Can MBA students be taught to be humble, hungry, honest and happy or are we just assuming that that’s what they should already be? Chris Lewis and Pippa Malmgren find out
Our education is very important to us. It’s what makes us who we are. But what if that very education itself was contributing to leadership failure? Could an overdose of rationality be to blame? It’s difficult to believe, I grant you.
We live in age of big data. We have more research than ever before. So why are we getting things wrong? Why did we not see the rise of Trump, nationalism and Brexit? Why did we not see the financial collapse of 2009? Why did we not see the scandals at Volkswagen, the Catholic Church, Oxfam, the banks, Bernie Madoff, etc until it was too late? What did all these scandals have in common?
They most often involved men in an unassailable position of confidence. It was unthinkable that charity workers would exchange aid for sex. It was too unsavoury to palate the notion that those entrusted with our spiritual well-being would seek to abuse us. Even the ‘people’s car’ company sought to mislead the people. Even more recently, according to an article in The Times we the people might have been inadvertently financing Osama Bin Laden with tax-payers’ money. It’s almost beyond comprehension, isn’t it?
Another commonality was that these all involved educated, experienced, trusted people with tons of data to analyse. Nowadays we even have predictive analytics to tell us what’s likely to happen on the basis on what has previously happened. But what if the pattern is not linear but cyclical? What if a linear pattern is completely reversed? When the Berlin Wall came down, we heralded a new age where the nation state would disappear and we’d all become global citizens. But three decades later we’re now building more walls than ever before in human history in Israel, in Slovenia, in the US and even virtual walls around China. How did that happen? Wasn’t the Internet supposed to bring us together?
Our logic can only take us so far because it’s based on the principle of Western Reductionism. We look at a problem and break it down into components. We then look at those elements and break them down. We call it analysis. Those people really good at analysis progress furthest in our educational system becoming ever more specialised. An MBA though is a generalist qualification and should be preparing us for leadership. The environment that most of us will work in is likely to be full of complex, multidimensional, ambiguous problems. This will require us to move fast to impose analytical and logical structures and come up with a predicted response. And herein lies the problem. As leaders our job shouldn’t be to predict one outcome. It should be to prepare for all outcomes. To do this, we need the power of imagination and that’s not something we’re teaching.
This is where the importance of diversity in leadership comes in. Different people worry about different things. They also have different visions about what the potential of a situation might reveal. To get them to articulate we need to ensure that everyone on the leadership team feels confident enough to come up with a ‘damn fool’ idea without judgment. What inhibits this goes right to the heart of the diversity argument that we tend to correlate confidence with competence. In Professor Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic’s book Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? (And How to Fix It), he points out the problem. Men apply for jobs when they have a modicum of the skills required. Women only do so when they have the majority of the skills. Dr Pippa Malmgren and I have taken his research further forward by interviewing leaders from all walks over a three-year period. It seems that our model of leadership is too based on the ‘leader’ and not enough on the ‘ship’.
It seems that we have become addicted to the Judeo-Christian model of the single, infallible (most often male) leader. Whether it’s Jesus Christ or Steve Jobs, Moses or Elon Musk, we’re fascinated by the hero leader. This model can be gloriously right and celebrated or it can be tragically wrong, as in the cases above. This level of binary outcome involves an enormous waste of resource and cost in broken careers and damaged people. We need structures that are more empathetic, collaborative and cooperative. Of course, leaders still need to be smart, but if you consider yourself to be the smartest person in the room, then you are most definitely in the wrong room. Your job is to make everyone else feel like they’re the smartest person in the room. Give them the confidence and the opportunity to speak up and speak out. Remember the leader should be the last person to speak in the meeting not the first and loudest. Diversity in the leadership is, hence, no longer just a matter of social justice, it’s a matter of business efficiency.
The notion of servant leadership is gaining ground. We hear more talk of the ‘Four H Model’ – humble, hungry, honest and happy. Can you teach MBA students this? Or are we just assuming that that’s what they should already be? The problem with Western Reductionism is that it lays the emphasis on critique, the ability to compare, contrast and analyse. These are the skills of the so-called left brain.
But if we truly believe these to be pre-eminent, then we should ask ourselves this simple question: Where are you when you get your very best ideas? We asked leaders this question and most often they observed that they were not at work, often on their own and most interestingly not trying. If this is the case, then it points to the overlooked area of leadership potential which is the output of the so-called right brain – the conceptualising and synthesising processes. Much of the workings of this process are shrouded in mystery because to some extent it involves subjectivity, but great thinkers have been here before, most notably Albert Einstein who describes the rational mind as a faithful servant and the intuitive mind as a sacred gift. He said: ‘We have too often honoured the servant but forgotten the gift.’
Leadership is a gift. It is better in the giving than in the receiving. And we are better focusing on it rather than on the leader, because they too often turn out to be a disappointment.
Chris Lewis and Pippa Malmgren are the authors of The Leadership Lab (Kogan Page) and winners of Business Book of the Year 2019. Entries for the Business Book Awards 2020 are now open.
AMBA members can benefit from a discount on this book, as part of the Book Club. Click here for details.
