A leadership pentalogue

In "The Leadership Code" Dave Ulrich, Norm Smallwood and Kate Sweetman synthesize their years of teaching and consulting in the leadership field. Their synthetic code consists of five rules and five leadership caps.

	Title:	The Leadership Code: Five Rules to Lead By
	Author:	D. Ulrich, N. Smallwood, K. Sweetman
	Pages:	182pages
	Publisher:	Harvard Business Press
	Price:	$26.95

The Leadership Code is a short book (182 breezy pages) which does not propose to break new ground but, rather, to summarize in a concise and comprehensible manner the essentials of leadership. Through interviews of a dozen eminent colleagues in leadership research, the three co-authors arrive at the conclusion that about two thirds of leadership characteristics are shared by all effective leaders. In turn, those shared characteristics fall into five areas, hence the five rules to lead by, which constitute the leadership code.

Rule No. 1 for effective leadership is to “shape the future”, with four major means to achieve this end. One is the discipline of curiosity. Think of this as interest in developments outside one’s immediate field of concern. Just as a strategist knows how to think beyond the short-term, effective curiosity knows how to look beyond the fore-ground. The authors cite as example, John Hoke, head of R&D at Nike, whose questing led him to an avant-garde design tool manufactured by Z Corporation, a desktop computer that uses hydrocarbon to print designs not on the two-dimensions of paper but in three-dimensions.

Harnessing the future can also involve probing the insights of savvy outsiders. The authors’ example here has Cisco embarking on the creation of a customer engineering certification program and asking (successfully) one of their toughest critics to preview and troubleshoot the team’s efforts. Astute insiders may complement savvy outsiders. Indeed, effective leaders engage their whole organization and call upon all the knowledge spread throughout its membership. An example of a company practicing this is Nokia which organizes cafés (their update of the traditional New England town hall meeting) bringing together its employees in all its regions for knowledge sharing. Effective strategists also create “strategic traction”, that is to say develop the desire and ability of organization members to transmit effectively the company strategy in their day-to-day decisions (see box on strategic traction).

Rule No. 2 is to be an executor. Making things happen is a leader’s happiness. To amend the words of America's founders (not those of the authors), leaders are devoted to the pursuit of happen-ness. These days, making things happen, more often than not, means making change happen. But to occasion change there must be a clear need for it--and that need must translate into buy-in. Strong leaders must be assigned to fructify the buy-in. Not least, change must last. The authors have identified a number of what they call “change viruses”, or reasons why changes do not last over time (see box).

Skill in decision-making defines the executor. The authors emphasize that success here requires deliberation and formalization – which makes them choose to recommend that “decision-making protocol” be followed. The protocol proposes focusing on key options, attributing ownership, assigning deadlines, securing information and arranging for follow-up. The authors insist on the importance of accountability, and its management via a set of standards for achievement (see chart below for effective standards), in addition to feedback on interim achievement and identification of consequences for meeting, or failing, standards.

Effective leaders are effective talent managers. This entails, first and foremost, the ability to communicate. To be effective, communicators choose a limited number of messages but share every message as many times as necessary for it to finally be heeded ...few messages, many times. And they are as adept at communicating bad news as good news. They use both kinds to energize the talent. To do this, they select a small number of goals or shared values. Work from that core creates a consensus that will serve as a platform from which individual differences may then be voiced. The authors insist on the good leader’s ability to encourage the expression of difference and cite Goldman Sachs as an example of a company that pays proper attention to the inclusion of so-called out-groups, people who do not immediately belong to the mainstream.

Energized talent must also be provided with the competencies and resources needed to meet their striving. Excessive demand results in detrimental stress while insufficient demand results in detrimental boredom. History majors will be reminded of Toynbee’s challenge-and-response philosophy of history. Too great a challenge leads to frustration, lack of challenge to regression. Finally, leaders need to make their organization a satisfying place to work. The authors propose five spiritual basics conducive to employee satisfaction:  opportunity to develop, kindness, fairness, temperance, and courage (understood as persistence linked with integrity).

While Rule 3 was about engaging today’s talent, Rule 4 is about building tomorrow’s talent. Effective leaders are human-capital developers. Here, the authors advise mapping the workforce. Such a map will treat critical jobs (the obvious ones at higher levels; the less obvious ones at lower levels--for example gate agents in the airline sector, baristas in the high-end coffee sector). Yet it will distinguish these from support jobs (be they transactional, or strategic).

The questions then become: how well-positioned are you to staff those critical positions? What is the risk of crucially needed staff taking employment elsewhere? How about back-up talent? Is there enough of it in place? Human capital developers build tomorrow’s talent by developing the employee brand and by getting involved in career management. These two activities help to attract outside talent as well as retain inside talent. The employee brand refers to the image of the company in the minds of actual and potential employees, and encompasses what the employee can and cannot expect of the company. Senior involvement in career management carries two benefits: it contributes to building the employee brand; it allows leaders to ascertain to what extent future leaders can be groomed from within or whether they need to be brought in from outside.

Rule 5 is not about others but about oneself, or per the authors’ commandment, invest in yourself. Personal proficiency manifests itself in a number of ways (see chart below). Two notable ones are curricular. The first is proficiency at prioritizing decisions (proficiency at the in-box exercise) and at embracing the fact that while this kind of decision is most likely to be of the difficult 51/49 variety, it must be absolved with 90/10 sureness. A second is a proficiency at tolerating stress. Think of it as working out in the resilience-room and building a general sense of optimism as well as an ability to move on from setbacks by learning from them.

Two further proficiencies are more extra-curricular: personal integrity and personal well-being. Regarding integrity, the authors propose the New York Times test: could your action appear on the front page and look OK? Actually, given that the front page is a chronicle of natural and artificial alarm and scandal, a better test might be, Why it will not make the front page? Integrity is rarely heralded, but is well worth, especially in the present climate of public opinion,  a business-school case. As for well-being, the authors plead that effective business leaders must know when to stop being busy. Time for the family, acquaintances and just plain old sleep-- these, too, yield high returns. Just as too much taxation can diminish tax revenues, too much leadership can depreciate leaders. To add a maxim to Ulrich, Smallwood and Sweetman’s list: For reason of highest strategy, real leaders do need to sleep.

Published in August 2009