, and mark those that you do not with an X. Make a commitment and devise an action plan to cultivate those traits you marked with an X.Use encouragement.
—Dale Carnegie
Throughout his career, Dale Carnegie was fond of relating a story about his namesake, Andrew Carnegie. Andrew was the founder of the United States Steel Corporation, and one of the wealthiest men in the history of American business. Long before he became rich, he had the gift of inspiring people to move in the direction of his leadership. They responded, not just because he told them what he wanted them to do, but also because they themselves wanted to do it.
When he was a ten-year old boy in his native Scotland, Andrew Carnegie had two pets, a father rabbit and a mother rabbit. As nature ran its course Andrew awoke one morning to find that he now had a whole nest of baby rabbits with nothing to feed them. And then he had a brilliant idea. He gathered the boys and girls in the neighborhood and offered them a special proposition. If they went out every day and picked enough grass, dandelions, and clover to feed the rabbits, Andrew would name the baby animals in their honor. The plan worked like magic and Andrew Carnegie had learned an important principle about leadership mastery and about the particular style of inspirational leadership mastery that will be the subject of this chapter.
Andrew Carnegie never forgot that incident with the rabbits, and years later he made millions of dollars using the same technique in the steel business. He wanted to sell steel rails to the Pennsylvania Railroad, whose president was J. Edgar Thomson. So, remembering the lesson from his childhood, Andrew Carnegie built a huge steel mill in Pittsburgh and named it the J. Edgar Thomson Steel Works. Soon after, when the Pennsylvania railroad needed steel rails, where do you suppose J. Edgar Thomson bought them?
It shouldn’t be surprising that this instance of inspirational leadership derives from a youthful incident, because this is the kind of leadership we all want to embody at some early point in our lives: firefighter, airline pilot, doctor, or nurse. When we are kids and we aspire to these professions, what we really want to be is an inspirational leader. We want to be the one in whom people place their trust. We want to help people. We want people to give us responsibility and we want to live up to it.
In its genuine form, inspirational leadership is nothing short of a miraculous process. Truly inspirational leaders include some of the world’s most admirable and remarkable people. This has been the case not just in our own time, but also throughout history.
When Hernán Cortés led Spanish soldiers in the conquest of Mexico, he did something that very clearly expresses the basic nature of inspirational leadership. Just after the soldiers had landed at what is now Veracruz, they saw that every one of their ships had just been set on fire. In other words, there was no turning back. The message that Cortés was sending to his men was very simple: Anything less than success was simply not an option. They would succeed because their leader had given them no alternative.
It’s worth noting that when inspirational leaders make a statement like this, it’s done in a very vivid and dramatic manner. Cortés didn’t just order one of his subordinates to read a memo to the troops. He made his point in a genuinely charismatic fashion. This is very characteristic of inspirational leaders, as we’ll see in this chapter and the one that follows. The content of one leader’s message may be the same as another’s, but the manner in which it’s delivered is what defines your leadership style.
Johnny Bench had a tremendously successful career in major league baseball as a catcher with the Cincinnati Reds. He once defined what the role of inspirational leadership meant to him. Bench said that he wanted the pressure to be on him. He wanted his teammates to give him responsibility for winning or losing the game, because he knew he could handle it. Like Johnny, we may want this type of leadership when we’re young and even strive to be that kind of leader. As we get older, though, many of us go to great lengths to avoid this type of leadership.
Many of us are right to avoid it, because not everyone is cut out to be an inspirational leader. As you read this chapter, you’ll surely find much to admire in the people we’ll discuss. You may also discover limits to the concept of inspirational leadership that you were not aware of.
In sum, the purpose of this chapter is not to tell you whether or not you should be an inspirational leader. Instead, it is to show you exactly what inspirational leadership is, to define its strengths and weaknesses, and to let you make your own decision about its congruency with your own style of leadership mastery.
Let’s begin by focusing on a specific quality of inspirational leadership. It is the sense that we’re all in a game, that there are winners and losers, and that I, as the inspirational leader, am most definitely a winner. If you follow me, and if you perform as I encourage you to perform, you will also win. We will be part of a winning team together.
Not everybody wins all the time, however, and even the most inspirational leaders eventually encounter setbacks or defeats. In fact, because of their highly emotional nature, even the most successful inspirational leaders experience ups and downs in their careers. When a down cycle takes place, one of the most interesting characteristics of inspirational leadership comes into sharp focus. Although this kind of leader is eager to accept the pressure and responsibility for success, he or she may not be able to take responsibility for failure. The high self-esteem of inspirational leaders sometimes does not allow for the possibility that they could fall short. There must be some other explanation, and inspirational leaders are very good at finding it before they go on to their next adventure.
The fascinating career of Ted Turner provides some very clear examples of this. In 1977, Turner won the America’s Cup sailing race with a badly outdated craft named Courageous that seemed to be no match for the high-tech boat from Australia. Despite the team-oriented nature of sailboat racing, Turner transformed the contest into a highly personalized endeavor. He had a dream, a dream that his old secondhand boat would win the race simply on the strength of his own inspiration, and that’s exactly what happened.
Turner took the triumph very personally and there was something childishly endearing about his capacity to do so. Turner simply believed he was the greatest. He couldn’t help communicating that belief to the world around him, whether it was his own crew, the news media, or the competition. In the 1977 race, this force of pure belief may well have turned the tide of victory.
Three years later, however, Turner and his crew faced a very different kind of leadership in Dennis Connor. An organizational leader of the first rank, Connor prepared for the 1980 race with more hours on the water than the combined total of all the other challengers. Turner badly underestimated Connor, and the race selection committee excused Turner’s boat during the preliminary trials. It was a crushing and even humiliating defeat for someone who had been so eager to personalize the competition, but he very clearly was not fazed. In contrast to how they regard victories, inspirational leaders let defeats pass right through them with little visible effect. Ted Turner never sailed again in competition. He even sold the boat in which he had won the legendary 1977 race, but his sense of himself as a born winner was absolutely intact. He just set off in pursuit of another dream.
The ability to create, communicate, and pursue dreams is, in fact, the first defining quality of inspirational leadership. Inspirational leadership masters see a clear picture of the future in their mind’s eye. The dream has tangible reality. It’s like Mount Everest: It’s there and the leader is going to lead his team to the top. Masters of inspirational leadership not only make their dreams seem real, they can enlist others in the pursuit of those same dreams simply through the energy of their own charismatic personalities.
To put it another way, inspirational leaders have the ability to transfer importance. They have an almost magical power to take what is important to them and make it important to other people. Conversely, they have a decided lack of interest in what someone else might consider a priority. They simply don’t worry about what’s on other people’s minds, and before long others aren’t worrying either. This is what transferring importance really means.
The pilot of a paramedic helicopter expressed this very well in an interview for a book entitled Bosses, written by Jim Wall. “You’ve got to learn to lead people to the decision you want,” the pilot said, “but they need to feel that it was their idea. This is not just telling someone what to do; it’s telling them what you want and intend to do, and having them want and intend the same thing. It’s also inspiring the belief that the goal is really possible, that it really can be obtained with the help of inspired leadership.”
From very early on in the history of Microsoft, Bill Gates had a vision. It was something that he saw very clearly, and something that he communicated with great verve. It was a vision that he saw as much more important than anything anyone else might suggest. The vision was this: a personal computer on every desk in America. It’s clear, it’s simple, and at least when Gates presents it, the image of two hundred million personal computers on two hundred million desks can even sound inspirational.
Similarly, when Steven Jobs and Steve Wozniak were in that now-famous garage creating Apple Computer Inc., they both had visions but not exactly the same ones. Wozniak was the more technically oriented of the two. He thought in terms of operating systems, processors, and hard-disk memory. The vision Jobs had was much more down to earth. He imagined a computer that came in a box. It was as simple as that: a machine that you could buy in a box, just like a radio or a microwave oven. It was a machine that you could take home and plug in, and it would work.
Why was this such a compelling vision? Once again it was simple, easily communicated, and at a time when computer components were bought one piece at a time, it was quite revolutionary. At the very moment when Jobs came up with his vision of a computer in a box, people with Scotch tape on their glasses and plastic penholders in their shirt pockets comprised the majority of computing enthusiasts. Basically they were people like Steve Wozniak. Having known people like that close-up, Steve Jobs knew there would never be enough of them to create the revolution he dreamed of.
He knew he had to reach the millions of people who formed mainstream society, the people who were used to buying things that came in boxes. So Jobs took the very complex and problematic task of introducing personal computing to America, and reduced it to a very simple and literal idea. The computer had to come in a box.
Steve Jobs was a master of inspirational leadership. He was able to communicate his vision and convince others to commit themselves to it just as deeply as he himself had. The ability to express a dream through a simple, tangible, down-to-earth image is essential to this kind of leader. Think about this the next time you are called upon to discuss a project or motivate a development team.
Robert J. Eaton was a chairman and CEO of the former Daimler-Chrysler Corporation. It was the world’s third largest car-maker in terms of total revenue. The company was formed in 1998 by the merger of Chrysler and Daimler-Benz. In its first year after the merger, net income was more than six billion dollars. Although Eaton had a technical background with a degree in mechanical engineering, he valued inspirational leadership very highly.
Eaton believed that the requirements for running a big company had changed dramatically in the twenty years prior to his leadership. In describing those changes, he made a sharp distinction between what he called managing and genuine leadership. “A manager is someone who thinks in primarily quantitative terms, numbers, units, quarters, fiscal years. A leader thinks in terms of people and ideas.” At DaimlerChrysler, Bob Eaton believed that he should devote less time to managing, and more time to leading. For one thing, the pure numbers of business change so fast that focusing on them almost becomes an exercise in futility, especially for a CEO. The time simply isn’t available for running all the numbers and keeping track of the results. Instead a leader needs to create vision and beliefs and values. A leader needs to break through creative roadblocks and inspire people to fulfill their potential (even if they have not yet discovered their true potential).
In an interview, Bob Eaton put it this way: “A leader is someone who can take a group of people to a place they themselves don’t think they can go.” This, in fact, is a perfect definition of inspirational leadership.
Whether you’re already a senior manager or still an aspiring leader, you’ll need to know how to encourage teamwork in your organization. This is an essential business skill. Building a team involves more than just putting the right people together.
If you have the power to handpick your team, make an assessment of their strengths and weaknesses to ensure the best combination of skills. Surround yourself with good people, but not people who are all good at the same thing. Be careful not to choose clones, especially clones of yourself. Diversity is always good as long as individuals are willing and able to work together.
Sometime you may be assigned to lead a group of people who have no interest in being part of a team. This is a chance to really test your leadership abilities. How can you create an environment in which each individual wants to work cooperatively and collaboratively? This is where the ability to inspire and implement teamwork becomes essential. Here are a few more guiding principles to point you in the right direction.
Make sure everyone grasps the long-range goals of the company. Reinforce those goals as often as possible. People may become so focused on today’s problems and routine duties that they lose sight of the big picture. When some members of the team concentrate on putting out fires, others can dedicate more time to reviewing longer-range strategies to forestall future problems.
Outline the duties and responsibilities of everyone on the team. Understanding one another’s duties and deadlines always helps people work collaboratively. Encourage the team members to define the division tasks among themselves. They’ll take on more responsibility if they are in control, and someone may even emerge as a previously untapped talent.
Team members need to develop individual and group objectives. As a leader, you can urge them to set achievable and measurable short-term aspirations as well as long-term ones. With collective, team-driven goals and a shared code of ethics, the group will begin to self-direct. Peer pressure and individual pride will help foster responsibility and peak performance.
Share as much information as you can to prevent gossip and rumor-mongering. A rumor mill is a drain on productivity and morale. Earn your team’s respect and confidence with openness and honesty. During periods of change or crises, reveal as much as you can as soon as possible and promise to update team members as soon as you can.
This is very simple. Keep your word. Be trustworthy and dependable. If you’re a sales manager and you promise a day off with pay if the sales team meets its target, follow through on that promise. If you’re a team member and offer to obtain information for a colleague, make that information a priority. Treat all members of the team consistently and fairly and don’t play favorites.
Be open to the team’s ideas, whether they’re presented as a formal written submission or in a brainstorming session. Consider every suggestion and respond to the individual or entire team, whichever is more appropriate. Many organizations spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on consultants without first asking employees for their ideas on productivity, new products, or cost cutting.
If the team does not seem to come together at first, give team members some time to get along. Watch patiently but closely to see if they can resolve their differences on their own. If not, you may have to reassign one or more individuals. Otherwise the success of the team may be compromised.
Challenge each team member to participate and contribute, but do this in a positive, results-oriented way. Urge them to take additional training, if need be, and to step beyond their comfort zones to develop their unique talents. Shift people’s responsibilities regularly and often. Acknowledge each individual’s strengths and offer positive reinforcement and encouragement.
Celebrate the team’s achievements together. Reward the team as a whole, not individual members. Sometimes a person will excel at everything. Recognize this privately and through the performance review process. But for the sake of continued teamwork, eliminate any opportunity for jealousy and resentment. Always speak positively about your team. Display their talents and publicly recognize their dedication, their efforts, and their successes.
Enthusiastic energy is contagious. Be positive, upbeat, and hopeful. Expect great things from your team and they’ll do their best not to disappoint you. A real leader knows how to focus on what’s going right even when everything seems to be going wrong.
Team spirit is energizing and unifying, so make time to enjoy being with the group. Join them for lunch occasionally or for a beer after work. Picnics and outings to sports or entertainment events can also be excellent morale builders. When team members see each other as unique human beings, cooperation and willingness to work hard will naturally increase.
Theodore Roosevelt said, “The best executive is one who has sense enough to pick good people… and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them.” So keep the number of rules as low as possible. “Because we’ve always done it that way” is not an acceptable reason for anything. To the greatest extent possible, let the team itself determine how to work together. For instance, unless you’re operating an assembly line, flexible starting times may increase productivity. Flexibility with all preexisting rules is an important key to successful teamwork.
Explain what needs to be done, explain how to do it—and then let go. Better yet, describe the problem and the desired result and let the team develop an action plan together. Trust the individuals and the collective team to complete their assigned tasks successfully and on time. If you’ve set a project review meeting for next Tuesday, resist the temptation to ask for an update today. Have confidence that the team will meet the deadline.
When you’re in charge of a team, lead by example. Say “we” more often than “I”—but always understand that the buck stops with you. If something goes wrong, take responsibility without blaming others. When the right time comes, discuss the problems calmly with the team.
1. Andrew Carnegie showed signs of inspirational leadership during his youth. Reflect on your childhood. What leadership initiative did you display at an early age? Write about any creative, inspirational, or bold initiatives you took when you were growing up.
2. From the following list, select the five individuals you personally find the most inspirational. After each name that you select, briefly describe the specific traits that you admire.
Muhammad Ali
Warren Buffet
Bill Clinton
Hillary Clinton
Walter Cronkite
Walt Disney
Bill Gates
Jim Henson
Michael Jordan
John F. Kennedy
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Rosa Parks
Elvis Presley
Christopher Reeve
Eleanor Roosevelt
Steven Spielberg
Barbara Walters
Tiger Woods
3. Go through the traits that you listed in #2, and mark those that you currently possess with a , and mark those that you do not with an X. Make a commitment and devise an action plan to cultivate those traits you marked with an X.