Goffee Robert - Why Should Anyone Be Led by You?: What It Takes To Be An Authentic Leader

Copyright 2006 Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Requests for permission should be directed to permissions@hbsp.harvard.edu, or mailed to Permissions, Harvard Business School Publishing, 60 Harvard Way, Boston, Massachusetts 02163.

First eBook Edition: January 2006

ISBN: 978-1-57851-971-2

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

This book is dedicated to

all those who strive to

lead organizations.

Why Should Anyone
Be Led by You?

A T THE BEGINNING of the new millennium, our research was driven by this single, simple question. It had an impact. Audiences we addressed throughout the world paused for thought when they were asked it. Rooms fell silent as people pondered their right to lead and the willingness of their followers to be led by them. A Harvard Business Review article with the question as its title produced a flood of communication.

Over the last five years, the question has taken us in intriguing, exciting, and often perplexing directions. Along the way, we have interviewed dozens of leaders (and their followers) in the corporate world and beyondin schools, hospitals, sports organizations, and elsewhere.sole preserve of high-profile CEOs. As we have continued to work with students and consulting clients, we have learned even more.

This is a book whose genesis was driven by a question, but it is one whose fruition, we hope, provides a range of answers to the leadership riddles and dilemmas we now faceas well as an entirely new range of questions.

Our own work on leadership began some twenty-five years ago and has followed three paths. First, as academics, we exhaustively surveyed the leadership research of the past century before developing our own working model. Second, as consultants, we tested our approach with managers and leaders in workshops worldwide and through observations with scores of clients. And third, as leaders, we vetted our ideas in our own organizations.

Throughout, the focus of our research has been on leaders who excel at inspiring peopleleaders who succeed in capturing hearts, minds, and souls. We are fascinated by leadership that, reaching back to the ideas of Max Weber, is antibureaucratic and charismatic. To have leaders with these qualities is not everything in business, but our contention is that it is worth a substantial amount. Indeed, great results are likely to be impossible without it.

Make no mistake: leadership is about results. Great leadership has the potential to excite people to extraordinary levels of achievement. But it is not only about performance; it is also about meaning. This is an important pointand one that is often overlooked by contemporary leadership literature. Leaders at all levels make a difference to performance. They do so because they make performance meaningful.

It is to state the obvious that the impact of leadership on our lives is profoundat work, in our spiritual lives, in sport, and of course, in politics. But this observation does capture a peculiarly modern obsession: the search for authentic leaders. In Western societies, at least, there is a deep and deepening disenchantment with the able role player or, worse still, the skilled apparatchikof the political or corporate kind. We are increasingly suspicious that we are being worked. The search for authenticity is ever more pressing.

There is evidence of the desire for authenticity all around us in popular culture. The seemingly inexorable rise of reality TV (a truly Orwellian phrase as participants are manipulated for an anonymous and isolated audience of voyeurs) is one manifestation. Or we can watch soap operas portraying a nostalgic view of communities filling the gap left by the decline in genuinely communal life painstakingly dissected in Robert Putnams Bowling Alone.

These questions about authenticity are related to a wider set of concerns about how we live now. Critics of modern societies persistently point to three concerns that, in their view, restrict or prevent the authentic expression of humanity and make it harder to be yourself.

To begin with, there is the triumph of individualism. If there is one overriding characteristic of the modern era, it is the extension of personal freedom through the march of individualism. At the heart of this, of course, lies a paradox. While few would deny that modern life has increased the scope for human choice, many have cautioned against the rise of excessive individualism: a world characterized not by the authentic expression of self but as simply selfish.

At its core, this critique argues that authenticity itself rests upon some sense of moral regulation. We cannot be freely ourselves without an overarching set of shared moral values. In their absence we get not authentic leaders but narcissistic ones. The damaging scandals at Enron, Tyco, Hollinger International, and World-Com add contemporary bite to this critique.

Closely related to this lack of moral regulation is the Weberian notion of the modern world dominated by a particular way of thinking. Weber calls this technical rationality. In more modern terminology, this is often called instrumental reason: the rationality of an act is judged by the connection between means and ends, where the ends are given. It is a view of rationality stripped of morality. Whatever your problem, there is a technically rational solution to it.

For Max Weber, the triumph of this way of thinking constitutes the nightmare of modern life. He writes passionately of mankind trapped in an iron cagefrom which it cannot escape. This critique of modern life had been elaborated many times, but of special relevance for us are its consequences in the workplace.

From this perspective, work is degraded. It becomes the means to the satisfaction of other endspaying the mortgage, buying designer-label goodsrather than being a milieu both for the building and discovery of an authentic self and for its disclosure. Both workers and executives are just another kind of input to be down-sized, delayered, and discarded. Our workplaces become not arenas for the expression of authenticity but soulless machines for the production of conformity. This is a theme captured in the grim pessimism of Kafkas novels and railed against in the long line of anti-bureaucratic heroes Western culture has produced, from Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times to Yossarian in Catch-22 via The Good Soldier Schweik in Jaroslav Haseks novel: all human beings who resist being processed.

One final theme helps to explain our focus on authenticity. It is most eloquently articulated in the work of Alexis de Tocqueville, He fears the withering of civil societythe myriad of informal associations that both provide social glue and critically function as vehicles for the expression of self.

This Tocqueville theme finds later expression in David Reismans classic The Lonely Crowd: a picture of isolated, atomized individuals lacking the social relationships from which they could create an authentic self. Putnam produces a veritable barrage of evidence to support this claim: declining membership of parent-teacher associations, falling attendance at public meetings, and of course, despite the popularity of bowling, the collapse of the bowling leagues.