Chapter Four
Reframing Leadership
Leadership is universally offered as a panacea for social problems. A widely accepted canon holds that leadership is a very good thing that we need more of—at least, more of the right kind. Yet there is confusion about what leadership means and how much difference it can make. Sennett (1980, p. 197) writes, “Authority is not a thing; it is a search for solidity and security in the strength of others which will seem to be like a thing.” The same is true of leadership. It is not a tangible thing. It exists only in relationships and in the imagination and perception of the engaged parties.
Leadership is distinct from authority, though authorities may be leaders. Authority and leadership are both built on voluntary obedience. If leaders lose legitimacy, they lose the capacity to lead. But many examples of obeying authority fall outside the domain of leadership. As Gardner (1989, p. 7) put it, “The meter maid has authority, but not necessarily leadership.”
Leadership is also different from management, though the two are easily confused. One may be a leader without being a manager, and many managers could not “lead a squad of seven-year-olds to the ice-cream counter” (Gardner, 1989, p. 2). Bennis and Nanus (1985) offer the distinction that “managers do things right, and leaders do the right thing” (p. 21). Kotter (1988) sees management as primarily about structural nuts and bolts: planning, organizing, and controlling. But Gardner (1989) argues against contrasting leadership and management too sharply because leaders may “end up looking like a cross between Napoleon and the Pied Piper, and managers like unimaginative clods” (p. 3). He suggests several dimensions for distinguishing leadership from management. Leaders think long-term, look outside as well as inside, and influence constituents beyond their immediate formal jurisdiction. They emphasize vision and renewal and have the political skills to cope with the diverse needs of multiple constituencies.
In story and myth, leaders are often lonely heroes and itinerant warriors, wed only to their honor and cause (Bolman and Deal, 2006). But traditional notions of solitary, heroic leaders focus too much on individuals and too little on the stage where they play their parts. Leaders make things happen, but things also make leaders happen. We need only look at the transformation of Rudy Giuliani’s image after September 11 to see that situation influences what leaders must do and what they can do. Giuliani found himself on-stage in an unplanned theater of horror, and he delivered the performance of his life. Another stage would have required, and permitted, different leadership. No single formula is possible or advisable for the great range of situations potential leaders encounter.
Heroic images of leadership convey the notion of a one-way process: leaders lead and followers follow. This blinds us to the reality of the relationship between leader and follower. Leaders are not independent actors; they both shape and are shaped by their constituents (Gardner, 1989; Simmel, 1950). Leaders often promote a new idea or initiative only after a large number of their constituents already favor it (Cleveland, 1985). Leadership, then, is not simply a matter of what a leader does but of what occurs in a relationship. Leaders’ actions generate responses from others that in turn affect the leaders’ capacity for taking further initiatives (Murphy, 1985).
It is common to equate leadership with position, but this relegates all those in the lowerarchy to the passive role of follower. It also reinforces the widespread tendency of senior executives to take on more responsibility than they can adequately discharge (Oshry, 1995; [also see Chapter Thirteen in this volume]). Administrators are leaders only to the extent that others grant them cooperation and follow their lead. Conversely, one can be a leader without a position of formal authority. Good organizations encourage leadership from many quarters (Kanter, 1983; Barnes and Kriger, 1986).
Leadership is thus a subtle, holistic process of mutual influence fusing thought, feeling, and action to produce cooperative effort in the service of purposes and values embraced by both the leader and the led.
REFRAMING LEADERSHIP
Dealing with people across challenging situations is a perennially perplexing aspect of leading. Executives are always looking for ideas to make the job easier. Too often, the search for simplicity overlooks important realities. Reframing—deliberately viewing a situation from multiple perspectives—offers a way to get beyond narrow and oversimplified views of leadership. Different perspectives or frames offer distinctive images of the leadership process. Depending on leader and circumstance, each frame can lead to compelling and constructive leadership, but none is right for all times and seasons. We have identified four frames: structural, human resource, political, and symbolic. For each, we examine skills and processes and propose rules of thumb for successful leadership practice.
Architect or Tyrant? Structural Leadership
Structural leadership evokes images of petty tyrants and rigid bureaucrats who never met a rule they didn’t like. Little literature exists on structural leadership in comparison to the other frames. Some structural theorists have argued that leadership is neither important nor basic (Hall, 1987). But the effects of structural leadership can be powerful and enduring, even if the style is subtler and less obviously heroic.
One of the great architects in business history was Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., who became president of General Motors in 1923 and remained a dominant force in the company until his retirement in 1956. The structure and strategy he established made GM the world’s largest corporation. He has been described as “the George Washington of the GM culture” (Lee, 1988, p. 42), even though his “genius was not in inspirational leadership but in organizational structures” (p. 43).
At the turn of the twentieth century, some thirty manufacturers produced automobiles in the United States. In 1899, they produced a grand total of about six hundred cars. Most of these small carmakers stumbled out of the starting gate, leaving two late entries, the Ford Motor Company (founded by Henry Ford in 1903) and GM (founded by William Durant in 1908) as front-runners to dominate the American auto industry. Henry Ford’s single-minded determination to build an affordable car had Ford in a commanding lead when Sloan took over GM.
Under GM’s founder, Billy Durant, the company’s divisions operated as independent fiefdoms. Durant had built GM by buying everything in sight, thus forming a loose combination of previously independent firms. “GM did not have adequate knowledge or control of the individual operating divisions. It was management by crony, with the divisions operating on a horse-trading basis. The main thing to note here is that no one had the needed information or the needed control over the divisions. The divisions continued to spend lavishly, and their requests for additional funds were met” (Sloan, 1965, pp. 27–28).
Sloan recognized that GM needed a better structure. The dominant model of the time was a centralized, functional organization, but Sloan felt that such a structure would not work for GM. Instead, he created one of the world’s first decentralized organizations. His basic principle was simple: centralize planning and resource allocation; decentralize operating decisions. Under Sloan’s model, divisions focused on making and selling cars, while top management focused on long-range strategy and major funding decisions. Central staff made sure that top management had the information and control systems it needed to make strategic decisions.
The structure worked. By the late 1920s, GM had a more versatile organization with a broader product line than Ford. With Henry Ford still dominating his highly centralized company, Ford was poorly positioned to compete with GM’s multiple divisions, each producing its own cars at different prices. GM’s pioneering structure set the standard for others.
In the 1980s, GM found itself with another structural leader, Roger Smith, at the helm. The results were less satisfying. Like Sloan, Smith ascended to the top job at a difficult time. In 1980, his first year as GM’s chief executive, all American automakers lost money. It was GM’s first loss since 1921. Recognizing that the company had serious competitive problems, Smith relied on structure and technology to make it “the world’s first 21st century corporation” (Lee, 1988, p. 16). He restructured vehicle operations and spent billions of dollars in a quest for paperless offices and robotized assembly plants. The changes were dramatic, but the results were dismal:
No GM chairman has disrupted as many lives without commensurate rewards, has spent as much money without returns, or has alienated so many. . . . Few employees believe that [Smith] is in the least concerned with their well-being, and even fewer below executive row anticipate any measure of respect, or reward, for their contributions. No GM chief executive’s motives have ever been as universally questioned or his decisions as thoroughly mistrusted [Lee, 1988, pp. 286–287].
Why did Smith stumble where Sloan succeeded? They were equally uncharismatic and neither had great sensitivity to human resource or symbolic issues. The answer comes down to how well each implemented the right structural form. Structural leaders succeed not because of inspiration but because they have the right design for the times and are able to get their structural changes implemented.
Effective structural leaders share several characteristics.
1. Structural Leaders Do Their Homework: Sloan was a brilliant engineer who had grown up in the auto industry. Before coming to GM, he was chief executive of an auto accessories company where he implemented a divisional structure. When GM bought his firm in 1916, Sloan became a vice president and board member. Working under Durant, he devoted much of his energy to studying GM’s structural problems. He pioneered the development of more sophisticated internal information systems and better market research. He was an early convert to group decision making and created a committee structure to make major decisions. Roger Smith had spent his entire career with GM, but most of his jobs were in finance. Much of his vision involved changes in production technology, an area where he had little experience or expertise.
2. Structural Leaders Rethink the Relationship of Structure, Strategy, and Environment: Sloan’s new structure was intimately tied to a strategy for reaching the automotive market. He foresaw a growing market, improvements in automobiles, and more discriminating consumers. In the face of Henry Ford’s stubborn attachment to the Model T, Sloan introduced the “price pyramid” (cars for every pocketbook) and the annual model change. Automotive technology in the 1920s was evolving almost as fast as electronics in the 1990s, and the annual model change soon became the industry norm.
Smith’s vision was truncated, focused more on reducing costs than on selling cars. As he saw it, GM’s primary competitive problem was high costs driven by high wages. He hoped to solve that by replacing workers with machines. He gave little support to efforts already under way to improve working conditions on the GM shop floor. Ironically, his two best investments—NUMMI and Saturn—succeeded precisely because of innovative approaches to managing people: “With only a fraction of the money invested in GM’s heavily robotized plants, [the NUMMI plant at] Fremont is more efficient and produces better-quality cars than any plant in the GM system” (Hampton and Norman, 1987, p. 102).
3. Structural Leaders Focus on Implementation: Structural leaders often miscalculate difficulties of putting their design in place. They underestimate resistance, skimp on training, fail to build a political base, and misread cultural cues. As a result, they are thwarted by neglected human resource, political, and symbolic barriers. Sloan was no human resource specialist, but he intuitively saw the need to get understanding and acceptance of major decisions. He did that by asking for advice and by establishing committees and task forces to address major issues.
4. Effective Structural Leaders Experiment, Evaluate, and Adapt: Sloan tinkered constantly with GM’s structure and strategy and encouraged others to do likewise. The Great Depression produced a drop of 72 percent in sales at GM between 1929 and 1932, but the company adapted adroitly to hard times. It increased its market share and made money every year. Sloan briefly centralized operations to survive the depression but decentralized once business began to recover. In the 1980s, Smith spent billions to modernize the corporation and cut costs, yet GM lost market share every year and continued to be the industry’s highest-cost producer: “Much of the advanced technology that GM acquired at such high cost hindered rather than improved productivity. Runaway robots started welding doors shut at the new Detroit-Hamtramck Cadillac plant. Luckily for Ford and Chrysler, poverty prevented them from indulging in the same orgy of spending on robots” (“On a Clear Day . . .,” 1989, p. 77).
Catalyst or Wimp? Human Resource Leadership
The tiny trickle of writing about structural leadership is swamped by a torrent of human resource literature. Human resource theorists typically advocate openness, mutuality, listening, coaching, participation, and empowerment. They view the leader as a facilitator and catalyst who motivates and empowers subordinates. The leader’s power comes from talent, sensitivity, and service rather than position or force. Greenleaf (1973) argues that “The servant-leader makes sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test [of leadership] is: do those served grow as persons; do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?” (p. 7).
Will managers who adhere to such images be respected leaders who make a difference? Or will they be seen as naïve and weak, carried along on the current of other people’s energy? The leadership tightrope is real, and some hide behind participation and sensitivity as an excuse not to walk it. There are also many human resource leaders whose skill and artistry produce extraordinary results. These gifted leaders typically apply a consistent set of leadership principles:
1. Human Resource Leaders Believe in People and Communicate Their Belief: Human resource leaders are passionate about “productivity through people” (Peters and Waterman, 1982). They demonstrate this faith in their words and actions and often build it into a core philosophy or credo. Fred Smith, founder and CEO of Federal Express, sees “putting people first” as the cornerstone of his company’s success: “We discovered a long time ago that customer satisfaction really begins with employee satisfaction. That belief is incorporated in our corporate philosophy statement: People—Service—Profit” (Waterman, 1994, p. 89).
2. Human Resource Leaders Are Visible and Accessible: Peters and Waterman (1982) popularized the notion of “management by wandering around”—the idea that managers need to get out of their offices and spend time with workers and customers. Pat Carrigan, the first woman plant manager at General Motors, modeled this technique in the course of turning around two GM plants, each with a long history of union-management conflict (Kouzes and Posner, 1987). One worker commented that before Carrigan came, “I didn’t know who the plant manager was. I wouldn’t have recognized him if I saw him.” When she left her first assignment after three years, the local union gave her a plaque. It concluded, “Be it resolved that Pat M. Carrigan, through the exhibiting of qualities as a people person, has played a vital role in the creation of a new way of life at the Lakewood plant. Therefore, be it resolved that the members of Local 34 will always warmly remember Pat M. Carrigan as one of us” (Kouzes and Posner, 1987, p. 36).
3. Effective Human Resource Leaders Empower Others: Human resource leaders often refer to their employees as “partners,” “owners,” or “associates.” They make it clear that employees have a stake in the organization’s success and a right to be involved in making decisions. In the 1980s, Jan Carlzon, CEO of Scandinavian Airlines System (SAS), built a turnaround effort intent on making the company “the best airline in the world for business travelers” (Carlzon, 1987, p. 46). To find out what the business traveler wanted, he turned to SAS’s front-line service employees for ideas and suggestions. Focus groups generated hundreds of ideas and emphasized the importance of front-line autonomy to decide on the spot what passengers needed. Carlzon concluded that SAS’s image to its customers was built out of a series of “moments of truth”: fifteen-second encounters between employees and customers. “We cannot rely on rule books and instruction from distant corporate offices. We have to place responsibility for ideas, decisions, and actions with the people who are SAS during those 15 seconds. If they have to go up the organizational chain of command for a decision on an individual problem, then those 15 golden seconds will elapse without a response and we will have lost an opportunity to earn a loyal customer” (p. 66).
Advocate or Hustler? Political Leadership
Sometimes even in the private sector, leaders have to plunge into the political arena to move their company where it needs to go. Consider two chief executives in dissimilar eras: Lee Iacocca, chief executive of Chrysler when the company was near death in the late 1970s, and Carly Fiorina, CEO of Hewlett-Packard in 1999.
Iacocca’s career had taken him to the presidency of Ford Motor Company. But on July 1, 1978, his boss, Henry Ford II, fired him, reportedly with the simple explanation, “I don’t like you” (O’Toole, 1984, p. 231). Iacocca’s unemployment was brief. Chrysler, desperate for new leadership, believed Iacocca was the answer.
Even though Iacocca had done his homework before accepting Chrysler’s offer, things were worse than he expected. Chrysler was losing money so fast bankruptcy seemed inevitable. He concluded that the only way out was to persuade the U.S. government to guarantee loans. It was a tough sell; Congress, the media, and the American public were against the idea. Iacocca had to convince all of them that government intervention was in their best interest.
Like Iacocca, Fiorina came in to head a troubled giant. HP’s problems were not as bad as Chrysler’s; it was still profitable with more than $40 billion in annual revenue. But customer service was deteriorating, bureaucracy was stifling innovation, and HP seemed to be falling behind the technology curve. BusinessWeek described HP as part of “the clueless establishment” (Burrows and Elstrom, 1999, p. 76). Fiorina’s arrival was big news. She was only the fifth CEO in HP’s sixty-year history and the first to come from outside since Hewlett and Packard founded the company in a Palo Alto garage in 1938. She was also the first woman to head a company of HP’s size in any industry. She brought strengths, including “a silver tongue and an iron will” (Burrows and Elstrom, 1999, p. 76). But she faced daunting challenges, especially after she set her sights on a merger with another, floundering, $40 billion company, Compaq. Her board supported her initiative, but the Hewlett and Packard heirs, who controlled more than 15 percent of HP’s stock, didn’t. Fiorina had to win a massive gunfight at the HP corral.
Ultimately, Iacocca got his guarantees and Fiorina got her merger by employing essential principles for political leaders.
1. Political Leaders Clarify the Distinction Between What They Want and What They Can Get: Political leaders are realists. They avoid letting all that they want cloud their judgment about what is possible. Iacocca translated Chrysler’s survival into the realistic goal of getting enough help to make it through a couple of difficult years. He was careful to ask not for money but for loan guarantees, insisting that the guarantees would cost the taxpayers nothing. Once Fiorina knew she was in a nasty, public squabble, she zeroed in on one goal: getting enough votes to put the merger through.
2. Political Leaders Assess the Distribution of Power and Interests: Political leaders map the political terrain [see Chapter Twenty-Five in this volume] by thinking carefully about the key players, their interests, and their power, asking: Whose support do I need? How do I go about getting it? Who are my opponents? How much power do they have? What can I do to reduce or overcome their opposition? Is this battle winnable? Iacocca needed the support of Chrysler’s employees and unions, but he knew that they had little choice. The key players were Congress and the public. Congress would vote for the guarantees only if Iacocca’s proposal had popular support. He concentrated his efforts there.
Fiorina knew she needed support from HP’s board, analysts, and ultimately a majority of voting shares. She first went after her board’s support, but ran into bad luck. Walter Hewlett, son of the HP cofounder, missed the meeting at which McKinsey consultants made the case for the merger. A month later, Hewlett voted reluctantly to approve the merger. But he had serious misgivings. The substantial layoffs touted as one of the merger’s “synergies” amounted to abandoning the HP Way in Hewlett’s mind. His doubts grew when HP’s stock dropped some 40 percent after the merger announcement. A few weeks later, he announced that he would vote against the merger (Burrows, 2001). Fiorina now faced an uphill battle, with her job and her vision for HP both hanging on the outcome. Her only chance was to make a case persuasive enough to win the analysts and shareholders who were still on the fence.
3. Political Leaders Build Linkage to Key Stakeholders: Political leaders focus their attention on building relationships and networks. They recognize the value of personal contact and face-to-face conversations. Iacocca worked hard to build linkages with Congress, the media, and the public. He spent hours with members of Congress and testifying before congressional committees. After he met with thirty-one Italian American members of Congress, all but one voted for the loan guarantees. Said Iacocca, “Some were Republicans, some were Democrats, but in this case they voted the straight Italian ticket. We were desperate, and we had to play every angle” (Iacocca and Novak, 1984, p. 221).
Fiorina’s primary target was institutional shareholders who held about 57 percent of the company’s stock, and the analysts whose opinions mattered. Armed with a fifty-page document that laid out the strategic and financial rationale for the merger, Fiorina and Compaq CEO Michael Capellas hit the road, speaking to every analyst they could find. Fiorina focused on big picture, strategic issues, while Capellas backed her up on the nitty-gritty details of integrating the two firms. A particularly vital target was Institutional Shareholder Services, an advisory firm whose clients held more than a fifth of HP’s stock. ISS’s recommendation could easily make or break the deal. Though initially skeptical, ISS’s lead analyst for the merger, Ram Kumar, said that the Fiorina/Capellas team’s persuasiveness and command of detail won him over.
4. Political Leaders Persuade First, Negotiate Second, and Coerce Only If Necessary: Wise political leaders recognize that power is essential to their effectiveness; they also know to use it judiciously. William P. Kelly, an experienced public administrator, put it well: “Power is like the old Esso ad—a tiger in your tank. But you can’t let the tiger out, you just let people hear him roar. You use power terribly sparingly because it has a short half-life. You let people know you have it and hope that you don’t have to use it” (Ridout and Fenn, 1974, p. 10).
Sophisticated political leaders know that influence begins with an understanding of others’ concerns and interests. What is important to them? How can I help them get what they want? Iacocca knew that he had to address the widespread belief that federal guarantees would throw millions of taxpayer dollars down a rat hole. He used advertising to respond directly to public concerns. He also spoke directly to congressional concerns. Chrysler prepared computer printouts showing how many jobs would be lost in every district if Chrysler went under.
Fiorina knew her biggest hurdle was the poor track record for big mergers. Walter Hewlett used Compaq’s acquisition of fading giant Digital Equipment in 1998 as evidence that the deal would be a disaster. Fiorina developed a threefold argument based on competitive scale, cost savings, and management strength. She took the story on the road in countless meetings with analysts and institutional shareholders. HP buttressed the case with a blizzard of press releases, advertising, and direct mail.
As the battle intensified, Fiorina even resorted to the business equivalent of political attack ads. HP put out a press release designed to gently but firmly discredit Walter Hewlett as a semiclueless dilettante: “Walter Hewlett, an heir of HP co-founder Bill Hewlett, is a musician and academic who oversees the Hewlett family trust and foundation. While he serves on HP’s board of directors, Walter has never worked at the company or been involved in its management” (Fried, 2002).
Iacocca and Fiorina won their respective battles. Chrysler pulled out of its tailspin, repaid its loans, ignited the minivan craze, and had many profitable years before it was acquired by German automaker Daimler Benz in 1998. Fiorina got her merger but lost her job because HP’s profits kept falling short of her promises and board expectations. Her successor, Mark Hurd, however, has made the merger look good—and HP’s profits and stock price have soared.
Prophet or Zealot? Symbolic Leadership
The symbolic frame represents a fourth turn of the leadership kaleidoscope. This lens sees an organization as both theater and temple. As theater, an organization creates a stage on which actors play their roles and hope to communicate the right impression to the right audience. As temple, an organization is a community of faith, bonded by shared beliefs, traditions, myths, rituals, and ceremonies. Symbolically, leaders lead through both their actions and words as they interpret and reinterpret experience, and they impart meaning and purpose to experience through phrases of beauty and passion.
Franklin D. Roosevelt reassured a nation in the midst of its deepest economic depression that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Burns (1978) was mindful of leaders such as Roosevelt, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr., when he drew a distinction between “transforming” and “transactional” leaders. Transactional leaders “approach their followers with an eye to trading one thing for another: jobs for votes, subsidies for campaign contributions” (1978, p. 4). Transforming leaders evoke their constituents’ better nature and move them toward higher and more universal needs and purposes. They are visionaries whose leadership is inherently symbolic. Symbolic leaders follow a consistent set of practices and rules.
1. They Lead by Example: Symbolic leaders demonstrate their commitment and courage by plunging into the fray. Rudy Giuliani in the aftermath of September 11 is a dramatic case in point. Risking his own life, he moved immediately to the scene. When the first tower collapsed, he was caught for fifteen minutes in the rubble.
2. They Use Symbols to Capture Attention: When Diana Lam became principal of Mackey Middle School in Boston in 1985, she faced substantial challenges. Mackey had the usual urban school problems: decaying physical plant, poor discipline, racial tension, disgruntled teachers, and limited resources (Kaufer and Leader, 1987a). In such a situation, a symbolic leader does something visible and dramatic to signal that change is coming. During the summer before assuming her duties, Lam wrote a personal letter to every teacher requesting an individual meeting. She met teachers wherever they wanted. She asked how they felt about the school and what changes they wanted. Then she recruited members of her family to repaint the school’s front door and the most decrepit classrooms. “When school opened, students and staff members immediately saw that things were going to be different, if only symbolically. Perhaps even more important, staff members received a subtle challenge to make a contribution themselves” (Kaufer and Leader, 1987b, p. 3).
When Iacocca became president of Chrysler, one of his first steps was to announce that he was reducing his salary from $360,000 to $1 a year. “I did it for good, cold pragmatic reasons. I wanted our employees and our suppliers to be thinking: ‘I can follow a guy who sets that kind of example’” (Iacocca and Novak, 1984, pp. 229–230).
3. Symbolic Leaders Frame Experience: In a world of uncertainty and ambiguity, a key function of symbolic leadership is plausible interpretations of experience. When Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke at the March on Washington in 1963, the opening line of his “I Have a Dream” speech was, “I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.” He could have interpreted the event in a number of other ways: “We are here because progress has been slow, but we are not ready to quit”; “We are here because nothing else has worked”; “We are here because it’s summer and a good day to be outside.” Each version is technically as accurate as the next, but accuracy is not the issue. King’s assertion was bold and inspiring; it told the audience that they were making history together.
4. Symbolic Leaders Communicate a Vision: One powerful way in which a leader interprets experience is by distilling and disseminating a vision—a persuasive and hopeful image of the future. Vision is particularly important in a time of crisis and uncertainty. When people are in pain, when they are confused and uncertain, or when they feel despair and hopelessness, they desperately seek meaning and hope.
Where does such vision come from? One view is that leaders create a vision and then persuade others to accept it (Bass, 1985; Bennis and Nanus, 1985). An alternative view is that leaders discover and articulate a vision that is already there in an unexpressed form (Cleveland, 1985). Kouzes and Posner (1987) put it well: “Corporate leaders know very well that what seeds the vision are those imperfectly formed images in the marketing department about what the customers really wanted and those inarticulate mumblings from the manufacturing folks about the poor product quality. . . . The best leaders are the best followers. They pay attention to those weak signals and quickly respond to changes in the corporate course” (p. 114).
Leadership is a two-way street, and no amount of charisma or rhetorical skill can sell a vision that reflects only the leader’s values and needs. But leaders still play a critical role. They bring a unique, personal blend of poetry, passion, conviction, and courage to articulating a vision. They distill and shape the direction to be pursued. Most important, they choose which stories to tell to communicate the vision.
5. Symbolic Leaders Tell Stories: Symbolic leaders often embed their vision in a story about “us” and about “our” past, present, and future. Us could be the Sorbonne, Chrysler, or any other audience a leader hopes to reach. The past is usually a golden one, a time of noble purposes, and great deeds. The present is a time of trouble, challenge, or crisis—a critical moment to make fateful choices. The future is the dream: a vision of hope linked directly to greatness in the past.
This is just the kind of story that helped Ronald Reagan become president of the United States. Reagan’s golden past was the frontier, a place of rugged, sturdy, self-reliant men and women who built a great nation and took care of themselves and their neighbors without the intervention of a monstrous national government. It was an America of small towns and volunteer fire departments. America had fallen into crisis, said Reagan, because “the liberals” had created a federal government that was levying oppressive taxes and eroding freedom through regulation and bureaucracy. Reagan offered a vision: a return to American greatness by “getting government off the backs of the American people” and restoring traditional American values of freedom and self-reliance. It got Reagan elected and worked again twenty years later in the election of a Reagan acolyte, George W. Bush.
The success of such stories is only partly related to their historical validity or empirical support. The central question is whether they are credible and persuasive to their audiences. A story, even a flawed story, will work if it taps persuasively into the experience, values, and aspirations of listeners. This reflects both the power and the danger of symbolic leadership. In the hands of a Gandhi or a King, the constructive power of stories is immense. Told by a Hitler, their destructive power is almost incalculable.
6. Symbolic Leaders Respect and Use History: Wise leaders attend to history and link their initiatives to the values, stories, and heroes of the past. Even as she unleashed massive changes at HP, Fiorina publicly told Bill and Dave stories and insisted on her fidelity to the HP Way.
SUMMARY
Though leadership is universally accepted as a cure for all organizational ills, it is also widely misunderstood. Many fail to recognize its relational and contextual nature and its distinction from power and position. Inadequate ideas about leadership produce oversimplified advice to managers. We need to reframe leadership to move beyond the impasse created by oversimplified models. Each of the four frames highlights significant possibilities for leadership, but each is incomplete in capturing a holistic picture of the work.
Lee G. Bolman is the Marion Bloch Missouri Chair in Leadership at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and author of several best-selling books on leadership and organizations. For more information visit www.leebolman.com.
Terrence E. Deal is professor emeritus at the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California and author of multiple, award-winning books on leadership, culture, and organizations.
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