a group of people who are happy to tell you when you're going wrong and you don't threaten them when they do tell you that. You don't shoot the messenger.

5

HATTIE: (Voiceover) At strong small companies, everyone has a seat at the table. Owner's shoulder the financial burden, but they seek ideas from everyone on the payroll.

DR. GRINT: The most important as where to think about in communications, is the difference between transmission and exchange models. Transmission models of communication are the equivalent of a lecture, so if I'm giving you a lecture I'm talking at you, not talking with you. And the consequence of that -- all the research that we know about transmissions models suggest that people don't listen to very much of what anybody else is saying. So within 10 minutes most people are asleep.

By and large transmission models of communication fail, but that what is used by most leaders most of the times. Or they send you the corporate video, or they give you the corporate lecture or they talk at you or they shout at you or whatever it is that they do, and we don't listen. A different way of thinking about the communication would be an exchange model. Now rather than the transmission model where it's one to one but it's a kind of hierarchical relationship, exchange model is another hierarchical relationships in the egalitarian relationship. So we speak with people, we speak with our friends. In this sense what we're doing is we're exchanging communication, we're exchanging information.

This is where the Latin word comes from. It's about exchange. It's not about transmission of information, it's the exchange of information. And we know that when people are communicating in an exchange method, that far more of that communication is actually retained, so it's a far more effective way of learning which is why we know that lectures by and large don't work. But if we engage in a conversation about something, more of the information is exchanged and more seeps in and more is retained. So if you're thinking about leadership and communication what you wanna do is move away from a transmission model wherever possible and try to get into an exchange method. It's much more time intensive, it's much more difficult to do, but it works compared to a transmission model.

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HATTIE (In the Studio): Even though Dr. Grint told us he didn't have much to say about communication, what he did say is powerful.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) Here, Sohrab Vossoughi, founder of Ziba Design, demonstrating the exchange model.

SOHRAB VOSSOUGHI: One of my golden rules is that what is good for the goose is good for the gander. Whatever is good for me should be good for the next person. If you want them to feel like this is their own company, give them what you have. This is really nice, I mean the way it tapers down to, that's nice.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) He is the Elvis of industrial design. Young people all over the world want to work here and when they arrive they are shocked to find this famous man sitting quietly in the corner in the same room with all the other designers. He's always asking and nearly never telling.

NANCY PINNEY: (Voiceover) It's great to have a leader that you can go to and throw these creative ideas off of and really gets it.

DR. GRINT: But the hubris of leadership is basically the issue and what occurs across time, leaders become more and more arrogant. And the problem with arrogance is that people who are arrogant surround themselves with people who don't challenge their arrogance. And it's the absence of a challenge which becomes the problem. And, it's a difficult thing for any of us to encourage people to challenge us. It's not comfortable to be challenged. So unless you're an unusual leader, you tend to surround yourself with people who don't challenge you, and then you get boards of people, boards of directors or whatever who are willing to acquiesce to a leader's decision whether it's good or bad.

9

HATTIE: Is there a difference between a manager and a leader? Is that the dull, boring, most ordinary question in the whole world?

DR. GRINT: Well that's not necessarily dull and boring, it's very controversial and there's lots of people who have written about it.

For what it's worth, I think there's a problem in differentiating between management and leadership, because the more you differentiate, the more the interesting things get put on with leadership and the more the boring bits get put on with management. The consequence of all that is that if you're just designated as a manager, you're nobody, you're going nowhere. But if you're a leader then you get all the responsibility and all the rewards.

I think organizations that succeed need to have people who are managing as well as people who are leading. And I really think that we need to stop in some ways bifurcating this between management and leadership and putting both of -- perhaps differentiating between administration and leadership and putting them both under the tool or the label of management.

So we have management at the top, everybody's a manager and within that you all have to lead and you all have to do some administration. So there are some very interesting leaders who are totally inept at administration who can sell you all kinds of visions, but have absolutely no way of knowing how to get to where you want to go. So, they're as problematic as people who don't have any vision at all. So I'm not a great fan of the distinction between management and leadership and the more we talk about just leadership being important, the more difficult it becomes to manage.

I don't think the vision thing is a big thing. I don't think that's a big deal. It doesn't take very long or a great deal of imagination to imagine a vision. What's difficult is how to get from the vision to wherever it is you want to go to. So how you get from A to B. If you look at the list of characteristics that you need to be a successful leader, the only one that really matters is you need to be successful. The rest you can just follow from there. So this is the kind of reversal of the listing process. The listings are irrelevant. There are lots of people I know who are successful leaders who have none of those competencies, but they're successful. And that's the only one that you need to have.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) And we've met scores of successful leaders. Business owners and the people who work with them to bring quality products and services to the market. They're not afraid to lead us into a better world.

In the Studio

HATTIE: We now have it straight. Leaders must manage and managers must lead. As business owners we can't run and hide. We have a position of power whether we like it or not. From that position we can build by installing systems, listening and respecting others and most importantly, thinking beyond ourselves. That's leadership.

We'll see you next time.