Keeping Leaders from Going off the Rails
Companies need leaders. It is instinctive, when one's mind goes to successful corporations, to associate them to an individual leader: Microsoft is Bill Gates, as much as Apple was Steve Jobs, and General Electric Jack Welch. So much for the positive side of leadership. What about the negative side? Where did leaders go when organizational catastrophes struck? Where did company leaders go when Union Carbide had to deal with the Bhopal tragedy and KLM with the Tenerife airplane disaster, amid extensive loss of human life? Or think the subprime crisis (which is taking Standard & Poor's rating agency to court), when trust in banks, firms and financial markets disappeared. Where were the leaders when we needed them?
They had been derailed, like a train that goes off track just when its destination seems assured. But why do leaders derail? Giovanni Dosi, head of the Institute for Economics of the Sant'Anna Graduate School in Pisa, Anna Canato, director of the Department of Management of Paris-based IESEG, and I have started constructing a research program that intends to provide more normative and robust the answers to such question.
Our solution comes in three steps. The first acknowledges the fact that people act on the basis of complex behavioral rules: folk psychology, which we all use in our daily lives, is not enough; we need to train ourselves to correctly interpret complex attitudes. So we have labeled as "affective leadership" the leader's capacity to engender emotional states in teams and induce continuous learning, so that people can orient their actions to consistently pursue results across time. Subsequently, this will cause a shift in focus from the individual, i.e. the leader to be followed, toward an attitude, a style. People will continue to act as individuals, but they are now integrated in a company context.
It is at this stage that we can talk about integrated leadership: the firm is an evolving ecosystem where the basic unit is not the individual, but the various groups that operate within such system. The abilty to govern complexity arises out of the integration of different individual cognitive abilities that can make the company able to interpret new challenges. But only if the leader is able to integrate them successfully can the company move from thought to action.
Why are we displacing the reassuring archetype of the leader as solitary entrepreneurial hero, able to weather market storms and inspire innovation? Because the same force that makes the leader think out of the box and break with established assumptions - the energy that makes business organization survive and thrive - must be shaped into a leadership style that yields a collective attitude. Otherwise it risks derailing leadersand the companies they lead. And only their colleagues can make them understand that their leadership is derailing, and it's time to build a new track in order to change track.