Leading the Way

Guests at Rice’s Community Dialogue Luncheons, sponsored by the Office of Minority Community Affairs, are tackling a number of important cultural and social issues. Brent Smith spoke recently on the qualities of leadership.

As society moves forward and social and cultural issues grow more complex, leadership assumes paramount importance. But what are the qualities of effective leadership, and how are notions about leadership evolving?

Brent Smith, assistant professor of management and psychology in the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management, became interested in leadership after he discovered that there is a serious shortage of effective leaders in the business world. According to Smith, the success rate of chief executive officers is a meager 50 percent. He also found that many companies were unconvinced that their leaders had enough talent to move them forward. Organizations began to realize that developing leaders was an imperative, he says.

But what makes a good leader is really hard to define. “In my own field, we have given up the hope of ever agreeing on a definition of leadership,” he explains. “At last count, there were about two hundred.” Smith received his Ph.D. in organizational psychology with an emphasis in personality from the University of Maryland at College Park. His research focuses on the personality characteristics of effective and ineffective leaders. His early consulting career was dedicated to the development of human resources systems for selecting leaders at various organizational levels.

“If one thing is true about leadership, it is that there are no universal truths in leadership. It all depends on the context,” he says. “That is, leadership varies in for-profit, not-for-profit, and political organizations.”

It is easier, Smith says, to explain what leadership is not:

Leadership is most definitely not a position. Psychologically and perhaps unconsciously, people attribute extraordinary power to those in positions of authority. The power and influence we give them are far beyond what they actually possess, he adds. “A good example of this is the compensation packages paid to CEOs—this can only be explained on the basis of our presumption that they have a major influence on an organization’s bottomline, which is rarely the case.”

Leadership is not genetic.

There was a time when leadership was a birthright, Smith says, but not anymore. Furthermore, while genes certainly have been shown to affect people’s character, the effect is not terribly substantial. “In other words, leaders are not only born, they also are made.”

Leadership is not all about charisma. CEOs such as Jack Welch of General Electric, Richard Branson of the Virgin Group, and Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines are not the only potential role models of leaders. “Interestingly, given the current corporate scandals, the ‘un-CEO’ is becoming a popular press icon, given their presumed trustworthiness and transparency.”

After much reflection, Smith has come up with some “quasi-enduring truths” about leadership.

Leadership is everyone’s concern. It amounts to a set of practices, a process that can be taught and learned. There are certain competencies, such as knowledge, skills, and abilities, that can be taught to almost anyone. “Leadership is no more about CEOs than it is about first-line supervisors—just the competencies change, and some competencies endure regardless of where you are in the organization.”
Leadership has everything to do with relationships. Leadership exists only in relation to followers, whether it is one-to-one or one-to-a-thousand. “Exemplary leaders are adept at building effective relationships based on mutual respect and caring. Trust is the central characteristic of effective relationships.”

Leaders are action oriented. “Peter Drucker [author of books on management] referred to leaders as monomaniacs on a mission.” It is very difficult to be passive and be an effective leader.

Effective leadership is predicated on a thorough understanding of oneself. Without self-knowledge and insight, people lack an understanding of their strengths and weaknesses. Effective leaders know what they are good at and what they are not.

To understand how to develop good leaders, says Smith, one must know what makes a bad one. Based on research conducted by the Center for Creative Leadership, most ineffective leaders, he explains, are insensitive and employ an intimidating managing style. They can be cold, aloof, and arrogant. These are people who lack integrity, vision, and flexibility. They are micromanagers.

But the lack of adaptability is the main and most significant problem that holds a manager back. “My research on managers’ use of influence suggests that they fail to adapt their strategy to the audience,” Smith says. “Managers are not thoughtful about the demands of their audience when choosing something so basic as a motivation strategy.”

According to Smith’s research, organizations have done a very poor job in developing leaders. In fact, in all too many cases they haven’t taken the time to cultivate them. Organizations have taken the approach that those with the right stuff will rise to the top. “I like to call this the unenlightened view of development,” he says.

“There is nothing inherently wrong with using experience as the primary vehicle for development,” Smith explains. “In fact, it is the primary developmental tool—however, someone must be there to manage the process and ensure that the proper lessons are learned.”

So how do we develop leaders? Smith offers four suggestions.
First, promote self-awareness. “We need to do something almost completely antithetical to the culture of many organizations—we need to give open, honest, development feedback that promotes self-awareness of leadership strengths and limitations.”

Second, teach people to recognize important differences in others and to respect those differences.

Third, create a culture of development. Learning must be built into the system by rewarding and reinforcing learning. Role models must be cultivated and made visible. People who share their talents and develop others must be rewarded.

And fourth, promote experimentation and skill development and remove the risk associated with failure if someone is trying to learn something new.

These solutions, Smith says, are not short term. They must be carried out over an extended period so that they become a permanent part of the organization. “We live in a society that seems increasingly to be focused on the short term,” he says. “This, I believe, explains many dysfunctional aspects of our current corporate and political environment, and it makes being a leader and focusing on development virtually impossible.”

For example, the highly publicized corporate malfeasance disasters of Enron, WorldCom, and ImClone are a result of focusing on the short term, Smith says. The downfall of those organizations has been attributed to their CEOs, who were the first to go.

Inculcating a culture of ethics and integrity takes time. We cannot make people moral, Smith says, but we can teach them what is ethical. “This requires a different focus for organizations and a move away from the short-term, stock price-driven mind-set that seems to dominate now.”
With these long-term goals, he says, maybe we can prevent another corporate scandal such as the Enron catastrophe.

—David D. Medina